Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 68

Here We Go Again: Another Bogus Attempt To Get Guns Into The ‘Wrong Hands.’

When it comes to reducing gun violence, Gun-nut Nation and its new fuhrer have the perfect solution: lock up every criminal who ever carried a gun and oh, by the way, ‘fix’ the mental health system to make sure that the nutty guy who uses a gun to settle some delusional score or another isn’t allowed to get his hands on a gun.

[image error]             I’ve been listening to this nonsense for the past twenty years, and while there certainly is something to the idea of removing violent criminals from the streets, the only people who believe that the phrase ‘fix the mental health system’ means anything at all are the same folks who stand around the fence outside Area 51 hoping to see a Martian space ship come down. But the problem is that every once in a while someone from that bunch gets elected to Congress (or the White House) and when they try to rewrite a law which makes it easier for mentally-ill people to get their hands on guns, then the nonsense takes a more serious turn.

And the latest piece of legislative nonsense is a bill just filed by Rep. Phil Roe (R-TN) called the “Veterans 2nd Amendment Protection Act,” which basically undercuts the process by which the VA declares someone to be considered ‘mentally incompetent’ and thus unable to own or buy a gun.  This is a replay of the action taken last month by Congress to annul Obama’s regulation requiring the Social Security Administration to report to FBI-NICS the names of persons who were no longer handling their own financial affairs. In this case, the new regulation goes even further because not only is a judicial exercise required before a final determination of mental incompetency can be made, but the court has to find that the mental impairment is such that the individual would be a “danger to himself or herself or others.”

Incidentally, Congressman Roe is not only a physician (OB-GYN) but is co-chair of something called the ‘GOP Doctors Caucus,’ which claims to be leading the fight for patient-centered health care which, if they inserted the word ‘rich’ before the word ‘patient’ might aptly describe the GOP’s effort to ‘replace’ the ACA.  But either way, if this group of physicians-turned pro-gun legislators believes they are bringing needed clarity to the determination by the VA as to which veterans should have guns and which shouldn’t, it’s about as much clarity as what Trump has brought to the discussion about his connections to Putin and the Russian money-mob.

The proposed law not only calls for a court procedure to determine gun-owning fitness by veterans who collect VA benefits, but requires this procedure to be conducted by a court which doesn’t actually exist. And worse, the law also stipulates that the only criteria which this non-existent court can use to determine gun-owning fitness is that it would have to be shown that the particular veteran was a ‘danger’ to himself or others.

Now I agree that the fact that I designate someone else to handle my financial affairs doesn’t, in and of itself, necessarily create the suspicion that I am prone to engage in dangerous behavior. But that’s not the point. The argument for keeping guns out of the ‘wrong hands’ has never been based on any foolproof test that can be used to predict violent behavior before it occurs. The argument is based on the idea that certain people who behave in certain ways (violent criminals, mentally ill, etc.) are more prone to behave violently and the easiest way to commit a violent act is to use a gun.

If the Republicans decide to undo the ‘wrong hands’ argument for determining fitness for gun ownership, they will be erasing public policies that go back to the first federal gun law passed in 1934.  But since every gun-control law has been the handiwork of Democratic administrations, isn’t it time we gave the other side a chance?

Trump Won But The NRA’s Biggest Battle May Still Be Ahead.

 

Will ‘Smart’ Guns Ever Be Sold? I’m Not Sure.

Ever since the Clinton Administration ponied up some R&D money, the idea of creating a smart’ gun, or what is also called a ‘personalized’ gun has been flopping around the edges of the gun-control debate without much to show for it except a couple of government reports, an overpriced 22-caliber pistol that may or may not work very well and an occasional news story which just takes us back to Square One.

[image error]             And Square One in the discussion about ‘smart’ guns is whether the average gun owner would be interested in owning a smart gun at all.  Because no matter how you slice it or dice it, putting an electronic gatekeeping device on a gun just isn’t as simple, easy or cheap as putting a fingerprint reader on a droid. The whole point of droid electronics is that everything that makes the device work is wired through a screen. But guns don’t have screens; they have metals and hard plastics and movable parts. Believe me, if someone could have come up with a droid-like fingerprint scanner that worked on a gun the way it works on a phone, it would have already been done.

