I WILL NOT Register
Jay gives another example of why.
Tag: gun control
What’s Next, Expelling Students for Having Guns in the Home
Check the headline:
Now check the specifics:
WILLOWS (CA) — The Willows Unified School District board of trustees has expelled a 16-year-old for having unloaded shotguns in his pickup parked just off the Willows High School campus.
(My emphasis.) OFF campus. Not ON campus.
So what’s next? Home inspections and expulsion of students with firearms in their homes?
Quote of the Day – More Equal Edition
Quote of the Day – “More Equal” Edition
Last week, the body of Chicago school board president Michael Scott was found in the Chicago River with a single bullet wound in his head. The big story was that this powerful, well-connected public official had, according to the county medical examiner, committed suicide. The less-noticed story was that he did it with an illegal weapon.
—
Unlike most Chicagoans, Scott could have been a legal handgun owner. Because he had it before the ban was enacted, he was allowed to register and keep it. But the police department says he never did. By having it in the city, Scott was guilty of an offense that could have gotten him jail time.
Amazingly enough, he was not the first local public official to take the view that firearms restrictions are something for other, ordinary people to observe.
– Steve Chapman, Armed Pols: A Chicago Tradition, RealClearPolitics
Found via Extrano’s Alley.
Canada’s Long-Gun Registry is Doomed
Canada’s Long-Gun Registry is Doomed
Doomed, I tell you!:
Why I changed my mind about the long-gun registry
Patricia Dawn Robertson
Wakaw, Sask. — From Thursday’s Globe and Mail Published on Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009 4:44PM EST Last updated on Friday, Nov. 13, 2009 1:57AM ESTI’m not a hunter. I also don’t own a gun. Yet, after five years of residing in the country, I’ve radically shifted my position on gun control from pro to con.
Before you start humming the eerie banjo strains from Deliverance, hear me out. Not every rural resident is a gun-toting, liberal-baiting, paramilitary commando.
Nor are rural Canadians stand-ins for the laconic cast of Fargo. I’m a feminist, a progressive and an organic gardener, yet I support the Conservative bill to pull long guns from the national registry.
After many years of fighting to have long guns exempted, lobbyists are finally seeing some movement from Ottawa. Conservative backbencher Candice Hoeppner, the Annie Oakley of Portage la Prairie, introduced her controversial private member’s bill last week to end the long-gun registry. Its passage is a victory for rural Canadians. But why can’t they convince their dogmatic city neighbours that it’s a fair compromise?
In December of 1989, as the Montreal massacre unfolded, I was enrolled in women’s studies at York University. Like many Canadians, I wanted my government to do something.
Which is typical. As Congressman Adam Putnam put it, governments only do two things well: nothing, and overreact. The urge to “DO SOMETHING!” is overwhelming, when doing nothing is usually the appropriate response.
When the registry was introduced in 1995, I supported it. But, as an urban resident, I only saw the issue from that perspective.
And the population concentrated in urban areas – ignorant of wider perspectives – are almost uniformly Leftist. It’s a “captive audience” effect, I suppose.
The Prime Minister must make good on his promise to scrap the registry. The Liberal approach has proved to be an overzealous and ineffective strategy for fighting urban crime. Allan Rock’s bill was predominantly targeted at reassuring his urban base that city streets and campuses would be safe again. When the registry was first introduced, vocal opponents were dismissed as gun nuts, while the Liberals took the moral high ground in a misguided bid to reduce urban crime and violence against women.
I’m not the only feminist who identifies with the Annie Oakley demographic. I wrote a feature about gun control for the Western Standard in 2004, and my subjects, educated female hunters, loathed the registry. This bloated $2-billion policy proved to be a knee-jerk response to a deeper social problem – why wasn’t all of this money allocated to stem the flow of illegal handguns across the Canada-U.S. border?
This complex issue is at the heart of the urban-rural split in Canada. I’m living proof that it’s possible to be a New Yorker reader and a long-gun registry debunker.
