All posts by Claire Wolfe

Poll, Uncategorized

Poll: How will gun owners’ legal status change in the next five years?

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This week’s poll requires no explanation. It simply asks how (or whether) the legal status of guns and gun owners will change in the next five years.

Of course, there’s really nothing simple about that question. But polish up your crystal ball and tell us what you see. You can give details in comments.

Oh, and if you don’t personally care about the legal status of guns and gun owners because your rights are above the law, fine. I know that’s a common view hereabouts (and I’m glad it is). But this question looks at the legal, not philosophical, issues.


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Uncategorized

YOU could win this rare, historic Israeli Mauser

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You want to see a thing of amazing beauty? Here it is:

TZP_IsraeliMauser

But it’s not only a beautiful firearm, sturdy and accurate. More importantly, this firearm — a Mauser Karabiner 98 Kurz — is a treasure of history. It was made in 1940. Made in Nazi Germany for the utmost evil purposes. But one of those particularly Jewish miracles soon transformed it into a tool of liberation.

Many Mausers found their way after World War II to Palestine and the hands of Jewish liberators. However, most of those were Czechoslovakian. Few came straight from Hitler’s arsenals. What you’re looking at is a rare item.

And better yet … it could soon be yours. The Zelman Partisans have acquired this firearm and will award it to the eligible person who pays an entry fee and tells us WHY, in 50 words or less, he or she would like to be the owner of this historic weapon.

Read more and enter to WIN THIS TREASURE here. Click the link to:

  • See the history and detailed description of this Israeli Mauser
  • View a host of click-to-enlarge photos
  • Read the full contest rules
  • Enter once
  • Or make multiple entries — get discounts on your entry fees and increase your chances of victory.

Your entry statements can be plain or fancy, short or longer (but no more than 50 words). To increase your chances of winning, we encourage you to enter multiple times and we offer DISCOUNTS ON MULTIPLE ENTRIES.

Read all about it and enter TODAY! Think how proud you’ll be to display — or shoot — this rare freedom tool.

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authoritarian swine, Poll

POLL: Denying gun rights to people on secret watch lists

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We’ve had years where handgun bans or machine gun bans were “the thing.” Ending free-market mail-order purchases had its day in the sun. Then came bans on ugly guns. And along with them, waiting periods. And background checks. And ammo bans. And background checks for ammo. Every time we turn around, victim disarmament has taken some new form. Some of these pushes against guns have become law; others not. But it’s funny how, decade after decade, there’s always some new way to “solve the problem” presented by guns and gun owners. (We are beginning to wonder when they’ll light on the “Final Solution.”)

The latest push — backed by both lefties and squishy or elitist righties alike — is to ban anyone who appears on certain secret watch lists from purchasing firearms.

We’d like to know your thoughts on that …


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gun control, Media, Sellouts and traitors, You can't fix stupid

JPFO now backing gun control?

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So says David Codrea about the once-noble organization from which TZP sprang. (And for which Codrea, yours truly, and several other TZP volunteers once wrote before JPFO was sold into the hands of a supporter of the Manchin-Toomey-Schumer gun-control bill.)

Even if this is just yet another case where the poor guy handling JPFO’s alerts was left to scramble for material on his own without guidelines or caveats, this does appear as if JPFO endorses the latest “no due process” nonsense that’s coming from both anti-gunners and the more spineless of supposed Second Amendment supporters.

(H/T ML)

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New merchandise

Everybody needs a good pair of binoculars

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… And as of today, The Zelman Partisans just happen to have 35 good pairs for our readers and fans. These are perfect for checking your pistol targets without having to walk downrange. Or for keeping in your truck. Or hanging next to the door at your rural home. They’ve got a thousand potential uses. They’re sleek looking, too. Check the photo:

TZP_Binocs_0616

You’ll find a bigger image of them by going to their page at our store and clicking on the thumbnail.

Did I mention they make terrific gifts? Or that you might want a pair and a spare for yourself? 🙂 Consider it mentioned. We’ve got only the limited number of these, and we’d like to see them go to good homes pretty quickly.

Seriously, these are very nice for their moderate price. They’re roof-prism models with independent focus for each eye (very helpful when your vision doesn’t match on each side). They come with their own case. And they’re just $29.00 plus shipping.

How many times have you really, really wished you had binoculars at hand … and didn’t? Now you can have a pair wherever you need them — and fly your TZP colors at the same time.

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authoritarian swine, Media, resistance, spirit of rebellion

Larry Pratt, the media and the “bullet box”

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The anti-gun punditry was all aflutter last week with the news that Larry Pratt had stated that in some near-future time, we might have to resort to “the bullet box” to preserve “proper constitutional balance.”

