Archive for the 'Firearms' Category

Soon to the report – but first a little story.

Once upon a time some teenagers were racing hot rods down Ocean Drive in Myrtle Beach, S.C.  Tourists were hit by one of these kids, and so the townsfolk came together and decided that something must be done to make things safer.  The decided on a plan, and even had a real time, in-situ display of their new ideas for the voters before the town voted on it.

They all got together that day and after speeches about “caring for the children,” and waded into the ocean, each participant having another participant (they called him their swimming buddy) within 20 feet of him, both to the right and left.  No one, according to the new ordinance, would be allowed to swim in the ocean, night or day, without buddies within 20 feet.  It would all be monitored by cameras and enforced by newly hired police officers.

Some of the townsfolk objected that no one could ever swim again because the line of buddies would never end since a person would have to be flanked on both sides, and thus the stipulations could not be logically met, but the participants told the objectors to “shut up, just because.”  Others objected that this all had nothing whatsoever to do with High School kids racing hot rods on Ocean Drive, but the partipants and local politicians all told them to “shut up, just because.”  And besides, “think about the children.”  And then, “shut up.”

I hope that this little parable has been a useful introduction to what seems to be coming down the road.

No surprise but newsworthy insofar as I think this is the first time a Republican as prominent as McCain has talked openly about some new form of gun control passing Congress. If you’re not sure what he means when he refers to the plan Coburn and Schumer are working on, read this. They’re going to close the “gun-show loophole” but carve out exceptions for family transfers and maybe for people who’ve already been vetted for concealed carry. How many votes will there be for that? Well, they’ll start at 58: Coburn and Mark Kirk are part of the group that’s working on a compromise bill and McCain’s already hinting that he’s a yes, so add those three to the Democrats’ 55 (no Dem would dare oppose a measure that might complicate Obama’s “Republican obstructionism” message on gun control). Collins and Murkowski are always gimmes on big bipartisan initiatives too, so there you go — 60 votes for cloture, although there’s bound to be many, many more than that. Follow the last link for your reminder that expanded background checks is the one gun-control measure that polls fantastically well across party lines. Even Lindsey Graham, who needs to protect his right flank in case of a primary challenge in South Carolina next year, is open to some form of new background checks albeit not the Democratic plan. You might see a majority of House Republicans vote no, partly as a symbolic rejection of further gun-control regulations and partly to distinguish themselves from the squishy RINOs in the Senate for the benefit of red-district voters, but it’s going to pass that chamber too with bipartisan support. When push comes to shove, I think Boehner would rather violate the “Hastert Rule” and push this thing through with mostly Democratic votes than risk handing Obama a potential weapon for 2014 by rejecting something that even many Senate Republicans support.

Regular readers know my view.  Universal background checks are a pretext for and necessary prerequisite to a national gun registry, and a national gun registry is a precondition for gun confiscations.  Furthermore, none of this has anything to do with the shootings that have been in the news lately.  And finally, we’ll see how that exception goes where they want to carve out provisions for transfer of firearms to children.  Give it some time – it will turn totalitarian because that’s the way totalitarian systems work.

But remember this fact about the entire conversation.  None of this is related to the antecedent events.  The only clear-cut and logical legislative action I support is abolishing gun-free zones.  Everything else is just a smoke screen.

Bob Owens discusses the fact that a growing number of companies are refusing to do business with New York and other states over unconstitutional gun laws.  More specifically, if a citizen cannot have a particular weapon, then law enforcement doesn’t get it either.

Mountain Guerrilla also weighs in with some direct contact e-mail addresses with the gun companies.  I also have some (one for Rock River Arms), and I intend to send notes around on this issue.

I have strongly advocated that Remington relocate to South Carolina (and that other firearms manufacturers relocate to different states, such as Kimber, Rock River Arms, Springfield Armory, etc.), and CBS News did a segment that showed that this kind of thing might be making a difference.

I realize that this is slightly off subject if we’re discussing manufacturers holding the states accountable for double standards, but this isn’t really that far off subject.  Most good people are hard workers, and I have put in my share of time for my company, including unpaid time.

