Sebastian – Page 228 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Gun Control Advocates Who Don’t Trust Bloomberg

Who can you trust to promote gun control? Apparently not Mike Bloomberg, according to folks who would like to at least see some gun control.

But there is another face of gun control that is much less trustworthy. It is a face which gun rights activists believe represents wholesale registration and eventual confiscation. That face belongs to Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, who is also the money behind Mayors Against Illegal Guns. This group made headlines recently for using a list of supposed gun victims, but which included killers like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers.

I almost have to wonder if someone pitched this editorial, and whether this represents infighting within the gun control movement now that they have accomplished nothing at the federal level in the wake of Newtown. Conceptually and strategically, I think MAIG has been a stronger opponent than the other gun control groups, at least in the last decade. But they are definitely saddled by the fact that Bloomberg isn’t a very likable or charismatic figure, and is easy to demonize.

Happy Tuesday: News Links

Any day where the dew point is under 50 and the high is only supposed to hit 82 is a good day in my book, so with the servers being kept cool with fresh outside air, here is the news:

Hey, gun people are everywhere. What’s more important is for other people to realize that.

Connecticut is going to talk about weakening their self-defense laws even further (they already have a duty to retreat).

Dave Hardy takes another look at the racial implications of SYG. Not the narrative you’ve been hearing in the media, is it?

Josh Horwitz of Coalition to Prevent Gun Ownership hates logic.

Does MAIG support sexual harassment?

Joe gave me a scare for a bit, but it raises a good question of how many of us have first aid training? I admit to being deficient in this area.

Good to see folks had fun at the Northeast Blogger Shoot. I went shooting in New Hampshire once, but the journey through Mordor has only gotten more perilous.

Destroying gun control as a political movement is our end game. To do that, we have to make it a toxic issue for both parties. We have succeeded, largely, in convincing many Republicans. Now the Democrats have to be freshly punished for their late transgressions. Maybe then they’ll finally get it for good.

The Brady Campaign gets one of their lawsuits tossed. I’m sure it was helpful for fundraising letters while it lasted. Eugene Volokh has more on the lawsuit getting tossed.

Expect the antis to keep pushing this concealed carry insurance mandate. Anything to drive up the cost and deny the poor the same rights the 1% have. They even have a blog.

Senate Democrats have abandoned efforts to pass a law this year. This has the right people very upset.

NRA is appealing the 18-20 year old gun rights case to the Supreme Court. I’ll be surprised if they grant cert on this, but anything is possible.

Smith & Wesson employees seem particularly worried about the prospect of more gun control in Massachusetts. They should be worried. The left has shown that gun control fantasies are more important to them than good paying jobs.

Second Bite at the Apple for CCW in New Jersey

After failing in the federal 3rd Circuit,Â the Second Amendment will have another bite at the apple at the New Jersey Supreme Court. I don’t expect this to go differently than in the 3rd. I’ll be shocked if it does. Most likely the NJSC wants to revise their now antiquated collective-rights ruling to be one which recognizes the Second Amendment as being a fundamental, inalienable right that doesn’t mean anything, so don’t get any ideas, peon.

As a side note, though somewhat related, if I could pick one fact to drive into the brains of gun owners around the country, it’s that the Second Amendment doesn’t fundamentally mean anything short of what the robed ones say it means. You’d be surprised how common the “Well, they just can’t do that. The Second Amendment, you see…” like the founding fathers are just going to descend from the heavens and beat some sense back into policymakers if someone gets it wrong. They have no idea how much this game has been rigged.

They Can Add Me to the List …

… of people who are not fans of Chief Kessler. IÂ think his being the public image of this issue in Pennsylvania is more harmful than helpful. In the past few years, I’ve I haven’t been talking as much about what I think is smart activism, versus what I think is just clownish behavior can actually hurt the cause. I’ve heard Chief Kessler speak, and heard what he has to say, and I did not walk away with a favorable impression of him as someone who can carry our message effectively. The news stories since then have not dissuaded me from that view.

In the wake of the Newtown tragedy, we had a strong, local upwelling of pro-gun sentiment that happened relatively spontaneously. After years of trying and failing to organize in various contexts, it was something to feel optimistic about. But as time wore on, the sensible folks who wanted to do real political engagement were pushed out by the clowns and whack-a-doodles, and the crowds aren’t turning out anymore. The potential is there, but it’s not surprising to discover most gun owners don’t really want to engage in loud and aggressive open carry protests and counter-protests all of the time. Every tactic has its limits.

