We are going to vigorously attack the law in courts, … Congress has no power to retroactively deprive people of their rights.
Dennis Henigan
October 21, 2005
Houses Passes Ban on Gun Industry Lawsuits
[One would assume from the words Henigan uses that he would be opposed to the Launtenberg Amendment. Somehow I don’t think he is capable of being that consistent.–Joe]
“How many open carry citizens have committed crimes with their weapons? Answer – none”.
You are incorrect. Open carry laws make it easy for psychos to tote around LOADED weapons, which are responsible for a lot of the crime and gun deaths each year. The law may be designed for the “law abiding” citizen, but if you think only “law abiding” citizens utilize the law you are an idiot.
Why does someone need to carry around an unloaded weapon anyway? To cure their small man syndrome? To “get chicks”? To make-up for their small endowment?
GuessWho
June 1, 2010
Comment to Ban on ‘open carry’ of guns passes Assembly
[For some reason GuessWho believes “psychos” will not think of concealing LOADED weapons in violation of the law when they go about violating the laws against robbery and murder. Facts, such as nearly all other states allow open and easy to obtain concealed carry licenses, are apparently irrelevant to them so they make dick jokes.
What is this about “Utilize the law”? The same rational would be just as applicable to the First Amendment with the right to worship as you please, associate with you please, and to speak as you please.
GuessWho should be less concerned with the endowment between my legs and more concerned with the endowment between his ears.–Joe]
If you want to save yourself some time by not read my late night rambling just read three sentences from Say Uncle on this topic.
As an engineer I make a lot of trade-offs. Execution speed and size (assembly language) versus code clarity and development time (high level languages) used to be a big trade-off. Calculating results every time you need them or caching them in RAM is a trade-off (it didn’t use to be that way but today the answer is usually you want to calculate them every time). Do you load everything in RAM for quick access or leave it on disk until you need it? Do you bringing a new hire up to speed or do you do it yourself?
I can whip out some code that will test a hypothesis in a few minutes or an hour and not worry if there is a single comment in it or if it handles a single error condition. To implement that same functionality in a product that literally millions of people will use, sometimes millions of times a day (or even per minute) may take weeks of effort by a team of people. It will involve specifications, design documents, a test plan, manual testing, automated tests, unit tests, code reviews by multiple peers, and alpha/beta testing by thousands or even 10s of thousands of end users. It only takes me a fraction of a second to decide how to proceed when I know the final goal for the task at hand.
Man minutes versus man months of time involved. Two different extremes in the effort involved in implementing, essentially, the same functionality. The difference is in what I was attempting to accomplish.
I’ve been making engineering trade-offs for over 30 years and most of the time it comes pretty easy to me. When my officemate, a very smart person but a fairly new entry into actually producing deliverable code, asks for advice on a trade-off it takes more time for her to ask the question than for me to arrive at the correct answer.
Another example comes from this morning. My boss came into my office and asked, essentially, “Do we ever return an answer of less than ‘X’ for condition ‘B’?” I knew my code didn’t do that directly but there were times when my code got the answer from the server rather than computing it directly and I couldn’t say for certain without checking with the server people. I started to go down that path and explain how the server might come up with a different answer and I barely got started into the fine details when he stopped me. “Let me give you some more context”, he said. The context was he was writing an email with the target audience of upper management who would not care about the fine details. When he asked the question I thought there was some bug that had been reported and he wanted to know if it really was a bug and if so who it should be assigned to. Without knowing what he was trying to accomplish I had made the wrong trade-off. I was giving him more and more detail when he really needed validation of his high level overview.
As a gun lobbying organization the NRA-ILA makes trade-offs too. What they are trying to accomplish is to improve, and in certain worst case scenarios minimize harm to, our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. Nearly all other considerations must be given a lower priority.
