Saturday, September 16, 2006

It's news, but it's not NEW news!

Today we present a special issue of Cogito Ergo Geek. We once called it "BlogMeat", but we over-used tha termt. For this single occasion, representing "The Night When The Geek Woke Up In The Middle Of The Night And Couldn't Get Back To Sleep, And Looked Up Old Blog Entries Out Of Sheer Boredom", we'll take a look at Gun Blog entries going back in time.

As an added bonus, this allows me to renew links to some of my favorite firearms-related websites, as reflected on my sidebar.


First, let's look at a Tucker Carlson interview with a Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence (formerly Handgun Contro, Inc.) lawyer discussing Indiana's revision to Concealed Carry laws. Indiana voted to issue Concealed Carry licences "for life" rather than require renewal every four years. The Brady Bunch objected, and Carlson called the Brady representative "unprepared" when she couldn't cite statistics on the number of Indiana CCW licensees who have been arrested for violent gun crimes. Read the show transcript here; search for "Brady" to find the applicable segment. (Show date July 6, 2006. H/T Packing.Org)


NEXT:


From Xavier Thoughts, a July 19, 2006 segment showing a male teenager who seems to break every rule of gunhandling safety while sitting at his kitchen table . The big Accidental Discharge sounds bogus to me ... and to others. Also, while he (the "Idiot With Guns #41") racks the slide of what looks like a very old Colt 1911, the hammer doesn't appear (to me) to have actually remained cocked. In short, while it illustrates the violation of basic safety rules, the entire filmstrip appears contrived. But don't take my word for it, go see for yourself.
H/T The Ninth Stage. (The link is at the bottom of the page, as of this writing.)

NEXT:


As long as I'm mentioning The Brady Bunch, allow me to gloat one more time in referencing their premature announcement on August 24, 2006,that the California state senate passed the egregious AB 352.

As I wrote on September 07, 2006, this impossible dream collapsed with the surprisingly realistic appreciation that enforcement of this law would be hugely expensive, completely ineffective, and was ultimately nothing more than the imposition of economic burdens on legitimate firearms owners in a thinly disguised end-run around the Second Amendment to establish ipso facto gun control. So ... Stamp THIS!, Brady!

FINALLY:

Here's a difficult subject, based on a September 5, 2006 editorial in the New York Times.

(This link may not work for you, unless you are an on-line subscriber to the NYT. It didn't really work for me, even though I signed up for the free subscription. After the day when it appears, an article is archived by the NYT and you can't see the full text of the article without buying it. I'm not inclined to pay $4.95 to read a single article in the NYT, or even to read the whole thing 365 days a year. If you are willing to buy the article, please send it to me and I will include it where it can be read for free by others.)

The article is entitled:

Editorial Observer; Once a Progressive State, Minnesota Is Now a Fief of the N.R.A.

It concerns the "Shall Issue" Concealed Carry law that Minnesota passed last year. Basically, the author ("VERLYN KLINKENBORG") is against it.

Gun-Pro Progressive, a Maryland gun-blogger, fisked the article in NYT Editorial–How Out of Touch Can You Be?, and I was entirely impressed by the logical approach to these falacious anti-gun arguments. (Click here to read his justifacation for being a pro-gun progressive ... a fascinating read.)

If you don't care to read the whole article, here are a few of the comments. Maybe they will convince you that it's worth your time:

But to me, owning guns and knowing how to use them properly was part of a civic bargain. I would leave the police work to the police, and they would leave the squirrel hunting to me. The notion that 38 states would have “concealed carry” laws in 2006 would have seemed insane, a regression to a more primitive idea of who we are.

Being able to defend yourself is not taking police work away from the police. It is NOT the police department’s job to provide for your safety as you go about your daily business. That’s well established caselaw, something Verlyn seems to have missed. See Castle Rock, CO. vs Gonzales.

