Tag: Irrelevancy the Anti-Gunner’s Other Nightmare

So Long Helmke

Uh oh it appears the Brady Campaign president, Paul Helmke, is finally stepping down:

According to an article in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, Helmke said he’s leaving the Brady Campaign on good terms after what he considers “five years of positive work to promote its platforms as moderate, reasonable approaches to gun control.”

The article went on to say that Helmke hasn’t figured out what his next step will be. “I’m going to take some time to figure things out,” he said.

I’m betting money that Helmke has seen the writing on the wall and realizes his sweet Joyce Foundation money is likely to dry up soon as the ineffectiveness of the Brady Campaign comes more and more blatantly obvious. Not to mention nobody shows up for the Brady Campaign press releases anymore so he can’t even get his name out there by remaining president of the failing organization.

There isn’t much else to say besides good riddance and I wish it was the entire organization that was leaving, not just the president.

More Anti-Gunner Whining About Wisconsin’s Imminent Passing of Carry Legislation

The hysterics presented by anti-gunners would be funny if they weren’t so pathetic (by they I mean both the anti-gunners and their hysterics). Take for instance this article warning that Wisconsin’s (hopefully) soon to be enacted carry legislation will allow people to carry in parks and at the Milwaukee County Zoo:

“Milwaukee will be like the wild wild west,” Said State Rep. Elizabeth Coggs. “To think that you can take a gun to a park, a bar, a daycare center, the zoo … it’s ridiculous.”

Coggs is correct in that the bill could turn Wisconsin into the Wild West, but it would be like the real Wild West [PDF] not the Hollywood portrayal most anti-gunners seem to have. Of course the anti-gunners are panicking because law abiding citizens will be able to carry at several venues that they like to frequent:

Under the bill, any free outdoor festival without gates does not have the ability to prohibit concealed weapons. That means guns could be present at events like Bastille Days, South Shore Frolics and the Locust Street Festival.

The inability to prohibit concealed weapons would also affect lakefront fireworks displays.

I’m sure Wisconsin will have the same trouble with people being able to legally carry concealed weapons at their open air festivals as the other 48 states who allow some form of carry have. That is to say Wisconsin won’t have any trouble at all.

Here’s the thing Wisconsin, you’re the late comer to the party. Although it has sucked for your citizens it does offer one advantage; you get to see the affects of enacting carry legislation in other states. When you look at each state that has continued to liberalize (the classical definition of the word) their carry laws you’ll notice a pattern of zero increase in violent crime and in many cases a decrease. You will also notice that there have been no apparent cases of arguments between somebody legally carrying a firearm and a third party that escalated to a shooting fight (at least if there has been such a case the anti-gunners haven’t reported on it).

I’m just glad that fewer and fewer people listen to whining anti-gunners. They’ve been crying wolf so long that people no longer take their prophecies of gloom and doom with and amount of seriousness. The difference though is unlike the kid who cried wolf the anti-gunners’ prophecies won’t come true.

In Lieu of Real Arguments the Brady Campaign has Resorted to Falsely Claiming Gun Owners are Drunkards

You have to hand it to the Brady Bunch, they want to keep that sweet Joyce Foundation money flowing to avoid getting real jobs and they’re willing to use any tactic to retain that funding. The Brady Campaign released a “research” paper that concludes basically that gun owners are drunks and thus can’t be trusted with firearm. So what’s wrong with their research? Well for starters the data was cherry picked so heavily that they could make millions on a harvest. The “report” makes the following claim:

Altogether, 15 474 respondents provided information on firearm exposure. After adjustment for demographics and state of residence, firearm owners were more likely than those with no firearms at home to have ≥5 drinks on one occasion (OR 1.32; 95% CI 1.16 to 1.50), to drink and drive (OR 1.79; 95% CI 1.34 to 2.39) and to have ≥60 drinks per month (OR 1.45; 95% CI 1.14 to 1.83). Heavy alcohol use was most common among firearm owners who also engaged in behaviours such as carrying a firearm for protection against other people and keeping a firearm at home that was both loaded and not locked away.

In many states that allow for a right to self-defense drinking while carrying is a big no-no. Here in Minnesota you can carry so long as your blood alcohol level remains no higher than .04 (half of the legal limit for driving). Combine those facts with the fact that carry permit holders are some of the most law-abiding people out there and you can put the puzzle together. As the rate of crimes committed by carry permit holders is generally lower than other people and carrying while intoxicated is heavily restricted or completely prohibited in most states you can logically conclude that there are few people able to legally carry a firearm who carry while drunk.

