CSGV

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Buyer Power Revisted

May 2, 2011 by 2 Comments

The National Shooting Sports Foundation responded on this past Friday to a report put out by CSGV’s sister organization The Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. The report urged municipalities to use their “buyer power” to force firearms manufacturers to adopt a set of rules that the gun control industry wants.

As I noted when it was released, gun controllers grossly overestimate the economic influence of municipalities when it comes to firearms purchases. Larry Keane of NSSF also points out below that the gun controllers forgot about the legality of their little scheme. In other words, it is illegal. Moreover, NSSF will sue if they try to go ahead and implement their little gun control scheme.

For Anti-Gun Groups It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again

April 29, 2011 By Larry Keane

The “Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence” (Ed Fund) released a “report” entitled “Buying Power” that claims to detail “an exciting new strategy to reform the gun industry.” Unfortunately for members of the gun-ban lobby, this strategy is neither new nor legal.

Here’s what the Ed Fund says:

“A city purchasing firearms for its law enforcement department can use its buyer power to create incentives for gun manufacturers to employ “countermarketing” strategies to ensure that their retailers are using all available procedures to prevent illegal firearms trafficking. Such strategies might include videotaping firearms sales, preventing the use of cell phones inside gun stores, and requiring criminal background checks for all employees who handle firearms. Gun manufacturers would be obliged to listen and change their policies to compete for cities’ business.”

Here’s what the Ed Fund should know:

In March of 2000, then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo and then-New York Attorney General Spitzer conspired with various mayors and local government officials to use their market purchasing power to boycott firearms manufacturers unless the manufacturers first agreed to sign an arbitrary and politically motivated list of firearms regulations entitled the “Code of Conduct.” Spitzer said, “We want every appropriate government entity to agree to purchase firearms only from companies that have signed a comprehensive code of conduct.” Spitzer said the objective of the coalition was to “…boycott gun manufacturers who fail to adhere to a new safety code.” Although Spitzer’s recruitment efforts weren’t always successful, officials of numerous cities and local governments agreed to join the boycott.

In response to this blatantly illegal restraint of trade, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), along with several members of the firearms industry sued Andrew Cuomo, Eliot Spitzer and the local government officials who agreed to the boycott. The filing of the lawsuit stopped this illegal boycott dead in its tracks, as all defendants – Cuomo, Spitzer, and the mayors – quickly disavowed the boycott (NSSF, et al v. Cuomo, et al). And much like 11 years ago, NSSF stands ready to once again take legal action against any attempt to implement an illegal boycott. No doubt such an attempt to manipulate the free market will be frowned upon by law enforcement when they learn that gun control groups now want to dictate which firearms they carry to protect themselves and our communities and base those selections on political considerations, as opposed to which firearms are most reliable and have the features desired by law enforcement.

The entire Educational Fund “report” is nothing but a rehash of the decade old factually baseless allegations made by the Brady Center and greedy trial lawyers in their failed attempts to destroy and bankrupt the firearms industry through junk lawsuits which began in the mid to late 1990s. Fortunately, these junk lawsuits failed, but not before members of the industry were forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to successfully defend the cases. In fact, the Educational Fund’s “report” is based largely on an article published by Professor Gregory T. Gundlach (ironically pronounced “gunlock”), who was a paid expert witness for the NAACP in its failed lawsuit against the firearms industry that went to trial before Brooklyn, NY federal court judge Jack B. Weinstein in 2003. The “advisory jury” judge Weinstein empanelled to hear the case rejected Professor Gunlach’s “expert” opinions and rendered a verdict in favor of the industry members. The “report” also relies upon an article by law school Professor David Kairys, the father of the roundly discredited “public nuisance” theory of liability underlying the failed municipal lawsuits. All that is old is new again it seems.

