Crap for brains isn’t just in Seattle. It appears to be far too common these days. There should be a law against it.
Oh, yeah. I forgot. There is a law against it. It’s Darwin’s Law. But we have been helping others violate Darwin’s law for so long that stupid is becoming dominate when, by law, it should become more and more rare.
Other people ignore the law and we have to pay the consequences. Life just isn’t fair.
Whenever they smell blood they start dancing to the tunes of AK-47s:
Tragic as it was, the cold-blooded drive-by shooting of Officer Timothy Brenton over the weekend handed supporters of a proposed state assault weapons ban with a compelling case to take to Olympia. Even though police say they have not yet determined what weapon was used, Ralph Fascitelli, president of Washington CeaseFire, says he plans to cite Brenton’s murder when lobbying for the bill in the next legislative session.
“Maybe this particular [police victim] wasn’t killed with an assault weapon, but the next one maybe will be,” Fascitelli says, adding that police safety was a key reason that automatic weapons were banned decades ago and that the International Association of Police Chiefs supports a ban on military-style semiautomatic weapons today.
It doesn’t matter if the band playing doesn’t even have an AK. Heck, I don’t think it would matter if there were even a band.
They apparently live in some sort of alternate reality where their fears of imagined boogie men are sufficient grounds to demand the government infringe upon a specific enumerated right when even their leaders admit they have insufficient evidence to justify their actions. And they call that “a compelling case”.
I call it crap for brains.
It has been found via public records requests that Portland Metro says one thing publicly and has a different internal policy:
…[T]hese locations have signs posted saying that no firearms are allowed and there are no exceptions.
…
In September we made a public records request from Metro asking for all rules and restrictions dealing with firearms at facilities and locations they control. While we still have not received those we have received a copy of an executive order dealing with firearms and license holders that clearly contradicts their stated policies.
While we believe that Metro is reexamining all of its firearms restrictions, until they have corrected the many unlawful rules at locations they control, we want you to have a copy of their executive order which clearly states that license holders are NOT subject to their restrictions.
As is usual the bigots drag their feet as much as possible in their continued attempts to deprive people of specific enumerated rights even when it’s made extremely clear to them they are in violation of the law.
Via email from Ben K.
…We circle back around to one of the big problems in our society, which is the idea that line-memorizing clothes horses have anything more valid to say about politics, science, or current events than the hippie on the street corner with a guitar case. The Romans had the right position in society for actors: Above cesspit cleaners, but not as well-respected as a decent whore.
Tamara K.
November 3, 2009
Shame!
[This reminds me of a Robert Heinlein quote:
A whore should be judged by the same criteria as other professionals offering services for pay–such as dentists, lawyers, hairdressers, physicians, plumbers, etc. Is she professionally competent? Does she give good measure? Is she honest with her clients?
It is possible that the percentage of honest and competent whores is higher than that of plumbers and much higher than that of lawyers. And enormously higher than that of professors.
Lazarus Long
A character in several books by Robert Heinlein.
Getting back to Tamara’s quote…
The problem is that people are still largely driven by some evolutionary advantageous urge to listen to and obey those whose faces are familiar rather than actually think for themselves. But of course that presumes said person is capable of and willing to think for themselves. I’m not convinced the majority of people are up to the task yet we protect them from their own stupidity almost as if they were children who would grow up someday. I sometimes see a future where the system collapses and Darwin collects on a massive debt we have been accumulating for the last 100 years. It would have been far, far better in so many ways to pay off Darwin in regular installments than to have the Grim Reaper swing his scythe in such a broad swath as I sometimes see as plausible.–Joe]
The Second Amendment Foundation, NRA, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and the Washington Arms Collectors filed suit against the city of Seattle (see also the SAF news release):
“Every time the anti-gunners want to push gun control, they say we are doing this for the children,” said Alan Gottlieb with the Second Amendment Foundation. “It’s almost like it’s their lead banner every single time, no matter what.”
They say the ban violates Washington State’s long-standing preemption statute.
