Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

She upbraids him in typical fashion.

Reuters:

Funds run by BlackRock Inc and Vanguard Group backed all directors at gunmaker Sturm Ruger & Co Inc despite the company’s rare rejection of talks with the world’s top asset managers, disclosures to regulators on Thursday showed.

The votes by the gunmaker’s largest investors stood in contrast to support BlackRock and Vanguard gave to a measure calling on Sturm Ruger to report on the safety of its products, which passed over the board’s objections at the company’s annual meeting on May 9.

Neither BlackRock nor Vanguard would discuss in detail their votes at the meeting …

Sturm Ruger declined to comment on the filings by the funds with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. BlackRock holds about 18 percent of shares outstanding, followed by Vanguard, with about 10 percent.

Both fund firms rarely vote against directors, and say critical votes may come only after companies fail to respond to shareholder concerns …

Investors and activists with a range of views about gun control said the asset managers’ split tickets seemed to reflect an approach designed to appeal to young investors concerned with social issues, without alienating clients who own guns or pushing Sturm Ruger’s board too quickly.

[ … ]

BlackRock spokeswoman Tara McDonnell said via email it takes a case-by-case approach to its engagement and voting “because doing so encourages change over time and promotes responsible business practices that align with the financial interests of our clients.”

Next up, Beth Baumann at Townhall.

A group of 11 Catholic groups came together to purchase stock in Smith & Wesson. The group purchased 200 shares, the minimum number required to for shareholders to demand reports from the company. Now, they want the gun manufacturer to provide a report that details what the company is doing to promote “gun safety measures” and “produce safer gun and gun products.”

According to an SEC filing, which is submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), here’s what the group wants to see from Smith & Wesson:

Shareholders request the Board of Directors issue a report by February 8, 2019, at reasonable expense and excluding proprietary information, on the company’s activities related to gun safety measures and the mitigation of harm associated with gun products, including the following (emphasis mine):

Shareholders request the Board of Directors issue a report by February 8, 2019, at reasonable expense and excluding proprietary information, on the company’s activities related to gun safety measures and the mitigation of harm associated with gun products, including the following:

• Evidence of monitoring of violent events associated with products produced by the company.
• Efforts underway to research and produce safer guns and gun products.
• Assessment of the corporate reputational and financial risks related to gun violence in the U.S.

The resolution asks American Outdoor Brands Company (AOBC) to report on activities underway to mitigate the risks that its products may be misused in criminal acts of gun violence. Contrary to what the company suggests, AOBC has both the responsibility and capacity to play a more active role in how its products are used; the requested assessment and reporting are the first steps towards acceptance of this responsibility.  As a result of several high profile mass shootings in the past year, most recently the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, gun violence is increasingly being seen as a public health crisis with extraordinary human and financial costs.

Importantly, events of gun violence have led to mounting public backlash against gun makers and retailers including calls for boycotts, divestment and demands for gun safety regulation at both the federal and state levels. This environment presents serious business risks which demand a meaningful response from AOBC. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights make clear the corporate responsibility to seek to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations, products or services by their business relationships, even if they have not contributed to those impacts.

AOBC has a responsibility to mitigate potential impacts through improved monitoring of its distribution and retail sales channels and enhanced reporting on research and development efforts to improve the safety features of its consumer products. The resolution does not request that AOBC produce smart guns or other specific products; nor does it call for the company to endorse a gun control regulatory or policy agenda. The resolution does, however, ask for reporting because existing disclosures of current risk mitigation measures are seen as insufficient for investors to assess their effectiveness.

BlackRock and Vanguard haven’t given up.  They’re playing the long game with Ruger.  Smith & Wesson has now been introduced to social justice warrioring 2.0  Version 1.0 saw them agree to Bill Clinton’s gun control and almost go out of business.

This updated version is smarter than that.  It’s an attack from the inside.  I’ve said before that any firearms manufacturer who goes public with its stock is vulnerable to this kind of pressure, unless the board of directors and employees own a majority of the stock and the corporation rules and bylaws are constructed to suppress this kind of pressure.

Ruger isn’t in the clear, no matter what the CEO says.  Smith & Wesson are at the very beginning of this new grand experiment in gun control.  The board of directors and financial folks had better get busy buying stock and amending the bylaws.

Of course, there are smaller firearms manufacturers who can build and sell firearms, but it would be a shame to see Ruger and Smith & Wesson go out of business.