Speaking of November’s election and its possibile consequences, Pratt noted:

The courts do not have the last word on what the Constitution is. They decide particular cases, they don’t make law. Their decisions, unlike the Roe v. Wade usurpation, don’t extend to the whole of society, they’re not supposed to. And we may have to reassert that proper constitutional balance, and it may not be pretty. So, I’d much rather have an election where we solve this matter at the ballot box than have to resort to the bullet box.

Now I differ with Pratt on a number of points, including any poorly supported assumption that the R. candidate will appoint better justices than the D. candidate. And the item he mentions is historic piece of military equipment more properly called a cartridge box, not a bullet box (and you can still buy replicas of it, NFI). But I don’t see anything unusually incendiary in what he said.

Unlike the Usual Suspects in the media.

The Huffington Post (presumably just before writer Ed Mazza swooned into a deep faint) cried that:

Pratt’s organization is considered even more extreme than the National Rifle Association. The Southern Poverty Law Center claims Pratt has “ties to the militia movement, white supremacist organizations and Christian theocrats.”

The SPLC, of course, makes millions by claiming that everybody to the right of Hillary Clinton has similar eeeeeevil “ties.” Specific claims against Pratt have been long debunked, as anyone with 10 fingers and a search engine could discover. And don’t you always laugh at those little squeaks of horror about organizations “more extreme than the National Rifle Association”? After all these years, it’s amazing that hopolphobic journos haven’t realized that, within the gun-rights realm, most organizations (including ours) are “more extreme than the National Rifle Association”?

Oh well.

Ed Kilgore of the New Yorker has a better understanding of Second Amendment supporters and even compliments us (though I suspect he doesn’t consider it a compliment) by calling those of us who are beyond the NRA “Second Amendment ultras” rather than the usual “extremist” cr*p. I’ve never been an “ultra” before and I think I’d rather like being one.

He also makes the absolutely correct point that if conservative politicians and activists like Larry Pratt, Joni Ernst, Mike Huckabee, or Ted Cruz (all of whom have made statements compatible with the “bullet box” remark) heard rhetoric similar to Pratt’s coming from, say, a black-nationalist group, they’d be crying alarm.

But Kilgore seems to have no grasp of the concept of a constitutional republic and seemingly no understanding at all of limited powers, the Bill of Rights, or for that matter the plain truth that individuals have rights that no government or interest group has authority to abolish.

Bottom line, although his language is restrained and high-toned, Kilgore, like Mazza, seems to hold the common hoplophobe view that taking to the bullet box simply means “shooting anybody you disagree with.” Especially if you don’t like particular election results or the views of judges.

Of course, anyone can see by Pratt’s statement that he’d rather do just about anything rather than resort to shooting. And I wonder how many of the fainting pundits understand that Pratt was referring to the famous “four boxes of freedom” — soap, jury, ballot, and cartridge — and that the final item is only the very last resort of people who’ve been so tyrannized that the first three fail utterly to preserve freedom. Not “democracy.” Freedom. Individual rights. The soap box, the jury box, and (at least in theory) the ballot box are all tools of the individual. It’s only when government or perhaps powerful agents working with government take them away that the cartridge box legitimately comes into play.

On the other hand, we know where we stand with the first three boxes now.

The soap box has long been under threat from uppity presidents, self-righteous campus thugs (not to mention campus speech codes), political intolerance on any part of the spectrum, state governments, federal officials, and even petty local tyrants.

Between the over-criminalization of everything, the pressure to force us to incriminate ourselves (pdf), and other forms of courtroom tyranny, the jury box isn’t as free as it was supposed to be, either.

And the ballot box? Oh, please. At a local level, and sometimes even at a state level, voting may occasionally nudge government a little ways in the direction of greater respect for individual rights. But at the federal level, overreach, mission creep, corruption, secrecy, uber-surveillance, funny money, militarization, paranoia, unaccountable bureaucracy, and “stroke of the pen, law of the land” arrogance have gone so far that the ballot box has become nothing but a kind of “opiate of the masses” — a quasi-religious ceremony that encourages us to believe we can influence the far-off “gods” who — no matter whether they’re the gods of the Ds or the gods of the Rs — increasingly rule without regard to any limits on their power.

No, I do not know a single gun owner who believes in “shooting anybody you disagree with.” But then again, maybe those ardent advocates of unlimited “democracy,” those believers in the “anything-goes” power of unelected judges, justices, and bureaucrats really do have something to fear.

Not gun owners. We’re not their enemy. We’re not the enemy of any peaceable people, no matter how much we may dislike their opinions. What they have to fear are the inevitable — and now rapidly growing — consequences of the very policies they so lovingly or stridently or self-servingly or ignorantly support.

—–

Ed. note: This commentary appeared first on TZP’s weekly email alert. If you would like to be among the first to see new commentary (as well as to get notice of new polls and recaps of recent posts), please sign up for our alert list. (See sidebar or, if you’re on a mobile device, scroll down). Be sure to respond when you receive your activation email!

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Poll

POLL: Will we have to resort to the “bullet box”?

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Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America stirred up controversy last week when he said he feared we might have to resort to the “bullet box,” specifically if this November’s presidential election resulted in Supreme Court justices who think that they, and not the Constitution as written, are the ultimate authority under (and over) U.S. law.

This week’s poll asks whether, and if so when, you think freedomistas in the U.S. might have to resort to that fourth box of liberty.

Although the poll asks only if and when, it would be even more interesting to hear what you think might bring us to the box of last resort — what policies, what catastrophic events, what seemingly small trigger event, what change in law or thinking could provoke armed opposition to tyranny? Or, if you think that can be averted, what would help us regain freedom while steering clear of violence? So please … comment away!

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authoritarian swine, gun control, gun grabbers, hoplophobia, Media, Poll

Poll: What happens to Katie Couric now?

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If you’ve read any gun news this week, you know that “journalist” Katie Couric was caught faking part of a documentary to make gun-rights activists look stupid and ashamed of themselves. Fortunately, one of the participants had made an audiotape — a very damning tape for Couric and her methods.

Even anti-gun NPR thought what Couric and her team did was a huge, manipulative no-no.

So in this week’s poll we ask, What happens to Couric now?

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authoritarian swine, gun grabbers, Politics

Ask the wrong questions, get the wrong answers

18 Comments

And so it begins.

Both parties have now produced “inevitable” presidential candidates who are corrupt, opportunistic, sexist, self-serving, anti-gun, pro-big government, as personable as rabid skunks, and (worse from the mainstream point of view) electorally weak.

The Punditocracy, both professional and amateur, feels it has no choice other than to persuade its readership to hold their collective noses and v*te for … somebody. But since there’s not a single good thing to say about the candidate of their reluctant choice, the argument usually goes: “Yes, we know you’ve said you’d rather v*te for nobody than for ______. But think again! On issue A, B, or C Candidate So-and-So is so much worse than Candidate Such-and-Such that you simply must v*te against ________. Or the sky will fall.”

In the face of national loathing for both mainstream candidates, it’s amazing that political insiders have not yet shoved forward an independent Ross Perot or John Anderson type. But here the situation stands. For now.

I am not a pundit. I don’t care if you v*te for Unindicted Co-Conspirator D or Mercurial Megalomaniac R. I don’t care if you v*te at all. As an old political junkie myself, I wake up about two mornings out of three thinking Trump would be less ghastly than Clinton II and wake up on the third morning thinking Hillary has advantages over The Donald, though by the time I’ve dosed myself with caffeine I can’t recall what those advantages might be. Oh yeah, that with those mysterious health problems she’s hiding, she’s more likely than Trump to drop dead suddenly and be replaced with someone marginally less horrible. Or with her email and corrupt fundraising history she’s more likely to be disgraced, indicted, or otherwise forced out of office early. That’s her advantage.

Not a good enough reason to v*te for her, though. Unless someone puts a gun to my head, I won’t be v*ting for anybody.

But I don’t care if you v*te or not. That’s your business. I do care if Americans ask the right questions about these party animals, about the thick mess the country is in, and about how we personally should respond to it.

‘Cause it seems vast swaths of Pundithood want you to ask the wrong questions. And when you ask the wrong questions, you never arrive at the right answers.

—–

One of those “You must v*te against ______!” pieces showed up in the TZP mailbox the other day. (A widely circulated but wildly misattributed piece of commentary.) It made a valid and important point against Hillary: the Supreme Court.

Justice Scalia’s seat is vacant. Ginsberg is 82 years old, Kennedy is 79, Breyer is 77, and Thomas is 67. …

These are 5 vacancies that will likely come up over the next 4-8 years. …

Hillary Clinton has made it clear she will use the Supreme Court to go after the 2nd Amendment. She has literally said that the Supreme Court was wrong in its Heller decision, stating that the Court should overturn and remove the individual right to keep and bear arms. Period.

Never mind that no court, no president, can ever “remove the individual right to keep and bear arms.” They can mightily interfere with the exercise of said right. So yes, the prospect of Hillary controling multiple appointments to the court is ominous.

But then the pundit goes absurdly over the top:

If Hillary Clinton wins, and gets to make these appointments, you likely will never see another Conservative victory at the Supreme Court level, for the rest of your life – – – Including your children and your grandchildren.

The rest of your life? The rest of your grandchildren’s lives? Oh, really? Let’s say you have a child this year and that child grows up and, at age 25, has a child. Then that child, your grandchild, lives 75 years. (Note: “the rest of your life, ridiculous enough, appears in the original. Someone added all those grandchildren as the piece circulated. So it’s the pundit’s editor going even farther over the top.)

We’re supposed to believe that, if Hillary is elected, the Supreme Court will remain rabidly Hillarian for the next 100 years???

“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

But worse than the Alice in Wonderland math and the Chicken Little claims are the things unsaid, the facts unstated, the untruths cleverly implied — the questions unasked. Such as:

What makes anyone think Donald Trump is a “conservative,” or that he would appoint “conservative” justices? Trump has supported single-payer health insurance (to the left of Hillary). Trump has been anti-gun, just like Hillary. Trump has used big government to his own ends and wants to use them now in populist (traditionally “left-wing”) causes. Trump has contributed to past Hillary Clinton campaigns. Conservative? What?

What makes anyone think that justices appointed by Trump, even if he happened to choose a few “conservative” ones, would be pro-gun or pro-liberty? This generation may have forgotten that the court headed by “conservative” Chief Justice Earl Warren produced some of the most unconstitutional, left-wing decisions in U.S. history (with Warren’s full and enthusiastic collaboration). But surely we can’t already have forgotten that current “conservative” Chief Justice John Roberts single-handedly saved Obamacare. “Liberal” justices tend to remain liberal, but “conservative” ones often do what other gov-o-crats do: v*te for big government once they’re part of it.

Ask the wrong questions — or fail to ask the right ones — and you’ll inevitably get the wrong answers.

While (correctly) damning Hillary, the viral article says not one, single, positive thing about Trump. It offers not one smidgeon of evidence that Trump would do anything better. Because there is no evidence to offer. It implies in a slippery and sideways manner that he’s a conservative (whatever that means), but actual evidence of his principles or his intentions is completely absent.

But Hillary is anti-gun! Hillary will appoint nasty Supreme Court justices!

So please don’t notice that Trump is just Hillary with even worse hair, a louder mouth, and a different variety of sexism.

The sky will fall if you v*te for Hillary! Your grandchildren will still be stuck with her 100 years from now!

Never mind the consequences of Trump. Don’t mention them. Imply that he’s a “conservative” antidote to creepy authoritarian anti-gun eternal statism and maybe in November it’ll miraculously turn out to be true.

It could happen. And pigs could fly. And Dorothy could click her heels and come safely home to Kansas. And Jesus really could appear on a tortilla. And orchids could bloom outdoors at the North Pole. And presidential candidates could tell the absolute truth, hold noble principles of freedom, and always do exactly what we hope they’ll do, just because we hope it so very, very ardently.

It could happen.

But wouldn’t we be better off if we closely examine reality and act in accordance with that?

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guns, Poll

POLL: What’s your “favorite” book and movie firearms goof?

22 Comments

While back I was reading a crime novel. Lots of guns in it. But it began to itch at the back of my brain that every, single gun mentioned was a revolver. Cops had revolvers. Crooks had revolvers. Private eyes had revolvers. Little old ladies had revolvers. No calibers or makers or models mentioned. Just generic revolvers.

Very unusual in this day and age, thought I. I quickly began to wonder how much this author knew about firearms — and therefore about anything else he was writing about.

Finally, a character wandered into the story with a Glock. Yes, a Glock. A non-revolver. Whoopee.

The character prepared for action. He drew his Glock. He “flipped the safety lever.”

I closed the book.

Alas, we all know that gun goofs are all too common in both books and movies. Sometimes it’s just a small, forgivable goof. (I’ve written books myself, and if readers held every goof I ever made against me, I’d be a total disgrace.) Too often, unfortunately, goofs about guns result from a complete lack of research or caring by the creators of the works.

Sometimes we just wince and go on. Sometimes the dumbness is so dumb it ruins the whole work for us.

Which takes us to this week’s poll: What’s your “favorite” firearms goof from novels or movies?

And … if you care to elaborate, leave a comment telling about novels or movies with particularly awful gun handling or gun “facts.” Tell us which were the worst — and maybe even which were the best — when it came to guns.

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