He was buying the AR-15, just to show how easy it was. Yeah, and the preacher was visiting the whorehouse to try to convince the girls to give up their life of sin.
Month: March 2013
If Gun Control is So Popular …
… why is Obama’s approval rating dropping too? A dirty little secret might be that it’s really not. Take this polls being hawked around Pennsylvania by MAIG. Sure, it shows 95% support for background checks, because people don’t know what a private transfer is. But what they don’t mention is gun control is barely on people’s radar. When presented with a list of what issues are important to people, and told to choose two, the top four issues are the economy, federal budget deficit, health care, and taxes. Protecting children from crime and violence only came in at 15%, but even worse news for meddling Bloomberg is that fixing gun laws came in at a whopping 3%, which was dead last on the poll, behind abortion and same sex marriage. Even “gun violence prevention,” which sounds great, doesn’t it? Comes in at 8%, behind education at 11%. That’s not popular. Even if someone’s willing to tell a pollster they want background checks, they still want a growing economy and balanced budgets more. It is therefore not surprising voters are not approving on the late focus on a topic they don’t care about, at the expense of a topic they do care about.
A Win for Non-Delegation
Over at Volokh, they are covering the high capacity soda ban being overturned by a New York judge. The grounds would seem to be that the power to do so was improperly usurped from City Council, and thus violated separation of powers. This pleases me, because I think the judicial weakening of the non-delegation doctrine was one of the greatest injuries to liberty undertaken by the courts. It’s a pretty simple concept: if someone thinks something ought to be illegal, the legislature should have to pass a law.
Colorado Senate Passes Gun Control Bills
The Colorado Democrats have shown they have no respect for the Second Amendment. The magazine ban passed 18-17. Remember in 2014. For Colorado, the 2014 elections has to be all hands on deck. No gun owners can remain on the sidelines. If the Democratic Party in Colorado is not punished for this, if Hickenlooper does not veto, and he wins a second term, the message the Democrats will get is that they can push gun control, and we’re powerless to punish them for it at the voting booth. Right now the dam is leaking badly. If 2014 comes without punishment, the dam will break, and Colorado will start the long slog toward being California.
UPDATE: John Richardson has more, including a the Democrats who stood with us. In this environment of relentless attack, I’d put a target on any Democrat who didn’t stick with us on everything.
UPDATE: Just to be clear, I mean target metaphorically, as in, we target these politicians in elections. Not a literal target. I shouldn’t have to explain this, but politics these days is ridiculous, and people are crazy and immature.
Gun Owners Swarm Hartford
Today is another day of lobbying for gun owners and the people who work for the gun industry in Connecticut. NSSF has some great photos of just floors and floors of the Capitol filled with gun owners visiting their lawmakers.
These lawmakers who wonder if just one or two anti-gun votes will be enough to make the issue go away need to be reminded that they will always have to answer for these votes at the polls, and the anti-gun groups will still attack them for not doing enough. As Rep. Jan Schakowsky (Illinois) tells us in this video, they want to bring back local gun bans and so much more after this initial flurry of bills.
I do have to admit that I love Rep. Schakowsky’s dedication to the issue – she’s so passionate, she can’t tell you the name of the gun control groups she’s is part of back home. She’s also so dedicated to a serious discussion of the issue, she won’t actually address the pesky little problem of McDonald in passing local gun prohibitions.
How to Explain Cuomo’s Numbers?
Jacob on the media’s attempts to spin Cuomo’s approval drop:
How could his gun control agenda have “broad support†if his approval rating dropped 20 points since December?
Jacob is right. People lie to pollsters about their true opinion on guns? I’m shocked. Shocked I tell you. If this wasn’t true, you’d have handgun bans right now in both Massachusetts and California. What people tell pollsters and what they actually do when they get into the voting booth are very different things.
Voting Day in Colorado
For you folks in Colorado, the final recorded vote on the gun control packages happens today, if you live in the state, flood the switchboards. The fight is not over. These bills could still be killed. Let us hope.
Publicola in the comments:
Slightly more complex than that – 5 bills will be voted on today in the Colorado senate. If all of them pass, 2 go straight to the governor’s desk for signing or vetoing, 1 gets some form of reconciliation (as it was heavily amended from the house version) & 2 go to the house for the same process they went through in the senate (3 readings + committee hearing).
