Gunwalker Update: Fast and Furious Lawsuit Slowly Moving and the Wide Receiver Story

First update on the civil suit against the Justice Department, from UT San Diego:

WASHINGTON — A federal judge seemed skeptical Wednesday of the Justice Department’s bid to dismiss a congressional lawsuit seeking records related to Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled federal gun-tracking operation in Arizona.

It was not a gun-tracking operation.  It was not bungled.  It did exactly what it was set out to do, it sent guns to Mexican narcoterrorist cartels, and it forced US gun stores to sell to people who should never have gotten guns.  There was no tracking involved, as whistleblower John Dodson stated – they were not allowed to track guns sent south, and they were intended to be recovered at crime scenes.  People buying guns included felons who could not have passed NICS background checks, except that the government gave them permission to buy guns by letting them pass background checks.

When asked about the breakdown, Stephen Fischer, a spokesman for the NICS System, said the FBI had no comment. However, an ATF agent who worked on the Fast and Furious investigation, told Fox News that NICS officials called the ATF in Phoenix whenever their suspects tried to buy a gun. That conversation typically led to a green light for the buyers, when it should have stopped them.

From the UD SD story again, the judge is at least doing her job:

Judge Amy Berman Jackson sharply challenged the department’s claim that federal courts have no jurisdiction in the dispute. Department lawyer Ian Gershengorn said the battle over the documents should be resolved by the checks and balances between the legislative and executive branches.

“I’m a check and balance,” countered Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama. “The third branch exists.”

Well, she seems better than other Obama appointments.  And she seems to understand that there has been no “check and balance” when the Department of Justice and the president have simply claimed executive privilege and hushed everything up – which is the reason for the lawsuit.  She is seeing things up close, so she probably has to acknowledge what’s going on.  She’s being presented with information directly, and can’t just ignore things like the media does.

To some degree, this is also a story of how the media not only gets it wrong, but how the media is carrying water for Obama.

The department has turned over thousands of pages of material on the operation itself. The continuing dispute is over documents describing how the department responded once Congress started investigating.

That’s what the Justice Department sent as “documents”.  Page after page after page.

Gershengorn said that if the suit were dismissed, Congress had other powers at its disposal, such as the power of the purse. He said that negotiations and accommodation between the House and the executive branch are messy and contentious, but that the system allows for accountability with voters.

That is absurd, insulting, and the kind of thing that would get Sam Adams heating up the tar and sending somebody to get feathers.  The DOJ is hushing up a the murder of two federal agents and hundreds of mexican citizens, hushing up their program that is the kind of violent criminal conspiracy that would make headlines for years if it were done by organized crime, but instead, is hushed up because the media simply refuses to report it, and refuses to report the truth because they love their great leader.

Saying that Congress can simply use “the power of the purse” to reduce budgets for departments is absurd.  No one is held accountable for this:

People need to go to prison, not have their department funding meddled with.  The DOJ lawyer Gershengorn should be with them as an accomplice after the fact to murders.

House lawyer Kerry Kircher called the notion that there haven’t been meaningful negotiations and accommodations “preposterous.”

“We’ve been negotiating for four months,” Kircher said.

He also said the House was at a disadvantage.

“This is an asymmetrical relationship here,” Kircher said. “They have the documents. We don’t have the documents.”

As to Congress’ powers, such as reducing spending for the executive branch, he said, “All that means is they get less money” – not that the committee gets the documents.

Presented with this kind of thing, I’d like to say the judge won’t just rule in favor of who appointed her, but there’s little telling.

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David Codrea at Examiner.com has some info on “Guns Across the Border“, a book that tells the story of Operation Wide Receiver.

“Operation Wide Receiver,” a precursor to “Operation Fast and Furious” wherein U.S. guns were bought by straw purchasers and “walked” under the noses of ATF investigators into Mexico, has been the subject of numerous Gun Rights Examiner reports. The central figure in those reports was Mike Detty, a gun writer, a firearms dealer, and the confidential informant who literally risked his life over the course of years to do what he believed was right, only to find the obvious criminals weren’t the only ones he couldn’t trust.

Operation Wide receiver really was a botched sting.  The ATF in Mexico knew that guns were coming, the Mexican authorities knew guns were coming.  The smugglers turned out to be good at smuggling and got a lot of guns past both US and Mexican authorities through a variety of tactics.  Smugglers are good at smuggling?  Who’da thunk it?

Fast and Furious, by contrast, was not a botched sting.  The ATF in Mexico (ATF attache Darren Gil) and the Mexican authorities had no idea guns were coming, and the purpose was to find guns at murder scenes in Mexico, about which ATF supervisors were “almost giddy”.

Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious were two different things.  Bob Owens at PJ Media did a solid bit on this explaining it further:

Wide Receiver sought to track and interdict guns being smuggled south using a combination of RFID-tracking devices embedded in the shipments and overheard surveillance aircraft. Wide Receiver failed because of the limitations of the technology used, compounded by the ineptness of its installation and the unexpected resourcefulness of the cartel’s gun smugglers.

As a result of the mistakes made in Wide Receiver, guns were lost: approximately 450 made it into Mexico. As a result, the botched operation launched in 2006 — and in this instance, actually botched — was shut down in 2007.

Compare the mistakes of Wide Receiver to the operations launched under Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, which had the advantages of learning from the postmortem failures of Wide Receiver two years before.

Fast and Furious used neither tracking devices nor aircraft, ran interference for smugglers with local law enforcement on multiple occasions, and federal agents were not allowed to interdict weapons.

Wide Receiver shut down within a year after 450 weapons went missing in a botched law enforcement operation. Fast and Furious purposefully ran at least 2,020 weapons to the Sinaloa cartel without any intention of arresting the straw purchasers and smugglers. Other operations in other states — CBS News’ Attkisson cites allegations of “at least 10 cities in five states” — allow the possibility that (if the other operations were as prolific as Fast and Furious) Holder’s Department of Justice may have intentionally sent more than 12,000 guns into criminal hands in the U.S and Mexico, enough to arm three U.S. Army brigades.

Law enforcement operations sometimes go horribly wrong, and every indication is that Operation Wide Receiver executed by the ATF during the Bush administration while Alberto Gonzales was the attorney general was a “keystone cops” operation of the first magnitude. It was a horrible failure.

But Fast and Furious was no accident.

Gun Economics: A Tale of Two Companies

Several months ago, Dick’s Sporting Goods stopped selling black rifles.  It was very noteworthy because they had contracted with Troy Industries and many, many people had rifles on order from Dick’s.  Dick’s managed to screw over both the consumer and Troy Industries at the same time.  But Dick’s pulled out of the firearm market and went limp from political pressure.

Today, Dick’s has posted a major loss, coming up short, and in laughable move, has blamed their performance issues on Lance Armstrong.

If there’s a silver lining for all the people who were eagerly waiting for that Troy Carbine and were vastly dissappointed, it’s that Dick’s isn’t doing so well in the financial department.

At a time where the only thing a company has to do to sell firearms, ammo and accessories is to unlock their doors, Dick’s sales have flat-lined. In fact, their sales dropped 2.2 percent  in the fourth quarter of 2012 compared to 2011 and their shares 10 percent in the last quarter.

Dick’s CEO pointed his finger squarely at, well, Lance Armstrong. “People had a very negative reaction to the Livestrong brand,” he said at an earnings report.

Except while Dick’s sales are going soft, other companies are doing quite well.  Cabela’s has been doing very well due to firearm sales – and those firearm sales have brought people in to the store to buy other products as well:

“First-quarter results exceeded our expectations on every line of the income statement,” said Cabela’s Tommy Millner. “In addition to expected increases in firearms and ammunition sales, we saw particularly strong performance in softgoods and footwear.”

Remember this is what Cabela’s gun racks looked like just three months ago:

Cabela’s at the floor level has a general approach within the company that it’s best to underpromise and overdeliver, and that may well extend to their higher levels as well.

“Without firearms and ammunition, same-stores sales increased just 9 percent — still strong, but clearly much of Cabela’s growth was driven by gun buyers,” wrote Jeremy Bowman of the Motley Fool. ”As the stock has now tripled in the past year and a half, investors may want to take a cue from their senators and sell while the stock is hot.”

We suspect it’s a bit early to start bailing on Cabela’s, that gun sales will stay strong for the coming months. What we can be sure on, however, is that while this boom is also a bubble, Dick’s failed to get in on much if any of it.

Cabela’s is wise enough to know that people are coming for the guns, but staying for the rest of the store, and that guns sales are a government-induced artificial bubble.  They probably will be continuing to do very well, even if their stock price begins to plateau.

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To give some idea what it’s looking like elsewhere in the gun world, consider that Sturm Ruger has had huge sales, and are now hammered with massive backorders.

Demand is still exceeding supply, and the bubble increase in demand (assuming the government doesn’t get progressively more tyrannical and spin us into Mad Max territory), is going to end up leaving an ultimately higher permanent demand than existed before the bubble started.

