We must fear a government monopoly on firearms. It is a path awash in the blood of millions and anyone who calls for bans on civilian firearms is on the side of evil.
Braden Lynch
April 21, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day—Ronald Reagan
[It may be the advocates have the best of intentions but as is well know, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.—Joe]
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Murphy
Murphy’s Law
[I’m at Boomershoot Mecca and things have not gone well for me today. I spent about two hours trying to get a Nanostation 2 to act as a router and get it’s IP address from the ISP. I “bricked” the device mounted on a pole 20 feet in the air. I can probably still recover it by pushing the hardware reset button but that means bring the pole down. The pole has a solar panel and the ISP’s wireless flat panel as well as the Nanostation on it. That isn’t going to be fun. Then I tried using another Nanostation I have at ground level. I was unsuccessful so I finally drove to Moscow (1 hour each way) to get a conventional household router. That worked and I got the AT&T microcell working with one of my phones but not the other. Then just as it was getting dark I started to put up my tent. I didn’t have the poles or the stakes. I have to go back to Moscow again. I’ll return in the morning.
As Barb asks multiple times during Boomershoot, “Are you having fun yet?”—Joe]
There are those in America today who have come to depend absolutely on government for their security. And when government fails they seek to rectify that failure in the form of granting government more power. So, as government has failed to control crime and violence with the means given it by the Constitution, they seek to give it more power at the expense of the Constitution. But in doing so, in their willingness to give up their arms in the name of safety, they are really giving up their protection from what has always been the chief source of despotism — government. Lord Acton said power corrupts. Surely then, if this is true, the more power we give the government the more corrupt it will become. And if we give it the power to confiscate our arms we also give up the ultimate means to combat that corrupt power. In doing so we can only assure that we will eventually be totally subject to it. When dictators come to power, the first thing they do is take away the people’s weapons. It makes it so much easier for the secret police to operate, it makes it so much easier to force the will of the ruler upon the ruled.
Ronald Reagan
Column published in Guns and Ammo (1 September 1975)
[First half via Proclaiming Liberty: What Patriots and Heroes Really Said About the Right to Keep and Bear Arms by Philip Mulivor, the rest via Wikiquote.
As I have said before, in the 20th Century more people were murdered by their own government than by individual or even gangs of criminals. People willing to give up their arms in the false hope of the government making them more secure from common criminals are missing the big picture. We have far, far, more to fear from an overly powerful government than from common criminals. In other words the hazards of too much freedom are of much less consequence than the hazards of not enough.—Joe]
Some good things came out of that fiery inferno: By the end of the day, April 19, 1993, I was a recovering liberal, ready to bear arms.
Sarah Connor
April 19, 2012
Comment to April 19, 1993: Where were you when Waco burned?
[I have a similar story but it started a little bit earlier.
I had bought my first gun in December of 1992. It was just an SKS but it was a beginning. This was in large part because of the helplessness I felt at Ruby Ridge a few months earlier. It went down just a few miles from my home at the time and there was nothing I could do. I didn’t have a firearm of any type and I had zero training.
Just the siege at Waco confirmed I was going down the necessary path. I didn’t have to wait for the outrage of the burning. The only doubts I had were whether I had started my journey soon enough and if I had enough money and time to complete it in time. In May of 1995 I got a contracting job at Microsoft that paid a lot of money and gave me easy access to high quality training and a nearby indoor range.
I was shooting USPSA matches in early 1995. I shot in a lot of steel plate and pistol league matches from 1995 through 1999. I went to my first dynamite shoot in May of 1996. I bought my STI Eagle in late 1997. I went to the USPSA Area 1 Championship in June of 1998. I won the Intermountain Tactical Rifle Championship in July of 1998. The first Boomershoot was in October of 1998. I took a class in long range precision rifle shooting in early 1999. Hundreds of people have participated in Boomershoot. They acquired the equipment and skills to hit one minute of angle targets out to 700 yards.
I and hundreds, if not thousands, are ready. It was Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the 1994 Clinton Gun Ban that motivated us. But what the really means is that almost for certain our equipment and skills will not be required for that method of last resort.—Joe]
There is no anti-gun group with enough money to defeat the pro-gun money. There is a lack of will and desire to confront this issue in the state and federal government and no strong anti-gun leadership from either party. The only way left to fight the gun industry is through the voices (and votes) of the American people.
