Archive for the ‘anti-gun asshattery’ Category

Yale gun prohibitionist shows ‘highly developed’ aversion to inconvenient truths

Posted: December 31, 2014 by gamegetterII in anti-gun asshattery
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Sophisticated Barack Obama reassures primitive tribal leader Vladimir Putin after making the moon "reappear" following a lunar eclipse.
Sophisticated Barack Obama reassures primitive tribal leader Vladimir Putin after making the moon “reappear” following a lunar eclipse.
Photo by Handout/Getty Images

“Stop blaming mental health for gun violence,” former Everytown director Mark Glaze parroted in a Sunday tweet. “The problem is guns.”

Glaze must miss the influence he used to have back when he was stumping for edicts he knew damn well would be useless at stopping bad people from acting out on their natures. It must have been even more intoxicating to threaten America with his then-boss Bloomberg’s whole foot, and a positively heady experience to slap Brady Campaign rival Dan Gross around over who had dibs on useful celebrity idiots.

Regardless, he took to Twitter to refer his devotees to an editorial in The Washington Post by Kimberly Yonkers, MD, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine. The funny thing is, there are some gun owners, including me, who would agree with her initial premise, to stop blaming mental health. The not-so-funny thing is, they’re nowhere to be found when that’s followed up with the expectation that those in danger of legally-imposed gun disabilities for alleged mental health reasons must not lose fundamental rights without the benefit of full due process protections. Likewise, none of them are insisting those protections must include an accessible pathway to restoration of rights when evidence shows a disabling condition no longer applies.”

http://www.examiner.com/article/yale-gun-prohibitionist-shows-highly-developed-aversion-to-inconvenient-truths?CID=examiner_alerts_article

The False Promise of Background Checks

Posted: December 30, 2014 by gamegetterII in anti-gun asshattery
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The idea of background checks for firearm purchases seems to sound sensible, but the reality is much different from the appearance. In truth, expecting firearm background checks to stop criminals is like trying to catch a few particular salmon during spawning season by placing a rock in the middle of the stream and watching for the specific fish to jump over the rock.

specious: adjective:
superficially plausible, but actually wrong.
“a specious argument”
misleading in appearance, especially misleadingly attractive.
– merriam-webster.com

There are more than 15 million NICS background checks processed every year, totaling over 180 million checks since the program’s inception in 1998. Between 98% and 99% of those checks were on regular, unrestricted people – most of whom already own at least one firearm. Of the few prohibited persons caught trying to purchase a firearm, the vast majority didn’t realize they were prohibited, and who had no criminal intent. In 2010, which is typical of recent years, only about 60 individuals – out of 15 million – were considered worthy of prosecution, and only 13 people – out of 15 million – were actually convicted of illegally trying to purchase a firearm. Not a very impressive return from a program that infringes on an enumerated constitutional right – that “shall not be infringed” – and has cost taxpayers an estimated $2 billion dollars so far.

Now the same people who brought us this incredibly inefficient and wasteful system want to expand it to include private transfers between individuals. Again, the idea seems, on the surface, logical and reasonable. But again, it is just another rock in the stream – a minor obstacle at best. The arguments in favor of so-called “universal background checks” are, in part, an acknowledgement that the present system can’t work; there’s just too much stream around the rock. One more rock in a wide flowing stream won’t stop, or even perceptibly slow the flow. There will always be plenty of ways for those wishing to acquire guns for criminal purposes to easily get them. Criminals get guns by stealing them, buying them on the black market, or by convincing a girlfriend, family member, or paid associate to purchase them.

http://www.buckeyefirearms.org/false-promise-background-checks

College Professor Calls for Repeal of “Stupid 2nd Amendment” in Column

Posted: December 30, 2014 by gamegetterII in anti-gun asshattery
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“It’s been a while since I broke down a dumb, anti-gun editorial right? Well hell, let’s do just that right now.

Tom H. Hastings, in a recent column on the WisconsinGazette.com, called for a repeal of the “stupid Second Amendment”.

Here’s a sample:

What country fetishizes, lionizes, valorizes, idolizes, and sacralizes guns as much as does our United States? OK, possibly Mozambique — the only country with an AK47 on its flag, but really, it’s long past time to end this obsessive “My Precious” attachment of Americans to instruments of death.

