Category: Anti-Gun Folks

Why bother with the readin’, ‘righin’, and ‘rithmetic when you can teach them that firearms are evil:

About 40 students in Increase the Peace, a club led by Esposito, will head to Albany next week to lobby for legislation that will hold the gun industry more accountable and keep drunken drivers off the road.

“We’re going to have fun on this field trip, but we’re also trying to save lives,” Esposito told students at an after-school meeting of the club this week. “There’s a good chance these bills will be passed. If they’re passed, you guys are a part of it.”

If I were a parent, I’d be having a cow right about now, and would be taking it up with the school board.  What do you think classmates would say about a student who, in protest, chose to stay behind, at school, rather than get a day off to go to Albany?

If you’re a reader, and you live in this school district, it’s time to raise hell.  It’s only when we’re silent that we lose.

Says Bryan Miller:

“Nugent is a promoter of violence,” said Miller, a Haddonfield, N.J, native whose brother died in a 1994 shooting.

“He believes guns are the way you settle conflict. That’s immoral.”

By that standard the Haddonfield, New Jersey police are promoters of violence.  They aren’t carrying firearms to tickle criminals into submission, they are meant to defend the officers.  Miller doesn’t seem to get the difference between predatory violence, and protective violence.

The odd thing is that we only had 150 people for Nugent.  He usually draws big crowds.  I suspect the 150 dollars a head was a bit rich for his fan base.  Still, the anti-gun protesters managed sixteen, and I’m betting most of them are friends of Miller.  Looks like the Quakers are involved too:

“When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them,” said Joan Huston, of Elizabethtown. “I feel really sad when I hear God’s name in connection with [gun rights].”

This is not new.  Quakers have been trying to disarm Pennsylvanians for years.  Years ago, back when this was wild country, Quakers were happy to free ride off other folks’ willingness to use protective violence.  In the 20th century, they advocate disarmament, for Quaker and non-Quaker alike.  People always talk about the religious right wanting to use government shove their beliefs down everyone else’s throats.  Do those same folks want to condemn the Quaker religious left for doing the same thing?

JR reports she’s listed as a consponsor on the bill, and adds:

Isn’t this the same Kirsten Gillibrand everyone was sending money to because she was such a pro-gun Democrat?

I will admit I was thoroughly wrong about Kirsten Gillibrand.  But at the time I was her advocate, there was no evidence to doubt Gillibrand’s fidelity to the issue except for a lot of cynicism.  Sometimes cynicism turns out to be right, and this was one of those cases.  But cynicism is also destructive if taken too far.

But prior to her elevation to the Senate, she signed on to everything NRA ever asked her to, including co-sponsoring ATF reform, signing into the Heller brief, and voting for DC gun rights.  Do I regret supporting her?  Yep.  But hindsight is always 20/20.  You have to take chances sometimes.  They won’t always work out.  I’m taking one with my new State Representative.  Taking a back seat and seeing how things turn out is not going to be effective, because politicians don’t come to your view through the righteousness of it, they come to it by being influenced.  I don’t see any logic in standing outside of that process, and automatically cede that ground to our opponents.

Nonetheless, if you were a hoodwinked supporter of hers, I would encourage you to make your displeasure known to her here, as I have done, especially if you’re a resident of New York.  I would also note that even if her Republican opponent is anti-gun, you’d at least be helping put the Senate back in charge of lawmakers who will support us.

You can hear the whip cracking now if you listen closely.  It seems that Mexican President Felipe Calderon is in the process of writing the White House gun control policy. Given how quickly Obama was to fold on the Inter-American Arms Treaty, we should probably prepare to fight not only that, but the rest of Mexico’s demands following their meeting:

• Ban on semi-automatic rifles
• Gun owner registry
• One gun-a-month
• Enact Mexican gun laws in the United States

That bit about applying Mexican gun laws here in the United States is exactly what Paul Helmke called for last month.  That list is just from one press conference.  I’m sure if we looked back at his other statements, he’d find even more demands.  Just like our own President, the Mexican President pays lip service to “respecting” the Second Amendment, but argues that if American citizens could just understand how much of a problem the drug trade is for Mexico, then we should be willing to compromise it away as if that’s simply the neighborly thing to do.

President Obama might dance for you as you crack your whip, President Calderon.  But we voters will oppose every gun restriction you tell him to introduce.  We will send his party packing from Congress, and you will get nothing.  It would be better to get your own house in order instead of telling us what to do and trying to rewrite our Constitution for us.

According to Mayor Jeremiah Healy, NRA is the sworn enemy of Jersey City.  Now, I’ve been to more than a few NRA Board Meetings by this point.  I can confidently report that at no time have I ever heard Wayne LaPierre, Chris Cox, or John Sigler get up and take an oath swearing that Jersey City is an enemy of the National Rifle Association.  But these are the kind of hyperbolic tactics we’ve become accustomed to from the other side.

From Antonio Maria Costa, Undersecretary of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime:

I know that the last thing many Americans want to hear is a senior U.N. official telling law-abiding citizens to curtail their Second Amendment right to bear arms. I’m not doing that. At the U.N. we fully understand the fundamental importance of constitutional rights and respect for the rule of law.