Cynthia Kounaris
April 17, 2012
Guns Help People Kill People
[And the American people have spoken. NRA membership is at or near an all-time high. The NRA annual meeting this year set a new attendance record. And 68% of the American people have a favorable view of the NRA.
Ms. Kounaris, the problem for you is that there aren’t enough people on your side of the issue. And the reason you don’t have many people is in a large part because gun control advocates can’t answer Just One Question. The anti-gun groups don’t even have a way to join on their websites. They have no real membership in the sense of the pro-gun groups. It’s time to educate yourself and join one or more of the winning teams.—Joe]
This might mess up Joe’s auto QOTD super system and crash his server, but here goes;
“I prefer clarity to agreement” – Dennis Prager
I love that quote, and he uses some version of it often on his radio show. It is in contrast with the usual method of obfuscation for the purpose of recruiting to one’s cause. Understanding, the prerequisite to true agreement or true disagreement, can only come out of clarity. It is required for any positive, productive communication in any subject. I don’t know if Prager has said it as such, but clarity is pure poison to the left.
Pure.
Poison.
As such, our mission is easy, no? If I had to name one thing, the lack of which is resulting in the most problems in our society, it would be clarity. Not energy, not oil, not honesty, not contraception, not redistributed money, not even liberty, but clarity, because without it we don’t have any of those other things. We’re paralyzed.
Think how refreshing it would be to hear true clarity on a regular basis. “Honesty” could be substituted in many cases, but it’s different from clarity in that some people don’t actually know what they think– Their thinking process has been retarded through obfuscation. Clarity must some first, then, before honesty (or the lack thereof) can become an issue. Glen Beck oft repeats a variation on it; “Say what you mean and mean what you say”.
No doublt, if some politician ever reads this, he’ll be asking his campaign advisors how he can best appear to be saying what he means and meaning what he says, ’cause he heard it was popular with those idiots in flyover country.
Anybody openly carrying a gun into Starbucks (or anywhere else) to “make a point” or “exercise a right” is inherently unqualified to carry a weapon. This is a fundamentally improper use of a firearm.
Like your dick, you only take out your gun if you are prepared to use it. You don’t openly carry it into a coffee bar to scare the liberals. This identifies you as a cheap tin can that shouldn’t be allowed near anything as powerful as a Model 29 or to use the other common penis substitute, a Porsche Turbo Carrera.
Honus
March 4, 2010
Comment to Open Thread: Penis Substitutes At the Ready!
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
Martyrdom’ is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw
[I wonder who he was talking about. Colin Goddard of the Brady Campaign comes to mind but the timeline doesn’t quite work.—Joe]
We need a president who will stand up for the rights of hunters and sportsmen, and those seeking to protect their homes and their families. President Obama has not. I will. And if we are going to safeguard our Second Amendment, it is time to elect a president who will defend the rights President Obama ignores or minimizes.
…
And if we are going to safeguard our Second Amendment, it is time to elect a president who will defend the rights President Obama ignores or minimizes.
…
This president is moving us away from our Founders’ vision. Instead of limited government, he’s leading us toward limited freedom and limited opportunity.
Mitt Romney
April 13, 2012
Romney touts support for gun rights at NRA
Photo credit: AP Photo/Michael Conroy
[Since Romney is a politician and his lips were moving I question how firmly, if at all, he believes what he says and whether he will remain true to these campaign promises. But he is saying some of the words gun owners and freedom lovers want to hear.
I want to hear that he is going to do more than play defense (“defend the rights”). I would prefer that he say something along the lines of what Newt said a short while later to the NRA (H/T to Bitter). We should be expanding the scope of the right to keep and bear arms to the rest of the world via the UN. That means a strong offense, not just defense.
For those of you who question the validity of that last sentence by Romney please see my QOTD-Barack Obama from October 28, 2008 with further info from Kevin.—Joe]
There’s no politician in the world that wants to write off the votes of 5 to 6 million Americans out of the gate.