But I once worked with a man whom I respect who held that this can and often does turn counterproductive in work, family and church.  The more we fill in the gaps for people, the less people feel the effects of their actions and decisions.  It keeps people from learning.  When we work hard to undo bad managerial decisions, management makes the same decisions again.  When we block consequences from our children, they don’t grow up.  I have begun to take my friend’s view in almost every walk of life.

When states abuse its citizens, they should lose business, respect and revenue.  States like New York, with its new assault weapons ban, and Illinois with the continued fight against even concealed carry anywhere in the state, don’t deserve the gun companies, and their states’ law enforcement agencies don’t deserve the best firearms.  Bad actions are needful of consequences in order to rectify those actions.

Furthermore, as I’ve pointed out before, the hypocrisy is just rich and a remarkable thing to behold.  States that ban weapons because they are “evil and inflict damage to innocent lives” but allow their manufacture because of revenue just aren’t worthy to be taken seriously.  This is happening in Colorado as we speak.

At Guns For Everyone, we learn that Colorado wants the ban Magpul’s magazines, but wants their money.

As Colorado state legislators debate HB 13-1224 – a bill that would ban magazines over 15 rounds – an issue arose around Magpul and its base of operations here in Colorado.

Magpul has vowed to leave the state if a magazine restriction is passed in any form.

To appease Magpul, and presumably to keep it’s reported 600 jobs and $85 million in taxable revenue in the state, Representative Joe Salazar announced an amendment to HB 13-1224, L.0.14, that would specifically exempt Magpul from this legislation in as far as they would still be welcome to manufacture and sell these black high capacity ammunition clip death machines to civilians, just not to Coloradans.

When House Republicans pointed out the obvious and blatant hypocrisy of this amendment, House Democrat Rhonda Fields insisted that the amendment was intended to allow Magpul to continue to sell these magazines to law enforcement and to the military because “the military protects the company…Country” (check the record, her slip of the tongue was real and darkly accurate).

This is a preposterous excuse for wanting Magpul to stay in Colorado and we know that she is lying.  Selling magazines to law enforcement and the military wouldn’t even come close to the business they do for the civilian market.

Kimber and Remington moving from New York, and Rock River Arms and Springfield Armory moving from Illinois, and Magpul moving from Colorado, is best for the citizens of those states, as well as the country as a whole, even if it causes pain for a while (or otherwise, if they don’t relocate, the laws need to be reversed as a precondition for their staying).  Likewise, firearms and ammunition companies shouldn’t be doing business with such states.  A principled stand like this also causes increased respect within the firearms community.  And we are a paying bunch of people.  We put our money where our mouth is.

UPDATE: Magpul is threatening to leave if the Colorado bill is passed into law.  I have sent e-mails to Rock River Arms, Smith and Wesson, Springfield Armory, Glock, Remington and Magpul about their positions regarding the state boycott.  I have yet to receive any responses.

Examiner:

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, decrying America’s demonization of guns, is predicting that the parade of new gun control laws, cheered on by President Obama, will hit the Supreme Court soon, possibly settling for ever the types of weapons that can be owned.

Scalia, whose legacy decision in the 2008 case of District of Columbia vs. Heller ended the ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., suggested that the Constitution allows limits on what Americans can own, but the only example he offered was a shoulder-launched rocket that would bring down jets.

And the wily judge suggested to an audience of Smithsonian Associates at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium Tuesday night that he is not just preparing for a new gun control challenge, but that he’s softening up one of his liberal colleague on guns.

The long-time duck hunter revealed that he’s taken Obama appointee Elena Kagan hunting several times, the last being for big game in Wyoming where she shot a whitetail doe. “She dropped that doe with one shot,” he said during an event that featured questions from NPR’s court reporter Nina Totenberg.

[ … ]

Scalia explained why he wrote Heller, but wouldn’t discuss current gun control limits in Congress and the states. “There are doubtless cases on the way up,” he said, adding that limits on what weapons can be owned will likely be part of any new decision. “There are doubtless limits, but what they are we will see.”

