May 2012 – Page 4 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Polling on Stand Your Ground Continues Looking Good

In yet another round of evidence that our opponents bet their paychecks on a lame horse, a new Quinnipiac poll is showing that 56% of registered voters in Florida support the law. Along the racial divide, 53% of Hispanics support the law, and 56% of blacks oppose the law. There’s an even more stark division by party:

Meanwhile, support was strongest among Republicans, who supported it 78 percent to 15 percent, while independents supported it 58 percent to 35 percent. A majority of Democrats opposed it: 59 percent to 32

Strong independent support means the law is likely safe from legislative interference, provided gun owners remain vigilant on this matter. But it’s always good to be able to show legislators that polling runs in your favor.

As far as opposition from Blacks goes, I would pose this question collectively to the black community. Who is more likely to end up having to defend themselves with deadly force? A black person who lives in a lousy neighborhood, or a white person who lives in a quiet suburb? Who do you think is more likely to be forced to explain himself in front of a jury, because the prosecutor didn’t want to cut them a break? A middle class white person, who can afford a good attorney, or a poor black person who has to fall back on a public defender? Who’s case of self-defense do you think is likely to be viewed more suspiciously by authorities?

A big reason why I think the Trayvon Martin shooting resonated with the black community is because there’s an underlying, and often correct belief, that blacks don’t get a fair shake from the justice system. But Martin is one case, and I think forming an opinion on one emotionally charged case is short sighted. The fact remains that because of high levels of black-on-black violence, African-Americans are far more likely to need to defend themselves than average. Combine that with a legal system which is reluctance to offer black defendents, particularly poor blacks that can’t afford to hire good attorneys, benefit of doubt, is all the more reason for there to be mechanisms in place to make it more difficult for an ambitious prosecutor to railroad a defendant engaged in a legitimate act of self-defense. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said in a judicial opinion upholding Stand Your Ground, that “detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an upliftedÂ knife.”

Welcome News for iOS & Mac OS Users

Our regular topic of conservation is looking a little slow today, so I’ve been catching up on my tech blogs.Â Looks like Google will be making a version of Chrome for iOS, though I’m skeptical Apple is going to open up its walled garden to allow Google to cut them out as a middleman on ad search revenue. With the introduction of Lion, Apple turned Safari into an unmitigated pile of garbage. On Mac OS, there is Chrome, though it does not do reading list or tab synchronization with Safari on iOS devices. If Chrome does indeed come to iOS, I could kiss Safari goodbye for good entirely. I recently tried the 5.1.7 update to Safari, and believe it is a step backwards, after some minor improvement since the launch of Lion. It’s now as unstable, once again, as it was when Apple pooped Lion unto the world. Many of the other initial issues with Lion have been fixed, but Safari is still an unstable piece of crap. All they’ve essentially done is separate the user interface from the actual rendering engine, so if the rendering engine takes a dump, all you notice is that all your tabs refresh. This is great until this happens when you’re in the middle of a post, and suddenly you’re back to the last autosave, and it’s demanding you log in again.Â In addition, like iOS, Safari starts purging out pages when it runs low on memory, regardless of how much RAM you have free on the box. This is understandable on iOS devices, which are limited in RAM, but on a machine with 8GB RAM, it shouldn’t manage memory this way.

I heard someone characterize Lion as Apple’s Vista. Based on my experience that’s an entirely accurate description. Mountain Lion better be a real improvement or I’m going to seriously consider going back to Linux, despite the fact that I found the Gnome 3 Desktop to be about as unstable as Safari.

Holding Gun Rights Hostage

Thirdpower shows that the Illinois State Police are threatening to further delay FOID approvals, and stop processing background checks if they don’t get a bill they want, which has a number of gun control measures attached to it.

It’s going to take incidents like this to convince the Supreme Court that there can’t really be any licensing of this right. Not when people like Mayor Rahm are out there, and view licensing as a way to limit its exercise. Ironically, I think these kinds of childish tantrums might be able to help move the courts in the right direction over the long term. If they were willing to treat gun licenses like hunting licenses or marriage licenses, I would be worried the courts may uphold them. But they still view licensing as a means of disenfranchising people, and turning a right into a state granted privilege. It shows no more clearly than it does in this case, and I don’t think the Court should stand by it.

