I’m going to beat this anti-gun horse to death, grind it into IKEA meatballs, and them feed it to them.

Everytown is quoting University of Houston, English Department, Associate Professor Maria C. Gonzalez.  A professor of English.  I wondered what type of “critical intellectual work” she felt allowing CCW on campus would discourage.  I showed this quote to my wife, who majored in English Education as an undergrad, and she asked the same question.

So I decided to do some digging.  Turns out, she has quite a few negative ratings about how she conducts her class.

Well that explains it.  Professor Gonzalez sees her role in the classroom as less about teaching students mastery of the written English language, and more about being a Social Justice activist.  Even her good reviews make it clear that Propagandist Professor Gonzalez is politically biased; she’s just an easy grader if you are willing to parrot her ideas back at her.

My guess here is that Propagandist Professor Gonzalez is a dyed-in-the-wool Progressive activist.  It’s not idea of a gun in her classroom that terrifies her.  It’s the idea of an independently minded, and potentially *gasp* conservative, student in her classroom that terrifies her.  It’s the idea that one of the impressionable young minds in her class might not be so easily malleable to her world view.  This is not the opinion of a professional educator who earnestly wants her students to think critically and evaluate new concepts.  This is the opinion of a Progressive evangelist who only wants to preach to the choir.

This type of professor is a stain on academia.  Her opinion on this issue is as worthless as the education she hoists upon her students.

Caught this over at the MDA Facebook page:

I know that you love to dance in the blood of martyr every person you can who has died from a gunshot wound.  Hacks gotta hack.  I get that.  I don’t want to make light of a family’s suffering, but this post of your is kind of beyond the pale.

“Eric Tusing, 27, was reportedly playing Russian Roulette with a gun he thought was unloaded when it fired, killing him.”

Really!?!  You are going to martyr as a “tragedy” a young man that played Russian Roulette?  You do know how that “game” is played, right?  What the point of it is?

This was a case of terminal stupidity.  Not and accident, not unintentional, just dumb.  There is no gun control that would have stopped this from happening.  If an adult is willing to point a gun at their head and pull the trigger… well… if the natural law of self preservation didn’t prevent this, there is no law of man that would have either.  Especially since the news article you cited said:

“They say the kids have always grown-up around guns and learned to always assume a gun was loaded.

So they still can not believe this happened. Last month they were told 27-year-old Eric Tusing was in Burlington, joking with friends about playing Russian Roulette.

That’s when he accidentally shot himself not knowing the gun was loaded.”

So this guy KNEW safe gun handling and did this anyway.

Let me redirect you to another article from a few years back that has just a little bit more integrity than this one.

“Bungee Jump Kills Local Man, Police Say Cord Was Homemade.”

When a guy about the same age ties a bunch of elastic cargo straps together and jumps off a bridge, that’s not a accident or a tragedy either.  There is no consumer protection legislation that would have stopped that.  You just can’t protect some people from themselves.

I feel bad for this family.  I can’t imagine the heart ache of having to bury two sons.  One son getting shot by a dropped gun feels dubious to me (drop testing is an industry standard, but maybe it was an old or defective gun), but at face value will accept that as accidental.  The son who shot himself playing Russian Roulette?  Do not, do not, do not, use his lethal idiocy to try and restrict my civil liberties.

Miguel has touched on University of Texas at Austin Professor Frederick Steiner’s elevation to anti-gun folk hero, for his decision to leave his position because of the passing of campus carry.

The people over at Everytown are now doubling down on this.  They are celebrating that campus carry will lead to a “brain drain,” calling for more professors to leave Texas.  The comments over at the Everytown Facebook account, as well as on the Rawstory article, fall into two camps (sometimes both):

1. I’d never send my kid to a school in Texas/state with campus carry.
2. “‘Brain drain?’ People in Texas don’t have brains, yuk yuk yuk (insert Bush joke).”

I don’t know Dr. Steiner.  I’ve never met him.  I can tell you from his interviews, I don’t like him.  In my long academic career, I have met many professors who just didn’t like students.  They loved research, writing, fundraising (which comes with taking a cut of any grant money brought in), and the prestige of holding  recognized chair in a field.  They just didn’t like having to show up in a classroom and interact with students.  I hated professors like that and swore that I’d never become one.  From the way Steiner just casually insults the (what would be mostly graduate level, since you have to be 21 to get a CCW permit) students of Texas – assuming that they are irresponsible and dangerous, I believe that he is one of those types of professors.  He “like[s] fund-raising, obviously,” students, not so much.

But I digress.

