Tag: Gun Rights

Minority Gun Owners

The New York Times, of all publications, ran a well balanced article briefly discussing some of the issues minority gun owners run into:

INDIANAPOLIS — Standing in a small booth surrounded by displays for rifles, pistols, holsters and other firearm accouterments, the Rev. Kenn Blanchard signed copies of his book “Black Man With a Gun: Reloaded.” Amid the sea of thousands of white faces that descended on this city for the National Rifle Association convention in late April, Mr. Blanchard, an N.R.A. member since 1991, offered his reasoning for why he was one of the few black visitors.

“We still culturally have a fear that we’re going to be that lone guy out, and you don’t want to be the lone guy out,” he said, estimating that one in 100 people at the convention was black. “The exposed nail gets hammered.”

[…]

At a time when gun issues are volatile nationally and sales are increasing, minority gun owners — whether black, Asian or Latino — may feel that their weighing of the practical pros and cons of gun ownership comes up against the conservatism and unyielding stances of the N.R.A. and some other gun advocates. Mr. Blanchard said it could be a difficult balancing act.

This somewhat touches on the culture issues within the shooting community. Namely that it can be difficult for people who aren’t white male conservative Christians to get involved in the shooting. Some of this pressure comes from the established shooting community itself and some of the pressure comes from other peer groups. Many organizations that focus on issues primarily facing minorities have a tendency to be anti-gun. That makes it difficult for somebody wanting to work with those organizations to also be pro-gun.

Culture is a difficult beast to tackle. Most of us are members of multiple communities. Oftentimes those communities are complimentary. There are a lot of shooters who are involved in their local hunting clubs and churches. Likewise many people involved in the martial arts community are also involved in the defensive firearm community. Fewer people participate in non-complimentary communities not just because of the opposing ideals but also because of the peer pressure to not participate in “false religion”.

Less Guns, More Crime

Gun control ninnies constantly claim that more guns equates to more violent crime. On the other hand intelligent people know that the number of guns doesn’t have any effect on the amount of violent crime. Only the number of violent criminals can effect the amount of violent crime. A demonstration of this is Russia. NPR recently ran a piece that likely made a lot of people in the gun control community cry:

There are fewer than 13 million firearms in circulation in Russia, compared with an estimated 300 million in the United States. That works out to about 9 guns per 100 people in Russia and closed to 100 guns per 100 people in America.

The most recent homicide statistics for Russia show that there were 21,603 killings in 2009.

According to the FBI, the United States had 13,636 homicides in 2009 with a population that is more than twice as large. More than 80 percent of those killings were gun-related.

If you give a gun to a saint you have nothing to fear. If you give a gun to a demon you have much to fear. After the fall of the Soviet Union much of Russia was basically up for grabs. As the people lived their entire lives under a brutal regime many of them decided to emulate the fallen union and become brutal overlords themselves (many of them, not surprisingly, were form members of the Soviet government). It’s not surprising to see the violent crime rate in Russia remaining high considering the atmosphere of the country. And it’s not surprising to see the gun control ninnies eating crow once again.

Check Your Gun Control Privilege

If you can’t beat them, join them. The social justice crowd spends a lot of time talking about privilege. What started out as valid point, that is some individual in society do enjoy privileges over others (for example, as a white male I’m less likely to be the target of police brutality), has become a mechanism to silence any and all opposition. If you don’t agree with somebody you are automatically accused of being privileged and therefore are no longer allowed to have an opinion (which, in my book, would mean the other person has an opinion privilege).

As this mess has gotten increasingly absurd I’ve tried to avoid it as much as possible. But the more I think about it the more I realize that gun control is a form of privilege. Specifically it’s something that only those who the social justice crowd traditionally label as privileged can enjoy.

Consider Michael Bloomberg. He’s arguably the most influential advocate of gun control in modern times. Granted it’s pretty easy to be the most influential advocate of gun control when you’re a billionaire and can personally fund several gun control advocacy groups. But those billions of dollars allow him to fund something else: armed body guards. Bloomberg even has enough cash to pay for armed body guards for his fellow gun control advocates.

Gun control, as the name implies, is about controlling who can have access to firearms. One question that should always be asked when the topic of gun control comes up is who gets to decide who can own a gun. The answer is always the state. And who makes up the state? A president who enjoys a lifetime of Secret Service protection and millionaire white males. In other words most of the people deciding who can have a gun are the very people most social justice advocates point out as being privileged.

So gun control is great if you’re on the top of society. It just sucks if you’re not. Unless the state has deemed you worthy of possessing a firearm or can afford to hire people who have been deemed worthy to shadow you 24/7 you’re mostly reliant on the police for protection. That’s not a good position to be in as police response times increase. And if you live in poorer neighborhoods, places where people arguably need protection the most, you’re going to suffer even longer response times. The further you are from the top the longer it will take to get state protection, if you get it at all.

This brings me to the main point of this post. Gun control works for those who social justice advocates consider privileged because they control who can possess guns and can afford body guards. The rest of us are more or less on our own. Sure we’re given access to police officers who may respond to our call for help if they’re not too busy, tired, or hungry. But if you need immediate defense you’re screwed.

