The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
Pennsylvanians, Virginians, and New Jerseyans especially. This is your chance to get some small measure of revenge on Bloomberg. If the elections today go well for us, it will be a big defeat for Bloomberg, and if they don’t, Bloomberg will use all that money he spent and the results to try to intimidate other politicians to do what he wants. It could be your state senate district next.
So get out there. What are you waiting for? Well, if you’re like me to be done with work, but don’t forget.
This weekend I managed to get shooting again. I’m slowly getting back into IHMSA competition. At this point we’re the last club standing in Pennsylvania that’s still running matches. Handgun metallic silhouette is a tough discipline. The closest target for small bore (which is what I mostly shoot) is chickens at 25 yards, and about the size post card. Pigs are at 50yd, Turkeys 75yds, and Rams at 100yds. I shoot standing, so I started back getting only 17 out of 40. Then 21 out of 40. This match our Mule ran out of gas and had to be pushed back from the 100 yard line, which got my heart rate up, so I bombed a few ranks of animals after that. Back to 17 this match. Maybe December will be better. But enough about that, now for the news:
There was no news from the Supreme Court as to whether they’ll grant cert in the Highland Park Assault Weapons Ban case. My prediction is that they will not take the case.
John Richardson takes a look at a recent 60 Minutes segment on smart guns.
Virginia Elections: Great kid, but don’t get cocky. The other side is feeling pretty jazzed too, and they have reason to be with Bloomberg dumping millions into these races. The right people have to turn out in the right places for all this to work for us, so be sure to turn out if you live in Virginia.
Lies about guns and children. Sometimes I wish they’d come up with new arguments so I’d have something different to talk about. I keep reading how rejuvenated the gun control movement is, but I’m not seeing new or novel arguments. It’s the same bullshit they’ve been trying to fool everyone with for decades.
You don’t say: Gun owners don’t always fit the stereotypes.
SayUncle: “I pondered if [the Dems going full gun control] was because big money guys like Bloomberg had them convinced it was a popular thing or they were just whoring for the money.” I think it’s a combination of the two. Obama convinced them it was popular, and Bloomberg is promising to spend big.
Gun headline of the week: “Prosecutor Who Went After Student For NRA Shirt Pulls Gun Over Fake Spiders.”
Suing to protect the gun rights of the Amish.
Media bias: reporting mass shootings when there was no mass shooting.
I think it’s fair to say one would be a fool to take self-defense advise from the New York Times, especially when they get offer VPC’s Googling the title of legitimate research. Fortunately, the public doesn’t seem to be listening.
Joe Huffman has some interesting observations about new media, “The online world has returned to the day of yellow journalism of 100 years ago.” I’ve been thinking this for a while now. Read the whole thing.
NRA still enjoys majority support in the US.
The real problem our opposition has is that shooting is a fun and safe activity.
Apparently male domestic violence victims are shockingly high. Probably also very underreported.
Also from Dave Kopel: English legal history and the right to carry arms.
The Center for American Progress is joining Bloomberg to attempt to turn Virginia into an anti-gun state, like neighboring Maryland. Baltimore must surely be a crime-free paradise!
The Democrats are working hard to ensure that they can shut down all gun sales by taking NICS offline. In this day in age, if the FBI can’t complete a background check in 72 hours, that’s not the fault of our community, that’s incompetence on the part of the NICS examiners.
There was a threat of Loyalsock Township passing a gun ordinance, but fortunately, it looks like they decided to let it die. A lot of times all it takes is grabbing a few friends and showing up. Local government aren’t used to actual participation, except for the people who show up every week to complain about something or other.
Joshua Prince and Allen Thompson: The Inalienable Right to Stand Your Ground.
Also from Josh Prince: It’s legal to carry a firearm while voting in Pennsylvania. My polling place is an elementary school, which is a legal grey area in Pennsylvania. I would not advise carrying if your polling place is a school.
Looks like the Dems are trying an old trick that stands little chance of working: making demands on government arms suppliers to implement gun control. Any handgun maker who cuts a deal with Chuck Schumer will be out of business in a year. That’s a promise.
Derp sells, part MCMXVII.
A pretty balanced article about Maine’s new suppressor hunting law.
Obama and Hillary both praise confiscation schemes of other countries, then drone on about how we might want to try it here, and there are still people with their heads in the sand about the real end goal in all this.
