You Can’t Buy Charm Like This

My golden touch has worked again. I got myself banned from another gun forum.

My first ban was over at Rimfire Central. They banned me for spamming. Having no product or service to offer anyone, I did not spam, but when I contacted the poobahs to point out the mistake, they didn’t reply. I could have done the customary thing. I could have made up another name and registered from a new email address. I didn’t bother.

My second ban took place at The High Road, where I had the gall to suggest that Massad Ayoob, a gun writer and part-time small-town cop with zero legal education was wrong to run around giving the masses dangerous legal advice. Ayoob tells shooters to talk to the police and try to convince them they’re innocent. Unbelievably stupid suggestion. Infinite wrongness.

On that forum, Ayoob calls himself “Kleanbore,” which is a trademark that was used by Remington on ammunition boxes. There are a lot of ammunition-related words I would have picked before that one, but anyway, that’s his handle. If you want some legal advice that can put you on the end of an executioner’s needle, you can Google his posts.

Ayoob and the forum silverbacks are buds, so even though what I said was correct and had the potential to keep people out of prison, I got the boot. I had failed to kowtow to their pal. Ayoob has continued to post Youtube videos encouraging people to do exactly what law schools and nearly all defense attorneys beg clients NOT to do. I have to wonder if any of his fans have been imprisoned yet.

They won’t go to prison over anything that happened in high-school-sized Grantham, New Hampshire, where Ayoob probably spent his time writing parking tickets or manning a speed trap. No one ever gets shot there.

Now I’ve been booted from another forum for talking down to other members. Perhaps I am guilty.

I was writing about the Alec Baldwin killing, and some person who is not a lawyer was writing very irrational things. He was arguing with me, among others, and I was trying to be gentle. He eventually called other members of the forum, which would presumably include me, bigoted, hateful zealots. He said we posted “bigoted, hateful, zealot opinions” because we said we thought Baldwin was negligent. That’s when I told him his legal opinions were worthless and misguided, which was factually correct, if blunt. I also said I had graduated from law school, cum laude. That may be what got me in trouble.

Gun forums don’t attract a lot of educated people. I don’t know why that is, but if you go to a random gun forum, wade into a discussion, and say you’re a lawyer, you can pretty much count on not having any other lawyers join in. I know of one lawyer at The High Road, but cursory Googling suggests he’s a low-level attorney who handles disputes for insurance companies. I don’t see him getting tapped for the Supreme Court any time soon.

My dad, who was a truly superb lawyer, told me that insurance companies don’t hire the worst, and they don’t hire the best. They spend what they think is enough money to get people who are capable of giving them an acceptable return on investment. They settle a lot, so they don’t seem interested in hiring actual litigators who can win trials.

It may be that I offended people when I pointed out that I was educated. That wasn’t my plan. I was trying to make this guy understand that I was not talking out of my hat when I suggested I knew more than he did or that he was saying silly things.

Most people don’t argue with doctors, and they wouldn’t try to tell an engineer how to design a truss, but everyone feels entitled to offer ridiculous legal opinions. It’s amazing.

If I were going to brag about something, it wouldn’t be graduating cum laude from law school. I think it means you broke a 3.0, in a field that attracts people who can’t make it as pre-meds. Getting a law school B is like getting an A in an undergraduate course, but then getting an A in a typical undergraduate course is nothing to crow about.

As I’ve often said, I’m embarrassed that I had to go to law school, because I did it after failing to get a Ph.D. in physics. I got burned out and had to quit. Then I graduated cum laude instead of magna or summa. Admittedly, I spent very little time working, but still. I did not clothe myself with glory. I did a little bit better than okay in my last-resort career field.

I remember when I found out I got cum laude. I was on the phone with a friend, and he congratulated me. I had no idea what he was talking about.

On the forum, I also aired a general grievance about the unpleasantness of being a lawyer and engaging in discussions with people who are not lawyers. It’s stomach-churning. I probably should have kept that to myself. It may have looked like I was belittling everyone else on the forum.

In my defense, I have to say that if a doctor told me it was frustrating to argue with non-doctors, I would not be offended at all. I would understand. It must send a lot of doctors looking for Maalox. If I said stupid things to him about medical conditions or treatments, and he contradicted me and told me why I was wrong, I would not insult him. I have been in that position. If he said my erroneous medical opinions were worthless and misguided, after I had said something nasty about him for disagreeing with me, no fair person would fault him.

The funny thing is that I got banned right after I quit the forum. As I have said here, I am tired of reading the news because it sucks the joy out of me and makes me mad, and I was also tired of responding to astonishingly wrong opinions about manslaughter. I decided not to go back to the forum. Then I went back.

