Sebastian – Page 1440 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Mayor Daley on Guns

Mayor Daley is out, once again, to bring Chicago style Gun Laws to a state near you, presumably because they haven’t done anything to reduce violence in Chicago.

“When you look at other countries, only 20 here 15 killed here,” Mayor Richard M. Daley observed. “30,000 people here. Unbelievable.”

What he’s not telling you is that the vast majority of those 30,000 people were suicides.

The mayor said he’ll soon appoint a commission to target gun laws and gun makers.

Gun makers that reside in the lower portion of his state, and live in towns that depend on that industry. Â I notice the Mayor nor this article make any mention of the death threats against gun shop owner John Riggio by a catholic priest speaking at Jackson’s rally.

Note To Media

I don’t generally post on crime news, but in this case I’d like to correct the media on something I see all the friggin time:

Weapons used in the bank robberies included a .380 handgun, an SKS assault rifle and an MDL assault rifle, according to the U.S. Attorney.

I guess I need to correct the US Attorney too, but, aside from the fact that I’ve never heard of an “MDL assault rifle”, the SKS is not and has never been considered by anyone to be an assault rifle.Â The correct term would be semi-automatic carbine, or self-loading carbine.Â There is no version of the SKS that’s natively capable of fully automatic fire, so it’s missing a key part of the definition.

Big Cities See More Crime

This article suggests crime is on the rise in the big cities:

Year-end totals for murders rose in eight of the nation’s 10 largest cities: Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio and San Diego. That contributed to a 6.7 percent murder rate increase in cities with populations over 1 million people.

The murder rate dropped in two other big cities, Dallas and Los Angeles. And it plummeted by an overall 11.9 percent in smaller cities, towns and rural areas, the data show.

What does this say about guns being the source of the problem?Â Small towns, cities, and rural areas tend to have a much higher percentage of households with firearms, and yet have plummeting crime rates. Â Of the cities they list that have had an increasing murder rate, Chicago and New York have a ban or a defacto ban on guns.Â Las Vegas has registration of all firearms. Â San Diego operates under California’s strict laws, which includes registration, waiting periods, gun safety rules, and one-gun-a-month.Â Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio and Houston are in states with liberal guns laws and preemption.

I’ll leave drawing conclusions as an exercise for the reader.

Gun Safety Experts

SayUncle does a good fisking of gun safety “experts” and tell us:

Sorry but to any gun owner out there, donâ€™t listen to safety experts. Listen to gun experts if you want real advice that will save your life and the lives of others. Safety experts will typically tell you not to have a gun (see?), which is not conducive to safety but more political posturing. So, take it with a grain of salt. Anti-gun hacks like Matthew Miller are not safety experts. They are hacks. Take your gun advice from someone like Col. Cooper or Massad Ayoob. Or your local firearms instructor.

I keep my firearm in the safest location possible; on my hip.Â When it’s not there, and I’m not home, it gets locked up, along with all the other firearms I’m not actively using at the time. Â At night, it goes next to me on the bed stand.Â Being that I live on my own, I’m not exactly worried about children.Â My main concern is not giving a burglar a convenient weapon to use on me if I come home and surprise him.

Progressive Secularist

It’s really good that we have folks like Bill O’Reilly to sort everything out for us people who don’t think right. After all these years of reading Dave Kopel’s scholarship on the gun issue, I had no idea he was a “secular progressive”, until I heard O’Reilly unmask Dave on national TV. For those of you who didn’t hear the debate, here’s a paraphrased summary:

DK: You’re taking stuff out of contex,t Mr. O’Reilly
BO: We are not! Let’s roll this tape, that my producers have pulled out of context, that clearly shows I’m not taking anything out of context.
DK: Go read the entire transcript on the independence institute web site
BO: I don’t need to read the context, when we have these tapes, that take what they are saying out of context! Roll it!
TAPE: blah blah blah… some psychologists use ecstasy … blah blah blah.
BO: Are you defending that? Any good parent would see this panel was out to turn their kids into communists who love drugs and gay sex. You’re not a bad parent, are you Dave?
DK: I prefer to talk to my children about things they hear.
BO: You’re out of touch with America.
DK: But…
BO: Secular progressive! You’re s secular progressive!
DK: You don’t know anything about me.
BO: Shut up you secular progressive!

I don’t know what scares me more, that fact that Bill O’Reilly actually has a prime time show, or the fact that people actually seem to take this guy seriously. To me, his show is just more proof that the main-stream media is a cesspool of ideas.

