Category: Gun Rights

I don’t ever want to see a spectacle like this happen in my country again:

Via John Richardson, who catches “Who are the police at war with?” A damned good question to all the fools who keep asking why weapons of war belong on our streets. Easy answer, they aren’t weapons of war. If they were, the police would have no business carrying them.

So ponders Glenn Reynolds, and it’s something that’s been on all our minds, I think. Michael Walsh thinks that it’s a hill to fight on, rather than a desk to die under. It was always going to be a difficult proposition, especially since many people normally with us, in the days following Sandy Hook, started lecturing gun owners how we were just going to have to cave on this magazine thing. Like hell we need to.

So why is it that the GOP, who are willing to sacrifice whole election cycles to talk about “legitimate rape,” and espousing absolutist views on abortion that are far outside the mainstream, can’t seem to bring themselves to stand by us when the going gets tough? I mean, we don’t have debates within the GOP that an abortion up to 26 weeks ought to be legal and protection, but at 27 weeks, well, that’s just cold blooded infanticide. But yet you get discussion that 10 rounds is enough for anyone to protect themselves, and 11 rounds is for nothing more than mass murder. They are willing to take the absolutist position, at the cost of disastrous election outcomes, for anti-abortion advocates, but not for us. Why?

I think the problem for our movement is that gun owners, in general, seem to be a lot better at tearing things down rather than building them up, and you need to be able to do both to be successful in politics. Once you find yourself in a race to unseat a politician who turned on you, you’ve already kind of lost, and if you fail, you’ve definitely lost. It’s far better to get someone in office and keep them on your side. In the 2008 and 2010 elections, when we were working phone banks, were the only ones in the game who were there specifically representing the gun issue. Values voters, even in this area, are ubiquitous among the volunteers we talked to on breaks. If you want to know why politicians go to the mat for these people and leave us hanging under the sword of damocles when the going gets tough, this is why. Values voters are everywhere at election time, and even in this area seem to represent the core volunteers on campaigns that are either actively sympathetic, or who have indicated they will be sympathetic. Gun owners are numerous, and highly motivated by fear and anger, which makes us very effective at negative reinforcement. We suck at positive reinforcement, and unfortunately, positive reinforcement is probably just as important, if not more important.

The first round of hearings will be in Annapolis this Wednesday, February 6th. Maryland Shall-Issue has the details. They are looking to pack the hearing room, and to make the hearings run overtime. The key is to make it painful for them.

The more and more I am looking at the new civility, as we go through yet another national conversation on guns, the more convinced I am that our original supposition that the prime driver in the gun control debate is a visceral fear of guns is completely wrong. Jeff Cooper coined the term “hoplophobia,” but I think it’s turning out to be way off the mark. Not that I don’t think there are people out there who are afraid of guns, but in the national debate, they aren’t who we’re dealing with.

Take a look at this article from Twitchy on sexist heckling of a woman pro-rights supporter as just one example, or this catch from Miguel of the Coalition to Stop Gun Ownership’s Facebook page. Clayton speaks of the fire eaters. Something I read earlier from Michael Bane sort of tied all this together for me. They aren’t afraid of your guns, they don’t hate your guns. They hate you, or to quote Michael Bane’s article, “It’s not the guns they hate…it’s us.”

I think this is absolutely correct, and everything we’ve been seeing in the media and from the gun control organizations seems to back that up. It fits with the article I did earlier on the cultural changes the coastal elites are seeing being the root cause of this latest backlash. We’ve been too successful for our own good. As long as gun ownership were confined to old, fat white guys (OFWGs), they were content to tolerate it. The changing face of gun ownership worries them, not because of a fear of guns, but for fear and loathing of the people who enjoy them, who increasingly are looking like them. If something isn’t done soon, they may have to take the opinions of gun owners seriously. Gun control is a movement of old white people, but they aren’t going to go down without a fight.

The good news is we’ve seemingly beaten an assault weapons ban, the bad news is they are pushing on magazine limits.

Senate Democratic leaders expect a gun bill to move to the Senate floor that includes most of the proposals backed by President Obama, with the notable exception of a ban on military-style, semiautomatic weapons, reports the Wall Street Journal. A top aide to Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said the bill would likely seek to limit the capacity of ammunition magazines; expand background checks to include sales at gun shows and other private transactions; and require better record keeping to keep guns out of the hands of those with mental illnesses. It would also try to curb gun sales in states with more relaxed gun laws to buyers in states with stricter laws.

Absolutely not. Magazine bans are just as out of the realm of discussion as the assault weapons ban. If you have not yet called or written your Senator, please do so. Don’t use the form letters by Ruger and Smith & Wesson. These kinds of forms aren’t as impactful as a personalized message, and aren’t given as much weight. In short, this takes real work. I’ve gotten so many people asking me to blog about these form letters, but there’s a reason I don’t. It’s better than nothing, but if it’s easy, it won’t have as much of an impact. There’s no getting around it. Feel free to take letters you see floating around out there and modify them. I’ve made some here. But take the time to personalize them and send them yourself. E-mail is generally best, but a mailed letter to a district office (not DC) is also impactful. We are not out of the woods by far.

