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Joyce Foundation, Heller case, and Obama
I've mentioned the Joyce Foundation, and its devotion of millions to funding anti-second amendment scholarship.
Yesterday, Politico.com ran an interesting story, noting that Joyce's efforts date to when a lawyer named Barack Obama sat on its Board. Joyce's protests that they really aren't antigun, just funding legal research, is shot down with the note that all the groups they sent money to filed amicus briefs supporting DC in the Heler case.
UPDATE: here's HotAir's take on it.
"Lately, the political world has buzzed about Barack Obama’s tenure with the Woods Foundation, where he worked with domestic terrorist William Ayers and which issued a $75,000 grant to Yasser Arafat toady Rashid Khalidi. However, Politico has found another paid foundation gig which may raise even more questions about Obama’s positions and honesty. While working as a director at the Joyce Foundation, the organization funneled almost $3 million in grants to political groups opposing gun rights ...."
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Sure. Why would a Board of do-gooders ever think about the CONSTITUTIONAL basis for the right to keep and bear arms? Because they are joined by a Constitutional Law professor (protege of rabidly anti-gun Mayor Daley) who tells them that the anti-gun side will lose the intellectual battle UNLESS someone provides a financial and organizational incentive for anti-gun professors to take up this issue. And who would that person be -- Barack Obama.
30YearProf:
Got any new graduate students? I'd like to see a dissertation something along the lines of this - Joyce foundation's connection to and involvement in the orchestration of the research and literature that seemed to conveniently converge with respect to the Heller case...in the Petitioner's brief, and in so many of the Petitioner's amici briefs. I'd wager that would be a very interesting pursuit.
The more people look at the general gun control movement in the USA, the more one keeps winding their way back at the Joyce Foundation. They claim they don't fund lobbyists.... But I've often wondered if Joyce Foundation money is somehow directly responsible for the fact that Illinois and Wisconsin are the only two remaining "no-issue" states?
If you look at the relationship of the Joyce Foundation and certain doctors publishing "studies" in the Harvard Journal of Medicine, you will get another flavor of a group that gropes for any pretense to accuse gun ownership of ills.
IIRC, a number of studies seem to have the same authors and always reach the same conclusion, gun ownership is unhealthy and not recommended. I have not read them all so I will not say "all", but certainly a group of them share authors and funding from Joyce.
The last study they published was fatally weak in using data from different years as if they were from the same year to establish the desired correlation of gun ownership and Bad Things. John Lott blew it out of the water with just a few observations.
The "professor" (how word fits) who authored it has a long association with Joyce...either a fellow traveler or he needed the grant money. Basic data management failure. My statistics class was in 1978 and the error was obvious as explained by Lott. No rebuttal came from the author.
And to Carl in Chicago, Los Angeles is fundamentally a no-issue town/county. Cops, criminals, campaign contributors/other glitterati can carry, but not some peon living in Compton trying to stay alive and not deal drugs.
"And to Carl in Chicago, Los Angeles is fundamentally a no-issue town/county. Cops, criminals, campaign contributors/other glitterati can carry, but not some peon living in Compton trying to stay alive and not deal drugs."
Posted by: Harry Schell at April 21, 2008 07:56 PM
LA county, yes. Orange county, not so bad. My point is that California is by letter a "may-issue" state, even though as you truthfully say, it is effectively "no-issue." The difference here is that WI and IL are by letter the only two "no-issue" states in the Union.
We try to be persuasive in our arguments, and when arguing for concealed carry, one is persuasive (and correct) to state that only 2 out of 50 states are "no-issue" or that 48 of 50 states have some form of carry allowance on their books.
Stuff you'll never hear from the
Mad Sycophantic National Barack Channel
Well, I'll be.
A Chicago democrat politician lying?
I guess I won't be voting for him now.
What is surprising is that any media picked up on it.