Posts Tagged Gun Control

A Modest Proposal on Murder

Today, in response to the UCC shootings, Hillary Clinton resurrected that old chestnut, making gun manufacturers liable for the misuse of their legal product.  She would allow the families of murder victims whose killers used a gun to sue the gun manufacturer for damages.

It’s a gun ban by another name, since no manufacturer would be able to afford the liability insurance required to stay in business.  And if you think this would end with the manufacture of guns, think again.  Gun ranges, gunsmiths, gun retailers (who are federally-licensed) would soon find themselves covered, making the transfer, sale, and repair of firearms effectively illegal.

The proposal is silly on the face of it.  Guns can be used for many purposes, almost all of them lawful, safe, and beneficial.  Guns are used for self-defense in this country every day.  As has been repeatedly mentioned, even as gun ownership has soared, crime rates, including the murder rate by guns, has plummeted.

But as long as we’re at it, let’s understand that while slightly fewer than half murderers use handguns, many use knives or blunt objects such as hammers.  If the goal is to reduce actual murder, rather than to simply get guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens, we should, by logic, allow the families of murder victims whose killers used hammers or steak knives to sue those manufacturers, as well.  In 2014, 71 people were murdered by fire.  We should then allow those families to sue match manufacturers.

Eighty-nine people were murdered by strangulation.  Strangling someone with one’s bare hands is hard; an object is usually used.  Clearly, the manufacturers of electrical cord, rope, belts, and other clothing should be liable.

In Israel, Palestinians have recently taken to driving cars into Jews standing at bus stops.  Were such a practice to become common here, the auto manufacturers should be held liable, as well.

Obviously, the economy would grind to a halt within minutes of such laws being passed, indeed, long before they actually became law, as retailers and manufacturers scrambled to get out of these suddenly-risky businesses.  But in principle, there’s nothing different between holding Ginsu responsible for the murderer who uses its kitchen knife and Glock responsible for the breakdown of social order in Chicago.

Despite having lost the gun control debate, Democrats holding and running for the White House continue to try to make a partisan issue out it.  The issue always fades away because the media and the Washington Democrats never learn that this isn’t a partisan issue anymore, with most Americans resisting new gun laws.

There are three former state senators here in Colorado who could remind them, though.

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Angela Giron, IRS Beneficiary

Well, what do we have here?

Colroado State Senator Angela Giron (D-Pueblo), facing a recall from voters in her district over her gun control votes in this year’s state legislature, has gotten considerably monetary help from outside sources in her bid to stay in office, the Pueblo Chieftain reports:

Giron, a Pueblo Democrat, is the target of a recall drive by Pueblo-area gun rights supporters and Republicans. Her defense campaign, called Puebloans for Angela, received a $35,000 contribution from the Sixteen Thirty Fund in Washington; a $20,000 contribution from a Denver organization called Citizens for Integrity; and a $15,000 contribution from a Denver group called Mainstream Colorado. (emphasis added – ed.)

The Sixteen Thirty Fund has been organized as a 501(c)4 since Feb. 16 of 2009 (we wonder how long it had to wait for IRS approval), according to its 2009 IRS Form 990, and its mission, as state on Page 2 of that documents is:

Sixteen Thirty Fund operates exclusively for the purpose of promoting social welfare, including, but not limited to, providing public education on and conducting advocacy regarding progressive policies.

The fund operated as a collector and distributor of over $3.3 million for various left-wing causes during 2009, including $52,000 to our very own Progress Now here in Colorado.  It won’t come as any surprise that most of those groups, including ones that are clearly political organizations, are also organized as 501(c)4s.

Now, I don’t have any problem with these or any other groups organizing as 501(c)4s, if the law allows that.  But it’s telling that Democrats have decided to turn the various IRS hearings into a trial of the tax law, one which they were perfectly happy to take full advantage of as long as the other side didn’t.  Having kept Tea Party, conservative, and libertarian groups on the sidelines through two election cycles, they can now afford to be outraged at unfair treatment, and call for a revision of the law.

