The BBC Takes an Interest in Tennessee Gun Laws

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The BBC Takes an Interest in Tennessee Gun Laws

I guess since the UK has enacted “the toughest gun laws in the world”, designed to “put a firm brake on the development of a dangerous gun culture in the UK,” they have to find their jollies vicariously:

Tennessee gun law divides opinion

By James Coomarasamy
BBC News, Nashville, Tennessee

Just an aside, but I’d really be interested in Mr. Coomarasamy’s personal take on being in Tennessee. Since Knoxville seems to be Blogger Central, perhaps one of the many bloggers there could put on their pajamas and interview him?

Following a recent series of high-profile shooting incidents in the United States, the southern state of Tennessee is changing its gun laws this week.

It is relaxing them.

If a last-minute legal challenge fails, from Tuesday, gun owners in the state will be allowed to carry their weapons in a lot more public places – including bars and restaurants.

I went to Nashville to find out what local residents thought about the proposed law change.

‘Seconds count’

Nikki Goeser takes her Second Amendment right to bear arms very seriously.

One of Tennessee’s 250,000 registered gun owners, she saw her husband, Ben, shot dead in front of her in April.

She believes her right was denied when she needed it most.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/external/player.swf
(Hooray for the BBC!)

I don’t believe Tennessee actually registers its gun owners – just the ones who have concealed carry licenses. Somehow I doubt Mr. Coomarasamy (or at least his editors) understands the difference.

Soon, Tennessee’s bars and restaurants will no longer be off-limits for registered weapons.

State legislators – a quarter of whom own firearms – have passed a law allowing guns into bars and restaurants, but preventing their owners from buying alcohol.

For the bill’s Democratic sponsor – State Senator Doug Jackson – it is a case of preserving the rights of individuals and those of individual states.

“People are fearful about tomorrow. They feel insecure. And the Second Amendment right is something that they cherish and it’s a means of protecting themselves and their family and defending what they have. It provides security in troubled times.”

But on the streets of Nashville, even some staunch defenders of Second Amendment rights fear that the Music City is about to become Dodge City. And that mixing guns and alcohol is a recipe for disaster.

Even though it’s not in any of the other states where it’s legal to do what Tennessee just enacted. Odd that Mr. Coomarasamy (or his editors) didn’t mention that.

Nashville restaurateur Randy Rayburn is anything but cool about the idea of his customers having guns.

He is leading a last-minute legal challenge to the law – to protect his barmen.

“Yes they’re scared, I’m scared, my wife is scared for our personal safety.”

He has done what restaurant owners are permitted to do – placed a sign in his window, saying “no guns allowed”.

But he is worried that the sign will not be enough to prevent people taking the new law into their own hands.

Er, what? Protect his barmen from what exactly? He expects CCW carriers to break the law, get drunk, and shoot the place up?

“We don’t need vigilantism inside my business,” he says. “I’m a gun owner, I have a gun at my home, but I keep it there, not at a public place where many people’s lives can be threatened.

Oh, right – vigilantism – he expects his patrons to pull out their gats and shoot bad guys for NO REASON. AND his barmen.

I think Nikki Goeser might want a word with Mr. Rayburn.

But Rayburn isn’t alone:

And he has support from the city’s police chief, Ronal Serpas, who does not believe that people who walk into bars with guns will steer clear of the shot glasses.

“If you think about how alchohol influences the choices people make… I don’t believe people are not going to drink and have guns, because I know they drink and drive,” he says.

“What process is going through their mind as it’s clouded by alcohol? [They’re] trying to do a good thing, but they have NO training, NO experience, NO time for reflective thought, and their minds are consumed by alcohol – it doesn’t make sense.”

So it’s Chief Serpas who believes that licensed CCW holders will violate the law and get drunk while armed, although up till now they’ve obeyed the law and not carried into establishments that serve alcohol. Always good to know what Law Enforcement thinks of the people it works for. In this case the Chief thinks that alcohol must give off the brain-altering waves that force people to drink.

Nikki gets the last word in the piece, though:

But for Nikki – and other law-abiding gun owners – what does not make sense is being allowed to have a gun, but being prevented from using it when it counts

“I hear people say all the time, guns are made specifically to kill,” she tells me.

