by The quote of the day comes from Linoge of Walls of the City via Twitter.
Asking the #BradyCampaign how many gun owners there are is like asking the #KKK how many blacks there are. #guncontrol #fail
That pretty much says it all.
Month: December 2011
John Frazier Of The NRA-ILA On Obama’s Signing Statement
Cam Edwards of NRA News interviewed John Frazier, NRA-ILA Director of Research and Information, regarding President Obama’s recent signing statement on the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2012. This was where Obama said he would ignore the law’s restrictions on the NIH regarding use of funding to promote gun control.
Another South Carolina Sheriff Gets It
Chesterfield County Sheriff Sam Parker gets it. In response to a brutal rape and murder of a local woman, Sheriff Parker is encouraging women to get their South Carolina Concealed Weapons Permit (CWP).
“Get you a CWP permit. To be honest with you, there is no just no reason to unlock doors, no reason to give anyone the opportunity to hurt you.”
I think this range is doing a great service by holding a Ladies Night to introduce women to firearms. I wish more ranges would do it.
I Lost A Bet…And Couldn’t Be Happier
The Complementary Spouse and I made a bet back in September. She thought I’d hit a half million visitors to this blog by December 31st. I thought that was a bit optimistic.
I was wrong.
Now the question is what I will need to pay for losing the bet. I’m thinking this.
However, I will let her make the choice on what she wants for winning the bet – even if it is a Glock!
I do want to thank each and every visitor to this blog since May 19, 2010. You are what make this rewarding.
Quote Of The Day No. 2
Kurth Hofmann, the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner, looks at the differing requirements for picture IDs. The Department of Justice and Attorney General Eric Holder consider it “racist” for a state to require a picture ID to vote but not to purchase a firearm.
Putting it into historical perspective, Kurt notes:
Voting, unlike the Constitutionally enumerated right to keep and bear arms, depends for its very legitimacy on the voter being who he or she claims to be. Some would doubtless argue that abuse of the right to keep and bear arms is far more dangerous than abuse of the right to vote. To make that argument, though, they have to forget that Hitler positioned himself to become Chancellor through the vote. The power of Chancellor, combined with Article 48 (which was the work of Max Weber, so admiringly cited by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence for his advocacy of a “government monopoly on force”), made seizure of dictatorial powers a fairly simple matter.
With governments historically being by far the most prolific mass-murderers in the world, (and with the victims often chosen along ethnic lines), how can protection of the legitimacy of the process by which the government is chosen be considered “racist,” while far more onerous requirements for possessing the tools to resist such murderous tyranny is not?
Interesting, isn’t it?
Goodwill – Not Just For Used Clothing Anymore
I like Goodwill thrift stores. I have found lots of great Aloha (or Hawaiian) shirts there which are great for concealed carry. The Complementary Spouse loves them for finding things that she can convert into craft projects.
According to this story from WFMY-TV in Greensboro, North Carolina, donations to Goodwill are getting better.
A Goodwill employee can now tell a story of sorting through donations and finding a gun in a sock.
Although the gun was found Monday, Police in Wilkesboro said they got a call from the Goodwill store, on Gateway Ave, on Tuesday. The caller said an employee had found an “unusual” donation inside a sock of some donated clothes.
Because of all the donations that had come in, workers said they have no way of knowing who donated the pile that included the gun.
If I knew they had guns, I’d never drive past another Goodwill without stopping!
The story doesn’t say what the final disposition of the found handgun will be by the Wilkesboro Police Department.
H/T The Gun Wire
Quote Of The Day
David Codrea in his National Gun Rights Examiner column today examines just who will be held accountable at ATF for the abuses of Project Gunwalker. He concludes:
Does anyone seriously believe the long-awaited Office of Inspector General report will do anything to advance criminal charges that demand prosecution of the perpetrators and prison sentences for the convicted, as opposed to supporting the administration meme that these were mere procedural and judgment lapses, best handled by internal personnel policies and outside of public scrutiny?
Women And Shooting Covered By CBS News
I’m not sure what they’ve been putting in the water fountain at CBS News lately but I like it. Not only has CBS runs some of the best – and almost only – coverage of Operation Fast and Furious featuring Sharyl Attkisson but yesterday they ran a positive segment on women and shooting for the Early Show.
