Category: Anti-Gun Folks

Days of our Trailers has done a good job of covering this last week, first with some of the local Illinois groups also merging, and consolidating under umbrella groups, like we saw with CeaseFire New Jersey merging under a peace group umbrella. Also, he’s found that Joyce is cutting VPC’s funding by a fairly significant amount.

It’s going to be painful days ahead for the gun control movement, as their funding dries up. This does not mean the gun control movement is going away, or that we can declare “Machine guns for everyone!” and wrap this whole thing up in a few years. The gun control movement is reinventing itself, as it has many times throughout its history. Expect more groups appearing under the MAIG model. Not necessarily with mayors, but in terms of rebranding their same gun control proposals as a crusade against “illegal guns” and “illegal gun trafficking.” Will it be any more successful than the current banner they march under? Who knows. We can’t take any chances, however. I will say this, MAIG has shown themselves to be smart enough that when the pendulum swings back, it’s going to swing hard. Our job is to make sure it never swings back.

Now that new media has freed MAIG’s Blueprint for Screwing Gun Owners, his eminence the Mayor has decided to grace the public with the document, according to the Brooklyn Eagle:

The report, entitled Blueprint for Federal Action on Illegal Guns, was sent to President Obama and key members of his administration last August and is being publicly released in the New Year.

How nice of him. I guess since we already made it public, he can pretend like transparency was his plan all along. It’s amazing how much these worms argue for things like openness and transparency out of one side of their mouths, then conspire in secret when it suits them. At least until someone flips on the light switch and the cockroaches scatter.

Previously, 13 Representatives and both Senators from Pennsylvania signed on to the pro-McDonald Congressional brief. Only two members out of the other six of the Pennsylvania delegation have decided to formally stand on the wrong side of history.

It isn’t a shock that Congressmen Bob Brady (D, PA-01) and Chakah Fattah (D, PA-02) joined Carolyn McCarthy’s brief filed in favor of upholding Chicago’s gun ban. In it, the Congressmen made the bizarre arguments that federal restrictions on fully automatic firearms dating from the 1930s clearly show that the current handgun ban is constitutional. To further their “evidence,” they cite previous federal laws that merely acknowledge the existence of state firearms laws – such as those banning the use of firearms by violent felons – as reason to consider an outright ban to be legal. In fact, the entire premise of their brief seems to be that the existence of some laws that pertain to guns clearly means that gun bans are fine and dandy. They seem to forget the Court made clear inHeller that bans are not merely legally debatable restrictions. While I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on tv, I do have to wonder how any attorney could write that brief with a straight face.

The following Pennsylvania Representatives were too scared to take any side in the case:

• Kathleen Dahlkemper (D, PA-03)
• Joe Sestak (D, PA-07)
• Allyson Schwartz (D, PA-13)
• Mike Doyle (D, PA-14)

I started to wonder if old Joe Sestak finally realized he was far too left-wing for Pennsylvania. Then I realized that he probably never saw the memo to sign up for McCarthy’s brief since he is campaigning full-time (literally).

Something odd has been happening on the Brady Twitter feed since yesterday afternoon.

Hashtags
They’ve gone full-on partisan with their tweets. Of their last 23 tweets, 21 have been labeled with either the #Democrats, #Liberal, or #p2 (progressive) hashtags.

I’m not naive enough to believe that most of their staff aren’t Democrats, but come on. One of the reasons they touted when they hired Helmke could be summed up as, “Lookie, we found a Republican who also hates guns. See, we’re bipartisan!” But with Rasmussen finding the number of self-identifying Democrats at an all time low last month and the number of self-identifying Republicans inching up to meet those numbers, it would seem like a bad idea to instantly wipe out half of your potential pool of support by tagging all of your commentary as geared for only Democrats.

I also would not suggest that it’s unwise to never use appropriate hashtags, even if they are party oriented. For example, if writing something about a Democratic Party activity, that would be a responsible and reasonable use. If complaining about Barack Obama, it might be relevant to use the party hashtag. But to label fundraising tweets, blog posts that aren’t political, and every other topic as for #Democrats only, that’s just madness for any group to do. Since it’s the Brady Bunch, I’ll just mock them. But if NRA started labeling tweets with party designation indiscriminately, I would hit the roof. I would be making every phone in Fairfax ring off the hook. Of course, that’s what happens when you have actual grassroots, not just donors who get a mailing once a year.

