So the gun control advocates, 2/3rds evil, 1/3 stupid. I would say full evil except that there are some gun control advocates who are able to learn, so not all of the ignorance is willful. Still, evil must be opposed.
American Mercenary December 1, 2010 Evil or Stupid? [I’m not sure I agree with this. If you read the analysis you will find that, according to him it boils it down to willful ignorance being evil.
But the end result is the same. Even if they have the best of intentions gun control advocates are harmful and must be opposed.
How we oppose the gun control advocate must be tailored to the advocate. Someone who obviously lies and misrepresents facts can be safely exposed as evil. But labeling the willful ignorance of someone with the best of intentions and perhaps the loss of an innocent loved one in their background as evil is probably going to do more damage than good.—Joe]
The mayor said the new laws break nearly two decades of what he termed “legal silence” and “legislative silence” on gun control laws to help reduce homicides and assaults in the city.
Adams noted that 4 out of 10 homicides in the city are committed with guns.
He says “legal and legislative silence” as if it were a bad thing. What if he were talking about blacks/Jews/homosexuals instead of gun ownership? The mayor should be politically skewered for this infringement just as severely as if he had pushed through laws aimed specifically at people with different colored skin who happened to commit some high percentage of the homicides.
Good intentions are not sufficient reason to infringe upon a specific enumerated right.
I’m not sure if this is a disconnect from reality or just yet another example of a process failure:
What I think we should do is regulate the price of bullets. I can see some CEO of a munitions company calculating his performance bonus right now. Let’s try $75 dollars per bullet for a .22 caliber bullet. $15 dollars more for each caliber higher. You want a .38? No problem! Only $315 dollar each. Want a .357 magnum? Only $5100 dollars each. Want six? Cool! A mere $30,600 will get you six. Want a 50 round clip of 9mm bullets. All you have to do is pony up a cool $15,700. This, of course, does not include the cost of the clip. How about a recyclable clip for $250 plus a $50 recycling deposit? At last, an eco-friendly way to kill each other. I can see Michael F. Golden (Smith and Wesson’s CEO) having multiple orgasms dreaming of his bonus based on the potential profits his company could make.
How disconnected is this? Let me count a few of the ways:
The instant creation of a black market.
The infringement of the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms.
What is or would be a recyclable “clip”?
S&W does not sell ammunition.
With such a high price on something more cheaply available on the black market ammunition manufacturing companies would have near zero sales.
Reading literally “$15 dollars” is “15 dollars dollars”. The same goes for “$75 dollars”, “$315 dollar” (well almost, it is “315 dollars dollar”), and “$5100 dollars”. It isn’t even consistent because many instances of “$” are correct.
.357 magnum is $5100/round but .38 (Special, I presume) and 9mm are only $315 each? How can one derive that from “15 dollars more for each caliber higher”?
Even though I have decades worth of examples of stupid stuff the anti-gunners say I am sometimes still amazed at the depths of stupid they are capable of reaching.
There are a set of people that believe the NRA is the countries most effective lobby group for firearms restrictions. They have some good points. Provided that we can politically exterminate the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center I would be okay with that. One or two problems at a time… The NRA warts can be better addressed once the BC and VPC cancer has been in complete remission (submission/whatever) for a few years.
I guess when your cause has no roots in reality it makes it easier to change your mind ever thirty seconds.
Christopher Burg November 30, 2010 Guns on Trains [He is referring to Brady Campaign spokesmen changing their story to fit whatever they hope might get some traction with the public. The problem for them is none of their predictions of the streets running red with blood have come true. Virtually anything they say will be either immediately demonstrated to be false or suspect. How many members do they have? They said they had “about half a million”. The true numbers are about 50,000 if you count everyone who has ever donated to them. They say gun control laws increase public safety yet they also say, “I am not arguing here that higher rates of gun ownership cause higher rates of crime, violent crime, or homicide. Such causation is difficult to show because so many other factors bear on the incidence of crime.”
If they were to say the sky was blue people know it probably is completely overcast or when pressed on the issue the Brady Campaign will claim they meant that it was blue someplace else.—Joe]
I got another begging letter from the BC, and in this one Paul Helmke says they have a $250,000 deficit:
Dear (friendly_iconoclast),
I am writing to you today as one of the Brady Campaign’s most loyal friends because we really need your help…
…But the truth is, because we’ve been fighting so hard on so many fronts, we’re facing a serious financial shortfall.
I need to make up a $250,000 budget shortfall before the end of the year….
Maybe they should ask the NRA for a loan. After all, the Brady Campaign has done wonders for their fundraising…
If they were a publically traded company I would consider attempting a hostile takeover (I could get a NRA range grant to build a Brady Campaign Memorial Boomershoot East, couldn’t I?). I would hire Tamara to write all their media releases for month or two as we liquidated every asset and did Boomerite experiments in the ashes.
