Mitch McConnell's musket

By Richard K. Barry

Don't shoot me, I'm only the piano player.

I would say that politics is becoming increasingly strange, but it doesn't do much to state the obvious. Latest proof is that Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is being criticized for not looking particularly comfortable on stage at CPAC as he carried a flint-lock musket to the podium before making his speech. 

The gun was an award for retiring Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., but McConnell must have though it would be a great idea to use it as a prop as he addressed the conservative faithful. 

But, As Courier-Journalist writer Joseph Gerth put it:

Instead or recalling images of Charlton Heston at NRA conventions, where the late actor incited the crowd by raising a similar gun, McConnell looked a bit more like Michael Dukakis riding in a tank or President Barack Obama shooting skeet at Camp David, or Jimmy Carter doing much of anything.

A little digging by the Courier-Journal could find no other picture of McConnell with a gun, and his campaign has refused to say whether he "hunts, shoots targets or even owns a gun."

On the one hand, the thought that one's familiarity with firearms should be considered an important qualification for high office is pretty scary. On the other, it's sad that McConnell tried to fake it in the way he did.

The other part of it is that McConnell is not the sort of politician CPAC types much cotton to. As Gerth writes:

McConnell is what he is. He’s a denizen of the beltway who revels in the type of insider politics that folks who attend CPAC hate. He is someone who has historically — at least until recently — believed in the largess of the federal government to help his state.

One thing for sure is the emergence of the far right has made establishment Republicans bigger frauds and liars than they had previously been, if that's possible. 

The new gun-control movement, post-Newtown

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I wasn't terribly disappointed when the Manchin-Toomey gun bill was defeated in the Senate (even though it got well more than 50 votes, because of a Republican filibuster), because it was a bad bill. But it did include an expanded background checks provision, along with various pro-gun provisions, and so in the end it was probably better than nothing.

And yet in defeat that bill did more for the gun-control movement that it would have done had it ever become law, and in that sense a lot of good may come from what at the time seemed like a serious, embarrassing, and revealing setback.

Actually, though, it started not on April 17, 2013, but on December 14, 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. There had been many other mass shootings previously in America, including recently at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, but Newtown was different. It was a brutal attack on a school, where parents leave their children and expect them to be safe, and the fact that so many children were killed in cold blood was simply too shocking, too powerful, too overwhelming, to ignore. (And there was a cultural/racial element to it as well. This wasn't inner-city Detroit. This was a part of America with which more Americans, including the political and media elites who shape public opinion, could identify. It's easy, sadly so, for many to ignore the plight of a city like Detroit. But if it could happen in Newtown, it could happen anywhere.)

This is not to say that the country was suddenly ready for significant gun control. That will take time. No, if not that, it was at least ready for something meaningful to be done to curb gun violence, to put a stop if at all possible to a mostly unregulated gun market that has resulted in guns, including weapons of mass destruction for which there is no reasonable justification for private ownership, falling into the wrong hands way too many times.

President Obama himself took the lead. In an incredibly moving vigil in Newtown a few days after the shooting, he said:

We can't tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.

And this: 

Charlotte, Daniel, Olivia, Josephine, Ana, Dylan, Madeline, Catherine, Chase, Jesse, James, Grace, Emilie, Jack, Noah, Caroline, Jessica, Benjamin, Avielle, Allison, God has called them all home. 

For those of us who remain, let us find the strength to carry on and make our country worthy of their memory.

Yes, the country was finally ready, at least for expanded background checks, and perhaps for much more, and they overwhelmingly expressed that in poll after poll. 

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Stupidest Shithole in America: Burkesville, Kentucky

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(It's our fourth entry in this new series. The first three were Nelson, Georgia; Mississippi; and Dietrich, Idaho.)

No, I'm not making light of the tragedy. Seriously, this is the sort of insanity we're dealing with:

Last Monday, Kristian Sparks and his sister, Caroline, visited a Fred's Super Dollar store here. A store manager recalled that it was an ordinary shopping trip, saying that the boy was outgoing and energetic, his little sister was cute and their grandmother was "like any grandmother — she bought them anything they wanted."

