BlakeBlog

Money Matters

I was reading the further coverage of the Newtown anniversary, amazed at how the media likes to glorify psycho killers and spur copycats, when I read:

 

"New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's organization, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, has spent roughly $15 million this year on advertising to influence the debate."

 

I recalled the stats from yesterday's Washington Post article:

 

"In the first half of 2013, the NRA and other gun rights groups outspent gun-control organizations on federal lobbying, $12.2 million to $1.6 million, according to the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation."

 

So, Bloomberg spent $15 million last year, but only $1.6 million (from all anti-gun sources) was spent on lobbying in the first half? Makes sense when you consider Bloomberg spent a lot of advertising money trying to sway State-level elections in November, but that certainly doesn't support the WaPo's narrative that "the NRA" massively outspent the anti's.

 

The distinction between lobbying money and advertising money becomes more clear in light of an article in Advertising Age that notes the anti's outspent pro-gun groups seven to one on TV:

 

"In the year after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., gun-control groups spent $14.1 million on TV advertising. According to Kantar Media's CMAG, that gave such groups a seven to one advantage over gun-rights organizations, which only spent $1.9 million.

 

"At the same time, gun-rights groups, led by the National Rifle Association, spent about $6.2 million on lobbying instead of advertising, according to a study by the Sunlight Foundation.

 

"The gun-rights groups may have had the better tactic -- especially in a quiet election year. [...]

 

"'The return on the investment has been very weak,' said Elizabeth Wilner of Kantar Media. 'When you are doing advocacy advertising you are looking for Congress to pass something.'"

 

If you add all these numbers up, the pro-gun folks spent about $8M on lobbying, while the anti's spent about $2M. When it comes to advertising, though, the pro-gun folks spent only $2M and the anti's spent over $14M. Add the both figures up, and the pro-gun folks spent about $10M while the anti's spent around $16M. Once again, we've been significantly outspent.

 

Don't be disappointed by this, though! Look at our successes, especially at the Federal level, and you can see that we focused our money where it would have the most influence and we were able to avoid any major legislation in the aftermath of Newtown. What this means is that our opponents spent more money, on less-effective channels, and still wound up with nothing to show for it.

 

That, my friends, is smart fighting.

The NSSF and US Firearms Sue Sunnyvale!

We warned the city of Sunnyvale that they were opening themselves up to lawsuits with their misguided efforts to pass local gun control in the form of Measure C. They didn't listen. In fact, the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence both counseled the city that the lawsuit threat was a bluff, and they even offered to provide pro bono (free) legal support in case a suit happened.

Well, it has! You can read the entire filing here:

http://nssf.org/PDF/NSSF_Sunnyvale-Suit.pdf

 The National Shooting Sports Foundation, as you recall, is the true lobby for gun manufacturers and retailers (not the NRA, as the anti's like to erroneously claim). And since part of Measure C directly affects one of Sunnyvale's firearms retailers—U.S. Firearms—both organizations have jointly filed suit against the city.

 

The suit primarily claims that Measure C is illegal due to State pre-emption, meaning that the State of California has a law that says cities and counties cannot pass their own gun control laws, so Measure C violates this law. The suit also argues that the requirement to collect personal information about lawful activities and report that information to the police is a violation of an individual's right to privacy.

The Run-up to the Newtown Anniversary

In the run-up to the Newtown anniversary, the gun-banners are reveling in the opportunity to display their assumed moral superiority in their struggle to stay relevant. Expect to see sympathetic stories like the following across the major media outlets:

http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_24690216/oakland-after-his-sons-fatal-accident-man-fights

 

It's a tragedy that Mr. Dix's son was shot and killed by a friend who was playing with a pistol he thought was unloaded. But, it's also a logical fallacy to think that a loaded chamber indicator would have changed the killer's behavior. If the killer wasn't taught the NRA's gun safety rules, or didn't apply them, then it's extremely doubtful that a small flip-up or chamber cut-out would have changed the outcome of this tragic event.

