“In 2013 we paid $134 million in state taxes to Connecticut, and if we would have kept on the same pace, Connecticut would have $140 million more today,” McGuigan said on Monday. “That is 10 percent of the budget deficit.”McGuigan was referring to the state’s projected $1.4 billion budget deficit for the fiscal year that begins July 1.A Malloy spokesman challenged the NSSF argument that the governor’s tough gun policies had a chilling effect on the firearms industry.
Mind you, They are not any safer that they were before and now the Governor was gun related fees applicable to residents quadrupled to help cover the deficit. But with the same breath they deny that gun restrictions made any impact in the state.
From the same article:
In 2013 Connecticut had 8,000 people working in the firearms industry and related fields. Last year that number was 4,900, the NSSF said.
PTR Industries and Mossberg take jobs somewhere else, but nah, it had no effect at all.
To finish this overly long dissertation, I want to go over two unintended consequences brought by the lust of power some people seem to have. If you still don’t know that Gun Control is just about the Power to control people, you have now been advised.
I wrote about handguns and concealed carry officially being now a daily occurrence plus now we have the AR rifle and similar semi-automatic rifles being commonplace thanks to the efforts to ban them and ban the right of the people to defend themselves or simply own them because they can. Two things happened with such popularity and demand, I am going to go over them really quick.
Yes, there was a brutal demand for both pistols and rifles. Companies rushed to offer not only the main product, but inundated the market with accessories to improve shooting. We went from painting the sights with phosphorescent paint to tritium sights to red dots. The furniture of the rifles became modular and lighter if for nothing else to attach lights and laser. Pistols and even some revolvers were designed to have a rail to carry the light and/or laser and the latest is the miniature red dots. All these things came about a demand that needed to be satisfied and companies did so engaging in a dirty and beautiful free market exchange; capitalism at its best. And I am not even mentioning ammunition, reloading supplies, ear and eye protection, slings, holsters, belts, pouches, etc. When the economy tanked, the gun industry not only did not follow but flourished. Where companies were eliminating shifts and firing employees, Gun & Accessory manufacturers were adding personnel and increasing working hours. When the failed economic policies based on soft Socialism kept failing, dirty ugly Capitalism was doing good in the Gun Culture. Freedom creates wealth. Freedom provides wanted products and satisfied customers. Statists want to control production, demand an outcome based on their wish list. Regulating & taxing the hell out of things till you overpay for soda and can’t add salt to the damned french fries without incurring in the wrath of your “Betters” does not a “better world” create. Guns and Capitalism? Free Market with satisfied customers? No wonder the Left is having kittens.
Much to the chagrin of Gun Controllers who have no problem painting us as irresponsible hicks shooting to the air as if we were in a Bedouin wedding, Firearms Training Schools started to pop across the country when more people came into the culture. And the same for sporting matches involving the rifle and/or pistol. Not only we have a sizable population that is armed, but also knows to use the guns safely and effectively. And if that alone was not bad enough, many firearm classes are teaching not only to how to shoot but when to legally to shoot. This has resulted in people suddenly being extra aware of attempts by politicians to penalize and restrict the instances where a citizen could exercise self-defense and bringing out a new generation of people who became very involved in the political process at state and national level. Some of those new people have fought with an amazing effectiveness, like the little lady below who is the scourge of Gun Control advocates in Texas..
Rachel Malone. Don’t mess with Texas or her…or both.
See? I already distracted myself of the point I wanted to make. So we have a healthy market on both the hardware (guns and “accessories”) and the software (training.) Besides your civilians reaping the Free Market Capitalistic goodies, another group of dedicated people suddenly benefits from all this “gun madness”: Our own Armed Forces.
OK, you are going to complain and say some stuff was done for the Military on purpose, but who designed it? Who tested it? who shot it till it broke and bitched loudly about it? Who called/emailed the manufacturers with improvements and even new ideas? And that is just the hardware side of things, because training has changed and it was brought about by the civilian side thinking “You know? this way of shooting/reloading/etc does not make a lick of sense. We have to come up with a better one.” and when the military instructors were slow to change, men and women in uniform paid out of their own pockets to go to civilian schools and learn new things that would keep them alive in the battlefield. And allow me to include cops in that mix, not as many as the should, but just the same.
And you want to know something funny? All that new training policy? all those developments in hardware? All were researched without costing taxpayers one red cent. Sure, they went through the process all stuff for the military goes through to be officially part of, but the R&D part was pretty much paid by the Gun Nuts. So, when some gun control idiot yells at you and says “You wanna play with machine guns, join the military!” you can proudly tell them “I am part of its Research and Development team that helps them win battles and stay alive. What is your part?”
In closing (as in general closing) it is us, the Gun Nuts, the armed “rednecks” of all flavors that have stood against Gun Control because we figured pretty quick that it is not about guns but about Control. It is hard to control a population that not only is keen on voting, but may have the resources and training to keep politicians in check. You simply cannot oppress somebody who can transverse your body with a third of an ounce of lead and copper projected at high-speed from several hundred yards away. Or as I heard Massad Ayoob say many years ago:
Hunting ain’t fun when the “bunny” shoots back.”
Sitting here in my “office” (dear Lord, I need to clean this place), I take a look around and see that just on reloading dies I have on one shelf of my bench I could have gotten 8 years in prison back in the old country. That on the amount of ammo I have for one caliber alone, I would be serving possibly another eight to ten years. And the simple semi-auto rifle with a $100 red dot I own would have classified me as Enemy of the State, earned me a trip to the National Intelligence Service where I would have a “sad and mortal accident falling off the toilet” or getting killed “while attempting to flee.” But instead, all I own is not only legal here but my gorramed right! Ain’t that a kick in the ass?
