The Gunner's Blog

Help design a new program to introduce people to shooting, that emphasizes safety and fun at the same time. An editorial in the Bangor Daily News proclaims: "If we changed the smoking culture, we can change the gun culture." It then outlines a plan for shaming and blaming that is supposed to discredit the "gun culture," that mostly imaginary bogeyman of the leftist anti-gunners. Of course the smears against smokers, smoking and smoke are out of all proportion to the real dangers, viewed statistically, but that has not stopped the cultural busybodies; such people never let truth get in the way of their cause du jour. The above article follows that pattern, with several distortions or flat out lies about shooting, shooters, shooting industries and the dangers of guns. The article makes one or two good points as well, but the lying is the predominant aspect. I do not say that only because I disagree with the thrust of the article; there are matters here of substan...

Some years ago, back in the nineties, I went into town with the intention of buying a Colt Commander .45. I came home instead with a German made SIG Sauer P220 in the same caliber, and it has turned out to be a truly outstanding sidearm. It did not look to me like a great pistol. The dull black finish and utilitarian plastic grips were plain and even homely alongside Colt's blue and walnut splendor. The SIG also looked rather square and blocky. I looked at the plain jane imported pistol, sitting there in the counter, then at its hefty price tag, and wondered what was going on. How could they charge that much for an ugly gun? Doesn't look like much. Appearances can be deceiving. The clerk explained that cops were buying SIG's to replace their revolvers. See? There is no safety catch, just a decocker that lowers the hammer safely when you press it. The first shot fires just like a DA revolver. After that the gun fires single action, as the recoiling slide cocks the h...

Here is a story I find disturbing.  The people at True the Vote, a tea party group, were targeted by the IRS, and mysteriously at the same time were scrutinized by several other agencies, FBI, BATFE and even OSHA. They also had problems with a state agency involved in environmental regulations. They were sued by the Democratic Party of their state and an ACORN group. That's a big stack of problems to deal with. This story raises important questions about the role and proper limits of government in our daily lives, questions of privacy, of fairness and equal justice, and of government powers wielded as a weapon in partisan politics. It may be that these questions all have simple and harmless answers, and this pile-on by government was just one of those things, coincidental to the political angle. But I have trouble believing in coincidences that big. Matters certainly look on their face as if the Democrats were simply out to get someone whose views t...

 Will the West's dalliance with socialism avoid the murderous phase and proceed directly to the abject collapse? The Socialism Lite schemes of Western Europe are in trouble. The politicians go to great lengths to deny it. Europe's economy is feeble and sure to remain so, since what is weakening it is exactly the stuff the politicians are pushing--wealth transfers from the productive parts of the economy. When you believe that each one's needs must be met by someone else's abilities, things always get awkward. To the extent that the Obama Left has succeeded in imposing the same nonsense on the USA, we will suffer the same kinds of problems. We will see an economy marked by businesses doing only minimal risk taking, sluggish growth in employment and rising dependency of the public on government checks. As dependency grows, money to back the government handouts will become more and more scarce. Note that printing dollar bills does not make money less sca...

Here the president repeats the previously discredited canard that Mexico's gun violence is due to our gun laws:  http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/05/03/obama_blames_us_for_gun_violence_in_mexico_pushes_for_gun_control.html He thinks his voice reaches people that gun bloggers, NRA circulars and mass media not in the tank for Obama do not. It undoubtedly is so, but we need to make his margin as slim as possible. What he is doing is echo an old worn yakking point of gun control folks, one which blurs an important distinction. A number of American guns in Mexico were  lawfully sent to militaries and police in Latin America, from whence these same guns mysteriously (elaborate Latino shrug) escaped to arm Mexican gangsters. This is not the same as guns coming from Bubba's Tackle & Bait in Texas, for you do not buy full auto rifles and grenades and machine guns and so on from Bubba. That's a big giveaway. See:  http://www.nraila.org/legislation/federal...

Here we have another story --there have been too many--about a little kid with unsupervised access to a firearm, doing something heedless with it, with tragic consequences. A five year old was playing with a gun, it discharged. The bullet struck his two year old sister and killed her. If the incident occurred as reported, it was entirely preventable. That is what gun safety advocates have been pointing out for years. There is no need for things like this to happen. The horror of the incident with be with that family permanently. The effects are not limited to one broken and grieving family, however. Already, the anti-gun contingent is building up this incident as a pretext for further restrictions on us all, and is portraying youth-sized firearms and kids learning to shoot as something sinister . We don't need further restrictions, or further calumnies against us, we need to use good sense and thus employ precautions we already know about. There is nothing so very difficult ab...