This Isn’t a Left/Right Issue Right?

I understand that NRA is trying to attack Biden here, and I fully support that, but I would beware of highlighting articles that have language like this:

Just imagine what the sneering left intelligentsia, in the United States and elsewhere, would have said if a Republican vice-presidential candidate had told CBS News that “when the stockmarket crashed [in 1929], Franklin Roosevelt got on television” and informed Americans what had happened.
Gun rights isn’t a left/right, Democrat Republican issue right?  As it turns out, the article linked to had some bits that would have been far better to highlight from a gun standpoint:
The feminist Maureen Dowd has depicted Palin as “the glamorous Pioneer Woman, packing a gun, a baby and a Bible”. Professor Wendy Doniger, of the University of Chicago, has gone further, declaring that Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is her pretence that she is a woman”. And the NBC News commentator Andrea Mitchell has been reported as maintaining that “only the uneducated would vote for Mrs Palin”.
NRA needs to be careful not to turn this into a left/right divide.  It often is, but that’s not ideally how we want to frame it.  It’s one thing to highlight gaffes from candidates who are against us, even if they are gaffes on other issues, but we must take pains not to come off as blatantly partisan when doing so, or diluting the pro-Second Amendment message by mixing them with other issues.

Going High-Tech for Gun Show Outreach

One thing I want to do for the Allentown show this weekend is make our table look attractive, to entice people to come over and talk with us.  The typical literature isn’t very interesting or eye catching, especially when you’re in a room with wall-to-wall guns.

In the mail is a digital picture frame, which I will use on the table to play video.  I’m planning on running the NRA Katrina video on that, with some literature placed near it.  In the other corner of the table, I’m going to borrow a Shuttle PC from my friend Jason, along with an LCD touch screen.  My idea was to put up NRA’s O-Match application up full screen and let people use it.  I figured kids especially may be drawn in, giving us an opportunity to talk to the parents.  Can you say “Barack Obama is a free speech stifling, gun banning weasel?  I knew you could.”  This should be something different, and we’ll see how this experiment goes.  I might lose my faith in humanity if I discover that cats and humans have more in common than I once thought, but if I get some more people at my table, and on my e-mail list, I’ll be happy.

Resistance Against Local Gun Ordinance

The Lehigh County District Attorney is resisting attempts by Allentown to pass local gun ordinances similar to Phialdelphia’s.  If people want to know why we defend preemption tooth and nail, this is why.  Before long you have a patchwork of laws that no one can reasonably comply with:

Any officer who makes an arrest under the ordinance could face obstruction of justice charges, Martin said in an interview Monday.

”The issue is clear,” Martin said. ”When it comes to gun-control legislation, any city ordinance is preempted by state law and that makes any Allentown law unenforceable.”

James Martin deserves the support of gun owners for being willing to stand by the law and our state’s constitution.

Dear Governor Rendell,

I would like you to explain why it took the death of four police officers before you thought it might be a good idea to review the practices of the Pennsylvania Parole Board?  The other officers that were killed weren’t murdered by Boy Scouts.  This has been a systemic problem, and it’s outrageous that only after Philadelphia has buried four officers you now feel the need to actually start looking at the problem.

Sincerely,

A Very Angry Sebastian

Financial Crisis

I’ve been reading voraciously about this financial crisis facing our country, and there’s a lot of quality econ blogs out there with good information about it.  My instincts tell me that a government bailout of people who made poor choices is bad.  But the financial system grinding to a halt would also be bad.

So is this something to not really worry too much about, or should I be pulling all of my money out of the bank and stockpiling ammunition?

UPDATE: I was mostly kidding about the last sentence.  I always have a healthy stockpile of ammunition on hand.  These days, most of it I loaded myself.

Another Name Change

My bank name has tracked exactly to the name of our Hockey/Basketball arena in Philadelphia.  First it was the CoreStates Center, then CoreStates got bought out by First Union, which got bought out by Wachovia.  So I wake up this morning and find out my bank has failed, and is now owned by Citigroup.  So the Citigroup Center it is, and it will appear that’s who I’m banking with now.

Nutter Problem

Robb beat me to another one.  This one is from The Bulletin:

Here’s a quick lesson in the law. If you’re a convicted felon, as Giddings was (and a very dangerous one at that), you can never legally buy a gun again. Never. That means that the weapon he used to kill Officer McDonald was obtained illegally. So no matter how tough you make it to buy a gun in Philadelphia, hardened criminals like Giddings will still obtain them illegally.

At least the media is starting to perhaps, finally, pull back the curtain to see what’s really behind it.

New Jersey News

Jersey City lost its appeal in its efforts to uphold its one-gun-per-month gun rationing scheme.  Good news, but it’s probably going to prompt the legislature to act on a state-wide bill to do the same thing.  After all, all those cousin humping rednecks in the Northwest and Southern parts of New Jersey keep killing themselves, and someone has to take all those dangerous things away from them.