Related posts:

1. Fourth Amendment Case Involving Open Carry
2. I Do Not Think This Poll Means What You Think it Means
3. Opposing Views

Implicitly, Barr and Gottlieb are advising gun owners who want to carry guns in public to keep them concealed from view; that is, make sure the danger is hidden. Perhaps this exposes their real concern about the open carry movement – that it eventually will cause a surge in public concern about the far more prevalent concealed carrying of guns made possible by the gun lobby-supported “shall-issue” laws passed in most states during the last two decades making it far easier to obtain licenses to carry concealed weapons. They also likely fear that open carry may intensify public opposition to recent efforts to gradually expand the locations in which concealed carry may occur -such as parks, bars, college campuses, even airports. After all, it’s not the “openness” of open carry that scares people – it’s the presence of the guns themselves and the inherent danger they entail. The only reason there is not an equivalent reaction to concealed carry is that the danger is, by definition, hidden from view.

He seems to believe that Barr and Gottlieb are somehow tacitly acknowledging the danger. There is no significant public danger from the open carry movement. The “danger” is the Brady Campaign doing exactly what they are doing now: trying to use the issue to push their agenda and to divide our movement.

Concealed carry laws don’t exactly have low levels of support. Even in Iowa, the latest battleground for concealed carry reform, opposition doesn’t beat 50%. But what Dennis understands is that public policy isn’t made by poll, but by determined minorities. If the 43% of Iowans that want to reform the concealed carry laws are motivated to do so, while the opposition is passive, reform wins. What they are looking for is getting some of that passive opposition to turn active.

The concern Gottlieb and Barr have is not that the public will suddenly realize the danger, and the gig will be up. The concern is that, much like the public is willing to acquiesce or support equal rights for homosexuals, they might not be so keen on the idea if they believe that means they’ll see gay sex everywhere in public. The analogy to guns may not be perfect, but many people who generally don’t care about or are soft supporters of people being able to carry firearms for self-defense might have a second thought if that means they think society will turned into an armed camp.

That shouldn’t really be our goal. Our goal should be that people who want to or need to carry a firearm for self-defense be able to do so, following their own judgments about their individual circumstances and situation. Whether that right is exercised through open carry or concealed carry I could care less about. What I do care about, however, are activism methods that have the potential to create a public backlash. The fact that the Brady folks have suddenly jumped on this issue, after its been gaining traction for years, makes me wonder if someone on their side of the issue has paid for a focus group, and we’re now seeing Brady attempt to exploit the opportunity.

Related posts:

1. Very Balanced Article on Open Carry
2. To Shield Gun Holders
3. Forcing Concealed Carry Reform

Related posts:

1. Second Amendment Research Center Defunct
2. More on That Joyce Study
3. Joyce Getting Behind Gun Control in Pennsylvania

Capitol Ideas is reporting that CeaseFire Pennsylvania is taking a position against this muzzle loading, black powder, flintlock being our official state gun, suggesting that “The last thing the Pennsylvania General Assembly should be doing is designating an official state rifle.” Next time I see some gang member toting around a muzzle loading flintlock, I might at least understand the opposition, even if I don’t agree with it. But do we really have to have a debate about this?

Joe Grace would no doubt prefer a debate about “Lost and Stolen” ordinances, and he says as much, but Joe needs to explain why he’s gotten almost two dozen municipalities to pass these ordinances, yet we have zero prosecutions. Two of those municipalities are Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. You’d think if this was such an important crime fighting tool, it might have been used once or twice by now.

Related posts:

1. West Mifflin Latest Law Breaking Municipality
2. We Have to Get Rid of Levdansky
3. Radnor Township Considering Lost & Stolen

[...] one of the complaints, of smokeless cartridges, by police, was that during gun fights, they could not see where the bad guys where.  Because there was no smoke to place their locations.

So Brady thinking would dictate, because it’s about LEO’s safety much like bullet encoding and microstamping, that smokeless technology be outlawed.

Sounds about right to me.

