Articles by Herschel Smith

Source.

Remember.  They come because of acts of love.

Called silencers or “mufflers” in the deliberations on the NFA, a redditor has done good work trying to find why suppressors were included in the NFA.  As we’ve noted the discussions waxed emotional and did in fact mention them as covered under the NFA, but again, no reason is given.

It appears that the reason for the inclusion of silencers in the National Firearms Act of 1934 is completely unknown to the official record. The NFA was cooked up in the Department of Justice and advocated for by Hon. Homer S. Cummings, Attorney General of the United States and (especially) Hon. Joseph B. Keenan Assistant Attorney General, Department of Justice. I have been unable to find any credible source outlining the reason silencers were included in the NFA, and this knowledge likely died with Cummings, Keenan, and their staff. If anyone can point me to a credible source, I’d love to see it.

And of course, no reason will be forthcoming.  The redditor also notes that the NRA supported the NFA.  How sad.

Do you think it doesn’t matter that we’re bringing in Mexican cartels and their killers to America?  Do you think law and order America will be able to get these warlords under control?

Breitbart notes one recent gun battle in the streets of Rio Bravo.

Machine gunfire and rolling battles along the main avenues of this city spread terror among townspeople who tried to hide inside homes and businesses. Stray bullets went through the walls of some houses.

The violence took place on Friday morning when Mexican soldiers and cartel gunmen clashed along the streets of this city. Rio Bravo is immediately south of Donna, Texas, and has an international bridge connecting both cities.

Is this something you want to see in your neighborhood?  How about what the Mexican security forces have to do to combat these warlords?  How about the use of helicopters and miniguns against cartel bosses?

David Codrea:

Add to this the Episcopal positions on Obamacare and on wealth redistributing “global warming/climate change/environmental justice.” We’ll not find much in agreement with the reasons conservatives in general and gun owners in particular supported, voted for, and have been consistently defending Donald Trump against all comers.

The position of the Episcopal church on gun rights is something we’ve noted before.  They don’t believe in gun rights.  Combine that with the other positions they take that could affect said rights, and you might have a volatile mixture of beliefs that undermines liberty.

We just don’t know unless Gorsuch is questioned in detail on these issues.  Suffice it to say that I share David’s skepticism of Gorsuch until he’s proven himself with opinions that line up with the text of the constitution.  Not infringing “lightly” on second amendment rights doesn’t even come close.

Via David Codrea, GRNC:

With GRNC feedback and support, Representative LARRY PITTMAN (R-Cabarrus) today introduced House Bill 69 for what will be GRNC’s main legislative thrust for 2017: constitutional (permitless) carry. In addition to Rep. Pittman, primary sponsors for the bill include Reps. MICHAEL SPECIALE (R-Beaufort, Craven, Pamlico), BEVERLY BOSWELL (R-Beaufort, Dare, Hyde, Washington), and JAY ADAMS (R-Catawba).

HB 69 (“Constitutional Carry Act”):

• Establishes a new Article 54C, under which handguns may be carried concealed without permits;
• Removes the need to have a concealed handgun permit to carry a concealed handgun in restaurants, public assemblies, parades and funerals, and (with the same limitations as currently in law) onto educational properties; and
• Retains the current CHP system for purposes of reciprocity with other states.

HB 69 is designed to be a “clean” reciprocity bill (i.e. without other measures) in order to draw fewer objections from potential supporters. GRNC will shepherd the introduction of additional legislative initiatives in other bills.

GRNC has a number of actions you can help with at the link.  I will.  But I remain skeptical about this.  Oh to be sure, there are a lot of actions we North Carolinians need, including repeal of the idiotic Jim Crow era requirement for CLEO approval of gun purchase permits.

But we have this stupid governor named Roy Cooper, who is a full on Social Justice Warrior.  He’s all bathroomed up, and he’s anti-gun.  I hate with every fiber of my body that Pat McCrory was defeated by this asshole, but honestly, I’m not convinced that HB2 (the infamous bathroom bill) is what did it.  I think it had as much or more to do with the toll lane on I-77, which cost him a huge number of votes North of Charlotte.  We Southerners don’t like toll roads. Don’t even float the idea of a toll road in the South.  Nothing will get you hanged any quicker than the notion of being nickeled and dimed for driving from here to there.

