StinkFight.com

GUNS FOR TOYS
by Michael W. Dean
(GREAT AMERICAN PAMPHLET #1-MP)

In the spirit of Christmas, I was thinking it might be a good idea for someone somewhere sometime to have a “Guns for Toys” drive.

It would be a great a protest against those idiotic “Toys for Guns” swaps. Here’s one from my county, second one this month. This “Gifts for Guns” drive is in response to a gang shooting:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-guns24-2008dec24,0,904693.story?track=rss

(Do you think all the local criminals with guns heard about this, were touched by the passion of it and said, “Oh, think of the children! Let’s stop the fussin’ and the fightin’, turn in our guns and just try to get along from now on!”?)

Gun-grabbers use toys-for-guns drives and “gun buybacks” to give people a false sense of safety, thinking they’re disarming criminals. That’s total BS. Only non-criminals will trade guns for toys. Gun grabbers also use the drives to condition the public to believe that handing over your guns to the government is a normal, even happy, thing to do. And they usually do the drives in dangerous neighborhoods. They’re basically just disarming potential victims, not criminals. (The drive linked above was in South Central Los Angeles. But it’s warming hearts from the Valley to Beverly Hills, if you believe what you see on the evening news.)

Toys-for-guns drives also get free billboards from Gannett and other companies, and get a lot of free radio and TV time. It’s always spun with a “THINK OF THE CHILDREN!” angle.

And the cops get some sweet guns, usually from grandmothers and widows who’ve had them in their attic, for free. The “toys” usually don’t come out of the cops’ pockets. The gifts-for-guns drive linked above offered a a 100-dollar gift card donated by some local businesses.

When it’s a “gun buyback” (specious term. How can the government buy BACK something they never owned?), sometimes public funds ARE used. Which is unconstitutional, because it’s using public money not to buy something for public use, but to buy something that is then destroyed. There is no public benefit in that.

I doubt that all the guns are even really destroyed at every “gun buyback” and toys-for-guns drive. How much do you wanna bet that nationwide, sometimes the cops keep the really expensive guns? I’ll bet sometimes they’re shooting those “destroyed” guns at the police range the next day.

A guns-for-toys raffle could attract a lot of attention, even national attention. It might seem like it would be the wrong kind of attention, but if you had your soundbites in order, it might work in a good way.

Guns usually are worth more than a toy. I think the economics of this event would be such that you’d have people give a toy to enter a raffle to win a gun. Maybe have two prizes, each of one gun, so the plural of “gunS for toys” would be satisfied. It might be better press-wise if you gave away a rifle and a shotgun, rather than two sidearms. That would also be cheaper than a good sidearm, if you used, say, a Remington 870 and a Marlin 60, which are both decent guns.

The entrants would obviously have to satisfy the state and federal requirements for owning a gun.

But anyway, you’d have your raffle, give the toys to some deserving kids (cancer victims always play nice in the press, so do kids of laid-off parents around Christmas time), and the lucky winner gets a sweet gun. You could have some second-place prizes, maybe ammo and holsters.

You’d have to check the laws (I’d ask a lawyer) to see about the legality of raffling a gun. I wouldn’t recommend doing it as “It’s OK if I go to jail” activism if it’s not legal, because it would involve other people, and if no one wins the gun, it would make the whole thing look bad.

Maybe a local gun store would be interested in helping? Maybe the JPFO, GOA or NRA would be into helping, or at least publicizing? Maybe ask your fellow statesman Massad Ayoob if he’d give some training as a additional prize.

I’m not going to try a guns-for-toys drive in Southern California, the gun grabbers would probably burn my house down. But it just might work in New Hampshire.

MWD

p.s. I just registered
http://www.gunsfortoys.org
and
http://www.gunsfortoys.com

I’m just rolling both over to my blog as placeholders for now. If someone wants to do this for real, I’ll let them have the domains.

Amazingly,
toysforguns.com
and
toysforguns.org
are also available. I’m not going to bother with those, but if someone really wants to do this, they might want to get those too, to roll over to
gunsfortoys.org
once the site is set up.

–
THIS POST IS MICHAEL W. DEAN’S GREAT AMERICAN PAMPHLET #1-MP (MP stands for “Modest Proposal”).
Like all MWD Great American Pamphlets, this is covered by a Creative Commons share and sharealike license. Feel free to share and repost, with attribution, anywhere, for any purpose.

Funny little fun commercial for the Free State Project, which DJ and I recently joined.

