Amid a new round of debate over gun control, Californians have already bought a record number of firearms in 2015, including major spikes in sales on Black Friday and the days after the San Bernardino attacks, an analysis of new federal and state data show.
Firearms purchases in California triggered 1.51 million federal background checks in the first 11 months of the year, breaking the previous annual record of 1.47 million set last year.
And December typically brings even more firearms purchases than any other month, whether for holiday gifts or getting ahead of new gun restrictions the new year might bring.
The gun dealers’ holiday season got off to a rousing start.
The newspaper interviews the head of a gun dealers trade group. And gets the standard book on the subject:
“Every single time the politicians start talking about firearms bans or increasing regulation, folks start to realize, ‘This is a right that if I don’t exercise it, I may lose it,’ “ said Craig DeLuz, spokesman for the California Association of Federal Firearms Licensees, a gun dealers’ trade group. “It’s not the sole motivator, but it’s a significant motivator.???
As he was shopping for some ammunition Saturday at San Jose’s new Bass Pro shop, longtime gun owner David Palava said the sales spike “is not hard to figure out.???
“Thirty years ago, guns were a hobby,??? said Palava, 62, of East San Jose. “Now they seem more necessary. … We have terrorists here being imported by our government.???
The government is the enemy.
And this is even as it has failed, or barely even tried, to do anything at the federal level on gun control. Insane booms in gun sales have occured at regular intervals and after every fresh massacre. The presidency of Barack Obama has also been fuel for increasing mass gun buys. Racism is the inspiration.
The other, the newspaper reads: “The number of background checks conducted each year in California — which fluctuated through the early to mid-2000s — has risen steadily each year since 2008, when President Barack Obama was elected and rhetoric about ‘gun-grabbing’ politicians began to fly in earnest.”
The newspaper asked the gun dealer, DeLuz, which California laws his trade group found “most egregious.”
These are “prohibiting concealed-carry permit holders from bringing guns into schools or onto college campuses; banning the sale of kits to convert legal magazines into high-capacity magazines; and increasing the period of time for which a person is prohibited from having a firearm because of a mental illness or threat of violence …”
“The Turner Diaries” is America’s premier piece of hate fiction. Published in 1978 by a white supremacist neo-Nazi for a large audience of white supremacist neo-Nazis, a lot of its eliminationist tone and philosophy, minus only the male romance fiction on dispatching all enemies, is noticeably mirrored presently in the Republican Party, the National Rifle Association and gun fanatics. Years ago, the book was often found at gun shows.
“The Turner Diaries” was literature for an underground white supremacy hate group. Today, the GOP, the NRA, gun fanatics, the American authoritarian right are a collectively large white supremacy hate group.
“Light the motherf**ker on fire,??? is the latest thing caught on videotape at a Trump rally yesterday.
“I would not only not piss on him if he was on fire—I’d throw gas on him.” said another raging white guy about the President, in a Frank Luntz focus group on the enthusiasm for the strongman.
“The Turner Diaries” tells the story of a violent overthrow of a “tyrannical” government and the mass revenge killings of black people who have been given advantage and positions over white men by a predatory government, according to the author.
However, lots of groups, races and classes are in for the deadly reckoning: Jews, any people of color, white people who marry or consort with any people of color, academics, elites, foreigners and, of course, government workers. The list of those marked for retribution and executed by the book’s freedom fighters basically encompasses everyone who isn’t Christian, white and a gun owner.
An excerpt:
All that brave talk by patriots, “The government will never take my guns away,” and then nothing but meek submission when it happened.
On the other hand, maybe we should be heartened by the fact that so many of us had guns then, nearly 18 months after the Cohen Act had outlawed all private ownership of firearms in the United States. It was only because so many of us defied the law and hid our weapons instead of turning them in that the government wasn’t able to act more harshly against us after the Gun Raids.
“The list of persons to be raided, it turned out, had been compiled primarily from firearms sales records which all gun dealers had been required to keep,” it continues.
Ten days after the San Bernardino shootings, thousands came to the Del Mar Fairgrounds to check out the latest deals on firearms and stand in line for discounted bulk ammunition.
