The Failure of Banning So-Called Assault Weapons

Whenever I’m asked about gun control and “assault weapons,” my first instinct is to steer people to the scholarly work of John Lott or the practical analysis of Larry Correia.

Unfortunately, some politicians in Washington haven’t gotten the message.

Here are excerpts from an article in the Pacific Standard, starting with a claim from Senator Feinstein that gun control works.

In the 10 years since the federal assault weapons ban expired, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) has kept trying to renew the law, which she authored. In a press release this month honoring the 20th anniversary of the ban, she wrote, “The evidence is clear: the ban worked.”

So let’s look at what the experts say.

…gun violence experts say the exact opposite. “There is no compelling evidence that it saved lives,” Duke University public policy experts Philip Cook and Kristin Goss wrote in their book The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know. A definitive study of the 1994 law—which prohibited the manufacture and sale of semiautomatic guns with “military-style features” such pistol grips or bayonet mounts as well as magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition—found no evidence that it had reduced overall gun crime or made shootings less lethal. “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence,” the Department of Justice-funded study concluded in 2004.

It turns out that Senator Feinstein based her argument on a discredited study. Indeed, the findings of that study have been repudiated by one of the authors!

The key statistic that Feinstein cited in her recent press release—that the ban “was responsible for a 6.7 percent decrease in total gun murders, holding all other factors equal”—was rejected by researchers a decade ago. …one of the authors of that study, Dr. Christopher Koper, a criminologist from George Mason University, told ProPublica that number was just a “tentative conclusion.” Koper was also the principal investigator on the 2004 study that, as he put it, “kind of overruled, based on new evidence, what the preliminary report had been in 1997.”

In other words, Senator Feinstein’s demagoguery-to-truth ratio on guns is akin the Obama’s demagoguery-to-truth ratio on tax havens.

Let’s close with some gun control humor. Back in March of last year I shared a satirical look at left-wing social science research involving Chicago.

Since Chicago is a case study of gun control, here are two additional images worth sharing. I don’t know if this is a real street sign, but it’s amusing.

And, technically, the people doing the shooting presumably were outside the city limits, so no laws were broken!

Here’s another one, highlighting the great success of gun control in Chicago.

If you want more gun control humor, you can find some good links by clicking here.

P.S. I’m very proud of the folks in Connecticut who are engaging in civil disobedience and defying the new gun control laws in the Nutmeg State.

P.P.S. Massachusetts passed Feinstein-type gun control policies. Needless to say, the results were not positive. No wonder front-line cops overwhelmingly reject gun control.

P.P.P.S. There are some sensible leftists on the issue of gun control, as you can see by clicking here and here.

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Disgusting News and Great News about the Exercise of Second Amendment Freedoms

As a libertarian, it’s easy for me to get agitated about the theoretical burden of high taxes, wasteful spending, and costly regulation.

But even regular people should get upset when they get exposed to specific examples of individuals who are victimized by abusive government.

Regarding the particular topic of Second Amendment freedoms and government misbehavior, I know I get very angry when I read about what happened to folks like Adam Meckler and Benjamin Srigley.

And now we can add Shaneen Allen to the list. Here’s some of what Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee wrote for USA Today.

When Ray Rice beat his wife unconscious in an elevator, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Michael Donio and New Jersey District Attorney Jim McClain agreed to put him in a diversion program for 1st-time offenders to keep him out of jail. But when Pennsylvania single mom Shaneen Allen was pulled over for a traffic violation and volunteered to a New Jersey police officer that she was carrying a legally-owned handgun with a Pennsylvania permit, the response of Donis and McClain was to deny her the same opportunity as Rice. …she faces a felony conviction and a mandatory 42 months in prison. Both Donio and McClain have been unwilling to dismiss the charges, or send Allen to a pretrial diversion program. They seem to want to make an example of her.

How disgusting. A big-time athlete gets special treatment even though he brutalized another person.

But Ms. Allen, who didn’t hurt anybody and only wanted the ability to protect herself, is being abused by the heavy hand of government.

Professor Reynolds argues that this is a problem that merits federal intervention.

The problem is, she’s being punished for something the Constitution says — and the Supreme Court has agreed — is a constitutional right. …Shaneen Allen wasn’t committing gun violence, and civilians with gun permits are a very law-abiding bunch, who have passed a background check and undergone training; no sensible state would want to discourage them from visiting. …Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to protect civil rights via legislation, and this seems like a good subject for action. I would suggest a law providing that when people who may legally own guns under federal law are charged with possessing or carrying them in violation of state law, the maximum penalty should be a fine of no more than $500. This would allow states a reasonable degree of regulation, without subjecting individuals to life-ruining consequences just because some politico wants to make a point.

Speaking of politicos, I hope Governor Chris Christie intervenes and pardons Ms. Allen. Pre-emptively if that’s even legally possible.

A few years ago, he did commute the sentence of a guy who was similarly victimized by New Jersey’s awful laws, so he’s at least semi-reasonable on these issues.

Now let’s shift gears and review a more uplifting story.

Back in 2011, I wrote about the unfortunate plight of unarmed Brits who had very little ability to defend themselves when their neighborhoods were assaulted by rioters and compared that situation to what happened during the Los Angeles riots, when Korean business owners used guns to successfully protect their lives and property.

And I augmented that analysis in 2012 when I wrote about disarmed New Yorkers who were vulnerable to thugs during the chaos that followed Hurricane Sandy.

However, there are places where people can exercise their constitutional rights to self defense, so let’s look at a feel-good story from the Midwest.

Here are some excerpts from a report out of St. Louis.

After nightfall, what began as a community’s peaceful demonstration against the Ferguson Police Department’s shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown turned increasingly violent. Crowds plundered a QuikTrip and burned it to the ground, and local news began reporting brazen raids on other stores in the area. After hearing of the roving bands of looters, Mike Gutierrez knew he had to protect his tattoo shop. He brought a posse with him, including Adam Weinstein, owner of County Guns… Gutierrez, Weinstein and their group arrived to find thieves tearing through a Dollar General in the same strip mall that houses their business. Weinstein says the looters attempted moving toward the shop, but were scared off by the guns.

Hooray that these guys had the freedom to defend themselves.

And I love the accompanying photo. At the risk of stereotyping, I assume that guys who run tattoo parlors are bad asses. Give them some guns and it becomes very obvious why the looters stayed away.

Though even mild-mannered suburban dads can deter looters. At least when they’re armed.

Meanwhile, what happens to store owners that rely on the government to protect them when bad things happen?

Well, there’s not a happy ending.

At the other end of the same strip mall that houses Gutierrez and Weinstein’s business, 53-year-old Silas Chung arrived at his women’s clothing store, Up N Up Fashion, to find a pane of glass shattered and a mannequin lying on its back in the parking lot. Inside the store, racks of newly stocked clothing had been stripped bare. Chung has endured a couple burglaries in the past nine years of running the store, but nothing comparable.

I hope Mr. Chung has insurance, though I would recommend that he also buy some guns and learn to shoot.

Sort of like this honest liberal.

P.S. As I’m typing this, I’m looking at the cufflinks that I received as a birthday present from the PotL. Very appropriate, wouldn’t you agree?

Perhaps not as strong of a statement as my license plate or my daughter’s t-shirt, but very nice nonetheless.

P.P.S. Here are some good videos on gun control (both serious and satirical) and here’s some good humor on the topic.

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Gun Control and Mass Shootings

Well, another loser killed a bunch of people, this time in Santa Barbara, California.

Which gives gun control zealots an opportunity to seize upon the tragedy to recycle their calls to restrict private firearms ownership and otherwise erode the Second Amendment.

But I’m not too worried that they’ll succeed. The evidence is simply too strong that gun ownership reduces crime. The research shows that criminals are less aggressive when they fear potential victims may be armed.

Moreover, they don’t even have practical proposals. Here’s some of what Jacob Sullum wrote for Reason.

None of the items on the anti-gun lobby’s wish list makes sense as a response to the crimes of Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old college student who murdered Martinez’s son and five other people on Friday night. …the Isla Vista massacre, which took place in a state with firearm laws that are among the strictest in the nation, exposes the false promise of policies that aim to prevent violence by limiting access to weapons. …The only specific policy Gross mentioned was “expanded background checks.” But California already has those: All gun sales in that state, including private transfers, must be handled by licensed dealers, and every buyer has to be cleared by the California Department of Justice…

Sullum continues.