At the NRA Annual Meetings last month I spent a couple hours talking to a NRA board member. He explained why they had done certain things in the D.C. lawsuit (for the most part I am not at liberty to discuss them) and had avoided the U.S. Supreme Court for decades. The next night (or was it the night after?) I spend time with Alan Gura who had a different view of the NRA contribution to the D.C. lawsuit. It was Gura’s contention that NRA-ILA really knows their stuff in regards to legislation but the same people attempting to handle court battles results in people working out of their area of expertise with less than optimal outcomes. My simple take on the topic was that the NRA was trying to avoid a disastrous loss and Gura was trying to get solid win. They both have our best interests at heart but in certain situations ended up “fighting over the ball” and risked fumbling it for a loss.
I think the people that are upset with the NRA support of Harry Reid don’t really understand the trade-offs involved and what the NRA is trying to accomplish. To best support the members, the gun owning people of this country, they have to play a “chess game” where they can never take back a move, the pieces are clouding in smoke, the playing field is shifting, the rules are only partially known and subject to violation by the individual pieces at any time. Try thinking three or four moves ahead under those conditions and see how well you can do. The NRA plays that game very well. They are experts at it. Sometimes when an expert is at work you will be baffled at the moves they make.
To the simple minded observer if you put a “good conservative” in office you will automatically get support for gun rights, hence you should always give support to “good conservatives”. Even an amateur like me can see far enough ahead to see a problem with that in certain situations. There are trade-offs involved. With a ‘D’ beside his name and lots of seniority Reid has lots of power that someone with an ‘R’ and little (or no) seniority would not have. That is just one trade-off. Another is that in certain jurisdictions a “good conservative” is not electable. The demographics of that district are such that the NRA can curry favor with someone that will be in a position to help us or they can try to defeat them during the election then try to make up with them after the election. Another trade-off is that some people like everything, or most everything, the Democrats offer but support our right to keep and bear arms. To a certain extent I am baffled by both the Republican’s and the Democrats. I really don’t understand (and don’t think they do either) the philosophy behind their politics. My guiding political principles are pro freedom. Each party has something to offer and a lot they want to take away from me in this regard. There are trade-offs in who I vote for.
In the case of Harry Reid an NRA lobbyist said this about him in an email discussion:
I have candidates for office running against pro-gun Dems who expect that NRA is going to endorse them as the pro-gun Republican challenger over the pro-gun Democrat incumbent…and tout all of their other “conservative” positions as proof that they’re the better candidate. They get frustrated with me, but I have to remind them that NRA doesn’t use whether you are pro-Life and small taxes to determine your endorsement or grade — and a large number of our members appreciate that, because they don’t agree with conservatives or Republicans on anything but guns! 😉
Whether they like it or not, Harry Reid has voted with gun owners and NRA 100% and used his position in the Senate to advance gun ownership rights in recent years. The Obama Admin was forced to sign a bill with Guns in Parks because Harry Reid allowed the Amendment. The House is holding up DC voting rights because Harry Reid allowed the DC gun rights amendment to the bill.
If Harry Reid isn’t the Senate Majority Leader, we’d have Chuck Schumer or Dick Durbin — think we’re going to get any of those amendments on bills with THEM in charge? No — it’ll be more Lautenberg crap.
In the eyes of an expert political lobbyist the making of the decision about Reid took less time than it took to write the first sentence of the explanation and it’s clear that is the correct answer for gun owners. Those that try to change the NRA support of Reid risk fumbling the ball to the loss of all of us.
I want to expand on a comment made here, since Joe often says I shouldn’t bury certain things in comments. I’m never really sure what he means by that, so I can only give it a go;
The citizens have been declared incompetent. Posing a danger to themselves and others, they cannot be entrusted with their basic rights. That is, in a nutshell, the entire message of the left, and they call us hateful, racist and divisive.
It’s really simple; in their efforts to rob us of our treasure and trample our rights, they have to portray us as evil by way of justification and to rally others to their side. That’s the whole gig, right there.
In opposing them, always keep that in mind. When you cut right to the chase with the basics, there’s nothing for them to do but express outrage, kicking and screaming, pointing fingers and lying in the hope that we’ll be distracted off-subject, that we’ll embarrass ourselves with a reply in-kind or be intimidated into silence. Maintain your course and composure, argue principles, and they lose every time. This takes practice.
