Category: Gun Rights

Via Jeff, a Penn student takes a gun safety course. Overall, a much better situation than I was exposed to this weekend, but a few things caught my eye here:

Our instructor, Ken, then came in with an unloaded 9-mm Glock and fake bullets. After 30 minutes with Ken, practicing loading, unloading and aiming, we were ready to shoot.

Why would you bring a 9mm firearm with blanks or simunitions? Beginners should be taught on a .22LR pistol, and then work up to something with recoil when they are comfortable with that. It’s a basic pistol course, not a combat pistol course.

There’s too many macho assholes out there that think .22LR is a wimpy cartridge, but they are perfect for a beginning pistol course involving people who’ve never fired a gun before.

Should you ever come across a gun laying on 42nd Street, with a simple lesson in gun safety, you could feel comfortable disarming it, instead of leaving it there for the next criminal to pick up,. It’s a small step to making Penn, and West Philadelphia, a safer place.

Should you ever come across a gun on the streets, don’t touch it. Call the police and allow them to handle the recovery. That firearm is potential evidence. It could have been used is a crime and ditched by the criminal.

UPDATE: I think I misunderstood what she meant by “fake bullets”. I was assuming blanks or some kind of submunitions. She meant the dummy rounds you use for classroom instruction. In that case, no foul. But I still think 9mm is too much gun for someone who’s never shot before.

One of the problems with “enforce the laws that are already on the books” is that a lot of the laws that are already on the book are morally reprehensible, and constitutionally suspect.  Clayton Cramer points to a specific example.

I noticed that a few folks are covering the article in Parade that appeared last week. Of course, the best rebuttal I can offer to these claims by a reporter, who clearly didn’t bother to do any research beyond Brady Campaign talking points, is from the ATF itself:

Firearms selected for tracing are not chosen for purposes of determining which types, makes or models of firearms are used for illicit purposes. The firearms selected do not constitute a random sample and should not be considered representative of the larger universe of all firearms used by criminals, or any subset of that universe. Firearms are normally traced to the first retails seller, and sources reported for firearms traced do not necessarily represent the sources or methods by which firearms in general are acquired for use in crime.

That’s what the ATF says, in bold print, on the second page right before the present the data they collect on tracing trends. Of course, that doesn’t stop people from doing exactly what the ATF says shouldn’t be done with the data.

John Edwards, who’s views on the second amendment are well known:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQFhdFfl6rM[/youtube]

Of course, that hasn’t stopped John Edwards from saying he supports the second amendment and loves hunters:

I think, first and foremost, that we need a president who actually believes in the Second Amendment and in the individual right to own firearms. And, the importance in that, both for hunting and for protection, and I do.

Do these people think we’re stupid? If John Edwards supports the second amendment, I’d hate to see what not supporting it would look like. I was happy that Field and Stream yesterday printed Chris Cox’s response to Edwards:

Edwards, of course, ran on the ticket with John Kerry at a time when Kerry had sponsored legislation that would have banned common semi-automatic hunting shotguns like the Remington 1100, Browning Auto-5 and Benelli SBE. His running mate told America’s hunters that they could not be trusted with these “assault weapons.”

Apparently they do think we’re stupid. Not a great way to win over voters. Read the whole thing.

Not only did their legislature pass a bill that allowed police department to surplus old firearms to civilians, they overrode O’Malley’s veto.

UPDATE: Sebastian has more analysis.

Ahab covers it here:

Read that very carefully.  They knew that the gun ban wouldn’t work, but they passed it anyway because they wanted to “start a national trend”.  It’s a perfect example of how the anti-gun mindset works, start small and spread.  DC wanted to impose their style of gun control on the entire nation; even today they still want to do that.

It’s never been about crime control.  Read the whole thing.

Joe Huffman makes a good observation in the comment in regards to my post the other day, where I suggested, in response to a “Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in!” scenario would be to plaster one up in my wall:

What will become difficult is to practice and receive formal training. You should be putting several hundred rounds down-range each month just for maintenance. If it becomes illegal to own then range availability as well as (black market) ammo prices will make practice nearly impossible.

Without the practice then you really won’t know if that 75 yard shot at the guard beside “the cattle car filled with Jews” will mean the release of the victims or your death. A 400 yard shot? Forget it. With practice you know what you are capable of (at GBR-2007 do you think I would have started off-hand shooting at the 400 yard plate had I not thought I would be able to make at least a few hits?). With this knowledge you can have the confidence to make plans and execute them.

It is my understanding that the “gardens of eastern Europe were well oiled” because of all the guns buried there. Even as tyrants of eastern rose to power, people were dragged off in the middle of the night, and the gulags killed their 10s of thousands those guns stayed buried in their well oiled graves.

To me, burying your guns is little different than turning them over. It’s only a victory in your mind. You must use them or you have lost them.

That’s a very good point.  Practice would be difficult or impossible, and skills would quickly deteriorate, rendering your firearm a short range weapon at best.  Another thing I hadn’t considered is that ammo has a fixed shelf life.  In 50 years, that 2000 rounds of ammo might no longer be viable.

I’ve never been convinced that a violent movement in response to a federal gun confiscation program would spontaneously erupt, but that action would occur through state governments either actively resisting federal power, or by leaving the United States entirely.  I think the place to start would be civil disobedience, as the Canadians are successfully doing with their long gun registration program.

I wouldn’t suggest burying firearms in a wall and then stop fighting, but to continue to push the issue.  While I don’t think most gun owners would have the stomach for violent resistance, I don’t think most people would have the stomach to violently enforce a gun confiscation either.  If a few states refused to do it, and brought the issue to a head, it might be enough to get folks to back down.  Most people aren’t passionate about gun control, and I think that could be used to our advantage if it ever comes to confiscation.