26 shootings reported over weekend in Chicago

Four were killed.

Meanwhile, here’s a comment on Reddit:

Also, 0 shootings at the White House over the last 7 years.

This country has it backwards.

Nice.

UPDATE: More here.

Confederate Yankee notes some of the leaders of th American Hunters and Shooters Association (AHSA), the supposedly pro-gun group with just endorsed Barack Obama as a gun friendly candidate, beginning with AHSA (and Kos diarist) president Ray Schoenke:

Schoenke, a failed Democratic candidate for governor of Maryland, has donated thousands to Handgun Control, Inc, a virulent anti-gun organization that was the forerunner of Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence. He has donated tens of thousands more to anti-gun Democratic politicians including Ted Kennedy.

AHSA executive director Robert Ricker has testified as a paid witness against the gun industry and consults for several anti-gun groups, and John Rosenthal, President of the AHSA Foundation, is a former member of Sarah Brady’s Handgun Control, Inc, and is leader of Stop Handgun Violence, a Massachusetts anti-gun group that has contributed to that state’s intolerant anti-gun guns.

Kevin at the Smallest Minority wasn’t fast enough.

And Jay at the Right to Bear Arms has more.

Caution: No running or shooting in pool area:

An off-duty New York City police detective’s gun accidentally went off yesterday inside Peekskill Middle School and the bullet shattered, with a tiny piece striking a woman by the pool.

No charges, of course.

David Codrea:

Assuming his finger did not press the trigger, he’s carrying around a service piece that discharges when jolted? Do these people not maintain their weapons? They don’t think that endangers the public?

And leaving it wadded up in his clothes unsecured on a bench where children are playing is not negligent?

Give me an effing break:

My guess is that a short conversation with the creator of this masterpiece would reveal that s/he suffers badly from most of these 13 characteristics that s/he assigned to a handgun as if it were a person.

Now what sort of crazy weapon have the Rooskies cooked up?

Guard Shoots Man In Run Over Attempt:

A security guard at an apartment complex parking lot shot and injured the driver of a vehicle who attempted to run him over, according to police.

Investigators said a Security Staffing Solutions guard became involved in the dispute with three men at the Lake Weston Pointe Apartments located at 2201 Lake Weston Drive on Monday night.

After the argument escalated, one of the men tried to back over the guard, a police report said.

A common point made by gun owners is that far more people are killed in cars than by guns, and the common comeback by the antis is that the deaths in cars are accidents.

Well, most of them, anyway.

Say Uncle on a piece by Arthur C. Brooks in the Wall Street Journal:

I knew gun owners spent a lot of money (guns aren’t cheap) but I was unaware that we were so darn happy.

UPDATE: Sebastian says “Happyness is a Warm Gun,” which was the Friday Night Video a few weeks back.

Well, I apparently hosed the whole site for Internet Explorer users at some point. I think I’ve got things a bit more readable now.

Comments remain a problem, and I’ve currently turned off the “rounded corners” while working on the comments. I think the script for the rounded corners is interfering with the script for the comments captcha and sign in somehow.

My apologies, for the technical difficulties.

It’s been so nice outside today, though, that you probably didn’t even notice. You were probably shooting, which is a lot more fun than sitting in front of a computer monitor, sucking down coffee, and making up new curse words after each unsuccessful rebuild.

At the SHOT Show in February I met Kyle Cassidy, and checked out his recent book Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes. It’s tough for me to critique photography in an artistic sense other than to say whether I like it or I don’t like it. In a nutshell, I like the photographs in this book.

The collection is a sometimes surprising cross section of gun owners in the United States, with a snippet about why they own guns. Seeing a wide range of regular (and a few not-quite-so regular) folks with their guns in their homes provides a lot of food for thought.

I conducted a quick email interview with Mr. Cassidy and his answers are both informative and thought provoking.

1. There is quite a wide range of gun owners portrayed in the book. Did you “try” to get a wide sample or did it just sort of turn out that way?

It mostly just turned out that way. I’ve come to suspect that the set of “gun owners” is a lot more diverse than most people think. We probably all have an idea of what a gun owner looks like. I found that there are people who are happy to identify themselves as owning a gun and there are people who don’t mention the fact that they do for one reason or another, maybe they don’t think it’s anybody’s business, or maybe they don’t shoot very much and it’s not a huge part of their lives…. So when you’re at a party and there’s a guy with an NRA hat on, you think “oh, that’s what gun owners look like” but there may be a dozen other people there who aren’t vocal about it and you don’t factor them into your idea of who gun owners are. I think I did a pretty good job at running into those other types of people because, for the most part, I wasn’t finding people at gun shows or places like that, where there might have been a bit more uniformity.

The way that I tried to diversify mostly was by changing my geography. Gun owners, and people in general, are different in Choudrant, Louisiana than they are in Seattle, Washington. And even from place to place in a state, gun owners in Philadelphia were different from gun owners in central PA. So, to some extent by saying “I’m going to spend X number of days in Wisconsin” I knew I was going to get people who represented the demographics of that area. There were some types of people I did actively court to greater or lesser degrees of success. I wanted someone who would represent the “I own a gun but I’m forbidden to have it with me” contingent, and I’d found a school teacher at a boarding school in New Jersey who kept his guns at his parents house because he wasn’t allowed to keep them on campus. I wanted to have him holding a photograph of his gun, but we just couldn’t work out timing. And I wanted someone who actually had a gun that local laws said they couldn’t have, because I think that’s an important part of the story. I offered to photograph anyone who wanted anonymously, but it’s a big leap of faith for someone to take. But apart from those I didn’t go out of my way to find particular types of people.

2. Did the gun owners write up the descriptions of the weapons?

For the most part though it was a bit of a hodge-podge. You’ll notice there are a couple times where the same gun isn’t listed the same way — I can’t think of an example off the top of my head, but there are a few, like one might say “Colt 1911″ and another might say “Colt .45″. Often people handed me a list of their guns that they’d written down, sometimes I’d write things down myself, and there were a couple of times where people just had no idea what kind of gun they had, so if it wasn’t something I was familiar with, I’d take a close-up of it and try and figure it out later.

Pretty much as soon as I had the manuscript in to the publisher the story broke on the Internet and we were getting bombarded by calls from the media, the people at Krause bumped it ahead in the production schedule to get it to press as soon as possible and the thing that suffered was conformity in gun identification. There aren’t many outright mistakes — the only one I can think of is a Lee Enfield that’s mis-identified as an M1, which is a big “ouch” but there were bound to be a few things that slipped by us.

3. With the exception of one which is difficult to make out, it appears that every person holding a gun has their finger clearly off the trigger. Was this always on their own? Or did you request it? If you requested it, was it for simple safety, or was it specifically for what you wanted in the book?

I decided right at the beginning that it wasn’t my job to be a range safety officer and as long as I was sure that I wasn’t going to get shot, or my assistant wasn’t going to get shot, it wasn’t my job to tell people to look responsible. I wanted to tell their stories and if that involved poor gun handling, that was part of the story. It just turned out that by and large, most people were careful, I got swept a couple of times but that’s probably par for the course when dealing with such a broad range of gun owners with varying degrees of familiarity with their guns. Some people were militant about safety, they opened chambers and showed me each gun was empty, and there were other people who weren’t as through.

4. Did you run into many situations where other members of the gun-owner’s family didn’t necessarily agree with the decision to own guns or appear in the book?
(more…)

Over at Sebastian’s:

There is no serious grass roots movement in this country for gun control. They can bring money to the table, they can bring media, but they can’t bring the most important thing; votes. I did not point out this thread on the HuffPo about Obama’s endorsement by AHSA. I wanted a chance to see how many gun control advocates actually turned out. The answer was, not many. Plenty of Obama and Democrat ra-ras, many of which were eagar to assure that Obama wouldn’t take away anyone’s guns, but very few people actually advocating for restrictions. And this is a site full of the exact demographic who should be most in favor of restricting guns. Where’s the passion? If it wasn’t for the anti-gun groups hold on the media, no one would pay attention to them.

I have no doubt that there are a fair number of folks who would claim that they favor current levels or increased levels of gun control. Particularly after a shooting incident has been headline news for a day or two. But, as Sebastian notes, they aren’t really any sort of movement. What organization they have is generally aimed at defusing the anti-gun positions of the politicians they support.

Contrast that with the grassroots movements dedicated to gun ownership, self-defense, concealed carry, recreational shooting, and hunting. There isn’t much in the way of a circle of anti-gunbloggers on the web, though a few dedicated antis seem to spend a lot of time on the pro-gunblogger sites making trouble in the comments sections.

Right now there are a number of grassroots movements in support of gun ownership and self-defense, though often they don’t overlap a whole lot. If the anti-gun lobby gains momentum (via a Democratic president, for instance) it will be important for the separate pro-gun groups to work together a bit more in order to hold the common enemy at bay.