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Gun sales surge on change in Missouri law

Posted by simonov on 10 September 2007

From the St Louis Post-Dispatch:

A new Missouri law that eliminated a time-consuming permit process has fueled a surge in handgun sales across the St. Louis area.

Gun shop owners and salespeople say business is up at least 20 percent since the Aug. 28 change. No longer do buyers have to seek permission from their county sheriff before buying a handgun. Also gone is the $10 fee paid for each permit.

Missouri? Holy cow, we’re they a slave state back in the day?

The idea behind the previous system was that a county sheriff’s department would do its own investigation of an individual’s background before issuing a permit. This was in addition to the FBI background check that accompanies every handgun purchase.

Good riddance to a dumb — and potentially discriminatory — law.

Shotgun Saturday

Posted by simonov on 13 August 2007

We experienced another pleasant weekend shooting in the desert, this time with shotguns:

Canadian handgun sales surge on new legal threats

Posted by simonov on 9 August 2007

Canadian politicians thought they banned handguns back in 1995, but as usual the law was as poorly written as it was poorly conceived, and now, in the wake of a wave of violence, they are thinking about closing all the “loopholes.”

This, apparently is good news for Canadian gun stores.

“The more that the government talks about banning them, the better sales are. It’s always been that way. I’m sure it’s something they don’t intend,” said Wes Winkel, an owner of Elwood Epps Sporting Goods in Orillia.

“The best I’ve ever seen in handgun sales was last winter when we had our federal election and Paul Martin came on TV and said he was going to ban handguns if elected. Wow – you should have seen the phone ring the next morning and for a month after that,” said Winkel who sells about 2,500 new and used handguns a year.

Echoes of California’s recent .50BMG ban, which saw thousands of the rifles flooding into the state just before the ban became effective.

Your daily dose of dread.

Posted by QuestionEverything on 1 August 2007

There’s one thing that everyone, no matter their political persuasion, can agree on: The Media Hates Us. Whether the “us” in question refers to the Anti-War Action Network or the John Birch Society, it seems that just about everyone is convinced that the Fourth Estate has it in for them.

For gun owners, this fact was thrown into sharp focus by the recent Democratic debate, where CNN put the candidates at the mercy of a freak show drawn from the far corners of the Internet. Among CNN’s hand-picked questioners was Jered Townsend, an embodiment of all the worst stereotypes about the pro-RKBA community. Jered’s reference to his “baby” was probably the reason his video got picked in the first place, another manifestation of the insidious “liberal media” or so some would have you believe.

Progressives have heard the “liberal media bias” shtick too many times to count, and the buildup to the Iraq war was more than enough to put the last nail in the coffin of that myth for any rational person. Dope-smoking hippie liberals don’t play cheerleader for violent foreign interventions. But if the media had enough of a right-wing slant to turn a blind eye to the holes in Bush’s war rationale, why are they so stridently anti-gun?

The fact of the matter is that the media does not lean “conservative” or “liberal.” Mainstream news organizations are not anti-gun so much as they are pro-fear. Humanity’s oldest and strongest emotion is money in the bank if you know how to channel it, and the news media, much like the Republican party, have mastered the art.

“Produce contaminated with anthrax and botulin! Could something deadly be lurking in your dinner? Find out after these words from our sponsors.” The surest way to keep all eyes glued on your TV channel is to tickle the most primitive parts of the hindbrain where the fight-or-flight reflexes take root. Fully automatic “assault weapons”, cop-killer bullets and gun-fondling maniacs are just three members of a growing pantheon of bogeymen paraded through the headlines to maintain market share.

To some extent, gun ownership involves confronting and overcoming fear. Everyone feels a bit unnerved the first time they pick up a firearm and experience its recoil and report firsthand. People who carry concealed and/or keep guns for home defense have come to terms with the risks involved and are confident in their ability to keep and bear arms safely. I’ve seen a proportionate lack of confidence when talking with some anti-gunners who could never own a gun because “I know I’d get mad and shoot someone.”

Fear overrides the mind’s higher functions, and if you can make others fear you can control them. Every bit of confidence a person builds and every bit of fear they shake off represents a defiance of the forces that work to manipulate their minds. The news channels, the corporate drug pushers, the insurance industry, the fashion industry and many other industries depend on a pliable population.

