Beto O'Rourke's Safe Place

"Beto" O'Rourke hates you and your guns. He's pinning his Hail-to-the-Chief fantasies on mandatory gun buybacks, national licensing and registration, and red-flag laws to confiscate your collection of old Winchesters because someone doesn't like you. It's run-of-the-mill stuff from the unicorn left.

BUT, Beto decided to cover his butt  with a little theatre. Saturday, he went to an Arkansas gun show, ostensibly to talk things over with the loophole set -- guys like you and me, red of neck, rusty of pickup, heavy with the steel implements of mass slaughter.

So far it hasn't occurred to anyone to point out that there, amidst hundreds of these armed deplorables, he was probably in the safest place he'll ever be.

What gun for face-eating monkeys?

This fellow Jeff has a point. We slip well away from the rule of law when a  bureaucrat can administratively void a state statute, in this case Missouri's open carry law. Whether his attention-seeking demonstration is useful way of making our  point is open to debate.

He plans to carry a gun, probably a sidearm, openly into the no-guns-allowed St. Louis zoo, just to see what happens other than his new 15 minutes.

Regardless of your conclusion about Jeff's tactical stunt, I think you might agree that the leading local cop is guilty of a notable non-sequitur.

St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson disagrees and said, “More guns are never the answer. I think we need to have stronger gun laws and make sure that they are used in appropriate ways.”

Sam, no one with the brains of  a three-toed sloth gives a damn about your elevated insights on citizen control. You are a hired hand, paid to enforce  laws written above your pay grade. If you hate the idea of everyone except you and your employees being stripped bare of self-defense means, write your legislator.

Hey Amigo. Let's see whose gun is loudest.

De Voto on the Battle of Palo Alto where Taylor's young artillery officers mowed down Mexican  troops by the the score, perhaps unnecessarily:

"That the Mexican troops faced such fire and stayed on the field is ample evidence they were good troops. (but) Few of them, here or later,  could shoot straight. Government policy, taking account of revolutions, had forbidden the citizenry to bear arms."

(Ahem, Mr. Obama.)

---

As I've opined before, you have to love De Voto for a lot of reasons. Another one, referring to future CinC  Taylor on the same battlefield near Matamoros in 1846:

"...he had no nerves and nothing recognizable as intelligence, he was afraid of nothing, and he was too unimaginative to know when he was being licked, which was fortunate since he did not know how to maneuver troops. Add to this a dislike of military forms and procedures and a taste for old clothes and you have a predestinate candidate for the Presidency."

---

Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision 1846, Little-Brown 1942 pp. 189-190

A Winchester 73, t'hee

I assume you were as torn by jealous rage as I was when the feds stumbled over  that 1873 Winchester leaning against a juniper in Great Basin National Park.

Why can't I ever find neat stuff like that?

But it helps a little to see a writer put it in perspective and -- perhaps -- guarantee the old classic will never be sullied by display in SSRs such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York.

The most popular common variation was the round-barreled carbine, which sported a 20-inch tube and was—in essence—the AR-15 of its day: fast, maneuverable, and high capacity.

Proving that low-cap magazines are also dangerous

I tend to doubt the chief said this, but who knows? Anyway, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch alerts its readers to the next big thing in guns-that-ought-to-be-illegal:


He (the local police chief) also said the 9 mm gun found on the suspect had five rounds in the chamber and one round in the magazine. He also said the gun was "defaced."


Somewhere in the nation's Capital someone is drafting a new law to forbid private ownership of high-capacity chambers.

Eh, Representative Pelosi?  Eh Senators Schumer and  Warren? Those things can be even more lethal than shoulder thingies that go up.

Most depressing; guns all over the place

Down Under

This guy Monis is a follower of Mohammad, maybe only incidentally to the point here.

Not incidentally,  he has long been credibly implicated in hate-mail harassment, rape, and murder. He is also a resident of an Australia approaching its third decade of "no guns" -- except for guys like him, thugs.

