Sebastian – Page 37 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Regulation is Coming

While both he GOP and the Dems are still sucking up to the Silicon Valley money machines, eventually regulation is going to come. YouTube has suspended a lot more categories of legal gun videos. John Richardson has a lot more to say on this. The purpose of anti-trust law can be best understood as to prevent unaccountable political power, which Google now wields in abundance. As Stephen Green says over at Instapundit: “Itâ€™s time to regulate YouTube, Google, Facebook, and Twitter as common carriers.” I’m not sure common carrier regulation is the correct thing, but if Google is going to maintain a monopoly on online video, it’s going to have to be a lot more even handed with content.Â Ordinarily you don’t have a course of action for private businesses, but when those businesses are monopolists, that changes.

I’d also note for our legal people, and we have a lot of them, that there are civil remedies available under the Sherman Act. I’d also be looking at remedies under Civil Rights Act. I see no reason to wait for the state to act, when we could be filing suit now. A pretty well-targeted suit against Google would be a much more effective way to channel some populist sentiment than another Angry Dana video. Just sayin’.

This Means We’re Losing

David French think it’s high time the NRA got on board with Gun Violence Restraining Orders, and praises it as a good move.Â I don’t agree it’s a good move, but I think it’s probably a necessary one. French seems to think this will make a difference, but I’m going to bet you even if we pass GVROs in every state, we’re still going to have mass shootings. French seems to believe gun control will work. It won’t. It’s never worked. In the Parkland case, they had every opportunity to take action under current laws, and no one ever bothered. This would just have been one more crack the killer would have fallen through, and everyone knows it.

I worried when Bloomberg started pushing the GVRO issue that there was a chance this would get traction, and that’s what has happened. So what do you do if you’re NRA? Again, the hard line answer is to shout “no” louder, but that’s not going to stop you from losing in a dozen more states on a bill that, like California’s, has zero due process. You also have the White House on board with this idea, which doesn’t help things.

So what NRA has decided to do is rebrand GVROs as Risk Protection Orders (RPO), demand some level of due process, and become all for it. Looking over the RPO concept, it would actually have more due process than a Protection From Abuse (PFA) order, which is already disabling. So this isn’t really the sellout some are claiming it is. I’d be thrilled to get this much due process for PFAs.

This is not the first time NRA has done a move like this. When it became apparent the Brady Bill had real traction, after years of fighting it, NRA declared that instant background checks were good and wholesome, and pushed that idea as an alternative to the seven-day waiting period the Bradys originally wanted. NRA’s position is eventually what we got.

I know hard-liners will be all “Negotiating Rights Away” yet again. By this point, I’ve heard it all. But let me ask you this: would we be better off with a 7 or 5 day waiting period for all gun purchases everywhere? Would we be better off if we had an assault weapons ban that had no sunset clause? Would we be better off with a dozen more states passing GVROs with no due process protections whatsoever? Would we have been better off if, as the original NFA intended, machine guns were defined as any firearm which could fire more than 7 rounds without reloading? As I’ve said, sometimes outright defeating your opponents isn’t an option. Sometimes it is a matter of minimizing the damage they are inflicting on you. If NRA had 10 or 20 million members, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But we don’t, so we are.

Weaponized Social Networks

This scenario is harrowing, and I already see some evidence of it. My mother’s side of my family and some friends on social media have gone commented and shared a lot on social media that aims to socially shame me and other gun people out of shooting and our opinions on the matter. It does not come close to rising to this level, but I see things headed in that direction.

One of the weaponized social networks I’m currently covering isÂ a loosely connected network built on a newly emergent consensus morality (#metoo, etc.).Â A consensus that it usesÂ to successfully wield social, and increasingly, political power.

This moral networkÂ recently expanded with the addition of the #neveragainÂ movement, after the Parkland shootings.Â Â In the past, a movement like #neveragain would be focused on gun control through changes in government legislation.Â Â Now that it’s part of this weaponized moral network, that focus is going to change.

Why?Â ThisÂ weaponized network isn’t interested in just changing legislation.Â It’s far more ambitious than that.Â Â It wants to change everyone‘s behavior and it is building the means to do it.Â Â Here’s how.

Read the whole thing. I agree with Joe Huffman, who brought this piece to my attention:

Gun owners all need to â€œcome out of the closetâ€ and make it clear we are normal people. We do not have blood on our hands from the school shootings.

That really is the best thing we can do.

