A backpacker in Denali shot and killed a grizzly, as Arma Borealis reports, and goes into more detail about grizzlies and stupid commenters. This wouldn’t have been possible before the change in the law, as Denali was not one of the Alaska parks that allowed carry under the old regime.
Year: 2010
Towns Repealing Local Ordinances
If you go around Pennsylvania, especially to county and municipal parks, you’ll find plenty of signs banning guns. Feel free to ignore them because they carry no weight of law. But now some towns are getting those laws off the books.
Bill Maher a Racist?
Apparently he wants a real black president, which to him means someone who acts like a thug:
“I thought when we elected a black president, we were going to get a black president. You know, this [BP oil spill] is where I want a real black president. I want him in a meeting with the BP CEOs, you know, where he lifts up his shirt so you can see the gun in his pants. That’s — (in black man voice) ‘we’ve got a motherfu**ing problem here?’ Shoot somebody in the foot.”
Will he get a pass on this from his friends in the media? I’m surprised people thought that was funny.
In Depth Look at Trafficking in Mexico
An example of the ways Mexican criminals sell guns to other criminals:
Merchants make it clear that prices are more accessible if the weapons have been ‘burned’ (used).  A 9 mm ‘clean’ (new) [pistol] is 12,000 pesos [US$934.00], and assault [rifles] like the AK-47 are 15,000 pesos [US$1,168.00].  The latter, like hand grenades, are only available ‘on request.’
In Tepito, those interviewed reported, monthly or bimonthly shipments arrive that are distributed to different destinations. The shipments include revolvers, submachine guns, rifles and grenade launchers, [and] many of them end up in the hands of organized crime groups, they acknowledge.
Naturally these all must be coming from US gun shows. Of course, toward the end of the article, they do note:
A percentage of the weapons, the seller said, come from Mexico via Ministry of Defense personnel who provide [them] in part from weapons seized in raids, or stolen from the ministry’s own arsenal.
You don’t say.
John Smith: Domestic Terrorist
Cemetery tells a story of a man with a common name who found out he was on the terrorist watch list. I was surprised that he has issues purchasing firearms, but New Jersey does a different background check than most states. Maybe that ends up showing up in New Jersey’s system. If it’s a NICS thing, that makes me wonder how the FBI is already using the list.
Licensing Journalists
There’s a Michigan lawmaker who’s proposing the idea. This is unconstitutional, of course, as there are a number of cases that put the kibosh on licensing the First Amendment.  But I have to wonder how many of the journalists who might look at such a proposal with righteous indignation will turn around and propose allowing government to license the Second Amendment right?
Still Going
Joe notes that gun sales for 2010, so far, are only off a bit from 2009, when Obama took office. My guess is you have a lot of noobs in that crowd who bought their first gun, and are continuing to buy. Most people will never develop extensive collections, but every house ought to have a pistol, a shotgun, and a rifle.
Walking around the gun show this weekend, I was still hearing dealers explaining how the process worked. We’re still making new gun owners out there. I think this whole sales boom might continue until people start feeling better about the economy.
The iPad is Meant for Gun Shows
Certainly, gun shows are not the main use of an iPad. However, this weekend, I actually found myself wanting one – a feeling I didn’t have even after watching Sebastian play around on one while we were in Charlotte or after watching all the times Dan from PAFOA could put it to good use on our trip.
But this weekend, I couldn’t help but miss all of the things we used to do in 2008 – running commercials & slides to promote our candidates quietly in the background of the show. It brought far more attention to the table, and it put names in front of folks in a more interesting way than simply hanging a sign.
For the first time, we weren’t against a wall that could serve us with sufficient power, and we just didn’t coordinate enough to justify hauling a monitor and laptop over there. But what could overcome those problems? An iPad.
We did buy a digital frame to at least display more interesting slides and attract attention. Again, we have the issue of power, and I can’t seem to get it to play the .jpgs I create as opposed to the ones I simply download. It’s a pain in the ass, and I’ve never spent more than about 3 minutes trying to figure it out. Instead we just started using it as a picture frame – crazy concept.
