Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

It’s obvious to everyone that there is an ongoing polarization in America, in fact with increasing speed and ferocity.  In New York the claim by gun owners has routinely been that NYC is NYC, and upsate is a different beast.  They honor their gun rights around those parts.  I wonder how this will affect them?

Family members, school administrators and law enforcement officials can seek to get guns confiscated from people deemed by courts to be an “extreme risk” to themselves or others, under legislation signed Monday.

The “red flag” law, as it’s called, takes effect in 180 days.

That’s not just NYC.  Next up, from reader Mike, Oklahoma just passed constitutional carry.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Individuals will be able to carry firearms in Oklahoma without a permit or training starting Nov. 1, when a bill passed by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Kevin Stitt goes into effect.

The bill is the first signed by Stitt since he took office.

And there is dispute in Maryland.

Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis wants Maryland lawmakers to know he will not comply with any bill that restricts a person’s Second Amendment right.

Legislators heard testimony from constituents and public officials during a hearing on Monday that addressed 19 different bills related to firearms. When speaking to a room of people after testifying, Lewis reiterated his thoughts on these bills.

“We’re gonna let them know that we are sick and tired of being penalized for Baltimore City’s inability to control crime,” Lewis told the room in a video that circulated on social media. “If these bills pass, we will not comply.”

Lest he be considered a hero, here the rest of his argument and one of his reasons.

Lewis, who has worked in law enforcement for the past 35 years, said he was not opposed to every piece of gun legislation that has been introduced to the Maryland General Assembly. Rather, he only raises issue with the bills that would “further encroach or infringe upon law-abiding citizens’ right to bear arms.”

[ … ]

Another piece of legislation that Lewis took issue with is House bill 612, which would add a Colt AR-15 Sports H-BAR (heavy barrel) rifle to the list of regulated firearms in the state. Lewis said this bill, if passed, would lead to confiscation without compensation.

“There are bills that would truly make it a suicide mission for a sheriff deputy or a Maryland state trooper,” said Lewis, who personally owns multiple AR-15 rifles. “There are just so many reasons why this is unjust and unconstitutional.”

So what if the gun owners were compensated – would that make it okay to the Sheriff?  And what if there were enough officers to effect confiscation without it being a suicide mission?  Would he participate in such a thing?

He needs to have all the right reasons for opposition to gun control, and right now, he doesn’t.

Expect this kind of thing to continue, and increase in speed and intensity.  The left is lurching further leftward, as their heart tells them to do, and the right is splitting into two factions – those who will follow just behind the left, and those who will drift further right.

There are froggy times coming.

David Codrea:

“Codrea also asserts that the bump stock rule violates the Takings Clause because it fails to provide compensation to current bump stock owners who must destroy or abandon their property. Regardless of the merits of Codrea’s takings challenge, however, it does not justify preliminary injunctive relief.”

Just because she says so, and she has all the power.

Where we stand now is unless the D.C. Appeals Court grants the appeal with expedited treatment, on March 26 I and others will become felons if we do not surrender or destroy property previously deemed lawful by the same bureau now saying it’s not.

And the FedGov has filed an opposition to expedite.  Of course.

Good on David for soldiering on and going through what will likely be a losing battle.

Townhall.com:

I think there are areas where we can find agreement, like extreme risk protection orders IF THEY’RE DON (sic) RIGHT, but this will also take time to get the language right to ensure people’s rights aren’t trampled, which is absent in the liberal process. It’s hard to discuss this with people whose sole goal concerning gun control is expanding government power. Then again, what else is new when dealing with Democrats.

This is surprising coming from Matt Vespa, who is usually a fairly straight shooter.  So let’s offer a brief rebuttal, shall we?

First of all, it has to do with being a statist, not democrat, and democrats don’t have the corner on that market.  Second, this embraces a false view of the state.  The state isn’t God, and cannot know the future.  Divination and spiritists are forbidden in the Holy Writ and being wicked, and red flag laws are based on pre-crime judgments, that is, someone makes a judgment (sometimes based on the determination of community witch doctors, or Psychiatrists), that a threat exists enough to deprive a man or woman of his or her means of self defense.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with threats, which are already illegal.

