Mrs. Clinton, if you want to come after the NRA, if you want a fight over the God-given rights of America’s 100 million gun owners, if you want to turn this election into a bare-knuckled brawl for the survival of our constitutional freedom, bring it on. We aren’t going anywhere – and we aren’t hard to find.
Wayne LaPierre
March 3, 2016
NRA chief tells Hillary Clinton to ‘bring it on’ in gun control fight
[I think that sums it up fairly well.—Joe]
Via Glenn Reynolds we have West Virginia lawmakers eliminate permits for concealed carry guns. But what I really latched onto was this:
…the proposed law includes a $50 tax credit for residents trained to carry a deadly weapon.
In Washington State the pro-gun people proposed a bill which eliminated sales tax (near 10%) on gun safes. The anti-gun people were put in a tough spot. If they opposed the bill they were against “gun safety”. But if they agreed they were lowering the cost of gun ownership. The bill was passed and gun safes became less expensive in Washington.
Why don’t the pro-gun people propose tax credits on all “gun (safety)” classes? And how about removing sales tax on “public carry holsters” which resist guns being taken away or accidently dropped? And removing taxes on “practice ammo” for guns which people who carry in public?
These proposed laws would put the anti-gun people in a difficult position when trying to oppose them. And, if passed, it would lower the cost of gun ownership, increase gun ownership and use, which would make it easier to change our culture to be more accepting of gun owners.
I received an email from Frank G. in Spokane today. He was confused by something he read in the Spokesman-Review (Spokane Washington) newspaper. The Spokesman-Review says:
The Idaho Senate has spiked legislation that would have expanded the list of the worst kind of felons banned from owning firearms.
Senate lawmakers voted 29-6 on Friday to reject including terrorists, criminal gang members, human trafficking and felony riot convictions as qualifiers to lose one’s right to own firearms.
Frank asked:
I don’t know a LOT about gun laws, but I’m pretty certain that federal law prohibits all convicted felons from owning firearms. It doesn’t matter if they were convicted of murder or embezzlement. Felony conviction? No guns for you.
So, is the idea that “the worst kind of felons … terrorists, criminal gang members [and people convicted of] human trafficking and felony riot” would be SUPER DUPER prohibited persons?
The confusion is because under Idaho law a convicted felony who as served there sentence may own a gun unless they have committed certain types of felonies. Basically non-violent crimes, such as embezzlement, do not put you on the Idaho “no guns for life” list. But under Federal law you could be convicted of using the wrong packaging for shipping shellfish and end up prohibited of possessing firearms for life.
The legislature was attempting to add terrorism, arson, theft by extortion, human trafficking, felony riot, hijacking, racketeering, and supplying firearms to a criminal gang as bars to further firearm possession. It failed, as Frank pointed out, in the Senate 29-6.
The question one would ask is, “With Federal law prohibiting all felons from firearms possession how does Idaho restoring firearms rights after completion of their sentence help anyone?”
Perhaps some lawyers can answer this better than I can, but I would say it means these people have to get the attention of a Federal Prosecutor who probably has “bigger fish to fry” then some little old lady who embezzled a few thousand dollars a decade ago who now wants to defend herself in her home with the gun her husband left in the dresser draw when he died.
I would like to suggest it might be a “good first step” to get changes in Federal such that it is similar to Idaho law. It’s just common sense.
* Note, that except for things like murder, after five years a person convicted of other things including counterfeiting, unlawful possession of destructive devices, rape, and kidnapping, may apply to the commission of pardons to get their firearms rights restored.
You guys (the left) really want to stop pushing quite so hard. The political pendulum has never, in the history of humanity, stayed on one side of a swing. The back lash from over reach has always been proportionate to how far off center it went before coming back. (Hint, that’s what started the whole prohibition thing, and it’s also what started the 60s, was backlashes) Well right now we’re staring at a whole hell of a lot of the country (about 80-90% of the land mass, as well as about 50% of the population) that is FED UP. You really don’t want those guys to decide that the only way to fix it is to burn it down and start over… REALLY! Most of these folks are vets, and the children of vets, they’ve had guns in their hands since middle school or before, or they’re still serving either in the regulars, the reserves, or the NG. If it goes to armed insurrection, even if the left wins, (highly damn unlikely) it will be a mess worse than reconstruction, worse than the Balkans. For the love of the country that I’ve served for over three decades, start seeking peace now.
