Category: Anti-Gun Folks

Looks like he’s gone from wanting to ban guns to wanting to ban bottled water:

Opposition to the bottled water industry is just beginning to gain momentum. In December 2008 the City of Toronto became the largest city in the world to pass a comprehensive policy banning bottled water in City buildings and aggressively reinvesting in the City’s public water supply delivery system. Other major urban centers, like Seattle and New York are promoting their own tap water over bottled water. According to the Container Recycling Institute, just supplying Americans with plastic water bottles for one year consumes more than 47 million gallons of oil, enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon out of the atmosphere. Ninety percent of used water bottles are not recycled. In California alone, more than 1 billion plastic bottles end up in California’s landfills each year, leaking toxic additives, such as phthalates, into the groundwater and taking 1,000 years to biodegrade.

Why can’t these people just leave well enough alone and stop telling people how to live their lives?  Bitter is going to head to the store today to get some more Coke Zero.  I’ll make sure she picks up a nice palette of bottled water, and we’ll drink a few in honor of AHSA co-founder John Rosenthal.

There’s one reason I sometimes drink bottled water.  My tap water tastes bad, and Britta doesn’t help much.  But hey, I welcome the change.  I anxiously await the creation of the American Water Drinkers Association, to defend the rights of water drinking Americans everywhere.

In moments of less than guarded statements, sometimes you get some real honesty out of the Brady Campaign:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZkcvdgn0xo[/youtube]

Lets look at what Helmke’s choices are:

• Any pistol larger than .38 caliber is illegal.
• Shotguns must be 12 gauge or smaller, and must be 25 inches or longer.
• Rifles in military calibers, or larger than .30 caliber are unlawful.
• Licenses for purchase, possession, and transportation required.
• Licensed collectors subject to home invasion inspection, and inspections are frequent.
• Full registration

So which of these laws do we need to adopt over here, Paul?  Are these all “reasonable gun laws?”

Add three more groups, in addition to the Brady Campaign, to those on the left calling for more gun control in the name of saving Mexico from its own drug cartels even though ATF says we don’t need it and Democrats in the House have made it clear that no gun control will come out of Congress. Here are quotes from various left-wing groups on the upcoming trips to Mexico by several Cabinet officials and the President:

“They are putting a lot of the cabinet on this, including the president himself,” Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center, told AFP. …

“They see this as an actual shared responsibility, that we have to actually do something about consumption, the money and the guns on our side of the border,” Selee said.

“I think that is a change in focus, actually.”

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counter-narcotics expert at the Brookings Institution, said it could take years before the administration reaps benefits from its new approach to blunt consumer demand, which she calls the “crux of the problem.”

In the meantime, she expects Clinton and others to cooperate more on choking off the flow of weapons from thousands of weapons stores on the US side of the border, even if she doubts how effective it can be.

“There are many other sources apart from the US, from which the cartels or the trafficking organizations could acquire weapons,” Felbab-Brown told AFP.

“But I think diplomatically it’s very important that the US makes an effort to show to the Mexican authorities as well as to the Mexican public that we share responsibility,” she said.

“Just like we share responsibility for demand, we are aware that we are the source of weapons and we take efforts against them,” she added. …

Christopher Sabatini, a top analyst at the Americas Society and Council of the America, urged the administration to challenge the National Rifle Association gun lobby over the weapons supply stores.

They should “go to the mat on it with the NRA,” he said.

Just because the math seems to be in our favor for the moment, it is clear that anti-gun groups – regardless of their primary mission – are trying to put extreme pressure on Obama to burn up his political capital on gun control, with their favorite being another semi-auto rifle ban.  In 2010, we have to make sure that Congress is even more pro-gun so that Obama knows he cannot afford to pick that fight no matter how many how many groups in his base are begging for it.

It’s times like this I think we ought to be classy and offer our sympathies to groups like The Brady Campaign, who no doubt will take the news today very hard, considering it follows on the heels of a tragic mass shooting involving politically incorrect semi-automatic rifles.  If sixty-five Democrats are willing to preemptively stand up and say “no thanks” to any new ban on semi-automatic firearms after that, The Brady Campaign can pretty much forget about the assault weapons issue at the federal level.  At least for the foreseeable future.  The tides could certainly turn, but 65 Dem votes is a lot ot make up for, and Eric Holder’s statements to the contrary, Obama certainly hasn’t indicated he’s willing to risk any political capital trying to get one passed.   So I will offer the Brady’s the same advice I offered after the Heller decision was handed down in June.  That’s right, nothing, and I mean nothing, beats Tequila for helping you forget that the most Democratic Congress in a generation won’t even hold a hearing on your issue.

When drowing your sorrows, don’t bother with the good stuff.  Go right to the bottom shelf.  There’s no shame in it. I’ve followed my own advice on more occasions than I care to admit.  It works!  You might not feel that great the next morning, but hey, you won’t have much time to think about legislation, or the lack thereof, when your head feels like it’s going to explode.  So crack open a bottle, it’ll do more to help the Mexican economy and fight off drug cartels than anything you guys ever proposed will.

Says General Wesley Clark on Geraldo:

I think we need to re-institute the assault weapons ban in the United States.  If people want machine guns, let them join the military.  We got em!  But for public and personal use, absolutely not.  That’s how they are getting across the border, and what the Mexican Government has asked of us is, “Please, cut off the flow of machine guns coming from the United States into Mexico.”

