The Brady Center seems to be pretty desperate for donations. Four pleas for donations to their 501(c)(3) in the past day. A pity half the folks who follow the Twitter feed are more likely to donate to the NRA Foundation, or Second Amendment Foundation, if they are looking to make tax deductible contributions to round out the tax year.
Category: Anti-Gun Folks
King Bloomberg of New York
Bloomberg is apparently looking for ways to further erode term limits for New York Mayor. Considering what he had to spend to barely eke out a win in the last election, maybe if he runs a few more times he won’t have any money left to fund MAIG. Of course, that would presuming he was using his own money, which he’s not.
On Justice Jackson’s Famous Quote
The Brady folks really need to give up their reliance on ignorance to get their point across, especially when that forum allows for comments, and their claims can be easily debunked. A good example of this is the case they bring up here:
To the contrary, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote 60 years ago, the Constitution is not a “suicide pact”:
No liberty is made more secure by holding that its abuses are inseparable from its enjoyment…The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact….
Justice Jackson wrote this in a First Amendment case. Yet while many may disagree over how to apply his principle to questions of free speech, the issue should be clear when it comes to access to firearms.
Speech is used to express ideas. Firearms are used to kill over 30,000 Americans every year and wound another 80,000.
So because surely the constitution is not a suicide pact in a First Amendment context, than it surely isn’t one in a Second Amendment context, right? That means we can just ignore all that nasty stuff like due process. The problem is Terminiello was a case of a man being charged with a “Breach of Peace” for giving a speech. The Chicago ordinance banned speech which “stirs the public to anger, invites dispute, brings about a condition of unrest, or creates a disturbance,” and was ruled unconstitutional by the Court. The Court wisely held that we couldn’t really exist as a society where no one could speak for fear of sparking anger and dispute:
Accordingly a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute, […] is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest.
Jackson was a dissenting justice, who spoke at great length as to the despicable nature of Terminiello’s speech, and indeed it was despicable. But that cannot be a factor in whether or not we suppress speech. Jackson’s actual quote, not the one cherry picked by Brady, goes as follows:
This Court has gone far toward accepting the doctrine that civil liberty means the removal of all restraints from these crowds and that all local attempts to maintain order are impairments of the liberty of the citizen. The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.
Practical wisdom, like people being afraid of make speeches that might stir controversy, or stir disorder, for fear that the government will come down on them. Imagine trying to speak on any controversial and emotional topic with this kind of standard? Fortunately, we should be happy that the majority view in this case came down on the side of liberty. I’m not surprised to see the Brady folks come down on the other side.
Guns for Goons
I am rather amused by the transposition of this headline with the picture that follows. Not that Paul Helmke looks like a goon, but his smile has always creeped me out, because it seems permanently welded on. That picture ranks high on the creepy factor with the smile.
A Million and a Half Dollars
When Talking Points Collide
Sometimes talking points collide over at the Brady Campaign. They must appear like the moderate group that’s not actually trying to ban guns anymore while also jumping on board with just about every idea someone can frame as gun control. Every once in a while, those two efforts don’t quite mesh, as Thirdpower has found.
Christmas Cheer from the Brady Campaign
The Brady Campaign notes that if you bring a gun on an Amtrak train, clearly you are going to die. And we’re the ones who are paranoid and hysterical? I mean, in a way I have to give them kudos for a sense of humor, and definitely an A for creativity. But come on. Let’s get real.
Caleb and Henigan
Follow the link here to see Caleb’s performance, which I thought was pretty good. We know the talking points now for the Brady Campaign, which is that these databases being public is important to be able to weed out people who were erroneously granted permits despite criminals records. Let me say that if this is the Brady Campaign’s primary concern, they should have been the first group to call the Times Herald to convince them not to publish the database.
No one would have objected to the newspaper, or anyone else for that matter, picking through the database and finding people who were erroneously issued carry permits who legitimately were not qualified to have them. It’s going to be a very small number of people who fit that mold, because applicants are already pre-screened for criminal records. The idea that you need to publish the entire database, 99.9% of which are people who are legitimately qualified to have them, is utter hogwash.
Indiana, along with many other states, has had gun permits as public records for a long time. In Indiana’s case, for decades. No one ever complained about it being that way until the Herald Times chose to publish those names. Gun owners are powerful enough to demand that law now be changed. The Bradys, newspapers, and other anti-violence groups have had access to that data for a long time, and could have been going through it looking for people who legitimately had criminal records that disqualified them. But they didn’t, which I think says something about their true motives.
Caleb on Fox News
Apparently he’s going to be going head to head with Dennis Henigan. I would concentrate on gun owners desire for privacy in how they protect themselves and their families. The courts in Indiana have protected the right-to-carry constitutionally, so one can’t argue with gun owner’s legitimate privacy concerns. Most people understand that it is a sensitive thing, if the concerns, like theft, retaliation by anti-gun coworkers, or strained relationships with anti-gun neighbors, are well articulated. I actually think the only folks the Brady folks win over with this argument are people who are hysterical about guns, which I think is a small minority.
So I’ll leave Caleb with that advice, but also the advice that the first rule of debating Dennis Henigan is spelling his name right :)
Brady Gambit Working
You will notice now that the Brady Campaign no longer gives states grades, and have rather decided just to rank order them. This is likely because they’ve only had real success in a small handful of states. By rank ordering, it can make it seem like the gun control movement has actually been more effective. That must be why the Associated Press says stuff like this:
The availability of guns compounds the problem, criminologists say. But Pennsylvania, the state with the most gun-related officer deaths so far this year, has among the strictest gun laws in the country, according to a ranking by the pro-gun-control Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Other states, like Louisiana, Oklahoma and Kentucky, have very little oversight and had few, if any, officer gun deaths this year.
I guess the AP didn’t notice that Pennsylvania, which is ranked at number ten, has a score of 26 on a 100 point scale. Only the top six score above 50, with even top listed California only earning a 79. Pennsylvania ranks higher than a lot of other states because we restrict private transfers of handguns, and allow the state police to keep a illegal registry records of sale for handguns as well. You can rest assured, however, we are doing our level best to ensure the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania drops precipitously on the Brady List.