He’s Ba-ack. Dick Heller And the NRA Come Up Short In Court.

September 20, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , 1 Comment

Were it not for the fact that the 68 square miles that covers Washington, D.C. wasn’t owned lock, stock and barrel by the Federal Government, most of the decisions reached by the D.C. District Court wouldn’t attract much attention, even when the decisions go up to the United States Court of Appeals. But the gun cases brought by Dick Heller and the NRA aren’t your local, garden-variety of court cases and the D.C. District Court isn’t some town magistrate dealing with whether the town has the right to prohibit overnight parking on all local streets. Nope, the D.C. District Court has been the scene of three separate 2nd Amendment cases whose rulings have become Law of the Land.

The first case brought by Heller – Heller I - went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2008 and resulted in the decision which basically said that the Constitution gave American citizens the right to keep a handgun in their homes for self-defense. The second case – Heller II – was a challenge to the gun registration scheme put into place by the D.C. cops following Heller I, which allowed D.C. residents to purchase and own handguns under conditions that were so onerous and difficult that handgun ownership remained a barely-realizable fact.

Dick Heller

As a result of Heller II, the District of Columbia revised its licensing rules, changing certain procedures, eliminating others and adding a few new ones, all of which provoked Heller and his NRA-backed legal team to initiate the action now known as Heller III. This case was decided by the Court of Appeals on September 18, and while the NRA lauded the decision as “bringing gun ownership within reach to more of D.C.’s upstanding residents,” the Appeals Court reaffirmed what I believe are the most fundamental gun-control tenets of all; namely, the right of the government to engage in the practice and policy of regulating guns.

The truth is that the ultimate policy objective of the gun lobby is to completely de-regulate the ownership and use of guns. The NRA can mouth all the pious platitudes in the world about how only ‘law-abiding’ citizens should own guns, but in the name of Constitutional freedom they have attempted to stymie even the most minimal government efforts to keep guns out of the ‘wrong hands.’ If there even is a gun problem, the response of the gun lobby is to ‘fix’ the mental-health system, a non-sequitur if I ever heard one, or increase penalties for gun crimes, despite the fact that every, single gun used illegally or inappropriately first entered the market through a legal sale. What’s the NRA’s plan for preventing the massive and continuous flow of guns from the good guys to the bad guys? Let every good guy walk around with a gun.

From a pro-gun perspective, the Heller III decision voided some of the DC registration rules which, as far as I’m concerned, weren’t of great value at all. This included dropping the ‘one gun a month’ rule, the re-registration of guns and a requirement that every gun owner pass a test on current DC gun laws. Most importantly, what the decision upheld was the constitutionality of gun registration per se, and perhaps even more important the use of ‘intermediate scrutiny’ for deciding the constitutionality of gun-control laws. Had the Court agreed with the NRA’s argument that the government’s attempt to regulate gun ownership could only be decided on the basis of ‘strict scrutiny,’ i.e., a law is only valid if it fits the exact issue for which it has been designed, you could basically throw out every gun-control statute that has ever been passed.

The Court also upheld the requirement that D.C. gun owners must take an online course in gun safety which I took while I ate breakfast, paid some bills and watched Morning Joe. If the gun-control community thinks they won a partial victory because the Court upheld this part of the D.C. law they should think again. Affirming the government’s right to control firearms is one thing; affirming a silly and useless gun regulation is something else.

 

 

 

Want To Know What It Really Costs To Protect Yourself With A Gun? A Lott More Than He Thinks.

September 18, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Remember Al Pacino’s great line from Godfather II when he tells some mobster that, “my father always taught me to keep my friends close but keep my enemies closer.” Which is why I listen to AM Talk Radio whenever I’m alone in my car. Because when it comes to guns, I know what my friends are going to say. It’s what the other side is saying that I need to hear. In that respect I was listening the other day to Mark Walters whose show, Armed American Radio, is actually a running advertisement for a clever marketing scheme called U.S. Concealed Carry Association, but occasionally there’s a time-out from endless USCCA promotions for a brief interview with a guest.

