Author: Sebastian

Can’t Speak for NRA, But I Can Speak for Me

Paul Helmke wants to know if NRA approves of people carrying to town hall meetings.  I have a confession to make.  I’ve carried a loaded firearm to several public gatherings over the course of the past few months.  I’ve even been in close proximity to elected officials.  I know this might come a complete shock to our Brady friends, but no one ended up getting shot, threatened, or otherwise intimidated.  In fact, given that I carry concealed, I’m pretty sure no one ever knew!  The horror!

I couldn’t have been the only one either, given that there are 600,000 people with Licenses to Carry in this state, and given that approx 6,000 or so are in my county.  The anti-gun folks love to paint us all as having “all the earmarks of a tinderbox, and is exacerbated by the presence of loaded firearms,” like the guns are speaking to us, and egging us on to cause mass carnage because we’re clearly all unable to contain ourselves.

Public gatherings certainly do attract their share of kooks, rabble rousers, and whackjobs.  That’s why I’d prefer if ordinary, responsible gun owners went strapped to these types of events.  Trust me, it’s not the guy open carrying a 9mm with a provocative sign you need to worry about.  In that case, the gun is a prop, just like the sign.  The ones you need to worry about aren’t going to advertise themselves.  They also aren’t likely going to give a crap whether you tell them they can’t carry there.

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Machine Gun Control

MikeB makes a point I’m honestly surprised anti-gun people don’t make more often, namely that we constantly make the point that machine gun crime is extraordinarily rare, yet argue that gun control doesn’t work.  Shouldn’t the controls on machine guns act as an example gun controls do work?  I’m not all that convinced, but I will admit that there’s a lot of room for bias here, and little data to go on.  But I will postulate, nonetheless.

I’m not that convinced that, outside of a few high profile criminals and high profile crimes, that machine gun crime was all that normal, even at the height of prohibition era.  One could argue that since mortars aren’t common in crime, that obviously mortar control must be effective, but mortar control did not effectively exist in this country before the Gun Control Act if 1968, yet it’s obvious mortar crimes have been uncommon to nonexistent. The reason you don’t see much crime involving mortars or machine guns is because neither is that remarkably useful for furtherance of criminal activity.  Machine guns aren’t easily concealed, and the ones easily concealed aren’t easily controlled.  All machine guns, except for crew served weapons, exhaust ammunition very quickly. It’s for that reason I don’t think machine gun crime has ever been all that common among criminals, who carry their weapons mostly for self-protection against other criminals.

During the 1920s and 1930s, machine guns made headlines, because along with the automobile, were relatively new technology that law enforcment and the public didn’t have much experience with, and that notorious criminals were quick to exploit.  But if we look, notorious machine gun crime hasn’t exactly been absent from the headlines since.  During the 1980s, Miami was known as the “machine gun mecca” even though less than 1% of crimes were actually committed with machine guns.  I’m sure we all remember drive by shooting hysteria, and who can forget the North Hollywood shootout.  I think it’s pretty clear that the media focuses on dramatic and rare crime largely because it attracts eyeballs to their story, and I don’t see any reason to assume that was any less true in the early part of the 20th century than it is today.

To speculate even further, I would argue that the presence of higher quality pistols that are more practical alternatives to machine guns actually reduce the use of fully automatic weapons in crime a great deal.  The reason being that if you’re going to make makeshift firearms, the open bolt submachine gun is actually among the simplest firearms to manufacture.  See stories form the UK about submachine guns being made out of bicycle pumps.  Or stories about how easy it is to obtain automatic weapons in the UK.  It’s probably not all that much harder here, but if all you have available is either expensive or crude, you’re probably going to have more full autos coming into the mix being used by common criminals.

That’s not to say the public is going to soon be in any mood to run the experiment of lesser restrictions on fully automatic weapons, to prove my theories correct, even though I suspect you wouldn’t see much of an uptick in violent crime if allowed to proceed.  But you could be practically guaranteed the few crimes that were committed would make headlines, just as they did in the 20s and 30s when the issue first appered.  Would that end the experiment?  Hard to say.

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Things Looking Up for Toomey

Instapundit reports on some polling that has him beating both Sestak and Specter.  My advice to Pat Toomey would be to play the middle.  Pennsylvanians tend to reject extreme viewpoints, on both sides of the political spectrum.  That’s how you get pro-life and pro-gun Democrats, and Republicans like Specter and Tom Ridge, who not many people would call arch conservatives.

My instincts tell me that Joe Sestak is too far to the left, and too egomaniacal to appeal to a great many Pennsylvanians, but that Pennsylvanians are also kind of tired of Arlen.  Given that Arlen’s been making more than a few faux pas interacting with constituents, and generally pissing everyone off, I wouldn’t say Sestak doesn’t have a chance of knocking him off, but I think it’s unlikely he’ll beat Arlen in the primary.  If it’s Arlen v. Pat, I think Pat has a good chance, but he has to be careful to avoid the problems that Rick Santorum created for himself.  If Toomey runs as a fiscal hawk, I think he has a chance, and I don’t think his pro-life position hurts him that much in Pennsylvania.  But being a Republican does, in a state that’s been Blue for a while now in statewide elections.  He should distance himself from the party establishment, and sell himself as his own man.  It’s a careful balancing act he will have to play, but I think he can run as a conservative candidate and win.  He just has to focus on the parts of the conservative agenda that motivate Pennsylvanians, but avoid going so far he loses the middle.