“My answer to that is: ‘yes a gun can kill, but in the correct hands, it can be used to save innocent lives’. I don’t care so much about a bad guy’s life. I’m sorry, I don’t. They make the choice to be evil, that’s their choice. If they choose that, and I am armed I know what I’m doing, I will try to stop them.”

And soon she will be allowed to – in a lot more places.

Boy, it’s a good thing the UK has the toughest gun laws in the world, and doesn’t have to worry about people carrying handguns into restaurants anymore . . .

Gunman opens fire in restaurant

A man and a 15-year-old boy are recovering from bullet wounds after a gunman opened fire in a packed restaurant in west London.

Both suffered non-life threatening injuries during the shooting in Harry Morgan’s restaurant in St John’s Wood High Street, at 2110 BST on Friday.

The attacker, carrying two guns, chased the 31-year-old man into the diner and opened fire, hitting him in the leg.

But that’s UNPOSSIBLE!! The UK has the TOUGHEST GUN LAWS IN THE WORLD!!

The Metropolitan Police said no arrests have yet been made.

Because they arrived just in time to put up crime scene tape and take reports.

Several shots were fired in the venue which was filled with people.

Pop star Rachel Stevens was dining at the venue at the time.

A spokeswoman for the former S Club 7 member said: “Rachel and her family were in a restaurant where there was gunfire. It was very frightening for everyone there but none of the diners were hurt.”

An eyewitness said diners threw themselves to the floor screaming and bullet-holes could now be seen.

And, being unarmed, all they could to was huddle there waiting to die.

BBC chief economics correspondent Hugh Pym was also in the restaurant at the time.

He said: “I immediately went to ground and pulled my 15-year-old son under the table.

“We were aware of a guy running through.

“He didn’t appear as if he had a weapon – it felt like he was the victim.”

Pym continued: “We were under the table and everyone was shouting ‘stay down, stay down’.

“Obviously there was a lot of broken glass and people gradually emerged from the tables.

“People were pretty shaken up and were wailing in shock more than anything else.”

Billy Osbourne was also in the restaurant and saw the first man run in.

“Then all of a sudden a guy in a motorbike helmet came in – he had two automatic pistols and he starts firing at the guy.

UNPOSSIBLE! Handguns have been banned in the UK since 1997!!

“As soon as I smelled the cordite I was under the table.

“Everyone was screaming and hitting the deck.

“It was unbelievable – it was a packed restaurant and it does not appear anybody [among the diners] was hurt.”

The shooter was probably a lousy shot.

Harry Morgan’s was established in 1948 by a London butcher and has been shortlisted in the Evening Standard Restaurant Awards.

I bet they counted on a “Gun Free Zone” sign to protect their patrons, too.

Oh, right. The entire country is a “Gun Free Zone.” How’s that working out for you?

(h/t AR15.com for these two stories.)

Quote of the Day

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In the first decades of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of Clark, and an ambitious handful of others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided to bend government schooling to the service of business and the political state—as it had been done a century before in Prussia.

Cubberley delicately voiced what was happening this way: “The nature of the national need must determine the character of the education provided.” National need, of course, depends upon point of view. The NEA in 1930 sharpened our understanding by specifying in a resolution of its Department of Superintendence that what school served was an “effective use of capital” through which our “unprecedented wealth-producing power has been gained.” When you look beyond the rhetoric of Left and Right, pronouncements like this mark the degree to which the organs of schooling had been transplanted into the corporate body of the new economy.

It’s important to keep in mind that no harm was meant by any designers or managers of this great project. It was only the law of nature as they perceived it, working progressively as capitalism itself did for the ultimate good of all. The real force behind school effort came from true believers of many persuasions, linked together mainly by their belief that family and church were retrograde institutions standing in the way of progress. Far beyond the myriad practical details and economic considerations there existed a kind of grail-quest, an idea capable of catching the imagination of dreamers and firing the blood of zealots.

— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

Sixty Days Until GBR IV

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Sixty Days Until GBR IV

Time flies. Now it’s doing loops, Immelmans and barrel-rolls.

There’s only sixty days left before the fourth annual Gun Blogger’s Rendezvous!

