Wikipedia describes projection bias, or psychological projection, as “the unconscious act of denial of a person’s own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, such as to the weather, the government, a tool, or to other people. Thus, it involves imagining or projecting that others have those feelings.”

I’m put in mind of this by two things: a letter to the San Jose Mercury News addressing the recent Open Carry brouhaha in the Bay Area, and a Brian Doherty article at Reason which contains some choice quotes from a Brady Campaign lawyer.

Let’s take the letter, first, from one Laura Knapp of San Carlos:

Eric Kistler (Letters, Feb. 16) believes that Caroline Rackowski’s concern about meeting gun-toting patrons at Starbucks is illogical and shows her ignorance regarding firearms. I’m afraid I must side with Rackowski and inform Kistler that most of us will have the same reaction. What would be illogical is to assume that when you see a gun in a public place that it is unloaded and poses no threat from a so-called “law-abiding citizen.” It is Kistler who is ignorant about firearms if he believes that people will not call the police on him every time he walks near their children in a public place with a gun in plain view, because that’s the way law-abiding citizens deal with potential threats to their safety. Peet’s, anyone?

Consider this in light of the frequent allegations from gun controllers that gun owners live in unreasoning fear of crime and thus fixate unhealthily on firearms: here’s Ms. Knapp, who evidently regards an ordinary citizen, minding his own business as he peaceably goes about his day, as a threat against her or her children merely because he has a gun — unloaded, no less! — on his hip.  Her neighbor, who Ms. Knapp likely won’t give a second thought to as he climbs into his car, becomes a menace sufficient to warrant calling the police because of the mere presence of an inanimate chunk of polymer and steel.

And we’re the frightened ones?  We’re the ones who fetishize guns?

Now, the Doherty article points to a Washington Post profile of Tom Palmer, one of the original plaintiffs in the Heller case, and who is now suing the District of Columbia to vindicate his right to carry firearms in public.  Enter the Brady Campaign’s lawyer:

Jonathan E. Lowy, a lawyer with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, says he thinks the case, pending in U.S. District Court, is open and shut.

“To force the general public to be exposed to the risk of loaded guns when they are out with their family in public areas is outrageous and has absolutely nothing to do with the right to defend the home,” he says.

The lawyer’s rebuttal to Mr. Lowry is that what he says is factually correct but entirely irrelevant.  Carrying a loaded weapon around in public does, indeed, have nothing to do with the “right to defend the home.”  But the Second Amendment, according to Heller, does not protect a “right to defend the home”.  Rather, it protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, which the District’s categorical ban on firearms ownership infringed upon at least with respect to a handgun kept in the home for personal defense.  The Heller holding didn’t go further than that because the litigants didn’t challenge the entirety of D.C.’s regulatory regime, just the portion that prohibited them from owning guns in their homes.

Also, bear in mind that Washington, D.C. has, arguably, more armed law enforcement officers per capita than any other municipality in the nation.  Between the Secret Service, the Capitol Police, the DCPD, the FBI, the ATF, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, and the dozens of other alphabet-soup bureaucracies with armed federal agents operating in the District, the general public is constantly exposed to the “risk” of loaded guns when they’re out with their families in public areas.

Something more than mere hypocrisy is behind this.  Talk to just about any gun control ideologue for any length of time, and you’ll meet someone who believes that he, personally, is not morally or emotionally equipped to comport himself appropriately while armed.  “I would not trust myself with a gun in a pressure situation,” you will almost invariably hear him say.  And because every gun control ideologue is also the most rational, sensible, and well-adjusted person he knows, he has convinced himself that everyone else in the world is also a morally and emotionally retarded jackass with poor impulse control, who thus cannot be trusted with a gun.

However, his experience with armed law enforcement officers has been that they’re not morally and emotionally retarded jackasses with poor impulse control, and that they can be trusted with guns.  In order to square this circle, he’s forced to conclude that there’s some secret component of law enforcement training that mystically alters mere mortals so as to cure them of their jackassery and convert them into righteous and responsible professionals, if not saints.

