A Geek With Guns

Please standby for this A Geek With Guns Public Service Announcement. All people residing in the United States of American are hereby given notice that the city of New York is not part of the Union. When entering New York City note that privileges you enjoy within the United States may not be exercised. For example if you find yourself exercising your Second Amendment right within New York City you will be arrested:

Ryan Jerome was enjoying his first trip to New York City on business when the former Marine Corps gunner walked up to a security officer at the Empire State Building and asked where he should check his gun.

That was when Jerome’s nightmare began. The security officer called police and Jerome spent the next two days in jail.

The 28-year-old with no criminal history now faces a mandatory minimum sentence of three and a half years in prison. If convicted, his sentence could be as high as fifteen years.

Jerome has a valid concealed carry permit in Indiana and visited New York believing that it was legal to bring his firearm. He was traveling with $15,000 worth of jewelry that he planned to sell.

The online gun-law information Jerome read was inaccurate, however, and his late September arrest initiated what may become a protracted criminal saga. He hasn’t yet been indicted by a grand jury, but there may be little legal wiggle-room if he is.

Please note that if you plan to carry a gun in New York City that you should not alert any authorities of your action. So long as you do not announce you are carrying a gun you will not be arrested unless your method of concealment is less than optimal. A little known fact is that criminals are able to bypass the law by using this very method while law-abiding individuals are left with the options of being disarmed victims or becoming criminals themselves.

I’m sure most of you have read the horror stories about developers submitting their application to the Apple App Store only to have it rejected based on unpublished requirements that seem arbitrary. Wouldn’t you know it, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) have a very similar system for determining whether or not a manufactured firearm is legal for production:

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is in charge of determining whether a gun model is legal, but the agency won’t say much about its criteria.

Despite overseeing an industry that includes machine guns and other deadly weapons, ATF regulations for the manufacture of weapons are often unclear, leading to reliance on a secretive system by which firearms manufacturers can submit proposed weapons for testing and find out one at a time whether they comply with the law, critics say.

Much like the Apple App Store the ATF is also inconsistent with their rulings:

The ATF recommends that manufacturers voluntarily submit weapons for case-by-case determination. But those judgments are private and, it turns out, sometimes contradictory. Critics say nearly identical prototypes can be approved for one manufacturer but denied for another.

One major difference exists between rulings of Apple App Store reviews and ATF reviewers, if the ATF declares something verboten it is illegal and grants men with guns the power to enforce the decision. Anybody with the capacity to think can also see the huge opportunity for abuse arbitrary regulations grant. A manufacturer not only has to submit to the ATF’s rulings but must remain on their good side for pissing off an agent may lead to every submitted prototype being rejected, which eventually would force the manufacturer into bankruptcy.

Anti-gunners always like to claim carrying a gun is dangerous because an attacker will just take it and use it against you. During the New Year’s Eve party I attended one of my friends made a great observation regarding this situation, “If a guns so easy to take I’ll just take it right back from the bad guy.”

A gun is a tool and like any tool is can serve multiple roles. For example you can use it to stop an attacker of the two and four legged varieties, you can use them for sport, of you can use them to save three children from a sinking car:

As many as 10 people jumped into an icy Utah river to help save three trapped children after a car plunged down a 10-foot embankment and flipped over, the state’s Highway Patrol said Sunday.

The rescuers helped turn the Honda Accord upright in the Logan River, and one man shot out the car’s window with a handgun and cut a seat belt to help free the children after the Saturday afternoon accident, patrol Lt. Steve Winward said.

This story makes a good case for carrying a firearm and a quality knife on your person. There is wisdom on the Boy Scout motto, “Always be prepared.”

The idea behind so-called gun-free zones has always baffled me. Proponents of the idea claim guns won’t be carried into these zones because bad people obey laws. When I look at the idea all I see is a big sign telling criminals that persons in these zones will most likely not be armed and therefore make prime victims. Whereas proponents have never been able to demonstrate their idea works those of us who claim gun-free zones are stupid ideas have plenty of examples to fall back on. Another example manifested earlier this money as a prosecutor in the Cook County courthouse was shot:

The Cook County attorney was shot and three others were hurt in the chaos. The gunman had been convicted of criminal sexual conduct moments earlier, his attorney said.

This should have never happened according to those who advocate the establishment of gun-free zones:

“This is a very small courthouse. This is a very small community,” County Commissioner Janice Hall said. “There’s a sign on the door that says no firearms allowed beyond this point.”

It seems to me that criminals aren’t much for obeying signs. Instead of trying to disarm lawful individuals how about we establish more areas where people maintain a right to defend themselves. If a criminal can get a gun into a courthouse they can certainly get one into a school.

The New York Times recently ran a hit piece on carry permit holders. The article tried to make permit holders sound like scary individuals with the following statistic:

To assess that claim, The New York Times examined the permit program in North Carolina, one of a dwindling number of states where the identities of permit holders remain public. The review, encompassing the last five years, offers a rare, detailed look at how a liberalized concealed weapons law has played out in one state. And while it does not provide answers, it does raise questions.

