How Would You Feel if Somebody Tried to Take Your Stuff

Anti-gunners constantly talk about compromise. They want us in the pro-gun community to compromise with them on gun laws. When we refuse they get upset and make claims that we must hate children or some other such emotion stirring argument. It becomes impossible for them to wrap their heads around why we’re so steadfast against them. You know why we’re so steadfast against them? Because they’re trying to steal our shit, plain and simple.

It’s not just anit-gunners of course. Laws have been passed to take away our incandescent light bulbs, our salt, our gas guzzling trucks, basically people all around are trying to use the law to steal other peoples’ shit. I mentioned yesterday that this week was the World Week for the Abolition of Meat and I wanted to setup a lunch at Fogo de Chao. I wasn’t kidding, I setup the lunch with a couple of my friends. Why? It’s not because I hate vegans, what you chose to eat is your own business. I set it up because I’m sick of the militant animal rights groups such a PETA trying to take my meat away from me.

When you try to steal somebody’s shit they are going to push back, plain and simple. When you try to steal somebody’s shit for reasons that make no sense you’re going to get an argument. How would you feel if I decided that cell phones cause cancer and successfully lobbied for a law banning the transfer of cell phones to private citizens? You probably wouldn’t be very happy would you?

For you anti-gunners who can’t wrap your head around any reason why we’re fighting to hard against you it’s because you’re trying to take our shit. You’re not trying to take it to make society safer (we’ve demonstrated time and time against that removing firearms from society just disarms the lawful while making society no safer), you’re trying to take it to make yourselves feel safer. You’re trying to take out shit for no good reason, that’s why we’re pushing so hard against you.

You don’t have a right to feel safe but we do have a right to defend our lives. Likewise it’s not legal to steal another persons’ possessions but it’s legal to own possessions.

Burden of Proof

Tell me if this has ever happened to you. You get into an argument with somebody dealing with politics and the second they can no longer argue against your facts they claim the source of your facts is funded by some lobbyist group whom agrees with what you’re saying.

And example of this came to my eyes a couple days ago. Somebody brought up the fact that Hawaii has a low rate of firearm ownership (he claimed 1 in 10 but gave no real source) and a low rate of gun related deaths while Louisiana had a high rate of firearm ownership (he claimed 1 in 2) and a high rate of gun deaths. I think the guy felt himself pretty damned smug that he came up with this statistic all by himself. The problem, as I pointed out, was his correlation didn’t hold. I decided to bring up firearm ownership information and gun related death information. My sources were the Washington Post (specially chosen because they have an anti-gun slant and thus really couldn’t be claimed to be bias in my favor) and SiteMaster (a good source of raw statistics usually).

I pointed out North Dakota has a similar rate of firearm ownership to Louisiana but has far fewer gun related deaths (and almost no homicides at all I might add) while District of Columbia has a very low rate of firearm ownership yet has the highest rate of firearm related deaths in the nation. Most logical people would have shut up at this point or admitted their argument was in error. Not this guy who decided to claim my sources were funded by the NRA.

Once somebody starts attacking the source of your information it is up to them to prove the potential conflict of interest. Most anti-gunners will just say something about the burden of proof not being on them just because they made the argument. The problem is the burden of proof is the responsibility of the one making the claim. I make many claims on this site but always try to provide some source of evidence supporting those claims. That’s because I’m making the argument and thus realize the burden of proof lies with me.

Whenever you make an argument you must be able to provide supporting evidence. This is how arguments work. The reason anti-gunners can’t seem to get a leg up is because they have no evidence supporting their claims. Look at the citations used by the Violence Policy Center or the Brady Campaign sometime. They often just cross-reference each other and claim it to be proof. And therein lies another thing about providing proof, you should provide it through neutral sources. I purposely go out of my way to avoid using NRA funded sources of information when arguing guns because I realize there is a bias. Often I’ll cite information provide by anti-gun organizations because I’m an asshole and like to use their information against them. But I try not to point people to the NRA or other gun-rights organization unless they’ve released a study that clearly provides citations to neutral sources (and sometimes even then I don’t because people will claim bias immediately).

Just remember if you’re going to get into an argument with an anti-gunner have verifiable facts at hand and be ready for them to attack those facts by claiming you used a bias source. Also once they claim the burden of proof isn’t on their hands even though they’re making the claims call them out on it. Don’t let this lazy shit fly.

I Must Agree

Several people in the gun community have been bringing up the Hughes Amendment, the law that bans any machine gun manufactured after 1986 from being transferred to peasants civilians. Basically people are saying the amendment wasn’t legally passed and therefore should be invalidated. I’m agree with Snowflakes in Hell that this is a wasted effort.

My reasoning is slightly different though. The reason I believe this effort to be futile is because we’re trying to use legal policy to repeal something that was illegally passed. This sounds good on paper but there is one hitch, it was illegally passed by the exact system that makes legal policies. We’d be asking those who make the law to admit they were wrong and then get them to repeal said law. That doesn’t usually work because our government has a habit of never admitting failure and on the rare occasion they do the status quo remains because they say, “Well it’s been law this long so we might as well just leave it alone.”