Which, as commenter Seerak quite accurately points out, is an expression of the wider premise implicit in the arguments of all regulationists and interventionists: that the same human beings who are too stupid to take care of themselves and live a virtuous life suddenly become paragons of rectitude and rationality when endowed with government power.

His lips are moving.  John Rosenthal, among the more famous of Massachusetts gun control ideologues, is engaged in fabulism about the Fort Hood shooter being on a terror watch list.

Doug Pennington, Assistant Director of Communications for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, is a freedom-hating asswipe:

An aside: isn’t it ironic how some libertarians want government to stay out of their lives, yet have no problem with forcing other people to live with loaded, concealed weapons everywhere they turn?  The grocery store; the park; the school; the airport.  Apparently, we have the “freedom” to live with what these so-called libertarians tell us to live with.  After all, they have the guns, right?

Yeah, Doug.  I have no problem “forcing” you to live with loaded, concealed weapons everywhere you turn in precisely the same way I have no problem “forcing” you to live with, say, people saying and printing things you don’t like or worshipping in ways you disapprove of; or with two dudes kissing in public; or with some people purchasing gigantic gas-guzzling SUVs and extravagantly-large wide-screen televisions; or with some people smoking cigarettes or eating fatty foods or drinking to excess.  In short I have no problem “forcing” you to put up with your fellow citizens enjoying their personal and economic freedoms in spite of the enormous psychic discomfort this apparently causes you.  It’s a small price to pay, given that the alternative is that we’re left the “freedom” to behave the way you want us to, whether we like it or not.

Cue Doug chanting, mantra-like, “Guns are not speech,” and backlinking to his past flailing at what he called the “damaged analogy between unregulated speech and unregulated [ed. -- if only] gun carrying”:

The assumption is that since prior restraint against speech is bad by definition, prior restraint against unrestricted gun carrying must be equally bad, or at least deeply suspect.  Except that it’s not, because they are radically different things when put into practice in the world real human beings live in.

If the cure for speech you don’t like is more speech, it can’t be the case that the cure for gun carrying you don’t like is… carrying more guns.  By extension, it can’t be that the only point at which society can do something about the high cost of illicit gun use in America – thousands of deaths and injuries – is after someone gets shot dead or wounded.

Got that?  “It can’t be,” because… well, Doug never bothers to tell us, other than to complain that “they are radically different things when put into practice in the real world human beings live in.”  Parents of two-year-olds are no doubt familiar with this style of argumentation:  “They’re different!”  “Okay. How?”  “They just are!”  “OK.  How?”  ”They just are!” 

Anyway, back to Doug on Fort Hood:

Because, thanks to the National Rifle Association,  law enforcement is prohibited from blocking gun purchases by someone on the Terrorist Watch List if  the buyer doesn’t have another disqualifying reason (such as a felony conviction or domestic violence restraining order).

Here, I yield the floor to Reason commenter “oaktownadam”:

Yes, it’s terrible that we don’t allow peoples’ constitutional liberties to be taken away without first being convicted by a jury of their peers. It’s a shame that secret lists aren’t allowed to be used to disenfranchise people who may or may not commit some crime in the indeterminate future.

Send better idiots, Bradys.

Trolling the intertubes you run across all manner of rhetorical nuggets, but I found this one at Reason Online and thought it nicely encapsulated the gun control ideologues’ (as distinguished from Joe Q. Public, who hasn’t given the matter much in the way of real thought) habit of mind:

When anti-second amendment types say “guns” they don’t mean the literal devices. Instead, “gun” is a code word for “people with bad judgment and the technological capacity for lethal violence.” Inserting the decoded phrase, his statement makes perfect sense:

“…was his insistence that more people with bad judgement and the technological capacity for lethal violence can only make things worse in a situation like the Fort Hood massacre…”

Which is probably true. People with bad judgement and weapons could have easily made the Fort Hood attack much worse. However, if you assume that the vast majority of people who carry weapons do in fact have good judgment about when to use those weapons, then the argument collapses.

