Category: Anti-Gun Folks

Now that gun rights supporters have shown interest, the USPS is now claiming that they haven’t made any final plans for the Charlton Heston stamp, and it only came out in the news because the WaPo supposedly reported from a leaked confidential document.

Except it’s a lie that the news was supposed to be kept secret. The USPS posted on their own website that the Heston stamp would be released this April, and that’s been up since January 14, according to a date at the bottom. The Hollywood Reporter, which reported the backtracking by USPS, also noted that this “confidential” claim is a little suspect since the USPS blogged about the stamp, providing the artwork sample, back on January 30.

The USPS is now saying they will take into account feedback from anti-gunners, even though the stamp is actually to recognize his epic Hollywood career, and may now opt to reject it before release.

I didn’t jump right on Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey’s bill, because any idiot Senator can introduce a bill. Introduction doesn’t mean it has any legs, or will get anywhere other than referred to committee to die a quiet death from utter neglect. Bob Owens took a look at the bill and notes that it would apply to all future handguns two years after the date of enactment. It’s actually worse than that. It would also require any gun sold, after three years, whether privately or from a dealer, to be a retrofitted smart gun, meaning there would be no grandfathering for current stock. All handguns would have to be retrofitted if with smart gun technology if you wanted to sell, offer for sale, trade, lease, transfer, ship your handgun. Markey might as well mandate we all use phasers, for all the science fiction going on with this bill.

To make matters worse, Markey’s bill would put all regulation in the hands of the notorious nanny state killjoys at the Consumer Products Safety Commission. They’d get to decide the “smart gun” standard. It guts the PLCAA, and allows the persons, states and the federal government to bring suit against gun manufacturers for “unsafe handguns.”

Though, one silver lining to Markey’s lunacy that it does not exempt law enforcement. He does exempt firearms owned by the department of Defense, but I notice he does not provide exemption for manufacturers to manufacture for the Department of Defense, nor exemption to sell non-compliant firearms to the DoD, but I suppose that was just his staffers having no clue how to write legislation. Or maybe not, it’s always hard to tell how much they live in their own world, and think the unicorns can just fart out new technology on command.

There’s a new study coming out that claims to prove that liberalizing gun laws causes crime. It’s coming to us from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, which is funded by the Joyce Foundation and Mike Bloomberg. This type of study is called an interrupted time series analysis, which you try to analyze the effect of a certain policy by looking at conditions before and after. This is the same kind of analysis that was done by John Lott to support his thesis in “More Guns, Less Crime.” In this case, the local jurisdiction is Missouri, and the policy in question was the 2007 elimination of the permit to purchase handguns.

I can’t comment on the validity of the study, since it is not out yet, and even when it appears in the Journal of Urban Health, I doubt the public will have ready access to it, since we can’t have laypersons peeking into what the priesthood is doing now, can we? But I certainly hope skeptical people will tear it apart and find flaws. The study flies in the face of the very apparent fact that though gun ownership has been increasing, and the number of guns in private hands has been increasing, crime overall has dropped precipitously. How many jurisdictions did they have to study to find one where they could make the numbers support their fore drawn conclusion?

Watch as college students in Southern California sign a petition to send us all to the FEMA camps:

h/t to Dave Hardy.

There’s just something about attractive women who favor gun rights that gets our opponents in a hand-wringing tizzy. From the moment it was announced that Dana Loesch was going to be on The View, the madness began. Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence Ownership libel Dana Loesch, by suggesting she’s a spokeswoman for Magpul, when she is not. They had better be careful. I know they are used to repeatedly spewing untruths without getting called on it, but eventually they’re going to libel someone who isn’t afraid to file suit and will revel in the media circling the wagons to defend one of their own.

Shannon has been going nuts trying to prevent The View from hosting Dana, and I can’t really blame her. Their issue lives and dies by being able to maintain an insulated media bubble where they can build their false caricatures of the gun culture unchallenged by viewpoints and arguments which could call their caricature into question. Dana Loesch’s appearance on The View is a clear and present threat to their ability to maintain that bubble.

An anti-gun activist was convicted of domestic violence and is currently serving jail time. It’s news because he’s also an anti-gun lawmaker still serving in the legislature from his jail cell.

Joe Huffman asks the question: what happened to Colin Goddard, The darling of the Brady Campaign?  Good question. Taking a look myself, I notice his dad has been in the news more than he has. I think the biggest question is what happened to the Brady Campaign? It’s pretty obvious that there was some major turmoil over there, with several key long time people no longer working for the organization. While Colin still says he’s working for Brady, we don’t really know what happened, exactly, in that shake-up. I’ve been singularly unimpressed with Brady’s new leadership, even looking at it objectively.

Post Newtown, the face of gun control became Mayor Bloomberg and Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and Shannon Watts, of Moms Demand Action. The Bradys were second fiddle, which is representative of the fact that we know from the MAIG emails that they were attempting to snatch the limelight from Bloomberg on celebrity PSAs. I’d actually argue that Brady was smart for attempting to use one of its core strengths (celebrity relations) to snatch the narrative back from MAIG, but it seems clear someone decided they needed to be a junior partner in all this. So I don’t think it’s clear whether Colin was a victim of the massive shake-up at the Brady organization, or whether he’s just not on the media speed dial anymore when they are looking for a quote.

I suspect that Colin, much like the organization he aligned himself with, is yesterday’s news. Why would they want a 20-something guy man whose tragedy is now seven years in the past to be the face of this issue when they have dead elementary school children and their grieving families to use? Why call Colin or Dan when one of the Demanding Moms can give you a juicier quote? Even Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has had better game lately, if you go by press attention.

It’s hard for me to see how the Brady organization survives long term, especially given that Bloomberg is throwing his money and organization behind Shannon Watts. It’ll be very interesting to see their form 990s in a couple of years, so see what their finances are doing. I have no doubt that someone will probably step up to keep some skeleton of Brady afloat, lest the news cycle begin to speak about the death of gun control, but it will be an organization severely diminished in stature and effectiveness from its glory days in the 1990s as Handgun Control, Inc.

They got less than a minute in an hour-five-minute speech. This isn’t much of a bone compared to last year, when he at much greater length and passion, demanded that gun control get a vote (which he lost):

Citizenship means standing up for the lives that gun violence steals from us each day. I have seen the courage of parents, students, pastors, and police officers all over this country who say “we are not afraid,” and I intend to keep trying, with or without Congress, to help stop more tragedies from visiting innocent Americans in our movie theaters, shopping malls, or schools like Sandy Hook.

That’s it. Not much meat there, Shannon Watts. Neither Brady nor CSGV certainly have much to chew on either. That’s all he thinks they’re worth, and he’s about as on your side as  they can realistically hope for. Granted, he can still do a lot of damage with executive orders, but this indicates to me he’s given up on Congress, and that’s a good thing for us.

UPDATE: John Richardson notes: “[Michelle Obama] had four invitees last year post-Newtown to push the issues. This year the sole invitee representing ‘gun violence’ is the school bookkeeper from Atlanta who talked a school shooter into giving up the gun.“