General Clark and Geraldo Rivera pretty clearly need a lesson in American gun laws, because when we speak of “assault weapons” we’re not talking about machine guns.  It’s amazing how this bit of disinformation just refuses to die.  Say what you will about Josh Sugarmann being dishonest, but he was right.  This issue is one of the most brilliant and effective disinformation campaigns ever waged in the court of public opinion.

Michael Bane is reporting that Georgia Arms, who remanufacture military brass, is facing having to shutter its production, and cancel law enforcement orders because of the Obama Administration’s decision to destroy surplus military ammunition components.

That’s right, Barack Obama hates guns and shooting to such a degree that he’s willing to cost the government money, put good people out of work, and inconvenience law enforcement, just to have a chance to piss on gun owners and shooters.  Remember, he supports the Second Amendment!

UPDATE: One other question.  Where is the organiztion that claims to represent hunters and shooters in this matter?  I know NRA is dealing with this, but where’s Ray Schoenke?  You know, the head of American Hunters and Shooters Association who endorsed Obama this election?  Do you endorse this Ray?  Do you endorse creating shortages of ammo for police departments and competitive shooters?

Apparently now we’re giving material support to narco-terrorists.  I shit you not, go read.

The web of interests concentrated in the National Rifle Association and which spends millions of dollars to lobby against gun control legislation in Congress may be inadvertently aiding in the reign of terror being waged by drug cartels in northern Mexico. Recent reports suggest as much as 90% of the weapons used by the cartels come from north of the border.

Here we go with the Mexico crap again.  This number has been bandied about for years now, but when you hear talk of guns in the hands of narco-terrorists, they are things like machine guns, rocket launchers, and other heavy weapons which are not available in the United States to civilians.

The gun lobby has consistently argued against any form of gun control, even against the logic of barring civilians from carrying concealed semi-automatic weapons. During his tenure as governor of Texas, George W. Bush signed legislation that allowed Texans to carry concealed weapons into churches, amusement parks and diners, among other public places.

Actually, churches and amusement parks are both places where carry is prohibited under Texas’ laws.  Some diners can be too if they derive more than 51% of their sales from alcohol.  But where is the blood on the streets that this was supposed to cause?  Forty states later, it’s failed ot materialize.

Now, the NRA is not likely to be engaged in such flagrant acts of illegality, but its attitude of moral indifference to the consequences of small arms proliferation throughout the US market clearly has made more weapons available for criminal entities to take advantage of.

So explain to me how we’re supposed to keep guns out of the hands of drug cartels who are already trafficking in a contraband product? Do you seriously think if we made guns illegal in the United States that drug cartels won’t be able to get guns?  They aren’t getting rocket launchers or machine guns from US sources.

The crux of the gun lobby problem is that its efforts have been aggressive and have arguably led to such a proliferation of small arms in US society that there is now a massive surplus, far beyond the real “need” experienced by the population at large

There’s that “need” word again. Who gets to define need?  It would seem based on sales of firearms lately that a lot of people seem to think they need one.

Let’s put the 2nd Amendment aside for a moment — reasonable law scholars disagree about whether or not the “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” was intended to be linked only to “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”, or whether it was intended to grant all citizens the right to carry handguns and semi-automatic firearms.

This isn’t an academic debate anymore.  The Second Amendment is an individual right, and it extends to being able to keep firearms in the home.  Based on dicta in Heller, it probably also extends to some manner of carrying firearms as well.  That’s now the law of the land.

In fact, strict gun control would not require a ban on weapons licensed for hunting, sport shooting or personal safety. So, one could argue that, except for the desire to push the proliferation of small arms, for the profit of interests backing the intense lobbying of Congress, there is no serious threat to 2nd Amendment rights from gun control and no sound legal basis for the lobbying effort itself.

Yep, because it’s always lobbying on behalf of some evil moneyed interest with the left.  It’s never the fact that millions of Americans disagree with gun control and don’t want to see any more of it.  Who do they imagine the NRA’s four million members are then?  Or the approximately thirty million Americans who identify with the NRA but aren’t current members?  We are the NRA, not the gun industry (who has their own group).

But why bother seeking out an understanding on the issue when you can just build an elaborate fantasy in your head about a vast industrial conspiracy to encourage the proliferation of small arms?  It certainly feels a lot better than pondering the fact that millions of Americans simply don’t agree with you.

Check out this Inquirer article:

“A child who does such a thing somehow has received the message that guns are a solution to problems, and that if you’re a ‘good guy’ and you shoot a ‘bad guy,’ then that kind of violence is OK,” Everitt said.

The bearers of that message are not responsible gun owners, he said; it is the avid gun-rights activists who view the victims of such shootings as “scumbags.” These activists oppose all gun control.

“As I am seeing these shootings where children are murdering people in cold blood, I’m beginning to believe that children are picking up on these messages, that there are no repercussions, and that you are doing the right thing to do this,” said Everitt.

Yeah, because murdering your mother is exactly what we advocate.  The sick part, though, is that the Inquirer happily prints this type of slander.  No wonder they are circling the bowl.

If you’re trying to rebrand yourself, much like AHSA seems to be trying to do, it’s inevitable that you’ll try to spin certain things.  But it’s never a good idea to try to spin something where the real facts can be easily looked up by anyone, like denying the fact that Ray Schoenke donated money to the Brady Campaign:

Did they think that maybe people wouldn’t realize HCI renamed itself to the Brady Campaign?