Back in 2015 our friends at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School conducted a survey which found that 60% of respondents said they would consider buying a ‘smart’ gun, but a major gap in this survey was that the people who answered weren’t asked how much they would be willing to spend beyond the cost of the gun to personalize the weapon with an electronic device. And a comment by a member of the Hopkins research group that such a gun could use technology that ‘already exists’ simply isn’t true.

Sooner or later, someone has to explain how electronic devices that would be used to create a ‘safe’ gun actually work. Because if you read descriptions of smart-gun technologies, they will tell you how the gizmo works that identifies someone who has been programmed to use a particular gun, but what they don’t tell you is what has to happen inside the gun after the scanner reads the database and finds a print which is a match. And what most of the descriptions tell you is that once a match is made, then the gizmo ‘unlocks’ the trigger and away we go.

But unlocking the trigger of a gun isn’t the same thing as just taking a key and unlocking the front door.  In order to ‘unlock’ a trigger so that it can be pulled to fire a gun, at least three separate parts in the gun have to change their positions, these parts connecting the trigger to the hammer to the firing pin or striker, or otherwise the gun doesn’t work. And if one of these parts doesn’t shift its position with enough force, energy or pressure, when you pull the trigger all you will hear is a – click!  This is the reason you can’t just attach a fingerprint scanner to a gun without entirely redesigning the inner workings of the gun. So to make a ‘smart’ gun you are basically designing and manufacturing a new gun, which means you’re not just adding a new part to the gun the way you might change the grips.

The smart gun folks could get around the cost problem if the government would mandate ownership of smart guns. But the odds of that happening are about the same as the odds that Donald Trump would actually say something that’s true. The only smart gun that has ever hit the market (for a day) was the 22-caliber Armatix pistol which had a retail price of over $1,700 bucks, and even though the company has announced a 9mm prototype, I don’t notice that they have announced a price. And the idea that in low-bid America the cops would ever carry a pricey gun of any kind is like Humphrey Bogart’s final words at the end of Maltese Falcon: This is what dreams are made of.”

What A Surprise! Gun Sales Hit The Skids Under Trump.

Want to make a million in the gun business? Start with two million.  It’s an old joke but it has a ring of truth to it because even though guns have been selling like hot cakes since you-know-who moved into the White House in 2009, now that he’s moved out, everyone’s predicting that the gun business will slow down.  And the problem with the gun business is that it’s always been boom-or-bust, driven primarily by the possibility that we won’t be able to get our hands on any more guns.

[image error]        So when Trump pulled off the unthinkable on November 8th, given the fact that he had made gun-control (or I should say, less gun control) a central feature of his campaign, it was clear that the mad rush to stockpile guns during the Obama regime would come to an end. How much of an end?  The numbers so far are much worse than what people thought might occur.

Before I get into the bad news (or the good news, depending on your point of view,) I have to explain how to figure out how many guns are actually sold. Since more than 90% of the guns sold in the U.S. come from companies that are privately owned, we can’t get any kind of valid numbers from the gun makers themselves, but the FBI-NICS background check is extremely reliable for telling us how many new guns have been sold.

In that regard, a funny thing happened to new gun sales in January – they didn’t go down, they collapsed.  The drop in sales from December wasn’t in the nature of 20%, which is what the experts are saying will be the story for 2017; it was more like a drop of 50%, and I don’t ever recall something like that ever happening before. In that regard, Breitbart’s gun ‘expert,’ AWR Hawkins, got it all wrong when he said that background checks needed to be viewed with caution because since every purchase could represent multiple guns, 3 million checks could mean that 6 million new guns were purchased. Except that the monthly NICS report contains a separate category for multiple guns covered by the same call.

