Articles by Herschel Smith

Gun owners could soon find themselves paying a penalty for their weapons.  Witness the following thought experiment at San Francisco Chronicle:

Mandatory insurance needs to enter the post-Newtown debate about guns. Requiring gun owners to carry liability insurance, as many states require vehicle owners to do, is not a magic bullet to solve the problem that leads to 30,000 dead Americans every year. But it is a tactic that, for a number of reasons, could have significant beneficial impact.

First, a well-drafted state law requiring gun owners to show proof of insurance will raise the cost of gun ownership. But insurance companies will offer rates that take into account the risk posed by each gun and gun owner, just as there are differential premiums for young drivers and sports cars. Thus gun owners will have a financial incentive to think about and implement safety measures, some of which would surely be developed in response to insurance-cost-driven demand.

See a similar commentary by Isa-Lee Wolf.  It sounds like Marsha Cohen is all proud of herself, even though I’ve seen this idea floated several times in the last couple of weeks.  But there’s only one problem with this approach.  It runs squarely into the constitution.  Let’s rehearse recent history for a moment.  Right on the heels of the Supreme Court Heller ruling, the city of Chicago, still recalcitrant, forbade firearms ownership within its jurisdiction unless the applicant practiced and qualified at a range also within its jurisdiction, and then simultaneously regulated ranges within its jurisdiction out of business.  The Seventh Circuit didn’t like this very much, and Glenn Reynolds observes of this particular ruling, “The right to practice at a firing range, then, is at the very least one of the aspects of the Second Amendment right to arms that reinforces its core purpose.”  Glenn further observes that:

… punitive controls on ammunition, designed to make gun ownership or shooting prohibitively expensive or difficult, would be unlikely to pass constitutional muster. If firing-range regulations that impose burdens on target practice violate the Second Amendment, then restrictions with a similar effect—such as the dollar-per-bullet tax proposed by a Baltimore mayoral candidate—would also constitute violations, it seems. Making it “difficult to buy bullets in the city”—the avowed purpose of the tax—would seem to be precisely the sort of purposeful discrimination that would violate the Second Amendment. It might even be analogized to discriminatory taxes on newsprint, or the licensing of newsracks, both of which have been found to constitute excessive burdens on First Amendment rights.

And if this is so, then “punitive” regulations or discriminatory taxes or burdens (or insurance) would seem to fall under the same prohibition.  At the very least, it isn’t obvious that this would be acceptable to the courts, and it hasn’t been directly adjudicated.

Finally, State Farm has voluntarily considered such proposals.

Gun safety in the home hasn’t been discussed much in the recent national conversation on gun violence, but the head of the nation’s largest homeowners and auto insurance company acknowledges that it could be.

Edward B. Rust Jr., CEO and chairman of the board of State Farm Mutual Insurance Co., said this week that gun ownership “could be among a multitude of things” considered among the risk factors used by insurance companies to determine the cost of homeowners insurance policies. “But,” he added, “whether someone owns a gun doesn’t necessarily make them a risk. . . . The bigger debate is, Are people competent in gun ownership?”

This strikes me as silly as charging customers higher premiums if they happen to have a Doberman or German Shepherd in their home.  Actuarial mathematicians have more important things to worry with, and penalizing firearms owners also seems to be a bad way to start a boycott against your company.

Gun owners’ insurance.  An idea whose time has come – and gone – and never really was sensible to begin with.

Tonight I heard Jay Carney advocate, on behalf of the President, the banning of all high capacity magazine clips.  Heretofore I was under the impression that they wanted to ban high capacity magazines.  As long as we are discussing high capacity magazine clips, I will throw my full support behind the ban.  Who can say that I am not a cooperative and reasonable individual?

Jay Carney:

Addressing President Obama’s planned announcement on measures to reduce gun violence tomorrow, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made a comment that raised some eyebrows both inside the briefing room and on Twitter.

Carney pushed the president’s plan for action over the status quo, paraphrasing a comment Obama made at his press conference yesterday as “if even one child’s life can be saved by actions taken in Washington, we must take these actions.”

Veteran CBS News Washington Correspondent Mark Knoller was the first to quote Carney’s statement on Twitter and it quickly garnered a barrage of outrage from conservatives who took exception.

Then came the demands to ban football, cars, and so on.  The twitter posts briefly point out what a hypocritical fake that whole argument is (along with the people who make it).

