How about no? US Mayors call for an end to preemption. It would result in a patchwork of laws that no one would have any prayer of understanding.
Nothing like joking about murdering your constituents if you’re running for Sheriff in North Carolina. But by all means, stay home in 2018 because the GOP passed a bloated budget.
Miguel takes a look at “military style.”
The Federalist: “Why Good Fathers Prepare Their Sons for War”
Believe me, these gun owners do exist. There’s a lot of people who will heartily embrace “Well, if it won’t affect me, I’ll support it.” That goes double if they think they can appease the opposition with someone else’s rights. These are fundamentally selfish people who don’t stand for anything.
If Politico actually believes this, they don’t understand organizing: “A small group of teenagers from Parkland, Florida, with no organizing experience or money has single-handedly energized the national movement for gun control after the Valentine’s Day mass shooting at their high school.” I actually stopped reading at that point, because the author of the story is either a propagandist, or too naive to be worth considering.
A lot of these people don’t really understand the nature of war, or how human beings assert power over one another. If power was just about killing, the Bundy family would have been charred corpses.
There is no epidemic of school shootings.
Delta went through great length to try to explain to use that rescinding their NRA discount was an effort to be politically neutral. That was a lie.
“I Went to the March for Our Lives Protest. Here Are My 7 Takeaways.”
USA Today: No great surge in youth support of gun control. From what I’ve seen, we get our values from our families; our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles. While a lot of my family are knee jerk liberals, the people I was closest to growing up, including my mother, were not knee jerk anything. They taught me to think for myself. The future belongs to those who have children. Raise them well.
Vox: “Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.” But I am assured no one wants to do that, right?
Could #MarchForOurLives be a setback for gun control? The Republican Party took a terrible risk alienating college educated suburbanites to embrace issues important to white working class voters. Why? Because white working class voters are historically unreliable. But I can’t think of very much that will get them to turn out to the polls than gun control. Also, speaking as a college educated suburbanite: the Republican Party pisses me off, and I’d be a lot more willing to find better things to do with my time when it comes to elections if the Dems would lay off the gun control bullshit.
NRA ought to be reaching out to people like this to build a lawsuit. Punch back twice as hard.
Would Vox be pushing something like this if the subject were abortion? Didn’t think so. “A gun debate compromise: let cities and rural areas pass different laws”
Delaney Tarr, one of the student speakers said on Saturday: “We will take the big and we will take the small, but we will keep fighting. When they give us that inch, that bump stock ban, we will take a mile.”
You don’t say.
A boatload of articles that reveal one key thing:…..There is nothing “grassroots” about the “March For Our Lives” thing. I watched and listened to some of the keynote speeches, and they were just loads of scripted Democrat Party Talking Points that I’ve heard going back to the 2012 and 2016 Presidential Campaigns of Obama and Clinton.
ShoutOut to Sebastian:
That Politico Article is a CYA (Cover Your Ass), propaganda piece to make it seem that the event on Saturday was “grassroits”. They were propagating bullshit.
The Candidate for Sheriff was sad that we took the “out of their cold dead hands” out of context. Granted, he made it clear that he wanted those gun owners to die of old causes…however, that doesn’t change the basic fact about that video:
*EVERY* single proposal is deeply offensive to gun owners. The video should be shared by *every* gun owner every time someone says “But nobody is after your guns”. Because, clearly, they want to make your life a living hell if you wish to exercise your 2nd Amendment rights.
Heh. The sheriff’s complaints reminds me of Bellesiles’s complaint that only one or two sources in his book were mistaken, when the reality was that there were major problems on every. single. page. of his book….
Yep. Not murderous. Just an @sshole authoritarian.
Can’t believe Remington didn’t make the news post today?
“Believe me, these gun owners do exist. There’s a lot of people who will heartily embrace “Well, if it won’t affect me, I’ll support it.†That goes double if they think they can appease the opposition with someone else’s rights. These are fundamentally selfish people who don’t stand for anything.”
Now take that thing you said right there and apply it to bumpstocks.
It’s a different attitude. I would love to be able to save machine guns and will continue to advocate for them (and politicians and the public view bump stocks as conversion devices). I’m talking about the guys that are fine with banning ARs because they don’t use them and don’t care.
My position on bump stocks is that they are not savable or defendable in the current political climate, and in the effort politicians are expending to ban them, they are putting semi-autos in legal jeopardy. There’s also not unsubsttual risk to the existing legal machine gun market, which we need to preserve if there’s ever going to be any prayer of turning the culture around on MGs. Right now in states that have passed bump stock bans, an RDIAS is illegal, no? How many are out there?
So yes. I support a strategic retreat on bump stocks because of the damage politicians are doing trying to ban them. Maybe that makes me no better than the “screw you and your AR crowd†and the difference is I will fight to save semi-autos at all cost. But I don’t usually hear arguments from those guys about why we need to retreat on semi autos. It’s usually “I got what I want, and screw the rest of you.â€
https://secure.anedot.com/firearms-policy-foundation/bumpstock_legal_action?sc=bumpstock_legal
This is probably a better idea to fight this particular instance of a bump stock ban. Among other things, it keeps things quiet.
And if that lawsuit wins, we’re going to get a bump stock ban from Congress that is much, much worse.
No. We do what we’ve ALWAYS done when a bad bill that “sounds reasonable” is thrown around, like Manchin-Toomey OR “no fly, no buy” OR bans for 18-20 year olds. Bills like that have deeper ramifications for the culture. And we all know they can ALWAYS come back to ban more, even if they have shown a propensity to hold back during election years. You’ve even said this yourself in defense of a federal law to force concealed carry reciprocity.
We educate, counter-act, and get loud. The problem here is (as stated below) I don’t believe the NRA has a strategy that doesn’t paint them in a hypocritical light in lieu of their expectation of Trump not to soldier on. This is my point in saying we have a broken arrow in the WH. It’s not just Trump and it’s not just the NRA that is causing problems at this juncture. It’s the mix of both with ZERO strategy that is catching up to the movement.
We have the votes to defeat most of those. 18-20 year olds we lost in Florida, but we seem to have brought that to a halt in Congress. What I’m saying is that you have a choice between a bump stock ban that sweeps in a lot of other things, or one that’s very narrow. Take your pick, because that’s the choice.
Rulemaking takes time. Lawsuits take time. Time is on our side, cools the ardor. We shall see what happens.
So what you are saying I do not quite understand. On one hand, we ought not push back on bump stock bans because the effort is fruitless. On the other, you are saying the logical continuation of bump stock bans lead to semi-auto bans? Those two things cannot occupy the same space if a) we want to be consistent and not be held as hypocrites when we criticize NRA for not listening to us and b) they do not lead to a meaningful tactical retreat that yields us something useful short/long term.
We need to play offense as much as (or more than) we play defense. Slowing down is how we got to the state things are now. When the next high profile shooting happens, does anyone other than the anti-gun left carry a playbook here that includes something other than pick apart how the shooter obtained weapons that were used or examine the failures of law enforcement?
History of this issue:
After Las Vegas, Congress started moving a bill to ban bump stocks that had enough votes to actually pass. It would have outlawed a certain class of legal machine guns. It also would have outlawed trigger modifications, lighter bolts, gatling guns, and anything else that you could attach to a semi-automatic rifle that would increase its “rate of fire.” Why was Congress willing to pass this? Because grandfathered machine guns remain legal because they fly under the radar. There’s no constituency out there that will openly defend machine gun ownership (which is what bump stocks are perceived as).
To stop that ban, NRA asked ATF to reevaluate bump stocks. Why? Because it would stop the awful bill in Congress from passing. They bought enough time and votes with that move to stop it. In the mean time, we’ve lost on that issue in several states with the very same kind of bill (because it’s all being pushed by the same people). Then we lost on that issue in Florida.
ATF reevaluated and said, “Hey, you know, for this one particular type of bump stock, we think we really did make a mistake. And oh, hey, you know, with the Akins Accelerator, it wasn’t really the spring. In both cases it’s the shelf you rest your finger on.”
My contention is that bump stocks are indefensible ground because they are perceived to be machine gun conversion devices. So it’s a machine gun fight. We’ve already lost there. We need to avoid losing more ground. I know people who have RDIAS M16s and M4s. It’s a pretty big swathe of the legal machine gun arsenal, which we need if we are ever going to bring that back from the brink culturally. If they succeed in banning the grandfathered arsenal, machine guns are never coming back, because you need familiarity to demystify them.
And that’s not even mentioning the legal risk the bad bill puts semi-autos in, which are savable when they aren’t easily conflated with machine guns.
So do you think it’s worth the trade to risk all that to try to probably unsuccessfully save bump stocks? I don’t. Maybe that makes me no different than the Fudds. I’m sure some will believe that. But they backed us into a corner quick on this issue after the Vegas Massacre, and this is the only way I see out. The difference with the Fudd, is he’s happy to throw other gun owners overboard as long as it’s not his ox getting gored. I don’t like to do it. But I’m also realistic about what’s possible to defend, and what isn’t.
Yes, I watched the Chris Cox interview shortly after Vegas and took away the same things at that time. I get the subterfuge factor immediately after a tragedy. It’s one of the few things NRA does best for my money. I get that.
However, I (and maybe you, I don’t know) didn’t actually expect Trump to follow through. I guess that’s where I am stuck at my blind criticism. Yes, NRA did a great job in ending the snowball back when fewer new about the device, but what now? Did they actually predict that Trump would follow through and that the bump stock efforts would be spoken of as being helpful to the cause? So what now? This is my problem.
I don’t think NRA was just buying time and hoping Trump wouldn’t actually do anything. We lost in Florida in part because this kind of thing takes a while. We’re probably poised to lose on this issue in a dozen more states if Bloomberg keeps pushing.
It’s indefensible territory. This takes it off the table, and very narrowly. Hell, if you shave the trigger shelf off, it’s not a bump stock anymore by ATF classification.
I just scrolled through the “Gun Debate Compromise: Localism” article…and it triggered a pet peeve of mine: the observation that certain locales have 4% of the population, but a disproportionate amount of violence.
These same areas *already* have the high gun control that places like Vox insist are necessary to prevent violence. Why is it that they are also cesspools of violence? Shouldn’t these high-regulation places be places of peace?
Oh, it’s because people smuggle guns from the peaceful-yet-high-gun-areas into these areas of violence! :eyeroll: Sheesh!
Why doesn’t anyone ever suggest that we look at places where gun violence is low, and adopt those policies in places where gun violence is high? Surely, the low-gun-violence places are the ones that have the right laws, right?
“That goes double if they think they can appease the opposition with someone else’s rights. These are fundamentally selfish people who don’t stand for anything.†Like bump stocks?
See above reply to Wizardpc
I know someone with a bump stock who couldn’t be bothered to comment during the BATFE’s bump stock ban comment period.
This polling data doesn’t make me very optimisic:
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/28/gun-control-polling-parkland-430099
To the extent you can trust any poll on anything without believing that confirmation bias exists, no. I can also find the WSJ/NBC News poll that shows more Americans believe owning a firearm makes them safer than not owning one taken just a week ago.
Make sense yet? Can you square those two numbers? I guess I sort of can, but “firearm” in 2018 includes a greater share of semi-autos, which when explained to many people makes them understand why “banning semi-autos” means banning better than 90% of firearms owned. AWBs lose in the court of public opinion at that point, but that’s not reflected in basic poll numbers of support/oppose.
Not good, no. A lot of people can be successfully bullied into telling pollsters they support X. Gun control has always polled better than it does when people actually have to put down votes. So this does worry me, but it’s not necessarily fatal.
We were in worse shape after Sandy Hook, as polls showed support for “Assault Weapons” Bans to be hovering around at, and in many cases, over 80%. Right now, it’s hovering in the high 60% to low 70% range. We were also in worse shape in the early 90’s.
Looking at the 1994, 2014, and 2016 Election Cycles, the polls showing support for Stricter Gun Laws resulted in Electoral Wipe Out level defeats for the Gun-Banners.
You now have the Progressive-Left calling for an outright repeal of the 2nd Amendment, and, gun-ban legislation that is worse than Australia now. This should drive Gunowners to the polls like in ’94, ’14, and ’16.
If it doesn’t, than police-state style, door-to-door gun confiscation is coming down the pike between 2019 and 2022.
Sebastian,
By this logic, let me offer a counter-argument…
So, a mugger comes up to rob you. He says, “Give me your wallet without a fight, and I will let you keep your gold wedding ring.”
Is it acceptable to surrender your wallet so that you may (perhaps temporarily) keep your ring?
Is that OK?
– Unbreakable AZ
It’s not OK, it’s still robbery. But if I have no means to fight back, I’d take the deal. The way we get justice in a political fight are by winning elections. Unfortunately, that’s hard.