Weer'd World

I’m starting to wonder if Elliot Fineman of National Gun Victims Action Council is even relevant to gun control anymore. Still this post was just too amazing to pass up!

New Year’s Resolutions for the NRA
Elliot Fineman
CEO and President
National Gun Victims Action Council

OK first we need to look at the hubris of this statement overall. Fineman is making resolutions FOR THE NRA! Not only is he making resolutions for OTHERS, but its a group he’s openly hostile and hateful to. WOW!

We will stop referring to ourselves as a “civil rights” organization that defends “human rights.” It is a sacrilege to people actually killed or harmed by civil and human rights abuses.

Sacrilege? You mean like Civil rights are a religion? Further every right confers some degree of danger. We’ll talk more about criminal behavior, but I assume that Fineman is in favor of New York City’s “Stop and Frisk”, because it MIGHT save a life, further the racist angles of that campaign are good to, right? Because Blacks are a huge part of the prison population.

Sorry, civil rights aren’t subject to approval by hateful rich people like yourself.

We will stop blaming gun crime on “failure to enforce existing laws” and confess that it is our lobbying that has blocked sharing and computerizing of national firearm sales data so crimes cannot be solved. We also block weapon microstamping, further making sure the “bad guys” never get caught.

We admit that arming bad guys through such loose laws and then blaming armed “bad guys” for the need for more firearms is like killing your parents and crying you are an orphan.

Oh, Mr. Crime-stopper! So because the records aren’t put into a national registry law enforcement can’t solve crimes? How many crimes have been solved by universal gun registration? The answer is statistically NONE. Same goes for Microstamping, its just a fancy way to bring gun registries to fired ammo. Cool, bro, but you can’t show me other registrations work, so why would this one. Further Microstamping doesn’t work! Even under ideal conditions many of the cases have illegible or ambiguous marks, further a few seconds with a common file will destroy the marks from marked guns. And of course lastly are the millions of guns that need to be retrofitted.

And for the bad guys? Where does any gun-rights group stand for arming violent criminals? Further where on Earth can violent criminals NOT get guns? Lastly why does the other guy need a gun before I can shoot them?

We will admit background checks are a joke. Mass shooters Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech), James Holmes (Aurora), Jared Loughner (Tucson), Aaron Alexis (Navy Yard), Paul Ciancia (LAX airport) and Stephen Phillip Kazmierczak (Northern Illinois University) sailed through them.

Hey we can agree with that! Background checks are a joke. Not only do these high profile killers sail right through them, but most of the NICS denials are false positives. Keep fighting for this one, Elliot!

We will stop our obstruction of “one firearm a month” laws to stop straw buyers. Convicted grandmother-killer William Spengler used a straw buyer at Gander Mountain in Henrietta, NY to get the weapons he used to kill firefighters last Christmas Eve. Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold also used a straw buyer.

Now this is laughable! First up Straw Buying is a FEDERAL crime, why do we need more laws to stop criminal acts. Further we’re citing a crime where a guy had ONE rifle. How’s “One-gun-a-month” going to stop that? For Columbine two of the three straw buyers served prison time, the third, Robyn Anderson, was never charged because she was willing to testify for gun control advocates like yourself. Gun Control is Pro-Criminal!

We will admit our contention that criminals will target homes because they believe there are no firearms or because they believe there are firearms is nonsensical. We will further admit that asking the same jack booted government we rail against to protect our identities so our neighbors don’t know about our firearms is contradictory and sniveling.

Well except that places that make it hardest to own or carry guns have higher crime, and indeed criminals did target houses specifically to get guns. So I guess talking about the truth is “sniveling”. BTW has anybody watched an Elliot Fineman interview? How would you describe his speech pattern? Just sayin’!

We will stop pretending our fear to go anywhere unarmed is somehow a public service and that we cop wannabes are the real law enforcers. We will admit our carrying does not protect others or ourselves and take a hard look at all the people–including elderly and 80 pound women–who go the same places we are afraid to go without weapons.

