September 2012 – Page 5 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Another Illegal Mayor Against Gun Rights

It looks like a recent member of MAIG is under arrest for a wide variety of corruption and theft charges.

Prosecutors say [Myron] Rosner committed grand theft by using money from his campaign account for personal ads on the bus benches. Another charge involves allegedly free bus bench ads given to Rosner so the company would not lose the city account. Prosecutors say it was understood that Rosner would not repay the cost of those ads.

They say that other charges include bad campaign checks and other finance violations.

As the former mayor of North Miami Beach, MAIG proudly used him in their letters to Congress when lobbying for more restrictions on the law-abiding while he was setting up his re-election campaign to violate multiple laws.

Almost a Test Case

Currently the law in Pennsylvania about guns in primary and secondary schools is a grey area. Having firearms in schools is generally prohibited, except with an exception for guns possessed for lawful purposes. Given Heller, self-defense is a lawful purposes, perhaps the most lawful purpose, for possessing a firearm.

But just because that’s what you or I think doesn’t mean that’s how prosecutors or judges are going to see it. Looks like a School Board member almost got busted for having a gun in a school, but the Bucks County District Attorney’s office are going to decline charges. The grey area will live. I’d like to see this issue decided one way or another, though I certainly wouldn’t volunteer to be that case, and hope no one else will either. Two things likely helped this guy. One is that he’s a public official, and while it’s wrong, public officials tend to not want to prosecute other public officials. Two if you’re a DA going to go forward with a precedent setting case, you’d likely want the circumstances to be as horrible as possible, like some dipshit who carried in a school and left it in a bathroom (and wasn’t a cop), or who had a negligent discharge (and wasn’t a cop) What you have with our school statute is a way a sympathetic judge or jury could screw your chance of getting a conviction, and I don’t think prosecutors usually like taking that kind of chance.

Oh, To Be a Low Information Voter

There are a handful of times when I wish my first thought about a campaign or candidate was not, “Hey I wonder how they feel about my rights?” I had one of those moments today.

A Supreme Court Justice candidate in Michigan is the sister of an actress from the West Wing. She managed to pull the key characters together to film a campaign video, and I hate to admit that it’s pretty funny – likely because it’s pretty light on politics and name dropping.

I loved the West Wing. I especially loved Ainsley Hayes who was a conservative alumna from an all women’s college in New England. It really was an enjoyable show, even given the obvious bias in the politics.

So, yes, I admit that with this video, it would kind of be tempting to be a low information voter. Fortunately, I don’t live in Michigan. I also can’t break myself of the habit of trying to find out more about actual candidate positions. (Hell, I even asked someone from Michigan if NRA usually grades in these races, but they said they didn’t think so. If you’re a Michigan voter, check the grades that should be posted soon to be sure!) Of course, I also doubt that if I was a low information voter that I would have watched West Wing at all or found any humor in the video.

Excuses, Excuses

Sorry for the lack of posting, but this morning I was cast in a role as an extra in a film, and we just got finished shooting.

Got Nothin

Spent most of today in the office today rearranging things to take this all into the final stretch, assuming we find some real-estate soon to put all this stuff. I felt bad ignoring the blog, but it didn’t take long to realize there was nothing to blog about anyway. Got caught up with other blogs pretty quickly, and looks like no one else has much to blog about either. It’s a real problem when you write about RKBA when no one is talking about it in public life. Let me rummage through and see what I have here.

I generally try not to pay great attention to polling numbers, because I think there’s a lot of tea leaf reading that goes on here on all sides. I’m skeptical they are rigged, however.Â I think there’s literally nothing to see here. I’d bet this is a fundraising scheme. If the person had been there, at the end they would have patched you through to someone who asked you to make a donation. If you answered Obama, or just stood there with a dumb look on your face, they probably would have dropped you eventually.

Speaking of polls, and why they aren’t to be trusted, we have this poll, which says 66% of Americans believe everyone should be required to pay some amount of income tax. From a post by Ilya Somin, we have a poll which shoes that 66% of Americans believe no one should pay more than 19%, and a whopping 88% believe no one should pay more than 29%. Now, if you think about cutting taxes on the wealthy to 29%, and especially 19%, while simultaneously raising taxes on the poor some modest amount, and how politically viable that is, you’ll understand why the gun control crowd’s reliance on polls to show their views are uncontroversial doesn’t hold any water with politicians who know better. People will tell pollsters anything. What matters is what happens when it’s time to make policy, and both sides rally, and the media prints and broadcasts, the bloggers blog, the forums forum, the pundits pundit, etc, etc. A poll on specific gun policy or tax policy doesn’t mean crap. Most people know next to nothing about both, including people who own guns and pay taxes.

