Logic an Anti-Gunner’s Worst Nightmare – Page 18

Man Harassed for Possessing a Standard Capacity Magazine

Norwalk Police wrote a summons for Tyrone Watson, 30, of Bridgeport, on Sunday for possession of a large capacity magazine on or after Jan. 1, 2014, that was obtained prior to April 5, 2013. His court date is Jan. 17.

An officer stopped Watson’s vehicle on Water Street at 1:25 a.m. Sunday, because the officer felt that Watson was tailgating him, police said. The officer let Watson’s car pass, then pulled him over, police said.

While trying to find his license and registration, Watson took out his pistol permit and quickly put it back, according to police.

The officer asked if Watson had a weapon on him, and Watson replied that he was carrying a gun, police said.

The officer secured the handgun for the duration of the motor vehicle stop and while making the pistol safe, the officer noticed that the pistol had 11 bullets in its magazine and none in its chamber, police said. The magazine had a capacity to hold 15 bullets, according to police.

A portion of Connecticut’s new gun laws, which went into effect Jan. 1, make it illegal to have a magazine that holds more than 10 bullets. Large capacity magazines purchased prior to the passage of the new law had to be registered by Dec. 31.

With the simple change of the data a gun that has been legally carried by a man became illegal, at least in its standard configuration. Now the man will have to waste his time and money trying to defend the fact that he continued to use the specified equipment for his carry piece. Another arbitrary government decree causes another innocent person to be harassed by the state’s thugs.

Fun with Stereotypes

I love stereotypes. Kevin at The Smallest Minority posted a great quote posted by somebody who doesn’t judge books by their cover:

(A)s soon as I learn that someone owns a gun, and is pro-gun ownership without heavy regulations, I totally judge them to be uneducated and conservative. Responsible or not, having a gun comes with a mentality of thinking it is ok to buy a killing device. I am happy to do that, because I have yet to meet an intelligent, well educated person who is pro-guns in real life.

The problem with stereotypes is that they suck for making accurate assessments of people. For example, I consider myself a dirty leftist liberal because, as an anarchist, I favor radical change. While I don’t consider myself terribly educated my friends and acquaintances have described me as such. For the purpose of this post I will defer to their opinions since the topic at hand is how one individual judges other individuals. As other seem to believe I’m intelligent I effectively smash the stereotype held by the person quoted above.

As a gun owner I know many fellow gun owners. Most of them are very intelligent people. If I had to stereotype gun owners, which I’m only doing here for the sake of discussion, I would say that they tend to be very practical individuals. What I mean is that the gun owners I know tend to be very good with their hands. If need advice on building something or somebody to build me something I check with my gun owning friends first. Likewise, if I’m having trouble with an automobile, plumbing, wiring, and other practical matters I tend to ask my gun owner friends first. In addition to having a great deal of practical knowledge they usually have a great deal of historical and legal knowledge. I spend a great deal of time discussing history and legal matters with my gun owner friends as those are topics that tend to interest us.

The person quoted above claims that he has never met an intelligent pro-gun person. With his preconception of gun owners I can see why. In all likelihood he disassociates with anybody who is pro-gun in order to maintain his confirmation bias. Unless you’re willing to associate with people who oppose your viewpoint you’re probably never going to get to know them well enough to determine their level of education.

Double Standard of Laws Barring “Mentally Ill” from Possessing Firearms

One of the big gun control drums being beaten today, often by both gun control and gun rights advocates, is barring people who have suffered a mental illness from ever possessing firearms. But we know that the state is hypocritical so any law prohibiting those who have suffered a mental illness from possessing a firearm will be a double standard that benefits the state. In fact Pennsylvania just demonstrated that fact:

Pennsylvania State Trooper Michael L. Keyes is in an odd situation.

When on duty, he can carry a gun.

Yet while off duty, he is barred by law from possessing any firearms, because seven years ago he suffered from deep depression, repeatedly tried to kill himself by taking drugs and was involuntarily committed for mental health treatment.

