If You Outlaw Pencils, only Outlaws Will Have Pencils

I wouldn’t blame foreigners for thinking the United States is a bit schizophrenic.

This is a nation where you can own a tank or a machine gun, and it’s a country where there are probably more guns than people.

Yet it’s also a country where little kids get suspended for throwing imaginary grenades while playing alone on a playground. A country where cops arrest 10-year olds for having toy guns. And a country where small children get kicked out of school for pretending their hands are guns and saying “pow, pow.”

And now, apparently, it’s a country where kids can’t point a pencil at a buddy and make shooting noises.

Oh my God, It’s an assault pencil!

Here are some of the absurd details from a local CBS news report.

Two Suffolk second graders have been suspended for making shooting noises while pointing pencils at each other. Media outlets report the 7-year-old boys were suspended for two days for a violation of the Suffolk school system’s zero-tolerance policy on weapons. They were playing with one another in class Friday at Driver Elementary. “When I asked him about it, he said, ‘Well I was being a Marine and the other guy was being a bad guy,’” said Paul Marshall, one of the boys’ fathers. “It’s as simple as that.” Marshall, a former Marine, said he believes school officials overreacted. …Bradshaw said the policy has been in place for at least two decades. It also bans drawing a picture of a gun and pointing a finger in a threatening manner. Marshall said his son has good grades and no history of being disruptive in class. On the suspension note, the teacher noted that the boy stopped when she told him to do so. He said school administrators failed to use common sense.

I’m almost at a loss for words. This wasn’t just one brainless bureaucrat. At the very least, both a teacher and an administrator were involved in this farce.

These are the people we want educating our children?!?

At least the dad had the cojones to criticize the bureaucrats.

With apologies to Martin Niemöller, I can’t resist this bit of satire.

First they came for the pop tarts,
and I didn’t speak out because I didn’t care for breakfast pastries.

Then they came for the pink bubble blowers,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a bubble blower.

Then they came for the cupcakes,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a cupcake eater.

Then they came for pencils,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

By the way, the United States is not the only nation suffering from a pathetic and wimpy form of political correctness. Here are some examples of how our cousins across the ocean have gone bonkers about guns.

• A women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.
• There was a proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• Starting pistols have been banned from some school races.
• There have been calls for knife bans.
• A man was arrested for shooting a burglar who invaded his house.

These are all example from my series comparing brainless policies in the United States and United Kingdom. Though I’m ashamed to say that this latest story puts the United States in the lead in this government-stupidity contest.

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Laughing at Obama’s Belly Flop on Gun Control

I’ve shared serious articles on gun control, featuring scholars such as John Lott and David Kopel.

I also posted testimonials from gun experts and an honest liberal.

But I haven’t specifically criticized Obama’s agenda.

And I’ve shared lots of gun control humor, such as this IQ test that I posted for liberals and criminals, this very effective neighborhood watch group, and several amusing videos linked at the end of this post. I’ve also shared clever pro-Second Amendment posters here, here, here, here, here, and here, and some amusing images of t-shirts and bumper stickers on gun control here, here, here, and here.

But with the possible exception of this poster, none of this humor has focused on Obama.

So let’s rectify this oversight, starting with the VFW sign that appeared in my inbox yesterday. Looks real, though I make no guarantees about its provenance.

Then we have a very good Lisa Benson cartoon celebrating President Obama’s legislative acumen on gun control.

By the way, my all-time favorite gun joke is the one explaining the difference between liberals, conservatives, and Texans.

Though the Alabama tan definitely gets honorable mention for obvious reasons.

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15-Year Old Speaks Truth to Power on Gun Control

I’ve shared some great videos on the Second Amendment and the individual right to keep and bear arms.

• Ted Nugent talking about gun ownership and the right of self defense.
• A look at the Switzerland’s strong gun culture and the importance of self defense as a protection against oppression.
• And some very powerful testimony to some weasels on Capitol Hill (make sure to pay attention around the 5:00 mark).
• Ice-T talking about the real reason to defend and support the 2nd Amendment.
• A Reason TV video with five facts for Vice President Biden’s task force.
• A look at how a young woman can defend herself.
• Mocking Piers Morgan.

Here’s another video for the collection. If I was in high school, I’d ask this young lady to be my girlfriend.*

And since I’m sharing videos against gun control, let’s close with some humorous examples.

• A revealing look at how leftists think about gun control.
• A heartwarming adoption story.
• An amusing cartoon conversation between an anti-gun ideologue and a supporter of the Constitution.
• This Christmas greeting from the Second Amendment.
• Joe Biden’s self-defense advice.

Joe Biden, needless to say, was unintentionally funny.

*Full disclaimer: Given my lack of success in high school, I would have asked any young lady to be my girlfriend.

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The United Nations and Gun Control: Two Negatives Don’t Make a Positive

Citing the analysis of America’s former Ambassador to the United Nations, I wrote last year about a treaty being concocted at the United Nations that would threaten our right to keep and bear arms.

Well, with the aid of the Obama Administration, this new treaty has been approved. Fortunately, there probably are not 67 votes in the Senate to ratify the measure.

And that’s a good thing. The Wall Street Journal has a column by John Bolton and John Yoo explaining why the new U.N . treaty is so misguided and dangerous.

…the new treaty also demands domestic regulation of “small arms and light weapons.” The treaty’s Article 5 requires nations to “establish and maintain a national control system,” including a “national control list.” …Gun-control advocates will use these provisions to argue that the U.S. must enact measures such as a national gun registry, licenses for guns and ammunition sales, universal background checks, and even a ban of certain weapons. The treaty thus provides the Obama administration with an end-run around Congress to reach these gun-control holy grails.

But doesn’t the Second Amendment protect our rights, regardless?

Unfortunately, that’s not clearly the case, as Bolton and Yoo note.

The Constitution establishes treaties in Article II (which sets out the president’s executive powers), rather than in Article I (which defines the legislature’s authority)—so treaties therefore aren’t textually subject to the limits on Congress’s power. Treaties still receive the force of law under the Supremacy Clause, which declares that “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” …this difference in language between laws and treaties allows the latter to sweep more broadly than the former.

One thing we can state with certainty is that opponents of individual rights will use the treaty to push an anti-gun agenda inside the United States. And since the Supreme Court has upheld the Second Amendment by only one vote, I’m not overly confident that we can rely on the judiciary anyhow.

Ultimately, our fundamental rights to protect ourselves and our families only exist because politicians are scared of getting voted out of office and losing the best job most of them will ever have.

And remember that the “slippery slope” is a very relevant concern. Many anti-gun activists think only government should have the right to possess guns, and they view incremental gun control measures as building blocks to that ultimate goal.

Even though government monopolies on gun possession have been associated with some of the world’s most brutal dictatorships!

I’m not worried that the United States is going to turn into some Venezuelan-style anti-gun totalitarian regime, so I actually disagree with the results of my poll on the biggest reason to oppose gun control.

If I was asked to give my worst-case scenario for why we need private gun ownership, it would involve fiscal and societal breakdown because of an ever-growing welfare state.

But regardless of why you believe in the Second Amendment, this U.N. treaty would be a very bad development.

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Powerful Anti-Gun Control Polling Data from Front-Line Crime Fighters

Early in the year, I shared a powerful video about the right to keep and bear arms. It featured the Sheriff of Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, who made a public service announcement advising citizens that gun ownership was important for self defense.

That’s such a common-sense point that it presumably shouldn’t have merited any comment, but it was newsworthy because the establishment press frequently tries to promote the narrative that law enforcement officials are opposed to the Second Amendment.

But in virtually every instance, the “officials” are big-city police bosses who are parroting the views of the political masters who appointed them to their positions.

So what do regular cops think about gun control?

I’ve always assumed they favored the right to keep and bear arms. Simply stated, cops have a practical understanding that there are bad people in the world. Moreover, they know it’s impossible for them to be everywhere at once, so armed citizens are the first line of defense.

And the cops that I know are strong defenders of private gun ownership, but I haven’t wanted to extrapolate from that anecdotal evidence.

So I’m not surprised that police officers are against gun control, but I had no idea that cops were so overwhelmingly solid on the Second Amendment until I saw the polling data from this survey of 15,000 law enforcement officials.

Here are two of the most startling findings, beginning with a question on whether magazine limits will be effective in reducing crime. An astounding 95.7 percent of respondents say no.

Makes you wonder whether Andrew Cuomo and other sleazy politicians understand that they’re pushing policies that will have no positive impact? Or whether they even care?

Perhaps all lawmakers should be required to read Larry Correia’s article on the real-world impact of such policies.

But what about “assault weapons”?

Well, 91.5 percent of cops said a ban on these semi-automatic weapons would either be useless or the policy would have a negative impact on fighting crime.

Indeed, almost three times as many cops said the effect would be negative compared to those who thought a ban on these guns would have a moderate or significant positive effect!

In other words, cops understand instinctively and through practical experience what scholars such as John Lott have discovered through research.

