A piece on the anti-rights clowns from 1925

Well worth the time.  One taste:
The new law that it advocated, indeed, is one of the most absurd specimens of jackass legislation ever heard of, even in this paradise of legislative donkeyism. Its single and sole effect would be to exaggerate enormously all of the evils it proposes to put down. It would not take pistols out of the hands of rogues and fools; it would simply take them out of the hands of honest men. The gunman today has great advantages everywhere. He has artillery in his pocket, and he may assume that, in the large cities, at least two-thirds of his prospective victims are unarmed. But if the Nation’s proposed law (or amendment) were passed and enforced, he could assume safely that all of them were unarmed.
One thing he doesn't seem to have realized: those people WANT all the commoners as unarmed and helpless as possible.  If they're not, how can they be 'saved' be the enlightened ones?  Not to mention they're a lot harder to control if they can shoot you.

Hatpin bans?

Because women dared use them for self-defense?
The piece highlights that the press went wild with stories around of women using hatpins for self-defense, and men in government did not react well. The story highlights that the Chicago Vice Commission earned the ire of women when they turned the blame for assaults on the victims and argued “that unchaperoned women should dress as modestly as possible—no painted cheeks or glimpse of ankle—in order to avoid unwanted attention.” When women objected to being told that they were to blame for attacks and promoted the idea of using self-defense by hatpin, that’s when the men decided that they had enough.
Look it over; he's right, a lot of the arguments against women wearing them sound like they came from the Laddites or Watts.


Can someone explain to me why even the most brain-dead AGW true believer would listen to Erlich?  The bastard's been wrong about EVERYTHING, yet here he is again.


Really, Harley?  You're playing this bullshit game?


What?  Everytown and members don't want to say things outright?  Obfuscate?  Lie? 

Anyone actually surprised?
Erika Soto Lamb, Everytown’s communications director, also clammed up when I asked her a simple policy question: “Does Everytown have a position on an ‘assault weapons’ ban or a limitation on the size of magazines?” Dodging the issue completely, Lamb curtly referred me to the group’s website — which is notably silent on those topics. I pushed again, and received no response. Only on my third attempt did I get anything remotely approximating an answer, accompanied by the instruction that I must quote the reply in full. Here it is, in full:

As I’ve told you before, Everytown clearly outlines our policy priorities on our issues page here including background checks, domestic violence, preventable deaths (child access to guns and suicide), and gun trafficking. 
While we believe assault weapons and magazine size have the potential to put the “mass” in “mass shootings,” we also know that events like these account for a small percentage of the 86 Americans who are killed by guns every day. Our focus is on the reasonable reforms that 90 percent of Americans support like background checks for all gun sales, prohibiting domestic abusers from getting their hands on guns, promoting the safe storage of guns and giving law enforcement the tools they need to shut down gun trafficking.

This is fair enough, as far as it goes. But it is not an answer to my question. Nor, it should be said, are any such answers forthcoming on the group’s website.

Can a federal agency trying to cover up wrongdoing lawfully withhold documents under executive privilege—reserved for the president of the United States—when the records don’t even involve the commander-in-chief?
To anyone except dirtbag lawyers working for the .gov agency, the answer is 'Hell NO!'  But the dirtbags are working hard at it.

So the wonderful gun laws of the People's Republic of MA failed?

Whoda thunk it?
Massachusetts registers firearm owners, it registers firearms, it registers firearm carriers, it registers all firearm transfers between people (even private sales), it even requires registration to possess a single piece of expended brass – an object that poses no threat to anyone older than two (choking hazards and all that). And yet here we have an individual officially judged unsuitable for firearm ownership due to repeated (and serious) mental illness issues, and he still owned firearms. He was ordered to turn those firearms in, and he still owned them. The police knew where he lived, knew that he owned firearms, knew that he had not turned them in, and he still owned firearms – the very firearms he used to murder those seven people.

From the linked post:
There's a good bit missing from the retrospective. First, Brad points out this nugget:

Despite the passage of time, Stephen C. Doherty, the now-retired Wakefield police chief who rushed to the company minutes after shooting erupted in the usually placid town, said his memories of the carnage surface almost every day.