This morning of Dec. 25, 2014, of the nine top stories from US Reuters, six were about shootings — four new ones and two about the national movement against shootings of citizens by police. This pandemic of sick violence, punctuated by mass killings of children, has gone on far, far too long. It is long past time to repeal the stupid Second Amendment.

Sounds like Tom’s issue is with media coverage. So here is Tom’s solution:

Repeal the Stupid Second Amendment. Surround it, grab it, bring it in the back room, pull down the shades, and end it. OK, petition for it, get it on the ballot, and get it done by enough of the US populace, by enough people in enough states, to get it consigned to the dustbin of history.

Well, good luck with that Tom. That only takes getting about 75% of the country (including Congress and state legislatures) to agree on repealing an amendment to the Bill of Rights. Once again, good luck sir.

Here is Hastings bio from the Portland State University website:

He is a nonviolent peace, justice and environmental activist, a Plowshares nonviolent veteran of three prisons and has done nonviolence trainings for more than 30 years across the US. He is a past chair and current board member of the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and on the Board of Directors of the Oregon Peace Institute. He is on the Governing Council of the International Peace Research Association and on the Board of Directors of the International Peace Research Association Foundation. He is on the Academic Advisory Council of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. He lives in the Portland Catholic Worker community Whitefeather House, and hikes and bikes for fun (transportain and he owns no automobile).”

http://gunssavelives.net/blog/college-professor-calls-for-repeal-of-stupid-2nd-amendment-in-column/

Documents Show Fast and Furious Was Initiated to Show Justification for New Gun Control Regulations

Posted: December 27, 2014 by gamegetterII in anti-gun asshattery
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Justification for New Gun Control Regulations

  • ATF’s internal Public Affairs Talking Points show the agency was using Fast and Furious to help justify new gun control regulations–without telling the public that ATF was actually facilitating the delivery of weapons to Mexican drug cartels.
  • The talking points (p. 15) state:

“These cases demonstrate the ongoing trafficking of firearms by Mexican DTO’s and other associated groups operating in Arizona and the need for reporting of multiple sales for certain types of rifles in order to ferret out those intent on providing firearms to these criminal groups.”

 Gunwalking Tactics

  • While the Department of Justice was still insisting the gunwalking was a renegade operation conducted by rogue agents in Phoenix, the documents make clear ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. knew that weapons were being allowed to flow to Mexican drug cartels.
  • For example, Fast and Furious began in October 2009. Washington D.C. talking points recount (p. 17) that:

“From October 2009 through October 2010, this organization, through the use of numerous straw buyers, purchased approximately 1.25 million dollars in firearms from FFLs [Federal Firearms License’s] in the Phoenix area and trafficked the firearms into Mexico and other locations within the United States.”

  • Another example is an October 12, 2010 funding request to ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. (p. 40) from Phoenix Special Agent in Charge Bill Newell. It stated, in present tense (making clear that ATF was aware, in real time, that the weapons were being transported by ATF suspects to cartels on a continuing basis):

“The firearms are then being trafficked into Mexico using non-factory compartments in various vehicles through various Ports of Entry (POE’s) in Arizona and Texas. Since the ATF case was initiated, agents have identified approximately twenty-seven straw purchasers who have purchased a large amount of AK-47 style rifles and pistols from various FFLs in the Phoenix Metropolitan area and Prescott, Arizona, since September 2009.”

Millions of Dollars: Mission Not Accomplished?

  • The documents hint at the cost of the umbrella program that was responsible for Fast and Furious: Project Gunrunner.

(p. 6) The FY 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act provided ATF with an “additional $5 million for Project Gunrunner.”
(p. 7) The Stimulus plan provided ATF with $10 million more for Project Gunrunner.
(p. 29) ATF received $37.5 million for Project Gunrunner in the 2010 emergency supplemental appropriation for border security.

  • The documents discuss that ATF developed Project Gunrunner in 2006 to stem the flow of firearms into Mexico and thereby deprive the narcotics cartels of weapons. (Instead, ATF agents helped deliver thousands of assault rifles and other weapons into cartel hands.)
  • As ATF became better funded by tax dollars and better staffed, gun trafficking and drug cartel-related violence escalated.

