A gun is a tool, and we choose tools based on their function. The primary function of a gun is to kill or injure people or animals. In the case of people, the only reason I might have to shoot them — or threaten to do so — is that they are immediately threatening serious harm. So a first question about owning a gun is whether I’m likely to be in a position to need one to protect human life. A closely related question is whether, if I were in such a position, the gun would be available and I would be able to use it effectively.
Unless you live in (or frequent) dangerous neighborhoods or have family or friends likely to threaten you, it’s very unlikely that you’ll need a gun for self-defense. Further, counterbalancing any such need is the fact that guns are dangerous. If I have one loaded and readily accessible in an emergency (and what good is it if I don’t?), then there’s a non-negligible chance that it will lead to great harm. A gun at hand can easily push a family quarrel, a wave of depression or a child’s curiosity in a fatal direction.
Even when a gun makes sense in principle as a means of self-defense, it may do more harm than good if I’m not trained to use it well. I may panic and shoot a family member coming home late, fumble around and allow an unarmed burglar to take my gun, have a cleaning or loading accident. The N.R.A. rightly sets high standards for gun safety. If those unable or unwilling to meet these standards gave up their guns, there might well be a lot fewer gun owners.
Guns do have uses other than defense against attackers. There may, for example, still be a few people who actually need to hunt to feed their families. But most hunting now is recreational and does not require keeping weapons at home. Hunters and their families would be much safer if the guns and ammunition were securely stored away from their homes and available only to those with licenses during the appropriate season. Target shooting, likewise, does not require keeping guns at home.
Finally, there’s the idea that citizens need guns so they can, if need be, oppose the force of a repressive government. Those who think there are current (or likely future) government actions in this country that would require armed resistance are living a paranoid fantasy. The idea that armed American citizens could stand up to our military is beyond fantasy.
These objections are a red herring. Guns can be owned and handled safely and the shooters can learn to shoot and observe the rules of gun safety. It’s done every day all over the world by millions of safe gun owners. This is written by someone who has never owned a gun – which speaks poorly of the NYT that they would approve opinion pieces on issues of which the author has no knowledge whatsoever.
But notice how quickly he turns the conversation on the notion that we need to check our firearms in to a state-approved armory, even as Mr. Gutting drives his automobile down the road and risks far greater and more frequent injury to innocent people than me with my guns. This is called hypocrisy.
Finally, take note of his position on the idea that we need to own firearms in order to ameliorate tyranny. Without so much as blinking, he assumes like the good collectivist that he is that the armed forces would put down citizens in armed revolt over gun confiscation orders. Posse Comitatus being the law of the land means absolutely nothing to Mr. Gutting.
Furthermore, Mr. Gutting is apparently not the scholar he is made out to be, and knows nothing of the history of insurgencies. Easy, it will be for the army – or so he thinks. Oh, they may be outnumbered a thousand to one with every insurgent melting away into the woods after shooting. But surely the army would “win,” whatever win means.
In spite of the difficulty of Iraq and impossibility of Afghanistan, Mr. Gutting is sure of the simplistic, bloodless nature of an American insurgency. But he feels that he will never be in a position to need a weapon for self defense (perhaps he would stand around and watch if his wife was being raped by gangsters?). It is Mr. Gutting who is firmly ensconced in fantasy land.
Proving once more that unintended consequences of “gun control” actually increase dangerous crime, The Detroit News reported Thursday that “Guns are being stolen from vehicles downtown, in part because nightclubs and the NFL ban firearms.”
Unable to bring their firearms into venues that ban them, many gun owners are nonetheless unwilling to travel to and from such locations without the means of defense, and are opting to have their firearms with them as long as they legally can, then storing them in their cars.
So instead of allowing gun owners to bring them into the stadium to keep them safe, they’re requiring that gun owners turn them over to criminals. They’re doing this for the children. Consider the children …
Apparently believing that the American public had not yet been subjected to enough ridiculous fearmongering over the supposed “undetectability” of firearms printed from plastic, ABC’s Katie Couric ran a short segment on her show, “Katie,” last week, titled, perhaps not surprisingly, “The Dark Side of 3D Printers.”
Who is Katie Couric?
Here is the NSSF on smart gun technology. I said before that Daily Caller annoys me, and increasingly so. Notice that NSSF doesn’t have any prima facie objections to smart guns, but they point out that they might be unreliable.