The next day Kristian, 5, shot and killed his 2-year-old sister with a gun marketed for children as "My First Rifle" in what the authorities said was an accident.

The death has convulsed this rural community of 1,800 in south-central Kentucky, where everyone seems to know the extended Sparks family, which is now riven by grief. But as mourners gathered for Caroline's funeral on Saturday, there were equally strong emotions directed at the outside world, which has been quick to pass judgment on the parents and a way of life in which many see nothing unusual about introducing children to firearms while they are still in kindergarten.

If you live in a place where it's a way of life for children to have their own guns, and if in that place the general response to a tragedy like this is to circle the wagons and emphasize that there's nothing wrong with children having their own guns, that there's nothing wrong with your way of life, then, let's be clear, you live in a shithole.

The NRA keeps ramping up the nasty, brutish, short, and crazy at its annual meeting

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The NRA has a crazy new neo-Confederate anti-government president and at its annual meeting this weekend in Houston it's been plumbing the depths of gun-nut craziness.

As usual, there was Wayne LaPierre, the face of the organization, using militaristic rhetoric and the usual paranoid delusions of the right to ramp up the fearmongering, as if being able to own any gun you want, whatever your fetish, whatever your own delusions, is the only freedom that matters, or rather the only component of freedom that matters, in the Hobbesian state of nature of the gun nuts' imaginings. (Hobbes viewed the state of nature as a dystopia leading to civil society; LaPierre and the rest of the nuts consider it, or something closely resembling it, their utopia. Yes, what I'm saying is that the NRA's project involves at its core the undoing of civil society and the replacement of it with life that is nasty, brutish, and short.)

And then there was this gem:

Gun owners should store a gun in their kids' room, according to a 'Home Defense Concepts' seminar offered at the National Rifle Association's Annual Meeting, comments that came just days after the fatal shooting of a two-year-old at the hands of her five-year-old brother.

The course was taught by Rob Pincus, who owns the popular firearm instruction company I.C.E. Training. Pincus argued that, in the event of a home invasion, parents would instinctually run to their children's room anyway, they might as well have a gun stored there to kill two birds with one stone:

PINCUS: How about putting a quick-access safe in your kids' room? [...] Good idea or bad idea? We have an emotional pushback to that. Here’s my position on this. If you're worried that your kid is going to try to break into the safe that is in their bedroom with a gun in it, you have bigger problems than home defense. [Laughter]... In the middle of the night, if I'm in the bathroom or getting a glass of water or in the bedroom or watching TV in the living room, if that alarm goes off and the glass breaks and the dog starts barking, what's the instinct that most people are going to have, in regards to, "am I going to run across the house to get the gun, or am I going to run over here to help the screaming kid?" And if I'm going to go to the kid anyway, and I have an extra gun and an extra safe, why not put it in their closet?

Oh, sure, what could ever go wrong?

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Believe it or not, the NRA is about to get a whole lot crazier

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Wait, is that even possible? Yes, apparently so (sorry for the long blockquote, but you need to know just what the NRA is all about):

Just in time for its wingnut-filled annual meeting tomorrow, the National Rifle Association is set to install a new president: an Alabama lawyer who laments "the war of Northern Aggression," calls Barack Obama "this fake president," and fantasizes about "whipping" opponents of the gun lobby's agenda.

Jim Porter of Birmingham, a longtime board member whose daddy's name graces an NRA championship shooting trophy,... laid those views out last summer in a videotaped address... to rod-and-gun enthusiasts in Ulster County, New York. While speaking to residents of that rural upstate region, which saw significant losses in life and wealth fighting for the Union cause in the Civil War, Porter took an unconventional tack. The NRA, he said in a barbecue-licked Dixie lilt,

...was started 1871 right here in New York state. It was started by some Yankee generals who didn’t like the way my Southern boys had the ability to shoot in what we call the 'War of Northern Aggression.' Now, y'all might call it the Civil War, but we call it the 'War of Northern Aggression' down south.

