Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

Via David Codrea, this dreadful statement.

“Nobody wants dangerous people to have access to firearms, which is why the NRA supports risk protection orders with adequate due process protections and ensure those adjudicated to be dangerously mentally ill receive treatment,” Jennifer Baker, a spokesperson for the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, said. “The NRA believes that any effort should be structured to fully protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens while preventing truly dangerous individuals from accessing firearms. We will only support an [Emergency Risk Protection Order] process that strongly protects both Second Amendment rights and due process rights at the same time.”

Echoing Mack’s comments, why would bearing arms be a deterrent if folks didn’t think I was dangerous?

The NRA: the most well-funded, well-connected, effective, best-resourced gun control organization on the planet.

Seattle Times:

County sheriffs who say they won’t enforce Washington’s new, stricter gun laws could be held liable if they refuse to perform enhanced background checks and someone who shouldn’t buy a gun is able to buy one and uses it in a crime, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said on Tuesday.

In an open letter to law enforcement, Ferguson wrote that he was confident the wide-ranging law was constitutional and would withstand court challenges, but that he was concerned about threats — mostly from county sheriffs — to not enforce the new law.

At least 13 county sheriffs have said they won’t enforce the law, Initiative 1639, which voters passed by a wide margin in November.

Are you going to let him talk to you like that?  Oh … probably so.

It is unclear how many of the sheriffs and police chiefs who have vowed not to enforce the law planned to not conduct the background checks.

For instance, Franklin County Sheriff Jim Raymond called the law unconstitutional and said he wouldn’t enforce it, but said he supported the 10-day waiting period and the enhanced background checks.

“Certainly we’re going to follow all of those type of things,” Raymond said.

If other sheriffs do not, however, Ferguson said they could be held liable if a gun sale that would have been prevented by the new background checks goes through and then someone uses that gun in a crime.

“The taxpayers of your city or county assume the financial risk of your decision to impose your personal views over the law,” he wrote.

Take note that surviving a challenge doesn’t mean that the law is constitutional, it just means that some tyrant, or gaggle of tyrants, lets it go.

So that’s the plan, just as I have said all along.  They will come after your money, your licenses, your reputation, your job, and your ability to do business.

In this case, he’s bullying the citizens of those respective counties to force compliance with the law by the Sheriffs out of fear of financial liability.

It’s almost as if they want to fight, or something.

Via WoG, this:

A retired Army veteran looking to comply with state law is now fighting to keep a family heirloom from getting scrapped.

The Buffalo News reports that Andrew Ciepiela, 46, recently tried to register an old Iver Johnson revolver that has been handed down through three generations. That’s when the Erie County Pistol Permit Department told him the gun, made in 1917, was last registered in the 1950s by a sexagenarian and, as a “nuisance” firearm, it could not be registered to him, clearing the way for local police to destroy it.

“I wasn’t expecting any issue. It took me by great surprise,” said Ciepiela, who saw the matter as a case of “big government stomping on the little guy.”

That’s what happens when the government becomes the big bully on the block.  I’m sure they cried a river of tears over the family’s loss.

Speaking of nuisance, who’s the real one here?  Who else will be stupid enough to try to comply with onerous rules that destroy family property for no good reason?

David Codrea:

Evidently, edicts to deprive people who obey laws of due process are high on the list, although what bearing that has on the Dycus case is left unstated. That and “universal background checks.”

No doubt the reptile who fired indiscriminately into a house full of unsupervised “juveniles” would have thought twice had those been in effect. No?

The point of new gun control laws in America is never to solve any problems.  It’s always to disarm peaceable men and women of their means of self defense and make them more subservient to state control.

NY Daily News:

The Texas gun store that sold the assault rifle used in the 2017 Sutherland Springs church massacre lost its bid Monday to have a lawsuit over the sale dismissed.

Well then.  By that same logic, I fully expect we’ll see victims of automobile accidents suing Ford and Dodge very soon, right?  Shouldn’t we expect to see that?

It’s everywhere, including Maine:

AUGUSTA, Maine — Former Portland police Chief Michael Sauschuck’s nomination for Maine public safety commissioner advanced past a legislative panel along party lines on Friday despite support for gun control policies that became the main focus of an hourslong hearing.