Remember that this is not about the person, or the people, making the argument. If this or that person weren’t making the silly assertions, it would be someone else. “It” will always find a willing accomplice. You’re not fighting the person or the group of people on the attack. You’re fighting the urge toward theft and coercive power. That urge feeds on weakness, and can infect a lot of people.
Petitioners’ prohibitions are now and always have been based on invidious prejudice that the law-abiding citizens of the District are incipient murderers.
David B. Kopel
2008
Brief of The International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA), The International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors (IALEFI), Maryland State Lodge, Fraternal Order of Police, Southern States Police Benevolent Association, 29 Elected California District Attorneys, San Francisco Veteran Police Officers Association, Long Beach Police Officers Association, Texas Police Chiefs Association, Texas Municipal Police Association, New York State Association of Auxiliary Police, Mendocino County, Calif., Sheriff Thomas D. Allman, Oregon State Rep. Andy Olson, National Police Defense Foundation, Law Enforcement Alliance of America, and The Independence Institute as amici curiae in support of respondent. D.C. v. Heller.
[This applies to anyplace, anytime, there are restrictions on the right of ordinary people to keep and bear arms.
Also note that this is a big worded way of saying the anti-gun people are bigots.
I was adding a quote to my database from spending most of the evening listening and talking to Dave Kopel at the NRA Annual Meeting last month (thank you Sebastian and Bitter for arranging it!) when I ran across this one that I had not yet posted. I would post the one I heard directly last month (it is awesome!) but he had been drinking and was probably a little more enthusiastic about freedom than he normally presents himself in public.–Joe]
Teaching a child to shoot is teaching a child to kill. It’s what guns are used for.
John Cook
Gun Control Australia
Attributed here. GCA defends the statement here.
[Apparently I didn’t teach my children very well then. I pretty sure they haven’t killed anything with a gun even though they first started shooting in the early 90s.–Joe]
While making my previous post about the FBI I remembered another item I picked up at the NRA annual meeting:
I obtained this from the husband of Nancy R. (also known as “The Shorter Half”).
It is reputed (in jest) to be a practice target for Lon Horiuchi. I would like to point out there is no evidence to support the assertion that Horiuchi practiced to shoot a mother in the chest while holding her baby in her arms–Vicki Weaver was shot in the head.
While at the NRA Annual Meeting I picked up a sheet of paper from the FBI NICS booth. The full sized scan of it is here but the most interesting data on it was this graph:
In late 2008 as Obama’s election was increasing likely we had a surge in gun sales that extended through the first months of 2009. No news there.
But what I didn’t realize was that sales didn’t continue their downward turn during the summer and fall to the levels of the early 2000s. In fact the sales of early 2010 are only slightly below that of early 2009.
Last week I came up with what are probably fairly accurate membership numbers for The Brady Campaign. In the comments I also speculated that membership would support from five to ten full time staff members. Of course this ignores grants from organizations like the Joyce Foundation.
Today I was looking through a collection of pictures from their annual event. It looks as if there were 50 to 100 people present.
Here are the staff and board members identified:
Not pictured but who I believe to still be staff is Dennis Henigan. One or more of those pictured could be unpaid interns or part time. There might be others not pictured as well but at a minimum they have a staff of six plus their board members. So that is in close agreement with my earlier estimate.
Another observation from these pictures is the general age of the staff and supporters. One of things the gun community has been doing in recent years is youth outreach. This not something as easily done by the Brady Campaign and it shows in their ages versus what I see at the NRA meetings.
We are winning. Now lets drive them into political extinction.
Carrying a gun for self defense is stupid. If you are being robbed, just give the robber what he wants. Your life or any life is not worth money. Very seldom does a robber want to kill you. And there are many women who are raped that go on to live normal, productive lives. Resisting during a rape will just get your face bashed in or worse. Self defense in reality does not work. A gun only increases your or a loved ones chances of getting hurt or killed by that stupid gun you got to protect yourself with.
sweatypie
May 28, 2010
Comment to Dueling emotions on gun control flare anew.
[Ahh… yes. Just lie back and enjoy it little lady. Facts are irrelevant.
