Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

It’s so very hard to pick because there are so many good ones.  This one stood out as important by reader Zion.

Lautenberg amendment in NICS acts retroactively to convictions prior to the law and they were NEVER INFORMED. This is “EX POST FACTO”. Those priors before NICS did NOT get “DUE PROCESS” to a lifetime gun ban adding a second sentencing to a prior judgement. This is a “BILL OF ATTAINDER”. NICS IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL TYRANNY, and supporters need to be prosecuted.

Not that there is any court in the land that will say such things as this.

Free Thought Project:

In an email Tuesday night, former Congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul released an ominous statement claiming that a source they have in the Senate revealed Democrats are teaming up with Republicans to push through a massive gun control bill.

According to their source, as Paul explained, “Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are teaming up with Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to ram through one of the worst nationwide gun confiscation schemes ever devised.”

The gun confiscation bill, according to Paul, is designed to disarm Americans without any due process. The senators are using the recent tragic shooting in Texas as the impetus behind the law—in spite of the fact that this law would not have prevented the shooting at all.

As the Free Thought Project has previously reported, some states have already begun implementing laws like this one. Using mass shootings as a their ammunition, states have enacted “Red Flag” or “Risk Protection” laws which allow police to confiscate a person’s weapon before they are ever given a chance to defend themselves.

In both of the gun confiscation cases reported by TFTP, neither of the two men were suspected of committing a crime, nor had they committed a crime.

Under the fifth and fourteenth amendments, due process clauses are in place to act as a safeguard from arbitrary denial of life, liberty, or property by the government outside the sanction of law. What’s more, neither of the men were granted their sixth amendment rights to be confronted with the witnesses against them. In both cases, simple orders—under new laws—were issued, arguably arbitrarily, which stripped these two men of their property.

In spite of what officials and the media claim, when a person is stripped of their constitutional rights, albeit temporarily, without being given the chance to make their own case based on what can be entirely arbitrary accusations, this is the removal of due process.

As Ron Paul explains, this removal of due process could soon be a federal law.

I’ll observe several things here.  I’ve found Ron Paul useful and informed at times, and other times not so much.  Let’s assume that he’s well informed this time and go from there.

It doesn’t surprise me at all to see the names Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.  If he were in better health, we’d see John McCain as well on that list.  These men are controllers, and we all know it.

I’ll also observe that while it’s bothersome and telling about the sorry state of respect for constitutional protections in America, I’m not so impressed by “due process.”  Due process means an activist social planner district attorney takes you on to destroy you and packs the jury with idiots who wear goofy-ass sports jerseys of their favorite criminal and worry about things like their “fantasy football” team.

Due process in America is a bad joke.  The problem is that America is sick unto death, and that doesn’t just mean the politicians.

I’ll close with several predictions.  First, if this does indeed make its way through the system, the NRA will support it and give all of the politicians cover for voting in favor of the bill.  Second, Trump will sign it into law if it crosses his desk.  Third, no court in the land will strike it down as unconstitutional.

We’ll see how well I have predicted, won’t we?

Sun Sentinel:

The families of two victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting on Wednesday sued the maker and seller of the weapon used in the rampage, claiming they should be held partially responsible for what Nikolas Cruz did with it.

The parents of Jaime Guttenberg and Alex Schachter want a judge to clear the way for them to claim damages against American Outdoor Brands, formerly known as Smith & Wesson, and Sunrise Tactical Supply. The Coral Springs store is where Cruz purchased the AR-15-style weapon used in the Feb. 14 shooting spree.

Fred and Jennifer Guttenberg, and Max Schachter “seek to hold defendants legally responsible for their complicity in the entirely foreseeable, deadly use of the assault-style weapons that they place on the market,” according to the lawsuit, filed in Broward Circuit Court.

Before the lawsuit can go forward, their attorneys said, judges have to clarify that gun manufacturers and sellers can be sued by victims.

“A confusingly written Florida statute stands in the way,” the attorneys wrote. “If the defendants claim that [the law] entitles them to immunity from such claims, and the courts agree,” the victims will be forced to pay the gun maker’s and seller’s legal fees instead of recovering damages.

