Colt’s Model 1915 Vickers Gun in .30-06
Categories
A S&W M&P Shield, chambered in 9mm
Most will remember the devastation that hit Louisiana, as well as several neighboring states, when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. New Orleans was dealt a particularly hard blow, and some may feel it will never completely recover.
Certain losses, especially those who lost their lives, can never be restored, but the region covered by Katrina’s deadly path has spent a decade-and-a-half building back. While that area of the country has always been prone to hurricanes, they hoped they would not soon experience another with the destructive force that 2005 storm brought.
Sixteen years later, to the day, Hurricane Ida made landfall. Thanks to many of the lessons learned from Katrina, the damage appears to have been greatly mitigated. One of those lessons was the importance of protecting civil rights in times of emergency.
After Katrina, NRA and the pro-Second Amendment community became outraged as reports began filtering in that the right to keep and bear arms appeared to have been eradicated in New Orleans. Orders came down to confiscate lawfully-owned firearms from city residents, and countless guns were seized from citizens who were simply concerned for their personal safety, and the safety of their loved-ones.
NRA brought this issue to light to the entire nation, and fought against this unprecedented assault on the Second Amendment. We have covered this issue in detail numerous times, along with NRA’s response, but you can find a good summary of this ordeal here.
The lessons learned from Katrina, as related to the Second Amendment, led to a flurry of new laws at all levels of government to ensure that, during any future catastrophe, our right to keep and bear arms will not be threatened. Today, most states, including Louisiana, have laws prohibiting the seizure or confiscation of lawfully-owned firearms and ammunition during a declared state of emergency. Federal restrictions were also put into place.
But that’s not to say that there continue to be some in positions of power, even in New Orleans, who still have their sights set on diminishing the Second Amendment.
Just last year, during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell (D) announced an emergency order, followed by a “proclamation,” indicating she could try to exploit the situation to try to ban the sale and transportation of firearms.
While Cantrell never followed through with any actions that undermined the Second Amendment and right to self-defense, the threat was enough to warrant legislative action. Later in the year, several bills were passed and signed into law to ensure Cantrell, or any other Louisiana politician with the power to invoke an emergency order, could not restrict access to firearms, or their transportation, during chaotic times.
So, thanks to NRA members, there are now plenty of safeguards in place to protect the Second Amendment during a state of emergency. With the lessons of Katrina learned—along with a reminder of the potential for anti-gun politicians to exploit turmoil during the pandemic—16 years later, we have not seen Hurricane Ida bring its destructive force to one of our most fundamental rights. While the storm may have still caused a great deal of destruction, the Second Amendment and the right to self-defense remained unscathed.
The City of San Francisco announced this week a plan to launch a program that uses cash incentives and mentorship relationships to encourage violent criminals not to commit crimes.
Several other American cities have adopted similar programs, and the results have been mixed. Some cities have seen a marked decline in violent crime while others have experienced little change.
In San Francisco, the program has been dubbed the “San Francisco’s Dream Keeper Fellowship,” and the pilot program will target 10 people who program directors believe are at risk of committing violent crime, according to NBC Bay Area.
Critics of these and similar programs balk at using taxpayer dollars to bribe violent felons, but proponents say the money is part of a much larger system designed to stop violence before it starts.
“Paying criminals to not shoot is an enticing headline, but it is a significantly inaccurate description of the program,” David Muhammad told NBC. “The primary intervention is a positive and trusting relationship with what we call an intensive life coach.”
Muhammad is the Executive Director of the National Institute of Criminal Justice Reform, an advocacy organization that seeks to “reduce incarceration and violence.”
Those involved in San Francisco’s program will receive $300 per month for being involved, Muhammad says. They’ll also be eligible to receive an additional $200 per month for achieving certain outcomes.
The Second Amendment community’s response to these programs has varied. The National Rifle Association published an article in 2018 expressing support for programs that intervene in the lives of criminals because they target gun violence without attacking gun owners. The Dream Keeper Fellowship and similar initiatives might waste taxpayer money, but unlike other policies aimed at curbing “gun violence,” they don’t try to restrict lawful gun ownership.
Others argue that despite the short-term success of these programs, they promote the wrong incentive structure and will ultimately fail. Joel Shults, a retired police chief in Colorado, made this argument in a recent dialogue posted on Police1.
“What gets backward in the money-for-not-murdering plan is that the cash reward can only be earned if you are already an offender or associated with a criminal gang,” he said. “Many businesses around the world have been paying people not to smash their windows or burn their buildings or break their kneecaps. Seems to be effective in the short term, while buying trouble in the long term.”
Strangely, gun-control groups are often the biggest proponents of “community violence intervention” programs even though these programs, if successful, would undercut their gun control agenda. Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords have published violence intervention pages on their websites, and President Joe Biden included $5 billion for these programs in the American Jobs Plan.
