September 2010 – Page 3 – Shall Not Be Questioned

You Ask, I Answer

The Brady People, probably reminiscent of Johnson who once said “If I lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” in regards to Vietnam, are upset at Jon Stewart for being willing to take a middle ground on the gun issue, and suggesting that the problem isn’t the guns, it’s the crazy, and that if you took away the guns, you’d have school bludgeonings. The Brady’s obviously don’t like this:

When, really, was the last time somebody in America was able to terrorize a college campus, kill 32 people, and wound 17 others in less than 12 minutes with a blunt instrument?

There’s plenty of examples that run along the lines they are asking about, if one cares to look. For instance, over in gun free Japan, in a culture more known for suicide than murder suicide, you did have some guy go ape shit with a truck and a dagger. This isn’t the only incident in Japan that involved someone going nuts with a weapon that was not a gun. Let’s also not forget the Osaka school massacre:

At 10:15 that morning, 37-year-old former janitorÂ Mamoru Takuma entered the school armed with a kitchen knife and began stabbing numerous school children and teachers. He killed eight children, mostly between the ages of seven and eight, and seriously wounded thirteen other children and two teachers.

But let’s not also forget about the Childers Palace Fire in Australia, after they instituted strict gun control after the Port Arthur massacre. Set by an unstable drifter, this fire killed fifteen people, and the man responsible was charged with murder.

Also from Australia, with the perpetrator currently imprisoned in Perth, is the case of a man who murdered five people when, enraged after being kicked out of a pub, he drove his truck into the pub, killing five people and seriously injuring sixteen.

Over to China, which has strict gun control, where earlier this year there were several attacks in schools using edge weapons and bludgeons. Here’s a report on just one of them. But there were more than a dozen, with dozens of children either killed or injured:

Some sociologists believe some of these attacks may due to the government’s failure to diagnose and treat mental illness

So I think Jon Stewart is exactly right in his assessment of the real problem, and it’s not just confined to the United States. Not by any means. The Brady folks would like to pretend this is a gun problem, but Stewart is exactly right. Crazy people who fail to get treatment, and who are out on the street, are ticking time bombs, and it matters little what kind of weapon controls are in place. Where there’s a will to maim and kill, there is a way. SayUncleÂ notes:

And that, Paul, is why youâ€™re losing. You canâ€™t even shore up the strident defenders of liberal policy who run fake news. Just like the real world.

It amazes me with all the other left wing causes out there that can get traction, like running future generations into debt beyond their wildest dreams, these guys are still wasting their time with what is increasingly looking like a dead issue.

Interview with Chris Cox in National Review

NRA has never had a very close relationship with the National Review crowd. To that part of the conservative movement, we’ve always been a bit of the crazy uncle in the attic. With that said, I’m glad to see an interview with Chris Cox in National Review.

Massachusetts Grown Pineapples & Farmers Markets

It apparently made news that many things sold at a farmers market in Los Angeles aren’t, in fact, coming from small farms.

NBCLA’s investigation began this summer, when we bought produce at farmers markets across the LA area, and then made surprise visits to farms where we were told the produce was being grown.

We found farms full of weeds, or dry dirt, instead of rows of the vegetables that were being sold at the markets. …

Frutos Farm’s state permit to sell produce at farmers markets says their farm is in Cypress.
NBCLA asked owner Jesse Frutos, “Everything you sell at farmers markets is grown in your Cypress field?”

Jesse responded, “Correct…everything.”

But when NBCLA made a surprise visit to the Cypress field listed on its permit, Frutos couldn’t show us most of the produce he was selling, such as celery, garlic, and avocados.

So NBCLA asked, “Do you grow avocados here?”

“Avocados? No, not here on the lot. â€¦ That I’ll be honest. That stuff came from somewhere else,” Frutos said.

Somewhere else? NBCLA’s undercover cameras followed Jesse’s trucks on farmers market days, and saw him going to the big wholesale produce warehouses in downtown LA.