Pfft! I object to smart guns because they’re unreliable too. But I also prima facie object to smart guns because of government interference and potential usage in gun confiscation or registration shenanigans.
Uncle links this post on revolver science, entitled why heavy, slow bullets hit higher than light, fast bullets. Okay, since the original author starts the science lesson, I’ll finish it. He’s dealing with the gun and bullet as a system rather than individually, considering the affects of recoil on the trajectory.
But rather than titling the post about heavy bullets, he should have stayed on point about the overall system. It isn’t an enigma why heavy bullets and light bullets have the same drop given the same velocity, or another way of saying it is that he should have left out the discussion of heavy and light altogether and stuck with velocity and the affects of recoil on the pivot point of the firearm.
If you take a bullet of 180 grains and one of 230 grains, and hold them the same height and drop them, they will land at the same time due to the acceleration of gravity, which is the same and constant regardless of mass. Alternatively, drop a marble and bowling ball from the third floor of the stairwell of your college physics building, and they’ll land at the same time (remove people from the stairwell before attempting this experiment).
Of course, I’m leaving out a complex discussion of aerodynamic drag, from which I could explain why it’s better for folks with trucks like my F150 to leave the tail gate up instead of down, but I’ll save this for another lesson.
This is why BDC is a function of muzzle velocity (and aerodynamics for such rounds as hollow points), but not bullet mass. Okay, is that clear to everyone? This is basic physics, and everyone should understand this, especially shooters. If you have to adjust BDC for your rounds given different bullet masses, it’s because of different muzzle velocity due to mass (and because lower velocity rounds won’t go as far), not because heavy objects drop faster than light objects. Heavy bullets do not drop faster than light bullets. Finally, in order to get an idea how quickly your bullet is hitting the ground, hold it at the height of the gun you’re shooting, drop it, and time it. When it hits the ground, it would have hit the ground if you had shot the bullet out of the barrel of your gun, just some hundreds of yards away.
As of mid-November, the state had received about 4,100 applications for assault weapon certificates and about 2,900 declarations of large-capacity magazines.
Michael Lawlor, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s criminal justice advisor, said that so far fewer people than expected have registered weapons under the new law. However, he said gun owners should take seriously the consequences of ignoring the law. Disregarding the registration requirements can carry felony charges in some cases, which can make Connecticut residents ineligible to own guns.
First-time offenders who can prove they owned the weapon before the law passed, and have otherwise followed the law, may be charged with a class A misdemeanor. In other cases, possessing one of the newly-banned guns will be considered a felony that carries with it a sentence of at least a year in prison.
“If you haven’t declared it or registered it and you get caught . . . you’ll be a felon. People who disregard the law are, among other things, jeopardizing their right to own firearms. If you’re not a law-abiding citizen, you’re not a law-abiding citizen,” Lawlor said.
Mr. Lawlor, like most government officials, seems to think he and his buddies have invented policy out of whole cloth, and that the population has no choice but to shuffle along and obey. But weapons registration laws have a history—a consistent history, as I’ve written, of noncompliance and defiance.
State officials could have taken a moment to glance across the state line to New York City, where a few tens of thousands of firearms are owned legally, and an estimated two million are held illegally, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. That is not uncommon. In my piece on the history of gun control’s failure, I wrote:
The high water mark of American compliance with gun control laws may have come with Illinois’s handgun registration law in the 1970s. About 25 percent of handgun owners actually complied, according to Don B. Kates, a criminologist and civil liberties attorney, writing in the December 1977 issue of Inquiry. After that, about 10 percent of “assault weapon” owners obeyed California’s registration law, says David B. Kopel …
Connecticut may want to look close to home for even lower compliance figures. In New Jersey, reported The New York Times in 1991, after the legislature passed a law banning “assault weapons,” 947 people registered their rifles as sporting guns for target shooting, 888 rendered them inoperable, and four surrendered them to the police. That’s out of an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 firearms affected by the law.
Noncompliance means they’re not giving up their weapons regardless of what the law says. And that means that if the statists really want them, they’ll have to send in armed teams to invade the homes of gun owners (if they can find them) and confiscate them while they also shoot anyone who gets in their way.