And of course, there’s this, from Senate President John Morse, fighting his own recall battle:

 

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It’s About Politics, Not Governance, With Guns

As the US Senate begins today’s debate on gun control, Coloradoans can be forgiven for having a feeling of deja vu.  That’s because the debate in Congress is intended to mimic the one in Colorado, and because it’s about politics, not about governance.

The one piece of the president’s broad gun control agenda that has survived public scrutiny is background checks on sales.  This is a broadly popular idea, and even gun owners support it by large margins in poll after poll.  But Dave Kopel of the Independence Institute has shown that in Congress, as in Colorado, while the bill will be sold as checks on sales, it actually does much, much more:

While the woman is out of town on a business trip for two weeks, she gives the gun to her husband or her sister. If the woman lives on a farm, she allows all her relatives to take the rifle into the fields for pest and predator control — and sometimes, when friends are visiting, she takes them to a safe place on the farm where they spend an hour or two target shooting, passing herover gun back and forth. At other times, she and her friends go target shooting in open spaces of land owned by the National Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management.

Or perhaps the woman is in a same-sex civil union, and she allows her partner to take her gun to a target range one afternoon. Another time, she allows her cousin to borrow the gun for an afternoon of target shooting. If the woman is in the Army Reserve and she is called up for an overseas deployment, she gives the gun to her sister for temporary safekeeping.

One time, she learns that her neighbor is being threatened by an abusive ex-boyfriend, and she lets this woman borrow a gun for several days until she can buy her own gun. And if the woman becomes a firearms-safety instructor, she regularly teaches classes at office parks, in school buildings at nights and on weekends, at gun stores, and so on. Following the standard curriculum of gun-safety classes (such as NRA safety courses), the woman will bring some unloaded guns to the classroom, and under her supervision, students will learn the first steps in how to handle the guns, including how to load and unload them (using dummy ammunition). During the class, the firearms will be “transferred” dozens of times, since students must practice how to hand a gun to someone else safely. As a Boy Scout den mother or 4-H leader, the woman may also transfer her gun to young people dozens of times while instructing them in gun safety.

These are not far-out scenarios.  Kopel notes that “transfers” are defined very specifically in the bill, with specific exceptions.  And lest “transfer” be read narrowly to exclude loans, where someone retains possession, time limits on such transfers are laid out.  In order to escape such notice, guns could be “gifted” to family members, but presumably those gifts would be considered taxable events.

The bill does include some exceptions, designed to provide plausible deniability to senators who want to claim they’ve made reasonable allowances.  Those exceptions are subject to such severe restraints so as to make them all but meaningless.  This was largely the same legislative and debate strategy used here in Colorado, and for fun, count the number of times reference is made on the floor of the Senate to what happened here.

All of these scenarios will fly under the radar.  The plan is for the press to continue to repeat the “40% of sales” myth and to deflect attention from the real burdens of the proposed law.  Western Democrats will be given enough cover to present their votes as reasonable to the folks back home, and Republicans opposing them will have the Hobson’s Choice of either caving (and dispiriting and disillusioning their supporters) or appearing obstructionist and unreasonable.

It’s the same strategy that the Democrats used with the Violence Against Women Act: take a non-controversial piece of legislation, load it up with partisan baggage, and dare the other side to vote against it.  It was a key element in the 2012 campaign theme of a “War on Women,” and it didn’t really have anything to do with governing.  Obama and the Democrats now hope to repeat the same trick, and set up the 2014 Congressional campaigns as one of the Republicans against the Suburbs, newly-competitive territory which the Dems see as the key to long-term victory.

The bills, largely written by Mayor Bloomberg of New York, suffer from the same lack of public process, examination, amendment, and debate as Obamacare and the ill-thought-out, and supposedly much simpler, magazine ban  rushed through the New York State legislature in the wake of Newtown.  That’s by design; while the mayor and the president may be true believers in disarming citizens, President Obama is a greater believer in winning elections.

To thwart this strategy, the Republicans will have to do more than filibuster.  Their amendments – and thus the floor debate – will have to be focused on the question of “transfers” and the absurd outcomes that this bill creates.  They’ll never have a better time to make their case publicly.

