Year: 2009

The Brady Campaign is reporting that Bob Ricker is dead. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has more on who Bob Ricker was. He was famous around these parts for the oft-used quote “self-defense whacks” which appeared on Bitter’s blog before she changed her blogging topic. She also had a bit to say about his views on women. More history here.

Please keep the comments tasteful. Gun control advocates have families too.

Protest Easy Guns is an interesting group that’s cropped up since the Virginia Tech tragedy. The group is lead by Abby Spangler. These are the people who do the highly appropriately named “lie-ins” where they all lie down on the ground and pretend to be dead. It’s always seemed rather macabre to me, but hey, it’s a free country, and you can protest however you want. Protest Easy Guns has quite a Twitter presence though, and I’m rather surprised they respond to pro-gun critics at all, let alone seeming rather annoyed by them. Typical of an exchange with them, they started out announcing a protest on Times Square. I retorted back that protesting guns in New York City was like protesting for gay rights in San Francisco. Not exactly a brave statement in either city. That must have gotten under Ms. Spengler’s skin, because the response was pretty angry:

@SebastianSH Sebastian, you know we are not protesting guns! PLEASE STOP SAYING THAT! We are protesting felons having easy access to guns!

My response was highly appropriate, I think, but we know it’s false, and we know that Protest Easy Guns is lying. We can see on their issues page here they propose all the same thing the Brady Campaign does, including banning so called “assault weapons”. Not just banning them for felons, but banning them for non-felon citizens too. They also are fighting against allowing non-felon citizens who are 21 years and older, are license and trained, from being able to carry a concealed firearm on college and university campuses. Those people are non-felons by definition. And what exactly does the Tiahrt amendment have to do with felons accessing guns? Law enforcement can access the trace system for criminal investigations. Why else would you want the trace data?

So no, Ms. Spangler, Protest Easy Guns is not just about keeping felons from having easy access to guns, because some of the methods you choose to do that essentially mean I can’t have them either. Next time they have a lie-in, think for a moment about how appropriate that name is. Lie-in is right.

Police officials in the UK have started a new public awareness campaign.

Parents are being warned by police not to buy their children realistic looking toy guns this Christmas as it could lead to them being shot by armed marksmen.

And Happy Holidays to you, too! I’m so glad to hear that the warmth of the Christmas season is prefaced with a threat from the police that if you buy your child a toy firearm, you may be condemning him or her to a death sentence. Even better, the gun control supporter quoted in the article agrees!

First, the police:

“People are increasingly aware of the potential for firearms in our midst and, quite rightly, call us whenever they see something resembling a gun. Whether this gun is an air weapon, BB gun or genuine firearm, our response is the same.

“While they are legal to own, parents must ask themselves whether it’s really appropriate for children to have these guns. If they do, they must learn to use them responsibly. We cannot have situations where innocent members of the public are injured by missiles they or we fire.”

I almost don’t know where to begin. So armed response units are the first response to a report of a 6-year-old with a toy? Second, why do their BB guns fire missiles? Third, why are the cops there so under-trained with their guns that their spokesman simply assumes they will miss a target and kill innocent bystanders?

And then let us go back to the comment that it is right to call the police anytime you see someone with anything that resembles a gun as opposed to someone simply with a gun. If that’s the case, I guess I should have called the cops when my nephew used to eat his bread into the shape of a gun. Or how about when he took his finger & thumb to pretend to shoot at things around him? That “handgun” (get it?) was awfully dangerous with its shape fitting that of some pocket pistols.

How far do we take this insanity? I ask that not because I’m reading this wrong and the police are only warning against people who paint their obviously toy guns to look like real ones. The police are asking parent not to buy any gun-shaped toy – whether it’s a clear purple water gun or an orange BB gun. They already have laws against realistic-looking guns, but police are now asking citizens to go further. It just shows that fears of a slippery slope are not unfounded.

While a civil liberties group rightly calls this a phantom problem, Mothers Against Murder & Aggression say there is no other way to deal with this manufactured issue.

“If a child is waving a toy gun around in the street police have no choice but to turn up with an armed response unit.”

Really? No other way at all? You mean to say that a child carrying this menacing Super Soaker justifies the use of a SWAT team? Although I suppose that the mad Mothers may find the particular model to be particularly threatening since it minimizes the need for going home to refill & you are only limited in your shots by how many bottles you can carry.