Commentary

Good.  Let’s rock.  Let’s get on with the preservation or diminution of our rights and freedoms.  Time is wasting.  It’s time to revisit the decisions in Heller and McDonald, not because, as Justice Ginsburg thinks, there might be a reversal of Heller on the horizon with a “future, wiser court,” but because Heller didn’t go far enough.  The Supreme Court recognized our right to ownership of firearms, but didn’t specifically broach the issue of “bearing” those arms, i.e., carrying them for personal defense.

This relationship that appears to be developing between Scalia and Kagan is, I’m sure, very sweet and and all of that, but I wouldn’t count on her vote.  Furthermore, the whole issue of duck hunting concerns me.  The Second Amendment, as Scalia knows, isn’t about duck hunting, or deer hunting, or any other “sporting purpose.”  The sporting purposes test imposed by the last round of onerous firearms laws, and enforced by the ATF, is entirely unconstitutional.  I have said before that I think the test is misapplied, and that if it is a firearm, it has a sporting purpose.  But proliferation of this test through the judiciary (from some future decision) is cowardly because it doesn’t formally recognize the truth, and that is that the second amendment exists in order to ameliorate tyranny.

But for the courts, just remember that we firearms owners aren’t likely to have any more respect for confiscatory policies (or anything that can enable confiscation such as universal background checks), onerous policies (such as counting the number of cartridges I can put in my magazine), or unconstitutional tests (like sporting purposes) coming from the courts than we would if it came from the Congress or the President.  And just for the record, the Supreme Court became a laughingstock over the decision on Obamacare.  You wouldn’t want to put the final nail in the coffin holding your honor or respectability, would you?

Be very careful.  Think wisely.  Don’t start things you cannot stop.

UPDATE: Thank you for the visit on this article.  It is timely and important.

NYT:

In Idaho’s graceful, striated-marble Capitol, home to one of the more ardent and adamant state legislatures in the nation in standing up for the Second Amendment, lawmakers from both parties say that a torrent of public passion, even panic, about new proposed federal gun rules is pushing in only one direction: toward more guns, not fewer.

If Idahoans, like Americans in many states, have rushed to buy guns out of fear for personal safety in the aftermath of recent mass shootings, or out of fear of tighter legal controls, then democracy has already spoken, many lawmakers said. People have voted with their pocketbooks.

[ … ]

The speaker of the House, Scott Bedke, a Republican, said that he would not guess what might come from the session, but that the will of the people was clear.

“Idaho will push back,” he said, referring to federal gun control proposals. “A question that is rolling around in most Idahoan’s heads right now is, What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ don’t they get?”

Yea, this voting with the pocketbook has been happening all over America.  I had placed my M1 Carbine on layaway several months before Christmas with Allen Arms in Greenville, S.C.  In September, Allen Arms had a copious stock of guns.  When I went to pay off my gun at Christmas there were no AR-15s, no M1 Carbines, no tactical shotguns, very few polymer frame pistols, and just a few revolvers left.  It looked like a tornado had come through the store.

I have also noted before that Hyatt Gun Shop in Charlotte was reported to have done more than one million dollars worth of business the Saturday before Christmas.  That’s one million dollars in a single day – on guns.  I went back to Hyatt just a few days ago to place another firearm on layaway with them (and buy some ammunition), and the store was as crowded as I have ever seen it.  There is no slowdown.  And this sort of thing is happening (and has happened) all over America.

Do you want another example, a little less anecdotal?

And it won’t do much good to go direct to the manufacturer for an AR type rifle. Top companies like Bushmaster, and Rock River Arms report wait times up to two years for the guns. Stag Arms, which bills itself as the “Worldwide Leader in AR Manufacturing” is so backlogged they’ve stopped answering the phone: “Please know that we are currently experiencing exceptionally high call volume due to increased demand. Current response time is anywhere from five to seven business days for all voicemail inquiries.”

Note again – a two year wait time for a Rock River Arms rifle.  These folks who have voted with their pocketbook will learn to cherish their gun collection, and they will want to bequeath it to their children and children’s children without the involvement of the federal government.

So listen, Eric and Paul.  It might be that you are listening to the “polls” in your support for universal background checks.  But I assure you, America is voting with it’s pocketbook.  The vote is overwhelming, and it is fixed.  We won’t change our minds.  You need to get with the popular crowd and drop the support for gun control as fast as you can.

