HB 1468 and SB 663 are taking Missouri closer to constitutional carry. As of now, permitless open carry is in effect there. If HB 1468 passes, then concealed permitless carry will be allowed.

Enter Everytown For Gun Control. They have released an ad against the law.

“A new bill would dismantle Missouri law and let people carry a hidden handgun in public without a permit or gun safety training; even some violent criminals and people with multiple DUI’s.”

Start with a true statement, then follow up with propaganda. Well I had no idea people with DUI’s were absolutely terrible people. Or that they should lose a right?

A station in St. Louis interviewed Mayor Francis Slay and Police Chief Sam Dotson. The mayor claimed that making it easier to get a gun and have a gun makes neighborhoods more dangerous. These bills just make concealed carry permitless. If anything, shouldn’t people that are afraid of guns feel better that more guns will be out of sight?

The police chief claimed that states with stronger gun control laws have less violence. To compare these stats you can find many, many sources. I chose to compare murder rates by state based off of FBI Uniform Crime Reports, and Guns and Ammo’s list of best states for gun owners. Missouri is number 9 on the list, with number 1 being the best state for gun owners. The murder rate per 100,000 people was 6.6 in 2014. Number 1 was Arizona, which has 4.7 murder rate, and number 2 was Vermont with 1.6.

Now sure, there are many different ways to compare states on how gun friendly they are. But don’t you think that if more gun friendly states were more violent then Vermont would be one of the worst states? Number 4 on the list was Utah, which had a 2.3 murder rate. So, not only does correlation not mean causation, these stats don’t even seem to correlate very well with each other.

There are many other factors involved so it is very misleading when a police chief states that these new laws would increase violence. It will be good to see Missouri take another step towards gun rights. Hopefully a couple officials hell bent on preventing it do not succeed in persuading the public based on their few words in those interviews.

I am also befuddled every time people think someone bent on breaking the law will suddenly care about getting a license to conceal carry before committing a crime.

Have a nice day, everybody.

Also. If you wish to see more correlation data:

Graphs comparing homicide rate and Brady scores

The opposition of that graph

Note that the second one includes all gun related deaths until the last graph, where suicides are filtered out. Also, the comparison is made to firearm deaths, not homicides. The article doesn’t make a direct comparison to the first link I posted as it meant to.

Have you seen the statistics on the high number of failed background checks compared to the low number of prosecutions for those failed checks? Remember when an NRA representative spoke with Biden about this topic?

Well, it flew under my radar that some states are now doing something about it. To be 100% clear, the laws are over lying on the background checks- so-called “lie-and-try”. Tennessee is the latest to join seven other states that now require law enforcement to be notified of failed checks. It seems that no state requires police to follow up, but there are many more investigations happening due to the law.

According to The Trace, data from Pennsylvania State Police shows a very big raise in investigations.

Personally, bravo. It’s about time people get more serious about criminals instead of law abiding citizens. Now, I could endlessly pick a bone with someone for hours over who should be labeled “criminal”, such as people who have served their time for minor offenses, but I will save that for a different day. However, I think this is a step in the right direction if people are serious about decreasing crimes committed with guns by repeat offenders. I do not like that if someone with someone with a minor offense is being blocked from purchasing a firearm. Perhaps they are less likely to be prosecuted fully, if at all? But if someone is a convicted murderer, then yeah sure, hit them hard.

I don’t enjoy any infringements on my rights, but this type of law is less toe-crushing than many of the things typical “anti-gunners” want.

Have a nice day, everybody.

It’s been a long week, but I wanted to share a story from my teenage years. You see, I grew up in a family that went hunting and fishing a lot. When I was in middle school, and my brothers in high schools, my family started to do a lot of animal trapping.

My father had to head to work early in the morning so my brothers and I would check the traps in the morning before school. For efficiency, the driver would stay in the vehicle while others ran off to check traps. However, there were a few traps visible from the vehicle.

One snowy morning we are going down the road with fields on both sides. Up ahead was a stream with small, densely packed trees down the banks. There was a truck parked near the stream crossing, but we thought nothing of it since we were on game-lands. We stopped at the crossing at peered out the window to see if the trap was set off. Two seconds into looking, I noticed a man in full snowy-camouflage peeing in creek about 30 feet from us. The man didn’t move a muscle, and it felt like we were staring for forever at him. When my oldest brother started casually pulling away because no animal was in the trap I busted out laughing. They did not see the dude peeing like ten feet away from the trap!

It always makes me laugh to think about what the man must have been thinking.

Update on my life: I just finished a few projects and will be less stressed out, so now I will be able to reserve more brain power for better blogs.

Have a nice day everybody.

