The new pre-emtiion enhancement bill, HB 2258, is now going before the Pennsylvania House floor, having been voted out of committee by a 21-6 vote. I’m curious to see if we can pass this with a veto-proof or near veto-proof majority. The GOP controls the House and Senate at levels in this state that have not been seen for decades, and there are still some pro-gun Democrats out there, so I’m hopeful we’ll get a good vote tally.
When this bill was briefly law before it was invalidated by the courts for violating the single-subject requirement of our state constitution, it did a lot of good. Most municipalities folded like a cheap deck of cards once challenged under it. The only holdouts were the big cities, which fought the law using the single-subject argument.
Follow this link to go to NRA’s handy app that will help you write your rep. Let’s get this done.
I’ve been too busy to do much posting. I’d feel bad about that if there was much gun news to post about. Things will stay very busy until mid October, when they should return to a more even keel. But as always, there always a little bit of gun news:
Alan Gura: “The Court after Scalia: The next “conservative” Justice may not save the Second Amendment.” I don’t know, George H.W. Bush was pretty culturally and temperamentally pro-gun control, but he still gave us Thomas, and his son gave us Alito and Roberts, without which Heller and McDonald would never have won. Though I suspect Roberts’ minimalism is a big part of our problem trying to bring greater security for the Second Amendment.
Sex Offender laws violate Ex Post Facto Clause, says 6th circuit. Relation to guns? Lautenberg by all rights should have been declared Ex Post Facto as applied to past convictions, but that was argued pre-Heller. A court willing to enforce the Second Amendment would take another look at that ruling.
“How to smash the gun lobby.” Well, first you need to understand the “gun lobby,” which you clearly don’t, so good luck with that.
Schumer: “Progressive Supreme Court #1 Goal.” Schumer if probably the shrewdest politician in public office today. He’s also probably the number one enemy of the Second Amendment in public office today.
NYT: “Gun Control Groups Divide Their Loyalties in Senate Race.” CeaseFirePA is funded by Bloomberg, so if you ask me, they are trying to create a “Head, I win. Tails, you lose.” type of situation by doing competing endorsements. For what it’s worth, I’m becoming more convinced by the anti-Toomey folks that he needs to go down.
Age discrimination in my industry is real, and I’m getting to the age where it’ll start becoming more of a problem. I’ve tried very hard to keep my skills up, and it’s letting them fall behind that’s a big driver. But the struggle is real, especially if you live in the Valley.
Looks like Bloomberg must have funded a major survey of gun ownership that didn’t just ask whether you had a gun in the home, but how many. Data shows that the number of gun owners has increased, but not at the same rate as population. The trend is apparently driven by men owning guns at a lesser rate, even as women are owning them at an increasing rate.
I think all of these social surveys are going to be limited by how many people are willing to talk to surveyors about a topic that’s a sensitive one. So even if the survey mythology it tip top, it’s always going to have that limitation. Personally, if someone calls asking about the number of guns I have in the home, and not just about whether I own one, I’m going to become very suspicious and hang up the phone.
Azrael, one of the study’s authors, said she was surprised that the detailed questions on gun ownership received no pushback. “People didn’t write back to GfK and say, ‘You have no right to ask these questions.’â€
“It was encouraging,†she said. “It didn’t feel fraught. It felt that we were talking about a regular consumer product.â€
Yeah, because if I were participating in that survey company’s response pool, I would just check off “no, not a gun owner” and send it back if I didn’t want to go there. I think the more they try to extract information, the lower the response rate is going to be. Low response rates are probably why this survey came up way short on the total number of guns we know (from ATF manufacturing data) are out there.
That said, I think the idea that most of the 300 million guns in this country are owned by a subclass of “super owners” as they call them in this survey is probably on the mark, and as Gary Kleck notes in the article, “That’s probably true for just about any consumer good.”
Most people reading this blog are probably “super owners.” Would you respond to someone with a long list of questions about your status as a gun owner? I sure as hell wouldn’t. But at the same time, Bloomberg is obviously funding these surveys for the exact purpose mentioned in this study: “this survey sounds like part of the ongoing effort to minimize gun ownership to make more gun control seem politically achievable.” Yep. You’re far better off talking to your elected representatives about how you feel about gun ownership than you are Bloomberg’s social surveyors.
Apparently there was a mass stabbing in Minnesota while I was incommunicado, which ISIS is taking credit for. Supposedly he asked at least one person if they were muslim before cutting them. Personally, I think it’s very courteous of jihadists to stop and ask whether their victims are muslims first. I very much appreciate being offered the time and opportunity to prepare my reply.
My only fear is that we’re making red states better, and meanwhile Bloomberg is showing a willingness to spend $600 grand a week to get what he wants in Nevada, and $200k to get what he wants in Maine. We have to punch him in the nose in purple states in a big way. Otherwise this is going to end up in bifurcation of the country, where the Second Amendment means a lot of different things depending on what jurisdiction you’re in. Bloomberg is willing to spend big money to make that a reality! What are you willing to do to fight him?
