My position is that anybody who’s in favor gun control is a fucking moron.
Jackie Mason
From Penn and Teller: Bullshit! Gun Control
See also Wikipedia.
[Actually, I can think of three other options. The gun control advocate could also be one or more of the following: 1) Ignorant, 2) Evil, 3) Insane. If you are a gun control advocate and are unsure as to your classification let me know and I’ll help you figure it out.–Joe]
In case you haven’t seen it yet. It’s 28 minutes spent worthwhile even if the language is a bit crude at times.
I will be using a sentence from it for the quote of the day tomorrow.
You remember Jenny Price from the other day, right? I was just looking at who has been visiting me and saw this:
| Domain Name | usdoj.gov ? (United States Government) | |||||||||||||||||||
| IP Address | 149.101.1.# (US Dept of Justice) | |||||||||||||||||||
| ISP | US Dept of Justice | |||||||||||||||||||
| Location |
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| Language | English (United States) en-us |
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| Operating System | Microsoft WinXP | |||||||||||||||||||
| Browser | Internet Explorer 6.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; DOJ3jx7bf; SV1; DI60SP1001; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) |
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| Javascript | version 1.3 | |||||||||||||||||||
| Monitor |
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| Time of Visit | Aug 21 2006 7:30:47 am | |||||||||||||||||||
| Last Page View | Aug 21 2006 7:31:54 am | |||||||||||||||||||
| Visit Length | 1 minute 7 seconds | |||||||||||||||||||
| Page Views | 2 | |||||||||||||||||||
| Referring URL | http://blogsearch.go…22&btnG=Search Blogs | |||||||||||||||||||
| Search Engine | blogsearch.google.com | |||||||||||||||||||
| Search Words | guns & “jenny price” | |||||||||||||||||||
| Visit Entry Page | http://blog.joehuffm…55-698f2960fb51.aspx | |||||||||||||||||||
| Visit Exit Page | http://blog.joehuffm…/Thinking Small.aspx | |||||||||||||||||||
| Out Click | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Time Zone | UTC-5:00 | |||||||||||||||||||
| Visitor’s Time | Aug 21 2006 10:30:47 am | |||||||||||||||||||
| Visit Number | 95,122 |
I wonder why the DOJ is interested in what bloggers are saying about Jenny Price. Did she get a credible death threat or something?
Very interesting…
I just made all my reservations for attending the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno. There are already lots of people signed up that I’m looking forward to meeting. You don’t have to be a blogger to attend, just have an interest in meeting some of the gun bloggers.
See you there?
Despite standing right beside the Muslim extremist who shot her and listening while he “ranted on the phone about Jews, Israel and the U.S. role in the war in Iraq and the Middle East” Ms Klein is concerned about all the wrong things:
Klein said she hopes the shooting will serve to renew local and national efforts to draft gun control legislation.
How and why Haq “was able to legally acquire two semi-automatic weapons in our state is still a very disturbing mystery to me,” she said.
…
“Naveed Haq has wasted enough of my time,” she said.
Huh? Haq is the reason she may not regain the use of her hand. His extremist religious beliefs are the reason he and millions of others want her dead. And she is distrubed because it’s legal to purchase firearms? Had she purchased and carried a similar firearm she and others might not have been shot. She should exercise her rights, her brain, and before pushing for more useless gun control legislation answer Just One Question.
For reference see:
As pointed out by Denise, Jenny Price wrote another editorial. This time on gun owners instead of guns. I commented on her last one here. This one is about being “Targeted by Gun Nuts”. At the time I suspected she visited my blog a week or two after I wrote that post because of what I saw in my log file, but one never knows for certain.
Jenny, if you visit again please answer Just One Question.
I think the most telling part of the editorial are the last two paragraphs:
…do you really want these people on these websites (and 40 million other people in the country) to have guns?
I can cite statistics, and I can tell you why the right to carry a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun with a 10-shot clip is not guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment. But the paranoia and bone-chilling hatred that spew from such sites as packing.org and freerepublic.com make for an equally — and unusually — effective argument for a ban on handguns.
She can cite statistics but can she do it correctly? Last time she had a terrible problem doing so. I’ve looked around a fair amount this morning and as near as I can tell she is off by about a factor of two, on the low side, with the number of gun owners in this country.
And if she can tell us why the 2nd Amendment doesn’t guarantee us the right to carry a 9mm handgun with a 10 round magazine there are some others besides me who would be interested in her reasoning. For example:
But then she could have done that this time but instead went for the emotional appeal and claims it’s is an unusually effective argument.
All though this video I get increasingly uncomfortable. I kept thinking “this can’t turn out well” and I was tempted to stop watching. The tension gradually increases and reaches a peak just as you “know” it’s going to get really ugly. It has a nice twist at the end as everything resolves in a satisfactory manner that makes it worthwhile watching. Via Ry.
