2014 – Page 27 – Shall Not Be Questioned

No Second Amendment Protection for Hunting

A group of hunters tried suing Pennsylvania over the Sunday hunting ban and one of their claims was a Second Amendment protection. Yesterday, a U.S. District judge tossed the lawsuit.

Kane said she could find no proof that courts have extended Second Amendment protections to include recreational hunting.

The hunters raised several other arguments, including religious discrimination, but the judge said the hunters could not prove the Sunday ban violated their religious freedom.

I kind of figured the case would end up dismissed. This has to be handled legislatively, and Virginia is the model for chipping away at it until it the ban finally falls.

Bloomberg is Buying Calls to Congress, and It’s Working

What do you do if you’re Mike Bloomberg and Everytown, and have a boatload of money but not really any substantial grassroots? Well, you buy phone calls to Congress:

The majority of the money paid for the call goes to a gun safety movement called Everytown. Sometimes, organizations benefitting from a campaign (like Everytown) make the calls themselves, but individuals can also sign up to become paid callers for campaigns, garnering a base rate of $1 per call.

Unfortunately this is working. NRA is currently noting Congress is only hearing from their side. I think there’s a tendency among gun owners to think if we got through Sandy Hook, this latest wave of mass shootings shouldn’t be a concern. But that is unfortunately not how this works. The other side has been fired up, in my opinion through a combination of the latest mass shootings and the nonsense going on in Texas. They money being dumped into the issue is all helping as well.

A lot of gun owners have no idea how tenuous this stuff can be. The gun control crowd made a lot of mistakes after Sandy Hook. They’ve learned. They are going to be less ambitious, less bombastic, and will build support slowly going forward. They will keep at this until they get what they want. A Republican Congress is not a guarantee nothing gets passed. They will turn on us in a heartbeat if they think they’ll get away with it. We have to call.

SeeÂ www.nraila.org/writeyourrepsÂ or call 202-225-3121. We benefitted greatly in the past decade by there being no money in the gun control movement. Bloomberg can single handedly dump more money into the issue than all of us combined. We have to pay mortgages and feed families. The only thing we have he can’t compete with is our collective voices, but we have to exercise it to make a difference.

School Bias – Getting Grades for No Dissent

A Connecticut school filters out all Republican and issue group websites that are commonly associated with GOP supporters, including pro-Second Amendment websites while gun control websites were all approved.

Even more interesting is that the student was attempting to look up the material while conducting the research for an assigned classroom debate. It’s awfully interesting that the school, which made it partisan when it opted to ban the official GOP website while allowing the Democratic website, is grading students for their participation in “debates,” but refuses to allow them to see any alternate viewpoints to present to their peers.

It’s even more interesting that the student only reported the incident to the media after notifying school authorities and he noticed that they refused to fix the blatant bias. Even now that the media is on the story, they only say that they “appreciated hearing the comments” and he raised an accusation that might warrant an investigation. But, hey, it’s just the tax dollars of Connecticut voters shutting down access to information from different political views – no big deal and nothing to see here…

Getting the Message Out

Robb Allen highlights a pro-gun article written on the dime of the Joyce Foundation’s media payment program in Minnesota. If that doesn’t make you laugh out loud at least once today, I don’t know what will.

Who Needs a Gun?

I don’t know about you, but I’d certainly feel safer with my S&W 629Â on my hip, loaded with .44 Magnum soft points. I’d hate to experienceÂ this kind encounter with nothing better than frantically searching for a rock, or hoping if I couldn’t outrun the bear, I could at least outrun my jogging partner.

Sadly, a .44 revolver is not an option for Canadians. Spray would have probably been enough to dissuade this bear, in the absence of a firearm, though, and I don’t think even Canada restricts bear spray. Don’t go out into the woods unprepared.

Gun Possession in Iraq

Clayton Cramer notes that reports out of Iraq show that the ISIS leaders have declared new rules for those in area they control that include a gun ban for anyone not in their ranks. It’s interesting how that also comes along with a ban on any public gathering not organized by ISIS as well.

It’s almost like those people who use the bumper sticker phrase that their Second Amendment right protects the First Amendment rights of others might possibly be on to something about the importance of both rights.

Legal Hunting Targeted by Facebook

Facebook locked the admins of a hunting-related page out of putting up new content after they pulled down a perfectly normal hunting photo that didn’t violate any laws or guidelines and claimed that it does not meet community standards.

One of the biggest hurdles Facebook has is not only growing their audience, but keeping the audience it has. Banning perfectly legal photos & pages just because their California staffers don’t like an outdoor tradition seems like it could easily send users running for other social media outlets.

Creative Counting & Expanding Agendas

Miguel and Thirdpower look at various photos and reports from the gun control march in New York where Moms Demand Action claimed over 1,000 people participated in their walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. They both notice that the photos from various angles appear to come up far shorter than the numbers claimed.

And, just as a reminder that Bloomberg’s Every Mom and Town Mayor Demanding Action isn’t really just about “background checks” like they try to claim. They are reviving the demands for magazine bans, mandatory storage laws, and cutting concealed carry options.

Hickenlooper: Let Me Feed You Another Lie…

I really hope that Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper keeps on talking because he’s keeping himself in the press for all of the right reasons – at least from our perspective of wanting to see him lose his re-election bid.

First, he “apologizes” for not talking to local law enforcement before pushing gun control that they would end up suing that state over. However, in his apology, Hickenlooper lied to the sheriffs by claiming that he never spoke to Bloomberg during the gun control push. Except he did, and there are records to prove it.

It would seem that perhaps Hickenlooper’s version of “stick[ing] to the facts,” a phrase he used to open his lie to the sheriffs, is a bit more like “sticking to complete falsehoods and hoping that no one has yet obtained the phone records to prove it’s a total fabrication.” I have to say, I hope that he stays in the media for such gaffes.

Juggling More Flaming Torches

Today I started an engagement at a new client, so my blogging schedule is going to be thrown for a loop while I try to figure out how to work everything in. It’s high-performance computing work though, so there’s not much of a learning curve, and I can hit the ground running. But starting a new client is still pretty much like starting a new job, and I still have my current work to do as well.

For the past few years I’ve been working on special projects internally, trying to develop a product pipeline that can sustain the company more reliably than billable hours. But thanks to the awful winter we lost a boatload of money in the first quarter, so volunteered to go billable for a bit to help make it up. Everyone else on my projects has to juggle billable hours with internal project work, and I didn’t think I should be any different.

Unlike our opponents, who do this for a living, or who are stinking rich enough to not need employment, I have a mortgage to pay, and I like eating better than ramen. This first week might be a little rough blog wise, but I’m working with Bitter to help make up the short-fall. After that I should have a new schedule figured out and things will appear to return mostly to normal.