And ANOTHER "Senseless Child Gun Death"

A 3-year-old girl gunned down in her driveway after a trip to McDonald's was targeted in a callous attack by gang members, authorities said...

"He intended to kill her. This was a callous killing. It is beyond even what gangsters consider usual."

That does it. I'm getting rid of my guns right now. It's the only way.

Dan Rodricks' Nutty, Cheesy Blog

What comes from Wisconsin, full of cheese, and a little nutty on the outside?

No, it's not one of those nutty cheese logs you see at football parties.

It's the proposal to train and arm teachers to defend schools against violent wackos loaded with firearms.

What comes from Baltimore and is full of...well, we've already established that...

Another Senseless "Child Gun Death"

A 19-year-old man died early Monday in an apparent game of russian roulette, police said.

Police said that Juan Garcia, who had been drinking heavily...put the gun to his right temple and fired, but nothing happened...Witnesses told police that Garcia then put another bullet in the chamber and spun it and fired again...

If only they had disarmed you and me with some "common sense gun laws"...

When Babies Are Outlawed…

A woman used her 4-week-old baby as a weapon in a domestic dispute, swinging the infant through the air and striking her boyfriend with the child, authorities said.

…only outlaws will have babies.

This Day in History: October 10

General William Howe is named the interim commander in chief of the British army in America on this day in 1775, replacing Lieutenant General Thomas Gage. He was permanently appointed to the post in April 1776.

Because Just Being a Citizen Isn't Important Enough

Go ahead and check a box, any box, to tell these elitists what you think of servants who would rule.

UPDATE: Just to show I never ask anyone to do anything I'm not willing to do myself:


[Via Grandmaster Boom in KABA Comments]

"I've Heard ALL the Arguments..."

I've heard all the arguments over and over again for not only the right to bear arms but the unfettered manufacture and sales of all kinds of firearms -- even in the wake of tragedies such as Nickel Mines.

But my Sun mailbox is crammed with letters from the gun-obsessed with all the old arguments, including the one about how the Second Amendment guarantees us all the right to own guns, guns and more guns...

Your gun ownership makes you part of a well-regulated militia, that is, the National Guard. You must show up for training and exercises on a regular basis and, at the moment, be eligible for service in Iraq. That's what the amendment says: A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. What do you say? Are you ready to march on Tehran? [More]

Well, Dan, like most of your kind, you’re quick to offer an unfounded opinion, but are wrong on so many counts that pointing them out becomes an exercise in tedium. Good Lord, you represent yourself to be an informed professional, but you come off like a stupid, shallow child.

That’s because none of the stuff I am going to repeat here is new. It’s been around and available and used to expose your facile assertions as bunk for, in some cases decades, in others, centuries. But we continually point them out to your side ad nauseam, only to find you either haven’t been paying attention because you’re too fanatically locked into your subversive mindset, or you’re just too ignorant and lazy to look beyond your own self-imposed insulation.

Yet you say you’ve heard all the arguments. If that’s true, Dan, that makes you an intentional deceiver, because the documented truth is quite the opposite of what you represent it to be.

As for the militia of the Second Amendment being the National Guard, here’s what the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the United States Senate Ninety-Seventh Congress had to say:

Congress has established the present National Guard under its own power to raise armies, expressly stating that it was not doing so under its power to organize and arm the militia.

This understanding is codified under US Code, TITLE 10 - ARMED FORCES, Subtitle A - General Military Law, PART I - ORGANIZATION AND GENERAL MILITARY POWERS, CHAPTER 13 - THE MILITIA, Sec. 311. Militia: composition and classes:

(b) The classes of the militia are -
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

Then we have the assertion that in order to claim the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, citizens must be members of a “well regulated militia.” No less an authority than Alexander Hamilton disagreed with you, writing in The Federalist No. 29:

To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss...Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped…

I don’t expect you to pay any attention to this, Dan. I merely wanted to point out the obvious, and to put you on notice that an excuse has been taken from you. Now you really have heard some of the arguments, or at least had them made available to you. You do this again and we’ll all know you’re just a liar.

[Thanks to Mark P]

Un-American University

"What's depressing is how little people are pushing for gun control today. The public has grown numb about this kind of gun violence, and there is a sickening predictability to these shocking outbursts," said Jamin Raskin, a law professor at American University here.

What's depressing, Jamin, is how the legal profession, academia and the lapdog media recognize and reward an undisguised fifth columnist like you as a Constitutional authority.

I can almost forgive "authorized journalist" Virginie Montet. After all, she does write for a French news agency.

But you, Jamin. You're twisted, man. You're Orwellian--right down to operating out of "American University" in our nation's Capitol.

[Via Dan Gifford]

Well, It's Official

Monica Yant Kinney is ineducable.

This Day in History: October 9

On this day in 1775, just a few short months after commanding British soldiers during the Battle of Bunker Hill, General Sir William Howe writes to the British-appointed secretary of state for the American colonies, Lord Dartmouth, to inform him of his belief that the British army should be evacuated from Boston to Rhode Island. From there, British forces could move expeditiously to the southern colonies, without having to go around Cape Cod. As Lord Dartmouth had previously received reports that men were needed in the southern colonies from the likes of Josiah Martin, the royal governor of North Carolina, and John Murray, the royal governor of South Carolina, he ordered General Howe to send officers stationed in Boston to North Carolina to assist Martin in the southern campaign.

Rand Eggheads: "Gun Control" a Failure--We Must Fail Harder

Convicted felons and other people with criminal records have bought thousands of rounds of ammunition from gun stores in Los Angeles, even though such sales are illegal, according to a study released Thursday.