Interestingly, it appears cops are even better on the Second Amendment than ordinary Americans. According to this polling data I shared back in January, “only” 58 percent of Americans understood that more guns would reduce crime.

But I’m still proud of these ordinary Americans. An overwhelming 65 percent of them said they would disobey laws designed to confiscate their guns.

P.S. While I’m very glad that police officers support the Second Amendment, there are some cops who deserve scorn because of what they do to me and what they do to innocent 10-year old kids.

P.P.S. If you enjoy anti-gun control humor, here are lots of amusing images and funny videos.

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Despicable Police State Policies from Andrew Cuomo in New York

Why do words like “snitch” and “narc” have distasteful connotations?

And why don’t we hold “tattle tales” and “stool pigeons” in high regard?

Is it because we think people should be able to do bad things and get away with it? Do we like misbehavior to go unpunished?

I think the answer to these last two questions is an emphatic NO. Close to 100 percent of people would want the authorities to know if any of us overheard a terrorist plot. Or somehow found out about a murder. Or knew about some dirtbag who had raped someone.

Yet we still don’t like “narcs” and “stool pigeons,” probably because we know that some rules are bad, misguided, or foolish. For all intents and purposes, most Americans have libertarian sensibilities about victimless crimes.

So while we approve of “tattle tales” if it means we catch genuine criminals who violate the rights of others, we look down on the “snitch” who rats out the guy smoking a joint, the jerk who informs the IRS on a small business owner hiding income, and the weasel who tells the local planning gestapo that someone is remodeling their basement without government approval.

I’ve previously shared nauseating stories about Soviet-style tax informant programs in both Chicago and the United Kingdom (where they’re actually encouraging kids to turn in their parents!).

The state of New York is engaging in the same reprehensible tactics, only this time the target is guns rather than money.

Here are some of the nauseating details from a story in the Daily Caller.

For more than a year, New York state has maintained a tip line allowing people to report illegal gun owners and collect a $500 reward. …A February 2012 press release from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office first publicly announced the tip line, saying it was designed to “encourage citizens to report illegal firearm possession.” …On the Facebook page for The Record’s story, several users criticized the tip line for apparently encouraging New Yorkers to spy on each other.

Of course, sometimes the government actually requires us to spy on each other, as is the case with money laundering laws that criminalize innocent behaviors in a costly, intrusive, and ineffective effort to reduce crime.

Not surprisingly, the government is defending this campaign to turn people into stool pigeons for illegitimate reasons.

…a spokesperson for the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services defended the program. “This program has been in place for more than a year and is aimed only at getting illegal crime guns off the streets: a goal that every New Yorker can agree with,” wrote Janine Kava, director of public information at NYS DCJS.

What the government should be doing, needless to say, it getting people who do bad things off the street. And that means investigating, arresting, prosecuting, and punishing those who abridge the rights of other people.

It does not mean arbitrarily criminalizing inanimate objects such as guns.

And as this young lady says, the government should only get the guns of law-abiding people under very particular circumstances.

P.S. Andrew Cuomo also happens to be a former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, where he infamously was in charge of imposing so-called affordable lending requirements that helped start the bad Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac policies that eventually led to the housing bubble and financial crisis.

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Anti-Gun Zealotry Has Morphed from PC Silliness to Government Thuggery

Mostly for the humor value, I’ve shared stories about brainless anti-gun political correctness by America’s “educators.”

I realize this is a serious issue and I should be figuratively banging my fist on the podium and demanding negative consequences for these foolish teachers and school administrators.

But I share my outrage for stories like this one from New Jersey.

“Take him from his parents and send him to a foster home!”

New Jersey police and Dept. of Children and Families officials raided the home of a firearms instructor and demanded to see his guns after he posted a Facebook photo of his 11-year-old son holding a rifle. …The family’s trouble started Saturday night when Moore received an urgent text message from his wife. The Carneys Point Police Dept. and the New Jersey Dept. of Children and Families had raided their home.

Thankfully, this absurd exercise in government overreach met with stiff resistance.

Moore immediately called [his lawyer] Nappen and rushed home to find officers demanding to check his guns and his gun safe. Instead, he handed the cell phone to one of the officers – so they could speak with Nappen. “If you have a warrant, you’re coming in,” Nappen told the officers. “If you don’t, then you’re not. That’s what privacy is all about.” …“I was told I was being unreasonable and that I was acting suspicious because I wouldn’t open my safe,” Moore wrote on the Delaware Open Carry website. “They told me they were going to get a search warrant. I told them to go ahead.” …The attorney said police eventually left and never returned. “He has a Fourth Amendment right and he’s not going to give up his Fourth Amendment right or his Second Amendment right,” he said. “They didn’t have a warrant – so see you later.”

But let’s not be too optimistic just because this story ended well.

…the person who reported the false allegations of abuse cannot be held liable, she noted. “You can’t be prosecuted for making an allegation of child abuse –even if it’s false,” she said. Nappen said what happened to the Moore family should serve as a warning to gun owners across the nation. “To make someone go through this because he posted a picture of his son with a .22 rifle on his Facebook page is pretty outrageous,” he said.

We should all be outraged by this story. You don’t need a vivid imagination to see that this type of nanny-state-meets-the-jackboot- state thuggery could become more prevalent – and a lot uglier – in the future.

Raising my kids right

I’ll be taking my kids out to the High Lonesome Ranch in May, and we’ll be doing some shooting. And when they were much younger, my kids enjoyed their opportunity to shred some soda cans with an AK-47. I can only imagine what might have happened if I had taken some photos and posted them (not that Facebook existed in the primitive 1990s).

Let’s close by being thankful for the Founding Fathers. They bequeathed to us a Bill of Rights that includes a 2nd Amendment and a 4th Amendment. I know my conservative friends appreciate the former, but I hope this story helps them realize that the latter is also important as a bulwark against government thuggery. It’s for that reason that I once had the unusual experience of siding with Ruth Bader Ginsburg over Clarence Thomas!

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An Inside Look at Left-Wing Social Science Gun Research

In a presumably futile effort to change their minds by learning how they think, I periodically try to figure out the left-wing mind.

Why, for instance, do some people believe in Keynesian economics, when it is premised on the fanciful notion that you can increase “spending power” by taking money out of the economy’s left pocket and putting it in the economy’s right pocket?

I actually think part of the problem is that folks on the left focus on how income is spent rather than how it’s earned, so I sometimes try to get them to understand that economic growth occurs when we produce more rather than consume more. My hope is that they’ll better understand how the economy works if they look at the issue from this perspective.

But I’m getting off track. I don’t want to get too serious because the purpose of this post is to share this satirical look at the how leftists rationalize their anti-gun biases.

Let’s take a look at two cities that are quite similar in terms of demographics and income. But they have very different murder rates. Your job is to pretend you’re a leftist and come up with an explanation.

To be fair, we can’t rule out cold weather as a possible explanation given this limited set of data.

For what it’s worth, however, scholars who actually do real research, like David Kopel and John Lott, reach different conclusions.

Returning to satire, the Houston-Chicago comparison reminds me of this IQ test for criminals and liberals.

And since we’re having some fun with our liberal friends, let’s close with this comparison of liberals, conservatives, and Texans.

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The Continuing Wimpification of America

I’ve reached the point where I can’t even get agitated any more.

The anti-gun ideology in government schools has led to so many stupid incidents that all I can do is shake my head and be thankful my kids somehow were spared this nonsense.

OH MY GOD!!! Call a SWAT team and child protective services!

Our latest story comes from Michigan, where a third grader brought some cupcakes to school for his birthday. That seems innocuous, but the boy’s mother (gasp!) decorated them with toy army men.

The school decided “to remove the Army soldiers from the cupcakes” and called the boy’s family to inform them that they had committed a thought crime.

Last week, Casey Fountain’s third-grade son had a birthday party at his school in Caro. His wife decided to whip up 30 cupcakes for the boy’s classmates. She topped the treats with plastic army guys like the ones countless boys and girls have played with for decades. Fountain says he never thought his innocent act of party planning would lead to controversy. Fountain says the principal of Schall Elementary School called him personally and told him that dressing the cupcakes with soldiers was, in the principal’s words, “insensitive” considering recent gun-related tragedies.

This definitely belongs in the Hall of Fame for brainless political correctness and hysterical overreaction. Other members of this distinguished Hall of Fame include:

• Bureaucrats suspended a little boy for taking bites out of a pop tart in such a way that it was shaped like a gun.
• Bureaucrats suspended a 7-year boy for pretending to throw a non-existent grenade on the playground.
• Bureaucrats suspended a 6-year old boy in Maryland for making a gun shape with his finger.
• Bureaucrats busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.
• A teacher in Rhode Island caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• Bureaucrats evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• Bureaucrats in Florida kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.

At some point, you have to ask whether sending your kids to a government school not only puts them at risk of a substandard education, but also is a form of child abuse.

P.S. Actually, I am getting agitated the more I think about this. For all intents and purposes, the principal was equating soldiers with crazy mass killers. Why hasn’t this person been fired?

