Guns – Page 394 – Shall Not Be Questioned

MAIG Getting Ugly?

A Denver Gazette article on MAIG getting nasty, and a failed attempt to get the Mayor of Colorado Springs to join the group. Some of you may know that Dave Kopel’s father, who is a legend in Colorado politics, died recently. This is of note from MAIG’s ED:

Mark Glaze, executive director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, addressed David Kopel on Twitter one day after his fatherâ€™s memorial service.

â€œAs a Colorado native I recall him well,â€ Glaze wrote of Gerald Kopel. â€œWonder what he would think of his son calling electeds liars. #apple fell far from free (sic).â€

As anyone who is active on the Twitter gun community can attest, there’s nothing wrong, in the mind of our opponents, spewing hate at gun owners. We’re not people, you see. We’re monsters. So anything goes.

The M.O.D. Squad

While reading “Against All Odds,” I had to laugh about this:

Buckleyâ€™s rationale for [refusing compensation for confiscation] was simple: â€œWeâ€™ve got a right to get poison out of society.â€ He denounced the Springfield, Mass., handgun manufacturer Smith & Wesson as â€œmerchants of death.â€

Anyone else suddenly inspired to watch a comedy tonight?

Learning from the Past

Dave Kopel wrote an article for the February edition of First Freedom that I believe should be mandatory reading for every gun owner in the country. In it, he tells the story of Massachusetts gun owners who faced an all out confiscation measure that was put to the ballot in 1976. There are lessons for every type of political scenario we face in 2012, even if confiscation is currently off the table as long as Heller and McDonald are allowed to stand.

I think some of the tidbits from the article very much relate to the issues we face today. For example, the issue of whether NRA should back pro-gun Democrats:

The leader of the â€œPeople vs. Handgunsâ€ organization was the popular Republican John Buckley, the sheriff of Middlesex County. Buckley was fresh off a 1974 win against a pro-gun challenger. Alongside Buckley was Robert diGrazia, the police commissioner of Boston who was appointed by the staunchly anti-gun Boston Mayor Kevin White.

At the insistence of Buckley and diGrazia, the Massachusetts handgun prohibition lobby did not think small. Confiscation would be total, with no exemption for licensed security guards or target shooting clubs. Even transporting a handgun through Massachusetts (e.g., while traveling from oneâ€™s home in Rhode Island to a vacation spot in Maine or a target competition in New Hampshire) would be illegal, except for people with handgun carry permits (which, as of 1976, were almost never issued by most states).

Buckley had the benefit of “incumbency” in the election for the Sheriff’s office because he was appointed by a Republican governor, according to this history of the office.

Kopel also highlights the plans for anti-gun groups to take the confiscation plan far beyond the borders of the Bay State, and how this plan has still been used in recent history.

A Buckley speech to the Conference of Mayors detailed â€œHow to Circumvent the Legislature for Gun Confiscation in 37 States by the Initiative Petition.â€

Eventually, it was hoped, the mass of state and local bans would provide the foundation for a national ban. …

The tactics of the national gun-ban groups are to use state and local bans as the starting point for national bans.

By 1994, only four states and a handful of cities had passed bans on so-called â€œassault weapons.â€ Two of the states (California and New Jersey) had far-reaching bans, while in Maryland and Hawaii, the ban was only for â€œassaultâ€ handguns. Yet this four-state foundation was enough for the gun prohibition lobbies to be able to push a national ban into law in 1994.

To me, this is one of the biggest problems we’ve faced in the pro-gun movement. While not screaming that the sky is falling at every turn, making gun owners realize just how close we have been to actually dealing with the knock at the door by Dianne Feinstein is something we are really only starting to overcome thanks to the internet.

I recall a story from the 2004 Pittsburgh NRA meeting where I was told an activist from Massachusetts sat down at a bar for a meal next to a guy from Pennsylvania who also came in for the convention. When the Massachusetts resident described what it was like to be a gun owner in the Bay State, the guy from Pennsylvania argued that he was exaggerating because things like that simply can’t happen in America.

Oh yes, they can. They can, and they do. I wouldn’t be shocked if that same Pennsylvania guy was actually floored by the news with Heller that the Second Amendment had never been interpreted as an individual right by the Supreme Court. For many of these types, it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that they find it hard to swallow that other citizens allow governments to act so badly without fixing it at the ballot box.

Go read the entire article. Come back here to discuss it if you like. It’s really eye-opening and worth your time.

When NRA is Laughing at You

A commenter today noted that NRA doesn’t do very compelling writing in its publications, but I’ll note that this take down of the Brady State Rankings for 2012 is most definitely worthy of some of the better snark you’ll see on the Internet.

On a side note, we noticed that the Tides Foundation gave $125,424 to the Brady Campaign and its affiliate, the Brady Center, between 2004 and 2009. But with no contributions in 2010, we wonder whether someone at the Foundationâ€™s grant office had a look at Bradyâ€™s previous scorecards and realized that even when youâ€™re wasting someone elseâ€™s money, there has to be a limit.