Rodger passed those background checks because he did not have a disqualifying criminal or psychiatric record. …Yes, Rodger was depressed, socially isolated, and desperately lonely. But how many people who fit that description become mass murderers? The difficulty of predicting which of the world’s troubled oddballs will turn violent is the reason “expanded background checks” cannot stop this sort of crime.

Good point. Heck, if getting rejected by the opposite sex was a predicate for mass murder, I would have been a potential killer in high school.

So what might have worked? Perhaps, in a leftist fantasy world, outright confiscation of 300 million guns. Though that would lead to massive civil disobedience.

Not to mention they would have to impose controls on knives and cars.

One can imagine policies that might have stopped Rodger, but they are neither practical nor constitutional. If the government not only banned guns but somehow managed to confiscate the 300 million or so Americans already own, that would have put a damper on Rodger’s plans, although he used knives to kill half of the victims who died and used his car to injure others.

And here are some excerpts from analysis by the invaluable John Lott. He starts by observing that the already-existing gun control rules in California were utterly ineffective.

As usual, the media news stories got fundamental facts wrong here. Of particular interest, half the people killed here were stabbed to death. Also, you won’t hear this in the news, the magazines that the killer used were also apparently limited to holding no more than 10 rounds (note that the Sheriff said that all the magazines were legal under California law). Obviously neither point fits the gun control check list.

More important, the anti-gun policies in California may have made it easier for the killer.

Santa Barbara County, where the attack occurred, is essentially a gun-free zone. As of February 2014, there were only 53 individuals with a concealed handgun permit in Santa Barbara County. With an adult population of 337,000, that is a rate of just 0.016 percent. The few people allowed to carry are undoubtedly politically well connected individuals who were unlikely to have been in the part of town where this attack occurred. As we have seen over and over again, these multiple victim killers deliberately select locations where victims are unlikely to be able to defend themselves.

Indeed, in another article, Lott notes that the nutjob carefully planned his attack to minimize the chances of being stopped by a law-abiding person with a gun.

Rodger spent over a year and a half meticulously planning his attack. His 141-page “manifesto” makes it clear that he feared someone with a gun could stop him before he was able to kill a lot of people. …Deterrence matters. As my research with Bill Landes at the University of Chicago found, letting people defend themselves doesn’t just prevent these attacks from occurring, it also limits the harm should the attack occur.  At some point, the fact that virtually all these mass shootings take place where victims are defenseless is going to have to matter.

To be sure, there’s no way to fully prevent crazed and evil people from doing bad things. But public policy can tip the scales in one direction or the other.

That’s why we should focus on policies that discourage bad guys by changing their cost-benefit calculations, such as making it easier for victims to defend themselves.

Not that I expect our statist friends to grasp this economic insight. It seems gun control is a faith-based policy, as captured by this amusing image.

The same message can be found in this Chuck Asay cartoon and these satirical images.

P.S. I shouldn’t stereotype all leftists as being naive on firearms and gun control. As you can read here and here, there are some who put reason ahead of ideology.

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Using the 1st Amendment to Protect the 2nd Amendment

I’ve explained on several occasions (here, here, and here) that we can be optimistic about the fight to preserve our rights to keep and bear arms.

Simply stated, politicians are increasingly scared to go after gun owners and we keep seeing more and more evidence that Second Amendment freedoms make society safer.

And courts are beginning to do a better job of upholding the Constitution. A recent example comes from Arizona, where the government was trying to simultaneously undermine both the First Amendment and Second Amendment.

The latest example comes from Arizona, where a pro-gun group won a legal fight to post notices about firearms training. A controversial gun-safety ad campaign is about to return to Phoenix, after the city lost its attempt to censor the project sponsored by a gun-safety training group, TrainMeAZ, LLC. The Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation, which represented TrainMeAZ, LLC, was granted summary judgment for its client Thursday by the Arizona Court of Appeals, preventing Phoenix from blocking the ads. …Officials at the time told Alan Korwin, owner of TrainMeAZ, that the message was too controversial and had garnered a complaint, and so had to be removed or changed. …“Gun-rights advocates nationwide are fond of saying the Second Amendment protects the First Amendment, which is totally true,” Korwin said. “In this case, however, it’s the other way around — free speech and the First Amendment have protected our right to keep and bear arms, and in particular, our right to train our selves and our precious families in real gun safety.”

This is welcome news, particularly since the court ruled unanimously against the government’s attempt to censor.

P.S. Back in 2012, I shared an IQ test for criminals and liberals. The test had only one question, which was whether criminals would be more likely to rob the house of a gun owner or a anti-gun activist.

Here’s a humorous sign sent to me by the Princess of the Levant. I hope it’s photo-shopped, simply because I like to think no homeowner is dumb enough to invite burglars.

 

And if you like this kind of humor, here are more examples.

P.P.S. While there have been some positive developments in the fight for firearms freedom, the news isn’t all positive. We continue to get jaw-dropping examples of anti-gun political correctness from government schools.

P.P.P.S. On a totally separate topic, I’ve already created a Moocher Hall of Fame, but I think I need to also set up a Bureaucrat Hall of Fame.

I already have a list of potential members, but there’s an overpaid drone at the Environmental Protection Agency who surely deserves to be one of the charter members.

Just how much porn does a person have to watch on their computer at work to get fired from the Environmental Protection Agency? Apparently two to six hours a day will let you hold onto your job….the employee confessed to spending, on average, between two and six hours per day viewing pornography while at work. Apparently, the employee, whose identity has not been revealed, earns about $120,000 a year and has still not been fired.

Though perhaps we should be applauding this bureaucrat. After all, if you look at some of the things EPA bureaucrats do when they’re “working” (see here, here, here, and here), the country may be safer if they spend more time watching porn.

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A Gun Graphic that Will Depress Your Leftist Friends

It’s easy to get discouraged if you believe in small government and individual liberty.

It seems that the burden of the public sector is always expanding and that politicians and bureaucrats are always figuring out new ways to restrict our freedoms.

But let’s not lose hope.

We still have a lot of economic liberty, particularly if you count non-fiscal policy factors.

And we still have the Second Amendment.

Heck, we don’t just have the right to keep and bear arms, we exercise that right in massive numbers.

Take a look at this impressive graphic. We’re #1 in some bad ways, but it seems we’re also #1 in a very good way.

Make sure to share this graphic with your statist friends and colleagues. It’s guaranteed to put them in a glum mood for the rest of the day!

And when you share this with your misguided acquaintances, ask them why guns don’t cause murder in nations such as Switzerland and Finland. Maybe you’ll have a breakthrough and they’ll confess that gun control isn’t the solution.

Incidentally, in addition to having lots of guns in America, we also are quite ready to defy the government if politicians try to take them away.

What’s happening in Connecticut is merely one example of this wonderful form of civil disobedience.

Since we’re on the topic of gun ownership vs. gun control, here’s another image that will cause heartburn for your leftist friends.

Same theme as the 4th image in this post.

And let’s not forget the best-ever poster on gun control.

Last but not least, here’s a poster sent to me by the PotL.

It’s the same message found at the top of this post and at the bottom of this post.

If you want more info – both serious and humorous – on gun control, click here.

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The Lesson We Should Learn from the Fort Hood Shooting

One of the best ways of reducing crime is to make anti-social behavior more expensive. Simply stated, the goal is to alter the cost-benefit analysis of criminals.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that I’m assuming that bad guys are geniuses who put together spreadsheets or engage in elaborate calculations. Instead, I’m simply suggesting that crime becomes less attractive if thugs have a feeling that they’ll be more likely to get caught and/or more likely to get harsh punishment.

And, as I explained in my IQ test for liberals and criminals, bad guys also will be less likely to commit crimes if they know there’s a non-trivial chance that they may get shot. I know that would change my cost-benefit analysis if I was a crook.

But it’s not just my satirical IQ test. You get the same results from real experts such as John Lott and David Kopel.

This is why there’s less crime when law-abiding people own guns (as humorously depicted here and here by Chuck Asay).

Unfortunately, an army base is one place where bad guys can feel confident that they’ll find unarmed victims.

This is worth discussing since, for the second time, we have a sad example of innocent – and disarmed – people getting killed at Fort Hood.

Glenn McCoy has a cartoon that aptly summarizes this issue.

I’m sure some statists would argue that both the cartoon and my analysis are wrong because the killers (Ivan Lopez earlier this month and Major Hasan back in 2009) were crazy and simply wanted to kill the maximum number of people.

But experts have shown that even nutjobs engage in planning and figure out that they will have more ability to kill if they choose venues where potential victims are disarmed.

And even if we hypothesize that some crazy people might be too unstable to make those calculations, what’s wrong with allowing people to carry weapons on a military base so they can defend themselves?!?

