I was browsing through some screed by the VPC about civilian “sniper rifles” and it made mention of how ours law allows civilians to own the same equipment as law enforcement and the military. This is essentially true but the wording is a little misleading.
It would be more correct to say that the people allow law enforcement and the military to use the same equipment as civilians.
Via email from Daniel Crocker:
I don’t know if you have seen anything about this, but the number of colleges allowing concealed carry on campus has more than doubled this week. Especially as this has not received any media coverage, I feel that this is a substantial news issue that should be covered and would be of interest to your readers. I’ve gone into more detail about this below, but feel free to email or call me at the address below for any additional information.
Prior to this week, only twelve colleges in the entire nation explicitly allowed carry of a firearm: The ten public colleges of Utah, Blue Ridge Community College in Virginia and Colorado State University. Following a substantial ruling to remove the ban at the University of Colorado, the fourteen colleges in the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) voted to rescind their current ban and allow any licensed adult with a concealed carry permit to exercise that right while on campus. While I cannot find any direct news articles about it, you may link to the revised policy at:
http://www.cccs.edu/SBCCOE/Policies/SP/PDF/SP19-10.pdf
This action alone more than doubles the number of universities and colleges allowing concealed carry from twelve to twenty-six.
In addition, one of the two community colleges in Colorado not part of the CCCS, Aims Community College, has scheduled a meeting to make the same changes in their policies. You may view an article about this at:
http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20100511/NEWS/100519933/1007
This dramatic shift follows in the wake of a ruling against a similar policy at the University of Colorado. Members of Students of Concealed Carry on Campus (Concealedcampus.org) and the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners (Rmgo.org) originally filed suit against the University of Colorado claiming that state law preempted any governmental entity, including the Board of Governors, from banning concealed carry license holders from possessing a firearm on campus. While the initial ruling went against the firearms activists, it was reversed on appeal:
http://www.thedenverdailynews.com/article.php?aID=8082
The Colorado State University (CSU) Board of Governors originally voted to reverse the long standing policy of allowing students with state-issues concealed carry permits to possess firearms on campus shortly after the initial ruling:
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_14454241
Over the last seven years while the policy had been in place, crime had rapidly decreased and not a single instance of gun misuse by a licensee has been reported. The new ban was opposed by CSU’s student government, the county sheriff, the editorial boards of both the campus newspaper and the Colorado Springs Gazette, as well as more than 1,000 students who signed a petition against the ban in just a few short days. Larimer County Sheriff Jim Aberdeen, was so outraged by its passage that he told local media that he intended to undermine it by refusing to book violators of the ban into his jail, which the CSU police department utilizes for arrests. In the wake of the recent ruling however, Colorado State University has reversed it’s ban on firearms.
http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_15027249
This issue will likely continue to be fought in court. For the time being however, it appears that some Colorado students and faculty will be allowed an option for self defense and that some criminals will no longer have a governmental guarantee that their potential victims will be unarmed.
Regards,
Daniel Crocker
Southwest Regional Director,
Students for Concealed Carry on Campus
Daniel.Crocker@concealedcampus.org
(205) 370-9126
I am have more than the usual interest in this topic because I have two daughters and a niece in college. Two of them have concealed carry licenses and are prohibited from using the most effective defensive tools should they be attacked.
So how do you measure a “potential terrorist”?
NRA ballcap or decal.
JadeGold
May 6, 2010
In the comments to Bloomberg on the “Terror Gap”.
[And when 80,000 “potential terrorists” get together this weekend just think of the havoc they will create. And it happens every year. It’s time people realized we can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to legitimately have freedom of association…
Oh, that’s right, the people at a NRA convention are extremely well behaved. It’s when a dozen or more leftists get together that they frequently riot and/or destroy property. The leftist terrorist organizations (FALN, ALF, ELF, anarchists, revolutionary socialists, etc.) commit far more crimes in this country than all the conservative, right-wing (National Alliance, WCOTC, Aryan Nation), and libertarian (have there any been libertarian terrorist organizations?) organizations combined.
I guess it must be the mental problems of JadeGold causing them to engage in projection.–Joe]
Or perhaps, as Peter Zatloukal has said, an entire symphony of sarcasm:
After hearing the news that consideration was being given to National Guard troops being dispatched to the city of Chicago to quell violence, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank Mayor Daley and Governor Quinn.
Mayor, Governor, congratulations. Your pathological efforts to disarm the honest law-abiding citizens of the state of Illinois have finally paid off in a most graphic way. By making Illinois one of only two states in the United States that denies its citizens the rights granted under the Second Amendment, you have succeeded in turning the city of Chicago into a war zone. Since the beginning of 2010, there have been more Americans killed in Chicago than in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. Congratulations, great job, I hope you’re proud.
