Guntards.net

Gun sales surge on change in Missouri law

Posted by simonov on 10 September 2007

From the St Louis Post-Dispatch:

A new Missouri law that eliminated a time-consuming permit process has fueled a surge in handgun sales across the St. Louis area.

Gun shop owners and salespeople say business is up at least 20 percent since the Aug. 28 change. No longer do buyers have to seek permission from their county sheriff before buying a handgun. Also gone is the $10 fee paid for each permit.

Missouri? Holy cow, we’re they a slave state back in the day?

The idea behind the previous system was that a county sheriff’s department would do its own investigation of an individual’s background before issuing a permit. This was in addition to the FBI background check that accompanies every handgun purchase.

Good riddance to a dumb — and potentially discriminatory — law.

Shotgun Saturday

Posted by simonov on 13 August 2007

We experienced another pleasant weekend shooting in the desert, this time with shotguns:

Canadian handgun sales surge on new legal threats

Posted by simonov on 9 August 2007

Canadian politicians thought they banned handguns back in 1995, but as usual the law was as poorly written as it was poorly conceived, and now, in the wake of a wave of violence, they are thinking about closing all the “loopholes.”

This, apparently is good news for Canadian gun stores.

“The more that the government talks about banning them, the better sales are. It’s always been that way. I’m sure it’s something they don’t intend,” said Wes Winkel, an owner of Elwood Epps Sporting Goods in Orillia.

“The best I’ve ever seen in handgun sales was last winter when we had our federal election and Paul Martin came on TV and said he was going to ban handguns if elected. Wow – you should have seen the phone ring the next morning and for a month after that,” said Winkel who sells about 2,500 new and used handguns a year.

Echoes of California’s recent .50BMG ban, which saw thousands of the rifles flooding into the state just before the ban became effective.

My Weekend in the Mojave

Posted by simonov on 22 July 2007

We have recently begun working on a series of videos about America’s Gun Culture, from the point of view of a Guntard. Most of these will be educational in nature, but in the meantime we are cutting our teeth on the camera and editing software with experimental efforts such as this latest recording a recent guntard weekend in the Mojave Desert:

The acceptable face of ignorant bigotry

Posted by simonov on 26 June 2007

You’ve probably seen this on other gun blogs, a CNN report highlighting how gun owners are particular hazardous to pregnant women:

Now, aside from the preposterous notion that pregnant women are at particularly high risk for being crime victims,* on the strength of the American media’s latest news substitution story (the scary buck Negro murders pregnant virgin white girlfriend case, though CNN doesn’t quite put it that way, despite their understanding that’s precisely why it is such profitable broadcasting fodder), CNN once again is using their broad brush of bigotry to gain viewers. Only instead of going after the thrilling scary buck Negro angle, which would justifiably alienate many of their advertisers, CNN has decided to paint tens of millions of law-abiding (male) gun owners and collectors as particularly dangerous people for (white?) (pregnant?) women to date or live with or marry or allow to father their children, buy their car, pay their mortgage, whatever it is the loyal CNN-watching distaff wants from men these days.

Strangely, they haven’t made any similar leaps of logic to suggest pregnant white women should avoid dating adulterers, police officers, African-Americans, Ohioans, meth-heads or people who use bleach.

Pay special attention to the bogus statistics about “leading causes of death” for pregnant women. Sorry, CNN, that should have been “leading forms of homicide,” which are probably almost the same proportions as in the general population. But you knew that, didn’t you, CNN? It’s odd that you continue to find it necessary to lie to your viewers whenever you discuss guns, CNN, since we gun rights advocates almost never feel the urge to do so.

You can tell Paula Zahn what you think of her reporting, or tell her bosses.

* Update: Our friend over at the excellent Grappling With Guns blog takes exception to this point, and insists that pregnant women are in fact at greater risk of being violent crime victims. Grappling arrives at this conclusion based on formal studies of criminology and discusses it in more detail in a blog entry on the Paula Zahn segment.