And the guest just happened to be none other than John Lott who has become the poster-boy for the armed-citizen movement, or maybe sometimes he’s the poster-girl, depending on whether or not he’s pretending to be John Lott or Mary Rosh. Either way, within a sentence or so after he begins, you can count on John to start mumbling about how safe people are when they carry a gun or keep a loaded gun in their homes. And he cites all kinds of ‘studies’ and ‘research’ from various right-wing academics and pundits who share his point of view. The truth is he hasn’t done any serious research in more than twenty years.

John Lott

John Lott

Oh, I take that back. In 1997 he allegedly conducted a telephone survey about defensive gun use but he couldn’t produce the data because his hard-drive crashed. Then to prove that he wasn’t faking the loss of data he produced testimonials from a couple of people who thought they remembered answering questions over the phone. You can read a very comprehensive analysis of Lott’s attempt to defend himself right here. And what Tim Lambert’s article points out is that Lott has gone to great lengths to validate the idea that he suffered a hard-drive crash but his attempts to prove that this hard drive contained any kind of DGU survey falls far short of the mark.

In any case, it doesn’t really matter whether or not Lott’s telling the truth because his audience could care less about whether guns protect us from crime or protect us from anything else. The bottom line is that there are simply plenty of people out there who believe that any attempt by the government to implement any kind of progressive social policies at all represents nothing more than the imposition of some kind of Islamo-Fascist-Socialist-Communist world order brought directly from Kenya to the U.S. Think I’m kidding? In 2010, Pew Research stated that 18% of Americans believed that Obama is a Muslim. You going to argue gun control with them? And this is John Lott’s audience, which is something that some of his critics, as well-intentioned as they may be, sometimes tend to forget.

Two of his most well-intentioned critics happen to be Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes, whose website, Armed With Reason, is sprinkled with endless articles which accurately capture both the misstatements and wrong-headed research of Mary Rosh, a.k.a. John Lott. But I’ve decided to take a different tack towards Lott’s work and, for the sake of argument, pretend that everything he says is true. Let’s quantify how much money is saved because bad guys breaking into homes are stopped by good guys inside who happen to have guns. This is CDC and DOJ data, not some phony telephone survey, and it looks like this. Each year roughly 830,000 people are at home when someone tries to break in. Of this number, roughly 8,000 used a gun to scare the bad guy away.

Know how much all those good guys saved by protecting their homes with guns? Somewhere around two million dollars. Know how much the victims of unintentional gun shootings cost in medical bills and lost wages? More than one billion bucks. And that’s what it costs us to let some misguided John Lott fans take their hero at his word. Oh well, maybe the world really is flat.

Want To Get A New Assault Rifle For $5 Bucks? Join The NRA.

September 18, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , , Leave a comment

If any of you think that anyone in the gun industry might want to reconsider their commitment to assault rifles in the wake of ‘black’ guns being tossed out of Walmart, think again. I just received my 3rd or 4th or maybe 10th email from Wayne-o reminding me to pony up five bucks for the 3rd Annual NRA Gun Raffle, and choose any one of 12 guns or, if I like, all 12 twelve guns which “any American gun enthusiast would like to own.” And in case there was any doubt in my mind about why I should enter with a chance to win, Wayne-o’s email goes on to remind me that I don’t want to ”miss this opportunity to enter to WIN the guns that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg want to BAN, along with many other great firearms!”

I know something about gun raffles because my gun shop used to be the site for an annual raffle to benefit the state Ducks Unlimited chapter which, in case you don’t know them, is a conservation and hunting organization founded in 1927 as an offshoot of the original hunting-conservationist effort, Boone & Crockett Club, that was started by Teddy Roosevelt and some friends in 1887 before TR went scampering up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War. Hunters and conservationists were one and the same back in those days, because hunters understood the necessity to preserve and extend natural areas for the survival and protection of game. The Ducks Unlimited raffle that I supported raised money for wildlife programs and preservation of wetlands in and around my state; you didn’t have to even own a gun to feel this was something worthy of your support.