Gun control is an artifact of self-serving, crusty, old rich white men, angry feminists and effeminate inner city dwellers who have never ridden a horse across a snowy mountain, sat up all night with a dog who has been bitten by a Copperhead, or plowed a row in a garden on a sunny day.  You’ll never reach the young people that way.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mike for the attention.

UPDATE #2: Thanks to David for the attention.

UPDATE #3: Thanks to Glenn for the attention.

UPDATE #4: More voting on gun control with money.

Specialized gun shops, super sporting goods stores and even big-box retailers are enduring a big-time demand for firearms ammunition as First Coast gun owners are buying up most of the bullets they can find.

“There’s a complete run on ammo and guns,” said Paul Rukab, who has owned St. Nicholas Gun & Sporting Goods on Jacksonville’s Blanding Boulevard for 22 years.

Bullets are leaving the store as soon as trucks arrive with new stock at local Walmarts and stores like Dick’s Sporting Goods and Academy Sports. Ammunition for long rifles and handguns is in highest demand.

It’s the same everywhere.

Greenville News:

A New York firearms company should move to South Carolina because the Southern state is more sympathetic to gun rights, according to an Upstate congressman.

Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan of Laurens is urging the parent company of Remington Arms to move its Ilion, N.Y., plant to South Carolina to avoid “enemies” of the Second Amendment.

“In South Carolina, we believe in the right to keep and bear arms,” Duncan wrote to the chief executive officer of the Freedom Group, a North Carolina company with firearms divisions in 14 states and more than 3,000 employees.

[ … ]

He said he’s also encouraging South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to contact gun-manufacturing facilities in other states where gun control legislation is likely.

But dislodging Remington from New York may be an uphill battle. The company’s history there goes back nearly two centuries, according to its website.

And the Republican congressman who represents Ilion says he’ll fight to keep the Remington plant where it is. The plant employs more than 1,000 people.

“Generations of expertise is in the DNA of all those who work for Remington and live in upstate New York,” Rep. Richard Hanna, R-N.Y., said Tuesday. “The Ilion plant remains highly competitive and its workers and the community are committed to the success of Remington. I look forward to working with New York state leaders to see that Remington stays here for generations to come and thrives right where it began almost 200 years ago.”

This isn’t enough.  Governor Haley is going to have to get deeply involved if she wants this industry in S.C.  As for Remington, it doesn’t matter that they have been in New York for two centuries.  The South is better.  The employees may gripe and moan, but given a few months, they’ll see the benefit themselves.  Their griping won’t last long.

Prior: It’s Time For Gun Industry To Move South

I have been watching carefully as more Southern states engage in courtships with the various gun manufacturers over location.  There are too many articles to link and discuss.  But this report does a good job of summarizing what’s at stake.

Every year, New York state gives out millions in tax incentives, loans and economic development grants to the private sector. Every state does it, and New York has little choice if it wants to prevent companies from leaving, but additional attention is now being paid to the incentives going to the state’s gun industry.

In a letter sent Jan. 3 to Empire State Development President Kenneth Adams, State Senator Liz Krueger urged an end to incentives for the firearms industry. 

“I’m still awaiting a formal letter of response, but I have been assured that this was a grant made in a previous administration, not in Governor Cuomo’s administration, and the moneys that were committed have been spent,” says Krueger.

She is referring to $5.5 million that went to Remington Arms in the last five years. The incentives to Remington in New York are among $19.9 million given by nine states to makers of assault weapons in the last decade and were revealed in a list compiled by the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting.

The $5.5 million that went to Remington and its parent company, Freedom Group, led to the consolidation of manufacturing plants in Massachusetts and Connecticut to Ilion, N.Y., where Remington has manufactured firearms for nearly 200 years.

“They were down to close to 600 jobs and now they’ve more than doubled that,” says Sen. Jim Seward, Ilion’s representative in the legislature. “These are good manufacturing jobs and obviously we want them to stay.”

Seward says as many as 40 of the guns manufactured in Ilion can no longer be sold to civilians in New York.