Before I visit New Jersey again (it’s been over 30 years since my last visit) they have to fix the gun laws or start issuing tags (varmint licenses would work too) for politicians and police officers.
Wisconsin will soon become the 49th state to endanger unarmed citizens with a gun crazy concealed carry law. While normal Wisconsinites prefer having no guns around as a way of ensuring a safe secure society, immature thugs and their guns will soon get their way via the party of bullying, the GOP.
…
While these paranoid wing nuts insist there’s nothing safer than a load [sic] gun in the hands of an angry anti-government whiner, the public has no choice but to fight back. Raise your voice, contact the police or business owner and tell them you feel threatened for you and your family.
John Peterson November 28, 2010 Concealed Carry Killers. And these are only the ones we know about. [Interesting. With those “great” Wisconsin gun laws how did this happen? It seems that a law against concealing firearms in a backpack and a law against firearms in a school didn’t stop a student from doing just that.
And where are all those people “endangered” by the concealed carry laws in the other 48 states? What is the violence crime rate in those states compared to the violent crime rate in the states that allow people to protect themselves with the best tools available?
Peterson is just another bigot on the wrong side of history.—Joe]
Via Laurel we have this story from just a few miles south of my bunker in Moscow:
A northern Idaho sheriff says he is not advocating the illegal shooting of federally protected wolves by offering a hunting rifle and a shovel as the prize in a raffle called “.308 SSS Wolf Pack Raffle” in a region where SSS commonly stands for “shoot, shovel and shut up.”
Idaho County Sheriff Doug Giddings tells the Lewiston Tribune that the SSS in the raffle stands for “safety, security and survival.”
The newspaper reports that the SSS in the wolf-shooting context often appears in the area on bumper stickers.
Raffle tickets went on sale Friday for $1 each or 11 for $10. The prize is a Winchester .308-caliber Model 70 Featherweight rifle and a shovel. The drawing is planned for March 8.
There are only two other states requiring the sale of confiscated weapons, Kentucky and Tennessee, both of which must have state governments almost as brainsick as Arizona’s. The NRA says why not sell these weapons to an authorized agent, and therein lies the problem. Gun show participants are authorized agents, and carry a loophole that would allow individual to individual weapons sales without background checks.
Jack E. Dunning November 29, 2010 Arizona continues to lead the nation in putting more guns in the public’s hands [This appears to be another case of someone lacking a thinking process. Not only does he have an error in his facts about gun shows but if you read the rest of his post you will discover he apparently believes there is a fixed supply of guns in the universe—he wants the police to destroy all confiscated firearms.
The only people that gain from destroying confiscated firearms are the people employed to do that and the gun manufactures. Yes, this anti-gun advocate is proposing a policy that benefits the gun manufactures by decreasing the supply of firearms in the marketplace. A decreased supply means more sales at a higher price for suppliers.
Sometimes I suspect they really are stupid. But if they were as stupid as they appear they couldn’t manage to string together the words into complete sentences. Nope, I think it has to be a mental defect.—Joe]
The Second Amendment is not about hunting, it’s about an armed citizenry. That’s an unsettling concept for many people. For others, it’s a bedrock of security, constitutionally guaranteed.
Jon Agner November 24, 2010 Guns and violence: McKelvey wrong on heritage, history [Blacks walking around anywhere, anytime, without supervision instead of being slaves—that is an unsettling concept for many people. And it’s constitutionally guaranteed.
The problems is as minor restrictions on firearms ownership (or blacks/Jews/gays/whatever) increase the people least in need of restrictions will be affected the most and those that would have abused their freedoms will be affected the least. Hence minor restrictions cause more harm than good. Extensive restrictions are blatant infringements and while they might repress certain aspects of the original problem they create their own disastrous consequences.
And that is the basis of the conflict and why there cannot be a reasonable compromise. A society can choose freedom or suffer the alternative.—Joe]
I find these handguns unaesthetic. They’re ugly. They’re in-between things of no particular utility — but if we banned things on the basis of ugliness and relative uselessness, there’s a whole lot of people who’d never be allowed out of the house.
Roberta X November 21, 2010 Pretzel Helmke Logic [Agreed. And if such bans were legal and ethical the first useless thing I wouldn’t allow out of the house would be Paul Helmke. But that isn’t the way this part of world works and it shouldn’t work that way. So we need to continue shaming and pointing out his lies and mental defects.
Roberta did a good job but I kept thinking that in the next sentence she was going to point out that the Columbine killers used an ordinary shotgun (which they had sawed off the buttstock) for most of the murders. But that wouldn’t have fit Helmke’s narrative of an “assault weapon” being the real criminal.
