Sebastian – Page 446 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Unable to Move On

It’s amazing how many anti-gun people just can’t move on:

Many are smart enough to see through the fog of the National Rifle Association. Many understand that the Second Amendment mentions a â€œwell-regulated militiaâ€ because the right to bear arms is only within that context.

It is mentioned only in the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Therefore its mention is purposeful and within this context when guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms.

Nope, you lost this one. It’s done. Over. There’s no more debate. It’s not the National Rifle Association anymore, it’s the Supreme Court of the United States. There seems to be a concerted effort among our opponents to stick their heads in the sand and pretend they aren’t losing.

Another Beating

In this one in Reading, PA, the victim was a 65-year old man. But it didn’t end like the one in Philadelphia:

The man was riding his bicycle about 11 a.m. on the Thun Trail near the Bertolet Fishing Dock in West Reading when the boys knocked him off his bicycle, police said.

Two of the boys were assaulting the man when he pulled a handgun and shot them, police said.

The police arrest everyone, but released the 65-year old victim, and sent the uninjured kid to juvie. I’m going to guess the Berks County District Attorney is going to decline charges in this case, except for the juveniles. This isn’t Philly.

Keeping it Mainstream

Josh Sugarmann and the VPC were always a little out there, but Sugarmann has always been more honest about his end goals than many of his counterparts, and he was a man willing to do his homework on the issue. For a while he was the brains of the gun control movement.

But now VPC wants to take personally owned firearms away from soldiers because they might hurt themselves with it. Yeah, that’s a message I’d want to take front and center in front of the public as an example of the kind of common sense measures their movement thinks we need. This has about as much logic as suggesting that depressed doctors and pharmacists remove any medication from their medicine cabinet at home because the easy access means it’s too easy for them to deliberately OD.

The First Starbucks Appreciation Day

I was looking through my archives, because I remembered we did a Starbucks Appreciation before, and noticed it was Joe Huffman who originally came up with the idea, back two years ago when the anti-gun folks first spewed the notion of harassing Starbucks for, you know, following state law. Back then I posted my receipt from that day, and will do so again this time around. A reader suggested posting receipts in the comments, which I think is a fine idea.

Looking back on the last fight, the Brady’s got upset over Joe’s campaignÂ rather early on, and Abby Spangler, from Protest Easy Guns, got a little sexist. Outside of McDonald, I noticed Paul Helmke and Peter Hamm looking pretty cold, and was tempted to bring them some Starbucks as a joke. I’m only sorry I didn’t follow through (I didn’t want to get out of line and risk losing my place). Things were different then. Brady was more professional, and the other side wasn’t practicing the kind of frothing at the mouth demonization of their opponents that is now a favorite of the Laddites in the gun control movement. Lastly, Abby Spangler wouldn’t let the issue go.

I haven’t noticed the Brady organization saying anything about this year’s Starbucks Boycott effort. I suspect they don’t want to waste their time and energy on a battle they are quite likely going to lose. This current effort, two years after the first, is being lead by a particularly whacked out fringe group called National Gun Victims Action Council, who are now proclaiming:

Our economic lever cannot be overcome because we outnumber the NRAâ€™s â€œextremistâ€ faction by minimally 50 to 1. To establish the economic lever, NGAC will initiate targeted boycotts.

No, they don’t, because no one is paying any attention to them except for the frothing at the mouth crowd, and I can promise you we all have much greater buying power than they do. I have more Facebook fans than they do, and I just got started with that. I have an order of magnitude more Twitter followers, andÂ I’m small potatoes in this issue. Take a look at who’s linking to the press release. These people have already lost, but they are too blind to see.

UPDATE: Competing events on Facebook. One here, and another here, the latter of which is the one I joined. I should note that the total number of people who say they are going is currently 3,771 across the two groups, which I expect will pass 4,000 before too long. This extremist anti-gun group has pretty clearly bitten off more than it can chew.

Hard For Gun Control Orgs to Find Friends

All the usual suspects are in dire straits because the President didn’t mention anything about gun control, err, sorry, gun violence, in his state of the union address. I don’t know why they are surprised by this. There’s only one person who wants to avoid the gun issue in the 2012 campaign more than Obama, and his first name rhymes with shit. Yet they continue to act like jilted ~~stalkers~~ lovers when Obama doesn’t toss them a bone during high-profile public speeches.

But who can blame them? Friends are hard to find these days for the gun control movement. We all remember Andrew Cuomo right? He was the HUD secretary under Clinton that sued firearms manufacturers, and then strong-armed Smith and Wesson into accepting the infamous deal that very nearly ruined its iconic American brand. Now Cuomo, following in his dad’s footsteps, is Governor of New York, and the state is running out of money. When it comes to fiscal responsibility and keeping up appearances for the sake of the gun control groups, what does he choose? Fiscal responsibility. He’s recommending the CoBIS ballistic database be scrapped, because it costs too much money and is ineffective. Andrew Cuomo is proposing scrapping a gun control law, because it doesn’t work. He is no longer willing to pretend the emperor is wearing clothes. I half expect next that Bill Clinton will come out of his Manhattan Office with an AR in one hand and an AK in the other, thrusting them in the air exclaiming “You know all that gun control stuff? Yeah. That was all Hillary. Long live the NRA!”

This Can Never Be Good

Jim Geraghty takes a look at Newt’s contract from Freddie Mac, a subject of current controversy. But what interests me, particularly, is the opening line from one of his readers:

I worked at FreddieÂ as a consultant during the same timeframe that Newt was there. I can tell you that the place was creepy with consultants of all ilk. The semi-circle drive in front of the main building was logged jammed with Lincoln Towncars come 4:30 pm every day. Iâ€™ve stood in line with Paul Begala waiting to get a coffee at the Starbucks in the Freddie lobby. Freddie at its height was a multi-trillion-dollar company that had only about 6,000 employees. Everyone else was a consultant or contractor.

There’s no way this is the situation and there’s not an awful lot of fleecing going on.

The New AK-12

Looks a lot like the AK-74m, only with a new stock, better pistol grip, a lot more rail. It does look, however, like they took a stab at the AK’s poor ergonomics, but I’ve always been the opinion that the achilles heel of that system ergonomically was with magazine changes, and it doesn’t look like that’s any different.

SOTU Summarized

Hey, aren’t I awesome? I killed Bin-Laden. Congress sucks because they won’t work with me. You kind of suck too, by the way. The rich, they also totally suck because they aren’t paying as much as Warren Buffet’s secretary. What we really need is a government program, and if you put that on my desk, I’ll sign the shit out of it right now. Not everything is bad, because Master Lock kicks ass. If you think things are bad today, it’s because we don’t work together like Navy Seals do. Did I mention I killed Bin-Laden? Goodnight capitalist pigs.

– Barack Obama

Tweet the SOTU

Sean has a few pertinent questions he’s trying to get in front of the Administration during the SOTU, including convenient links for helping get the word out across Twitter.

Trading in Precious Metals

Clayton Cramer has an amusing tale about “of two Americans being shut up in a room together, and emerging twenty-four hours after, each with a large fortune made by swapping jack-knives.” Apparently bowie knives were often used by Americans as a stand in for currency, to which Sir Lyon comments “it must be admitted, that it lends American trade a certain kind of respectability, by giving it some sort of metallic basis to rest upon.”

I’m hoping this means Clayton is researching the background of the bowie knife, and how it came to be associated with the criminal element. Some of the earliest moves by the pant wetters in America came about over the bowie knife, and then again many years later when the hysteria of the day were switchblades.