by I can’t begin to say how proud and happy I am that we had a gentleman of Otis McDonald’s stature as the face of the battle to bring the Second Amendment to the states.
H/T SayUncle
Month: October 2010
My Kind of Female Politician
Susana Martinez is the Republican nominee for Governor in the state of New Mexico. Polls currently show her in the lead over Lt. Gov. Diane Denish. When CNN was wiring her up for an interview they got a bit of a surprise.
When CNN interviewed Susana Martinez, New Mexico’s Republican candidate for Governor, we got a surprise. Our cameraman John Torigoe was trying to clip the microphone pack to the candidate’s belt when she pulled away and said “Be careful, that’s a gun back there.” Martinez tells CNN she has a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
Now I understand why Cope Reynolds of The Shooting Bench podcast and owner of Southwest Shooting Authority in Luna, NM is such a big fan of hers!
Art of the Dynamic Shotgun Trailer
According to Magpul Dynamics:
Available now at Magpul.com and authorized dealers for Preorder. Shipping 1st week of November.
While it’s the most versatile and violent weapon system in the small arms arsenal, the shotgun brings a level of complexity that requires extensive training to master.
Join Magpul Dynamics instructors, Travis Haley and Chris Costa as they guide a diverse group of shot gunners up an intense ladder of excellence. On this journey, the viewer takes a student perspective, benefiting as the students identify and solve problems with a variety of shotgun platforms. This 3 disc instructional set progresses quickly as it covers the fundamentals of shotgun manipulation, pattering, weapon’s configurations, actions types, ammo management, and real life complex scenarios for the Home Defender, Law Enforcement Officer, Military Operator and Competitor.
That reminds me, I need to install the TacStar Side-Saddle I bought on my Remington 870. It does no good sitting in the box!
CCW Win in Sacramento County, California
Just sent out by the Second Amendment Foundation:
SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS REAFFIRMED AFTER SACRAMENTO COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE CHANGES CARRY LICENSE POLICIES SAY GUN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS
CASE CONTINUES AGAINST YOLO COUNTY TO SECURE RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE
BELLEVUE, WA & SAN CARLOS, CA – The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and the Calguns Foundation have dismissed their case against Sacramento County, California and its Sheriff, John McGinness, after the Sheriff modified his handgun carry permitting policy. Law-abiding Sacramento County residents may now successfully apply for permits to carry handguns by asserting self-defense as a basis for carry permit issuance. A one-year residency requirement has been eliminated, as has policy language that tied self-defense to arbitrary geographic factors.
While Sacramento County has changed its policies, other counties still fail to recognize that self-defense is a legally sufficient reason for issuance of a handgun carry permit. The litigation will continue against Yolo County and its Sheriff, Ed Prieto, on behalf of SAF, Calguns, and Davis resident Adam Richards. Additionally, this past March, Calguns supporter Brett Stewart unsuccessfully asserted self-defense as a basis for seeking a carrying license from Sheriff Prieto. The Sheriff’s written policy states that “self protection and protection of family (without credible threats of violence)” are insufficient reasons to exercise Second Amendment rights. Mr. Stewart will seek to join the litigation as a plaintiff in this case, now styled Richards v. Prieto.
“We are very happy to have been able to work with Sheriff McGinness to assist Sacramento County in revising their policies and practices,” said Gene Hoffman, Chairman of the Calguns Foundation. “Over the past year, more than 30 of our law abiding members and supporters have received licenses to carry firearms with good cause’ statements that are simple variations of self-defense. Even though the Sheriff is retiring at the end of the year, both candidates to replace Sheriff McGinness have publicly stated their support for Second Amendment rights and that they consider self-defense a compelling reason for issuance of gun carry permit.”
“The Second Amendment Foundation will continue working with the Calguns Foundation and keep funding attorney Alan Gura’s lawsuits in California until everyone’s firearms civil rights are fully protected,” added SAF founder Alan Gottlieb. “Together, we will see many more legal victories.”
For those who wish to apply for a CCW permit, the Calguns Foundation maintains an informational portal to assist applicants in all 58 California counties as part of its recently announced Carry Licensing Compliance and Sunshine Initiative. The Sacramento County page has details on the actual procedure and successful good cause statements and is available at http://bit.ly/CGFSacCarry .
