Gun Free Zone

Scrappycrow sent me this link of a letters to the editor at the Boston Globe.

The recent shooting in Virginia Beach, Va., shows that the most severe gun-related problem facing our society is the proliferation of guns containing a semiautomatic mechanism. The gun used in this incident was a .45-caliber handgun, not an “assault rifle.” The connection between the handgun used and an assault rifle is the incorporation of a semiautomatic mechanism in both. This mechanism automatically ejects spent cartridges and loads new ones. Both styles of weapons accept high-capacity magazines and can handle large-caliber ammunition. While we focus on AR-15 style weapons, literally tens of millions of semiautomatic handguns are sold to the general public. These are the weapons that function exactly the same as the Virginia Beach gun.

The Virginia Beach handgun shares a deadly feature with assault rifles. 

My guess is that Mr. Richard Duby, President of the Falmouth Gun Safety Coalition (your guess is as good as mine) heard about the Virginia Beach shooting and had this long press release ready hitting the usual point about NRA White Supremacists with Assault Weapons and high capacity magazines mass killing poor innocent people. So it hd to be a cussin’ disappointment when the shooter turned out to be a Muslim African American using pistols.

I guess Duby racked his brain trying to come up with a righteous outrage to write about and the Triple A Maglite incandescent light bulb went on: “Semi automatic pistol? Semi automatic rifle? ZOMG! How come nobody has spoken about this! It is a conspiracy that I will denounce and be famous!  Yes!” So Duby went to write about mechanical principle in firearms that became available in 1885 or 58 years before the first assault long gun, the Sturmgewehr 44. Good for him because that was a secret kept for 76 till he unearthed it and no we all be saved from violence.

He closes his letter even more stupid:

These are weapons that were designed for military and law enforcement purposes only and not for the general public. Revolvers, lever-action, pump-action, and bolt-action guns cover the full spectrum of civilian needs, whether they are hunting, personal protection, or home protection. The semiautomatic mechanism for guns has no place in civilian hands.

Beside the obvious part that revolvers, lever-action, pump-action, and bolt-action guns have been used as and some even started as for military and law enforcement, what should scare you about the idiocy of this published letter is that somebody in the Boston Globe found worthy of publication.

That is sad.

PS: Am I the only one that keeps reading Scrapycrow and Scrapy Cow”? 🙂

This Tweet by Now This has been going around the Internet.

The Trump administration is rejecting requests to fly the Pride flag at these U.S. embassies pic.twitter.com/g3NVoC62iX

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) June 10, 2019

The Pride Flag should not be flown in an official capacity by any US Embassy or any Federal or state building or department.

That is not an anti-LGBT attitude.  That is an anti-“stop the division of American through identity politics” attitude.

The Pride Flag is the only flag of which I am aware that is representative of a single demographic that is regularly flown by government offices.

There is the Pan-African flag, the red, green, and black tri-color flag designed by Marcus Garvey in 1920.  It is associated with Black Liberation or Afro-Separatism and is not flown in February.

There is no Jewish flag.  Jews often fly the Israeli flag, but there is no flag representing purely the Jewish Religion.  There is a Christian flag.  It is known as the Pentecostal Flag and is a red Latin cross in a blue field on a white canton.

Flying the Pentecostal Flag above a government building, say for the month of Lent, would be a clear violation of the First Amendment as an endorsement of a specific religion.

By that logic, flying of the Pride Flag by a government agency would be an official endorsement whatever the Pride Flag is supposed to represent.

So how did we get to this point where for the month of June, the Federal and many state governments endorse, by way of displaying the flag on official flag poles, one demographic of Americans, and for the remaining eleven months of the year, no other demographic of Americans get equal treatment.

And look at how Now This frames this.  As bigotry.  Saying that US Embassies should fly one flag, the flag of the United States, a flag the represents all American citizens equally and without playing demographic favorites isn’t an anti-LGBT act.

If you want equal rights and to be treated like everyone else, that means you don’t get a special endorsement by the Federal Government one month out the year that nobody else gets.

No, you demand to be treated special where the government flies your flag and paints it into city street crosswalks and lights up government buildings in your colors.  That is not equality and don’t be surprised when there is pushback.

There is already a flag that represents gay Americans.  It is called the American flag and it represents all Americans everywhere.

I need to stop checking in with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter.  It is a cornucopia of bad ideas.

Her latest: why she should get paid more for being useless.

Yep. Voting against cost of living increases for members of Congress may sound nice, but doing so only increases pressure on them to keep dark money loopholes open.

