Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

Newsweek:

Fatma Muge Gocek, now a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, did not learn about the massacre of Armenian civilians as a student growing up in Turkey but began researching the topic after moving to the U.S. Her book Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence Against the Armenians 1789-2009 was published in November.

But such outspoken deviation from the official line does not come without its dangers. According to Boghossian, Turks who do so can be prosecuted under Turkish Penal Code 301, which makes it a crime to insult “Turkishness.” In the past, the code has been used against those who refer to the events of 1915 as “genocide.”

As for leaders outside of Turkey, there are other reasons to avoid the term that so riles the country, even if the violence itself is not downplayed. These reasons, as in the case of Obama’s avoidance of the term, are geopolitical: Turkey is seen as a key NATO ally. During the Cold War, Marsoobian notes, it was an important ally against the Soviet Union. Now Turkey is crucial in the fight against ISIS.

Obama famously promised as a presidential candidate in 2008 to use the g-word: “Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence. The facts are undeniable,” he said at the time. “As president I will recognize the Armenian genocide.”

Yet he did not use the word in his remarks on Thursday, calling the events Meds Yeghern (an Armenian term roughly translated as “the Great Catastrophe”) instead and disappointing Armenian-Americans who have been lobbying for recognition of the genocide committed against their ancestors for years.

Newsweek is soft-selling Obama’s treachery by pointing to NATO membership (NATO is powerless and Turkey has never done a thing as member of NATO) and being a so-called “ally” in the fight against ISIS (an ally which doesn’t exist in a fight that is not occurring).  This has been going on for a while.

And it’s important to remember the framework in which the genocide occurred.

The government made a point of disarming Armenians and sent police into villages to search for and confiscate any guns. The father of my grandfather was charged with having firearms and was imprisoned. They never saw him again.

ISIS also imposed gun control immediately upon takeover of the terrain under its control.  Totalitarians fear weapons as the only threat to their supremacy.  Do not ever allow yours to be confiscated.  The next step is enslavement and death.

WSPA.com:

And so what do Messrs Horton and Sanders recommend?  Allowing gun “instructors” to perform eye examinations?  Or perhaps forcing gun permit holders to obtain yearly eye examinations and submit the results to the state for approval for continuation of their permit?

This is called corruption, and we in North Carolina have had our share too.  Mr. Jim Black was convicted when he pushed legislation through to force minors to obtain eye examinations from Optometrists prior to entering school (and Mr. Black is, not coincidentally, an Optometrist).  There is more to this than meets the eye.  I want to know what’s in it for Messrs Horton and Sanders.

And as for Mr. Sanders, who ran into serious problems with his eyesight a few years ago and “took care of it,” would he have forced people in similar positions to interact with the state to do what he did?  He knows that he isn’t going to be buying a load of bread and “catch a stray bullet” from a blind permit holder.  That is perhaps the stupidest thing I have every seen in print, and the “journalist” is a rube and tool for printing it.  He’s invoking the “boogeyman under the bed” tactic.  Boo! … boo! … be askeerd.  Wild gun battles in the streets and stores by blind men!

I think we can safely put Horton and Sanders in the same category as State Senator Larry Martin of Pickens, S.C., who opposed open carry legislation in S.C. because those horrible Negros might open carry around Charleston, affecting the tourism industry (“The word is the SC tourism industry lobby killed the open carry bill. It was feared that “minority youth” walking around Charleston with pistols strapped to their hips would scare off the tourists”).  They are all communists.  They deserve to be treated as such.

David Codrea:

There’s a real simple way for those in the gun rights community who wish this issue to go away to get those of us who keep bringing it up to stop: Provide credible evidence — not anecdotes and platitudes, but something that can be independently validated — that refutes and puts to rest the concerns. If injecting millions of anti-gun voters dependent on Democrat “entitlements” into the electorate will not result in an unbeatable “progressive” super-majority, having a disastrous effect on politicians elected, laws passed, judges confirmed, and decisions upheld, all they need do is share with us how they know that.

Good on David for not dropping this issue.  I’ve tried to be diligent as well.  But I’m not even willing to put it in terms of an “unbeatable “progressive” super-majority” (although that’s what it will be).  No, I’m not willing to accept a single immigrant unless it’s in the best interest of the country.  Immigration shouldn’t be decided based on compassion – this conflates state with church (it is the duty of the state to administer justice, not compassion, and much of the trouble in our progressive system comes from the confusion of a state trying to administer both justice and compassion at the same time, which cannot be done).  As to anyone bringing forward evidence that we won’t be inundated with an unbeatable “progressive” super-majority, they won’t because they can’t.

