The Lebanon Daily News says they support hunting, but not pigeon shooting, but call hunting a “blood sport,” in the same category as pigeon shooting. Actually, no. Blood sports are things like dog fighting, cock fighting, bear baiting, and bullfighting, though I’m sure HSUS appreciates the subtle smear against hunting. I’m sure they also appreciate the Daily News repeating their lie that Pennsylvania is the only state that permits pigeon shoots. No doubt they greatly appreciate the entire article, which promotes HSUS’s agenda in Pennsylvania.
Strangely enough the Bradys are opposing this bill. Really? You still have a process for adjudicating someone, it just requires taking it to court rather than a unilateral decision by a government bureaucrats. The Brady position seems pretty radical to me, for a group that says they just want reasonable gun laws.
And apparently it’s all a vast, NRA fueled Yankee conspiracy, at least that’s what the Canadian media is implying. Word now is that the bill to repeal the long gun registry is doomed, because there are some Liberal Party politicians in rural ridings who are going to vote against it. Here’s my advice to Canadian Gun owners, just to fuel the conspiracy: You need to single out these rural, Liberal Party MPs and make examples out of them by voting them out of office, and make sure it’s apparent that the gun vote was significant. You will likely have to coalition with other malcontents, but it can be done. Crap like this is what you’re up against, but politicians will ignore that if they start to think the gun vote can remove them from office. That’s how we did it here. There’s no reason it can’t work in Canada too. Step one is to put the fear of the gun vote into the politicians. The rest will follow.
You can see some other parts on YouTube here and here. I probably watched some of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation videos myself when I was in Junior High too. It’s occurred to me that I was probably among the last of the 16mm film reel generation. When I entered high school, the schools were just starting to get the newfangled Laser Discs, which could be controlled with a nifty Apple IIGS computer. Kids today will never know the disappointment of being subject to regular lessons because the projector wouldn’t track correctly, the film reel broke, or the bulb in the projector blew out (some teachers knew how to fix these things, others didn’t). I’m sure with a new generation of media came a new generation of films, which means kids today will miss out on the delight of what I saw in Volcano National Park in Hawaii, reliving some interests from childhood:
Parts two, three and four if you’re interested. Documentary filmmaking today doesn’t have the same dry, cheesy appeal. No dramatic score, or inappropriately deadpan, unenthusiastic narrator. In part four, at the end, I was particularly struck by the fact that they used, as evidence of mother nature recovering, that they tilled over the soil, and planted some papayas, and they grew, dammit! Today it would be some kumbaya crap about fragile native plants that man as clearly destroying growing in the lava, and starting the cycle anew, rather than man punching mother nature right back in her face and getting some farming action back on.
As it is, I hiked through the area mentioned here, and it’s still pretty desolate.
I guess we didn’t punch mother nature quite hard enough. Not often you get to hike on naturally made, volcanic gravel — a remnant of the lava fountain that spewed here for a while.
Dave Hardy has the story. He was convicted back in June for accepting bribes from contractors, in the form of home improvements, so that they could keep lucrative city contracts.
When you have an organic grassroots uprising, it’s sort of silly to expect that it will make every decision with surgical skill and perfect foresight. Indeed, the attempt to play mincing games of compromise threatens to cool the very passions that have gotten us this far. In this Rush, I think, is basically right.
Both parties in Delaware have been led by blue-blood patrician types for eons. That probably isn’t unusual in most states, but in a small state it plays out in a very interesting way. The big donors and loyalists of both parties are members of the same bar association, members of the same country clubs, do business together and send their kids to the same private schools. They live in the same neighborhoods, too. This co-mingling created a genteel centrist quality in Delaware politics that has not been challenged in any significant way, until now.
It’s news that nobody from the establishment wants to hear. The Democrats may win Delaware, but at the price of watching a new political fault line define itself without being able to take much advantage of it. To the traditional horizontal divide between Republican and Democrat is added a vertical one: Washington insider vs outsider. It has divided politics into quadrants.
I think, in the end, O’Donnell’s victory may be a tactical loss, but strategically, it probably needed to happen. What surprising is that Mike Castle was able to avoid a significant primary challenge for as long as he did. It was his time to go.
I heard reports of Reasoned Discourse breaking out over at Common Gunsense, but my comments seem to have gotten approved. But I will offer another thought exercise for Ms. Japete. Consider this article from the UK talking about what a mess their gun laws have become. Ours are really not much better. The other side talks about working together, and arriving at common ground. The other side talks about the importance of universal background checks. But how dedicated is Ms. Japete and the Bradyphiles to that proposition? What follows is meant to be a mental exercise, not a proposition for a serious policy prescription.
What if gun owners finally accepted the Brady way and acquiesced to a licensing scheme, and for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it’s tied into the criminal databases so that it gets revoked immediately if you’re convicted of a disabling offense, or go bonkers and get involuntarily committed. Sounds good right? A Brady dream. Oh, but there’s a catch.
The license is available at any post office, costs five dollars, and is valid for as long as you aren’t convicted of a disabling offense. Licensed individuals in any state can buy, sell, trade, transport, and ship firearms to licensed individuals in any other state, or to import firearms from outside the United States. This means licensed individuals can buy firearms off the Internet. The license is also a valid license to carry a loaded firearm, concealed or otherwise, in all fifty states. There are no dealer or manufacturer FFLs. Dealers and manufacturers are only required to make sure their employees who handle guns or gun parts have a license. Non-licensees can possess firearms only under limited circumstances (such as taking someone target shooting, or if your non-licensed wife has to use your gun in self-defense, etc).
This is a general framework. Obviously there are details that would need to be filled in. But if this is not an acceptable regime to the Bradyphile, then the real concern has nothing to do with background checks, or it being “too easy for dangerous people to get guns.”
NRA can now put Mike Castle’s proverbial head on a pike outside HQ, and start carving Lindsey Graham’s name into the next sharp stick. It’s one thing to be a RINO, it’s quite another not to understand which groups you don’t want to piss off and mobilize. While I think that O’Donnell is, well, nutty as a fruitcake, I do hope she beats the formerly bearded marxist. Given the choice between crazy and nuts, I’ll take nuts.
I truly feel sorry for Delaware voters. The sad thing is, I would still feel the same way if it had gone the other way. I don’t shed any tears for Mike Castle. The electorate is pissed. He’s just the latest career politician that’s gotten what’s coming to him. I don’t think the anger is over yet, as I’m sure they are going to find out come November.
And we’ll find out just how nuts NRA is for endorsing Christine O’Donnell in the primary. My instinct would have been to sit this one out. Not because Mike Castle is our best friend, but because this strikes me as a risky bet. Some polls have shown the race between O’Donnell is close, and turnout is expected to be low. NRA would, no doubt, like to be able to send the message to Castle, and by contrast all the other Republicans, that they can end the political careers of intransigent Republicans (hear that Lindsey Graham?).
But to send that message, you have to win, and we’ll see how O’Donnell does after tonight when the results start to come in. The end result, either way, is likely going to be that seat remaining anti-gun. If Mike Castle wins his primary, he’s polling well for November against Chris Coons. If O’Donnell wins, the Democrats are very likely to hold that seat. These party concerns can’t and shouldn’t be a concern for NRA, but it’ll make November interesting. O’Donnell, to put it mildly, is nuts. I don’t see any scenario where she wins in Delaware, with the Democrats holding a significant registration advantage, and where Independents tend to like more moderate candidates. I think Delaware could support a better conservative than Mike Castle, especially this election, but I don’t think it can support someone as far right as Christine O’Donnell. This seems to be a frequent mistake being made by the Tea Party movement.
