September 2011 – Page 9 – Shall Not Be Questioned

The Mystery of GOP Debates

First, there was the debate sponsored by MSNBC. I’m not sure what Republicans were thinking, “This is a brilliant idea! Hosted by a network that hates us and with a liberal audience who won’t be voting in Republican primaries!”

Next, there was last night. I think the timing of the debate is best summed up by Jim Geraghty in today’s Morning Jolt:

Well, sure, it was up against the season premiere of Monday Night Football, but at least the early primary states were tuned in. Wait, the New England Patriots were playing, so every football fan in New Hampshire was watching ESPN. Okay, but the debate was taking place in Florida, so at least the Florida Republicans, er, wait, no, the Patriots were playing Miami. Hey, Tea Party Express, what other debate dates were you contemplating? Halloween? Thanksgiving night? Christmas?

And that doesn’t even get into the actual debate itself, most of which we caught.

There was the 30-year-old man debacle in which Ron Paul was asked if a fit, young guy carried no health insurance at all and then got into a bad accident, what should happen to him? No real answer came out, so he was asked outright if the guy should be left to die. And, of course, a brilliant Ronulian decided to scream out that he should, which became the answer everyone focused on for the evening. Stay classy, Paul supporter. You just made your candidate look like a bigger douche. Then, Paul finally said that churches bailed sick people out when he used to practice shortly after the Stone Age. Somehow, I don’t think putting the cost of healthcare on the backs on non-profits is the world’s best plan. Bachmann was then asked to tackle the 30-year-old question and the non-answer turned into screaming about Obamacare. Apparently, no one in the GOP presidential pool can say, “Send him the bill for his care.”

But the really bizarre turn happened when the issue of giving the HPV vaccine that can prevent a form of cancer in women was more controversial than Romney’s version of Obamacare. Bachmann was on a roll with a Jenny McCarthy-type rant against the vaccine, and I’ve seen more than a fair share of social conservatives on Twitter express discomfort with the extremes in her behavior on stage when it came to the HPV issue. Hello? Tea Party audience members who were wildly cheering her on, if you’re so anti-vaccine, why stay calm & let the Romneycare go with a pass? It seemed like the audience’s priorities were a bit out-of-whack.

I just hope that all of this extra coverage & the new opportunities for Republicans to spread the crazy doesn’t result in alienating independents for the eventual nominee.

Bloomberg is Scared

He commissioned a poll, which isn’t cheap, to try to defeat National Concealed Carry Reciprocity, HR822. It comes with a brand new web site. When I first clicked on it, I thought maybe the individuals were MAIG mayors, since I believe MAIG mayors have also been convicted of all those things, and at greater rates than concealed carry license holders.

Remember, if your mayor is in MAIG, it’s time to get him or her out. They are putting their names on opposing your rights. It should be made abundantly clear to MAIG mayors that they are supporting gun control. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

It’s interesting, because you can see the poll results here. 35% favor the bill. 38% oppose. 28% are undecided. This poll actually doesn’t look good at all for MAIG, so I’m not sure why they are publishing it. The politicians know quite well that overwhelming majorities support the phony assault weapons ban back in 1994, and Democrats still got their asses handed to them when it came time to put people in the voting booths.

NRA Needs to Shorten the Leash on their Fundraising People

We had a pretty good narrative going there about our opponents using 9/11, and then someone at NRA had to jump in and ruin the party by doing something stupid. The anti-gun groups are busy shaming NRA for using the 9/11 anniversary to fundraise for itself, and they are right to. If you’re going to do a fundraising mailer, or e-mailer, using 9/11 as your catch, you ought to at least make sure it’s clear that money is going to be earmarked for programs that benefit our soldiers and/or first responders. Otherwise it’s just poor taste.

Another Open Carry Dust-up

From Rob Pincus:

I think Open Carry is a poor choice in populated areas when you have other options (CCW) to be armed for personal protection. I vehemently believe that you should NOT carry a gun for political reasons, but solely as a means of defense.

