Articles by Herschel Smith

Yea, well, I’ve never been invited.  But I’m not Jerry, so there’s that.

The ripples of this case are just beginning.

A South County man indicted by a federal grand jury in 2015 on weapons and marijuana charges was set to be sentenced today after taking a plea agreement. But Craig Mason’s sentencing has been postponed until mid-November, because a different case currently being litigated could invalidate the weapons charge.

Mason pleaded guilty in March to unlawfully manufacturing and dealing in firearms and was facing as much as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, according to court documents. At the center of the charge was an allegation that Mason manufactured and sold the parts necessary to assemble a firearm to a person he believed to be a felon.

But in a memo sent last week to U.S. District Court Judge Kimberly J. Mueller, Mason’s attorney cited developments in a case involving similar allegations — United States v. Roh. Like Mason, Roh was indicted for manufacturing and dealing firearms — hundreds of AR-15-type lower receivers, completed pistols, and completed rifles, according to court records.

At issue is whether “lower receivers” can be considered firearms. Federal prosecutors have, as in Mason’s case, considered the answer to be “yes.” Mason operated a workshop on his Rosewood Road property just outside Lake of the Pines, where he allegedly converted AR-15-style blanks into lower receivers. A “blank” is a metal casting that can be converted to allow the firing a of a projectile. Once converted, it is considered a firearm by statute, even if there is no barrel, handle, or trigger, and it is subject to regulation.

In Joseph Roh’s case, a judge ruled “the evidence at trial was uncontroverted that a finished AR-15 receiver does not contain a bolt or breech block and is not threaded to receive the barrel. … The plain conclusion is that the finished receiver is not a firearm.” The ruling continued, “Roh did not violate the law by manufacturing receivers. The Court further finds that with respect to manufacturing receivers, the statute and regulation are unconstitutionally vague.”

Following the tentative order, the prosecution and defense agreed to a deal in which Roh would plead guilty to the charge against him, but would be allowed to withdraw that plea if he stayed out of trouble for a year. Prosecutors would then dismiss the case. If Roh abides by the deal, he will have no criminal conviction and serve no time behind bars. Roh’s sentencing has been set for July of next year.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had been investigating the unlawful sale and manufacturing of firearms by Sacramento dealer LCG AR Parts and Custom Accessories. A confidential informant reportedly purchased blanks from LCG in 2013, asked to have them illegally converted and was directed to Mason. According to court records, Mason manufactured two AR-15-style lower receivers for the confidential informant, despite being told the man had been to prison and was prohibited from possessing a firearm.

During execution of a federal search warrant on Mason’s property in October 2013, law enforcement officers reportedly found multiple AR blanks and lower receivers, as well as several AR-15 rifles and a pistol built with a lower receiver that originally had been blanks, and three jigs used to machine blanks into lower receivers.

I wonder how far this will go?  Will this case be dropped as well, or at least, recast into something else?  Is the ATF’s spider web of judgments, regulations and letters of interpretation beginning to unravel, or will they just judge-shop until they find a ruling they like?

The good.

TALLAHASSEE – Floridians would be able to carry guns openly in public without a license under a bill filed Tuesday by state Rep. Anthony Sabatini.

It’s good to see this come up again.  Cheers to the brave Congressman who submitted this bill.  And for the bad news?  This has a snowball’s chance in hell of passing.  Florida is a misplaced Yankee state.  And for the really bad?

PALM BEACH, Fla. — Right now there’s a push to add restrictions to a current law that allows gun owners to open carry in Florida under certain circumstances. This comes after a recent demonstration of gun advocates openly carrying their rifles and guns on the Royal Park Bridge leading into Palm Beach.

Michael Taylor was one of those gun owners.

“We’ve demonized firearms to a point where we need to un-demonize it,” he Taylor with Florida Carry said.

Taylor who said he started to exercise his open carry right while fishing after he was almost robbed under a bridge one early morning.

“Ever since that day I’ve been open carrying,” Taylor said.

In March, he and a group of other gun owners demonstrated their rights by fishing on the Royal Park Bridge also holding American flags and flags in support of President Donald Trump. Citizens who saw shotguns and AR 15s called 911.

Training and Community Relations Coordinator Michael Ogrodnick at the Palm Beach Police Department said it is the duty of officers to respond and find out what the intent of the gun owners is. He said all of the officers are trained and know the law. The issue he believes is that the statute as written allows for gun owners to open carry while or on the way to or from hunting, fishing, or camping regardless of what’s around those areas.

“We believe the spirit of the law was for someone who was hunting, fishing, camping, in a rural area, a fishing hole, out on a lake, not in a Downtown commercial area in West Palm Beach walking over to the barrier island of Palm Beach,” said Ogrodnick.

Palm Beach Police Chief Nicholas Caristo has written a letter to Senator Bobby Powell asking that the introduce an amendment to the wording of the current law.

“The chief has requested that the legislation just be amended to read that within the 1500 feet, Birdseye view of a school, house of worship, guarded beach, or government building, people exercising their second amendment right not open carry within that distance of those buildings,” said Ogrodnick.

I bolded it.  He’s lying.  There is no such duty, and he knows it, but 99.999% of the idiot voters and politicians will believe him.

Leave it to LEOs to muck up the situation rather than making it better.  That’s their specialty.  It must be in their procedures somewhere.  Or perhaps just in their DNA.

By the way, speaking of misplaced Yankee states, with all the crap going on in South Carolina, I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t a misplaced Yankee state too.  Say, what’s going on at the S.C. open carry front?  Nothing?  Like I had suspected?  All of it just for show, opposed at every step by the cops and politicians?

Via WRSA, from Matt Bracken.