Lyle notes:

You cannot claim to defend the second amendment while supporting or openly accepting the NFA of ’34 and GCA ’68. Or background checks. It makes absolutely no sense.

I think it depends on what you mean by “accepting.” When every expert in the field tells me that fighting the National Firearms Act, or most provisions of the Gun Control Act in court are fruitless endeavors, I can’t really find much ground to disagree with them considering we can’t even get the courts to agree we have a right to bear arms. Legislatively, I’ve never talked to a gun lobbyist who thinks that NFA or the many regulatory aspects of GCA are repealable in the current political climate, or in a foreseeable political climate. The current situation bears this out; if we’re worried about a ban on semi-automatics, because too many people think they are machine guns, how do you expect to find the votes to ease restrictions on machine guns themselves? I think it’s a waste of the community’s energy and political influence to fret over battles we lost years ago and can’t win now. It’s talk of storming the castle, when we aren’t even half way up the hill the castle is on yet.

Joe has a good post on the fallacy of the effectiveness of background checks, and I agree with him that’s true. An old study by the Bureau of Justice Statics bears the facts out for all to see. It shows in a simple table where criminals obtained their guns. It’s pretty clear that the decline in guns obtained at retail after the enactment of the Brady Act was nearly perfectly replaced by straw purchasers, most of whom are friends and family of the criminals who have clean records. The reason we got background checks is not because the NRA or gun rights advocates caved on the issue. NRA caved on the issue because the vast majority of Americans agree with background checks, and it was going to be a choice between instant background checks and background checks with a lengthy waiting period. As I said in the last post, sometimes it’s a matter of having to pick your poison. Most people have no inclination to dive into the data and find the truth, and if background checks feel emotionally satisfying to them, they’ll dispute your claim of ineffectiveness even without bothering to look at the evidence themselves and make up their own minds. They have no dog in the fight, so why should they?

If you want to eradicate the current gun control regime, you have to first deal with this: a majority of Americans do not own guns, know nothing about the gun culture, shooting, hunting, or anything involving firearms. About 100 million Americans live under state or local governments who have enacted enough strict gun control as to effectively destroy their shooting culture. That’s 1/3rd of the population of the United States we can write off, just starting out. Unless we get strong enough protection from the courts to make it possible to rehabilitate the shooting cultures in these places, that population will effectively remain among the people we can’t ever reach. The only way you’re going to make strong advocates for the Second Amendment is to give people a personal stake in the fight. One reason I often advocate people getting over the NFA is because, to be honest, it’s going to be necessary to concede those issues, for now, in order to get stronger protections for everything else. You have to reach into the areas where that 1/3rd lives, and start changing minds before a conversation about NFA or GCA, or the Brady Act, is even going to be possible. That is the fight right now, and the current backlash your seeing is because the elites in those places know we’re being successful, and it frightens them. We may one day get to storm the castle, but that will likely belong to the kids being born now. It’s incumbent on us — those in the fight now — to get them to the top of the hill.

Jim Braaten talks about how dealing with his pre-school daughter is awfully similar to dealing with anti-gun advocates and politicians.

“Clearly Unconstitutional” I am glad to hear such a firm statement. There have been others in the Second Amendment legal community that have broached the topic of round limitations, and while I realize there’s a limit to how far the federal courts are likely willing to go on these topics, if a ten round limit is conceded as constitutional, why not a seven round limit? What qualifies a judge, or legislator, to make such assessments? I know a lot of folks have derided the “common use” language in Heller as being a circular argument when it comes to machine guns and other long-regulated items, but I think that misses the forest for the trees.

If the Court does, in future cases, cement a “common use” test, that takes such questions out of the hands of judges and lawmakers and puts it squarely in the hands of the American people. You have some subjectivity in determining what does or does not constitute “in common use,” but if it’s interpreted correctly, I think in terms of magazines, it would get you to at least twenty round magazines being protected arms, and a more honest assessment ought to protect thirty round magazines as well. In terms of other arms, I likewise think it offers broad protections, without putting things like rocket launchers, MANPADs, or anti-tank missiles on the table, which federal judges, lawmakers, or the American people, are just never going to accept.

I’ve said before, we lost the machine gun argument in the 1930s. That was the time to have a fight over machine guns and it didn’t happen. I agree that for machine guns, common use is a circular argument, since they are not in common use because of the restrictions. I’d like to own a few myself if they eased the restrictions. But I think we’re beyond arguing for legal protections for machine guns, and the goal now needs to be getting serious and broad protections for everything else.