Alphecca

Weekly Check on the Bias

Welcome, my friends, to the July 26th edition of my Weekly Check on the Bias, wherein I report on just some of the coverage by the mainstream media pertaining to gun ownership and the Second Amendment.

Before getting to "the gory stuff" I am continuing the series I started last week of reproducing some of the beautiful, fine-art photography taken by Robert Langham for the 2006 Texas State Rifle Association Calendar. When the calendar is ready, I will post details on how to order it so you can not only see the true beauty of the final pictures, but also have the chance to support the TSRA itself and get a swell calendar to-boot. Robert has kindly given me permission to post these preliminary shots. Robert Langham is an NRA member, a Texas State Rifle Team National Match Shooter, a Junior Rifle coach, and a holder of the Distinguished Rifleman's Badge. He has donated his time to help train US Army troops. I present his comments on each shot first, and then the photo.

From the CMP North store. Did the stocks with Murphys Oil Soap, now peening gas rails and switching parts to tighten up the group.

Cowboy shooting is a big deal. They have their own magazine. They have "handles" (fake names) and badges with numbers. Basically the deal is, they dress up like cowboys and go out and shoot period or replica pistols, shotguns, and rifles at a course of fire based around a holdup, barfight, bank robbery or jail break out.

Just imagine a 68 year old baldheaded happily married insurance adjuster strapping on this gear and entering a competition where you kill your fellow card players using four firearms at a match you enter without revealing your name.

He-Haw Jackson meet Purple Toes Smith. You and Grizzly Zabrieski will be teaming up against Cut Hand Leftwitch and Lefty Stump One-Eyed Johnson. Starting team will be determined by cutting the cards. Double-Horse Washington will be the umpire.

An aquaintance who is a hell of a nice guy loaned me about 7K worth of vintage rifles, pistols, leatherwear, bear-gutting knives, (this one modeled after Geronimo's shiv), hats, chaps, et. et. I think his handle is Latigo Snake-Eyes or something. He's an INSURANCE ADJUSTOR!

This is NOT an Olympic Sport. Yet. I admit to being slightly aghast but...in the photos from the shoots, everyone seems to be having a hell of a time.

Oh, they sell rolling gun carts that look like.....(wait for it)....coffins.

Under my corner windows with a white card reflector and one small hand-held silver card I shot with the coolpix. Custom light balance. 1/8 second. Took less than 30 minutes and I took the stuff back before they could print a wanted poster. I include two possible shots.

When we were kids Dad had a 1891 Argentine Mauser he sporterized for us to hunt with. It's long gone but several years back these 91 Carbines came into the country. I rattled up a nice buck and shot him with this Cavalry model and I have an Engineers model that is cleaner. I handload 7.65 Argentine.

The second rifle is a K31 Swiss that I bought off Gunbroker. I bought two and passed one on to my junior shooter, Evan Hess. I got the walnut stocks. Most of them have the name and address of the guy it was issued to under the buttplate. This one belonged to Alois Rathmann. I wrote him and sent him a photo of his rifle in Texas, but got it back in the mail.

I shot this rifle with the GP11 ammo prone at 600 yards last week. I set the rear sight on 600 meters and shot twice hitting two nines at nine O'clock about six inches apart. Not bad for Rathmann's old rifle. I bet he would have paid the 139.00 on gunbroker to have had it back.

The bottom rifle is a 1937 K98 W.W.II war trophy. No papers and someone put a Lyman Peep on it. 1937 was about the time the Nazis got rolling. I'm glad to have it in Texas in civilian use. I keep thinking I will shoot a doe with it. 8mm is a lot of bullet.

I built the set in the corner of two windows. I used a big white card on the left with the light off my reloading bench coming around it and lighting up the Texas Flag in the background. There's a smaller silver card off the right. The flag is draped over CMP rifle shipping boxes. I added ammo and a Swedish canteen. Lots of clamps and risers to get the rifles arranged. Coolpix 8800 handheld, custom light balance off a piece of computer paper, and the Vibration Reduction turned on.

So... Turning to the media, what happens when a judge demands that a woman violate a gun law? From St. Louis Today:

An Alton woman embroiled in a divorce case spent more than four hours in jail for contempt of court after she refused a Madison County's judge's order to return a handgun to her ex-husband, a convicted felon.