Third, we needn’t delineate between gun control, and gun control for the purpose of expanding government power.  All gun control has as its purpose the expansion of government power, and all gun control is evil.  Fourth, rights are trampled with red flag laws, Matt needn’t attempt to ensure this doesn’t happen.  It happens as a function of the process itself.

I could go on, but I’ll let readers fill in the gaps.

Reuters:

A federal judge gave the Trump administration the go-ahead on Monday to ban “bump stocks” – rapid-fire gun attachments used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history – in a defeat for firearms rights advocates.

“None of the plaintiffs’ challenges merit preliminary injunctive relief,” Washington-based District Judge Dabney Friedrich wrote in a 64-page ruling.

[ … ]

Friedrich found courts have regularly recognized the ATF’s authority to “interpret and apply the statutes that it administers,” including the definition of a machine gun.

So in other words, because the courts have teamed up with the administrative state to empower themselves even further, it’s okay.  There’s precedent for it.  Congress doesn’t really matter if we give all authority to the administrative state anyway.

I see that David Codrea is already on this.

Judge Friedrich begins with the assertion that “According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), the [Las Vegas] gunman used multiple ‘bump stocks’ in the attack, which increased his rate of fire.”  As contrary to most news reports, political claims and public opinion as this may sound, that has never been definitively established, or if it has, that information has not been made public. True, guns were recovered from the scene with bump stocks attached, but, as a Freedom of Information Act response documented, ATF was denied inspection access to weapons at the scene to determine if the ones used had been modified with “machine gun fire-control components or known machine gun conversion devices,” and to this day no report of technical examination has been released.

He further observes, “Who’s still asleep enough to still think this is “just about bump stocks” or still in denial enough to insist that it’s some genius 3D chess maneuver purposely designed to lose in the courts?”

That was my first thought when I read the report from Reuters.  Yea, what about that 3D chess match Trump is playing to make this all fail in court?  I’ve seen that sort of floated by Glenn Reynolds before, who also notes that this is unconstitutional.

I never once thought that Trump wanted anything but a bump stock ban since (contrary to what the Reuters article says) the NRA gave him cover for it.  He believes that gun owners are a monolith represented by the NRA, when in actuality, many if not most of us consider them to be to willing too compromise.

It’s as if Trump doesn’t really know who his base is, or doesn’t understand them, or doesn’t really care, or simply believes he can replace them with another base.

This is a bit wordy.

DENVER–The “Red Flag” bill moving through the Colorado Legislature has been the subject of plenty of debate, but as it stands now, for persons against whom even a temporary Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) has been issued, there is a risk they could be trapped into inadvertently violating federal gun control laws.

House Bill 19-1177 requires that at the initial ex parte hearing (where the subject is excluded), and based on a judge finding by a preponderance of the evidence that the person meets the “danger to self or others” standard, a ruling issuing a temporary ERPO and search and seizure warrant to confiscate guns is required.

According to federal regulations provided to Complete Colorado by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) someone is “adjudicated as a mental defective” if found by a “court, board, commission or other lawful authority” to be, among other things, “a risk to himself or others.”

A strict reading of the federal law suggests that a person under any ERPO has been “adjudicated as a mental defective” by a judge and is barred from all gun ownership from the federal perspective.

The potential threat to gun owners is that even if the judge declines to issue the year-long order, there is still an adjudication and a temporary ERPO on record that arguably prohibits people from getting their guns back until another court proceeding required by federal law to relieve that disability is held.

As well, an ERPO that expires without further court action at the end of the statutory time period of 364 days doesn’t meet the standard for relief from the federal gun-ownership disability.

Prior to 2008, a judicial finding that a person was a danger to himself or others permanently revoked a person’s right to keep and bear arms. This disqualified many people suffering from temporary mental health issues from gun ownership for life.

