One way to discourage the gun culture is to remove the guns from the hands and shoulders of people who are not in the law enforcement business.
New York Times
September 24, 1975
The Gun Culture
[“Discourage” the gun culture?
I don’t think “discouragement” would be the response. The New York Times was, and still is, quite out of touch with reality.—Joe]
Mr. speaker, we must take swift and strong action if we are to rescue the next generation from the rising of tide armed violence. That is why today I am introducing the Handgun Control Act of 1992. This legislation would outlaw the possession, importation, transfer or manufacture of a handgun except for use by public agencies, individuals who can demonstrate to their local police chief that they need a gun because of threat to their life or the life of a family member, licensed guard services, licensed pistol clubs which keep the weapons securely on premises, licensed manufacturers and licensed gun dealers.
…
The time has come for the Congress to place reasonable controls on handguns. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting the Handgun Control Act of 1992.
Rep. Stephen J. Solarz, New York
August 12, 1992
Congressional Record, 102nd Congress, 1991-1992, Daily Edition, Pages E2492-2493.
[Those were dark days when “reasonable controls” were a ban on an entire class of firearm.—Joe]
Tuesday, November 19th, is National Buy Ammo Day. Be sure to do your part. If you can’t find some in a caliber you shoot, but a new gun for the ammo you do find. (I’m partial to 6.5mm, aka .264 caliber). If you can’t / don’t want to do that, load some of your own.
Just a friendly reminder.
March of 3014. Dang!
That’s some mighty good food preservation technology, right there.
(Yeah; I know. Don’t try to correct me. I though it was kinda funny, OK?)
We usually think of it terms of incorporation doctrine, but;
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Just sayin’. Now I know the times and the environment in which it was passed, but read the words. As an amendment to the construction they were meant for all times and all environments. They say what they say, and nothing different, and there’s been a whooole lota rebellin’ and insurrectin’ goin’ on out der.
The ATF and Federal prosecutors responsible for Fast and Furious have been removed from the lawsuit by Agent Brian Terry’s survivors:
A judge has dismissed federal employees from a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of a slain Border Patrol agent over the botched “Fast and Furious” gun operation, noting congressionally-mandated remedies are already in place for when an agent dies in the line of duty.
But the judge let stand the lawsuit against the gun dealer:
Attorneys for the Terry family said they will appeal the judge’s ruling and will continue to pursue the lawsuit against the remaining defendant, Lone Wolf Trading Co., where the gun found at the shootout scene was purchased.
The gun dealers involved in Fast and Furious were told by the ATF they should let the sales of guns to known felons go through. The gun dealers objected but cooperated anyway.
What were the gun shops going to do? Tell their regulators to “shove it”? The ATF would have been “auditing” them, refusing to tell them what they had done wrong, with plausible threats of stomping kittens to death, destroying evidence, falsely telling the court you been convicted of robbing banks, entrapping you, and falsely claiming you ran a meth lab.
This is an incredible injustice. AG Holder and everyone that contributed to the decisions for this belong in jail.
There are all kinds of “survivalists” and “preppers” in the world. Most are good folks, if a bit odd. Some are… not so acceptable. I came across this article about a group that explicitly says in a major disaster, which they expect, their plan is to take what they need. Not stockpile their own stuff, but take it from their neighbors. I.e, they plan to become looters. They claim to have “80 dues-paying members.” But I have to admit, the last paragraph in the story really gave me a laugh – it tells me they are really not all that clued in about their working environment. Situational awareness operates at many levels, and it seems they are seriously missing the big picture in a major way.
I’ve seen a number of hit pieces on Alan Gottlieb in the mainstream media. But this is a decent article from the Seattle Times.
H/T to Anette Wachter.
If carrying a gun is counter productive because the bad guy will just take it away from you and use it against you then you don’t have anything to worry about with bad guys having guns. This is because you can just take the gun away from them and use it against them.
If you then don’t have anything to fear from the bad guys having guns then there is no problem with good guys carrying guns. Therefore there shouldn’t be any laws restricting gun ownership or carrying in public.
Anti-gun logic fails again.
Guys who need guns to impress typically are smalley endowed and afraid to be alone with themselves and their “things.” Big gun=Scaredy cat. Big gun=Little thing.
sabatia
November 11, 2013
Comment to Texas gun advocates just “posing for a photo” in public–with rifles.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!—Joe]
In any conflict, the most important thing is to understand exactly what it is that’s conflicting with what. If you can’t define the opposition, or even name it, you can’t fight it. Worse yet is to fail to understand what it is you’re fight FOR.
Even those ostensibly opposed to ObamaCare are often heard conflating medical insurance with medical treatment, as though one equals the other– If you don’t have insurance, you have no “health care”. They are the same thing.
By that standard, since I do not pay into a common financial pool designed to insure against starvation, I have no food. Period. I do not eat. I’m already dead. I died back in 1958 or ’59 as soon as my mother ran out of milk. I’m a ghost. Boo!
