SayUncle has the round up. I’m glad everyone had a great time, and I’m sorry I missed it. Next year might be easier, since it won’t be an election year.
Month: October 2008
Bradys Endorse Obama/Biden
I’m actually happy about this endorsement. I will make sure to print it out and display it at the gun show this weekend so the bitter clingers up North will believe us when we tell them Obama will be a disaster for gun rights. Obama is running like hell from his gun record when he or his surrogates are speaking in Pennsylvania. This will actually help me:
The Obama-Biden ticket understands that the rights of law-abiding gun owners can co-exist with the reasonable restrictions which the U.S. Supreme Court recognized as “presumptively lawful” in its recent Second Amendment decision finding a general gun ban unconstitutional. As Justice Scalia stated, there is “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever for whatever purposes.” Senator McCain once understood this concept but that “straight talk” is now silent.
Yes Pennsylvanians, Obama gets an endorsement because he believes the Second Amendment allows for the federal government to ban whole classes of commonly owned firearms. Thanks Paul, you just made my job a lot easier!
Two Op-Eds on VCDL And Open Carry
One is a smear piece on the group and their activities, and the other is pretty good. Good on the Virginia-Pilot for blancing out the viewpoints. I do have to wonder whether their editorial board believe that a criminal or mass killer would choose to carry the instrument of his crime out in the open where everyone could see it, including law enforcement.
Careful
A church in Brooklyn is accepting guns and exchanging them for cash.
As part of the program, anyone can anonymously hand in a gun or rifle, legal or illegal, and get a $200 bank card — no questions asked. The cards may be used at stores or to withdraw money at ATM machines.
While gun owners can turn their weapons over at police precincts for $100 anytime, pastors say churches are seen as sanctuaries by those wary of authorities.
Except it’s a violation of the laws of the State and City of New York for the pastors at these churches to take possession of the firearms that are being turned in. If I were to go to New York to swap guns for cash, they’d throw me in prison. Why do these guys get a pass?
More Fighting with Allentown
But Pawlowski responded that the new state law would still leave police the difficult job of proving that a straw purchaser was lying about losing the gun. That’s no different from the current system, ”which obviously isn’t working,” he said.
The mayors have acknowledged that only the state may regulate legal guns, but ”this law is about illegal guns,” Easton Mayor Sal Panto Jr. said. The mayors’ argument is that the guns become illegal once they’re lost or stolen.
They are arguing over HB 1845, which was passed last week, and I believe signed by Ed Rendell. It makes penalties stiff for falsely claiming to police that a gun was lost or stolen, when it was really sold on the streets. The idea that this isn’t a law regulating the possession of firearms, which is preempted by state law, is absolutely abusrd. The gun might become an illegal gun, but the possession of it by the person that was victimized was not illegal, and regulation of that possession is strictly a matter of state, and not local law.
LA Times Not Liking Endorsement
The LA Times isn’t liking the NRA endorsement of McCain:
Even during the presidential campaign, he hasn’t ruled out “common-sense” efforts to lower the murder rate in big cities. That’s anathema to the NRA, which wants no one to abridge gang members’ right to slaughter one another.
Even if the NRA is right about Obama, he’s still not going to take Americans’ guns away. By striking down Washington’s handgun ban in June, the Supreme Court assured that it will be very difficult for the government to forbid gun ownership by law-abiding citizens in the future. It’s unclear whether the NRA cares; having won its 2nd Amendment battle, it’s now out to block any restriction on gun freedom, even the freedom of felons and the mentally ill to buy guns. There are dangers in such extremism, and they’ll become clearer as the body count rises.
Nothing to see here. Please move along. Pay no attention to what the gun loons think and get out there and vote for The Lightworker.
Grassroots Efforts
Our Saturday breakfast with the Sportsmen for McCain director didn’t turn out as well as we had hoped. We wanted to keep the group small, so we sent out our invitations to key people in the shooting sports and club culture in Southeastern Pennsylvania. I had more than 10 RSVPs, but only one person showed up. There’s one thing about grassroots involvement you should take to heart: keep expectations low. Sometimes you will have failures. In fact, most of the times I think you will have failures if you set your expectations too high.
Later that night was the ANRPC Annual Banquet. Stephen Halbrook was the keynote speaker. I got an autographed copy of his book, The Founders Second Amendment (if you don’t have a copy, get yourself one). I heard his next book will be on Nazi Gun Control. I am very anxious to read that, since there’s a lot of good and bad information out there regarding that topic, and it would be good to have a definitive scholarly work on it. I also ran into CemeteryCAS at the dinner, and reader and activist Paul Raynolds. Bitter, Bitchy Mom and I were seated with Scott Bach, who is president of ANJRPC, Matt Carmel, developer of the Palm Pistol, and very nice guy, BTW, and New Jersey Assemblyman Richard Merkt, who hopefully will run for governor, since I think he’s probably one of the few politicians left in the Garden State who understands the problems, and wants to do something about them. Oh yeah, I also won a safe in a raffle! I seem to be on a roll with Friends’ dinners. Not a big safe, just a little pistol safe. But hey, I never win anything, except at Friends dinners it seems. Interestingly, no guns can be raffled at the New Jersey Friends of the NRA dinners because raffling a firearm is illegal in New Jersey. “Firearms” and “Illegal” are often two words that go together in New Jersey, like Ebony and Ivory.
Today was the Sportsmen for McCain Rally in Oley. I’ll have more from that later, but I got to meet Sam Rohrer (Pennsylvania State Representative – very pro-gun and NRA endorsed), Tom Corbett (PA Attorney General, also very pro-gun and NRA endorsed), Chet Beiler (GOP candidate for Auditor General), and Dave Batagllia one of the other active EVCs in the state out west. Turnout was a bit less than I had hoped for, but not low enough to be a disaster. You can’t expect too much when you don’t have the candidates there. I estimate about 250 people showed up. One woman there was the spitting image of Sarah Palin. I kid you not. I would have been fooled any more than 10 feet away. The Berks County GOP seems to have their act together, which is good. One of the speakers also indicated the campaigns internal polling for Pennsylvania has the race much closer than the polling organizations. I would imagine that’s the case, otherwise McCain and Obama wouldn’t both be dumping so much money into Pennsylvania. I’ll have some pictures and some video later.
Forget One Gun a Month
In the past week, I’ve bought four guns. Three of them I bought today. There was the Kel-Tec at the show last week. I just got my ParaUSA LDA .45 and the ParaUSA LTC 9 for Bitter, and also picked up the Marlin .17HMR rifle I won two weeks ago at the Friends of the NRA dinner. Four guns in a week. Three guns in a day. CeaseFire Pennsylvania can kiss my ass.
If I get a visit from the ATF or State Police, my reaction will be “Gun trafficing? Hell no. Have you been watching the poll numbers?!?!?” In these trying economic times, the mildly pessimistic will hoard their money. The real pessimists will hoard ammunition :)
Court Rules Against Akins
Looks like the District Court agreed the Akins accelerator is a machine gun. Dave Hardy has the details.
Obama Talks to Smerconish About Guns
And look what he says:
“I do believe in some gun safety measures — so, for example, with all the shootings in Philadelphia, most recently police officers, I want to make sure that we can trace back guns and bullets that are used in crimes back where they were purchased, so we can make sure that in fact the laws are being enforced.”
That has to be music to Russ Ford’s (of ammunition coding systems) ears. We have to defeat this guy. I don’t care what the polls say. Get out there and start volunteering for McCain. We have to stop this here. If we don’t, there might not be any stopping it once Obama gets the political winds blowing against us. We could be in for some dark days.