Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

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.

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.

Progressive legislators in New Mexico are threatening with new gun control laws.

Santa Fe, NM – A bill requiring background checks on all firearm sales passed the House Consumer and Public Affairs Committee by a vote of 3 to 1.  House Bill 50 would close a dangerous loophole that allows guns to be sold online or at gun shows or even in parking lots without criminal background checks. It has exceptions written in to allow family members to transfer guns to their relatives and for the loaning of guns for hunting, shooting ranges or self-defense.

“We must balance public safety with convenience,” said HB 50’s sponsor Rep. Stephanie Garcia Richard (D-Los Alamos). “It’s not difficult to buy a gun from a licensed dealer. Background checks take, on average, two minutes.”

Rep. Garcia Richard told of her own experience buying a gun from an online dealer. “We met at the parking lot of a McDonald’s. No names, no IDs, and I paid cash.”

Testimony was given by members of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, Voices For Children, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense New Mexico Chapter, the National Association of Social Workers New Mexico Chapter, Everytown for Gun Safety, former law enforcement officials, and other concerned citizens who support this common sense measure. Rep. Eliseo Alcon (D-Milan), chairman of the committee, allowed any member of the public who wanted to speak for or against the bill to comment at today’s hearing.

They’re lying about what this bill does.  The truth of the matter is more stark.

• An individual loaning his or her significant other a handgun for self-protection when homes or apartments in her neighborhood have been burglarized;
• A member of the military who is deployed overseas and wants to store his or her personal firearms with a trusted friend;
• Someone borrowing their co-worker’s gun to take on a hunting trip, to the local range or to shoot on BLM land when the colleague cannot accompany him or her on the excursion.
• Working ranch employees possessing and transporting ranch-owned rifles in vehicles or on their person.
• Volunteers staging auction or raffle items for a non-profit, charitable fundraising event where a firearm is displayed.

SB 48/ HB 50 also require the return of loaned firearms to original owners be conducted through a licensed dealer, with completion of federal paperwork and payment of an undetermined fee.

I don’t have a sense of how the legislature will act, nor do I know the governor well enough to predict the outcome.  But New Mexico residents need to be flaming the Senate and House members, and telling the governor in no uncertain terms that this bill must not pass.  And that you have a very long memory.

Do you want to look like California, or worse? I notice that open carry is dead in Florida and didn’t even make it out of committee. Now this. You have to be more than a keyboard warrior.

David Codrea:

Here’s the thing about Virginia Tech that some of us commenting at the time attempted to publicize: Nine months before the shootings, graduate student Bradford B. Wiles wrote a letter to The Roanoke Times in response to a campus manhunt for a murder suspect.

Rules against having guns are always designed for the moral amelioration of the immoral.  The progressives know that law abiding men and women will follow the law, up to a point, and the liberal project of societal salvation through law-making was not intended for those who do not need it.

There are consequences for defenestration of the family and church.  The progressives know full well that their rules will neither change the law-aiding nor allow him legally to defend himself.  The immoral part of the progressive project is that it harms peaceable men and women, and the project masters don’t care.

The stupid part is that they believe they can change the behavior of the wicked with a new law or rule.  But to what else would they turn?  Without the church and family, the law is all that’s left.

Linda Greenhouse at The New York Times:

It will be late February at the earliest before the justices announce whether they will hear the case, Peruta v. California, filed on behalf of five California gun owners and a gun-rights organization by Paul D. Clement, a solicitor general during the George W. Bush administration who since then has taken on a number of high-visibility conservative causes. The mere fact that the appeal is pending is bound to play a role during the confirmation hearings for the next Supreme Court nominee; during the campaign, President-elect Donald J. Trump called on “Second Amendment people” to vote for him as a bloc to prevent a President Hillary Clinton from being able to fill the Supreme Court vacancy with a justice opposed to gun interests.

With minor exceptions, California bans the open carrying of firearms. State law allows the concealed carrying of a loaded handgun by those who pass a background check, take a training course, and demonstrate to their local sheriff or police chief that they have “good cause.” The definition of “good cause” is left up to the local law enforcement officials authorized to issue the licenses. While most of these officials accept a stated desire for self-defense as good cause in and of itself, the sheriff of San Diego County has set a higher threshold. An applicant there must prove a particular need for carrying the concealed gun, like a documented threat or having obtained a restraining order against a specific individual. Under this standard, the sheriff’s office denies most applications.

The plaintiffs argue that given the ban on open carry — which is being challenged in a separate lawsuit filed last August in Federal District Court in Los Angeles — the San Diego sheriff’s restrictive policy on concealed carry means that as a practical matter, “the typical law-abiding resident cannot bear a handgun for self-defense outside the home at all.” The question is whether there is any such right.

