Category: Anti-Gun Folks

In contrast to a conversation that goes nowhere, last week, Doug Pennington of the Brady Campaign threw down on Megan McArdle.  Obviously they took Megan’s comments seriously enough to respond to them.  But Doug, in his response, ditches much of the usual Brady nonsense and actually talks about some real issues:

Contrary to McArdle’s framework, the issue here isn’t whether firearms have a magical, mesmerizing power to make good people do bad things.  The issue is whether fallible human beings carrying the best tool for killing people to a heated protest increases the possibility of a lethally violent outcome – something of particular concern at a Presidential venue.  Other issues include whether adding guns to Presidential events – outside of trained law enforcement – makes the Secret Service’s job unnecessarily harder, and whether being confronted with a gun-carrying protester can be intimidating and stifle debate.

I’m with Megan that I’ll defer to the Secret Service on how best to protect the President, but I actually share Doug’s concern that the open display of guns could be seen by others as threatening, and may discourage people from speaking out, but I’m also concerned that people are assaulting those who disagree with them, even going so far as biting fingers off their opponents.  Yes, it is emotionally charged.  Which is why ordinary, well adjusted individuals might not be unreasonable in wanting tools to protect themselves in such situations.

I’ve always gotten the impression that Brady folks believe that violent criminals are just ordinary people who just snap.  But murders, particularly assassins, tend to be more than just your average “fallible human beings”.  Most scientific research into the minds of violent criminals shows them to be quite different from ordinary people.  But Doug continues:

The problem with McArdle’s view, and the gun libertarian position generally, is the assumption of a damaged analogy between unregulated speech and unregulated gun carrying.  The assumption is that since prior restraint against speech is bad by definition, prior restraint against unrestricted gun carrying must be equally bad, or at least deeply suspect.  Except that it’s not, because they are radically different things when put into practice in the world real human beings live in.

Whoa!  Real philosophical arguments coming out of the Brady Campaign rather than emotionally charged nonsense and drivel?   Let’s hope this isn’t a trend.  We might actually have to start making arguments back instead of just mockery.  I don’t think our argument has ever been that the right to keep and bear arms has to be absolutely identical to the right to free speech, or freedom of religion.  Whether or not prior restraint when it comes to guns should be treated the same way as for free speech is a matter of debate.  But what we do demand is that the right to keep and bear arms be taken seriously, as we do with other constitutional rights.  And that means you don’t get to pass laws and enact policy based on the justification that some behavior makes you uncomfortable.

We can also take steps to make it harder for dangerous people to get guns as a general matter – for example, criminal background checks for all gun sales (a policy McArdle agrees with), limiting bulk purchases of firearms to cut the illegal gun market; and restricting access to military-style assault weapons.

OK, now we’re back to ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers.  The Brady penitence for our wicked ways.  I’ve said before, I’m willing to sit down and talk about background checks on private transfers, but certain things have to be taken off the table first, like being forced to go through an FFL, and you have to be willing to talk about how NICS works too, and address some of our concerns with it.

At the end of the day, reducing gun violence isn’t about any one law, but is about a collection of policies that work together as a safety net to prevent as many needless gun deaths and injuries as we can in this country.  We can do these things while respecting the Second Amendment, and the First.

I don’t think anyone ever believed it was just about one law, and now that the Supreme Court has taken prohibition largely off the table, it can’t be about one law.  But what’s the Brady Campaign’s philosophy about respecting the Second Amendment?  It can’t just be anything short of prohibition is lawful.  That’s not a treating the right seriously.  A collection of laws who’s intention is to frustrate and discourage gun ownership, much like DC’s new almost prohibition, or even New Jersey’s laws, is absolutely off the table.  If that’s respecting the Second Amendment, we have nothing much to discuss.  Any law that proposes to limit gun ownership on the part of criminals by limiting gun ownership on the part of everyone is an automatic non-starter with us.  I wish there was some way to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, without interfering with ordinary people’s right to keep and bear them, but there isn’t.  At least not without bringing about this kind of world.  If the Bradys want to start having a serious philosophical discussion about the Second Amendment, I’d be game for it.  It would certainly be better than the usual BS rhetoric, but I’d suspect they’d have to admit they really don’t respect the Second Amendment, and would have to admit their goal is to limit the impact of Heller to the greatest extent possible.  Perhaps the reason there’s little or no common ground between the two sides is because we each understand the other’s true end goal.

