Category: Guns

Straight Talk on Guns and Democrats

Over at The Daily Kos.  I think this is one thing we can all agree on:

I know liberal couples who give each other pocket size copies of the Constitution for Christmas.

Ask liberals to list their top five complaints about the Bush Administration, and they will invariably say the words “shredding” and “Constitution” in the same sentence.  They might also add “Fourth Amendment” and “due process.”  It’s possible they’ll talk about “free speech zones” and “habeus corpus.”

There’s a good chance they will mention, probably in combination with several FCC-prohibited adjectives, the former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

So.

Liberals love the Constitution.  They especially love the Bill of Rights.  They love all the Amendments.

Except for one: the Second Amendment.

Read the whole thing.  Another mistake a lot of folks on the left make is assuming we gun owners don’t care about this administration’s abuse of other civil liberties, or that we love the former attorney general, rather than thinking he’s as much of a weasel as they do.  I have known few gun owners who are entirely happy with the Bush Administration.

Democrats need to understand that the gun vote is not lost to them, and the way to get it back is not through sham endorsements or transparent pandering.  They way to get it back is to cease supporting gun control.

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Disregarding the Law

Dan Pehrson, president of the PA Firearms Owners’ Association, has an editorial running in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

Until our elected officials learn to abide by the law, we gun owners will have to set an example. In what is only the first of many steps, gun-owner groups have filed for a temporary restraining order to prevent enforcement of the Philadelphia gun-control ordinances. Those of us who live in the city will continue to lawfully keep and bear our arms, waiting on the city to follow our lead in respecting the laws and constitution of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Read the whole thing.  A certain pair of gun bloggers, who will hunt you down and beat you if you don’t, helped in the drafting and submission of this editorial.

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Smart Gun New Jersey: 5 Years Later

A startling admission from the New Jersey Star-Ledger:

Today, after gun manufacturers, engineering firms and research universities have spent millions competing to perfect the weapon, the quest has wandered onto the slow track.

The federal government has all but ceased its funding, crippling research. Legal squabbles over patents shelved promising technologies. And gun manufacturers got out of the business entirely, wary of potential lawsuits and marketing guns that would cost far more.

You don’t say?  This kind of project is happens to be in the displine that I’m trained in professionally, and if I were working on this project, I would definitely take exception to this:

“We need to demonstrate that you can reliably turn a gun off in real time,” he said.

That is not good enough for Bryan Miller, executive director of Ceasefire New Jersey, which pushed for the law five years ago.

“They went about inventing the Ferrari of recognition technology when they could have used the money to build a Ford,” Miller said. “They’ve run out of money and they can’t marry it to a handgun and, frankly, I think it’s shameful.”

Miller said he believes the nationwide effort has been sabotaged.

“We know that gun manufactures have already developed these technologies, they just don’t want to put them in guns,” he said. “The National Rifle Association doesn’t want them to do it.”

Bryan Miller has little respect for how difficult an engineering project something like this is.  Not only must the circuitry withstand forces well beyond what typical consumer electronics will have to endure, they must get it right 100% of the time in a fraction of a second.  What I suspect Bryan is looking for is a ring type system, where the firearms user has to wear a ring in order to use that gun, which transmits a code to the firearm if it’s in proximity and that allows it to fire.  It’s really the only way to solve the problem technologically, but even that will be subject to reliability problems.  As a professional engineer, who also understands guns very well, smart gun technology is a folly.  It’ll be enormously expensive and won’t always work properly.  It’ll be prone to interference, bad gripping, all the problems you’d encounter shooting in a high stress situation.

But that’s doesn’t matter to Bryan Miller.  These dastardly conspiring engineers just don’t want to deliver the technology, and it’s screwing with his master plan to ban all guns in New Jersey, except for his junk smart guns.  Bryan Miller summarized: “It doesn’t have to work!  I just want to ban guns, so deliver something already!”

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Why We Win

Rustmeister points out that the Chicago Tribune may be starting to figure out why anti-gunners have a difficult time finding traction lately.  The Internet has created, literally, an army of well informed pro-gun activists who are eager to spread facts and evangelize the second amendment.  Thanks Al Gore!

UPDATE: SayUncle has a lot more.

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Artificial Meat

Greg says he’d never eat it.  I’m more open to the idea if it tasted good.  If I couldn’t distinguish bacon that didn’t used to oink from bacon that did, I wouldn’t care too much, especially if it were more economical than farming.  I will give PETA credit on this one, it’s research that I have no problem with, because if you can grow a filet mignon, you can probably grow a kidney or a liver too, and that will help a lot of people.

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The Importance of Being “Out”

Eugene Volokh discusses “preference falsifiction” in regards to gun ownership.  I think it highlights the importance of making sure people know you’re a gun owner.  I don’t think you must, or even should, wear it on your sleeve, but hiding and pretending we’re doing something wrong because some people don’t approve of it will kill our rights in the long run.  If people know other normal people who are gun owners, they will be less likely themselves to support taking them away from whatever people they might imagine engaging in the practice.  As long as people don’t know they know someone who shoots, hunts, or keeps a firearm for self-protection, that leaves a blank canvas on which the anti-gun groups and media can paint whatever they wish.

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