Tag Archives: Guns

Why Gun Sales Have Declined Under Trump, by Sam Bocetta

Posted on August 18, 2017 | 2 comments

Gun sales have declined and gun retailers are overstocked. According to Sam Bocetta there are deals to be had. If you don’t have an AR-15, or if you just want to supplement your arsenal, it’s a good time to pick up one, two, or a few. From Bocetta at fmshooter.com:

Many of us welcomed Trump to the Presidency with a sense of pride. However, there is one group for whom the new (ish) president has brought some bad news – gun store owners, and gun manufacturers.

This is because gun sales have seen a significant drop since the election of Trump. But don’t worry – this does not indicate waning enthusiasm for people to own guns. Quite the opposite. It appears that demand has dropped because people feel that their rights to own guns will be protected under the new administration.

The extent to which this is true remains to be seen. While Trump seemed to be pro-gun during the election campaign, and though his campaign eventually won the backing of the NRA, it is not clear that there is a concrete policy position on gun rights. Like a lot of issues raised by the new administration, Trump’s stance on gun rights is frustratingly vague and lacking in details.

Of course, doing nothing to further erode our Second Amendment rightswould be a welcome change from the Obama regime. The constant attempt to ban and / or limit ownership of assault-style weapons, though ultimately defeated, was a source of worry for people don’t want their rights to be further limited, or who rely on these guns for their livelihood.

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To continue reading: Why Gun Sales Have Declined Under Trump

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Execution by Firing Squad: The Militarized Police State Opens Fire, by John W. Whitehead

Posted on June 20, 2017 | 1 comment

You can own a gun, but it can get you killed by the government. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“It is often the case that police shootings, incidents where law enforcement officers pull the trigger on civilians, are left out of the conversation on gun violence. But a police officer shooting a civilian counts as gun violence. Every time an officer uses a gun against an innocent or an unarmed person contributes to the culture of gun violence in this country.”—Journalist Celisa Calacal

Legally owning a gun in America could get you killed by a government agent.

While it still technically remains legal to own a firearm in America, possessing one can now get you pulled over, searched, arrested, subjected to all manner of surveillance, treated as a suspect without ever having committed a crime, shot at and killed.

This same rule does not apply to government agents, however, who are armed to the hilt and rarely given more than a slap on the wrists for using their weapons to shoot and kill American citizens.

According to the Washington Post, “1 in 13 people killed by guns are killed by police.”

Just recently, for example, a Minnesota jury acquitted a police officer who shot and killed 32-year-old Philando Castile, a school cafeteria supervisor, during a routine traffic stop merely because Castile disclosed that he had a gun in his possession, for which he had a lawful conceal-and-carry permit. That’s all it took for police to shoot Castile four times as he was reaching for his license and registration. Castile’s girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter witnessed the entire exchange.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that Florida police will not be held accountable for banging on the wrong door at 1:30 am, failing to identify themselves as police, and then repeatedly shooting and killing the innocent homeowner who answered the door while holding a gun in self-defense. Although 26-year-old Andrew Scott had committed no crime and never fired a single bullet or lifted his firearm against police, he was gunned down by police who were investigating a speeding incident by engaging in a middle-of-the-night “knock and talk” in Scott’s apartment complex.

To continue reading: Execution by Firing Squad: The Militarized Police State Opens Fire

 

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Government, Uncategorized

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If Guns Kill People…. from The Burning Platform

Posted on May 27, 2016 | Leave a comment

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/05/27/if-guns-kill-people/

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The Constitution, the President and Guns, by Andrew Napolitano

Posted on January 7, 2016 | 1 comment

From Andrew Napolitano, on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:

“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.” — Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

In 2008, the Supreme Court laid to rest the once-simmering dispute over the meaning of the Second Amendment. In an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court articulated the modern existence of the ancient personal right to keep and bear arms as a pre-political right.

A pre-political right is one that pre-exists the political order that was created to protect it. Thus, the court held, the origins of this right are the ancient and persistent traditions of free peoples and their natural inclinations to self-defense.

The court also characterized the right as fundamental. That puts it in the highest category of rights protected by the Bill of Rights. Though the origins of this right are from an era well before guns existed, the textual language in the amendment — “arms” — makes clear, the court ruled, the intention of the Framers that its continuing purpose should be to recognize the right of people to keep and use the same level of technologically available arms that might be used against them.

That, in a nutshell, is the history, theory and purpose of the amendment as the modern Supreme Court has found them to be. But as we have seen, the constitutional guarantees that were written to keep the government from interfering with our rights are only as viable as is the fidelity to the Constitution of those in whose hands we have reposed it for safekeeping.

In our system, principal among those are the hands of the president; and sadly, today we have a president seriously lacking in this fidelity. And that lack is salient when it comes to the Second Amendment.

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama announced that he will sign executive orders that expand the size and scope of federal monitoring of the acquisition and use of guns — traditionally a matter left to the states — and he will interpret the laws in novel ways, establish rules and impose obligations that Congress rejected, and prosecute those who defy his new system.

The president has very little room to issue executive orders on guns because the congressional legislation in this area is so extensive, detailed and clear. In addition to ordering your doctor to report to the Department of Homeland Security any mention you may make to the doctor of guns in your home, the president has decreed on his own and against the articulated will of Congress the obligation of all people who transfer any gun to any other person to obtain a federal gun dealer license. This is among the most cumbersome and burdensome licenses to obtain.

