A couple of articles caught my eye and angered up my blood recently.
1. Justice Stevens Speaks to Brady Campaign on October 15
Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens apparently spoke at a Brady Campaign event in the middle of last month. A couple of his remarks are worth discussing.
“The Second Amendment provides no obstacle to regulations prohibiting the ownership or the use of the sorts of automatic weapons used in the tragic multiple killings in Virginia, Colorado and Arizona in recent years.” -Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. (emphasis mine)
If you're reading this, I would expect that you know that automatic weapons were used at precisely none of these shootings. I would also assume that you are at the very least familiar with the distinction between semi-automatic and automatic weapons. It's a very big distinction. One one side are the things you can (in free states) walk into a store and buy that day, and on the other side are firearms that are incredibly limited in supply, very expensive, and subject to a number of federal regulations and taxes. You, dear reader, are now more educated than a former Supreme Court Justice on the matter of semi-auto and automatic weapons.
This mistake is made all the time in the media and by our less-educated friends, and it appears that even the men and women who represent the pinnacle of our judicial system are not immune. This mistake is dangerous, because it makes guns out to be scarier than they are. Think of all the people who mistakenly believed that Holmes of the Colorado shooting had an automatic rifle, just because of how it looked, and filled our Twitter and Facebook feeds with incredulous shouts of "this crazy guy can just buy an automatic weapon at Wal-Mart!!!" It's very easy to disabuse people of this belief, since it's so very wrong, but when it persists it leads to people banning things they don't understand (aka an "Assault Weapons Ban").
Another thing Stevens said:
"Maybe you have some kind of constitutional right to have a cell phone with a pre-dialed 911 in the number at your bedside and that might provide you with a little better protection than a gun which you’re not used to using.”
The article notes that he said this to laughter from the Brady Campaign. I'm not even going to waste time dissecting this. This is something that someone who does not care about you or your rights would say. I dare Justice Stevens to look this woman in the eye and tell her that she only had the right to dial 911. Imagine what would have happened to her and to her baby if she weren't armed. The attitude of "you don't need a gun, just call the cops" and the flippancy of Stevens' remark disgusts me and it should disgust you too.
2. Cook County Gun and Ammo Tax
A few weeks ago Cook County, Illinois - the home of Chicago, the anti-gun utopia where gun control has completely eliminated crime, racism, and unhappiness - mulled the idea of instituting a tax on guns and ammunition. This tax would help pay for the costs of providing healthcare to Chicago residents injured by gun violence. Healthcare costs for those injured end up being in the area of $50,000 per person, so this is a definite budget issue.
Since Cook County regularly shits on the 2nd Amendment rights of its inhabitants, it figured that they wouldn't mind being shit on a little more. The proposed tax was an extra $25 on a gun and 5 cents per bullet. As the article shows, they have somehow had given up on the bullet tax. Think about a box of .22LR that contains 550 rounds - the tax would be more than the bullets!
But the gun tax appears to be going strong. So this is how it is? The law-abiding citizens of cook county already have to jump through incredible hoops if they want to even keep a gun in their house, nevermind concealed carry (remember IL is the last holdout in that regard), and now they have to pay a little extra because low rent gangbangers can't stop shooting each other with their illegal weapons? Not to get political, but this is redistribution most foul. It is Chicago favoring its criminal element at the expense of trod-upon law abiding citizens who only want to protect themselves from that same criminal element!
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It's the election today, as I write, and since I'm fed up with politics and trying to avoid the news for the next few days, you have my word that I'll stop being political here for the foreseeable future. Next update will be a range report and photos of the CZ P-07.
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