Shall Not Be Questioned – Page 776 – The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …

Bloomberg Looking to Avoid a Lawsuit

Apparently he went to New York City Council with a plan to cut gun permit fees to anywhere between $25 and $110 bucks. City Council says no.

“There’s no way I could vote on this. Since I’ve been in the council, we’ve voted on numerous bills where fees and fines were increased and it would send a strange message to New Yorkers that the one fine we look to reduce is the fee and fine to permit a gun,” Councilman Erik Dilan (D-Brooklyn), who did not attend the caucus, said.

Thank you, Erik Dilan, for calling it a “fine.” You’re making the inevitable multi-million dollar lawsuit against your city that much easier. Another fine council member notes wonders why they would get sued when the fee has been that high for years, as if length of time on the books has anything to do with a statutes constitutionality. What kind of screwed up place is New York City when Bloomberg is the pro-gun guy in this picture?

It’s the Gift that Keeps on Giving

Our favorite Brady Board member:

As I have said over and over and over again- yes sir, it is legal to sell guns to felons in most states that have not passed a law to require background checks on all gun sales at gun shows. Private sellers are more than just people selling occasionally. Some of these private sellers sell hundreds of guns a year at gun shows. That is a fact that cannot be avoided…

Under current law, it is never lawful, in any state, to knowingly sell a gun to a felon, whether there’s a background check conducted or not. It is never legal for a felon to purchase a firearm, whether from an FFL or from a private seller. It is never legal to sell a firearm to someone who does not reside in the same state that you do. It is again, not legal for someone to be engaged in the business of selling firearms and to not hold a federal firearms license. This is all current law. I could quote the relevant parts of federal statutes, but I think most people here are familiar with them.

So essentially, the leaders of the gun control movement are advocating we make changes to federal law, when they don’t even really understand what federal law currently is.Â Not only that, but if there’s a coherent argument for ending private transfers coming out of Common Gunsense, I’ve yet to hear it. This is in spite of some people being willing to have a dialog on the issue.

We can certainly talk about enforcement of these current laws at gun shows, and how we can do better. ATF has undermined enforcement of illegal trafficking at gun shows by not being able to help itself from using strong-armed police state tactics when it’s tried. A better run agency would find a lot of willing help from the firearms community when it comes to preventing people dealing and buying unlawfully, but they don’t, and part of the reason is ATF’s long history of treating their mission as if it were to destroy the lawful commerce in firearms rather than to ensure that the firearms commerce proceeds according to the law.

Another DCCC Attack Ad

This one is incredulous that these dangerous tea party types actually believe the federal government’s powers are limited to those constitutionally enumerated:

This is running in Colorado. These people are utterly incredulous that anyone would have to audacity to tell them their power is limited. We need to beat these totalitarians roundly next week.

DCCC Running Anti-Gun Ads for Lentz

If I were a Pennsylvania blue dog, I’d be livid that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was running this ad. This was run during the Phillies game on Saturday. This goes to show that we absolutely have to make sure that Lentz doesn’t win a congressional seat:

Interesting they show a submachine gun as an assault rifle, isn’t it? And interesting how the supposed loophole has nothing to do with either assault rifles or submachine guns. But when has the truth ever been an obstacle for gun haters like Lentz?

If you want to help the Meehan campaign, and please do, you can donate here, or volunteer here. He needs help. We have to win this one.

UPDATE: You know, this isn’t even a federal issue. This is a state issue. But how many people realize that?

New Shooter

Elena Kagan, apparently taken to the range by Justice Scalia.

Magic Bullets

Generally speaking, I’m skeptical of Â folks who sell easy fixes to complex problems. For example, there are some who argue that if we just repealed the 17th Amendment (direct election of Senators) then we’d restore the checks and balances necessary to get a smaller government outcome. I’m skeptical of that claim, and tend to be of any solution that just seems too easy.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t look for magic bullets myself. One conclusion I’ve come to is that we honestly make it way too easy for people to vote. That sounds kind of crazy on the surface, because we revere the act of voting in our country. I wouldn’t argue for a return to the days when only wealthy landowners voted, or we denied the franchise to people based on gender or race. But I would argue that people who want better and smaller government should generally resist efforts to get more people voting.

This weekend I was calling mostly soft Republicans and Independents, meaning they tend not to vote in primaries, and often skip elections. These are usually people campaigns ignore, but this year the hard Republicans are fired up, and the federal campaigns are going to do a better job of making sure they turn out. While I was encouraged at the level of support we had among these soft voters, I was surprised that a week out from election day how many people did not know the candidates, hadn’t made up their mind, and had no issues that the could name that they were concerned about.

My feeling is our Republic would be better off if we made these people go through a little extra effort to be able to vote, in the hopes that the casual, uninformed voter won’t bother. Even if they do end up getting to the polls and punching the ballot for our guys, I’m not comforted by the fact that I’m pretty sure their voting choices are going to be made by something not much more rigorous than a coin toss. I if the corrupting influence of money in elections is something you worry about, consider that the vast sums of money campaigns spend for expensive media buys are aimed at these voters.

But that’s not to say I have much in the way of specific proposals. One thing I thought of is that if you miss more than two general elections, you get automatically purged from the voter rolls, and have to renew your registration. That would certainly make the jobs of volunteers easier, because casual voters generally get more angry about being called or visited by campaigns vying for their votes, whereas regular voters are usually more polite, and more interested in talking about issues.

