I’m not a big supporter of the what the wildlife refuge standoff folks did, but I’m heartened by this result because I absolutely support jury nullification and wish more people were aware of it and would use it more often. I don’t believe juries should nullify lightly, but I think it’s a critically important check the people retain against the power of the state, and in this case the federal government has just reaped the resentment is has spend years sowing with western ranchers.
Author: Sebastian
Late Season NRA Ad
This one pretty much successfully sums up what’s at stake:
I’ve found a lot of folks who don’t seem to understand that the Second Amendment is not self-enforcing. You’d think this would be kind of obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people think just because the words are on a piece of paper that actually means something. When you start explaining it, I think inherently these people get that it’s not, just that they have such a difficult time wrapping their heads around the idea that federal judges would engage in such blatant skulduggery as to suggest the amendment doesn’t mean what it plainly says.
Our only hope for saving the handful of bad states for gun rights is the federal courts. If Hillary picks Scalia’s replacement, that path will be foreclosed for a generation. In that scenario, I’d be lucky, very lucky, to live to see that damage undone. Most of the folks who laid the foundation for Heller and McDonald will not live to see it. We’ll be lucky if we don’t see those cases reversed entirely.
Support for Assault Weapons Ban is at a New Low
This new poll result, which shows 61% of Americans opposed to assault weapons bans is great news. Support is falling even among Democrats. Hopefully will help efforts to prevent gun control advocates from building that “West Coast Wall” by convincing lawmakers in Washington and Oregon to pass a ban on assault weapons. It should also, hopefully, forestall Bloomberg from thinking balloting a ban is a smart investment. Gun control groups will probably try, but it takes money to get the signatures, and money to con convince the public, and if Bloomberg isn’t willing to spend millions to achieve that, they don’t have a prayer of doing it on their own.
I think two things are going on. First, gun control got a boost from the psychological damage and ensuing hysteria after the JFK, RFK, and King assassinations, and that’s worn off, prompting a reversion to traditional American attitudes. Second, it’s become obvious over time that gun control is a dumb political gimmick, mostly designed for virtue-signaling at the expense of flyover rubes.
I think he’s that’s largely correct, but my worry continues to be that while national numbers like these are good news, what matters more is where people of this opinion are concentrated. For instance, if all those Assault Weapons Ban loving Dems were concentrated on the West Coast, they could get their wall, especially if Bloomberg is willing to spend big. And while I believe the effort of the Colorado recall heroes probably saved Colorado from more gun control for quite some time, demographic trends there aren’t good long term for gun rights. I certainly believe there are states in which the gun control movement will never make real gains: essentially any state where Democrats aren’t that competitive. But they stand to make real gains in states Dems are competitive in provided there’s a lot of geographical concentration of like opinion, and no real ability for gun vote to change much (e.g. California). I’d love to see more geographic-centered polling on this issue, because that’s ultimately going to determine whether the gun control movement has a shot at flipping a half-dozen or so more states into their column.
Dress Around the Gun
I’m glad to see other people speaking out against “Dress around the Gun.” Most of the time in the summer I’m pocket carrying a Ruger LCP with a Mitch Rosen Pocket Softy. Not because I think it’s ideal, but because the alternative would be not carrying a firearm. I don’t have the option of dressing like a hobo a lot of times.
I’ve been meaning to upgrade to a newer generation pocket pistol, like S&W’s Bodyguard, but I’ve been chronically short on disposable (well, really disposable) income for several years now. I’m happy to see Ruger fixed a lot of the problems with the LCP, such that it’s not just a P-3AT with better fit and finish. Competition is a wondrous thing.
In Hawaii, I shed the gun (not legal to carry in HI), spray, knife (legal in HI, but illegal in carry-ons), and bagged my flashlight instead of carrying it in my pocket. It was amazing how well my pants stayed up!
Toddlers & Guns Continues
The media has been going on a good bit to try to drive Hillary and the Brady Campaign’s toddler’s and guns narrative. Never mind that they seem to have padded their stats with adults, there’s an election to win!
