Category: Gun Rights

Giron is out too! I didn’t honestly think to get champagne. Bitter and I decided just to open a cheap, crappy bottle of white and mix it with some Pellegrino to improvise. It’s kind of bubbly. I was feeling pretty good this morning that we’d get at least one of the bastards, but felt that hoping for two was getting a bit greedy.

It actually turns out we beat Giron by a wider margin than Morse. I think we ought to dub this the recall heard round the world. Gun control is a losing issue. That can’t be any more clear than it has been tonight. Giron was in a Democratic district, but it was a working class, blue collar Democratic district, and those folks can be motivated to cross party lines when the gun issue is pushed.

I will have more about this later, but if you contributed anything to the recall, even if you were like us and just contributed the cost of a dinner out, pat yourself on the back. If you were part of the on-the-ground recall effort in any of these two districts, go buy yourself a nice steak dinner. You deserve it! You have done the rest of us in this country a huge favor. We owe a tremendous debt to you, especially to those of us in other purple come blue states, like Pennsylvania. This effort will need some serious study. This should become a playbook on how to accomplish great things in the gun rights movement.

Repeat after me: gun control is a losing issue for Democrats. Morse is conceding that he has indeed been recalled. Giron is doing better, but results are very preliminary, and she was a stretch goal to begin with. We can get the rest of the bastards in 2014 regardless, but we can’t go back to sleep.

“Very interesting. They even seem to be organizing into a well-regulated militia of sorts. Read the whole thing.”

Well, let’s be honest, when it comes to the folks who argue that we have to be a well-regulated militia to assert our rights, there wouldn’t be any “militia” that’s “well-regulated” enough for them to be comfortable with the idea.

This is a story that really needs to be told, and I hope everyone will get themselves a copy when the book comes out. Here is an excerpt:

Gun! Just the word raises the temperature. Add Negroes and the mixture is incendiary, evoking images of hopeless young gangsters terrorizing blighted neighborhoods.

This book tells a dramatically different story. It chronicles a tradition of church folk, merchants and strivers, the very best people in the community, armed and committed to the principle of individual self-defense. This black tradition of arms takes root early and ranges fully into the modern era. It is demonstrated in Fredrick Douglass’ advice of a good revolver as the best response to slave catchers. It is evident in mature form in 1963, when Hartman Turnbow of Mississippi fought off a Klan attack with rifle fire. Turnbow considered this fully consistent with the principles of the freedom movement, explaining, “I wasn’t being non-nonviolent, I was just protectin’ my family”.

The black tradition of arms has been submerged because it seems hard to reconcile with the dominant narrative of nonviolence in modern civil rights movement. But that superficial tension is resolved by the longstanding distinction that was vividly evoked by movement stalwart Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer’s advice about segregationists who dominated Mississippi politics was, “Baby you just got to love ‘em. Hating just makes you sick and weak.” But asked how she survived the threats from midnight terrorists Hamer responded, “I’ll tell you why. I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.”

Read the whole thing, and you can pre-order the book here.

When the media isn’t busy talking about whether George Zimmerman had a hard poop this morning, they are talking about Syria. It’s still a gun news desert. That might change after the recall elections. If we win, you can expect crickets. If we lose, you can expect it to be evidence the people want more gun control, and you can expect the media, politicians and gun control advocates to start beating the drum again. If we win one but not the other, pundits will wring their hands and ponder what it means. I’ll take a dry news cycle for a win.

NYC cops dealing in illegal firearms? Maybe Bloomberg should look in his own backyard before looking in mine.

Comparing murder rates between countries is troublesome because they all have different standards.

Pete King (R-NY) is planning to run for President. That’s crazy talk. The GOP will never nominate a RINO from a deep blue northeastern state.

ATF has published their proposed ATF rule.

So some two-bit dictator gasses a lot of his people, and the UN is hapless. But one guy shoots another guy and they are all over that. Why is it we continue to let the UN occupy some of the most valuable real-estate in the US?

I’d just like to make clear, I’d never endorse destruction of public property. No. Never.

Panic in Maryland, as gun control law looms.

Fallout from the SAFE act continues in New York.

Massad Ayoob on Aftershocks in the Zimmerman verdict.

Guns Against Tyranny. A must read by an immigrant from China.

Isn’t this guy’s 15 minutes over yet? Miguel takes the most comprehensive look at the reaction. Apparently GZ is in the midst of a messy divorce and his wife is making allegations. This is me twirling my finger. I guess that’s just how the cracker crumbles. I don’t plan to keep covering the comings and goings of George Zimmerman. I couldn’t be filled with more don’t give a crap about him at this point.

Bloomberg has dropped $350,000 in an attempt to buy the race. All we have are our votes, so if you’re in those two districts, please be sure to vote today.

The money from Bloomberg, an advocate for stricter gun laws with his group Mayor’s Against Illegal Guns, is formidable compared to any single contribution that recall backers have publicly disclosed. In all, Morse and Giron’s supporters have raised about $2.5 million, including Bloomberg’s contribution and $250,000 from billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad.

And while recall backers have been mum about their spending, Democrats think the amount is formidable, noting that some of their opponents are nonprofits that don’t have to disclose their contributions.

In other words, their opponents are real grassroots organizations, and not a couple of rich assholes.

Victor Head, a 29-year-old plumber who organized the recall effort against Giron, said he and his friends were so enraged by what they saw at the state Capitol that they came to the simple conclusion: “No more sitting on the couch and shaking our fist at the TV.”

And that’s all it takes. A few motivated people can make a huge difference. Also, keep in mind that NRA is putting $361,700 into the recalls, and that money doesn’t come from a handful of wealthy patrons, it comes from you and me in 20 dollar increments here and there.

UPDATE: The stakes are high folks.

This isn’t something I could have ever believed I’d see a decade ago. More on the gutting of Chicago’s gun control ordinances at the Chicago Sun-Times. To quote Joe Biden, this is a big effin deal.

UPDATE: Originally I tried to embed the video directly, but it sets to autoplay if you embed it, which I find to be one of those obnoxious things web designers do.

They are tomorrow. Charles Cooke has a pretty good article about the recall efforts, and Jim Geraghty notes that Giron has enlisted some grassroots help of her own. Everyone who cares about Second Amendment rights in those districts need to get out to the polls. There’s absolutely no excuse for staying home.

Writes Joseph J. Ellis, in the Los Angeles Times:

The 2nd Amendment represented Madison’s attempt to respond to the fears of a standing army by assuring that national defense would reside in the states and in militias, not at the federal level in a professional army. The right to bear arms derived from the need to assure that state militia could perform its essential mission.

All this was what constitutional scholars call “settled law” until Heller, in which the high court ruled that the right to bear arms, despite the language of the 2nd Amendment and the historical context of its creation, existed independent of service in the militia.

I guess he missed the years of Second Amendment scholarship which generally convinced most of the legal academy that the “settled law” was anything but. Actually, Second Amendment law was far from settled in terms of collective rights. This article is full of ignorance on a great many topics, including the fact that “original intent” originalism has largely fallen out of fashion and has few supporters these days even among ardent originalists.

But even Scalia, fully aware of the legal precedents he was overturning, saw fit to insert the following caveats near the end of his opinion.

What legal precedents? Heller and McDonald have overturned nothing. Miller, in fact, is still valid case law because it was never the collective rights case that people imagined it to be.