Quote of the day–Richard Lamm

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Christmas is the time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell government what they want and their kids pay for it.

Richard Lamm
[This quote reminds me of a book I just finished listening to: The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel by Stephen Leeb and Glen Strathy. It has some interesting stuff in it. He claims we are headed for some very bad times, “Unless government does something.” Of course this annoys me a great deal unless he means that government should stop meddling in the free market. Published in 2006 he correctly predicted $100/barrel oil when it was $60 and the DOE was predicting it would return to the $35 to $45 range. He said gold would skyrocket. He is saying that we could even see the collapse of civilization because of the shortage of energy and our large debt.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Milton Friedman

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If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.

Milton Friedman

More Heller from eyewitness Korwin

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I met Alan Korwin at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in 1999 and 2000. I was very impressed both times.

Read what more on what he has to say about the Heller case.

Books, explosives, and voodoo

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Blogging will be light for a few days while I work on Boomershoot 2008 tasks. I give you Xenia as a substitute…

It’s becoming a tradition. During Xenia’s spring break we go to Portland, visit Powell’s, I buy books on explosives, and we get Voodoo Donuts.

And, again, Xenia captures it in pictures.

Quote of the day–Barry Goldwater

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A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Barry Goldwater

Wolf guarding the hen house

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Grrrrr… Even if the ATF and police didn’t actually get the lawyer-client conversation tapes (I don’t trust them to tell us the truth about this), that they admit to getting a list of the times and duration of the calls is unacceptable to me. Even if I don’t have access to the actual content of your phone calls and email if I have all the other information the traffic analysis alone can reveal far more about you than you might want known.

The machine gun issue

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Throughout the Heller case I think most hard core gun rights activists have been thinking “Will this help or hurt machine guns? Even if the Supreme Court slaps D.C. down on handguns, rifles, and shotguns will they create a rule or test that slams the door on machine guns becoming commonly available?”

I’ve been, behind the scenes, asking people not to even talk about machine guns in the context of Heller. My thought was that if machine guns are ignored in the Heller decision, then if we do things right after a Heller win we can get some machine gun relief eventually. Obviously it came up in a big way during the oral arguments. Some people have been critical of Gura for “throwing machine guns under the bus” during the oral arguments. I am not one of them. I viewed it as unfortunate collateral damage. We needed to bomb the crap out of D.C. and they were holding machine guns as hostages. It was more important to destroy D.C. now than to try and figure out a way to get the machine guns to safety. We might still be able to resurrect machine guns, they aren’t really dead, just on life support.

Now, via Uncle, I find Gura responds. I agree with him.

More thoughts on the slaves being freed

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The following is from a reader regarding my post Slaves are about to be freed. He reveals that he and his family are so far unarmed but strongly support the RKBA. He lives in the California which puts a severe chilling effect on actually possessing firearms.

From: Rob 
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 2:42 PM
To: Joe Huffman
Subject: Re: Your post: “Slaves are about to be freed “

 

Joe,

 

I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

 

“I think we should start preparing to use a new weapon that we might well have in our arsenal by July. As with all new weapons we need to train with it and plan how to use it before we can use it to maximum effectiveness.”

 

I thought you were going to write about a newly informed populace and moreover, new shooters. 

 

The biggest thing we can have/build is numbers.  Politicians can read polls.  If we have the majority of folks behind us (as I think we do) we tend to win.  If we have repeated instances of the Kim du Toit happy dance for new shooters, then we have motivated people behind us. 

 

Numbers are what the Brady Bunch worked on for a long time, but they are in trouble because they are selling a negative – the momentum has shifted. 

 

The intermediate victory is that we have begun to sell gun ownership and carrying as a positive.  A place not to let up is the “Gun Free Zone” nonsense.  We need to make darned sure that private defensive use of firearms in such situations is responsible and underscored in the media as such.  The Brady Bunch has no answer for this.

 

People are the new weapon.  The most potent weapon is people who understand RKBA truth and wield it well – freed slaves, empowered private citizens.

 

I see the training as literal, for new shooters. (My little family – for example – will someday, God willing, be new shooters.  We are pro-gun and pointedly so, but not –yet- armed.)  The gun community needs to train train train,  Now is not a time for a blossoming of gun accidents because people do not know and strictly follow Cooper’s four rules.

 

When we add to our numbers (who this we unarmed white man?) we win.

