A Call to Reason

By Jeff Knox

Psychologists and social scientists have long understood that people are inclined to stick to a belief even when they are presented with clear evidence that their belief is incorrect.  In short, people are obstinate.  Recent research has shown that this is not just a psychological issue, but also has a physiological basis.  Our brains are actually wired for this behavior, and it accounts for a great deal of the strife and conflict we see in politics, religion, and our regular daily lives.

I have written several times about the issue of mandatory background checks for firearm purchasers.  There’s no question that the idea of checking a gun buyer’s background to make sure they are not a criminal or crazy person seems reasonable and rational, and just common sense, but there’s a problem: Background checks don’t work.  At least they don’t work the way people think they do.  Unfortunately, a good percentage of the population can’t get past their initial conclusion that background checks make sense.  That’s why I want to ask you to make a conscious effort to suspend your own presumptions and beliefs for a moment and try to maintain an open mind as you read this column.

Continue reading Background Checks Are a Waste →

2015 NRA Board of Directors Election

By Jeff Knox

(February 16, 2015) It’s time again for my annual pronouncement on NRA elections.  Actually it’s past time, but for some reason I didn’t receive a ballot this year.  Since the NRA insists on keeping election information and their board of directors shielded from public scrutiny, it is impossible to comment on the elections without first reviewing the rather scant information NRA provides with the official ballot.  Since I didn’t receive one this year, I have had to collect the information from others who did, thus I’m running a bit late.

For 2015 I am endorsing the following seven candidates:

$11.       Timothy Knight, Durango, Colorado is a proven, effective, grassroots activist who orchestrated the stunning recalls of anti-rights senators in Colorado.  He is not an NRA insider, and was nominated by petition of the members, not the Nominating Committee.

$12.       Sean Maloney, Liberty Township, Ohio is an attorney who has an extensive record of grassroots activism and comes highly recommended by people I trust.

Continue reading Jeff’s Endorsements for NRA Directors →

Mike Bloomberg’s Latest Racist Comments

By Jeff Knox

(February 12, 2015) If Mike Bloomberg weren’t a liberal, anti-rights billionaire, the press would have eviscerated him in February.  If the Koch brothers or Donald Trump said something as blatantly racist as Bloomberg did, the media elite would go into apoplectic outrage mode.  Demands for apologies, excommunication, and retribution would have flooded our TVs, radios, and computers.  Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would have been marching around – somewhere – demanding –something – and encouraging illiterate young thugs to break windows and burn down their neighborhoods.

What did Bloomberg say?

According to the Aspen Times, speaking to a sold-out gathering at the oh-so-progressive and tolerant Aspen Institute’s Colorado campus, Bloomberg on February 6 stated that 95% of murders are committed by people who are male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25, and that cities need to get guns out of these people’s hands “to keep them alive.”

Continue reading Racist Is as Racist Says →

ATF & DOJ: Corruption in Action

By Jeff Knox

(February 5, 2015) As I was graduating from high school in Prescott, Arizona, My father was in Washington, DC making war plans as the head of NRA’s lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action.  By the following year, Dad had publicly declared war on a government agency and the laws that agency enforced.  The agency was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the laws were the federal gun laws collectively known as the Gun Control act of 1968.  From Dad’s perspective, BATF had been actively waging war on gun owners for years, and he had left his dream job as editor and publisher of two prominent gun magazines based in Arizona, with the specific objective of destroying the BATF and reforming the Gun Control Act which had been passed ten years earlier.

The BATF started as a special tax collection and enforcement branch of the Internal Revenue Service.  It was tasked the regulation of machineguns under the National Firearms Act, or NFA, and overseeing licensed firearm manufacturers, importers, and dealers under the Gun Control Act, or GCA.  Their mission was to make sure proper paperwork was maintained, taxes and fees were paid, and violations were investigated and served up for prosecution.

Continue reading Over 45 Years of Abuse →

What Dart Should Teach Reporters

By Jeff Knox

(January 29, 2015) I recently reported that the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, a project of the prestigious Columbia School of Journalism, is hosting a workshop for reporters in Arizona, supposedly intended to help them more effectively report on guns and “gun violence.”  The conference raised red flags for gun owners by including inflammatory, misleading factoids about the toll of gun violence in our society while neglecting any mention of the benefits.  A closer read revealed that funding for the workshop was generously provided by Mike Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety – a gun control advocacy project.  Dart’s director, Bruce Shapiro assured me that, though Bloomberg and Everytown were underwriting the event, they were not participating in selection of participants, curriculum, or presenters.  But when I pointed out the blatant anti-rights bias displayed in the Dart announcement, and asked him if prominent pro-rights and firearms experts were going to be included as presenters, he quit responding to my emails.

As I doubt that Dart is going to invite me, or any other gun-knowledgeable, pro-rights critic of media to participate in the program, here’s the one point that I think is most important for every journalist – and consumers of media – to know about reporting on gun issues: You are being lied to.  Moreover, unless you set aside your own biases, you will believe and perpetuate the lies.

Continue reading An Ethical Education for Reporters →

Is Teaching Propaganda Ethical?

By Jeff Knox

(January 15, 2015) A workshop titled “Covering Gun Violence” is being offered in Phoenix by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma to “help journalists and news organizations in the Southwest improve their reporting on guns and gun violence.”  That sounds reasonable and helpful.  Surely the Dart Center, a project of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism could help improve the state of reporting on the firearms issue, especially in light of the way reporters seem to call every pistol a Glock, every rifle an AK47, and every gun an automatic. 

