2ND Amendment Ruling Due in 2008

[Haggis@wk]

This leaves Illinois as the only state without any legal concealed carry legislation, and a few states that need seriously improved laws(New York, New Jersey, California, Hawaii, and a couple of others).

Curiously, the much predicted "shoot out in the streets" scenario only happens in Chicago, the most gun restrictive place in the U.S.

Peaceful citizens, lawfully carrying guns for self protection and they're not gunning each other down?

Since 2008 gun ownership in the U.S. increased 1.5 - 2% to the highest levels ever while at the same time, according to the FBI, murder stats in the U.S. are down. This perplexs some MSM types. Of course those same people can't understand why, if crime in the U.S. is declining, we have so many people in jail.

[Giant Communist Robot]

Hawaii has a high rate of gun ownership. I can't quote any statistics, but crime with guns seems rare here. A cultural thing, maybe.

[Haggis@wk]

Hawaii has a high rate of gun ownership. I can't quote any statistics, but crime with guns seems rare here. A cultural thing, maybe.

Gun ownership is high in Swedden, Finland and Switzerland and they don't seem to suffer for it

[Shapley]

Hawaii has a high rate of gun ownership. I can't quote any statistics, but crime with guns seems rare here. A cultural thing, maybe.

I found it quite odd to see the 'gun guys' standing on the street corners in Waikiki handing passers-by fliers inviting them to shoot a machine or fully-automatic handgun. I gather that the indoor ranges do a pretty decent business with that. Perhaps its the Japanese tourists, many of whom never get to touch a firearm at home, that jump at the opportunity to handle such a weapon. The fliers and sandwich boards were printed in English and Japanese.

I didn't take pictures of those guys. I guess I should have. Them, the homeless guys, the 'need money for pot' guys, and so on are, I suppose, part of the make-up of Waikiki, but I just ignored them.

If I want to shoot a firearm, I can do that off my back deck, so the idea of going inside a concrete room to shoot at a paper target didn't appeal to me.

[Giant Communist Robot]

the idea of going inside a concrete room to shoot at a paper target didn't appeal to me.

There's a big outdoor range at Koko Head, a couple of miles east of Waikiki.

[Haggis@wk]

Most ranges in metro DFW, including rifle, are indoors. I try to shoot twice a month but recently my arthritic wrist can't take the recoil of my .40 cal and the spring is hard to assemble as well so I'm using a .38 wheel gun until I can find a suitable replacement for my .40, probably a 9mm Glock or Beretta. Those are both good weapons and the springs are much smaller and easier to handle.

[jamiebk]

Most ranges in metro DFW, including rifle, are indoors. I try to shoot twice a month but recently my arthritic wrist can't take the recoil of my .40 cal and the spring is hard to assemble as well so I'm using a .38 wheel gun until I can find a suitable replacement for my .40, probably a 9mm Glock or Beretta. Those are both good weapons and the springs are much smaller and easier to handle.

Why don't you get a smaller gun. After all, I am told that it is all about how well you use it and not just the size that matters

[Haggis@wk]

Why don't you get a smaller gun. After all, I am told that it is all about how well you use it and not just the size that matters

Actually, that's what I was saying, going from the larger .40 cal to the smaller 9mm. I prefer semi-automatic pistols to wheel guns because of the generally greater magazine capacity of semi vs. 5-6 rounds for wheel guns, although the wheel gun, perfected for the last century and a half is regarded as being marginally more dependable.

While the 9 has a smaller reccoil the rounds don't have the same stopping power of a .40 or .45

I posted the following in the "News" category in 2008

in 1992 a gunman walked into the base legal office and shot his wife and her lawyer and then began shooting people at random. A young Security Police Airman confronted the gunman in a hallway and began shooting at the gunman when it appeared the gunman was going to shoot the Airman. At that time the Security Police only used ball ammo in a 9MM pistol and as he shot at gunman it seemed the Airman was missing the gunman since the gunman kept walking towards the Airman. later on it was determined that the gunman had been hit multiple times and the rounds passed through his body. Although he was technically dead he was still walking and shooting.

Another OSI investigator interviewed the young Security Police Airman who had shot the gunman. The initial investigation seem to point to the fact that the Airman had shot all 32 rounds he had. Later on we determined that in the heat of the moment the Airman had thought his first magazine was empty and dropped it and loaded the spare magazine but he still had 9 rounds in the original magazine.

Anyway, in the first part of the investigation the investigator asked the Airman why he had shot all 32 rounds and the Airman replied as earnestly as he could "That's all I had, sir"

More is always better when it comes to ammo.

[Haggis@wk]

Why We Win: on the Travel Channel

Take a famous New York Chef, give him a hit TV show on the Travel Channel, send him and his crew out to the Ozarks, and what happens?

He gets all gun nutty.

First he cleans a squirrel and eats squirrel pot pie and some bow hunt venison. Then he goes gigging for fish, which turns out to be more dangerous than hunting. Then there is an unsuccessful raccoon hunt. Duck hunting and duck cooking. And finally, just because that is not enough, some tin cans get shot to end the show.

Part one, Part two, and Part three starts with the duck hunting.

