The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
National Review has more to say about FactCheck.org lack of facts. Apparently the Washington Post is joining in the deception as well. You can’t really blame them, they do have an election to win, after all.
UPDATE: CNN Joins in with the same nonsense.
UPDATE: The Washington Independent too.
UPDATE: Firearms and freedom sums it up:
I can sum up factcheck.org’s “check†of the NRA material in 5 words: “Obama says that’s not true!â€
Like I said, they have an election to win.
I found a nice way to calculate my readership from RSS feeds here. It nailed both my bloglines feeds, so I have good confidence it’s accurate. Apparently 310 or so people are reading via RSS. That’s 310 people who don’t give a crap whether my site is blue, red, green, black or brown. I want to thank them for reading, and for doing their part to make the blogosphere truly color blind.
UPDATE: Someone asks about readership number in total. It’s hard to say, but based on my understanding of the data google analytics gives, it’s somewhere along the lines of 25,000 readers, a reader being defined as someone who shows up at least one or twice a week. I should really do some research on how these numbers are calculated though, and get a number I feel more confident in.
Looks like some ward leaders in Northeast Philly aren’t sold on Obama yet. Philly has to be pretty solid to carry the state. This is a good sign for McCain.
Breda has been busy making sure we pass the Second Amendment traditions down the line. No doubt there are pant shitters out there who would be horrified by this.
David Codrea is looking for some help on looking for a petition for rulemaking on part of ATF which will amend the definition of the term “pistol” in the Code of Federal Regulations.
Looking through all the rulemaking proposals, I couldn’t find any which propose to modify 27 CFR § 478.11, which defines the handgun:
Any firearm which has a short stock and is designed to be held and fired by the use of a single hand
That’s not to say they aren’t planning on proposing a new rule, however. It might just be that hammer hasn’t fallen yet. Rulemaking is a process at the federal level for making changes to federal regulations. It’s the same process we’re currently going through with the Department of Interior on National Park carry. ATF can’t just change federal regulations willy nilly, but I wouldn’t count on the ATF not just altering their interpretation of existing rule when it comes to the pocket pistol. It’s not like we haven’t seen that happen before.
There are a lot of people in the shooting community who frown on ARs because they are not the traditional steel and wood a lot of people have come to love. NSSF is reaching out to outdoor writers to try to educate them about the platform.
Here’s a great quote from Biden:
When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, “look, here’s what happened.”
Well, except for the fact that FDR wasn’t president when the stock market crashed in 1929. Herbert Hoover was president. The first president to appear on Television was actually Franklin Roosevelt, but that was at the 1939 World Fair.
The other funny thing is, I doubt Joe Biden could even explain what happened. I’ve been reading for days on this crisis, and I can’t exactly say I understand completely how all these financial instruments that are in play here all interact with each other.
I will go into some more detail on FactCheck.org’s claims. It may very well be that they don’t understand the gun issue. In fact, I would say that’s so. Let’s take a look at some of their claims:
Letting the owner of an unregistered firearm escape the penalty for failing to register is one thing, but it’s another thing entirely to make it a crime to use any firearm – registered or not – in self-defense.
I agree with them on this one, that it’s a bit of distortion. But what they fail to mention is that you can’t register a gun in a lot of these communities because handguns are banned. You have to have a registration certificate to own one, but you can’t get a registration certificate because they are banned. The end result is, if you use a gun in self-defense, you go to jail. Obama voted for that. It’s not bullshit.
The amendment applied only to handgun ammunition “capable of penetrating body armor” and to rifle ammunition that is “designed or marketed as having armor piercing capability,” however.
The problem here is there’s no such thing as a handgun cartridge. There are handguns made for hunting and target sports such as Metallic Silhouette which fire rifle cartridges, which will penetrate soft body armor. Handguns have been made for virtually every rifle caliber. There are also rifles which shoot ammunition that are generally considered handgun rounds. But there is no set definition of a handgun round or a rifle round. The amendment in question was badly worded enough, and poorly thought out enough, it would have had the effect of banning hunting ammunition. When that was pointed out, the Senate properly defeated it. But Obama and Kennedy knew exactly what the were trying to do, which was enact a back door gun ban.
As we wrote previously, an amended version of the questionnaire was later submitted to the group, with Obama’s handwritten notes on it providing more detail on some of the answers. Obama clearly saw and handled this version personally and did not alter the question about banning the sale and manufacturing of guns. Nevertheless, his aides maintain that the gun-ban answer was a mistake and didn’t reflect Obama’s true position.
Sure, that’s what his aides say now. But there it was. He reviewed the questionnaire and added notes, and he did not change his stated position on the gun ban. Whether his aides wrote that or not is immaterial. That’s the position his office took. He might be singing a different tune now, but he has supported banning handguns. There’s no rescuing him on this one.
Obama indeed has spoken in favor of licensing handguns, but so far as we can determine he hasn’t called for registration of hunting weapons. And he’s said a national gun registration law isn’t politically possible: “I just don’t think we can get that done.”
Can you explain exactly what hunting weapons are please FactCheck.org people? I’d really like to know. Because there is actually such a thing as handgun hunters out there. You knew that didn’t you? There are also a lot of handgun shooting sports, which are fast becoming the most popular shooting sports due to the fact that you don’t need a lot of real estate to build a pistol range.
I’ll give FactCheck.org a pass on the assault weapons issue, and on judges. That’s based mostly on how we know the politics will play on this issue. Let me ask you this, do you believe Obama will appoint pro-second amendment judges after refusing to sign onto the Heller brief and saying he thought DC’s law was constitutional? It might be a lot of circumstantial evidence, but I think it would be enough to take to court.
It’s also interesting to note that FactCheck got no response on the questions of increasing ammunition taxes by 500% and on the 5 mile gun shop exclusion zone he one proposed.
I would encourage folks to contact FactCheck and tell them of some of their oversights here. Be factual. It very well may be, and probably is, that they don’t understand the gun issue that well, and NRA’s publications are meant more to rally gun owners than they are to educate the masses. That’s often going to be our job.
UPDATE: SayUncle has a lot more too.
UPDATE: Also The Other Sebastian.
Is FactCheck.org really nonpartisan? Because here’s what they say about NRA’s attacks on Barack Obama:
Much of what the NRA passes off as Obama’s “10 Point Plan to ‘Change’ the Second Amendment” is actually contrary to what he has said throughout his campaign: that he “respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms” and “will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns.”
The NRA, however, simply dismisses Obama’s stated position as “rhetoric” and substitutes its own interpretation of his record as a secret “plan.” Said an NRA spokesman: “We believe our facts.”
Except if you look at Obama’s record on guns, he’s proposed all these things! If you’re going to call yourself “Fact Check” the first thing you should do is check your facts, and if you do that, you’ll see that Barack Obama’s record on The Second Amendment is absolutely atrocious. They actually expect gun owners to believe what he’s saying now to get elected, and pass that off as “Facts”
Non-partisan my ass, they are shills out to get Obama elected.
Unions leaders have been pretty upset at the gun issue pulling votes away from Democratic candidates. But rather than push the party to embrace gun rights, they’ve decided to try to pull the wool over the eyes of their membership.
Now apparently they are trying to make a stink over the fact that some of their members talked to an NRA film crew, and said bad things about The Chosen One.
The United Mine Workers will call for the stoppage at Consol’s Blacksville No. 2 mine next week, union President Cecil Roberts said Monday at a news conference with representatives of Obama’s West Virginia campaign in Charleston.
Apparently it’s an unpaid stoppage too, per their contact. Apparently there’s no depth to which union leaders will sink to fool their members into believing Barack Obama is anything other than a gun banner.