Month: January 2013

A former slave from Tennessee, Mary Fields, holding the assault weapon of her age. The Winchester 1876 carried fifteen rounds, which is more than double the amount deemed necessary for self-defense by Governor Andrew Cuomo  and the New York State Legislature.

Today is Martin Luther King day. King is, by some ways of looking at it, the man who finally won the Civil War. In the Reconstruction and Jim Crow era, often times Blacks had to protect their rights as Americans with Winchesters like the one Mary Fields is seen here with. Their tormenters just as often government as private terror groups. Often they were the same thing. Indeed, as many have documented, the history of gun control is intertwined with the subjugation of African-Americans as second class citizens. They went hand in hand.

Hat Tip to Cemetery, who has the full sized photo.

News is building up, once again:

A survivor of Tiananmen square on gun rights.

A way to foil ground penetrating radar? Could be handy if you live in New York.

A tale of two cities. Richard Fernandez’s guest poster sees the gun control fight as boiling down, essentially, to a battle between a Rousseauian “general will” vision for America, and the civic minded republican individualism of our founders so admired and observed by Alexis de Tocqueville. Very much worth your time.

I saw some people here suggesting that NRA use Jessie Duff as a spokesperson for the cause. Well, here you go.

Demographic change undermining the gun control movement. See also this.

Lighting money on fire. This is a tax credit idea I could get behind. If prices drop back down, it’ll help me trade up. Don’t think of it as a voluntary buyback so much as a tax credit for gun collectors.

How many kids had a choice in writing letter asking Obama to ban guns?

The problem with public research on gun violence that Obama wants us to pay for.

Gun sales rise in Pennsylvania.

How to crush dumb gun control arguments.

Obama’s tired gun control schemes won’t make children, or the rest of us, any safer. By Chris and Jeff Knox.

Chris Christie sets up a “task force” and suggests one of NRA’s ads is reprehensible. Now sure how he thinks he’s going to win a Republican primary at this rate. There’s also this.

To me, this is more proof our real enemy is Bloomberg and Obama, and whatever Brady and CSGV do is just a side show:

“The thing that really addresses gun violence is the thing that Brady was set up to do, and that is federal legislation,” said Michael Wolkowitz, a New York filmmaker who was on Brady’s board of directors for 10 years until he left last July. “Brady’s people knew policy like no one else.”

Yet so many years of congressional inaction led to a decline in the group’s ability to raise money, Wolkowitz said, which is why the board wanted a new, less policy-focused mission. “It’s borderline Kafka,” he said.

And now you realize what I mean when I said that offering victory, any victory, to our opponents screws us politically. It is part of why we can’t have any rational conversation on this issue, because even to give a little would enable our opponents to regroup, come back, and take more, and there can be no doubt what many want, at this point, because it’s confiscation. There is no possibility that anyone can credibly argue now that this is not the case.

Read the whole article, it goes into more detail about the Brady decline:

Brady’s 2011 tax documents show it raised $5.8 million, about half its haul a decade earlier. The staff on I Street had dwindled to 30 — though Wolkowitz estimates the roster is now in the teens. Debra DeShong Reed, a spokeswoman for Brady, declined to say how many people work there.

Of course, that also cuts both ways. Gun owners have been in a long slumber that Obama is waking our people out of, though NRA has always had a broader based of members from which to raise funds than the Brady folks could ever dream of.

 

Bill Clinton warns Democrats not to lightly dismiss gun owners and the people who represent them. I think it is sage advice, but for Clinton it is also self-serving. I imagine Bill and Hillary would still like to be the patriarchs of the Democratic Party, and Obama is a threat to that. If Obama gets his ass handed to him, he can smugly say “I told you.” Of course, he still has choice words for NRA:

Clinton also recalled threatening to veto a bill as Arkansas governor that would have prevented the city of Little Rock from instituting an assault weapons ban.

Clinton said that an National Rifle Association lobbyist threatened him over his veto in the state house, saying that the group would cause problems for his upcoming presidential campaign in rural states like Texas.

“Right there in the lobby,” Clinton said. “They thought they could talk to governors that way.”

“I knew I was getting older when I didn’t hit him,” Clinton said. Clinton recalls telling the NRA lobbyist, “If that’s the way you feel, you get your gun, I’ll get my gun and I’ll see you in Texas.”

Why are anti-gun people so violent? And why can’t we talk to governors that way? A governor is not a king. He serves the people.