That was apropos of the NRA's original purpose, Porter said: to train civilians to use military-style weapons so that "when they're ready to fight tyranny, they're ready to do it. Also, when they're ready to fight tyranny, they have the wherewithal and the weapons to do it."

Apparently, the time to fight tyranny is now. "The NRA, I can assure you, is dug in," he said. "And I can assure you, we're whipping their ass. Everywhere we can go. Right, left, up and down."

Porter never specified who "they" were in his applause line, but he later ranted against Obama, "this fake president," whose "entire administration is anti-gun, anti-freedom, anti-Second Amendment." He reserved special ire for Attorney General Eric Holder, whom he called "rabidly anti-gun, rabidly un-American, involved in trying to kill the Second Amendment at the United Nations."

The speech wasn't a fluke for Porter. At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference, he told an NRA interviewer of the need to rally "warriors for freedom" against Obama's push not merely for gun control, but for an all-encompassing "European socialistic bureaucratic type of government."

An anti-government, anti-Obama (racist, xenophobic, you name it) neo-Confederate with serious paranoid delusions... and an anti-Amerian traitor with clear criminal intentions.

Yes, he's right at home in the NRA.

The song of the Furies

By Carl 

Witnesses to them that died,

The blood avengers at his side,

The Furies' troop forever stands.

Aeschylus was more right than he knew.

I'll leave it to Gabby Giffords to explain what this post is about:

SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.

On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.

Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents — who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.

The former congresswoman is far more eloquent than I could be in reaction to the cowardly, blood-thirsty vote that took place in the Senate yesterday, as 45 traitors voted to block a yes or no vote on... and here Congresswoman Giffords and I differ in what she defines as "common-sense"... on a bill that amounted to the Democrats throwing up their hands and saying, "Fine! YOU write a gun control bill!"

President Obama was rightly angry at the 45 senators, saying, "unfortunately, this pattern of spreading untruths about this legislation served a purpose, because those lies upset an intense minority of gun owners, and that in turn intimidated a lot of senators."

There it is: he called them "cowards" to their faces.

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The great liberal gun policy victory

By Frank Moraes 

The New York Times (and plenty of other news outlets) has reported that we have a gun control bill that can make it through the Senate. Hoo-fucking-ray! Let's look back on what's happened the last 4 months. Mass murders in America every few days. About 40 gun suicides per day. About 25 gun murders per day. But we can't talk about limits on handguns even though they are used in the overwhelming majority of gun related deaths. Let me rephrase that: it isn't that such handgun limits would be impossible to get through Congress, it is that we can't even talk about them. (Except for extremists like me.)

So after Sandy Hook, what do we get? The most liberal among us called for a ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines as well as background checks for all gun purchases. Well, right off the top the assault weapons ban was thrown away. I can't say that I care that much. Assault weapons are, after all, just scary looking guns; what makes them most dangerous are their 30 round banana clips. But there was still hope that we might be able to limit magazine sizes to ten.

To work NRA! This floors me. Really! The main argument I heard about limiting magazines to ten was, "Why 10? Why not 9? Why not 11?" That's what passes for serious debate in America. The answer, of course, is that everyone thought that number was a good compromise between interfering with the fun of gun enthusiasts and protecting society from the harm from (I'll just say it!) gun enthusiasts. Related to this tactic is the "It won't do any good!" argument. Moderates try to placate the NRA crowd by limiting their proposals. Then the NRA comes in and (rightly) argues, "It won't do much good." Okay then, how about a handgun ban? Oops! I forgot, we can't talk about that. (It might cause the NRA to explode.)

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Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy slams NRA, Wayne LaPierre: "reminds me of clowns at the circus."

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, fresh off signing the nation's toughest gun restrictions into law, was on CNN yesterday advocating for gun control and taking on the NRA and its main mouthpiece, Wayne LaPierre: "Wayne reminds me of the clowns at the circus. They get the most attention." He continued:

This guy is so out of whack, it's unbelievable. 92% of the american people want universal background checks. I can't get on a plane as the governor of the State of Connecticut without somebody running a background check on me. Why should you be able to buy a gun? Or buy armor-piercing munitions? It doesn't make any sense. He doesn't make any sense. Thus my reference to the circus...