If a child’s life (or an adult’s life) is worth regulation and disarmament, then disarm the police.  After all, poor Mr. Eurie Stamps was killed by a SWAT officer who stumbled over his prone body while (the officer’s) finger was on the trigger of his weapon, causing sympathetic muscle reflex to shoot his weapon, thus killing innocent Mr. Stamps.  Mr. Stamps isn’t the only innocent human victim who has been killed by police.  Dogs also die by the score in SWAT raids across America as a routine practice by police.  They simply couldn’t care less.

Oh, you say, but it has to be different for law enforcement officers?

Those kinds of guns are made to kill people, and no one should be killing people, except in the line of duty.

But why should anyone kill anyone else in the line of duty?  Has this author read the Supreme Court decision in Tennessee versus Garner?  Law enforcement officers can only shoot in self defense, i.e., to save their lives.  Use of weapons to enforce the law isn’t allowed.

So the author is only allowing shooting in the line of duty, and duty only includes self defense.  Does that mean that it applies to me too?  I see self defense as my religious duty.  God requires it of me.

In reality, following their arguments to their logical conclusions isn’t in the game plan. They aren’t interest in your safety.  That argument is fake, and they quickly give it up when challenged.  They’re only interested in allowing government-sanctioned violence.  They don’t want to admit it, but they’re Fascists.  So the next time you read another advocacy commentary for gun control in the name of your safety, make a mental note of that person as a complete fraud and dismiss it as another Fascist attempt to fake his way through the issue.

So as we have been discussing, Texas is considering a proposal to imprison federal agents who enforce new gun regulations.

A Texas lawmaker says he plans to file the Firearms Protection Act, which would make any federal laws that may be passed by Congress or imposed by Presidential order which would ban or restrict ownership of semi-automatic firearms or limit the size of gun magazines illegal in the state, 1200 WOAI news reports.

Republican Rep. Steve Toth says his measure also calls for felony criminal charges to be filed against any federal official who tries to enforce the rule in the state.

“If a federal official comes into the state of Texas to enforce the federal executive order, that person is subject to criminal prosecution,” Toth told 1200 WOAI’s Joe Pags Tuesday.  He says his bill would make attempting to enforce a federal gun ban in Texas punishable by a $50,000 fine and up to five years in prison.

Toth says he will file his measure after speaking with the state’s Repubicans Attorney General, Greg Abbott, who has already vowed to fight any federal measures which call for restrictions on weapons possession.

Toth concedes that he would welcome a legal fight over his proposals.

At some point there needs to be a showdown between the states and the federal government over the Supremacy Clause,” he said.

We need more than talk.  One or more of these state bills needs to pass in order to be a legitimate threat to the power of the federal agencies.

Explained by the black man for whom I would vote for President before any white politician I know. Two minutes into the video.

From NBC News:

But as a veteran law enforcement officer, what was most striking to Kehoe was that the gunman, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, had heavier firepower than Kehoe and his officers. The police had Glock pistols with 14-round magazines;  Lanza had a Bushmaster assault-style rifle, two handguns and multiple 30-round magazines that allowed him to squeeze off an estimated 150 shots.

Although it’s still not clear if Lanza ever fired at responding officers — Kehoe thinks he took his own life when he heard the police sirens —  the disproportionate balance in firepower bothers him.

“We never like to think we’re going to be outgunned in any situation we’re dealing with,” he said. “We do a good job of  securing dynamite in our society. … (Assault rifles) are another form of dynamite. … I think they should ban them.”

I think you’re not getting the full story, so I have posed the following questions to the Newtown Police Department:

(1) Do your officers have tactical shotguns (e.g., Mossberg 930,
Benelli, etc.) in their units?  If not, do they have any kind of
shotguns in their units?
(2) Do your officers have AR-15s in their armory?
(3) If so, do they carry them in their units?
(4) Are their AR-15s the equivalent of assault rifles, i.e., do they
have selective fire capability, or are they only semi-autos like
civilians arms?
(5) Did any of your officers carry any firearms other than their side
arm in response to the Sandy Hook disaster?
(6) If not, could your officers have made the choice to have carried
any firearms other than their side arm in response to the Sandy Hook
disaster?
(7) Finally, it has been reported that the response time to the Sandy
Hook disaster was 20 minutes.  Is this accurate?

Thank you so much for your attention to these questions.

What you want to bet that I never get answers to these or any other questions?

