February 2010 – Page 3 – Shall Not Be Questioned

“He Pulls a Knife, You Pull a Gun”

Wyatt notes how the Philadelphia Police are responding to knife attacks against officers now. With hot lead. This makes me wonder what the policy was before? It’s extremely difficult to tangle with someone wielding a knife without getting yourself cut or stabbed. Wyatt mentions, “Take this as another example of ‘the militarization of the police’ if you will, but most of us want to go home to our families.”

When I think militarization of police, I think of things like this. Shooting people threatening others with knives should be standard procedure.

Keep Talking Bill

Barack Obama might have done more than any other President to help boost the firearms industry, but it’s hard to argue that he beats Bill Clinton when it comes to boosting gun rights organizations. Every time Bill says something like this …

“They have a lot of advanced notice now. I think the biggest problem that the president’s got is that the lifetime — it’s the — the danger that people who want health care will be disappointed and stay home; that happened to me,” he said.

Clinton added that the National Rifle Association also played a bigger role than it’s credited in turning over Congress during the 1994 Republican revolution.

They were mad about this whole weapons ban and the Brady Bill, and they probably took 15 of our House members out. That was their number, they said between 15 and 20, and I’d say, at least on the low side, they were right,” he said.

… it just adds to our political reputation. Obviously Clinton wasn’t our best buddy. Sometimes I wonder if senior Brady Campaign people don’t have a picture of Bill on their desks, next to the wife and kids, which they stare at wistfully, thinking of better days. No President has ever put more on the line for them than Bill Clinton. But Bill Clinton’s willingness to be honest and forthright on the backlash from gun owners has helped our political reputation immensely, and destroys the credibility of the gun control groups when they try to argue we’re a paper tiger — a ghost story that Democrats like to tell their kids, “Don’t support gun control, or the gun lobby will get ya!” Â All I can say is, “Thanks Bill!”

Hat Tip to Dave Hardy for this one.

NRA Board Endorsements

We’ve traditionally done yearly NRA Board endorsements here on this blog, where we’ve promoted board members we either know or like, and encouraged readers to mark them on their ballots which should be in this month’s copy of your NRA magazine. We’re still planning on doing that this year, but are running kind of behind because of how little time I have with my current work load. Last year we did some interviews with candidates, and I would like to do that again this year. So stay tuned.

More Desperate Grasps as Relevance

The VPC is hawking their most recent in their series of “Google Studies” proposes, this time, to show a massive increase in violence against law enforcement officers using so-called “assault weapons” in the past two years. What are Google Studies, you might ask? Anything you have to add this kind of disclaimer to:

The information described in the following pages is based on a compilation derived from multiple searches using a variety of terms (â€œassault weaponsâ€ and â€œassault rifles,â€ for example) of reports published in U.S. news media and included in the commercial database Nexis between March 1, 2005 and February 28, 2007. Stories that recounted firearm-related events outside of those date ranges were discarded. For example, if a story within the date range reported an appellate decision or trial of a shooting that occurred prior to the date range, that story was eliminated.

Here all this time I’ve been compiling the very same terms on Google (though, I will admit I don’t have access to Nexis), I could have been releasing study after study. Of course, if you read the whole study, they don’t claim this to be scientific, or comprehensive, though you can bet they won’t mention that part when they pitch this to their media contacts, and you can absolutely bet on their media contacts not bothering to actually read the study, or include said disclaimers in whatever stories they write about the latest menace caused by semi-automatic rifles.

They also blame us for the dearth of information available on the evil “gun lobby”. But you know, if they hadn’t used that information in the past to try to sue gun manufacturers, dealers, and anyone else involved in the firearms business out of business, we wouldn’t be in this situation, would we? I don’t think too many of us are against the government doing studies, or tracking data. What we are against is that data being used to crap all over our rights by groups like HCI and VPC.

One-Gun-a-Month Flip Flops

The NJ Star-Ledger is pleading with Virginia not to re-open the “Iron Pipeline” by repealing its gun rationing law, but this previous editorial from the same paper notes that it never really closed, and suggests that most of New Jersey’s guns come from Pennsylvania and Virginia even though Virginia has a one-gun-a-month law. I don’t think the frequency that Virginia is cited as a source state for guns has diminished any as a result of their law.

This study of trafficking from the FBI in 1998 highlights the problem:

The straw purchase serves as another method often employed by an illegal firearms trafficker who cannot legally purchase firearms. Most traffickers use a series of straw purchasers directed to various firearms licensees. A common scenario entails the firearm trafficker accompanying the straw purchaser into the firearms store to pay for the purchase while the straw purchaser completes the paperwork. Store video surveillance can verify this type of purchase.

The problem is that the straw purchase rings, to the extent that they exist, aren’t stupid, and know to how to route around current trafficking detection practices. It’s relatively easy to route around others. Where there’s a high demand for a product, there’s going to be supply to meet that demand. You might be able to drive price higher with interdiction, but only to a point.

Maybe It’s PSH Week

We notice more pant shitting hysterics from the media from yesterday in the Sacramento Bee, and from the Rock Hill, SC Herald, both of which think it’s trouble waiting to happen. Discovery News says it’ll make enforcement of poaching more difficult, and makes gun owners more likely to taunt a bison. Locally, the Chester County Daily Local News thinks guns in Valley Forge National Park is just an odd concept. Probably because they think hunting is what the Second Amendment is about, “People still aren’t allowed to hunt or fire their guns in the parks â€” so what is the purpose of allowing loaded guns into a national park?” then go on to describe why the Second Amendment is really just obsolete. The Kitsap Sun has roughly the same reaction. The South Florida Sun Sentinal speaks of how our founding fathers never would have approved of guns they couldn’t have envisioned in National Parks they couldn’t have envisioned, but then switches to saying guns in civilian hands just cause horrible carnage as gun toter after gun toter just kill each other in a confused frenzy.

All this even though none of this has happened anywhere else. It’ll happen in National Parks. Really. Just listen to the media.

The Timid Second Amendment Ruling

Looks like the fourth circuit did a pretty thorough analysis of why the federal laws barring domestic violence misdemeanants from arms aren’t “presumptively constitutional” under the Heller language, unfortunately they made it an unpublished opinion, so it has no precedential value.

AK-74gery

I can attest to what Caleb links to here about the AK-74 patterned Kalashnikovs. I have one of these, which I blogged about a long time ago here. They are definitely more accurate than an the 7.62×39 Kalashnikovs.Â I do have both, and both make for a cheap and productive day of practice at the range, but on accuracy the ’74 wins hands down. Plus as the pictures show, chicks dig them. Careful with ammo though, because there’s corrosive stuff on the market. Follow this advise if you ever shoot it.

Too Few Kids With Guns

Not something I think the Brady Campaign wants to see in a major media outlet — an article that laments not enough kids like to hunt and shoot because of video games, and because they never get exposed to shooting sports.Â Of course, as bloggers have pointed out before, video game exposure can be as much an opportunity as a curse.

HSUS Facing Federal Lawsuits

Looks like the Center for Consumer Freedom Ringling Bros. Circus is suing HSUS under RICO. I can’t speak much to the merits, but RICO suits are often a refuge for kookery, so color me skeptical about the prospects of this.