Keyes’ latest attempt to be allowed to have a gun all the time was rejected this week by the state Superior Court.

It’s important to point out that the officer suffered from deep depression. Since depression is something you can overcome, and his freedom from a mental institute indicates he has overcome it, there is no reason he should still be prohibited from owning firearms. But the double standard here is what is most interesting.

Based on this situation I am lead to believe that the state believes that anybody who wears one of its issued costumes is instantly cured from any mental ailment… until they remove that costume. Obviously that’s a ludicrous belief so I’m lead to believe something more logical. In all likelihood the state has no issue with the mentally ill possessing firearms so long as they’re using those firearms to hurt people who disobey its decrees. In fact anybody willing to kick in a random door and shoot a dog because the occupants were accused of possessing a plant is probably suffering from some form of mental illness already.

When you demand that the state prohibit the mentally ill from possessing firearms remember that it will only prohibit the mentally ill outside of its employ from possessing firearms. The state exists on hypocrisy. Its only law is that rules are for thee, not for me. It is the reason politics has never solved a social issues in the history of humanity and never will. Whenever it issues a decree to fix a social issue it always exempts itself from that decree.

Open Carry Sensationalism

Have you heard the news? Us gun owners have discovered a new way to instill fear into the hearts of men! How? By advocating for the ability to openly carry a firearm. OK, it’s not a new strategy. Some of us have been open carrying for quite some time now. And it’s not a strategy meant to instill fear. But if you read Salon’s latest gun control article, and knew nothing about open carry laws, you would be lead to believe that gun owners are fighting for open carry laws so they can scare grandmothers and little children:

The debate over open carry is the new front line in the battle over gun rights and public safety in American culture. In Texas, Florida, South Carolina, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, gun rights activists have been staging protests, demanding broader liberty to display their guns in public rather than keep them concealed under clothing. Major candidates in statewide elections have voiced support for open carry, asserting that the conspicuous display of firepower will deter crime. For decades, though, social scientists have studied the way people behave around guns, and they’ve found that all of us — not just criminals — will be affected by seeing guns in our everyday environment.

This is pure sensationalism. We already live in a society where guns are openly carried by people. These people are called cops and they’re responsible for killing eight times as many people as terrorists. In fact the number of Americans killed by cops has surpassed the number of Americans killed in the Iraq War. We’re not only exposed to people carrying firearms every day but those people have a rather violent history.

Let’s discuss carry permit holders for a second. Compared to carry permit holders cops are three times more likely to murder somebody. Here in Minnesota the rate of murder and manslaughter committed by carry permit holders is .542 per 100,000 whereas the rate for the general population is 1.78 per 100,000. So people should actually feel less threatened by permit holders openly carrying firearms than by the general population sans firearms.

If seeing a person openly carrying a firearm instills fear or aggression I haven’t noticed it even though I’m always openly carrying a firearm while biking. Nobody cares nor have people made any attempt at avoiding me on the trail (in fact I get asked for directions with notable frequency).

Open carry is already normalized in American society thanks to the police. The article sites a 1967 study to argue that people act more aggressively when in the presence of a gun:

Even when you’re not holding a gun, you can be psychologically affected by seeing one. Since 1967, researchers have been observing the “weapons effect,” a phenomenon in which the mere presence of a weapon can stimulate aggressive behavior. Of course, a person doesn’t respond to a gun the way a cartoon bull reacts to the matador’s cape; we aren’t spontaneously enraged every time we notice a firearm. But empirical research has repeatedly shown that when people are already aggravated, seeing a gun will motivate them to behave more aggressively.

Imagine you’ve volunteered to participate in a study on a college campus. You arrive to find the lab somewhat cluttered: There’s a badminton racquet and some shuttlecocks on a table. The researchers tell you to ignore that stuff — it’s for a different study. They hook you up to a machine that administers electric shocks, and hand the controls to another participant like yourself. He zaps you. Repeatedly. (He’s secretly part of the research team, following specific instructions — but as far as you know he’s just being a jerk.) Now it’s your turn to zap him. How many shocks will you administer?

Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage repeated this experiment with 100 male students at the University of Wisconsin, sometimes replacing the badminton equipment with a revolver and shotgun (or no stimulus at all). They found that participants administered more electric shocks when in the presence of guns. According to Berkowitz and LePage, the weapons were “aggressive cues.”

There’s a major flaw in that study’s methodology. How a person perceives a gun sitting on a table is likely to differ from how he or she perceives a gun carried on a person. If this weren’t the case then police officers would find themselves constantly dealing with more aggressive than average behavior. Most people, when dealing with a police officers, tend to act less than aggressive. The primarily reason for that likely stems from the fact that aggression is unwise when the other person has the ability to defend him or herself. As Robert Heinlein wrote in Beyond This Horizon, “An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” A good example of this may have been a time period often cited by gun control advocates: the Old West. Unlike portrayals in Hollywood and claims by gun control advocates indicate, the Old West was quite peaceful (at least until the federal government started grabbing for more power in the region). Openly carrying firearms during that time period wasn’t uncommon yet the rate of violence was quite low.

Openly carrying a firearm isn’t anymore dangerous for a society than secretly carrying a firearm. The manner of carry isn’t important, the people carrying are. In our society firearms are openly carried by law enforcement agents, who have higher rate of violence than the average carry permit holder. Our civilization hasn’t collapsed due to this. Civilization also hasn’t collapse in states where open carry is legal. Advocating to legalize open carry in other states isn’t a dangerous new strategy being used by us gun nuts. It’s an acknowledgement that legalized open carry hasn’t negatively impacted any state so there is no justifiable reason to prohibit the act elsewhere.

Carrying a Firearms is Apparently a Gateway Crime

Remember when your teachers tried to scare you away from cannabis by claiming it was the gateway drug? Supposedly smoking cannabis would lead to your also snorting cocaine, dropping acid, and injecting heroine. Following that line of thinking Garry McCarthy, the Chicago police superintendent, had something to say about those of us who carry a firearm:

Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy says that’s more than any major city and he says if you can reduce weapons you will reduce crime.

“Carrying a loaded firearm is the gateway crime to committing a murder,” McCarthy said.

If that’s the case then receiving a badge must be a gateway crime as well because it seems that the Chicago Police Department has a rather interesting history of criminal behavior [PDF].

In all seriousness I do understand McCarthy’s attitude. Police officers often seem to have a desire to commit murder and other violent crimes. Were I surrounded by police officers every day, especially Chicago police officers, I would probably hypothesize that carrying a gun is what drives their desire to commit violent acts. But when you’re not involving in the police machinery the picture looks quite different. Most non-state agents who carry firearms are quite peaceful.

Exploiting the Mentally Disabled to Enforce Gun Control

When people develop the attitude that the ends always justify the means the doors open for some really heinous acts. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has developed a history of questionable actions during its existence. Recent revelations with Operation Fast and Furious, where the ATF and other federal agencies provided firearms to Mexican drug cartels, show just how wicked the agency’s enforcement methodologies have become. But I believe it has outdone itself. This time the ATF tatooed a mentally disabled teenager and used him in a sting operation:

They would even pay him and a friend $150 apiece if they agreed to turn their bodies into walking billboards.

Key, who is mentally disabled, was swayed.

He and his friend, Marquis Glover, liked Squid’s. It was their hangout. The 19-year-olds spent many afternoons there playing Xbox and chatting with the owner, “Squid,” and the store clerks.

So they took the money and got the ink etched on their necks, tentacles creeping down to their collarbones.

It would be months before the young men learned the whole thing was a setup. The guys running Squid’s were actually undercover ATF agents conducting a sting to get guns away from criminals and drugs off the street.

The tattoos had been sponsored by the U.S. government; advertisements for a fake storefront.

The teens found out as they were arrested and booked into jail.