H/T Thirdpower 

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Comparison Of Them And Us

April 24, 2011 by 3 Comments

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence lives for hyperbole. This afternoon they posted the following:

CSGV
PHOTOS of large Heeding God’s Call protest in front of Mike & Kate Sport’s Shop in Philly. #PA #politics #faith #peace http://fb.me/MdC2SsLF

Being the skeptical sort, I looked up the “large Heeding God’s Call protest” from yesterday. By my count, they have about 35 people standing out in front of Mike & Kate’s Sports Shop blocking the entrance.The rest of the pictures can be found here.

If that is large, what would they consider the picture below from ISRA’s IGOLD Day.

Courtesy of Days of our Trailers.
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“Buyer Power” As A Means Of Gun Control?

April 19, 2011 by 11 Comments

The Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence released a study proposal today entitled “Utilizing the “Buyer Power” Strategy to Reform the Gun Industry.” The gist of this proposal is that state and local governments can force gun manufacturers to adopt the regulations suggested by Mayors Against Illegal Guns by refusing to buy law enforcement firearms from those that don’t conform to this “code”.

In theory it sounds good. In reality it ignores two salient facts. First, while large purchases are made by law enforcement agencies, these sales are dwarfed by sales to individuals at retail. Second, any manufacturer that decides to play along – or even engages in such talks – would be hit with a boycott so quick that heads would spin. The authors of this proposal obviously have forgotten what happened to the old Smith and Wesson when they signed an agreement with the Clinton Administration. The remnants of the old Smith and Wesson were sold by their British corporate owners to Smith and Wesson Holding Corporation which quickly repudiated that agreement.

The Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence maintains that criminals and “mentally unbalanced individuals” have easy access to firearms with which to perpetrate their crimes. They blame this on two factors.

1) The lack of a comprehensive regulatory scheme to prevent prohibited persons from acquiring firearms, and;
2) The refusal of the gun industry to engage in any type of self-policing to prevent illicit sales.

If the National Instant Criminal Background Check System which is run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and mandated under the Brady Law isn’t a comprehensive regulatory scheme, then what is it? Every sale made by a licensed dealer goes through this system unless the purchaser holds a CCW permit which is accepted in lieu of the NICS check. Even then, that state’s CCW permit had to be expressly approved by the Federal government as an acceptable alternative.

The second “factor” ignores the efforts made by the National Shooting Sports Foundation to educate dealers about straw purchasers. The Don’t Lie for the Other Guy program is aimed at preventing straw purchases by prohibited persons.

Understanding the importance of cooperating with law enforcement, the firearms industry through the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) — the industry’s trade association — has for nearly a decade partnered with the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) to assist law enforcement in educating firearms retailers to be better able to identify and deter illegal straw purchases and to raise public awareness that straw purchasing is a serious crime.

The report also accuses “unscrupulous FFLs” of selling firearms “off the books”.  Undoubtedly this has happened but it is so rare as to become a headline event when a dealer is arrested for doing this.

The following are the procedures that the Educational Fund wants implemented.

• All firearms sales are videotaped and these videos are maintained for an extended period of time.
• A computerized log of crime gun traces relating to the retailer is maintained in-house. When a customer who has a prior trace at that retailer attempts to purchase a firearm, the sale is electronically flagged. The dealer has the discretion to stop the sale.
• The dealer posts clearly visible signage to alert customers of their legal responsibilities at the point of sale.
• Customers are prohibited from making in-store calls on their cell phones.
• The dealer requires criminal background checks for all employees that sell or handle firearms in the store.
• The dealer conducts daily and quarterly audits to make sure no firearms are missing.
• The dealer prohibits all sales based on “default proceeds,” which are permitted by law when a background check has not returned an approve/deny result within three days.
• The dealer keeps all firearms in customer-accessible areas in locked cases or secured to gun racks.

Every gun shop that I’ve been in over the last 5-10 years or more has kept the handguns in a locked case. This is nothing new. Dealers also do and would do regular inventories and audits regardless of any regulation. It is simply good business practice.

I do have big problems with the “crime gun traces” requirement and the cell phone requirement. Why should an individual who has been the victim of a theft be made even more of a victim just to appease these gun prohibitionists? With regard to the banning of cell phone usage within a store, that is really a “WTF?” measure.