Ultimately, media bias isn’t a matter of liberal versus conservative but of liberty versus authority. The big-money oligarchy that controls most of the information flow in the United States works to reinforce the status quo and consolidate power in the hands of a few, as big-money oligarchies tend to do. Civilian firearm ownership is just one of many obstructions in their quest for a more tightly-controlled society. The question for gun owners and citizens in general is how to respond to the trend of increasing government and private power over the individual.

My Weekend in the Mojave

Posted by simonov on 22 July 2007

We have recently begun working on a series of videos about America’s Gun Culture, from the point of view of a Guntard. Most of these will be educational in nature, but in the meantime we are cutting our teeth on the camera and editing software with experimental efforts such as this latest recording a recent guntard weekend in the Mojave Desert:

False Advertising by the Antis

Posted by QuestionEverything on 11 July 2007

I remember how giddy I felt when I put my AR-15 together and headed to the woods with my friends to do some test-firing. Enough firepower to lay waste to a city in a compact six-pound package! Press releases from the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center had assured me that my new rifle was a mortifying instrument of mass destruction.

Its 5.56mm cartridge could penetrate entire buildings and destroy vehicles. The flash hider would make the weapon invisible to fire at night and quieter than a ninja’s church fart. And, as a dozen ashen-faced news anchors had assured me, the AR-15 was a fully-automatic weapon that could fire hundreds of rounds with one pull of the trigger. Pictured at left is the destructive effect typical of the AR-15 rifle as claimed by the Bradys.

You can imagine my dismay when I found that my new rifle would only fire one thunderously loud shot per trigger pull and that it took multiple rounds to do so much as break apart a cinder block. Later on I talked to a friend of mine who’d bought a Glock, and I was again disappointed when he told me the gun couldn’t pass through metal detectors and that the hollowpoint rounds he fired with it wouldn’t penetrate multiple layers of armor and turn a man’s body inside out.

The antis like to paint the NRA as a tool of gun manufacturers although their support is almost totally grassroots in nature. If you ask me, if there’s any political group that speaks on behalf of the firearms industry, it’s the Brady Campaign. They have to be one of the most ingenious promotional schemes in history—they grossly overstate the quality of the product and they get every major media outlet to parrot their words.

Seriously, these misconceptions would be funny if they weren’t being used as tools to take our rights away. It’s similar to the “Weed with Roots in Hell” propaganda that led to the Marijuana Tax Act. If you ask me, one of the most important things we as gun owners can do to guarantee our rights is stamp out these misconceptions wherever they’ve taken root.

From talking to non-gun owners, I’ve learned that:

Guns can “go off” without warning if you touch them or look at them.

Loose ammo can discharge if dropped or exposed to sunlight and propel bullets at lethal speed.

Guns left in a hot car can fire spontaneously, perforating the gas tank and blowing up the vehicle.

Thugs with shotguns can “blow away” multiple people in one shot without bothering to aim.

While the anti movement seems now to be shrinking, the lies they spread may long outlive them, poisoning the well for future debate on the gun issue. So write your representatives and donate to your RKBA organization of choice, but make sure you also take the time to debunk these claims whenever you hear them.

Breaking news at this hour!

Posted by QuestionEverything on 5 July 2007

The 4th of July is now behind us. I hope everyone enjoyed the fireworks…

Anyway, I’m QuestionEverything and I’ll be helping Simonov out with the Guntards blog. You could say I’m going to be his spotter on the battlefield of ideas, helping him line up thousand-yard rhetorical shots against the gun-grabbing hordes. And on the topic of ideological conflict, I thought I’d share something for my first post: a little “news release” I wrote on the state of the gun issue at Democratic Underground.

AP WIRE, DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND

Gun violence took a deadly toll on Democratic Underground last night when yet another of Bongo Marie’s* arguments was brutally shot down by an armed Democrat. Gun control advocates on America’s most popular progressive political discussion board have been in a state of panic for weeks now, afraid to voice their ideas in public for fear of being mercilessly rebutted by the many self-defense supporters who frequent the forum.

Bongo Marie and her associates have urged administrators to ban “assault anecdotes:” pieces of evidence supporting gun rights that can be quickly presented and do massive damage to the anti-gun cause.

“Some of the evidence these gun nuts are packing is just insane,” said one gun-grabber, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I’ve heard them citing FBI statistics, talking about how Eleanor Roosevelt owned a revolver, stuff like that. It’s just crazy. I mean, last night one of them mentioned that the first gun control measures were part of the Jim Crow laws! That’s not fair—no one needs to cite facts that compelling. Guns are evil and that’s all there is to it.”

