There is no way to understand the mentality of people who want to disarm decent citizens while criminals keep all their guns. It’s a sickness that defies description or comprehension.
TeeJaw
December 14, 2014
Comment to #IWillNotComply rally in Olympia
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
Being called fetishist by someone preferring random slaughter of children to giving up a penis substitue: priceless.
BadExampleMan @BadExampleMan
Tweeted October 25, 2014
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a tweet from Linoge.—Joe]
I have better things to do with my time than listen to stupid, uneducated rednecks.
thambi
December 12, 2014
Comment to A lobbyist resurfaces: The NRA mulls strategies to undermine I-594
[This was in a response to a suggestion they attend a rally against I-594 in Olympia.
This is what they are willing to say about you in public. What they actually think of you is almost for certain more than enough to justify maintaining a firm grip on our specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms and regular training.—Joe]
Just as it is none of the government’s business who peacefully protests in a public setting, First Amendment advocates seem to insist, it is equally none of the government’s business – or anyone else’s – when someone harmlessly exercises the right to keep and bear arms, Second Amendment activists might argue. Do they have a legitimate point?
The Stranger habitually sneers at Second Amendment activists and, exercising the First Amendment right of free speech and the press, clearly advocated placing the “universal background check” restriction on gun owners. The Stranger is a popular alternative newspaper among Seattle’s far left, the folks who overwhelmingly voted for I-594. It was not their right being stepped on.
How many of those attorneys and public defenders and newspaper editorialists voted for I-594? If they don’t understand the parallels between restricting peaceful protest and being photographed by the police, and building records on gun owners, then they shouldn’t be practicing law or pounding keyboards for a living.
Dave Workman
December 12, 2014
Is it time to treat the First Amendment just like the Second?
[Lyle has often said the political left understands how rights are supposed to work. But I think we have sufficient evidence now that is not true. Do you think progressives understand how the First Amendment is supposed to work? Really? If so then explain to me why we are nearly 600 days into the IRS scandal with none of the perpetrators in jail or even indicted?
I do not believe progressives have respect for individual rights. They only claim rights when people engage in activities that advance the cause of the collective. As THE Clint Black tweeted a few days ago:
Your government arms dictators.
Your government arms “rebels”.
Your government arms terrorists.
Your government prefers you unarmed.
How else do you explain this?
Here’s another example: There are about 8000 murders each year in the U.S. that are committed using a firearm. Using the most conservative estimates there are about 80 million gun owners. Assuming the worst case, suppose each of the murders was committed by a different person (way wrong, at Newtown there were 26 murders by just one person) you still end up with the odds of some random (and they are certainly NOT random) gun owner being a murderer in a given year at 0.01%. Yet they insist we should be registered and every time a gun changes hands we should request permission from the government and submit paperwork documenting the exchange. And this is even in those cases where the recipient already owns one or more guns. No rational person can believe this will make society safer so their must be another reason. I can only think of two possible explanations for this behavior:
In either case we have only unpleasant options available to us.—Joe]
No woman should obtain a restraining order unless she believes it will help her circumstance no mater what police may say. The fact that so many of these murderers also commit suicide tells us something. It tells us that refusing to accept rejection is more important to them than life itself. By the time they reach this point are they really going to be deterred by a court order? A glib response is that the temporary restraining order can’t make things worse.
But here’s the rub. The restraining order does hurt by convincing the woman that she is safe. The bottom line is that there is really only one good reason to get a restraining order in the case of wife abuse. And that is that the woman believes the man will honor it and leave her alone.
If a victim or a professional in the system gets a restraining order to stop someone from committing murder they have probably applied the wrong strategy.
Gavin de Becker
The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence
[This is an excellent book. It was recommended to me by Rolf (and here). Ignore the few times Becker drops some anti-gun nonsense into it. With his personal history I almost give him a pass. Everyone I have convinced to read (or listen to) this book have told me it was awesome.
The last sentence it the money quote. If someone is not deterred by the penalties associated with murder you can be absolutely certain they will not be deterred by the penalties associated with the violation of a restraining order. The only method of prevention is to make it physically impossible to commit the murder. This gives us only three options to save the life of the innocent victim:
We do not have a Department of PreCrime so the first option is off the table.
The second option is extremely difficult, expensive, and requires a very challenging change in lifestyle if you have a smart and determined pursuer. The physical and emotional costs associated with this option may be out of the reach of many people.
The third option requires people with guns. If they cannot afford hiring others to protect them then they will have to protect themselves. There is no substitute for a gun. Embedding multiple jacketed hollow-points in an attacker is not a guarantee that a victim will escape injury, or even survive, but it does dramatically improve the odds.
No anti-gun person can sincerely claim they are concerned about the safety of women who are being pursued by people intent upon violence unless they value the safety of the attacker more than that of the intended victim. These people either have an extraordinarily warped and dysfunctional sense of morality and/or they are incapable of rational thought.—Joe]
The essence of the “weapon of choice” argument is that, because criminals and madmen use these guns to commit crimes, the law- abiding must give them up. But to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow.
