Category: Gun Rights

When No Right of Self-Defense is Recognized

When the right of self-defense isn’t recognized stories like this start cropping up:

The man is believed to have grabbed a legally owned gun after they were disturbed by the break-in early yesterday.

He is understood to have fired at the intruders who then fled the isolated house at Melton Mowbray, Leics, before calling the police.

Minutes later, an ambulance was called to treat a man with gunshot injuries nearby. It is understood that call was made by one of the suspected burglars.

The arrested man’s mother said: “This is not the first time they have been broken into.

“They have been robbed three or four times. One of them was quite nasty.

In the United Kingdom self-defense often goes unrecognized by the state, which leaves individuals at a severe disadvantage when facing aggressors. Why should a man be put into a cage for shooting would-be burglars? In such situations home owners can’t know the intent of apparent burglars. Are they breaking into the home merely to take stuff or are they breaking in to hurt or kill somebody living there? The only certainty in such situations is that the people breaking into the home don’t have noble intentions.

Arresting home owners who defend themselves is nothing more than a form of victim blaming. Instead of arresting the aggressors the state arrests the victims, which sets a precedence that says home owners should wait until apparent burglars caused actual bodily harm before retaliating. Of course by that time the home owner would be dead or mortally wounded, but the state doesn’t care about individuals it only cares about power.

Where Gun Control Advocate Should Start Supporting

Advocates of gun control always want to take away guns from private individuals but have no problem with the state keeping its guns. While they claim to support gun control because they oppose violence the exact opposite is true since the state is the most violent user of weaponry:

Let me say immediately that I too believe in gun control. However, I do so in the light of the knowledge that by far the largest number and the most powerful guns and other weapons are in the possession of the government. First and foremost, of course, the federal government, which has atomic and hydrogen bombs, as well as ballistic missiles with which to deliver them, fleets of warships, and thousands upon thousands of tanks, planes, artillery pieces, machine guns, and lesser weapons. State and local governments also possess considerable weaponry, though less than the federal government. But just the revolvers, rifles, shot guns, clubs, tear gas, and tasers in their possession are capable of causing serious injury and death, and frequently do so.

Moreover, the threat of deadly force is implicitly present in every law, regulation, ruling, or decree that emanates from any government office, at any level. The threat of such force is what compels obedience on the part of the citizens. Even such an innocuous offense as a parking violation is capable of resulting in death if a person persists in not paying the fine imposed and, when ultimately confronted with arrest, resists by physically defending himself.

[…]

It simply doesn’t occur to many people nowadays that government could be the source not only of massive economic ills but of human deaths on a scale dwarfing the deaths caused by the worst individual psychopaths. The number of murders attributable to governments around the world in the 20th century, including those resulting from government-caused famines in places such as the Ukraine and Communist China, is estimated to exceed 260 million. Of this total, Communist China is responsible for more than 76 million, the Soviet Union for almost 62 million, and Nazi Germany for almost 21 million (R.J. Rummel, Death By Government [New Brunswick, N.J., Transaction Publishers, 1994], note 1). Of particular note, approximately 2 million of the murders committed by Nazi Germany were in the form of mass shootings, similar in nature to those in Aurora and Oak Creek, but performed on a scale commensurate with the size of military units.

Even the most violent of gangs fail to hold a candle to the state when it comes to murder. If advocates of gun control really opposed violence they would be demanding the state surrender its arms before even looking at guns owned by private individuals. Needless to say, while the state maintains possession of its weapons private individuals must do the same. Without weapons we are at the mercy of the state and history has demonstrated that being at the mercy of the state is not good for one’s health.

Lawful Carriers of Firearms can Return to the Front of the Bus

It seems that the University of Colorado Chancellor, Phil DiStefano, wasn’t amused by Professor Jerry Peterson’s attempt to make students lawfully carrying firearms sit at the back of the bus:

University of Colorado Chancellor Phil DiStefano notified the Boulder campus faculty Tuesday afternoon that professors “do not have the right to shut down a class or refuse to teach” should they learn that one of their students is lawfully carrying a gun under a concealed-carry permit.

And, DiStefano added, any faculty members who do so will be in violation of their contracts and face disciplinary action.

I guess bigotry isn’t as pervasively loved at the University of Colorado Boulder as Peterson’s statement first lead me to belief. Thank you Chancellor DiStefano for having common sense and good judgement. Let me also thank Uncle for this story.

