Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

David Codrea:

Much of the current mess we find ourselves in can be attributed, at least in part, to gun owner detachment, apathy, and unwillingness to personally share in the burdens of gun rights activism. That’s a shame, because it really doesn’t require a lot of effort to get and stay engaged, and the personal rewards and friendships made can be invaluable.

Of course, he’s right, and this could be extrapolated to lack of involvement in education (I am an advocate of home schooling for reasons I will explain at some point in the future), lack of involvement in the politics of wealth redistribution, and so on down the line.  I have chosen to spend at least some of my free time (there isn’t much of it) on gun rights.  As I’ve said, I write until I cannot do it any more since I have a day job, and annoy many of my closest friends by shamelessly pimping my content (sometimes I wonder why I still have any friends).  But just when it seems that it’s all a waste, we need a sermon like the one David is preaching.  Go read his piece.

One more thing concerning David.  All I can say is “come South, young man, come South.”

Kurt Hofmann:

And again, Judge Skretny clearly knows that a law requiring that magazines not be loaded with more than seven rounds gives a clear tactical advantage to the criminal willing to violate that law, over the “law abiding gun owner” who is not willing to do so, but seems somehow to have failed to realize that a law banning “assault weapons” similarly favors the criminal who ignores the law.

Oh, this is rich.  Kurt is doing what he does best.  He points out that the very reasoning the stupid judge uses to deem the magazine cartridge limit “arbitrary” isn’t applied to the guns themselves, and should have been.  And this judge is supposed to be a degreed lawyer with judgment and wisdom.  Yea, not so much.  Kurt is a better one that he is.  Read Kurt’s assessment here.  I’ll have more observations on this ruling later.

Mike Vanderboegh is still pressing ahead with his toys for totalitarians program.

Looney said he was informed by Capitol Police Sgt. Timothy Boyle of the present late Monday.

The majority leader said he didn’t accept it and a spokesman for the police said the three empty magazines have been turned over to the Connecticut State Police major crime squad.

Sorry, but this doesn’t do it for me.  Someone took possession of it, and I want to know who?  And why aren’t they being prosecuted under the new law?  I repeat: someone took possession prior to the police.  If they don’t prosecute, they are ignoring enforcement of the law.  I want to see a Connecticut resident in prison for it – preferably someone associated with making the law to begin with.

Instapundit:

Concealed carry means fewer murders, says new study.

Of course, but the first thing to remember when reading these studies and citing them is that they will be followed by another “study” done by some progressive group of researchers, and regardless of what the data proves, we have God-given rights to possess weapons.  My rights do not depend on data to substantiate or undergird them.

I had said before that The Daily Caller gun pieces annoy me.  Here is another example of why.  The world’s greatest hunting rifle.  They’ve found it.  The … world’s … greatest!  Ever!  It reads like they’re shilling for the company which produces it (and I won’t even mention it by name, regardless of how good it is supposed to be).  Folks, when I purchase a gun or ammunition I’ll give the low down – the good, the bad and the ugly (I like Rock River Arms, but I hate their customer service, and I love my Springfield Armory XDm and their customer service, but I had an out of round barrel on my .45 after 2000-3000 rounds, and I absolutely hate Armscor ammunition because of the bad manufacturing tolerances, and I have a review coming soon on my Kel-Tec PMR-30 that will have both good and bad, etc.).  Because I don’t shill for anybody.

Infowars has a piece on the U.S. government purchasing Potassium-Iodine tablets for Fukushima fallout in order to block the uptake of radioactive iodine to the thyroid.  But there’s a problem.  The longest-lived radioactive iodine isotope is I-131 which is about 8 days.  The radioactive iodine from Fukushima is all gone (unless it is a daughter product from the decay of Tellurium, but that is mostly gone too).  Folks, don’t ever put anything in your mouth and swallow it because the government says to.

First in dealing with this subject, a bit of background is in order for my readers who were not around for my military coverage and commentary.  My son Daniel was in the 2/6 Marines and conducted a combat tour of Iraq in 2007 to Fallujah.  At this time, the foreign fighters were retreating from Ramadi due to robust Marine Corps (and other) operations there combined with the so-called tribal awakening.  Fallujah was a bad place, and the baddest of the fighters had ensconced themselves there.