I think the gun control folks have always been a little befuddled at our movement. I know of several gun control people on the other side who have been willing to talk to me that I believe assume we all work closely with NRA and take marching orders. In truth, I hardly ever speak with anyone at NRA headquarters or really even other people in the movement. We got to Annual Meeting every year because it’s the only time of year we get to see and talk to other people in this issue.
I’ve never gotten anything like this document from anyone in the gun rights movement, because our people don’t need prompting to get involved, either don’t need to be coordinated or actively resist efforts to do so. Our people don’t need to be scripted (though I sure wish some of them would think before they open their yaps). Organizing gun owners is herding cats on a good day. The reason they can’t fathom this is because it’s the exact opposite of how their movement works: from the top down.
Sad truth: if the wasn’t for President Obama and Mike Bloomberg, most of the gun control movement would have folded up shop several years ago. Two people have kept this issue alive. That’s not a grassroots movement.
Bearing Arms is reporting. I don’t honestly think they have a case, and expect it will be quickly dismissed.
The Defendants manipulated the footage in service of an agenda: they wanted to establish that there is no basis for opposing universal background checks by fooling viewers into believing that even a panel of pro-Second Amendment advocates could not provide one.
Yeah, I’m not sure that’s legally defamation. Additionally their claims of harm are somewhat dubious. One claim is that an FFL holder lost business for being thought a fool, and the same for the attorney.
Sadly, this is freedom of the press. The recourse we have as gun owners is to not watch or subscribe to their content, and not to agree to be interviewed by hacks like Couric.
Good news from Firearms Attorney Joshua Prince regarding the Pennsylvania Superior Court case that ruled “other lawful purposes” language in the Pennsylvania school weapons ban didn’t include legally carrying a firearm, but instead meant that lunch ladies could have knives in the kitchen, or other such school related activity:
After the decision, Mr. Goslin contacted me and we, pro-bono, filed a Motion for Reconsideration/Reargument en banc, wherein, inter alia, we argued that the Superior Court should permit new briefs to be filed and oral argument, after vacating the court’s July 6, 2016 decision. Today, the Superior Court GRANTED the motion, withdrew the July 6, 2016 decisions and scheduled re-briefing and argument.
That’s definitely good news. Hopefully we can get a better result on appeal. If this case loses, it would technically be a serious violation to drop your kid off at school with a firearm in the vehicle, or even to turn around in a school parking lot on the way to the range. What about a sidewalk that transits school property? The “other lawful purposes” was what prevents this law from applying to ordinary people, rather than only to people who don’t have lawful intent.
The captured group theory was put forward by Princeton political scientist Paul Frymer in a book first published in 1999, “Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America.â€1 He argued that politicians focus their attention on white swing voters, and that the two-party system is structured to push aside the concerns of black voters2 because they consistently and overwhelmingly favor one party.
Eventually, if there is no pro-gun insurgency within the Democratic Party, we’ll just get baked into the election numbers for the GOP and there won’t any good reason for the Dems to improve their standing with gun voters, and the the Republicans won’t have to work very hard to please us.
I don’t really spend time participating in comment sections anywhere, but I do occasionally skim comments to gauge the mood. I’ve been appalled at how full of nastiness and vitriol the comments are even among many of my “happy warrior” sites like Instapundit. Most of this would seem to be coming from the new “alt-right” crowd. Let me offer an interview of Jonah Goldberg by Hugh Hewlett which I don’t even think ought to be controversial, but apparently is among some folks:
Jonah Goldberg, author of “Liberal Fascism” is big on the philosophical roots of political movements, and believes we ought to have nothing to do with the core, racist alt-right, and shouldn’t aid in expanding the use of the term. Because of Jonah’s comments here, I noticed this over at Instapundit of all places:
Jonah is a hundred times worse than the vaguely defined Alt Right. They are not traitors to their own side of the political spectrum. They are not trying with all their force to get the Alinsky communist government weaponizing Islamophilic mega-criminal Hillary Clinton elected president.
Jonah is part of what is in fact a Jewish cabal (prominently led by himself and Bill Kristol and backed by numerous other prominent Jewish conservatives like Ben Shapiro), created expressly to betray the strong majority of Republican voters who chose Trump as their nominee. Trump took the lead on the issue Republican voters most care about: stopping illegal and jihadist immigration. Establishment Republicans always betrayed the voters on this issue and now this de facto Jewish cabal is doing the same.
I’m not going to be a participant in a political coalition with racists and anti-semites. Note that I’m not saying IÂ believe that every, or even the majority of Trump supporters are racist and/or anti-semitic, and I actually don’t believe Trump himself is either, but Trump was shameless enough willing to dog whistle racial politics to audiences eager to embrace it. This has emboldened some very distasteful individuals who now don’t feel so marginalized.
