Sebastian – Page 202 – Shall Not Be Questioned

New York Times on the Gun Control Battle in Congress

Link here. It’s a very in-depth article, and there are a lot of potential takeaways, including how remarkably dumb our opponents were. But I would note I’m rather skeptical of the sources of some items in this report, as I suspect they are mostly Joe Manchin’s office, and other people who have a vested interest in discrediting NRA. Generally speaking, NRA won’t speak to investigative reporters, so if there’s a source for, say:

In their conversations, Cox told LaPierre that he did not yet have a clear sense of how their congressional allies were reacting to the Newtown shootings. Coxâ€™s instinct was that the N.R.A. should stay quiet for the time being, as it had done following past shootings. Instead LaPierre decided to respond forcefully, without consulting the N.R.A.’s lobbyists or its full 76-member executive board. One week after the shootings, he stood behind a lectern at the Willard InterContinental hotel a few blocks from the White House and broke into a blistering attack on the news media, the movie industry and video-game manufacturers while defiantly declaring, â€œThe only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.â€

It would be interesting to know who’s talking to the enemy (The NYT is the enemy). I suspect a leak from a member of the Board. A lot of people are upset that the report states they were working with Manchin’s office. I would note the source for this is likely Joe Manchin’s office, who aren’t exactly enamored with NRA these days.

But I’ll accept that it’s true, for the sake of argument. Even if it’s true that they were negotiating over the bill, I would kind of expect NRA to be sure, if there aren’t votes to stop it, that what passes is less of a disaster for gun owners. Note this from the article:

The N.R.A. declared war on those who helped pass the 1994 assault-weapons ban, most of whom were Democrats, but while the bill was being crafted, the N.R.A. worked with two of its House Democratic allies, John Dingell and Jack Brooks of Texas, to weaken it so that if it did pass, it would apply to only a limited number of firearms and would expire a decade later. (It did not pass again.)

As it was this time, we had the votes to kill the Manchin-Toomey deal outright, so it was done. Did GOA have anything to do with that? I’m sure they believe they did, and I’m also sure they likely told that to the author of this article. But does anyone seriously want to argue that we’d have been better off if Dingell and Brooks hadn’t negotiated to get important element like the sunset provision? Does anyone feel confident after failing to outright repeal the bill in 1996, we’d have had any luck now?

Too many people think politics is all binary choices. It’s not that kind of game. If you can buy yourself a little insurance, in case the vote goes badly for you, you do it. If we hadn’t done that in 1994, we’d all still be living under the federal assault weapons ban, and that ban would have looked more like California’s than what eventually passed.

Excellent Observations of Colorado Shooting

From Tim, over at Gun Nuts Media:

Right at the anniversary of Newtown somebody tried to up the score, but because one good guy armed with a handgun was around we instead got a beautiful contrast between the worthlessness of the policy proposals of media figures, politicians, and celebrities and the very effective solutions proposed by the NRA and others whoÂ actually have a damn clue on what theyâ€™re talking about.Â Nothing the elites proposed stopped or would have stoppedÂ the little coward who went into that school intent on murder prior to the act, but a policy we as the gun community wholeheartedly support provedÂ VERYÂ effective at stopping him dead in his tracks before he could soak the ground with innocent blood.

Yep. The problem is there’s a certain segment of the population, and it’s probably much larger than any of us would be comfortable with, who will never accept it, no matter how much evidence is presented that we’re right.

Monday News Links

Happy Monday. On Wednesday Bitter and I head down to the National Archives to do some research, so posting may be scarce Wednesday. We’ll see. But for now, here’s the news:

I’ve seen gun clubs who can raise more money than thisÂ in a single fundraiser.

60% of Americans believe it should be illegal to hit “print” if what you’re printing is a gun. People fear what they don’t understand, and what people fear they usually want to make illegal. We still have a lot of work to do.

Remember, the American Academy of Pediatrics is the enemy. If you’re a doctor, and a gun owner (and there are a lot of you out there) I wouldn’t associate with these groups. Here’s more on the left-wing medical establishment and gunsÂ from Howard Nemerov.

Why are anti-gunners so violent?

The most loved and hated gun in America. If it’s a popular gun, they will hate it.

NRA Board aspirant Brandon Webb gets a warm AR-15.com welcome, along with some speculation about who’s backing him. Anyone who thinks America has a “gun problem” has no place on the NRA Board. Fortunately, I don’t think he stands much of a chance.

