Category: Anti-Gun Folks

This is unbelievable. Bloomberg’s “The Trace” web site has shown itself very adept at building straw men so they can tear them down, but this takes the cake. Their argument seems to be that because the gun confiscations after Katrina weren’t universal, that means that NRA is exaggerating. The city confiscated approximately 800 firearms in the wake of Katrina. No one at the time ever argued it was a mass confiscation. We were aware at the time that many of the confiscations were carried out by “out of town” law enforcement.

But hundreds of Americans have their civil rights violated at the time they most need them, and no big deal, right? Note how Bloomberg’s Mouthpiece goes into detail later about bizarre conspiracy theories, and then tries to conflate mainstream gun rights opinions with them.

I have to admit I just don’t understand how some people go through the grieving process. For me it’s a deeply personal thing and not something with which to involve the rest of the world outside of immediate family and close friends. When my mother died when I was 20 years old, I found all the attention surrounding the funeral to be more stress inducing than the actual loss itself. I was happy when all that was over. But hers was not a sudden and unexpected death. It was untimely — she was 43 — but she had been fighting the cancer for years.

I imagine sudden an unexpected is a different experience, and I’m sure burying a child is more difficult than burying a parent. But it’s very difficult to understand how grief could manifest itself in attention seeking behavior. For that reason, I don’t really understand Andy Parker, the father of the anchorwoman who was murdered on live television. A former candidate for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates, he’s seemed to seek out the limelight in the wake of the murder of his daughter. He has vowed to take on the NRA. I can actually understand that, even I think the anger is misplaced. Someone’s bound to shove a camera in your face after a high-profile incident like this, and I can understand lashing out in anger, especially when the person responsible took his own life rather than allowing the victims family to get any sense of justice. But then he goes and demands to know why key politicians aren’t calling him, then stating later in another press interview saying he’s going to buy a gun himself. He’s been writing op-eds in the Washington Post. It’s been reported in the news Parker has been in contact with Bloomberg’s people and Giffords. It’ll be interesting to see if which group, if any, will pick him up.

At the risk of sounding completely cold hearted, this behavior strikes me as very odd for someone mourning. Perhaps I just don’t understand it. Everyone grieves differently. But I have been around more than enough grieving people in my lifetime to, I think, declare this a very strange way of going about it. I’ve seen people who use the opportunity of deaths, marriages, births, etc, and attempt to make such public events all about them. But we usually think of those people as insufferable boors, don’t we? I’m not saying that’s what we’re seeing here, but if this is one of many means of grieving, I sure would like to understand it. It’s very difficult to wrap my head around making a media spectacle, and blaming your own tragedy on millions of fellow Americans who had nothing to do with it, and who also believe it’s awful and senseless.

Our opponents are circulating a petition to ban minors from shooting machine guns. I’m going to agree that starting the kids off on machine pistols is pretty irresponsible, as we’ve seen from at least two tragic accidents. It’s far better to start the kids off on something belt fed. It would seem they believe this puts us on a weak footing:

Now, opponents of the petition will have to explain why the right of a 9-year-old to shoot an automatic weapon is so important.

“My read on pro-gun activists right now is they are facing tremendous cultural pressure, and being asked tough questions that they weren’t five years ago about … how extreme the pro-gun movement has gotten,” says Ladd Everitt, a spokesman for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence in Washington.

Except I’m not going to accept the premise. This is not about gun rights, primarily. The issue is bigger than that. This is about the rights of parents to raise their children in the manner they see fit, provided they aren’t abusing them on putting them in grave danger. Letting a kid shoot, even shoot a machine gun, is statistically less dangerous than letting them play football. It’s none of anyone’s business where, when, or how a parent teaches their child to shoot. The state has no business poking its snout into parental choices like this. None!

“Laws say that children can’t drink, can’t drive, can’t vote. But they can shoot fully automatic assault weapons. That hasn’t changed,” Mr. Vacca’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth, says on the petition.

In many states, they can, under supervision of parents. The states that absolutely prohibit minors from drinking (like Pennsylvania) I think are wrong, and I would advocate repealing those laws. European children don’t seem any worse for wear for having more tolerant laws in this respect. Children can drive motor vehicles, if it’s not on public roads, and voting doesn’t have anything to do with the freedom of parents to raise their children how they see fit.

When you make something illegal for minors to do, you’re really limiting the parental freedoms of parents, and inserting the state into the parent child relationship. The people pushing this petition should answer why they also are not banning children from participating in other organized sports, or riding bicycles, which have astounding rates of injury. Sports contribute to 21% of all the traumatic brain injuries among American children. Every year approximately 50 children die in sports related injuries. Statistically, the shooting sports are safer than golf. The folks pushing this need to explain why they are singling out a relatively safe activity, while ignoring other sports that are far more dangerous.

First it was “handgun ban,” but people rejected the idea thoroughly in very liberal Massachusetts. Then it was “handgun freeze,” but Californians overwhelmingly rejected that idea. Then it became “handgun control,” and when that got nowhere, they switched to trying to ban scary looking long guns. Then Third Way came along with “gun safety.” After that didn’t work, “gun violence prevention” became the rallying cry. Then back to “gun safety” when Bloomberg’s people came in and must not have realized people didn’t fall for it the first time around. Now it looks like they are trying out “gun responsibility.”