In December, 2016 the NICS call center logged 2,763,115 calls.  In January, 2017 total calls were 2,032,108.  Hold on you say, that’s only a decline of 26%, which happens to be, by the way, the biggest month-to-month drop since December-January, 2015-2016. But there’s only one little problem: of the slightly more than 2 million calls in January, more than one million were calls for license checks, pawn redemptions and private sales.  In fact, January 2017 marked the first time that calls for background checks on over-the-counter purchases were less than half the total calls handled by NICS. Gun sale checks were 976,341, which meant the month-to-month calls for background checks on gun sales dropped by nearly 55%.

Neither the NRA nor the NSSF has let out a peep about the January NICS numbers, as opposed to previous months when they couldn‘t wait to let everyone know that background checks for gun sales kept going up. If this trend continues, gun sales are to go back to where they were at the beginning of 2012, before Sandy Hook and before Obama got on his high horse about regulating guns.

No wonder Wayne-o went to CPAC and pledged that the NRA would become the first line of defense against violent, left-wing thugs. After all, if Trump gets his way with immigration, we won’t have all those undocumented, criminally-disposed ‘illegals’ top kick around any more. And unless Gun-nut Nation can come up with a new threat to hearth and home, it may not be long until the shrunken January gun numbers will be a pleasant memory compared to what gun sales might really become.

Wouldn’t it be funny if the NRA is secretly funding Obama’s ‘secret coup?’

The Gun Industry Comes Up With A New Product For Your Health.

Since I registered for Medicare, a week doesn’t go by when I don’t receive something in the mail offering a hearing aid at a reduced ‘special for seniors’ price. So when I found out about a new federal bill called the Hearing Protection Act, I got really excited because I figured that the Congress was going to make it easier and cheaper for me to start hearing again.

[image error]             But in fact this proposed law has nothing to do with helping me hear at all; the purpose of the bill is to make it easier to buy a silencer and thus make it harder for me to hear the sound of a gun being shot off, a noise which, by the way, is a good thing to hear because it tells me that someone may be using a gun in a dangerous and unsafe way.

It figures that the moment Gun-nut Nation comes up with a way to bolster sagging gun sales, they would want everyone to think that what they are doing will actually protect people rather than create harm. The same bunch has been peddling the same nonsense about the virtues and benefits of concealed-carry and the value of walking around with a gun.  But the problem is that gun sales have now slumped and industry analysts predict a rocky year ahead.  Shares of Smith & Wesson (now calling themselves American Outdoor Brands I guess because they own a company that manufactures saws for cutting down trees) have dropped from $30 to $20 a share – the Obama bloom is clearly off the rose and nobody sees it coming back any time soon.

But why would anyone imagine that just because people can now put a silencer on their gun that this will help the gun industry sell more guns?  Because putting a silencer on a gun isn’t the same thing as just changing the grip or adding a laser sight.  In order to mount a silencer on the front of a gun barrel you need to machine the outside of the barrel’s end so that the silencer will screw on and hold tight. If the silencer isn’t mounted exactly flush on these rails, you’ll probably destroy the silencer with the first shot and also probably break the gun. Now here’s where things get tricky, or sticky.

Most hunting guns have barrels that will take a scope or use the iron (open) sights that are part of the barrel itself. Which means for a silencer you have to change barrels which in many cases requires changing the gun.  This is also true with pistols, some of which have barrels that are easily swapped out, others are attached to the bolt. And every pistol that might take a silencer will need a longer barrel so that the part that is machined to accept the silencer will stick out from the front of the slide.  In other words, you’re buying another gun.

Funny, but this doesn’t seem to be explained in the advertising for silencers that I have seen online.  You would think from the promotion for silencers is that all you have to do is buy one, then go through the paperwork, fork over your $200, wait six months or more for the purchase to be approved and then away you go.  That’s not true. What this new law aims to do is get rid of the current licensing process (mandated since the National Firearms Act of 1934) and thus make the purchase of a silencer just as easy and simple as buying any other consumer product that you can put on a gun.

Know what? This law has nothing to do with protecting hearing. The purpose of this law is to give the gun industry a new product line that can be sold to current gun owners because nobody’s buying new guns.  The only protection being offered by this law is protection for the gun industry’s bottom line.