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More Amusing Gun Control Posters

Since I shared a pro-Second Amendment t-shirt the other day, let’s have an encore and enjoy this poster on gun control.

I’m not sure, though, whether it’s the most compelling message in the world. I remember years ago being a spectator to an abortion argument, with the pro-choice person asserting that “if you don’t like an abortion, don’t have one,” which seemed somewhat persuasive, but then the pro-life person countered by asking whether it would make sense to assert “if you don’t like robbery, don’t commit one.”

But I almost never venture into the abortion debate (the only exceptions being here and here), and I’m not going to change my pattern today.

My only point is that the poster is snarky and mocking, which is the type of humor I often enjoy, so I had to share it.

We do have a second image, and this one is unambiguously clever and compelling.

Very similar message to the first image in this post.

And if these two images don’t give you enough anti-gun control humor, feel free to click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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A T-Shirt for Constitution Lovers

I’ve shared some powerful (and amusing) pro-Second Amendment posters here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. And some clever  images of t-shirts and bumper stickers on gun control here, here, here, here, and here.

Here’s another good one for the collection, and I gather you can actually buy one for yourself if this website is legit.

Here are some additional examples of Second Amendment humor, and you can enjoy some Chuck Asay cartoons here and here.

By the way, if you want some practical information on gun control, I strongly recommend the famous Larry Correia article. And for wisdom on the issue of so-called assault weapons, John Lott is the oracle.

And you can read the confessions of two honest liberals here and here.

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More Insane Political Correctness and Absurd Anti-Gun Nonsense

I weep for my country. We are becoming pathetic fools and total wimps.

Consider these jaw-dropping examples of behavior by adults who work in government schools. I think they must be competing for the Stupid Official of the Year Award.

The contestants include:

• The bureaucrats who suspended a 7-year boy for pretending to throw a non-existent grenade on the playground.
• The bureaucrats who suspended a 6-year old boy in Maryland for making a gun shape with his finger.
• The bureaucrats who busted a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.
• The teacher in Rhode Island who caught an 8-year old boy with some plastic toy army men.
• The bureaucrats who evacuated a school because an 11-year old boy made a motion detector for his science experiment.
• The bureaucrats in Florida who kicked an 8-year old boy out of school for a year because he had a plastic gun in his backpack.
• A dual award in Virginia, with half the prize for the bureaucrats who suspended a 10-year old boy for a toy gun and half the prize for the cops who then arrested the kid.

Here’s another example that belies belief. It starts innocently enough, as reported by a Baltimore news outlet.

Children at Park Elementary School went home with a letter today explaining there was a disruption in school.

A “disruption”? What, pray tell, happened. A fire? A theft? A gang fight?

Well, brace yourself lest you faint in fright at what you’re about to read.

At Park Elementary school, Josh was enjoying his breakfast pastry when he decided to try and shape it into a mountain. Josh said, “It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top and it kinda looked like a gun but it wasn’t.” Josh takes full responsibly for trying to shape his breakfast pastry, but admits it was in innocent fun. He told FOX45, “All I was trying to do was turn it into a mountain but, it didn’t look like a mountain really and it turned out to be a gun kinda.” When his teacher saw the strawberry tart he knew he was in trouble, he recalls, “She was pretty mad…and I think I was in big trouble.”

Oh, Heavens. Get the smelling salts!

What was the punishment for this thug?

Josh’s dad received a phone call from the school saying that Josh has been suspended for two days because he took his breakfast pastry and fashioned it into a gun. Josh’s dad was astounded to learn the school chose such a harsh punishment, even after no one was hurt.

But here’s the real kicker. The supposed adults who run the school (and are in charge of educating children) decided that an artfully chewed pastry was “an inappropriate gesture.”

Late Friday afternoon a letter went home with students explaining the incident saying, “A student used food to make an inappropriate gesture.” But Josh’s dad is not happy saying, “I would almost call it insanity. I mean with all the potential issues that could be dealt with at school, real threats, bullies, whatever the real issue is, it’s a pastry.., Ya know?”

The dad had the right reaction.

And the real moral of the story is that we need to break up the government-run education monopoly and allow school choice.

P.S. Mindless political correctness is not limited to the United States. There are also unbelievable examples from the United Kingdom.

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Joe Biden’s Self-Defense Advice

Good ol’ Uncle Joe.

Given his chief role as national laughingstock, the Vice President attracts plenty of abuse. I like this caption contest, which led to a clever winning entry.

Handgun bad, shotgun good?

Here’s an amusing joke (with the naughty word redacted), and the late-night talk shows have produced some good one liners about the Veep here, here, here, and here.

And let’s not forget the laughs we all enjoyed when he asserted that paying higher taxes was patriotic.

But Biden has reached new levels on unintentional humor with his recent advice on home defense, all of which appears to be illegal according to fellow Bulldog Mary Katherine Ham.

This video, which has been a viral phenomenon, looks at the practical implications of arming some people with 12-gauge shotguns.

This is amusing, though it’s actually not that funny when you realize that this clown is in charge of the task force putting together gun control proposals for the Obama Administration.

By the way, if you like humorous videos dealing with gun control, here are my favorites.

• A revealing look at how leftists think about gun control.
• A heartwarming adoption story.
• An amusing cartoon conversation between an anti-gun ideologue and a supporter of the Constitution.
• This Christmas greeting from the Second Amendment.

P.S. And if you want serious videos about gun control, you can access several options by clicking here.

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If You Outlaw Tanks, only Outlaws Will Have Tanks

I realize the sequester kicks in tomorrow and I should be writing about that rare opportunity to control the burden of government spending.

To be sure, my fingers are crossed that Republicans won’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and I’ve been busy on Capitol Hill talking to folks about the issue, but this post already says everything you need to know about that topic.

It’s time to switch gears, particularly since I have a soft spot for feel-good stories.

And what could be more heart-tugging than a story about the right to keep and bear tanks?

Here are some blurbs from the Wall Street Journal.

Weapons buffs may stock semiautomatics in the gun safe. But nothing makes a statement like having an Army tank in the garage. …there are several hundred to 1,000 private tank owners in the U.S. …Brothers Ken and Gene Neal, owners of Bullet Proof Diesel, a truck-parts manufacturer in Mesa, Ariz., once took their 1966 British Chieftain tank into the desert and joyfully backed it over a rusty car. When their insurance agent inquired about their plans for the tank, the Neal brothers emailed back, “We are going to use it to take over the world.” Says Ken Neal, 45: “A tank is cool.”

The latest in home defense

But is it legal?

Yup, and it can even have a working gun if you’re willing to fork over $200 for a permit.

A tank in the U.S. can have operational guns, if the owner has a federal Destructive Device permit, and state laws don’t prohibit it. The permit costs $200, and the applicant must swear he hasn’t been a “fugitive from justice,” “adjudicated mentally defective” or convicted of “a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.” A local law-enforcement official, usually a sheriff or police chief, has to sign off on the application. Tanks generally aren’t street-legal, so owners usually drive them off-road or on other private property. Some say local authorities sometimes make exceptions for parades, a quick test drive or a trip to the gas station.

But won’t tanks in private hands lead to horrible crimes? Doesn’t seem that way, particularly since the story mentions that the only tank used in a crime was one taken from a government armory.

And in sensible places such as Texas, local police think a tank is “awesome,” not a cause for hysteria.

Earlier this month, Mr. Bauer, the Texas banker, took his Chaffee out for a spin in his warehouse parking lot. He had rigged the .50-caliber machine gun on the turret with a propane system that generates the noise and muzzle flash of gunfire, without the bullets. He fired off several bursts. Minutes later, two Port Lavaca police cruisers pulled up. The first officer rolled down the window and asked dryly: “You know why we’re here, right?” Mr. Bauer assured him that no actual rounds had been fired. …The second policeman, Jeremy Marshall, got out of his car and eyeballed Mr. Bauer’s tank. “Awesome,” he said.

Meanwhile, a 6-year old boy in Maryland is suspended for making a gun shape with his fingers and a 5-year old girl in Pennsylvania is busted for having a pink plastic gun that shoots bubbles.

The best of America…and the worst of America.

But we shouldn’t be resting on our laurels. Most able-bodied men in Switzerland have fully automatic guns (i.e., capable of continuous firing) in their homes, so it’s an open question which nation is more “awesome.”

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In a Remarkable Display of Government Stupidity on Steroids, Cops Arrest a 10-Year Old for a Toy Gun

As part of my US v UK government stupidity contest, I’ve shared some really bizarre examples of anti-gun/anti-self defense political correctness.

At first I thought the Brits were more brainless.

• A women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.
• There was a proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• Starting pistols have been banned from some school races.
• There have been calls for knife bans.
• A man was arrested for shooting a burglar who invaded his house.

Though, to be sure, there’s lots of foolishness in America.

• A Rhode Island boy got in trouble for bringing toy soldiers to school.
• A student in San Diego got in trouble for making a motion detector for a science project, simply because someone decided it resembled a bomb.
• A Florida student was expelled for having a toy gun on school property.
• A little boy got suspended for making a pistol shape with his fingers.
• Another little boy got suspended for playing cops and robbers.