The state’s new gun control law, known as the SAFE Act, bans semiautomatic weapons with certain design features deemed military-style, like detachable magazines or folding stocks. 

The company can still manufacture the banned guns in New York for export, but Seward says cutting off Remington from future incentives would make it even harder to keep the operation in Ilion.

“I must point out that they are being constantly recruited by other states,” says Seward. “And at some point, we hope this day does not come, but at some point, the company could say, ‘hey, well why should we remain in a state that is perceived by many as being hostile to law-abiding gun ownership?’”

Politicians in Michigan, Texas, Oklahoma and South Carolina are reportedly all trying to convince Remington to relocate.

Another manufacturer called Kimber, which makes guns that are not classified as assault weapons, received $700,000 from Empire State Development in 2009.

The move South makes sense for the gun manufacturers.  First of all, living in the upstate South Carolina area means that you’re always within one hour of some of the most beautiful mountains East of the Mississippi, and within three hours of some of’ the best beachfront on the East coast.  Second, the gun manufacturers can always rely on workers who wouldn’t be caught dead paying money to a labor union.  Third, they would be located in a state that wanted them, had laws that were amenable to their needs, and rewarded them handsomely for their industry.  Continued time spent in the Northeast is time wasted.

I think this is true of Springfield Armory and Rock River Arms in Illinois too.  Their time is limited in the North, and the move is inevitable.  As for the states from which the manufacturers relocate, I think the figure of speech is called “chickens coming home to roost.”  If New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and other Northern states decide that the jobs are too important to lose, then we have the delicious irony that these states care enough about their own citizens to protect them from these “evil” guns, but not the citizens of other states.  Making money is more important than the lives of other people.

How rich is that?

Sometimes I feel inadequate to be a gun blogger.  For instance, there is a new category of weapon with which I lack familiarity.

For years I have ruminated on what it is about (some) Americans that make gun ownership such a “third rail” issue. I have never heard any person say we should remove weapons from hunters or and sports shooters. One of my grandsons shot his first with a bow and arrow.

I have never heard anyone state that people should not be allowed to own a weapon for home defense.

The following question is never answered by the NRA: “What would justify a regular American citizen having super-assault weapons and massive ammo magazines?” I ask again: Why is this question never answered?

I don’t know what a “super-assault weapon” is, but if you can tell me, I’ll tell you if I need it.  I do know this.  I want one.

On to other things though.

Rep. Mike Thompson, the California Democrat charged with crafting gun safety policies in the House of Representatives, keeps talking about ducks.

More specifically, duck hunting.

“Federal law prohibits me from having more than three shells in my shotgun when I’m duck hunting. So federal law provides more protection for the ducks than it does for citizens,” Thompson said earlier this month during a panel discussion on gun violence at the liberal Center for American Progress.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, also on the panel, was delighted by the line. “That’s a very powerful point,” Emanuel said. “My instinct is we’re gonna hear more of this line going forward.”

[ … ]

“My point is, when people say, ‘How dare you talk about putting limits on how many shells I can have in my gun?’ — that somehow this is unconstitutional, it’s an affront to, you know, God, country and apple pie — I think it’s important to point out that this isn’t something that’s new,” Thompson told TPM last week. “This is something that we already do and it’s something that we’ve done in the past.”

Brad Bortner, chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s’ Migratory Bird Program, told TPM hunters have generally been “supportive of the regulations” because they preserve waterfowl populations that they care about.

You don’t say?  You mean to tell me that states restrict the kinds and capacities of firearms in order to protect the population of game animals and thus their revenue?  Pretty good idea, huh?  Nothing to do with the second amendment, but a good idea nonetheless.  But now on to the learning experience.

And the duck-hunting line does appear to be catching on among Democrats. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) used it at the same news conference where Durbin spoke.

“These are good law-abiding citizens,” McCarthy said. “They want to hunt. They want to go duck hunting. And the guns they use, duck hunting, you’re only allowed three bullets.”

There you have it.  Duck hunting with bullets.

UPDATE: Thanks David.

