"If there’s a consensus, we’ll move on it." -- Buttstroke -- "OK, pal, try that again without your teeth."

More along the lines of the "60 votes can't buy gun control love" lullabye.

(3) Attack Movements. There are four attack movements designed to disable or capture the opponent: thrust, butt stroke, slash, and smash. Each of these movements may be used for the initial attack or as a follow-up should the initial movement fail to find its mark. The soldiers learn these movements separately. They will learn to execute these movements in a swift and continuous series during subsequent training. During all training, the emphasis will be on conducting natural, balanced movements to effectively damage the target. Precise, learned movements will not be stressed. . .

(b) Butt Stroke. The objective is to disable or capture an opponent by delivering a forceful blow to his body with the rifle butt . . . The aim of the butt stroke may be the opponent's weapon or a vulnerable portion of his body. The butt stroke may be vertical, horizontal, or somewhere between the two planes. The instructor explains and demonstrates how to step forward with your trailing foot and, at the same time using your left hand as a pivot, swing the rifle in an arc and drive the rifle butt into your opponent. To recover, bring your trailing foot forward and assume the attack position. The movement is taught by the numbers in two phases:

1. BUTT STROKE TO THE (head, groin, kidney) AND HOLD, MOVE.

2. ATTACK POSITION, MOVE.

At combat speed, the command is, BUTT STROKE TO THE (head, groin, kidney) SERIES, MOVE. Training emphasis will be placed on movement at combat speed. The instructor gives the commands, and the soldiers perform the movement.

Figure 7-13. Butt stroke to the head.

Last Friday, I wrote a largely-ignored post here entitled "60 Votes Can't Buy Gun Control Love: What it means for us in the time of Gangster Government."

Today, here we have the latest on that theme, reprinted below.

Remember that all crime, especially that of tyrants, is opportunistic. The one statement you should pay attention to in this story is this by Obama's brain, David Axelrod:

"If there’s a consensus, we’ll move on it."

Consensus can be manufactured in many ways. This, as I observed in "60 Votes", is one:

Der Reichstagsbrand, 27 February 1933.

So, re-read "60 Votes" and continue to:

Wake up.

Gear up.

Train up.

Be alert.

The appetite is still there. They will continue to try to find a way to eat that which they covet -- your liberty and property. Be ready to break their teeth with a swift butt stroke to the mouth the moment they bare fangs to try to take a bite.

So when Axelrod says, "If there’s a consensus, we’ll move on it," we must let him and his Obamanoid pards know that if they move, a countermove is ready. (See above, "Butt stroke.")

"OK, pal, try that again without your teeth."

Mike
III

Democrats hold fire on gun control

By JEN DIMASCIO | 5/19/09

Last week, 27 Senate Democrats joined Republicans to pass an amendment that allows concealed weapons in national parks.

This week, the Senate could take the first step toward overturning a gun control bill passed by their own Democratic brethren more than a decade ago.

After a soul-searching exile, the Democratic Party that regained control of both Congress and the White House in the past two election cycles is proving in many ways to be a distinctly different breed than the one that last ruled the capital.

Nowhere has that transformation become more evident than on the issue of gun control, which was promoted by Democrats in 1992 to attract suburban voters and abandoned by Democrats in 2008 to gain support among rural voters.

The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee is expected on Thursday to advance the Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act, which is being co-sponsored by Sens. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.).

The legislation would overturn a section of the law that prohibits veterans who are unable to manage their finances from obtaining a firearm. The bill maintains a 1990s gun restriction on veterans found to be a danger to themselves and others.

Asked about the legislation, Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, sighed. “I don’t understand why it’s needed,” Helmke said, adding that there’s an appeals process for veterans who feel they have been unfairly denied guns.

“The Supreme Court has said, yes, there are rights, there are gun rights. The Supreme Court has also said there are responsibilities. This bill goes beyond gun rights and overlooks responsibilities,” he added.

