Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

ISIS fighters were gun controllers, remember.

“ISIS was telling everyone, ‘We’re all brothers,’ ” Abu Malik said. “They let people smoke and drink. At the checkpoints, they distributed presents to the kids. They ate with people, drank tea with people. They were very nice—they didn’t bother anyone. Then, a week or so after they arrived, they started confiscating weapons. They told us it didn’t matter if we’d been with the Awakening or the Army or the police—if we gave up our weapons, we’d be forgiven. Ten days later, they started taking people. Everything changed. They took my cousin. My brothers dug holes in the fields and hid. I was at my house when they came for me. It was afternoon. I saw two Hyundai Santa Fes pull up outside, and I ran out the back and jumped over the wall. That was the last time I saw my family.”

This is no different than Adolf Hitler, who confiscated weapons and outlawed a lot of other firearms hardware from his enemies.

… 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.

Do you want more?

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms.  History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.  Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.   So let’s not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.”

How about Benito Mussolini.

“The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements. … They were elements of disorder and subversion.  On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind.  This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results.”

We could go on with Pol Pot, communist China, Stalin, the Christian Armenian genocide at the hands the Turkish Muslims, and so on.  Suffice it to say that dictators love gun control.

What about today?

Khamenei’s “hard line” on guns is nothing new. One of the Ayatollah’s first orders of business, when he came to power, was to disarm his own citizens – a technique regularly used by “supreme leaders” to extend their tenures.

Ultimately, Khamenei makes a unique case that the Second Amendment is, in fact, an insurance policy against tyranny.

Now, of course, the left, despite being vocal on gun control for the last several weeks, embracing nearly every unqualified expert in agreement with them, up to and including members of the Kardashian family, has been silent on the Ayatollah’s expressed agreement with their agenda. But there is an undercurrent of support – as recently as early January, the Huffington Post wrote glowingly of some of the Ayatollah’s ideas.

Gun control is tyranny, and tyrants love gun control.  It’s in their blood.  It’s who they are.  Any time you hear talk of gun control, remember this and equate the advocate of gun control with Stalin, Mussolini, Turkish Muslims, Khamenei, and ISIS.

This includes any gun control measures, like advocating a ban on bump stocks.  Hey, didn’t the NRA do this?

NRA:

Even as the nation was grieving the terrible loss of life in Parkland, Fla., gun control activists were doing what they do best: exploiting tragedy to advance their political agenda.  Gun control activists are pushing a message that you are to blame for the criminal violence that took place last month. They’re attempting to capitalize on this tragedy to convince members of Congress to vote for their gun control wish list. 

Proposals to ban the most popular rifles in America, arbitrarily limit magazine capacity, require a waiting period on all firearm sales, and restrict the right of law-abiding young adults to acquire rifles and shotguns have been suggested as “solutions” by those who wish to curtail the rights of law-abiding gun owners. Legislation encompassing these proposals could be voted on in the U.S. Congress in the coming weeks. That’s why it’s imperative that you contact your members of Congress and state lawmakers today and ask them to oppose all gun control schemes that would only impact law-abiding gun owners.

Hey, wasn’t it the NRA who went on record saying that bump stocks should be banned, or at least an NFA item?  Yea, it sure was.

It’s almost like the NRA is stirring up trouble in Congress trying to get them to do things against the wishes of the gun community in order to get the gun community to donate dollars to try to fight what they’ve stirred up.  If you can get it, that’s a sweet gig.

David Codrea:

The latest citizen disarmament plot currently being hatched will raise the minimum age for rifle purchases to 21. While some are specifically calling out semi-automatic rifles, others want it all. Such plans are  gaining traction at the state and federal level by no shortage of Democrat opportunists and “bipartisan” Republican panderers, including Sen. Marco Rubio and President Donald Trump.

An interesting article over at Firearms News notes Audie Murphy would have been deemed “too young” to be trusted with a rifle at the time his legendary heroics earned him recognition as the most decorated combat soldier of WWII.

But wait, the emperor-god Trump wants it, so it must be good, or he must be lying, or he must be playing 4-D chess while everyone else is playing checkers, or something else, it can’t really be that Trump didn’t keep his promises to be pro-gun, can it?

