The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
A brief blurb on our efforts last night before the Lower Makefield Board of Supervisors. When we fight, we win. We only lose when we stay home. This is what Democracy looks like.
UPDATE: Looks like we’re not the only ones:
Boston News, Weather, Sports | FOX 25 | MyFoxBoston
Good show!
One of our local communities, Lower Makefield, is misbehaving on gun rights. I’m planning to show up and to be prepared to speak on behalf of my club, who have many members in that township. They are preempted, so the potential for damage is minimal, but it’s a Republican and former state rep who’s the Chairman of the Board of Supervisors, and I don’t want the County GOP to start thinking they can push us around. If you live in the area, consider stopping by tonight at 7:30PM.
UPDATE: A good number of my fellow club members showed up, and early on the Township Board of Supervisors rescinded their earlier resolution supporting gun control, much to the disgust of the two anti-gun speakers present. Sometimes victory is sweet indeed. But more importantly, the message was sent.
Every activist goes through ups and downs. As I noted on Twitter earlier today, simply the act of posting information relevant to sportsmen and hunters while encouraging people to meet with their lawmakers on Second Amendment issues got me called a Fudd. Because, you know, even mentioning the word hunting and guns apparently makes one a Fudd. Seriously, who needs enemies when we have our own people willing to scream traitor for even acknowledging the existence of other areas of interest in the shooting sports & gun movement?
But, then, things turned around. I started scoping out which MAIG mayors are up for election this year in our county. It turns out all of them are. Unfortunately, many haven’t been challenged in previous years, so that’s not great. But, when you find out one was not only challenged in his last election, but he also only won by 68 votes, that’s a pick-up opportunity! That’s like a happy dance because just a little bit of activism by a handful of gun owners could turn those numbers around if he has a good challenger again.
Anyone else have MAIG mayors who are on the ballot this year?
IMAO has posted a list of gun tips offered to Americans by our brilliant and thoughtful Vice President.
Counties are starting to pass resolutions opposing the New York SAFE Act. Niagara County has passed a unanimous resolution, along with Ulster County, and Schoharie County. Resolutions will be considered soon in Sullivan County, Delaware County, and Greene County.
BTW, Sullivan County is named after this guy, and not this criminal. Also notable is that not all of these counties are upstate. Sullivan and Ulster County are both considered part of the New York metro area, and a few are swing counties in terms of Democrat v. Republican.
UPDATE: Here’s a complete picture of the current county government resolutions. Looks pretty good.
According to Democratic Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, women who want to legally use firearms to defend themselves should only use rifles that are easy to manage. The limitations to this rule of self-defense is that they shouldn’t use any called AR-15 or with shoulder things that go up.
Democratic Vice President Joe Biden says that Rep. McCarthy, the dear little old lady, just doesn’t know what she’s talking about and that women should only consider shotguns for self-defense.
But out in Colorado, Democratic Rep. Joe Salazar thinks they are both clearly wrong because women aren’t capable of sound judgement if they “feel like [they]’re going to be raped,” so they’ll shoot up the place and kill all sorts of innocent people with their willy nilly unsafe gun use.
So, tell me again, which political party is known as the party of women’s right to choose?
I was quite pleased to come across two quality election analyses of two Pennsylvania congressional district and their traditional counties of representation. They happen to include both my current county (Bucks), and also the county I grew up in (Delaware). Having read them both, they are quite thorough and good, and done by people who seem to have a grasp for the political situation we’ve been facing here in the Philadelphia suburbs. If you’re interested in the suburban Philadelphia political dynamic, or in Pennsylvania politics in general, I highly recommend following the links. I think it’s very important for all Pennsylvanians to understand the dynamics here, because with the western part of the state rapidly depopulating, politics in this state, including gun politics, is going to increasingly be decided in the Philadelphia suburbs. First, here is an excerpt from the Bucks County analysis:
Bucks, along with the other three suburban counties on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware Valley, was traditionally a Republican stronghold. While Lower Bucks, dominated by union influence, has traditionally been Democratic, Republicans have always dominated county politics on a local and statewide level. Bucks County voted about four points to the right of the nation in the 1980 and 1984 Presidential elections and about seven points to the right of the nation in the 1988 Presidential election. The right Republicans, ones who could connect with Lower Bucks’ working class, heavily Irish Catholic population, could even squeeze out votes from Lower Bucks. Even if a Republican wasn’t a great fit for Lower Bucks, middle and upper Bucks provided more than enough votes to give Republicans a strong victory countywide. Middle and Upper Bucks have traditionally had a very Christian population but one with a pacifist streak.
