Category: Anti-Gun Folks

From Jeff:

“I support the Second Amendment. Law-abiding citizens should be able to own guns,” Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, a New York senator, said in response to questions from The Des Moines Register. “But I also believe strongly in smart laws that keep guns out of the hands of criminals and terrorists.”

Man… I hope no one is buying that. Her husband’s administration was an unmitigated disaster for gun owners. Hers will be worse.

UPDATE: Let’s take a look at Hillary’s support for the second amendment:

1. Voted to reinstate the assault weapons ban.
2. Cosponsored the 50 caliber ban
3. Voted against ending frivolous lawsuits against firearms manufacturers.
4. Voted against bill preventing arms seizures during emergencies

I could go on and on, but if this is supporting the second amendment, I’d hate to see what she thinks crapping on it would look like.

It certainly looks that way.  I would encourage everyone not to get too complacent.  It’s quite possible a big part of why Brady & Company is struggling is because the left is so preoccupied with getting us out of Iraq, they aren’t thinking too much about the gun control issue these days.   In other words, this could be rather temporary, and fortunes could change.

Back in June, I wrote a satirical piece about how to write an anti-gun editorial, which was intended to be funny. I always find it somewhat depressing and yet slightly humorous when I find an article that follows the script quite exactly, like this article in the Guardian.

With the ominous title of “Guns take the place of pride in American family values”, the article is basically an homage to all the foolish, misguided arguments that gun control people toss around, with a healthy dose of how eeeeeeeeevil the NRA is. For example, they take some potshots at the recent book “Armed America”, which consisted of pictures of gun owners from all walks of life.

To look at the photographs in Kyle Cassidy’s book Armed America is to glimpse a surreal world. Or at least it seems that way to many non-Americans. Cassidy spent two years taking portrait shots of gun owners and their weapons across the US. The result is a disturbing tableau of happy families, often with pets and toddlers, posing with pistols, assault rifles and the sort of heavy machine-guns usually associated with a warzone.

I particularly enjoyed how they subtly imply that all Americans are crazy lunatics with full-automatic weapons behind every door – I don’t suppose it’s worth mentioning that no one in “Armed America” had a “heavy machine gun” of any type. Of course, I would probably die of a heart attack of the Guardian printed something factually correct about gun owners.

The editorial basically amounts to two things: 1) A hit piece on gun owners, and 2) an article that wallows in its own smug self-satisfaction. I suppose if you enjoy reading an article that stands as a shining example of European arrogance and condescension towards the American way of life, you could go read it.

Paul Helmke is absolutely correct that this incident, and many like it, are horrible:

And then, on September 22, their family life was shattered by a man who walked up to their adopted son, Daren Dieter, and shot him in the spine. The shooter left Daren in a parking lot in Philadelphia, paralyzed from the neck down. Daren happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, a young man simply trying to buy a late-night snack for himself and his date.

Now he’s permanently attached to a respirator.

I don’t like hearing about a family having to go through anything like that, and I hope by some miracle their son recovers. I don’t disagree with Paul that criminal violence is a a big problem, and that it can strike anyone if they are at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I can’t agree with him on how to solve the problem, because what his organization advocates simply won’t work. The scumbag who shot this young man is Tyree Bohannon:

Court records show Bohannon has been arrested three times in the last two years on numerous charges, including robbery, assault, firearms violations, receiving stolen property, and providing false identification to police.

He has been convicted only of false identification and was placed in a program for first-time offenders after his arrest last November.

So he had previous arrests for some very serious crimes, yet the DA in Philadelphia thought he was a good candidate for the ARD program, which lets first time offenders off easy.

Philadelphia’s crime problem will not be solved by taking guns away from law abiding citizens. It won’t be solved by one-gun-a-month, by restricting good people from getting concealed carry licenses, or by any of the other measures the city has been begging for in Harrisburg. Until they get tough on the criminals causing the violence in Philadelphia, the problem will continue. The measures Paul Helmke and his organization want to take will only serve to make good people defenseless against cretins like Tyree Bohannon.

UPDATE: More over at Days of our Trailers

Looks like my post attracted the attention of the man himself:

Hey, c’mon fellas, lighten up! Do you get your ramrods all bent out of shape when the fictional crimes are murder? This is just windshields. A lot of us have lost things to gunfire that were a lot more precious than windshields.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing a whole bunch of you at the White Dog on the 15th. Just check your expectations at the door.

