Articles by Herschel Smith

The Hill:

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a case challenging the constitutionality of California’s concealed carry laws, which give locally elected sheriffs discretion over issuing licenses for good cause.

Sacramento County residents James Rothery and Andrea Hoffman, who were denied licenses more than 10 years ago, argue the law deprives them of their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for protection outside the home and violated the clause of the Constitution that affords everyone equal protection under the law.

The law allows each city and county the power to issue a written policy setting forth the procedures for obtaining a concealed-carry license for good cause. It also allows retired police officers to obtain concealed carry permits without having to show “good cause.”

The residents argued the Sacramento County sheriff was issuing permits to friends, donors and supporters but excluding others.

But state officials said Rothery now has a concealed carry permit thanks to a new sheriff, who changed the definition of good cause after taking office in 2010. That definition required only a stated desire to have the ability to carry a weapon for purposes of self-defense, or defense of a family, to obtain a license. Hoffman has not reapplied for a permit since being denied in 2008.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court’s decision to dismiss the case. The court held the Second Amendment does not protect, in any degree, the carrying of concealed firearms by members of the general public.

The decision by the Supreme Court not to hear the case keeps that ruling in place.

So the decision the SCOTUS made pertained to Mr. Rothery and that Ms. Hoffman could have ameliorated this situation with a simple re-application.  Easy, right?

Not so fast.  This doesn’t change the rest of California, nor does it ensure that their rights will be honored in perpetuity.  That would require a SCOTUS decision, and they weren’t willing to give it.  Do not entrust your rights to black-robed tyrants.  You’ll be disappointed.

As I’ve said many times before, rights come from the Almighty and thus are as immutable as He is.  The constitution is a covenant and contract (remember those classes in covenants and contracts, lawyers?).  It means only that the state (county, state or FedGov) is or is not honoring the duly constituted covenant under which we’ve all agreed to live.

Thus it means that the state has declared war on its people.  Broken covenants means being cursed by God.  It’s that simple.  You don’t break covenants without consequences.

Via Fred Tippens, news from Maryland:

FERNDALE (WBFF) — Anne Arundel County Police are investigating an officer-involved shooting that occurred Monday morning in Ferndale.

Police spokesman Jacklyn Davis said officers responded to 103 Linwood Avenue at around 5:15 a.m. to serve an “emergency risk protective order,” also known as the red flag order.

Police say Gary J. Willis, who was the subject of the Extreme Risk Protective Order and the Emergency Petition, answered the door armed with a handgun.

When officers began to serve Willis with the order, he became irate, opened the door to the residence and grabbed the gun according to police. They say, an attempt was made by an officer to take the gun away from Willis when Willis fired the gun.

A second officer fired their service weapon, striking Willis, who was pronounced deceased at the scene.

Davis says no Anne Arundel County officers were injured in the struggle. The suspect was pronounced dead on scene.

Brought to you by the department of pre-crime in the land of “Minority Report.”  Judges and legislators: mind readers, one and all.  Capable of discerning right from wrong and predicting the future even before it happens.

Shooting Illustrated has a good review of the Ruger AR 556 in 450 Bushmaster.

I do find this quite an interesting cartridge.  It’s also informative that Leupold came out with a scope specifically designed for this cartridge, called the VX-Freedom 3-9x40mm Bushmaster.  It’s also reasonably priced.

I’d like to know if any readers have a Ruger AR 556 (the make, form factor, materials and gunsmithing will all be about the same regardless of caliber, so any input is appreciated).

Mr. Guns and Gear thinks the make is nice but they should Melonite the barrel.

Ryan Saavedra on Twitter: “Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams says she will ban semi-automatic rifles and she *refuses* to answer whether she’ll have the government go door-to-door and confiscate people’s firearms.

But I guess that doesn’t apply to everyone (via WiscoDave).

Members of the Black Panther Party marched through the city of Atlanta, strapped with assault rifles and brandishing Stacey Abrams campaign signs.

In a video posted on the group’s Facebook page on Saturday, members of the Black Panther Party are seen marching through the West End neighborhood of Atlanta in support of Stacey Abrams gubernatorial campaign. As they marched, the Black Panthers carried assault rifles and continually shouted slogans such as “black power” and “power to the people.”

[ … ]

One of the members can be heard saying afterward: “You need to march in your neighborhood. When we was [sic] in West Virginia, 99 percent crackers, stone cold crackers.”

Nice sentence construction there.  No one knows what you’re talking about.  Here’s a tip: learn English.

But on to the point, it would appear that he isn’t concerned about the candidate for Governor taking his weapons, only those of others.

Hey, Georgia is an open carry state only with permit.  Did they all have permits, and did anyone check?  Did police charge them with brandishing weapons?

Calling Atlanta police.  Anyone?  Perhaps a PR employee of the Atlanta Police Department?

