The Real Gun Guys

As if there were any doubt…

Take that FactCheck! He’s no longer even trying to hide it.

From Barack Obama’s own website:

Address Gun Violence in Cities: As president, Barack Obama would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals who shouldn’t have them. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent, as such weapons belong on foreign battlefields and not on our streets.

(h/t Armed Canadian)

Share/Save

Keith Olbermann: Still a Douchebag

I’m sorry, but how else do you describe someone who calls Justice Antonin Scalia as a “clown” and the “worst person”, while saying that the NRA wants gun deaths to increase? Oh, and don’t forget the “the second amendment only applies to muskets” canard. Geez, what a maroon!

Perhaps he’s compensating for something?

On Wednesday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann claimed that pro-gun groups like the NRA “are trying to increase deaths by gun,” as he used his “Worst Person” segment to attack a gun rights activist who infiltrated gun control groups to spy on them: “Mary Lou Sapone infiltrated the executive boards and learned the plans of organizations trying to decrease deaths by gun in this country, and apparently reported it back to organizations like the NRA, which are trying to increase deaths by gun in this country.” A month earlier, on the June 26 show, after the Supreme Court struck down Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban, Olbermann named Justice Antonin Scalia, whom he called a “clown,” as “Worst Person” as the Countdown host ridiculously claimed that the Second Amendment only applies to the types of weapons that existed in 1791, like muskets, to be used in a militia. Olbermann: “You’ve got around 30,000 gun deaths in this country per year, another 75,000 non-fatal gun wounds, half the suicides are by gun; and this clown and his four colleagues decided that the 32-year-old ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., and the demand that firearms kept in the home be locked or disassembled was unconstitutional based on the Second Amendment.”

Share/Save

Not “Wanted”

Read!

Share/Save

Gun & Knife Control at the Convention

From the NY Daily News:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - A small but startling sign welcomed the gun lovers who arrived at the National Rifle Association’s annual gathering Friday.

“Firearms WILL NOT be allowed in Hall A during the Celebration of American Values Leadership Forum.”

Beyond this sign at the Kentucky Exposition Center was a row of 10 metal detectors. They were manned by uniformed Secret Service officers deployed because the scheduled speakers included presumptive Republican nominee John McCain.

The Secret Service sets the rules in such circumstances, and even NRA big shots had to go through the screening. Thousands found themselves standing in a long, slow, feeder line before they even reached one of the lines that stretched in front of each metal detector.

Many had been alerted to the no-firearms edict, so few arrived packing.

“I got a gun in the car,” said Deborah Phelps of Fredonia, Ky.

The alert, however, said nothing about pocketknives, which seemingly everybody here was carrying. Hundreds of conventiongoers finally reached the detectors only to be told they could not be admitted with an implement they had never even considered to be a weapon.

Yet another long line formed at a glassed-in kiosk where a pair of Expo Center security guards agreed to watch over the knives.

“It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it?” Rob Stevens of Bedford, Ky., said. “We preach the right to carry everywhere, and we got to start by turning in a pocketknife.”

A pair of Long Islanders who had driven 800 miles to attend the gathering turned in their tickets rather than suffer the humiliation of standing in line to surrender a tiny knife.

“It’s supposed to be about freedom,” said Anne-Marie Biggins of Bethpage as she stood with Brian O’Connor of Farmingdale.

A 16-year-old local boy named Zachary Hicks who arrived in uniform was turned away because he had a folding knife.

Barbara Heetderts of Dallas was about to follow her husband through the screening when an officer found she had six spent shell casings. She was barred from entry.

“Why?” she asked. “It’s empty brass cases.”

“They’re cartridges,” the officer said.

“No, they’re cases,” she replied. “A cartridge has powder, a primer and a bullet in it.”

“I’m saying you can’t take them in,” the officer said.

Her empty cases joined hundreds of knives, scissors and nail clippers at the kiosk. The line now stretched across the lobby, and the woman running the German Roasted Nuts stand on the far side began taking knives and placing them in white paper bags bearing the owner’s name.

“We’re hoping they buy nuts when they pick up their knives,” said Eydie Brown.

“This whole thing is nuts,” one of the knife owners remarked.

Nearly 100 people were still waiting to check their knives when the pro-gun speeches began.

