Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

Philly.com:

If you Google the name Jabir Kennedy, you will read about a fugitive wanted for gunning down four men, one fatally, during Christmas week 2017 in the Elmwood section of Southwest Philadelphia. You will read that the “armed and dangerous” fugitive turned himself in a week later and was charged with first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder.

Well, that’s partly because Google sucks, and partly because this is all the information the DA’s office and cops  wanted you to know.

So when the case reached its conclusion this month, there were no headlines for what turned out to be a rarity in the criminal justice system: an admitted gunman in a quadruple shooting acquitted by a jury of all charges.

Let that wash over you again.  “Assistant District Attorney Sheida Ghadiri argued during the trial that the gun Kennedy fired belonged to him, that he knew how to use it given that he shot four of the five men he fought with, and the number of bullets he fired — eight to 10 — was too many to be self-defense.”

Yes, she wanted you to die.  Self defense isn’t a right recognized by the state, at least not any more.  And God help you if you ever put yourself on the line and defend someone you don’t know who is in distress.  You see, the only agents recognized by the state for dispensing violence are those commissioned by the state to do so.  To the communist, the state is the beginning, middle and end of all things.

I have absolutely no confidence in the so-called justice system, neither judges no juries.  Fortunately, they go this one right.  They tried to convince the jury it was more complicated than that (read the rest of the article if you wish), but in the end it’s simple.  Man is made in God’s image and thus has a solemn duty before the Almighty to defend his life.

News from New Mexico:

ALBUQUERQUE – A nonprofit that pushes for gun-control laws nationwide sent letters Wednesday to numerous New Mexico sheriffs, asking them to provide records related to their coordinated stance against gun-control laws that they do not plan to enforce.

The Brady Center, a Washington, D.C.-based organization, said it requested emails from the sheriffs under the state’s Inspection of Public Records Act, with demands for emailed communication among sheriffs and gun-lobby representatives.

Attorney Jonathan Lowy of the Brady Center said his group is seeking the emails to learn “what possible basis” the sheriffs have for declaring they won’t enforce the laws. Brady also wants to obtain any communication the law enforcement officials had with the National Rifle Association and other gun-rights groups.

I’d be nice to tell them to blow it out of their collective asses, but since it comes with a requirement by law, the Sheriffs are answering.

But I can answer for them.  Concerning “what possible basis,” it violates the constitution.  There, I’m glad I could be of assistance.  Now, go back to your worship of Baal, you pagans.

Dear Cecile,

I notice that the link you provide to notify the New Zealand Police that I intend to turn in my firearms doesn’t allow me to enter any information.  That sucks.  I’m absolutely livid about this.

I’ve decided to turn in some firearms.  Actually, I need to be more precise.  I have 8616 firearms, and by my calculations this is somewhere on the order of a $10 million collection.

I’ve had a talk with God about this, and after that talk I’ve decided to turn in one, leaving me with 8615 firearms.  I know what you’re thinking?  Why would he turn in just one?

Well, the specific firearm I intend to relinquish is an XM556 Microgun.  I’m sick and fed up listening to my wife complain about all of the ammunition sitting around.  Also, the floors of my house are beginning to sag from all of the weight.  Every … single … room.  Finding a place to put it all has been a bitch.

This has turned into a $10,000 per week habit.  I know you think I need an intervention, Cecile, but you’re too late.  I’ve conducted my own intervention, and I’ve decided to break the habit.  It’ll be hard, and I need your prayers.

So please, please inform the New Zealand Police that I intend to turn in my 5.56mm Gatling gun.  In fact, please also forward this post to your contacts in the New Zealand Police.  I thought I’d drop it in UPS, and within a week or so it should show up on their doorstep.  Or if you’d like, I can send it to you for safe keeping.  Be careful, though.  It’s addictive.

Yours very truly.

ps: I decry and herewith denounce the troll who said he had nuclear weapons he wanted to turn in.  I would never do something like that.

The Washington Post:

New Zealand’s gun lobby shares many of its goals with the United States’ National Rifle Association, the world’s biggest gun lobby organization, which supports aligned politicians financially and uses social media to attack its opponents. Some of the NRA’s frequent arguments may also apply in New Zealand, with an estimated quarter of a million gun owners in a country of only 5 million people.

[ … ]

But unlike the NRA, New Zealand’s interest groups have predominantly lobbied the government quietly, rather than threatening politicians with the scorn of their powerful voter base. The perceived silence of those lobbying organizations led to some calls from gun enthusiasts for a bolder and more vocal stance. New Zealand’s gun lobbies were probably well aware, however, that they are not the NRA and never will be, despite the aspirations of some of their members.