The people were so aligned with the insurgents that upon the initial patrols by the Marine Corps, the Marines found themselves to be surrounded by the children of the city, carrying black balloons, the balloons being used to assist the insurgents to sight mortar fire.  As I said, it was a bad, bad place.  The people were willing to send their children out to assist the insurgents.  My son was a SAW gunner, and in addition to patrols and other city-wide operations, he shot insurgents crossing the Euphrates river attempting to enter Fallujah.

Robert Bateman isn’t limited to one idiotic article (indeed, he has written a multitude of them) – he has penned yet another one.

Way back in 2007, I personally invited Wayne LaPierre, the director of the National Rifle Association, to live in Baghdad. I had been there, less than 24 months earlier, and I thought LaPierre might appreciate the opportunity to live in a society which lived up to his standards. Surprisingly, he never took this offer up, nor did he ever visit the troops in Iraq, or Afghanistan for that matter, which is, well, normal for him. He likes his guns, but he is really not cool with being surrounded by them, like he would have been, had he ever visited our troops in Baghdad, or Helmand, or Kabul…or basically anywhere.

In Iraq, every single household (with a male that is) may have one assault rifle. This seems to be Mr. Wayne LaPierre’s ideal. And interestingly, we have a country (a couple, actually) where his vision exists. Iraq and Afghanistan.

This article isn’t really about Wayne LaPierre so much as it’s about Bateman’s false presuppositions.  So I talked with Daniel today and he gives me the following assessment.

Bateman is a dumb ass.  The insurgency in Fallujah ended because we locked down the city and made it to where the people had to deal with it or live in utter isolation from everyone else and with no means of transportation, with two ways into and out of the city.

Lt. Col. William F. Mullen (now Col. Mullen) was the unmitigated sovereign of the city.  Nothing happened without his approval.  The Iraqis may have had a right to automobiles too, but we took them away.  If Mullen had wanted to confiscate AK-47s from the folk we could have done that.  The chain of command in Baghdad left us alone, and we did what we wanted to do.

Every family had a fully functional, fully automatic AK-47.  It wasn’t a problem.  I was never shot at except by the insurgents, and mainly the foreign fighters – bad people from Syria, Egypt, Iran, blacks from Africa, and some fighters with slanted eyes from the Far East.  I looked in the face of every man I killed, and some of them had slanted eyes and were of Far Eastern descent.

We did confiscate some weapons caches, but only the ones hidden by the insurgents when the people gave us the intel.  The AK-47s were used by some of the people to fight the insurgents, but they weren’t used on us.  We were fighting the insurgents, and mainly foreign fighters.  We were not afraid of the AK-47s owned by the families.  The families helped us shut down the insurgency when we made it clear that they had to do that.

Now, it may be that this experience doesn’t apply to Baghdad, but that’s the point, isn’t it?  Guns are just machines, and can be used for good or ill.  Because Bateman cannot control people like he wishes (as the good social planner we wants to be, given that the Army has turned into a cadre of fruitcakes and social “scientists” – I use the word sarcastically), he wants to control their machines.

But this doesn’t work either.  The foreign fighters brought their own weapons with them.  The families would have been left utterly defenseless without their own AK-47s, which is the way Bateman wants us left.  Bateman wants us defenseless because that’s what the state wants.  The concern to them isn’t our own protection – it is the protection of the state from it’s people.

So that summarizes a brief conversation with my son.  Much more could be said, but I’ll leave it there.  Oh, and to Mr. Bateman, Daniel thinks you’re a dumb ass.  Or did I mention that already?

NYT:

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that New York’s strict new gun laws, including an expanded ban on assault weapons, were constitutional, but struck down a provision forbidding gun owners to load more than seven rounds into a magazine.

The ruling offered a victory to gun control advocates at the end of a year in which efforts to pass new legislation on the federal level suffered a high-profile defeat in Congress, although some new restrictions were approved in state capitals.

The judge, William M. Skretny of Federal District Court in Buffalo, said expanded bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines were legally sound because they served to “further the state’s important interest in public safety.”