We also tried to fix an old and broken touchscreen monitor borrowed from one of Sebastian’s friends so we could run NRA’s Obama love quiz they made in 2008. Unfortunately, when we did get it working, we found out that it was one of very few that somehow ended up inverted. If you pushed the top, it read it as pushing at the bottom. That wasn’t going to work for us. There is the argument that the specific program was done in Flash, so it wouldn’t work on the iPad.
But the idea of being able to sign people up as volunteers online, take some sort of online quiz application that could be designed around the issue, or give them a quick tour of the website on a screen they can really see, that really appealed to me. And with NRA now sticking their toe into the water of development for iPhones, it isn’t outrageous that they consider some kind of app or at least Apple mobile product-friendly version of any Obama love quiz type programs in the future.
The biggest appeal for me this weekend would have been the “oh shiny” factor. Even though they are flying off the shelves, they are still exceptionally rare in the wild beyond the standard early adopting tech crowd. At a gun show, the iPad itself would bring more traffic to the table where we could start the conversation about whether the visitor is registered to vote and if they want to help any pro-gun politicians win this year.
Sebastian is certainly ready to buy, and if he would let me take it to gun shows to really use for the people, not just behind the table when we’re bored, then I’ll drive us to the Apple store with the pedal plastered to the floorboards.
The Great Difficulty With Working Gun Shows
So we’re done with the gun show work on behalf of NRA for the weekend, and have the rest of the holiday to enjoy. This was a slow show, to be honest. Not many people seem to want to visit a gun show on a holiday. I would say about one third to one half the people in the show at any given time were from New Jersey, judging from the cars in the parking lot. Not fertile ground when you’re pushing Pennsylvania candidates.
This is a persistent problem working shows in this area. In the 2008 election year we managed to get several hundred McCain signs, which were impossible to get, for a show up in Allentown, which is close enough to draw a lot of people from our respective districts. Unfortunately, it’s also close enough to drawn down New Yorkers. Not that we don’t like New Yorkers, but we got about halfway through our signs before we started to wonder about the accents of people asking for them, and sure enough, they were mostly New Yorkers. If you saw any McCain signs on Long Island, they probably came from us. New York wasn’t set to get any, because they are blue state no matter what.
But the real difficulty in working shows is not spending money. I spent about 100 bucks this weekend, despite not getting any guns, on various things. I had my eye on an 1898 Krag that was absolutely beautiful. Virtually flawless furniture, mostly in tact bluing, and only some minor blemishes on the receiver. The bolt looked clean, and I’m assuming the barrel was in good shape too (didn’t have a bore light to look) 1400 bucks. Looked on Gunbroker for comparison, and it seems a reasonable price. Sadly though, it’s tough to justify dropping 1400 on a gun right now. If in our future show work, I find that gun haunting me, I may just have to buy it. Hopefully someone buys it before I do. Well, not really. That would make me sad. But you know what I mean.
Clayton Cramer on the Rand Paul CRA’64 Controversy
This pretty much reflects how I feel about the issue, but said much better and with more completeness than I did:
Would free markets have been enough to break this long history of governmental force in support of racism? I would like to think so – but I also know that the libertarian solution requires a population of rational actors prepared to look out for their own economic interests. You let me know when you find a species that fits that model.
In my experience most extreme libertarian solutions require rational actors. Libertarians assume that most people are like themselves, when they generally aren’t. I still believe in small government, but I no longer care to go through mental gymnastics to try to figure out how to implement private market solutions to problems that Government is probably the only real viable solution. Anarchocapitalism is also one thing I’ve never really understood. To me it makes the same mistakes as to human nature that communism does.
Either way, when I was in high school I used to work in a union shop, in a job that was menial but was not union. The place never had an official policy of not hiring blacks, because that would be illegal, but I can tell you that no blacks worked there. I can also tell you that this wasn’t an accident. This is a shop that had serious problems getting and retaining good employees. Part of the issue is that people in hiring positions there felt that we can’t have “those people” coming in and taking our “good union jobs.” Maybe it’s gotten better since the late 80s, early 90s, but one of the reasons I’ve become so anti-union in my adulthood is because of what I witnessed growing up.
Uppity Northeasterners, who’ve never had to work in those kinds of environments, often like to pat themselves on the back that the North never implemented the kind of institutionalized racism that those cousin humping rednecks down south did. That is only superficially true. The North had, and probably still has plenty of institutionalized racism. We’re just better at hiding it.