Year: 2008

Difference in Attitudes

The Brady Campaign looks at stuff like this, and this, and comment “Another sad, tragic waste.”  I call it Darwin at work.  I have no problem with idiots like this chlorinating the gene pool with their own stupid carelessness.

I do have a problem when their stupid carelessness takes other people down with them, which is why I anxiously await the Brady’s supporting my proposal to reintroduce the shooting sports into our nation’s schools, so that everyone knows how to safely and responsibly handle a firearm, in a supervised environment.

Gun accidents are rare, and becoming rarer, thanks in part to the shooting community adopting a culture of safety.  You will never stop every idiot, but we can and have reduced the occurrence of accidents among gun owners to the point where they are unusual enough to be newsworthy.

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Access Barriers

Bitter talks about the NSSF panel that discusses ways to overcome access problems for hunters and shooters.  I tend to agree that we both share some of the same problems, but my local indoor range does IDPA matches.  My club’s indoor range does Bullseye shooting.  We do share some of the same issues, but our issues are seperate.  Actually, we only really share access problems with hunters when it comes to rifle shooting.  When it comes to handgun shooting, access problems are significantly reduced.  But I forgot, handgun shooting is icky.  My bad.

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Law Abiding Gun Owners

There are many different stories around the blogosphere today highlighting this phenomena:

Law Abiding Gun Owner one

Law Abiding Gun Owner two

Law Abiding Gun Owner three

Law Abiding Gun Owner four and five

Just a few days ago, a friend of mine who lives in Philly, and is licensed to carry, got threatened by three youths with a Taser.  Believing there was no way this was going to end well, he drew his pistol, muzzle pointed toward the sidewalk.  The miscreants decided that Glock beat Taser and beat a hasty retreat.  No one was hurt.  My friend called 911, but the police never showed up to take a report.  Keep in mind this city has had a rash of people getting beaten up in random acts of violence.  Yet the Brady’s want to continually deny that there are real law abiding gun owners who have a legitimate concern about personal protection, and who aren’t dangerous or irresponsible with firearms.

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NSSF Summit Notes

Bitter is covering the NSSF summit.  Conclusion from the introduction to the report:

So, the webcast is over and there was absolutely no statement about these just being ideas.  Like I said, if I were watching that with out no other information from NSSF, I would believe that this document was their new gospel.

So does this mean the NSSF is now adopting action items that will marginalize the handgun shooting sports?  I think this is beyond misguided, it’s just plain stupid.

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Open Carry in Wisconsin

If you open carry in Wisconsin, and have been harassed as a result of it, Milwaukee magazine is looking to do a story on this.  I would be very careful talking to the press.  In fact, this is something where state leaders in the movement really need to step up and make sure the media is getting the right message, and coaching people on how to deal with them.  Treating the media like friends of gun owners can turn into an embarassing mistake very quickly.

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Busted in Russia

Don’t take a box of ammo to your buddy in Russia.  American attitudes toward guns are rather unique in the world.  Guns in Russia, for instance, are heavily regulated or prohibited in many cases.  Guns in Mexico are flat out illegal, despite the fact that Mexico has their own version of the second amendment.  There have been folks who have been prosecuted at the border of Mexico for having a single piece of ammunition floating around in their car.

Of course, both Mexico and Russia have violent crime rates that are stratospheric compared to the United States, and I’m also told that 50 dollars will cause the Mexican authorities to suddenly remember they have a right to keep and bear arms.  But the anti-gun folks get around that bit of inconvenience by arguing that those countries aren’t “civilized.”  You see, civilized countries are only the ones that ban guns and have a lower rate of crime than the United States.

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Pittman-Robertson Reform

It looks like a bipartisan bill is being introduced in Congress that will making it a bit easier for the firearms and ammunition makers to make payments on their Pittman-Robertson tax obligations, which go to wildlife and conservation funding, as well as maintenance of public shooting ranges:

Earlier this year the industry marked an important milestone in its longstanding support of wildlife conservation. Manufacturers have since 1991 contributed more than $3 billion dollars to fund wildlife conservation through the payment of the federal excise tax. Since the inception of the excise tax in 1937, more than $5 billion dollars has been collected.

That’s a powerful reason hunters ought to be very interested in the health of the other shooting sports.  Shooters pay for a lot of wildlife conservation that benefit hunters through the payment of these excise taxes.

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Talked with NSSF

Bitter and I both talked with one of National Shooting Sports Foundation‘s public relations guys, the same guy SayUncle talked to, and he was emphatic that NSSF does not endorse the conclusions of that report.  This report was meant to throw out ideas, and the purpose of the summit was to seperate the wheat from the chaff.

From my point of view, I emphasised that NSSF needed to be careful.  In the age of the Internet, it’s very difficult to have much of any control over the means and rapidity that information is disseminated.  The old Internet adage that “Information wants to be free” very much applies here.

While I understand and agree the industry needs to be presented with new data and ideas, and debate the implications, it needs to, nonetheless, be very careful about what it puts its name on.   There was no indication in the report that the action items in the report weren’t endorsed by NSSF.  Add that to the fact that there were numerous items in there, because of poor choices of language, would be good fuel for the gun control movement, and you have a recipe for a big problem.  And that’s not even mentioning the damage that can occur from within the gun rights movement itself.

So I am glad to hear that NSSF is distancing themselves from these ideas.  I’m as much of a handgun shooter as I am a rifle shooter, so I appreciate that others in NSSF recognize the importance of those parts of the shooting community, and don’t seem ready to throw handgunners under the bus.

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