The Brits were in the lead because they actually arrested people who did done nothing wrong.

But now the United States may deserve this booby prize. Here are some details of a Kafkaesque story from RT.

School administrators in Virginia suspended a 10-year-old boy earlier this month after he was caught with an orange-tipped toy gun in his backpack. Now as he awaits his next meeting with his probation officer, his mother opens up about the incident. …she is still in disbelief over what the entire event has done for her son, herself and the community.

But he wasn’t just suspended. He then got arrested.

Just one day after her fifth-grader’s toy gun was discovered on a school bus leaving Douglas MacArthur Elementary School in Alexandria, Virginia, his mom says he was arrested, dragged to court and questioned, photographed and fingerprinted. “Any time we get a call like this, we take it very seriously until we can determine the extent of the weapon, if it’s real or not, and what the student intends to do with it,” Alexandria Police Department spokesman Jody Donaldson told the Washington Examiner after the boy’s arrest.

Now that the bureaucrats are getting laughed at, they’re beginning to say the whole episode may have been a mistake. Gee, you think?!?

Today, though, Donaldson admits that things may have been a bit different had the authorities taken a breath before they rushed to respond. “If we were able to investigate right away, the outcome might have been different,” she tells the Post. Ms. Gilbert agrees and thinks authorities acted a little too overzealously. Even the mother who first reported the gun that her daughter saw on an Alexandria school bus tells the paper, “It’s such a bad handling of the situation, it was ridiculous.”

But this isn’t a laughing matter. The little boy’s life has been turned upside down.

…the boy has been forced to switch schools and has been entangled in a legal nightmare surely to serve as a thorn in the side of his family for years to come. That, of course, isn’t even taking into consideration what sort of effect the entire incident will have on the boy, who now has a record with local authorities.

It’s quite embarrassing that this happened in my state of Virginia.

You’d expect this kind of vapid political correctness in New York, not in the south.

But the infectious disease of bureaucratic brainlessness is spreading all over Dixie.

Here are some excerpts from a story about some first-rate government stupidity that recently was on display in Alabama.

A high school student in Florence said he has been suspended because of a picture of a gun. Daniel McClaine Jr., a freshman at Poston Butte High School, said he saved the picture as his desktop background on his school-issued computer. A teacher noticed it and turned him in. …the district policy states students are prohibited from “sending or displaying offensive messages or pictures,” and cannot access, send, create or forward pictures that are considered “harassing, threatening, or illegal.”McClaine said he read the guidelines but does not consider the picture threatening to anyone. …Daniel’s father said after ABC15 contacted the school, the administration backed down and will let his son return to school on Monday instead of Wednesday.

The good news, so to speak is that Daniel wasn’t arrested and the school’s bureaucrats backed down and canceled the suspension.

But it’s hard to be optimistic about the education system after reading this type of story.

If bureaucrats don’t have common sense, how can they teach reading, writing, and arithmetic?

Maybe the bigger lesson (especially given the shocking lack of results after record levels of staffing and funding) is that we should break up the government school monopoly and let parents choose better-quality schools?

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Another Honest Liberal Writes about Gun Ownership and Second Amendment Rights

Late last year, I shared a very powerful article by an admitted liberal who concluded that gun control was impractical and illogical.

Now I want to share a New York Times column from another leftist. Justin Cronin also supports the right of gun ownership, but he offers a more personal reason for his support of the Second Amendment.

Here are some of the key excerpts from his column.

I am a New England liberal, born and bred. I have lived most of my life in the Northeast — Boston, New York and Philadelphia — and my politics are devoutly Democratic. I am also a Texas resident and a gun owner. I have half a dozen pistols in my safe, all semiautomatics, the largest capable of holding 20 rounds. …I’m currently shopping for a shotgun, either a Remington 870 Express Tactical or a Mossberg 500 Flex with a pistol grip and adjustable stock. …I am my family’s last line of defense. I have chosen to meet this responsibility, in part, by being armed. It wasn’t a choice I made lightly.

A “pistol grip”? A gun that holds “20 rounds”? An “adjustable stock”? Gasp, the horror! I imagine Obama is probably sending the BATF after this guy. Heck, maybe even target him with a drone.

So why does this self-described leftist own guns and believe in the right to self-defense? The answer is common sense, based in part on what happened when Hurricane Rita was heading toward Houston.

My wife and I arranged to stay at a friend’s house in Austin, packed up the kids and dog, and headed out of town — or tried to. As many as 3.7 million people had the same idea, making Rita one of the largest evacuations in history, with predictable results. By 2 in the morning, after six hours on the road, we had made it all of 50 miles. The scene was like a snapshot from the Apocalypse: crowds milling restlessly, gas stations and mini-marts picked clean and heaped with trash, families sleeping by the side of the road. The situation had the hopped-up feel of barely bottled chaos. After Katrina, nobody had any illusions that help was on its way. It also occurred to me that there were probably a lot of guns out there… Here I was with two tiny children, a couple of thousand dollars in cash, a late-model S.U.V. with half a tank of gas and not so much as a heavy book to throw. …Rita made a last-minute turn away from Houston. But what if it hadn’t? I believe people are basically good, but not all of them and not all the time. Like most citizens of our modern, technological world, I am wholly reliant upon a fragile web of services to meet my most basic needs. What would happen if those services collapsed? Chaos, that’s what.

We’ve already witnessed real-world examples of societal breakdown caused by government incompetence and failure.

I wrote two years ago to celebrate the superiority of the American system, which allowed Korean shopowners to protect themselves during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, and the British system, which left immigrant shopowners vulnerable and defenseless to rampaging mobs.

That argument gets more relevant and powerful every year. Indeed, there have been riots all over Europe, and I suspect that we’ll see more chaos and social disarray as the welfare state continues to collapse. And as I discuss in this NRA-TV interview, only a fool (or a victim of bad government) is unarmed when the you-know-what hits the fan.

Simply stated, would you want to leave your family vulnerable, and rely on the callow and feckless political class for their safety? I hope not, which is why I’m surprised that “protection during a societal breakdown” only got about 13 percent of the vote in my poll asking the most important reason to oppose gun control.

Let’s return to the NYT column. Our liberal columnist naively wishes guns didn’t exist (as if a pack of young, male thugs need weapons to terrorize a family), but at least he recognizes that his anti-gun leftist friends don’t know what they’re talking about.

…in the weeks since Newtown, I’ve watched my Facebook feed, which is dominated by my coastal friends, fill up with anti-gun dispatches that seemed divorced from reality. I agree it would be nice if the world had exactly zero guns in it. But I don’t see that happening, and calling gun owners “a bunch of inbred rednecks” doesn’t do much to advance rational discussion. Thus, my secret life — though I guess it’s not such a secret anymore.

Here’s a final excerpt that is very heartwarming, and this picture reveals that I obviously share the same sentiments.

My wife is afraid of my guns (though she also says she’s glad I have them). My 16-year-old daughter is a different story. …she asked to take a pistol lesson. …the instructor ran her through the basics, demonstrating with a Glock 9-millimeter: how to hold it, load it, pull back the slide. “You’ll probably have trouble with that part,” he said. “A lot of the women do.” “Oh really?” my daughter replied, and with a cagey smile proceeded to rack her weapon with such authority you could have heard it in the parking lot. A proud-papa moment? I confess it was.

If you want more practical information on gun control, I strongly recommend the famous Larry Correia article. And for wisdom on the issue of so-called assault weapons, John Lott is the oracle.

And if you want to laugh at the dishonest (or naive) liberals, watch this amusing video to see how they think gun control works in their fantasy world.

Then give your leftist friends this IQ test on gun control and see if they can figure out the right answer.

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In Addition to the Moral and Practical Arguments against Gun Control, there’s also the Constitutional Argument

I mostly approach the gun control debate from a moral and practical perspective.

Morally, I think there is a presumption that free people should have the means to protect themselves. It doesn’t matter if they want to guard against crime, whether they’re worried about social breakdown (my concern, as I explain in this NRA-TV interview), or if they fear government tyranny (the most common answer in this poll).

The practical argument against gun control is best explained in this article by a liberal and this article by a conservative.

But let’s not forget that there’s also a constitutional argument against gun control, as explained in today’s Wall Street Journal by David Rivkin and Andrew Grossman.

…the debate over guns, as is the case with many other contentious issues in American history, cannot be intelligently pursued without recognizing its constitutional dimensions. The Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Heller v. District of Columbia confirmed that the Second Amendment means what it says: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” After Heller and its follow-on case, McDonald v. Chicago, which applied the Second Amendment rights to the states, what government cannot do is deny the individual interest in self-defense. As a legal matter, that debate is settled.

The authors then look at some of the anti-gun laws being considered at the state level.

