Helmke asks:

What do you call a law that forces employers to accept guns on their property, when doing so makes it impossible to provide a safe workplace under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA)?

What a joke! Those companies should be sued for violation of the act. Work place shootings happen because of their prohibitions on possessing firearms on their property. Their prohibitions remove the employee’s ability to defend himself, therefore creating an unsafe workplace. I hope that the next time a workplace shooting occurs, an employee sues the company into bankruptcy for failure to protect the employee.

Paul Helmke has more specious reasoning at his blog. A federal agent shoots himself in the foot in front of a class room, and that means only “trained” LEOs should have guns? So I guess we shouldn’t have welding or grinding equipment in shop class, or stoves and kitchen knives in home-ec classes? Watch the video. This guy was waving the gun around and acting all “big shot”. I have yet to shoot myself in the foot, and I’m not a “trained law enforcement officer”. Of course, I don’t wave guns around in front of classrooms trying to impress them with how special I am, either.

Paul Helmke has a new post up at the Brady Campaign blog which I believe, if you really think about it, shows why they’ll lose: they don’t care about all violence, just violence committed with guns. They don’t do a damn thing about violence in general. It’s all about “how we as a society relate to guns”. They don’t give a damn about enabling battered wives to defend themselves against their abusers. They don’t give a damn about giving people the best defense for themselves from someone wielding a bat, or a tire iron, or fists. They don’t seem to care if you get the same thing Matthew Sheppard got as long as no guns are involved in the violent act.

Why? That’s what I want to know. Why are they happy to let other forms of violence run rampant, just so long as no one uses a gun?

Why, Paul?

We have to promote a real solution to the problem the anti-gun/anti-rights people claim to want to solve. Every time they suggest a gun ban as the answer to murder, we have to reply not just with the “gun bans don’t work, they make it worse”. We have to reply with “concealed carry helps prevent crime” and “mandatory death penalty for all murders and rapes” and the evidence that backs up these as real effective solutions. We have to provide the real answer.

From July 1, 2006, through December 31, 2006, the Violence Policy Center (VPC) used the Google News search engine to collect every reported news article that contained the term “drive by.”

Yeah! That’s some good research there! The hilarious thing is, their study shows that gun control at best does nothing positive. Here’s the table they produce. The number one state in drive-bys, according to their findings, also has some of the strictest gun-control in the nation. They show twice as many drive-bys as their number two, which has fairly reasonable gun laws.

The only thing I think this shows is that urban population density along with warm weather is the culprit, not gun availability.

Since she returned from her Harry Potter vacation, Robyn Ringler’s Under Fire blog seems to have shifted focus a bit from crying “ban those guns!” to whining “why doesn’t someone do something about this gun violence?” It’s a slight improvement, though I find her defense of Elliot “gun control via lawsuit” Spitzer amusing. Really, why pursue malfeasance on the part of an elected official, when we could be banning guns?!?!!

I’ve mentioned here and there the real solution to gun — and all other — violence: execution for your first murder or rape.

Paul Helmke has a good piece up, but of course, comments are still off. It’s a well written piece; not inflammatory or bombastic, nor attacking anyone. Kudos, Paul. Let’s have more like this.

This is the one area where NICS really does work. I wouldn’t let my 5 year-old have a gun unsupervised, and an adult with the mind of a 5 year-old shouldn’t have one either, as one example. But the restoration of the right is important also. Someone who sold a little weed to his friends 20 years ago, but is now a deacon in his church probably shouldn’t be prohibited.

From Oleg Volk:

From the US v. Miller ruling:

The Court can not take judicial notice that a shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches long has today any reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia; and therefore can not say that the Second Amendment guarantees to the citizen the right to keep and bear such a weapon.

So the appeal was denied because the Court did not believe that a short barrel shotgun could be considered a military weapon! If you haven’t read the Miller decision, you should go read it and see what it really says. It’s not what the the anti-gun crowd says. The decision nowhere touches on the topic of individual v. collective right.

I frequently hear about the rights of society in opposition to the rights of the individual. Society has no rights and can have no rights because society is a concept, not a thing. A society is simply a set of individuals. It cannot have anything more or less than the individuals that comprise it. If a society has the “right to be safe” all that could mean is that the individuals who comprise that society have the “right to be safe”.

The Brady Campaign — hindering law enforcement at every turn!: A3511 helps to protect illegal gun traffickers from detection and arrest. A little publicized, but aggressively enforced Federal Law requires licensed firearms dealers to secretly report multiple handgun sales. A3511 renders this program useless in New Jersey. And as currently written, it will restrict purchase by retail dealers to one handgun per month from non-retailers! That is, a retail dealer can buy one handgun in a month from a wholesaler, OR one from a private seller, OR one from a manufacturer — but only one of those! So, how are the dealers going to get the handguns to sell to the cops, eh?

So the Brady Campaign turned off comments on their blogs, but forgot to turn off trackbacks. (Can they turn off trackbacks?) Why would they do that? We were having such good Reasoned Discourse! It’s not our fault the only commenters they could field were only capable of appeals to emotion and ad hominem attacks. One commenter, Kelli, flatly refused to stop insulting other commenters with whom she disagreed. Another, macca, turns out to be a member of the board of the Brady Campaign from Texas. You should see the stuff she wrote. Sad.