CSGV

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The Incestuous Relationship Between Media Matters And CSGV

May 15, 2012 by 2 Comments

Last week we saw another hit piece on gun rights issues by Media Matters for America. This one concerned Operation Fast and Furious. It accused former S.C. Governor Mark Sanford of being the latest to push the “paranoid conspiracy theory” that Project Gunwalker was an effort to build support for more gun control in the United States.

Or put more simply, Sanford is saying that “a lot of people” want to know if “Fast and Furious” was a plot hatched by Attorney General Eric Holder to curb gun rights in the United States. The answer to this question is a resounding no.

This conspiracy was recently laid out in the book Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and its Shameless Cover-up, authored by Townhall news editor Katie Pavlich. The theory is so far-fetched that even Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has expressed skepticism, calling it a “conspiracy thing.” Media Matters has previously debunked several other outrageous claims contained within the book.

Attacks on gun rights and on gun rights organizations like the NRA are not new for Media Matters. The NRA-ILA had a post a day later that noted for the month of April alone MMfA had run 32 hit pieces on the NRA. Attacks on the investigation into Operation Fast and Furious by the House Oversight Committee are also common as alluded to in the quote above regarding Katie Pavlich’s new book. They had one just yesterday accusing Rep. Darrell Issa and Fox News of trying to politicize the scandal.

What is new is the author of these last two pieces for MMfA’s County Fair blog – Timothy Johnson. If his Facebook page is to be believed, he now works for Media Matters.

Prior to joining Media Matters, he worked for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (sic) and ran the MeetTheNRA website for their 503(c)3 counterpart the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence (sic). He can be seen in his hoodie, second from the left, in this photo of CSGV staffers. The MeetTheNRA website is where they take quotes out of context so that they can accuse NRA leaders, past and present, of being “a group of individuals who promote racism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-immigrant animus, religious bigotry, anti-environmentalism, and insurrectionism.”

Attack pieces seem to be Mr. Johnson’s forte as evidenced by an article that he and Ladd Everitt published in the Neiman Watchdog entitled “‘Is the NRA paying mainstream reporters by the hour?'” Neiman gave the article this synopsis.

Two gun control advocates say that misstatements and fuzzy data coming from the National Rifle Association often are accepted by the press unchecked, and then disseminated, incorrectly, as trends and facts in American life. They point out, among other things, that gun sales are not perpetually rising; that neither are sales of guns to women, and that lax ‘carry laws’ have not been shown to lessen crime. There’s a lot of misinformation being spread, hardly examined at all by the press.

Prior to this stint with CSGV, Mr. Johnson was an intern with the Brady Campaign’s Legal Action Project in the Fall of 2010.

Legal Action Project Intern Tim Johnson, a current Georgetown Law student, joined the Brady Center for similar reasons. Tim explains, “Interning for the Legal Action project has shown me the importance of pro bono legal work as a way to assist victims injured by the negligence or intentional conduct of corrupt gun dealers.” In the wake of the McDonald and Heller Supreme Court decisions has allowed Tim to take part in the ongoing debate over the Second Amendment.

Johnson is listed in the Georgetown University directory but no info as to year or area of studies is given.

Nonetheless, Mr. Johnson does seem to have a long history of working with gun prohibitionists. Prior to his work for the Brady Campaign and CSGV, he worked the now-defunct Iowans for the Prevention of GunViolence in his home state of Iowa.

To conclude, given the left-wing and rabid anti-gun biases of both Media Matters and CSGV, is it any wonder that Media Matters sought someone from CSGV to be their new, pun intended, hired gun? If anything, his hiring just serves to confirm the incestuous relationship between these groups.

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Timing Matters

April 10, 2012 by

If you read my post on the planned demonstration outside the NRA Annual Meeting by certain attention seeking St. Louis politicians and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (sic), you know it is scheduled for Saturday at 1pm. This time in the afternoon was chosen, I presume, to make the news cycle for the 5pm local news broadcasts.

As I said in the title, timing matters.

Whoever scheduled this event forgot about another major event happening in downtown St. Louis at the same time. The 2011 World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinals will receive their Championship Rings in a special ceremony at Busch Stadium prior to the 1:05pm game. They will wearing special gold trimmed uniforms to commemorate their World Championship. Not only is this the middle game of their first homestand of the season but they are playing the Chicago Cubs. This is a baseball rivalry on par with that of the Yankees and Red Sox in the American League.

