Barack Obama did not take the Manchin-Toomey expanded-background-checks bill’s defeat in the Senate very well. In fact, he called all of us opposed to that bill “liars” and said that this measure, which would not have prevented the shootings in Newtown or in Phoenix or any other of the well-known mass shootings, was a “common sense step to help keep our kids safe.”
It was never clear to me why Barack Obama or Pat Toomey thought the Constitution actually granted any power to Congress to regulate a non-interstate firearms sale that takes place across a table.
Senator Mike Lee explained that he voted against the bill because he recognized that all this was another liberal salami game, taking one more slice of our rights today and then coming back for another tomorrow.
The Toomey-Manchin amendment admirably attempted to carve out certain protections for gun owners, but today’s carve-outs are tomorrow’s loopholes. The current “gun show loophole” was itself once considered a legitimate carve-out that protected certain private sales.
Eratosthenes was moved to remark on the president’s sense of self-entitlement. When the left doesn’t get its way, the system has always failed.
I was just noticing this yesterday while listening to the President’s speech on the radio. If the democrats get their butts beat a hundred times in a row, we can predict they’re going to say some variation of exactly the same thing, a hundred times in a row, and that thing will be: This just goes to show that you voters have to give us more of a lock on power.
This is a big part of the reason why I don’t trust them, why their whole way of looking at politics is incompatible with the way the republic was built. Not wanting to over-simplify it too much, but they’re spoiled brats. It’s just like an ex-wife who wants her child support or alimony early: They got this idea in their heads about what is going to happen. Nobody gave them that idea. They literally just gathered around a conference table and wrote it all down. They formed the idea in what was, for all practical purposes, a vacuum, and nobody made any promises about any of it save for the promises they made to each other. On the strength of that thing not coming to pass, they portend misery and doom. Just like any spoiled brat.
They Won’t Give Me Their Guns!And it’s always something polarizing. They get a few RINOs to participate and on the strength of that, they throw around the word “bipartisan” like peas at a food fight or something…but really. If you haven’t been following the news too closely lately and someone described the bill to you and said “Now, what do you think is the Republican position on this and what do you think is the democrat position,” would you really stand their scratching your head going “duh??” because the bill is just so-common-sense and wonderful like Emperor Barry was saying yesterday?
In defeat, I would expect a party that really does deserve more power, to say, in America: Well, back to the drawing board. It wasn’t meant to be. Not right now, at any rate. ...
In defeat, the democrats always say the same thing: This was supposed to happen — we decided so — and it didn’t happen that way, so this shows things are really messed up! Voters, you have to help us get rid of those Republicans. When we said we wanted a form of government that works for everybody, we were not talking about them! Their opportunity to be represented in our nation’s capitol, is the one thing that is really, really, heap-big busted right now, and that has to be the next thing fixed.
I recently sold one gun via an Internet gun auction site and purchased another. Each transaction constituted a complex bureaucratic nightmare passage through a labyrinth of rules and restrictions.
Paypal, the (commonly used, and ill-loved by everyone) vehicle for on-line payments, is a California entity and will have nothing to do with firearms transactions.
You cannot send a gun to anyone who is not a dealer possessing a Federal Firearms License (and the BATF has been doing its best for years now to restrict the number out there and to make FFLs very difficult to get).
Handguns and ammunition present special problems. The US Post Office shuns the kind of moral lepers who own handguns today, and won’t convey them, period. FedEx and UPS will reluctantly carry them, but only by exorbitantly-priced Priority Overnight or Next Day Air respectively.
When you buy a gun, you have to pay a dealer a fee to receive it for you, and you also have to pay for a police check on yourself.
Essentially, buying or selling any non-antique gun in any federally-regulated interstate transaction is a royal pain. The whole affair is loaded with added costs, occult rules and regulations, laws with stiff penalties just waiting to be violated, and the opportunity to be treated like a criminal.
This month’s issue of the NRA’s magazine, American Rifleman, had a letter from a reader (unfortunately not posted on the American Rifleman web-site) which really got my attention.
Just a few generations back, when America was still a free country, an American soldier could slap a handful of stamps on the buttstock of a captured enemy rifle, put on an address label, and (just for safety’s sake) hang a second address tag from the front sling swivel, and put a completely unpackaged, unwrapped rifle in the mail to his dad back home. And the post office would a) deliver it without demurral, and b) not break it.
Tasteless and moronic video by Jim Carrey simultaneously sneering at rural America, insulting the late Charleton Heston, and blaming American gun owners for violence. If anyone ever doubted that Carrey is an asshole and an idiot, just watch this. He is so spectacularly stupid that he obviously thinks this is clever, and that the chain of consequences alluded to in the rapid patter, closing section of the song makes some kind of sense.