Prior:

High Magazine Clips And The Shoulder Thing That Goes Up

Automatic Bullets In Rapid-Fire Magazine Clips

The current focus by the politicians in their quest for social and human factors solutions to gun violence appears to be two-fold.  First, there is a call for universal background checks.  Even the NRA has indicated potential approval of this approach (while there is still vacillation and equivocation within the ranks of the NRA on this issue).  While this is tempting, it won’t solve any problems, and instead it will lead to a national gun registry.

But if there is vacillation on the issue of universal background checks, there appears to be growing consistency in the call for more intrusive and comprehensive mental health checks for firearms ownership.  Progressive and conservative alike, from politician to random interviewee on the street, casting aspersions on mentally troubled people and pointing to mental health screenings as the problem and solution, respectively, is the one area of agreement.

Walter Russell Mead weighs in in the affirmative on this problem – solution coupling:

Love it or loathe it, legislative gun control is unlikely to have much impact on violence American style. But there is another door to progress: taking care of America’s mentally ill. The good people at Mother Jones recently compiled a study, revealing that of the 62 mass shootings since 1982, 38 were carried out by a person suffering from mental illness (mostly men). Most had displayed signs of paranoia, depression, and other issues with mental health well before reaching for a weapon.

While most of the gun violence in America is committed by the clinically sane, the most horrific massacres are often the work of deranged people whose problems had come to the attention of family, neighbors or work associates.

I have shared before that I have a concealed handgun permit in my county, and in order to get permitted like this, one of the requirements is to sign over authority to examine your medical records to the county Sheriff.  Any admissions to one of five or six regional hospitals for mental health or substance abuse issues would have been reason to have denied my permit.  But I have often wondered, what if I had a recorded admission for some matter in one of the above two categories?  What would that have proven?  Little to nothing, as we will see.

What about the logical contraposition?  I am in a fitness for duty program because I have unescorted access to nuclear power plants.  Does that make me mentally stable?  How about law enforcement officers, since they are in a similar kind of program?  Anecdotal cases demonstrate problems.

Reports of Metro Police Lt. Hans Walters underscore the mental health component of the current gun control debate. Walters shot and killed his wife, a former police officer, and his son and then set fire to their Boulder City home before taking his own life.

Most would agree police departments conduct exhaustive background checks, screening tests, training and safety procedures before authorizing officers to carry and deploy a number of firearms. Yet a former colleague comments to the Las Vegas Review-Journal that Walters “didn’t seem out of the ordinary at all,” adding that “Cops are pretty intuitive. They can tell when something’s wrong with someone. He seemed totally fine.”

Beyond the anecdotal level, there are problems with diagnosis and with the very nature of psychology.  One clinician weighs in this way.

Clinicians treating patients hear their fears, anger, sadness, fantasies and hopes, in a protected space of privacy and confidentiality, which is guaranteed by federal and state laws. Mental health professionals are legally obligated to break this confidentiality when a patient “threatens violence to self or others.” But clinicians rarely report unless the threat is immediate, clear and overt.

Mental health professionals understand that, despite our intimate knowledge of the thoughts of our patients, we are not very good at predicting what people will do. Our knowledge is always incomplete and conditional, and we do not have the methods to objectively predict future behavior. Tendencies, yes; specific actions, no. To think that we can read a person’s brain the way a scanner in airport security is used to detect weapons is a gross misunderstanding of psychological science, and very far from the nuanced but uncertain grasp clinicians have on patients’ state of mind.

What about diagnoses?

If mental health professionals were required to report severe mental illness (such as paranoid schizophrenia) to state authorities, it would have an immediate chilling effect on the willingness of people to disclose sensitive information, and would discourage many people from seeking treatment. What about depression, bipolar disorder, substance abuse or post-traumatic stress disorder, along with other types of mental illness that have some link to self-harm and impulsive action? The scope of disclosure that the government could legally compel might end up very wide, without any real gain in predictive accuracy.

Diagnosis is an inexact and constantly evolving effort, and it is contentious within the profession. To use a diagnosis as the basis of reporting the possibility of violence to the authorities would make the effort of accurate evaluation much more fraught. And what of the families and friends of the mentally ill? Should their weapons purchases be restricted as well? A little reflection shows how unworkable in practice any screening by diagnosis would be.