The best part is the smiles on each and every one of these woman’s faces including CBS report Katrina Szish after they shoot.
Grass Roots North Carolina Hits Back Hard Against New York Times
The New York Times, or as SayUncle calls it, the paper of making things up, ran a story on Monday asserting that 1% of North Carolina concealed handgun permit holders had been convicted of felonies or misdemeanors. They didn’t break down the number of felonies versus the number of misdemeanors as that would lessen the impact.
Grass Roots North Carolina head Paul Valone was interviewed for this story and responded late yesterday in a GRNC Alert.
Mike Luo’s crusade
Following an extensive interview between GRNC president Paul Valone and New York Times reporter Mike Luo, the Times is now trying to depict North Carolina’s population of concealed handgun permit-holders as rife with felons. To support his claims, Luo relies on flawed methodology, misuse of anecdotal data, and selectively ignored facts he learned during the interview. The current piece is at least the third time Luo has written biased and misleading articles on gun ownership.
Figures lie…
Although Luo claims to have done data-matching between criminal databases and permit-holders, he admitted confirming only a dozen matches with the NC State Bureau of Investigation.
Data matching between large databases is subject to high rates of “false positives” depending on the number and type of parameters matched. To quote one data mining whiz: “The problem is that if you’re trying to search a couple of large data sets for something that occurs infrequently, the number of true hits (if any) is likely to be far less than the number of false positives.”
…and liars figure
When asked whether Luo would confirm all matches with the SBI, or whether he would do statistical analysis of his data, determining what percentage of North Carolina permit-holders commit crimes, or whether he would simply provide misleading anecdotal examples as he did on a November 13, 2011 piece on restoration of gun rights for felons, Luo refused to answer.
How Luo creates a false impression
The plural of “anecdote” is not “data”: By pulling a small number of anecdotes rather than verifying all of the data, Luo hopes to paint a false portrait of NC concealed handgun permit-holders as criminals.
Selective data: Luo has a reputation among researchers for cherry-picking research to support his assertions, and for failing to disclose the gun-related leanings of researchers he cites.
The Charlotte Observer fell over itself to propagate Luo’s deceptive story
The Charlotte Observer ran this insult to their gun-owning readership as front page news!
GRNC president Paul Valone responds
“What The New York Times recently published is a biased ‘hit piece’ designed to undermine the unerringly successful expansion of concealed carry laws. By cherry-picking anecdotes from error-prone data matching, reporter Michael Luo creates a false impression of widespread abuse by concealed handgun permit-holders. Luo admits not bothering to confirm more than a handful of the matches found, so given the small data set used, the number of “false positives” may well exceed the number of accurate matches.
“Even Luo’s claim of 2,400 crimes by permit-holders – which includes DUI convictions and relatively minor misdemeanors – represents only a tiny fraction (0.6%) of the 395,251 concealed handgun permits approved since 1995. Moreover, data from other states reveals that few permit revocations result from misuse of firearms.
“As Luo was told during the interview (but chose to ignore), when Grass Roots North Carolina helped draft the state’s concealed handgun law in 1995, we gave law enforcement officials the tools for permit revocations by attaching concealed handgun permit information to the state drivers’ license database. Any concealed handgun permit-holder arrested for a crime would be immediately identified as such.
“Furthermore, nothing in the law prevents the North Carolina Department of Justice from doing checks on permit-holders to ensure they remain in compliance with the law, nor would we oppose such an effort. If the state fails to avail themselves of those tools, the problem lies not within the concealed handgun law, but instead within its enforcement.”
Sean at An NC Gun Blog has some further comments on GRNC’s response here and has been running a whole series of stories examining the NYT piece. They make for good reading.
I do find it interesting that this story comes out less than two weeks after New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg starts another crusade to close the “private sale loophole”. I really don’t think it is any coincidence.
UPDATE: More on the NYT’s “story” from Bob Owens here and a roundup from the Instapundit here.