Bongo Marie herself has felt the sting of gun violence all too often. As one of the most fervent supporters of gun restrictions, her posts have been shot full of holes more times than she cares to remember.

“It’s utterly apalling,” said Bongo Marie. “I spend upwards of an hour writing and proofreading every post I make, and that doesn’t even take into account the time I spend going through people’s post histories looking for non-gender-neutral pronouns. And all it takes to rip them apart is one little cut-and-pasted chapter from a civil rights history book. All this spinning and hair-splitting isn’t as easy as it looks, you know. No honest person should be able to rebut my arguments so easily.”

Long-standing Democratic Underground policy forbids the denial of a poster’s progressive politics on the basis of their self-defense views, but gun control advocates are working to push through the Liberal Litmus Test Act nonetheless. Among the act’s provisions are a ban on the citation of any gun control statutes from before 1980, total prohibition of any discussion regarding Switzerland and strict controls on references to Gary Kleck’s publications.

“Those lunatics are running around blasting us with fully-footnoted studies and all we can do to defend ourselves is make penis jokes,” said another anonymous anti-gunner. “The mods need to do something to balance the scales.”

In lieu of a legislative response to the verbal barrage from gun owners, some anti-gun posters have opted to guard their minds with bulletproof shields that keep any outside ideas from entering.

“I’m not afraid of those gun-sucking freaks,” said long-time gun control advocate Paco*. “No logic or reason can penetrate my mental armor. I’m going to keep posting ‘Are Gun Owners Babykilling Psychopaths?’ polls in General Discussion until I get a majority Yes vote.”

*Paco and Bongo Marie are alternate names for infamous DU gun-grabbers who don’t deserve any more publicity than they’ve already gotten. Paco has spammed the general discussion forum with so much push-polling and gun hate material that even the more anti-gun DU members have told him to knock it off.

So what’s the point of all this? The antis are running scared, even on forums like Kos and DU. The anti-gun bias that the Bradyites have worked so hard to instill into the progressive community is eroding away, and now that logic and reason are entering into the debate the antis are finding themselves sorely outgunned, since emotion and distortion have long been the only weapons in their arsenal.

Once the prejudice against firearms is defused, the anti arguments will fold like cheap cardboard, and on the Internet we can see it happen in real time. Sites like Guntards, which mark the overlap between the pro-gun and progressive communities, will be an important part of this process.

Well, I have lots more to say but not much time to write now, so I’ll catch you later.

The acceptable face of ignorant bigotry

Posted by simonov on 26 June 2007

You’ve probably seen this on other gun blogs, a CNN report highlighting how gun owners are particular hazardous to pregnant women:

Now, aside from the preposterous notion that pregnant women are at particularly high risk for being crime victims,* on the strength of the American media’s latest news substitution story (the scary buck Negro murders pregnant virgin white girlfriend case, though CNN doesn’t quite put it that way, despite their understanding that’s precisely why it is such profitable broadcasting fodder), CNN once again is using their broad brush of bigotry to gain viewers. Only instead of going after the thrilling scary buck Negro angle, which would justifiably alienate many of their advertisers, CNN has decided to paint tens of millions of law-abiding (male) gun owners and collectors as particularly dangerous people for (white?) (pregnant?) women to date or live with or marry or allow to father their children, buy their car, pay their mortgage, whatever it is the loyal CNN-watching distaff wants from men these days.

Strangely, they haven’t made any similar leaps of logic to suggest pregnant white women should avoid dating adulterers, police officers, African-Americans, Ohioans, meth-heads or people who use bleach.

Pay special attention to the bogus statistics about “leading causes of death” for pregnant women. Sorry, CNN, that should have been “leading forms of homicide,” which are probably almost the same proportions as in the general population. But you knew that, didn’t you, CNN? It’s odd that you continue to find it necessary to lie to your viewers whenever you discuss guns, CNN, since we gun rights advocates almost never feel the urge to do so.

You can tell Paula Zahn what you think of her reporting, or tell her bosses.

* Update: Our friend over at the excellent Grappling With Guns blog takes exception to this point, and insists that pregnant women are in fact at greater risk of being violent crime victims. Grappling arrives at this conclusion based on formal studies of criminology and discusses it in more detail in a blog entry on the Paula Zahn segment.

