Category: Anti-Gun Folks

This whole CeaseFirePA effort to become politically relevant is turning into comedy. Apparently, the reason Tom Corbett didn’t bother responding to the questionnaire was because he didn’t care for the endorsement. His campaign said the questionnaire was to be used for endorsement purposes. But CeaseFire is all about education, right?

In a follow-up interview, Grace said he’d made repeated overtures to Corbett’s campaign over the phone, through e-mail and in-person at a March debate at the National Constitution Center in Philly, to get the AG to play ball on the questionnaire.

At no time did the question of an endorsement come up, Grace said.

“It was clear as could be,” he said. “We were seeking that the Attorney General, as with all the candidates, respond to the questionnaire.”

At no time! Never did any talk of endorsement every come up. Not at all.

Except, when it did. John Micek noted that the cover letter of the questionnaire does specifically say that the questionnaire is about earning the anti-gun group’s endorsement.

What muddies the waters, however, is language on the cover letter of the questionnaire which reads thus:

“To be considered for endorsement by CeaseFirePa, please complete the questionnaire and return it to CeaseFirePA no later than February 26, 2010.”

In standard anti fashion, now they swear that it’s not what they meant. And they promise that even though they did talk about an endorsement, they didn’t really mean it.

It sounds a lot like how they jump around on the issue of gun bans, too. “We’re not for taking people’s lawfully owned guns! Except for anything we don’t like. And we don’t like rifles, shotguns, or handguns.”

Tip to Joe Grace & his anti-gun friends: It’s a lot easier to cover up your lies when you don’t lie in the first place.

It’s very telling that the anti-gun group in Pennsylvania is giving out positive grades for nothing more than acknowledging their existence. Sam Rohrer was willing to talk to CeaseFire PA, so they gave him a D. Tom Corbett blew them off, so they failed him.

I was chatting with a fellow activist who said, “I wonder what they give you if you talk to them and tell them to fuck off. D-?” I laughed.

Dennis Henigan is a bit upset that the media is running stories about kinder, gentler militias:

The Michigan militiamen must have regarded the NPR story as a spectacular success. According to NPR’s introduction to the story, the militia movement has “grown less violent in recent years.” Ms. Raston described the Southeast Michigan militia as “benign”.

This judgment seems to have lost the forest for the trees. To point out the obvious, it is possible to help the local sheriff find missing people, collect coats for needy kids, and adopt a local highway, without engaging in military training in the woods with assault weapons. One of the militiamen described his “battle gear” to Ms. Raston as including a rifle with four 30-round magazines, as well as a 9mm sidearm. These people may or may not be racist or paranoid as individuals, but what brings them together is an ideology that should be very troubling to most Americans. The militiamen believe that it is entirely legitimate to form a private army to prepare for armed conflict with our government.

Bravo, Dennis! We all are aware that preparing for armed conflict with your government has absolutely no historical root in the history of the United States. None whatsoever. It’s absolutely unthinkable that any people would even think about using violence against their own government. It is well known that governments are always legitimate, and it has never happened, in the history of man, that a legitimate government has become illegitimate. It just can’t happen! It certainly could never happen here, right?

Look, it’s not like I don’t think the militia movement is a bit silly. I don’t think a group of Americans can get together and declare themselves a legitimate constitutional militia any more than a group of Americans can get together and declare themselves a jury. There’s a certain governmental structure that’s historically gone along with militias in the United States.

Nonetheless, it’s a free country, and if a bunch of people want to get together and hold mock trials as a hobby, well, more power to them. It’s a legitimate exercise of their First Amendment freedoms, just as practicing shooting is a legitimate exercise of their Second Amendment freedoms. As long as they are not professing violent overthrow of the government, which the Michigan group is decidedly not, it’s within the realm of what the Second Amendment protects. I’ll leave Dennis with a quote from a dangerous proponent of militias:

The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? are they not ourselves. Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American. What clause in the state or federal constitution hath given away that important right…. The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.

We really have to do something about this dangerous militia thinking that’s recently made its way into our American discorse, that’s for sure! We can let them warp American History no longer!

Doesn’t look like the Brady’s are having much luck raising money scaring people with a funny parody on open carry activism. I guess Jon Stewart just isn’t scary enough to get the hysterical to open their wallets. The Brady Campaign have been pushing this via Twitter only, as best as I can tell, and so far with no luck. We’ll keep watching.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention, Starbucks Sales are up 7% too.

UPDATE: Looks like that figure is based on same store sales, and Starbucks closed 5% of their stores.

We’ve already seen the Brady Campaign partner with new media fundraising and organizational groups like Credo, who worked with them on the Starbucks Campaign. Now we notice they are working with a group called Karma411, which is a new mediaish fundraising group. They seem to have begun a campaign to try to raise money using the open carry issue as a lever to drive people’s interest in their cause.

I’m going to be watching this campaign closely. They’ve set a goal of 10,000 dollars. Will they reach it? So far they are only 20 dollars toward their goal. What I want to see is how much traction Brady gets with this issue. This is going to reveal some pretty critical pieces of information in relation to this fight:

• New media fundraising is going to give us some kind of idea how their message resonates with younger people, who are going to be the target audience of this new media message. If they can bring another generation into the gun control fight, that’s going to be beneficial to them in the long run.
• It give us some idea how much money there is in scaring people about open carry. We’ve documented here in thorough detail that the Brady folks are having difficulty raising money. Is this an issue they could use to turn that around? Is the issue dead, or is it just that they’ve been going about fundraising the wrong way?
• It gives us more information for our own internal debates about the issue. If Brady can’t raise any money on it, those of us who have been detractors of open carry as a strategy will have to accept that despite what the public may or may not think about it, it’s not an issue that is going to hurt us, because the other side can’t do much with it. On the other hand, if they beat their fundraising goals, that’s a critical piece of information that open carry might be motivating renewed interest in gun control.