Some people are getting into the gun market so they can get their homeland security rifle and that’s it.

Some are getting into it because they think it’s a “last chance”, and some are getting into it because of concerns that guns will be more difficult to acquire – not a last chance, but a last easy option.  Some are getting into it because others are, and they want to see what it’s all about.

If the government’s inexorable push for citizen disarmament is stymied again for a while (and Joe “I Get Drunk With Your Rulers On My Black Tie Yacht And We Disarm You Pissants” Manchin is introducing another anti-rights bill), there will be a permanently elevated demand for ammunition and arms.

The public’s interest in firearms will have changed by the millions of votes in favor of the Second Amendment – the millions of votes not made at the ballot box, but with the money in Americans’ wallets.

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The American public is still taking the Brain Gremlin’s advice:

High Capacity Magazine PSA

From MB Studio Productions:

They note in their youtube comments section that technically, they’re talking about standard capacity magazines, but they’re using the media term to garner attention.

It’s also reminiscent of this disturbing ad by the Montana Meth Project.

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To gun-hating tyrants, the magic number is ultimately zero, whether it be pistol or rifle or shotgun.

DHS and Hollowpoints Explained

This has been done a few times here, addressing the initial 450 million rounds of JHP, then addressing it with Social Security’s investigators, and then debunking it again, but the story of DHS’s millions and billions of rounds keeps resurfacing.  And it’s good to ask questions, but some of them have answers that have already been given, and others are answers that just aren’t was widely known because they’re just a bit specific and technical.

From HotAir:

Why do they need to purchase huge stockpiles of ammunition? Far more, in fact, than the the Army buys on a per capita basis.

Homeland Security’s procurement officer is grilled in Congress on why federal agents who rarely fire weapons need several times more bullets annually than an Army officer. Who or what are they shooting at?

Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz on Thursday asked Nick Nayak, DHS’ chief procurement officer, a question we and others have been asking: Why has the Department of Homeland Security been buying so much ammunition?

The military doesn’t actually shoot that much.  Military personnel walk around on base unarmed, and their issued weapons are locked up in armories, stored far from ammunition (hence why civilian security stopped Hasan at Ft. Hood).  There just isn’t that much shooting done – for example, rifle qualification in the Marine Corps has been an annual thing for years.  Infantry may fire more rifle or machinegun rounds, armor crews may fire more machinegun rounds, but admin and intel and logistics and motor T and the like will fire maybe once a year.

By contrast, federal law enforcement goes everywhere armed.  They even fly armed.  Pistol, rifle, and shotgun qualification for federal law enforcement is often a quarterly event.  They carry guns every day, everywhere, in contrast to the military, which carries when deployed or on assignment, and sometimes not even then.

Law enforcement often operates as individuals who encounter violent criminals who are an immediate, personal threat to their lives.  The military operates as a large group, and in such a manner that overwhelming force is used to prevent losses.  A law enforcement officer is responsible for their own safety in an immediate and personal way, and can only fire when personally threatened.  The soldier, sailor, airman or Marine is responsible for his own safey as well, but in a different way, and very rarely is he alone, and he can fire when a target is present – whether or not that target is a personal threat to his own life.  The law enforcement officer usually can’t run and hide from a thug with a knife 10 feet away, but the soldier can usually take cover from fire 500 yards away and call for an airstrike.

Apples and oranges.

Chaffetz notes that DHS is currently sitting on more than 260 million rounds of ammunition. Their current claimed rate of expending bullets works out to between 1,300 and 1,600 rounds per officer each year, while the Army averages 350 per officer. Nyak agreed with the math, but insisted that DHS goes through roughly that amount every year, almost exclusively for training. But if it’s for training, there’s another question to be answered.

Another question is why so many hollow-point bullets are being purchased?

Federal law enforcement fires a lot more rounds per year.  They shoot a lot more.  They are issued ammunition for training and duty, and that ammo is the same.  The last thing you want to do is issue out some full metal jacket ammo for training and have someone carry it to the field.  The reason jacketed hollow points are used is because they’re very effective at energy transfer.  They’re good for stopping bad guys.

And that’s what law enforcement does.  Law enforcement shoots to stop.  Not to kill, but to stop an immediate, personal threat on the officer’s life.

That’s an important distinction, and one that needs to be made.

Full metal jacket rounds penetrate easily, but don’t do as much energy transfer.  They don’t create wounds that are immediately disabling the same way that JHP rounds do.  There is a plethora of information about this on the internet.