The federal NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007 provides, among other things, a pathway for people who were barred from gun ownership due to temporary mental illness to regain their rights once they are no longer in crisis.

The 2007 federal law says that a state can provide relief from the federal ban by creating a program for granting relief in state law. The law must provide that a “state court, board, commission or other lawful authority” grant the relief.

Colorado passed just such a statute in 2013 that is found at C.R.S. 13-5-142.5

When petitioned, the court may grant relief if it finds the person is “not likely to act in a manner that is dangerous to the public safety” and that the relief is not “contrary to the public interest.”

The catch is that only persons who have been “found to be incapacitated,” “committed by order of the court” to the custody of the state, or for whom the court has entered an order for short term treatment or for long-term care of a mental health disorder are eligible to petition for relief.

The bill does not address this situation, meaning that the subject of either a temporary or year-long ERPO might not be eligible to petition for relief under existing Colorado law.

Both federal and Colorado statutes say that persons taken in for observation on a 72-hour mental health hold or those who voluntarily admit themselves to a psychiatric facility do not qualify as being “committed to a mental institution,” which is another event that disqualifies gun ownership. But the Colorado ERPO bill doesn’t require a person adjudicated as dangerous to get any mental health treatment at all.

This potentially puts people who are issued temporary ERPOs pending a full hearing, those who are not issued an ERPO at the full hearing and those for whom an ERPO expired without further court action in the position of having to go back to court to relieve the federal prohibition, if they even know they must do so, only to find that they are not eligible to petition for relief under state law.

As I said, it was a bit wordy but I think I’ve got it.  The Colorado law may put people in “no-man’s” land where he can’t even use what little federal relief there is to get his property back or ever purchase firearms again.

But take note of the comment, which pointed me to this startling passage of the bill.

If a family or household member or a law enforcement officer establishes by clear and convincing evidence that a person poses a significant risk to self or others by having a firearm in his or her custody or control or by possessing, purchasing, or receiving a firearm, the court may issue a continuing ERPO

Taken without any other context – which it would appear the way this passage is posed – it seems to say that mere possession of a firearm, if deemed unsafe by just about anyone connected to the person, can be a justifiable reason to disarm him.

Oh Colorado.  What have you done by letting so many Californians into your home?

I stumbled on this via reddit/firearms, but David Codrea has a number of links as well.  Look at what the boys at reddit have dug up.

You can Google Darlene Hooley and see here love for gun control and the Brady Center’s love for her.  So how did this all come up you ask?

Here’s their reply to the kerfuffle.

Not good enough.  Traitors.

I don’t own any Benchmade knives, and never will.  There are too many good companies out there (Ka-Bar, CRKT, etc.) to give my money to traitors.

How about you?

So says the editorial board of the Seattle Times.

After their elections, county sheriffs take an oath to uphold the laws of the country, state and county — even when they disagree.

At least 13 county sheriffs have said they won’t enforce the state’s new gun law, Initiative 1639. They must reconsider, enforce the law as it is and find another, legal way to protest. Not to do so is to flout their oath and responsibility to citizens.

And, as Attorney General Bob Ferguson warns in a sharply worded letter, the sheriffs would be held liable in the case of a gun sale that could have been prevented by the new background checks and then someone uses that gun in a crime. These elected officials should be accountable for doing their jobs.

The courts will determine whether the wide-ranging new gun law is constitutional or not. It raises the age to 21 to buy semi-automatic rifles, requires enhanced background checks for those purchases and can hold gun owners responsible if their weapon was stored carelessly and is used in a crime.

The National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment Foundation are pursuing such a court decision with a lawsuit they filed in federal court. If the sheriffs — from Adams, Benton, Ferry, Franklin, Grant, Grays Harbor, Kittitas, Klickitat, Lincoln, Mason, Pacific, Stevens and Yakima counties — want to join that lawsuit, and their county ethics laws allow it, they could.

The sheriffs have not clarified what part of the law they plan not to enforce, with journalists who have asked. Gun stores could lose their licenses if they sell to someone under age, regardless of whether their county sheriff will look the other way.