Do you think I’m exaggerating? If so then why did Helmke use these exact words, “The TEC-9 assault pistol used by the Columbine killers murdered 12 of their classmates and a teacher.”?—Joe]
The Brady Center is about as effective and relevant as TSA which doesn’t say much for either organization. They also share the small-minded trait of getting nasty after having been called out on their goofs. The Brady Center certainly doesn’t provide a very good example of how adults should behave.
Much like the Antis warnings of shootouts over parking spaces, violent gunfights in movie theatres and general “Dodge City” mayhem, Florida’s crime rate continues to fall, just like the crime rate of the other 39 States who have legislated Shall Issue Concealed Carry. 1.6 million Floridians with CCW permits – crime rates fall.
You’d think, with all that money, that Paul Helmke would be able to buy a clue.
On the more serious side is Bruce Schneier (via Chet) with my favorite section being:
There’s talk about the health risks of the machines, but I can’t believe you won’t get more radiation on the flight. Here’s some data:
A typical dental X-ray exposes the patient to about 2 millirems of radiation. According to one widely cited estimate, exposing each of 10,000 people to one rem (that is, 1,000 millirems) of radiation will likely lead to 8 excess cancer deaths. Using our assumption of linearity, that means that exposure to the 2 millirems of a typical dental X-ray would lead an individual to have an increased risk of dying from cancer of 16 hundred-thousandths of one percent. Given that very small risk, it is easy to see why most rational people would choose to undergo dental X-rays every few years to protect their teeth.
More importantly for our purposes, assuming that the radiation in a backscatter X-ray is about a hundredth the dose of a dental X-ray, we find that a backscatter X-ray increases the odds of dying from cancer by about 16 ten millionths of one percent. That suggests that for every billion passengers screened with backscatter radiation, about 16 will die from cancer as a result.
Nate Silver on the hidden cost of these new airport security measures.
According to the Cornell study, roughly 130 inconvenienced travelers died every three months as a result of additional traffic fatalities brought on by substituting ground transit for air transit. That’s the equivalent of four fully-loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year.
Hidden costs… That is something that is difficult to get across to many people. Just like gun control. Ban all the guns and the total crimes committed with firearms will probably go down but the crime rate may actually increase because having unarmed or poorly armed victims enables crime. It appears that is just too difficult of a concept for some people.
I’m not sure how to handle this problem. If they didn’t have (or threaten to have) the force of government behind them it would be fairly easy to ignore them and let Darwin take care of them. But that isn’t the way it works. They can use government to force us all to back over the cliff trying to avoid a nut case in front of us who pops up and says “Boogie! Boogie!” once every few years. We should just allowed to carry our guns and put a bullet in his head when he shows himself.
It seems people are beginning to realize the price they are paying for the security theater but will they be willing to embrace freedom and self-reliance?
Whatever the outcome it makes things worse for gun control. We should be able to draw the parallel between security on an airplane and security in schools, office buildings, and college campuses. If this is what it takes to make things safe on an airplane why should it take any less to make a dorm room “safe’?
How many people do you think will be tolerate this sort of “security” every time they enter a building or any other “gun free zone”? I don’t know the answer but we should start asking the question.
Update: I forgot about Rob’s email that I had saved away:
They might as well have put an arsonist in charge of the fire department.
Chris Cox November 17, 2010 Executive director, NRA Institute for Legislative Action. Cox is referring to the appointment of Andrew Traver as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE).
[This statement indicates Cox is operating on the assumption that the ATF serves as valid a purpose as the fire department. I’m not at all convinced it does and I’m not convinced Cox believes that either.
I think a better analogy would be putting a KKK Grand Wizard in charge of the Bureau of Minority Regulation.–Joe]
We are expected to accept Goddard as some kind of expert on our rights–as having some unique insight about how to legitimately infringe on that which shall not be infringed–not because of extensive study on his part of Constitutional law (his major was international studies), but because he was shot. When he argues that continuing the mandated defenselessness policies on college campuses is necessary for safety (despite how poorly that worked at VA Tech and elsewhere), we are similarly asked to accept that he is an “expert” on the subject, not because of his extensive training in self-defense (which I have never seen claimed), but again because he was shot. By that standard, I suppose everyone who survives a heart attack is now a cardiologist.
Just open your eyes and realize that gun shop and school don’t belong in the same sentence.
Michelle November 17, 2010 West Allis Alderman Proposes Gun Store Ban [How about opening your eyes and realize that the Bill of Rights never mentions schools but does say, “…the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”—Joe]
Does it really matter who the head of the Bureau of Political Speech and Book Censorship is? Or how about the Bureau of Blacks, Jews, and Homosexuals? The answer is a very vigorous, “No!”
As long as the BATFE is a regulatory and enforcement agency instead of government surplus distribution center it doesn’t matter. The political goals and fight remains the same regardless of who the head is.
The entire organization should be abolished and most of the people involved with the organization, it’s formation, and funding prosecuted.
