Guns – Page 55 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Good Night for Gun Voting

If the today me went back in time a year and told the last year me we will elect Donald Trump President, the last year me would have worried at what point in the next year I will develop a severe drinking problem. That would be doubly the case if I had told last year me that the Republican candidate would turn Pennsylvania red. There is now some hope that we can replace Scalia with someone who is strong on the Second Amendment, and that is damned important. Let’s look at the winners and losers from a gun rights point of view:

Winners

The background check issue can no longer be credibly claimed to be a 90% issue. Really, it couldn’t after Washington State, but at this point it’s too close to call in Nevada and Maine. Looks like it will barely eek by in Nevada and be defeated, again barely, in Maine. Bloomberg spent a metric shit ton of money on these, and the best he could manage is a nail biter. People will tell pollsters anything that makes them feelÂ good. When people actually weigh the policy implications of ending all private sales of firearms, they aren’t nearly as enthusiastic. This is a mixed bag for Bloomberg, but I think he’ll keep trying.
The NRA. They dumped a ton of money into running ads for Trump and helping with getting our people to turn out. The NRA hats I saw in line at my polling place tells me we were out there. Trump owes us big time, and we had better make sure he remembers that.
Pat Toomey eked out a victory, but his margin was smaller than Trumps. People did undervote! I think we would have been better off if he had lost, but hopefully he’ll “come back to Jesus,” so to speak. Bloomberg pretty clearly cost him votes.
Pennsylvania Dems. The top of the ticket, Trump and Toomey, might have won, but the GOP lost all the other state wide races. This tells me that Pennsylvania went red because of Trump, not because of any major shift in the electorate. Further, a lot of those people who voted for Trump either split their tickets, or only voted for Trump.
Brian Fitzpatrick. He replaces his brother, Mike Fitzpatrick in the seat for PA-08. I am not pleased that he only rated B from NRA, but Santarsiero wanted to ban semi-automatic firearms, and go door to door. Screw that carpetbagger! He can go back to New Jersey if he wants a second political career. The other ring county GOP congressmen all retained their seats. Pat Meehan is no great friend to us, but no great enemy either, and won re-election. Ryan Costello, however, retained his seat, though that district is such aÂ gerrymandered monstrosity, so it’s hard to argue that’s really a ring county district. No other upsets in the Pennsylvania Congressional delegation.

Losers

The State of California is a lost cause. Their gun control ballot initiative won comfortably. That initiative instituted background checks for ammunition purchases and banned magazines holding more than ten rounds.
Washington State voted for the Bloomberg initiative by what looks like a healthy margin. This initiative implements “Gun Violence Restraining Orders” which allow people to have their rights taken away by anyone who is willing to testify that a person is off their rocker. Expect Bloomberg to bring this to other states via ballot.
Hillary Clinton. Oh, her tears are sweet. I am skeptical of the orange one, but I will enjoy this. Never in my life have I seen a candidate so worthy of losing. She’s an awful politician, and I mean that in the way if I said you were a good politician, it at least would mean I admire your talents in getting 50%+1 people to think you’re not such a bad person. How bad is Clinton? She lost to Donald Effin Trump. That’s how bad she is! She ran on gun control as a major centerpiece of her platform and it did not help her.
Gun control as a winning issue for the Democrats. Seriously guys, it’s a stinker. Put Bloomberg in the corner and you’ll be a lot better off. I actually have a pretty open mind about things, and I’m a very reluctant Republican. But I won’t vote for any candidate that supports the kind of crap your candidates have been peddling. Seriously, stop listening to Bloomberg and Obama. They are a big part of the reason you have ended up here!

Feel free to share more winners and losers in the comments! Obviously I don’t follow every local race or issue.

Busybodying May Be The Most Powerful Force in the Universe

How much have busybodies infiltrated the corridors of power? Enough that the National PTA has a position on guns, and it’s so badly done, you almost won’t believe it. Their definition of a semi-automatic assault weapon is hysterically ignorant. There’s one part of the position I’m somewhat OK with, “require knowledge of appropriate firearms use and safety practices.” I agree, so let’s get rifle teams back in our high schools, and have the team members run the gym class where the kids get introduced to that kind of thing.

Most of us here are Dems, Republicans, Libertarians, etc. But if we had to really pick a party that would truly represent us, it would probably be the “Leave Me the Hell Alone” Party. The problem is, because we’re the types that like to be left alone, we don’t really seek out offices and avenues by which we put ourselves in the position of running other people’s lives. We’re just not into that. You do your thing, I’ll do my thing, and as long as you’re not screwing up my shit and I’m not screwing up yours, we’re good.