Why Do People Stop Owning Guns? A Possible Answer

Sometimes surprises come from the funniest places, like a study of the relationship between religious belief and gun ownership which turns out to yield possible answers to one of the major points of disagreement in the gun-violence debate. But before we get to the big surprise, let’s spend some time looking at the basic findings of the study itself.  Published by David Yamane, a sociologist at Wake Forest who teaches an undergraduate course on the sociology of guns, this study attempts to create a ‘nuanced’ view of gun owners based on looking at gun ownership relative to religious belief and what Yamane refers to as various forms of religiosity, such as attendance at religious functions and strength of religious beliefs.

[image error]             What Yamane claims to have discovered is that, contrary to what many people believe, evangelical Christians are no more likely to own guns than Catholics, Jews and people who profess no specific denominational orientation at all, although evangelicals are more oriented towards gun ownership than members of mainline Protestant denominations (Episcopalian, Methodist, et.al.) But when Yamane talks about gun ownership, it’s very important to understand that he defines a ‘gun’ only as a handgun, basing this choice on the fact that lately more and more Americans state that the primary reason they own a gun is for self-defense.

Yamane’s focus on handguns is an important nuance to inject into the gun debate because the motives that drive people to own handguns, by definition, will be different than the reasons why people own and use long guns whose design and function basically fit the requirements for hunting and sport. And I wish that more gun scholars would follow Yamane’s lead in this respect and nuance their own research to take into account the differences involved  in the ownership of handguns as opposed to the general ownership of guns.

On the other hand, Yamane has to be careful not to push his nuanced methodology too far.  Because as he admits, most gun owners own multiple guns, and the fact that they consider their primary reason for currently owning guns to be self-defense doesn’t mean that they aren’t also buying and using long guns for hunting and sport.  So the fact that someone decides to own a self-defense gun because he doesn’t trust the government to keep him safe, still leaves open the question as to why that same person owns other types of guns. Which makes correlating the reasons for gun ownership with other social or cultural factors a bit more difficult to do.

But let’s leave those issues aside and get to the big surprise which awaits the reader if he/she can wade through the sociological jargon which permeates sections of the text. Yamane states at the outset that gun owners tend to live in rural areas, the South and the Great Plains/Mountain West. But he notes that when these folks move out of those places, the only population which retains the same or higher rate of gun ownership are former residents of rural zones. But what he doesn’t tell us (perhaps the data simply doesn’t exist,) is where these ‘out-migrants’ go to live, because with the exception of former rural dwellers, folks who leave the South or the Midwest and Great Plains show a significant decline in their ownership of guns.

This is a very important finding and may represent a great gift to the gun violence prevention (GVP) community because a major proposition of the gun-control crowd, fiercely contested by the other side, is that more laws help curb gun violence. So if the ‘out-migrants’ caught in Yamane’s data become less involved with guns after they leave the places where they were born and grew up, does this perhaps mean that they are moving into areas which have greater regulation of guns?

The fact is that most states with strong gun regulations also tend to be states with lower per-capita ownership of guns. But which came first – the lack of guns or the tough gun laws?  Too bad the answer to that question still isn’t known.

If Trump Goes Down The Tubes, The NRA Won’t Be Far Behind.

Before everyone gets all hot, bothered and indignant about Wayne-o’s attempt to out-trump Trump at the CPAC conference, I’d like to point something out. Let’s remember that it’s been a long time since the NRA dropped any pretense towards being a gun-safety organization or a sportsman’s organization or any other kind of organization devoted to what we call the ‘shooting sports.’ Because unless you want to define ‘sports’ as wandering around with a gun in your pocket to protect the neighborhood from some kind of terrorist assault, you’d better look elsewhere to join other folks who just want to have fun with their guns.

[image error]             The NRA is now contributing to the political debate with arguments that range from a warmed-over version of The John Birch Society (you’re right, Ladd Everitt) to the usual insurrectionist rhetoric of the dumbest militia-type groups. And if you think I’m being extreme, just listen to Wayne-o at CPAC when he went on a rant which included statements about the ‘violence’ of the ‘paid’ demonstrators at the inauguration that resulted in numerous cops being hospitalized during the event, even though there were exactly two officers sent to local hospitals for injuries which were considered ‘minor’ by the hospitals staffs.

