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Until and unless I can figure how to embed this bad boy, click here to watch the Kabuki theater of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on civilian disarmament (a.k.a., “What Should America Do About Gun Violence?”). Here’s the rundown of scheduled witnesses:

– Captain Mark Kelly, USN (Ret.), husband of Gabrielle Giffords, shot in the head by Jared Lee Loughner. Kelly’s now the spokesmouth for Americans for Responsible Solutions. Pro-gun control. Big style.

Professor David Kopel Adjunct Professor of Advanced Constitutional Law Denver University, Strum College of Law. “Simply put, if not for gun control, Hitler would not have been able to murder 21 million people.” So pro-2A, then.

James Johnson, Chief of Police, Baltimore County Police Department, Chair, National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence, funded by the deep-pocketed and so anti-2A it hurts Joyce Foundation

Gayle Trotter, Attorney and Senior Fellow, Independent Women’s Forum “In reality, guns make women safer.” Pro-2A as well.

– Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer, National Rifle Association

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72 COMMENTS

  1. As soon as I read that gabby giffords and her astronaut hubby were going to testify, your headline “Civilian Disarmament” is quite appropriate!

    Just another dog and pony show.

    No thanks, I have better things to do than watch!

    • Same here, “look at the bullet hole in her head,”look at the bullet hole in her head”, thats getting a bit old, Randy

    • A news story said that Ms. Giffords was to be an, “unscheduled witness”. If you or I went to testify as an, “unscheduled witness”, what would be the chances we could even cross the Potomac?

      Zero, I’d say….

    • My above comments ran on assumption. RF has updated the article with some details of the individuals and where their stance primarily lies.

      I’m actually a bit surprised by the representation for the pro-2A side.

  2. I know it’s completely off the topic of the post and this hearing, but I really wish I could reach through the screen and clear Leahy’s throat for him. Listening to him makes me need to cough.

  3. Question, as I’m still trying to learn about the law making process.
    If Obama can’t get the support he needs in the House and Senate as well as members of congress writing that polite chill the F out letter, what’s up with this and yesterdays super secret clubhouse meeting of the police? He’s kinda floping around like a fish on hot pavement at this point isn’t he?

    • He’s probing around to see where he can get support for his proposals, and maybe even try to sway them. I wouldn’t be surprised if for the LEO’s there could be things like, if you get on board with a mag cap ban we can also give you funding to hire more officers for your schools and general jurisdiction. I’m only speculating but it could be things like that as to why it is behind closed doors.

  4. I’ll never understand how having been shot or knowing someone who has been shot makes one an expert witness.

    Maybe it only works in grade school and politics?

      • Flawed logic. They blame the gun and believe that if guns were eliminated so would murder and violence. They also believe that there’s no way the gov’t would ever overstep their bounds. You point to thing that happened to us generations ago, and happened/are happening in other countries and they say that can/will never happen to us.

    • I was in a car accident once, which makes me a leading authority on tire design and wet surface adhesion. Go ahead, ask me anything!

  5. Funny how CNN stopped the live feed once the Professor said the 1994 ban didn’t work based on J. Reno’s study of the ban..

  6. Chief Johnson has made so many completely incorrect flat pronouncements that I’m surprised he doesn’t burst into flames. The most recent and the one that prompted this comment was, “High capacity magazines, like assault weapons, are not used in hunting.” (Emphasis his, not mine.)

      • That may be the case for actually running your name in the computer, but then you add in the time to fill out the form, call or fax it in, wait in queue, and all of a sudden that number has multiplied 10 fold. It’s dishonest to not take into account the whole process.

  7. Gayle Trotter is making an incredibly compelling argument that I feel will affect more liberal-leaning women in particular.

    “Guns are the great equalizer in a violent confrontation.”

    Great stuff, and much more pro-2A than I expected.