Mike Vanderboegh is also covering this.  I’ve told you guys before – really, I’ve told you before – that it is a mistake to look to federal courts and the Second Amendment to protect your rights at the state level.  It’s the wrong strategy.  All politics is local, and that includes gun politics.

Kurt Homfmann resolves to be a gun criminal.  What will the gun owners of New York do?

Reno-Gazzete-Journal:

If we have learned anything in the year that has passed since 20 young children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. (also dead were the shooter, Adam Lanza, and his mother, Nancy), it’s that Americans are incapable of having a rational discussion of the role of guns in our lives no matter how many tragedies they have endured.On the first anniversary of the shooting, President Barack Obama called for new gun-control measures, but there will be none. There won’t even be a serious discussion of the possibility of trying to stanch the flood of guns in this nation. Congress and most states gave short shrift to gun-control measures in the past year, and, in Colorado, one state that approved minor changes in the law, lawmakers found themselves the target of a well-financed recall campaign. Already, two have lost their posts.

Oh, we’re quite able to talk about guns.  We have non-stop for more than one year now, and before then always when the collectivists are in office.  It’s just that the country has listened and replied a resounding no.  The collectivists don’t like the answer, and thus the charge that “we can’t talk about it,” or in other words, we can’t talk you into our plans for national disarmament and reservation of the use of force to government forces of occupation no matter what falsehood we purvey.

Joe Manchin knows the same to be true.

Sen. Joe Manchin says rounding up the votes to pass a bill creating background checks for gun purchases next year is going to be “difficult.”

While saying he’s “hopeful” that some would change their minds, the West Virginia Democrat acknowledged there are Democrats who opposed the bill creating background checks for gun purchases.

“Hopefully, they would maybe reconsider,” Manchin said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It’s going to be difficult to get the extra votes that we need. I’m going to be honest with you.”

Manchin, a gun owner who had a top rating from the National Rifle Association, negotiated a background check bill with Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut. But the measure stalled in the Senate in April when it failed to get the needed 60 votes to advance.

Manchin said gun owners didn’t oppose background checks in theory but were concerned that government wouldn’t stop with checks.

Note that Joe still has hopes of disarmament of the American people, he just thinks it won’t work.  He hasn’t lost his progressive, collectivist credentials.  Once a totalitarian, always a totalitarian – a lesson we hope that America has learned well when it comes time to cast a vote for gun grabber Chris Christie.

And as for universal background checks, we all know that it wouldn’t stop there.  But that doesn’t mean that we don’t oppose universal background checks on principle.  I oppose it whether it leads anywhere else or not.  It has nothing to do with crime.  That’s just a lie told by the hive.

David Codrea:

Against armed sociopaths, unarmed protection is severely limited, and New Jersey gun laws ensure the advantage goes to the predators.

Like I discussed here, you can contrast that with shall issue states.  The picture is stark and self explanatory.  Gun control laws are unsafe.  They prevent people from doing their duty of defending themselves and their loved ones.  Thus they are all evil.

David  Codrea:

What is immediately noticeable is a total absence of anyone even remotely sympathetic to an individual and uninfringed right to keep and bear arms having a position of influence in the seminar. While some with an eye toward safeguarding America’s unique intended protections may attend to keep apprised of the latest developments, others with a less tolerant and patent view of meddling internationalists plotting to undermine their rights …

I’ve covered their meddling here.  To me this is simple.  If I won’t allow the U.S. federal government to steal my firearms, I certainly won’t allow foreign bodies – armed or not – to do the same.  Case closed.  If you want conflict, bring it.  ‘Nuff said.

Kurt Hofmann:

Comparing gun control to the Holocaust is one of a number of faulty and offensive analogies the gun rights movement has used to illegitimize [sic] gun reform measures.

Kurt is covering the progressive Jewish reaction to the use of the holocaust to assess gun control measures.  I saw this too and hadn’t commented on it, and Mr. Abraham Foxman says to us, “No matter how strong one’s objections are to a policy or how committed an organization is to its mission, invoking the Holocaust to score political points is offensive and has no place in civil discourse.”  Well, let me respond by saying that a hit dog always yelps, and if the comparison is valid, I’ll make it any time I want.  Oh, and don’t tell me what to do, Mr. Foxman.

