Month: August 2012
Fake Twitter Followers
Based on this USA Today article (via Richard Fernandez), showing that many of Obama’s twitter followers are phony baloney, my first thought was this would be a great tactic for gun control groups to use, given their lack of any real grassroots energy. The tool can be found here. First I checked myself, and found 80% of my peeps are good, 16% are inactive, and only 4% are phony.
CSGV are 88% good, 12% inactive, and they have no fakes. This isn’t too surprising, because they have been gaining followers largely through following large numbers of people and asking for follows back, which is a legitimate tactic, and usually works.
Brady, however, is a different story. The tool lists only 20% of their users as being good. The rest of their followers, some 77%, are inactive. Only 3% are fake, but with that many inactive, it’s safe to say that CSGV probably has more engaged followers than Brady.
VPCInfo has about the same mix as I do, 79% good, 18% inactive, and 3% fake. He also has fewer followers than I do. This isn’t too surprising, because Sugarmann has been phoning it in for a few years now on the issue overall, and doesn’t really seem to have any kind of social media strategy other than being there.
NRA actually doesn’t look too great. The NRANews is 60% good, 31% inactive, and 9% fake. The NRA main feed is 54% good, 36% inactive, and 10% fake. Interesting.
I think it’s safe to say that no one in this issue seems to be buying friends. So why such appalling numbers for Brady, and even NRA’s don’t look so good? I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point Brady encouraged their followers to get on social media, and a lot did, and promptly got off. Gun owners trying Twitter, and getting frustrated or bored with it could also explain NRA’s numbers. I’ve generally found Twitter to be a bit like a garden. Every once in a while, you have to pull weeds. I’ve found TwitBlock to be a pretty good for that, but if you have a lot of followers, it can take quite a while to scan your whole list.
The Changing Demographic of Gun Show Attendees
While the silly season is not yet in full swing, Bitter and I are still trying to fill seats at the county Friends of the NRA dinner, so that means working gun shows (don’t forget to sing the fun show song). The most popular area gun show used to be hosted at the Valley Forge Convention Center, but they’ve recently turned that into a casino, forcing the shows to move to a convention hall just up the road in Oaks. So Sunday I get to sit there at our table and not wander, lest I might find something, like a Trapdoor Springfield in very good condition, which tempts me greatly to part with money I shouldn’t be spending on guns right now. Of course, said Springfield was on the table next to us, and it called to me the whole time. I resisted, however.
But there’s a few things that struck me about the crowd compared to even a few years ago. Generally speaking, guns shows were mostly a sausage fest, and the women you did see tended to be bored girlfriends who were dragged there by their boyfriend. What’s surprising is that not only are there more women at the shows, but they often have kids in tow. Gun shows seem to have developed into family affairs where mom and dad bring the kids along. Bitter talked a good bit to someone who was a 4dH mom, and who was interested in the dinner (since the grants fund 4H programs). The other demographic that seems to have grown quite a bit at the shows are middle class blacks. Sure, you still have your stereotypical fat middle-aged white guys, but the demographics are getting younger, more diverse, and trending toward families. Needless to say this is not good news for our opponents.
Neil Armstrong Dead at 82
It was exiting to live in a time where we walked the earth with such pioneers. Not many of them are left, and we are not replacing them. We haven’t been back since Apollo was cancelled in the early 70s. I think the next time man sets foot on the moon, it will be a commercial venture, rather than a government one.
Note the Reaction of the Social Conservatives
I’ve generally found their are two types of social conservatives. There are ones who are mostly dedicated to the ideas of smaller government, and restoring fiscal and regulatory sanity, but are also personally religious and are generally on board with many of the socially conservative planks in the GOP platform, such as opposing abortion and gay marriage. But mostly their public activism is motivated around reducing the size and reach of government. The other type are the people who have come to politics purely through their social conservative values. They might offer lip service to smaller government, but their ultimate objective is to advance socially conservative ideas though the use of government. Their patron saint is Mike Huckabee. I believe the distinction between these two groups is perhaps the start of a rift within the Republican coalition, and that rift has never shown itself more strongly than with the recent Todd Akin affair.
The former group, the personal SoCos, joining with many non-SoCos (which I’ll call the National Review types), have pretty roundly condemned Akin, and joined the chorus demanding he step down from the race. The latter group, the political SoCos, now represented by their patron saint, have largely stood by Akin. See, Akin apologized, and Christian forgiveness being what it is, they have decided it is time to move on. But politics isn’t about Christian forgiveness, and no amount of that is going to overcome the fact that Akin is now down in the race he was once ahead in, and it’s looking like his dumbassery is even hurting Romney in Missouri, a state that has generally been getting more red as of late.