Visit and join Free State Project:
http://freestateproject.org

(Note: The creators of this commercial are participants in FSP, but are acting on their own by posting this. This video does not represent the Free State Project as a whole, or any other individuals in the project.)

CREDITS:
Story, male voice and editing: Michael W. Dean
http://www.michaeldeanvoice.com

Story edits, female voice and haberdashery: Debra Jean Dean
http://www.debrajeandean.com

LEGAL:
Most images were grabbed from the Internet. Used with a clear understanding of Fair Use.

File, story and audio covered by Creative Commons Share and Sharealike license 3.0. Anyone may reuse, remix, repost, for any purpose.

Contact us if you would like the high-quality audio as a WAV file to use for radio broadcast, or to remix.

More “I told ya I know the beautiful people” news: the new edition of Guitar Hero coming out in January, has a song by Samhain with my friend London May (pictured above on left, with Glenn Danzig) playing drums on it, Original recording with his actual drum tracks. Excellent! Info here.

“”Guitar Hero: Metallica” About 40 percent of the 45-plus songs will be from artists that influenced Metallica, played concerts with them or appeared on 1998 covers album “Garage Inc.” Among them: Queen, the Foo Fighters, Alice in Chains, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Seger, Kyuss and Samhain….

The Samhain song featured is “Mother Of Mercy” from the “November-Coming-Fire” album

Yay! Love it.

And be sure to check out London’s new band, a punk cover band that only does charity benefit gigs for worthy causes, Millions Of Dead Comps! “COME START A PIT FOR THOSE LESS FORTUNATE!”

I did a phone interview today with tech guru Dave Graveline. The subject was me and Alan’s new book, YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts. It went well, Dave’s a total pro, and I dug yackin’ with him.

In typical Michael Dean style, we ran out of time before he ran out of questions. (I basically think all interviews with me could just be one question, I can talk at least 30 minutes on that if I’m not stopped!)

Here’s an MP3 of the eight-minute interview if you don’t want to have to be near a computer or radio at a set time.

The interview airs this weekend on many AM and FM radio stations, on XM Satellite radio (Channel 166, American Right, which also features shows by Glen Beck and G. Gordon Liddy), and streaming on the Internet, here.

My segment is eight minutes long, and will be on the radio, on XM Satellite radio and the Internet, this Sunday, during the second hour of the show, which generally falls between 3-4 PM Eastern time. Time may vary from station to station, (show airs Saturday night, not Sunday afternoon, on a few stations) check the listings from the list of stations, here, scroll down for your town, click the link for your town’s station, and look for “Into Tomorrow” on that station’s schedule.

Tell two friends!

=====

The show currently airs on 128 AM & FM radio stations around the U.S., on SIRIUS XM Satellite Radio, radio stations in Germany, Bermuda, New Zealand, Canada and several other sources including Mobile Broadcast Network, BeOS Radio, Sprint Radio, TiVo, CelleCast and many others - every weekend. “Into Tomorrow” is also heard around the world on the Armed Forces Networks in several other countries. In addition, we stream all our audio and video via our web site and provide free Podcasts of our show archives.

Article on Alan’s blog explaining the “punk rock cheerleading” I did on the YouTube book.

my kittyfeet.com e-mail is having problems, related to server transfer. If you need to get a hold of me, try

kittyfeet70@yahoo.com

until further notice.

MWD

Dec 23: It’s all good now.

“YouTube: An Insider’s Guide to Climbing the Charts” authors Alan Lastufka and Michael W. Dean are doing five-day blog post series on “How to create and promote more effectively on YouTube.” Here’s part three of five:

Greetings, eager blog reader! You probably expected another installment on “Making it big on YouTube.” But that’s Alan’s job. Alan’s handed the reins over to me to give him a rest on humpday, and I’m the guy who wrote the “punk rock cheerleading” parts of the book. I want to talk about making it important on YouTube. (Which, by the way, could actually also lead to making it big on YouTube.)………

Read the rest, and learn to CHANGE THE WORLD (seriously) on YouTube.

At 02:13 PM 12/8/2008, my friend wrote to me and asked:

Have you seen this?

http://shootingliberally.blogspot.com/

Howdy!

No, I haven’t seen that but I have seen the “gun-toting liberal” blog:
http://guntotingliberal.com/

Most of the gun people I enjoy reading are politically small-L libertarians (libertarians, but not always members of the Libertarian Party. Many small-L libertarians vote Republican, but still even have a problem with that.)

Their hero is often Ron Paul,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Paul
who, while voted in as Republican, is the only libertarian in high office in the US.