Frank Ladonne
Buffalo Grove
Kevin points out that the other side lies, extensively, even when actual numbers are easy to come by and their lies are easily exposed.
He asks why do they do that. That is actually an easy question to answer.
As I have demonstrated before they are incapable of determining truth from falsity. They cannot distinguish their fantasy world from reality. This is part of the reason they can be so convincing with their lies. They actually believe them. The other reason they can be very convincing is that many of their audience want to believe them. They want to believe there are solutions as simple as congress flipping a switch and making the Boogie Monster under the bed go away.
They are frequently pathetic creatures for whom the light switch on the wall is, in a very real sense, magical. They have no concept of how things actually work. How else do you explain their belief that some collection of people could write down set of rules on a piece of paper and evil people, who fail to obey existing rules against violence crime, will suddenly obey still another rule to turn in or destroy their tools which enable them to pursue their chosen evil ways?
Of course do not underestimate our opponents. As Sean likes to point out, not all of them are so simple minded.
Police have a difficult and thankless job. They put their lives on the line every day in a world affected by drugs and violence and social decay. May each of us in this noble profession, as we pursue the guilty among us, never be guilty ourselves of the greater crime: violating our oath in God’s name to defend the constitutional rights of the people for whom we work.
Sheriff Richard I. Mack
From My Cold Dead Fingers–Why America Needs Guns, Third Edition (“Final Chapter”), page 217.
[I have an autographed, and addressed to me, copy of this book. I found it in the garage when cleaning this weekend. I don’t remember buying it. I remember it laying around, but I don’t remember when or where I bought it. Probably at a gun show someplace. I haven’t read it yet. I just scanned it a some.
There are lots and lots of great quotes in it. You’ll be hearing more from this book.–Joe]
After the main event is over and most of the participants have left there is still work to be done. There is trash to be picked up, trash cans to be emptied, caution tape and signs to be taken down, stakes to be pulled and put away, and the left over targets have to be burned or detonated. I drive the ATV back and forth from the field to the Taj carrying trailer loads of stuff to be put away. The staff with ATF approval to handle explosives take care of the left over and damaged targets. The ones damaged too much to be moved are detonated in place.
No sound system we have tried can really capture the experience but Barron has the rest of the story and the video from this year. At about 3:00 minutes in Rolf demonstrates his .357 and Entertainingly Close.
I surprises me that as much history as we have in this country on blacklisting people exercising a specific enumerated right that people have not learned the appropriate lessons. We need to make sure the people advocating for blacklisting of people who wish to exercise their Second Amendment rights get the same treatment by history as those who infringed upon people’s First Amendment rights 60 years ago.
From the editorial The Gun Lobby’s Long Shadow in the NY Times:
Senator John McCain and other members of the gun lobby’s cohort are pressing for legislation to strip local taxpayers in Washington of such basic gun controls as owner registration and a ban on semiautomatic battlefield rifles — laws already upheld by the courts.
First off, the owner registration and “ban on semiautomatic battlefield rifles” was not upheld in the Supreme Court. My presumption is that they are talking about the Heller decision which merely said registration and bans on certain types of guns were not at issue in the decision.
Second, it is very telling the way the writer words things, “strip local taxpayers in Washington of such basic gun controls…” It has not been proposed the taxpayers be stripped of anything other than “chains”. It has been proposed the local government be stripped of a claimed power than infringes on a specific enumerated right. The wording used is analogous to someone whining about proposed legislation that would eliminate registration of blacks and prohibitions against them being in public after dark after the 13th Amendment was passed.
Such basic controls are just common sense, right? It was foolish to pass the 13th Amendment but even if we accept it at face value surely no one can believe that it can mean that the people will be stripped of basic common sense Jim Crow laws. Can they?
Bigotry is an ugly thing. No matter where it is found.
I’m sure the Administration’s position that “Thou shalt have no position on guns,” drives Holder nuttier than a fruitcake. It’s a joy to watch.
