As the Senator from next door, I’ve had the displeasure of a long familiarity with Joe Biden. Stories like this, where Biden claims to have had a brush with the Nickel Mines massacre in Pennsylvania are nothing new to anyone familiar with his career. I’ve concluded that Biden may, in fact, be a pathological liar. He’s certainly a world class weirdo, at the least, and certainly makes you hope the Secret Service has their A game on.
You’ll Have to Pardon My Slow Posting Today…
Sebastian is busy at work, so I’m supposed to cover the relevant news for the blog. However, I might take a little longer than usual. See, I had to drop my car off for state inspection and some recall work this morning. While I waited on Sebastian to pick me up, I had to suffer through listening to what networks call “morning news.”
Is anyone shocked why this country is full of idiots? I’m pretty sure I lost more brain cells just being in the same room as that television than I have will all of my years of drinking combined. I actually witnessed the first 26 seconds of this Fargo clip in the waiting room when a woman pulled out her knitting project and had that mindless grin/stare at the “antics” of the morning news crew as they debated how tough it was to get through their month-long challenge of not chugging down alcoholic drinks on set while they worked.
To give you an idea of just how intolerable it was to hear such mindlessness, I found it better to go wait on Sebastian outside. I should add that the temperature was 18 degrees with a windchill of 6. I had no hat or gloves, just a leather jacket. It was preferable to witnessing the horror of watching people staring at the tv with glee and wonder. At least I had a little faith that maybe the people on their cell phones were looking at something more stimulating.
The time spent in that waiting room makes me more appreciative of the time I spend engaged in civic groups. Whether it’s phone banking for a campaign, planning for the next Friends of NRA event, or even engaging in serious discussions on here, today gave me a new appreciation for just how few people are even interested in understanding the world around them in a serious way.
Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show Bans PA Sportsmen’s Club Fundraiser
The ban on modern semi-automatic rifles at the Eastern Sports & Outdoors Show doesn’t just apply to the display and sale of the actual firearms and related accessories. According to the early report from Firearms Industry Consulting Group, the new rule also says that vendors may not feature “brochures or documentation that mention or picture any ‘black rifle’ or high capacity magazine.”
This means that the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs cannot sell tickets to their raffle for a Bushmaster XM-15E2S A3. They have posted the order form online for anyone who wants to mail in a form with payment. So, if you’re interested in a chance of winning a rifle for $10 (or 6 chances for $50) with a only 500 tickets sold, take a look.
UPDATE: PFSC provides confirmation that even their raffle ticket is banned at the ESOS under the current rules:
PFSC had planned to sell raffle tickets for a chance to win the hottest-selling firearm on the market today. It comes fully-accessorized! Unfortunately, we wouldn’t be able to mention, display or provide a picture of it at the show.
They also include in the announcement that they will no longer have an active presence at the show because of the ban on modern semi-automatic rifles.
From the Vice President
From an e-mail sent out to the White House e-mail list, from the Vice President, which begins with the sentence:
Taking the oath of office is a serious piece of business.
Put another way, it’s a big ‘effin deal, right Joe? You mean the oath of office which says:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Which refers to the Constitution which says:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
If it’s “a serious piece of business,” why don’t you start the first term actually following your oath, Mr. President and Mr. Vice President?
Photo of the Day
A former slave from Tennessee, Mary Fields, holding the assault weapon of her age. The Winchester 1876 carried fifteen rounds, which is more than double the amount deemed necessary for self-defense by Governor Andrew Cuomo  and the New York State Legislature.
Today is Martin Luther King day. King is, by some ways of looking at it, the man who finally won the Civil War. In the Reconstruction and Jim Crow era, often times Blacks had to protect their rights as Americans with Winchesters like the one Mary Fields is seen here with. Their tormenters just as often government as private terror groups. Often they were the same thing. Indeed, as many have documented, the history of gun control is intertwined with the subjugation of African-Americans as second class citizens. They went hand in hand.
Quote of the Day: Shrill Gun Control Advocates Edition
Our favorite Brady Board member writes:
The emotion about the Sandy Hook school shooting is exactly what is driving the movement to change our current gun laws so that more parents won’t send their children to school in the morning and get a call that their child is one that didn’t make it home that afternoon. That’s emotion. The emotion felt by those families was felt by the entire country. If the protesters who showed up on Saturday don’t or can’t feel that emotion, what is wrong with them? Their emotion is all about fear and paranoia that is fueled by the NRA lobbyists.