Uncle notes that Mayors against guns merges with Moms Demand Action.  I see this as a sign of weakness rather than strength.  Sort of like when Ansar al Sunna merged with al Qaeda in Iraq when both began to lose to the U.S. Marines deployed in the Anbar Province.  Did I just really make that comparison?  I guess I did.  So be it.

David Codrea:

“He has given his life to the community,” Owens said in court. “I’m not sure how much more punishment is actually appropriate.” [More]Maybe you could find instances where someone without a badge has “accidentally” shot a cop and that would give you a pretty good benchmark…

Gave his life to the community?  You mean to tell me that he didn’t get paid for his work all of those years?  He did it all for free?

David Codrea:

The paid staffer who heads anti-gun billionaire and outgoing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns revealed the strategy the group will use to advance its demands across the nation, a report by the Associated Press documented Wednesday.

David goes on to discuss the statist threat that Bloomberg is, and what 2014 might portend for gun owners and our rights.  Bloomberg is a threat indeed, but this only heightens the diligence we must bring to bear on opposing every piece of his agenda, even when (and perhaps especially when) it comes under the rubric of cooperative efforts with the gun community (here for example, think NSSF).

Kurt Hofmann:

Dr. Ben Carson, considered by some a potential “conservative” candidate for President in 2016, stumbled badly back in March, at least among gun rights advocates, when he blithely told Glenn Beck on Beck’s The Blaze radio show that the right to own semi-automatic firearms is contingent on where one lives.

This is a very good article by Kurt.  Go read the rest of it to find out what Dr. Carson believes concerning the fountain of our rights.  I’ve said it here and here in great detail, but I’ll sum it up again.  God grants our rights.  The states (formerly colonies) recognizes them, and to the degree to which they infringe upon them, those administrations deserve to be overthrown.  The second amendment stipulates that the federal government has no right whatsoever in the making or enforcement of any gun law of any kind at any time.  All federal gun laws are unconstitutional.  And to remind you of what you already know, Dr. Carson is no conservative and won’t protect your rights.  I like it best when candidates talk before their handlers get hold of them.  The truth generally comes out then.

A Grand Bargain On Guns?

A year ago, in the days after 20 schoolchildren and six adults were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., it seemed for a moment that something had changed in America’s long-running cultural debate on guns. A new kind of national conversation — even some consensus — seemed possible. But that was then. Today the voices on both sides of the gun policy debate are back to being as shrill as ever.

J. D, Tuccille with Reason:

According to Hugh McQuaid at CT News Junkie:

As of mid-November, the state had received about 4,100 applications for assault weapon certificates and about 2,900 declarations of large-capacity magazines.

Michael Lawlor, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s criminal justice advisor, said that so far fewer people than expected have registered weapons under the new law. However, he said gun owners should take seriously the consequences of ignoring the law. Disregarding the registration requirements can carry felony charges in some cases, which can make Connecticut residents ineligible to own guns.

First-time offenders who can prove they owned the weapon before the law passed, and have otherwise followed the law, may be charged with a class A misdemeanor. In other cases, possessing one of the newly-banned guns will be considered a felony that carries with it a sentence of at least a year in prison.

“If you haven’t declared it or registered it and you get caught . . . you’ll be a felon. People who disregard the law are, among other things, jeopardizing their right to own firearms. If you’re not a law-abiding citizen, you’re not a law-abiding citizen,” Lawlor said.

Mr. Lawlor, like most government officials, seems to think he and his buddies have invented policy out of whole cloth, and that the population has no choice but to shuffle along and obey. But weapons registration laws have a history—a consistent history, as I’ve written, of noncompliance and defiance.

State officials could have taken a moment to glance across the state line to New York City, where a few tens of thousands of firearms are owned legally, and an estimated two million are held illegally, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. That is not uncommon. In my piece on the history of gun control’s failure, I wrote:

The high water mark of American compliance with gun control laws may have come with Illinois’s handgun registration law in the 1970s. About 25 percent of handgun owners actually complied, according to Don B. Kates, a criminologist and civil liberties attorney, writing in the December 1977 issue of Inquiry. After that, about 10 percent of “assault weapon” owners obeyed California’s registration law, says David B. Kopel …

Connecticut may want to look close to home for even lower compliance figures. In New Jersey, reported The New York Times in 1991, after the legislature passed a law banning “assault weapons,” 947 people registered their rifles as sporting guns for target shooting, 888 rendered them inoperable, and four surrendered them to the police. That’s out of an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 firearms affected by the law.