What changed my mind about such a hot-button issue? Living side by side with Prairie farmers has been an invaluable lesson in tolerance. While urbanites fear the sound of gunshots on their streets, the sound of gunfire is as commonplace in the country as the roar of Cherry Bomb headers on an F-150.
Rural long-gun owners are responsible, respectable citizens, not criminals who need to be tracked and tagged. They use guns for pest control on their farms. They hunt deer and elk to fill the freezer just as urbanites stock up at Costco. For farmers, it’s a much harsher, frontier way of life.
And this is why it is crucial for the gun-owner demographic to not decline to the point where they have no voice in the political process, which has happened in the UK. “Normalization” of gun ownership is a requirement to maintaining that voice. People must see gun owners as “responsible, respectabl citizens, not criminals who need to be tracked and tagged,” and for that to happen they must be SEEN. When less than one-half of one percent of a population legally owns a firearm, that can’t happen.
Camo-clad hunters aren’t holding up 7-Elevens. These wealthy American sportsmen are the mainstay of Saskatchewan’s tourism economy.
The Daily Show mocks Sarah Palin for her hunting expeditions, but she’s right in step with the rural lifestyle. Self-sufficiency is the key to survival: Chop wood, carry water, grow your own food, hunt for protein, shingle a roof. In the country, a gun is another tool, like a reciprocating saw – not a weapon. Next, paranoid urbanites will demand that farmers “register” their eight-pound chopping mauls.
She even gets in a pro-Sarah shot! I’m shocked!
Common sense dictates that tracking hunters and farmers is not the answer. Why not target rejected engineering students, angry loners, frustrated WCB claimants or military personnel with post-traumatic stress disorder?
Because that would be profiling!
My own private citizen’s bill would propose a BlackBerry registry for urban nano-nerds who drive and text. They’re far more dangerous than that gun-toting Elmer Fudd of the Back Forty.
And she concludes with a shot at the Fudds! (Though I doubt she’s familiary with the term from a gunnie’s perspective.
When self-professed Leftist Feminists (but I repeat myself) oppose the registry, it’s toast, sooner or later.
I Repeat:
I Repeat:
I wish I could say I was surprised.
UPDATE: Reader “eeky” points out this earlier story:
Man accused of attacking DVLA inspector with broom walks free
Monday, September 29, 2008
A man accused of beating a DVLA inspector with a broom handle as walked free from court after claiming his alleged victim had exaggarated the incident.
Inspector Hayden Hart had claimed he was attakced my[sic] Paul Clarke, 26, as he patrolled Wood Street, Merstham, checking parked cars for out-of-date tax discs.
The inspector said he was clubbed repeatedly by his attacker, who warned him: “If you come near my vehicle again, I’ll break your f****** legs.”
But Mr Clarke, of Wood Street, Merstham, walked free from the Crown Court at Guildford after winning his appeal against conviction for assault by beating at Redhill Magistrates Court on March 12 this year.
Mr Clarke, 26, of Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, denied the offence, insisting he had never actually struck Mr Hart during the confrontation on June 12 last year (2007).
The court was told that Mr Hart was driving along Wood Street stopping to inspect parked vehicles to make sure that they were displaying valid vehicle excise licenses.
Giving evidence at the appeal hearing, Mr Hart said: “I had seen four vehicles which I was going to report for not having up-to-date tax discs.”
He said he was inside his Honda filling out the appropriate forms when he heard a loud bang on his window and looked up to see a young man.
Mr Hart said: “He was carrying a broom stick without the head on the end of it.”
He said the man appeared very aggressive and threatened violence against him.
“As I got out of my car to ask him what he was doing, he struck me on the arm two or three times with the handle,” he said.
Mr Hart said he grabbed hold of the stick and there was a scuffle before the other man walked off.
He said he suffered extensive bruising on his arm and had to have time off work because he felt so shaken by the incident.