The O’Reilly Factor is the only show on TV that when someone tells me to watch it because someone is going to be on it that I might want to see, makes me feel like drawing my pistol, and putting a bullet in my television. Â I can’t stand 10 minutes of that guy!

Evil Black Legs

Clearly we need to renew the federal ban on assault legs.

Dumb Protest Ideas

It seems to me these people need to be loaned a few brain cells:

“What we want is to bring just some basic common sense to gun laws. Itâ€™s crazy you don’t need any registration, you don’t need any permits.Â If you have a hand gun, you can get a permit to carry it concealed. That makes no sense.â€

Yeah, because common sense says that the drug dealers killing each other on the streets of Philadelphia bother to get gun permits from the police and would bother with registration and licensing. Â Do you people listen to the crap you’re saying?Â Â I’m pretty sure it’s not our gun laws that don’t make any sense.

Honk if You Like Gas Lines

Apparently State Representative Tim Solobay (D-Washington County), who either is, at best, looking to score cheap political points off people’s ignorance, or, at worst, has never taken a basic economics course, wants to set up a board for regulating the price of gasoline, just like the one that ensures residents of the Keystone State pay too much for milk.

Dairy farmers are a powerful interest group in the commonwealth, and the state sets minimum prices for milk.Â Presumably the gas board would set maximum prices for gas. Â Maximum gas prices create shortages, since it will force gas out of the state, where refiners will be able to sell it at a higher profit.

If Representative Solobay manages to bring gas lines to the Keystone State, I’ll be saying a hearty goodbye and screw you, and will move to Arizona.Â Seriously, the Democrats here are really starting to scare me.

Gun Show Disappointment

Bitter and I attended a gun show yesterday at the Philadelphia National Guard Armory off Southampton road in the northeast part of the city.Â Only a 400 table show, so I wasn’t expecting much, but I didn’t really find anything that caught my eye.

The only prize for the day, and since it’s been a while since I’ve been to a gun show, perhaps this isn’t much of a find, one table had Polish made Kalashnikov magazines that were pristine and unissued.Â I have several magazines for both AKs, but these don’t even have so much as a ding on them.Â I also picked up some targets and some jerky, but other than that, nothing really to catch my fancy.Â No good deals on ammo either.

Bitter, who is always on the look out for bad PR, found some at the show, and I think intends to blog about it later.Â I don’t quite have the eye she does, so I didn’t notice.Â I’ll let her tell the story, but say that I do think we need to be cognizant of the fact that the media loves to show up at gun shows to report on how crazy people are at gun shows, but I also think when they are out to get you, they will always find stuff.

Next weekend is one of the big shows in Harrisburg.Â Hopefully I can find some decent ammo deals there.

Nanny State

Dr. Helen mentions a book that looks like it’s worth a read. Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children.

In so many ways, the state has become the babysitter and infantilizer of all of us, even adults and the most depressing part to me is that we are allowing it, bit by bit, every time we give the state more and more authority in the form of petty laws that control the lives of countless citizens in ways that take away personal autonomy while at the same time, doing little to prevent or severely punish those who are truly violent.

I’ve often wondered why we tolerate so much intrusion into the country’s daily life from the political class. Â I’m not a “golden age” libertarian, that is one who believes we’re fallen from some imagined time when government stayed out of people’s lives, and we had more freedom, but I do think there are two main factors at work today that contribute the country having such distasteful political leadership.

The elevation of democracy above liberty as an ideal of government.
Less involvement in political parties by people with healthy motivations.

It’s been said that Democracy is three wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for lunch.Â Somewhere along the line we’ve gone from believing that the purpose of government is to protect liberty, to the purpose of government is to do the will of the people.Â In the past, this type of government wasn’t possible, because it was hard to gauge public opinion.Â Now with polls, and various other mechanisms, politicians see “Most people favor bans on smoking in restaurants.” and exploit that for political gain.Â I don’t think people have ever been particularly committed to liberty, but polling lets the politicians know exactly what they can get away with.

The second factor is obvious any time you step into the voting booth on a general election day.Â Since I first voted for George H.W. Bush over Bill Clinton in the 1992 election (my first election where I was over 18), I have never once pulled the lever for someone I really felt I was excited about and that I felt represented me.Â Why?Â I think because most people who want smaller government and more autonomy don’t really have the time to participate in politics on the party level, or vote in primaries.Â A very small percentage of people are deciding who we get to vote for.Â There’s no doubt many of them are activists who want to get something out of government.Â Â Interest group politics are as old as the Republic, but I wonder today who the are the constituency that stands for liberty?Â Â Sure, there are groups, think tanks, and what have you, but that doesn’t seem to be translating into leadership that can carry that banner.