And that means that gun owners who decide to keep their weapons have nothing left to lose when those armed teams come calling. The collectivists want it to be ever so easy, with fawning, stupid, television-watching imbeciles who listen and obey their edicts as long as they get free bread and circuses.
But are they okay with bloodshed as a result of their edicts? Perhaps yes, perhaps not. Perhaps with some, perhaps not so much with others. But collectivists nationwide should consider the ramifications of their laws. Gun owners won’t surrender firearms peaceably. You can take that to the bank.
The U.S.’s lax gun laws are fueling a massive business of illegal arms trade through its southern border into Mexico. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), two out of every three illegal firearms found in Mexico originate in the U.S. In other words, each year, over 253,000 guns purchased in the U.S. are smuggled south of the border.
Why should we be concerned? For one, there is a direct correlation between gun ownership in cities and gun violence – as one increases, so does the other. But that’s true regardless of location. A paramount issue, specific to the U.S.-Mexico border, is the link between illegal guns and the drug trade. Outside of the one firearm store in Mexico City, there are no other stores to purchase guns in Mexico. And yet, the drug wars have claimed the lives of thousands.
Without firearms, the ability of gangs to acquire and smuggle drugs would be greatly weakened. And given the fact that the U.S. spends $51 billion a year on the war on drugs, reducing the proliferation of illegal guns flowing across our border is a security issue Capitol Hill cannot ignore.
Nonetheless, there is not one federal gun trafficking law in the U.S. …
Not one federal gun trafficking law. Not a single one. Except of course, for this:
The GCA does not require export licenses. However, most firearms and ammunition must be exported in accordance with the provisions of the Arms Export Control Act of 1976. Regulations implementing this Act generally require a license to be obtained from the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, Department of State, PM/DDTC, SA-1, Room 1200, 2401 E St., N.W., Washington, DC 20037; (202) 663-1282.
The export of sporting shotguns and ammunition for sporting shotguns is regulated by the U.S. Department of Commerce rather than the State Department. An export license is generally needed to export these shotguns and ammunition. For further information, contact them at their nearest district office or the Bureau of Industry and Security, Outreach and Educational Services Division, U.S. Department of Commerce, 14th St. & Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, DC 20230, (202) 482-4811.
When exporting NFA firearms, ATF Form 9 must be completed and approved by ATF prior to export.
Who do they write for, imbeciles? It’s like the gun controllers don’t even try to hide the lies any more.
Continuing the rumor mill, Uncle reports that Remington may move operations to Tennessee. We’ve discussed a potential Remington move several times, but I’m not so sure it’s Tennessee.
Gov. Cuomo’s tough new gun law has put a target on the state’s gun makers.
Cities, counties and states from across the country have been making lucrative pitches to New York’s firearms companies, urging them to relocate. Their argument: They have a gun-friendly atmosphere, and New York does not.
“They receive solicitations . . . on almost a daily basis,” said Lawrence Kean, senior vice president and general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group.
“CEOs have told me they could basically move their factories for free.”
Cuomo pushed his new gun law through the Legislature a month after the deadly shooting rampage in Newtown, Conn. The law broadened the definition of what is considered a banned assault weapon, and it reduced the size of permissible gun magazines to seven rounds, from 10.
Since then, the state’s remaining firearms companies, including major employers like Remington Arms in upstate Ilion and Kimber Manufacturing in Yonkers, have been wooed by officials from places including South Carolina and Texas.
Anthony Testa, general manager of Just Right Carbines in upstate Canandaigua, southeast of Rochester, said his company received at least a dozen offers from other states.
Just Right, which employs about a dozen workers and produces an assault rifle now banned under the state’s new law, has decided to stay put.
The owners, Testa said, have strong family ties to the region. “That’s the only reason they are not considering these things more seriously,” Testa said.
“You combine the high tax load along with the fairly restrictive and fairly anti-gun stance that the state has, it makes it difficult to do business selling a product that the state doesn’t like.”
Let’s be clear about this. Cuomo is a Putz, and New York is a totalitarian state. Furthermore, I haven’t said much about the union at Remington, but the workers simply can’t adopt collectivist practices and policies, forcing New Yorkers into collective bargaining agreements (as opposed to say, South Carolina which is a right to work state), and then gripe and complain because Cuomo institutes collectivist policies of his own. You must be consistent.
A pair of Democratic lawmakers are proposing steep new taxes on handguns and ammunition, and tying the revenues to programs aimed at preventing gun violence.