One of the first guns Canberra banned back in the 1990s was the pump shotgun,  which is what Monis used to take a restaurant full of hostages and set off a three-fatality scuffle down in Sydney yesterday.  He invaded the joint knowing that none of his victims had the slightest chance of opposing him with equal force. Law-abiding subjects of the Queen, they meekly surrendered their self-defense rights years ago.

He would have lacked that confidence in much of the United States where any large random gathering may easily contain a few law-abiding citizens of the Republic, armed and quite willing to meet his force with their own.

No one pretends that victims shooting back create soft and lovely resolutions to murderous situations. When a thug waves his gun, any time, any place, the atmosphere becomes ugly and bloody,  but some immediate equality of force between the good guys and the bad leads to the chance of a better solution than, "Oh My, Cyril, I do hope someone has notified the authorities."

His religion is mentioned above only to highlight the handiest excuse for Hellish evil, the faith factor, not exclusive to Islam.  His lawyer explains:

"This is a one-off random individual ... “His ideology is just so strong and so powerful that it clouds his vision for common sense and objectiveness,” the lawyer said.

Or, in other words, if your deity tells you to do something, go ahead, no matter how horrid. We will understand and make appropriate allowances.


------

In Newtown

One of the back doors to citizen disarmament  has for decades been intimidation of the industry that makes self-defense possible. A thug commits mayhem, sue the businesses.

And no nonsense seems too weak for a certain kind of special pleader:

“The AR-15 was specifically engineered for the United States Military to meet the needs of changing warfare,” attorney Josh Koskoff said in a release. “In fact, one of the Army’s specifications for the AR-15 was that it has the capability to penetrate a steel helmet.”

As though that is something new and  awesomely surprising.

Josh, it gives me a certain amount of pain to tab you as an historical  illiterate, or a charlatan, or both. (Though, on second thought, not all that much pain.) Military and civilian desire for powerful projectiles goes back at least  to the earliest days of the steel helmet. We can easily imagine a  Camelot wherein Arthur pines for a crossbow bolt powerful enough to "penetrate the steel helmet" of Lancelot  for diddling Guenevere. It is all very unpleasant, but hardly a cogent legal argument.

You may or may not get some mileage out of your negligent entrustment theory, but you merely pollute the atmosphere with bullshit when you spew such steel-helmet nonsense, probably designed, now that I think about it,  to begin polluting the jury pool.  Nothing like a good round of hysteria to get folks in a proper lynching mood.

Six-Gun Colorado, Damn Good Jazz, Hog Balls, and Other Political Notes

-- Democrats are in considerable trouble in Colorado, and reporters are stumbling over themselves with explanations. You can, however, wear out a pair of reading glasses looking for any MSM mention of Governor Hickenlooper's assault on the Second Amendment.  He had the backing of Senator Udall who wants to disarm citizens in all 50 states. Both are in electoral trouble, though my crystal ball tells me the Hick will squeak it out. The Denver Moms (and Dads) Scared Shitless of Guns and Most Everything Else, Too are laying low. They recognize that Colorado is still far more John Wayne than John Denver, and those old boys out along the Dolores River will vote.


---

--Here in Iowa, Michelle Obama is stumping around, trying to pull Bruce Braley's balls out of the fire. The race to replace Tom Harkin is very close, but  RCP has Joni Ernst looking like a winner. I've liked this campaign. Ernst skewered Braley for his stupid and condescending remark about Sen. Chuck Grassley being a mere Iowa farmer who never practiced law.

She became the Hog-Ball Lady,  "I'm Joni Ernst and I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm."  Braley has not yet recovered, maybe because he's trying to prove he can get elected with the most incompetent handlers in the business.

Item:  For months the Braley campaign massed-mailed slick cards featuring a huge picture of Ernst, who happens to be a very attractive woman. The text was so subdued that people tended to think it was a pretty good piece for her.

Item: That mailing ended eventually, replaced by similar cards with photos of a paunchy congressman quickly going to jowls.  If elections are beauty contests, Braley conceded even before the swim-suit competition.