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It’s A National Political Strategy

On Friday’s Grassroots Radio, the discussion of Rep. Mike McLachlan’s (D-Durango) deceptive advertising of his own gun control positions turned to the national agenda being rammed down Colorado’s throat.  I pointed out that while other states with Democrat majorities and governors – Illinois and Washington came to mind – had rejected similar proposals, Colorado had seemingly been singled out for lobbying by Mayor Bloomberg and Vice President Biden.  Bloomberg has been open about his desire to influence other states’ policies, but traditionally, federal officeholders don’t meddle in state politics.  Even Diana DeGette and Ed Perlmutter confined their post-Aurora comments to proposed federal legislation, not what Colorado ought or ought not do.

So something was up.  Tomorrow’s New York Times tells us what: “If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere.”  This was the article that Hick was waiting for, before announcing his intent to sign these bills on Wednesday.

It has been clear from the beginning that Obama plans to use gun control, not merely as a diversion from governing, but as a battering-ram issue to achieve his major 2nd-term objective: regaining the House of Representatives for the Democrats.  To do that, he believes he must isolate the Republican House as being an obstruction to common-sense, practical gun control measures that most of the country agrees on.  To do that, he must persuade enough Senate Democrats – especially Western Democrats – to back proposals that they really, really don’t want to even vote on, much less support.

Colorado becomes the key to providing them cover.  The proposals – poorly-written, full of absurd outcomes – will have to be portrayed as practical compromises.  The debate on the national level will mirror the deceptive line taken here: confusing sales with temporary transfers, or even loans to friends; outlawing magazines of more than 15 rounds, but forgetting to mention that inheriting such a magazine from a deceased parent is a criminal act, a felony, even.  Colorado’s reputation as a western, freedom-loving state works in their favor.

This was a repeat of the entire Obamacare political drama, here at the state level.  The Democrats in favor barely felt the need to argue for them on the floor, largely because when they did, they embarrassed themselves with references to pens as defensive weapons, whistles as substitutes for protection, and condescending to rape victims.  State senators either abandoned, fled, or chastised their own town halls when the issue came up.  Democratic leadership openly asked its members to ignore the public.  The controversial bills passed without a single Republican vote, but over bipartisan opposition.

But the “If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere,” line of publicity conceals what really happened.

Ultimately, it makes the recalls of Sen. Hudak and Rep. McLachlan – along with whatever other vulnerable Dems can be included – even more important.  Those recalls, like the recalls in Wisconsin, take on a national significance and urgency, not merely because of the issues involved, but because of the political implications at the national level.  The promise of protection, of resources and money, to vulnerable Dems who backed him on this legislation, is the application of national resources to state races, just as the Blueprint was the application of state resources to local races.  It is the Blueprint raised to a national scale.  If Obama is able to implement that, then he will indeed have locked in substantial political changes that can change the society for the worse, for the long run.

On the other hand, if those promises can be shown to be empty – before the House of Representatives comes up for election, or has to vote on the national bills – then the entire narrative is turned on its head.  Not only does Obama look like an unreliable friend, but the power of the issue dissipates.  (That’s one reason why an initiative is more useful in the event that we fail to take back both the legislature and the governor’s mansion: only fiscal issues can be on the ballot in odd-numbered years.)

Hickenlooper, in 2012, specifically avoided charging voters up over this issue.  Even in 2010, he didn’t really mention it at all.  Colorado has not had a vigorous debate on these bills or these issues.  This was not something done by us.  It was something done to us.

It’s our move, Colorado.

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Hick Nick Chicks’ Boomsticks

Governor John Hickenlooper (D) has announced that on Wednesday, he will sign the gun control bills passed by the Colorado legislature last week.  These include the magazine ban and the background checks, even for temporary transfers between individuals who know each other.  A number of women legislators today protested the disparate impact that this law will have on women’s self-defense.