Noncompliance means they’re not giving up their weapons regardless of what the law says.  And that means that if the statists really want them, they’ll have to send in armed teams to invade the homes of gun owners (if they can find them) and confiscate them while they also shoot anyone who gets in their way.

And that means that gun owners who decide to keep their weapons have nothing left to lose when those armed teams come calling.  The collectivists want it to be ever so easy, with fawning, stupid, television-watching imbeciles who listen and obey their edicts as long as they get free bread and circuses.

But are they okay with bloodshed as a result of their edicts?  Perhaps yes, perhaps not.  Perhaps with some, perhaps not so much with others.  But collectivists nationwide should consider the ramifications of their laws.  Gun owners won’t surrender firearms peaceably.  You can take that to the bank.

By way of preliminaries, I had promised to craft more detailed response to Mr. Bateman, but the context of the promise is this comment.

When my son Daniel was in the USMC (part of which was a combat tour) I followed the Small Wars Journal and associated writers so that I could monitor the silliness. It was an exercise in self serving navel gazing and pedantry. Bateman was among those who spent time on those pages writing worthless garbage for others to ingest. I’ve seen his stuff before.

Bateman wants very badly to be more handsome, younger, more important and smarter than he really is. And he wants people to pay attention. Thus, when he would write and it seemed that no one was paying attention, he would then seed it with something really, really outlandish and ridiculous so that people would pay attention to him.

He isn’t so much an ideologue as he is an attention hound who wants everyone to look at him even if you find him grotesque. Rather than a stooge, he is like a misbehaving child who throws tantrums in front of important people.

Rehearsing the subject which initially brought about this charge, Robert Bateman penned a piece in Esquire in which he bolstered his credentials as a collectivist.  Basing his diatribe on a recent shooting over a college football game, he outlines his plans for gun control.  Here are some excerpts from his commentary.

My entire adult life has been dedicated to the deliberate management of violence. There are no two ways around that fact. My job, at the end of the day, is about killing. I orchestrate violence.

I am not proud of that fact. Indeed, I am often torn-up by the realization that not only is this my job, but that I am really good at my job. But my profession is about directed violence on behalf of the nation. What is happening inside our country is random and disgusting, and living here in England I am at a complete loss as to how to explain this at all. In 2011 the number of gun deaths in the United States was 10.3 per 100,000 citizens. In 2010 that statistic in the UK was 0.25. And do not even try to tell me that the British are not as inclined to violence or that their culture is so different from ours that this difference makes sense. I can say nothing when my British officers ask me about these things, because it is the law.

But just so we are all clear on this, let me spell it out for the rest of you. During the American Civil War, a topic about which I know a little bit, we had a system of state militias. They formed the basis of the army that saved the United States. For most of the first year, and well into the second, many of the units raised by the states were created entirely or in part from militia units that predated the war. But even when partially “regulated,” militias are sloppy things.

Which is why, in 1903 Congress passed the Militia Act. Friends, if you have not read it I’ll just tell you: As of 1903, the “militia” has been known as the National Guard.

Bateman then turns attention to his proposals.

The only guns permitted will be the following:

a. Smoothbore or Rifled muzzle-loading blackpowder muskets. No 7-11 in history has ever been held up with one of these.

b. Double-barrel breech-loading shotguns. Hunting with these is valid.

c. Bolt-action rifles with a magazine capacity no greater than five rounds. Like I said, hunting is valid. But if you cannot bring down a defenseless deer in under five rounds, then you have no fking reason to be holding a killing tool in the first place.

2. We will pry your gun from your cold, dead, fingers. That is because I am willing to wait until you die, hopefully of natural causes. Guns, except for the three approved categories, cannot be inherited. When you die your weapons must be turned into the local police department, which will then destroy them. (Weapons of historical significance will be de-milled, but may be preserved.)

