Why Do I Own Guns? Because I Like To Own Guns.

January 16, 2025

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I bought my first real gun in Florida when I was 12 years old. A beautiful Smith & Wesson 38. Got it in a flea market somewhere on Highway 441. Owned that gun for about 30 minutes until my Uncle Nat took it away from me and probably hocked it the next day. He was right. What the hell was a twelve-year old kid doing walking around with a gun?

 

Star 30-M

Star 30-M

This purchase began a life-long addiction to guns which continues to this day. Or at least until yesterday, when I walked into Dave’s Gun Shop and bought a Star Model 30M, a heavy, all-steel pistol that holds 15 rounds. Why did I buy the gun? Because I wanted to buy a gun. Why does my wife buy shoes? Because she likes shoes.

If I were a typical gun guy, I would tell you that I bought this gun because it’s good for self-defense. I don’t often, if ever, carry a gun. Guns are lying around the house but none are close enough to be grabbed up if an intruder were to suddenly burst through the door, but I know that owning a gun makes me safer, which is why I bought the gun.

Actually, that’s not true. I didn’t go into a gun shop yesterday because I was thinking about my personal safety. I didn’t walk up to the counter, take one look at that Star pistol and decide that this gun would protect me from crime. I certainly didn’t for one second imagine that buying that gun would somehow make me ‘free.’ I bought the gun because I wanted to buy a gun.

This may have been the third time I owned this gun. I had a Star 30M back in the mid-90’s; sold it to some guy in my gun shop who then sold it back because he needed a set of tires for his truck; sold it later to another guy who probably at some point traded it at Dave’s shop where it was sitting when I made it mine. You don’t see a Star 30M all that often, and it’s not as if the gun, or any gun for that matter, ever wears out. If this gun had been picked up at a crime scene instead of being sold to me, the ATF trace would show that the gun went into private hands somewhere around 1995. But it went into private hands and then back into an FFL inventory at least two more times over the intervening twenty years. So much for the value of ATF traces and as well as the nonsensical discussions about Time to Crime.

On the NRA website, Wayne LaPierre tells the NRA membership that “nothing would make us more vulnerable to generations of suffering and slaughter than the destruction of our 2nd Amendment.” There’s about as much reality behind this statement as the idea that I bought that Star pistol to protect myself from crime. I live in a White, middle class neighborhood – if anyone ever tried to break into my house it would probably be my drunk neighbor who thought he had come home and forgot his keys.

I have personally owned, bought and sold, probably 500 guns over the course of my lifetime, and I can say that in all those transactions going back to 1956, I never once asked myself why I needed any particular gun. But if someone were to ask me why I bought and sold all those guns, I might rattle off something about crime, or terrorism, or my Constitutional ‘rights.’ After all, I have to come up with some kind of answer, and it’s not as if people who don’t like guns can offer me a clue.

In crafting sensible solutions to gun violence, my friends in the GVP community have to understand that any new law will force me to somehow change this impulsive habit. And when was the last time you stayed on that low carbs diet?

 

 

 

 

What You Hear Is What You Get - The NRA Response To Obama.

January 14, 2025

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It didn’t take Wayne-o 48 hours to respond to Obama’s remarkable SOTU speech, and his response really points up both the success of the GVP movement to date, along with the challenge faced by GVP going forward. The fact that LaPierre felt compelled to call the President a ‘liar,’ ‘narcissist,’ ‘dishonest,’ ‘long-winded,’ ‘gas bag’ and basically a shill for the Hillary campaign, reveals the degree to which Gun Nation and Trump-ist political rhetoric have merged; i.e., if you insult your opponent enough times, you can avoid any serious talk. What’s the difference between Trump bellowing ‘Make America Great Again’ and LaPierre saying that Obama has “laid waste to the America we remember?” No difference. And that’s a good thing.

lapierre It’s a good thing because the GVP strategy shouldn’t be based on trying to convince 2nd-Amendment nihilists that there are sensible solutions to the problems caused by guns. Obama’s attempt to push a small percentage of gun transfers into the ATF-FBI-NICS framework by requiring individuals who make a ‘continuous’ profit from gun sales is hardly an attack on gun-owning rights, and LaPierre’s totally false description of this effort obliterates even the slightest possibility that his video message was an attempt to engage in an honest exchange.