Bring it back to reality. Why are they against universal background checks when 92% of the American public is in favor of them? If they can't answer that question — and they can't, Candy — What this is about is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as possible even if they're deranged, even if they're mentally ill, evening if they have a criminal background, they don't care. They want to sell guns.

The clown/circus quip is amusing but also putting it lightly. Otherwise, though, Malloy's explanation of the NRA's priorities is right on. It's not just that the NRA is insanely pro-gun (and insane in its general gun nuttery), it's that it's the chief lobbyist for the gun industry. It will stop at nothing to stop anything that might limit the gun industry's ability to make enormous profits, and that means the sale of assault weapons that serve no other (non-military) purpose than mass killing (and the fetishism of enthusiasts, if you can call them that), as well as armor-piercing bullets, and so on.

LaPierre is indeed a clown, of sorts, but he's a very dangerous one given the power and influence of his vile organization.

(I would also note that LaPierre made what has become a key conservative argument against any and all gun control: Criminals won't abide by gun laws, so why bother? But this is basically an argument against all criminal law. Why have laws against murder, or rape, or breaking and entering, or fraud? Like I said, these gun nuts are insane.)

Ted Cruz accuses Obama of trying to "take advantage" of Sandy Hook massacre

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Teabagger Ted Cruz, first-term Republican senator from Texas, has emerged as one of the most loathsomely extremist members of what is overwhelmingly a loathsomely extremist party. And like any "good" Republican extremist, he's taking it upon himself to block any and all gun control efforts, and of course to use any and every occasion to attack the president:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) responded to President Barack Obama's latest call for action on gun control Thursday, launching criticism at the White House and promising to do everything in his power to stop the administration's push for stricter legislation.

"It is saddening to see the president today, once again, try to take advantage of this tragic murder to promote an agenda that will do nothing to stop violent crime, but will undermine the constitutional rights of all law-abiding Americans," Cruz said in a statement. "I am committed to working with Sens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and Jim Inhofe -- and I hope many other colleagues -- to use any procedural means necessary to protect those fundamental rights."

Cruz also blamed the Obama administration for contributing to the gun violence it is now attempting to address.

Yes, you know, your "fundamental" right to own weapons of mass destruction that can do things like this, and to be able to acquire them without background checks, and to be able to do so within a gun-obsessed culture that glorifies gun violence, without effective law enforcement to go after criminals (Cruz blames the Obama administration, but it is Republicans, backed by the NRA, who have stripped the ATF of what it needs to do its job to enforce gun laws).

And of course it isn't just Newtown. It's Aurora, it's Oak Creek, and it's Tucson. It's Columbine. It's the mass murders that become media sensations and historical events, even if nothing is ever done about them, and it's the murders that don't because there are just so many of them, day after day after day. And it's so much else, including all the gun violence since Newtown.

Ted Cruz is a despicable right-wing ideologue with an agenda of extremism. But on this as on so many other issues he's solidly in the mainstream of the Republican Party, and he and his wretched party will continue to do all they can, no doubt successfully given the dysfunctionalism of American government, to block even the most mild (and even the most popular) gun control initiatives.

Craziest Republican of the Day: Lindsey Graham

By Michael J.W. Stickings

ThinkProgress:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) pushed back against efforts to limit the availability of assault weapons during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday by echoing the paranoia of the National Rifle Association and insisting that Americans would need access to AR-15s to protect themselves from "roaming gangs" during natural disasters.

Speaking to Attorney General Eric Holder, Graham argued that an AR-15 would have been "a better defense tool" than "a double-barrel shotgun" in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy.

Um, does Graham know anything about the damage an AR-15 can do? And he really thinks people would be better off if they, and a lot of other people, had these killing machines, these weapons of mass destruction, to defend themselves? 

Holder pointed out that it's unlikely that "New Orleans would have been better served with people with AR-15s in a post Katrina environment," which was marked by chaos, violence and looting. 