Related posts:

1. Update on Microstamping in California
2. Brady’s Pushing Microstamping Hard
3. The Case Against Microstamping Visualized

Related posts:

1. Quote of the Day
2. When it Comes to Public Service
3. It’s High Time

The best thing we can at this point is to quietly, unobtrusively, politely buy Starbucks products. Let the Brady Campaign throw their tantrum. Nearly everyone is going to recognize them for what they are. They are jerks no different than those that would insist no blacks, Jews, or mixed race couples be served.

The best way we can have an impact is increasing our consumption of their products. Not being a coffee drinker, I am drinking a lot of hot chocolates and chai lattes. I like their cupcakes a lot too.

This is what we had yesterday before heading out to my dad’s. I am pleased to report that despite the fact that I was armed (concealed), there were no children there eating scones, so Abby Spangler can rest easy. A kid did come in later, but he got a milk, and by some miracle, my gun did not jump out of its holster and shoot him or anyone else. Went out to dinner with my dad later in a crowded restaurant that was licensed to serve alcohol. I managed somehow to avoid getting drunk and shooting up the place. My gun managed to stay in its holster and not disturb anyone. Funny how that happens.

The Brady Campaign and allied organizations are starting to get some real media coverage on this issue, so it’s incumbent on us to keep patronizing Starbucks, especially while the heat is on. If we don’t give them a reason to stay with us, they might decide to change their minds. If they succeed here, you can safely bet they’ll repeat this performance again and again.

Related posts:

1. Shown Your Appreciation Yet?
2. Be Sure to Thank Starbucks
3. Starbucks Appreciation Day

UPDATE: The Bradys say they are removing the tags. It’s tough escaping the fact that this is a culture war issue.

Related posts:

1. New Jersey Bills Passed out of Committee
2. Anti-Gun People Got Their Media On
3. Lots of Anti-Gun Folks In This World

But really, it would be hard for me to function in my world if I held people’s differing political beliefs against them. My grandmother was anti-gun. My aunt would ban them all. My mother was not particularly fond of them either. I have a coworker who wouldn’t ban them, but would force you to lock them up a gun club and leave them there. This is a coworker who I’ve long allied with, through good management and bad (mostly bad). I’ve had heated arguments with him about this topic. But we both shared the same vision for what we wanted the company to be and have cooperated to promote hat vision within the company’s internal politics (our vision is winning now, which is why I’ve been so busy). I’ve dated at least one anti-gun girlfriend, who grudgingly worked her way toward ambivalence, and let me take her little brother shooting.

It’s very difficult for me to understand holding any kind of  personal animosity toward the people at the Brady Campaign, or most of the other gun control promoting groups when there are people I am very close with in my personal life who would do worse to my rights given half the chance. I wouldn’t last long if I gave the cold shoulder to everyone once I found out their position on the gun issue if it didn’t agree with mine. I certainly wouldn’t last long if I wouldn’t let the disagreement go.

That’s not to say I don’t understand the resentment of being looked down upon by people who have certain cultural prejudices about the kind of people gun owners are. I do. But the solution to that is to be a functional, normal member of society, and to be up front about what you did this past weekend if they ask. The first time you tell your anti-gun friend or coworker “Shot a match this weekend.” he or she might recoil in horror. By the fifth time they’ll be asking how you did. They may never agree with you, but you can at least start to break down the worst that people think/fear about gun owners and people who shoot.

So showing civility to the other side is something I do believe is part of being a good citizen, but I also think it’s a smart strategy for moving the issue forward as well. If upon finding someone is anti-gun your response is never to speak to them again, you’re missing out on an opportunity to break down preconceptions and prejudices. How do you all deal with anti-gunners in your lives?

Related posts:

1. Way to Stay Classy, Anti-Gun Folks
2. Breaking the Tradition
3. On Bigotry

STARBUCKS, you are making a tragic mistake allowing guns. You are on practically every block in Manhattan, in neighborhood after neighborhood across America — and somehow you think that you shouldn’t have to be in the middle of this debate. If you weren’t in the MIDDLE of every community, maybe you wouldn’t be — but you are. Is allowing guns in Starbucks the way you reward the customers who have given you so much money in our communities? WOW. We will be protesting you allowing guns next to our children eating scones tomorrow in Virginia, just as others have already done in Seattle.