To continue reading: The Constitution, the President and Guns

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Guns Don’t Cause Suicide, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on January 7, 2016 | 2 comments

From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

Homicide rates in the United States have been declining for 20 years as the number of privately-held guns in the US has increased substantially.

In some states, such as New Hampshire and Oregon, which have very weak gun laws, homicide rates are remarkably low, and these states are among the safest places on earth.

As homicide rates have declined, however, and gun-related homicides with them, gun-control advocates have attempted to create a new category of “gun violence” by blaming suicides on access to guns.

Most “Gun Violence” Is Suicide

Note this recent article from The Washington Post which casts suicide as indistinguishable from homicide, and goes on to point out that there were as many firearm related deaths in 2014 as there were deaths that resulted from automobile accidents.

The article rightly notes that thanks to medical science and safety features on automobiles, deaths from car accidents have gone into steep decline in recent years. The article then notes that suicides have been increasing over the same period, but then attempts to connect this rise with access to firearms.

The article never explicitly says that suicides are indistinguishable from homicides, of course — since any rational person can see a large and obvious distinction — but it does imply the two are more or less the same by classifying both firearm-related suicides and firearm-related homicides as “gun violence.”

Employing the usual lazy methods of mainstream journalists, The Post fails to provide hard numbers or to direct links to sources, so I’ll do it for you:

To come up with this new category of “gun violence” The Post combines the CDC’s statistics of firearm suicides (a total of 21,175 in 2013) to the total of gun homicides (a total of 11,201 in 2013). Then it compares this total to the number of accidental automobile deaths, which was 33,804 in 2014. (The article claims there is new 2014 data from the CDC showing more gun deaths than automobile deaths, but the CDC web site has not been updated to reflect this.)

So, overall, as of 2013, there were 32,376 gun deaths and 33,804 automobile deaths. (During that same period, about one-third of automobile deaths were alcohol-related.)

So, yes, according to the CDC, the number of gun-related deaths and the number of automobile deaths are similar — but only if suicides are included.

Contained in all of this, however, is the implied conclusion that were it not for such easy access to guns, the suicide rate in the US would be lower. This is of course pure speculation, and rather baseless speculation at that.

To continue reading: Guns Don’t Cause Suicide

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Pew: Homicide Rates Cut in Half Over Past 20 Years (While New Gun Ownership Soared), by Ryan McMaken

Posted on November 2, 2015 | 1 comment

The argument that gun control will cut murder rates, and the converse, that increased gun ownership leads to more murders, are directly contradicted by the evidence. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

The Pew Research Center reported last week that the murder rate was cut nearly in half from 7 per 100,000 in 1993 to 3.6 per 100,000 in 2013. Over the same period, overall gun deaths (including accidents and suicides) have fallen by one-third from 15.2 to 10.6 per 100,000.

In spite of this, Pew reports, the American public believes that homicides and gun deaths are increasing in the United States. Those who think violence is getting worse should probably watch less television and look around them instead. The murder rate in the US is currently similar to 1950s levels.

Meanwhile, the number of privately owned guns (and gun commerce in general) in the United States has increased substantially in recent decades.

According to the World Bank, here are the homicide rates in the US since 1995:

Here’s the homicide rate graphed against total new firearms (manufactured plus imported) in US (indexed with 1995 =100):

To continue reading: Homicide Rates Cut in Half While New Gun Ownership Soared

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Lessons, by Karl Denninger

Posted on October 4, 2015 | Leave a comment

From Karl Denninger, at the burningplatform.com:

There are some very disturbing reports coming in about the Oregon shooting.

First off, it was clear within minutes that the shooter targeted Christians. How many people in our political system have been outraged that Christians were targeted for execution while others were either shot in the leg or not shot at all? I have heard exactly nothing from Obama or anyone else in political power in that regard. Why not?

Second, you’ve heard my screeds over the years about The Second Amendment. If you cannot argue facts and logic then get the hell off my lawn — you’re unwelcome around me. In matters of life and death there is exactly zero room for any sort of “squishy”, “touchy-feely” or “feel good emotionalism.”

Let me be clear: If you resort to emotion when life or death are on the line you are going to die.

If you wish to entertain the debate here on firearms, gun control or anything of the sort then you are going to argue logic and facts. Here they are:

• The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. You call the police when there is an active shooter and they show up with guns. They don’t willy-wally around; they look for a tactical solution and if they get one that works they shoot the bad guy. That’s exactly what happened yesterday.

• We cannot have cops everywhere, all the time. We are not only incapable of paying for it nobody would want to live in such a world. Even if a cop is just one minute away from anywhere in the United States (an utterly fanciful expectation even in a big city) a person with a bolt action rifle or single-shot pistol can shoot a dozen people (or more!) in that one minute. As a result the faster any good guy with a gun can engage the bad guy with a gun the lower the risk is of everyone in the vicinity winding up dead — and the more good guys with guns and the closer they are to the situation the better the odds are for you and everyone else.

• Virtually all (something like all but three) mass-shootings in the last couple of decades have taken place in “gun-free zones.” To those who want to further restrict firearms — since there are literally over 100 million peaceful Americans that never have and never will commit a crime with a firearm, and that is an overwhelming majority of the population that owns guns, why don’t we ban gun-free zones since virtually every single mass-shooting has taken place in one? There’s an obvious reason that these homicidal maniacs don’t shoot up a cop shop — everyone there is armed and will shoot back! If our President — or anyone on the left — gave a good damn about human life they would both take down the “Nobody here that obeys the law is able to defend themselves, commit mass-murder here” signs.

To continue reading: Lessons

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