Tag: gun control

Irony, Indeed!

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The post below, I Love My People has been linked at Un-DemocraticUnderground

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=118×165622

(Link left cold, on purpose.)

One “Iverglas,” hit the site some time after, I believe, I was ceremoniously kicked off after my own six month stint there – September 3 of 2002 by none other than Skinner, the site administrator. “Iverglas” appears to hate all firearms and anyone who does not hate all firearms, and posts this:

I see no reason for thinking that this post is anything other than the astroturf effort undertaken by the online “gun rights” community to take over discussion at that site:

http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2008/04/i-love-my-…

The original post is dated January 6, 2008, so it took a while for our grassroots to find it, but just damn!

I complained awhile ago about some of our more vocal elements sometimes being a detriment to our cause, but the comments to this post are outstanding, even given the inevitable minor errors. The entire tone is calm, logical, factual, and fierce.

Everybody who commented? Take a bow. You deserve it.

Everybody who linked? You are the difference between Joyce-funded astroturf, and the grassroots from the divots our opponents keep picking out of their teeth.

Ah, irony.

Indeed. Obviously, “Iverglas” has A) no understanding of the word “grassroots,” and B) no understanding of the word “irony.”

Because they just whacked him/her in the mouth.

Heh. How’s that divot taste, Iverglas?

Quote of the Day.

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This is another multi-parter. The first part comes from Mr. Dave Musgrove, a self-described “Democratic voter and blogger” who penned a piece for Pajamas Media about the Des Moines, Iowa Pizza Hut delivery driver who used his legally carried concealed weapon to defend himself against a mugger, and who subsequently lost his job, since carrying a pistol with the pizza is against Company Policy.

The whole piece isn’t very long, but the gist of it is that Mr. Musgrove doesn’t understand the difference between “violent and predatory” and “violent but protective.” No, in Mr. Musgrove’s world, if you carry a gun, you’re a threat (unless, of course, you’re an authorized agent of the State. – Remember my three–part series on that?)

Musgrove states:

Among the internet reader comments on James Spiers’ story are more than a few urging a boycott against Pizza Hut. I don’t think a boycott, per se, will be necessary. More likely, the next time I think about ordering pizza, part of me will be reminded that the delivery guy may be armed, and I’ll hear a whisper of Dirty Harry’s own voice asking, “Do I feel lucky?”

So I won’t be doing any boycotting. But wondering whether the pizza delivery guy trotting up my walk is packing heat along with my pepperoni isn’t likely to do my appetite any favors.

Because, you see, in Musgrove’s world Mr. Spiers, the victim of the robbery, is equally as dangerous as Kenneth Jimmerson, the man who tried to mug him, but who won’t be mugging anybody for a while.

Musgrove also put up a post at his own site, No Pizza for Old Men, where he noted the volume and tone of the comments to his PJM piece. What did he learn from those comments?

95 comments so far over at PJM. Here is what I have learned so far:

guns = safety
killing = courage

I dropped him a comment of my own:

Here’s what I’ve learned:

You = oblivious

You actually suggested that disarming the victim would be better than allowing him to defend himself. Have you actually tried to engage any of your critics?

No, that would require Mr. Musgrove to question his own philosophy. He took two additional comments, then closed the comment thread at his site, but not before he added what he thought would be the clincher argument, the one that made his point of the PJM piece:

Whether you agree or disagree with what I have written, I commend to you these words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who died 40 years ago today, himself the victim of gun violence:

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

Problem is, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. died from hatred. A rifle wasn’t the cause of his death. A bomb would have done the job James Earl Ray set out to do. Or a molotov cocktail, or any of dozens of other methods. But Musgrove blames the gun, ’cause, guns’r bad mmmmkay?

None of those are the Quote of the Day. This is, and it’s by The Geek with a .45:

In a truly civil society peopled primarily by enlightened, sober individuals, the carriage of arms might be deemed gratuitous, but it is nonetheless harmless. In a society that measures up to anything less than that, the option to carry arms is a necessity.

I’m sure Mr. Musgrove would read it and shake his head and move on. As Churchill put it, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”
Amen. And good night.