Only time will tell if this latest attempt has success in The City by the Bay.
————————————————————————————-
The Life of a Cop is never an easy one! Grumpy
Canadian-born political commentator and George W. Bush-era speechwriter David Frum has taken a break from promoting actual wars in the Middle East to advocate for a culture war on gun ownership here at home.
Now a staff writer at the stultifyingly establishment Atlantic magazine, Frum authored a piece for the October 2021 issue titled, “How to Persuade Americans to Give Up Their Guns.” Frum’s thesis is that Americans own too many guns and that more guns leads to more death and crime. In order to combat this situation, Frum urges gun control advocates to convince gun owners to forfeit their firearms by making gun ownership socially unacceptable. In the commentator’s mind, there needs to be a “moral reckoning” whereby gun ownership is treated as something akin to drunk driving.
There’s nothing novel about Frum’s approach. As with most of the Atlantic’s content, Frum’s piece is mostly warmed-over regime talking points.
The CDC’s chief anti-gun advocate, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control Director Mark Rosenberg, pushed for a cultural anti-gun campaign in the early 1990s. In a 1994 interview with the New York Times, Rosenberg said, “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes.” The taxpayer-funded activist added, “It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol, cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly and banned.”
In 1995, then-U.S. Attorney Eric Holder gave a speech in which he stated, “What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we changed our attitudes about cigarettes.” The future Attorney General went on to add, “We have to be repetitive about this. It’s not enough to have a catchy ad on a Monday and then only do it Monday. We need to do this every day of the week, and just really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.”
Likening gun control and the gun control effort to anti-drunk driving policies and the Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaign is a similarly tired bit. Gun control activists from Donna Dees-Thomases of the inaccurately-named Million Mom March to Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts have cited MADD as inspiration. Conversely, the vast majority of Americans seem to intuitively understand that exercising their fundamental right to keep and bear arms isn’t analogous to recklessly traversing the public roadways.
As noted, Frum’s chief contention is that more guns leads to more death and crime. For instance, Frum attempted to connect the historic gun sales in 2020 with the recent spike in violent crime. The commentator wrote,
When the coronavirus pandemic struck last year, people throughout the developed world raced to buy toilet paper, bottled water, yeast for baking bread, and other basic necessities. Americans also stocked up on guns. They bought more than 23 million firearms in 2020, up 65 percent from 2019. First-time gun purchases were notably high. The surge has not abated in 2021. In January, Americans bought 4.3 million guns, a monthly record.
Last year was also a high-water mark for gun violence—more people were shot dead than at any time since the 1990s—though 2021 is shaping up to be even worse.
This lazy inference, also advanced by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, runs contrary to even anti-gun researchers’ findings.
In July, the journal Injury Epidemiology published “Firearm purchasing and firearm violence during the coronavirus pandemic in the United States: a cross-sectional study.” The paper concluded, “Nationwide, firearm purchasing and firearm violence increased substantially during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic. At the state level, the magnitude of the increase in purchasing was not associated with the magnitude of the increase in firearm violence.” This acknowledgement is notable, given that paper was funded by the anti-gun Joyce Foundation (which also funds handgun prohibition organization Violence Policy Center) and California’s gun control factoid factory at UC Davis.
While its refreshing for gun control supporters to make such an admission, the UC Davis findings won’t surprise anyone who didn’t sleep through the last three decades.
Since the early 1990s, the number of privately-owned firearms has more than doubled, from about 192 million to more than 405 million – including more than 167 million handguns. Moreover, thanks to the diligent work of gun rights supporters, more Americans than ever before can exercise their Right-to-Carry outside the home for self-defense. Until Florida passed a “shall issue” permitting process in 1987, less than 10 percent of the American public lived in a Right-to-Carry state. Today, 42 states, accounting for 74 percent of the U.S. population, respect the Right-to-Carry – with 21 states respecting the right to do so without a permit.
According to FBI data, the homicide and violent crime rates fell by roughly 50 percent between 1991 and 2019.
Frum also pointed to what he perceives as a problem with unintended shootings. Again, these unfortunate incidents have fallen precipitously as the number of firearms Americans own has increased.
The rate of fatal firearm accidents involving children (ages 0-14) decreased 91 percent from 1975 to 2019. The rate of fatal firearm accidents among all ages has decreased 96 percent from the recorded high in 1904 to 2019.
In another lame throwback, the Bush-era speechwriter rehashed tired arguments about the purported dangers of a firearm in the home. The pundit stated, “In virtually every way that can be measured, owning a firearm makes the owner, the owner’s family, and the people around them less safe,” and that “The gun you trust against your fears is itself the thing you should fear. The gun is a lie.” Further stoking suspicion of everyday gun owners, Frum wrote,
Drawing a bright line between the supposedly vast majority of “responsible,” “law abiding” gun owners and those shadowy others who cause all the trouble is a prudent approach for politicians, but it obscures the true nature of the problem. We need to stop deceiving ourselves about the importance of this distinction.
