Demand Gunwalker Accountability

                Most of the larger national media outlets are doing their best to ignore the Gunwalker scandal, but the word is dribbling out despite the best efforts of the Obama Administration and their lackeys in the mainstream press. Those who know about the outrageous project should be demanding answers and accountability.

The recent hearings in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA), showed clearly that agents of the ATF and other agencies, working with the approval from the highest levels of the Department of Justice – no more than one desk below Attorney General Erik Holder, if not Holder himself – actively conspired and facilitated the sale of some 2000 or more rifles to suspected illegal firearms traffickers and then intentionally allowed those guns to continue in illicit channels with no attempt to track, interdict, or disable them. ATF field agents who objected to the program were threatened and rebuked. On one occasion an agent pointed out that people were being killed with guns supplied by the ATF and his manager responded with the callous cliché that if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

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Dear Republicans

               Could we please have a serious, pro-rights, pro-Constitution candidate for the office of President this time? For the past several elections you have passed over good, pro-rights, pro-Constitution candidates – or never come up with any – in favor of wishy-washy “moderates” with poll-based values and elastic principles. Make no mistake: the rights movement, and the wide array of activists concerned about constitutional liberty and restoration of the Republic, will not endorse, support, or actively work for any candidate who does not have a proven record of personal commitment to the Constitution and individual liberty.

Please do not be suckered into nominating another bland “moderate” based on the lie of “electability.” The question of a person’s electability can only be definitively answered in a flat-out run for office. Anything short of that is just speculation.

Granted, some would-be candidates are clearly unelectable from the start. Others are obviously long shots. But the only way to get a candidate’s true measure is to give your support to the candidate – or candidates – who best represent your values and vision for the nation and do your best to push that – or those – candidate(s) to the top of the list in the primaries, straw polls, and other preliminary popularity contests. Don’t let the pundits, the experts, pragmatists, “moderates,” or the mainstream media convince you that you should throw your support behind a candidate who doesn’t reflect your values and vision based on a wholly manufactured concept of electability.

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Who does speak for gun owners?

If you put six gun rights advocates in a room they will come out with at least seven different opinions on how we should proceed in the fight. The fact is that in the gun rights war, as in any other endeavor which inflames people’s passions, an organization can maintain unity of spirit and clarity of focus right up to the point that the second person joins. That’s when words like “Principle,” “Respect,” and “Communication” become extremely important – and the more people you add, the more important, and complicated those words become. While we each understand (to a degree) our own motivations, principles, goals, and fears, we don’t always communicate them clearly and we often don’t understand at all what is moving the other guy. My father used to express the phenomenon by saying, “Everybody in this outfit is crazy except you and me.  And I’m not so sure about you!”

Unfortunately it is all too often an accurate sentiment. When people feel passionately about something – particularly something which can not be scientifically quantified – they tend to either develop their own belief structure around the subject or cling tightly to a structure advocated by someone else – to the exclusion of all other opinions, theories, approaches, and ideas. The fact is that anyone who identifies himself with a movement − regardless of the movement or its objectives − has already separated himself from the herd.  By their nature, movement people are oddballs.  They think independently and will follow a leader as long as that leader is going in the “right” direction − as they define it.  Movements, and movement people, work best when they are dealing with generalities. They can unanimously call for gun rights, lower taxes, limited government, or whatever. Start getting down into the particulars of the rallying cry, however, and the movement tends to lose focus. Some always want to charge on to total victory while others advocate a more cautious approach and few can completely agree on fundamentals − like specifically which guns where, what taxes, how low, and to the detriment of what government services, or how “limited” government should be.

Continue reading Who Speaks for Gun Owners? →

Felony or Felony Stupid: It shouldn’t be Rewarded

               Representative Darrel Issa (R-CA) referred to the activities of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) Operation Fast and Furious as “felony stupid.” Others have suggested that the plan was intentionally designed and cleverly crafted to bolster statistics in support of stricter gun control laws. Whether the operation was just stupid or intentionally criminal, it was clearly bad behavior on the part of ATF and Justice Department (DOJ) and such bad behavior should not be rewarded.

Some members of Congress, Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Elijah Cummings (D-MD) in particular, want to reward ATF and DOJ’s criminal stupidity with increased funding and increased authority through tighter regulation of firearms dealers and lawful firearm purchasers. ATF has introduced – and the Administration has now approved – and “emergency” regulatory change requiring firearms dealers in border states to report any purchaser who buys more than one semi-auto rifle greater than a .22 within a given week. The US House of Representatives promptly, and properly, rejected the new regulations by passing an appropriations rider prohibiting any funds from being used to enact or enforce the plan.

