Quote of the day—Heather Wilhelm

In the wake of Sunday’s horrific Texas church shooting, America’s chattering classes promptly responded with silent, respectful, and somber reflection, holding off on divisive and caustic political debates for the day.

Unfortunately for all of us, that was over on Earth 2.

Heather Wilhelm
November 8, 2017
Gun Control and Magical Thinking
[She goes on to say:

Government bureaucracy often fails. It should be held accountable; it is not always our friend. To think otherwise, in fact, might be the ultimate in magical thinking.

Yup.—Joe]

Typical

I’ve known Les Freeman for over 35 years. My ex-wife and I didn’t see nearly as much of him after he moved to Oregon in, I think, the 1990’s. But there was occasional contact and then when Facebook became a thing we were “friends” there. I don’t spend much time on Facebook but occasionally I would check out his posts. In the last few years I saw a lot of really hateful stuff about Republicans and his support for Sanders, then Clinton in the last election. Sometimes there would be rants about gun ownership but I ignored it all. Les has had a lot of stress in his life recently with the loss of all his siblings, the loss of both parents, the loss of his only child, and then brain surgery which required him to relearn talking, reading, and walking. I saw no need to add more stress in his life by confronting him on his home turf.

Occasionally he would make a comment on Facebook about one of my blog posts about guns. They were always negative and I would gently correct his errors and that would usually be the end of it for a few weeks.

Until last night.

It started with this comment about my QOTD by Saurus post, “STOP THE SHOOTINGS. STOP REPUBLICANS”. Les responded with:

I didn’t really understand what he was saying and asked for clarification:

He didn’t respond to that and started a new Facebook comment thread on my QOTD by the NRA post:

Ahh yes, a thinly veiled threat of violence. Progressives are all about forcing people who disagree with them to do what they want. It’s part of their nature.

I responded with:

Yes, I know. The first point was somewhat overstated. This is particularly true from a practical standpoint. But I wanted to cut off the common claim that the Second Amendment never meant individuals could own guns until the rogue Heller decision and this was the most succinct way I know of to do that.

I was then unfriended and blocked. Then he proceeded to make a half dozen or more anti-gun posts on Facebook (I have more than one account).

I guess he didn’t want to have a discussion. He didn’t even want to know what I had to say. I know this because from looking at my log files I could see that he didn’t read a single one of the blog posts I linked to. He just wanted to assert his opinion and then threaten me if I didn’t conform to his beliefs.

Typical. It’s called Reasoned Discourse.

Continue reading

Quote of the day—NRA-ILA

It would be nice to think that with a pro-gun president and pro-gun majorities in Congress, statehouses, and governor’s mansions across the country, the battle to secure the Second Amendment is won. But as long as decent, law-abiding gun owners are blamed for the acts of deranged murderers, the battle can never end.

For us to think otherwise is to sow the seeds of our own undoing.

NRA-ILA
October 13, 2017
Gun Banners Unmasked: The Vengeful Face of the Anti-gun Agenda Emerges Once Again
[Eternal vigilance and all that.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Saurus

STOP THE SHOOTINGS. STOP REPUBLICANS

Saurus
November 5, 2017
Comment to At least 26 dead in South Texas church shooting, officials say
[One has to wonder what color the sky is in this person’s universe. Nearly all mass shooters are either Democrats or have no known political affiliation.

The most likely explanation for the comment is psychological projection.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Lara Smith

They hate us more than the NRA!

Lara Smith
Spokeswoman for the Liberal Gun Club regarding Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
November 4, 2017
The Loneliness of the Liberal Gun Lover
[Of course. Liberals with guns are considered traitors and/or apostates. Such people are always more hated and punished than the enemy.

Fortunately, Bloomberg and friends don’t yet have the kind of powers governments and authoritarian religions have to punish traitors and apostates. Let’s keep it that way.—Joe]

Not for everyone

My sense of humor may be considered somewhat warped, but I think this is shockingly funny:

Image may contain: 1 person, text

I agree with @Kimberly_Corban

There is abundant evidence to support this assertion:

Examples abound in books such as The Gulag Archipelago, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, and Hitler’s Willing Executioners. And if that isn’t enough to convince you then research the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and the Armenian genocide. For an even more general view read Lethal Laws: Gun Control Is the Key to Genocide.