Justice Dept. Withholding Statistics

The Justice Department has repeatedly refused Congressional and media requests for reports on the violent crimes in which “walked” guns have been used. The newly-released documents confirm ATF has meticulously collected and reported such data in the past (p.39). In a case called “Operation Zebra,” ATF stated that 338 illegally purchased firearms were associated with 63 deaths: “18 law enforcement officer sand civilians, and 45 cartel gunmen.”

Redactions

A number of mysterious redactions remain in the 60-page document grouping. These include:

  • (p. 15)
  • (p. 30)
  • (p. 39)
  • (p. 40)
  • (p. 43)
  • (p. 52) Internal document dated Jan. 10, 2011 mentions Fast and Furious connection to Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s death, though the Justice Department had decided not to release that information to the public. The document contains redactions.

http://sharylattkisson.com/belatedly-released-and-revealing-fast-furious-docs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SharylAttkisson+%28Sharyl+Attkisson%29

Multi-Agency Participation in Fast and Furious

Posted: December 25, 2014 by gamegetterII in anti-gun asshattery
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  • There is evidence of widespread knowledge of and participation by several federal agencies in the controversial Fast and Furious gunwalking case that let traffickers put thousands of weapons into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
  • Agencies participating in Fast and Furious included the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch (ICE), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Phoenix Police Department.
  • A January 2011 “Key Messages: Tasking Points” memo (p. 14) generated by the Public Affairs Division at ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. stated:

“The Fast and Furious investigation is just one of a number of firearms trafficking cases perfected by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) Strike Force, a multi-agency team of investigators from ATF, DEA, ICE, IRS, and the Phoenix Police Department.”

http://sharylattkisson.com/belatedly-released-and-revealing-fast-furious-docs/

Refusal as a weapon

Posted: December 23, 2014 by gamegetterII in anti-gun asshattery, gun rights
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“Refusal as a weapon. There is NO unconstitutional law that Mike Bloomberg can buy that we cannot nullify with armed civil disobedience.”

They can jail us. They can shoot us. They can even conscript us. They can use us as cannon-fodder in the Somme. But… but, we have a weapon more powerful than any in the whole arsenal of their British Empire. And that weapon is our refusal. Our refusal to bow to any order but our own, any institutions but our own. — Liam Neeson portraying Michael Collins, 1996.

“Mike Bloomberg thought he was on a roll. In the wake of Sandy Hook, his money managed to buy unconstitutional legislation in Connecticut, Colorado, Maryland and New York. In the election just past, his money staved off defeat for two governors who did his bidding, although as Wellington said about Waterloo, it was “the nearest run thing you ever saw.” Most importantly — and the latest jewel in his anti-firearm crown — his money and that of Bill Gates, Paul Allen and other like-minded elitists “bought the mob” (in the parlance of the Founders) with the success of I-594 in Washington state.

Yes, Bloomberg was on a roll. The so-called “mainstream” gun rights organizations, from the NRA to Alan Gottlieb’s Second Amendment Foundation and all the smaller spin-offs in the affected states, had no answer to Bloomberg’s millions and refused to put their own rivalries and jealousies aside to find one. This is hardly a surprise, since almost all of these groups have always been more about raising money to “fight gun control” than actually FIGHTING gun control. Each has been more obsessed with their own reputation in the collectivist-dominated press and their obsession to “win friends and influence people” in the middle. So, following their long-established patterns and refusals to think and act outside the boxes they placed themselves in, they lost. They lost in Connecticut, they lost in Maryland, they lost in New York, they lost in Colorado and now they have lost in Washington state.

In each case, Bloomberg understood his enemies, their foibles and their failures far better than they understood him. So he won and they lost.

But then something happened that Bloomberg in his arrogance never expected, something that the “mainstream gun rights organizations” for their part never expected either — in every single state where Bloomberg had “won,” it turned out that the victims of his unconstitutional laws had other ideas. And they didn’t need “leaders” like Wayne LaPierre and Alan Gottlieb to lead them.

