Dave Hardy has the story. He was convicted back in June for accepting bribes from contractors, in the form of home improvements, so that they could keep lucrative city contracts.
Category: Guns
Man with a Gun
The Portland police set up a perimeter of officers with rifles drawn for reports of a man with a gun. At a gun store. (Link stolen from Radley.)
Another Mental Exercise for the Bradyphile
I heard reports of Reasoned Discourse breaking out over at Common Gunsense, but my comments seem to have gotten approved. But I will offer another thought exercise for Ms. Japete. Consider this article from the UK talking about what a mess their gun laws have become. Ours are really not much better. The other side talks about working together, and arriving at common ground. The other side talks about the importance of universal background checks. But how dedicated is Ms. Japete and the Bradyphiles to that proposition? What follows is meant to be a mental exercise, not a proposition for a serious policy prescription.
What if gun owners finally accepted the Brady way and acquiesced to a licensing scheme, and for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it’s tied into the criminal databases so that it gets revoked immediately if you’re convicted of a disabling offense, or go bonkers and get involuntarily committed. Sounds good right? A Brady dream. Oh, but there’s a catch.
The license is available at any post office, costs five dollars, and is valid for as long as you aren’t convicted of a disabling offense. Licensed individuals in any state can buy, sell, trade, transport, and ship firearms to licensed individuals in any other state, or to import firearms from outside the United States. This means licensed individuals can buy firearms off the Internet. The license is also a valid license to carry a loaded firearm, concealed or otherwise, in all fifty states. There are no dealer or manufacturer FFLs. Dealers and manufacturers are only required to make sure their employees who handle guns or gun parts have a license. Non-licensees can possess firearms only under limited circumstances (such as taking someone target shooting, or if your non-licensed wife has to use your gun in self-defense, etc).
This is a general framework. Obviously there are details that would need to be filled in. But if this is not an acceptable regime to the Bradyphile, then the real concern has nothing to do with background checks, or it being “too easy for dangerous people to get guns.”
Today is Delaware’s Primary
And we’ll find out just how nuts NRA is for endorsing Christine O’Donnell in the primary. My instinct would have been to sit this one out. Not because Mike Castle is our best friend, but because this strikes me as a risky bet. Some polls have shown the race between O’Donnell is close, and turnout is expected to be low. NRA would, no doubt, like to be able to send the message to Castle, and by contrast all the other Republicans, that they can end the political careers of intransigent Republicans (hear that Lindsey Graham?).
But to send that message, you have to win, and we’ll see how O’Donnell does after tonight when the results start to come in. The end result, either way, is likely going to be that seat remaining anti-gun. If Mike Castle wins his primary, he’s polling well for November against Chris Coons. If O’Donnell wins, the Democrats are very likely to hold that seat. These party concerns can’t and shouldn’t be a concern for NRA, but it’ll make November interesting. O’Donnell, to put it mildly, is nuts. I don’t see any scenario where she wins in Delaware, with the Democrats holding a significant registration advantage, and where Independents tend to like more moderate candidates. I think Delaware could support a better conservative than Mike Castle, especially this election, but I don’t think it can support someone as far right as Christine O’Donnell. This seems to be a frequent mistake being made by the Tea Party movement.
More on the Mexican Gun Canard
Common Gunsense is a blog run by a Brady board member (their board positions, much like the NRA, are uncompensated, so not a Brady employee), and we once again get the narrative that all the guns in Mexico are coming from the United States, and discusses this situation:
Her remarks were discussed while listening to a Colombian mother and her two daughters talk about the tragic story of watching their husband and father assassinated by a gun before their very eyes. They were in their home when members of the para military came to their door wielding weapons. This man was an elected official in his small town in Columbia. The woman and her two daughters escaped but the situation in Columbia was too dangerous for them. They sought political asylum in the U.S. and are now living in a suburb of Minneapolis. They were brave enough to stand before us and share their tragic story.
They weren’t assassinated by the gun, Ms. Japete, they were assassinated by narco-terrorists wielding guns. And what purpose does it serve for only the corrupt government, and narco-terrorists being the ones that are armed? What if instead of running, our Colombian friends had the ability to shoot back? How many narco-terrorists would they find willing to make housecalls like this if they knew there was a high likelihood several of them wouldn’t make it back? These are unpleasant thoughts, to be sure, but when you have armed people showing up to your home willing to you harm, you’re out of pleasant solutions, you have before you a choice of evils.
But even aside from that, Ms. Japete needs to explain how this was purchased legally in the US. Or how these guns were purchased legally in the US (have you ever seen anything like this at a gun show? Or at a shop? I sure as hell haven’t). I’d also, using this same article, ask her to go through this mental exercise:
Monterrey is Mexico’s wealthiest city, its third largest, and until a few years ago, one of its safest. But in the last six months the metropolis has been turned upside-down. Drug gangs have set up scores of roadblocks on major highways, murdered the mayor of a prominent suburb, intimidated the media, and taken control of many neighborhoods. The military, federal police, and local police are everywhere but are almost as feared as the gangs. Systematic police and mayoral assassinations are causing entire towns to go dark.