We discussed this a bit earlier, and TTAG has an informative update on it.  For a summary, see the picture below, but make sure to read the stupidity at TTAG.

Oh dear.  Am I going to have to teach some ignorant ATF agent and DoJ lawyer, who never studied geometry, the Pythagorean Theorem?  Good Lord.  I guess if you can’t get a job doing anything else, you go to work for the ATF.

Before we get to that, perhaps we ought to teach DoJ lawyers about the second amendment.

David Codrea:

What’s not is what will happen next. At this writing, we are two weeks away from the midterm elections. We’ll see if enough gun owners are motivated to keep the momentum on the High Court going or if a predicted “Blue Wave” washes away our hopes. Expect things to get “New York state of mind”-ugly either way.

As I’ve said before, politics is the initial stages of what China calls “Unrestricted Warfare.”  You do it in order to prevent things from getting uglier.  We’ll see how motivated gun owners are in protecting their rights.  Or perhaps they’re sitting on the couch watching sitcoms.

By the way, I agree completely on David’s take on Kavanaugh.

This is very interesting.  As if you needed another reason to keep your hands away from the end of the cylinder where it meets the forcing cone, watch until the end when he shoots the revolver.

Forbes:

For a while this summer, Ginger Chandler ignored the emails from LodeStar. As an executive who had formerly worked on product development for Smith & Wesson and Remington, she was an obvious candidate to help the startup develop a better smart gun. But she knew the history of smart gun efforts in the United States.

In short, they’d failed. Smart guns are a kind of graveyard of heroes who have been torn apart on the rocky shoals of American gun politics.

Chandler had been laid off from Remington as it neared bankruptcy in spring 2017. She’d started a platform for to help small gun accessories makers to access markets. But she had time. So, she started to think about the idea.

“Smith & Wesson ran after this 20 years ago and failed,” said Chandler. “Other companies have done it and failed. And I’m not interested in addressing the politics. I feel like we get it wrong every time we try to do that.”

But the executives at the company were on a mission.

CEO Gareth Glaser had a 30-year career in corporate America, but after a mid-career program at Harvard he wanted to do something with a social mission.

Ah, how sweet.  A social mission.  It’s all mere altruism, isn’t it.  But wait.

Ralph Fascitelli, another executive, had long been involved in Seattle-based Washington CeaseFire, which advocated pragmatic solutions to gun violence. They both saw smart guns as a business-oriented, pragmatic solution to gun violence, and a big market: They estimate potential sales at $1 billion, or about 40% of the 7 million unit handgun market.

There were high-profile investors involved (though they don’t want to be public), including a former CFO of Smith & Wesson, Chandler told me. The company has raised $500,000 and needs about $3 million to start producing the guns.

LodeStar was appealing, to be sure, Chandler thought.

“Giving people options so that they can maintain their firearms and keep others who are not authorized from using them …  that is a good and honorable cause,” she said. “No one would disagree with that.”

She found herself open to the idea. But there were other challenges.

The idea of smart guns makes incredible sense: build guns with tech-enabled safety features, like fingerprint IDs, that could prevent them from being used by someone who doesn’t own them. Take, for instance, the 15,000 children who are killed or injured by guns every year (the number is based on 2015 stats). “Smart guns can reduce gun deaths by 37%, which correlates with our own analysis re saving lives from suicides, domestic violence, police gun grabs, stolen guns used in homicides, child accidents, school shootings involving teenage underage shooters,” said Fascitelli by email.

In other words, the technology used on your smart phone, applied to guns, could save as many as 37 people out of the 100 who die each day from guns, not to mention those who are injured by guns. In fact, the three big gun safety/public health experts have all voiced support for smart guns: UC Davis’s Dr. Garen Wintemute, Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Stephen Teret and Harvard’s Dr. David Hemenway.

The market for smart guns starts with parents who want to keep their kids safe and police departments who worry about guns being turned around on police officers.

But when companies have tried to introduce them – Mossberg Firearms, iGun and most recently, German company Armatix – some of the technology wasn’t as easy as it is now. There’s been a backlash from the gun community.

So which is it?  Either the gun community will accept these things because no one could possibly disagree with such an approach, and it makes good sense, and it’s a swell idea, or the gun community has rejected them and is causing a “backlash.”  Which is it?  It can’t be both.  Only a lousy reporter wouldn’t probe to find the truth.  Only a shill would write an article that sounds like an ad.

The NRA says officially that it is concerned that technology introduced in guns could make guns less safe, though that claim is widely dismissed. The second issue is that smart gun technology could be mandated, which both the NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation object to. More than 15 years, a New Jersey law seemed to confirm some gun owners’ worst fears:

A law sponsored by Loretta Weinburg in 2002 mandated that only smart guns could be sold in New Jersey within three years after the first model hit the market anywhere in the United States. That law is now largely regarded as a well-meaning failure — even by Weinberg — because it touched off such a nasty dispute with gun rights proponents,  as columnist Mike Kelly wrote.