Quote of the day—Wendell Phillips

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.

Wendell Phillips
January 28, 1852
Speech to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society
[The link about his speech has some interesting history about the frequent misattribution of the “eternal vigilance…” quote.

Also note they had the same problem with democrats then as we do today.—Joe]

Another fishy data point

In the Las Vegas shooting thing, some huge number of firearms, we were told, were brought along, with the only possible result being a hindrance of the crime.

Similarly bizarre, or more so, the Manafort & Mueller thing was telegraphed days, if not longer, in advance. If the law is serious about kicking in your door to look for evidence against you, they aren’t going to call you on Thursday to notify you of a raid scheduled for the following Monday. Not if the raid is all on the up and up. Yet that is essentially what happened.

I suppose someone more privy to the process will tell me that I don’t understand how it works. Fair enough, but it’s still retarded at best– Basic logic says that a raid for seizure of evidence and arrest of a suspect is done before the suspect has any idea what’s about to happen, not after it’s been in the Drudge Report headlines for days and all the pundits have been talking about it.

Gun Rights are Women’s Rights

Via Robert J. Avrech:

Some of the comments regarding the video are pretty good:

Feminism doesn’t want women to be safe. They tell women to ignore safety tips to avoid rape because it “blames the victim”, discourages women from arming themselves with mace, pepper spray or even a Taser, telling them that it’s men that should be taught to stop rape instead of them being responsible for their own safety.

N¡ghtshade

feminism like liberalism needs victims.

invidcyborg

Quote of the day—Sebastian

On the other side of the argument are the folks on our side who think just shouting “no” very loudly is a legislative strategy. How much impact do you think Ron Paul had on the overall direction of Congress? Because that’s effectively what he did for his whole career. People who do that in deliberative bodies get ignored, and worked around. For these people, the question is this: would you rather sulk in the corner and take solace in the fact that you believe you’re right and righteous as you lose one thing after another, or do you want to actually play the game and win? The latter is what you’re seeing now.

Sebastian
October 25, 2017
What’s Going on With Bump Stocks?
[Principles are, at best, merely guidelines when you are involved in the dirty business of politics.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ryan Born

When conservatives appeal to “free speech,” it is actually a calculated political move, designed to open up avenues of political discourse while shaming others from moving in active political opposition. I argue that when conservatives resort to this move, they can be safely ignored, as they are appealing to a right that does not exist. In my belief, when conservative ideas are opposed, there is no right that is being infringed.

Ryan Born
September 25, 2017
Speech is free
[At first I though Born was setting up a straw man with “it is actually a calculated political move….”. But that hypothesis was blow away in the following sentence.

Born needs to retake a junior high class on U.S. government and receive a passing grade before attempting to have a conversation with adults. In the mean time don’t ever forget this is what many people on the political left think of specific enumerated rights.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Leonard Pitts

A 2014 Pew Research Center study found that the percentage of Democrats and Republicans holding extremely negative views of the opposite party has more than doubled since 1994; Pew also found that, while 64 percent of Republicans in ’94 held opinions that were to the right of the average Democrat, these days 92 percent do. And 94 percent of Democrats are now to the left of the GOP median.

So the right is moving further right, the left, further left and the center, as the poet Yeats observed, “cannot hold.”

What other option, then, do Democrats have but to move left, exploiting the anger, energy and enthusiasm to be found there?

Leonard Pitts
October 16, 2017
Democrats need to move left
[Yes. That should work nicely. Advocating for the policies of Venezuela and Cuba will play so well in the GOP advertisements.

I find it very telling that the option of liberty and adherence to the constitutional limits of government doesn’t even cross his mind. Laws and principles are for suckers. The only thing of importance is restoring power to “his people”.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Dana Loesch‏ @DLoesch

Spent my weekend preparing to move due to repeated threats from gun control advocates.

