I have four different devices I use for trolling for news and keeping track of what I want to post about. I hate it when I find a tab with something I meant to post about, but overlooked until the news was stale. Ordinarily, I usually just write that story up as a loss, but I’d feel bad if I did that in this case.
Several weeks ago I was on an episode of the Gunblog Variety Podcast, talking about this post. I had the episode open but didn’t find it until yesterday when I did my gun news post and went through all my tabs on every device. Checking my history, sure enough, I never did the post. You can listen to their latest podcast here.
I tend to feel that there’s an obligation to engage in cross promotion, so I didn’t just want to let this go. It takes a lot of work to do vlogging and podcasting, and I dropped the ball here. If you ever looked at my desk, yeah, the computer side of things isn’t much more organized.
Apparently during the elections in Georgia last October, an NRA instructor was asked to remove his “NRA Instructor” hat at a polling station. Georgia’s law is not uncommon, in that it does not allow campaigning or election materials at or near polling stations. Bundy Cobb was made to take off his hat, but later decided to fight. It appears that he won.
I often wear some kind of NRA hat or shirt so the local politicians can see that we show up and vote. I’ve never had a problem with it, but this isn’t the first story I’ve heard of people being asked to take off NRA paraphernalia. On the other side of the issue, I’ve been scolded before as a poll stander for helping an elderly NRA member who was legally blind find his way into the polling place, and I forgot I had put campaign materials (for a candidate) on my hat. That was my fault, and I apologized to the poll watcher, but once they realized the voter was blind, the presumably Dem watcher didn’t seem to mind so much.
UPDATE: The title originally said lawsuit, but he did not sue. He appealed to the State Department and County Election Board.
I’m sorry to tell you that it’s been a pretty slow week for gun news. I didn’t post anything on Monday, not because I was pressed for time, but because I just didn’t find anything interesting to write about. It’s that slow. But I’ll give a gun news post a try and see how it goes. Hopefully this won’t leave me dry tomorrow:
Dave Hardy is celebrating diversity. 14% of Illinois carry permits are issued to women, and in many minority neighborhoods. Imagine what it would look like if costs weren’t driven up beyond what many poor folks can afford? This was a big enough issue, Bloomberg’s mouthpieces felt the need to pooh pooh the article.
The Washington Post throws down on Hillary and her gun position. It’ll be very important for us that Sanders gives Hillary a run for her money. Sanders is far from perfect on the gun issue, but the bet among progressives is that the gun issue will hurt him.
Glenn Reynolds: The Donald and Bernie Show. Both candidates are entirely a result of the establishments of both parties not listening to their voters.
You know the old retort that the attacker will just take the gun away from you? Well, it finally happened.
Kids today! In truth people have always been ignorant, but I think the difference is this generation seems to combine profound brilliance without profound ignorance in a way my generation didn’t.
Now that Bloomberg has put some real money back into anti-gun research, the studies appear to be flowing. Bloomberg’s mouthpieces, Evan DeFillippis and Devin Hughes (yes, those guys, who I now speculate were paid shills all along)Â point to a new study out that shows you’re really just better off running away. Notice how all their studies are published behind paywalls, while our researchers upload their studies to SSRN where anyone can read and dissect them?
Anecdotally, I only know two people who have ever had to use a gun in self-defense. In one case, the friend was in an attempted robbery. Attempted because he drew a gun on the robbers, and they retreated posthaste. The incident was reported to 911, but the dispatcher asked if the friend really wanted a car sent out to take a report, and he answered no. The second was in a rural home, before the days of 911, and was just never reported to police. Both of these were absolutely and unambiguously self-defense.
I’m not surprised they are picking these studies apart, because just about every study has shown a fairly significant amount of defensive gun use. I would expect more studies on how ineffective firearms are at protecting people. But here’s a question for Mr. DeFillippis and Mr. Hughes: if firearms are so ineffective at self-protection, when will Mr. Bloomberg, your patron, voluntarily disarm his security detail? Or are guns only effective when they are protecting rich billionaires?
Newsmax has published it’s list of 100 most influential people in the pro-gun movement. Newsmax is normally on the list of sites I won’t link, because they are the National Enquirer of the conservative news sites. But this was a stupid enough list I had to comment. Â It strikes me more as “Let’s list out 100 people we can think of or Google who are in the pro-gun movement and list them, and we can do it in the order we find them.” It would hardly be wrong to say that, Dudley Brown, for instance, is not influential, but when he actively sabotages progress on our issue, I don’t think it’s wrong to question his priorities. It also seems that all you have to do to get on their list is be a minor celebrity, well-known and own guns, or have once said a kind word.
The list is insulting to the real people who have dedicated their lives to this fight, often out of the limelight and not in the expectation of getting any thanks for what they were doing. So here’s who ought to have made this list, in no particular order:
Don Kates
Dave Hardy
Dave Kopel
Robert Dowlut
Clayton Cramer
Nelson Lund
Robert Cottrol
Glenn Reynolds
Stephen Halbrook
Nicholas Johnson
And that’s just ten legal scholars I can think of off the top of my head, who have all done tremendous things for the issue. I could probably list ten more, all of whom belong on that list more than twenty others who have no place on it.
What about Alan Gura and Alan Gottlieb? I mean, I know Alan Gura argued only argued two landmark Second Amendment cases and all, but hey, Bruce Willis once said something pro-gun! Alan Gottlieb, whatever his faults, has still done a hell of a lot more on the issue than Whoopi Goldberg.
Or what about Chris Cox and his whole lobbying team? Everyone thought we were going to get it good and hard in Congress during the 2013 fights, and our opponents walked away empty handed. Not even worth an honorable mention?
This list was written by people with no understanding or appreciation of the issue. It’s one reason I will continue to not link to Newsmax, or take them seriously.