Full metal jacket:

Jacketed hollow point:

The duty and training ammo is the same because the agent training with it will know how it fires, how it recoils, and they’ll know how to handle it.  FMJ loads do not recoil the same out of a defensive pistol as a JHP duty/defensive round, either.  Ammunition is manufactured to its use, and JHP is manufactured to have to stop a threat, so the ammo is hotter, and recoils differently, which has effects on follow-up shots.

Pistol rounds in FMJ are not the best there is for self-defense, and are often wholly inadequate.

The duty and training ammo is also the same because if the agent were to bring a magazine loaded with FMJ to the field, and if the agent needed to stop a threat, the rounds wouldn’t perform as well.  If that threat overpowered him and the agent was killed, his family would have a pretty decent basis for a lawsuit on their hands.  Even if it were found to be the dead agent’s fault, the lawsuit would be expensive, as would the loss of an agency’s investment in a trained agent.

How many millions of dollars would that be, and how many millions would the repercussions be as compared to just buying JHP for everything?  Bean counters do those kind of numbers and find it’s probably easier just to spend the money once and just use JHP.

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There have also been specific incidents in which FMJ rounds have been used in the field by federal law enforcement, and failed.

In 2009, a Border Patrol BORTAC unit in Arizona tracking rip crews ran into an armed smuggler group, one of whom decided to engage one of the BORTAC members with a revolver.  The BORTACer did what he could to try to avert the attack by attempting to blind and disorient the smuggler with a high-power flashlight and get the subject to surrender.  Even knowing he was spotted and caught, the smuggler turned to fire. The BORTACer had to fire 14 rounds with his rifle, 11 of which hit his assailant.  The first 10 were center-of-mass hits, and did not stop the attacker.  The smuggler, despite receiving 10 wounds from a rifle, was still able to fire all 6 rounds from his revolver at the agent.  What stopped the attacker was the last round – a headshot.  The ammunition used by the BORTACer was 55 grain FMJ.

Would the smuggler have died due to the FMJ in the body?  Yes, later.  But as demonstrated, it did not stop his attack.

The law enforcement officer is responsible for all of his rounds.  He’s not shooting in a war zone.  The military soldier, sailor, airman or Marine is not responsible in the same way for every round he fires.

HotAir quotes IBD here:

As former Marine Richard Mason recently told reporters with WHPTV News in Pennsylvania, hollow-points (which make up the bulk of the DHS purchases) are not used for training because they are more expensive than standard firing-range rounds. “We never trained with hollow points. We didn’t even see hollow points my entire 4-1/2 (years) in the Marine Corps,” Mason said.

As already noted, with pistols especially, performance is different, both for training purposes and especially for application purposes in the field.

The reason the Marine Corps doesn’t train with hollow points is twofold.  One is that the Hague Convention of 1899 outlawed the use of soft points and hollow points (so even though the US didn’t agree, they weren’t exactly in use much), and the other more important reasons are that the military may have to engage targets through concealment and/or cover, or to destroy materiel as well as personnel.

A JHP round will deform when it hits an object, as it’s supposed to mushroom out and cause more immediate damage to an immediate assailant that needs to be stopped RFN.  An FMJ round is much more likely to penetrate objects and still retain some performance, enough to cause disabling wounds or injuries which will take a combatant out of the fight, even if it’s a few minutes later from blood loss.

For example, federal law enforcement is unlikely to shoot through walls or doors because they have to be sure of their target, and prove ability, opportunity, and intent of a lethal force threat to be legally justified in a shooting.  If someone runs into a building to hide, you probably don’t keep shooting, because they’re probably no longer an immediate lethal force threat.  It’s time to call the negotiators and sit.

By contrast, if a Marine or soldier has a target that runs into a building to hide, shooting through walls or doors is quite often an option.  That’s because the person they’re going after isn’t even called a threat, but a target.  The military doesn’t have to wait to fire in self defense (discussions of bad ROEs aside), the military identifieds targets and destroys them.  Law enforcement reacts to threats.

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JHP and FMJ rounds are used for different things.  DHS knows enough to buy it cheap and stack it deep, just like serious citizens have done for decades.  That’s just a matter of economics.  Is it good to ask questions?  Absolutely.

But it would be better to find out what Napolitano knows about terrorists that get in the country, and maybe why she’s allowed to not answer questions.

Or why Eric Holder, who’s killed DHS personnel in ICE and USBP through his Fast and Furious program, isn’t in prison.