  8. Capt. Mark Kelly has not made me completely want to puke like other anti’s. I do not agree much of anything that he has said, but I am glad he seems to speak with some thought and not all emotions. He could have gotten up their crying and carrying on about gun violence. I just wanted to say I am glad he did not especially with the experiences he has personally had with violence. I would have liked to see a few more pro gun advocates from groups like SAF, GOA, or NAGR instead of Wayne the yes man. Even though, he has recently tried to take some lessons lately from charlton heston. James Johnson got me, he made me want to puke.

    • Personally I can’t stand the dude. He talks out of his ass and people listen just because his wife was part of a failed assassination attempt.

  9. Somehow I didn’t realize that Wayne’s speech would be the same one I read yesterday. Pretty good statement, but the delivery was a little weak at the end. I think he might have been up against the clock, because he got rushed and started dropping words and stumbling a bit compared to the beginning.

  10. The “so anti-2A it hurts” Joyce Foundation?

    Do you mean the same Joyce Foundation where one Barack Hussein Obama used to be a director on the board?

    Oh yes, that Joyce Foundation.

    Everyone who voted for Obama thinking he wouldn’t do anything about gun control… don’t act surprised. The evidence was there from the start what his thinking on RKBA was.

    • I am not terribly happy with the Prez reaction to Sandy Hook, but I am at least intelligent enough not to have to put his middle name out there to make a point. Last time I checked, none of us had a choice in what our parent’s named us. Get real.

      • I put it out there to disambiguate him from anyone else with his name.

        Just the same way the BATFE, law enforcement and everyone else does to me on every form I have to fill out. Gets to be a pain in the neck to fit my full name into tiny little name blanks on federal forms. It’s not enough that they ask for my full name – they want my SSN, all my aliases, any former FFL number I’ve held, addresses going back five years… blah, blah, blah.

        Turnabout is entirely fair play. If I had his SSN, I’d use that too.

        • DG, I respect and appreciate you, but I think you’re being intellectually dishonest in this instance.

          The only reason anyone ever uses President Obama’s middle name is to imply that he’s some kind of un-American Muslim terrorist sympathizer. Full stop. It’s a cheap tactic, and it’s counter to the egalitarian spirit that makes America great. We’re better than that.

        • I’m not implying that he’s Muslim (who knows what he is?).

          For a long time, some presidents get their middle names attached to them. We don’t talk about FDR much without his middle name, same for both Bushes, Clinton, Nixon, etc. Goes back to Adams… with the Quincy in there.

      • Because no one ever used the name “William Jefferson Clinton” during the Lewinsky scandal or “George Walker Bush”, etc. Middle names are not uncommon when referring to the president.

        • John Quincy Adams
          William Henry Harrison
          William Howard Taft
          Franklin Delano Roosevelt

          Actually, it’s cooler when they use an initial
          John F kennedy
          Warren G Harding
          Chester A Arthur
          Lyndon B Johnson

          Lets start doing Barack H Obama. Is that PC?

  11. You know, if I wanted to improve violence in this country I’d take whatever the Baltimore PD does, and do the opposite.

  12. “Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Civilian Disarmament Live Streaming”

    I have to object strenuously when the esteemed editor of this website uses the term “civilian” in the title of this post to refer to We The People. This is a gross misnomer. We are NOT civilians under the laws of The United States. We are more accurately described as CITIZENS, not civilians. I think the distinction is important because citizens have rights, privileges and immunities under The U.S. Constitution whereas civilians are just helpless, disarmed targets vulnerable to “collateral damage” from combatants. I’m pretty sure the latter situation does not describe most readers of this website.

  13. Sen. Chuck “The Oleaginous One” Schumer really likes the phrase, “You can’t falsely shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre.” I think I’ve heard him say it every time I’ve seen him speak in the last two months.

    • Ugh. I’m so sick of hearing or reading people using that line. People don’t even know what the case was about when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes penned that sorry ass metaphor. The US government had put Jewish socialists on trial for speaking out against US involvement in WWI, a clear violation of the first amendment. This was Holmes’s excuse: ‘Well you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater!’

      What the hell?

      • gun control is akin to duct taping your face at the theatre.

        You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, and you can’t shoot guns in a crowded theatre. Same thing. but if you can bring your mouth, you can bring a gun.

