Fortunately, things are starting to calm down. But I still have much to clear from my tabs.
New York is investigating NRA over Carry Guard. Additionally, anti-gun folks are putting pressure on Chubb, the underwriter. I hope NRA has all its ducks lined up with Chubb, and they will hold and not wimp out under pressure. I’m sure the investigation in New York is a political shake down. NRA is a New York corporation, so it seems unlikely to me they wouldn’t have evaluated the program’s legality under New York law.
Know your enemy: “Gun reform needs grassroots activists, not astroturf.” I might not agree with the author’s goals, but he knows what he’s fighting better than most people who decry “the corporate gun lobby.”
This is always a mystery to the media: “As with many gun control pushes, the effort has already fallen by the wayside despite the support.” Maybe because journalists can’t read legislation. If they had just tried to ban bump stocks, they might have succeeded. But they tried to ban all modification of semi-automatic firearms, and failed. This is what I predicted would happen.
Constitutional Carry being pushed in Michigan.
Now anti-gun folks are looking to restrict night-vision gear. This technology is now ubiquitous, and no longer that sensitive. That’s why it’s cheap. It’s just cameras and displays.
People can bitch about Chris Christie all they want, but if Murphy wins on Tuesday, it will be effectively over for New Jersey gun owners.
Dem AGs fighting National Reciprocity.
Florida Political Review: “This conversation shouldn’t be construed as both-sides-ism. The evidence is clear that higher rates of gun ownership correlate with higher rates of gun violence. Countless studies suggest a variety of policies – waiting periods, universal background checks, buyback programs, limits on magazine capacity – can and do reduce the rate of gun death. The point of this wasn’t to debate policy, it was to understand a different perspective.” What evidence? Provide it. I’ve followed this issue a long time, and there is no credible study that has come to this conclusion. There’s certainly no consensus that this is the case.
Monumental Mental Health Second Amendment As-Applied Challenge Success
“Researchers says law to expand background checks in Colorado and Washington failed most likely due to noncompliance and a lack of enforcement.” You don’t say? I never would have predicted this. In truth, it’s better for the cops to chase real criminals than trying to lock Elmer in jail because he lent his rifle to his hunting buddy. None of this was ever going to be reasonably enforceable, and anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional, or doesn’t understand the scale of what’s trying to be regulated.
Are Millennials Moving Right on Guns?
Yep: “Blogs opened up the internet for honest debate. Social media will kill it.”
The root of gun control: “On reflection though, as an urban liberal who has not touched a gun in 20 years, that is an easy position for me to take. ‘Taking their guns’ seems reasonable, but owning a gun is a right that I will never exercise and means nothing to me. I should recognize that that might influence my willingness to place the Second Amendment on a sacrificial alter.” There’s also the fact that urban liberals don’t very much care for the kind of people who own guns either. After years of writing on this topic, the idea that this issue has anything to do with public safety is naive at best.
NRA Carry guard: You have a sixth amendment right to counsel, period. Group legal or a public defender is no different. If I put a defense attorney on retainer is that murder insurance?
I have different concerns about NRA Carry Guard. Like when (if?) it comes time to push national reciprocity are they going to allow a rider for forced insurance or bond, which conveniently they happen to sell now.
The insane thing about this is that every so often, anti-gun types float a proposal to require every gun owner to carry insurance, in case they shoot people with their guns (because a legal gun owner is a basket-case that will go off and murder at the slightest provocation, don’cha know?)…yet now that the NRA (and others, for that matter) are offering some form of insurance, it’s “murder insurance” and therefore Evil, bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha HA!
It’s the stupidest thing in the world! Someone ought to compare and contrast their “Insurance should be required!” and “This is MURDER INSURANCE” quotes. Alas, I wish I had the time to do this digging myself….
LOLOLOL. Christie is the last GOP Governor that NJ will ever have, like Schwarzenegger for California. Murphy will be NJ’s next governor, and it’s not just gun owners who are toast, its the taxpayers, as a whole, who are done. I have family in NJ, and after talking to my parents,…….they are putting the house up for sale in 2 weeks, and moving out of NJ by next year! My parents already said there is “not one f***ing way or another” that they are going to be forced to walk into a Police Station to register their firearms.
Murphy is essentially going to finish the process of COMPLETELY turning NJ into a 1 party, Democrat Dictatorship like that of NY and CA. From increasing taxes that will drive business out of the State, to making NJ a Sanctuary State that provides Safe Harbor for Illegal Aliens,…..NJ…..is F***ED.