Several political forces are driving the Democratic gun control conversion.

The most obvious one is that gun control turned out to be a losing issue for dozens of Democrats.

Republicans gained 54 House seats in 1994, in part because of voter backlash at the passing of an assault weapons ban and other gun measures.

A major force behind those victories was the National Rifle Association, an organization that has ebbed from the headlines but still holds considerable political influence.

“The NRA and its allies have succeeded in making the slippery slope argument stick,” said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky. “Any form of gun control is a step in the direction of outlawing guns. People have heard that for so many years, it’s become a very hard thing for Democrats to go against.”

NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said simply: “Our job is to monitor them and make sure they vote the right way.”

More broadly, allegiance to gun control was constraining the party’s efforts to claw back on top.

Even if the Democrats could win all the House seats in the urban areas and liberal enclaves, it wouldn’t be enough for a majority. The party had to find a way to accommodate conservatives, and it aggressively did so in the past two cycles.

Now, “there are a lot of Democrats, primarily from rural states, for whom the Second Amendment is an article of faith,” Cross said.

Finally, party leaders realized the issue shouldn’t be narrowly viewed as a regional concern — or even a strictly conservative one. Former DNC Chairman Howard Dean is a pro-gun liberal; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is a pro-gun moderate.
Key states in the presidential contest, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, are often won or lost on the margins, and the gun issue is powerful enough to make that difference, said John Anzalone, a Democratic political adviser.

For all those reasons, said one Democratic adviser, “an internal détente that has been declared before the pro-gun and pro-gun-control forces within the Democratic caucus.”

The post-exile Democratic pivot was made even easier as gun control and crime dimmed as a concern among voters.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from April reported 53 percent of Americans backed a ban on assault weapons. That’s down from 75 percent in May 1991.

A Gallup Poll from last year shows 49 percent of Americans wanted stricter gun laws, compared with 70 percent in 1993.

When White House adviser David Axelrod was asked on “Face the Nation” in April about a possible assault weapons ban to curb the flow of guns into crime-ridden Mexico, he dodged the political bullet.

The White House would “monitor” the issue, he assured. “If there’s a consensus, we’ll move on it. As you know, we’re faced with an enormous array of challenges, and we need to make some choices as to which to pursue first,” he added.

The Burr bill is a particularly knotty issue for the White House, given its targeted constituency: veterans.

Exit polls from the 2008 elections showed Democrats scored 35 percent support from veterans, up from 31 percent in 2004, according to an ABC News report. Republicans saw their numbers drop to 34 percent last year from 41 percent four years prior.

Anzalone attributes that drop to the Republicans’ own poor political performance, which included voting against some veterans issues, and President George W. Bush’s management of the war in Iraq.

But Democrats were moving proactively, as well. Webb, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and a former Reagan Navy secretary, was elected in 2006 and quickly pushed for expanded veteran benefits.

Capitol Hill Democrats also took up the cause of improving veterans’ treatment at government hospitals after a scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

“Unfortunately for Republicans, there is no longer a monopoly on national security voters for the Republican Party,” said John Ullyot, a Republican strategist who was an aide to former Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner of Virginia.

President Barack Obama now is trying to build on those gains by elevating the sacrifices and service that military families give to the country. First lady Michelle Obama has made honoring military families a central theme of her term.

All that said, Burr is still expecting to run into resistance once the legislation advances from the Senate veterans committee, which is teeming with rural, conservative Democrats and is in the hands of the party’s leadership.

But he seems perfectly happy about stirring the fight between the Democrats’ liberal and conservative wings — and putting Obama in the middle of it.

“I think they were terrified to have guns in the park, but it passed with 67 votes,” Burr said.

“The policy behind this is that veterans are being treated unfairly — that their constitutional rights are being taken away,” he said. “To restore that, I’ll go to whatever means and put it on a must-sign vehicle and let the White House decide whether they want to enact it.”