Apparently Politico does not like the new concealed-carry reciprocity law recently passed in the House. They must not like it. After all, aside from covering it in a negative light, the newser so badly misstated the law that it could easily turn its readers against the whole idea. But perhaps that’s the idea?

The law, the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2011, would allow gun owners that have a concealed-carry license in their home state to carry their firearm in another state if that state also has a carry law in place. The law, however does not allow someone to carry a firearm in a state that does not currently allow its own citizens to enjoy concealed-carry rights.

All this law does is standardize the lawful status of interstate gun carriers so that law-abiding citizens are not confused by and in fear of violating the many different state statutes concerning their firearms when traveling.

But that isn’t what Politco said on Nov. 15 in its overwrought and badly fact-checked piece. Not only is Politico spectacularly wrong, but it leads with a false reading of what the bill does. [My bold for emphasis]

If congressional gun-rights stalwarts get their way, a firearms owner with a concealed-weapons permit issued in Utah could be allowed to carry that gun in New York — regardless of the gun laws in the Empire State.

Politico is simply wrong that the bill would allow concealed-carry regardless of the gun laws in any state.

Politico goes on to report how critics of the bill are trying to use states’ rights claims against the bill to prevent its passage. One would think that this is not a very reliable tactic in this case. After all, the Second Amendment is a Constitutional issue so it’s a bit harder to claim that all gun laws are local issues. If it’s a right guaranteed right in the Constitution, that makes it a bit hard to claim that it shouldn’t at all be a federal issue!

Another false claim of those that oppose this law is that state laws are nullified and replaced by some national concealed-carry law. This is also bunk.

Politico gives space to a New York State Attorney who claims that his state’s stricter laws on who can and cannot carry would be nullified by forcing New York to accept the concealed-carry rights of other states. But this is not a true statement.

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MSNBC’s newest show host Alex Wagner is eager to make her mark on the world of punditry. Twice this week Wagner has made mention of how much she detests the Second Amendment. The other evening while on a political panel with Martin Bashir and Jedediah Bila, Wagner challenged Bila’s recollection of firearm statistics, and when faced with a losing battle, looked to Bashir for support. While doing so, Wagner essentially called Bila stupid for disagreeing with her:

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In my experience, there are two ways that the mainstream media blames Bush for problems that exist three years after he left the Oval Office:

1. They blame Bush when something is bad that they think should not be considered Obama’s fault.

2. They blame Bush when there is no denying that Obama is at fault, so they try to soften it with a dose of moral relativism (Bush did it too!).

Such is the case with operation Fast & Furious, the ATF’s gunwalking experiment that has resulted in countless weapons being transported to the cartel-controlled portions of Mexico and has possibly resulted in the deaths of American border agents.

Last week, after Congressman Darrel Issa subpoenaed Attorney General Eric Holder, the media was very quiet on the matter.  Some outlets at least went to the trouble of reporting that it occurred, but few actually offered any analysis on its importance or potential political ramifications.  This is startling, considering the wall-to-wall coverage granted to “lawyer-gate” when Alberto Gonzales was Attorney General under Bush.  That scandal eventually forced Gonzales to resign, and the analysis offered during the drama was seemingly without end.

The Associated Press did manage to pick up a story that allowed them to implement Blame Bush2.0 (that’s the “he did it too” version) when Friday it was revealed that, apparently, there was a gun-walking operation at the ATF that took place in his administration, also called “Operation Wide Receiver.” (more…)

From time to time, an event of national significance serves as a Rorschach test for whether you are on the left or the right.  This is the case with the rampage in Tuscon this past Saturday.  Enter Tom Brokaw:

To a leftist like Brokaw, a 22-year-old male shot 19 innocent people attending a rally in front of a Safeway, killing six, and nearly assassinating a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, and it’s the fault of… the gun.  This is clarifying.

For those of us on the right, we have a different reaction.  First we see a tragedy perpetrated by an individual capable of pure evil that should have been locked away from society years ago.  We see a town Sheriff, who knew the evil individual had previously made death threats, suspiciously anxious to pass off blame to the political right (the famous quote from Hamlet comes to mind: he “doth protest too much, methinks”).  And lastly, we wonder if more people in the crowd had concealed weapons on their persons, would Jared Lee Loughner have gotten off a whopping twenty gun shots, killed six people, and wounded a dozen more? (more…)

*** Updated and Clarified

Out here along the Picketwire, we were mighty surprised ten years ago when we heard about an historian back east who’d proved that nobody to speak of had actually owned guns back in early America. This came as a big surprise, because it wasn’t what we’d heard from our daddies and granddaddies. But this historian, Michael Bellesiles by name, had all the facts and figures to prove it. This was pretty cheering to the New York Times’ reviewer (Garry Wills, “Spiking the Gun Myth,”), who said Professor Bellesiles had “dispersed the darkness that covered the gun’s early history in America” and provided “overwhelming evidence that our view of the gun is as deep a superstition as any that affected Native Americans in the 17th century.” Apparently a lot of people agreed, because Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture was given the Bancroft Prize.

Well, you probably know what happened. Some gun nuts and spoilsports started looking into Professor Bellesiles’ research, and it turned out that the evidence Garry Wills was so happy about didn’t actually exist. Professor Bellesiles had made it up, and the press had eaten it up. “Now many of Mr. Bellesiles’s defenders have gone silent,” the Times had to report a year later (Robert Worth, “Historian’s Prizewinning Book on Guns is Embroiled in a Scandal“):

Over the past year a number of scholars who have examined his sources say he has seriously misused historical records and possibly fabricated them. They say the outcome, when all the evidence is in, could be one of the worst academic scandals in years.

And in the end, they took his Bancroft Prize away, and he lost his job at Emory University in Atlanta. (more…)

When otherwise intelligent writers like the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson lose their minds, one has the audacity to hope that Michele Obama and her Obesity Police will add Kool-Aid to the list of sugary drinks they’d like to ban. With his latest column about the Arizona border law, Inspector Robinson-Clouseau proves he needs only a trench-coat and a French accent to complete the portrait of the fumbling fact-tracker unable to see the clues right in front of his own alleged nose-for-news.

Like a good upstanding member of the New American Pravda, Robinson forthrightly begins by drawing his conclusion—the Arizona border law enforces “breathing while Latino”—then methodically reshaping the facts to fit his brilliant deduction. He devotes his first two paragraphs to inform us that the Arizona border is actually a safe place these days.

Apprehensions of would-be immigrants along the 2,000-mile border have dropped from a peak of 1.8 million in fiscal 2000 to 556,000 in fiscal 2009.

Assuming Clouseau’s facts are correct (no official Pravda source is cited), this is akin to your doctor telling you not to worry because your fever has dropped from 108 to 105. (more…)

Pollster Frank Luntz is trying to hawk his new poll on gun laws commissioned by the left-wing group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns. He’s trying to sell the concept that NRA members are just as interested in “common-sense gun policies” as anti-gun nuts and that legislators should take this into account when crafting future anti-gun legislation. The problem is that this poll (.pdf at link) is misleading in some important ways, and the fact that the devil is in the details is totally glossed over.

In an op ed in the Los Angeles Times written by Luntz and Tom Barrett, gun owners are compared favorably with non-gun owners over their feelings on gun banning laws. “The culture war over the right to bear arms isn’t much of a war after all,” the pair tells us. “As it turns out, there is a lot everyone agrees on.”

And this main point serves as the biggest problem with Luntz’s poll. Of course everyone will claim he’s for “common-sense” firearms laws. But the first thing that anyone will find out when discussing concrete policies is that disagreement quickly reigns when people start getting specific. An assumption that everyone “agrees” on just what common sense means disappears pretty quickly when the details are laid out. (more…)