And more clinicians weigh in similarly:

“We’re not likely to catch very many potentially violent people” with laws like the one in New York, says Barry Rosenfeld, a professor of psychology at Fordham University in The Bronx….

A study of experienced psychiatrists at a major urban psychiatric facility found that they were wrong about which patients would become violent about 30 percent of the time.

That’s a much higher error rate than with most medical tests, says Alan Teo, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan and an author of the study.

One reason even experienced psychiatrists are often wrong is that there are only a few clear signs that a person with a mental illness is likely to act violently, says Steven Hoge, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. These include a history of violence and a current threat to commit violence….

The next problem is that even if the science was capable of sustaining the load that we want to place it under, it still wouldn’t have the desired effect:

Perhaps most important, although people with serious mental illness have committed a large percentage of high-profile crimes, the mentally ill represent a very small percentage of the perpetrators of violent crime overall. Researchers estimate that if mental illness could be eliminated as a factor in violent crime, the overall rate would be reduced by only 4 percent. That means 96 percent of violent crimes—defined by the FBI as murders, robberies, rapes, and aggravated assaults—are committed by people without any mental-health problems at all. Solutions that focus on reducing crimes by the mentally ill will make only a small dent in the nation’s rate of gun-related murders, ranging from mass killings to shootings that claim a single victim.  It’s not just that the mentally ill represent a minority of the country’s population; it’s also that the overlap between mental illness and violent behavior is poor.

Finally, it isn’t just anecdotal evidence that calls into question the whole notion that mental health professionals can bear the weight of societal violence, or even the warnings of mental health professionals themselves.  Evidence doesn’t substantiate the current emphasis on mental health as the answer.

President Obama has called for stricter federal gun laws to combat recent shooting rampages, but a review of recent state laws by The Washington Times shows no discernible correlation between stricter rules and lower gun-crime rates in the states.

States that ranked high in terms of making records available to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System also tended to have tighter gun laws — but their gun-crime rates ranged widely. The same was true for states that ranked poorly on disclosure and were deemed to have much less stringent gun-possession laws.

For example, New York, even before it approved the strictest gun-control measures in the country last week, was ranked fourth among the states in strength of gun laws by the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence, but was also in the top 10 in firearm homicide rates in 2011, according to the FBI.

Meanwhile, North Dakota was near the bottom in its firearm homicide, firearm robbery and firearm assault rates, but also had some of the loosest gun laws and worst compliance with turning over mental health records to the background check system.

[ … ]

The Times analysis looked at the Brady Campaign’s rankings for strength of each state’s gun laws and at Mayors Against Illegal Guns’ rankings for how states perform in disclosing mental health data to the background check system. That information was then matched against the FBI’s 2011 gun-crime rankings for homicides, robberies and assaults.

The results showed no correlation among the strength of laws and disclosure and the crime rates.

For example, Maryland and New Jersey — both of them populous states with large metropolitan areas — have tight gun laws but poor mental health disclosure. But New Jersey’s gun-crime rate was in the middle of the pack, while Maryland ranked sixth-highest in homicides involving guns and second-highest in robberies with guns.

Delaware and Virginia, which both ranked high in mental health disclosure and ranked 18th and 19th in the Brady tally of tough gun laws, also had divergent crime rates.

Delaware ranked among the top 10 in number of gun robberies and gun assaults, while Virginia was in the middle of the pack on its measures.

My own view is somewhat more pedestrian and pragmatic.  New programs to empower the government rarely avoid abuse, and man’s evil propensities always tend towards totalitarianism and excessive control.  The innocent who get swept up in the mental health screenings and refused means of self defense will be considered the price to pay for government control.  With the right administration, simply wanting means of self defense will be justifiable cause for denying such.

With so little good that can come from this emphasis, coupled with such a large chance for abuse, mental health isn’t the answer that the politicians tout it to be.  As I have previously noted, the common element in the high profile gun violence cases (theater, schools, churches and malls) is that they’re all gun free zones.  Glenn Reynolds points out that this causes a false sense of security.  “Policies making areas “gun free” provide a sense of safety to those who engage in magical thinking, but in practice, of course, killers aren’t stopped by gun-free zones. As always, it’s the honest people — the very ones you want to be armed — who tend to obey the law.”

