Uncategorized

Blaming the gun

Posted on by Caleb

The City of Gary, Indiana has an open lawsuit against Smith & Wesson, which is now being argued in the Indiana Court of Appeals.  The previous ruling by the lower court had held that S&W was protected by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act; however the judge that ruled that the act protected S&W also ruled that the law was unconstitutional.

Currently, the City of Gary is arguing that the law is unconstitutional, and that their lawsuit against S&W (as well as several other firearms manufacturers) should be allowed to proceed.

Now, a lot of my readers probably aren’t familiar with the Gary, IN area.  Allow me to educate you.  Gary is a regular contender for the title of Murder Capitol of America, pretty much every year.  The city is just riddled with poverty and crime, which is due largely to the fact that ever since the 60’s, US Steel (the primary employer) has been cutting jobs.  Education in Gary is a joke, as the test scores are some of the lowest in the state.

So with all the knowledge, why is Gary suing S&W?  Well, that would be because as you often see in cities overrun with crime and poverty, the “leaders” are all from the Democrat party.

I have a newly formed theory regarding Democrats in positions of power.  We all have seen and heard how that party panders to people in bad economic situations, saying that “we’ll help you”, etc.  However, I have come to the conclusion that the Democrat party only wants to help poor people just enough to get their votes, but not enough to actually help them not be poor any longer.

Which of course is why the City of Gary is suing S&W.  Gun is what you do when you don’t actually want to do anything.

Uncategorized

A good question

Posted on by Caleb

In the comments here, Mike asks the following question:

My wife had a trauma involving firearms also, and has not recovered yet. While working as an ER doc in Baltimore, she assisted on a case where a young man found a revolver in a park, took it home, was playing with it, and shot his younger brother. The gunshot victim got his chest and abdomen opened in the ER to stop bleeding – and died weeks later of overwhelming sepsis. Not something anyone would want to watch. She still won’t handle guns although she accepts that I have an interest in them. Any suggestions as to how to get her past her dislike of firearms?

I don’t have any easy answers to a question like that – for people who have experience the visceral impact of crime, and have personally witnessed the damage that can be caused by negligence and abuse, it is not easy to separate the thing (the gun) from the action.

I would offer the following advice though. Foremost, don’t push her. If she’s not interested in guns, don’t push her to go shooting, or drag her to the gun shop. At the same time, don’t let her blame the gun for what happened. In her particular case, the appropriate person to blame would be the asshole who left a loaded gun out where it could be found by anyone, and also the parents who didn’t teach their children to never play with guns.

Again though, don’t push her. Be gentle, and try to take whatever opportunities to gently reinforce that guns themselves are not evil or good, and posses no inherent will of their own. I would also recommend that your wife get counseling in a professional setting – dealing with the death of a child in a case in which a person is personally involved is not easy.

If you guys have any answers to Mike’s question, please post them in the comments.

My answers are the answers of someone who is not a medical professional; and thusly may be really bad.  All I can tell you is how I personally would handle the situation.  Honestly, I’d love to hear Dr. Helen‘s opinion on this.

shooting

You mean we’re not all white dudes?

Posted on by Caleb

Apparently, women are shooters as well.  This shouldn’t be a surprise to any of you guys, but I’m always tickled when I see a media outlet talking about women and shooting without devolving into the usual crying and PSH.  Stuff like this following excerpt makes me happy, because it represents good news for the shooting sports.

The Women on Target instructional and shooting clinic at Rose Valley this summer, a National Rifle Association event, was packed. Organizer Nina Neuron of Santa Paula said she had to turn away more than 40 women, adding, “And that’s when I stopped counting.” About a third of the roughly two dozen female participants, Neuron noted, had never fired a gun before.

I guess that kind of shoots holes in the perception that we’re just a bunch of suburban white guys.  I really can’t even begin to express how much I like it when I see women at the range – it helps me realize that our sport is actually growing, and we are successfully making our sport, our hobby accessible to new groups of people.  Near the end of the article is a really big nail in the coffin of another popular anti-gun statement.

Fuller said she never thought she’d enjoy guns. Her father committed suicide with a gun when she was 7, and she subsequently was afraid of them much of her life. But she started shooting about 18 years ago and liked it, especially as a stress reliever.

Now, I want you to take special note of this.  Ms. Fuller had a tragedy in her life that involved a gun; and if anyone has a reason to be biased against firearms, it would be her.  However, she overcame that tragedy and her own personal fears and in so doing has become (unknowingly) a fantastic ambassador for the shooting sports.  Ms. Fuller would stand out as a textbook example of there not being any lost causes; her courage in overcoming her personal fear alone makes her a model gun owner.

shooting

I can’t think of a title

Posted on by Caleb

For this entry, I really can’t.  My problem is that the subject matter is ridiculous, but it’s at the same time very serious.  The Winchester Canyon Gun Club has lost its legal rights to some land in the Los Padres National Forest due to the Department of Agriculture overruling a decision made by local officials to allow the gun club to continue using the land.

