You have to know Cody Wilson, of the WikiWeapon Project, is doing something right if Josh Horwitz is writing an entire article which is nothing less than an anaphylactic reaction to the thick and luxuriant fur on Cody’s wookie suit. The more I look at the WikiWeapon, the more I think this looks like Reagan’s “Star Wars” program strategically. The “Star Wars” program was about as much of a technological pipe dream as a pistol you could make on a 3D printer, but it scared the Soviets enough that they were forced to spend a lot of time and energy thinking of ways to counter it; money they could ill afford to spend. The fact that our opponents are having a cow over it is good enough reason to push the technology and continue to democratize it. Gun control has always been ineffective, but now it is to be obsolete as well, as we’ve demonstrated on our blog.
Month: October 2012
Colt and Remington Threatening to Relocate
Over microstamping. I’m sure there are plenty of other states that would be happy to have them. You know, the North won the Civil War largely because all the manufacturing and arms making industries were located in the industrialized areas, mainly of the Northeast. If the South were ever to rise again, where’s all the manufacturing and arms making in the country now? More importantly, where does all our nuclear material come from? What city makes rockets? Just something for Northeastern elites to consider. What does the Northeast manufacture these days other than financial crises?
Six Reasons Gun Owners Should Care About This Election
Remember, Barack Obama is the best pro-gun President of all times, according to the media, and these paranoid gun nuts are just a bunch of moronic hicks brainwashed by the NRA. This article in Forbes lays out the case for why that’s as big a lie as virtually anything else they’ve parroted this silly season:
More recently in a move unprecedented in American history, President Obama quietly banned re-importation and sale of 850,000 collectible antique U.S.-manufactured M1 Garand and Carbine rifles that were left in South Korea following the Korean War. Developed in the 1930’s, the venerable M1 Garand carried the U.S. through World War II, seeing action in every major battle.
I had kind of forgotten about this, because Presidents screwing us on importation rules has been a grand bipartisan tradition, but it’s certainly something to count against the President.
An Obama reelection presents an extreme risk of replacing at least one of five Supreme Court justices who have vindicated Second Amendment protections in the precarious Heller and McDonald decisions. If this were to happen, our right to bear arms might become a lost historical memory for future oppressed generations to read about.
This point needs to be pounded on until gun owners start to get it.
Still, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence continues to wage war on several fronts, most particularly attacking the constitutionally-sanctioned Second Amendment right of law-abiding citizens to carry guns for protection outside their homes, a right the vast majority of state governments acknowledge. According to their director of legal action, Jonathan Lowy, “this battle is far from over.â€
I think the Brady Campaign has largely beclowned itself under Gross, and is sliding further down the slope into irrelevance. Bloomberg and MAIG are the big threat now, and that’s another reality I think gun owners need to be made to understand.
UPDATE: First comment on that article illustrates an attitude you find often among gun owners who are ill informed:
No one…not even the President of the United States…can *legally* impose any restrictions on a citizen’s right to keep and bear arms. Until the Bill is Rights is abolished that right is just as important as any other right in the Bill of Rights. Can you imagine the uproar if some silly woman senator suggested “Common Sense restrictions on the right to free speech? The Second Amendment is the ONLY amendment to specifically state that the “right to KEEP and BEAR arms shall NOT BE INFRINGED.
So…what PART of “Shall NOT be INFRINGED†do these people not understand? No one has the right to tell *anyone* that they cannot only KEEP but also BEAR arms anywhere at anytime. Why? Because the Second Amendment does not have ANY provision for that. It’s really simple. But some law breaking “government officials†believe that they can force people to do what *THEY* deem as right. Well, it AINT gonna happen.
The unfortunate fact is the Second Amendment only means what 9 unelected men and women in robes say it means. Beyond that, it does not protect you. A great many gun owners don’t understand the existence and recognition of this right by the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, doesn’t mean squat unless the courts enforce it. I think this is an understandable, if naive view, that people in the government will act in good faith. They won’t. I think a good reason the Court argument may not be effective among gun owners is that they don’t really understand the magnitude of the threat. “It’s in the Constitution, and I can read,” they likely think, probably also remembering back to civics class about what it takes to amend the document. But while Judges can read too, judges also have agendas.
What seems clear can be unclear. I can remember being this naive once, back when I was first getting into this issue in a serious way, and someone told me the Second Amendment was ruled not to be an individual right. I couldn’t believe this was the case, so I looked up the Supreme Court cases on it, and couldn’t find anything that lead to that conclusion. But this did lead me to the collective rights work of Saul Cornell, and I was outraged enough by it to seek deeper knowledge, which was part of my transition out of that space. Sometimes I think when ordinary gun owners find out how this really works, they are going to be pissed.