“I felt very depressed,” he said.
However, under cross-examination by defence counsel Richard McConaghy, he admitted the bruises might have been caused when he had leapt out of his vehicle to see what was going on.
Mr Clarke said he had confronted Mr Hart because he thought he had seen him trying to steal something from his pick-up truck.
“I didn’t realise he was a DVLA inspector. He might have been a prolific thief,” he said.
He said he had the broom because he had been sweeping up some glass in the road – and the head, which was loose, had fallen off during the fracas.
Mr Clarke accused Mr Hart of exaggerating his injuries, adding: “I reckon he wanted some time off work and compensation.”
After the court was told that it was not possible to prove that the bruising to Mr Hart’s arm had actually been caused by Mr Clarke, prosecuting counsel Laurence Aiolfi applied to have the offence changed from assault by beating to one of common assault.
But the judge, Mr. Recorder Stuart Lawson-Rogers, refused to agree to this – allowing Mr Clarke’s appeal to succeed.
Eeky and I seem to agree that someone decided Mr. Clarke needed to pay his debt to society for failing to conform to the “passive victim” standard. Loaded sawed-off shotguns don’t magically appear in most people’s gardens.
COP-KILLER
COP-KILLER!
A lot has been written recently about Major Hasan’s choice of weapons for his Ft. Hood rampage shooting, the FN Five-seveN handgun. SayUncle has some links, Tam discusses the SS190 5.7×28 loading in some detail, Michael Bane talks about it, and mentions a Brady press release from 2005 that describes the pistol as a “cop-killer gun.”
If you want real hysteria though, you have to travel back in time with me to July of 2006 when a Queens, NY District Attorney announced that an FN Five-seveN pistol was one of the weapons confiscated during a drug arrest. Apparently he read the Brady presser and thought it didn’t go far enough, as the DA’s press release contained this little bit of hyperbole, picked up and spread by media outlets such as Newsday, the TimesLedger, the Staten Island Advance, and local AM radio station 1010AM. It was also picked up by the Ass. Press:
Three men have been charged with illegally possessing two handguns, one of which is called a cop killer because it can break through most bulletproof vests and plates worn by police officers, prosecutors announced Thursday.
William Davis, 21, his brother Clarence Davis, 18, and their friend Gquan Lloyd, 18, all of Queens, were charged with multiple counts of criminal possession of a weapon, District Attorney Richard A. Brown said.
During the execution of a narcotics search warrant Wednesday at the apartment the men shared in Far Rockaway, police found a defaced, unloaded Fabrique Nationale Five-seveN semiautomatic handgun, the first recovery of such a weapon in the city, Brown said.
“Its presence is troubling and makes the job of street cops that much more dangerous,” Brown said.
Of the 616 police officers killed nationwide between 1994 and 2003, 425 were shot with FN 5.7s, Brown said.
So far as I can tell, Officer Kimberly Mundy is the only officer who has ever been shot with an FN Five-seveN, and she’s still alive.
The piece I wrote in 2006 was about how the media, with all its professionalism and layers of editorial oversight, managed to pass DA Brown’s little faux pas on as fact, and then did very little about correcting the error afterward, but the Brady Campaign has never worried overmuch about little things like facts.
Remember Professor Brian Anse Patrick?
He’s a professor of communications at the University of Toledo. I wrote an Überpost largely about his book The National Rifle Association and the Media: The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage back in January of last year, The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation. Professor Patrick’s investigation into the inner workings of “Professional Journalism” (and yes, those are “scorn quotes”) was fascinating, especially in conjunction with the exposé works of outcast journalists Bernie Goldberg and John Stossel.
Well, he’s got a new book out, Rise of the Anti-Media: In-forming America’s Concealed Weapon Carry Movement. He dropped me an email today to let me know it was out. I emailed him back congratulating him on his new book, and informing him that I’d be waiting for the paperback. You can get it now for 20% off, but that’s still $56.00.
