Why It’s Not Quite 1994

Some folks have said it’s like 1994 all over again. I disagree. There are many factors that are different. Some play in our favor, and some don’t. But the ones that do:

* We have better access to the media than we did in 1994, such as this Dave Kopel article in the Wall Street Journal illustrates.

* Back in 1994, the standard competition rifles were the M1A, the M1 Garand and M1 Carbine. If people owned a semi-auto, it was probably more likely to be a Mini-14 than an AR or AK. Today those have largely been replaced by the AR-15, except for specific Garand or Carbine competition.

* That leads us to numbers. We have more far people that would be affected by a ban today than yesterday. My fear is that many of these new owners are not politically initiated, and will likely spend their time panic buying rather than trying to stop the predators of their rights.

* Anti gun groups are much weaker, relatively, than they were in 1994. They fought us for a decade on the Brady Bill, and when the dam finally broke, they were very strong, and NRA was at a weak point. I think part of the urgency you see how is that many on the left know if they can make no headway in the aftermath of this, they are finished. Keep in mind the stakes for them are every bit as high as they are for us. This works both ways.

* The media, overall, is less influential. We have plenty of new outlets to express ourslves and communicate.

Gun owners need to be quietly influencing things on social media. I generally don’t do politics on my FB page; it’s a way to keep in touch with friends, family, and coworkers. I am open about being a gun owner and a shooter. I have been making a personal appeals on this topic since yesterday, without making it overtly political. Are you going to be around family these holidays? Talk. Don’t shout about your rights, and get angry. Make personal appeals. We have to talk our way out of this, not shout our way out. Make your family, friends, co-workers, etc know how much some of these proposals would affect you. Most people don’t know what it’s like to be a gun owner and a shooter, if they aren’t one themselves. Frame it as being like someone demanding you turn over your car, without being compensated for it. Or suggest you can’t ever buy the car you like again, or sell or trade your car in, because some drunk plowed into a bus full of kids and killed them. Imagine if when you said that wasn’t fair, you were told the whole thing was your fault anyway for for being a driver and having a car fetish. Don’t let them get away with, “but cars aren’t meant to kill people,” dodge. Make them imagine that reality as a hypothetical. Make them think about how that would make them feel. When they reach that understanding, if they are capable, you follow up with

“That’s what it’s like being a gun owner. I had nothing to do with this, but I am told I am to be punished because of the actions of a psychopath. It is not conceivable that this could ever happen with cars, because everyone owns them and is familiar with them. But this happens all the time to gun owners.”

I think even the most hardened, but thoughtful person, could be made to understand that.

Post to Twitter

Source

Video: “It doesn’t matter if gun violence is down”

Katie flags this quote from CNN anchor Don Lemon, who won’t allow facts to complicate his righteous public emoting about US gun laws (expanded transcript via Breitbart):

Listen, for the past three days, I have been on the verge of tears every second, and most of the people here have been crying 24 hours straight. Yes, we need to address mental health, but mental health in this particular issue — let’s not get it twisted — is a secondary issue. If someone who has a mental issue did not have access to guns that should only be available in war zones, we would not be dealing with this. Who needs a bullet piercing, armor piercing bullet to go hunting? Who needs an assault rifle to go hunting? You can’t even use the prey that you kill with an assault rifle if you indeed do it. no one needs an assault rifle to go out and shoot a deer. … That’s the issue that we need to deal with. So to say that gun violence is down does not make sense. To me, it’s insulting to everyone who lost a loved one here and who was dealing with that. It doesn’t matter if gun violence is down. 20 children are dead here and 6 adults are dead, and the mother of a person who was not mentally — who is mentally challenged in some way is dead. so to say that gun violence is down — we need to talk about mental health, yes. mental health is a secondary issue. We need to get guns and bullets and automatic weapons off the streets. They should only be available to police officers and to hunt al Qaeda and the Taliban and not hunt children.

