Sebastian – Page 339 – Shall Not Be Questioned

When Reporters Make Assumptions

Stephanie Jones has an article in Salon that starts off with “If Americans cared as much about their voting rights as their gun rights, they’d be up in arms right now.” And I could say that if the left cared about Second Amendment rights as much as they care about Voting Rights, you’d be able to buy a gun cash on the barrel, no questions asked. I find this kind of attitude infuriating:

These laws â€” which require voters to show a state-issued photo ID that many Americans donâ€™t have and will have great difficulty obtaining â€” could bar 3.2 million eligible and legally registered voters from voting in the next election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan think tank.

Oh, but there’s no concern about millions people who might not be able to exercise their Right to Keep and Bear Arms for the same reason? This is complete and utter bullshit. I’ll put more thought into what to have for dinner tonight than what Stephanie Jones put into this article, for her to parrot such nonsense. Either you can’t condition the exercise of a right on showing state ID, or you can. If you can, it’s acceptable for both rights. If you can’t, it’s acceptable for neither. That’s the debate, and it’s one I think that is worth having. It’s also one I’m perfectly happen to be on the side of requiring no state ID for either, if Ms. Jones can decide voting rights are really that important. But what we don’t get to do is choose rights we like to have the highest protections, and those we don’t to have inferior protections. That’s no way to run a country that claims to be serious about rights and protecting them.

Which State Has The Most Legal Machine Guns?

It would seem it’s Virginia. There’s some speculation as to why that is. Of course, if you ever go to the National Firearms Museum at NRA Headquarters in Fairfax, they have an enviable collection. I wouldn’t be surprised if they aren’t single handedly helping contribute to Virginia’s first place finish. There aren’t that many full auto firearms out there, so it’s not inconceivable if a museum that had hundreds of samples is located within a single state, it’s going to bump that state’s numbers up not insignificantly.

Article on Philadelphia Publishing of Permit Holders

Folks might remember a little bit back in the summer, the City of Philadelphia published the names of people who had appealed their denial of concealed carry permits. I had looked into some of the background of these individuals, and found some of the denials rather questionable. A reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News has taken up the story, and talked to some of the people involved here, including an Licenses and Inspections spokeswoman who had to have given the quote of the day by saying,Â “We touch a lot of people’s lives in a lot of intimate ways.”

It does appear that there are going to be lawsuits over this disclosure, and we’re happy for that. Kudos to William Bender of the Daily News for taking up the story. Gun owners don’t really demand the media be pro-gun, and I wouldn’t classify this article as advocacy. It’s a good example of reporting on an potential unlawful abuse of authority by those in power, and that’s something I believe is in the public interest for journalists to pursue regardless of the subject matter at hand.

Home Ownership

According to Ian Argent: “more fun than a barrel of monkeys on nitrous oxide.” I agree. This summer, I ended up replacing a lot of dirt around a corner of the house where soil was mysteriously subsiding. I was wondering where this dirt could have gotten off to. Recently we decided to renovate my office, which is in the finished basement. I ripped out the baseboard heating units today, and part of the drywall. I ended up discovering a trench drain several inches wide along the perimeter, which was filled with dirt. Under the dirt, I found a weep pipe through the foundation wall that went into the drain. The mystery of the dirt had been solved. Kill me now.

With a hand trowel, some water, and a shop vac, I carefully removed all the dirt to get back down to concrete. It was several trips with a bucket to get it all back outside. The weep pipe is now completely uncovered. The question now is whether it was part of a previous failed basement waterproofing attempt that I have since corrected, or whether it is something I have not yet discovered. Best case scenario this weep pipe no longer weeps. Problem solved! Worst case scenario, it still carries water and dirt, which was cut off to the sump by previous owners who finished the basement and blocked the trench drain with extreme prejudice. The fix for that is non-trivial, and may require a jackhammer, so I am sincerely hoping this weep pipe is extinct, or will at least remain dormant until such time as I can sell the house to the next ~~sucker~~ owner.

UPDATE: I should note that it was disclosed to me at the time of the sale the basement had water intrusion issues, and so I will be required disclose such to the next owner unless I spend the big money to fix the problem permanently, which is not out of the question. But for now, I want to get on with cleaning out and redoing my office, so this can is getting kicked down the road for now.

Open Thread On Cultural Shifts

I’ve often wondered about the rapid shift in the center of our issue to more strongly favor gun rights over gun control. It happened very quickly. In the space of just a bit more than a decade, we went from the high water mark for the gun control movement to the gun control movement being at death’s door, and needing to reinvent itself to achieve relevance.

I’ve seen some data that shows a generation gap on the issue, with the very old tending to favor gun control at a greater rate than other age demographics. This leads me to a postulate: the Greatest Generation were considerably more supportive of gun control than Baby Boomers and subsequent generations are. The shift in the center that’s happened in the issue has come about because the Greatest Generation has largely died off in the past decade.

Another postulate: if there was a generational shift in the issue, to what extent did racism and xenophobia play into it? Using my grandparents as my example from that generation, they were far more openly racist than is socially acceptable today. To what extent did support for gun control by older generations exist because of social anxieties about blacks asserting their rights and demanding to be treated as equal members of society, along with the social unrest that went with that?

Keep in mind I’m speaking generally, and there have always been a separation between elites and ordinary people. But I think it’s a safe observation to suggest that elites in the 30s through 60s were considerably more supportive of gun control than they have been since. Another postulate I would put out there is that our current success is not so much driven by a generational change, as the fall of the Northeast as an economic and cultural center, and the rise of the South, Midwest, and Mountain States, which have never had a cultural inclination toward gun control. In short, Southern elites are not out-eliting our elites, which I consider a good thing.