So how would this help liberty? Well, I’m not sure it’s any more of a magic bullet than repealing the 17th Amendment, to be honest, but a big component of electoral politics involves political activists manipulating the casual voters to come out for their guys. Given that liberty generally doesn’t bring activism to the table in any tangible way (at least not before the Tea Party movement), having a voter pool that’s more engaged and less prone to manipulation would hopefully hamper those pushing for big government than it would pushing for smaller government. Think about soft voters as the “soundbite voters,” and decide whether you agree with me that liberty would be better served if we made these people jump through a few more hoops to be able to cast their ballots?

UPDATE: I should make it clear, everyone would have to jump through the same hoops. The idea is that motivated and informed voters will.

Gender Gap

Paul Helmke says because women don’t like open carry, that means Democrats have a lot to gain by supporting gun control. How did that work out for Al Gore? Or John Kerry? How’d it work out in 1994? I think we know the answer. Interesting that Brady touts the open carry numbers as evidence women support gun control, when the real numbers show that support for gun control among women has been dropping precipitously.

The Hidden Life of Guns

Here I thought that they just basically sat in my safe when I wasn’t using them. The Washington Post tells a different story. It’s actually more balanced than you probably would have seen out of the Post in the past.

Running From His Record

You want to know what’s awesome? Waking up on Sunday morning to find this kind of endorsement in the local paper:

[Patrick] Murphy enjoys a significant advantage over Fitzpatrick in financial resources, and he’s utilized his war chest to denigrate his opponent at every turn. Rather than stand on his own record since January 2007, Murphy’s strategy has been to berate Fitzpatrick for his performance in Congress in 2005-06 during President Bush’s second term. He’s even bashed Fitzpatrick for his service as a county commissioner, an office he vacated in 2004.

In one very telling episode, Murphy spent virtually his entire endorsement interview with our editorial board taking shot after shot at the challenger while answering none of our questions. It was, in a word, a “terrible” performance.

And really, it gets no better than their succinct summary of what’s on the line in this race – surely not something that will help Patrick Murphy’s chances:

When you get beyond the nasty rhetoric and innuendo, what you have is this: Murphy, a loyal soldier in Barack Obama’s Democratic army who has voted consistently to advance the president and his party’s agenda, versus Fitzpatrick, who believes that agenda is wrong for America and promises to vote to undo a lot of it.

The choice for voters should be simple: If you agree with what the Democrats have done and plan to do, then there’s no stronger advocate in Congress than Patrick Murphy. On the other hand, if you don’t like what Congress is doing, then Fitzpatrick is your guy.

Well that certainly explains why he’s avoiding his own record. As Sebastian said when I read him that piece today, there’s no way that Murphy will try to run on his record because as soon as people figure out he’s not really the moderate he promised, they’ll vote him out. It certainly looks like that might happen.

Oh, and you want to know their big complaint against Mike Fitzpatrick’s campaign?

Fitzpatrick hasn’t been a choir boy in all this, either. While several of his mailed campaign pieces feature a smiling Mike on one side, the other side shows unflattering pictures of Murphy as if he were some sort of demon.

Yes, we have an incumbent who is too scared of voters to actually talk about any of the policies he has supported that have kept us in a state of economic uncertainty and reduces hiring, and the other guy uses some less than flattering photos. Seriously, if that’s all they’ve got, then they really need to get a life.

The Unwashed Masses

What is the purpose of the silly season? Campaign messaging seemingly geared toward sounds bites and tailored to the lowest common denominator. See Tam’s site for an example of this. Running against Obamacare because it guts Medicare is a common theme amongst Republicans this year. Without making any comment on the Indiana Senate race, where I probably wouldn’t vote for either of those two either, I will explain why this particular tactic isn’t concerning me all that much when it comes to the struggle for smaller government in general.

Spend some time talking to people in the last days of an election, and you start to feel depressed. Most people, even people who are otherwise pretty intelligent and rational individuals, are rationally quite ignorant of politics. When I say ignorant, I mean to the extent they know anything about political issues, it’s not within any ideologically consistent framework. For the ones who are not just blatantly self-interested, they vote because somewhere in their upbringing they’ve been told it’s their civic duty, but no one ever mentioned the civic duty of not being ignorant about what you’re voting for.

The purpose of silly season is to get the unwashed masses out to the polls to vote for the peopleÂ who support your issues of the day. In order to do that, you have to find messages that motivate people. A lot of seniors are upset about Obamacare. Let me rephrase, a lot of seniors are really upset about Obamacare. Why? Because it’s changing their health care, which they are relatively happy with. Medicare is generally a component of that.Â They are part of the constituency for repealing Obamacare, which should be the primary goal of liberty loving people right now.

Whatever you may think of Medicare, it is tomorrow’s battle. It should be today’s battle, but the 2008 elections set us back a decade, and now we have more ground to make up than we did before. We’reÂ going to find allies among seniors who are pissed at the Medicare cuts, even if they are voting with us for the wrong reasons. They are ready and willing to vote out bastards who voted for Obamacare. By the time we have the fight over Medicare, their government run health care may have killed many of them off, so I don’t worry too much about it.

When dealing with the unwashed voting masses, you can only really think short term. Freedom will not be won back in one fell swoop. The first rule of politics to to forget that the process has anything to do with principles or philosophy. The only role principles play is helping guide you, the activist, to know which battles need to be fought to get closer to your goal.

Battles change, and coalition partners come and go. What politics really comes down to is a very small number of activists struggling against another very small number of activists, using the vast and ignorant voter rolls as pawns on a chessboard. That may make people of principle very uncomfortable, but that’s what it is. The question is whether you’re an observer, one of the pieces on the board, or someone moving the pieces of the board. For the most part, people who love liberty are observers. What we need to be are the people moving the pieces on the board. That’s the only way we’re winning the game in the end.