“The ban makes it impossible, under threat of criminal trespass penalty, to lawfully carry firearms for the protection of spouses, partners and children on public property where these citizens have a right to be,” he said.
But there was some support for the ban at Green Lake.
“I don’t know why anyone needs a gun at a playground or any place where there are kids around,” said Brain Nevenhouse.
But for others, they say the need for protection is everywhere. One of those party to the suit is Bob Kennar who supervises parolees for the state. He carries his own gun, because some of the bad guys don’t like him.
“It’s in the back of my mind,” Kennar said. “I don’t lose sleep over it, but like the police I know there’s a chance that could happen.”
Kennar has carried a gun for 29 years. He says the city of Seattle can’t tell him no.
Ray Carter is gay. He’s a founder of the Seattle Chapter of Pink Pistols. He carries a .380 because he says gays are targets and police can’t prevent that.
“They can show up in time to write the report and mop up the blood and maybe find out who did it,” Carter said. “As a potential victim that doesn’t do me a lot of good.”
Carter and Kennar use parks and community centers They understand the desire to protect children, but say they need protection too.
Ray Carter is a Seattle area blogger who uses a pseudonym so I’ll not provide the link to his blog. But I have known Ray since long before there were blogs. Ray has been a force in gun rights for many years. See for example this Seattle Time Editorial that mentions both Ray and I. It was at a pizza restaurant in Seattle where Ray, some other pro-gun people and I were planning our (political) attack against the anti-gun organization Washington CeaseFire who had been scoring some painful blows against our rights in the late 1990s. It was Ray who said we should call our little organization Washington Cease Fear. It was while doing work for this group that I came up with my Jews in the Attic Test. That organization didn’t thrive even though it still exists as a the Yahoo Group ceasefear. About a year after our founding and work on Capital Hill (see the Jews in the Attic Test web page) the Pink Pistols came out with essentially the same idea and took the nation by storm. Ray was a founding member of the Seattle Chapter of the Pink Pistols.
I’m not surprised he is taking point on this lawsuit.
As our neighbors to the north attempt to regain a little bit of their freedom the anti-freedom people are “horrified and fearful”:
Gun-control advocates say they are horrified and fearful that Canada’s long-gun firearms registry is on the verge this week of being scrapped because the Conservatives may have enough support from the opposition to kill it.
Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control, says her organization has been monitoring the progress of a Conservative private member’s bill to abolish the registry and is now bracing for it to clear an important vote in the Commons on Wednesday.
“It is astonishing, just a few months after the opposition parties voted for a Bloc Québécois motion that reiterated support for the firearms registry and against efforts to repeal it, that many of the same MPs will support this Conservative bill,” Cukier said Sunday.
“It not only eliminates the need to register rifles and shotguns but requires that the information contained on seven million registered guns be destroyed.”
I find it very telling they don’t tell us how many crimes the two billion dollar gun registry helped solved. The last time I heard a number it was one. Yes, one crime was solved that would not have been solved without it. Two billion dollars to solve one crime and these people are “horrified and fearful”?
The only conclusion that I can come up with is that it’s not about crime. It’s about control. They are “horrified and fearful” they will have less control.
As strongly as the U.K. is politically opposed to guns in the hands of private citizens it sometimes seems they have a fascination with people in the U.S. having guns. Here is an example:
Debbie Ferns travels the USA organising “Ladies Only Gun Camps” complete with pink weapons to encourage women to take up shooting.
Mrs Ferns, 55, from Tucson, Arizona, has also written a book called Babes with Bullets, Women Having Fun With Guns.
“Every woman in America should shoot a gun,” said Mrs Ferns, who has more than 20 in her home collection.
She added “As long as the woman is a legal and law-abiding citizen I feel they should at least have a basic education in firearms safety.”
The three-day camps, which cost £400, are exploding across the country and in January next year a US TV show will begin documenting the female gun trend.
