Category Archives: Gun Rights

Fighting small fires

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Have you ever spent any time fighting fire? In the woods or maybe a grass fire? If you have you know you need to jump on things as soon as you can. Extinguish it while it is still small. A spark might start something on the other side of your fire break and if you don’t put it out soon it will quickly get as big as the original blaze.

John Snyder is helping us by dealing with a spark from the mostly contained, but still burning fire, of the gun control movement. The Vatican is supporting gun control at the UN:

The St. Gabriel Possenti Society, a Virginia-based organization devoted to protecting the individual’s right to self-defense, criticized statements by Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Holy See’s representative at the UN, endorsing “the promotion of disarmament” and calling for stiffer international controls on the sale and possession of firearms.

John Snyder, the founder and chairman of the St. Gabriel Possenti Society, said the archbishop’s words pointed to a “terribly misguided secular political initiative.” He urged Catholics in the US to protest that initiative.

This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned Mr. Snyder. He was dealing with another small fire a few months ago.

You should also know that John Snyder isn’t just some random person. He’s also the Capital Hill Editor of Gun Week.

Stopping bad guys

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I stumbled across some old work of mine yesterday.  I was just one of a few that provided comments to the King County (Seattle area) Board of Health in January of 2000. They announced they were going to hear a report on “Firearms as a Public Health Issue” and public input was welcome. I and a few other good guy activists showed up to give our input. The procedure was rather odd. We had to give our input before we heard their report. We also had to sign up ahead of time and they called our names one at a time to talk to the board about our topic. Another odd thing was there were none of the bad guys signed up to testify as the cutoff time came and went.  IIRC Joe Waldron speculated they figured it was a slam dunk and they didn’t need to bother showing up.

But what to say? We hadn’t heard the report, so how could we comment? We had some hints though. The “public health” meme was probably at it’s peak about then and the arguments were well known. I had my laptop with me and started writing up a little speech. I took the laptop to the podium with me and read from the screen. I forget how much time I had, something like two minutes or so.

Here are the official meeting notes. Here is what the notes say about my input:

Joe Huffman lives in Moscow, Idaho, but also maintains a home in Redmond, Washington.

Any study of gun ownership and use must take into account the benefits. He is concerned that in the report to the Board, they’re unlikely to see the lives saved, the rapes stopped, and all the other millions of times each year that firearms are used by private citizens for self-defense. Ninety-eight percent of the time, that’s without a single shot being fired. You might think he exaggerating when he says millions of times each year, but he’s not. Numerous peer reviewed studies by criminologists put the number literally as high as 2.5 to 3 million times per year. When the people here today listen to the report, he’d like them to remember the silent benefits of gun ownership. Ask if it includes the health benefits as well as the trauma, crippling, and deaths that are caused by firearms. Ask if the trauma and deaths are police shootings that are completely justified or are accidents or criminal acts. If they don’t include the benefits, ask why not. Ask if they can point to a single place or time where reducing the availability of weapons had made the common people safer. Mr. Huffman has been asking that question in debates for years, and has yet to hear a verifiable affirmative response. If the report is only on the costs and not on the benefits, ask why they don’t have an interest in the benefits. Ask if it would be appropriate to report on the 100,000 medical accidents each year that result in death without noting the millions of lives saved and improved. Of course, it wouldn’t be appropriate, but yet it’s the same thing.

After our testimony we got to listen to the report being presented. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. You can read about it in the notes.

Then a most outrageous thing happened. Pam Eakes, President of Mothers Against Violence in America was invited to speak even though she hadn’t signed in before the deadline, didn’t get there until after most of us had spoken, and then she was given more time than any of the good guys were. I suspect she was called when the input was all going against them and she rushed into town to try and help.

That evening I heard my voice on the radio.  The meeting was recorded and the radio station had extracted a few sound bites. I provided the sound bite for the good guys.

At that time many gun rights leaders thought we were just fighting to slow them down as best we could. They didn’t say that in public of course.  But in private, when no one was within earshot they would tell the insiders, the people whose loyalty wasn’t in question and asked the right questions. They told me it wasn’t going to be possible to stop them or reverse the tide. We were fighting a lost battle they said. Another 10 years and it would all be over except for the shouting. The courts wouldn’t help us and the 2nd Amendment would just be a vestigial organ that in another 10 or 20 years after that no one really knew what it had ever meant.

