Sorry for the lack of posting, but this morning I was cast in a role as an extra in a film, and we just got finished shooting.
Author: Sebastian
Got Nothin
Spent most of today in the office today rearranging things to take this all into the final stretch, assuming we find some real-estate soon to put all this stuff. I felt bad ignoring the blog, but it didn’t take long to realize there was nothing to blog about anyway. Got caught up with other blogs pretty quickly, and looks like no one else has much to blog about either. It’s a real problem when you write about RKBA when no one is talking about it in public life. Let me rummage through and see what I have here.
I generally try not to pay great attention to polling numbers, because I think there’s a lot of tea leaf reading that goes on here on all sides. I’m skeptical they are rigged, however. I think there’s literally nothing to see here. I’d bet this is a fundraising scheme. If the person had been there, at the end they would have patched you through to someone who asked you to make a donation. If you answered Obama, or just stood there with a dumb look on your face, they probably would have dropped you eventually.
Speaking of polls, and why they aren’t to be trusted, we have this poll, which says 66% of Americans believe everyone should be required to pay some amount of income tax. From a post by Ilya Somin, we have a poll which shoes that 66% of Americans believe no one should pay more than 19%, and a whopping 88% believe no one should pay more than 29%. Now, if you think about cutting taxes on the wealthy to 29%, and especially 19%, while simultaneously raising taxes on the poor some modest amount, and how politically viable that is, you’ll understand why the gun control crowd’s reliance on polls to show their views are uncontroversial doesn’t hold any water with politicians who know better. People will tell pollsters anything. What matters is what happens when it’s time to make policy, and both sides rally, and the media prints and broadcasts, the bloggers blog, the forums forum, the pundits pundit, etc, etc. A poll on specific gun policy or tax policy doesn’t mean crap. Most people know next to nothing about both, including people who own guns and pay taxes.
The Ultimate Poll on the Second Amendment
Louisianans will be voting on a strengthened Right to Keep and Bear Arms ballot measure this November. Needless to say if we lost on this, it would be a minor disaster, so if you know people there, or live there, help spread the word. This is also meant to send a strong message to the courts about how the people expect their rights to be treated. Practically every court has called for intermediate scrutiny for the Second Amendment, rather than strict, because it allows them to do the kind of interest balancing that should not happen with a fundamental constitutional right.
Salon Covers Crossroads of the West
Salon is not known for being a right-wing publication. If anything, they lean left. But I find this article about Crossroads of the West to be fairly balanced for a Main-Stream Media article. They do a pretty decent job of talking to both sides of the divide, and also being fair about describing the environment.
Compare and Contrast, Part II
From the folks at Guns Save Life, in Illinois, who drew approximately 160 people to their event. We’re here, we’re real, get used to it.
Constructing Statutes
Sean Caranna brings up a very interesting issue in Florida, regarding concealed carry. Depending on how your state’s concealed carry statute is put together can depend on whether a police officer can lawfully stop, and sometimes arrest you, if he suspects you’re carrying a concealed firearm. Some states generally outlaw carrying of a concealed firearm, and make an exception for persons licensed to do so. Other states make it illegal to carry a concealed weapon without a license to do so. Pennsylvania’s Uniform Firearms Act is constructed the in the latter manner.
I remember speaking to a lawyer who told me the slight wording in language, even though it seems to be the same, could be used by the courts to determine whether or not suspicion that someone is carrying a firearm could be a pretext for a stop. In the former construction, where concealed carry is illegal except by exception, it could be read as allowing for a stop, because carrying a concealed is a crime, generally, so the officer is justified in the stop to ensure the person falls under the exception. In the latter construction it can’t be a pretext for a stop, because it’s only unlawful to carry without a license to do so, so an additional element is required to make a stop. An officer must not only have reasonable, articulable suspicion that the person is carrying a concealed firearm, but also reasonable, articulable suspicion that the person does not have a license to do so.
New Jersey guns laws are constructed entirely the same way Florida’s carry law is. Firearms in New Jersey are generally illegal. You can only own them under exceptions to the general law. While it’s difficult to see how that can be a proper means of regulating a fundamental constitutional right, it’s one reason New Jersey gets away with abuses that it’s difficult to get away with in other state. Hopefully Florida can change the wording of its statute to fix this.
If It Was Really About The Children
Groups we’d see before the gun control groups we have now, if they were really concerned about saving children:
- Coalition for Better Seatbelts
- Brady Campaign Against Swimming Pools and Large Buckets
- Coalition Against Plastic Bags
- National Coalition to Ban Dangerous Household Chemicals
- Pedestrian Policy Center
- Medical Community Against Bicycles
- Mayors Against Tall Stairs
Why? Because all of these things kill children more often than firearms. Also, I was thinking what’s with the huge surge in poisoning among adults versus children? You’d think kids would be more prone to quaffing poisons than adults. But then I remembered most of us like quaffing a certain beverage that is poisonous in large quantities. Then you also hear stories about drunks on the wagon slamming down rubbing alcohol in a last, desperate act. But I wouldn’t qualify that last one as accidental.
The Partisans Are Lined Up. What’s Next?
Currently we are a nation divided. Everyone would love to think that people think the deficit is currently driving us off a cliff, but while many Americans will agree with that, when it comes to doing something about it, they want low taxes and big government. If we were not a divided nation, this election would not even be close. But it is close.