I can promise you, Abby, that Starbucks is well aware they are in ever corner of every community in America, which is precisely why they are wisely not inserting themselves into this debate. There are four Starbucks locations in Bismarck, North Dakota. There’s one in Lawton, Oklahoma. Two in Moscow, Idaho. Two in Richmond, Kentucky.

Why would Starbucks want to risk offending a not insignificant part of their customer base in these areas. The vast majority of Starbucks locations are not in Manhattan. I would wager the majority of their locations aren’t even in major cities. So, Abby, gun owners and people who have licenses to carry guns are giving business to Starbucks too, and they know that. That’s why they aren’t bending.

Related posts:

1. Starbucks Continuing to Hold
2. Strategy: Let the Starbucks Issue Die
3. Seattle Residents: The Starbucks Saga Continues

But back to my original point, what I meant to illustrate is that if folks are going to go around saying things like “Vote from the rooftops,” or declaring that you’re willing to shoot your fellow Americans, if need be, to defend the Bill of Rights, then it seems to me that we owe it to our country to exhaust all possible political tactics, including dirty, dishonorable, and abhorrent ones, if it could result in stopping a push against us. If you admit that you’re willing to do anything, then you’re no better than the gun control folks. They are only doing anything they need to do to achieve victory. We have vastly different versions of what we’d like America to be, and the gun issue touches very directly on how Americans view their relationship with their government, which is why it’s such a contentious issue. But if the alternative to the political process involves civil unrest, or God forbid, civil war, we owe each other the courtesy of understanding. That’s what I’m saying. Strategy should be evaluated based on its effectiveness, and what other means are available. We should always choose the straight and narrow when that’s open to us, and will get the job done. We’re fortunate, in our case, to be the side with the most options.

Related posts:

1. Sounds Like My House
2. I Really Hate Euphemisms
3. The Balance

I see no problem whatsoever with being rude to people who’s sole intention is to infringe upon the rights and liberties of their fellow countrymen…who have demonstrated a willingness to stoop to any level to forward their agenda including slander, obfuscation and outright lies.

These are not honorable people with whom we simply have a disagreement, their actions daily prove that they are dishonorable and are beneath respect.

Until things devolve to the point where we arrive at what Clausewitz would call “politics by other means” then they are, in fact, “people with whom we simply have a disagreement.” The entire point of a political system is so that we can air these disagreements and avoid having to enter politics by other means. To do that, it takes a certain amount of separating politics from the personal.

A political struggle has nothing to do with honesty, honor, or integrity. Those are foreign concepts to the process. Politics is not honorable, it is dirty. Ask yourself this: if you had good data that strongly indicated that gun control actually worked, and that respecting the Second Amendment cost society greatly, would you support getting rid of it? Or would you use every means at your disposal to preserve it? Would you manipulate statistics to be more in your favor? Use rhetoric that would be more persuasive to the public, even if you knew in your heart you were bending the truth? If you say yes, you’re really no better than the Brady folks. If you say no, you’re not really dedicated to this fight.

While I was in DC this weekend, I saw the Temperance Fountain, which stands as monument to a movement that was once so powerful it amended the constitution. It is maintained by the Cogswell Society, who’s motto is “To temperance; I’ll drink to that.” I would like nothing more than there to be a future tribute of this nature to the gun control movement, and I don’t care what I have to do to get there. Much like the great leftist organizers, I am not interested in honor, or having clean hands. I want to win. I am no better than the Brady folks.

I will do anything to keep the Second Amendment alive, and send the gun control movement into political irrelevance. Because of that, I don’t think it’s too much to accept them as fellow citizens, who simply have the misfortune of being on the opposite, and God willing, losing side of this political argument. Is it really too much sacrifice to be civil and magnanimous? It is really wrong to have some understanding of how it would feel if the shoe were on the other foot?

