Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

They have their own security.

I don’t even know what the 73rd Annual Golden Globe Awards are.  I suspect it’s when famous people get together and present each other with some kind of awards.  Seriously.  I’ve never seen it.  But take note.  They’re anti-gun only when it comes to you.

News from Boston:

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is ramping up enforcement and oversight of the state’s gun laws, which were updated last year as a response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut.

The Boston Globe reports Healey sent out a letter Tuesday to the 350 gun dealers in Massachusetts and her office plans spot checks on Bay State gun stores to make sure they’re not selling illegal guns.

“For me, this is a public health crisis and acting to address it is a moral imperative,” Healey wrote in the letter, which was also obtained by MassLive.com. “There are simply too many guns that are too easy to obtain.”

Healey noted that there were 102,081 sales and transfers of handguns, rifles and shotguns by dealers to licensed state residents in 2014, “more than double the number from 2006.”

“You are selling more weapons to more people at a scale and at a time that demands a heightened vigilance from every dealer and employee,” she wrote.

Massachusetts gun laws, often referred to as some of the nation’s toughest measures, ban semiautomatic assault weapons and “large capacity feeding” devices, though law enforcement officers are exempt from the ban.

In her letter, Healey reminded dealers of the ban.

“At this moment of deep and justifiable anger over gun violence, you have a serious role in ensuring public safety,” she wrote.

She added: “The gun violence epidemic demands our collective action. As responsible gun dealers, I urge you to redouble your commitment to ensuring the safety of your neighbors and ask you to share any ideas you may have to increase gun safety and reduce gun violence.”

Legislators at the State House moved to strengthen the state’s gun laws in 2014 after the Sandy Hook shooting.

The updates included requiring licensed gun dealers to run criminal offender background checks on current and new employees, and post information on suicide awareness and prevention.

The update also required all personal sales and transfers of firearms, rifles and shotguns to be completed through a state gun transaction portal.

“Illegal guns”  … “There are simply too many guns that are too easy to obtain” … “You are selling more weapons to more people at a scale and at a time that demands a heightened vigilance from every dealer and employee.”

Notice the confusion in this language.  She naturally assumes that since more guns are being sold, there must be something illegal going on.  Shocked, she is.  Never heard of the free market, I suppose.  Too easy, says she.  Laws notwithstanding, of course.  Since the laws allow too easy purchase of guns, there are too many of them.  Or, since laws have been “strengthened,” it must be that “illegal” guns are being sold and the law is not being followed.  Or something.

I do indeed understand that progressives are evil, and their desire to control others a reflection of the evil in their heart.  But here there seems to be more at work.  This lady doesn’t impress me as the brightest bulb on the hallway.  In fact, she seems like an unmitigated dumbass to me.  But take note, whether it’s the AG position in Virginia or this AG, executive actions seem to be the current wave of attacks against God-given rights to self defense.

NYT:

The New York City public advocate on Monday asked federal regulators to investigate whether the gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson had made adequate disclosures in its financial statements.

In an eight-page letter, the public advocate, Letitia James, said the Securities and Exchange Commission should examine whether Smith & Wesson misrepresented or omitted information about how often its products are involved in crimes and what it has done to keep its guns out of the hands of criminals.

Shareholders would want to know whether Smith & Wesson faced heightened regulatory scrutiny or significant litigation risk, Ms. James said in the letter.

Nearly two weeks ago, a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., left 14 people dead and provoked a fresh outcry about gun violence in America. It also is the third anniversary of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.

“With the increase in mass shootings, public concern about the proliferation of firearms has animated a national dialogue about gun control measures, interstate gun trafficking, and whether gun manufacturers should take additional steps to ensure that their products do not end up in the hands of criminals,” the letter says. “Smith & Wesson knows that it is at risk of grave reputational harm.”

Ms. James is opening a new avenue in her fight against gun sellers and makers. Earlier this month, she called on TD Bank, a big lender, to stop financing Smith & Wesson. This summer, she convinced the New York City Employee Retirement System, the city’s largest pension fund, to explore divesting itself of its holdings of gun retailers like Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Here is the letter, sponsored by the City of New York because it is hosted on a New York City web site.  Ms. James, who makes $165,000 per year at the expense of city taxpayers, and who is almost never on the job to do her job of public advocate, is using her salary, time and staff to fight legitimate, law abiding gun manufacturers by – you guessed it – regulating them to death at the hands of the *.us.gov.  What regulation, what law, what knickers-in-a-wad fabricated problem of the day, it matters not.  This is what community organizers do.  Regulators are the philosopher-kings, and we are the subjects.