Sebastian
April 10, 2012
The Dreams of Bloomberg
[I’m reminded of something Chris Cox (NRA top lobbyist) said, “They don’t fear me. They fear you.”—Joe]
The argument that an armed citizenry cannot hope to overthrow a modern military machine flies directly in the face of the history of partisan guerilla and civil wars in the twentieth century. To make this argument (which is invariably supported, if at all, by reference only to the American military experience in non-revolutionary struggles like the two World Wars), one must indulge in the assumption that a handgun-armed citizenry will eschew guerrilla tactics in favor of throwing themselves headlong under the tracks of advancing tanks. Far from proving invincible, in the vast majority of cases in this century in which they have confronted popular insurgencies, modern armies have been unable to suppress the insurgents. This is why the British no longer rule in Israel and Ireland, the French in Indo-China, Algeria and Madagascar, the Portugese in Angola, the whites in Rhodesia, or General Somoza, General Battista, or the Shah in Nicaragua, Cuba and Iran respectively–not to mention the examples of the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It is, of course, quite irrelevant for present purposes whether each of the struggles just mentioned is or was justified or whether the people benefitted therefrom. However one may appraise those victories, the fact remains that they were achieved against regimes equipped with all the military technology which, it is asserted, inevitably dooms popular revolt.
Perhaps more important, in a free country like our own, the issue is not really overthrowing a tyranny but deterring its institution in the first place. To persuade his officers and men to support a coup, a potential military despot must convince them that his rule will succeed where our current civilian leadership and policies are failing. In a country whose widely divergent citizenry possesses upwards of 160 million firearms, however, the most likely outcome of usurpation (no matter how initially successful) is not benevolent dictatorship, but prolonged, internecine civil war.
Don B. Kates Jr.
Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment
Michigan Law Review 82 (1983): 204-273.
[Via Proclaiming Liberty: What Patriots and Heroes Really Said About the Right to Keep and Bear Arms by Philip Mulivor.
This is along the same lines as what Lyle described as the Plausible Threat.
It’s worth noting that the estimate of 160 million firearms in the U.S. was in 1983. The estimate is nearly double that now.—Joe]
That of course was its only purpose from the outset, so we’ll have to call the program a complete success.
What?– You believed the stuff about “protecting public safety”? No, see, that’s the just the selling point. That’s that charming, handsome man with his arm in a cast, Ted Bundy, asking you get in his van. Forget the assertions. The actual goal is something else entirely. That’s how communists (and serial killers) roll. It’s always a ruse.
Lyle
April 6, 2012
Comment to Gun card chaos: FOID foibles in IL
In response to “The only success of FOID cards is the successful persecution of gun owners.”
[Many, perhaps even most, of the people advocating for restrictions on firearms believe it will improve public safety. But at the top they know better. I’ve been listening to them and even meeting them face to face for many, many, years. Listen to and read carefully the words of gun control politicians Chuck Schumer, Diane Feinstein, and Bill Clinton. Listen and read carefully the words of the top leaders of the anti-gun activists. The smart articulate ones. Not the rambling incoherent ones. They know the truth. They know it’s not about public safety. It’s about buying votes, gaining power, and control of the general population.
For a long time I have wanted to get a meme started, “What is the real reason?” But apparently we are not quite ready to ask that question. And for the population at large, and gun control advocates in particular, gun ownership laws are not something that is subject to reason.—Joe]
Although the exact number of Americans killed by gun violence in the 20th century will never be known, it is now all but certain that it will, by any measure, vastly exceed the number of Americans shot and killed on battlefields since 1900.
Brady Campaign
December 30, 1999
MORE AMERICANS KILLED BY GUNS THAN BY WAR IN THE 20TH CENTURY–1.4 Million Known American Firearms Casualties Since 1933
[What the Brady Campaign either is ignorant of or willfully ignoring is that during that same time frame countries without the right to keep and bear arms murdered about 170 million innocent non-military lives in the 20th Century.
There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
The trade-off is not between guns being readily available to individual criminals and guns being banned and hence as difficult to obtain as other banned items like recreational drugs. The trade-off is between freedom and tyranny. It’s between losing a million innocent people in century due to criminal acts of individuals and losing 100 million people due to criminal acts of governments.
The founders of the this country understood and placed the security of a free state above the risk from individual misuse of arms:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Firearms in the hands of the people are a plausible threat to would-be tyrants and hence a “safety net” for freedom.
Gun control in this country was implemented to make it easier to suppress slaves, former slaves, and the descendants of slaves. That is a shameful heritage for the advocates of gun control.
The Brady Campaign is a small and small-minded organization that does not represent the people of this nation or it’s values. It’s time they faded away into the dustbin of history like their small-minded ancestral cousins, the KKK.—Joe]
I’ll give you my cold, dead dick when you take it from my gun-wielding hands!
Quiddity
March 4, 2010
Comment to Open Thread: Penis Substitutes At the Ready!
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.