The Ultimate Poll on the Second Amendment

Louisianans will be voting on a strengthened Right to Keep and Bear Arms ballot measureÂ this November. Needless to say if we lost on this, it would be a minor disaster, so if you know people there, or live there, help spread the word. This is also meant to send a strong message to the courts about how the people expect their rights to be treated. Practically every court has called for intermediate scrutiny for the Second Amendment, rather than strict, because it allows them to do the kind of interest balancing that should not happen with a fundamental constitutional right.

Fast & Furious OIG Report

It was released less than half an hour ago. Just out of curiosity, I opened it and did a search for two words: inaccurate and false. In case you’re now curious about my findings, the two returned a combined 178 hits.

That means they appear about every 2.5 pages.

Doesn’t Obama promise us the move transparent Administration ever? Somehow, I don’t think that quite works out.

Salon Covers Crossroads of the West

Salon is not known for being a right-wing publication. If anything, they lean left. But I find this article about Crossroads of the West to be fairly balanced for a Main-Stream Media article. They do a pretty decent job of talking to both sides of the divide, and also being fair about describing the environment.

Compare and Contrast, Part II

From the folks at Guns Save Life, in Illinois, who drew approximately 160 people to their event. We’re here, we’re real, get used to it.

Constitution Day at the Local College

Sorry for the lack of posts this morning, folks. We spent our morning preparing for and afternoon attending the Constitution Day Fair at Bucks County Community College. They invited us to set up a table as NRA volunteers, alongside many other groups such as Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Lower Bucks Young Democrats, Bucks County Republican Party, Libertarian Party, Young Americans for Liberty, NORML, and even Occupy Wall Street. (I know I missed a couple of groups, but that just shows the range of organizations invited.)

Not that many people came by the fair, but a few folks came in to check everything out. Interestingly, any group that was either right-of-center or focused on talking about the Constitution had candy to give away. The Democrats and groups that one would normally consider left-of-center didn’t want to share candy with attendees.

We did speak with a guy who said he was writing an article for the school paper. He was mostly interested in confirming what he had heard that NRA endorses both Democrats and Republicans. We talked a bit about that history, and he took notes on the fact that NRA sends questionnaires to new candidates and grades incumbents based on voting records and questionnaires.

Ironically, our visit from a guy who said, “I support the Second Amendment, but…” was actually a Republican. He wants to ban semi-automatics. I assumed he was confused, but he did comprehend that they only fired once with each pull of the trigger. We didn’t pursue the discussion too much beyond that because I don’t know how far you can bring a person who wants a Second Amendment that allows banning guns people actually own. To make it even weirder, he said his dad is an NRA member. While this guy did know that one round is fired with each pull of the trigger, he was convinced that he could do some kind of spray shooting without aiming and hit moving targets even if he didn’t really know much about shooting guns. I guess it just goes to show you that you need to make sure you kids really understand how firearms work.

We also had a visit from a woman who wanted to know where she could get shooting lessons because she views learning the basic handling of firearms to be a safety issue – just like learning how to swim or any other personal safety concern. We, along with one of the Young Americans for Liberty guys, gave her several recommendations.

Perhaps some of the most interesting conversations overheard during the event when our table didn’t have visitors came from the Democratic representatives. Apparently, George Bush is running for President this year. Oh, wait, he’s not? You would not have known that to listen to their pitch. At this point, I wonder if some future history books will actually have mistakes listing either the election of 2008 or 2012 as Obama versus Bush.

As you can see in the pictures, we gave out Twizzlers. Given the pretty sparse crowd of visitors, they were actually pretty popular. College students love candy, and at less than $8 for 180 Twizzlers, it was a cheap and easy way to get people over to the table. A few of the students even picked up the bumper stickers.

We had several students and a couple of the staff come up just to thank us for coming out and representing the Second Amendment at an event like that. In fact, they now have interest in doing more events that feature policy debates and representatives of different sides of political issues.

While this event wasn’t huge for getting lots of new volunteers signed up, it was absolutely useful in reminding folks that the “gun lobby” is people. It’s 4 million NRA members who care about our rights. It’s even college students today who wanted to talk guns, but are still saving up for an NRA Life membership. We are real, and we do vote. We’re not representatives of some gun company as the anti-gun groups want to argue. We’re just average folks who care about Constitutional rights.