The “I Will Not Comply” movement in the various affected states began the instant Bloomberg’s Intolerable Acts were passed. Individual firearm owners, led here and there by some courageous activists of the smaller rights groups who were not so worried about raising money and preserving their press image than their “betters,” simply announced that they would not obey such unconstitutional laws. They refused to cooperate in their own disarmament. They refused to obey. If the government wanted to make them criminals, well, then, they would be criminals and they dared the authorities to do anything about it.

And the authorities did . . . nothing. When it became apparent that Connecticut was experiencing a stunning non-compliance rate approaching 85 percent, Mike Lawlor, the governor’s appointed “gun commissar” in that state made threatening noises. But the raids did not begin. And now, almost two years later, they still haven’t begun. In New York, the non-compliance rate is even higher, with county sheriffs even threatening to arrest state policemen who seek to enforce the SAFE Act in their jurisdictions. And Governor Cuomo has done . . . nothing.

In Colorado, on the day the magazine ban went into effect in July 2013, resisters gathered on the statehouse steps and broke the law. And the authorities did. . . nothing. After I announced on 20 April 2013 on the steps of the Connecticut state capitol that I had smuggled in forbidden magazines in violation of their diktat, Lawlor had the state police open a criminal investigation of me, but did . . . nothing. Since then my friends and I have smuggled in more such magazines to that state and the authorities have done . . . nothing. I even recently attended a gun show in CT simply to give the authorities a chance to arrest me if they felt froggy enough. And they did . . . nothing. The raids have not begun. The state and its newly felonized citizens have been looking at each other with firearms in their hands for almost two years now. Yet the other jackboot has not dropped. And the authorities, as with those in other states with Bloomberg Rules, don’t know whether to defecate or go blind. Consequently they have done . . . nothing.

This refusal, this armed civil disobedience, reached its highest expression to date with the “I Will Not Comply” rally at the state capitol in Olympia on the 13th of this month. Two thousand armed people met, without a permit, defied I-594, held a successful rally without incident, and the authorities did . . . nothing. I was privileged to speak at this historic event as well. I will go back to Yakima in June for a planned gun show that will refuse to conduct the 594-required background checks and we will give the authorities a chance to enforce their new Bloomberg Rules.

And where are the “mainstream gun rights groups” in this national campaign of armed civil disobedience which has negated the results of Bloomberg’s money, his so-called “victories”? Why, they’re nowhere to be found. They have either condemned them or ignored them. In a recent interview, Alan Gottlieb, — who was apparently vacationing in Hong Kong on the proceeds of his members’ dues while the brave men and women of his state were risking arrest defying I-594 — denied that the rally was in fact “armed civil disobedience” because, he ludicrously claimed, “most people there weren’t armed.”

And if you didn’t get the underlying message, he went on to say “I don’t think it helped us with the general public. It doesn’t help us with the public or the legislators.” And, he added, “I’m not a fan of armed civil disobedience.”

Coming from a guy who has never risked more than a paper cut opening fundraising envelopes . . . coming from a guy who was willing to trade away national background checks in the immediate aftermath of Sandy Hook . . . this was hardly surprising. He will do what he has always done when confronted with Bloomberg Rules. If he cannot sue it, if he cannot lobby a “compromise” that gives up a little more of other people’s essential liberties and property, he will do . . . nothing.

Yet such “leaders” risk exposure and irrelevance in the new shifting paradigm. Legal challenges on all these Intolerable Acts are working their way through the courts. All have, up to now, failed. Elections have been fought and lost. Lobbying has been redoubled. Indeed, in the same interview Gottlieb asserted that the emergency was so grave that they had hired another lobbyist!

But the practitioners of armed civil disobedience, the resistance behind enemy lines in Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Colorado and Washington state, have ALREADY NULLIFIED BLOOMBERG RULES. And Michael Bloomberg himself doesn’t seem to know whether to defecate or go blind.

The failures of the “mainstream gun rights groups” to protect liberty and property from Bloomberg’s assaults have forced the American people — an eminently practical people — to make their own arrangements. If this risks exposing the increasing irrelevance of such groups there is nothing we can do about it. (Although there is certainly something THEY can do about it — thinking and acting outside the boxes of their own comfort zones would be a good start.) But the fact of the matter is that, as demonstrated now by almost two years of experiences THERE IS NO UNCONSTITUTIONAL LAW THAT MIKE BLOOMBERG CAN BUY THAT WE CANNOT NULLIFY WITH ARMED CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE.