Smart guns haven’t received much support from some gun control organizations over the years – though the Obama Administration tried to promote research into them.

“The major gun safety groups like Brady have done very little to promote a technology approach. … This we “believe” is because of a small group of naive well-heeled idealists on the left don’t want a safer gun to be the solution to gun violence   The idealists on the left, who supported the New Jersey mandate, and right have prevented a pragmatic solution for a long time,” said Fascitelli.

So the controllers haven’t pushed technology, it’s the right teaming up with the left that has prevented smart guns.  Well, this is a narrative I haven’t heard before, maybe because it’s idiotic.

In addition, politicians in New Jersey seemed open to changing the 2002 that would have mandated smart guns in New Jersey (which some in the gun community objected to on principle and as a sign that other states would follow.)

This week, in the wake of the Tree of Life shootings, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said he would introduce new gun control bills, including one that would replace the mandate. The new legislation would require every New Jersey gun retailer to carry at least one smart gun

Mandates did trouble Chandler, but New Jersey seemed to be conceding part of that battle, and truthfully, over the years she had come to have a more nuanced view of the subject.

“When seatbelts got mandated in Texas, it made me angry that they were trying to legislate an individual right. But when somebody has a wreck without one, all of your insurance goes up,” she said. “Then, in my first job out of school, I designed air bags. Air bags save lives.

Mandating that they are in cars is not a bad thing.”

[ … ]

So now we get to the crux of the issue, yes?  It’s not that this is an economic option for people, it’s not that it’s the far right teaming up with the far left to kill the idea, it’s not that the technology sucks, it’s not that it can be hacked, it’s not that it’s another step in the process of defending life, it’s not the failure modes inherent in yet another complex component in the train of equipment, it’s all really about the need to mandate these things.

I asked if, in the wake of her decision to join LodeStar to work on smart guns, whether she’d gotten any hate from her friends or the community. She was nervous about that, she said.

But, no. “What I did get was, ‘Ginger, that’s such an uphill battle. Why would you spend your time there. They’re not against smart guns. They just don’t think anybody can do it.”

That’s not the kind of remark that stops Chandler, who seems not only pragmatic but one of those people who slices through obstacles like butter. Saving 37 lives every day seems like a pretty good goal.

“I just kind of believe this is a good thing,” she said. “I believe this will happen.”

She’s a liar.  She doesn’t really believe in them, and she doesn’t really believe the market can support this.  She believes that she can sell the product if the government mandates that all other products are illegal.

I remind readers of my challenge.  Hard hats and ketchup, folks.  I have yet to have anyone take me up on it.  And as for money, I hope and recommend that she and leftist investors of all sorts drop millions upon millions upon millions of dollars into the venture.  I think that would be wonderful – and a good social mission.

Via WiscoDave, that’s not exactly the way the title of the article reads, but it’s close enough to the real effect.

TRENTON, NJ – No Ghost Guns. No 3-D Firearms. And no purchasing any component used in making either of these weapons.

Legislation banning the manufacturing of any untraceable or covert firearm was approved 68-5-3 by the full Assembly and the Senate 31-0 Monday.

The bill (A-3129)- sponsored by Assembly Democrats Paul Moriarty, Gary Schaer and Annette Quijano – would make it illegal to purchase firearm parts for the purpose of unlawfully manufacturing firearms without a serial number and to manufacture or possess covert or undetectable firearms and 3-D printed firearms.

“Instead of making it harder for criminals to obtain weapons, new technology and mail-order kits are only making it easier for criminals to manufacture firearms at home,” said Moriarty (D- Camden and Gloucester). “Our only recourse is to arm our court system with additional penalties for those who choose to skirt the law, avoid licensure and manufacture these types of firearms to keep or even to sell. We’re saying no to ghost guns, and no to 3-D firearms. Not in New Jersey.”

Well, in addition to running headlong into the second amendment, which they don’t care about, there’s also the issue that manufacturing a firearm for personal use without a serial number is perfectly legal under federal law as long as the firearm isn’t sold or transferred to anyone.

This isn’t really about 3D guns.  This is about universal background checks and government control.  But I’m being redundant, yes?

The Federalist:

“I do not believe like weapons of mass destruction like the AR-15 belong in civilian hands,” she said. “I think it should be prohibited from civilian use. I have shot an AR-15, and I think you probably have too, and while it’s an amazing amount of power, it also is an amazing amount of destruction, and there is very little that can be done to protect vulnerable communities when the AR-15 is present.”

So in other words, the only people who should be able to employ destruction is the authorities.  Okay, I’ve got it.  So much for that pesky little notion of death at the hands of a corrupt state apparatus.

As for that horrible, high powered weapon of war, Charles Whitman called from hell and said you’re full of crap.