The nomination of Sauschuck, 48, of Windham, a Marine veteran who served for more than 20 years for Portland’s department before taking a city administrative job last year, has never been in danger, but he quickly emerged as by far Gov. Janet Mills’ most controversial Cabinet pick.

That became clear during an almost-six hour confirmation hearing before the Legislature’s public safety committee, when people from all over Maine testified that Sauschuck posed a threat to Second Amendment rights. More than 100 people signed up to testify on the nomination, including more than 60 opponents who hit solely on guns.

While in charge of police in Maine’s largest and most liberal city, Sauschuck was a prominent progressive voice in the state’s traditionally restrained law enforcement community, publicly campaigning for gun control policies and establishing a diversion program for drug users.

Prior to the hearing, an estimated 200 gun-rights supporters turned out for a State House rally. Gun-rights groups including the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of Maine and the Free Maine Campaign implored their supporters to oppose Sauschuck.

Sauschuck advocated for an unsuccessful 2016 referendum that would have expanded background checks to private gun sales that lost because of wide opposition in rural Maine. He opposed a 2015 change that nixed Maine’s concealed handgun permit requirement and has backed gun magazine limits.

In his testimony, Sauschuck highlighted his work in Portland in establishing procedures to provide peer support to officers and dealing with people who have mental illnesses.

He was firm when lawmakers asked about his stances on guns, giving gun-rights Republicans few reasons to vote for him while saying both that he was serving constituents and his department by speaking out on gun issues.

“That’s not to say that in a position that deals with statewide issues and statewide agencies that you don’t have the ability and the opportunity to work with other people and to learn their perspective and to deal with those kind of things,” he said.

A key argument made in support of Sauschuck was that his department will largely enforce Maine laws, which only legislators can change. Darrell Crandall, a former Aroostook County sheriff who is now a commander for the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency in northern Maine and opposed the 2016 referendum, said he trusted Sauschuck “to follow the laws as they exist.”

But Franklin County Sheriff Scott Nichols, who was one of three Republican sheriffs to oppose Sauschuck and also was a vocal referendum opponent, said “any leader” listens to their lieutenants and “their opinions matter when it comes to making policy.”

“She could have chosen a lot of people out there that were very well-qualified that don’t have the baggage,” he said of Mills.

Mills’ record in Augusta is mixed on guns. As a legislator in the first decade of the 2000s, she received A ratings from the National Rifle Association — which led to attacks on her from the left during her 2018 primary. She backed many gun control measures, including expanded background checks. As attorney general, Mills helped craft a proposed “red flag” law in 2018 that would have allowed guns to be seized from people deemed dangerous by a court.

She nominated a controller for the position because she’s a controller.  He believes in permitting a constitutional right, standard capacity magazine limits, and universal background checks, and he’s unrepentant about it.  That’s fine with me, as I don’t want candidates to get in front of people and lie.  I also don’t mind his drug user diversion program.

But I do mind his gun control, and I think he should be ashamed to have worn the USMC uniform.  They say there are no ex-Marines, only former Marines.

Folks, Michael Sauschuck is an ex-Marine, a blight on the other good people who were in the military with him, and a traitor to his oath.

Star-Telegram:

House Speaker Dennis Bonnen wants to make one thing perfectly clear.

Gun rights are safe and sound this session, despite some grumbling from grassroots activists.

“I’ll bet my critics an AR-15 that their gun rights won’t be infringed,” he posted recently on Facebook.

This comes after some Texans began criticizing the Angleton Republican for “betraying” efforts to pass more legislation.

“For the first time in decades, a Speaker has appointed anti-gun Democrats to chair the two most important House Committees for Texas gun owners,” according to an article by The Texas Firearms Coalition.

At issue: state Rep. Poncho Nevarez, D-Eagle Pass, who was named to head the Homeland Security & Public Safety Committee, and state Rep. Nicole Collier, D-Fort Worth, who was appointed to head the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee.

“It has come to my attention that a small handful of gun rights fringe groups have called my leadership into question. Let me set the record straight,” Bonnen wrote on Facebook. “For 22 years I have been an advocate for Texan’s 2nd Amendment Rights.

“I have not wavered at any point.”

Collier received an F rating last year from the National Riffle Association.

“I’m here to promote the legislative process,” she said Tuesday. “Speaker Bonnen has set the tone for the new session and has expressed his trust and confidence in his colleagues in the House.”

Nevarez received a D rating from the NRA.