It illustrates the truth of Lyle’s post from the other day.
No wonder the police and the politicians in Philadelphia want the citizens disarmed: Philadelphia cops use badges to exhort sex.
Liberty is a hollow joke without an armed populace to protect the rights of all.
Donald L. Cline
August 14, 2006
Gun laws only help criminals
We were supposed to be in Springfield MO by now. But our plane to leave Seattle arrived 40 minutes late. It took off well over an hour late (taxiway congestion). We arrived in Minneapolis about 10 minutes after our connecting flight to Springfield was scheduled to leave.
The airline (NWA) put us up in a very nice room with free ground transportation, meals, and small overnight kit (they locked up our luggage for the night). Tomorrow morning we get a wake up call at 4:00 AM (2:00 AM my time) to catch a shuttle ride back to the airport where we catch a flight to Memphis and from there we go to Springfield arriving almost exactly 12 hours later than we planned..
Barb is stressing a little bit but as long as I do the interacting with all the wonderful service people that have been so accommodating we’ll do just fine.
I am annoyed with the hotel here, they have a policy of no guns on the property. This appears to be in accordance with Minnesota law. But since I don’t have my gun with me (it’s locked up at the airport) I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much this time. I’ll leave them one of these cards in the morning:
Appeasement but begets new and bloodier wars.
Douglas MacArthur
1880-1964
American general
Address to Congress
April 19, 1951
[Communists, Islamic extremists, or anti-gun owner bigots it still applies.–Joe]
From the U.K. via the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies comes this study, ‘Knife Crime’: Ineffective reactions to a distracting problem? A Review of Evidence and Policy.
The PDF document is protected such that I can’t copy and paste but some hand typed excerpts are worth the effort:
Government and the police lack a coherent, evidence-based, reasoned strategy for dealing with knife carrying and knife-related offences. There is insufficient evidence that a knife amnesty or increased sentence length for carrying knives will decrease the level of knife use and carrying. Due to the easy availability of knives, there will always be opportunities to commit knife offences. Since it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to limit the availability of knives and knives are merely a tool used in violent crime, success in fighting knife usage will only come with success in dealing with the underlying causes of violence, fear and insecurity.
This is mostly correct and applies to firearms as well as knives. What I disagree with is the last few words. And it is these last few words that are critical to solving the problem. They have an incorrect problem statement. This shows, conclusively, they don’t understand the problem. If they don’t understand the problem then they can never solve it.
They believe they have a violence problem and they are attempting to make it more difficult to commit violence. This is totally wrong. They have a violent crime problem. The only solution (assuming we are talking about ordinary crime and not sometime like a rebellion that is labeled crime by the ruling class) to violent crime is violence, or the threat of violence, against the criminals. This is what the police do when they arrest someone. They use violence or the threat of violence to remove the criminal from the general population.
The “underlying causes of violence” are more numerous than “fear and insecurity” which also shows they don’t understand the problem. I’m shocked the author didn’t at least throw in “poverty”. But even then he would be leaving out the really big issue, evil in the hearts of men. It is only with this last issue can you explain such things as rape and extortion.
So a better problem statement is that they (and we) have violent crime problem for the most part because some people are evil. I will grant that as poverty (the definition of which is tenuous at best) increases crime tends to increase as well, but that is a topic for another day.
The solution becomes much more obvious with an appropriate problem statement. The dominant root cause is “some people are evil”. The problem can now be broken down into identification and “elimination” (either by incarceration or other more violent solutions) of the perpetrators or “persuading” the potential criminal to not act out their evil inclinations. And as Al Capone said when discussing persuasion methods, “You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.” And this basic truth is what the people in the U.K. have overlooked with their faulty problem statement. Further compounding their problems is that they have disabled the most effective identification and persuasion mechanism available by disarming the victims of violent crime.
It may be that they will eventually figure out the error of their ways. For example the study points out the folly of the “knife amnesty” program as follows with the stereotypical British understatement:
According to the Home Office, at total of 89,864 knives were handed in during the national amnesty. Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker stated that this means “fewer knives on our streets” and greater security for everyone. Assuming that there are approximately 22 million households in England and Wales, each possessing a single kitchen knife, the amnesty has been successful in removing 0.0041 of the knives that might be used in crimes. Of course, most households contain many more than a single knife and it is barely worth considering the tens of thousands sitting in shops waiting to be purchased. As such, it is, at best, questionable whether this will result in a reduction in knife carrying and knife-related offences.
Further evidence that they might be getting a clue is this part of the conclusion:
At the moment the government seems to be planning action to a problem without knowing the full and true nature and extent of it and whilst overlooking the causes.
The author has a clue, but just barely. But really, there is Just One Question that needs to be asked.
The Government is constructing responses without any credible evidence that they will be successful. Knife amnesties will have a negligible impact since knives will be available as long as there is unsliced bread.