William Lehman
September 16, 2015
Thoughts on the road
[Last weekend I heard people people say it would be a good thing if Seattle burned down. They figured it was a lost cause and their solution was to prepare to protect themselves and their family and turn their back on what used to be a city they loved.—Joe]
With the election coming up she can’t afford any sort of loose end. She’s the closest thing you can imagine to Al Capone. I don’t think she is going to rest until she puts me to rest.
…
I think the Clintons are capable of anything. Do I live in fear, no – because I’m armed too, I’m prepared. You have to be when you think perhaps your life is being threatened.
Sally Miller
February 16, 2016
EXCLUSIVE: ‘He put on my frilly nightie, and danced around playing his sax.’ Former Miss Arkansas says Bill Clinton was so-so in bed and confided Hillary was into sex with women. Now she fears Hillary vendetta and sleeps with loaded semi-automatic
[I can’t offer anything as to the veracity of her claims Hillary is out to get her. But I’m convinced she is correct about the general character of the Clintons.—Joe]
If history has taught anything. When someone says he is going to murder the Jews, believe him.
Professor Ruth Wisse
February 6, 2016
Professor Ruth Wisse Explains the Worst Case Scenario
[There was another gem in the same post:
Professor Wisse explained why she is a political conservative. “When I look at any policy, I ask myself: What is the worst outcome that can happen?” Liberals, she said, are fixated on the best outcome. The liberal outlook ignores history and reality.
I can’t recall where I read it, and it was very recent too, but someone explained progressive thinking in a very similar manner. Their observation was something to the effect that if a good outcome was possible from government involvement then that was sufficient justification for government action. Examples abound but the most obvious are Obamacare and the popularity of an admitted socialist running for U.S President.—Joe]
The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.
Louis Pasteur
[I can’t disagree with the conclusion. But I fear that particular derangement of the mind is so common that one would be hard pressed to prove it was abnormal. Hence my placing it in such a wide variety of blog post categories.—Joe]
Sanders is a kookily proud outsider and self-declared Democratic Socialist who joined the House of Representatives in 1988 and the Senate in 2005. In the quarter-plus century he’s served in federal office, only 3 bills he’s sponsored have ever made it into law. Otherwise, he was that guy you would occasionally see yelling about rapine capital or the unnecessary proliferation of deodorant brands to an empty chamber of Congress on C-Span during midday break sessions. And this has been Bernie’s professional life for the past 35 years. Get up. Go to Congress. Fight with Lamp. Declare victory.
Stephen Miller
February 1, 2016
Culture Club: How Media Makes a Meme
[H/T to Ed Driscoll.
I have nothing to add.—Joe]
Nothing points out the bankruptcy of our nation’s gun-control debate better than the mythologies that surrounds it.
Prior “common sense” proposals are perpetually abandoned. The so-called “news” media adopts each new absurd gun-control scheme dutifully, promotes it uncritically, then drops it like a hot potato when it is proven worthless and runs to the next latest greatest bit of hoplophobic (morbid gun fear) ridiculousness.
In effect the nation endures a serial mythology, with new myths invented constantly, so we lose sight of each established myth as new ones spring into the public eye.
Alan Korwin
December 21, 2015
KORWIN: America’s Real Gun Problem – The Gun Myths
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
We have an admitted socialist running for president and making a “good” (for certain definitions of “good”) showing. People don’t really seem to get what socialism means. Recently I had a college student tell me that, “A little socialism is good.” Rather than hammer them into the ground and destroy a friendship I mildly disagreed with their claim and changed the subject.
Unless you are of the opinion that we need to destroy our country before we can save it we need to destroy the idea that socialism in any form is “good”. Socialism and communism have been attempted and failed more times than any other political system. While many of the failures have only resulted in general malaise, economic stagnation, and lower standard of living the most extraordinary political failures in history occurred under socialist systems. National Socialism of Germany, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the Peoples Republic of China being the most well know of those with their approximately 100 million dead.