The proponents of the “buyer power” scheme think that a “grassroots” effort will convince municipal officials to try and force the “gun industry” to go along with them. Using the term grassroots along with gun control is an oxymoron. These groups have no grassroots. Most don’t even have members and those that do lie about how many members are on their rolls.

The Educational Fund’s sister organization, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, has set up a web page with “resources” to be used in this grassroots (sic) effort. It is filled with “reports” from the Clinton era as well as from the Brady Campaign and other well-known “violence” researchers. They also have templates for your letters to the editor and “dear elected official” letter.

I say let them waste the Joyce Foundation’s money on this as I don’t think it is going anywhere. If it does crop up in a locality other than Chicago or New York, I’ll report on it.

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“Gun Extremist”

March 31, 2011 by 3 Comments

I am now officially a “gun extremist” according to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. Below is a Tweet that they sent out today.

CSGV
Gun extremist says C. McCarthy is “using the tragic death of her husband as a means of political gain.” #politics… http://fb.me/YLVswYYw
16 minutes ago

I want to thank them for this accolade and will endeavor to live up to it.

As to what I wrote about Carolyn McCarthy, I stand by it. Mrs. McCarthy has used the tragic death of her husband as a means for political gain since the day she first ran for Congress and continues to do so. One need only read her recent press releases on gun control issues to see this.

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College Planning Courtesy of CSGV

March 16, 2011 by 1 Comment

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence is horrified at the thought that trained, state-certified, law-abiding adults should be allowed to carry concealed on the property of higher education institutions. To that end, they have established a new website called Armed Campuses. The website lists those schools where concealed carry on campus is permitted.

CSGV tries to equate gun-free zones as safe places.

The overwhelming majority of colleges and universities in the United States of America prohibit the carrying of firearms on their campuses. These gun-free policies have helped to make our postsecondary education institutions some of the safest places in the country.

To justify this position they use 1999 stats from the Department of Education that says that the criminal homicide rate on college campuses is lower than the criminal homicide rate for the United States as a whole. While their stats may be correct insofar as they go, no effort is made to compare rates for urban campuses versus rural campuses or anything in between. Moreover, using 1999 stats cuts out the murders that happened at gun-free Virginia Tech and gun-free Northern Illinois University.

The site tries to say that rapes and other violent crimes perpetrated against college students happens off campus 93% of the time. That is like saying that if a student at UNC-Chapel Hill is robbed on the north side of Franklin Street it is off-campus crime while if it happened on the south-side it may well have been on campus. It is still a violent crime.

When discussing so-called gun-free zones, I prefer to remember what Massad Ayoob said about them on Tom Gresham’s GunTalk radio program a few years ago. He said “so-called gun-free zones are nothing but hunting preserves for psychopaths.”

If I were a parent, I would use the Armed Campuses website as a place to look for a place to send my child and not as a place to avoid.

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Dancing On Graves

March 13, 2011 by 3 Comments

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV) seeks “to secure freedom from gun violence through research, strategic engagement and effective policy advocacy” according to their self-description. There is a lot of things you can say about CSGV and their methods.

However, classy isn’t one of them.

Last Thursday, CSGV tweeted links to three stories on their Twitter feed. All three stories involved concealed carry holders or those training to obtain a CCW permit. Two of the stories involved a murder and the third involved a person dying in an accident.

 

The above comes from Bassett, Virginia. In the story in the Martinsville Bulletin, Rasheem Alonzo Penn of Bassett was murdered while he sat in his car. He had been having a conversation with Brandon Manns who had come up to his car. Manns, a convicted felon, is charged with shooting Penn twice in the head. So what did the CSGV focus on? It was this,

Inside the Expedition, officers found a fully loaded 9 mm handgun in the center console, (Henry County Sheriff’s investigator Corey) Reynolds testified. The console was closed, glass was on top of it, and it had no odor of a fired gun, all of which led Reynolds to conclude that that gun had not been fired, he testified.

