Common Sense
Common Sense
Sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts.
Noticed lately how every call for more gun control laws are labeled as ‘Common Sense’? It’s the latest rhetorical device, designed to make all those who disagree look unreasonable. By labeling their arguments as common sense, they are declaring that their argument is valid, without the tedious process of actually presenting their case. In high school debate, this would be called Informational Fallacy.
Gun control proponents can’t win on facts, so they rely on emotional arguments and intellectually dishonest tactics to promote their ideals.
Don’t let them get away with it.
You labeling something as ‘Common Sense’ does not make it so. Common Sense was the argument used to prove that the earth was flat. The verdict at the Scopes Monkey trial relied on the ‘Common Sense’ of 12 jurors.
If you look at the facts, none of their agenda items are anything of the sort. There is no evidence that anything on their agenda will reduce criminal use of firearms in any way. Over the last couple of decades, concealed carry laws have swept the nation… and crime rates have fallen drastically. As John Lott has been saying for 20 years now… more guns, less crime.
Those facts don’t fit the gun control crowd agenda, so… shut them up. Call every draconian gun ban ‘Common Sense’. Tell the world that a huge majority supports their ideas… never mind that it’s all a lie, doesn’t matter, nobody is going to call you on it. Make the other side out to be nutcase, extremist, knuckle dragging cavemen. Not true… the fastest growing segment of people purchasing guns today is women, but that truth doesn’t fit the agenda, so ignore it.
As the old saying goes, if you have facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table. The gun control crowd has lost the argument on the facts, they’ve lost the argument on the law, all the ‘Common Sense’ argument shows is that they have been reduced to pounding the table.
Lowering firearm death rates, a pro-2A perspective.
A case for Freedom
Because of the mayor’s lack of support, the NYC PD staged a very effective ‘work slowdown’ protest. Thousands of parking tickets went unwritten, minor traffic violations were ignored, virtually nobody was arrested for drinking in public, or jumping the subway turnstile… Claims are that NYC lost somewhere north of 5 million dollars in fines and court fees. And the most important thing that happened was this…
Life went on.
According to Reuters: “During the slowdown, there was also a moderate decline in reports of murder, robbery and other serious crime, the data showed.”
That’s right, despite thousands of ‘crimes’ going unpunished, less murder, robbery, and ‘serious’ crimes. People went on with their lives. Society did not fall apart, despite all of those speeding tickets that never got written.
Now, Anarchist, I’m not. I tend to side with the police on most issues. If I had to guess, I’d say that most police officers would rather be chasing those ‘serious’ criminals than writing speeding tickets anyway. Not the cops fault, really… they’re not the ones who make the laws, they’re just charged with enforcing them. Seems to me, what this whole thing really shows, is that perhaps we don’t need all these laws in the first place.
Imagine that.
Jeb Bush for President?
A few years back, I posted an article about why I could never vote for John McCain. That primary ended with me having a choice of him, or BO… and, against my better judgment, I voted for ‘the lesser of two evils’. BO won anyway… and I developed a more critical thought process. I will never walk away from a voting booth with a sour taste in my mouth again. Practicality can take a flying leap, I’m voting for the best candidate, regardless of his (or her) chances of winning.
Here comes the election cycle of 2016, and people are starting to talk about Jeb Bush. Sorry, I’ll write in Mickey Mouse before I check Bush’s name on a ballot… and here’s why:
1: No way Bush would close the border. We badly need to secure our borders, there are lots of folks in this world who would like nothing better than to come here and re-play 9/11, and keeping a two thousand mile wide hole along our southern border is a pretty dumb thing to do. Add drug cartels to the mix, and it just gets worse. Here’s my position on illegal immigration: They’ll keep coming, as long as they can… and we’re making it easy. Hey, I’m no Native American… and I don’t have anything against Mexicans… heck, if I were there, and dirt poor, I’d try and come here too. We can debate until the cows come home over what to do with the millions of illegals that are here now… think it through. If we CLOSE THE DARNED BORDER, the illegal immigrant problem will resolve itself in a generation, right? Think Jeb is going to do that? Think again.
