This week has been pretty busy, with house guests, our annual Friends of the NRA dinner, and a lot of work stuff. I’ve been falling down on the job in terms of commenting on the happenings of the day, and blew all my blog mojo on a long post about Starbucks. So here’s everything in my tabs:
Sometimes it’s good when our opponents spell out the long term plan for us.
John Richardson looks at the impact of the Illinois Supreme Court ruling on right to carry.
Vulnerable Dems Fleeing from Anti-Gun Nuts.
9 potential mass shootings that were stopped by personally owned firearms.
Gun Control Legislation Isn’t Going Anywhere. This meme is prevalent and is really bad news for our opponents.
Obama pivots back to gun control, but he’s losing the narrative. I doubt the recalls will help get the votes he needs, despite the attempts of our opponents to blame the magazine limits. I love it when even our opponents are running from their own agenda!
Gun control is not the answer. “This is why gun-control advocates need to abandon the routine of using mass shootings to turn law-abiding citizens into social pariahs and instead focus on something that could work.” Yep, and after they do this they are surprised when we won’t cooperate with them.
Hickenlooper continues to stumble. The recalls were an important message, but they have to take a beating in 2014 as well to really drive the point home. If I were an activist in Colorado, retiring Hickenlooper would be my focus.
This study has been making its way around, with anti-gun folks all excited about it. I don’t have access to the journals to evaluate it seriously, but even if it’s true, they only look at firearms homicide. Does it make them feel better if they were all pushed out of windows?
Again, the wages of destroying your civilian gun culture. Without the training and infrastructure support the civilian market provides, police get far fewer and worse training options.
Shot towers from around the world. We have one here in Philadelphia, pictured in the link.
Why are anti-gun activists so violent?
Textbooks rewriting the Second Amendment. I’m sure there’s more of this out there than we realize, much of it from old and outdated textbooks.
Prince Law Offices continues doing an excellent job covering the ATF rulemaking over NFA weapons. They are also looking for people who have been denied LEO sign-off.
They don’t really have enough bullets.
Gun control support drops after Navy Yard shooting. I’m sure the terrorist attack on a mall in Nairobi isn’t going to help bolster support for gun control either.
The study is abysmal. The methods section is instructional and the results are telling. It’s measure for population gun ownership is a surrogate based off of firearm suicide and they gloss over oodles of interpolations and statistical massages. Plus, even their final outcomes show far greater associations with homicide rates and black population, crime rate, and incarceration rates than gun ownership. When they look at sub group analyses for where they can use survey numbers and don’t have to hang their hat on surrogate data for gun ownership, their incidence rate ratio confidence interval crosses over 1.0 and has no statistical significance.
It is a tortured study. No wonder gun control advocates love this study: it’s as full of crap as they are.
To be more precise, incarceration rates have a negative correlation with firearms homicide and don’t yield a magnitude change as great as their surrogate measure of firearms ownership, but incarceration can be directly measure and isn’t dependent on a surrogate. I trust those outcomes more.
The thing about gun control support dropping after a shooting like at the Navy Yards makes perfect sense to me. The natural reaction to such an event is to imagine being there, and wondering what you would do. And the natural reaction for most Americans is, “If I’d had a gun, I would have tried to stop it.” The alternative is to be a victim–and we don’t like to be victims. These events might cause a burst of anti-gun nuttery from those already convinced by gun control (or, more likely, simply knee-jerk reactions by those who are liberal and don’t know anything about guns). But I still think these events move people in a pro-gun direction. The police couldn’t stop it in time, the military couldn’t stop it in time. Who could have? Armed civilians. It’s not a difficult argument to make, and it’s damned difficult to dismiss.