In 2015, Nevarez became the center of media attention after open carry supporters had a heated exchange with him.

Kory Watkins, then a spokesman for Tarrant County Open Carry, posted a video online that showed open carry advocates being aggressive with Nevarez, telling him he “won’t be here very long, bro,” because he didn’t support open carry.

The House soon approved new rules letting lawmakers put panic buttons in their offices that would summon Texas Department of Public Safety troopers if they needed to remove people from their offices.

The fear this session is that anti-gun bills in the House will get hearings but “pro-gun bills either will not get a hearing or won’t get a committee vote in time to reach the House floor for debate and voting,” the Firearms Coalition article stated.

It went on to encourage Texas gun owners to reach out to top Texas Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, to weigh in on “Bonnen’s betrayal.”

“The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make the political price of betrayal so high that no elected official can afford it,” according to the article.

Bonnen responded to the concerns on social media. He said his committee appointments “represent diverse views — just as any well functioning democracy should.”

But he said he also named a majority of pro-gun members to committees that will consider gun legislation.

“The fact that some fringe groups can’t count to 5 for a 9 member committee is really not my problem,” he wrote.

And he believes committee chairs will “allow reasonable bills which reflect the values of Texans” to make their way through the session.

“I have not wavered at any point.”  I agree.  You appointed full-on communists to posts of importance.  There was no vacillation with you.

The notion that the Texas Firearms Coalition is a “fringe” group is patently absurd, and I predict he’ll pay a steep price for his treasonous behavior.

By saying that “reasonable bills” will make their way through session he means that the committees will hear them, stall, vote a split decision too late to do anything about them in the once every two years meeting of the Texas Legislature, and then can the whole idea if it doesn’t do homage to state control over gun rights.  And then he’ll make excuses for the committees about the wording being wrong, or LEOs opposing the bills because of “public safety,” or some such bullshit.

Watch and see if I’m wrong about this.  You can tell him what you think about all of this at the following email address: dennis.bonnen@house.texas.gov.

News from Representative Chris Lee of Hawaii.

“The open carry states are ones where everybody gets shot so I think we have a very good record in Hawai’i for gun safety protection and and the fourth lowest gun violence in any state in the union.  It’s a combination of things but one of most important parts of it is that we have strict gun laws.”

Representative Lee says it could be years before the Young case is settled but the top priority for Hawai’i lawmakers is public safety.

“I’ve owned guns in the past; I don’t today but we have an obligation on our part in Hawai’i to make sure that we have the adequate legal protections in place to make sure that it’s not gonna be the wild, wild west …

Drama queen much, Ms. Lee?

From the comments, “The open carry states are ones where everybody gets shot.” Oh yeah, Vermont is a really dangerous state.

Texas too, huh?  Blood in the streets, it is.  Everybody is getting shot.  Everybody.  Because open carry, that’s why.  Everybody.

No exaggeration.  Everybody.  From open carry.

The Guardian:

In Washington state, a freshly implemented ballot initiative and a raft of new bills may produce some of the tightest firearms regulations in the US. But standing in the way is a group of rural law enforcement officers who say point blank that they won’t enforce any of it.

The Klickitat county sheriff, Bob Songer, is one of them. He told the Guardian that the initiative passed last November “is unconstitutional on several grounds. I’ve taken the position that as an elected official, I am not going to enforce that law”.

Songer also cited ongoing litigation by the National Rife Association gun industry lobby and others which aims to demonstrate the laws violate both the second amendment and the state’s constitution. He also said that if other agencies attempted to seize weapons from county residents under the auspices of the new laws, he would consider preventively “standing in their doorway”.

In November, the state’s voters handily passed an initiative, I-1639, which mostly targeted semi-automatic rifles. As of 1 January, purchasers of these weapons must now be over 21, undergo an enhanced background check, must have completed a safety course, and need to wait 9 days to take possession of their weapon. Also, gun owners who fail to store their weapons safely risk felony “community endangerment” charges.

Feeling the wind at their backs after the ballot, gun campaigners and liberal legislators have now gone even further in the new legislative session. Bills introduced in the last week to Washington’s Democrat-dominated legislature look to further restrict firearms. Some laws would ban high capacity magazines and plastic guns made with 3D printers. Others would mandate training for concealed carry permits, and remove guns and ammo during and after domestic violence incidents.