[ … ]

4. We will submit a new tax on ammunition. In the first two years it will be 400 percent of the current retail cost of that type of ammunition. (Exemptions for the ammo used by the approved weapons.) Thereafter it will increase by 20 percent per year.

You’ve seen enough to get the picture.  A number of technical responses may be offered to Bateman.  For example, Bob Owens has a takedown of the notion that well-regulated means under government control.  Directing his instruction at Bateman, David Codrea remarks:

As for who is protected by the Second Amendment, it’s the people, just like it says. Alexander Hamilton addressed “well regulated” in The Federalist No. 29, conceding “To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss…Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped…”

There are other responses across the web.  But mostly they are aimed at the content of Bateman’s commentary, which is good analysis technique, but there is more to understanding Mr. Bateman and why he wrote this diatribe.

Several years ago I frequented the pages of the Small Wars Journal.  I linked them often and was linked by editors.  Mostly what undergirded my advocacy was a concern over my son and his colleagues in the U.S. Marine Corps.  The 2/6 infantry was soon to deploy to Fallujah, and I took a great interest in studying how the Marines did things, where they were going, and in watching the progress of the Battalion.

It was a hard time and I spent many hours awake (while other men were asleep), waiting at my door in the dark for that Marine Corps officer and Chaplain (who never came).  It was also a rich time in some ways.  I had shot guns my whole life, but I had not purchased an AR-15 until then and Daniel taught me to shoot the way the Marines taught him to shoot, i.e., what some might call aggressive, plates-forward stance.  It came naturally to me.  Still, the hard and bitter times were far weightier than any good times from it.

During this misadventure, I was unfortunately introduced to Mr. Bateman on the pages of the Small Wars Journal blog.  I invite you to study his prose.  Don’t take my word for what I have said and am about to say.  Read until you simply cannot stand it any more.  He is a scholar, and warrior, and he is good at what he does, and he is great at what he does, and he laments the evil, and he advises and counsels the best, and everyone listens to him, and he knows virtually everything.  If you don’t believe me, just listen to him tell you that himself.

Bateman can only go so long without the attention he so richly deserves, though.  When things get a bit quiet and he wants to shore up his credentials once again, he starts fights with men of notoriety so that they will respond and give him the press he’s after.  The fight between him and Victor Davis Hanson (see here, here, and here) eventually bored Hanson, it appears, and anyway Bateman was highly over-matched.

Bateman goes into a fury over fairly well established facts like the idea that the Western way of war is different.  I’ve commented in a pedestrian way on that same issue, but again, I am under the impression that this is fairly well established.  Either way, Bateman got the attention he wanted, and he was eventually reduced to personal attacks and name calling, with commenters telling him he was acting like a juvenile.

It doesn’t stop there.  At Zero Anthropology (and I make no claims to a knowledge of what this site advocates or the subject of the disagreement), one author had finally had enough of Bateman, and responded this way.  First, Bateman’s comment, and then the response.

Bateman:

Well, at least I now know that you, at least, see what I type. That evidence, at least, now exists for your readers. As does the fact that you ban free speech on your site. Since your readers now see that you openly posted, “This is from the man who is now claiming that I “silenced” him and tried to avoid him challenging my ideas. Of course, he is saying that in private, because he has been banned from this blog and has sent four more messages nonetheless (not included in the list above).”

Well Max, I really could not contrive a confession of oppression of free speech or discourse any more clearly than the way you just laid it out for your readers. Well played son. Well played indeed. “He claimed I ’silenced’ him” and “he has been banned” are wonderfully juxtaposed.

“OPEN” Anthropology.

Regards Max. And I apologize for the future. Not really my fault. But I am sorry nonetheless.

Bob

Response:

You apologize for the future. It was worth approving your message just so that others can see the veiled threat.

It is OPEN Anthropology…just no longer open to you, and your kind. You had your say, and became repetitive, and rather obnoxious, especially as you turned some of your comments on this blog into ad hominem attacks toward someone (me) who had been very analytical, even handed, calm, and reasonable with you. But then the military wolf in sheep’s clothing is all ready to pounce, eh Bob?

Remember, you have a right to free speech. But not on this blog: it is a privilege, and you abused it.