Straw man! I’m not afraid to go places unarmed, unfortunately I do it all the time. I visit states that don’t honor any of my permits, and I work in a gun free zone. I’m not afraid of these places, I go there all the time. What makes this unfortunate is I know that spree shootings almost always happen in places like this. Further I know that places that restrict gun ownership are more dangerous. Lastly I don’t carry a gun because I’m a “cop wannabe” or I’m afraid, I carry one because if I NEED a gun and don’t have one, I will likely die.

While she was pregnant my wife stopped eating cold cuts. This is to avoid Listeriosis, and illness I have never witnessed first hand, or known anybody who has gotten it. Still Listeriosis in a pregnant woman will almost certainly mean the baby will die. My wife and I probably eat one sandwich with cold cuts a month, the chances of 9-10 sandwiches causing a miscarriage in a pregnancy is almost non….still for the sake of the baby we took that extra step. Same with carrying a gun.

Also the argument that people go places and aren’t assaulted is like saying that because people do things and aren’t raped, or hit by drunk drivers, such crimes don’t exist, or need to be of concern.

We will stop whipping up “preppers” and citizen army extremists into stockpiling bigger arsenals because jack booted government agents are about to storm their homes and disarm them. Though we love the melodrama of being “victims,” the 2008 Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller means that will never happen. Never. And if we are victims, we’re the best armed victims in the history of the world.

Now the NRA does support various “Prepper” causes, you can buy food, farming, and safety equipment at the NRA shows. I don’t really see the NRA doing much for the preppers who think they will single-handedly wage a war. Still NRA has been doing a lot to fight the illegal confiscations of firearms after Hurricane Katrina, further as Fineman was typing this, New York Police are indeed doing door-to-door confiscations.

We will stop our compulsive firearms talk about clips, magazines and how a semiautomatic weapon shouldn’t be considered an assault weapon. Though the blather is designed to reveal how the public is too ignorant about firearms to understand laws, the truth is we get buzzed just talking about weapons. Yes, it’s a fetish.

You started a political organization that focuses on banning those very guns without any cause or reason. You indeed are ignorant about firearms laws (hell I just pointed out some BLATANT factual errors in this one post), who has a fetish? We’ll stop talking about them when you stop trying to ban them. Deal?

Finally, we will retire our shopworn “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” slogan and our mantra that gun laws won’t stop the bad guys and mentally disturbed people. Mentally ill people are everywhere, like a man in China who attacked over 20 school children on the same day as the Sandy Hook massacre. Because he had a knife and not a rapid fire weapon, the children did not die and 40 parents in China still have their loved ones. Unlike in Newtown.

Indeed the one case he cites nobody died, but what about here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here?

That’s just EIGHT cases I dug up from my archives. I’m sure there are lots more just here, and I’m certainly not the comprehensive location for school stabbings, and school spree-killings where guns weren’t used. Mr. Fineman doesn’t care about the facts, he just cares about banning guns. Who has the fetish?

Here’s my New Year’s Resolution for Elliot Fineman. #1. Start acquainting yourself with facts. #2. Start caring about public safety like you CLAIM to do. #3. Start working on your anti-gun compatriots to get them to do the same!

This is an interesting view into the alternate reality of the anti-freedom advocates:

I once had an anti-gun person say to me “Would you be talking about how guns make us safer to somebody who had lost a child in a school shooting?”

I responded with “Would you tell somebody who defended themselves from a violent attack with a firearm that they really shouldn’t have guns?”

That second question is the inconvenient truth that they do anything they can to ignore. That was further shown when President Obama ordered the CDC to look at defensive gun use.

2. Defensive uses of guns are common:
“Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”

You see, I WOULD find it very uncomfortable to tell somebody who lost a loved one to a shooting that we NEED more guns in society. But that’s the truth, we’re SAFER where gun laws are liberalized. If that wasn’t true, I probably wouldn’t be blogging at all. I understand that the 2nd Amendment is a human right, and rights are not dependent on safety or the actions of criminals. Still I came to my pro-gun beliefs as somebody who didn’t see rights as an absolute.

