Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

PolitickerNJ:

At a Tuesday candidate forum in LD24, Assemblyman Parker Space, who is up for reelection this year, declared: “There is nothing better than an unregistered gun, believe me.”

Westword.com:

Earlier this week, we shared new reports about the investigation into Noah Harpham, who police say shot and killed three people before dying in a gun battle with officers. A neighbor, Naomi Bettis, said she’d called 911 after seeing Harpham with a gun but was told there was nothing police could do owing to open carry laws; see our previous coverage below.

Now, the Colorado Springs Police Department has responded with a detailed account of what took place during the ten-minute period between the first 911 call and a second, during which Bettis revealed that a man, later ID’d as bicyclist Andrew Myers, was dead, and also released audio of the conversations in question. We’ve shared the links here.

The CSPD insists that the first report wasn’t shrugged off. However, it was initially given a lower priority because lives weren’t thought to be at risk.

Bettis’s first call came in at 8:45:40 a.m., with the department noting that it “reported a suspicious male walking into a building carrying gasoline cans and a rifle” on the 200 block of North Prospect Street in the Springs.

The emergency response technician, or ERT, speaking with Bettis initially classified the report as a “priority 3” — near the middle of its six-point prioritization system. (Priority 6 is the least threatening designation, priority 1 the most serious.) However, about one minute into the two-minute call, the ERT upgraded the circumstance to a priority 2 under the theory that Harpham might be planning to commit a burglary.

Regarding the open-carry mention, here’s the transcription: “Well, it is an open carry state, so he can have a weapon with him or walking around with it. But, of course, having those gas cans does seem pretty suspicious, so we’re going to keep the call going for that.”

To listen to the first 911 call in its entirety, click here.

And commenter John P. Koury blames open carry laws.

Was walking into Walmart on 8th, two guys right ahead of me strapped with handguns. Mentioned it to the clerk, who started quoting open carry laws and said that it was their God given right. I walked out.

How does anybody know if these guys were robbers, thugs, angry punks or just bad-looking so called “good guys”? Open carry is nuts. If you are so paranoid that you think you have to carry a gun wherever you go, you probably are too unstable to have one.

And if open carry had been illegal, the shooter, if he had in fact decided to perpetrate evil, would have used a pistol, or several pistols, or an SBR hidden under a coat.  The caller wouldn’t have called in because there would have been nothing to call about, and hence no one could have blamed open carry.  Said another way, if open carry had been illegal, the shooter wouldn’t have carried openly else he would have been caught before perpetrating his evil action.  Evil men aren’t mentally deficient and unable to reason – they are just evil

Do you see the point?  Let’s use Aristotle’s categories in metaphysics and ontology to help us.  Open carry is an accident of this event, not essential to it.  It was essential to the shooter to be evil and to have shot.  The mode of transportation for himself or his weapon was not essential.  Understand?

As for Johnny boy, he doesn’t get to decide whether my carrying a gun disqualifies me from carrying a gun (Johnny needs to study tautology a little better, no?).  Because … I have guns and can stop Johnny.  Understand?

Central Maine:

I agree that gunfire is a loud noise. What is curious is what is the actual benefit of making that noise less audible?

Is it to avoid hurting the shooter’s ears? Is it to not scare off nearby wildlife? Is it so people don’t know a gun is being fired in their immediate area?

Understandably, when James Bond wants to do away with an evil villain, it’s to his benefit to do so with a bit of stealth.

The state of Maine just passed a law that allows people with possibly no conceivable training in firearms to carry one among unknowing people. Before this law, people who wanted a concealed weapons permit had to be totally vetted by a number of state agencies, including the state police and/or their local police chief. Now it’s go to a gun shop, pick up a 9mm and a shiny concealed holster, and off they go.

The insanity continues with lessening the sounds of a firearm being used nearby. That means game wardens would have less opportunity to arrest night hunters, neighbors wouldn’t be sure how far away they are from guns being fired, and careless hunters would have more opportunity to fire closer to neighborhoods than legally allowed.

As a past hunter and active skeet shooter, I wear ear protection, practice safety to the highest degree and am well-versed in the safe handling of firearms. I wish I could say the same for the masses that tramp through the woods and walk into public places with a seriously dangerous machine that they may not know how operate, thus causing potential danger to themselves and an unknowing public.

A quiet gun. No one seems to have a viable answer for why we need one, except that it might mean more sales for gun sellers.

Well thank you Mr. Fudd.  With friends like you, who needs enemies?  Actually, I jest.  I consider you the enemy.  In fact, come to think of it, I think you’re lying.  I don’t think you’re really a past hunter and active skeet shooter.  You sound just like a collectivist, statist windbag who’s making things up for the sake of drama.