The linked article is but one example of the genre. First, as I often feel the need to do, let’s tear down the straw man: no one argues that toddlers should have access to firearms, or that gun owners should be careless in the storage of their firearms. The problem is our opponents are approaching the issue as if the policy debate is simple, because to them it is. When you approach the issue at hand from the point of view of “you shouldn’t own a gun in the first place,” anything that makes it harder to do that is fine by them, and our concerns be damned.
The District of Columbia solved this problem by banning handguns, and beyond that demanding any gun stored in the district be rendered inoperable for purposes of self-defense. We, and the Supreme Court argued that was and ought to be a violation of Second Amendment rights. Hillary Clinton disagrees that’s the case. Hillary Clinton believes DC ought to be able to ban guns and force them rendered useless for self-defense, for the children. That’s not a mainstream belief, by a long shot. Yet the media is perfectly willing to obscure the difficulty of the issue for her.
Trigger locks! Except trigger locks are dangerous if not used properly. Could we force gun owners to lock their firearms in safes, as San Jose is proposing? The affordable models are often not worth spit, and may even be actively dangerous. They won’t stop thieves worth a damn. I don’t have children in the home, so why should I be part of this one-size-fits-all-and-fuck-you solution? And why is my locked home not considered secured enough? Do we require everyone to have a real-deal secure $2000 gun safe? Won’t that mean that the poor effectively have no Second Amendment rights? Do we have a government program to help the poor afford gun safes? Why not? Libraries helped the poor access their First Amendment rights for decades before books were cheap enough for anyone to afford.
One thing I’ve learned immersing myself in this stuff for so many years: nothing is ever as easy as zealots want to convince you it is. If someone tells you there’s a simple solution to something, they are either ignorant, or know better and are hoping you’re ignorant enough to buy it. Gun ownership is no magic bullet against bad things happening, and gun control isn’t either. That’s why I’m not about grand solutions, and tend to believe people should be left free to fix their own problems and make their own choices. I oppose gun control because the movement is philosophically centered around denying individuals the right to make their own decisions about their own lives, security, and happiness.
The “Yes” Vote Heard Round the World?
LA Times: “If California voters approve stronger gun control, the message sent at the ballot box will be heard across the U.S.” That’s the whole idea. They are trying to send a message to politicians that the people want more gun control, and they are being successful at doing so. It won’t matter that the only reason they are being successful is because Bloomberg is willing to spend big money. You can lament the ballot all you want, and I certainly don’t believe in lawmaking by referendum, but Bloomberg picked a strategy where money is king, and he’s executing on it very well. He is exactly what I long feared: someone with the both the money and strategic thinking to understand where and how to fight.
The reality is this: the one thing that correlates strongly to whether or not you reflexively do or don’t support gun control (and for most people, who don’t spend 10 minutes thinking about political issues, it’s reflexive) is whether you own a gun. California Democrats have been using red tape to frustrate people out of owning firearms for the past 30 years, and they’ve largely succeeded. Those who were most passionate have, by now, left the Golden State for more permissive states. With each encroachment, it becomes harder and harder to stay and fight.
They are trying to repeat this in more and more states. They’ve likely succeeded in tipping Colorado. They are tipping Washington State. They’ve started tipping Oregon. They are now trying to tip Maine and Nevada this election. Who will be next? When will our people abandon the cartoon reality pushed by conservative media and actually get serious? I suppose we shall see.
Death of a Blogging Legend
Steven Den Beste has died. If you weren’t a reader on the very early blogosphere, you may have never heard of him. But for me this is more evidence that the best years of blogging are behind us. Ace at Ace of Spades notes:
I should say that Den Beste belonged to a pre-professional blogging age (such as it may well be), a novice/hobbyist phase, when writers would just write about whatever interested them at that moment, whether it “fit the format” or whatever. Rather like I’ve heard FM radio was when it first came out, as opposed to heavily-programmed/demographically-targeted AM.)
