When Idiots Write Gun Control Laws, We Get Idiotic Laws, Redux

Radio guy Tom Sullivan is fond of saying that the "C" students are running the country. Tom may be an optimist. Here in California, we have yet another example of "We have to do something about all these shootings!". In this case, yet another onerous gun control law that will not make anyone one whit safer.

The genius savants in Sacramento have passed a bill in the state Senate, that would register ammunition buyers, forcing them to submit personal information and fifty dollars for a background check. The vast majority of people in this state and indeed the United States, are law abiding citizens who use their guns for sport, recreation and even self defense.

Let's look at this proposed legislation not from the perspective that finally the legislature is doing something, but will the legislation produce the desired results and at what cost?

Let's back away from firearms for a minute, since talking about guns makes some people crazy. Let's say that there have been a number of highly publicized, high profile, drunk driving incidents around the country. One drunk driver drove onto a school playground, killing and injuring a number of children. One drunk driver drove onto the sidewalk in front of a movie theater, killing and injuring a number of people standing in line to see a movie. Another seriously injured a popular, prominent politician on her way to a town hall meeting. The number of people who drive drunk and kill or injure people is very small compared to the number of licensed drivers, but...we have to do SOMETHING!

So, the brain trust under the dome in Sacramento puts their best minds on the problem. You can't drive drunk without gas in your car (all you drunken Volt drivers notwithstanding!). So, in addition to licensing cars and drivers, Sacramento lawmakers want to require you to have a separate license to purchase gasoline (or electric cars). A fee will be levied on every new licensee, and a questionnaire exploring every licensee's drinking habit will be filed away for law enforcement to reference. The fact that this file will be a virtual duplicate of the records on file at the DMV means that there will be an additional level of bureaucracy and twice as many files for law enforcement to go through to get the same limited results.

Now, ask yourself, how are drunk drivers typically apprehended? By police officers combing through DMV records? Or is it primarily officers on the street, following up the relative few who commit the crimes, rather than the millions who do not.

Let's look at some of the high profile gun cases that get everyone's blood boiling:

The Sandy Hook shooting. If the shooter's Mom had been required to obtain a license before she purchased her ammunition, do you think this would have deterred her son in any way? No.

The Aurora theater shooting. The miscreant guilty of that crime purchased a large quantity of ammunition, but apparently there was nothing criminal on his record that would have raised any flags. (He also illegally constructed bombs, which indicate that even if his ammunition purchases had been criminalized somehow, he would not have hesitated to attempt to obtain ammunition illegally.)

The Virginia Tech shooting. Once again, nothing on his record that prevented him from purchasing the guns he used. How would an ammunition license magically have turned up something different?

The Gabby Giffords shooting. Same story.

The Fort Hood shooting. I know people like Obama like to forget about this one because it doesn't fit the "template". Both guns and ammo are tightly controlled on military bases. Requiring civilians to obtain ammunition licenses would not have stopped this bit of terrorism ludicrously entitled "workplace violence".

The Columbine shooting. Same as Sandy Hook. When they obtained the weapons, they had access to ammunition.

The Boston Marathon bombers. Duplicating the law that could not keep them from possessing a gun (or bombs) would not have kept them from obtaining ammunition.

In every case, some mythical ammunition license would not have prevented any of these horrific crimes. And to achieve that end, you would hassle millions of sportsmen and citizens, some of them lower income, from obtaining what they need to defend themselves against those who do not obey the law. Now put yourself in the shoes of a typical sportsman or hunter: How happy would you be to have to make an additional trip to the DMV before you purchased your next tank of gas?

Far better to have law enforcement vigorously follow up and prosecute every drunk driver and everyone who commits a crime using a firearm. The Obama administration has a notoriously low record in prosecuting people who have broken federal gun laws. (Eric Holder comes to mind!) Almost as if the Obama administration would rather have gun control as a political issue rather than to apprehend those guilty of crimes with firearms...

The fifty dollar fee, in addition to the fee required to purchase a firearm, the firearm itself and ammunition, will be a disproportionate financial difficult for the poor. The prohibitions against "Saturday Night Specials" was first instituted to try to keep guns out of the hands of inner city blacks, regardless of their disposition to criminal activity. Dianne Feinstein and her bodyguards will have all the ammunition they need. Some single mom living in a bad neighborhood, or some battered spouse whose better half is not particularly deterred by a paper restraining order may not.

The law will not work as designed. It will be costly to maintain and will yield virtually no benefit. Better to budget money for officers on the street, not file cabinets full of dead trees. Doing something just for the sake of doing something may please a political constituency, temporarily, but apart from hassling the majority of law abiding citizens will not yield any positive results, certainly not those the lawmakers supposedly want to achieve.



When Idiots Write Gun Control Laws, We Get Idiotic Laws (part I)
Cross posted at LCR.