If memory serves me correctly, the Ducks Unlimited raffle gave away five or six guns, all of them rifles and shotguns used for sport or the hunt. There was always a beautiful Beretta over-and-under, usually with a Ducks Unlimited logo engraved on the case and the gun; a Marlin 39A 22-caliber lever-action carbine with the gold-inlaid stock; a magnum-caliber Weatherby for elk and a Marlin 336 for white-tail deer. One year the guy who won the Weatherby told me he really didn’t want the gun so I bought it from him and it’s still sitting around somewhere in the basement or out in the garage.

Want to know what are the guns you can win from the NRA? The raffle’s main prize is a Ruger SR-762, which has nothing to do with the Ruger 77 bolt-action rifles that the old man designed and made Bill Ruger’s name famous both here and abroad. The SR-762 is a 30-caliber assault rifle which retails for more than $2,500 and shoots a 30-caliber round through a piston-type of operating system that promises to deliver “superior operating endurance” for every tactical need.

You can choose a Ruger for your raffle ticket but you can also select five other assault-style guns, including the Larue Tactical PredetAR rifle, the M4 V1 carbine from Daniel Defense, the KRISS Vector CRB Carbine and theTavor-IDF IDF 16 rifle with a Mepro 21 sight. The last-named gun comes out of Israel and is made by the same company which many years ago gave us the lovely little machine pistol known as the Uzi which, if you recall, was considered by the Bush Administration too dangerous to be imported after 1989. I love it when Wayne-o tries to make believe that only Democrats, Liberals and native-born Kenyans want to ban guns.

Fully half of the twelve guns in this year’s NRA raffle are assault rifles, and don’t give me any crap about they’re not assault rifles, they’re really some figment of the NSSF fantasy-world called ‘modern, sporting’ guns. Make no mistake, they are designed to kill human beings and they have nothing to do with hunting or sport. That’s the way the gun industry has changed, and that’s the reason the industry needs to be kicked in the ass until it returns to honesty and common sense.

 

 

 

 

Did You Know That Gun Owners Are America’s Most Persecuted Minority? Just Ask Dana Loesch.

September 16, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , Leave a comment

If I were an African-American or a member of some other racial or ethnic minority, it would really be comforting to know that the cause of racial equality is being championed by a gun-toting woman named Dana Loesch. Not only does Dana understand gender issues, but she claims to be a gun owner, which by definition means she knows all about prejudice and being a member of the most persecuted minority group of all. But thanks to the NRA and its video series, Freedom’s Safest Place, Dana’s now able to defend my minority rights and the rights of all law-abiding Americans who know they’ll be safer if they use and carry a gun.

When you’re a member of a persecuted minority like Dana, it’s easy for you to identify the people who persecute you the most. And Dana’s been on a rant lately concerning the Numero Uno persecutor, the arrogant, elitist, New Yorker Michael Bloomberg, who keeps getting an assist from another no good, anti-gunner named Shannon Watts. Dana began issuing warnings about Bloomberg’s racism earlier this year when she linked to an audio of remarks made by Mayor Mike at an Aspen conference at which he allegedly stated that “ninety-five percent” of all murders were committed by “minorities” which, according to Dana, means African-American males. And since, according to Dana, only about half of all murders in America are committed by African-Americans, here’s proof-positive that Bloomberg’s just another racist White guy trying to disarm all the Blacks.

bloomberg Now in fact, if you actually listen to the Bloomberg tape, what he’s referring to is New York City where violent crime happens to be an uncontested feature of minority life, but the word ‘minority’ in New York City doesn’t refer only to Blacks, it means all the residents of economically impacted inner-city ghettos like Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn, Jamaica in Queens, Upper Harlem in Manhattan, Port Richmond in Staten Island and most of the South Bronx. Nobody living in a million-dollar co-op on Manhattan’s trendy Upper West Side needs to be worried about getting mugged, ditto residents in Brooklyn Heights or Forest Hills. And this is what Bloomberg meant in correctly using the term ‘minority’ when he answered a question at Aspen, and this is what Dana Loesch has consciously misrepresented in attacking both Mayor Mike and Shannon Watts in her recent tweets.

