Jimmy Carter needs to be disarmed:

I have used weapons since I was big enough to carry one, and now own two handguns, four shotguns and three rifles, two with scopes. I use them carefully, for hunting game from our family woods and fields, and occasionally for hunting with my family and friends in other places. We cherish the right to own a gun and some of my hunting companions like to collect rare weapons. One of them is a superb craftsman who makes muzzle-loading rifles, one of which I displayed for four years in my private White House office.

But none of us wants to own an assault weapon, because we have no desire to kill policemen or go to a school or workplace to see how many victims we can accumulate before we are finally shot or take our own lives. ThatÂ’s why the White House and Congress must not give up on trying to reinstate a ban on assault weapons, even if it may be politically difficult.

President Carter doesn't go on to mention precisely what kind of firearms he owns or what calibers they are chambered for, but I feel confident asserting that every single firearm he owns, in every caliber he owns, has been used to kill people, and I suspect we can include police officers wearing bullet-resistent vests in that tally. I'm equally confident that weapons strikingly similar to what Carter owns can be directly linked to some of the worst mass killings in American history, most of which did not use "assault rifles."

Carter claims that he has no desire to " kill policemen or go to a school or workplace to see how many victims we can accumulate before we are finally shot or take our own lives."

But can we really trust him?

After all, Carter admits to owning two handguns, and it was with two handguns that Seung-Hui Cho committed 32 murders at Virginia Tech before taking his own life, and Jiverly Wong recently used two handguns to kill 13 befor taking his own life in Binghampton, New York.

Carter also admits to owning an arsenal of four shotguns, and it was a pump-shotgun that Eric Harris fired 25 times at Columbine High school; his perverse partner Dylan Klebold was found with a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun beside his body as well.

As for Carter's scoped rifles, why are his any different than the weapons used by Charles Whitman in his Texas bell tower attack that left 14 killed and 32 wounded?

Perhaps it is safest to err on the side of caution and view Carter's angry letter to the editor as a final cry for help before he embarks on his own killing spree.

Jimmy Carter owns weapons have been used in more mass killing sprees than the assault weapons that that the former president is somehow convinced contain a malevolent soul, and Carter's record of incompetence has been unmercifully skewered for three decades as being one of the most incompetent Presidents in American history, giving him a far greater reason to go on a random killing spree than almost any mass shooter in American history.

Perhaps America does need more gun control.

Let's start with James Earl Carter.

Update: Jimmy has killed before, shooting his sister's cat. Don't profilers claim that animal cruelty is one sign of a sociopath?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 07:55 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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It is more than a little sad that a man like Mr. Crumbo put his life on the line in dangerous combat missions in the service of a Constitution and Bill of Rights he clearly knew nothing about.

As various other posters to the op-ed linked above have made clear, the 1994 "assault weapons" ban did not ban so much as ONE assault weapon or machine gun capable of firing one shot per trigger pull. It was, for all intents and purposes, a law to ban scary looking features on some firearms, and did not in any way affect their lethality or rate of fire.

The Second Amendment that Mr. Crumbo so clearly does not understand was not written to protect your hunting rights. It was written by a group of very wise men who had just watched a army comprised largely of civilian militiamen defeat one of the most formidable land armies on the planet. The Second Amendment was expressly written to protect the rights of following generations to own arms that would be suitable for them to use as militiamen if the need again arises, as it has repeatedly through American history, most recently (to my knowledge) in the Battle of Athens/McMinn County War in 1946.

The semi-automatic intermediate-caliber rifles that mimic the look and feel of today's modern military weapons, far from being something not protected by the Second Amendment, are the very weapons that should be most protected by a Right that ensures Americans never again need feel the boot of a tyrant on their necks. It is perhaps the Right most singularly responsible for ensuring that our United States boasts what may be the oldest continuously-functioning government on Earth.

The Second Amendment was never about home defense, or hunting, or target shooting. The clear purpose of the right to keep and bear arms was to create a nation of riflemen, a citizenry armed with weapons suitable for use as a militiaman.

If former Navy SEAL Kim Crumbo is the weapons expert he claims to be, perhaps he can point out a civilian weapon more suitable for the militia use imagined by our Founding Fathers that the very semi-automatic rifles that he now says should be banned.

I thank Mr. Crumb for his service, and hope that he uses his retirement to educate himself about a Constitution he defended, but so clearly never understood.

(h/t NC Tea Party Revolution)

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:00 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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The Mexican police have captured another cache of weapons from a drug cartel, and their apparent instinct was to hype their find as being something more than what they captured, which the Daily Mail bought into entirely.

The "anti-aircraft gun" in the picture is an old M1919 in what appears to be an A4 configuration, and is mounted on a low-tripod for its designed use, allowing infantry to take on ground targets, not aircraft.

Far from the 800-rounds-per-minute claim in the Daily Mail, the cyclic rate of fire was rate of 400-600 rounds per minute, but because the gun was air-cooled and would overheat if fired continuously, it was fired in short bursts, resulting in a rate of fire that was much less.

This is as much an anti-aircraft gun as Margaret Thatcher is a Victoria's Secret model. Sure, all the basic parts are there, but pressing this configuration into a role it was never designed for is a recipe for disaster, and the over-hyping Mexican Police should be ashamed of themselves.

(Via Instapundit.)

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:57 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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No, ABC News didn't put explosives in a gas tank, but they certainly stacked the deck in creating Diane Sawyer's "guns are bad, guns are useless" self-fulfilling prophecy, which AWR Hawkins deftly exposes at Pajamas Media.

The scenario is worth watching, if only to point out the flaws in the contrived scenario, starting with neophytes playing the role of CCH holders, the CCHs being forced to wear a holster in a position where they could not draw their weapon in a sitting postion (and would not think of carrying a weapon in real life simply for reasons of comfort).

And of course, ABC rigged an outcome where the only possible outcome was the death of students in the scenario, with the only question being "how many?"

In real life, of course, there is never just one possible scenario or possible outcome.

As I noted in a comment at PJM, what ABC News pointedly didn't run is what I would dub the "Virginia Tech" scenario.

Have a student with a concealed weapons hear shots in another classroom, draw his weapon, and cover the door. Then tell me how far the shooter gets through that classroom door, compared to rooms without a CCH.

Alternately, think about the possible reaction of CCH to seeing an agitated man pull a weapon or enter the hallway brandishing the weapon on the way to a classroom. Frankly, if I was a student or faculty member with a CCH and saw an agitated man pull a weapon as he entered a class room in front of me, my immediate reaction would be to draw my sidearm and draw a bead on the back of his skull and close the distance.

It isnÂ’t always that the CCH closest to the threat is immediately on top of it, or that in a mass shooting, the perp will always have the element of surprise on his side.

People who legally carry concealed weapons are not going to magically prevent attempted mass murders. There are simply too few of us in the general population, and well-meaning but ignorant people in positions of power make it far too difficult to carry in the very settings (schools, businesses, civic buildings) where such attacks are most likely to occur.

But just because a concealed carry permit holder can't be everywhere a shooting takes place or prevent people from always getting killed in these rampages doesn't negate their potential to alter or terminate a threat in some scenarios.

It's funny, but the same people who rail against concealed weapons because they are concerned about the rare instances of CCH permit holders becoming violent never seem to want to talk about the possible lives that could be saved by them.

It's almost as if they have an agenda...

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:56 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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The falsehoods and untruths in Sir Harold Evans unhinged rant that I first noted earlier this week are even worse than thought, with him apparently making up statistics and attributing them to a Department of Justice study.

Can we call him Sir Beauchamp?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:48 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Say Uncle pointed me this morning to the an absurd new meme that ABC's William Kates is attempting to spin, that massacres could be prevented if we just listened to comedians.

Yeah, really.

Ballistics reports showed Jiverly Wong fired 87 times from a 9mm Beretta and 11 times from a .45-caliber handgun. If he bought the ammunition online, he could have paid as little as $40 for the rounds he fired.

Friends say Wong complained that he only received $200 a week in unemployment benefits.

"Chris Rock says in one of his routines — have all the guns you want but charge like $1,000 for every bullet," said Jackie Hilly of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. "I think if you raised the price, you would probably discourage the violence, but I don't think you would prevent it."

In other news, Eddie Murphy suggested that raising the price of cars to a minimum of $300,000 would increase carpooling while decreasing the number of people picking up transvestite streetwalkers.

But that's neither here nor there.

What I really want to know from ABC's Kates is just how much a massacre is supposed to cost. If Kates thinks the cost of the ammunition used in the massacre was too inexpensive, what would be an appropriate price to pay for the slaughter? If Wong paid $98,000 for the bullets he used in his massacre ($1,000/bullet x 98 bullets) would Mr. Kates have then found the cost in human lives acceptable?

Of course, we know that Kates and his allies couldn't care less about the specific cost of bullets used in this shooting or other gun crimes, because the cost is only secondary to their primary goal of establishing control over gun owners.

Gun laws have always been about establishing political control over a population and forcing them to rely on the government to protect them.

Can we think of any reason why typically left-leaning journalists and politicians might want to advocate for people being forced to rely on the government?

Yes we can.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:21 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Harold Evans, editor and historian according to his bio, can now added "discredited crank" to his list of accomplishments, all thanks to a rant he published in Tina Brown's The Daily Beast.

The rant, Accomplices to Murder, attacks, well, nearly everyone as being an accomplice in the recent spate of mass shootings.

Indeed, Evans may have something when he accuses the society at large for creating an environment where such barbaric events are too commonplace. But Evans goes over the line in attempting to fix blame to certain people and groups in a rant howled into type.

Unencumbered by his former roles as a historian and editor, Evans has now descended to printing blatant falsehoods to support his position, acts which should result in a retraction of his article, and perhaps a re-evaluation of his relationship with the Beast.

He rants:

All these gun killings—43 in total—occurred over the last 26 days. All harvest profuse expressions of sympathy and prayers for the families and the communities. The detestation for the killers is universal. How could it not be? These are crazed and evil people. They merit our detestation.

But they are not alone in their guilt. The people who put guns into the hands have a share of that ignominy. Who are they?

The guilty are the gun dealers at flea markets and state shows who will sell any number of weapons to anyone—juveniles, criminals, nuts—without any background check or records.

By federal law, licensed gun dealers must have perspective purchasers fill out ATF Form 4473. Dealers then must check a government issued photo ID and then must call the FBI-run NICS (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) for a background check of the buyer.

This background check must be performed by gun dealers for all firearms transactions, at their primary business front location in a guns store, a flea market, or a gun show. There are no exceptions, and form 4473 specifically includes question #17 on the form that asks "Location of sale if at a gun show. (city, state)".

Only individuals who are not gun dealers may sell their private firearms without a background check according to federal law, though that varies according to the laws of individual states.

Mr. Evans flatly lies when he says dealers are not required to perform a background check, as direct links to the government web sites and documents above clearly shows. This lie is pervasive enough throughout his screed, and forms enough of the underlying thesis, to demand that the rant be retracted in its entirety.

But Evans is just warming up, and he is likewise deceptive when he implies the Mexican cartels are heavily-armed because of lax U.S. gun laws.

83% of the firearms captured by Mexican law enforcement in the past two years –more than 20,000—came from sources other than the U.S civilian market, and most come primarily from the international black market.

Mexican cartels are often armed with hand grenades, automatic weapons, and anti-tank rockets—weapons unavailable on the U.S market at any price.

But nowhere does Mr. Evans display his ignorance more than when he discusses the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.

The assault weapons "ban" did not ban assault weapons. The popularity, sale, and ownership of semi-automatic military-style weapons grew over the ten-year course of the ban, all quite legally. Several American gun companies that build "assault weapons" exclusively grew over the course of the ban, and the already low rate of crimes committed with such weapons never deviated substantially from the roughly 2% that it was before, during, and after the ban.

The actual net effect of the ban was no reduction in crimes committed with the class of firearms covered in the ban, an actual increase in the distribution and popularity of so-called "assault weapons," and the creation of an entirely new class of ultra-compact and powerful handguns designed for concealed carry, which brought even more specialized gun manufacturers into existence.

The Department of Justice study Evans sought to cite as evidence of a drop in gun crime as a result of the ban also seems utterly irrelevant to his argument, and a bit of a purposeful red herring. We don't know precisely which report he refers to because he omits that detail, but by Evans' own description, the DOJ study was for automatic weapons, not the semi-automatics covered in the ban. Evans can't even plead ignorance of the difference in the terms, as he explains the difference between automatic and semi-automatic himself:

...semi-automatic fire (one trigger pull per shot but with magazines enabling the user to fire hundreds of rounds in a minute).

He knows the difference, but appears intent on conflating the terms on purpose. Is he being purposefully deceptive? It would appear so.

The only person "guilty" in this shameful display of collapsed ethics is one Mr. Harold Evans, who commits the journalistic sin of deceiving and misleading his readers, massacring truth along the way.

Update—A Nepotistic Beast? As "happyfeet" points out in the comments, the head of the Daily Beast, Tina Brown is married to Harold Evans.

Will she chose to retract her husband's sloppy rant, or risk the integrity of her latest venture and her life's work as an editor, along with Barry Diller's investment in her leadership?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 02:40 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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By all accounts, there were 14 dead (including the shooter) and four wounded when police finally entered the American Civic Association in Binghampton, NY yesterday, at least an hour after a three-minute rampage had ended with the death of the shooter.

If autopsies determine that even one of the 13 victims died after the "golden hour" and could have been saved by police immediately entering the building and getting them medical care, instead of forming a perimeter and just waiting, then I hope the citizens if Binghampton call for Chief Joseph Zikuski's ouster.

Why do I have a CCH permit? Because when seconds count, police are just seconds 25 yards and several hours away.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:27 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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More information is already coming out about the man who went on a shooting spree inside the American Civic Association in Binghamton, NY today.

Jiverly Voong, 42, was a nationalized naturalized Vietnamese-American who has been in the United States for 28 years. He began his rampage at 10:31 AM, killing 13 others and himself by 10:33 AM. There is still some uncertainty about the number of people who were wounded during the shooting who are in area hospitals.

Voong is said to have used a pair of semi-automatic handguns in his assault, once chambered in 9mm and one chambered for 45 ACP (Kudos to the ABC News staff for using my rewrite of that paragraph to report the story more accurately; they had originally used a sentence that described the weapons used inaccurately as heavy caliber automatic pistols).

Police have no known motive for Voong's attack, but some media are suggesting that his recent layoff from IBM may have been part of the reason for the for the shooting. An account of last week's layoffs from WBNG suggests a thin motive for attacking the Civic Association:

Big Blue plans to layoff 5-thousand U.S. Employees today.

IBM headquarters has not responded to calls about whether there are cuts at the Endicott site.

Conrad says Alliance has been told layoffs are taking place in Global Business Services, Systems Technology Group, and Global Technology Services.

"We are hearing that these jobs will be eliminated here in the United States and the work shifted to India, China, Asia-Pacific and Latin America." says Conrad.

It is thin and perhaps irrational reasoning that would lead an immigrant to attack other immigrants for jobs that are leaving this country, if this was indeed Voong's motive. Sadly, that is all the motive we have at this time, and no motive could every justify such a senseless act.

I would caution Americans on the left not to use this senseless tragedy to push for more gun control (New York has restrictive gun laws that obviously failed here), just as I'd advise my fellow citizens on the middle and right not to blame the current or former Presidential Administrations for the recession that led to IBM's layoffs. Congress?

That's a point that may well be worth discussing...

Update: As they so often are, earlier media reports were wrong. Voong (formerly Wong) hated America, was obsessed with guns, and hated having poor English skills.

Illiteracy kills?

Zikuski said Wong was depressed about his poor English-speaking skills, which he was teased about, and his recent unemployment.

"He was terminated from his job at a place called Shop Vac, and he was very upset about that also," Zikuski said.

Zikuski told NBC's "Today" show that people "degraded and disrespected" the gunman over his inability to speak English well.

As a result, said Mayor Matthew Ryan on ABC's "Good Morning America," he was upset about his problems with the language.

This makes his decision to attack a room full of recent immigrants, many who we can assume also faced the challenge of adopting to a new language, even less understandable.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I've said before that the anti-gun forces in this country must lie about the horrors of firearms, because reality won't to stoke a level of fear that would convince the American people to give up their Constitutional rights.

An anti-gun lie being pushed hard recently is that 90 % of the guns used to commit violent crime in Mexico come from the United States. Democrats favoring more gun control have been hammering that claim repeatedly, claiming the violence in Mexico justifies further restrictions here in the United States.

That lie, favored by our media, our Attorney General, and our President, is now circling the drain.

There's just one problem with the 90 percent "statistic" and it's a big one:

It's just not true.

In fact, it's not even close. By all accounts, it's probably around 17 percent.

What's true, an ATF spokeswoman told FOXNews.com, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency's assistant director, "is that over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S."

But a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the U.S. for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S.

"Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market," Matt Allen, special agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told FOX News.

So where are the 83-percent of guns coming from, if they aren't coming from the United States?

Shockingly, cartels that exist to smuggle large quantities of illegal drugs internationally also have the ability to smuggle large quantities of illegal weapons internationally as well. Who knew?

Well, anyone with the slightest bit of integrity.

The super-majority of firearms that have turned up in the hands of Mexican cartels came from black market sources, Central and South American revolutions, are smuggled in from Asia, or come from deserters of the Mexican military.

We should hope that President Obama's administration, members of Congress, and media outlets that reported the 90-percent lie will be as honest as Fox News was, and put this myth to rest.

I have hope, but not expectations.

Update: An interesting take on Mexico's gun laws and gun culture from the inside.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:43 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Via The Gun Source:

That NFA laws have been repealed through a long standing court battle in the 7th US Circuit Court. The president of TGSCOM had sued the federal government on the grounds that the NFA law violated the Second Amendment of the Constitution. After heated and lengthy oral arguments, TGSCOM is now able to sell fully automatic weapons to the general public without tax stamps and the additional background check. The one stipulation to the agreement is that fully automatic rifles will be treated like handguns in that they will require a purchaser of 21 and older, the firearm must be transferred in the state of their residence (same as handguns) and that the buyer must submit to all regulations in the state of their residence.

I'd been watching this in the court system and had hoped for this outcome, but frankly was surprised TGSCOM prevailed in such a manner, and with so little fanfare. Since I'm a registered gun writer because of my work for Pajamas Media I was able to order a Glock 18 machine pistol during a writer's only sale last night. With spare 33 round magazines, it will probably become my new concealed carry pistol.

Once I saw up the money from the Obama stimulus, I'll also be picking up the 100-round G36K for "squirrel and rabbit hunting" and the FN M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) I've always wanted.

Frankly, I don't think I'd use it for hunting, but it might make parts of Durham accessible again.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:12 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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