Back to Basics

Vice President Joe Biden will try to restart the dormant gun control push next week with an event to tout the administration’s progress in combatting gun violence.

The June 18 White House event will mark the first time Biden or President Barack Obama has held a public event on gun control since the Senate rejected expanded background checks for gun purchases April 17. . . .

But Biden apparently couldn’t wait until the 18th.  Democrats are trying to divide the Republican party on the issue by blaming two Senators for forcing the other Republicans to vote against.

“On the gun issue, I don’t care what your position is — I called 17 senators out, 9 of whom were Republicans. … Not one of offered an explanation on the merits of why they couldn’t vote for the background check. But almost to a person, they said, ‘I don’t want to take on Ted Cruz. I don’t want to take on Rand Paul. They’ll be in my district.’

“I actually said, ‘Are you kidding? These are two freshman,’” Biden said, according to the pool report.  . . .

Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg is trying to put more pressure on the few Democrats who voted against the new regulations.

Bloomberg is contacting more than 2,000 Democratic New York donors telling them not to give money to Sens. Max Baucus, Mark Begich, Mark Pryor and Heidi Heitkamp after they joined Republicans to block a bill expanding background checks on gun sales, POLITICO’s Mike Allen reports in Playbook. . . .

Of course, Baucus isn’t running for re-election and Heitkamp isn’t up again for 5 more years.

I get that researchers always want more money, but people have to take those desires with a grain of salt.  Just because researchers want more taxpayer money, doesn’t mean that it is really needed.  From the New York Times:

. . . President Obama has included $10 million for gun-related research in his 2014 budget, the first federal financing for the topic in years, and the panel’s chairman, Alan I. Leshner, said the report was a first step to deepen evidence about the public health implications of guns. The panel was assembled by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council at President Obama’s request.
“Policies are made on the basis of facts and values, and we are the facts people,” said Mr. Leshner, who is the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “We are trying to provide a tool for the country to address this very difficult issue more productively than it has been able to do in the past.”
Among the panel’s recommendations was a call for better data on guns. For example, there is no national count of how many guns there are in the country. And while federal law enforcement authorities, like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, gather data on specific guns, they track only those used in crimes, and often the details are not accessible to researchers. One database, the National Violent Death Reporting System, which compiles information on deaths from police departments and medical examiners’ offices, covers only about a third of the states. . . .

The problem is also that creating this data isn’t bias free.  The people who create it could have a political agenda and the concern is that the Obama administration could use political criteria on who they decide to give the money too.  The lopsided bias in terms of how this report was put together shows why we shouldn’t trust the Obama administration to look at these issues objectively.

A copy of the report is available here.  Here is what the study writes on concealed carry research:

It would be nice to get this data to look at.  To see what happens to the crime rate in these neighborhoods that are getting the guns.  It is interesting to me to see how Democrats say they support people being able to own guns and yet how they come out strongly against this program.  From Fox News:

. . . Strain’s northwest Houston community of Oak Forest is the first neighborhood in the country being trained and equipped by the Armed Citizen Project, a Houston nonprofit that is giving away free shotguns to single women and residents of neighborhoods with high crime rates.
While many cities have tried gun buy-backs and other tactics in the ongoing national debate on gun control, the nonprofit and its supporters say gun giveaways to responsible owners are actually a better way to deter crime. The organization, which plans to offer training classes in Dallas, San Antonio, and Tucson, Ariz., in the next few weeks, is working to expand its giveaways to 15 cities by the end of the year, including Chicago and New York.
But others in Houston, while expressing support for Second Amendment rights, question whether more guns will result in more gun-related deaths rather than less crime. . . .

What are the odds that an actress who is a strong Obama supporter would say: “anyone who comes for my guns will be shot in the face”?  I would think that the odds of that would be close to zero.  Given how much media coverage was given to Bloomberg over this threatening letter, where is the media coverage pointing out that the person who made this threat was an Obama supporter and unlikely to be pro-gun?  Note that this nutty Obama supporter also sent a letter to Obama.  From the New York Post on June 1st:

Guess, caring for her kids as authorities combed through her house, ripped her husband yesterday.

“He’s racist and hates Obama. Everyone knows that,” she said. . . .

Why won’t these news stories mention that another attack has occurred where guns are banned?  I would be happy if even a 10th of the news stories mentioned this simple fact.  From Fox News:

Authorities say a man with a semi-automatic rifle who killed at least four people and wounded several others Friday as he carried out a deadly rampage in Santa Monica before police shot him dead had planned the attack.
Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks said Saturday afternoon the gunman had 1,300 rounds of ammunition along with a duffel bag full of ammunition magazines and extra weaponry. . . .