We like to say that Obama has been the gun industry’s best salesman because gun revenues have soared over the past seven years. But he’s also been a magnet for the NRA’s attempts to expand its own ranks. According to Advertising Age, the circulation of the American Rifleman magazine surged by nearly 30% from 2012 to 2013, although the total circulation of all NRA membership magazines still doesn’t nearly add up to the 5 million members that the NRA now claims to represent. But numbers are one thing, the message going out is something else. If you take the time to watch Wayne-o’s video (quoting don Corleone, “Keep your friends close but your enemies….”) you’ll quickly realize that the organization which claims to speak for America’s gun owners has abandoned even the slightest pretense for anything remotely connected to reality, facts or common sense.

Take the alleged ‘failure’ of the Obama Administration to prosecute gun crimes. According to LaPierre, the President could simply pick up the phone and direct his Justice Department to mount a scorched-earth campaign to rid Chicago of every drug dealer, violent felon and gangbanger currently prowling the Windy City’s streets. This statement, incidentally, is made less than one minute after Wayne-o accused Obama of using his executive authority to destroy the Constitution, as if one can find anywhere in the Constitution the legal grounds for using a federal agency to deal with local crime.

You may recall that back in 1995, Wayne-o sent out a fundraising letter referring to ATF agents as ‘jack-booted thugs’ who were the shock troops in the “final assault to eliminate firearms ownership forever,” rhetoric that caused President George H. W. Bush to resign from the NRA. Now he’s at it again, claiming in this video that Obama is creating a ‘federal gun force’ that will be four times larger than the number of Special Forces currently leading operations against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. I don’t think that combat against ISIS has cost the lives of more than a handful of our beloved and heroic troops but gun violence kills more than 80 Americans every day. More resources to respond to domestic gun violence as opposed to overseas terror attacks? Doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.

Watch the entire video because Wayne-o saves the best for last. After referring to the President in the most indecorous and insulting terms, he then flips and obsequiously asks Obama to engage in a one-on-one debate. I can see it now – Wayne LaPierre in the Oval Office lecturing the President on the 2nd Amendment and why Michelle should be walking around with a gun. If the NRA thinks that such amateurish grandstanding appeals to anyone beyond their most devoted members, they better think again.

At The CNN Town Hall Obama Hit The Nail On The Head.

January 8, 2025

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Want to get to the absolute highlight of Obama’s Town Hall discussion about guns? Go to the one-hour mark of the video and listen to how he responds to a question from Mark Kelly about the alleged desire on the President’s part to take away everyone’s guns. I’m not going to tell you what he said, but I will say that his response effectively demolished one of the NRA’s most sacred talking-points, namely, the idea that any gun-control laws will lead to registration, which will lead to confiscation, which will lead to fascism, which will lead to God knows what. And the reason he demolished it was the same reason why he presented a remarkably-effective argument about gun violence in general; namely, because the entire event allowed him to focus everything he said on the average American for whom concerns about gun violence are, at best, a passing thing.

bomber When do most of us think about gun violence? When there’s a horrific shooting at San Bernardino, Umpqua or Sandy Hook. Beyond that, the 84 gun deaths that occur every day get little, if any attention at all. And when there is a response from Washington, the pro-gun gang can ramp up the energies of the folks who believe that aliens landed at Area 51 and get them to yell and shriek about how nobody’s going to take away their guns. And if you think I’m overdoing it, take a look at Wayne-o’s video message which begins with the claim that the Federal Government “would disarm us during the Age of Terror.”

So it was really refreshing to hear Obama answer questions, a majority of which came from pro-gun men and women, all of whom politely told the President that they didn’t believe his proposals would necessarily achieve his own goals, namely, reducing gun violence by keeping guns out of the wrong hands. And because he was answering questions from folks who clearly were not on the GVP side, this gave him the opportunity to reach out not to the community that is already convinced that guns pose a risk, but to the much larger community of folks whose minds may not yet be made up.

Of course the immediate response from the pro-gun gang, predictably, was that the President had once again failed to get anything positive done. As the Town Hall was ending, CNN switched to a quick comment from conservative mouthpiece Hugh Hewitt, who called the President’s performance ‘disappointing’ and ‘divisive,’ and this was followed by Wayne-o’s lapdog, Chris Cox, who told Megyn Kelly that “this President’s no longer credible to speak to the issues of law-abiding gun owners.” I wasn’t surprised that the NRA declined an invitation to attend; about the last thing Wayne-o will do is debate, quietly and objectively, his loony claim about how America’s Number One Liberal wants to take away all the guns.