The “brain drain” that the anti-gun establishment is hoping for, I don’t think is going to happen.  The causal assumption here is that antis are smart and gun people are stupid.  My favorite professor as an undergraduate was in the Mechanical Engineering department.  He taught Materials for Mechanical Engineers, and is the man who got me interested in Materials Engineering, and Design for Manufacturing.  He was also the faculty sponsor for the college gun club – yes, we had a school funded gun club.  During DfM, he would bring in samples (the way good profs do) of parts manufactured in different ways.  Guess what he brought in as an example of forging?  If you guessed an AR-15 upper receiver blank, you are right.

My graduate adviser is/was also a gun guy, and has been a consultant for the firearms industry for years.  He actually got me working on my very first firearms related failure analysis while I was a student.  We actually got the school to change its policy on firearms on campus (before the state legalized campus carry) in order to bring guns in to do materials testing on them in the lab.

When I started working, one of my colleagues turned out to be the former chief metallurgist of one of the largest firearms and ammunition manufactures in America, and one of the smartest men in the world on brass metallurgy.  He is now semi-retired as a consultant and is a adjunct professor at am engineering college in Indiana.

There are a lot of gun guys in Academia.  We’re pretty quiet and don’t like to rock the political boat.  Engineering and hard science is a lot more conservative than you think.  Sure, maybe some professor that teaches “sexism in pre-colonial cave paintings” may flee for the Blue states, but I have total disregard for their un-serious field of study anyway and don’t consider that a loss for the university.

There isn’t going to be a “brain drain” in campus carry states.  At most it will be a culling of the heard of useless academics.

Also.

For all those anti-gun snobs who look down on Texas and other Red states south of the Mason-Dixon, let me remind you that Texas has consistently been in the to 5 states for economic growth for the last 10 years.  It was No. 2 last year, beat only by the North Dakota oil boom.  Manufacturing and technical industry is booming in the south.  Detroit is hemorrhaging jobs.  Alabama is now home to manufacturing for Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Navistar, Mercedes-Benz, and Airbus.  Huntsville may be “Rocket City USA” by history, but it’s fast becoming “Motown 2.0.”

I am reminded of stories from history about poor, racist whites, no matter how poor and illiterate they were, no matter the conditions of barefoot squalor they lived in; comforted themselves in the knowledge that they were white and therefore “better” than their black neighbors who might actually work harder and make more money.  Today, Blue state liberals, no matter how bad the economy is in their states, no matter how in debt they are, no matter how high their unemployment may be; they take solace in the fact that they are not southerners.  It is the same attitude, filled with the same smug bigotry and hatred, and it is just as ugly.

According to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City’s tough gun laws has resulted in an increase in stabbings; and apparently that is a good thing.  The violent crime rate may be going up, but fewer people are getting shot.  This is a victory for gun control.  Just don’t tell that to families of the victims of these stabbings.

*Door bell*

Police Officer: “Ms. Smith, we have good news and bad news about your husband.  Which do you want first?”

Ms. Smith: “The bad news first.”

Police Officer: “Your husband was killed this morning on the subway during his commute.”

Ms. Smith: “Oh my god!  Then what’s the good news?”

Police Officer: “He wasn’t the victim of gun violence.”

Now I might be a pessimist, my wife tells me that I am, but personally… if I find my self shitting into a bag through a hole in my side because a piece of metal has pierced my guts, I really don’t care if it was a bullet or steak knife that did it.

The un-funny Trevor Noah did a shtick on the Daily Show about the bill making its way through Iowa that would allow children under the age of 14 to shoot handguns while under direct supervision of an adult.

His coverage of the bill was embarrassingly bad.

“Currently, kids in Iowa can use long guns legally for target practice, or murder, or hunting.”

Yes, he said that.  The rest of the bit got worse from there.  I wished the horror of just how out of touch with reality that was, was due entirely to Trevor Noah’s lack of comedic talent.  But it wasn’t.  This was a case of art imitates life.

During legislative debate over the bill, Rep. Kirsten Running-Marquardt (D) said “What this bill does, the bill before us, allows for 1-year-olds, 2-year-olds, 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds to operate handguns.  We do not need a militia of toddlers.”

Really!?!  Because that’s not what happens in real life.  I know.

I started shooting with my dad at about 7 years old.  The only gun we owned at the time was some war trophy my grandfather brought back from the European Theater and was called “Grandpa’s 32.”  I was sold off years ago and I have no idea what it was.  But that was the gateway drug that got my dad and me into shooting.  After that, there was a long string of target pistols including an old Beretta 22 of indeterminate vintage and a Taurus revolver that never hit to point of aim.  That evolved into a wonderful collection of guns that now numbers greater than the number Trevor Noha’s fans.  He got into hunting, I didn’t, and it all started with pistols.  Some of my best memories as a kid are of shooting with my dad.