So Wayne-o is now a caricature of Trump himself, the boy from Fairfax exhibiting a total disregard for anything that remotely smacks of the truth, and the question needs to asked: Has the NRA become a real threat?  I’m not talking about the possibility that a national concealed-carry bill might become law or that the movement to expand FBI-NICS background checks to secondary sales might get stopped dead in its tracks.  I’m talking about Wayne-o’s thinly-veiled appeal for people to use their guns against the new threat from the ‘violent’ Left: “Make no mistake. If the violent left brings their terror to our communities, our neighborhoods, or into our homes they will be met with the resolve and the strength and the full force of American freedom [guns] in the hands of the American people.”

Now this statement has played again and again throughout the #resistance community on Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else. But what didn’t make the digital airwaves was the very next sentence that came out of Wayne-o’s mouth, when he said, “And make no mistake about it – we are the majority.”  This line got a nice round of applause from the CPAC audience who probably felt they were the majority of the folks who ponied up a minimum of $150 for a day pass to hear Wayne-o and other CPAC-ers speak. But the truth is that what he said wasn’t true. It was a complete and utter lie and its within that falsehood that the NRA’s real weakness during the Age of Trump can be found.

Because look what happened yesterday when, according to Breitbart, we were going to see millions of God-fearing and Trump-loving Americans take to the streets to show their support for their Commander in Chief.  If there was a single ‘Spirit of America’ rally which drew more than 100 persons you wouldn’t know it from the pics that have appeared (20 people in Florida, 30 in Atlanta) all over Twitter and it wasn’t some phony troll who was putting this stuff out.

If things continue to go as they’ve been going, everyone will get sick and tired of Trump. Which means they will also get sick and tired of people and organizations that continue to prop him up. The bottom line is the NRA doesn’t represent a majority of any kind. It represents a bunch of well-meaning gun owners, most of whom voted for Trump but like many people who pulled a red lever in the voting booth, are now wondering if they did the right thing. And if these folks decide that Trump’s rhetoric doesn’t deserve support, then they’ll decide that the NRA doesn’t deserve their support as well. Resist Trump, resist the NRA – it may go hand in hand.

 

A Must-Read Book On Cop Killings.

Now that we finally have a President who supports the police and promises to end the ‘dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America,’ we can begin to gauge how and why this so-called anti-police atmosphere has arisen from a remarkable piece of research, When Police Kill, written by Frank Zimring and published by Harvard University Press.  Zimring is no stranger to the field of gun violence research, having produced formative efforts in this field for more than forty years. And if you think for one second that the issue of cop killings doesn’t go to the heart of the debate about gun violence, think again. Because what Zimring shows is that not only are most fatalities which occur at the hands of police the result of cops using guns, but the number of such deaths each year is undercounted by more than half!

[image error]             Zimring bases his estimate of 1,000+ fatal cop shootings each year on the data collected by The Guardian, whose website contains incident-by-incident counts of cop shootings drawn from a constant scanning of web reports, tips from viewers, social media, what is referred to as ‘crowdsourced’ information which Guardian staff carefully examine and attempt to validate before posting the results online. The first half of When Cops Kill is based on the Guardian data covering January 1 through June 30, 2015. I looked at the remainder of 2015 and the year’s entire total was 1,146, more than twice the number estimated by the three government agencies – FBI, DOJ and CDC – which are supposed to provide solid information on which discussions about public policy usually depend.

Zimring’s explanation for this whopping discrepancy in the numbers covering cop killings basically falls back on some well-worn idea about the limitations of coroner reports, the lack of money for more intensive research and the fact that not one single police agency whose jurisdiction might encompass a police shooting (or any kind of shooting, for that matter) is required to report this information to the FBI.  But what’s really behind this lack of specificity about cop shootings is something more generic to the problem itself, namely, that better data would require that the cops do a more thorough job of investigating and reporting shootings by their own, and this just simply doesn’t take place.

