The Austin-American Statesman is carrying an opinion piece by John Lott on the open carry bills in Texas.  It is subscription, but Mr. Lott also mirrors the entire commentary on the web site Crime Prevention Research Center (where he is president).  Mr. Lott felt the latitude to undercut the Austin-American Statesman by publishing the entire piece on his site, but I will only provide excerpts.

With well over 700,000 concealed handgun permit holders in Texas, there is a good chance that someone next you in a grocery store or restaurant is carrying a concealed handgun. But some are only satisfied if others actually know that they are carrying.  They think that by openly carrying guns they can make others comfortable with guns. They want to make a statement.

Texas lawmakers are now wrestling with the questions of campus carry and open carry. They couldn’t face a clearer choice between enhancing safety or making political statements.

Open carry advocates carry rifles because they can’t legally openly carry handguns. While no problems have occurred, simply handling a rifle as opposed to keeping a handgun in a holster, raises the risk that something might go wrong.

Open carry advocates have not been the best at public relations and they have scared some people. Much has been made of supposed gun bans by Starbucks, Jack in the Box, Chipotle, Wendy’s, Applebee’s, Chili’s and Sonic’s supposedly banning guns. In fact, these companies merely “respectfully request” that customers not openly carry guns. Passing an open carry law where proponents carried handguns, instead of rifles, would be less threatening and thus likely make it less of a PR issue.

Still, there is a more basic problem with open carry – it isn’t as effective in protecting people.

Criminals and terrorists can strike anywhere and at any time, that gives them a huge strategic advantage. When an attacker sees someone openly carrying a gun, they can either attack that person or wait for a more opportune moment. Alternatively, they can select another target.

Concealed carry makes attacks riskier. A killer can’t attack an auditorium in Texas without facing near-certain resistance. And, of course, an attacker has no idea who might be packing heat.

[ … ]

Open carry isn’t bad, but concealed carry is better. There are more important changes to be made. At $140, Texas has one of the highest permit fees in the US. Lower fees would increase the number of people who can protect others. It would especially help those who are most likely to be victims of violent crime — poor blacks living in high-crime urban areas.

If safety is the goal, let’s eliminate gun-free zones or lower permit fees. Open carry may make a political statement, but is that really the top priority?

In order fully to answer this, I have to point folks back to an article I wrote entitled Suburban Battle Rattle.  I didn’t write this to be silly, trivial or even tendentious.  I did it in order to get feedback from readers about what they do and how they approach this subject.

Mike Vanderboegh linked it, and one reader in particular put me on edge by saying this.

I would not recommend an ankle rig unless it was for your “third gun”. For years I worked plain clothes assignments as a DA Investigator. I was in some of the worst areas of SoCal. My duty weapon was a Glock 19 in a very secure DeSantis rig on my right hip. In my left front pants pocket was a S&W model 37 with a bobbed hammer in a Galco pocket rig. Extra mags were on my belt and in the left pocket of my sport coat, I kept an impact device, edged device, and a few other lightweight goodies.

If you have to evac and area in a hurry, ankle rigs will not only slow you down, they can loosen and start spinning around your ankle. Been there, done that.

The best weapon I had was the one between my two ears. Situational awareness and OODA techniques kept me in one piece until I was eligible to retire. H/T to Mr. Mike: I did not poke any wolverines in their nether regions unless I had a good plan in place and a secure method of egress.

” …ankle rigs will not only slow you down, they can loosen and start spinning around your ankle. Been there, done that.”  I don’t so much disagree with him, as dismiss it as bluster if he doesn’t back it all up by political action and other necessary things to force changes to both law and cultural norms to allow open carry.  Let me explain a bit and then I’ll get back to John Lott.

I’ve had my ankle rig swing around on me too, and beyond that, if I needed it quickly I am hampered by the location of the weapon and its being covered by my trousers.  But it’s one thing to complain about ankle rigs while you’re a LEO who can open carry, and quite another to work to change the situation for those of us who cannot open carry all of the time.