I used to be in favor of gun control because I thought it made us all safer. I thought that infringement was worth it. I later found that that first statement was wrong, and that only solidified the tyranny of the second statement, not the other way around.

Some may see it differently, and frankly, I don’t care because we’re on the same side. The people who AREN’T on our side don’t CARE about the absolute nature of rights, but they DO care about their individual safety, and the safety of their loved ones.

I can argue for both of those things with the greatest of ease, and I think we need to tailor our arguments to our audience. My audience is not the pro-gun people (tho I know you guys read, and I love you), and its not the anti-gun people (who I know read, and you disgust me), its the people who aren’t absolute about the principal of rights, but ARE concerned about their personal safety.

Supporting absolute rights is supporting personal safety. Those who argue against rights, such as the zealots who make, and distribute these images are involved enough in the cause to know this. They deny it anyway because dead children and dangerous streets are WORTH banning guns to them.

They are monsters!

So anti-rights activist Jason “Baldr” Kilgore has a post up on a killing in a gun shop:

The gun crowd is always saying, “If only the victim had had a gun, they could have defended themselves.” After all, according to the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre in his unhinged call to arm all schools, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

But that philosophy certainly didn’t help Frank Petro, owner of Frank’s Gun Shop & Taxidermy, in Saltsburg, PA, just outside of Philadelphia. His business also features a “double tap shooting range” as advertised on his webpage, which features a news feed from the NRA-ILA and an NRA-approved training program (“Tuesday is Ladies Night”). Here’s his Facebook page for his business.

What could be safer? Not only was this not a “no gun zone” that the pro-gun folks are always saying are so unsafe, but it was literally FULL of guns within easy reach — and approved by the NRA!

Unfortunately for Mr. Petro, all those guns couldn’t save him. In fact, it was one of his OWN GUNS, taken from a display case, that killed him, in his gun shop.

You see, Mr. Petro had an ongoing conflict with a man named Jack Edmundson Jr., who had extorted a large amount of money from Mr. Petro.

Edmundson confronted Petro in the gun shop, took a loaded handgun from a display case, and shot Petro twice. Edmundson then started trying to set the store on fire, when Petro revived and attacked Edmundson, shooting and injuring him, before Edmundson delivered the lethal shooting to Petro.

Now of course the killer was shot in the process, but Jason ignores that, because he ignores ANY story where a lawful gun owner shoots a criminal. In this case the lawful gun owner dies, and Jason celebrates.

You’ll note that the anti-rights people were all talking about the shooting at the Colorado school…until it turned out the shooter was stopped by an armed resource officer, then that was the last we heard about it.

Meanwhile in America the Detroit Chief of Police is talking about the violent crime problem:

Detroit’s police chief has a solution to help drive down crime in one of the nation’s most dangerous cities: arm more citizens.

James Craig made the comments at a police press conference Thursday, when he announced a 7 percent drop in violent crime in 2013, The Detroit News reported. Although urban police typically favor gun control, Craig said his views evolved after working in Los Angeles and Maine, where concealed weapons permits are more easily obtained.

“I changed my orientation real quick,” Craig said. “Maine is one of the safest places in America. Clearly, suspects knew that good Americans were armed.”

Thursday’s comments echo statements Craig has made in the past, including those he made last month, when he said responsible citizens who carry concealed pistol licenses “translates into crime reduction.”

As I read that I went “Oh I know that guy!” but I don’t know him well as he became Chief of Portland Maine the year after I left Portland. I just naturally assumed that since he was from LA, and the last Police Chief (who was from Chicago) was VERY anti-gun despite Maine being a very pro-gun and pro-carry state. Still I’m glad to see him doing this.

Of course, Police Chiefs generally kowtow to the Politicians they serve under, in this case he’s backed by science.

Using data for the period 1980 to 2009 and controlling for state and year fixed effects, the results of the present study suggest that states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murder rates than other states. It was also found that assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level. These results suggest that restrictive concealed weapons laws may cause an increase in gun-related murders at the state level. The results of this study are consistent with some prior research in this area, most notably Lott and Mustard

Anti-rights activists are anti-safety, anti-science, and anti-freedom.