There are bad people in this world, which is unfortunate. But so long as those people exist the need for self-defense will likewise exist. Whether you like guns or not you cannot argue against them being effective tools for self-defense. They’re equalizers that render physical ability and skill mostly irrelevant. A woman bound to a wheelchair can effectively use a gun to defend herself against an athletic male who means her arm. An African-American male can effectively use a gun to defend himself against an armed police officer who is attempting to brutalize him. Any social, physical, racial, or gender privileges an attacker may enjoy are meaningless when his or her target has access to a gun for self-defense. Even targets suffering from most physical disabilities can render their attacker’s ableism irrelevant.

In the end it is the people who social justice advocates label as privileged thate are the primarily advocates of gun control. They are the ones who can decide who can have a gun. They are the ones who can afford armed body guards. They are the ones who can live under gun control without concern.

There Hasn’t Been 74 School Shootings

Advocates for gun control wouldn’t irritate me so much if they stuck to the truth. Granted if they did that they wouldn’t have a case for gun control but that’s another story for another time. One of Michael Bloomberg’s shell corporations, Everytown for Gun Safety, released a map that showed that 74 school shootings have occurred since the one in Newtown:

Tuesday’s school shooting in Oregon is at least the 74th instance of shots being fired on school grounds or in school buildings since the late-2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., according to a list maintained by the group Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for policies it believes limit gun violence.

The problem is the list is a lie:

Charles Johnson, a journalist and writer, started sorting through the list Everytown published. He spent hours yesterday on Twitter publishing his analysis, one by one. See below for embeds of his stream.

What he found is that the group was far off base in its classification of what constitutes a “school shooting.” Events that occurred after hours, accidental shootings, suicides, gang activity and even a shooting in self-defense somehow meet the group’s definition.

In the fine print of their report the group says, “Incidents were classified as school shootings when a firearm was discharged inside a school building or on school or campus grounds.”

So Everytown for Gun Safety took every incident of a firearm being discharged on a school property and labeled it a school shooting. I don’t understand why anybody takes anything gun control groups publish seriously. Time and time again it has been demonstrated that they either outright lie or twist facts until they fit their agenda. Oh well, for the time being the media and a lot of people will lap up their lies so I will continue joining the rest of the gun rights movement in pointing out those lies.

Why I Bike With a Gun

I’ve noted several times how I always carry a gun when I’m biking. Many people, who generally don’t carry guns themselves, find this behavior odd. They demand I justify my action to which I usually inform them that I have no duty to do so (My polite way of saying “Why? Because fuck you, that’s why!”). But Every Day No Days Off posted video of a mountain biker being robbed a gunpoint that pretty much makes my case for me:

You never know when somebody bad is going to target you or what reason they will target you. That being the case it’s usually a good idea to be a prepared as possible. The biker was lucky that the thief only took his bike. It’s not difficult to imagine the thief simply shooting the biker since they appear to be out in the middle of nowhere.

Women Must Be Tiring of the Patriarchy

Social justice warriors spend a lot of time complaining about patriarchy. Well it looks like women in Washington state have took those complaints to heart and have taken steps to smashing patriarchy:

Between 2005 and 2012, the number of state residents receiving new concealed-carry permits tripled to 62,939. Now some 451,000 Washington residents are allowed to carry a hidden handgun almost anywhere they go, more than 100,000 of them women.

Notably, the growth rate for women getting new permits is twice as fast as that of men.

The thing that annoys me about a lot of social justice warriors is that they spend a lot of time demanding equality but seem to scoff at the idea that guns offer exactly that. Oppression generally requires force disparity. In order to ensure compliance an oppressor must have greater force than the oppressed (this is probably why governments have such a hard-on for gun control). As soon as the oppressed can command equal or greater force then the days of the oppressor become numbered.

I’m also a firm believer that using one oppressor to combat another oppressor still leaves you oppressed. The common strategy for social justice warriors is to use one of the greatest oppressors of our time, the state, to combat oppression by men and whites (ironically though the state is mostly made up of white men). This doesn’t actually solve the problem of oppression. On the other hand if you give women the power to fend of prospective oppressors then patriarchy isn’t easy to achieve.

So fight the patriarchy, encourage women you know get carry permits and assist them in whatever they need to do so.

Target Target

After receiving a great deal of assistance from Open Carry Texas (OCT) the folks over at Moms Demand Action (MDA), a front group for Michael Bloomberg, have managed to get Starbuck, Jack in the Box, and Chipotle to issue statements requesting customers to not openly carry guns in their stores. Since this strategy has proven to be the only successful one in the group’s short history it is going all out with it. Now it’s targeting Target:

Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, the Michael Bloomberg-funded gun-control group that shamed Starbucks and Chipotle into asking customers to leave their guns at home, is setting its sights on the Target chain.

The group turned its focus to Target after gun-rights groups advocating open-carry laws in Texas photographed themselves shopping at Dallas-area Target stores toting rifles strapped over their shoulders.

“Moms have their eye on Target because it’s a place we take our children to shop — and we’ve been disturbed by some of the demonstrations that gun extremists have held with loaded rifles inside and outside some stores. Assault rifles have no place in the baby aisle,” said Erika Soto Lamb, a spokeswoman for the group.