The country’s lobby mainly represents a core of rural supporters, whereas more than 86 percent of New Zealanders now live in urban areas and form a largely liberal majority. In the United States, the ratio of citizens living in urban areas is slightly lower. More important, however, the U.S. system of representation and the way congressional districts are drawn increase the significance of rural Republican voters disproportionately. That helps explain why the NRA can pressure politicians into following its demands, even though NRA supporters account for only a fraction of all U.S. voters.

[ … ]

“Our form of government, with a Senate that gives extraordinary power to rural states over urban states and is deferential to states’ rights, makes it difficult to advance relatively modest gun-control measures, much less more sweeping measures,” said Webster, the gun policy expert.

In contrast, New Zealand’s election system is designed in a way that the number of lawmakers a party has in Parliament is aligned with its share among all votes cast. The mixed member proportional voting system — which is also in place in countries such as Germany — is supposed to prevent small interest groups from being able to gain disproportionate influence over lawmakers. To pass legislation, only a simple majority is needed.

This is what happens when writers who have no knowledge of American culture consult with “gun experts” (i.e., progressive gun controllers) for analysis and perspective (take a quick look at their creds, they’ve likely never set foot in middle America among the “great unwashed masses”).  The entire article turns out to be a joke.  So let’s spend a few minutes fisking this, shall we?

First, we learn this from WiscoDave at Kenny’s place about what is going on in New Zealand.

My brother is a plumber in NZ he said a lot of work sites have come to a grinding halt because they can’t buy PVC pipe. ….he said NZ is basically burying their guns and gun City is running low on stock of semi autos.

It isn’t obvious whether there will be turn-ins, confiscations, or massive non-compliance.  We’ll wait and see.

Next, it’s the bad ole’ electoral system that’s at fault.  It can’t be the millions upon millions of AR-15 owners out there whom the FedGov knows will not comply with such a thing, nor the hundreds of millions of pistol owners who will do the same.  No, it’s the electoral system which is at fault.  Without it, according to the authors, we would have gun control on par with the rest of the world because that’s what people really want.

Third, notice the ubiquitous meme of the evils of the NRA, awful bullies they are, and how they can allegedly turn on their members like a light switch.  What’s not mentioned by these authors is that the NRA is losing membership, but gun owners are hardening their positions while the NRA tries to catch up.

Among educated readers here at TCJ, the NRA is known not as the largest gun rights organization on earth, but as the largest, most well-funded, most well-connected gun control organization on earth, having given cover or impetus for the National Firearms Act, The Gun Control Act of 1968, the bump stock ban and red flag laws popping up all over the nation.  It’s a game they play, you see, where they support gun control, tell their members they need money to fight it, and enrich themselves in the process.  But American gun owners, many of them, are no longer falling for it.  Thus, everyone whose address is known by the NRA is receiving ever more frantic calls for money from Chris and Wayne.  It’s sad, really.

What the authors don’t understand is that gun owners are not a top-down kind of people.  They don’t wait for “leaders” to tell them what to think like the statists do.

And that’s why New Zealand gun control won’t work in America (and may not work in New Zealand either).  It has nothing whatsoever to do with the electoral system, nor the NRA, nor any of the other bits of “wisdom” imparted to these authors by the “gun experts.”

American gun owners won’t comply.  And that’s the end of the story right there.  It’s really rather simple, and I could have boiled this all down to that single sentence.  The authors were probably paid by the word for that story.  In the future, journalism classes should force their students to go live somewhere other than Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Duke or NYU.  They need some perspective from someone other than their Marxist professors.

American gun owners won’t comply because they know the history of people who turn in their guns.  It always means loss of rights, and sometimes it means loss of life (It’s funny how someone who knows a lot more than these two authors, like Dave Kopel, can write such a clear-headed commentary for the very same news organization, The Washington Post, yes?).  Gun control always precedes utter totalitarianism.

News from the arm pit of the universe, the abode of demons, gargoyles and pit vipers.

“I think passing a federal law is probably beyond what the market will bear,” he said in his opening remarks on Tuesday. But he said the federal government could give a nod to the states that “if you do it in a certain way, the federal government will incentivize you.”

“I think that’s the best way at least initially to solve this problem,” Graham said.

Give the state some money to do the dirty work.

