Category: Anti-Gun Folks

People think we gun nuts are exaggerating when we say that many believe guns are magical devices, capable of rendering people good or evil. We’re not.

UPDATE: Follow Breda’s link to the original source, and you’ll see it resolves to a site called Wounded in America. I checked their domain registration, and it resolved to Chicago, which got me suspicious.

Follow through to their website, and look who they receive their funding from: Physicians for Social Responsibility, Pikes Peak Community Foundation, and The Medical College of Wisconsin. Physicians for Social Responsibility and Medical College of Wisconsin both get funding from…. wait for it… it’ll shock you… The Joyce Foundation.

As I mentioned in Breda’s comments:

They are an incestuous bunch aren’t they? Great grass roots they have going there. You know, we do our advocacy for free. I think we’re getting the short end of the stick!

Thanks to reader kaveman, we have an exclusive Brady e-mail alert reaction to The Court announcing it will hear Heller.

Just minutes ago, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to take what could be the most significant Second Amendment case in our country’s history.

Thanks to your support, your Brady legal team had already begun preparing for this announcement, but now our lawyers have swung into high gear to prepare our “friend of the court” brief.

We have a tidal wave of work to do in the weeks ahead and we need your help now.

This fight is so critical that we need to raise $50,000 by November 30.  And since your gift will be going to our Brady Gun Law Defense Fund, it will be fully tax deductible!

We need your help today to build a strong Brady Gun Law Defense Fund to protect America’s gun laws.  Please give today.

Earlier this year, a U.S. Court of Appeals struck down a gun law as violating the Second Amendment for the first time in American history.  We believe this decision was judicial activism at its worst and was clearly wrong.

This legal case at its very core is the most important battle we have ever waged.  The U.S. Supreme Court has the chance to reverse a terribly erroneous decision and make it clear that the American people can adopt restrictions on firearms in their communities.

If the Supreme Court does not reverse the federal appeals court decision, gun laws everywhere could be at risk…

…from the long-standing machine gun ban…to the 1968 Gun Control Act…to the Brady background check law.

…to your local and state laws…like the ones in California and New Jersey banning military-style Assault Weapons… and many more.

If that happens, then your Brady Center will defend these laws in the courts as we have done so many times in the past against the attacks of the gun lobby.  But now we must focus on the immediate challenge at hand as we prepare for the fight in the U.S. Supreme Court.  Please give generously.

Friends of The Court briefs are expensive, and the Brady Campaign isn’t exactly swimming in loot these days. The Brady’s definitely understand that this one is for all the marbles.  The machine gun ban, and the gun control act of 1968 could be in jeopardy?  I can only hope!

It’s been a good time lately for quotes:

So what do you think Peter Hamm is doing right now?  We can take solace knowing that Paul Helmke’s Turkey Day will be spent on the phone with lawyers.

– Bitter’s response to me being nervous about Heller

I feel better already.

Dave Kopel has an article in the Fort Worth Star Telegram that talks about how the movement to ban handguns has hit a brick wall virtually every place they’ve tried it.  But gun control advocates say they would never try to ban handguns.  I don’t buy it.  Do you?

Let’s see just how common Paul Helmke’s sense really is.  He’s pushing Massengill’s recommendations, using Virginia Tech as the lever for his arguments:

• All states should report information necessary to conduct federal background checks on gun purchases.

As I’ve said, I don’t have too many problems with HR2640.  But it needs to be paid for, which is why it’s being held up by Coburn.

• Virginia should require background checks for all firearms sales, including those at gun shows.

Cho didn’t buy his guns at a gun show.  So why does this matter?  Only because it’s what they’ve been pushing for years.

• The Virginia General Assembly should adopt legislation in the 2008 session clearly establishing the right of every institution of higher education in the Commonwealth to regulate the possession of firearms on campus if it so desires.

