Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

David Codrea:

I understand some have differences, but those are not with JPFO itself, and that’s important enough for me not to automatically abandon my inclination to do what I can to help the organization survive, thrive and grow. If you don’t agree, I’ll not waste any more of your time trying to persuade you. Stop reading and go in peace. This message is intended for those of you who would like to join me in doing what we can to help this entity called JPFO.

I’ve already stated my position.  I align myself with people, not organizations.  I don’t have a lot of money to donate, but I have a Google page rank of 5.  I want to assist David Codrea and Kurt Hofmann.  If that means that I assist JPFO in the process, then so be it.

David Codrea:

In order to counter the well-financed propaganda effort, Nevadans for State Gun Rights has created a fact sheet that presents counter-arguments to those voters are being exposed to, and that warns against the loss of rights should they heed what the Bloomberg coalition is trying to make them believe. Supporters who object to and wish to respond to Sen. Smith’s Everytown talking point-parroting “editorial” can submit letters to the Gazette-Journal being careful to observe the paper’s requirements, including limiting them to 200 words.

This is simple folks.  Do what needs to be done and the gun controllers can be defeated.  Don’t be knots on a log.  Stop watching idiot TV sitcoms at night.  Spend time doing something useful (I know, my readers don’t watch idiot shows anyway, and they’re busy people.  Still, please add Nevada into your do-list over the coming weeks and months.  Patriots there need you.).

In case you haven’t read Kurt Hofmann’s latest at JPFO, please do so.  I previously linked this piece.

Mike Vanderboegh links an article on supply of the Ukrainian military.  I’ve discussed this before, and you know I’m a sucker for logistics.

Mike Vanderboegh says we are not all Charlie.  Hmm … I think Ned Weatherby said something just like that here.

Mike Vanderboegh, all over America, the government is cracking down on preppers.  Wood stoves are mentioned again.  The EPA is as out of control as I’ve ever seen anyone or any organization.  The regulations on stoves are immoral and obscene and the EPA doesn’t have a God-given right to tell people how they may heat their home.  Thus I recommend disobeying those regulations since, being immoral, they have no binding obligation on men.

The New Yorker:

The news that the parents of the children massacred two years ago in Sandy Hook, near Newtown, Connecticut, by a young man with a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, were undertaking a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer was at once encouraging and terribly discouraging. The encouraging part is that those parents, suffering from a grief that those of us who are only witnesses to it can barely begin to comprehend, haven’t, despite the failure to reinstate assault-weapons bans and stop the next massacre, given way to despair. Like Richard Martinez, after his son was murdered by a weapon that should never have been in the hands of a lunatic, or anyone else, for that matter, they’re allowing themselves to be angry, and then turning their anger into action: they’re naming the business that helped kill their children and asking a court to hold that business responsible.

The filed complaint—the numbered paragraphs give it an oddly religious feeling, like theses nailed to a church door—is worth reading in full, however painful that might be, not only because of the unbelievable suffering and cruelty it details on that terrible morning but also because it offers, in neatly logical fashion, an indisputable argument: the gun manufacturer is guilty of having sold a weapon whose only purpose was killing a lot of people in a very short time. Despite the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives having previously declared that such weapons “serve a function in crime and combat, but serve no sporting purpose,” Bushmaster sold it anyway—and precisely on the grounds that it could kill many people, quickly. “Forces of opposition bow down. You are single handedly outnumbered,” the advertising copy read.

… one of the ironies of the whole story is that there already is a long-standing ban on truly automatic weapons—machine guns—whose legality not even the N.R.A. or their allies dispute. If anything, they tend to make a sniffy point of discriminating actual machine guns from mere semi-automatic ones, among them the Bushmaster. (Back in the twenties, the availability of the tommy gun to gangsters meant that the police were often brutally out-gunned.) But all of the talk about legal and illegal weapons, automatic and semi-automatic—as about the treatment of the psychologically troubled—evades the simple, central point: it ought to be very, very difficult, as it is in every other civilized country, to get your hands on a weapon whose only purpose is to kill people quickly. The N.R.A. and their allies make it very, very easy.

There are replies to Gopnik, but thus far I have yet to see one that targets the fundamental flaws in the argument.  To begin with, I don’t stipulate at all to the notion that the ban on fully automatic weapons is legal regardless of what the NRA believes.  I believe that the Hughes amendment is an unconstitutional and obscene abomination.  Adam needs to get out of Manhattan a little more and see the world.