I bring this up because I think it’s possible for the Republican coalition to survive and thrive with the former type of social conservatives in it. We mostly all want the same thing, and while they’d probably have difficulty joining a coalition in a party that supported abortion rights and gay marriage, that’s largely not what drives them toward political activism. The latter type I think is hazardous to the coalition, because it’s their social conservative values that are driving their political activism, and they are less concerned about jeopardizing the goal of reducing the size of government. Indeed, they may even be fine with big government provided that it is controlled by social conservatives to serve socially conservative ends. I think in the long term, the big tent that the GOP would like to represent is going to have to have a moment of reckoning with the Huckabee branch of the Party, and the Akin controversy may provide the vehicle for that to happen.
Ordinarily, what I’ve called the National Review types, have always been uncomfortable with the inclusion of the Huckabee branch of the party, and Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” before that. The problem encountered is that the National Review types can’t win on their own. They can bring money to the table, but they don’t bring enough activists, organizations or votes, so they choose to coalition with the people who are personally socially conservative, the former group in my example above. These folks bring everything to the table the National Review types don’t. The problem is that the former personal SoCos are not all that uncomfortable with the Huckabees being part of the coalition, and thus would unlikely join any movement within the coalition to marginalize them. If Missouri costs the GOP control of the Senate, or McCaskill ends up being a key vote to prevent Obamacare from being repealed, I am hoping, perhaps against hope, that many personal SoCos will see that the cause of small government is being sacrificed on the altar of the Huckabee wing of the party. My hope is that they will see that candidates need to have better qualifications than just mirroring their own religious beliefs, and having the right views on a handful of social issues.
The coalition needs people who can carry small government values, which should be, after all, the best way to promote family values. I could care less if someone has the right religion, and the fact that Huckabee was once a preacher means about as much to me as the fact that Joe Wurzelbacher was once a Plumber. While I’m personally pro-choice and favor civil marriage for gays, I don’t think any of that is going to matter much if the country bankrupts itself, and the rest of us with it. The primary issue is that the government has run out of other people’s money, and facing that, has just decided to switch the printing presses into overdrive. Picking a candidate because he has the right religion, or the right views on abortion or gay marriage, is roughly analogous to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and it seems many of the Huckabee folks in the Republican Party are as energetic in this rearrangement endeavor as the Democrats.
A Challenge to Gun Control Advocates
Chris said he’s confident he and his crew will always be one step ahead of the police. “You’ll never stop us from getting guns,†he said. “You feel me?â€
The gang member also notes that enforcement of Illinois gun laws is an utter joke in Chicago. It is the same way in Philadelphia, where you can reasonably expect that if you’re caught with a gun nothing serious is going to happen to you, despite the fact that penalties range from 5 to 10 years in prison for people illegally in possession. It’s also worth noting a major source of crime guns, aside from straw purchasers, given that Chicago is a major national rail hub:
Another source of stolen guns is “the freights,†Chris said.
He was talking about the freight trains parked on easy-to-access rail yards on the South Side.
“You bust the lock,†he said. “Once you get in there, you may get the wrong thing. You may get shoes or something. You feel me? But you keep trying. We tried it before and we know what kind of containers they in. They’re carrying all type of handguns — in crates.â€
Now stealing guns from trains will get you a federal rap of ten years on each count, and that’s just for stealing guns. I’m sure it’s also a felony to steal from trains. Makes you wonder if you nailed gang bangers on the gun charges, before they go on to commit crimes with guns, whether that would make a difference. One thing is for sure, they can’t be engaging in shootouts on the street, robberies, or other types of gang activities if they are behind bars.
Our opponents have been quick to believe if you enact gun laws like Chicago’s everywhere, this kind of thing will stop. That was roughly the same philosophy that lead to tough federal laws and stepped up enforcement of our drug laws, and we see how well that’s working.
Rapid Tracing of Firearms
Ian Argent is surprised by how quickly the police turned the trace around for a country where registration is supposed to be illegal. The truth is that this country has had a form of registration since 1968. The concept of the registry created by the Gun Control Act of 1968 is that given a particular gun, the police can quickly find the last legal owner, but they could not find out whether a particular person did, or didn’t own guns, nor could they find out how many guns that person owns. But for the purposes of tracing a gun to a person, this country already has registration.