One might be tempted to assume that the underreporting is also a function of the extent to which police gun violence, like all gun violence, primarily involves minorities, but this is not the case.  In fact, in 2015, whites were 50% of all victims shot by cops, blacks were 27% and Hispanics comprised 17%.  But of the 12,979 deaths attributed by the CDC to non-cop gun violence, the ratios were reversed, with whites comprising 24% of the total, blacks comprising 58% and Hispanics at 16%. The bottom line is that police gun violence is ignored because it’s ignored, period.

Reported or not, the real question is why are there so many fatal cop shootings each year – the numbers dwarf differences between our overall gun violence and what is experienced in other Western countries. Zimring’s answer is what you might expect, namely, “the proliferation of concealable firearms in the civilian population.”  For the first half of 2015, guns were recovered from 56% of the victims of fatal police shootings, a number which dropped to slightly below 50% for the year as a whole.

Notwithstanding the lack of training, the lack of thorough reporting and the lack of operational concern, the fact is that a police officer in the United States who finds himself in a confrontational situation believes that there is a one out of two chance that his adversary is carrying a gun.  And as we say, you don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.

I will publish a separate column on Zimring’s recommendations for what he refers to as ‘the mess’ of police gun violence. But don’t wait for my additional thoughts on this valuable and important book before reading it yourself. It needs to be read.

Move Over Bannon – The NRA Is Now Leading The Alt-Right.

Sooner or later the NRA was going to forget its traditional role as an organization devoted to gun training, gun safety and sportsmanship and turn itself into an organization that represents the lunatic fringe.  Not only does the NRA want to be part and parcel of the loonies, according to our friends in The Trace, America’s ‘oldest civil rights organization’ wants to play a leadership role. And their campaign is being kicked off tomorrow with a speech that will be delivered by Wayne-o at the real inauguration of the 45th President, which is the annual CPAC meeting being held just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.

[image error]            How the wheels of fame and fortune doth turn.  I remember it was just a few years ago that the CPAC headliner was Sarah Palin – what happened to her?  And while Dana Loesch is on the program, how come there’s no space for Ann Coulter, perhaps because she tweeted  a defense of Milo Yiannopolous whose former Breitbart boss will, of course, spend his appearance burnishing his national security credentials before his boss takes the stage?

I’m not sure if this year’s CPAC meeting is the first time that Wayne-o has appeared at the event, but it certainly marks a decision by the NRA leadership to throw all their energies into a full-fledged effort to move to the forefront of the conservative tide.  Because it’s one thing to dump some cash into the willing laps of pro-gun legislators or lobby for less gun regulations at the federal level or within individual states.  The NRA’s been doing those things for nearly fifty years, but the organization never before presented itself as a self-appointed leader of the lunatic fringe.

And let’s be honest folks about who Trump really represents.  Because the fact is that he won the election because he pulled one-half of one percent more votes in MI, WI and PA than she did and, by the way, Jill Stein outpolled Ms. Clinton by almost two to one in those three states. So Trump can lie from here to high heaven about those ‘millions’ of illegal votes that she got, but the bottom line is that a combination of the worst-managed Presidential campaign of all time (thank you Bill Clinton for waiting until after the votes were counted to say that Mook should have been fired) and the statistical vagaries of the Electoral College allows Trump-o to pander to the lunatic fringe to his heart’s content.

But how come he’s being joined in the decision to institutionalize his hateful and wacko rhetoric by the NRA?  Okay, the gun guys want a national, concealed-carry law, they want to prevent extended background checks, they want more guns and less gun laws as the order of the day. But what does that have to do with the issue of immigration? What does that have to do whether a transgender kid goes into this bathroom or that? Wayne-o claims that his CPAC speech will be an effort to lead the forces that are conspiring to sabotage Donald Trump.