Second, his categorization of weapons “whose purpose is to kill” shows fundamental ignorance of guns and the history of them.  The sporting purposes test applied by the ATF and codified into law is circular reasoning as I commented on the ATF study on importability of certain shotguns.

Wrapped up in this paragraph we have not only an amusing logical blunder but also the real crux of the problem. Authors have presupposed the answer (so-called circular reasoning) at which they must arrive, i.e., the statute must remain useful. Thus, all interpretations by ATF are biased to yield that result. It is not the responsibility of the ATF nor is it within the purview of their authority to ensure the continued usefulness of a statute, if in fact it is rendered useless by advances, common practices, evolution in sporting, or lack of wise crafting of the statute (such as the fact that nowhere in this discussion of “sporting purposes” is there any latitude given for personal protection and home defense under the second amendment to the constitution of the United States). This single paragraph renders the study itself as useless as the statute has become.

Let’s use another example in order to make the point clear.  Short barrel revolvers.  While some hunters use long barrel revolvers with scopes for hunting, no one uses a short barrel revolver for hunting.  It has no purpose except to kill (whether used in crime or in self defense).  And yet these aren’t the weapons Adam refers to when he discusses guns with a single purpose.  He is referring to AR-15s and other similarly-styled weapons, which ironically are used quite a bit for hunting (as well as for other sporting purposes such as 3-gun competitions).  You see, the ATF has written the rules by formulating a list and then trying to ban anything on the list – which is circular reasoning.

Scoped bolt action rifles are used as sniper rifles – or for hunting deer.  Shotguns are used for turkey – or to clear rooms in Now Zad Afghanistan by the U.S. Marine Corps.  There is no list that doesn’t ‘beg the question’ (as a formal logical fallacy) when it comes to military or sporting purposes.

Furthermore, a weapon’s capacity to kill is precisely what makes it valuable when it comes to the amelioration of tyranny, which is what the second amendment is all about anyway.  You see, death comes to us not from an imperfect society that lacks the proper state supervision, needing just one more law or the right kind of leadership in order to be the utopia on earth envisioned by Gopnik.  Death comes to us at the hands of criminals, petty and state-sanctioned, due to something called federal headship in Adam and original sin.  Gopnik must return to Genesis Chapter 3 in order to craft a meaningful and consistent anthropology that explains reality.

As with all statists, their god fails them.  They will forever be waiting on the providence of an impotent totem, and may as well slash their wrists and bleed before Baal.  God sits in the heavens and mocks them (Psalm 2:4).  Their attempts to bring heaven down to earth through lawfare and social programs will only end in failure and suffering.  Statistics on guns and crime aren’t relevant to Gopnik’s problem.  He needs to jettison his fundamental world view in order to understand who he is, who man is, and what man must do to be saved.

Kurt Hofmann sends this along.

First of all, the folks carrying the cartoon are rude and ill mannered.  The cartoon is poorly done.  I don’t mean just in poor taste, I mean poorly done.  It’s an awful cartoon.  My dog could draw better than this.  Second, the cartoon is in poor taste.  Blood dancing is in bad form no matter who the dancer or victim.

There are good cartoons and bad ones, and I don’t even have to agree with the cartoonist in order to appreciate good art and clever ideas.  For example, a very liberal cartoonist with whom I seldom if ever agreed, Doug Marlette, once gave us this after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

The Eagle cries.  Now one doesn’t have to agree with huge government programs in order to appreciate Doug’s having captured the moment with a cartoon.  Furthermore, as an engineer I know full well how Morton-Thiokol had ignored their own engineer’s warnings concerning temperature and O-rings.  The failure never had to occur.

Still, whether one agrees with the cartoon or not, Doug wasn’t blood dancing.  He was showing true grief and sorrow over needless deaths.  The folks at CSGV have latched on to crap and made it their own.  Very well.  It suits them.

Via Uncle, Prince Law.

ATF is at it again in their latest determination later. Previously, I discussed their determination in relation to the sample that Black Aces Tactical submitted and hinted that ATF might be shifting its view on stabilizing braces …

The letter notes that the literature included with the sample states the Stabilizer is not designed nor intended to enable a user to fire a weapon from the shoulder (Page 1 of the letter). FTISB correctly finds that attaching the Stabilizer does not turn the pistol into a “firearm” as defined by NFA, but then states “provided the Blade AR Pistol Stabilizer is used as originally designed and NOT as a shoulder stock.”

The issue with FTISB’s latest determination is they are attempting to classify a firearm based on the end users use of an attachment designed and intended to be used in a certain way.

