Archive for the ‘2A’ Category
The educator war on gun culture continues
Subtitled: Being a dick to children.
Legal Insurrection: All your front yards are belong to school zero-tolerance policies by William A. Jacobson
Reason: School Defends Long Term Suspension of Students For Playing With Air Soft Gun: It’s For The Children, Even the Suspended Ones by Ed Krayewski
NRO: Schools Are Not Parents by Charles C. W. Cooke
Quotes from the 911 call made by a neighbor:
“He is pointing the gun, and it looks like there’s a target in a tree in his front yard,” she told the dispatcher. “This is not a real one, but it makes people uncomfortable. I know that it makes me [uncomfortable], as a mom, to see a boy pointing a gun.”
Yes, you read that right. She called 911 over a boy pointing something she knew was not a gun, at a tree, in his own yard.
Quote from the Larkspur Middle School principle:
This was a dangerous situation that involved the intervention of law enforcement, the Office of Safety and Loss Control and our school administration.
Translation: everyone massively overreacted so we are going to retroactively brand them as dangers to society to cover our backsides.
I have a slightly different take on this
Via Gunfreezone: Underpants Gnomes Statistics & Research.
Methods. We conducted a negative binomial regression analysis of panel data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting Systems database on gun ownership and firearm homicide rates across all 50 states during 1981 to 2010. We determined fixed effects for year, accounted for clustering within states with generalized estimating equations, and controlled for potential state-level confounders.
Taken literally, this would indicate that the CDC Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) had data on gun ownership. I examined both the Fatal Injury Data system there and National Violent Death Reporting System and no data is provided on gun ownership at all.
Now, if we assume that Miguel is correct, and they examining the databases of registered firearms possessed by the individual states (those that actually exist) then all they actually demonstrated is a correlation between “firearm homicide rates” and registration of firearms.
However, they mention that they also use a proxy for levels of household firearm ownership: the percentage of suicides committed with a firearm. The problem here is that an assumption is made that the percent of gun owners who commit suicide is a constant no mater what state they are in despite it being known that suicide rates between the states vary wildly (Alaska’s is double Ohio’s for example). They also don’t say if they assume that percentage of suicides is the exact percentage of households with guns or modify it somehow to make it useful to compare to data “measured directly”. The proxy is of dubious value.
This study isn’t in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health so I will have to wait until it actually sees print to find out what they actually did.
There is also the usual issue that they were only concerned with “the firearm homicide rate” and not “the homicide rate”. Being 1% less likely to die by gun but 1% more likely to die overall (for example) is not a good trade. Gun control advocates not only try to ignore externalities, they try to hide them from everyone else so they don’t realize they are making a fool’s bargain.
Great job BFA!
HotAir: Gun control rally turns into gun rights rally
“There’s no reason for Mayors Against Illegal Guns to be in Ohio,” said Linda Walker of the Buckeye Firearms Foundation. “Ohioans stand up for our constitutional rights and that’s the way it’s going to be.”
…
“People are fired up, people are concerned,” said Walker. “It’s overwhelming this many people show up on a Friday afternoon because our constitutional rights are that important.”
I am so mad at myself for missing this, even though I was at work when this was going on. A big “thank you” to everyone who did attend.
Something worth pointing out (Update: or not)
John Hinderaker raises what I think is an important point:
What is odd about this is that a filibuster occurs in the context of a cloture motion, for which 60 votes are required. “Cloture” means cutting off debate, but the Democrats aren’t planning on having a debate–any debate. They apparently intend, in keeping with their recent practice, that senators should read Reid’s bill and vote on it simultaneously. It is the Republicans, not the Democrats, who would relish a debate on the Left’s harebrained gun control schemes.
We’ve already seen a lot of this from the Democrats on the state level in places like New York and Connecticut: they want to avoid public debate of their legislation. They don’t want the public to know what is being done to them until it is already law. Despicable.
Update: Learn something new every day. There are apparently several stages at which a bill can be filibustered, and in this case it was filibustering the motion to open the bill for consideration and debate. There will be a later stage where the filibuster occurs in the context of a cloture motion.
Educator drafts students to make war on gun culture
campusreform.org: Prof at public univ under investigation for allegedly forcing students to make anti-gun posters
According to the complaint, obtained by Campus Reform, the professor compelled students in her graphic design class to create artwork opposing firearms on campus and opposing pro-gun legislation currently pending before the Texas state legislature.
The professor then used the artwork students created online to publicize an anti-gun petition entitled “MSU is anti-Concealed Carry on Campus” and on a now deleted Facebook page opposing firearms, says the complaint.
“On Monday, April 1, around 7 PM (class was 5:30 – 8:20), Jennifer Yucus, Assistant Professor of Graphic Art/Design, compelled students from her Computers For Artists class to advocate in favor of a political petition opposing firearms on campus, in opposition to a pair of bills currently before the Texas legislature, using personal art materials and MSU resources,” reads the complaint.
