Sebastian – Page 95 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Why Carrying Pepper Spray is a Good Idea

I’ve been an advocate of carrying defensive spray for a while now, because there are plenty of situations where you’re justified in using spray, but are not even close to a deadly force situation. Such a case recently occurred at a Donald Trump rally:

The link above has more video from different angles, including one where she admits she had it coming. She got sprayed as soon as she threw a punch. If one punches a hippie in the face and cause serious injury, the cops might feel they have to do something, even if it’s just questioning to sort out who did what. You’ll notice the cops escorted her out, but didn’t make any arrest. I’m not honestly sure who employed the spray. Defensive spray is a very low level of force, and far less likely to cause long term consequences for either party in an altercation. If you’re in a situation like this where both parties are alleging assault, you’re far less likely to end up in real trouble with spray as you would if you used a higher level of force.

UPDATE: Looks like it wasn’t the guy who was punched who responded with the spray after all. I’ve watched the video from a few angles, and I don’t see where she was justified in throwing the punch, but with the other guy doing it, it’s not as clear cut a case of self-defense. It’s going to be a case of he said she said.

Fundamentally Transformed

Bitter and I were talking this morning about how this doesn’t feel like the same country as it was a decade ago. It’s easy to blame Obama, given his penchant for trolling middle America, but I think the problem goes deeper than that. It’s easy to blame Cable News and Talk Radio, but those all existed for several decades, and it didn’t make people all that much nastier. Some might argue that it’s the result of the self-esteem generation coming of age, but I don’t think things get this bad this quickly with generational turnover.

Early on in the Trump phenomena, I read “It’s like the comment sections of the Internet came alive and decided to run for President.” I think that in a strange way that is actually true, because what I blame for the divisiveness and nastiness in today’s society is Social Media. Mark Zuckerberg is probably just as much to blame as Barack Obama. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is indisputably true. The polite term for this is the Online Disinhibition Effect. We’ve been dealing with this for longer than Twitter and Facebook have been around too, but what Twitter and Facebook do far better than any other predecessor is making it possible to keep in touch with your circles of friends, neighbors, co-workers and relatives without the need for face-to-face interaction.

Face-to-face you will probably be far more inclined to soften your views somewhat, and respond to non-verbal cues of the people on the other side of the conversation. They’ll also have a better read. The reason I think our politics is getting nasty is that we’re interacting with people face-to-face less, and online more. Almost everyone has an extreme view or two, and a many folks aren’t afraid to share it, rough edges in full view, to all their friends on Facebook. I think it’d probably go a long way to fixing political discourse, among other things, if we got off social media and started talking to people in person more often.

Carry at GOP Convention Was Never Going to Happen

The media has been going nuts over the story that a petition is being circulated to allow carry at the GOP convention. This was in the realm of “never going to happen,” and the reason why has just revealed itself. Even at the NRA Annual Meeting, where despite media lies you can actually carry, when the Secret Service comes to a venue with a candidate under their protection, there’s no carry and there’s security checkpoints at the entrance to the venue. You’ll almost certainly see that at work in Louisville this year.

Civil Rights Victory in Mariana Islands

The Second Amendment Foundation has won a victory in federal court, with a ruling that overturns the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI) ban on handguns. Given that this was an outright ban, not much different from DC’s or Chicago’s, it would have taken some pretty convoluted logic, or just outright ignoring the Supreme Court, to argue that the ban could stand. CNMI is part of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

This can still be appealed, but given the direct congruence to Heller & McDonald, I doubt even the liberal 9th Circuit would overturn it. I agree with NRA-ILA’s analysis that warns not to get hopes up over the decision in Caetano v. Massachusetts. We have two votes on the Supreme Court for a robust Second Amendment. Two. Caetano made that clear. The only way we’re going to get more is to win elections.

UPDATE: I’m told the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund also contributed to this case.

Idaho Becomes 9th Constitutional Carry State

The Governor of Idaho, Butch Otter, has signed Constitutional Carry into law. It’s worth noting that this only applies to residents. So it’s really almost-but-not-quite constitutional carry. Still, it’s an improvement over the status quo, so I’ll take it. We’ve shown we can go back and improve things later. Bloomberg pulled out all the stops to defeat this bill, and we schlonged him. Pennsylvania was one of the pioneering states in shall-issue carry with a license, and we’re quickly being outdone by other states in this area.Â Arizona was the first big state with a big city to pass Constitutional Carry. We probably need another one, like Florida or Texas to pass it. Texas lagged behind the shall-issue licensed concealed carry movement, while Florida was a leader. Virginia wouldn’t be a bad pickup either.