To the notion that Bateman has been “silenced” on that blog, the author lists 32 comments from Bateman approved by the editors.  The straw that broke the camel’s back was this comment:

…your apparent lack of eductation (sic) on military affairs and international relations. But then, of course, you are a minor teacher without a single published monograph, so I suppose you have to try and make your academic mark somewhere, eh? Anything for tenure.

The final remarks by the author are telling:

Not only is it ad hominem, it is a basic lie. Mission accomplished, Bob, you live up to the values of your institution. An academic, you are not, not even a good poser and pretender.

Well, Bob, you wanted attention, now you got it. You have all of our attention now, with your very own post on this blog, all about you. Is this what you wanted?

Why yes, that’s exactly what Bob wanted.  He got his attention, and you spent your time responding to this narcissist.  Perhaps I’m doing the same thing, but if enough people understand who Bateman really is, then my ordeal will have been worth it.

Bob’s outlandish, exaggerated, extremist prose is his hallmark.  It helps with the attention.  Consider:

My entree was, “I think that Robert E. Lee, as a traitor and betrayer of his solemn oath before God and the Constitution, was a much greater terrorist than Osama Bin Ladin… after all, Lee killed many more Americans than Bin Ladin, and almost destroyed the United States. What do you think?”

Yeah, I flunked “Subtle 101” in High School. Oh well. Like I said, I was not in a good place.

But the fact is that there was nothing that any of these men, and they were all men, could say in honest denial to my assertion. They sputtered and growled, spouted and shouted, but not once did it end well for them on any level. You see, if they were “unreconstructed rebels,” well then I was something almost none of them had ever experienced, an “unreconstructed Yankee.”

So that you understand him, he spells it out for you.  He is not just a narcissist, he is a narcissist with an agenda (oops, that may not be so good for a dispassionate “historian,” no?).  And his collectivist tendencies are usually obvious by the folks he hangs with.  For instance, a search of “Bateman” at CNAS (the center that advises Obama on foreign policy) turns up some attention there too.

Now based on the discussion above, consider his recommendation to end ownership of weapons at death.  Does anyone really think that this could ever obtain in America?  Men who have spent $20,000, or $30,000 or $40,000 or more on guns, scopes, optics and ammunition, and who have taught their sons to use those weapons for self defense and bonded by hunting game with those guns, are expected to turn over those weapons to the government to be cut up with a torch rather than turn them over to their sons as a heritage!

Does Bateman know what he is proposing for the armed forces and police of America in the coming years under such a protocol?  Of course he does.  And the irony is that he claims to loath violence.  Does Bateman know that it would take a violation of Posse Comitatus to even try to pull something like this off, breaking the law of the land?  Of course he does.  And does he know that tens or hundreds of thousands of men would perish as a result of his proposals?

Yes.  And thus has Bateman shored up his progressive credentials one more time, and gotten the attention he so desperately wants, all at the same time.  In the future, pay no attention to Mr. Bateman.  He’s a publicity hound and attention seeker, and uses inflammatory and exaggerated rhetoric to evoke responses.  The internet calls this a “troll.”  It’s just that he’s a troll with credentials – and he’s an expert on everything.  If you don’t believe it, just ask him.

WRSA

David Codrea

Kurt Hofmann

Mike Vanderboegh

David Codrea:

The State of Connecticut’s Office of the State’s Attorney for the Judicial District of Danbury released its long-awaited report Monday on the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. While representative mainstream press accounts seem focused on the killer taking his motives with him to his grave and other aspects of the report, a paragraph on page two in the Executive Summary contains the most important revelation applicable to future mass murder attempts …

Read the rest of David’s report.  This is why the notion that the police can be the amelioration for crime and all of its affects is mistaken and dangerous.  Self defense is the most reactive and quickest way to change the boundary conditions for the system.

David Codrea:

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the firearms industry’s trade association, has written letters to Congress urging both houses to reauthorize the Undetectable Firearms Act before it expires on Dec. 9 …

Oh, and I’m sure that the NSSF doesn’t have any skin in the game, do they?

But according to Kurt Hofmann, there may be a champion in the hall.

In other words, Schumer had hoped to pass the bill without any debate, and without any of the other procedural “speed bumps” intended to prevent legislation from being forced through before anyone has an opportunity to object … Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) thwarted Schumer’s plot.

