Category: Anti-Gun Folks

Thirdpower has a hilarious troll of CSGV’s Facebook page. I don’t know who this Chris Conmy guys is, but if he is a reader, well played, sir. Well played.

The Violence Policy Center is busy bowling us over with the might of their research, once again. This time telling us that cars are becoming so safe that people killing themselves with guns is becoming a higher cause of death in some states than auto accidents. Eugene Volokh takes apart some of the flawed logic on display here.

I would make a wager that the Violence Policy Center has become the most irrelevant anti-gun group out there. If they disappeared tomorrow, I don’t think the anti-gun movement would notice. VPC is, in fact, in trouble as an organization. One can see from their Form 990 for 2010, that pretty much their sole purpose as an organization is to serve as a jobs program for Josh Sugarmann and Kristen Rand, who compromise approximately 55% of their salary expenses. Also worth noting that public support, a measure the IRS uses to determine whether a non-profit organized under 501(c)(3) is a “public charity” or a “private foundation,” has been in precipitous decline at the VPC. The IRS generally requires an organization to receive one third of its support from public sources in order to be considered a public charity. There are mitigating factors that the IRS considers, but it you look at the total return for 2010, it follows with a letter which essentially begs the IRS not to classify them as a private foundation, which would eliminate certain deductions, and make donor information public. VPC’s 17% of public support in 2010 should be very worrying for them, since below 10%, regardless of mitigating factors, you cannot claim public charity status. Here’s how VPC’s public support has been trending:

One can see that as VPC has become increasingly dependent on grants from a small number of foundational donors, they are increasingly less and less qualifying to be considered a public charity. In contrast, EFSGV’s public support percentage is 87.5%, and Brady Center’s is 97.41%. Given these facts, it’s amazing that VPC isn’t trying to do more to be relevant. I can’t imagine the good graces of the IRS will last forever, and they are dropping precipitously close to the 10% floor beyond which no one can claim to be publicly supported.

I think it just desserts that the organization behind the assault weapons strategy is now, probably, the most irrelevant gun control group out there, and quickly on its way to even greater irrelevancy as a private foundation no one pays attention or donates to. You have to wonder how long before even their Joyce backers realize their grants to VPC are just good money chasing bad.

Thirdpower finds another instance of left wing eliminationist rhetoric that isn’t going to be showing up on CSGV’s Insurrectionist Timeline anytime soon.

Sean Caranna over at the blog All Nine Yards has a fantastic find about MAIG activists getting bankrolled by the City of Orlando. The person they appear to have hired is a long time gun control activist, with a history with the Brady Campaign, Florida anti-gun groups, and MAIG. The position is funded partially (the rest by taxpayers) by a granted from United Against Illegal Guns Support Fund, which is managed by John Feinblatt, who works out of Mayor Bloomberg’s office. You can find the organization’s form 990s here. The organization is a 501(c)(3). Keep in mind that if Linda Vaughn does any lobbying activity in this role, she’d be putting the tax status of this organization in jeopardy. Bloomberg is no fool, so I’m sure this is on the up and up non-profit tax wise, but it’s something to keep an eye on. Also worth noting that Bloomberg’s non-profit arm of MAIG is funded quite heavily by the Joyce Foundation.

Now, this is happening in New York already. But the big difference here is that, as rumor has it, the Second Amendment community has some sway over the Florida legislature. If positions like this are being hired to promote MAIG’s agenda, taxpayers should not be funding it. The legislature of Florida, indeed any state where this is happening, needs to step in and forbid cities from spending taxpayer dollars in this manner.

UPDATE: Going through this document some more, there are a lot of duties for this position that are not supportable under 501(c)(3) auspices.

Add Amendment Six of the Bill of Rights to the list of rights that anti-gun groups happily disparage:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Miguel has the evidence. I’d note that even other lefties are asking them to get off the crazy train at this point. I think Miguel is correct that they will likely come to regret, over the long term, throwing in their lot with the charlatans who played the media and the American public about the true nature of this case. For people who became emotionally invested in the case, and the conclusions driven by the narrative, they will likely never accept the truth, no matter how hard it punches them in the face. But the majority of the American public, I believe, ultimately, views the Sixth Amendment guarantee as an important one.

Our opponents’ only hope, at this point, is to continue foaming at the mouth, and hope that other mouth foamers are willing to open their wallets. For the Brady Campaign, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Violence Policy Center, I think the focus for several years now has been saving their phony baloney jobs, rather than attempting to seriously engage at the level of public policy. That’s a good thing for us, but unfortunately for us, Bloomberg is a lot smarter and more strategically minded than I think these guys ever were.

Our opponents view of things in the past month or so:

The reality of the last couple of months: 11 wins for gun owners federally, three in Florida, one in Georgia, two in Mississippi, and three in Oklahoma including an omnibus bill that legalizes open carry, among other things. In addition, we are on our way to victories in Hawaii, Illinois, and we ousted a MAIG Mayor in Quantico. Meanwhile, back in the reality of anti-gun groups:

Sometimes, you see a wound that just begs to have salt poured on it.

Bloomberg has put a target on the Buckeye State.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a bipartisan coalition of more than 650 American mayors, announced today that 103 Ohio mayors have joined the coalition to fight crime in their communities by reducing the spread of illegal guns and preventing gun violence. The coalition believes much more can be done to keep guns out of the wrong hands…

Pennsylvania still has far more mayors than any other state, unfortunately. I believe we still have a perfect record of keeping his MAIG mayors from reaching higher office here in the Commonwealth. (I actually need to double check that now that the primary is over.) Looks like Ohio gun owners need to watch out for the same thing.

I am reminded of my late interaction with our opponents, of a paper written a few years ago by Dave Kopel, who borrows the term “Pacifist-Agressive” from Eugene Volokh. The paper examines, in length and in detail, of the roots of the pacifist movement, and offers some great examples of pacifisms successes and its failures. Also discussed a length are the intellectual failings underlying much of modern pacifism, which, whether CSGV wants to admit or not, form the intellectual basis of the many of the religious-left organizations that make up CSGV. I highly encourage folks to take some time to read it. It directly speaks on the matter of pacifisms failings on the “What would you do about Hitler?” question.

Anytime a remark of mine spawns a post on CSGV’s “Things Pro-Gun Activists Say That We Take Out Of Context“ I feel I must be doing something right. I finally got tired of them spewing their peacenik nonsense, and tried to make them live up to the logical conclusion of their rhetoric, which would be that the violent, armed resistance that was necessary to eradicate Nazism in Europe was an immoral act. Apparently they didn’t appreciate that, and went off at length to mischaracterize my statement as suggesting that advocating non-intervention was the same as outright support.

But the fact is, anyone who advocated for waging peace against the Nazis, or sitting idly by while Hitler conquered Europe and wiped the Jewish people off the face of the planet, certainly fits in the category of those who “would have let Hitler finish his final solution.” Perhaps that is a logical conclusion of CSGV’s rhetoric for which they are deeply uncomfortable. But I suspect that is the case.

I would point out I never got a satisfactory answer to my question posed here, and ultimately CSGV had to cop out of that particular conversation, suggesting that questions about how to defeat Hitler by waging peace were above their pay grade, even though they themselves advocate this philosophy on a regular basis.