White Dog is a restaurant right off my alma mater’s campus. I would actually go, if I weren’t flying back from Reno at that time.

I understand that Mr. Hoffman’s work is one of fiction, and I will admit I have not read it, except for the sample first chapter. I don’t get bent out of shape when fiction portrays murder, but I wouldn’t particularly want to write or read a book where the sympathetic protagonist was a serial killer. While shooting out the windshields of gun owners who are members of organizations to protect their interests does not amount to murder, forgive me if I’m a little indignant about the idea being presented in a sympathetic light.

People have lost more to violence than just a windshield, but neither me, my readers or gun blogging colleagues have anything to do with that.  Would it be fair to suggest the American Homebrewer’s Assocation (a fine organization, BTW) is responsible for drunk driving deaths?  I don’t think so.

I’m sympathetic to people that have lost loved ones to violence, but that doesn’t mean they get to extract whatever political concessions they want out of me. Taking away the guns of law-abiding people isn’t going to fix the problem.

Late last week a commenter by the name of Lynn Hoffman came to comment on Bryan Miller’s blog. It would seem that Mr. Hoffman, a fellow Philadelphian, is a food and wine critic, and author. Now, the comment was bad enough, but it would also seem that Mr. Hoffman is the author of an anti-gun work of fiction called “bang BANG”.

Being the curios fellow I am, I decided to look up what this book was about. Here’s part of a review I found:

Enraged by the use of her words and picture by a pro-gun US Senator, and after seeing herself in an ad for gun rights in Telescopic Sight Digest, she takes to the streets of her Center City Philly neighborhood–with a BB gun. Her first target is a Jeep Wagoneer, chosen for the UGA (United Gun Association) decal on its rear window. Her ensuing spree is highlighted by a “Valentines Day Massacre” of at least forty UGA-stickered windshields in the city.

This is fiction from the gun control folks; glorification of vandalism against gun owners who stand up for their constitutional rights. Unbelievable. Just more Reasoned Discourse^TM, I suppose.

I’m not going to criticize the Brady Campaign for having someone else manage Paul’s blog. That’s par for the course in these kinds of matters with non-profits. But for the sake of staying on message, I’m rather surprised that they show someone else posting on behalf of Paul Helmke:

I’m going to guess dpennington is Doug Pennington, detailed here by Buckeye Firearms Coalition:

Recently I was notified by my friend Dan Gettlefinger that just the very sort of disinformation piece I have been talking about ran in the Cincinnati Enquirer. The author, Doug Pennington, is a former Cincinnati resident now living in Washington D.C. and an employee of Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. His article was prompted by an op-ed penned by a Vietnam War vet named Charles Donabedian.

None of us, I think, really believed that Paul did his own blog entires; that’s what staff is for. But you’d think they’d know enough to avoid these kind of careless oversights. It’s one thing to understand Paul doesn’t really manage his own blog. It’s another thing for us to know who actually does it.

SayUncle does a great fisking of an editorial by Laura Washington. I have some comment myself on this part:

The rabid response of the gun lobby is damning, but impressive. They out-gun, out-email, gun-control advocates by more than 20 to one. Their ability to organize a rapid response is exactly the opposite of FEMA. The gun army, made up almost exclusively of white men from suburban and rural areas, is loaded for bear.

Emphasis mine. I think Bitter, Tam, Denise, ZendoDeb, and Squeaky would be interested to know that the “gun army” was made up exclusively of males. Pro-Gun Progressive, a resident of the Pigtown section of Baltimore, MD, might be surprised to find out that we’re exclusively suburban and rural. Kenn Blanchard might be surprised to learn we’re exclusively white. Jeff Soyer, who Washington’s article mentioned, is, in fact, a rural white male from Vermont, but he’s also a gay rural white male; not your stereotypical Bubba.

She may want to believe that we’re all just a bunch of angry white males, but we’re a cross section of America. We’re not the “gun lobby” she thinks we are.

Thirdpower wants to know how many candidates are groveling before the Brady Campaign to beg for their support.  Good question.  If the answer is greater than zero, I’m not seeing any evidence of it.

Go over to Cam’s blog for something that will outrage you.