Category: Anti-Gun Folks

Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center, takes the a look in the gift horse’s mouth, and doesn’t like what he sees. Hey Josh, the Brady Campaign figured out that they could spin this as a victory to their supporters and donors, and were lucky to have the media gobble up the notion like they are wont to do with anything you guys tell them. It even tricked enough gun owners to get the NRA in hot water with its constituents.

But Josh, buddy, seriously… take the spin and go with it. I mean, you wouldn’t want to ruin Paul Helmke’s fundraising efforts by getting the notion out there, among yours and Brady’s donors, that HR2640 wasn’t actually a gun control law, would you? If that’s the case, that means you guys haven’t won a victory in, what is it now? 14 years.

I’m a lurker there. I don’t have time to comment, but I think for the most part folks are doing OK keeping up the pro-gun sides of the argument. This latest caught my eye, from Macaca, one of the few anti-gun commenters on their site:

what’s happening now is the shame of this cournty. so let’s TRY something new even if it means that every gun purchaser has to go through a background check. the people of Philly and every other city that has gun violence deserve it.

Yeah, OK. Except that every firearms purchaser in Pennsylvania already has to go through a background check, and for handguns, ANY transfer has to go through a dealer or sheriff. There is no so-called “gun show loophole” in Pennsylvania. We closed it. And guess what? 234 and counting. Macaca later shares with us:

Finally done he stood up and said there is only one thing he didn’t like about England and that was their gun laws. I quickly handed him my business card and told him who we were and what we were all about and my friend told him that England was safe BECAUSE of it’s gun laws.He quickly left. His wife on the other hand stayed. She said she had been trying to tell him the same thing about England for years but he wouldn’t listen. She said, now that he’s made such a fool of himself maybe he’ll have to rethink his position. And with that she stood up, gave us a $100 bill as a donation and left.

Gee, I wonder what business card that could have been? Good to see those grass roots at work!

UPDATE: Macaca Macca responds in the comments. Odd choice of nickname. I’m going to guess not a big George Allen fan. I can understand that, because Allen was a dummy. I have to wonder how the Brady folks in Virginia feel about their current gun nut Senator.  Seems I’m a dummy too.  DMeadows reminds me that I need to read more carefully.

Come on Paul, just declare Godwin’s Law and be done with it. If you want reasoned discourse, why don’t you post about some of the stuff you disagree with on some of our blogs? Brady people are as welcome to comment here as anyone else. Although, I guess you and your staff are too busy destroying our second amendment rights to bother. A shame, but it’s not our fault you guys don’t have any real grass roots to back you up.

I’ve noticed a lot more blogs lately picking up on the gun control thing.  This keeps things interesting, at least, but I wish they’d come up with their own material.  When was the last time you saw one of us linking to crap at the NRA?  They are usually a week behind us.

 For two examples, 1) keeping guns out of the hands of mentally impaired veterans (who, after all, know how to use them); and 2) letting the ATF track guns used in crimes back to their point of sale. The NRA vigorously opposes both of these controls, for “reasons” that strike us as benefiting absolutely no one, except (in the second case) gun dealers who knowingly traffic with persons buying firearms for criminal purposes.

Many of those veterans added are no longer suffering from mental illness.  They were added as a matter of course by the Clinton administration.  Veterans still suffering from mental illnesses will still not be eligible to purchase a firearm under this bill.

The ATF can still trace guns used in crimes to their source.  The NRA supports that.  What they don’t support are people having access to the trace data for matters not relating to criminal investigations.  That’s what Tiahrt does.  The ATF supports it.  So does the Fraternal Order of Police.

Indeed, the NRA thinks that the massacre at Virginia Tech could have been prevented if every student and teacher there had carried a handgun. Perhaps that massacre could have — who knows? — but the notion of arming 18-24 year olds, at the very time that “drugs and alcohol use and suicide and mental health issues all peak” is, well, CRACKPOT CRAZY.

No one thinks that every student or teacher should carry a handgun.  I would oppose any effort to hand out guns to students.  What we do support is removing legal barriers that prevent people who hold concealed weapons licenses from carrying on college and university campuses.  Maybe you think that’s crackpot crazy too, but I have news for you, people over 21 years of age can get a license that allows them to carry most other places.  Will it prevent VT tech style incidents?  Maybe not.   But if you ban them, then definitely not.  VT’s rule against guns on campus didn’t stop Cho.

After all, as the Brady Center schools report observes, on the whole “college campuses are safer than the communities that surround them, precisely because those institutions have barred or tightly controlled firearms.

Or, because like where I went to college, in West Philadelphia, outside of campus is, shall we say, not the nicest of areas.  It has nothing to do with campus policy on firearms, and everything to do with most college students not being miscreants.  Do you think muggers bother to read the student manual?

Right now, by the way, the Brady Center could use your support to help fight the strong possibility that activist judges –this is rich — will strike down Washington, D. C.’s and eventually every major city’s most effective gun laws.

It’s activism to uphold the Bill of Rights?  I’ll remember that next time Congress starts prattling about making more restrictions on speech, and the courts strike it down.

Explore the Brady site to see how you can help in this fight . . . unless, of course, you believe the bumper sticker that greeted me on the rear of a hunter’s pickup when I returned to Pine Mountain from Blacksburg after the shooting spree at Virginia Tech on April 16 took our son Jamie’s life: “Gun Control: Simple Solutions for Simple Minds.”