But if you are, you got yours, didn’t you?  And you don’t trust anyone with guns except you, your Fudd buddies, and the cops, even if we all lose our hearing, outside or inside at the shooting range.  Do you?  And don’t give me that crap about wearing hearing protection.  We both know better.

We both know that even with ear plugs and muffs, it’s better for us all to have suppressed weapons.  It’s better for our quality of life as we grow old, and it’s better for long term health costs for our progeny who must watch over us.  But that doesn’t matter to you, does it?  You’d rather sacrifice our hearing, preferring that Mr. Fudd pal around with other Mr. Fudds in the woods once a season, and go shoot clays a couple of times a year.  Are you a member of an an exclusive country club too, Mr. Fudd?

Does the encroachment of technology scare you, Mr. Fudd?  Does freedom offend you?  Good.  I hope you’re appalled at the likes of me.  As I said, I consider you the enemy, just like the collectivist windbags.  So don’t bring up anything else about being a hunter and clay shooter.  I’m not interested.

The Guardian:

When President Maduro launched a disarmament plan in 2014, and security forces were also ordered to destroy weapons seized during the police operations, the government’s intention was to reduce violence by making it harder for people to obtain guns. His predecessor had already made private gun ownership illegal in 2012.

But these actions have only increased interest in the people allowed to carry weapons. “There are now fewer deals in black market arms but that has made anyone in uniform a more popular target for criminals than before,” says Eliseo Guzmán, the general commissioner of the Miranda state police force. “They will identify a police officer and take away his life just to take his gun.”

A sad case study in the law of unintended consequences, yes?  Do government control freaks really think that laws against guns will ensure the guns are only in the hands of government enforcers?  Really?  Could they be that naive?

Take Action:

To: Florida Commission on Tourism and the Florida tourism industry

Florida is a favorite vacation destination for many families. But the state is now considering giving gun owners with concealed-carry permits the right to openly carry their firearms anywhere they want in public. Please stop the open-carry bill from moving forward, because families don’t want to vacation in a state where people are openly carrying their weapons.

Sincerely,

[Your name here]

Oh bullshit.  Open carry was commonplace with the bus drivers (and others in Wyoming) when we visited Jackson Hole for a week last winter.  There were plenty of families there, and women, children and effete men didn’t run for cover screaming, regardless of what the “Moms Rising” want you to think.

Hey, now that I think about it, given South Carolina State Senator Larry Martin’s opposition to S.C. open carry based on tourism in Charleston, he thinks just like a “Mom Rising.”  Or effete man.  Because he is.  An effete man, that is.

Hartford Courant:

Silence never solved complex national problems. Yet some spineless lawmakers put special interests ahead of the public even to the point of discouraging and shutting off discussion of important public issues.

This is nothing new. Congress imposed a gag order from 1836 to 1844 on the overriding issue of the 19th century, refusing to accept any and all “petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions or papers relating in any way, or to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery.” It was unconstitutional, draconian and finally ended because a few congressmen fought it every day.

Gun violence in America is another critical public issue, but Congress has for nearly 20 years found a way to silence government researchers by using the power of the purse to intimidate the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After the terrible murders in Newtown three years ago, President Barack Obama signed an executive order directing the CDC to resume gun research. The CDC still hasn’t, but it must — despite congressional threats from the majority Republicans.

The bullying started in 1996, when the CDC released studies that researched the risk factors that led to gun violence.

One study found that just having a gun in the home was associated with a nearly 300 percent increase in the likelihood that it would be used to murder someone in the house. The likelihood that someone in the house would use a gun to commit suicide was even higher — 500 percent.

Then the National Rifle Association swung into action, complaining that the CDC was using public funds to push gun control and ask political questions. The Republican-controlled Congress cut CDC funds by the exact amount used to study gun-related violence and prohibited researchers from using public funds to advocate for gun control.

This put researchers in a bind: If they did open-ended, scientifically sound research that, say, examined what local regulations were most effective in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, Congress would accuse them of breaking the rules and would punish the CDC by slashing its budget.

The threats did what the weapons manufacturers wanted, dropping a curtain of silence on guns.

This is a piece of work.  Slavery and guns are brought up as if there’s some analogous feature.  Debunked “studies” are cited, emotional, draconian terms are invoked (silence, slashing, prohibited, etc.), and then finally, the NRA is blamed for it all.