My story is not unique.  There are many, many kids in quite a lot of states who shoot handguns safely, some far better than many adults.

This isn’t murder.  This isn’t a militia of toddlers.  This is Americans enjoying a constitutionally protected sport as a family.  If you want to talk about safety, Pee Wee Football has the worst injury rate for any sport played by kids.  If you really wanted to protect children, don’t let them play contact sports.

I get that anti-gunners are going to shill because that’s what they do.  But their lies have become so bald faced, that it makes you wonder what color the sky is in the world they live in.

So some Australians travel to the US and decide that “visiting some of these gun-loving towns is like stepping onto another planet.”

I’m not going to fisk this article, because what would be the point.  I’m a little tired of point by point arguments against Australians, or Canadians, or Brits as to why Americans and non-Americans can’t see eye-to-eye on the issue of gun safety and how Americans just can’t seem to get with the rest of the world on this.

Here is the one thing that non-Americans (and even some Americans) need to understand.

The Deceleration of Independence was ratified on July 4, 1776.  At that moment, every resident of the Colonies with loyalty to America became a citizen of these United States.

Until 1949, there was not really such a thing as a “British Citizen,” every resident of the United Kingdom was a British Subject.  A Subject.  Let that sink in for a second… a Subject.  Even today in the UK, the British still haven’t figured out what they are.  Canadians and New Zealanders were Subjects of the Crown until 1977 with the passage of the Canadian and New Zealand Citizenship Acts.  Australians were Subjects of the Crown until 1984 with the passage of the Australian Citizenship Amendment Act.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word Subject as “Under the control or domination of (another ruler, country, or government),” the classical definition being “under the dominion of a monarch.”

Nearly 240 years of being citizens and not subjects have given most Americans a healthy disrespect for overbearing authority.  For the most part, we don’t like politicians trying to micromanage our lives.  We don’t like bullies in uniform.  We don’t like people telling us what to do, what to think, and how to live.  When some elected narcissistic tells us we can’t buy a 20 oz of our favorite sparkling beverage, we tell him to “get bent” and that said narcissist can stick his law someplace that wont be seen until his next colonoscopy.

And yes, there are plenty Americans who’d have no moral qualms against shooting a politician to preserve the sacred right of being able to deep fry a donut in trans fats.

You can take my deep fried Snickers bar when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

Americans’ favorite movies mostly involve some Regular Joe having to kill his way through an oppressive government for freedom.  We really don’t care what the contrived reason is – invasion by a totalitarian regime (Red Dawn), corrupt backwoods sheriff (First Blood), or space opera Planetary Alliance (Serenity) – nothing makes Americans stop stuffing their faces with popcorn and cheer like watching some nameless government stooge  get turned into pink mist by the patriotic hero’s bullet.

The growing gun rights movement is a direct result of the growing onerous and burdensome expansion of government power.  Every time some politician assumes a little more power, the people buy a few million more guns.

That is why they don’t “get” us.  There are a lot of Americans who grew up saying “this is a free country and I can do what I want” and still believe it.  Guns are a part of that.  The motto of this country is e pluribus unum only because F*ck you and get off my lawn wouldn’t look classy on the money.

The ability and the desire of the people to push back is ingrained in us in a way no one, one generation removed from being a subject, would understand.  Sure, we’d like it if there was less crime and fewer total nut jobs.  But were not going to give up our gun rights just because it’s what the historically oppressed think we should.  We are citizens, not subjects.

A young man, Peter Mielke, 19, was an employee at a pizza parlor in Bellaire, Texas, and was shot and killed during an armed robbery.  The news report says that Peter complied with the robbers demand for money and then was shot multiple times.  The murderer’s identity is as of yet unknown and police are asking for help from anybody that might know something about the crime.

This is a sad story.

Moms Demand Action managed to make it worse.

“Help us fight our nationa’s lax gun laws and ‘guns everywhere’ culture, which endangers our families.”

Um… WTF!?!  When MDA screeches about “guns everywhere culture” they are usually talking about concealed carry.  Even when ranting about open carry in Texas, that still requires the carrier to have a permit, which in the state of Texas involves a fingerprint background check.  So it MDA going out on the limb that the murderer who robbed a pizza parlor was a CCW permit holder?  Color me skeptical on that one.

I don’t think Texas’ lax gun laws or “guns everywhere culture” are responsible for this one.  Why?  Because New York City has some of the toughest gun laws on the books and virtually no concealed carry, yet a quick search of the NYC CBS local news shows that armed robbery is a pretty common occurrence there.

This murder isn’t the product of Texas’ love of guns.  This is the result of a bad guy engaged in criminal activity.  If there is a culture responsible for this, isn’t not the one where loving families go to the range and target shoot together.