So I read an article a day or two ago that stated Lindsey Graham has seen his support increase in South Carolina since he decided to glom onto Trump.  Of course, he’ll be facing an election soon.

If South Carolinians fall for his opportunism, they’re idiots.  And if anyone thinks Trump is pro-second amendment, he is equally an idiot.

Via David Codrea.

Because when we decide constitutionality, it can only be for one person at a time.  You don’t have “standing,” which means you aren’t rich enough to afford the exorbitant legal fees associated with taking on the FedGov.  And we, the judiciary, play right along with that.  It’ll have to go person by person, unless of course we reject plaintiff’s arguments and go along with the FedGov.  Which we probably will.

Because we’re better than you.

So says Salon.

Take a minute and look at all the military-speak gun-culture nomenclature babble they slap down: “match-grade” and “muzzle brake” and “infinitely adjustable folding stock” and all the rest of that crap. That’s the way they market guns like the “Scorpion,” and you know what it is? It’s insane.

OK, their use of “insane” is a kind of gun-lover-hipster-speak, and the Scorpio isn’t a semiautomatic assault rifle like the ones used to kill 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook, or the the 50 Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand, or the 17 students and faculty killed in Parkland, Florida, or the 58 concertgoers in Las Vegas. But it’s the same style of weapon, with the same style aluminum stock and ventilated “rails” alongside its barrel, and it’s got capabilities far in excess of what would be necessary for  any sort of legitimate civilian usage. “Loaded up with the faster 230-grain Berger round, I got hits on a 3-by-3-inch steel target at 2,000 yards,” the reviewer boasted. That is 1.13 miles, folks. This guy hit a target about the size of your forehead from over a mile away.

Who the hell needs to hit something, anything, from over a mile away? I’ll tell you who: an Army or Marine sniper, that’s who. They’re selling military-grade rifles to the general public. That’s what this sniper rifle is, and that’s what all the various iterations of the AR-15 style assault rifles are. Military-grade killing machines. All of them are for sale on the open market here in the United States of America. You can go down to your local gun store and buy one tomorrow. That means you’ll be able to set the damn Scorpion up on its bi-pod and hit a so-called “soft target” so far away you need a goddamn telescope to see it.

Oh, I can hear them now. The NRA and its ilk will tell you that this military-style assault rifle is just the thing to use hunting deer, or elk, or some other poor creature. But it’s really a killing machine, a thing you can buy that is designed for one purpose: to kill a “soft target” from up to a mile away. That is insane.

Even for your bolt action guns, they want to restrict the muzzle velocity, ballistic coefficient and bullet mass.  Funny how the sons and daughters of hippies and beatniks morphed into communists so fast, yes?  Say, maybe they were never really libertarians to begin with.  Perhaps all they wanted was liberty for them – and slavery for you.  Yes?

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young grok the French revolution and Karl Marx.

From someone who has studied it.

“Registration is a pillar of gun control and has been in 150 countries for a century and a half,” he said.

“The first pillar is licensing … then you register the object … and then you make it clear that ownership of a firearm is a conditional privilege, which can be taken away.”

He said all three pillars were absent in the US, in NZ two pillars existed – strong licensing and a definite rejection of the right to bear arms.

“The middle pillar, the third leg on the stool if you like – registration – simply doesn’t exist in New Zealand … so like a two legged stool it’s an unreliable object.”

Statists the world over agree.

The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.

Unfortunately, right now we can’t. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it:

The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them. Canada has a national firearms registry. We need to copy their model. We need a law demanding all firearms be registered to a national database. We need to know who has them and where they are. We need to make this as easy as possible for gun owners. The federal government provides the money and technical expertise, and the State police carry it out. Like a funded mandate. Most firearms already have a serial number on them, so it would really be a matter of taking the information already on the ATF form 4473 and putting it in a national database. I think about 6 months should be enough time.

Along with this, make private sales illegal. When a firearm is transferred, make it law that the registration must be updated. Again, make it super easy to do. Perhaps over, the internet. Dealers can log in by their FFLs and update the registration. Additionally, new guns are to be registered by the manufacturer. The object here is to create a clear paper trail from factory to distributor to dealer to owner. We want to encourage as much voluntary compliance as possible.