We saw him loading up his truck, with boxes of produce from big commercial farms as far away as Mexico. He bought many of the types of items we saw him selling at the farmers markets.

Their customers don’t bother asking, so it’s easy to get away with selling things you pick up at Sam’s Club. This should not shock people. It would be like me getting offended by the local markets I saw with Sam’s Club delivery trucks parked outside their stores in Hawaii. It’s just the easiest and cheapest way to get goods into the hands of people who want them, yet want to shop at a smaller or closer store. Yes, I could go buy the same things at the same prices, but there are tradeoffs with that – more quantity than I can eat, and another shopping trip to make.

But, this is also a good excuse to highlight an email Virginia Postrel posted in response to her recent locavore column in the WSJ.

Beyond these public policy issues, we run a series of focus groups and mall intercepts and other studies that interact with consumers from the UK to North America and on to Australia/New Zealand. You would be shocked at what people expect. A seemingly intelligent woman walked out of a farm stand in Massachusetts. The stand stood on a small farm but probably 90% of the sales of the farm stand were purchased off the local wholesale market. Yet when we asked shoppers why they liked shopping there, more than one pulled out their pineapple and pointed to the advantages of a good Massachusetts grown pineapple!

Painful.

What I don’t get is why some shoppers are upset if they find out the truth. Is buying into the lifestyle of farmers markets really that important? We bought a bunch of jams, sauces, and spreads out in Hawaii that tasted delicious. (The Aloha Stadium Swap Meet – don’t miss it.) If you were to tell me that they were secretly manufactured by some big company, I wouldn’t be upset. Instead, I’d be excited since it would increase the likelihood that I could purchase more without having to go to Honolulu. The fact that we did buy from small local retailers is interesting, but note the key to my purchase. The reason we purchased was because each of the products was delicious. We’re not looking for a lifestyle beyond one filled with fruity delicious jams.

Important Castle Doctrine Vote Today

An alert from PAFOA on the matter. Today we’re having the vote on the discharge petition, to get it out of Dwight Evans’ appropriations committee, and get it onto the floor for a vote.

More in the Scott Case

From Confederate Yankee. Here’s an interesting observation from his account of the inquest:

One of the fundamental questions in this case is whether any Costco employee actually asked Scott to leave the store and if so, his response to that request. It is reasonable to believe that if anyone representing Costco had asked Scott to leave at any time, the police would have noted it and the prosecutor would have been sure to secure such testimony, but thus far, this does not seem to be the case. Considering the very negative thrust of the other evidence presented to Scottâ€™s detriment, if such evidence, of an angry, armed man refusing a lawful order to leave the premises existed, surely it would have been made public at the inquest, but it has not.

I should note that there’s a difference between “legally justified” and “the guy got what was coming to him.” This is looking like the former case. This shooting didn’t need to happen, and I think mistakes were made on all sides that night. There are also, certainly, very legitimate criticisms of this inquest process. But if you put me on a jury, and every witness says he made a move for a gun, and they find the gun, even in its holster, near the guy, my vote is that the cops walk. I don’t expect them to note the difference between a gun in its holster, and a gun out of its holster. The question, legally, is what the cops reasonably believed was going to happen, not what actually happened.

A Movement Gone Wrong

What if I told you that there was an organization out there taken over by zealots, and people who are motivated by grief to engage in activism restrict the freedom of others. Sound familiar? I really enjoyed this link to Classical Values provided by Glenn Reynolds, who also had some really worthwhile contributions to this line of thought. From Eric of Classical Values:

When I was awakened early this morning, I made the mistake of turning on the TV in the hope of being bored into drowsiness so I could go back to sleep. I turned on C-SPAN, thinking that boring speeches would do the trick.

Big mistake. Instead of boring speeches, I was greeted by passionate, in-your-face activists from M.A.D.D. The hard core of that organization consists mostly of people who have lost a family member because of an accident with a drunk driver, and who have clearly sublimated the normal grief which accompanies the death of a loved one into political activism. They think that their loved ones died because of lax laws, and they press for endlessly tougher laws, which they claim will stop drunk driving.