The Trace:

Investigators have released information on the weapons carried by the gunman who opened fire at a Florida video game tournament this weekend, killing two and leaving another nine victims with bullet wounds: He was armed with two handguns, a 9mm and a .45 caliber, both recently purchased from a licensed dealer.

The fact that the assailant wielded a common semiautomatic pistol, the staple of the contemporary American firearms market, would seem to make this most recent gun rampage an outlier among the mass shootings that have elicited opposition to the assault-style rifles that have become closely associated with such attacks. But the numbers show that it instead makes the carnage at Jacksonville Landing routine.

The Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center at Texas State University has studied active-shooter rampages for reports commissioned by the FBI. The FBI defines an active shooter as someone who kills or attempts to kill people in a confined or populated area. “Active shooter” is a more expansive category than mass shooting, which applies only to incidents that result in a minimum number of casualties. The term “active shooter” can apply to more targeted attacks as well as unsuccessful attempted mass shootings.

According to data compiled on 200 such attacks from 2000 through 2015, the ALERTT team found that pistols, not rifles, were the primary weapon used by the majority of active shooters …

Pistols were the most common weapon regardless of whether active shooters struck schools, businesses or churches. The perpetrator of one of the deadliest mass shootings in history, the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, was equipped solely with pistols.

Well then.  We must ban all pistols.  We mustn’t allow the people to defend themselves with – pistols.

Reuters:

Dick’s Sporting Goods reported a bigger-than-expected drop in quarterly same-store sales on Wednesday and forecast further declines this year, hit by tighter gun controls and a drop in Under Armour sales.

Shares in the company fell as much as 10 percent after it posted a 1.9 percent drop in same-store sales, bigger than analysts’ average estimate of a 0.62 percent dip.

Dick’s was one of the first retailers to stop selling assault rifles and high-capacity magazines as well as bar the sale of guns to people under age 21 following a massacre at a Florida high school in February.

The company had predicted that its hunting guns business would be pressurized by the change in policy but said the move should also attract more people to its stores.

Yep.  That’s what they said alright.  Somehow I doubt that this has anything to do with Under Armour sales.

I can’t think of a better company to be struggling.  Schadenfreude, I think they call it.

ZeroHedge:

The Constitutional Court of South Africa recently ruled that 300,000 gun owners must turn in their firearms.

This judgement came in response to the North Gauteng High Court’s ruling in 2017 which said Section 24 and Section 28 of the Firearm’s Control Act were unconstitutional.

A report from The Citizen explains what Section 24 and Section 28 entail:

“Section 24 of the Act requires that any person who seeks to renew a licence must do so 90 days before its expiry date Section 28 stipulates that if a firearm licence has been cancelled‚ the firearm must be disposed of or forfeited to the state. A 60-day time frame was placed on its disposal, which was to be done through a dealer.”

Now that the High Court’s initial ruling has been overturned, gun owners who failed to renew their firearms licenses must hand in their firearms to the nearest police station, where authorities will then proceed to destroy them.

Many naïve political observers will paint this event as a casual gun control scheme, but any astute student of politics will recognize that the floodgates are now open for further encroachments – not only on the gun rights of South Africans, but also on others facets of theirs lives.

A look at South Africa’s current political climate will give us an idea of the potential ramifications of this gun control scheme.

And is there any doubt about what comes next?

NPR:

How many times per year does a gun go off in an American school?

We should know. But we don’t.

This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.” The number is far higher than most other estimates.

But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government’s Civil Rights Data Collection.

We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.

In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn’t confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn’t meet the government’s parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn’t respond to our inquiries.

“When we’re talking about such an important and rare event, [this] amount of data error could be very meaningful,” says Deborah Temkin, a researcher and program director at Child Trends.

I want to be very deliberate and careful here in how I analyze this report.  First of all, good for NRP for the research.  Perhaps they’re capable of good reporting after all if they push their politics out of the way?

Second, I have never argued, nor do ever intend to argue in the future, that school shootings, or the lack thereof, proved anything at all or justified gun rights.  Similarly, I have never argued, nor do I ever intend to argue, that negligent discharges in the home are justification for gun lockup laws, or that Chicago inner city shootings are a justification for more gun control, or that the lack of shootings in a gun-rich locale are reason for believing that gun rights reduces crime.