Statists often ask who would take care of the mentally disabled without a government. I want to know who is protecting and providing for them now. The state seems to have a knack for exploiting the mentally disabled in its never ending quest to control our lives. This case not only shows the state’s willingness to exploit the vulnerable but also how corrupt the ATF has become. None of the high ups in charge of approving operations decided this idea was too extreme? Is the agency really operated entirely by psychopaths? Judging by the actions of the agency over the last several years I’m left to believe that it is.

Ironic Gun Control Propaganda

The more irrelevant “major” gun control advocacy groups become the more apparent their desperation to be noticed becomes. Linoge retweeted the following propaganda piece put out by Moms Demand Action:

The irony is almost thick enough to drown in. Let’s consider what Moms Demand Action is, well, demanding. The organization has been pushing several gun control initiatives including a renewal of the “assault” weapon ban, a ban on standard capacity magazines, universal background checks, and a ban based on an arbitrarily selected bore diameter (one half of an inch). What do all of these things have in common? They requires the government to use its guns to enforce. In other words Moms Demand Action are trying to use the government’s guns to restrict the rights of Americans.

Advocates of Gun Control Create a Sandy Hook Shooting Simulator

I guess the imminent demise of gun control is starting to get to some of its advocates. They’ve apparently suffered a mental snap and have decides to create a game that allows players to reenact the Sandy Hook School shooting:

A new pro-gun-control game allows players to reenact last year’s Sandy Hook elementary school massacre.

The game, The Slaying of Sandy Hook, has players to carry out a bleak, stylized version of the shooting, which took the lives of 20 children and six adults. Players take on the role of Adam Lanza, the perpetrator, and text boxes prompt them to pick up a Glock pistol, move into the bedroom of Lanza’s mother, Nancy, and shoot her four times, just as Lanza did in real life. They are then directed to pick up an AR-15, ammunition, and Nancy Lanza’s car keys.

The game then moves to Sandy Hook Elementary where players have an 11 minute time-limit to kick in classroom and bathroom doors and slaughter students and teachers as they flee or cower on the ground. There are no voices or music; the only sound effects come from gunfire and bullets impacting bodies. When prompted, players may also end the game by committing suicide.

I’m not sure what the message this game is trying to send is. After first I assumed it was simply a cry for gun control. But the fact that the game has a “gun control mode” that allows you to slaughter students just as handily has the “uncontrolled gun mode” leads me to believe otherwise:

The game also has a “gun control mode,” which allows players to attempt to carry out the massacre using a katana—after sarcastically challenging the player to open a gun safe—and suggests that Lanza would have been able to break into the school anyway if a sledgehammer “happened to be . . . available.”

Maybe the message here is that gun free zones are ineffective. It makes sense. Without a means of responding to initiators of violence schools are at the mercy of anybody with violence in their heart. It doesn’t matter if an evil doer walks into a school with a gun or a katana, they effectively have free reign until police arrive. That message seems detrimental to the mission of advancing gun control so I can only assume the creators of this game suffered a lapse of judgement.

Be Sure of Your Target

I’ve been thinking over the story of the 13 year-old shot by police for holding a pellet gun. Officers hit the teenager seven times out of a believed eight rounds fired. At first this lead me to one of two possibilities. Either the officer took glee in unloading rounds into the teenager or he had poor shot placement.

But another thought has crossed my mind regarding this incident. Since a police officer performed the shooting many people, including advocates of gun control, seem willing to assume fault on behalf of the teenager. We have little more than the officers’ words to go by since the teenager is dead. After 30 years of living on this planet one of the lessons I’ve learned is that police officers aren’t more honest than other individuals. In fact I’ve found that police officers are quite often dishonest. I’m not willing to simply believe the officers’ stories. Even the outcome of the investigation may be in question because the same organization that shot the teenager is performing the investigation. Having a monopoly on law enforcement and justice has its benefits.