One guy hunted down my private cell phone number, called when police were here, threatened to shoot me in my front yard. Another guy created a string of social media accounts, posted photos of my house, threatened to rape me to death. Another gun control advocate, after threatening to hunt me down and assault me, dragged my kids into it.

Dana Loesch‏ @DLoesch
Tweeted on October 15, 2017
[Violence. It’s the nature of the political left.

The scumbags of the political left did the same sort of thing to Michelle Malkin a few years ago. (I suspect it continues to this day). I set up a honey pot for catching those threatening Malkin. The link below is another honeypot. If you link to it from your website/blog using the appropriate text it will get more Google Page Rank and appear closer to the top of search engine results.

Dana Loesch’s address and phone number.—Joe]

What is AgitProp?

It’s short for “agitation propaganda”, sure, but what does that mean?

For a good definition, this should be in textbooks.

All such assertions (in this case the assertion is “We’re jittery and dysfunctional, so we need more gun restrictions”) depend on one false premise, which says, in effect;

Human rights are subject to revision based on circumstance.

If that premise is true, then we should yield to the moment, we appease and give in. “There there, you can have what you want if you’ll only STOP CRYING…”

If the premise is false then we STAND for what we know is right, not for the moment but for all time. We prevent the emotion-driven from making mistakes harmful to themselves and others. We do them the favor of correcting them. It’s what adults do when confronted with irrational behavior.

You all know, even you leftists know, that the premise is a false one. Human rights are not altered by circumstance, statistics, emotions of the moment, nor by the way, are right affected by weather.

Rather than argue circumstances then, we must learn to reject the premise that rights are subject to circumstances, bring some very needed reason into play, assert rights, name their origin and stand up, faithfully and consistently to defend rights for all time. Do it for the children (to play on an authoritarian mind trick*).

Do it for future generations. Otherwise we fall down that rat hole wherein someone’s implanted, overwhelming emotions have the power, all by themselves, to force you to relinquish your rights and appease the sleaze. (Hey, that’s a slogan; “Relinquish Your Rights and Appease the Sleaze….”)

That’s the end game for the Dark Side, and it almost always works.

Will it work this time? How many of you, within a matter of hours or days, started, in your minds, bargaining away bump stocks, for example? Then one after another, like robots…”Bargain away bump stocks, bargain away bump stocks…” It was like a plague that spread via the airwaves, from coast to coast, in a matter of hours.

Who really needs a bump stock, after all, right? Not me, but that’s not the point.

At all.

Don’t participate in the insanity of the appeasement of the insane. That’s how they get you, and you even end up thinking yourself smarter for it. How deliciously evil is that? You’re smarter than those confounded “extremists”;
“Why, if it weren’t for them, this thing could be handled delicately and properly, and we could deal, and everyone would win…”
You’ve heard it all before. Eventually you’ll be saying it more and more.

Here’s an idea; the crazy people, no matter how frightened or offended they on the left act, no matter how they kick and scream and hold their collective breath until they turn blue, and no matter how they threaten or accuse, they aren’t your masters. They’re just sad, angry, confused people with nothing else to offer but more sadness, anger and confusion. Don’t feed the trolls.

Offer reason to the irrational. It’s the only possible way to help them. Don’t be that parent at the supermarket who’s giving in to the three-year-old just to make him SHUT UP. You idiots.

Who’s in control, the parent or the three-year-old? It can go either way, and you’ve all seen it.

Don’t pretend like their crazy assertions (“I’m so scared…we need a gun law to make me feel better– You bastards!”) have any validity, or guess what? You just put the crazy people in control, and you’d have to be crazy to do that. But you do it anyway, then you bitch and carry on about how the inmates are running the asylum. Well no shit Sherlock; you put them in charge.

It happens in your personal life. That’s where it starts. You start out walking on eggshells at home, or at school, and you end up walking on eggshells politically, then before you know it you’re trying to make other people walk on eggshells. Same causes, same effects. The Progressives know when they’ve got to you, just like a shark smells the chum-of-appeasement you’re throwing in the water, just like a dog knows when he has you upset.