More than 2,400 permit holders were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, excluding traffic-related crimes, over the five-year period, The Times found when it compared databases of recent criminal court cases and licensees. While the figure represents a small percentage of those with permits, more than 200 were convicted of felonies, including at least 10 who committed murder or manslaughter. All but two of the killers used a gun.

2,400 permit holders were convicted of felonies? Holy mother of Thor, that’s a bit number. Well, except in the grand scheme of things, it’s not:

That’s a dozen gun assaults a year. How many permit holders are there in North Carolina? According to the story, “more than 240,000.” So 0.2 percent of them are convicted of a non-traffic-related offense each year, about 0.017 percent are convicted of a felony, and only 0.005 percent are convicted of a gun assault. The Times concedes that the number of permit holders convicted of crimes “represents a small percentage of those with permits.” More like “tiny.” By comparison, about 0.35 percent of all Americans are convicted of a felony each year–more than 20 times the rate among North Carolina permit holders.

So the average rate of felony convictions for North Carolina permit holders is far less than the average felony conviction rate in the nation. That seems to prove once again that permit holders are less likely to commit felonies than the average population.

Several years ago in the socialist paradise of Venezuela the government announced they were going to implement stricter gun control to curb crime:

Caracas, Venezuela, July 2, 2006–The Venezuelan Ministry of Justice announced the creation of a new firearms control plan on Wednesday, in an attempt to decrease excessive violence in Venezuela. The plan will be presented to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in two weeks, and could begin to be implemented by the end of July.

[...]

According to official statistics, in the past three years there have been 11,643 (2003), 9,719 (2004), and 9,412 (2005) homicides, which is high, considering that Venezuela has a population of 27 Million people. The murder rate in Venezuela in 2005 was six times higher than in the United States.

So how has that plan been working out? Not so well:

The Venezuela Violence Observatory says at least 19,336 people have been killed this year, an average of 53 a day.

The figures suggest Venezuela’s murder rate is the highest in South America and four times that of Mexico.

While I love irony as much as the next person I wish people didn’t have to die in order to make a point. Gun control doesn’t work and it never will work. Six years after establishing stricter gun control laws to curb the country’s crime rate Venezuela leads South America in murder rates, even surpassing the drug cartel stricken state of Mexico.

The group did not give an overall reason for the rising violence, but said the problem was fuelled by impunity, with the great majority of killings going unpunished.

A high level of gun ownership is also a factor.

Emphasis mine. If a high level of gun ownership is a factor shouldn’t the murder rate have dropped after stricter gun control laws were implemented in 2006? The first linked story put the murder rates of Venezuela at 11,643 in 2003, 9,719 in 2004, and 9,412 in 2005. In 2011 there were 19,336 murders, an increase of roughly 10,000. If gun ownership rates were a contributing factor than the murder rate should be staying relatively steady or decreasing since stricter gun control laws were implemented. Instead they have more than doubled since 2005.

Anti-gunners try to scare people by claiming owing a gun increases your risk of having a firearm related accident or committing suicide with a gun. They like this argument because technically it’s true, one can’t have a firearm related accident if they are never around a firearm, nor can they commit suicide with something they don’t have. What the anti-gunners leave out in their fear mongering is the fact that accidents and suicides involving firearms is very low:

Data recently released by the National Center for Health Statistics shows that in 2008, the number and per capita rate of firearm accident deaths fell to an all-time low. There were 592 firearm accident deaths (0.19 such accidents per 100,000 population) in 2008, as compared to 613 accidents (.20 per 100,000) in 2007. In 2008, the chance of a child dying in a firearm accident was roughly one in a million.

Firearm accidents accounted for 0.5% of all accidental deaths; well below the percentages accounted for by motor vehicle accidents, falls, fires, poisonings, and several other more common types of mishaps.

Firearm suicides rose in 2008 because total suicides rose, but the percentage of suicides accounted for by those misusing firearms remained steady, at just barely over half. This is down from about 60% during the 1980s and early 1990s. The firearm suicide rate remained at just under 6 per 100,000, as it has been every year from 1999 forward. Contrary to claims made recently by some gun control advocates, firearm suicides among children are extremely uncommon, and in 2008, fell to an all-time low.

It must really piss the anti-gunners off knowing trends do not support their message of fear. One half of one percent of accidents involve a firearm, that’s insanely low. Likewise removing firearms from a suicide would only result in the use of another means of suicide. When somebody has been pushed to the point of suicide little is going to stop them besides immediate intervention.

Anti-gunners often accuse gun rights activists of being middle-aged white racists. Unless you actually are one of the rare middle-aged white racists you laugh and call the anti-gunner a hypocrite. Why? Because the history of gun control has been almost entirely driven by racism and fear of minorities having the same rights of self-defense as whites:

As an adult I continued to fear and hate guns and to generally align myself with the gun control cause, but Jeff’s suggestion that the regulation of people’s access to guns is essentially conservative nagged at me, unresolved, until I read UCLA law professor Adam Winkler’s stunning new book Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. At the heart of his narrative, Winkler convincingly argues that the people who began the movement against gun control operated not out of the National Rifle Association’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C., but out of a nondescript two-story brick building three blocks from where I sat staring at that pistol: 3106 Shattuck Avenue, in the heart of radical Berkeley. It was there, in 1967, at the headquarters of the Black Panther Party, that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale planned an armed march into the California State Capitol that “launched the modern gun-rights movement.”