None of this will be perfect or conclusive information, no matter what way it goes, because we don’t really know what karma411’s fundraising effectiveness is. Ten grand is a sideshow of a fundraising effort anyway, even for the Brady Campaign. But the important thing is the names they get from this can be used to raise further money. I’ll be curious to see how this turns out for them, because it’ll at least be an important bit of information we can use.

Disconnected is a very apt word, if you ask me, but it’s a masterful piece of gun control propaganda with the usual half-truths an omissions. I’ll take them one-by-one:

“Don’t Tread on Me Flags” on the Mall framed by flags at half-staff around the Washington Monument in memory of victims of terrorism since yesterday was the 15th Anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing by an anti-government NRA member who made the money to make his bomb by selling weapons at gun shows;

One variant of the “Dont Tread on Me” flag is our current Navy Jack. Surely that’s not a disconnect for flags flying at half staff, is it? Plus, if you read the book American Terrorist, you’ll find McVeigh quit the NRA because it was too soft, and went around to gun shows handing out hate literature, rather than selling guns to make money to buy his bomb. Considering his bomb was diesel fuel an fertilizer, I’m not sure how much it cost to buy it anyway. Either way, if he had worked at a gas station to make the money, we wouldn’t blame the gas station.

Speeches that focused less on guns and more on health care, the federal deficit, bailouts, and other decisions with which they disagreed with the very express implication that the reason they were carrying (or wanting to carry) their guns was because “the guys with the guns make the rules” (as stated by the NRA boss Wayne LaPierre last Spring after Obama took office);

Brady would love people to believe they were egging on extremists to take their guns and go out and “make the rules” but it was another group of extremists he was referring to.

Seeing guns carried in an area where Confederate troops may once have marched within view of the Capitol Dome which was being constructed when Lee and Davis and the Southern states decided that they wanted to “restore” a different understanding of the Constitution than that endorsed by Lincoln and the voters who elected him

Sure, get a few hidden hints at racism in there for good measure. Too bad the history is wrong, because pretty much all of Northern Virginia that was in artillery range of Washington D.C. was occupied by federal troops for the duration of the Civil War.

Seeing guns carried close enough to the Reagan National Airport (named after a President who was shot by a gunman in DC in 1981) where a 50 caliber sniper rifle (legal in this country and now allowed in national parks) might easily take out airplanes on the ground (or about to land or take off);

If the standard is being able to punch holes through the relatively thin aluminum skin of an aircraft, then no small arm short of maybe a .22 is acceptable to the Brady folks. But here you were with some of the most extreme people our movement has to offer, and no planes were shot down, no revolution got started, no one got shot, and they were polite:

And finally, being treated (for the most part) politely by people on a beautiful sunny day whose level of fear and paranoia seemed to reflect a dark view of society and our nation.

Surprised? I have disagreements with these folks on tactics, and I don’t agree with them that our government is anywhere close to being the kind of Government Jefferson spoke about in the Declaration of Independence. But our federal government is supposed to be one of limited and enumerated powers. Raise people to believe that, then suddenly change the rules and start telling them it’s really unlimited, I can’t blame them for being pissed. I’d hardly call urging a return to that state a “dark view.” They take to using guns as props in their political theater because they’ve been made to feel powerless and unrepresented by the political process. The reasons for that I think are complex, but why think about the topic seriously when you can use a few sentences to mold everything into the left’s narrative about the right, and particularly gun owners, being dangerous.

If there’s one thing that’s true about politicians is that they don’t want to come out and directly tell anyone “no.” They’ll beat around the bush and go about it in subtle ways. Such was the case with pro-gun Virginia Senator Jim Webb, but apparently Abby Spangler has a hard time reading between the lines, and ended up with a very public repudiation in the Washington Post. This is a big error on the part of Protest Easy Guns, and you can bet Webb’s office isn’t happy. This kind of thing has happened on our side too, so we shouldn’t get too proud, but generally, our folks do a better job of handling this kind of stuff. Perhaps Senator Webb will remember next time to speak in Abby’s language, with gratuitous use of the shift key.

From Roll Call:

Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group led by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino (D), is expected today to unveil a lobbying blitz to prod Congress to approve legislation that would require background checks on all firearm sales at gun shows.

The group will launch a six-figure media campaign that includes both national cable and selected state advertising spots as well as an online petition drive.

“The truth is the conventional wisdom is just wrong that you can’t do a gun issue,” said John Feinblatt, Bloomberg’s chief adviser for policy and strategic planning.

Six figures doesn’t buy you that much, but it’s still a threat. It shows that Bloomberg is willing to dump serious money into the issue in order to move the ball forward. NRA is very very good at playing the lobby and electioneering game. They are much less adept at media campaigns to shape public opinion. That’s always been the other side’s core strength against us.

In addition, there was a story last week about MAIG looking to hire an Ohio coalition coordinator with a $75,000 grant, much like Max Nacheman here in Pennsylvania. Let me tell you, Max is a tough, tough adversary for us here in Pennsylvania. This is not good news for Ohio activists.

They are trying to raise money on the Second Amendment rally:

Today, on the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, there’s a Second Amendment march on Washington. They’re not allowed to bring guns onto the National Mall, but if they had their way, someday they could march into Washington with guns at their sides. Unless we stop them.

I’ll remember this one next time I hear accusations from the other side that NRA raises money based on fear and ignorance.