Service Use
During the holidays when DC basically shuts down, the Brady development staff hijacked the twitter account to send out tweets begging for donations. They abused it a little bit by sending them out too often and without any other good content, but I do applaud them for using HootSuite to both schedule their tweets and (assuming they were using it to the full ability) tracking which posts got clicks and resulted in donations. Lord knows how many times I’ve begged the daytime staff handling @NRANews to do the same thing so that they don’t flood my twitter stream with 10 posts at a time. If they just gave like a 20 minute buffer between news items, it wouldn’t be so bad.

But during the last day, the Brady feed has been updating every hour or so. They are also using a different shortner service that’s so underused, Twitter doesn’t even have its name featured in the tweets. (When using HootSuite, the tweets say that they are posted by that service, same with Seesmic and pretty much all other reputable sites.) Why make the sudden switch from a service so well-respected that even the White House uses it to some no name service? Why go from carefully timed posting to posting every single hour, even when there is no news?

Regurgitating Really Old Stuff
Whoever took over the Twitter account believes that all of the Democratic-only Brady supporters are best served by relinking really old blog posts that are more than a month old. Yes, the big breaking news late last night was Dennis Hennigan’s whine from early December that gun owners didn’t like his book. Or the equally urgent breaking news from December 10 that there was a memorial for police officers who have died in the line of duty hosted by a law enforcement group.

It’s not that I want to see the Brady Campaign succeed in meeting their mission, but man I have to wonder what kind of crack they are smoking in that office to think that posting month-old news every hour and limiting their posts to only attract the attention of Democrats is a good idea for their cause. I would love to pick the brain of the person responsible. Did Peter Hamm & Paul Helmke go on a new year vacation together and leave the interns in charge? Or did Helmke finally switch parties and decide to dive in by using the Brady Twitter feed to celebrate? What happened that made them go nuts with this social media abuse? Curious minds want to know…

Hat tip to reader Carl from Chicago for pointing out this hilarious poor choice of words on the part of the Joyce Foundation:

I’m sure what they meant to say was research into ways to ensure that guns are only owned by the law abiding, but it can be read another way, which humorously is closer to Joyce’s actual position on private ownership of firearms.

They say loophole, I say freedom. Story is that a Milwaukee gun dealership was sold to other owners, and got to “keep” their FFL (in reality, the new owners were issued a new FFL). What is the Brady solution to this so called loophole? Do we punish the premises? No gun shop can open on that property, because pretty clearly it’s a bad property, right? Do we punish the name?  No one can ever again operate a gun shop called “Badger Guns” again? Because clearly the name is evil. The article goes on to describe how liquor regulations work, and suggests that maybe FFLs should be treated more like liquor distributors, but liquor distribution is a different kind of business, and regardless, it’s misleading to suggest that the type of arrangement Badger has should be in any way illegal. Here’s the actual criteria for licensing, without any editorial filtering from the media. ATF regulations state that upon receipt of a properly executed Form 7, the application shall be approved provided:

(1) The applicant is 21 years of age or over;

(2) The applicant (including, in the case of a corporation, partnership, or association, any individual possessing, directly or indirectly, the power to direct or cause the direction of the management and policies of the corporation, partnership, or association) is not prohibited under the provisions of the Act from shipping or transporting in interstate or foreign commerce, or possessing in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition, or from receiving any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce;

(3) The applicant has not willfully violated any of the provisions of the Act or this part;

(4) The applicant has not willfully failed to disclose any material information required, or has not made any false statement as to any material fact, in connection with his application; and

Three generally means you haven’t had an FFL revoked before. How much malfeasance does this standard really allow for? How is this a “loophole?”  What could you possible do that would fix this, without adopting an absurd standard? One would imagine the Brady Campaign cares little, as long as it means more gun shops closing down.

Joe notes the begging has continued, and has some interesting videos, which I really hope are supposed to be parodies.

Cemetery is reporting that Jersey City Mayor Healy is being sued by the former head of the parking authority. The suit alleges that he was fired by the Mayor because he refused to stop issuing Healy parking tickets in advance of his re-election campaign.