What is with guns and paranoia?

[BStrong]

Sometimes paranoia might not be unresonable.

Case in point, right now.

www.stopsb249.org

Dedicated website to fight against proposed legislation wrt semiauto firearms.

Here's an Email that just went out to interested parties

For those experiencing a slowdown or inability to get to Calguns.net there is a reason.

Well we can only assume we are doing something right.

As we said only 2 days ago when we wished you all the best on the 4th of July - that we stand as a - 1st Amendment friendly hosting provider.
So someone... or a lot of zombie-fied computer someones - really didn't like what we said...

We are now in 2+ hours of - enduring a flat out Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that has done it's best to remove us as entire company from the Internet.

We are somewhat happy to say - we are able to send email and most of your websites are running as expected.

Unfortunately some are not.

For those of you who have noticed your websites are offline right now we are doing our best to get them all back online - by changing public IPs to a range that is not under attack.

For customers on the ASP platform; or people using Dedicated IPs ( on ASP or LAMP ) - your sites are not affected by this attack.

The attack was designed to cripple our core shared services. And we had to have our upstream fiber providers block specific destination IPs in our network - to allow the rest of the sites to continue without interruption.

Thank you for being our customer, and thank you for your patience during this time.

Since Calguns is a major user of GeoVario resources it's not surprising that we're being hit by this DDOS too.

Hopefully this can be resolved quickly and we'll be back up soon.

Dedicated DoS attack on Geovario servers, who carry several firearms forums.

Given that the stop SB249 website is coordinating opposition to this law, and has been particularly active as a clearing house for contacting state legislators, a DoS attack is a serious blow against organized opposition to SB249.

Make of it what you will.

 

[BStrong]

I think the comparison to car registration is invalid. You only need to register a car if you drive it on public roads. Plus if the cops catch you driving an unregistered car they would probably just give you a ticket which would go away if you got it registered. Whereas I imagine you want it to be a criminal offense to have an unregistered firearm?

I would not be opposed to allowing the feds to track firearm sales better though.

Not to mention that there are no limits on number of vehicles purchased, type of vehicle purchased, or pre-approval needed to buy, sell or trade.

 

[Ranb]

And you don't need special permission to own a car that is too large, too small or has a muffler.

Ranb

 

[crimresearch]

Don't forget, in addition to the ridiculous urban myth about George Soros buying up all the gun companies (dumbest conspiracy ever), the NRA claims President Obama not taking away our guns in his first term is proof positive he plans to take away our guns in his second term.

Well, isn't that a standard feature on doomsday scenarios? Sliding end dates?

 

[Giz]

Chicago may have strict laws

Did you ever stop and think that maybe you are coming at this from the wrong angle? That banning law abiding citizens from owning handguns only means that law abiding citizens don't have guns? That stopping gang violence maybe means addressing more complex and perhaps difficult to solve social issues than "lets just ban those nasty guns"?

 

[Giz]

And you don't need special permission to own a car that is too large, too small or has a muffler.

Ranb

Why would you want to own a quieter car? You must be some kind of criminal stalker!! (but it's OK if you pay a tax)

 

[Ranb]

I can still hear as low as 5-15 decibels. Never would have happened without effective suppression and/or hearing protection for the last 30 years.

Ranb

 

[R.Mackey]

Well he is to date the only person I know who ever went out and actually legally bought a gun. And he was very unwell. The way he'd declare that he was "horny" and thus needed to shoot and kill something deeply disturbed us.

We were very glad when he was turned down for a concealed/carry license. He wasn't, however, that's why he moved to Nevada.

Sorry to hear you live around some crazy people. You should get out more...

At my last class we had about the most cosmopolitan mix of students you could imagine, from Asian-Americans only a month after their citizenship oath to a Mexican-American Marine (retired) with his teenage son and daughter. The instructors backing me up included a husband-and-wife senior citizen team and an openly gay woman, not that anyone has ever made the slightest fuss about it. The attitude you describe was totally absent here, as it would be among the overwhelming majority of those who enjoy their civil right to own and operate firearms.

You may be looking at this from the reverse causal perspective. If one is paranoid, i.e., believes others are out to get one, one may mechanically gravitate towards mechanisms of self-defense no matter how poorly considered. But this hardly means all gun-owners are crazy. This is like saying "9/11 Truthers opposed the war in Iraq, therefore all sane people are for the war."

