Posts Tagged → control
Patriot News Article on Eastern Outdoors Show Cancellation
“The British didn’t understand Americans in 1776, and they don’t understand us in 2013″…my favorite quote ever.
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/02/assault_weapons_tactical_ban_b.html
Why I am against “gun control” in a nutshell
I am against “gun control” because it has no correlation with crime control.
Police are not required to protect individual citizens from harm, but rather to provide for the general peace.
So now we have government officials who want to remove my ability to defend myself. But they will not provide for my defense, nor will they be accountable for either failing to protect me, or for eliminating my ability to protect myself.
This is the definition of failed government. It is all about control, and nothing about serving the citizens that give it legitimacy.
This is the situation in England, where law-abiding citizens are disarmed, and self-defense is punishable and is actually often punished more harshly than the criminal act that initiated the defense.
British activist Piers Morgan pretends to be a journalist, but he is an advocate for policies that clearly violate America’s Constitution, a document created to protect Americans against people like Mr. Morgan.
That’s why I am against “gun control.”
Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show CANCELLED
Reed Expo (or Exhibitions) just announced that the Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show is being “postponed,” which means it is effectively cancelled.
Reed Expo is canceling because of the enormous boycott of the show over their new anti-Second Amendment policy. That boycott started with a call to me from one of the show’s vendors over ten days ago. I sent a statement which was rapidly shared across the sporting community, and the sportsmen’s community (PFSC, HUSH, WFE Foundation, NWTF) leapt into action. Before you knew it, Reed Expos was getting kicked in the teeth by hurt, angry American citizens. The betrayal was too much to bear.
Reed Expos is a British company. Britain was once a great nation, and the British were once a great people, but they have decided to disarm themselves and to criminalize self-defense. Failed gun control of every sort is de rigeur in England, and Reed Expos took the dubious but very British position of banning from the show the one gun that most symbolizes the Second Amendment: The AR-15.
That upset their core audience. That core audience just fought back. And wait until the breach-of-contract lawsuits start flying against Reed Expos. The company will probably lose tens of millions of dollars. They may go bankrupt. That would be their own fault, however, because at every step over the past two weeks, they were asked to reconsider their policy change. Neither vendors nor paying visitors wanted to miss the show. Reed Expos stuck to their guns, and has suffered the consequences.
Message to businesses: If you stand with us, we will stand with you. And if you stand against us, we will stand against you.
Next stop: Hollywood, the least principled, most hypocritical, most destructive location on Earth. It’s like that one place is the epicenter of a continual tidal wave of crap that splashes all over the planet. It’s time to financially punish empty-headed actors like Danny Glover, who profited enormously from using guns in his movies, but who now says that the Second Amendment was designed to protect slavery.
Three cheers to the American sportsman: You did it. You united. You had an effect. You should be proud of yourselves.
Josh’s Comments to Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show Promoter
Over the past ten days a brouhaha in the most unlikely place has been gathering force.
Ten days ago, Reed Expos, the promoter of the Eastern Sports & Outdoor Show, abruptly announced that “tactical firearms” would not be permitted at the 2013 ESOS.
The ESOS is held annually at the Pennsylvania Farm Show. It is the largest outdoor show in the country, and draws a million participants from around the nation. Hunting and fishing guides, ATV – trailer – and firearms manufacturers, clothing dealers, ammunition experts, trappers, land conservationists all gather for a week to promote, sell, entertain, teach, and transact on every aspect of the outdoors. If you hunt, fish or enjoy the outdoors, this is your show.
Reed Expos is reportedly not the easiest company to deal with in the best of times. “A one-way street” is how several vendors described them to me, emphasizing that the promoter’s short-term profits seem to trump all other considerations year after year.
When Reed Expos suddenly announced that AR-15s and similar firearms could not be displayed, most vendors felt not only betrayed in a time of political weakness, but that their own vendor contract had been unilaterally breached. When one of the bigger vendors approached me for help getting through to Reed Expos and trying to get them to change their new policy, I in turn reached out to Pennsylvania’s sporting leadership (below are the comments I sent to Reed Expo, eight days ago). The Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, WIld Turkey Federation, Hunters for Sunday Hunting, and the Wildlife for Everyone Foundation all leapt into action. For those political watchers wondering if the hunting community still has clout, feast your eyes on this: In just eight days, over 80 vendors have pulled out of the ESOS, including powerhouse Cabela’s.
Not many visitors are going to hand over ten dollars for entrance to a hall that is largely empty. The whole ESOS is now looking like a bust, sad to say. Every year my kids come with me to shop, talk, and talk shop with many vendors who have become personal friends. For example, John R. Johnson of Perry County is my custom knife maker, and every year I go to see him and his lovely wife, and pick up a beautiful, rugged new knife. One hall over is Cody Calls, makers of state-of-the-art turkey calls, a family-owned business. I get to talk with the Cody founders and the next generation, listening to their take on the changing world of outdoor sports. Cody Calls has given me expensive calls to give to new turkey hunters, who in turn take them home and become consummate woodsmen. These are all good, good people. The thought of missing all of them this year feels like losing an aunt or uncle; it’s just a little painful.
But boycotting the ESOS is the right thing to do. Reed Expos, if you won’t stand with us, then why should we stand with you?
January 13, 2013
Mr. Chris O’Hara, Public Outreach Coordinator
Reed Expos
Dear Mr. O’Hara,
Thank you for your time on the phone today. I am opposed to Reed Expo’s new policy of excluding semiautomatic rifles from the 2013 Eastern Sports and Outdoor Show here in Harrisburg, PA, scheduled for next month. As you requested, here is a recapitulation of our conversation:
1) Semi-automatic rifles are sporting arms by any standard or definition. AR-15s dominate the organized high-power target competitions across the nation. In many states AR-style rifles are legal for hunting small and large game. The same goes for other semi-automatic long arms and in some cases, semi-automatic pistols, like the .50 Caliber Desert Eagle. Semi-automatic shotguns are legal in all states for waterfowl. Gun prohibitionists make no distinction between semi-automatic rifles and semi-automatic shotguns; today they are trying to eliminate the rifles. If they are successful with those, they will next go for the shotguns. Reed Expos is buying into a false definition.
2) The Second Amendment to the Constitution has zero to do with hunting or target arms. Like all of the other rights in the Bill of Rights, it confers an individual right. Its intention in 1787 was, and remains today, to guarantee that citizens can belong to state-based militias to off-set the military power of the Federal government and that they can personally own the military-grade firearms necessary to make those militias effective. Today’s AR-15 and other similar semi-automatic rifles are basically the civilian version of the full automatic arms used by the military. Hunting and target shooting arms are naturally included in the Second Amendment, but they are not at its core, or its purpose. Civilians have owned military grade long arms and pistols since the beginning of our nation. We will continue to do so.
3) The Eastern Sports and Outdoor Show is and has been all about outdoor sports, including hunting and shooting. Your audience does not make the artificial distinction that you are making between one long arm and another long arm.
4) By excluding semi-automatic long arms at this desperate hour, when the enemies of liberty are doing everything possible to eradicate the Second Amendment, Reed Expos is abandoning its core consumers. Reed Expos is caving in on a symbolically powerful issue. Let me ask you: Who pays to enter the ESOS? Gun prohibitionists, or gun rights enthusiasts? Reed Expos is shooting itself in the foot, and damaging its relationship with its audience (not to mention the SHOT Show). If you do not stand with us, then why should we stand with you?
5) Every year our family goes to the ESOS. Living in Harrisburg makes it easy for us, and we also volunteer for some of the non-profit groups who have booths there. My three children have grown up with the ESOS. It is a big part of their year, marking the end of most hunting seasons and the beginning of fishing season. They buy new clothes and hats, see old friends, view equipment, etc. So, it is both upsetting and kind of edifying to hear that vendors are now discussing a boycott of the event, in order to communicate their displeasure with Reed Expos. To miss the ESOS would be my family’s personal loss; but to see your poor decision rewarded with the justified financial punishment of a boycott would be mighty rewarding.
Thank you for considering my comments,
Josh First
Harrisburg, PA
No Empty Words, Please
Talking with a gun-owning Democrat friend and then a gun-owning Republican friend on Friday, the subject in both phone calls centered on just how far this anti-Second Amendment effort is aimed.
My Democrat friend said that the Democrats don’t really want all of our guns and that they are already backing away from many of their toughest positions staked out two to three weeks ago. My Republican friend said not to count on the many non-voting gun owners for political support or actual resistance. Why, he asked, would a guy who has never voted in his life, freeloaded off the NRA and his local gun club to stand up for his interests, and rarely does anything for his community suddenly get politically active now? And just how far will that same guy go to resist unconstitutional gun bans and door-to-door confiscation?
Interesting stuff. A year ago this was the purview of the far right and conspiracy theorists. Now it is as real as the air that greets your lungs when you awaken in bed in the morning. And these two guys are both wrong.
First, I am convinced that most Democrats want every single gun taken away from private citizens. For example, a few years ago a local congressman, Joe Hoeffel (SP?), wrote legislation to aggressively control muzzleloading guns. You know, the kinds of guns your great-great-grandfather used in the Civil War and which pose their greatest threat to toes when these heavy art pieces are dropped from the unsuspecting hands that have foolishly removed them from their ancient mountings above the fireplace. Not exactly a public threat. But lots of people react against that greatest symbol of American freedom, and in fact, Congressman Hoeffel had plenty of support.
Second, I am convinced that my Republican friend is wrong, because I grew up in an extremely rural place, where everyone had guns, few people were politically active, and where a healthy suspicion of the government was endemic (and thus, not much time was invested in anything government). A lot of my neighbors, the closest being about half a mile away in any direction, were descended from those Scots-Irish tribesmen who had fled imperial Britain to find enough room to run a still and live unhampered in the 1700s New World. Their anti-government attitudes have always resulted in the toughest fighters, even if that isn’t evident at first or second glance.
Pushed hard enough, they too will be shooting out of their second story windows at government goon squads coming to confiscate their guns. Yes, yes, I know, I sound like a ‘fringe lunatic’ here.
Which brings me back to my Democrat friend. My response to him and to other Democrats who have perhaps foolishly engaged me in discussion about this topic in the past few weeks, including an avowedly liberal reporter from New York City, is this: You are not taking our guns. You’re just not. Anti gun laws have zero to do with crime control, and everything to do with government control.
Most people know me as a passionate conservationist, a birds-n-bunnies guy, a hunter who cares for the green woods, and that’s all true. I am a peaceful guy who just cannot shake certain aspects of my Quaker upbringing, no matter how hard I try. And if I am pushed hard enough, I will meet gun confiscation with armed resistance. Because to do anything else is an abdication of my Constitutional duties.
See, the Second Amendment guarantees the individual right to belong to an armed militia. Necessary to a free state, those local, grass roots, citizen-led militias were intended from the founding of our nation to be an active counterbalance to a centralized, national, federal army. Because political rights are only as good as the citizens’ ability to force change or resist tyranny, the Second Amendment is the one right that guarantees all the other rights in the Bill of Rights.
So go ahead, call me a radical, a nut, a whacko, an alarmist. I wear such appellations with pride in times like these. Someone once said something cute, like, extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice; by backing up the Second Amendment, we are backing up the entire Constitution, and if that is a vice in the eyes of a particular political party, then so be it.
I am standing my ground, proud, unwavering, no matter what illegal law is passed in America. I will not abide by it. I will dissent and I will resist. This love of liberty is a so-called vice that many otherwise quiet Americans will join. Trust me. I am an American, and I know.
Militia
Militia
By Josh First
January 3, 2013
[PHOTOS ARE COMING]
Along with other beautiful stained glass windows dedicated to free speech and religion, “Militia” is just another large, elaborate stained glass window in the Pennsylvania State Capitol building (photo above).
This window’s prominent place in the Capitol is no accident, as the free citizen militia were fundamental to being an American citizen, and formative in founding the nation. After all, it was a free citizen militia (photos below) that was so determined to hold on to their liberties (now yours) that they literally faced down the world’s greatest super power, shooting only when they saw the whites of their hardened enemy’s eyes.
Like the other rights in the Bill of Rights, belonging to the militia is an individual right. No central or national army can supplant it. It is the exact purpose of the citizen militia to act as a counterweight to a centralized army or National Guard. As the Second Amendment so clearly states, you can’t belong to a militia unless you are armed with a military-quality arm, that you own and keep in your possession, as the original militia did.
Militia is not the heavily regulated, structured, centralized Army or National Guard of today; well-regulated meant muster rolls were kept. Militia was always a grass roots, citizen-led counterbalance to national governments, whether of Britain or the new United States. Unless the National Guard reports only to the local citizens or state governors, then it is not the heir to or the modern representation of the founding militia. The militia were and must remain separate from the central (national) government and its standing army.
The Bill of Rights does not describe governmental rights. All ten of its amendments describe and reserve citizens’ individual rights and liberties, and set limits on government power. Who creates a “Bill of Rights” that grants the central government the “right” to make an army and disarm the citizens? The fact that Americans have owned firearms since the beginning demonstrates the clear intent of the Bill of Rights. Whether or not some of today’s Americans are aware of, or comfortable with some Constitutional rights and obligations, they exist nonetheless. This is who we are. It’ll take a Constitutional amendment to change the Second Amendment, if you don’t like it. And changing it could lead to a second civil war, because the Second Amendment guarantees all the other amendments, and, like the Revolutionary War militia, free citizens are still willing to fight for their liberties.
Let’s talk more about that supposed potential change to the Constitution.
Gun prohibitionists are now pursuing an orgy of unconstitutional laws that exponentially grow government intrusion and end citizenship as defined since the birth of America. Do gun prohibitionists and anti-gun politicians really believe that freedom-loving Americans will just roll over and “turn them all in,” as US Senator Dianne Feinstein so casually says? I guarantee you a massive, defiant, and probably violent dissenting reaction across the nation in response to such an effort, if not an outright armed rebellion. Political elites like Feinstein and their fellow urbanites have little contact with “fly-over country,” so they do not know, care, understand, or respect the views of their fellow citizens there.
Statists, like Feinstein, whose greatest goal is a big government involved in citizens’ lives from cradle to grave, are deaf and blind to the kind of vehement resistance now brewing among tens of millions of citizens. Many, many Americans feel and see the America they knew and loved being transformed into an unrecognizable juggernaut aimed at controlling citizens’ lives and erasing their liberties. Seething beneath the surface of daily life is an increasing, simmering frustration and mistrust. It’s one thing to beat them at the ballot box. It’s another thing altogether to aim to disarm them.
These citizens know that the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. The more the government does, the less the citizen can do. To them, government is a direct threat, not a solution.
Gun control already exists in overbearing quantity; new laws that would take away guns from law-abiding Americans are exactly the kinds of unconstitutional assaults on individual liberty that the Second Amendment was designed to repel and that the citizen militia was created to address. Using democracy to achieve undemocratic results has been the method of extremists from both Left and Right; with the latest wave of proposals, gun prohibitionists reveal their own extremism.
Draft resistors, anti-government dissenters, and assorted protests have been historic hallmarks of one part of the electorate. Will Second Amendment-rights activists have to carry their God-given guns on a Million Man March to Washington, DC, carrying today’s equivalent of the 1776-era military-grade musket, the AR-15, to get their point across?
Pro-abortion activists have long stated matter-of-factly that legally prohibiting abortion won’t end abortion, and that those who want one will seek it out, legal or not, safe or not. Well, folks, tens of millions of Americans are about to have that equivalent experience with their guns, taking them into the back alleys, yards, and woods, where they will have them, despite whatever the government may say. Such defiance is what created America. Let’s hope it doesn’t end up re-creating it.
Adam Lanza’s insane massacre of school children in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, is so painful, so emotionally scarring that I will never be the same person I was the day before it occurred. My three children are as gentle, innocent, defenseless, and precious to me as those children were to their parents, and the thought of losing mine or theirs in such a cruelly violent way is too much to contemplate. My heart aches for the Sandy Hook parents. My fury rises at the incompetent parole board that unleashed murderer William Spengler to murder again, this time the brave firefighters who rushed to douse his arsonist blaze in Webster, NY. Blame enough to go around, but the actual problem-solving is hard.
Let me try: Does Hollywood really have an unfettered, unaccountable right to use its power of suggestion to continually encourage cruel, unchecked violence across America? During the recent Benghazi debacle, weren’t we told that the First Amendment doesn’t necessarily confer a right to make a movie that might incite violence? Thus, if Hollywood wants to continue marketing sadistically happy murder carnage from Django Unchained and the equally moronic Gangster Squad, why don’t all movies and video games with a modern gun in them have to pay a 50% ‘violence mitigation fee’ on each ticket sold? Use that money to put armed guards in schools, gratis Quentin Tarantino and Sean Penn.
In sum, disarming innocent citizens will not succeed, at least not without forcing millions into long-neglected, perhaps forgotten, well-regulated militias to defend their rights. Using emotional crises to immediately demand sweeping new laws is irresponsible. Can cooler heads prevail? Let us hope and pray so.
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The Militia:
You, the citizen, are still the militia. America is yours.
Militia
“Militia” is an oval stained glass window in the Pennsylvania Capitol. Its prominent place is no accident. The militia were formative and fundamental to being American.
Anyone with an interest in the US Constitution and the Pennsylvania Constitution can look up what ‘militia’ means. All citizens are members of the various militias that have existed since our founding. All militias were mustered with the requirement that each member of the militia provide his own personally owned military grade long arm. The militia provided sufficient shot and powder for the coming engagement.
Whether or not Americans are aware or comfortable with the Constitutional requirements, they exist nonetheless. This is who we are.
Mr Obama, Mrs Feinstein, are you mustering us up?
Politicizing A Tragedy
Wasn’t it just a few months ago that people said we aren’t supposed to politically exploit tragedies? Wasn’t Mitt Romney excoriated by his political opponents for asking basic policy questions about the declaration of war and murderous assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya? So why now should these same exact people and politicians be trusted to lead us down the right path on the discussion about what happened at Sandy Hook?
Emotion is the wrong approach to policy solutions. But feelings and emotions have always been at the heart of liberalism, not rational thought or careful reason.
My heart aches for the Sandy Hook victims and their families, and as a parent of small children, I will never forget this event.
Sandy Hook
Today’s massacre of small children in their school at Sandy Hook, Connecticut, is an unimaginable horror. My heart and soul go out to the victims and their families. Gun control creates soft targets, and bad/ insane people pay no attention to legal restraints. Regulating guns more will have zero effect on the safety of places like Sandy Hook. It’s a debate for the period after grieving, and as a parent myself you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll argue for maximum protection. Again, the pain I feel about this event is indescribably bad and deep, and I wish I could console the families.