From CBS New York:

People familiar with closed-door negotiations told The Associated Press a tentative deal was struck over the weekend.

The tentative agreement would further restrict New York’s ban on assault weapons, limit the size of magazines to seven bullets, down from the current 10, and enact more stringent background checks for sales. Other elements, pushed by Republicans, would refine a mental health law to make it easier to confine people determined to be a threat to themselves or others.

Yaaaaaay!  This means that some of Kimber’s 1911’s (with seven round magazines) are legal, while the ones that have eight round magazines are “assault weapons.”  And maybe for a real laugh NY will include the eight- and nine-shot revolvers in their AWB while excluding the 5- and 6-shot revolvers.

Notice also that the NY republicans pressed for making it easier to falsely imprison innocent people.  New York.  Good for a laugh if nothing else.

From Dr. Keith Ablow:

… gun control advocates also ignore the potential widespread psychological harm that disarming Americans could cause.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote to his nephew Peter Carr in 1785, “A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the Body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind . . . ”

The right to bear arms is a critical component of feeling competent and autonomous as individuals, rather than relying on the goodwill of a super-powerful, unassailable government.

A disarmed population is, by definition, a population that has completely ceded the power to defend its homes against local, state or federal authorities. This implies a level of trust much more consistent with that which children have for parents than that which thinking adults have for the institutions they have created to perform vital functions like defending the nation, keeping the peace, maintaining schools and providing clean water.

A disarmed population is allowed the toxic luxury of feeling as though our way of life and our safety from oppression comes without the tremendous responsibilities and moral complexities of wielding force. The same people who passively pay taxes that put tanks on the streets and fighter jets in the skies over our enemies’ nations can cringe at the idea of owning guns themselves — projecting their survival instincts onto an all-powerful father figure (the state).

History is replete with examples of cultures in which taking guns away from law-abiding citizens foreshadowed catastrophic abuses of the power thereby invested in government. One need look no further than Nazi Germany.

While gun control advocates point not only to episodes of terrible violence, but also to the toll of accidental deaths and murders involving firearms, I believe such tragedies highlight the need for citizens to take more personal responsibility for the handguns they own, not any justification for them to be infantilized by banning them from owning handguns at all.

It may well be that putting more—not fewer—guns in the hands of law-abiding American men and women and training them to safely store those guns would actually be one immediate way to immunize the population from feeling like potential victims of the Adam Lanzas and James Holmes among us.

It may be that putting more—not fewer—guns in the hands of law-abiding American men and women would be a way of immunizing them from feeling like passive participants in history and in safeguarding what we value about our way of life.

The psychological truth is that every gun privately and legally owned in America is a tiny impediment to the citizenry assuming a docile, nearly delusional perspective that the world will always be predictable, that one’s home and loved ones will always be safe and that government will always tend toward light and never toward darkness.

We’ve recently heard from all manner of statists pretending to be liberals, and also pretending that the reason they’re pressing for gun control has to do with the our own safety or the greater public good.  The truth of the matter is that this is a misdirect and smokescreen.  Statists are always interested in laws and regulations that increase the power and scope of control of a centralized government.

The second amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with personal or public health, shooting at squirrels or deer, or personal defense.  It pertains to holding a tyrannical government at bay, something that causes the statists to be aghast at our temerity and jurists like Robert Bork to ridicule the notion that we could stop a government who owns nuclear weapons.

But just occasionally it’s nice to be able to push back and show the gun control argument to be impractical, unhealthy and unsafe.  It’s also nice that Dr. Ablow mentioned the example of Nazi Germany.  Since the Obama administration began it’s gun control push in earnest it has become fashionable to deny the history of Germany’s gun control in the holocaust.

I deal with this issue in Obama, Hitler And Gun Control.  Gun control certainly turned out to be very unhealthy for the Jews under Hitler.

Mike at Sipsey Street Irregulars gives us a nice report about a real Sheriff.

“My office will not comply with any federal action which violates the United States Constitution or the Kentucky Constitution which I swore uphold.”

And far from worrying about repercussions for doing this, Peyman sees the gun control push as a sign of weakness that will crumble in the face of real opposition: “Just a few of us have to be willing to stand up to political opposition putting our people at risk. The other side will back down.”

Rock on, brother Peyman.  And you’re right.  The statists will back down when they see the horrible cost and the impossible task of implementing their unconstitutional laws.  This isn’t the only report of massive resistance.