However, Demographic changes that have magnified since the early 1990s have stripped Bucks of its historical position as a Republican stronghold. With minority growth in the borough of Bristol, Bristol Township, and Bensalem Township, Morrisville, and Falls Township, Lower Bucks has become harder for Republicans to win crossover votes in the lower third of the county. Additionally, middle aged Jews who had the money to leave Northeast Philadelphia, or their wealthy college graduate children, largely settled in middle Bucks around the Newtown or Doylestown areas …
Read the whole thing, because it’s top notch analysis. It comes with some very interesting heat maps that show how different parts of the county and congressional districts voted. The analysis of Delaware County and the 7th Congressional district is equally good:
For years, Delaware County, Pennsylvania had an almighty, well organized Republican machine that controlled the local government and its politics. Party bosses and the “War Board,” the county Republican Party’s executive committee, ran everything in Delaware County. Even in the county’s historically black areas, like Chester, Republicans controlled many local offices. Current Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R-Chester) served as Chester’s mayor between 1999 and 2002 and Chester even had a Republican mayor until 2012. …
The author then goes on to document how Delco has swung hard in the other direction, mostly due to demographic changes. The overall picture in both counties, at least how I read the maps, isn’t so much that the GOP has lost adherents, though the strong social conservatism and bungled war efforts during the Bush years certainly have contributed to that, but that the traditional GOP voters are moving farther out, with urban, largely Democratic voters from Philadelphia moving into the near suburbs. That’s making it more difficult to draw safe GOP districts.
The good news is the cohort of voters which have formed the traditional GOP base swung back in the 2010 and 2012 elections. If you think the Obama effect is temporary, that’s a good thing. There might be a basis to get a lot of suburban voters back into the fold, if the GOP is smart. The sad part is, the GOP is quite often far from smart. The “culture wars” have not helped the GOP in this area. In terms of gun politics, there is still a rather healthy gun culture in Chester and Bucks counties, to a lesser extent Montgomery county, and to a considerably lesser extent in Delaware County, especially the eastern parts. There is a basis through which we can form a movement. Creating a pro-gun movement for Pennsylvania’s future is going to depend greatly on mobilizing activists in this part of the state. In my experience, it is hard, but Obama is currently providing us a base from which to do it.
Justice Scalia thinks we’ll be hearing more Supreme Court cases on guns soon. I think Scalia would vote to give us a strong and robust Second Amendment, but he needs four more votes to win cases. I’m glad to hear he’s softening up Kagan. Who would have thought in the 70s and early 80s we’d be primarily fighting long gun bans because handgun bans were off the table? I actually think it would benefit even a very urban and very gun weary Democratic Party to have the courts largely settle the issue in favor of gun rights. That opens the door to the Democrats using gun control the same way Republicans use abortion. Republicans love to talk a good talk on abortion, but the fact is the court protections preclude most of the policy options they advocate, and they are then left nibbling around the edges, and mostly failing at that, when it comes to policy. But it’s a good issue to drag out at election time and dangle in front of important constituencies. I’d be tickled pink of the gun issue ended up like abortion, and with similar levels of protection from the courts.
Amicus briefs have been filed in Kachalsky. I don’t think all this late gun control nonsense is going to change the fact that carry will be the next issue before the Court, and we can hope the Court will clear things up a bit when it comes to standards of review.