No, she isn’t another Bloomberg apparatchik.  She is much more progressive than Bloomberg, and gave an anti-Bloomberg speech upon de Blasio’s inaguration so caustic that that even The New York Times berated it.  She is next-gen progressive.  And like the current administration, she doesn’t mind spending money she didn’t earn from the public coffers to battle what she perceives to be social justice warrior battles.

And we can all say with one voice, “Get a real job and mind your own damn business.  We don’t care what you think.”  I hope Smith & Wesson buries you.

Hispanic voters vow to punish the GOP.  But, but, but, I thought they were solidly in our camp, conservative, religious and all that?  Isn’t that what we were told?

David Codrea:

No doubt the press will show up, but funny thing — there’s not a lot in the “news” announcing things at this writing.  My guess is, they don’t want it to turn out like Bloomberg’s bus tour, where they kept stops secret because they didn’t want subsidized “supporters” outnumbered. Still, look for the media to give the handful of indignant zealots who do show up inordinate exposure, and to position their camera shots to make it look like the events draw widespread public participation.

It’s because they’ve lost.  No, I’m not saying stand down.  We can never stand down.  Evil knows no end until the very end, i.e., judgment day.  I’m saying that moms have lost, but as a Leopard cannot change its spots, so too the moms cannot help but be collectivists.

LEOs and gun free zones.

In a statement Thursday, Police Chief Steve Conrad expressed surprise that some of his officers weren’t allowed inside the downtown theater.

“Given today’s climate, we would think most businesses would welcome armed and well-trained police officers, on or off-duty, to help out should there be a problem,” Conrad wrote.

Oh go cry me a river.  And what about concealed carriers?  Oh, I see.  You’re more “specialer” than we are.

From Mike Vanderboegh.  This seems to me to be very important.  I might talk to my daughter the Nurse Practitioner about this.  Read it.

After watching this, I’ve decided that The Captain’s Journal will call for a ban on guns for all one-armed men born on the third Thursday of April.  After all, you never know when they will become a terror problem.

Or not.

Rolling Stone:

In a major defeat for the National Rifle Association, the Supreme Court decided this week not to take up a challenge to one of the toughest gun-control statutes in America, a law on the books in Highland Park, Illinois.

Politico:

I am a lifelong Democrat. I proudly boast an “F” rating from the NRA. And, yet during my 2014 gubernatorial campaign in Texas, I supported the open carry of handguns in my state.

It is a position that haunts me.

Every few months, on the heels of a shooting that devastates a different corner of America, we find ourselves arriving at exactly the same place: Republicans offer their prayers; some offer up the idea of focusing our attention on mental health; almost none of them mention guns. Democrats talk background checks, magazine limits, closing the gun-show loophole and, ultimately, get exasperated. In the wake of the San Bernardino and Planned Parenthood shootings, the conversations we’re having now are almost exactly the same. Meaningful gun reform still seems as distant as it did when the Manchin-Toomey bill, which would have required background checks on all commercial gun sales, failed in 2013, mere months after 20 children and six adults were killed in a mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

As baffling as this would appear to an outside observer, I know why we keep ending up here. I know why because, even with my history of supporting sensible gun laws, I was cowed by the political realities of my state. Me, a Democrat who wasn’t afraid of making waves when it came to strapping on a pair of pink sneakers as a state senator and filibustering an anti-abortion bill for 13 hours. I might be doggedly progressive most of the time, but when it came to staking out my position on the open carry of handguns in a red state, none of that mattered.

[ … ]

I wanted the campaign conversation to be about education funding, equal pay for women and access to health care—not guns. But this was Texas. Fifty-eight percent of voters in the state think gun restrictions should be either loosened or left alone.

Against that backdrop, I chose to do something that was cleverer than it was wise. I decided to take a position in favor of open carry

Poor, poor Wendy.  But this smacks of repentance of the sin of freedom and liberty, something the progressives will never allow.  So a public explanation, turning, and confession is needed if her sins are to be washed away.  But the sin, notice well, isn’t some untoward dalliance, but rather the sin of caring too much.  If she is to be elected, says she, then the conversation must turn about the issues she can affect.

Thus, she compromised, but the compromise was over something that marks the difference between slave and free men, and the slaves will never allow her to feign being free.  This issue is too important.  It would have been better for her to have put this issue more bluntly.  Her statement should have read something like, “I know I supported open carry, but I lied about that and had I been elected I would vetoed every attempt to pass such legislation.”

Following this more Alinsky-like strategy would have made her a hero.  Now she’s just a goat.  Finally, notice what haunts her.  It isn’t letting her husband fund her way through law school and then divorcing him, or preventing further restrictions on abortion in Texas.  No, the screams of the babies she helped to murder don’t haunt her dreams.  It’s failure to stand firm on gun control.