The 2001 law, Florida Statute 790.331, explicitly prohibits state, county and city government agencies from suing businesses over the legal manufacture and sale of weapons that are later used unlawfully. The law is silent on whether victims can sue on those grounds.

The same law allows governments and victims to sue over defects in the weapons, but “the potential of a firearm or ammunition to cause serious injury, damage, or death as a result of normal function does not constitute a defective condition of the product.”

The Guttenbergs and Schachter want a judge to either declare that the law does not block them from collecting damages — or to declare the law unconstitutional.

Cruz, 19, bought his Smith & Wesson M&P 15 .223 rifle legally a year before the shooting in Parkland.

Messages left for the attorney representing Sunrise Tactical Supply were not returned Wednesday. Attempts to reach American Outdoor Brands were unsuccessful.

I suspect that the Florida statute is clear, as is the federal statute.  So one of two things happen here.  Either the judge is an activist totalitarian and declares that the suit can go forward, in which case S&W has to hire attorneys as does the Sunrise Tactical Supply, and potentially lose in court – or, the judge declares that the suit can’t go forward and S&W still has to hire litigation attorneys who will charge them a lot of money.

Although we may never be able to prove it, the lawyers for the victims may be funded by Everytown and Bloomberg (or Soros).  This should not be seen disaggregated from the holistic gun controller strategy which is a multi-front war on gun owners and gun manufacturers and sellers.  This is one manifestation of the legal battles we will face in the future, the other manifestation being law-makers at the state and federal level.

This is war.  See it that way.

Via Codrea, we learn a lot about Michael Diamond from his confession.

Most Americans would be surprised, for example, at how little time military personnel in particular spend with their weapons over the course of a career. Apart from firing on highly structured firing ranges or routine maintenance, access to your weapon on base is rare. Military Police provide security, so soldiers move about the base unarmed. There’s a reason for this: In the military, anything that reduces accidents, homicides or suicides isn’t put up for a vote. It’s a requirement.

The military’s strict rules on weapon and ammunition access can apply to wartime as well, as my own experience demonstrates. In 1991, I was a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Reserve. My unit was mobilized and sent to Fort Bragg, N.C. Shortly before boarding a plane to Saudi Arabia I was issued my M16 along with several magazines of live ammunition.

Although I had fired countless live rounds over the years on various military weapons ranges, it’s a different feeling when you’re issued live ammunition before heading to a combat zone. This time it was real.

After a 16-hour trip — most of which I spent sitting on the hood of a truck with my back against the windshield trying to stay warm — we emerged into the intense desert heat. Because of the ear-splitting noise of departing jets we quickly inserted hearing protection, and then surrendered our ammunition.

That’s right. Once we arrived in an operational war zone, one of the first things the U.S. Army did was take our ammunition away.

Eventually, my unit moved north toward Kuwait, where we were re-issued ammunition just before the start of the ground war. Several weeks later, after successfully completing our mission in Kuwait City, we were re-routed to northern Iraq to address the Kurdish refugee crisis. On arrival, we once again surrendered our ammunition.

These military safety requirements are a stark contrast to civilian U.S. gun laws. Where the military requires background checks before a service member is allowed anywhere near a live weapon, the majority of U.S. states allow private gun sales without a background check. Where military personnel are trained to take a weapon away from a soldier who poses an extreme risk to himself or others, most states do not have laws enabling law enforcement or loved ones to do the same.

Compared to the weapons training that military and law enforcement personnel undergo, the training required of civilian gun owners is a joke — if it exists at all.

[ … ]

And where military and law enforcement undergo extensive training on how to make the right shooting decision quickly while under extreme stress, civilians receive no such training, contributing to avoidable deaths arising from poor decisions and petty disputes. In this context, the National Rifle Association’s favorite slogan about good guys with guns defeating bad guys with guns is more naive myth than solution.

It’s crucial that veterans now bring our voice and experience to the national conversation about reasonable gun reform. As a group, we understand guns and appreciate that responsible gun ownership is an important part of American life — but we also understand that a safe environment is achieved through training and regulation.