Elizabeth "Beth" Ritchie, 30, said that complying with Associate Judge Ellar Duff's order, delivered at a hearing on Thursday, would have required Ritchie to commit a crime herself.

It is a felony in Illinois for a felon to possess a firearm, and for anyone to transfer a gun to a felon.

Duff said in an interview Friday that she did not learn until after the hearing that Ritchie's ex-husband was a felon, and that she then ordered Beth Ritchie released from the Madison County Jail.

Ritchie said she tried to explain the situation to Duff in court but was ignored.

"I was being ordered by the law to break the law," Ritchie said. "And when I wouldn't, I got thrown in jail."

Ritchie's ex-husband, Timothy D. Ritchie, 34, a used-car salesman from Wood River, was convicted in Madison County Circuit Court of felony drug possession in 1999 and felony theft in 2000. He got probation in both cases.

Timothy D. Ritchie has two felony convictions and he's still on the street, in case any of you liberals wanted to know why I prefer to take my safety into my own hands. In any case, Judge Duff claims she didn't know about Timothy's criminal record but that is clearly a lie (in my opinion) as we read:

Beth Ritchie said she had mailed certified letters a month before Thursday's hearing to three court officials - Associate Judge Nelson Metz, State's Attorney Bill Mudge and Circuit Clerk Matt Melucci - informing them of the legal dilemma over the pistol. She said she followed the letters up with calls but never heard back from the officials.

Beth Ritchie attended Thursday's hearing with her father.

Beth Ritchie said that she explained the situation to Duff but that the judge refused to listen.

"She said she didn't care about other circumstances, that I had better return the gun to Tim immediately," Ritchie said.

At that point, Beth Ritchie's father approached the bench, after getting permission from the judge.

"I could see the letter Beth had written, outlining the whole matter, right there on the bench in front of her (Duff)," said Swift, 59.

Swift said he asked whether the pistol could be given to Duff to transfer, "so that we wouldn't be the ones breaking the law."

"At that point, Judge Duff just snapped and ordered my daughter and me arrested for contempt of court," Swift said.

I'm not sure exactly why I'm including this story other than that in a country with over 20 thousand gun control laws on the books, I'm not sure that ANYONE can keep up with all of them. Certainly the judge should have known but how does the average citizen know. I point this out because when the City of Columbus, Ohio decides to pass their own restrictive "assault weapons" ban, it makes it very difficult for other residents of Ohio who might want to drive through Columbus and suddenly find themselves committing a crime for their legal possession of one of those banned guns.

For that reason, I support efforts in states such as Colorado and Virginia and -- hopefully -- soon in Ohio where legislation is pending to prohibit municipalities from enacting gun ordinances that exceed state law.

California is no stranger to some very tough gun control laws, not that it's done anything to reduce crime because criminals tend to ignore laws anyway. I reported here some time ago that bills were pending to require "ammo registration". It's moving forward but at least some newspapers there are reporting that it might not be a good, or effective idea. From the Madera Tribune:

According to the legislation, each bullet will be required to have a serial number to be laser engraved. Then, after a crime is committed with a handgun, the belief is that the bullet can be retrieved and the serial number traced back to who purchased the bullets. Bullets would have to be sold in boxes of 50 and all 50 bullets would have the same serial number that matches the serial number on the box.

“That’s where a problem exists,” said Gar Svendsen, director of production and quality service for Federal Ammunition. “We have been told that the machine needed to do the laser imprinting only costs $300,000 to $400,000. What they don’t realize is how our manufacturing process works. We manufacture hundreds of thousands of bullets every day. They are all placed in large bins and everything is automated. To accomplish the goal of SB357, we would have to set up several production lines, purchase dozens of the machines, and hire added labor because out automated systems can’t do the job. The cost of manufacturing would go through the roof. We really wouldn’t have too many choices. Either the cost of ammunition would increase dramatically, and I mean dramatically, for a few cents per round to up to $2 or $3 per round or we would have to forget California as a market.”

[...]

Thomas Millner, president of Remington Arms Company, has written Gov. Schwarzenegger about SB357.