(emphasis mine). Minutes. When seconds count, police are only minutes away. We repeat this mantra often, at the risk of losing sight of what it represents. This is the very reason we carry our own guns - by their very nature, the police cannot be everywhere at once.
Ref that last, I'm going to bring up one of Robert Peel's 9 Principles:
7) Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
And it was an expected thing that a citizen had the right of self-defense, and the right to use the tools necessary to defend; a part of the Principles that far too many LE and politicians really don't want people to think about, or consider.


Speaking of the last, Lawdog noted that BBC did a series of shows based on Sherlock Holmes and Doc Watson, updated to current days; I've seen two of them, and they were good. What comes to mind right now is from the first, when Watson realizes he's in a situation were things are getting very odd and somewhat dangerous and asks the people giving him a ride "Can we make a stop so I can pick something up?" They stop at the place where he's been staying and he goes in, digs out the pistol he snuck back from 'Stan, checks the mag and slips it under his belt, under his sweater; don't you know a bunch of people at BBC and in the Brit government shit bricks when they saw that? I'm really surprised it made it in.

"But the government would never actually BAN guns"

Got this comment on the 'mind of an Only One' post:
Do you really think there's any possibility that the federal government will one day want to confiscate your guns? I definitely do not. I think this discussion is used by you and your friends to aggrandize your situation by painting a picture of yourselves fearlessly fighting against incredible odds, all for your principles.

What is likely is that there will be some increase in gun control laws because many people believe as I do that the greater the availability of guns there is the more problems we have as a result.

Well, no, I don't think it's a 'possibility'; I think it's a reality. I think that because a bunch of politicians and activists have said flat-out that that is their intention.

Diane Feinstein stated that if she thought she could get the votes in the Senate, she'd pass a bill ordering the ban of ownership of all handguns. She also, when mayor of San Francisco, pushed a total ban on handgun ownership.

Sen. John Chafee: I shortly will introduce legislation banning the sale, manufacture or possession of handguns (with exceptions for law enforcement and licensed target clubs). . . . It is time to act. We cannot go on like this. Ban them!

Rep. Major Owens: Mr. Speaker, my bill prohibits the importation, exportation, manufacture, sale, purchase, transfer, receipt, possession, or transportation of handguns and handgun ammunition. It establishes a 6-month grace period for the turning in of handguns. It provides many exceptions for gun clubs, hunting clubs, gun collectors, and other people of that kind. (Don't you just love being one of 'that kind'?)

Rep. William Clay said the Brady Bill is "the minimum step" that Congress should take to control handguns. "We need much stricter gun control, and eventually we should bar the ownership of handguns except in a few cases," Clay said.

Mayor Barbara Fass of Stockton, CA: I think you have to do it a step at a time and I think that is what the NRA is most concerned about, is that it will happen one very small step at a time, so that by the time people have "woken up" -- quote -- to what's happened, it's gone farther than what they feel the consensus of American citizens would be. But it does have to go one step at a time and the beginning of the banning of semi-assault military weapons, that are military weapons, not "household" weapons, is the first step.

Michael Gartner, when president of CBS News: There is no reason for anyone in this country, anyone except a police officer or a military person, to buy, to own, to have, to use a handgun.

I used to think handguns could be controlled by laws about registration, by laws requiring waiting periods for purchasers, by laws making sellers check out the past of buyers.

I now think the only way to control handgun use in this country is to prohibit the guns. And the only way to do that is to change the Constitution.

Barack Obama, about to be sworn in as President, has in the past called for
a ban on all handguns,
a ban on all semi-auto firearms,
a national ban on concealed carry.
You want a list of his various ban/restriction words and actions, look here.

Charles T. Morgan, at the time Director of the Washington office of the ACLU said in Senate testimony in 1975 when asked about gun registration:
What the administation's and Congressman McClory's bills . . . call for is a whole new set of Federal records. . . .

I have not one doubt, even if I am in agreement with the National Rifle Association, that that kind of a record-keeping procedure is the first step to eventual confiscation under one administration or another.


These notes are from this article at GOA:
In 1989, New Jersey State Senator Frank Graves introduced a bill which defined an assault weapon as any rifle or semi-automatic shotgun with a magazine capacity of 7 or more rounds or any semi-automatic handgun of 18 or more rounds. Any firearm which uses a detachable magazine technically has a "magazine capacity" of these large sounding numbers because it can accept a magazine of any capacity that fits that firearm. (Please note that in New Jersey, a Marlin Model 60 .22 is considered an 'assault weapon' and banned because it can hold 17 rounds.)