At some point everyone has to understand the pattern here (see also here and of course more detail here and here).

Obama keeps saying that he doesn’t want to chill the media, but he is responsible for the chill that has already produced.  From Politico:

. . . In conversations with POLITICO, national security reporters and watchdogs said they already have seen increased caution from government sources following revelations that the DOJ had subpoenaed Associated Press reporters’ phone records and tracked the comings and goings of Fox News reporter James Rosen at the State Department. . . .

“I had one former intel officer say, ‘I hope you’re buying ‘burner’ phones for your sources,’ but I think he may have been pulling my leg,” said David Ignatius, the Washington Post’s national security columnist.

Reporters on the national security beat say it’s not the fear of being prosecuted by the DOJ that worries them – it’s the frightened silence of past trusted sources that could undermine the kind of investigative journalism that Obama was talking about.

Some formerly forthcoming sources have grown reluctant to return phone calls, even on unclassified matters, and, when they do talk, prefer in-person conversations that leave no phone logs, no emails, and no records of entering and leaving buildings, reporters and watchdogs said. . . .

From Peggy Noonan at the WSJ:

. . . The most compelling evidence of that is what happened to the National Organization for Marriage. Its chairman, John Eastman, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, and the tale he told was different from the now-familiar stories of harassment and abuse.

In March 2012, the organization, which argues the case for traditional marriage, found out its confidential tax information had been obtained by the Human Rights Campaign, one of its primary opponents in the marriage debate. The HRC put the leaked information on its website—including the names of NOM donors. NOM not only has the legal right to keep its donors’ names private, it has to, because when contributors’ names have been revealed in the past they have been harassed, boycotted and threatened. This is a free speech right, one the Supreme Court upheld in 1958 after the state of Alabama tried to compel the NAACP to surrender its membership list.

The NOM did a computer forensic investigation and determined that its leaked IRS information had come from within the IRS itself. . . .

In April 2012, the NOM asked the IRS for an investigation. The inspector general’s office gave them a complaint number. Soon they were in touch. Even though the leaked document bore internal IRS markings, the inspector general decided that maybe the document came from within the NOM. The NOM demonstrated that was not true.

For the next 14 months they heard nothing about an investigation. By August, 2012, NOM was filing Freedom of Information Act requests trying to find out if there was one. The IRS stonewalled. Their “latest nonresponse response,” said Mr. Eastman, claimed that the law prohibiting the disclosure of confidential tax returns also prevents disclosure of information about who disclosed them. Eastman called this “Orwellian.” He said that what NOM experienced “suggests that problems at the IRS are potentially far more serious” than the targeting of conservative organizations for scrutiny. . . .

From Peggy Noonan at the WSJ:

. . . The most compelling evidence of that is what happened to the National Organization for Marriage. Its chairman, John Eastman, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, and the tale he told was different from the now-familiar stories of harassment and abuse.

In March 2012, the organization, which argues the case for traditional marriage, found out its confidential tax information had been obtained by the Human Rights Campaign, one of its primary opponents in the marriage debate. The HRC put the leaked information on its website—including the names of NOM donors. NOM not only has the legal right to keep its donors’ names private, it has to, because when contributors’ names have been revealed in the past they have been harassed, boycotted and threatened. This is a free speech right, one the Supreme Court upheld in 1958 after the state of Alabama tried to compel the NAACP to surrender its membership list.

The NOM did a computer forensic investigation and determined that its leaked IRS information had come from within the IRS itself. . . .

In April 2012, the NOM asked the IRS for an investigation. The inspector general’s office gave them a complaint number. Soon they were in touch. Even though the leaked document bore internal IRS markings, the inspector general decided that maybe the document came from within the NOM. The NOM demonstrated that was not true.

For the next 14 months they heard nothing about an investigation. By August, 2012, NOM was filing Freedom of Information Act requests trying to find out if there was one. The IRS stonewalled. Their “latest nonresponse response,” said Mr. Eastman, claimed that the law prohibiting the disclosure of confidential tax returns also prevents disclosure of information about who disclosed them. Eastman called this “Orwellian.” He said that what NOM experienced “suggests that problems at the IRS are potentially far more serious” than the targeting of conservative organizations for scrutiny. . . .