 

When even those who do not choose to arm themselves are happy to allow us to do so, we triumph.

 

I think I hear the sound of triumph approaching just over the next hill.

 

Rob

All good points. I’m sure there are others that can be made. I just threw things together off the top of my head to get people started thinking. Please keep thinking and if you want it to have more visibility than a comment email it to me and I’ll probably post it.

Quote of the day–George Washington

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I have heard the bullets whistle; and believe me, there is something charming in the sound.

George Washington
After returning from a battle during the Revolutionary War.
[For a general he was quite the bad-ass. He had horses shot out from under him. His coat had numerous bullet holes in it. His accomplishments as a young officer were rather daring as well. To say that Washington was “highly regarded” by his men and country would be a huge understatement. My school history books did not do him justice.–Joe]

Always Think Forfeiture

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I already told you what TSA really means.

Now Jed spills the beans on what ATF really means and the U.S. Government backs him up on it.

Scary stuff.

Another article by Jonathan Rauch

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H/T to Rob who sent me the link and made at least a tenuous connection to my previous efforts.

Jonathan Rauch. Does that name sound familiar to you? And if so what did he do for gun owners?

Okay, so maybe one out of 50 or 100 gun rights people will recognize it. You would have to be pretty hard core (potential pun material) to recognize his name and make the connection to gun rights.

So, Rauch just published an article in Reason: The Right Kind of Gun Rights–Why the D.C. case is about self defense. Before I tell you the first article he wrote which got my attention and ultimately nearly all gun rights activists here’s the final clue–from todays article:

Yesterday, unbeknownst to itself, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a gay-rights case. To most people, admittedly, District of Columbia v. Heller is a gun-rights case. In fact, it’s the most important gun-rights case in decades, one that may cast a shadow for decades to come. But to gay Americans, and other minorities often targeted with violence, Heller is about civil rights, not shooting clubs.

To put it all together, this is from the main page on the Pink Pistols website:

“Thirty-one states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible.”

–Jonathan Rauch, Salon Magazine, March 13, 2000

Yeah, now you should remember. Jonathan Rauch wrote an article and the Pink Pistols spontaneously burst up out of nothingness and gives the gun hating liberals severe indigestion to this day.

Cool, you say. But so what?

What’s interesting to me is that some other people and I had been trying for a year or two before Rauch wrote his article to get something going (see the Lewiston Morning Tribune and the Seattle Times) using the same concept. We didn’t get much traction. Perhaps it was the wider distribution of his article. Or maybe it was just an idea whose time had finally come. Perhaps it was just the right person got the message and had better organization skills than we did. Or maybe Rauch puts his words together in some magic way. No matter. Rauch wrote a single article and did massive damage to those that would take our freedoms away from us.

Sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword and Rauch demonstrated that in a big way.

Self-parody

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I had seen the graphics below before but just shook my head and went on. Reader Rob sent them to me today and pointed out it’s self-parodying. They are from the main page of the Brady Campaign website.

In the first graphic they actually say guns murdered people. It seems to me if that is the case all those biologists trying to create and/or modify life in a “test tube” should be redirected to study common metals, charcoal forges, hammers, and drills. Apparently the secret to life was discovered with the invention of the first firearms four or five hundred years ago.

Okay, so maybe I was taking them a little too literally. But my point is they twist the meanings of words to achieve their goals. It is only by telling half-truths and sometimes outright lies that they can achieve political traction. We need to rub their noses in it in a very public manner.

In the second graphic they try to take advantage of a negative stereotype of the gun owner as a vandal who shoots up a sign. They also imply that disallowing guns makes a workplace safer. To test that hypothesis answer this question, “Which is a safer workplace, a maximum security prison or a police station?” Nearly no one has a gun in the prison (including the guards who are in contact with the prisoners) and almost everyone has a gun in the police station. Of course the police station is safer–because the people there are much more likely to be trustworthy people. It’s the people, not the guns, that make the difference.

In the world view of the Brady bunch the concept of there being more than one variable that contributes to personal safety is too difficult of a concept. Guns have no will of their own and are tools that can be used for good or evil but making the intellectual leap from the gun to the person pulling the trigger is just asking too much of their feeble brains.

Either that or they have mental problems.

CryptLight

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Last night I wrote a simple encryption program. Basically it’s “Encryption for Dummies”. You can use it to encrypt text message such as email or even instant messages.

