Abusive Anti-Hunting Advocates are Targeting U.S. Olympic Shooters

With the various Olympic records being shattered by American shooters in London, there’s an increased interest in the human interest stories behind Team USA. Unfortunately, that increased coverage has resulted in animal rights groups learning that many of our Olympic shooters – gasp – hunt! Here’s one report about the biggest attacks on Corey Cogdell:

She grew up in Alaska where wild game was what’s for dinner, hunting and fishing with her father and her sister. It was hunting that lead her to competitive shooting, which lead her to the bronze medal in the 2008 Beijing Olympic games. But, the rabid animal rights groups…started berating Cogdell with nasty comments and death threats. …

Cogdell gave a great statement on her Facebook page defending her hunting. Unfortunately, the comments have become so terrible that she decided to take down her fan page.

By the time I heard about what was happening, the page was removed. However, that hasn’t stopped animal rights activists from attacking her on blogs, Twitter, and other social networks. Here’s one woman who tries to claim that Cogdell conducts her Olympic practice on animals. You can find a Tumblr user who not only spreads the same lie about using animals for target practice, but goes on to say this about our Team USA Olympian:

Corey demonstrates true pyschopathic behaviour in this photograph by her lack of remorse.

Activists have started a petition out to convince the US Olympic Committee to kick hunters (and all of those who defend lawful hunting) off the team. Another animal rights blogger rants about how an athlete who hunts should be considered as engaging in misconduct:

Misconduct is a very mild word when used in reference to Olympic medalist, Corey Cogdell.

But I think Twitter is where some of the worst things have been posted to Cogdell’s account. There are the threats & wishes for bodily harm:

There are the wishes for her to fail:


Yes, this is the kind of support that our Olympic athletes are getting right now as they prepare for their competitions. So, if you’d like to lend a little support to Team USA, you can find the list of all of the shooters on Twitter here. I’m sure they could use a bit more positive support after seeing what Corey has had to deal with.

UPDATE: Here’s even more threats against Corey from other networks. More Americans are involved than on the Twitter accounts, including a Minnesota man who says he wants to physically assault her.

Below the jump, there’s more of a taste of how these animal rights folks view hunters just because they don’t agree with the pastime. I suppose it’s a great representation of the new civility. Continue reading “Abusive Anti-Hunting Advocates are Targeting U.S. Olympic Shooters”

Oh, That Lefty “We Don’t Want to Take Your Guns” Meme

The Baltimore Sun is whipping up good old fashion straw-man stereotyping hoe down, where we celebrate those silly and stupid gun nuts who think people want to ban their assault weapons, regulate gun show out of existence and force registration of firearms. Silly gun owners. I have no idea where they could get such a nutty idea like that from. Really. How stupid can these ignorant rednecks be? I mean, we here at the Baltimore Sun know these types struggle with reading, but we are so much better than them. Let’s celebrate!

The folks at the Baltimore Sun want to shame us out of our activism with their own smug sense of superiority. Clearly they believe we should listen. I would. If you have a subscription to the Baltimore Sun, cancel it now. Tell them why. Starve the beast. It’s the only way to beat them.

I Love the Smell of a Little (near) Civil Disobedience

It isn’t quite civil disobedience since it was still legal at the time, but I loved reading this story at PA Water Cooler earlier this month about some politicians encouraging folks to fight against the nanny state:

The Council voted to ban barbecue grills within five feet of homes, any combustible material, or property lines. Got a wooden deck? Then you’ll either have to move your grill or teach it how to levitate. Otherwise you’re a criminal.

Fortunately, Mayor George Doscher chose to veto it because apparently his head is screwed on straight. Good for him. Not to be outdone, though, the Bellevue Council doubled down and overrode the veto! …

The mayor and Councilwoman Kathy Coder (who is also running for the State House and you should totally check out her website and throw some cash her way) led a good old-fashioned civil disobedience event by holding a still-legal-for-now cookout in front of the Borough Building. The mayor even wore a chef’s hat.

Latest Poll Post Aurora: Bad News for Our Opponents

Pew: Views on Gun Laws Unchanged after Shooting. Yet on their side there has been hope, that this time was going to be different! This time they were going to turn it around, and start sticking is to us. They’d show us!

Well, not bloody likely, is this polling is believed.

Gun Control or Gun Freedom from a Biological Perspective

I have to admit this is a new angle on the issue I haven’t seen before in the media. The article is one of those middle ground articles, and one of my areas of disagreement is that the debate are at dogmatic poles. It only seems that way because the media doesn’t know anything else, and their reporting on the issue sucks. In truth, we’re currently at a middle ground, and will have reached a consensus when one side can no longer move the debate to one side or another very much. I tend to view the role of the courts in this whole affair as eliminating the outliers (like Chicago, New York, New Jersey, etc) and forcing on them a basic respect for the right, while perhaps letting them get away with a bit more in the way of controls as other places. One of my big beefs with these middle ground people is a lack of understanding that politics just doesn’t work like that. Politics arrives at a middle ground, because people on both sides struggle, and reach the limits of their political power.

UPDATE: Bill Quick of Daily Pundit:

You stand there without your gun, and I’ll attack you with a club and beat you to death. You obviously don’t need a gun because I don’t have one. Or if you’re weak enough, I’ll just beat you to death with my bare fists. No weapon needed.

Heh. I wonder how much middle ground he could find in that scenario. I think there was actually a lot of wisdom wrapped up in the old saying that God may have made man, but it was Sam Colt that made them equal.

