The Gunner's Blog

Just today. http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/shooting-at-carver-high-school/nWB9y/ An armed police resource officer apprehended the suspect, also a student at the school, “within minutes,” authorities said during a late afternoon news conference. Charges against the suspect are pending... I want every journalist eating crow who said we were all lunatics for calling for armed school guards. If you are unfamiliar with how to obtain a crow I will show you how to shoot one. Wait. That would mean I would have to teach you gun safety and how to shoot, unless, like Obama, you "shoot skeet all the time." Journalists who are continually careless with their facts--I'm not sure I'd want the job of teaching them to handle guns responsibly. Get the facts wrong when it comes to safe gun handling and someone could get hurt. The big story here is the guard who stopped it with only one student wounded. Apparently the student hit was grazed. That's good over all. We wo...

Another H/T to my buddy out in Free America!

A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities. -- Thomas Jefferson What's striking about this quote is how little it resembles America in the present day. It comes from Jefferson's first presidential inaugural address, delivered in 1801. You can read the rest of the speech here . Indeed, the rest of it bears little resemblance to national politics in 2013. It is jarringly different from Obama's second inaugural speech, which speaks of goals either conflicting with the above ideals or even directly opposite them. You can read Obama's address here .

Some news media outlets are distinctly one-sided in their coverage, giving every advantage to the anti-gun side and short shrift to the other. Fortunately we still have some choices in our news sources. Fox News gave Wayne LaPierre a chance to answer some of the allegations and to attempt to bring some clarity to the discussion. If you have been following the news from other sources, you might have the impression that Wayne LaPierre is a lunatic, but he seems sensible enough when you listen to him rather than people talking about him, people who have long been hostile to his position. Well, you decide: Does he sound crazy to you? 18 January 2013 Here he goes into more detail, speaking before the Weatherby Foundation's annual dinner. He sounds pretty level-headed to me! In fact he goes right to the heart of this debate, which is finally about truth versus hysteria and involves intentional distortions on the other side, even distortions of the meanings of w...

You oughta read Wayne Allyn Root's article, " Why I Just Joined the NRA ." He tells it like it is. He has produced an excellent review of the contradictions and failures involved in gun control efforts. For that reason the article is an excellent backgrounder for you to offer to anyone who has not heard any side but Obama's. Then Root gets to the nub: I’m a proud Jewish American. Over six million of my fellow Jews were enslaved, starved, tortured, and then slaughtered by Adolph Hitler. Before it could happen, in 1938,  Hitler banned gun ownership for Jews. The reality is that throughout history, the first thing all tyrants do, is disarm the citizens. Then the mass killings begin. In the end we all have to remember our second amendment was not put in place to protect us from criminals and random crime. It was put in place to protect us from our own government. Thomas Jefferson put it best:  "When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the pe...

I have asked on twitter whether this is who I think it is, photographed years and years before she became famous. And, presumably, before she learned about the Four Rules . Her finger should be OFF the trigger because her sights are not ON the target. That is because all guns are always loaded. If you doubt it, go around touching triggers at random.  Other than that, I can't fault the pic or the caption...except...please, people. "It is" has for its contraction "it's," while "its" is a possessive pronoun. 

Some have questioned whether the Second Amendment is still useful as a measure against tyranny. Of what use are rifles and pistols against tanks, jet planes, artillery and the rest of the might of a modern army? It is a sensible question. It is sensible, at least, if it is honestly asked, without a snarky presumption that the conclusion is foregone. Hard, grim and costly such a conflict surely would be. But hopeless? The first indication that it is not hopeless is every tyrant's insistence on disarming the people he means to oppress. It is a consistent habit shown by oppressors throughout history, including recent history. If the householder's rifle is no great threat, why take it away from him? For his own good? Hah. Enough willing people with small arms can soon make a country ungovernable. That is a good start on removing an oppressor. It is not certain that the resistance would permanently be limited to small arms. In the Chinese Revolution, the Communists got much o...