I’ve been following MikeB’s blog now for several weeks, and one of the disappointments has been that the conversation just doesn’t seem to go in any real direction.  There will have to be a lot of agreeing to disagree when two people are coming from the opposite side of the spectrum on an issue, but usually when talking with someone who is intellectually serious about a topic, the conversation at least tends to take on some structure, as areas of agreement and disagreement tend to be worked out.   Typically in this kind of situation you’ll find serious questions, that don’t have easy answers, get asked by each side.  People tend to move past the bullshit, and the easy stuff, and get to real areas of philosophical disagreement.  So here’s a few questions for MikeB, based on some of his recent posts.

Straw purchasers arrested trafficking guns from Colorado to California:

No one denies that, but the dispute comes in when trying to accomplish it inconveniences gun owners. They immediately start talking about “infringement” and “gun bans,” when actually we’re not talking about those things at all.

So here’s your fundamental problem.  It’s legal for a citizen with a clean criminal history to purchase a gun in the United States.  To get around the problem of not having a clean criminal history, criminals put up straw men, who do have clean records, to purchase guns on their behalf.  Girlfriends of criminals are your typical straw purchaser.  How do you fix the straw man problem without banning guns?   Keep in mind it’s already a felony to buy a firearm under false and misleading pretenses.  As long as it’s lawful for a citizen with a clean record to purchase firearms, criminals are going to use straw men to get guns.  How do you fix that problem without a ban, or something that’s awfully close to a ban?

MikeB takes on the Queen of Snark over the Wintenmute gun show study:

Why do pro-gun folks resist these intelligent and highly educated men so aggressively? Why is it necessary to attack them on their expertise as well as their veracity? What’s wrong with simply discussing the issues? I’ll tell you what I think.

I think what explains the incredibly nasty attitude on the part of so many pro-gun writers is that they realize they’re wrong. They realize that anyone who refuses to join in a common effort to find a way to diminish gun violence is in the wrong. Well, why would they do it then? Out of fear. Out of fear and insecurity.

Joe Huffman, in the comments, basically cuts to the heart of the matter: “how do you determine truth from falsity.”  I don’t particularly resist intelligent, highly educated people.  In fact, I spend most of my time working with intelligent, highly educated people, and they are prone to the same kind of biases, assumptions, and have agendas just like everyone else.  I’ve seen some remarkably good science happen in my career, and some remarkably bad science.  Just having credentials doesn’t mean you’re automatically putting out quality research and quality science.  It doesn’t mean you don’t have an agenda or bias.  Joe’s question was good.  How do you sort true from false?  I can go into detail about why I think Wintenmute’s studies are relatively useless, but can MikeB tell me why they are good?  Can we have a real conversation about it?

Seth Godin I think hits on the reason the gun control movement has difficulty finding a voice today:

Enormity doesn’t mean really enormous. It means incredibly horrible.

The problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn’t work. Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down.

Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies and you won’t get a bigger donation, you’ll just get averted eyes.

If you’ve got a small, fixable problem, people will rush to help, because people like to be on the winning side, take credit and do something that worked. If you’ve got a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won’t pan out, we’re going to move on in search of something smaller.

Not fair, but true.

I think the Bradys have a big enormity problem.  Some of it isn’t their fault.  I wouldn’t discount the effect it had on the population, either consciously or unconsciously, that a handful of extremists with box cutters and a plan managed to topple two of the largest man made structures on earth, kill 3000 people, and start two wars that would kill many thousands more.  What good is gun control when you can kill thousands with box cutters?   The Bradys even pile on to the enormity problem by pointing out there that guns take 10 9/11s a year.

In contrast, our movement has gotten very adept at fighting one battle and one issue at a time, and small, achievable steps.  Godin has a good point that people don’t want to be on the losing side.

