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Do You Have The ‘Right’ To Own a Gun?

June 13, 2023

mikethegunguy Blogs , 2 Comments

              Yesterday I watched Chris Christie on the CNN Town Hall, and one of the questions he had to answer was about guns. The questioner asked him: “How do you balance out more gun-control laws versus our right to own a gun?”

              This narrative about gun ‘rights’ has become a fixture on both sides of the gun debate. On the pro-gun side, the argument goes that laws which in any way make it more difficult or more costly to own and use guns are a violation of the 2nd-Amendment ‘right’ for private citizens to own guns. On the gun-control side, we get a standard disclaimer about how a new proposed gun-control law or gun-control regulation doesn’t conflict with gun ‘rights’ at all.

              This entire notion about how Americans have the ‘right’ to own guns is made up out of whole cloth.  There is nothing behind it other than a clever way to promote gun ownership and gun sales, and Gun-control Nation should have enough knowledge about the American Constitution to reject this entire argument out of hand.

              There is no such thing in American jurisprudence or Constitutional precedent which grants unlimited ‘rights’ for anything. The fact that what we refer to as certain ‘freedoms’ of speech, religious belief and gun access which appear in a document known as the Bill of Rights doesn’t vest these so-called ‘freedoms’ with any unlimited or universal ‘rights’ whatsoever.

              The Amendments which comprise the Bill of Rights are Constitutional texts which have been altered or added to the Constitutional document through a process which is very explicit, very clear and takes anywhere from several months to several hundred years.

              But what gives all the amendments their legal authority is when Congress passes a law or multiple laws which define what behavior is allowed under a particular Amendment, and what behavior cannot be approved or condoned. When Congress ratified the 13th Amendment which outlawed slavery in 1865 and turned some four million pieces of chattel property into human beings, Congress then had to go back and pass a civil rights law the following year which defined what it meant to be a citizen of the United States.

              In fact, Congress has passed five laws which define the 2nd Amendment in terms of what someone can and cannot do with a gun. The first law, passed in 1934, imposed an excise tax on guns and also created a separate licensing system for certain types of guns. The 1938 federal gun law imposed licensing and record-keeping requirements on gun dealers and the 1968 law extended the regulations of the 1938 law to cover not only gun dealer, but gun owners as well. The last two guns laws which created the Brady background check system and the assault weapons ban, were passed in 1993 and 1994.

              Along with these five federal gun laws, every state has multiple laws and regulations written into their state law codes. Some states have more laws, some states have fewer laws, but no matter where you live, if you want to own a gun, you have to obey federal laws, state laws and in many cases, laws covering a specific county or municipality as well.

              There’s a reason why the National Rifle Association (NRA) always refers to its members as ‘law-abiding gun owners.’ The NRA doesn’t use that sobriquet just to remind everyone that most gun owners are the ‘good guys with a gun.’ It’s also a way for the NRA to avoid being held responsible for all the murders, assaults and other criminal acts which involve the use of guns.

              There are some far-out, radical elements in Gun-nut Nation who promote the idea that since guns are protected by the 2nd Amendment, there’s no reason to have any government regulation of gun ownership at all. This argument is usually linked to the idea that we have a God-given ‘right’ to self-defense, and there’s no better way to defend yourself than with a gun.

              Want God to regulate how we behave with guns or with anything else? Pack up your guns and move to Iran.

Can Gun ‘Rights’ And Gun ‘Control’ Groups Ever Agree?

November 9, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , 17 Comments

              Yesterday I received an email from a good friend who wanted to know my thoughts about a group – Gun Owners for Responsible Ownership – which claims to be a group of gun owners that wants to “take the lead to promote safe gun ownership and sensible laws and regulations.”

              When the NRA began to collapse following its brief honeymoon with Donald Trump, a whole bunch of gun organizations started to get some attention, most of them being groups that were more vociferous about their gun ‘rights’ than the boys from Fairfax, but there were also several groups which claimed to be interested in finding a ‘middle way’ between the pro-gun and anti-gun extremes. This group is in that latter camp.

              According to their website, their commitment to the 2nd Amendment goes hand in hand with a desire to promote “gun safety” through comprehensive background checks and secure storage of guns. They also partner with the gun-research group at the University of Michigan as well as a foundation that distributes free gun locks in Oregon public schools.

