Month: February 2013
The Usefulness of Gun Control
Anti-gun lawmakers from Philadelphia are speaking out on Pennsylvania’s new concealed carry reciprocity restrictions. What are they saying?
- “I don’t think it’s going to drastically affect violence in Philadelphia.” – Rep. Kevin Boyle (D-rated by NRA)
- “It’s not the people with legitimate guns, it’s the people with the street guns who are destroying the neighborhood.†– Rep. James Clay (refused to answer NRA member questions during his election)
- “We have to be realistic. This isn’t a panacea that’s going to solve all of our problems.†– Rep. Brendan Boyle (D+ rating from NRA)
In other words, this served absolutely no purpose even though many of the Philadelphia lawmakers previously claimed that “closing the Florida Loophole” would absolutely make a huge difference to solving Philadelphia’s crime rates. Now that they have it, these lawmakers are calling for more laws and restrictions.
New Local Anti-Gun Groups
Reasoned Discourse breaks out in just about every corner of anti-gun activism. The same is true for local groups that are popping up in Southeast Pennsylvania.
The first example, found via PAFOA, is Bucks County Against Gun Violence. What’s item one of tonight’s anti-gun agenda?
- Facebook – changes that have been made to safeguard the facebook page
Yes, shut down dissent! Based on what I see, they appear to report all pro-gun comments as spam on Facebook. This group is so extreme that they support an idea that would ban gun owners from purchasing and transporting firearms across city lines. Yes, city lines.
Then there’s Bucks Safe which is run by a public official, and his meeting announcement informs us that he’ll only allow you entrance if you agree to his mission statement. Since he’s holding his meeting on private property, he can have them turn away anyone he deems unsuitable or with opinions that don’t match his sufficiently. This is the same Pennsylvania lawmaker who called continued ownership of semi-automatic rifles a dangerous loophole that he plans to close by declaring possession illegal.
These folks don’t want a serious discussion about what measures might actually reduce gun violence. They just want to make the laws complicated enough that gun owners who think they have some kind of “right” to own firearms are put in jail or disarmed. They don’t want to hear debate, nor will they tolerate the presence of gun owners who might have different ideas in their midst.
Helping Gun Grabbers Write Better Legislation
I think we might be helping the other side write better legislation. I’m just as guilty of this too, and likely one of the biggest offenders, but I’m hard pressed to not notice that every magazine ban proposed doesn’t have the obvious flaws we pointed out in previous bans. They’ve also learned not to ban this. Previous magazine bans proposed in the Congress and in some State Capitols were so broad they covered things like tube fed .22s and lever action rifles, which commonly hold more than 10 rounds. What’s worse is that we made these arguments on bills that weren’t going to go anywhere, and weren’t going anywhere. All that was accomplished was teaching the other side how to write better legislation so that now, some very effective arguments against the current bills are off the table. It’s making me think.
I will continue to do reporting on bills that have legs, and offer legislative analysis. But for bills that aren’t going anywhere, I’m really going to have to think twice about tearing apart the flaws, because the next bill, one that might start to move, won’t have those flaws, and I scuttled those arguments for no gain. Gun owners today are much harder to divide than they have been in the past, but it definitely helps when you can point out to someone, say, in the cowboy shooting community that it is in fact your guns they are after. People are always going to be more fired up when they are directly affected than when it’s the other guy who’s ox is getting gored, even if they still oppose what’s happening. I will try to think carefully from now on about what I’m saying.
Colorado At Grave Risk
A bill, HB1224, has passed out of committee in the Democrat-controlled Colorado House. HB1224 would ban magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, and shotgun magazines that hold more than 5. This would ban many common shotguns. It doesn’t matter of the magazine is detachable or fixed. It would make it a crime to give a magazine to a friend to shoot, and then take it back. It also prohibits manufacture for civilian use. Magpul has threatened to leave the state, and take approximately 1000 jobs with them, if this passes. Democrats are showing they care more about their far-left agenda than they do about jobs.
Gun owners in Colorado need to do everything they can to assure that this does not pass. Flood the Capitol!
A Report from New Jersey
After the pre-planned rally in Trenton managed to turn out about 1,000 people even with an impending blizzard hitting New Jersey, lawmakers decided to suddenly scheduled hearings on 24 gun control bills the following week (today) so that gun owners would be less likely to attend given the time they took off of work the week before.
One report I saw pop up on Facebook appears to show that they aren’t keeping gun owners from speaking out against more gun control:
So many Pro-2A people showed up to testify against new gun control in NJ, that they can not all fit in the building. An emergency demonstration permit has been issued to allow them to gather outside the Capitol.
Bing Measures the SOTU Gun Control Debate
Much of the State of the Union was going up and down in the Bing audience live ratings that allowed viewers to vote every five seconds during the speech. But I noticed a very interesting trend among all parties and both genders when President Obama started talking about gun control.
The average rating during his gun control rant was -75, and I never saw it drop lower at any other time during the speech.
UPDATE: Commenter Tim adds important context to the dramatic drop in support from viewers:
Fox News just stated that the largest spike in votes for the “Bing Pulse Tracker†occurred when the President began talking about gun control (+ 1 million). To see the highest spike in votes turn into highest dislike rate during the entire address is very telling of how Americans really feel.
Live Blogging the SOTU
On Twitter. Brought to you unofficially by Jim Beam Rye, which is the only rye carried by the state monopoly in my town. I can’t promise to be witty or to even keep up, but I will try.
NRA Response to Obama State of the Union
ILA is tweeting this out ahead of the State of the Union. Apparently Eric Holder’s DOJ have been busy bees studying the gun control issue:
The document NRA is speaking about can be found here, and is a January memo from the National Institutes of Justice, part of the Department of Justice. I think it’s important this is spread far and wide.
The Lies of the Other Side
Listen to this nonsense, and note that YouTube allows you to express disapproval of this video. I would encourage you to do so. Unfortunately, Reasoned Discourse is in full effect for comments, though I don’t honestly blame anyone for doing that on YouTube:
I guess I should be glad our opponents don’t heed the first lesson of conflict, which is to know your enemy. I used to think these people didn’t actually believe this stuff, and it was just spin designed to make Second Amendment rights seems freakish and out of the mainstream. But after having interacted with many of them on social media, many folks on the other side of the issue are utterly convinced everything here is truth. As I’ve said, NRA is a manifestation of the gun culture. The gun culture is not a manifestation of NRA. If NRA were working for the gun industry, they’d support ending private sales, because it drives more dollars to dealers, and by making guns harder and more costly to trade, drives people to newly manufactured firearms. The only reason the gun industry hasn’t gotten on board with this already is because we’ve gotten very talented, as a community, at rooting out and destroying the businesses of traitors.
I’d encourage everyone to spread this video far and wide and get people to give it a “thumbs down.”