And just to cheer everyone up even further, the dems have at least one (deals with medical records), possibly more, anti gunowner bills they haven’t introduced yet. And there’s another one – a bill that’d change the definition of a deadly weapon, but i’m not sure where it’s at in all of this.
But, if all 5 bills get killed today then that would be the final vote, and likely it’d stop the dems attempts for the rest of this session.
Quote of the Day: Racism Edition
From Brady Board member Joan Peterson, in reference to this ad run by NRA:
Plus, the NRA has thought of a cynical new way to make angry white guys more afraid of Black people with guns by encouraging people of color to arm themselves.
I don’t understand why I’m supposed to be afraid of black people with guns. I’ve been around armed Black Americans at matches Joan, and never thought much of it. I’m afraid of criminals with guns, and I believe all Americans have a right to arm themselves for self-protection, as is guaranteed by our Constitution. So who’s the racist here, Joan? You’re the one that said I should be afraid, and you’re the one that thought such a thought, so who’s the racist in this debate?
The New Hope of Gun Control Advocates
Other gun owners interviewed for this article expressed similar reservations, citing their enjoyment of hunting or of introducing family members to the sport while expressing support for stricter gun control legislation. Mr. Kundu, for instance, supports a ban on the kind of assault weapon that he owns, a rifle manufactured by Panther Arms.
Yes, AR-15 owners who think AR-15s ought to be banned. Does the New York Times really believe this is a deep well gun control folks can tap in order to get support? This times piece strains credulity.
Kundu claims to be a master marksman in Washington State. The governing body for that kind of shooting is the NRA or WSRPA. Most competitive shooters will have match results online somewhere, especially at that level. So I decided I would start digging. If he is truly ranked Master in high-power, someone should have heard of him, or shot with him, and there should be a record. When you do that kind of competition, and are ranked highly, you’ve shot with an awful lot of people in an awful lot of matches. I couldn’t find any match results indicating this guy is a serious competitor, but what I did find destroys the whole NYT narrative. Michael Kundu, who the New York Times claims is the new “middle ground” in the gun control debate, is neither an ordinary gun owner, or any kind of moderate voice.
This is not the first time Kundu has been in the media pitching himself as a self-hating, anti-hunting gun owner. CNN has taken the bait too. So who is Michael Kundu? Well, he was School Board President for Marysville School District who ended up in hot water in the past for writing a racist e-mail as a school board president. Also, as School Board President, he attempted to censor dissenting viewpoints on global warming from being discussed in schools.
Perhaps more telling, Kundu’s associated with Sea Shepherd, who were recently declared pirates by the 9th Circuit:
Johnston’s 1997 stock donation included shares of a company named Northern Development Associates, a for-profit business which is now 100-percent owned by Sea Shepherd.
Corporate records show that the company’s officers include Watson’s ex-wife Lisa DiStefano and longtime associate Michael Kundu.
Sea Shepherd’s own web site says he was Pacific Northwest coordinator for the group in 1997. You can see a profile of him here. Additionally, his activities have earned him the ire of native Americans.
How stupid does the New York Times think we all are? And are we to believe that no one at CNN, or the New York Times, are aware that the new, moderate voice of gun ownership is in fact a radical activist with a group that has been accused of engaging in piracy on the high seas? There is nothing ordinary or moderate about this guy.
Mark Kelly, Gun Control Advocate, Buys Gun He Wants Banned
Mark Kelly, who proudly brags of (usually) buying guns at Wal-Mart, may find that going on tv to call for the renewal of a ban on so-called “assault weapons” gets him unwanted attention when he walks into a traditional gun store, buys a 1911–and an AR-15. He was recognized by witnesses, photographed by another customer filling out his 4473, and then questioned about why he would buy something he says he doesn’t want other people to have.
As his new Democratic PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions, was questioned by media, Kelly suddenly issued a statement saying that he doesn’t plan to shoot or even keep the firearm. Instead, he claims to have bought it just so he could waste his money and turn it in to the police. Sssuuurrreee, he did.
I think that Kelly is going to find that his very public campaign to restrict our rights isn’t going to bode well if he plans on shopping anywhere other than big box stores where gun owners are unlikely to gather.
UPDATE: This morning I just remembered that I thought Arizona had some kind of law requiring guns taken by or given to police actually have to be sold back on the open market. Here’s a January article on that very issue, so Mark Kelly may have just bought a gun that will end up right back in the gun shop.