But it wasn’t always thus.  This was Hick in the immediate aftermath of the Aurora shootings here in Colorado:

Crowley:  When you look at what transpired here – a man with no criminal background, not even any contact with police, a speeding ticket, I think was the only thing found there – when you look, and if you are not familiar with the interior West or the Midwest, obviously lots of rural places here on the East Coast, and don’t totally understand the gun culture, when you look at what this young man was able to acquire over three or four months: an assault weapon, a shotgun, a 9mm Glock, another 9mm, all of these tear gas things, and 6000 rounds of ammo from the internet, people stand back and look at that and say, “Shouldn’t some bell have gone off somewhere,” and you’re looking and saying, “Somebody’s collecting an arsenal.” And yet there was no way to connect all those things. Should there be?

Hickenlooper:  Well, I mean I’m not sure there’s any way in a free society, to be able to do that kind of – he was buying things in different places. Certainly, you can try, and I’m sure we will try, to create some checks and balances on these things. But this is a case of evil, of somebody who was an aberration of nature, and, you know, if it wasn’t one weapon, it would have been another. He was diabolical. If you look at what he had in his apartment and what his intentions were. I mean, even now, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It’s terrifying, just the thought that he could spend so much time planning such evil.

Crowley:  And do you see any law anywhere that might have stopped a man with no record, in a society that protects the 2nd Amendment, that might have prevented this?

Hickenlooper:  Well, we are certainly looking and that, and trying to say, “How do you prevent this?” I mean, the Virginia Tech shootings, we’ve been looking at the shootings all across the country, and say, “How do we preserve our freedoms, right, and all those things that define this country, and yet try to prevent this from happening again?” Let me tell you, there’s no easy answer.

Crowley:  What I hear from you is that you would be open to someone who wanted to suggest a gun law, or something that might prevent this sort of thing, but that at the moment, you can’t imagine what that would be.

Hickenlooper:  Yeah, it’s just – I’m happy to look at anything, but again, it’s – this person, if there were no assault weapons available, if there were no this or no that, this guy’s gonna find something right? He’s gonna know how to create a bomb. I mean, who knows where his mind would have gone, clearly a very intelligent individual, however twisted. You know, I don’t know – that’s the problem, I mean this is really – this is a human issue in some profound way that this level of disturbed individual that we can’t recognize it, that the people around him obviously had no idea that this was something that he was capable of.

(Emphasis added.)

As I mentioned in December, when he suddenly changed his tune, these were not the words of a man who wanted to sound as though he were looking to impose new controls.  Virtually all of the objections he raises to Crowley’s implications about new gun laws are the very same objections raised by Republicans and a few Democrats during the legislative debates.

The opening for pursuing this agenda now clearly comes from the Aurora and Newtown shootings, in short, the very events that Hickenlooper says earlier in the interview shouldn’t be determining our way of life.  In the Denver Post at the time, he said that he “wanted to have at least a couple of months off after the shooting in Aurora to let people process and grieve and get a little space.”

The net result, in fact, was that gun control was barely discussed at the state level during the election, and here in Colorado was treated almost exclusively as a federal issue, as Reps. Perlmutter and DeGette staked out strong positions in favor of reviving the so-called Assault Weapons Ban and even stricter measures.  This suited Hick just fine, since any suggestion that he was seriously looking at the sort of laws passed last week might have complicated the Dems’ narrative about te Republican “War on Women” and civil unions.

With the election behind him, and with some pressure from Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns (of which Hickenlooper was Colorado’s sole member in 2010), and a little arm-twisting from Vice President Joe Biden, Hick feels free to go ahead an implement changes he had rhetorically taken off the table only months before.

 


Copied from the following post: It’s a National Political Strategy

On Friday’s Grassroots Radio, the discussion of Rep. Mike McLachlan’s (D-Durango) deceptive advertising of his own gun control positions turned to the national agenda being rammed down Colorado’s throat. I pointed out that while other states with Democrat majorities and governors – Illinois and Washington came to mind – had rejected similar proposals, Colorado had seemingly been singled out for lobbying by Mayor Bloomberg and Vice President Biden. Bloomberg has been open about his desire to influence other states’ policies, but traditionally, federal officeholders don’t meddle in state politics. Even Diana DeGette and Ed Perlmutter confined their post-Aurora comments to proposed federal legislation, not what Colorado ought or ought not do.