Now let’s assume that the person who shot the teenager wasn’t a police officer but an average Joe with a carry permit. Do you think people would be blaming the teenager or the permit holder? My guess is that the permit holder would be the one receiving the brunt of the blame. We need only look at the shooting of Trayvon Martin to get an idea of how things may have gone down. Before any evidence was brought forth people would be calling for the permit holder’s head. The media would be reporting about how the horrible permit holder purposely shot the small child for no reason whatsoever. We would learn about how the kid worked at several local charities, excelled in school, and never did anything wrong. Every bit of dirt on the permit holder would be dug up and put under a microscope. The fact that the permit holder felt threatened by what he thought was a real rifle would be brushed aside. It would be written off as a lame excuse to get away with murdering a child in cold blood. Even if the evidence later exonerated the permit holder his life would be ruined by the media’s character assassination.

This is something to think about. As permit holders we are under far more scrutiny than police officers. While the average person, media, and courts tend to side with the police the same is not true for permit holders. I guess they believe that an officer’s costume and badge somehow make him morally superior to the common man. But my point is that life will be far different for us than it is for a police officer. While police officers get a paid vacation after shooting somebody we get to spend time in a cage. Media outlets will generally consider the evidence and explanations put forth by police officers after a shooting. As permit holders we don’t receive the same treatment. Ever grain of dirt will be brought out for the public to see.

The bottom line is this: we need to be absolutely sure of our targets. We have to be so sure of our targets that we’re willing to go to jail for the remainder of our lives over not defending ourselves. Equality under the law, at least here in the United States, is a myth. Police officers, as the state’s enforcers, receive special privileges that us serfs do not. Keep this fact in mind at all times and let it guide you in whatever manner you see fit.

The War on 3D Printers Has Begun

The United Kingdom has begun its war on 3D printers. Police in Manchester reported seizing parts for a 3D printable firearm:

British police have seized a 3D printer and components “suspected to be a 3D plastic magazine and trigger.” Police made what they’re calling a “milestone” discovery when executing a number of warrants in the Manchester suburb of Baguley late last night. The Greater Manchester Police Department says it’s the first seizure of this kind in the UK, where personal firearms are illegal without a hard-to-obtain permit. The parts have been sent for forensic analysis to establish if they could be used to construct a genuine firearm, and a man has been arrested “on suspicion of making gunpowder.”

In a prepared statement, Detective Inspector Chris Mossop called the discovery “really significant.” Mossop says that, if the components are genuine, “then it demonstrates that organized crime groups are acquiring technology that can be bought on the high street to produce the next generation of weapons.” He goes on to note that, as the components are plastic, they are easy to conceal and smuggle past current detection methods. “A lot more work needs to be done to understand the technology and the scale of the problem.”

I was fortune enough to attend a Sky Talk about the Liberator, the famous 3D printable handgun. The first thing anybody interested in 3D printable firearms should know is that the current technology is in the very early prototype stages. Plastic, as it turns out, isn’t the most sturdy material and firearms, being little more than controlled explosions inside of pipes, require a fairly sturdy material. Even if the Manchester police captured parts for a 3D printable firearm the bust wouldn’t have been significant. But they didn’t seize parts for a 3D printable firearm, which brings us to another issue police departments trying to enforce gun control laws are going to run into:

In what could turn out to be a major embarrassment for the Greater Manchester Police Department, the “3D-printed gun parts” could well be spare parts for a printer. Verge user Theobald02 points out that the parts look like upgrades to the Replicator 2 (the printer pictured above, which was also seized by the police). The “trigger” is part of an extruder, while the “magazine” is a holder for non-Makerbot filament spools.

3D printers allow for the rapid creation of new parts. This makes enforcing laws against manufacturing impossible to enforce. Police departments may seize 3D printed parts but will have no way to know exactly what those parts are meant for. Laws against thought are impossible to enforce and 3D printers are devices that effectively allow one to translate his or her thoughts into physical objects.

Make no mistake, the state is going to do its damnedest to crush 3D printers. The technology’s potential is too disruptive. If 3D printers became widely available they could destroy centralized manufacturing. Most centralized manufacturers are joined at the hip with the state. Those manufacturers provide the state whatever it needs and the state will protect those manufacturers from possible competition. This raid by the Manchester police is only the beginning. Thankfully, in the end, the state will lose. Suppressing a technology has never worked in the long run and it’s not going to work this time.