RKBA

Tom Smith on Gun Control

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This is very well considered:

Everybody wants to stop events like Newtown, but one suspects the gun control supporters want to do more than that: I think they want to promote an idealistic vision of “a peaceful society without guns” or something like that. I think that agenda is unrealistic on several levels — I don’t think a society without guns would be more peaceful and secure, unless you imposed a lot of other social controls that would not be imposed and you might not like if they were, and I don’t think such changes would be accepted by more than at best a bare majority of the American people, if that. It seems barely possible that sweeping anti-gun legislation could be shoved through Congress a la Obamacare after 2014, but such legislation would be very socially devisive.
 
Another point — do we really understand how very widespread gun ownership fits into what you might call the political economy of public order in this country? To take another thought experiment: could there be any reasonable doubt that some sort of program (and I’m not saying mainstream gun-control advocates are calling for this, at least I hope not) that would require everybody to hand over any and all semi-automatic pistols and rifles they have to the government and own them no more, and was actually enforced (which would be very difficult) would result in unpredictable and possibly dangerous changes in the balance of forces between the law-abiding and the criminal in this country? I don’t know how much public order in this country is actually enforced by the latent threat of private citizens with guns, but I bet it’s a lot more than your typical well-meaning gun-control advocate would think, and I’m confident that she has not thought about that question in much depth. I bet you would find gun-control advocates live disproportionately in the safest, most heavily policed parts of this country, that is, relatively affluent, urban or suburban areas. Their cognitive biases I suspect lean against taking very seriously the personal security of people very unlike themselves in terms of social status, lifestyle and other such identifiers. All this points in the direction of legislation, if there is any, that is specific and targeted at the problem that needs to be solved. I have no confidence Congress is capable of this, as it is a hard problem and even easy problems seem beyond their ability to address sensibly, but one can hope.

Worth reading in full.

Heading to Indiana

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I just loaded up my car with four long guns, five hand guns and a big assed box of ammunition. Bitter Clinger, indeed.

After a bit of work this morning I am heading to Indiana to meet friends old and new. For the last half decade we have gathered on a farm property once every autumn to enjoy the company of each other, and to celebrate the Second Amendment. We will enjoy some target shooting, grill some flesh, and have a beer or two (after shooting, of course). Rumor mill has it that we will have some ladies joining us this year, and I think that is fantastic.

I look forward to this weekend each fall very much and feel sort of “cleansed” and refreshed when I return home. There is a lot wrong with America, but there are still a lot of very good people here, and many that understand that these rights that our forefathers gave us are to be cherished and celebrated.

How To Be A Terrible Journalist – Chicago Magazine

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From time to time Dan and I just agree to “give up” on certain types of blog posts because they are repetitive. One of those types of posts involve journalists missing the entire point and purpose of what they are writing about.

Chicago gun article

And yet this article from Chicago Magazine was such an egregious offender that it caused me to need to write a post on it.

The article starts with the traditional journalistic chestnut – the protagonist. In this case, it is how Mr. Patton, the corporate counsel of the city of Chicago, can adjust the gun control laws as little as possible to meet the terms of the latest court decision that gives citizens access to firearms. In the end, the counsel for the city of Chicago “doesn’t anticipate” any further legal challenges to the gun laws, a comment that the reporter accepts at face value. And finally, the article ends with this:

“We’re committed to achieving the greatest extent of gun control that’s lawfully possible while still complying with the Second Amendment,” he says. “It’s something we can do in the city’s overall effort (against) gun violence. It’s a plague, and we’re doing everything we can to fight it.”

And with that final quote from the protagonist, the “article” is ended.

Note how this article likely sailed through “fact checking”, because the corporate counsel really did say all those things, and the events listed did occur in that chronological row. However, the FACTS ARE WRONG.

Even the most cursory analysis of the situation on gun control by this “journalist” would have turned up salient facts that were completely relevant to the situation. The NRA does intend to aggressively fight and issue lawsuits against the City of Chicago and all other municipalities that limit second amendment rights, and this could be found everywhere on the internet or by spending even 5 seconds calling the NRA, which the writer didn’t bother to do.

More subtle than that obvious issue, is the fact that Chicago, which has among the strictest handgun laws in the country, is among the leaders in carnage caused by handguns, indicating plainly that these laws do not work in terms of keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and only work to deter law-abiding citizens from the ability to protect themselves from these criminals.

I won’t even bother to link to the latest articles showing shootings in Chicago which spike every weekend; they are everywhere and available to everyone, even this “journalist”.

While Chicago is a notorious hotbed of handgun violence, all the states around us have embraced concealed carry and limited restrictions on citizens, without the “wild west” shootouts promised by detractors. Chicago citizens travel every day into Indiana and now Wisconsin without fear of regular citizens harming them, while they would be scared to venture into their own neighborhoods “protected” by these city laws supposedly limiting gun violence.

The ideas that guns can be banned from a small corner of the populace is just irresponsible and ludicrous given that there are hundreds of millions of them across the US and that the tide of the second amendment has passed through almost every state of the union except for Illinois which ought to be a salient fact.

Cross posted at LITGM

Aurora shooting: the other #narrativefail

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Glenn Reynolds is rightly mocking the failure of the left wing narrative that shootings should result in new restrictions on guns. But there’s another narrative out there, one that should be calmly insisted on, that the Aurora shootings should be analyzed as a failure of Colorado’s commitment to its own state constitution whose Article 17 insists that the ordinary guy between 18 and 45 constitute a militia. All of us, the gun control side, the gun rights side, are not acting as if we take that seriously. And the gun rights side *should* be taking that seriously.

The next day after the 1983 Beirut truck bomb, US sentries in Beirut were no longer walking around with no round in the chamber and no magazines inserted as they had been when the truck zoomed through the sentry post on its way to mass murder. The rules of engagement for US forces in Beirut changed quickly.

The day after the Aurora Colorado killings, that movie chain was still barring CCL carriers from entering their premises with their legal firearms. Nobody seems to find it strange that we acted that way. Nobody seems to find it strange that we don’t have a legal framework that we can use to change the rules of engagement for the unorganized militia. We have to go through the legislature and make a new law every time. It is as if the narrative of the general population being a militia is something we only pay lip service to. This too is a failure in narrative, and a worrying one.

New! – Your Helpful Marksmanship Tip of the Day

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Chicagoboyz like to visit the target range, but after President Obama was elected we realized that guns are bad and so we donated all of ours to schools and hospitals and took a tax deduction. This has caused us some problems as we sometimes get invited on shooting outings, and we have had to resort to borrowing our Uncle Ernie’s old Mauser that he brought back from the Spanish-American War. This is a very fine weapon and in theory we could hit a gnat at 500 yards, with either hand (during legal gnat season, of course). The problem is that we have eyes like an eagle, if by eagle you mean a middle-aged eagle with lousy eyesight, and the sights on old Mausers are very small and probably not usable by anybody older than about 14.

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