More recalls over guns, this time in Rhode Island.

The Heller II case is still proceeding.

Why we fight.

ATF contemplating more regulation changes? As Prince Law notes, even the act of considering such a thing is a crime. But who’s going to prosecute? Certainly not Holder’s DOJ. This Administration doesn’t follow any of the usual rules.

Nuclear option for 41P?

Joe asks a good question when it comes to ammunition.

Cuomo is a non-factor for 2016. Now his people are acting like he was never interested in a run. Everyone knows that’s not true. He flushed his political ambitions away on gun control.

So How’d that CNC 1911 Actually Work?

Jason managed to finish, after much frustration, the complete buildout based off his CNC milled M1911 receiver. It was unusual, in that he took a standard M1911 CAD model for an aluminum receiver, cleaved it in two, and then added screws so it could be easily bolted together after milling. By cleaving it in two, it allowed for easier machining. Today we decided to head out, despite the generally awful conditions, and give it a test fire. The results surprised me:

I should note that Jason was TCWing to keep his hand away from the ‘splody parts, should something go badly wrong. I couldn’t help making the joke in the video. I expected it to go bang, but I didn’t figure we’d empty the 50 round box of .45 without trouble, given how much frustration went into fitting it, and given that it was a cheap parts kit. Seriously, the magazine looked like it could have been manufactured near the Khyber Pass.

Jason brought his 7 year old daughter along, because good parenting should involve stoking your children’s curiosity about experimental home firearm building. Jason brought his .22LR AR-15 pistol along to keep the girl amused, and I do have to say she’s an excellent shot! I had never considered the utility of an AR-15 pistol for teaching kids, but it works a lot better than you might expect. It’s long enough that muzzle discipline is easy to enforce, like a rifle, but you don’t have the issue of badly sized stocks. She also seemed to do quite well with the EOtech sight.

But aside from that, while it wasn’t the most accurate 1911 I’ve ever fired, it certainly did well enough for a 1911 that cost a few hundred bucks. The project still isn’t totally complete, since he plans on attempting home anodization, which apparently involves a nice bath of acid, a high voltage power supply, and a wife who is remarkably tolerant about what you are doing in the kitchen.

That Evil Gun Lobby Money …

… was outspent 7 to 1 by gun control groups, according to Adage.com. I’d wager good money the vast majority of that money came out of Bloomberg’s pockets. We can’t outspent Bloomberg; 14.1 million dollars is the change in his sofa cushions. But we can defeat him with real grassroots energy.

The Ryan Budget Deal

This is veering off topic, but while I have the makings of another tab-clearing news link, everyone is all atwitter about the Ryan budget deal. I haven’t been able to get all that worked up about it, to be honest, because it seemed another case of the grassroots conservatives wanting to fight on every front all of the time rather than picking battles carefully. I see this quite often in the gun issue. A lot of people got worked up over UFA renewal, but it’s the wrong battle to fight at the wrong time. The bill has nearly zero impact on every day gun rights, and for a lot of reasons I think it’s fine to kick that fight ten years down the road for now.

Megan McArdle wrote an article today I think is correct in term of analyzing the Ryan deal.

But if they do nothing at all, many reason, they get all the sequestration cuts. Why trade them away?

To avoid another showdown. Though I, too, would like government to shrink, I think this is the right policy trade-off; shutdowns are making it harder and harder to talk about rational budget policy in this town. And tactically, I think this is a clear win for theÂ Republican Party. The last thing they need right now is to take the focus off the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and revive Obamaâ€™s flagging poll numbers with an ill-timed budget battle. Their best shot at a budget they really like is, after all, to retake the Senate in 2014.

RTWT. From my reading of it, the Ryan deal is meant to avert another government shutdown, which the Democrats have been preparing to do. Another shutdown would be a disaster for the GOP, because as Megan says, it would take the focus off the flaming train wreck that the ACA is turned out to be. That’s why the Dems would love to precipitate another shutdown in order to distract the low-information voters from their own failures and focus everything back on how awful the GOP is.

Of course, the GOP won’t say that, because they would rather piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining, and that, I think, pretty much sums up the GOP’s problem, which is messaging and communication. That gets back to what Glenn Reynolds noted:

I think thatâ€™s right. I think the problem is that a lot of the grassroots donâ€™t trust the GOP leadership to do that. The leadership might want to think about what it can do to build such trust.