These people see no contradiction is saying “guns” are bad but that police with guns are okay because they aren’t talking about the weapons but rather the people with the weapons. They trust police with the weapons but they don’t trust their neighbors.

That is what all “gun” control is about, an elitist disdain for the judgment of the average citizen. “Gun” control isn’t about controlling weapons, it’s about controlling people.

The first step to fighting this is to not let them control the language and to stop letting them use euphemisms and code words. Make them come out and say they think most people are idiots who can’t be trusted with sharp objects.

I would add that there exists a significant cohort of gun controllers who aren’t merely motivated by elitist disdain for the judgment of the average citizen, but who regard gun ownership itself as somehow retrograde and unenlightened — a rebuke to (and I am paraphrasing Jeffrey Snyder, here) coercive utopian collectivism insofar as it communicates a reservation of judgment about whether the state is encroaching on liberty and a willingness to defend that liberty with more than words.

The joint U.S.-Mexico task force on border issues has, entirely predictably, returned a recommendation to reinstate the federal “assault weapons” ban:

A binational task force on U.S.-Mexico border issues will call Friday on the Obama administration and Congress to reinstate an expired ban on assault weapons and for Mexico to overhaul its frontier police and customs agencies to mirror the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Why?  Because:

Mexican officials want a ban, saying that 90 percent of guns seized in drug crimes in Mexico and submitted for tracing to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives originate in the United States, including most assault rifles.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that’s true, and the notoriously corrupt Mexican government isn’t simply making things up to deflect from the incompetence and graft endemic in its own ranks.  Note the language used in the article: “90 percent of guns seized in drug crimes in Mexico and submitted for tracing” (emphasis mine).  I’ve talked about tracing before, in my post about the Tiarht Amendment.  The universe of traced guns is not a statistically-valid sample from which to draw any conclusions about the larger universe of untraced guns, for the simple reasons that (a) not every criminal investigation results in a trace, and (b) not every trace is for a criminal investigation.  Is the Mexican government requesting traces for 100% of the guns seized in drug crimes?  We don’t know, and that fact alone makes the article’s “90%” statistic a load of codswallop.

And, of course, this is to say nothing of the constitutional issues involved, nor to point out that there’s no evidence so-called “assault weapons” are disproportionately dangerous or used in a disproportionate number of crimes.

By way of amplifying my last post, i.e., that movement gun controllers are contemptibly dishonest pieces of human garbage, I’d like to introduce you to a Belgian acquaintance of mine:

This is the FN Five-seveN (odd capitalization intentional).  It is manufactured by Belgian gun manufacturer FN Herstal, which has U.S. subsidiaries located in Virginia and South Carolina.  The handgun was designed as a companion sidearm for the FN P90 (which you are familiar with if you ever watched Stargate SG-1, after its first season), and is chambered for the same 5.7x28mm cartridge.

FN Herstal designed these two weapons for law enforcement, executive protection, and military vehicle crews.  They’re lightweight and compact with a large magazine capacity, and for those target applications FN Herstal developed a special variant of the 5.7x28mm round — the SS190 — that can pierce light body armor.  While that’s not necessarily optimal for all law enforcement and executive protection applications, it’s ideal for military vehicle crews.

However, the SS190 is not available to civilians.  At all.  Armor piercing ammunition has been illegal for civilian sale in the United States since 1986, and FN’s US subsidiaries sell the SS190 only via a secure Customs bonded warehouse, which delivers directly to customers after U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) approval.  The only 5.7x28mm ammunition which civilians can legally purchase in the United States are rounds that have been specifically declared by the BATFE to be non-armor piercing.