Rahm is looking for help from suburban lawmakers for gun control. People often make the mistake of thinking the core of the gun rights movement is rural. It is not. It’s largely a suburban phenomena, if you have ever taken a serious look at studies that have looked into who the gun culture is really comprised of. In my experience, people in rural areas are less aware of what a contentious issue guns are. A lot of people from my generation who became active in this issue came out of the tech industry.
TFB notes that  “Guns are the new golf,” linking to a story about a reviving of the shooting culture in Silicon Valley, and noting some famous gun wielding techies, like Eric Raymond. It’s worth nothing that ESR is from around here, rather than Silicon Valley, and the Philadelphia suburbs still has a fairly healthy gun culture, whereas California has taken extensive measures to destroy its own legal gun culture. This makes reviving a gun culture difficult, but the seed is there if we can fix California.
Among Gen Xers, tech people tended to be pretty libertarian in their thinking and political orientation. The Millennials who are coming up to replace us are culturally just as tolerant as we were, but identify more with the left on economic issues and on the role of government. I’ve often wondered how much of the current push was to try to pull Millenials, who think quite highly of President Obama, into being the next generation of gun control advocates by using Obama’s cool factor to help make gun control seem cool. As Glenn Reynolds notes, gun control is a movement of old white people, and old white people die off.
All the news that’s fit to dump:
More fun with headlines, and the media spin. BTW, that Vermont story came out right after Sandy Hook, so I took some time to watch this guy’s videos, and thought it was something Clayton Cramer might be interested in. I’m not sure that concerns this guy had mental issues are unfounded.
Are Governor Cuomo’s Presidential ambitions ruined? Well, jumping on the gun control bandwagon isn’t going to help win Democratic primaries in the South.
Chris takes a look at the dominoes. Once they start to fall it’s going to be hell to stop them. He notes: “‘Pack up and move’ seems to be a dwindling option at the rate the infection is spreading.” The anti-gun folks are raising the stakes. You do realize that works both ways, right? We need to work hard. We need to regain momentum and crush them.
Would new gun laws spark widespread civil disobedience? I’d hope so. If we ever get to the point where we stand idly by and allow our civil liberties to be taken from us, we’re not Americans anymore.
It’s another Markley’s Law Monday.
So you want to ban magazines, eh? Do you even know where all yours are? I always find them when I go digging through my bins.
Democrats have a full blown Aiken on theirs hands. I think all sides can probably agree that if you’re a politician, and the word “rape” comes into your wormy little brain, zip your trap. Resist the temptation. More here.
Maybe we need magazine limitations for cops.
The real danger lurking in David Frum’s ignorance.
Colorado Democrats think you should consider alternatives to defending yourself with a gun, like ball point pens.
Chicago has no space for more “gun criminals,” but yet we need more gun laws.
Trying to make progress in other states. We’ve actually been winning battles, if you pay close attention. Our enemies are focused on other things.
This is all part of the plan to destroy the Second Amendment. What’s scary is that he might succeed.
UK legal pistols by exploiting the “steel counterweight loophole.”
Lawmakers predict Congress will OK new gun laws. They want to make you think this is inevitable, so why bother lifting a finger? Don’t listen to them.
California-approved handgun safe.
Guns are really boaring. But I thought if you shot an animal with an AR-15, it exploded?
Guns are not a defensive weapon. Really? So Police Chief Ken James’ officers carry them for offensive purposes like murder? Remember that police chiefs are politicians. Actually, in some cases they are worse than politicians. They are usually appointed by politicians, which means chapping your lips on an awful lot of asses to get there.
NRA is noting that it’s starting in Pennsylvania. We have the advantage of a friendly House, a so-so senate, and a friendly Governor. Even though the GOP controls all three, their fortunes here over the long term don’t look good. Pennsylvania should absolutely not be taken for granted. Bloomberg is putting a big target on all of us.