Here are the facts.  Many NRA members lose patience with the NRA because we see it as too progressive and willing to compromise in its rating system.  The real enemy of progressives is gun owners, even though they don’t know it.  They still see gun owners as a monolithic group, controlled and told what to think by the NRA.  Independent-minded thinking never occurs to progressives because they don’t work that way.

No one has prohibited anyone from studying whatever they want.  What Congress did was prohibit the spending of tax dollars for studies that first of all, would likely be used to press for political ends, and second, should never be funded by the government anyway.  Many gun owners would assert that the government has a constitutional right to raise monies for the common defense, and not much else.  The only reason such a thing comes up with the CDC is because government spending is out of control.

I strongly recommend that the folks at the CDC – and anywhere else for that matter – study whatever they want, on their own dollars and on their own time.  There is no moratorium on such studies (they’re not illegal), just on using my money for them.  I don’t get to take your money and study how to make M855 ammunition more effective, and you don’t get to take mine and throw it away on “studies” I don’t sanction.  That’s fair enough.

Perspective from the sports world:

Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh has a way with words, and he proved that again Monday.

Speaking to reporters, Harbaugh said he doesn’t deal with “ifs” and “thats” before coming up with a crazy “if” scenario.

“If worms had machine guns, birds would be scared of them.”

Well, sure. Worms probably can’t do a whole lot with a machine gun, but I get your point.

On the surface it appears to be a completely random phrase. Even Harbaugh seemed unsure of its origins saying, “Somewhere along the way I got it in my brain.” So where did this phrase come from? It appears it came from a children’s book title, “If Worms Had Machine Guns.”

So if you read the summary of the book, it has to do with making do with what you have.  There’s a lesson in that for us all, but one has to wonder whether what the feds are thinking is a little darker.  We can’t let them have machine guns because then we would be scared of them, whereas now we can eat them up as we wish.  Hence, GCA and NFA.

But the analogy breaks down in who is the bird and who is the worm.  In our case, the worms do have the machine guns, no?

There is this report, but the translation sounds like a five year old did it.  Much better is this report at World Net Daily.

Austrians are arming themselves at record rates in an effort to defend their households against feared attacks from Muslim invaders.

An interesting exchange occurred between David Kopel, Joyce Malcolm, et. al., and another professor on carry of guns in England.  The first volley appeared at The Washington Post, and while I won’t quote in its entirety, I will quote at length and send you to the article for the conclusion.

Should D.C. residents have the same right to the licensed carry of defensive handguns as the people in most states? That is the issue currently before the D.C. Circuit, in Wrenn v. District of Columbia. The D.C. government lost on this issue in federal district court. D.C.’s brief to the D.C. Circuit argues that “For as long as citizens have owned firearms, English and American law has restricted any right to carry in populated public places.” According to the brief, the pre-existing right to arms, which was protected by the Second Amendment, “did not encompass carrying in densely populated cities.” Further, D.C. says that in the 19th century, carry prohibitions were widespread in the United States. An amicus brief on behalf of Michael Bloomberg’s organization “Everytown” makes similar claims.

In an amicus brief filed this week, several legal historians, including me, dispute the D.C. and Bloomberg claims. Besides me, the amici are Joyce Malcolm (George Mason Law; the leading historian on the history of English gun control and gun rights), Robert Cottrol (co-appointment at George Washington in Law and in History; a specialist in the history of race, including the racial aspects of gun laws),  Clayton Cramer (author of three books and many articles on the history of firearms law in Early America and the 19th century) and Nicholas Johnson (Fordham Law; most recent book is Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms). Our attorneys were Stephen Halbrook and Dan Peterson. Halbrook has a 5-0 record in the U.S. Supreme Court, all on firearms law cases, and is himself a leading scholar on the legal history of the right to arms.

The claim that there was a general prohibition on the carrying of arms is based on the 1328 Statute of Northampton, which D.C. characterizes as a public carrying ban. As our brief explains, the case law is contrary to such a broad interpretation of the 1328 Statute.  For example,  Sir John Knight’s Case (1686) said that the statute applies only to “people who go armed to terrify the King’s subjects.” There was a lot of weapons-carrying in England, partly because of public duties, such as keeping “watch and ward,” as well as required target practice (in longbows and muskets) at the target ranges that every village was required to maintain. The peaceable carrying of arms was an ordinary thing to see, not a terrifying one.