The notion that I might simply pay directly for my food, as I wish, and choose my own food provider, with no middle man, no money pool and no qualifications (or, heaven forbid; I might even grow some of it myself) is apparently a foreign concept to those who claim to favor a free market. It simply doesn’t even enter their minds.
If those who are opposed to a nationalized starvation insurance program are telling me I have no food, or if those opposed to ObamaCare are talking about people who have no healthcare, they are insane. They are not on my side. They have been co-opted by the enemy. They are blind, blithering, gibbering idiots, or zombies, who can’t even understand their own words, and yet we tolerate and entertain this insanity. Liberty isn’t even on the table for discussion. We can’t even speak of it, or even define it, and so how can we claim to fight for it?
What’s wrong with us?
Firearms are currently exempt from the health and safety laws that apply to every other consumer product in America, from toasters to teddy bears. Applying those same standards to guns is the real key to reducing firearm death and injury in America. Under these standards, handguns would be banned because of their high risk and low utility.
Violence Policy Center
Cited March 16, 1999 by GunCite
The False Hope of the Smart Gun
[I find it interesting that the 2013 version of this paper has removed the last sentence of the above paragraph.—Joe]
I just finished Emily Gets Her Gun: …But Obama Wants to Take Yours.
I had sort of followed her Washington Times series and hadn’t really planned on getting the book. I was sort of tempted when she won an award at the Gun Rights Policy Conference:
Finally I gave in and purchased the audible version so I could listen to it while driving. I’m not sure I should be driving when read it though. It generated a lot of adrenaline.
My thoughts on the book are that I’m going to do my best to avoid going to D.C. until you can get hunting tags for D.C. politicians and police.
The book should have a stronger title. Something like “The Most Dangerous City in the Nation is a Police State”. Or maybe “In D.C. Only Criminals and Cops Have Guns and You Can’t Distinguish Between Them.”
It is really, really bad in D.C. The roadblocks they put up to prevent you from getting or using a gun are bad enough. I knew about them and sort of accepted that is the way it is going to be until the Federal courts slap them down. But they way they treat gun owners even if you are within the law is criminal. The police have literally told gun owners, “I don’t have time for Constitutional B.S.” It’s not just the 2nd Amendment they despise. The ignoring of the 4th Amendment and due process is standard operating procedure.
The politicians and police committing these crimes cannot believe they are innocent of wrongdoing or protecting the innocent. Their actions are so atrocious that I’m serious when I say there should be hunting tags issued for them.
It will never happen you say? Hmmm…
Times change.
How long was it from the time Saddam Hussein, his sons, and thugs were comfortable in their position of power in Iraq until they had “dead or alive” bounties on their heads? Maybe a year or two at most?
How long was it from the time Mussolini, Hitler, and their thugs were in comfortable positions power until they were hunted? Maybe a couple of years. And Hitler’s thugs were hunted for several decades after their crimes.
How long was it from the time Nicolae Ceauşescu and his thugs were comfortably in power until they were being hunted? If you are generous it was about two weeks.
I have to conclude that when the government is a police state things can change extremely rapidly. It just might be possible there will come a time, within my lifetime, when people will be able to get hunting tags for the thugs in D.C.
While looking for something else I stumbled across one ounce silver rounds with ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ on them:
I find it interesting you can only purchase these in quantity 1:
You can also get an ounce of silver in .45 ACP:
This has been one of the most enjoyable political moments of my lifetime. I wake up in the morning and rush to find my just-delivered newspaper with a joyful expectation of worsening news so intense, I feel like Morgan Freeman should be narrating my trek to the front lawn. Indeed, not since Dan Rather handcuffed himself to a fraudulent typewriter, hurled it into the abyss, and saw his career plummet like Ted Kennedy was behind the wheel have I enjoyed a story more.
Alas, the English language is not well equipped to capture the sensation I’m describing, which is why we must all thank the Germans for giving us the term “schadenfreude” — the joy one feels at the misfortune or failure of others. The primary wellspring of schadenfreude can be attributed to Barack Obama’s hubris — another immigrant word, which means a sinful pride or arrogance that causes someone to believe he has a godlike immunity to the rules of life.
Jonah Goldberg
November 14, 2013
Obamacare Schadenfreudarama: It feels pretty good to watch the whole thing fail.
[H/T to John Balog in the comments here.
It is great to see that proponents of big government get whacked alongside the head with the clue-by-four of reality. Most of the time they are smart enough and deceptive enough to hide the tragedy of their misdeeds by diffusing it through time and layers of obfuscation that enable them to avoid taking the blame for the damage done. This time they reached way too far. It’s obvious to all but the most dedicated Marxists that this is a failure that directly affects millions and millions of people. And this time it will be much more difficult to blame on others.
