Category: Anti-Gun Folks

Anti-gun Bingo

With all of the Media Matters attacks on gun bloggers, NRA News, and the Second Amendment in recent years, we just assumed that it was the money from the Joyce Foundation that inspired their attacks. Turns out there may be more to it than that…

David Brock was smoking a cigarette on the roof of his Washington, D.C. office one day in the late fall of 2010 when his assistant and two bodyguards suddenly appeared and whisked him and his colleague Eric Burns down the stairs.

Brock, the head of the liberal nonprofit Media Matters for America, had told friends and co-workers that he feared he was in imminent danger from right-wing assassins and needed a security team to keep him safe.

The threat he faced while smoking on his roof? “Snipers,” a former co-worker recalled.

“He had more security than a Third World dictator,” one employee said, explaining that Brock’s bodyguards would rarely leave his side, even accompanying him to his home in an affluent Washington neighborhood each night where they “stood post” to protect him. “What movement leader has a detail?” asked someone who saw it.

Um. Wow. Okay.

Daily Caller has a look at the world inside Media Matters, and the paranoia of politically-motivated snipers isn’t the only gun-related news they found about the founder of the organization.

By 2010, Brock’s personal assistant, a man named Haydn Price-Morris, was carrying a holstered and concealed Glock handgun when he accompanied Brock to events, including events in Washington, D.C., a city with famously restrictive gun laws. Price-Morris told others he carried the gun to protect Brock from threats.

Late in 2010, other Media Matters employees learned about Price-Morris’s gun, and he was fired due to their objections. No public announcement was made.

According to one source with knowledge of what happened next, Brock was “terrified” that news of the gun would leak. “George Soros and a lot of groups connected to gun control are funding this group, and they wouldn’t be too happy that an employee of Media Matters was carrying a gun, especially when it was illegal in D.C.”

So, let me get this straight. The attacks on lawful gun owners are coming from a group that is headed by someone who hires an armed driver, suffers from a questionable mental state, has publicly admitted to drug use, and had an assistant violate gun laws on his behalf. The organization leader isn’t actually concerned about the hypocrisy of it all, but rather that funding might dry up if his gun hiring habits are exposed.

There’s much more in the article about the absurdity that supposedly takes place in their offices – looking the other way while colleagues are having sex on a desk, while also trying to fire a researcher for the crime of being ugly – and just how many in the media have run with their stories while the White House ultimately uses the rhetoric that Media Matters writes and pitches.

Is a good offense. We all know the term, but so does Rahm Emmanuel. Illinois has gotten dangerously (in Rahm’s view) close to shoving concealed carry down Chicago’s throat, and if they succeed in doing that, they can succeed in preempting a log of Chicago’s post-McDonald ridiculousness. I think he wants to get an anti-gun bill moving in Springfield as a defense to that. If we all have to rally to stop a bad bill, that runs us out to push a good bill. It’s smart, but it assumes Rahm can get it moving.

Joan Peterson mistakes a zombie for a “black man,” and then proceeds to be horrified that zombies are an largely just fun and games, and became an internet meme, just like lolcats. I can’t recall when the zombie internet meme actually started, but it started as a joke. The earliest stuff I can remember being this:

It doesn’t have to be your humor, but this stuff was all over the Internet several years ago, and started, if I recall, largely outside the shooting community. Then some clubs started doing zombie shoots. A club near me had one each halloween and it was very popular, and a lot of fun. You get that Joan? Fun! Some people think shooting is fun, and shooting at zombie targets on halloween? Double fun!

Why is this so hard to deal with and understand? If shooting wasn’t fun, many of us wouldn’t be so energized by this issue. Imagine how it feels for us. It would be like being a golfer, and having petulant busybodies constantly trying to limit access to golf courses, country clubs, and golf clubs, all the while talking about what scary, horrible people golfers were. This is exactly what you people are doing applied to another pastime. Is it so difficult to understand that in a free society, different people have different ideas of fun and humor? Shouldn’t those who value a free and tolerant society embrace such diversity of thought and pastimes? The only answer I can come up with is that Joan and her ilk value neither freedom, tolerance, or diversity, if it people happen to enjoy things they don’t understand or approve of. We have a word for people like that.