Item: Then Braley or his wife threatened to sue a neighbor whose chicken walked across their yard.

Item: Then Michelle spent most of a speech  intro identifying him as "Bill  Bruce Bailey." Which reminded me of how much I loved Ella Fitzgerald. Somebody needs to remake her classic into "Bruce Braley Won't You Please Go Home." It would scan just as well. (You should click the link; it will do your heart good.)

---

--We lost a very good man a few weeks ago. Libertarian senate candidate Doug Butzier flew his PA 46 into the ground trying to land in Dubuque. He was polling the Iowa LP's usual 1 or 2 per cent, but was earning props as level-headed candidate  who was being pretty effective in promulgating the liberty message.

---

You will be shocked, shocked, I tell you, to learn that before too long I will be saying some nice things about a Democrat who will turn up on the TMR Iowa Caucus list. Jim Webb.

Won One

No matter how potentially evil a thing,  by itself  it is a neuter.  So next time you're in your head shop and feel like getting a glass pipe to blow bubbles with or something, y'all just go right ahead in these parts.

Keep the idea of your gun in the back of your head while you digest this. Some Des Moines cops decided to bust a store and confiscate glass pipes as drug paraphernalia. The owner sued to get them back, lost in district court, but won at the Iowa Court of Appeals.

The report from Radio Iowa says: "The Appeals Court ruling says the law requires the pipes to be used to ingest drugs to be considered illegal. The court says no drugs were found in the store and there was no evidence to conclude the pipes had been used."

There you go. Drugs are evil but glass pipes for smoking them are not, so...

Hold it Jim!

Yes, stupid of me to lose the distinction, even momentarily.

Drugs and pipes share no moral qualities. They are ethical castrati at least unless some mysterious happenstance empowers a smoky hemp plant to vote in congress.  (Tempting as it is, I won't go further in that direction today.)

People who use them are possibly evil and  probably stupid to begin with; certainly they become dumber by the puff.  Or the guzzle in the case of ethanol based drugs.

Now, about all those "illegal" guns the politicians and journos keep yakking about:  Wouldn't it be nice if a senior court hearing an appeal from an innocuous, law-abiding fellow charged only with possession of a weapon heard about the Iowa pipe case and got to thinking along the same lines?

God: Bought and Paid For

A nice boy from the Jewish tradition, MAIG boss Michael Bloomberg certainly loosens jaws when he lines up with the most anal of the Calvinists and Weberites; you know, the folks who deem Tesla drivers holier than poor schmucks  tooling around in rusty pickups.

Bloomberg is going to Heaven because wealth is a sign of God's favor, don't you know?

Honey, I shrunk the camel.

His Gate pass wasn't free. He bought off St. Peter with deposit of  $103 million to pretend to clean up the coal and motivate fish to fuck more frequently. He now  announces he  getting his halo out of layaway with another $50 million to ensure that only criminals are armed.

No one is making this up:

I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.

So be it, and we can hope that former mayor Bloomberg enjoys an eternity in close companionship with Abner Scofield, of whom our friend Mark Twain wrote.  You'll recall, of course, that the wealthy coal dealer secured his seat near the Throne of God as a reward for sending $15 to his impoverished sister. The Recording Angel confirmed the arrangements in a personal letter to Abner:

"... (St.)Peter, weeping, said, "He shall be received with a torchlight procession when he comes"; and then all heaven boomed, and was glad you were going there. And so was hell."

Which Twin Has the Sanctimony?*

I don't know why an excellent science site is running the story this week. There's no news peg I can see, and the space launch doesn't happen until next spring.

But it is still interesting that identical astronautical twin brothers are teaming up to let scientists compare human bodies in space to those on the ground.

Scott Kelly will fly to the ISS for a year. Brother Mark will stay down here with Gabby. Each will be poked and prodded and tapped to observe and compare  physiological changes.