Again and again the President made the point that none of his actions would ‘solve’ the issue of gun violence; his actions would have small, incremental results at best. The most powerful moment was when he said, “I know we aren’t going to end 30,000 gun deaths each year. But what if we can reduce that number by two thousand? Those are two thousand families that don’t have to bear the tragedy and heartbreak of losing someone to a bullet.”

This is when all the shrieking about the 2nd Amendment begins to lose its effect. Because now the President is talking about something that the average person, gun owner or not, can understand. CNN may have wanted the NRA to attend the Town Hall, but Obama’s couldn’t have cared less. He knows he’s wasting his time trying to convince the Area 51 crowd that he isn’t trying to grab their guns. It’s the rest of us who want solid, believable answers and solutions to the problems we face every day. When it comes to the problem of gun violence, Obama talked the talk.

Want To Be In A Movie With Kevin Bacon? Everytown Just Produced One And It’s Great.

December 9, 2024

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I always wanted to be in the movies. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be in the movies? And I want a speaking part. Doesn’t have to be a big part, a few words will do. And I want to be in a movie with a big star – someone I really like. Well now my dreams have come true. I can go to a new website posted by Everytown, download a video cam and say, “We can end gun violence.” Then I shoot the file up to the website and I’m in the same video as Kevin Bacon. Kevin Bacon! I mean we’re not talking about some nobody. We’re not even talking about President Obama, who also appears in the video. We’re talking about Kevin Bacon. Wowee - kazowee.

After I get done writing this column I’m going to get ready for my cameo appearance: need to put on a different shirt, comb the little hair I still have left, stand in front of the mirror and say the line again and again until I have it right. Should I emphasize the word ‘we?’ Or put a little juice into the word ‘end?’ Or just run off the whole string but change my expression when I get to the word ‘violence?’ Decision, decisions. Look, it’s not every day that my family and every friend I have in the whole world can see me and Kevin Bacon go at it, right?

I have spent the last two years waiting and hoping that the GVP community would get into the video environment big time. Because this is the way that an increasing number of people get their information, particularly the up-and-coming generation whose decisions about what to buy and how to behave will set the tone in the years ahead. And it seemed to me that until I saw this new video, that the pro-gun gang seemed to understand this issue much better than the other side.

Take a look at the NRA website. It’s all about video – a message from Wayne-o that tells you why the 2nd Amendment can protect you from anything and everything; a video of Colion prancing around saying something I can’t understand, some men and women sitting in front of a Sig-Sauer logo with this one guy lamenting that kids don’t learn about the ‘real’ American history; i.e., the value of guns. I can’t imagine anyone actually sitting all the way through any of these insipid, boring commentaries, most of all because they are completely contrived. The scripts come right out of the NRA marketing department even though there’s an announcement that tries to make you believe that you’re getting some kind of personal opinion from the spokesperson him or herself. But if you are an NRA member, every time they post a video you receive an email linking you to the latest missive which all have one thing in common, namely, that guns are a food thing.

Well maybe they are and maybe they’re not, but I’ll tell you this. When the NRA says that “guns don’t kill people, it’s people who kill people,” what they conveniently forget is that the easiest and most efficient way for one person to kill or injure another is to use a gun. And if you take the guns away, there would still be plenty of violence, there would still be plenty of crime, there would still be plenty of people who would want to end things without waiting for nature to take its course. But the annual death and serious injury toll in this country would be minus 100,000 because that number represents what happens with guns.

What makes this new Everytown effort so powerful and so different from the video contrivances posted by the NRA is that these are real people, many related to someone who was shot with a gun, and their message is so simple and so direct that there’s nothing more that needs to be said. Don’t want to end gun violence? Kevin Bacon’s got plenty of other co-stars.

 

My Response To Colion Noir: Guns Don’t Make You Free.

November 4, 2024

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I knew that something had been posted about me on the internet when I started to receive a more-than-usual number of emails which began with ‘Dear Mike Rat-Ass,’ or ‘Hello Mike You Jerk,’ and other bright and cheery salutations. And it turned out that the NRA, in response to my comments about its racist appeal to the membership, unleashed their African-American attack dog, Colion Noir, who went after me today in a video he stuck up for everyone to see.