Several states…are considering gun-insurance mandates modeled after those for automobile insurance. There is no conceivable public-safety benefit: Insurance policies cover accidents, not intentional crimes, and criminals with illegal guns will just evade the requirement. The real purpose is to make guns less affordable for law-abiding citizens and thereby reduce private gun ownership. Identical constitutionally suspect logic explains proposals to tax the sale of bullets at excessive rates. The courts, however, are no more likely to allow government to undermine the Second Amendment than to undermine the First. A state cannot circumvent the right to a free press by requiring that an unfriendly newspaper carry millions in libel insurance or pay a thousand-dollar tax on barrels of ink—the real motive, in either case, would be transparent and the regulation struck down. How could the result be any different for the right to keep and bear arms?

Rivkin and Grossman also explain why the President’s plan is empty posturing.

The same constitutional infirmity plagues the president’s plan. Consider his proposal for a new “assault weapons” ban, targeting a class of weapons distinguished by their cosmetic features, such as a pistol grip or threaded barrel. These guns may look sinister, but they don’t differ from other common weapons in any relevant respect—firing mechanism, ammunition, magazine size—and so present no greater threat to public safety. Needless to say, the government has no legitimate interest in banning guns that gun-controllers simply do not like and would not, themselves, care to own.

That last sentence is worth emphasizing. There are many types of cars I find distasteful. And there are many clothing styles I would never wear. But those cars and clothes serve the same functions as my car and clothes.

That’s why the attacks against so-called assault rifles are nonsensical. Those weapons are identical to guns that don’t look “scary.” Indeed, they’re usually less powerful.

One final point, albeit a depressing one. Contrary to what Rivkin and Grossman wrote, the constitutional issue is not settled. The Supreme Court correctly decided both the Heller and McDonald cases, but only by 5-4 margins.

All it takes is one untimely death or retirement and Obama surely would appoint some ideologue who will disregard the Second Amendment (in the same way Justices routinely disregard Article I, Section VIII, and other sections of the Constitution).

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An Amusing Video Medley of Moral Preening on Guns from Piers Morgan

I’ve shared some very powerful videos that help explain why we should respect and celebrate the individual right to keep and bear arms.

• Ted Nugent talking about gun ownership and the right of self defense.
• A look at the Switzerland’s strong gun culture and the importance of self defense as a protection against oppression.
• And some very powerful testimony to some weasels on Capitol Hill (make sure to pay attention around the 5:00 mark).
• Ice-T talking about the real reason to defend and support the 2nd Amendment.
• A Reason TV video with five facts for Vice President Biden’s task force.
• A look at how a young woman can defend herself.

Here’s one that’s worth sharing just for entertainment value. It shows a British import desperately trying to gain visibility and ratings by engaging in a series of gun control debates.

I can’t vouch for the veracity of what’s being said by Ventura, Pratt, et al, but they obviously win the overall arguments about the right to self defense, the fight against crime, and having the means to resist tyranny and oppression.

But as much as I like all of these videos, the best arguments for the Second Amendment come from this conservative and this liberal.

Actually, I don’t even know if the author of the first article is a conservative. Or even libertarian. He just makes so much sense that I assume he’s on the side of freedom instead of the state.

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Thoughts on “Assault Weapons” and “Magazine Limits” from an Actual Gun Expert

I’m not a big gun owner and I’m not part of the gun culture. So why, then, do I frequently post about the issue of gun control?

Mostly because I believe in freedom and the Constitution.

But I also appreciate facts and analysis and I know that law-abiding citizens are safer and criminals face greater obstacles when good people have the right of self defense.

Last but not least, I think there’s a non-trivial possibility that the United States will suffer some sort of social chaos and/or breakdown of law and order because of the damage caused by reckless fiscal and monetary policies. As I explain in this interview on NRA-TV, that’s when firearms ownership can mean the difference between life an death.

But now it’s time to get some analysis from Larry Correia, a real expert. Here’s some of his background, which may help explain why his article has been viewed more than 1,000,000 times and attracted about 2,500 comments.

I owned a gun store. …that means lots and lots of government inspections and compliance paperwork. This means that I had to be exceedingly familiar with federal gun laws, and there are a lot of them. …When I hear people tell me the gun industry is unregulated, I have to resist the urge to laugh in their face. I was also a Utah Concealed Weapons instructor, and was one of the busiest instructors in the state. That required me to learn a lot about self-defense laws… I have certified thousands of people to carry guns.

Here’s what he has to say about stopping massacres. In this section, he’s specifically talking about the value of armed teachers, but the message obviously applies more broadly.

The single best way to respond to a mass shooter is with an immediate, violent response. The vast majority of the time, as soon as a mass shooter meets serious resistance, it bursts their fantasy world bubble. Then they kill themselves or surrender. This has happened over and over again. Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. …cops can’t be everywhere. There are at best only a couple hundred thousand on duty at any given time patrolling the entire country. Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range. We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is far worse. …So in some cases that means the bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible things with nobody effectively fighting back. So if we can’t have cops there, what can we do? The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.

In this passage, you can see that he’s not overly impressed by “gun-free zones.”

Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period. Think about it. You are a violent, homicidal madman, looking to make a statement and hoping to go from disaffected loser to most famous person in the world. The best way to accomplish your goals is to kill a whole bunch of people. So where’s the best place to go shoot all these people? Obviously, it is someplace where nobody can shoot back.

Sort of the same message as this humorous video.

In all honesty, I have no respect for anybody who believes Gun Free Zones actually work. You are going to commit several hundred felonies, up to and including mass murder, and you are going to refrain because there is a sign? That No Guns Allowed sign is not a cross that wards off vampires. It is wishful thinking, and really pathetic wishful thinking at that.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the Aurora theatre was a gun-free zone.

The man that attacked the midnight showing of Batman didn’t attack just any theater. There were like ten to choose from. He didn’t attack the closest. It wasn’t about biggest or smallest. He attacked the one that was posted NO GUNS ALLOWED. …Over the last fifty years, with only one single exception (Gabby Giffords), every single mass shooting event with more than four casualties has taken place in a place where guns were supposedly not allowed.

He then deals with the issue of “semi-automatic” weapons. He first explains that these weapons are not machine guns, notwithstanding the inane/biased commentary in the press.

Semi-automatic means that each time you pull the trigger the action cycles and loads another round. This is the single most common type of gun, not just in America, but in the whole world. Almost all handguns are semi-automatic. The vast majority of weapons used for self-defense are semi-automatic, as are almost all the weapons used by police officers.  It is the most common because it is normally the most effective.

Anti-gun zealots often use “assault rifle” as a pejorative, and they probably are similarly clueless in thinking that such weapons are machine guns. Correia addresses some of the specific issues of these weapons.

…real assault rifles in the US have been heavily regulated since before they were invented. The thing that the media and politicians like to refer to as assault rifles is basically a catch all term for any gun which looks scary. …The US banned assault rifles once before for a decade and the law did absolutely nothing. I mean, it was totally, literally pointless. …And the reason was that since assault weapon is a nonsense term, they just came up with a list of arbitrary features which made a gun into an assault weapon. Problem was, none of these features actually made the gun functionally any different or somehow more lethal or better from any other run of the mill firearm. Most of the criteria were so silly that they became a huge joke to gun owners, except of course, for that part where many law abiding citizens accidentally became instant felons because one of their guns had some cosmetic feature which was now illegal.

Here are a couple of examples he discusses.

Does this make a gun more dangerous?

For example, flash hiders sound dangerous. …Problem is flash hiders don’t do much. They screw onto the end of your muzzle and divert the flash off to the side instead of straight up so it isn’t as annoying when you shoot. It doesn’t actually hide the flash from anybody else. …Barrel shrouds were listed.Barrel shrouds are basically useless, cosmetic pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t accidentally touch it and burn your hand. But they became an instantaneous felony too. Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust your rifle to different size shooters, that way a tall guy and his short wife can shoot the same gun. …Now are you starting to see why “assault weapons” is a pointless term? They aren’t functionally any more powerful or deadly than any normal gun. In fact the cartridges they normally fire are far less powerful than your average deer hunting rifle.

One of the big issues in the gun-control debate is whether there should be limits on the number of rounds in a magazines.

…why do gun owners want magazines that hold more rounds? Because sometimes you miss. Because usually—contrary to the movies—you have to hit an opponent multiple times in order to make them stop. Because sometimes you may have multiple assailants. We don’t have more rounds in the magazine so we can shoot more, we have more rounds in the magazine so we are forced to manipulate our gun less if we have to shoot more. …ten rounds sucks when you take a wound ballistics class like I have and go over case after case after case after case of enraged, drug addled, prison hardened, perpetrators who soaked up five, seven, nine, even fifteen bullets and still walked under their own power to the ambulance. That isn’t uncommon at all. …Also, you’re going to miss. It is going to happen. If you can shoot pretty little groups at the range, those groups are going to expand dramatically under the stress and adrenalin. …or the bad guy may end up hiding behind something which your bullets don’t penetrate. Nobody has ever survived a gunfight and then said afterwards, “Darn, I wish I hadn’t brought all that extra ammo.” So having more rounds in the gun is a good thing for self-defense use.

He then responds to the assertion that magazine limits will make life more difficult for bad guys.