In 1994, the U.S. Congress voted to ban scores of semi-automatic firearms. While the author of this ban, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), claimed the law would only ban 19 types of firearms, other government officials dispute this claim.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has admitted the law bans at least 45 guns. (12) And firearms experts have concluded that the law, which uses generic definitions to ban even more weapons, will actually cover more than 180 guns, thus affecting 50% of the gun owners in the country. (13)

This means that if a person fails to register a common hunting shotgun or rifle (not realizing that their gun is covered by the generic definitions in the bill) they will become a criminal and could lose their gun rights forever.

Sen. Ted Kennedy and Charles Schumer have called for outright bans, though in public they more often tend to speak of 'registration' and 'limits' and they save what they really think for friendly audiences.

And the UN, which many of these people practically worship at the altar of, does NOT like the idea of peasants with arms:
* "To prevent conflict and violence from undermining development, effective disarmament programmes are vital..."
* "Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) is one precursor to the establishment of a stable and secure environment..."
* "[Small arms] are fundamentally dangerous and their removal from the equation either by control, neutralisation or removal is essential. The first step is to gain information on their numbers and whereabouts."
...
"I must … express my disappointment over the Conference’s inability to agree ... on language recognizing the need to establish and maintain controls over private ownership of these deadly weapons and the need for preventing sales of such arms to non-State groups." [2]
'Non-State groups' meaning anyone except military and police, i.e. the peasants. That's us.

Got news for you, guy, I'm not 'fighting fearlessly'; this scares the crap out of me. But it's a choice of being quiet and hoping to avoid notice, or making noise and trying to stop this garbage; and a bunch of us have decided to make some noise. As to your comment about 'the more guns, the more problems', I'd suggest you hop over to Smallest Minority(here's a good place to start) and browse around. Check the left sidebar, he's got links to some good ones. Or Alphecca. Hell, just check Kevin's blogroll, you can find a lot of places with a lot of information debunking the 'more guns, more crime' idea.


By the way, the 'Disarmament idiocy' category isn't aimed at you, it's aimed at the policians & fellow-travellers.

A profoundly uncomfortable conclusion

I’ve had this bouncing around my mind for a while, and after the previous post decided to put it down.

We know there are a lot of politicians who, no matter whether they personally have any like or dislike for firearms(or other arms, for that matter) like the idea of licensing/restricting/banning them, purely for purposes of control(thought they’d call it “For the public safety”). And we know there are far too many people in LE who’d have no real problem taking an illegal order to confiscate arms(either because they like the idea or they’re more worried about trouble with the brass than the legality/right or wrong of it). So the question is this:
Do you think there are politicians, on any level, who would force such an action in the hopes of causing an incident, so they’d have a bloody shirt to wave and call for a total ban?

I’ve been thinking about it the past while, and I’ve come to the very depressing conclusion that the answer is ‘yes’.

We’ve known all along, from their actions and words, that many politicians and ban-the-guns groups like the Bradys will happily dance in the blood of crime victims so they can call for such legislation. After thinking of these actions, and the urge many seem to hold to control every aspect of everyone’s lives, I think some of them would. Would Obama? Possibly; however, he’s quite likely to take the advice of(possibly orders from?) his handlers in the House & Senate, and people like Ayers. Hell we know Ayers & Co. would like to see bloodshed, they want it. Add to that the past actions of many of these career politicians…

And there’s far too many bureaucrats in positions of power in federal agencies who, if they didn’t actually work to cause such, might not do anything to avoid or prevent one; it would give them a nice trampoline to bounce on as they scream about ‘evil gun nuts’ that need to be disarmed, who killed those dedicated LE officers/Federal Agents just because they kicked in the doors in the night or in plain clothes attacked them, and by the way we need a BIG boost in our budget to deal with this so how ‘bout it?

I really, really hate this, but yes. I believe there are politicians who would be willing to, a couple might be actually eager to, take actions to cause a violent incident so they could use it to their advantage.

Do you have any idea how depressing it is to come to that conclusion?