How to Handle Gun Buy Backs

Gun buybacks have always baffled me. First of all the name buyback is deceptive as it implies the person “buying back” the firearm was the original owner. Since the state was never the owner of the firearms it isn’t buying back firearms, it’s simply buying them. It would be more accurate to call these programs gun buys. More and more individuals are beginning to use the state’s “buyback” program against them. Following this proud tradition gun owners in Oregon attended a gun “buyback” and competed with the state by offering more money for firearms:

They were among a group of gun buyers who’d staked out periphery positions as a firearms “turn-in” took place inside the parking lot. The Ceasefire Oregon Education Foundation conducted the turn-in for four hours. Gun owners could turn in a weapon to foundation volunteers, who were assisted by Portland police with handling the weapons for eventual destruction. In return for each operable gun, owners received the gift card.

“I believe the majority of people would not show up here today,” said foundation volunteer Liz Julee, “if they did not want their gun removed from circulation.”

Obviously Julee doesn’t understand how markets work. People exchange only when they feel as though they’ll come out better in the end. Many people who turn in firearms at these “buyback” programs value the gift card more than the firearm that they never use. Few, if any, are attending because they want to get guns out of circulation (if that was what they wanted to do they could just destroy the firearms themselves). While Julee’s knowledge on the working of markets is lacking several gun owners used their knowledge of how markets work for fun and profit:

But a minority clearly knew that the price point began at about $80 cash to sell their weapons to West or to a handful of other buyers on the sidewalk. The group did not venture into the parking lot to solicit potential sellers, having been instructed by Portland police at last year’s event to keep their distance.

West, 22, traveled from Medford. One of his first purchases of the day, a Remington Nylon 66 22-caliber rifle, was for $20. He immediately resold it for $100 to another gun buyer, Darren Campbell of Salem, who recognized the firearm as worth potentially triple what he paid.

West and Campbell both said they were purchasing guns largely because of their resale value. Other buyers said they purchased guns on a principle — to prevent the firearms from going out of circulation — but all the buyers interviewed had at some awareness of the firearms’ true resale value.

In the end the seller of the Remington 66 was better off because he or she valued the $20.00 more than the firearm. West was better off because he valued the firearm more than the $20 knowing he could sell the firearm for more than he paid. The final purchaser of the firearm was better off because he valued it more than his $100. In the end everybody was better off, which is why markets are amazing.

It’s great to see the free market working against the state, especially when it comes to gun “buybacks.”

Possible De Facto Carry Coming to McLean County in Illinois

It appears as though de facto carry may be coming to McLean county in Illinois as the McLeon State’s Attorney General has stated he will not prosecute individuals who carry a firearm:

Bloomington, IL (Guns Save Life) – McLean County State’s Attorney Ron Dozier is set to announce publicly today, Monday, August 2o, to the media and residents of McLean County, Illinois, his decision not to prosecute Firearm Owner Identification Card holders who are arrested for merely possessing a concealed weapon in violation of Illinois’ prohibition on law-abiding residents carrying the means with which to protect themselves.

In essence, with Dozier’s decision, gun owners may be able to use their FOID card as a de facto carry permit in that county.

It’s nice to see that there are a few individuals working for the state that have common sense and the backbone to disobey the state’s decrees. Even though this is good news and I commend Dozier for his refusing to enforce an idiotic law the state has many ways to deal with dissidents:

His purpose in making the announcement, he cautions, isn’t to encourage folks to disregard the laws, particular pertaining to firearms, but to send a message to the Governor and legislators “who continue to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court decisions”.

Now, as we mentioned earlier, word of this announcement has been filtering around. Word has it the Illinois State Police is borderline apoplectic. “We can’t have a bunch of untrained people running around with guns!” seems to be their attitude. We know this statement is nothing but a canard as the Illinois State Police does not support private individuals with training above and beyond the average police officer carrying firearms here in Illinois.

Whether or not the Illinois Attorney General can and is willing to prosecute individuals carrying firearms in McLean Country would be interesting to know.

Carry Permit Holders to the Back of the Bus

Not only is the University of Colorado Boulder segregating permit holders into “separate by equal” housing but one of the university’s instructors has state he will cancel any class that is attended by a lawfully armed student:

The state Supreme Court has made it clear that the University of Colorado can’t stop students with concealed-carry permits from bringing their guns to campus. But the chairman of the Boulder Faculty Assembly says if he ever discovers that any of his students are armed, class is over.

