Category: RKBA

Friday Quote – Matthew Makarios

February 8, 2013 / / 0 Comments

We found that gun buyback programs have not shown to be effective….They’re rifles, shotguns, things like that. Less likely to be small handguns, which are really more likely the types of guns to be used in gun crime.

Matthew Makarios, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin Parkside

The above quote was found in one of the local TV station’s investigation into the effectiveness of gun buybacks.

From the article:

We found that the vast majority of guns turned in aren’t the type of weapons typically used in crimes. We also found many cases where people turned in BB and pellet guns, guns that were visibly broken, and even a flare gun.

At two Clearwater Police Department buybacks in 2011, 20% of the guns turned in were BB and pellet guns. The Largo Police Department held their buybacks jointly with Clearwater, and 12% of the guns they took in were BB or pellet guns.

If this was a private organization sponsoring these gun buybacks, I really wouldn’t care. The problems is that it’s the local law enforcement agencies. That’s my money being used to buy and then dispose of those guns. Why should I be forced to pay for a program that doesn’t accomplish its stated goal and serves little point except for propaganda for gun control and the police?

What’s worse is some of these people are selling their property at far below their value in this gun market when they could really use the money. On a purely anecdotal basis, I told one of my co-workers about the buyback and she wanted to take some unused guns down. I convinced her not to and to let me take a look at them. I was pretty sure she could get more for them than what was being offered.

If we’re going to have a gun buyback, shouldn’t they at least be forced to pay market value? Kind of make it like Antiques Roadshow, the firearms edition.

Friday Quote – Penn Jillette

January 25, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Everytime something really bad happens, people cry out for safety, and the government answers by taking rights away from good people.

Penn Jillette

There was the temptation to use Franklin’s quote concerning liberty and temporary security, but that’s been overused to the point that it’s become background noise or such a canned phrase that you’d need a Turing test to determine if the user is human and not a spambot.

If there’s one thing I’ve become more and more annoyed with, it’s the idea that we can make the world safe for humanity. To put it bluntly, that is utter bullshit. There’s a risk for living on this planet. It comes from the flora, the fauna, other humans, the planet itself, and from the cosmos that the Earth lives within.

From my observations, humans thrive the best when they have the liberty to do as they see fit and a strong rule of law to ensure that they suffer the consequences for their actions. For their actions. Not for the actions of others. Collective guilt is one of the tools to divert power from the individual to the authority. To strip liberty under the auspices of the “greater good.” To make humans less than what they could be.

Currently, this quote rings true surrounding the current debate about guns. Yet, what about the other intrusions. Frank-Dodd, Obamacare, the PATRIOT act, Sarbanes-Oxley…the list goes on and on. With the crisis immediate, the people are willing to sacrifice their freedoms for the promise that the government will prevent such things from happening again.

But do we get our freedoms back when those promises are broken? Please?

When Parody is Almost Too Real

January 10, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I know the Duffel Blog is satirical, kind of like a military version of the Onion. Then there’s articles like this that make wonder.

WASHINGTON, DC – A senior U.S. general has confirmed that the military has secretly drawn up plans to round up large numbers of privately-owned firearms from American gun owners.
General James M. Scott of the U.S. Air Force confirmed that the Pentagon received a series of formal directives from the White House between November 7 and December 13 to begin plans for a massive nationwide operation to confiscate guns using a series of federal databases compiled over the last few decades.

I know that if such an order was given, there would be a lot of pushback from the troops and field commanders. It still doesn’t quell that tiny threeper screaming in the dark recesses of my mind.

The Further Refuting of Piers Morgan

January 10, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I saw this interview thanks to Weerd.

Click over and watch the whole thing. Every foolish statement is calmly countered including real world examples.

This was even better than the interview with Larry Pratt when Morgan was reduced to ad hominen attacks.

Plus there’s Weerd’s wonderful analysis:

This is where you see Weer’ds Golden rule. When somebody says “Let’s Agree to Disagree”, it simply means “I may have lost the argument, but I refuse to admit you’re right.”