…he’s not going to walk up right next to you while he reloads anyway. Unlike the CCW holder who gets attacked and has to defend himself in whatever crappy situation he finds himself in, the mass shooter is the aggressor. He’s picked the engagement range. They are cowards who are murdering running and hiding children, but don’t for a second make the mistake of thinking they are dumb. Many of these scumbags are actually very intelligent. They’re just broken and evil. In the cases that I’m aware of where the shooter had guns that held fewer rounds they just positioned themselves back a bit while firing or they brought more guns, and simply switched guns and kept on shooting, and then reloaded before they moved to the next planned firing position. Unless you are a fumble fingered idiot, anybody who practices in front of a mirror a few dozen times can get to where they can insert a new magazine into a gun in a few seconds.

So what will happen if the government imposes a new magazine restriction?

Magazines are cheap and basic. Most of them are pieces of sheet metal with some wire. That’s it. Magazines are considered disposable so most gun people accumulate a ton of them. All [the 10-round limit] did was make magazines more expensive, ticked off law abiding citizens, and didn’t so much as inconvenience a single criminal. …So you can ban this stuff, but it won’t actually do anything to the crimes you want to stop.

Correia closes with some remarks on the importance of self defense.

…the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced in a legal self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence of the gun is enough to cause the criminal to stop. Clint Smith once said if you look like food, you will be eaten. Criminals are looking for prey. They are looking for easy victims. If they wanted to work hard for a living they’d get a job. So when you pull a gun, you are no longer prey, you are work, so they are going to go find somebody else to pick on.

Which then brings us back to the key question: If gun control does nothing to stop bad guys, and it makes life more dangerous for good people, why do so many politicians want to undermine our constitutional rights?

I don’t think American politicians have the same evil motives as some of the world’s most reprehensible dictators, all of whom supported gun control as a way of controlling – and in many cases slaughtering – their people.

Indeed, I suspect some of them simply are unaware of the facts that Mr. Correia provides in the article.

Last month, I posted an article by a leftist who openly admitted that gun control was impractical. Our goal should be to help more people on the left reach this logical conclusion.

But since life shouldn’t be totally serious, here’s some gun control humor – including links to several additional jokes about the issue.

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Milwaukee County Sheriff Promotes Self Defense and Gun Ownership

A lot of big-city police chiefs are political appointees who promote gun control, presumably to please their political masters.

They tell citizens that they should passively rely on government rather than take personal responsibility for self defense.

I have no idea if the numbers in this image are correct, but there’s no doubt that a gun is a lot quicker than the cops. Heck, just watch this video and ask yourself whether you would want your daughter armed.

And the cops I know – the ones who actually interact with the public and fight crime – are supportive of the Second Amendment, precisely because they realize they can’t be everywhere and they know there are bad people in the world.

But not all police chiefs and senior cops are mindless bureaucrats. In this video, the Sheriff of Milwaukee County not only acknowledges the right of self defense, but he’s also is willing to help train citizens to resist crime.

This doesn’t necessarily make him a libertarian hero. Indeed, his comments about layoffs and furloughs indicate that he’s also interested in maximizing the size of his staff.

And even though cops are probably my favorite government employees (at least when they’re fighting crime rather than giving me ridiculous traffic tickets), that doesn’t mean we should have too many of them or pay them too much (though, to be fair, they’re presumably not paid as much as cops in Oakland).

But I’ll forgive Sheriff Clarke for pursuing the interests of his staff, even if that conflicts with the interests of taxpayers.

P.S. Here’s a very good joke about what to say when you call 911.

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In this Situation, Would You Want Your Daughter to Have a Gun?

Even though I’m first and foremost an advocate of limited government and that’s the primary focus of this blog, I’m also glad to have the opportunity to promote the right of free people to keep and bear arms.

And readers seem to agree. The 4th-most viewed post of all time is the famous dictators-for-gun-control poster, while this satirical video is the 11th-most viewed (other Second Amendment-related posts in the top 16 can be seen here, here, and here, with the last one being quite relevant considering what’s going to happen on Monday).

It’s a matter of taste, of course, but I actually prefer videos. Here are some of my favorites.

• Ted Nugent talking about gun ownership and the right of self defense.
• A look at the Switzerland’s strong gun culture and the importance of self defense as a protection against oppression.
• And some very powerful testimony to some weasels on Capitol Hill (make sure to pay attention around the 5:00 mark).
• Ice-T talking about the real reason to defend and support the 2nd Amendment.
• A Reason TV video with five facts for Vice President Biden’s task force.

Now I have a new one to add to the list. As you watch this video, imagine this is your daughter (or my daughter!). In this situation, would you want her armed?

The answer to my rhetorical query is obvious. Or at least it should be obvious.

And I think there’s at least one honest leftist who would give the right response.

Guns enable the weak and defenseless to protect themselves, as explained in this letter-to-the-editor. I don’t know if the letter is real, but the points it makes are accurate.

Let’s close with a few humorous videos on gun rights.

• A heartwarming adoption story.
• An amusing cartoon conversation between an anti-gun ideologue and a supporter of the Constitution.
• This Christmas greeting from the Second Amendment.

But if you like posters, bumper stickers, t-shirts, and other images, then here’s a post you’ll enjoy.

And don’t forget there’s still time to cast a vote for why you think the Second Amendment is worth defending.

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Suspended for Playing Cops and Robbers?!? The Continuing Wussification of America

I’ve had fun documenting and comparing examples of government stupidity in both the United States and United Kingdom, and today’s story clearly belongs on those lists.

Send this kid to a re-education camp!

It’s also an example of a perverse anti-gun mentality.

How else can you explain a school in Talbot County, Maryland, suspending a couple of young boys for the supposedly horrible offense of making gun shapes with their fingers while playing cops and robbers?!?

Here are some of the details from a local news report.

There’s controversy at a Talbot County school after two 6-year-old boys were suspended while playing cops and robbers during recess and using their fingers to make an imaginary gun. “It’s ridiculous,” said parent Julia Merchant.

There’s a reason this story may seem familiar.

This is the second time a Maryland child has been suspended for such play. Earlier this month, 6-year-old Rodney Lynch was suspended from his Montgomery County school after pretending to fire an imaginary gun more than once.

He fired his finger more than once? That might mean he has a semi-automatic finger! Oh, the horror.

Amazingly, the school in Montgomery County backed down after parents objected.

The school reversed its decision after Rodney’s parents appealed. “They’re saying he threatened a student, threatened to shoot a student. He was playing,” said Rodney’s father, Rodney Lynch Sr. …A number of parents agree. “Suspending them is a bit harsh and I don’t think that’s gonna do any good for the parent, child or school,” said Janet Geotzky.

It’s unclear what’s going to happen with this new incident (or, more accurately, non-incident) in Talbot County.

But I know what should happen if we want to discourage further episodes of political correctness run amok.

1. The person (I assume a teacher) who filed the initial complaint should be suspended.
2. The bureaucrat (I assume school principal) who suspended the boys should be fired.
3. The children (all of them, not just the two who were suspended) should be given toy guns and encouraged to play like normal kids.

Have I missed something?

The Un-Free State

What else should be done to stop the continuing wussification and wimpification of modern society?

P.S. It’s probably no coincidence that these displays of government stupidity took place in Maryland. This is the state, after all, that crashed on the Laffer Curve, imposed regulations making it difficult for summer camps to protect kids from sunburn, and considered a law to give bums panhandling permits.

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Gun Control, Crime, and Political Satire

I’ve shared several satirical signs, posters, videos, and bumper stickers on the topic of gun control, but surprisingly few political cartoons.

If my aging memory is correct, I’ve only posted a couple of Chuck Asay cartoons on concealed carry (here and here) and one Steve Kelley cartoon mocking the leftist tendency to focus on inanimate objects when a bad guy uses a gun.

So it’s time to correct this oversight.

Let’s start with this comparison of liberals and conservatives. As you can see, it’s sort of what you get when you mix this joke with this poster.

No wonder liberals and conservatives are contemplating divorce.

And with Obama proposing a bunch of executive orders on guns, this Scott Stantis cartoon is very timely.

After all, who cares about the Constitution and the democratic process!

And here’s a cartoon with the same theme found in this poster.

Now let’s shift to a couple of cartoons that look at causes of death, starting with one from Michael Ramirez that shows that so-called “assault rifles” are a statistical asterisk (and no more dangerous than other types of guns).

And here’s a specific comparison for 2011. Obviously we need hammer control.

While all these cartoons are amusing, the attack on our Second Amendment rights is not funny.

In my poll on protecting the right to keep and bear arms, a plurality of respondents said the Second Amendment was worth preserving so people had some ability to resist tyranny.

I personally think that the risk of societal breakdown is a more pressing concern, as I explained in this interview on NRA TV.

But all that really matters is that we all agree that freedom is worth defending. So let’s close with this inspirational powerpoint presentation on the Second Amendment.

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Some Much-Needed Anti-Gun Control Humor

Back in the early days of this blog, I shared a very amusing anti-gun control message on the back of a vehicle.

