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Day one of the Obama Administration: Still no gold-farting unicorn. Though inmates of Gitmo might beg to differ.
Reports from elsewhere aren't that good, either. From email this morning:
From the White House website, buried in the Urban Policy section:
But politely, eh, AFSis? -the Armorer
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I was pondering how to "Embrace what is Right" because, well, I'm already a Right Wing Knuckledragger, when I realized that prolly isn't what the Reverend Joseph Lowery meant. So, was pondering a response to same. Then I read Cassandra's. Works for me. -the Armorer
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Over at Big Hollywood, Andy Levy was apparently reading this space yesterday... -the Armorer
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Day one of the Obama Administration: Still no gold-farting unicorn. Though inmates of Gitmo might beg to differ.
Reports from elsewhere aren't that good, either. From email this morning:
The lack of gold-farting equines appears pervasive. It's early yet, and they're probably still hung-over from the parties last night.Ladies and Gents,
We are going to have to move our meeting back one week. January 29th at 1:30 pm.
Sorry about the change and hope this will work out for everyone. There's just been way too much going on to be ready tomorrow.
I'll be sending out a call for agenda items this afternoon.
Cxxxxxxx
PS: Dude..where's my pony?
From the White House website, buried in the Urban Policy section:
I expect a "divide and conquer" approach that will pit sport shooters and self-defenders against pure hunters, with the "country-club" hunters as poster children. From yesterday's post on the subject:Address Gun Violence in Cities: Obama and Biden would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent.
Additionally, repeal of the Tiarht Amendment translates to de facto gun registration. Closing the "gun show loophole" simply pushes a large number of transactions into complete shadow. Law enforcement can troll gun shows. They can't troll private transactions. Look to see accompanying legislation to require *all* transactions be brokered through dealers. Sadly, there is little to indicate from the reasoning and caveats of the Heller decision that the Supreme Court wouldn't find all of these restrictions reasonable. And a question not addressed - are we talking the actual text of the old AWB, or Ms. McCarthy's version, which reaches back and makes M1 Garands illegal? Let the games begin.Now's as good a time as any to dispel one blatant lie that Brady includes with its wish list. Brady says, "Beginning with the Brady Law in 1993, the assault weapon ban in 1994, and other Clinton Administration policies, our nation experienced an historic decline in gun crime and violence," adding, "during the Bush years, gun crime increased as the Administration and Congress . . . allowed the assault weapons ban to expire [and] gave the gun industry special legal protection."
The truth is, violent crime began declining in 1991, three years before the Brady Act and the semi-automatic firearm ban, and more than a year before Bill Clinton took office. And, the nation's violent crime rate has declined another eight percent since President Bush took office.
But politely, eh, AFSis? -the Armorer
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I was pondering how to "Embrace what is Right" because, well, I'm already a Right Wing Knuckledragger, when I realized that prolly isn't what the Reverend Joseph Lowery meant. So, was pondering a response to same. Then I read Cassandra's. Works for me. -the Armorer
****************************************
Over at Big Hollywood, Andy Levy was apparently reading this space yesterday... -the Armorer
***************************************
*A term of art from the artillery. Harassment and Interdiction Fires. Back in the day, when you could just kill people and break things without a note from a lawyer, they were pre-planned, but to the enemy, random, fires at known gathering points, road junctions, Main Supply Routes, assembly areas, etc - to keep the bad guy nervous that the world around him might start exploding at any minute. Not really relevant to today's operating environment, right? But, it *is. The UAVs we fly over Afghanistan and Pakistan looking for targets of opportunity are a form of H&I fires, if you really want to parse it finely. We just have better sensors and fire control now. Of course, now I have to call them UAS's, because someone got a Legion of Merit for the name change.Anyway, I call the post H&I Fires because it's random things posted by me and people I've given posting privileges to that particular topic. Another term of art that might be appropriate is Free Fire Zone.
After all, when you have a yardsale and get rid of your old toaster it's done that way, right?
Or when you pass a family heirloom - say the flag that came back from WWII instead of your uncle - that gets approved and recorded too.
And the Tiahrt Amendment doesn't stop police from accessing trace data, it just stops journalists and the Bradys from accessing it.
While removing a sitting President is difficult (as it should be) it wouldn't take much to start Recall petitions for certain members of the House and Senate.