After this groundswell got started, the local politicians were paying attention. Even politicians we never figured would touch the gun issue with a 20 foot pole were at least willing to come see what the buzz was about. Now I’d be surprised if they want to touch the gun issue with a 50 foot pole, especially if they think it’ll mean having to explain their involvement with a group allied with Chief Kessler’s CSF to their largely suburban constituents.

Only about half of households are gun owning, and many of them are completely unfamiliar with the gun culture. They have a difficult time even putting something like IPSC or IDPA into context, let alone something like a Constitutional Security Force. Additionally, it’s always a good rule of thumb is that when even fellow gun owners are put off by your tactics, it’s a signal you might want to rethink what you’re doing. You can hew and haw all you want about how wrong they are, and you might have a point, but at the end of the day you need to bring those people along with whatever you want to accomplish.

There is a very strong strain in the pro-gun community that seems to believe only good intentions matter, and arguing over what makes for effective tactics amounts to a form of elitism. I’ve resisted these conversations in recent years, because to be honest, I haven’t had the time or energy to deal with it. But I’ve watched too much opportunity here in Pennsylvania get sacrificed to clownish behavior in the past few months to keep completely silent about it.

Here’s the cold, hard truth: if we do not manage to keep suburban legislators and suburban voters on the side of, or at the least acquiesced to the idea of civilian gun ownership, Pennsylvania will slowly begin transforming into New Jersey and New York. Attitudes might be a bit different in places like Gilberton, but because of migration patterns in Pennsylvania, it’s increasingly suburban Philadelphia voters who call the shots in state elections. You can’t avoid having to consider what those voters think of you.

And it’s not just suburban voters; suburban gun owners have to feel comfortable being involved. Tactics that alienate and keep them on the sofa are cutting off your nose to spite your face. It takes more than a couple dozen activists with megaphones, banners, flags, and ARs and AKs strung across their chests to defeat a gun control bill, to push a pro-gun bill, or to successfully swing elections. Whether you want to accept it or not, those three things are the meat and potatoes of political action. Anything that doesn’t involve supporting those processes is window dressing.

As a movement, we seem to enjoy window dressing a bit too much these days, and my fear is that’s going to kill us if we’re not careful.

Ammo Hunting

I hope everyone had a satisfactory weekend. I spent part of it at Cabela’s teaching my dad how to buy ammo without looking like a newb. Several years ago he moved from the Delaware Valley to Bumfsck, Central Pennsylvania, and he’s been interacting with the local culture. Unfortunately, the rifle I lent him is chambered in .17HMR, which is about as rare as hen’s teeth these days, so I was growing concerned that we wouldn’t be able to feed it.

Fortunately he just called and told me he scored some at a local gun shop. I guess panicking suburbanites aren’t making their way out to the rural shops to clean the shelves of rimfire ammo just yet. A quick safety check shows he was learning good habits, so the people teaching him seem to be on top of that kind of thing. That’s not something I wanted to take for granted because some of the poorest gun handling I’ve seen has been on public ranges in rural areas where everyone grows up around it. Fortunately, my dad has access to a private range.Â As I’ve mentioned before, I did not grow up in a gun owning family. I didn’t really get into shooting until after I moved out and had a decent paying job where I could afford toys.

Balanced Article on Machine Gun Shoot

From Slate. I appreciate it when reporters legitimately make an attempt to step outside their comfort zone. Of course, at least one of the gun owners he interviewed shows why our own people are a bigger impediment to advancing gun rights than the gun control zealots. See here:

Darwin Edwards and his friend John Paskey left the Big Sandy Shoot early. The 4,000-mile round trip from Kentucky, Edwards says, was worth doing once. He says the machine gun community proves the efficacy of rigorous background checks: “Machine gun owners are one of the few groups of people who can prove they’re not felons.” Ammo remains “really just not available because of the feeding frenzy” fueled by the gun control legislation. But Edwards isn’t worried. He’s got enough ammo to last him the rest of his life. He’s deeply disappointed that the Senate didn’t pass gun control. “The majority of people in the country, including me, were in favor of that particular bill,” he says. “I don’t see how any thinking person would vote against it.”

