Strategy for California

Gene Hoffman talks about his plan for getting carry in California. Their plan is quite sensible, I think, and likely to succeed. One though on my mind lately is how long the other side is going to keep playing games before they just accept the way things are going to be.

In the history of civil rights in this country, it hasn’t been unheard of for the Supreme Court to expand a right more than they had initially been willing to because of the intransigence of government officials who tried to navigate around Supreme Court rulings. So in the end, the game playing could benefit us.

16 thoughts on “Strategy for California”

  1. Another good idea might be to get the ever-helpful open carry activists to stop scaring soccer moms into demanding gun bans.

  2. The way you associate your movement with the Civil Rights movement is silly. To say that’s a stretch is putting it mildly. I’d call it total bullshit.

    As for “the way things are going to be,” I think you’re like the little boy whistling in the dark. With the absense of Obama-takin’-yer-guns-away, like you all predicted, and the Supreme court decisions which you claim as, although debatable, victories for your side, you’re not doing that well at all.

    You’ve made two steps forward and one backward. You’ve had some hard-fought wins and some heartbreaking losses.

    My new hope is that Obama has been doin’ the old rope-a-dope on ya. In the second term he’ll begin doing the right thing and replace one or two of those bought-and-paid Supremes.

    Forget about open carry and concealed carry, you’ll be lucky if half of you can keep the guns you’ve got.

  3. Because it, of course, makes no sense to study successful litigative strategies from the past to get the Supreme Court to take certain civil rights seriously.

  4. mikeb…do you even live on the same planet as the rest of us? Obama’s reelection prospects are looking increasingly dim, and if he DID somehow manage to get reelected, and then somehow managed to appoint two more supreme court justices (which I doubt he’d get to do unless two of the current ones died), and they proceeded to overturn an immensely popular ruling (more than 2/3s of Americans believe that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms) there’d be hell to pay. The backlash would be severe, to say the least.

    You can hope all you want, but you’re living in a fantasy land.

  5. mikeb is in the house, dropping some much needed truth bombs! You are right, mikeb, it’s been a desert the last few years. Especially when it comes to expanding the right to carry.

    * Obama signs national parks handgun carry bill passed by Dem-controlled Congress (May 2009)

    * Iowa becomes a “shall issue” concealed carry state (April 2010)

    * Kansans vote by overwhelming, nearly 8 to 1 margin, to add a strong, individual right to bear arms for self-defense to their state constitution (Nov. 2010)

    * Midterm elections bring increased pro-gun majorities to Congress (Nov. 2010)

    * Seventh Circuit nukes Chicago’s gun range ban in Ezell (July 2011)

    * Wisconsin enacts “shall issue” concealed carry (July 2011). More swing state action!

    * Ohio reports record gun sales, with NICS checks up 42.4% from 2008 (Aug. 17, 2011). Hey, another swing state.

    * Texas issued about a quarter of a million CCW permits in just 2009-2010. The fastest growing group of permit holders? African-American women. (Austin American-Statesman, Aug. 20, 2011).

    As always, thanks for the reality check. Great comment.

  6. MikeB said:

    “Forget about open carry and concealed carry, you’ll be lucky if half of you can keep the guns you’ve got.”

    Wait. I’m confused. The anti-gunners have always said that they weren’t for gun confiscation. They were for “common-sense gun laws”. Are you trying to tell us that another name for common-sense gun laws is gun confiscation? I’m shocked!! All this time I trusted you people!!

    How do you propose to take my guns away from me?…Ahh, that is the rub. I am not going to turn them over so you will have to (try) to take them away from me by force. Is that what you and your kind intend? Are you willing to kill me and my family to get them? Do you want to force a civil war? (here’s a news flash–you and your ilk will be on the losing side of said conflict so be careful what you wish for).

    Take off a gun-grabbers mask and you find a tyrant. Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, MikeB302000. Do you like having your name associated with that group.

    No? Good. I hope not. I am assuming that you have a conscience.

    Then think about what you are advocating and its logical end.

  7. Another great quote of Gene’s from the link

    “…increased statewide carry license issuance by approximately 25% in the last 12 months”

    CGF has somewhat quietly (don’t hear about it much in SoCal) created a revolution here in California. CGF has the momentum and the strategy to win. SoCal will be next.

    Put that in your pipe and smoke it, MikeB and Friends.

  8. The way you associate your movement with the Civil Rights movement is silly. To say that’s a stretch is putting it mildly. I’d call it total bullshit.

    There was no association. It was a history comparison.

