June 2012 – Page 3 – Shall Not Be Questioned

RMGO Loses Its Tax Exempt Status

I’ve often been pretty critical of Dudley Brown and the National Association for Gun Rights, but it’s looking like another one of Dudley’s outfits, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, has lost its tax-exempt status from the IRS, because they have not filed tax returns for three years. I wonder how long it will take the inevitable fundraising letter to go out, talking about how the Obama Administration, through his Internal Revenue Service, is trying to silence the voice of gun owners, and surely won’t you donate some money to fight Obama.

To be fair, most any tax-exempt political organization is pretty shameless when it comes to fundraising, but I’ve always thought Brown’s organization was an extra shade of shameless. I’ve also never really understood what they are really contributing. From what I’ve been able to find, NAGR doesn’t even have a lobbyist registered on the Hill.

Rahm Backs Down

As I had speculated last week,, it would appear the City of Chicago has decided to revise its ordinance rather than appeal. I didn’t think Mayor Rahm would be making noise about protecting Chicago’s gun laws if he wasn’t planning a strategic retreat. The proposed ordinance revision will bar anyone from a gun license who has a violent misdemeanor conviction in the past five years. I would imagine the courts would uphold temporary prohibitions on violent misdemeanants, but that’s not completely certain. It will take some time, to bring cities like Chicago and New York into compliance with the Bill of Rights, but it’ll be a bit, metaphorically, like sculpting marble. We will make precedent one hammer strike at a time, hopefully without striking poorly and having to start all over again.

Anti-Virus Triggering on Gun Bogs?

John Richardson’s blog, “No Lawyers, Only Guns and Money” seems to have gotten blocked by Norton’s anti-virus software. I use ClamAV when I use anti-virus at all. It’s not as critical in the Mac and Linux world except to scan file servers for stuff deposited by Windows users. If anyone notices this blog on such a list, let me know. Let John know too. Could be that perhaps this is only blogspot. And stop using Windoze :)

A Partisan Shift

A little commentary by Jeff Bishop of damnum absque injuria about a decision that came down today:

Falwell v. Hustler Magazine, the case widely misrepresented as “People vs. Larry Flynt,” was decided 8-0 on First Amendment grounds in favor of a corporation. Citizens United and today’s American Traditions Partnership decision were both decided 5-4, with all four liberals arguing in dissent that legal persons (corporations, LLCs, etc.) aren’t really “people” and therefore, any natural person with the audacity to form one should check his own First Amendment rights at at the door.

So for all four liberals on the Supreme Court, along with an overwhelming majority of self-described liberals outside it, corporations are “people” with First Amendment rights when they peddle porno and smear public figures, but cease to be “people” as soon as they contribute anything of value to national political discourse.

What Isn’t News Today

So no healthcare decision today. According to SCOTUS Blog, they weren’t too far from having 100,000 people on their live coverage site today. They have planned for Thursday and realize that they could reach 250,000.

While we wait, I thought there were parts of this NYT article that gave a preview of how little thought many in Congress and the White House gave to the idea of any kind of legal challenge:

In passing the law two years ago, Democrats entertained little doubt that it was constitutional. The White House held a conference call to tell reporters that any legal challenge, as one Obama aide put it, â€œwill eventually fail and shouldnâ€™t be given too much credence in the press.â€

Congress held no hearing on the planâ€™s constitutionality until nearly a year after it was signed into law. Representative Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, scoffed when a reporter asked what part of the Constitution empowered Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance. â€œAre you serious?â€ she asked with disdain. â€œAre you serious?â€
…
The first lawsuits were filed the day Mr. Obama signed the plan in March 2010. By the end of January 2011, judges in Florida and Virginia had ruled it unconstitutional. Only then did the Senate and the House hold hearings on its constitutionality, and the administration grew worried.

The Lame Deflections of the Anti-Gun Crowd on Fast and Furious

A common deflection by our opponents in the gun rights movement is that we Second Amendment supporters are making a big ado about nothing, considering Fast and Furious only represented a fraction of the overall number of guns trafficked into Mexico unlawfully. Let me take this analogy to another form of crime, and show why the anti-gun groups are phony baloney when they speak about their desire to reduce gun violence (rather than just wanting to reduce gun ownership).

Let’s take this to another form of crime, and to a smaller scale. Let’s talk about a neighborhood that has a problem with home break-ins. The community is small enough that people have a pretty good idea of who the bad apples are, and the local police have worked with the hardware stores in the town to ensure that they don’t crowbars or other burglary tools to the bad apples in town until they solve the rash of home break-ins. The local police catch a few burglars, all of which got in with crow bars, but the burglaries generally continue.

Let’s say that the state police then decide to sweep in, and announcing this is all part of a much bigger burglary ring, not only tell the hardware stores they should sell as many crowbars to the bad apples as they can, but actively encourage them to do so, so that they can infiltrate the ring and bring it down. So the only result is that burglaries in town shoot way up. This raises the question:

Are the citizens of the town correct to be angry at the state police?
Would it be paranoid and unreasonable to suggest the state police might have had selfish reasons, like boosting their own budgets, to inflate the crime problem?
Because burglars still get a hold of crowbars, is it correct to blame the hardware store?
Is it correct to blame the manufacturer of the crowbar?
Would you say citizens that are concerned greatly about the police facilitating a rise in crime are just misdirected from the overall problem of burglars getting crowbars? Or the fact that hardware stores sell them?