Manchin And Toomey Still After Your Rights

From Newser, the Black Tie yacht drunks are back and still after your rights, peasant:

(Newser) – The push for stricter gun laws might not be quite so dead after all in the Senate. The New York Times reports that efforts are “quietly” underway to get something done on background checks and illegal trafficking. Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey, the co-sponsors of the background-check bill that got yanked last week, say they have been talking to colleagues to get rid of some objectionable loopholes. One potential compromise would allow a person who lives in a rural area to sell a weapon to someone without having to find a sporting goods store to facilitate.

So they’re admitting that they’re targeting “urban” people?  At least they’re getting more honest about their racism.

Looks like that’ll be a 14th Amendment violation for lack of equal protection under the law.

A separate initiative to crack down on illegal trafficking, which includes buying a weapon for someone who can’t legally own one, is being spearheaded by Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand and Republicans Kelly Ayotte and Chuck Grassley.

That last name is very interesting.  Chuck Grassley has been the spearhead of the senate move against Obama’s Fast and Furious program wherein the ATF gave guns to the Mexican narcoterrorist cartels.  He’s well aware of how anti-gun this administration is, he’s seen how the Department of Justice has held back and said nothing about Fast and Furious, and he’s well aware of the violent hatred of the Constitution demonstrated by this adminstration when it used the ATF to undermine the Second Amendment in order to push for gun control and oppression of citizens.  He’s very knowledgeable on the subject.

The story notes this at the end:

Gun-control supporters are working on a national campaign to put pressure on those in the “no” camp.

Yup.  They never stop.  Ever.  They have a need to destroy your rights.  It’s what they do, it’s all they do, and they will never, ever stop until they have their boot stamping on a human face forever.

Harry Reid Introduces S. 792 – Gunpowder Restriction Bill

Via GunsSaveLives, from The Hill:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday introduced a bill that would require background checks to be run on anyone buying explosive powder, a reaction to last week’s Boston Marathon bombing.

Reid introduced the bill, S. 792, for Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who has been out sick for much of the year. But in a press statement, Lautenberg said the Boston bombing shows that background checks are needed for explosive materials.

“It defies common sense that anyone, even a terrorist, can walk into a store in America and buy explosive powders without a background check or any questions asked,” Lautenberg said Tuesday.  “Requiring a background check for an explosives permit is a small price to pay to ensure the safety of our communities.

Note the clever wordplay.  What they want to ban is blackpowder, gunpowder, reloading supplies, and everything else associated with ammunition and firearms ownership.  Frank Lautenberg is famous for being as anti-gun as they get.  The shoddy attempt at avoiding saying “we want to ban gunpowder and disarm the citizenry” and instead saying “explosive powders” makes it sound like we’re getting attacked by Persian sorcerors.

If one were to look at it logically, they’d find that the Boston terrorists didn’t use gunpowder for ammunition, or black powder, or anything else related to guns.  I’ve mentioned it before, but terrorists and US gun culture are mutually opposed.  People in US gun culture are the type who either fancy themselves as someone who would stop terrorists… or are people who have stopped terrorists.

The Boston terrorists used fireworks.

A New Hampshire fireworks store has told the FBI that it sold four-hundred dollars worth of fireworks in February to accused Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

The gunpowder in fireworks is often used in bombs.

“He just wanted the biggest, loudest stuff we had in the store,” said Megan Kearns, the assistant manager of Phantom Fireworks, in an interview with ABC News affiliate WMUR.

So the proposed bill, which regulates only gun owners, and is only targeted at gun owners, would do absolutely nothing when it comes to what terrorists have done.  Lautenberg’s bill exists only to harass gun owners and reloaders and destroy American gun culture.  Firework gunpowder and ammunition gunpowder have been very different things for a long, long time now.

From the Hill:

Under current law, people can buy up to 50 pounds of explosive “black powder” with no background check, and can buy unlimited amounts of other explosive powders, such as “black powder substitute” and “smokeless powder.”

Lautenberg’s bill would require a background check for the purchase of any of these powders.

It would also let the attorney general stop the sale of explosives if a background check shows the applicant is a known or suspected terrorist, and if there is a belief the explosives will be used for terrorism.

He is going after gunpowder, not after what the bombers used.  They bought fireworks and disassembled them.  Lautenberg wants to destroy US gun culture one piece at a time.

It would also require a permit to make homemade explosives, and direct the government to study how to better trace the use of explosive powders.

So is Lautenberg that stupid or does he just think you are?  Terrorists would try to get permits to make homemade explosives?  Really?

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Also, as I noted when Lautenberg first proposed this Second Amendment-stomping dictate, you can still drive to your corner gas station and buy gallons and gallons of highly flammable, destructive gasoline.

