Category: Anti-Gun Folks

Joan Peterson talks about rude gun guys. I’m sympathetic in regards to running into rude assholes on the Internet. I can believe it. We have a lot of bozos in the gun movement on the Internet, same as any movement that generates real passion. But I have to take serious issue with this:

There were a lot of claims about concealed carry permit holders and the inconvenience of not being able to carry their guns into every state in the nation. I’ll tell them about inconvenience. My family was inconvenienced when we had to plan a funeral for my sister, shot to death on an August day. The inconvenience of sneaking to the back of the church in a rented bus to avoid the press shouldn’t have to be, but it was. It was inconvenient to watch my mother deal with the death of her first born child. It was inconvenient to watch my own children deal with the awful death of their favorite aunt. It was inconvenient to watch my sister’s grown kids and step children deal with each other and with their grief. So really, I just don’t feel sorry for these guys who can’t carry their guns everywhere they go.

My mother died an untimely death at 43 when I was 20. I spent most of my adolescent childhood watching her slowly die. I am not unsympathetic to what a family goes through when they lose a loved one in an untimely manner. My aunt (her sister) still has a lot of difficulty with it, and my grandmother did as well until she died too eight years ago. We all had to go through that, and still have to go through that together. You never get over it, you just learn to live with it, as best you can.

But I am absolutely not able to understand the sentiment expressed in Joan’s quote above. None of the people reading this post had anything to do with what happened to Joan’s sister. In fact, none of the many millions of individual who have concealed carry permits from the 41 states that issue them do either. So I quite seriously question Joan on this issue.

Why take your grief out on all these individuals who, quite frankly, have nothing to do with your sister’s death? I’m really not trying to be cold or callous. I really want to understand this. You go on further:

Do they care about victims? Are their gun rights more important than the public’s right to be safe from shootings of family members or friends? Are their rights to carry their guns more important than jobs, health care, housing, and other pressing needs? I believe that most Americans know the answer to this.

This is a horrendous accusation to make against your fellow citizens. If we lived in world where drivers’ licenses weren’t universally recognized by all states, and your sister was killed by a drunk driver, would you suggest that folks who just want to be able to drive freely in other states didn’t care about drunk driving? This is not a rational argument.

People don’t take kindly to being made to own up to the sins of the insane and criminal, and accept collective punishment. We want to be able to freely travel in other states while exercising our Second Amendment rights. Making those of us who feel this way somehow responsible for the death of your sister is insulting. When you insult other people, is it so surprising some of them decide that lashing out is the best course of action?

It looks like the feds are going to charge the guy who took pot shots at the White House with attempting to assassinate the President. From the article:

Authorities suspect Ortega has been in the area for weeks, coming back and forth to the Washington Mall.  Before the shooting, he was detained by local police at an abandoned house. U.S. Park police say Ortega may have spent time blending in with Occupy D.C. protesters.

Apparently the Secret Service raided the Occupy DC folks looking for this guy. If this had been a tea party, I can promise you that it’d be all over CSGV’s insurrectionist timeline. In fact, if this guy had even a hint of being right wing, I can promise you Brady would be all atwitter about another dangerous nut with a gun.

But since the left-wing occupy movement has embraced this guy as one of their own, he’s going to get a pass from these groups, who apparently only care about some kinds of gun violence. If you want to understand why Bloomberg is the future of gun control, this is why. It’s really hard to take them seriously anymore. I follow CSGV, Brady, VPC and ProtestEasyGuns because it’s worth a laugh, not because I’m worried about what they are going to do next.

John Richardson is covering the reaction of our opponents to the passage of HR822.

Louise Slaughter brought up the specter of the Gifford’s shooting as a reason to vote against HR822:

“This is a pretty serious piece of work for me today because less than a year ago, one of our colleagues from Arizona was shot in the head while she was trying to convene with her constituents outside a supermarket,” Slaughter said, recalling the shooting that left six people dead and Giffords seriously wounded. “The horrible shooting of our colleague wouldn’t have been stopped with the passage of today’s bill, and no one is made safer by allowing guns in the public space.

Does Slaughter really think Laughner, who is completely out of his gourd, would have been influenced over whether or not it was lawful for him to carry the gun on his way to murder a groups of people including a Congresswoman?

The Giffords shooting was a failure of the mental health system. Letting crazy people wander the streets unmedicated and untreated is potentially dangerous.

Not surprising, but if they could get other lawmakers to sign on, you think they’d take the time. From the letter to the White House:

In our states, we work hard to keep guns out of the hands of people who have no business having them. In New Jersey and New York, law enforcement is directly involved in the concealed carry permit process and has discretion to approver deny a permit if it would jeopardize public safety.

Let me rephrase that for the Senator and Congresswoman:

In our states, we work hard to keep guns out of the hands of as many people as we can. In New Jersey and New York, law enforcement is directly involved in the concealed carry permit process, and has discretion to approve or deny a permit if the person applying isn’t well connected, or hasn’t donated to the right campaigns.