If I'd ever had any thoughts about moving to California,

this crap is just one more nail in the already-buried coffin of that idea.
Introduced by State Assembly Member Kevin De Leon (D-45), Assembly Bill 2062 puts ammunition sales in the crosshairs. AB2062 would require that law-abiding gun owners obtain a permit to buy handgun ammunition and would impose severe restrictions on the private transfers of handgun ammunition. Applicants for a “permit-to-purchase” would be required to submit to a background check, pay a $35 fee, and wait as long as 30 days to receive the permit.

Granola country, times four.

To take note of a couple of Oklahoma laws

passed or proposed that touch on the 2nd, I note these:
HB2513: The bill would allow students to carry firearms on campus if they are at least 21 and are licensed to carry a concealed weapon. "As long as students kept their weapons concealed, they could go into class with them," Murphey said. He said he decided that the bill was needed after the Feb. 14 shootings that left six dead, including the gunman, at Northern Illinois University and an attack in April at Virginia Tech in which a gunman killed 32 people.

Of course, one of the objections is Rep. Paul Roan, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper for 25 years, voted against the bill, saying such a law could greatly hinder law enforcement.

"You wouldn't know who the players are," he said. Because weapons now are banned, he said, police can tell if someone comes onto campus "with a gun for evil purposes."

No you can't, sir; you have no damned idea if someone has 'evil purposes' in mind or is just concerned with protecting themselves if some dirtbag decides to get his name in the media. And it doesn't do any good for the cops to 'know who the players are' when that means they find a bunch of dead students and teachers and a bad guy. When they finally get there.

Which is the reason for this bill: the cops always get there after pretty much everybody who will die, is dead. It may sound very nice to say "We need to know who the players are", but that is covered very nicely by "Some guy just started shooting at people, and a guy in class shot him. Yeah, we're in the classroom and we'll stay here 'till you get here." on the phone. Or simply the good guy setting his piece on a desk- unloaded if there's time- and saying "My sidearm's over there." Or something similar.

Second, a while back OK passes a law basically saying that employers couldn't fire someone for having a firearm locked in their vehicle. And some people are not happy about it:
ConocoPhillips Co. and other smaller employers in a court case contend the law constitutes "an unconstitutional taking of (their) property" and their right to exclude people from their property. That argument is in a new filing by the employers at the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. They want the court to uphold a decision of U.S. District Judge Terence Kern in Tulsa who struck down the law.
Now a couple of other groups are getting in on it:
Two major safety and security organizations - the American Society of Safety Engineers and ASIS International - joined the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in filing a "friend of the court" brief urging the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals to affirm a 2007 federal district court ruling striking down Oklahoma's 2005 guns-at-work law as unconstitutional. In a suit filed by ConocoPhillips and others - ConocoPhillips v. Henry - the lower court held that the law, which made it a crime in Oklahoma for employers to bar guns from company property, impermissibly conflicted with the general duty under the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act for all employers to provide workplaces free from recognized hazards.

To me, the 'right to exclude people from their property' argument sounds like BS; they're not 'excluding people', they're telling people they can't have something in their vehicle. And the 'providing a workplace free from recognized hazards' is standard Brady Coalition to Ban Firearms and other nanny groups crap.

One more set of battles.

I had to create a 'Disarmament idiocy' link

for this crap.
"I would have stopped him," Knox said. "Because when I went to school, I carried a gun. It was legal; I did it."

Goddard, a Virginia Tech senior who was shot four times in the April 16 massacre, was taken aback, then said: "I feel sorry for you - the fact that you feel you need to protect yourself in every situation.

"You're afraid of crazy situations happening. I've lived through this and I know that I can't continue in my life afraid of things," he said, adding that he put his "full trust" in the police to protect society.

I have to sit here and marvel at the idiocy of this. He's sorry for someone who 'feels the need to protect himself'? SORRY?!? "...I know I can't continue in my life to be afraid of things," but is SORRY for someone who's not afraid, only prepared just in case?

Just frickin' amazing. Of course it fits in with the ADL jumping into the Heller case, commented on by the Pistolero here.

People who think A: there's something very moral about being disarmed and unwilling to protect themselves and B: want the rest of us to be forced into the same mindset, or at least forced to act like it. Wonderful.