              Promoting academic gun research, safe storage and universal background checks happen to be priorities of all the gun-control groups. So, the fact that this group is committed to the same agenda but is made up of gun owners needs to be taken as perhaps an important straw blowing in the wind.

              The only problem (and here Mike the Gun Guy™ is going to do what he usually does to piss everyone off) is that the wind happens to be blowing the wrong way. You can call safe storage and universal background checks whatever you want to call them – responsible, accountable – I don’t care. The truth is that we do not suffer from gun-violence rates that are 7 to 20 times higher (thank you David Hemenway) than any other economically-advanced country because we don’t have universal background checks or because many gun owners don’t keep their guns locked away.

              We endure and suffer from more than 125,000 intentional and unintentional gun injuries every year for one, simple reason, which is that we are – ready? – the one country in the entire world which allows its residents to purchase, own and carry on their persons guns that are designed only to injure and kill human beings.

              Several years ago, our friends at The Trace published an inventory of more than 9,000 guns picked up by the cops connected to crimes throughout the United States. I took the trouble to analyze this entire listing and you can download and read my analysis of the data right here.

              On the other hand, if you don’t want to spend any time gorging your brain on my faultless prose, I’ll summarize this information by saying that we may own somewhere between 300 and 400 million guns, but most of those guns don’t have anything to do with gun violence at all.

              I couldn’t find one, single ‘crime’ gun on this entire list manufactured by such long-time manufacturers as Remington, Mossberg, Winchester, Browning, Marlin, or Savage Arms, which together have certainly produced more than 100 million of the guns privately owned.

              What are the guns that turn up again and again in the daily shootings which create our extraordinary gun-violence rates? Try Glock, Sig, Beretta, Smith & Wesson, Colt, and all the cheapie lookalike wanabees (Taurus, Kahr Arms) that are floating around.

              Now, the idea that such guns are considered ‘sporting’ arms by Gun-nut Nation just because they don’t fire in full-auto mode only goes to show you how far from reality the gun debate in this country remains.

              But the fact is that the gun-control groups buy into the same nonsense. They also want comprehensive background checks and safe storage of guns. The fact that there has never been one, single piece of published research which shows any connection between gun safety or background checks and gun violence rates, so what?

              Matter of fact, Colorado instituted universal background checks in 2013, a year when the overall gun violence rate was 11.44.  In 2019, the rate was 14.45. Gee, that’s only an increase in gun violence of 25 percent. No biggie, right?

              Want to reduce gun violence? It’s very simple. Get rid of the guns which are used to commit that violence. There’s simply no other way, no matter how ‘safe’ or ‘responsible’ we hope everyone will behave with their guns.

A New Book On The 2nd Amendment

June 16, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 4 Comments

              For all the noise made by Gun-nut Nation about how they are always on the verge of losing their 2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ a new book by Carol Anderson, who runs African-American Studies at Emory University, focuses on the 2nd Amendment as a device which was stuck onto the Constitution to help maintain the slave system and is still being used to foster what she calls the ‘fatal inequality’ between Blacks and Whites.

              I am convinced, incidentally, that if Donald Trump hadn’t flipped three states – MI, PA, WI – by 3/10ths of one percent of the total votes cast in those three states, he wouldn’t have won the 2016 election and the growth of concern about endemic racism – BLM, The 1619 Project, critical race theory, Anderson’s book – would probably have never occurred. If Hillary had been President when George Floyd was killed, she would have rounded up the usual suspects, appointed a Presidential Commission to publish a report, and that would have been the end of that.

              The first half of Anderson’s book is a detailed discussion which tries to revise the standard explanation for the 2nd Amendment, which says that the existence of local militias comprised of citizens who carried their own weapons was designed to maintain the political and military supremacy of the individual states. Against this view, Anderson posits the thesis that the existence of the militia was primarily to maintain slavery by chasing down runaway slaves and suppressing slave revolts.