Kurt Hofmann:

And come home to roost they some day most assuredly will. Our nation’s friendly creditors are not going to eternally continue to offer us a bottomless credit card, and indeed, when the suspension of disbelief in our ability to ever pay off the debt is no longer sustainable for even the most incurable optimists, Americans will face a darkness like we have never known.

In that time of rioting, looting, starvation, and disease–all on a scale too massive for most Americans to even imagine, it will be up to private citizens to secure their lives and liberty–and their families’. And if DeLauro has her way, those private citizens will have handed the best means of providing that security over–for two-thousand now valueless dollars.

Read this quote again, and then read it again once a day for the next year.  Kurt has issued salient warnings as to the future of our system (something that cannot go on forever won’t) and what it will take to secure yourselves and your families.  And Kurt has pointed out evil men and women who would prevent you from securing your families.  Don’t listen to them, don’t heed their counsel, they mean you harm rather than good.  God wants you to defend yourself.

Via Mike Vanderboegh, women still being defenestrated from the Marine Corps infantry officer course.  Of course they are.  I talked to a Marine Corps officer last week, and he pointed out something to me that most of you will never hear.  Most (it sounded like all, but I’m hedging my bets here) of the women who have attempted the infantry officer course at Quantico were diagnosed with pelvic fractures.  Of course they were.  Because in case you weren’t watching when you grew up, men and women are created differently.

From MackH, this, with Mack commenting:

“A combination of poor infrastructure development, Luddite hatred of power generation, slavish prioritization of dubious ecological initiatives over agricultural realities, and a general religious taboo against desalinization plants are all overlapping each other in a multi-dimensional Venn Diagram of Horror, and nobody in the state government apparently wants to tell the radical ecologists that it’s time to start building more dams and reservoirs.  But the state government can tell people to cut their water intake by 25%, and by gum they will do precisely that.  Welcome to California: Lake of Fire of their own making.”

Yes, good point.  You can cry out to God and believe in His Son and He will save you now and in eternity.  But He doesn’t undo the affects of our earthly choices in time.  He forces us to learn from them and praise Him anyway.  For the poor people of California, I don’t hate you, and I don’t ridicule you.  I pity you, whether it has to do with water or gun control.  The reality the collectivists have created is awful.  Welcome to dystopia.  I wish I could help you, but it seems to me the best option for you is to leave California.

Grocery theft?  Hey, call out the SWAT team.  BB gun threat?  Hey, call out the SWAT team.  Methinks this is a little silly.

I have a right to worry about guns going off when I don’t want them to.  Yes, you do.  But you don’t have a right to affect my life because of your worries.

He should have shot the alligator when it was perpetrating its evil, but since he apparently didn’t have a gun with him, I have a suggestion.  Shoot the damn alligator.  And start carrying a gun.

SunwolfNC:

Hah. That author has no intention of ever questioning LEOs’ ability or The System at large. That article clearly demonstrates where she is in their caste system. She is fully entrenched and a willing minon. To her anyone who wants to think and act on their own within the framework of the Constitution, is clearly a knuckle dragging potential murderer who should be arrested and jailed immediately (sic).  Isn’t the ‘party of tolerance’ great?

Great comment!  I hadn’t thought of it that way, but then again that’s why I have great readers – to point out great things to me.  Opponents of open carry, who themselves support open carry for LEOs, believe in and defend a caste system within America.  There is no other way to look at it.  Such thinking is clearly prejudiced, bigoted and entrenched in ancient and indefensible tiers of privilege.

David Codrea:

What Hollis won’t do, if the suit prevails, is rescind the National Firearms Act of 1934, including registration and transfer tax requirements. What it would do is invalidate the absurd prohibition that says you can own a machine gun made before May 19, 1986, but if you possess an identical firearm made after that arbitrary date, you’ll be a felon in for a world of hurt. And the other thing it would do is create all kind so interesting market repercussions that have kept the prices of pre-’86 machine guns at artificially inflated (and then some) prices.

To anyone capable of grasping basic logic, acknowledging the ludicrousness of the cutoff would seem cut and dried. But when descending into the bizarre and often contradictory world of ATF rulings and judicial interpretations, a happy resolution is anything but a slam dunk.

Read David’s entire piece.  I sure would like to see the arbitrary cutoff go down in flames.  As I’ve argued before, this arbitrary cutoff also has other nefarious affects on the American arms industry, like preventing the development of fully automatic weapons technology.  Why do you think the only squad automatic weapon fielded today in the Army and Marines is made by FN Herstal?  Wouldn’t it be wise to invest in open bolt technology in order to have better weapons ourselves?  Sorry, can’t do that, because there isn’t enough money to develop weapons that may or may not be contracted by the U.S. armed forces.  Weapons like this need a civilian outlet in the case of rejection by the Army and Marines to make them financially feasible.