The article on No Lawyer – Only Guns and Money also point out the fact that Utah ranks dead last on the Brady Campaign’s list of freedom hating states yet is mostly Mormon and Mormons have a prohibition against alcohol consumption. Thus there seems to be a lack of correlation between the Brady Campaign’s rating of “safe” states and alcohol consumption (and thus less opportunity for carry permit holders to carry while intoxicated). Oh and Utah has an extremely low rate of alcohol-related deaths to boot.

Basically if you cherry pick your numbers well enough you can create a report that says anything. If I worked hard enough at it I could release a report that demonstrates a correlation between being anti-gun and being a Nazi sympathizer.

I find hit hilarious though that the Brady Campaign can find any factual numbers to back up their claims that more restrictive gun laws lead to safer communities so they’ve resort to simply trying to run a smear campaign against gun owners. The next report they release will probably demonstrate how gun owners like to kick babies and murder cute baby bunnies while torching retirement homes. After that they’ll probably resort to simply calling us poopy-heads. Honestly you guys at the Brady Campaign should just quit before you embarrass yourselves any further. There is nothing bad about admitting when you’re wrong, we’ve all made mistakes. The difference is admitting your failures allows you to keep your dignity while attempting to do everything possible to avoid admitting failure just makes you look petty and pathetic.

A Blueprint for Not Getting Elected

Do you want to run for Congress but ensure you don’t get elected? If that’s you then Mike Barkley is the man for you to emulate because he’s ensured that he’ll never get elected:

Now the Manteca resident is seeking the Democratic nomination for Congress with his primary campaign platform being the repeal of the Second Amendment and any pre-existing doctrine of natural law, common-law or laws under state constitutions that allow the right to keep and bear arm.

Barkley, though, has no qualms with individuals exercising the privilege to possess weapons to protect themsleves. To address that he’s proposing a constitutional amendment that would impose an annual tax on every firearm in a household. Taxes would start at $10 for the first firearm, $20 for the second firearm, $30 for the third firearm, $100 each for the fourth through ninth firearms and $1,000 each for any firearm in excess of nine.

Granted he’s running for California which is one of the only states where a person with such a position could possibly get elected but even there I doubt such a candidate would get elected (Californians please don’t take this as a challenge, I don’t need to have yet another reason to hate politics in your state). But repealing the second amendment and taxing the ever living shit out of gun owners isn’t the only stupid thing Mr. Barkley is recommending:

And under his proposed amendment should a firearm be lost or stolen it would result in a $1,000 penalty with the penalty rescinded or refunded if the firearm is recovered. But there’s a big caveat to that: If the firearm is used in the commission of a felony then an additional $1,000 penalty will be imposed.

Isn’t that a great position to have? First you turn the victim of a crime into a criminal by fining a victim of theft for the actions of the thief and then fine the victim again if the criminal performs another crime with the stolen gun. Hell with rock solid logic like that we’ll be looking to fine car owners if their vehicle gets stolen next.

Honestly with positions like this I don’t see Mr. Berkley has a legitimate candidate for Congress but I found these ideas stupid enough to be funny and thus worth posting about here. This is the kind of crazy shit anti-gunners come up with. They have such a hatred and/or fear of a mechanical device that they wish to punish everybody who owns one. Not only are they willing to take away our right to defend ourselves but they also want to turn victims of crimes into criminals.

It’s absolutely sickening to me that somebody would advocate punishing a victim of a crime. What’s next? Are we to fine people $1,000 because they were mugged? Should be fine the family members of murder victims? How far would such stupidity have to be carried before anti-gunners realized the idiocy of their concept?

Either way have fun not getting elected Mr. Berkley. Oh and your personal website (linked to in the article as I won’t link to that crap here) is shittier than mine which isn’t easy to pull off considering my lack of web design capabilities.

Oops

It seems the Coalition to Stop Gun Ownership (Fucknuts) is having some problems with their Twitter account… namely it’s not there because they got their stupid asses banned. As you could see by my last post Fucknuts were “outing” gun bloggers by posting personal information. My life and identity are fairly public thus this didn’t concern me and I even tried helping them out by ensuring they posted about the correct Christopher Burg. Many gun bloggers like to have a semblance of anonymity and thus were none too happy with the shenanigans being pulled by Fucknuts.