So something was up. Tomorrow’s New York Times tells us what: “If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere.” This was the article that Hick was waiting for, before announcing his intent to sign these bills on Wednesday.

It has been clear from the beginning that Obama plans to use gun control, not merely as a diversion from governing, but as a battering-ram issue to achieve his major 2nd-term objective: regaining the House of Representatives for the Democrats. To do that, he believes he must isolate the Republican House as being an obstruction to common-sense, practical gun control measures that most of the country agrees on. To do that, he must persuade enough Senate Democrats – especially Western Democrats – to back proposals that they really, really don’t want to even vote on, much less support.

Colorado becomes the key to providing them cover. The proposals – poorly-written, full of absurd outcomes – will have to be portrayed as practical compromises. The debate on the national level will mirror the deceptive line taken here: confusing sales with temporary transfers, or even loans to friends; outlawing magazines of more than 15 rounds, but forgetting to mention that inheriting such a magazine from a deceased parent is a criminal act, a felony, even. Colorado’s reputation as a western, freedom-loving state works in their favor.

This was a repeat of the entire Obamacare political drama, here at the state level. The Democrats in favor barely felt the need to argue for them on the floor, largely because when they did, they embarrassed themselves with references to pens as defensive weapons, whistles as substitutes for protection, and condescending to rape victims. State senators either abandoned, fled, or chastised their own town halls when the issue came up. Democratic leadership openly asked its members to ignore the public. The controversial bills passed without a single Republican vote, but over bipartisan opposition.

But the “If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere,” line of publicity conceals what really happened.

Ultimately, it makes the recalls of Sen. Hudak and Rep. McLachlan – along with whatever other vulnerable Dems can be included – even more important. Those recalls, like the recalls in Wisconsin, take on a national significance and urgency, not merely because of the issues involved, but because of the political implications at the national level. The promise of protection, of resources and money, to vulnerable Dems who backed him on this legislation, is the application of national resources to state races, just as the Blueprint was the application of state resources to local races. It is the Blueprint raised to a national scale. If Obama is able to implement that, then he will indeed have locked in substantial political changes that can change the society for the worse, for the long run.

On the other hand, if those promises can be shown to be empty – before the House of Representatives comes up for election, or has to vote on the national bills – then the entire narrative is turned on its head. Not only does Obama look like an unreliable friend, but the power of the issue dissipates. (That’s one reason why an initiative is more useful in the event that we fail to take back both the legislature and the governor’s mansion: only fiscal issues can be on the ballot in odd-numbered years.)

Hickenlooper, in 2012, specifically avoided charging voters up over this issue. Even in 2010, he didn’t really mention it at all. Colorado has not had a vigorous debate on these bills or these issues. This was not something done by us. It was something done to us.

It’s our move, Colorado.

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Rep. McLachlan Hopes His Constituents Don’t Have Internet

I’m not sure what other explanation there is for this remarkable statement in today’s Durango Herald.  Commenting on his eventual vote for HB-1224, the magazine limit that would essentially ban all magazines, McLachlan had this to say to his constituents:

Fields originally wanted the limit set at 10 bullets, but McLachlan successfully amended it in February to raise the limit to 15. He later said he wanted to see a 30-round limit.

McLachlan voted again Wednesday for the 15-round limit and told the Herald he decided to support the bill after no Republicans stepped forward to help him raise the limit to 30.

He asked gun lobbyists to get Senate Republicans to try to raise the limit, but they were more interested in killing the bill than improving it, he said.

“The reason we’ve ended up where we are today is, in part, their fault because they never tried to put a 30-round limit forward,” McLachlan said.

Not so fast.  HB-1224 was assigned to the House Judiciary Committee, on which McLachlan sits.  The record shows that he introduced Amendment L006, which raised the limit from 10 to 15 rounds, as he says.  But there was a proposed amendment to the amendment, which would have raised it from 15 rounds to 31 rounds.  That amendment to L006 failed on a 7-4 strict party-line vote, with McLachlan voting against.  Eventually, L006 did pass, raising the limit to 15 rounds.