I sincerely hope if the shoe is ever on the other foot again, that I can remain as civil to them as they were able to be with the pro-gun people who spoke with them outside of McDonald. I seems to me, as long as our American Republic continues to function, we owe that to each other.

Related posts:

1. Threatening the Political Establishment
2. Pour it On
3. More Unhappiness with Obama

Click here to view the embedded video.

Even though you hear the term, “men with guns” they aren’t men arguing back at you sweetheart. Not that I favor these forms of confrontational protest, but women are fast becoming our most passionate advocates.

Related posts:

1. Seattle Taking a Cue from Philly
2. Clearly What We Need is More Guns!
3. She’s Baaack!

And to Starbucks corporate management: How’s it feel to be kissing up to guys carrying guns drinking your coffee? FEEL GOOD? Wouldn’t you rather be kissing up to the women of America? FEEL OUR HEAT at Saturday’s Starbucks protest. All are welcome.

So no women carry guns eh? Even though they are the fastest growing category of concealed carry license holders? Look at Arizona’s statistics? Sorry, not all men, and lots of women.

She obviously wasn’t at Cafe Berlin in DC, after the McDonald oral arguments on Tuesday. Sandy Froman was kind enough to invite us out to lunch with NRA’s General Counsel folks and Dave Hardy. There were ten of us, and five were women, four of whom are accomplished attorneys. One of them, Sandy, is also a past President of the National Rifle Association. These are women, Abby, not men, and they are all thoroughly dedicated to protecting the rights of other women to keep and bear arms. This isn’t about “men with guns.” It never has been. Time to turn off the caps lock and get real.

UPDATE: More sexism here. This being promoted by the Brady Campaign, no less.

Related posts:

1. Starbucks is Smarter than Abby
2. Starbucks Continuing to Hold
3. Strategy: Let the Starbucks Issue Die

Then a writer for Consumerist decides to profile the situation and only quote anti-gun leaders before putting up a poorly-worded poll about the issue. They claim the company has changed their policy to allow guns, but that’s not true. No policy has changed. However, they have still added a poll to gauge support for the issue. Here’s another chance to vote freedom first by choosing either the 2nd or 4th option – supporting the policy or don’t care and will buy anyway.

So if this is the game that Paul wants to play, let’s show him how it’s played. It will be a nice little preview of November.

Related posts:

1. More on NRA Voting Patterns
2. A Poll About Revolution
3. We’re Not Stupid

I’m no good at Excel charting, so what I did was plot the violent crime rate (per 100,000) for each state (y-axis) against its Brady Grade (x-axis). I’ve seen folks picking certain data from one side or another to support the assertion that Brady rank means higher violent crime. In truth, there’s no correlation. If you run the r-squared correlation on the two data sets, you get 0.0005, which is effectively uncorrelated. This shouldn’t make anyone at the Brady Campaign too excited, because while it would seem that passing gun control laws doesn’t make violent crime go up, it doesn’t make it go down either. There’s a much stronger correlation, for instance, between annual mean temperature of a state, and violent crime, which means global warming will surely kill us all.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that Justice Breyer seems to want a statistical based test for scrutiny for the Second Amendment. From the McDonald oral argument transcripts:

There are two ways. One is that — look at — all you have to do is look at the briefs. Look at the statistics. You know, one side says a million people killed by guns. Chicago says that their — their gun law has saved hundreds, including and they have statistics — including lots of women in domestic cases. And the other side disputes it. This is a highly statistical matter. Without incorporation, it’s decided by State legislatures; with, it’s decided by Federal judges.

I wonder how he would interpret this pretty damning data on the effectiveness of gun control laws.

Related posts:

1. Correlation Between Brady Rank and Crime
2. Crime Correlation to Brady Scores
3. Is Jacksonville More Dangerous Than London?

Senator Leach, in all the wisdom he can muster, tried to explain his theory – which we will call Leach’s Law – on the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court that might have reached #fail proportions.

