The new president announced, among other things, that membership was increasing by 100,000 a month, and that over 10,000 new members had signed up during the convention.

David Hardy
May 18, 2009
Referring to the membership of the NRA.
Some notes from the NRA Board meeting
[100,000 new members in a month is probably more than the total money paying membership in any given year of all the anti-gun groups combined. What I want to know is how the side that only has about 2 to 3 percent as many members as the larger group can imagine the larger group are the “extremists”. I guess it comes with the territory. These are the same people that declare themselves to be “gun safety” advocates and have never even taken, let alone taught, a gun safety course.–Joe]

If President Obama has ruled out a revival of the Assault Weapons Ban, he should at least use his political capital to redefine the issue of gun control. As a Chicago resident, he must be acutely aware of the toll of reckless gun use. As a party leader, Obama may be keen to renew an old party tenet through an electorally important lens. Perhaps even the term, “gun control,” should be overhauled. Democracies and, ultimately, the people, thrive on adversarial conversations on public policy. Despite disagreements on the efficacy or constitutionality of such restrictions, the nation is being done a disservice if at least one party doesn’t question the role of non-sporting guns in our society and their limited state of regulation. At the very least, the families of the thousands of dead due to gun violence deserve an honest debate.

Alex Levine
May 12, 2009
The gun control debate must be re-framed as a pro-security issue
[There are at least three things which Mr. Levine fails to recognize. 1) The anti-gun people lose big time from that view point as well; 2) The anti-gun people lose big time in any honest debate; and 3) The anti-gun people have been renaming their objectives, their names, and “reframing” the debate for decades and each time they were identified for what they were–wolves in sheep’s clothing and anti-gun bigots.

In my comment I asked Just One Question, but I don’t expect an honest answer.–Joe]

The nature of the right as understood and incorporated by the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment also affects the type of protection implied by that right. Being an individual right against all levels of government, the degree of scrutiny should be heightened and governmental justifications viewed with skepticism. Furthermore, given the self-defense justifications of the right, any competing claim that seeks to deny the right of or need for self defense would be inconsistent with the embedded purpose and assumptions of the right to bear arms and hence invalid on its face. Finally, while there certainly are some restrictions on arms that even the Framers understood to be permissible — use only for lawful purpose, for example — any restrictions supposedly advancing permissible interests cannot be allowed to prevent ordinary citizens from exercising the core of the right and owning a weapon capable of protecting themselves, their families, and their communities if necessary, in the very circumstances where such protection would be necessary.

Steven M. Simpson
D.C. versus Heller, Brief for the Institute for Justice as Amicus Curiae in support of respondent.
[Basically, if the government is going to claim a restriction on weapons they cannot do so in a manner which would restrict self-defense. Hence prohibitions on weapons in certain cities, such as Chicago, should be considered unconstitutional.–Joe]

Sometimes, the most important shot is the one you don’t take.

Christopher Whitcomb
Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team
[Whitcomb wrote about his experience as an FBI sniper. He was at Ruby Ridge and Waco. His insight was extremely interesting to me. It was a bit more favorable to the FBI than what I think is actually the case but that is to be expected. It was well written and I really appreciate him telling the story from point of view of the snipers who were there. Probably the thing that bugs me the most is that he said Marshall William Degan was murdered. This is false. Weaver and Kevin were acquitted of those charges. Hence Degan was not murdered. It’s possible that he was saying that is what they believed at the time and did not intend for that statement to apply in a universal sense. But that isn’t made clear.

I’m probably a little sensitive to that because FBI Director Louis Freeh frequently made the same claim in a context which was clearly post trial and a manner that made it clear that the trial result was irrelevant in his world view.

Ry also pulled a QOTD from the book over two years ago.–Joe]