Why just the gun manufacturer?

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I’ve been thinking about the lawsuit against Bushmaster because of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting. And the more I think about it the more clear it becomes that our political opponents are not rational.

If the gun manufacturer is responsible then isn’t the magazine manufacturer just as, if not more, responsible? Why just the gun manufacturer?

What about the manufacturer of the custom springs in the gun? Why just the gun manufacturer?

What about the manufacturer of the ammunition? Why just the gun manufacturer?

What about the manufacturer of the propellant in the ammunition? Why just the gun manufacturer?

What about the manufacturer of the bullets? Why just the gun manufacturer?

What about the manufacturer of the shell casing? Why just the gun manufacturer?

What about the manufacturer of the cups, anvils, and explosive compounds in the primers? Why just the gun manufacturer?

And of course we could, and have, asked similar questions about the car the shooter drove to the school, and that leads to the gasoline, tires, oil, and roads he used to get there. And once we go there why not the shoes and clothes of the shooter? Or maybe he wore glasses and would have had trouble hitting his targets if it hadn’t been for the manufacturer of the corrective lenses and the optometrist who prescribed them.

We could carry this on to bizarrely extreme levels but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. So how does the anti-gun mind work such that they think the gun manufacture is responsible but none of the other manufactures of the components involved in the crime are? The point is that there is no clear threshold where it is easy to say the manufacturer of one component is responsible and the next is not.

The only thing I can think of is that they have some mind distorting hatred of GUNS!!! such that they cannot think rationally. They recognize the absurdity of blaming the car and corrective lens manufacturers but it just doesn’t register that since the ownership of a gun is constitutionally protected right that makes the liability of gun manufacturer even more absurd.

The inability to recognize the obvious in defiance of clear and presence evidence is evidence of a mental disorder. We see it with Peterson Syndrome and we see it here.

Speaker at I-594 Rally for Your Rights

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Yesterday I was asked if I would be a speaker at the rally against I-594 on January 15th. I agreed and today they announced it.

Don’t let this stop you from showing up and supporting the movement to rid our state of this unconstitutional law. Confirm your attendance here.

Quote of the day—westcoast2012

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Back ground checks before being allowed to own a gun is just common sense, as is outlawing AK-47’s, but the pro gun movement has always seemed to me to be void of common sense.

westcoast2012
December 14, 2014
Comment to Bride, groom bring out the big guns during Washington state rally opposing universal background checks
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one want to take your guns.—Joe]

What’s going on here?

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This is an elaboration of a comment I posted on Paul Barrett’s article about the inevitable failure of the lawsuit against Bushmaster in regards to the Sandy Hook tragedy. Barrett went to law school and has more than casual acquaintance with firearm law. I share his certainty it will fail.

I would have expected most reputable lawyers would have redirected the parents of children murdered at Sandy Hook to counseling rather than to pursue a hopeless lawsuit against the manufacture of a gun. I can understand the pain and even a need to “do something” but a lawyer who did any research at all, let alone gave it a few minutes of thought, should have concluded such a lawsuit is doomed to failure and deepening anguish for the parents.

I initially hypothesized the lawyer involved was someone desperate for money and at least momentary fame. But it is a law firm with a history that goes back 75+ years (via an article on CNN Money).

It’s possible they are short on money and with nine parents backing the lawsuit they may be able to bill (bilk?) them for perhaps a much as a million dollars. But will losing such a high profile case be to their benefit in the fame department? It’s been said many times that there is no such thing as bad publicity but that is usually in a much different context. When winning is what matters to your customers you don’t want to be well-known as a loser.

Lawyer David Hardy says, “I really can’t see it as filed in good faith.”

So I’m perplexed by this. Are the lawyers in this firm so ignorant of gun law (Lawful Commerce in Firearms Act), proximate causation precedent, and blinded by emotions that they think they have a chance “because GUN!!!”?

Filed for future use

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If we get to the point where we are prosecuting politicians and law enforcement for violation of our civil rights questions like this will need to be answered:

I haven’t researched it, but I wonder how this plays out in the setting of a criminal prosecution of a government actor for deprivation of civil rights. Is ignorance of the Constitution no defense, because it’s a criminal case, or is reasonable failure to appreciate there was a constitutional right being violated a defense because of qualified immunity?

Quote of the day—TeeJaw

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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]

A legend in my own time?

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I recently had an email conversation with John G. at the Lewiston Idaho pistol club. I haven’t attended a match there in probably two years but he said they still tell stories about me.

Really?

So he claimed. Then he gave me the following examples (link added about the magazine shooting incident):

A shooter dropped a mag while reloading on the run and somehow booted it into the target area, prompting the story about Joe Huffman, who once shot one of his own mags clean through…  Better to be infamous than forgotten, I suppose.  Strangely, I’m reasonably certain that the person telling the story wasn’t shooting with us when it happened, suggesting you’ve become part of the oral history of our matches.

We also still use you as a unit of measure for heights (e.g., “Joe Huffman could shoot over it but nobody else can, so it’s high enough”).

Wow! I’m thinking maybe I should go back and shoot a match with them again sometime over the holidays.

I was wondering. Does this make me a legend in my own time? Or just in my own mind?

Riding the Red Horse

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Riding The Red Horse is a military fiction anthology being published 15 Dec 2014 by Castalia House. It is edited by Tom Kratman and Vox Day. I have a short story in it, the story of the first Armadillo mission. There are some big names in it, and I am honored to be among them. Vox posted about it here.

