Find The Boots

The shooting at CNN is a real tragedy. Of course, the Brady Bunch was all over it as yet another reason to restrict people's right of self defense. In response, a pro-gun commentator pointed out that had anyone been armed, they might have been able to defend themselves. Paul Helmke responded in typical Brady fashion in his blog:

Guns do not instantly and always make people safe. To suggest otherwise is irresponsible at best. And to suggest that Charles Williams – whose only alleged failing was that he did not carry a gun – has some moral responsibility for the death of Clara Riddles is simply unconscionable.

To quote Bill from Office Space: "Ooh, uh, yeah. I'm going to have to go ahead and sort of disagree with you there. Yeah."

Let's break down Mr. Helmke's post a bit. First, he starts off by quoting statistics about homicide rates of men vs women.

...intimate partner homicides composed only 4% of the murders of men but about one-third of the murders of women

Of course, he doesn't mention whether or not those take place with guns or not. Frankly, if someone is so stoked up that they want to kill the ex, then access to a gun isn't going to make much difference. Here's a real shocker for the libs: Men are physically stronger than women. Yes, I know, hard to believe but there it is. In fact, I'll go ahead and make the claim that in most circumstances, the only chance a women has against even an unarmed man who has decided to kill her is with the great equalizer -- a gun. Pepper spray, tasers, whistles, and screaming are much more likely than a gun to merely enrage your attacker.

And by the way, a guy that has decided to kill his ex probably isn't too concerned about breaking the law to get a gun. So if Mr. Helmke had his way, only women would be unarmed and their insane ex-boyfriends would have guns.

Then the typical liberal response of just dial 911 was made:

...an armed security guard responded immediately.

Except in this case, like most others, the cops didn't show up in time to do anything about it. I guess, according to the Bradys, that if you're rich enough to be able to afford security guards around you at all times you get to be safe, but for the rest of us that just want to take responsibility for protecting ourselves and the people around us, too bad.

Now here's one place that I'll agree with him. Charles, the guy that stepped aside to allow the ex-boyfriend to murder the woman in peace, isn't morally culpable. He wasn't armed and his choice not to put his life in danger was his own to make. The moral culpability for that situation goes to the people that made sure that he wasn't armed. Made sure that he didn't have a choice to be armed. Made sure that he had to get the permission of the government before he could carry a weapon. Made sure that an environment of hostility exists towards those citizens who are willing to take responsibility for their self defense.

So the kicker here is that the first comment on Mr. Helmke's blog is from Tim James, who puts it all in perspective:

It is tragic that the man did not happen to have a gun or other weapon that day to give Clara a small chance at life. While it would be no guarantee, armed citizens have stopped public acts of violence many times before. I’m sure Clara, who is now dead, would have loved to take those odds rather than wait helplessly for her imminent death.

I guess if the woman being dragged by her hair to her death was a member of the Brady Bunch, she'd have been thinking "Wow, I'm glad I don't have a gun. This situation could have really gotten out of hand!"

But I do have to tip my hat to Mr. Helmke. Most bloggers would have just deleted that embarrassing comment. After all, he looks like a complete buffoon when you consider the arguments. But at least he's willing to stand up and take his whipping like a man...

Labels: 2nd amendment, Brady Bunch

This may take the cake as the most stupid anti-gun website I've ever seen. Let's work through a few of the "facts" that they've published:

.50 Caliber Sniper Rifles were designed to attack parked or landing aircraft, armored personnel carriers, rail tank cars, bulk fuel storage, and concrete bunkers.

Actually, they were designed as anti-personnel weapons and have both police and military applications. Their effectiveness against soft targets such as aircraft, tank cars, and bulk fuel storage is not much greater than the effectiveness of traditional dangerous game hunting rounds. To be effective against hard targets you'd have to use AP rounds, which are illegal for civilian use. And I wonder where they got the idea that even a .50 AP round could penetrate a concrete bunker? Maybe one made from cinder blocks....

* .50 Caliber sniper rifles are powerful enough to puncture armored limousines and can be used as tools for assassination.

Again, AP rounds are illegal. If the bad guys can get those, then getting the rifle isn't any harder. And yet, there hasn't been a single instance ever of a crime committed with a .50 cal, much less an assassination.

