Category: Gun Rights

Need Support

What is the Brady Campaign to do? They’re fighting a losing battle but the heads of their organization was to continue receiving pay checks to they keep trying to make themselves appear relevant. They need supporters but nobody seems to be willing to acknowledge them. So what can they do? Create sock puppet Internet accounts of course!

Yes the Brady Bunch are back to drumming up grassroots efforts… but making up multiple Internet accounts and using their copy and paste capabilities (obviously they’re not running Windows Phone 7, ZING!).

Trying to be Relevant

How cute the Brady Campaign is trying to be relevant again. This time Paul Helmke is saying the way to get women votes is to support gun control. Strangely enough I don’t know many women who support stronger gun control and I know more who are bleeding-heart liberals than not. Of course the Brady Campaign have no bias on the matter because they get their data from polls:

Similarly, a poll done of voters nationwide for the Brady Campaign by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, Inc. in the November 2008 election found that 83 percent of female voters supported “the passage of laws placing reasonable restrictions on guns” (something that 68 percent of male voters supported). Eighty six percent of women supported criminal background checks on all gun sales (79 percent of men supported this).

Women voters’ desires for tighter restrictions don’t stop there. Seventy three percent of women (and 63 percent of men) supported registration and licensing of gun owners. Seventy percent of women (60 percent of men) supported restrictions on military-style assault weapons). Sixty seven percent of women (63 percent of men) supported a waiting period of five days for handgun sales. And, 60 percent of women (46 percent of men) supported limiting the number of guns that can be bought at one time.

Yes I removed the link from the quote because it goes to the Brady Bunch’s website and I’m not giving them any traffic. If you want to think you can copy and paste it:

http://www.bradycampaign.org/media/press/view/1085

Let me see if I can find their bias here. Oh there it is, “Similarly, a poll done of voters nationwide for the Brady Campaign…” If you pay a polling company to do a poll they will get you the results you want. That’s just good business. They also play the fear card:

With more than 100,000 getting shot or killed by guns each year in this country, voters — particularly women voters — are looking for candidates who will work to reduce gun violence. Since the U.S. Supreme Court has made it clear that near-total gun bans are off the table, now is the time for candidates to propose and support common sense restrictions that make it harder for dangerous people to guns. This would be good policy — and good politics — particularly for those seeking to widen the “gender gap.”

Once again the link was removed because of my strict rule of not giving those fuckwits referrals. Here’s the link you can copy and past into your browser:

http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/gunviolence

You’ll notice it’s under the subcategory /facts which is an oxymoron coming from gun control advocates as anybody who’s read this site for any length of time knows. Notice how the quote says, “With more than 100,000 getting shot or killed by guns each year…” That’s important because they are including accidents and suicides in their statistics.

I think politicians will find the quickest way to get voted out is by supporting gun control. I’m sure most of the politicians still remember what happened the last time they supported the Brady Campaign’s agenda.

The Great Meme Machine

Wow, I can’t even begin to count the number of anti-gun memes in this article. Let’s count them shall we?

First we have the title which brings up the “big scary evil gun lobby that kicks puppies:”

ATF’s oversight limited in face of gun lobby

See that? The ATF’s oversight is limited because of the puppy kicking “gun lobby.” Those irresponsible lobbyists! How dare they work to defend a right confirmed in the Constitution this country was founded on! Meme two is the fact that there is no central database of gun purchases:

The government is prohibited from putting gun ownership records into an easily accessible format, such as a searchable computer database.

Most anti-gunners will claim such a database wouldn’t count as registration but it most certainly does. Any system that has a list of firearms sold and who purchased them is a registration system by default. Meme three is the claim that the ATF hasn’t the resources to complete this mission:

The agency still has about the same number of agents it had nearly four decades ago: 2,500. The firearms bureau inspects only a fraction of the nation’s 60,000 retail gun dealers, taking as much as eight years between visits to stores. By law, the ATF cannot require dealers to conduct a physical inventory to determine whether any guns have been lost or stolen.

