Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

Market Watch.

Convictions for driving under the influence may be linked to the risk of being arrested for subsequent violent crimes, a new study of legal gun owners suggests.

Researchers studied 79,678 California handgun owners from their first legal firearm purchase in 2001 until 2013, using the state Justice Department’s database of legal handgun sales.

During that period, nearly 9% of the 1,495 handgun buyers with previous DUI convictions were later arrested for crimes classified as violent by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s crime index: murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. Only 2% of the 65,700 buyers with no previous criminal history wound up being arrested for those violent crimes, according to the study, which was published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Mmm … I see.  So we should punish the other 91% for what the 9% did or may do.

I wonder if the authors listened to how stupid this sounds before they went to press with it?  Oh, and they left out something about throwing chicken bones and visits to their local palm reader and community witchdoctor.

From a reader, news from New Zealand.

A man who took a bullet for his country is getting over the ordeal of being “interrogated” after he tried to get into a gun buyback event with his support dog in Canterbury.

Dion Taka took his service dog, Delta, with him when he went to hand his guns over in Rakaia on Saturday. It was already a daunting prospect for the war veteran.

Badly wounded when he was shot in Afghanistan in 2012 in the Battle of Baghak, he now lives with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and type-2 complex regional pain syndrome.

For the past two-and-a-half years, Taka has been able to resume some of his independence with Delta by his side. She is able to recognise his anxiety and calm him down, and performs a raft of other duties including fetching medication.

“It took me a couple of weeks to decide to go [to the gun buyback], but I knew I had to,” Taka said. “I just put on a happy, brave front to get though it.”

He walked in and was greeted by a row of police officers down one side and a row of contractors down the other, all dressed in black.

Taka said one of the contractors immediately called him back to put his rifle and accessories on the desk, and tie Delta, who was wearing her service jacket, up outside.

“I told him, ‘she is a service dog, she is working’. But he told me again to tie her up outside.”

When Taka again refused, the contractor asked why he needed a service dog.

“I told him, ‘for situations like this. I have PTSD’. Then he asked me what I was there for, which was a pretty stupid question. I told him was there to hand my guns in.”

Taka said the contractor then whistled at him “like a dog” two or three times and asked if he ought to own a gun if he had PTSD.

He said the contractor also told him he should “see someone” instead of just having a dog to stroke.

Contractor.  In other words, someone being paid money for confiscating weapons from other men.  I wish the dog had turned and bitten him in the ass.

So contractor, quit being a coward.  Go earn your creds by doing this across the pond.

From reddit/firearms, this interesting report.

At the local range. We were talking AK rifles. He admitted the russian rifles that weren’t burnt out barrels were excellent rifles. However how they got them was going to door to door confiscation. “to get the good stuff” and give it the the new government soldiers of Iraq. They treated the civilian as no rights and used them as armories.

Him being LEO now. All i can think of he knows where to start the confiscation and “get the good stuff”. If ordered. I doubt he would hesitate at AWB and being the gun club president would use his knowledge to best rifles first.

Very surreal vibe he gave off and I think he became aware of it afterwards. Conversation got to a little awkward at the end.

And Gosh, this strategy worked out so well for Iraq and the American troops, didn’t it?  Leaving them defenseless when the foreign fighters came by in the night, drug heads of household out and took a power drill and drilled holes in their heads as examples to anyone who would cooperate with the Americans, just did wonders for morale, winning hearts and minds, and pacification of the people.

That LEO is a retarded idiot.

Now for the rest of the story.  This only happened as long as the retarded idiots were in charge.  The story was different when the thinking men took charge.  This report was provided to me by my own son, who fought and earned the combat action ribbon in Fallujah in 2007.

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.

I have no doubt that Mr. LEO would conduct the same sort of confiscatory practices today on Americans if ordered to do so, as would 99%+ of all other LEOs.

Weapons confiscations are happening as we speak via red flag laws, and they are bound to intensify.  They happened before after Katrina (readers, please ignore Wayne LaPierre commenting in the video).  This will work as long as the people tolerate it, but when they get fed up, there will be hell to pay.

So if you’re a LEO, listen up.  If you support or would participate in these types of confiscatory practices in America, you are a retarded idiot, just like it was retarded to do that in Iraq.  And you just may end up paying with your life.  Many did in Iraq.

As for the rest of us, the lesson is that LEOs are willing to do this.  Don’t let that happen.

News from New Zealand.

The president of the Police Association says it’s only a matter of time until police carry guns at all times.

His comment comes as police search for a man in the central North Island who allegedly pulled a gun on two officers and stole their car on Saturday night.

Chris Cahill says the incident highlights the risk that many officers face.

“It’s pretty scary and it’s just an add-on to so many others we’ve had,” he told the AM Show on Monday.

Cahill says that in the six months since March this year, there have been 179 incidents where criminals have pointed a gun at either an officer or a member of the public.

“It’s a bit more common than a lot of us realise,” he says.

“It continues to be a big concern in New Zealand – there’s just far too many firearms in the hands of criminals.”

Cahill says around 72 percent of frontline officers in his association support being armed at all times.

“What are you going to say to those officers who get a gun pointed at them and have nothing to protect themselves with?”

He says the Government’s gun buyback scheme introduced following the Christchurch mosque shootings is a great first step in limiting the number of firearms in circulation in the country.