I Love My People…

KevinLeave a comment

…we People of the Gun. There are currently at least eight posts all linking to one very interesting post and comment thread at Sociological Images. They are as follows:

If You Read Nothing Else Today

WARNING: Possible tools of the gun lobby

Quote of the Day

A Basic Human Right

Visual Rhetoric

Their Own Weapon Turned Against Them

Interesting Images

A Rant Deleted

The original post is dated January 6, 2008, so it took a while for our grassroots to find it, but just damn!

I complained awhile ago about some of our more vocal elements sometimes being a detriment to our cause, but the comments to this post are outstanding, even given the inevitable minor errors. The entire tone is calm, logical, factual, and fierce.

Everybody who commented? Take a bow. You deserve it.

Everybody who linked? You are the difference between Joyce-funded astroturf, and the grassroots from the divots our opponents keep picking out of their teeth.

I love all y’all.

UPDATE: If you’re visiting from DemocraticUnderground, you might want to read this response to Iverglas.

KevinLeave a comment

Quote of the Day.

That’s the great thing about being in the real grassroots, I know that every point I don’t address will get nailed by someone else. – Ahab concluding his post Wintemute is Back

Yup. The biggest problem I’ve got now, after almost five years of gunblogging, is getting something written and posted before six other people have done a better job of it! (Case in point….)

“A New Constitutional Right”

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A lot has been made recently over Slate legal columnist Dahlia Lithwick’s characterization of the Supreme Court’s Heller arguments as “fall(ing) in love with a new constitutional right.” Eugene Volokh and Glenn Reynolds, among others, took exception to her choice of words.

Thomas Girsch, guest-posting at SayUncle (and crossposting at LeanLeft) finds this amusing, apparently, and links to a post at Obsidian Wings on the topic. I read the piece. Written by “Publius,” I for one have to take extreme exception. He (or she, you never can really tell on the internet) states:

(T)he meaning of constitutional text isn’t self-evident. To be blunt, the Constitution means what the Court ultimately says it means. We can say “First Amendment” all we want, but it’s ultimately the Court that defines the scope and meaning of the “freedom of speech” text as applied to various types of circumstances (e.g., Bong Hitz 4 Jesus, crowded theater, libel, etc.). Now maybe you like this, and maybe you don’t. But that’s the way things have been for some time.

In this sense, the “individual rights” interpretation of the Second Amendment is absolutely a “new” constitutional right. Courts have traditionally adopted a “collective/militia” interpretation. Maybe that’s good, maybe it ain’t. But that’s been the traditional judicial interpretation.

That depends on just how far back you want to go in your research into “judicial interpretation.” It would appear that depth of inquiry only goes back as far as you can find (or interpret, or invent) the finding you want. If you go too far, well then, the decisions must have been flawed or otherwise discountable.

I’ve been through this before with the “honorable opposition.”

The earliest case in which the Supreme Court discusses what are our individual rights as citizens is Dred Scott v. Sanford in 1856 – a case in which seven of the nine Justices decided that blacks could not be citizens – slave or free – because citizenship:

“would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

In that I count: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and the rights to keep and bear arms outside of any mention of militia service.

This was followed by U.S. v. Cruikshank in 1875, which declared that the right the Second Amendment protected was “that of ‘bearing arms for a lawful purpose.’ “ Not only that, but that right “is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.” No, in that case the Supreme Court declared that (and Alan Gura made use of) the Second Amendment prevented only the Federal government from passing laws infringing on it.

D.C. is under Federal law, not State.

But Cruikshank made it OK for states to violate this pre-existing right to “bear arms for a lawful purpose.” Again, no mention of militia service was made. Apparently the 1875 Supreme Court hadn’t yet had a chance to study up on the (1868) 14th Amendment’s first paragraph, the second sentence of which is:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States;

You know, the “privileges or immunities” listed by the Court in Dred Scott, one of which was “to keep and carry arms” wherever we go?

Third, in Presser v. Illinois of 1886, the Supreme Court found it was acceptable to forbid private militias, using Cruikshank as precedent, but – most fascinating – that court stated not once but twice that:

(I)n view of the fact that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force of the national government as well as in view of its general powers, the States cannot prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms, so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining the public security.

and:

It is undoubtedly true that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force or reserve militia of the United States as well as of the States, and in view of this prerogative of the general government, as well as of its general powers, the States cannot, even laying the constitutional provision in question out of view, prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms, so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining the public security, and disable the people from performing their duty to the general government.