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There also seems to be a cultural component to this.  I’m sure once he’s banned guns, next Lautenberg will be the type to want to ban fireworks, and leave all fireworks displays to specific fireworks-trained government-appointed authorities on fireworks who will handle that dangerous work and keep fireworks out of the hands of dangerous terrorists like you, so peons like you can celebrate International Workers Day and see the glorious fireworks of the state.  Were he on a smaller scale, he’d be the type to ban fireworks for “the children” because some North Park kid got his hand blown off, leaving you with snakes and snap-pops.

He’s surely that kind of nanny-state asshole as well as dictator wannabe.

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Link to the bill at govtrack (no text posted yet).

The Incessant Academic Argument For Tyranny and The Refutation of Freedom – Part 2

Part 1 here, mostly about food and people who want the government to dictate to them how they should eat.

And today, part 2, as we look at a Time Magazine piece titled “Tread on Me“.

America was born from resistance to tyranny, and our skepticism of authority is a healthy tradition. But we’re pretty free.

That’s good enough, right?  We’re “pretty free”.  It’s about time we move on in the Tytler Cycle and get back to bondage!  Woo-hoo!  Bondage!  The state will make us free from responsibility and dangers of the world!  They know what’s best for me!

the Don’t Tread on Me slippery-slopers on both ends of the political spectrum tend to forget that Big Government helps protect other important rights

Doesn’t work that way.  This is a question of whether people believe in more or less government control.  Americans believe in less government control, have traditionally always believed in less government control, and only ever believe in having government control them when they’ve been brainwashed and programmed.

But standby for incoming collectivist BS…

Like the right of a child to watch a marathon or attend first grade without getting massacred—or, for that matter, the right to live near a fertilizer factory without it blowing up your house.

There are no such rights.  To be free from danger is not only impossible, but even reduction of danger is not a right – it something paid for by someone’s work – whether it be the soldier, policeman, or factory manager and safety staff.

I guess you could call me a statist.

How about one who will lick the hand that feeds with his chains resting upon him, and someone who I would wish posterity would forget was my countryman?

Go ahead, quote the Ben Franklin line about those who would sacrifice some liberty for security deserving neither.

You forgot the last part – they deserve neither – and will lose both.

But what about the rights of 8-year-old Martin Richard, blown away after watching his dad finish the marathon? Who safeguarded the liberty of 6-year-old Charlotte Bacon, gunned down in her classroom in her new pink dress? What about Perry Calvin and Morris Bridges and the other victims of the West Texas explosion? Nobody read them their rights.

There are no such rights as to be free from danger – and there can be none.

This kind of high-minded utopian fantasy was cranked out back in the 1930s and 1940s by the FDR administration.  There were even oaths made to defend the freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Photo by ShortTimer

It is, by itself, nonsense.

Life? What ‘right’ to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What ‘right’ to life has a man who must die to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of ‘right’? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man’s right is ‘unalienable’? And is it ‘right’? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.

- Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers

You cannot legislate industrial accidents out of existence (unless you obliterate industry entirely – which is a goal of the left as a tool to fight Manbearpig).

You cannot legislate madmen out of existence.  You can forcibly disarm the populace, and leave them at the mercy of governmental ruler madmen like maniac cop Chris Dorner.  You can leave them at the mercy of government to make them “safe”.

You do all of those by destroying liberty, something that high-minded collectivist utopians have done in the past to construct human nature into what they want it to be – to “mold the world closer to their hearts’ desire”.

And it almost always looks the same in the end.

In contrast to those statist desires, you can safeguard the liberty of 6 year-old Charlotte Bacon.  You need a rough man ready to do violence on her behalf to safeguard that liberty – that liberty needs to be bought, but the left is terrified of the tools of violence to the point where they irrationally declare that to make the gazelle safe from the lion, you must strip the gazelle’s horns.

By the left’s logic, to make the child safe, you must leave her unguarded; and target those who would do her no harm but instead do seek to protect her.  There are people who are actively willing to put their own lives in harm’s way, but they are called monsters for demanding real security.  They are demonized for understanding the tools and nature of violence as defense and deterrent.

You can begin to defend the life of 8 year-old Martin Richard more by identifying the threat and dealing with the threat when it rears its head.  What killed him was islamic terrorism.  We know this.  We all know this, but our government denies it on the basis that their ideology rejects making that judgement.  By the response of the authorities in the Boston bombing case, there will be no more fatalities from those particular two terrorists.  The hundreds of lives saved, like the baker’s new suit in the Broken Window Fallacy, are easily forgotten because they never materialized.  There were no more terrorist attacks from those two because the terrorists were pursued (at a cost of life and harm) and stopped.