Congratulations to the CalGuns Foundation, the Second Amendment Foundation, and Deana Sykes for taking a stand for gun rights in California – and winning.
Given Nikki Stallard’s comments at the Gun Rights Policy Conference on this case, I wonder how the California media will play it.
Vuurwapen Discussion on AR-15 Magazines
Andrew at Vuurwapen Blog has released another of his great videos. In this video he discusses the pro’s and con’s of the various magazines available for use in the AR-15 including USGI, PMags, EMags, Lancer, and the H&K. There is some excellent advice in it.
Steinbeck on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
John Steinbeck, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was commissioned by the US Army Air Force to write a book called Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team. It was a wartime report and a nonfiction account of his experiences with Air Force bomber crews during WWII. I picked up a copy of the book while out in California for the Gun Rights Policy Conference.
I came across this interesting paragraph which indicates the fight for the Second Amendment is nothing new:
And we may be thankful that frightened civil authorities and specific Ladies Clubs have not managed to eradicate from the country the tradition of the possession and use of firearms, that profound and almost instinctive tradition of Americans. For one does not really learn to shoot a rifle of a machine gun in a few weeks. Army gunnery instructors have thus described a perfect machine gunner: When he was six years old, his father gave him a .22 rifle and taught him to respect it as a dangerous weapon, and taught him to shoot it at a target. At nine, the boy ranged the hills and the woods, hunting squirrels, until the pointing of a rifle was as natural to him as the pointing of his finger. At twelve, the boy was given his first shotgun and taken duck hunting, quail hunting, and grouse hunting; and where, with the rifle, he had learned accuracy in pointing, he now learned the principle of leading a moving target, learned instinctively that you do not fire at the moving target, but ahead of it, and learned particularly that his gun is a deadly weapon, always to be respected and cared for. When such a boy enters the Air Force, he has the whole background of aerial gunnery in him before he starts, and he has only to learn the mechanism of a new weapon, for the principles of shooting down enemy airplanes are exactly those of shooting duck. Such a boy, with such a background, makes the ideal aerial gunner, and there are hundreds of thousands of them in America. Luckily for us, our tradition of bearing arms has not gone from the country, and the tradition is so deep and so dear to us that it is one of the most treasured parts of the Bill of Rights – the right of all Americans to bear arms, with the implication that they will know how to use them.
I just love that first line about “frightened civil authorities and specific Ladies Clubs”. I wonder if Steinbeck had a premonition about the Brady Campaign and their so-called Million Mom March.
The Hidden Life of Guns
It is indeed ironic that the quote “follow the money” traces its lineage back to then-Washington Post reporters Bob Woodard and Carl Bernstein. “Deep Throat” told the reporters that the key to understanding Watergate was the money. And so it is with a collection of feature stories in today’s Washington Post entitled The Hidden Life of Guns.
The stories feature a multi-media piece (at least online), a hit piece on a gun store in Prince George’s County, MD, and a tut-tutting piece on the “gun lobby” and the Tiahrt Amendment. It is this last story entitled Industry pressure hides gun traces, protects dealers from public scrutiny where the role of money in supporting so-called gun policy research becomes apparent. To support the authors’ contention that the Tiahrt Amendment protects “rogue” dealers from scrutiny by groups such as the Brady Campaign and Mayors Against Illegal Guns as well as making it harder for the police, they call on Professor Glenn Pierce of Northeastern University and Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum.
First, Wexler:
“It was extraordinary, and the most offensive thing you can think of,” said Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit group for police chiefs. “The tracing data, which is now secret, helped us see the big picture of where guns are coming from.”
And now, the work of Prof. Glenn Pierce:
But in 1995, Professor Glenn L. Pierce of Northeastern University analyzed ATF tracing data and discovered that a tiny fraction of gun dealers – 1 percent – were the original sellers of a majority of the guns seized at crime scenes – 57 percent. Pierce’s analysis “blew everybody away” at the ATF, recalled Joseph R. Vince Jr., then deputy chief of the firearms division. Law enforcement might be able to reduce crime by focusing on a relative handful of gun dealers.