This represents something the gun control faithful won’t accept and truly don’t understand, it represents why their can’t really be any “national conversation.” We all want to make sure our children are well protected. We all felt awful in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. To think that every protester that showed up as some kind of uncaring monster is exactly the kind of attitude that makes having a conversation impossible. We are not monsters. We care just the same for our families as you care for yours, we just have vastly different philosophies on how they are best to be protected. That’s a wide gulf, to be sure, but it’s not one so wide that people on the other side can smugly declare that they are the only ones who care about children.
States and Background Checks
I’ve had this article from National Review in my tabs for a while, but I wanted to comment on something:
So watch out. If the Obama administration proposes money for states to conduct background checks, according to federal instructions, or “permission†for states to do background checks, according to federal instructions, the governments of the several states should answer with one voice: Absolutely not. Washington should pay for, implement, and be accountable for its own policies
In most cases, states don’t conduct background checks. That is done by the FBI on the federal dime. There are states that do conduct their own background checks and act as a point-of-contact with the federal system. There is little doubt the federal government will make monies available to the states to report mental health records to the federal system. Indeed, such monies are already available. I don’t think that’s really a violation of the principle of dual sovereignty, to merely hold federal money out to entice a state to do something. In Printz v. United States the Court ruled that the federal government may not commandeer state agencies or officers, and in NFIB v. Sebelius, the Court ruled the federal government may also not threaten to cut certain funds in order to coerce states. But it can hold out money as an enticement to do the federal government’s bidding.
Maryland Shall Issue Needs Help
The Maryland Legislature is being asked to consider a broad range of gun control proposals. The Governor claims he will have an easy road to banning anything he determines to be an “Assault Weapon” and to force fingerprinting and registration of all buyers in the state. He will ban magazines holding more than ten rounds and force expensive training requirements on those who would purchase and own firearms.
The goal in Maryland is simple: make the ownership and use of firearms so expensive and so onerous that people will not bother to exercise their right. Gun Controller’s in this state look to take a big bite today, and then continue to chip away at our rights every chance they get. Their goal is the eventual destruction of the right through implementation of impractical laws, expensive training and onerous regulation. O’Malley wants to eventually force you to turn in your guns, just like they will in New York.
You can follow Maryland Shall Issue here. Let’s hold them at New York.
Tab Clearing: Cause It’s Monday Edition
News is building up, once again:
A survivor of Tiananmen square on gun rights.
A way to foil ground penetrating radar? Could be handy if you live in New York.
A tale of two cities. Richard Fernandez’s guest poster sees the gun control fight as boiling down, essentially, to a battle between a Rousseauian “general will” vision for America, and the civic minded republican individualism of our founders so admired and observed by Alexis de Tocqueville. Very much worth your time.
I saw some people here suggesting that NRA use Jessie Duff as a spokesperson for the cause. Well, here you go.
Demographic change undermining the gun control movement. See also this.
Lighting money on fire. This is a tax credit idea I could get behind. If prices drop back down, it’ll help me trade up. Don’t think of it as a voluntary buyback so much as a tax credit for gun collectors.
How many kids had a choice in writing letter asking Obama to ban guns?
The problem with public research on gun violence that Obama wants us to pay for.
Gun sales rise in Pennsylvania.
How to crush dumb gun control arguments.
Obama’s tired gun control schemes won’t make children, or the rest of us, any safer. By Chris and Jeff Knox.
Chris Christie sets up a “task force” and suggests one of NRA’s ads is reprehensible. Now sure how he thinks he’s going to win a Republican primary at this rate. There’s also this.
Bloomberg Expose About the Brady Campaign
“The thing that really addresses gun violence is the thing that Brady was set up to do, and that is federal legislation,†said Michael Wolkowitz, a New York filmmaker who was on Brady’s board of directors for 10 years until he left last July. “Brady’s people knew policy like no one else.â€
Yet so many years of congressional inaction led to a decline in the group’s ability to raise money, Wolkowitz said, which is why the board wanted a new, less policy-focused mission. “It’s borderline Kafka,†he said.
And now you realize what I mean when I said that offering victory, any victory, to our opponents screws us politically. It is part of why we can’t have any rational conversation on this issue, because even to give a little would enable our opponents to regroup, come back, and take more, and there can be no doubt what many want, at this point, because it’s confiscation. There is no possibility that anyone can credibly argue now that this is not the case.
Read the whole article, it goes into more detail about the Brady decline:
Brady’s 2011 tax documents show it raised $5.8 million, about half its haul a decade earlier. The staff on I Street had dwindled to 30 — though Wolkowitz estimates the roster is now in the teens. Debra DeShong Reed, a spokeswoman for Brady, declined to say how many people work there.
Of course, that also cuts both ways. Gun owners have been in a long slumber that Obama is waking our people out of, though NRA has always had a broader based of members from which to raise funds than the Brady folks could ever dream of.