Firearm Brass Art
This is pretty cool. Apparently the dark parts are done by burning gunpowder over the brass.
Some Maintenance
UPDATE: The upgrade is complete. There should only be some minor issues I need to work through now that shouldn’t disrupt the blog much, if at all.
We’re going to need to do some maintenance to our Firewall/Router/Access Point. I need to to upgrade the firmware due to some issue unrelated to the blog. We may be down for a brief period of time. I am becoming less convinced that dd-wrt is robust and bug free enough for critical work. It’s certainly good for a consumer unit, but I think it’s rather appalling that I have to reset the whole unit to default settings in order to do a flash upgrade, and then be forced to manually re-enter everything. I’m thinking of ordering one of these and putting a MiniPCI WiFi card in it. I’ve always been really impressed by pfSense. As open source solutions go, quite capable and reliable. Like any project, they have hiccups and downsides, but generally speaking, it’s gotten the job done for me when it’s come to firewalls for years. But for home I went cheap. The Buffalo WiFi unit I own is pretty high end, but it’s still a consumer unit.
I’ll probably get started as soon as I’m finished dinner. It’ll probably only take me about 10-15 minutes from start to get the blog back online once the flash upgrade is completed, but I may need to reboot from time to time while I work on my other issue. That is, assuming, Murphy isn’t lurking, as he sometimes is.
An Act of Kindness
Robb Birthday is coming up in a few days, and he’s asking as a present for some kindness for your fellow man. If it were up to me, and I had godlike powers, I’d make it so Robb doesn’t have to turn 40, and hope that maybe that kindness will be returned when it’s my turn in, err… a year and a half (that soon? Ugh).
Telling Evidence from the Clinton Years
Dave Hardy has been browsing around the Clinton Presidential Library online, and finding some interesting gun control items.
Taxing a Right
This would seem to be the latest scheme of Illinois Democrats, in Cook County. If you can’t ban it, tax it. Unfortunately for them, taxing a right for the purpose of discouraging its exercise is unconstitutional. Even taxing a right for the purpose of raising revenue is probably unconstitutional, which could end up being a problem for Pittman-Robertson funding. There are other contexts where taxation of a right is completely impermissible, such as in free speech, per the case Arkansas Writers Project, Inc v. Ragland, or in the case of marriage, the Illinois Supreme Court already rejected a 10 dollar fee on licenses to fund services for victims domestic violence (ironically also implemented by Cook, “We’ll Blame the Law Abiding,” County). (Source: Implementing the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Volokh, Page 1542).
So Cook County is skating on very thin ice here. Thirdpower notes:
It’s funny that while the Democrats are screaming about voter ID laws ‘disproportionately effect poor and minorities”, their leadership are pushing laws that disproportionately effect poor and minorities.
That’s because they don’t really care about rights as a concept, and nor do they care about the poor or minorities. They are rhetorical bats with which to beat one’s opponents over the head with. The reality is pure power politics, where we revere and uphold rights which we find pleasing, and abridge and trash rights that we find unpleasant. The GOP and many on the right are just as guilty too, especially in and near Chicago, where power seems to be wielded for power’s sake a lot more than in other places in this country.
NRA Ads
Jacob doesn’t think too highly of this particular NRA Ad:
While I am sympathetic to the fact that 15 second spots are cheap, and that’s not much time to get the message through, what is the message here, other than our Second Amendment rights are under attack? And we don’t get to that until we cover a bunch of things that have nothing to do with the Second Amendment.
And why is NRA having such a difficult time this election talking about the real issue, which is who Obama will put on the federal bench, particularly the Supreme Court? Do focus groups show no one cares about the Second Amendment this election? Even among people who supposedly care about the Second Amendment? Do they show that no one understands or cares about the courts? I’ve heard Court arguments coming from Chris Cox, the head of ILA, but I don’t hear it coming from anywhere else in NRA. It’s like we’re “All In” this election, but only that Obama is bad. And why? Well, you’ll just have to take our word for it. It wouldn’t convince me if I wasn’t already convinced.
UPDATE: Here’s the 30 second spot:
Most Effective Ad of This Season
I’m not sure I’ve seen the equal of this ad during the 2012 election season:
Saw it appear over at Barron’s first, who has been there, and then at Instapundit. Having gone through it myself with just us, I can’t imagine how stressful it would be with kids to support.