Concealed Carry and College Campuses

My column about why the Second Amendment and the rights of CHL holders shouldn’t be considered void on college campuses is up at Guns.com.

Guns.com is a new site I’m writing for and there are a few bugs as with any new publication. So forgive a few editing errors that pop up.

Here’s a taste.

“I was shot through the left thigh, both hips and right shoulder and I survived by playing dead,” said Colin Goddard, a survivor of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 who is now a student at the University of Texas in Austin.

He told his emotional story to try to sway Texas lawmakers to reject a coming bill in the 2011 legislative session that will add one more place that concealed handgun license holders are allowed while armed – college campuses.

“I was there that day. That was the craziest day of my life with one person with two guns. I can’t imagine what it would have been like with multiple students with multiple guns,” he said.

I can imagine it. And it’s not some Pollyanna scenario. It’s based on the facts on the ground at Virginia Tech in 2007

and in Texas in 1991 and 1966.

But before I get into that, I have to tell you this isn’t new territory for me. Nor is it for Texas. Texans have been fighting an incremental fight to expand gun rights that started with the massacre at a Luby’s in Killeen, Texas.

The massacre and its aftermath should be required reading for all sides in the gun debate.

Read the rest here.

Is Open Carry a Threat or a Deterrent? My Column at Guns.com

My column is up at Guns.com, a new site that I’m writing for now.  I look at the new movement for open carry.

opencarry4Is carrying a gun openly a threat to those around you? Is it a provocation? Should it make people around you uncomfortable? Does Fobus make paddle holsters in colors other than black, because if nothing else, open carry is a threat to my fashion sense?

Read my full column here at Guns.com.

(I’ll be honest, I give this one a low B. I’m out of practice on writing opinion columns so it will take a few to get back in the groove.)

Schutze: A Man Crush

He and I will never see eye to eye on so much, but this is why I can’t quit him:

Two things. First, I would like for people to quit bitching about my photo. One guy wrote in that he found it “disturbing.” Well, WTF, Einstein. It’s not meant to be a sympathy card.

Second: Another guy wrote in with a really good idea yesterday. I had written about how the city is persecuting Robert Groden, the Kennedy assassination guy, because he’s selling his books and magazines in Dealey Plaza without a Dealey Plaza Literature Sales Permit or DPLSP, which, I should mention, is a term I made up. And here is why I made up such a term:

The city has taken Groden to court on a charge of selling literature in Dealey Plaza without a permit allowing him to sell literature in Dealey Plaza. But there is no such thing as a permit to allow anybody to sell literature in Dealey Plaza.

I was pointing out that this is the kind of Kafkaesque/Soviet bullshit that Dallas City Hall thinks is clever. Fine the guy for not having a permit. But then when he tries to go get one, tell him that no such permits exist.

I had written before about City Hall security and the requirement that members of the press present credentials at certain types of events. But in Dallas there is no such thing as an official press credential. So I said I just make mine on the copying machine with some cheap laminating sheets you can buy by the box.

Obama = Keynesian

Awesome. From the Stewart/Colbert rally…

And Speaking of True Colors, This Time Red…

This is from the weekend Democratic Party/Union/left wing/MoveOn rally on the mall in Washington.

Power to the people, brother.

Fiscal Black Holes, the Tea Party, and the Incompetent Media

mainstream_media

However, in a climate where even Pres. Obama’s budget director warned that our debt is “serious and ultimately unsustainable,” perhaps more should be expected of the establishment media.

Indeed, our unsustainable financial situation led to the creation of a Tea Party movement — one of the biggest political developments in America over the past two years. It would seem to be the perfect news peg for ongoing media coverage of our government’s fiscal irresponsibility. Of course, it didn’t work out quite that way, did it? Instead, the establishment media ignored, then attacked the Tea Party movement — first as astroturf, then as racist, as Birthers, as hypocritical (for not having formed when the problem was less dire, and for gullibly expecting the government to make good on current entitlement promises or reform them before adding new ones), etc. The establishment media’s coverage of the Tea Party often seems devoted to discussing anything other than the issues at the heart of the movement.

Thus, the establishment media reveals itself, not as the people’s watchdog against irresponsible government, but as the irresponsible government’s guard dog against the people. It is ground zero for manufacturing center-left consent. After all, how could the establishment have seriously discussed passing the trillion-dollar ObamaCare behemoth, when so much of the funding comes from “reductions” in Medicare and Medicaid spending that is unsustainable in the first instance? How could the media have gone along with the laughable CBO estimate that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit (based on assumptions the CBO admits are unrealistic), if they had to take our ginormous public debt seriously? How could they float an economy-crushing cap-and-tax scheme to combat global warming, or climate change, or climate disruption, or whatever it’s being called today, if everyone was forced to acknowledge how far government has already promised beyond its means?

Emphasis added, and the full thing is here.

How Do You Know If Your Councilman Is A Moron?

He says things like this:

But if we hope to continue to attract world class businesses and corporations to Dallas and avoid bigger cuts in future budgets, the answer is clear: We must increase taxes in order to preserve and enhance the quality of life for all our residents.

Seriously.

This is the kind of ignorance of basic business 101 that rivals former Dallas City Councilman Leo Chaney, who once told me that investors would build another Mockingbird Station in his district if only he got the area zoned for it. Never mind things like demographics, traffic, demand, or any of the other fundamentals retail developers weigh.

Every time there’s a budget crunch, they cut the kind of services that anger people enough to where they accept a tax increase — cutting library hours, community pools, park maintenance.

What they don’t do is cut, or don’t cut enough, is where it counts — city payroll and civil service pensions.

Oh, and how’s that $500 million city-owned hotel working out? Glad they’re spending half a billion smackers on that?

The Intellectual Marvel That Is TX Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee

She once asked why the Pathfinder didn’t photograph the U.S. flag that was planted on Mars in 1969, and says that Tea Party members are Klansmen without sheets.

Now she tells us that today there are two Vietnams.*

(*For those of you enrolled in or employed by DISD, Vietnam has been united since 1975.)

(h/t Moe Lane)

The Most Honest Political Ad Evah!

The Sublime Nobility of Public Service

Remind me again how people who go into “public service” are so much better than the rest of the us.

If this were a just republic, this congressman would be tarred and feathered, if not put up against a sufficient backstop.