“It started with one camp in 2004 and now we’re planning 15 to 20 camps for 2010,” said Debbie, who has helped recruit over 1,000 women to the shooting world.
“Women love it. We get schoolteachers, lawyers, nurses, women from all walks of life.
“They come in as novices and go away with a brand new skill using a powerful tool.
“Quite often they make new lifelong friends at camp as well.”
The women-only gun camps are particularly popular with women over the age of 35, up to those in their 60s.
“We have so much fun and it’s very exciting.
“It’s a fast paced program and by the third day of camp we have women safely drawing from holsters and shooting on the move,” said Mrs Ferns. “We often get emails from women telling us that the camp has changed their lives.”
There’s more and it is a very positive article. I have to wonder what that means for the future of gun ownership in the U.K. Is it an indicator of change for their firearm bans?
I am not arguing here that higher rates of gun ownership cause higher rates of crime, violent crime, or homicide. Such causation is difficult to show because so many other factors bear on the incidence of crime. For instance, simple cross-national comparisons of gun availability and crime do not control for the degree to which various countries impose legal restrictions on firearms. It also is difficult to sort out whether high levels of gun ownership lead to high crime rates or whether high crime rates lead to high levels of gun ownership.
Dennis A. Henigan
Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths That Paralyze American Gun Policy page 107.
[I find this an extremely interesting admission. With this admission how can he in good faith advocate for restricting private citizen access to firearms? In essence he is admitting that he cannot answer Just One Question yet he wants to push the envelope as far as he can in infringing upon a specific enumerated right.
As I said in a Tweet yesterday after getting off the plane, I’m nearly certain I could find a fatal flaw on every page of his book. It’s filled with half-truths, cherry picked data, and straw man arguments. I stand behind my nickname of Half-Truth Henigan for him.
I do have to give him credit for pointing out a few valid instances of NRA (almost all his attention is directed at the NRA) overstating things as well. John Lott gets some valid criticism too. He is not stupid but he’s not going to be winning any awards for piercing insight either.
I’ll be posting much more on this book over the next few days. In the meantime take a look at Dave Kopel’s review of it.–Joe]
We had a nice time on our cruise. Below is a picture from the wedding (it was on a beach on a Disney Island, not on the ship like I said earlier):
Barb and I were somewhat surprised at the nice time we had. Disney, as usual, paid a lot of attention to detail on the cruise and their island (99 year lease I was told). More pictures and stories later. Barb says we can check our bags in now at the Alaska Airlines ticket counter (we are still in Orlando).
I’ve seen many politicians paralyzed in the legs as myself, but I’ve seen more of them who were paralyzed in the head.
George Wallace
[I’m not a fan of his politics but I can’t help but wonder if Wallace wouldn’t have more than one ax to grind with the current occupant of the White House. I’m not saying all of them would be valid but from the above quote I think at least one would be applicable.–Joe]
The column achieved what it was supposed to do. It got people thinking about the problems associated with assault weapons.
Whether you believe there’s a problem or not, the reality trumps your rhetoric and your use of conservative/NRA babble trying to pass for the truth.
I don’t have the answers, but if enough people work on it they will come.
Dave Stancliff
September 13, 2009 4:13 PM
Comment to Let’s face it, no one will take the high road to gun control
In response to demonstration that his “facts” in an anti-gun editorial were all wrong.
[“If enough people work on it” they will be able to refute verifiable facts? I suppose if the Ministry of Truth (or is it the Truth Czar these days?) puts enough people on the problem it’s possible.–Joe]
I know many books that have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.
Voltaire
[Voltaire was wrong. This is not to take issue with Voltaire’s primary message of strong civil liberties in general or even free speech in particular.
Voltaire should have known of the tens or hundreds of thousands kill because some religious book said followers should kill, maim, or enslave non-believers. But he didn’t live at a time to have seen the hundreds of millions dead due, in large part, to Karl Marx‘s The Communist Manifesto. One can use the same arguments used in defense of the First Amendment in defense the Second Amendment. People that claim free speech doesn’t harm people like guns do only have to shown the millions and millions of dead in the Soviet Union, China, and other “people’s paradises”. And the sad part is that private weapons ownership would have prevented most of those deaths.