Unless we have the votes to override Cooper’s veto, we won’t win this one.  But what it may be useful for is forcing a vote on the floor to see just who we need to target for replacement.

You know what I mean, right?  Floor votes are good.  Committees are for cowards.

Wand17:

Springfield – Ammunition for handguns in Illinois could be required to have serial numbers under legislation being pushed by three Democratic Chicago area lawmakers.

“It’s another attempt in my opinion to harass gun owners,” stated Dan Cooley, owner of the Bullet Trap in Macon.  “Ill-conceived and poorly thought out.  It’s impossible.”

The measure pending in the House Judiciary Committee would make it a misdemeanor for selling or possessing ammunition without a serial number after January 1, 2019.  Illinois State Police would be responsible for a centralized registry of all reports of handgun ammunition transactions.  A tax would also be placed on ammunition purchases.

“What you develop, you develop the black market like you do for drugs,” Cooley said.

Macon County Sheriff’s Office Lieutenant Jon Butts says his agency does not need serialized ammunition to assist in their investigations.

A similar measure failed to make it out of committee in 2016.

(House Bill 0271 – Sponsor Rep. Sonya Harper, (D) Chicago)

I can see it now.  Serial numbers get etched on ammunition casings, the casings explode in the faces of the users because the casings are designed a certain way to be able to sustain SAAMI rated pressures for that cartridge, and people lose their eyesight or have scarring to the face and hands.

Just brilliant.  Only the progressives folks.  Only the progressives.

Currently this web site has around 4300 posts and over 20,000 comments.  It’s still a small blog, but it pays to have some help in managing comments.  Disqus has been fairly good at that, allowing for threading, response flagging via email, and upvotes.  I’ve also had a fairly easy time with spamming comments and banning users.  I’ve had to ban mostly David Brock type CTR shills and trolls, as well as some Bloomberg trolls who tried to hide their identity.

That’s all about to change.  Disqus has gone full SJW.

Recently, many passionate users have reached out to us regarding instances of hate speech across our network. Language that offends, threatens, or insults groups solely based on race, color, gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or other traits is against our network terms and has no place on the Disqus network. Hate speech is the antithesis of community and an impediment to the type of intellectual discussion that we strive to facilitate.

[ … ]

Currently, we are working on improved tools to help publishers effectively prevent troublesome users from returning to their sites. And as we get smarter about identifying hate speech, we are working on ways to automatically remove it from our network.

And that means exactly what you think it means.  Breitbart is taking a beating in the comments from the other snowflakes in the comments, and there is a fairly robust beatdown from Disqus users back at Disqus as well.

I simply won’t allow another party to moderate comments on my web site, especially a company who apparently joined the ranks of social justice warrior.  Progressives are heavy into the tech sector, from Google to Facebook, to reddit and Disqus.  Very well.  I don’t have to use their product.  Disqus will now find out just how good and necessary they are when they start deleting comments based on anonymous feedback and arbitrary rules.  I suspect this won’t be pretty for them.  Either way, it’s their problem now.

My programmer – who is my oldest son Joshua – hasn’t been able to spend much time on the site recently because he has a full time job as a professional programmer.  This is the impetus we needed to work on that bucket list for the web site.  I’m dumping Disqus.  Look for changes in the near future.

We won’t lose any comments.  He wrote his own WordPress plugin to mirror and sync comments from Disqus as soon as they were sent.  I’ve noticed before the couple of times that Disqus went down that the comments were all still there, just without the framework that Disqus provides.  At the time it was a curiosity to me.  Now I’m truly thankful for the job he did.

I don’t need Disqus.  I do make a pittance from the ads, enough to cover the cost of hosting the web site (I also don’t allow my content to be controlled by BlogSpot or any other independently owned operation, so I pay for hosting on a server of my choosing).  My content is mine, and I won’t turn the keys over to anyone else (except one writer whom I had, liked very much, and who quit on me).  Now, I’ll just have to foot the bill for hosting this web site out of pocket, which is between $30 – $40 per month.  It used to be lower, but when they saw the traffic load and band width I used, they called and said that we needed to renegotiate the contract.  So I did.

