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Page 790 of 791 pages « First < 788 789 790 791 >
May 1994
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From ‘The Armed Genius,‘ May 1994
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Tue 31 May 1994 9:57
by Kevin McGehee
in Sacramento, CA
0 comments
[The Armed Genius]
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Attention NRA members! If you have not already cast your ballot in this year’s election to the NRA Board of Directors (ballots due May 1), take another look!
RKBA member Prof. Joseph E. Olson, who is an incumbent on the Board and who also founded Academics for the 2nd Amendment some time before I founded RKBA, is seeking re-election. I made the mistake last year of not endorsing an RKBA member who was seeking re-election to the Board at that time, and he lost. We currently have two representatives on the Board; let’s keep it that way.
If you haven’t made up your mind about the other 24 votes you have in that election, some editorial opinion: read the statements carefully and give preference to candidates whose focus is not on looking good in a stalemate, but on winning the war.
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From Steve Wiegand’s column in the March 27 Sacramento Bee:
“(Sacramento) cop Mark Tyndale has only an outside shot to knock off Sheriff Glen Craig in the upcoming sheriff’s race, but not for want of a novel campaign pledge. ‘If elected,‘ he says, ‘I will issue a permit to carry a concealed firearm to every qualified person who applies for one. There is no better deterrent to crime than a well-armed community!‘“
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It’s rumored that there’s a new D.C. status symbol: word is, you know you’re important if George Stephanopoulos calls your boss and tries to have you fired.
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People persist in considering it paradoxical that wild beasts renowned for their strength and ferocity, are also capable of great gentleness. Not only wild beasts, I say, but humans as well, both good and bad. I have noticed that many a hothead became a cool-head upon getting, and learning to use, a gun.
I’m also aware that many of the great human monsters of history were very affectionate with their own offspring, if not with anyone else’s. Stalin loved his own children, but that didn’t stop him from exterminating some 20 million of other people’s.
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I recently received a fund-raising letter and complimentary bumper sticker from “Dehere Gun Fighters of America”, creators of the ridiculous New York “Death Clock.“ Much as I appreciate receiving bumper stickers gratis, I couldn’t display this one, with its insipid slogan, “Guns. They’re Killing Us”, without my educational and intellectual credentials being—if you’ll pardon the expression—shot to hell.
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It began, actually, with a handful of counties out West, asserting state sovereignty in response to federal attempts to overregulate land use. Now we see county sheriffs challenging the Brady Act as an unfunded federal mandate; ten states suing on the grounds that state constitutional provisions banning public funding of abortion supersede a federal rule to the contrary; other states winning Supreme Court approval of student-led school prayer; and forty states studying a Colorado proposal to nullify unfunded federal mandates with state action, rather than by going through the federal courts.
The abortion case is the federal government’s attempt to nullify the principles of federalism by making Congress and federal bureaucrats sovereign over state constitutions. We’ll be watching this and the other cases.
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I was editorially gratified at the results of a recent poll that show Bill Clinton losing in a two-way election against “a Republican.“ This despite economic figures released about the same time that bore absolutely no bad news! Perhaps voters are sophisticated enough to know that when all the news is “good,“ something is terribly wrong somewhere.
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In response to a letter from one of its readers, Guns & Ammo printed the following editor’s note: “Any of our Right to Keep and Bear Arms articles may be reprinted and circulated, as long as they are used for non-commercial purposes. In fact, we urge any interested reader to do so to help support our ongoing battle to preserve our Second Amendment rights.“ FYI.
Also in G&A, columnist Jeff Cooper offers the following:
“Ed Detrixhe gives us a very pungent analogy when he points out that when a hoplophobe is confronted with a reasoned argument that destroys his position, he reacts exactly as a computer does when it is suddenly hit with an unexpected power surge. The screen goes blank. In an age when our educational system produces technicians rather than educated people, it is common for one who has never been introduced to logical argument to blow a fuse when he is hit with it. It is possible that these hoplophobes are not necessarily insane, but rather totally unable to think straight, never having been called upon to do so in school.“
By and large, public education has become an American genocide.
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I was pleased to give Dick Hershbain, who besides being a member of RKBA co-ordinates the [Mensa] Survivalist SIG, my permission to reprint “Join the PCI Crusade” in his SIG newsletter.
Many of you know that one of the great thrills for any writer is learning that someone considers your work worthy of inclusion in their own publication.
[That piece was later published in Guns & Ammo, attributed to some hunting club newsletter. G&A never responded, as far as I know, to my attempts to have them correct the attribution.]
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Jan 1994
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Join the PCI Crusade
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Mon 31 Jan 1994 6:38
by Kevin McGehee
in Sacramento, CA
0 comments
[Humor?]