David Codrea:

“It is not believed that members of the various shooting clubs and organizations would concern themselves over a curtailment of highly-powered firearms,” Hoover opined, probably not altogether incorrectly considering the indifference of many who to this day still place sporting interests over rights. “Additional penetration is of no value to target shooting, and it is logical to assume that organizations promoting this sport would be in hearty accord with legislation curtailing high velocity bullets in an attempt to insure their members the continued use of target pistols.”

How interesting.  David has a great find on history of the .357 magnum cartridge and Hoover’s opinion of civilian ownership of weapons that can handle the cartridge.  He (Hoover) uses the word “insure” rather than the correct word “ensure,” a pet peeve of mine, so I think he was an idiot, and I would have slapped him around for it.  See David’s link to the document.  Between David’s research and what Jerry Miculek lectured and demonstrated, we are learning more about the .357 magnum.  And the more we learn, the more I like it.  I’ve always liked shooting it.

Handgun permitting by CLEOs may be done away with in North Carolina, like it should be.  Personally, I think it’s a pain in the ass in addition to being an infringement.  It’s a reversion to Jim Crow laws.  But look for CLEOs to fight it because they would lose revenue, control and justification for staffing.

See this billboard courtesy of Mike Vanderboegh.  This is a great billboard, in addition to being a very nice piece of art work.  I’d like to see a few in every state, or as many as we can get, with people all over this nation asking, “What’s this I’m seeing about III%?  What does it all mean?”

Philly.com:

Washington Times:

Washington, D.C., will drop its appeal of a federal court ruling that overturned the city’s ban on carrying handguns in public, Attorney General Karl Racine announced Wednesday.

City attorneys will instead focus on defending concealed-carry laws adopted by legislators in the months after U.S. District Court Judge Frederick J. Scullin Jr. declared the ban was unconstitutional.

“We need to focus our energies not on litigating old laws, but defending new ones that our leaders enacted in good faith to comply with court rulings while still protecting public safety,” Mr. Racine said.

[ … ]

… gun owners have criticized the permitting scheme as too restrictive, citing the fact that the Metropolitan Police Department requires proof of a “good reason” why a gun owner would need to carry a firearm for protection.

Right.  Nothing has been won for gun rights.  Like the good communists they are, the D.C. politicians and police will find other ways to prevent the free exercise of God-ordained rights.  When one method runs dry, they go to a different fishing hole.  The fact that the courts have found their infringements unconstitutional means nothing to them.  They only follow the law when they agree with it.

What a bunch of loathsome, terrible, despicable men and women.

Yahoo:

Ottawa (AFP) – Canada’s high court struck a blow against gun control on Friday, with a decision that clears the way for the federal government to destroy data on owners of rifles and shotguns.

Ottawa ordered the database destroyed in 2012, but Quebec went to court to try to stop it, hoping to use the names of Quebecers on the list to build its own firearms registry.

The Supreme Court’s decision means that while Canadians must still obtain a license to own a gun, most will not have to disclose that they own a long gun.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a longtime advocate for the gun rights of hunters and farmers, said he was “happy” with this outcome.

But in Quebec, which also fought to maintain the national firearms registry created by parliament in 1995, there was disappointment.

The province pressed Ottawa to hand over parts of the database relevant to Quebec after the federal government shut down the national firearms registry three years ago.

But Harper’s Tory government refused, citing critics of the registry who complained the original had been an expensive intrusion on gun owners and should not be repeated.

Furthermore, the Tories argued, the registry did not help to stem crime.

With both sides refusing to yield and Quebec vowing to create its own registry from scratch, firearms regulations are sure to become a hot campaign issue in upcoming elections.

In a five-four split decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Quebec had simply failed to establish a legal basis for its claim to the data.

The court added that the disagreement over the fate of the information in the registry should have been negotiated in a political process, rather than adjudicated.

So here’s the scene.  The firearms registry is being done away.  Quebec wants the information, and this court case decided the issue.  Quebec doesn’t get it.  In the process, the Canadian supreme court looks a lot like the U.S. supreme court and other morons, and stipulated that in the future, the political process must be used to restrict God-given rights.  But it gets better.

Quebec Public Safety Minister Lise Theriault said the province would move ahead with its plans for a database of its own, allocating Can$30 million (US$24 million) for the project.

If the centralized government won’t help, they’ll do it themselves.  Sounds like New York or Connecticut, no?  But wait.  It gets even better than this.

