Miguel discovers another case of mayors who are on the MAIG list, but claim to have never joined the organization. This isn’t the first time this has been uncovered.
Year: 2012
What Anti-Gun People Play
Media Matters Hypocrisy
With all of the Media Matters attacks on gun bloggers, NRA News, and the Second Amendment in recent years, we just assumed that it was the money from the Joyce Foundation that inspired their attacks. Turns out there may be more to it than that…
David Brock was smoking a cigarette on the roof of his Washington, D.C. office one day in the late fall of 2010 when his assistant and two bodyguards suddenly appeared and whisked him and his colleague Eric Burns down the stairs.
Brock, the head of the liberal nonprofit Media Matters for America, had told friends and co-workers that he feared he was in imminent danger from right-wing assassins and needed a security team to keep him safe.
The threat he faced while smoking on his roof? “Snipers,†a former co-worker recalled.
“He had more security than a Third World dictator,†one employee said, explaining that Brock’s bodyguards would rarely leave his side, even accompanying him to his home in an affluent Washington neighborhood each night where they “stood post†to protect him. “What movement leader has a detail?†asked someone who saw it.
Um. Wow. Okay.
Daily Caller has a look at the world inside Media Matters, and the paranoia of politically-motivated snipers isn’t the only gun-related news they found about the founder of the organization.
By 2010, Brock’s personal assistant, a man named Haydn Price-Morris, was carrying a holstered and concealed Glock handgun when he accompanied Brock to events, including events in Washington, D.C., a city with famously restrictive gun laws. Price-Morris told others he carried the gun to protect Brock from threats.
Late in 2010, other Media Matters employees learned about Price-Morris’s gun, and he was fired due to their objections. No public announcement was made.
According to one source with knowledge of what happened next, Brock was “terrified†that news of the gun would leak. “George Soros and a lot of groups connected to gun control are funding this group, and they wouldn’t be too happy that an employee of Media Matters was carrying a gun, especially when it was illegal in D.C.â€
So, let me get this straight. The attacks on lawful gun owners are coming from a group that is headed by someone who hires an armed driver, suffers from a questionable mental state, has publicly admitted to drug use, and had an assistant violate gun laws on his behalf. The organization leader isn’t actually concerned about the hypocrisy of it all, but rather that funding might dry up if his gun hiring habits are exposed.
There’s much more in the article about the absurdity that supposedly takes place in their offices – looking the other way while colleagues are having sex on a desk, while also trying to fire a researcher for the crime of being ugly – and just how many in the media have run with their stories while the White House ultimately uses the rhetoric that Media Matters writes and pitches.
Where We Agree But Disagree
Sarah Brady and Joan Peterson think the folks that live on West Crooked Lake are entitled to peace and quiet from duck hunters, who supposedly are newly enabled to blast away at ducks during season, thanks to the state giving teeth to preemption. I haven’t looked into Florida law yet to see whether this is the case, but in most cases, in many states including Pennsylvania, local communities have been preempted from interfering with lawful hunting for some time.
I have to say, I’m sympathetic to the residents. I’d be really peeved if I was awoken from sleep by the sound of shotgun blasts, and quick look over the lake shows it to be a pretty heavily residential area. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. But for all I know hunting has gone on here for a long time, and these folks have just found a new vehicle by which to complain about it. You never really can expect to be told the full truth by the media with these local issues. Nonetheless, I’m sympathetic to the residents.
But you know what would fix this problem? Legalizing suppressors. I suspect Sarah Brady and Japete aren’t going to go for that one. That would take care of the noise problem, and the lake is certainly big enough to safely hunt on provided all the standard precautions are taken. Bird shot doesn’t stay lethal for all that great a distance, despite the woman in the article worried about “someone’s child accidentally catch[ing] a stray bullet.” You don’t hunt ducks with bullets lady, you hunt them with shot.
Crime Gun Shift
The seminal study on where criminals are getting their guns, one can make an interesting observation. In 1991, the survey notes that 20.8% of inmates reported getting their guns through legal sources, like licensed gun shops. Criminals reported in 1991 getting 33.8% from friends and family, and 40.8% from a street source. When the study was repeated in 1997, after the enactment of the Brady Act, the number of criminals reporting getting their guns from an legal source was down to 13.9%, however, the number reporting getting guns from friends and family increased to 39.6%, and street sources dropped to 39.2%. So the drop in crime guns from legal sources dropped 6.9%, while friends and family increased by 5.8%.
What this could very well say is that most criminals who obtained firearms through “lie and buy” prior to the enactment of the Brady Act, after the Brady Act merely shifted to the tactic of obtaining firearms from friends and family.
The breakdown appearing in Table 8 is also of interest. Actual purchases from friends and family went down, but what went way up is the practice of borrowing or renting guns from friends and family. That went up by 8.4%. Breaking down street and illegal sources, theft of firearms dropped somewhat from 91 to 97, as did buying from drugs dealers or other criminals. Black market sources rose.
I think it’s reasonable to conclude from the data that ending private sales would have nearly no effect on criminal access to firearms. Renting or borrowing from associates is not an activity the law can reach easily. This practice is already unlawful in the case of lending or renting to individuals who are prohibited, or who intend to use the firearm to commit a crime. My conclusion is the great burden it would put on lawful gun owners, versus the negligible effect it would have on criminal access, speaks against ending private sales, and probably against having background checks at all. A conclusion that can easily be drawn from this data is that the Brady Act only had the effect of shifting how criminals obtain firearms, rather than seriously impacting the illegal gun market.
