Guns – Page 340 – Shall Not Be Questioned

The Changing Demographic of Gun Show Attendees

While the silly season is not yet in full swing, Bitter and I are still trying to fill seats at the county Friends of the NRA dinner, so that means working gun shows (don’t forget to sing the fun show song). The most popular area gun show used to be hosted at the Valley Forge Convention Center, but they’ve recently turned that into a casino, forcing the shows to move to a convention hall just up the road in Oaks. So Sunday I get to sit there at our table and not wander, lest I might find something, like a Trapdoor Springfield in very good condition, which tempts me greatly to part with money I shouldn’t be spending on guns right now. Of course, said Springfield was on the table next to us, and it called to me the whole time. I resisted, however.

But there’s a few things that struck me about the crowd compared to even a few years ago. Generally speaking, guns shows were mostly a sausage fest, and the women you did see tended to be bored girlfriends who were dragged there by their boyfriend. What’s surprising is that not only are there more women at the shows, but they often have kids in tow. Gun shows seem to have developed into family affairs where mom and dad bring the kids along. Bitter talked a good bit to someone who was a 4dH mom, and who was interested in the dinner (since the grants fund 4H programs). The other demographic that seems to have grown quite a bit at the shows are middle class blacks. Sure, you still have your stereotypical fat middle-aged white guys, but the demographics are getting younger, more diverse, and trending toward families. Needless to say this is not good news for our opponents.

A Challenge to Gun Control Advocates

From a Chicago Gang Member:

Chris said heâ€™s confident he and his crew will always be one step ahead of the police.Â â€œYouâ€™ll never stop us from getting guns,â€ he said. â€œYou feel me?â€

The gang member also notes that enforcement of Illinois gun laws is an utter joke in Chicago. It is the same way in Philadelphia, where you can reasonably expect that if you’re caught with a gun nothing serious is going to happen to you, despite the fact that penalties range from 5 to 10 years in prison for people illegally in possession. It’s also worth noting a major source of crime guns, aside from straw purchasers, given that Chicago is a major national rail hub:

Another source of stolen guns is â€œthe freights,â€ Chris said.

He was talking about the freight trains parked on easy-to-access rail yards on the South Side.

â€œYou bust the lock,â€ he said. â€œOnce you get in there, you may get the wrong thing. You may get shoes or something. You feel me? But you keep trying. We tried it before and we know what kind of containers they in. Theyâ€™re carrying all type of handguns â€” in crates.â€

Now stealing guns from trains will get you a federal rap of ten years on each count, and that’s just for stealing guns. I’m sure it’s also a felony to steal from trains. Makes you wonder if you nailed gang bangers on the gun charges, before they go on to commit crimes with guns, whether that would make a difference. One thing is for sure, they can’t be engaging in shootouts on the street, robberies, or other types of gang activities if they are behind bars.

Our opponents have been quick to believe if you enact gun laws like Chicago’s everywhere, this kind of thing will stop. That was roughly the same philosophy that lead to tough federal laws and stepped up enforcement of our drug laws, and we see how well that’s working.

Rapid Tracing of Firearms

Ian Argent is surprised by how quickly the police turned the trace around for a country where registration is supposed to be illegal. The truth is that this country has had a form of registration since 1968. The concept of the registry created by the Gun Control Act of 1968 is that given a particular gun, the police can quickly find the last legal owner, but they could not find out whether a particular person did, or didn’t own guns, nor could they find out how many guns that person owns. But for the purposes of tracing a gun to a person, this country already has registration.

Up to the 4473, those records are already largely computerized. To find out which dealer a particular gun was sold to doesn’t take ATF any time at all. None of the big manufacturers or distributers are doing A&D records by hand anymore, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ATF has direct access to this data without a person having to be involved. Once the dealer has been identified, the question is whether that dealer is in business. If not, then it’s just a quick call over to the big ATF vault in West Virginia where all the 4473s of defunct dealers are sent, and put on microfilm. ATF is forbidden from computerizing these records by law (because that would make a registry, where they could link people to guns, in addition to linking guns to people). If the dealer is still in business, I believe all that is required is to send over a trace request, the dealer looks up the 4473, and there you have the trace. If the gun was sold more than 20 years ago, and the dealer lawfully destroyed that record, the trace fails at that point. Traces to fail rather often, as dealers are only required to keep records for 20 years, and the records in West Virginia are likewise sometimes incomplete.

But that’s why the trace can happen so quickly. It doesn’t take a whole lot of manual labor to accomplish one. Generally speaking, the amount of time it takes for a dealer to retrieve a 4473, or for an ATF agents in West Virginia to do the same from their files. You’re talking a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

Shooting Olympian to Address GOP Convention

Provided that a hurricane doesn’t interrupt the GOP convention, they have invited shooting Olympic record holder Kim Rhode to speak at the event. In fact, I’m very impressed by the fact that the GOP does not shy away from mentioning her shooting records in her biography. There’s no sugarcoating it, they are straight up talking about Rhode’s accomplishments as a serious competitive shooter. It’s a context that doesn’t threaten people, but makes clear that shooting is an American pastime.

