The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
To Minnesota Public Radio’s credit, they printed it. He basically argues that Joe Vince wants to make money off mining the trace data in his consulting work, and that ATF, along with other police organizations, have supported restricting trace data to protect active investigations.
The media loves disclosure of potentially conflicting interests, except when it comes to their own business. Something about the reporter’s notebook story Sebastian linked to kept rubbing me the wrong way. Then I realized that while the reporter disclosed the source of his funding & research in the notebook, the stories that came out of the Joyce Foundation fellowship made zero mention of the fact that they were bought & paid for by an organization that views gun ownership as a public health problem.
Looking at the work by Brandt Williams, there’s no mention on the website or in the audio files of what aired that he was paid $5,000, plus additional support to cover meetings with anti-gun groups. In fact, the audio files start with an introduction that asks listeners to support their work. The bio for Williams makes no mention of the fact that he’s a Joyce Journalism Fellow, another clue that would tip listeners off to any potential bias in his articles funded by the Foundation.
There’s no way that Williams and any other reporters involved can claim that their work is free of bias since a stipulation of taking the $5,000 was that their work be written in order to “have a major public policy impact.” In addition to Williams, Joyce was willing to fund up to six other writers or broadcasters who were based “in midwest and northeast region with priority given to journalists in Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.” Since Joyce doesn’t appear to list them, the coordinating organization doesn’t list them, and no results turn up on media sites for titles and terms such as “Joyce Journalism Fellow,” it could be hard to figure out exactly who was paid for these planted stories.
In addition to outright paying for coverage at the rate of $5,000 per story or series, Joyce also funded travel & networking opportunities for their grantees to hang out with the leaders of anti-gun groups. The Foundation describes it rather innocuously:
To kick off the project, the Center will hold regional hands-on workshops for the selected reporters.
In reality, fellows were flown to Chicago for a workshop that primarily featured these speakers:
Yet, not a single mention of the obvious slant in speakers by Williams in his notebook entry for the trip. It begs to question whether any of the fellows raised any serious concerns about this project whatsoever.
Beyond the initially purchased stories, this fellowship program from Joyce is seeking to create a long term network of journalists working to advance their public policy initiatives. Take a look at some of the other resources that Joyce helped fund to keep them on a short leash:
To help facilitate the reporting program, the Center will also provide research assistance to help the Fellows gather data, develop contacts, and manage resources on gun violence stories. The Center will also create online tools for project participants to exchange information with colleagues and post questions for Center trainers and administrators. An electronic library containing articles, research, and media sources will be developed for peer journalists unaffiliated with the project.
Gee, the funders looking to advance policy in a specific direction set up a database of source material for the fellows to use – there’s no chance of bias there, is there? But they are members of the esteemed fourth estate, so we’re supposed to trust them instead of asking them for a bit of honesty or disclosure in this case.
If we want a general guide to where the articles bought by Joyce ended up, we can probably get a pretty good idea from the mention in the Williams notebook that one anti-gun group focused on gun laws in Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan. If you see any obviously biased feature stories dated from late last fall to the end of this month turn up in those states, then you likely have a Joyce-funded reporter on your hands. Just don’t expect them to reveal that fact.
I’m kicking around some ideas for a title to the project. “Gun Project” is not terribly catchy. I’m thinking of “Manufacture to Murder,” or a play on the actual model and manufacturer of the crime gun we wind up using. (Editor’s note – I like it; much better than “gun project”.) The Washington Post adds another part to their Hidden Life of Gunsseries. They trace guns used to kill cops.
Oh, I can think of some choice names to call this article. I’m sure you can too.
I talked to Bob Schmidt and Bernie Zapor from the St. Paul ATF yesterday. They told me that even if the MPD wants to give us gun trace data, they are forbidden from doing so. They told me that instead, we’ll have to get our trace data from court records, which is not what I understood from Ben Hayes, the ATF agent who gave a presentation at the Chicago seminar. However, that is apparently how the Washington Post got the data for their series.
Now you can see the importance of Tiahrt, which keeps this data restricted to law enforcement uses through an appropriations rider NRA gets attached every budget. I’m actually impressed the Washington Post was so eager to disparage the Second Amendment they went through the trouble of digging through court records to get around Tiahrt.
I started doing a little online browsing to see what handguns cost these days. If you want to get a sense of how gun makers try to sell people on new cosmetic features and gadgets, check out the Smith & Wesson website.
You sir, know nothing about the subject you’re shooting your ignorant mouth off about. I’m also noting the macabre tone of these notes, chasing a police homicide here, an armed robbery or murder there. All for the greater public good, you see. Nothing to see here. Move along. We’re just out to condemn the object, you see, not the person wielding it. We’re good people.
Success! Sort of. A federal judge just sentenced a guy named Kingston Gaulden to 33 months for being a prohibited person with a firearm. An ATF agent filed an affidavit saying that the .40 caliber Smith & Wesson gun found with Gaulden was traced back to a gun store robbery in St. Louis Park on Dec. 8, 2009.
A gun store robbery! What luck!
At the center, I spoke with Chief Charlie Houser. Houser gave me a tour of the center and I got to see firsthand how much manual labor goes into sorting records for tracing. They have stacks of out-of-business records from gun sellers across the country. They get 1.3 million records each month. These have to be scanned by hand into their system and stored as a picture file. They used to put the records on microfilm, but don’t any more.
However, by order of Congress, they cannot use optical character recognition software on the scanned documents. That would create a searchable database. And that is prohibited. Houser says if he doesn’t have at least 7 of his 10 scanning machines running 16 hours a day, they’ll be overrun with records. At times, they’ve gotten so backed up they’ve had to get shipping containers put in the parking lot so they can store boxes.