 

Even without the requirement for loaded chamber indicators, magazine disconnects, and all the other "common sense safety features" the gun banners would like to impose on free America, accidental gun deaths are at historic lows. According to the very source the article quotes to justify Mr. Dix's quest, the Centers for Disease Control, unintentional firearm deaths are at all-time lows:

 

 

Also, interestingly, I can't get the "1,900 children […] accidentally killed with a firearm" from their claimed source. Even if I generously define a child as anyone from birth to 19 years old, I only get 1,515:

 

 

If you apply a more typical age range for what we consider "children," from birth to 14 years old, the number falls to 619 over the eight-year period. Each and every one of them tragic, but a small fraction in comparison with car accidents (21,085) or drowning (7,425). (I'm still waiting for the sympathetic stories calling for the bans on allowing children to travel by car, or live in houses with swimming pools.)

 

The gun-banners lie all the time—never trust a number from the gun-banners! I thought that major media was supposed to be better than simple bloggers because of the "layers and layers" of editorial oversight, but apparently they can't even be bothered to fact-check some simple data that's freely available via the Internet.

NRA Sues San Francisco over Magazine Ban

KTVU, a local TV station, decided to cover the NRA's decision to file suit against San Francisco over their recently-signed ban on magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds. This local law ignores the State-level grandfathering of all 10+ round magazines owned before 2000, requiring their owners to dispose of them without compensation before December 8, 2013.

There's some comedy gold in this article, but it also provides a nice update at the end regarding several of the current lawsuits that the NRA is leading here in California: 

http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/nra-challenges-city-ammunition-law-behalf-local-re/nbyN5/

For example, there's this gem of a statement:

"The bullet dispensers can be used with machine guns, semi-automatic rifles and some semi-automatic handguns."

Yes, "bullet dispensers." And they're interchangeable, too! Just stick 'em in whatever machine gun you've got lying around—and I'm sure you have plenty of machine guns in your possession, right? But apparently they're only useable in some semi-automatic handguns; I guess they think other semi-automatic handguns use cylinders?

 Or how about this one:

"The lawsuit cites a landmark 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the high court said the constitutional right to bear arms applies to individuals as well as state militias." 

Ah, yes, KTVU can't seem to let go of the old "the Second Amendment only applies to militias, not people" belief. (So tell me, just what exactly is a militia made up of, if not people?)

But, more importantly, here's the quick update on current lawsuits:

"In another gun rights case, the NRA has asked a federal appeals court to strike down two other San Francisco laws that regulate gun possession and ammunition sales.

 

"One measure requires gun owners other than peace officers to keep their weapons in a locked container or use trigger lock devices when they are not carrying the guns. The other prohibits gun shops in the city from selling dangerous ammunition, such as fragmenting bullets, that serves no sporting purpose.

 

"The NRA and the San Francisco Veteran Police Officers Association challenged those laws in a 2009 lawsuit. They appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco declined to grant a preliminary injunction in 2012. 

A three-judge panel of the circuit court heard arguments on the appeal in San Francisco on Oct. 7 and now has the case under consideration."

Let me add an obligatory note of clarification: the ban on "fragmenting bullets" is actually a ban on the sale (but not possession) of hollow-point ammo (SPPC section 613.10(g).) As we all know, hollow-point bullets don't intentionally fragment; they're designed to expand upon impact. It appears the San Francisco doesn't want to allow its citizens to protect themselves with the same bullet technology that their own police force uses. Like the Trix cereal rabbit used to hear, "Silly citizen, self defense is for police!"

State Boycotts by Publicly-Owned Firearms Companies

Many states are currently working to pass, or have passed, new restrictions on the kinds of firearms and magazines that citizens can own. In particular, New York has enacted the most draconian restrictions in the country. In response to this, quite a list of firearms companies is declining to sell firearms to the governments and police departments of states, like New York, unless those same items can be purchased by regular citizens of that state, too.

However, if you peruse that list you won't see the largest names in the industry, like Glock, Smith and Wesson, Remington, Colt, Sig Sauer and Springfield Armory. These companies are the primary suppliers of firearms to government and law enforcement, so they'd have the most to lose by refusing to sell, but they'd also be the most effective at forcing the states to treat all its citizens equally.

Some folks have tried to excuse this behavior by saying that they're all publically traded companies, so they have a financial duty to the shareholders to maximize profit; refusing to sell to a large and profitable market segment would open those companies up to lawsuits. While this may be true—certainly in modern America you can sue anyone for just about anything—it does seem to ignore both history and current parallels.