He’s got his, so who cares, right? If only that attitude were rare as hens teeth.Â “Machine gun owners are one of the few groups of people who can prove they’re not felons.” And you know what? Despite that, they still banned them. Once they get the rest of us out of the game, we’re not going to be able to stop them when they come to confiscate your now ungrandfathered machine guns. This guy had the nerve to call other gun owners uneducated. He’s a world class fool, blind to the realities of this issue.

Rain and Drought

The beginning of this week looked like a promising news cycle from a gun blog standpoint, but it’s quickly dried up. I usually hold a few things in reserve for days when things aren’t as active, but now we find ourselves clean out of anything to put up. Hopefully something interesting will come across our in our sources. Well, but not too interesting. Sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.

Third Circuit Upholds New Jersey Carry Restrictions

The case is Drake v. Filko. The third circuit has generally been terrible for the Second Amendment, and not really too surprising since although it’s major state is relatively pro-gun, the circuit judges are going to tend to be drawn from Philadelphia, and reside there.

Here, we conclude that the requirement that applicants demonstrate a â€œjustifiable needâ€ to publicly carry a handgun for self-defense qualifies as a â€œpresumptively lawful,â€ â€œlongstandingâ€ regulation and therefore does not burden conduct within the scope of the Second Amendmentâ€™s guarantee.

Wow. Talk about lazy. Because that’s totally what Heller said. So there it is folks. There is no right to carry a firearm in the State of Pennsylvania, New Jersey or Delaware under the Second Amendment as far as our federal judicial overlords are concerned. Poof! Gone. Unless the Supreme Court steps in to fix it.

It’s Evolution! You Can’t Argue with Science

Over at Common Gunsense, Joan Peterson has been breeding a special batch of extremist ramblings lately. Like a train wreck, you can’t help but look. In this episode, she takes a position against teaching kids gun safety. She notes:

Little boys in particular seem to love shooting noises and pretend shooting at an imaginary animal or toy. It must be something in the DNA of male children ( or testosterone?). But real guns are not toys.

It’s evolution, and who can argue against evolution? It’s science! You’re not a science denier, are you Joan? I thought that was for the kinds of people who support the corporate gun lobby.

See, without weapons, humans make pretty tasty cat food, and our early ancestors and cousins wereÂ regularly preyed upon by big cats, birds and other predators until hominids evolved large enough brains to fashion weapons.Â Like most other species, our young instinctively engage in play that aids in honing critical survival skills, just like you notice in kittens. Even typical youth past times like baseball have an evolutionary angle revolving around weapon employment. If our species’ most sophisticated weapon was still the spear, young boys would still be picking up sticks and engaging in play that involved throwing them, probably at each other. It’s instinctive behavior, because humans whose children engaged in this behavior survived better than those whose didn’t, and that’s evidenced by the fact that our species, the weapon making species, is the only hominid species to survive.

The first step in bringing those aggressive instincts under control is to first acknowledge that they exist, and then teaching the young the discipline and responsibility necessary to control them, and use them in a socially responsible manner. For many boys and girls, the discipline required by shooting is a healthful outlet for what they are naturally are drawn to. Denying them the opportunity to explore that part of themselves under proper supervision would be a grave disservice, especially to appease a paranoid and fearful prohibitionist movement, that would rather pretend such things just aren’t true.

Profile Piece of NAGR/RGMO’s Dudley Brown

This is a very interesting article for people who like politics, essentially describing one viewpoint on how Colorado was lost. I don’t know enough about Colorado politics to have any insightful commentary, but the state, like many other western states, strikes me as having a pretty strong libertarian streak, much of which I’d imagine is incompatible with Brown’s very strong social conservatism. There’s a strong current in the GOP base, and especially in the Tea Party, that if we just run candidates that are conservative enough, we’ll never lose. I’ve never believed that to be true, and Colorado is evidence. You can run candidates that alienate other parts of your coalition, and hand the election to your opponents. That if we just run someone conservative enough is a myth peddled by talk radio hosts that making their livings telling people what they want to hear. The reality is getting to enough votes to win an election is not so simple.

Brown may be correct that the Democrats in Colorado have really stepped in it with the gun issue. I hope he’s correct in that. But for gun rights to be secure in Colorado, or anywhere, over the long term, you have to have a workable governing majority, and sometimes that involves making compromises. That would seem to be something Brown has trouble with.