I do not argue that way about things dictated by the Almighty, and my right to self defense and the amelioration of tyranny is based on His Holy decree, and is not function of other data or the vicissitudes of men or the machinations of politics.  But what we do learn from this report is that there are no limits to which the controllers will go to ensure that their agenda reigns supreme.

Lies are merely a tactic.  The ends justify the means for those who have no scruples.

So you’re the same fellow who believed that the NSA surveillance program of Americans was a good thing.

“I assured her that I firmly believed that what N.S.A. was doing was effective, appropriate, and lawful. I also reminded her that the program’s success depended on it remaining secret, that it was appropriately classified, and that any public discussion of it would have to await a later day.”

And I see that you defended all of this in your remarks to The National Press Club.  So I see you in the same category as the Petraeus, McChrystal and their ilk.  In fact, you were coupled up with those controllers months ago demanding more gun control, so this is old hat to you.  I’m as unimpressed with you now as I was back then.

You’re just another traitor to your oath, another collectivist who wants to disarm the American people.  You’re also a liar, just like Petraeus and McChrystal.  You don’t really believe “those guns” have no purpose, or else you would be demanding the disarming of the military and the police.

As for your “service” in the air force, I don’t give a damn about that.  As for your claim that more Americans are dying in the states than in Afghanistan, that’s because we’ve effectively ceased military operations in Afghanistan, and fatherless, inner city criminals are still being made in America by entitlement programs that destroy the family.

So you can just sod off.  I think it’s just dandy that you’re in league with Giffords and her band of mother hens.  That says something about both of you.

The Hill:

Jacksonville, Fla., city councilman Reggie Gaffney told a reporter on Sunday that Americans need to talk about gun control and getting closer with God after a shooting in his district Sunday afternoon.

“I think we’ve really go to ask ourselves two questions,” Gaffney told a local CBS/Fox affiliate shortly after reports of the shooting. “What are we going to do about guns? And we’ve really got to get focused on getting closer with the Lord.”

“I really think we’ve got a gun problem in America, I think we’ve got a gun problem in Jacksonville, and I think we’ve got a faith problem,” Gaffney said.

The councilman said he is “very sad and frustrated” after “the second shooting in less than 48 hours.”

Gaffney was likely referencing the shooting Friday night at a Jacksonville football game, which claimed the one life and sent two other Floridians to the hospital, an associate of the Florida Times-Union reported.

You’re suggesting that getting closer with God mean endorsing gun control.  As I’ve pointed out Reggie, that’s opposite of the truth.  I don’t have a problem at all – you’re the one who is confused.

What you should really be saying is that parents should be doing a much better job at raising their children, and turning our collective American back on the God of the Bible has turned out to be a really bad idea.

I don’t take cues from ignoramuses.  Go do some study and pondering, Reggie.

NBC News:

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the group behind federal background checks for firearms purchasers, is launching a new ad campaign that is an effort to find common ground in a country divided on the issue of gun control.

The campaign launching Wednesday, finds its way to television via public service announcements facilitated by the Ad Council, and aims to make the term “family fire” a household word as it describes accidental shootings of children and other family members in homes across the nation.

“Rather than mudslinging and name calling, we’re focusing on how can we act to keep our kids alive,” said Kyleanne Hunter, a Brady Center vice president. “And that might open the door to more discussion about how to end gun violence.”

I know what you’re doing.  You want to team up with me to enact all new regulations that allow the state to subsume the proper God-ordained role of the family and church, just like all other efforts at control over other men and women.

Well, let me offer a quick response.

Blow it ou’cher ass.

I’m glad we had a chance to have this conversation.  Call me any time.

Vox has gotten its pink panties all in a wad over big bullets and guns, looking for something else to control.  The amusing thing about this “study” is this.

I think someone needs to go back and review the definition of caliber (Which is a measure of the inside diameter of the barrel, most often specified in fractional inches, not in metric units).

So this “study” has the .357 magnum shown as a large caliber, while the .38 special is shown as a medium caliber, ignoring the fact that it’s the very same round.

The 7.62X39 belongs in with the medium caliber, not large caliber in this picture.  And none of this has anything to do with ballistics.

Layers and layers of fact checkers for this “study.”  And Vox has no more sense than to glom onto something as stupid as this.

But restrict “big bullets and guns” and the world will be a better place, and pink unicorns will fart pixie dust rainbows while we hold hands and sing Kumbaya around a campfire.

Or something.