Whereas this web site was self sustaining, it will now be a net loss.  But I will not allow Disqus to manage my comments in this manner.  It’s a shame that it has to be this way.  It has happened with so many companies it’s hard to count.  Patagonia entered progressive politics, and that nice winter parka I was going to buy from them will hang on the racks.

I don’t even really care enough about Disqus to watch and see what happens to them.  I used a product, and that product failed because of poor management decisions.  It’s a story as old as the hills, but in this case the appurtenances has all the marks of twenty first century America.

This commentary caused me to revisit the National Firearms Act (hereafter, NFA).  Perhaps there are better versions of this discussion (perhaps someone can find a PDF of the deliberations), but here is a rendering of the deliberations of the Congress on the NFA.

One of the most stark and eyebrow raising parts comes up front.  It is the testimony of Homer S. Cummings, then Attorney General of the United States.

Here are some of his statements.

“The situation has become exceedingly serious … there are more people in the underworld today armed with deadly weapons, in fact, twice as many, as there are in the Army and Navy of the United States combined.  In other words, roughly speaking, there are at least 500,000 of these people who are warring against society and who carrying about with them or have available at hand, weapons of the most deadly character.”

” … defines firearms to mean pistol, revolver, a shotgun having a barrel less than 16 inches in length.”

” … it defines a machine gun as any weapon designed to shoot automatically, or semiautomatically, 12 or more shots without reloading.”

This is the first draft of the NFA on which he is testifying.  Note that all handguns, including revolvers, and all semi-automatic rifles, were included in the first draft of the NFA.

For that matter, so was body armor, what he called “bullet-proof vests.”

But he waxes to the most earnest and emotional part thereafter when asked how laws were going to effect change in those who already had these weapons.

“I racked my brain to try to find some simple and effective manner of those already armed.”

His solution if you care to read it is to tax them, trace them and make interstate commerce and travel with these NFA items illegal.

And thus we know that his entire testimony is complete and unmitigated bullshit.  He begins by whipping up the terror.  Half a million.  Again, half a million of these nefarious workers of evil who have no compunction about killing or savagery currently have access to machine guns (which he defines as semi-automatic rifles) and pistols.  Not only that, he points out upon questioning that these are half a million people, not weapons.  Each person may have a dozen or more weapons.  Seriously,  read it for yourself.  That’s six million machine guns in the hands of cold blooded killers who have no conscience and a ready-made organization.  More, mind you, than the Army and Navy combined.

And yet, making interstate commerce in those weapons and travel across state lines illegal is supposed to work as an effective deterrent to the crimes they perpetrate.  Realistically, half a million machine gun toting cold blooded killers could have taken over the government in a day, and yet Cummings is advocating his law as an effective means to hold them at bay.

This law will go down as an abomination and obscenity, and in fact it already has.  The testimony was full of lies, the law was intended to disarm peaceable men, and the use of terror was an emotional ploy on stolid Congressmen, or perhaps those who knew and played along in the disarming of the public.

The NFA is a wicked testimony to the depravity of mankind.  It’s still the holy grail for gun controllers today who want to restrict semi-automatic weapons, pistols, barrel lengths and magazine capacity.  God will not bless a country with a history of controlling people in such a manner, and this law deserves our utmost disapprobation.  We should not and do not recognize its legitimacy.

I won’t outline the details of the Obama executive order for you.  You know the details.  The order included submission of names to the FICS who were social security recipients and who also had someone other than themselves handling their personal finances.

This is a fairly simple thing.  It’s routine for elderly people to have someone acting as power of attorney, and it’s also fairly routine to have someone other than themselves (e.g., their children) who handles personal finances.  This isn’t just commonplace with the elderly.  Seldom do both spouses handle the finances, and seldom do both spouses want to handle the finances.

The Congress has punted this ridiculous order (although why this couldn’t be punted by another executive order, I don’t know).  According to the progressives, the end of the world is upon us.  Consider these quotes.

NJ.com: “It was deemed that the ability to manage one’s own finances was a suitable proxy to identify the severely mentally ill.”

ARSTechnica: “Beneficiaries affected would be those suffering with mental illnesses so severe that they require a representative to manage their finances for them.”