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Assault weapons

By Mustang Bobby

In case you missed it, Wednesday was an emotional day at the Senate hearing on assault weapons. Via TPM:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) sparred with Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn over prosecuting people who fail firearms background checks, a common line of attack from the gun rights side of things. The back-and-forth grew heated, requiring Feinstein to gavel in asking for order.

But it was from the gun control side where the strongest emotions came. Among the Democratic witnesses was Neil Heslin, a father of a boy killed in the Newtown shooting. He spoke about his recent testimony at a Connecticut hearing where gun rights advocates in the audience shouted out to him after he posed a question during his testimony, leading the chair to accuse them of heckling. Once again, Heslin asked why guns like the AR-15 that was used to kill his son should be in civilian hands.

"What purpose those serve in civilians' hands or on the street?" he asked.

Chances that the assault weapons ban will actually pass the Senate are slim, and when you get the to the House, virtually nil. The NRA have bought and paid for enough members of Congress to ensure that nothing will get through without their blessing. And they'll have no problem attacking Mr. Heslin or any other victim of gun violence as an enemy of freedom, America, and Smith & Wesson's bottom line.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Guns and Christianity, reductio ad absurdum

By Michael J.W. Stickings

CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) tweeted at 3:17 PM on Tue, Feb 05, 2013:

Arkansas Legislature approves bill to allow concealed guns in churches. (link)

(https://twitter.com/cnnbrk/status/298888180273381377)

And it all comes together...

The final merger of a bloodthirsty gun culture and an enslaving religion based on a grotesque blood sacrifice.

Welcome again to the death throes of the American Empire -- from the NRA-GOP alliance to Columbine to Aurora to Sandy Hook to the streets of any major city to the redneck countryside to the churches of Arkansas.

Land of the "free," home of the "brave."
And truly insane.

Guns and children and the gun crazies with their heads up their asses

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Read this very powerful piece at Slate:

What does the body of a 6-year-old girl look like after a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle's high-velocity bullets rip through her? The average 6-year-old girl weighs about 44 pounds and stands around 3 feet 9 inches tall. The size of her organs and the diameters of her arteries and veins, bowel, and bones are much smaller than an adult's. But a 6-year-old girl is not a miniature adult; her organs are more vulnerable and less protected by bones. So when a high-velocity projectile like a .223-caliber bullet, traveling at approximately 2,000 miles per hour, from an assault weapon like a Bushmaster AR-15, enters her body, all hell breaks loose. If that bullet pierces her chest wall into her heart, it will cause her heart to explode, and if it passes within 3 inches of her aorta, the shockwaves will tear it open. If it slices into her arm, it will shatter her humerus into so many fragments that it will no longer be recognizable as a bone. If it spirals into her brain, the cavity and damage the bullet causes will be so extensive that her head will break apart.

Guns kill kids. In 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2,694 children and teens in the United States died because of a firearm. Another 15,578 children and teens were injured. Every 30 minutes, a child is killed or injured by a gun. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the largest organization of pediatricians, recommends that conversations about guns and gun safety start during a prenatal visit and be repeated every year as part of anticipatory guidance. Those conversations start with a question: "Do you own a gun?"

And yet the NRA, its Republican allies (like Florida's Rick Scott), and the various other gun nuts who believe in a deeply flawed interpretation of the Second Amendment and who have succumbed either to paranoia or to fetishism, and often to both, are trying to block even this, seeking to prevent doctors from engaging in any sort of discussion about guns with their patients -- this in a gun-crazy culture with a pandemic of gun violence. 

As I wrote last night, it's time for Americans, governing themselves, to put an end to this madness.

The government rescues boy from gun-loving anti-government nut in Alabama, ending hostage standoff

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Great news from Alabama:

A 5-year-old child abducted from a school bus six days ago is safe, and his kidnapper is dead, ending a nearly weeklong ordeal for the little boy, his family and a small Alabama town.

The child appeared to be OK when he was freed, law enforcement officials said.