Also, it may be that Pat Brown’s report here was presented out of context, that some of her comments about gun owners were meant to be directed towards psychopaths specifically. She attempts to clarify her views in this e-mail response appearing in the comments section on Xavier’s blog. Be that as it may, it sure would have been nice if Pat Brown had pointed out how the statistics Paula Zahn asked to her comment on were deliberately misleading. Apologies to Pat Brown if we seem to be unfairly slurring her, but clearly CNN is trying to push forward an agenda, the usual one for them. I can’t find a transcript of the show on CNN’s website, but you can very clearly hear the first words in the clip (from a different talking head), “. . . another big aspect is men who are gun owners as being particularly dangerous.”

I’m happy to set the record straight here, but of course none of this does anything to mitigate the absurdity of linking gun owners and gun collectors, the vast majority of whom are peaceable, law-abiding people, with a propensity toward misogynistic violence.

Update II: Pat Brown makes it clear on her own blog that her words were taken out of context. Apologies to Pat Brown, but none (so far) will be offered to Paula Zahn and CNN.

On the other hand, I do object to this: “Now, after doing interviews on the Jessie Davis murder, those from the right are taking one statement out of context and going nuts about it.” Some of us aren’t from the right, Pat.

You know, to be honest, it wasn’t even Pat Brown’s comments in that clip that got my fur up so much as the misleading chart and the initial words (possibly less damning in their full context as well), “. . . men who are gun owners as being particularly dangerous.” That, and the sordid business of fabricating an anti-gun fable out of the pregnant white virgin killed by scary black man story. But hey, if it bleeds it leads, right CNN?

Putting accidental deaths in perspective

Posted by simonov on 23 June 2007

My attention was captured this morning by an AP report on the tragic and widespread American phenomenon of parents backing over their young children. According to Kids and Cars, a child safety advocacy group in Leawood, Kansas, “more than 1,200 children under 15 . . . were killed since 2000 in nontraffic motor vehicle accidents in the United States. Half of those fatalities were in backovers, almost all of them involving children under 5.”

Whoa!

Since I enjoy fooling around with numbers, I immediately cranked up Excel and downloaded the Centers for Disease Control’s National Vital Statistics Report on US Deaths and Death Rates. Now, if the Kids and Cars people are to be believed, an average of 80 children under the age of 15 are killed every year by their parents backing over them. According to the CDC, that’s a third more than the 60 accidental gun deaths for children under 15 in 2002 (if you want to use the figure for children under the age of five, only 12 died from gun accidents in 2002).

Of course, 60 accidental firearms related deaths is 60 too many, but I can’t help thinking the hysteria from the VPC and the Brady Center regarding accidental firearms deaths is a little disproportionate, considering how many American parents (presumably almost all of them licensed drivers of registered vehicles) can’t help running over their own children every year.

A Democratic senator before the Culture Wars

Posted by simonov on 21 June 2007

Few activities provide me with as much pleasure as reading Gore Vidal’s essays and novels, as well as his two memoirs, Palimpsest and Point to Point Navigation, which I recently completed. He was friend, acquaintance or family to much of the US ruling class, back in the day, with a single thread of regret running through his memoirs being that he has quite unexpectedly outlived almost all the characters that appear in them.

I was amused, but not very surprised, to encounter this anecdote concerning Vidal, his step-brother-in-law JFK and Tennessee Williams (whom Vidal called the “Glorious Bird”) in Palimpsest:

In 1958 I went down to Miami to meet Tennessee and the film producer Sam Spiegel . . . When Jackie heard that we were in Miami, she asked us up to Palm Beach for lunch. The Bird had no idea who they were but took my word for it that Jack was running for president. We arrived an hour late. Jack was firing a rifle at a target on the lawn. He was not a very good shot; and I was as bad as he. The Bird casually took the rifle from him and shot three bull’s-eyes, “Using only my blind eye,” he cackled.