[The Armed Genius]
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There is a plague in our nation that arises from the widespread misinterpretation of the First Amendment.
The portion of the First Amendment dealing with the freedom of the press, reads, quite simply (or should I say, simplistically): “Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the freedom ... of the press.“ As you can see, the phrasing is highly elliptical and open to interpretation, and the prevailing view both among the people and in the courts holds that the freedom of the press is nearly, but not quite, absolute.
The problem with this interpretation is that it is based on an obsolete understanding of what a bunch of dead white guys known, rather messianically, as the “Founding Fathers”, intended for it to mean.
The authors of the Bill of Rights were addressing a publishing technology that was restricted to hand-operated presses using movable engraved type. Such presses were slow to set up, slow to operate, and could print only one page at a time.
They had no inkling back then that publishing technology would reach today’s level, with high-speed mechanical presses printing thousands of copies per hour from computer-typeset models. Nor could they have anticipated today’s world of personal laser printers hooked up to personal computers using desktop-publishing software, which turn people of relatively slight means and low social standing into mass-media publishers almost on a par with the established, respectable commercial publishers. These technological developments show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the current view of this portion of the First Amendment is no longer tenable, and that reasonable controls must be enacted on the tools used in printing to ensure that these “nobody” publishers do not cause great harm to our Republic.
Each of you is invited to join in this effort to enact reasonable press controls by joining Press Control, Incorporated. Our president, Kent Hackett of Monroe, Md., has known personal tragedy as a result of the careless misuse of these widely available, unregulated concealable publishing devices; his brother-in-law, Pat Pending of Attica, N.Y., was ruined financially after a common street publisher printed pamphlets attacking his business methods (the pamphleteer accused Pending of causing his own name to be engraved on every new invention developed in America for the past several decades, with the result that millions in royalties were allegedly diverted to his own pockets, rather than those of the true inventors).
Although Mr. Pending and his army of high-priced lawyers succeeded in winning billions in damages from the pamphleteer in a lawsuit, he says his reputation has been besmirched and small children now call him names on the streets of his own hometown.
This same kind of vicious, unprovoked attack can happen to any of us, at any time, from quarters none of us expect. Should our children be afraid to go to college because they fear that an independent student paper might print bad things about them? Should the thankless work of authoritative publications like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today be made unrewarding by competition from the likes of Rush Limbaugh (The Limbaugh Letter), R. Emmett Tyrrell (The American Spectator) and Mike Antonucci (The Right Mind)?
If your answer to these questions is “No,“ then you should be one of us. If not, then you are a despicable creature undeserving of the name “human being”—probably a white supremacist printer-nut getting bribes from the makers of cheap Saturday-night special desktop printers. We know who you are.
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May 1993
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...And It Fires 300 Stupidities per Second
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Sat 1 May 1993 15:45
by Kevin McGehee
in Sacramento, CA
0 comments
[Media Ochre]
[The Armed Genius]
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ABC’s Easter Sunday presentation of the comedy farce “This Just In” promised to be a send-up of the idiocies of television news—but it sent up a few idiocies of its own, including showing an Army general holding a “service revolver” that looked suspiciously to me like a Colt M1911 autoloader.
Even more idiotic was the fake commercial for the “National Semi-Automatic Rifle Association”—portraying people firing machine guns. Once more, you Hollywood types: a semi-automatic rifle does not have continuous-fire capability!
Chalk it up as yet another example of the role ignorance plays in Hollywood-style political correctness.
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Jan 1993
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‘The Armed Genius’ #1, January 1993
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Thu 7 Jan 1993 5:16
by Kevin McGehee
in Sacramento, CA
0 comments
[The Armed Genius]
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[The following was sent out as the first official letter of the “RKBA” special interest group I founded as part of Mensa in 1993. The disclaimer below is included here because it is referenced in the letter itself. The scare quotes on “has no opinions” are mine, because the Mensa Bulletin had done a fawning cover story about Bill Clinton, which many Mensans interpreted as a violation of the society’s claim to (all together now) “have no opinions.“]
RKBA is a special interest group of American Mensa, Ltd. The views and opinions expressed in this newsletter are those of the author(s), and do not necessarily reflect those of American Mensa, Ltd., which “has no opinions.“
Dear Members and Friends:
As of January 7, 1993, RKBA is an officially recognized Mensa SIG, and will be listed in the regularly published SIG directory. The disclaimer above is mandatory even though Mensa’s claim to have no opinions has been questioned by some since the appearance of the January/February 1993 Mensa Bulletin. My opinion is, that kind of hypocrisy on the part of Mensa officialdom merely highlights the need for Mensans like us to stick with it and be active in promoting our own views—on Second Amendment freedoms and on other things.
