ORP Trading Post

Another Oldie but Goodie.

One mistake that gets made all the time is assuming people of color, women, LGBT folks and even many Democrats can’t possibly be gun owners who support the Second Amendment.

From Ross in Range:  http://web.archive.org/web/20070125225648/http://www.john-ross.net/mistakes.htm

By John Ross

Copyright 2003-2005 by John Ross.  Electronic reproduction of this article freely permitted provided it is reproduced in its entirety with attribution given

This is a piece I wrote a couple years ago, and I still get regular requests for it.  Might as well put it on Ross In Range.

One of the biggest mistakes that freedom advocates make is we often fail to take the moral high ground on freedom issues, and we let our enemies define the terms.  This is a huge mistake.  Never forget: We are in the right on this issue.  We are on the side of the Founding Fathers.  They are on the side of Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and every other leader of an oppressive, totalitarian regime.

Let me give some common examples I’ve often heard when Second Amendment advocates debate gun control supporters:

THEY SAY: “We’d be better off if no one had guns.”

WE SAY: “You can never succeed at that, criminals will always get guns.” (FLAW: the implication here is that if you could succeed at eliminating all guns, it would be a reasonable plan.)

WE SHOULD SAY: “So, you want to institute a system where the weak and elderly are at the mercy of the strong, the lone are at the mercy of the gang.  You want to give violent criminals a government guarantee that citizens are disarmed.  Sorry, that’s unacceptable.  Better we should require every citizen to carry a gun.”

THEY SAY:  “Those assault rifles have no sporting purpose.  You don’t need a 30-round magazine for hunting deer–they’re only for killing people.”

WE SAY: “I compete in DCM High Power with my AR-15.  You need a large-capacity magazine for their course of fire.  My SKS is a fine deer rifle, and I’ve never done anything to give my government reason not to trust me blah blah blah.” (FLAW: You have implicitly conceded that it is OK to ban any gun with no sporting use.  And eventually they can replace your sporting arms with arcade-game substitutes.)

WE SHOULD SAY: “Your claim that ‘they’re only for killing people’ is imprecise.  A gas chamber or electric chair is designed for killing people, and these devices obviously serve different functions than guns.  To be precise, a high-capacity, military-type rifle or handgun is designed for conflict.  When I need to protect myself and my freedom, I want the most reliable, most durable, highest-capacity weapon possible. The only thing hunting and target shooting have to do with freedom is that they’re good practice.”

THEY SAY: “If we pass this License-To-Carry law, it will be like the Wild West, with shootouts all the time for fender-benders, in bars, etc.  We need to keep guns off the streets.  If doing so saves just one life, it will be worth it.”

WE SAY: “Studies have shown blah blah blah” (FLAW: You have implied that if studies showed License-To-Carry laws equaled more heat-of-passion shootings, Right-To-Carry should be illegal.)

WE SHOULD SAY: “Although no state has experienced what you are describing, that’s not important.  What is important is our freedom.  If saving lives is more important than the Constitution, why don’t we throw out the Fifth Amendment?  We have the technology to administer an annual truth serum session to the entire population. We’d catch the criminals and mistaken arrest would be a thing of the past.  How does that sound?”

THEY SAY: “I don’t see what the big deal is about a five day waiting period.”

WE SAY: “It doesn’t do any good, criminals don’t wait five days, it’s a waste of resources blah blah blah.” (FLAW: You have implied that if waiting periods did reduce crime, they would be a good idea.)

WE SHOULD SAY: “Shall we apply your logic to the First Amendment along with the Second? How about a 24-hour cooling-off period with a government review board before the news is reported?  Wouldn’t that prevent lives from being ruined, e.g. Richard Jewell?  And the fact that this law applies to people who already own a handgun tells me that it’s not about crime prevention, it’s about harassment.  Personally, I want to live in a free society, not a ‘safe’ one with the government as chief nanny.”

THEY SAY: “In 1776, citizens had muskets.  No one ever envisioned these deadly AK-47s.  I suppose you think we should all have Atomic bombs.”

WE SAY: “Uh, well, uh…”

WE SHOULD SAY: “Actually, the Founders discussed this very issue–it’s in the Federalist Papers.  They wanted the citizens to have the same guns as were the issue weapons of soldiers in a modern infantry. Soldiers in 1776 each had muskets, but not the large field pieces that fired exploding shells.  In 2005, soldiers are each individually issued M16s, M249s, etc. but not atomic bombs.  Furthermore, according to your logic, the laws governing free speech and freedom of the press are only valid for newspapers whose presses are hand-operated and use fixed type.  After all, no one in 1776 foresaw offset printing or electricity, let alone TV, satellite transmission, FAXes, and the Internet.”

