Dustin has more on the law abiding gun owner and concealed carry permit holder that managed to defend his life at a Wal-Mart. His includes video.
Year: 2008
McCain Picks Sarah Palin
It’s Palin! She’s an excellent choice. Excellent. Her politics are exactly where McCain needs his VP choice to be, and the fact that she’s a woman will help with jilted Hillary supporters. And she’s a hell of a lot better looking than Joe Biden.
UPDATE: Well, that didn’t take long.
De-Americanizing Political Science
Apparently there is a movement of academics to de-emphasize teaching political science from an American perspective. Now we can have even more highly educated people who have no understanding or respect for how our political system functions!
More Bluenosing
This time it’s John Tester, who should know better. Blue dogs need to start growing a pair and, rather than cowtowing to their party’s anti-gun leadership, stand up for their constituents. It’s one thing to be all rah rah Dems on other issues that are important to Montanans, where Barack Obama might be their man, but it’s another to try to downplay the gun issue when there’s just no doubting his record.
The last time pro-gun Democrats allowed party to trump principle, back during the vote on Clinton’s Assault Weapons Ban, it helped usher in the 1994 Republican Revolution (which the Republicans promptly squandered, but that’s nother rant). Blue dogs should want the gun issue to die, but the way to kill it isn’t to get the Lightworker elected to the White House. Blue dogs should follow in the footsteps of Oklahoma Representative Dan Boren, who has refused to shill for Obama.
Sportsmen for McCain
As I mentioned before we went to Blackwater, Bitter had to bail out at the last minute to attend the launch of Sportsmen for McCain, which was held at a club near Scranton. She ended up shooting the breeze with Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty for quite a bit, and was impressed with his depth of knowledge of our issue. As a possible VP pick for McCain, he would certainly be OK with me, but speculation is currently leaning toward Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Palin would also be an excellent choice.
AAA Silhouette
Todd Jarrett has made me a better Silhouette shooter. Tonight was our thursday airgun match. I started out on chickens, doing about what I normally do, got into pigs, and then noticed I was moving the gun when I pulled the trigger. I then remembered Todd saying “You have to increase your grip strength by 20%, at least.” so I tightened up on the grip until the gun started shaking. I backed it off a bit until the excessive movement stopped, and holding a much firmer grip than I was used to, starting knocking down animal after animal. I kept my game up until my hand got tired, and I started trailing off on the rams. But damn, I shot a AAA score of 37. That’s ten whole friggin animals better than I had shot at any previous Thursday airgun matches, and better than I shot at states. It’s amazing such a simple thing can make such a difference. Wow!
Hasta La Vista Tax
Both Another Gun Blog and No Looking Backwards have covered California’s “Hasta La Vista Tax” which taxes people over a certain income for leaving the state. Rich flight has created a serious revenue problem for California.
There’s a good case to be made that this law is unconstitutional, because it interferes with the common law right to free movement and travel. There is a pretty strong body of law which would speak against such a law’s constitutionality. Anyone subject to this tax probably has a good case to take into the federal courts. California has no respect for the second amendment, it’s hardly surprising they don’t respect unenumerated rights as well. Anything’s fair when it comes to soaking the rich, I guess.
More Nonsense from New Jersey
Bernard Bell is the associate dean at Rutgers Law School, and thinks that there should be strict liability for gun owners:
A move toward absolute liability would ideally be accompanied by private insurers’ willingness to insure gun owners against such liability. Such insurance should be separate from standard homeowners’ insurance, so that homeowners who do not own guns are not required to subsidize those who do.
The cost of insurance would reflect the expected cost of compensating gun injuries to innocent people. Individuals would then have the incentive to weigh the cost of injuries to others in deciding whether to purchase or keep firearms.
And insurance companies might well offer incentives, in the form of lower rates, to gun owners who engage in practices that decrease the likelihood of accidental injuries, such as trigger locks, safe storage and regular courses in maintenance and use of handguns.
Gun control people everywhere are thinking up ways to get around Heller, in order to discourage people from owning guns, and especially discouraging people from using them in self-defense. Sadly, most of this stuff is probably not going to get the scrutiny they deserve from the courts, which is why the political fight is still paramount.
I wonder if Professor Bell is open to the idea that these liability issues should be applied equally to the police and military?
A Case Against One-Gun-A-Month
New Jersey Assemblywoman Joan Quigley asked the question:
I introduced that bill in the spring of 2006. If it had actually become law on the day it was introduced, Mr. Braico would have been able to accumulate 33 handguns between then and now. I fail to see how that’s an unreasonable restriction on his civil rights. And I do wonder what he might have done with all those deadly weapons.
An intrepid gun owner in The Garden State provides her with an answer:
When I first bought my XD-40 handgun, it was quite a large caliber, and so expensive to use for target practice. As my self-defense instructor told me, a large caliber is necessary for “stopping power” in self-defense situations. However, I immediately bought a smaller, inexpensive weapon – a .22-caliber Browning Buckmark – for target practice, just to save money. There, already, were two guns in one month.
However, both of those guns were too large for my wife to operate, so we bought a Lady Smith revolver, which is specially designed for the smaller hands of a woman. At that time, we discovered that the XD-40 jams quite a lot (a design flaw, I believe, but certainly a problem in a self-defense situation), so we bought a large Ruger six-shooter as a more reliable alternative to the XD-40.
The point is we bought more than one per month, for good reason.
I would say if the XD-40 jams a lot, it’s either a specific problem with the gun, or his wife is limp wristing it. The XD line are generally pretty reliable from what I’ve heard. But it’s a great way to point out why the one gun a month issue is a problem. The burden should be on the people advocating it to prove it reduces crime, of which there is currently no evidence whatsoever.
Hat Tip to Cemetery’s Weblog
Olympic Shooting
I’ve had a bit to say about why we don’t dominate the Olympics here, but Kim has some more, and I think he’s right about this:
The problem is that outside the Army Marksmanship Unit, there are no professional Olympic shooters in America—no sponsorships, no funding from any source—so therefore people cannot afford to train for 8-10 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, which is what’s required to win the Olympics, in any sport (ask Michael Phelps about the training required to win Olympic Gold).
So when we say that we “should†be winning Olympic gold medals in the shooting sports, because we are by golly the Land of the Second Amendment and the Nation of Riflemen, we forget that winning Olympic medals is not just raw talent, but dedication—and dedication not just from the participants, but from We The People.
If there is no public support for Olympic shooting, though, then we have no right to complain when our amateur shooters can’t compete against the professionals of other countries.
If we want to be winners, money has to flow into these sports, and right now, not enough is.