Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

News from Bowling Green:

Wearing a Class B uniform – the type of uniform with a badge embroidered on a polo-style shirt – Robinson entered the theater with friends, including some children who were looking forward to seeing the show. He was met by an employee who told him company policy forbids off-duty law enforcement officers from wearing guns into the theater.

He explained he was on his lunch break until 4:30 p.m. The employee responded by saying he could stand in the lobby until that time but still had to remove his gun before going into the theater.

“I got refused service at a movie theater,” Robinson said. He said he was “flabbergasted.”

I couldn’t care less that you’re a LEO.  I fully support the idea that you’re just like us, not better.  I fully support their right to tell you not to carry, as well and your and my right to boycott their theater because of their policy.  What I don’t support is your right to carry in that establishment if they don’t recognize mine.

By the way, as for this fear you have of attacks for which you’re unprepared?  How does it feel?  You see, wearing a uniform is only one of the things that could get you attacked.  The list is long, including color of your skin, length of your hair, whether you’re wearing head covering if you’re a woman (if you live in Dearborn, Michigan), or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This problem you have with being unarmed and unable to respond to attack is the very same problem we face if we can’t carry.  Join the club.  But don’t expect sympathy from these quarters.

So says Dave Nagle:

The four arrived around noon at Union Station, having taken the train down that morning from New York. They ate lunch and then debated whether to complete their task or simply go back home. Three wanted to stop, but the fourth was adamant and said she would do it herself. She started walking up the hill to the Capitol and the three reluctantly followed.

Hey Dave, I’m right there with you concerning the issue of people shooting in the most unexpected places and the most unexpected times.  But there are problems with your analysis.

The issue of open carry has nothing whatsoever to do with your commentary.  The things you address are also applicable to concealed carry, because there is no practical difference between open and concealed except that in one case you can see the weapon if you happen to notice.  So I think this entire argument is completely fabricated and fake.  I don’t think your problem is with open carry.

But the unexpected shootings can occur anywhere, on the street corner, in a restaurant, at a gas station, or in the work place.  And see, there is nothing that makes you different from us even though you would like to think there is.  You’re not more special than we are, and the House and Senate chambers aren’t anything special to us.

In fact, let’s drive this point a little further.  What if you are so unspecial to us and given the nanny state, brooding hen, control freak governance you want to have over everyone at their expense and on their hard earned tax dollars, we consider your work loathsome and disgusting?  Grok that, Dave?

What if we don’t want you to have special protections or be able to grant yourselves special security compared to everyone else?  What if we want you to live with the very same laws you create for other people, meaning that if people cannot conceal carry because of you, then you don’t get to either, and you don’t get your very own security?

And what if the open carry law you advocate effects everyone, including you, and LEOs, and you don’t get any extra, additional or special security?  What if we just don’t care enough about what you do to grant you security on our tax dollars?

I know I’ve given you a lot to think about, Dave.  Please feel free to post a comment and tell us what you think.

So says Alex Yablon at The Trace.

When José Luis Hernández was a boy, his hometown of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, had its share of gangs, neighborhood toughs who used knives to claim turf and settle scores. As he came of age, a new generation of criminals took over. These crews worked with international organized crime rings, and they carried guns.

“I started seeing guys around town that weren’t just local gangs,” Hernández says. “They were sicarios” — professional killers working for the drug cartels — “armed better than the police. They’d have AK-47s.”

As Honduran gangs grew ever more well-armed and difficult to police, they gave young men like Hernández an impossible decision: join up, or be marked for death. In a single month, one gang in San Pedro Sula tortured and murdered as many as eight minors who refused to enlist. Across the small country, according to official counts, nearly 50,000 people were murdered between 2008 and 2015. In several of those years, civilian homicides reached a rate of 80 per 100,000 residents — a higher rate than recorded at the height of the Iraqi insurgency. Eighty percent of Honduran homicide victims were shot.

“With all the violence” Hernández says, “I didn’t have a choice” but to flee north to the United States. “I call it a forced migration.”

He made one unsuccessful attempt to get to the United States in 2005, then journeyed north a second time the next year, hopping a Mexican freight train line known to migrants as La Bestia (The Beast) for the tendency of riders to be maimed or killed while riding it. Clinging to the train in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, Hernández fainted and fell. The train severed a leg, an arm, and half of one of his hands as it rolled on without him. He was hospitalized for more than a year in Mexico before being deported back to his home country.

Hernández again braved the trip to the United States in 2015, as part of a larger group of disabled Hondurans calling themselves themselves the Caravan of the Mutilated. This time, they reached the border crossing at Eagle Pass, Texas, where they sought and received asylum.

“We had nothing to lose,” Hernandez says of his reason for undertaking the arduous passage, “and a lot of hope to achieve something” by escaping Honduras.

