Dinner And Education Event On The Racist Roots Of Gun Control

Historian and blogger Clayton Cramer will be the featured speaker at an event co-sponsored by the CalGuns Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition on March 29th in Sacramento, California. He will be speaking on the racist roots of gun control. Other speakers include Second Amendment attorneys Don Kilmer, Bradley Benbrook, and Stephen Duvernay, CalGuns Foundation chairman Gene Hoffman, and Firearms Policy Coalition president Brandon Combs.

More info on the event is below. If you are in the Sacramento area on the 29th, this sounds like an interesting event. On a personal note, it is great to see Clayton doing a public event like this given his stroke about a year and a half ago. If you can't make the event, Clayton has put together a YouTube video on the topic including PowerPoint slides.

Sacramento, CA – Firearms Policy Coalition and The Calguns Foundation have announced a special dinner and education event featuring noted Second Amendment historian Clayton E. Cramer, who will give his talk The Racist Roots of Gun Control.

Cramer will be joined at the March 29 event by firearms law and policy experts including noted civil rights attorneys Donald Kilmer and Bradley Benbrook, Calguns Foundation Chairman Gene Hoffman, and Firearms Policy Coalition President Brandon Combs. Speakers will be taking questions from the audience following the talks.

Tickets for the event, which can be purchased at FPC’s website, are $60 per person and include a filet of beef, chicken, or salmon dinner. College, university, and law school students can purchase tickets at a reduced rate of $30 per person.

Event: The Past, Present, and Future of Second Amendment Policy and Litigation — A Special Evening with Historian Clayton E. Cramer and Friends

Tickets: https://www.firearmspolicy.org/events/cramer/

Date: March 29, 2015

Time: 5:30 p.m. guest check-in & mixer; dinner 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. (or until Q&A concluded)

Location: Embassy Suites Sacramento – Riverfront Promenade (link to hotel website) (link to Google map)

Speakers and topics will include:

• Historian Clayton E. Cramer: The Racist Roots of Gun Control

• Attorney Donald Kilmer: Gun Violence Restraining Orders and the Growing Problem of Constitutional Conflicts in Public Policy

• Attorney Bradley Benbrook: Firearms-area Litigation and Emerging Second Amendment Jurisprudence

• Attorney Stephen Duvernay: Active litigation case updates

• The Calguns Foundation Chairman Gene Hoffman: The Minimum Necessary Right to Keep and Bear Arms – What, Why, and How We’re Doing So Far

• FPC President Brandon Combs: What to Expect In and From Firearms Policy and Litigation Going Forward

Comment Of The Day

The comment of the day actually comes from this past Saturday. Sebastian had a post on the Melissa Bachman non-controversial lion hunt that has been made into a hate-filled cause ce'le'bre by the world-wide anti-hunting element. Sebastian pointed out the hunting variation of the "I'm a gun owner but..." rationale.

Clayton Cramer had this great comment in the comments section:

Whenever I run into a Fudd, I remind them of one really ugly fact: most of us “extremists” are trying to defend gun rights because of self-defense. If the right to protect yourself from a murderer, rapist, or robber isn’t sufficient reason to own a gun, what makes you think that having a gun for entertainment is going to be a good enough reason?

We all hang together, or we will most assuredly all hang separately.

While a counter-argument could be made that a firearm is necessary to feed one's family, very few people in this country exist anymore on what they hunt or what they gather.

Clayton's assertion that we need to hang together is spot-on. I rarely hunt anymore but I'll defend both meat hunters and trophy hunters against the PETAfiles. I just ask that they try and return the favor.

CCRKBA - Bloomberg "Half Right"

Mayor Michael Bloomberg was on the Jimmy Fallon Show and was complaining that the media doesn't do a good job of reporting "firearm news" other than mass shootings. The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms agrees and issued this statement.

BELLEVUE, WA – Anti-gun New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was “half-right” when he told NBC’s Jimmy Fallon that there is “scant coverage” of other firearms news, because there is virtually no coverage of self-defense uses every day, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

Bloomberg complained about the lack of attention paid by the press to “people who are killed by guns every day,” according to Yahoo News.

“Press coverage of justifiable gun use in self-defense is almost invisible,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “yet firearms are used in successful self-defense situations hundreds, if not thousands of times every day. It is disingenuous to talk about crime without mentioning the lives saved because an intended victim was armed.

“We know that hundreds of thousands of lives are saved in this country every year because someone had a firearm,” he continued. “In most cases, a shot is never fired, but the display of a gun sends criminals running.”

He noted examples such as the shooting at a Florida internet café last year, and the intervention by an armed citizen at the Clackamas mall in Oregon last month that stopped a gunman.

“Most of the time,” Gottlieb noted, “if they are reported at all, such stories rarely get beyond local media coverage, and quickly vanish from the headlines. It would be a refreshing change to see the press pay more attention when an armed citizen defends himself, his family, his home or total strangers by being in the right place at the right time.

“While Bloomberg would ignore these people,” he observed, “they really are first responders and they sometimes perform acts of remarkable heroism in saving innocent lives. The press only pays attention to tragedies while ignoring triumphs.

“Mayor Bloomberg is famous for telling half a story,” Gottlieb concluded, “and he wants the press to continue as his surrogate in this campaign to demonize firearms and the people who own them. In truth, gun owners are our friends, neighbors, doctors, the people who teach our children, and many others who have sometimes been called upon to use a firearm to save a life, and we out number him.”

Clayton Cramer used to do a great job in publishing media reports of defensive gun use. Unfortunately, he stopped doing this after getting sued by the charlatans at the now-defunct RightHaven, LLC. While I have checked the old Armed Citizen site, it doesn't seem up-to-date.

Ben Stein On The Need For Gun Control...Or Not

Economist, lawyer, and actor Ben Stein provides an occasional editorial comment on CBS's Sunday Morning. Today's topic was gun control. Contrary to what one usually gets on guns from the mainstream media, this was actually good.

Stein felt the calls for more gun control as well as the attempts to demonize the NRA are misplaced. He pointed out that in places like Chicago, LA, and DC which have strong gun control laws there are many more shootings than in a place like northern Idaho where carrying guns is quite common. While Stein is not sure what the correct answer is, gun control isn't it.




We know that gun control is a failure and that it will never stop madmen. If we want to prevent the aberrant shootings like Virginia Tech and Aurora, Colorado, I think the answer lies in the mental health realm. This is what Clayton Cramer has been saying for a while now and I think he is correct.

Update on the RightHaven Lawsuit Against the Armed Citizen

Clayton Cramer posted yesterday that the he plans to fight the lawsuit against him and The Armed Citizen by RightHaven LLC. Given that he won't roll over like a submissive dog to Steve Gibson's threats, it is going to cost money to fight it. He has issued an appeal on The Armed Citizen website for donations. I plan on making a donation and I hope that you will as well.