Former Bush mini-me Karl Rove got three standing ovations as he made jokes about Barack Obama’s unfortunate remark about bitter people clinging to guns and religion.

“Doesn’t that make us clingers?” Rove asked the crowd. “Or does that make us Klingons?”

NAVY SEAL Marcus Luttrell told the crowd he’d been briefly jailed in New York Thursday for slapping a foreign-sounding man who had insulted America.

The man who will almost certainly be facing Obama in the November election was the last to speak. John McCain bemoaned those occasions when a particular violent crime has prompted calls for tighter restrictions on firearms. Such crimes include assassinations and attempted assassinations, the memory of which make even NRA members cringe at jokes even about Obama. The fear that such a thing could also happen to McCain himself was what prompted the zero tolerance at the hall’s entrance.

As McCain spoke on, the Secret Service began dismantling the metal detectors, having briefly brought gun and even penknife control to the NRA convention.

Members began drifting out to reclaim their knives - and all seemed back to normal as they wandered down the hall to inspect the thousands of firearms on display in what another sign called “Acres of Guns.”

mdaly@nydailynews.com

Share/Save

Clueless Lyon Meows Again

Apparently Cliffy thought I’d forgotten about him when he posted his latest diatribe, this time trying to link (ala Michael Moore) the NRA to the KKK. If it weren’t so serious a charge, it’d be laughable. Not only is the assertion that the NRA grew out of the KKK patently absurd, it’s also extremely offensive. While I am willing to admit that a few gun owners are racist, the vast majority are not, and to paint an entire group of people or organization with such a broad brush is a bald-faced lie.

Let’s take a look at what Cliffy has to say. He starts off with a short video clip of Mike Huckabee speaking at the 137th NRA annual meetings and Exhibits in Louisville Kentucky. There is a loud noise in the background and he makes a joke that Barack “Hong Kong Phooey, #1 Super Guy!” Obama tripped over a chair and someone pointed a gun at him. Okay, not really the best joke in the world, and I’ll readily admit that Mike Huckabee is a white man, and a preacher, but to use this as evidence of racism by him and by extension, the NRA is shaky at best.

Is it possible that the attraction of NRA gatherings, which are attended almost exclusively by white men and always held south of the Mason Dixon line, is that they are really just KKK meetings by another name?

Actually yes. Thanks for asking. Despite the hysterical denials and obscure reasoning of white, male, predictably racist gun advocates. The NRA was formed almost immediately following the outlawing of the Klu Klux Klan (KKK). But the NRA did not claim rights based upon the constitution, rather, they lobbied very successfully for laws that forbid blacks from owing guns.

I can’t imagine this will come as a surprise to our johnny-come-lately (as in since Heston came along), self-proclaimed, legal expert, revisionist historian friends.

Wow, where to begin?

First of all Cliffy, I can blow your premise with your first paragraph. Unless you consider Denver, CO, to be south of the Mason Dixon Line, you’re SOL. I could continue to list other places north of the Mason Dixon Line the NRA has held conventions, but you’re not worth it.

Let’s examine the evidence and see it the NRA really is the KKK reborn.

This from Wikipedia:

The first Klan was founded in 1866 by veterans of the Confederate Army. Its purpose was to restore white supremacy in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The Klan resisted Reconstruction by intimidating “carpetbaggers“, “scalawags” and freedmen. The KKK quickly adopted violent methods. The increase in murders finally resulted in a backlash among Southern elites who viewed the Klan’s excesses as an excuse for federal troops to continue occupation. The organization declined from 1868 to 1870 and was destroyed by President Ulysses S. Grant’s prosecution and enforcement under the Civil Rights Act of 1871.

About the NRA:

The National Rifle Association, or NRA, is a non-profit group dedicated to the protection of the Second Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights and the promotion of firearm ownership rights, marksmanship, firearm safety, and the protection of hunting and self-defense in the United States. It was established in New York in 1871 as the American Rifle Association. The NRA sponsors firearm safety training courses, as well as marksmanship events featuring shooting skills and sports. The NRA is sometimes said to be the single most powerful non-profit organization in the United States. It bases its political activity on the principle that gun ownership is a civil liberty protected by the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and claims to be the oldest continuously operating civil liberties organization in the United States. According to its website, the NRA has “more than four million members.”

and

Dismayed by the lack of marksmanship shown by their troops, Union veterans Col. William C. Church and Gen. George Wingate formed the National Rifle Association in 1871. The primary goal of the association would be to “promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis,” according to a magazine editorial written by Church.