Called the “Gun Violence Prevention and Safe Communities Act,” the bill sponsored by William Pascrell, D-N.J., and Danny Davis, D-Ill., would nearly double the current 11 percent tax on handguns, while raising the levy on bullets and cartridges from 11 percent to 50 percent.
“This bill represents a major investment in the protection of our children and our communities, and reflects the long-term societal costs of gun and ammunition purchases in our country,” Pascrell said.
The lawmakers say the bill would generate $600 million per year, which would be used to fund law-enforcement and gun violence prevention.
Critics predicted defeat for the measure.
“What the anti-gun interests can’t ban, they want to tax it out of existence,” Alan Gottlieb, chairman for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, told FoxNews.com. “It’s nothing more than confiscatory taxation.
“I doubt this bill will pass, but we will lobby against it if need be,” he added. “This is simply another shot against gun owners in this country.”
The bill would exempt all federal, state and local agencies, including police departments, from paying the tax.
The bill would also increase the transfer tax on all weapons (except antique guns) covered under the National Firearms Act (which excludes most common guns) from $200 to $500 and index to inflation and increase the transfer tax for any other weapon from $5 to $100.
I don’t care much about the increase in fee for the tax stamp, since I will never, ever register a firearm with the ATF or pay a tax stamp. But the philosophy is that if we cannot beat them at an outright ban, then we can tax them to the point that they cannot afford to own weapons or ammunition.
This approach is both irrational and unconstitutional, not to mention immoral. But something must source the massive expansion of the federal Leviathan, and the Congress has figured out that we will not give up our guns or our shooting. Feed the beast, even if it makes use of what they loath so much – our freedoms. It sure must seem a Faustian bargain to them.
A manufacturer of a robustly popular product wants to capture what it perceives as missed-opportunity sales by opening a third production plant, this one in North Carolina.
The company is pledging to create hundreds of jobs and bring a renowned brand and sure-fire economic shot-in-the-arm to the community.
However, there are analysts skeptical of the expansion plans, saying the company already is facing saturation of its product in the U.S. marketplace amid formidable competition. They aren’t sure consumer demand will continue to outpace supply even though the short-term future is bright.
The company: Dell Inc., the world’s largest PC manufacturer. The time: summer 2004. The community: Winston-Salem.
Fast forward six years, and Dell is preparing to close its $110 million plant and finish eliminating the remainder of a workforce that reached 1,400 at its peak. The company is shifting production to third-party vendors after falling laptop prices eroded its market share for desktops and consumers proved increasingly indifferent to a customized product.
Fast forward another three years, and you find Rockingham County reveling in what local officials and residents consider as a godsend – an announcement that Sturm, Ruger & Co. Inc. has chosen a 220,000-square-foot plant in Mayodan as its preferred site for a third firearms manufacturing plant.
If an unknown amount of local and state incentives are approved in August, local economic officials say they are confident Ruger will commit to spending $30 million on capital investments and hiring a workforce of 300 to 700 full-time employees. The plant would be expected to open by early spring.
It would be the first manufacturing expansion for the Southport, Conn., company since 1988. The company also has plants in Newport, N.H., and Prescott, Ariz. There are about 2,100 employees companywide.
Still, there are analysts who question whether opening a third Ruger plant is prudent. They wonder how many firearms gun buyers want or need before feeling fully stocked.
“While most industry executives believe this surge in demand should still have some steam left in the tank, it’s safe to say it certainly won’t last forever,” said Steve Symington, an analyst with The Motley Fool.
Yes, our “expert” is with The Motley Fool. Give yourself time to quit laughing and let’s cover what’s really happening here.
First of all, Ruger is having trouble meeting demand, and the U.S. is as in love with its guns as it has ever been. There is always a demand for good gun manufacturing, especially with firearms made in the U.S. (including every part and component).
But second, take note of the location of the home office. Connecticut. What this “expert” with The Motley Fool doesn’t understand is the loyalty of gun owners, or conversely, the wrath of their judgment wrought upon gun manufacturers disloyal to America. For a brief primer on this, consider the Smith & Wesson boycott.
Ruger is betting on expansion, but not just any expansion. They’re relocating South. Look for operations in Connecticut to decrease over time. If Ruger doesn’t take this step, they will go out of business, just like Remington in New York.