Our favorite 5 are nothing if not predictable. You don’t even have to know the issue before the court to know who is going to win. All you need to know are the litigants. So for example, if it’s a prosecutor vs. a criminal defendant, well then the prosecutor is going to win. If it’s a civil-rights plaintiff vs. a company accused of discrimination, then the company is going to win, unless the plaintiffs are white guys, in which case the white guys are going to win. In fact, its a pretty good rule of thumb that if the case is white guys against anyone else for any reason the white guys are going to win.

Using Senator Leach’s theory, let’s examine the McDonald case.

Otis McDonald is not white. Colleen Lawson is not a man. Chicago, in this case, plays the role of prosecutor. And both McDonald and Lawson, along with the other plaintiffs, are seeking relief from a civil rights violation. Under Leach’s Law, the five Justices will vote that the handgun ban stands and governments are free to continue denying a fundamental right to minority citizens.

Wait. That’s not the conclusion he reaches. I guess even Leach’s Law is meant to be broken every once in a while since he actually believes the minority parties will win over the government oppressing a civil right.

If you want more of his twisted logic, feel free to click on over and read why he looks forward to the result of the case so he can push more gun control. (See, I told you it was twisted.)

Related posts:

1. Hutchinson’s S.1001 – Repeal the Ban
2. Getting Ready to Go to DC
3. Free Speech

Why are you Seattle folks feeling like a little Starbucks from the original location today around 10:30am? Because Abby Spangler just announced her next lie-in today. She’s outraged that Starbucks has refused to make a political statement on her pet issue. There’s also going to be a Brady press conference, where they will present their petition. So let’s make sure that enough paying customers speak up and just ask that Starbucks stick to coffee and leave the politics to the DC-based groups.

Interestingly, the Brady Campaign doesn’t even care about this enough to bother letting their fans know about it.

Related posts:

1. Great Response to Starbucks
2. Be Sure to Thank Starbucks
3. Starbucks Continuing to Hold

A coalition of gun violence prevention groups in Virginia (Protest Easy Guns, the Virginia Center for Public Safety, the Virginia Chapters of the Million Mom March, and the Angel Fund) strongly condemns the decision of the House Militia, Police and Public Safety Committee to hold a surprise subcommittee meeting last night to pass HB 49, a bill that would repeal Virginia’s one-handgun-per-month law.

Late last week, the subcommittee, chaired by Del. Thomas C. Wright, had announced that it would conduct no further meetings, leaving HB 49 unreported.  Yesterday, late in the day, the subcommittee inexplicably reconvened with less than a few hours notice to the public to approve this single piece of legislation.

You did this to us for decades, and now paybacks are hell. They raise the specter of Virginia Tech, but fail to mention that the killer there bought two guns in compliance with the rationing law.

Related posts:

1. Gun Show Bill Dead in Virginia
2. The Gift That Keeps Giving
3. Hillary Set Up Us The Bomb

The information described in the following pages is based on a compilation derived from multiple searches using a variety of terms (“assault weapons” and “assault rifles,” for example) of reports published in U.S. news media and included in the commercial database Nexis between March 1, 2005 and February 28, 2007. Stories that recounted firearm-related events outside of those date ranges were discarded. For example, if a story within the date range reported an appellate decision or trial of a shooting that occurred prior to the date range, that story was eliminated.

Here all this time I’ve been compiling the very same terms on Google (though, I will admit I don’t have access to Nexis), I could have been releasing study after study. Of course, if you read the whole study, they don’t claim this to be scientific, or comprehensive, though you can bet they won’t mention that part when they pitch this to their media contacts, and you can absolutely bet on their media contacts not bothering to actually read the study, or include said disclaimers in whatever stories they write about the latest menace caused by semi-automatic rifles.

They also blame us for the dearth of information available on the evil “gun lobby”. But you know, if they hadn’t used that information in the past to try to sue gun manufacturers, dealers, and anyone else involved in the firearms business out of business, we wouldn’t be in this situation, would we? I don’t think too many of us are against the government doing studies, or tracking data. What we are against is that data being used to crap all over our rights by groups like HCI and VPC.

