Christie Courting Gun Voters
But he’s not getting much traction.

By Jeff Knox

(July 8, 2015) Was anyone surprised when Chris Christie officially announced his candidacy for President of the United States?  Christie has been prominently featured as a possible presidential contender for years, and in all of that time, I and others in the rights movement have been saying that Christie could never get the support of gun voters, and without gun voter support, a Republican presidential win is unlikely – just ask John McCain and Mitt Romney, and George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, and Gerald Ford.  

Just as the media and gun control activists make the mistake of thinking that the National Rifle Association is “the gun lobby,” so too do most Republican politicians think that an NRA endorsement is all they need to seal up gun voter support.  The reality is that, even with some five million members, the NRA is only able to significantly impact an election if the activist core of those members, along with the activist core of various other rights-focused firearm groups, actively get behind the candidate.  The overlap among these activists in the various groups is extensive, and these are people who are paying attention to politics all year long, not just in the three months leading up to an election.  While an NRA endorsement can help reinforce, and fuel the work of the serious activists, these folks make their own decisions.  If the year-round core activists aren’t willing to get behind a candidate they don’t trust, no amount of NRA praise is going to change their minds, and without their support, the NRA is only able to sway the least-active, and least informed of their membership.  In a state with 50,000 NRA members, maybe 5,000 of those will be politically active, and most of those will also be members of a state grass roots group.  Politicians might be able to cajole an endorsement out of the suits at NRA HQ, but unless they can convince the guys who actually do the work on the ground, they’re just spinning their wheels.

Continue reading Christie’s Part of the Problem →

Only Police Should have Guns?

By Jeff Knox

(July 2, 2015) Humans are complicated and confusing creatures.  We often cling to misguided beliefs and self-destructive philosophies, even as we decry the impacts and results of those beliefs and philosophies.  One of the most confusing examples of this is when a minority that has suffered oppression and abuse advocates for policies that enable that abuse and remove options for protecting against future abuse.

The right to arms has long been recognized as a core distinction between a citizen and a subject, a free man and a slave.  Virtually all gun control laws in the U.S. prior to the 1970s were aimed primarily at Blacks, first in fear of slave rebellions, then in fear of retribution from freed slaves, then in fear of “Black crime.”  California’s ban on open carry of long guns was a direct result of members of the Black Panther Party legally carrying guns out on the streets and actually into the State Capitol.  The Ku Klux Klan, which was a recognized political force in the 1920s and ‘30s, helped pass gun control laws in several states as a way of keeping Blacks defenseless.  Many of those laws remain on the books today, including in North Carolina where a bill to repeal a Jim Crow-era Purchase Permit law fell to heavy-handed political maneuvering this year.

For decades African Americans struggled for the unencumbered right to arms.  It was one of the core liberties identified in the early days of the civil rights movement, and was one of the central objectives of the NAACP.  The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached pacifism and non-violence as a tactic for advancing the cause of equality, but he did so surrounded by armed men prepared to defend him and his followers.  The Deacons for Defense and Justice not only guarded Black leaders, Black churches, and Black neighborhoods, they represented an ominous shadow in the background behind Dr. King.  Though they maintained a strictly defensive posture, many political leaders new about the Deacons, and they feared what would happen if the civil rights movement ever shifted from Dr. king’s doctrine of non-violence to the Deacons’ philosophy of armed resistance.  Whites were more willing to negotiate with Dr. King in order to avoid having to negotiate with men like the Deacons.

Continue reading No Guns for You! →

The Exploitation of Mother Emanuel

By Jeff Knox

(June 24, 3015) Last week a deranged coward joined a Bible study group in Charleston, South Carolina, sat with them for about an hour, and then pulled out a gun and started shooting people, killing nine.  He then drove away, only to be captured without incident a few hours later.

Reports say the demented little troll declared his need to kill the people because they were “raping our women and taking over our country.”  How sick and detached from reality did this vile creature have to be to take these nine innocent lives – six women and three men –on such a pretext?