What this approach does is lower the costs of a criminal “doing business”. It’s like a welfare program. You don’t really want people on welfare but once you have created such a program some people will decide that is a better/easier way of life than working for a living and figure out a way to take advantage of the system. You want to raise the costs of being a criminal. Sure, the police, courts, and penal system impose a cost on the criminal but only if they get caught and convicted. We supply free legal representation so the cost is essentially only imposed if they are convicted. And what are those odds? One in a hundred for every crime committed? And then what happens? They spend some time in prison. That is a gamble the criminal is willing to take–and we have the criminal facts to prove it.
If the criminal has to consider that one out of ten of their victims is capable and willing to splatter their brains all over the sidewalk the odds look considerably different. The criminal facts from places outside of Chicago and Washington D.C. also prove this.
If someone should actually encounter sweatypie I would like to suggest taking Greg Hamilton’s lead on dealing with people like this.
Update: Another approach to dealing with someone such as sweatypie is to suggest they convince their local police force that, “Self defense in reality does not work.” Once the local police have agreed and complied for a year or more you will give it further consideration.–Joe]
It’s fairly frequent that some anti-gun bigot will read something I or someone else wrote and completely misunderstand what is being said. From the words of the Second Amendment to advertisements (fingerprint resistance is about rust prevention, not criminal use) they either deliberately or through lack of reading comprehension skills arrive at completely basely conclusions. Anytime they claim some scientific paper supports their conclusions I know I have to get my hands on the actual paper before I’ll have a clue as to what was actually written.
Even give the above I was still surprised at this post by Gun Control Canada. It is nothing but a complete copy of this opinion piece in The Star Phoenix which is totally pro-gun.
Yes. Apparently the anti-gun blog Gun Control Canada misread the (admittedly poorly worded) headline and copied the entire thing without reading and/or comprehending the editorial. Microsoft Office informs me the Flesch Reading Ease is 45.6 and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 12.0 which I have to conclude is too difficult for the bigots at Gun Control Canada. Just for comparison this post has near equal scores of 47.2 and 11.8.
I am aware that there are those at and near the top of the food chain in the gun control hierarchy who are smart and are deliberate in their falsehoods and half-truths. But I’m convinced the vast majority of their followers have crap for brains. They are useful idiots as the communists used to refer to Soviet sympathizers in the west.
How’s it feel to be on the losing side, Paul? Hey, did you hear? Louisiana’s passing its own Firearms Freedom Act, Indiana’s Parking Lot bill passed, and Arizona just got Vermont Style Carry. We have got your astroturf “movement” down and we are kicking it like a naked fat guy at Altamont. Taste the ash heap of history, you bigoted old Bolshie.
Tamara K.
April 14, 2010
Hi, Paul!
[I normally exclude Tam from the competition for QOTD because there would be little point in anyone checking out The View From North Central Idaho for a QOTD when they would have already picked it up when reading the View From The Porch earlier. But this was different. I was catching up on my RSS feeds that I was got behind on in the days before Boomershoot 2010 and I thought this was particularly applicable again six weeks after it was written because of my discovery of the Brady membership numbers.–Joe]
If we see anyone walking around with a gun it is a signal that they are crazy and we should lock them up. “Guns don’t kill people, but crazy open carry people walking around with guns can kill people”. Lets hope that Obama has the guts to push for a total gun ban and melts down all the guns these crazy people want to wank around with.
sfprogressive
May 28, 2010
Comment to Dueling emotions on gun control flare anew
[Ahhh… yes. This is no surprise. If you don’t conform to their view you must be crazy and need to sent off to the mental hospital. That is what they did in the USSR and it’s what the “progressives” advocate here.–Joe]
Via Ry we have this story which reminds me of a story I heard at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in 2000.
The Second Amendment Sisters held a counter rally to an anti-gun event in Chicago. They passed out balloons to all the kids that said “How will Mommy protect me if she can’t have a gun?” Of course this inflamed the anti-gun people. They were so out of their minds (much more than usual) that they ran around popping all the little kids balloons.
My understanding is they did capture it on video but the video didn’t turn out very well.
We have often wondered what the true membership numbers of the Brady Campaign are. In 2004 they said they had “about half a million”.
