Pro-Tip to #GunControl Types: Do Not Pick a Convicted Rapist or Terrorist as Your Spokesmen (And How Gun Control is Like Immigration Control)

Meet Jerome McCorry.  He is a minister and president of two charitable organizations: the Adams Project and Ceasefire Dayton.  The Adams Project is about reforming criminals into being good members of society, and Ceasefire Dayton is devoted to peace in the community.  Both are, on their faces, worthy causes.

And he is an advocate of gun control.  For instance, Ohio’s WHIO TV’s website has video of him talking about gun control.  I can’t embed it, so let me suggest instead you go there and view it. talking about gun control.  And if you can’t, here are some choice quotes:

“We know that guns are being sold on the floor inside Hara Arena illegally” said Jerome McCorry. “No background checks no identification of any kind.”

McCorry said “AK-47s and M16s are not gonna be used for hunting, they’re not going to be used to protect anybody. These are the weapons that are coming back and being used in mass murders and mass killings.”

And here he is on Dayton’s WDTN News website:

Locals divided on gun control debate

If you can’t watch it, here’s some choice quotes from the accompanying article:

Reverend Jerome McCorry is on the other side of the gun debate.

"What we are saying is if you are protecting yourself with a M-16 or AK-47, then maybe you need to call someone outside of yourself," said McCorry, President of Ceasefire Dayton and the Adam Project, two anti-violence groups aimed at changing the gun culture in our community.

McCorry said President Obama's plan isn't the entire solution but, it's a start.

Oh, and meanwhile, via Dana Loesh I learn that  he is also a convicted rapist.  Here’s his mugshot:

The page I linked to won’t tell you much unless you pay for a background check, but it does tell you where he currently lives according to the sex offender registry and that his victim was female.

So he is a convicted felon now heading two charity organizations supposedly dedicated to good causes...  Where have I heard that before?

Well, I won’t let my recent negative experiences cause me jump to the worst conclusions.  Maybe he is sincere about reforming himself and others, although I have had my fill of convicted felons who fake reform so you will hopefully understand if I am wary of a new one.

But still even if you accept his reformation, isn’t it creepy to hear him talk about how easy it was to get a gun without a background check, when more than likely he can’t pass a background check?  Isn’t it creepy to for him to talk about the mechanics of self-defense when some time ago a woman had a need to defend herself against him?

But of course according to WHIO-TV that past is not relevant:

Why don’t you guys give us that information yourself, and let us decide for yourself?

Indeed, if I was a liberal, I would be quoting Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in The Abyss and saying to the Reverend: “do me a favor, stay off my side.”  It is criminals like him that make people like us want a gun in the first place.

Or for that matter there is Brett Kimberlin, too.  In a series of posts at his organization’s site, Justice Through Music (no links, you will have to trust me on this), he urges readers to sign a petition to ban assault weapons, and his site features this rant against Ted Nugent:

Ted Nugent, one of the leading Teabagger mouthpieces, Tweeted after the news broke of the national tragedy in Connecticut that "we take our kids huntin so we dont hafta hunt our kids", and has (no pun intended) stuck to his guns and continues to voraciously and vocally support the rights of Bushmasters to be in our communities, rather than side with the families who want to protect their children. RawStory.com reports that Discovery Channel announced they have canceled the "Ted Nugent's Gun Country" TV show, along with another unrelated show "American Guns". One wonders about the "Sons of Guns" TV gun show and it's future. I say we rethink this whole thing about these death machines being "entertainment". Hitler ruined the toothbrush mustache, and Lanza ruined assault weapons as "entertainment". Take up another hobby, do a different TV show. JTMP fully supports bringing back the assault weapons ban, closing the "gun show loophole", and other measures to make our communities safer and reduce the chance, even if slightly, of a tragedy like this one.

Well, of course anyone claiming that there is a gun show loophole is lying.  There is no gun show loophole.  There is not a single word in the U.S. Code that treats sales at gun shows different from anywhere else.  It’s a political lie made up, as best as I can tell, by Bill Clinton.  I know… “Clinton lied!  Hold the presses!”

In any case, it is curious that one of Brett Kimberlin’s organizations would advocate gun control.  After all, Kimberlin himself is a repeat violator of gun control laws.  As a brief review here’s what the Seventh Circuit said about him in Kimberlin v. White:

Kimberlin was convicted as the so-called "Speedway Bomber," who terrorized the city of Speedway, Indiana, by detonating a series of explosives in early September 1978. In the worst incident, Kimberlin placed one of his bombs in a gym bag, and left it in a parking lot outside Speedway High School. Carl Delong was leaving the high school football game with his wife when he attempted to pick up the bag and it exploded. The blast tore off his lower right leg and two fingers, and embedded bomb fragments in his wife's leg. He was hospitalized for six weeks, during which he was forced to undergo nine operations to complete the amputation of his leg, reattach two fingers, repair damage to his inner ear, and remove bomb fragments from his stomach, chest, and arm. In February 1983, he committed suicide.

But usually I don’t get into the nitty-grits of what he was convicted of.  What he was convicted of in part was unlawful possession of firearms (as in “bombs”).  From U.S. v. Kimberlin:

In Counts 1 through 8, each corresponding to one of the explosions, defendant was charged with possession of a firearm (destructive device) not registered to him, in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 5861(d). In Counts 9 through 16, he was charged with manufacture of a firearm in violation of Chapter 53 and § 5861(f) of 26 U.S.C. In three counts (17, 18, and 22), he was charged with maliciously damaging by explosive the property of an entity receiving federal financial assistance, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 844(f), and in three counts (19, 20, and 21) with so damaging property at a business used in and affecting interstate commerce, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 844(i). In Count 22, it was also charged that personal 216*216 injury resulted, augmenting the maximum penalty prescribed by § 844(f).