Likely an Old Debate

Humans are programmed in their brains to apply religious qualities to weapons. We do it, they do it. For many people on our side, it’s a talisman that wards off all evil. The attitude of “it’s just a tool,” is held by a very small group of people. I’ve found the tendency to view it as “just a tool” tends to roughly correlate to one’s level of training and experience. Experience and training demystifies the magic.

I believe this debate probably goes back as far as we do. No doubt Ogg was once pissed off that members of his tribe demanded he burn the shaft of his spear, and smash its point, because while he was out hunting one time, he had to kill Moog from the other tribe with it. The tribe shaman insisted the spear was now possessed of evil. Ogg’s hunting buddies insisted the spear was possessed of good Mammoth killing spirits, and only a fool would insist it be broken. Ogg shrugged it off and thought, “It’s a good mammoth spear, but I can make another.” Chances are if you’re reading this, you’re Ogg, and now that we have the technology, we’ve taken this ridiculous religious argument to the tribe of our entire country, even world. Ogg would probably think: “The more shit changes, the more shit stays the same.”

Walkout Wednesday

Say what you want about the school walkout thing, but it was brilliant. As in, “I wish I had thought of it,” brilliant. It’s times like this I wish I had kids, because I would have had them walk out with pro-gun signs and hand them out to likeminded teens. I’d definitely love teaching them the great pleasure of suing the government for fun and profit if they tried to stop them. The brilliance of it is that kids will take any excuse to get out of school, and these days we don’t really do discipline, so it was kind of inevitable that the schools would accommodate. A bit of ideological sympathy on the part of educators doesn’t hurt either. So you get nice big crowds that are more likely to impress lawmakers, and that can be spun to people who don’t understand activism as a huge generational shift on the issue. See, the future is gun control!

I don’t have kids, but for those of you who do, take a look at what Popehat has to say about the issue, and remember:Â “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

I Think She’s Right

Ashe Schow:

Basically, the left had money and infrastructure ready to go for an all-out assault on guns and the NRA, they just needed the right moment â€” the right victims.

Itâ€™s sickening, when you think about it; they were basically waiting for children to die so that they could swoop in and blame everyone they dislike, instead of the actual shooter. They paraded grieving children in front of cameras without any care for their well-being just to help their cause.

And as much as it pains me to say this, and as much as I think this was a horrible thing for the Left to do; the right should learn from these tactics.

I think the reason for this is most of us really just want to be left alone, and aren’t really the rallying, marching, and organizing types. The reason the religious right was so successful within the right coalition, is they were the ones who really wanted the power to bring about social change that’s more amenable to them. My primary issue with the religious right was their failure to recognize that culture leads to politics. If you’re trying to use government to correct cultural trends you don’t like, you’re fighting a rear guard action, and you’re destined to lose.Â That’s why I think they will suddenly find themselves out in the cold when the current realignment finishes. If you want political power, you have to get people back in the pews.

Ashe Schow is at least as uncomfortable with these tactics as I am, but as we’re observing, they do work — especially when they are well-executed and well-funded. This is a big reasonÂ I called on NRA to up their game. Our movement is very good at self-organizing, but it’s exhausting for the people who have to put it together. As a movement, we’re firing on 3 out of 6 cylinders on a good day, because most of us have jobs and families. NRA has a great role to play as facilitator, but as I noted, parts of NRA seem overly focused on using members as passive consumers rather than as active change makers. We’re a lot better at getting people into pews than the religious right is. What we have remaining to do is to get them to do more than just listen to the sermons.

PA-18 Special Election Result

While Connor Lamb’s victory in PA-18 is bad news for the Republican Party, there’s a few takeaways that I think are worth looking at:

Both candidates were hand picked by the party. The Dems picked a pro-gun, pro-union Blue Dog who is the kind of candidate that traditionally won in that district when it was a Dem district. The GOP picked Rick Saccone, who ran on a platform of Right-to-Work, practically guaranteeing that unions, who are strong in that district, would spend and organize heavily against him. Candidates matter. We don’t elect parties in our system.
If the Dems replicate that strategy, which they will struggle to do where the candidate has to fight an actual primary, we shall be in good shape gun rights wise. Because that sell out by the GOP in Florida? They know all they have to do is be better than the other guy. The reason the Dems are so ra-ra for gun control is because it doesn’t cost them anything. If suddenly they have their majority back on a Blue Dog wave, we’ll be in the situation again where both parties will compete for our vote, as we saw in PA-18. It also gives the leadership something to lose.
On the downside, the Dem leadership sacrificed the last Blue Dog wave on the altar of Obamacare. But they got it, and the hapless GOP has so far been unable to undo it. What will the next Blue Dog wave be sacrificed for? Gun Control? It’s happened before, so I would not rule it out. Remember, what brought us to this present situation is that the NRA could not single-handedly save the Blue Dogs from voters angry at the Blue Dogs over Obamacare. That greatly changed the calculus for the Dem leadership, who then had nothing more to lose.