Continue reading Felony Stupid →

No Longer Your Castle

Your home is your castle.  That’s what they say, but recent decisions by the Supreme Court of the US and the Indiana Supreme Court have left the castle walls in a pile of rubble – along with the Fourth Amendment.  These decisions pit the rights of persons to be secure in their homes against the ability of the police to take certain actions in the name of public safety.  

At the US Supreme Court level the Justices have been chipping away at the Fourth Amendment for decades, mostly under the cover of the war on drugs. They have drastically lowered the bar concerning the admissibility of evidence obtained by police during an illegal search or the issuance of warrants based on questionable information. Now the Court has taken another swing at the castle walls with their legal wrecking ball.

There have always been exceptions to the prohibitions against police entering private property without a warrant. These exceptions are legally referred to as “exigent circumstances” and include such things as hearing screams for help from inside, directly following a fleeing felon into the residence, or seeing a person (or crucial evidence) in imminent jeopardy, but the Court’s new ruling adds an interesting twist to “exigent circumstances.” One controversial exigent circumstance which has been accepted is that bit about destruction of evidence. When police see, or hear, or otherwise perceive that evidence is being destroyed, they have a compelling need to intervene in the name of justice. This rational is most often used during service of drug-related search warrants to justify “dynamic entry” – kicking down the door – when officers say they hear sounds like repeated toilet flushing.

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My “Dumbness Victory” Or Fooling Fools for Fun and Profit

A few weeks ago I reported about an anti-rights propaganda film called Gun Fight

being shown on HBO throughout April and May. The film, which claims to be a balanced documentary showing both sides of the gun rights issue, is actually a “tingle up the thigh” commercial for the Brady Bunch, and their young rising star Colin Goddard.  

The film presented very reasonable-seeming anti-rights advocates in comfortable conversation, and very radical-seeming rights advocates ranting and railing.  They achieved this by sitting down and talking with proponents of gun control to get their side, and cobbling together snippets of rights advocates from rallies, protests, and hallway ambushes to get ours.  They did have footage of rights advocates carefully explaining our position, including several hours of interviews with me, but they chose not to use any of that footage.

I recently received some “fan mail” from an HBO viewer named John who wanted to let me know what he thought of my brief appearances in the film.  His note confirmed for me the effectiveness of the HBO propaganda and the gullibility of the public.  I enjoyed John’s comments so much I thought others might find them equally entertaining and edifying so I decided to reprint his note:

Jeff, I see lots of stupid people every day. But you are the dumbest of the dumb. I saw your ridiculous speech to the gunowners’ group on HBO, and the meanness factor gives you the dumbness victory over the rest of the pack.

“Whatever’s in front of you dies”? Really, it never makes sense to shoot to disarm or disable, like cops do? No one needs instruction about not carrying the weapon when they’ll be drinking…stuff like that?

A five year old knows enough? What’s going on with the many little kids we hear about– killing each other while playing with guns? Maybe they don’t know everything they need to know.

You really are a fool. Look, you’ve probably got a small dick..and no amount of over-compensation with all this cowboy gun-talk and shooting will change that. Grow up.

Continue reading Stupider →

Obama Admits Stealth Attack on Rights

Media Yawns

              “I just want you to know that we are working on it,” Barack Obama told Sarah Brady regarding gun control.  “We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar,” Obama said according to Brady.

This interesting bit of news was reported in an April 11 Washington Post Lifestyle section story about Obama’s gun control and regulatory policy wonk Steve Croley.  Toward the end of the article the writer, Jason Horowitz, mentioned a March 30 meeting between Jim and Sarah Brady and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney during which the President “dropped in.”  He then quotes Sarah Brady relating how President Obama gave his personal assurance that he and his administration were working hard on a gun control agenda.  Brady reported that Obama then told them about advancing the agenda “under the radar.”

What is truly startling about this story is the way it has been totally ignored by the rest of the media. Compare the media’s current silence with what happened during the 2000 presidential campaign when then NRA Vice-President (and GOP activist) Kayne Robinson told a group of rights supporters in California that electing Bush would mean “we’ll have a president where we work out of their office, unbelievably friendly relations.”   The media went into a feeding frenzy over this comment to such a degree that Bush distanced himself from the NRA, publicly endorsed reinstatement of the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban and withdrew overt support for the Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. The story was carried repeatedly on virtually every major media outlet in the country – and it was not based on anything Bush himself had said. Here the leader of a prominent organization is claiming that the President himself had avowed active support for a highly controversial agenda and admitted that he was violating his own promise of transparency in pursuit of that agenda. Yet the media ignores it.

Continue reading Stealth Attack on Rights →