But I’m not holding my breath expecting the ideologues in the Obama Administration to change their anti-Second Amendment policies.

Though at least we can be happy that more and more states are acknowledging reality and expanding concealed-carry rights and implementing stand-your-ground laws.

P.S. I’m increasingly optimistic that we are beating the statists on this issue. Honest leftists (see here and here) are acknowledging the value of private firearms ownership. We have very strong polling data from cops that gun control is misguided. And ordinary citizens would engage in massive civil disobedience (as we’re seeing in Connecticut) if the thugs in government tried to confiscate guns.

P.P.S. But let’s not get complacent. Statists may be losing some battles, but they won’t give up in their war against the Constitution. And they’re using government schools to push a fanatical anti-gun agenda. And they’re also working through the United Nations in an effort to get gun control through the back door. Though I suppose we should be happy that American statists aren’t as crazy as their British counterparts.

P.P.P.S. Let’s close with some gun control humor. If you want to know how leftists concoct data against gun ownership, here’s a good example. And here’s a video showing how leftists think about guns. Folks will also enjoy this comparison of how guns are viewed by liberals, conservatives, and Texans. And I think we can all agree that this driver is being very polite.

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Grim Times for Gun Grabbers

I’ve already explained why leftists must be depressed about their failure to restrict private gun ownership.

They’ve suffered brutal electoral setbacks in Colorado, and more and more states have strengthened the right to keep and bear arms.

Moreover, it’s hard for them to claim their agenda is about safer streets when cops overwhelmingly reject the premises of the anti-gun zealots.

And they also have to deal with something very troubling that further undermines their campaign against the Second Amendment.

That troubling thing is facts and data.

Because the more information that we learn, the more evidence we have – as John Lott often reminds us – that more guns equal less crime.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley peruses some new data from the FBI. Here are some key excerpts.

A new FBI report says that violent crime continues to fall nationwide, which might annoy liberals because gun purchases continue to rise. In the first six months of 2013, murders fell by nearly 7 percent, compared with the same period in 2012. Aggravated assaults fell by 6.6 percent, and robberies are down 1.8 percent. “All of the offenses in the violent crime category—murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, and robbery—showed decreases when data from the first six months of 2013 were compared with data from the first six months of 2012,” according to the FBI. Overall, violent crime in the U.S. fell by 5.4 percent. …The left likes to link violent crime to the proliferation of guns in the country, so it’s worth noting that the crime reductions described in the FBI report correlate with a steady increase in firearm sales.

But that’s not all.

It’s also worth noting that gun-ownership rates in the Midwest (39 percent) and South (50 percent) far exceed gun-ownership rates in the Northeast (22 percent), yet violent crime is down more in the Midwest and South than it is in the Northeast, according to the FBI statistics. And rural areas, where gun-ownership rates also are higher than average, saw a larger reduction in violent crime that metropolitan areas, where gun-ownership rates are lower than average. Not that gun-control zealots, who are so certain of a causal link between firearms and violent crime rates, care about such details.

Gee, what a surprise.

When more law-abiding people have guns, the bad guys are more skittish.

Hmmm…sounds like someone took the IQ test I devised for criminals and liberals.

But we have more good news.

It seems that Americans are not sheep meekly waiting to be fleeced of their constitutional freedom and liberties.

In Connecticut, where reprehensible politicians exploited a school shooting to impose restrictions on the Second Amendment, it appears that many citizens are – in effect – telling them to bugger off.

Here are some excerpts from a story in the Hartford Courant.

Everyone knew there would be some gun owners flouting the law that legislators hurriedly passed last April, requiring residents to register all military-style rifles with state police by Dec. 31. But few thought the figures would be this bad. By the end of 2013, state police had received 47,916 applications for assault weapons certificates, Lt. Paul Vance said. An additional 2,100 that were incomplete could still come in. That 50,000 figure could be as little as 15 percent of the rifles classified as assault weapons owned by Connecticut residents, according to estimates by people in the industry… And that means as of Jan. 1, Connecticut has very likely created tens of thousands of newly minted criminals — perhaps 100,000 people…who have broken no other laws.

This story makes me proud to be an American.

We’ve seen some polling data that shows there would be widespread civil disobedience if politicians tried to confiscate guns, but I wondered whether people would be more willing to acquiesce to preliminary steps such as the Connecticut registration plan.

So it’s great to see that tens of thousands of them are resisting.

P.S. As I’ve noted before, anyone who cares about this issue should read these observations from a genuine firearms expert.

And if you have left-wing friends, there are two posts that may convince them to be rational about guns. Justin Cronin explains here that restrictions on gun ownership undermined his ability to protect his family. And Jeffrey Goldberg looked at the evidence and concluded that guns make people safer.

P.P.S. If you simply want a laugh or two,  this funny video shows that our left-wing friends are incapable of understanding this topic.

For more gun control humor, check out this joke comparing California with other parts of America, this interview with a general is worth sharing (presumably an urban legend, but could be true), and here’s a t-shirt that I’m putting on my Christmas list.

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Let’s Call a Penalty on the NFL’s Anti-Gun Bias

There are certain groups of people who support gun control for very logical reasons.

Criminals are obviously big fans of gun control because they prefer unarmed victims.

Dictators also are big supporters of gun control because they want unarmed subjects.

Other segments of the population like gun control for inexplicable ideological reasons.

International bureaucrats advocate for gun control because they apparently think government should be daddy and citizens should be children.

Foreign politicians impose gun control because…well, I’m not sure why, but probably because they’re weenies.

And some American politicians want gun control because it appears they viscerally oppose individual freedom.

But I’m at a loss to understand why other segments of the population are on the wrong side of the gun issue. Why, for instance, does the National Football League have a policy prohibiting this very simple and innocuous ad from airing during the Super Bowl?

You may be thinking that the NFL simply doesn’t want to get involved in a controversial issue. And I wouldn’t be upset if that was the motivating factor.

But don’t forget that they allowed these two political clowns to appear in this ad during last year’s Super Bowl.

In other words, it’s okay for a couple of hack politicians to peddle anti-Second Amendment nonsense, but the NFL is barring a company from airing an ad designed to sell a legal product.

So what’s going on? I’m guessing the League is barring the ad from Daniel Defense for reasons of political correctness.

But your guess is as good as mine.

If you want more information about this kerfuffle, here’s a video about the controversy from the National Rifle Association.

For what it’s worth, I don’t agree with everything in the video. It’s wrong for the NFL to block the ad, but that doesn’t mean it’s censorship or a violation of the First Amendment. That occurs when government is prohibiting a voice from being heard. When a private entity does it, it’s just empty-headed political correctness.

P.S. Maybe we should be happy the NFL gave Mayor Bloomberg air time. When he gets involved in fights to restrict the Second Amendment, the good guys seem to win.

P.P.S. Here’s my favorite video from the NRA.

P.P.P.S. If you like pro-Second Amendment videos, here’s a great collection.

• Ted Nugent talking about gun ownership and the right of self defense.
• A look at 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.
• Debunking the left’s “black NRA” parody.
• A 15-year old speaking truth to power.

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Simple Messages about the Folly of Gun Control

Let’s start this post with some cheerful news.

The statists face a huge uphill battle if their campaign to undermine our rights to keep and bear arms. If you want evidence, just look at last year’s special election defeats of two anti-Second Amendment politicians in Colorado (followed by the resignation of another state senator who feared a recall). Or remind yourself about the utter failure of President Obama’s cynical attempt to get more gun control by exploiting the murder of children in Newtown, Connecticut.

And check out these two maps to see how we’re making progress at the state level.

But this doesn’t mean we can relax our vigil. Showing contempt for America’s separation-of-powers system, the President repeatedly has asserted that he has the power to unilaterally change government policy. And just as he arbitrarily rewrites Obamacare, he claims he can impose more gun control.

But that only allows him to nudge policy in the wrong direction since the courts have been reasonably helpful on the Second Amendment in recent years.

Moreover, the real constraint on the statists is the wonderful fact that the American people would respond with massive civil disobedience if politicians ever tried to take our guns. Heck, even some very admirable government officials already are engaging in civil disobedience.

So let’s maintain our momentum by doing everything we can to educate others about the folly of gun control. Here are a handful of images that help make the case for the the Second Amendment.

Though I fear our left-wing friends will misinterpret this one and demand to regulate box cutters (just as some left-wing Brits have advocated knife control).

Here’s one that reminds me that teachers in places such as Israel and Texas have the right to be armed.