Here is the zip file: CryptLight_1_0_0_1.zip (225.56 KB)

Download it. Unzip it, read the ReadMe.htm file and you should know all you need to know about it. If it sounds like something you could use run Setup.exe and have fun.

As a test message use this with the passphrase of “Password” (without the quotes):

gmPtGYutvQCrqXMT++rFLwcN53qTuDpieDL/Z3svuIz4RnHNTCeJ+8aGC4Z2orZ9Zsen/rg7
8JG/Rm/cQ33D5bqSWqTXU4ctDCabZAKw2po=

Update: I forgot to mention, because of my exceedingly Microsoft centric view of the universe, this only works on Windows. I tested it on XP and 32 and 64-bit versions of Vista.

Update2: If you enter in corrupted cipher text and try to decrypt the program will crash. I have fixed it but haven’t released new version yet. I’ll wait for a few more days to get feedback and bug reports. Consider what you have as an Alpha release.

Aren’t They Going to Hate it

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What if DC citizens get to exercise their right to keep a functional, loaded firearm in the home for self defense, and the crime rate drops?  What if at some point DC gets legal concealed carry, and crime rates drop even more?

Won’t the antis just hate that?

Yes, I think it is reasonable to assume they would see that as a defeat and absolutely hate it (it’s exactly how they viewed all other defeats, where crime has dropped after a new concealed carry shall-issue law) which points to the utter depravity of these people, and the lie they’ve been telling us when they claim that what they’re doing is about “safety“.

Working hard for dead last

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We don’t have the best Brady score yet, but we are working on it.

Many, many thanks to Mike Brown at Idaho Sport Shooters Alliance who wrote this bill and pushed it through.

News releases from the good guys

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I like the one from SAF. A short excerpt:

“An affirmative ruling, which we anticipate sometime in late June,” he concluded, “will provide a foundation upon which other Draconian firearms laws can be challenged, and more importantly, it will destroy a fantasy that has become a cornerstone argument for restrictive gun control laws. This should put an end to the lie that the Second Amendment only protects some mythical right of the states to organize a militia. That was not true when the amendment was written, it is not true today, and it will not be true tomorrow, regardless how hard extremist gun banners try to make it so.”

The NRA-ILA release looks like it was written the day before. They can do better.

Nothing from GOA.

Update: The NRA did get in the news with some strong statements.

Contributions by everyone

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The day before yesterday I wrote about others contributing to and being a part of history in the Heller case. Certainly the participants in that battle did some really heavy lifting and deserve credit for it. I’m also hearing some of them say encouraging words to the effect that they couldn’t have done it alone. That all the decades of activism on the part of the grass roots and enabled them attempt lopping off the head of the beast yesterday.

Listen to what Dave Kopel says.

Ashley Varner at NRA-ILA sent me this in an email after I told her to tend to important things and not to worry about answering my email right away:

I must kindly take issue with your last email. Don’t say you are unimportant — if I were to believe the Brady Campaign claims, we are all a part of the Triangle of Death and each of our different roles are important to the cause of pissing off anti-gunners, educating the mass of gun owners, inspiring others to join the fight and above all, preserving liberty for our future generations. 🙂

I have two “take aways” (Is that in common usage? Or is that just a Microsoft thing?) from this:

  1. The big hitters in our political game (a game of life and death!) are gracious.
  2. A contribution even at the very lowest levels make a difference so don’t think you can’t or don’t help by getting involved.

Slaves are about to be freed

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I have been reading (and listening) to a lot of material over the last 24 hours. No one has said they think the bigots are going to win on the individual versus collective right issue.

Reading the websites and listening to the statements from the bigots I get the impression that they are trying to hold things together and not collapse into disarray:

The Brady Bunch:

“Today, the Justices of the Supreme Court thoroughly discussed the Second Amendment of the Constitution for the first time in nearly 70 years, in the District of Columbia v. Heller case.  Their probing questions, and the lawyers’ responses, highlighted the complex history and competing approaches to gun regulation in our country.  I am hopeful that their ruling will uphold the right of people in communities like the District to enact common sense gun measures they feel are needed to protect themselves and their families.

“One of the reasons we have weak or nearly non-existent gun laws today is because a lot of politicians, and many citizens, think the Second Amendment limits our ability to enact common sense gun restrictions. Today’s arguments, however, demonstrated broad support from all sides for responsible regulations concerning guns. 