Take this out of Monterrey for a minute and try to imagine what would happen in Texas or Arizona if drug gangs were trying to take over whole inhabited towns and the government and police stood by and did nothing. Do you think the narco-traffickers have a large enough supply of thugs to keep manning those roadblocks after a few of them get picked off from a distance every night? Is anyone going to be willing to take the job after the first few nights? If you think Texans or Arizonans wouldn’t do such things, you don’t know Texans or Arizonans very well. Hell, I don’t even think Californians would take it for very long.
When you start to understand this, you understand why this violence is only peripherally spreading into the United States. I am not at all suggesting that the availability of your average person to arm themselves is the only variable at work here; a fairly uncorrupted police and military force is still our primary line of defense, but Mexico is the prime example of what happens when you disarm every day people so that they can be properly terrorized. Whether that’s by government or criminal thugs is of little matter. The people of Mexico have two choices. Submit or die. North of the border, there is at least a third option.
That Has to Hurt
Alan Gottlieb, on our victories in McDonald and Heller:
Gottlieb attributes the rapid turnaround in part to the brazen overconfidence of gun controllers. If Washington, D.C., had not challenged the March 2007 appeals court decision overturning its highly restrictive gun ban, the Supreme Court would not have had the opportunity to declare in Heller that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to arms. If Chicago had not insisted on maintaining its gun ban after the Heller decision, there would have been no McDonald, and the question of whether the Second Amendment binds states and cities would have remained unsettled. “We needed a little luck, and the other side gave us that luck,†says Gottlieb. “Our opponents are our biggest supporters.â€
Read the whole thing.
Earning the Brady Love
Apparently Obama can find some room to praise Texas Christian University’s shooting team, and mentions he shoots with the Secret Service (color me skeptical on that one). Either way, this likely is an indication he still does not want a fight. After the EPA incident, he’s looking to back away from the issue visibly, and calm nerves.
That’s not to say I’d trust the guy. He’s still going to nominate anti-gun Supreme Court justices, and for that reason he has to go, but he’s definitely no Bill Clinton. At least not yet.
Only in Josh Horwitz’s World …
… would an ad that explicitly mocks and cheapens the “insurrectionists” among us, and encouraging people to change things through the ballot box, be taken that NRA “now appears to find its advocacy for insurrectionism humorous.” But that’s just how Josh Horwitz is trying to spin it. If the Bradys are good at polishing turds (a high art, it would seem), Horwitz is talented at knocking over the lego set and storming off to tell mom.
He then goes on to list the ways that Norris buys into the “insurrectionist theory” of the Second Amendment. Truth is, I think most people believe in an insurrectionist theory at some point. The question is where you think that point is. If Horwitz would seriously be the kind of guy that would have sat idly by and let the SS haul off his neighbors in cattle cars, I have to question his dedication to humanity. It’s perfectly fine to argue that there are many who draw the line too soon. It’s quite another thing to argue there’s no line to be found at all.
Making Shooters the “Norm”
I have a habit that I know sometimes annoys Sebastian. I talk about the Second Amendment and shooting, preferably in places where it is unexpected and might even shake a few people out of their comfort zones. However, as he has learned by now, I’m very good about putting it into a context that people can understand so that they aren’t venturing so far out of their comfort zones that they want to run in the other direction. (That’s what we call counter-productive, not “cool” or something to take pride in.)
Our first adventure on Hawai’i was the Mauna Kea Summit & Stars tour (worth every penny). Since we would be on a bus & exploring the top of a mountain together for 8 hours, our tour guide asked us to introduce ourselves (the tours are small) and tell everyone else where we were from and one passion or hobby. Aha – my bright idea bulb goes off. (Poor Sebastian was too busy taking landscape photos to see the look that would have warned him what was to come.)
Aside from meeting another couple from our area in the introductions, it was a useful excuse to say that a hobby and passion of mine was target shooting. At dinner, two other couples came up to talk to me about shooting – one a recreational & occasional shooter and the other a hunter. Suddenly, the number of people who actually shoot or who were fine with guns in the home was now the majority on the bus. Anyone who might have been uncomfortable with it before now had to deal with the fact that they were in the minority opinion in the group. The hunter and I even talked about the various species he and his family members harvest and the deer numbers of northern New York. We created a casual atmosphere for other shooters to come out of the closet and talk about their sport like it was any other hobby or interest rather than a contentious political subject.
Shooting became the norm on that bus headed to the top of Mauna Kea. Mix that with the fact that Sebastian was the only one taking decent shots of the stars (real photos to come later) with everyone wondering how to do it, and some friendly conversation over dinner, and we gave guns a happy, human face.
Polishing the Turd
The Brady folk have an annual report out. Joe Huffman notes that their main theme seems to be declaring victory because they didn’t lose everything. I do have to admit, they say you can’t polish a turd, but the Brady folks are very good at it, reading over their report. Comparing to previous years, they seem to be doing a bit better raising money from new members than in 2007, but worse than 2008. In addition, they seem to be doing a really poor job of keeping members, based on renewal income continuously dropping, despite general contributions to both the Campaign and the Center being up in 2009 over 2008. It’ll be interesting to see their 2009 Form 990s, when they become available.