Still no sign of any rainbows or my Unicorn. I even checked all around for a 'Sorry we missed you!' slip.
And unfortunately, he's using his new-found power to do exactly what he said he would about Gitmo, gun laws, and abortion. He's apparently going to reverse Bush's regulation that prevents US tax money from going to foreign countries to fund abortions. Just lovely. He'll cut and run in Iraq and Gitmo in order to fund foreign abortions instead. *groan* Let the fun begin!
I rarely every get political, but just calm down regarding President Obama and guns. Let’s remember that you can’t buy a new gun if you don’t have a job.
Let’s also remember that Vice President Biden is a gun owner who once insinuated that there would be trouble if Barack Obama ever came after his shotguns. But shotguns don’t seem to be the issue whenever President Obama’s name is raised, assault rifles are.
The new President has a lot on his plate right now. Odds are that firearms are way down on his priority list. If congress works on gun control legislation instead of the economy, America will not be pleased.
I am probably in the minority here as a gun owner who lives in the predominantly anti-gun state of New Jersey. I have never hunted a deer. I have no concept of what it is like to leave my house and see nothing but farmland. I have never fired a non-military firearm on anything other than an air-conditioned shooting range. I have no use for an assault rifle, although I can personally understand the desire or need for a high-capacity magazine-fed repeating rifle in the Midwest where the police may be hours away.
I’ve seen interesting attitudes with soldiers from Southern and Midwestern Guard units. If you ask them why they don’t like President Obama, they hem and haw and finally they spit out the words “ban assault rifles.” It seems like most of the anger is directed at this one single issue. If that issue went away, a lot of these guys wouldn’t mind the new President so much.
You have to understand that Starbucks-sipping suburban dwellers like myself are becoming the majority and assault rifles scare the hell out of us. Extended magazines scare the hell out of us. Many people I know in my Wall Street world support the 2nd Amendment in theory, but would never own a firearm. This attitude is not going away. It is only going to increase as more farmland gets plowed under by subdivisions and Wal Marts.
If you own a shotgun or a .22 rifle, you will probably be ok. If you hunt deer with a bolt action rifle or one with a five round magazine, you will probably be ok. If you live in a state with open-carry permits on pistols, you will probably be ok.
But if you own an assault rifle and you really want to keep it, you need to start working with the current administration to either educate them on these weapons or help craft legislation that will create a reasonable compromise.
BT
And there's the problem in a nutshell.
There is no such thing as an 'assualt rifle'. It's a made up term that's generally used to refer to any 'scary looking' long gun.
I have an AR-15. It's a semi-automatic chambered for .223 and accepts removable magazines. I have magazines in different sizes for it, including a 5 rounds, 10, 20, and 30.
The ever-indulgent wife has a WASR-10. That's a Romanian(?) rifle based on the AK-47 design. It's semi-automatic, takes a removable magazine and is chamberef for 7.62x39.
I also have a Marlin 336XLR. It's a lever action rifle with a tube magazine chambered for .30-.30
One of these days I'll get around to adding the (nearly required) 10-22 to my collection. It's a semi-automatic rifle that takes removable magazines and is chambered for .22LR
Find me a definition of 'assault rifle' that doesn't include all of those guns.
Don't be fooled by their Divide & Conquer tactics. If you're not one of the elite, or one of the Elite's paid mercenarys they don't want you to have any firearm. The basic rule of Governing is that the unarmed are Subjects and the armed are Citizens.
I'm a Citizen.
I am a recent NYC transplant to VA and I have never been afraid of the so-called 'assault rifles' because 99.99% of armed crimes in NYC are NOT done with the 'assault rifles' can't really stick them into the waistband of the sweat pants, you know what I mean??
One of my former bosses, a partner in a NYC law firm, owns several firearms including an AK74, at his LI weekend house. His liberal mindset?? HE can own these because he is a highly educated professional, the rest of the grey uneducated massess should not because it is dangerous for them. This is what you have with Biden and Co, Obama cannot have Biden's shotguns but he can go and take away mine (oh, wait, I am a lawyer, too, so may be I can keep mine anyway).
Just a reminder, contrary to the popular liberal belief, the Constitution is not a 'living breathing' thing and cannot be discarded because self-proclaimed highly sophisticated urbanites are scared of those uneducated bitter rednecks clinging to their evil-looking rifles next door...
redneckMurtha constituent...You say that people in New Jersey are scared by extended-capacity magazines, but are they actually endangered by them?