You see by the time he committed the Speedway bombings, Kimberlin was already a convicted drug dealer and perjurer, and due to being a drug dealer he was prohibited from having any kind of firearms, which naturally included bombs.  In addition to that, Mark Singer reports that when he was arrested for the Speedway Bombings, he was in possession of numerous more ordinary firearms, including the now infamous AR-15.  So Brett Kimberlin knows first hand exactly how useless gun laws can actually be, but he wants the rest of us, the law-abiding, to be prohibited from having the very guns he had no trouble obtaining illegally.

But hey, at least he isn’t doing something really crazy like running a website devoted to stopping domestic terrorism...  oh wait.

(Don’t worry, that is a safe link.  Always practice safe surfing when the Kimberlin Krew is involved.  And yes, Velvet Revolution is the other alleged charity he runs.)

But it does bring up a big point.  Several times when talking about gun control, I have linked the issue to border control, making sarcastic comments like “gun control is pretty much pointless without border control” or something to that effect.  I mean if you can’t stop a full human being from coming into this country, what chance do you have of stopping a gun which is much smaller, and doesn’t need stuff like food, water, and oxygen and can be broken down easily into smaller parts?  And that is true, but it occurred to me recently that gun control is like immigration control in another way.  Let me quote extensively from a classic Mark Steyn essay on immigration:

In Michelle Malkin's book "Invasion," she recounts the tale of two fellows who in August 2001 pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Va., in search of fake ID from the illegal-immigrant assistance network that hangs around there. Luis Martinez-Flores, who'd been living here illegally since 1994, took them along to the local DMV, supplied them with a fake address and falsely certified they lived there. The very next day, the two guys returned with two pals of their own, and used their own brand new state ID on which the ink was not yet dry to obtain, in turn, brand new state ID for their buddies. A couple of weeks later, all four of them used their Virginia ID to board American Airlines Flight 77 at Dulles Airport and plowed it into the Pentagon.

Think about that. From undocumented illegal alien in the 7-Eleven parking lot to lawful resident of the Commonwealth of Virginia in just a couple of hours. Wow. Say what you like about Luis Martinez-Flores but he runs one efficient operation.

By comparison, say you've got two kids under 5, and you'd like to bring over a nice English nanny to look after them. Name of Mary Poppins. Good references, impeccable character. If you apply now, there's a sporting chance the process may be completed before your children's children are in college.

Given that the immigration "compromise" bill that the Senate was wrangling over last week retrospectively approves all the millions of people who've been through the superefficient Luis Martinez-Flores immigration system but without doing anything to improve the sclerotic U.S. immigration system, maybe it would be better just to subcontract the entire operation to Senor Martinez-Flores and his colleagues. It would certainly be cheaper.

His point is to contrast how we treat legal immigrants with illegal immigrants, how much easier things are for those who aren’t troubled by breaking the law.  And then he really twists the knife in.  After quoting Bush as saying that family values doesn’t stop at the U.S. border, he tells us where apparently family values stops:

Here's another place where family values stops: The rubble of the World Trade Center. Deena Gilbey is a British subject whose late husband worked on the 84th floor: On the morning of Sept. 11, instead of fleeing, he returned to the building to help evacuate his co-workers. A few days later, Mrs. Gilbey receives a letter from the INS noting that as she's now widowed her immigration status has changed, and she's obliged to leave the country along with her two children (both U.S. citizens). Think about that: having legally admitted to the country the terrorists who killed her husband, the U.S. government's first act on having facilitated his murder is to add insult to grievous injury by serving his widow with a deportation order.

And indeed you should read the whole thing.  It was written in 2006 but applies just as well today.  (And you can get much more about Gilbey’s plight, here.)

So that is immigration control: harassing, keeping out and throwing out the good people who are willing to obey the law and come in the front door, while barely doing anything to stop the millions of people sneaking in on the side.  And that is gun control, too: harassing and disarming good people who obey the law, while doing nothing to stop the Brett Kimberlins of the world from getting bombs and assault rifles.  And that is why gun control is worse than useless: it is dangerous to the good, law-abiding people.

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My wife and I have lost our jobs due to the harassment of convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin, including an attempt to get us killed and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up to ten years.  I know that claim sounds fantastic, but if you read starting here, you will see absolute proof of these claims using documentary and video evidence.  If you would like to help in the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin accountable, please hit the Blogger’s Defense Team button on the right.  And thank you.

Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

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Disclaimer:

I have accused some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct.  In some cases, the conduct is even criminal.  In all cases, the only justice I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system.  I do not want to see vigilante violence against any person or any threat of such violence.  This kind of conduct is not only morally wrong, but it is counter-productive.

In the particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him.  Do not call him.  Do not write him a letter.  Do not write him an email.  Do not text-message him.  Do not engage in any kind of directed communication.  I say this in part because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want that to happen to him.

And for that matter, don’t go on his property.  Don’t sneak around and try to photograph him.  Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision.  Your behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).

And do not contact his organizations, either.  And most of all, leave his family alone.

The only exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might report.  And even then if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request.  That this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you refuse.

And let me say something else.  In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above.  But if any of you have, stop it, and if you haven’t don’t start.