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.  -- Rahm Emanuel  The left is exploiting the Newtown tragedy pursue a big wish list of anti-gun measures long held in readiness by gun control advocates. The crisis they were waiting for has arrived.  Most of the proposals now flying around Washington are old ones. They have long existed in the hopes and dreams of anti-gun organizations such as the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center. They have been featured for years in their web sites and newsletters. The gun control contingent has used the tragedy to bring out their wish list of further regulations. It does not seem to worry anyone on the left that many of the measures proposed have nothing to do with the Newtown massacre and few would have been of any use to prevent it. The measures are not good responses to Newtown or other recent mass shootings and indeed we...

H/T to my shooting buddy, way out there in far-away Free America.

If people propose to do something and justify their proposal with lies, it should be a warning to us that there is something wrong with the thing they propose to do. The leftists are supporting their drive for more gun laws with an astonishing array of falsehoods. Any lie will do if it advances the cause. The 40% Fabrication President Obama has declared that 40% of gun sales happen without background checks. When I heard that I knew it was wrong. I did not have statistics to back it up, just years and years of being around the gun scene. Fortunately someone with info on the stats came forward and shot down the President's canard:   http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/337958/gun-sales-and-background-checks-obamas-bogus-40-percent-stat-john-fund Private transfers occur only rarely and mostly between family members or shooting buddies. There is too much potential for a legal problem otherwise. Give, sell or swap your gun to someone who later commits a crime ...

It seems to me to pose a moral problem and a practical problem to restrict my gun rights on the basis of what happens in some drug-fueled free fire zone across town. . . If you infringe my rights because of the actions of lunatics, it fails the test of proportionate response: I am not a lunatic. The gangs If we are really going to have a broad national debate on gun violence, let us focus our attention first on where the biggest problem lies. America's violence problem is peculiar among other developed and civilized nations in that our problems are strongly localized. America is a peaceful country most places you go. Gun violence tends to concentrate around certain social and demographic factors: urban blight, government dependency and the drug trade. These factors are complexly interrelated, but it would take too much space to unpack all that here. Doubtless that is fodder for another broad national debate. For the present, it is enough to look at who shoots wholesale not...

Every time I hear that line that says gun owners must be compensating for something I feel like pointing out that my preferred sidearm is the snubnose. My nose is rather large...

Smear and sneer, blame and shame. These are the tools of the modern left. I am alarmed to discover--courtesy of the leftists--that the NRA is responsible for the deaths of children. As a longtime voting member of that organization, I do not recall that we ever supported that. Our  Eddie Eagle thing, a gun safety and awareness program for children and parents, and which includes schools and teachers, seeks the opposite outcome. More recently we are working on improving children's physical safety at school with a new look at building security, which includes armed guards. I notice some anti-gun spokespeople, no more than half seriously I hope, publicly wishing for my death. Kill the NRA! I find this awkward to answer. If they mean it they are deranged; if they don't they are overwrought. I am a citizen supporting a constitutional right. Here we have people saying I ought to be shot on account of it. But that's politics in the age of Alinsky : Conservativ...

To say the citizen will never need thirty rounds for his own defense is clearly at odds with the evidence provided by real world shootings. Most shots fired in gunfights miss. That is true even for skilled and experienced shooters. There are several reasons. Fear, excitement, adrenaline and confusion combine so that more misses are fired than hits. Unless you are a sociopath, you also have within you a bit of mental resistance to the idea of shooting someone else, even when it is plain that is what you need to do.  That resistance may surface later, after the shooting stops, as post shooting stress, but it is present at all times, and may contribute to missing your target. Some people have even felt a moment of hesitancy when aiming at human-outline silhouette targets at the shooting range.  Compounding these problems is that your assailants in a gunfight are likely to be in motion or taking cover behind whatever is available. Still another factor con...

I want to talk for a moment to those who disbelieve all spiritual narratives--the secularists who think gods are delusions and religions are folly. I want to talk about a repeating pattern in ghastly crimes. The killer kills a number of people. Then, in many cases, he kills himself. The religious person may well look at this in terms of demons and demonic influence. The disbeliever in such things needs to cast about for words like psychopathology and schizophrenia that are longer. Grant that we are talking on some level about the same thing. We see the one outcome and have two explanations. Under either explanation, passing laws to deter madmen does not deter them. They mean to kill themselves; what can the law do to them after that? Or let us say the crazed murderer gives up to police instead--some do. Already he faces justice for multiple murders. He will get the maximum--life in prison, the death penalty or commitment,  permanent we may hope, as criminally insane. N...