The only way we could possibly get the Hughes Amendment repealed, in my opinion, is by getting a bill through. I don’t see that happening anytime soon since people seems to think machine guns are some kind of magical weapon that can destroy all of society should they become legal for lawful citizens to own (remember according to anti-gunners lawful citizens becomes blood thirsty psychopaths the second they get a gun).

Google Not Happy with Android Market Performance

Hey Google and I share something in common, neither of us are happy with the Android Market. It’s for different reasons of course, they aren’t happy with the number of application sales, while I’m not happy with the fact Google lost all records of every application I purchased from the Market. Maybe they just wanted me to rebuy everything to bump their sales figures (that was sarcasm in case anybody decides to claim I’m just making up a conspiracy theory).

Either way I think Google needs to do two things in order to improve the Android Market. The first one is to make it easier to search for applications. If you do a search for an application there is a very good chance you’ll get pages of unrelated applications. When I do a search for an application Google of all companies should provide me with great search results. The other thing Google should do is create some kind of real customer support for the Market. Current Google only has their Market forum which I’m doubting they even monitor (I still haven’t seen a single reply to my question from back in November). If Google at least setup a monitored e-mail address customers could contact when they have problems it would go a long ways in my not so humble opinion.

Lautenberg is a Busy Boy

While most senators only find the time to create one bill to fuck the American people periodically Senator Frank Lautenberg found the time to introduce three, all related to gun control.

The first bill, S.32, bans the transfer for standard capacity magazines between two subjects citizens. The second, S.34, allows the government to bar any firearm transfer to people they don’t like “terrorists.” The find bill, S.35, will bar private individuals from selling their own property because they can’t legally perform mandatory background checks.

None of the bills are available at this time for reading so we don’t know what other horrors most likely await.

Data Retention Moving in Subcommitee

With all the problems facing this country including unwinable resource consuming wars, a fiat currency that’s quickly devaluing, and an economy in shambles it’s good to know our government isn’t too busy to find a little time to stomp all over our rights. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security held a hearing on creating legislation that would require ISPs to retain information on websites that customers have visited.

The usual bullshit was used as excused by our “representatives” to mandate ISPs retain all customer data dealing with interactions with anything online. Of course the people arguing that we need such violations of privacy don’t understand that retention of so much data will cost ISPs a small fortune in equipment to gather and store said information. But hey destroying businesses is what government does best… which is probably why they can’t figure out how to fix the unemployment rate.

I did find it rather cute that during the hearing Jason Weinstein called on the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) specifically for a guide they wrote back in 2008 titled Best Practices for Online Service Providers.

This will be an issue to watch in the upcoming months.

What the Hell Have You Done

It’s probably no surprise to anybody that I don’t like things that work changed. Usually I don’t bring it up because it’s pointless but today when I opened up my browser for my hourly dose of Slashdot I saw this. Yes they completely changed the site overnight.

And I only bring it up because it’s actually… better. Facebook could learn something from Slashdot when it comes to site redesigns (i.e. make the new site more useful to users).

State of the Union Speech

Obama gave his State of the Union Speech last night and you know what he didn’t talk about? Gun control. Hey Brady Campaign and Mayors Against Illegal Guns… wah wah.

It’s OK though the only reason Obama isn’t addressing your issue is because he’s afraid of us gun owners all campaigning for the other guy next election season.

Thankfully Most Criminals are Morons

If you’re a criminal and want to obtain a gun how do you go about doing it? According the the anti-gunners you go to a gun show. What they don’t tell you though is the fact most people at gun shows are dealers and thus required to perform background checks thus most criminals usually try to get somebody with a clean record to purchase guns for them. This is known as a straw purchase and is illegal. Thankfully most criminals are rather simple minded and don’t think things all the way through so they often raise a bunch of red flags when trying to skirt the law. The guys at Monsoor’s Sports Shop encountered one of these idiot criminals trying to obtain a gun through a straw purchase:

Monsoor’s Sport Shop owner Pat Wendling contacted the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives last week about a possible “straw purchase” after the 28-year-old La Crosse man came in to look at handguns.

What do you think was the red flag that caused them to call the ATF was? I’m betting it was this:

When shown a 9 mm Taurus pistol, Damon Taylor lifted his shirt, tucked the gun in his waistband, commenting it would fit nicely, according to an ATF agent’s affidavit unsealed Friday. He said he wanted to buy the pistol for his fiancĂ©e and asked how to go about it.

Ah yes the waistband carry test followed by an excuse that he wanted to buy the gun for somebody else. Yup, that won’t raise any attention at all.

Beyond this story though I’d also like to give a shout out to Monsoor’s. The La Crosse area is where I was born and spent a good chunk of my life. During my time living there I did quite a bit of business with them and they were always great people to deal with. If you’re ever in the area and need something gun related I highly recommend them.