I have no doubt he was promised something for this bit is silliness.  No one actually believes those things about Hillary Clinton.  With the corruption, Uranium One, the misadventures in Haiti, and the trail of dead bodies lining the streets from Arkansas to Washington, D.C., everyone knows all about the Clintons.  This isn’t hard.  It’s also not difficult to believe that no one in the audience believed a word of his speech.  The more difficult thing is to understand why anyone would care what McRaven thinks?

Let me switch gears for a moment to General Mattis.  He comes with indisputable creds form the USMC, but even then, his view of things is broken.  He upbraided Trump several days ago with these words.

“I earned my spurs on the battlefield … Donald Trump earned his spurs in a letter from a doctor,” Mattis joked at one point, in a reference to the medical deferment for bone spurs that kept Mr. Trump from serving in the military during the Vietnam War.

At another point, Mattis responded to reports that Mr. Trump called him “the world’s most overrated general” during a meeting with Democrats earlier this week. Mattis joked that he felt like he had “achieved greatness,” because he was “not just an overrated general, I am the greatest, the world’s most overrated.”

“I’m honored to be considered that by Donald Trump, because he also called Meryl Streep an overrated actress,” he continued. “So, I guess I’m the Meryl Streep of generals. Frankly that sounds pretty good to me.”

I have no problem with his upbraiding of the president.  I don’t like him.  I didn’t like the one before him, nor the one before him, nor the one before him.  What I do have a problem with is discussed here.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, military brass quickly began to plan an attack on al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But Marines almost missed being a part of this effort, as planners including Army Gen. Tommy Franks, then CENTCOM commander, didn’t see the point in sending an amphibious force into a landlocked country. But Mattis was part of a small team of officials who crafted a plan to send Task Force 58 — amphibious ships and a landing force — into Camp Rhino in southern Afghanistan. “The minute [5th Fleet Commander Vice Adm. William Moore] pointed to a map showing landlocked Afghanistan, hundreds of miles from the sea, I knew I could land there with thousands of Marines,” Mattis writes.

Mattis indicates another clash with Franks, the CENTCOM commander, elsewhere in the book, when he describes the 2001 search for Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Mattis believed, with the use of light infantry and special operations troops, he could close off the escape routes and take bin Laden. Franks thought sending Marines and vehicles into the mountains would only repeat Soviet mistakes. Ultimately, the trap was not laid, and bin Laden would not be killed until 2011. “If I had to do it again,” Mattis wrote, “I would have called both [the U.S. Army Central Command] commander and Admiral Moore and said, ‘Sir, I have a plan to accomplish the mission, kill Osama bin Laden, and hand you a victory. All I need is your permission.'”

And he was right.  Readers from long ago may recall that my counsel would have been to put Marines on the border with Pakistan in the Hindu Kush, perhaps supplemented by Rangers, while a MEU drove him and his fighters towards the border and snared him there before he could escape to live a lot longer.  After this brief campaign, we should have withdrawn.

But instead, Mattis kept his mouth shut and allowed America to get bogged down into a two decade COIN effort as part of nation building and winning hearts and minds, all run by social justice warriors, college graduates with guns who wanted to cure the world’s evils.  Petraeus was too busy with his concubine to do much there, while McChrystal brought in ROE that hampered the effort and killed American troops.

McChrystal and his ROE was directly responsible for the boys at Joyce denying support to the Americans at Ganjgal, along with the corollary deaths of 1st Lt. Michael Johnson, 25; Gunnery Sgts. Aaron Kenefick, 30; and Edwin Johnson, 31; and Hospitalman 3rd Class James Layton, 22, and Army Sgt. 1st Class Kenneth Westbrook, 41.  Three marines and naval corpsman, 1st Lt. Michael Johnson, Staff Sgt. Aaron Kenefick, Gunnery Sgt. Edwin W. Johnson, and Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class James Layton, were killed after remaining behind to cover the withdrawal of the Afghan soldiers from the ambush site.

Yet after all of that, Petraeus and McChrystal have the temerity to continue to push for gun control over Americans, despite the oath to the constitution they swore to uphold.  There is a sense of entitlement among the military elite, as if experience in strategy and logistics enables them and gives them righteous jurisdiction over American policy.

This is an error made by not only McChrystal, Petraeus, and Mattis, but Trump as well.  Trump’s insult to Mattis is as irrelevant and unimportant as Mattis’ rebuttal.  But this is an error made by many of the American people.  Even the left will engage the error as long as the general pushes policies of which they approve, despite their hatred of everything America.

So why should anyone care about McRaven’s policy preferences?  They shouldn’t, any more than they should care about those of McChrystal or Petraeus or Mattis.  But Americans are always searching for a hero to worship, and they find them in the military elite.

Oh, and there is one more item of interest here.  McRaven is as much of a gun controller as Petraeus and McChrystal.  How do you SpecOps guys feel about that?  And McChrystal?  Didn’t you call him “The Pope?”

David Codrea:

“Principled Statesman Mike DeWine Endorsed by Brady Campaign,” the headline read.

“While many politicians pander to ideologically out of touch special interests, Mike DeWine does the hard work on bread and butter issues and defends the rights of the majority,” the flack piece continued. “DeWine was a leader in the fight against legislation that called for special rights for gun dealers and manufacturers facing gun violence victims trying to hold them accountable for negligence.”

There.  That’s everything you need to know.  David sums it up nicely – but do go visit and read his full piece.

I have several observations.

First, the “commander” is an asshole.

Second, they don’t know the law the way they should.

Third, and I’ll say this for the hundredth time, muzzle flagging people like cops do is dangerous to life.

Fourth, listen again to the “commander’s” words.  Any time someone says that they support the second amendment, but … you know they’re lying.

Fifth, it’s good to see folks in Florida challenging the cops.  These 2A audits are becoming a thing.  I like that.  A man has no business telling me how I should carry my weapons.