"Elections *Matter*," Part MCMLVIII: Gun control.
By Moe Lane Posted in Archived — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Jim Geraghty notes some trends that occured while Senator Obama was a director of the Joyce Foundation:
During Obama’s tenure with the Joyce Foundation, donations to anti-gun groups increased dramatically. For example, in 1997 and 1998 the Violence Policy Center received $221,000 and $360,000 from the Foundation; those grants and donations increased to $1 million in 2000 and $800,000 in 2002. In all, during Obama’s tenure, the group received $15 million from the Joyce Foundation.
The Violence Policy Center, despite its name, never seems all that concerned with beatings, stabbings, immolations or explosions. No, they’re completely focused on gun violence, and they can effectively be called an anti-gun or pro-gun control organization.
Lest anyone think I’m mischaracterizing their objective analysis, note that their web site touts themselves as “the most aggressive group in the gun control movement.” Also note studies like their one from 2000 entitled, “Unsafe in Any Hands: Why America Needs to Ban Handguns,” which declared the idea that the Constitution would forbid a national handgun ban a “pure myth.” Also note the organization’s subtly-titled book, Every Handgun is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns.)
Read the whole thing. And remember:
Elections matter.
If you trail the story back to Politico, and find his questionaire when he originally ran for the state Senate, their disclaimer is that a staffer filled it out.
Well, Obama needs to get better staffers, then. I'm a staffer for a state Rep here, and ANY questionaires that come into the office are filled out by the boss, or filled out by me, and reviewed by the boss. If someone did that here, they wouldn't hear the end of it.
In politics, you have your word and your friends; go back on either and you're dead. (Rule #11 of the public policy process)
Nick,
Then you should know that it's hard for NoBama to find the time for things like that when they are busy bringing Hope to the huddled masses.
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NObama...no way!.....McCain '08 !
Chicago, along with a lot of other large municipalities in this country, is s strange city:
They won't allow law-abiding people to own guns for their own protection and/or enjoyment and instead choose to cynically and manipulatively them for the fact that they need to raise taxes to prevent gun violence. It is not, and has never been, the fault of law-abiding people that criminals use guns in crimes. If Chicago and New York were successful in destroying the entire firearms manufacturing industry in this country, all that would be left would be the guns that come in on container ships from China -- undetectable, inscrutiable and completely beyond their capacity to either engage with or control.
Daley in Chicago is really horribly wrong when he says the things that he does. The most important thing he could do by raising taxes is to teach the people in Chicago's public school system to become full citizens of the United States instead of being his wards.
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BTW the argument that exposure makes you guaranteed to become what liberal law professors commonly refer to as "gun nuts" is simply untrue. I was exposed to firearms in high school for three years and became one of the farther-left people you will ever meet, including my views on firearm ownership.
It just so happens that I was wrong. That realization only comes in the fullness of time.
Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and a lot of other cities in the country would be doing themselves (and their citizens) a big favor by supporting competitive marksmanship programs in their school systems. They're blinkered right now about the real importance of those programs, but it's pretty straightforward: if you teach people responsibility, and invest them with responsibility from a young age, they have a tendency to behave responsibly more often than not, particularly when there's something important at stake. And you wouldn't even have to raise taxes.
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But it seems like the horribly weak argument that libs make amongst themselves.
If the libs had exposure the question is why aren't they packing ?
If they hadn't had exposure why are they issuing forth from a state of ignorance ?
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
It's really ultimately simple, although if you scratch the surface of an academic liberal you'll find different explanations. People who are involved with International Weapons Control will tell you that they want to ban guns in the United States because the fact that Americans manufacture guns makes their efforts internationally look valid. Feminists want to ban guns because they're a symbol of patriarchal, white-male power. Professors who are against the death penalty don't want to see people own guns because it's not even the *state's* decision to take a life -- even after someone has been threatened with losing their own.
A lot of liberals simply won't admit that the Great Society has been a failure, and has led to more criminals, not less: their solution is to take everyone's guns. Some people don't bother to do anything but portray the numbers in the worst possible light. And in other places like Massachusetts there are legislatures who will simply do anything to reduce the "number of guns" without understanding the first thing about them or their owners, just because it sounds good. Those things lead to the kind of legislative fraud that happened in Massachusetts in 1998.
The only bright spot is that Al Gore's ideas about power generation might make the urban more rural as more urban towns cannot comply with his demands and try to by wasting billions of dollars on windpower. Los Angeles is one of the most strict towns in the nation concerning windpower generators, but they might have to bend on that if Barack becomes the POTUS. And if Los Angeles is going to have windmills and go back to the 1930s, it might as well start thinking about having much more liberal firearms ownership, because it's going to need it...
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That's all I could think when I knew a couple of them. You know, this is one of the rare occasions when I'll give Dan Savage his due -- he went to a shooting range in Texas and found out firsthand that really nobody there was crazy, and in fact he enjoyed himself and talked about it on NPR in an interview highlighting his book "Skipping Towards Gomorrah."
In fact I would be surprised if Savage himself doesn't own a gun along with his partner. He said in the interview that he was described as a "natural" while he was at the range -- and I wouldn't want to see his right to own a firearm restricted for some idiotic reason among the many that I've heard.
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And that has never bothered me in the slightest. If anything, there should be more interest, because they'd make the photographs in the American Rifleman look better, I think. Nothing wrong with that.
It's a Constitutionally enumerated right. Every law-abiding citizen should remember that regardless of party, that's what it's about.
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What happened at Columbine -- in Littleton, which is one of the most upwardly-mobile, wealthy and competitive places in the country -- has been a misrepresentation of the facts.
Harris and Klebold were a couple of guys who were ostracised and then who not only ostracised themselves but decided to take murderous vengenance on the rest of their school. They were LEFTISTS at heart -- alienated, and deeply at odds with the rest of the school. They were Kafkaesque. Littleton, Colorado is one of the most high-achieving school districts in the United States, and these two guys and their friends were the black sheep.
That's why they're Michael Moore's heroes.
I dealt with a couple of guys like that in Union New Jersey when I was the Captain of my team. You'd get a couple every year -- the ones who would normally have fallen through the cracks.
The paradoxical thing is that by allowing them to join the team and become a part of something successful with other people, we brought those guys in and helped them succeed instead of doing somthing totally insane.
It's a paradoxical statement but I can tell you that having been Captain I know positively that there were people we brought on to the team because they were curious but who needed friendship and structure. We gave that to them and we were very successful. Otherwise they would have been alienated as well: Union, New Jersey is a very competitive town: just ask anyone who was ever on the football team.
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One of the reasons Chicago is a strange city is that there are really very few people there who actually trust each other, despite the fact that the city is a polyglot mess and hosts things like the multicultural "taste of Chicago."
On a day to day basis, most people in Chicago are pretty fearful of each other and themselves, because nobody really knows who is emailing Da Mayor and who is going to get their head chopped off next.
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Four Justices of the Supreme Court were willing to substitute personal policy preferences for the plain text of the Second Amendment.
And, it's not clear whether Justice Kennedy would have supported expanding the ruling to include incorporation.
But, their importance had already been cemented in stone by Boumediene when the Court ignored precedent and bestowed upon enemy combatants, captured on the battlefield, during an ongoing war with the United States, the constitutional right to habeas corpus.
The very foundation of our Republic has been threatened.
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“Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.” – Ronald Reagan