If McLachlan wanted a 30-round limit, that was his chance, and he turned it down.  It was also ample evidence that a 30-round limit had little-to-no support among Democrats.  He could only hope to blame Senate Republicans, in the expectation that his constituents would be unaware that he had voted to kill just such an amendment, if he believed that his constituents weren’t listening online to the debate, or couldn’t look up his votes in committee.

McLachlan is facing a potential recall over this vote.  He only won election in a fairly Republican district by 900 votes in a strong Democratic year here in Colorado.  And it’s far from clear that repeating the defensive, condescending tactics of so many Obamacare-burdened Democrats in 2010 will serve him any better than it did them.

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Purim as an Argument Against Gun Control

I’m always reluctant to re-read religious texts with a political slant.  The Left has, for the most part, sought to replace religion with politics with the sort of baleful results we saw in 20th Century Europe and Russia.  Even today, the American Jewish left uses such Jewish concepts as “Tikkun Olam” to justify pretty much the entire leftist political agenda, and JCPA General Assembly resolutions to that effect almost always find some Torah text to torture into testifying on their behalf.  So to the extent that I’m edging across a self-imposed line here, the people it’s most likely to unnerve are the very liberals who’ve gotten used to thinking of the Torah as their personal political property.

But to the extent that Judaism has a political holiday, Purim is it.  The internal power and factional politics of the Persian Empire, the Jews’ place in a multi-ethnic society, Megillat Esther is steeped in politics, and thus, human nature.

So for those who think that voluntarily disarming Jews is a good idea, consider the manner in which Ahasuerus’s decree of doom is reversed.  Not by repeal, which the text tells us is beyond the King’s legal authority.  Instead, it’s negated this way (8:11):

…that the king had given to the Jews who are in every city, [the right] to assemble and to protect themselves, to destroy, to slay, and to cause to perish the entire host of every people and province that oppress them…

We don’t need to carry the argument to the reducto ad absurdum of the Holocaust or the Holocaust-that-wasn’t in the Megillah to make this point.  Even in the US, from time to time, anti-Semitic riots do happen.

The President of the United States has invited the instigator of two such riots to the White House to advise him on economics, and granted him a television interview.  Both the Crown Heights riots and the Freddy’s Fashion Mart riots were anti-Semitic and Sharpton’s handiwork.

The ADL was founded as the result of one such riot that turned into the lynching of a Jewish man – in spite of the efforts of the authorities to prevent it.

And Seraphic Secrets’s hair-raising description of being defenseless during the Rodney King riots in LA, when the police abandoned the field, should drive home the point that riots need not be anti-Semitic in nature to be deadly.

In a country where we have that right by law – the same as all other citizens, and without any special royal dispensation necessary – why would we voluntarily cheapen Jewish blood again by disarming ourselves?

So tomorrow night and Sunday, when we’re celebrating our victory over our enemies, let’s also spare a thought for the fact that, unless we choose to give it up, here in the US, we have as a matter of course the very same rights that gave us that victory.

Happy Purim!

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Newtown and A Conflict of Visions

I first read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions about 25 years ago, at the urging of a friend of mine.  Sowell’s book is devoted to explaining the underlying assumptions that divide modern conservatives and modern liberals, in particular, the notion of human perfectibility.  Liberals, since Jefferson, have tended to believe that human beings and human society are infinitely perfectible, if only sufficient and correct resources are brought to bear perfecting them.  Conservatives, on the other hand, tend towards the Burkean tradition of accepting that the crooked timber of humanity is likely to remain so, and we must plan accordingly.

Interesting then, that in the particular case of gun control, the left, rather than looking to improve human nature, instead chooses to focus on the hardware itself.  It’s an unusual position for them to take, although I suppose it’s at least consistent with the contemporary Left’s trust of state power over the judgment of their fellow citizens.  But it’s also, I think, consistent with their attempts to perfect society, if not the individual.  In this case, they’d like to make society safer by taking away dangerous weapons from everyone.  Presumably, they envision a softer, gentler world, with a lower overall blood pressure, so to speak.