Personally, I think the whole zombie thing has jumped the shark. It’s gotten old, and at this point even I’ll agree the joke isn’t funny anymore. But I get how it started, and kept going. Even the Puritans had more of a sense of humor than the anti-gun folks, geez. It reminds me of an old saying about people who wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, terrified at the prospect that there might be people out there having fun. It would seem for many of the leaders of the anti-gun movement, this is an accurate description!

Interesting development in Detroit:

Justifiable homicide in the city shot up 79 percent in 2011 from the previous year, as citizens in the long-suffering city armed themselves and took matters into their own hands. The local rate of self-defense killings now stands 2,200 percent above the national average. Residents, unable to rely on a dwindling police force to keep them safe, are fighting back against the criminal scourge on their own. And they’re offering no apologies.

Police have been cut back so much that the average response time is 24 minutes now, compared to ten minutes in most of the rest of the country.

One high-ranking official in the county legal system, speaking to The Daily, said the rise in justifiable homicides mirrors a local court system that’s increasingly lenient of the practice.

“It’s a lot more acceptable now to get your own retribution,” the official said. “And the justice system in the city is a lot more understanding if people do that. It‘s becoming a part of the culture.”

This is the danger in the break down of law and order. To form governments, people surrender their natural right of retribution to the state. In return, the state administers fair and impartial justice. When the state fails to live up to its end of the bargain, people take matters into their own hands. Since juries are going to be composed of the same people mentioned in this article, prosecutors will have a hell of a time earning convictions on legitimate cases of vigilantism, and can forget about earning convictions on borderline self-defense cases, or cases such as shooting a burglar in the back after he dropped your stereo and is on his way out your front door.

And yet our opponents would rather have these people disarmed for their own good. Needless to say I strongly disagree with that statement. The residents of Detroit are doing what they can to keep some semblance of order. This is a failure of the state, and when the state fails, the people have a right to replace the administration of the state’s justice. That street justice is ugly, is why we have government to begin with. Our opponents view this as a failure of the individuals, whereas I believe we view it as a failure of the state.

It kind of makes me wonder in situations like this, if city budget cuts are the root problem here, why government doesn’t move in and do something particularly radical? Why not set up, dare I say it, the old concept of militia. Take the most responsible among the city residents, train them, and get them on the streets administering the state’s justice, rather than street justice.

But heavens no… we have to leave that to the “professionals” in modern society. You have to wonder, in polite society, which is the more abhorrent idea? Street justice, or the state organizing ordinary citizens to take care of their own? I think I know the answer for most of the elite, and probably our political opponents in the gun control movement.

From a former San Jose Mercury News Reporter, now turned freelancer, we learn that it’s hard for even hunting bloggers. Apparently Google’s policies “doesn’t allow the promotion of … violent concepts” including “the promotion of self-harm and violence against people or animals.” with an exception that it’s just fine for “self-defense, hunting and sporting events.” To me that still says guns, knives, and weapons are a no no, but Google is OK with events related to lawful activities with these items.

Not that remarkably surprising for a company that has it’s two big US sites being in Mountain View and New York. There used to be a time when tech people were almost universally “leave me the hell alone” types, but with the Gen Y and beyond, it seems to have taken a turn for the left. I’m thinking that might have to do with computers becoming less about ones and zeros (the realm of engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists) into a creative industry, not all that remarkably different from arts and philosophy.

According to CSGV, anyone who questions the strategy of gun control groups lighting candles in order to achieve a political change is just a big old mean person. And a jerk. Well, I look forward to their condemnation of Michael Bloomberg.

In what is otherwise a fawning piece over Bloomberg’s financial and political sacrifices for gun control, there’s an entire section called “NO MORE CANDLES.”

In the past, advocates for stricter gun controls held marches, rallies and candlelight vigils. MAIG has taken a far more activist approach, conducting undercover investigations and sting operations that are then dramatically revealed to the press.