But the busybody, especially the morally crusading busybody (lets face it, most gun control activists come off as Gladys Kravitz types to me), have every incentive to seek out those kinds of positions. You can even see it in this election: the DC-based religious right establishment is ready to have a cow if Trump wins, because the people they claim to represent put him there! The system picked out the worst moralizing crusaders and sent them to DC because they are the ones with the right incentives to get into those kinds of positions. To give government more power is to give moralizing busybodies more power, because that’s what’s attracted to government.

Most of us don’t want power to rule others: we want to be left alone. But in order to be left alone, you have to seek enough power to make them leave you alone. That, I think, is our great Catch 22.

Don Kates Dies

This is a real loss for our community:

I’ve received the following. For those who can remember the beginnings of the 2A movement, Don was the person who took it mainstream, with his article in the Michigan Law Review. He thereafter served an invaluable function in reaching out to academia […]

His work represented a key foundation of the Heller and McDonald decisions. I think it’s reasonable to argue that without Don Kates there would have been no Heller and McDonald. It would be awful for his memory if those cases end up reversed or limited to meaninglessness by future courts. Let us hope that does not happen.

Really? This is a Controversy?

Looks like Shannon Watts is gunning up controversy because NRA decided kids might enjoy some fun targets. I know this is hard for certain people to believe, but a lot of responsible parents teach their kids to shoot, and the kids might find some targets a bit more enjoyable to shoot than others. Hell, even I think it this looks like a fun and challenging target.

Upon seeing the NRAâ€™s post, the consensus among Twitter users was shock. Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, called out the association for marketing guns to American children.

Shannon Watts, a gun control group, and a couple of other people now represent a consensus? It’s an insult to the millions of parents who teach their kids how to safely shoot to suggest that something like this represents “marketing guns to children.” If you don’t think these people will pass laws that prevent you from teaching your kids to shoot if they ever had the political power, you’re kidding yourselves.

Buying Elections

I am not a fan of the ballot. When there was murmuring about passing that in Pennsylvania, I wrote my reps. I gotÂ an unusual phone call back from a staffer of my State Senator, perplexed someone wroteÂ them on this topic and looking for clarification as to my reasoning. My response basically was, “Look at how badly the ballot has screwed up California. It’s not democracy, it’s mob rule; the victor is almost always the side that spends the most money. It’s a great way for monied interests to dupe the people into voting for nonsense legislators would never be foolish or stupid enough to pass.” I was reassured by the staffer that the article I read was not indicative of a serious effort to get the ballot passed in Pennsylvania (which would require a Constitutional Amendment) and that my Senator would be unlikely to support such an effort should it come up. That was before Bloomberg started using the ballot to buy his political preferences.

Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control group founded by billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has been leading the charge, throwing its financial weight behind three of the four measures. The organization plans to spend $25 million nationwide on the issue, almost as much as the powerful National Rifle Association has spent on television advertising for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

NRA has made the calculation that Trump is a better investment than fighting the ballot initiatives. The collective wisdom of gun fora will certainly declare, if Trump wins and puts desirable people on the Court, thatÂ was a brilliant move! If he loses, or screw us, NRA will be the worst gun rights group ever! It’s a tough position. NRA is not capable of outspending Bloomberg in a ballot fight, so fights must be picked carefully. Past ballot initiatives we have won on have been defeated purely through grassroots effort. In both Massachusetts’ handgun ban ballot initiative, and California’s handgun freeze initiative, we were outspend heavily, but we had enough people on the ground who were good organizers to get it done. We’ve seen some of that recently (like the Colorado recall) but not nearly enough. Our people are very good at self-organizing when you hit at the heart of something very important to them (like Â gun or magazine bans).

What you can expect Bloomberg keep doing is using the ballot to nibble around the edges. It’s an expensive thing to do: so expensive that once more money limited gun control groups realized they couldn’t go big, so they might as well go home. Bloomberg doesn’t seem to mind blowing tens of millions of dollars for incremental, marginal gains. People in Washington State may just have seen a glimpse of what Bloomberg has in store for them next. But I have to wonder if he’ll go for something big like universal registration, or some other real culture breaker. Bans on private transfers will largely be ignored by both the public and the authorities. It’s unfortunate to see Bloomberg win a victory, but it won’t break the culture. It won’t make the activists and hard core gun rights folks leave the states this passed in. At some point, Bloomberg will probably have to go after a culture killing issue to really win, and flip a state into the anti-gun column. Otherwise he’ll spend a decent chunk of his fortune whittling away at the margins. When and where will that move occur? Your guess is as good as mine.

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

I figured the competing endorsements, of Toomey by the Bloomberg Camp and McGinty by the CeaseFire Camp (as if they were separate: Bloomberg funds CeaseFire) was to create a situation such that no matter what the outcome, victory against the evil gun lobby could be declared. This article in the Dallas News backs that up, because it looks to me like prepping the ground space for this narrative. See, Toomey loses to McGinty, it’ll mean the people want gun control. And if Toomey gets re-elected, it’ll mean the people want gun control. You can see how Bloomberg can use this effectively.