Significantly, in ruling against the plaintiffs last June by a vote of 7 to 4, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit didn’t actually answer that question. That fact may deter the Supreme Court from hearing the appeal — or, depending on the justices’ appetite for a major gun case, it may prove irrelevant. The justices have the power to frame just about any question they want to answer. If they want to decide the core question of whether the Second Amendment gives the right to carry a gun, in some manner, any manner, outside the home — which is to say, if four justices think they can count on an eventual fifth vote for that proposition, then this will be the case to grant.

Farther down in the opinion piece, she cites Scalia’s position on the second amendment, viz. “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited …”

Ms. Greenhouse is a lecturer at Yale Law School, and she has the same reflexive instincts as, unfortunately, Justice Scalia, and most certainly any progressive law graduate, prosecutor or judge.  Even Justice Scalia couldn’t extricate himself from the notion that the constitution “secures” rights.

We’ve addressed this before.  All of life, from marriage, to work, family, church and state, is the covenant.  Without understanding life within the framework of covenant, one cannot understand it at all.  The constitution, including the second amendment, is a covenant.  It contains a set of stipulations within which we have agreed to live, and while success in following them brings blessings and peace, failure to honor them brings curses and conflict.

The founders understood this well, and Dave Kopel has done marvelous work in showing that gun control was one of the main catalysts of the war of independence.  The founders looked to something other than King George for a definition of their rights.  Our rights come from our creator, and more specifically, the second amendment is a recognition and codification of not only the right, but moral duty of self defense and defense of family.

The right to bear arms isn’t secured by the government, and the extent to which the government attempts to bar the exercise of moral rights and duties will be proportional to the conflict it spawns.  And yet we also attempt to peaceably resolve our differences and persuade the parties to honor the covenant that is supposed to govern our actions because we wish to be slow to conflict.

In this instance, Peruta may not be ripe.  We need a replacement for Scalia first, and even then I don’t know how Kennedy would vote.  He joined Heller, but Heller was a weak decision and Kennedy may not go along with increased recognition of the right of self defense.  It will be interesting to watch this case, but what would be worse than never getting a hearing in front of the Supreme Court would be to get a bad decision that actually denies the right to self defense outside the home.

In either case, when it comes to recognition of fundamental rights and duties, men cannot be patient forever.  The covenant looms large, and there are curses for causing its wreckage.

Casper Star Tribune:

“We need to do something about people who are going to attack us getting weapons to do it,” said co-sponsor Sen. James Anderson, R-Casper.

Anderson said he heard a presentation on the issue at a legislative committee meeting last year and asked for a bill to be drafted.

Seventy-one percent of Americans believe that banning gun sales to people on the federal no-fly watch list would be at least somewhat effective at preventing terrorism, according to a June poll by Gallup.

Senate File 75 would add people on the FBI’s Terror Screening Database — which includes the “no-fly list” — to the list of people who are not eligible to possess guns in Wyoming.

Democrats in the U.S. Senate have unsuccessfully pushed several times to pass federal legislation barring people on the terror watch list from purchasing firearms. The efforts, which were repeatedly defeated, were intended to pressure Republican senators who oppose any form of gun control.

But if the measure placed conservatives in a difficult political position, it included a further wrinkle.

Because there is little judicial oversight of the various terror watch lists included in the FBI database, several liberal and civil liberties groups — who are already often opposed to the lists — were concerned about taking away the constitutional right to bear arms from American citizens without due process.

Anderson indicated he was ambivalent about that issue.

“I don’t happen to believe that the military and the police state would make those many mistakes,” Anderson said of who ends up on the terror watch list.

So somebody in Wyoming should ask Anderson why there are “terrorists” here to begin with?  What kind of open border policy does he support that lends itself to having terrorists come into America unimpeded?

And that could lead to the next point, which is that the “watch list” is comprised no only of cross border terrorists who should be deported but haven’t been under the Obama administration, but America patriots as well who happen to believe that the second amendment is the final remedy against a tyrannical state.  Or in other words, peaceable American citizens who haven’t been tried in any court or found guilty of any crime whatsoever.

He should be forced to admit that in front of people, and then to admit that he is a gun controlling communist.  Do I have good readers in Wyoming who can press this issue with Anderson?  It looks like y’all have your fair share of trash to take out just like the rest of us do.

Law Newz:

The GOP has just risen to a whole new level of crazy. Last week, it introduced the Duncan-Carter Hearing Protection Act of 2017, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) and Rep. John Carter (R-TX). The bill removes gun silencers from the scope of the National Firearms Act of 1934, and refunds the $200 transfer tax to applicants who purchased them after October 22, 2015.

Yes, we’re talking about gun silencers, or “suppressors” as they are euphemistically known in the industry. You know – those things that assassins snap on the ends of their pistols in action movies to look all slick and cold-blooded. Apparently, the logic is that the world would be a much safer place if silencers were more readily available to the average consumer. Sure.