I voted for Bob Barr in the last election. I don’t really like him, but was voting for the Libertarian Party more than the man, because I didn’t like either of the major candidates. If Ron Paul would have been on the presidential ticket, instead of as a write-in, I absolutely would have voted for him, and may have campaigned for him. Most people have never heard of Ron Paul or Bob Barr though, because unfortunately, the media gives NO coverage to third-party candidates, unless they’re as rich as Ross Perot, and can buy their way into the debates.

A lot of libertarians believe that Obama is a socialist, and maybe think that him being elected is the beginning of the end. “Kind hearted” Lenin paved the way for Hitleresque Stalin, recall? Whether you think Obama’s truly socialist, he is for much bigger government as the “answer”, and is very against private gun ownership. (Even though he’s protected 24/7 by armed men with guns.)

Also, I’ve heard this line, “They say that socialism is to help poor people. But if that’s true, how come some of the richest leaders in the world are socialist?”

libertarians are fiscal conservatives without the heavy moral agenda of many Republicans. libertarianism is about reducing the size of the gov to nearly nothing, and often about arming everyone. libertarianism is summed up, in a broad way as “No one has the right to use any force on anyone, except in self-defense.” That “force” is subject to debate, it can be anything from a mugger to a tax collector to being dragged off to the gas chamber.

I’ve heard “A libertarian is a liberal who understands economics. Or a conservative who’s had his ass kicked by the cops.”

What I’m running into more and more is the idea that the real point of the 2ed amendment has little to do with protection from muggers, and nothing to do with hunting or a state-run militia. It’s the idea that citizens should be armed, individually and as a group, to prevent another King George (or Hitler or Pol Pot) from taking us away to camps. And gun confiscation has historically usually started with gun registration. In the US, that’s part of it, and also incrementally “legislating” various aspects of guns here and there (number of rounds you can have in a magazine, etc.) instead of doing it in one fell swoop, which would upset armed people too much.

It makes sense. All tyrants disarm before they slaughter the masses. Across the board historically. And it “can’t happen here” doesn’t fly, historically. It probably can’t happen here this year, or this decade, but libertarians generally believe they should spread safe shooting and gun culture so our grand kids don’t have to go to a museum to see a gun, and so our grand kids can’t get taken away and gassed.

It’s not just libertarians. Check out the Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership,
http://www.jpfo.org/
who are much more no-compromise than the NRA. The JPFO are people whose parents and relatives were sent to the gas chamber after being disarmed.

I’m not sure what libertarians would replace our current system with, if they came into “power.” First, they can’t agree on who represents them. Some Libertarian Party members were so upset over the party choosing Bob Barr (who was in favor of the very un-libertarian USA Patriot Act) for their candidate in the last election that they formed their own splinter group, The Boston Tea Party.

And it seems that many libs don’t like the idea of voting as a solution, because in a vote “51% can tyrannize 49%.” So I’m not sure what they’d replace democracy with. Some wags say “With benevolent despotism.”

Who knows. The world is a confusing place.

But I like shooting guns, and am a peaceful man so far.

MWD

===

“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”

–George Orwell (who was a socialist)

===

“If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.”
– The Dalai Lama

(May 15, 2001, The Seattle Times) speaking at the “Educating Heart Summit” in Portland, Oregon, when asked by a girl how to react when a shooter takes aim at a classmate

Yup. That’s my good friend London May with Paris Hilton.

Quote from WorldOfWonder:

“The scene: The opening of the new ultraposh SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills. The time: 10:45PM, well after the 7:00 kick-off which included speeches by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, nightlife impresario Sam Nazarian, and the hotel’s designer Philippe Starck; the party drew the likes of Jared Leto, Kate Hudson, Dylan McDermott, and Dash Mihok. The moment: Paris Hilton, who has a wing named after her at the new Children’s Hospital being built, stops her red carpet stroll to meet with London May, drummer for Millions of Dead Comps, who just so happens to also be an RN in pediatrics.”

====-

My take on this? Beautiful people, for sure. But it’s a little disturbing to me, because I always thought Paris Hilton didn’t really exist. (Like I didn’t think Angelyne existed until I saw her stumbling past me on Hollywood Blvd, getting into her pink Corvette one night.) I thought Paris Hilton was a hologram based on focus groups and fairy dust, then output with with CGI bluescreen. But now I know someone who’s met her. And London is too smart to fall for that.

Unless….they’ve replaced London with an automoton. But I think I’ll be able to tell. I’ll ask him next time he’s over for dinner.