While the shootings, which killed 14, were a common topic of discussion Saturday, there were a mix of interests and motivations at the Crossroads of the West Gun Show, which runs through Sunday. Some, like [a fellow from Poway], said recent talk of further gun restrictions from federal and state-level politicians following the San Bernardino shootings made them think now might be the time to buy.
“It definitely makes you wonder how long before it’s time to pick up and move because they’ve already infringed on so many of our constitutional rights,??? [the Poway fellow] said.
The Sheriff’s Department has reported an uptick in the number of applications for concealed weapons permits in recent weeks. A federal appeals court is still considering whether to open up concealed carry to all law-abiding citizens in the state …
[Another man from Pacific Beach] said many who come to the show are simply concerned with the trends they see in the world, from the ongoing drought to terrorist attacks at home and abroad…
“People are worried about having things taken away from them.”
We’re all renting space in Ted Nugent’s Land when it comes to guns. Most reasonable people probably gave up all hope of any change after Sandy Hook and 20 dead children brought about explosions in gun and ammunition sales. And even the the most trivial legislation to restrict deadly weapon ownership went down.
To be sure, Ted Nugent and people like him are a minority. Nugent is venomous, plainly psychotic during his waking hours and with views, on everything, not just gun ownership, deeply unpopular to a majority.
But his ilk: the gun nuts, the NRA, the extremists and small arms manufacturers are united and effective. They kill all debate immediately and cause all politicians to cringe and crumble before them. As a result, we are reduced to renting space in Ted Nugent Land. It only falls to us to endure it while the rest of the civilized world thinks “You’ve made yourselves into a collective of irredeemable assholes,” shrugs and moves on.
Regardless of the President’s disappointment and fury yesterday, or the calls to political action filling up your in-box, the only course of action after Sandy Hook failed to achieve anything was to give up. Slaughter is the norm.
In late August, just after the last public gun massacre (I think), the LA Times ran a story on why the US is the exceptional nation when it comes to gun slaughter.
It boils down to social and psychological studies of the character of the country. Americans are delusional about what they can expect for themselves, what they believe to be important and what “success” means. Briefly, they believe in fictions like the American dream, that they can have it all, and that fame and money are always within their reach. When most of it never pans out, it produces mental stressors that have to be lived with on a daily basis. Those with mental problems can crack.
Easy access to guns, the instantaneous nature of the American telecommunications infrastructure and the certainty that launching an armed assault on the public somewhere always leads to global (in)fame guarantees it.
America’s “gun culture” … is deeply rooted in the idea that broad gun-ownership is a bulwark against the emergence of tyranny. And those roots continue to lie close to the surface, he wrote: A national survey conducted in 2013 found that 65% of Americans believe that the purpose of their right to bear arms remains “to make sure that people are able to protect themselves from tyranny.”
Tyranny, a word that American usage has wrung all meaning from, now only signalling that the most appalling acts of bloodshed are acceptable and that everything else must come to a full stop.
How do you escape the tyranny of Ted Nugent Land? And will you wish you could shoot the first person you read or hear mentioning the word “heal” today (do it quickly because the next shooting is coming fast) or tomorrow? Rhetorical questions, obviously.
Late this week, Timothy Egan at the New York Times, wrote “Trump Is the Poison His Party Concocted.” I could also describe it in four words: the Ted Nugent vote.
They say he’s trashing the Republic brand. They say he’s “stirring up the crazies,??? in the words of Senator John McCain. But Trump is the brand, to a sizable degree. And the crazies have long flourished in the Republican media wing, where any amount of gaseous buffoonery goes unchallenged.
And now that the party can’t control him, Trump threatens to destroy its chances if he doesn’t get his way, running as an independent with unlimited wealth — a political suicide bomb.
Trump is a byproduct of all the toxic elements Republicans have thrown into their brew over the last decade or so — from birtherism to race-based hatred of immigrants, from nihilists who shut down government to elected officials who shout “You lie!??? at their commander in chief.
And for years, GOP pols have been proud to also be associated with the classic rock kleagle, Ted Nugent, the only celebrity musician I know that’s ever been investigated by the US Secret Service.
Nugent is the boiled-down essence of the angry extreme right-wing extremist, a nativist and public bigot who regularly puts down everyone unlike him, but reserving his fury primarily for the president, African Americans living in cities and the need to destroy the US government, which he calls Fedzilla. His enemies are all subhuman, bloodsucking punks and Chicago is “Chiraq,” downtown south Los Angeles a place that ought to be machine-gunned from a helicopter.
Ban all gun-free slaughter zones. Ban freedom-haters from public office by supporting and voting for those candidates who support freedom and common sense while punishing those who want to put their boots on the throat of freedom and common sense.
A week earlier he devoted his column to describing what a potential GOP president must be prepared to do:
Only those on dope fail to recognize how foolish those on dope look, sound, smell and act like braindead dopey morons.
The trick is to not be a braindead moron and stay off dope.
The only sheep dishonest enough to vote Democrat are the dopey sheep benefiting from the redistribution scam artists, thereby enslaving the sheep to further engineered dependency …
Job 1: Annihilate anybody and everybody who publicly declares hate or danger to America, Americans or our allies. Unleash the greatest military might upon them with a fury that is inescapable. No more playing “containment??? games. Wipe them out.
Next, end the scourge of bribing Americans and illegal invaders to be bloodsucking, nonproductive leaches [sic] riding on the backs of hardworking, sacrificing American families.
Secure the borders for God’s sake, and for the sake of a safe, excellent American America. Invaders must return home or face painful, extremely uncomfortable punishing jail time. Legal good, illegal bad. Know it, enforce it.
American America! The week before Nugent recommended Trump be given the Medal of Freedom, effectively endorsing him for President.
Like Trump, Ted Nugent is the Republican brand. He has been for years.
And if you’re curious as to what Ted Nugent looks like when his summer tour season is canceled, click here.
The purpose of this writing is to encourage as many readers as possible to create their own lifesaving children’s event to counterpunch the embarrassing self-inflicted scourge of political correctness that is on the fast track to further dumb-down more American children with such lies and scams as animal rights, anti-hunting and anti-gun propaganda flooding from the media, our government and academia nationwide.
As we have learned for 25 years, it does indeed take some serious effort and sacrifice, but I can assure you that there is nothing available in the world today that will spike kids’ attention like the discipline of the various shooting sports, the magic of trapping and taxidermy …
The constant libertarian assault on the radio, in newspapers, on the television, this drumbeat of anti-government discourse is an old story – but still very important for understanding the anarcho-liberal sensibility. Just tune in to AM radio late on a weekday evening and listen to the anti-government vitriol. It’s sort of wild.
Someone could do an interesting study, Ph.D., in unpacking the cultural history of all this. It is tempting to speculate that deindustrialization, having disempowered and made anxious many huge sections of the working class, opens the way for fantasies of empowerment. The anti-statist, rugged individualist common sense is also always simultaneously a fantasy of empowerment. White men are particularly vulnerable to these fantasies. The classic guy who calls into the batshit crazy, late night, right-wing talk radio show is a middle-aged White man. Listen closely to the rage and you hear fantasies of independence. In this rhetoric, guns and gun rights become an obviously phallic symbol of individual empowerment, agency, self worth, responsibility etc.
We need to drastically restructure the state. We need it mobilized and able to transform the economy.
But most importantly, we have to think about how all of this anti-state ideology is being stirred up with investments from elites.
Delete phrases like “anarcho-liberal sensibility” and it’s a decent encapsulation.
Or, in other words, the tribe and party of Ted Nugent.
Last Thursday, Nugent went on one of his standard pro-gun rants, presenting an illogical comparison as something built on common sense: Swimming pools kill more children than gun accidents. (If you don’t understand why it’s illogical, you’ve no business reading this blog. We haven’t the slightest thing in common.)
As a very young man I ran my town’s swimming pool for two summers and was second-in-command for two more. Ted Nugent is a despicable insult to the good people I worked with.
Without going into details, we occasionally acted quickly and with skill, as lifeguards, to ensure the summer afternoons of young children were safe and never unpleasant, no questions asked. Kids will be kids, you watch over them. And sometimes you fished them out of the water and put them on their towels until they were calmed. You told mom just to keep him or her out of the water for a while.