              As far as I’m concerned, you could have it either way.  The fact that the way gun ownership is regulated today is couched in legal terms that which dates from the eighteenth century and grows out of a legal tradition which nobody really understands, may be an interesting discussion-point for a seminar on Constitutional law, but really doesn’t enlighten today’s argument about gun violence at all. If the NRA and Gun-nut Nation want to believe that the Founders understood the necessity to maintain their vigilance against the ‘tyranny’ of the national state, good for them. The guys who commit 125,000+ gun assaults against themselves and others every year aren’t thinking about whether they have any kind of ‘right’ to walk around with a gun.

              Professor Anderson makes a convincing argument about how the 2nd Amendment has been used in the modern period to enfranchise Whites with gun ownership while denying the same enfranchisement to Blacks. In particular, she cites recent instances in which Blacks who were in legal possession of guns (Philando Castile, Jemel Robertson, Emantic Bradford) were shot by cops even though the cops weren’t in any way threatened by the behavior of these Black men.

              The author also notes that exceptions to 2nd-Amendment guarantees fall disproportionately on Blacks, in particular the whole idea that only ‘law-abiding’ citizens can own guns. And since the incarcerated population is overwhelmingly minority-based, obviously any withholding of the ‘right’ to self-defense from members of minority groups hurts more than helps these individuals protect themselves and their families once they get out of jail.

              On the other hand, what Professor Anderson does not want to acknowledge is the fact that even though 2nd-Amendment ‘rights’ are seemingly reserved for members of the White race and denied to Blacks, it cannot be said that this particular type of discrimination makes Blacks more vulnerable to gun violence perpetrated by Whites. In fact, gun violence is overwhelmingly almost to the point of universality, an intra-racial event. When it comes to using a gun to hurt someone else, Blacks shoot Blacks, Whites shoot Whites. And it certainly can’t be argued that by restricting legal ownership of guns only to law-abiding Whites, that this practice has made it difficult for residents of inner-city, minority neighborhoods to get their hands on guns.

              Carol Anderson has written a lively book and there’s no reason to ignore the fact that there have been too many, much too many instances of Blacks getting shot and killed by cops, whether the victims were armed or not.

              I just don’t think the issue of gun violence will be better understood by viewing through the vortex of 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’

The NRA Goes Bankrupt – For A Few Months.

May 13, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 3 Comments

              In January, the NRA decided that enough was enough, and that they would stop letting themselves being Letitia James’ favorite whipping-boy and get out of town. Letitia James happens to be the New York State Attorney General, and she happens to work for Andy Cuomo, who happens to be the most anti-gun Governor in lo, these 50 states.

              Don’t get me wrong. I like Andy. I think he’s been a good Governor even though he seems to have some staff around him who can’t keep track of anything involving Covid-19, but if he wants to run for Senate or even President, that’s fine with me.

              But when Andy was Secretary of HUD under Clinton, he wrote the deal which Clinton foisted on Smith & Wesson and which S&W stupidly agreed to follow – a deal that almost put the second-oldest, continually-operating manufacturing company in America out of business and would have put the entire gun industry in the dustbin if other gun companies had followed suit. By the way, the oldest continually operating manufacturing concern in the United States is an outfit located down in Hartford with the name of Colt.

              Back in 2019, after our friend Mike Spies published his superb reportage on the financial flim-flam engaged in by Wayne-o and some of the other boys at the NRA, Attorney General James announced that her office was conducting an investigation into how the NRA was managing, or to put it bluntly, mis-managing its financial affairs. In fact, this investigation had been going on since at least 2017 under the auspices of Letitia’s predecessor, Eric Schneiderman, but the reaction to the Spies article pushed things forward a bit.

              At some point the NRA boys decided it was time to get the hell outta Dodge. So, on January 20 of this year, they announced they were leaving New York where they had originally been founded in 1871 and moving down to the Lone Star State. This move was part of a reorganization plan which was part of a Chapter 11 filing – in other words, America’s ‘oldest civil-rights organization’ was broke and was declaring itself to be bankrupt.

              There was only one little problem, a problem named Letitia James. Because why should the New York State Attorney General have to drop her attempt to bulldoze the NRA out of existence just because the subjects of her investigation believed they had done nothing wrong? So, Ms. James countersued and the whole issue wound up in a Texas bankruptcy court where a three-week trial ended last week.