A Real War on Women

Apparently the Taliban are poisoning school girls, because girls aren’t supposed to get an education, or something like that. As someone who was initially supportive of both wars, and still believes it was ultimately the right thing to do, I’m starting to become of the opinion that these folks just aren’t all that interested in joining the modern world. My lack of regret is because it had to be tried. The specter of the Belmont Club’s three conjectures is still haunting.

VPC: The Most Irrelevant Anti-Gun Group?

The Violence Policy Center is busy bowling us over with the might of their research, once again. This time telling us that cars are becoming so safe that people killing themselves with guns is becoming a higher cause of death in some states than auto accidents. Eugene Volokh takes apart some of the flawed logic on display here.

I would make a wager that the Violence Policy Center has become the most irrelevant anti-gun group out there. If they disappeared tomorrow, I don’t think the anti-gun movement would notice. VPC is, in fact, in trouble as an organization. One can see from their Form 990 for 2010, that pretty much their sole purpose as an organization is to serve as a jobs program for Josh Sugarmann and Kristen Rand, who compromise approximately 55% of their salary expenses. Also worth noting that public support, a measure the IRS uses to determine whether a non-profit organized under 501(c)(3) is a “public charity” or a “private foundation,” has been in precipitous decline at the VPC. The IRS generally requires an organization to receive one third of its support from public sources in order to be considered a public charity. There are mitigating factors that the IRS considers, but it you look at the total return for 2010, it follows with a letter which essentially begs the IRS not to classify them as a private foundation, which would eliminate certain deductions, and make donor information public. VPC’s 17% of public support in 2010 should be very worrying for them, since below 10%, regardless of mitigating factors, you cannot claim public charity status. Here’s how VPC’s public support has been trending:

Year	% Donations to VPC From General Public
2007	24.19%
2008	22.01%
2009	17.82%
2010	16.93%

One can see that as VPC has become increasingly dependent on grants from a small number of foundational donors, they are increasingly less and less qualifying to be considered a public charity. In contrast, EFSGV’s public support percentage is 87.5%, and Brady Center’s is 97.41%. Given these facts, it’s amazing that VPC isn’t trying to do more to be relevant. I can’t imagine the good graces of the IRS will last forever, and they are dropping precipitously close to the 10% floor beyond which no one can claim to be publicly supported.

I think it just desserts that the organization behind the assault weapons strategy is now, probably, the most irrelevant gun control group out there, and quickly on its way to even greater irrelevancy as a private foundation no one pays attention or donates to. You have to wonder how long before even their Joyce backers realize their grants to VPC are just good money chasing bad.

More “Insurrectionist Timeline” Hypocrisy

Thirdpower finds another instance of left wing eliminationist rhetoric that isn’t going to be showing up on CSGV’s Insurrectionist Timeline anytime soon.

Deinstitutionalization and Mass Murder

Clayton Cramer has an interesting article in the Federalist Society publication that looks at the rise in mass shootings, and how they coincided with mass deinstitutionalization. I actually think it should be pretty difficult to commit someone to an institution against their will, but it’s pretty clear that complete deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill hasn’t served either the public, or the mentally ill, as well as many proponents of it had hoped.

Patrick Purdy, a mentally ill drifter, used his Social Security Disability payments to buy guns, while having a series of run-ins with the law. After one suicide attempt in jail in 1987, a mental health evaluation concluded that he was â€œa danger to his health and others.â€²⁷Â In January 1989, Purdy went onto a schoolyard in Stockton, California with an AK-47 rifle, murdered five children and wounded twenty-nine others, before taking his own life.

And you can see how this issue affects ours. Californians now live under their assault weapons regime because the State of California, rather than ensure that the clinically insane were institutionalized, decided to, every so slightly, institutionalize everyone else in the state by limiting everyone else’s freedom.

State Attorneys General Support National Reciprocity

A letter to Congressmen Stearns and Shuler, from 22 state Attorneys General. Who is not among the signers? Linda Kelly, the Attorney General of Pennsylvania, who replaced Tom Corbett when he became Governor. Disappointing.