Every fan attending the game with a paid ticket is getting a replica Championship Ring courtesy of St. Louis-based stock brokerage Edward Jones.

Now where do you think the local media is going to be – outside America’s Center with a bunch of protesters or inside Busch Stadium with the home town heroes? Even if they do cover the protest, it will be bumped off lead story status.

CSGV might be excused for not knowing about this event but what does it say about local politicians such as Rep. Jamilah Nasheed, Rep. Tishaura Jones, and Board of Alderman President Lewis Reed? Do they really think they will get more media attention – good, solid vote getting attention – by dissing the hometown team in favor of solidarity with the anti-gunners? Even Al Sharpton decided it was better not to be in Sanford, FL over the Easter Weekend despite his earlier promise to “occupy Sanford.”

H/T “Dirk Diggler”

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Unscheduled Events At The Annual Meeting

April 8, 2012 by 7 Comments

Thanks to Twitter, I found this unofficial, previously unscheduled event that is planned for the NRA Annual Meeting in St. Louis. It will feature some local politicians as well as possibly some out-of-town visitors. The flyer for the event is below.

Since the Tweet featuring this flyer linked to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (sic) website, I’m assuming that they are the organizers of this soiree. As Sebastian so accurately observed today on Twitter, they are professional agitators. I don’t think they should be confronted, heckled, or otherwise given more attention than they deserve.

That said, I’d love to get a picture of myself with Ladd Everitt or Josh Horwitz much as Mike Vanderboegh has one of himself with Paul Helmke at the Restore the Constitution Rally. It would make a great keepsake – and a great reminder of our opposition.

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So Riddle Me This, Josh Horwitz

March 21, 2012 by 2 Comments

Josh Horwitz, the head of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (sic), is on this campaign to have you believe that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, gun ownership is declining.

The gun lobby is desperate to perpetuate its image as The Lobby That Cannot Be Crossed by Politicians in the face of a very harsh reality: Declining gun ownership in the United States.

As The Riddler used to say in the old Batman shows, “So riddle me this”. I think we can all agree that the economy is in recession. Moreover, small businesses are closing right and left due to the poor economy. So given that, why have the number of Federal Firearms Licensees been on the increase since January 2010?

According to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the number of 01 FFLs – dealers in firearms – has increased from 47,411 in January 2010 to 48,987 in February 2012. This is an increase of 1,576 dealers or a 3.3% increase during that time period. The days of the kitchen table FFL are, for the most part, long over due to the Clinton Administration. Thus, this means that 1,576 people thought the growth in the market for firearms was strong enough to invest their time and money into a storefront business.

You can see this in graphic form below.

So riddle me this Mr. Horwitz, if as you claim the number of gun owners is declining and that the new sales are only going to existing gun owners, why would anyone in their right mind open a new gun shop in a bad economy? The answer is that they wouldn’t. So either those 1,576 people getting new dealer licenses are delusional pawns of the gun industry or you are deliberately trying to minimize the real growth in the number of gun owners to mask the ineffectiveness of your arguments.

I vote for the latter.

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More “Insurrectionists” Than I Imagined -#EFAD Is Number Two

March 2, 2012 by 4 Comments

The favorite epithet that the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (sic) and their leaders love to throw at gunnies is “insurrectionist”. It doesn’t matter which end of the political spectrum you are on, if you believe the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms then you are labeled an “insurrectionist”.

Imagine their consternation to see that the number two book on the Top 100 Free Kindle books is none other than Matthew Bracken’s Enemies Foreign and Domestic. That is because in their worldview this is one of the classic insurrectionist novels for its portrayal of an out-of-control ATF and the armed response from Ranya Bardiwell, Brad Fallon, and friends. It ranks right up there with John Ross’ Unintended Consequences as subversive literature in their narrow-minded opinion.

Matthew Bracken is making this book available for free in Kindle format until March 5th. Frankly, he is hoping the attention given the book will start a discussion and has penned an essay called “Gangster Government, and Sakarov’s Immunity” that should serve as a basis for discussion. I would suggest downloading that as well.

