Given what the law is for North Carolina, I think I’ll probably leave mine at home when we go to the NRA Annual Meeting in Charlotte. When it’s in Pittsburgh next year, you’ll be able to carry. The only place off limits in PA are court houses, and (maybe) primary and secondary schools. That’s it.
Brady Fundraising on Open Carry
We’ve already seen the Brady Campaign partner with new media fundraising and organizational groups like Credo, who worked with them on the Starbucks Campaign. Now we notice they are working with a group called Karma411, which is a new mediaish fundraising group. They seem to have begun a campaign to try to raise money using the open carry issue as a lever to drive people’s interest in their cause.
I’m going to be watching this campaign closely. They’ve set a goal of 10,000 dollars. Will they reach it? So far they are only 20 dollars toward their goal. What I want to see is how much traction Brady gets with this issue. This is going to reveal some pretty critical pieces of information in relation to this fight:
- New media fundraising is going to give us some kind of idea how their message resonates with younger people, who are going to be the target audience of this new media message. If they can bring another generation into the gun control fight, that’s going to be beneficial to them in the long run.
- It give us some idea how much money there is in scaring people about open carry. We’ve documented here in thorough detail that the Brady folks are having difficulty raising money. Is this an issue they could use to turn that around? Is the issue dead, or is it just that they’ve been going about fundraising the wrong way?
- It gives us more information for our own internal debates about the issue. If Brady can’t raise any money on it, those of us who have been detractors of open carry as a strategy will have to accept that despite what the public may or may not think about it, it’s not an issue that is going to hurt us, because the other side can’t do much with it. On the other hand, if they beat their fundraising goals, that’s a critical piece of information that open carry might be motivating renewed interest in gun control.
None of this will be perfect or conclusive information, no matter what way it goes, because we don’t really know what karma411’s fundraising effectiveness is. Ten grand is a sideshow of a fundraising effort anyway, even for the Brady Campaign. But the important thing is the names they get from this can be used to raise further money. I’ll be curious to see how this turns out for them, because it’ll at least be an important bit of information we can use.
I Don’t Think They Understand the Process
Sometimes I read what politicians do, and it makes me wonder how many times they’ve stumbled across the stupid stick.
The House Transportation Committee voted unanimously to report as amended HB 914 which amends Title 75 requiring certain first time DUI offenders to have their vehicles equipped with an ignition interlock device and increase the required time period for ignition interlock to third and subsequent offenders. After the vote was taken, several committee members raised questions regarding the bill and its potential impact. A motion to reconsider the vote was made but eventually withdrawn with the understanding there will be further discussions regarding the bill.
Typically the questions are asked and impact considered before the damn vote.
In other news, I hope that those who have made one unfortunate mistake of driving while a little over the limit are willing to give up mouthwash and/or use of their cars.
Fight Continues Against Pittsburgh L&S
DCVRA Reactions
Both Roll Call and the WaPo have pretty good articles on this topic. It looks like the Dems were on board with moving the bill, until there was an attempt to fix DC’s carry laws, which soured the deal. It looks like it would have made DC Alaska carry, but it’s hard to say whether that’s really the case, or whether it was a shall-issue provision. It’s Elanor Holmes Norton, and I doubt she understands the issue in detail.
Why up the ante? I don’t really know, since NRA doesn’t share with me the details of their legislative strategy. I can only speculate what’s going on. There are folks who believe they are conspiring with the GOP to kill the DCVRA, using the gun language as a hammer. I’m not sure why NRA would be all the concerned about DC voting rights (and they shouldn’t be), but it’s quite possible the minority critters are using the gun issue strategically in this manner. If you’re a lobbyist, what are you going to do? “No, we’ll score that vote against you and lower your grade if you offer that that amendment which favors our issue!” You’ll lose credibility quickly if you start doing that.