Snarkybytes doesn’t like Pincus’s statement at all. Uncle is somewhere in the middle. I’m not willing to say that carrying for a political purpose is wrong. My message has generally been to just be smart about how you go about it. That only part of Rob Pincus’ statement I really agree with is that OC is a poor choice in populated areas looking at it strictly from a tactical point of view, unless you’re carrying in a holster with proper retention and have had some level of retention training. That’s not, IMHO, a justification for banning the practice, but personally, it’s not something I’d be comfortable doing absent retention training.

Here’s my real problem with suggesting that carrying for political purposes is wrong. It could end up being that the Supreme Court rules that open carry is constitutionally protected, but not concealed carry. There are a few state right to keep and bear arms cases that mirror this position. While I think it’s probably more likely the Court will just protect carry, and leave to the states the manner in which they choose to regulate the practice, there is a chance they could adopt the position that only open carry is protected activity, and that as long as it’s allowed, the states can ban concealed carry.

If that’s the case, we’re going to need people to carry for political reasons, while state and local authorities in hostile jurisdictions are taught a lesson in exactly what “right” entails. Those early individuals are going to be carrying more for political reasons than reasons of self-protection. It’s hard for me to see, however, why that would be wrong.

A Futile Attempt to Become Understood

Joe Huffman has spoken at great lengths about our opponents inability to distinguish Truth from Falsity. To be fair, I don’t think that applies to all our opponents, but certainly many of them we’ve encountered in the wilds of the Internet. This has me wondering if they can even comprehend our arguments at all. I’m not sure how there can be a dialog when there’s not even a basic grasp of the subject matter at hand, or any real understanding of what we believe at all:

And so, dear readers, I have argued that someone with a loaded gun in a public place will not be able to save the day to protect themselves or others for some of the very reasons expressed in the comments above. I mean, the shooter might have an overwhelming arsenal making your pistol ineffective; people freeze up and can’t believe it’s happening; this is a perfectly normal human reaction; the police are actually trained to deal with situations like this and permit holders are not necessarily, etc. etc. It is amusing to watch these folks turn themselves into pretzels to argue withÂ commonÂ senseÂ and then saycommon senseÂ things themselves.

The problem is, our dear Brady Board member has erected all manner of straw men in her head about what gun owners believe, and virtually none of it is fact. She believes in a caricature of gun owners, and desperately wants to cling to that caricature, no matter how often the fairly rich tapestry of our lot walks by her virtual playground on a regular basis. Understand that most of us are not trying to be mean, nor do we expect that she’ll come around to agree with us. I think the reason people waste their hours attempting to comment on Common Gunsense is that they want to be understood. They don’t expect agreement, or capitulation, rather they are looking for that point where each side understands the other, and there at least is agreement to disagree. The great frustration with so many of the folks on the other side of our issue is, there’s not really any hope of reaching that point.

I have come to the conclusion that trying to get to that point of understanding with her, and people like her, is a futile act. They are either incapable, or unwilling to come to that understanding.

9/11 No Big Deal

Our opponents seem to be continuing the meme of “9/11 was really no big deal. Those icky guns have killed way more people than box cutters and well-fueled jets, so you should be paying attention to our issue,” even on the anniversary of 9/11 itself. What a winning PR message.

Let the Hysterics Begin

Looks like the powers that be, owned by certain a egomaniacalÂ Mayor, are nervous as hell about HR822, as can be seen in this article. It’s a really good mix of both hysteria and misinformation.Â For instance, the bill would not allow a resident of New York City to carry on a Florida license, only people who resided out of state. This won’t help people in may-issue states carry in those states.

The bill â€œeffectively prevents a state from controlling who has guns within the state, which has always been a core police power function of state government,â€ said John Donohue, a professor at Stanford Law School, who said he thinks it would be held unconstitutional. â€œIt is so ironic that it is the conservatives who are trying to push this encroachment, since they usually are very active in championing statesâ€™ rights.â€

Segregating schools used to be a core police power function too, you know. How about coming up with an argument that’s actually compelling, professor. Here’s some other interesting opinions:

While the Constitutionâ€™s commerce clause gives Congress authority to regulate commerce between the states, the reciprocity bill probably wouldnâ€™t fall within that power, said Weisberg, the law Stanford professor who serves as faculty co- director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. Nor would it fall under Congressâ€™ power to enforce such existing constitutional liberties as the right â€œto keep and bear arms,â€ he said.