2: Big Government. Jeb’s an ‘establishment’ candidate. High taxes, more and more regulations, government poking its nose into everyone’s personal business… Government controlled education, big business, special interests… he’s a Bush. We’ll get much of the same thing we got from the first two.
3: He can’t win. Hillary is coming, and we need someone we can really get behind to defeat her. Another pro-establishment old white male isn’t going to do it. Honestly, nobody on the current list is very exciting to me… Perhaps a solid, conservative woman? Jan Brewer?? Nikki Haley?? Heck, I don’t know, but Jeb Bush? No chance.
Millionaires in politics
I keep seeing outcry on the left over the Koch family giving money to the right… Let’s look at this with some balance.
Yeah, the Koch family has given lots of cash to the right. To Republican and Libertarian candidates, as well as the Tea Party, Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, etc. I don’t have numbers here to quote, but I’m sure it’s a lot.
Fred Koch was an American chemical engineer, started an oil refinery business, and did very well. His family is still running that business, and is still doing very well. They give back to the country that allowed them to succeed. I know oil isn’t a popular product at the moment, but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t an important one.
The left’s equivalent, George Soros, was born in Hungary, educated in England, came to the US in his late 20’s. He made his money on investment speculation, much of it by selling short the British pound. He made billions, the British people lost billions.
Now, I don’t know if the money donated by Koch bros and Soros are anywhere near equivalent, honestly, I’d guess that Soros has given far more to the left than the Koch bros have given to the right, but the fact remains… screaming about the Koch family, while ignoring George Soros, seems a bit dishonest to me.
So, which of these two would you rather associate with politically, an American family who made their money in the oil business, making a product that, like it or not, everyone needs... or an investment speculator who immigrated to the UK, educated himself on the public dime, and then got rich by destroying their currency?
Spent round
Found this after busting up a cinder block with my revolver... .500 S&W Magnum, 350g Berry's plated bullet, travelling in the 1700fps range. Nice expansion, for something that was never designed to expand :) Measures 0.935"
SKS Rifle Customization
Several years back, a good friend of mine put together a 'how to', on modifying a basic, inexpensive (or at least they were then...) SKS rifle into something more Rifleman friendly. Since that friend isn't too tech savy, he then gave the document to me to make it available. Still getting hits on that old document... as valuable today as it was when he made it.
http://www.midkiff.us/sksltr.pdf
Enjoy, and Thanks, KR!
Mandatory Firearms Training
I recently read a facebook post, from Chester, a good friend of mine, recommending that gun owners undergo some sort of mandatory training in order to exercise their 2nd amendment rights. Another acquaintance of mine, Christopher, jumped on the bandwagon. ‘Training is good…’ they say. Well, they’re right, training is good. ‘Mandatory’ training, however, is most certainly not a good thing.
I’m going to strenuously disagree with my good friends Christopher and Chester on this one. Applying this sort of logic to the 1st amendment, you could purchase a typewriter or computer, but if you’re going to publish your opinions, well, that requires a license. Sound good to you? “ …the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Please explain to me how what you’re proposing does not infringe on the right to bear arms? Can you give me an example of any other right that depends on training, licensing, or fees in order to exercise that right? Who do you propose we trust to tell us how much training we need, how much is ‘fair’ in licensing fees, what other restrictions we might have… Nancy Pelosi? Barack Obama? Claire McCaskill?