Sheriffs and other law-enforcement officers are already doing the enhanced background checks for handgun purchases, so refusing to do so for semi-automatic rifles would be illogical. At least one sheriff, Franklin County Sheriff Jim Raymond, said he would follow the new rules concerning background checks and a 10-day waiting period. Their main responsibility under the new law is to check at least three state and federal databases for outstanding warrants and pending criminal charges.

“These enhanced background checks keep guns out of the hands of dangerous individuals who lawfully cannot own firearms because of a mental illness or criminal record,” Ferguson wrote in a letter to law enforcement.

The First Amendment protects the right of free speech for county sheriffs and all of us. They may continue to object to the law with their words. But their actions must stick to their oath of office, in which they promised to uphold the law of their county, state and country.

The sons and daughters of libertarian hippies so quickly morphed into statists, controllers and communists that you didn’t even notice.  Signs gave way to 中华人民共和国, and disdain for the politicians gave way to blind, unquestioning trust in senators and black robed tyrants, as long as they say everything is okay.

So here is their logic.  A law gets made, and as long as the judges say it’s okay (since they’re infallible), the Sheriffs must enforce it.  But the Sheriffs take an oath to the U.S. constitution too, whether they attended Yale or Emory law school or not.  And every man has a conscience, is accountable to God, and must do what he thinks is righteous without being a respecter of persons.  I’m left wondering how the Sheriffs feel about being considered monkeys who obey orders without thinking?

That gun control and confiscations preceded every genocide in recent history is irrelevant or unknown to these sophomores on the editorial board, and that mass shootings at the hands of state actors in “gun free” nations approaches 170 millions souls (death by government) matters not to these moral pygmies.

They could be betting that once the state declares such-and-such concerning guns, the hundreds of millions of gun owners in America will willingly comply.  They could be right about a large fraction of them.  I suspect that were AR-15s to be declared illegal except in the hands of LEOs, all but ten million people would comply.

And there are other less draconian edicts in the pipeline as well to catalyze death by a thousand cuts, from lockup requirements for your guns, to increased age before buying, waiting periods, red-flag confiscation laws (one potential red flag being that you believe the second amendment codified God-given rights to ameliorate tyranny), no more bequeathing of firearms in wills, etc., etc.  They have all the solutions.  They will tell you so.

But ten million.  Come up with your own number, folks.  Ten million, five million, fifteen million.  Or two million.  Recall at the absolute height of the war in Iraq (in which my son fought, so I know these things) that the Multinational Force estimated the total number of combatant insurgents to be approximately 20,000.  No more than 20,000 combatants in Iraq caused the torment you watched for a decade, and required saturation by several hundred thousand troops to quell, including 5000 U.S. deaths and around 50,000 more casualties.

Compare those numbers.  Two million (a very low estimate) versus 20,000.  And here is the thing to ponder.  The editorial board of the Seattle Times doesn’t care.  They don’t mind some shedding of blood, some violence, some brutality, because good communists never do.

It’s all the rage now, gun control at the state level, when many gun owners have been focused on federal gun laws.  First up, Arizona has already completed a major infringement and has it in its rear view mirror.

Nevada’s governor on Friday signed into law a bill expanding background checks to private gun sales and transfers, taking advantage of a Democrat-controlled Legislature to approve the first gun-related bill to cross his desk.

Lawmakers say the bill is a fix to a 2016 gun background check measure that was narrowly approved by voters. Former Gov. Brian Sandoval and former Attorney General Adam Laxalt, both Republicans, opposed the law and said it could not be implemented because it required the FBI to conduct the checks.

Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat who took office last month, signed the legislation shortly after Assembly Democrats easily passed the measure. The legislation fulfills a campaign promise of his to address firearm background checks. He described the legislation as “long overdue.”

The bill closes a loophole that allows gun buyers to avoid background checks by going through unlicensed gun sellers. Senate Majority Leader Kelvin Atkinson said the bill addresses an issue with the 2016 measure by allowing Nevada to conduct its own background checks.