Even though my own home state is a traditional open carry state, I cannot open carry all of the time because of cultural norms.  Sometimes I am left with concealed carry IWB or ankle rig.  I find IWB carry obnoxious for a number of reasons, including but not limited to: (1) sweat and body oils rust and corrode your weapon, (2) it’s uncomfortable, and (3) you must use a small handgun or print your clothing.

With swollen knuckles due to my arthritis, I cannot efficiently handle small frame subcompacts (I do just fine with larger frame weapons).  So I am left with a large frame weapon which weighs too much and prints at my side.  I may as well use a rigger’s belt and open carry, which I find significantly more comfortable than IWB carry.  I’m saying all of this to suggest that Lott’s assertion that open carry is done in order to make a political statement is both insulting and ignorant.  When I open carry, I don’t do it to make any kind of statement.

But beyond being insulting and ignorant, Lott’s procedure is the same as he has used before, and it is as objectionable as it has always been.  As I’ve stated before:

“What happens to society at the macroscopic level is immaterial.  My rights involve me and my family, and don’t depend on being able to demonstrate that the general health effects in society are not a corollary to or adversely affected by the free exercise of them.  It’s insidious and even dangerous to argue gun rights as a part of crime prevention based on statistics because it presupposes what the social planners do, i.e., that I’m part of the collective.”  I object to John Lott’s procedure, and have stated frequently that I do not believe in the second amendment.  I believe in God.  The Almighty grants me the rights to be armed, and when the Almighty has spoken, it is eternal law for all men everywhere and in all ages and epochs.  See also Holding Human Rights Hostage To Favorable Statistical Outcomes, and Kurt Hoffman on the same subject.

And that’s the main problem with John Lott and his procedure.  If you need to, read his commentary above again, very carefully.  He doesn’t come right out and say he is opposed to the legalization of open carry, but he spends his entire time trying to prove that it is inferior to concealed carry, and ends with the question, is it “really a top priority?”

He is trying to talk the Texas legislators into letting the bills perish in committee.  It isn’t good enough for him to enable the practice of God-given rights.  It isn’t good enough for him to couple with other gun rights activists to press forward to the enjoyment of more freedom.  No, for some inexplicable reason he must work to undermine the gun rights community and be divisive and schismatic.  Being quiet isn’t good enough.  He must engage in chest pounding, blathering on in front of people about how much he knows.  As to how much he supposedly knows, I do Monte Carlo particle transport calculations, worrying over things like the first, second and third moments of a problem, sampling statistics, variance reduction and meeting the central limit theorem.  John Lott doesn’t impress me (with his anecdotal accounts in the distribution “tails”) any more than the VPC or Brady gun controllers.

Ironically, while various anti-gun groups such as the VPC attempt to use arguments like this to prohibit the practice of God-given rights by a subterfuge of worthless “statistics” they don’t really understand, John Lott attempts to do the very same thing under the guise of being safe and ensuring the best response to potential attackers.  He is more like the anti-gun crowd than he would be willing to admit.  It isn’t enough that we must do battle with the collectivists to ensure the free exercise of our rights.  We must also do battle with self-proclaimed gun rights advocates like John Lott.  Working to legalize open carry in Texas doesn’t change cultural norms, but it’s a starting point.  Those of us who favor such legalization will have to step over the “gun rights” activists to make this happen.

David Codrea:

Falling back on a tradition of deceptive hysteria in order to subvert gun rights, the Fourth Estate Fifth Columnists at The New York Times are scaring those who don’t know any better into thinking lawful concealed carriers represent a significant menace to society. Relying wholly on numbers compiled from internet searches of news accounts by the Violence Policy Center, Gray Lady readers are being convinced that people who believe in self-defense and the right to bear arms pose an unreasonable criminal threat to everyone else.

Yea, others are pushing this junk science too, and for the same reason.  Go to David’s article and do some of the very basic mathematics he requests.  Come back and tell me what you find?  Look folks, I’ve explained what I think about so-called “scientists” like this before.  Do your study, send it to a registered professional engineer for review, and let him put his PE seal on it where he legally liable for errors and omissions.  Then I’ll review it.  Until then, it’s nothing to me.  Putting Dr. or PhD with your name doesn’t impress me in the least.  PhDs are the ones who gave us the myth and lies of anthropogenic global warming.

