Category: Gun Rights

CS monitor reports on a new Gallup poll. It’s interesting how the media always pooh poohs this, as if the guy doesn’t have an awful record on the issue before coming into the White House. I mean, he voted against a bill that would have decriminalized defending your home with a handgun as State Senator. Even I think he’d like to take my guns, I just think he’s smart enough to know it’ll cost him politically. I don’t think he’s changed his mind on guns, I just think he’s being a smart politician.

Jeff Soyer reports, and notes that these bills haven’t fared very well. That’s largely true, but it forces the other side to spend time and resources organizing against it. It keeps them on the defensive. So even if it’s not working out in individual cases, the issue is of great strategic value.

Joe and a few other blogs have reported that the NIH is getting into the gun research business. I don’t think studying the gun issue should really be part of NIH’s mission, just like it ought not to be part of CDC’s mission. CDC did a lot of anti-gun research in the 90s under Clinton, and it looks like NIH might be getting uppity on the issue under Obama. My worry is this is bureaucrats with an agenda who will spend their research dollars trying to verify their fore-drawn conclusions. In statistics, that’s often easy to do.

Seth Godin says that the Internet is full of true believers. This is true for tech products, but it’s also true for special interest groups as well:

The truth of the market is that the market you sell to isn’t filled with true believers. It’s filled with human beings who make compromises, who tell stories, who have competing objectives. And as a result, the truth of the market is that the products and services that win (if win means you can make a good living and make positive change) are rarely the products and services that are beloved without reservation by the true believers.

A lesson we could learn here in the Second Amendment community.

The media has picked up on the story generated by the Milwaukee DA and Police Chief saying they might be willing to accept concealed carry reform in exchange for some more restrictions on gun sales. While it’s true that this hardly indicates they’ve been converted, they are at least signaling a willingness to deal. That doesn’t mean gun owners have to accept a deal, but when you have your opponent over the ropes in politics, this is typically the kind of signal sent that would be the equivalent of crying “Uncle!”

I think it’s a good example of targeted open carry activism having a positive effect.

Looks like, in order to avoid having to give DC residents their Second Amendment rights back, the Democratic leadership in the House is going to attach DC voting rights to a defense spending bill. To do that, the Democrats will have to waive House Rules, which prohibit legislation or amendment implementing legislation in appropriations bills. This is a bit of a desperate measure, meaning that Pelosi hates the Second Amendment that much.

It’s kind of funny this subject came up, because I was exchanging some e-mails with Clayton Cramer just a few days ago where he speculated that we were likely going to get open carry as a constitutionally protected form of carry, which raised more speculation that development would make all the current opponents of concealed carry reform change their tune very quickly. Looks like we already have a convert. This would seem to show there’s value in open carry activism aimed at prodding officials into backing concealed carry reform.

UPDATE: Someone in the comments points out we’re not really looking at a convert, but someone looking to deal. That’s an accurate characterization, I believe. I would not suggest we take him up on it, but it’s interesting he’s willing to talk about it after it’s been made clear by the Wisconsin Courts he can’t do anything about open carry.

This isn’t good news. As much as Bush was a disappointment in many ways, he at least put Bolton in charge of our relationship with the UN, and Bolton was willing to tell the UN to go to hell:

The decision, announced in a statement released by the U.S. State Department, overturns the position of former President George W. Bush’s administration, which had opposed such a treaty on the grounds that national controls were better.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States would support the talks as long as the negotiating forum, the so-called Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty, “operates under the rules of consensus decision-making.”

At least Clinton is insisting on consensus, which gives any nation a veto over the process. But will we use it?  As I said before, it doesn’t really matter whether the US ratifies the treaty or not. Most forms of it that have existed in the past require signing nations to implement licensing of gun owners and registration of guns — something that’s not going to fly in the United States — in order to be a nation that can legally be exported to. This means even without US ratification, if Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Italy, Czech Republic and Russia signed on to the treaty, we’d essentially lose imports of all firearms and ammunition from those countries. In that case, we can only hope that there are ways to get around the treaty. But you can bet that International NGOs like Amnesty, IANSA and Oxfam will be lobbying the UN hard to close those “loopholes” in the treaty. Many foreign manufactures set up shop in the US to get around our importations laws already, but we still import an awful lot from foreign countries.

SayUncle probably does a better job of laying out what I was trying to say than I did, which wasn’t really that people should “stop open carrying, right now, all of you!” but more making the point that it doesn’t seem to me to be remarkably effective at carrying the pro-gun message. My style is more aggressive and confrontational than Uncle’s, which is probably why I get more hate coming my way when I post this stuff. But I do think having the debate is important for the community.

This is one of those cases where we all just have an opinion. No one has ever focus grouped open carry to see how people perceive it, and I don’t know if anyone ever will, so that means we’re not arguing based on hard facts and data. Since this movement has started in a period where gun control is on the decline, and public opinions about guns are drastically improving, I believe we will very likely be proven wrong if we predict dire legislative consequences arising out of this issue. To some degree, I should just be happy we’re in such a favorable environment that we don’t have to worry as much about a backlash.

But the pro-gun movement was flying pretty well from the passage of FOPA, until the assault weapons issue hit like the hammer of Thor in the late 80s and early 90s, and we weren’t really prepared to deal with it. Sometimes it can be hard to predict what the other side will get traction on, and that’s something I spend a good deal of time worrying about.

I was thinking of an idea for a post, but as I was thinking it up, I got that dejavu feeling you get if you’ve been blogging a while “I know I’ve blogged about this before.” So rather than revisit the topic again, I’ll just link to it. Why you don’t have the option of not caring what other people think about your movement. I think a lot of gun owners are independent minded libertarian types that ideally prefer to do what they want, and screw what other people think. In a world dedicated to libertarian principles (i.e. not the world we live in) you could get away with that. But in a world where a minority is trying to convince a majority to accept its culture and habits, you have to care what the average joe thinks. It’s tempting to believe the average joe accepts what you do, or doesn’t care, and that might even be the case, but the fact that I know I need Joe’s consent to continue doing what I do is one of the reasons I get paranoid about this stuff.

The media environment has changed greatly for us in the past decade, and it’s largely been in our favor. I know it sounds crazy to believe, because a lot of gun owners believe the media just hates us, and we shouldn’t care what they think, but that’s courting disaster. If the media’s treatment of the gun issue today turns your stomach, it would have given you a full case of dysentery in the 90s. One of the reasons I’m skeptical of open carry as activism is every time I read coverage of the issue in the media, it reminds me of the 1990s media, and I don’t want to go back to that. In addition to that, in various reports or commentary, you’ll notice plenty of gun owners who aren’t particularly enamored with the practice. It’s not like some of the places where open carry has created a backlash in Pennsylvania are hotbeds of anti-gun sentiment — it’s coming from very pro-gun areas. Then you have incidents like in Idaho. Idaho! You don’t get a much more pro-gun culture than that. If all this were limited to anti-gun urban areas where I’d expect people to freak out, I wouldn’t worry as much, but when I start seeing people freak out in Idaho, I wonder whether we may be pushing the issue a bit beyond what we can defend in the public space.

You can disagree with me about open carry, and think I might be worrying too much, but I think it’s hard to argue there’s absolutely no cause for concern at all.