April 2014 – Page 9 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Thursday News Links

With the latest mass shooting at Fort Hood, there’s obviously going to be a lot of reaction. As I mentioned yesterday, our opponents have a poor track record of exploiting this kind of situation, but surely they will try:

MAIG/MDA’s statement on the Fort Hood shooting. I notice that it appears that John Feinblatt is now the Chairman of MAIG, which I’m guessing means that Bloomberg is now employing him instead of New York City taxpayers. Should have always been that way.

Piers Morgan: still a jackass.

Bearing Arms has the facts of the shooting as they stand now.

Shocker: mental illness seems to have played a role in this latest mass shooting.

Shocker, Part II: The CEO of GDSI, the smart gun company, isn’t a gun guy. No, I suspect his passion is using government to force his product down people’s throats whether they want it or not.

Comparing murder rates across countries. If you don’t cherry pick your data, there’s no correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates.

Linking Senator Yee’s voting record to campaign donations. More about Yee from Business Insider. From Reason: Why isn’t Leland Yee a household name? Because he’s a Democrat, and the media hates Republicans.

Hot guns fueling gun violence. But I thought that criminals got their guns from gun shows and the internet?

The Drake case, challenging New Jersey’s no-issue concealed carry policy, has been getting some attention from the press.

New Mexico’s requirement that concealed carry permit applicants be US citizens has been struck down. I’m not even sure you need to reach the Second Amendment on that, since I think it’s well-established that kind of discrimination violates equal protection.

NSSF and SAAMI are suing California over microstamping.

Dave Hardy: “Excuse me while I upchuck.” The Arizona Republic thinks we should celebrate the architect of Fast and Furious. Dave also has an update on the Jones testimony about F&F before Congress.

Claire McCaskill would do well to remember she won her last election by extraordinary luck in drawing a hapless opponent. She’s still a leftist serving in a red state that’s just getting redder. Blasting the NRA and singing Vivek Murthy’s praises won’t endear her. This article is bad advice.

Moms Demand Action speak out against preemption in Florida. Know what their end game is. Preemption is a bedrock principle. Gun ownership basically becomes impossible without great legal jeopardy if local communities can infringe on your rights at will.

College student suspended for questioning the gun control orthodoxy.

How traffic stops should unfold.

Bob Costas: still anti gun. Most of us are far more law-abiding, generally, than your average professional athlete. This isn’t about athletes.

Before the Sturmgewehr. A walk through the pre-history of the assault rifle.

Off Topic:

Charles Koch, the devil himself, defends himself in The Wall Street Journal.

EPA experimenting on children and unsuspecting. If they were a company, and FDA found out about this, the company would be raided and charged with unapproved human trials, which is a crime.

Blaming the Object Rather Than the Individual

It’s spelled D-e-o-d-a-n-d, and before the Normans invaded and gave us all those fancy French and Latin words, the Angles and Saxons called them banes.Â We’re not really any more enlightened as a society than the people who invented the concept in the first millennium, no matter how much we might want to kid ourselves or pat ourselves on the back for our modern sophistication.

NYS Trooper PBA: We Didn’t Pass SAFE

No, they didn’t pass SAFE. That we all agree on. I don’t blame New York State troopers for the law. But police front line when it comes to prosecutorial discretion. They don’t have to look, they don’t have to find, and even if they do find, they don’t have to arrest. If a trooper pulls someone over for a traffic stop, and that person comes back clean when your run their driver’s license, there’s no reason why “have a nice day, and drive carefully,” can’t be the end of that conversation. If they choose to enforce this law on otherwise good and law-abiding people they are as bad as the politicians who passed it.

Looks Like Another Shooting at Fort Hood

Since nearly everything that comes out in the next several hours is likely to range from mildly wrong to grossly wrong, I’m not going to report on facts until facts are in. I’d note that our opponents have not had much success in exploiting mass shooting tragedies at military bases.

Machine Guns & Public Television

I noticed this story about a Friends of NRA event in the midwest that gave donors the opportunity to shoot one of the Gatling guns that Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders used at San Juan Hill plus some machine guns, and I had to say that I’m impressed a public television program actually aired the event in Milwaukee.

This is one of those opportunities that makes our anti-gun opponents cringe – men, women, and children have huge smiles on their faces as they fire round after round into the berm.

I Love Being Protested

Miguel reports on Moms Demand Action’s plans to protest the NRA Annual Meeting. Whether they will protest directly, or just do their own event nearby to try to draw media attention away from the convention remains to be seen. Last year in Houston, which wasn’t too long after Moms Demand got started, they managed a protest, but it wasn’t all that impressive. With more wind coming out of their sails every day, I can’t imagine they’ll do better at Indianapolis, but as Miguel mentions, this is her backyard. Also, with Bloomberg’s money, they can afford to pay for buses.

Media Priorities

It’s interesting to note that the only article that the Chicago Sun Times manages to publish on the Leland Yee indictment is really more about Shrimp Boy and the the Chinese underworld in San Francisco than about Leland Yee, but an NRA lobbyist gets a ticket for not having his crossbow cased while hunting on private land? Scandal city!

David Keene on Smart Guns

David Keene recently appeared on Fox Business to discuss the topic of smart guns, and NRA’s opposition to Vivek Murthy’s nomination to the post of Surgeon General. Keene is a great spokesman for NRA and the issue, so I’m happy to see he’s still on the news circuit speaking on behalf of the organization. Obviously this was a friendly interview, but I’ve also seen Keene handle himself well in hostile interviews.

NRA Finally Getting Social Media?

I was interested to see NRA actually jumping in to an online comment thread and defending their record on certain issues when it was attacked. As short as a few years ago, NRA didn’t really have a very effective new media game, and one thing I always thought is that they needed to be more engaged with defending their record. There are always going to be haters, and haters gonna hate, but I think most people can be reasoned with. I am very pleased to see them jumping in here. The era of mass media isn’t over, but it’s getting there, and the more it gets there the more you depend on reaching individual people. That’s how you stay relevant.