Bloomberg’s publishing arm has been on a tear recently to try to frame the gun issue from Bloomberg’s point of view, and make the NRA look bad. This article doesn’t quite work, as the six comments so far in support of NRA would seem to indicate. I think most people get that you can’t have a patchwork of laws on a topic where violations are typically felonies or high-level misdemeanors. Most cities, including Philadelphia, actually can’t make more than petty crimes by ordinance according to state law, but cities in other states often have much greater leeway for making serious crimes. The ability to preserve that is part of why Bloomberg is making this a big deal.
Month: August 2012
Gun Group Sues Honolulu Police
Interestingly, this is a First Amendment case. The claim is that the City of Honolulu, engaging in Reasoned Discourse(TM) on their Facebook page, by deleting unfavorable posts, constitutes unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. That’s very interesting, and I’m not an expert in First Amendment law, but from what I do know, I think they probably have a good chance of prevailing here.
The Truth About Gun Sales
An excellent article in Forbes, which is bad news for our opponents, because it’s not only fear driving the trend:
Other Gallup polls are even more interesting. The number of women gun owners in America has gone up from 13 percent in 2005 to 23 percent today. Also, the number of Democratic households with firearms in their homes skyrocketed from 30 percent in 2009 to 40 percent today.
If they want to know why Obama doesn’t talk about gun control, this is why. They also note other increases, particularly in women, and even some preliminary data that seems to show the long term decline in hunting has, at least for now, reversed itself.
Mass Shooting at Empire State Building
Story developing, but two dead including the gunman. This probably isn’t the time to try to score political points by suggesting New York’s strict gun laws have failed. Let the other side be the ones who exploit tragedy for gain. I have a lot of readers in New York, so I hope everyone’s OK.
On Sword Fighting
An excellent overview of a lost art, comes to us via Instapundit. It would seem so much of what we know today is wrong, including this absurd notion by the proponents of gun control that man doesn’t know or shouldn’t be concerned with the concept of violence outside the realm of firearms. From the article:
Only recently in the last decade or so has this extraordinary and all but forgotten material finally come to be properly examined and studied. Reconstruction of these remarkable teachings offers an unparalleled view into how fighting men prepared and trained themselves for duels, street-fights, and battlefield encounters. Their manner of fighting with swords is not the classical Western style we see today, which is largely a contrived 19th-century gentleman’s version of a narrow, aristocratic Baroque style. What the surviving sources show us is wholly different from the familiar pop-culture version, as well as being dramatically distinct from what has gone on for years in assorted reenactments and contrived living-history efforts. Rather, Medieval and Renaissance sword fighting was a hell of a lot more violent, brutal, ferocious, and astonishingly effective. The way in which these swords were held, the way they can be maneuvered, and the postures and motions involved, differ substantially from common presumptions and modern-era fencing styles.
Read the whole thing. Maybe, much like 80s movies featuring gunplay look silly and ridiculous to modern, trained eyes, that movies featuring swordplay will get better, and find better ways to realistically portray it.
UPDATE: Some video from the author:
Millennials Not Buying Cars
I used to think this was a sign of the end times, with kids these days not wanting to drive like normal, independently minded people. But then someone pointed out to me the government has systematically destroyed the value of drivers’ licenses for young people, and by the time they are old enough for the licenses to matter, they are off to college where the need to drive is less, then once out of college, they don’t have jobs to make payments on new cars anyway, and are often buried under mountains of student debt. So perhaps Ford and the other companies need to get together and tell the auto insurers, who pushed a lot of this nanny state crap, that the gig is going to be up for both of them if they don’t do something to restore the market. Perhaps making it easier for young people to drive, as it was when I was younger, is the key to fixing this problem, rather than dumb corporations trying to slick up their marketing, and wondering why it’s not working.
Slow News Day
Not often that I run out of stories for the day before 2:00, but the well is dry. I don’t even have any tabs left to clear, except all the technical stuff I’ve been working on for the job that actually pays the bills, and a few things I’ve been sitting on that could turn into posts, but that would take a bit more time to write than I have time to take right now.
In the mean time, the gun blogosphere loves itself a good OC debate, so go see these posts by Caleb and Robb.
Gun Control Works: Assault Weapons in NJ, Chicago, and MA
Stories in Massachusetts, Chicago (in schools, no less), and New Jersey. I don’t know how this could happen, since all three of those states ban them. Also, go take a look at the photo on the Massachusetts story. That looks like a slidefire stock to me, on one of the seized guns. Watch that become the next “loophole.”
Illinois State Attorney Position Makes Mainstream Press
The AP is carrying a story on it, along with the Bar Association journal. I understand from folks on the ground in Illinois that gun control groups in the Land of Lincoln are having a cow over this. The national groups have already classified this as an affront to democracy (which begs the question as to whether they believe grand juries are likewise an affront to democracy). I think it’s really important to highlight this quote from the press release, because it tells you exactly what the gun control crowd stands for:
Our message is this: we will no longer use the power and authority of our office to criminalize and punish decent, otherwise law-abiding citizens who choose to exercise the rights granted to them by the Second Amendment of the United States’ Constitution to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves and their families.
This is what they are freaking out about. It’s not criminals possessing guns, it’s not drug dealers possessing guns — they are freaking out because a prosecutor has declared he’s not going to try to put otherwise law-abiding, honest people in prison.
And Here I Thought they Promoted Peace and Non-Violence
More evidence that’s just a sham. Not that we really need more evidence that the whole “gun violence” and “peace” facade is a fraud designed to cover the fact that they just hate guns and the Second Amendment, but here you go anyway. Looks like yet another case of pacifist-agressive.