Despite my feelings about guns, even as a child I admired that the Panthers made their name shortly after their founding in 1966 by patrolling West Oakland streets with rifles and shotguns and confronting police officers who were detaining blacks. It seemed to me that there was no more effective means of curbing the daily police brutality being meted out to the residents of Oakland’s ghetto. But I did not know until reading Gunfight that the Panthers’ armed patrols provoked the drafting of legislation that established today’s gun regulation apparatus, or that the champions of that legislation were as conservative as apple pie.

Whether your like or dislike the early actions of the Black Panthers it must be noted that their rise was a direct result of police brutalizing members of the black community. In other words if they didn’t come together as a community and fight against the state’s monopoly on initiating violence they would be subject to acts of violence without recourse. The Second Amendment was drafted for this exact reason, when the state becomes overly tyrannical an armed citizenry maintains the option of defending themselves from state actors. Members of the Black Panthers originally armed themselves to resist tyranny as all other options including the courts were entirely against them. Sadly the need for self-defense gave the state an excuse to advance gun control in the hopes of disarming blacks and rendering them easier to subjugate:

In 1967 Don Mulford, the Republican state assemblyman who represented the Panthers’ patrol zone and who had once famously denounced the Free Speech Movement and anti-war demonstrations at the University of California at Berkeley, introduced a bill inspired by the Panthers that prohibited the public carrying of loaded firearms, open and concealed.

[...]

Two months after the invasion of Sacramento, riots erupted in response to instances of police brutality in the black sections of Detroit and Newark. From rooftops, windows, and doorways, gunmen fired on police, National Guardsmen, and Army troops sent to quash the rebellions. Congress responded by passing the Gun Control Act of 1968 and its companion bill, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. Although Winkler chastises “extremists” on both sides of the current gun control debate who characterize their opponents as totalitarians, he does note that while drafting the 1968 bills, Sen. Thomas Dodd (D-Conn.) had the Library of Congress provide him with an English translation of the gun control regulations that the Nazis used to disarm Jews and political dissidents.

Yes the 1968 Gun Control Act is basically an English translation of the Nazi Gun Control Act. Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership published an excellent book that compares our 1968 Gun Control Act with the Nazi equivalent and they are almost the same (minus the fact our version doesn’t overtly target a minority group).

I think I’ll throw Gun Fight onto my reading list and, whenever I get around to actually reading and finishing it, I’ll post up my thoughts.

The Brady Campaign has been trying to build up hype for their next failed attempt to create a movement of victim disarmament. You may not have heard anything about it as nobody pays much attention to the Brady Campaign anymore but Miguel over at Gun Free Zone had his ear to the ground and found the Brady Campaign’s new site, Too Many Victims (of Gun Violence, people killed by other violent crimes need not apply). Here’s a link you can copy and paste to visit the site:

http://www.bradycampaign.org/toomanyvictims/

Yeah I know it’s kind of petty to not link directly to their site, but I don’t link directly to sites of white supremacists either. If you’re advocating the creation of victims you’re not getting any link love from me.

Basically it’s a site created so people can go post memorials of people killed by guns. As Miguel pointed out the Brady Campaign doesn’t give two shits about victims of other violent crimes. If your family member was stabbed to death that’s just too bad, find somewhere else to post his memory.

The other thing the Brady folks are doing is encouraging people to host vigils for the victims of violent crimes involving firearms (if you were a victim of rape you can just take your sob story right over there with the rest of the people who were victimized in other violent crimes). Conveniently they have a very sparse list of planned vigils (which can be visited at the following link):

http://www.bradycampaign.org/toomanyvictims/local-vigils/

Notice how most of the planned vigils don’t even have a date or location set yet, I’m guessing they never will. Sadly the only one going on in Minnesota is why the fuck up in Duluth so I’ll not be able to verify if five or six people attended.

I’m going to find it difficult to surpress me desire to troll this site. Miguel brought up the idea of posting “memorials” for criminals who were shot by their would be victims. My question is whether or not these vigils are open carry events. There is also the question regarding whether or not the Brady Bunch are so cold and calloused as to remove memorials of victims of violent crimes not involving firearms. Do Brady shills employees verify the memorials are for real people? There is certainly the potential of creating some very funny memorials for non-existant or fictional individuals (some James Bond villains would be good candidates).

Now that I’ve given you all these bad ideas I want to urge you to take the high road and do your best to resist trolling this site. Ff we don’t give it any traffic nobody will (seriously, we’re the only people who visit anti-gun websites and we do is just to laugh).

Either way the lack of factual evidence to back up their claims has lead to the anti-gunners to rely entirely on emotional manipulation. This new initiative by the Brady Bunch is a sickening demonstration of their selectiveness in opposing violence. They don’t care about violent crime, only gun crime.