My grandfather had a Browning Hi-Power pistol. I inherited precisely zero of his many nice guns from his estate, and many were never accounted for. I have my suspicions, but my solution to the problem has been to forgive and go out and buy much better versions of the guns my grandfather had, and to shoot them much better, with much more knowledge, than anyone in the family. When I decided to get a Hi-Power, I learned that FN had stopped making them about half an hour earlier. They were no longer in gun stores, and people were asking way too much for guns they had managed to buy at the last minute.

Five days ago, without my knowledge, Springfield Armory released a new version of the Hi-Power. It’s called the SA-35. It’s far better than the old gun, and the price is great. Because I didn’t learn about it until today, of course, every single SA-35 on planet Earth has been bought, and people are trying to sell this $700 gun on Gunbroker for $1400. I can’t predict the future, but I’ll bet I won’t be able to get one for less than a grand, ever, and since I won’t be gouged, that would mean no SA-35 for me, period.

More or less the same thing happened to me, twice. Maybe next month I’ll find out FN is making Hi-Powers again, two days after gun stores run dry.

I felt an urge to visit the forum to see if anyone had written about the SA-35. That’s when I saw I had been banned.

I think this was the first time I actually felt bad about being banned. I could have been more polite, and I liked some of the members. On the other hand, I felt like God was helping me do what I had already decided to do.

I sent the forum police a note saying there were no hard feelings and that they should keep up the good work, meaning they should continue supporting our Second Amendment rights. I don’t expect a response. People who run forums tend to hide behind their keyboards.

It’s good that I’m no longer going over there to provoke myself, but it’s also good to be isolated from that crowd. There had been a number of posts about going to war with the left, and they didn’t seem to get much in the way of negative feedback. I don’t belong to the militia crowd. I think they’re extremely deluded, and they may boil over and cause a civil war that will fail to liberate the country while wasting a lot of blood.

There were also occasional posts that seemed racist, and they didn’t seem to get much opposition. The other day, a woman shot up her neighborhood driving off two or three black thieves, and one of the forum members who saw the video said something about a thief tripping over his lips. There is no plausible non-racist reason for making a crack like that.

I’m not exposing anyone by mentioning these things, because the contents of the forum are already available to everyone. You don’t have to be a member to read.

Maybe I should have quit the first time I saw an unsavory remark go unchallenged, but in this world, you will often find yourself in a large group of people that contains a few bad apples without being so corrupt you find it necessary to leave. If you maintain a zero-tolerance policy, you may end up more socially isolated than you really ought to be.

I went to church with black racists and anti-Semites, and I didn’t let them get to me. I was patient and gave them slack because I knew the social pressures they faced. I worked for a boss who was prejudiced against everyone, including people like me who were born in Kentucky, but I didn’t quit. I worked in a bar where the employees were unquestionably racists, but I needed the work. When I was in high school, some of my wealthy Jewish friends used the N-word without shame. One of my best Cuban friends in Miami sometimes made racist remarks after a few beers, and I took a long time to withdraw from him. Everyone who lives in Miami knows you can’t socialize with Cubans without hearing things like that sometimes. Life is full of social judgment calls.

The weird thing is that I had just gone back to the forum after seven months away. I had left because some people were annoying and others were saying the types of objectionable things I mention above. I had been back for two weeks when I quit and got ejected simultaneously.

I went back because I wanted advice on a potential gun purchase, and I thought the forum was the best source available without joining another forum and complicating my life. I thought I wouldn’t involve myself beyond hit-and-run posts about firearms. Then I saw posts that interested me, and I fell off the wagon.

I should have stuck to my plan. I should have ducked in and out, getting useful information without letting anything unpleasant stick to me. I may have offended some very nice people. I will never know, because the guy who bans people removed me before I could find anything out.

I think the Internet may be a prediction device. If you read blogs, Internet comments, forums, and so on, you can probably see how Americans will treat each other face to face in a few years, when they get brave enough. I’m not sure. In any case, it’s best to try not to get pulled along with the crowd. Anger and unforgiveness send people to hell, so I keep trying to limit what I expose myself to.

As for the Hi-Power or SA-35, I am not crazy enough about it to pay the cost, and I don’t have any practical use for it. They’re too big to carry, they hold fewer rounds than modern full-size guns, they weigh a lot, their triggers are not great, they have delicate finishes, and to me, the only purpose a Hi-Power serves is fun. If I could get one for anything close to MSRP, I would buy it, but that’s impossible, so I’ll let it go.