There’s a whole lot he isn’t telling you.  First of all, one of the main reasons crime is so low on military installations is that it is extremely hard now to get on board a federal reservation.  I saw this beginning when Daniel was in the Marine Corps, and while highly difficult at first, it was nearly impossible towards the end of his time in the Corps to get on board at Camp Lejeune.  They guard their borders, unlike some countries I know.  Do you understand what I’m saying?  They guard their borders.  No one gets in who doesn’t belong there.

Second, he isn’t dumb.  He’s a highly intelligent man, and what he knows and isn’t saying is that his recommended trust in the police (he says “Military Police provide security, so soldiers move about the base unarmed”) is completely misplaced.  Warren v. D.C. and Castle Rock v. Gonzalez is all the evidence you need to rightly conclude that there is no legal obligation of protection by any police, whether civilian or military.

Third, we shouldn’t have to suffer the claptrap from someone like Diamond when one of the most storied gun battles ever fought by the NYPD involved discharging 84 rounds at a single shooter, and missing with 83 of them.  Folks, I don’t know any cops named Doug Koenig.  Like all collectivists, Diamond turns LEOs into superhuman heroes.

Fourth, we shouldn’t have to listen to the know-it-all attitude from Diamond anyway.  I sent this article to my former Marine, Daniel, and he responded rather harshly.  “He’s openly admitting that he’s a POG and has absolutely no experience in weapons handling or shooting, much less actual combat.  He’s a dipshit.  He has it all wrong about who and what is dysfunctional [he could point the finger of blame at homes being wrecked by government agencies that contribute to the breakdown of home life, but doesn’t].  Furthermore, the guy is a coward.”

I thought about that some, and concluded that my son is right.  Diamond is a coward.  He’s recommending that I rely less on weapons for personal security, but refusing to provide that personal security by standing as armed guard in my home.  Also recall what I’ve said about men who write cantankerous prose without giving you a chance to weigh in with comments and email directly back to them.

Whatever you think of me and my writing, you can always send me nasty emails.  I won’t ignore them.  Sometimes I’ll even highlight them and publish them on the web site.  You can also disagree with my remarks in your own comments.  You won’t hurt my feelings.  Diamond gives you no such option, and doesn’t relinquish his email address.

What we do learn about him, other than being a coward, is that he is a traitor.  He took an oath to uphold the constitution, and now refuses to do just that.  He never believed in his oath to begin with.  He is of the same class as Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, both gun controllers.  Nothing he says can be trusted, nothing he does can be relied upon.

Avoid being around such men.  Turn your back on them.  Excommunicate them from your fellowship, not just because you have a disagreement with them, but because they are liars, one and all.

ABC Australia:

A hand grenade has been used to target a notorious family in a troubling escalation of gang violence in Melbourne’s north-west.

It is the first time a hand grenade explosion has been investigated in the state’s history, Victoria Police believe, underlining the fears of senior officers that underworld figures are increasingly accessing military-grade weapons.

A mother and her infant child were sleeping in a front room of the Tiba family’s Lalor house only metres away from the blast on November 19 last year.

The grenade, an M52 manufactured in the former Yugoslavia, is understood to have bounced off the house and detonated between the property and the nature strip.

A front window in the house was shattered and two cars parked on the street were significantly damaged in the explosion. No-one was injured.

The ABC has delayed reporting on the attack at the request of police.

It is unclear how the grenade was brought into Australia, or how many may be in circulation.

Hey wait a minute!  Isn’t this the land of draconian weapons control?  This simply can’t be.  You mean criminals will get weapons regardless of the law?  You mean prohibition doesn’t really work after all?

lehighvalleylive.com:

If Congress won’t close the “ghost gun” loophole — and that prospect seems unlikely, even with popular demand running high for common-sense gun restrictions — state legislatures must lead the way.

Ghost guns are rifles, shotguns or handguns that can be purchased legally, usually on the internet, and assembled at home. No registration or background check necessary — and no serial numbers. These weapons are a favored source of untraceable guns for criminals. They’re also a hit with many law-abiding gun enthusiasts and hobbyists.