Interesting. So now we know how they are storing them. The problem here is that it would be pretty easy to go from pictorial snapshots to actual full blown gun registry if Congress were to ever allow them to OCR the electronic forms. Almost makes you think whether you should perhaps not write so clearly on your next 4473 transaction.
Before Tiahrt, Nunziato’s Tracing Center would send an officer data related to the gun they were trying to trace. He says “it would say the address used by the person who purchased the gun was also an address used by somebody that possessed the gun that was involved in a killing in Chicago.” And he says the ATF would provide the name and number of the officer in Chicago investigating that killing.
I’m not understanding how Tiahrt prevents ATF from doing this. What it does do is prevent Joyce funded reporters from getting their grubby hands on the data and drawing conclusions on it about limiting constitutional freedoms in this country. For that, I am grateful.
The Daily Caller is “launching a multi-part guide for readers not entirely up to snuff.” I’m disappointed in one aspect of the article, because the media keeps ignoring the elephant in the room when it comes to the ban on magazines, which is the fact that police are exempted from it. They don’t bother asking why police are exempted from the magazine ban if “they’re for hunting people.” The police don’t hunt people, do they? You can’t declare the magazine ban to be common sense until you explain why the police need to shoot as many people as fast as possible. It seems to be common sense that the police carry guns to protect themselves from the criminal element, those same criminals that prey on the law abiding. So it stands to reason if police need magazines that hold more than ten rounds ordinary people do as well.
I am happy, however, they were willing to ask Bloomberg some difficult questions, which he doesn’t seem to appreciate:
When TheDC asked Mayor Bloomberg how the expanded checks were supposed to prevent those “already-prohibited dangerous persons†from continuing to be “dangerous persons,†he became a little testy. Others in the crowd turned their head when the question — if 99.9 percent of gun owners are “law-abiding†citizens already following the current legal measures, how will increased measures stop the one percent of bad guys who already engage in illegal activities in the first place? — was asked.
You have to be amazed at how much our opponents are used to the press not doing their jobs in questioning their agenda. I hope to see more of this. But I’d like it if journalists took a closer look at some of the proposals. You can’t just go on what the gun control folks say. They are deceitful, and will mislead people, especially journalists. Don’t trust, and verify, verify, verify.
The Washington Post notes “childish intransigence of the National Rifle Association, which declined to participate in the administration’s “listening tour†on gun issues.” I’ve seen more childish intransigence from the Washington Post that they aren’t getting the gun control they want than I’ve seen from the NRA.
UPDATE: Chris Cox in Townhall in regards to some of Washington Post’s recent childishness. I really hope they are think up some new ways to make the media go off the deep end like they have with NRA’s rebuffing Obama. The ironic thing is, this kind of reactions plays right into NRA’s hands.
They think the President needs to do more on guns. I should note that they call for banning private sales. I also note that private sales of handguns, which represent the vast majority of criminal gun uses, is already illegal in Pennsylvania. This has not prevented the Inquirer and those sympathetic to their deranged point of view from calling for more gun control.
And these people wonder why we won’t sit down and talk to them? Screw Obama and screw the Philadelphia Inquirer. Hopefully in a few years both of these outfits will be flushed down the sewer of history where they belong.
The LA Times is hardly a hotbed of pro-gun radicalism, but even they couldn’t help but notice:
The bill, SB 610, says the good-cause determination would be deemed to be met for any California member of Congress, statewide elected official or member of the Legislature.
The surprising thing about this bill isn’t just that it has appeared in California, which tends to favor restrictive gun laws, but that its coauthors are all Democrats who in the past have voted to limit gun rights for ordinary citizens.
They go on to worry about the implications of panicked politicians spraying bullets into crowds. At least the LA Times is consistent — they think it’s dangerous for everyone to carry a gun, except for the police who have magical gun powers.
From the Washington Post reporter James Grimaldi:
The controversy highlights the difficulty ATF agents face in complex cases against increasingly sophisticated gunrunning rings, said former and current government officials. Because of weak gun laws and investigative limitations imposed at the urging of the gun lobby, many gunrunning cases end with little more than paperwork violations against buyers who procure guns for others. Such so-called straw purchaser cases rarely amount to more than charges of lying on federal documents.
Not only bias, but ignorance. Is Mr. Grimaldi aware of what the penalty is for lying on those documents? The crime is to be found in 18 USC 922(a)(6):
It shall be unlawful for any person in connection with the acquisition or attempted acquisition of any firearm or ammunition from a licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, licensed dealer, or licensed collector, knowingly to make any false or fictitious oral or written statement or to furnish or exhibit any false, fictitious, or misrepresented identification, intended or likely to deceive such importer, manufacturer, dealer, or collector with respect to any fact material to the lawfulness of the sale or other disposition of such firearm or ammunition under the provisions of this chapter;
Penalties can be found in 18 USC 924:
(2) Whoever knowingly violates subsection (a)(6), (d), (g), (h), (i), (j), or (o) of section 922 shall be fined as provided in this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.
It’s unlikely you’ll do 10 years for robbing a bank in this country, so I think to characterize the crime here as “little more than paperwork violations,” is ignorant at best, and deliberately disingenuous at worst. These are serious federal crimes, and despite what Mr. Grimaldi would have you believe, neither NRA, or the vast majority of gun owners, have ever voiced objections to using these laws to prosecute criminal traffickers of firearms. In fact, we’ve encouraged the law to be used in this manner.