Washington’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, who proposed several of the bills, said in an email: “Now is the time to act. Washingtonians have made it clear that they support common-sense gun safety reforms.”

Kristen Ellingboe, from Washington’s Alliance for Gun Safety, which has long campaigned for more firearms restrictions, said that “for a long time our elected officials thought that gun violence protection was somehow controversial, but they have been behind where the people of Washington are on this issue”.

But like other west coast states, Washington exhibits a deep cultural and political divide between its populous, coastal cities and its more sparsely populated rural hinterland.

I-1639 passed on a roughly 60-40 split; in the big, blue counties west of the Cascade Mountains, such as King county, where Seattle is located, the margins were even bigger.

However, 27 of Washington’s 39 counties rejected the ballot measure. Many of those counties are in the state’s more rural, sparsely populated districts.

It is in these counties that many – including sworn officers – are promising to resist the laws.

In Ferry county in eastern Washington, more than 72% of voters rejected I-1639. In the county’s only incorporated city, Republic, the police chief Loren Culp asked the council in November to declare the city a “second amendment sanctuary”. That vote has been delayed until March, but in the meantime, like Songer, Culp says he will not enforce.

The sheriff in Ferry county, Ray Maycumber, told the Guardian that he would not be enforcing the laws either, at least until the NRA’s litigation is completed.

“There’s a window of time when I get to make the assessment”, he said. Should the NRA not succeed, he said, he would “consider if I want to go on in the job”.

The “sanctuary” idea has caught on with other rightwing activists. Matt Marshall is the leader of the Washington Three Percent, a patriot movement group which has held several open carry rallies in downtown Seattle in the last year.

Marshall is attempting to persuade rural Washington counties to adopt local second amendment sanctuary ordinances. Next week, together with the Patriot Prayer founder and former Senate candidate Joey Gibson, he is addressing a meeting of Lewis and Pierce counties to try to persuade them to adopt resolutions which would mean that the gun laws were not enforced.

The refusal of law enforcement officers to enforce the new restrictions plays into a longer history of so-called “constitutional” sheriffs resisting the gradual tightening of gun laws. There are also hints, in the stance, of the doctrine of “county supremacy”, long nursed on the constitutionalist far right, which holds that county sheriffs are the highest constitutional authority in the country.

Oh no.  Please, not more of the nullification crap that’s never going to happen?  I don’t really care if there are Sheriffs who refuse to enforce these laws.

Here is my question for those Sheriffs: “When hard times come, and the state police, or the ATF, or some other agency, comes to enforce those unconstitutional laws, will you then use the power of your office to arrest those trying to enforce the laws and throw them in jail?”

Actually, I have two other pragmatic and related questions.  “Do your direct reports all support you in this project?”  And “Do you have an understanding with the local judges to keep them in prison so that your project doesn’t get scuttled on the legal system?”

Tell me those things, and then I’ll make up my mind on your project.

WSJ:

Dustin Coleman has bought a booth at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention for his shooting accessories company for the past three years.

But last month, he canceled his reservation and donated the $1,400 rental fee to a rival group, the Firearms Policy Coalition. His reason: The NRA, the nation’s leading Second Amendment group with 5.5 million members, is no longer pro-gun enough.

It’s their own fault.    It doesn’t matter if there was “overwhelming legislative support for proposals that went far beyond these specific devices,” and there is still no evidence to this day that bump stocks were used in the Las Vegas shooting.  I defy the authors to produce it.  A picture proves nothing at all, and given that the ATF was never allowed to examine the firearms by the FBI, I doubt anything the FBI has to say about the incident.  This is one of the reasons I recommended that independent analysts be contracted to examine the firearms and crime scene.

The NRA could have thrown their weight around, threatened to score every vote, pour money into reelection campaigns coming up, and expose every politician for their work behind the scenes.  Or in other words, the NRA could have done their jobs.

Instead, Trump did it for them in an end run around the constitution.  That tells me that the politicians were scared.  Good.  They should have been, and we should have queued this up for them to deal with in order to expose them.  The NRA gave Trump cover to keep the politicians covert.

I don’t want to hear any excuses.  I consider all of them completely unacceptable.

Is the NRA in trouble with its base?  That depends.  The Fudds will always defend the NRA – right up until their bolt action hunting rifles and shotguns are confiscated and taken down to the local armory for “safe keeping.”  Or in other words, right up until their own Ox gets gored.