Now we get down to it. The registration period has passed. Now we have criminals without registered guns running around. Probably kooky types that “lost” them on a boat or something. So remember those ATF form 4473s? Those record every firearm sale, going back twenty years. And those have to be surrendered to the ATF on demand. So, we get those logbooks, and cross reference the names and addresses with the new national registry. Since most NRA types own two or (many) more guns, we can get an idea of who properly registered their guns and who didn’t. For example, if we have a guy who purchased 6 guns over the course of 10 years, but only registered two of them, that raises a red flag.

Now, maybe he sold them or they got lost or something. But it gives us a good target for investigation. A nice visit by the ATF or state police to find out if he really does still have those guns would be certainly warranted. It’s certainly not perfect. People may have gotten guns from parents or family, and not registered them. Perfect is the enemy of pretty darn good, as they say. This exercise isn’t so much to track down every gun ever sold; the main idea would be to profile and investigate people that may not have registered their guns. As an example, I’m not so concerned with the guy who bought that bolt action Mauser a decade ago and doesn’t have anything registered to his name. It’s a pretty good possibility that he sold it, gave it away, or got rid of it somehow. And even if he didn’t, that guy is not who I’m concerned with. I’m concerned that other guy who bought a half dozen assault weapons, registered two hunting rifles, and belongs to the NRA/GOA. He’s the guy who warrants a raid.

I don’t think the first author is correct, as it depends upon which state you live in and whether form 4473s have been made electronic and retrievable.

In any case, that is how they intend to do it.  Remember those words: “We need to make this as easy as possible for gun owners.”

Ted Bromund:

The Sessions memo was backed up in January 2018 by a new Department of Justice policy that “prohibits the use of agency guidance documents in affirmative civil litigation in a manner that would convert such guidance into binding rules of conduct.” The ATF understood these directives to mean that it had to stop issuing public, industry-wide guidance or opinions—the very documents that could ensure uniform compliance in industry with existing regulations. When this author reached out to ATF for comment, the ATF stated that it was of course abiding by the former Attorney General’s memo, and that “we do not interpret the law.”

As a result of its understanding, the ATF now operates almost exclusively by private letters. It has not published a ruling on firearms or explosives since July 2017, and its only notifications on proposed rule-making since December 2017 relate to the politically-charged (and politically-motivated) pursuit of bump stocks.

This was not the outcome the Sessions memo envisaged. The memo makes it clear that “not every agency action is required to undergo notice-and-comment rulemaking…. [A]gencies may use guidance and similar documents to educate regulated parties through plain-language restatements of existing legal requirements or provide non-binding advice on technical issues.” The point of the memo was to prevent department rule-makers from using public guidance documents to evade the rulemaking process, not to stop them from issuing any public guidance at all. Education is not interpretation.

The ATF’s approach means that each industry member that asks a question about how to apply or interpret the rules gets its own private answer, an answer that none of its competitors knows about and which does not serve as a legal precedent. It means that no one in the industry has any certainty, not even the firm that asked the question in the first place, because the ATF can always change a decision it made in a private “no-action” letter later on. And it means that the ATF has almost complete discretion in how it regulates, because it is creating no precedents.

According to Jared Febbroriello, a lawyer working with firearms and defense companies “It is disconcerting that any agency that is tasked with interpreting the law might seek to restrict the public’s ability to access their interpretations but given the potential for criminal prosecution and the heightened risk for the loss of life, liberty and property that is associated with firearms one would think that ATF would be embracing complete transparency. Sadly, they are not.”

I do not thing any such stupid thing.  The administrative state won’t do anything in the interest of America or her citizens.  It exists wholly to serve itself.

The ATF does this sort of thing because there is a such a thing as the administrative state to begin with, but also, because Jeff Sessions is a crap-weasel of mammoth proportions who did nothing of any lasting value and lacked the guts to reign in the worst offenders.

And then again, we cannot exonerate the legislative branch who allows all of this, not the president who [a] agrees with it all, [b] lacks the guts to shut it down, [c] pretends it isn’t occurring, [d] claims that it cannot be stopped, or [e] secretly wants to use that administrative state to accomplish what no one else will despite what he tells the voters (e.g., the bump stock ban).

David Codrea:

Likewise, the Codrea Plaintiffs-Appellants (No. 18-cv-3086 (D.D.C.) in their Motion for a Preliminary Injunction (Doc. 5-1, p. 24), Reply Brief (Doc. 18, p. 17), and Principal Brief before this Court (p. 29), requested a “systemwide preliminary injunction.”

Good.  The stupid way the court works the stay would only have been good for the specific plaintiff.

We shouldn’t even be here.  Thanks Trump.  And NRA (who gave you the original idea and cover for it).