If firearms manufacturers stay in the North, they will become obsolete and eventually go out of business. If they relocate to the South, a welcome party awaits. So much for the “experts.” Ruger knows what they’re doing.
Nonprofit Quarterly recently carried a commentary on Lindsey Graham and his comments on AR-15s that took a detour into the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Rick Cohen’s thoughts make for interesting reading.
Our impression of American behavior during disasters has been that people generally pull together, that adversity brings out the best in us. Sure, we know that people do very bad things, but the press often notes how people also go out of their way to help and protect their neighbors. In fact, that feeling of mutuality was what we thought undergirded the nonprofit sector in a democratic society.
It must be that we fell for some Panglossian view of America, if we are to believe Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, Graham grilled Attorney General Eric Holder about the proposed ban on assault weapons. We haven’t seen the news reports that verify what Graham says happened—or sort of happened—to spark his support for carrying around military-style assault weapons:
“Can you imagine a circumstance where an AR-15 would be a better defense tool than, say, a double-barrel shotgun? Let me give you an example, that you have (sic) an lawless environment, where you have an natural disaster or some catastrophic event — and those things unfortunately do happen, and law and order breaks down because the police can’t travel, there’s no communication. And there are armed gangs roaming around neighborhoods. Can you imagine a situation where your home happens to be in the crosshairs of this group that a better self-defense weapon may be a semiautomatic AR-15 vs. a double-barrel shotgun?
I’m afraid that world does exist. It existed in New Orleans, to some extent up in Long Island [after Hurricane Sandy], it could exist tomorrow if there’s a cyber attack against [the] country and the power grid goes down and the dams are released and chemical plants are — discharges.
What I’m saying is if my family was in the crosshairs of gangs that were roaming around neighborhoods in New Orleans or any other location, the deterrent effect of an AR-15 to protect my family, I think, is greater than a double-barrel shotgun.”
As far as we can tell, Graham must be referencing a gang of white vigilantes in New Orleans’ Algiers Point neighborhood who, armed with shotguns and assault weapons, allegedly opened fire on African Americans “with impunity” after Hurricane Katrina; the militia was reportedly on the lookout for anyone who “didn’t belong” in the neighborhood, as reported by ProPublica and The Nation. If so, maybe Graham’s fears would have more of a basis in reality if he looked a little more like Holder and was facing a white militia armed with AR-15s.
It is in vogue to tell this revisionist history of Katrina. We’ll deal with this shortly, but before we do that and in order to set the stage for our response, we will now be the ones to take a detour into another crisis to watch how a nation behaved. We’ll address AR-15s, catastrophies and totalitarian governments, but for now let’s briefly revisit the fall of the Berlin wall, the role of one church, and the actions of the East Gernam Army.
OathKeepers has an interview with Lt. Colonel Gunter Spens, in which he describes the fact that the East German Army simply refused to obey orders to stop the protests at the wall and stayed on base. True enough for part of the story, and as much as I admire Oath Keepers, it isn’t as simple as this and there is more to the story. This is the church that brought down the wall.
In the GDR, atheism was the norm. Churches like St. Nikolai were spied on but allowed to remain open.
“In the GDR, the church provided the only free space,” Fuhrer said in an interview with Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. “Everything that could not be discussed in public could be discussed in church, and in this way the church represented a unique spiritual and physical space in which people were free.”
In the early 1980s, Fuhrer began holding weekly prayers for peace.
Every Monday, worshippers recited the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. Few came at first, but attendance grew as the Soviet Union began opening to the West.
The prayer service, Fuhrer said, “was something very special in East Germany. Here a critical mass grew under the roof of the church — young people, Christians and non-Christians, and later, those who wanted to leave (East Germany) joined us and sought refuge here.”
As a college student in those years, Sylke Schumann was one of the hundreds, then thousands, who joined the vigils in the sanctuary at St. Nikolai and then marched in the streets holding candles and calling for change.
“Seeing all these people gather in this place … from week to week and more and more people gathering, you had the feeling this time really the government had to listen to you,” Schumann said.
In October 1989, on the 40th anniversary of the GDR, the government cracked down.
Protesters in Leipzig were beaten and arrested. Two days later, St. Nikolai Church was full to overflowing for the weekly vigil. When it was over, 70,000 people marched through the city as armed soldiers looked on, but did nothing.