Life Memberships Half Off

The NRA is offering half-off life memberships:

In appreciation of your support helping us reach over 1,550,000 likes on facebook, we are offering NRA Life Membership for half off for the next 48 hours! To take advantage of this offer, please visit http://membership.nrahq.org/facebooklife. Be sure to share this post and ask your friends to like the NRA!

Let’s see, 1.55 million likes. Brady has 21,666 likes. CSGV has 6600 likes. VPC has 421 likes. MAIG has 4072 likes. And these people wonder why politicians listen to the NRA and not them? Even on Twitter, after CSGV has begged like half the planet to please follow them, and NRA has several different feeds, CSGV is still has an order of magnitude less followers than NRA News.

A Newbie Takes on Olympians

The Wall Street Journal sent a guy who had never shot a gun before out to try his hand at skeet and trap with Olympians Corey Cogdell and Frank Thompson. I love that they explain what the sports involve, along with a reminder about safety and addressing a common fear with shooting shotguns – recoil.

Let’s Not Make Up False Claims by Anti-Gunners

I’ve noticed something about some comments that some conservative commentators have been using to frame the new McCarthy-Launtenberg ammo sales ban/restrictions. It gets under my skin because it makes it easier for our opposition to say that we’re delusional and don’t understand their “reasonable” attempts at gun control. We don’t have to misrepresent the anti-gunners to highlight just how creepy and restrictive their proposals really are. We can just give straight up facts and people will find it bothersome!

Take, for example, this tweet from Tim Graham that Cam from NRA News retweeted:

Without having been in NYC to watch the press conference live, I have not read anything that indicates McCarthy, Lautenberg, Bloomberg, or any of the other speakers said Olympic & world record holder Kim Rhode should not be practicing with 1,000 rounds a day – except the post written Tim Graham’s group that tries to make that leap. I hate that they do that. You know why? Because it’s so damn easy for the anti-gun groups to say that they said nothing on that order. In fact, Sen. Lautenberg actually congratulated Matt Emmons and recognized him as an Olympic shooter this week. Now you want to say that he was out attacking Olympic shooters? Yeah, it doesn’t stick and it’s so easy to tear down as an argument.

You know what isn’t so easy to defeat? Telling people what the bill actually does.

Instead of saying that Lautenberg & McCarthy don’t want Rhode to practice as much as she has to in order to compete at the Olympic level, why not emphasize the fact that Senator Lautenberg and Representative McCarthy want Kim Rhode to be reported to law enforcement authorities every single week for the rest of her career?

Most gun owners and non-gun owners alike would find that creepy as hell and consider it a case of government overstepping its bounds. The anti-gunners can’t argue with it. If she’s shooting that many rounds a week, her name and information will be passed on to authorities every single time she stocks up on her practice ammunition. They will be put into the corner of having to defend why our Olympic athletes should be treated like “pre-“criminals. And it’s all factual. No need to make up statements or claim more than what is really in the bill.

Emily Miller reported on Facebook that the bill targets those who buy more than 1,000 rounds at one time. That is factually true. However, even many gun owners wouldn’t buy more than 1,000 rounds at a time. (Let’s face it, many gun owners don’t actively shoot that often.) It’s not unheard of by any means since just a couple of bricks of .22 and even one extra box of anything else would put you over the limit, but it’s not something that’s done all that commonly by many folks. For those who don’t shoot at all, 1,000 rounds seems like a ton of ammunition regardless of the fact that it’s really not.

However, you know what message will really hit home with far more folks – gun owners or not? The mass of paperwork and bureaucratic headaches this reporting requirement will cause for small businesses.

Because, while Emily’s claim is true, it actually leaves out that businesses selling ammunition will have to track every single round you buy since the 1,000+ round reporting requirement actually spans every five business days. That means that JoeBob’s Gun Shop will have to take down your information when you buy that first brick of .22 for your son’s Boy Scout shooting event on Saturday. Then, should you pop in on Tuesday to pick up the boxes of shotgun shells for your club’s Women on Target event, JoeBob will need to write down everything you purchased, find the record for your Saturday sale, and add the two up. If you cross that 1,000 round limit, he has to report you to the authorities. That means at the end of every business day, these licensed ammunition retailers will have to read through all of their paperwork of the previous week to figure out if anyone crossed over the limit.

On top of all this, without having a bill to actually read, we don’t know what happens with chain stores like Dick’s, Cabela’s, Bass Pro, or Wal-Mart. Will they have to calculate the list of buyers and ammunition purchase totals across their entire network or stores, or will the reporting requirement only kick in for each location? Regardless, at high-volume businesses like that, they will likely have to cut workers from other areas to monitor these sales and pay thousands of dollars for new software to track such specific information or just give up and get out of the ammunition sales business altogether. Even gun owners whose rifles have sat in their cases collecting dust for half a decade will understand why that kind of reporting burden is too onerous.

Once again, the point is that we have plenty of ammunition (pun intended) to attack this bill for the incredible burden government wants to put on businesses. It’s not like that hasn’t been a theme of the Obama administration or anything…

My advice to gun owners who oppose this bill is not to put words in the mouths of the sponsors that could set off people’s BS detectors, nor should you simplify the talking points down to something that can give a perception of not impacting many people. Focus on the facts. Connect this bill to feelings of unease about government overreach and attacks on business that people already feel and identify with, and you’ll have more success in highlighting why this bill is not the solution.

Non-Firearm Mass Murder

As Clayton Cramer documents, the worst mass murders in history haven’t been committed with firearms, but with fire. But I guess it’s hard for some people to get worked up over easy access to matches and gasoline, so the media only focuses on mass killing where a gun is used.

Also see these accounts of non-firearm mass murder, via Instapundit.