By criminalizing an act that is not wrong in itself the purchase and sale of a firearm the ban violates the presumption of innocence, the principle that insures that government honors the liberty of its citizens until their deeds convict them. By completely banning the sale of assault weapons to prevent crime before it occurs, the law effectively and irrebuttably presumes that all who want such a weapon are no better than murderers or madmen, forever ineligible to acquire these firearms.
Obviously, a law which restricts the liberty of the innocent because of the behavior of the guilty, that rests on principle that the conduct of criminals dictates the scope of liberty the law will allow to the rest of society, in no sense “fights” crime. It is, instead, a capitulation to crime, born of a society in full-bore retreat from crime, a society fearful of and desperately accommodating itself to crime.
Jeff Snyder
August 25, 1994
The Washington Times, page A19.
Who’s Under Assault in the Assault Weapon Ban?
[H/T to Craig in the comments.
This same argument can be used against almost any law that presumes to “prevent crime” rather than punish acts which injury others. I’m specifically thinking of I-594 in Washington state but the application is far broader.—Joe]
Anti-Second Amendment advocates argue that because violent criminals have black market access to firearms, law abiding innocents should not. They argue that because rapists and murderers may illegally possess firearms the law abiding innocent women and men should not carry them. They don’t defend your Constitutionally protected choice and instead better enable the choice of criminal to make you a statistic.
They want to be able to have a choice as what to do after you’ve been raped. But want to restrict your choices of how to prevent your rape.
Dana Loesch
Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America
[I recently finished listening to this book and was quite impressed. Usually in a book of this type I find little new material and a significant number of errors. That was not true in this case. I seem to recall one minor error but I didn’t write it down and I don’t recall what it was now.
I addition to detailing her personal fights with anti-Second Amendment advocates, such as Piers Morgan and Shannon Watts, she articulated sound arguments and gave insightful analysis to both the principles and factual data regarding the right to keep and bear arms.
I have many more QOTDs in the queue from this great book. Thank you Ms. Loesch.—Joe]
Wow, Mark, that was nearly wrong in every particular! It bordered on fractally wrong, in that every little piece, taken by itself, was as wrong as the whole.
Tam
December 7, 2014
Sigh
[I read Mark Morford’s troll piece and briefly considered blogging about it. But I prefer to blog about things that either no one has noticed yet or that I have a quasi-unique viewpoint on. And this piece has been well covered by many others. This is just a small sample:
I had completely dismissed it as blog material. Morford is just too easy of a target and I have dealt with him at length before. Then I read the last sentence I quoted above of Tam’s. Wow!
I have seen this sort of thing many times before but didn’t have a name for it. Fractally wrong. I like it. I like it a lot.—Joe]
What about my right to not live in fear of my fellow citizens? Is that moot because you have a boner for guns?
Travis Dodge @MWTravesty
Tweeted on October 16, 2014
[It’s (sort of) another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a tweet from Linoge.
Dodge obviously doesn’t understand rights when he says he has a “right to not live in fear”. There are people afraid of gays, blacks, and Jews as well as gun owners. But that fear doesn’t allow them to infringe upon our rights.—Joe]
The cheap and easy availability of guns in any home in America makes it very easy for criminals to get their hands on as many weapons as they choose. All they have to do is break in and steal them and create their free market of stolen guns on the street –quite the active and ongoing enterprise. Shhhhhh…this is a truthful point that upsets Conservatives if you even dare to bring it up and burst their bubble. They like to pretend that there is no cause and effect that results from that.
AllynF
December 6, 2014
Comment on Gun Control, Real Time with Bill Maher.
[Got that? Criminals “get their hands on as many weapons as the choose” because private citizens possess guns in their homes. The specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms is the root of all problems with guns.
If banning the private possession of something would solve the problems associated with it then banning alcohol, cigarettes, and recreational drugs would solve problems too. AllynF has no respect for the Bill of Rights, no concept of guns being useful for the protection of innocent life, and at best a tenuous connection with reality.
Don’t let anyone ever get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]
To suggest a criminal will submit to a background check has to be the worst argument for gun-control ever, it requires a disconnect from reality.
williamdiamon
December 5, 2014
Comment to Gun Control Leader Unfazed By Gun Transfer Event
[See also Background checks.—Joe]
the attempted commercial introduction of the Armatix has floundered so badly that it remains the sole example that Brady can cite as even approximating a “smart gun.” Thus, were it to trigger the New Jersey law, the result would surely collide with the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. There, the Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to possess arms “in common use at the time” for lawful purposes. Even the Brady Campaign cannot seriously argue that all handguns other than the iP1, an $1800, 10- shot pistol chambered in .22LR, are not commonly used for lawful purposes.
NRA-ILA
December 4, 2014
N.J. Attorney General Rejects Brady Campaign Bid to Trigger Handgun Ban
[Elaborating even further, it seems likely the entire NJ law will declared unconstitutional simply because it makes illegal those guns which are in common use.—Joe]
What it shows though is the power of setting the narrative, and that’s done in print on paper, even in these days of the Internet.