In any case, this is the first official communication of RKBA as a Mensa SIG. Some of you may find that it repeats things I’ve written in other, informal, pre-recognition communications. I hope you’ll bear with me.
The stated goal of this group is to bring pro-freedom Mensans together in a kind of long-distance roundtable to discuss ways to better promote the pro-freedom position to the general public. Our SIG directory listing will characterize RKBA as “the pro-freedom brain trust.“ Its success as such is contingent on my hearing from members and friends with ideas for attacking the stereotypes, distortions, lies, and overwrought rhetoric of the pro-control forces.
As I write this, one William Jefferson Blythe Clinton of Arkansas is less than a week away from assuming the presidency. Mr. Clinton, who received votes from the largest minority of those casting ballots on Election Day, has embraced Sarah Brady and the Brady Bill—which cannot have come as any surprise to any of you. During one of the presidential debates, Mr. Clinton responded to a question about gun control with the patented disclaimer, “I support the right to keep and bear arms, but—-“ This kind of talk has earned pro-control politicians the affectionate nickname, “but”-heads.
Pro-freedom opinion made some headway in the congressional elections, but the domestic disarmament lobby remains strong, and is backed by the media and leading segments of the legal profession.
Politicians, journalists and celebrities who push gun control are a curious breed. While they undertake to legislate the survival imperative out of existence for ordinary citizens like you and me, they insist on their own right to hire bodyguards with permits to carry exotic weapons that would not be available to the common citizens even in the wildest utopian dreams of the most fanatical “gun nut.“
Mobilizing pro-freedom opinion is essential under these circumstances. We can be the leaders of one segment of the movement, opening a new front in the battle. I want to hear from you with ideas that can be tested, as well as with success stories of your own. One of our new members belongs to a shooting club and hosted a reporter whose opinion had been mildly hoplophobic. By the time the club members were finished, that reporter had changed her opinion, and is now a pro-freedom, armed American. All it takes is to show people how it really is.
There is a problem, however. The depth and intensity of bias against the right to keep and bear arms is considerable among the members of the news media. Getting a pro-freedom message, even an extremely well-constructed and argued one, to the general public can become impossible. The willingness of the media to censor inconvenient facts is illustrated in the fact that, while the national economy bottomed out and began to recover early last year, the news of the beginning upturn never made it to the people until after the election. When the vast majority of Americans have their opinions shaped by Big Media, this lack of journalistic integrity is a tangible threat to all our freedoms, including freedom of speech.
I wish therefore to place on the table the question of how to circumvent the hostile media gatekeepers in order to get our messages to a wider audience.
The National Rifle Association has some good, sensible guidelines for writing printable letters-to-the-editor that won’t show gun owners in an even worse light than the pro-control forces create. Unfortunately, no glut of brief, snappy LTEs can hope to overcome the influence of a 25,000-word editorial full of the worst kind of misrepresentation. Playing the media game by the media’s own rules is very much like gambling in a corporate-owned casino: the odds are always stacked in the house’s favor.
The NRA has created “GunTalk,“ a computer bulletin-board service for pro-freedom networking. Its new, aggressive approach to championing the right to keep and bear arms is very promising. I, however, subscribe to the theory that the best and quickest way to solve a seemingly insurmountable problem is to attack it from several angles at once. What other ways are there for us (supporters of Second Amendment freedoms) to get our arguments out there?
What little-known strategy or system already works? What untried idea seems promising? Millions of Americans terrorized by crime in their own neighborhoods, or faced with the loss of their hunting heritage, or fearing that their favorite shooting sports will become impossible to practice, are waiting for thinking, concerned people like us to help protect what they hold dear. I need to hear from you.
I want to thank all of you for your enthusiastic support. Although it has been something of a deluge, I can’t honestly say I’m surprised. Public opinion since last spring’s L.A. rioting has swung slightly but noticeably in our direction. A greater proportion of America’s 70 million gun owners are becoming aware and involved in the fight to preserve their freedoms. Your interest in RKBA is just one more example, especially when I see how many of you have never even considered joining a SIG before. I suspected when I joined Mensa last July that its membership included a vast, untapped reservoir of pro-freedom opinion. What I reasoned then has now become incontenstible. We can win. We must.
Yours, as always, in support of freedom,
Kevin McGehee
Co-ordinator, RKBA
[To put the timeline in perspective, I didn’t even have a computer yet when I wrote this; got my 386 later that year. Moved to Fairbanks, Alaska the summer of ‘94 and got married that fall. Didn’t get an email address until 1995, a website until 1996. TAG content got posted on the website as it was produced, and I back-archived older stuff for a while too—but website space in those days was very limited; you couldn’t leave a lot of stuff posted very long if you were generating new content.]
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Jan 1984
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