I just wish I was a better writer to explain to you how sweet and how liberating owning a gun can be for those of us who were born and raised under less enlightened regimes. The idea of Rights and Freedom can be overwhelming and some never stomach it, that is why you see many minority members taking the side of Gun Control and sadly some do it because they want to be the ones in control and to have a chance to become the little dictators they saw back home. Sorry fellas, there are “traitors” to the race/color/religion/etc like me that having tasted Freedom, have become intoxicated by it and we will make damn sure you either change your mind, move back to where you come from or become part of the ecosystem if you try to replicate the banana republics we escaped from.
The NRA and other gun-rights types might see this as payback for the relentless push by New Yorkers like ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg for tougher gun laws in the rest of the country. In fact, it’s the same thing: a foolish effort to push a parochial set of values into areas where they don’t make sense (at least, not to the people who actually live there).
Let’s remember who Cy Vance is for a moment. Vance is the DA that has consistently over prosecuted New Yorkers for carrying pocket knives under NYC’s gravity knife law, and is proud of it.
Vance is a tyrant that enjoys his position as DA, keeping his boot on the necks of New Yorkers. That is his New York value. This is keeping inthe tradition of Emperor Governor Cuomo, who stood by Vance and vetoed meaningful knife reform and passed the NY SAFE act in an “emergency” to avoid resistance, enunciated the New York value of hating, oppressing, an wanted to exile everyone who wasn’t a lockstep Progressive.
“You’re seeing that play out in New York. … The Republican party candidates are running against the SAFE Act – it was voted for by moderate Republicanswho run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.“
So it goes without a doubt that these tinpot dictators don’t want the Federal Government to force them to expand civil rights for their proles. A century and a half ago, Democrats like these on the opposite side of the Mason-Dixon stood for exactly the same thing.
This isn’t payback for the meddling of Mayor Bloomberg outside the Five Boroughs. This is our version of the Voting Rights Act. When Democrats made voting so difficult for Blacks that their ability to exercise their Constitutionally protected right was in effect denied, the Federal Government stepped in. Now that Democrats are doing the same thing, by making the ability to keep and bear arms effectively impossible by cost and regulation, the Federal Government once again, has the duty to step in.
In traditional Democrat fashion, MDA supporters immediately jumped on preserving NYC’s hyper-restrictive CCW rules by invoking “states rights.”
To these Progressives, states rights do apply to Constitutional protections like the right to keep and bear arms, but don’t apply to the right to conceal carry a twig and berries into the ladies room. A Texan can’t carry a gun into New York, but a New York man can carry his package into a Texas girls locker room.
Why? Because the Constitution doesn’t matter, your rights exist at the whims of Progressives.
Justice Alito framed the case as an issue of due process incorporation, i.e., whether the 2nd Amendment is incorporated in and applies to states through the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause (slip op., p. 10). The 14th Amendment states in part that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” The first clause is generally referred to as the “privileges and immunities” clause; the latter, the “due process” clause. Over the past century, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Due Process Clause to “selectively incorporate various rights.” Incorporation of certain Bill of Rights provisions into the 14th Amendment’s due process guarantee, make these rights enforceable against the states and not just the federal government.
After reviewing various tests and standards that the Court has used in the past to apply the Bill of Rights’ protections to the states through incorporation, Alito concluded that the appropriate test is whether “a particular Bill of Rights guarantee is fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty. . . [and] deeply rooted in the country’s history and tradition” (ibid, p. 19).
Drawing largely on the historical record and the fact that the majority of states include the right to bear arms in their constitutions, Alito determined that “self defense” is a fundamental right and central component of the 2nd Amendment, and the right to own a handgun is part of this basic right to self-defense. Alito draws on Heller for much of the support behind his reasoning (ibid, pp. 21-26).
The next logical step in this direction is that the Second Amendment, which is an individual right, guarantees the right to self defense outside the home, i.e., guarantees concealed carry.
This is why I have become so supportive of the idea of National CCW to a low standard. It will allow a NYC and CA slave revolt. If NYC and CA won’t issue CCW permits to their residents, but a resident of Florida can carry on a trip to NYC, than NYC residents will rush out to get Florida, Utah, and Arizona CCW permits.
In the 1915 landmark film Birth of a Nation, a racist depicts what white Democrats thought giving the right to vote to blacks would look like.
All you have to do is read the MDA posts to see what those same people a century later believe that giving the undesirables the right to carry would do to America.
Uncontrolled bloodshed in the streets, with people shooting each other over every fender bender, committing mass murder and getting away with it by claiming self defense.
It is an eerily similar scene of disarray.
Andrew Cuomo, Cy Vance, Bloomberg, Jerry Brown, and all the supporters of MDA, Everytown, and the rest, are nothing but plantation owners in their own minds. It is their control over who has what rights that maintains law and order, and when you allow the formerly oppressed to have their rights, they are going to act like savages and destroy society.
Today the difference isn’t quite as clear cut along color lines, but the underlying belief is the same.
A national CCW law is the gun owners Emancipation Proclamation, lifting the boot of Democrat rule off the necks of people in every state where rights are denied.
West Covina PD arrests suspect threatening bystanders and officers with a baseball bat at the police station.
At about 10:18 am this morning (Monday, February 27, 2017), a man carrying a baseball bat walked up to the front lobby of the West Covina Police Department and began striking the large glass windows.