Seems he’s missed that actually 40+ states allow private citizens to carry. You’d think if allowing CCW permits led to bedlam and mayhem and a “regression to a more primitive” state of affairs, you’d have heard about it by now. It’s amazing to me people like Verlyn can look at a map of the United States, and see state after state where the passage of Shall Issue laws has been a complete non-event (no blood in the streets, no anarchy, no OK-Corral-On-Every-Corner scenarios), and not realize that they’re barking up the wrong tree. It’s as though they’re thinking “well it didn’t cause hell on earth in the first thirty-odd states that went Shall Issue…but it’s going to happen soon! Really!”
Actually, it's 48 states, as I mentioned last March.

The editorial writer mentions several other issues which are central to the gun-control frantic efforts to obfuscate the issue:

"The application for a concealed-weapon permit appears to have been created by people who believe the real threat in carrying a gun is the loss of privacy entailed in filling out the form. Yet it isn’t possible for a member of the public to find out who has received a permit and may, in fact, be packing heat."

This isn't just a "privacy Issue" as Pro-Gun Progressive argues. It's also a safety issue.
A few years ago I wrote (not on this forum) about a lady friend of mine who lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She lives in the suburbs, so she drives her car to a light-rail nexus and takes the train to work. While waiting for her morning train one cold winter morning, she was approached by a group of yobs who started their typical aggressive intimidating cant about how she should give up her purse because they needed the money in her purse more than she did. Cold and frightened, she put her hands in the pockets of her overcoat.

The yobs were immediately intimidated. The "Shall Issue" bill had recently been passed in Oregon, and the yobs knew that she could legally carry a firearms in self-defense. They accused her of having a firearm in her hand, and cursed her vigorously. But they retreated, and never threatened her again.

She had been 'tagged', in their mind, as a person who was a 'non-victim'.

The great value of "shall issue" laws is not that it allows people to carry concealed firearms, but that the yobs of the world don't know who is a non-victim. Perhaps this is an unintended consequence of these acknowledgements of an individual's right to self defense, but it is one that may act to the benefit of even those who falaciously believe that police are their first line of defense against criminal aggression.

But there’s a bigger problem. By focusing so obsessively on an individual’s rights — in this case, the purported individual right to bear arms in the library — all other rights are shoved aside. Police departments are forced to grant concealed-weapon permits to individuals who have almost none of the training and certainly none of the restrictions that police officers have.

Heaven forfend we be a little concerned about individual rights (this is why an old lefty like me hates anti-gunner nonsense so much–rightfully so, we make a lot of hay about George Bush’s NSA program invading our privacy and ignoring our individual rights, we want invidual choice when it comes to abortion, gay marriage, religion, free speech, you name it…but not when it comes to protecting your own life). What rights are being shoved aside? You don’t have a right to insist that I can’t protect myself.

And he uses the old canard, that we’re not trained properly.

Training.

What is it good for?

It's good for a lot, if you're going to use a firearm ... let alone carry one.

The idea that police officers are poorly trained, underpaid bureaucrats who spend their on-duty hours eating donuts and harrassing hookers has been with us for far too long. I personally know a number of LEOs who work hard at gun-handling skills and are some of the most daunting IPSC competitors in the area. (I also know some whose gun-handling skills are nearly non-existant, and who frighten me whenever I share a range with them, and a few of them are members of what passes for S.W.A.T. teams locally.)

There are two points here:

One is that the police are not obligated to protect you from aggressive criminals. You're on your own, Pal, and if you don't want to be mugged, raped and murdered it behooves you to learn how to protect yourself in the best way that seems possible.

The other is that not ALL police officers, perhaps not even the majority, are incompetent when it comes to shooting. As long as a significent number of LEOs consider firearms profeciency to be, for whatever reason (self-defense, job competence or even casual firearms competition), a priority ... all those who know that competent shooters are on The Force may serve to dissuade the yobs from challenging them in the field. This is A Good Thing for civilization.

I think that local police agencies are making a big mistake by not publicizing the competitive accomplishments of their LEOs, and it seems a likely subject for a future post. If everyone knew that Officer Krupki was a Grand Master shooter, the yobs would be praying that the next time they mug a person ... the responding officer would not be Officer Krupski.

UPDATE: September 21, 2006
I've been given a copy of the original NYT article, and I've posted it for your consideration here.

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