But there’s more to the story.  The workshop is being funded by Mike Bloomberg’s anti-rights advocacy conglomerate Everytown for Gun Safety, and the very general description of the “experts” who are going to be presenting the training sounds very much like the same “experts” that Bloomberg and his associates rely on to push their biased and misleading “research” and reports.  Even the call for applicants itself leads off with an anti-rights propaganda rant, quoting misleading statistics and discredited claims straight out of the Everytown propaganda playbook. 

Continue reading Bloomberg Buys Journalism School →

Paranoia Leads to Tragedy

By Jeff Knox

(January 7, 2015) Just days after the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a 23-year old college student in Connecticut was a victim of another gun-related tragedy.  No guns were fired, no one was physically injured, but even so, a life was ruined.  William Dong was licensed in Connecticut to carry a concealed handgun.  He worked for an armored car company and, along with being a good student, and hard worker, he was a budding firearm enthusiast.

Like all of us, Dong was deeply disturbed by the atrocity in Newtown and the subsequent media hype surrounding that tragic event.  And like many people, especially those near the event, he developed a fear of something like that happening again and being helpless to do anything about it.  He was reassured by his own ability to carry and effectively use a handgun, but also wanted to have a good personal-defense carbine.  That’s where William Dong made his first mistake; on a trip to Pennsylvania he purchased an AR-style rifle from a private seller.  It’s not illegal to purchase a long gun in another state in a face-to-face transaction, but out-of-state purchases should be made through a licensed dealer.  Since the rifle he purchased had a collapsible stock and other “military” features, it was subsequently banned in Connecticut, compounding Dong’s mistake.

Continue reading Gun Laws Make Criminals and Victims of the Innocent →

The One Thing You Can Do for Rights in 2015

By Jeff Knox

(January 1, 2015) It is mind-boggling that we’re now living in 2015.  I like to think I’m not so old, but I also remember when 2001 was a distant date in a science fiction movie.  I’m still waiting for the flying car I was promised.  But flying cars weren’t the only things we were promised back in the good old days.  Looking back at when we were looking forward to these days, I remember predictions about a coming ice-age, a one-world government, and the end to crime, hunger, and poverty.  There were also lots of predictions about the end of gun ownership.  Back when groups like the National Coalition to Ban Handguns and Handgun Control Incorporated were new, they were describing a process whereby they were going to completely do away with handgun ownership by slowly adding one little restriction on top of another over a couple of decades.  More than 40 years later, they are sticking to that strategy with new language and new tactics, but the target:  destruction of the “gun culture” and the right to keep and bear arms, remains the same.

They’ve made some progress on some fronts, and are positioning themselves to make more in coming years, but rights supporters have been working hard too.  We’ve installed strong rights protections into the laws of most states, spread the gospel of lawful concealed carry to every state in the nation, and proven that more guns doesn’t mean more crime, but that as gun and gun ownership have gone up, crime and firearm accidents have actually gone down – dramatically.  Those efforts have pushed the anti-rights extremists to back completely away from their demands for banning and confiscating handguns, and instead call for thinner and thinner slices off of the Bill of Rights.  Instead of calling for national registration of all guns and gun owners, they now call for “universal background checks,” something that sounds completely different, but accomplishes much the same thing.  Under their “background check” proposals, government records would be created for every firearms transfer – records that could then be computerized to identify almost every legal gun and gun owner – thereby accomplishing a major step in their goal of universal registration, but hiding the goal behind camouflaged language.

Continue reading A Resolution for 2015 →

Bloomberg’s Professional Liars Keep on Lying

By Jeff Knox

(December 24, 2014) John Feinblatt, Mike Bloomberg’s top flunky in his gun control operations, has doubled down on the anti-rights lobby’s lies in a piece on the leftist web site The Daily Beast.  As I have been pointing out in my ongoing series about the lies of the anti-rights lobby, virtually everything that comes out of these propaganda operations is either blatantly false or seriously distorted.  Feinblatt’s Beast piece is a prime example of this.  The piece is headlined: The NRA’s Twisted List for Santa, and presents 10 bullet point distortions of the NRA’s position on various gun control proposals.

According to Feinblatt, the NRA’s political wish list includes:

$1·         Guns for Felons.  Feinblatt equates the NRA’s support for the federal process whereby some felons can petition to have their rights restored – after convincing a judge that they are not a threat to society – is tantamount to giving a free pass to murderers, rapists, and terrorists.  In reality – before Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) got all funding for the program blocked – the typical person seeking restoration of rights was not a hardened, violent offender, but rather one who had been convicted of crimes like tax evasion or possession of marijuana.  Their petitions were usually only considered after a minimum of 10 years of post-release, model citizenship. 

$1·         Guns for Terror Suspects.  Bloomberg and his lackeys want to add anyone who is on the “Terrorist Watch List” to the FBI’s “prohibited persons” database so they can’t legally buy a gun from a licensed dealer.  The problem here is that the “Watch List,” by necessity, is shrouded in secrecy.  No one knows what criteria are used to place a person’s name on the list nor is there a formal process for someone to get their name off the list.  Add to that the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has labeled fundamentalist Christians, Libertarians, opponents of abortion, military veterans and “patriots” as “potential terrorists,” and you can see why NRA would be leery of this proposal.

Continue reading Liars Lie – Even at Christmas →