The Rand press release is here.

Here's what it boils down to: Gun control doesn't work. We need ammunition control.

It's not enough to keep a watchful eye on the 80 million or so gun owners and quarter billion or so guns in this country.

We need databases for every ammunition purchase. We need to be able to track the untold billions of rounds out there.

But we can't stop there.

We need to serialize and register primers and casings, and then track their purchasers. We need taggants in the powder so we know who bought which from which lot. The bullets themselves need to have some sort of identifier. And what can we do to make sure lead is traceable--no matter how many times it's remelted? Maybe something at the atomic level...?

Forget the failure in Canada, where bureaucrats wasted billions when they had promised only millions. By the time we're done, we're talking tracking trillions of individual components, which is a milieu the eggheads should find quite insulating as they promulgate their arcane machinations on the taxpayers' seemingly infinite supply of dimes.

And when they're all done figuring out their system and capitalizing the equipment and writing the software and generating the reports and staffing the agency and lobbying to fund it all--especially since the cost of this level of obsessiveness likely dwarfs the potential gross national product for the next few decades--and when they've multiplied everything by the square root of pi to once and for all determine out how many angels really can dance on the head of a pin, some troglodyte who couldn't pass 4th grade math will outwit the system, throw a wrench in their works and kill somebody with a gun that he stole using black market ammunition.

And the eggheads, undeterred, will pull out their slide rules, murmur amongst themselves in their grant-built ivory tower, and propose God only knows what as their next solution...

UPDATE: JR tells us a Los Angeles councilman wants to be on the leading edge of this foolishness. Figures.

[Thanks to Mike S.]

We're Ahead

But participation's pretty pathetic...

Educating Monica

Andrew Frechtling gives a wayward journalist a dose of truth. Will she be able to handle it?

Dear Ms Kinney –

You are correct about one thing in your column of 5 Oct (Tough gun laws can make a difference).

Tough gun laws increase violent crime by disarming the law-abiding and making criminals’ work safer and easier.

This table tells the tale.
In the first column, we list Pennsylvania and all its immediate neighbors. The second column lists the violent crime rate in each state per 100,000 persons, taken from the 2004 FBI Uniform Crime Report, which is the latest complete UCR available as I write.

The third column is the 2005 “grade” for each state from the Brady Campaign, formerly known as Handgun Control Incorporated. This represents an aggregate grade of several sub areas rated by the Brady Campaign. As might be expected, restrictive gun control practices, like arbitrary denial of concealed handgun permits, are rated “best” by the Brady Campaign. You’ll see that New Jersey ranks high because of just the sort of restrictive procedures you had to go through to buy a gun.

We see that the two least violent of Pennsylvania’s neighbors, West Virginia and Ohio, are rated as having the least restrictive gun control laws by the Brady Campaign. And the most violent of Pennsylvania’s neighbors - Maryland – ties with New Jersey as having the most restrictive gun laws in the region.

So there is little reason to believe that gun control laws have any positive effect on violent crime rates.

However, it is indisputable that armed citizens are able to fight back against criminals more effectively than unarmed citizens.

And to the extent that gun control laws work to discourage citizens from arming themselves, such laws make us less safe, not more.

Andrew Frechtling
Major, USAF (retired

Great letter, Major Frechtling. Thanks for letting me post it here. Please let me know if you get a reply that we can share.

Campus RKBA Roundup #2

I've been taking some time in the evenings to find some RKBA-related articles originating from our nation's campuses...

The Mad Hatter tells us what's on young minds and in young skulls.

This Day in History: October 8

A group of Continental Army soldiers under the command of Colonel William Butler launch an evening attack on Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant’s home village of Unadilla on the Susquehanna River in what is now Otsego County, New York, on this day in 1778. The assault was retaliation for Brant’s September 17 raid on the town of German Flats, New York.

You've Got Mail!

Letters are in the mail to more than 25-thousand gun permit holders in Berks County who may have had their personal information accessed.

Government. Is there anything it doesn't do well?

Damned Foraners Ruining it for Everybody

The Foran student approached another student in the hallway about 11:20 a.m. Friday and allegedly opened his backpack to reveal a pellet gun resembling a .45-caliber pistol...

What's with all these damned foraners either committing crimes with guns or demanding more "gun control"?

What?

Foreigners...?

Uh...never mind.

Demand to be a Victim

An 18-year old who was among the shooting victims at Dawson College last month is crusading for better gun control in Canada.

The Star's headline: "Shooting victim wants better gun control"

A more appropriate headline: "Man who won't defend himself demands all others be rendered just as contemptible"

Yeah, it's a tad long. Feel free to use the "Comments" to share the headline you would use.

Wyoming Sues BATFU

A federal agency is balking at a Wyoming law that allows people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence to regain their right to own guns simply because the agency wants to take guns away from as many people as possible, a state lawyer told a federal judge Friday.

You can read about what some victims did to "earn" a lifetime federal ban here (along with a tale about an anti-gun celebrity who has inexplicably managed to avoid becoming firearms-disabled).

I've said it before, and I'll keep repeating myself:

If you can't be trusted with a gun, you can't be trusted without a custodian.

An Incomplete Question

Well, yeah, of course they should. But so should the rest of us.

Right now, amazingly, "our" side is losing, albeit less than 300 people have voted thus far. If you're into these kinds of things, follow the title link and add your opinion to the mix.

No, it won't change anything, but if we don't overwhelm them, the antis will bray about public support being on their side, so what the hell...why not take 30 seconds?

I'll check back on the results tomorrow morning when I post.

[Via Skip]