Ghost guns have been used in single and mass killings across the country. The sales of these parts and kits can be banned outright — the New Jersey Legislature is considering this possibility now — but this can be a difficult flow to track.

At the least, gun kits should be regulated as other firearms are, requiring that sellers conduct background checks to ensure buyers are free of criminal records and mental health/domestic abuse restrictions. Gun components sold in kits should be identified by serial numbers. Sellers should be licensed.

Last week people in the Lehigh Valley learned through a local example how ghost guns can be obtained by felons.

Lehigh County District Attorney James Martin announced that a state trooper had been justified in shooting and killing an armed man, Aaron Ibrahem, in an Allentown-area Walmart in March. Martin said the weapon that prompted the trooper’s fire had been bought in parts and assembled by Ibrahem, even though he was prohibited by a criminal record from buying or possessing a gun.

Martin said Ibrahem was able to buy a serial-numbered slide/barrel, also known as an upper, for a Glock .40-caliber handgun, and then attached it a frame/receiver, or a lower, to make it functional.

“Ironically, this integral part of the pistol may be purchased legally on the internet (eBay) without scrutiny — no ATF form required,” Martin wrote. “It is not considered to be a firearm.”

The horror!  You can buy a barrel on the internet.  A barrel, for crying out loud?  A rifled tube of steel with a barrel lug!

If it wasn’t so amusing that someone thinks this is somehow complex manufacturing, it would be sad.  And I suppose it is sad that these folks know close to nothing about tool and die work, machinery, manufacturing processes, or metallurgy.

The editorial does essentially nothing except testify to the disconnectedness of people who write editorials with the great unwashed America who actually earns a living by the sweat of their brow, ingenuity, hard work, tenacity and patience.

From several readers, Dave Holmes writing at Esquire:

Anyway, I just wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I now actually do want to take your guns.

All of your guns.

Right now.

I’m concerned about a great many things in life, but not this.  Dave Holmes is going to take my guns?  Really?  This Dave Holmes?

Oh, and it looks like several folks have responded to poor Dave.

You cannot trust everyone to read past a punchy headline. That’s why plenty of people—plenty—ran right to their keyboards to say: “You’re taking my guns? You’ll get them bullets first.” I would also accept—and did, oh my God, so many times:

• “Go ahead and try, the streets will be awash in blood.”
• “Good luck confiscating all those guns yourself, really hope you don’t get murdered by law abiding citizens lol.”
• “Molon Labe.” (I’d never heard this one before, and it appears to be the gun lobby’s version of “Bazinga.”)
• Lots of memed-up screenshots from Tombstone and Deadwood, which, if you’re trying to convince me that 2018 America is not the Wild West, are less than encouraging.

This is not a problem that’s endemic to one side of one issue, by the way. Plenty of people of all political persuasions will get worked up over a headline and develop an opinion instead of reading the piece. But in my experience, only gun-rights activists will do this and then add that they’re going to shoot you.

Welcome to thunderdome, boy.  Hey, you’re the one who wanted to run with the big dogs.

Science Daily:

Due to its ballistic properties, lead shot up to now has been regarded as the optimal ammunition for hunting waterfowl. But it came to criticism because lead poisoning was observed in ducks and sea eagles which had ingested the shot as a result of bottom feeding respectively with their prey.

Ammunition manufacturers now offer a range of alternative hunting shot containing iron, copper, zinc, tungsten, or bismuth as primary declared component. A team of researchers at the TU Munich led by Prof. Dr. Axel Goettlein and Prof. Dr. Jürgen Geist, however, has come to the conclusion that a number of the alternatives are even more toxic to water organisms than conventional lead shot.

As part of the study, shot made of each of the different materials were exposed to the identical conditions in water. These measurements demonstrated, that the quantity of metal ions released into the solution varies greatly. While shot made of tungsten, bismuth, and a coated lead shot released almost no metal ions into the solution, alarmingly high concentrations were measured for shot made of copper and zinc. The researchers found, that it was not always the declared main component of the shot which dominated ion release. Particularly striking was a sample of iron shot that released large quantities of zinc, which obviously came from a coating.