Emphasis mine.

We especially encourage the debate on the issue of reinstating the 1994 U.S. ban on assault rifles that expired in 2004. And we support further debate within the United States on whether to close the gun show and private sale loopholes in existing U.S. laws, which create boundless opportunities for criminals to acquire illicit weapons. These legislative changes do not affect law-abiding hunters and sport shooters in any way.

No, Signore Costa, you don’t understand it.  I think I speak for a lot of American gun owners when I tell you “vaffanculo! vai in culo!”  You don’t get to tell us what is and isn’t in our constitutional tradition, and what will and won’t affect hunters and sport shooter.  We know that better than you.  And furthermore, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with either of those things.  Both hunting and shooting are an incidental side effects to the enjoyment of a right which you claim to understand, but clearly understanding nothing about.

That’s the end of the discussion.  If you don’t like it, you can go back to Italy, and take the rest of your internationalist unaccountable bureaucrats, who are currently wasting some of the most valuable real estate in my country, with you.

UPDATE: Perhaps I should not have been so harsh.  Antonio Maria Costa is clearly just trying to do his alma mater proud.  Though, he got his Ph.D from here.  Not much if a difference, really :)

Another gun blog points to an entanglement with a blog that asks what evidence we have that Obama is anti-gun.  Apparently she doesn’t want to listen to the answers.  The greatest bit of evidence is Obama’s history with the Joyce Foundation.  That sealed the deal for me.

So far, Obama hasn’t expressed any desire to burn political capital trying to push gun control in a serious way, but that has more to do with it not being smart politics, than because he’s a real believer in gun rights.  Obama is anxious not to repeat the mistakes of Bill Clinton, which is smart on his part.  But what happens when he’s done spending all our kids’ money?

UPDATE: Looks like the post linked was removed.  Reasoned Discourse strikes again!

We might be able to get somewhere in this issue if it wasn’t for arrogant rich New Yorkers.  Michael Bloomberg is financing another gun group, called Americans United for Safe Streets.  Who could be against safe streets?  Here’s a write-up in the Washington Post about their inaugural effort:

On Monday, Bloomberg, whose gun control campaigns in Virginia have roiled gun rights groups, will join Omar Samaha at an Arlington hotel to unveil a 30-second commercial that will air statewide next week. Their campaign calls for the General Assembly to close the so-called gun-show loophole in Virginia law that allows private sellers to sell firearms without conducting background checks. The commercial, which will be previewed at the Crystal City Marriott at 11:30 a.m., was paid for by Americans United for Safe Streets, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that counts Bloomberg as a financial contributor.

It gets interesting when you start looking at who’s behind this new group.  If you look at the AUSS web page, you see that the contact is Alex Howe, who is a Senior Account Executive at Fenton Communications.  If you take a look at Fenton, you will notice who they provide services for:

Alex Howe provides publicity support and strategy for a broad range of public interest issues and political clients, including MoveOn.org, the ONE Campaign, Avaaz.org and Win Without War.

This is the left-wing new media machine involved with a lot of this effort.  Right now, if you look at their domain records, they are registered to an address above a deli in New York City.  To a William Swenson, who is Advisor to the Criminal Justice Coordinator at the Office of the Mayor.  This guy works in Bloomberg’s office.

This also looks like a 527 organization, rather than a 501(c)(3) or a 501(c)(4) non-profit, along the lines of NRA or the Brady Campaign.  You can see where their money is coming from, as well as who they are spending money with.  They got a million-five from Bloomberg himself, and not a small amount from people who work for the City of New York.

I’ve worried about the possibility of a well-funded, new media savvy anti-gun group springing on to the scene.  The Brady Campaign is still largely interested in re-fighting the battles of the 1990s, and relies increasingly on a dying media establishment to get their message out.  A new group would come with new ideas, and come at us from unexpected directions, and through mediums that have until now been entirely dominated by us.  These people might be the real deal.

Ultimately the left needs a counter to the NRA if they are to be successful long term.  One way to counter NRA is the old “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” strategy.  While that might be acceptable to a lot of moderate rural and suburban Democrats, it’s not acceptable to the urban progressive left.  They need an answer to NRA that brings the twin pillars of influence to the table in the form of money and votes.  This folks have a track record of bringing that, so I wouldn’t laugh this group off.

NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg is paying for ads to run in Virginia urging a ban on private sales.

New York’s mayor and relatives of Virginia Tech massacre victims are releasing a new television ad next week urging the state to close a gun show loophole.

The second anniversary of the shooting is next Thursday.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will join victims’ relatives in Arlington on Monday to release the ad.

Two quick things:

1. The Virginia Tech shooter did not buy his guns at a gun show or through a private sale.  This ad serves no purpose other than to use the victims to advance a political agenda.
2. The timing was picked for no other reason than public relations grandstanding considering the Virginia General Assembly went out of session in February.  In fact, they met for the last time this week just to review vetoes and actually overrode two vetoes of pro-gun legislation.