[ … ]

The letter to FTISB stated that the device was not designed OR intended to enable a user to fire a weapon from the shoulder. So how does FTISB come to the conclusion that an end user shouldering the Stabilizer turns the firearm into an item regulated by NFA?

[ … ]

Allow me to pose this hypothetical to you using the logic in this latest determination letter. If an individual attaches the Stabilizer to his AR pistol, goes to the range, shoots it as the manufacturer intended and then hands it to his friend who shoulders it, did it just become an illegal short barreled rifle?

I know that the good and smart folks from Prince Law are attempting to make sense of an arcane law and regulation thereto.  That’s their profession and they’re good at it.  And to be clear (although unrelated exactly to this post at Prince Law), lawyers do things that sometimes puzzle us, like argue for or against something before a court and then argue (in case the court rejects that argument) something that undercuts the first argument to see if the court accepts that position, as if they didn’t believe the first argument.  But the problem is that none of this (stabilizer brace ruling) makes any sense.

Let’s circle around on this one again.  The problem is that none of this makes any sense.  It’s similar to the same thing we observed with the sporting purposes test for the importability ruling for shotguns.

On page 4 the following statements are made: “The 1989 study then examined the scope of “sporting purposes” as used in the statute. The study noted that “[t]he broadest possible interpretation could take in virtually any lawful activity or competition which any person or groups of persons might undertake. Under this interpretation, any rifle could meet the “sporting purposes” test. The 1989 study concluded that a broad interpretation would render the statute useless.”

Wrapped up in this paragraph we have not only an amusing logical blunder but also the real crux of the problem. Authors have presupposed the answer (so-called circular reasoning) at which they must arrive, i.e., the statute must remain useful. Thus, all interpretations by ATF are biased to yield that result. It is not the responsibility of the ATF nor is it within the purview of their authority to ensure the continued usefulness of a statute, if in fact it is rendered useless by advances, common practices, evolution in sporting, or lack of wise crafting of the statute (such as the fact that nowhere in this discussion of “sporting purposes” is there any latitude given for personal protection and home defense under the second amendment to the constitution of the United States). This single paragraph renders the study itself as useless as the statute has become.

The entire NFA is useless, (in the main) unenforceable, and nonsensical.  It needs to be repealed, along with the GCA. This ruling by the ATF on stabilizer braces is yet another demonstration of that fact.  Fortunately, we have another option.

In each case, Bloomberg understood his enemies, their foibles and their failures far better than they understood him. So he won and they lost.

But then something happened that Bloomberg in his arrogance never expected, something that the “mainstream gun rights organizations” for their part never expected either — in every single state where Bloomberg had “won,” it turned out that the victims of his unconstitutional laws had other ideas. And they didn’t need “leaders” like Wayne LaPierre and Alan Gottlieb to lead them.

The “I Will Not Comply” movement in the various affected states began the instant Bloomberg’s Intolerable Acts were passed. Individual firearm owners, led here and there by some courageous activists of the smaller rights groups who were not so worried about raising money and preserving their press image than their “betters,” simply announced that they would not obey such unconstitutional laws.

In the case of a stabilizer brace (and I don’t currently have one and I also have no AR pistol or SBR), if my home was threatened by invaders intent on doing harm, I would use whatever weapon was within reach, including a pistol with a stabilizer brace, and deploy it the way I deemed best suited for my own safety and the safety of my loved ones.  If that meant shouldering a pistol, they so be it.

The folks at Prince Law will not argue that way because it isn’t their job.  But it’s our job to disobey unjust laws.

The latest silliness from Mike Weisser comes to us from Huffington Post:

Last week I attended a conference on medicine and gun violence in which a cross-section of researchers and clinicians focused on how to figure out if patients are at risk for gun violence and how to intervene appropriately when such a clinical situation appears to exist. The problem raises medical, legal and ethical issues involving proper patient care, privacy, liability and other questions that the medical profession has been wrestling with for a long time but have really come home to roost this year.

Three states have now passed laws limiting the degree to which physicians can ask patients about guns and only a last-minute surge of votes from Democratic senators who will shortly be replaced by Republicans allowed a Surgeon General to be confirmed whose views are decidedly anti-gun.

Throughout the conference I kept listening to presentations which were based on an assumption about medicine and guns which I’m not sure is really true. And it goes like this: in order to effectively raise the issue of gun risk, the physician must first determine whether a patient is, indeed, a risk to himself or others if he has access to a gun. And if the physician determines that the patient is, in fact, a health risk if there’s a gun around, how do you determine the degree of gun access without infringing on his right to own a gun whether he’s a risk for gun violence or not?