M.A.D.D. activists are now pushing toÂ make drunk driving a felony,Â and to lower the blood alcohol level standard for DUI from .08 (already lowered from .10 thanks to MADD activists) down to .04.

.04 is the BAC you’d get from a glass of wine.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see that this would create a gigantic new group of felons.

Read the whole thread. Sounds awfully familiar doesn’t it? I’d say just as wrong too, but really, no one is going to be put in jeopardy of life and limb by not getting behind the wheel after a few drinks. Someone denied their right to effective self-defense tools just might.

For anyone who wants to belong to an organization who actually stands up for the motoring public, I would suggest the National Motorists Association, who have actually been willing to stand up to MADD’s insanity. They are doing what AAA used to do before they sold out to become an insurance company.

What’s really sadd about MADD, is that if they get what they want, they will destroy the legitimacy of these laws in the eyes of the public, and will actually reverse the gains they’ve made in the past several decades educating the public that drunk driving is a serious problem. In the end, social shame is what stops DUI, and if the standard is one drink and you’re a felon, that shame is going to disappear. MADD actually hurts its own cause with this garbage.

Reasoned Discorse^TM Part MDCCCXLVII

By now it’s an old formula, pro-gun people find an anti-gun blog, pro-gun people engage anti-gun blog, anti-gun blog heavily moderates comments in an attempt to shift debate away from topics they’d rather not address. Common GunsenseÂ has not completely shut down comments, but she’s also pretty clearly not interested in debate, only parroting the talking points:

The idea is to harangue and harass and hope I will go away. There was an early complaint that the Brady Campaign didn’t allow comments. I completely understand why. It is overwhelming and would require at least a full time staff person to publish and respond to comments. And to what end?

No, that’s not the idea at all. The idea is to show your ideas cannot stand up to open debate, and ultimately fail in the court of public opinion because of that. The idea isn’t to get you to go away, but to show that for all the accusations that have been flung at gun owners in the past decade, that they could not think for themselves, that they were essentially manipulated by the “evil gun lobby,” and could only regurgitate talking points, that is in fact more true about your side than ours. I’ve run into a few Brady staffers who know how to make an argument, but for the most part, any time I’ve pressed down on the astroturf, I don’t sense much in the way of depth below the surface.

If you were only moderating nasty comment, or even only moderating ridiculous comments, I wouldn’t have thought poorly of it. But it’s quite possible to talk through the unreasonable people and get to the folks who have something worthwhile to say. It doesn’t take a full time staffer to speak with commenters. I’ve floated at least one opportunity inÂ the thread on private sales, where I once again proffered a slight variation on this idea, and asked her whether she would find this an acceptable idea, and if not, what was wrong with it?

I can only assume, since the comment was never approved, that it leads to an area that the Brady folks would rather not talk about, because it addresses the problem they claim to be concerned with, but doesn’t amount to much in the way of restricting law abiding people form purchasing guns. That’s also, I would point out, not a proposal you’ll see from the NRA any time soon. I’m sure a lot of folks there cringe every time I discuss such things. But where are your internal disagreements? Where are your debates? Ours are increasingly happening out in the open, because that’s what you’d expect when you have millions of opinions, thousands of activists, and hundreds of soap boxes.

Ultimately, I think we have come to the point where we have to agree to disagree. I think Joe is probably right about this whole circumstance, and I don’t see anything to be gained by further engagement. So I shall declare Reasoned Discourse^TM, and move on.

Latest MAIG “Research”

Released just today, but it seems to me that it’s making assumption on top of assumption. Nonetheless, it throws numbers around with authority. I’m not sure how statements like this are convincing, however:

Moreover, the average TTC of the ten states that export crime guns at the lowest rates is 14.1 years, while the average TTC of the ten states that export crime guns at the highest rates is 9.9 years. This average TTC data provides an alternative method to assess which states are the top sources of crime guns most likely to have been trafficked. However, this report primarily relies on the proportion of short TTC crime guns originating from a state because ATF has specifically identified a short TTC as a key indicator of gun trafficking.