Yet there are still high-minded utopians who believe that if they just apologize enough, that if they are sensitive enough, they can stop people who chant for their deaths in the street through just well wishes.

And here’s where the Time writer gets worse:

Our rights are not inviolate. Just as the First Amendment doesn’t let us shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, the Second Amendment shouldn’t let us have assault weapons designed for mass slaughter.

This is, as Jonah Goldberg would say, bonesnappingly stupid.

The First Amendment totally and completely does let us shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

If the government could mandate a white-noise generator that would specifically tune into the sound of a human voice shouting the word “Fire!” so that it could never again be said in a theater and the First Amendment were restricted, what would happen when there is a fire and no one can shout the word?  What happens when no one can give the alarm?  What happens when that lifesaving tool is denied?  It would result in people burned to death.

The Second Amendment totally and completely does let us have modern firearms.  I have yet to take or instruct a firearms class wherein I have taught or been taught to use an “assault weapon” for “mass slaughter”.  Sorry, just doesn’t work that way.

The Second Amendment protects the natural right of self defense.  It codifies it in the Constitution and ensures that the tools of self defense will not be denied.  It does the same in that sense as the First Amendment protecting the word “Fire!”.  It exists as the last full response against oppression, large and small, whether it be a lone criminal or the force of a dictatorial government.

If used improperly or abused, it’s a crime, just like yelling fire when there’s no fire.  If used properly, it’s a wholly necessary lifesaving right; and it protects tools that allow for lives to be saved.  And just like the loss of yelling “Fire!”, if it is taken away, it ends up the same – the result is people burned to death.

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To revisit this quote from the “Tread on Me” masochist:

Those of us who support aggressive government action to protect the public ought to acknowledge that it does, at the margins, limit individual rights—the rights of gun owners, the rights of business owners, the rights of the accused. Go ahead, quote the Ben Franklin line about those who would sacrifice some liberty for security deserving neither. But what about the rights of 8-year-old Martin Richard, blown away after watching his dad finish the marathon? Who safeguarded the liberty of 6-year-old Charlotte Bacon, gunned down in her classroom in her new pink dress? What about Perry Calvin and Morris Bridges and the other victims of the West Texas explosion? Nobody read them their rights.

The Bill of Rights is there to limit government.  Governments create oppression.  In a state of nature, there may be terror, but there is no all-encompassing institution that can deny you your natural rights.  The Constitution is there as a contract of free men that created a limited government with the intention of protecting all of our natural rights possible while providing us tools to ensure greater protection for all as well.

I’ve been told that invoking the death of innocents is an emotional appeal rather than a logical argument. And I do admit these tragedies make me angry. But I think it would be logical for our government to try to limit these tragedies in the future.

The author thinks wrong.  There have been a million individual tragedies that are easily forgotten by their magnitude that were undertaken by free men (and sometimes conscripts) to preserve liberty, not to have it thrown away because some statist submissive grovels to beg for tyrants to enslave us all because he is a sniveling coward.

You want to protect people, do it yourself.  You want to prevent tragedies, do it yourself.  You want to tread on me because you’re a coward?  Then you become an oppressor, Mr. Grunwald, and you are trading bought-and-paid-for liberty for security that is not only fleeting, but wholly nonexistent.

We already sacrifice liberty all the time—our right to automatic weapons, our right to walk through airport security with our shoes on, our right to run our businesses however we please.

The writer is an amoebic poltroon who kneels before the might of the state.  We shouldn’t sacrafice our right to automatic weapons, our right to walk through airport security with shoes on, or our right to run our businesses however we please.  Excluding abuse of our rights, which infringes on someone else’s natural rights, it’s not the place of the government to do anything.  Just because the government has abused rights in the past, doesn’t mean we should tolerate it any further.

The rights of the next Martin Richard and the next Charlotte Bacon matter, too.

Yes, and the next Martin and the next Charlotte may be killed by leftists with utopian wishes who demand schools be gun-free zones, ensuring that only criminals and madmen intent on mayhem will be armed.  The next Martin and Charlotte, if they survived being left in a defenseless free-fire zone for 12 years of mandated government schooling, may not like being x-rayed by government lackeys who see them nude any time they get on a plane.  They may not like that when they go to start a business, that their government demands so much from them that it’s easier just to not start the business, that their freedom has been curtailed so much that they don’t have options for a business.

But they may grow up thinking they’re “pretty free”, because there’s always something worse.

