So a bunch of left-wing operatives call on the Obama Administration to turn its scandal ridden and politically weaponized IRS on the National Rifle Association, like we haven’t seen enough of that already. I’m guessing Yahoo, which has been slowly circling the bowl for a while now, thinks it can get more eyeballs by being the Weekly World News for leftist hacks. We’ll see how well that works out for them.
Ever expanding the class of prohibited persons to encompass people convicted or accused of ever more minor offenses is a logical strategy for a movement that has had very little luck with any other form of gun control. There’s a significant amount of ignorance among elites about what “domestic violence” can consist of. Most people envisage someone beating their wife, and certainly that does happen, and those people deserve to go to jail. But domestic abuse can, in some states, consist of something as little as grabbing a cell phone out of someone’s hand or pushing someone out of the way as you run out of the house in a huff.
Remember that lower class people don’t have money to hire lawyers in most cases, and can often be one vindictive ex-girlfriend away from losing their gun rights for good. Lower class people tend to have these kinds of problems more than the upper classes do. This is really a perfect issue for the gun control movement, because few people want to be seen standing up for domestic abusers, and fewer people understand how the law in these cases actually works to understand the wool is being pulled over their eyes by very deceptive people.
Hate monger for the Daily Beast Cliff Schecter is losing it. You can consider Schecter a barometer for how we’re doing as a movement. The more petty, angry, and hate filled he gets, the better we’re doing. He must be pretty exhausted by now, having built all those straw men. We even get a bit of Markley’s Law for good measure:
Much like the guy screaming about the end of the world on the street corner, when it doesn’t happen, the NRA just pushes back the timeline a bit, rinses and repeats. Considering their target audience is comprised of the same old white men who buy penis pills via group email, pulling this off is not as difficult as one would imagine.
I sincerely hope we can continue to help Mr. Schecter with his continuing mental breakdown.
New York Mets pitcher says they were duped into wearing orange. I saw that photo, and figured they must have something in their contract, since I can’t imagine ball players, even in New York City, are all big on gun control. They were apparently told it the photo was for “raising awareness for gun violence,” rather than supporting Bloomberg’s gun control agenda.
See, we can laugh all we want about them using the “gun violence” moniker, but it does fool people. Most people aren’t all that engaged with the issue.
Completely subjective, I know, but having to do the grocery shopping yesterday on the way back from the office, I decided to take notice of anyone wearing orange. I can report I did not notice a single person wearing orange all of yesterday. Of course, to really be scientific, you’d have to take a control sampling at the same place on a day when Bloomberg isn’t asking people to wear orange, and then calculate whether the variation is statistically significant. But my number was a big zero. Did anyone else notice anyone wearing orange? Miguel did.
It’s not surprising that the gun control community postures over current events, because those events can sometimes help drive their narratives. When a kid steals a gun from a parent and does something untoward with it, it makes their case that all guns should be disassembled into pieces and stored in underground vaults in the backyard. When one of “mom’s little angel” teenagers gets ahold of a gun and shoots a few rivals and some bystanders, it’s not necessarily crazy on the part of our opponents to presume that maybe some kind of vague, “stricter background checks,” might find a sympathetic ear among voters.
Sunday’s confrontation in Waco also appears to have started as a result of a dispute involving the Bandidos, one of the world’s largest motorcycle clubs, with as many as 2,500 members in 14 countries, and one that’s engaged in distribution of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, according to the Justice Department. One of their mottoes: “We’re the people your parents warned you about.â€
Yes, I’m sure if we just stop people from privately transferring guns, outlaw biker gangs will be reduced to settling their differences through pillow fights and rock/paper/scissors. It’s certainly not possible that a criminal enterprise, who already traffic in contraband, would have no problem obtaining guns or anything else they need to pursue their black market trade. But I think they really believe this.
They don’t live in reality. Outlaw Biker Gangs aren’t going to be disarmed. Motivated lunatics will find ways to get guns. The only people their policies succeed in disarming are the people you didn’t have to worry about in the first place.
A few weeks ago, Yahoo News published a hit piece on NRA. I figured this was likely ginned up by some of our opponents in the gun control movement. Most of the mainstream outfits would love a story like that, but the fact that it only appeared on Yahoo, to not much fanfare from the rest of the media, hinted to me that whoever wrote it probably did not follow the barest of journalistic standards, and quite possibly was an operative from the other side, especially given that the author is associated with a left-leaning group Center for Public Integrity, which is supported by supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and has a board stocked with people who are not friendly to Second Amendment freedoms.