It's not clear what happened, nor how exactly officials were able to figure out what was going on, but it appears that something serious prompted the rescue attempt:

FBI Special Agent in Charge Steve Richardson at the scene said negotiations had broken down with 65-year-old Jimmy Lee Dykes, the child's abductor, and Dykes was "observed holding a gun."

Believing the child to be in imminent danger, an FBI team entered the bunker at 3:12 p.m. CT (4:12 p.m. ET) and rescued the boy, Richardson said, adding that the hostage-taker is dead.

Let me make a few points:

First, what a relief. I really don't like to see killing of any kind, and I wish this had ended peacefully, but the key is that the boy is safe after a long and horrible ordeal for him and his family.

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Annals of gun nutsery

By Mustang Bobby

According to Rep. James Lankford, (R-OK), guns don't kill people. Welfare moms who medicate their kids with free drugs kill people:

CONSTITUENT: My question is regarding the guns and is Washington at all aware of the psychotropic drugs that these children are taking? I guarantee it 100 percent that's our big problem. [...]

LANKFORD: I agree with that. I think there's a bunch of issues that, quite frankly, most liberals are afraid to talk about. [...] Where are we on all those psychiatric drugs? We've overmedicated kids. Quite frankly some of the overmedication of kids are because welfare moms want to get additional benefits and if they can put them on SSI through maintenance drugs, they can also put them on Social Security disability and get a separate check. That is wrong on every single level. Not only is it fraudulent to the government, but it also tells a kid with great potential, "don't try because you're disabled."

This genius is the fifth-ranking Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives. And they let him out without supervision. Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't bring up the welfare Cadillac and the young bucks buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. Why let perfectly good racially-tinged stereotypes go to waste?

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Someone please hand Wayne LaPierre a bigger shovel

By Carl 

Because he clearly doesn't believe he has hit the bottom of his self-dug grave yet:

WASHINGTON — Wayne LaPierre, the executive director of the National Rifle Association, angrily accused President Obama on Tuesday of demonizing law-abiding gun owners and of wanting to put "every private personal firearms transaction right under the thumb of the federal government."

In a fiery speech at a hunting conference in Nevada, Mr. LaPierre criticized Mr. Obama's Inaugural Address on Monday when the president said Americans should not "mistake absolutism for principle."

That reference, Mr. LaPierre said, was intended as an attack on the N.R.A. and gun owners who believe that the Second Amendment to the Constitution provides an absolute right to bear arms. 

What gun nuts won't tell you is that the Second Amendment is the only one, the only one, that places a condition on a Constitutional right. They'll ignore the language of the first part about a "well-regulated militia" -- and if the Founders were alive to address this, I think they'd acknowledge local police forces as constituting said militiae -- but woe betide anyone who interprets the rest of the Amendment to read as anything but "all the guns we want, all the time."

But then La Pierre doubled down on the stoopit:

"I urge our president to use caution when attacking clearly defined absolutes in favor of his principles," Mr. LaPierre said. "When absolutes are abandoned for principles, the U.S. Constitution becomes a blank slate for anyone's graffiti."

In effect, La Pierre is demanding absolutism on his relative terms. For instance, the gun that Founders referred to is a muzzle loader, a musket. At best, you might have a flintlock pistol. Why doesn't he mention that in his "principle"? After all, colonists had to defend their farms against varmints both human and animal, and they seemed to do a pretty good job of surviving. If the purpose of owning a gun is to defend yourself and your family, then it seems to me that mission accomplished there.

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Baby on Board

By Capt. Fogg

If all that I read were the sporting goods catalogs that arrive in the mail I would still know something was up.  There are suddenly pages of drum magazines for sale to fit  everything from non-military versions of  long guns to shotguns to semiautomatic pistols.  Drum magazines, you'll remember seeing them on The Untouchables, great round things holding 75 to 100 rounds mounted on the infamous "Chicago Typewriter."   One catalog even features violin and cello cases fitted out to carry them.  Fedora and Zoot Suit sold separately. What you'd need to carry a Glock pistol with a 75 round drum mounted below the grip, I don't know, but it's next to useless as a concealable or even portable weapon. So why this feeding frenzy?  Why just now?  Is there an invasion coming?