Making the Case Against Obama

CNN is covering the NRA’s stepped up campaign for this election season:

The new commercial charges that Obama is jeopardizing people’s rights to defend themselves and specifically mentions the president’s nominations to the Supreme Court – Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

Finally! Bitter is working up some video of the Justice Stevens event, which I’m hoping can show how important the court issue is. Stevens was put on the bench by Gerald Ford, but at the time gun control was still a bipartisan issue. We’ll need to understand the importance of the Court as a movement no matter who controls the White House. It’s worth remembering that Bush wanted Harriet Meyers on the Supreme Court instead of Justice Alito. It was outrage from within the GOP, and among the various interest groups on the right in DC that brought her nomination down. Getting our people primed for a Court fight is one reason I want to see this issue get more coverage than it does.

Where Would Gun Control Be …

… if it wasn’t for rich assholes?

New York City’s billionaire mayor said Wednesday he will fund a super PAC to help candidates who favor gun control in local, state and federal elections nationwide. A person familiar with the plans put the commitment at $10 million to $15 million.

That’s pocket change for Bloomberg. But the guy didn’t make his money by being a moron. He may be a tyrannical nanny-stater, but he’s sharp, and that’s what makes him the biggest threat to our rights out there.

Quote of the Day: Big Gulp

Zermoid wins the Internets in the comments:

There is something very wrong with America when you can have a serious discussion about â€œyou wonâ€™t need to smuggle in a Big Gulp. You can buy one legally.â€

So we apparently do not have pre-ban Big Gulps and post-ban Big Gulp’s.

To Shake their Salt in the Tyrant’s Face

A minor wordplay on Robert Churchill’s book. Bitter and I went up to ~~Mordor~~ New York tonight for dinner and a concert. Since King Bloomberg deems salt unfit for his subjects, I decided I needed to engage in a minor act of defiance:

In truth the food was fine without the salt, but it had to be done. I return to the Kingdom of Bloombergia in a couple of weeks, and it is my intent to smuggle in a Big Gulp. It’s interesting that I can’t order an Imperial Pint of Coke in New York, unless I ask them to put rum in it too, in which case it’s fine. I still await the day when I can carry a firearm through the streets of New York without Bloomberg or any other New York mayor being able to do a damned thing about it.

The Romney Assault Weapons Ban That Wasn’t

Being very close personally with someone who worked at GOAL during the Romney Administration, there is a lot to like and a lot to dislike about Mitt Romney’s record on our issue. What’s not to like has gone largely undiscussed. What’s been discussed far more often is the assault weapons issue, which alternately has people or the media suggesting Romney made Massachusetts’s assault weapons ban permanent, or accusing him of being the Governor who passed Massachusetts’s Assault Weapons Ban in the first place. Both are untrue. The ban passed and signed byÂ Governor CellucciÂ in 1998 never had an expiration. The problem came about in 2004 because Massachusetts Law makes several references to the federal ban. Without the supporting language from the federal ban, the definition of what exactly an assault weapon is in Massachusetts would have become uncertain. Fine, right? Well, no. Massachusetts is not a state where ambiguity in the law is decided in favor of a gun owner. The definition of assault weapon contains the language “shall include, but not be limited to,” which is like music to the ears of a prosecutor wanting to warn the fair citizenry that they exercise their right in his fiefdom at their peril. The limiting language in the Massachusetts definition was tied to a Federal Law which was about to disappear.

In 2004 that anti-gun leaders of the Massachusetts Legislature started to raise false concerns about needing to make Massachusetts’s assault weapons ban permanent, given that the federal ban was about to expire. This was never true, but presented an excuse to convince other legislators to revisit, and simultaneously greatly expand the definition of what an assault weapon is in Massachusetts, making the ban cover far more firearms. They went ahead and drafted a bill. Fortunately for gun owners in Massachusetts, GOAL was able to essentially gut the bill, and preserve the existing language in the definition, which included the federal list of exempted firearms. In addition they got a number of other easements to the bill which are detailed in their press release speaking about Romney’s record on guns. The anti-gun sponsors of the original bill were not pleased, but the rest of the Massachusetts Legislature went along with the GOAL plan of preserving the existing definition in the law, and slipping in some easements through under the radar. This wasn’t about making the ban permanent. Massachusetts Law would have still made assault weapons illegal, just with a far more nebulous definition of what exactly an assault weapon is.

While the anti-gun sponsors were not happy about what their bill had turned into, they got a lot happier when Governor Romney was misadvised about the bill he was signing and made the now infamous signing statement:

â€œDeadly assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts. These guns are not made for recreation or self-defense. They are instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people.â€

That was essentially cover for them, especially given that the media ran with this, and has kept running ever since. GOAL was inundated with calls from angry gun owners, who took the media and anti-gun legislators word on what the bill actually did.Â No one, not reporters, anti-gun folks, or angry citizens, bothered to read the actual law. While it takes some work to follow, but it’s pretty easy to see the effect of the first three sections of the law, if you look at the statute it is modifying, by inserting a concrete reference to the federal law with the addition of a date. The rest you need a deeper understanding of Massachusetts gun law to follow, but the “assault weapons” parts aren’t hard.

So Romney has never signed a gun ban, and anyone who suggests he has is missing the facts. He did other things, such as raising fees to try to balance Massachusetts’s budget, rather than raising taxes. Massachusetts has long required people to obtain licenses to possess firearms. Among those fees he raised were gun licenses, and the price hike was not trivial. The price was quadrupled without concern to what effect this would have on the exercise of people’s rights. The burden is not minor for someone who doesn’t have much money. That’s enough reason to distrust Romney on the issue as much as a gun ban is. I don’t blame gun owners who are wary of Mitt. But I’d like to see that wariness based on facts, and not bullshit peddled by the media.