Linoge took a few seconds to inform Twitter of the harassment being performed by Fucknuts and lo and behold their Twitter account went away. It seems Twitter isn’t very happy about the whole posting of private information thing. Too bad Fucknuts but it seems as though your attempt of winning through harassment isn’t nearly as successful as our winning through factual information.

I also would like to applaud Linoge’s method of dealing with these idiots. The e-mail he sent to Twitter was factual and to the point. Unlike the anti-gunners we pro-gun individuals prefer not to resort to lying to accomplish our goals.

EDIT: 2011-06-19 11:06: Corrected a couple of grammatical errors pointed out by my editor-in-chief Nicole.

Congratulations Arizona

A huge congratulations needs to be given to Arizona as they have finally managed to score a perfect zero on the Brady Campaign anti-gun scorecard:

Gun-rights activists called Arizona’s ranking proof that they are successfully protecting gun rights, and they vow to continue their efforts. Gun-violence-prevention groups said it’s proof that the state is continuing to move away from the values of most Arizonans.

With the current legislation moving through Minnesota we’re trying our best to catch up with the great example being put forth by Arizona. Although I doubt we’ll be able to achieve the same score anytime soon I promise us gun owners are doing everything we can to ensure that we receive the best possible score.

A Difference in Numbers

I mentioned that the National Rifle Association (NRA) Annual Meeting had 71,139 people attending and was curious how many people attended anti-gunner rallies. It seems Snowflakes in Hell was good enough to give us the skinny on an anti-gun protest that was somewhat near the NRA Annual Meeting.

According to Bitter there were somewhere between 200 and 250 protesters. I’m a fan of using worst case scenarios so we’ll assume 250 protesters were there. Put into perspective if the protesters had attended the NRA Annual Meeting they would have composed only 0.35% of the people there. Put another way we had 284.556 times as many people attending our event as they had attending their event. We decimated them as far as numbers go which isn’t surprising.

Walmart Bringing Guns Back

Unlike a large number of people I know I personally have nothing against Walmart. Walmart got to where they are today without exploitation of government regulations to push out their competition which means as far as I’m concerned they got to where they are through legitimate methods. It seems the people running Walmart have decided to bring guns back to many of their locations. I chose this specific news article because the author gets one point right:

Why does the same store that sells baby clothes and books like Organic Gardening for the 21st Century think its customers will want rifles, shotguns, and ammunition? Because Americans love guns. And Walmart thinks they can sell them to us.

Whether you like Walmart or hate them they got to where they are today by doing one thing; they offer products that people want for prices people are willing to pay. Yes they use their clout to strong arm suppliers into providing goods at a price Walmart wants to pay but that’s how business works. This part is kind of funny:

The retailer is already the biggest firearm and ammunition vendor in the country. Having more gun-stocked Walmarts probably won’t influence local violence, though it may put some mom and pop gun stores out of business (that liberal complaint is still valid!).

Walmart is unlikely to push any gun store out of business because of the poor selection of firearms. When Walmart used to sell firearms the only things they had on hand (at any Walmart I went into at least) were shotguns and hunting rifles. There were no handguns nor military pattern rifles. Both categories of firearms are very popular and unless Walmart changes their previous stance local gun shops have nothing to worry about.

I also like the fact that Walmart is going to sell guns against because it gives me something else to shove in the faces of those anti-gunners.

Bias Survey Finds Biased Results

Need a complete non-shocker for today? Apparently the Violence Policy Center have released a definitive survey which shows gun ownership rates are down:

Almost one-third of U.S. households report having any guns in the home — the lowest level ever since the survey began in the 1970s, a survey indicates.

The report by the Violence Policy Center is an analysis of data from the General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The report says household gun ownership peaked in 1977, with 54 percent of households reported having any guns.

What this actually means is the rate of people willing to tell those idiots at the Violence Policy Center that they own firearms has gone down. A good chunk of gun owners are very private people and we’ve become more private about what we own as politicians have been trying to take those possessions away from us. If somebody contacts me and asks if I own firearms I don’t even respond but simply hang up. What I own is my business and the business of those whom I’m willing to inform.

I’m sure the National Rifle Association (NRA) could do a similar survey and get completely opposite results. Surveys are just quick methods of getting whatever results you desire, nothing more. In order to create an authoritative piece of research you need to be able to verify your results with something more than what somebody answered on a questionnaire.

What is even more interesting is the fact that the rate of National Instant Criminal Background Checks (NICS) have been quite high leading to the fact that the number of people buying firearms from federally licensed dealers has been increasing.