Articles by Herschel Smith

But it’s a big one.  David LaPell writing at Ammoland.

The bill (S7065) (A01589) would make it mandatory that every gun owner in the state of New York get a mental health evaluation before they could purchase a firearm. This wouldn’t be a one-time thing, this would be for every gun and of course, these evaluations would have to be held at a location of the state of New York’s choosing and would be at the expense of the person looking to purchase the gun.

[ … ]

There is also a larger and much more sinister motive to think about here. New York passed its own version of a Red Flag law last year, and unlike other states, it allows schools and just about anyone else to petition the courts to get an ERPO and have someone’s firearms taken away. Now can you imagine every gun owner now having to be subjected to a mental health exam, over and over again, where one wrong question, one misconstrued answer or even the bias of the doctor could not only prevent someone from legally buying the gun they were looking to get, but also lead to the police coming to the house and taking the rest and with a doctor’s word versus the citizen’s in court, the gun owner, soon to become the former gun owner, wouldn’t stand a chance legally.

This is a page right out of the communist playbook.

Not even mentioned is the fact that mental health professionals don’t want to be involved in such things, don’t believe that their trade can accurately predict those predisposed to violence, and certainly don’t want the liability and professional risk.

Always remember what reader Menckenlite said.

Control freaks love psychiatry, a means of social control with no Due Process protections. It is a system of personal opinion masquerading as science. See, e.g., Boston University Psychology Professor Margaret Hagan’s book, Whores of the Court, to see how arbitrary psychiatric illnesses are. Peter Breggin, Fred Baughman and Thomas Szasz wrote extensively about abuses of psychiatry. Liberals blame guns for violence. Conservatives blame mental illness. Neither have any causal connection to violence. The issue is criminal conduct, crime. Suggesting that persons with legal disabilities are criminals shows the nonsensical argument of this politician and his fellow control freaks. Shame on them.

The communists never sleep.  We can’t either.

News from Florida.

HOLLY HILL, Fla. – A bullet struck an apartment of a Holly Hill family getting ready for the day on Wednesday.

The bullet came from the rifle of an officer, according to a police report.

Police said around 6:40 a.m. Wednesday officers responded to the Charleston House Apartments in reference to a suspicious incident.

A renter told officers he believed someone shot into his apartment because of a large hole in the wall and the plaster and wood on the floor, according to police.

Investigators said there was a hole in the wall above a door frame in the northeast bedroom of the apartment.

Two kids were in the bedroom getting ready to go to school, according to the report.

“Yeah, my wife was home. She was up, she was getting our kids ready for school and then like a wall in our apartment exploded,” he told a dispatcher.

The dispatcher asked him why it took an hour to call authorities.

“She just told me. She had to get the kids up and to the school bus before it left and she just got back,” he said.

A Holly Hill officer lives above the apartment and he told police he was attempting to move a rifle, according to the incident report.

He told police he was walking with the rifle and must have had his finger inside the trigger guard, according to investigators.

Investigators said he told police he tripped on something and the rifle discharged.

Police said there aren’t criminal charges and the officer was off duty.

The officer is still on regular patrols, according to police.

The department will do a review of the situation, according to investigators.

Yea, that’s important information for a dispatcher to know: ” … why it took an hour to call authorities.”  Not why some dumb ass discharged a round through an apartment wall.

50,000 guns in Richmond, Virginia, not even a single negligent discharge.  One cop with a rifle, a hole in a neighbor’s wall

The best part is that “The officer is still on regular patrols.”  Well good.  We wouldn’t want a cop to go without work, even if he does occasionally kill neighbors by leaving rounds in the chamber, the muzzle pointed in the wrong direction, and the rifle laying where it can be knocked around.

Then again, there’s always the possibility that he didn’t knock it around.  Sympathetic muscle reflect might have caused him to pull the trigger when he tripped.  In this case, that’s another rule of gun safety he violated.

David Codrea.

As just one prominent example, it makes no sense for NRA to give superlatives to Marco Rubio for what he does with one hand when what he does with the other undermines all of that in the long run. He betrays us on things like chain migration, unnecessary worker visas, refugee and asylum fraud, illegal immigration rewards, and a “path to citizenship” for illegals. To present him as our great friend in light of supporting a 70% Democrat influx is indefensible.