That said, the GOP is almost certainly in trouble for 2018. The Dems have more to defend in the Senate race, so I don’t know what chance I give them of taking the Senate, but I’d say it’s an uphill climb. However, if they can successfully execute a Blue Dog return to power, I’d say the GOP loses the house. That’s going to be hard, because it’s pretty apparent the Dems will celebrate for now, their progressive base isn’t happy they had to win that election with a conservative leaning Democrat.

Quote of the Day: On Politicians

From John Richardson:

The one thing to bear in mind right now is that no politician is your friend. It doesn’t matter the party nor their past support for gun rights. They will throw gun rights and gun rights supporters under the bus if they think it could impact their chances of reelection. One merely need look at Florida where many supposed gun rights supporting legislators threw gun rights under the bus in their haste to pass SB 7026.

Great lesson in politics there. If you’re Marion Hammer, what do you do now? The problem is that the other side is crazy. Many Florida Dems actually voted against the Florida gun control package (3 day wait for all guns, GVROs, 18-21 ban on purchase for all guns, meaningless Armed teacher program concession) because the Republicans would go along with outright bans. The Republicans are going to be happy to say, “Your favor was the no on bans after a mass shooting at a school, but we’re going to do something.”

Here’s the problem: once you start losing, it’s hard to stop losing.

“Take no prisoners! Primary them all!” the hardliner would say.

Say you give every one of those A-rated Republicans who voted for this shit (and there were a lot of them) and changed their grades to an F and backed every primary challenger you can find.Â That might feel good, but do you think it’s likely that politician is going to try to get back in your good graces, or just write you off? Sure, you can back a primary challenger, but in most cases, that challenger is likely to lose. There’s a lot to be said for the phrase, “If you take a shot at the King, you had better not miss.” If you’re not smart about it, you’re just going to piss away all your influence with these people. The purist solution to this problem is just to take your ball and go home. Well, you can do that, and it might feel good. It might also be a lot less work. But that pretty much means everyone elected to office will ignore your interests entirely.

If I were Marion Hammer, I’m not going to forget that vote. I’ll look for targets of opportunity if someone looks vulnerable, and I think I might have a shot. But I’m going to be most concerned about preserving my influence and not losing even more. While I would argue priority number one going forward is ending that waiting period and repealing the 18-20 prohibition on sale, neither is a culture killer. The waiting period is a hassle, and the universe of 18-20 year olds buying guns is pretty small. The ban on 18-20 year olds from purchase is a culture frustrater, but not a killer. Gun bans are culture killers, and at least so far, Florida Republicans have held the line there. In any sell-out like this, there are going to be leaders and followers, and it’s some leader scalps I’m going to want if I’m the lobbyist, but I’m not going to aim recklessly or indiscriminately. I’ll choose my time and opportunity. But taking the occasional scalp is how you build political power, and the lesson isn’t so much for the scalpee — he or she is irrelevant once they are sent packing — it’s the implicit threat to his or her replacement that you can do the same to them, and also to every one of the previous worm’s followers.

Here’s another truth of politics: whether you like it or not, when the political opposition is entirely opposed to your interests, your political allies will start to believe they don’t have to be perfect on the issue, they just have to be a more palpable alternative to the opposition. There’s no getting around this. You can take your ball and go home, but then neither side will care a whit what you think. Influence isn’t a binary proposition. Think of it more as a garden. Marion Hammer now has a weed problem, and it’s threatening the crops. The hard-line approach, such as advocated by GOA, is just to take a flamethrower to the garden. Some weeds are a bigger problem than others. Weed selectively. We can live with some of them and still have a good harvest.

The key right now in Florida is going to be organizing. Marion Hammer has power because ordinary, every day gun owners give it to her. Without organizing at the grassroots level, we are nothing. We have to build. Bloomberg can outspend us all day long, and money can buy awfully impressive astroturf, which we laugh at, but it’s no joke. Look what it just did in Florida.