NRA Developing a Gaming App
FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif., Feb. 9, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — MEDL Mobile, Inc. (OTCBB:MEDL.OBÂ -Â News), an incubator and aggregator of mobile technology, announced today that it has been Licensed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) to develop mobile entertainment technology strategy for the organization, starting with its first entertainment shooting app which through various methods promotes gun safety via a series of educational information within a gaming environment.
“We wanted to provide current and future shooters with an entertaining way to learn about gun safety, so we partnered with MEDL Mobile to create an experience in which users engage in target practice at the NRA Headquarters shooting range, enter tournaments, compete online and invite friends to participate, all while learning important firearms safety information along the way,” said Mike Marcellin of the National Rifle Association. “The app will even allow users to look up state-by-state gun regulations and other helpful information, all within a fun, interactive game environment.”
“The NRA needed a way to interact beyond its 4 million active members, an enormous following that may not otherwise engage with the organization — until now,” said Andrew Maltin, CEO of MEDL Mobile. “Reaching a very large membership and communication to supporters are a few of the many challenges a mobile strategy can help a business or membership organization overcome.”
The NRA’s first interactive mobile game app is expected to debut in the spring of 2012.
I’ll be interested to see how this works out. Most online video games that involve shooting are either combat games or hunting games. It’s going to take a good bit of creativity to create a game that’ll attract people to play. Shooting is a lot of fun to do yourself, but watching other people shoot is like watching grass grow, and I’ve not found a huge number of shooting games that aren’t combat-based that are really addictive. Like I said, I think it’ll take creativity, and hopefully this company NRA has hired has the chops. I’m skeptical that “look up state-by-state gun regulations” and “Â all within a fun, interactive game environment” are two things that are going to successfully go together.
Gun Range Politicking
Remember when I gave Rick Perry a little campaign advice about hitting up a gun range while on the campaign trail? Well, someone in Rick Santorum’s campaign definitely has it together. Looking ahead to the March 6 sorta-Super Tuesday, he was looking to hold a campaign rally at a gun shop in Oklahoma City. Unfortunately, it had to be moved when ticket requests went through the roof after his non-binding caucus & primary wins this week. However, he still stopped in to do a little campaigning at the gun range.
During his pre-rally visit at H&H, Santorum said, “I wish we could have had it here, this would have been perfect.â€
He added, “I am very impressed. It is easy to see why gun ownership is so strong here, and I stand tall with the Second Amendment.â€
Said Miles Hall, founder and president of H&H, “It was a great honor to show a small but important part of the shooting industry to one of our presidential hopefuls.â€
Defensive Gun Use
Clayton Cramer has an article in the Washington Times outlining the fact that use of a gun in self-defense is more common than many people think. Way more common than our opponents will admit, even to themselves.
Our study examines a variety of incident types: concealed-weapon permit holders (285 accounts); home invasions (1,227 incidents); residential burglaries (488). There are categories that we would never have thought were all that common: 172 incidents where people defended themselves from animal attacks (some wild, some dogs gone wild); 34 were incidents where pizza delivery drivers defended themselves from robbery.
As Clayton mentions in the article, the low end, from the National Crime Victimization Survey, is 108,000 DGUs per year. That’s already higher than the much vaunted “gun death” rate suggested by our opponents. Self-defenses incidents are going to overwhelmingly end without the need for bloodshed with a defensive gun use. You have criminals who don’t want to get shot, combined with defenders who don’t want to shoot, and that’s a recipe for resolving confrontations without having to shoot someone.
The Inquirer: Thinking It’s Readers are Fools Since 1829
The Inquirer editorial board is incensed that the legislature is even thinking about enforcing state law. Do they even bother to look at the facts? Of course not. Facts are optional in today’s journalism:
Pennsylvania legislators, forever beholden to the gun lobby it seems, want to kill lost-or-stolen ordinances enacted by a number of Pennsylvania towns to help fight illegal gun trafficking.
The ordinances, passed by 30 communities, require lawful gun owners to report it to police when their firearms have been lost or stolen.
Can the Inquirer name a single case where any of these towns or cities have used to ordinance to go after straw buyers? Can they even name a case of anyone being fined? No, they can’t. They can’t because to the best of my knowledge, this critical, badly needed law has never been used. That’s rather shocking when anti-gun activists and anti-gun politicians acted like the sky was going to fall if they didn’t pass these ordinances.
I am also amazed that the Inquirer has the temerity to suggest Pennsylvania does not have adequate “straw buyer” laws, when it imposes felony sentences on the behavior, and the state outlaws all private transfers of handguns, and has since 1934. Very few other states have such a restriction. If the Inquirer wants to editorialize like these laws don’t exist, pardon us if we get busy working to make that a reality.
The Best Defense
Is a good offense. We all know the term, but so does Rahm Emmanuel. Illinois has gotten dangerously (in Rahm’s view) close to shoving concealed carry down Chicago’s throat, and if they succeed in doing that, they can succeed in preempting a log of Chicago’s post-McDonald ridiculousness. I think he wants to get an anti-gun bill moving in Springfield as a defense to that. If we all have to rally to stop a bad bill, that runs us out to push a good bill. It’s smart, but it assumes Rahm can get it moving.