Yea, sign me up for opposition to said stupidity, but you knew that already.

On a different subject entirely, David has a great idea for a new gun law.  I support this one.  Don’t look for it in the bills on the House or Senate web site though.

Time:

Dick’s Sporting Goods announced on Wednesday that it would stop selling assault-style rifles in all of its stores, a direct reaction to the February 14 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead.

“When we saw what happened in Parkland, we were so disturbed and upset,” CEO Edward Stack said.

The move leaves just one major retailer standing alone in continuing to sell the semi-automatic assault-style rifles commonly used in mass shootings: Bass Pro Shops, which now includes Cabela’s, a competitor it purchased last year. Bass Pro Shops was named by Forbes as one of America’s largest privately-owned companies. There are a total of over 160 Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops retail stores in the U.S. and Canada. Both stores also sell high-capacity magazines, which allow shooters to fire a higher number of rounds without needing to reload.

Many large companies have changed their policies around guns lately, as protesters push for tougher regulations. Some have cut ties with the National Rifle Assocation, ending discount programs for NRA members. Dick’s announced that all of its stores would immediately stop selling assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines, and that it would no longer sell any guns whatsoever to customers who are under the age of 21.

While stating that “we support and respect the Second Amendment,” Dick’s also urged Congress to take action and called for a national ban on assault-style firearms, a ban on high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, and a minimum age of 21 for all firearms sales. “Thoughts and prayers aren’t enough,” a Dick’s press release said.

[ … ]

Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, has also been scaling back gun sales at its stores. In 2006, Walmart stopped selling guns at roughly one-third of its stores, citing “diminished customer relevancy.” In 2015, all Walmart stores stopped selling semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15, the weapon of choice in mass shootings such as those in Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Las Vegas, and most recently in Parkland, Florida.

Ridiculous.  So someone tell me the last time you were in a Dick’s or Walmart and saw anyone buy a gun?  Anyone?  I didn’t think so.

Gun buyers don’t go to Walmart or Dick’s.  You have to call someone over to the counter just to ask about that ammunition behind the counter that you can’t pick up.  Otherwise, the gun counter is the most unmanned part of the store.  No one is buying anything, save a little ammunition or cleaning supplies from time to time.

Walmart will still continue to struggle competing with Amazon, and Dick’s will continue to sell pansy-ass golf gear and clothes and wonder why they’re struggling compared to Bass Pro Shop and Cabela’s – where you can get literally anything you want.

And nothing else will change.  And time will continue to write breathless, hyperventilating fake news about big wins for the gun control lobby.

The Hill:

“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time,” Trump said at a meeting with lawmakers on school safety and gun violence.

“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.

No, you didn’t go to sleep and imagine Trump being elected, only to wake and find out that you’re still in the Obama era.  Obama didn’t say that.  Trump did.

Wasn’t this the guy that was going to save the second amendment and root out the deep state, drain the swamp and make America great again?  Or was he just a temporary stop on the way to dystopia, a delay for getting ready for what we all know is coming?

See, the whole idea behind “due process” is that it happens first, not second.  It’s not due process if it happens out of sequence.  But he didn’t think very deeply about this before he said it.  It may be what he believes and feels, but it sounds so stupid that if he thought about it, he wouldn’t have actually said it.

And if he was more of a thinking man, he might have pondered the fact that no progressive is going to vote for him in the next election for being a gun controller, but he might just have alienated the very base that put him in office to begin with.  But remember his words during the debates: “Everything is negotiable.”  That apparently includes your  God-given rights.

You don’t have enough ammunition yet.  Neither do I.

Michael Gerson at The Washington Post:

It is one of the dirty habits of our political discourse that so many people use thermonuclear rhetorical weapons as a first resort. It is not enough for defenders of gun rights to be wrong; they must be complicit in murder. It is not enough for gun-control advocates to be mistaken; they must be jackbooted thugs laying the groundwork for tyranny.

These competing apocalypses, paradoxically, make politics appear smaller — the realm of unbalanced partisans and professional hyperventilators. But more destructively, this type of argument makes incremental change — the kind that our system of government encourages — more difficult.