And even this report doesn’t tell the whole story. I was a member of a church during this time that received regular (underground) reports from East German churches about the events of that era. When society has rejected God and embraced totalitarianism, the men can become lovers of power or drunkards and whore chasers. Not all men do, but many succumb to this fate.
But oftentimes the women – mothers and grandmothers who want their children to be raised with a sense of morality and the knowledge of God – toe the line. Secretly they teach their children. Their children learn to love their mothers and the instruction, and like ticking time bombs that explode later in life, that instruction proves determinative.
And toe the line the women did. The crowds were heavily populated with mothers and grandmothers, and the boys who populated the East German Army remembered their instruction. They wouldn’t discharge their weapons at their own blood, and whether it was the instruction in underground churches or the simple fact that the boys wouldn’t kill their mothers or mothers of colleagues, no rounds were fired. It had little to do with orders to stay in garrison. If the East German Army had deployed (as some of them did), they would simply have watched as the wall fell without a shot.
Now, let’s return to the issue of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. Except for the horrible racist, Aryan gangs who abused the black folk, it was a veritable Shangri La indeed. Except for the white folk everyone would have gotten along just swimmingly. White Aryan gangs in the middle of New Orleans. You simply can’t make this up.
Except that this isn’t reality. Revisionist doesn’t even begin to describe that view. That view is an outright fabrication and falsehood. A more accurate and honest accounting shows how rough the time was.
In the City of Vultures, a New Zealander is one of the few remaining police officers who has stayed behind to protect the helpless.
James Gourlie, 30, formerly of Christchurch, is one of six officers who have remained out of a district force of 200.
“This is my district. I will not abandon my district, my county, my workmates or these people,” he told the Herald On Sunday last night.
Mr Gourlie was speaking while preparing for another night patrol from the Hampton Inn, which he and fellow officers took over after their police station was overrun. For its single entrance, and the war zone outside, they have dubbed the hotel “The Fortress”.
It’s been six days and five nights of lawlessness since Hurricane Katrina hit. In the vacuum left by Katrina, anarchy has reigned. Human vultures have preyed on the helpless, pillaging homes and shops, committing murder and rape.
The decision to stay while hundreds of fellow officers fled has left them bitter. Mr Gourlie returned after getting his American wife Jennifer out of New Orleans.
When one fellow officer and friend pulled out for Texas on Friday, taking two automatic rifles and a shotgun, he earned his colleagues’ anger.
“They’re preserving their lives but they’re risking their friends,” said Mr Gourlie, of the “cowards” who have left. “You know what the New Zealand and Australian way is – and that ain’t the Anzac way. You sacrifice yourself for your mates.”
There are incidents every day involving weapons, although Mr Gourlie is thankful he has not yet had to shoot anyone. The times the officers have intervened, those desperate for help have wept and offered thanks.
A fellow officer was killed after warning looters away from a store. A looter pushed a gun against his head and pulled the trigger. “It was heartbreaking to see this police officer lying on his back, blood pouring out of his head.”
There are gangs of armed thugs in the convention centre. One young hood the officers pulled up was carrying a civilian version of a military M-16 rifle.
“There’s shooting. The thugs inside, they have come outside. They are running up and down, disturbing people with impunity. They know we can’t cross the road and engage them because we don’t know where their cohorts are. We are so vastly outnumbered, especially at night,” said Mr Gourlie.
There has also been murder and rape. In one awful case, a 15-year-old girl had suffered both, her body stuffed into an oven with her throat slit.
“I would expect something like this in a war zone in the Middle East. You’d be stupid not to be afraid. It’s how you face it that counts.”
The gangs in the centre have now destroyed the generators, and last night was the first Katrina’s survivors have spent without light. “That’s one of the reasons why people are so afraid today.”
I am certainly no admirer of Lindsey Graham. His criticism of Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul over their filibuster was petulant, and his friendship with John McCain shows that he wants to stay in power rather than hold government accountable. But from the mouth of the unexpected sometimes comes wisdom, even if by accident.
Unfortunately like the author says, Ameica is indeed like this concerning violence and danger, even if his intended target – white gangs – is a fabrication of his imagination. And during this period of peril for the citizens of New Orleans did the National Guard keep order? No, to their everlasting shame they spent their time confiscating weapons from law abiding citizens.