              Going in to the trial, I suspect that the NRA gang believed that they were going to plead their case because they had found the perfect judge. The case had been assigned to a federal judge named Harlin Hale who prefers to go by his nickname – ready? – ‘Cooter’ Hale. Ol’ boy Cooter is the son of a Louisiana cotton farmer, his son is a security officer for the Air Force, and he is a member of the Elder Board of his church where he has taught Sunday School for the past 25 years.

              Now how could a group which has been maligned and unfairly attacked by all those New York liberals for defending 2nd-Amendment ‘rights’ come up with a better judge than Harlin DeWayne ‘Cooter’ Hale? No wonder that when Wayne-o testified, he sometimes sounded like he was either unconscious or asleep. On several occasions he even had to be reminded by the Court that a long-winded response to a question hadn’t been a response to the question at all.

              What finally happened when the trial came to an end? The judge wasted no time in issuing a ruling which shut down the bankruptcy filing and sent the NRA packing back to New York. He said: “The Court finds there is cause to dismiss this bankruptcy case as not having been filed in good faith both because it was filed to gain an unfair litigation advantage and because it was filed to avoid a state regulatory scheme.”

              Talk about a kick in the ass.

Guns for Good Guys, Guns for Bad Guys (Guns in America Book 1) – Kindle edition by Weisser, Michael R.. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

A 2nd Amendment Case Gets To The Court.

April 27, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 12 Comments

              Uh-oh, sooner or later we knew it would happen. We elect a President who actually shows some concern about gun violence and the other side gets its conservative friends on the Supreme Court to expand gun ‘rights.’

              Here’s what the Giffords group had to say about yesterday’s announcement that the Court will take up a challenge to a New York State law which makes someone jump through a whole bunch of legal hoops before they can walk around the neighborhood carrying a gun: “Today’s announcement,” said Giffords, “is a warning sign that our nation’s highest court is poised to brush aside the will of the people and instead side with gun lobby groups seeking to eliminate even the most modest firearm laws.”

              Not to be outdone, our friends at Everytown made sure to link this threat to our safety to the threat posed by Covid-19: “Gun violence has only worsened during the pandemic, and a ruling that opened the door to weakening our gun laws could make it even harder for cities and states to grapple with this public health crisis.”

              The New York State law basically says that if you want to walk around town with a gun in your pocket, you have to apply for a license which is different from the license you need to buy or own a gun. While the latter license only requires that you pass a background check, the former requires that the applicant explain why he needs to use a gun for self-protection, and if the explanation doesn’t convince the issuing authority that there’s a good reason to be self-armed, the application can be denied.

              The problem raised by the plaintiffs in the New York case is not whether New York State can issue a separate license to allow someone to walk around with a gun. The alleged denial of 2nd-Amendment ‘rights’ is based on the fact that the cops have complete and arbitrary authority to approve or deny the concealed-carry license request.  How do the cops figure out whether someone has made a convincing argument for protecting himself with a gun? Whatever way they want to figure it out.

              Our friend David Hemenway published a study on this licensing procedure in Massachusetts, which is one of the eight states, along with New York, which grants police an arbitrary authority to decide who can and who cannot walk around with a gun. A large majority of the 121 police chiefs who answered David’s survey stated they were comfortable with the retaining discretionary authority over the issuance of concealed-carry permits, but only 2% of the permit requests were denied each year.

              Let’s say the Supreme Court sides with the plaintiffs in this case and says that New York State has to relinquish its authority to arbitrarily decide who can, and who cannot walk around with a gun. This would represent such an ‘elimination of modest firearm laws’ (to quote Giffords) that New York State would join the other 42(!) states which have already ‘eliminated’ this ‘modest’ firearm law.

              In 1986, there were exactly 7 states whose residents could apply for a concealed-carry permit without having to cite a particular need. That same year, the national homicide rate stood at 8.6, with 60% of all homicides committed with guns. In 2019, with 42 states giving just about every law-abiding resident the right to walk around with a gun, the homicide rate was 5.8, with 75% of all homicides committed with guns.

              What’s the connection between the so-called elimination of ‘modest’ gun laws and an increase in gun violence throughout the United States? Beats hell out of me.