Mark Steyn, on Rush Limbaugh’s Show yesterday, read, in the recent school suspension of a 7-year-old in Baltimore for allegedly nibbling his breakfast pop tart into a shape resembling a gun, serious bad news for American civilization.
You’re doomed America! You’re done for! No society can survive this level of stupidity! The school counselor is available to meet with any students who are traumatized by hearing reports of some guy four grades below them who nibbles a pop-tart into a gun-like shape.
I’ve never subscribed to this whole greatest generation thing, you know. But you look at those guys, they weren’t much older than the kids from the school. A lot of them were like seventeen, eighteen years old. And they’re storming out of these transport ships in the churning waters of the English Channel and the North Sea and they’re landing on the beaches of Normandy. And their getting out of these and they stomping up the beaches and they’re taking German gunfire and all the rest.
Do you think if you raised people so that you make a school counselor to available to them in cased they’ve been traumatized by someone who was nibbled a pop-tart into the shape of a gun….do you think if they’re ever called upon to get out those ships and the storm the beaches of Normandy, do you think they’re gonna be up to that?
‘Oh no look, the Germans, they’re all holding pop-tarts! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!’
No society can survive this level of stupidity! These small things are not small. They tell you a lot about the institutionalized stupidity of our institutions.
This video is hamming it up a bit by using footage of ladies who have obviously not been properly familiarized with how to hold or use those shotguns, but it certainly delivers an effective rebuttal to the Vice President. Obviously, not every woman who one day finds herself needing to defend herself and her home is going to have previously acquired good shotgun handling skills.
You used to ask, out of politeness, for permission to light your cigarette, and the conventional reply was “It’s a free country.” When’s the last time you heard someone say that?
Fred explains how what used to be small towns and the country got changed into extensions of the city, and everything went to hell. And that’s where gun control comes from.
Things… changed. The country increasingly urbanized. So much for rugged.
It became ever more a nation of employees. As Walmart and shopping centers and factories moved in, the farmers sold their land to real-estate developers at what they thought mind-boggling prices, and went to work as security guards and truck drivers. Employees are not free. They fear the boss, fear dismissal, and become prisoners of the retirement system. So much for Marlboro Man.
Self-reliance went. Few any longer can fix a car or the plumbing, grow food, hunt, bait a hook or install a new roof. Or defend themselves. To overstate barely, everyone depends on someone else, often the government, for everything. Thus we became the Hive.
Government came like a dust storm of fine choking powder, making its way into everything. You could no longer build a shed without a half-dozen permits and inspections. You couldn’t swim without a lifeguard, couldn’t use your canoe without Coast-Guard approved flotation devices and a card saying that you had taken an approved course in how to canoe. Cops proliferated with speed traps. The government began spying on email, requiring licenses and permits for everything, and deciding what could and could not be taught to one’s children, who one had to associate with, and what one could think about what or, more usually, whom.
With this came feminization. The schools began to value feelings over learning anything. Dodge ball and freeze tag became violence and heartless competition, giving way to cooperative group activities led by a caring adult. The female preference for security over freedom set in like a hard frost. We became afraid of second-hand smoke and swimming pools with a deep end. As women got in touch with their inner totalitarian, we began to outlaw large soft drinks and any word or expression that might offend anyone.
Thus much of the country morphed into helpless flowers, narcissistic, easily frightened, profoundly ignorant video-game twiddlers and Facebook Argonauts. ...
Serving as little more than cubicle fodder, they could not survive a serious crisis like the first Depression. And they look to the collective, the hive, for protection. The notion of individual self-defense, whether with a fist or a Sig 9, is, you know, like scary, or, well, just wrong or macho or something. I mean, if you find an intruder in your house at night, shouldn’t you, like, call a caring adult?
The echoes of the former America linger in commercials in commercials for pickup trucks with throaty bass voices and footage of Toyotas powering through rough unsettled country that almost no one ever even sees these days. Mostly it’s just marketing to suburban blossoms. The number of vehicles with four-wheel drive that have actually been off a paved road is not high.
Many who grew up in the former America, and a good many today in the South and west, substantially adhere to the old values. They won’t last. We live in the day of the Hive, and in the long run there is no point fighting it.
A growing number of firearm and firearm-related companies have stated they will no longer sell items to states, counties, cities and municipalities that restrict their citizens’ rights to own them.
According to The Police Loophole, 34 companies have joined in publicly stating that governments who seek to restrict 2nd Amendment rights will themselves be restricted from purchasing the items they seek to limit or ban.
All over the country people have been stocking up on guns and ammunition, leading to inventory shortages nobody has ever seen before.
It has only gotten worse recently, post-Sandy Hook, but even back in December a gun rights blog was reporting that inventories were at astonishingly low levels.