Both sides are expending too much energy on what should be a non-issue, and not paying enough attention to the real cause of gun crime in our country: gangs and the drug trade.
Respectfully,
Anon.
The focus on guns is because it targets a shrinking demographic who are basically prone to be law abiding, thus providing the ability to say one has "done something" when in fact, one is "doing something" in order to avoid the real causes of the problem, which involve drug-war fueled gang conflict, which has means dealing with demographics that no one wants to touch.
So, go for my guns. Parade them in front of the folk, and tell people "See! We did something!"
And the drive-bys will continue, unabated.
I can entertain the notion that I'm working with bad data here.
Sorry guys. The internet has been up and down over where I am in Iraq. Now, in order to get a signal I have to sit out in the cold near some of the CHUs.
There are times when I feel like I am in some sort of disguise as I move amongst the population of my home state. I hold some of their views, but I hold some unpopular views as well.
I think that gun violence from drugs and gangs doesn’t register on the radar screen for a lot of suburban homeowners in New Jersey. This is just something that you see on the news from time to time in Camden, Trenton, Newark, and especially Philadelphia. I live in a wealthy community where every house has an alarm and the police are two minutes away. People feel safe. Hell, people are safe. My neighbor has been living there for 20 years and he can’t remember the last burglary in the neighborhood.
So you take that attitude and you multiply that times the number of people in the Toll Brothers McMansions that dot the state and you get a good idea of what you are up against: sheep who think that because nothing bad ever happens, nothing bad ever *will* happen.
But one thing that does register in their heads is assault rifles. And assault rifles look terrifying to many of these suburban homeowners. Assault rifles are what they think people use to go on killing sprees, and it is that damn extended magazine that makes the weapon “look” evil. While many of these people do not like guns and would never own a gun, they seem comfortable with the 2nd Amendment covering shotguns and hunting rifles. They might not run out and get one, but they are not as afraid of them as they are with any repeating rifle that has an extended magazine.
Steve said that there is no real definition of an assault rifle. But I’ll tell you one thing; the suburban housewife goes by the Justice Potter Stewart definition of “I know it when I see it.” And when they see that extended magazine, trust me, they see it.
Whether their attitude is right or wrong, the fact is that it *is* their attitude, and that feeling will only grow as more farms give way to subdivisions and people have fewer and fewer places to hunt and plink at cans.
This leaves you with a choice. Do you keep on fighting the same old way, or do you adapt?
Maybe the way to adapt is to give ground on the extended rifle and pistol magazines and use that as a sacrificial offering to allow a federal “shall-issue” handgun carry permit?
Maybe another way to adapt is to use a containment strategy? Contain the liberal northeast but lower restrictions in the Midwest and South?
As I write this, my Mossberg 500 shotgun is lying on the bench next to me. My M4 is locked up in my BDOC, and I have more weapons and ammo than I will ever need at my fingertips. I am just fine with firearms, but the trick is to convince the people in the northeast corridor that they should be fine with them as well.
BT
the issue is that this 'extended' magazine is something that can be re-defined indefinitely until you have none left.
Federal 'shall issue' law will come with so many f$$king strings and registrations attached that it would be equal to a national gun-registration law with the records kept indefinitely and available to any alphabet soup agency for any reason.
In this ban, my WWII M1 Garand would be anathema. Under the old ban it was not.
This isn't just giving up the 20 round magazine for a 5 round magazine - this is giving up the weapons. To be clear, McCarthy's proposed law as it stands (when I last read the text) does not confiscate existing weapons, it just prevents manufacture and sale to civilians of new ones.
Meaning it does nothing to impact, in any significant sense, the pool of weapons currrently available, even as the violence levels rise and fall in consonance with trends that really don't correlate with firearms possession.
The other problem, philosophically, with your approach is that it essentially presumes they are correct, i.e., we have to negotiate away something in order to keep something we currently have, which is conceding that they're position is factually correct, among other things, when in fact it's being argued from an emotional standpoint.
And, again, let's them off the hook for doing something that might actually *affect* the problem.
You want to take an negotiating stance - I'll offer up the War on Drugs to keep my rifles and magazines.