Today, as near as I can tell, Mothers Against Violence in America doesn’t exist anymore (http://www.mavia.org was their website). I’m pretty sure Ms. Eakes was the founder and the only public face to that organization. She got lots of media attention. I suppose it wasn’t really a fair fight. Ms. Eakes against the millions of NRA members, hundreds of thousands of members in SAF and CCRKBA, the JPFO and dozens of other organizations. The media tried to even things up by giving her far more than her fair share of coverage. But in a fight of millions against a handful it’s generally safer to bet on the millions.

Even though I was, and am, just one of millions of people that contributed to some of our recent victories for the right to keep and bear arms I’d like to think I contributed a measurable part in stopping the bad guys in King County Washington that day. And mostly it was because I, an Idaho resident living 300 miles from the battle front that day, bothered to show up. You can show up and make a difference too. Ry and I were talking about this on Wednesday. Human nature applies to gun (and anti-gun) activists too. If you can just show up you can make a much bigger impact than you might imagine because most of the time showing up is 90% of the battle.

Quote of the day–The Gun Guys

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For all their grunting and hawing about how bad criminals are, the gun lobby actually has a pretty good deal going with murders and illegal gun traffickers. The gun industry sells guns to the criminals, and the criminals get in trouble for it. The gun lobby gets paid, and they set up the laws so that the penalties go only to the person who uses the gun, and no further.

Gun Guys
The NRA Sees “Value” in Protecting Illegal Gun Traffickers
June 29, 2006
[When they say things like that I don’t think I need to explain how these Gun Guys have mental problems.–Joe]

The distortions of Josh Sugarmann

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Mr. Sugarmann has a post about how terrible the NRA and their lapdogs in the U.S. House are. There is something you need to know about Sugarmann.

In this post he keeps talking about “guns traced to crime”. Don’t think that slightly odd wording wasn’t given very careful thought by Sugarmann.  It implies “guns used in the commission of a crime” but that isn’t what is being discussed. The data the ATF has on gun traces includes guns that are stolen property. It’s inseparable from the guns used to commit crimes. Sugarmann knows this and deliberately misleads the ignorant.

This type of behavior isn’t anything new from Sugarmann. He distorted the truth to pursue his agenda on “assault weapons” and admitted it in the planning of that assault on our liberties.  From the VPC web site:

Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

See also his distortions connecting guns to murder-suicides.

AK clays

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Suppose you could mount a red-dot scope securely on the top of an AK rifle. What would that do for you in terms of target acquistion speed and accuracy? 

The answer is AK clays (~60 MByte .MOV file) are a reality.

Brought to you, in more ways than one, by UltiMAK.

One of these days we are going to make Boomer Clays work.  If nothing else I’m going to fill a milk jug with Boomerite and lob it into the air with giant slingshot for Lyle to shoot.

Quote of the day–Robert Joseph

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We recognize the rights of the oppressed to defend themselves against tyrannical and genocidal regimes and oppose a blanket ban on non-state actors.

Robert Joseph
U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control
June 27, 2006
Speaking at the U.N. conference on “illegal small arms”.
[Expressed only slightly more forcefully, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”–Joe]

Password protected cartridges

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The idea is just plain stupid:

Safety catches do not always prevent firearm accidents and even newfangled biometric guns, which check the identity of a user by their fingerprint, cannot stop thieves from using stolen ammunition in other weapons.

The way to make firearms really safe, says Hebert Meyerle of Germany, is to password-protect the ammunition itself.

Meyerle is patenting a design for a modified cartridge that would be fired by a burst of high-frequency radio energy. But the energy would only ignite the charge if a solid-state switch within the cartridge had been activated. This would only happen if a password entered into the gun using a tiny keypad matched one stored in the cartridge.

The people in the comments get it right. The commenters missed (as of my last reading) another concern of mine that the communication between the gun and the ammo might also be electronically jammed.