Now, if you’re wondering why the Federal Government is interfering with decisions made by local officials, it’s because the land has been claimed to be sacred ground to the Chumash Indians.   Now, I am all about respecting the religions of other peoples, and I certainly don’t think that we should go shooting up any sacred burial grounds, or areas that have archaeological significance.  However, in this case, I smell bullshit.

The reason I smell bs is because in May, the gun club had a full environmental survey done by the Forest Service.  That survey concluded that the Gun Club did not pose a danger to the environment or to visitors.  So, if the Forest Service says that the range is safe, why is there a push to close it?  Well, the simple answer would be because the push to “save the windcaves” is being driven primarily by the Sierra Club.

The Sierra Club has always been notoriously anti-hunting, and it would logically follow from that they are also anti-gun.  While there is no overt evidence of an anti-gun agenda here, closing the Winchester Canyon Gun Club would actually be a significant loss for the California shooting community, such as it is.

As of right now, the club is still open, and is operating off the Forest Service permit, pending an appeal of the Department of Agriculture.  The Secretary of the Department of Agriculture can be reached via this form, which I’m sure just goes to some flunky.  If you do write, be polite and concise.

Uncategorized

A question about NFA

Posted on by Caleb

Are black powder firearms subject to the NFA laws?  For example, say I hypothetically had a double barreled 10 gauge muzzleloading shotgun that I wanted to chop down into a replica of a Wells Fargo coach gun.

Obviously, I don’t want the ATF climbing up my ass, and before I go wading through the NFA for an answer, I figured I’d ask the intertrons.

So, any answers?

gun control

When reason doesn’t work

Posted on by Caleb

Then you have to appeal to emotion. The problem is that you know that if you call it an “appeal to emotion”, you’ll be verbally castigated from one end of the internet to the next by people like me. So, you need to come up with a new term. The term you come up with is “values-centered discussion”.

Same game, different name.

Values-centered conversations will embrace a strong sense of citizenship and a concern for the common good; if we frame questions around those kinds of values first and then around the issues we need to resolve, we may begin to get somewhere.

You see, and there is where the whole “values-centered” line completely breaks down. The people on opposite sides of this issue have completely different definitions of “good citizenship” and “the common good”. The “common good” as defined by the anti-gun crowd is essentially “get rid of all the guns”; they appeal to your emotions by saying that everything would “better” and “safer” if there were no gun.

You can use all the different buzz-words that you want, but none of it changes the simple fact that gun control arguments are based on emotion, and not reason.

Robb at Sharp as a Marble has a more in depth look at the article.

gun control

Two for the Price of One

Posted on by Caleb

HR 2640 stalls (again) and Mayor Bloomberg of New York is an idiot.  Both fascinating topics in one article.  On the first issue, it seems that the passage of HR 2640 has been stalled in the  Senate (again), but this time it’s for a decent reason.

But Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) questioned the $5.5 billion the Senate bill would funnel annually to help states automate their reporting to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.  “This bill authorizes more than $2 billion in new spending that is not paid for with reductions in other lower-priority areas of the budget,” Coburn said in a statement.

I suddenly like Sen. Coburn, because he’s doing exactly what an elected official should – question additional government spending.  Sen. Coburn’s objection is the first good reason I’ve seen that we should take a good hard look at HR 2640.  Not because I think it’s going to strip veterans with PTSD of their gun rights (because it’s not), but rather because it appears that it’s going to add even more expenses to the already bloated federal budget, without a clear method of paying for said expense.

I am in favor of this legislation on terms of principle – I don’t subscribe to Larry Pratt’s outrageous lies about this bill – but I don’t want to see additional financial costs without a method for covering those costs.   I still want the bill to pass, but I want it to pass correctly and be properly funded.

On to the Bloomberg issue: during his confirmation hearing for Director of the ATF, Michael Sullivan said that he does not believe that federal law does not bar him from sharing trace data with local law enforcement.  He is correct, inasmuch as the Tiahrt Amendment has never prevented the ATF from sharing trace data with local law enforcement.

…the acting director of the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told the Senate Judiciary Committee he does not believe federal law bars him from sharing gun trafficking data with local police agencies.

Of course, because Mayor Bloomberg is an idiot, he has to try and spin this his own way.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been critical of the ATF, saying it has impaired New York police investigations of the flow of illegal weapons into the city by refusing to share information on Virginia “gun mill” dealers.   “We welcome the policy shift by the ATF and hope they will commit to sharing this kind of information, which mayors and law enforcement have been calling for,” said Lindsay Ellenbogen, a Bloomberg aide.

See, it’s apple and oranges.  The ATF didn’t share data in those cases because there weren’t any crimes being committed; Bloomberg was trying to build up his lawsuit against certain gun shops.  The ATF has always been allowed to share trace information on crime firearms with local agencies.  Cops know that, which is why the Fraternal Order of Police supported the Tiahrt Amendment.