This is a particular shame on the issue of gun violence. The maximal solutions — broad restrictions on gun ownership or fixing the mental-health system — are so difficult or unlikely that they have become obstacles to action. They are something like, on the issue of global warming, recommending that the Earth be moved farther from the sun.

[ … ]

When it comes to mass killings, we know what the perpetrators generally look like: disappointed loners, motivated by grudges, seeking fame and planning their violence carefully. So here is an answerable public-policy question: What can we do to identify these dangerous malcontents and keep ­military-grade weaponry out of their hands? We should be considering: special police task forces that actively identify and track prospective killers instead of ­passively responding to warnings. ­Higher age restrictions on gun access. Broader application of gun­ violence protective orders that forbid gun ownership to people exhibiting warning signs. Better education on those warning signs among adults who deal with young men. Media norms against using the names of mass killers, which only encourages their deadly performance art.

[ … ]

When it comes to American gun culture, the issue of motivation matters a great deal. If you defend access to guns for sport and self-defense, there is no logical reason to reject reasonable ­restrictions on firepower and access. Some compromise — focused on keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous and unstable people — is within the realm of possibility. But if you view the ultimate purpose of gun ownership as resistance to a future (or present) tyrannical government, then restrictions on firepower and access are exactly the things a tyrannical government would want. Because the goal of an oppressive state is to have a monopoly on sophisticated weaponry, any incremental movement toward that goal is unacceptable.

This argument — summarized by David French as “the concept of an armed citizenry as a final, emergency bulwark against tyranny” — is perhaps understandable in a country born of revolutionary violence. But more than two centuries removed from the ­revolution, the concept seems, well, frightening.

When I look at many of the people holding the guns, I don’t really view them as legitimate protectors of my rights, or as qualified to make choices about the employment of violence in politics. I don’t view America as halfway to tyranny. And I am grateful that Americans such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — who suffered actual oppression by government — made a principled commitment to nonviolent political change.

It is one thing when Thomas Jefferson said “the tree of liberty must be ­refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” It is another thing entirely when your well-armed neighbor says the same.

I have no idea how much this attitude infects the right. But the fever can be measured in talk of a “deep state” coup against the president, in sympathy for Cliven Bundy in his armed standoff with federal agents, in support of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) when he ordered the State Guard to monitor the Navy SEAL/Green Beret joint training exercise Jade Helm 15. All destructive madness.

So let me assist you a bit, Michael.  First of all, I would do nothing to protect you against tyranny.  You’re the enemy, or at least you’re in bed with the enemy.  You love tyranny.  You love high taxes, government control, government-run health care, redistribution of wealth, and a police state.

You’ve traded liberty for a semblance of security, but that security is only as the state deems right and fitting.  You could wake up tonight to a SWAT team busting your door in and shooting your loved ones, all in the name of a war on drugs, with no apologies, no recompense, and no explanation.  Wrong home?  Who cares – certainly not the police.  You feed from the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.  And you’re happy with that.

There are a lot of us.  We’re the dirt people.  You get your power from us, and your lights come on only because we allow it.  We feed you.  We drive the trucks that deliver your supplies.  We make the lines of logistics.  We grow your crops and worry about heavy equipment breakage and droughts and the price of goods and paying our employees.

And we have guns.  We have pistols, shotguns, bolt action rifles, and AR-15s.  You’re not getting any of them.  One of my commenters observed something that may be enlightening to you.  Listen closely.

The gun-banners aren’t too well-educated and haven’t thought things through. They really haven’t. They have not studied the history of the Prohibition Era enough in depth to realize that the federal government can’t really outlaw anything – all the government can do is force buyers and sellers of goods/services out of the above-board, legal market and into the underground economy and black market. That’s it.

It’s basic economics. As long as a market for a particular good or service exists, and producers/sellers of that particular good or service exist, they will find a way to do business – whether the government likes it or not. Not only the prohibition of alcohol, either, but the so-called “war on drugs” proves this fact.