McGinty is attacking Toomey for not being gun control enough, which was entirely predictable. She argues his background check effort was largely window dressing, which is absolutely true. Toomey was trying to have his cake and eat it too, apparently believing Bloomberg’s bullshit polling on the issue and thinking his money would help him. If Toomey loses, it’ll be because most of us “stayed home.” It won’t be because he wasn’t gun control enough.

There is a strong undercurrent within the GOP in Pennsylvania that this is a safe issue to equivocate on, which was probably true decades ago when the GOP maintained their political machines in the ring counties. Growing up in Delco, hard to believe today, but a lot of Dems registered as Republicans because that was the only way you could have an actual vote. Plus, if you wanted county jobs, you had better belong to the right party, and that wasn’t the Dems. If there are any older Delco readers, you probably remember the “War Board.” A lot of GOP elders have not really fully grasped the consequences of the collapse of that system.Â The GOP leaders have clearly not been opening the cross tabs on a lot of these polls and seeing how wide the gap is by party affiliation. Those cross tabs show that Democrats overwhelmingly support gun control, and Republicans overwhelmingly support gun rights. Independents? They lean a bit more Republican on the issue than Democrat. This should be especially noted in a state, like Pennsylvania, where if Republicans win state-wide office, it’s going to be by a hair’s breath. Toomey needs every vote he can get, and there are a lot of us that feel he stabbed us in the back.

And it’s not necessarily just because he went against us on this one issue of background checks: his record of disagreement on that issue was pretty clear going in. It was the manner in which he went about it where the real insult came. Toomey could have signed onto Tom Coburn’s Amendment. He could have actually read the FOPA provisions in his bill that would have effectively gutted its protections. He could have acknowledged his mistakes. But instead of that,Â to add insult to injury, he tookÂ Bloomberg’s money, endorsement, and allows ads to run that try to out-gun-control McGinty? Yeah, screw that, Pat.

Toomey is also wrong about background checks: they always poll great when people are asked about them abstractly. WhenÂ people start having to think about the actual policy implications of what the gun control groups actually want, then maybe they don’t poll so well. We saw this in Washington also, that the policy specific doesn’t vote tally nearly as well as it polls, even when put to the people in a deep blue state. That Nevada’s initiative is polling at 54% gives me a little hope we can reduce Bloomberg’s margin a good bit this go-round, or perhaps even defeat him outright. Gun control has historically over-polled on ballot initiatives.

As for Toomey, I couldn’t care less about his fate. Defeat would at least show the GOP that there is no room to equivocate on this issue, and that touching Bloomberg or his money in exchange for equating on gun rights is a fatal move.

Lack of Gun News

Not much happening out there that’s interesting, and I include in that Springfield’s announcement of SAINT. Might end up being a good launch date for Springfield if Hillary wins, though I’ve seen some speculation by people in the know that we the people might be a bit panicked out. I largely stopped doing too much shooting the past 5 years mainly due to lack of time and money.

I guess there’s some news:Â Bloomberg continues to crap money all over flyover country in an effort to buy elections. Years ago I used to be able to assure lawmakers that the gun control groups didn’t have the money for that kind of oppo anymore, but thanks to Bloomberg, now they do. They even have money, apparently, to help write TV shows. I watched a few episodes of the new Hawaii Five-O and thought it was dog shit.

I do not agree with the left about Citizen’s United, because I very strongly believe in free speech. But do I think it’s fundamentally fair that one rich guy can buy his political preference against millions of other Americans who don’t have that kind of money? No. But I can understand why many on the left feel that way. Their solution to the problem, silencing people, is both politically and morally wrong. But I can understand the desire to do it.

Weekly Gun News – Edition 49

Been missing the gun news the past couple weeks because of Hawaii, then your usual get back from vacation madness. But here’s a tab dump! Some of these might be a bit aged, so sorry for that.

Dave Hardy examines Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the Waco fiasco.

~~Looks like Soldier of Fortune is cribbing content these days too. How the mighty have fallen. At least they didn’t attribute it toÂ “Maj. L. Caudill, USMC (Ret)”~~ Looks like they had permission.

Gun control group admits background checks are a failure. NGVAC is run by an eccentric, but he’s often more willing to tell the truth than other gun control groups. At best, background checks have a marginal effect in gun availability to criminals.

VA Actively Depriving Veterans of Second Amendment Rights.Â And still our complaints about due process fall on deaf ears, because some rights are more equal than others.

The New York Times takes a serious look at a gun issue and concludes that it’s actually kind of complicated, and there are no good solutions. You don’t say?

We know Ginsburg wants to reverse Heller, now it appears and Breyer does too. Well, if Hillary wins, they’ll probably get their chance to do so.