              Know why our homicide rate keeps going down but more and more of the killings are committed with guns? Because we are the only country in the entire world which imposes ‘modest’ gun laws based on how we hope gun owners will behave, and not on what kinds of guns they can own.

              Want to get rid of gun violence? Get rid of the guns which are used to commit violence, okay?

www.bantheseguns.org

There Ain’t No Such Thing As Gun ‘Rights.’

January 27, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 9 Comments

Our good friend Eric Foner has just published a book, The Second Founding, which gives a concise and compelling explanation for how the Federal Government got into the business of defining our basic rights. Which makes this book required reading for everyone who wants to have anything to say about guns and gun violence, since so much of this debate turns on the issue of gun ‘rights.’ If you don’t believe me, just read any of the news accounts of the demonstration which took place in Richmond, VA on MLK Day to protest a new law that Trump claims is an infringement on gun ‘rights.’

The Federal Government first started defining Constitutional rights following passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments following the end of the Civil War. These Amendments ended slavery (13th), defined citizenship as a birthright (14th) and granted universal suffrage to all male Americans. Foner refers to the passage of these Amendments as a ‘second founding’ because these laws (to quote a Republican Senator from Missouri) “made the liberty and rights of every citizen in every state a matter of national concern.”

 Foner points out that none of these fundamental Constitutional changes would have taken place were it not for the fact that Southern legislatures were dominated by Black officeholders from 1867 through 1877 when Reconstruction came to an end. But precisely because Reconstruction ended only ten years after it began, the Civil Rights laws passed in 1866 and 1875 to give some legal teeth to the Amendments, were either watered down in court decisions or simply ignored.

Both civil laws were attempts to define what ‘rights’ would be protected under the Constitution once the founding document contained protections which applied to every male citizen in the land. The 1866 Act enforced the implementation of laws that covered the following rights: “to ‘make and enforce’ contracts, own property, testify in court, sue and be sued, and ‘enjoy the full and equal benefit of laws for the protection of persons and property.’” (p. 64.)

See anything here about self-protection?  See anything here about armed, self-defense? You won’t find any reference whatsoever to that terminology in the entire text of the Constitution or any of its Amendments, not even in the blessed 2nd Amendment from which all gun ‘rights’ allegedly spring forth. When the NRA proclaims itself to be the ‘oldest civil rights organization,’ is it referring to the rights embodied in the 14th Amendment and enumerated in the Civil Rights Act of 1866?  No. It’s not referring to anything other than what a clever advertising agency figured out would help promote the sale of guns.

In fact, if you take the trouble to read the 2008 Heller decision where our late friend Tony Scalia propounded his view of gun ‘rights,’ you will note that it is not only a very narrow definition of what the 2nd Amendment says a gun owner can do with his guns (he can keep one handgun in his home) but it’s far from being an uninfringeable right because the government has great leeway in determining who can and cannot own guns.

Not only are gun ‘rights’ not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, nor in any of the federal laws that have been passed to define or enforce Constitutional texts, there is also no mention of the other hallowed Gun-nut Nation ‘right,’ i.e., the ‘right’ to self-defense. When the Constitution talks about being protected from harm, the reference is to equal standing in the courts, not to passing a background check so that you can walk around with an AR-15 on your back.

There’s also the non plus ultra for carrying your Glock, which is that self-defense is a ‘God-given right.’ I hear this all the time from my Gun-nut Nation friends and my answer is simply this: If you want to live in a country where laws are first and foremost the handiwork of Almighty God, move to Iran, okay?

Foner’s book isn’t about guns. It’s a solid work about how the word ‘rights’ should be defined and used in any important discussion about current events. In this respect, the way our friends in Gun-nut Nation use the word fails both historical and legal tests.

Is It Time To Start A New Gun-Rights Organization?

May 21, 2019

mikethegunguy Blogs , 1 Comment

Our friends at Media Matters have posted a pretty good summary of the financial/management problems at the NRA, even though the situation could change tomorrow and what we thought yesterday no longer holds. But the bottom line is that some of the recent disclosures on Wayne-o’s spending habits in Beverly Hills could not only cost him his job, but result in the loss of the organizations’ tax-exempt status as well.  And if it turns out that there was a conscious effort to disguise personal expenditures as business expenses, and if this effort resulted in a conscious mis-statement of IRA filings by either the NRA or its PR firm, Ackerman-McQueen, someone could be going to jail.