But the NRA has been doing indefensible things ever since its inception.

I’ll tell you what.  Get rid of Wayne and his suits.  Get rid of all of the other senior staff.  Get rid of most of the board of directors, especially Marion Hammer and Tom King.  Begin anew by opposing immigration (because they vote 70%-80% gun control).  Oppose things like bump stock bans rather than actually suggesting them.  Oppose universal background checks rather than actually suggesting them.

Start behaving wisely and prudently with membership money.  Score every vote that even comes close to testing the waters on immigration and new gun control measures.  Never compromise (compromise means giving anything).  Only lobby to get things for gun owners.  Oppose any new controls on MSRs.  Oppose red flag laws instead of actually suggesting them.  Spend money to throw out gun control politicians.  Begin the long march towards undoing the GCA and the NFA.

Then we’ll talk.  Otherwise, the NRA is just harming the cause as I see it.

Good Lord.  “Mowing down approaching armies” by sweeping the muzzle from side to side (If you ever try something like that at a range, you’ll be kicked off the range with prejudice, and this isn’t even discussing the fact that you won’t hit anything except by accident – if he was open-minded, which he’s not, it might be useful to take him to a range and actually demonstrate how this is done.).  “Red hot magazines.”  Red … hot … magazines.  And there is just no data at all to justify his statement that mass shootings have to do with whether AR-15s are legal, nor is there any justification that machine guns couldn’t be used for mass shootings today with the relative ease of drilling two holes and dropping in an auto-sear.  A determined criminal can do pretty much anything s/he wants.  And note that he doesn’t allow that the criminal will have an AR-15, but you won’t for defense of home and hearth because you’re not a criminal.  Then again, no one in Virginia will “grandfather” their ARs.  No one.

Finally, mass shootings have gone way down, not of course including state-sponsored mass shootings in “gun free” nations, which is the reason for ownership of AR-15s in the first place.

Fisk it yourself.  It’s not hard.  He’s ignorant, prudish, and arrogant.  And yet with Bloomberg money, an influx of controllers to Northern Virginia, and an absent voter base in the last election, he and his ilk is governing Virginia.

You just can’t make this kind of thing up.  I love it when the progs self-identify as idiots.  It saves us the trouble.

Prior:

• The Captain’s Journal » High Ammo Clips
• The Captain’s Journal » Automatic Bullets In Rapid-Fire Magazine Clips
• The Captain’s Journal » Duck Hunting With Bullets
• The Captain’s Journal » Guns, Accoutrements And Idiots
• The Captain’s Journal » The Fully Loaded Ammunition Cartridge
• The Captain’s Journal » The High Magazine Round
• The Captain’s Journal » Bob Owens On Open Carry In The Atlanta AIrport
• The Captain’s Journal » Mother Jones On “High-Caliber Rifles”
• The Captain’s Journal » The 40-Clip Magazine

UPDATE: Though per David Codrea, it may be impossible to shame him.

Gaston County, the most recent N.C. county to become a second amendment sanctuary.  Like I said it would.

David Codrea.

Despite things not working out the way the governor ginned up all that fear for, reality hardly stopped his political allies from doing what they do best, springboarding off his lie and adding whoppers of their own.

“Annual gun lobby day protest in Richmond drew large numbers of white nationalists, militias, and racist conspiracy theorists this year,” the ever-odious Rep. Don Beyer tweeted. “Neo-Nazis tried to use this rally to launch violent attacks. Trump’s symbolism and memories of Charlottesville are vivid in many minds today.”

Taking their cue on what to amplify, NBC was representative of the rest of the DSM (Duranty/Streicher Media), breathlessly planting seeds like:

“On far-right corners of the internet, some have said the rally will accelerate a ‘race war.’”

No one I know said something like that.  Being a bit dramatic, are we?  Open carry is legal in Virginia (it won’t be if the communists get their way), so no law was broken, no fights broke out, no violence ensued, and not a single negligent discharge occurred out of 30,000 firearms (it would be good for the police to take a page from their book).