I see that college textbooks have still not come down in price.
I asked him about the title, too: why “In-Formed”? He responded:
I wanted to emphasize the old meaning of the term “inform” which at one time meant (and still does) to imbue with shape and spirit, while the modern “informed” person is the saddest and most tiresome creature on earth, who after watching a newscast and reading a newspaper imagines the few facts and allegations he has encountered bear some resemblance to social-political reality.
A main reason the concealed carry movement worked (and gun culture generally) is because it created its own anti-media, alternative media, often computer mediated, that in-formed it, and therefore its people were capable of directed action in concert over time, as opposed to people with vague anti-gun attitudes who had been informed in the only most superficial and ephemeral sense by mass news media. –people who then move on like a browsing goat to the next morsel of news, the last forgotten, with no behavioral correlates to whatever fleeting attitudes the last piece of news may have briefly stimulated . On the other hand, gun people have an attention span because they are in-formed and their beliefs have strong correlations in behavior such as voting and voluntary political association.
“(T)he modern “informed” person is the saddest and most tiresome creature on earth, who after watching a newscast and reading a newspaper imagines the few facts and allegations he has encountered bear some resemblance to social-political reality.”
There’s Quote of the Day material!
Honestly, it does look like an interesting book, and I’d love to read it – I’m just not going to pop $56 on a copy right now.
From Across the Pond
From Across the Pond
I received an interesting email this morning from across the pond (full name redacted):
I believe in the right of the individual to keep and bear arms in defence of themselves. This makes me a significant rarity, given that I am as British as Cornish pasties.
I heard the standard arguments of the pro-banning-guns community while growing up, but I had an analytical enough mind to know that I wouldn’t be able to conscionably form an opinion without investigating the statistical nature of taking guns away from a community in comparison to communities where guns are not taken away. This missing piece was provided by a friend I gained via IRC who runs a gun shop in Pennsylvania, who linked me to gunfacts.info, and I saw the proverbial light. Beyond that, firearms have never played a central part of my life – I’ve never lived in the areas of the country where gang warfare and violent crime are greatest, and nobody in my family had much to do with firearms in a sporting context or hunting.
As such, I have a question which is likely not quite what you normally get. You’ve characterised the sweep of gun control through the legislation of the UK as a slippery slope, which I don’t disagree with; what can I do to try and reverse the process?
Thomas
Here’s what I sent him in reply:
Thank you for your missive. I wish I had a simple answer for your question, or even some words of encouragement, but with regard to that slippery slope I’m personally afraid that the UK has proceeded too far down it to ever climb back out. “Reversing the process,” in my opinion, requires “renormalization” – that is, making guns and gun ownership if not common, at least not uncommon again. One of my favorite quotes regarding the “normalization” of gun ownership comes from Teresa Nielson Hayden: “Basically, I figure guns are like gays: They seem a lot more sinister and threatening until you get to know a few; and once you have one in the house, you can get downright defensive about them.” Unfortunately, the disarmament of your nation has proceeded well past the point where that can occur – thus guns and gun ownership will remain (in the eyes of the majority of your fellow subjects) abnormal, anti-social and frightening. It’s a cultural change that took over eighty years to accomplish, and the inertia of that effort will preclude the necessary reversal of your gun control laws that will allow renormalization. The British psyche no longer recognizes two “gun cultures” – one of sportsmen and protectors and one of criminals – it only recognizes one – the criminal. Note that many in your culture still object to the arming of police forces even in the face of skyrocketing violent crime. As you yourself noted, your belief in the right of armed self-defense makes you a “significant rarity” in your own culture.
The only way to “reverse the process” is to convince the voting public that guns are not the cause of crime, that gun owners are not violent psychopaths or petty criminals just waiting for the opportunity to criminally misuse their guns, and that they themselves are responsible enough to own one and use it in defense of themselves, their families, and their property. That option has been stripped from you in death-by-a-thousand-cuts legislation dating back to 1920. I think the final step over the brink was the 1996/97 handgun ban.