Cemetery points to a rather ridiculous practice, but it’s nothing new.  Gun control didn’t poll among the public as well as gun control groups thought it needed to for them to gain any real traffic, so it morphed into “gun safety.”  Andrew McKelvey, who founded Monster.com, even created an entire group in order to get this meme to sail, but the ship sank.  It was after AGS failed, that we suddenly got AHSA, also founded by leaders in the gun control movement.  AGS failed so spectacularly that they are largely gone from the Internet.  There’s not even a defunct web site.  Let’s hope that’s a metaphor for Corzine’s campaign.

I mentioned in my final post about breaking down the ranks of Bloomberg’s anti-gun mayors that if your mayor is on the list, go after them on the anti-concealed carry advertisements Bloomberg funded. I said there was a possibility that they had no idea what their names were being signed on to in conjunction with Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Turns out, I was right.

Two mayors resigned from the group specifically over those ads and the position Bloomberg took against concealed carry. I already mentioned the resignation of the Houston mayor in the post, but I just found a reference to the specifics of his departure:

Former comptroller John Sharp, a Democratic candidate to succeed Hutchison in the U.S. Senate, said Monday that Houston Mayor Bill White, another Democrat seeking the Hutchison seat, should resign from a group called Mayors Against Illegal Guns. White’s campaign said he resigned last week, adding that the group’s focus had grown from its original effort to prevent the sale of stolen guns.

Sharp’s campaign pointed to the group’s fight against a proposal to allow those with concealed gun permits to carry them into other states. White’s campaign said he resigned the day that the group took out a newspaper ad denouncing that proposal.

Either he didn’t know about it, or he did and realized that it was a political liability. Either way, Bloomberg’s extremism cost him the mayor of Houston.

It turns out that those ads also caught the attention of Sen. Thune himself.

The ads included lists of mayors. That definitely got the attention of Thune’s office. Someone noticed that one ad suggested Sioux Falls Mayor Dave Munson opposed the amendment. That one stung — Thune lives in Sioux Falls.

Thune’s office placed a call to Munson, who told them he didn’t oppose the amendment, a Thune staffer said. Several days later Munson resigned from the mayors group, Feinblatt says.

So there’s confirmation that Bloomberg is signing mayors onto policy statements they do not endorse. He’s using their names to advance his personal agenda without even consulting them. Those types of actions make pretty much every politician skittish.

In years past, they used to give Valium to hysterical housewives.  The Rolling Stones even wrote a song about it.  But what’s the prescription for hysterical anti-gun lawyers?

Judging from the public commentary about these stories, most Americans regard this behavior as bizarre, intimidating and dangerous, with frightening implications for the President’s safety in particular. But it is important not to treat these incidents of public gun-carrying as merely the misguided behavior of a few individuals. It is more than that. What we are seeing is the acting out of two central tenets of the extremist “gun rights” ideology long espoused by the National Rifle Association and other radical Second Amendment absolutists.

So you see, this is all part of an elaborate NRA fueled conspiracy against all that is good and decent in America.  Even though NRA has said not a word about these protesters, and not said anything to encourage them.  This despite the fact that they can see that this behavior is clearly controversial even within the community.

Oh well, at least he didn’t use the word “shock troops“

The Bradys seem to be relatively pissed at Robert Gibbs:

Hearing this from someone who speaks daily from the podium in the James S. Brady White House Briefing Room – named after a press secretary seriously injured in an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan – is bizarre.

I agree it’s bizarre.  I sure wasn’t expecting those words to come out of Gibbs’ mouth.

Robert Gibbs’ cavalier response to protesters carrying guns to presidential events was tone-deaf. This isn’t a political issue and it isn’t about the Second Amendment. It’s about open and honest debate, using common sense and protecting the president of United States.

I almost feel sorry for them.  They were handed a good issue on a silver platter, and the Obama Administration basically snatched their toy away from them just as they were figuring out how to play with it.  All will be sacrificed for the sake of the failing health care agenda!  There’s good company under the Obama bus, Brady folks.  Don’t fret too much.  Just remember that the bus does have a reverse gear.

Dave Hardy thinks it’s time for the Brady folks to start polishing up their resumes because of the White House endorsing the right of Americans to protest while armed.   Obama would probably prefer the issue to go away.  That’s not good news for anti-gun groups, who by now have to be feeling pretty down that Obama is doing everything he can to not end up in a fight with gun owners.