Weekly Gun News – Edition 31

Happy Friday, and welcome to another issue of gun news. Even in slow weeks, there’s usually a lot of stuff that’s news, some of it is even interesting, but I just don’t have much to add. I don’t want the blog to go all Instapundit, or to bogart SayUncle’s style, but I do worry that some news gets stale by the time it ends up here. Here’s some hopefully not too terribly stale news:

Idaho now has a constitutional carry bill on the Governor’s desk. I’m not popping any champaign corks yet. Even Republican governors have vetoed these bills. If you live there, I’d call.

Now that Chris Christie is out of the race, this guy is probably screwed. Careful when you leave America.

The LA Times does a profile piece on NRA News’s Cam Edwards.

No anti-Second Amendment litmus test for Sander’s nominee for SCOTUS.

Long term, hunting is doomed if hunters don’t stop this shit.

Also, in Iowa, a silencer legalization bill hits the Governor’s desk.

Shocker: “the study has proven so flawed that the most influential members of the anti-gun research community have been forced to denounce it; lest the public realize the larger problems attendant to the entire field of study.”

Church joins fight for Nevada gun control ballot initiative. You know, if Churches are going to do this, maybe they should lose their tax exemption.

Well, the Supreme Court’s new stun gun case should have put an end to this argument: “Mark Hamill: You Have the Right to Bear Muskets, Only Muskets.”

I wouldn’t let this happen without a protest if I were a Michigan gun rights activist.

This gun control bill has gone down to defeat in Tennessee. MiguelÂ explains why it was such a bad one.

As a famous gun blogger likes to say:Â Like you and me, only better.

Remember, they are just peace loving people who want to save lives!

Eugene Volokh comments on Caetano.

I don’t know if this is NRA trolling, or it’s meant to be serious. If it’s trolling, kudos. It’s upsetting the hand wringers.

Should you put slogans on your AR?

They have to believe it’s about the money, because otherwise instead of fighting evil corporations, they are working to take away something important to their fellow citizens, which would make them horrible people, rather than heroes, and they want to think themselves heroes.

John Farnam on Open Carry.

Really, a decent holster or lockbox isn’t that expensive. lawyers are much more expensive:Â Charges have been filed against Jamie Gilt, the Florida mother who was shot by her 4 year old.

Blue on blue: Obama attacked from the left for being the best arms salesman ever.

Off Topic:

Remember, Republicans only believe in federalism when it benefits the opposition’s pet projects. They are fine with destroying federalism when it benefits their pet projects, like pandering to some good old fashioned law-and-order populism.

Campaign Against GOP Senators on Scalia Replacement Fizzling

The campaign to pressure Republicans to confirm Merrick Garland seems to be fizzling. As Glenn Reynolds noted, “Because everyone knows the Dems would do the same thing if parties were reversed.”

This whole business is depressing. If the Dems win the White HouseÂ in 2016, we’ll get worse, and that may be the end of a meaningful Second Amendment. I think we have two real votes for a meaningful Second Amendment on the court: Thomas and Alito. Scalia was the third, but he’s gone now. I didn’t think there was anything radical about the Alito and Thomas concurring opinion in the Stun Gun Case, yet it’s interesting that neither Kennedy nor Roberts joined it. My perception, I hope I’m wrong but fear I’m right, is that the reason there’s been no certiorari granted on any of the gun cases is because the Heller majority had two weak links. Heller and McDonald may very well be the best Scalia could extract from his colleagues who formed the five justice majority in those cases.

Our best case scenario is quickly shaping up to be President Trump picking Scalia’s replacement. I don’t know if that scares you, but it scares the hell out of me. Makes you think that maybe McCain & Romney weren’t such bad guys after all.

Is the Increasing Number of Women in Shooting a Myth?

Bloomberg’s propaganda branch can whine all they want about the General Social Survey. No one who’s been in this issue for any appreciable amount of time doesn’t believe more women are becoming gun owners. Gun shows around here used to be a sausage fest, and now you see the whole family out, women included. There are a lot more women at the NRA Annual Meeting exhibit floor than there was when I started attending yearly in 2007. I’m seeing more women members joining our club. They can argue it’s anecdotal all they want, but everybody who regularly deal with the ordinary gun-owning public is reporting the same thing.

The problem with the General Social Survey, and other surveys like it, is that it doesn’t measure actual gun ownership. It measures the number of people who are willing to tell a pollster they own guns. You can even see it in their graph: when gun owners are under attack, the numbers go down. When the crisis passes, they go back up. There are plenty of people who will not answer to a stranger they own firearms.