In terms of lethality, the 5.7x28mm cartridge has ballistic characteristics similar to those of the .22 Winchester Magnum Rimfire cartridge.  It is somewhat less powerful than the ubiquitous 9x19mm Luger cartridge, and considerably less powerful than the .40 S&W or .45 ACP cartridges, when all are fired from pistol-length barrels.  Hence why there has been no stampede of American law enforcement to replace their Glock and Beretta and SigSauer semi-autos with Five-seveNs: the trend has been away from light, high-velocity rounds (like the 5.7x28mm) that are prone to overpenetration, and toward larger, heavier rounds that transfer more kinetic energy to a target.

This is all verifiable fact.  The ballistic characteristics of these cartridges are susceptible to objective measurement; anyone with the tools and the time can satisfy himself that the 5.7x28mm round is by no stretch of the imagination some kind of scary super-bullet.  And yet this hasn’t prevented the Brady Campaign Against Gun Violence from flat-out lying, and dubbing the Five-seveN a “cop-killer”.

That was four years ago.  The Brady Campaign’s claims about the Five-seveN have been conclusively debunked.  And now, in the wake of the Fort Hood shootings, when it appears that the killer employed a Five-seveN, the Brady Campaign continues to lie, and the media is repeating those lies over and over and over again.

When I heard about the Fort Hood shootings on Thursday night, my first reaction was a combination of outrage and heartbreak.  My second reaction — borne out of years of experience in the debate — was to think, “I wonder how long it will be before the gun control ghouls start dancing in the blood of the victims?”

One damn day.

“Single payer” healthcare devotees; anti-gay marriage zealots; anti-abortion fanatics; Net Neutrality votaries; hysterical global warmenists — as passionately as I disagree with all of them and as wrongheaded as I think they are, I can usually still manage to ascribe some basic level of good faith to them.

But movement gun controllers?  No.  For them I have nothing but contempt.

Sebastian talks CA-AB962, which we have discussed here previously.  And he’s correct: the Brady Campaign and other assorted anti-gun lobbying groups, for all that they sell themselves as merely being anti-gun violence, have never met a gun control law that they didn’t describe as reasonable and common sense regardless of how burdensome the law was on honest gun owners.  Sebastian:

Try finding odd calibers or match grade ammunition at your local corner gun shop. For a lot of competitive shooters, especially cowboy shooters, mail order is really your only option, and now Governor Arnold just told those people they don’t matter.

I can tell you, without my regular mail order houses, there’s no way I could find everything I need easily. The local gun shops are often poorly stocked with reloading supplies, and the nearest Cabela’s is 100 miles away. Even if you think it makes sense to regulate loaded ammunition, it makes zero sense to regulate components, because criminals are not going to hand load their ammunition. That was purely a fuck you to law abiding gun owners from the Brady Campaign and Governor Schwarzenegger.

Yeah, you read that correctly: even reloading components are subject to this law.  And Sebastian is saying this from the perspective of somebody who lives in Pennsylvania, a significantly smaller state than California.  There are far more areas of California that are unserved by a well-stocked Friendly Neighborhood Gun Store; even here in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to a few million people all told, there are only about half a dozen shops, and none of them are “specialty” stores that cater to, for instance, the CAS crowd.

Sebastian’s exit question is worth quoting:  “And [good-faith proponents of gun control] still want to insist there’s no hidden agenda here? Hell, it’s not even really that hidden!”

Let’s begin, as before, with some context:

The semi-automatic weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

Those words were written by Josh Sugarmann, the executive director and founder of the anti-gun Violence Policy Center, in 1988.  Sugarmann is, in fact, frequently credited with inventing the term “assault weapon.”  His and other anti-gun activists’ express intention has been to advance their policy goals not by informing the public, but by preying on public ignorance and fear.

So what is an “assault weapon,” really?

Read More

It’s for a worthy cause and everything, and it definitely makes Dianne Feinstein cry, but even if it was legal in California I simply couldn’t bring myself to bid on this… thing.

Shudder.