Oh no! Not only can the ATF not handle the workload they already have but many guns are purchased from private entities (bonus points to the story writer who didn’t directly say “gun show loophole:”

Depending on how well a dealer keeps records, a firearms trace can take hours or weeks. But one-third of all gun traces come from the records of out-of-business gun dealers. In those cases, there is no one to call.

I’m going to just pull over for a side note and bring up this quote:

“Katrina was a mess,” Houser said.

Damn right it was! Katrina was a classic example of gun confiscation. The National Guard actually went in to New Orleans and stole peoples’ means of self-defense. Shit like this is a classic example of why gun owners are afraid of any registration system, then the government knows where to go to confiscate firearms. Of course this article wasn’t talking about that fact when they quote somebody saying Katrina was a mess. Oh no:

Gun dealers all over the Gulf Coast region were driven out of business by the hurricane, and they sent their wet and mildewing records to Martinsburg. For months, paper files sat in the center’s parking lot, drying in the sun.

The Mexico meme made a guest appearance in this article as well:

The difficulties at the tracing center have slowed efforts to trace guns seized from crime scenes all over the country – as well as in Mexico, where most of the seized weapons come from U.S. gun dealers, according to congressional reports.

Traces are most useful within the first few days, but it took the ATF an average of about two weeks to complete traces of firearms recovered in Mexico between 2004 and 2008, according to a congressional report last year on the ATF’s efforts to combat arms trafficking to that country. In addition, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General said the ATF doesn’t have enough Spanish-speaking personnel and has been slow in developing a tracing system in Spanish.

I wonder if the author was getting paid by the meme for this article. And yet again the author brings up the meddling gun lobby:

Meanwhile, the change requiring Senate confirmation for an ATF chief allowed the gun lobby to have a say on Capitol Hill about the agency’s leadership.

Yet another meme is the ATF doesn’t have the legal authority to fulfill its mission:

The ATF’s hands are often tied when it comes to regulating dealers, according to interviews with current and former agency officials, as well as thousands of pages of internal files obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

Yes those bastards have to follow the letter of the law! How horrible!

It’s impressive that the author was able to fit all that bullshit into one article. The only thing missing was a blurb about children.

Responsibility

The “unbiased” Washington Post has a survey posted on their website with the question being “Are gun stores responsible for crime?” Not only is this the question but some people actually are voting yes on it.

I’m completely flabbergasted as the idea that gun stores should be responsible for the actions of their customers. Although is cliche I’m going to use the classic car analogy. Should a car dealership be held responsible if one of their customers kills a kid while driving intoxicated? Almost nobody I know would answer yes to this but somehow some people feel the rules should be different for gun stores. What logic or sense is there in the idea of holding gun stores responsible?

In order for a gun store to sell a gun they must be a federally licensed dealer. Having a federal firearms license (FFL) is the de facto definition of being a gun store. When you hold an FFL there are certain restrictions and regulations put into place. First you must have every customer fill out an ATF Form 4473 which records the firearms sold, the firearm’s serial numbers, and the person information of the purchaser.

After this form is completed the FFL holder must call the FBI’s National Criminal Instant Background Check System (NICS) hot line and provide the information on the 4473 to the person on the other side of the line. With this information in hand the NICS is used to run a background check on the purchaser. There are three results possible from this; go, no-go, or delay. This means the FBI ultimately grants permission on all sales performed in gun shops.

Shouldn’t this be considered enough on behalf of the FFL holder? If you want to blame somebody else for the actions of a criminals why not blame the FBI? They ultimately approved the sale.

What I would like to hear is justification from somebody who thinks gun stores should be held accountable for the actions of their customers. This justification must also include reasoning why gun stores are special and should be treated differently than other stores (unless of course you believe all stores should be held accountable for what their customers do with items that have been purchased at the establishment).

Guns are the only things I’m aware of where people say sellers should be held accountable for the actions of purchasers. Every other thing on the planet is assumed to be an item of no conscious and the user is ultimately held responsible for any misuse. Hypocrisy pisses me off almost more than anything else.

