A backpacker in Denali shot and killed a grizzly, as Arma Borealis reports, and goes into more detail about grizzlies and stupid commenters. This wouldn’t have been possible before the change in the law, as Denali was not one of the Alaska parks that allowed carry under the old regime.
Category: Guns
Towns Repealing Local Ordinances
If you go around Pennsylvania, especially to county and municipal parks, you’ll find plenty of signs banning guns. Feel free to ignore them because they carry no weight of law. But now some towns are getting those laws off the books.
In Depth Look at Trafficking in Mexico
An example of the ways Mexican criminals sell guns to other criminals:
Merchants make it clear that prices are more accessible if the weapons have been ‘burned’ (used).  A 9 mm ‘clean’ (new) [pistol] is 12,000 pesos [US$934.00], and assault [rifles] like the AK-47 are 15,000 pesos [US$1,168.00].  The latter, like hand grenades, are only available ‘on request.’
In Tepito, those interviewed reported, monthly or bimonthly shipments arrive that are distributed to different destinations. The shipments include revolvers, submachine guns, rifles and grenade launchers, [and] many of them end up in the hands of organized crime groups, they acknowledge.
Naturally these all must be coming from US gun shows. Of course, toward the end of the article, they do note:
A percentage of the weapons, the seller said, come from Mexico via Ministry of Defense personnel who provide [them] in part from weapons seized in raids, or stolen from the ministry’s own arsenal.
You don’t say.
John Smith: Domestic Terrorist
Cemetery tells a story of a man with a common name who found out he was on the terrorist watch list. I was surprised that he has issues purchasing firearms, but New Jersey does a different background check than most states. Maybe that ends up showing up in New Jersey’s system. If it’s a NICS thing, that makes me wonder how the FBI is already using the list.
Still Going
Joe notes that gun sales for 2010, so far, are only off a bit from 2009, when Obama took office. My guess is you have a lot of noobs in that crowd who bought their first gun, and are continuing to buy. Most people will never develop extensive collections, but every house ought to have a pistol, a shotgun, and a rifle.
Walking around the gun show this weekend, I was still hearing dealers explaining how the process worked. We’re still making new gun owners out there. I think this whole sales boom might continue until people start feeling better about the economy.
The iPad is Meant for Gun Shows
Certainly, gun shows are not the main use of an iPad. However, this weekend, I actually found myself wanting one – a feeling I didn’t have even after watching Sebastian play around on one while we were in Charlotte or after watching all the times Dan from PAFOA could put it to good use on our trip.
But this weekend, I couldn’t help but miss all of the things we used to do in 2008 – running commercials & slides to promote our candidates quietly in the background of the show. It brought far more attention to the table, and it put names in front of folks in a more interesting way than simply hanging a sign.
For the first time, we weren’t against a wall that could serve us with sufficient power, and we just didn’t coordinate enough to justify hauling a monitor and laptop over there. But what could overcome those problems? An iPad.
We did buy a digital frame to at least display more interesting slides and attract attention. Again, we have the issue of power, and I can’t seem to get it to play the .jpgs I create as opposed to the ones I simply download. It’s a pain in the ass, and I’ve never spent more than about 3 minutes trying to figure it out. Instead we just started using it as a picture frame – crazy concept.
We also tried to fix an old and broken touchscreen monitor borrowed from one of Sebastian’s friends so we could run NRA’s Obama love quiz they made in 2008. Unfortunately, when we did get it working, we found out that it was one of very few that somehow ended up inverted. If you pushed the top, it read it as pushing at the bottom. That wasn’t going to work for us. There is the argument that the specific program was done in Flash, so it wouldn’t work on the iPad.
But the idea of being able to sign people up as volunteers online, take some sort of online quiz application that could be designed around the issue, or give them a quick tour of the website on a screen they can really see, that really appealed to me. And with NRA now sticking their toe into the water of development for iPhones, it isn’t outrageous that they consider some kind of app or at least Apple mobile product-friendly version of any Obama love quiz type programs in the future.
The biggest appeal for me this weekend would have been the “oh shiny” factor. Even though they are flying off the shelves, they are still exceptionally rare in the wild beyond the standard early adopting tech crowd. At a gun show, the iPad itself would bring more traffic to the table where we could start the conversation about whether the visitor is registered to vote and if they want to help any pro-gun politicians win this year.