It made a good point about the fallacy of gun control (sort of like this photo as well), while also mocking a well-known opponent of the Second Amendment.

Now we have another photo, which also shows the back of a vehicle. It’s not directly on the topic of gun control, but I somehow suspect the driver is not a proponent of disarming innocent people.

And it does provide a lesson in the economics of crime. Let’s imagine you’re a thief. Not the kind that wields power in Washington, just a run-of-the-mill street thief. If you’re thinking about doing a bit of carjacking, would you be more likely or less likely to go after this vehicle?

Yes, this is like the IQ test that I posted for liberals and criminals. The answer should be obvious.

Sort of like whether you would go looting in the neighborhood pictured at the end of this post.

P.S. You can  see additional pro-Second Amendment posters here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. And some amusing images of t-shirts and bumper stickers on gun control here, here, and here.

P.P.S. You can still cast a vote in the online poll to identify the most important reason to defend the Second Amendment.

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Five Important Facts for Vice President Biden’s Anti-Gun Task Force

I asked yesterday for readers to weigh in on why they support (or don’t support) the Second Amendment. The poll is getting lots of responses, though some folks have complained that I should have included more answers, such as “To protect the rights of hunters.”

And I even had a few left-wing friends tell me I should have included more options for them, such as “The Second Amendment doesn’t mean military-style weapons” or “The Second Amendment doesn’t guarantee individual gun ownership.”

Speaking of our friends on the left, Vice President Joe Biden is overseeing an Administration effort to concoct new gun laws. In the interests of being helpful, I suggest the Veep’s team look at these four videos.

• Ted Nugent talking about gun ownership and the right of self defense.
• A look at the Switzerland’s strong gun culture and the importance of self defense as a protection against oppression.
• And some very powerful testimony to some weasels on Capitol Hill (make sure to pay attention around the 5:00 mark).
• Ice-T talking about the real reason to defend and support the 2nd Amendment.

We also have a brand new video from the folks at Reason TV. It provides five facts for Biden and his task force.

For some reason, I won’t be surprised if the Vice President doesn’t see this new video. Or any of the others.

Yes, you can call me a pessimist, but I think Biden’s task force has no interest in doing real research.

Their goal is to figure out (from the left’s perspective) politically feasible ways of undermining the Constitution.

So let’s gird our loins, which sounds like it might be fun, but it simply means prepare for a fight.

But, unlike the statists, we’re not humorless drones. So let’s enjoy some humorous gun control videos to put ourselves in the right frame of mind.

• A revealing look at how leftists think about gun control.
• A heartwarming adoption story.
• An amusing cartoon conversation between an anti-gun ideologue and a supporter of the Constitution.
• This Christmas greeting from the Second Amendment.

P.S. Don’t forget you can still cast a vote to explain why you support the Second Amendment.

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What’s the Most Important Reason to Oppose Gun Control?

I assume that most readers are sympathetic to free markets and small government.

But that doesn’t mean there’s universal agreement about how we solve various problems created by excessive government.

Last year, for instance, survey questions that I included with two posts generated very interesting results.

• In August, I reported on a guy who got pissed at the cops for screwing up his life with a marijuana arrest, so he responded by crushing some empty police cars with a tractor. I gave people four possible ways of responding to this story, and the results (based on my arbitrary division) showed a 60-40 split in favor of libertarianism.
• In November, I asked which candidate readers preferred. I was somewhat surprised by the results. Not only did Romney get nearly 70 percent of the total, but Obama wasn’t that far behind Gary Johnson. I’m not sure how to interpret those results, but they definitely suggest that anti-Obamaism was more powerful than pro-liberatarianism.

So now I’d like to get a sense of how readers view gun control.  Here’s a poll with five possible answers. Feel free to share it widely so we can get the broadest possible set of responses.

I’m not going to say how I would vote, but this interview with NRA-TV may give you a hint.

But I don’t include that link to sway the vote. I genuinely am curious about why people support (or don’t support) the Second Amendment.

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On Second Thought (and as a Second-Best Proposal), David Gregory Should Be Arrested and Prosecuted

I’ve never watched Meet the Press, so I obviously didn’t see David Gregory’s pathetic attempt to play gotcha by unveiling a magazine while interviewing someone from the National Rifle Association.

And even when it was revealed that Gregory had broken D.C. law by possessing this supposedly dangerous object (basically a metal box with a spring), I didn’t care.

After all, gun control is a foolish policy (as even some leftists and foreigners are slowly beginning to realize). And surely cops have better things to do, after all, than arrest a callow journalist for something that shouldn’t be against the law in the first place.

But I’m now beginning to change my mind. One of the core principles of a just society is that the law applies equally to all people. Heck, that principle is even etched above the entrance to the Supreme Court.

…unless you’re a member of the beltway elite

If misguided laws were never enforced, I wouldn’t want to target Gregory for discriminatory treatment. But I get very irritated when ordinary folks with no power or connections are persecuted while those with political connections get a free pass.

And that’s exactly what’s happening. Here’s an excerpt from a Washington Times report about a member of the non-elite who ran afoul of the same stupid law that Gregory broke.

Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier’s spokesman refused Monday to respond to whether Mr. Gregory had even been interviewed yet. This is a rather curious departure for a city that has been ruthless in enforcing this particular firearms statute against law-abiding citizens who made an honest mistake. In July, The Washington Times highlighted the plight of former Army Spc. Adam Meckler, who was arrested and jailed for having a few long-forgotten rounds of ordinary ammunition — but no gun — in his backpack in Washington. Mr. Meckler, a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, says he had no idea it was illegal to possess unregistered ammunition in the city. He violated the same section of D.C. law as Mr. Gregory allegedly did, and both offenses carry the same maximum penalty of a $1,000 fine and a year in jail. Mr. Meckler was charged with the crime and was forced to accept a plea deal to avoid the cost and time of a protracted legal fight.

After reading this outrageous story, my first reaction is to want the law repealed. My second reaction is to hope for a judicious and appropriate application of tar and feathers to certain D.C. officials.

But I’m also thinking that the high and mighty – including influential journalists – should be subject to the same bad laws as the rest of us.

Mark Steyn also has some reprehensible examples of government run amok. He starts with some sage comments on our over-legislated society.

…in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And in this case NBC were informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it anyway… David Gregory intended to demonstrate what he regards as the absurdity of America’s lax gun laws. Instead, he’s demonstrating the ever greater absurdity of America’s non-lax laws.

And then he lists examples of innocent people caught in the chainsaw of government harassment and persecution.

Not far away from David Gregory, across the Virginia border, eleven-year-old Skylar Capo made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days. For her pains, a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter accompanied by state troopers descended on her house, charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species, issued her a $535 fine, and made her cry.

Or how about this one.

Daniel Brown was detained at LAX while connecting to a Minneapolis flight because traces of gunpowder were found on his footwear. His footwear was combat boots. As the name suggests, the combat boots were returning from combat — eight months of it, in Iraq’s bloody and violent al-Anbar province. Above the boots he was wearing the uniform of a staff sergeant in the USMC Reserve Military Police and was accompanied by all 26 members of his unit, also in uniform. Staff Sergeant Brown doesn’t sound like an “obvious” terrorist. But the TSA put him on the no-fly list anyway. If it’s not “obvious” to the government that a serving member of the military has any legitimate reason for being around ammunition, why should it be “obvious” that a TV host has?

Here’s another outrageous example.

Three days after scofflaw Gregory committed his crime, a bail hearing was held in Massachusetts for Andrew Despres, 20, who’s charged with trespassing and possession of ammunition without a firearms license. Mr. Despres was recently expelled from Fitchburg State University and was returning to campus to pick up his stuff. Hence the trespassing charge. At the time of his arrest, he was wearing a “military-style ammunition belt.” Hence, the firearms charge. …He had no gun.

This next story is amusing, until you think about how the coercive power of government is making life difficult for normal people.

Ernest Hemingway had a six-toed cat. …descendants of his six-toed cat still live at the Hemingway home in Key West. Tourists visit the property. Thus, the Department of Agriculture is insisting that the six-toed cats are an “animal exhibit” like the tigers at the zoo, and therefore come under federal regulation requiring each to be housed in an individual compound with “elevated resting surfaces,” “electric wire,” and a night watchman.

So what’s going to happen with this David Gregory kerfuffle? Well, what should happen is that bad laws should be repealed.

In the corrupt world of Washington, though, we know that Gregory hasn’t been arrested even though he clearly broke the law and there’s obvious evidence of his “criminal” behavior.

My guess is that the matter will get quietly dropped, and Steyn also assumes something like this will happen.

Gregory can call in a favor from some Obama consigliere who’ll lean on the cops to disappear the whole thing. If he does that, he’ll be contributing to the remorseless assault on a bedrock principle of free societies — equality before the law. Laws either apply to all of us or none of us. If they apply only to some, they’re not laws but caprices — and all tyranny is capricious.

The moral of the story (though “immoral” is a better word) is simple.

Laws are for the little people — and little people need lots of little laws, ensnaring them at every turn.