“Several of my classmates were uncomfortable with the assignment and either quietly or openly expressed this,” it continues. “Professor Yucus asked students to rationalize objections by thinking of it as a job from an employer (or words to that effect).”
Of course in reality the students were the ones paying for this class. They aren’t employees; they are customers. I think the ethical thing to do would be for the university to refund the student’s cost for the class.
The complaint adds that Yucus “did require all works to include the URL to the petition” she had created and adds that students were photographed while crafting the posters to give the illusion of youth support.
“Professor Yucus took photos of her students in the process of drafting and creating the posters, but did not say how these would be used,” says the complaint. “The posters were then hung in the hallways of the Fain Arts building, giving the impression of student support.”
Some of the photos later appeared on an anti-gun Facebook page that appeared to have been created by Yucus. The page appeared to have been deleted after the complaint was filed, but Campus Reform was able to capture the posted images before they were removed.
I am not a lawyer, and that goes double for Texas law, but I wonder if that crossed the legal line into misappropriating the student’s likenesses since it sounds like she was taking advantage of their reputation, prestige, or other value associated with them, for purposes of publicity.
According to the complaint, Yucus used her official university-issued e-mail address to later forward a URL to her petition to the entire class.
State law in Texas appears to forbid professors at public universities from using their authority to compel others to advocate for political causes.
“A state officer or employee may not use official authority… to interfere with or affect the result of an election or nomination of a candidate or to achieve any other political purpose,” reads subsection C of 556.004 of Government Code, Title 5, entitled “Open Government, Ethics.”
So at the least, that bit of the law seems to have been broken.
Poll: Overwhelming majority of law enforcement officers oppose new gun control
86 percent feel the currently proposed legislation would have no effect or a negative effect on improving officer safety
Similarly, 92 percent feel that banning semi-automatic firearms, or “assault weapons,” would have no effect or a negative effect on reducing violent crime
Respondents were more split on background checks, with 31 percent agreeing that mental health background checks in all gun sales would help reduce mass shootings, while 45 percent disagreed
71 percent support law enforcement leaders who have publicly refused to enforce more restrictive gun laws within their jurisdictions
82 percent believe gun buyback or turn-in programs are ineffective in reducing the level of gun violence
91 percent support the concealed carry of firearms by civilians who have not been convicted of a felony and/or have not been deemed psychologically incapable
Likewise, 80 percent feel that legally-armed citizens would likely have reduced the number of casualties in recent mass shooting incidents
ACLU says Reid’s gun legislation could threaten privacy rights, civil liberties
The Daily Caller: ACLU says Reid’s gun legislation could threaten privacy rights, civil liberties
Since it’s an attack on the right to keep and bear arms, I wouldn’t bother with the word “could” with respect to civil liberties.
But Calabrese says that Reid’s legislation fails to include those “privacy best practices.”
“Contrast this with what the existing [Reid] legislation says, which is simply that a record has to be kept of a private transfer,” Calabrese highlighted, “and it doesn’t have any of the protections that we have in current law for existing licensees.”
“We think that that kind of record-keeping requirement could result in keeping long-term detailed records of purchases and creation of a new government database.”
“And they come to use databases for all sorts of different purposes,” Calabrese said. “For example, the National Counterterrorism Center recently gave itself the authority to collect all kinds of existing federal databases and performed terrorism related searches regarding those databases. They essentially exempted themselves from a lot of existing Privacy Act protections.”
“So you just worry that you’re going to see searches of the databases and an expansion for purposes that were not intended when the information was collected.”
Reid’s legislation is hauntingly vague about who would physically keep information about American gun purchases, but it’s crystal clear that records will be kept.
That is the privacy part. Here is the civil liberties angle:
The ACLU’s second “significant concern” with Reid’s legislation is that it too broadly defines the term “transfer,” creating complicated criminal law that law-abiding Americans may unwittingly break.
“[I]t’s certainly a civil liberties concern,” Calabrese told TheDC. “You worry about, in essence, a criminal justice trap where a lawful gun owner who wants to obey the law inadvertently runs afoul of the criminal law.”
“They don’t intend to transfer a gun or they don’t think that’s what they’re doing, but under the law they can be defined as making a transfer. We think it’s important that anything that is tied to a criminal sanction be easy to understand and avoid allowing too much prosecutorial discretion.”
“For example, different gun ranges are treated differently,” Calabrese said. “You’re firing a firearm in one geographic location, you’re OK, but in another, you’re not. And those kind things, it’s going to be hard for your average consumer to really internalize and figure out the difference.”
“Criminal sanctions shouldn’t hinge on those kinds of differences,” he said.
Dishonest Solutions
That’s the title of Colion Noir’s newest and most excellent piece for NRA News:
BornLib's Blog 