Hello, George here. AKA Curby. I will be writing about 07 manufacturer FFL related stuff. I will try to stay away from politics and gun rights as they are well covered,however I may comment occasionally. Right now my primary work is nickel , chrome plating and polishing firearms. Business name Reflections, reflectionsusa.biz ( shameless plug!!) I am also a Certified NRA Instructor and teach. Future plans are building various arms and surpressors and testing them. I will touch on instructing and tips on polishing arms. I will be posting at least once a week. Hopefully I wont bore y all to death. Take care and see ya out there.

In case the article by A.T. Faust on arguing gunsense made you feel as if all arguments had been won. Here’s a man who posted a migraine inducing article on the same day. Perhaps he just needs to head over here to see more clearly.

The article is full of one- and two- liners that make guns, gun owners, and concealed carry sound terrifying. At the Bowling Green State University in Ohio there was an open carry walk. The article writer might be a medical doctor, since that is the only person in the entire city with the same name as the writer. The reason I point that out is that it is not a college student who wrote it.

Migraine inducing quotes below:

“Consider that Mr. Smith[, who led the open carry walk], is a “gun rights” activist and you will easily see that he is simply trying to convert you to his point of view. Mr. Smith and others like him “get off” on “packing heat” and don’t seem to care about the 100s and 1000s of innocent Americans who are executed and otherwise gunned down yearly because of widespread ownership of all sorts of firearms, vigorously promoted by the NRA and its followers.”

“With open carry, at least students have a chance to see the upcoming danger and get out of the way and call the police. With concealed carry, that chance is essentially gone.”

““Gun rights” activists will tell you that concealed carry is the only way that you can protect yourself against people who want to hurt you. If that is correct, then why do so many fully armed policemen/women die at the hands of shooters they never saw coming? Why are gun owners killed with their own weapons in their own homes?”

If you believe 100s and 1000s die because of widespread gun ownership, then check out some statistics. See that there about 10,000 to 14,000 firearm homicides each year if you look at CDC statistics. In 2013, 2,596,993 deaths of USA residents were recorded. 11,208 were firearm homicides. That means firearm homicides were .43% of the total deaths, and .0035% of the U.S.A. population. Ownership is about 101.1 guns per 100 people, according to Gun Policy. If it was the number of guns that dictated deaths, then charts like this wouldn’t exist.

The horizontal axis is guns per 100,000 and the vertical axis is murder per 100,000.

Graph source. Feel free to debate its accuracy. There are many other similar graphs such as the ones that ClockWorkGremlin pointed out below.

And the comment on open carry being okay because then students could see danger coming? This guy definitely just hates guns. Assuming gun owners are all dangerous is way off base.

And that last quote. Really? They were armed but still died, so why should you be able to carry a gun? That reasoning reminds me of the guy who told me that we don’t need semiautomatic rifles with more than 10 rounds.

Side story, I told him about the riots were gun owners stood ground on their stores with semiautomatic rifles in ’92. It wasn’t recent, so he wasn’t convinced. I told him about the Ferguson riots where the riots were allowed to happen for a while and there was a convenience store and a gun shop shared building and the owners awaited the riots. However, the riots did not reach their stores. So no store owners in those riots fired guns to defend their livelihood as far as I know. At this point, the guy I was talking to said that we don’t need “large” magazines because the stores that did burn down did not choose to protect their stores. If you don’t use it, you lose it. I was taken aback for someone to be so blunt about having people lose their rights.

Anyhow, back to saying that because some gun owners and police died even though they were armed means that you don’t need to carry a gun. Flawed logic here, let me demonstrate. Some people died in car wrecks even though they had air bags, so air bags are no good. See how that logic is flawed?

The article has a few other gems you can check out for yourself. The author seems to be angered by the peaceful open carry demonstration, and this is the only column by him. If you look below the column, you can see related columns where students are writing columns about the open carry demonstration in positive light.

Have a nice day, and lower your blood pressure by watching Demolition Ranch shoot a small safe to see how many shots it takes to open it.

The Northeastern Junior College held a debate between philosophy and criminal justice majors over whether or not more gun control laws should be enacted. The “pro” side was for more legislation and the “con” side for no more legislation.

Let me do a run down of the article.

It opened with comments from the pro-legislation side. The opener, Venus Bukowski, went straight to the Sandy Hook shooting and showed images of one of the kids. Then said the lines of “no one is trying to make guns illegal”, and “both sides recognize we have a gun problem”.

Hold your horses, Venus. The emotional card is your go to? Not logic? And while you may not want to make guns illegal, there are many who do so it becomes a valid concern. The only gun problems I have right now are the lack of constitutional carry and not enough money to get a Scar 17s.

The goals of the pro-side was to have mandatory training before someone’s first firearm purchase, eliminate the magazine size ban, and that a law should hold provisions so that educational facilities can have properly trained faculty for protection. They also kept citing that according to Gun Violence Archive, there were 783 gun deaths this year due to accidents/negligence. (If you check out the site, the number is for total accidents, not deaths). Why lie like that? Another pro-side debater claimed that responsibility should be part of our right to own guns, and that current laws to deal with safety even though the constitution says “Well regulated militia”. His proposed “safety law” would be the mandatory training.