NRA has endorsed candidates in the off-year elections tomorrow, November 3rd. It is very important for every gun voter to show up this year. PVF’s web site looks like it’s finally correct, and has all the endorsed candidates. FOAC also has their slate of candidates up, with some further local races you might want to pay attention to. We elect judges in Pennsylvania, and that’s mostly what this election is about. The Supreme Court plays a big role in drawing of districts, and realize that if the Dems manage to take full control of this state in their current “wild-eyed leftist and loving them some gun control” incarnation, your gun rights will be finished. This is no exaggeration. The important statewide candidates:
Supreme Court
Superior Court
Commonwealth Court
Also, if you live in State Senate District 37, which comprises parts of Allegheny and Washington counties, you have a special election tomorrow where Guy Reschenthaler (R) is the NRA and FOAC endorsed candidate.
I probably should not have jumped to conclusions so quickly in my last post about Senator Stanley getting threats from Andrew Parker. As if often the case, there was more to the story. Apparently this was among the rants:
“YOU’RE FINEST MOMENT, YOU SORRY LITTLE COWARD,†he posted. “YOU DIDN’T EVEN HAVE THE DECENCY TO REACH OUT AND OFFER A LAME CONDOLENCE AFTER MY DAUGHTER Alison Bailey WAS MURDERED IN YOUR DISTRICT. WHEN YOU SEE ME AGAIN, YOU BEST WALK THE OTHER WAY LEST I BEAT YOUR LITTLE ASS WITH MY BARE HANDS.â€
I still hold that Everytown is probably going to be sorry they allied with Parker. Pretty clearly he’s unstable. Grief can be a funny thing though, but perhaps counseling is what Mr. Parker should be seeking right now, rather than vengeance based on some odd perceived wrong committed by Senator Stanley for not appropriately validating his grief.
I’d be tempted to link to this with “Why are gun control advocates so violent,” but I don’t really think it’s warranted in this case. Senator William Stanley suggests this message by Andrew Parker is a threat:
Late Tuesday, Parker sent this message to Sen. William M. Stanley Jr., R-Franklin County, via Facebook: “I’m going to be your worst nightmare you little bastard.â€
Granted, I do think Parker is a strange duck; I don’t know of anyone whose first instinct after the loss of a loved one is to seek out any media publicity he can get before there’s even been a funeral. His statement certainly displays a lack of tact. But I think Stanley is playing this up a bit more than is honestly warranted.
“From the very beginning, he turned on me as if I had something to do with the horrible death of his daughter,†Stanley said. “It’s not rational, but nevertheless, when I was asked about it, I said, ‘Let him grieve. If I have to be the object as he works through this, fine.’ But this goes beyond the pale.â€
Hey, welcome to collective guilt — it’s what these people peddle. You are responsible for their personal tragedies, even if you had nothing to do with them. Disagreement is enough to make you an accessory to murder.
“It is legitimate. I am going to be his worst nightmare,†Parker said. “He and Parrish are both little cowards. Anything I say to him and post on his website, I will take full credit for.â€
Parker may not be violent, but he’s pretty clearly a loose cannon. He’ll probably end up being a liability to their movement if he keeps this up. Not that I’m one to complain. Every incarnation of the gun control movement has had to deal with freaks and weirdos. I’m not sure why Bloomberg should get a pass on that just because has enough of his own money to not deal with them.
A common theme I’ve been seeing floating around in the media is that gun control is back, baby! They’ve crossed “the threshold” and are on their way to victory. There’s a certain zeitgeist, and the pendulum is swinging back in their direction. Is it true? Even WaPo’s Dana Milbank thinks they are overstating their case, but agrees there’s some truth to it. How has the gun control movement revitalized itself? According to Milbank, gun control movement has seen revitalization by lowing their sights to win on more achievable issues like background checks.
But there is some truth to what he says. From the legislative debacle following Sandy Hook, the gun-control movement has retreated to a limited but pragmatic approach. Gone is the notion of “gun control,†replaced by “reducing gun deaths†or “gun violence prevention.†Gone, for now, are efforts to restrict any type of gun or ammunition. Instead, the movement has found a laser focus on background checks.
I can’t think of too many real movements that have revitalized themselves by thinking smaller, and thinking smaller is nothing new. None of the new terms Milbank points to are actually new. Gun control advocates have been trying to get away from the unpopular term “gun control” since at least the mid-1990s, and none of those efforts made any difference. Andrew McKelvey couldn’t sell “gun safety” any better than Sarah Brady could sell “handgun control.”