What benefits are going to come of gun owners accepting these restrictions on our right, acknowledging that our rights are subject to government approval, and therefore, not really rights at all, but privileges? Chester proposes that “this type of law would probably save the lives of lot children who are killed every year in accidental shootings”. According to the national center for health statistics, the annual number of deaths among children due to accidental shooting is down 90% since 1975. 1.1% of all accidental deaths are caused by firearms. With all of the regulations, taxes, and fees applied to driving a vehicle, vehicles still account for 41% of accidental deaths in this country. Do you really believe legislation requiring training, safe storage, licensing fees, etc. is really going to lower this number significantly? There is no benefit, aside from making people ‘feel’ safer, in any such legislation.
Carrying a firearm for self-defense without sufficient training is stupid. On that point we can agree. Legislation banning stupidity is even more so. I pray that you will both reconsider your positions. Actively campaigning for additional restrictions on our rights is good for one group of people only, those who want to do away with the 2nd amendment altogether. Right now, Obama is pushing some BS about 90% of gun owners who want universal background checks. This kind of thing hurts… badly.
Divide and conquer works for them. In 94, Clinton used duck hunters to push his ‘nobody needs an AR’ agenda, and got his assault weapons ban passed. In 86, nobody stood against the Hughes amendment, and the full-auto registry was closed, without so much as a whimper from pro-2a groups. Now, you want to voluntarily divide us again, in to pro/anti mandatory training camps? We MUST STAND TOGETHER. No new anti-gun legislation, no new restrictions on the 2nd amendment, whatsoever. If we don’t, it’s only a matter of time, they’ll all be gone.
Arm our school employees
The tragic events in Connecticut last week have touched us all; my prayers go out to all involved in this horrific event. Over the weekend, I’ve seen no less than a dozen calls for new gun control laws, ranging from banning anyone who has ever been treated for mental illness, to another ‘assault weapons’ ban. Neither would have prevented this tragedy, of course, but still, the calls go out to DO SOMETHING. This idiot broke at least a dozen different laws in committing this act, and multiple counts of most of them. If he hadn't killed himself, no doubt he’d be looking at multiple life sentences, most likely in solitary, since his life expectancy in general population would be quite short. Needless to say, he wasn't discouraged by the thought of punishment for his crimes. Why would anyone think that adding a few new laws would have stopped him, or anyone who gets the same idea in the future?
LAWS DON’T PREVENT CRIMES, THEY PUNISH THE GUILTY. Law enforcement didn't do anything wrong here, it’s not their job to prevent things like this from happening; it’s their job to find and punish criminals after the fact. Since this guy killed himself, about the only thing law enforcement can do is to tell us exactly what happened, and clean up the mess. In order to prevent this sort of thing, something else has to change. The way I see it, there are 3 things that we could do to prevent this sort of thing in the future.
Option 1, the Brady bunch dream: Ban guns. If we threw out the 2nd amendment and passed a law that made all civilian ownership of firearms illegal… would that stop this sort of crime? How long has the ‘war on drugs’ been raging now, over 40 years? Do you think we might be as successful in banning guns as we have been in banning drugs? The last time we took a popular, widely available product and banned it completely was in 1919, with the 18th amendment, prohibition of alcohol. Everyone remember how successful that experiment was? Banning firearms in this country will not take guns out of the hands of criminals, who are already legally prevented from owning guns.
Option 2: Better security. We could build fences, topped with concertina wire, around our schools, with armed security at the gates. This might work… it’s been fairly successful in Israel. Of course, turning our public schools into prisons might not be very popular, and may well have a less than positive impact on educating our children, but the option is there. I don’t know what the cost would be… how many schools are there in this country? How much would it cost to surround each of them with a good security fence, outfit them with a guard post at all of the gates… I have no idea. Can’t imagine it would be cheap, but hey, they’re getting ready to raise the debt ceiling once again, what’s a few billion added to our current debt?
