Category: Anti-Gun Folks

They pretty much say it:

I strongly urge House members to reflect deeply upon whom it is they are supposed to represent and protect, and oppose this tarnished legislation. I urge every American who wishes to be heard on the most important issues of our time to contact Congressional leaders and urge them to stop this proposal.

You know, I actually agree with the Brady Campaign on this, and will contact my reps and ask them to oppose the DISCLOSE act, as it stands. But I would note that the Bradys had no position on this legislation until it was no longer going to chain their opponents. I welcome them to the party, but view their interest in this opposition as entirely self-serving, or they would have been on the record sooner.

I’ve seen reports around from several blogs about the Brady Center scrubbing their association with Helen Thomas from their web site. The links still appear to work for me, which makes me wonder if they started to, and changed their mind once people were critical.

I’m going to be a contrarian on this one (surprise, I know) and suggest that the Brady Center scrubbing their association with Helen Thomas is the right thing to do. To be fair, they likely didn’t know about Helen Thomas’ insensitive views on the Jewish people when they gave her the “Visionary Award.” All they knew is that she was a fellow traveler who hated guns.

But the Bradys’ continued use of Thomas is, in my view, a tacit acceptance of what she said. Or at the least a strong indication they aren’t bothered enough by it to make a statement or distance themselves from it. If NRA had given a journalist an award, and they had then gone a few weeks later and made disparaging comments that, say, African-Americans should go back to Africa, I would be angry at NRA if they did not make a statement condemning those statements, or scrubbing any association with that person from their web site. I can’t get angry at Brady for doing what I would expect of NRA under similar circumstances. I hope they scrub every reference to Helen Thomas from their site. She deserves it.

Looks like the VPC is trying to smear Tennessee with the whole gun deaths meme. I notice that they only mention that gun deaths include suicides in passing, even though suicides represent the vast majority of their numbers. I did some analysis of violent crime compared to Brady state ranking a while back and found no correlation between Brady Grade and the levels of violent crime. VPC is trying to conflate the issue by arguing that more guns mean more gun deaths, when all they are showing is that in state with higher levels of gun ownership, more people choose to kill themselves with a gun. That’s not exactly shocking, and not exactly a compelling reason to limit access to guns. If you think about where government it leads — taking dangerous things away from people, because they might hurt themselves — it’s not a pretty place. Certainly not a free society. I don’t wish to live in a padded room. I suspect most other Americans don’t either.

Abby Spangler of Protest Easy Guns has successfully sponsored a soccer team. I don’t expect Matt Carmel will take this lying down. I wouldn’t be surprised if Matt wasn’t the genesis if this idea. No matter, I’d rather have 10 Matts on my side than 100 Abby Spanglers any day of the week. Maybe you guys will do better when you stop copying our side’s ideas. I might start to be impressed when Abby comes really close to getting Medicare to fund her gun ownership prevention ideas.

We’ve all heard by now the story of Helen Thomas making remarks indicating that she thinks Jews ought to leave Israel and go back to Germany and Poland:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQcQdWBqt14[/youtube]

A position I’m sure puts her in the good graces of Hamas and Hezbollah. Understandably she’s being dropped left and right, first by her speaking agency, and then even by a high school she was scheduled to speak at.

But remarkably silent in all this is the Brady Campaign, who recently honored Helen Thomas on the tenth anniversary of the Million Mom March:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY1CJewDM9Q[/youtube]

Also note the praise heaped on Thomas in their Facebook page. She’s an angry old dinosaur of the old media, and it’s time for her to retire. If this is the kind of woman Brady wants to associate themselves with, it’s their own business, but I think it’s a mistake. We might not agree with the Bradys on much, but I’d like to think we can all agree that an endorsement of ethnic cleansing goes beyond what most reasonable people ought to accept. If she were on my side, I would repudiate her. Will the Bradys take back her “Visionary Award.”  Or do the Brady’s accept Helen Thomas as a true visionary, ethnic cleansing and all? We’ll see.

UPDATE: Helen Thomas is retiring. Good riddance! I’m going to guess this is a graceful way for Hearst to end the relationship.

I wish we could make MAIG membership as toxic in Pennsylvania as it apparently is in Texas. Pennsylvania rivals Texas for top spot in terms of number of NRA members, but for some reason our members aren’t willing to hold politicians accountable to the degree Texans are.

“Anywhere in the civilized world you would be able to make the argument that everybody should be able to be against illegal guns. But we’re not in the civilized word. We’re in Texas,” said Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson.

Except that Mayors Against Illegal Guns has very little to do with illegal guns, and everything to do with repacking the same old agenda the Bradys have been pushing into a more palatable pill for politicians to try to swallow. Like gun control groups of the past, their means to stop illegal guns centers around making gun ownership more difficult and risky for the law abiding. There’s nothing new about that. It’s good to see Texans are seeing through the smoke and mirrors. I wish Pennsylvanians would too.

Josh Horwitz seems to be having issues with the fact that insurrectionist thinking is going mainstream. I hate to tell him this, but many of the ideas he rails against have always been mainstream. Take a look:

While America began as a revolution against the king of England, revolution turned out to be a terrible form of governing, Horwitz says. “There was no ability to tax, so (Gen.) Washington’s army starved. State legislatures had an immense amount of power. There were mobbings in every city with no central authority to put any (revolt) down. Militias formed and closed down the courts.”

This seems to be a tacit suggestion that perhaps we would have been better off staying under the British Crown. I have to wonder if Horwitz believes that. Because really, what Horwitz is rallying against is the very founding idea of this nation itself:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

If you had to pick one paragraph from the Declaration of Independence that you could say is really the philosophical basis of the United States of America, this is it. This was the sentence that gave birth to this nation. If the anti-gun people want to take the side of the loyalists, and suggest we ought to have remained under the British Crown, they are free to. But you can’t escape this passage. It is who we are, and it shouldn’t be surprising that people are still talking about it 234 years later.

What I can’t figure out is whether Horwitz is legitimately goofy about believing that folks who would suggest the Declaration of Independence is a blueprint for just revolution are just as radical and extreme as, say, a Timothy McVeigh, or whether he’s trying to chain the real extremists to those who are not in hopes that it pulls the whole issue under the water. If it’s the latter, he might want to rethink much of his rhetoric.

So says Eleanor Holmes Norton in a press release, opposing exemptions to DCs gun laws for active duty military:

“It is difficult to understand the obsession by some members of Congress with a congressional district that is not their own.  Worse, neither Mr. Gingrey, nor any other member of Congress, would tolerate interference with the local laws of their district.  Neither will I,” Norton said.  “However, Mr. Gingrey’s aim is transparent: to score political points at the expense of residents of the nation’s capital.”

Not their own? I could swear there being something in my copy of the constitution about Congress having the power, “To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States,” among other things. I don’t know what color the Constitution is in Eleanor Holmes Norton’s world, not even speaking of the sky, but Congress is vested by the constitution with ultimate authority over the District of Columbia, which means what goes on in The District, especially when it comes to constitutional issues, is most definitely Congress’ business.