Federal immigration statistics show that Hernández and his caravan are part of a tidal wave of Central Americans driven north by violence in their home countries. The flow became a humanitarian and political crisis in 2014, when the Department of Homeland Security apprehended nearly 480,000 people at the southern border, including tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors. In 2016, another 400,000 people were captured by the Border Patrol in southwestern states.

Dramatically reducing immigration to the United States is a pillar of President Donald Trump’s agenda. He announced his candidacy with warnings about undocumented Latino migrants bringing drugs, violence, and rape. He has secured $341 million in federal spending for the first phase of a promised 20-foot-high wall to keep them out, and requested $1.6 billion more to extend the barrier. Arrests of undocumented immigrants, the majority of whom lack records of other criminal offenses, are up 38 percent during the first three months of the Trump administration, a crackdown designed to deter would-be migrants from entering the country. Recent reports say the Border Patrol is refusing to admit asylum seekers like Hernández, in violation of international law.

But experts say Trump’s tactics could amount to a finger plugged into the dike, halting people at the border without addressing the reasons why they flee to America.

Ah yes, and now we’re down to the root of the issue according to Alex.  There isn’t enough American gun control, for if there were, we wouldn’t be the recipient of such overwhelming immigration.

No mention is made of the fact that our borders are virtually open.  No mention is made of the fact that progressives want the immigrants for votes, and republican elites want them as workers for Monsanto and Archer-Daniels-Midland on our middle class tax dollars when they go to the local ER for routine medical care.

And no mention is made of the fact that we in America have more guns per capita than anywhere else on earth, and yet we aren’t attempting to migrate South, are we?  No question is posed, “If guns fuel immigration, then why aren’t Americans trying to leave?”  No mention is made of the cultural and moral problems that underlie the entire machine sending migrants North, or of the fact that Mexico and the Central American countries want to ship their criminals and impoverished here for us to take care of.

Because.  Just because.  Shut up.  Alex doesn’t want to deal or traffic in facts or even Sunday School level logic.  No, if we just had more gun control, the entire problem would dissipate overnight.

What a dumb ass.  Or liar.

David Codrea:

One might if one had zero knowledge of guns, of gun design and of defensive gun uses. Left unacknowledged are inconvenient realities like the fact that the harder the trigger pull, the more inaccurate the gun, a problem the New York Police Department (and those they shoot and/or miss) has experienced since the bureaucrats imposed a 12-lb. trigger pull requirement (resulting in a 15% hit ratio). Serrano has not offered how making a gun less accurate makes it safer.

Have you ever tried to use a gun with a 12 pound pull?  I haven’t, but close.  I believe it had around an 8-9 pound pull.  It belonged to someone else, and I believe I managed to saw the left arm off the target silhouette.

I don’t think the NYPD needs any more help in learning how to shoot badly.  Leave it to progs to design dumb laws intended to super-manage lives rather than punish criminals.  By the way, David also links an NRA piece on the S&W sellout that I have never seen.

KTTS.com:

City officials in Ozark are discussing a possible ban on concealed weapons in certain places.

People in Missouri can carry a concealed weapon without a permit in most places. Police departments and a few other places are still off limits.

“However, you can carry a concealed weapon in city hall if it’s not posted,” says Ozark city attorney Dave Collignon.

One city official asked someone with a concealed weapon to leave Finley River Park. Guns are allowed at the park though. That’s what started the discussion amongst city council members.

The plan is to further limit where concealed weapons are allowed and to make a list for people of places having a concealed weapon is not allowed.

When men and women get charge of someone else, there is virtually no limit to what they are willing to dictate.  I’ve seen church elders and deacons want to dictate what people wear, what they say, how they act, how they address them, and on and on the list goes.  Rulers reflexively turn into tyrants.  That’s why in my own view of church government I’ve become a Congregationalist.  I’ve never seen the “rulership” form(s) of church government function well or become anything other than a laughingstock or tyranny.  Not ever.  Not even once.

The same is true concerning civil government.  It doesn’t matter that these people aren’t national leadership, or weren’t elected at the state level.  They want the power to tax, determine matters for the local schools, signage, roads, utilities, and tell you when and where you can effect life-saving self defense or defense of someone else.

Tyrants, one and all.  In case you ever wondered, this is why we need preemption laws.  Right here.  And the next town full of little communists, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one.  No town, city, or municipality has ever relaxed laws or regulations compared to state law.  They are all more restrictive.  If you find an example to the contrary, tell us about it and I’ll retract this statement.

The Daily Caller:

Gun control activists who previously worked for Watts in various state organizations are said to be frustrated and feeling burned by her, according to one source.

“Staff who worked for Shannon quit or are fired faster than the organization can replace them. She’s a nightmare,” the source told TheDC.