Cars vs. Firearms

One common thing use pro-gun people like to state is far more people are killed each year in automobile accidents than firearms. The idea behind this is simple, since anti-gunners claim we need to control guns because they kill so many people then we must also strictly control automobiles. I’m doing some research into automobile fatalities (not in any way related to firearms) and decided since I have the data at hand I might as well do a comparison.

Behold the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration trend data (NHTSA) on fatal automobile accidents. Now behold the 2008 (chosen because 2008 is the latest data on the NHTSA website) Unified Crime Report expanded homicide information. Specifically I’m looking at the FBI data on weapons used in homicides.

Since the FBI data only goes from 2004 to 2008 that’s what we’ll stick with.

In 2004 9,385 people were murdered with firearms while 38,444 were killed in automobile accidents. 2005 showed a similar trend with 10,158 people being murdered with firearms and 39,252 people killed in automobile accidents. 2006 continues this trend with 10,225 people killed with a firearm and 38,648 killed in automobile accidents. Guess what happened in 2007? Same thing, 10,129 killed with firearms and 37,435 killed in automobile accidents. Finally we have 2008 where the trend continued as 9,484 people were murdered with firearms and 34,172 were killed in automobile accidents.

In the United States it seems the number of people killed in automobile accidents is a little under four times the number murdered by firearms. If anti-gunners are actually concerned about peoples’ safety they would be lobbying for stricter car control laws instead of gun control laws. Anyways that’s just an interesting observation I made.

That’s Impossible

Apparently an Al-Qaeda plot has been uncovered by I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E:

An al-Qaeda plot to carry out co-ordinated attacks in the UK, France and Germany has been uncovered, Western intelligence sources say.

Small teams of militants were to seize and kill hostages, similar to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, the sources said.

Sorry but that idea is completely impossible. The Mumbai attack required the user of firearms and firearms are strictly controlled in the UK, France, and Germany. Hey I’ve got an idea. Since gun control has worked so well at preventing mass shootings let’s make suicide bombing illegal! What didn’t anybody think about that?

We’re Moving Up in the World

Uncle notes that us gun owners are moving up in the world. How do we know this? Well is seems second amendment rallies make lists of terrorist-related threats:

Metcalfe’s annual Second Amendment rally, which attracts gun owners from across the state, was mentioned in an April bulletin to state Homeland Security officials by the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, a York-based nonprofit paid $103,000 by the state.

Remember kids standing up for your rights guaranteed by the laws of your country is a terrorist activity! Only a terrorist would demand that their rights, guaranteed by the country’s own laws, be respected.

Canadian Will Keep Wasting Millions of Dollars

Every Day, No Days Off informs us that our friends up north have decided to keep wasting millions of dollars on a point long-gun registry. This is both a blow to the civil rights of Canadian as well as a boon from criminals whom ignore the registry anyways and know any slight inconvenience for citizens self-defense is a convenience for crime.

If It Doesn’t Work Just Do It Again Only Harder

Snowflakes in Hell has informed us gun ban activists are at it again in Germany. A German woman went on a shooting spree killing four and injuring another 18. When strict gun control laws aren’t preventing shootings what’s the best way to deal with it? According to gun ban activists ban guns entirely.

I’ll never be able to wrap my head around the idiocy of these people. It’s been shown time and time again that enacting draconian gun control laws doesn’t prevent gun violence. In the real world where I operate most of the time when something doesn’t work we stop doing it and try to solve our problem in a different manner. If you’re using a hammer to pound in a screw and getting sub par results the answer isn’t to get a larger hammer but to get a different tool all together.

Gun ban activists seem to be believe if something isn’t working you just need to do it harder. German already has some of the strictest gun control laws on the books and they still have to deal with shootings every now and then. Britain which almost has a complete ban on gun ownership also have to deal with shootings periodically. People are going to go crazy and kill others. If somebody is willing to commit murder they’re willing to break gun control laws. Knowing these two things maybe the best option is to loosen gun control laws and allow people to arm and defend themselves. Obviously gun control laws aren’t doing a damned thing.