The Demagogue-in-Chief's Shameless SOTU on Gun Control

I must confess, I took the night off from politics last night. I had intended to listen to the Bloviator-in-Chief prevaricate and dance around the actual state of the union in favor of some warmed over leftist rhetoric about "investing in the future" and a laundry list of new spending programs, but I somehow found more productive things to do.

Unfortunately, glancing over my dead tree newspaper this AM, I had to address some things on which I could not remain silent. The headline read:

Obama: Parents of Shooting Victims Deserve Vote

"They deserve a vote". Obama must believe it, he repeated it eight times. The parents, Gabby Giffords, The families of Newtown, The families of Aurora...deserve a vote on all of these gun control proposals.

Do you know what they deserve Mr. President? They deserve an honest president who doesn't demagogue tragedies to further a political agenda. They deserve a president honest enough to tell them that most or all of the proposals they "deserve" a vote on, would not have prevented the tragedies that you are seeking to exploit.

And listen to just how sympathetic the Demagogue-in-Chief is to their plight!

One of those we lost was a young girl named Hadiya Pendleton. She was 15 years old. She loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss. She was a majorette. She was so good to her friends, they all thought they were her best friend. Just three weeks ago, she was here, in Washington, with her classmates, performing for her country at my inauguration. And a week later, she was shot and killed in a Chicago park after school, just a mile away from my house.

"She loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss". What about victims of domestic abuse, Mr. President? Any of them "love lip gloss"? So, if a woman gets a restraining order against an abusive spouse or boyfriend, who chooses then to ignore that order, and one of your new virtually meaningless regulations prevents her from obtaining a firearm for self defense, when she is seconds away from bodily harm and death, and police are only minutes away, will you come before the nation and tell us what she deserved?

Hadiya Pendleton lived in an area with some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation. Don't her parents deserve the truth, Mr. President? That what you are proposing is already on the books in Chicago, and failed to prevent the shooting of a little girl who loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss? That none of the proposals you say "deserve" a vote would have prevented the shootings in Aurora or Newtown? Would not have prevented the shooting of Gabby Giffords or the firemen in New York, who were shot by a weapon that illegal to own in New York, by a felon who was already prohibited by law from owning any firearms at all? Mr. President, what difference would one more gun law meant in any of these incidents? Don't those victims' families deserve to know?

At the bottom of my blog posts, there are labels or tags to help people searching for certain stories to find them. Up until today, I had never found the need for one marked "shameless", but in my five years of writing this blog, I have never seen anything so blatantly shameless as this president. Gun control fails in Chicago, New York City and Washington D.C. The murder rates are higher there than in most of the country. The lowest murder rates are in states with the highest per capita gun ownership. Mr. President, the families of murder victims deserve more than your smarmy demagoguery in furthering your agenda of gun control.

But since we're talking about things that the citizens of the U S deserve, how about a budget? The Constitution requires that the Senate pass a budget every year...something they haven't done since 2009. In this shipwreck of an economy, Mr. President, don't you think the people f the U S, victims of higher inflation, higher cost of living and higher unemployment deserve a detailed plan as to how your administration would put us on the path to fiscal responsibility? It is Harry Reid and your party, Mr. President, who have forced the country into crisis after crisis by not passing the budget every year, that they are Constitutionally required to produce. And when budgets were passed by the House, Senate Democrats refused to even bring them up for a vote. Mr. President, don't you think the U S deserves to have a Senate that obeys the Constitution they have sworn to uphold?

Don't you think the people of the United States deserve a vote on a budget that effects nearly every aspect of their lives?
In four years, Senate Democrats could not produce a budget, but in a mere manner of weeks were able to draft bill after bill on gun control measures, which would not only not solve the problems, but in many cases, make some of them worse, but still allow shameless politicians to beat their chests and tell us how much they care about little girls who love Fig Newtons and lip gloss.


Two words for you and your speech, Mr. Obama: Shameless demagoguery




Transcript of 2013 SOTU

Cross posted at LCR.

Gun Control Idiocy From Those Wacky Folks Over at ...Fox News

Here, I thought I had flown into Ohio, turns out, I overshot Ohio and ended up on the Bizarro planet. A little jet lagged and behind in my blogdasarian duties, I brought dinner back to the hotel and passed on an HBO movie where absolutely no one in the cast wore any clothes (okay, they were animated birds!), after having been assailed by a promo for Real Time with Bill Maher. (The primary problem being that Real Time isn't Real Funny!) Notice how many shows on HBO tout themselves as "Real"? Real Time, Real Sports, Real Sex. Reminds me of the lady who said, "Honey, if you have to hang a sign around your neck saying you is, then you ain't!" But, I digress...

So I watched a little bit of Special Report with Bret Baier, without Bret Baier. Charles Krauthammer was on the panel, so I thought it might not be too bad. I couldn't tell you of anything spectacular ventured on the program until this blonde, whom I surmise to be A. J. Stoddard, said something spectacularly ill informed.