Other law enforcement officials, like numerous state legislatures, are pursuing nullification in an effort to void any unconstitutional statutes within their jurisdictions. Gilberton Borough, Pennsylvania, Police Chief Mark Kessler, for example, is asking local lawmakers to adopt the “Second Amendment Preservation Ordinance,” which cites the state and U.S. constitutions to invalidate any further assaults on the unalienable rights of residents in his community.

“Hopefully this will spread like fire throughout the country, and the people will stand up and say, you know what, enough is enough, and under the Tenth Amendment, which grants the power of nullification of unconstitutional laws, we’re going to recognize this as unconstitutional, we’re not going to enforce it, we’re going to make sure this doesn’t happen,” Chief Kessler told The New American in an interview, adding that the Second Amendment was clear. “We want to do this peacefully, we don’t want any kind of violence whatsoever — I’m totally against that — I just want to see a peaceful resolution to this. And under the Tenth Amendment, hopefully we can accomplish this through the nullification process.”

Elected county sheriffs are also expected to be on the front line in any potential showdown between an out-of-control executive branch and the American people. Former Graham County, Arizona, Sheriff Richard Mack already has experience protecting residents in his jurisdiction from federal lawlessness. And he says that as the top law enforcement officers in their jurisdictions — with power to arrest federal agents for violating the law — sheriffs have a duty to protect the people and their liberties.

“The sheriffs need to be united in letting the federal government know that we’re not going to allow it,” he told WorldNetDaily in a recent interview. “Out of 200 sheriffs with whom I’ve met, I’ve only had one give me a wishy-washy answer. That one said he would try to take the federal government to court. Most of them have said they would lay down their lives first rather than allow any more federal control. They also said they would do everything they could to stop gun control and gun confiscation…. If the federal government wants to start a new Civil War, all they need to do is go ahead with gun confiscation.”

And just like I predicted would happen, states are looking for ways to preempt federal regulations.  They (i.e., the federal agents) will know we’re serious when state police begin arresting the agents for attempting to enforce federal laws within the borders of their particular states.  Some cooling off time in the state penitentiary might be just what the DHS agents need.

One fellow writes in simply indignant that there is such a thing as an assault rifle.

I grew up an avid hunter in the 1950s. At that time, federal law required using a shotgun with a plug limiting it to holding three shells … to hunt DUCKS.

That law still stands.

But today, we keep electing federal legislators who don’t even have the courage to limit assault rifles to holding fewer than 30 rounds … to hunt little 6- and 7-year-old CHILDREN.

I always like it when writers mention the fact that they are hunters, or former hunters from their childhood, or have served in the military – as if any of that is supposed to mean anything to me.  It’s markedly special, too, when one of those writers uses words like clip to refer to magazine.

If the perpetrator of the shooting in Connecticut had been using a revolver he would have accomplished the same horror.  He was unimpeded, and that is the problem that isn’t being addressed by any of the tyrannical laws being proposed.

The Governor of the State of New York is waxing know-it-all on hunting too.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called for tougher state bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines of ammunition as part of a progressive agenda in a sometimes fiery State of the State speech Wednesday.

“No one hunts with an assault rifle. No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer,” Cuomo said. “End the madness now!

Okay.  I’ll acquiesce.  No one needs ten rounds to kill a deer.  But apparently Mr. Bayezes needed 30 rounds from an AR to defeat his home invaders, and lot’s of guys hunt feral hogs with ARs, assuming that the bay dogs can bay up the hogs.  We are losing the war on hogs, and need to kill as many as possible.

Finally, there is one other thing that we might find useful about an AR that Governor Cuomo hasn’t mentioned, i.e., suppressing tyrannical dictators like him.  After all, that’s the point of the second amendment anyway.

Addressing the objection that “Gun advocates will be hard-pressed to explain why the average American citizen needs an assault weapon with a high-capacity magazine other than for recreational purposes,” Kevin Williamson writes “The answer to this question is straightforward: The purpose of having citizens armed with paramilitary weapons is to allow them to engage in paramilitary actions. The Second Amendment is not about Bambi and burglars — whatever a well-regulated militia is, it is not a hunting party or a sport-clays club. It is remarkable to me that any educated person — let alone a Harvard Law graduate — believes that the second item on the Bill of Rights is a constitutional guarantee of enjoying a recreational activity.

There is no legitimate exception to the Second Amendment for military-style weapons, because military-style weapons are precisely what the Second Amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear.”