All of Southeast to go “Shotgun Only”

It looks like there are plans afoot to make both Lehigh and Northampton counties “shotgun only” for hunting:

Currently, the restriction on rifle hunting applies only in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties. However, a proposal on the agenda for the commission’s Tuesday business meeting would prohibit deer hunting with a rifle throughout Wildlife Management Unit 5C, which also would be significantly expanded to include the Reading area and all of Lehigh and Northampton counties except a small sliver adjacent to the Blue Mountain.

If the measure is adopted, the only rifles that would remain legal for hunting use in the territory would be less powerful .22-caliber rimfires, which could be used for small game such as squirrels or furbearers such as foxes and coyotes.

I guess the PGC decided the study that showed shotgun hunting isn’t any safer was without merit.

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Ramsey’s Crime Fighting Plan

Looking at his overall plan, there would seem to be some good:

Philadelphia’s new commissioner said he plans to disband the elite Strategic Intervention Tactical Enforcement team – the SITE unit, which was created in 2006 by former Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson to flood violent areas at night. Ramsey said that the SITE unit had drained resources from regular patrols to the detriment of the local districts.

My armchair quarterbacking here might be in error, but it would seem to me that anything that steps up regular patrols will help.  I don’t know much about SITE, or whether to accept Ramsey’s assessment of it, but if it was one of Johnson’s ideas, that makes me skeptical of it off the bat.

Ramsey instead plans to create a “mobile force” of officers who offer to work extra shifts during the high-crime summer weekends, when violent crime tends to spike.

A mobile force?  You mean one that drives around in patrol cars? :)  What does this mean?  Is all the overtime sustainable?  Are there enough officers who want the overtime?  Would it be cheaper to just hire more cops?

Ramsey said he would concentrate resources into nine of the city’s 23 police districts that were responsible for 65 percent of the city’s homicides: the 12th, 18th and 19th Districts in Southwest Division; the 14th, 35th and 39th Districts in the city’s Northwest Division; the 15th District in the lower Northeast; the 22d District in North Philadelphia and the 25th District in the Eastern Division.

That means little to me, so I can’t assess whether that’s the smart thing to do or not.   Wyatt Earp says it’s a whole lot of nothin’.  Since he’s in the department, and I’m not, I’ll defer to his judgment on this matter.

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First You Have to Decide Goals

Uncle is asking for some help:

So, there’s a lot of pro-gun activists on the Internet. I mean, there’s a ton. We’re just not all in the same place what with message boards, live journal, face book, etc, etc. If everyone actually got together, we’d be pretty influential, I would venture.

Any ideas on how to do that?

First you have to decide what your goal is, because online organizing is good for certain things, and not entirely good for other things. If the goal is grassroots mobilization, forums and blogs are effective, but I question whether we have the numbers to turn elections, which is the root of all political power. Politics is all local. A large percentage of my readers live here with me in Pennsylvania, so in a state wide race, I may have some very small effect on election outcomes. Online gun rights organizations like PAFOA, with many thousands of readers, could have even more. But could I mobilize my readership to defeat my local state representative? Probably not. A congressman? Probably not. You need a different kind of organization to affect those types of political outcomes, and for gun owners, they are, and will remain for the foreseeable future, local clubs and associations, along with NRA’s considerable election mobilization machine that works through a network of EVCs on the ground locally. This is why I think it’s important to have a debate about what we want a blanket online gun-owner project to accomplish. I don’t think online gunnies can’t affect political outcomes at all, but we have to play to our strengths, and understand our weaknesses.

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Not Everyone Will be a Shooter

Uncle relays a story from one of his readers. I agree with Tam‘s assessment in the comments:

You know, not everyone is going to be a shooter, for whatever reason.

I don’t hang out on any golf-specific web forums, but are guys there as worried about getting their wives to come golfing with them as male shooters are to get their S.O. to the range?

I’ve only known a couple of women who were shooters and who had beaux that weren’t at all interested, and neither one really wrung her hands about getting her fella to the range.

She’s right that not everyone is going to be a shooter, but I think I can explain the male mind here. Golf players don’t sweat their sport. No one repeatedly accuses golfers of wanting to murder children, or causing inner city crime. There’s no strong political movement dedicated to the eradication of their “barbaric sport”. I think for a lot of guys they are seeking a bit of affirmation that the significant other really is OK with what they are doing, and won’t someday join with the chorus of people who look down on him because he likes to play with baby killing bullet hoses.

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Blow Dry to Bow Out

News reports has it that John Edwards is leaving the race.  Rudy is expected to bow out as well, and endorse John McCain.  That leaves both parties narrowed down to two candidates.  McCain is definitely not the best that gun rights folks could have hoped for, but the worst guy will be out.  McCain most decidedly is the best on the issue of the moderate candidates, as I feel Romney will be more unreliable than Bush.  I’m still not ruling out a protest vote for Ron Paul if my choice is those two.

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It’s McCain

McCain edged out Mitt Romney in Florida. Rudy bet his campaign on Florida, so he’s pretty much toast now. On to Super Tuesday, where McCain now has the momentum.

UPDATE: Looks like Hillary won too, but gets no delegates. This doesn’t please me, but it’s occurred to me that Obama could be tougher to beat, so maybe I shouldn’t savor his victories over The Hildabeast so much.

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Anti-Gun Protests in South Carolina

We’ve been seeing a lot of this logic lately:

Hafter’s daughter, Lizzy Hafter, a Dean’s List graduate of the University of Virginia, was murdered in September 2006 on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Charlottesville, Virginia. The killer had stolen the gun weeks earlier. The gun had not been reported stolen. Lizzie’s mother is advocating for a law in South Carolina, Lizzy’s Law, to require gun owners to report to police a gun that has been lost or stolen.

How would this woman’s daughter have been saved if the gun had been reported stolen?  It’s a violation of federal regulations to have a firearm on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the first place, but does reporting the firearm magically remove it form the hands of the criminal?

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