Though I wonder whether that would be comfortable. Perhaps this Alabama woman has a better idea.

Here’s an image with the same message found at the top of this post and at the bottom of this post. (and if you want to see a t-shirt that shows the left’s “morally superior” approach, click here).

Needless to say, my daughter has been raised with the right understanding of this issue.

Here’s a poignant reminder that gun control often is a tool of totalitarian regimes.

Which is why I’ve always thought this poster is the most powerful argument against gun control.

Last but not least, here’s a reminder that bad people don’t like private gun ownership.

Sort of the same message I had in my IQ test for criminals and liberals. In simpler terms, would you go looting in the neighborhood pictured at the end of this post?

Let’s close this post with links to a couple of articles that also are worth sharing. If you have left-wing friends, there are two posts that may convince them to be rational about guns. Justin Cronin explains here that restrictions on gun ownership undermined his ability to protect his family. And Jeffrey Goldberg looked at the evidence and concluded that guns make people safer.

And for your analytically minded friends, this Larry Correia piece is must reading for anyone who wants to understand about magazine limits and so-called assault weapons.

P.S. Fee free to vote in my poll asking the most important reason to oppose gun control.

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The Biggest Risk Factor Leading to Premature Death Is…?

Nope, the answer isn’t smoking. Or fatty food. Or 16 oz. sodas.

And it’s not alcohol, driving too fast, or standing between politicians and a TV camera.

Why is murder “chic” for some people?

In the past 100 years or so, the biggest cause of premature death has been government.

Back in 2011, while criticizing the Baltimore Symphony for using the Soviet hammer and sickle in a promotion, I linked to a website showing how many millions of people were murdered by the dictators who ruled the Soviet Union.

You’ll find similar data in this video, as well as some equally shocking numbers for other examples of democide (death by government).

I don’t know if all the numbers in the video are right. I don’t even know if the government bought 1.6 billion hollow point bullets. And I certainly hope our tax dollars didn’t help finance Pol Pot’s democide in Cambodia.

But I fully agree that government is the greatest killer of all time.

This doesn’t mean, by the way, that I think all governments are equally evil. I wouldn’t even make the claim that there’s a link between big government and democide (though that’s probably true given the track record of National Socialists in Germany and Soviet Socialists in China and the Soviet Union).

Instead, I’ll simply regurgitate some of what I wrote back in August.

…be thankful that there are some libertarians willing to raise a stink about government even if the rest of the world thinks we’re a bit odd. As we’ve seen dozens of times, most recently with the IRS and NSA, bureaucrats and politicians have a compulsive tendency to grab more power and make government more intrusive. …I’ll end today’s post by mentioning the fable of the frog that gets put in a pot of water and doesn’t jump out because the temperature feels comfortable. But then the heat is slowly raised and the frog no longer has the energy to escape when he finally figures out he’s being cooked. Well, libertarians are the ones who loudly complain when the government puts us into pots.

In other words, governments are less likely to do really awful things if there are some of us fighting when they do mildly bad things.

Don’t forget that when enough mildly bad things occur and you get economic stagnation, one result is the kind of social chaos and rioting that has occurred in some European nations.

And those are the conditions that sometimes lead to takeovers by the types of governments that do really awful things.

Let’s close with two bits of satire. First, here’s something I saw on Twitter. It’s for the statists who claim that communism is a good theory, but that it hasn’t been properly implemented.

Needless to say, I can’t see the appeal of a theory that says we are slaves to each other. But the point of this poster is that real-world communism is always about murder and oppression.

Second, this is a good opportunity to emphasize one of the messages from the end of the video.

A common trait of dictators is that they want the citizenry disarmed.

This poster is the fourth-most viewed post I’ve ever produced. But not because I said anything clever.

Instead, people like this poster and share it with their friends because it makes a very important point about the dangers of unlimited state power.

So what’s the moral of the story? I guess the message is that small government is tolerable. Medium-sized government is bad. And unlimited government is horrible.

Actually, George Washington said the same thing with much greater clarity: “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

P.S. I suppose this shouldn’t be a joking matter, but here’s an amusing look at communist efficiency from the Beijing Olympics.

P.P.S. And the fourth video at this link has some great examples of Reagan’s use of humor against communism.

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More Good News in the Battle to Preserve Second Amendment Freedoms

Like all advocates of freedom, I normally despair about the future. Whether we’re measuring the ever-growing burden of government or the erosion of key forms of social capital such as self-reliance and the work ethic, it seems that the world is heading in the wrong direction.

But, at least for today, I want to be optimistic. At least on the issue of guns.

Mexico isn’t a tax haven, but Cabo is still much better than DC

My good cheer may simply be a function of the holiday season. Or maybe my optimism is merely an illogical side-effect of having just enjoyed a couple of days of warm sunshine.

But I don’t think so. I actually think we’re winning the battle to preserve the Second Amendment.

And Colorado is Ground Zero in this battle. In an unprecedented move, two state senators – including the Senate President – were kicked out of office earlier this year because voters were upset that they voted to undermine the right to keep and bear arms.

Then, more recently, another state senator in Colorado resigned her seat rather than face a similar recall election.

Those political results were impressive, but it’s even more surprising that we’re now we’re seeing some very admirable forms of civil disobedience. But what’s amazing isn’t that citizens are refusing to obey tyrannical and unjust law.

That’s inspiring, of course, but we’ve now reached the point where even law enforcement is refusing to comply.

Here are some encouraging excerpts from a report in the New York Times about how Colorado sheriffs are openly stating that they have no intention of carrying out the misguided dictates of the political class.

When Sheriff John Cooke of Weld County explains in speeches why he is not enforcing the state’s new gun laws, he holds up two 30-round magazines. One, he says, he had before July 1, when the law banning the possession, sale or transfer of the large-capacity magazines went into effect. The other, he “maybe” obtained afterward. He shuffles the magazines, which look identical, and then challenges the audience to tell the difference. “How is a deputy or an officer supposed to know which is which?” he asks.

It’s not just Sheriff Cooke.

…if Sheriff Cooke and a majority of the other county sheriffs in Colorado offer any indication, the new laws — which mandate background checks for private gun transfers and outlaw magazines over 15 rounds — may prove nearly irrelevant across much of the state’s rural regions. Some sheriffs, like Sheriff Cooke, are refusing to enforce the laws, saying that they are too vague and violate Second Amendment rights. Many more say that enforcement will be “a very low priority,” as several sheriffs put it. All but seven of the 62 elected sheriffs in Colorado signed on in May to a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the statutes.

Even the Sheriffs on the wrong side of the lawsuit aren’t necessarily on the wrong side of the issue.

Even Sheriff W. Pete Palmer of Chaffee County, one of the seven sheriffs who declined to join the federal lawsuit because he felt duty-bound to carry out the laws, said he was unlikely to aggressively enforce them. He said enforcement poses “huge practical difficulties,” and besides, he has neither the resources nor the pressure from his constituents to make active enforcement a high priority. Violations of the laws are misdemeanors. “All law enforcement agencies consider the community standards — what is it that our community wishes us to focus on — and I can tell you our community is not worried one whit about background checks or high-capacity magazines,” he said.

We’re seeing healthy resistance in other states as well.

The resistance of sheriffs in Colorado is playing out in other states. …In New York State, where Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed one of the toughest gun law packages in the nation last January, two sheriffs have said publicly they would not enforce the laws — inaction that Mr. Cuomo said would set “a dangerous and frightening precedent.” …In Liberty County, Fla., a jury in October acquitted a sheriff who had been suspended and charged with misconduct after he released a man arrested by a deputy on charges of carrying a concealed firearm. The sheriff, who was immediately reinstated by the governor, said he was protecting the man’s Second Amendment rights. …“Our way of life means nothing to these politicians, and our interests are not being promoted in the legislative halls of Sacramento or Washington, D.C.,” said Jon E. Lopey, the sheriff of Siskiyou County, Calif.

By the way, Governor Cuomo is half-right about “a dangerous and frightening precedent.” He’s just oblivious to the fact that this phrase applies to his policies, not to the Sheriffs who are obeying the Constitution and common sense.

For more information on the Second Amendment and the folly of gun control, here are some great videos.

• Ted Nugent talking about gun ownership and the right of self defense.
• A look at 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.
• Debunking the left’s “black NRA” parody.
• A 15-year old speaking truth to power.

P.S. Andrew Cuomo was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton years when the so-called affordable lending requirements were dramatically expanded, thus helping to pave the way for the housing and financial crisis.

P.P.S. Another way of protecting the Second Amendment is for juries to engage in nullification and to refuse to convict people for peaceably owning and bearing arms.