Talking to Non-Gun People, Redux

Thanks to social media, we can now all see into each other’s minds, so I have an idea of what non-gun people think about the issues of the day. I see consistent themes. Here’s a few facts I see people get wrong a lot:

Rapid Fire: A meaningless term. If you hear this, try to flesh out whether the person is confusing machine guns. If so, relieve that ignorance. It’s OK to say “machine guns are banned.” They effectively are. A lot of gun spergs will get all ACKCHYUALLY, and that’s not the path to take. Your goal as an ambassador to the gun culture is to relieve ignorance, not to impress your opponent with your knowledge of obscure firearms minutia.

Military grade: What does this mean? Almost all firearms have a military pedigree of some sort. Even Grandpa’s deer rifle likely uses the bolt action invented by Paul Mauser in 1898. The M1911 was developed for the military. Again, this could be a symptom of confusion between machine guns and semi-automatics. This is where your typical explanation of the “assault weapons” issue comes in. The war on AR-15s is nothing more than a war on scary looking rifles and ergonomics. It functions no differently than other common rifles.

Magazines: Most people have no idea it takes only a few seconds to change a magazine. It’s also not completely apparent to someone who hasn’t taken any kind of firearm self-defense course that magazine restrictions benefit attackers over defenders. The attacker has planning on his side, and he can plan around the restriction. As a defender, I’m not going to carry a gym bag full of 10 round magazines around with me all day (as the attacker in Parkland did for the shooting). I’m going to carry what’s in my gun, and I want it to hold what it’s designed to hold. Police feel the same way, which is why they’d fight tooth-and-nail if the restriction applied to them. Your average cop is more likely to need his gun than I am, but the vast majority of police shootings don’t exceed ten rounds.

Firearms are Deadly: We shouldn’t mince words. The AR-15 platform is not designed to wound. That’s one of the biggest pieces of gun lore out there, and it’s not true. The reason the .223 Remington was adopted by the military as the 5.56x45mm because a solider can carry a lot more rounds of it than the .308 and .30-06 ammunition it replaced, and it does the job adequately enough. Yes, as rifles go, the AR is not particularly powerful shot-for-shot. Yes, in many states, you can’t hunt medium sized game like deer with it because it’s not powerful enough. What makes it popular among shooters is also what makes it a choice for some mass killers: it’s an open-source, accessorizable platform with good ergonomics, manageable recoil, and a quick learning curve. There’s nothing remarkable about the AR-15s function that sets it apart from any other magazine fed semi-automatic rifle. I think it’s important for people to understand why it’s a popular platform. While I’ve always thought the term “Modern Sporting Rifle” was a transparent euphemism, the war on so-called assault weapons is a war on modern ergonomics and usability.

Yes, We Care About Children: How many of us have heard this one over the past few weeks? I don’t really take kindly to the use of emotional blackmail, so usually if someone engages in it, I will cut off discussion. But yes, we care about kids. We just don’t agree on solutions.

Arming Teachers: Be realistic about arming teachers. The caricature pushed by the media and gun control proponents is that we want to hand out guns to school staff. No proposal by the NRA or anyone else even comes close to this. My actual opinion on this is that there should be no legal penalties for a person to carry in a school if they are licensed to carry everywhere else. I think local schools should have the option to adopt state prescribed training standards for allowing select personnel to carry. Could be a resource officer, could be retired veterans, could be teachers who are inclined. I don’t really care either way. It should be up to the school district how they want to go about it, or if they want to allow it at all. If a teacher has a license to carry and wants to carry regardless of district policy, they risk their jobs. I don’t see any public benefit to putting them in prison for it.

It’s Just a Hobby: If it was just a hobby, we wouldn’t be at each other’s throats. Skiing is just a hobby, and even though people die skiing, no one argues over it. The fundamental argument at work in the gun issue is what the proper distribution of power in society should be. That’s not a simple topic where there are easy answers. Unfortunately, people very strongly want to believe there are easy answers to complex social problems. I don’t believe popular sovereignty really has any meaning if those in power disarm those without it. Without arms in the hands of the people, it’s a fiction. Also, non-shooters tend to be unaware of the interdependency between the civilian shooting culture and the police and military shooting culture. The truth is when you destroy your civilian gun culture, shit like this is what happens. Many of the training options police and military now have are courtesy of the civilian culture, and vice versa. You can’t destroy one without damaging the others.

Also, I would encourage you to check out Tam’s post on this subject, and add that to your quiver.