Smuggling guns to Mexico is illegal. Buying guns from federal dealers to smuggle guns into Mexico is illegal. We expect the police to catch people who are doing it. Aside from disagreements we may have with anti-gunners about mutli-sale reporting requirements, of gun show loopholes, etc — is it not rational and healthy, when the police are found to be facilitating an illegal activity, to apparently no rational end, to be outraged and demand answers? What The Brady Folks, CSGV, and other anti-gun people are disingenuously suggesting, is that because we care about law enforcement not facilitating crime, that means we don’t care about crime. This is a ridiculous leap in logic, even for our opponents. Their reaction to Fast and Furious is further evidence the whole gun violence shtick is just that. If you have a situation where law enforcement is facilitating crime, if you’re interesting in fighting rime, the first order of business is to get the government to stop facilitating crime. Then we can talk about what to do next.

A Little Weekend Mindless Consumerism

Who can’t use a set of Presidential Rubber Duckies or Patriotic Rubber Duckies?

As Sebastian noted when I found these, the patriotic set needs a militiaman in the group.

More on Commercial Blogging

A reader took some exception to my post previously on commercial blogging, and I just wanted to clear up some things. As a supporter of Capitalism,Â I don’t blame anyone for trying to make money, and therefore I don’t blame anyone for the mere act of making money off their blog. I’ve linked to plenty of commercial blog content, and I still link to The Firearm Blog, even though that is now pretty clearly a money making venture. So I don’t particularly have a problem with the idea of people making money off blogging, writing, etc. On balance I’d say that commercial blogs actually do a better job of generating quality content than the many if not most hobby bloggers.Â But the techniques one uses to optimize a blog for the purpose of maximizing monetary return is going to lead to a very different blog experience.

The main area of concern I have with commercial blogs, is that a core philosophy behind blogging, which is linking to other blogs and content, is in direct conflict with making money off running a web site. It’s never a good idea, from a money making standpoint, to give your readers a reason to click off your content and onto someone else’s. But that’s exactly what blogging is as a matter of core philosophy. There are commercial blogs out there that still make good money, and still largely follow the core tenants of the medium. Most of those started out as hobby blogs and went commercial. Many newer entrants into commercial blogging try to make their blogs communities unto themselves, which is great for keeping an audience, driving loyalty, and in the end, making money, but my fear is the community as a whole will suffer for it. For instance, I’d take Tam‘s advice on an old Smith or other curio any day over most of the commercial gun reviewers out there. I consider Tam’s expertise well and above most other gun writers out there on that subject, and most blog readers won’t get too far in the amateur community without being exposed to some of Tam’s writing. By the same token, Dave Hardy is my go-to source when I have 2nd Amendment legal questions. Clayton Cramer has forgotten more on early American history than most of us know, and I’m not convinced there’s much he’s forgotten. Being in the same community with these minds has greatly enhanced my own knowledge, and through the community of blogging, we’ve all been enriched. My fear is that the spread of commercial blogging will results in the dilution or destruction of the community that’s an important part of what Brian Anse Patrick calls “Horizontal Interpretive Communities.”

So my concern with commercial blogs is not that they make money. I have no problem with the idea of making money. It’s that in order to make money efficiently, your commercial venture has to make like it is theÂ source for gun information online, and that by nature is going to weaken what has, I think, become a key part of our success as a movement.

Quote of the Day

From a TN Count of Appeals:

There is no economic sliding scale for the right to engage in constitutionally protected activities. The richest and poorest among us, as well as those individuals in-between, all have the same rights under the constitution.

Â This was in a First Amendment context, which caused SayUncle to ask the obvious question.

The Theory That F&F Was a Pretext for Gun Control

CBS News has a piece that lends credence to what is being portrayed by the water carrying media as a wild-eyed paranoid conspiracy theory:

“Bill – can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks.”

Of course, evidence that they used Fast and Furious to make the case for the multi-sale reporting requirement is not evidence that the entire purpose of the operation was to gin up support for gun control. It’s hard for me to see why they’d request wiretaps if the sole purpose was driving up trace numbers. I think when all is said and done, we’ll discover that driving trace numbers from Mexico was just the icing on the cake. If I had to take a wild eyed guess on what the President is hiding, it’s probably evidence of perjury, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a some talk about how the higher trace numbers will just provide more evidence to support gun control efforts, whether the multi-sale requirement or a new assault weapons ban. Was the purpose of F&F only to make a case for gun control? Who knows. It wouldn’t surprise me, but I also wouldn’t be surprised to find out that this literally was an underpants gnome strategy of an investigation.

Let straw purchasers traffic lots of gun to Mexico.
???
Take down cartel kingpins!

I mean, it’s ridiculous, but it’s also Government. But if all this was is a botched operation, the politically sensible thing to do would be to throw a few people under the bus and come clean about it. This was obviously something bigger, or none of the coverup makes sense. But what is the White House hiding? It’s hard for me to understand how people on the left aren’t interested in that question. If this was still the Bush Administration, I’d sure as hell be curious, and would want answers.