Because you can find a *much* stronger correlation between the drug war and gun violence (just as we did during Prohibition) than we do to the availability of the tools.
Sounds like a swell idea! BTW, the cameras in your home will only be active 8:30AM - 6:00PM Monday - Friday - we're just using them to make sure no one breaks in while you're away. You're not really giving up anything in exchange for this increased security.
Oh wait - sorry. Invert that.
As John noted, this is an attempt to win the debate by defining the terms.
If the objection to the 'scary looking' guns is based on ignorance then isn't the better solution to attempt to fix the ignorance? I realize we've had a generations long push to cause the ignorance, but the tissue of lies they've used is so thin it really doesn't take much to tear it away.
As others have said elswhere "Gun Control is what you do instead of doing something"
No, coming from the state of Wackifornia, with it having already mostly given up on the Drug War, and bearing the emotional and quite PHYSICAL scars of such a move I'd rather we didn't opt for a 'libertarian paradise' by abandoning the DW. How about we use the police to break up gangs and such with prejudice(not extreme prejudice, mind you, but going hard, using all of DIME to do it, including Obama's 'it isn't acting white to get good grades and play by the rules.) Sorry, John. I've lived in libertarian OC where people have adopted your stance, and it sucked. When you see a dozen teen agers who had bright futures evaporate because the needle set hard---and their parents were largely 'let them have a taste so they won't get hooked' libertarian types--- you might not think it a victimless crime so much. And, even though there's all that infrastructure in place to help them, they wind up robbing your neighborhood? Well, it sure isn't a victimless crime either, even though it's legal, cheap, and taxed.
THe problem is cultural, but coughing up the drug war doesn't make the anti-gun lobby go away. It just breeds a whole new set of victims, homey: people whose lives are jacked over because some fool got hooked on pot, heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, etc.. Even in places like SF where it's not even really looked askance at to do drugs you still have drug related crime. BTDT, and if they gave a t-shirt for it I'd have it.
A DW abanadonement won't get rid of the problem. Cigarettes are legal. There's an underground market for them, has been since forever. Protection rackets and the other condiments of gang/mafia existance won't go away because you made drugs legal.
Go after the gangs and the mob. Then you'll see a drop in violence that's permanent.
In a sense, we're just trading around which demographic pays the bill of being stupid.
As Ron White observes, you can't fix stupid.
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Find me a definition of 'assault rifle' that doesn't include all of those guns.
I was operating under the definition of "assault rifle" as "long gun firing an intermediate cartridge with burst fire or fully-automatic fire capability".
And if you're willing to idiomatically translate sturmgewehr [storm rifle] as "assault rifle", then you could make the argument that the term WAS originally invented to instill fear, and is still working perfectly 65 years later.
For a post about the president, but also innumerable affronts facing the US Constitution, check out this article on my blog - byshaw1.blogspot.com
Well, since sturmgeschutz [storm goes bang] is idiomatically translated as "assault gun," you wouldn't be stretching it.
Thing is, words have meaning, and if you let someone else define the word (or words, in this case), you're ceding ground you'll never regain. It'll devolve into "It depends on what your definition of 'is' is" mealy-mouthed weasel-wording.
In this instance, the Brady Bunch is defining some long guns and shotguns as "assault rifles" -- and they are *not*.
I agree though, I absolutely hate it when people [somehow it always seems to be hippies/tree huggers/pinkos/whatever] hijack words or phrases and give them some completely inappropriate new meaning. "Green", "African American", "working class"...I could go on. It makes me want to smack people. It's far worse than "donuts".
Then there's my pet peeve, "awesome" which has been slighted like a medieval castle from meaning "struck dumb by the presence of god" to... Kewl!
You illustrate my point, exactly. The root word being "awe"...
1. an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like: in awe of God; in awe of great political figures.
2. Archaic. power to inspire fear or reverence.
3. Obsolete. fear or dread.
–verb (used with object) 4. to inspire with awe.
5. to influence or restrain by awe.
"Kewl" (which is pretty much what it means now in common usage) ≠ "an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like: in awe of God; in awe of great political figures."
Now we use it to describe McFood.
Yes, exactly!
Discussions like this are why *everybody* should at least own the Condensed version of the OED.
I don't trust the OED anymore, they keep adding non-words.