The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
An attack in Nice, South of France. Looks like dozens dead. Plowed a truck through a Bastille Day crowd. There are reports of gunfire, but that could be police trying to shoot the driver. Early reports are almost always wrong in some way. This will no doubt bolster Trump and Marine LePen.
God help us all. This will not end well.
Professor Tim Smith has calculated “The Social Costs of Guns.” Apparently if you use “market approaches” to artificially drive up the cost of gun ownership, it’s not really gun control, even though his proposal would cost me thousands of dollars each year. He does a calculation on the social cost of gun ownership. To Prof. Smith’s credit, he admits that the social costs of rifles are actually very low, because they are so rarely used in crime. But at the end he proposes an annual registration fee of $140 per firearm, to cover the social cost they impose.
A lot of people would give up on gun ownership under this scheme, so it’s a political non-starter. It would gut our political power to resist further encroachments, and the registration scheme it would involve would result in massive non-compliance by gun owners. So this is not something that would ever become reality even if it could be passed.
This was prior to the Castile shooting:
Instead, the stop was so troubling that he later went to the then-St. Anthony police chief to tell him he may have a serious problem with how the department conducts traffic stops. But the chief, Olson said, dismissed his concern.
“I told him that if you don’t fix this, you’re going to have an even bigger problem,†Olson said. “And that’s apparently what happened.â€
Read the whole thing. Joe Olsen is one of the academics responsible for the Heller and McDonald decisions, and has been a RKBA activist for a long time. Longer than I’ve been alive.
Have you noticed the cognitive dissonance that many supporters of “common-sense†gun control have been exhibiting as of late? I’m not sure it’s possible to support more gun-control laws and oppose “mass incarceration†or “excessive policing†policies. How can someone argue that young men of color are overpoliced, while at the same time calling for more non-violent-offender gun laws to be placed on the books?
Cam goes on to ponder why the media was quick to jump on NRA’s lack of commentary, then cautious commentary on the Castile shooting, but isn’t asking Bloomberg about his “stop and frisk” policies that he promoted as mayor, which even he conceded disproportionally jailed minorities for non-violent offenses.
Both Joe Huffman and Gun Free Zone are writing about Vox survey which asked people whether certain guns should be banned by sight. Twenty percent of Democrats, that’s one-in-five, think even flare guns ought to be banned, and all surveyed folks are dead split on whether the Remington 700 ought to be banned. I haven’t seen the survey methodology to suggest whether it’s any good, so I’m not going to take this too seriously. But I keep saying we’re heading into heap big trouble if gun owners keep sitting on their collective posteriors.
I do think the other side is succeeding in building their movement back up again, and I believe this election has the potential to lay waste to gun rights. It’s gloomy, but I have a lot of reasons to feel gloomy about our prospects. I think a lot of people don’t believe we can end up back where we were in the 1990s. We absolutely can.
No teaching your kids shooting with scary looking rifles, because they just HEART you and your kids, you see… totally more than you do, so they get to make the calls.
“Even at a shooting age and under professional guidance, a semi-automatic rifle in a child’s hands is a tragedy waiting to happen,†Mr. Markey said. “These weapons are not toys and children should not be allowed to play with them. They are simply too powerful and too difficult for a child to control.â€
What the hell does Ed Markey know about firearms training? The purpose of this is to prevent us from passing the culture on to future generations so they have better odds of killing off the hunting and shooting culture off in the future.
There’s been articles in both the Washington Post and The Guardian about how NRA is split over the whole Castile police shooting. Personally, I think it’s better for NRA not to go off half-cocked at events like this until all the facts are in. For events like this, it’s often good to look at what NRA News is saying, since they are NRA’s official unofficial spokespeople (meaning they say things NRA can’t since they don’t officially speak for the NRA):
NRA is always going to be reluctant to risk coming across as anti-cop because a) police and former police compromise a decent percentage of the membership, and b) when NRA has gone up against law enforcement in the past, NRA has lost. You can lament that state of affairs, but it is the state of affairs.
NRA is never going to have a knee jerk reaction to events like this, and to be honest, they shouldn’t. The Civil Rights Defense Fund often takes cases involving people, and yes, even black people, who’s civil rights were unjustly violated, but they are very careful about which cases they back. Again, they should be.
I think the division is not necessarily ginned up by the media, but is real. NRA is a coalition, just like any other movement, and we don’t all come to this issue from the same set of principles. There are libertarian NRA members, like myself and I suspect a lot of readers, who are very concerned with civil liberties and police overreach. But there are also a lot of NRA members who are populist and think the police can do no wrong. The folks in Fairfax have to be concerned with keeping these people focused on the issue and not at each other’s throats. That’s not an easy job.
Islam’s conspiracy made a fake call to police, leading police to the NRA head’s Virginia home and leading them to “briefly detain” him, LaPierre’s lawyer said.
The dude’s last name is Islam, just to be clear. Sounds like he was a recluse and probably a bit off his rocker. He also published Mike Bloomberg’s Social Security Number, so it doesn’t seem like he’s just picking sides here. Sounds like a loser who needs to feel powerful.
Either way, he got two years.
He’s joined George Takei’s new gun control group “One Pulse for America,” as Director. I’d ponder whether this represents rats off the sinking ship, but given that going from Communication’s Director of a small gun control group to running a whole new group which may end up being more successful represents a promotion, and it’s probably something I’d take (were I in his shoes) even if CSGV isn’t headed down.
Takei doesn’t have the coin to fund a group at nearly the level Bloomberg does, so it will be interesting to see how this works out. One thing is for sure, Pink Pistols and Operation Blazing Sword just got a lot more important. Have it it folks! Ladd Everitt is now your new arch nemesis.
CBS News reports, or rather misreports, because they don’t know what they are talking about:
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives calls the SKS rifle Micah Johnson used to kill five Dallas police officers on July 7 a “Curio or Relic.”
Due to this status, which the SKS shares with many other models of Berettas, Colts, Remingtons, Rugers and other firearms that are at least 50 years old, gun dealers said that in some states and jurisdictions the Soviet-era rifle can be purchased online and delivered to your door without securing a permit.
Um, you can only have one of these “delivered to your door” if you apply for a Federal Firearms License. So you do indeed need to secure a “permit,” whatever the fuck they think that means.
Yes, old technology can still be pretty effective in the hands of a well-trained shooter. Yes, having a ten round fixed magazine is not really much of an impediment to a well-trained shooter either. This is why we keep saying that assault weapons bans are stupid. The SKS is legal even in California, with it’s very severe Assault Weapons Ban. Even the new ban allows the SKS.
I also love how in these articles, they always talk about how quickly you can apply for a license. How long should it take? There’s only so much information they need to know to run a background check. You half expect if they aren’t asking you the name of your pet hamster when you were a kid, then it cannot, of course, be very thorough.
It sure would be nice if they actually took the time to understand how all this stuff works before writing about it.