An idea doesn’t have to have a market to patentable and a patent was granted on this bad idea.

Regulating CO2

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From the Seattle Times:

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear arguments on whether the federal government must regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, a case that could have broad implications for utilities, auto manufacturers and other industries nationwide.

The high court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide in order to combat global warming.

CO2?????  If it weren’t for it being a violation of the various rights (sometimes I wonder why I should respect the rights of those that don’t respect my rights to keep and bear arms) the way I would reduce CO2 emissions would be to encourage the environmental wackos to stop breathing.  This attack from the wackos is not about “global warming” or “climate change”.  The man-made effects on the global climate are so small it’s almost impossible to measure.  Therefore the motivation for these attacks can only be attributed to something else.  Possible candidates for the real reason include anti-capitalism, a scam to make money by the proponents of these claims, and mental disorders.  I’m partial the mental disorder hypothesis myself–When Prophecy Fails successfully explains many of these nut cases.

Did you know that water vapor is a bigger contributor to the green house effect than CO2?  See also Jeff’s post on this subject.  And that when gasoline or diesel is burned it produces more water vapor (by volume, not mass) than it does CO2?  Of course we could always limit water vapor emissions from the wackos as well.

Quote of the day–Ron Paul

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The UN claims to serve human freedom and dignity, but gun control often serves as a gateway to tyranny. Tyrants from Hitler to Mao to Stalin have sought to disarm their own citizens, for the simple reason that unarmed people are easier to control. Our Founders, having just expelled the British army, knew that the right to bear arms serves as the guardian of every other right. This is the principle so often ignored by both sides in the gun control debate. Only armed citizens can resist tyrannical government.

Rep. Ron Paul, Texas
June 26, 2006
The Worldwide Gun Control Movment in Texas Straight Talk
Also: June 27, 2006
The Worldwide Gun Control Movement in The Sierra Times

Quote of the day–Jeff Cooper

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The passage of the Brady foolishness was a foregone conclusion in Washington – despite its blatant unconstitutionality – as soon as we lost the election of `92, thus it comes as no surprise. What is really awful is the unblushing profession that while the bill itself will do nothing at all, it is still necessary to “make a statement,” as if the legislators meant that they were going to do something. You and I will not be inconvenienced by any five day waiting period, since we already have our guns, as all proper members of the United States Militia must have. The idea that our lawmakers can profit from doing something silly, and admitting that it is silly, makes one more than ever doubtful about the merit of the democratic process. Alcibiades pointed out that it would never work, and that was some four-hundred years before Christ. Perhaps he was right after all. 

Jeff Cooper
Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries
Vol. 1, No. 11
10 December 1993
[I don’t think it can seriously be claimed that the democratic process “will never work”.  It doesn’t work as well as we would like but it does work better than anything else that has ever been tried.  Unfortunately human nature is such that those that crave the power of government seldom have the strength of character to abide by the restrictions placed upon them by the same laws that give them their power.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Greg Hamilton

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You know what they teach you in the military about what you use a handgun for?  You use it to fight your way to a rifle.

Greg Hamilton
Self Defense Instructor
Nov. 19, 1995
[Greg may have picked this meme up from Clint Smith, but I first heard it from Greg.-Joe]

More proof

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Gun bans don’t work.  Not on an island such as the U.K.  And not in the workplace such as in this case. 
The prison guard wasn’t supposed to bring a gun to work with him but as
he probably wasn’t exactly an upstanding member of society (he was
accused of having sex with the female inmates) he didn’t obey the
rules.  As gun rights advocates have been saying for decades, if
you ban guns only the criminals will have guns.  This criminal,
unafraid of laws against sex with prisoners, and shooting at Federal
law enforcement officers, certainly wasn’t going to be concerned about
a law banning him from bring a gun to work.

It’s too bad the Fed had to die but at least this slimeball’s raping career is over.