But either way I think we come out ahead. There’s not much to lose by upping the ante. The worst that happens is we don’t pass anything, and the Court cases challenging DC’s laws go ahead. That’s a slower, and less predictable path, with the possibility of setting bad precedent, but there’s at least a way to move forward. But even if you lose the legislative battle, you win, because the fight reveals useful information. We’ve had a few gunfights in the Senate already, the most important one being when we barely lost on the Thune Amendment. We haven’t had a gunfight in the House because the leadership isn’t allowing votes to come to the floor. Ahead of the 2010 elections, it would be really nice to get some of these newer “pro-gun” mostly Dem politicians on record with a vote. So I could see reasons why NRA wants to pick a fight, rather than just letting the Senate version move ahead without one. This puts the anti-gun leadership in a very tough position, and forces a lot of the newer politicians to put their money where their mouth is.
It sucks that rights of DC residents are tied up in this game, and I’m sympathetic to that frustration, but I think, in the end, one way or another, this is going to work out. We have a lot more options today than we did ten years ago.
Bombing is Such a Negative Term
I love the fact that the GOP candidate who actually has a serious shot at winning HI-1 is changing the term from money bomb to money wave.
Like Ted Kennedy’s seat going to Scott Brown, this has some symbolism as well because it is being billed as “Obama’s home district.” I don’t know his position on the gun issue, but having a Republican win that seat will likely make the anti-gun Democratic leadership quake. They already nearly caved on getting ride of DC’s gun laws after the Brown win, so we might be able get more out of them if this seat flips. More importantly, I think it will remind Democrats that gun owners are one group they haven’t “officially” pissed off yet, so they really shouldn’t cross the line to do so now.
In the same way that I remind folks that Massachusetts is not like the rest of the country, Hawaii is also fairly solidly Democratic. This seat is D+11. I mean this is my grandmother’s district. That won’t mean much for 99.9% of the people who read this, but just know that I have lost a lot of hair trying to have any kind of serious discussion about issues that goes beyond “it feels good.” Even more frustrating is that because she can afford to live in the district, anyone who makes her feel good gets a decent donation.
From what I’ve read in passing about this race, the two Democrats may well split their vote so the GOP can win. The Democratic leadership is behind one candidate, while unions and others have lined up behind the other Democrat. Also, the Democrats couldn’t find a single person in the district to run – both live elsewhere.
This will be an interesting one to watch. Just like Massachusetts, Hawaii has been known to elect Republicans from time-to-time. (Gov. Linda Lingle is apparently the only Republican in history to make my grandmother “feel good.”) And apparently the seat was once Republican for a whooping two terms back in the late 80s/early 90s.
Helmke’s View of the Marchers
Disconnected is a very apt word, if you ask me, but it’s a masterful piece of gun control propaganda with the usual half-truths an omissions. I’ll take them one-by-one:
“Don’t Tread on Me Flags†on the Mall framed by flags at half-staff around the Washington Monument in memory of victims of terrorism since yesterday was the 15th Anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing by an anti-government NRA member who made the money to make his bomb by selling weapons at gun shows;
One variant of the “Dont Tread on Me” flag is our current Navy Jack. Surely that’s not a disconnect for flags flying at half staff, is it? Plus, if you read the book American Terrorist, you’ll find McVeigh quit the NRA because it was too soft, and went around to gun shows handing out hate literature, rather than selling guns to make money to buy his bomb. Considering his bomb was diesel fuel an fertilizer, I’m not sure how much it cost to buy it anyway. Either way, if he had worked at a gas station to make the money, we wouldn’t blame the gas station.
Speeches that focused less on guns and more on health care, the federal deficit, bailouts, and other decisions with which they disagreed with the very express implication that the reason they were carrying (or wanting to carry) their guns was because “the guys with the guns make the rules†(as stated by the NRA boss Wayne LaPierre last Spring after Obama took office);
Brady would love people to believe they were egging on extremists to take their guns and go out and “make the rules” but it was another group of extremists he was referring to.