Kurt Hofmann:

He said those who wanted high-capacity magazines were more interested in “arming against the government.”

All the scores of millions of us? Oddly, Murphy did not bother to address some rather glaring exemptions to the ban–the usual, military, law enforcement, and retired law enforcement. So is there some need for these people to be “arming against the government”?

Murphy is frightened of a well armed American citizenry. This is very good news. Those who would presume to govern a free people should be mortally afraid of the wrath of the people whose rights they threaten.

Right.  What exactly does he think the second amendment is for anyway?  Well, a blind squirrel does find a nut from time to time.  In this case, Murphy is both the blind squirrel and the nut, and always has been.  Hey, that 1911 at the top of the article is a double stack 1911 if I am not mistaken.  Hmm … good juxtaposition given the subject Kurt, but I have to say, I just don’t know what to think of such an oddball thing.  A double stack 1911?  John Moses Browning frowns from heaven.

See this comment by Mike Vanderboegh.  This one is worth reading.  I leave comments and send letters too, most of them not worthy of posting (only on rare occasion have I posted comments on other sites).

NBC10.com:

A Pennsylvania state police corporal was arrested Tuesday on reckless endangerment charges in a firearms training accident that claimed the life of a state trooper.

Cpl. Richard Schroeter, 43, was conducting a training session Sept. 30 and pulled the trigger on his firearm while discussing the weapon’s mechanism, prosecutors said. The gun discharged, killing 26-year-old Trooper David Kedra.

Military.com:

U.S. Embassy Marines in Yemen handed over their M-9 pistols and M-4 carbines before evacuating the chaotic country with diplomatic personnel, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

The Marines also left behind several vehicles at the airport in the capital city of Sanaa before departing on a civilian flight, said Army Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman.

Warren said the Marines destroyed their machine guns and other crew-served weapons before leaving the Embassy for the airport. He also said that it was unclear who now had custody of the weapons and vehicles that were surrendered.

A Marine spokesman could not immediately say whether the surrender of weapons by Embassy Marines in an evacuation was unprecedented.

[ … ]

Warren also could not say why a civilian charter flight was used rather than military aircraft for the evacuation. He suggested that the handover of weapons may have resulted from international rules barring weapons on a civilian flight.

And another report from Marine Corps Times:

“No Marines handed over a functional weapon to anybody,” the official said.

Each weapon was made inoperable before the Marines’ departure, the official said. It was not clear, he said, whether the Marines damaged the weapons’ barrels, removed rifle bolts, or taken other steps to render them unusable.

The Marine Corps Times is just painting a happy face on the sorry event.  The Pentagon “official” is incorrect to suggest that because it was a commercial charter flight firearms weren’t allowed.  My own son departed from Cherry Point bound for Iraq with his firearms in hand aboard a commercial chartered flight, as did the rest of the 2/6 Marine Corps.

This is a sad, sorry, horrible, embarrassing, shameful episode in Marine Corps History.  I ashamed for them.  What on earth has happened to America’s 911 fighting force?

David Codrea:

In a huge victory for supporters of gun rights, the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas Fort Worth Division issued a ruling Wednesday declaring the federal ban on interstate transfers of handguns unconstitutional. The 28-page opinion in the case of Frederic Russell Mance, Jr. against Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive Director B. Todd Jones was signed by United States District Judge Reed O’Connor.

Read the rest of David’s summary and analysis of it.  I have two comments.  The first is fairly wonkish, but I’ll go ahead and present it anyway.  I read the entire opinion.  The judgment cites the example of long guns being able to be sold across state lines, and doesn’t note any further stipulations on those sales.  In fact if I am not mistaken, current regulations stipulate that long guns may only be sold across state lines in adjoining states.  Of course that regulation is ridiculous just as the ban on handgun sales across state lines is also ridiculous, but I’m only noting what I understand to be current regulation.  Second, this is a very strong and good opinion.  We’ll have to see if it holds up on appeal.  I suspect that a more progressive court will reverse this judgment.