The reason I’m not comfortable with this assumption is because I happen to believe one simple thing about guns, namely, that if there is a gun lying around, locked or unlocked, the risk of gun injury is simply much greater than if the gun doesn’t exist. To borrow a phrase from the late Elmore Leonard, “Don’t fool with guns in here, okay? The goddamn piece’s liable to go off.” Now researchers can parse all the data with a fine-tooth comb from today until next year, but the bottom line is exactly what Leonard says: if it’s around, sooner or later it’s going to go off.

We’ve covered this in detail before.  Guns don’t “go off.”  Someone puts their finger on the trigger and pulls it.  If it is pointed in an unsafe direction, someone may get harmed or killed.  It’s the same with automobiles or trucks.  I drove beside a truck the other day that was swerving to the point I thought the driver may be drunk.  Likely he was sleepy, which is as bad or worse than being drunk.  Or, we may substitute chemicals in the home, or cold temperatures, or overheating for the elderly if they lose or cannot afford air conditioning.

Guns are no different.  The problem is that the author sees the role of doctors the same as the role of any other profession – as agents of the state.  He sees life this way because he is a collectivist.  And he likely knows that guns don’t just “go off.”  He is using that phrase in order to evoke emotion and approbation for doctors who won’t behave as agents of the state.

You recall another society where doctors were agents of the state, don’t you?

Breitbart:

Writing on Facebook, Jefferies said he believes many people will argue that the hostage situation proves that gun control–of which Australia has plenty–does not stop criminals. But Jefferies believes the hostage situation proves just the opposite.

Jefferies wrote:

I don’t know what the end result of this stand-off will be, but I do know this, he will only shoot that shotgun once before the police will be in there. This is a piss weak terrorist at best.

If this had happened in the USA the guy would have semi automatic weapons and hand guns that could easily kill many people in a short period of time. It seems to me that gun control in Australia is working better than ever.

And as for that one time, well, if it’s you I guess he’s sorry, but you’re not important enough for him to relinquish his collectivist views.  To this Newsweek article, the comment thread is interesting.

Harold Rosenbaum

You can’t take people’s guns away if guns are still in the hands of others. I wonder what would have happened if someone had a gun in the purse or on their person.

Better to sacrifice one or two schmucks than to allow the whole lot of them to be killed , or so goes the thinking in Australia.

David Codrea:

Democratic Virginia State Delegate Joe Morrissey “is on a leash,” Henrico County Sheriff Michael Wade told CBS 6 in a Tuesday report on the jailed politician’s work release arrangement. Morrissey, 57, was convicted last week of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and sentenced to 12 months in jail with six months suspended for “an inappropriate relationship” with a 17-year-old administrative staffer in his legal office who is now reportedly pregnant … So when Morrissey attacked the right to keep and bear arms in 2013 by bringing an AK-style rifle onto the floor of the House of Delegates “in a wild stunt aimed at rallying support for tougher gun laws …

Hey, laws and morality are for the peasants.  Otherwise, what good is an election anyway?

Kurt Hofmann:

Among “progressives,” it’s an article of faith that gun rights advocacy and racism are inextricably linked. One writer goes so far as to argue that broad recognition of gun rights in the U.S. causes cops to shoot black men … No matter that American “gun control” has its roots in a desire to keep African-Americans disarmed and thus powerless

Here in my state we still have laws that require the approval of the CLEO to purchase handguns, laws that have historically been used to prevent those horrible Negros from getting their hands on things that can hurt the good folks.  Hey, what good is a Jim Crow law if it can’t be used to generate revenue whilst encoding bigotry in the law books?

Uncle:

A man who can’t use his arms was in a car with others. The police pulled them over. The police found a gun in the car. And are charging the man who can’t use his arms with possession.

Hey, it’s New Jersey.  If the cops and prosecutors can’t be stupid there, what the hell is happening to this great country?

Kansas City opinion pages, weapons force difficult decisions for police officers.  Hey, if they would just follow the same rules I have to, the decisions would be much easier for them.

Fusion:

Philip Alpers, a professor at the Sydney University School of Public Health, said that’s not likely to change. He said most Australians would still agree with Howard, the conservative former prime minister who instituted the gun laws.

“There are only a handful of Australians who might suggest that having more guns inside that café would have made the situation less dangerous,” Alpers said. He added that if anyone suggested more guns were the answer, “he’d be howled down and become a laughingstock across the country.”