Ilya Somin notes that this is not a historically unprecedented election, and that Obama and Romney are not doing any better or worse than other elections with similar economic indicators. He also notes:
Some of the models also take account of foreign policy events. While one can certainly make a case against Obama’s foreign policy, he has not presided over a large and obvious failure that can clearly be laid at his door in a way that swing voters – most of whom have very low levels of political knowledge – can readily grasp.
This is why I don’t really get political with events like the fiasco that just happened in North Africa, which resulted in the death of several people including our Ambassador. I don’t think it’s a very useful political club. The voters we need to reach won’t likely pin that on Obama, largely because the media won’t pin that on Obama, and the low information voters don’t care enough to seek out better information. This is a highly partisan election. Those who follow politics are already set in their decision, and the result is still very close. We will be depending on these low-information voters to decide the outcome. Zombie, at PJ Media, calls them Honey Boo Boos:
Honey Boo Boos is a term I just made up for the last remaining undecided voters in America. As you may have read at the time, the infantile and atrocious reality TV show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo either surpassed or tied the viewership totals of both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. That means millions of people are so tuned out of politics and so uninterested in current affairs that they’d rather watch a family of obese rednecks abusing their young daughter than learn even the most basic facts about the next president of the United States. These Honey Boo Boo viewers are what pollsters like to call “low information voters,†but that descriptor is not complete: Honey Boo Boos are also low interest voters whose political ideology is either easily malleable or absent altogether.
As Professor Somin often points out, these aren’t stupid people — their decision not to pay careful attention to politics is rational, since the odds of their vote influencing the outcome of an election are vanishingly small. But they do still vote. Collectively, these are the people who will be deciding the 2012 election. Therefore rhetoric in this election will be more ridiculous than in an election where it wasn’t close, because much of the messaging will be aimed at low-information voters who aren’t persuaded by ideological or policy arguments. You see ads saying, “Obama is a nice guy, but hasn’t done a great job as President.” Those are aimed at those types of voters, who will tell pollsters that they are disappointed in Obama’s job performance, but they still personally think he’s a good man, and so are undecided.
Somewhere along the line we started telling people that voting was a civic duty. That was the wrong lesson. Being informed and educated about the workings of your Republic is the civic duty, and voting follows as a natural consequence of being informed and educated.
Compare and Contrast
Miguel has a link to the latest CSGV protest at the White House. I count twelve people. Meanwhile, last week, we had our Friends of the NRA Dinner for Bucks County:
That’s 81 people, who paid 45 dollars to show up, and then also forked out an average of several hundred dollars a person on games. Granted, this is the non-political branch of NRA — Friends of the NRA raises money to fund grants to support shooting sport programs, particularly youth programs run by groups like the Boy Scouts and 4H. In a single county, we can attract nearly 7x more than CSGV’s White House protests.
And I’d note that our dinner is new, and we’re hoping to grow it. Why? Because 81 is a sad turnout by Friends of the NRA banquet standards. The Liberty Bell Committee puts on a dinner in the City of Philadelphia that regularly attracts 250 or more. Chester County FNRA, hosting their dinner in Kennett Square, attracts 300 people. Montgomery County, also a new committee, but a few years older than ours, is up to 160. Biggest of all in Eastern Pennsylvania is the Lancaster Friends, who put on a dinner with 800 or more, such that they have to run the dinner buffet style, and keep it running all night so that everyone can eat.
The gun control movement in decline (GCMD?) keeps denying they are up against real people. NRA? A toadie for the gun industry who just wants to sell more guns. NRA is an organization that’s brainwashed a small number of extremists. Guns are not a grassroots cause.
But the truth is that a small number of extremists would seem to more accurately describe their movement than ours.
The Mental Breakdown of the Gun Control Movement
Thirdpower has been diving the wreck, and finds a whole lot of crazy. Namely Elliot Fineman of National Gun Victims Action Council:
I wonder how he can claim this being that he’s previously claimed that ‘There is no such thing as a law abiding citizen‘? Is he saying there’s no gun homicides? Being that he’s in Chicago, how does he then explain Chicago Police Dept. reports stating that87% of the homicides committed in the city are by those w/ prior arrest records (pg56/57)?
I can probably clear up the gun control narcosis here. This seems to be a common claim now by the gun control crowd. It’s not true, but those in the gun control movement who’ve now made a hobby of erecting and tear down straw men focus very heavily on the “law abiding citizen,” and we’ve had to endure taunting and mockery from individuals who couldn’t argue their way out of a wet paper bag.
I say the other side is erecting straw men here because no one argues that the proxies we used to try to determine one’s proclivity toward criminal behavior are perfect. Given that the Minority Report was a work of fiction, the best we can do is to use some form of proxy, and there is no form that would be perfect. The only logical conclusion one can come to, based on the rhetoric of anti-gun activists, is that because some people may go on to misuse their guns, that no one should have them. Any time they use this argument, it’s neo-prohibitionism on display. This is the continued de-professionalization of the gun control movement. The professionals have left the building, leaving the people those professional were front for exposed to us. It’s a sad spectacle.
Which then leaves us with MAIG, the only professional gun control organization remaining, and the only one making arguments in a post-Heller world. MAIG’s focus is on the proxies we use. We categorically reject the lack of due process involved with many of their proposals, but they have, so far, avoided the kind of amateurish arguments you see from the groups in decline.