February 2008 – Page 7 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Cal State Lockdown

Caleb speaks of Cal State going ape shit over someone walking around with an assault rifle.Â When I was in college, one of the ROTC kids got himself a reprimand for toting an M16 openly down the streets of Philadelphia on his way to our school’s rifle range.Â Oddly enough, perfectly legal for anyone to do; open carriage of pistols is illegal in the City of Brotherly love without a License to Carry, but openly carrying a long gun is not, and Pennsylvania law makes no distinction between legal machine guns and other types of long guns.

I’m not sure this is evidence of hoplophobia.Â If I saw someone openly carrying what looked like an M16 around campus, I’d probably be a little alarmed too. Â It’s not so much the gun as it is that it’s something out of context.Â I’m not sure my level of alarm would be lower if the person was in uniform.

Nebraska Ban on “Inherently Dangerous” Firearms

This turd passed unanimously out of committee.Â Folks in Nebraska need to get off their butts and join Joe in stopping this.Â You only get one chance.Â Repealing laws once they pass is next to impossible.

Let it Snow

Good thing about the snow: No work!!

Bad thing about the snow: Too hazardous to go see Bitter :(

2008 Election Poll

I have a new polling plugin, so I’m going to try this sucker out.

[poll=2]

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Your feedback is appreciated.

It’s Only February …

… and I’m already tired of this election year.Â Tired because I find myself defending John McCain, and I don’t even really like the guy.Â McCain is pretty far from being a classical liberal I could really get behind, and tends to fall more into the category of “National Greatness” conservative, who are open to a lot more state meddling in things the state ought not meddle in than I’m comfortable with.

But there are more crazy claims about McCain circulating out there than I can shake a stick at.Â The first is that he’s anti-gun, and no better than Hilly or Obama.Â Brady gives McCain a career rating of 17%.Â Obama and Hillary both have 100% ratings, as did John Kerry.Â The other is that McCain is a socialist. Other than Ron Paul, McCain’s federal budget is the lowest of any remaining Republican candidate.Â McCain is not in favor of socializing 7% of the US economy in the same manner Obama would.Â I think McCain on fiscal matters will be a significant improvement over Bush, let alone Obama or Hillary.

To my mind, campaign finance reform is his biggest sin, and there were a lot of other folks, including Fred Thompson and President Bush, and five members of the Supreme Court, who all took their turn to drop their dookie into the constitutional swimming pool.

But given that I’m the only person in the gun blogosphere who is thinking, “McCain!Â Why did it have to be McCain!?!?” but still planning to vote for him regardless, and encouraging others to do so as well, I find myself wondering if the more apt analogy is Han Solo telling Chewbacca, “Get in there, you big furry oaf! I don’t care what you smell!”

We’re All Shills to Them

It’s probably hard for a cadre of paid activists to believe that folks like myself and W. Scott Lewis do what we do because we value our rights, and not because we’re paid shills for the “gun lobby”

Or perhaps it’s not so hard for them to believe, but in order to paint the big bad NRA, and its 4 million members, in a negative light, it has to claim we’re all paid shills of some nefarious “gun lobby”

From Peter Hamm, of the Brady Campaign:

But Peter Hamm, communication director for the Brady Campaign to Stop Gun Violence, is concerned that the group is the latest tool of the powerful gun lobby.

“We know very clearly that they were organised and they are funded by the gun industry, by the companies that are selling the guns,” he said.

“This is not some spontaneous, grassroots organisation.

“There are more members than there were before Virginia Tech because the gun industry is spending more money to enlist more young people to help them spread the word, that if only we had more guns in America, we’d have less of a gun violence problem.”

So the tens of thousands of people on SFCC’s Facebook group are all paid shills of the “gun lobby” and not real grass roots?Â If Peter Hamm wants to know what astroturf looks like, he doesn’t need to look very far.

Peter Hamm offers no facts to back up this assertion, but are we really surprised?

Silhouette with Bitter’s Rifle

Shot a 21 with Bitter’s new CZ-452 Lux rifle, open sights.Â Not good, but I meant to take it to the range last night to make sure the sights were zeroed, but didn’t get the chance because I felt like dog pooh. It was shooting a bit high at to the left, but it’s hard to tell exactly how much just looking at the splatter on the animal.Â I ended up missing the first couple of animals until I figured out where to aim for that particular animal.Â After that it was down to my general skill, which only gets me about 30 or so with my scoped 10/22.

I think it’ll be a great shooter once I get the sighs zeroed and get a scope on it.

CNN Story on Campus Carry

CNN has a pretty balanced piece of campus concealed carry.Â They get some of the legal subtleties wrong though.Â For instance, you can carry on a college campus in Pennsylvania legally, it’s just that Colleges and Universities, including those in the state system, exclude firearms through policy (rather than law).Â This is the case in Virginia as well.Â The laws being proposed in different states are meant to have various effects.

Many states, including Texas and Tennessee, ban concealed carry on college campuses through law.Â There are proposals to repeal this, but that would still allow college to ban them through policy.Â You could be expelled from the school, but you won’t be facing charges for violating a gun free zone.Â Virginia’s proposal would have prevented the state run school system from imposing restrictions on individuals who possessed a Concealed Handgun License.

While I have some issues with how CNN has chosen to cover this, the fact that this is becoming a serious debate at all is a sign on how far we’ve come here.Â Even five years ago, it wouldn’t even be up for serious debate.

Gun Control Obama Style

Obama says that he wants to implement California style gun controls, as an example of how much he loves the second amendment.Â Sportsmen for Obama talks about what exactly that would mean for the whole country.

Be Afraid …

… be very afraid:

“He walks into a room and you want to follow him somewhere, anywhere,” George Clooney told talk show host Charlie Rose.

“I’ll do whatever he says to do,” actress Halle Berry said to the Philadelphia Daily News. “I’ll collect paper cups off the ground to make his pathway clear.”

If it was just vapid Hollywood stars who liked this guy, I wouldn’t be that worried, but it’s enough people that I’m beginning to fear the prospect of an Obama presidency more than a Hillary presidency. Is this fervent and religious devotion to Obama among the young a product of schools long ago hijacked by the left?

I don’t like Hillary Clinton, and I despise her politics.Â I was initially rather irrationally happy to see Americans thumb their noses at her.Â But no one really likes Hillary Clinton all that much, even the people who vote for her.Â Lacking any real mandate, she’d be limited to what she can accomplish as President.

If Obama sweeps into office on a wave of near religious devotion, at the risk of invoking Godwin, I can’t help but thinking about the other times this has happened.Â I’m not at all making the comparison of Obama to Hitler, or suggesting he’s going to burn down Capitol Hill to create a pretext, but just the kind of blind devotion I’m seeing in Obama supporters leads to that kind of thing, and if this is the road our young people want to go down, they need to spent more time learning history, with a skeptical eye toward human nature.

Hat tip to War on Guns for the link.