That’s funny because the federal law barring felons from possessing firearms and ammunition is based on the exact same commerce power that the reciprocity bill is based on. So why is it constitutional for the federal government to prohibit possession by felons, and unconstitutional for it allow possession by the law abiding on the public streets?

Quote of the Day

From Jennifer:

One of my responsibilities was to read the Patriot Act and bring the bank into compliance. Â Yeah. Â I read the whole damn thing. Â I saw every bit of infringement on personal liberty. Â I suddenly became a lot more interested in what my Congress critters were doing out there in the pretty building. Â Any idea that I had about the government being benevolent went out the window. Â Our response to being attacked by pure evil was not to vaporize them, but instead to gouge the freedoms of the citizens of this great nation.

I don’t just want to remember the victims of 9/11, but the monstrous response of the federal bureaucracy to it. Never let a crisis go to waste. If it was only Rahm that believed that, there wouldn’t be much of a problem.

Remembering

I don’t have much to say about the anniversary of 9/11, except it’s one of those moments you remember exactly what you were doing. Ten years ago I had just started a job at an exciting new biotech start-up the past June. I was driving to work on a Tuesday morning, which I remember was a really pleasant morning. I tuned in the local news station for the traffic. About as I approached the on-ramp for Route 30 in Downingtown, which is where I lived at the time, the first plane hit the North Tower. No one knew, at the time, it was a terrorist attack. I remember from history that a small plane once struck the Empire State building in foul weather. But how did this happen? It’s a completely clear day. Not a cloud in the sky.

As the news story wears on during my commute, news reports a second plane has hit the South Tower. Well, if the first place was an accident, there’s no way two planes can accidentally run into an individual tower. This has to be deliberate. This is really worrisome. I know people who work in that tower. I know it can hold the population of a small city, and that it’s nearly impossible to fight fires in building that high.

I was at work by the time the plane struck the Pentagon. By now it was obvious to everyone what had happened, and it was pretty apparent who was responsible. Nobody really thought about the possibility of both towers collapsing. A few of us were huddled around a radio in our cafeteria when the first tower collapsed. We immediately went out to tell anyone who wasn’t listening to the radio. We could easily lose more people today than were lost at Antietam today. No one really knew how many people were in the towers. By this time there was talk of a plane crashed in Western Pennsylvania. We were told we could go home. On my way home is when the other tower collapsed.

Once I got home and got the cable news on, is when I saw the replay footage of people throwing themselves out of the burning building before the towers collapsed. No one knew how many people had died. It could be tens of thousands. I spent most of the night watching cable news wondering why we weren’t carpet bombing the shit out of Afghanistan by now. By this time they had grounded all aircraft. I remember my friend Jason was in Arizona on his honeymoon. They had to drive back. Several days with no contrails in the sky was eery. I seem to recall it wasn’t for several days that we had an idea of roughly how many people were killed in the tower. I did not know anyone directly. A relative who worked there hadn’t yet entered the building, and made a quick exit from the WTC subway station.

I spent the next several weeks eager for some paybacks. Call me a primitive Neanderthal, but you don’t come into my country, kill 3000 people, destroy two pieces of precious real-estate, destroy four planes, and disrupt the lives of millions of Americans and not expect our military to come into where you live and kill those responsible, and try to offer to the rest of the people living there a more civilized means for governing themselves. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. I still think both were the right thing to do. As a nation we have become weary of nation building, and I have too. If the radical Islamists attempt to up the ante post-911, I’m going to be considerably more in the camp of rubble don’t make trouble. We tried to do it the nice way the first time around, and that part of the world can take those lessons or leave them. It’s their choice. But we don’t have the patience, or quite frankly the money, to do it the nice way again.

Buy One Get One Free

Thanks to the generosity of some fellow bloggers and NRA friends in Arizona, we have three tickets for our Friends of the NRA dinner this Thursday to give away to the first three people who buy a ticket. So for the first three folks, if you can make it, and buy a ticket, you can bring a spouse, child, or friend with the freebie. If you bought a ticket in response to my previous post, feel free to chime in to the comments if you want one of those tickets. I’ll announce if/when the three tickets are spoken for.