“The domestic ammunition industry, of which Remington is a market leader, produces about eight billion rounds of ammunition each year, and our facilities manufacture, assemble and package millions of rounds daily,” Millner wrote. “Serialization of individual cartridges would turn modern assembly lines into early-19th century piece work shops, with individual workers engraving casings and bullets, then matching and boxing them in increments no larger than one or two dozen. This proposal would be prohibitively expensive to implement, without credible evidence that the benefit would come close to the cost incurred to our high volume, low margin industry.”

The Sporting Goods and Ammunitions Manufacturers’ Institute, Inc. said on its website, “Manufacturers would be forced to abandon the California market or go bankrupt.”

Another bill would require that all handguns sold in California be capable of stamping each shell-casing with an individual gun i.d. This would make the guns prohibitively expensive, which in turn means that many of the people who most need them -- poor women trying to protect themselves from abusive ex-spouses for example -- couldn't afford them. We all know that restraining orders are less than useless.

I must applaud the writer of this news story, Cal Tatum, for presenting an unbiased look at the consequences of such legislation. It is clear that two of the major ammunition makers would probably just pull out of the California market. That will disadvantage everyone from Olympic hopefulls to target shooters and hunters and even just those folks who own guns for defensive purposes and wish to get some practice time in at the local range.

The article concludes:

Assemblyman Ron Haynes wrote, “The two bills that seem designed to stop the sale of firearms and ammunition in California are AB352 and SB357. Apparently, they were written by someone who has watched too many episodes of CSI.”

News bias by the mainstream media, especially TV, is certainly enough to convince the average non-gun owner that crime is out of control. That's why it's so refreshing to read an article that takes the media to task for creating a climate of fear. From the current issue of ThirdAge:

After the tragic school shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, NBC's Today Show host Katie Couric declared that today's youth were "more likely to pull a gun than make a fist." U.S. News & World Report then weighed in with a report about "Teenage Time Bombs" and "Children Without Souls." The stolid New York Times opined that the shootings "were a disturbing trend."

After school shootings by teen boys in four separate states over two years, it appeared to TV news viewers that the average American youngster had become a Nazi storm trooper who liked to shoot up schools just for kicks. But nothing could be further from the truth. If those in the media had bothered to check, they would have found youth homicide rates have declined by 30% in the last decade. Youth homicide rates were actually higher in 1965 than they are today!

"We live in a culture of fear," says Barry Glassner, Ph.D., University of Southern California professor of sociology and author of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. "The harm? We are continually distracted from serious problems by focusing on things that are extremely unlikely to happen."

According to Glassner's statistics, the more real dangers to teenagers include car accidents, binge drinking, and unprotected sex. He adds, "It's very unlikely the average teen will be shot at school. But that's what captures headlines." When all the news channels repeat scenes of one tragic shooting over and over, it looks like schools everywhere are under attack.

In reviewing police reports, scientific studies and skeptical media accounts over five years, Glassner found part of the blame for widespread false fear rests with the news media's penchant for crime stories. When a crime happens in any city, it is very likely to be the lead story on all the newscasts. But the truth is, between 1990 and 1998, the nation's murder rate declined 20%. Meanwhile, the number of murder stories on network news increased 600%, according to Glassner's calculations.

"You may not get the proper perspective from a T.V. station whose motto for selecting news is 'If it bleeds, it leads,'" Glassner says. "Consequently, Americans waste tens of billions of dollars yearly fighting minor or non-existent dangers." All the while, we neglect real problems—problems we could solve if we put our minds to them.

The author, Charles Downey, provides some examples that one hopes will sober-up TV news editors. It won't, of course, because most in the liberally dominated media have an almost hysterical loathing for firearms and will stop at nothing -- not even the facts -- to push their anti-gun agenda.

How else to explain the repellent editorial from the NY Daily News that I discussed yesterday? I won't repeat myself here (since it's just the previous post) but I'd like to point out one more thing about the opening paragraph:

The gun-huggers at the National Rifle Association will not be holding their 2007 convention, as had been planned, in Columbus, Ohio. Lucky Columbus. Of course, the NRA would never even consider N.Y.C. This city does not believe in blowing the heads off small animals. Or people. Which is why it wants to get tougher on illegal weapons. Guess what group is opposed?