Many in academia and the non-profit world have become grant-whores. In a publish or perish world, securing a grant is the road to salvation for a professor. It supports grad students to do the grunt work, it brings you recognition, it legitimizes your work as being “significant”, and, most importantly, it makes your university very happy as they get a cut of the grant for so-called overhead. And as for non-profits, it keeps their doors open as they exist on soft money.
So, if we follow the money, where does it lead? To the surprise of almost no one in the gun community, both the Police Executive Research Forum and Dr. Glenn Pierce are recipients of grants from the Joyce Foundation either directly or indirectly. The Joyce Foundation is THE leading funder of gun violence (sic) groups along with anti-gun oriented research in academia. If the National Rifle Association were to set up a grants program for pro-gun research, the academic world as well as journalists would be in an uproar. However, when it comes to the Joyce Foundation, silence.
Alan Gura on Strategic Civil Rights Litigation
This is a speech that Alan Gura gave at the Grass Roots North Carolina Gala for Gun Rights. The event was held in Charlotte, NC on Friday, May 14th. It was held concurrently with the NRA Annual Meeting.
I was in attendance at this dinner. I learned more about the entire process of carefully selecting litigants and cases in those 15 minutes than I had ever before.
To put this into perspective, I took two semesters of Constitutional Law as an undergraduate from a professor who lived and breathed the constitution. I also spent 3 1/2 years in a PhD program in Political Science at UNC-Chapel Hill before leaving with a wife but no degree. It is one thing to learn about the courts and the Constitution in a classroom. It is an entirely different thing to hear the inside story of the process from a lawyer who has argued – and won – two major precedent setting cases before the Supreme Court.
If you want to learn how pro-gun civil rights litigation should be done, take a few minutes and listen to this YouTube video.
H/T Gene Hoffman
Cry Me A River
Colbert King, in an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, laments that the expected increase in the number of conservatives and Republicans in Congress after mid-term elections doesn’t bode well for the District of Columbia’s autonomy. Pardon me if I am not sympathetic especially when he writes:
What’s more, a new Congress, under Republican influence, is likely to give the District more of what it doesn’t want.
Expect, for example, a renewed effort to weaken D.C. gun laws and restrict the D.C. Council’s regulation of firearms. Gun-rights forces tried to do that this year when they attached pro-gun language that ultimately derailed voting rights legislation. The Nov. 2 elections, if all goes as predicted, will only strengthen their hands.
I guess we should be happy that the District has been run by foolish politicians or we never would have gotten the Heller decision. Mayor Adrian Fenty’s intransigence led to DC’s appeal of the Court of Appeals win for Dick Heller. This, in turn, led to the Supreme Court acknowledging, finally and concretely, that the Second Amendment is an individual right.
So to assuage Mr. King’s sorrow, I send him this nice rendition of “Cry Me A River” sung by Susan Boyle.
Annie Oakley Does Not Exist
The New York Times ran an article this week contrasting real life police work with TV police work. After police-involved shootings, cops are often asked why they didn’t just shoot the weapon-wielding perpetrator in the hand or leg. Indeed, New York State Assembly Members Annette Robinson (D-Brooklyn) and Darryl Towns (D-Brooklyn) actually sponsored a bill earlier this year requiring police to shoot to wound if possible.
Two recent police shootings in New York City actually did result in shots to the legs which stopped a deranged man with a knife and a guy shooting at police respectively. However, as the article notes, this was more by accident than by design.
In fact, in the Thursday case at Pennsylvania Station, a second bullet fired by the officer missed the knife-wielding man and went flying into the pavement near the shooting scene.
Police officers, the article notes, are trained to shoot to stop the criminal by going for center of mass.
John C. Cerar, a retired deputy inspector who was the commander of the Police Department’s firearms training section, said officers are taught to shoot at center mass — which means the “head and torso” of a suspect like a man armed with a gun.
“You can’t just shoot to aim for a leg or an arm; it just doesn’t work,” Mr. Cerar said. “You are trying to hit the biggest part to the target, to stop the actions of the person using, or attempting, deadly physical force.”
He paused and added, “Annie Oakley does not exist.”
It is interesting to see the difference in reporting in the Times. The guy who covers the police beat recognizes the reality of the confusion, fear, and excitement inherent in violent encounters. Those who usually pen the editorials which involve firearms don’t have a clue. At least somebody at the Times gets it.