Dear NRA

It’s time to sit down and have a little talk. There’s a few things that are becoming apparent as I’ve watched the reaction to Parkland. One is that Bloomberg’s game has been much better organized and more focused than it was after Sandy Hook. My impression then was that the gun control movement was poorly prepared and organized. Bloomberg was still mucking about with Illegal Mayors, and the Brady organization was flat broke and not really ready. The White House hadn’t yet spent much time on gun control, and Sandy Hook was the pretext that got them started. That has not been the case this time. They’ve learned a lot, they were much better prepared, and they executed on their strategy very effectively.

NRA used to be an organization that was good at grass roots organizing. I have participated in some of those efforts as a volunteer coordinator over several campaigns. I stopped in frustration, because we could never recruit any volunteers to coordinate. It was always just Bitter and me. Back then, I thought they were my deficiencies; maybe I didn’t have the touch. There were some volunteer coordinators who are pretty successful. But since then, I’ve learned I can be an effective organizer of volunteers. The chief problem was that I didn’t have enough local connections to be effective. The other thing I learned is that people did not recognize NRA as an organization that they are or should be directly involved with. We might like to say “I’m the NRA,” but I’m not sure that’s really ringing true for a lot of people these days. NRA is an organization that sends them a magazine and asks them for money. A lot of members might agree that NRA is important, and that why they maintain their memberships, but they are more in the role of passive consumers of what NRA is offering.

That has to change. We must turn them into active participants. NRA will not accomplish that by continuing to encourage members to passively consume more Ack-Mac-generated Angry Dana videos. I worry that in another few years of planning and learning from prior mistakes, when Bloomberg et al get their next pretext, the dam is going to break. It may have broken already; this is all still playing out. We can lament that Bloomberg has been more effective this time because he’s hiring professional organizers who know how to work with a small number of dedicated activists, or we can beat him at this game by upping our game.

This past weekend, I organized a mailing of more than 200 letters to local lawmakers from members of my club. We came up with templates people could start with. We were ready to look up lawmakers for members, and had a bunch of envelopes, pre-printed address labels, and stamps. I offered work time (which applies against dues) to members who participated. The response was pretty good. We are an NRA Gold Star club. How many other clubs out there would like to do something, but don’t quite know what to do? How many other clubs or shooting outfits view NRA as some far off organization they don’t really know or interact with?

Grassroots activism is hard. It’s a lot harder than paying Ack-Mac to make another series of angry videos. But effective organizing takes more than feeding people’s anger. You have to effectively turn that anger into something useful and positive. For that, there is no substitute for face-to-face local contact. NRA doesn’t seem to do a whole hell of a lot of that outside the Friends of NRA program.

I would strongly encourage NRA to focus on a few areas:

More outreach to NRA affiliated organizations, specifically for the purpose of training people how to be effective. But less specifically to get face time with members. Doesn’t have to be top people. Could be Board members. Could be local volunteers.
A lot of clubs and shooting organizations need help with technology. NRA could be a lot of help with this. Technology facilitates communication. I could never have organized the letter writing campaign with the technology we had even two years ago. I was only able to do that because I put a framework in place to facilitate it. It was a lot of work, but paid off. What I’m lacking is the ability to communicate with other area clubs. I’m slowly building that, but that’s a harder problem. Again, NRA could do a lot to be a facilitator to get local organizations talking to each other. Sometimes being an outside organization can be an advantage, and this is one of those times.
People need to have politics explained to them. Most people don’t understand the political process. They need to see and understand how their action fits in. I was recently reminded of a passage from a leftist organizer: “Power tends to appear magical to those who have less of it, and mechanical to those who are accustomed to wielding it instrumentally.” The article continues: “Itâ€™s not magical kids, and itâ€™s not George Soros sprinkling money around. Itâ€™s hard work by people whoâ€™ve trained to do it.” When the balloon goes up, our people have to know what to expect, and be able to spring into action. We’re very good at self-organizing, but some people will need it spelled out a bit more than others. You don’t want to lose because you’re only depending on self-starters. In my experience, self-starters are rare, and they are getting rarer in the younger generations.

We have a lot more people at our disposal, and unlike their people, ours have a lot to lose. They will have to pay people to organize their small cadre. We should require far fewer paid professionals. But the work nevertheless has to be done, and it’s something that can’t be accomplished with a membership accustomed to passively consuming content. NRA needs to spend more time getting out there among the people, and most importantly educating them, and offering the tools they need to be successful.