* .50 Caliber Sniper Rifles have effective ranges up to 2,000 yards, or in other words, 20 football fields laid end to end. Deer hunters generally shoot at ranges of 150 to 200 yards.

The effective range of almost any rifle in the hands of the average deer hunter is about 200 yards, because there are only a handful of people in the world that can hit targets at longer ranges. Even with a .50 cal in their hands, few people can engage targets at 2000 yards. BTW, the lethal range of a .30-06 is about 3,500 yards -- the distance at which the bullet looses its lethal effectiveness.

* Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network bought 25 Barrett .50 Caliber sniper rifles in the late 1980s.

They make it sound like OBL just walked into a Walmart and picked up 25 Barretts. In reality, those rifles were sold to the US government, who was supporting OBL at the time as he fought the Soviets. That transaction would be illegal today, because, err, he's a felon. The "In the News" section describes a news article about Iraqi terrorists getting .50 cal weapons that were sold to Iran. So how about they start asking Iran to stop supplying terrorists and leave law abiding American citizens alone? Another news story was about a man of "middle eastern descent" who tried to get into the Barrett plant. Guess what? He didn't get in. Probably couldn't get one legally so he was trying to steal one.

* .50 Caliber ammunition is the largest round available on the civilian market and highly destructive armor-piercing, incendiary, and explosive rounds are easily available.

Easily available? They're illegal. Ban the .50 cal and guess what, it will still be available.

Your safety is at stake because these weapons are so readily available.

Have they priced a Barrett recently? Well out of the range of the average citizen. I'm quite the gun nut and I've only seen a few of these things.

.50 Caliber sniper rifles are a terrorist’s dream considering the death and destruction they could inflict.

It takes years to acquire the skill to engage targets at 2,000 yards, if you've got the basic talent to start. Frankly, a 12-gauge police shotgun is more of a terrorists dream. Just walk into a shopping mall and start shooting. Of course, purchasing any gun would be illegal for most terrorists since they tend to be felons.

Every single statement they make about the .50 cal can also be made of other high caliber rifles. After they ban the .50 cal, they'll be coming for the .375 mag, .405 Winchester, .450 Marlin, and .45-70 Government. They'll eventually work their way down to the .30-06, .308, and .30-30 -- all had military uses and are lethal against soft targets at long ranges.

The next time you hear someone say that "sniper rifles aren't for hunting game, they're for killing people", remind them that before the Barrett .50 cal, the most widely used sniper rifle in the US Military arsenal was the Remington model 700. I'll bet you've got one in your gun case -- I do, it's a great deer rifle.

Labels: 2nd amendment

Dave Kopel has a great article that talks about the grammatical interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. Lots of great stuff, but here's one that stands out:

"A well-schooled electorate, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books, shall not be infringed." Is the grammatical structure and usage of this sentence, and the way the words modify each other, identical to the Second Amendment? Could this sentence be interpreted to restrict "the right of the people to keep and read Books" only to "a well-educated electorate" — for example, registered voters with a high-school diploma?

This shows an interesting point about human cognition. A liberal can read the 2nd Amendent:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

and because they feel that somehow guns are evil and should be restricted to the distasteful military, their brain puts an emphasis on the first phrase and is able to turn that into acceptance of all sorts of "reasonable" restrictions. But take the exact sentence structure and replace education and books for militia and arms and they can clearly see that any restriction on the right of the people to read books would be barred in the first sentence. This isn't a slam against liberals, it just shows that the perspective that people approach things from has a dramatic impact on their understanding of "clear" english.

This explains why two people with different agendas can look at a powerpoint bullet and get completely different meanings. Except that the 2nd Amendment isn't a powerpoint bullet. It has a very clear meaning -- the liberal brain just has to go through more gymnastics in order to believe that it doesn't say what it says.

Labels: 2nd amendment, guns, liberals

Just in case you've been in the air for the last week and this is the first blog you're reading since you've been back, hunting celebrity Jim Zumbo really stuck his foot in it. Outdoor Life took the blog down, but thanks to Mrs. du Toit the text is still available of Zumbo's articles and his two apologies. If you read through the comments you'll see that I got into a bit of a discussion with her.