In the American colonies, nobody appears to have thought that they could not carry arms because of a 1328 English statute. Rather, the colonies mandated gun carrying in certain situations, such as when traveling or when going to church. To the extent that a few early states (and later, D.C.) enacted statutes expressing common law restrictions on arms carrying, the statutes (like the common law) only applied when a person did so “in terror of the country.” (D.C. 1818 statute; similar language in the states). In the colonial period, and in the first 37 years of independence, there were no restrictions on concealed carry. Several states enacted concealed carry bans thereafter, but of course these did not limit open carry. Moreover, our first “four Presidents openly carried firearms.” The notion that they, or anyone else, thought Americans were prohibited from doing so by a 1328 English statute is implausible.

To this, Priya Satia responds at Slate.

Doing so is crucial in a gun case now before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals: Wrenn v. D.C. The case is critical for Washington residents but also more broadly as the pro-gun lobby challenges laws in cities across the country. The District of Columbia argues that English and American law has always permitted restrictions on the right to carry guns in populated public places, tracing this tradition to the 1328 Statute of Northampton, which generally prohibited carrying guns in public. The District argues that the Second Amendment and its English precursors did not allow unfettered public carrying in densely populated cities, and thus the District may restrict it.

A group of legal historians has disputed this interpretation in an amicus brief filed this month, followed by an essay in the Washington Post by David Kopel, adjunct professor at Denver University’s law school. They claim the English Bill of Rights of 1689 superseded the 1328 statute and that, “There was a lot of weapons-carrying in England.” Thus, they conclude, D.C. residents have the right to carry guns in public. But their English history is wrong, as are their conclusions about public carry in the nation’s capital.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 established a Protestant monarchy in England under William and Mary, ending the reign of the Stuarts. The Bill of Rights codified the constitutional limits on the new monarchy, including a provision guaranteeing Protestants (but not Catholics or Jews) the right to bear arms. But political realities overrode this provision. The new monarchy remained vulnerable to “Jacobites” seeking to restore the Stuart dynasty, with French and Spanish backing. This danger meant the British state could not permit widespread gun ownership.

The new monarchy’s disarmament laws built on laws passed after the Restoration of 1660, when the Stuarts returned to power after 11 years of republican rule and were similarly concerned with political stability. A 1670 statute had limited firearms possession to the noble and rich, although even their arsenals were subject to search and seizure at sensitive moments. A series of game laws from 1671 through 1831 dramatically reduced the number of people permitted to hunt, empowering gamekeepers to search for and seize unauthorized firearms. Smuggling laws also made carrying arms grounds for arrest. An armed militia was active through the 1680s, but not the 80 years that followed. Through the 1740s, its arms were locked in royal arsenals and distributed only at assembly. The government’s success at disarming the population made the militia superfluous, since its entire purpose was to prevent an armed rising against the government.

And I think you see where this argument is going, i.e., justifying law enforcement use of weapons to the exclusion of everyone else, even the military.  I wrote to Dave Kopel for a rejoinder, and he declined saying he had too many “irons in the fire,” but that “among its errors are conflating anti-hunting laws (which continued after 1689) with laws against defensive gun ownership.”

He also sent me to Joyce Malcolm, who is also busy but reminded me of her piece in Financial Times (I cannot locate the URL except at Free Republic).

Self-defence, William Blackstone, the 18th century English jurist, wrote, is a natural right that no government can deprive people of, since no government can protect the individual in his moment of need. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 affirmed the right of individuals “to have arms for their defence”. It is a dangerous right. But leaving personal protection to the police is also dangerous, and ineffective. Government is perilously close to denying people the ability to protect themselves at all, and the result is a more, not less, dangerous society.

I won’t rehearse the details of the debate.  But one thing stands out to me in this exchange, and it’s Kopel’s statement that “The notion that they, or anyone else, thought Americans were prohibited from doing so by a 1328 English statute is implausible.”  This is an important observation, so let’s unpack it a bit.

From my pedestrian point of view (from my coursework in philosophy, history and apologetics in seminary), I’ve always claimed that the best way to understand what the founders intended was to observe their lives and understand what they did or didn’t think their words meant.  Look to the culture, context and milieu which created these men and their views.  I have cited the public and open carry of weapons to which Kopel refers.

In the colonies, availability of hunting and need for defense led to armament statues comparable to those of the early Saxon times. In 1623, Virginia forbade its colonists to travel unless they were “well armed”; in 1631 it required colonists to engage in target practice on Sunday and to “bring their peeces to church.” In 1658 it required every householder to have a functioning firearm within his house and in 1673 its laws provided that a citizen who claimed he was too poor to purchase a firearm would have one purchased for him by the government, which would then require him to pay a reasonable price when able to do so. In Massachusetts, the first session of the legislature ordered that not only freemen, but also indentured servants own firearms and in 1644 it imposed a stern 6 shilling fine upon any citizen who was not armed.