This makes campaign finance reform *harder.*

ALL workers deserve cost of living increases, incl min wage workers. https://t.co/fCdgHKx4G1

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 11, 2019

See, the reason they are greedy grifters who figure out how to turn public service into a money tree is that we don’t pay them enough to be fucking worthless out of our tax dollars.

A salary of $174,000 per year plus pension is practically minimum wage, which is why they turn to glad-handing, sinecures, and graft as soon as they possibly can.

The ONLY thing Congress is any good at is lining their own pockets at taxpayer expense.

Personally, I think we should do away with the Congressional salary.  Make it a per diem for every day that Congress is in session.

What is clear is that she is the archetypical socialist.  She is absolutely useless but believes that she deserves a raise from public money.

Somebody else called her out on her bullshit and she doubled down on the stupid.

In democratically socialist businesses (like worker co-ops) or methods (like collective bargaining) you actually CAN vote for a worker pay increase.

Many do!

We can’t pass these laws bc of big money. This is how you chip at it.

Like I said, it’s not popular but I’m being ? https://t.co/toFwbs56x0

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 11, 2019

And now you understand how Toyota, Mazda, BMW, and Mercedes can make cars in the USA and Chevy and Ford have to make them in Mexico.  Because the UAW voted themselves raises and benefits disproportionate to what the business could handle.

I can’t tell you how many stories I have read of small business or coops that have tried this model just to find out that then the low skill employees vote themselves $20 per hour wages and 30 hour work weeks, the company ends up folding and going under a few months later.

The reason Congress can vote itself a raise is that it comes from taxpayers, and if we don’t pay our taxes, the IRS takes us to prison.  They have a guaranteed source of income.

When the local coop sells bananas at ten times market rate because the part-time banana stocker voted himself “a living wage,” they can’t force you to shop there.

But what do I know, I was radicalized into the alt-right by Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman.

I know that sometimes what we are forced to wear and do seems silly. But probably there is a long-standing reason why it is being done, usually terminal.

Mediaite is a strongly Left-leaning news site.

They published this story on Sunday:

WATCH: NYT’s Charles Blow Calls Out Jake Tapper’s ‘Horrible Question’ About Gun Violence

(Video from IJR)

New York Times columnist Charles Blow went off on what he called a “horrible question” that CNN’s Jake Tapper asked of Senator Cory Booker this week about the gun massacre in Virginia Beach, a question that is frequently asked in the wake of such tragedies.

On this week’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, host Bill Maher noted that “Cory Booker was on with Jake Tapper, and Jake Tapper asked him, a couple of times, what in your plan would have stopped the massacre that we had last week at Virginia Beach, and Cory Booker took a very long time to not be able to answer that question.”

“Can I just say this? Journalists have to stop asking that horrible question,” Blow said. “That is a horrible question.”

“Because what we’re doing is picking out one incident out of 30,000 deaths per year and saying ‘How could you solve this one thing?’” Blow continued. “That is not the objective of gun control. The objective of gun control is to reduce capacity to kill people who should not be killed. And once you reframe it that way, maybe the proposal I have today will not solve that problem, but it cuts into this massive number of people that we are losing to gun violence.”

It’s not a horrible question, especially when politicians use a particular mass shooting to justify their gun control proposal.

Politician: “This latest mass shooting is why we need UBC’s.”
Reporter: “But how would UBC’s have stopped that shooting?”
Blow: “That’s a horrible question.”

Blow pulls the mask off the idea that gun control proposed after a high profile shooting is intended to prevent other similar high profile shootings.  It is a diversion to push gun control for the sake of gun control because the politicians making these proposals are NEVER able to answer that question.

The question rankles because it smacks of pro-gun talking points, but as Blow points out, it also suffers from a serious logical flaw. It’s like asking a scientist what his cure for lung cancer would do to prevent pancreatic cancer.

No, it’s like your doctor saying:

“You have pancreatic cancer so we’re going to perform a double mastectomy.  I know it’s not going to fix this issue, but we have to do something.”

Never mind that from pro-gun advocates, this is a pure bad-faith argument that doesn’t come up when gun massacres feature details for which specific gun laws would have made a difference, such as gun storage laws that could have prevented the Sandy Hook massacre and many other preventable child deaths, or a ban on extended magazines that could have saved the life of 9 year-old Christina Taylor Green.

Adam Lanza’s mother kept her gun in a safe.  Adam killed his mother and stole the keys.  How would gun storage laws done any more to stop that shooting?  Those are intended to prevent accidental child access, not a 20-year-old from stealing the keys.