Frum doesn’t cite an actual study to support his claim, but this anti-gun talking point is often accompanied by a reference to a 1993 study by Arthur Kellerman titled, “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home.” The notorious work is largely responsible for the anti-gun factoid that a person with a gun in the home is supposedly more likely to shoot a family member than a criminal.
As we have repeatedly pointed out, the study was rife with methodological flaws and reached questionable conclusions. An actual examination of the output of Kellerman’s model shows that renting a home or living alone are both higher risk factors than keeping a firearm in the home.
In a detailed critique of the study in his book “Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control,” Florida State Criminology Professor Gary Kleck noted that Kellerman’ work should be “cited in a statistics textbook as a cautionary example of multiple statistical errors.” Challenging the study’s methodology, which involved sampling atypically high-violence geographic areas, Kleck concluded, “there is no formal research basis for applying any conclusions from this study about the effects of gun ownership to the general population.”
To Frum’s point denigrating law-abiding gun owners, after examining the data on violence perpetrated with firearms Kleck concluded,
It simply isn’t true that previously law-abiding citizens commit most murders or many murders or virtually any murders; and so disarming them could not eliminate most or many or virtually any murders. Homicide studies show that murderers are not ordinary citizens, but extreme aberrants of whom it is unrealistic to assume they will have any more compunction about flouting gun laws than about murder.
While exaggerating the risk posed by normal gun owners, Frum was quick to dismiss evidence showing that Americans use firearms to defend themselves at least hundreds of thousands of times each year. According to the writer, the fact that this evidence is procured from survey data means it is biased. The former speechwriter neglected to acknowledge that data from multiple surveys conducted by different entities, including the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, indicate roughly 1 million defensive firearm uses per year.
According to Frum, “American gun buyers are falling victim to bad risk analysis.” Here the writer exposed his belief that ordinary Americans are too stupid to take stock of their own circumstances and determine how to best defend themselves and their families. Presumably, he would outsource Americans’ personal decisions to media and government elites like himself. In an era where trust in media and the federal government are trending to all-time lows, concerns over crime have surged, and parts of the country have been all but forfeited to criminals, Frum’s new war will be a tough sell.
Categories
The Gun that Eats EVERYTHING
With days to go until the September 20 snap election called by Justin Trudeau, the Liberal Party leader and current Prime Minister, face the possibility of losing seats. As of early September, the Conservative Party had overtaken Trudeau’s Liberals as the favored party in polling. For Trudeau himself, opinion polls indicate he has dropped in popularity “with nearly every age and gender group.” Of the five political party leaders covered by the August 30 poll, Trudeau commands the highest “unfavorable” ratings. Forty-one percent of respondents have a “very unfavorable” view of him, and almost two-thirds view him unfavorably overall. Campaign coverage has regularly featured Trudeau being met with furious voters at his public events (like here, here and here).
Perhaps hoping to bolster voter support and boost his poor poll standings, on September 5 Trudeau promised Canadians even more gun control. Trudeau is already responsible for imposing a May 1, 2020 Order in Council that banned over 150,000 types of firearms arbitrarily classified as “assault weapons” with a concomitant confiscation of these previously lawful guns. The new measures Trudeau now promises are a limit on “high capacity” magazines along with CDN$1 billion in funding for provinces and territories to implement handgun bans.
At the same time, Trudeau (who appeared with Bill Blair, the current Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, whose department is responsible for enforcing the gun ban and confiscation program), attacked his Conservative opponent using a standard tactic of Democrat politicians in the United States, claiming Erin O’Toole, the Conservative Party leader, was making “secret deals” with “the gun lobby.”
As part of its election platform, the Conservative Party promised to repeal the “assault weapon” ban and confiscation law. “Canada’s Conservatives will improve the regulation of legal firearms to ensure that it is evidence-based and focuses on protecting public safety. We will start by repealing C-71 and the May 2020 Order in Council and conducting a review of the Firearms Act with participation by law enforcement, firearms owners, manufacturers, and members of the public…” Earlier, in a policy declaration adopted in March, the Conservatives committed to what one would think are uncontroversial policies of “cost-effective gun control programs designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals while respecting the rights of law-abiding Canadians to own and use firearms responsibly.”
Regardless of Trudeau’s efforts to deflect and distract, Canadians will likely focus on his last six years in office and the weak economy, the massive federal deficit and government spending, and rising taxes. His unnecessary election alone will cost an estimated CDN$610 million, the most expensive election in Canadian history.