Gun shops are getting very crowded again.  There's a large supermarket style one under construction in my area of coastal Florida.  Prices are rising and they can't seem to keep military-looking fake 'assault rifles' on the shelves.  Another catalog features a kit allowing one to bolt together two Ruger 10/22 rifles - the kind of gun some country gentleman might give his son on his 18th birthday into a two barrel, crank operated .22 rimfire Gattling gun, complete with tripod.  Only $397 but you have to supply your own pair of rifles. Their website bears a headline saying they're up to a week behind on shipping orders because of  massive demand.

In barber shops and hardware stores and the Sporting Goods department at the local Wal-Mart, you hear muttering and whispering about "that monkey" and they don't mean Wayne LaPierre.  I heard an octogenarian friend say at dinner the other night "we don't have any freedom any more."  She'd just sold her handgun from the fear that someone would steal it and murder someone and she'd be blamed.  It isn't true of course, I don't think there's any way of tracing guns in Florida, but the fear is on the street and in the retirement homes and the mansions and yachts and trailer parks. That monkey is after our guns.

Yes, it's gun control time again with one side arming themselves for war and the other side howling Gun Control like ragged extras in a  Frankenstein movie.  The President has offered a package of measures designed to calm the hysterical on both sides and  it's not likely to do that, or so I think.  It's the "biggest legislative effort in a generation" says the Huffington Post,  "a bold and potentially historic attempt to stem the increase in mass gun violence."  Lets see what it looks like after passing through the entrails of Congress. Surely some of the proposals were pinned to the coat-tails of  a tragedy like a rider on an unrelated bill: ban the armor piercing ammunition?  Well it's really not that nor are the hollow points we use for hunting "Cop Killer Bullets" either.  How does one argue for meaningful gun control with all that lying going on?

 Really most of these inflammatory lumps of high velocity hyperbole are just that: attempts to emotionalize and to dupe the uninitiated and succeed in polarizing the attempt to do something useful. To me, much of this heated argument  is corrupted by dishonest coinage, invention and the refusal by both sides to examine  the axioms their arguments rely on. GUN CONTROL! and when I ask "what kind?"  The expression I get from either side is the same -- I must be one of them!

Will banning the millions and millions and millions of  guns and accessories now in 150 million private hands  do anything?  By the time anything like another loophole-ridden, designed-to-fail ban hits the streets, the number of these things buried in back yards and hidden behind paneling in basements will have doubled and the ranks of camo-clad, militiamen and survivalists and preppers will have grown further and short of a house to house search of 100 million private residences and storage lockers and bunkers, very little will be done to reduce their numbers. And nice people, ordinary people, educated people, affluent people are buying guns they would have had no interest in -- because Obama's gonna ban them.   The best way to create demand is to ban something.

And if Congress does do it again, and if they suddenly disappear with a wave of the magic wand, will someone still be able to find the hardware to kill a score of innocents?  Could you get drunk in 1929?  Can you get stoned in 2013? Of course.

Have all the miscellaneous and ballyhooed safety regulations done anything?  Mandatory trigger locks, microstamping of firing pins, loaded chamber indicator and magazine disconnect regulations?  No. Has there been an increase in the murder by firearm rate as is being said?  No. It's lower than it was in the 1950's. The fear is oversold.  Much of what is being proposed can be no more effective in protecting school children than those stupid, yellow Baby on Board signs people put on their cars in the '70s.  It's just there for the "I hate guns" people.

I'm still wondering if there has been an increase in mass gun violence or if the handful in the last few years is a statistical blip and the result of the unrelenting "never forget" emotional media coverage  that promotes repeat performances, but that question will never be settled when opinions on both sides are bolstered by selective facts, when the tenets of faith, the proclamations of activists and politicians and lobbyists are taken as axiomatic without question.  