P.P.P.S. My fourth, sixth, and ninth most viewed posts are about gun control and the Second Amendment, so this obviously is an issue people care about.

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More Bad News for Gun Grabbers

Citing polling data with poorly (or dishonestly) worded questions, anti-Second Amendment ideologues often argue that gun control is popular.

The real test, though, is what happens on election day. That’s why it was such big news when two incumbent Democrats from Colorado’s State Senate were defeated in a recall election.

They both represented districts that had voted for Obama, yet they were easily tossed out of office after voting for legislation to restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens.

Well, as Yogi Berra would say, it’s deja vu all over again. Another statist politician has been forced out of a job in Colorado. Here are some details from a local news report.

Political thug gives up her seat after undermining constitutional freedoms

State Sen. Evie Hudak has decided to resign rather than risk facing a recall election… Hudak, D-Westminster, could have been the third Democratic lawmaker to face a recall over a package of gun control bills they helped pass earlier this year. Sens. John Morse, D-Colorado Springs, and Angela Giron, D-Pueblo, both decided to fight recall elections against them, but were ousted in September in favor of Republican replacements.

So why is she throwing in the towel? Because she thinks she will lose and that would give the GOP control of the State Senate.

Hudak is playing it safe. By resigning before the signatures are turned in, she assures that a Democratic vacancy committee will appoint her replacement, keeping the seat — and the senate — in the party’s hands, at least through November, when her successor will be forced to win reelection.

It’s almost a shame that there won’t be a recall election. Not because I care about whether Republicans take over the State Senate, but rather because I would like to see the outgoing Napoleonic Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, squander more of his fortune on another Colorado contest. He blew a lot of money on the earlier gun-related recall elections, and he also dropped a lot of cash on a failed effort to replace the state’s flat tax with a so-called progressive scheme that would set Colorado on a path to becoming another California.

But I won’t let that little detail reduce the happiness I feel that a political thug has been forced to resign. Particularly since that sends a signal to other politicians all across the nation.

Since we’re on the topic of gun control, this is a great opportunity to call attention to a powerful column by Stephen Halbrook. He explains how the Nazis used gun control to advance their totalitarian and murderous agenda.

Historians have documented most everything about it except what made it so easy to attack the defenseless Jews without fear of resistance. Their guns were registered and thus easily confiscated.

He provides some of the sordid history of the period.

The Nazis immediately used the firearms-registration records to identify, disarm and attack “enemies of the state,” a euphemism for Social Democrats and other political opponents of all types. …The Gestapo cautioned the police that it would endanger public safety to issue gun permits to Jews. …By fall of 1938, the Nazis were ratcheting up measures to expropriate the assets of Jews. To ensure that they had no means of resistance, the Jews were ordered to surrender their firearms. …This scenario took place all over Germany — firearms were confiscated from all Jews registered as gun owners. …Under the pretense of searching for weapons, Jewish homes were vandalized, businesses ransacked and synagogues burned. Jews were terrorized, beaten and killed. Orders were sent to shoot anyone who resisted. SS head Heinrich Himmler decreed that possession of a gun by a Jew was punishable by 20 years in a concentration camp.

So what’s the message. Halbrook puts it in very stark terms.

Today, gun control, registration and prohibition are depicted as benign and progressive. Government should register gun owners and ban any guns it wishes, Americans are told, because government is inherently good and trustworthy. The experiences of Hitler’s Germany and, for that matter, Stalin’s Russia and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, are beneath the realm of possibility in exceptional America. Let’s hope so.

Most people assume that such awful things could never happen in America.

And maybe they’re right. But when you look at very grim numbers showing that the United States is headed for a fiscal collapse, and when you consider that there already has been rioting in Europe as the welfare state implodes, it doesn’t require a very vivid imagination to think that America could face some very tough times in the not-too-distant future.

That’s why I argued, in this interview with NRA TV, that gun ownership is very important in the event of societal breakdown.

Let’s conclude with a bit of gun control satire.

My fourth-most viewed post is a montage of dictators who supported gun control. But some dictators are worse than others.

And the former head of the National Socialists definitely is in that category.

So, given the wise words we just read from Stephen Halbrook, let’s all keep in mind this very powerful message from Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

P.S. If you want more information on gun control, I strongly recommend this analysis from an actual firearms expert, as well as remarkable admissions from leftists that can be read here and here.

P.P.S. If you’re interested, my three posts with the most views are the set of cartoons showing why welfare states collapse, a joke about California and Texas, and a story of how you can use beer to explain the tax system.

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Are Government Schools a Form of Child Abuse?

I’m a big fan of school choice. If we bust up the government education monopoly and create a competitive education market, we’ll get a much better education system at much lower cost.

This isn’t just idle theorizing. The evidence shows that competition produces better results.

That will be especially good news for children from poor and minority neighborhoods, as even the Washington Post has admitted.

There’s even good evidence for school choice from other nations, such as Chile, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

And since we’re looking at international evidence, it’s worth noting that America spends more per student than any other nation, yet gets very mediocre results.

However, there’s also a non-educational argument for busting up the government school monopoly. Simply stated, we have to rescue kids from brainless school bureaucrats who impose crazy forms of anti-gun political correctness.

What am I talking about? Well, check out these excerpts from a Fox News report.

Natural Born Killers

Two seventh-grade students in Virginia Beach, Va., were handed long-term suspensions Tuesday that will last until the end of the school year for playing with an airsoft gun in one of their front yards while waiting for the school bus. WAVY-TV reports that 13-year-old Khalid Caraballo and Aidan Clark will face an additional hearing in January to determine if they will be expelled for “possession, handling and use of a firearm” because the guns were fired at two others playing in Caraballo’s yard. …Khalid claims he never took the toy gun to the designated bus stop or Larkspur Middle School, according to the report. Two other students who fired guns were also suspended.

Your eyes are not deceiving you. The kids were punished for playing with toy guns while on private property.

Yet apparently school bureaucrats don’t think their power is limited by school boundaries.

A neighbor saw Khalid shooting the airsoft gun in his yard and called 911, telling the dispatcher, “He is pointing the gun, and it looks like there’s a target in a tree in his front yard,” the station reported. …The school’s so-called “zero-tolerance” policy on guns extends to private property, according to the report.

At least one of the parents has the right view of things.

If you outlaw Zombie Hunters, only outlaws will have Zombie Hunters

Khalid’s mother, Solangel Caraballo, said it’s ridiculous that her son and his friends were suspended because they were firing the airsoft gun on private property. “My son is my private property. He does not become the school’s property until he goes to the bus stop, gets on the bus, and goes to school,” Caraballo told the station.

Now let’s add some important caveats. Even though the toy guns only shoot little plastic pellets, it seems that the boys may have shot at some kids who weren’t part of their play. That’s something that should be punished.

And it’s also possible that the boys are troublemakers and the school was simply using this episode as an excuse to get rid of them.

So maybe there’s some sort of “rough justice” happening behind the scenes. Simply stated, there’s probably a back-story.

But there’s no question that we’re seeing a bad trend.

• 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.
• A third-grader got in trouble for having toy army men on his birthday cupcakes.
• Two second-graders got suspended for holding pencils like they were guns.
• Bureaucrats suspended a kindergartener for having a lego-sized toy gun.
• Bureaucrats wanted a deaf child to change his sign-language name because it required him to shape his fingers in a way that resembled a gun.

It’s almost to the point where sending your kids to a government school could be considered a form a child abuse.

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Is Defending the Second Amendment akin to Supporting Slavery?

The English are an interesting tribe. There is much to like about their country, including the fact that voters repeatedly elected Margaret Thatcher, one of the world’s best leaders in my lifetime.

On the other hand, the United Kingdom has veered sharply to the left in recent decades, and Thatcher must have been very disappointed that her Conservative Party now is but a hollow shell, controlled by statists who actually think people should voluntarily pay extra tax to support wasteful and corrupt government.

And the politicians openly pursue Orwellian tax-collection tactics!

No wonder the country now faces a very grim future.

But the thing that most irks me about the British political class is the fanatical embrace of anti-gun policies. Consider some of these examples.

• There was a proposal to prevent children from watching Olympic shooting events.
• A British veteran of the Iraq war was arrested after his local trainees included a gun when mailing his possessions back to England.
• In an example of private sector political correctness, a bookstore put shooting magazines in the porn section.
• 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.
• A man was arrested for shooting a burglar who invaded his house.

Given these example of anti-gun zealotry, you won’t be surprised to learn that some English pundits think America is primitive and backwards for retaining an individual right to bear arms.