Kurt Hofmann:

This, by the way, is hardly a new position for Bloomberg, although this might be the most baldly he has articulated it. As NYC’s mayor, Bloomberg presided over the NYPD’s explosive expansion of “stop-and-frisk” policies, whereby the Fourth Amendment rights of the people were contingent on them not being young, male, and African-American or Hispanic.

Kurt makes a very good point.  Bloomberg was a racist before this episode.  As for the stop and frisk policy, the SCOTUS approval of “stop and identify” was certainly a heinous part of their history.  Perhaps their shame will follow them beyond the grave.  One can only hope.

Mike Vanderboegh:

I have a challenge for Dr. Gottlieb and his Igor Workman: Why don’t we get together at the NRA Convention, somewhere off venue of course, and debate these issues? If your case is so strong and ours is so weak, what do you have to lose? Let’s see how your strawman arguments stand up to facts and searching examination of opposing argument.

I’d like to debate them too.  Don’t hold your breath Mike.

Portland Tribune:

A handful of Oregon Episcopal School 12th grade students will ask Portland’s City Council on Wednesday to adopt a strict gun control measure.

It’s part of a semester-long class research project on engaged citizenship, says Mike Gwaltney, chairman of the OES History Department and a teacher at the Raleigh Hills school on Southwest Nicol Road.

During the council’s Wednesday morning meeting, OES students Maddie Mosscrop, Elizabeth Keeney, Zach Solomon, Rowan Berridge, Nut Cheepsongsuk, Meredith Loy, Teddy Morrissette, Jackson Thomas, Peter Graham and Chelsea Choi, will propose that the city adopt an ordinance banning the manufacture or sale of “assault weapons” and large-capacity magazines for semi-automatic weapons …

Portland Mayor Charlie Hales, who has advocated for stricter gun safety laws, in January 2013 signed on to a statement of principles endorsed by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a national group formed in the wake of the December 2012 shootings at Clackamas Town Center and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Hales proposed requiring criminal background checks for all gun sales, banning “military-style” assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines and making gun trafficking a federal crime.

The OES students’ measure is modeled on similar ordinances adopted by Sunnyvale, Calif., Highland Park, Ill., and Washington, D.C. It’s also an extension of ordinances adopted by Portland’s city commissioners in December 2010.

[ … ]

The students’ proposal comes on the heels of a plan by U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer announced Monday to treat gun safety like automobiles and tobacco use.

Blumenauer, a Democrat representing Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District, outlined his proposal during a Feb. 9 press conference with the introduction of a new report, ‘Enough Is Enough.’

Blumenauer plans to turn the report’s nine proposals into federal legislation later this year. The proposals are based on the federal government’s response to automobile safety and reduction of tobacco use “two significant public safety challenges where the government responded in ways that dramatically reduced injury and death, success came from defining the problem, identifying risk factors, testing prevention strategies, and ensuring widespread adoption of effective solutions,” Blumenauer said Monday in Portland …

Among Blumenauer’s proposals:

• Closing the private sale loophole so no guns could not be sold without a background check.

• Improve the mental health system so some people with mental illnesses cannot get guns.

• Authorize and increase research on ways to prevent gun violence.

• Limit access to “the most dangerous weapons.”

• Include firearms in the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Act.

If you read Blumenauer’s report – and I have – you will find a veritable orgy of government control over every aspect of your rights, from giving the government bureaucrats control over the design, testing, sale and manufacture of guns, to involvement of the CDC and other health professionals in whether any one individual or class of individuals should be allowed to have weapons, to prohibition of certain types of weapons and magazines, to ending what they call the “private sale loophole” (see page 11).  It’s a collectivist’s wet dream of government regulation and control.

Now, this won’t get passed in either the House or Senate.  I have come to believe that this isn’t the point of the report.  This “protest” by the school children (probably all orchestrated by their collectivist teachers) was timed to begin with the push for federal legislation, which won’t pass but that fact will be used to pressure local officials because “we can do something even Congress can’t.”

Money will eventually flow into Oregon from Bloomberg and Gates if it hasn’t already started.  The new paradigm for gun control efforts is the state level, not the federal level (where they will lose) or the local level (where preemption laws turn their efforts to waste).

This serves as a warning to all readers in Oregon.  Saddle up your horses now.  Get you bedroll ready, strap it on to the saddle, get some oats, salted pork, and horse feed.  Grab your oilskin coat.  Get your carbine and pistols ready, clean them, and get your ammunition.  Hit the trail now, your posse is needed.  It will be a long time before you sleep.

Get busy immediately or you will be the next in line after Washington’s I-594.  The evil one has designs on your soul.  You’re in the fight of your life.  It has already begun while you were sleeping.

Ned Weatherby:

SWATting prank terrorizes family:

ST. CLOUD, Minn. — Josh Peters knew what was happening the instant he heard his mother’s frantic voice.

It was around 1 a.m. on Feb. 4, and Peters, 27, was hosting an online stream as he played a video game, “Clash of Clans.” Peters makes a living as “Koopatroopa787,” the host of a channel on the website Twitch.tv, where more than 50,000 gamers watch him play and interact with him.

He had noise-canceling headphones on, so he only barely heard the commotion upstairs, hurried footsteps to the basement, and his mom shouting to him that the police were at the house. But Peters, who returned from a tour of duty with the Air Force in Kuwait last November, stayed calm and paused his stream. He knew why they were there.

“Right away, I knew I was being swatted,” he said.

St. Cloud police had received an anonymous call reporting an active shooter incident with a woman’s life in danger at Peters’ address, according to Lieutenant Jeff Oxton. It’s called “swatting,” and is a prank growing more common in the gaming community. Oxton said this was not the first swatting call St. Cloud police have responded to. Peters had heard of it happening to plenty of others, but never imagined he would be the target.

Kristin Darnall, Peters’ mother, was asleep when she heard pounding on the door. She looked out the window and saw police lights flashing. She went downstairs and saw through a window on the door several officers with weapons drawn.

Her husband came downstairs to let the officers in, but when he reached to undo the complex lock on the door, police yelled at him to keep his hands in the air. Peters was upstairs by this point. When the door was finally opened, Darnall said, police threw her husband and Josh to the floor. She stood with her back pressed against the wall, trying to ask what was happening … Oxton said police have to respond to these types of calls as if they are real.

Darnall said her 10-year old son, in the days since the incident, had suffered a migraine, had been play-acting the scenario with Nerf guns, and had woken with “night terrors.”

Police pull weapons on six year old autistic boy:

A Jackson couple says Ridgeland police pointed a weapon at their 6-year-old autistic son while serving a warrant on a family member in the home.

Paul and Angela Thompson Roby told WLBT that Ridgeland officers arrived in an unmarked car at a home owned by Angela Roby’s mother on Brisbane Lane. They were looking for Carneigio Gray, 23, who is Angela Roby’s brother.

Ridgeland spokesman Lt. John Neal said officers had received information that Gray, who has an outstanding warrant for contempt of court for failure to appear on a three-year-old paraphernalia charge, was staying in that house. When they entered the home, he resisted arrest.

That’s when the Robys said their son asked officers not to hurt his uncle. They told WLBT that officers then drew their weapons on the child.

DEA agent shot in pre-dawn “drug raid”:

COLUMBIA, SC — A criminal trial expected to be closely watched by law enforcement and gun owners around South Carolina opens Monday in federal court in Columbia.

At issue: whether Joel Robinson, 32, is guilty of a crime for shootinga DEA agent in the first few seconds of a surprise federal law enforcement raid last October at his Orangeburg house.

Agents expected to find a cache of drugs, but a search of the premises found nothing but a small amount of marijuana for recreational use, according to legal records in the case.

Robinson is expected to claim self-defense, saying he did what any citizen would have in assuming he was the target of a home invasion – grabbing a gun and firing a half-dozen shots in the direction of those he assumed were home invaders.

But the person struck by a Robinson bullet was DEA agent Barry Wilson, one of more than a dozen law officers surrounding the house. The bullet broke bones in Wilson’s right elbow and forearm. His recovery likely will take more than a year and he is expected to lose some use of that arm, according to testimony in a pretrial hearing.

During the trial, the prosecution is expected to claim that law officers on the scene announced themselves loudly, initiated flashing blue lights and sirens as they broke a side window in the house, and that, in any case, it is against the law to shoot a federal law officer in the performance of his official duties.

In the first case, the only real danger that night was from cops who pointed weapons at innocent people.  No muzzle discipline is characteristic of this kind of tactic, and if this kind of lack of self restraint occurred on any range we regularly visit, most of us would beat the hell out of the perpetrator(s), or at least disarm them and make it clear they were never invited back.

In the second case, what is there really to say, except that the autistic boy was probably about as dangerous as the 95 year old man who was shot to death by cops in a nursing home.

These aren’t even all of the instances of such tactics, just three of the more prominent and recent.  It’s as if reporting of this gruesome tactic is becoming dull and tedious.  But in spite of the poor little autistic boy who was probably scared to death and certainly didn’t need this terror, the most legally interesting is the last one.

The salient observation here is that it is illegal to shoot a cop in the performance of his duty.  And note that his “duty” is anything they want it to be, including home invasions in the middle of the night (with the cops looking like gang hoodlums with their faces covered) where the victim knows nothing about the event except that he and his family are in danger.

What this does – the notion that we cannot shoot home invaders for fear that we will shoot a cop in the performance of his duty, even if it is a wrong address raid – is effectively disarm innocent people.  You can have all of the guns and ammunition you want, but if you can be hauled before court at any time for using them to defend your home, you may as well have nothing unless you’re willing to shoot back and accept the consequences.  It’s almost as if this is all designed to create a passive class of sheep, no?

A man’s home is his castle … indeed!

The Aspen Times:

Bloomberg claimed that 95 percent of murders fall into a specific category: male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25. Cities need to get guns out of this group’s hands and keep them alive, he said.

“These kids think they’re going to get killed anyway because all their friends are getting killed,” Bloomberg said. “They just don’t have any long-term focus or anything. It’s a joke to have a gun. It’s a joke to pull a trigger.”

At one point, the former mayor brought up New York City’s stop-and-frisk practices, which gained national attention in 2011. Bloomberg said that during his last year in office, a minister at a Baptist church in Harlem invited him to speak.

“While I’m sitting there waiting for him to introduce me, he said to his congregation, ‘You know, if every one of you stopped and frisked your kid before they went out at night, the mayor wouldn’t have to do it,’” Bloomberg said. “And so I knew I was going to be okay with that audience.”

Well, this is just rich, isn’t it?  The state is acting as mommies, or daddies, in place of the non-existent mommies or daddies (can you say in loco parentis?).  What a hell the progressives have created for the black man and themselves!  They have pressed for policies that impoverish the black man and make him dependent upon government largesse, incentivizing fatherless families, and then step in to act as the parent.

And take note that this, in the view of the collectivist, is the rightful place of the state.  Add to this the fact that progressives are racists, and you have a witches brew of ugliness for the inner cities that usually displays itself in crime against the middle class, the militarization of police, and class animosity.

Bloomberg doesn’t want those horrible black boys to have guns, any more than he wants them to have a father.  And all Jim Crow gun laws – such as in my own state where CLEOs get to make the final call on gun permits – are in place to keep those “horrible Negros” from getting their hands on guns.

Bloomberg is a racist.  It’s nice that he openly admitted it rather than us having to drag it out of him.  But in order to appear that he isn’t, his proposed gun laws (like I-594 in Washington and so-called “assault weapons ban”) hits only law abiding citizens.  Or in other words, the innocent and law abiding suffer for the sake of the special class of people he is trying to redeem.  In Bloomberg’s view, the state has a salvific role in the policies it implements, and everyone must make atonement for the sins of a few.

Inquisitr.com:

Hoping to get attention by being placed under arrest, about 50 pro-gun advocates gathered at the Washington State Capitol building on Saturday morning. They were protesting the decision against allowing guns to be openly carried into the Legislature’s viewing gallery. However, the doors to the gallery were kept locked by the Washington State Patrol after the capitol was opened to the public at 11 a.m.

