NRA to Brady: “Losers say what?”

NRA has an article rebutting Dan Gross’s assertion that NRA is now weak and ineffective:

Gross also failed to mention how his own organization scored in the 2012 elections.  The reason for that is simple: the Brady Campaign was not included in the study because it just isn’t a player.  It raised and spent so little money that it wasn’t worth measuring.  However, if you apply the same standards to Brady as the Sunlight Foundation used, the Brady score would be 0.00.  It did not spend money backing one winning candidate in the 2012 election.

In order to spend money to back any candidate, one must have money to back a candidate with. The Brady folks have been short of that for some time, and have not raised serious money for electioneering in many years. Bloomberg is the big threat now. Gun control is exclusively an issue for a handful of billionare moguls.

Kathleen Kane Already Sticking it LTC Holders

She’s already signed on to a letter to the Senate leadership expressing opposition to the National Reciprocity Bill, while I’m sure she’s champing at the bit to be able to recind our own reciprocity agreements.

Pennsylvania is on its way to no longer being a pro-gun state. It’s only been kept that way by the hard work of a lot of people over the years. We’ve long depended on the blue dog Democrat to keep their own party in line. Blue dogs are now critically endangered, even in Pennsylvania. The hard left is taking control of the Democratic Party, and they are still winning elections.

Upholding the Sullivan Law

Miguel takes a look at exactly what the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld. Yes, judges Katzmann, Wesley, and Lynch (Clinton, Bush Jr., and Obama, respectively), this is the racist claptrap, that sacred “one-hundred-year-old law” that you tacitly endorsed when you declined to “call into question the state’s traditional authority to extensively regulate handgun possession in public.” You know, slavery and Jim Crow were a tradition in many parts of the country until relatively recently too. Time don’t make right.

Why Does This Say Anything?

MAIG has commissioned polls:

The Mayors Against Illegal Guns survey of voters in Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado indicated 45 percent of voters trusted Obama on gun issues, while 40 percent trusted Romney, results released Thursday indicated.

Really? This is supposed to mean something? Do you have any idea how many staunch supporters of gun rights did not trust Romney on guns? I had more than a few people on here arguing with me that Obama was objectively better, because he at least signed two bills that contained two improvements to gun laws.

Obama won re-election by largely ignoring the gun issue. If NRA’s power really is waning, it’s because the gun voters are getting complacent and going back to sleep. Bloomberg’s theory is that the gun vote doesn’t really exist. If Bloomberg wants to team up with Obama, and wake the gun voter back up, I’m game.

Heaviest Thing Amazon Will Ship Free

Happens to be a gun safe. They take a loss on the safe, but make it up on smaller items. I’d note that when I was looking into a safe, I looked at mail order, like Amazon. The downside is they’ll deliver it to your property, but getting it in the house, and to the space you want to put it, is your problem. If you don’t have the equipment to move a 1500 pound safe, you’re screwed. I chose to go with Liberty Safes of New Jersey, who delivered to the room I wanted, and bolted it to the floor. It was well worth the extra cost to have them do it.

Interesting AR Accessory

This device for stabilizing an AR-15 pistol would seem to be for disabled shooters, but it’s interesting generally. I’d want a quick release strap for being able to put the pistol down, but this is about the closest I think you’ll get to being a cybernetic being with a pistol as an appendage. It would certainly make dual wielding more interesting.

5-Day Loaner Gun

Via Dave Adams on Facebook, I found a Saturday Night Live video I’d never seen before that features Charlton Heston in response to the Brady Bill passage. You have to be able to laugh at yourself, and it allows him to make the point that criminals could still get guns even as the law-abiding had to wait.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/279031

A Violent Illegal Mayor Against Guns

It seems like there are many criminal members of Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns coalition who lobby Congress and the White House for more restrictions on law-abiding gun owners as a supposed solution to crime in their cities.

A reader noticed the other day that a new mayor in Pennsylvania was recruited into the ranks, one with a history of violently assaulting women and police officers. In fact, local police have publicly opposed his involvement in public office because of his assault that left one officer with a permanent disability.

All of this information was available for Bloomberg’s MAIG recruiters to find well before they signed up Mayor Vaughn D. Spencer and touted his name & photo on their website, as evidenced by this article from the Reading Eagle in January of 2000.

At the time, Berks County District Attorney Mark C. Baldwin filed suit to have Spencer removed from a City Council appointment because the assault made him legally unfit to hold public office. Here’s the relevant part of the story about the multiple violent attacks for which Spencer was accused and convicted:

In April 1986, police said, Spencer went to a home in the 900 block of the North Ninth Street and punched and kicked Carol Ann Parker, breaking her shoulder. Then-Patrolman Charlie Kaucher responded, and Spencer punched him and threw him from a porch, police said.

In October 1987, Spencer pleaded guilty in county court to aggravated assault on Kaucher, a first-degree misdemeanor, and was sentenced to five years of probation.

Nine other charges were dismissed in exchange for the plea, records show.

Kaucher suffered head and other injuries and was left with permanent hearing loss.

I think it’s time for Bloomberg to start answering some questions about his priorities with this coalition of mayors – upwards of 30 of which have been under criminal investigation or convicted of various crimes – now that they have recruited a mayor with a violent criminal record, are they going to put politics before principle?

In recent months, MAIG scrubs any mayor arrested after they signed up for the coalition from their site, but this is a completely new case where the crimes were documented before Bloomberg promoted Spencer’s membership. More importantly, Reading, as a larger city in Pennsylvania, has been a source of political capital for Bloomberg’s coalition. Is he willing to kick out a mayor of a major Pennsylvania city for a history of assaulting police officers, or is the political connection too important for him to keep so that he overlooks the conviction?

In fact, given the rate at which mayors appear to commit crimes, it’s a reasonable question as to whether or not Bloomberg will take the ultimate stand against criminal behavior and actually mandate background checks on members before they sign up with MAIG. It would be an interesting challenge to see if Bloomberg would have the nerve to actually mandate that mayors must be legally eligible to own a firearm before they can join. His numbers would likely see a very sharp drop.