It is illustrated with a photo of Tennessee with the rifle, while Vidal and JFK look on (without any eye or ear protection):

Since this was prior to 1970, there is nothing really surprising about a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts shooting a rifle in his backyard not for any photo op political purpose but for simple recreation, a “sporting use” of firearms in which, incredibly, no animals are harmed. And we should be only a little more surprised that the flamboyant (if you know what I mean, and I think you do) playwright Tennessee Williams turns out to be a crack shot.

In those days, a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts was likely to associate gun control with Jim Crow. Later, sadly, the respective leaderships of both parties latched onto gun control as a delightfully polarizing issue useful in separating the sheep from the goats, and of immense value in the emerging American Culture Wars.

New York Times on the Black Rifle

Posted by simonov on 4 June 2007

It’s starting. The mainstream media are finally waking up to the reality of the AR-15 industry and market in America, including the true nature of the people who own and shoot these and similar black rifles and “assault weapons.” And guess what? We aren’t all drug dealers, terrorists or other criminals. Who knew?

Yesterday an unusually informative and balanced article on black rifles appeared in the Money section of the New York Times. The article does a good job of describing the emergence of the AR-15 industry in the wake of the 1994 Federal “assault weapon” ban, without actually going so far (as we do) as suggesting the rise of the AR-15 was caused by the 1994 law (bless you, Dianne Feinstein).

Of course, you can’t produce an article on firearms for the mass media without consulting the most firearms-ignorant commentators available (ie, spokesmen from the VPC and the Brady Center, as well as Senator Charles E. “They have no place in our society” Schumer). But that’s just the nature of journalism in America. Despite the usual brainless quotes from the strident anti-gun militancy, it’s a good article, certainly the best article on guns I’ve ever seen in the New York Times.

Published comments from Jim Zumbo also reveal some of the thought process that allowed Zumbo to call AR-15s “terrorist rifles:”

“Having met the people who shoot these things, they were regular folks; they weren’t sinister people who were bent on causing harm, they weren’t hostile people,” he says. “They were interested in the guns because they were fun to shoot.”

It might be as simple as that. As a hunter, all Zumbo cares about guns is their utility in killing animals. But most non-hunting gun owners in American (this would be most gun owners overall) are interested in firearms because they enjoy owning, collecting or shooting them. That’s why we are more sensitive about gun control — any gun control — than hunters like Zumbo. That’s America’s Gun Culture.

Guntards.net's First Video Ever

Posted by simonov on 27 May 2007

We’ve been thinking about making some educational videos of guntards at play, the first step being wrestling with video cameras and editing software to figure out how to do it. So this month whilst out in the desert shooting jugs, your webmaster also shot some video, and this weekend finally wrestled the Sony Vegas video editing software to the ground and produced the following opus:

Okay, so it’s not exactly Oscar material, but it was a first effort.

You can also watch the video on YouTube.

Matthew Corwin MySpace Terrorist case update

Posted by simonov on 26 May 2007

We thought we would take a moment to update everyone (everyone who isn’t already at Calguns) on the Matthew Corwin case. As previously reported, six of the most obviously bogus charges against Corwin were dropped, and the bail was reduced. Then about a week ago Corwin’s attorneys worked with his mother to post equity in lieu of bail and he was released from custody.

As we have said before, not only is this case just another of many instances of harassment of gun owners that is common in California, but it also has disturbing implications, so far completely ignored by the national or local media, for the right of free expression. Clearly free expression is far more important for trendy columnists and Hollywood luminaries than for creepy gun owners.

Corwin is not out of the woods yet, and this will probably not represent any sort of “test case” for the off-list lowers now commonly available in California. His and his lawyers’ primary concern at this moment is doubtless getting the charges reduced as much as possible. Frankly, by now, after being laughed at by the BATFE, the DA probably is feeling much the same way. Nonetheless, we believe this wanton harassment is worthy of a monetary contribution to Corwin’s legal defense, so we have made the $1,000 donation shown above to Corwin’s legal defense fund. Just a little love from us socialists, big government apologists, and DOJ ass kissers to help in the good fight. BTW, the godless communists around here feel the same way.