Does it bother anyone else when the government talks about “recovering” guns from citizens? An example:

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ New York Division traced 9,673 guns in 2009, more than half were recovered in New York City. Handguns outnumbered long guns in New York by two and a half percent, and in New York City that number increased to four to one.

Or, more directly, on page three here:

The Statistics used in this report were gathered and prepared in February of 2010 from a data set that was created as of February 15, 2010 and includes crime gun recovery information with a recovery date between January 1, 2009 to December 31st, 2009. The statistics from this report are taken from data submitted to be traced by all law enforcement within the jurisdiction of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) New York Field Division and ATF National Tracing Center (NTC). If the recovery date is blank then the date that the trace was entered into the Firearms Tracing System was used. This yearly report was created to show firearm patterns and trends for certain geographic areas within New York State. Reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy and completeness of the statistics. The statistics may change due to the finalization of traces and/or recovery information. All data excludes traces with a completion code of XX or DT which correspond to Duplicate Traces. Additionally Gun Buy Backs and Firearms Not Recovered are excluded. The data was gathered by the following criteria: Recovery State = NY, if the Recovery State is blank, then Requestor OA_State= NY, if blank, then SA_State= NY Recovery County = ______________, based upon the counties for each geographic. Successful traces are those traces where a final purchaser was found as deemed by the NTC, Martinsburg West Virginia. “In Progress” traces are those that are still being researched by the NTC For traces involving New York State Police with more than one Originating Number (ORI #), all of these traces were grouped as one ORI number even though they have separate ORI numbers.

What they really mean is “confiscated“. “Recovered” has an entirely different meaning which is totally inappropriate for what is going on.

I don’t have a problem with the government confiscating things, even guns, under certain situations. And sometimes “recovered” is in fact what is going on. If some criminal stole my guns I would be pleased if the police confiscated them from the bad guy and recovered them for me. But to talk about all confiscated guns as “recovered” is Orwellian and I don’t like it.

If you like to follow what is happening in Canada with their firearms registry you should read this.

The main points to remember from this are:

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) has come out swinging in support of keeping the costly and ineffective long-gun registry despite absolutely no evidence it has prevented or solved a single crime.

…

The “9,400 hits” figure for the Canadian Firearms Registry On-Line (CFRO) is deliberately misleading. Whenever police officers access the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) for any reason, such as for a simple address check, an automatic hit is generated with CFRO whether the information is desired or not. This is the case, for example, with the Toronto Police Service (5,000 officers), the Vancouver Police (1,400 officers), Ottawa Police Service (1,050 officers) and the BC RCMP (5,000 officers). Additionally, every legal purchase of a firearm generates three administrative hits to the registry; for the buyer, for the seller and for the firearm. Clearly, a hit on the Registry does not denote legitimate investigative use.

The gun controllers tout how many times a day the registry is “used” by police. But as seen above, the gun controllers in Canada just like in the U.S., have to use half-truths to make their case.

Alan Gottlieb and Dave Workman write Is the Brady Campaign a closet klavern of the Klan?

They opposed a landmark court ruling that struck down the handgun ban in District of Columbia, a city with a predominantly black population.

They later opposed legislation that would grant the District full voting rights in Congress, because the measure contained a provision expanding gun rights for those same citizens.

They filed a court brief opposing a lawsuit filed against the City of Chicago’s handgun ban by Otis McDonald, an African-American whose life story would make inspiring material for a movie.

“They” are the leaders of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and one is left to wonder how this bunch would have reacted to the plight of Robert Hicks, a black man who rose to civil rights prominence in the mid-1960s. The 81-year-old Mr. Hicks passed away April 13, and is remembered for being, among other things, the last known surviving member of the Deacons for Defense and Justice.

As I have said many times before, they are the 21st Century equivalents of the KKK and to completely defeat them we must make supporting them as socially viable as a membership in the KKK.

While browsing through the grants made by the Joyce Foundation I found they routinely make donations to the International Association of Chiefs of Police:

$250K on April 16, 2009 “To continue implementation efforts around the recommendations contained in the report of the Great Lakes States Summit on Gun Violence.”

When someone says the police are for more gun control be sure to check up on which police organization and who butters their bread for them.

Update: The link to the Joyce Foundation may not work. From some IP addresses it does and from others it doesn’t. Try my save of the grant page (the year selection doesn’t work, go to “Page 2” instead).

I don’t think organizations representing just a few people are any less legitimate than those representing millions. I fully believe in minority rights and the smallest minority is the individual. But the situation changes when just a few people (or an individual) attempt to infringe upon the rights of the many. Hence the right of an innocent individual with dark skin to be left alone trumps the interests of 10,000 KKK members who wish to lynch him or her.

That said there are those that effectively use the phrase “special interests” to denigrate organizations and people who attempt to affect legislation through campaign donations or lobbying efforts. I don’t really understand the power this phrase on the population at large but it does seem to be effective in swaying public opinion. Why don’t people think in terms of the merits of the points made by each side rather than vague catch phrases like “special interests”? I don’t get it, but if those are the rules for this game then I would like to try my hand at playing the game for a few minutes.

I find it “interesting” that the VPC uses the phrase “special interests”* to describe pro-gun organizations. The NRA has several million dues paying members and hence their money comes from millions of members and they represent those millions of members and to a somewhat lesser extent 80 or 100 million gun owners who are not NRA members.

How many members does the VPC have? They don’t tell us. We do know a little about their gross income and income sources though. In 2006 they had an income of $700k. Would anyone like to take a guess on how many donors they had 2006? If it was a grass roots organization like the NRA they might receive an average of perhaps $50 per member. This would translate into 14,000 members. Compared to the multiple millions of NRA members who are they to call the NRA a “special interest”? Isn’t an organization with only 14,000 members much more of a “special interest” than an organization with nearly 300 times as many members?

Even handicapped with the assumption above I think I could successfully defend the position that the VPC is the actual “special interest” group in this debate. But that assumption of the VPC being a grass roots organization with 14,000 donating members is wrong. What if they only had 1000 donors? What then? Or what if they had 100 or just 10 donors? Now we are talking about a really special interest group attempting to influence laws and policies that affect many millions of people for each of one of the donors. If they had that few of donors the Westboro Baptist Church is a better representation of the citizens of the United States.

But in 2006 the VPC didn’t have just 10 donors. It had one donor. Yes! ONE donor.

The Joyce Foundation gave them a grant of $700K for 18 months on July 20, 2006.

Another game of “Special Interests” anyone?

Update: The link to the Joyce Foundation may not work. From some IP addresses it does and from others it doesn’t. Try my save of the grant page (the year selection doesn’t work, go to “Page 5” instead).

Update 2: See also Howard Nemerov’s post on the same topic.