Another progressive, who totally aren’t coming after your guns, BTW, pens an article praising coming after your guns as a good and wholesome thing. You know what would convince me, as a gun owner, the lefties weren’t after my guns? Not constantly saying they are after my guns, and hoping I somehow don’t notice. Note that today they aren’t really arguing crime anymore. They are arguing suicides. They are going to take them away for your own good, you see. Because “the person most likely to kill you with a gun is yourself.”
This shows the folly of statistics, because the likelihood I will die by suicide is precisely or very near to 0%, and if by some very odd and dire circumstance I ended up going that way, it’s none of anyone else’s f***ing business but my own. I realize that in this is an age where everyone is out and public with their personal problems to any poor schmuck who will listen, but I don’t believe my personal problems are anyone’s albatross to carry but my own, and certainly aren’t any reason for someone to insert themselves into my personal business uninvited.
The gun control movement probably realizes that in this age, speaking out on suicide prevention by taking dangerous things away from people, whether they are suicidal or not, fits the cultural zeitgeist a lot better than the idea that we’d do better as a society if we minded our own business as much as we seem to enjoy minding everyone else’s.
Bloomberg’s organization wants to extend the waiting period for handguns, essentially. The Brady Act requires a NICS background check, but in the case where the system delays for manual review, the FBI has three days to make a determination, or the sale is allowed to proceed under what is called a “default proceed.” The problem, as they see it, is that the Charleston mass-murderering racist was delayed by the system, and after waiting five days, managed to get the gun on a default proceed.
There is nothing broken about the NICS system itself. It was designed to work this way. Where there was a failure is in the FBI not following through to determine the status of his case. Eugene Volokh took a more detailed look into this issue, and determined that the the racist mass-murderer was arrested previously on a non-felony drug charge, but which was accidentally entered as a felony drug charge. Ordinarily, a misdemeanor charge doesn’t bar you from purchasing a firearm. Only people under indictment or information for felony charges are barred from purchasing (but not possessing) firearms. However, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) bars people who are “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.”
Bob Owens has written twoarticles already about how this is not a failure of NICS. I agree with him. Even if the drug charge was a misdemeanor charge, unquestionably the FBI had grounds to deny The Racist under 922(g)(3), but it did not follow through. A big of communication between FBI and ATF could have seen The Racist’s gun recovered. That did not happen. This is an inevitable failure of bureaucrats, not a failure of NICS itself.
But guns have a special salience now, after Newtown, after South Carolina, and veterans of the marriage movement see familiar terrain in guns — so familiar that they feel optimistic about being able to guide Americans to a similarly radical culture shift down the line.
The reason that culture shift happened so quickly is because the movement played off American’s sense of fairness. On the gun issue, that isn’t going to play. It’s a pure policy issue. If anything, gun owners can play to American’s sense of fairness to argue the gun control movement wishes to treat us unfairly.
Let us also not forget that the gay marriage issue also had a very significant generation gap. The issue won as much because it’s opponents were dying off, and the proponents were all young and energetic, as much as they changed minds. There isn’t any such generational gap on the gun issue. Young people tend not to be gun owners, but that probably has a lot to do with guns being expensive, and young people facing European levels of structural unemployment.
The gay marriage issue also had a large and passionate grassroots. Not only was their community fully invested in the issue, they got their friends and family invested too. They talked to people, and changed minds. Who does that sound more like to you? The answer is not the anti-gun movement. If the anti-gun movement had a patron saint, it would be Gladys Kravitz.
The article goes on to recite left-wing myth after left-wing myth about the gun rights movement.
“Today, fewer households own guns than ever before”
“gun lobby itself, which profits, obviously, by peddling fear.”
“able to mobilize a small but zealous and loyal group of voters”
“especially on background checks, a gun-protection measure which 92 percent of Americans”
First, he’s taking advice from Dan Gross, who runs the Brady Campaign, a group that post-Newtown basically surrendered control of the movement to Mike Bloomberg because of their history of ineffectiveness. The Brady Campaign had not passed any gun control legislation of any real significance since 1994. Dan Gross lives in la la land. Everyone knows it. I’m sure even Bloomberg and Feinblatt would agree.
These people still think “assault weapons” are achievable as an issue. That boat has sailed. Last I checked they were barely holding on to a majority on that issue, and that’s with loaded polling questions. They are still parroting 92% when they know damned well in a very blue state they only got 60% yes. The article ends by speaking of a value that is just fundamentally at odds with how Americans think about personal security.
In this redefining, he hopes to make a point. “Protection†isn’t an individual matter (a canard in any case, because having a gun in the house makes you exponentially less safe) in which individual patriarchs safeguard individual offspring. “Protection†is a communitarian thing, in which the safety of one’s own children depends on the safe habits of one’s neighbors.
This is a very European attitude, and one that is completely foreign to the American Experience, which has a tradition of armed, personal defense. This message will play very well with European Immigrants. It’s going to fall flat with Americans, even most liberal Americans. How are these people thinking they are going to make any difference at all when they don’t even understand the fight or who they are fighting?
Found this on Facebook, and while I can’t say I read all the comments, I did scroll through to the end, so I saw an awful lot of the root-level stories. Unsurprisingly, they were basically all self-defense incidents. Not all were defensive firearms uses, and more than a few ended with an attack hoist on their own petard, with the “victim” getting ahold of an attacker’s weapon and using it on the attackers.
The main thing I noticed? That in a lot of the cases, the attackers were not armed with firearms, but the victims were. So that even the anti-gunners got their way and were able to wave the magic wand and disappear all the guns, it would result in good people unable to defend themselves against bad people. These are the people anti-gunners want dead, maimed, or raped. And a number of them did what their attackers wanted and were still hurt after compliance.