Also, it may be that Pat Brown’s report here was presented out of context, that some of her comments about gun owners were meant to be directed towards psychopaths specifically. She attempts to clarify her views in this e-mail response appearing in the comments section on Xavier’s blog. Be that as it may, it sure would have been nice if Pat Brown had pointed out how the statistics Paula Zahn asked to her comment on were deliberately misleading. Apologies to Pat Brown if we seem to be unfairly slurring her, but clearly CNN is trying to push forward an agenda, the usual one for them. I can’t find a transcript of the show on CNN’s website, but you can very clearly hear the first words in the clip (from a different talking head), “. . . another big aspect is men who are gun owners as being particularly dangerous.”

I’m happy to set the record straight here, but of course none of this does anything to mitigate the absurdity of linking gun owners and gun collectors, the vast majority of whom are peaceable, law-abiding people, with a propensity toward misogynistic violence.

Update II: Pat Brown makes it clear on her own blog that her words were taken out of context. Apologies to Pat Brown, but none (so far) will be offered to Paula Zahn and CNN.

On the other hand, I do object to this: “Now, after doing interviews on the Jessie Davis murder, those from the right are taking one statement out of context and going nuts about it.” Some of us aren’t from the right, Pat.

You know, to be honest, it wasn’t even Pat Brown’s comments in that clip that got my fur up so much as the misleading chart and the initial words (possibly less damning in their full context as well), “. . . men who are gun owners as being particularly dangerous.” That, and the sordid business of fabricating an anti-gun fable out of the pregnant white virgin killed by scary black man story. But hey, if it bleeds it leads, right CNN?

Putting accidental deaths in perspective

Posted by simonov on 23 June 2007

My attention was captured this morning by an AP report on the tragic and widespread American phenomenon of parents backing over their young children. According to Kids and Cars, a child safety advocacy group in Leawood, Kansas, “more than 1,200 children under 15 . . . were killed since 2000 in nontraffic motor vehicle accidents in the United States. Half of those fatalities were in backovers, almost all of them involving children under 5.”

Whoa!

Since I enjoy fooling around with numbers, I immediately cranked up Excel and downloaded the Centers for Disease Control’s National Vital Statistics Report on US Deaths and Death Rates. Now, if the Kids and Cars people are to be believed, an average of 80 children under the age of 15 are killed every year by their parents backing over them. According to the CDC, that’s a third more than the 60 accidental gun deaths for children under 15 in 2002 (if you want to use the figure for children under the age of five, only 12 died from gun accidents in 2002).

Of course, 60 accidental firearms related deaths is 60 too many, but I can’t help thinking the hysteria from the VPC and the Brady Center regarding accidental firearms deaths is a little disproportionate, considering how many American parents (presumably almost all of them licensed drivers of registered vehicles) can’t help running over their own children every year.

A Democratic senator before the Culture Wars

Posted by simonov on 21 June 2007

Few activities provide me with as much pleasure as reading Gore Vidal’s essays and novels, as well as his two memoirs, Palimpsest and Point to Point Navigation, which I recently completed. He was friend, acquaintance or family to much of the US ruling class, back in the day, with a single thread of regret running through his memoirs being that he has quite unexpectedly outlived almost all the characters that appear in them.

I was amused, but not very surprised, to encounter this anecdote concerning Vidal, his step-brother-in-law JFK and Tennessee Williams (whom Vidal called the “Glorious Bird”) in Palimpsest:

In 1958 I went down to Miami to meet Tennessee and the film producer Sam Spiegel . . . When Jackie heard that we were in Miami, she asked us up to Palm Beach for lunch. The Bird had no idea who they were but took my word for it that Jack was running for president. We arrived an hour late. Jack was firing a rifle at a target on the lawn. He was not a very good shot; and I was as bad as he. The Bird casually took the rifle from him and shot three bull’s-eyes, “Using only my blind eye,” he cackled.

It is illustrated with a photo of Tennessee with the rifle, while Vidal and JFK look on (without any eye or ear protection):

Since this was prior to 1970, there is nothing really surprising about a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts shooting a rifle in his backyard not for any photo op political purpose but for simple recreation, a “sporting use” of firearms in which, incredibly, no animals are harmed. And we should be only a little more surprised that the flamboyant (if you know what I mean, and I think you do) playwright Tennessee Williams turns out to be a crack shot.

In those days, a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts was likely to associate gun control with Jim Crow. Later, sadly, the respective leaderships of both parties latched onto gun control as a delightfully polarizing issue useful in separating the sheep from the goats, and of immense value in the emerging American Culture Wars.