They are in denial because if they lose women, they lose their movement. Women have been the drivers of gun control, traditionally, and with more of them coming over to our side, it will put them in desperate straits. In truth, as long as Bloomberg is willing to continue single-handedly funding the gun control movement, it’ll continue to harass us and our rights, but without women, harassing us is about all they can hope for. They won’t succeed in their real goal, which is the destruction of those rights.

Why Not Reduce The Court to 7 Justices?

There’s a lot of concern that if Hillary, Bernie, or Joe Biden put in as pinch hitter for an indicted Hillary win in 2016, our goose is cooked as far as the Supreme Court go. But it’s not written in stone that the Supreme Court must have nine justices. Originally, there were six justices. Congress then added additional justices as we added federal circuit courts until it reached ten. Then in 1866, Congress passed the Judicial Circuits Act which said the next three justices to retire would not be replaced. That didn’t last long before in 1869, the number was returned to nine, which is where it remains today.

If the court were reduced back to 7, Scalia would not be replaced, and the next justice to die or retire likewise would not be replaced. You have two Dem appointees on the Court who are getting up there in the years (Breyer and Ginsburg), one Republican (Kennedy), and Thomas isn’t getting any younger either. It would seem to me that would preserve the balance on the court, and lower the stakes somewhat. But I think both sides like the high stakes, and therefore I don’t think this will ever happen.

Follow Up on Trump Poll

First let me apologize for my broken polling plugin. It works OK if you’re logged in, so I didn’t notice it was broken for those who were not logged in. A lot of WordPress plugins are hot garbage, unfortunately. But I wanted to follow up on some themes from Trump supporters. I am not becoming a Trump supporter myself. Both my preferred candidates are out of the race by this point, and I have no intention of voting for Trump (or perhaps anyone) in the primary because I just don’t trust him, and that’s a low bar as applied to politicians. But I do want to learn the lessons of the Trump phenomena, something that the GOP would be wise to do themselves.

I’ve come to believe the success of Trump in the GOP primary rests on three legs of a gold plated, terrific, really the best stool ever. The first is outrage with the left. A lot of working class voters were fooled by Obama, believing he’d improve their lot after the financial crisis. Eight years later, and it’s very good to be upper middle class, but for everyone else, things have only gotten worse. The people supporting this leg are rough-around-the edges-working class types, and they are not ideologues.Â These are the folks most receptive to anti-immigration anti-free-trade rhetoric. These are the people who didn’t show for Romney.

The second leg is outrage with the GOP beltway insiders. Even before Trump came along, I’ve long thought that the GOP would do itself a huge favor if it would hire a consultant to go down K street with a flamethrower, rather than hiring consultants to help talentless hacks lose elections. For better or worse, Trump is the first guy to come along in some time that actually has genuine raw political talent. Rubio has talent in abundance too, but Rubio also listened to a lot of talking heads and K-street hacks about how to brand himself for this race, and it was all wrong. A monkey could have told you it was all wrong.Â The GOP has not had anyone in the White House not named Bush since Reagan, and all the losing candidates have tried to follow the Bush model on how to win.Â I’ve never been of the opinion the Bush family have remarkable political talents and instincts. In fact, they are about as responsible for Trump as Obama.

The third leg is Trump enthusiastic rejection of political correctness. He says what he wants and gets away with it. There are a lot of people out there who have felt afraid to speak their mind because of the stifling conformity and groupthink demanded by the left. The downside to this is Trump has freed people to speak that I really wish wouldn’t (such as genuine racists and xenophobes). But I think supporters believe Trump is the path to ending the current wave of political correctness. They want to win back some legitimacy for their views.

Let me conclude that I don’t believe all the chicken little predictions that Trump will lose in a landslide to Hillary, and that he’ll throw all the down ticket races to the Democrats, and the seas will rise and skies will blacken. If Trump, or really anyone,Â can manage to win an election without K-street and the GOP think tanks in their corner (i.e. the real GOPe), they’re done, and they know it. There’s a lot of money made in losing elections for talentless hacks, and less but still good money in flushing real talent down the sewer with focus grouped poll tested bullshit (like they did with Rubio). You can bet they will stop at nothing to prevent anyone from strangling their golden egg laying goose. When he first appeared on the scene, I had hoped Rubio could be the guy who gave the finger to these hacks, and tried to go it on instinct, but unfortunately he disappointed.

Again, I am not a Trump supporter. I am interested in understanding his candidacy as someone who has followed politics closely for a long time.