I could paraphrase an old Beck’s Beer commercial here,Â “NRA doesn’t do comedy, they do fear,” in that most of their rhetoric is aimed at presenting gun owners with frightening worst case scenarios in an attempt to fire up their single-issue voter instincts. So really, when even the NRA has resorted to just pointing at you and giggling? How the mighty have indeed fallen.

How the Tables Have Turned

You know we’re full of win when the anti-gun crowd is crowing that the media is bought and paid for, because, you know, they are reporting the truth about gun sales being up. Hey, what do you know, even the mainstream media figured out the gun control crowd were charlatans, and they aren’t buying it as hook, line and sinker as they used to. No wonder they are angry.

Protecting Us For Our Own Good

Mayor Mike doesn’t want us to have guns, because we might kill ourselves with it. Think about where this line of reasoning leads? It’s not to a free society, it’s to a society where you’re not allowed to have anything dangerous, because you might hurt yourself with it. This is a recipe for the few lording over the many. It does not describe the free republic of our founders.

It’s also interesting to note that Bloomberg is only offering an anecdote. That’s like saying none of your friends have guns, and none of them have killed themselves, so clearly not having guns prevents suicides. But the actual data shows otherwise.

Abe Lincoln Had a Saying …

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

The PA Legislative Strategy

Following up on the last post, I think the real importance of HB1523, which will give real teeth to preemption in Pennsylvania, is that it shuts down one avenue MAIG can use to attack us, namely creating momentum for gun control by getting cities and towns to buck preemption. MAIG has been very smart strategically, or at the least very lucky in how they chose to approach the problem.

MAIG’s strategy is actually somewhat of a trap. It would spread NRA very thin to have to get involved in tens of thousands of local races, in order to make a serious effort to get rid of MAIG mayors. NRA has tried some cheap, half-hearted efforts to urge members to get their mayors to quit, but have, so far, and wisely in my opinion, resisted full blown and expensive campaigns against them. The smart counter-strategy to MAIG is to play whack-a-mole with the Mayors; when they run for higher office, swing the mallet on their political ambitions; make MAIG membership a liability for higher office. When MAIG mayors come into the arena where NRA knows how to play the game well, that’s when we whack the mole.

But using small towns and Mayors as pawns in the chess game MAIG is playing was a brilliant calculation, and if it was a deliberate decision on the part of Mayor Bloomberg, I have to hand it to him for the evil genius of it. That strategy also enabled pushing gun control from the local communities up, as long as there wasn’t any consequence to bucking preemption. But NRA, able to wield significant power in most state houses, can counter MAIGs strategy by shutting down this avenue to Bloomberg.

This is the 10,000 foot view of why I think HB1523 needs to be the top legislative priority we have this year. As much as we might like to see some other things as gun owners, from a strategic point of view, HB1523 will counter a major components of MAIG’s strategy, and prevent them from growing as a threat to the Second Amendment.

MAIG Fighting Back

It’s pretty clear that MAIG has been on a campaign to get media outlets to write about the pending bill HR1523, since they have been parroting MAIG talking points.

According to tracetheguns.org, a project of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the missing gun reporting requirement and allowing local communities to enact gun laws are two of five laws Pennsylvania has not passed out of “10 key state laws that curb illegal gun trafficking.” Pennsylvania also does not require a purchase permit for all handgun sales, does not allow criminal penalties for buying a gun for someone who can’t, and does not permit inspections of gun dealers, the website says.

I think it’s become pretty clear by now that MAIG is a radical gun control group, and not just a coalition of mayors trying to battle illegal guns, which begs the question of how there are still hundreds of mayors who are members of MAIG in Pennsylvania. This is one area gun owners really need to step up and confront their local officials. MAIG is pushing for purchase permits for handguns? Arguing, falsely I might add, we have no penalty for straw buying? Arguing our state should waste law enforcement resources inspecting gun dealers when the feds already do it? If you’re mayor is a member, you should make them own up to what MAIG is doing in their name.

We have a few nearby boroughs that have MAIG mayors (we live in the township, which has no mayor), but I’ve never noticed that any gun owners in those boroughs bother to organize against their MAIG mayor. This is one area you really need borough or city residents to stand up.

NRA Nightmares

I have to imagine the folks at NRA HQ are pulling for anybody but Romney. They could sell Newt, Rick or Ron to their membership as pro-gun. Trying to sell Mitt isn’t going to pass the smell test, even if Mitt’s actual record on guns isn’t as bad as many people assume. But being that court picks are our biggest issue this election, Obama has to go, even if it’s Mitt. So what do you do? Mitt follows his political interests, and sitting out the election could mean Mitt could care less what NRA thinks when it comes to court nominees, but I don’t see Mitt as someone they could credibly endorse. If it were my choice, and it’s Mitt, I’d probably decline the endorsement, but make it clear to the campaign we’ll be beating up on Obama on guns in key markets. Withholding an endorsement has consequences though, and part of me thinks this election is too important to just sit back. There is no good choice here, only bad ones. If Mitt gets the nomination, I’m going to be really glad I’m not Chris Cox.