CU physics professor Jerry Peterson — speaking for himself Monday, not the faculty group he leads — said he wants his students to feel safe to engage in classroom discussions that could be controversial.

“My own personal policy in my classes is if I am aware that there is a firearm in the class — registered or unregistered, concealed or unconcealed — the class session is immediately canceled,” Peterson said. “I want my students to feel unconstrained in their discussions.”

In other words if there are any “undesirables” attending his class Peterson will cancel it. I wonder if his list of “undesirables” includes more than permit holders. Will he cancel class if there are homosexual or minority students present? Perhaps he’ll cancel class if a Jew or Muslim is present. I’m curious to know just how far Peterson’s bigotry goes.

Peterson’s stance should be a boon to students who are unprepared for class. Any student who fails to complete an assignment on time or isn’t prepared for a test need only accuse his neighbor of lawfully carrying a gun, at what point Peterson will cancel the class and the unprepared student will buy himself time (by the way, if you’re attending one of Peterson’s classes I highly recommend doing this).

Segregation Never Left

People mistakenly believe that segregation was eliminated from our society with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Segregation never left, the targets have merely changed throughout time. Anybody on the sex offender registry, regardless of the reason they were put onto the list, finds themselves cast into areas outside of arbitrarily defined radiuses from school properties. Felons, regardless of the violation that put them on the felony list, find themselves segregated from gun stores and voting booths. Now, as Uncle points out, permit holders wanting to attend Colorado universities are now being tossed into “separate but equal” living spaces:

The University of Colorado Boulder today announced it is amending housing contracts to ask students who live in undergraduate residence halls and hold a Colorado concealed carry permit, or CCP, to forgo bringing a handgun to campus. The campus also will accommodate those who hold a CCP in a graduate student housing complex off the main campus, provided the permit holders store their weapon in a safe within their dwelling when they are not carrying it.

The university also is asking residence advisers and faculty who live in university housing to sign the same housing agreement as a condition of their residence in these facilities.

Emphasis mine. You have to love the language, holders of carry permits will be “accommodated” as if they somehow have differing needs than students that don’t holder carry permits. What is this really about? Control. The administrators of the University of Colorado Boulder don’t like guns or gun owners and, like any good statist on a power trip, demand the students comply with the administration’s desires. After being defeated in court the administrators had to change their tactics. The Colorado Supreme Court merely ruled that carrying firearms on campus couldn’t be prohibited, it didn’t say that students holding valid carry permits couldn’t be tossed into a ghetto off campus.

What can be done to fix this problem? Another court case could rule that students with valid carry permits can’t be segregated but that will merely require the school administrators to find another way to penalize permit holders. The root of this problem is the fact that school administrators can find out which students hold valid carry permits. Thus the real issue here is that a registry of permit holders exists. These registries need to be abolished and the right to bear arms must be acknowledged as an extension of self-ownership instead of a state granted privilege.

When All You Have is a Hammer

When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. That’s what a few doctors are proving in their advocacy to treat gun control as a public health issue:

Is a gun like a virus, a car, tobacco or alcohol? Yes say public health experts, who in the wake of recent mass shootings are calling for a fresh look at gun violence as a social disease.

What we need, they say, is a public health approach to the problem, like the highway safety measures, product changes and driving laws that slashed deaths from car crashes decades ago, even as the number of vehicles on the road rose.

One example: Guardrails are now curved to the ground instead of having sharp metal ends that stick out and pose a hazard in a crash.

“People used to spear themselves, and we blamed the drivers for that,” said Dr. Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine professor who directs the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California-Davis.

It wasn’t enough back then to curb deaths just by trying to make people better drivers, and it isn’t enough now to tackle gun violence by focusing solely on the people doing the shooting, he and other doctors say.

The analogy is flawed from the beginning. Take the given example of guardrails, they mention how people used to get impaled on them so the guardrails were redesigned. What do such incidents have in common with acts of violence? Little. We make changes in guardrails, automobiles, chainsaws, etc. safer to prevent injuries in accidents. Violence isn’t accidental, a person who initiates violence against another is making a conscious purposeful action. The shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin weren’t the result of a person failing to pay attention to trigger discipline and accidentally shooting people, it was the result of two individuals who decided they wanted to bring violence against their fellow human beings.