And The New York Times and their cronies control it and do it. Despite reality, despite the ludicrous absurdity of their claims about so-called assault weapons that can’t even be defined, they were able to twist the national civil-rights debate about guns into a knot for ten years, and then only fess up ten years later. Two decades lost to mythology — by “the paper of record.”
Alan Korwin
December 3, 2014
“The Assault-Weapon Myth” (NY Times Headline)
[It’s only by perpetuating the culture of deceit that they win.
It’s time to prosecute the perpetrators.—Joe]
While the NRA portrays itself as protecting the ‘freedom’ of individual gun owners, it’s actually working to protect the freedom of the gun industry to manufacture and sell virtually any weapon or accessory.
Josh Sugarmann
Executive director of the Violence Policy Center
December 1, 2014
Connecticut dodges answers on Sandy Hook school tragedy
[I find it very telling that ‘freedom’ is in quotes.
Sugarmann has no respect for, and perhaps does not even recognize the existence of, individual freedom. If he did then he would recognize that the freedom of individual gun owners is dependent upon there being a free market offering for sale the types of firearms the individual wants.
For example, would we have freedom of religion if the book publishing industry were only allowed to publish religious texts if they were consistent with Islam? Protecting the freedom of the gun industry to design, develop, and manufacture whatever gun or accessory there is a market for protects the specific enumerated right of the individual to keep and bear arms of his choosing. Sugarmann has clearly stated he does not want individuals owning handguns or “assault weapons.” This rhetoric is a means to that end.—Joe]
Ammunition is not protected under any stretch of any amendment.
samsingh
December 1, 2014
Comment to L.A. City Council tentatively approves new gun control measures
[This constitutional scholar has further study to do.—Joe]
Of course. You guys have the freedom 2 kill 1 another with your penis extensions. Congrats!
Sandra Lägel @WittyGentlelady
Tweeted October 16, 2014
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a tweet from Linoge.—Joe]
The problem we have is not with death, so much as it is the violence, which is ironic since we seem to want to curb the very right and the very tool that protects us from said violence.
L.Bearer
January 20, 2013
Comment to Please Take Away My Right to a Gun
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]
I personally wish the blue states (but only blue states) would legalize all the drugs.
Reason: You can’t straighten any of them out but you MIGHT be able to screw them up badly enough to render them useless as a voting bloc.
evilwhitemalempire
November 26, 2014
Comment to The Children’s Wing of the Libertarian Party
[I understand the desire to screw up the voting of the blue states but I don’t think drug legalization would have that effect any more than freely accessible alcohol and tobacco does now.
Yes, many of the drugs are much more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco but I think that in general the people who currently avoid them because of their danger would continue to do so. And the people that don’t recognize the danger will, as they currently do, run those risks.
Yes, I believe there will be some people that will use the drugs that wouldn’t have if they were illegal. But I also believe that some people will be more likely to get help and recover from the consequences of recreational drug abuse.
And more importantly, where do you or the government, with a limited set of powers that you posses, get the authority to make decisions about what sort of recreation others partake in? Society has a legitimate concern about driving while intoxicated, or even carrying a gun in public while intoxicated. But aside from a few cases like that it really should be a matter of freedom of choice.—Joe]
We cannot have big guns out here as far as the big guns that are out here, the semi-automatics and all of them. We can’t have those running around out here. Those are not hunting weapons. We should ban those in Iowa.
…
The state of Iowa should take semi-automatic weapons away from Iowans who have legally purchased them prior to any ban that is enacted if they don’t give their weapons up in a buy-back program.
Rep. Dan Muhlbauer
(D-Manilla)
January 7, 2013
Iowa Lawmaker on ‘Semi-Automatic’ Firearms: ‘I Think We Need to Start Taking Them’
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you no one wants to take your guns.
He may incoherent and possibly even hallucinating about guns with legs running down the streets. But his vote in the state legislature is worth thousands of times more than yours is in the ballot box.—Joe]
We are keen to raise awareness of the devastating impact of knife crime and to reduce the number of families affected so we have decided to keep the knife bins indefinitely.
While projects encouraging the surrender of knives are not a single solution to violence, they have an important role to play in inspiring communities to get behind education and preventative measures.
Such campaigns show a desire to address local concerns and Lancashire Police is keen to throw our weight behind them in support.
We’ve been delighted with the response so far, but our communities have told us that they want an end to knife crime and that they want to work with us to make that happen.
Steve Dowson
Detective Chief Inspector
Lancashire, England
August 10, 2014
Save a Life – Surrender Your Knife
[Via a Tweet from Chris Knox.
No. This is not satire. Here is another link to marvel at.
Read carefully. Notice how they measure success in terms of symbolism and good intentions? Measuring success in terms of crime rates is not even hinted at. No mention of the futility.
This is a culture that has some serious mental problems. They apparently cannot distinguish between their fantasy of good intentions and the reality of criminal behavior. Do they also believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Great Pumpkin?
This would be our future if we were to surrender to the anti-Second Amendment people.—Joe]