And this is no fluke. Guns are fairly common on the show. For example
Anthony Bourdain has rode along on a seal hunt and shot full-autos with Ted Nugent.


And there are other shows out there that put guns in front of several million eyeballs. Mythbusters being one of the best. As well as Pawn Stars, American Pickers and Auction Hunters (a show I just discovered). Hell even Top Gear on the BBC tried some skeet shooting.


Throw in shows like Top Shot and Sons of Guns and the TV guide must make Sarah Brady a very sad lonely Panda.

In the 50's I can remember my father taking me to shooting demonstrations which I remember as being quite thrilling and made me want to shoot like that (I never did)

While I suspect we will never get back to that heyday of shooting, the country is, nevertheless, getting more sensible about firearms from hunting to self-defense to just shooting for fun. My friend, an ER doctor, shoots scoped rifles competitively as a sharpshooter.

Hmm, I've getting a hankerin' to go punch holes in paper.

[Shapley]

I watched a few episodes of Swamp People this weekend. It was quite interesting.

[Haggis@wk]

SHOCKER: Gun crime continues to decrease, despite increase in gun sales.

Despite increases in gun sales, gun crimes continued to decrease in the United States for the fourth straight year in 2010, according to the FBI.

The FBI recently released its Crime in The United States statistics for 2010. Overall, murders in the U.S. have decreased steadily since 2006, dropping from 15,087 to 12,996. Firearms murders — which made up 67 percent of all murders in the U.S. in 2010 — have followed this trend, decreasing by 14 percent.

At the same time that firearms murders were dropping, gun sales were surging. In 2009, FBI background checks for guns increased by 30 percent over the previous year, while firearms sales in large retail outlets increased by almost 40 percent. The number of applications for concealed carry permits jumped across the country as well.

Wow, you could write a book about this phenomenon, if you could just come up with a title or something.

This is like that other phenomenon that has the NYT stumped. It seems that crimes go down even though our prison populations are at an all time high.

[dai bread]

A couple of questions then: is the crime rate down because the criminals are all locked up, or are there societal factors at work? If the latter, what are they?

[jamiebk]

The book "Freakonomics" did a whole section on the issue of economy -vs- Crime.

We spent an entire chapter in Freakonomics exploring the factors that do and do not seem to have brought down the rate of violent crime in the U.S. In short, factors that matter include: number of police; number of prisoners; changes in drug markets; and the availability of abortion. And those that don’t seem to much matter: the economy; innovative policing strategies; most gun laws; capital punishment; and demographics.

I checked their website and they have a good forum on the subject. Here is a link: http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/06/08/ ... e-to-fall/

It's full of thought-provoking theories and worth a read.

[Haggis@wk]

You get what you pay for......

[Haggis@wk]

MARK STEYN: Laws Are For Little People. And Not David Gregory.

This is, declared NYU professor Jay Rosen, “the dumbest media story of 2012.” Why? Because, as CNN’s Howard Kurtz breezily put it, everybody knows David Gregory wasn’t “planning to commit any crimes.”

So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. Ignorantia juris non excusat is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about doable. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And in this case NBC were informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI, and the ATF take out NBC News and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.

But, even if we’re denied that pleasure, the “dumbest media story of 2012” is actually rather instructive. David Gregory intended to demonstrate what he regards as the absurdity of America’s lax gun laws. Instead, he’s demonstrating the ever greater absurdity of America’s non-lax laws. His investigation, prosecution, and a sentence of 20–30 years with eligibility for parole after ten (assuming Mothers Against High-Capacity Magazines don’t object) would teach a far more useful lesson than whatever he thought he was doing by waving that clip under LaPierre’s nose.

To Howard Kurtz & Co., it’s “obvious” that Gregory didn’t intend to commit a crime. But, in a land choked with laws, “obviousness” is one of the first casualties — and “obviously” innocent citizens have their “obviously” well-intentioned actions criminalized every minute of the day. Not far away from David Gregory, across the Virginia border, eleven-year-old Skylar Capo made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days. For her pains, a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter accompanied by state troopers descended on her house, charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species, issued her a $535 fine, and made her cry. Why is it so “obvious” that David Gregory deserves to be treated more leniently than a sixth grader? Because he’s got a TV show and she hasn’t?

Pretty much.

[Shapley]

This seems to be recurring thing with anti-gunners, as more and more of them are caught with their holsters down. We had the Washington D.C. reporter a few years back that used an unregistered firearm to chase a group of thugs out of his swimming pool, we had Diane Feinstein's bodyguard caught with an unregistered fully automatic firearm, we had the anti-gun politician aiming for the seat vacated by Jesse Jackson, Jr. caught carrying a firearm in an airport. The list goes on.

Guns are bad, which is apparently evident by the number of bad politicians and bad reporters who carry them.

[barfle]

Haggis, a lack of uniformity of laws, whether regulating guns, truck weights, same-sex marriage, gas taxes, etc. are the result of localities having the liberty to define their own societies.

If you're driving a cross-country truck, it IS your responsibility to know the laws of the places you're going through. If you're packing heat, it IS your responsibility to know the laws of the places you're going through.