All the Eighteenth Amendment really did was to turn tens of millions of otherwise law-abiding Americans into instant felons overnight by making illegal what had previously been legal – the production, sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

At the stroke of a pen, millions of gainfully-employed people were rendered unemployed, and businesses large and small immediately felt the ripple effects of the new laws. Not only the tavern down the street, but the liquor distributor across town and the bottling plant the next state over and the largest firms involved in the business of slaking their customer’s thirst.

Alcohol prohibition also – nearly single-handedly – created and enabled the explosive growth of the mafia – the outfit, the mob, La Cosa Nostra, whatever you wish to term them. The biggest syndicates moved huge amounts of liquor, beer and spirits smuggled into the U.S. from outside; reaping giant profits in the process.

It took the FBI (back when that agency still had a shred or two of honor to its name) decades to finally beat back and take down the mob, so powerful had they gotten in the 1920s and 1930s.

Alcohol prohibition and the war on drugs will fade into insignificance in comparison to the massive underground economy sure to be created in the wake of any national ban on the ownership of firearms. Such a ban would surely create the largest and most-profitable black market in history.

And bear in mind that such a vast underworld enterprise will likely not restrict itself to the sales of deer rifles and five-shot revolvers; it will deal in the latest military-grade hardware – including fully-automatic weapons. After all, if the mere fact of owning a firearm is already a crime, there is no additional harm done going “all in” and getting the mil-spec hardware.

Very quickly, this country will move from resembling the U.S.A. we have known and loved to something like Mogadishu, Somalia, where even a poor man can afford to buy an AK47 and an RPG down at the local market and arms bazaar.

We don’t like government interference and government intervention.  You see, when the Scriptures teach us that “The good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,” we take that seriously.  That means government theft is immoral, and if the government has become an impediment to us providing for our children’s children, then the government has become a stumbling block and worker of evil.

We do not look to the state to provide, protect and give us cradle to grave security like you do Michael.  It might be “scary” to you that we’re armed the way we are.  That’s by intent, for our armaments are not only for our own personal protection, but amelioration of tyranny.  We aren’t “legitimate protectors of your rights,” we are legitimate protectors of our rights.  People like us believe that the Mr. David French you cite is too progressive and we pay little attention to him.  You mustn’t forget the history of gun control, with the Armenian genocide, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Hitler and The Third Reich, and Stalin, all of whose regimes were preceded by gun confiscations and gun control laws.  Deaths at the hands of tyrants in the last century approached 200 million souls.

So the best and quickest way to ensure the war you apparently fear is to keep pushing government control and disarmament.  Do it at your own peril, Michael.  Your secure home and lifestyle inside the beltway may not be as secure as you think if you can’t control that controller impulse in yourself.

Motherless Jones:

I’m not generally on the gun control beat, but I’ll repeat my view for the record: semi-automatic weapons should be banned for civilian use. Basically, shotguns, revolvers, and bolt-action rifles would remain legal, and that’s it.

The last time I mentioned this, a bunch of gun folks chimed in to claim I was an idiot. Revolvers are semi-automatic weapons! Ha ha ha. Being the reasonable guy that I am, I was willing to consider them manual load weapons, since it takes human power to advance the cylinder. A true semi-automatic uses the power of expanding gas¹ to chamber a new load. However, if the gun folks consider a double-action revolver to be a semi-automatic, who am I to argue? That just means my list has been revised to include shotguns, single-action revolvers, and bolt action rifles.² In other words, the only legal firearms would be those that require a separate human action to load a new round. There are other details I’d support too, but this is the main thing.

If I were your benevolent dictator, this is what would would happen. But I’m not, and nothing like this will happen in my lifetime. This is why I don’t spend much time writing about guns.

Oh, I don’t know about that, Kevin.  We’ve got evidence of you being on the gun control beat before.  I think you’re a liar.  I also think you’re a coward.  I told you then, “So Kevin, I expect you to kick my door in tonight to grab my guns.  Oh, I see, you’re a coward and won’t show up here.  Just as I guessed, you want to send other armed men to do it.  This only proves that you don’t really believe in gun control for everybody, just some people.”

