These 62 Had The Courage Of Their Convictions

Do you have the courage of your convictions with regard to the Second Amendment? Would you go to the mattresses to use a term from The Godfather?  Would you put your job at risk or would you just quietly suck it up?

62 former employees of Dick's Sporting Goods and their Field and Stream subsidiary did have the courage of their convictions. After Dick's CEO Ed Stack not only changed the company's policy on selling modern sporting rifles and raised the purchase age to 21 for all firearms but fully bought into the gun control agenda, these 62 resigned their jobs.

From the Pittsburgh Business Times:

According to CEO Ed Stack, 62 employees quit working for Dick's Sporting Goods over the retailer's decision to stop selling assault-style weapons, announced in February....

"We anticipated that there would be some people that would leave. We've got 40,0000 employees, and 2,500, or 2,6000 (sic) people working at our corporate headquarters," said Stack, of the Findlay-based company. "We're a cross-section of the country. We knew people would be upset."

His comments came in a Wall Street Journal CEO Council interview. An excerpt of that interview is below.



Stack says it is OK to have differing views and he is correct. However, it is one thing to have differing views on whether the Steelers or the Eagles are the better team and a whole another thing to have differing views on working to suppress a right enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

What Stack did not say was who they were and what jobs they held. Some, like the clerk he mentioned, probably held low level jobs. Other I'm guessing held higher positions. While I don't have any confirmation of it, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Jack Barnes who is the new VP for Commercial Sales for Sig Sauer was one of those 62. He had developed and implemented the concept of the Field and Stream stores for Dick's.

These 62 former employees put skin in the game and stood for the Constitution when the head of the company they worked for decided it was politically expedient to trash it. They are to be applauded. If I owned a company in the firearms industry I'd be looking for these 62 as they would be the kind of employees I'd want.

Was This Intended Or Unintended?

Where you place paragraphs in a story makes a difference and can lead to different interpretations of your argument. Today's Wall Street Journal provides an excellent example of it in a story on the flaws of the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The story is in the Southeast paper edition of the Journal but does not appear online. The only thing online is an infographic on the failures of the system.

Consider this paragraph.

And then there are private sales. Background checks aren't always required when sales are made by private sellers, those people who make only occasional guns sales from private collections.

It was immediately followed by this paragraph.

Several mass-shooters have purchased guns they shouldn't have been able to buy. 

The story by Ashby Jones then goes on to give examples of how both the Virginia Tech mass-murderer and the Sutherland Spring First Baptist mass-murderer were able to obtain their weapons, though prohibited persons, after passing a FBI NICS check. The story does detail how the Virginia court and the US Air Force had failed to submit the records for inclusion in the FBI's databases.

By placing the second paragraph immediately after the paragraph on private sales, the reader is at first led to believe that the mass-murderers obtained their firearms from a private seller which we know was not the case.

If that second paragraph had added "due to the failure to submit disqualifying records to the NICS database" or "even though they passed background checks", then it would be understood that the killers obtained their firearms due to a failure of the system and not due to the negligence or greed of a private seller.

Is this a case of unintended juxtaposition? Is it a case of tight editing for brevity in the second paragraph? Or is it, more problematically, a case of using the structure of the story to convey an argument for so-called universal background checks.

I don't know but I do know that the wrong impression is initially given by the structure of the story.

If this came from the New York Times or the Washington Post I would say it was intended to mislead. Since the Wall Street Journal tends to be more neutral on firearms issues, I could go either way. Nonetheless, this is a case of the mainstream media, intentionally or unintentionally, pushing the narrative for universal background checks which is wrong.

The Establishment Has Spoken

The Wall Street Journal ran an unsigned editorial yesterday regarding background checks for firearms purchases. They noted the Florida school murderer was a known threat. He had been reported to the FBI, the local sheriff's department had been called multiple times, and the school had a warning out asking to be notified if he showed up with a backpack.

The editorial then advocates for the passage of Sen. John Cornyn's Fix NICS Act of 2017. They say this could be done quickly if only, in my words, those ideologues in the House would decouple national concealed carry reciprocity from their version of Fix NICS. While they are at they could throw in a Trojan Horse ban on bump fire stocks.

From the editorial:

The bill would tighten an imperfect background-check system and is supported by the National Rifle Association, police associations and the White House. The House passed the legislation last year, but it also added a provision requiring reciprocity for owners of concealed firearm permits across state lines. Democrats oppose the reciprocity provision, which can’t pass the Senate.

Republicans would be wise to let that reciprocity provision die and send a clean Fix-NICS bill to the Senate. The House can throw in a ban on so-called bump stocks, which let an AR-15 rifle fire more rapidly. That also has bipartisan support, and President Trump on Tuesday directed the Justice Department to propose a regulation banning bump stocks.