And Colion’s correct in that I did mistakenly accuse the NRA of identifying a young man who was shot in a Chicago playground as a bad-ass who shot and killed a young girl in St. Louis; same name, wrong picture, but it doesn’t change the validity of what I said. And what I said, and I won’t back down, is that the NRA has been and continues to pander to racial animosities as a way of doing what they do best, namely, using fear to promote the ownership of guns.

Fear is the most dangerous of all human emotions. A little bit is a good thing, because we need ways to warn ourselves that something is too risky or will yield results that will hurt more than help. But fear can also spur over-reactions which lead to violence and destruction – a phenomenon in history we have witnessed too many times. I support the NRA 100% when they talk about gun ownership for hunting, collecting and sport. But when they promote guns by pandering to fear, that’s where I draw the line. If Colion doesn’t like it, he can lay brick.

A new study conducted by Nobel Prize-winner Angus Deaton has found that white males, ages 45 to 54 with no more than a high-school education have recently shown an alarming increase in mortality due to substance abuse; typically alcoholic liver disease or overdoses of heroin and other opioid drugs. The numbers constitute an ‘epidemic’ and parallel an unprecedented increase in suicides within the same group. Not surprisingly, this population has also been unable to surmount the economic difficulties of the past decade, with household incomes dropping by as much as 19 percent!

 

Middle-age white men with high school education at best - is there a particular group in America which fits that profile to a greater or lesser degree? It’s the group which remains the core of the gun-owning population, no matter what Colion Noir and Dana Loesch try to pretend about all those women and minorities going out to buy guns. Noir can call me all the names he wants, but when he says that what I’m doing is trying to ‘manipulate’ black people away from the ‘gun rights’ issue, he’s just going back to the same old crap that the NRA has been using to try and convince African-Americans that guns are their first line of defense against the depredations of ghetto life that many still endure.

On the other hand, if you are a white, middle-age male without a job and without much of a future, you become susceptible to alcohol, to drugs, to depression, and there’s a good chance you’ll walk around all day feeling pissed off. And it’s this anger, this fear of yet the next unpredictable catastrophe that makes some respond to the NRA message which says that you are more in control and have less to fear if you walk around with a gun.

The Huffington column has been corrected and I apologize to Wayne-o for what was my error, not his. But if Colion or Collins or whatever his name believes that prancing around with an AR-15 makes him ‘free,’ then he’s either appealing to the lowest common intellectual denominator or to a messed-up mind of some teenage-boy who spends all day playing video games and watching tv.

Want to walk around with a gun? That’s fine. But understand you are increasing, not diminishing risk and if the NRA would just come out and admit what Colion wants to pretend he doesn’t know, Wayne-o would get no argument from me.

Want To Know The NRA’s Election Strategy? Here It Is.

October 28, 2024

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Now that the 2nd Amendment has become an issue in the looming 2016 Presidential campaign, it was just a matter of time until the NRA got its own campaign playbook together and started adding its voice to the political fray. So it was hardly a surprise when the NRA released its first political message right out of the mouth of Wayne LaPierre, who claimed he was responding to Obama’s appearance at a police chief’s meeting in Chicago where the president dutifully repeated his call for ‘common-sense’ laws to help end the everyday carnage from guns.

The NRA’s campaign message turns out to be a riff on the ‘we don’t need no stinkin’ new gun laws’ mantra that was first promoted by Donald Trump. And once Trump said it, all the other Republican Presidential pretenders fell into line with what has become official policy for the NRA. And why don’t we need any more gun laws to stop what Wayne-o calls the “bloodshed?” Because all we have to do is “enforce the federal gun laws” and “direct every federal jurisdiction to round up every felon, drug dealer and gangbanger with a gun” and the problem will be solved right then and there.

lapierre But Obama won’t do it, and if she’s elected Hillary won’t do it because they “wait for a crime that fits their agenda and blames the NRA.” Which is another way of saying that instead of locking up all those bad guys with guns, the Democrats just want to pass new gun-control laws. “President Clinton and President Obama use the carnage to campaign for new gun laws” says Wayne-o, and the result of not enforcing current laws is that “thugs” like Darius Brown (picture of Brown the thug with voice-over from Wayne-o) don’t go to jail and instead end up shooting a nine-year old girl.

So here we have the NRA game plan as we inch towards Election 2016. Blame it all on the Democrats who don’t enforce crime laws, tie them to ‘thugs’ who are always young men of color, and make sure to remind everyone that urban ‘bloodshed’ has nothing to do with guns. Doesn’t it remind you just a bit of the Willie Horton campaign ads that secured the White House for the first iteration of George Bush? But if the Horton campaign was short on facts and long on emotional, racist-tinged images, it can’t be compared to the misrepresentations and racist-laden messaging this time around.