The answer to that was summed up very accurately by Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychologist who appeared on FOX and Friends a few days ago.  During his brief interview, Dr. Welner stressed several things. “The mass killer is an irrelevant person […] who is looking for relevance,” he said.  “Of course this is a hate crime.  Of course it’s a racist crime, but the mass killer is about himself, and is about getting attention for himself, and he knows that if we have this ‘national dialog,’ ultimately we’re talking about him.”  He goes on to say; “This was a cultural crime.  It is happening in the United States much more than elsewhere, but it’s not a gun issue, it’s because we socially incentivize it.”  Dr. Welner suggests that these murderers are seeking fame and attention, and that the media and politicians reward them by giving them that fame and attention.  He said that rather than focusing on the infamy-seeking perpetrator, we should instead focus attention on the victims and what remarkable people they were.  He offered up coverage of the murder of Chris Kyle as an example of a better way to handle these situations.  In the Kyle case, the attention focused primarily on Kyle and his life and accomplishments.  Dr. Welner pointed out that few people remember the name of the man who murdered Kyle because the media and politicians didn’t focus their attention and agenda on the murderer, instead focusing on the victims.

Continue reading Crying for Mother Emanuel →

Control freaks just can’t help themselves

By Jeff Knox

(June 16, 2015) Both the Obama administration and Congress have been busy with firearm-related business in recent weeks, with the Department of Justice offering up a series of regulatory changes relating to firearms, and members of the U.S. House introducing legislation and appropriations riders aimed at rolling back some of the current restrictions and complications.

The issue that has caught the most attention within the firearms community is a proposal from the Department of State to “clarify” regulations regarding the “export” of “military technology.”  The proposal was obviously spurred by the 3D printing activists at Defense Distributed, who have sued the federal government for suppression of their First Amendment rights.

Defense Distributed is a company founded by libertarian-minded college student, Cody Wilson, who wanted to prove the futility of gun control laws by demonstrating the simplicity of firearm manufacture using 3D printer technology.  While firearms have previously been made using traditional machining processes, taking a chunk of metal and carving away everything that didn’t look like a gun, 3D printing reverses that process, spraying layer after layer of material (usually plastic) to build a three-dimensional shape. 

Continue reading Control Freaks →

New Legislation Mandates Flying Cars

Within five years, all new cars must fly.  Used cars must fly within ten.

By Jeff Knox

(June 4, 2015) Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation requiring that five years after its passage, all handguns manufactured or imported into the U.S. must have “personalization” technology incorporated into them that prevents “unauthorized” users from firing them.

Okay, that’s not flying cars, but it might as well be.  The comparison is very appropriate.  Currently, there are prototypes and a few awkward, commercial examples of flying cars out there.  None is practical or reliable, and few people would be willing to trust their lives to them.  Nonetheless, they are out there.

Similarly, there are a few prototypes and commercial examples of “personalized” firearms – guns equipped with technology which prevents their use by “unauthorized” persons – but like flying cars, so-called “smart gun” technology is impractical and unreliable, relegating it to the realm of science fiction and movie fantasy.

Continue reading Flying Cars? →

Bloomberg Steamrolls Oregon

By Jeff Knox

(May 15, 2015) After dumping millions of dollars into political campaigns and misleading advertisements, Mike Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety managed to eke out a victory in Oregon last week.  By the thinnest of party-line majorities, the Oregon State House passed a bill criminalizing firearm transfers between private citizens, requiring that any transfer must go through federally licensed firearm dealers, requiring paperwork, submission to a background check, and incurring additional costs for the buyer.

The law is so stringently worded that even leaving a gun with your wife’s best friend when she’s house-sitting for you, or holding onto your buddy’s guns when he’s on deployment with the military would make you – and them – criminals, if you didn’t first take all of the guns down to a dealer, fill out paperwork on all of them, and have the transferee pass a background check.  That paperwork, with identifying information for all of the guns, and both individuals involved, would then be available to law enforcement and bureaucrats, and could be used to track down the owners of any guns that might be banned at some point in the future.

Last year Bloomberg and his friends spent well over $10 million to get a similar bill passed in Washington State through a voter initiative, and they spent several hundred thousand more getting an almost identical initiative qualified for the 2016 ballot in Nevada.  Residents of that state can expect to see a multi-million dollar Bloomberg campaign telling them that the measure is “merely” a background check bill intended to “keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.”  They will claim, as they did in Washington and Oregon, that the law will save lives, and they will make it sound like a simple and effective way to keep guns away from dangerous criminals.  All of that will be lies and distortion.

Continue reading Bradies, Bloomies, and Bongs →