I also noticed recently that J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy (which I have not yet read, but I’ve been reading a lot of his commentary) takes a beating in the comment section of National Review over his article on why race relations have gotten worse. I don’t think there’s anything particularly ridiculous about Vance’s statements here, yet in the comments, you see comments like:
What a gigantic heap of baloney. White failure to empathize with black problems is responsible for all the problems in the black community? Good grief. Black behavior is responsible for problems in the black community. Vance is just another dizzy excuser of black pathology.
I know from a decade of blogging that reading comprehension is not the strong suit of a lot of people, but did this well-liked commenter read the same article I did? I didn’t get the impression Vance was making excuses so much as trying to promote understanding. Understanding among factions is a critical thing if we’re to avoid being at each other’s throats all the time.
One of my big problems with the anti-PC movement coming from alt-right camp is that there are some things that you don’t say… not because of PC conformity, but because decent people don’t say shit like that. I feel pretty confident in saying that if you utter “Jewish cabal” in public, you suck as a person and I don’t want anything to do with you. If that makes me PC, well, so be it. This is not the kind of thing I’m willing to tolerate or look past for the sake of political coalitions, and I’m glad there are other people who feel the same way.
How did we get here? Unlike a lot of people, I don’t blame Trump or his supporters. Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the disease, and I don’t think most of his supporters represent the kind of nasty discourse we see above.
In the current political situation, both parties have weak coalitions. The fastest growing party in this country is no party. Granted, most of those “independents” tend to lean one way or the other, but increasingly Americans aren’t all that interested in party politics. Johnathan Chait alludes to the weakness of the party system in his article, “Why American Politics Really Went Insane,” but I think Chait glosses over the fact that the Democratic Party’s leftist nuts are just as radical and out there as the Republican Party’s newly rediscovered alt-right whack jobs.
Barack Obama was, in fact, the transformational President he claimed to be. He was transformational in the sense that he realized (or perhaps accidentally stumbled upon) that the Democratic Party could build a stronger coalition than the one previously constructed by Bill Clinton. The limits of the Clinton Coalition showed with the Obamacare vote, and the devastating election results for the Democrats that followed. The Dems never really got what they really wanted out of Obamacare, but it cost them control of Congress, most state legislatures, and most governorships. Bill Clinton’s coalition was simply not capable of delivering European-style Social Democracy to US shores.
But the 2008 election results showed opportunity if that same coalition that easily swept Obama into the White House could be reproduced reliably.
What Democratic strategists figured out (and this is very much a “Chicago politics” divide-and-conquror style of running things) is that if money and grassroots effort was funneled to causes that helped nurse identity (racial, sexual, gender, etc) grievances, a thoroughly progressive coalition could be maintained that didn’t require catering to moderate suburban voters, as Clinton had done. But in order for the coalition to work, turnout among those groups needed to remain at Obama-like levels. The results had to be repeatable.
I don’t believe the fact that most people view race relations at an all time low is any accident. The Democratic political class engineered this in order to shore up their political power. That this would fuel the rise of white racial politics isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, and the hateful people coming out of the woodwork and participating in this nonsense are actually playing right into their hands.
This is not to let off the Republican Party off the hook in all this. They went into the 2016 elections thinking it was business as usual, which of course meant running someone else named Bush. I marginally more identify with “elites”, and I thought this was the very definition of insanity by the donor class. It would have been a moronic move even in a normal election year to line up behind Jeb!, but it was a disastrous one this year. The problem the GOP has is that they are beholden to the same wealthy interests as the Democrats. The difference between a Republican Wall Street Banker and a Democratic Wall Street Banker are not nearly as great as the difference between any Wall Street Banker and an unemployed coal miner from West Virginia, or some poor dude working two jobs to pay the rent and back child support. That gap in understanding is the real cause of our political woes, if you ask me. All this racial and gender bullshit is nonsense ginned up by our supposed rulers.
See, if working class whites, working class Blacks, and working class Hispanics suddenly realized they have more political interests in common with each other than they do with their wealthy coalition partners in the major parties, they might just figure out that if they vote together, they have the power to call the shots, and that would be the real disaster if you were to ask the donor class of either party. So best to keep the working classes divided against each other before they realize it. As for the rest of the rubes? Let them have bread and circuses culture wars!
That’s my cynical take on it all. I’m not comfortable with believing this, because class is something Marxists obsess over, and I’m not a Marxist. If we had a growing economy that was lifting all boats, I don’t think we’d be in this mess. But we don’t have that, and given the advances in automation and robotics, it’s going to be hard to achieve the kind of growth for the working class. The post World War II order is now coming to an end, and I don’t know what will replace it. But I don’t like what I’m seeing so far.