Since they are selling their membership list we now know what are probably close to the true numbers:
50,581 DONORS/MEMBERS (TOTAL FILE)
40,765 DONORS/MEMBERS (24 MOS)
28,417 DONORS/MEMBERS (12 MOS)
9,590 CATHOLIC DONORS/MEMBERS (36 MOS)
5,368 JEWISH DONORS/MEMBERS (36 MOS)
Founded in 1974 (Formerly known as Handgun Control) this public citizens lobby works for legislative controls and governmental regulations on the manufacture, importation, sale, transfer, and civilian possesion of guns. Activists are individuals who have responded by mail on a gun control issue.
Average Donation $40.00.
So, they have about 50K total “donors/members” on their list. If I’m reading the data correctly only about 28K have donated in the last 12 months.
[sarcasm] It appears their membership has dropped significantly in the last six years. And to think that in 2001 they had an influx of a million moms too. [/sarcasm]
What is the NRA membership these days? About 4 million? That gives us about a 140:1 ratio, which is fairly typical of the public turnouts I have attended.
The Second Amendment Foundation has over 650K members. That is a ratio of about 23:1.
With an average donation of $40/per donor that means they have an annual income from members of about $1.14 million.
It’s no wonder most politicians give them a cold shoulder these days. In addition to their blatant lies, even if you count their total membership file that is only an average of a little over 1000 members per state. There are gun clubs in some large cities with that many members.
I would find it rather amusing if the NRA bought the list and sent them a little propaganda to inform them of the futility and illegality of their support for the Brady Campaign.
As I’ve said before, I buy banned guns and books.
I think proposed “assault weapon” bans should be viewed exactly the same as bans on books, magazines (unintentional pun), or videos. The same goes for import bans on firearms, it’s just another type of censorship.
Taking it a step further why isn’t a fully functional Ma Duce considered a work of art and given the same protections as any other piece of art or expression?
It appears the left is getting so close to their victory they are getting impatient. Sort of a “I’m so close I can taste it” type of thing. This is from Woody Allen:
“It would be good… if [President Obama] could be dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly,” Allen is quoted as saying.
Allen is also to have said: “I am pleased with Obama. I think he is brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him.”
I read this last night and spent a lot of time thinking about it as I went to sleep and after I work up this morning.
My first thought in response was Allen would probably think it was a less desirable situation that he thinks because the health care system would probably be heavily strained by all the lead poisoning that would result from such a change in our form of government.
Then this morning I thought, “No. That wouldn’t happen. The military would be required to implement it and the leadership would quietly and firmly tell him that they took an oath to defend the constitution from all enemies–foreign and domestic. But then it occurred to me that the military course of action would probably be to replace Obama with the next in line to succeed the President. I’m not certain what Biden would do but I am of the opinion that Pelosi and the Marxists in Obama’s cabinet would all be inclined to take the role of dictator. What would happen if all the Commander-in-Chief replacements said their position was that a dictatorship (or the equivalent) was what was required?
Bear with me for a minor tangent…
Last week a friend (who I think I might have already known had a gun but he does not identify as a “gun-owner” like many of my friends) was on a rant about the debt, the bailouts, the health care farce, etc. and said he was about ready to get out his gun and start oiling it. He might have to start shooting pretty soon he said. I asked, “Who would you shoot?” After a long pause he said, “I would figure it out.”
This is would be the problem the military would be faced with. If there is just one or two (or 1000) people that are a threat to our form of government then the solution, even though “messy”, illegal, and perhaps immoral it would still be plausible to implement. But what if it is 20% of the population that is intent on enslaving the other 80%? Do you still think it could be done? Before you answer keep in mind that only about 1% to 2% of the German population was involved in the Holocaust and yet that small percentage was not stopped by the vast majority. Predators have a different mindset than gives them an advantage in many situations.
I don’t know the answer. But I do know the left is getting impatient and that recent gun sales show people who value their freedom are contemplating such solution to the looming threat.