Between 1990 and 2009 the number of annual automobile accidents ranged from a high of 39,386 in 1990 to a low of 30,797 in 2009 [PDF]. Part of the reason the number of accidents resulting in fatalities has been diminishing isn’t due to stricter automobile control laws but increases in safety features. Such actions work when the result of fatalities are accidental in nature. When the actions are purposeful increasing safety features doesn’t work because individuals wanting to cause harm will bypass said safety features. Gun control is an attempt to create safety features around firearms in the form of background checks, mandatory mental evaluations, etc. and people willing to harm others will also bypass these “safety” features.

When the threat is purposeful action the only real way of protecting yourself is purposeful action. You can’t stop an enraged ex from killing you by simply passing a couple of laws. Killing people is already illegal so somebody willing to kill has already demonstrated a willingness to ignore the law. In such cases you must have a means of defending yourself, of taking purposeful action. When measures are put into place to control access to firearms they merely prevent those willing to obey the law from obtaining said firearms. In other words gun control puts the lawful at a disadvantage while advantaging the lawless. To compare gun control to redesigning guardrails, it would akin to welding six foot spikes onto guardrails once it was shown people were being impaled on the current design. The redesign would put those involved in collisions with guardrails at a disadvantage while not affecting those don’t collide with guardrails.

I understand doctors deal with health issues and therefore they are biased towards seeing everything as a health issue. In this case they need to take a step back and analyze the issue. Violence doesn’t stem from accidents or making poor health decisions, it stems from some people wanting to hurt other people. The failure isn’t on the patient’s end, there is seldom anything the patient can do to prevent it.

Minnesota GOCRA Releases Gun rights Ratings for Primary Candidate Elections

Minnesota’s primary election is going down tomorrow and many of you may be wondering where the candidates stand on the issue of gun rights. To answer that question the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (GOCRA) has released their gun rights grades for candidates in this state’s primary elections.

In a move that must have been specially crafted to reinforce my view of politics I notice that all three of the primary candidates in my senate district are rated F or F* (which indicates that the candidate didn’t care enough to actually fill out GOCRA’s survey and is usually a pretty clear indicator that the candidate has no love for gun rights). My house district faired a little better since only one of the two candidates have an F rating.

This Witch Hunt will be Interesting

Mr. Hwang had police officers draw firearms on him before arresting him because he was peacefully minding his own business. As it turns out Mr. Hwang is a lawyer, which means this case is likely to get very interesting:

Sung-Ho Hwang (pictured at left), a 46-year-old lawyer and president-elect of the New Haven County Bar Association, was arrested Tuesday night at an evening showing of the latest Batman movie at the Criterion. Three patrons saw him carry a gun into the theater and— on the heels of a mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo. screening of the same movie last month—called the cops. They swept into the theater and charged Hwang with breach of peace and interfering after he allegedly refused to obey orders to show his hands.

Arresting a lawyer that wasn’t doing anything illegal is a good way to find yourself at the business end of a rather nasty lawsuit. The article does state that Mr. Hwang was arrested for refusing to obey the police officers’ orders but those orders, which were for everybody in the theater to raise their hands and submit to a pat down, weren’t lawful and thus shouldn’t have been obeyed. It would be like your neighbor coming to your home and demanding you give him $50.00 for no reason at all. In such a situation you should rightly ignore your neighbor’s demands.

Adding a little spice to the story it appears as through the mayor of New Haven, Connecticut is a little despot:

At a 4 p.m. press conference Wednesday, Mayor John DeStefano and Police Chief Dean Esserman stood behind the cops and condemned Hwang’s behavior. DeStefano said people shouldn’t carry guns into dark movie theaters.

“Just because something is legal, doesn’t make it right,” DeStefano said.

Emphasis mine. Whether something is right or not has no relevance to this case, the only thing that matters is whether or not Mr. Hwang’s actions in the theater were legal. Since he possessed a valid carry permit it was legal for him to carry his firearm into that theater and therefore he shouldn’t have been arrested by the police. In fact I question the legality of sending police officers into a theater and having them demand every patron stand up, raise their hands, walk out of the theater in a single file line, and submit to a warrantless search of their persons. If anybody should be considered criminals in this case it’s the New Haven police officers.