In an immobilization testfor the water flea Daphnia magna standardized according to DIN, their movement behaviour is used as an indicator for their vitality. As the study showed, even small quantities of copper and zinc consistently led to very high or complete immobilization of this model organism. In contrast, shot made of pure iron, bismuth, and tungsten did not impact the mobility of the water fleas. Nor did lead shot cause a significant impact on the mobility of the water fleas as compared to the control group.

The study concludes that, if lead shot should be banned for the reason of environmental protection, the current findings indicate that a prohibition on copper and zinc for manufacturing of shot should also be called for. Because widely different conditions concerning water quality in conjunction with the correspondingly adapted organisms occur in nature, additional studies are necessary in order to provide a sound basis for making decisions concerning alternatives to lead shot.

Water fleas.

So if they ban lead and you go to copper or something else, that’s just as bad according to these “researchers.”  They don’t just want your lead ammunition, they want it all.

Because science.

And water fleas.

David French:

Writing in 2015, Malcolm Gladwell wrote what I think is still the best explanation for modern American mass shootings, and it’s easily the least comforting. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex argument, essentially he argues that each mass shooting lowers the threshold for the next. He argues, we are in the midst of a slow-motion “riot” of mass shootings, with the Columbine shooting in many ways the key triggering event. Relying on the work of Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, Gladwell notes that it’s a mistake to look at each incident independently:

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyonearound him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Gladwell then argues that Columbine changed the thresholds …

If this is the best French could come up with, he should have just shut up and done chores that day.  Next, to NRA president Oliver North.

“The problem that we’ve got is we’re trying like the dickens to treat the symptom without treating the disease,” Mr. North said on “Fox News Sunday.” “And the disease in this case isn’t the Second Amendment. The disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence.”

He said everything from violence on television to Ritalin, a drug used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, may be contributing to the problem.

North should have just done chores too.  Good Lord.  Ritalin.  Mr. North is a doctor now.  Did you know that one of the intended side effects of Ritalin is to slow the response time during testing, not speed it up?  To be sure, doctors probably over-prescribe Ritalin like they overprescribe many things, but Oliver North needs to go get an MD before I’ll listen to any more of his claptrap.

Hey, here’s an innovative idea.  It’s not Ritalin.  It’s not thresholds.  It’s not guns.  Shootings, whether “mass” or otherwise, are a symptom of the moral malady that afflicts our society, the sin sickness of the souls, which is the rejection of Jesus Christ as the only savior and the only Son of our Father, truly God and truly man.  Rejection of Christ means rejection of His law-word for our lives and for society.  The two propositions are corollaries of each other.

So here’s the project of the social planners: teach children that God doesn’t exist and that morality is a social construct, pile them into places with no protection, and then be surprised when they act like there is no God.

Of course, since the only remedy the social planners will countenance is more social planning, they want all of your guns – except those that belong to the social planners.

David Codrea:

Chris Murphy’s “baby steps” advocacy and Nancy Pelosi’s “slippery slope” enthusiasm prove the original goal of incremental to total disarmament is still being pursued.

As for shotguns, why is it no one is now accusing the Fudds or Dick’s Sporting Goods of having blood on their hands? They couldn’t throw semi-auto owners under the bus fast enough. Now, just as a matter of logical consistency, it ought to be their turn in the barrel.

[ … ]

In addition to repeating calls for all the usual prior restraints, don’t be surprised to see a new “lock up your safety” push, under the ignorant presumption that one “solution” fits all. They stand a good chance of getting away with it, too, because relatively few people have heard of or remember the Merced pitchfork murders.

Sadly, just today around these parts, a man committed murder of family members with a vehicle.  Vehicles, pitchforks, guns, hammers, whatever.  It’s the person, not the implement.

So Fudds, tell me why we shouldn’t ban wheel guns and scatter guns too?  I see no real need for upland fowl hunting.

How does it feel?