At the end of that article, you’ll notice a quite lengthy update, where NRA has addressed many of the allegations against it. When I first saw this article, I thought that it was probably a coding error on their web site, because to be honest, the firm they hire to do that kind of work has been sloppy in the past. Because we’re often using the PVF web site to look up grades, I can’t tell you how many times it’s just been broken. Though, it’s been pretty good recently, so maybe they’ve hired some better people.
A key thing people get confused about when it comes to campaign finance laws is what constitutes political activity. To use an example, here’s an add NRA ran in Colorado ahead of the 2014 elections:
Some folks might say this is clearly political activity, but it does not call for people to support for, or oppose any bill or measure. It does not mention any candidate for federal office. This is educational outreach, rather than political activity. This ad could even be funded under the auspices of a 501(c)(3). In fact, a good bit what NRA does that many people might think is “political” is done under a 501(c)(3), NRA’s Freedom Action Foundation.
This article was pretty obviously a targeted hit piece. That’s even more apparent when you consider none of the other MSM outlets, who’d love to be all over a story like this, really touched it. The only other outlets I saw talking about it are Townhall and Brietbart.
I used to be very much against the “physician gag laws,” viewing it as a First Amendment issue, but lately as the medical professional societies recommend more and more intrusions into the lives of patients I’m moving more into the “meh” category. They kind of deserve what’s being served upon them. If the medical profession wants war, it can have war, and they can find out just how much lobbying power we have.
Various medical professional organizations, lead by the American Society of Physicians, are putting out a position paper calling for more gun control. You can see the abstract here.
The specific recommendations include universal background checks of gun purchasers, elimination of physician “gag laws,†restricting the manufacture and sale of military-style assault weapons and large-capacity magazines for civilian use, and research to support strategies for reducing firearm-related injuries and deaths. The health professional organizations also advocate for improved access to mental health services and avoidance of stigmatization of persons with mental and substance use disorders through blanket reporting laws. The American Bar Association, acting through its Standing Committee on Gun Violence, confirms that none of these recommendations conflict with the Second Amendment or previous rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court.
I can’t really tell you how much this infuriates me. If I were NRA, and any of these medical societies receive any kind of federal or state funding for this kind of crap, It’d lobby to get it cut. Screw them over any way you can think of. These people have declared war on the Second Amendment using the guise and prestige of the medical profession. As a wise man once said, punch back twice as hard.
It’s pretty apparent that that various medical professional societies and the American Bar Association have been taken over by social justice warriors, and they are all conspiring to deny us fundamental constitutional rights. The American Bar Association doesn’t get to decide our constitutional rights. It would probably be a good idea to form a movement among grassroots medical and legal professionals to take their professions back from the SJWs. It’s going to take gun owning physicians (and there are a lot of them) speaking out against the social justice warriors. If only we had a Larry Correia or two in the medical and legal professions.
It was pretty apparent when the judgement came down that the spin was going to be: “Look at this poor family, forced to pay $280,000 by the evil gun lobby who killed their son.” Well, that didn’t take long, did it? John Richardson over at No Lawyers, Only Guns and Money did some digging (with the help of an observant reader), and it turns out that the victims in this case are on the Brady payroll.
It would seem likely, in this case, that the Brady Center is going to pick up the tab for the lawsuit. I’d bet that if fundraising letters haven’t already gone out begging for donations to help the family out from under the thumb of the evil gun lobby, those fundraising letters are surely being prepared. Still, with these kinds of fees, it’s hard to imagine how filing frivolous suits like this is going to be a winning strategy for Brady in the long term. I suspect, however, that they are desperately trying to carve out a niche in a space increasingly dominated by Mike Bloomberg.
Bloomberg’s biggest liability is how well he self-vilifies, and how poorly he plays in flyover country. Shannon Watts’ organization once looked like it could be formidable, but goofs and gaffes she’s made have seriously sapped her organization of credibility. Meanwhile, the Brady Campaign and Center, though both shadows of their former selves, still achieved a great deal in the gun control movement. It would be good to see that slide into the dustbin of history.
I suspect, however, that the more likely future for Brady is along the VPC model, where the organization maintains a skeleton crew, funded largely by outside foundations, maybe even including Bloomberg. It would be better for Bloomberg to control the Brady organization, and keep it subservient, rather than letting it collapse, with all the bad headlines for gun control that will follow after such a well-regarded, pioneering organization folds up. That kind of thing would not go unnoticed in DC, either by policymakers or politicians.