Sebastian
May 7, 2010
You Can Tell it Just Drives Him Nuts
[One might argue Holder was already “nuttier than a fruitcake” but that is just being nit-picky. It is definitely a joy to watch.–Joe]
According to the annual Freedom House survey of democracy and liberty around the globe, there was almost no increase in freedom during Carter’s presidency. Instead, both Iran and Nicaragua, principal targets of Carter’s human rights policy, became human rights disasters; the Soviets cracked down on human rights activists Anatoly Scharansky and Aleksandr Ginzburg; and Carter’s foreign policy weakness encouraged the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. The aftershocks of Carter’s foreign policy failures reverberated most powerfully in the Islamic fundamentalist terrorism we have today. It was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that created the mujahadeen, who revived the idea of jihad. More important, the fall of the shah in Iran gave Islamic fundamentalist radicalism an enormous state sponsor and inspiration and made being an American ally in the Middle East seem more dangerous than being an American foe. Carter’s idealism failed in confronting communism during his presidency and later in confronting communist North Korea. Carter idealism–if it can be called that–in the Middle East would have us side with the terrorist PLO rather than the democratic Israel, and would have us on a perpetual merry-go-round of talks aimed at appeasing Arab dictators rather than toppling them or challenging them to reform and cease sponsoring terrorism.
Steven F. Hayward
The Real Jimmy Carter, page 230.
[One can claim, with reasonable ability to defend the thesis, that Carter was a “nice guy” and had “good intentions”. But the results of his policy are just like the “nice guys” who have “good intentions” and want infringe our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms. They fail. They fail because they are naive. “Bad guys” exist. Bad guys take advantage of the weak. It is, as George Orwell said, “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Guns in the hands of the common person allow them to sleep peaceably in your bed at night because they can do their own violence when it becomes necessary to defend themselves and other innocent life. It is hopelessly naive to believe removing the power to do violence from the innocent will ever make the world a better place. At every level from the individual through city, state, and national level the means and the will to defend the innocent will always be a requirement for a safe and just society.
H/T to Davidwhitewolf who donated the author signed copy of The Real Jimmy Carter to the Boomershoot raffle. The inscription reads “Dear Boomershooter, Thanks for supporting the 2nd Amendment, Boomershoot 2010, and Project Valor-IT, [signed] Steven F. Hayward. I put many raffle tickets in the bucker for this book but someone else got it. They brought it to me afterward and asked me to blow it up for them. “Huh? Didn’t you read the find print on the jacket cover? It says, ‘How our worst ex-president undermines American foreign policy, coddles dictators, and created the party of Clinton and Kerry’?” Nope. They hadn’t read the fine print. I said that I would be glad to take the book and even blow it up for them if they really wanted that. But I would rather read it and use it as a source of quotes. They agreed and gave it to me.–Joe]
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.
Under the new carry provisions,
We could use more laws like this. This is the 10th Amendment in action.
Alan Korwin
April 5, 2010
Reverse Tenth Amendment
[Unfortunately the feds didn’t have this imposed on them by the states, they imposed it upon themselves. It seems to me that in a more utopian world the state legislatures could have voted, with a simple majority, to overthrow any federal law. Sort of like an initiative process that occurs in many states when the citizens enact or repeal laws the state legislatures and/or governor refuse to do. The feds could only override the states on issues of rights that are infringed by the states.
My utopia is far from realized and I fear I will have to find my own planet to implement it.–Joe]
Some incompetent religious fanatic tries to blow up the infidels and the would be tyrant politicians want to infringe the rights of everyone:
New York desperately needs more anti-terror funding and tighter gun control laws to guard against the next attempted attack on the city, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly told Congress Wednesday.
Bloomberg cited the handgun found in the van of Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahraz. He noted new federal stats showing that suspects on terrorism watchlists tried to buy weapons more than 1,200 times in the last six years and were successful 90% of the time.
…
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) backed Bloomberg’s plea for more Homeland anti-terror funding while breaking with the Obama administration on how the arrest of Shahraz was handled.
“I don’t believe somebody like Shahraz should receive Miranda rights,” Lieberman said. Terrorism suspects “ought to be turned over to the military justice system” Lieberman said.
Until a suspect is clearly associated with a foreign organization they are common criminals not enemy combatants.
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.
Since America is infested with millions of murder instruments, we don’t know whether control laws ever can reduce the death toll. But conscientious leaders should keep trying. Closing the gun show loophole would be a plausible step.
The Charleston Gazette
May 2, 2010
Pistols: Gun show sales
[H/T to Say Uncle.
One persons “murder instruments” are another persons life saving self-defense tools–which we all have a constitutionally protected right to keep and bear.
America is also “infested” with millions of homosexuals, Jews, Muslims, and people with non-white skin but that doesn’t mean their rights should be infringed no matter how plausible it is to some bigots.–Joe]
Just got back into town from Boomershoot.
OH GOD SO FUN.
I have a feeling this next year is going to be a spendy one for us. Yeeeeah.
Laurel
Aprile 25, 2010
*dies of awesome*
[My evil plan is working.–Joe]