Tag: Gun Rights

ATF Looking to Lose Some Funding

Some good news has been brought to my attention. Due to the overinflated national debt budget cuts are in the works and everybody’s favorite assholes, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF), are one of the targets:

About three weeks before the deadly shootings in Tucson renewed a national debate about gun control, the White House budget office proposed steep cuts for the agency charged with enforcing federal gun laws.

Does this mean the ATF won’t be able to afford these “studies” that determine what kind of shotgun is “sporting” and therefore legal and what kind of shotguns are super-concentrated-evil? I doubt it. I’m sure no matter how little money the ATF receives they’ll still find time in their busy schedules to stomp all over our rights. But it’s nice to see these assholes may not be receiving as much money to do so in the near future.

ATF Releases Study

Although it seems the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms Explosives and Fun (ATF) a little late Snowlakes in Hell let us know they finally released their shotgun study [PDF]. Surprisingly it seems Saigas may be safe.

There is some stupid shit in there. For example exhibit four talks about integrated rails. If your rail runs along the top of the shotgun it’s “for sporting purposes” while rails located anywhere else are apparently only for murdering people with our side mounted flashlight (flashlights are also an item on the “bad things” list). Forward pistol grips are apparently evil as are those horrible magazines that can store an arbitrarily high number of rounds (the ATF chose five to be the number of rounds useful for “sporting purposes”). Oh and mounts for grenade launchers are also a no-no.

Basically the list contains a ton of stupid shit, about what you expect from a government agency that only exists to bad things that are fun. Thankfully nothing on that list specifically prohibits the Saiga shotgun (it’s imported with a five round magazine).

The White House Looking to Lose the Next Election

I took a bit of time out of my busy day to mock the anti-gunners because Obama didn’t heed their call and mention gun control in his State of the Union address. Well rumors are circulating that the White House will be making a push for stronger gun control in a short while:

But in the next two weeks, the White House will unveil a new gun-control effort in which it will urge Congress to strengthen current laws, which now allow some mentally unstable people, such as alleged Arizona shooter Jared Loughner, to obtain certain assault weapons, in some cases without even a background check.

Who knows if this is true or not but you can be sure you’ll hear about it on the gun blogs if it is. I’m sure if a push is made they will be trying to perform the impossible and require the NICS system to detect crazy. I’d mention a potential ban on large capacity magazines may be in the works but McCarthy already showed those cards with her stupid ass legislation.

Keep your ear to the ground ladies and gentlemen, if there is one entity on the planet that can’t be trusted to do the right thing (not make more worthless gun control laws) it’s government.

Minnesota Looking to Repeal Permit to Purchase Requirement

It looks like some rare good news is making it’s way through Minnesota’s legislature. Apparently the Republicans want to earn their keep here right away and have proposed legislation to eliminate Minnesota’s permit to purchase law.

For those of you not familiar with Minnesota’s permit to purchase system it goes something like this. If you want to purchase a handgun or an “assault weapon” you need to either have a permit to carry or obtain a permit to purchase. A permit to purchase is a piece of paper you obtain from your local police headquarters. When you want to purchase a handgun or an “assault weapon” you need to go to your local police station and apply for a permit to purchase. After turning in your application there is a seven day waiting period while the police pretend to run more than a National Criminal Instant Background Check System (NICS) check on you. After seven days you return to the police station and they hand you a piece of paper that says it’s OK for you to have more than a shotgun or “hunting rifle” (unless you’re a prohibited person of course). Of course the permit is only good for a year after which you have to repeat this entire process.

This system is a huge pain in the ass and has needed the boot for a long time. Why does it need the boot? Well because you can’t get these permits outside of weekdays during normal business hours. I’m going to use a little example here to explain the problem with such a system. I have a friend who is unable to drive and works full time. This person is also a strong supporter of the right to keep and bear arms. In order for this person to purchase a handgun or an “assault weapon” a trip to the police station is required. This is quite the pain in the ass when you can’t drive and work during the same hours the police station is open. How does such a person obtain a permit? Well it usually involves having somebody else give them a ride which results in two people having to take time off of work, twice (the permit has to be picked up a week later as they won’t mail it to your home).

Although the story in the Red Star I liked to has people who claim the system prevents violence such claims haven’t been demonstrated in any way. The police are also against repealing the law:

The Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association and the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association both testified against the bill, saying it could strip them of their ability to do proper backgrounding.

Of course this has nothing to do with background checks, one is performed every time you purchase a firearm through the FBI’s NICS system. The police don’t want this repealed because it takes away something they desire, power over the peasantry. Some common sense did come out of the debates:

At one point, as legislators debated the recent Arizona shootings that left six people dead and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords severely wounded, Cornish said that the “bald-headed goon” arrested for the shootings probably would not have been stopped from buying a gun under the Minnesota law.

Exactly. The Minnesota system wouldn’t have helped catch that asshole. The seven day waiting period can’t detect crazy any better than other background check systems (which is to day background checks don’t detect crazy). I’m glad to see the new legislature is moving to repeal this worthless law. The law (which I’m not sure of the name of so can’t look it up, thanks Red Star) made it out of committee and will be moving through our legislature.

I hope to see more restrictions against our right to keep and bear arms repealed. Heck get rid of the Minnesota prohibition against suppressors and allow us to purchase machine guns with the requirement they be on the curio and relic list and I’ll most likely work to reelect you guys.

An Example of Burden of Proof

I love it when examples make themselves apparent. Shortly after I posted about the whole idea that burden of proof is on the accuser Uncle posted a story where the accuser presents not facts to backup their claim.

The claim made by Salon author Gene Lyons is, “Guns costs more lives than they save.” The numbers provided to backup that claim? Nonexistent. The author provides a couple of unverified (no link or description of where the story originated from) stories where police officers were shot in the line of duty. Oh and the author flat out lies about this:

Anyway, here’s the thing: In the wake of the Tucson tragedy, handgun advocates argue that a well-armed private citizen could have saved lives by putting a decisive end to alleged gunman Jared Loughner’s mad act. Never mind that Arizona has the most permissive gun laws in the country. Indeed, the killer had broken no laws until he shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at point-blank range.

Emphasis mine.

Actually he committed a crime when he purchased the firearm because he was a user of marijuana which legally prohibited him from possessing a firearm.

See how that works? I made a claim and backed it up with citations of evidence.

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).

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.

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.