Kim Rhode, the co-host of the Outdoor Channelâ€™s Step Outside program, is the only American Olympian to win five medals in an individual event in five consecutive Olympic Games. Sheâ€™s the most successful female shooter at the Olympics, the only triple Olympic Champion and the only woman to have won two gold medals for Double Trap. Most recently, she brought home gold in skeet shooting at the 2012 Summer Games in London, equaling the world record of 99 out of 100 clays. When double trap was eliminated from the Olympic Games, she set a new world record in skeet at the 2007 world cup competitions, going on to win the silver at the 2008 Summer Olympics in womenâ€™s skeet.

Also, of the 11 Olympians attending, she’s one of three selected to speak.

Some Questions for Mike Bloomberg

It’s now becoming clear that just about all of the injured in today’s mass shooting outside the Empire State Building were injured by the police response rather than by the shooter himself. This begs some questions:

How do you expect to have police that know how to shoot when you’ve done everything possible to extinguish any kind of responsible shooting culture in your city?
How many police officers do you think learn to shoot because they interact heavily in the civilian gun culture by taking part in competitions, belonging to shooting clubs, and generally shooting for recreation?
NRA has an entire division dedicated to law enforcement training. Have you ever considered inviting them to New York?
Law enforcement is a profession that tends to run in families. Indeed, a good many gun bloggers come from law enforcement families. Part of that is indoctrinating the next generation in the ways of the gun. If there is no civilian gun culture, how are the martial arts of this profession going to be passed down?
What if there is a Mumbai style attack in New York City? You’re now advertising to the world that your officers can’t shoot. The terrorists are listening.

There will probably be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over this. Some will undoubtedly want to disarm police officers. Cooler heads will call for more training. More training would obviously be a good thing, but the best thing for New York would be a restoration of a responsible civilian gun culture where police officers can find means to hone their skills recreationally, where there’s a body of knowledge and competence from which to draw from, and where there are places to shoot and plenty of people practiced in the art of shooting, from whom much can be learned. In other words, allow New York to be more like the rest of America, and you might find that suddenly your officers can reliably hit a target from yards away without having to expend a magazine and seriously injure innocent bystanders.

UPDATE: I guess we’ll see how some folks in Idaho stack up in the LAPD combat course.

That Didn’t Take Long

A few weeks ago I pointed out we seemed to have a new anti-gun blog in our midst. Thirdpower is reporting that Reasoned Discourse(TM) has already broken out. You’d think there would be at least one pro-gun control person out there dedicated enough to their point-of-view to actually, you know, argue it, and make their case. But it seems squashing opposing opinions is easier for them. Maybe that says something about the strength of their point of view.

Fighting for Preemption

Bloomberg’s publishing arm has been on a tear recently to try to frame the gun issue from Bloomberg’s point of view, and make the NRA look bad. This article doesn’t quite work, as the six comments so far in support of NRA would seem to indicate. I think most people get that you can’t have a patchwork of laws on a topic where violations are typically felonies or high-level misdemeanors. Most cities, including Philadelphia, actually can’t make more than petty crimes by ordinance according to state law, but cities in other states often have much greater leeway for making serious crimes. The ability to preserve that is part of why Bloomberg is making this a big deal.

The Truth About Gun Sales

An excellent article in Forbes, which is bad news for our opponents, because it’s not only fear driving the trend:

Other Gallup polls are even more interesting. The number of women gun owners in America has gone up from 13 percent in 2005 to 23 percent today. Also, the number ofÂ Democratic households with firearmsÂ in their homes skyrocketed from 30 percent in 2009 to 40 percent today.

If they want to know why Obama doesn’t talk about gun control, this is why. They also note other increases, particularly in women, and even some preliminary data that seems to show the long term decline in hunting has, at least for now, reversed itself.

Mass Shooting at Empire State Building

Story developing, but two dead including the gunman. This probably isn’t the time to try to score political points by suggesting New York’s strict gun laws have failed. Let the other side be the ones who exploit tragedy for gain. I have a lot of readers in New York, so I hope everyone’s OK.

On Sword Fighting

An excellent overview of a lost art, comes to us via Instapundit. It would seem so much of what we know today is wrong, including this absurd notion by the proponents of gun control that man doesn’t know or shouldn’t be concerned with the concept of violence outside the realm of firearms. From the article:

Only recently in the last decade or so has this extraordinary and all but forgotten material finally come to be properly examined and studied. Reconstruction of these remarkable teachings offers an unparalleled view into how fighting men prepared and trained themselves for duels, street-fights, and battlefield encounters. Their manner of fighting with swords is not the classical Western style we see today, which is largely a contrived 19th-century gentleman’s version of a narrow, aristocratic Baroque style. What the surviving sources show us is wholly different from the familiar pop-culture version, as well as being dramatically distinct from what has gone on for years in assorted reenactments and contrived living-history efforts. Rather, Medieval and Renaissance sword fighting was a hell of a lot more violent, brutal, ferocious, and astonishingly effective. The way in which these swords were held, the way they can be maneuvered, and the postures and motions involved, differ substantially from common presumptions and modern-era fencing styles.

Read the whole thing. Maybe, much like 80s movies featuring gunplay look silly and ridiculous to modern, trained eyes, that movies featuring swordplay will get better, and find better ways to realistically portray it.

UPDATE: Some video from the author: