David Codrea:

The prevalence of guns in the Philippines is complicating efforts to bring relief to survivors of Typhoon Haiyan, the diplomatic correspondent for The Daily Telegraph asserted yesterday.

[ … ]

He appears to be getting those numbers from GunPolicy.org, a project of the Sydney School of Public Health that “promotes the public health model of firearm injury prevention, as adopted by the United Nations Programme of Action on illicit small arms.” It’s hardly an endeavor sympathetic to private gun ownership, but nonetheless provides a useful resource for unwittingly showing the utter failure of globalist citizen disarmament edicts at living up to their promise of a safer world. And as with other countries this column has reported on that used the website as a resource, a summary of gun laws for the Philippines is instructive.

“The regulation of guns in the Philippines is categorised as restrictive,” the policy assessment reports, but adding “In the Philippines, private possession of handguns (pistols and revolvers) is permitted.”

That would seem to exclude rifles …

Read the rest of David’s piece.  When the report came out I looked at what they’re citing as the rate of gun ownership, and concluded that this couldn’t possibly be the cause of the problems.  The problem is that this is on the other side of the world, they should have evacuated people before the storm, and the government is inefficient (what government is efficient?).  Guns have nothing to do with it, or so I concluded.  It’s just another chance to bring up personal freedoms and stomp on them if they can.  Oh, and by the way, I disagree wholeheartedly with the idea of using what used to be the most effective and violent fighting force on earth, the United States Marines, for missions of benevolence.  We need to find another way to conduct relief efforts.

Kurt Hofmann:

LA Times columnist George Skelton nevertheless takes Governor Brown to task for not being anti-gun enough, because one of the vast number of models of rifle the vetoed bill would have banned is supposedly the one used in the LAX “gun free zone” killing. From the LA Times:

Not that it would have mattered for Gerardo Hernandez, 39, the TSA agent who was murdered. The bill would not have taken effect until Jan. 1. And Paul Anthony Ciancia, 23, the disgruntled, alleged assassin, could have kept his semiautomatic rifle by registering it.

And, yes, he also could have armed himself with a handgun and probably inflicted the same damage.

Yep–Skelton admits that the incident he is using to bolster his argument condemning Brown’s veto would not have turned out any differently if Brown had signed the bill …

Kurt is doing what he does best.  He’s undermining the arguments of the gun controllers by examining their inconsistencies.  Gun control, like control of everything else, doesn’t work.  A person bent on killing will always do it, even if he has to learn to fabricate the tool himself.  The Texas tower shooter, Charles Whitman, used primarily bolt action rifles to inflict most of his damage.  The best option is always deregulation, i.e., get rid of gun free zones.  Gun free zones are for killers and their protectors, the lawmakers.

On another front, I didn’t know that we have U.S. federal agents doing the bidding of the Polish government?  I guess they don’t have anything else to do.

Chris Christie:

“If you look at what we’ve done in New Jersey, we want to control violence,” Christie told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “And some of that may involve firearms, but a lot of it doesn’t.”

Just reminding you again of what we’ve already discussed.  Chris Christie is an anti-gun nut from way back.  There could almost be no better reason to stay home during the next presidential election than if the GOP were to nominate him for office.  There isn’t a dime’s worth a difference between Hillary Clinton and him.  The former is a cackling, collectivist, totalitarian control freak, the later is the same thing except with a loud mouth.

Here I discussed my good experience with Springfield Armory.  It looks like I’m not the only one.

Michael Bane has some interesting comments:

… we have been having a “dialog” about the role of firearms in American society at least as long as I’ve been alive. IMHO, the “dialog” ended when the war began.

Let me say this again…we are at war with a segment of society whose sole goal is total civilian disarmament. We are not in a dialog. We are not in a debate. We are not in a healthy give-and-take in the Cornell University academic lounge. The primary weapon used by our blood enemies is the Big Lie.

It works like this…our enemy states a Big Lie, and I could list dozens, and we run around like little bitty chickens with our heads cut off, marshaling our arguments, footnoting our learned responses, bullet pointing our facts…and after the whole charade is over the enemy repeats the Big Lie, the lapdog media reports it as truth, and WE LOSE AGAIN!

Look at the thoroughly discredited “a gun in the home is 43% more likely to harm rather than protect the homeowner.” Probably more words have been written debunking that fake piece of trash than all Shakespeare’s plays and the complete transcribed Wikipedia, yet 2 weeks ago I read it presented as gospel truth in a daily newspaper website.

During the fight on the Colorado gun laws earlier this year, thousands of us came with our carefully prepared remarks, charts, studies, bullet points, facts — real honest to goodness facts. Our blood enemies, most notably Michael Bloomberg, shipped in a parade of liars…heads of fake organizations created by Bloomberg, a presentation of “polls” that wouldn’t meet even the most basic rules for polling, etc. We had the “indisputable” facts; they had the Big Lie. Who won?

Hint: It wasn’t us.

Good points all around, Michael.  But then, I’m not sure sure about this from Michael!  By the way, concerning Metcalf’s position that I discussed here, I don’t back down one bit from my position that the state is the right level for regulation of any kind, including firearms.  Of course, that’s not to say that there should be onerous regulation of firearms even at the state level.  Recall our previous discussions where I have said the fight is at the level where the founders wanted it, i.e., near the people and not with a centralized government.  The state constitutions, all of them if I am not mistaken, recognize the right to bear arms, although Illinois was late to the game (and some states are stronger than others).  The corollary to my position, of course, is that all laws made at the federal level are unconstitutional.  All of them.  Every last one.  When the states are weak, voters need to fire the politicians and put in honest men.