I see some troubling factors in America's current situation, an unwholesome convergence of symptoms in the body politic that are merely annoying singly, but together feel rather like something worse. Can you put your finger on why I feel uneasy? I do not believe in global conspiracies, only the habit of mankind to repeat the same mistakes: the dog, the vomit, the sow and the mire. Here are the factors I find troubling when seen together: Charismatic leader Leader has some thuggish associates And some very rich and socially elite associates Socialist ideology is popular Economic instability is evident Rising food prices Government interference in businesses and markets Hateful rhetoric directed at the leader's political opponents Evasion of answering the rational cases posed by the political opposition Leader calling for strict gun control Gun control is supported with misleading claims Growing dependency on handouts Recruiting  children as political dupes Re...

Deputy Carolyn Gudger (AP photo) August 30, 2011--a gunman attempted to gain entry to a Tennessee high school. He was thwarted by armed school resource officer Carolyn Gudger, who held him at bay until more officers arrived. The responding officers, finding the gunman still in an intractable mood, shot him dead.  That is how school shooter incidents are supposed to work. You did not hear about Deputy Gudger's heroism in the national news. You will not hear about it as the discussion rages about armed guards at schools. Here are some local stories about it: http://www.tricities.com/news/article_35434f30-00d3-522f-98f1-58f372591713.html http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2010/aug/31/school-official-commends-deputy-reaction-gunman/ The New York Times ran a snippet  at the time, and some photos, but nothing about the salient fact of the whole matter: An armed guard posted at a school to serve and protect did just that, and saved the day.  Depu...

In a gunfight, most shots fired miss, so you want extra tries. I don't own an AR-15 myself. My interests lie elsewhere. I have fired or examined a representative sampling of AR-15 and M-16 weapons, though. Every citizen should have a working knowledge of the service rifle, even if he prefers something else. I will, however, argue that an AR-15 is entirely a suitable weapon for defense of home and hearth, thus just the sort of thing the Second Amendment has in its view to protect. For many families' purposes it is an ideal choice. The wife and kids can shoot it if they have to  The type is inherently easy to shoot. Its good ergonomics, straight-line stock and light recoil make it easy to manage, even for women and teens. Here is a story where a teen used his dad's AR-15 to defended himself and his sister. It is quite accurate More so is better than less so, in a defensive firearm. The AR-15 is more accurate than most comparable types. That also helps to s...

The purposes of the Second Amendment and its associated traditional rights include Assuring that the people can protect their own lives, come what may--from brigands and highwaymen, for example; Giving the states a pool of citizens, and arms, from which to form defense forces at need; As a last resort, resistance to tyranny, whether the tyrant is foreign or domestic. All of these can be summed up, for my purposes here, in a single principle: The people are to have arms adequate for their own defense against armed aggression. That means something like parity in armament with those who may threaten them. A flintlock musket will  no longer suffice. The people need arms that enable them to oppose criminals and tyrants and do it with some prospects of success. There are limits, of course, to what sort of weaponry the Second Amendment protects. The Heller decision took that into account. But it makes nonsense of the decision, and of the whole purpose of the Se...

H/T to The Truth About Guns blog  and The Michael Bane Blog .

The serpent said to Eve, "You will be like God, knowing good an evil." He was offering her the power of independent moral judgment. Previously the boundaries of her conduct were set by God. God's commandment was that she and Adam not interfere with that. They were not to eat of the tree of knowing good and evil. The narrative permits several readings, some literal, some metaphorical and some that blend the two. However you read it, the central point is the same. Mankind's problems stem from taking upon ourselves the definitions of good and evil, taking the matter out of God's hands. The trouble is we continually get it wrong. Biased by self interest, blinded by ignorance or simply because we're perverse, we call bad things good and good things bad. The same old lie just keeps rolling along, causing one disaster after another. In Jesus' day, Pilate offered the cynic's defense: "What is truth?" He pardoned Barabbas, condemned Jesus and...