Because the regulation on the possession of firearms on campus worked so well to stop Cho, clearly we need more of the same.  Sorry Paul, last I checked the student manuals at most universities weren’t terribly effective at stopping bullets.

I guess with John Timony and other South Florida gun control hacks picking up the slack on the evil assault weapon issue, the other gun control weenies feel safe in, once again, targeting gun shows.

I guess they figure if you recycle the same bullshit often enough, someone might buy it.

Joe goes over the list of objectives for at least one international gun control organization, and notes they want to eliminate the basic right of self-defense.

Uncle taunts the Brady Campaign with some electoral facts. Brady is boasting bout 19 out out of 21 candidates in the Virginia House of Delegates winning. It’s easy to increase your electoral success rate if you never take any chances. What they don’t say is that NRA endorsed candidates in The Virginia House won 57 out of 62 seats and in the Senate won 23 out of 27 seats, including the upset of Devolites Davis, and a hearty “screw you” to Bloomberg.

Let’s see… that puts NRA’s winning percentage at 90% in Virgina. Tell me who’s victory this was again? In both raw numbers and in percentage, it looks to me like NRA came out ahead.

I have to hand it to Peter Hamm, he’s good at making an electoral defeat look like a victory.

It’s a funny title to an odd blog post. I know a lot of gun owners who are annoyed by the NRA, but not for the reasons Paul would think. I’ve been observing for a while now the Brady’s are starting to understand more of our fault lines in their attempts to divide and conquer. Paul’s latest article would attest to that.

Richard Feldman and Jim Zumbo should start a club.

They could call it, “Gun Owners Who Annoy The NRA.”

Except that the whole Jim Zumbo thing was over before NRA really knew what was going on. That was grassroots that did that, not NRA. I’m reminded of the quote from Tam. [UPDATE: More from Ahab here]

I don’t consider the Brady Campaign to be one of the groups described [that would ban guns] in that last comment, but I would like to find common ground with the NRA on ways to make our communities safer. I’m not sure they’re interested in such an approach, however.

How about this, Paul. Since your organization isn’t about banning guns, why don’t you join us in getting rid of the ban on firearms in Washington DC? It certainly doesn’t seem to be making Washington DC any safer, except for the criminals. No one is going to take the Brady Campaign seriously about not banning guns as long as they continue to defend…. gun bans. Get it? It’s pretty simple.

Aside from the fact that the Brady’s link to few verifiable facts in their latest tirade against gun shows, we can point out at least a few problems:

Remember: unregulated gun show sales are how Eric Harris and Dylan Kleybold got their guns before they murdered 12 and wounded 22 others at Columbine High School.

I know you guys aren’t going to believe this, but the Brady’s statement here is is completely misleading.

Several months before the Columbine massacre, the killers obtained firearms from two suppliers. The first was a 2-year-old Columbine graduate named Mark Manes (ironically, the son of a longtime Handgun Control, Inc., activist). Manes bought a pistol at a gun show and gave it to the two killers (who were under 18 at the time).

Colorado law prohibits giving handguns to juveniles, with certain exceptions, and Manes is currently serving time for this offense in a Colorado prison. The second supplier was an 18-year-old fellow student at Columbine, Robyn Anderson, who bought three long guns for the killers at a Denver-area gun show in December 1998.

Both Manes and Anderson were lawful gun purchasers and could legally have bought the guns from a firearms dealer at a gun store, a gun show, or anywhere else.

What the Brady’s want to do here is to villainize gun shows, which, because none of us can buy firearms over the Internet, are really the only way people can generally find what they are looking for without going to 20 different gun stores. At least 1/3rd of my collection was purchased at a gun show. The private sale issue has nothing to do with gun shows, and they know it.

… bought an arsenal of his own, “including a Sten submachine gun, a Ruger Mini-14 rifle, two pistols and a hunting rifle.”

No one is buying off the books unregulated submachine guns anywhere and not violating some very serious federal laws.  They know that too.