“It’s great those New Zealanders that are handing in their firearms,” he says. “We know criminals arm themselves by stealing them from licensed firearm owners, so if we can get those sort of firearms out of the community and make sure security is better for the other firearms then there’s less chance of criminals having them and New Zealand will be safer all around for that.”

This is truly rich.  He advocates the disarming of the peaceable population so that criminals won’t have access to stolen firearms, so that cops won’t get guns pulled on them.

You read that right.  “What are you going to say to those officers who get a gun pointed at them and have nothing to protect themselves with?”

The same thing you say to anyone else who gets a gun pointed at them and has nothing to protect themselves with.  Welcome to gun control, where no one is safe.  It sucks to be you.  Glad you could join the party.

David Codrea.

… noting that Mr. Trump now really needs to keep his supporters rallied, a tweet from the president came across as bizarrely counterproductive:

“The Democrats are so focused on hurting the Republican Party and the President that they are unable to get anything done because of it, including legislation on gun safety, lowering of prescription drug prices, infrastructure, etc. So bad for our Country!”

Really? Now’s the time to demotivate the gun owners who put him in office? Not coming up with new infringements is what’s “bad”?

While he is also saying this.

In a fresh effort to dismiss the impeachment inquiry as nothing but a partisan fight with no real merit, Trump characterized the effort as a move by the Democrats to take things away from the voters who elected him as well as an attack on democracy itself. “The Democrats want to take away your guns, they want to take away your health care, they want to take away your vote, they want to take away your freedom, they want to take away your judges,” Trump said in the video. “It’s all very simple: They’re trying to stop me, because I’m fighting for you.”

I’m afraid he is so tone deaf to common Americans that he doesn’t realize that he’s already in serious trouble with gun owners, perhaps never to regain their trust or their vote, with the nomination of Canterbury to head the ATF, the bump stock ban, support for red flag laws, and apparent support for universal background checks.

The Washington Times.

But the biggest question remained: Where does the president stand?

“That’s an important piece — if the president doesn’t support it, there’s no point. It’s not going to become law,” Mr. Hawley said.

It was not clear what Mr. Trump thought of the proposal, with lawmakers pointing out that he hasn’t signed off on it and Mr. Barr was taking a temperature check.

I told you so.

NYT:

When Mr. Manchin volunteered to take his name off the background checks bill, Mr. Murphy said, the three senators were huddled around a speakerphone, talking to Mr. Trump from Mr. Toomey’s Capitol hideaway office.

“The president is a guy who thinks about branding,” Mr. Toomey said. “I think we just want to make it clear to the president that if he was going to do this, that he should get credit for it.”

Oh, no one has to worry about that.  Whatever new gun control makes its way into law, Trump will own it.  Completely.

Of the things that turn gun owners against gun manufacturers, these three things are highest on the list.

1. Aligning with gun control
2. Exclusive focus on military contracts
3. Reliance on name branding in lieu of true appreciation for the customer (e.g., H&K).  Look up the H&K memes like “Hi, we’re H&K and we hate you.”

It’s difficult to understand what’s so hard about this.

David Hunt on the Trench Gun.

The enemy didn’t like the trench broom one bit. In September 1918, the German government issued a diplomatic protest, complaining that the Model 97 Trench Gun was illegal because “it is especially forbidden to employ arms, projections, or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering” as defined in the 1907 Hague Convention respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land. When the Americans rejected this, the German high command then threatened to execute any soldier caught with a Trench Gun or even just Trench Gun shells. General Pershing replied that, henceforth, any Germans caught with flamethrowers or saw-bladed bayonets would be lined up and shot. As far as is known, no American or German POWs were executed under such circumstances.

For a lesson in history, visit his article.

But not so fast.  The shotgun is still a weapon of war.  As I’ve pointed out before, the U.S. Marine Corps used shotguns for close quarters battle in Now Zad, Afghanistan.  I snagged this shot of a YouTube video of fighting there when I was covering Marine Corps work in that theater.

So the next time some loud mouth tells you that “civilians” should not have “weapons of war designed only to kill others,” inform them that every soldier or Marine is first and foremost a civilian (in that he came from our ranks and will return to our ranks), and that every weapon that has ever been designed, or improvised, by an insurgency or uniformed army, is a weapon of war.  There are no exceptions, from sticks to rocks, from shotguns to rifles, from revolvers to pistols, from bolt action long guns to machine guns.

That’s a Red Herring anyway.  They don’t care about the details.  They just want you disarmed of all weaponry.  You’re easier to control that way.

Via David Codrea, FPC has a brief analysis here.

The invocation of “chain of title” is also problematic, as it suggests a legitimate government interest in maintaining searchable records of all firearm transactions. In other words: a universal registry masquerading as a background check system.

It’s a bad idea for a whole host of reasons.  But I wanted to point out one thing on this that you may have overlooked.

There are so many articles out there where it’s claimed that the White House said “Trump hasn’t bought any of this yet” that I cannot cite them all.

Here’s what I think happened.  These are ideas collectively promulgated by both Trump (a gun controller from way back) and Barr (a gun controller from way back).  Don’t believe it when the articles hint that this is all Barr and Trump is waiting on the Congress to lead by interacting first with Barr.

Barr is his boy on this.  Trump wants plausible deniability, and this effort is him sticking his finger in the wind.  Whether he gets all of this or not, at least now you see where Trump’s hearts is: “chain of title.”  Or in other words, a national gun registry.