These ideas might not have stopped (killer's name redacted), but then neither would the oft-proposed ban on AR-15s. He could as easily have bought handguns, which is how (killer's name redacted) killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007. But one consequence of Parkland should be a debate on how American society can deny the dangerous mentally ill access to guns of any kind. That will require a rethinking of privacy laws and state mental-health statutes.

Democrats keep saying they merely want “common sense” gun laws, not a ban, and the Cornyn bill is a test of their sincerity.

So let me get this straight so I can understand the thinking of the Establishment. If the Democrats "compromise" and support a bill that gives them virtually everything they want short of a ban on semi-automatic rifles and universal background checks, it is a "test of their sincerity". However, this also implies that if the Republicans insist on fulfilling their promise to the American voters on national reciprocity they will be considered obstructionists.

What a masterful example of Establishment doublespeak!

The proper response by us gun rights demanding proles is not only no but hell no. Passing Fix NICS with a bump fire ban but no carry reciprocity is no compromise. It should be rightfully seen for what it is:  a willful surrender by spineless Republicans who only give a shit about gun rights when it comes to getting our votes at election time.

A Great Letter To The Editor

The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed commentary on the 100th anniversary of Communism this past Tuesday. It was entitled, "100 Years of Communism - 100 Million Dead." The article discussed the consequences of the Bolsheviks' turning Marxist-Leninist ideology into reality.

In response to this article, Jack Wissner of Atlanta had this to say:

Wanton killing of millions in the name of some bankrupt ideology is a bit more difficult when everybody, not just the elite, are armed.

Mr. Wissner shows an astute understanding of why our Founding Fathers made the right to keep and bear arms part of the Bill of Rights.

Wall Street Journal Notices Impact Of Election On Gun Sales

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article looking at the impact of the upcoming Presidential election on gun sales. The article by Shelly Banjo examines retailers' stocking plans, the rise in both NICS checks and excise tax collections, and manufacturers' backlogs.

Cabela's has two stocking strategies for this fall and winter season - one if Obama is re-elected and one if Mitt is elected.

The Sidney, Neb.-based retailer and other companies in the guns-and-ammo business say if Mr. Obama wins a second term they are preparing for a surge in sales—the same as they saw after he was elected in 2008—from buyers fearful the president would back policies to make buying a gun more difficult. If Republican challenger Mitt Romney wins, though, the chain plans to stock more items such as waterproof boots and camouflage hunting gear.

"If Mitt Romney is elected and there's no perceived threat on the freedom to own guns, people might decide to spend disposable income on things like outerwear instead," said Joe Arterburn, a Cabela's spokesman.

The article notes that Cabela's is offering to pay suppliers so as to go to the head of the line for the distribution of limited inventory. Their normal payment cycle is as long as 120 days from receipt of the merchandise. To get guns and ammo for their stores, they are moving this up to 15 days. From a business and accounting standpoint, this is very significant.

When the respective presidential campaigns were asked for comment, the Obama campaign responded with the usual platitudes about President Obama respecting the Second Amendment. The Romney campaign declined to comment. In my opinion, this was a lost opportunity on their part. They should have responded that voters obviously don't trust Obama to protect their Second Amendment rights and are voting with their pocketbooks. Like I said, a lost opportunity.

WSJ Covers Zoot Shooters

Michael Bane is pleased and Paul Helmke is having heart palpitations. The Wall Street Journal just ran a front page story on the American Zoot Shooters Association - and it was favorable.




The story notes the contrast between the quest for authenticity of the Zoot Shooters and cowboy action shooting. While zoot suits are more properly associated with the 1940s, the Zoot Shooters' stages are more from the Roaring 20s and 30s.The story notes that some cowboy action shooters criticize them for it. However, "Judge Roy Bean" - co-founder of the Single Action Shooting Society - had this reaction:

Among them was Harper Creigh, the 74-year-old founder of cowboy action shooting, who goes by the alias Judge Roy Bean.

"I at first thought they hated us," Mr. Huss said.

Instead, Mr. Creigh said he knew who Mr. Huss was and told him that about 25 years ago he and a buddy contemplated creating a shooting sport with Tommy guns called the "Roaring Twenties." The idea never came to fruition. "If I wasn't so old and beat up I'd probably jump in and get involved," Mr. Creigh says.

It is good that the Wall Street Journal is running stories on action shooting. Stories such as this help remove the stigma from the gun culture that the Brady Campaign and some in the mainstream media have tried to propagate.