No one trusts them because a) the 1994 revolution turned into a non-revolution, and b) the GOP sucks at communicating. The Ryan deal may be necessary, but the GOP leadership would rather kick the grassroots in the teeth and offer platitudes than talk to them like actual adults. Want to understand the popularity of Chris Christie? Because he communicates, and treats voters like adults. Corbett, by contrast, just hiked my gas taxes and then has the nerve to send me a fundraising letter bragging about how he eliminated the retail gas tax (failing to mention that he accomplished this through a massive hike in the wholesale gas tax). Maybe we had to hike the gas tax. Maybe that was the only way to get a transportation bill funded. But don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Level with me. The GOP might be playing a bad hand the best they can right now, but you’d never know it, because they have no idea how to communicate to voters. If you ask me, that’s the GOP’s number one problem.

How’s That Registration Working Out for Ya?

Connecticut officials are warning of dire consequences for failure to comply. After all, where to gun owners belong if not in jail?

Mr. Lawlor, like most government officials, seems to think he and his buddies have invented policy out of whole cloth, and that the population has no choice but to shuffle along and obey. But weapons registration laws have a historyâ€”a consistent history,Â as I’ve written, of noncompliance and defiance.

They know we won’t comply. And to them, that’s just fine. Because then, in their minds, you’ll end up where you belonged in the first place. Really, if you think about it, if you were an owner and a gun was stolen, are you going to call the cops about it? So how do these laws really help things? They don’t. They just make it more likely gun owners are going to be uncooperative with police when it comes to enforcing laws.

The Gun Battle in the States

Reuters notes that the gun control battle is shifting to the states, with a slight edge going to pro-gun bills. The New York Times does a summary of the issues, which show that it’s considerably more than a “slight edge.” It also shows that a number of those bills that were passed, that are in the pro-gun control column, are minor bills like NICS improvements…. hardly a big win on their parts.

A Desperate Move by the Antis

The latest move is to head on over to Europe to lobby those European gun makers to enact gun control. Because surely those European gun makers will be more enlightened, because they’re all so Euorpeany.

They want the European gunmakers, for example, to refuse to allow their weapons to be sold through unlicensed gun dealers. They also want the manufacturers to renounce political meddling in the U.S. through contributions to lobbying groups like the National Rifle Association.

It demonstrates how little they know about how the gun industry works. Manufactures don’t make shipments to unlicensed gun dealers. That would be illegal. They will sell to their US division, who are federally licensed to import. That importer will sell to a licensed distributor, who will sell to a licensed dealer, who sells to the general public. How exactly is, say, Berretta, supposed to control what happens to it after the point of retail sale?

Also, gun industry money is a fraction of NRA’s total contributions. Most of NRA’s money is raised in small increments from its members through traditional fundraising. While losing industry money would certainly hurt a little, it would far from cripple NRA, and you can bet if they were successful in doing this (which they won’t be), NRA would have a fundraising letter out next week talking about how anti-gun forces are bullying manufacturers into cutting off funds, and won’t you pretty please donate 25, 50, 75 or 250 dollars to help NRA make up the short fall.

And before the fundraising letter would even hit the mail, any cooperating European manufacture will have their US market share destroyed by our grassroots. The manufacturers are will aware of this, so all this is doing is costing the anti-gunners money. Though I’m sure they will enjoy the European Vacation on their organization’s dime.

A Subversive for NRA Board?

Caleb has been alerting the community about someone running for NRA Board who aims to make the organization more reasonable, as in to support gun control. This is not really much of a concern, because the Board is carefully engineered to avoid any uppity faction from being able to place members on the Board. There are often times when I think the Board’s size and structure is a bug, but in this case it’s a feature.

Brandon Webb has two paths to a board seat. He can be nominated by the nominating committee, which is about as likely as the snowstorm overhead right now heading down to Miami and covering Miguel rather than me. The other option is to be nominated by petition, which if I recall requires the signatures of 250 voting NRA members, which is lifers or people with 5 unbroken consecutive years of annual membership. That’s not an impossible mountain to climb, but that’s just to get on the ballot.

I can recall only one petition candidate successfully winning since I’ve been following this stuff, and that’s Maria Heil, and she managed to win only through very dogged campaigning on a personal level. In short, I don’t think Webb stands a chance of even getting on the ballot, let alone actually winning. But it’s worth it to point out that there’s a subversive with interest in running, so I would check out Caleb’s post.

One last thing is that this idea has been floated before, but never gone anywhere. Webb is just the first person to think of it who isn’t absolutely on the other side.