I won’t argue the mechanics of guns with you Kevin, you wouldn’t be able to hang with me anyway.  In fact, I won’t argue at all or compromise in any way.  I’ll say the same thing as before.  If you want my guns, come and get them.  I’ll be waiting for you.  I Promise.  And if you want gun control only for some people, to wit, me but not the police, then I’ll be waiting for the police when they come to confiscate my guns too.  It makes no difference to me who tries to confiscate them.  You’re all the same to me.

Kevin wants civil war.  If he gets his way, that’s exactly what will happen.  That’s a promise.

That’s the title of the article.  Don’t blame me.

“I grew up in a town where two-thirds of the people who came to school drove trucks and had hunting rifles and hunting shotguns in their gunracks in their trucks,” said Jones, who was born in Deland, Fla., about an hour north of the Braves’ spring training complex, and attended high school in nearby Pierson and then Jacksonville. “But never at any point did anyone ever pull one out and say, ‘I’m going to kill somebody.’ Whenever there was a disagreement, we threw knuckles. We’d meet after school and fight. That’s just the way it was.”

[ … ]

“I believe in our Constitutional right to bear arms and protect ourselves,” Jones said. “But I do not believe there is any need for civilians to own assault rifles. I just don’t.

“I would like to see something (new legislation) happen. I liken it to drugs – you’re not going to get rid of all the guns. But AR-15s and AK-47s and all this kind of stuff – they belong in the hands of soldiers. Those belong in the hands of people who know how to operate them, and whose lives depend on them operating them. Not with civilians. I have no problem with hunting rifles and shotguns and pistols and what-not. But I’m totally against civilians having those kinds of automatic and semi-automatic weapons.”

So the write apparently thinks it helps his case that Chipper Jones is a baseball hero or an “avid hunter.”  Chipper decries “assault weapons,” AR-15s, AK-47s, semi-automatic weapons, and anything that’s not “what-not.”

It apparently didn’t occur to the author that Chipper Jones is an idiot.  He began explaining that guns were ubiquitous when he was growing up and that no one would have even thought about a school shooting.  Good.  He is on to something there.  He could have explained what has changed and why this kind of thing occurs today when it didn’t not so long ago.

But he didn’t.  His setup was badly off script and pointed to something other than the ubiquitous availability of guns and into morals, culture, and [heaven forbid] perhaps even whether the nation worships at the foot of Baal or God.  So he would have been better off just to shut up about what happened when he was a kid.  Too many people remember that the same way, and are able to see that it has nothing to do with guns.

Or what-not.  Idiot.  Go back to school and learn English composition.  Oh, and by the way, Charles Whitman says hello, Chipper.

David Codrea:

I guess it’s no surprise to see NRO offering a sop, as if that will satisfy those who’ve made it clear they want it all. National Review founder William F. Buckley didn’t really get the “shall not be infringed” thing either, on either prior restraints or on militia-suitable arms. And sorry, but David French’s is not a “conservative” voice I want representing gun owner interests if the extent of his judgment is to throw the circling pack of Democrat jackals a scrap of flesh. Nor is Ben Shapiro’s.

I don’t want any of those people representing me either on any subject.  I’ve learned immediately to dismiss anything David French says or writes.  I don’t even open the article.  Hey, speaking of compromise, I was at Sebastian’s place the other day and saw this.

So what do you do? Call on ATF to undertake rule making, where you can control the process under a friendly administration, and make sure whatever comes out is narrowly worded. Also, since it’s regulation, rather than law, it’s much easier to change.

So that was the choice: a bump stock ban that swept in a lot other ordinary and legal activity, and a bump stock ban that was just a bump stock ban, and was regulation rather than law. There are no other options. Don’t like that? Then you’re left replacing many of the squishy Republicans. But you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone running for office in this country willing to stand up and shout, “Yay for machine guns,” let alone win on it. And if you challenge all the squishy Republicans and lose? You’re done. Finished. Bump stocks ain’t a hill I’m dying on, and trust me, it is a hill you’ll die on.

It was initially difficult to tell whether Sebastian was being cynical and sarcastic with the first paragraph or serious.  Upon second (and third) reading, I think he’s actually being serious.  He believes we can “control the process” as long as we tell the ATF we want them to infringe our rights.  Also, we can get it changed later.

Right.  Myth-making and fairy tales.