President John F. Kennedy
January 20, 1961
Inaugural Address
[The “we” and “them” Kennedy was referring to were the United States and the communists of the world. But the sentiment has broader application.
It also applies to the people of a nation and a government delegated certain powers by those people. And if you think of “arms” as lawyers and financial resources it also has application to those with whom you enter into contracts with.
And if “arms” were a metaphor for “votes” the first sentence, but not the second, could have immediate application to the NRA, SAF, and other gun rights organizations and politicians versus the anti-gun organizations and politicians.
I had hinted at something similar with a very narrow application over 16 years ago but Kennedy says it more clearly and with broader application.—Joe]
It wasn’t a failure of laws. I just don’t see how our gun laws could have stopped something like that.
Amanda Wilcox,
Lobbyist for the California chapter of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
April 6, 2012
California’s tough gun laws could not prevent Oakland tragedy
[It’s nice to see the Brady Campaign admitting gun laws cannot stop mass shootings but she still has some pretty significant symptoms of Peterson Syndrome.
Did you noticed she said “It wasn’t a failure of laws” but then in the next sentence she says she doesn’t see how gun laws could have stopped the shooting. One or the other of those statements has to be false.
The corrected statement should be:
Our gun laws have failed. Our gun laws cannot stop something like that. The best known way to stop an active criminal shooter is for another person to shoot back. As long as our gun laws make it difficult or impossible for potential victims to defend themselves these tragedies will continue to happen.
But the Brady Campaign has a vested interest in the blood of innocent people running in the streets. If they were more rare their funding would dry up and they would cease to exist. Hence they give out sound bites that at first glance support their warped view but upon closer examination cannot even maintain coherence from sentence to sentence.
See also Say Uncle and the comments to his post.—Joe]
Their words and the things they choose to defend prove again that the Brady Center is not merely rooting for the criminal element, they are offering to hold their coats and act as lookout during the murder, rape or robbery of the law abiding citizens.
Windy Wilson
April 5, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day—Gura & Prossessky.
[While I do not believe people of the Brady Center intend this to be the result I am certain this is the unintended consequence of their actions.
Many of these people have no rational belief system and some don’t even have a grasp of what rational thought is but some do. My model for those who have a quasi rational belief system is that they are only vaguely aware of these unintended consequences.
Those of us on the side of individual rights are willing to accept the unintended consequences of freedom. Those unintended consequences include crimes and accidents involving firearms.
As Thomas Sowell made very clear in one of his essays from the 1980s (read Compassion Versus Guilt, and other Essays) and in a great many of his other writings and lectures, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”
The proper question then becomes, “Which set of tradeoffs is better?” And digging still deeper, “How do you measure ‘better'”? But as near as I can tell our opponents are unwilling, or perhaps unable, to even acknowledge there are no solutions. Yet the real debate should be at least three levels deeper.–Joe]
Hey, @MotherJones @sidhubaba, how is this story http://is.gd/tXiZEU turning out so far? kthxbye
Gura & Possessky
Tweeted on March 31, 2012
[In the story link to above, (former) Brady Center President Paul Helmke says in reference to a brief they filed in a federal court in North Carolina seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by Gura, “Police and emergency responders seeking to quell a riot,” he said, “should not be forced to contend with legally-authorized armed individuals and groups roaming alleys and public streets.” The author @sidhubaba, said, “You don’t say!”
In the decision released last week striking down the bad law the Brady’s were defending Judge Malcolm J. Howard said, “It cannot be overlooked that the statutes strip peaceable, law abiding citizens of the right to arm themselves in defense of hearth and home, striking at the very core of the Second Amendment.”—Joe]
A lot of people (both conservatives and liberals) are going to end up being embarrassed by their instant, snap judgments about this case.
The focus on a single case to evaluate laws that have been in effect for years in over 40 states is troubling enough. But right now it looks as if the rush to reform is based on nothing more than bad reporting.
John Lott
April 3, 2012
Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman and the media’s misleading rhetoric on guns
[The problem is that many (most?) people do not base their opinions on facts or rational analysis. Yes, this can be hard at times. Stirring up emotions or allowing your emotions to rule your actions “gets things done” but at what cost? The cost is wasted resources, bad law, and injustice.—Joe]
What happened to the old fashioned way of using your car to compensate for penis size? Suddenly I feel a wee bit less safe indulging in my coffee in the morning.
Yutsano
March 4, 2010
Comment to Open Thread: Penis Substitutes At the Ready!
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]