Category: Anti-Gun Folks

CSGV is blasting some bloggers, including Joe Huffman, for, as best as I can summarize being mean to Joan Peterson. They particularly seemed incensed by Link P’s assertion:

“Peterson is no survivor of gun violence.  Her sister was murdered by her criminal brother in law. She wasn’t even there.

This isn’t something I would have ever said to Joan, because I think her grief is genuine and real, and I wouldn’t want to appear to be diminishing it or trivializing it. But I’m also not sure why Link’s statement is fundamentally wrong as a matter of how we generally think about these things.

Those who have been reading for a while know my mother died of breast cancer when I was 20 years old. She was diagnosed in my early teens and spent about 8 years fighting a losing battle against the disease. So I not only know what it’s like to lose a loved one, I know what it’s like to watch them slowly die and deteriorate over a period of years.

But yet the title of this post would make you think I had cancer, had beat cancer, or had otherwise somehow been directly victimized by it. By the same token, if I had said I was a suicide victim, it might make you wonder if I had tried it, or was giving a new definition to the term “ghost writing.” Usually when we speak in the context of victimhood, we assume a direct association with the person who was victimized. If your sister was raped, you’d say your sister was a victim of rape. You wouldn’t say you were a victim of rape. People would naturally assume that meant you yourself were raped.

There’s a lot of religion in this issue, on both sides. I don’t mean literal religion, but figurative, in the sense that the same kind of devotions, faiths, heresies, dogmas and scriptures are at work at a very fundamental level. But our religion is the role firearms play within the American cultural and political framework. It is heresy to the other side, because their religion centers around victimhood. Victimhood, to us, is heresy. Or at least the type of victimhood their religion centers around is. In short, Link was questioning Joan’s religion, and while that’s never polite, I can’t be so quick to say it’s incorrect. If it is, then I’m a cancer victim.

Clearly we must rid of world of this menace, which waste our most precious resources. I can see no use for such pretentiousness, such gaudiness, and such… Frenchness. These Dassault Clip have no use other than to make it hurt a lot more if you fall into someone and jab them with the tail fin. Call your Congressman now. Only trained pilots and aviation mechanics should have these dangerous clips.

I’m thinking of a little Photoshop play on the Brady’s new term might be in order for folks out there who have mad Photoshop skills. Clearly the creativity department at the Brady Campaign and Brady Center are running a bit lean these days. I thought Mass Murder Magazines was actually a better term, but assault clips it is. So here’s some ideas I have, but don’t have the artistic skill to create:

• Kind of like the Microsoft paper clip, but threatening in some way. Like he’s going to assault you.
• Some menacing variation on a clipboard that looks scary and dangerous.
• Know those things you use to hold bags of potato chips closed? Those can cut a leg clean open, I’m telling you.
• Tie clips. Nuff said.

Assault weapon was an invented term, but albeit one loosely related to assault rifle, which is a real term. Assault clip is pretty unashamedly conversion of what’s normally the noun or verb “assault” to use as an adjective to make whatever object seem like something scary that needs to be banned. Also amusing they aren’t even modifying the proper noun in this case, which would be “assault magazine,” though they probably figured that would bring to mind a publication with unusually strong paper edges, making for deeper paper cuts in the minds of the uninitiated. This isn’t about correctness or truth, after all, when there are guns to be banned.

Submit any further ideas or photoshopped work in the comments.

Josh Horwitz is at it again, trying to paint NRA as a bunch of militia crazies because Don Young, Congressman from Alaska, has apparently been seen with someone who later turned out to be a sovereign citizen militia whacko. The entire evidence of this is seen here, showing Young in some sort of fast food establishment talking to what he probably thinks is some kind of tea party-like Second Amendment group. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest Cox probably wasn’t going off about fringed flags and admiralty courts in front of the Congressman. I’m going to go out on another limb here and suggest you probably can’t swing a dead cat in Alaska without hitting some kind of Second Amendment group, and that politicians aren’t going to vet the leadership of every single one before speaking to them. Alaska is not a populous state, yet they have two representatives on the NRA Board. That should speak to the dedication of the average Alaskan to Second Amendment rights.

Speaking of the other NRA Board member, Wayne Anthony Ross (WAR, for short), CSGV levels poorly substantiated charges of racism and sexism. The sexism charge is particularly odd, since Ross broke ranks with NRA to endorse Sarah Palin for Governor, against the male incumbent. Odd for a guy who apparently thinks poorly of women. That, ironically, is what had everyone digging for anything WAR had ever written, including a defense of freedom of expression, penned twenty years ago, which has been twisted into evidence of racism.

This is a sad accusation by a group that is out of influence, and will soon be out of money.

