Guns – Page 62 – Shall Not Be Questioned

How You Know There Will Never Be Enough Gun Control

Mom’s Demand laments 14 dead in California shooting that “no one is talking about.” Sorry Shannon, we may be too busy watching the post-war order my grandparent’s generation establishedÂ fall apart all around us, like Germany for example, where apparently an axe lost it and decided to chop a bunch of people on a train. I’ll have to go chain mine up after this. Same headline at CNN: “Germany ax attack injures several on train, police kill suspect.” Maybe I need to start drilling axe shooting scenarios!

Where there’s a will to maim or kill, there will be a way. The media and elites believe if they just stick their heads in the sand a little farther, everything will be fine. Then, on the other extreme, you have the folks who think the only good muslim is a dead one, despite the fact that muslims are doing the majority of the fighting and dying to put an end to this barbarity.

California just passed a battery of enhanced gun control laws, already having had some of the toughest in the nation. Yet bad things still happen, and people like Shannon Watts don’t ever accept that there will always be evil in the world. They’ll keep demanding more and more laws, and burying their heads ever deeper in the sand.

UPDATE: An another one. Good thing Europe has such strict gun laws, or someone might have gotten hurt.

Give Me That Old Time Law and Order

The Cleveland Police Union asks that open carry be banned for the Republican National Convention. I can certainly understand why they would prefer this. I can certainly understand why they might just want to ban protests too. But the fact of the matter is that it’s just not constitutional under the laws of Ohio for the governor to do this. Fortunately, Kasich seems to know his limits.

Recall it was an armed march by the Black Panthers during Ronald’s Reagan’s stint as Governor of California that prompted the legislature to pass, and Governor Reagan to sign, the first ban on open carry in the Golden State.

Sometimes respecting constitutional rights makes the job of the police difficult.Â That said, if you’re planning to OC at the RNC, I’d keep it slung/holstered if I were you.

Weekly Gun News – Edition 43

Again, hate to start off the week with a links post, but it’ll be a long week. Went to the Doctor for the migraines and they found out my blood pressure was through the roof. They are trying anti-hypertensive drugs to bring things down, and I’m trying to be patient and not panic about it. Doesn’t help that I’m pretty severely medical phobic, as in takes every bit of my willpower not to run out of there screaming. Even with home checking, the cuff freaks me the hell out and the thing reads all over the place. I think the protocol will probably be to medicate me with anti-hypertensives until I start passing out :) I seem to be pretty tolerant of the beta-blocker I started taking Friday, but it also isn’t dropping it a whole lot (it’s about a 40% of max dose for my weight). But enough about that, here’s the news:

France is looking for some good guys with guns.

The Nation: “The NRAâ€™s â€œinsurgency theoryâ€ fantasy rests on the idea that â€œpatriotsâ€ will rise up in unison against government tyranny. But the reality is that firearms have never been a bulwark against tyranny; weâ€™ve maintained a Constitutional government for 230 years because of the separation of powers â€“ because the Framers divided power between co-equal branches of government that serve as checks on any branch gaining absolute power.” Good thing no one is doing everything they can do undermine separation of powers.

Bloomberg seems to be rallying top generals and veterans to push gun control. I don’t for a minute believe these are independent efforts.

Reason: “If you like the war on drugs, you’ll love the war on guns!”

Al Sharpton asks if the Second Amendment is for whites only. I don’t know anyone in the RKBA movement who believes that.

Why 2016 Could Be a Turning Point on Guns. To be honest, it could be.

Dems vow to keep heat on GOP over gun control. They think it’s a winning issue, and if they keep winning, they will be right.

Congressional staffers refuse “gun free zone” signs in front of their houses. I’ve never really thought this was much of a gotcha, to be honest. I wouldn’t put a “This home is well-armed” sign in front of my house either.

Gavin Newsmen is a piece of garbage, but he’s also likely to be the next Governor of California.

Obama can’t lay off the gun control talk, even at a funeral. Classy.

Non Gun:

Truck attack!

The 9th Circuit has ruled it’s now a crime to visit someone’s web site if they don’t want you to. No worries here. Everyone is welcome.

I thought this was a good read: “When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism”

This is actually worthwhile legislation if the Republicans are serious about pushing it: “Itâ€™s time to dismantle the ‘fourth branch’”

How Obama Left us More Racially Divided Than Ever.

Quantifying the Social Costs of Guns

Professor Tim Smith has calculated “The Social Costs of Guns.”Â Apparently if you use “market approaches” to artificially drive up the cost of gun ownership, it’s not really gun control, even though his proposal would cost me thousands of dollars each year. He does a calculation on the social cost of gun ownership. To Prof. Smith’s credit, he admits that the social costs of rifles are actually very low, because they are so rarely used in crime. But at the end he proposes an annual registration fee of $140 per firearm, to cover the social cost they impose.