I have all three books in Bracken’s EFAD triology and I paid full price. You can get the first volume for free if you go to Amazon.com and download it. Here is the link to make it even easier.

I’ve been re-reading it today and I had forgotten how engrossing the book really is. It will keep you hooked. Now pass on the link to friends and family and encourage them to download it so we can continue irritating Josh, Ladd, and others of their ilk.

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Quote Of The Day No. 2

March 2, 2012 by

Bob Owens has a good point. You’d think that organizations who are ostensibly dedicated to ending “gun violence” would be leading the charge against Operation Fast and Furious. After all, it was a gun running scheme that has lead to hundreds of dead Mexicans and at least two Federal law enforcement officers. If that doesn’t meet the definition of “gun violence”, then what does.

I’ll let Bob continue from here.

Both CSGV and Brady claim to be organizations dedicated to stamping out gun violence, but a search of both of their web sites show that neither seems to have the slightest problem with Operation Fast and Furious. The gun-walking plot is the deadliest political scandal in American political and Presidential history, costing the lives of 300+ Mexican nationals and only came to light after three U.S. federal agents were gunned down using walked weapons from separate gun-walking operations in Arizona and Texas.

If the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Brady Campaign really represented sincere efforts to end gun violence, then they should have been two of the organizations leading the charge for accountability here. Brady and CSGV should wage a public relations war, helping the House and Senate investigators, and demanding answers and accountability from the Obama Administration…

These organizations remain graveyard silent as the bodies continue to fall. Far from fighting gun violence, they use their silence to enable it.

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If They Are Going To Call Us Insurrectionists, Might As Well Get The T-Shirt

February 22, 2012 by 3 Comments

The gun prohibitionists love to characterize those of us who care about our Second Amendment rights as “insurrectionists”. This is especially true of Ladd Everitt and Josh Horwitz of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (sic).

Frankly, if standing up for one’s Constitutional rights makes one an “insurrectionist” then I wear their epithet proudly. So proudly in fact that I bought the T-shirt.

The quotation on the shirt is from Thomas Jefferson and reads, “The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” That works for me.

The T-shirt is available from Gadsden and Culpepper in black and coyote for $12 plus shipping.

And for the FTC bureaucrats who have too much time on their hands, my only relationship with Gadsden and Culpepper is as a customer and I bought my coyote Militia of One T-shirt at retail.

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If Only The Colonel Were Still Alive

January 20, 2012 by 3 Comments

The Educational Fund To Stop Gun Violence, the 503(c)3 arm of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, has a website called MeetTheNRA.org. Their goal is to publish (out of context) quotes in an effort to discredit current and former members of the NRA Board as being conservative radicals, racists, and insurrectionists.

The screen cap below is from today in their effort to smear the late Col. Jeff Cooper.

What Col. Cooper actually wrote in his Commentaries, Vol. 4, was this:

Clearly propaganda is more potent than truth. Take this matter of Guernica, for example. Pablo Picasso, one of the more significant propagandists of the left, made a very successful point in claiming that the town of Guernica had been flattened from the air by the German Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War − this being an atrocity since the town had no strategic value. This point was accepted by the world press, and is now considered a fact, even for inclusion in encyclopedias.

For those who have access to the official records it is clear that the Condor Legion had been grounded for two weeks prior to the occupation of the city by the Nationalist forces. Moreover, the German light bombers did not have the technical capacity for “carpet bombing,” as later practiced by the Allies in Europe. Most conclusive, however, was the fact that there were no bomb craters in the streets. The buildings were pretty well demolished, but this was done from inside them. It is obviously impossible to flatten a town from the air without hitting any of the streets, but now, to the amazement of the well−informed, the German government is proposing to pay an indemnity to Spain for an atrocity never committed. Such goings on!

Now Col. Cooper served as an officer in the US Marine Corps during both WWII and the Korean Conflict. Moreover, he had a graduate degree in history to complement his undergraduate degree from Stanford in political science. I happen to think that a military officer, especially one trained as a historian, is somewhat more likely to have seen the official reports and to have made sense of them than a hoplophobe like Ladd Everitt who wasn’t even born when Kennedy was killed.