[ … ]

The people who should be most outraged by the Hearing Protection Act aren’t gun-hating liberals who knee-jerk at any mention of firearms. They are conservatives and libertarians who value their own credibility in the nationwide debate over Second Amendment rights. It is the responsibility of supporters of Heller to call bullshit on legislation that is nothing more than a marketing plan dressed up as “hearing protection.” Gun owners of integrity have an obligation to remind Congress that earplugs and earmuffs are readily available, and that claims of the necessity of silencers are as stupid as any that big tobacco should manufacture self-lighting cigarettes to prevent kids from burning themselves with lighters.

So I guess suppressors can give you cancer and cause you to become professional assassins.  Since suppressors actually do no good protecting your hearing from noise, I guess there must be another reason for them.  I’m sure they don’t allow hunters to be aware of their surroundings, like whether they’re near other hunters when they shoot.  I’m sure all of those ear muffs don’t interfere with your cheek weld.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when people who know absolutely nothing about guns try to make policy and law about guns.  They have nothing to which they can turn except shoot-’em-up movies and assassins.  And suppressors are the same thing as tobacco and can give you cancer.

Harvard Law Review:

Criminal justice reform has been a focus of my entire career — even since before my time at the Harvard Law Review. As a community organizer, I saw firsthand how our criminal justice system exacerbates inequality. It takes young people who made mistakes no worse than my own and traps them in an endless cycle of marginalization and punishment. More than twenty years ago, I wrote about my experience in neighborhoods where “prison records had been passed down from father to son for more than a generation.”

Well, this is a mouthful, and he’s said too much, enough to indict his own argument.  First of all, I agree that we have criminalized far too many thing, with petty drug offenders sent to prison to be hardened by real criminals, turned into real killers and street thugs, and maybe converted to Islam in the prisons.  I have advocated against such things, and in fact I don’t believe in prisons at all because they are unbiblical.  The Scriptural prescription for wrongdoing is retribution and restitution.

Retribution is the death penalty for high crimes such as rape, kidnapping and murder, and restitution means that the perpetrator becomes the slave of the wronged until the debt is paid.  There is no biblical concept of a “debt to society.”  No one has a debt to society.  There is no biblical notion of the collective.

But by invoking fatherhood he has damned his own argument.  The absence of fathers, undergirded by the absence of true religion and public giveaway programs to hold the inner city black man in slavery, has led to the situation Obama laments.  He won’t admit it because he is of those who enslave.  He believes in the enslavement he laments.

We have a responsibility to act. And like the vast majority of Americans — including the vast majority of gun owners — I believe we can take commonsense steps to reduce gun violence that are consistent with the Second Amendment.

As an Administration, we’ve made some meaningful progress on keeping guns out of the wrong hands through background checks — whether it’s making clear that anyone in the business of selling firearms must get a license and conduct background checks, or dedicating more resources to ensuring those background checks are conducted on time.  We’ve also jumpstarted the development of smart gun technology.  As long as we’ve got technology to prevent a criminal from stealing and using your smartphone, then we should be able to prevent the wrong person — including kids — from pulling the trigger on a gun.

But there’s a great deal of work left to be done. Congress should pass the kinds of commonsense reforms supported by most of the American people — from investing in access to mental health care, to expanding background checks, to making it possible to keep guns out of the hands of suspected terrorists. The actions we take won’t prevent every act of violence — but if even one life is spared, they will have been well worth it.

He’s lying and he knows it.  The vast majority of gun owners do not in fact believe in his proposals.  His inability to enact further gun control is all the proof you need.

We’ve dealt with smart guns before, and it’s an idea that will never obtain for reasons Obama himself understands.  His “investment” in mental health care is the same thing as his notion of keeping guns out of the hands of terrorists.  It’s all a red herring.

It’s a way to prevent people from having access to means of self defense by circumventing the constitution with so-called “health care professionals” and secret lists made by government employees who are accountable to no one and unreviewable even by courts.  It’s all a method to avoid due process.  He should be asked “why are there known terrorists in America at all?”  To which he can only answer that he’s referring to Americans who haven’t been convicted of any crime at all.

But even deeper than that, this is a great kabuki dance.  The constitution says “shall not be infringed.”  There is no point in having this conversation.  We will not submit by having our rights removed by statists.  On too many issues to catalog, Obama and his ilk broke covenant with the American people, from confiscating huge swaths of land (under the purview of the federal government) that wasn’t his, to taxing people for failing to purchase a product on the open market (Obamacare), to sending weapons South of the border to arm the drug cartels.

We can only hope and pray that the awful man’s legacy turns to dust and disappears from the earth.  He is a usurper and deceiver of the highest order.  Good riddance to the ass clown.  I wish I had never known him.