Another source close to the organization said in a written statement, “Two beliefs unite nearly all gun control supporters: background checks save lives, and Shannon Watts is a self-promoting tyrant.”

Well congratulations!  That’s just how all sincere, thinking gun owners feel about you gun controllers.  You’re a bunch of self-promoting, tyrannical control freaks.  See how it feels?

David Codrea:

For instance, in Haynes v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled a felon could not be required to register a gun because that would violate the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. Is requiring a person to submit to the background check and then prosecuting him if he fails equivalent? Especially if he doesn’t realize he’s “prohibited”? (Hey, it’s happened, and Neil Gorsuch said knowledge was necessary.)

And what about “false positives”?

[ … ]

Noting NRA’s penchant for the “law and order/enforce existing gun laws” mantra, what about this reporting bill did they craft and/or signal a green light for …

Good questions all around, but I’m not sure that the state cares, nor the NRA, frankly.  As for false positives, I work in an industry where I am randomly drug tested under the “fitness for duty” policy.  False positives happen.  I’ve seen them before among coworkers.  I feel certain that a plan like David describes is even much more susceptible than the one I’m under.

David Codrea:

It wasn’t much of a counterweight to the convention. Depending on who you listen to and which carefully-cropped photos you look at, the Astroturf Moms managed to attract anywhere from several dozen to a couple hundred supporters. For grassroots numbers, you’d need to go inside the 2017 NRA Annual Meeting, with attendance estimates exceeding 80,000.

To-to-toe, huh Shannon?  Is that sort of like when the moms tried to shut down Harris Teeter in Charlotte when “about 10 women, men and children held placards in the Harris Teeter parking lot, cut their customer loyalty cards in front of television cameras and carried a letter to the store manager?”

Is this all about the optics, Shannon?

The Morning Call:

Coopersburg resident Mary Ann Nord was looking for reassurance when one of her senators, Republican Pat Toomey, headed to the microphone Wednesday during a gun-safety advocacy event in downtown Washington.

Nord, a member of the Philadelphia chapter of Moms Demand Action, a nonpartisan group created after the elementary school shooting in Sandy Hook, Conn., is quick to praise Toomey’s work on his 2013 background check bill that stalled in the Senate.

Crafting and pushing that legislation took courage, Nord said. She recalled being in Toomey’s office and hearing the phones ringing with angry callers. But more recently, she’s been underwhelmed by his actions on the issue.

“Since then, it’s not been as clear if he was going to continue to be that kind of an advocate for the cause,” said Nord, who spent Wednesday lobbying Pennsylvania legislators and their staffs. “We have been a little bit discouraged that he hasn’t been more vocal.”

The Lehigh Valley senator told her and others gathered at the Grand Hyatt that he and West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin — his cosponsor on the measure to extend background checks to gun show sales and online purchases — still support the bill and finding a path through Congress.

“We have not been successful yet, but my determination has not diminished and one day we’re going to succeed on this bill,” Toomey told the reception crowd, drawing applause.

The event was part of a two-day summit organized by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and Americans for Responsible Solutions, a group founded by former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was severely injured in a 2011 shooting.

Giffords’ group endorsed Toomey during his tightly contested re-election fight due to his efforts on the 2013 gun background check bill. A gun-control advocacy group founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg aired pro-Toomey ads, highlighting an issue the senator emphasized as he sought to win over moderate, suburban voters.

He took criticism from gun-rights advocates as a result of the background check bill, and his A rating from the National Rifle Association dropped to a C last year.

His rating should have dropped to F.  He should have never had the A rating to begin with, and that was a function of bad judgment by the NRA, something we see time and again.

This goes a long way back with Toomey and Manchin, as it did with Eric Cantor and as it also does with Paul Ryan.  The fact that Ryan is House speaker tells us all we need to know about the judgment of other members of the House who supported Ryan’s candidacy for said position.

The gun controllers will never give up, and neither can we.  I’m not saying that it’s impossible to truly change, because God can save fallen men.  But the reliance on the state for safety and security is a demonstrable indicia of statism and thus fallen and pagan thinking.  Men live like the die, and they die like they live.  The thief on the cross was a stark exception, but he was just that – an exception.

Toomey and Manchin apparently are the standard, not the exception.  Fight them with all your breath, with every ounce of energy, with every cell of your body, and with every prayer in your soul.

Leo Hohmann:

Of course hate isn’t a crime.  The collectivists just want to control what people think, or at least, what they say they think.  Volition before God, and accountability for what one does, says and thinks, is replaced in this calculus with accountability before the state because the state usurps God’s authority to judge.

The collectivists want to expand it for some other reason though, to wit, they just don’t want individuals to be capable of self defense, which circumvents the process by which they adjudicate “justice,” dispense grace, and decide the future for everyone.