You may be thinking, “so what, they have their bad laws and we have our good laws.” But it seems at least some Brits want to disarm not just their own citizens, but Americans as well.

Writing for the UK-based Guardian, Henry Porter asserts that it is time for the United Nations to somehow undermine private gun ownership in the United States.

…what if we no longer thought of this as just a problem for America and, instead, viewed it as an international humanitarian crisis – a quasi civil war, if you like, that calls for outside intervention? … If this perennial slaughter doesn’t qualify for intercession by the UN and all relevant NGOs, it is hard to know what does.

Mr. Porter doesn’t specify how the United Nations and other non-governmental organizations are supposed to accomplish this task.

Does he want Obama to ram through the U.N. treaty that leftists hope would trump the Second Amendment?

If so, all I can say is good luck trying to enforce gun bans. The American people would engage in widespread disobedience if our own politicians tried to take away our constitutional freedoms.

I’d like to see UN bureaucrats try to disarm these great Americans

And if a bunch of U.N. bureaucrats tried to do the same thing…well, that’s such a ridiculous notion that I’m reminded of my fantasy about what might have happened if the United Nations had tried to stop Texas from executing a child murderer who originally was from Mexico.

But the call for UN intervention is not the most absurd part of the article.

What could be sillier, you ask? How about the fact that Mr. Porter implies that gun owners are akin to slave owners. It’s not an explicit accusation, but you can see in this excerpt that he wants readers to draw that conclusion.

Half the country is sane and rational while the other half simply doesn’t grasp the inconsistencies and historic lunacy of its position, which springs from the second amendment right to keep and bear arms, and is derived from English common law and our 1689 Bill of Rights. We dispensed with these rights long ago, but American gun owners cleave to them with the tenacity that previous generations fought to continue slavery.

So if you “cleave” to your guns, you’re on the same level as the people who defended slavery. I guess this is the U.K. version of Obama accusing some Americans of “clinging to guns.”

Ironically, Mr. Porter self identifies as a “journalist specialising in liberty and civil rights.” But he doesn’t specify what side he’s on, so I guess we can assume – based on this column – that he specializes in undermining liberty and curtailing civil rights.

P.S. The Guardian is known as a left-wing newspaper, but I’ve always had a special place for them in my heart ever since one of their writers accused me of being “a high priest of light tax, small state libertarianism.” He meant it as an insult, of course, but I think of it as the nicest thing ever written about me. Even better than this.

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Underwhelming Left-Wing Humor about the “Black NRA”

I’m more than willing to give credit to leftists who come up with clever political satire.

This cartoon about Fox News, for instance, is rather amusing, and this imagery about the greed of the developed world is effective even though it’s misguided.

I’ve even shared funny videos, cartoons, and images that mock libertarians.

So when Sarah Silverman put together a pro-gun control video mocking the idea of a “black NRA,” I was prepared to laugh.

Having watched it, you can put me in the underwhelmed category. My computer skills are deficient and I only know how to embed YouTube videos, so you’ll have to click here if you want to watch her full video, but here’s a video from Carl Jackson that includes some of what Silverman did along a very effective response.

My reaction, for what it’s worth, is that Silverman is very attractive so it’s a shame she’s a leftist (my attitude about Stephanie Cutter as well). But on a more substantive level,

1. It’s almost laughable that a multi-millionaire like Silverman, who doubtlessly lives in a very safe area and almost surely relies on armed private security, wants to restrict the gun rights of ordinary Americans.

2. Do Silverman and the other characters in the video really think that criminals are impacted by gun control laws? Do they have enough sense to understand that the bad guys prefer when law-abiding people are disarmed?

But enough about my reactions. Here’s a very good video response from PJ Media.

If you want more videos on the general topic of gun control, here are some of my favorites.

• Ted Nugent talking about gun ownership and the right of self defense.
• A look at 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.
• A 15-year old speaking truth to power.

And if you want gun control videos that are both funny and on the right side, here’s my collection.

• 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.
• Joe Biden’s self-defense advice.

Since this post is about blacks and gun control, let’s close with a link to what Thomas Sowell has to say about the topic.

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Two Huge Victories in Colorado for the Second Amendment

Back in 2012, I reported on some academic research showing that Democrats lost about 25 seats in the 2010 mid-term elections because of support for Obamacare.

But it’s not just big-government entitlement programs that are politically unpopular. Bill Clinton admitted that his ban on so-called assault weapons boomeranged against Democrats in the 1994 elections and he acknowledged that “The N.R.A. could rightly claim to have made Gingrich the House speaker.”

But we don’t have to go back nearly 20 years to find evidence showing that gun control is unpopular.

In a remarkable development, two incumbents from the Colorado State Senate – including the Senate President – were ousted yesterday from their seats in a special recall election. Here’s some of what’s being reported in this morning’s Denver Post.

An epic national debate over gun rights in Colorado on Tuesday saw two Democratic state senators ousted for their support for stricter laws, a “ready, aim, fired” message intended to stop other politicians for pushing for firearms restrictions. Senate President John Morse and Sen. Angela Giron will be replaced in office with Republican candidates who petitioned onto the recall ballot.

What makes these results so amazing is that voters in these Senate seats have a history of voting for leftists. Obama won both of them comfortably, garnering 59.7 percent and 61.2 percent of the vote. Neither seat could be considered red-state territory.

…[Giron’s] district is heavily Democratic, Pueblo is a blue-collar union town. Morse’s district included Manitou Springs and a portion of Colorado Springs — and more liberals. …It’s unclear when the city of Pueblo was last represented in the Senate by a Republican.

It’s also worth noting the unprecedented nature of this election.

The turn of events made Morse and Giron the first Colorado state lawmakers to be recalled.

The pro-Second Amendment backlash also is causing a headache for the state’s governor, who was once seen as a politician with national potential.

Gov. John Hickenlooper — once deemed so unbeatable that the GOP couldn’t even find a candidate to run against him in 2014 — now faces falling approval ratings and a crowded field of Republican contenders, in part for backing stricter gun measures.

Last but not least, the Atlas Project (don’t know what that is or who they are, but they have lots of good data on the recall election) reports that the anti-Second Amendment people had a huge money advantage, outspending supporters of the Constitution by a 5-1 margin.

Republicans trail badly in the money race. In total, Democratic groups have raised over $2.6 million and spent almost $2.3 million in the two races. Republican interests have raised not even $523,000 and spent less than $482,000. Clearly, Democrats are taking the recall threat seriously and are both better funded and better organized.

In other words, even though there had never been a successful recall in Colorado history, and even though advocates of gun rights were targeting Senators in two districts that voted overwhelmingly for Obama, and even though the statists had a huge money advantage, what mattered most was that voters did not want their gun rights eroded by politicians.

Opponents of the Second Amendment probably thought they could win because they weren’t trying to ban guns (at least not in the short run). Instead, they “merely” required background checks and restricted large-capacity magazines. But the people of Colorado recognized and understood that the pro-gun control cranks such as Mayor Bloomberg view “modest” gun control schemes as nothing more than stepping stones to gun bans and gun confiscations.

Polling data shows the American people would engage in massive civil disobedience if politicians tried to ban guns. But it’s also comforting that voters also are willing to overcome heavy odds to knock off politicians who push for any type of gun control.

This is one further bit of evidence that we should be optimistic about the future of the Second Amendment. The political elite may want the American people disarmed, but we’ve seen major progress in the other direction in recent years because of pressure from ordinary Americans. Not only have pro-gun control politicians been punished, but dozens of states have taken steps to expand and protect the rights of gun owners.

And let’s not forget how Obama’s attempt to exploit the Connecticut school shooting flopped.

That being said, we should never get overconfident. Yes, it’s good that some honest liberals (here and here) have recognized that gun control is misguided. And it’s great that we have powerful polling data from cops showing that they realize gun control does not mean less crime.

But there are still lots of politicians hoping to take advantage of some future tragedy to push their statist anti-gun agenda. Simply stated, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

P.S. Click here and here for links to some good anti-gun control humor, but I want to close by sharing a link to this poster, which seems to drive leftists crazy and deservedly is the fourth-most viewed post in the history of my blog.

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Another Failed Gun Control Experiment

It sounds strange, but my two favorite columns on gun control were authored by self-identified leftists. But they didn’t let ideology trump common sense.

Justin Cronin, for instance, explained that restrictions on gun ownership undermined his ability to protect his family. And Jeffrey Goldberg looked at the evidence and concluded that guns make people safer.

This doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate gun control columns by non-leftists. This Larry Correia piece, for instance, is must reading if you want to understand about magazine limits and so-called assault weapons.

And if you like real-world evidence, Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe examines what happened after Massachusetts adopted onerous gun control legislation. He starts by explaining the law and what supporters promised.

In 1998, Massachusetts passed what was hailed as the toughest gun-control legislation in the country. Among other stringencies, it banned semiautomatic “assault” weapons, imposed strict new licensing rules, prohibited anyone convicted of a violent crime or drug trafficking from ever carrying or owning a gun, and enacted severe penalties for storing guns unlocked. …One of the state’s leading anti-gun activists, John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, joined the applause. “The new gun law,” he predicted, “will certainly prevent future gun violence and countless grief.” It didn’t.

Legal gun ownership plummeted.

The 1998 legislation did cut down, quite sharply, on the legal use of guns in Massachusetts. Within four years, the number of active gun licenses in the state had plummeted. “There were nearly 1.5 million active gun licenses in Massachusetts in 1998,” the AP reported. “In June [2002], that number was down to just 200,000.”

Jacoby then explains, however, that the advocates of gun control were not very successful in restraining the behavior of criminals.

But the law that was so tough on law-abiding gun owners had quite a different impact on criminals. Since 1998, gun crime in Massachusetts has gotten worse, not better. In 2011, Massachusetts recorded 122 murders committed with firearms, the Globe reported this month — “a striking increase from the 65 in 1998.” Other crimes rose too. Between 1998 and 2011, robbery with firearms climbed 20.7 percent. Aggravated assaults jumped 26.7 percent.

Gee, what a surprise. The bad guys responded to incentives and committed more crimes once they knew that victims were less likely to be in a position to defend themselves.

To be fair, the statists do have a response.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for gun-control activists to admit they were wrong. …“Massachusetts probably has the toughest laws on the books, but what happens is people go across borders and buy guns and bring them into our state,” rationalizes Boston Mayor Tom Menino. “Guns have no borders.”

But here’s where Jacoby administers a knock-out punch. He looks at evidence from other states and shows that there’s no plausible alternative explanation to the proposition that more gun control is correlated with more crime.

…why didn’t the gun-control lobby warn legislators in 1998 that adopting the toughest gun law in America would do Massachusetts no good unless every surrounding state did the same thing? Far from explaining why the new law would do nothing to curb violent crime, they were positive it would make Massachusetts even safer.  …But crime in Massachusetts didn’t just continue, it began climbing. As in the rest of the country, violent crime had been declining in Massachusetts since the early 1990s. Beginning in 1998, that decline reversed — unlike in the rest of the country. …Guns-across-borders might have explained homicide levels in Massachusetts continuing unchanged. But how can other states’ policies be responsible for an increase in Massachusetts homicides? Relative to the rest of the country, or to just the states on its borders, Massachusetts since 1998 has become a more dangerous state. …In 1998, Massachusetts’s murder rate equaled about 70 percent of the rate for Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York. Now it equals 125 percent of that rate. Clearly something bad happened to Massachusetts 15 years ago. Blaming the neighbors may be ideologically comforting. But those aren’t the states whose crime rates are up.

Game. Set. Match.

But just in case you’re still not convinced, check out some of the empirical work generated by John Lott.

• Lott explained how anti-gun laws facilitated the terrorist attack at Fort Hood.
• Writing after the Tucson shootings, Lott explained the benefits of concealed-carry laws.
• In the aftermath of the Heller decision, Lott explained how more guns resulted in less crime in DC.
• Lott explained how gun control made Jamaica a more dangerous country.
• Lott debunked myths about so-called assault weapons.

Or check out some of the fact-based research on guns and crime by David Kopel.

In other words, even if you don’t care about the Constitution, there’s no case for gun control. Jeff Jacoby’s column is simply the 100th nail in the coffin.

P.S. Since I usually try to include something at least  vaguely amusing in my posts, click here to see some of my favorite examples of gun control humor.

P.P.S. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that cops overwhelming agree that gun control  is ineffective.

P.P.P.S. Jacoby does very good work and deserves more attention. Here are links to some of his columns that caught my eye.

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Should We Be Optimistic or Pessimistic about the Future of the Second Amendment?

Fifty years from now (assuming we haven’t suffered a Greek-style fiscal collapse), will we still enjoy our constitutional freedom of private gun ownership?

Sometimes I’m pessimistic about what will happen because politically correct educators are brainwashing our kids. We’ve even gotten to the point where a deaf kid can’t use sign language if his fingers somehow resemble a gun! And if you think that’s bizarre, check out these other horror stories of anti-gun hysteria in government schools.

And even though there’s currently a majority on the Supreme Court in favor of the Second Amendment, it’s only a one-vote margin. That doesn’t give me much comfort, particularly since we’ve seen examples of Justices ignoring their oath when subjected to political pressure.

Moreover, it’s difficult to be optimistic when a local government imposes a $1,000 fine on a man who uses an unregistered gun (gasp!) to save a child’s life.

On the other hand, I’m somewhat optimistic because gun owners and defenders of the Constitution have done a remarkable job in expanding and extending our Second Amendment rights at the state level.

For instance, check out this map of concealed-carry laws in the United States. The first thing to notice is that every single state allows citizens to carry, with the only real difference being whether the law is “shall issue” or “may issue.”

I’m a bit mystified, for what it’s worth, that Alabama has a relatively weak “may issue” law. Do they really want to be in the same anemic category as California?!?

Now let’s look at this map of stand-your-ground laws. The right of self-defense is not as ubiquitous as the right of concealed-carry, but the trend is very positive with more states moving from blue to red over time.

I’m puzzled why Nebraska and Missouri have weak New York-style laws, but I imagine those colors will change in a couple of years.

By the way, state legislatures are not the only place where we’re making progress. Thanks to scholars such as John Lott, it’s increasingly clear that social science research leans in favor of private gun ownership.

And I challenge anyone to defend gun control after reading this Larry Correia article.

But the biggest sign of progress may be that honest leftists are beginning to acknowledge the benefits of the Second Amendment. If you have squeamish friends and colleagues who favor gun control, show them this article from The Atlantic and this column from the New York Times.

I’m also encouraged by polling data that shows cops overwhelmingly reject the gun control agenda.

So what does all this mean? To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure. It does appear, however, that the political elite is moving in the wrong direction on the Second Amendment and the American people are moving in the right direction.

I don’t know what side will win, but it’s a safe bet that we’ll have some major political battles in the future.

P.S. If you enjoy anti-gun control humor, here are some amusing videos.

• 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.

And you can find lots of additional anti-gun control humor at this link.

P.P.S. If you outlaw tanks, only outlaws will have tanks.

P.P.P.S. Feel free to add your vote to my poll on the most important reason to defend the Second Amendment.

P.P.P.P.S. Last but not least, here are some serious videos on the folly of gun control

• 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.
• A 15-year old speaks truth to power.

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Support Individual Responsibility, Say No to Back-Door Gun Control

If a bad person robs a bank and then uses a Chevrolet to make his getaway, do we blame General Motors?

Of course not.

If a pilot suffers some sort of medical incident, loses control of her plane, and injures people on the ground during the crash, do we blame Cessna?

No, that would be silly.

If a con artist tricks a consumer into sending money, do we blame the bank where the fraudster has an account?

Logically, the answer is no, but thanks to money laundering laws, the government actually does expect banks to know if customers are misbehaving. But that’s why experts think those laws are absurdly unworkable and expensive.

I’m asking these rhetorical questions because a couple of professors, in a New York Times op-ed, claim that gun manufacturers and gun owners should be subject to special taxes. Why? Well, because some people deliberately or accidentally cause damage with guns.

Gun manufacturers have gone to great lengths to avoid any moral responsibility or legal accountability for the social costs of gun violence… But there is a simple and direct way to make them accountable for the harm their products cause. For every gun sold, those who manufacture or import it should pay a tax. The money should then be used to create a compensation fund for innocent victims of gun violence.

They justify their plan with economics. Or, to be more accurate, they use economic terminology to sell their scheme.

This proposal is based on a fundamentally conservative principle — that those who cause injury should be made to “internalize” the cost of their activity by paying for it. …it makes sense to tax gun manufacturers directly. The result would be that those who derive a benefit from guns — for hunting, target practice, self-defense or simply for collecting — would shoulder some of the social costs of their choice as manufacturers pass along the cost of the tax to them. Such a tax might also exert at least some economic pressure on manufacturers to market especially lethal guns less aggressively, or to implement safer gun technologies, like “smart guns” that could be used only by the registered owner. Right now, they have no such incentive — they’re immune from most lawsuits, and guns are expressly exempt from regulation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is supposed to protect the public from unreasonable risks from consumer products.

