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Today in minor CW news: Naomi Biden’s Secret Service detail takes shots at
carjackersthieves breaking in to a USSS vehicle. The vehicle in question was not occupied, so it wasn’t literal self-defense, but I am willing to assume it’s within protocol.I’m bringing this up here to take predictions on the level and type of attention this will receive. My prediction is that the most vocal coverage will be conservative Twitter/substack trying to make this about Democrat hypocrisy with regards to crime. There’s just not enough material to make it personal about the Biden family. While I don’t doubt that spicy takes will exist, I’m wondering if they’ll make it to cable news.
Edit: immediately after posting, I see the next Twitter link is some guy with triple parentheses talking about how crime is so normal in DC. I swear I hadn’t seen that when I made my prediction.
Yes, I agree with this prediction. The most common take will be something along the lines of, "see Democrats believe that shooting people that steal from people that matter is good, they just think you don't matter". For my part, I agree that shooting thieves is good, but I expect that most of the soft-on-crime left will maintain ideological consistency and say that it's bad that the Secret Service would shoot at someone that wasn't even a threat to anyone.
Yeah. It is a matter of routine for politicians or rich people who are strong advocates for gun control to have private armed security and even concealed carry licenses. Famously Dianne Feinstein had a CCW issued in San Francisco, which is about as common as unicorns when it comes to exclusive gun rights.
They don't want to disarm all of society. They want unimportant people like you and me to be disarmed. Important people such as them and their important possessions will still be defended with privately owned guns.
This is such a lame charge of hypocrisy. It's as stupid as saying that it's hypocrisy for gun control advocates to want the military to have access to weaponry; of course there will be exceptions but the point is that those should be tightly controlled by the state - an asymmetry of force in which those guarding politicians have more at their disposal than their would be attackers is a good thing.
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I don't think that's it:
That's still kinda the point, isn't it? Feinstein wanted to be armed to protect herself, while at the same time working to prevent others from being able to be armed to protect themselves. Granted, she had a reasonable basis to anticipate that she might need that protection, but it's not as if other normal citizens who also want protection are being unreasonable.
I'm all for gun control, but it seems entirely fair to point to the hypocrisy here.
OP claimed that she was allowed to carry a gun because she was "important", but in fact it is because she faced an unusual threat.
She felt she faced an unusual threat. In reality, some dork like Kyle Rittenhouse has had more credible threats against him in the last two years than she has faced in a career.
And if so, I am perfectly fine with Kyle Rittenhouse getting a concealed weapon permit.
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The quote you provided does not appear to establish that. It says she decided to arm herself in response to the bomb threat, not that she was allowed to arm herself because of it.
And personally it's the decision to arm herself that I see as hypocritical, regardless of the licensing regime. If she didn't believe the government could provide adequate protection to a goddamn Senator, it's a bit rich for her to insist that normal people rely on it.
One can believe that Protection(Senator) < Threat(Senator) && Protection(Random_Citizen) > Threat(Random_Citizen) and not be hypocritical.
I have absolutely no idea what this means and wish you would just use normal language.
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She of course was not a Senator at the time. And, normal people are not personally targeted by terrorist organizations.
If the law at the time required good cause for a concealed carry permit, it is not hypocritical to get a permit if you personally have good cause therefor. Is it hypocritical to think that higher income taxes rates would be sound policy, yet to take advantage of a tax deduction to which you are entitled under current law? I don’t see how it is.
Yes it is. That is one of the few areas in the law where you can unilaterally impose your preferred policy on yourself. This is very unlike the "Libertarian Meeting at the Public Library" meme. Those libertarians can't not pay library taxes by not using the room, you can pay higher taxes whenever you want!
"But anti_dan," you say, "I don't want higher taxes just for me, we need it on everyone to do XXX." But that's just a self-checkmate you are admitting paying taxes sucks and makes people poorer.
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Apologies re the Senator thing - I had heard at some point that she was "first elected in the 70s" and assumed this meant to the Senate. My bad on that point.
But on this point:
Did it? I haven't heard of any such provision in the law and I haven't been able to find one with a bit of googling. It seems like currently it's a matter of discretion for the county sheriff, and I haven't been able to find anything saying that this has changed since the 70s. Pre-Mulford Act was clearly different, but that was 1967.
And while I'll grant you that normal people are not (usually) personally targeted by terrorists with the exception of e.g. Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and so forth, they do get personally targeted by violence! California has something like 200,000 assaults per year and I expect most of those are personally targeted. I never heard Feinstein saying it was important for e.g. women with violent ex-partners to be able to get guns, nor did I see her proposing legislation to that effect. So yes, I do think she was hypocritical.
Again, I agree with her on the merits. Bad guys get guns off good guys with guns - there's no realistic way to ensure that all the safe and none of the dangerous people are armed, so effectively everyone should be disarmed. But I have no respect for anyone who refuses to live by the rules they set for others.
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Can't it be both? She faced an unusual threat but she was allowed to carry a weapon due to her prominence? If she was a business owner who faced a similar threat would she have been granted the permit? Were other people facing similar threats granted permits? It'd be interesting to review the permit applications to make an assessment but I don't think they're PAI. Feinstein says she voluntarily gave up her permit after she decided NWLF wasn't a threat to her (along with her cute little story about melting it into the cross for the Pope) but it rings a little hollow considering she had a tax-payer funded armed detail for her protection at that point.
IIRC she’s literally the only CHL permit that her county ever granted, so this isn’t a situation similar to, say, Italy where people who legitimately have a heightened need for security can get a license to carry concealed weapons but it requires a legitimate heightened need for security(and my understanding is that this is how European ‘may-issue’ CHL regimes actually work in practice, as opposed to US may issue regimes. There is probably a lesson there in why the red tribe doesn’t trust gun control).
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Of course it can be both. But where is the actual evidence for the claim that "importance" is a causal factor, especially in general? Because that was the claim: that "it is a matter of routine" for advocates for gun control to have concealed carry licenses.
Your reply to TIRM on down was about Feinstein, so that's what I addressed in my comment.
As far as evidence, we'd need to be able to take a look at who's getting permits in CA but that data isn't FOIA-able due to privacy issues. There was a leak a while back but it looks like that dashboard is now offline.
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Po-tae-to, Po-tah-to.
Normal people have to deal with threats too. I don't see why the threat Feinstein faced, and her moral right to defend herself, is contingent on the type of threat. All I see is an important person having the sorts of threats they face being classified as "special", while the threats normal people deal with aren't.
No, normal people are not individually targeted by terrorist groups, especially not groups that send several bombs to her and other SF supervisors and are affiliated with organizations which assassinate school superintendents in nearby cities
I'm pretty close to a gun rights absolutist, but it's worth mentioning that being armed isn't actually a very good defense against assassination. As you point out in the first link, bombing is a common means of assassination; shooting bombs sounds cool, but probably won't do much to prevent a car-bomb from taking out a target. In the event that an assassin does engage with a firearm, a competent one is likely to choose the Oswald approach of firing an accurate, high-powered rifle. Carrying a pistol isn't going to do much against someone with a 6.5 Creedmoor sighted in at 200 yards, and the accuracy at that distance is pinpoint.
To the extent that firearms are useful as a self-defense tool, I would guess that they have at least as much utility for a convenient store worker as a politician.
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Completely and totally irrelevant to my point. You just further buy into the notion that special people face special threats and deserve special treatment, which I reject in it's totality.
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