You lent them an arm so they could pull themselves in and continue playing. Or you stood there on the concrete edge, looking at them, giving them the confidence that just because they’ve suffered a snoot full, you’ve seen it and they’re not in trouble. Because you were there.
And the Pine Grove swimming pool was not a small pond. Half a million gallons with a two-story pump house, exceptional for a town of its size.
What does it have to do with guns?
To see the summer swimming experience fashioned into something worse than gun violence by some very public ninny is beyond hateful. Guns have one function. Killing, putting holes in things. Swimming and water recreation are something for everyone, a pleasure of the human as well as the animal condition.
In Nugent world, might as well write a piece about choking to death on food. Or all the people who die of flu because they aren’t immunized.
All allegedly much worse than accidental death from loose gun handling in the home.
The Big Lie about guns is that innocent kids are being gunned down or are accidentally shooting each other. Compared to drowning, gun-related deaths don’t even register.
The Big Lie is just that – a lie.
Indeed, some kids do die in gun-related deaths, mostly in the president’s old stomping grounds of Chicago. However, very few kids under the age of 10 die or are injured as a result of gun-related accidents.
The vast majority of teenagers who die as a result of guns are involved in gangs. They are punks, thugs and street rats …
Nugent is one of the popular voices of the batshit crazy white guy, now mainstreamed and in control of one political party.
Media Matters immediately pointed out that, as usual, Nugent has no grasp of what he’s ranting about:
According to a project of Everytown for Gun Safety, there have been at least 88 incidents just this year “in which a child 17 or under fired a gun unintentionally and someone was harmed as a result.” In 2013, the group documented at least 100 accidental shooting deaths of children aged 14 or younger. A Mother Jones report that examined the same time period found 84 fatal gun accidents involving children aged 12 and under, 64 of which involved a child pulling the trigger, killing themselves or someone else, which debunks Nugent’s claim that children are not “accidentally shooting each other.”
Indeed, one such shooting captured national headlines when a 5-year-old boy accidentally killed his 2-year-old sister in rural Kentucky with a rifle designed for children.
Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, recently looked at data from 2009 and found that 662 children aged 14 or under were hospitalized after being accidentally shot that year.
There is never a shred of humanity in anything written by Ted Nugent.
If it’s not enough to drag drowning in the summer into an article in defense of gun accidents, the language of Nazi Germany is also employed.
Hitler first wrote about “the big lie” in Mein Kampf. The Nazi leader accused Jews of telling “the big lie” to corrupt “the broad masses,” who he claimed “more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie.” The phrase is also associated with tactics used by chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
It’s hard to argue that accidental gun deaths involving children are not worth calling attention to, let alone that covering such tragedies is comparable to Nazi-style propaganda.
Yeah, it’s hard to argue. Still, it doesn’t matter. We live in a country where half of the political spectrum embraces senseless, patently offensive positions with no basis in reality.
On the other side of the coin, many in the not entirely batshit crazy parts of the country really do detest Ted Nugent. This is minor progress.
Liberals, Obama- and Hillary-lovers, Democrats, gun-controlniks, vegans and, one supposes, Jade Helm 15 operatives, beware: Rock musician/bow hunter/gun advocate/tea party favorite Ted Nugent takes the stage May 25 at the Waco Hippodrome in a solo show …
Funny, funny, funny.
The tickets aren’t selling: “About 180 tickets are left for the May 25 concert, including 12 VIP tickets, with about 140 tickets already sold.”
What do you think is the better deal, even in Waco?
A standard two six packs of cheap beer and a steak or Nugent playing the Star-Spangled Banner and telling people how he got to be a “political animal” for the sake of freedom and liberty?
[The GOP’s political message] is divorced from coherent policy. Take the central issue of inequality. Republicans like to say that the problem is disparity of opportunity, not disparity of wealth. But the two are increasingly one and the same, with federal budgets and inheritances playing a major role in both.
The Republican budget plans, for instance, obviously tilt the economic playing field in favor of the wealthy by cutting tax credits for the poor while leaving intact tax breaks for the wealthy.
Do you believe in the death tax? You know, stealing from families that have worked hard all their lives and created hard-earned savings, then thieves like you actually think you have the right to snatch it away from them.
If you truly want to know if a person is good or bad, simply ask them if they believe in the death tax. If they do, then they admit that they are thieves and reside solidly in the liability column of America. Case closed.
Until everybody does indeed earn and pay their fair share and we eliminate the legal thievery of the anti-American death tax, America will never be the best that we can be. The current system is actually bribing people to not produce.
It’s repeal the estate tax season, which means we are hearing all sorts of nonsense about how the tax forces people to sell their family farm or business. It should be self-evident that this is nonsense since no one owes a penny of tax on an estate worth less than $5.4 million …
But if you still think that families are losing their farms because of the tax, then it’s worth going back to an old NYT story by David Cay Johnston. Johnston called the American Farm Bureau, a major lobbyist against the tax, and asked to be put in contact with someone who had lost their farm due to the estate tax. The Farm Bureau could not produce a single family anywhere in the country who had lost their farm as a result of the tax.
In short, families do not lose farms or businesses due to the estate tax. They lose them because the next generation doesn’t feel like operating them. This is just one more story that politicians tell in order to justify reducing taxes on the very wealthy.
And from me. Sing it! I demand it. Are you people crazy? We got a hit single here! It should easily be over 1,000 plays (wow!) by now!
Hang around and notice Youtube’s autoplay feature lines up Atlas Shrugged, Part III, for your enjoyment.
I watched it. It recommends home schooling because public schools are crap. John Galt is tortured by the American president for not sharing his machine that makes electricity out of air. But he is freed by the libertarian rich people’s resistance movement, escapes and wins in the end. Dagny Taggart shoots an unarmed guard because he can’t decide to obey her fast enough. And Dagny and Francisco D’Anconia rejoice and hug on the waterfront on the news that her bridge has collapsed, presumably killing thousands!
The NRA exists so that regular freedom-loving Americans can carry guns to protect themselves. We all can’t be liberal elitists with our own armed security team, I was told. But while the NRA raged on about those liberal elitists with their own private security, the NRA VIPs were given armed security. Ted Nugent’s booth had three uniformed Metro Nashville Police officers standing guard, while multiple plain-clothed security guards stood closer to Nugent.
Nugent wasn’t the only VIP with security details. As I walked around the convention center, there were many with their own phalanx.
Nugent used his speech at the convention to talk about shooting Harry Reid.
Livin’ in America furnishes so many inspiring stories about how being a public disgrace is virtuous, your head will explode.
“I never smelled racism. I never heard of any racism except this celebration of divisiveness in the media, academia and by our own government. So when I hear the racism from a gun-running attorney journal and they side with an Al ‘Not So’ Sharpton racist mongrel, it breaks my heart because nowhere in the Nugent world, nowhere on tour, nowhere in my hunting camps, nowhere in the school activities or the charity activities, nowhere can I find racism except coming out of the White House!???
Only to these off the cliff denial cultists does “Hands up, don’t shoot??? make any sense, even though no one can site [sic — jesus, there’s no limit to the talent] an instance where a black man had his hands up and got shot by a white cop.
In the world of the racist race-baiting industry, no one will ever let facts get in the way of their scam …
And though each and every black life indeed matters to everyone I know, clearly they don’t merit a protest, an inquisition, a grand jury probe or the time of day …
Ol’ Uncle Contemptible, Ted Nugent, paid by Don Blankenship, at “Coalstock” in 2009.
This week Don Blankenship of Massey energy was indicted by the US government for his role in a calamitous explosion at one of his company’s coal mines in 2010.
The former chief executive of the company involved in the nation’s worst coal mine disaster in 40 years, in which 29 men died in West Virginia in 2010, was charged on Thursday with widespread violations of safety rules and deceiving federal inspectors.
Donald L. Blankenship, who formerly ran the Massey Energy Company, was indicted on four criminal counts by a federal grand jury in the Upper Big Branch disaster near Montcoal, W.Va.
Mr. Blankenship was accused of looking away from hundreds of safety violations “in order to produce more coal, avoid the costs of following safety laws, and make more money.???
IN 2009 Massey held the laughable “Coalstock,” a Labor Day celebration in West Virginia. The celebrity entertainment was Nugent and two other country artists, Hank Williams, Jr. and John Rich of Big & Rich.
From this blog, 2009 quote from Blankenship at “Coalstock:”
“Today was a good day for American workers past, present and future. This historic event brought tens of thousands of people together to show their support for the men and women whose hard work built this country and we were proud to welcome them …
“It is also about what our government is allowing others to do to American labor. Our government, environmental extremists, American corporations, and politicians on the right and the left are all endangering American labor.”
There is no better instance of [cognitive] erasure than the enormous rally held in West Virginia on Labor Day 2009 for the express purpose of announcing the solidarity between coal miners and the coal mine operators … The get together feature the protest favorites Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent and was presided over by Don Blankenship, the CEO of Massey Energy, a pollution-spewing strike-breaking mogul of the old school. Dressed in American flag clothing and boasting that the gathering had cost him “a million dollars or so??? Blankenship took the stage and declared he was there to “defend American labor because no one else will??? … Eight months after that rally, 29 workers in Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine were dead from a huge underground explosion … Now when we find a mine operator claiming that his own struggles against regulation are actually the struggles of mine workers — workers who are then killed because mine regulations are not properly observed .. we have stumbled upon a near perfect example of what the sociologists call “complete horseshit.??? The man’s ideas are so contrary to reality …
“The charges hold [Blankenship] personally responsible for … hundreds of safety violations in 28 months leading up to the explosion,” reads the Times.
If convicted Blankenship faces a prison sentence of up to thirty years.
Web error 500 — “internal server error” messages when accessing this blog are the consequence of a corporate hosting fault felt across its entire network. In other words, I can’t do anything about them but complain and have done so.
I am told, as have been many others, that engineers are working on the problem, which has now affected matters for about two weeks.
It is one of the reasons I haven’t posted much to the domain.
I’ve written about the extortion job America’s most beloved classic rock bigot pulls on those who get cold feet after booking him for their family-friendly events. And Nugent’s lawyers are now busy bag men, squeezing decent sums for nothing out of the six venues that canceled on him this summer due to bad publicity over his being … America’s most beloved classic rock bigot.
Controversial rocker Ted Nugent didn’t play a note at the Clark County Fair, but that didn’t prevent him from collecting a settlement worth $45,000 …
Nugent’s original contract called for him to be paid $61,500 for a show at the Clark County Fair.
The fair announced Nugent would be a performer in late April. Almost immediately, some residents expressed concern that Nugent, known for his right wing views and racy lyrics, was not a good fit for a family-friendly concert. A petition began circulating on the website MoveOn.org to have him taken off the bill.
Shortly after the petition hit the Internet, Fair Manager John Morrison announced Nugent’s gig had been canceled.
Nugent, the newspaper replied, promptly issued a threatening e-mail:
Nugent himself wrote an email to Morrison, in which he groused that people were spreading “hateful lies” and that his shows were the “ultimate PG13 family events.”
“I respectfully recommend you do the right thing to avoid a wasteful & ridiculous long drawn out legal action to finally get to the right thing” …
Nugent’s lawyers quickly filed a breach-of-contract suit.
The Columbian adds Nugent’s litigious history, mentioning he sued the Muskegon (Michigan) Summer Celebration for $80,000 after it dropped him from its bill due to “potentially offensive racist terms.”
A couple of years ago, this blog dealt with that event here.
Earlier this summer, the city of Longview, Texas, had to pay Nugent a $16,000 go-away fee just for backing out of negotiation with him after the townspeople decided they didn’t want him for a a show on the 4th of July.
Going forward, any middling city in the heartland offered a piece of Ted Nugent’s summer tour needs to be very careful in researching his history. Nugent successfully extracts significant cash pay-outs from those who back out of a gig with him after he creates a racist stink with his mouth that rebounds nationally as well as in the community.
Either make sure his contract is rewritten so that he can be dropped if his appearance or utterances in public bring shame, fall below community standards or are offensive to groups living in the area of the show or don’t book him at all.
The guy’s literally da bomb. A business transaction is just that and does not carry with it any guarantee clause for free speech.