Refusal is a weapon. It is a weapon that has been used to good effect in this country since the time of the Founders. Michael Bloomberg’s Rules are negated by the Law of Unintended Consequences. And looking back on the past two years of expensive laws and craven legislators bought and sold that all of his “victories” required, Bloomberg must be wondering this Christmas why it is that someone crapped in his stocking. He should be celebrating. Instead he has been frustrated, as the Founders intended, by the refusal of the armed citizenry of the United States to bow down to him and his tyrannical kind.”

http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2014/12/refusal-as-weapon-there-is-no.html

 

Daily Mail Fast and Furious report repeats unsubstantiated claim

Posted: December 21, 2014 by gamegetterII in anti-gun asshattery
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Curiously, in all his 'Gunwalker' testimony before Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder never detailed steps taken to "track" Fast and Furious guns. So why is the media so certain in telling the public that's what happened?
Curiously, in all his ‘Gunwalker’ testimony before Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder never detailed steps taken to “track” Fast and Furious guns. So why is the media so certain in telling the public that’s what happened?
Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In a Thursday report on a 2011 Phoenix “gang-style shooting” in which a gun from the Operation Fast and Furious “gunwalking” scheme was used, Mail Online repeats unsubstantiated claims that give cover to the administration and mask the government’s intentional uncontrolled release of guns into the criminal underworld. U.S. Political Editor David Martosko tells readers the purpose of the operation was to track the guns.

“[The] Phoenix gang-style shooting in 2013 was carried out with an AK-47 purposely sold to gun-runners under the watchful eye of the ATF,” a preface bullet reads. That much is true, with the reporting problem starting with the second point, claiming “[The] Obama administration tried to track 2,000 guns into Mexico to drug cartels.”

The latter claim is where the ubiquitous administration-serving media narrative falls apart. How does one track guns without making any attempt to do so? That, in turn, leads to the fraudulent, but often-repeated media claim that Fast and Furious was a “botched gun sting.”

That’s despite whistleblower sources claiming in early January, 2011, that guns were being walked “to pad statistics.” It was through these sources that the story was investigated and reported by citizen journalists while “legitimate news media” remained deliberately indifferent, until information coming to light could no longer be contained, prompting many “Authorized Journalists” to manage and spin it instead.

Undaunted by the facts, Martosko soldiers on with the wholly unsubstantiated “tracking claim.

“Fast and Furious was “an ill-fated Obama administration program that tried in vain to track firearms across the Mexican border to drug kingpins,” he asserts. “In vain” implies an exhaustive effort, does it not, as opposed to just letting guns go without even trying, and in fact, ordering agents to allow the guns to “walk” while intentionally keeping the Mexican government in the dark — in itself a violation of both U.S. and Mexican laws?

“’Operation Fast and Furious’ involved straw-buyers who sent 2,000 guns to Mexico (including these weapons) with help from the ATF, which hoped to track the firearms to drug cartels — but failed,” a photo caption accompanying the article reads. All evidence points to the hope being geared toward change — to U.S. gun laws. To date, the administration has had to content itself with requiring additional reporting of multiple rifle sales from Southwest border gun dealers, with the real goal, to justify banning misnamed ‘assault weapons,” thankfully still beyond their grasp.

How one ‘devises’ a program that completely omits the part where weapons are followed from gun stores to cartel leaders, and then expects any other result, is left unexplored by Mail Online and other “legitimate news media” apologists. How anyone can track guns without even attempting to, or botch a sting that has no mark, are questions those who spread such excuses never try to answer.

Perhaps the best analogy for challenging the “failed tracking/botched sting” theory was conceived by St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner Kurt Hofmann.

“We are … being asked to believe that the BATFE’s grand strategy for bringing down the drug cartels … resembled ‘South Park’s’ Underpants Gnomes’ business plan … with the BATFE adaptation going something like this: ‘Phase 1: Encourage gun dealers (and sometimes pay them, as confidential informants) to sell guns to known traffickers Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Humbly accept plaudits as Mexican drug cartel comes crashing down,’” he wrote.