A lot of people would give up on gun ownership under this scheme, so it’s a political non-starter. It would gut our political power to resist further encroachments, and the registration scheme it would involve would result in massive non-compliance by gun owners. So this is not something that would ever become reality even if it could be passed.

Prof. Joe Olsen Expressed Concern About St. Anthony Police

This was prior to the Castile shooting:

Instead, the stop was so troubling that he later went to the then-St. Anthony police chief to tell him he may have a serious problem with how the department conducts traffic stops. But the chief, Olson said, dismissed his concern.

â€œI told him that if you donâ€™t fix this, youâ€™re going to have an even bigger problem,â€ Olson said. â€œAnd thatâ€™s apparently what happened.â€

Read the whole thing. Joe Olsen is one of the academics responsible for the Heller and McDonald decisions, and has been a RKBA activist for a long time. Longer than I’ve been alive.

One in Five Dems Think Guns Should be Illegal

Both Joe Huffman and Gun Free ZoneÂ are writing about Vox survey which asked people whether certain guns should be banned by sight. Twenty percent of Democrats, that’s one-in-five, think even flare guns ought to be banned, and all surveyed folks are dead split on whether the Remington 700 ought to be banned. I haven’t seen the survey methodology to suggest whether it’s any good, so I’m not going to take this too seriously. But I keep saying we’re heading into heap big trouble if gun owners keep sitting on their collective posteriors.

I do think the other side is succeeding in building their movement back up again, and I believe this election has the potential to lay waste to gun rights. It’s gloomy, but I have a lot of reasons to feel gloomy about our prospects. I think a lot of people don’t believe we can end up back where we were in the 1990s. We absolutely can.

Dems Introduce HEART Act

No teaching your kids shooting with scary looking rifles, because they just HEART you and your kids, you see… totally more than you do, so they get to make the calls.

â€œEven at a shooting age and under professional guidance, a semi-automatic rifle in a childâ€™s hands is a tragedy waiting to happen,â€ Mr. Markey said. â€œThese weapons are not toys and children should not be allowed to play with them. They are simply too powerful and too difficult for a child to control.â€

What the hell does Ed Markey know about firearms training? The purpose of this is to prevent us from passing the culture on to future generations so they have better odds of killing off the hunting and shooting culture off in the future.

Real Controversy? Or Ginned Up by the Media?

There’s been articles in both the Washington PostÂ and The GuardianÂ about how NRA is split over the whole Castile police shooting. Personally, I think it’s better for NRA not to go off half-cocked at events like this until all the facts are in. For events like this, it’s often good to look at what NRA News is saying, since they are NRA’s official unofficial spokespeople (meaning they say things NRA can’t since they don’t officially speak for the NRA):

NRA is always going to be reluctant to risk coming across as anti-cop because a) police and former police compromise a decent percentage of the membership, and b) when NRA has gone up against law enforcement in the past, NRA has lost. You can lament that state of affairs, but it is the state of affairs.

NRA is never going to have a knee jerk reaction to events like this, and to be honest, they shouldn’t. The Civil Rights Defense Fund often takes cases involving people, and yes, even black people, who’s civil rights were unjustly violated, but they are very careful about which cases they back. Again, they should be.

I think the division is not necessarily ginned up by the media, but is real. NRA is a coalition, just like any other movement, and we don’t all come to this issue from the same set of principles. There are libertarian NRA members, like myself and I suspect a lot of readers, who are very concerned with civil liberties and police overreach. But there are also a lot of NRA members who are populist and think the police can do no wrong. The folks in Fairfax have to be concerned with keeping these people focused on the issue and not at each other’s throats. That’s not an easy job.

Wayne LaPierre SWATed?

According to this article, about the conviction of the man who reportedly did this to several celebrities:

Islam’s conspiracy made a fake call to police, leading police to the NRA head’s Virginia home and leading them to “briefly detain” him, LaPierre’s lawyer said.

The dude’s last name is Islam, just to be clear. Sounds like he was a recluse and probably a bit off his rocker. He also published Mike Bloomberg’s Social Security Number, so it doesn’t seem like he’s just picking sides here. Sounds like a loser who needs to feel powerful.

Either way, he got two years.

Ladd Everitt Leaves CSGV

He’s joined George Takei’s new gun control group “One Pulse for America,” as Director. I’d ponder whether this represents rats off the sinking ship, but given that going from Communication’s Director of a small gun control group to running a whole new group which may end up being more successful represents a promotion, and it’s probably something I’d take (were I in his shoes) even if CSGV isn’t headed down.

Takei doesn’t have the coin to fund a group at nearly the level Bloomberg does, so it will be interesting to see how this works out. One thing is for sure, Pink PistolsÂ and Operation Blazing Sword just got a lot more important. Have it it folks! Ladd Everitt is now your new arch nemesis.