If MDA manages to pull this one off it will finally get a store that I sometimes shop at to issue a request that customers not open carry firearms into its store. Of course that’s probably all the group will manage to achieve because even with people carrying rifles into store MDA hasn’t managed to get any company to issue an outright ban.

Overall I’m not too worried. But part of me wonders if OCT stops carrying rifles into private businesses, which it has said it will stop doing, if MDA will start doing so just to drum up the pictures necessary for its campaign. A good old fashioned false flag campaign would be fun to ridicule and MDA is just crazy enough to pulls such a stunt.

The Presidential Business Hit List

Regulatory agencies have for a long time been the tool of choice for the executive branch when it wanted to target things it didn’t like but didn’t want to wait for approval by the legislative branch. The current head of the executive branch has made no attempt to conceal his distain for guns so it’s not surprising to see that he sicced his dogs on firearm sellers:

The administration is using an anti-credit card fraud effort dubbed Operation Choke Point to go after legitimate businesses it deems “high-risk,” says a staff report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Internal Justice Department documents show that Attorney General Eric Holder was informed that small businesses were being hurt by the operation as banks dropped them and exited entire lines of business deemed “high-risk” by the government, yet his department has continued to pursue the operation, the report says.

[…]

The Washington Times has reported that several gun retailers have been dropped by their banks as a result of the operation — the most recent being Powderhorn Outfitters, a sporting goods shop in Hyannis, Massachusetts, which was dropped last week by TD Bank after a 36-year business relationship.

And gun stores aren’t the only organizations being targeted by Operation Choke Point. The Washington Times included a convenient picture that covers other so-called high-risk businesses that have cause the Department of Justice’s ire:

operation-choke-point

It’s pretty ironic that surveillance equipment made it onto a government list of high-risk merchants but I digress. While many people are focusing on the gun store angle specifically I think the take away from this story is that giving the state regulatory power is dangerous. Whenever something bad happens the government always steps in and offers to regulate that bad thing. If the Democrats are in power then self-proclaimed Democrats take the government up on its offer. If the Republicans are in power then self-proclaimed Republicans take the government up on its offer (even though they claim to want a smaller government). Neither side stops to consider the fact that their party won’t be in power forever and when the party in power changes those new regulatory powers will be used in a different manner.

Open Carry Texas Strikes Again

File this under the With Friends Like This Who Needs Enemies category. Hot on the heels of convincing Chipotle to request gun owners not carry their firearms into its stores Open Carry Texas went to work convincing Chili’s to consider the same:

Chili’s is reviewing its policy on guns in its restaurants after a pro-gun group upset diners by bringing rifles to one of its Texas locations.

The restaurant chain’s statement comes just days after another cadre of Texas activists, also carrying guns, prompted Chipotle to issue a statement telling customers that guns aren’t welcome at any of its locations.

Chili’s isn’t going that far yet, but the idea is on the table. “Given the recent attention to open carry laws, we are evaluating our policy to ensure we provide a safe environment for our guests and team members,” a spokeswoman for Brinker International, Chili’s parent company, told The Huffington Post.

Although it’s futile I will point out that Chili’s, like Chipotle, is a business interested in making money. Becoming a battleground for political issues is a detrimental to that mission. If you pick a side or even appear as though you’re thinking about maybe picking a side you’re likely to piss of approximately half of your customer base.

Luckily for us gun rights activists Open Carry Texas has officially revamped its activism strategy, which means the number of incidents like this will hopefully go down. But let this be a lesson to anybody involved in a political battle, leave anybody who doesn’t ask to be involved out of it.

Open Carry Texas Revamps Its Strategy

After brining gun owners the Chipotle fiasco Open Carry Texas has decided to revamp its strategy. Thankfully the revamping looks pretty intelligent:

For all further open carry walks with long guns, we are adopting the following unified protocol and general policy to best ensure meeting our respective legislative mission to legalize open carry:

1) Always notify local law enforcement prior to the walk, especially the day of.
2) Carry Flags and signs during your walk to increase awareness.
3) Carry the long gun on a sling, not held.
4) Do not go into corporate businesses without prior permission, preferably not at all.
5) If asked to leave, do so quietly and do not make it a problem.
6) Do not post pics publicly if you do get permission and are able to OC in a cooperate business.
7) Do not go into businesses with TABC signs posted with a long gun (Ever).
8) If at all possible, keep to local small businesses that are 2A friendly.

Points four and five are the big ones in my opinion. Businesses exist to make money. Anything that potentially interferes with that goal is undesirable. Politics is bad for business. No matter what your political stance is it will probably piss off half of your customer base. That’s why most businesses avoid making political statements, posting political signs, and otherwise be overt about political issues. When gun rights activists try to use a business for political gain it will cause unwanted backlash (as we’ve learned from Starbucks, Jack In The Box, and now Chipotle). Unless specifically invited leave businesses out of politics.

Kudos to Open Carry Texas for admitting it had a problem and doing something about it. Too many political organizations refuse to accept criticism and end up doubling down on their stupidity.