Tag: gun control

Interesting Information from the Trenches

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My favorite local Merchant O’Death reports:

So, three days after the shooting in San Bernardino and we still have ARs on the shelf. As a matter of fact, we have sold a whopping total of TWO ARs and have put one on layaway. No other type of “assault rifle” has left the shop. I have yet to sell a single hi-cap mag for any type of long gun. Still have plenty of .223/5.56, .308, 7.62X39, 9mm, .40, .45ACP, .380 auto, .38 Special…..hell, we have a lot of everything except .22LR and .22 Mag.

We have been really busy the last three days for sure. I would attribute that to the usual hustle and bustle of the coming holiday but I know better. I have yet to hear a customer say “I want to get my husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend a gun for Christmas….” Judging by some of the purchases I have no doubt that some of the firearms being bought are to be stashed under the tree. Most of them are obviously being purchased to be stashed in purse or pocket.

Compact, concealable handguns are making a mass exodus along with spare magazines/speed loaders and the attendant ammunition. The majority of the buyers are older folks, men and women, couples and singles The usual “tacti-cool” crowd are noticeable by their absence. A large proportion of the buyers are inquiring about CCW classes as well as basic firearms handling courses and public ranges.

While there is no sense of hysteria among our patrons, there is an increasing amount of concern being voiced. Not so much about the political climate but more about the fact that the shooters in California had links to terrorists organizations in the Middle East. I do sense a bit of shock in a lot of folks as if they have finally realized that the threat is very real and not just something that happens “over there”.

I would imagine that the SAR show in Phoenix this weekend is doing a land office business. I’ll be interested to see what Monday brings. I do believe that POTUS is going to address the nation tomorrow regarding the recent event. This should be stunning….

I wonder if Tam is seeing similar things in Indiana.

ETA, 12/10/15:  The Washington Post reports:

Read the whole thing.

How About “No.” Does “No” Work for You?

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So much for “nobody wants to take your guns.”

Seems the New York Times, Paper of (making up the) Record, found it worthwhile to put an op-ed on its front page for the first time in forever.  The topic?  Banning “assault weapons” – oh, wait, I’m sorry – “End(ing) the Gun Epidemic in America.”  Excerpt:

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection.

As was the Brown Bess musket, the 1903 Springfield, and now the AR-15. Your point?

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

Considering that our fellow citizens in Connecticut, New York and California won’t even register them, I think your idea of banning them is a complete non-starter.

So, how does “NO” work for you?

“…no political will in the country to address inner-city violence.”

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As I’ve said here and on other fora, if you really want to do something about homicide by firearm then you need to pay attention to who’s doing the killing, who’s doing the dying, and where it is taking place.  ProPublica has an article out, How the Gun Control Debate Ignores Black Lives, on this topic, and the title to this post is THE pullquote from it.

Some other choice selections:

In 2012, 90 people were killed in shootings like the ones in Newtown and Aurora, Colorado. That same year, nearly 6,000 black men were murdered with guns.

—

Mass shootings, unsurprisingly, drive the national debate on gun violence. But as horrific as these massacres are, by most counts they represent less than 1 percent of all gun homicides. America’s high rate of gun murders isn’t caused by events like Sandy Hook or the shootings this fall at a community college in Oregon. It’s fueled by a relentless drumbeat of deaths of black men.

Gun control advocates and politicians frequently cite the statistic that more than 30 Americans are murdered with guns every day. What’s rarely mentioned is that roughly 15 of the 30 are black men.

Avoiding that fact has consequences. Twenty years of government-funded research has shown there are several promising strategies to prevent murders of black men, including Ceasefire. They don’t require passing new gun laws, or an epic fight with the National Rifle Association. What they need — and often struggle to get — is political support and a bit of money.

—

Lost in the debate is that even in high-crime cities, the risk of gun violence is mostly concentrated among a small number of men. In Oakland, for instance, crime experts working with the police department a few years ago found that about 1,000 active members of a few dozen street groups drove most homicides. That’s .3 percent of Oakland’s population.

—

Two weeks after Obama unveiled his plan, (Pastor Michael) McBride and dozens of other clergy members, many of them from cities struggling with high rates of gun violence, met again with staffers from Vice President Biden’s task force.

The mood at the January 29 meeting was tense. Many of the attendees, including McBride, felt the president’s agenda had left out black Americans.

“The policy people working for Biden worked with the reality of Congress,” said Teny Gross, one of the original Boston Miracle outreach workers who now leads the Institute for Nonviolence Chicago. “What they were proposing to us was very limited and was not going to help the inner city.”

Gross said he “blew a gasket.” The clergy members in the room were pleading for help. “We bury hundreds of kids every year in the inner city,” Gross recalled them telling the administration representative. “Some of the solutions need to apply to us.”

A staffer said that the political will of the country was not focused on urban violence, several ministers who attended the meeting recalled.

“What was said to us by the White House was, there’s really no support nationally to address the issue of urban violence,” said the Rev. Charles Harrison, a pastor from Indianapolis. “The support was to address the issue of gun violence that affected suburban areas — schools where white kids were killed.”

The Rev. Jeff Brown, from Boston, was angered by the administration’s calculated approach. “When you say something like that and you represent the President of the United States, and the first African-American President of the United States, you know, that’s hugely disappointing,” he said.

It would seem that Obama’s a huge disappointment to a lot of people.

RTWT.  And especially the comments.