Sebastian is certainly ready to buy, and if he would let me take it to gun shows to really use for the people, not just behind the table when we’re bored, then I’ll drive us to the Apple store with the pedal plastered to the floorboards.
The Great Difficulty With Working Gun Shows
So we’re done with the gun show work on behalf of NRA for the weekend, and have the rest of the holiday to enjoy. This was a slow show, to be honest. Not many people seem to want to visit a gun show on a holiday. I would say about one third to one half the people in the show at any given time were from New Jersey, judging from the cars in the parking lot. Not fertile ground when you’re pushing Pennsylvania candidates.
This is a persistent problem working shows in this area. In the 2008 election year we managed to get several hundred McCain signs, which were impossible to get, for a show up in Allentown, which is close enough to draw a lot of people from our respective districts. Unfortunately, it’s also close enough to drawn down New Yorkers. Not that we don’t like New Yorkers, but we got about halfway through our signs before we started to wonder about the accents of people asking for them, and sure enough, they were mostly New Yorkers. If you saw any McCain signs on Long Island, they probably came from us. New York wasn’t set to get any, because they are blue state no matter what.
But the real difficulty in working shows is not spending money. I spent about 100 bucks this weekend, despite not getting any guns, on various things. I had my eye on an 1898 Krag that was absolutely beautiful. Virtually flawless furniture, mostly in tact bluing, and only some minor blemishes on the receiver. The bolt looked clean, and I’m assuming the barrel was in good shape too (didn’t have a bore light to look) 1400 bucks. Looked on Gunbroker for comparison, and it seems a reasonable price. Sadly though, it’s tough to justify dropping 1400 on a gun right now. If in our future show work, I find that gun haunting me, I may just have to buy it. Hopefully someone buys it before I do. Well, not really. That would make me sad. But you know what I mean.
Thomas Not Happy About Defeat in PA House
Representative Thomas was the sponsor of three of the bills, the gun control bills, that were defeated in committee this week in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. He is not too pleased with the result, which naturally pleases me:
“There is no reason why anyone should bring a weapon with a 30-round clip into a residential neighborhood,” Thomas said.
Thomas said that, after much debate, his bills were not approved by a committee majority.
[…]
Thomas said he particularly thinks he will garner support for H.B. 1044 considering that the courts have already upheld the constitutionality of 37 local gun ordinances.
“Right now, municipalities’ hands are tied by the PA Uniform Firearms Law. I think it’s just a matter of time until my bill becomes law,” Thomas said.
Funny, I have several dozen 30 round “clips” in a residential neighborhood and they haven’t managed to jump out of the safe and kill anyone yet. I have to admire his optimism in the face of a stunning defeat — the votes in all three cases were very lopsided — but we will continue to oppose his agenda. I’m sorry, but you’re not going to make me a criminal because I happen to go through the wrong town on the way to a shooting match. Especially not when the state police commissioner, a guy who is thoroughly anti-gun, and a crony of Ed Rendell, is the one making that call.
High Tech Shooting in Germany
This post comes to us from the Firearms Blog:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyq90LEZe4k[/youtube]
I’m going to guess that membership in this club isn’t cheap, but it’s an interesting way to solve a lot of problems shooting ranges have. Namely, I’m going to guess that lead management is no issue here. I notice they have neat buckets on the trap range, and you see no shells on the ground. I guess no good German would want to dirty the range.
Brady Membership Numbers
Joe Huffman has a great find, namely the number of Brady Campaign members, and how many have recently donated. Short answer is, it doesn’t look good for them. But go over and have a look.
Most groups don’t want their membership numbers to be public. NRA keeps the exact figure a not so closely guarded secret, but my understanding is NRA is currently running a good bit higher than 4 million members, but I guess not quite enough to claim 5 yet. Still, that’s orders of magnitude more than the Bradys claim. To compare to NRA, I would only look at the number of Brady donors who have given in the past twelve months.
UPDATE: I should also point out that it’s interesting Brady is selling their list. NRA does not sell its membership list. It’s one of the reasons we know Frank Luntz poll claiming to be polling NRA members is completely bogus. There’s no way for the pollster to know.