Penn owned the gun and had a valid concealed carry permit, Reynolds testified.

From the description of the event by eyewitnesses, there was no loud argument and nothing that gave off any vibes that a shooting was about to happen. If this is correct, I doubt even the best trained person would have had time to react to prevent from being shot. The fact that Mr. Penn held a CCW is irrelevant in this situation – except to the grave dancers at CSGV.

The next two tweets involved a spousal murder and a training accident.

The spousal murder involved Thomas and Micah Rine Pate of Bartlett, TN. According to the story in the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, the Pates had a troubled marriage and were seeing a marriage counselor. Thomas Pate is accused of murdering his wife and then hiding her body by the Loosahatchie River near Lakeland, TN. If you look at the tweet pictured above, the most important thing about this case according to CSGV was the following.

The husband and wife both had gun permits and Pate said he accidentally shot his wife in the back of the head when she walked in front of him while they were target practicing near the river.

The fact that Thomas Pate may have been cheating on his wife, that they had marital problems, that she was upset by his anger, and that he may have been abusing drugs and alcohol is irrelevant according to their tweet.

The final tweet involved Glenn Seymour of Douglas County, Missouri. Mr. Seymour died from an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot to the chest while in a concealed carry permit training class. The class was being taught to shoot with their non-dominant hand. Mr. Seymour pointed the muzzle of the pistol towards himself while trying to manipulate the manual safety. As SayUncle has pointed out, Mr. Seymour violated two of the four rules of firearm safety. The accident involving Mr. Seymour was a training issue and a supervision issue. That it happened in a CCW class was incidental to these issues.

All three deaths involved concealed carry in only the most tangential manner. But if you went by the tweets from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, you would have thought that the CCW was the central aspect of their deaths.

CSGV – grave dancers extraordinaire.

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Insurrectionist Ideology?

January 13, 2011 by 3 Comments

Since it appears that the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence doesn’t want to be left out of the frenzy surrounding the Tucson shootings, they released this on Monday but with their own unique spin:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 10, 2011

MEDIA CONTACT:
Ladd Everitt, (202) 701-7171, leveritt@csgv.

STATEMENT OF CSGV ON TUCSON SHOOTING RAMPAGE

Washington, DC—Those of us at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence are deeply dismayed at the horrific shooting rampage that occurred in Tucson this weekend. Our thoughts and prayers—and the thoughts and prayers of all our member organizations—are with the victims and survivors of this terrible tragedy. We hope for a full recovery for all of those who lie wounded today.

Sadly, Saturday’s tragedy was both predictable and inevitable. Insurrectionist rhetoric—which posits that the Second Amendment gives individuals the right to take violent action when they believe that our government has become “tyrannical”—was once confined to the dark corners of gun shows and the Internet. In today’s America, however, it has become a “mainstream” idea that is widely promoted by movement conservatives, high-profile media figures, and even elected officials and candidates. Tucson was not unique—since the conservative wing of the Supreme Court embraced the insurrectionist idea in the D.C. v. Heller decision in 2008, there have been numerous threats and acts of violence against government officials.
Additionally, America’s weak gun laws continue to allow individuals who are obviously deranged to legally purchase semiautomatic firearms with high-capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. Jared Lee Loughner’s history of mental illness, substance abuse and violent threats was well-known to law enforcement, the U.S. Army and his educators at Pima Community College. None of this, however, was detected by an instant, computerized background check that takes just a few minutes and involves no actual investigation of the gun purchasers.

If we are to avoid future massacres, our elected officials must institute policies that prioritize public safety and human life over gun industry profits. And they must speak out in no uncertain terms against poisonous insurrectionist ideology that threatens the integrity of our democracy itself.

Insurrectionist ideology? I guess Josh Horwitz and Ladd Everitt don’t know much about history and prefer to live in their own Wonderful World. If they need some help learning history, I’d be glad to suggest some books such as the two books from David Young dealing with the origins of the Second Amendment and the founder’s intent in putting it in the Bill of Rights.