Personally, I think that’s a delusion that, far from making us safer, will make us far less safe.  After all, an attacker doesn’t need a gun to threaten me.  He can have a knife, or if he’s sufficiently muscular, his bare hands.  I’m never going to turn a gun on innocents; for me, it’s purely a sorely-needed equalizer in my own absolute right to self-defense.

Now one might be tempted to argue that the converse is true of conservatives – that in this case, they’re choosing to believe in education over technology.  But that would be wrong.  Conservatives are merely recognizing that no matter what technology is available, some people will be inspired by mental illness or just plain evil to put them to destructive use, and that the best thing we can do is to equip ourselves with the best defense available.  It should go without saying that when that defense involves potentially deadly force, there’s a moral responsibility to train ourselves to use it effectively and only in circumstances where it’s necessary.

To the degree that we have talked about mental illness, it’s been to get people off the street, get them whatever treatment may be available, and to keep them from getting their hands on weapons they can’t possibly be expected to use safely.  And while society may make the facilities for treatment or confinement available, ultimately it will remain the job of families and communities to identify at-risk individuals.

We are being completely consistent with a philosophy that takes the world as it is, rather than as we wish it would be.

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Hickenlooper on Guns, Then and Now

In the wake of the Aurora Theater Shootings, CNN’s Candy Crowley interviewed Gov. John Hickenlooper, and tried mightily – and unsuccessfully – to get him to declare in favor of increased gun control.  Hickenlooper didn’t necessarily commit.  But one would be hard-pressed to see the interview, and read the transcript, and not come away with the impression that the Governor wasn’t interested in imposing new restrictions on Colorado gun owners:

Crowley: Do you see any law anywhere that could stop a man with no record in a society that protects the 2nd Amendment that might have prevented this?

Hickenlooper: You know, we are certainly looking at that and trying to say, “How do you prevent this?” You know, the Virginia Tech shootings, I look at – been looking at the shootings all across the country. And I try to say, how do we preserve our freedoms – right? – and all those things that define this country, and yet try to prevent something like this happening. Let me tell you, there’s no easy answer.

Crowley: What I hear from you is you would be open to people who wanted to suggest a gun law or something that might prevent this sort of thing, but at the moment you can’t imagine what that would be.

Hickenlooper: Yeah, I’m happy to look at anything, but this person, if there were no assault weapons available, if there were no this or no that, this guy’s going to find something right? He’s going to know how to create a bomb, he’s going to – I mean, who knows where his mind would have gone. Clearly a very intelligent individual, however twisted. You know, I know that’s the problem. This is really a human issue, in some profound way, that this level of disturbed individual, that we can’t recognize it.

What a difference a few months – and an election – make.  The Denver Post reports that Hickenlooper is now singing a different tune:

In a significant shift from his statements earlier this year, Gov. John Hickenlooper now says “the time is right” for Colorado lawmakers to consider further gun restrictions.

The Democratic governor made his comments in an interview with The Associated Pressthat comes less than half a year after the mass shooting in an Aurora movie theater that killed 12 and injured at least 58. His latest words also follow a shooting in an Oregon mall Tuesday that left three dead, including the gunman, who shot himself.

“I wanted to have at least a couple of months off after the shooting in Aurora to let people process and grieve and get a little space, but … I think, now … the time is right,” Hickenlooper said in the Wednesday interview.

Hickenlooper didn’t, at the time, say anything like, “Now isn’t the time to be considering this, in the heat of the moment.”  He spoke in terms of protecting freedoms and rights, the difficulty of crafting a bill that wouldn’t impinge on those, and the fact that Holmes would have used other items at his disposal to wreak havoc, if guns hadn’t been available.

But that was then.  The state House of Representatives was in Republican hands, and there was little-to-no chance of passing any sort of gun control legislation.

Now, with the House set to be firmly in Democrat control, Hickenlooper has changed his mind.  This position may more closely resembles his actual views on the matter.  Alternately, whether this may be merely the first of a series of instances where a more hard-line liberal legislature will force him to make difficult choices he has thus far been able to avoid.

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