THEY SAY: “We require licenses on cars, but the powerful NRA screams bloody murder if anyone ever suggests licensing these dangerous weapons.”

WE SAY: Nothing, usually, and just sit there looking dumb.

WE SHOULD SAY: “You know, driving is a luxury, whereas firearms ownership is a right secured by the Constitution.  But let’s put that aside for a moment.  It’s interesting you compared guns and vehicles. Here in the U.S. you can at any age go into any state and buy as many motorcycles, cars, or trucks of any size you want, and you don’t need to do anything if you don’t use them on public property. No license at all.  If you do want to use them on public property, you can get a license at age 16.  This license is good in all 50 states.  No waiting periods, no background checks, nothing.  If we treated guns like cars, a fourteen-year-old could go into any state and legally buy handguns, machine guns, cannons, whatever, cash and carry, and shoot them all with complete legality on private property.  And at age 16 he could get a state license good anywhere in the country to shoot these guns on public property.  Sounds great to me.”

FINAL COMMENT, useful with most all arguments:

YOU SAY: “You know, I’m amazed at how little you care about your grandchildren.  I would have thought they meant more to you than anything.”

THEY SAY: “Hunh?”

YOU SAY: “Well, passing this proposal won’t have a big immediate effect.  I mean, in the next couple of years, neither George W. Bush nor Hillary Clinton is going to open up internment camps for Americans like Roosevelt did sixty-odd years ago. But think of your worst nightmare of a political leader.  Isn’t it possible that a person like that might be in control here some time in the next 30, 40, or 50 years, with 51% of the Congress and 51% of the Senate behind him or her?  If that does happen, do you really want your grandchildren to have been stripped of their final guarantee of freedom?  And do you really want them to have been stripped of it by you?

Let me know if any of these points make you more effective the next time a “gun control” advocate starts in on his favorite subject.

John Ross 9/14/05

From America’s 1^st Freedom:  https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2017/5/22/why-do-gun-haters-want-shooters-to-lose-their-hearing/

by Mark Chesnut, Editor
Monday, May 22, 2017

This feature appears in the June ‘17 issue of NRA America’s 1st Freedom, one of the official journals of the National Rifle Association. 

The battle over the Hearing Protection Act of 2017, currently under consideration in the U.S. Congress, is yet another that pits logic against emotion. And once again, gun owners are the ones coming down on the side of logic.

Regardless of the overwhelming amount of evidence available that suppressors help protect hearing and are not commonly used by criminals, anti-gun activists and their media enablers continue to push all the same old lies.

Recently, however, doctors and researchers have begun to present arguments that support the legislation.

Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership recently released a seven-page position paper on why the legislation is necessary to help protect the hearing of shooters and hunters.

The group pointed out that while the use of earplugs and other hearing protection devices is helpful, those devices can’t completely keep users from experiencing hearing loss.

“Hearing protection in the form of ear plugs or ear muffs, alone or in combination, can only reduce noise exposure by approximately 20-30 decibels,” the paper states. “This limitation in noise reduction may still expose a firearms user to damaging levels of noise; 120 decibels is still louder than a car horn from three feet away. Thus, inside-the-canal and over-the-ear devices (i.e., ear plugs and ear muffs)—the only current generally available protection—are inadequate for impulse noise protection, and when used together they deafen the wearer to all external sound.”

In fact, hearing loss from gunshots isn’t just experienced by hunters and shooters, but also by bystanders.

Recently, a study published in the medical journal The Laryngoscope revealed that many shooters don’t employ adequate hearing protection while exercising their Second Amendment-protected rights.

Titled “Epidemiology of firearm and other noise exposures in the United States,” the study sought to determine the prevalence of harmful noise exposure in the workplace and in recreational activities, and how frequently individuals use hearing protection in these settings. For firearms, the study found that 58.5 percent of adults that had used a firearm in the previous 12 months “always used hearing protection.”

Continue reading at:  https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2017/5/22/why-do-gun-haters-want-shooters-to-lose-their-hearing/

This one originally ran on America’s 1^st Freedom on March 11, 2015 and is currently being rerun on America’s 1^st Freedom:  https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2015/3/11/jim-crow-and-the-racist-roots-of-gun-control/

by Dave Kopel
Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Jim Crow is alive and well. School children today are taught that “Jim Crow” was the name for a legal system of racial oppression, which began after Reconstruction, particularly in the South, and reached its nadir in the early 20th century. Children are also taught that Jim Crow was banished by legal reforms such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.

