Category: Anti-Gun Folks

Abby Spangler, head of Protest Easy Guns, seems to have gender issues. Bitter and I have been giving her a bit of a hard time on Twitter with some of the things she’s been saying about “men with guns.” This is representative of something we’ve seen a few times from Abby:

And to Starbucks corporate management: How’s it feel to be kissing up to guys carrying guns drinking your coffee? FEEL GOOD? Wouldn’t you rather be kissing up to the women of America? FEEL OUR HEAT at Saturday’s Starbucks protest. All are welcome.

So no women carry guns eh? Even though they are the fastest growing category of concealed carry license holders? Look at Arizona’s statistics? Sorry, not all men, and lots of women.

She obviously wasn’t at Cafe Berlin in DC, after the McDonald oral arguments on Tuesday. Sandy Froman was kind enough to invite us out to lunch with NRA’s General Counsel folks and Dave Hardy. There were ten of us, and five were women, four of whom are accomplished attorneys. One of them, Sandy, is also a past President of the National Rifle Association. These are women, Abby, not men, and they are all thoroughly dedicated to protecting the rights of other women to keep and bear arms. This isn’t about “men with guns.” It never has been. Time to turn off the caps lock and get real.

UPDATE: More sexism here. This being promoted by the Brady Campaign, no less.

I decided to run the Brady State Rankings through Excel, and see if there was any correlation to violent crime rates. The short answer, no. You can see the scatter chart here:

I’m no good at Excel charting, so what I did was plot the violent crime rate (per 100,000) for each state (y-axis) against its Brady Grade (x-axis). I’ve seen folks picking certain data from one side or another to support the assertion that Brady rank means higher violent crime. In truth, there’s no correlation. If you run the r-squared correlation on the two data sets, you get 0.0005, which is effectively uncorrelated. This shouldn’t make anyone at the Brady Campaign too excited, because while it would seem that passing gun control laws doesn’t make violent crime go up, it doesn’t make it go down either. There’s a much stronger correlation, for instance, between annual mean temperature of a state, and violent crime, which means global warming will surely kill us all.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that Justice Breyer seems to want a statistical based test for scrutiny for the Second Amendment. From the McDonald oral argument transcripts:

There are two ways. One is that — look at — all you have to do is look at the briefs. Look at the statistics. You know, one side says a million people killed by guns. Chicago says that their — their gun law has saved hundreds, including and they have statistics — including lots of women in domestic cases. And the other side disputes it. This is a highly statistical matter. Without incorporation, it’s decided by State legislatures; with, it’s decided by Federal judges.

I wonder how he would interpret this pretty damning data on the effectiveness of gun control laws.

If you are anywhere near Seattle, you should stop by the flagship Starbucks store around 10:30am and order some food or drink. Then maybe you should let the manager know that you think the people outside are nuts and you hope they don’t get involved in politics with those weird people lying on the ground.

Why are you Seattle folks feeling like a little Starbucks from the original location today around 10:30am? Because Abby Spangler just announced her next lie-in today. She’s outraged that Starbucks has refused to make a political statement on her pet issue. There’s also going to be a Brady press conference, where they will present their petition. So let’s make sure that enough paying customers speak up and just ask that Starbucks stick to coffee and leave the politics to the DC-based groups.

Interestingly, the Brady Campaign doesn’t even care about this enough to bother letting their fans know about it.

As much as I might be a proponent of transparency in Government, I have no sympathy here:

A coalition of gun violence prevention groups in Virginia (Protest Easy Guns, the Virginia Center for Public Safety, the Virginia Chapters of the Million Mom March, and the Angel Fund) strongly condemns the decision of the House Militia, Police and Public Safety Committee to hold a surprise subcommittee meeting last night to pass HB 49, a bill that would repeal Virginia’s one-handgun-per-month law.