Demands of Our Times

January 1, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I did something today that a year ago I swore I’d never do. Today, I rejoined the NRA. This is the organization that back stabbed Florida gun owners over open carry. This is the organization that seemed to go out of its way to piss me off because I don’t fit their normal demographic. Yet, I still not only joined, but helped one of my friends join. Why?

Two reasons. One, because as bad as they piss me off, the NRA is going to be the most effective lobby group against the oncoming tidal wave of anti-gun legislation. In this kind of fight, As Sebastion put it, “we have to go to war with the NRA we have, not the NRA we want.”

Second, I can change the NRA far more effectively as a member instead of as a lone blogger. Right now, the NRA ranks somewhere between uneasy ally and my enemy’s enemy. If I want it to be more, I will have to help change it from the inside.

This is something I didn’t want to do, but something that I feel the times have demanded of me.

What Price Gouging?

December 29, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I keep seeing charges price gouging by the some of the major Internet retailers. I also see pictures of stores stripped of evil black rifles and their associated paraphernalia. These two claims are contradictory. If we are asserting there is an unusually high demand that has resulted in a low supply of AR’s and parts, we shouldn’t be surprised that the prices would have go up, sometimes dramatically. We understand this when we see prices go up for gas in an emergency (Hurricane Sandy being the most recent), but seem oblivious to it when it affects our hobby.

Sure we can complain “oh it’s just a simple piece of aluminum/plastic with a spring,” but there’s a scare supply. Brownells went through what would normally be a three year supply in three days. So, if some retailers have adjusted their prices to match the hyper-demand with low supply, that is not price gouging, that is how prices are determined. What will the market bear? If we as consumers believe these suppliers are charging too high a price, then we choose not to buy at high-priced dealers. When the supply increases or the demand (panic) decreases, those retailers will be forced to decrease their prices or not be able to move their inventory.

This is economics, not a conspiracy.

Friday Quote – Dr. Steven Novella

December 28, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The only real consensus I found [in the literature] was that these types of school shootings, or even spree killings, are too rare to do any kind of meaningful analysis of cause and effect… There’s more variables than there are data points. So you can’t do any kind of meaningful analysis. So we just don’t know what the important influences are and policies might reduce the risk of this happening again in the future.

Dr. Steven Novella, on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe #388

Everyone has been rushing to find a solution to these types of incidents. It must be guns, it must be violent video games, it must be because we don’t have armed security, it must be because of mental illness. The truth is we just don’t know.

Collective Guilt

December 27, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Penn Jillette went on the Wendy Williams show (which I’ve never even heard of) to pimp his new book Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday. He’s caught up in the roundtable discussion:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KvtS0QHnAc

If you were able to make it through that video, Penn makes some great points. We don’t know enough right now to make judgements on how to stop these types of murders. So why are we so willing to punish people who had nothing to do with it?

Most people who own guns, even AR-15s, do not murder people.

Most people who who play violent video games do not murder people.

Most people who suffer from mental illness do not murder people.

Yet, there is a cry to punish each of these groups because someone did something horrific and we think these might have contributed to the horror. We can discuss the lousy state of treating mental illness and the stigma of having mental illness. We can debate if letting children play video games for long hours without supervision stunts emotional and social growth. We can talk about if the availability of guns has an effect on these types of murders. The problem arises when we are willing to punish these groups with ill-thought-out legislation in a rush to “do something.”

Why would we ever assume collective guilt of a segment of our population based on the actions of one individual?

Friday Quote – Col. Jeff Cooper

December 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.

Col. Jeff Cooper, firearms pioneer

I will not play the game of “if there had been someone with a gun” game with the current tragedy, but the truth remains that armed citizens do deter crime and stop violence. Guns are not magical talismans, but they are powerful tools. Like any tool, like a car or a lawn mower, they can be used to hurt people or to make people’s lives better. That can only be done by the person wielding the tool.