I’ve talked to people that have lived under socialism. They know better than the naïve people in this country who have lived all their lives in a somewhat free market economy. I’m not the only one who has talked to the survivors of these regimes. One of my children’s high school teachers, Don Kaag, posted this on Facebook a couple days ago:
My old VW mechanic Dieter in Pullman, WA, is in
his 80’s, retired now, and has turned his shop over to his son Georg. In the late 1950’s, Dieter, as a young East German, “came over the wire”. He escaped from the German Democratic Republic’s “Socialist Paradise” with nothing but the clothes on his back and some mechanical skills he could use to earn a living in the West.He worked as a car mechanic in West Germany, in Scandinavia, and then immigrated to South Africa, where he met his wife, and where they started their family. Finally he relocated to Canada and then at last to the U.S., earning his way with his talented mechanic’s hands and his brain.
He hates what Socialism did to his homeland.
I was stationed in southern Germany—in Bavaria—in the early to mid-80’s, an Armor officer and tank company commander guarding the inter-German border against a possible invasion by the USSR…and for those of you who were not there and privy to the secret briefings, you have no idea what a very near thing it was. Our tanks had their war-load of ammo on-board 24/7/365.
The border was a sobering sight. Twenty-foot-high barbed wire fence on concrete posts topped with concertina wire. On the fence, pointed back into East Germany, were command-detonated claymore mines. Past that, 100 yards of ground was defoliated, plowed and planted with pressure-sensitive anti-personnel mines. Then further into the GDR there was yet another barbed wire fence with a gravel patrol road behind it, and with hexagonal concrete guard towers every quarter-mile. They had powerful searchlights mounted on them, and machine guns, both pointed into “no-man’s land”.
There’s a point to all of this, I promise. All of this was built TO KEEP EAST GERMANS IN, not to keep West Germans and Americans out.
My friend Dieter was one of the lucky ones—thousands of East Germans died on that wire, or lost their lives to the minefields or machine guns, or to the killer guard dogs trained to attack would-be escapees—Dieter made it, he got out.
Dieter and I have seen the ugly face of “true Socialism” firsthand. He suffered under it and risked his life to escape from it, I only watched it slowly destroy a people through my binoculars and tank sights.
When the Wall in Berlin came down in November 1989 such was their hate for that wall that Germans from both sides attacked the ugly barrier by hand with sledge hammers and picks.
The moral to this little tale of obscure Cold War history is this: America, be very, very careful about electing an avowed Socialist as President of the United States.
Bernie Sanders seems a harmless old duffer, and he promises free goodies for everyone, but in the final analysis he represents those who still think, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, that Socialism is the “wave of the future”. (Look at the U.K. before Lady Thatcher, or at Cuba and Venezuela right now… “Iron Maggie” once said, “Socialism works great until you run out of other people’s money.”)
Socialism and communism needs to be swept into the dustbin of history and given as much respect as witch burning—which it closely resembles.
Presidential involvement in small arms has been strategic and game-changing in our history. Obama comes along and tells the Army that, in this administration, money is going into small arms to build — not a deadly weapon, not an effective weapon, not a dominant weapon, not a lifesaving weapon, not a technological cutting-edge weapon — but a weapon that prevents accidental discharge. Give me a break.
Maj. Gen. Robert Scales
Former commandant of the U.S. Army War College
January 31, 2016
Obama’s eye-opening order to Pentagon: Make combat weapons safer, not more lethal
[He is doing just what he said he would do. He is fundamentally transforming our country.—Joe]
I don’t like this:
Proponents of President Barack Obama’s executive orders in the area of gun control point to OSHA’s General Duty Clause as a possible basis for a national “no guns at work” policy.
The General Duty Clause requires employers to maintain a safe workplace, including the implementation of policies that may be necessary to further that goal. Proponents argue that this significant increase in workplace violence coupled with the expansion of concealed carry laws would be the basis for this regulatory change. Moreover, because a General Duty Clause already exists within the OSHA statute, there would not be a need for congressional approval.