I’m not sure what money they found to make this ad. I’m really not sure what money they will find to run it:

ABC is reporting:

The Brady Campaign, an advocacy group for stricter gun laws, will release a 30-second television ad today urging the President and Congress to ban assault clips. The group is teaming up with the Kelly O’Brien, the fiancée of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ Congressional staffer, Gabe Zimmerman, who was killed in January’s shooting rampage in Tucson. O’Brien will be on Capitol Hill today to pledge support for legislation to ban assault clips like the one Tucson gunman Jared Lee Loughner used to kill six and injure 13.

So it would seem they have intentions to air this on television, but to be effective they are going to have to target their strongholds in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, all of which are very expensive media markets. As of 2008, the Brady Campaign was down to 381,668 dollars total in assets, after having to swallow an 838,000 dollar loss that year. I can’t imagine their finances improved with the financial crisis.

I know many of my readers are in the New York City media market, so if you see this ad, let me know. That would be indication the Brady Campaign has come into money since 2008, that someone else is fronting money to run the ads, or stations are donating the time. We need to know so we can properly identify who our opponents are.

I’ve been watching our opponents work themselves up over the whole mass shooting in Brazil, and beating the cause of gun control. The problem is that if that incident says anything, it’s that strict gun control laws don’t stop this kind of thing. Brazil completely prohibits semi-automatic rifles. Pistols must be a caliber of no greater than .38 Special. Handguns are strictly licensed and registered. Owners must be 25 years old or older. There are limits on how many guns you may own. You can see a summary of Brazilian laws here.

Yet to some this means we need to try more gun control here. Brazil’s laws are a gun control advocates dream. They are well beyond anything that would be politically achievable in the United States. But yet we must still try something. Because if we do, the unicorns will fart a few more rainbows and surely less people are going to die by gunfire. Take their word for it. Ignore the fact that there’s no evidence it works.

So many things wrong with this statement:

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has promised a St. Catharines woman whose daughter was killed in 1996 with a stolen handgun that his party plans to simplify the gun registry will not weaken it.

OK, so the woman’s daughter was killed with a stolen gun, which I feel we are safe in assuming the daughters murderer did not then go register with police, so to make her feel better I will propose that we streamline the process for rural farmers to register their long guns, which naturally can’t possibly be stolen and used in murders. Because if we streamline the process, maybe then murderers with stolen long guns will go register them with police, giving us the opportunity to catch them.

What I want to know is if this made the woman feel better. I’m betting it did. I’m also betting the woman in question is still grieving, and is a few sandwiches short of a picnic on this issue because of that. Grieving people should not be the basis of public policy, and this is why.

I have to hand it to whoever created this blog. It was hard to tell at first whether it was real. But I’m fairly certain it’s parodying our opponents by use of caricature. How else do you explain a gem like this?

It’s come to my attention that gun owners belong to the NRA and are Tea Party Insurrectionists Extremist Gunophile Fetishists. It’s also notable that they will often give up their families, careers, and even their life to have “Wild West” type shootouts over minor disputes such as parking spots or to compensate for some other shortcoming. Again, this is not personal conjecture but consensus among the public as verified in the Comments sections of several web sites. That’s not to say that they don’t favor common sense civilian disarmament polices such as the prohibition of AK-47 Assault Weapons since they can now safely be considered Weapons of Mass Destruction, and have no civilian use, or the reasonable ban of Glock brand machine pistols since they have no militia use and therefore, are not protected by the Second Amendment.

It would be funnier if it was more of a caricature, though. Unfortunately, it’s not really much of one. I think if the folks over CSGV were to see this site, they’d be regular readers.

Over at the Huffington Post, the dynamic duo of gun hating have teamed up to demand we ban mass murder magazines now.

Ladd Everitt, and the other fine folks over a Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, are doing a fine job at bringing the vast diversity of the right to keep and bear arms movement together. They don’t seem to have much time these days to use their Twitter feed for anything other than sniping at bloggers.

This is not honestly surprising. You can see it’s not a wealthy organization. None of their money comes from any kind of membership dues, so they are not accountable to individuals. In fact, if you look at their 2008 tax forms, of the 219,000 or so CGSV took in, less than 95,000 dollars went to program services. One hundred eight thousand dollars of that went to something called EFSGV Consulting. That would be the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. As of 2008, EFSGV itself was hemorrhaging money, while having cut their overall budget substantially over the past five years. They took in approximately 346,000 dollars, 108,000 of which we know came from their nearly bankrupt 501(c)(4). Because 312,000 went to salaries and benefits of the people who are spending their time taunting bloggers, they had to cut substantially into cash to pay for programs. I can’t imagine anyone who’s donated money to this farce would be very happy about this. Charity Navigator won’t even track them, and tell me how well they do with this guideline.

As quipped on Twitter  yesterday, we bloggers are the diversionary troops. Yes, please, pay attention to us, by all means. Ignore the Gucci loafered fellow on his way to Capitol Hill to lobby for more and more Second Amendment freedoms. Ignore all evidence of the new legal framework we’ve established. Continue to fiddle, while the anti-freedom movement around you burns. We “anti-Constitution insurrectionists” are watching with delight.