To date, no one advancing the “failed/botched” apologia has even attempted to explain “Phase 2,” and provide documentation, or even a plausible hypothesis, on how the government — which according to all evidence kept their own attaché and Mexican law enforcement in the dark — intended to track any guns once they crossed the border.

Except, of course, to recover them at crime scenes after shootouts and deaths had occurred and then point fingers when serial numbers allowed them to be traced back to U.S. gun shops. Not that a public largely relying on “real reporters” from “mainstream” outlets would be likely to know.

http://www.examiner.com/article/daily-mail-fast-and-furious-report-repeats-unsubstantiated-claim?CID=examiner_alerts_article

Jihadist hostage-taker enabled by Australian gun laws

Posted: December 17, 2014 by gamegetterII in anti-gun asshattery
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A Sydney cafe hostage is taken out on a stretcher.
A Sydney cafe hostage is taken out on a stretcher.
Photo by Joosep Martinson/Getty Images

An Islamic gunman who took Sydney cafe employees and customers hostage is among the three people reported dead after automatic weapon-wielding police using flash grenades stormed the building early Tuesday morning Australian time, Fox News is reporting. Man Haron Monis, an Iranian immigrant charged with the murder of his wife and the sexual assault of another woman, and who waged a campaign against families of fallen soldiers by mailing them letters calling the deceased “murderers,” highlighted both the problems of a country welcoming hostile foreign nationals, as well as the ease with which one armed assailant can victimize multiple unarmed citizens.

Touted as a model for the U.S. to emulate after passing sweeping gun control legislation in 1996, Australia has adopted many of the laws currently existing in some states and being pushed for in the rest. Per GunPolicy.org, a project of the Sydney School of Public Health, which, while decidedly anti-gun, nonetheless provides instructive and useful compilations of gun laws from around the globe, Australian gun laws are “categorized as restrictive.

“In Australia, the right to private gun ownership is not guaranteed by law,” the analysis advises. “[C]ivilians are not allowed to possess automatic and semi-automatic firearms, self-loading and pump action shotguns [and] private possession of handguns (pistols and revolvers) is only permitted subject to stringent conditions.”

In addition to registration and regulation of sales for what is permitted, there are waiting periods, “safe storage” requirements for firearms and ammunition, and transport regulations. Carrying firearms openly or concealed, “in a public place is prohibited without genuine reason. In law, personal protection is not a genuine reason.”

The people with no “genuine reasons” Monis took captive were all unarmed and “law-abiding,” and thus helpless to do anything to protect themselves except wave an Islamic flag when ordered to, wait for men with guns to save them, and hope or pray they would survive. If domestic advocates of citizen disarmament have their way, petitioning U.S. cafes and other businesses to disallow guns on their premises, and further, demanding government pass laws prohibiting them, Americans obeying such edicts could find themselves in the same dilemma as the Sydney hostages.

http://www.examiner.com/article/jihadist-hostage-taker-enabled-by-australian-gun-laws?CID=examiner_alerts_article

Why Gun-Control Advocates Lie about Guns… The facts aren’t on their side.

Posted: December 17, 2014 by gamegetterII in anti-gun asshattery
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Angered by the news that American voters are now more supportive of the Second Amendment than they have been in two decades, the New York Daily News’s Mike Lupica used his weekend column to vent. Over the course of 900 words, Lupica lambasted the public for continuing “to protect gun nuts,” chided the “mouth-breathing” NRA for its murderous myopia, and contended emotively that “there are no words” available to describe the horror of “a recent poll that says a majority of Americans believe it is more important to protect the right to own guns than it is for the government to limit access to guns.”

And then, having established his moral bona fides for all to see, he tried to sneak a brazen lie past his audience:

The flyers on the table feature a picture of a beautiful, smiling girl with a pink bow in her hair, with Christmas and her whole life ahead of her until Adam Lanza walked into her school on a Friday morning with an automatic weapon — the kind of gun we are told must be protected or the Second Amendment is turned into a dishrag — and started shooting.

