Category: Guns

Bloomberg is planning a protest on September 10th at Capitol Hill. If any of my readers who live in the area want to go grab a decent wide-angle picture, we’ll see what kind of turnout they can generate with all this new gun control energy the media keeps saying is welling up from the grassroots.

Donna Dees, the person behind the Million Mom March, writes an article over at The Daily Beast about how to organize a march: “Got $3 million? That’s what my march cost in 2000. The bigger the march, the more expensive the march.” Dees seems to believe that with the addition of Social Media, she could have produced a much bigger march than the Million Mom March on Mother Day 2000. I think she discounts that the dynamic of this issue has changed quite fundamentally since 2000. We have more women involved in the shooting sports and armed self-protection than any other time in recent memory. There are other voices, female  voices, out there who will oppose you vigorously. It won’t be as easy this time. Dees article reads like a bit of chest beating to me, almost challenging Bloomberg to do better than she could, knowing he probably won’t.

But Bloomberg certainly has the cash to organize a march on this scale, and you can drive turnout if you’re willing to pay for busses and boxed lunches. Despite the fact that most gun control groups are not doing well, Bloomberg brings more money to the table than the gun control movement has ever had at its disposal. Dees seems to believe, “America is at a rare tipping point now.” I guess Bloomberg’s rally on Capitol Hill will give us an idea of whether or not that’s true.

We wrote a few weeks ago about CSGV’s call for its members to call 911 if they spotted someone carrying a gun concealed or unconcealed, and how it showed the CSGV was really no more than a radical hate group hiding itself behind a cloak of peace and love. Now that story seems to be getting a fair amount of mainstream attention thanks to the issue being highlighted by Fox News. Miguel has a round-up of some of the reaction, including one woman who suggests faking a panic attack so she can later sue for emotional trauma. Yeah, why don’t you try that and tell us how it works out for you.

I’m glad to see Bob Owens joining the call the contact their coalition members and confronting them with some of the hateful and non-peaceable rhetoric they cultivate and promote. Demand to know why they support this. Note there are mainstream churches who are part of CSGV. If you’re a Presbyterian, Methodist, Jewish, Catholic, or any of the other religions represented, you have a right to demand answers over what is done in your name.

It’s not often I’ll get involved in the comments at Raw Story, since they aren’t really much above Gawker in the slime pits of the Internet, but a hit piece they put out on Colion Noir really pissed me off. First, is the misleading headline. He never said that. But some of the comments, including one person pasting a picture of an Oreo cookie, struck me as just outright racist. Others were more couched, but equally racist, such as suggesting this is all being orchestrated by “devious white people,” because Colion can’t be expected to hold his own opinions, you know. You see that theme repeated a couple of times. Colion is “shilling” for the NRA. He can’t possibly have come to his opinions on his own, I guess. Certainly he did not have a highly successful YouTube channel long before NRA even approached him. No sir! He’s a “dancing puppet.” who “sold his soul.” He’s a “token.”

Yeah, right. We’re the racists? Sure. I’m not the one who thinks opinions need to have a color.

This is unbelievable. Bloomberg’s “The Trace” web site has shown itself very adept at building straw men so they can tear them down, but this takes the cake. Their argument seems to be that because the gun confiscations after Katrina weren’t universal, that means that NRA is exaggerating. The city confiscated approximately 800 firearms in the wake of Katrina. No one at the time ever argued it was a mass confiscation. We were aware at the time that many of the confiscations were carried out by “out of town” law enforcement.

But hundreds of Americans have their civil rights violated at the time they most need them, and no big deal, right? Note how Bloomberg’s Mouthpiece goes into detail later about bizarre conspiracy theories, and then tries to conflate mainstream gun rights opinions with them.

I have to admit I just don’t understand how some people go through the grieving process. For me it’s a deeply personal thing and not something with which to involve the rest of the world outside of immediate family and close friends. When my mother died when I was 20 years old, I found all the attention surrounding the funeral to be more stress inducing than the actual loss itself. I was happy when all that was over. But hers was not a sudden and unexpected death. It was untimely — she was 43 — but she had been fighting the cancer for years.

I imagine sudden an unexpected is a different experience, and I’m sure burying a child is more difficult than burying a parent. But it’s very difficult to understand how grief could manifest itself in attention seeking behavior. For that reason, I don’t really understand Andy Parker, the father of the anchorwoman who was murdered on live television. A former candidate for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates, he’s seemed to seek out the limelight in the wake of the murder of his daughter. He has vowed to take on the NRA. I can actually understand that, even I think the anger is misplaced. Someone’s bound to shove a camera in your face after a high-profile incident like this, and I can understand lashing out in anger, especially when the person responsible took his own life rather than allowing the victims family to get any sense of justice. But then he goes and demands to know why key politicians aren’t calling him, then stating later in another press interview saying he’s going to buy a gun himself. He’s been writing op-eds in the Washington Post. It’s been reported in the news Parker has been in contact with Bloomberg’s people and Giffords. It’ll be interesting to see if which group, if any, will pick him up.

At the risk of sounding completely cold hearted, this behavior strikes me as very odd for someone mourning. Perhaps I just don’t understand it. Everyone grieves differently. But I have been around more than enough grieving people in my lifetime to, I think, declare this a very strange way of going about it. I’ve seen people who use the opportunity of deaths, marriages, births, etc, and attempt to make such public events all about them. But we usually think of those people as insufferable boors, don’t we? I’m not saying that’s what we’re seeing here, but if this is one of many means of grieving, I sure would like to understand it. It’s very difficult to wrap my head around making a media spectacle, and blaming your own tragedy on millions of fellow Americans who had nothing to do with it, and who also believe it’s awful and senseless.