Here’s an update:

The raffle for the Para GI Expert is almost set up. Soldier’s Angels will be running it on-line. Tickets will be $10 each, and the quantity of tickets will not be limited. YOU NEED NOT BE PRESENT TO WIN.

ALL OTHER PRIZES are for ATTENDEES (or their representatives) ONLY. And here’s some of the swag you may get from attending:

Another (as yet unrevealed) Para pistol

A Hi-Point 9mm Carbine – their newest and latest:
(They ended Battlestar Galactica too soon, I think.)

A range bag from Dillon

T-shirts from GLOCK and probably Brownell’s, and if last year is any indication, lots of gun lube, cleaning stuff, other T-shirts, gift certificates, etc., and maybe another gun. But you have to come to win this stuff!

Still, the best part of the Rendezvous is the people. Other attendees expected this year include:

KeeWee, from KeeWee’s Corner

Mr. Completely his own self.

Phil & David, from Random Nuclear Strikes

US Citizen, from Traction Control

Uncle, From Say Uncle

Ride Fast & the Commandress, from Ride Fast – Shoot Straight

Mr. & Mrs. JimmyB, the Conservative UAW Guy

Lou from Mad Gun

Derek from The Packing Rat

Rachel Parsons from the NRA

D.W. Drang from The Clue Meter

EJ from Engineering Johnson

Cap’n Bob & the Damsel

Mark Knapp from Firearms Lawyer

Maj. Chuck Ziegenfuss from From My Position – On the way and founder of Project Valour-IT.

Dirt Crashr, from Anthroblogogy

Chris & Mel Byrne, from The Anarchangel

Larry Weeks, from Brownell’s

Andy and Lance from HiCap Gun Works

Mark Knapp, Firearms Lawyer

and Guest of Honor: Alan Gura
So get off the stick and GET SIGNED UP!

Quote of the Day

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Back to The Underground History of American Education:

(George) Washington had no schooling until he was eleven, no classroom confinement, no blackboards. He arrived at school already knowing how to read, write, and calculate about as well as the average college student today. If that sounds outlandish, turn back to Franklin’s curriculum and compare it with the intellectual diet of a modern gifted and talented class. Full literacy wasn’t unusual in the colonies or early republic; many schools wouldn’t admit students who didn’t know reading and counting because few schoolmasters were willing to waste time teaching what was so easy to learn. It was deemed a mark of depraved character if literacy hadn’t been attained by the matriculating student. Even the many charity schools operated by churches, towns, and philanthropic associations for the poor would have been flabbergasted at the great hue and cry raised today about difficulties teaching literacy. — John Taylor Gatto

According to this source:

‘At a time when estimates of adult male literacy in England ran from 48 percent in the rural western midlands to 74 percent in the towns . . . adult male literacy in the American colonies seems to have run from 70 percent to virtually 100 percent . . . .’ (See Traditions of American Education, NY: Basic Books, 1977, and American Education: The Colonial Experience, NY: Harper & Row, 1970.)

Today? The National Assessment of Adult Literacy tests for three kinds of literacy: prose, document, and quantitative, described thus:

Prose literacy

The knowledge and skills needed to perform prose tasks, (i.e., to search, comprehend, and use continuous texts). Examples include editorials, news stories, brochures, and instructional materials.
document literacy example

Document literacy
The knowledge and skills needed to perform document tasks, (i.e., to search, comprehend, and use non-continuous texts in various formats). Examples include job applications, payroll forms, transportation schedules, maps, tables, and drug or food labels.
quantitative literacy example

Quantitative literacy

The knowledge and skills required to perform quantitative tasks, (i.e., to identify and perform computations, either alone or sequentially, using numbers embedded in printed materials). Examples include balancing a checkbook, figuring out a tip, completing an order form or determining the amount.

Per their 2003 survey, the NAAL concluded that 14% of the American population tests “below basic” for comprehending prose, 12% “below basic” for document comprehension, and 22% “below basic” for quantitative reading.

Twenty-two percent – more than one in five Americans over the age of 16 – were unable to ferret out the simplest mathematics from a piece of text. And we’ve spent how much on the “Department of Education” since it was created in 1980? Yet George Washington, who by age 11 had never set foot in a classroom, could – like nearly everyone else his age, regardless their class – read and do arithmetic.

But They MEANT Well

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But They MEANT Well!