All that is subterfuge.  It infringes God-given rights by making person-to-person sales illegal, plain and simple.  Next up, Tennessee.

HB1049/SB0943, also known as the “Families Know First Act,” would allow for an “Extreme Risk Protection Order” to be presented by police then issued by a court for those deemed a risk to themselves or others if in possession of a firearm(s).

Under the bill, a law enforcement officer or agency could seek an extreme risk protection order if based on an investigation police find the individual poses an “immediate and present danger of causing personal injury to the subject or to another by having in the subject’s custody or control, owning, purchasing, possessing, or receiving a firearm.”

[ … ]

If ordered, subjects would have to surrender firearms and ammunition to law enforcement for safekeeping or sell the firearms and ammunition to a licensed dealer.

Say, I’m sure “safe keeping” means that the firearms will be stored in a humidity controlled environment and will work just great when they are returned, which will be immediately when ordered?  And I’m sure that families know best means that no one will use this as a prank or simply because they’re pissed off to have property taken away from people, right?

Next up, even South Carolina.

Law enforcement across South Carolina may soon have the right to seize firearms and ammunition.

A bill filed at the State House provides law enforcement with tools to intervene if someone has mental health or substance abuse issues.

Probable cause must be established and presented to a judge before anything is seized.

The bill’s sponsor says he simply wants to provide officers with tools to keep people safe.

Say, I haven’t heard much about open carry in South Carolina.  Where does that stand?  Oh yea, nowhere.  We’re fighting the controllers on just about everything else, so South Carolina is one of only a handful of states, like California and New York, that don’t allow open carry.

What a sad state of affairs, but involvement in local and state politics is absolutely necessary.  The war for tyranny is first fought politically, and the controllers will only proceed to the next steps if they win the first skirmishes.

David Codrea:

“But if you don’t vote for them a Democrat will win, and they’ll be even worse!” we are warned. Hey, we wouldn’t be in this mess if people would have insisted on principles from the very beginning. And now we’re expected to believe our only way out is to continue enabling the enemies inside the gates?

Make sure to read the comments he’s getting too.  I wouldn’t say, with David, that these commenters are reading-challenged.  I’d say they’re idiots.  They are comprehension-challenged.

Voting for the lesser of two evils, rather than insisting on principles, has gotten us where we are today.

Fox News:

Democrats this week approved legislation to require background checks for essentially all sales and transfers of firearms — but rejected GOP-led efforts to amend the legislation to alert law enforcement authorities when gun buyers, including illegal immigrants, fail those background checks.

The House Judiciary Committee voted in favor of the bill 23-15, in a strict party-line vote, sending it to the House floor. If approved by the full House, the bill would be the most significant gun-control legislation approved by either chamber of Congress in at least a decade — although it stands little chance of passage in the Senate, where Republicans command a slim majority.

Republicans in the House charged that H.R. 8, known as “The Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019,” should have included Florida Rep. Greg Steube’s proposed amendment to require that law enforcement be notified “when an individual attempting to purchase a firearm fails a federal background check.” (H.R. 8 was numbered in honor of former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot in Arizona on Jan. 8, 2011 by a mentally ill gunman.)

“Clearly, the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee don’t care about preventing gun violence, they simply are playing politics with Americans’ Second Amendment rights,” Steube, a Republican, said after the vote. “The fact that Democrats do not want law enforcement notified if an individual attempting to purchase a firearm fails a background check is truly troubling.”

The democrats want universal background checks, just not if it means that illegals will be deported.  That’s the most important thing.

Troubling, however, is that it’s not clear whether this is a “poison pill” intended to be inserted by the republicans (which they should have known would be rejected), or a capitulation to the forces of gun control?

And what would Trump do if this bill was brought to him to sign?  We all know that the likes of Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn want universal background checks, and that Trump believes in virtually nothing.

Say, what are the chances that the politicians just kill the notion of background checks altogether as being an unrighteous, unconstitutional infringement on God-given rights?  Did anyone bring that up in the hearings?