Yet, we are to believe, the right to arms is a new right, heretofore undeclared and unrecognized by the Supreme Court?

I was called on this by a commenter, once. He said:

In the Supreme Court cases from which you quote, all individuals who sought protection under the Second Amendment LOST.

Indeed, they did.

I replied:

BINGO! You win the kewpie doll! Let me rephrase your statement a bit more accurately: In the Supreme Court cases from which I quote, the Supreme Court was complicit in violating the right(s) it was tasked to defend.

And the excuse used each and every time? Let me quote Mayor Adrian Fenty:

I want to again emphasize that this case is a public safety case.

“Public Safety.” That was the argument the Dred Scott court used to deny citizenship to a whole class of people. Here’s the quote again, with one extra line:

(Citizenship) “would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.”

Boy, good thing the Court didn’t find in favor of Mr. Scott and his entire race. There might have been a Civil War or something!

As I have said before, the history of the Second Amendment is what has made me an advocate for it. Its legislative and legal history illustrates precisely what happens when judges and legislators “constitutionalize their personal preferences” instead of upholding their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

The Supreme Court has the opportunity to correct 151 years of bad precedent and protect the rights of individual citizens whose rights they’ve folded, spindled, and mutilated in the name of “public safety.”

Long ago, Thomas Jefferson found a quote by Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria in his 1764 treatise On Crime and Punishment so profound that he copied it into his own “Commonplace Book”:

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms … disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes … Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

Here we are, over two hundred and forty years after Beccaria’s astute observation, and still we are arguing over whether disarming the law-abiding should be legal, and Fenty is arguing that disarming the law abiding has made them safer.

It’s insane, and it needs to stop.

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“…a more educated, sophisticated and straight thinking hunter and shooter demographic.”

Bob Ricker of the astroturf gun-ban er, –control, ah, -safety “organization” American Hunters and Shooters Association, has been dropping by pro-gun blogs and leaving comments. First, one over at Bitter’s that piqued SayUncle’s ire, and then one at SayUncle’s post about it.

Here’s the key graph of the first one:

I think it should be clear from my comments here and on other “whacko” blogs that AHSA is reaching out to a more educated, sophisticated and straight thinking hunter and shooter demographic.

And here’s his second comment, with his really poor attempt at superiority:

Hey SayUncle- only seven comments to this post? I’m stunned. Of the 30 to 40 million so called NRA members Bitter writes about, you could only find 7 who don’t agree with me. How many “whackos” do you represent?

Let me take on, as others have done, his first comment:

“More educated” – I have a BA from the University of Arizona. Granted it’s in “General Studies,” but the three areas of concentration are Math, Physics and Engineering. It was enough to qualify me (with work experience and recommendations from other licensed engineers) to take the exams necessary to get my own license to practice Electrical Engineering. I took each exam once, and passed.

“Sophisticated” – Boy, you got me there. I don’t eat Brie or drink wine (even out of a box!) I can’t discuss opera or the theatah, and ballet absolutely bores me to tears. I’m just unsophisticated as all get-out.

“Straight-thinking” – I won’t go where Uncle went, but I think if Bob spent some time reading the “Best Of” posts on my left sidebar, he might conclude that my brain works just fine. It has to: I’m an engineer.

“Hunter” – Well, I’ve been on one deer hunt and one javalina hunt. No joy either time. But hunting is not really my bag. Hunting, to me, is taking your gun for a walk.

“Shooter” – Not as much of a shooter as I’d like to be. All this reading and writing cuts into my time to reload and get out on weekends to shoot. But I have started participating in action matches, and I look forward to burning about 250 rounds of .45ACP a month doing that, plus whatever time I can spare shooting some of my other firearms.

So, the demographic Bob is after is the $10,000+ Perazzi wingshooting set?

Good luck with that, Bob! (I prefer shooting thrown clays with my .30-06 1917 Enfield. It’s a bit more of a challenge.)

Perhaps my sixteen regular readers might want to opine over at Uncle’s. His post is up to thirty-two replies as I write this.

