Author: Sebastian

We wrote a few weeks ago about CSGV’s call for its members to call 911 if they spotted someone carrying a gun concealed or unconcealed, and how it showed the CSGV was really no more than a radical hate group hiding itself behind a cloak of peace and love. Now that story seems to be getting a fair amount of mainstream attention thanks to the issue being highlighted by Fox News. Miguel has a round-up of some of the reaction, including one woman who suggests faking a panic attack so she can later sue for emotional trauma. Yeah, why don’t you try that and tell us how it works out for you.

I’m glad to see Bob Owens joining the call the contact their coalition members and confronting them with some of the hateful and non-peaceable rhetoric they cultivate and promote. Demand to know why they support this. Note there are mainstream churches who are part of CSGV. If you’re a Presbyterian, Methodist, Jewish, Catholic, or any of the other religions represented, you have a right to demand answers over what is done in your name.

It’s not often I’ll get involved in the comments at Raw Story, since they aren’t really much above Gawker in the slime pits of the Internet, but a hit piece they put out on Colion Noir really pissed me off. First, is the misleading headline. He never said that. But some of the comments, including one person pasting a picture of an Oreo cookie, struck me as just outright racist. Others were more couched, but equally racist, such as suggesting this is all being orchestrated by “devious white people,” because Colion can’t be expected to hold his own opinions, you know. You see that theme repeated a couple of times. Colion is “shilling” for the NRA. He can’t possibly have come to his opinions on his own, I guess. Certainly he did not have a highly successful YouTube channel long before NRA even approached him. No sir! He’s a “dancing puppet.” who “sold his soul.” He’s a “token.”

Yeah, right. We’re the racists? Sure. I’m not the one who thinks opinions need to have a color.

This is unbelievable. Bloomberg’s “The Trace” web site has shown itself very adept at building straw men so they can tear them down, but this takes the cake. Their argument seems to be that because the gun confiscations after Katrina weren’t universal, that means that NRA is exaggerating. The city confiscated approximately 800 firearms in the wake of Katrina. No one at the time ever argued it was a mass confiscation. We were aware at the time that many of the confiscations were carried out by “out of town” law enforcement.

But hundreds of Americans have their civil rights violated at the time they most need them, and no big deal, right? Note how Bloomberg’s Mouthpiece goes into detail later about bizarre conspiracy theories, and then tries to conflate mainstream gun rights opinions with them.

I have to admit I just don’t understand how some people go through the grieving process. For me it’s a deeply personal thing and not something with which to involve the rest of the world outside of immediate family and close friends. When my mother died when I was 20 years old, I found all the attention surrounding the funeral to be more stress inducing than the actual loss itself. I was happy when all that was over. But hers was not a sudden and unexpected death. It was untimely — she was 43 — but she had been fighting the cancer for years.

I imagine sudden an unexpected is a different experience, and I’m sure burying a child is more difficult than burying a parent. But it’s very difficult to understand how grief could manifest itself in attention seeking behavior. For that reason, I don’t really understand Andy Parker, the father of the anchorwoman who was murdered on live television. A former candidate for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates, he’s seemed to seek out the limelight in the wake of the murder of his daughter. He has vowed to take on the NRA. I can actually understand that, even I think the anger is misplaced. Someone’s bound to shove a camera in your face after a high-profile incident like this, and I can understand lashing out in anger, especially when the person responsible took his own life rather than allowing the victims family to get any sense of justice. But then he goes and demands to know why key politicians aren’t calling him, then stating later in another press interview saying he’s going to buy a gun himself. He’s been writing op-eds in the Washington Post. It’s been reported in the news Parker has been in contact with Bloomberg’s people and Giffords. It’ll be interesting to see if which group, if any, will pick him up.

At the risk of sounding completely cold hearted, this behavior strikes me as very odd for someone mourning. Perhaps I just don’t understand it. Everyone grieves differently. But I have been around more than enough grieving people in my lifetime to, I think, declare this a very strange way of going about it. I’ve seen people who use the opportunity of deaths, marriages, births, etc, and attempt to make such public events all about them. But we usually think of those people as insufferable boors, don’t we? I’m not saying that’s what we’re seeing here, but if this is one of many means of grieving, I sure would like to understand it. It’s very difficult to wrap my head around making a media spectacle, and blaming your own tragedy on millions of fellow Americans who had nothing to do with it, and who also believe it’s awful and senseless.

Our opponents are circulating a petition to ban minors from shooting machine guns. I’m going to agree that starting the kids off on machine pistols is pretty irresponsible, as we’ve seen from at least two tragic accidents. It’s far better to start the kids off on something belt fed. It would seem they believe this puts us on a weak footing:

Now, opponents of the petition will have to explain why the right of a 9-year-old to shoot an automatic weapon is so important.

“My read on pro-gun activists right now is they are facing tremendous cultural pressure, and being asked tough questions that they weren’t five years ago about … how extreme the pro-gun movement has gotten,” says Ladd Everitt, a spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence in Washington.

Except I’m not going to accept the premise. This is not about gun rights, primarily. The issue is bigger than that. This is about the rights of parents to raise their children in the manner they see fit, provided they aren’t abusing them on putting them in grave danger. Letting a kid shoot, even shoot a machine gun, is statistically less dangerous than letting them play football. It’s none of anyone’s business where, when, or how a parent teaches their child to shoot. The state has no business poking its snout into parental choices like this. None!

“Laws say that children can’t drink, can’t drive, can’t vote. But they can shoot fully automatic assault weapons. That hasn’t changed,” Mr. Vacca’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth, says on the petition.

In many states, they can, under supervision of parents. The states that absolutely prohibit minors from drinking (like Pennsylvania) I think are wrong, and I would advocate repealing those laws. European children don’t seem any worse for wear for having more tolerant laws in this respect. Children can drive motor vehicles, if it’s not on public roads, and voting doesn’t have anything to do with the freedom of parents to raise their children how they see fit.

When you make something illegal for minors to do, you’re really limiting the parental freedoms of parents, and inserting the state into the parent child relationship. The people pushing this petition should answer why they also are not banning children from participating in other organized sports, or riding bicycles, which have astounding rates of injury. Sports contribute to 21% of all the traumatic brain injuries among American children. Every year approximately 50 children die in sports related injuries. Statistically, the shooting sports are safer than golf. The folks pushing this need to explain why they are singling out a relatively safe activity, while ignoring other sports that are far more dangerous.

First it was “handgun ban,” but people rejected the idea thoroughly in very liberal Massachusetts. Then it was “handgun freeze,” but Californians overwhelmingly rejected that idea. Then it became “handgun control,” and when that got nowhere, they switched to trying to ban scary looking long guns. Then Third Way came along with “gun safety.” After that didn’t work, “gun violence prevention” became the rallying cry. Then back to “gun safety” when Bloomberg’s people came in and must not have realized people didn’t fall for it the first time around. Now it looks like they are trying out “gun responsibility.”

Same bullshit, no matter what you call it. Keep trying to polish that turd. We are not fooled.