This file photo taken on September 8, 1996 shows Norm Legg, a project supervisor with a local security firm, holding up an armalite rifle which is similar to the one used in the Port Arthur massacre and which was handed in for scrap in Melbourne after Australia banned all automatic and semi-automatic rifles in the aftermath of the Port Arthur shooting. (William West /AFP/Getty Images)

Mr. Alpers may be whistling past the grave yard if Australians want their country back and, but it remains to be seen.  If he’s right, thus continues the enslavement of the Australians to their collective.  Never underestimate the ability of the totalitarians to get slaves to advocate and go along with their captivity.

Mike Vanderboegh:

You know the Founders were as suspicious of unrestrained democracy as they were of absolute monarchy. Both can be tyrannical. Both can be deadly. Both are threats to life and liberty and property. This is why they crafted a constitutional republic. The Founders knew that the mob could be manipulated by cynical elites to rob other citizens of their liberty, their property and their lives – cynical elites, wealthy men, powerful men, with unceasing appetites for more and more power …

Tyranny as you have now experienced with I-594 can be voted into existence by a majority. This does not make it right. This does not make it legitimate. Indeed it is a violation of natural law and natural rights derived from God …

This is one of Mike’s best, and I’ve been thinking about freedom, slavery and God-given rights over the last few days.  Slavery in all of its forms is evil.  To be sure, forced labor for the benefit of others is theft.  Forced relocation is kidnapping, and forced sex is rape.  But as heinous as these things are, they are byproducts of the main focus of the evil behind slavery.

Slavery is an interdiction and attempted thwarting of the main institution and building block in God’s economy – the family.  When I say “economy,” don’t think money and finances, although that would certainly be included.  Think of the role of the family in education, self determination, living location, choice of labor, value system, religious proclivities, and every other aspect of life.  Think God’s administration of His created order.  The family is central, it is essential, it cannot be harmed without both adverse natural consequences and God’s divine punishment on people, individually and corporately.

Whether it is a totalitarian state that sucks bank accounts dry through taxation, Boko Haram who steals girls from their families for sex, ISIS who beheads teenagers who refuse to relinquish their Christianity and swear allegiance to a false religion, diktats which govern what guns can be owned by whom and when, or whatever the form, it all steps in between the head of a family and his wife and children, a man’s work, a man’s calling before God, a man’s ability and freedom to say how his family will live and how he will care for and protect them.  Thus it is an affront to the laws of God, sinful, a cosmic crime against the most high.  It is all (what the Bible calls) high-handed sin (Numbers 15:22-31).  It is perpetrated by men who raise their fists to God and say they will not bow their knee to His laws.

Men who engage in this high-handed sin might be so bold as to kidnap girls for sex, or they might be so surreptitious as to sell their ideas to the stupid public as for their own safety and protection, such as gun control in the form of dictating what can be owned by whom and what one must do to placate the state if he engages in bartering.  Or, in the case of entitlements, it might take the form of “assistance” to families which ultimately destroys the family like it has with minorities in America.  But make no mistake about it, it is all high-handed sin, and God will judge it, now and in eternity.

Control over weapons is the final step and the signal accomplishment of a state which seeks to enslave its people.  Thus is disobedience to these evil measures a righteous calling.

Virginians should prepared themselves for the kind of gun control we recently saw in Washington with I-594.

RICHMOND — Gov. Terry McAuliffe on Monday will call for a package of gun restrictions in Virginia, including a renewal of the state’s one-a-month limit on handgun purchases and a requirement that buyers at gun shows undergo background checks.

McAuliffe will also propose keeping guns away from people convicted of crimes related to domestic violence and revoking concealed-handgun permits for parents who are behind on child-support payments.

[ … ]

While campaigning for governor last year, McAuliffe veered from the playbook of Democrats seeking statewide office, pushing openly for gun control and other liberal causes, including abortion rights and action to mitigate climate change.

Because elections have consequences.  I have to admit that I was surprised at his election to the office of Governor, but I suppose that the urban areas control the suburban and rural areas of Virginia.

To my readers in Virginia, begin now.  If you don’t want these draconian measures that the totalitarians and control freaks would shove down your throat – causing you to have to engage in the same sort of thing we see now in Washington with the “We Will Not Comply” campaign – then make it clear that passing such measures will have consequences too, consequences that they fear enough to turn this back.

But beware, you are fighting Goliath.  Expect Bloomberg/Gates money to back this, and expect a fight for your very freedom.  Bathe it in prayer, make the consequences clear to the politicians, and then disobey the authorities should such measures pass – and dare them to do anything about it.