Even these left wingers are jumping ship:
Of course there are those who view the Obamacare failure as a good thing:
Obama has a Second Chance to do what he should have done when first elected in 2008 with the criminally LOOTING Banking and Wall Street-scare EMPIRE (but which he didn’t have the guts to do then) —- he would have an amazing chance to do a rare ‘re-do’, and NATIONALIZE both the crooked looting Health-scare private corporate looting industry, AND go back and NATIONALIZE the even more obvious crooked looting Financial-Scare Industry — and insure (no pun intended) that important PUBLIC GOODS, like Health Care and Banking are removed from the hands of the PRIVATE CROOKS and returned to the hands of the democratic citizens who deserve not to be further ******.
Do not be complacent. This is a crisis and we must take advantage of it because you know the Marxists will if we don’t.—Joe]
A short one this week.
Have a good Friday and weekend.
My general counsel tells me that while firearms are exempted from our jurisdiction under the Consumer Product Safety Act, we could possibly ban bullets under the Hazardous Substances Act.
Richard O. Simpson
1973
Chairman, U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
[Via GunCite.
The current efforts to ban lead bullets are in part a watered down version of the same mindset and is getting much better traction.—Joe]
The Whitehouse is panic stricken over the failure of Obamacare and didn’t just trip and fall on their face this morning. They quadrupled down on their live demonstration of failure.
It was obvious to even an outsider like me that they had no clue what they were doing when they made their announcement this morning. Just what do you think the insiders that know in far more detail are going to say and do? I’m not just talking about people who work for the insurance industry. The insurance industry might be successfully demonized by Obama and friends and made to be the scape-goat for Obama’s mess. I’m talking about all the government regulators of insurance. The insurance industry is highly regulated by the states. While these regulators may not understand or approve of the free market you can be sure that after a few years of contact with the insurance industry they know a thing or two about the industry.
What are these regulators are going to say about these changes? We don’t have to do much speculation. The clues are coming in:
Washington later became the first state to announce that it would not allow insurers to extend their policies. Saying that its state-based exchange was “up and running and successfully enrolling thousands of consumers,” Mike Kreidler, the Washington state insurance commissioner, expressed “serious concerns” about Obama’s move and “its potential impact on the overall stability of our health insurance market.”
“In the interest of keeping the consumer protections we have enacted and ensuring that we keep health insurance costs down for all consumers, we are staying the course,” he said in a statement Thursday afternoon.
That is the “for the public” version. What almost for certain is being said in back channels to representatives in Congress and the Whitehouse is that changes such as these would violate state law. Obama does not have dictatorial powers, as much as he might like to, and he may be able to find some legal loophole to avoid or delay enforcing Federal law upon the beleaguered insurance companies. But he cannot demand insurance companies bypass state processes and laws to make changes he thinks will work. Furthermore these people know the Whitehouse changes are complete nonsense.
Obamacare is like a train. The millions of people who are losing their insurance are the passengers on this train. The train entered a tunnel at full speed only to find the tracks weren’t fastened down (the website being non-functional). But the train can’t stop. It’s still sliding, sparks flying as the wheels get ripped off on the rocks, into the end of the tunnel which could not be dug through the rocks made impenetrable by the laws of economics. At this point there is nothing the supporters of Obamacare can do but watch the crash and attempt to avoid prosecution.
The tragedy is that the politicians responsible for the train wreck made sure they were not on the train. But this should not be a surprise to anyone. Liberals love forcing people onto trains. Obama may say he’s not a dictator but he has a fair amount in common with some of them. The obvious match being dictators who forced other people on trains which carried them to their deaths.
USA Today has an article today about “Armed protesters rattle Texas moms’ gun-control meeting”. They include the complete picture supplied by the anti-gun implying they were laying in wait to attack someone:
They severely cropped the picture showing they were posing for a picture:
Remember the original version?
To be fair, they did provide the rest of the text if you read the entire article. But why crop it out? What media bias?
With millions of consumers getting cancellation notices for their current health plans, President Obama announced Thursday that he will encourage insurance companies to continue offering their customers the same health plans next year.
“This fix won’t solve every problem for every person,” Obama said, saying he would consider legislative action to go further. But he appeared to rule out the sort of legislation that House Republicans are pushing, which would allow insurance companies to continue selling new policies, indefinitely, that would not comply with the law’s new consumer standards.
“I will not accept” legislation that would “drag us back to a broken system,” Obama said.
He and his supporters have no idea what they are doing.
Not only did the Democrats have no constitutional authority to inflict this upon the people but they had no idea what they were doing. They believe changing the laws of economics is as simple as changing the laws of the nation. The reality is that the laws of economics are as immutable as the laws of physics. To believe that Obamacare could make health insurance cheaper and more accessible to everyone is to believe perpetual motion machines are possible.
There will probably always be simple minded people that believe in perpetual motion and we have present day proof of that in those that voted for and support Obamacare.
Update: An insurance industry insider just told me: “Your post is exactly what we were just talking about. The magnitude is staggering.”