Late last week, the subcommittee, chaired by Del. Thomas C. Wright, had announced that it would conduct no further meetings, leaving HB 49 unreported.  Yesterday, late in the day, the subcommittee inexplicably reconvened with less than a few hours notice to the public to approve this single piece of legislation.

You did this to us for decades, and now paybacks are hell. They raise the specter of Virginia Tech, but fail to mention that the killer there bought two guns in compliance with the rationing law.

The VPC is hawking their most recent in their series of “Google Studies” proposes, this time, to show a massive increase in violence against law enforcement officers using so-called “assault weapons” in the past two years. What are Google Studies, you might ask? Anything you have to add this kind of disclaimer to:

The information described in the following pages is based on a compilation derived from multiple searches using a variety of terms (“assault weapons” and “assault rifles,” for example) of reports published in U.S. news media and included in the commercial database Nexis between March 1, 2005 and February 28, 2007. Stories that recounted firearm-related events outside of those date ranges were discarded. For example, if a story within the date range reported an appellate decision or trial of a shooting that occurred prior to the date range, that story was eliminated.

Here all this time I’ve been compiling the very same terms on Google (though, I will admit I don’t have access to Nexis), I could have been releasing study after study. Of course, if you read the whole study, they don’t claim this to be scientific, or comprehensive, though you can bet they won’t mention that part when they pitch this to their media contacts, and you can absolutely bet on their media contacts not bothering to actually read the study, or include said disclaimers in whatever stories they write about the latest menace caused by semi-automatic rifles.

They also blame us for the dearth of information available on the evil “gun lobby”. But you know, if they hadn’t used that information in the past to try to sue gun manufacturers, dealers, and anyone else involved in the firearms business out of business, we wouldn’t be in this situation, would we? I don’t think too many of us are against the government doing studies, or tracking data. What we are against is that data being used to crap all over our rights by groups like HCI and VPC.

This article provides a bit of history on some of the Chicago-area gun bans. It turns out that the widow of a man shot became so obsessed with blaming the gun that the very night her husband was shot, the first thing she wanted to do was organize a press release to go out in the morning calling for a gun ban.

A major segment of the case began, however, not with lofty constitutional quarrels but the long-ago murder of a lawyer and judge in a Chicago courtroom. It was Oct. 21, 1983, when wheelchair-bound Hutchie Moore, using a handgun he had hidden under a blanket, shot his ex-wife’s divorce lawyer, James Piszczor, as well as the presiding judge in the Cook County Circuit Court, Henry Gentile, on the 16th floor of the Daley Center.

Piszczor’s best friend, Christopher Walsh, was in Washington attending a reunion of clerks to then-Chief Justice Warren Burger, when he heard of Piszczor’s death. …

“I flew back that night,” Walsh recalled last week. “Jim’s wife, Maureen, asked me to issue a press release the next morning.” In that release, Piszczor’s widow launched a drive to restrict handguns in their hometown of Oak Park, Ill., a Chicago suburb. “She said that part of the problem that led to Jim’s death was access to handguns, and she didn’t want another widow to have to deal with what she was dealing with.”

I realize that people deal with death differently, so I’m going to try not to judge here. However, I really can’t imagine a circumstance where the very night that my other half was killed, my reaction would be to go into political activist mode and send out press releases.

Regardless, it worked. And it stood for more than two decades.

I totally missed this, and I don’t recall seeing it other places. Apparently Freedom States Alliance got eaten up by another gun control group last week.

At the Heeding God’s Call Facebook Page:

The purpose of the page is promote the work of Heeding God’s Call and to announce upcoming actions and activities. Attempts at turning it into a blog to be used for trash-talking and hostile notes regarding our mission has caused us to make this decision. Please continue to check in regularly for updates and news.

It’s their sandbox. I will give them that. But it’s just one more example of shutting down debate when they are called out for their bullshit. This has become almost routine by now.

UPDATE: They claim that 60 people turned out in support of their cause, even though we heard from reports yesterday that the total was less than that, and that most of them were Second Amendment supporters.