Believe it or not, I don’t really blame Dana Loesch for making up an argument about guns based on whole cloth. A girl has to earn a living, and while I’m sure we’ll soon see a line of Loesch leather garments for professional S&M dommes, Dana’s just stupidly parroting a line about guns and African-Americans that the NRA has been pushing for the last several years.

Back in the 1990s, the gun industry discovered that people like me who owned guns for hunting and sport were slowly dying off and not being replaced. So they invented a new reason to buy guns -protection from crime - which meant that gun owners were really protecting themselves from the you-know-who’s. And if you doubt that gun ownership for self-protection wasn’t part and parcel of a racist appeal, take a look at the television spots that Charlton Heston produced for the NRA.

The good news is that the strategy kept people buying guns. The bad news is that while gun sales continue to go up, the number of gun owners keeps going down. So the industry and its promoters have to find new markets wherever they can. Enter the likes of Dana Loesch with messages crafted for both minorities and moms, neither group, incidentally, showing much inclination to run into gun shops and pull bangers off the shelves.

Dana, let me break the news gently to you and your like-minded friends. You’re talking to yourselves and nobody who knows or cares anything about history, facts, or the reality of inner-city life is going to take you seriously. And gun violence is a serious issue, which is why you have nothing to contribute at all.

Want To Do Something About Gun Violence? There’s A Meeting For You On November 3rd.

September 16, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I was born in Washington, DC and one of my earliest memories was being taken by my mother to a concert at the resplendent National Cathedral, the towering Gothic edifice which until the recent re-making of downtown, used to be one of the tallest building in our Nation’s Capitol. The ‘cathedral,’ as we all used to call it, was much more than the seat of Washington’s Episcopal Diocese; it was also a site that attracted visitors worldwide and had been the venue for many events that symbolized what America was all about.

Some Presidents , including both Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, journeyed up Massachusetts Avenue following their inaugurations to participate in prayer, other Presidents – Ford, Eisenhower – lay in repose at the Cathedral following their deaths. Although the Constitution still gives everyone the right to follow whatever religion we choose, or not to follow any religion for that matter, the Congress designated the Cathedral as the “national house of prayer,” and what the Rev. Eugene Sutton called a “soaring, majestic place” still evokes the same wonderment in me today as it did when I walked into the building for the first time as a six-year old little boy.

Leaving aside its historical, architectural and spiritual significance for a moment, the Cathedral has also not shied away from confronting public issues which impact all of us from day to day. And if you believe there’s any public issue that demands our attention more than the issue of gun violence, don’t waste your time trying to convince me that I’m barking up the wrong tree. I’m not saying there aren’t other issues that need to be addressed, but gun violence is the only public problem for which a loud and incessant chorus repeats ad nauseum that no issue exists at all. There’s no gun violence according to the NRA; there’s no gun violence according to the NSSF. In fact, the NSSF was just awarded a $2.4 million DOJ grant to help them continue their “effective” Project Chlldsafe program which is so effective that unintentional gun deaths and injuries have increased over the last few years.

If the National Cathedral is the nation’s house of prayer, it also functions as the nation’s public conscience. There is no religious organization that has been as consistently and publicly concerned about equality, promoting freedom of choice and freedom of being over all racial, religious and gender lines. In fact, the very last pulpit from which Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a sermon before he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet was the pulpit at the National Cathedral. The Cathedral was the scene of lively debates about wars in Viet Nam and Iraq; its leadership, both religious and lay, spoke out about the injustices of Abu Ghirab and the Cathedral sponsors an ongoing initiative to help veterans overcome the wounds of war.