After being granted a charter by the state of New York on November 17, 1871, the NRA was founded. Civil War Gen. Ambrose Burnside, who was also the former governor of Rhode Island and a U.S. Senator, became the fledgling NRA’s first president.

So the Klan was formed in the south after the Civil War by Confederate Army veterans, and the NRA was formed in New York by Union veterans to “promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis.” Incidentally, Ulysses S. Grant was the eighth president of the NRA, the very man who aggressively prosecuted the Klan and eventually destroyed it. Hardly a man you’d expect to be a member of a racist organization.

But wait, there’s more!

The end of slavery in 1865 did not eliminate the problems of racist gun control laws; the various Black Codes adopted after the Civil War required blacks to obtain a license before carrying or possessing firearms or Bowie knives; these are sufficiently well-known that any reasonably complete history of the Reconstruction period mentions them. These restrictive gun laws played a part in the efforts of the Republicans to get the Fourteenth Amendment ratified, because it was difficult for night riders to generate the correct level of terror in a victim who was returning fire. It does appear, however, that the requirement to treat blacks and whites equally before the law led to the adoption of restrictive firearms laws in the South that were equal in the letter of the law, but unequally enforced. It is clear that the vagrancy statutes adopted at roughly the same time, in 1866, were intended to be used against blacks, even though the language was race-neutral. 

The former states of the Confederacy, many of which had recognized the right to carry arms openly before the Civil War, developed a very sudden willingness to qualify that right. One especially absurd example, and one that includes strong evidence of the racist intentions behind gun control laws, is Texas.

In Cockrum v. State (1859), the Texas Supreme Court had recognized that there was a right to carry defensive arms, and that this right was protected under both the Second Amendment, and section 13 of the Texas Bill of Rights. The outer limit of the state’s authority (in this case, attempting to discourage the carrying of Bowie knives), was that it could provide an enhanced penalty for manslaughters committed with Bowie knives.Yet, by 1872, the Texas Supreme Court denied that there was any right to carry any weapon for self-defense under either the state or federal constitutions — and made no attempt to explain or justify why the Cockrum decision was no longer valid.

and here:

Fact: The NRA was founded in 1871 — by act of the New York Legislature, at request of former Union officers. The Klan was founded in 1866, and quickly became a terrorist organization. One might claim that while it was an organization and a terrorist one, it technically became an “illegal” such with passage of the federal Ku Klux Klan Act and Enforcement Act in 1871. These criminalized interference with civil rights, and empowered the President to use troops to suppress the Klan. (Although we’d have to acknowledge that murder, terror and arson were illegal long before that time — the Klan hadn’t been operating legally until 1871, it was operating illegally with the connivance of law enforcement.)
Fact: The Klan Act and Enforcement Act were signed into law by President Ulysess S. Grant. Grant used their provisions vigorously, suspending habeas corpus and deploying troops; under his leadership over 5,000 arrests were made and the Klan was dealt a serious (if all too short-lived) blow.

Fact: Grant’s vigor in disrupting the Klan earned him unpopularity among many whites, but Frederick Douglass praised him, and an associate of Douglass wrote that African-Americans “will ever cherish a grateful remembrance of his name, fame and great services.”

Fact: After Grant left the White House, the NRA elected him as its eighth president.

Fact: After Grant’s term, the NRA elected General Philip Sheridan, who had removed the governors of Texas and Lousiana for failure to suppress the KKK.

Fact: The affinity of NRA for enemies of the Klan is hardly surprising. The NRA was founded by former Union officers, and eight of its first ten presidents were Union veterans.

Fact: During the 1950s and 1960s, groups of blacks organized as NRA chapters in order to obtain surplus military rifles to fight off Klansmen.

Hmmm, what’s left…oh, this video clip from Bowling for Columbine by award winning liar Michael Moore.

Wait! I’ve already talked about that…

With all this, I’m left wondering in Cliffy is ignorant, stupid and half-witted, or just plain gullible.

You decide.

Share/Save