So they have some sense- they see the magazine bans are useless and that it is a good thing for educational facilities to have armed faculty. However, they shoot their argument in both feet by lying about a statistic and ignoring the Heller decision, which made it clear that citizens do not need to be in a militia to exorcise their right that the second amendment reflects upon).

The con-side of this said that more laws would infringe upon our rights, and there are many laws already in place. They denoted that more laws would call for too much money to enact/enforce and that gun safety should not originate from legislation. The opener also referred to Russia, Estonia, and four other countries were murder rates are higher than the rate in the USA. According the Brookings Institute and the NRA, anywhere from 3,000 to 16,000 gun control laws are in place. She also cited that in 2008, all firearm incidents hit the lowest it had been since 1993. “This matters because creating new gun laws did not lower gun violence,” she said. 

Using facts and logic? Perhaps the opposition here should have gone for that route.

Also note that later on the pro-side cited more than 4,000 gun related deaths this year. I checked it out, and the site lumps suicides in, of course.

The three judge panel ruled the con side had won the debate.

Now, I know the people in favor of more safety legislation believe they are doing what is best and do not want to revoke anyone’s right to own a firearm. I see it as being influenced heavily by emotions of fear and sadness. A little boy was shot to death by a psycho. No one likes or wants that to happen. But you cannot legislate away stupid. Besides, if all you want is for a few safety laws for mandatory training that say that “those that own guns previous to the safety law being enacted would not have to take the training and new purchasers only have to take the training once”, then why even refer to someone who lost his mind. Also, I assume they approve of a registration because how else would it be known if you are being grandfathered in.

And safety laws don’t exist??? One guy said that the only laws right now refer to manufacturing, buying and selling, and transportation. Perhaps he is ignorant of laws against brandishing, of gun free zone laws, of gun ban laws, and of all of the other restrictive laws in respect to firearms that come in the name of “public safety”. And a one-time training for just new owners isn’t even going to make a big enough difference to reduce accidental injuries to zero, which is a goal of theirs.

So, the gun supporters who are in favor of more legislation lost the debate, misspoke of death/accident statistics, used the emotion card immediately with images included, and want some more useless legislation. The good side is that they still supported teachers having guns and ridding their state of magazine bans.

The gun and true second amendment supporters said that more infringement is not good. They also said that instead of more laws, the current laws need to be better enforced. They were also already aware of the Heller decision and used it to rebuttal against the well regulated militia statement.

It is great to see pro-gun people having a debate about gun laws instead of seeing the normal anti-gun rhetoric. Because while some of the arguments brought up on the pro-side were flawed, they stood more ground on reasoning than saying guns are bad. I just don’t support more gun legislation unless it is freeing me of government placed burdens on my freedoms. A gun safety course like that is pretty useless. I support everyone going and getting training and firing their guns often for practice. But a one-time training course? I hardly learned anything at the hunter’s safety course from when I was about 12 years old. And it was a long time ago. Shooting the clay pigeons that day does not make me a well trained person with a shotgun. At this point, someone in favor of training might say that this means the courses should be more often then. But now we are back at “well regulated militia” and the Heller decision- and that is the end of that discussion.

Have a nice day, and I’ll leave you today with this thought,

It is up to me to continue my training with dedication, not legislation.

With all of this talk about Obama pushing for more expansion on smart guns I am surprised to see very little reflection on Colt’s attempt in the 90’s, which was recently covered by NPR.

Donald Zilkha, an investment banker who was not a gun owner, bought the company in the 90’s. He had a plan to lead Colt into being the first company to producing smart guns.

While the technology and reliability was the big concern, the engineers at Colt felt they could tackle that challenge.

However, the biggest problem was one that Zilkha admits that he had not considered. “I hadn’t totally fully understood the culture.” He found out that many gun owners were skeptical of a gun that required technology to work in a life or death situation. To overcome this and to reach everyone else, Zilkha planned to demonstrate the technology for the Wall Street Journal. The tech used was a bracelet that used a radio frequency from a wristband that the shooter must wear.

Then the second problem occured at the demostration- the gun did not fire when it should have. It made the front page of the WSJ, and the smart gun from Colt was dropped. Since then no big gun company has produced smart guns, at least not effectively.

So there is a history of unreliability and not big market for such a product. Manufacturers and dealers should not be forced to supply something, especially when their is no demand. I don’t care if people want smart guns for their home. That’s your freedom to make that decision. However, I, as well as millions of others, do not want smart guns in our houses. It’s the same reason as to why I do not want a low quality gun, I prefer to own something reliable.

So the next time you see someone wanting smart guns just remember that it is their choice to want one, but it is not anyone’s choice what you should own.

Have a nice day, everybody.