And now the Cathedral will become a focal point for voicing concerns about gun violence when they sponsor a national forum on gun violence scheduled for Tuesday, November 3rd. The meeting will bring together all the different constituencies who want to see some “common-sense” solutions put into place: political leaders, advocates, public policy experts and, most important of all, victims and survivors of gun violence themselves. There will be a webcast, exhibits and tables run by the advocacy groups; it’s an opportunity to strengthen and extend the concerns we all share about putting an end to the senseless and destructive use of guns.

I just looked at the latest video treats offered by the NRA, It’s a series called Freedom

Safest Place and it features some of our country’s most notable freedom-fighters like felon Oliver North and home-schooling expert Dana Loesch. I don’t notice that anyone who was injured with a gun ever comes out on behalf of the NRA. Isn’t it funny how the victims of gun violence always seem to end up on the other side of the debate? And that’s the reason why the people who come to the National Cathedral on November 3rd will ultimately win.

 

There’s Nothing Like A Tough Woman To Promote Carrying A Gun.

September 15, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , Leave a comment

I don’t know which one – the NRA or Dana Loesch – has hit an all-time low for the dumbest, most pandering and colossally stupid statement about gun ownership that has ever been made, but since Dana made the statement on behalf of the NRA, let’s lump them together and call it a draw. The video message went out over Twitter and all the usual red-meat digital venues and it’s the standard entertainment format for all such NRA-promoted public service announcements, namely, one of their mouthpieces looks straight into a camera and barks out a few sentences about something or other having to do with guns.

loesch If you’re a die-hard, red-meat internet trawler of course you’ve heard of Dana Loesch. She’s been a helpmate of Glenn Beck, hosts her own radio show and tweets away to a responsive and raucous crew. Of course she has all the right credentials to promote guns: makes sure you see that little Christian icon that she wears around her neck (stole the idea I suspect from Laura Ingraham), never lets you forget that she’s a good ol’ Southern gal and, in case you thought there was any chance she would let the slightest, liberal influence into her home life, she home-schooled her kids. It’s a masterful image, made expressly for red-meat consumption, and it figures that sooner or later she’d wind up pimping for the NRA.

In this ad Dana is dressed up in the gun-girl style which used to be pink but has now shifted to leather and black. I have a good friend who loves to spend time with women who dress from head to toe in black leather – he supplies the whip. And this new ‘tough’ image for the gun-carrying female brigade wasn’t developed by accident; it’s all part of a continued attempt by the NRA and the gun industry to figure out how to get the majority of Americans who happen to be women into guns. Pushing the soft, feminine angle didn’t work so now they’ll try the tough, disciplined look. It’s so obvious and so phony that I’m astonished Dana could pull it off with a straight face.

But what’s even phonier than the clothes is the message itself: “I’m a Mom and that’s why I own guns.” Then Dana goes on to say that because she’s a Mom she has to protect her family and the best way to protect her family is with a gun. Dana may have quit the Tea Party but she then launches into the usual spiel about how the “media” constantly underreports women using guns to protect themselves and their homes. Dana better be careful about how much time and energy she spends going after the ‘mainstream’ press. The last woman who built her career around that gambit was a part-time Governor from Alaska who still hasn’t told us which newspapers she reads.

As for Dana’s comments that she needs a gun to protect her family and her home, a bit of research reveals some facts that negate everything she says. A survey of 14,000 crime victims reveals that in less than 1% of the criminal attacks did the victim protect themselves with a gun. And when they did defend themselves, the number of victims who were injured was the same whether or not they had a gun. Want to know the real reason the ‘media’ doesn’t report all those home invasions where a woman defends her life and sacred honor with a gun? Because they account for less than 2% of all home invasions, that’s why.