Historically, criminal use of firearms is trending steadily downward, even as sales of firearms accelerate and (in recent years) infringements of the Second Amendment have been slowly beaten back. Education, economic advancement and equality, effective policing and transparent justice are the keys to reining in violence -- along with care for the mentally ill. Has nothing to do with restricting civil rights.

I personally spend a lot of time on the "education" side. I've personally instructed close to a thousand people in firearms safety and responsible marksmanship, strictly as a volunteer, nonprofit, NGO. Don't need to get the federales involved. A good model organization was the Division of Civilian Marksmanship, or in its present form the CMP, originally started by an arch-conservative visionary you may have heard of named Teddy Roosevelt.

 

[Kestrel]

Please explain.

This is closer to the truth:

http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_20952388/follow-guns-from-georgia-bay-area-streets

On April 13, 2009, Crystal Erin Davis walked into the Cherokee Gun and Pawn shop on Knox Bridge Highway in Canton, Ga., and bought a Cobra Enterprises .38-caliber pistol, commonly known as a Saturday night special. She filled out paperwork that said the gun was hers.

But in fact Davis bought the weapon -- and, on other days, 20 others -- for her boyfriend, Jeffrey Martin Colon-Moore, a Vallejo native and ex-convict who could not legally buy guns from licensed dealers. He sold and shipped the firearms by overnight delivery to buyers in the Bay Area that spring.

Those buyers, in turn, put the weapons in the wrong hands.

About 15 of the 125 guns Moore's crew bought from gun stores or gun shows have since been recovered by law enforcement. While none has been directly traced to a killing, they've been taken from parolees after car chases, from juveniles after a robbery and from a car searched after a fatal shooting at a San Francisco nightclub.

The story of those guns -- which emerges from a federal trafficking case -- provides a rare view of the ways criminals get firearms, and just how easy it can be. It also helps explain why, when Oakland police seize an average of 1,200 to 1,500 firearms every year, there is a steady supply to replace them.

"It is definitely frustrating," said Sgt. Nishant Joshi, head of the Oakland Police Department's Gangs/Guns Intelligence Task Force. "A lot of guns come from out of state, a lot of straw purchases. Guns are not manufactured in Oakland. There's no big warehouse in Oakland where you go in and buy what you want."

Straw buyers are indeed one of the main ways of diverting weapons from the legal trade. If firearms registration was computerized, their purchase patterns would stick out like a sore thumb.

 

[Kestrel]

Did you ever stop and think that maybe you are coming at this from the wrong angle? That banning law abiding citizens from owning handguns only means that law abiding citizens don't have guns? That stopping gang violence maybe means addressing more complex and perhaps difficult to solve social issues than "lets just ban those nasty guns"?

My goal is to make straw buying and other techniques for diverting handguns into the criminal trade a lot more dangerous. Leave an easy to follow trail in the records that will point directly to the person who violated the rules. This in turn will raise the price of handguns in the criminal trade.

 

[zeggman]

Fear of castration?

They can have my johnson when they pry it from my cold, dead hand.

 

[BStrong]

Straw buyers are indeed one of the main ways of diverting weapons from the legal trade. If firearms registration was computerized, their purchase patterns would stick out like a sore thumb.

There's already a regulation in place (and referenced in the article I linked to) that requires FFL dealers to notify ATF in cases of multiple purchases by the same individual - it has come up in the Fast & Furious operation as well - FFL dealers reporting suspicious purchase patterns to ATF.

I'm still interested in hearing an explanation of your earlier statement

The big ugly secret of the firearms industry is the the illegal trade is supplied by diverting firearms from the legal trade

 

[Cainkane1]

The fact that things like this continue to hold traction with the gun crowd has me concerned. Especially since I have hung with some very liberal crowds in my time and really have never run across a deep rooted desire to actually ban all guns. Sure a lot of them don't like guns, I certainly don't, but they were pragmatic enough to know that trying to ban them would be a huge folly.

So why does this paranoia persist?

They seemed sure Obama would ban guns and then he didn't. Then they thought that Fast & Furious was part of some plot to ban guns. Now they think George Soros is spending huge amounts of his own money to simply stop manufacturing them.

I mean really?

A paranoid person feels that a gun is a barrier between himself and some forms of trouble such as crime.

