Author: Sebastian

I’m wondering who floated this piece to the San Francisco Chronicle. It essentially says the reason that Fast and Furious happened was because the agency isn’t well funded enough. It takes an increase in federal funding to realize that deliberately allowing firearms to be trafficked to drug cartels is wrong? Really? The alternate message is that since the NRA apparently controls ATF’s funding, it’s really NRA’s fault that ATF can’t do its job.

The NRA’s efforts to control the ATF have ended up costing the bureau millions. An NRA-supported congressional appropriations provision prevents the agency from building a national gun registry. As a result, the 375 contract employees at its National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, W.Va., work largely without computers, relying on phone calls and scanned or microfilmed paper records to connect crime gun serial numbers to original purchasers.

Because if you put them into a computer, you have a searchable, national registry of what guns people own, that would actually have very little little missing information, given the number of dealers that go out of business. If the ATF and government are so concerned about what the West Virginia facility is costing, it’s always an option to shut the doors and destroy all the records. I’d feel a lot better if we weren’t always one hostile appropriations bill away from having a national gun registry, wouldn’t you?

But now, it’s backed with science!

The research, published in PLoS One, was led by Dr Kerry O’Brien from The University of Manchester and Monash University and used data from a large representative sample of white US voters.

After accounting for numerous other factors such as income, education and political ideology, the researchers found that for each one point increase (on a scale from one to five) in symbolic racism there was a 50 percent increase in the odds of having a gun in the home and a 28 percent increase in support for policies allowing people to carry concealed guns.

If you support gun rights, or are a gun owner, you’re a racist, and these people aim to prove it! They aim to convince your progressive friends that they aren’t out to disarm fellow citizens, but are out to disarm xenophobic racists! And that makes it OK. Talk about coming to your conclusion and then setting out to prove it, which is kind of the opposite of science.

However, the authors note that this reduction is unsurprising as opposition to bans on guns equates to self interest on behalf of those who already own a gun and do not wish to give it up. And racism was already strongly associated with having a gun in the home.

Admit it, Neandertheal, you’re a racist! Kneel before the power of our science! There’s no way, if you advocate for gun rights, you’re getting out of being a racist in our study.

Dr O’Brien said: “According to a Pew Research Center report the majority of white Americans support stricter gun control, but the results of our study suggest that those who oppose gun reform tend to have a stronger racial bias,  tend to be politically and ideologically conservative and from southern states, and have higher anti-government sentiment.”

But they’ll completely ignore the racist history of gun control. No, let’s not talk about that at all. Own it, opponents of the regime. You’re the racists. Face it!

These people need to be shamed. They need to be exposed and never hear the end of it, and by people who know and understand science better than they do.

An important part of building success for the Second Amendment, over the long term, rests in making good arguments within the legal community. We lament the current state of federal rulings in Second Amendment cases, but it’s worth noting that most of the judges on the bench today spent most of their careers believing the Second Amendment was a meaningless anachronism, and old habits die hard. There is a chance with the next generation. Jonathan Goldstein has an article in The Philadelphia Lawyer discussing the issue of gun rights in a way that’s not going to come off as mouth foaming to the uninitiated:

These and other uncertainties in the law must be clarified. Gun owners working hard to comply with the law shouldn’t have to live with the constant threat of prosecution for vague offenses or uneven application of the law. Instead, our statutes and regulations should serve as a clear guide to help principled gun owners comply with the law.

In short, if we treat law abiding gun owners as the respect-worthy citizens that we are – mainstream people exercising a constitutionally protected civil right – we can find common ground to keep guns away from inappropriate people and demonstrate to any observer that compliance with the law is worth the trouble.

As they say, read the whole thing. I know a lot of people aren’t comfortable with the idea of “inappropriate people,” but “gun rights for felons and schizophrenics” isn’t a hill I think most of us are particularly keen to die on, especially not in publications meant to persuade the legal community.

A few New York assembly folks are calling on social media companies like Instagram to crack down on gun sales. This is quite likely an overblown problem, but it’s worth noting that the gun control movement is still pushing the “OMG! People are selling guns on the Internets!” meme. It’s capitalizes on the fact that most people don’t know the law, and reinforces the notion that our gun laws amount to an unregulated wild west. While it is technically legal to ship, via common carrier, to a non-licensee in your own state, practically none of the common carriers will accept firearms that aren’t being shipped by or to an FFL, and the U.S. mail is only an option for FFLs. So really, these are face-to-face transactions at the end of the day.

UPDATE: More on this subject over at the Daily Beat.

Lots of stuff in the tabs this week:

Talking to your kids about gun safety. I can find little to argue with here, unlike this event which looks like a political agenda disguised as common sense, despite their assurances.

Slate is disappointed more people who have gun accidents don’t go to jail. Well, the one guy was a felon, so he wasn’t legally allowed to have a gun to begin with. The problem with a lot of these “common sense” laws is that they are difficult to enforce.

Is the Obama Administration the cause of the gun and ammunition shortages?

For squirting a water gun at her boyfriend, this woman is now stripped of her Second Amendment rights. That is the law. Don’t you feel safer? (h/t Instapundit)

Obamacare visualized. If you can’t get on the exchanges, try ehealthinsurance.com. Though I notice individual plans have more than doubled in price for crappier coverage.

Price Law Offices takes a look at Commonwealth v. McKown, and also talks about dispatching injuries deer.

“These people appear to genuinely believe that some law or set of laws will actually prevent school shootings from ever happening.” And at least one anti-gun blogger we all know and love seems to think that if something happens, that means it’s legal.

Californians are getting into the recall game.

He’s the only one responsible enough.

Sarah Palin got invited to appear on Piers Morgan, but she’s a little busy.

Another SAFE act failure.

Our most disastrous war.

Remember, be careful when leaving America.