Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

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.

David Codrea:

“If all the sudden you couldn’t buy an AR-15, what would you lose?” Ohio Republican Governor John Kasich asked on CNN, talking about new citizen disarmament edicts he’d favor in the wake of the Stoneman atrocities. “Would you feel your Second Amendment rights would be eroded because you couldn’t buy a God-darned AR-15?”

No Johnny, I wouldn’t feel that my rights to gun ownership – that is, any kind of gun I damn well pleased to own – eroded at all, since they don’t come from you, your opinions, or a piece of parchment.

Yes Johnny, the second amendment would have been infringed even more than it has been, and it is a covenant between the government and the people.  That infringement will have eroded the peace and stability of the nation.  That is what will have changed.  You can count on it.

NYT:

For the past year, chief executives have often talked about the new sense of moral responsibility that corporations have to help their communities and confront social challenges even when Washington won’t.

In the aftermath of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 students and staff members — and at a time when Washington shows little interest in limiting the sales of assault weapons — there’s a real opportunity for the business community to fill the void and prove that all that talk about moral responsibility isn’t hollow.

Here’s an idea.

What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?

Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.

PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

“We do not believe permitting the sale of firearms on our platform is consistent with our values or in the best interests of our customers,” a spokesman for Square told me.

The big financial firms don’t even have to go that far.

For example, Visa, which published a 71-page paper in 2016 espousing its “corporate responsibility,” could easily change its terms of service to say that it won’t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, which make semiautomatic rifles fire faster. (Even the National Rifle Association has said it would support tighter restrictions on bump stocks.)

The purpose, of course, being not only choking the financial flow of firearms sales, but trying to shame gun owners, just like laws against open carry are an attempt to shame gun owners.

Politico:

“The president also surveyed Mar-a-Lago Club members about whether he ought to champion gun control measures in the wake of last week’s school massacre in nearby Parkland, telling them that he was closely monitoring the media appearances by some of the surviving students, according to people who spoke with him there.” http://wapo.st/2HuDHxx

David Codrea also links this Towhall piece and takes a swipe at Fairfax.  Hey, I get it, and I like to take swipes at Fairfax too.  And don’t get me wrong, I get that Trump is way better than the alternative.  Way better.  But when you begin from the platform of believing basically nothing, you can end up virtually anywhere.

Or another way of saying it is this.  If you’re not ideologically and incorrigibly committed to God-given rights to personal defense and the amelioration of tyranny – like I am, then you can be talked into virtually anything regarding the tools used thereto.

David Codrea:

There is one “gun law” that at least had the potential to make a difference, but it was being infringed by “gun free school zone” edicts.  Broward County Public Schools, of which Stoneman Douglas is part, explains on its website …

As I said, if you must pile your children into state schools of indoctrination rather than home school them, run, hide and fight isn’t a plan.  It’s not even hope, and hope is not a plan.

No one will protect your family but you, or someone who functions en loco parentis.  I would rather just trust myself.

Speaking of the family, some Christian parents in Ohio lost custody of the 17-year old girl because they refused her transgender drugs.  Because in the view of the state, “All your children are belong to us.”

Via David Codrea, this news from Florida is most welcome.

The gun store owners who sold confessed Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz the semiautomatic refile he used to kill 17 people on Wednesday said their devastated the weapon came from them.

Michael and Lisa Morrison said that they are so ‘mortified’ over the event, they shuttered their business, Sunrise Tactical Supply, indefinitely on Friday.

The Morrisons lawyer Douglas Rudman said in a statement that the couple are ‘completely shocked and mortified that anything like this would happen,’ according to The New York Daily News.

[ … ]

The couple also said that they will support new legislation designed to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of people with mental health issues.

From the department of pre-crime, anyone who sports a Gadsden flag must be considered mentally unstable and unfit for firearms ownership.  Or so they must now believe because they want to give the power over the definition of mental health issues to the all-consuming, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent state and their band of witchdoctor psychiatrists.

Good riddance to the vermin.  It’s always nice to see impostors cast out and treated like the traitors they are.  It’s best not to have them in our midst and to be found out before they could do any more damage to the cause of liberty.