So let’s pretend that Wayne-o copied Paul Manafort and spent thousands of dollars on various baubles at the Zegna boutique on Rodeo Drive. And let’s further pretend that the NRA covered these purchases, and others, by billing the receipts to Ackerman-McQueen. And then let’s take the next step and pretend that Ackerman-McQueen billed these costs to the NRA as a business expense and the NRA paid the bills out of tax-exempt funds. And let’s not forget that NRA President, Carolyn Meadows, has gone on record as denying that anything untoward has happened at all. If all of this flim-flam turns out to be true, and you can read a good summary in a column on Rolling Stone, America’s gun owners may be forced to look for a new organizational home to call their own.

Well you say, that’s no problem. After all, according to our friends at the Hopkins-Bloomberg school, overwhelming majorities of gun owners support some gun restrictions, including universal background checks, higher standards for concealed-carry licensing, red flag laws and stricter controls over dealer operations. So why not form a new organization that will continue to support 2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ while at the same time, advancing ‘reasonable’ restrictions on guns?

And just to keep Gun-nut Nation happy, the new NRA will continue to hold its annual jamboree as well as sponsor even more grass-roots events.  Right now there are 31 NRA events scheduled in Florida between now and October 1st. South Carolina has 10 events coming up, California has 38!

Just imagine if all these events were sponsored by a new gun-owners organization which would give you a full rack of ribs, two corn-on-the-cob and cherry pie for free, because Mike Bloomberg is happy to pay for the dinner of any gun owner who signs a pledge that he’s in favor of comprehensive background checks?

There’s only one little problem with this fantasy. It’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen because advocacy movements that make a real difference have to be led by the people who will be affected most by the laws that are going to be changed.  The civil rights movement was successful because it was led by African-Americans beginning with Martin Luther King. The gay rights movement became a potent force for gender equality when gay men and gay women felt strong enough to stand up and declare their true sexual orientation for all to see.

The problem with the movement which seeks to reduce gun violence is that new gun regulations, no matter how ‘reasonable,’ won’t really make a dime’s worth of difference to the lives of most gun-control advocates, for the simple fact that they don’t own guns. So why would they care if I want to give one of my guns to my son but he and I have to drive 30 miles to a gun shop to do a background check?

But wait a minute. I thought most gun owners also favor comprehensive background checks. That’s true. But you know what other ‘reasonable’ law gets the approval of most gun owners? A law that would let them carry a handgun in all 50 states. And I guarantee you that no gun owner will join any gun ‘rights’ organization whose agenda is determined only by folks who don’t own guns.

The N.Y. Times Thinks It’s Been A Tough Year For The NRA. I’m Not So Sure.

February 12, 2019

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , 1 Comment

              “Politically, financially and legally, the gun-rights cause and, more specifically, the lobbying juggernaut that is the National Rifle Association have not fared well in the Trump era.”

              Thus speaketh this morning’s New York Times, and if The Times says it, then it must be true. Except, it happens not to be true. Or it’s certainly not as true as The New York Times Editorial Board would like you to believe.

              And the reason it happens not to be true is because the gun-control community, of which The New York Times considers itself to be a leading media voice, knows as much about the gun industry as I know about the structure of the atom. And I didn’t take physics or nuclear physics in college, so I don’t know anything about the structure of the atom, okay?

              The reason I can’t get on board with the judgement of the gun industry’s impending doom is because the gun-control community invariably defines the ‘power’ and ‘influence’ of the ‘gun lobby’ as based on the activities of America’s ‘first civil rights organization,’ a.k.a., the NRA.  And anyone who believes that the health and welfare of the gun ‘lobby’ should be measured simply by the bottom line of the NRA’s balance sheet, doesn’t know anything about the gun lobby or anything else connected to guns.

              The NYT editorial board cites as its proof that the NRA is on the ropes the fact that, for the first time, election spending by gun-control groups (read: Bloomberg) was higher than the dough spent by the pro-gun gang. But before our friends in Gun-control Nation jump for joy over this unique turn of events, the reportage by our friends at The Gray Lady needs to be nuanced a bit.