Most of the blogs I still read regularly are the few remaining pre-professional blogs. Instapundit may have rolled into the PJ Media universe, but it’s still largely unchanged in style and format from what it was in the early aughts. There’s very few other blogs still going from those early years. The past decade feels like it’s been a great endarkenment on that front. Most of the commercial venues are vacuous. There are no big ideas. It’s “ra-ra team,” “look at how stupid and wrong those other people are!”, “Gather round the fire and let me tell you what you want to hear.” There’s no more conversation about big ideas, and places to go to read about things no one else is talking about.
I am among a dying breed of bloggers. I don’t do this for a living, and I barely make any money through ads. Most importantly, I don’t care that I don’t, because this was never about money: it was just an outlet. Den Beste’s death feels to me like yet another nail in the coffin of the hobby blog.
Enjoy Seeing Bloomberg’s Hopes & Dreams Flushed Down the Jail Cell Commode
Savor this, as it might be the only schadenfreude you’ll get this silly season:Â Kathleen Kane in handcuffs being carted off to prison. They had high hopes for this rising star in Democratic politics, and now where are they? Bloomberg sank, if I recall, about half a million into her race. That’s a lot of cash to spend to buy a few reciprocity agreement changes, but it’s always good to get in the ground floor of a rising political career. But that was not to be.
I noticed that Bloomberg was only willing to dump an even quarter million to Josh Shapiro’s campaign in the AG race this time around, but at this point he’s probably only looking to protect his gains from that office rather than looking for risky favors.
Forbes Accepts an Entirely Manufactured Narrative
Colin Goddard gave a lecture offering a narrative that he was just your average everyman, nursing his wounds from Virginia Tech, when Sandy Hook happened, and then he decided he had to do something!
Yet he didn’t immediately join the the gun safety movement. It wasn’t until the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Mass., when he watched the victims on TV the same way the rest of the nation watched his tragedy at Virginia Tech, that something changed for Goddard. He has come to refer to this shift as his ‘Newtown moment.’
“I think the fact that it was an elementary school shook this country to its core,†he told Forbes. “People said, ‘Something has to change.’â€
The following day, Goddard packed his bags and moved to Washington DC.
That’s not the history I remember, and I’m betting you don’t either. The reason for that is because it’s totally made up. A search for “Goddard” on my blog turns up dozens of stories when Colin was professionally employed by the DC-based Brady Campaign well before Sandy Hook. The entire narrative offered to lackadaisical Forbes reporter Alexandra Wilson is entirely manufactured! Ten minutes of Googling would have shown Colin Goddard is making up this timeline.
Reporters need to be a lot more skeptical of claims from the gun control movement. Chances are if you see their lips moving, you’re either being outright lied to, or you’re being deceived in some way. Check their facts with actual experts.
UPDATE from Bitter: It turns out that she didn’t even need to Google it. Colin’s own LinkedIn page says he started working as an Assistant Director of Federal Legislation in the gun control movement years before the Newtown shooting. Yet Alexandra Wilson claims he didn’t even head to DC until after Sandy Hook. So is she lying about the timeline, was she deceived, or do Brady Campaign donors have a very fair concern over why a former Assistant Director wasn’t working in DC, despite his job being to work on federal affairs?
Heller & Toddlers
I’m guessing we uncovered a bug in Hillary’s latest firmware update when she mentioned that the issue at hand in the Heller case was protecting toddlers. It’s like she watched the latest Brady video, and that confused the programming.
Fortunately, Hillary has the shills at Politifact to cover for her. Because DC claimed its safe storage laws were meant to protect babies from guns, of course it must be true! Because gun control people always raise the “For the Children” cliche, it is perfectly valid and factual.
Fact: the word “child” nor “toddler” can be found at all in the Heller decision. It was about whether a 66 year old security guard was allowed to keep a firearm in the home and ready for self-defense. Hillary Clinton has said she is opposed to the Heller decision. When she claims that this is about the children, she is out-and-out lying.