And yet, the National Guard had no evidence that New Orleans wouldn’t devolve into something like the L.A. riots, leaving people helpless and defenseless.
America as we have know it is dead. It is no more. The cities are violent and the government totalitarian. America is more bifurcated than it has ever been in history. Ninety million people are out of the labor force, and something approaching half of America pays no income tax. Keynesian economics has failed like a star burning out. The first medium size city has gone bankrupt, taking with it nearly one billion dollars in pensions for state workers. Note that this doesn’t include Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment payments, welfare, social security or any other federal program. One billion dollars – just on state pensions, just with one medium size city.
While the states are going down, the federal government is working hard at making itself more totalitarian than before.
The ATF doesn’t just want a huge database to reveal everything about you with a few keywords. It wants one that can find out who you know. And it won’t even try to friend you on Facebook first.
According to a recent solicitation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the bureau is looking to buy a “massive online data repository system” for its Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information (OSII). The system is intended to operate for at least five years, and be able to process automated searches of individuals, and “find connection points between two or more individuals” by linking together “structured and unstructured data.”
Primarily, the ATF states it wants the database to speed-up criminal investigations. Instead of requiring an analyst to manually search around for your personal information, the database should “obtain exact matches from partial source data searches” such as social security numbers (or even just a fragment of one), vehicle serial codes, age range, “phonetic name spelling,” or a general area where your address is located. Input that data, and out comes your identity, while the computer automatically establishes connections you have with others.
Many other specific requirements are also to be expected for a federal law enforcement agency: searching names, phone numbers, “nationwide utility data” and reverse phone searches. The data will then be collected to help out during investigations and provide “relevant information and intelligence products.”
To do this and similar things they are spending the wealth of your children and children’s children. Ben Bernanke is trying ever so hard to keep hyperinflation under control and interest rates low in order to keep the deficit from exploding, but sooner or later America’s unfunded liabilities will come due and no amount fiat money will suffice. Fractional reserve banking will prove to people when hard times hit that their money doesn’t exist and cannot be withdrawn from their accounts. It’s just a waiting game, because the system cannot be saved.
The American experiment – subtended by wealth redistribution, race baiting, totalitarianism and the creation of taker class that leeches off of workers – is over. It has been replaced by Fabian socialism. But all is not lost. America will be reborn in a different form. Hard times are approaching, and there are some salient and hard questions that are a function of those hard times.
Will police, soldiers and Marines raise their weapons against American civilians? The Louisiana National Guard did. To each and every officer, soldier and Marine I tell you, you’d better not. God will condemn you for it. Your orders must be legal and moral to require your fealty, and notwithstanding the [il]legality of such an order, it would be immoral. Will you confiscate weapons if so ordered? You’d better not – God will condemn you for it. Each man lives his appointed days, and then he will face judgment. Do not face God having removed means of legitimate protection of the family. And do not face God having been the stooge for a tyrant. It matters little how long you live. It matters much how you live, and how you perish.
To parents, you must teach your children and instill in them a reverence for and love of liberty. Even for the old among us, you may very well end up training the very men who would otherwise be your tyrants, but who will remember their upbringing instead. Mothers and grandmothers, you essentially saved the day in East Germany. Don’t underestimate your role. Teaching the children is the most important job on earth.
Men, don’t be naive. God apparently granted a special dispensation to East Germany for a bloodless coup. It won’t happen that way anywhere else. The National Guard in many states has already shown that they will assist totalitarianism. The race riots in Los Angeles were nothing compared to what it will be like in the event of an economic collapse in America.
Teach the children. Defend the family. It isn’t just a right, it’s your God-given duty. And never, ever relinquish your weapons. That would be as immoral as the actions of totalitarians in confiscation. You shall not cooperate with the totalitarians and be approved by God. Never give up. God is on your side.
Pathetic rag The Raw Story on Mike Huckabee on Obama and guns:
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) declared on Wednesday that President Barack Obama and gun control advocates are possibly planning on confiscating the nation’s privately owned firearms and imposing a Nazi Germany-like “dictatorship” in this country. According to Media Matters, Huckabee made the remarks in response to a caller on his radio show.
“I’m very concerned,” said the caller, “it seems like there’s so many people who have not read and do not understand how quickly Germany was turned into, it was a democracy, then turned into a dictatorship by everyone having to register their guns and then they went door to door and collected them.”