Related posts:

1. Brady Cited Study on Workplaces
2. Holder Indicates New AWB Still on Table
3. Regular Readers

A major segment of the case began, however, not with lofty constitutional quarrels but the long-ago murder of a lawyer and judge in a Chicago courtroom. It was Oct. 21, 1983, when wheelchair-bound Hutchie Moore, using a handgun he had hidden under a blanket, shot his ex-wife’s divorce lawyer, James Piszczor, as well as the presiding judge in the Cook County Circuit Court, Henry Gentile, on the 16th floor of the Daley Center.

Piszczor’s best friend, Christopher Walsh, was in Washington attending a reunion of clerks to then-Chief Justice Warren Burger, when he heard of Piszczor’s death. …

“I flew back that night,” Walsh recalled last week. “Jim’s wife, Maureen, asked me to issue a press release the next morning.” In that release, Piszczor’s widow launched a drive to restrict handguns in their hometown of Oak Park, Ill., a Chicago suburb. “She said that part of the problem that led to Jim’s death was access to handguns, and she didn’t want another widow to have to deal with what she was dealing with.”

I realize that people deal with death differently, so I’m going to try not to judge here. However, I really can’t imagine a circumstance where the very night that my other half was killed, my reaction would be to go into political activist mode and send out press releases.

Regardless, it worked. And it stood for more than two decades.

Related posts:

1. Maureen Faulkner
2. Midge Rendell Longs for “Benevolent Dictator”
3. Your Life in Press Release Headlines

Related posts:

1. Mixed Messages
2. Tasteful Guys
3. Nebraska Reciprocity

The purpose of the page is promote the work of Heeding God’s Call and to announce upcoming actions and activities. Attempts at turning it into a blog to be used for trash-talking and hostile notes regarding our mission has caused us to make this decision. Please continue to check in regularly for updates and news.

It’s their sandbox. I will give them that. But it’s just one more example of shutting down debate when they are called out for their bullshit. This has become almost routine by now.

UPDATE: They claim that 60 people turned out in support of their cause, even though we heard from reports yesterday that the total was less than that, and that most of them were Second Amendment supporters.

Related posts:

1. Fair Weather Protesting
2. Another Opportunity for Reasoned Discourse
3. Heeding God’s Call Targets Another Gun Shop

The rankings are conducted on a 100-point scale. Their “best” state is California which comes in at 79 points – a C+. The second spot is secured by New Jersey with 73 points – a C-. However, I consider the most telling grade to be Massachusetts. Brady said they only scored a 54 out of 100 – or have an F in the gun control grade book.

Massachusetts is a state with discretionary license to own. If you walk into a police station and offend the police chief by wearing his least favorite color, he has the authority to deny you a license to even own a rifle or handgun in your home. Massachusetts is a state where the gun laws go so far that pepper spray requires its own firearms permit. If a new shooter wants to take empty shell casing home after a successful day at the range, they risk criminal charges for inert cases if they do not have a gun license.

This is what the Brady Campaign considers to be a failing grade?

There is no right to own arms in Massachusetts. That is still not good enough for the Paul Helmke. What is good enough? Confiscation? Would that get them up to maybe a B? What is an A for the Brady Campaign?

Related posts:

1. Correlation on Brady Rankings and Crime
2. Peer Review
3. Cases Progressing to Massachusetts High Court

You’d think after a while they’d stop beating the same drum, continuing to lose credibility. Lost in the argument Sugarmann and the Bradys make, trying to scare people with the prospect of open carry, is why you don’t see people open carrying rifles and handguns in the multitude of other venues, including state parks in most states, where people may legally do all those things now. Open carry is a total non-issue. It’s not that widely practiced. After February 22nd, people will be no more likely to see an openly carried firearm in a National Park than they will anywhere else. That’s not to say you’ll never see it. Even I’ve practiced open carry while hiking, and one other time I’ve run into someone else on the trail open carrying. But it’s never been a big deal. If the sight of a gun that bothers you that much, I recommend counseling to help you get over your irrational fears.

Related posts:

1. Obama Signs National Park Carry Reform
2. Great Editorial, but Wrong
3. Another View on National Park Carry