I personally enjoy shooting my guns at paper targets, cans, plastic bottles filled with water , rotten pumpkins and watermellons etc.

I don't want to kill anything.

 

[Kestrel]

There's already a regulation in place (and referenced in the article I linked to) that requires FFL dealers to notify ATF in cases of multiple purchases by the same individual - it has come up in the Fast & Furious operation as well - FFL dealers reporting suspicious purchase patterns to ATF.

It only works when they make multiple purchases from the same dealer. Since there are lots of dealers, it's not all that hard to spread purchases around.

I'm still interested in hearing an explanation of your earlier statement

The big ugly secret of the firearms industry is the the illegal trade is supplied by diverting firearms from the legal trade

Straw buyers are one of the ways used to divert firearms from the legal trade. Due to the way firearms laws pander to the paranoia of the gun lobby, it's easy for a straw buyer to operate under the radar. Registration isn't done online, the paper work is stored at firearms dealers. Private sales in many states are legal without a background check and registration.

 

[roger]

while I don't think government is going to round up all the guns, or make them illegal, in many places we have to fight to retain our rights. When I moved here to CA we had to sell a carbine that is perfectly legal in the rest of the nation because it had two features - a short barrel, and a pistol grip. It makes no sense. This shot .45 ACP, a pistol round. Yet much more deadly weapons are perfectly legal. There's a huge list of manufacturers that are illegal to own. Sure, some of them put out the 'saturday night special' guns, but a lot just sell affordable hand guns. If you just feel like plinking at paper targets a few times a year it doesn't make sense to spend $600+ on a hand gun. I had a concealed carry permit in CO. There is basically no chance of me getting one here in CA. I was lucky in that none of my current hand guns have a magazine capacity of more than 10 rounds - I had sold a few that did, not becuase of the CA laws, but coincidentally, a few months before. And so on. Furthermore, the laws are quite complicated, and making an honest mistake can result in a felony conviction and loss of all rights to ever own any kind of gun again. For example, a guy was coming back from hunting to his car, a game warden was there and asked to see the license. The guy complied, leaning the gun against the vehicle. The officer then wrote him up for a gun on the vehicle because it was still loaded. Should the guy have unloaded first? Probably, but try to start fiddling with your gun with an officer present and see how that goes for you. Could the guy have handled it better? Sure, but forgetting to say "hey, I need to check if this gun is loaded, what should I do" results in a felony conviction? Doesn't make sense to me.

In other states, gun laws are actually relaxing, and the NRA has a significant role in that. I think the paranoia is just that, paranoia, but when you have states like CA it pretty much guarantees that the opposite side is going to fight hard and unceasingly for every gain, and to fight any tiny fall back.

 

[Cain]

And of course, you'll have no problem spelling out exactly what 'my desired narrative is', and backing it up with facts, right?

You mean your consistent misreadings, such as the last one? Or the first one -- where you're not interested in what someone believes, but what you think was said? Or this one, where you're again aggressively going off topic? If you had any idea how silly you looked, you wouldn't -- couldn't -- take yourself seriously.

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BStrong

If you're talking about carry permits, I'm all for training and licensing, and ran the classes off and on in my jurisdiction....

If you're talking about a government permit to simply own firearms, no go.

So it's OK for the government to force you to get a permit... if you want to carry a firearm, but it's not OK for the government to make you get a permit... if you want to own one. You make it sound as though there are obvious differences, so why the opposition to the latter but not the former?

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Ranb

I said fail to renew.

You really should try to read for comprehension. I'm rather clearly arguing that your reasons against renewal work against a license altogether.

There are reasons why a person could fail to renew a license. If the law does not require the state to issue a license on demand to a person who qualifies, then this can lead to trouble for a person who is trying to stay legal.

And there are "reasons" a person could fail to renew any license.

Re: incentive for renewal:

Renew because it is the honorable thing to do?

Good point. Why have penalties for anything? It's not like we're living in the real world.

--------
RenaissanceBiker

What other freedoms gauranteed by the constitution do we need licenses for?

A reasonably good example of the loaded question fallacy.

Will I need a free speech license next? Maybe I'll need a license to be an atheist too.

And mostly false comparisons. For certain events, protestors must apply for permits, and are sometimes corralled into free speech "zones." Are concealed-carry permits unconstitutional as well?

