VA-ALERT: VCDL Mini-update 10/26/15

[OakRidgeStars]

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Not yet a VCDL member? Join VCDL at: http://www.vcdl.org/join
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VCDL's meeting schedule: http://www.vcdl.org/meetings
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Abbreviations used in VA-ALERT: http://www.vcdl.org/help/abbr.html
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1. REMINDER: VCDL meeting on the Eastern Shore THIS Thursday, October 29th!
2. VCDL Board member lays waste to an anti-gun editorial in the Catholic Virginian
3. The McLean Citizens Association should have a committee report on gun-store-near-school on November 4th
4. Excellent article on the gun-control charade
5. Criminals don’t need to do a background check to get a gun. This article shows just how many stolen guns are in the black market
6. Gun Rights Policy Conference wrap up

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1. REMINDER: VCDL meeting on the Eastern Shore THIS Thursday, October 29th!
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Member Bradford Bradach has set up a VCDL membership meeting on the Eastern Shore (a rare event). The meeting is being held Thursday, October 29, at:

The Sage Diner
25558 Lankford Hwy
Onley, VA 23418
(757) 787-9341

Those wishing to have dinner, please arrive at 6 PM. The meeting will be called to order at 7 PM.

This meeting is open to the public, so please bring along friends, family, and co-workers!

I will be discussing current events and what VCDL would like to accomplish in the next legislative session. Questions will also be fielded.

If you are attending and haven’t done so already, please RSVP to president@vcdl.org so I have a rough headcount for the restaurant. Also let me know if you are planning to join me for dinner at 6 PM.


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2. VCDL Board member lays waste to an anti-gun editorial in the Catholic Virginian
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Dennis O’Connor sets the record straight on Universal Background Checks with an LTE to the Catholic Virginian:

http://www.catholicvirginian.org/archiv ... tters.html

Gun control laws disputed
In his October 12 commentary “What can we do?,” Editor Steve Neill proposes stricter gun control, and further asks “what is their reasoning?” for political candidates who might not agree.

While the horrific grief and sorrow we experience from mass killings naturally result in calls to “do something,” gun control offers simplistic solutions to complex problems, makes society more dangerous, and therefore always fails.

Every public mass shooting since 1950, except for two, has occurred in a so called gun-free zone. From federal installations like Fort Hood or the D.C. Navy Yard, to public schools (only in those states that forbid guns therein), to artificial environments created by policies in theaters, malls and universities, each target had all the gun-control in place that anti-self defense advocates call for.

They become a draw for criminals and the insane exactly because they are assured a high body count. Only the law abiding obey laws and policies, or signs on the door, and good citizens have all been disarmed in such places by law or policy.

As for background checks, they do not stop criminals. Research by the U.S. Department of Justice, in conjunction with the Regional Justice formation Service, reveals that while the FBI conducted over six million background checks in 2010, only 62 applicants were charged with crimes by federal prosecutors, and 18 of those prosecutions were subsequently dismisssed.

While many criminals simply steal guns or get someone else to buy them, there is a long list of mass murderers who passed background checks, including killers at the Charleston church, Oregon college, Roanoke TV site, Virginia Tech, Aurora theater, D.C. Navy Yard, Fort Hood (both mass shooters), just to name a few.

Most frequently, background checks only hamper or delay good citizens in their ability to defend themselves, sometimes with fatal results.

Earlier this year, New Jersey resident Carol Browne was murdered by the person she had a restraining order against, while waiting for her long delayed background check to clear.

Yes, we MUST do something to curtail the mass murders that occur in society. And a logical first step is to abolish so called gun free zones which give murderers free reign to “shoot fish in a barrel” in a victim rich environment.

Gun control kills.


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3. The McLean Citizens Association should have a committee report on gun-store-near-school on November 4th
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The next board meeting of the McLean Citizens Association is Wednesday, November 4 at 7:30 p.m. at:

The McLean Community Center
1234 Ingleside Avenue
McLean, VA

The board is likely to hear an update from the ad hoc committee that is "investigating" what can be done about the location of NOVA Firearms, which is near a school.

If you live in the area, please put this on your calendar for now and I will advise if I find out that the committee is NOT going to make their report to the Board at this meeting.


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4. Excellent article on the gun-control charade
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Thanks to member Lindsay Trittipoe for the link:

http://on.wsj.com/1OPXiIH

The Progressive Gun-Control Charade

Nicholas Johnson
Oct. 25, 2015 4:48 p.m. ET

In the wake of horrific crimes like the recent mass shooting in Oregon, many in the political class respond as if there were an easy way to keep such tragedies from happening. If it weren’t for the stubbornness of the National Rifle Association, the story goes, these deadly incidents could be prevented. Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton urged “sensible restraints,” and said if she is elected president she would use her executive authority to impose them.

This sort of rhetoric suggests that there is a workable policy sitting on the shelf, ready for implementation. It also attempts to have it both ways, suggesting that effective gun control is possible without reaching into America’s gun safes and disarming ordinary citizens.

It’s notable how much the rhetoric has changed since the peak of the national gun-ban movement, when politicians talked honestly about reducing violence by constricting the gun supply—and what that would require. In a 1989 Senate hearing, Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, a Democrat from Ohio, candidly explained: “If you don’t ban all of them you might as well ban none of them.” But gun bans proved unpalatable to American voters in even the most liberal jurisdictions. In 1976 Massachusetts voters rejected a handgun ban referendum 69% to 24%, with 86% of eligible voters going to the polls. In 1982 California voters rejected a handgun “freeze,” which would have barred their sale, 63% to 37%, with a voter turnout of 72%.

In the decades since, the politics of gun control have become a kind of minuet. Progressive politicians pander to a core liberal constituency with gun-control rhetoric, all while chasing the votes of the 42% of American households, according to Gallup, that own one. The photo-op of the candidate duded up for hunting or skeet shooting is a common ploy.