KevinLeave a comment

You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy

(I wanted to post this on Tuesday, but illness and work has postponed it until now.) From the press conference held by Mayor Adrian Fenty and the rest of the D.C. team immediately after oral arguments in D.C. v. Heller. Fenty:

I want to again emphasize that this case is public safety case. We have long had a law in the District of Columbia are banned in the city. Thirty years ago, as is the case today, handguns represent a disproportionate number of crimes in the District of Columbia. Everything from homicides to robberies to rapes.

Well then, doesn’t that tell you that the BAN DOESN’T WORK?

No, of course not!

The fact that we have had a handgun ban has significantly curtailed the number of violent crimes in the city as evidenced by the fact that violent crime has steadily gone down since the law was enacted.

Outright, blatant, unapologetic LIE #1. Here is a nice compilation of FBI crime statistics for the District of Columbia in one place. The law was enacted in 1976:

Murder: 26.8/100,000
Rape: 72.4/100,000
Robbery: 1,003.4/100,000
Aggravated assault: 378.8/100,000

In 1980:

Murder: 31.5/100,000
Rape: 69.1/100,000
Robbery: 1,400.6/100,000
Aggravated assault: 509.4/100,000

In 1985:

Murder: 23.5/100,000
Rape: 53.8/100,000
Robbery: 835.5/100,000
Aggravated assault: 712.0/100,000

In 1990:

Murder: 77.8/100,000
Rape: 49.9/100,000
Robbery: 1,213.5/100,000
Aggravated assault: 1,117.0/100,000

In 1995:

Murder: 65.0/100,000
Rape: 52.7/100,000
Robbery: 1,239.0/100,000
Aggravated assault: 1,304.7/100,000

In 2000:

Murder: 41.8/100,000
Rape: 43.9/100,000
Robbery: 621.3/100,000
Aggravated assault: 810.0/100,000

In 2005:

Murder: 29.1/100,000
Rape: 31.8/100,000
Robbery: 658.4/100,000
Aggravated assault: 789.1/100,000

Yet Mayor Fenty expects us to accept that the handgun ban somehow caused crime rates in D.C. to “steadily decline.”

Bullshit.

Here’s a page that compares Washington, Arlington, and Alexandria – three cities in very close geographical location, but with vastly different gun laws. In 2005, D.C. (with a handgun ban and a population of 550,000) had 195 homicides. Alexandria, VA (right next door with a population of 130,000 and “shall-issue” concealed-carry) had 3. That’s a rate comparison of 35.4/100,000 for D.C. to (carry the one…) 2.3/100,000. But D.C. is supposedly safer because of its gun laws?

That’s Fenty’s talking point!

As mayor of the District of Columbia, I can attest that the majority of the residents of this city enthusiastically support the laws the council passed in the seventies, and want it to continue in order that crime continues to go down.

I don’t think he really gives a damn what the residents of the city think. They very well might support such laws if they are stupid enough to swallow this kind of bilge as “fact.”

Next up, Chief of Police, Cathy L. Lanier

I have said many, many times as Police Chief of Washington, D.C. and after policing here in the city for nearly eighteen years, that the issue with handguns to me is very clear: a weapon that is easily concealed, that can be taken inside of schools, inside of churches, inside of government buildings, without anyone’s knowledge and be used, uh, and even high-capacity, uh rounds, capacity for a lot of handguns to create massive destruction is something that we don’t want in the District of Columbia.

Yet you think a ban will (or has) stopped this? The national homicide rate in 2005 was 5.6/100,000. In D.C. it was 29.1. “But D.C. is a city,” you argue. The homicide rate in New York City in 2005 was 6.6. In Boston, 12.9. Orlando, 10.5. Washington, D.C. ranked #13 out of 353 different cities for homicide rate in the U.S. in 2005. but we’re supposed to believe that Washington’s handgun ban actually keeps handguns out of the hands of criminals there?

I think the reasonable standard of the handgun laws in the District, which are not completely a ban, because there is licensed handguns in the District of Columbia for law enforcement, retired law enforcement, federal law enforcement, security agencies, so it’s not a complete ban on handguns,…

No, indeed. It’s just a ban for anyone who is not an “only one.” It’s a ban for anyone who doesn’t draw a government paycheck. And Anthony Heller, who is a security guard, and who carries a firearm to protect judges is not allowed to have that same firearm at home to protect himself. He’s not “only one” enough. But he was the “only one” enough to have standing in the suit against the City.