Option 3: Allow our school employees to arm themselves. This seems to be a very unpopular solution, but would it work? Violent crime rates fall in states with liberal concealed carry laws. Virtually every mass shooting that has occurred in this country has been committed in a ‘gun free’ location. Could an armed teacher prevent this sort of thing? Who knows? At a minimum, they could reduce the number of victims. Seems to me it would be much harder to wipe out classrooms full of kids when the teacher is shooting back at you. Properly trained teachers, administrators, and custodians at our schools are unlikely to injure a student on purpose. These school employees are already being screened, right? Cost to the taxpayer is near nothing... and schools don’t look like a prison camp. Seems the only reasonable solution to me.
Denial, ignorance, and fear. These are _not_ the weapons that our children should have to rely on for their safety.
Assault Weapons
I hear so much misinformation on the subject of so-called ‘assault weapons’, that I thought I’d spend a few minutes to put together some actual, verifiable facts on the subject.
First, the term ‘assault weapon’ itself… this term was made up by anti-gun groups for political purposes. From a gun owner’s perspective, the category simply doesn’t exist. The idea is this, if we can’t get political support to eliminate guns entirely, we’ll divide guns up into different groups, and go after them one at a time. The term is applied to anything that looks like something the military might use. Functionally, there is absolutely no difference between a modern AR15 and great-grandpa’s 1905 Winchester hunting rifle. The only difference is in how it looks. Remember the ‘Assault Weapons Ban’ of the Clinton era? It banned guns, not based on functionality, or capability, but simply on cosmetic features, such as adjustable stocks, pistol grips, etc.
Assault weapons use extremely powerful ammunition: No, they don’t. The most common rifles that would be considered ‘assault weapons’ by people who use that term, would be the AR family of rifles. In fact this platform uses a very mild cartridge. From a hunting perspective, this caliber is suitable only for small game… typically referred to as a varmint round, used mostly for prairie dogs, coyotes, that sort of thing. Compared to serious hunting calibers, these rifles are quite mild.
Assault weapons are only good for killing people: Tell that to the millions of shooters who use AR15 type rifles for competitions, hunting, target shooting, or just plain fun. AR platform rifles are light weight, easy to shoot, low recoil, accurate, reliable, and modular. Those qualities make it an ideal target rifle. It’s the single most popular type of rifle in the civilian market, and has been for years.
Assault weapons are the same as Machine Guns: Ask the BATFE on that one, they created the definition. A Machine Gun is capable of firing multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger. Machine guns are strictly regulated and heavily taxed by the BATFE. They have a list of civilian owned machine guns, and it’s been illegal to add to that list since 1986. The hundreds of thousands of AR and AK type rifles being sold every year in this country are all semi-automatic, meaning that a single round is fired with each press of the trigger. They can’t be converted into machine guns legally, and have been designed specifically to make such a conversion as difficult as possible.
Assault weapons are commonly used by criminals: Wrong. According to the FBI, 358 murders were committed in 2010 by all types of rifles combined, we don’t know how many of those could be considered ‘Assault Weapons’, as the FBI doesn’t use that term either. To put that number in perspective, 745 people were beaten to death with bare hands during the same year. Hardly the scourge of humanity that the anti-gun people would have you believe.
Banning guns, assault rifles or otherwise, provides no benefit to society, and has many negative consequences. Like it or not, the cat is out of the bag, when it comes to firearms. They’re not terribly complicated devices, a functional firearm can be built with tools and materials found in a typical suburban garage. Keeping such a simple device completely out of the reach of people willing to commit crimes is simply impossible. They exist, and they’re always going to, at least in the hands of criminals, who, by definition, don’t follow the laws. Thus, if you ban guns, only criminals will have them. Guns are used defensively by law abiding citizens many times as often as they are used by criminals. They also prevent corrupt governments from committing acts of genocide. Hitler had to ban guns before he could round up the Jews. Same in Rwanda, Russia, China, everywhere in the world where this type of despicable behavior has happened, civilian gun ownership was banned. The founding fathers of this great nation believed that an armed populace was the only guarantee of a free society, and they placed the 2nd amendment in the bill of rights to keep that promise. I, for one, will fight with any means necessary to keep that promise for my children.