One of the things he wants to do, IMMEDIATELY, after being elected, is to put ALL Planning Boards under control of Trenton. This is gor the purpose of putting Section 8 Housing into every neighborhood in the State, specifically targeting the few remaining Republican strongholds like Hunterdon and Warren Counties, to FORCEFULLY change their Demographics into Democrat Party Strongholds. Glad i left NJ a couple years ago.
Though I would feel sorry for those righties left in NJ, I unabashedly look forward to a D governor in NJ. We know what’s going to happen when they have full control, and they will shoot themselves in the foot (proverbially, because guns will be illegal). The new laws will extend well beyond their legal authority, and the pushback will substantial. We’ll see a protracted battle that will eventually reach a federal court, and by then, hopefully more federal appointments by the current administration will apply strict scrutiny to their rediculous laws. The slap down could be monumental, and would send a signal to other People’s Republic states like NY, MD, MA, CT, and CA that they are next in line to be on the losing side of history.
From your last link:
“In real life, gun control is not binary. It is an array of knobs, and twiddling a few would almost certainly save lives with only minor inconvenience to the Second Amendment crowd. Our chances of success would be amplified if we recognize that our lack of a personal stake in this issue probably causes us to underestimate how far we are turning a knob, and that people who do have a personal stake in the issue will probably overestimate the same turn.”
The difficulty is that people have openly stated they want to turn the knobs to the stops all the way to the left, and then break off the knobs so they can’t be turned back up again.
That’s poisoned the well for further debate and compromise on this issue for generations to come. We do not believe people who say they only want common sense gun control because they’ve supported some pretty nonsensical ideas over the years.
And every time someone calls gun owners a name, or makes a lame joke about us, we dig our heels in deeper, and in fact start looking for ways to improve our lot.
And we’re winning.
Nothing less than total victory will ever satisfy me now.
If you had asked me back in 1986, I probably would have been perfectly happy forever with the status quo then. But now? After all the crap the anti-gunners have tried? After all the lies and all the new laws? After all the people who have been harmed?
War. War to the finish. I didn’t start this Kulturkampf, but I intend to see us win it.
what annoyed me about that same description was the casual, naive assumption that a little “twiddling” could trivially save lives without inconveniencing too many people. or, presumably, having any other side effects.
every difficult problem has a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. if “a little twiddling” could so trivially help matters, it would’ve been done a long time ago. difficult political problems are called difficult because they’re not simple.
“There’s also the fact that urban liberals don’t very much care for the kind of people who own guns either.” One of the most memorable comments from a sci-fi convention I attended was from a NYC writer who lamented she had canning in common w/ ‘those people’ in middle America.
Why is the NRA incorporated in NY, where it is subject to harassment and illegitimate scrutiny that it would be free from in an American state?
Historical artifact. It was founded by Union officers after the Civil War to teach yankee boys to shoot. Their first range was in Queens.
I would imagine if they got jerked around enough, they’d re-incorporate somewhere else, but I suspect they want to keep the original corporation in tact.
Plus, it doesn’t really matter: Their headquarters are in Virginia, so there is very little NYS can do to harass the NRA from a legal standpoint.
“on a sacrificial alter.”
He also doesn’t realize that “alter” =/= “altar.” What does that tell you?
Meh. Could be a typo. I’m less inclined to ding people on that kind of thing because I make the very same mistakes myself on a regular basis. Now, you really want to get me riled up? Use “less” instead of “fewer” when talking about individually distinguishable subjects (“Less people attended”), or the reverse when talking about a quantity of indistinguishable stuff (“This canteen holds fewer water”).
I love this bit of open honesty that slipped by the Politico editors on the millennials on guns article:
Are younger Americans more progressive? One would be hard pressed to disagree. The under-30 crowd has led a fight on transgender rights and new forms of racism.
New forms of racism. Exactly. When the old forms of racism die down, one must come up with new forms rather than lose that political bludgeon tool. That is precisely what we are seeing in America today.
Shannon Watts will do anything for Bloomberg’s money, and that’s why he pays her. She’s his hand puppet.
From the Lament about Astroturf article:
“””After suicides mostly by white men, much of America’s gun violence is concentrated among young urban minorities, as documented by the Violence Policy Center whose research has long been unassailable.”””
I’ve been a minion for Clayton Cramer when he wanted to examine VPC’s attempt to list all the times concealed carry people were involved violence, and only about half the events actually had anything to do with concealed carry law (and a certain percentage of them were self defense events).
So I find it hard to accept “unassailable” as a word to describe VPC’s research…which is another reason why the anti-gun crowd has such a hard time getting their efforts off the ground!