Good for him.  Actually, according to Emily Miller, there is a nuance of this legislation I hadn’t thought of.

His scam was to have the bill expire again during the Senate’s lame duck session in 2014.  At that point, Mr. Schumer and his compadres could tack on the gun-control expansions that their vulnerable Democrats in rural and western states would not support in an election year.

Mr. Schumer and some Democrats on the Judiciary Committee had been trying recently to expand the scope of the ban to include millions of existing and non-threatening polymer magazines.

This is easy folks.  If someone brings this up in conversation with you, tell them that you cannot so much as take a penny through the detectors at the airport.  The notion that they are undetectable firearms is a lie.  Case closed.

Concerning off-duty cops and NFL games:

Yet when we contacted the business manager for the St. Louis Police Officers Association, he told us, he’d been given assurances by the Rams Security Director that this was only a recommendation and the Rams intended to continue to allow off-duty police to carry their service weapons into the Dome.

I sent a note to the NFL inquiring as to the accuracy of this report, i.e., that it is only a recommendation and not policy.  To the chagrin of the LEOs at reddit/guns, I supported the ban on high capacity magazines for LEOs in California if citizens weren’t allowed to have them either.  If citizens must be defenseless, then LEOs should be as well.  What’s fair is fair.  And I won’t likely hear back from the NFL.

Terry McAuliffe is already making moves on gun control in Virginia.  Because when you elect communists to office, they enact totalitarian measures – it’s who they are and what they do.

Uncle gives us a blast from the past on the Hughes Amendment when the honorable Ronald Reagan sold us out.  It might be a little more complex than that, but still, he shouldn’t have signed such an unconstitutional abomination.  And we still labor under that awful piece of legislation today.

David Codrea:

If passed and signed into law, his bill would effectively negate the ability of concealed carry permit holders, or gun owners in states that recognize “Constitutional carry,” to lawfully carry their firearm when dropping off or picking passengers up, rendering them defenseless for the duration of the trip to and from an airport. And importantly, it “would take precedence over any city or state laws that allow weapons in any airports nationwide.”

Go read David’s piece and see what he’s talking about.  If something involves federal preemption of state laws, you know I’m going to be against it.  The federal government, in my view, has a right to raise armies for the common defense and build roads to enable interstate commerce.  Beyond that we’re in unconstitutional territory.

David:

… absolute hypocrisy of a billionaire who can afford an around-the-clock armed presence devoting a substantial amount of his time and untold millions of dollars with the goal of disarming everyone of more modest means.

That’s always the way it is with the people of means and fame.  Gun control for thee but not for me.

Kurt Hofmann:

… it becomes difficult to decide what is the most appalling–the unbridled savagery of the attacks: “One victim shown in the footage is a 46-year-old man from Hoboken, N.J., who was found dead with his neck broken and head lodged between iron fence posts, according to NJ.com,” or the chilling callousness of the descriptions of the “game” …

Kurt makes an excellent point about the size of the mobs doing this savagery and the need for more rounds than most of the gun control states allow in your weapon.

Michael Bane cites Charlie Rangel:

“No one makes a big deal of it, but if you’re a fly on the wall in any of their homes — I’ll tell you what: If you track the Confederate Army to the Dixiecrats, to the conversation of the Republicans, to the districts that were affected, you may be dealing with different labels, but if they were ever able to track down their ancestors, there’s a Confederate general in every damn living room.”

Michael then makes his way through his living room looking for a Confederate general and can’t find one.  Charlie doesn’t have to be a fly on the wall.  My picture is very prominent.

Finally, a New Yorker’s view of guns from Adam Gopnik.  After admitting that gun violence mostly doesn’t happen outside of minority neighborhoods, he nonetheless wants to ameliorate a medical problem you have.

But it’s good, at least, to hear someone arguing the details and filling out the fact-picture, good to be reminded that the cultures and rituals of the gun, however irrational in nature, are still felt to be essential by the people who engage in them. Curing the irrationalities of human culture later depends on understanding them now.

He’s a collectivist and loyal hive member, and he wants to “cure your irrationalities.”  On a related note, sometimes I feel that I have nothing in common with New Yorkers except a language, and I’m beginning to wonder about that.