 As reported by Yahoo! News, the pro-gun protesters, which included two state legislators, marched down the hallway of the building and were prepared to knock on the gallery’s door and the door of Jay Inslee, the Governor of Washington. There were no arrests and no reports of disturbances …

This is emblematic of the bad reporting on the event.  They wanted to send a message, tell the legislators where the line was, and that it had been crossed many times over.  They wanted to demonstrate that this isn’t over – far from it – and that they will not stand for more infringements.  To the contrary, the very ones they illustrated had better be reversed.  Mike Vanderboegh – shown above – gives us a better report.

Briefly told, we gathered on the portico of the building waiting for the rotunda doors to be unlocked, chatted as people gathered (I gave the prefatory talk that is captured in the video post earlier) and then we had the speeches. I thought that the legislator’s speeches were particularly good and WA state is very lucky to have such principled folks representing them. When the doors opened, we trooped in, armed, and went to the gallery doors, which as we had learned the night before were going to be locked. They were. In a spontaneous moment, and I know this to have been completely unscripted, people approached the door and knocked on it, some asking in loud voices to be let in. As they did so, one little girl emulated the adults and went to door and knocked, crying out “Let Freedom in!” I hope that the designated videographer got that moment, because if so it will likely go viral. The protestors, like Martin Luther and his Theses, affixed their petition for redress of grievances to the doors of the gallery and those of the Governor’s office in the Capitol building. We then marched to the mansion where a very nervous gate guard accepted another copy for the Governor. The gesture, and the optics, were striking.

There is more in Mike’s report.  How utterly cowardly.  They passed a law that they now do not now want to enforce, and so rather than doing the hard business of enforcing it or otherwise reversing it, they simply kicked the can down the road and obviated the need for a decision at the moment.  What a bunch of worms.

David Codrea weighs in.

Much is being made of Mike Vanderboegh calling an unsafe demonstrator a “moron” in a preliminary talk he gave before his main speech yesterday at the Washington State Capitol in Olympia. Contrary to some of the arguments being made, using that term for someone who ignored specific gun handling cautions is not equivalent to others who have invoked the word “extremist” …

[ … ]

We’ve moved into new territory, or more precisely, been moved into it whether we want to go or not. And the only thing those who disagree with such direct tactics can do about it is side with the antis, the same people who would call them extremists.

Another argument is the pile-on by anti-gun readers and “reasonable” gun owners in comments to press accounts.It should not be a surprise most of those condemn Saturday’s actions. Most gun owners probably will too, at least for now. The defiant ones don’t call themselves Three Percenters for nothing.

There were plenty of good people in 1771, those objecting to heavy-handed disregard of their rights, but still trying to work the system, who thought the similar-sized handful of impatient and angry people throwing tea into Boston Harbor were radical extremists who hurt the cause, and made them all look bad. But looking back, it’s doubtful public sentiment could have been galvanized without such “impatient” patriots setting the necessary tone though actions many disapproved of. And today’s protesters haven’t even approached that level of defiance and resistance — yet.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I believe disparaging and dismissing what we saw yesterday will not serve those doing so well, especially since there is nothing you or I can do about dissuading further such demonstrations.

I have weighed in before on the issue of muzzle discipline among anyone whom I am around.  There is no need for me to do that again.  You point your gun at me and we’re going to tangle.  Regarding working the system to which David refers, I really don’t have a problem with that.  That’s why if any party out there can field a candidate who is worthy of my vote, I’ll go to the trouble to cast it for that man.  I will also engage in political action, send notes, make calls, and engage in protests as I deem appropriate.  Some of my open carry in North Carolina has to do with just that, since I could be arrested for “going armed to the terror of the public.”

What I have a problem with is compromise while “working the system.”  That, my friends, you do not have a right to.  When you speak for the gun community, you speak for a large, non-monolithic group of men and women, many of whom do not acquiesce to your compromises.  If you “work the system,” you can only work towards less restrictive laws and regulations, not more.  There is nothing about my God-given rights that is open to your consideration for negotiating capital.  Do you understand?

Here is Mike’s speech.