Let’s start with the charge that Clinton and Obama won’t enforce laws and are ‘soft’ on crime. In 1993, the national violent crime rate was 746. Eight years later, at the end of the Clinton Administration, the rate had fallen to 506, a decline of 33%. Eight years after that, at the end of Bush II, the rate stood at 457, a further decline of 10%. In 2014, seven years into Obama, it’s at 357, a drop from the end of Bush’s tenure of 22%. Since 1993 the violent crime rate has declined by 52%, of which 90% disappeared during the administrations of two, crime-loving Dems.

In the rush to get Wayne-o’s comments up there right after the President addressed the police chiefs, the folks who produce those insipid NRA videos might want to take another look. Because the picture of ‘Darius Brown’ is actually a picture of Jamal Streeter, one of three young men charged in the murder of a 13-year old teenager named Darius Brown. Oh well, if every young man of color is either a gang banger or a thug, how hard is it to get them all mixed up?

It’s not hard at all if you’ve decided that, everything else failing, you’ll fall back on the time-honored issues of race and crime in order to galvanize your political base and garner some votes. I happen to believe that most Americans, gun owners or not, will see right through this stupid charade even if Wayne-o and the NRA haven’t yet figured it out.

 

 

Responding To Mass Shootings Has Nothing To Do With ‘Gun-Free’ Zones.

October 26, 2024

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What are we going to do about mass, public shootings which not only exact a terrible physical and psychic toll on our society, but also appear to be on the rise? Well, there’s two ways we can go. One way is to believe that the stupid, self-promotions of people like John Lott about ‘gun-free’ zones and armed citizens can provide a measure of safety and security. The other way is to sit down with the professionals in the field who are intently trying to figure out the problem based on real data and real-world experiences and listen to what they have to say.

The latter response is the basis of an important article in Mother Jones by Mark Follman, who writes frequently about guns and gun violence for the Mother as well as for just about every major news venue that can be found. This article is based primarily on a threat assessment conference that Mark attended in August at which 700 professionals got together to share ideas, experiences and strategies for what might and might not work to identify and stop mass shooters before they hit the ground. The conference was sponsored by the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP), which comprises law enforcement officers, forensic psychologists, private security consultants, representatives of school districts, researchers; in other words, the people whose job it is to protect all of us from mass shooting events. The annual conference was held this year at Disneyland because public amusement parks are considered a Numero Uno attraction for anyone who wants to commit serious mayhem with a gun.

campus I’m going to pause right here for a moment and tell you why Wayne LaPierre wasn’t invited to this conference, despite the fact that he postures himself as an expert on how to respond to mass shooting events. The NRA response to every type of gun violence – ‘good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns’ – may get an enthusiastic response from everyone who suffers from arrested development when it comes to fantasizing walking around with a gun, but it’s nothing more than a shabby marketing ploy to sell more guns.

In that respect it should be noted, incidentally, that the conference attendees were near-unanimous in their belief that easy access to guns, particularly guns that are favored by mass shooters like AR-15s, make these events not only more probable, but also more lethal. This wasn’t the opinion of a bunch of tree-hugging, liberal do-gooders who want to get rid of guns. This was the consensus view of law enforcement and security specialists who spend all their time trying to figure out what to do. Nobody at the conference wasted a moment talking about the 2nd Amendment; it was simply recognized that when you have so many guns lying around, this creates more problems for professionals who are trying to stop mass killings in which invariably guns are used.

One of the reasons that the professionals dealing with mass shooters don’t come out and tell people like John Lott where to get off is because the nature of the task which confronts them requires that they operate in a non-public mode. For example, the FBI has a special unit at Quantico that brings together specialists from five federal agencies in an effort to assist local police departments in identifying and tracking mass shooting threats. Since 2012 this group has taken on more than 400 cases, in other words, good guys using computers to stop bad guys with guns.

Identifying a mass shooter means figuring out a probable profile and then figuring out who fits the profile before the shooting begins. I came away from reading this article with a greater awareness of the difficulties and challenges precisely because sometimes the mass-shooting profile fits and sometimes it does not. But the profiles are all the same in one respect: these shooters all have in common the ease with which they get their hands on guns.

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