Seeing guns carried in an area where Confederate troops may once have marched within view of the Capitol Dome which was being constructed when Lee and Davis and the Southern states decided that they wanted to “restore†a different understanding of the Constitution than that endorsed by Lincoln and the voters who elected him
Sure, get a few hidden hints at racism in there for good measure. Too bad the history is wrong, because pretty much all of Northern Virginia that was in artillery range of Washington D.C. was occupied by federal troops for the duration of the Civil War.
Seeing guns carried close enough to the Reagan National Airport (named after a President who was shot by a gunman in DC in 1981) where a 50 caliber sniper rifle (legal in this country and now allowed in national parks) might easily take out airplanes on the ground (or about to land or take off);
If the standard is being able to punch holes through the relatively thin aluminum skin of an aircraft, then no small arm short of maybe a .22 is acceptable to the Brady folks. But here you were with some of the most extreme people our movement has to offer, and no planes were shot down, no revolution got started, no one got shot, and they were polite:
And finally, being treated (for the most part) politely by people on a beautiful sunny day whose level of fear and paranoia seemed to reflect a dark view of society and our nation.
Surprised? I have disagreements with these folks on tactics, and I don’t agree with them that our government is anywhere close to being the kind of Government Jefferson spoke about in the Declaration of Independence. But our federal government is supposed to be one of limited and enumerated powers. Raise people to believe that, then suddenly change the rules and start telling them it’s really unlimited, I can’t blame them for being pissed. I’d hardly call urging a return to that state a “dark view.” They take to using guns as props in their political theater because they’ve been made to feel powerless and unrepresented by the political process. The reasons for that I think are complex, but why think about the topic seriously when you can use a few sentences to mold everything into the left’s narrative about the right, and particularly gun owners, being dangerous.
The First Amendment Wins!
I have a slightly more detailed post up over at PAGunRights about today’s important win at the Supreme Court. It was a First Amendment fight that could have spelled the end for all outdoor magazines and any commercial sharing of hunting images across state lines.
There is so much to say about this case, and it calls for far more attention than I can give it right now. This a law that even Bill Clinton knew was unconstitutional when he signed it back in 1999. He added an order for the Justice Department to limit how it was enforced, but in their first ever prosecution, they strayed from that order. And because of that very stupid move, they set up a case that showed the law was overly broad and chilled free speech.
The odd bit here is that no one in the hunting community really noticed this law when it passed. Technically, publishing Pennsylvania bear hunting photos in an outdoor magazine that could be sold in New Jersey was a federal felony for a decade. But because no one was prosecuted, no one paid attention. The case that was brought against a person didn’t have to do with hunting, but dog fighting. Using video from an event that was legal in the location it was filmed, the defendant created a so-called “documentary” about dog fighting and sold it. It was not a recording of criminal activity, but perfectly lawful (in its location) activity. The feds declared that the mere depiction was a crime, which is why the outdoor media community would have been decimated if this law stood. Field & Stream would be contraband in DC because the District allows no hunting. Better hope that online forum with ads where you posted that picture of the deer killed with a crossbow doesn’t get read by someone where use of crossbows are illegal. It was that bad.
DC Voting Rights Bill Dead Again
Hoyer is saying it’s not going to happen. They hate the Second Amendment that much, because you can bet this would have passed already without the gun rights amendment attached in the Senate.
Lobbying Mistakes
If there’s one thing that’s true about politicians is that they don’t want to come out and directly tell anyone “no.” They’ll beat around the bush and go about it in subtle ways. Such was the case with pro-gun Virginia Senator Jim Webb, but apparently Abby Spangler has a hard time reading between the lines, and ended up with a very public repudiation in the Washington Post. This is a big error on the part of Protest Easy Guns, and you can bet Webb’s office isn’t happy. This kind of thing has happened on our side too, so we shouldn’t get too proud, but generally, our folks do a better job of handling this kind of stuff. Perhaps Senator Webb will remember next time to speak in Abby’s language, with gratuitous use of the shift key.