      • This statement was indeed a justification for supressing freedom of speech, and Holmes himself retracted it in a subsequent decision. Holmes was also a supporter of forced sterilization of “mental incomptents”, so I suggest Schumer be very careful in invoking him.

  14. I know this is going to make me sound like an asshole, but why do they keep effusively thanking Capt. Kelly, and what makes Gabby Giffords “heroic,” as Sen. Durbin just said? Was it heroic to get shot, or to live through it, or to recover, or to show up at this hearing? I don’t understand calling her a “hero.”

  15. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Sessions from Alabama are wonderful people.

    Sen. Graham just quoted Joe Biden’s idiocy on the double-barreled shotgun comment.

  16. How about a little balance, like the lady who put five bullets into a perp’s face recently and thereby saved her life and the lives of her children? That’s an expert, indeed. Couldn’t a pro-2A member of the committee have invited her to testify?

    Or, to repeat a question asked many times in the past few years: is the Republican establishment really so stupid?

    • I agree. The antis dominate the emotional side of the argument. I’m glad that we have facts and historical evidence on our side, but apparently it is not enough or else we wouldn’t be discussing this at all.

      Pro 2A groups real need to start propping up some people like that mother who have defended themselves with a gun and use rhetoric that appeals to emotion on our terms. Emotions is what sways the people.

      • Your right on the money there. We can bring all the facts to the table that we want, but until more stories of DGUs and disarmed victims come are publicized it’s not going to do alot for us.

    • The reason they didn’t bring out the “5 bullets mom” to testify at this hearing is that she’s a one-trick pony. Not to diminish what she did, but it happened, she did it, it’s over, end of story. She was not a super self-defense prepped person who has studied this type of thing. She was a scared mom who knew enough to hide her kids and grab the gun.

      She wasn’t sitting at that table because she wouldn’t have had much else to say after she told her short story. She wouldn’t have answered policy questions, she probably would not have known statistics, and it’s a small table and time is limited. For all of those reasons, her story was better told by other people there — who did tell it — but who also had other things to say.

      The best use of her in a hearing like this is someone who would be there in the gallery so they could point to her, the cameras could go to her for a moment, and maybe she could be available for a soundbite or two after the hearing ended. Perhaps someone at that table did ask her to be there — maybe Gayle Trotter, who told her story more than a couple times — but she could not make it due to work or simply having to raise the kids she saved.

      That’s why you didn’t see her, or anyone else like her at this particular hearing. It was not the appropriate venue to bring up a bunch of people one after another to tell their short story.

  17. I’m finding that Mr. LaPierre doesn’t really present compelling arguments. He really goes off-track and distracts from the discussion.

  18. So, Mark, because it is “required” that means all the criminals will instantly voluntarily do this and not sell guns to one another illegally as they already do? Oh, Ok.

  19. Uggg both of my senators spoke Klobucher and Frankin. They made me throw up a little in my mouth. Thank God that Frankin is up for midterm election. His stupid speech is enough to make me more active in politics. Senator Cruz was a breath of fresh air.

  20. I love how the clearly anti 2nd reps keep going to the police officer claiming “Let’s hear from law enforcement on this issue” When they obviously found a police guy who is anti 2nd. How can Wayne get a police guy in the room to combat what the other guy is saying? We need to get more pro 2nd police chiefs into this discussion.

    • Good luck with that. Police Chiefs are usually hired by town councils, town managers, or mayors. These tend to be the same groups of people that are advocating gun control and disarming the people for the sake of the children. Not to say there aren’t some that see it our way, but just unlikely. You’re better off looking to the pool of sheriffs. I hear there might be a good candidate in Wisconsin.

  21. The Gabby Giffords thing is beyond old now. She is as boring as Jessie Jackson is who shows up everywhere. Ok Gabby, you got your brains splattered all over a disabled parking spot and the “be brave, be courageous” is as old as her last years dried tampon.
    Until they address the fact that SMOKING KILLS 10 times more people each year than guns, I’m going to take giant crap on each and every gun control nut-case loser and do it with a smile while I happily clutch my P229 and SAM7R.

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