Anyone remember the anti-aparthied boycotts and sanctions of South Africa in the 80's? Pepsi, along with a number of other companies, sold their assets and pulled out of South Africa in response to public pressure. Were any of those companies ever sued by their shareholders, and if so, did it ever amount to anything? (Not to my knowledge, and no, respectively.) Furthermore, currently there are groups who claim that Israel has enacted a form of apartheid and they are advocating for a boycott of Israeli products. I couldn't find any companies claiming they'd love to boycott Israeli suppliers, but they couldn't due to their fiduciary duty to their shareholders.

So, while the duty to shareholders may be a convenient excuse, it's one that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Important note: I'm not suggesting that gun owners "get medieval" on the companies that aren't participating in the New York boycott. I'm just pointing out that the meme running around about the financial duty to shareholders doesn't really hold any water.

The Gun Control Compromise

So we know the gun grabbers aren't going to get what they want at the Federal level, unless we agree to give them something. So, if we were of the mind to give up something, what should we give and what should we ask for in return?

It's pretty clear the two things the gun control lobby wants most are universal background checks and magazine capacity restrictions. In my book, capacity restrictions are a non-starter, so that leaves background checks.

(Why? For one primary reason. The police have decided that 13– or 17–round Glocks and 30–round AR-15s are the best self-defense tools available for their officers—who normally travel in pairs—and these officers have the baddest, most heavily equipped reinforcements just a radio call away from helping them resolve a situation that may be getting out of hand. So, an individual citizen, who usually doesn't have an armed buddy covering their "six" (backside), and who really doesn't have the same kind of access to overwhelming backup, needs at least the same level of self-defense capability if not more.)

Background checks, if done right, could actually be a good thing. By done right, I mean revamping the NICS system so that anyone can access it over the internet or via phone, for free. You supply enough personally identifying information to the system to uniquely idenitfy someone, say full name, date of birth and Social Security number. Since this is the government I'd give them a little more time than the average credit card transaction to come back with a result. If the system can't get an answer within 60 seconds, the transaction is approved. If the person is not prohibited from purchasing firearms, the seller gets a receipt back from the system with a hash (number) that can cryptographically prove that the buyer was not a prohibited person given the information in the NICS database at that specific time. With this hash, the seller is legally indemnified against any and all liability claims, civil or criminal, if the buyer goes on to violate the law with that firearm sometime in the future. NICS keeps no record of the transaction, so there are no firearm serial numbers recorded, but that hash can mathematically prove that a check of the buyer's elegibility was done at a specific date and time.

So, with universal background checks done correctly, what should we get in return? I can think of several things. First, all state-level "assault weapons" bans could be preempted by the Federal government since the Second Amendment was incorporated via the 14th Amendment to apply to the States.

Second, silencers could be removed from Class III status so they no longer require special permission or a tax stamp to purchase. Again, the Federal government would need to preempt the States on this, but who in their right mind thinks it's a good idea to have to ask your local police chief for permission to pay a $200 tax to purchase hearing protection?

Third, we could get rid of the "sporting use" clause that's used to prevent foreign manufacturers from importing some kinds of firearms. This has turned out to be a bit of crony capitalism that protects domestic firearms manufacturers from competition, but it also significantly infringes on our ability to get quite a fiew firearms that are very popular elsewhere in the world.

Fourth, we could make concealed carry licenses as universally accepted as driver's licenses. The States have already done a pretty good job of establishing reciprocity, but much like the Restoration South, there are some hold-outs that need to be nudged along the civil rights path.

Lastly, we could use univeral background checks to nullify all current magazine limitations and prohibit any new ones. I put this last because I'm not a big fan of spending all the political capital from background checks on preventing a law that isn't currently on the books. I'd rather see us use that capital to roll back some of the egregious restrictions that have already been enacted.

But those are my thoughts. What are yours?

Watsonville Police Chief Dismisses NRA's School Shield Program

From down Watsonville way come comments by Police Chief Manny Solano:

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_22336964/watsonville-police-chief-warns-random-shootings-are-risk

So apparently, in the Chief's view, the NRA's School Shield program is a bad idea and armed citizens are just disasters waiting to happen—their guns will be stolen or they'll shoot innocent bystanders. Hmm. A quick look at the stats from David Kopel's paper "Shall Issue: The New Wave of Concealed Handgun Permit Laws" indicates that 11% of police shootings kill an innocent person, whereas 2% of shootings by citizens kill an innocent person.