Let’s set aside Lemon’s purported role as a newsman, and ignore the callow and manipulative implication that anguish alone somehow bolsters the legitimacy of an argument. Truth be told, I am among those Americans who are conflicted over guns and gun policy. In the immediate wake of Friday’s nightmarish slaughter, I tweeted some of the complex thoughts I’ve harbored on the subject for some time, drawing heated responses from both sides. On one hand, it seems indisputable that firearms — high-powered, high-capacity ones in particular — make these sorts of horrors significantly easier to perpetrate. Yes, other weapons have been used in acts of mass violence, but guns are an especially efficient tool to wreak human carnage. The body counts in Tucson, Aurora, and Newtown would almost certainly have been substantially lower if those deranged individuals were wielding knives, to pick one example (click the previous link and look for the death toll). On the other hand, there’s considerable evidence that higher gun ownership actually diminishes violent crime in the aggregate. I’ve also internalized the truth that malevolent actors will often find a way to get their hands on firearms one way or another, so disarming the overwhelmingly law-abiding public would amount to a unilateral disarmament — rendering innocents virtually defenseless in the face of in-progress gun violence. Waiting for the police to arrive mid-rampage isn’t much of a solution for imminent targets. It’s also a fact that strict gun laws do not magically solve the problem of gun violence. See, for instance, the horrific Chicago bloodletting. Indeed, the Newtown shooter reportedly used weapons that were purchased legally and dutifully registered by someone else (his mother), who lived in a state with restrictive laws. Should Congress pass the ‘Don’t-Let-Your-Psychotic-Son-Steal-Your-Guns-To-Kill-You-And-Others’ Act of 2012? What would that accomplish, exactly? And beyond these legitimate practical concerns, there’s also that pesky detail called the United States Constitution, and the individual liberties it enshrines.

Unlike many conservatives, I don’t reflexively bristle at the term “common-sense gun control.” The mere notion of placing some limits on the types of guns average people can purchase does not offend. Calls for legislative action to keep certain weapons out of the hands of mentally unstable people strike me as reasonable. I also recognize that myriad regulations along these lines already exist, and I’m skeptical that proposing more grief-fueled laws is a meaningful solution. And even if one could accurately project that passing Gun Law X would save Y number of lives, where do Constitutional rights come into play, and who gets to weigh those factors? If curtailing the First Amendment could also be scientifically proven to save some quantifiable number of lives, would we tolerate additional government limits on those core, specifically-enumerated freedoms? These are extraordinarily difficult questions. In fact, even the mental health discussions that crop up after these tragedies can lead down some worrisome paths regarding civil liberties and the public good. I’m heartbroken over Newtown, I’ve been grappling with these quandaries for days, and I admittedly have no clean answers. But as one of those citizens who does not hold especially dogmatic views on guns, I’m repulsed by Lemon’s emotionally-charged diatribe, which explicitly rejects empirical evidence. It’s dishonest and exploitive. It is troubling that many of the voices clamoring loudest for a “national conversation” about gun policy already seem to have their minds made up about what sorts of guns should be available, and to whom. If that’s how one feels, one should at least be intellectually honest and make open calls for sweeping bans and “confiscation.” Let’s see how that “conversation” goes.

This post was promoted from GreenRoom to HotAir.com.

Source

Why We Win

It really boils down to a difference in perceptions.

On the one hand, "gun control" fetishists gleefully dance in the blood of victims and exploit the murder of innocents to further their own, personal, unjust, totalitarian, anti-Constitutional dreams, as documented in the image to the right. (Highlights added to really bring out the crazy in those cultists’ eyes.)

On the other hand, we quite cheerfully and respectfully celebrate the lawful, peaceful defense of civil rights and the restoration of the same to an entire state of people for whom certain aspects of the United States Constitution might as well have never existed.

Now, tell me – to an outside observer, which group of people would appear to be the more rational, reasonable, well-adjusted, and positive? And which would be perceived as being destructive, irresponsible, and negative? Hm.

In other news, I am very thankful I am not the only person who considered the Portland, OR mall shooting yesterday to be remarkably… coincidental… what with it happening on the same day as the decision in Moore v. Madigan being passed down. Obviously I am not hypothesizing that "gun control" extremists keep spree shooters locked in a big pen until they are needed, and then release them into the wild to distract/detract from pro-rights victories; that would require more coordination and intelligence than those organizations are capable of. But I do think the media sees incidents like these transpire on the same day as something major like that court case, and think, "Oh, hey, this would make a great counterpoint; let’s blow this out of proportion!"

After all, more people were murdered in Chicago on the 30th than were murdered in the Clackamas Town Center on the 11th, but the former is the "gun control" capitol of the country, and we would not want to highlight the fact that such policies demonstrably do not work, now, would we?

(And for a dose of humor, that Michael Barkley character at the bottom, whinging about not being supported by his anti-rights cultist ilk? We have discussed him before, and apparently even his fellow fetishists think he is too far out in the weeds to really care about – he admits to coming in "a distant fourth" in his district. Poor baby.)

Articles Mentioned Here