Chris Eades
The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies
‘Knife Crime’: Ineffective reactions to a distracting problem? A Review of Evidence and Policy
From The Independent: Big rise in knife crime despite tougher penalties
[First they came for the guns…–Joe]
I can’t get away from it. It has to be mental problems. Do they even realize what they are saying?
…it’s also a symptom– a symptom of a culture that believes guns can be safe, a culture that believes teenagers can be trusted with firearms.
The truth is that no one can be trusted with firearms. They represent a threat, all the time, every time. This study makes it clear that things need to change– the only way to protect children from guns is to get the gun out of the houses they live in.
And here:
Guns are dangerous everywhere– why should we think a gun is any safer when it’s in a park rather than a church or a school? The guns don’t change. The people carrying them don’t change. Concealed weapons aren’t safe anywhere, because, as history shows time and time again, no matter how much training or discipline a gun owner has, a gun still represents a dire threat to everyone around it.
Evidence apparently doesn’t matter. I have Just One Question.
He should volunteer to live in a place where the police don’t have guns. Oh, that’s right, there is no such place. I guess that means he yearns for a place that doesn’t exist. Some imaginary world where everything is as he wants it to be rather than the way things are. I suppose it could exist for a while. Britain survived for a while without the police having guns on a regular basis. But look where they are now. They saw the folly of that and they have now have teams with guns available on short notice and one of the highest violent crime rates in the western world.
This weekend Barb attended a class in Spokane. We stayed in motel and I ran errands and worked on the computer while she attended class. Saturday while out walking around on my errands I noticed that just a block or so from our motel there were a large number of vagrants hanging out under the freeway and the neighboring parking lots (I-90 and Division street). One approached me and asked for a dime or a quarter. Greg Hamilton describes this as an “interview”. I apparently failed the interview and did no further business with him.
Later that evening we walked to a restaurant for dinner past the same area. On the edge of the parking lot of a drive-in burger joint (Dicks) several vagrants nearly had the sidewalk blocked. We took a path through the middle of the parking lot to reach our restaurant (Frankie Doodles) that adjoined Dicks. Barb and I were talking but I was watching out of the corner of my eye. The largest of the vagrants stood up and followed us about 20 feet behind and to our left which put him in a position to close the distance if we returned to the sidewalk. For thirty feet or more he matched our speed and direction. My gun was between Barb and I and not in danger of being blocked by him if he chose to attack. I could deploy and utilize it if needed. But at his range he could probably get a first strike in before I could get off a first shot. But why wait for an attack? I’m not a grass eater, he needs to know that. I snapped my head around and looked directly at him while continuing to walk. He immediately stopped and developed an intense interest in something on the ground.
Later returning to the motel they were still there and we gave them an even wider berth. They paid us no interest.
Access taxes and proficiency tests for exercising your rights are very much alive for black Americans, and all Americans, if you wish to exercise your right to keep and bear arms.
Alan Korwin
August 04, 2006
From Michelle Malkin:
A disabled war hero and his wife were assaulted and robbed in Bethesda, Md., a few weeks ago.
The guy lost an arm and a leg in Iraq and five punks mugged him and his wife. If one or both had been armed things might have turned out differently. Maryland, however, doesn’t trust it’s citizens to carry firearms to defend themselves except under rare circumstances. Hence being outnumbered or out-sized is an invitation to the predators on the street.
From the Washington Blade:
“It’s a shame in this world that both in the area of gay rights and in the area of gun issues that these should be political issues,” Sarah Brady says. “These should be common sense, human decency, public safety issues, not political footballs.”
The bipartisan approval that the Brady Bill ultimately achieved is something that she would like to see occur in the realm of gay rights, Sarah Brady says.
“We were able, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, to bring the two parties together for public safety and that’s something which is beginning to happen in the gay community as well,” she says. “It should not be a hot-button issue. It should be common sense and the right thing.”
I fully agree neither issue should be political footballs. Common sense and scientific facts should bring us together for the elimination of the Brady Act and other unlawful, immoral, and hazardous restrictions on our inalienable rights to keep and bear arms.
The other day I posted about a friend not getting a job after being asked bigoted questions about his gun ownership. I bumped into him again on Thursday. He now has a job with another company. This company didn’t ask any questions about his personal life during the interview.
He asked if I was interested in working there. For now I’m not. I’m happy with my job and my co-workers and no one has even hinted my interest in guns and explosives is a problem. I’ll keep my eyes open for warning signs though.
The right there specified is that of ‘bearing arms for a lawful purpose.’ This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed; but this, as has been seen, means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress.
Chief Justice Morrison Waite
U.S. Supreme Court
U S v Cruikshank
92 U.S. 542 (1875)
[In response to “The Gun Guys“. Remember that rights are guaranteed or infringed. They are not granted. Only privileges and permissions are granted.–Joe]
