Category: Guns

I guess the epic smackdown Michael Bellesiles received at the hands of Clayton Cramer and other in the gun community wasn’t enough. The left is back again with this fraudulent argument, arguing that Americans had no real interest in guns until after the Civil War. In this case, the argument is that Big Corporations made us love guns. I can’t imagine why anyone heading out west on the wagon train might, for perfectly rational reasons, desire themselves a repeating rifle. Yep. Must be slick marketing.

What it boils down to is that this is an election year, and Clinton is determined to get elected on a platform with gun control at the center. Notice Haag, the author, says:

Haag says she began this project determined not to become “entrapped” in gun-control politics. “I came to this material as an historian,” she writes. But she concludes with calls to put the bottom-line gunmaker, rather than the emotionally invested gun owner, at the forefront of the battle over gun violence. She calls for “smart gun” technology, by which a weapon can be used only by its rightful owner. She wants to remove the barriers to research and data collection on gun violence. She calls for additional consumer regulations and protections involving firearms. (“A toy gun is subjected to more consumer safeguards as a product than a real gun,” Haag writes.) Most important, she urges the repeal of the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which shields manufacturers, distributors and dealers from civil liability for damages caused by their products.

Yes, I do not wish to become “entrapped” in gun control politics. She’s just a poor little innocent historian, after all. So now allow me to regurgitate every talking point from Hillary’s campaign.

NRA has already pointed out some issues with this narrative, but I’m sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Like most people who support gun control, I figured this article was written by an old white woman, but she seems to be of my generation. The silver lining in this article is that if she’s having to deal with female students exciting about shooting, we’re winning. Winning even though in this case, she questions giving a student a recommendation because the student enjoys shooting:

She seems to be a good kid, Sarah. And I don’t know what she really thinks of gun advocacy and political failures that have cost us all these lives and our sense of safety as educators. I don’t know what she does on the weekends. I also don’t know if she understands emotions, or what real rage feels like. It seems to me no person who has truly experienced the full impact of their own emotions would ever go near a gun.

Sounds like you’re projecting some of your own personal failings onto others there, Professor. I agree, if you’re so emotionally unstable that you worry you’ll hurt others in a fit of rage, don’t own guns. It’s really not for you. She speaks of her mother who got rid of all the guns in the house because her father was manic depressive and had wild mood swings. No one on our side would argue with that. But not everyone is the same way. I’ve never in my life been so angry that I felt like I did not have control, and I’ve been plenty angry. There are millions of other Americans who are the same way.

I’ve seen this article over at Forbes pop up quite a bit, about how a Canadian hacker can do a better job of finding gun sales online than Facebook can. There’s a lot of things I believe that might seem conspiratorial, like the fact that anti-gun groups, namely Bloomberg’s groups, are feeding the media these stories. But that’s really become standard practice, so the surprise would be if they weren’t doing it. Maybe this one was spoon fed, but maybe it wasn’t. But the strategy at work here is pretty smart (from their point of view).

Having the machines look for patterns is going to create a lot of false positives, because machines kind of suck at this. If that wasn’t the case, you’d never have to retrieve anything out of your spam folder, and in some ways that’s an easier problem if you have enough samples to evaluate.

I think the anti-gun folks know this, and that the real target are the false positives that will be generated. Social Media is a key place we promote the shooting culture, share information, and self-organize. Facebook is now my number two referrer (behind SayUncle). The false positives are going to occur most often when people are talking about guns, sharing pictures, and spreading the culture. If people can be made to fear sharing that information, because of their accounts keep getting suspended when they do, it would hobble us as a social movement pretty severely.

It’s not just Bloomberg’s money I fear, but the skills the man has that got him that money. I doubt it’s lost on the leaders of his gun control organizations that the spread of the culture is a real problem for them finding success going forward.