Obama in the Primaries

According to Gateway Pundit, Obama has lost 36 Arkansas counties to a man known as John Wolfe. Who he is we don’t know. In Kentucky, however, he lost 67 counties to “uncommitted.” But hey, at least he didn’t lose them to a prison inmate, right?

As much as I’d like to joke, it’s still going to be close. This race is going to hinge on a couple of states, among them being Florida and Ohio, which are currently tossups.

Open Carry and the Political Process

I have been following the debate in Caleb’s comment section, and I wanted to point out a particular thread. I have to photo capture this because Caleb’s theme doesn’t seem to easily allow linking to comments:

I think John makes a good point. We’re really not as far along in this debate as many think. Gun owners need to repeat this unfortunate fact: the vast majority of Americans are wholly unconcerned with their rights, other than the rights which affect their individual, daily lives. If you’re talking about appealing to a deeply held principle of natural rights, that makes perfect sense to people who have studied Locke, or read the writings of Jefferson, Madison, or Adams, you’re talking about a concept that completely alien to the people who actually vote in elections. You can blame the educational system, or what have you, but the vast majority of the American public are not ideological voters. Most voters vote their interests, and you have to appeal to that.

Robb’s frustration in this is completely understandable. I have shared it many times. You will drive yourself crazy by what other gun owners are unwilling to do to support their own rights, even though we all share broad agreement. I don’t think many gun owners really understand the house of cards that this issue is built on, largely because of another bias in that thinking other people, of course, naturally have similar thought processes to you.

I have pointed out this thread, because I think this is one of those cases both people are making really excellent points. Worrying about public backlash is a concern of someone who understands the outer limits of this debate. We’re talking the issue being pushed by a determined minority, and if that determined minority is meets the brick wall of obstinate public opinion, the issue won’t advance much farther.

How far you can push your issue as a determined minority completely hinges on your ability to influence legislators and threaten their cushy jobs. It hinges on nothing else. If they are not true believers, and almost none of them are, your ability to influence them comes down to, in reality, a good poker bluff. You have to make them believe you can threaten their seat if the bluff gets called. But the politician you’re influencing also is bluffing. He’s betting you don’t have votes behind you on an issue he’s trying to avoid taking a position on, or is thinking about taking a contrary position on.

Neither you, nor they, may be entirely convinced who’s really bluffing. It is an accepted fact in politics now that when the gun vote really does get motivated, the results are epic. That’s the space you, as an activist, have to work in. If the politician in question calls your bluff, you better be sure you can deliver, or else your credibility is finished, and you can expect that legislator will no longer give a rat’s behind about anything you have to say.

This is the nature of the game, and it is a game. Don’t for a second kid yourself politics is about principles, logic, or deeply held tradition. You can appeal to these things; rhetoric is important, but it no more than a part of the game, of building a mystique, of posturing and maneuvering. It serves no purpose apart from that. It is deeply cultural, but also, at the end of the day still a game.

My opinions on open carry are driven largely by the fact that I see it divides gun owners, and our losses have always been driven through issues that divide us, whether it be background checks, or years ago the utility of these newfangled AR-15s, or cheap Chinese semi-automatic knockoffs of the AK-47. Our opponents have traditionally won where they’ve been able to exploit division in the ranks. Let me clarify that — our opponents have only won where they’ve been able to exploit division in the ranks. So I think when you get other activists, not just ordinary gun owners saying, “You know, I’m just not sure about this,” that should give you very serious pause, and open carry is one of those issues.

The question is whether, like the assault weapons issue, we can spend the next two decades educating people. I think what motivates most gun owner activists which are wary of open carry, is that even if it is a topic that 20 years of education can turn around, Â it’s practically worth the effort expended when compared to other issues we have to build consensus for. In many ways, I think constitutional carry (i.e. carry, open or concealed, without a license) is less radical than open carry as a form of activism among gun owners. I think it is always important in considering whether a particular course of action offers opportunity to your opponents, and I believe in some cases, this can be the case with open carry. But not in all cases.