The next Martin and the next Charlotte are not one or two children, they are millions of children who will grow into adults in a nation where they are less free.  The next boy may be bashed for being gay because he’s left disarmed against a mob, the next girl may be another Amanda Collins, who was raped because she was disarmed by government.  The next boy may have developed the motor that runs on static electricity, but will never make it because the government has regulated him into oblivion.  The next girl may not want to have her privacy violated by government every time she enters a private contract with an aircraft company to fly her somewhere.

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There are no shortages of people demanding destruction of liberty.  From Cass “We Must Dominate You For Your Own Good” Sunstein, to any of the intellectuals Thomas Sowell criticizes as dominating sheperds who demand you be their sheep, there is never a shortage of men who wish to dominate and control their fellow man.

There is always a question of how many people believe that becoming sheep is noble, and how many reject that destructive notion of bondage.

Media Forms “Human Shield” To Protect An Advocate Of Disarming You

From Real Clear Politics:

Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post, explains to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell how he and other “journalists” prevented Capitol Hill police from removing an anti-gun advocate from the Senate gallery after she yelled at Senators who voted down an amendment to expand background checks.

And so says the leftist reporter:

GRIM: I interviewed her along with a number of other journalists right afterwards. They were trying to escort her out of the building, but journalists kind of formed a human shield around her because they all had their microphone in front of her. The Capitol Police realized perhaps arresting a hero of Tucson, right after the Senate knocked down this sensible gun bill, wasn’t the best move, so they let her continue to talk.

There is nothing sensible about the bill.  It criminalizes citizens who have done nothing wrong, it would’ve subjected you to additional regulation while doing nothing to stop crime.

They claim a “hero of Tuscon” suddenly has moral authority over those who fought to defend rights, which disregards completely the heroes who fought to preserve those rights and why they fought.

But these are just, you know, 90%, 90% of people support this.

Lie lie lie, lie lie lie, lie lie lie lie.

And a 90% oppressor of a 10% minority is an oppressor.

There’s no Second Amendment right to 50 bullets, and yet here we are.

The Second Amendment covers arms.  There is no limit to one or 10 or 50 or 100 or 1000 bullets.

Hitler Finds Out Gun Control Failed in the Senate

The filibuster part could just be changed to straight up failed, as apparently the parody was made early.  Still hilarious.

NRA President David Keene on Senate Gun Control Stall

From Washington Examiner:

The head of the National Rifle Association mocked President Obama’s Rose Garden “tantrum” after losing the gun control fight in the Senate, charging Thursday that Obama suffered the worst defeat of his presidency because “he bit off more than he could chew.”

David Keene told Secrets that the president and his team misplayed their hand because they don’t have a sense of the public’s attitude toward gun control. “They just can’t gauge the public reaction to what they do because they don’t have any sense that the public has feelings different than they do,” said Keene.

“He thought and his folks thought that Newtown changed everything. Newtown was a tragedy but that doesn’t change people’s basic values and feelings,” added the NRA president.

Fact is, people are opposed to it.  The culture of the nation is opposed to having the government chip, chip, chip away at our rights.  This is the Country Class telling the Ruling Class “no”.

The loss devastated the president, who ranted about the NRA’s power during his Rose Garden address after Wednesday’s vote.

Keene, however, saw it differently. “It was the biggest legislative defeat he suffered but that does not justify the unseemly picture of a president of the United States throwing a public tantrum.”

Keene is spot-on here.  Obama was mad and ranting, calling the NRA and the pro-rights lobby “liars”.  Mind you, this is the same president who had the ATF send guns to Mexican narcoterrorist cartels and then claim executive privilege to hush it up.

Keene said that many lawmakers who voted against the background check expansion felt that if it passed, gun control advocates would simply return to the issue to chip away more at the Second Amendment, so they decided to “just stop it now.”

All you have to do is listen to what the Democrat anti-rights activists say:

They do not stop.  They will not be happy until everyone is disarmed and doing exactly as they say.

Keene had a good way of handling the leftists who want to “compromise” by sticking in just the tip, baby:

In a way, Keene signaled that to the sponsors of the Senate compromise, Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. Keene recalled that he took a day off last week to fish for trout on the Missouri River in Montana. “Unfortunately, I took my cellphone with me and my cellphone rings in the midst of my float and it’s Joe Manchin, who’s talking about how reasonable his idea is. And finally I said, ‘Look, I’m in the middle of the Missouri River, I’ve got a trout on the line. I don’t agree, you will have to make your own decisions, and I hung up. You have to keep your priorities straight.”

There is no compromise, and there’s no use in talking to someone who just wants to stick in the tip a little bit, baby.  No means no.

May as well go fishing.