I prefer SayUncle’s favorite saying: “Gun Control: It’s what you do instead of something”.   I don’t think everyone who supports gun control has a simple mind, I just think they don’t really know much about the issue, and desperately want to believe a lot of things that aren’t true.

Feel free to head over and comment, but please be polite.

A letter to the editor, in response to a letter to the editor.  I could swear I’ve linked to this paper before for the same thing.

As a longtime gun owner, world traveler and, I like to think, common-sense advocate, I need to make the following notes regarding his “fear” of losing his “rights.”

…

Anyone who believes that there has been a single bill designed to eliminate hunting rifles and shotguns needs to really read the proposals. No one wants to inhibit hunting, sporting clays, target shooting, or sport of any kind. AK-47’s, Glocks and Uzi’s are not sporting guns.

A quick googling would indicate the Bob Zembower is from Bedford, PA, sells Vulcanized Fiber in Wilmington, DE, and is religious.  In other words: a real person.  We see so many of these letters following the same pattern, but maybe it’s not astroturfing.

Hey folks, I think our opponents in the gun control movement are trying to recruit some real grass roots in the blogosphere.  This should be fun.  Notice that stophandgunviolence.org is making some banners that some lefty bloggers are picking up.

Here’s another example of the kind of frothing at the mouth we can expect to see:

The NRA, with the money at their disposal and their willingness to do anything to win, with an almost gleeful expression as they lessen the security of the American people, are bar none one of the most evil of these groups in the country. The sad thing is not just the Republicans, but good Democrats who bow down before them.

Lessen the security of the American people?  Give me a break.  How is demanding respect for the bill-of-rights, you know, all of it, not just the parts you like, evil?   If that be evil, I’ll gladly accept that.

I wrote a column three years ago on this subject, so let me quote liberally from that piece, and how today it is even more important as the NRA fights to ensure every terrorist, crimininal, child or mentally imbalanced person has access to an AK:

I really would prefer criminals, children, mentally imbalanced folks, and terrorists don’t have access to guns, but the problem is, if I have access to them, then so do the criminals.   And guess what?  If you ban my access to them, the criminals and the terrorists will still have guns.  It’s just me you’ll be disarming.

Go have a read.  For all those who are picking up on the gun control mantra in the blogosphere: Welcome to the Party.  We gun bloggers have been here for years talking amongst ourselves.  It’s great that we’ll have some one to actually argue with other than Paul Helmke.

Let the games begin.

I think we reached a new level of achievement when we turned the Brady Blog into a place where gun owners were talking shop about their favorite firearms and calibers. I was also amused to find out the gun blogosphere has two token blog parasites, according to Kelli. But do you wonder why the Brady Campaign has to gain from running a blog?

To understand that, you have to have some idea of how non-profits work. I’ve heard enough stories from Bitter’s career in non-profit (can’t mention which ones) to have some idea of why they might be allowing this. The reason is, the Brady Campaign have probably realized they need to break into the new media, and no doubt they’ve been hearing a lot of their donors say this as well. The pro-gun message is out there already, even though the NRA’s new media efforts, so far, have been pretty pitifully awful. But because the gun rights movement has real grass roots, we’ve self-organized and gotten the message out there in the new media, despite the fact that the NRA barely acknowledges we exist, let alone reaches out to us. But the Brady’s have to be out there in the new media, and we’re doing everything we can to help them!

“What?” you might ask, “we have pwned the Brady Blog!”

This might be true, but when it comes time to talk to their donors, do you really think they are going to say:

“Well, we started a blog, but it quickly became a forum for gun rights people to bash us, and then talk amongst themselves.”

No. It’s going to get spun like this:

“The Brady Campaign is definitely reaching out to New Media. Paul’s blog entries are cross posted at the Huffington Post, which is one of the leading progressive new media sites. Our own blog is getting thousands hits a day, and we’re getting hundreds of comments on each post that Paul does. Our new media efforts are getting our message out there, and people are responding.”

They won’t mention that most of the traffic and commentary is being driven by the gun blogosphere. This doesn’t mean I think we should just ignore the Brady Blog, because we need to have fun, after all; it can’t be all serious, all the time. But just keep in mind, they aren’t stupid, and one thing they are masterful at is spin. If they are letting us dominate their blog, there is probably a reason.

Josh Rosenthal, who you all might remember as a board member of the American Hunters and Shooters Association, is putting up a new billboard along the Mass Pike, along with Deval Patrick, The Massachusetts State Police and the Boston Police Department.

I have to admit, my muse has gone on vacation too.  But I haven’t so run out of things to say that I’m resorting to posting what the trolls say on the blog.  When you get people posting crazy stuff, just ignore it.  That’s what most of us do.  I mean, I’ll gladly approve someone who disagrees with me, even if it sounds a bit nuts, but if you’re completely off the reservation, to the point where I don’t know what you’re saying or why you’re babbling, the “Spam” button works pretty well for that.

In defense of the Brady Campaign, I think that was probably an actual comment, though I see some people are skeptical of this.  You’re probably seeing what they don’t approve.   But still, we all get crazy stuff as comments from time to time.  This is like having show and tell at an elementary school, and the Brady’s are the kid that brings a pencil.  We’ve seen it before, and we all have one.