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.
Quote of the Day
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?
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?
Quote Of The Day
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an article which described the growth of Federal police ranks especially in the agencies not traditionally associated with law enforcement. When you have 5 criminal investigators for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and 7 for the Government Printing Office, I think you have a problem. I think Ronald Gainer, a former Justice Department official, hits the nail on the head.
Skeptics also say some of these smaller departments tend to wield their powers indiscriminately, even for seemingly minor infractions, in ways that seem self-justifying.
“When you start making innocuous actions crimes, you multiply the number of people who are enforcing” the laws and regulations, says Ronald Gainer, a former Justice Department official for Democratic and Republican administrations who has cautioned for years against the proliferation of federal law. “You multiply the number of people who have to enforce criminal laws and they all want guns.”
As Tam said earlier this year after the Department of Education SWAT team raid in California, “Look me in the eye and defend this.”
Quote Of The Day
The quote of the day comes from Tam regarding the authors of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank, a pair of career tax leeches on the cursus dishonorum, neither of whom has soiled their patrician hands with an honest day’s work in their life, are going to bring sense to financial markets and look out for the well-being of the little guy? Yeah, right.
And I think she is unfortunately correct that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will eventually have its own SWAT team. It just won’t have a director if Obama continues to nominate hyper-partisan types and the Senate maintains a backbone.
Quote Of The Day
Sebastian at Shall Not Be Questioned has a very insightful look at the GOP field that he posted yesterday. As much as I don’t really care for Willard Mitt Romney, given the problems every other front-runner has had – and the media’s determination to sabotage them – it is looking more and more likely that Romney will be the last man standing. The Quote of the Day comes from a comment on Sebastian’s post by “Gnarly Sheen”.
This election feels more and more like someone taking you to a maximum security prison and asking you to pick whichever inmate you want to take care of your mother for the next four years.
Damn if Gnarly Sheen hasn’t hit the nail on the head!
As to Sebastian’s central position, that the next President could very well appoint 2-3 Supreme Court Justices and that is what really is at stake, I think he is right. Sandy Froman made that same observation at the Gun Rights Policy Conference when she quipped, “Pray for the Five”. There are a lot of post-McDonald cases wending their way through the District Courts. We need appellate level judges who will stand by the Second Amendment and for that reason, and that reason only, I would vote grudgingly for Romney.
It’s a helluva choice, ain’t it?
Quote Of The Day
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism held a hearing yesterday on one of Mayor Bloomberg’s pet projects. The bill, S. 436, the Fix Gun Checks Act of 2011, was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). The witnesses were what might be expected from in the Democrat controlled Senate with one exception.
Attorney David Kopel appeared to testify before the subcommittee in opposition to the bill. He correctly tore the bill to pieces. His conclusion is the quote of the day.
S. 436 violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due of law, the Fifth Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the law, and the Tenth Amendment’s reservation of state authority over purely intrastate activities. S. 436 further violates the Tenth Amendment by imposing on the vast majority of states an extremely repressive system of restrictions on law-abiding gun owners which those states have already rejected.
Ever since 1776, Congress has recognized that a national gun registry would be a dangerous violation of the right to keep and bear arms. S. 436 creates such a registry.
S. 436 has no legitimate constitutional basis of authority, because S. 436 attempts to twists Congress’s real power to regulate interstate commerce into the power to regulate what is not interstate and not commercial.
S. 436 treats arrests as if they were convictions.
S. 436 takes the current gun ban for the criminally insane and applies it to non-dangerous people who have been ordered to get counseling for mental problems that have absolutely nothing to do with dangerousness—including stuttering, lack of sexual desire, and nicotine dependence.
Whatever good intentions might lie behind S. 436, the actual bill as drafted is grotesquely overbroad, and a Pandora’s Box of the dangerous consequences that are the inevitable result of making it a felony for law-abiding Americans to possess and use firearms.
Quote Of The Day
The Daily Caller reports today that Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department tried to manipulate the press coverage of Operation Fast and Furious prior to a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on November 1st.
The Justice Department selectively leaked documents about earlier gunwalking that were delivered to the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 31st. The goal was to make Sen. Chuck Grassley’s questions appear partisan when he asked about Operation Fast and Furious.
Ed Morrissey writing in HotAir.com has this to say about the attempt at manipulating the press:
Well, it’s no big deal, right? It’s not as if this is a life-and-death issue. Oh, wait …
Scandal-free, my foot. If this administration had nothing to hide, it wouldn’t be so desperate to manipulate the media and dodge Congressional oversight. It’s long past time for Eric Holder to resign. It might be time for the Senate to block all Obama nominees until he fires Holder.
Quote Of The Day No. 2
Reporter Katie Pavlich of Townhall.com has been covering Project Gunwalker and Operation Fast and Furious for quite a while now. If you follow her on Twitter, you know she has continually objected to any characterization of this operation as “botched”, “failed”, etc. Yesterday, in a column for Townhall.com, she laid out why it is wrong to view Operation Fast and Furious as “botched”. She says:
The only thing botched about Operation Fast and Furious is that the American public found out about it. Fast and Furious was carried out exactly as planned: allow straw purchasers to transfer guns to cartels, let those guns get trafficked back to Mexico and see where they end up. There was no plan to trace these guns and no plan to inform the Mexican Government of the operation, either.
And then after laying out the facts, she concludes:
The Obama Administration botched the cover-up of Fast and Furious. Lies perpetuated by the Holder Justice Department continue to be shredded by a handful of media outlets, Sen. Charles Grassley, Sen. John Cornyn, Rep. Darrell Issa and members of the House Oversight Committee, but in no way was allowing Mexican cartels to get their hands on high powered weapons a “mistake.”
H/T Sebastian
Quote Of The Day No. 2
The second quote of the day comes from HotAir.com’s Allahpundit. His reaction to Eric Holder’s expected call today for more gun control as the solution to Operation Fast and Furious is spot on. And I do like his new proposed gun law.
Seriously, though, having Obama’s AG mumble about more gun regulation in front of a mic will accomplish two things. One: It’s bound to worry all sorts of swing-state gun owners in Pennsylvania and Ohio once word of his testimony gets around, which is all to the good for election day next year. Two: The more gun owners perk up about Holder’s testimony, the more public interest there’s bound to be in Fast & Furious. And hey — there actually is room for a smart new gun law here if Congress is willing to take it up. I call it the “DOJ Shouldn’t Walk Guns to Psychotic Mexican Drug Cartels Act of 2011.” The text reads, in full, “The DOJ shouldn’t walk guns to psychotic Mexican drug cartels.”
I’m thinking that would be a party-line vote in the House.