It sounds like a reasonable experiment to me, but I note a flaw. Let's reverse the roles and send Mark up there, sparing Earthlings a full year of his pestering us about new gun laws.

---

*I told you early exposure to electric teevee sets makes you weird.

---

H/T to brilliant No. 2 grandson (to brilliant No. 1 grandson on Facebook)

Bullets in schools, the eeeeek level explained

Eeeek Level One.  Sammy might actually get away with this one because lead-headed teachers and administrators are probably unaware of the very useful "bullet" pencil.

Eeeek LevelTwo. This one will cause a lockdown and local editorials praising Superintendent  Z. T. Limply for taking no chances. After all.  if it saves just one life...

Eeeeeek Level Three:   If you feel like amusing yourself with a full SWAT, active-shooter routine, complete with horrified mothers on MSNBC  (and even more horrified interviewers), you could slip one of these into some rotten kid's back pack.

California handgun carry: My lawyer can kick the s..t out of your lawyer

It's a little early to plan the party welcoming California back into the federal union, but a happy sign appeared today.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit has ruled that California de facto handgun carry bans are unconstitutuonal.

The link takes you to the full text of the 2-1 decision.  I've read only a few pages so far.  Media commentary suggests the case will go before the full Ninth and to the Supreme Court. Because other federal courts have ruled otherwise, SCOTUS will probably agree to hear the case.

In the early pages I've read, the Ninth panel buys the notion that the Second Amendment creates no right. Rather, it guarantees a pre-existing (or "natural?") right. I think I remember some of us making that point a time or two.

---

EDIT TO ADD:  Recommended: David Kopel's Washington Post explanation of  the decision and its limits. This guy thinks like a lawyer but writes like a writer. Nice combination.

Gabby and Gun

Dumping on Gabby Giffords is not a pleasant thing to do. So let's not.

But why should we cut breaks for  political ghouls using this mentally-diminished woman to gut America by disarming all citizens who did not wound her and kill six other people?

She will be on your teevee tonight, in paid commercials sandwiching Obama's annual paean to Obama. Her handlers would probably just as soon ignore Ms. Giffords one-time delight in center-massing a a nice-looking boy's image with her assault rifle.

Sure, he's pointing his own weapon at her, but maybe he meant merely to shoot the M16 (AR15?)  out of her hands. So she chould have just shot him in the leg.

Negroes and guns.

Rational gun people routinely argue that gun control mania is often a tool for   -- and result of -- racial bigotry. Lately we're getting more help from academia.

From a review of  Nicholas Johnson's Negroes and  the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms:


“Race has always been part of the unspoken motive for gun control in the United States. Johnson provides the best, most thorough history of the topic, telling the story mainly from the perspective and voices of blacks themselves. Shattering the myth of black passivity in the face of violent racism, the book is full of inspiring stories of genuine American heroes—some of them famous and many who were not—who used their Second Amendment rights to defend the civil rights of their people. Never shying away from the hardest questions, Johnson addresses the moral and practical complexities of armed self-defense, past and present. A major contribution to cultural studies and to the history of race in America.”

—David B. Kopel, research director, Independence Institute, Denver, Colorado

Poor Rahm

Hizzoner Emmanuel may appeal, but if he doesn't -- or if he tangles with appellate judges who have read the Constitution -- citizens will be able to purchase a gun in Chicago.

Well done, Judge Chang.  Well said, too.

"...a fundamental duty of government is to protect its citizens. However ... it's also obligated to protect fundamental rights named in the Constitution, including the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.

There's a happy little side note here. His Ineptness appointed  Judge Chang to the bench at a time when Duh Mare was still Obama's chief of staff and thus in tactical charge of advancing all Obama dreams.

I like schadenfreude so much that I'm hoping Rahm tosses and turns all night, yammering "wudda, cudda, shudda." The president, too.

Bwa-ha-ha.

