Month: February 2013

Surrender your Fourth Amendment rights to exercise your Second Amendment rights. How does something like that end up in a bill by mistake? That’s not something you get through poor definitions:

“In order to continue to possess an assault weapon that was legally possessed on the effective date of this section, the person possessing shall … safely and securely store the assault weapon. The sheriff of the county may, no more than once per year, conduct an inspection to ensure compliance with this subsection.”

In other words, come into homes without a warrant to poke around. Failure to comply could get you up to a year in jail.

“I’m a liberal Democrat — I’ve voted for only one Republican in my life,” Palmer told me. “But now I understand why my right-wing opponents worry about having to fight a government takeover.”

Gee, ya think? That was deliberate, and no accident. There’s nothing that’s too draconian for these people when it comes to gun ownership. Get the message: “you should not be a gun owner!” They will abuse you to no end until you get that message.

UPDATE: It would seem it’s also been an “accident” in past legislative sessions.

Caleb asks whether it’s a waste of time talking to anti-gun people. It’s a broad spectrum. For truly anti-gun folks, I would say yeah, it’s waste of time. You’re never going to convince those people, and a lot of them are mouth foamers of the highest order. I’d talk to them only for entertainment value. Beyond that there are people who believe in gun control, but for whom it would be a stretch to classify as anti-gun. Those people might be reachable, but it depends on their level of dedication to their belief. But neither anti-gun types or gun control advocates are the real enemy. The real enemy is ignorance.

Rational political ignorance is something you can read a lot about, and guns as a political topic is no exception to the rule. We have always lost when the gun control proponents are more successful at reaching the ignorant and manipulating them than we are at trying to relieve ignorance. The real threat of highly publicized mass tragedies like Sandy Hook is the re-energization of their own base, and a greater willingness on the part of the ignorant to be manipulated. In terms of talking to people, the best thing we can do as gun owners is try to relieve ignorance, and you can find it everywhere. You can even find it at places like your local gun club or gun shop. It runs especially rampant among people who don’t guns, aren’t familiar with them, and have put very little thought into the topic.

A lot of people on our side often get complacent and cocky because we greatly outnumber the people dedicated to gun control, and the gun control advocates don’t bring much to the table. The former is true, but the latter is not. What gun control advocates bring is a talent for manipulating ignorance in their favor. More importantly, they once again have the willing assistance of the media, and now bring the vast monetary resources of Mike Bloomberg to the table as well. All the focus on demonizing the NRA is part of this manipulation. The goal is to destroy the NRA brand in the eyes of the public, and to damage any lawmaker or policymaker who associates with it. How many people do you think choose who to vote for based on vague impressions and gut instinct about a candidate, rather knowledge actual knowledge of the issues and position? It’s not a small number, and if you wonder why NRA tries hard not to go too far out ahead of public opinion, and why politicians pay any heed to gun control at all, here is your answer.

Unfamiliarity is the soil in which the gun control seed grows, and ignorance is its fertilizer. We have been successful as a movement because of our numbers, and because we’ve evangelized the issue through our own horizontal interpretive communities, and through good old fashioned word of mouth. Instead of having a fake national conversation that only involves political elites and the media, we went and talked to people, took them shooting, and relieved a lot of ignorance in the process. What really keeps people like Mike Bloomberg up at night is the idea, that through more court victories, and further cultural progress, we may be able to begin mission work in his very city, and begin converting the heathen. When we talk, we win.

Publicola is blogging again, after a long hiatus. His blog predates this one by a good bit. I agree with his analysis about what’s going on in Colorado. What they are trying to do is swing the pendulum back in the other direction. No new major gun control has passed in this country since the 1990s, really at either the state or federal level. That’s largely because of the drubbing we gave them at the ballot box after the smoke cleared. Well, it’s twenty years later and Obama and the far-left Democrats are betting that the gun vote is built into the Republican count, and that the gun issue can no longer deliver swing voters. They are throwing down, and betting they can slap us around with impunity, and there’s nothing we can do about it. This is what that looks like in New Jersey, as Democrats tell gun owners they won’t get to have a say before the voting:

We already saw a devastating loss in New York, and New Jersey and California aren’t far behind. This is certainly not good, but in the big picture gun owners have been punching bags for politicians in those states for years, and we all know it. It’s like showing how tough you are by beating up the fat kid after lunch. Colorado is different, because it is a state that has typical western attitudes when it comes to civilian gun ownership. New gun restrictions there, even modest ones, is a much bigger deal than in the states anti-gun forces have already largely won. Any victory there will provide a template that will be repeated in other traditionally pro-gun swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, you name it. Once the dominoes start to fall, it’s going to be extremely difficult to stop. This is why they cannot be allowed to score any wins at all. This isn’t about reasonableness. This isn’t about people coming together to solve problems. Politics is not either of those things: it is about power, and nothing else, and the side that is more effective at wielding power is the one that goes home victorious, and the other beaten up and bloodied in ways that couldn’t have been imagined when you went in thinking they were going to be reasonable. There is no reasonableness in the political process, there is only victory and defeat.

If they beat us in Colorado, we have to punish those responsible in the next election cycle. If Colorado passes gun control, and no one loses their seats, it’s going to be over for gun rights in Colorado, and possibly other states. Once politicians learn you can’t threaten their seats, your state will be New Jersey and California very very fast. Political elites don’t like civilian gun ownership. They don’t really like you either. We’re going to need all hands on deck to try to stop this, and failing that, to deliver the punishment that is necessary at election time. The progressive-left is calling what they think is a bluff. We have to show them it’s no bluff, and that we still hold a winning hand.

Voting could occur on the House floor tomorrow, so it is imperative to call or e-mail your lawmakers. Shut the capitol down! Arma Borealis has a handy list of e-mails you can use, along with a sample letter.

Bloomberg has completely thrown down in the special election race in Illinois with his million dollar investment to defeat Debbie Halvorson. It’s incumbent on every gun owner in Illinois to make sure it’s a bad one. Getting Halvorson ahead of the pack, and helping out her campaign, if it leads to victory on election day, would send a huge message to the rest of the country about how good Bloomberg’s money is when put against our grassroots. I know I haven’t been too keen on the Democratic Party lately, but this is an overwhelmingly Democratic district, and Halvorson is enough of a threat that Bloomberg thought it was worth a million dollars, and this is shaping up to be a strategic race.