Your Laws Mean Nothing To Me
When candidate Barack Obama was running for President in 2008 he was highly critical of then-President George W. Bush’s use of what are called signing statements. These are written pronouncements by a president when he signs a bill into law. From Wikipedia.org:
A study released by then-Assistant Attorney General, 1993–1996, Walter Dellinger[3] grouped signing statements into three categories:
Constitutional: asserts that the law is constitutionally defective in order to guide executive agencies in limiting its implementation;
Political: defines vague terms in the law to guide executive agencies in its implementation as written;
Rhetorical: uses the signing of the bill to mobilize political constituencies.In recent usage, the phrase “signing statement” has referred mostly to statements relating to constitutional matters that direct executive agencies to apply the law according to the president’s interpretation of the Constitution.
Here is candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail in 2008 responding to a question about signing statements.
That was then and this is now.
Two days before Christmas, President Obama was presented with HR 2055 – the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2012 – and he signed it. He also concurrently released a presidential memoranda or signing statement saying he objected to parts of it. From the political newspaper The Hill:
President Obama said Friday he will not be bound by at least 20 policy riders in the 2012 omnibus bill funding the government, including provisions pertaining to Guantanamo Bay and gun control.
After he signed the omnibus into law Friday, the White House released a concurrent signing statement saying Obama will object to portions of the legislation on constitutional grounds.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2012 is a 486 page document that contained Congressional appropriations for most agencies and departments of the Executive Branch. Contained within it were three provisions that are considered wins for gun owners. The NRA-ILA released a statement on these provisions that said in part:
Stopping Your Tax Dollars From Funding Anti-Gun Studies
One of the protections expanded and strengthened can be found in Sec. 218 of the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education (Labor-H) division of the bill. This section prevents the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from using taxpayer dollars to promulgate junk science designed to paint legal gun ownership as a public health hazard. Since 2002, the NIH has spent nearly $5 million on this “research” even though their counterparts at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have been prevented from funding similar studies since being blocked in 1996 by a NRA-backed provision.
No Tax Dollars to Lobby and Promote Gun Control
The second is a new NRA-backed provision that is found in Sec. 503 of the Labor-H division. This section prevents federal funds from being used for lobbying efforts designed to support or defeat the passage of legislation being considered by Congress, or any state or local legislative body. Too often, community action groups are utilizing federal money to lobby for increased regulation of firearms including trigger locks, bans on semi-automatic rifles, regulated magazine capacity, etc. This funding subverts the Second Amendment and allows anti-gun Administrations to fund grassroots gun control efforts using taxpayer dollars. We are grateful that H.R. 2055 prohibits further use of this gun control scheme.
Protecting Historic Firearms and Spent Brass Casings from Destruction
Finally, a long-standing provision, found in Department of Defense (DOD) Sec. 8017 division A, preserves the opportunity for American gun owners to purchase surplus firearms that are no longer of use to the U.S. military. This includes M-1 Carbines, M-1 Garand rifles, M-14 rifles, .22 caliber rifles, .30 caliber rifles and M-1911 pistols. Starting in 1979, different versions of this language have prevented these firearms from being needlessly destroyed. In 2009, Congress amended this language at the urging of the NRA to prevent the destruction of spent brass casings, a boon for gun owners and reloaders concerned about the rising price of ammunition.
According to the signing statement, Obama specifically said he would not be bound by the first of these provisions:
Additional provisions in this bill, including section 8013 of Division A and section 218 of Division F, purport to restrict the use of funds to advance certain legislative positions. I have advised the Congress that I will not construe these provisions as preventing me from fulfilling my constitutional responsibility to recommend to the Congress’s consideration such measures as I shall judge necessary and expedient.
Section 218 which relates to the funding of the National Institutes of Health says:
SEC. 218. None of the funds made available in this title may
be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.
So again we see now-President Obama doing things which then-candidate Obama criticized President George W. Bush for doing. In this case, using signing statements to modify implementation of Congressional actions. Moreover, he appears to be making good on his earlier promise to Sarah Brady to conduct gun control policies under the radar.
UPDATE: Here are a couple of more takes on Obama’s contentions in his signing statement.
From Dave Hardy: Obama Discovers the Constitution
From Sebastian: Not Reading the Same Constitution