Duelling news

I keep trying to save my friend's soul. He +tries+ to be a good anti-statist, but always get hung up on guns, and I think in his heart of hearts he's believes they  should be confiscated and converted to manhole covers. My latest effort, below,  is  generated by the Exeter, Rhode Island, gun squabble, and the congressional spat over what to do about plastic guns.

Personally, I trace part of the problem to the ready availability of The New York Times in his region. A copy can be purchased every day in undetectable cash deals, no permit required, no cooling-off period, no age limit, no restrictions on concealed -carry or  even brandishing. 

---

I suppose your  "Exeter Swamp Yankees" and my Iowa Hog Lot Wranglers share a passion other than oiling and stroking our barrels as we contemplate the the pleasure of our next mass murder.

I refer, of course, to our well-known study of epistemology and our curiosity about why, to certain groups, knowledge becomes valid by virtue of publication in the New York Times.

Why, just the other day my epistemology advisor, Melvin "Pigs" Dykstra, blew his nose on his sleeve and announced that he had been reading BusinessWeek lately and found (in his own quaint words), "By golly, guys, blamed if I ain't startin' to think that there's some other stuff to read and a lot of it ain't wrote by pointy headed interlecturals who genufuct or however you call it to that picture of Ol' Abe Rosenthal on their desks."

Here's what I think he was referring to:


A sample about "undetectable" guns: We’ve been down this road before. In the late 1980s, gun-control advocates tried to ban an Austrian-made Glock that was fabricated mostly from industrial-strength plastic and demonized as a weapon that would defy airport security. Congress held hearings and then passed the original undetectable gun ban. Strangely, though, the Federal Aviation Administration concluded that the Glock wasn’t really a threat at all. If screening personnel paid attention, they could detect the gun-shaped piece of plastic, not to mention the bullets needed to make the Glock lethal, the FAA said. “That was a big ‘oops’ moment,” Richard Aborn, a former president of Handgun Control, now known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, once told me. “We made the classic mistake of failing to do our homework.”

And about self-willed guns killing  people: 

Apart from politics, dispassionate observers must question the simplistic liberal slogan that more guns equals more crime. The U.S. has seen a two-decade period during which private gun ownership has continued to soar (some 300 million firearms are now in civilian hands), while crime has diminished.

---

Mel's opinion got back to the Democrat who lives in his county. He flicked the dust off his Hillary button and yelled that Business Week is just another one of those right-wing tea-party rags owned by Rush Limbaugh and edited by the National Rifle Association.

That made Mel maddern a wet hen, but he calmed himself and quietly corrected the button man. He allowed as how he thought the magazine belongs to (former) Mayor Whatzizname Bloomberg who started up Mayor's Against Illegal Guns.  And who, he might have added, openly and blatantly reads (and even approvingly quotes)  The New York Times.

As an aside, I need to note that Bloomie usually doesn't quote the Times about free-for-all Terry Stops of New York City citizens guilty of EWBBB, that is, Existing While Being Black or Brown.

Officer Friendly strikes again

Nothing looks neater than a big Harley with an assault rifle strapped on, unless it's the driver cop himself,  all decked out in leather, ballistic nylon, and a hi-cap .40 by Glock. The contrast of Officer Charlie McCoppy in tacticals with a peaceful school yard simply adds to his patriotic, law-and-order aura as he strolls around friendly-like, cautioning sternly against reefer madness.

It is a wet dream for some suburban clown who manages to get himself hired by a militarized police force taking its tactical and strategic cues from the same movie and television fantasies as the tyke who beat the "failsafes."  

You see, some little kid, probably raised by a flat-panel telescreen, fingers the unattended "AR-15" and makes it go bang. A bullet "disintegrates" and scatters itself or something hot and hard (pieces of the Hawg?) into the wee ones.

That no one was badly hurt signals more of divine grace than of a cop and his bosses possessing, among them, perhaps three functioning neurons.  The bracket was secure according to the company that sold it so why bother to unload while Officer Friendly does DARE business?  He feared the perceived threat that  some some third grader forgot to take his ADHD medicine and might throw an eraser?