RH1_900

Continue reading →

Quote of the day—BadExampleMan @BadExampleMan

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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]

High heels

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I’ve occasionally blogged about high heels before. Supposedly they improve women’s sex life because they “directly work the pleasure muscles linked to orgasm”. As I pointed out it would seem to me there are better ways to directly work those muscles without the risk of breaking an ankle, but whatever. I don’t have any real interest in them. But this article was very interesting to me (H/T Glenn Reynolds):

Scientists from the Universite de Bretagne-Sud conducted experiments that showed that men behave very differently toward high-heeled women. The results, published online in the journal “Archives of Sexual Behaviour,” may please the purveyors of Christian Louboutin or Jimmy Choo shoes — yet frustrate those who think stilettos encourage sexism.

The study found if a woman drops a glove on the street while wearing heels, she’s almost 50 percent more likely to have a man fetch it for her than if she’s wearing flats.

Another finding: A woman wearing heels is twice as likely to persuade men to stop and answer survey questions on the street. And a high-heeled woman in a bar waits half the time to get picked up by a man, compared to when her heel is nearer to the ground.

I could see myself being more likely to help them pick up something. But answering survey questions? Really? That just doesn’t resonate for me. I have never picked up a woman in a bar and only go to a bar when Barb wants to hang out with some of her friends. I therefore I have zero personal data on that point as well.

I am attracted to tall women. But what I find is that after “prying” my eyes from her face at something approaching my eye level I look at her feet. If she is wearing heels my interest is severely degraded. So, to me, high heels are negatively associated with attraction.

Barb has an interesting “relationship” with high heels too. In addition to being difficult for her to walk in them she says that when she wears them it’s as if people don’t see her. She is nearly 6’ 1” in her bare feet so with high heels she is pushing 6’ 4” and many people end up looking at something approximating her bellybutton (she has very long legs, much longer than mine). For her to make eye contact with people while wearing high heels involves hand gestures, verbal cues, and sometimes offering them a stepstool.

Quote of the day—thambi

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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]

#IWillNotComply rally in Olympia

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I drove to Olympia today to participate in the rally against law created with I-594. We had a decent turn out. I didn’t stay for the entire thing but it seemed to go very well from what I could tell. People were participating with the speakers and the Washington State Patrol officers present looked bored:

IMG_1969IMG_1974Adjusted

I’m putting the rest of the pictures “below the fold” so that it doesn’t create long load times for the main page for the next week.

Continue reading →

Quote of the day—Dave Workman

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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:

  1. These people have serious mental defects.
  2. These people have evil intent.

In either case we have only unpleasant options available to us.—Joe]

I’m honored

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This Tweet came out this morning:

From: The Original SPQR ‏@SPQRzilla

#FF @TamSlick @LawSelfDefense @monsterhunter45 @AdamBaldwin @BruceNV @LosFelizDayCare @iowahawkblog @HRatAOSHQ @JoeHuffman

I can’t begin to say how honored I am to be placed in such company.

Quote of the day—Gavin de Becker

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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:

  1. The perpetrator is incarcerated or executed prior to assault.
  2. The intended victim cannot be found by the perpetrator.
  3. Physical force is used to defend the innocent victim before the assault has caused permanent injury or death.

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]

Anniversary

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Tonight I was telling Barb about a Twitter conversation I got involved in with a soon to be Markley’s Law example. At some point Barb asked how long I have been doing the Markley’s Law Monday theme.

I looked it up and found the first Markley’s Law Monday was almost exactly three years ago. I’m not in any danger of ever running out of material.

I am reminded of a quote falsely attributed to Albert Einstein:

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

No matter how often we point out that we have Supreme Court decision on our side and the best they have to offer are childish insults we probably will never run out of people demonstrating Markley’s Law. There is apparently an unlimited supply of those who insist that the right to keep and bear arms is not an inalienable, preexisting, human right guaranteed to be protected the Second Amendment but is instead a symbolic penis extension.

Quote of the day—Jeff Snyder

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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]

Quote of the day—Dana Loesch

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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]

Cruise ship security

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Barb and I really enjoyed going on a cruise last February and have been talking to various people about where our next cruise should be. I’m not very happy about the government regulating transportation security even more than they already do:

The Coast Guard is considering new airport-like security procedures on cruise ships, the agency said Tuesday.

After consulting with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Coast Guard is proposing new pre-boarding screening requirements for passengers, crew members, and their luggage.

The pre-boarding requirements could resemble those seen at airports and would include a list of prohibited items.

The individual cruise lines and ships should be making these decisions. Not the government. What exactly does the government think it is going to prevent? Passengers have access to sharp knives, matches, lighters, and with a little bit of effort probably even fire axes and liquid fuels.

From reading part of the proposed rulemaking  it appears they want to standardize the procedures and the list of prohibited items. But “one size fits all” security procedures works as well as “one size fits all” clothes.

It’s clear these people view the lessons of the USSR Central Committee as a how-to manual rather than a dystopia.

Redirected

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A few minutes ago I discovered you would be redirected from my blog to a URL that looked like this:

http://x.vindicosuite.com/imp/?l=169943&t=h&u=&r=&rnd=75008735

Where the query string item ‘rnd’ had a different value each time you tried to visit my page. It appears to have been some sort of malware associated with Sitemeter. I remove Sitemeter and the problem went away.

Sorry about that.

But this may explain the complaints I have occasionally received from readers about popup ads here. There should not be any here. But if someone was able to infect Sitemeter’s scripts then such a thing is possible.

The domain registration info is as follows:

Registrant Name: Lee Sautia
Registrant Organization: Vindico LLC
Registrant Street: 245 5th Ave., 21st Floor
Registrant City: New York
Registrant State/Province: New York
Registrant Postal Code: 10016
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone: +1.6468332940
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax:
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: domains@vindicogroup.com

Using vindicogroup.com as an URL redirects to http://vindico.com/. This website claims they do behavior based video advertising. I would like to inform them that it is not surprising to me that such slimy behavior as theirs originated from someone in New York City and my behavior is to have nothing to do with them.