Same bullshit, no matter what you call it. Keep trying to polish that turd. We are not fooled.

So the news that Regal Cinemas is instituting bag searches at their theaters has been making the rounds.

Honestly, I didn’t even think to blog it when I first read about it because I presumed that everyone knows the real reason – and that it has nothing to do with public safety. It turns out that Sebastian suggested not everyone realizes the extent to which it has absolutely nothing to do with guns.

See, Regal, like every movie theater chain I’ve heard of, bans food and drinks not purchased at their concession stands.

Outside Food or Drink:
No outside food or drink is permitted in the theatre.

As this Time article notes, the theaters see about 85% of every dollar spent at the concession as pure profit. The money isn’t made at the ticket counter, but at the concession stand.

How bad is it? Search on the terms Regal Cinema and candy, and the first page includes Yelp reviews talking about how to sneak candy into the theater to save big bucks over Regal’s inflated prices. I could buy an entire pound of Twizzlers at Wegmans today for less than what Regal discounts a regular size candy to on Mondays for members of their rewards club.

Theater owners know that people sneak food and drinks in so that they don’t have to stop at the concession stand. I have no doubt that they have talked about ways that they could catch these people and toss their outside food for years, but only now feel like they have enough “cover” to do so in the name of public safety. It’s not about catching anything that’s a threat to the safety of patrons, but about catching those people who want to save a buck and forcing them to feed Regal’s profits.

I have little doubt that if you could spend a week watching which bags they choose to search, they will universally be targeted on those who don’t walk up with anything from the concession stand and those who appear poor (as though they might want to save a several dollars). It won’t be some creepy dude who buys a soda while carrying a suspiciously shaped bag.

Bloomberg has been using his money to fund quite a number of studies that say guns are bad, Mmkay? The latest is that police officers tend to be killed by guns in states with more guns.

“If we’re interested in protecting police officers, we need to look at what’s killing them, and what’s killing them is guns,” says Swedler.

What’s killing them is cars, really. Take a look at this NPR story looking at 2014 deaths, and you’ll note that firearms deaths are only about 1/4 of all the police officer deaths. NPR also notes this:

One important asterisk to this news: While gun deaths of officers have increased, they still remain 12-percent lower than the decade-long average of 57.

And that’s while the civilian stock of firearms has been skyrocketing. Reuters has another article on the study. The media eats up these stories from Bloomberg’s researchers. Unlike other studies, this one can be found online. You can find John Lott’s deconstruction of the study here.

Over at guns.com, they are reporting on several anti-gun groups coming out in opposition of S. 2002. Bloomberg’s mouthpiece says:

“This bill would have the net effect of invalidating many records currently in the system, and it would allow people who have been involuntarily committed to buy a gun immediately after leaving a psychiatric hospital – a particularly dangerous time, according to mental health experts,” said Everytown President John Feinblatt in a statement.

Well, you know, maybe if your beloved Obama administration hadn’t put a bunch of records in there willy nilly, without sufficient due process which one would think we could muster for the sake of our nation’s veterans, we wouldn’t have this problem now, would we? Blame him for the problem.

Secondly, it would not automatically restore the rights of someone after leaving a psychiatric hospital. I can’t call them outright liars, because it could happen in theory, but only after a separate finding that “a judicial officer, court, board, commission, or
other adjudicative body” finds the person:

(I) Does not present a danger to himself or herself or to others;
(II) has been restored to sanity or cured of mental disease or defect;
(III) has been restored to competency; or
(IV) no longer requires involuntary inpatient or outpatient treatment by a psychiatric hospital[.]

Typically if a person is released from a psychiatric hospital, and they are still mentally ill, they are going to fall under involuntary outpatient treatment, and the firearms prohibition will still hold. Even if that’s not the case, if the person is released without any further hearing, the prohibition will hold unless they petition for a restoration of rights. So yeah, not outright lying, because in theory it’s possible, but in practice it’s not going to happen, so it’s definitely spin.

Ladd Everitt’s claim in the article is that it wouldn’t have stopped the Charleston Mass Murderer, the Lafayette Mass Murderer, or the Chattanooga Mass Murderer is even more pathetic. The Charleston shooter was hate filled sociopath. I haven’t seen anything that suggest he was insane. And as has been pointed out before, that was a case of a NICS examiner dropping the ball. The Chattanooga shooter wasn’t a prohibited person, as far as I’ve been able to tell. None of CSGV’s prescriptions, save banning guns for the law-abiding, would have stopped him.

It seems that a White House staffer, a special assistant to President Obama, was arrested for grabbing her boyfriend’s gun and shooting at him just because he wouldn’t give her access to his cellphones after she went ballistic accusing him of cheating.

It was not an accidental shooting, as she warned him that she would do it if he didn’t give in to her demands for full access to his electronic devices. She reportedly said, “You taught me how to use this. Don’t think I won’t use it.” Lovely.

The White House is refusing to comment on the woman who apparently believes that shooting at people is a reasonable response to not giving in when she steals their devices. However, the news article notes her earlier positions which would seem to put her in the anti-gun advocacy world:

[Barvetta] Singletary came to the White House a year ago from her job as deputy chief of staff and policy director to Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., the third-ranking Democratic in the House.

As policy director for Rep. James Clyburn, she was likely part of the team that helped to secure his solid F rating from NRA.