AgitProp. That’s what it means. That which arouses emotion in you owns you.

*“Nothing is too good for the children”, we are told. Like most everything the left touches however, the definition of that phrase, when uttered by a leftist, is its own opposite. It means;

“Nothing is too bad for the children.”

For the left, rights deprivation isn’t too bad for the children. Abortion isn’t too bad for the children (except in the sense, “Too bad, children!”), nor is grabbing power from the People, nor graft, nor violating the constitution, nor are coercion and wholesale confiscation too bad for the children. None of the horrible things done by communist regimes, past or present, have been too bad for the children, and if that’s the case (and the left has always had love affairs with communist regimes), then truly, nothing is too bad for the children.

I thought you should know that. Carry on.

Quote of the day—Derek Hunter

Imagine there has been a horrible case of child abuse in your neighborhood. A large family with 10 children had parents who brutally beat their kids, and two died. In reacting to that horrendous news, there’s a knock at your door. It’s your mayor and police chief.

“I understand you have two children in this house. Is that correct?” the mayor asks.

“Yes, that’s true. Why?” you reply.

“We’re going to need to see them, to inspect them to make sure they haven’t been subjected to abuse by you,” the chief says.

“Wait, what? You’re not going to inspect my children,” you respond.

“We are going to. And we’re going to monitor your kids from here on out, stopping by periodically to check on them, inspect their bodies for bruises and have them talk to a psychologist to make sure they aren’t being emotionally abused either,” the chief shoots back.

“What the hell gives you the right to do that?” you ask.

“After the horrible abuse that took place a few blocks away, we decided that we had to insert ourselves into the lives of all parents to prevent that from happening ever again,” the mayor says. “So we’ve passed a new law that says we can curtail parental rights for the greater good. Now go get your children.”

Derek Hunter
October 5, 2017
After Las Vegas, Democrats Send In The Clowns
[The sad/scary part of this is this that public education is a significant step in this direction and there are policies which show we are on this path.—Joe]

The Impact of Mass Shootings on Gun Policy

This is an interesting study:

The Impact of Mass Shootings on Gun Policy

There have been dozens of high-profile mass shootings in recent decades. This paper presents three main findings about the impact of mass shootings on gun policy. First, mass shootings evoke large policy responses. A single mass shooting leads to a 15% increase in the number of firearm bills introduced within a state in the year after a mass shooting. Second, mass shootings account for a small portion of all gun deaths, but have an outsized influence relative to other homicides. Our estimates suggest that the per-death impact of mass shootings on bills introduced is about 80 times as large as the impact of individual gun homicides in non-mass shooting incidents. Third, when looking at enacted laws, the impact of mass shootings depends on the party in power. A mass shooting increases the number of enacted laws that loosen gun restrictions by 75% in states with Republican controlled legislatures. We find no significant effect of mass shootings on laws enacted when there is a Democrat-controlled legislature.

I found this difficult to believe. Didn’t the elementary school shooting in Stockton California enable passage of the “assault weapon” ban in California? Didn’t the Newton Connecticut school shooting result in more restrictive laws in New York, Connecticut and Colorado?

I didn’t duplicate their math but I read their process details fairly closely. It sounds like they did a good job of accounting for various factors and categorization of legislative action and every other variable I could think of (and some I didn’t think of).

The bottom line appears to be that those increasing of firearms restrictions due to the mass shooting events I think of are statistical noise. This is interesting and timely because one hypothesis of the most recent mass shooting in Las Vegas is as follows:

It has been said that ‘the medium is the message’.

In this case that is the literal truth. There is only one plausible motive for what this man did. And here it is:

This man wished to telegraph to America in graphic form the hard irrefutable evidence that guns and gun ownership and the ease of gun purchase in America are an evil and must be controlled. On that hypothesis everything now makes sense. And it must be said his concept has a certain demented genius.

Because even if the public learns and believes that his motive was all about ‘guns’ the horror of the act itself – an act to protest such acts – is in some ways even worse for being plain evidence that there is no limit to the insanity to which guns can be put.