Earlier this month, Harper earned widespread scorn over comments he made which seemed to wrongfully imply that Canadians have the right to shoot intruders.

“My wife’s from a rural area, gun ownership wasn’t just for the farm, it was also for a certain level of security when you’re ways away from police, immediate police assistance,” he’d told the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities on March 12.

Legal experts and the opposition pounced on the comments to suggest Harper had urged Canadians to take the law into their own hands.

“It’s vigilantism,” former Ontario attorney general Michael Bryant was widely quoted as saying.

“People are going to find themselves facing the criminal justice system and being charged with serious crimes if they decide to follow what the prime minister is suggesting.”

Rather than being a God-ordained duty, self defense is “vigilantism” according to Bryant.  The former attorney general of Ontario is a damn communist.  And the damn communists (and Harper’s Tories) notwithstanding, the reasons for ownership and bearing of arms goes beyond hunting and self defense (American “Fudds” also notwithstanding).  It also enables us to kill people just like them.  The extent to which Americans get that will be directly proportional to the liberties we retain in the face of men just … like … the … rulers … of … Quebec in the U.S., federal, state and local.

Daily Caller:

Andrea Grimes, senior political reporter at the lefty women’s site RH Reality Check, sank to a disgusting new low Thursday by saying that guns should be confiscated only from white men.

“Suggestion: we don’t have to vaporize all the guns. Let’s just vaporize white men’s guns,” Grimes tweeted, linking to an article about Arizona shooter Ryan Giroux.

“White guys cannot be trusted to use guns responsibly. It is time to stop giving guns to white guys,” Grimes added. ”I mean, it’s time to stop giving guns to everybody, but we can start with the white guys.”

[ … ]

“As a bonus, we can collect their tears for research and resource purposes while they line up to surrender their weapons,” Grimes said.

Hahahahaha … is that the way you think this is going to go down, deary?  You’re going to pass a law to make our guns illegal, and we’re just going to line up to turn them in?  We’re going to cry while we do it?  You don’t get out much, do you?

The more likely scenario is this.  Against the advice of the police, you pass a law that makes our guns illegal.  The police have to enforce the confiscatory policies you learned in your idiotic sophomore collectivist classes in college.  Blood runs in the streets, women weep for being made widows, and children weep for being made fatherless.  The police curse you for making policies they have to implement while you sit perched on your elitist throne.  Civil war consumes the nation, the electrical grid goes down not to return for years, medicines are unavailable, and the economy has collapsed.  The things called the federal reserve and the stock market are but a distant memory of a different time that your children will never know except as told in fairy tales and stories.

You didn’t consider that possibility, did you?  You’d better.

David Codrea:

As for the first part of his statement, it’s funny he prefaced it with “But I’ll be honest with you,” and then failed to mention who has done comparison shopping in such neighborhoods and then reported which purchase offered more quantity and variety selections, was quicker, easier, less expensive and scary, and carried fewer inherent risks. It’s also funny he failed to mention why that was the fault of gun owners, and where he got the talking point from.

Barry is a liar, and he’s not very creative either.  He has to use the lies created by other people in order to have talking points.  It’s a far cry from his lofty rhetoric and prediction of the cessation of the “rising of the tides” with his advent.  David has written a good article and vetted Obama’s sources on this one.  I find it amusing when we know their tricks.  Similarly, their astroturfing has been such an abysmal failure that it does more for our side than theirs.  Read all of David’s piece.

Kurt Hofmann:

This unimaginably courageous man, “armed” only with a shopping bag, is one of CSGV’s despised “insurrectionists”? Granted, one could make the case that refusing to meekly surrender to the government’s unlimited coercive force is indeed “insurrectionist” behavior, even when unarmed, and thus doomed. The Chinese government no doubt believes it was. But isn’t that a good thing–something to be admired, even revered?

Very good catch, Kurt.  Go read what Kurt is talking about.  And no, CSGV couldn’t care less about ending totalitarianism’s rule over the people, leading to such things as the murder of children under the still-enforced one-child policy.  As long as the collective is unhindered in its aims, then the CSGV is happy.  That says all sorts of remarkably bad, ugly, obscene things about Josh Horwitz, doesn’t it?

From Glenn Reynolds, backyard grilling targeted by the EPA.  Glenn responds, I’M INCREASINGLY IN FAVOR OF BACKYARD TARRING-AND-FEATHERINGS THAT TARGET THE EPA.  David Codrea also notes this today.

Yes, tar and feathers.  It seems to me that it’s past time for disobedience and threats.  Until the federal government has a healthy fear of the people, they will continue to perpetrate this sort of obscenity.