Ammunition Stock levels have fallen by more than 90% from the pre-Election Day levels. Less than 10% remains available. Available Ammunition links will be updated throughout the day.
Handguns are down by 80%, Long Guns by 63% for an overall 72.2% reduction in firearms inventories.
AR pattern rifles are becoming particularly difficult to source.
———————————————
The Chattanooga Times-Free Press reports that this month, ammo shelves are commonly empty, police departments report months-long delays in receiving their ammunition orders, and it is becoming difficult to source reloading supplies.
They didn’t know when they’d be getting anything back in stock, from magazines to rifles to pistols. Manufacturers were running full-bore, but couldn’t come close to keeping up with market demand. It wasn’t just the AR-15s, the AK-pattern rifles, the M1As, and the FALs that were sold out. It really hit me when I realized that the World War-era M1 Garands, M1 carbines, and Enfield .303s were gone, along with every last shell. Ubiquitous Mosin-Nagants—of which every gun store always seems to have 10-20—were gone. So was their ammo. Only a dust free space marked their passing. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Every weapon of military utility designed within the past 100+ years was gone. This isn’t a society stocking up on certain guns because they fear they may be banned. This is a society preparing for war.
Barack Obama, Dianne Feinstein and the rest of the Statists have done more to promote gun ownership than the NRA ever did. Well done,
Democrats!
The Lamoille Valley Fish & Game Club shooting range.
The local Fish & Game Club in a rural town just outside the urban community of fashion’s key outpost in Vermont, in response to recent Gun Control moves by Burlington’s left-wing administration and city council, told Burlington that its city police should go find some other facility to use for training and range qualification.
Burlington’s mayor and the police department are using the same word to describe a Lamoille County firing range’s edict that city officers are unwelcome to train there in a dispute over gun control:
“Unfortunate.”
Reached Thursday evening, Mayor Miro Weinberger told the Burlington Free Press that the ban on city police use of the facility is “an unfortunate response to the beginning of a process by the City Council to attempt to protect Burlington’s children and community.”
Said Burlington Police Department Deputy Chief Andi Higbee: “It is unfortunate that this important and much-needed community dialogue regarding gun control currently under way in the City of Burlington and across the Nation has resulted in this action.”
At issue is a decision this week by the Lamoille Valley Fish and Game Club Inc. to order a halt to Burlington police officers’ use of the Morrisville facility. The action is a response to the City Council’s advancing a measure to ban semi-automatic rifles and large-capacity magazines in Burlington.
The City Council’s action threatens constitutional freedoms, Robert Boivin II, board chairman, wrote in a letter to the police department and to city and state leaders.
That letter, dated Tuesday, was obtained Wednesday by the Burlington Free Press, which broke the news of the expulsion on its website Wednesday night.
The club’s executive board “can no longer support the City of Burlington with such a prejudice against our club and its members, and has voted to suspend the City’s use of our range for its law enforcement. This action is effective immediately,” Boivin wrote in the letter.
“We hope that the council reconsiders its actions and redirects its efforts towards perpetrators of violent crimes and security issues,” Boivin continued.
The city’s exclusion from the range likely would affect how and when officers train with firearms, Burlington Police Chief Michael Schirling told the Free Press on Wednesday night.
“Training facilities are limited in the area,” Schirling said. “It’s unfortunate that a polarized discussion of this nature has this kind of impact.”
The Burlington City Council voted 10-3 earlier this month to direct its charter change committee to craft a ban on assault-type firearms and large-capacity magazines. The meeting was marked by a high turnout by the public, virtually all of whom were opposed to such a ban.
According to US Dept of Health and Human Services
There are roughly 700,000 employed physicians in the U.S
There are roughly 120,000 accidental deaths caused by physician per year
That means there are roughly 0.171 accidental deaths per physician per year
According to the FBI
There are roughly 80, 000, 000 gun owners in the U.S
There are roughly 30,000 gun-related deaths (accidental/non-accidental) per year
That means there are roughly 0.000375 deaths per gun owner per year
David Mamet takes on Gun Control in Newsweek no less:
The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime, but what is there about criminals that ensures that their gun use is accident-free? If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves?
An interesting little factoid has emerged from a new Fox News poll of U.S. voters: Personal sentiments are strong and defiant among many U.S. gun owners.
Question 46 in the wide-ranging survey of more than 1,000 registered voters asks if there is a gun in the household. Overall, 52 percent of the respondents said yes, someone in their home owned a gun. That number included 65 percent of Republicans, 59 percent of conservatives, 38 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of liberals.
But on to Question 47, addressed to those with a gun in their home: “If the government passed a law to take your guns, would you give up your guns or defy the law and keep your guns?”
The response: 65 percent reported they would “defy the law.” That incudes 70 percent of Republicans, 68 percent of conservatives, 52 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of liberals.