Yet you believe this is “reasonable.”

...but I think there is some reasonableness on where and when certain types of weapons can and should not be carried. A great example of that was I had to surrender my weapon when I entered the Supreme Court today as Chief of Police of the District of Columbia, and I have no problem with that. I think it’s reasonable.

Tell me, Chief; would you think it would be “reasonable” to drop you – in full uniform, sans radio and sidearm – in the middle of the highest-crime district of the city at eleven o’clock at night? Would you feel safe?

So, I think again, as a person who’s looked at the other side of the gun violence, and the accidents, and the suicides and all the other things that go along with handgun possession in the District of Columbia, I think the arguments today were very strong on our behalf, and I’m excited and looking forward to the outcome.

Wait, how can there be suicides and accidents and gun violence if there’s a ban that’s working?

Now Peter Nickles, D.C. Attorney General:

Good morning. In my view the ultimate issue here is can the City impose reasonable regulation on a Constitutional right.

A complete ban on private possession is “reasonable regulation”?

There is no Constitutional right that is not subject to reasonable regulation. I think, in the rebuttal, my colleague, the former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger, he made the ultimate point, and that is do you want a legislature that can deal with the idiosyncracies and the difficulties and the details of this city as distinct from a rural community making policy decisions, or do you want a thousand judges around the country deciding what the Second Amendment means and how it should be regulated?

No, we just want the nine Justices on the Supreme Court bench doing that – finally, after seventy years. We’ve already tried the “thousand judges around the country” crap.

But I felt the Justices were obviously very interested, it was a very spirited argument and we look forward to the outcome.

I bet you do.

Walter Dellinger:

It was a very interesting and lively Court this morning. Obviously everyone on the Court was interested in debating the great issues of history and Constitutional law. At the end of the day, I think however one resolves those great theoretical and Constitutional issues, we come down to the fact that this is an extremely reasonable law…

If you happen to not live under it, or are protected by “law enforcement, retired law enforcement, federal law enforcement, or security agencies.” If you happen to live in a high-crime area and are just Joe or Jane Average, however, it’s not so reasonable. Ask David Souter how safe D.C. is.

…because the District of Columbia really thought this through, and they allowed rifles and shotguns – they believe in the right of people to be able to defend their homes.

Outright, blatant, unapologetic LIE #2. Rifles and shotguns are required by law to be kept unloaded, and disassembled or equipped with a trigger lock. A gun in this condition is known as “a club.” Alan Gura pointed this out during his oral argument. Amazing how the City somehow magically found this “loophole” in their complete ban on functional firearms in the home.

They singled out handguns because they are as the Chief of Police said, a unique weapon because they are concealable and mobile. They can be taken on busses, on the Metro, into schools, into offices, into government buildings. They were responsible for ninety percent of the armed robberies in the year before this law was enacted and they were used in every single rape in which a weapon was used, it was a handgun, in the year before this law was enacted. The facilitate suicides, they are prone to accidents, and I’ve talked to the police officers of the District, and they tell me how concerned they are about concealable handguns when they have to execute a warrant or go into a scene at a home of a domestic disturbance and what the risk is to law enforcement.

What? Thirty years after the ban went into effect the police are still concerned?

Wow. That reasonable law has worked wonders, hasn’t it?

We think this is a reasonable law…

Did somebody change the dictionary meaning of “reasonable” to “counterproductive” when I wasn’t looking? Is this another example of right-wing language manipulation that no one told me about?

…and that the decision ought to be overturned because it sets an absolutist position that if you have a weapon, a kind of weapon that is a lineal descendent of something that was in 1787 you absolutely may not prohibit that weapon at all. And we think, as the Solicitor General of the United States said today that that would put at risk prohibition on machine guns and armor piercing bullets which are a threat to our law enforcement officers. So we hope that when considerations are given to the reasonableness of this law and the alternatives that are allowed for self-defense, that this law will be sustained.

Again, a complete ban is considered a “reasonable restriction”? Hunting ammunition for centerfire rifles will defeat police vests. Should all centerfire rifle ammunition be banned? Is that “reasonable”?

It is in their world.

Vincent Gray, D.C. City Council Chairman:

As the Mayor indicated, homicides in the District of Columbia have gone down.