That’s a good description of our corrupt tax code. That’s a good description of America’s regulatory morass. That’s a good description of much of what government now does.

If you want to be further depressed, peruse these horror stories of government in action.

• A story of vicious IRS persecution.
• A women jailed overnight because she let her kids play outside.
• Cops legally stole $17,000 from a man who committed no crime.
• Threatening to send a woman to jail because someone whistled at a whale.
• Two stories of innocent people who were victimized by the idiotic Drug War.
• A video about how the EPA tried – and fortunately failed – to destroy a family.
• A story about the Justice Department’s discriminatory attack on a hapless homeowner.
• The government treating child molesters more leniently than people who accidentally omit irrelevant info from forms.

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Suspending a Little Boy for Playing Toy Gun with His Hand? I’m Embarrassed for my Country

I’ve shared several horror stories of government incompetence and bureaucratic nonsense as part of my series comparing stupid policies in the United States and United Kingdom.

This has been a neck-and-neck battle, with the United Kingdom recently throwing down the gauntlet with a decision to take kids away from their foster family because the mom and dad didn’t believe in unlimited immigration.

The United States responded by paying to have a bunch of bureaucrats attend a conference so they could learn how to respond to a zombie attack.

I’m not sure which of those decisions wins the prize for government stupidity, but today’s story suggests that it’s time to start chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A.”

After all, surely the United Kingdom can’t surpass the moronic decision by Maryland school bureaucrats to suspend a little boy for pretending his hand was a gun and “shooting” another child.

Here’s all you need to know, as reported by the Washington Examiner, about this laughable – yet nauseating – example of nanny-state political correctness.

I guess he should play with dolls instead

A Montgomery County elementary school student was suspended for a pretend gunshot… The 6-year-old, who attends Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Silver Spring, made a gun with his hands, pointed it at another student and said “pow,” according to Robin Ficker, the boy’s attorney. He was given a one-day suspension, with a conference on the matter planned for Jan. 2, the day students return to school from winter break.

This is not an isolated incident. There are other examples of embarrassing stupidity in America.

• A Rhode Island boy offended the PC nanny-staters by bringing toy soldiers to school.
• A student in San Diego got in trouble for making a motion detector for a science project, simply because someone decided it resembled a bomb.
• A Florida student was expelled for having a toy gun on school property.

Seems like the United States wins this contest for government stupidity.

But, wait, maybe I was blinded by patriotism. Perhaps I wanted America to win and that caused me to overlook equally inane decisions in the United Kingdom.

Indeed, that was the case. Showing that stupidity can reign supreme on both sides of the Atlantic, it turns out that two boys in England were reprimanded for make gun shapes were their hands.

But that’s not all. There have been other idiotic episodes of anti-gun lunacy in the United Kingdom.

• There was a serious proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A man got arrested for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• A prohibition on the use of starting pistols at races lest children get frightened by the noise.
• A bookstore putting shooting magazines in the porn section.

And let’s not forget the woman who got in trouble with the police for trying to scare away some thugs by brandishing a knife in her own home.

So I guess that means we still have a tie. In the contest for government stupidity, the United States and the United Kingdom are both winners.

And the citizens of both nations are losers, but let’s not allow that pesky little fact take away from this exciting contest.

P.S. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Montgomery County is a suburb of Washington, DC. And, as you can see from this map, it is filled with overpaid bureaucrats and lobbyists. Since these are the people imposing so much bad policy on the rest of the nation, at least they’re being consistent and subjecting themselves to foolishness as well.

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The Bad Results and Unjust Consequences of the United Kingdom’s Gun Ban

I wrote yesterday about a silly proposal in the United Kingdom to ban long kitchen knives.

Some people objected because the story was from last decade, but that misses the point. Proponents of the Second Amendment are vigilant against encroachments in part because we’re worried about the slippery slope.

I predicted in yesterday’s piece that at some point the Brits would resort to banning long knives. I hope I’m wrong, but my prediction is based on what the U.K. government has done with gun control.

Ever since 1920, the government has made it more and more difficult for law-abiding people to possess weapons. And in a perverse example of Mitchell’s Law, the failure of one policy is then used to justify the next policy.

That’s how proposals that sound radical and foolish sometimes get implemented many years later.

We don’t know if this will lead to a knife ban at some point, but we can look at evidence showing that gun control in the U.K. was a precursor for a gun ban. And we also know such policies don’t reduce crime.

Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm of George Mason University has a column in the Wall Street Journal, looking at the impact of anti-gun policies in the United Kingdom.

…the Firearms Act of 1998…instituted a nearly complete ban on handguns. Owners of pistols were required to turn them in. The penalty for illegal possession of a pistol is up to 10 years in prison. The results have not been what proponents of the act wanted. Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is. Armed street gangs have some British police carrying guns for the first time.

By the way, it’s not just gun crime that has gone up. The U.K. has become a much more dangerous and violent society – almost surely in part because the thugs don’t have to worry about armed resistance.

Heck, if you are one of the few legal gun owners in the nation and you shoot a burglar, you get arrested instead of a pat on the back.

The U.K.’s draconian restrictions on individual liberty lead to some Orwellian consequences. Professor Malcolm offers up two examples.

Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens who have come into the possession of a firearm, even accidentally, have been harshly treated. In 2009 a former soldier, Paul Clarke, found a bag in his garden containing a shotgun. He brought it to the police station and was immediately handcuffed and charged with possession of the gun. At his trial the judge noted: “In law there is no dispute that Mr. Clarke has no defence to this charge. The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant.” Mr. Clarke was sentenced to five years in prison. A public outcry eventually won his release. In November of this year, Danny Nightingale, member of a British special forces unit in Iraq and Afghanistan, was sentenced to 18 months in military prison for possession of a pistol and ammunition. Sgt. Nightingale was given the Glock pistol as a gift by Iraqi forces he had been training. It was packed up with his possessions and returned to him by colleagues in Iraq after he left the country to organize a funeral for two close friends killed in action. Mr. Nightingale pleaded guilty to avoid a five-year sentence and was in prison until an appeal and public outcry freed him on Nov. 29.

Amazing…and nauseating. I already had written about the unjust treatment of Mr. Clarke, but Mr. Nightingale’s legal nightmare is just as absurd.

Gun control laws are utterly perverse. They don’t work, just like prohibition didn’t work in the 1920s, and just like today’s Drug War is an unmitigated failure.

Gun bans turn law-abiding people into criminals, while simultaneously making life easier for the low-life scum of society.

And as the welfare state begins to fall apart and civil unrest becomes more common, the deadly impact of these bad policies will become even more apparent.

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When Gun Control Satire Becomes British Reality

Back in my less sophisticated days (shocking as it may seem, I wasn’t always the mature, statesmanlike figure I am today), I sometimes resorted to silly arguments when debating gun control, such as, “does this mean you want to ban knives since they also can be used to kill people?”

Smarter opponents would scoff and accuse me of knocking down straw men, assuming a non-existent slippery slope, or engaging in reductio ad absurdum.

I wasn’t even sure what the last one meant, but I secretly felt chagrined because I also thought the argument was nonsense. But it’s not like we had the Internet back in those days so I could quickly peruse the writings of John Lott or David Kopel.

Well, I no longer need to feel shame. It turns out that my straw man came to life and he’s sliding down a slope into a big pool of whatever that reductio thing is.

I kid you not. There’s a supposedly civilized nation that is seriously talking about banning long kitchen knives.

I’ll give you a couple of hints to help you figure out what country is considering this bizarre policy.

• It’s the country that wanted to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• It’s the country that arrested a man for finding a gun in his yard and turning it over to the police.
• It’s the country that imposed a prohibition on the use of starting pistols at races lest children get frightened by the noise.

Yes, I’m talking about our friends in the United Kingdom.

They make some decent movies and they have cute accents, but they seem totally clueless about how to fight crime and the notion of individual rights appears to be a totally alien concept.

So the nation that once ruled half the world actually has contemplated whether to ban certain kitchen knives. Here are some details from a 2005 BBC report.

A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing. …The research is published in the British Medical Journal. The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all. …The researchers say legislation to ban the sale of long pointed knives would be a key step in the fight against violent crime. …Home Office spokesperson said there were already extensive restrictions in place to control the sale and possession of knives. “The law already prohibits the possession of offensive weapons in a public place, and the possession of knives in public without good reason or lawful authority, with the exception of a folding pocket knife with a blade not exceeding three inches. … A spokesperson for the Association of Chief Police Officers said: “ACPO supports any move to reduce the number of knife related incidents, however, it is important to consider the practicalities of enforcing such changes.”

Given my low opinion of and low expectations for Britain’s political class, I’m impressed that pocket knives are still legal. It’s probably just a matter of time before than changes. After that, the next step will be fingernail clippers.

And I’m glad that the ACPO person warned that there might be problems enforcing such a silly law.

But I fully expect to see that foolish proposal get enacted at some point. After all, this is the country where a women who was being threatened by thugs got in trouble with the police for brandishing a knife in her own home.

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