The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
A few things of note:
Given the ease of transporting an iPhone vs. a laptop, I expect that Sebastian will be updating mostly via Twitter while he’s hanging out with other gun bloggers. If you don’t follow him on Twitter, you should.
I’m quite confident he’ll have more insightful commentary on the event other than the fact that Reno’s airport smells bad. Expect pictures live from the scene, too.
It’s getting harder and harder this day to navigate through the noise, Michael Silence quotes another blog post:
What was once this great way to connect with others, has become this never ending loop of barely keeping my head above the social media water line. I’ve literally lost sleep over the fact that I haven’t ever visited some of the my most loyal commenters or that I didn’t answer a question left in my comments section or that I have at all times at least two or three need-to-be-answered emails. My close friends’ blogs, I hardly have time to read those and when I do, my comments often amount to “great post,” which is apparently the “wrong” way to comment.
I can sympathize with new media overload. I find Facebook, for instance, absolutely impossible to keep up with. I check in occasionally, but no doubt I’m missing a lot. Twitter I actually enjoy and find useful. Â For activism, I think it’s far and away a superior tool over Facebook, and I’ll even say over blogs in many respects.
Back in the beginning days of my blogging career, I used to follow a prodigious number of blogs on a daily basis. Â Now I read some here, some there, during the week. Â The list of blogs I hit every day is less than ten now. Â In terms of finding out what other blogs were talking about, it’s easier to just follow a few aggregators, and use their editorial sense to find out what’s going on. Â The more you continue in blogging, the harder and harder it seems to get to keep up.
Kind of a last minute thing, but I will be attending the Gun Blogger Rendezvous IV next week out in Reno, Nevada.  So last minute I’m worried my registration won’t make its way through the postal system to Mr. C before he actually heads out there.  My job situation has been less than secure (who’s isn’t these days?), so I’m reluctant to make big commitments of money far in advance.  But it looks good for now, so I can go.
BTW, the raffle for the Para GI Expert ends today, so if you want a chance to win the gun, you have to buy a ticket before midnight. Â You don’t have to be going to GBR to win. Proceeds benefit Soldiers’ Angels.
Via Joe Huffman, John Fogh of Insight Training Center in Seattle has started to blog about training related topics, with a link to Robb. Â It’s good to see folks in the training industry doing new media outreach. Â One of my chief criticisms of new media efforts by established organizations in the issue has been the lack of outreach to pre-existing communities within new media that could help get them out there. Â That doesn’t necessarily need to mean links, but it does mean building relationships, and links are one way to do that. Â They are also a way to get the community to pay attention. Â Good on Insight for starting off on the right footing.
SayUncle has turned seven. Â I’ve been following for about 5 or 6 of those years.
I’ve been rather surprised by some of the reaction to my commentary over the past few days, with several commenters seeming to suggest that I just want to shut people up, and it’s my way or the highway. Perhaps I need to reconsider how I approach topics, and how I communicate. But I do want to make one thing clear to everyone. All I am is a dude with a blog. I can’t stop someone from doing the kind of activism they feel good about doing, even if I wanted to. I don’t presume to exercise control over anyone.
But I do have strong opinions on what kind of tactics work and what kind of tactics don’t, and what kind of organization promotes success, and what kind or organization is doomed to failure. As a community of people who share goals and interests, it’s important to have those kinds of conversations without having folks take it personally, or feeling that my disagreement about the effectiveness over their preferred tactic is meant to be personal. It’s not.
Tactical disagreements are always going to be ambiguous, because each side in the disagreement is essentially arguing that they are able to analyze a complex and changing system to such a degree that the outcome is clear. I think in this past example, no one would have predicted the Obama White House would come out and endorse armed protesters. I certainly did not predict it, and that was probably the major factor that made this incident turn out well for us in the end.
I don’t ask that everyone agree with me, but I do ask that people argue with me on the same terms that I would argue with them. I would also ask that there be no dogma, or sacred cows in this issue. This reminds me of something I recently read in “Rules for Radicals,” in Alinsky’s description of the qualities of an effective organizer:
To the questioner, nothing is sacred. He detests dogma, defines any finite definition of morality, rebels against any repression of a free, open search for ideas no matter where they may lead. He is challenging, insulting, agitating, discrediting. He stirs unrest. As with all life, this is a paradox, for his irreverence is rooted in a deep reverence for the enigma of life, and an incessant search for its meaning.
Maybe we could all take a lesson from that, and agree that though we may sometimes piss each other off, none of us really has all the answers.
I’ve been hearing “decades long slow-motion hate crime,” to describe what’s happened to gun owners, for a long time now, which prompted me to see if the origin of the term could be found. I found a few sources. One is this quite excellent essay by Dr. Michael S. Brown called “The Radicalization of America’s Gun Culture.” But there, Dr. Brown only mentions:
American gun owners feel as if they are being slowly crushed. One writer recently described this decades-long campaign as a slow motion hate crime.
So he’s attributing it to someone else. That essay is from September of 2000, so I would be looking for a primary source around that time. I think I might have found it. This is actually an article on Canadian gun control by Dave Kopel from August of 2000, which was only a month before Dr. Brown’s article was published:
In short, Canadian gun control is a sort of slow-motion hate crime, perpetrated by the government. The real purpose is to harm a minority whom the government dislikes. In the United States, one need only attend a few anti-gun rallies — especially rallies put on by the dishonestly named Million Mom March — to find plenty of anti-gun activists for whom hatred is obviously the guiding value.
Given that it’s not attributed, and the passing manner in which it’s stated, I think it’s safe to say this is quite likely the primary source for the blog meme which has survived nearly a decade now.
It would appear that Jim Shepherd heard us this morning and issued a correction about the source of rumors of Daniel Defense. It was based on email rumors within the industry, not anything in the blogosphere. Jim explains that he has mistakenly used the term blogosphere to describe the internet as a whole. I’m happy to see a resolution, and hopefully this will raise the positive profile of the blogosphere as a whole. Given some of the facepalm moments of the recent NSSF summit that was trying to encourage new media use by the participating companies and groups, you can see why getting these things right is important.
Congratulations to Stuck in Massachusetts, and all the other responsible bloggers, for a succesfull blogger shoot. I especially love Marko‘s nametag. It’s made of win. For those who don’t get the reference, see here.