Author: Sebastian

From our favorite Brady Board member, in her own comments:

Should we just not do anything? That is not what this country does. When there is a national public health and safety problem, people get to work. They pass laws, they educated, they do something. Seatbelt laws, no smoking laws, breast cancer and colon cancer screenings- all national efforts to get people to take better care of themselves or to mandate things that will make people safer and cut costs to health care, etc. We haven’t even tried with guns so how would we know?

Sometimes nothing is exactly the right thing to do. I don’t get this “We have to do something,” mentality. Especially when something generally involves restricting people’s liberty in the cases of smoking bans and seatbelt laws. I think this is really what probably separates our two sides; we value freedom and they want to be relieved of the burdens of it. I think this more now that we have interacted with them more.

Note the comparison to breast cancer screening and colon cancer screening. Would Joan Peterson favor mandating these? With long prison sentences for failing to show up to your scheduled screening? Because that’s what using gun control to solve the problem of violence means. Maybe she would. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me. But to borrow some of their lingo in a different context, as a cancer victim and survivor myself, having lost my mother to it, I would never advocate mandating such things. Freedom is more important than saving the lives which would be saved by mandatory screening with stiff penalties for non-compliance. I think most other folks would agree.

But there’s one difference here. There’s reliable scientific evidence that early screening greatly increases cancer survival rates. There’s absolutely no evidence at all that gun control reduces violence crime or murder.

These stories are almost getting old, but then again, so is the ink being spilled by our opponents in regards to the gun sales data not meaning what it means.

The gun lobby doesn’t actually provide any gun sales data to the media. The NSSF (the trade association for the gun industry) and the NRA have this data–because gun manufacturers have to understand what their dealers are selling in order to produce the proper amount of product and maximize profits. But the gun lobby has blocked public access to this information for decades. Instead, they offer reporters data on background checks run through the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

This kind of rhetoric goes to show that Horwitz is either an ignoramus or is deliberately deceptive. No one is blocking manufacturing data. It is there plain for everyone to see (scroll down to Annual Firearms Manufacturers And Export Report), which the ATF compiles every year, with a one year delay, in order to comply with the Trade Secrets Act, which is not a “gun lobby” piece of legislation.

Also, the only body that offers reports on NICS checks are the FBI. Anyone else is just relaying the FBI statistics. This is what the gun control groups wanted. I’m sure in a million years they never believed it would be used to chart their painful slide into irrelevance.

Well, it would seem some folks have touched a nerve with CSGV, that now they’ve taken to outing and libeling people on their blog. By now we’ve gotten used to it, of course if they had paid attention carefully they would realize those words are not mine (Sebastian) but those of my co-blogger Bitter.

Let me be clear here, what Congresswoman Giffords attended in Tucson was a memorial gesture in honor of the victims of that mass shooting.

Suzi Hileman, who took her young friend and neighbor, 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, to meet Giffords that day, took the stage at the vigil and hugged Giffords, walking to the candle area, lighting one of 19 candles for all those killed and wounded, and mouthing “thank you” to the crowd.

I don’t bemoan anyone there doing whatever makes them assuage the loss, and to help heal their community. But what the anti-gun groups like CSGV and Brady are doing is not that. What they are doing is a publicity stunt. In fact, I’ve wondered if their candle event was intended to draw media attention to themselves, in the hopes that reporters would believe that perhaps their candle lighting event was somehow related to the true memorial service in Tucson. We don’t mock anyone’s suffering. We do mock a group of busybodies trying to draw attention to themselves by taking away from the true event in Tucson, in an attempt to get media attention to their cause of taking other people’s freedoms away.

UPDATE: It would seem CSGV has corrected their oversight, and added a few more items for which I don’t apologize. Once your grief crosses over into trying to remove my freedoms and shred part of the Bill of Rights you can no longer claim the right to be left alone.