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The Thing about Shooting Clubs

For the past few months I’ve been filling in for Jim, our club’s Recording Secretary, who was on an extended summer vacation.  Jim was elected to the job at the beginning of the year, but I think decided it wasn’t the job for him.  A few weeks ago he came back, and apparently thought I had done such a good job, that he resigned, and recommended the Board of Trustees appoint me to fill the remainder of his term.  Last night they did.  But that’s not really the point of this post.  What I mean to talk about are shooting clubs in general, and why I think they are worthwhile to become involved in.

I see often in forums and elsewhere, people saying “I won’t joint his club or that club, because this club has some stupid rule I don’t like, and that club doesn’t run any matches that look interesting, or their facilities are in bad shape.”  I’m sympathetic to these statements, because it’s not like our club doesn’t have things I’d like to see changed, but I think clubs are too valuable to the community as a whole to eschew involvement in them because certain things aren’t to your liking, and you’d be really surprised how easy it is to change things.   More often than not, the people in leadership positions at shooting clubs are happy to have people willing to be involved and help out.  Demonstrate you’re one of these people, and you’ll have input.  You might not be running the place, you might not always get your way, but at least you’ll have a seat at the table, and have a voice.

Clubs are an important component to the shooting community, and while mine is relatively healthy membership wise, that’s not universally true across the board.  Some of them are desperate for people, and those that aren’t are still desperate for people willing to help out.  Especially younger people.   Yes, along with most other civic organizations, shooting clubs are getting older, and some are having a difficult time attracting new, younger members.

A lot of the blame can be placed at a lot of the older clubs running matches in shooting sports that younger people aren’t participating in.  This is a problem, but it also illustrates why I think clubs are important, and why younger people should be seeking involvement with them.  Because it’s not all that difficult to convince a club to run new matches.  To convince a commercial range that you want to run a match, you have to convince them they will make money on it, or at the least appeal to their sense of supporting a shooting community (who they can then get money from in other ways).  But ultimately a commercial range is in the business to make money, and that’s going to change their calculus when it comes to running matches.  With clubs it’s a much easier sell, because a club isn’t putting as much as risk by approving a match.  There’s not as much opportunity cost for turning a range over to a match for an afternoon.  That’s why I think clubs are important to the shooting sports, and for the continuing survival of the Second Amendment.  It would be a shame if many of these clubs die off because younger people aren’t joining.  Once a club is gone, it’s gone forever.  It’s a resource the community will never get back, and I think that will make us all worse off in the long run.

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Speaking Truth to Power

From a town hall meeting with Claire McCaskill.  If only a few percent of the soldiers returning from overseas are like this guy, I might have to rethink a lot of my pessimism that we may never recover our liberties.  I think we all owe it to veterans like this to get up and do something about the current state of affairs:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y98HxYbsdBM[/youtube]

When the left speak of “Speaking Truth to Power,” I doubt this is what they had in mind, but this is one of the best examples of that philosophy I’ve seen.

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No Help for the Left

This blogger makes some very salient points about the guy who open carried a gun near an Obama event with a sign saying “It’s Time to Water the Tree of Liberty.”

However, on the subject of what actually took place here, was this man well within his Constitutional right; being he was well within the proper law to carry his gun, the answer to this question is an obvious yes.  The second question is and I will answer it; is this.  Was it really in the best interests of Conservative, Republicans, and yes, even libertarians and law abiding gun owners for this man to show up at a town-hall meeting where the President of the United States was going to be attending with a Firearm and a sign that says that the Government needs to be overthrown by a violent revolution?  I say this as not only Conservative who believes in the right to carry a firearm.  But as someone who believes in something, that is not found in this day and age of internet sound bites, called common sense —  I am going to come down on that side and say that this man was totally out of line and should been removed from the area.  The reason I say this is because I happen to know that our President is getting more threats on his life now, than when the previous Administration was in power.

I don’t agree that he should have been removed.  The Secret Service wouldn’t have been worried, because he was well away from the President.  But I absolutely agree that it was a boneheaded move.  I saw the segment on Chris Matthews, and agree he did a good job of avoiding Matthews’ trap.  Matthews was hoping for foaming at the mouth, and got Libertarian geek instead.  I don’t think this guy was ever a threat to the President to the point where the Secret Service would have had to do something, but I agree it’s not the best public face for our movement.

My worry is that a lot of these people are attention seekers, and the fact that he got what he was after might mean more people try a stunt like this.  The left is already going ape shit trying to smear us with these guys.  The last thing we need is more.  If you’re going to a rally or public event, I wouldn’t bemoan anyone carrying, but I think people need to exercise discretion.

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