This is, as it were, the low hanging fruit.  Tackle the easy things and leave the questionable ones behind.

Prior Featured:

What To Expect On Gun Control In The Coming Months

The War To Disarm America

Christians, The Second Amendment And The Duty Of Self Defense

Do We Have A Constitutional Right To Own An AR?

U.N. Arms Treaty: Dreams Of International Gun Control

I had previously said “Universal background checks have nothing whatsoever to do with keeping weapons out of the hands of criminals, or a reduction in violence of any sort.  The system, if set up, is a predecessor and necessary prerequisite to a national gun registry.”

Feinstein’s proposals:

The bill will exempt firearms used for hunting and will grandfather in guns and magazines owned before the law’s potential enactment. However, the grandfathered weapons will be logged in a national registry.

A national gun registry – it’s one of the touchstones of success for the statists.  And universal background checks and a national gun registry go together like a hand in a glove.  When they make laws they are looking long term.  In fact, take note of one part of her legislation.

The legislation being pushed by Feinstein — who has long history of calling for gun bans — would prohibit the sale, transfer, importation and manufacture of certain firearms.

Neocon Charles Krauthammer (no friend to the second amendment) theorized the approach for them.

It is simply crazy for a country as modern, industrial, advanced and now crowded as the United States to carry on its frontier infatuation with guns. Yes, we are a young country but the frontier has been closed for 100 years.

Ultimately, a civilized society must disarm its citizenry if it is to have a modicum of domestic tranquility of the kind enjoyed in sister democracies like Canada and Britain. Given the frontier history and individualist ideology of the United States, however, this will not come easily. It certainly cannot be done radically.

It will probably take one, maybe two generations. It might be 50 years before the United States gets to where Britain is today.

Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic – purely symbolic – move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation. Its purpose is to spark debate, highlight the issue, make the case that the arms race between criminals and citizens is as dangerous as it is pointless.

De-escalation begins with a change in mentality. And that change in mentality starts with the symbolic yielding of certain types of weapons. The real steps, like the banning of handguns, will never occur unless this one is taken first, and even then not for decades.

What needs to happen before this change in mentality can occur? What must occur first – and this is where liberals are fighting the gun control issue from the wrong end – is a decrease in crime. So long as crime is ubiquitous, so long as Americans cannot entrust their personal safety to the authorities, they will never agree to disarm. There will be no gun control before there is real crime control.

Universal background checks and assault weapon bans are mere window dressing.  The goal is to desensitize the public and cause this to occur over one or two generations.  You can keep the rifle you just purchased.  But you must register it with the federal government and you cannot bequeath it to your children or grandchildren.  Thus do they wish to accomplish confiscation by means other than sending SWAT teams into your home.  The question is, will you let them?

In order to demonstrate my good-natured and cooperative spirit concerning new firearms regulations, with Jay Carney and Mr. Obama I’ve come out strongly against High Capacity Magazine Clips, like this:

From National Journal, here is yet another potentially problematic feature of firearms that needs to be regulated.

It will also be tricky to determine just how many automatic bullets should be allowed in a rapid-fire magazine clip. Three? Ten? Twenty? Democrats in favor of restricting high-capacity magazines say that three bullets is enough to kill a duck or a quail. Fair enough, but gun enthusiasts say that 10 or 20 rounds makes more sense for people who possess firearms for self-defense purposes. How do negotiators strike a deal on that one?

I’ll tell you how.  We firearms owners stipulate that automatic bullets in rapid-fire magazine clips won’t be tolerated.  Now that I’ve compromised and met my detractors in the middle, be warned and walk with caution.

I won’t tolerate any more challenges to or infringements upon my second amendment rights and God-given duty of self defense.  And just to let you know that I’m serious, remember that I have guns and I’m willing to use them.  No, seriously.  I’m willing to use them to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Prior: High Magazine Clips And The Shoulder Thing That Goes Up