 

[RenaissanceBiker]

So it's OK for the government to force you to get a permit... if you want to carry a firearm, but it's not OK for the government to make you get a permit... if you want to own one. You make it sound as though there are obvious differences, so why the opposition to the latter but not the former?

Because there are obvious differences.

A reasonably good example of the loaded question fallacy.

I don't think so. If I need a license to own a gun when that right is specifically stated in the Constitution, it sets a precedent that all rights could be subject to licensure.

And mostly false comparisons. For certain events, protestors must apply for permits, and are sometimes corralled into free speech "zones." Are concealed-carry permits unconstitutional as well?

Certain events and free speech zones are analogous to concealed carry laws. These are usually just and reasonable. Requiring a license to own or possess a gun in my home is analogous to restricting my free speech in my own living room.

 

[Ranb]

Because gun enthusiasts enthusiastically support a licensing process, in addition to other regulations. They're well-known for it; NRA lobbies for those controls all the time.

Still waiting to see your evidence to support this claim.

Ranb

 

[Cain]

Because there are obvious differences.

Such as...

I don't think so.

You asked me a question that assumed your interpretation of the Constitution.

Certain events and free speech zones are analogous to concealed carry laws. These are usually just and reasonable. Requiring a license to own or possess a gun in my home is analogous to restricting my free speech in my own living room.

I like this answer because it's something you probably made up off the top of your head, but sounds pretty good at first. So, on your reading of the Constitution, the government can restrict who carries a concealed weapon in public, which I guess means that it's not a guaranteed right (maybe the Founders anticipated the mini-musket). As for keeping a gun in your home, I don't think the speech analogy holds; I don't think it's a particular useful comparison even. More generally, most people are willing to tolerate behavior that does not affect others (e.g., talking to oneself, watching pornography, drinking beer, owning a gun etc).

To the extent that our behavior affects society, I think it's reasonable for society to deter anti-social effects and recoup costs. When it comes to alcohol, we should not have a government agent counting the number of beers you consume. That's intrusive, people vary in size and tolerance, and it's not remotely cost-efficient. However, it is reasonable to have a tax; it's reasonable to restrict sales to people under a certain age, and so on. For pornography, well, the domain of sexuality is even more private so social mechanisms are probably enough (if there's anything "wrong" with pornography at all); that kind of speech is probably inappropriate close to a school, or on public airwaves during the day time.

Guns. With one shot, a gun can kill someone. Cars are also dangerous. It's important know how to safely operate and store each. You're naturally going to have more restrictions on use for these things than smoking a joint... at least, in a reasonable world.

Someone earlier said we only need to register cars if we intend to drive them on public roads. That's not true in Republik of Kalifornia. Even if you have no intention of operating your vehicle for the next year, you still have to pay a registration fee (for me non-use was ~$18. I paid ~$160).

-------

Still waiting to see your evidence to support this claim.

You're clueless, man.

 

[RenaissanceBiker]

Such as...

One is a right protected by the constitution and the other isn't.

You asked me a question that assumed your interpretation of the Constitution.

Mine and the Supreme Court's.

I like this answer because it's something you probably made up off the top of your head, but sounds pretty good at first. So, on your reading of the Constitution, the government can restrict who carries a concealed weapon in public, which I guess means that it's not a guaranteed right (maybe the Founders anticipated the mini-musket). As for keeping a gun in your home, I don't think the speech analogy holds; I don't think it's a particular useful comparison even. More generally, most people are willing to tolerate behavior that does not affect others (e.g., talking to oneself, watching pornography, drinking beer, owning a gun etc).

To the extent that our behavior affects society, I think it's reasonable for society to deter anti-social effects and recoup costs. When it comes to alcohol, we should not have a government agent counting the number of beers you consume. That's intrusive, people vary in size and tolerance, and it's not remotely cost-efficient. However, it is reasonable to have a tax; it's reasonable to restrict sales to people under a certain age, and so on. For pornography, well, the domain of sexuality is even more private so social mechanisms are probably enough (if there's anything "wrong" with pornography at all); that kind of speech is probably inappropriate close to a school, or on public airwaves during the day time.

Whew! You are all over the place with that one. Talk about muddying the waters. You brought up pornography, alcohol, intrusive governemnt agents, etc. just to get to this point.

Guns. With one shot, a gun can kill someone.

An appeal to emotion. You got nothin'.