Sure. There were 188 homicides in D.C. in 1976, and 195 in 2005. That equals “going down” in my book! The population of Washington D.C. has ALSO gone down, from 702, 000 in 1976 to 582,000 in 2005.

Go on, pull my other leg.

In a substantial part because of our ban on handguns.

Then you ought to be able to prove that. But since you’re lying from the outset (and no one is calling you on it in public), why bother?

I shudder to think that if we were to have this ban removed what kind of lawless behavior we would see in the District of Columbia.

Ah, yes. Here’s the key graph of the whole thing: the “Wild West shootouts,” the “blood in the streets” that we always hear about – but never actually GET. D.C. already has “Wild West shootouts” and “blood in the streets.” What Mr. Gray fears is that the law abiding citizens will start acting like the criminals who already infest his city.

In short, like most politicians, he doesn’t trust his own constituency. (Well, seeing that they’re stupid enough to reelect Marion “Bitch set me up!” Barry, maybe he’s on to something after all…)

Frankly, if we were able to prohibit importation of guns into the District of Columbia, I think we would be even closer to zero homicides than we are now.

So let’s see about chucking the protection against unreasonable searches? Wouldn’t that be “reasonable”? I mean, after all, it’s a public safety case, right?

This is the semantic equivalent of “Communism hasn’t worked because it’s never really been tried.” The entire island nation of Great Britain has banned handguns. They have no adjoining neighbor nations. You have to either fly, take a ferry or the Chunnel to get there. And their handgun crime has never been higher than it is right now – more than double what it was when all legally registered and licensed guns were turned in by their owners. “If we were able to prohibit importation of guns” is the fantasy that all gun-ban supporters dream of. It’s the same as “If pigs could fly.” The philosophy cannot be wrong! Do it again, only HARDER!

So I think a strong argument was made today, and I feel confident that when the Court considers this they will consider the District of Columbia’s law eminently reasonable.

I hope not. I hope they slap you so hard your momma says “Ouch!” But I don’t expect that. I’ll settle for an unequivocal definition of the right to arms as an individual one.

I really want to see the Ninth Circuit’s Hickman decision overturned.

Fenty, answering questions from the media:

As Mayor of the District of Columbia, more guns anywhere in the District of Columbia is going to lead to more crime, and that is why we stand so steadfastly against the repeal of our handgun ban.

Even though in the entire nation we add 3-4 million firearms per year, but crime has been going down since the early 1990’s. Here’s a man firmly attached to his fantasy. This is the gun-banner’s mantra – guns are the cause of crime. They give off evil brain-altering waves that make people commit violent crime, suicide, and accidents. Guns are talismans of evil!

Dick Heller was asked:

Why does this case mean so much to you? Why was it worth taking to the Supreme Court?

Heller answered:

It’s a basic issue of our Constitutional right to our life and self-defense has been violated. And additionally, as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect government officials, but my life isn’t worth protecting at home, in their eyes.

That’s it in a nutshell.

And here’s the Quote of the Day:

The ruling class doesn’t care about public safety. Having made it very difficult for States and localities to police themselves, having left ordinary citizens with no choice but to protect themselves as best they can, they now try to take our guns away. In fact they blame us and our guns for crime. This is so wrong that it cannot be an honest mistake. – former U.S. Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wy.)

Not one of the fine representatives of the City of Washington, D.C. could be properly tagged with the word “honest.” They wouldn’t know honesty if it bit them on the ass.

Saul Cornell has a Protégé?

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The wonders of academia.

Dave Kopel reports at The Volokh Conspiracy on more revisionist history requiring deliberate omission and erroneous interpretation of written documentation.

Shades of Michale Bellesiles – only this is done in an amici brief to the Supreme Court. Bellesiles is actually cited, as though Arming America had never been disproven, and Bellesiles disgraced for his academic malpractice.

Once again, Clayton Cramer has done the heavy lifting on the history.

These people have absolutely no shame.

More “Reasoned Discourse”

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This time OUR side gets dinged.

When I posted Another Debate Invitation Refused I did not consider (though I should have) that some of the people who read this blog would charge over to give the author of the blog and the author of the comment I was responding to what-for.

Do me a favor:

STOP.