Now I'm not bashing the police here—they have a hard job, coming into a chaotic scene and trying to quickly make sense of it. People being people, sometimes they get it wrong. But it's pretty clear when you're an individual citizen being assaulted by an aggressor who the bad guy is, and the statistics would seem to bear that out.

The Chief's idea that "The solution is to have an officer [at the school] as much as possible" is certainly a great one if the community is flush with cash and can afford to expand the police force. If not, maybe it'd make sense to train some volunteers instead of abandoning the students and staff to the ballistic protections emanating from the "No Guns Allowed" signs.

Treating Innocent Gun Owners Like Criminals

More fawning press for Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner's AB48, which would treat ammo purchasers like criminals:

http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_22326241/berkeley-legislator-unveils-bill-regulate-california-ammunition-sales?source=rss

It's too bad the paper uncritically re-published Skinner's misleading statistics. Maybe the Mercury News is too stuck up to read the competition, but The Sacramento Bee recently published the statistics from the California Department of Public Health that provide a fuller picture. From 2002-2012 annual gun sales in California have climbed from 350,000 to 600,000, and during the same timeframe the number of hospitalizations due to gun injuries declined from 4,000 to 2,900 annually.

Even if the Mercury News doesn't want to admit to keeping an eye on the competition, they could simply look up the FBI's crime stats and learn that not only has our violent crime rate been cut nearly in half over the last 20 years, but that twice as many people are killed every year with fists than with rifles.

So just what do you think you will accomplish by treating law-abiding citizens like criminals, Assemblywoman Skinner?

The Riddle of the Gun

A friend referenced an article titled "The Riddle of the Gun" on Facebook, and I found it to be a pretty interesting opinion piece. I posted the response below on Facebook, and I liked it enough that I thought I'd post it over here in my neglected blog.

Overall I think it's pretty well reasoned, but I'll quibble with a few points.

"Ordinary altercations can become needlessly deadly in the presence of a weapon."

49 states allow for concealed carry (IL will become the 50th later this year), and before the passage of concealed carry bills the anti-gun lobbies said "There'll be blood in the streets! Gunfights over parking spots! It'll be the Wild West again!" Of course, it never happened, and in fact crime has always decreased in each state after it allowed for concealed carry. (I'm not saying that concealed carry caused the decrease, but it certainly didn't cause any increase, either.) Furthermore, people who hold concealed carry permits commit crimes about half as often as sworn police officers, so the facts don't seem to support this assertion.

"The only other variable to consider is the number of rounds a gun can hold, because this dictates the frequency with which a shooter must pause to reload. Here the path to increased public safety is reasonably clear. [...] As a consequence, the moment at which a shooter can be tackled by bystanders comes after every 10 shots."

Bad idea—it overestimates how long it takes to reload, and it assumes folks will be able to distinguish between a simple pause in the shooting versus the need to reload. With a couple hours of practice most folks can reload and be back on target in 2.4 seconds or less, which is no where near enough time to poke your head out from behind whatever cover you're using, assess the situation, and be able to cover the distance between yourself and the shooter. It also ignores that most spree murderers carry multiple weapons and can quickly drop empty ones and begin using loaded ones. Lastly, larger magazines are critically important for everyday self defense in situations where an individual is trying to defend him/herself against multiple aggressors. This is the very same reason police officers carry more than 10 rounds in their firearms—and they even have backup they can rely on like no individual citizen can enjoy.

"Even if the Second Amendment guaranteed everyone the right to possess whatever weapon he or she desired (it doesn’t), we have since invented weapons that no civilian should be allowed to own."

I could be snarky and say that, by this reasoning, since the founders never imagined the Internet Mr. Harris shouldn't have any First Amendment protections in that medium, either. But more to the point, in the Founders' time the people did actually own all the implements of a then-modern army. Lexington and Concord were fought when the British tried to first take the cannons, and then the powder, from colonists. The British were aghast at our rifled barrels that allowed us to take "unsporting" shots at their commanders hiding at the back of the battlefield. America's first Navies consisted substantially of privately owned ("privateer") warships conscripted into service by George Washington. The Founders never wanted a standing army, they wanted every American (the "unorganized militia") to have all the modern weapons of war and to be proficient with them so that they could be called into service as necessary—and to provide an overwhelming force that would prevent any government from becoming a tyranny.

"Given the changes that have occurred in our military, and even in our politics, the idea that a few pistols and an AR 15 in every home constitutes a necessary bulwark against totalitarianism is fairly ridiculous."

Yep, because the North Vietnamese were helpless against the French and us, just like the Afghans were helpless against the British, the Russians, and us. What's truly ridiculous is that governments of various stripes are responsible for first disarming, and then murdering, somewhere between 35 and 50 million of their own citizens in the last century alone. History doesn't repeat, but it sure does echo, and no armed populace has ever suffered from tyrannical genocide.

"Getting a gun license could be made as difficult as getting a license to fly an airplane, requiring dozens of hours of training. I would certainly be happy to see policy changes like this. In that respect, I support much stricter gun laws. But I am under no illusions that such restrictions would make it difficult for bad people to acquire guns illegally."

The author contradicts himself here—he supports restrictions that he admits will do nothing to reduce gun violence. Also, he ignores the positive social value that guns have—namely, that they're used approximately two million times a year, usually without firing a single shot, in self defense. Mr. Harris' licensing scheme would penalize the woman threatened by an abusive ex by making it impossible for her to quickly get a gun for protection. It would also make guns less available to those who make less money, making it harder for the very people who are likely to need them most because of the poor neighborhoods they tend to live in.

I really like the ending several paragraphs—Mr. Harris gets it right here, IMHO.

For another perspective I highly recommend reading Larry Correia's thoughts on the topic: http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/

The Trouble with .223's (Reloading, That Is)

Labor Week continues for me this week. I've got a surplus of vacation time from work and am in a "use it or lose it" situation, so I decided to take the full week of Labor Day off so that I could get some personal projects done. One of those projects is to get ahead in my reloading so that I'll have enough practice ammo to carry me through most of the rest of the year.

The past couple days I reloaded 9mm Luger until I ran out of Blue Dot powder. That gave me 700 more rounds—which seems like a lot until you realize that I try to shoot 100 rounds a week to stay in practice. Once out of Blue Dot, I turned my attention to .223 Remington—and that's where the fun began this morning.

First, I have a bunch of empty cases that I've already prepped and that are just waiting to be reloaded. If you're not familiar with reloading, to reload a rifle cartridge you need to apply some lube to it before you resize it, otherwise it'll stick in your resizing die. Well, I had already resized all these empty cartridges so they already had some lube on them, but that was from about six months ago…

…and it turns out that lube doesn't stick around for six months.

So, the very first case I started reloading this morning got stuck in my resizing die. ("Man, is this going to be a great day, or what?" I thought to myself.) I then got the joy of using my "stuck case removal kit," a bench vise, and a drill to get the recalcitrant case out. This wasted a good hour of the cool morning time.

Then I relubed a batch of cases and started reloading again, checking the powder weights and overall length (OAL) of the completed cartridges. Here's where I hit my second snag: the OALs were varying about by about 0.010", and I usually shoot for no more than 0.002" variance. You're naturally going to have some variance since bullets aren't perfectly uniform, but I didn't recall having this much variance with this particular bullet, Hornady's 75gr Match bullet.

I know that with some of the longer bullets there can be a little more variance than normal, so I grabbed a handful and measured them:

 

Wow! I didn't realize these bullets varied so much. Their standard deviation was 0.004" around a mean of 0.993". I picked out 10 of the bullets that measured the median value of 0.994" and set my seating die to give me an OAL of 2.250" and called it good. All that fun wasted another hour, but after that I was able to get down to business and crank out about 350 rounds.

After some lunch I was still a bit curious about the OAL issue so I decided to measure my other go-to bullet in .223, Swift's Scirocco II:

 

OK, that looks better. A nice, regular distribution (with just a single outlier) and a standard deviation of only 0.002". Of course, the Sciroccos cost about three times as much as the Hornadys, which just goes to show that you get what you pay for.

I really like the Scirocco's terminal ballistics, but I haven't worked up a load for it yet. It should be pretty similar to the Hornady, but because the bullets are a bit longer I'm pretty sure I won't be able to use the same amount of powder, and I'll probably need to increase the OAL closer to the .223's maximum of 2.275". I'll have to work up some "ladder loads" that gradually work up to my normal 24gr of Reloader 15 and see if there are any signs of overpressure.