              To begin, even when the NRA was priming the electoral pump by giving pro-gun candidates as much campaign money as they could, the average federal office-holder, at best, could only count on the boys from Fairfax to provide 6% of what the candidate had to spend. So for all the talk about the financial ‘power’ of the NRA, after a candidate picked up the check from Wayne-o or Chris Cox, he still had to raise almost all the dough necessary to fund his campaign. What does an average House campaign cost today? Try around $1.5 million or more. How much money did the average pro-gun House member receive in each of the last two Congressional campaigns?  Try less than $5,000 bucks.

              Where the financial imbalance between the NRA and its competitors really shows up, however, is in the amount spent on lobbying activities once a candidate takes his or her Congressional seat. Except the imbalance is so much in favor of the NRA that the notion that Gun-control Nation is beginning to pull abreast of Gun-nut Nation in the halls of Congress is a joke.

              During the 115th Congress, 2017 – 2018, Bloomberg’s Everytown PAC spent just short of $2.5 million on lobbying activities.  In those same two years, the NRA spent more than $9.5 million bucks. In the 8 previous years when Obama was in office, the highest yearly lobbying amount spent by the NRA was $3.5 million. And The New York Times is telling us that the fortunes of Gun-nut Nation have suffered under Trump?

              Finally, when we look at FBI-NICS background checks on gun transfers to gauge how gun sales stack up, the news isn’t all that bad. Handgun-long gun transfers for December, 2007 were 925,000, for December, 2016 they were 1,700,00, for December, 2017 they were just under a million and a half. That’s a month-to-month drop of slightly more than 10% from the last year of Obama to the first year of Trump, but it’s still nearly a 40% increase over the final month’s figure for another pro-gun President named George Bush.

              I’m not saying that it’s been smooth sailing for my friends in Fairfax this past year. But if anyone is thinking that the Gun-nut patient is on its way to life-support, think again.

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ 2nd Amendment.

January 15, 2019

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , 6 Comments

              Now that H.R. 8 has been filed, I am beginning to see the outlines of the campaign narrative that Gun-nut Nation will employ in an effort to beat back any attempt to implement universal background checks, a.k.a. UBC.  Judging from the emails that have come flying in plus comments on various pro-gun blogs and forums, the anti-UBC strategy will embrace two, basic ideas:

              (1). Giving the government the power to control what I do with my private property is a violation of the 5th and 14th Amendments, which protect private property against unlawful seizure.

              (2). Making every gun transfer subject to a background check will create a national gun registry which will lead to confiscation and is a violation of the 2nd Amendment.

              As to the first argument, that people should be able to do whatever they want to do with their private property, I only wish that this had been true when I sold my house in South Carolina but first had to shell out four thousand bucks to Harold and Willy. Who were Harold and Willy? They were two guys who showed up after the house was inspected and informed me that the house couldn’t be sold until they went around and killed all the termites in the walls and the floors. In other words, we have long accepted the idea that you can’t just sell your private property to someone else if in so doing, the sale creates a risk. And even the nuttiest of all gun nuts agrees that selling a gun to someone who has committed violent crimes creates a risk. That was the easy one. Now here comes the hard one.

              Incidentally, I’m hoping that my friends in the gun-control movement will use what follows to prepare themselves for the arguments they might get from the other side. I still have a survey on my website which asks gun-control advocates 12 simple questions about gun laws (there is the same survey for people who considers themselves pro-gun advocates) and to date, I have received 87 responses and the average score of correct answers is 6. So I hope you’ll read what follows here.

              The 2nd Amendment means what the SCOTUS said it meant in the 2008 Heller decision, the majority opinion written by a dear, departed friend. And what it means is that keeping a handgun in the home is a Constitutional ‘right.’ Which means that a state government can pass any gun law it wants, as long as it does not prevent someone from owning a handgun, assuming they are not considered a risk to themselves or to anyone else. Who determines whether someone’s ownership of a handgun might create a risk?  The government. Who determines whether the existence of a particular type of handgun might create a risk?  The government. And that’s it. That’s what the 2nd Amendment means.