This would be another chilling effect on our rights. I frequently go to the range at lunch time or after work. And I know a lot of other people go hunting before or after work. And OSHA creating a regulation such as this would have to make exceptions for a many of places of employment. Police stations, security firms, gun manufactures, gun ranges, gun stores, any place which hires armed guards, etc.
I can see it being a valid concern for guns to be prohibited in some places of business (I’m thinking of oil refineries and other places where “high energy events” could be triggered). But it should be up to the business to decide if they have an overriding set of circumstance where firearms are just too high of risk to allow.
This could be our next fight for our right to keep and bear arms.
The forces acting upon the gun industry are Armageddon, for which we are all tooling up, and our Peerless Leader, who has sold more firearms than even Bubba Clinton, and The Horror That Is Hillary, who is lurking in our future like the Wicked Witch of the West.
David E. Petzal
January 25, 2016
SHOT Show 2016, Part I
[Via Caleb who has a much different, but entirely valid, angle on Petzal’s post.
As others have observed, if Obama and his friends want to reduce the number of guns being sold in this country they should resign from politics.—Joe]
Whenever someone tells me to “check my privilege”, I like to respond with “root access confirmed”.
Brian Garrett
January 21, 2016
Comment to Indistinguishable from Reality
[To understand this, and find it absolutely hilarious, it helps to be a computer geek.—Joe]
The 20th C Left had to shoot people en masse to get them to obey.
The 21st C Left plans on using dick jokes.
Azathoth @ArkhamRealty
Tweeted on January 13, 2016
[This is only true because it’s the best the Left has available at this time. If they had the power to murder people en masse they would.—Joe]
The right to keep and bear arms is not up for popular debate. It’s a constitutionally enumerated civil right.
Craig DeLuz
Firearms Policy Coalition spokesman
January 12, 2016
Gun debate: Californians support more gun control, poll finds
[Technically he is correct. But from a practical standpoint he is wrong. If a large majority wish to hurt us any way they can, as one person in the article said regarding buying ammunition, “Anything that slows the process down, I’m all for,” the local courts will ultimately find some weasel words to allow it. We have to change the culture or we need some very strong rulings from higher courts.
With dwindling percentages of gun owners in the most oppressed states and significant obstacles for bringing new people into our camp changing the culture is probably nearly a lost cause in these areas.
Therefore getting a pro-freedom president in the Whitehouse next January is our do or die battle for states like California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, etc. Otherwise the Supreme Court will, for all intents and purposes, eviscerate the Heller and McDonald decisions.—Joe]
The term ‘loophole’ suggests that it was a minor, unintended flaw in the design of the law, something inadvertently overlooked by lawmakers, when it was actually the very intentional result of a carefully worked-out political compromise between those who wanted background checks on all gun acquisitions and those who did not want any at all.
Gary Kleck
January 7, 2016
PolitiFact Sheet: 3 things to know about the ‘gun show loophole’
[This article does a good job of explaining the facts about the “gun show loophole”. I particularly like this part:
Our findings show that there is, in fact, an exemption in the law. But the exemption pertains to who sells the guns rather than where they sell them.
And that distinction is critical. The anti-gun crowd uses deliberate deception (it’s part of their culture) in an attempt to get laws passed which would be far less likely to get support if they were to be truthful.
I also found this to be of interest:
Professors at Northeastern and Harvard universities conducted a gun survey in 2015 that isn’t yet published. The national survey of 4,000 non-institutionalized adults found that 22 percent of the people who purchased guns — at gun shows, stores or elsewhere — underwent no background check, said Matthew Miller, professor of Health Sciences and Epidemiology at Northeastern University and co-director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.
When researchers excluded purchases between family and friends, that number dropped to 15 percent, which equates to approximately 5 million gun owners whose most recent purchase did not involve a background check.
I sent an email to Miller that said, in part:
I have some questions about the study referenced.
When will this study will be published?
A “background check” is not a black and white activity. Did your study consider the seller requiring the purchaser possess a concealed carry license a “background check” or not? There are other indirect “background checks” possible as well. For example, some gun organizations require a concealed carry and/or background check for membership. Hence any member of the organization has had a background check at some point in the not too distance past.