Also note that nearly all mass shooters are inclined to be Democrats. Most are way around the bend nuts, but was part of their nuttiness that they were trying to convey their message that guns were too dangerous for private citizens to have “because look at what I did?” If so, then widespread knowledge that gun laws tend to be relaxed as a result of mass shootings may tend to reduce the frequency of mass shootings.

Quote of the day—David Brooks

So why are lawmakers responding to mass killings by loosening gun laws? The wrong answer is that the N.R.A. is this maliciously powerful force that controls legislators through campaign dollars. In fact, the N.R.A. spends a minuscule amount on campaign contributions compared with the vast oceans of dough washing through our politics.

The reality is that in some places people want these laws. It’s true that individual gun control measures, like banning bump stocks, have popular support, but, over all, the gun rights people are winning the hearts and minds of America. In 2000, according to a Pew survey, only 29 percent of Americans supported more gun rights and 67 percent supported more gun control. By 2016, 52 percent of Americans supported more gun rights and only 46 percent supported more control.

Today we need another grand synthesis that can move us beyond the current divide, a synthesis that is neither redneck nor hipster but draws from both worlds to create a new social vision. Progress on guns will be possible when the culture war subsides, but not before.

David Brooks
October 6, 2017
Guns and the Soul of America
[For a New York Times opinion piece I found this to be very insightful. His view on “progress on guns” is much different than mine but I believe his words to be correct even if his intended meaning is 180 degrees from mine. We need to win the culture war.

Even in Brooks opinion piece there is evidence this is about a culture war rather than about the facts of gun ownership related to public safety, constitutional law, or philosophy:

This gigantic shift in public opinion hasn’t come about because the facts support the gun rights position. The research doesn’t overwhelmingly support either side. Gun control proposals don’t seriously impinge freedom; on the other hand, there’s not much evidence that they would prevent many attacks.

Even though he knows the evidence doesn’t support his goal of “progress on guns” he thinks it should be done anyway. Why?

It’s about control. He want a culture controlled by a central committee. We want a culture of liberty. We have to win this war. We should only compromise if it takes us a small step closer when we find we can’t make a large step closer to our goals.

Take new shooters to the range. It works. I just found out a couple days ago that new shooters Kurt and Tracie recently bought their first gun.

Guns are a “gateway drug” to liberty. Get them hooked.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Dana Milbank

Consider Title XV of the sportsmen’s bill, also known as the “Hearing Protection Act,” which makes it easier for gun owners to buy silencers for their weapons. The uninformed might suspect that silencers are used by people who want to fire weapons without being caught by cops or observed by witnesses. But more and more hunters are finding that conventional earplugs and muffs are not adequate for today’s weapons — for example, quail hunting with an M777 howitzer or grouse hunting with an FIM-92 Stinger missile launcher.

Dana Milbank
September 11, 2017
The NRA’s idea of recreation: Assault rifles, armor-piercing bullets and silencers
[One might guess Milbank is so out of touch with reality that he believes the right to keep and bear arms is about recreation. And one also has to wonder what part of “shall not be infringed” he doesn’t understand.

But, just as likely is that Milbank does have at least a passing grasp of reality and knows he can’t put up a valid argument so he just goes straight to mocking.

We can make most of the stuff Milbank is “concerned” about in our garages with cheap metal working equipment and a trip to the local hardware store. These changes in the law are a mere recognition of reality. The existing law did nothing to improve public safety and made life more hazardous for good and gentle people who just want to be left alone. But to be left alone is asking too much from authoritarians like Milbank. So, I won’t be asking. I’m telling.

Molṑn labé, Dana.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Michael Z. Williamson

It is the triumph of Western democracy that philosophies are allowed to exist and propagate even if they are ultimate evil. It is the failure of Western democracy that we support this to a fault, of allowing Communists to breathe air needed by human beings.

Then we can get back to killing National Socialists and regular Socialists as well, since their difference is only one of path, not destination.

Michael Z. Williamson
September 21, 2017
We Still Need To Kill Commies For Mommy, And For The Children.
[I’m going to need more ammo.—Joe]