Meet Mike “The Gun Guy” Weisser; Self Hating Arms Dealer and Gun Owner Hating Zealot

The following article was published in the NYT by what may be  is one of the most condescending anti-gun zealots in a long time; he also appears to be a self hating arms dealer, "Despite what the N.R.A. says about people, not guns killing other people, there is no consumer product as lethal as a gun. But walk up to a guy (and it’s still almost always a guy) who is lovingly caressing the gun he just bought and tell him that what he’s holding is a lethal weapon and he’ll stare at you in disbelief. Ask him why he just plunked down $600 and he’ll stare at you again. He bought that gun because he likes buying guns — it’s as simple as that. He may mumble something about the 2nd Amendment because that’s what he’s been told, but if you think picking up a gun is any less impulsive than buying any other nonessential consumer item, think again." A Gun Dealer talks About Guns


Mike “The Gun Guy” Weisser  statements seem designed to show gun buyers/ owners as brainless trend following idiots (based on his description of his gun buyers, it really sounds like the only people that buy guns from him are know nothing liberals that have no idea why they are buying a firearm, it’s just seemed a cool thing to do). I for one have never heard a gun owner mumble when asked why he owns a gun(s), be it for self defense, hunting or target (milk jugs included) shooting. I can surely agree that if you “walk up to a (conservative) guy (and it’s still almost always a guy) who is lovingly caressing the gun he just bought and tell him that what he’s holding is a lethal weapon and he’ll stare at you in disbelief,” as the conservative will think the woman asking the question (and it’s still almost always a woman) must be a liberal tune; the fact that a firearm is a lethal weapon is the very reason it was bought for gods sake!! Further one wonders what liberal socioeconomic circles the author runs in where one would have the money to impulse buy a $600 gun, they way most of us pickup a key chain flashlight while waiting at a checkout line. In the final analysis, when you hear a liberal say they believe in the 2nd Amendment (like it’s alien spacecrafts) and they only believe in common sense gun safety (like banning assault weapons when it is pretty much agreed the use of any rifle in a crime is so rare as to be an anomaly). The truth behind all this appears to be liberals continually trying to drum up a gun emergency where none exists; fortunately it has become common knowledge that gun crimes/homicides have been steadily falling for over 20 years, which is why the majority of Americans put gun control near the bottom of their list. But liberals still want to make it a decisive issue so they can try to use guns to discredit conservatives in elections.

Mike Weisser ends his article saying the best course is to trick gun owners into believing that anti-gun laws by liberals are only to protect the 2nd Amendment and make it easy to continue to by guns.

"Rather than considering them as participants in a modern morality play, they need to be engaged as consumers who, above all, don’t want to lose their ability to quickly and easily purchase guns. The trick is to convince gun owners that by helping to find ways to protect us from gun violence they won’t lose what they love. But that’s a conversation of a very different kind.

Liberals call these "ways to protect us from gun violence," common sense gun laws; what is not discussed openly is that liberals believe that it is only common sense to disarm the public and ban firearms. So that is their real end game.  

AP Attacks Meg Whitman with Op-Ed "News" Article

Today, my local paper printed the second of two hit piece in 4 days on Republican candidates; the first (9/11) by the NYT “A G.O.P. Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists” and the second (9/14) by AP "Whitman exaggerates Brown’s spending". I wouldn’t mind the articles so much if they were printed on the opinions page, but placing theses editorials next to supposed real news is purposely misleading. What the AP article said was Meg Whitman used dumbed down accounting techniques to show the extent of Jerry Brown's tax and spending while he was Governor of California.

When Brown took over the Governorship from Ronald Regan in 1975, he inherited a $500 million surplus. Brown allowed this to balloon to nearly $5 billion in three years. This huge surplus was not result of anything done by Brown, but the result of taxes on California’s skyrocketing property values and inflation in the late 1970’s. Brown refused to re-distribute the surplus back to the voters, so a taxpayer’s revolt voted in Proposition 13, which drastically cut property taxes. Brown’s response, rather than reduce the size of the Government was to rely almost solely the the surplus, resulting in a $1 billion deficit by the time he left office. The AP article presented the fact that Brown held the growth of government to 10% a year after Proposition 13 as a positive, but if you do the math 10% a year will double the size of government spending every 9 years. Further the so-called budget cuts by Jerry Brown were not reductions in current spending, but reductions in the amount of future government increases. The AP article also compared Jerry Browns 120% increase in government spending to Ronald Reagan’s 105% increase. This is presented as if there was some consensus that Regan's spending increases were viewed a something positive by conservatives, where the opposite was true, as conservatives were highly critical of Regan’s increased spending as Governor. It is also not lost on the reader, that this AP article is not showing Brown in the light of a fiscal conservative, but rather placing him in the same category as a big spending Republican governor.

Brown did cut State income taxes by about $4 billion before Proposition 13, hoping to placate angry voters who saw the state budget surplus increasing while they could barely afford their property taxes. After Proposition 13, Brown raised gasoline and sales tax, which increased Californian’s tax burden by $2.5 billion and $4.5 -$5 billion respectively. While these taxes may have been necessary to offset Proposition 13, they most certainly were tax increase. Finally the article throws out a figure of $4.4 billion dollars being returned to local government during the 1978-1979 fiscal year. What it failed to say was as a result of Proposition 13, property tax revenues no longer went directly to local governments, but was paid through the state and then returned to local government, so it would follow that the amount of money returned to local government would substantially increase under Proposition 13.

So, to no ones surprise, the AP article is a partisan response to Meg Whitman’s political ads. One could almost justify these articles if they were more balanced, but there is also a total lack of opposing articles pointing out the obvious mis-information from the Jerry Brown attack ads. The most obvious is the ad that points out in a very accusatory manner that ebay’s overhead increased 2000% when Meg Whitman took control; the fact that she increased the number ebay employees from 40 to 15,000 may have had something to do with that increase. It’s as if Meg Whitman is being attack for creating jobs. So no, there is no reciprocity here, these AP and NYT’s articles should be clearly labeled as OP-Ed pieces. The fact that they are not, is indicative of the NYT being in near receivership and the Whitehouse’s stated desire to subsidize these partisan news media, as not to lose an outlet for their Progressive propaganda.