–Joe]
I love Annie Oakley. So much.
…
I hope I grow up to be that cool.
Laurel
October 26, 2009
This may be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.
[And I think it’s pretty cool there are women like Laurel as my neighbor in Moscow, Idaho.–Joe]
I just found out while I will have Internet access while on our cruise there is a price involved: $0.75/minute.
Roaming charges on my cell phone are $2.26/minutes.
Unless I can find something cheaper I’ll be offline until sometime on Sunday.
The numbers and the law don’t support their position so they result to insults, distortion, and copyright violation:
There is an America still stuck in the fifties, isolated from our cities and from each other by virtue and circumstance and the placement of highways and byways.
Where no gangs roam and real gun play is only on TV and children are not killed by stray bullets but by accident and by suicide in flaccid homes, all for the idle dreams of idle men made more flaccid by their flaccid imaginations.
They are white, nice and stuck, flaccid fools clinging to a romantic fantasy that disguises their impotent existence if not their impotence.
Armchair Constitutional scholars between clocking out and passing out. This is flaccid tea party America. Heels in the mud, Palin on the tube and loaded gun in good working condition, exceeded only by that of the remote.
For flaccid America, killing is an idea, a fantasy pastime, a friend of boredom, that seems to bear the right not to be.
Here is the original picture:
Writing the ATF and providing them with your information is akin to giving thieves your home address and the hours you won’t be home.
Dudley Brown
October 17, 2009
Executive Director National Association for Gun Rights
ATF Goes On The Offense
[This is probably exaggerating just a bit. But I’m pretty sure the ATF is not as responsive to public opinion as some other agencies are. Writing to the people that decide their funding is going to be more effective. They listen to the people with purse strings.–Joe]
Barb and I made it through A Security Theater and are now waiting at the gate ready to board our flight to Orlando.
I’m wearing this shirt:
It seemed to get a smile from one of the TSA agents. I wonder if it was because he agreed with it or because he knew I wasn’t carrying at the time–he and his co-workers had defeated me for the moment.
I don’t think a creative solution is needed. Only one that is straight to the root of the problem: Coming from a country which does not believe that civilians should be allowed to carry arms for self-defense, Singapore – and we have a very low crime rate, and even lower crime rate involving arms – why don’t Americans consider taking back all the guns civilians are allowed to have once and for all?
Li Li
October 26, 2009
Comment to Looking to Blog Readers for Good Ideas to Reduce Teen Shootings
[Because freedom is better than bondage and tyranny, it fails my Jews in the Attic Test, and it would be a violation of a specific enumerated right. Try answering Just One Question then get back to me.–Joe]
Montana and Tennessee passed it. Ohio is now considering it:
Reps. Seth Morgan, R-Huber Heights, and Jarrod Martin, R-Beavercreek, have introduced legislation that would allow for firearms made and sold within Ohio to be exempt from federal firearms regulations.
Morgan said that House Bill 315 is mainly a preemptive effort to protect the state in the event President Barack Obama’s administration tries to push any new federal regulations.
My opinion is here.
Bob Barr says the U.N. is coming to take our guns:
The real agenda of these folks at the UN, and in London, Tokyo, Brasilia, and the other capitals around the world of nations pushing the US to “come on board,” is not international regulation, but limiting the freedom we enjoy within the United States to keep and bear arms.
Back in the mid-1990s the NRA sent out postcards for members to mail to the head of the U.N. saying what they had planned was illegal under the U.S. Bill of Rights. I added a note to the one I sent. I told him the guns wouldn’t be voluntarily turned in even with monetary compensation. And if they sent people to take them by force to make sure anyone they sent brought their own body bags.
I still am of that opinion and I’ve had a lot more time to prepare and prepare others for such circumstances (see also here). And my neighbors have similar opinions.
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