Don’t worry, Wendy.  We all knew you were lying when you supported open carry, and this confession doesn’t make us think any differently about you.  You were a whore then and you’re still a whore today.

David Codrea:

Get this, you monstrous foreign collectivist, who came to this country to escape Nazi horrors and enjoy the Blessings of Liberty: How twisted and evil that you now work to undermine the very reasons why the Holocaust your family fled from will never happen here, at least without those issuing and carrying out the orders hanging from lamp posts. Because WE WILL NOT DISARM.

No, we won’t.  And that may mean war in numerous forms, some mundane, some terrible.  But war it will be if the rulers insist.

David Codrea:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places,” Ephesians tells us. That we do, but it manifests itself in the physical world, and that’s where down payments on the final price are made.

We are facing dark days. We cannot lose courage and we cannot lose faith. And we cannot know what price will be required from each of us.

We are to move forward with courage.

From Uncle, Amitai Etzioni a the Huffington post says we need domestic disarmament.  Uncle responds:

I don’t think progressives understand how that will play out. Those sitting on the sidelines cheering on the disarmament effort are as much fair game as those doing the disarming.

That’s strong tea from Uncle.  And a sign of the times.

Reader and commenter Menckenlite concerning guns and mental health.

Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

Oftentimes my readers can say things better than can I.  The above quote is a perfect example.  Obama now wants guns from these 47,000 people.

Leaving the federal government in charge of anything is the surest way to screw it up.  I’m sure it is indeed a problem for the air marshals.  But the biggest issue for me isn’t related to errors and screwups, as prolific as they may be with the *.gov.  Another thing this conversation suffers from is confusion of the terrorist watch list with the no-fly list.  They are not at all the same thing.  Obama wants you to be confused, he revels in it, he will use it to his advantage.

If a terrorist is inside America, deport him.  If a terrorist is trying to get in, bar him.  Close the borders immediately and completely, and the issue of ne’er-do-wells perpetrating crimes and terror via our border will go away.  But since we won’t close the borders, we aren’t serious about this problem, at least not yet.

In the mean time, Obama doesn’t really want 47,000 people to turn in their guns.  He doesn’t care in the least about errors and screwups.  He wants so-called anti-government types on the list, or in other words, people who believe in God, people who believe in the constitution, people who believe in their right to bear arms, and people who think the *.gov is too intrusive and the executive branch too powerful.

And therein lies the problem.  Under Obama’s schema, the executive can put anyone on the list for literally any reason.  I sometimes disagree with Volokh, but in this case I think he nailed it.

… we don’t deny constitutional rights based just on suspicion? If you think you can prove someone is a terrorist, lock him up. If you have probable cause to think he’s a terrorist, and think you can develop proof beyond a reasonable doubt, arrest him. Even if you have only suspicion, follow him, ask people about him, and so on. But if you don’t have enough to prosecute or even arrest someone, you can’t take away his constitutional rights, even if you suspect he’s a terrorist (or if you suspect he’s a drug dealer or a gang member or whatever else).

This is the nexus between mental health and terrorism.  Unfortunately for those who suffer from mental health issues, they are misunderstood and badly characterized, in large measure because everything that occurs due to the existence of evil in the world is falsely ascribed to mental health.

The nexus has to do with the how the progressives treat them.  The commonality is an end run around due process, and the progressives no more regret that for believers in the constitution than they do for those who suffer from mental health maladies.  In fact, the progressives would likely see everyone cast into the same boat – those who suffer from mental health maladies, a category including all conservatives or libertarians.

Don’t fall for the rhetoric.  It’s a smoke screen, a ruse.  Obama and his ilk don’t really care about terrorism in the way you do.  They want to take your guns.  Isn’t it telling and ironic that while collectivists want to ban people from buying guns by executive fiat, Donald Trump is open to the idea.  Or was I being redundant by saying “collectivists” and Donald Trump?”

David Codrea on the Maryland Deputy Attorney General:

“My complete answer, off the record, is we should ban guns altogether, period,” he said. “If you want gun practice with a gun, you can go to the gun range and then you leave it there and you go home.”

He said, in his opinion, personal ownership of firearms should be limited to law enforcement and to individuals who pass licensing tests, pay a tax, have insurance and, as technology allows, have fingerprint trigger locks.

This isn’t substantially different from what we already knew about the gun controllers.

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.

Unfortunately, right now we can’t. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it.  The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them.

Both this controller and the Deputy AG are willing to go some distance towards their goals in order to achieve long term full compliance with their view of the world.

Never trust a “gun controller” because of the second word in the phrase.  There is no limit to the control a controller wants to exercise in his quest to control you.