When they wrote that the sport and food-gathering endeavor of hunting was nothing more than "blowing the heads off small animals" and that NYC residents don't believe in that, how do you account for NYC residents voting overwhelmingly for this guy:

Wasn't he running around last summer trying for every photo-op that he could of him being a "hunter"? [Don't bother to thank me, NY Daily News, glad to help you out, anytime...]

Thanks to blogger David Hardy I came across an American Chronicle article by John J. Cahill that (here's a shock) catches the Brady Bunch in a lie:

The Brady Campaign testified on March 15, 2006, at the House Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, against H.R. 800. This testimony included opposition to companion Senate legislation S. 397. Part of that testimony was a letter purported to be from several national Law Enforcement organizations opposing Gun Liability reform. The letter was published on the web along with Brady’s record of testimony. The letter carried a list of 66 individually named Sheriffs and Police Chiefs of major cities. Six of the names listed were Nevada Chiefs or Sheriffs. My Sheriff was included.

I made contact with my Sheriff through a ranking officer in the Department. He remembered getting a briefing from the Brady organization at a State meeting but didn’t remember that our Sheriff had signed any letter. Later my Sheriff responded directly and personally to an email saying he was checking facts on the whole matter.

[...]

Following the NRA Alert, all of the feedback I was able to track indicated that not one of the Nevada Law Enforcement Officers listed had signed the letter or authorized the use of his name. My info now is that every one of the six has demanded his name be removed and two penned letters of support for S.397.

Time and again I have pointed out the lies and distortions that the Brady Bunch and the VPC resort to in their testimony and press releases where they attempt to mislead the American public and their legislators. Read the whole thing.

How about a positive story to end with? From South Coast Today (MA):

NEW BEDFORD -- One by one, the women learned how to load and shoot guns -- a .22 caliber revolver, pistol and rifle.

In a windowless, wood-paneled room, they wore bright orange ear plugs and fed bullets into the guns' magazines. Then they slid the barrels into place, undid the safety and cradled their non-trigger fingers around the hand grip.

"Pull the trigger slowly," one shy instructor named Chad said.

Then a loud boom rang out -- louder than any gun sounds on television.

A Fairhaven woman, Robin Bodeau, said she felt a jolt and closed her eyes after firing the .45.

Bullet holes, appeared on the paper targets hanging 25 yards away, if the shooters were lucky.

"I had my instructor sign my target," Julie Marchetti, a cheerful blonde, said afterward. "I'm going to frame it and show it to my husband."

Ms. Marchetti and about 25 other women learned how to care for and fire guns yesterday at the New Bedford Revolver and Rifle Club, a nonprofit organization on Bolton Street. The event, called Women on Target, was sponsored by the National Rifle Association and was meant to inspire women to practice target shooting -- still a male-dominated sport, club members said.

Although the New Bedford Revolver and Rifle Club welcomes female shooters and competitors, only 20 of their 200 members are women. "Maybe it's just a time factor," Judy Thornhill, a member of the club's pistol team, said to explain the dearth of women. "I got into it originally because of my husband. Now my husband plays golf and I shoot."

I try to point out these stories when I can because I really believe it's important to try to make new converts to the fun -- yes, fun! -- of target shooting and all the other shooting sports. It also demystifies firearms and shows the public that, despite what mainstream media and gun-grabbing flunkies would have you belive, a gun is just "a thing" that can be used for good or evil. It's not up to the gun.

Here's what's happening at some other fine blogs:

Learn first hand from Irons in the Fire about what goes into forging a knife. Interesting stuff and I'm looking forward to future installments.

There are some blogger shoots coming up. Publicola has the scoop on the August 7th meet in Colorado and Jay G at Toys In the Attic has the details on the August 6th New England bloggershoot in Massachusetts. Time is running out so I urge all who can attend (you don't have to be a blogger, just a blog reader!) to get in touch with them.

Lots of bloggers are participating in the "What's on your nightstand" meme that I also posted on last week including WadCutter and Les Jones.

Yipes! It's almost 11 o'clock. Time to get this up! I'll be on Cam's later today and thanks so much for stopping by.

Posted by Jeff Soyer at July 26, 2005 10:47 AM