Twitter was abuzz after Ms. Watts tweeted what I thought were some rather polite criticisms of Dana’s remarks, and the nasty attacks on Shannon indicate that, once again, the NRA is opting to create the most extreme arguments for carrying a gun. Which is a good thing, when all is said and done, because it means they’ve given up trying to bring reasonable people over to their side. And in case you didn’t know it, the reasonable argument always wins out.

When It Comes To Gun Violence, It’s Time To Stop Being Polite.

September 14, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , , , , 1 Comment

Back in 2014, when Mike Bloomberg ponied up $50 million to help empower Shannon Watts and her ladies (that’s not a rock band) to begin leveling the playing field against the NRA, the guardians of our beloved 2nd Amendment began running some television ads designed to remind us lucky gun owners how mean-spirited and dangerous a guy like Bloomberg could be. One ad aired during the battle over extending background checks in Colorado, and it showed a Western-style chick tooling along in her 4X4, with a voice-over accusing Mayor Mike of being an “elitist” and “hypocrite” because he wanted to ban snack foods, soda and, of course, guns.

bloom The snarky NRA campaign fizzled, of course, but what I found interesting was the attempt to link firearms regulation to Bloomberg’s long-standing public health concerns on healthier eating, as if full-calorie soft drinks, potato chips and guns all help promote the common good. Now it’s one thing to argue about whether or not guns represent a benefit or a risk; John Lott gets away with promoting the ‘more guns equals less crime’ nonsense because scholars whose research supports the opposite point of view are honest enough to admit that their argument may not yet be airtight. But the medical evidence on health risks from soda pop and junk foods is compelling, even though the NRA would have you believe that the benefits of guns, smokes and Twinkies are one and the same. I’m surprised the NRA didn’t also score Bloomberg for his anti-smoking campaign, but give the folks in Fairfax credit for a bit of reality-testing, if only a bit.

What I won’t give them credit for, however, is their continued attempt to pretend that firearm regulation doesn’t work and that any effort to extend regulations is nothing more than a nefarious effort to get rid of all the guns. And their latest broadside in this respect is the editorial by NRA head lobbyist Chris Cox, who responded to the Virginia shooting of two journalists by stating, “the fact is that no piece of legislation would have stopped this brutal crime.” And in case you’re wondering, the NRA does have a solution for the occasions when a deranged individual gets his hands on a gun and starts shooting everything in sight – it’s called “fix the mental health system,” whatever that meaningless sentence can be believed to mean.

The position of the NRA boils down to this: there is no such thing as gun ‘violence;’ people are violent and guns are beside the point. Ergo, we need to solve the root causes of violence and forget about the guns. This is not only a cynical and self-serving approach to the problem, it’s not true. And I think it’s time for all the gun-control activists to stand up, take off the gloves, and begin responding in kind. I’m not saying that the activist community should invent false arguments to promote the idea that guns are a risk to life and health; the evidence is clearly there. They should stop being so worried about the 2nd Amendment, they should stop being so polite, they should tell it like it is.

When the NRA says guns aren’t the problem, people are the problem, they are promoting behavior that is a risk to well-being and health. When the NRA says background checks don’t work so we don’t need to extend background checks to private sales they are making it easier for guns to get into the wrong hands. When the NRA says they were “touched” by the Virginia tragedy they are shedding crocodile tears, because it’s the proliferation of handguns designed to be carried by all those dutiful ‘armed citizens’ which brought that shooting about.

If I learned anything from the recent shenanigans of Donald Trump, it’s that he who yells loudest usually gets heard. I don’t see why the gun-control community can’t ramp up the volume and drive their arguments home. The good news is that their arguments are true, and sooner or later, truth will out.

Purchase on Amazon.

Older Entries Newer Entries

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 170 other followers

Build a website with WordPress.com
%d bloggers like this: