About 1/3rd of my club are residents of New Jersey. We’re a stones throw from the river, and so we’re convenient to all of Central Jersey and even have a contingent from North Jersey. It’s been utterly depressing watching them go through everything with Murphy’s last batch of gun control laws knowing that more is probably coming. Also, when they ask “What can we do?” Having to answer, “Nothing, unfortunately. Only the courts are going to save you. If you’re voting, writing to your reps, you’re doing what you can. But the fact of the matter is you’re outvoted. Moving here [PA] is the only way you’re getting your gun rights back quickly.”
I’m hoping the Supreme Court will give them some welcome news. I’d like to be able to tell them things are about to get better. I want them to have hope. If Roberts wants to play his minimalist games he should come talk to these people and tell them in their face it’s not the court’s job to save them, as he did in NFIB.
Just as an aside: the people who say the immigration issue is tied to gun rights aren’t really out in left field. I still advocate NRA should not take a position on immigration as other gun groups have done, but the fact is that of the worst states for gun control, California has 27% foreign born. New Jersey and New York are is 22%. They are among the top 5 states with foreign born populations. In contrast, Pennsylvania is 6%.
Of course not every immigrant favors gun control, and I don’t think immigrants as a group are clamoring for more gun control. But I believe they are on balance more likely to tolerate it, which allows progressive elites to impose it on the deplorables without suffering much for doing it.
That’s not to say you can’t have large number of immigrants and still win on gun rights. Florida has the highest foreign born of the gun rights leaning states at 19%, with Texas following up at 16%. So it is possible to absorb a large number of immigrants and still maintain gun rights. Maybe once you cross the 20% mark, it’s pretty much over. But it probably helps that both those states started pretty opposed to gun control in the first place. That’s not true of New Jersey. Though it was once true of California. I don’t think immigration explains all of it, but the correlation can’t be ignored.
If we are to start making “inroads” with the rising number of migrants, most of which whom are 3rd Worlders, then we need to embrace a little bit of the “Class-Warfare” Tactic and turn it on the Left.
Tell these people that Democrat Billionaire Donors like Bloomberg, Gates, Steyer, Cook, and many others throughout WallStreet and Silicon Valley want to recreate the horrid situations in the countries that they fled.
Tie those things to the Gun-Issue. Tell these people that the Democrat Billionaires, who want this Country disarmed, are cut from the same cloth as the corrupt politicians in those 3rd World Countries, and that Gun-Rights are important in standing against them.
Also, California was never really a friendly State for Gun Rights. California had a lot of “Jim-Crow South Style” gun control laws in the past, and they weren’t tossed to the way-side until the late 1950’s, but then again a decade after that, The Mulford Act came down the pike, and it’s been downhill there ever since to now and going into the future, so it seems.
John Roberts should go to Hell as far as I’m concerned. If he had any honor, he would step down from that Court for someone like
Amul Thapur or Joan Larsen. Ever since his twice saving and rewriting of Maobamacare, he leaves me no doubt that he is a “compromised/blackmailed” puppet of the Progressive-Left.
The bigger problem is CA, NJ, and NY all passed laws that made making new gun owners extraordinarily difficult.
And are making it worse every year.
I still think we need to find ways to sneak gun culture into the borders of countries and States where gun culture is heavily restricted.
Video games are certainly a good candidate for that. I have also wondered if we could create and popularize* decent laser handgun and rifle target systems….
* I add “popularize” because it’s my understanding that systems exist, and may even be decent, but I don’t know how *popular* they are….
I know that MSM sources are preferred, but this has hyperlinks to other articles. Pat Cippollone is close with Jared and Ivanka. It looks like Trump is going to “moderate”, as in, stab us in the back on the Courts now.
This is all Jared and Ivanka, and also included, is the Bush-Wing.
https://www.infowars.com/white-house-working-behind-trumps-back-to-appoint-leftists-to-9th-circuit-court/
I have read an update about this on Instapundit; apparently, the Republicans have decided to ignore the Democrats and appoint their own justices. Apparently they rightly decided that there was no need to compromise with Democrats right now.
But this is certainly something we need to continue to watch.
They don’t need to compromise, since they eliminated the filibuster for judges. They did this because the Dems signaled they were going to do it. They won’t likely make that mistake again.
Some of this may be related to income. Like it or not, gun rights is a “culture war” issue in the sense it can’t be boiled down to strictly economic factors. And contrary to the What’s a Matter with Kansas thesis, these kind of issues are more likely to become a deciding factor in your vote when you’ve become middle class than when you’re poor.
The working poor, working class, middle-class, and the upper-middle-class have been the backbone of the Gun Rights Culture. From Upper New England to the Great Lakes Midwest, and Pennsylvania through Central and Southern Appalachia, those are the places that provide us the truth in those facts.
Those economic classes brought an end to the Racial Jim Crow Gun Control Laws of the old Deep-South and made supporting Gun Rights a bipartisan movement throughout the Southwest, Midwest, and Pacific Northwest.
However, it is the economics of mass migration into America, as you are correctly pointing out, that has the biggest effect on the 2nd Amendment. The impoverished 3rd Worlders flooding our Country have flipped Oregon and Washington State to the Antigun Column, and as we all know, California was, up until the 1990’s, relatively middle of the road on guns. Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado are in serious jeopardy of flipping to being solidly anti-gun, and Democrats in States like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota are becoming hostile to the 2nd Amendment. Of course as we know, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York are becoming police-state style, antigun.
These 3rd Worlders are also giving us political filth like Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schummer, Kamala Harris, Chris Murphy, and Bob Menendez.
So Joe, what do we do? Sum it up for a slow reader like me…
I’m currently afraid that because Rogers vs Grewal is up for cert now, it’ll get dropped because SCOTUS took the NYC case as “This term’s” 2A case…
Deferral is an option, which may be preferred over denying cert.
If memory serves RBG deferred the NYC case by at least a year…
It may not be that the immigrants are so much more tolerant of restrictions as it may be that they are used to it as the norm. Anything (like freedom) outside their norm scares them.
Hey Sebastion, What’s the name of that gun club?
Falls Two RPA.
Okay. We’ll just have to shoot our way out of it. It’ll be fun. Shawn and Joe will be in the front lines no doubt. Count us in. Rosy.
I dont see that gun control in NY and NJ are immigration related. NJ and NYC have had draconian gun control for almost a century.It was the Italian and Irish mafia that gave us that.
Keep in mind Texas attempted to completely ban carry in the late 1800s and really came to the CCW party after Florida. Florida experimented with CCW in the 80s because of crime.
Speaking of high crime, Brazil’s new President ran on reducing barriers to civilian gun ownership, to reduce crime.
Cuban and many Asian immigrants are happy gun owners, in part because they understand non-freedom in their home country.
Bottom line is I don’t think its “immigrants.” More like the classic old urban-rural divide. Thats why Pittsburgh and Philly are anti-gun and always have been, while Pennsyltucky T is red.
Public carry and ownership of guns has *always* been controversial in urban areas, and you can go back to founding documents in 1780s to see the same debate.
Fortunately, thanks to prodigious experimentation, we know that rights, safety, and low crime can co-exist in urban areas.
Know where else guns are controversial? In a society with extreme wealth/income inequality. Gun control never ever applies to rich elites looking to protect their wealth and property. Even in NYC, NJ, rich and famous can get carry permits. Think Mark Zuckerburg has a wall around his property, and guns in his house? I would bet that he does.
California, NJ, and NYC rank high on inequality. “Progressive” politics usually increase inequality and keep housing prices high and wages low, not the reverse.
Cant have the masses owning guns when only a few people own the wealth. Mafia/elites/slave owners protecting their property is the same story since history began.
I can think of about 50 ways that places like NY, CA, NJ can sabotage any court decisions. We could have 9 Clarence Thomas’ on the Supreme Court and the anti-gun places would just ignore or sabotage. What it is going to take is to start putting state and local officials in prison for denial of civil rights under color of law. I have no confidence this will happen.
Many of our most recent immigrants are coming from Latin America. Latin America doesn’t really have a middle class on the scale that we do. For a number of historical reasons, they have a thin skim of wealthy landlords (or cartels) floating atop a large mass of peasantry. The Gini Coefficients in Latin America show its the most unequal place on Earth.
That sort of society doesn’t typically embrace US-style freedom and liberty. Things end poorly for you if you’re the landlord and you let the peasants arm themselves (or gather in large groups, or say what they think).
So at a minimum there is a (likely generational) assimilation process that is needed to acculturate people from a very different socioeconomic situation to America. However, our society isn’t so good at that anymore. We used to culturally be able to bring in the aforementioned groups (Irish, Italians, etc) and within a few generations bring them fully into the fold of American life. We went from “NO IRISH NEED APPLY” signs in stores to St Paddy’s day being a national celebration in what, 2-3 generations?
Now it seems like we struggle to assimilate newcomers into the broader US culture (which is increasingly fractured itself), or even question whether that is desirable (#SJW, #IdentityPolitics). A lot of the social institutions that might have helped do that in the past are fraying or long gone. We aren’t as bad as, say, France (which has massive tensions due to their failure to assimilate waves of immigrants) but I’d say our special national advantage in absorbing immigrants is waning for a number of reasons.
Gun rights will just be one of many economic-cultural casualties as this plays out.
So, cyanide capsule then? Sounds bleak. What are you doing to fight besides practicing keyboarding?
While it may sound bleak, there’s a good reason to discuss it: before we can even start talking about a solution, we need to have a good idea of what the problem is.
I personally can’t help but wonder what part *we* can play to assimilate these people — regardless of whether they are here illegally or not.
Maybe talk to them and don’t treat them like shit? Generally that’s probably been key to our assimilating immigrants. Our Volk is based on an idea, not where you were born or what country you came from. Accept the idea, and you’re in. Not saying it’s perfect, and we’ve had our share of immigrant hate, and still do, but it’s worked better than most other cultures that have tried to do it.
I have more of a problem with the left’s notion that the idea is bad, and we want to import a lot of immigrants who agree with us that it’s bad, and keep them in a state of dependence so they keep voting for the right people. That’s not an American attitude towards immigrants.
Leftists are not only doing everything they can ensure open borders, they are doing everything they can to prevent assimilation. And by the way they hate the whole idea of a constitutional republic. Easy enough to live with immigrants who accept the idea. Living with leftists, immigrants or native born, who don’t accept the idea and actively hate me is not something I want to do. The only solution I can see short of a country-wrecking civil war, is the national divorce.
Read carefully — its a challenging situation and a worrisome trend but we’re still light years ahead of other western countries. There are unassimilated ghettos full of angry unemployed youth burning cars in Paris on a fairly regular basis, for example. Despite rhetoric to the contrary we’re not in that bad a spot by any means. I am worried because part of America’s secret sauce and grand-strategic advantage was assimilating new cultures pretty quickly, relatively speaking. We seem to be losing some of our mojo for that.
As for what I’m doing… I personally am an officer for a shooting club and spend about a dozen days a year as a volunteer teaching shooting marksmanship and telling American history. I’ve had diverse groups of students. Over the summer we worked with our NRA affiliate in a very purple state to run the rifle portion of a youth shooting camp. Kids were able to come shoot all week (and hear some US history) for a negligible cost.
So that’s part of it.
More cynically I think there’s something to the Milton Friedman line about having a welfare state or open borders. I also think in our modern information age economy, an immigration system more like Canada’s might make a lot of sense. But trying to affect that policy is well beyond my span of control. So I’m just volunteering, affecting a dozen students at a time, one weekend at a time.
The more I see of the gun issue, the more I think that’s what it’s important and has been the key to our success. It all flows from bringing more bodies into the tent.
Immigrants that come from communist countries tend to be strongly pro 2 A Florida has a lot of Cubans I bet if we had lots of Venezuelans their attitudes about guns would be better
I appreciate that our comrades in NJ are fighting behind enemy lines, but we could really use their help here, to keep PA from teetering over the brink.
I’ve often thought that we should just give Philly and NYC to New Jersey, let them have their anti-gun dystopia, and then the rest of us can be happy.
Would that work geographically? Let me check a map….yes, that would work out nicely!
When I lived in New York State, I have often thought that NYC should secede and leave the rest of the State to their own devices. I think this would work out nicely too.