Attribute whatever irony you like to the final AP graf:

The shooting occurred while police visited the school for Red Ribbon Week, an annual national event that features a series of activities designed to raise awareness about drug and alcohol abuse.

How about another-colored ribbon week designed to alert kids to the danger of Keystone Kops abuse? I suggest one event for the affair. Governor Brown and Mayor Bloomberg lead a panel re-explaining why the police are the only ones qualified to carry weapons.





 

Eric Holder, Defender of Freedom

Eric Holder has decided to be  a nice guy and let a fellow publish part of his book.

Or maybe Eric figured the ACLU would win, making the AG look even more like a statist fool.

President Obama's top cop said BATFEE Agent John Dodson "may publish the book but that a few parts of will be redacted for law-enforcement reasons. The book, "The Unarmed Truth," is scheduled for publication in December by Threshold, a conservative imprint of Simon and Schuster."

It's about Fast and Furious,of course. Only a slobbering anti-government libertarian would offer to bet that redacting some parts serves the law enforcement function of  making General Holder look good. Or not so bad, anyway.

---

And in a late-breaking development, one of the teevee networks is saying "we" let some guy take a lot of hand grenades over the border for the Mexican drug bosses. Very possible, of course, given our weak grenade control laws -- the loophole allowing unrestricted frag traffic at American gun shows.

Dancing with the Tsars

At the Obama-led grave dance, it was again determined that a self-willed gun killed a group of people. More precisely,  His Ineptness blamed "a bullet from a gun," demonstrating again his absolute mastery of turning a solemn occasion into a photo-op captioned with sound bites.

I assume it was merely an oversight that he neglected to mention that his -- and I mean his --  security services decided it was dandy to award a "secret" clearance and easy naval-base access to an admitted tinfoil hatter who heard voices and had a history of shooting off guns when ever he felt a little frustrated.

Perhaps his advisers will alert him to the omission, and he will shortly go back on the teevee to add that he has been commander-in-chief for some five years and hence might bear some buck-stops-here responsibility for a Three-Stooges  security performance.

Still, I'm reserving most of my scorn for a guy a little lower on the public pay scale, our old buddy duh mare.  

"Washington Mayor Vincent Gray also called for action, saying "our country is drowning in a sea of guns."

Look, you nincompoop, the nation is not drowning in a sea of anything except debt and devalued money. Otherwise it's actually in drought. We're bone dry of politicians capable of addressing the point at hand which, in this case, is a security bureaucracy with Curly in charge, advised by Moe and Larry.
.

Big Money: Guns just Fine and Dandy

This clown makes a point.

He eyed Ruger and SW stocks after the Navy yard shooting by a guy with a Bidengun. They rose, and he declared, ergo,  the gun debate is over. He couldn't report without taking a few shots as us, however. For example:

"Sturm, Ruger has been one of the best performing stocks on Wall Street since America elected a black Democrat president five years ago, and the tinfoil-hat brigade rushed out to stock up on guns."

Making us racist while skipping mention that the Navy shooter was black.

Making us the pulp Sci-Fi gobblers while ignoring the murderer's own terror at microwaves taking over his tortured brain.

Let him have his fun, even:

"Despite the news coverage, events like Monday’s aren’t really so remarkable. People with guns kill about 30 people (other than themselves) every day in America...

Which is an approximately correct number. it works out, according to the feds, to some 3.6 gun homicides per 100,000 persons living in America, per year.  But it is  revealing to do the arithmetic. Divide 3.6 by 100,000 and get .000036 per cent. Then toss out all of the slain young urban men with a criminal record and you can walk down most American streets with a cheery attitude.*

 "Yet investors on Wall Street are betting that, despite all the hand-wringing and pious talk, no one will do anything. They are probably right."

Yep. Grin.

It is pleasant to have confirmation from our "markets" that those of us who endorse the moral right to self-preservation are -- so far --  occupying tenable political ground, no matter what sort of goof brings the message to us.

---