That’s more like it. I don’t know why they’d think Obama would want to issue a veto threat. If I had to guess, this White House is going to work behind the scenes to make sure this bill dies in the Senate. They aren’t going to want to publicly take a position on it if they don’t have to. That would actually play right into our hands.

Ladd Everitt seems to be pretty proud of his performance here:

I am not really impressed, to be honest. For those of you who don’t want to listen to Ladd debate for ten minutes, Everitt’s main assertion seems to be that imperfect enforceability and imperfect deterrence don’t mean the laws are not worthwhile. Our folks note, quite correctly, that laws barring people from carrying guns accomplish nothing, because the likelihood a murderer will be deterred by a sign or law against carrying the gun is vanishingly small. Everitt contends that the same thing could be said for the law on murder itself, so by our logic, we shouldn’t have laws against murder.

The problem Ladd has here is that he hasn’t really spend much time thinking about the law. While I think he brings up a good point, his mistake is to assume that the primary purpose for laws punishing murder is deterrence. I contend that it is not. When people form governments, we surrender certain natural rights to it, and retain others. One right we surrender is the right of retribution. In a natural states, if you come over to my house and kill my brother, I have a natural right to seek retribution for your depriving a loved on of his life. It is difficult, in a civilized society, to allow for individual punishment of crime. So we surrender retribution to the state, who formalizes the process, and ensures justice is served. The primary purpose of laws against murder is not so much that it will deter someone intent on committing it, so much as offers the living a sense that justice was served. If the state fails to be effective as this function, you risk a break down of law and order, and a reliance of vigilantism.

But this is not to say that laws against murder don’t also have deterrent effect. One has to examine how this deterrent effect works, however. Generally speaking, unless you’re scrupulously careful, if you murder someone, you are much more likely than not going to be caught and brought to justice. About 70% of murder cases are solved in the US. This qualifies as a fairly powerful deterrent. I would wager this probably does help keep the murder rate down significantly.

Serving justice can’t possibly be a justification for preventing someone from carrying a firearm, because there is no victim of the crime who will be seeking it. It’s fair to judge a law against the practice solely on its deterrent effect, which is not also true for murder. The problem for Ladd is that the likelihood of being caught with a concealed weapon is infinitesimally small unless you do some kind of screening in the place where carry is prohibited. I’ve been carrying for a decade, and I’ve never been stopped by law enforcement who noticed. Sure, a law prohibiting carrying concealed weapons will have a deterrent effect; it will deter people who are generally law abiding and don’t intend to commit crimes. It will not deter someone who is intending to use that firearm to commit more serious crimes that do have victims that will require justice served. It certainly won’t deter someone who is mentally deranged.

So if the law has a relatively zero change of deterring someone, other than someone who is not intent on committing a crime of violence, why is it incorrect to question whether this is a worthwhile law? What Ladd Everitt defends has a deterrent effect on one intending violence, either through criminal inclinations or madness, that is so vanishingly small is to be logically of no use to society. I think he’s wrong to so quickly dismiss this fact, and to make poor analogies to laws against murder.

The good news for Mayor Bloomberg is that he won all the races he was backing in Northern Virginia. The bad news, however, is the reason he backed these candidates was to prevent the Republicans for taking over the Senate, which they appear to have done. This means:

There are 10 gun bills that have passed the GOP-controlled General Assembly and now could also pass the Senate, including one that would repeal Virginia’s current mandate that a person can only buy one gun a month.

However, one of the state’s leading political experts noted that sweeping reform was unlikely.

But with the GOP controlling key committees, it will certainly be easier. The question is whether Bloomberg really believe that Virginia’s one-gun-a-month law help tamp down trafficking to New York City, or whether he’s concerned that if the law is repealed, and Virginia’s trace numbers do not precipitously increase, or in fact decline, whether it will repudiate the entire concept, which Bloomberg’s Mayors are pushing in other states.

Looks like the Mayor’s office has felt the need to officially respond to our little finding from yesterday, which has spread around Al Gore’s Internets quite nicely today:

“With more than 600 mayors in cities across the county, there are always going to be changes to keep up with. We actually called every one of our 169 mayors’ offices in Pennsylvania this summer to confirm status. The staff in Freeland never returned our calls, so we relied on the government websites, which still list him as Mayor.”

So how many other towns “never returned our calls,” who’s mayors you still kept singing onto your gun control agenda, or to block pro-Second Amendment legislation in Congress?

Freeland Borough is a small town in Northeastern Pennsylvania, having only a few thousand inhabitants. It’s not atypical of Pennsylvania towns. Many of these local municipalities don’t have full time staff to return Mayor Bloomberg’s calls. Nor do they always keep their web sites up to date. The greater point here is that Bloomberg is using the names of his mayors without doing so much as asking each mayor whether or not they want to get behind specific initiatives.

In all likelihood, a great many MAIG mayors sign up thinking “Who could be for illegal guns?” and don’t bother to pay much attention to what Mayor Bloomberg is using their names for. That’s why it’s incumbent on gun owners who live in towns with MAIG mayors, to try to get their mayor to quit. In a lot of cases, all it takes is talking to them.