There are lots of reasons why I disagree with this column, but my main objection – as suggested by the rhetorical questions above – is that the professors want to improperly redistribute risk and blame.

A gun is not inherently dangerous. Indeed, gun ownership is associated with lower crime rates, so it’s more accurate to say they are inherently safety enhancing. Cops, for instance, overwhelmingly think gun control is either futile or counterproductive.

That being said, what’s the best way to deal with those individuals who deliberately or accidentally use guns in an unsafe manner?

The answer is simple. There should be criminal penalties imposed on those who engage in deliberate wrongdoing and we should rely on insurance and/or the tort system (properly focused)  for accidental misuse.

Will that system be perfect? Of course not. Criminals will always exist. All we can do is to make crime less attractive. And accidents will always happen, even if we have a good system of insurance and torts.

Let’s conclude with a statement of the obvious. I’m 99 percent certain that the professors are completely unserious about modifying how we insure against gun-related damage. They’re simply using the terminology to impose a policy that is best characterized as back-door gun control.

Which makes me all the more appreciative of the message on this young lady’s t-shirt.

I’m tired of statists, most of whom (like Rosie O’Donnell)  live very comfortable lives in safe neighborhoods, trying to tell the rest of us how to live.

P.S. Sloppy and flawed analysis seems to be a specialty at the New York Times.

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America’s Dysfunctional Education System Has Jumped the Shark

I give up.

I’ve been having some fun over the past couple of years by mocking education bureaucrats for absurd examples of anti-gun political correctness.

I have made fun of teachers and other bureaucrats when they wet their pants about tiny Lego guns. I laugh at them when they go after little kids for half-eaten pop tarts that ostensibly have gun shapes. And I abuse them for getting their panties in a wad about pencils, fingers, and…um…well, air.

I’m even willing to enjoy a laugh when idiot bureaucrats bust a 5-year old girl because her pink bubble blower vaguely resembles a gun. Or when they nail a little boy for toy army men.

But in recent months, the exercise has become a chore because I’ve slowly come to realize that bureaucratic stupidity is becoming the rule rather than the exception.

And now I think it’s time to throw in the towel and give up. Why? Because there’s really no hope for government schools when you come across a news report about some moronic paper pushers in Nebraska who wanted a deaf boy to change his sign-language name because it requires his hand to vaguely resemble a gun.

A clear and present danger?!?

Hunter Spanjer says his name with a certain special hand gesture, but at just three and a half years old, he may have to change it. “He’s deaf, and his name sign, they say, is a violation of their weapons policy,” explained Hunter’s father, Brian Spanjer. Grand Island’s “Weapons in Schools” Board Policy 8470 forbids “any instrument…that looks like a weapon,” But a three year-old’s hands? “Anybody that I have talked to thinks this is absolutely ridiculous. This is not threatening in any way,” said Hunter’s grandmother Janet Logue. …”We are working with the parents to come to the best solution we can for the child,” said Jack Sheard, Grand Island Public Schools spokesperson. That’s just about all GIPS officials will say for now.

The good news is that it appears the bureaucrats have backed off following a public outcry.

But it’s nonetheless outrageous that people like Jack Sheard get our tax dollars and then even contemplate making life harder for a deaf kid.

I realize it’s a gross exaggeration to say that all public school teachers are bad and that all government schools are a failure, but we’re getting closer and closer to the point where the presumption should be that good parents send their kids to private schools whenever that’s a feasible option.

And from a policy perspective, we need to bust up the government school monopoly and implement school choice. And not because suburban kids are being victimized by political correctness. That’s a nuisance, not a crisis. It’s far more important to have competition in education to rescue the kids trapped in failed inner city schools.

We now have lots of good data on the benefits of school choice.  There’s also strong evidence for school choice from nations such as Sweden, Chile, and the Netherlands.

So next time we see a news report about bureaucrats running amok and ruining the education system, our energies should be focused on promoting school choice, not attacking political correctness.

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The Continuing Wussification of America

I’ve shared some bizarre horror stories about adults being victimized by anti-gun fanaticism, including the Washington, DC, man who got fined $1,000 for saving a child’s life and a British man who got arrested for finding a gun and turning it over to the police.

But I get more worried about the future of the country when I read reports of children being subjected to this kind of politically correct nonsense.

Consider, for instance, these absurd details from a local news report.

A Massachusetts kindergartener has been given detention and could be suspended from the bus after bringing a Lego-sized gun to school last week. …the incident happened on an Old Mill Pond Elementary School bus in Palmer last week. A 6-year-old had the toy gun, which is slightly larger than a quarter, on the bus and it was seen by another student, who alerted the bus driver. The boy’s mother, Mieke Crane, said her son had to write a letter of apology to the driver, was given detention and could be temporarily suspended from the bus.

Reading that passage, I don’t know whether to be more angry with the bratty tattle-tale kid who told the bus driver, or with the bus driver who obviously must have informed the school.

Both of them could use some serious counseling.

But that’s just part of the story.

The school sent home a letter to parents explaining what happened, stressing no gun was on the bus and there was never any danger. “(The driver) said he caused quite a disturbance on the bus and that the children were traumatized,” Crane told WGGB.

A letter to parents about a tiny plastic toy gun?!? Are the bureaucrats in this school so under-worked that they have time to waste on such nonsense? If I was a parent in this school district, I would put my kids in a private school.

Especially if it’s true that “children were traumatized” by a piece of Lego. I wouldn’t want to take the risk that wimpiness and poor cognitive skills could be transmitted by proximity to my kids (perhaps causing them to need “emotional support” animals in college).

By the way, this is not an isolated example. To get depressed about the future of the country, read these posts about children being exposed to foolish thinking.

• 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.
• A third-grader got in trouble for having toy army men on his birthday cupcakes.
• Two second-graders got suspended for holding pencils like they were guns.

Stories like this make me wonder whether I should emigrate, though the rest of the world tends to be in worse shape so the moral of the story is that we need to save the United States from the brainless (and overpaid) bureaucrats who are trying to ruin our children.

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Virtue Is Its Own Reward, but Using a Gun to Save a Child’s Life in DC Will Get You a $1,000 Fine

This story belongs in my “Great Moments in Local Government” series, which features examples of bureaucratic and political stupidity (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) that will make you laugh, cry, yell, or all of the above.

Not surprisingly, the deeply dysfunctional local government in Washington, DC, wants to be part of this collection.

We have what at first seems like a feel-good story. A little boy is attacked by some vicious pit bulls. Other people in the neighborhood flee to protect themselves. But one man acts quickly and saves the child’s life.

Here are some details from the Washington Times report.

…11-year-old Jayeon Simon and his friend rode bicycles near Eighth and Sheridan streets Northwest in the Brightwood neighborhood. According to court records filed in D.C. Superior Court, three unleashed pit bulls pounced on Jayeon and attacked him. Seeing the attack, Mr. Srigley went inside his home to get his Ruger 9 mm pistol while several other men hopped over fences to get away from the dogs, court records state. From behind the wooden fence of his front lawn, Mr. Srigley began firing at the dogs. His shots attracted the attention of a Metropolitan Police Department officer on bicycle patrol nearby, and he also opened fire on the dogs, killing the other two. The boy survived the attack but now bears scars on his elbow, torso and leg as a reminder.

Mr. Srigley seems like a great guy. Or at least a guy who did something great. Surely he was rewarded, right?

Did he get a commendation from the police department? A ceremonial key to the city from the Mayor?

Mr. Srigley should have been a good liberal, called 911, and relied on the cops to arrive after the child was dead

Don’t be silly. We’re talking about Washington, DC.

…Benjamin Srigley, 39, was required to pay a $1,000 fine…for the three unregistered firearms and the ammunition that investigators found in his possession, said Ted Gest, a spokesman for the office of the attorney general.

But showing great mercy, they decided not to try to send him to prison.

“We took it into account that he saved this boy’s life,” Mr. Gest said.

Gee, what a bunch of swell guys in the DC government. Mr. Srigley is “only” hit with a $1,000 fine.

One hopes that this won’t cause a potential Good Samaritan to let some kid get killed or some woman get raped in the future.

P.S. At least the pit bulls weren’t in a dorm room providing federally-mandated “emotional support.”

P.P.S. One of the comments below reminds me that Mr. Srigley should have been a housebroken journalist since that entitles you to a get-out-of-jail-free card for gun offenses in Washington, DC>

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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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