All of the articles I’ve seen have ignored the elephant in the room. I agree that the gun control movement is seeing some revitalization. I would agree they’ve recovered from their post-Heller blues. I do think that’s correct. But it’s almost entirely because Mike Bloomberg is willing to spend millions of dollars of his massive fortune to make that happen. Without Bloomberg’s money, the gun control movement would be going nowhere. All the victories the gun control movement has achieved have been bought and paid for by one multi-billionaire who thinks he can buy our Republic, and he may be right!
The Washington Post takes a deeper look into the huge sums of money Mike Bloomberg is dumping into the Virginia races, and finds that one of his big ad buys isn’t even about the gun issue. One is a race baiting ad that has nothing to do with guns at all, but rather a local school district issue. Moreover, the ad misleads the reader into believing Glen Sturtevant himself is being sued, when it is actually the school board being sued.
I think this is tacit admission on the part of Bloomberg that guns aren’t a huge motivator for people on the left side of the political spectrum, and so a hard-hitting ad was needed in order to boost black turnout at the polls; a necessary thing if the Democrats are going to take that seat and have a shot at taking the Virginia Senate.
Bloomberg is absolutely determined to buy this election for himself, and he doesn’t care if he has to use issues other than guns to do it. If he’s successful, he will still own Dan Gecker, and he can use it however he wants. No one will care how he bought it. Our people need to turn out in large numbers. Don’t believe for a minute that Bloomberg doesn’t have the money or the drive to buy your state government away from the people of Virginia and make you vassals of the New York elite.
He’s basically saying that more gun control means fewer dead police officers. Kind of ballsy for a guy who has “unnecessarily played up tensions between police and civilians” and been a key player in driving a “narrative that seeks to divide police and communities they serve.”
“It’s time to be honest: fewer gun safety laws don’t mean more freedom, they mean more fallen officers. They mean more grieving families, and more Americans terrified that they or their loved ones could be next”
At this point, I think he’s just trolling us. But hopefully he keeps is up. I’d love to have an election where the Democrats run on nothing but gun control.
Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence isn’t happy about the Hearing Protection Act. If that’s not a good reason to pass it, I don’t know what is. But it’s pretty apparent he’s not a physics major:
“It’s only a matter of time until a silenced round injures or kills an innocent person who had no opportunity to hear the report of gunfire and find cover,†warned Ladd Everitt, spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.
Bullets fired from a typical hunting rifle are moving anywhere from two to three times the speed of sound. A person in the path of a hunter’s bullet is going to be hit by the bullet before they hear the shot. At that point I don’t think it will much matter to them whether the report they hear is full or muffled. This isn’t like Star Trek the Next Generation where you have a pretty good chance to duck out of the way of a fired phaser.
Aside from this one ridiculous argument, a lot of anti-gun people are ignoring the fact that hearing is a two way street, and a hunter who does not need to wear hearing protection, and hasn’t been deafened by gunfire, stands a much better chance of hearing people nearby before taking a shot.
This USA Today article gives a peek inside ATF’s huge storage facility in West Virginia which houses all the 4473 paperwork that comes from defunct FFLs. It sounds like there is an effort to make the records electronic, sorted by dealer. Basically, you would look up the dealer and then go through each record of the FFL looking for the correct 4473. Because the individual buyers are not indexed, this technically does not violate the federal law making a registry illegal.
If the out-of-business dealer’s records have been converted to the ATF’s electronic database, examiners can attempt to locate purchasers by tabbing through digital folders organized by former dealer names and then sort through individual sales records to identify individual buyers.
But once those records are electronic, it is exponentially easier to run OCR through every record and compile a registry. There is software out there that do name and address corrections, so even if the OCR doesn’t get everything perfect, you could probably still get a registry that is probably 95% accurate. It wouldn’t be that hard to set up a system that did serial number normalization either. You could get from something perfectly legal to a useful registry in a matter of hours with the right systems in place.
The article mentions the large number of traces the office is getting, increasing year-over-year. A lot of anti-gun politicians have been forcing these “trace every gun” policies on their police departments, whether the trace is really needed for the purposes of an investigation or not. Kind of convenient, isn’t it, that the volume of requests coming into ATF has them crying for more money to digitize more and more records.
Now obviously this registry would not be complete, because it would not include private transfers, but they are doing their level best to work on that side of the equation too.