Let me tell you what’s really going to sabotage Trump and it ain’t all these evil forces against which we can protect ourselves by carrying guns.  What’s going to sabotage Trump are the 30 million people who may find themselves without health coverage or the 150 million middle-class Americans who will discover that Trump’s ‘fantastic’ tax plan won’t help them one bit.

There’s a Republican Congressman in Texas, Louis Gohmert, who just cancelled his Town Hall meeting because he was afraid that someone might show up and start banging the way that Jared Loughner shot Gabby Giffords and 17 other folks with, of course, a legally-purchased gun. Gohmert’s rated an ‘A’ legislator by the NRA which means that he supports their nonsense about how everyone should walk around armed. But the real reason Gohmert cancelled is because he knows that representing the loonies won’t replace the ACA. And by the way, Wayne-o, appealing to the loonies won’t sell any more guns -they have as many as they need.

Wayne Goes To CPAC And The NRA’s Now In Charge.

Sooner or later the NRA was going to forget its traditional role as an organization devoted to gun training, gun safety and sportsmanship and turn itself into an organization that represents the lunatic fringe.  Not only does the NRA want to be part and parcel of the loonies, according to our friends in The Trace, America’s ‘oldest civil rights organization’ wants to play a leadership role. And their campaign is being kicked off tomorrow with a speech that will be delivered by Wayne-o at the real inauguration of the 45th President, which is the annual CPAC meeting being held just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.

[image error]             How the wheels of fame and fortune doth turn.  I remember it was just a few years ago that the CPAC headliner was Sarah Palin – what happened to her?  And while Dana Loesch is on the program, how come there’s no space for Ann Coulter, perhaps because she tweeted  a defense of Milo Yiannopolous whose former Breitbart boss will, of course, spend his appearance burnishing his national security credentials before his boss takes the stage?

I’m not sure if this year’s CPAC meeting is the first time that Wayne-o has appeared at the event, but it certainly marks a decision by the NRA leadership to throw all their energies into a full-fledged effort to move to the forefront of the conservative tide.  Because it’s one thing to dump some cash into the willing laps of pro-gun legislators or lobby for less gun regulations at the federal level or within individual states.  The NRA’s been doing those things for nearly fifty years, but the organization never before presented itself as a self-appointed leader of the lunatic fringe.

And let’s be honest, folks about who Trump really represents.  Because the fact is that he won the election because he pulled one-half of one percent more votes in MI, WI and PA than she did and, by the way, Jill Stein outpolled Ms. Clinton by almost two to one in those three states. So Trump can lie from here to high heaven about those ‘millions’ of illegal votes that she got, but the bottom line is that a combination of the worst-managed Presidential campaign of all time (thank you Bill Clinton for waiting until after the votes were counted to say that Mook should have been fired) and the statistical vagaries of the Electoral College allows Trump-o to pander to the lunatic fringe to his heart’s content.

But how come he’s being joined in the decision to institutionalize his hateful and wacko rhetoric by the NRA?  Okay, the gun guys want a national, concealed-carry law, they want to prevent extended background checks, they want more guns and less gun laws as the order of the day. But what does that have to do with the issue of immigration? What does that have to do whether a transgender kid goes into this bathroom or that? Wayne-o claims that his CPAC speech will be an effort to lead the forces that are conspiring to sabotage Donald Trump.

Let me tell you what’s really going to sabotage Trump and it ain’t all these evil forces against which we can protect ourselves by carrying guns.  What’s going to sabotage Trump are the 30 million people who may find themselves without health coverage or the 150 million middle-class Americans who will discover that Trump’s ‘fantastic’ tax plan won’t help them one bit.

There’s a Republican Congressman in Texas, Louis Gohmert, who just cancelled his Town Hall meeting because he was afraid that someone might show up and start banging the way that Jared Loughner shot Gabby Giffords and 17 other folks with, of course, a legally-purchased gun. Gohmert’s rated an ‘A’ legislator by the NRA which means that he supports their nonsense about how everyone should walk around armed. But the real reason Gohmert cancelled is because he knows that appealing to the local loonies won’t replace the ACA. And by the way, Wayne-o, appealing to the loonies won’t sell any more guns -they have as many as they need.