OK, so the “source” states are still having an average “Time to Crime” rate of 9.9 years for guns recovered? Your average crime gun is still on the street 9.9 years before recovered in a crime? Sounds like we have a horrible trafficking problem to me. They also seem to claim that state laws against straw purchasing make a difference in TTC rates, and that restricting private sales does as well. Actually they seem to claim all gun control laws lower TTC.

But all of this is really based on some pretty wild assumption. I think it’s probably reasonable to conclude that guns will flow from places with low restrictions to places with great restrictions, because that’s easier than alternatives. But it makes the assumption that if we just make all the US a place of great restriction, we’ll solve this whole problem. But that ignores the alternative methods of trafficking and obtaining firearms. It might take a bit more creativity, and gaming the system, but where there’s demand, there will be supply. Just ask people who smoke crack.

Bloomberg also ignores the fact that we do not find New Jersey’s, New York’s or California’s gun laws acceptable, or constitutional.Â So keep tilting at windmills, Mayor Mike, we’re coming for your gun laws in short order. You will be made to comply. We promise.

Scott Case Looking More Like a Justified Shooting

Unless you believe there are multiple individuals who are all involved in a conspiracy to cover up the improper death of a person, Erik Scott isn’t turning out to be any kind of poster child.Â Generally speaking, if you buy the notion that most people will do the right thing most of the time (which is really what allowing carry is based on), that rules out broad conspiracies. Based on the Las Vegas Sun story on the inquest:

Dr. Alane Olson, a medical examiner in the Clark County Coronerâ€™s Office, testified that Scott had a number of drugs in his system when he died. The levels of morphine and xanax found by a toxicology screen conducted after his death were very high and potentially lethal, she said. The levels also indicated that he had likely built up a tolerance to the drugs over time, she said.

This includes testimony from multiple doctors who said he had an issue, with even his most sympathetic doctor agreeing he was trying to wean him off narcotics. While this doesn’t have a whole lot of bearing on how things actually went down, and whileÂ there’s still conflicting statements from witnesses, but they all seem to agree on this:

Every one testified they saw Erik move his right hand towards his waist. It gets unclear as a few recall him pulling his gun out; pictures show the gun never left its holster.

There more here. I’m not sure it really matters if he drew or not. All witnesses seem to agree he made a move for his waist, and he was known to be armed. So far there have been more than twenty witnesses. I think we should be careful about drawing conclusions, and playing armchair jury. I certainly don’t absolve myself of jumping to conclusions here, in suggesting it looks liked it could be a civil rights lawsuit. So far, this is looks like a justifiable shooting on the part of the officers.

Pepper Jewelry

Breda is skeptical of this piece of jewelry that claims to deliver a dose of pepper spray to an attacker. I share her skepticism of the basic design and delivery method, but the idea of making pepper spray easier to carry I think has a lot of merit. With this ring, in addition to the accidental discharge issue, I’d be skeptical that it could deliver enough spray. Looking at some other descriptions of it, it has a range of a whopping twelve inches. You’d probably be better off following through on that short distance with a fist, to be honest.

My preferred option for spray these days is the Kimber Pepper Blaster, which is actually a gel, rather than a spray. It has a much better range, fits nicely in a pocket or purse, draws more naturally, and is a much more powerful formulation than typical sprays. The big downside is you get two shots. For something with a bit more, Fox Labs makes good sprays in a more traditional canister.

I still think it’s a good idea to carry OC. There’s a whole lot of force between harsh language and hot lead that pepper spray helps fill. One can imagine situations where someone is in desperate need of being in pain, but gunfire would not be legally justified. For instance, someone stealing the radio in your car: if you shoot him, you’re going to jail. But most state allow the use of force (but not deadly force) to protect property. Pepper spray is force, legally, and not all that high a level of force, so there is a greater number of useful circumstances where it can be employed.