First, Zumbo's original blog entry:

Assault Rifles For Hunters?
As I write this, I’m hunting coyotes in southeastern Wyoming with Eddie Stevenson, PR Manager for Remington Arms, Greg Dennison, who is senior research engineer for Remington, and several writers. We’re testing Remington’s brand new .17 cal Spitfire bullet on coyotes.

I must be living in a vacuum. The guides on our hunt tell me that the use of AR and AK rifles have a rapidly growing following among hunters, especially prairie dog hunters. I had no clue. Only once in my life have I ever seen anyone using one of these firearms.

I call them “assault” rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I’ll go so far as to call them “terrorist” rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are “tackdrivers.”

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting.

We don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I’ve always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don’t use assault rifles. We’ve always been proud of our “sporting firearms.”

This really has me concerned. As hunters, we don’t need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of these weapons. To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let’s divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the praries and woods.

I read this article and my first thought was "What was he thinking?" Calling assault rifles "terrorist weapons" wasn't a very good idea. And rubbing salt in the wound that is the divide between shooters and hunters was a bad concept for an article.

My second thought was that maybe he has a point. Anti-hunters would get a lot of mileage out of pictures of hunters with scary looking black rifles. Imagine if the Hmong hunter in Wisconsin had been using a black rifle. Hunting gets attacked from all sides -- from within over divisions between dog hunters, Sunday hunting, night hunting, game farms, etc, and from the outside by animal rights groups and soccer moms that buy their meat at the grocer but think hunting is cruel. The attack on guns is pretty much in the background for hunters. Even John Kerry felt he had to buy a brand new goose hunting outfit in 2004 and go on a hunt. The lefties pander to hunters to get elected because they're seen as separate from the assault weapons that they're so willing to ban. So the argument that perhaps hunters shouldn't let themselves get grouped in with the assault weapons crowd doesn't seem so unreasonable.

The floodgates in the blogosphere opened up. Zumbo issued a couple of apologies, but he was basically forced into retirement. He misunderstood the key concept that the things you can say with friends around a campfire or in an anonymous forum or blog entry are entirely different than what you can say when you make your living by what you say and what people think of you. He generated a firestorm and ended up effectively becoming unemployed because sponsors wanted nothing to do with him.

I'm not in the camp that feels bad for Mr. Zumbo. He should have known not to poke the bear, and he shouldn't have been surprised when it slapped him. But I also think that this discussion should never have turned into a 2nd Amendment issue. He never suggested that assault weapons should be banned. He merely stated that he thinks they look bad for hunting and hunters shouldn't be allowed to use them. He was misinformed about the state of hunting, and he stumbled into a very sensitive area.

Assault weapon owners are rightfully touchy with a Speaker of the House named Nancy Pelosi. The assault weapon ban is coming back. I'm worried too, although I wonder how many of these gun owners that are screaming stayed home last November and didn't vote in order to teach the Republicans a lesson? It was a bad time for Mr. Zumbo to step in this particular steaming pile.

My experience with hunting celebrities is that they're pretty much idiots. They're writers and TV personalities, not expert sportsmen. My defining experience with the genre was when I was working as a guide in a remote Canadian fishing and hunting camp. We got a visit from a famous hunting celeb that did a show on moose hunting. The celeb was insufferable. He thought he knew everything. He had read a book on moose hunting on the plane, and he decided that the best strategy would be to drive the moose. While that method may work just fine in an organized hunt in neatly divided European farmland, the muskeg forest doesn't lend itself to it with just two hunters. He spooked every moose in the area. Finally, on the last day of the five day hunt one of the guides got up early and killed a moose at the far end of the lake while the celeb was sleeping off a hangover. If you watch the TV show, it looks like the celeb did everything and killed a moose on his first day.

So the idea that Zumbo, too, is an idiot shouldn't surprise anybody. From his world view, he took a somewhat controversial stand. He didn't take into account the current anxiety in the shooting world, and what he actually said got twisted around quite a bit. His apologies didn't fix the damage. Instead of saying "I never meant to say that people don't have the right to own assault weapons" (which he didn't), he talked about how he was learning that assault weapons are indeed becoming popular in hunting. It didn't matter. The gun nuts wanted a scalp and they got it.

Labels: 2nd amendment, guns, hunting