Faced with examples like these, they revert to some other talking point, often by simply arguing that people will ignore these laws, so why have them? It doesn’t matter how much data you throw at these talking points, there will always be another one to take their place.

And that is not pro-gun-control people from arguing in bad faith?

A headline from last weekend:

Chicago experiences most violent weekend of 2019: 52 shot, 10 killed

Chicago’s violence also disproportionately affects several swaths of low-income black and Latino neighborhoods on the West and South sides.

On Monday, Johnson criticized gun laws and court policies that he says turn the county jail into a revolving door for gun offenders.

“Until we stop giving them (gun offenders) the sense that they can do this with impunity, then we are going to continue to have these press conferences,” he said.

Chicago gun crime is overwhelmingly gang and drug related.  So if the purpose of gun control is to reduce crime, that how with all the gun control that Illinois has on the books, is Chicago still awash in drug dealer blood?

It is not a “horrible question” to ask how a policy will fix what advocates say it will fix.

But even if you grant the flawed premise of the question, asked in good faith by a journalist testing gun policy arguments, there is a better answer than attacking the question. When you attack the question, you are signaling that you don’t have a good answer, and there is a good answer to this question, every time.

Translation: “stop calling us out on our bullshit, you’re supposed to be on our side.”

For example, the Virginia Beach shooter used extended magazines, which allowed him to fire many more rounds without reloading. Without those, some of the 12 deaths might have been avoided. And based on the pure hypothetical of the question being posed, there’s no way to know if the shooter would have engaged in this massacre at all without that advantage in firepower.

That’s a hypothetical load of shit.  The advantage of firepower wasn’t that he had an additional 4 to 8 rounds (he carried a two 45 ACP pistols, I don’t know which ones but the average high capacity 45 holds 12-14 rounds) more than he would have with 10 rounds mags. The advantage of firepower he had was walking into a gun free zone where nobody else was armed.

Mediaite seriously thinks a guy who supposedly snapped would have had the thought “I’d kill all those mother fuckers if I only had more than 10 rounds in each gun.”  No.

In fact, Booker could have argued that any number of his policies might have dissuaded the shooter from carrying out this act. A federal firearms registry might have made him think twice, a more stringent background check might have raised a red flag, a waiting period might have allowed him to cool off, and if he had taken steps to avoid the stricter laws, those laws might have caused him to be intercepted.

The guy was killed by cops, what would a registry have done?  Most of those shooters do this knowing they won’t be taken alive.  The guy bought his guns one and three years before the shooting.  His cooling off didn’t need to happen before he bought the gun.

Every proposal fails to prevent that shooting, and many more like that.

When these people argue that the question “how will your policy work” shouldn’t be asked, and instead turn to inane hypotheticals, it shows that they don’t really care about solving problems, they just want gun control for the sake of control.

To his credit, Jake Tapper defended himself on Twitter.

Watch the longer video clip of this from Bretibart.

Clearly, the Dem Rep from California hates gun owners.  She wants gun control because she wants to control the people on the other side of the aisle she doesn’t like.  I have the feeling Blow, because of his politics, feels the same way.

But you can’t get people to vote for you by saying “I don’t like you and I want to take your guns away.”  Bill Maher, to his credit, said that.

So they have to frame their gun control push by saying it will prevent crime, but when asked how they fail.

So now the argument is it’s wrong to even ask how the policy will work.

It’s not about stopping crime.  It’s about stopping law-abiding gun culture.

They keep proving that more and more.

Hat Tip Bother Chuck

When states legalize pot for all adults, long-standing medical marijuana programs take a big hit, in some cases losing more than half their registered patients in just a few years, according to a data analysis by The Associated Press.

Much of the decline comes from consumers who, ill or not, had medical cards in their states because it was the only way to buy marijuana legally before broad legalization. But for people who truly rely on marijuana to control ailments such as nausea or cancer pain, the arrival of so-called recreational cannabis can mean fewer and more expensive options

Medical Pot Takes Hit When Weed Legal for All

So, first you admit that a lot of people with Medical Pot Cards were not sick but just needed a government-medically-issued excuse to munch heavily on Doritos. Next you are surprised that people would go for the cheaper Free Market untaxed  pot from the corner dealer with little overhead rather than the more costly store-with-expenses-and-taxes ganja.

It goes to show that it was not decriminalization what they were after but another way to collect more taxes for the government till. I see in a few years the government cracking hard on non-commercial traffic and growth of pot with the BAMTF (Bureau of Alcohol, Marijuana, Tobacco and Firearms) leading the charge.