Having a gun is consistently the safest course of action when someone is confronted by a criminal. Research by academics such as Gary Kleck and Larry Southwick have used the National Crime Victimization Survey, which surveys about 100,000 to 150,000 people each year, to directly measure how different types of victim reactions impact the probability that they will be injured by the attack. The data from the 1990s indicated that the probability of an injury after self protection with a gun is 3.6 percent; for running or driving away, 5.4 percent; screaming, 12.6 percent; threaten without weapon, 13.6 percent; and passive behavior, 55.2 percent.
John Lott
An Interview with John Lott
[I find it very interesting that the anything other than being passive will result in less injury than “giving them what they want” which is frequently the advice given by anti-gun activists.
This shows three things.
First, violent criminals think different than most people. In the stereotypical situation the bad guys offers you a deal, “Do what I want or get hurt.” But the evidence is that the bad guy frequently does not honor the deal they offered. They break the “contract” they wrote.
This was one of the surprising things I learned in the book Ice Man about mafia contract killer Richard Kuklinski. One of his contracts were brothers in South America who were suppliers of cocaine to the mafia. The mafia found a cheaper supplier and rather than simply paying for the last shipment and ordering from the new supplier they refused to pay for the last shipment. When the brothers complained about not being paid they hired Kuklinski to murder them. In another case Kuklinski had a request from a pharmacist for some cheap Tagamet (Kuklinski was also in the business of hijacking trucks and selling the contents “wholesale”). Kuklinski didn’t have any leads on it but when the pharmacist said he had the cash ($20K) in hand Kuklinski told him he had the drug and then killed him for the money when the delivery was supposedly going to be made.
For some reason this failure to honor agreements surprises me. It shouldn’t, I have had far too many personal interactions where people and organizations that are supposedly “normal” law-abiding and trustworthy violate not only verbal but written contracts that they themselves wrote. And that doesn’t even count the U.S. Constitution and how it has been violated by our public servants.
As a bit of a tangent this is further evidence that unless you have a means of enforcing a contract you should not count on the contract being honored. The Second Amendment is a last resort contract enforcement tool.
Second, I believe that criminals have a behavior pattern that can be accurately modeled as predator versus prey. The more you act like prey the more likely they are to treat you like prey. If you give off signals that you are also a predator (you can be a benign predator such as a sheep dog) the more likely they are to avoid getting into a conflict with you. If they think of you as a “grass eater” they do not think you worthy of respect any more than they would respect a steak in the refrigerator.
Third, it shows anti-gun activists live in a fantasy world with only a tenuous connection with reality.–Joe]
Myths surrounding the discussion around gun control tend to focus on the problems of urban violence, gangs, and handguns. This however ignores the fact that most firearm deaths in Canada are suicides and the guns most often used are rifles and shotguns. In addition, referring to harmless “duck guns” masks the truth: if this law passes, police will no longer be able to trace non-restricted firearms including the powerful semi-automatic Ruger Mini 14 used in the Montreal Massacre and sniper rifles such as the L115A3 and the Steyr-Mannlicher HS50 which can pierce Kevlar vests and fire bullets over 2 km with great accuracy.
Wendy Cukier
President of Coalition for Gun Control
May 25, 2010
Coalition for Gun Control Takes Aim at Myths About the Firearms Registry
[It may be that Cukier didn’t say those exact words. The news release is unclear about who actually wrote them. But the odds are very good she would not object to them being attributed to her.
Some of the myths she doesn’t address are those that she propagates. In just this one paragraph she does the following:
Cukier apparently lives in a fairy tale land of her own making. I wouldn’t be surprised if she still believes in Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, and The Great Pumpkin too.–Joe]
I walked over to son James place for dinner and videos after work tonight. I decided to wear my new glasses and open carry. The video was boring so I didn’t both to post it.
On the way back it was cool and I put my coat on and it covered my gun. Besides they had the polarized lenses installed which would have made it difficult to see at night. In the entrance/exit to his condo complex there were two cop cars and another car. I turned on the video and just held them as I walked past.
The video was as good as could be expected in the low light. Here is a screen capture of one of the frames:
My expectation is that if there is enough light you can see then the video will be usable.
Unfortunately they broke when I took them off (they were hanging from a lanyard around my neck) when I got back to my place. The frame just above the right eye broke. I think I can glue them and then if I am very careful with them they will still be usable.