Whatever happens, I doubt my shotgun will be confiscated, nor my Civil War pistols or my Flintlock Rifle. I'm sure I'll still be able to go to the outdoor shooting range and make holes in targets with a .22 pistol  Top Shot will still be on the History Channel and the Biathlon will still be held and Sarah Palin can still hunt for moose. Floridians will still be able to shoot wild hogs and Burmese pythons and out in the bayou, they'll still be able to hunt 'gators with .22 rifles. The fear is oversold.

Whatever happens, much legislation will be designed by people who know dangerously little about firearms and in a state of near hysteria and much will be sabotaged by their opponents terrified of symbolic emasculation and little will change. No one will bother to mention or discuss or factor in the fact that gun violence is still on the decline and that the level of gun control in any particular state or city does not correlate to that decline. It's a battle of preconceived notions and it's all about irrational fear.

Increased penalties and such won't effect anyone bent on committing  suicide and taking a few dozen innocents with him. Banning an auto-loader with a 15 round magazine when Abraham Lincoln's brass bound Henry repeater will fire 16 rounds in 16 seconds will  not make anyone all that much safer and we'll go on banning all kinds of things to "save the children" and setting the stage for a massive Republican victory in 2016.  America loves guns or we wouldn't own 300 million of them. America loves guns the way it loves trucks and football and beer and that's not going to change. 

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Granholm slams Santorum on gun control

By Michael J.W. Stickings

More than that, the former Michigan governor further exposed the absurdity of the extremist gun nuts:

Former Republican presidential candidate and likely 2016 contender Rick Santorum dismissed the need for gun safety regulations during an appearance on ABC's This Week Sunday, arguing that Americans should have access to military-style weapons and magazines, including the armor piercing bullets used by criminals to kill cops...

GRANHOLM: Why do you need armor-piercing bullets, why do you need that?

SANTORUM: Because we're talking about a particular type of bullet that is and can be available –

GRANHOLM: Deer don't wear armor. Why do you need an armor piercing bullet?

SANTORUM: Criminals could and having, having…

GRANHOLM: And police officers certainly do…

SANTORUM: And having the ability to defend yourself is a right in our country. 

I continue to contend that assault rifles are weapons of mass destruction in that their purpose is to kill large numbers of people in small amounts of time. And obviously there is no reason to have this sort of ammunition unless you want to kill someone wearing armor. And the fact is, it's not criminals wearing armor, it's law enforcement and the military. Which is to say, the only reason to have these bullets is to kill police officers or military troops.

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Guns only give Americans the illusion of freedom

By Marc McDonald

Fact: America has by far the fewest restrictions on guns of any First World nation (as well as most of the rest of the world).

Fact: With over 2.3 million people locked up in prison, America has the biggest prison population and the highest incarceration rate of any nation on earth.
 
What's wrong with this picture?
 
Gun advocates often claim that guns play a crucial role in giving Americans freedom.
 
But the fact is, guns only give Americans the illusion of freedom.
 
America today is a nation is that is awash in guns. There are an astonishing 300 million guns now in circulation in America. But that didn't prevent our nation from turning increasingly into an oligarchy over the past three decades.
 
Does an abundance of readily available guns really give Americans "freedom"?

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Economic stimulus

By Mustang Bobby

Apparently the mere idea that President Obama is even thinking about doing something to curb the sale of assault weapons has scattered the pigeons — including the clay ones, I suppose — within the gun community:

Interviews with gun store owners in four states after Obama's speech show that passion among buyers has not decreased over the month since Newtown; if anything, Obama's speech appeared to set off a new frenzy of buying, with some stores running low on guns.

"We were just swamped in here as soon as he got off the news," manager Bill Loane of Pasadena Pawn & Gun in Maryland said of the reaction to Obama's gun proposals. "People were just pouring through the door."

As the first news was breaking in Connecticut a month ago, buyers were having the same reaction. Between 11 a.m. and noon Dec. 14, firearms retailers in the state were busy performing 105 background checks – nearly double the amount logged in the same lunchtime hour a week earlier.

A total of 725 background checks were performed that day, up from 585 a week before. The trend continued in the days ahead, resulting in a 55 percent week-over-week increase in checks.

And they said Barack Obama was doing nothing to stimulate the economy.