CNN: ” … those who are considered incapable of managing their own disability benefits due mental illness.”

The Sacramento Bee: ” … Obama administration regulation intended to keep guns away from people so mentally disordered that they cannot work, and so depend on Social Security benefits.”

And finally, The Hill: “If your mental impairment is so significant you cannot work and cannot manage money, chances are you cannot safely manage an automatic weapon.”

Forget the fact that retiring to take advantage of social security benefits has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called mental illness.  Forget also the fact that handling finances today requires online presence unfamiliar to many Americans currently on social security.  I seriously doubt the authors of any of these commentaries know anything about the computer they use as a dumb terminal anyway.

Most of them couldn’t code their way through a hand held calculator and are likely only barely able to operate the calculator on their iPhones to multiply two numbers together.  I’d like to see them solve a differential equation, and upon failure perhaps I could cast doubt on their mental readiness to operate a vehicle.

No, these elderly folks are characterized as mentally ill, not only that, severely mentally ill, and moreover, disabled and disordered.

These anti-gun commentaries have become so outlandish that they’re cartoonish and laughable.  One can only suppose that they are receiving their talking points from Everytown or some Bloomberg apparatchik.  They are in good company along with Hamilton Nolan at Gawker who exclaimed:

When you’re old you’re slow as hell and decades of muscle erosion have made you weak. Pretty much any healthy young person can beat you up. Is a gun gonna even things out? Nope. In order for that gun to work you have to pull it out and aim it in a moment of crisis. While you’re fumbling to do that, all slow, a young person is just pushing you on the ground. And taking your gun out of your feeble hands.

Leave the guns to the young nuts, oldie.

Smoothly drawing a gun from a holster, aiming it quickly, and firing it accurately despite the kickback require a level of strength and dexterity that you just don’t have. I’ll lay 5-1 odds that any street criminal can kick you in the knee and chuckle as you roll around on the ground, grasping for the gun you dropped, as they rifle through your purse and then steal your gun, too.

How we treat the weaker among us is as good a metric of our national character as it ever was, perhaps the best possible metric.

One of the commentaries poses the question for a poll.  Should the mentally ill be allowed to have guns?  In my response I refuse to play their game.  Mental maladies have no correspondence to propensity to violence, so says the mental health experts.  The elderly have the right to self defense just as anyone else.

I believe we should restrict gun rights, but only for those who believe that we can define mental health in such a way as to restrict the rights of those we define.  Unprovoked violence has to do with wickedness, not mental illness.  In other words, if you believe that we should take guns away from people based on your definitions of who should have guns and who shouldn’t, I believe you are too dangerous to have guns.

The desire to control the actions of other men is pathological.  Acting on this pathology is wickedness.  I don’t believe you are actionable people for compromise or open discussion if you fall into this category.  You are a danger to society and should have your gun rights restricted.  If you would lord it over other men to control their lives, fortunes, self defense, children, work and other aspects of their lives, you are suitable only as an opponent in battle.

David Codrea:

“As a long term bureaucrat, this white paper reads as an application for the ATF director spot,” Weingarten surmises. “The paper fairly screams: I am willing to work with you, and I know how to take direction.”

That tracks with opinions I’ve received from insider and industry sources. It also works to mitigate the threat to the Bureau of having its functions spun off to different agencies.

I must admit to being skeptical of the motivation myself.  Government employees don’t usually work to undermine the scope of their authority.

I’ll also comment on a point David makes about a FOIA request in which he was involved.  Perhaps the FOIA request caught them with their pants down and forces them to consider their failures as an organization.

My experience has been that any entity that thinks it will be embarrassed by what it divulges in response to a FOIA will ignore the FOIA.  If you have massive legal assets like Judicial Watch, you typically can get what you want, albeit with some effort.  But for me, this usually goes badly.  The FOIA framework has no teeth because little people like me have no ability to force them to obey the law.

At any rate, the white paper reads like a job application.  Perhaps it is.  I don’t blame him.  I blame the executive branch of the government for allowing the ATF to get this badly out of control, I blame the Senate for the NFA and GCA, and I blame the people of the U.S. for putting communists in place who would promulgate this kind of legal framework to begin with.

What a sorry situation.