So, now that Bloomberg is publicly throwing CSGV & Brady tactics under the bus, will they condemn him?

There are a few notes from this USA Today web piece on the new Brady president, and I decided to turn it into a game.

Youth anti-violence advocate Daniel Gross has been elected to head the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Center, the Washington-based organization promoting gun control plans to announce Monday.

In the opening sentence, we have two already. He was hired, not elected. There may have technically been a vote by the Board on whether to extend an offer, but he was hired. We know this because the Board hired a recruiting firm (multiple times, it seems) to find someone for the job. When a recruiter finds a candidate for a job and that applicant then interviews with multiple people who mutually come to a decision on extending an offer, we don’t say they were elected to do their job. They were hired.

Also, we know they announced last week. Although, to be fair to Dan Gross, it would seem that they didn’t plan to do so, so maybe it doesn’t count as an outright lie. I’ll count it for half.

Gross is cofounder and executive director of the Center to Prevent Youth Violence and was elected to the Brady post by the organization’s board of trustees. He replaces former Brady president Paul Helmke, former mayor of Fort Wayne, Ind., who announced in June he would step down on July 10. Helmke’s resignation followed a five-year commitment he’d made to serve the organization starting in 2006.

This bring our tally to 4 1/2 lies. First, we have the elected crap again. The Board came to agreement to extend a job offer, not hold an election of Brady Campaign members. Second, Paul Helmke & the Brady Campaign were all quite vocal that he wasn’t stepping down, they weren’t welcoming him back. Along those same lines, the third sentence is an outright fabrication that he resigned since it has been reported by mainstream media outlets when Helmke was giving interviews left and right last year that he didn’t want to leave the Brady Campaign, the Board refused to renew his contract.

After this paragraph, the rest of the story is the standard gun control manipulation counting suicides as the same as crime, and talking about how many children (many of whom do not meet any definition that a regular person defines as a child) die by guns. Following that, it’s all about feelings. I’m not exaggerating when I describe his quotes as sounding like Bette Midler in Beaches.

“Policy is a big part of the solution but people have to realize that this isn’t a political issue, this is an issue that’s claiming the lives of 30,000 people every year and eight kids every day and we need to approach it with that kind of urgency,” Gross said.

“The bottom line is making people care about this issue and care about it personally and deeply,” he added.

“Now, tell us the truth. I want you to pull out all the stops. We know the performer. Who is the person? Who is C.C. Bloom?”

“Oh, Marla. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked myself that very same question. Well, first and foremost, I would have to say that C.C. feels things – deeply. C.C. is a deeply feeling person. And, because of this, is deeply emotional. Do you understand?”

I would like to thank Dan Gross for inspiring me to pull out my copy of Beaches which I haven’t watched in far too long. I admit that I teared up even fast forwarding to get to the interview scene.

Back to more serious issues, his comments definitely highlight that the Brady Campaign is likely to make themselves even more scarce on Capitol Hill. It looks like we need to focus on MAIG’s efforts in DC since they are the new and upcoming gun control group looking to pass actual policy instead of just trying to make you feel deeply like C.C. Bloom.

Also of note, he had a random foundation director from Beverly Hills email the reporter about himself. I guess he is trying to highlight that he’s bringing a fundraising network to the table, but those funds are going to be pretty well restricted to the (c)3 that can’t lobby much.

Notice they don’t let Mumbles talk a whole lot. But I do have to say I’m relatively relieved. This could have been a lot worse for us, especially if they had been willing to spend money on a one minute spot. They spent so much time in their initial comical banter, they were only able to make a laughable statement about supporting the Second Amendment, and then imploring people to visit their web site (which no one will). Given that we now know they only bought spots in the DC market, my opinion in that this ad is meant to get MAIG exposure in front of politicians. After all, if they have the money to buy a Super Bowl ad, they must be big players in this issue. And imagine what they could do if they pumped money into issue ads during a race?

Of course, they already tried that in a media market primed for their message and failed spectacularly. But they surely want DC to know who the big dog is in this issue.