Dustin offers a personal example of how you can’t depend on living in a “good neighborhood” to mean you’ll be safe from crime. I also live in a decent neighborhood, but that didn’t stop an armed robber from trying to stick up an old man in the bathroom right down the street from me. Fortunately, the old man pulled his mohaska, and the guy took off.
Year: 2007
Plight of the Deer
Ahab links to an editorial calling for us to recognize the “plight” of deer, and not make sport of it. While I would not try to pass myself off as a wildlife biologist (most of whom are paid for by hunters) I’m pretty sure the plight of the deer pretty much revolves around eating, running away from shit, and humping other deer.  We have a word for things that don’t do anything except eat, run and hump: food.
Bias? What Bias?
Hard to hide it when things like this happen. Now, I generally am not a “the media are a bunch of liberals out to get conservatives” kind of conservative — I generally won’t watch network news just because it’s crap, sensationalist tripe, but it’s hard for me to believe that was just coincidence, when there were 5000 videos.
Altering the Past
It looks like The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership made sure to scrub their web site of Dennis Henigan stating that “The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” before accusing the DC circuit of leaving certain parts out of the second amendment. Why am I not surprised?
Game On, Washington
Both Joe Huffman and Ahab are reporting on Joyce latest efforts to push gun control, this time in Washington State. Joe says:
They have no interest in hearing anything other than their predetermined agenda. This isn’t a “conference”, it’s a conspiracy against rights and they should be arrested and be given a fair trial.
Yep, and they will keep trying. They are getting desperate to show some progress, and Washington has been one of the states they’ve thought they could turn. It’s been received wisdom in the anti-gun circles for a while that the state would be receptive to an assault weapons ban. I seem to recall before the federal ban expiring that the Brady’s, or some other gun control group, claimed that they would get several states to pass assault weapons bans if the federal ban were allowed to expire. So far their tally is a big fat zero. They are desperate, and I expect a push to be made on Washington. We beat them back in Pennsylvania, hopefully Washingtonians can too.
50 Caliber Guided Bullets
The big question is, will these only be available to “only ones”? Of course, I think it’s cheating, but don’t tell Gene Simmons.
ABC News Story
I had my friend Jason record the ABC news story in high definition for me just in case we had a nice spread like we had with the CBS story a month or so ago. While the ABC story was poorly researched and entirely one sided, it didn’t have any goodies, and their evidence table actually had a few Kalashnikovs laid out on it.
Ryan reported on this story as well. It’s pretty clear ABC didn’t even bother to research what the Assault Weapons Ban actually did, and didn’t do, or bother to do anything other than offer John Timoney and his anti-gun pals, a forum to push their crap on a media organization who doesn’t know any better, and couldn’t be bothered to check.
UPDATE: I agree with Illspirit that it’s quite likely police were using these firearms before Timoney decided to push his agenda in the media.
Swiss Gun Culture Under Fire Again
Looks like there was a shooting, along with further calls for more restrictions and bans.
The initiative includes a call for army weapons to remain in the barracks and a national gun register. The anti-gun proponents argue that the practice is no longer necessary from a military point of view.
But speakers from the rightwing Swiss People’s Party and the centre-right Radical Party say the decommissioning weakens Swiss security and is a vote of no confidence in soldiers.
I have to be honest, I’m not optimistic about the future of shooting in Switzerland. Because their gun culture is so tied to militia service, which is increasingly unpopular among young people in the country, I don’t think it’ll survive if the militia system is abolished. Unlike the US, there is no right to bear arms in Switzerland; it’s tightly tied with militia service. If that goes, I think the shooting culture goes with it.
D’Allesandro v. Pennsylvania State Police
Eugene Volokh blogs about a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision that mentions something very key: that the second amendment is an individual right.  Read the whole thing.
A Quick Response
I know some people pooh pooh e-mail as being a poor means of communication with representatives, but I’m impressed that I got such a quick response from Representative Daylin Leach on the issue I e-mailed him about, basically outlining the same points I did in the post below. Here’s his response:
I understand your rhetorical point but I think comparing speech to guns (or any right to any other) is apples and oranges. We don’t restrict the number of E-mails because there would be no state interest (“compelling” or otherwise) in doing so. But where there is a compelling interest in restricting speech to preserve public safety, we do so.
In states where it has passed, one-gun-per-month has, at least on a temporal basis (comparing crime rates shortly before and shortly after the law went into effect) shown an average reduction in gun violence of about 30%.
It does seem to be common sense that if I want to go into a store and buy 20 cheap hand-guns to sell on the street, but find I can only buy one, that will mean 19 illegal gun-seekers will be disappointed and have to look elsewhere. Some will find a gun elsewhere right away, some won’t. If all straw-purchasers are similarly affected, it will be increasingly difficult (although certainly not impossible) to buy illegal guns on the street. This will save some (but not all) lives. But if it’s your 6 year old daughter who doesn’t get shot by a stray bullet as she plays on the porch; that will be very important to you.
I think we’ll probably have to agree to disagree on this. Actually, I included e-mail spam as the compelling state reason for limiting people to say, 50 e-mails a month. Who sends 50 e-mails a month? That’s 600 a year. It won’t affect anyone but spammers. Spam costs the economy billions of dollars a year. No compelling state interest in trying to stop that? We don’t accept those kinds of prior restraints on speech, why should we on firearms?
As for the assertion that it has lowered crime, I’m pretty sure he’s confusing that with a study done on ATF tracing data, using a subset of traced firearms in 1996 that appeared in the JAMA. The problem is, ATF has said again and again that its tracing data can’t be used to draw conclusions about crime guns. Therefore, these studies lack a real scientific rigor, because they don’t use a representative example of crime guns. It’s possible, though, that maybe legislators have some data that I don’t have.
Either way, if you look at cities who are in one-gun-a-month jurisdictions, like Baltimore, the crime rate is still atrocious — nearly double that of Philadelphia. Maryland and Virginia are still the largest source of crime guns for Washington DC, which bans all guns, despite the one-gun-a-month law present in both surrounding states. Even if one-gun-a-month has a temporary effect on crime, it would seem that the criminals have no trouble figuring out how to get around it.
So I still question why a law, even if it only affects gun owners at the margins, passes a strict scrutiny test when a) the criminal activity it’s meant to stop is already unlawful, and b) there are is a profound lack of good evidence it actually works.