If you can’t discuss the topic rationally without the use of invective, ad hominems and other insults, then DON’T. I don’t need nor want your “help.”

I appreciate your frustration. I understand that we are, as Dr. Michael S. Brown described it, the victims of a decades-long slow-motion hate crime, but THAT IS NO EXCUSE. If you cannot control your temper over some other person’s words and attitudes, then WHY SHOULD THEY EXPECT YOU TO BE RATIONAL WITH A FIREARM IN YOUR HANDS?

Any chance I had to actually discuss the FACTS with anyone from that site is now GONE. You have, whoever you are, done what Say Uncle intelligently advises against: You’ve “frightened the white people” (non-gun-owners), and given them more reason to consider us as Joe Huffman describes our current condition: “gun niggers” – people who they consider dangerous and “not like us” for whom it is OK to restrict our rights.

Thanks a lot.

I’ve left new comments of apology over at the site. I would not be surprised if they disappeared in short order. DO NOT “HELP” ME BY BEING JERKS.

Here’s one of the comments I left there, just in case she does decide to yank it:

Maggie wrote: “His blog contains a link to my posts on gun control on healthbeat, which explains why so many ideologues suddenly appeared out of the woodwork to drown out any possibility of rational discussion here–just as they had when Robert Feinman tried to raise the subject in an online diary.

“The NRA, and its supporters, are very well organized. One person who saw my post (a troll named Bob G) alerted Kevin, he in turn put a link on his blog to health beat, and suddenly we were overwhelmed with negative, nasty and personal comments. (They have removed –and will be in the future.)”

Maggie:

I’m sorry it happened, too. I certainly did not want it to, and I will write a post to that effect. However, while I will apologize for the behavior of those who came here and posted “negative, nasty, and personal comments” I cannot and will not take responsibility for them.

Again, I never made any suggestion that I was a “disinterested party.” Your blog attaches a hyperlink to my name which happens to go directly TO MY BLOG. My email address, which I assume you have access to since I must leave it in order to comment here, is “gunrights@comcast.” There was NO attempt made to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes.

The fact that you popped over to my site, saw the “McCain-FEINGOLD Insurrection” link and leaped to the mistaken conclusion that I’m a McCain supporter (and that somehow that dubious “fact” apparently disqualifies me in some way from being a reasonable person) says far more about you than it does about me.

Further, you had – PRIOR to my Friday evening post – already refused my THREE offers to discuss the topic of gun control – publicly or privately – because of your fear that “rational debate” would be drowned out by other voices. (How that would occur via a private email exchange is beyond me, but…)

I am FULLY aware of the acid and vitriol that the gun control debate stirs up. I am a veteran of the talk.politics.guns Usenet forum and a full six months and more than 1800 posts in the “gun dungeon” of DemocraticUnderground.com. I have been blogging on the topic for nearly five years now, and studying it for nearly thirteen. I know how hostile BOTH sides can be.

As one writer described it, gun owners have been the victims of a decades-long slow-motion hate crime. We’ve been described in the national media as red-necked, knuckle-dragging inbreds with one tooth and single-digit IQs. And those have been some of the KINDER things said. Media forces have SELF-ADMITTEDLY (I have the references) dropped any pretense of impartiality on the topic.

While “the NRA and its supporters” ARE very well organized, you might not understand that the organization you speak of truly is “grass roots.” We do this because it is IMPORTANT to us, and it isn’t the NRA telling us what to do and what to think. The NRA pretty much has to follow our lead.

Again, I really would like to discuss this topic with you either publicly or privately, and that invitation goes out to ANY interested party. No negative, nasty, or personal comments. No acid, no vitriol, just a calm discussion of the FACTS, the history, the law, the statistics, and the reasoning behind my position and yours. As I said before, I don’t expect to reverse anyone’s beliefs, but I DO expect to give you a perspective you haven’t previously been exposed to.

Again, my apologies for the trolls my post brought to your site. I should have expected it. But this is the internet, and we’re both grownups. If either of us are that affected by mere words, we shouldn’t be posting on the internet.

C’mon people. I thought we were better than that.

UPDATE: My comments were erased, but even more, sometime today (3/9) BOTH of her posts on gun control and all their comments were shoved down the memory hole.

“Reasoned Discourse” indeed. (h/t to Kevin P. for the heads-up.)