    As for “the way things are going to be,” I think you’re like the little boy whistling in the dark. With the absense of Obama-takin’-yer-guns-away, like you all predicted, and the Supreme court decisions which you claim as, although debatable, victories for your side, you’re not doing that well at all.

    District courts matter little at this stage.

    You’ve made two steps forward and one backward. You’ve had some hard-fought wins and some heartbreaking losses.

    Again, district court matters little. There was no losses that would be considered “heartbreaking”. Also, may I remind you of Ezell?

    My new hope is that Obama has been doin’ the old rope-a-dope on ya. In the second term he’ll begin doing the right thing and replace one or two of those bought-and-paid Supremes.

    Your assumption is based on whether or not Kagan will join the minority against the application of Heller. We have the answer about Justice Sotomayor. The jury is still out on Kagan. If she votes in favor of the right to bear that’s on it’s way up, that means Obama isn’t using RKBA as a litmus test. You lose.

    Forget about open carry and concealed carry, you’ll be lucky if half of you can keep the guns you’ve got.

    Considering we forced Obama to sign national parks gun ban repeal, amtrak gun ban repeal/check in, and repeal of military rules which allowed the military to control the firearms ownership of soldiers off base, I seriously doubt this will be the case.

  9. It’s not likely to succeed. What was the first thing that happened after Chicago lost in court? Legislators simply drafted a new law that was 99.999% as obnoxious as the old one. While they may get a win here and there they won’t have lasting peace until CA gun owners start electing pro-gun people to office.

  10. Part of the strategy in California has to be (must obviously be?) to keep the pin-heads busy and close-focused, and playing games with snippy legislation so they don’t see the emerging Big Picture – so good, let’s do it that way.

    One lesson we have learned is that they are way over their heads in legal skills and knowledge, and have a hugely outsized and un-challenged view of their own skill-set that bears no objective correlation to reality.
    The California Left’s lack of objectivity and reliance on rote Doctrine and simplistic Lefty notions has resulted in a near clinical example of the Dunning–Kruger effect – “unskilled and unaware.”
    The reality is that there’s no competition among them in their own kindergarten Leftspace, and they’ve begun to produce weaker and weaker candidates from a shrinking pool of genetically inferior and electorally untested, intransigent Leftoids.
    They *believe* themselves to be oh-so clever (eg: MikeB2000whatever), but they write laws so badly and so full of holes and un-forced errors that it’s relatively easy to tie them up in court and force a countervailing opinion to result. So let them go down that crooked road and we’ll keep straightening them out – and since they are unskilled and unaware they fail to learn from any of their own mistakes, so we end up winning.
    Hell you can buy a S&W M&P AR15 in California now, in several different configurations. Just a few years ago major Manufacturers were afraid to sell into this (huge) and un-tapped market, but that’s all changed!

  11. When you add it all up, that is, SCOTUS ruling that the Second Amendment is a individual right, and then incorporation. The tide has definitely turned against the victim disarmers no matter what anti-gun malcontents, like mikeb302000, and their ilk try and claim.

    What the Calguns Foundation is accomplishing in California will amount to concealed carry, and that is most likely not an if. When you read such naysayers come to this site and make preposterous comments, you can be rest assured that they see the writing on the wall. They have been beaten down by vigilant Americans.

  12. Before opening the champagne, remember that it is much more likely to be June 2013 (rather than June 2012) before the Supreme Court issues rulings that address both outside-the-home carry and apply First Amendment prior restraint analysis towards carry licensing schemes.

    That means that California will remain a highly discretionary-issue carry license state for at least another two years – and even this timeline assumes that every piece of strategic litigation goes according to the so-called plan.

  13. It’s difficult to fully explain but there are two factor that will keep the CA legislature out of this fight. The first is that even they’ve grown tired of silly anti-gun laws post-Heller and McDonald. They wouldn’t even give a 10+ round magazine capacity ban bill a hearing after the Lovell Mixon/Oakland shootings.

    Second, those with carry licenses already (in the may issue, political favors world) have surprising political clout and don’t want to see their privilege go away. The Legislature would have a hard time going against the wishes of the sheriffs and the police cheifs.

    And mikeb – love you man. You know the law that prohibits open carry in California? The Mulford Act? Passed to disarm Black Panthers and signed by Ronald Reagan. California’s carry license law was put in in 1923 to keep the Chinese and “Latin” communities from carrying. Other than dismantling racist gun control this has nothing to do with civil rights…

    -Gene

  14. Poor mikey. He is so frustrated at the unstoppable pro-gun tide that he is lashing out.

    Even so, how nice to see mikey drop the mask of moderation to reveal the true anti-gun extremist that was always there.

    It’s over mikey. You lost.

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