So, for example, if you live in New York City and a handgun is found in your home and you cannot produce the requisite paperwork which takes the NYPD Licensing Division about six months to issue on your behalf, you will be convicted of a felony because New York City decided back in 1912 that you can’t keep a handgun in your home for self-defense, or any other reason, until the NYPD says it’s okay. If you go into Court the day of your sentencing and tell the judge that New York City is abridging your 2nd-Amendment ‘rights’ because you would have to wait six months to get a permit, I strongly urge you to bring your toothbrush because you ain’t going home.

Between 1966, when I bought my first gun, and 2008 when Heller was decreed, I probably bought and sold at least 500 personally-owned guns. Not one of those transactions had any Constitutional protection at all. So what? My friends in the gun-control movement should stop worrying about whether something as timid and non-intrusive as UBC is a violation of any kind of rights, Constitutional or otherwise. It’s not, and you can take that one to the bank.

Don’t Be Surprised If Your Physician Supports Gun ‘Rights.’

November 1, 2018

mikethegunguy Blogs , , , 2 Comments

Just about everyone who reads this column will also at some point make a visit to their internist for their annual check-up or to follow up some medical issue of concern. I visit my internist several times each year because I happen to like him very much and I kid myself into believing that getting on his office scale will somehow translate itself into me losing weight. Yea, right.

acp              But the next time I visit him, I’m going to ask him if he happens to be a member of the American College of Physicians, which is the national organization which represents internists, and I suspect the answer will be ‘yes.’ At which point I’m going to bring to his attention the fact that the organization to which he belongs and pays dues is guilty of a degree of professional malfeasance which needs to be stopped. And it needs to stop now.

I am referring to the practice followed by the ACP, along with many other professional medical organizations, to pretend that they are very, very concerned about gun violence while, at the same time, utilizing the dues paid by their members to promote the pro-gun narrative and messaging developed by the NRA.

Specifically, this takes the form of donating to the campaigns of Senate and House members who not only vote against all legislative proposals to reduce gun violence, but also speak out in favor of gun ‘rights.’  In this respect, the ACP’s behavior isn’t quite as nefarious as the behavior of the American College of Emergency Physicians; that bunch is the second-highest funder of pro-gun politicians of all the medical societies. In fact, the ACP actually gives more dough to Democrats than to Republicans, so far this year the split is 60-40 in favor of the blue team. Nevertheless, when it comes to supporting a pro-gun politician, some of the candidates who benefit from ACP largesse represent the worst of the worst.

  • Andy Barr (R-K) has received $3,000 from ACP to date. In response to Obama’s mild attempt to promote more gun regulations after Sandy Hook, this is what Barr had to say: “I’m not convinced that President Obama’s proposals would either protect the American people from crime or safeguard the constitutional rights of law abiding citizens.” That statement was right out of the NRA press kit, literally word for word.
  • Kevin Brady (R-TX) is so far spending $5,000 on his campaign courtesy of ACP. He not only voted in favor of the PLCCA law that immunizes the gun industry from torts, he also is a co-sponsor of the bill that would allow concealed-carry licensees to take their gun into all 50 states.

I could list a few more of the dumbest of the dumb Members of Congress whose fervent belief in gun ‘rights’ finds favor with the internists but I think you get the point. In case you don’t, however, read what the chief mouthpieces for the ACP have to say.  Here’s the most recent pronouncement from Ana Maria Lopez, MD, who happens to be the President of ACP: “It’s more important than ever that our nation’s leaders implement common-sense policies that ban the sale of automatic and semi-automatic military-style ‘assault’ weapons that are designed to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.”

Let’s leave aside the fact that neither Dr. Lopez nor anyone in the ACP press office knows the difference between a full-auto and semi-automatic gun. The bottom line is that this same bunch of cynical fools are giving campaign contributions to office-holders like Barr and Brady whose presence and activity in Congress virtually guarantees that no assault weapons ban will ever see the light of day. And if Dr. Lopez doesn’t know who receives campaign contributions from her organization’s PAC, there has to be a complete breakdown between what she does and what she says.

Here’s the bottom line. When it comes to physicians giving a single dime to any political candidate who will vote in favor of guns, this sh*t has got to stop. It has to stop now. Now.

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