Up to the 4473, those records are already largely computerized. To find out which dealer a particular gun was sold to doesn’t take ATF any time at all. None of the big manufacturers or distributers are doing A&D records by hand anymore, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ATF has direct access to this data without a person having to be involved. Once the dealer has been identified, the question is whether that dealer is in business. If not, then it’s just a quick call over to the big ATF vault in West Virginia where all the 4473s of defunct dealers are sent, and put on microfilm. ATF is forbidden from computerizing these records by law (because that would make a registry, where they could link people to guns, in addition to linking guns to people). If the dealer is still in business, I believe all that is required is to send over a trace request, the dealer looks up the 4473, and there you have the trace. If the gun was sold more than 20 years ago, and the dealer lawfully destroyed that record, the trace fails at that point. Traces to fail rather often, as dealers are only required to keep records for 20 years, and the records in West Virginia are likewise sometimes incomplete.
But that’s why the trace can happen so quickly. It doesn’t take a whole lot of manual labor to accomplish one. Generally speaking, the amount of time it takes for a dealer to retrieve a 4473, or for an ATF agents in West Virginia to do the same from their files. You’re talking a matter of hours, not days or weeks.
Shooting Olympian to Address GOP Convention
Provided that a hurricane doesn’t interrupt the GOP convention, they have invited shooting Olympic record holder Kim Rhode to speak at the event. In fact, I’m very impressed by the fact that the GOP does not shy away from mentioning her shooting records in her biography. There’s no sugarcoating it, they are straight up talking about Rhode’s accomplishments as a serious competitive shooter. It’s a context that doesn’t threaten people, but makes clear that shooting is an American pastime.
Kim Rhode, the co-host of the Outdoor Channel’s Step Outside program, is the only American Olympian to win five medals in an individual event in five consecutive Olympic Games. She’s the most successful female shooter at the Olympics, the only triple Olympic Champion and the only woman to have won two gold medals for Double Trap. Most recently, she brought home gold in skeet shooting at the 2012 Summer Games in London, equaling the world record of 99 out of 100 clays. When double trap was eliminated from the Olympic Games, she set a new world record in skeet at the 2007 world cup competitions, going on to win the silver at the 2008 Summer Olympics in women’s skeet.
Also, of the 11 Olympians attending, she’s one of three selected to speak.
Some Questions for Mike Bloomberg
It’s now becoming clear that just about all of the injured in today’s mass shooting outside the Empire State Building were injured by the police response rather than by the shooter himself. This begs some questions:
- How do you expect to have police that know how to shoot when you’ve done everything possible to extinguish any kind of responsible shooting culture in your city?
- How many police officers do you think learn to shoot because they interact heavily in the civilian gun culture by taking part in competitions, belonging to shooting clubs, and generally shooting for recreation?
- NRA has an entire division dedicated to law enforcement training. Have you ever considered inviting them to New York?
- Law enforcement is a profession that tends to run in families. Indeed, a good many gun bloggers come from law enforcement families. Part of that is indoctrinating the next generation in the ways of the gun. If there is no civilian gun culture, how are the martial arts of this profession going to be passed down?
- What if there is a Mumbai style attack in New York City? You’re now advertising to the world that your officers can’t shoot. The terrorists are listening.
There will probably be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over this. Some will undoubtedly want to disarm police officers. Cooler heads will call for more training. More training would obviously be a good thing, but the best thing for New York would be a restoration of a responsible civilian gun culture where police officers can find means to hone their skills recreationally, where there’s a body of knowledge and competence from which to draw from, and where there are places to shoot and plenty of people practiced in the art of shooting, from whom much can be learned. In other words, allow New York to be more like the rest of America, and you might find that suddenly your officers can reliably hit a target from yards away without having to expend a magazine and seriously injure innocent bystanders.
UPDATE: I guess we’ll see how some folks in Idaho stack up in the LAPD combat course.
That Didn’t Take Long
A few weeks ago I pointed out we seemed to have a new anti-gun blog in our midst. Thirdpower is reporting that Reasoned Discourse(TM) has already broken out. You’d think there would be at least one pro-gun control person out there dedicated enough to their point-of-view to actually, you know, argue it, and make their case. But it seems squashing opposing opinions is easier for them. Maybe that says something about the strength of their point of view.