Back in 1976 I was only 14 years old so my memory of this is non-existent, but perhaps some of my readers would remember it better. In ’76 there was another Swine Flu scare, and the .gov decided that it was imperative that everyone in the country be vaccinated. Tens of millions were.

Some developed side-effects that varied from mild, to permanently crippling, to deadly. Here’s a 60 Minutes segment on it from (I assume) 1979:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro1WL5ketWg&hl=en&fs=1&&w=560&h=340]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0aIoa97X5k&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&w=560&h=340]
Now, let’s get the pertinent parts correct: According to the 60 Minutes piece there was no pandemic. The vaccine given had not been tested, though the documentation given to the patients said it had. The forms the patients signed did not inform them of the (very slight) possibility of adverse reactions to the vaccinations. The government broadcast various “scary” and “everyone is doing it” commercials to convince people to get the shots, even going so far as to lie about who had received innoculations. Now in 1976 the .gov could only encourage, cajole, and browbeat people into getting vaccinated, and they weren’t above lying even back then. Now? Who knows? This time there really is a pandemic, though its lethality is still in question. If people start dying this time, what will the reaction be in Washington?

(Found at Dvorak Uncensored)

Quote of the Day

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And this one’s not from John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education for a change:

I understand good manners involve one side acting completely guilty and the other side acting completely innocent. I understand the protocol expected is for the righty-tighty to leap, chest-downward, on the grenade. I understand the expectation is to repeat the scene where Tom Sawyer gets the whipping so Becky whats-her-name’s glorious butt cheeks remain unscathed. I get all that.

I’m just tired of doing it. It comes down to something very simple. ONLY LIBERALS CAN PRESENT “FACTS” WITHOUT BECOMING EVIL. — House of Eratosthenes, “Tired of the Charade, Pretending it’s My Problem”

The topic was economics rather than guns and gun laws, but the principle is precisely the same. Some more:

I’m tired of ignoring the elephant in the room, and the elephant in the room is this: The abrasive thing I did was to present factual evidence incompatible with the desirable trope. I presented some hard numbers that would compel a newcomer to at least remain open to an alternative point of view. That was my infraction. And I’m tired of pretending otherwise. Did I mention how tired I am of it?

No 24-Hour TV Coverage, No Obituaries in News Magazines

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No 24-Hour TV Coverage, No Obituaries in News Magazines . . .

I found out today via Irons in the fire that Darrell “Shifty” Powers passed away on June 17 of this year.

Who is Shifty Powers, you ask? (Well, some of you, I’m sure.) Perhaps this will jog your memory:


That’s Shifty on the left, as played by Peter Youngblood Hills in the 2001 HBO mini-series “Band of Brothers.” A pretty good job of casting, as here’s what Shifty looked like back in WWII:


And here’s what he looked like just a couple of years ago:


Quite simply, Darrell “Shifty” Powers was considered to be the best shot in all of Easy Company with his M1 Garand.

Firehand found out by email, and I suggest you read the whole thing, but here’s the part that I want to emphasize:

Shifty died on June 17 after fighting cancer.

There was no parade.

No big event in Staples Center.

No wall to wall back to back 24×7 news coverage.

No weeping fans on television.

And that’s not right.

Let’s give Shifty his own Memorial Service, online, in our own quiet way. Please forward this email to everyone you know. Especially to the veterans.

Rest in peace, Shifty.

One other thing: In March of 2006 a very dedicated man did a very nice thing for Shifty. You might want to read that, too:

A Rifle for Shifty

Quote of the Day

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Quote of the Day

Might there be an instructive parallel between teaching a kid to drive as my uncle taught me to do at age eleven, and the incredible opportunities working-class kids like (Benjamin) Franklin were given to develop as quickly and as far as their hearts and minds allowed? We drive, regardless of our intelligence or characters, because the economy demands it; in colonial America through the early republic, a pressing need existed to get the most from everybody. Because of that need, unusual men and unusual women appeared in great numbers to briefly give the lie to traditional social order. In that historical instant, thousands of years of orthodox suppositions were shattered. In the words of Eric Hoffer, “Only here in America were common folk given a chance to show what they could do on their own without a master to push and order them about.” Franklin and Edison, multiplied many times, were the result. — John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education