Orwell must have written their playbook

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I just stumbled (with the help of Joel Rosenberg) onto something very interesting.  The bigoted “Gun Guys” (and their Orwellian named Freedom State Alliance umbrella organization) I mention far too frequently are supported by a $650,000 grant (over 18 months) from the Joyce Foundation.  This grant money is to Mark Karlin & Associates:

To support the continued efforts of its Freedom States Alliance, a
project to promote financial self-sufficiency and effective media,
public, and policy-maker education efforts among gun violence
prevention groups, especially those in Illinois and Wisconsin.

I have often wondered how, with such small memberships,
these anti-gun groups can afford to do what they do. Now we
know. I wish I could get $400K/year to run some pro-gun websites
and blog about gun rights.

To further emphasis their Orwellian nature read the Freedom States Alliance news release:

“But the energy we’re seeing from communities that are
rising up against the gun lobby is amazing.  Yes it will take time
to take back our country held hostage by gun violence, but if it’s one
thing Americans are good at, it’s fighting for our freedom. We’re here
to declare our freedom from gun violence and our Internet strategy is
going to carry that message like never before.”

“Fighting for freedom” by attempting to ban guns.  You can’t get much more Orwellian than that.

Mineta leaves

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Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta just resigned. Now if they would just get rid of the rest of the Mineta minions.  These anti-gun bigots made it extremely difficult for airline pilots to carry firearms and in general have no clue about airplane or even security in general.  As Michelle Malkin says, “Finally.”

Quote of the day–Patrick Henry

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The great object is that every man be armed.  Everyone who is able may have a gun.

Patrick Henry
In the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution

Brady Campaign and sour grapes

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Brady Campaign Dismisses Influence of College Gun Clubs.  It sounds like a sour grapes story to me.

The Canadian Cukier

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I was going to comment on this but Jeff did a better job that I would have.  I’ve commented on her so many times before I would just be repeating myself.

Protecting civilians from armed violence

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It’s already against the law to commit violent acts against innocent civilians.  More laws and/or treaties won’t help.  Allowing civilians to defend themselves is the only effective way for civilians to be protected.  Just the opposite of what the U.N. bigots are trying to accomplish:

Amnesty International, Oxfam International and the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) are pushing for a treaty to “protect civilians from armed violence.”

Those three groups — which have formed a coalition called the Control Arms Campaign — say their goal is to reduce arms proliferation and misuse — “and to convince governments to introduce global principles to regulate the transfers of weapons.” They are urging the United Nations to impose a “binding arms trade treaty.”

These guys want guns to remain in the hands of the governments.  And governments were the biggest perpetrators of violence against innocents in the last century and I expect they will be in this century too.  The right to keep and bear arms is an inalienable right.  It can only be infringed, not granted or denied.

Alan Gottlieb, of course, gets in right (in the same article):

Had it not been for America, all of Europe might be speaking German. Were America not the ‘great arsenal of democracy’ that President Franklin D. Roosevelt described in 1940, the world would be a far different place, and the sanctimonious bureaucrats at the U.N. might instead be working in labor camps.

…

We have done much for the U.N., and in return, the organization has hosted despots, tyrants and dictators whose record of human rights abuses, aggression and genocide speaks for itself.

Quote of the day–Robert Whelan

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The right to private property is the Englishman’s right to his castle. This looks to me like the point where Labour has overstepped the mark into behaving more like a dictatorship than a democratic government.

I think anybody whose property is seized under this law should go straight to court to see if a judge thinks it should stand.

Robert Whelan
Representative of Civitas
From Homes of the dead to be seized by the state
June 17, 2006, Daily Mail
[Perhaps Mr. Whelan is using English understatement because in my viewpoint the English politicians started behaving like a dictatorship when they started putting restrictions on firearms.  And when they seize the property of the dead, remove the contents, and rent it out for their own gain it’s way past the point of “seeing a judge things it should stand”.  It’s time to exercise your right to keep and bear arms.  But the people are just now realizing they waited too long to do that.  HT to Ry for pointing this out.–Joe]

Quote of the day–The Gun Guys

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…there’s no reason to have a gun around in the first place. A gun isn’t used to protect anything. It’s used to kill.

Your Gun Guys Daily Update
June 21, 2006
Email from The Gun Guys
[This nutcase must think all policemen carrying guns are government assassins.  This is a reminder that most anti-gun people have mental problems.-Joe]