When the British government began to increase its military presence in the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, Massachusetts responded by calling upon its citizens to arm themselves in defense. One colonial newspaper argued that it was impossible to complain that this act was illegal since they were “British subjects, to whom the privilege of possessing arms is expressly recognized by the Bill of Rights” while another argued that this “is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defense”. The newspaper cited Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England, which had listed the “having and using arms for self preservation and defense” among the “absolute rights of individuals.” The colonists felt they had an absolute right at common law to own firearms.

And further:

Their laws about children and guns were strict: every family was required to own a gun, to carry it in public places (especially when going to church) and to train children in firearms proficiency. On the first Thanksgiving Day, in 1621, the colonists and the Indians joined together for target practice; the colonist Edward Winslow wrote back to England that “amongst other recreations we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us.”

The ownership and carry of weapons was virtually ubiquitous in colonial America.  It was so for the purposes of hunting, defense against animals, and defense against men.  As my own professor C. Gregg Singer has pointed out, news reports, primary source literature and eyewitness accounts are the best information on colonial America.  All information and data points to the expectation of the duty of self defense, rather than a prohibition of such.

Moreover, while I concede that it’s interesting what English law had to say about ownership and carry of weapons, it isn’t determinative.  We follow the constitution, and in particular, I have asserted before that rights to ownership and carry of weapons follows God-given stipulations, the constitution flowing from it’s basis in this moral history.

If Satia’s goal was to persuade me that I could look to England to find basis to reject ownership and carry of weapons, the goal wasn’t met.  The attempt was an abject failure.

Mike Vanderboegh:

… what I didn’t notice until after a discussion with a long-time friend is what a gift Winkler has made us with this confession in the same article:

The fastest-growing minority group in America is Latinos. Between 2000 and 2010, the nation’s Latino population grew by 43 percent. Hispanics, which make up 17 percent of the population today, are expected to grow to 30 percent of the population in the coming decades. Gun control is extremely popular among Hispanics, with 75 percent favoring gun safety over gun rights.

It is impossible to overstate the favor that Winkler has done us by this triumphalist bragging about the “demographics gonna get yo momma” message to the NRA. This collectivist’s inadvertent confession not only confirms their evil, confiscationist intentions but it absolutely condemns the NRA’s “single-issue” avoidance of the illegal invasion threat. My partner in thought crime David Codrea has been banging this drum for some time now, only to be ignored or ridiculed by the NRA partisans on the Internet.

Yes, David has indeed (although I’m hesitant to link them because of my new policy of not linking Examiner), and so have I, here, here, here and here.  It’s important to understand, as I have explained, that this isn’t some cooked up, half-ass theory.  There is a very specific reason for their political proclivities.

“For historical reasons to do with the nationalisation of the land under Lázaro Cárdenas and the predominant form of peasant land tenure, which was “village cooperative” rather than based on individual plots, the demand for “land to the tiller” in Mexico does not imply an individual plot for every peasant or rural worker or family. In Mexico, collectivism among the peasantry is a strong tradition … one consequence of these factors is that the radical political forces among the rural population are on the whole explicitly anti-capitalist and socialist in their ideology. Sometimes this outlook is expressed in support for guerilla organisations; but struggle movements of the rural population are widespread, and they spontaneously ally with the most militant city-based leftist organisations.”

One of the reasons for this reflexive alignment with leftism has to do with the the mid-twentieth century and what the Sovient Union and allied ideologies accomplished.  South and Central America was the recipient or receptacle for socialism draped in religious clothing, or in other words, liberation theology.  Its purveyors were Roman Catholic priests who had been trained in Marxism, and they were very successful in giving the leftists a moral platform upon which to build.  This ideology spread North from South and Central America into Mexico, and thus the common folk in Mexico are quite steeped in collectivist ideology from battles that were fought decades ago.

Hispanics and Latinos are collectivists from way back.  Their priests have trained them in statist thinking, and this to their own demise.  In other words, they can no longer see how their cultural and political choices harm them, if they ever could.

Sadly, the NRA is today good for nothing more than a fairly good magazine once a month.  As for Winkler, he has made a fatal error in judgment.  Like other leftists, he thinks that gun owners are monolithic and controlled by the NRA.  To them, we are reactionary and able to be turned by the winds of wording, able to be controlled like the hive controls its own.  They think this way because it’s impossible to imagine a world view without central command issuing orders.  This is good news.  It’s always better when the enemy underestimates your power and resolve, and misjudges your character.