In Scotland in 2007 there were 26,056 firearm certificates on issue to a total population of 5,062,000. In other words, about 0.5% of the population is licensed to own a centerfire rifle or a shotgun that can hold more than two shells. In England and Wales there were 128,528 firearm certificates on issue to a population of about 54 million, or less than 0.25% of the population there. That’s nowhere near enough to make firearms ownership anything approaching “normal,” and the laws make it extremely unlikely that firearm ownership levels in UK will ever again approach even 5%.
It’s cold of me, I know, but the UK for me now serves as an example of what can happen here if we don’t fight tooth and nail to prevent it.
I wish you luck in your endeavors, though. I’d love to be proven wrong.
Actually, I repeat my entreaty: Get out. Get out NOW.
Activism Update
Activism Update
I got a reply from the manager of Thunder Canyon Brewery.
For This We Should Be Thankful
For This We Should Be Thankful?
Julie lives in Australia, a land that the gun-control forces here in the States want us to emulate when it comes to gun control. Here is her description of the process required to get a rifle added to her firearms license:
It was only an addition of a category A firearm – which means that the local police station can process it and it doesn’t have to go to the Firearms Branch for prior approval so it should have been a simple matter.
I went into the Police Station yesterday to make an appointment with the Firearms Officer. I initially made the appointment for Thursday but my day off was changed so I rang the Station at 8.30am this morning to change the appointment to today and check the requirements for transportation of the firearm etc.
The (Acting) Firearms Officer wasn’t in yet (he was supposed to get in at 9am) so I left a message for him to ring me. An hour and a half later I had heard nothing so I rang again to be told that he had called in sick.
Now I could have just decided to wait until another day off coincided with a firearm licensing day (Wednesday or Thursday at my local Police Station) and hope that the Firearms Officer wasn’t sick that day. However, I thought I would try and see if I could get this processed today. So I rang the Firearms Branch to see what they suggested.
They didn’t really have any ideas but they agreed with my suggestion that I try the District HQ Station. I rang that station and asked to be put through to the Firearms Officer there and after being cut off once I finally got to talk to someone.
The cop I spoke to wasn’t the Firearms Officer but he was a really nice helpful guy who decided that I should be able to get the rifle on a licence today and was going to help me make this happen. The Firearms Officer had been told off previously by his boss for processing licences for another station so he wasn’t willing to help. So the nice cop then rang my local station and arranged with a Sargent there to process it for me (he told me the Sargent’s name was Steve).
So I went back to my station and asked for Steve and, guess what, he didn’t exist 🙂 … However, the cop there, after I explained what I was trying to do decided to be helpful and process it for me.
So I filled in the application form for the licence (2 pages), a form the firearm’s details (2 pages), a statement regarding my safe (1 page) and another form for some reason (2 pages). They also took a photocopy of my Driver’s Licence and club membership card and my property letter. The statement regarding the safe had to be witnessed by a cop so the cop I was dealing with grabbed another cop walking by to do this.
The two cops then filled in a permit for me to transport the firearm from my house back to the station and I went and got the rifle.
When I got back to the station the cop checked the make and serial number and wrote it as an addition on my licence. After I paid my $28 I was free to take the rifle and go home 🙂
A half-day of waiting, run-around, and bureaucracy that at any time could have ended if any one of those same bureaucrats had decided otherwise.
But here’s the thing that stood out to me:
I was quite pleased with this experience, especially with the two cops who decided that this should be possible.
She was quite pleased with the experience. Ah, yes – the soft bigotry of low expectations!
I’m quite piqued with a society that decided that this should be necessary.
Sorry, Julie, but that’s not something anybody should be pleased about.
[millionmommarch]“England can do it! Australia can do it! We can too!”[/millionmommarch]
Not here. Not on my watch.