Don’t you know the progs just hate that?

NC Renegade.

Allies are crucial in this war, but the right has no understanding of how to make an alliance, with whom to make it, or what has to be done to sustain it.  The right cannot even ally itself with itself.

Yea.  As I’ve been trying to say over these past few weeks.  If you don’t get past this “us four and no more” philosophy,” if you don’t learn not to “major on the minors,” you’ll get squashed like a bug in the road.

Honestly, with the disagreeable nature of gun owners lately, I wondering whether they will be pounding in anger on the keyboard until they’re picked up to ride the rail cars, and inside the rail car, if they’ll be bickering over who sits where.

There is no reason for the communists to worry.  They have no unified opposition.

News from New Mexico.

“Citizens have a right to bear arms and we cannot circumvent that right when they have not even committed a crime or even been accused of committing one,” added the Sheriff’s Association.  “We sheriffs have sworn to uphold those and other God-given rights for our citizens at all costs.”

[ … ]

In the statement from the New Mexico Sheriff’s Association, signed by the chairman, Sheriff Tony Mace, it says, “The founding fathers of our republic were patriots with firearms in their hands fighting against tyranny for the freedom and liberty of which they were denied by England. Upon their victory, they formed a new and innovative government to protect their newfound freedom to include the drafting of a Constitution with accompanying Amendments to protect their rights.”

“This created the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. It is an Amendment that has often been challenged and interpreted by the highest court of the land and to this day stands as an individual right for each law-abiding citizen to keep and bear arms,” reads the statement.

“Law-abiding citizens are guaranteed the right to freely choose to arm themselves as collectors, to hunt, to compete in shooting sports and/or recreational shooting, as well as personal and home defense,” says Sheriff Mace. “Most importantly, and should it become necessary, American citizens have the right to be armed to stand and protect the republic against a corrupt and usurping government once again as the original framers of the Constitution intended.”

He continued, “29 out of the 33 New Mexico sheriffs agree that the rush to react to violent crime and atrocities perpetrated by disturbed and/or violent offenders by proposing controls on law-abiding citizens’ guns is ill conceived and is truly a distraction to the real problems proliferating violence in our counties and in our state.”

“These sheriffs encourage the full and complete enforcement of existing gun regulations and oppose any executive order or rule that further restricts the rights of law-abiding citizens to own, possess, keep and use firearms for lawful purposes,” reads the statement.

We might note that this is a great statement except for the last part about existing gun regulations.  A bit of discussion is in order about our understanding of compromise.

Not one more inch, not one more compromise, not one more infringement.  Yes, and all of that, but would you seriously refuse to become allies with these Sheriffs?

Compromise, the way I see it, is giving something up that isn’t justified and isn’t a guaranteed right by God.  In this case, enforcement of existing laws isn’t a compromise.  Those laws are already on the books.  Undoing them is way down the road, because the gun rights community is in full retreat right now.

The “us four and no more” philosophy will get gun owners killed.  This community is going to have to learn incrementalism.  We’ve got to learn to find proper allies.  The statists have made good use of that tactic, and we are where we are because rather than ally with those closest to our views for a period of time, we sit and squander the opportunity to press forward in the war.  Politics is war.

Those Sheriffs aren’t asking you to give anything up that hasn’t already been codified in state law.  If they are serious – and that’s a big if – they are potentially putting their jobs and pensions on the line to be “constitutional Sheriffs.”

Would you refuse an ally like this and let Eric Holder take them on and destroy their careers, cast them out of office, and turn your neighborhoods against you?  Eric Holder understands incrementalism.  If you’re waiting on the perfect one, you may as well board the train now and save the state the money to hunt you down.

Again, there is nothing in that statement above that would cause a patriot to wince except the enforcement of existing laws.  That can be handled later, maybe, but certainly not if your Sheriff is Art Acevedo, or Paul Penzone (41mag will have no audience with him).  When is “a huge step in the right direction” worth your support?

And if nothing is, what’s your plan?  And don’t give me a list of all the tactical crap you’re going to do if you won’t even use your real name to comment.

If I lived in New Mexico, I’d be telling these Sheriffs to press on.  They’re doing God’s work.