This is Interesting

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In 1998 the Massachusetts legislature enacted Chapter 180, a gun control law requiring residents to acquire a Firearms ID card before owning any weapon.  “Weapon” being defined as anything as or more potent than pepper spray.  The FID card application cost $25.  There was a pre-existing law requiring a “license to carry.”

That cost for the FID was raised in 2003 to $100.  Some time after that, the permit fee for chemical sprays was reduced back to $25, but firearms permits remained at $100.

As a result:

If the intent of the Gun Control Act of 1998 was to discourage the sport of hunting and competitive target shooting and to disarm Massachusetts citizens, it must be considered a howling success. In 10 years since its passage, the number of licensed gun owners has decreased from 1,500,000 to 220,000, an 85 percent drop, according to figures provided by the by the House Post Audit and Oversight Committee.

Of course, supporters of the law made claims like:

“Fewer firearms on the street makes life safer for everyone,” said Robert F. Crowley, Quincy’s police chief. “The average citizen who has a gun 24-7 I don’t believe has the experience, knowledge, and training to know when and if they should use a firearm.”

And

“Today, Massachusetts leads the way in cracking down on gun violence,” said Republican Governor Paul Cellucci as he signed the bill into law. “It will save lives and help fight crime in our communities.” Scott Harshbarger, the state’s Democratic attorney general, agreed: “This vote is a victory for common sense and for the protection of our children and our neighborhoods.” One of the state’s leading anti-gun activists, John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, joined the applause. “The new gun law,” he predicted, “will certainly prevent future gun violence and countless grief.”

And

The author of the law, state Senator Cheryl Jacques, was pleased that the Bay State’s stiff new restrictions had made it possible to “weed out the clutter.”

Nice to know that the majority of legal gun owners were considered “the clutter.”

But the reality?

If the intent was to reduce crime, then that law must be considered a miserable failure. Based on incidents per 100,000, gun-related homicides are up 68 percent, assault related gun injuries up 72 percent, assault related hospital discharges up 160 percent, gun assault Emergency Dept visits up 222 percent and gun assault outpatient observations up 538 percent. Keep in mind that these increases occurred when there were 1,280,000 fewer licensed gun owners in the state.

And:

Since 1998, gun crime in Massachusetts has gotten worse, not better. In 2011, Massachusetts recorded 122 murders committed with firearms, the Globe reported this month — “a striking increase from the 65 in 1998.” Other crimes rose too. Between 1998 and 2011, robbery with firearms climbed 20.7 percent. Aggravated assaults jumped 26.7 percent.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for gun-control activists to admit they were wrong.

We know better than that. The philosophy cannot be wrong!
 
But now there’s better news:

The number of legal gun owners in Massachusetts is growing. The 22News I-Team obtained and analyzed state data showing how many people have a license to carry from 2009 to September 2015.

378,642 people or one in every 14 adults has a gun license in Massachusetts. Up from 227,612 in 2010. A 66% increase.

Still a far cry from 1.5 million, but things are finally moving in the right direction again.

As always, the stated intent of “gun control” laws is to increase public safety, but the result of these laws is to disarm the general public, and public safety suffers.  After all, the mantra of The Other Side™ is that “the number of guns” in circulation is “the problem.”  Therefore “the solution” must be to reduce that number to a level indistinguishable from zero.

Never forget that.

Blocked at Quora.com

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Well, I’ve been temporarily blocked at Quora.com for violating their “Be Nice, Be Polite” policy.  Can’t post there until October 30.  In the mean time, I guess I can still post here!

If you’re unfamiliar, Quora is a site where anybody can ask anything, and anybody who joins up can respond.

Ran across this jewel over there and thought I’d share it.  The question asked was, “What will it take to radically change America’s gun culture?”  Like there’s only one.

Seems this guy thinks he’s struck upon something original.

Avoiding getting dragged into the gun control debate and attempting to answer your original question, I would say there are at least two options, both of which would be lengthy and difficult in application. First, like cigarettes, the government could embark on a long term effort of making gun ownership and gun use difficult and expensive, while propagandizing against equating guns with generally positive terms such as “liberty” and “freedom”, instead instilling in future generations the association of guns with negatives such as “murder” and “anti-social”. Realizing that a goodly number of people holding social and political power in the US are themselves gun nuts, you can imagine this is a remote possibility. Equally problematic is the idea of revolutionary change in the US which removes all notions of American exceptionalism, militarism and conservative ideology from popular thought.

Summing up, the two paths I see involve public “shaming” of gun people in the same manner as smokers are publically(sic) shamed today, or the active suppression of what I think are really defining characteristics of America: conservative ideology, religious ideology, fierce individualism, a tendency towards conspiracy theory, a preference for violence as a solution to social and individual problems, and mistrust of government. As you might guess, I’m not optimistic.

As Instapundit once said, “It’s pretty irritating, being shamed by people who have none themselves.”

He apparently doesn’t realize that his prescription is precisely how it was done in the UK.  I have to wonder, though, at what form his “active suppression” would take.  What’s most interesting to me however, is what he himself describes as the “really defining characteristics of America,”

  • Conservative ideology
  • Religious ideology
  • Fierce individualism
  • Mistrust of government 

You begin to understand Barack Obama’s appeal to people like him when Obama promised to fundamentally transform the United States of America.

They’re ashamed of it.  They hate it. 

So yeah, I do think they’re un-American.  They admit it themselves.