Once elected, these politicians advance incremental gun restrictions that are demonstrably inadequate—for instance, the now-expired ban on “assault weapons,” which barred new sales of a narrow class of rifles outfitted with pistol grips and adjustable stocks but allowed continued sales of the same guns minus those features.

Gun owners and Second Amendment activists understand that Howard Metzenbaum was absolutely right about the logic of supply-side gun control. So they resist incremental gun controls on the understanding that the latest proposal cannot be the last step. And when these half-measures fail, in either passage or effectiveness, progressives can always blame the “gun lobby.”

This interplay allows progressive politicians to claim they have no interest in gun confiscation, and still wax heroic about lost battles over glittery legislative proposals that in practice would not have prevented the crimes they purport to address. Everyone, across the political spectrum, should reject this kind of duplicity.

As a candidate, Barack Obama said that he had no interest in trying to take peoples’ firearms. Now, beyond the influence of voters, the president has begun to elaborate his true inclinations. This month he praised Australia’s far-reaching gun-control efforts. In 1996, after a lunatic used a semiautomatic rifle to kill 34 people in Tasmania, the Australian government banned all semiautomatic rifles and repeating shotguns. Owners of these roughly 700,000 firearms (about a quarter of the country’s three million total guns) were required to turn them in for destruction. The government called this a “buyback,” but no one had a choice.

This sort of confiscation effort would not work in the U.S., and actually would make things worse. For one thing, these types of guns have many easy substitutes. (An Australian-style plan would leave roughly 100 million handguns in U.S. circulation.) For another, Americans own roughly 325 million guns, orders of magnitude more than any other country. The U.S. equivalent of the 700,000 guns confiscated in Australia would be many tens of millions of firearms, virtually none of which can be tracked to a particular owner.

In 2007 the International Small Arms Survey studied 72 countries that had attempted gun confiscation or registration, and found massive circumvention of these laws: an average of 2.6 illegal guns for every legal one. So if Americans, steeped in Second Amendment and frontier culture, defied gun bans at only the average rate that has occurred internationally, the result would be many millions of guns flooding the black market.

Still, President Obama’s open praise of the Australian gun ban is progress of a sort. It sets us on the path toward an honest debate about the confiscation policies that supply-side gun control inevitably requires. The challenge is to get the politicians who continue to crave the votes of gun owners to speak as candidly about this as the president has.

For instance, after strident but vague criticism of the gun lobby following the Oregon shooting, Hillary Clinton two weeks ago tepidly endorsed the Australian model, while getting all the details wrong. She asserted that it focused on automatic weapons (false) and suggested it was a voluntary buyback, like the “cash for clunkers” plan for retiring old cars (false). The Australian model was “worth considering,” but she said, “I do not know enough detail to tell you how we would do it, or how would it work.” When an MSNBC reporter then asked the campaign’s spokeswoman, Jennifer Palmieri, whether Mrs. Clinton was “suggesting confiscation of guns,” the answer was “of course not.”

So, to the glib critics of America’s gun culture: You cannot continue to have it both ways. If vast reductions in the supply of guns are the key to stopping mass shootings, tell us precisely what policies you propose. And then tell us how you intend to square those policies with the fact that Americans already own hundreds of millions of firearms.

If you cannot reconcile these two things, then you owe America’s lawful gun owners a different conversation: One in which you try to convince them that they’d be better off under policies that would disarm good people in a fruitless attempt to keep bad men from getting guns.


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5. Criminals don’t need to do a background check to get a gun. This article shows just how many stolen guns were available to a single criminal
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Here is a criminal who was hoarding 10,000 weapons that he bought from thieves. Background checks did not catch any of these transfers and most others committed by and for criminals.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/10/25/so ... warehouse/

or

http://tinyurl.com/nhrcwvr


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6. Gun Rights Policy Conference wrap up
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A few weeks ago I attended and spoke at the annual Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC). This year it was held in Phoenix, Arizona. Next year it will be in Tampa, Florida.

This year’s GRPC was packed with leadership and members from gun-rights groups from sea to shining sea. GRPC provides a fantastic venue for the various gun groups to hear presentations by experts on a wide variety of subjects and allows for interaction between attendees. If you’ve never attended a GRPC conference, you are really missing an important event.

Hats off to the Second Amendment Foundation (saf.org) for the massive effort they put into the free two-day conference every year, including making it run so smoothly.

I had the opportunity to meet with the leadership of the Arizona Citizens Defense League. Fred Dahnke, who is the AZCDL’s treasurer, is also a VCDL Executive Member. This year Fred was given the prestigious honor of being selected as the Gun Rights Defender of the Year! He also got that award back in 2008, as I recall. Congratulations, Fred!

I spoke about VCDL’s fight in Virginia to protect out rights on a panel with several other panelists representing other key states.

There was a lot of discussion on how to deal with Michael Bloomberg’s attack on the Second Amendment, especially dealing with Universal Background Checks and ballot initiatives.

Oh, I also have some unexpected bragging rights. On the afternoon before the event began there was a shooting match for attendees. It had five stages, with each stage having different layouts and its own winner (fastest shooter completing the stage successfully). I won the first stage, which required hitting 5 steel plates at various distances. I still can’t believe I pulled that one off, especially watching some of the talent that was there that day, but I’ll take a healthy dose of luck any day!




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VA-ALERT is a project of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, Inc.
(VCDL). VCDL is an all-volunteer, non-partisan grassroots organization
dedicated to defending the human rights of all Virginians. The Right to
Keep and Bear Arms is a fundamental human right.

VCDL web page: http://www.vcdl.org [http://www.vcdl.org/]