If you’re getting your history from Carl Bogus, you’re getting it from the wrong place, but at least Time magazine is acknowledging that gun control in America has its roots in racism, and even today gun control laws tend to more successfully disenfranchise poor minorities than they do criminals.

You can’t really get away from the conclusion that there’s a certain school of thought out there among some people that carrying a weapon for self-defense is a form of pre-meditation. I’d suggest if any of the reporters involved in this have fire extinguishers, certainly they are arsonists.

Folks in Charlotte were denied their Second Amendment rights during the riots because of North Carolina’s antiquated Jim Crow era pistol permit system.

BloombergÂ is dumping nearly half a million bucks into Minnesota races. Oh, and he’s also trying to buy a New Hampshire Senate seat.

If you want to understand why the gun control groups are so big on getting CDC to research gun control, this will help you understand why.

Apparently some Democrats question whether gun control is really a winning issue. More on that here, showing Clinton’s people wanting to distance her from the SAFE Act.

Actually, I think progress on this front has been one of the great achievements of the movement in the past decade: “Time for Conservative Intellectuals to Get Comfortable With the Right to Bear Arms.”

Could valuing less aggressive qualities in cops actually lead to more police shootings? This makes you think: “A Crazy Woman with a Baseball Bat.”

Notice when forums are put together to discuss things like guns as a public health issue, experts from our side are never invited?

Hey, Bloomberg paid good money for that school of public health. What did you expect?

Off Topic:

New evidence emerges that Truman was right to fire MacArthur.

I can’t agree with this more: “You’re ruining Facebook (and friendships) with political rants.” I think social media like Facebook needs to be regarded as if it were an ongoing dinner party. It’s good to catch up and stay familiar with friends and family, but no one like the boor who rants constantly aboutÂ politics at a dinner party. In my social media circles, who are mostly friends and family, the Baby Boomer generation are the worst about this.

I can’t say that it would: “I’ll say it again: if Donald Trump had been hired by the Clinton Foundation as a Trojan Horse to torpedo the GOP and leave the party a sinking wreck, what would look different?“

Late Season NRA Ad

This one pretty much successfully sums up what’s at stake:

I’ve found a lot of folks who don’t seem to understand that the Second Amendment is not self-enforcing. You’d think this would be kind of obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people think just because the words are on a piece of paper that actually means something. When you start explaining it, I think inherently these people get that it’s not, just that they have such a difficult time wrapping their heads around the idea that federal judges would engage in such blatant skulduggery as to suggest the amendment doesn’t mean what it plainly says.

Our only hope for saving the handful of bad states for gun rights is the federal courts. If Hillary picks Scalia’s replacement, that path will be foreclosed for a generation. In that scenario, I’d be lucky, very lucky, to live to see that damage undone. Most of the folks who laid the foundation for Heller and McDonald will not live to see it. We’ll be lucky if we don’t see those cases reversed entirely.

Support for Assault Weapons Ban is at a New Low

This new poll result, which shows 61% of Americans opposed to assault weapons bans is great news. Support is falling even among Democrats. Hopefully will help efforts to prevent gun control advocates from building that “West Coast Wall” by convincing lawmakers in Washington and Oregon to pass a ban on assault weapons. It should also, hopefully, forestall Bloomberg from thinking balloting a ban is a smart investment. Gun control groups will probably try, but it takes money to get the signatures, and money to ~~con~~ convince the public, and if Bloomberg isn’t willing to spend millions to achieve that, they don’t have a prayer of doing it on their own.

Glenn Reynolds notes:

I think two things are going on. First, gun control got a boost from the psychological damage and ensuing hysteria after the JFK, RFK, and King assassinations, and thatâ€™s worn off, prompting a reversion to traditional American attitudes. Second, itâ€™s become obvious over time that gun control is a dumb political gimmick, mostly designed for virtue-signaling at the expense of flyover rubes.

I think he’s that’s largely correct,Â but my worry continues to be that while national numbers like these are good news, what matters more is where people of this opinion are concentrated. For instance, if all those Assault Weapons Ban loving Dems were concentrated on the West Coast, they could get their wall, especially if Bloomberg is willing to spend big. And while I believe the effort of the Colorado recall heroes probably saved Colorado from more gun control for quite some time, demographic trends there aren’t good long term for gun rights. I certainly believe there are states in whichÂ the gun control movement will never make real gains: essentially any state where Democrats aren’t that competitive. But they stand to make real gains in states Dems are competitive in provided there’s a lot of geographical concentration of like opinion, and no real ability for gun vote to change much (e.g. California). I’d love to see more geographic-centered polling on this issue, because that’s ultimately going to determine whether the gun control movement has a shot at flipping a half-dozen or so more states into their column.