It’s unclear, but implied, that the way study was conducted was to ask 4,000 people if their most recent gun purchase was made without a background check. Is this true? If so, that raises an important issue as in the following scenario.
Suppose collectors of antique firearms purchase almost exclusively from private individuals at a rate of five firearms per year. If most people with only one (or very few) firearms purchase almost exclusively from licensed dealers, then it’s not possible to discern the overall number of sales without explicit background checks. In this situation there is a bias which results in an underestimation of the number of sales without explicit background checks.
Other scenarios are also possible that can give a bias in the other direction. Additional information is required to arrive at the true rate of explicit background checks.
But in any case, it would appear there is data which puts the upper limit on private firearm sales to people of unknown eligibility at about 15 percent. This is in contrast to the common, long known to be erroneous, claim of “40 percent”.
Now I wonder when (if?) this study will be released and if the anti-gun people will revise down their claims of the prevalence of firearm sales without background checks. Particularly when Miller receives a lot of money from the Joyce Foundation.—Joe]
Update: I sent the email to Miller four days ago on January 11th. No response yet.
Via email from Miles I received this bill introduced in Missouri by Representative Stacey Newman.
The TLDR version is, in Miles words:
It would create restrictive guidelines that a person must follow to purchase a firearm in the state of Missouri.
Basically you can only buy from an FFL that’s at least 120 miles away from your residence, after getting a psych eval signed off (I assume at the buyer’s expense), watch a 30 minute anti-gun video and take a tour of a trauma ER on a weekend between 10pm and 6am when there’s actually a patient being treated for a gunshot wound, visit two families who have had a family member shot and visit two “ local faith leaders” who have performed a funeral service for a teenager who was shot and killed in the last year. Oh, I almost forgot, I have to have my 91 year old father and 89 year old mother sign off on the purchase too as there’s no age limit for the required parental permission slip (and what happens if one is an orphan?).
Many anti-gun people have mental health issues. I have to believe this another one. It’s hard to believe someone, even the most evil, if they are rational, can imagine this would pass muster in the courts let alone with a majority of their fellow politicians. Even in the most generous of scenarios, signaling her virtue to other anti-gun people, you would have to conclude, “this is crazy talk”.
How does someone like that even get elected? They must have stopped taking their meds after winning the election.
Via Glenn Reynolds, Don Surber says FBI headed for a showdown over Hillary :
“I believe that the evidence that the FBI is compiling will be so compelling that, unless [Lynch] agrees to the charges, there will be a massive revolt inside the FBI, which she will not be able to survive as an attorney general. It will be like Watergate. It will be unbelievable,” DiGenova said.
Speculation? Sure. We shall see.
By the way, you can run for president from federal prison. Keith Russell Judd received 41 percent of the Democratic primary vote in West Virginia in 2012 while sitting in a federal prison in Texas.
You might find it odd that people are speculating about her running for president while in prison. But, as in the case mentioned above, prison is frequently a credential for certain groups of people. It appears to have strong correlation with people who vote for democrats. Marion Barry and Judd, above, are but two examples. Victimhood is a sought out by these people and just as Hillary sought that with her claim of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” in the 1990’s she will claim arrest and prosecution for her crimes as a valid reason to vote for her.
I am quite willing to believe Hillary has engaged in more than sufficient criminal activity to put someone away for years if it had been committed by any ordinary person. Her husband didn’t spend any time in prison after all the crimes he committed. Why should it be any different for Hillary? I’ll believe she spends time in prison only after the cell door clangs shut behind her.
I’m not advocating violence – I am warning liberals that they are setting the conditions for violence.
And that better worry them, for the coastal elites are uniquely unsuited to a world where force rules instead of law. The Serbs were, at least, a warrior people. The soft boys and girls who brought us helicopter parenting, “trigger warnings” and coffee cups with diversity slogans are not.
I know the endgame of discarding the rule of law for short-term advantage because I stood in its ruins. Liberals think this free society just sort of happened, that they can poke and tear at its fabric and things will just go on as before. But they won’t. So at the end of the day, if you want a society governed by the rule of force, you better pray that you’re on the side with the guns and those who know how to use them.
Kurt Schlichter
April 5, 2015
Liberals May Regret Their New Rules
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]