“Think how much safer we all would be if we made it harder for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons nationwide, not just in a few areas.”

The Gun Guys:

The VPC:

While cautioning that, as Barb and I say in cases like this, “I’ll believe it when the check clears the bank”, I think we should start preparing to use a new weapon that we might well have in our arsenal by July. As with all new weapons we need to train with it and plan how to use it before we can use it to maximum effectiveness.

The biggest issue I see is that we are, in a lot of ways, like slaves that have never known freedom. We are about to be freed from a terrible yoke and we have to learn how to use our new freedom on several different levels. If we don’t we will mess up and we will still be “gun n***ers“, freed, but still “gun n***ers” and subject to all the Jim Crow laws the bigots can muster.

  • Most importantly we must be responsible with our new tool. Challenging restrictions on RPGs, tanks, artillery, and even machine guns needs to be off the table. Just tell people, “That’s not at issue here.” When they insist, tell them there is no point in talking about it because it’s not at issue.
  • We need to just hammer the bigots who for decades have claimed it was a “collective right”. Anytime one of them says anything about gun control remind the world this is the same guy that lied to everyone about what the Second Amendment really means. Capture their quotes now before they try to rewrite history. Make them eat those words every time they open their mouth.
  • The bigots lied before and they are probably lying again. Make them completely justify every word and nuance. Put them and their organizations under the strictest scrutiny we can possibly deliver.
  • Remind the world the CCRKBA/GOA/JPFO/NRA/SAF/etc. was right. These are the people that have been defending inalienable civil rights and have been vilified by lying bigots all these years.
  • Attack, attack, attack. You don’t win a war by playing nothing but defense. We must choose the battles, the skirmishes, and the conflicts.
  • 18 USC 241 and 242. It is a right. Those that oppose it are criminals. Tell your prosecutors, tell your representatives, tell the media, tell it to the bigots faces.
  • We must politically destroy the opposition. If nothing else I expect can financially destroy the organizations. We can probably turn a Heller victory in at least a moderate financial win for the pro gun side and even though the bigots might be able to get a short term financial boost I expect this ruling will impair their ability to raise funds long term. Their supporters will realize they have been lied to and it won’t sit well that they have been supporting a lie.
  • Gun owners have been and are victims. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t feel right to portray ourselves that way, but it’s a powerful tool and it’s true.

That’s just what I can come up with off the top of my head. Think about it and try to realize that we have a completely new game with brand new rules here. Yes, technically the rules haven’t changed they are just being enforced for the first time in, well, forever. But the things we can do now that we have rule book the other side is forced to accept changes the picture. Instead of arguing about the rule book we can now play the game.

Web stickers from the Triangle of Death

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I’m going to add some of these soon:

Quote of the day–Mike Brown

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I know a little something about state constitutional RKBA and I can tell you that Gura made exactly the wrong argument– he started talking about how courts had interpreted these provisions 100 years later. Stevens was having none of this: he was allowed to make his point that it was 12-2 for a collective right in the early state constitutions. The correct argument was to put this in historical context: the citizens had just fought and won a revolution. Everybody was armed– what the state constitutions were saying was:”Hey, we will never disarm the militia like the British just did!” The English did something similar after they kicked James II out– they put a provision in their bill of rights guaranteeing an individual right for Protestants to have guns for personal protection. Stevens also made a big deal about this English bill of rights language showing that the english predecessor to the second amendment allowed parlimentary regulation of the right.

Gura could have neatly wrapped both these issues up together: The English Bill of Rights was adopted in the context of a revolution against a Catholic King who had disarmed the Protestants and ignored Parliament. The state bills of rights were adopted in the context of a revolution against an imperial power who had disarmed the militia.

Pennsy was an outlier because it was full of Quakers who were pacifists, and so they made the right one of self defense rather than military. Vermont had like 12 people in it when they became a state so they basically cribbed Pennsy’s constitution to save money. The Federal Bill of Rights was adopted in the context of nation-building: the convention toned down the states’ fire-breathing militia rhetoric in the first clause of the second amendment and then, in the second clause, reaffirmed the common law RKBA of individuals which was protected by the English bill of rights but, without making it explicity subject to congressional regulation.

Mike Brown
March 19, 2008
Lewiston Pistol Club email list, Heller Argument.
[Mike is our resident lawyer at the club and top dog at Idaho SSA.–Joe]