Got Another Live One at Quora

A guy who claims to be an NRA member, but...

(Bumped) Let's See Who Still Reads This Blog

So, who's up for another Southern/Central Arizona Blogshoot?  It's about that time of year again.  Elsy Pearson Public Shooting Range, Casa Grande, AZ.  Chime in in the comments.

UPDATE:  New post.  The date is January 10.  Please check in there if you think you're coming.

The Christmas Tree for My Office Just Arrived

I'll put it up on Monday:

Markley's Law

XKCD weighs in on Markley's Law as only XKCD can:


As someone on Facebook noted, I wonder if the 'gun as a phallic symbol' meme explains why they keep wanting to grab 'em?

Thomas Sowell: Wealth, Poverty and Politics

His latest Uncommon Knowledge interview.  Worth your 45 minutes.


My favorite living economist and philosopher.  Still looking good and thinking brilliantly at 85.

I'd Like to Make an Observation

Not one of my three AR-15's is a "weapon of war."

But my M1 Garand, M1 Carbine, 1917 Enfield, No. 5 Mk 1, No. 4 Mk I* and P14 all are.

And you can't have those either.

Why the Sudden Push for Gun Control?

Glenn Reynolds says:

Because when people are talking about gun control, they’re not talking about Obama’s many failures, ranging from the failures of vetting and counterterrorism that may have led to the San Bernardino attacks themselves, to Obama’s foreign policy debacles in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to how the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign against Boko Haram accomplished nothing, to how Putin is running wild in Eastern Europe, to Obama’s plans to import more poorly-vetted refugees from Muslim countries that foment terror or the still-anemic economy that has left far too many Americans unemployed or underemployed despite years of “recovery.”

Those are all things that the Obama Administration — and the Hillary Clinton campaign — don’t want to talk about.

I think he may have missed something.

Remember Solyndra? $535 million in loan guarantees up in smoke?

Heard about Solana? A solar power station built here in Gila Bend, AZ? The Dept. of Energy under Obama guaranteed $1.45 billion in loans for that project. And now the parent company, Spain's Abengoa, is on the brink of bankruptcy.

But wait! It gets better!

In addition to the $1.45 billion for Solana, the Dept. of Energy also guaranteed another $1.2 billion loan for the construction of the Mojave solar power station in California - also an Abengoa project.

So $2.65 billion in loan guarantees - almost five times more than the Solyndra debacle - and another solar power pipe-dream flushes down the toilet. In an election year.

Let's talk about gun control, instead.  Oh, and climate change.

The media - Democrat operatives with bylines.

Yes, Yes I Am

Found at Facebook:



Here I stand.  I can do no other.

Interesting Information from the Trenches

My favorite local Merchant O'Death reports:

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

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

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

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

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

I wonder if Tam is seeing similar things in Indiana.

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

Read the whole thing.

How About "No." Does "No" Work for You?

So much for "nobody wants to take your guns."

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

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

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

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

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

So, how does "NO" work for you?

LAYERS of Editorial Oversight

Another invocation of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

The Clock Boy

Bill Whittle's latest:

"...no political will in the country to address inner-city violence."

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

Some other choice selections:

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

--

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

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

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

--

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

--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RTWT.  And especially the comments.

For Your Thanksgiving Enjoyment

Found at Facebook:

This is Interesting

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

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

As a result:

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

Of course, supporters of the law made claims like:

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

And

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

And

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

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

But the reality?

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never forget that.

Why We're Winning

Somebody once said:

I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors. I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.

I think this guy gets it (seen on the streets of Tucson):

Quote of the Day - Sudden Jihad Edition

From Sean Sorrentino on Facebook:

If we keep pretending to ourselves that this takes "Extensive pre-planning and training," then we fool ourselves into believing that it can't happen. The real limiting factor is finding about a dozen psychos who are so mentally whacked that they think that this is a good idea, but are still composed enough that they can work together effectively. The tools and the tactics are easy to pick up. It's the broken, yet not shattered brains that are in short supply.

RTWT.

Iowahawk Scores Again

The man is a national treasure who should have his own monument on the D.C. Mall.

Yes, This Is a Perfect Representation of Modern Edumacashun

This does explain the recent actions at Yale and the University of Missouri.

Tough history coming, indeed.

Maryland Scraps its IBIS System

Maryland scraps gun "fingerprint" database after 15 failed years.

A surprising admission of reality.

If you're interested in the "Why" behind the (extremely overdue) decision, read my 2005 post, Why Ballistic Fingerprinting Doesn't (and Won't) Work.