Now I will acknowledge that there is a significant difference of opinion about what really happened at Guernica especially among historians so the Colonel could be wrong in his assessment. Jeff Cooper was reputed to be a man of strong opinions, somewhat cranky and irascible, but brilliant nonetheless. If he were alive today, the intellectual flaying he would have given the small-minded gun prohibitionist hoplophobes at the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence and CSGV would have been a thing of beauty. It is a pity he didn’t live long enough to apply it.

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Gun Control Activists Fire Squib Loads

January 14, 2012 by 2 Comments

I’m sure Joan Peterson will accuse the NRA-ILA of being big meanies for their take-down of the gun prohibitionists Josh Horwitz and Josh Sugarmann. And I’m equally sure that whomever wrote this for the ILA had a damn good time doing it!

The NRA-ILA took issue with CSGV’s Josh Horwitz and his contention that gun sales are not booming. They point out that reporters could do just exactly what the NRA and NSSF do: go to the ATF’s website for their reports.

They then look at  Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center and his work. Given his “scholarship”, they suggest he might be able to con the Joyce Foundation out of another $100 grand “for his tiny operation.”


Friday, January 13, 2012

On Monday, Josh Horwitz of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence—previously known as the National Coalition to Ban Handguns— penned an item for the very left-leaning Huffington Post website, deriding media reporters for writing articles that say gun sales are booming.

According to Horwitz, the reporters are wrong because their claims are based upon the FBI’s monthly counts of National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) checks. As Horwitz points out, not all firearm-related NICS checks are for firearm acquisitions, and the number of checks does not reflect the number of firearms acquired in conjunction with the checks. Among other things, he also points out that some NICS checks are for acquisitions of second-hand firearms.

Yet NICS checks, over 99 percent of which are related to firearm acquisitions or carry permits, have risen from 11 million in 2007, to nearly 13 million in 2008, to over 14 million in 2009 and 2010, and to 16.4 million in 2011, almost guaranteeing that sales of new firearms have been increasing during that time frame.

However, Horwitz is wrong to conclude that new gun sales have not been rising, merely because NICS check tallies do not specifically address the question of whether new gun sales are increasing and, if so, by how much.

There’s a much better indicator of new gun sales that Horwitz ignored: U.S. firearm manufacturers’ production data and firearm importation statistics, both reported by the BATFE. Horwitz accuses NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation of not providing reporters hard data, but reporters can get the BATFE’s data the same way the NRA and the NSSF do—by visiting the BATFE’s website.

The BATFE’s data show that the number of firearms made in the U.S.A. and not exported, plus the number of firearms imported, increased from 5.1 million in 2005, to 5.7 million in 2006, 6.5 million in 2007, 6.9 million in 2008, and almost 9 million in 2009. Figures for 2010 and 2011 have not been released, but based on the trend in NICS checks, it’s likely that they will follow a similar pattern.

Also this week, the Violence Policy Center’s Josh Sugarmann—a former employee of the NCBH himself—had an item on the Huffington Post website, claiming to have conducted a “study” of homicides in California. To be precise, the “study” consisted of cutting and pasting data available from the California Department of Justice. If that’s a “study,” then anyone with a computer and 15 or 20 minutes to spare can be a “scholar!”

In Sugarmann’s case, however, it may have been 15 or 20 minutes well spent. His “study” concludes that the California data surely warrant further study of “the identification of the make, model, and caliber of weapons most preferred by this age group as well as analyses identifying the sources of the weapons” and an “expansion of comprehensive violence intervention and prevention strategies that include a focus on the psychological well-being of witnesses and survivors of gun violence.” Those are just the sort of things Sugarmann might convince the Joyce Foundation to donate another $100,000 or so for his tiny operation to whip together, since the Congress recently banned the National Institutes of Health from using taxpayer dollars for such a frivolous and politically motivated end.

Meanwhile, Fox News ran an article concerning data that undercut the concerns of both anti-gun activists. Bearing in mind that the number of privately owned firearms in America is at an all-time high and apparently, increasing at a record pace, the article says that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that “For the first time in 45 years, homicide has fallen off the list of the nation’s top 15 causes of death,” down to 16th place on the list. So much for their assumption that more guns bring more crime.