That Lupica would knowingly write these words should be of great concern to anybody who is concerned with the truth. There were no “automatic” weapons used at Sandy Hook. Rather, Adam Lanza used a standard semi-automatic rifle of the sort that millions upon millions of Americans have in their homes. Moreover, Mike Lupica knows this full well, for on every other occasion he has written about the AR-15, he has described it correctly. In March of 2013, Lupica called for the federal government to ban “a semiautomatic rifle called the AR-15.” A few months later, railing against the same weapon, he explained to his readers that AR-15s are “semi-automatic” — and explained not just once, but twice. Elsewhere, he has proven himself to be more than capable of identifying different gun types when it has suited him to do so. Why, then, the change?

The answer, I suspect, lies in this famously dishonest piece of advice from the Violence Policy Center’s radical founder, Josh Sugarmann:

Assault weapons – just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms – are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons – anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun – can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

Bingo.

As you will see, “semi-automatic” does not mean “slightly weaker machine gun,” but is instead a technical term used to describe any firearm that requires its user to pull the trigger each and every time he wishes to expel a round. “Automatic,” by contrast, denotes something very different indeed: namely, any gun that keeps firing for as long as the trigger is depressed. “Automatics” have been heavily regulated since 1934 and are almost never used in crimes of any sort; “semi-automatics” have been available at almost every gun store in the country for almost a century. One can easily understand why Lupica hopes that the public will mix the two up: Their doing so is the only way he’s going to get anywhere with his crusade. But that he has elected to use his position as a “journalist” to help it along is little short of disgraceful.

Apparently, it is also somewhat typical. “So,” he sighed in yet another anti-AR-15 column last year, “it takes nine months and two days from Newtown, from 20 dead children and six adults, for someone else to carry the same kind of AR15 that Adam Lanza carried into Sandy Hook Elementary School into the Washington Navy Yard.” The cover line for his story? “Same Gun, Different Slay.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394727/why-gun-control-advocates-lie-about-guns-charles-c-w-cooke

Virginia governor seeks to reinstate restrictions on handgun sales

Posted: December 16, 2014 by gamegetterII in anti-gun asshattery
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Virginia Gov McAuliffe attends National Governors Assoc discussion on Growth and Jobs in America during its Winter Meetings in Washington

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Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia makes remarks during a “Growth and Jobs in America…

RICHMOND, Va. (Reuters) – Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, on Monday called to reinstate restrictions on the purchase of handguns, in a move that opponents described as unlikely to succeed with a Republican-dominated legislature.

McAuliffe asked lawmakers to reinstate a law allowing buyers to purchase only one handgun a month, which had been repealed during his Republican predecessor’s administration. He also wants to require private vendors at gun shows to run background checks on all prospective buyers.

“At gun shows, private vendors are not required to conduct criminal background checks, creating an easy avenue for criminals to illegally gain access to guns,” McAuliffe said. His call came the day after the second anniversary of a gunman’s rampage in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 26 elementary school students and educators.

McAuliffe also aims to revoke concealed weapons permits for parents who are delinquent on child support payments and prohibit the possession of firearms for misdemeanor domestic violence offenders.

The head of a Virginia gun-rights group called the move political payback to former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an ardent gun-control activist who was a major donor to McAuliffe’s 2013 gubernatorial campaign.

“I think this is all politically motivated,” said Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun rights group. “If anything, Virginia is more pro-gun than it was last year.”

The National Rifle Association, meanwhile, has said it financed $500,000 in ads on television and online striking out at McAuliffe’s views on firearms.

In 2013, gun sales in Virginia set a new high with nearly 480,000 transactions, according to state police statistics on the number of mandatory criminal background checks of gun purchasers.

Gun sales grew 10.8 percent over the previous record set just a year earlier.

Overall sales could be even higher, because state police don’t track private firearm transactions. Final sales numbers for 2014 aren’t in yet.

Thomas Baker, a criminologist and an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, said McAuliffe’s gun control proposals could spur even more gun sales.

“Usually, when new policies restricting firearm purchases are proposed, we see a rise in firearm sales,” Baker said

http://news.yahoo.com/virginia-governor-seeks-reinstate-restrictions-handgun-sales-221451821.html

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