Rather than correct the caller that in 1938, the Nazi Party loosened gun regulations that had been imposed by the Versailles Treaty in the wake of World War One, lowered the age limit for gun ownership and de-regulated the possession of shotguns and rifles for everyone but Jews, Huckabee chose instead to stoke the caller’s fears.
“People do forget that,” said Huckabee. “And by the way, know that when you bring that up you get people who get crazy on us, and they’ll start saying, ‘Oh there you go comparing to the Nazis.’ And I understand the reaction, but it’s the truth. You cannot take people’s rights away if they’re resisting and if they have the means to resist, but once they’re disarmed and the people who are trying to take over have all the power, not just political, not just financial, but they have the physical power to domesticate us and to subjugate us to their will, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it other than just plan to die in the course of resistance.”
I’m delighted that Raw Story brought up this issue about correcting the record. No, not correcting Mike Huckabee, but correcting this unserious Harcourt study. The comprehensive study by Stephen Halbrook is much more honest, and points out that at least the following weapons features were banned for everyone: silencers, tactical lights on weapons, detachable high capacity magazines (more than five rounds) and telescoping stocks. Does this list sound familiar? Halbrook also remarks concerning Nazi gun control:
… the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was consolidated by massive searches and seizures of firearms from political opponents, who were invariably described as “communists.” After five years of repression and eradication of dissidents, Hitler signed a new gun control law in 1938, which benefitted Nazi party members and entities, but denied firearm ownership to enemies of the state.
As I’ve said before, no one has ever claimed that Nazi gun regulations didn’t benefit the totalitarians in Nazi Germany. Someone always has the guns. The issue is who, and under what circumstances, and for what purpose?
That Harcourt would publish such an unserious study is embarrassing for him whether he knows it or not. It’s probably not possible for The Raw Story to be embarrassed about anything. But take careful note of the argument that is repeated in the silly article. It’s not really gun control if it only affected the Jews. Can you imagine a more racist, bigoted position than that?
Ever to be late to the debate and wrong with the facts, Fluffington Post discusses Hitler and guns.
When the president of Ohio’s state school board posted her opposition to gun control, she used a powerful symbol to make her point: a picture of Adolf Hitler. When a well-known conservative commentator decried efforts to restrict guns, he argued that if only Jews in Poland had been better armed, many more would have survived the Holocaust.
In the months since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, some gun rights supporters have repeatedly compared U.S. gun control efforts to Nazi restrictions on firearms, arguing that limiting weapons ownership could leave Americans defenseless against homegrown tyrants.
But some experts say that argument distorts a complex and contrary history. In reality, scholars say, Hitler loosened the tight gun laws that governed Germany after World War I, even as he barred Jews from owning weapons and moved to confiscate them.
Advocates who cite Hitler in the current U.S. debate overlook that Jews in 1930s Germany were a very small population, owned few guns before the Nazis took control, and lived under a dictatorship commanding overwhelming public support and military might, historians say. While it doesn’t fit neatly into the modern-day gun debate, they say, the truth is that for all Hitler’s unquestionably evil acts, his firearms laws likely made no difference in Jews’ very tenuous odds of survival.
“Objectively, it might have made things worse” if the Jews who fought the Nazis in the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising in Poland had more and better guns, said historian Steve Paulsson, an expert on the period whose Jewish family survived the city’s destruction.
It’s difficult to imagine how it could be worse than gas chambers and ovens to commit genocide, but they aren’t reluctant to cite an absurd comment like that because it’s a failing organization. It’s a wonder anyone will write for or talk to them.
… the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was consolidated by massive searches and seizures of firearms from political opponents, who were invariably described as “communists.” After five years of repression and eradication of dissidents, Hitler signed a new gun control law in 1938, which benefitted Nazi party members and entities, but denied firearm ownership to enemies of the state.
… control over weapons that have collapsible or telescoping capabilities, easy take-down and modularity, lights, no so-called “sporting purpose,” and magazines more than a pre-determined amount has its roots in Nazi Germany.
Again, the record is clear. Today, potential enemies of the state includes everyone except law enforcement, and the controls that the current administration advocates are to be found in Nazi Germany.
No one has ever claimed that either the Obama administration or Adolf Hitler wanted the disappearance of all guns. They just want guns in the “right hands.”
12 years, 4 months ago