Yet in one important part of American life, Jim Crow continues to thrive—the legal foundation of restrictive and oppressive gun control that was built by Jim Crow. The Jim Crow cases continue to hobble the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Shockingly, the Jim Crow laws and legacy are lauded by some persons who consider themselves liberal and tolerant. In the 2010 Supreme Court case McDonald v. Chicago, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that asserted that District of Columbia v. Heller should be overturned, and that state and local governments should be allowed to ban guns. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the dissent. That dissent included a litany of restrictive American gun control statutes and court cases, many of them the products of Jim Crow. Previous issues of America’s 1st Freedom have told the story of how the defeated Confederate states enacted the Black Codes, which explicitly restricted gun possession and carrying by the freedmen. Sometimes these laws facilitated the activities of the terrorist organization Ku Klux Klan, America’s first gun control organization. The top item on the Klan’s agenda was confiscating arms from the freedmen, the better to terrorize them afterward.

Outraged, the Reconstruction Congress responded with the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1870—every one of them aimed at racial subordination in general and racist gun control laws in particular.

President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77), who would later serve as president of the National Rifle Association, vigorously prosecuted Klansmen, and even declared martial law when necessary to suppress KKK violence.

Reconstruction formally ended in 1877 with the inauguration of President Rutherford B. Hayes and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. Even before that, white supremacist “redeemer” governments had taken over one Southern state after another.

Because the new 14th Amendment forbade any state to deny “the equal protection of the laws,” gun control statutes aimed at blacks could no longer be written in overtly racial terms. Instead, the South created racially neutral laws designed to disarm freedmen. Some laws prohibited inexpensive firearms while protecting more expensive military guns owned by former Confederate soldiers. Meanwhile, other laws imposed licensing systems or carry restrictions. As a Florida Supreme Court justice later acknowledged, these laws were “never intended to be applied to the white population” (Watson v. Stone, 1941).

Continue reading at:  https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2015/3/11/jim-crow-and-the-racist-roots-of-gun-control/

This weekend we will be at the Premier Gun Show in Lewisville. On the frontage Rd, west side of the I35E just south of the Fox Avenue Exit.

Seems like the major highways north and south through Dallas are doomed to being perpetually under construction but when I went up to set up today the 35E seemed remarkably unhindered.

We enjoyed having a weekend off.  We finally got a couple of shipments of knives that were delay due to spring flooding and have replenished our supply of Kershaws,  We also have a very interesting Lion Steel skinner and a couple of new Cold Steel as well as a really dangerous looking Cold Steel Karambit.

Show Hours are:
Saturday       9:00am-5:00pm
Sunday        10:00am-4:00pm

The parking for this show is free and plentiful.

Admission is $8, kids 11 and under are FREE. Say “SIG” at the door for $1 off the cost of admission. We’ll see you there!

From Knife Rights:  https://kniferights.org/legislative-update/action-alert-knife-rights-texas-illegal-knife-repeal-bill-hearing/

May 18, 2017

Knife Rights’ bipartisan Texas Knife Law Reform Bill, HB 1935, to repeal “illegal knives” in Texas statute, was passed out of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee by a unanimous vote. It now goes to the floor on the Local and Uncontested Calendar. Keep your fingers crossed. 

Knife Rights Director of Legislative Affairs, Todd Rathner, has been in Austin again for another full week working to get this bill passed. HB 1935, as amended, eliminates daggers, dirks, stilettos, poniards, swords, spears and most notably, Bowie knives, completely from Texas statute, effectively allowing them to be carried anywhere in the state.

However, in order to get the bill moved after the tragic University of Texas stabbing, the amendment stipulated that knives with blades over 5 1/2 inches are now defined as “location restricted” knives. These knives may be carried all over the state except in a narrow list of places such as schools, colleges, correctional facilities, houses of worship, and bars that derive more than 51% of their income from alcohol sales. This is an unfortunate amendment, but the alternative would have been to watch the bill die and throw years of work in Texas down the drain.

This bill’s passage would still be a huge win for knife owners in Texas and given the tragic circumstances, Todd’s done an incredible job not just saving the legislation, but ending up with 95% of what we wanted. If we get this bill passed, we will be back in two years and again try to finish the job in Texas.

This is a perfect example of why your support is so important. Otherwise, Todd could not have spent two weeks in Austin and this bill would have died. It’s that simple. Your support is critical!