Category: Guns

UpNorth sends us a link from our buddy, Bob Owens who reports that Kentucky Representative Leslie Combs, who was headed to a meeting with a fellow representative and when she tried to clear the Ruger LCP .380 handgun that she carries, she had a negligent discharge. So, the gun was cleared after that.

When asked by reporters Wednesday to see where the gun was discharged, Combs declined and said she was putting the gun away because, “I don’t want to use it anymore.”

“I thought it was totally clear,” Combs said. “I am a gun owner. It happens.”

Yeah, I know it’s tough clearing the little automatic. Dropping the magazine out and jacking the slide to check the breech, all while keeping your finger off the trigger is tough. Oh, yeah, it’s probably the gun’s fault anyway. According to the story, Combs plans on getting a revolver instead;

“I urge everyone to be extremely cautious with their firearm. I know from personal experience how easy it is to discharge a firearm accidentally.”

[…]

Combs is sticking by her Second Amendment rights, and was already planning to replace her gun.

“It’s an automatic,” Combs said. “I need to stick with revolvers.”

Yeah, there are no accidental discharges, only negligent discharges. I’ve never had a discharge that I didn’t intend. It’s not the gun’s fault, it’s the head behind the trigger.

MCPO NYC USN Ret.sends us a link to the Chicago Sun-Times which reports that the dam has busted in Chicago in regards to the new handgun permits;

On the first full day of an online sign-up, more than 4,500 concealed carry applicants gunned it to a state website to register for state permits, the Illinois State Police confirmed Monday.

Authorities have estimated 350,000 to 400,000 people will sign up for permits to carry their handguns in public within the first year of the law’s passing — close to 1,000 people a day.

So that just proves to me that legislators in Chicago were legislating against the will of the citizens there.

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Pinto Nag sends us a link to NBC News which reports that a federal judge has struck down Chicago’s new gun laws are unconstitutional, you know, the new guns laws they wrote when the Supreme Court struck down their gun ban in 2010;

U.S. District Judge Edmond E. Chang said in his ruling that while the government has a duty to protect its citizens, it’s also obligated to protect constitutional rights, including the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. However, Chang said he would temporarily stay the effects of his ruling, meaning the ordinances can stand while the city decides whether to appeal.

The decision is just the latest to attack what were some of the toughest gun-control laws in the nation. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Chicago’s long-standing gun ban. And last year, Illinois legislators were forced by a federal appeals court to adopt a law allowing residents to carry concealed weapons in Illinois, the only state that still banned the practice. The resulting state law largely stripped city and officials of surrounding Cook County of their authority to regulate guns, which especially irked officials in Chicago, where residents had to apply for concealed-carry permits through the police chief.

I know someone will stumble in here and try to make the case that we need to rescind the Second Amendment, or relegate us to 18th century weaponry. But, the Washington Times’ Emily Miller reports that Americans have voted with their wallets on the gun control debate;

The FBI reported that it performed an astounding 21,093,273 background checks for the year ending Dec. 31. In fact, eight of the top 10 highest weeks ever for National Instant Background Check System (NICS) checks were in 2013 (the other two were during Dec. 2012.)

The checks in 2013 were 8 percent higher than 2012. The one-year increase is significant because the year leading up to the presidential election also saw massive which firearm sales.

[…]

Smith & Wesson had net sales of $625 million in the fiscal year quarters that ended on Oct. 31, 2013. That is an impressive 25 percent increase over that same period in 2012.

Sturm, Ruger & Company reported net sales of $506 million for the first three quarters of 2013, which was a 45 percent increase over the corresponding period the previous year.

Freedom Group, which owns companies including Remington, DPMS and Bushmaster, reported that the first three quarters of 2013 had net sales of $1 billion, up 47 percent from the $677 in revenue for the same period in 2012.

Four of those 21,093,273 background checks were mine, by the way. I know, I’m a lightweight.

The Detroit Police Chief, James Craig, took a stance generally unpopular among the nation’s other police chiefs last week when he told a radio audience that good guys with guns make society safer. He also said that his conversion to this position took some time and experience, according to the Detroit News;

Craig said he started believing that legal gun owners can deter crime when he became police chief in Portland, Maine, in 2009.

“Coming from California (Craig was on the Los Angeles police force for 28 years), where it takes an act of Congress to get a concealed weapon permit, I got to Maine, where they give out lots of CCWs (carrying concealed weapon permits), and I had a stack of CCW permits I was denying; that was my orientation.

“I changed my orientation real quick. Maine is one of the safest places in America. Clearly, suspects knew that good Americans were armed.”

Of course, gun grabbers weren’t happy with the chief’s revelation;

Robyn Thomas, director of the the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence in San Francisco, disagreed.

“I think at its core, his position is an emotional one, based on the idea that people feel safer when they have guns. But studies have shown more guns don’t deter crime,” Thomas said. “There’s no research that shows guns make anyone safer, and it does show that, the more guns in any situation, the higher the likelihood of them harming either the owner, or people who have access to them.”

Yeah, well, if there’s an emotional position, it’s the unsupported theory that fewer guns make society safer. In fact, gun ownership has been on the rise in the last decade and violent crime rates have plunged. Here at TAH, we see stories nearly every day, from nearly every state, in regards to good guys with guns saving themselves and their families from criminals armed with everything from guns to shovels. So, who is really being emotional here? Just because the gun grabbers don’t bother to read those stories that doesn’t make them right.

Thanks to Andy for the link.

Jonn’s pretty busy today, so I’m posting this one on his behalf.

As Jonn wrote here some months ago, last year both Beretta and Magpul publicly went on record as opposing proposed changes to firearms laws in their respective states (the People’s Republic of Maryland and Colorado, respectively).  Both firms were essentially ignored by those states, which each enacted   truly ignorant and in practice utterly meaningless and counterproductive   substantially tighter gun control laws.

Well, regarding Magpul the other shoe has now dropped.  Magpul announced yesterday that it will indeed move its production/distribution/shipping operations and corporate headquarters outside of Colorado.  Production/distribution/shipping will move to Cheyenne, WY; the corporate headquarters, to a yet-to-be-determined location in Texas.

Way to go, Colorado.  Looks like when Magpul told you you were about to GFY, you were too stupid to listen.  Tell those jobs – and the taxes they generated – goodbye.

Your turn, Beretta.

You remember how a few months ago Starbucks asked it’s law abiding customers to leave their guns at home when they buy the over-priced, over-roasted yuppie beverages, right? Well, I hate to engage in a bit of schadenfreude, but it appears that folks who aren’t abiding by that policy, aren’t the law-abiding types, at least not in Colorado Springs;

Police are searching for a man who held up at Colorado Springs Starbucks Sunday morning.

Employees told officers that after the suspect walled in, he pulled out a gun and demanded money from the register. He left after employees gave him money. No one was injured.

The suspect is described as a black man in his early-to-mid 20s, slim and about 6 feet tall to 6-foot-2. He was dressed in all black. Police say he may have left the area in a black Subaru-style vehicle.

If only there was someway to make the criminals obey the store’s policies….

I was going to write something like I normally do when one these shootings happened like the one in Colorado yesterday where the shooter killed himself after wounding two fellow students. But, it turns out I don’t have to write anything because it wouldn’t come close to what our buddy, Nicki wrote at her place, The Liberty Zone, so you should click over and read it.