Category: Gun Rights

They are already using the shooting at the Holocaust Museum as a political tool to try to beat down the amendment on the D.C. Voting Rights bill:

“Congress needs no more evidence than today’s tragedy, which occurred blocks from the White House, for the justification of the District’s strict gun laws, which protect the President, Members of Congress, D.C, residents, and millions of tourists who travel to Washington, DC each year to visit monuments and other sites like the Holocaust Museum,” said D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson in a statement.

The gunman in the Holocaust Memorial shooting was a prohibited person.  It was illegal for him to possess a firearm anywhere.  Gun control laws don’t protect anybody, and if this is a case for anything, it’s the ineffectiveness of D.C.’s existing laws.

Pro-Gun Progressive and dcist are reporting that the D.C. Voting Rights bill appears to be dead, and along with it, the D.C. Second Amendment restoration amendment.  One unconstitutional law is sacrificed, so another may live.  What a great sense of perspective our government has.

UPDATE: Lots of sad pandas.  Time to bring the icon out, in honor of Delegate Norton.

Robb takes a look at how we overcame a societal perception that tomatoes are poisonous, and compares it to guns in restaurants.  Some people just aren’t drinking the tomato juice, no matter how many times they see someone do it, and not die.

I think the problem, and what this whole gun rights issue really boils down to, is whether you trust ordinary citizens to generally do the right thing, or whether you view them as poor in judgment, and thus in need of structure in order to protect themselves and society from it.  If you believe the latter, you believe it’s only a matter of time before someone chokes on a tomato, so maybe people are just better off not eating them.  And surely when this inevitably happens, you will be quick to point out “See!  Tomatoes kill people.”

What I’ve never been able to understand is why the gun control crowd believes having a badge immunizes a person from the poor judgement they attribute to other ordinary people.  Why put so much stock in the badge, but so much less in another token from the state which sends many of the same signals?  It must be something deep seeded: ordinary people just can’t be trusted.  They know that sure as 18th century Americans knew tomatoes killed people.  It’s something I understand, but then again, I’ve always liked tomatoes.

Looks like Joe Huffman got to ask the Mayor of Seattle a question about guns when he visited Microsoft.   No, not that question, but still a good one.  Apparently the Mayor is still planning to ban carry in city parks, in violation of state preemption.

Eric Shelton issued a challenge on his last handgun podcast, for a handgun podcast 6%ers.  I guess you could call them sixers, but I think our local basketball team might take issue.

Six Percent is almost embarrassingly low.  It’s actually kind of sad to think that that’s all I feel I can reasonably expect to get involved.  But the good news for you guys is it dramatically increases your chance to win!  Post email replies or scanned images of mailed replies from your elected officials here, when you contact them about your Second Amendment freedoms.  They’re politicians, so I don’t expect them to say anything worthwhile in their letter.  But knowing that you contacted them enters you to win the Handgun Podcast pistol that will be awarded in Episode 100.

I’ve said that with twenty motivated people, I could change the politics of this whole Congressional district when it comes to guns.  It doesn’t really take much.  Kudos to Eric for putting up a gun as a prize for getting people more involved.

I’m pulling for Creigh Deeds to come out as the Democratic candidate.  Virginia Shooting Sports Association has a very nice guide to the Dem primary (Part 1 and Part 2).  He’s the best candidate in the race for gun owners, I think.  The Democratic establishment is busy pushing Terry McAuliffe, including my governor.  McAuliffe is even running against guns, which seems to me to be a stupid idea in Virginia.

My understanding is Virginia has open primaries, so if you’re a gun rights supporter, I would encourage you to go vote in the Democratic primary for Creigh Deeds tomorrow.  Virginia deserves better than another Tim Kaine, and I don’t think we’d go wrong with Deeds.

NYSRPA are asking people to contact legislators to try to keep the microstamping bill off the floor of the Senate.  As Jacob mentions, it’s worse than California’s, requiring the stamp to be in two places on the extracted casing.  Because of the difficulty of this, it will essentially ban handguns in New York State after January 1, 2011.

Here we’ve been worried about him taking our guns, when apparently it’s our knives we have to worry about.  Banning folding knives?  Are you kidding?  Fortunately, there’s a group for this.  I guess since guns were out of the question, well, he had to take something dangerous away from us plebes, didn’t he?

Michael Bane gets shut out of some Hotel WiFi for “questionable traffic,” namely, reading gun blogs:

Am on the way to the airport in a couple of minutes…I wanted to post more, but the airport hotel I’m in, La Qunita, whacked my Internet access because of “questionable traffic…” That would, I suppose, be guns. I signed off their service and booted my 3G model. Interestingly enough, the specific site that got me was The Firearms Blog, which I like to check every day.

This is why I always use an encrypted tunnel if I’m on Hotel or other WiFi that I don’t control. I can tell you this though, I won’t be staying in an La Quinta inn any time soon.