Speaking of the Colorado theater shooting, she said of the ammunition he purchased, and I speak from memory, that "none of this ammunition is used for self defense."

Fancy that! I have a Glock .40 that I have personally used for self defense, which uses, wait for it, .40 cal ammunition. He carried an 870 Remington shotgun, which is an excellent home defense weapon, and an AR-15, chambered in .223. Some of you might be old enough to remember the LA riots, where Korean shopkeepers climbed up to the roofs of their shops, armed with guns very similar to the AR-15, to defend their property against looters and arsonists. I don't know if they ever had to fire a single shot, but their presence served as a deterrent.

Let's recap: All three varieties of ammunition have been used or could certainly be used for self defense. If you want to argue about the quantities of ammunition he ordered, that's another story. But, if you don't know what you're talking about, please educate yourself before you enter the adult world of discussions on firearms laws and regulations.

Which brings us to Bill O'Reilly. He hit the trifecta tonight. I almost never watch Mr. O, but after yet another lap of the channels available, I saw he was going to have Bernard Goldberg on, so I thought, Aha! Another bright spot.

So I turned it on in the background and looked up as Bill was launching into a rant. First, he made some crack about buying bazookas without the Federal government knowing about it*. This, of course, is patently absurd, particularly if you are speaking of a functional bazooka with ammunition. These are highly regulated devises that are not commonly available to civilians.

I thought it was just part of his "Shtick", that he was saying something so hyperbolic for comic effect. He followed that up with a statement that one can buy machine guns without the feds knowing about it. He generated quite a bit of faux outrage at this! Unfortunately for Bill, it isn't true. The only people who can purchase machine guns are those who have Federal Firearms Licenses (FFL).

These weapons are tightly regulated and FFLs are not easy, or inexpensive to obtain. I cannot explain why, buy Mr. O'Reilly was getting quite incensed over something that simply is not true.

He compounded the idiocy with a parting remark about how it is "irresponsible to take a six year old to a midnight showing of a movie to be killed", as if it were somehow responsible to take a six year old to a movie matinee to be killed.

Hindsight is 20/20 Bill. Except for one deranged person, taking a six year old to the movies is hardly the act of an irresponsible parent. Bad judgment? Maybe. I wouldn't have done it, but like your rhetoric about bazookas and machine guns, your use of the word "irresponsible" was, well, irresponsible.

* I heard the quote a second time. It was more like "terrorists can buy bazookas without the FBI knowiung about it. Sheesh!

Movies as Usual? Or a DVD and a Dead Bolt?

Just as 9/11 forever changed the way we (and the government) look at airports and airport security, so the theater shooing in Aurora this past week threatens to do the same for our entertainment venues.

Theater owners and associations of theater owners are making public condolences and investigating ways to beef up security in their theaters, but how much of that toothpaste is already out of the tube? Movies have always been a form of escapism - people go to the theater to sit in the dark and dream other people's dreams, and to forget about their own situation for an hour or two. The word "amusement", in fact, comes from the Greek, where the privative "a", (as in "atheist - one who believes there is no God), comes in front of "muse" - to think. Literally "to be amused" is to stop one's thinking.

From the Dark Knight Rises trailers, we see a bridge being destroyed and a football stadium, filled with onlookers, as the field literally disappears from under the feet of the players, but, everyone in the theater knows that ultimately, it's not real. It's a trick of the camera or computer. Computer generated images (CGI) combined with intricately detailed scale models create a world that can be destroyed without anyone ever getting hurt! So the guy with the dead end job (or no job), goes to the theater, and says to himself, "Yeah, I may have it bad, but look! They're trying to kill that poor SOB!"

Fast forward a couple of weeks. You walk into the theater and you see an armed, uniformed guard in the lobby. Feel safer? The Aurora shooter came in the back door. How many guards do you think it would take to adequately guard every movie theater, mall and stadium in the country against that kind of intrusion?

And if you could get enough guys, they aren't working for minimum wage, so that would get added to the cost of your movie ticket, the price of which already has many people balking and seeking out different forms of entertainment.

Answer me honestly, the next time you go to the movies, as you enter the theater, will you be noting where the exits are a little more carefully than before? The first gunshot that explodes on the screen, as the character looks around to see where it came from, how many in the audience will be looking around to see where it came from, too? Anyone ever get up during a movie to go to the concession stand, answer a phone, or hit the head? Which gets more of your attention now: the movie, or weak bladder guy?

Even though the shooting in a Colorado theater was an aberration, and might never happen again, how many people do you think will feel a little uneasy over sitting in a dark room with that many strangers? How many do you think will want to opt for a DVD and a dead bolt on their own front door instead?

Oh, and if I haven't totally soured your next movie going experience yet, one last thought:

If they do hired armed security to patrol inside the theater? The Aurora shooter had a clean criminal record except for one speeding ticket. There's nothing that would have prevented him from getting the job himself.

Save the aisle seat for me!

Cross posted at LCR.