Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

News from the bush country:

Since the 1990s, Alaska’s state constitution has said gun rights can be exercised by individuals. The Legislature has expanded gun rights over the years.

First, there was the “Castle Doctrine,” which allowed people to use deadly force to protect their homes. Then, a few years ago, the Legislature expanded that doctrine with a “Stand Your Ground” law, removing the requirement that an Alaskan had to retreat from a confrontation — if possible. Now an Alaskan can use deadly force for protection on the sidewalk or any place the person has a legal right to be.

But there’s also been a move in the Legislature to restrict gun rights for people undergoing temporary mental problems. That bill was sponsored by Rep. Geran Tarr, an Anchorage Democrat.

“I haven’t been called a Communist, but people certainly get pretty passionate about the Second Amendment,” Tarr said in a recent interview.

Well then, let me be the first.  Making laws that attempt to restrict rights before a crime has ever been committed is what communists do.

You are a communist.

I’m glad I could be the first.

Via WiscoDave, this unfortunate view:

A new magazine capacity restriction goes into effect today in New Jersey. The internet is on fire with cries of people, including many gun owners not in New Jersey, criticizing the law as unjust, unconstitutional, meaningless, unfair and worse. What is missing is much real practical advice for New Jersey Gun Owners. What should they do now? What should they do with magazines that have a capacity of over 10 rounds?

Unfortunately, while the law may eventually be found unjust and overturned, today it is the law. Second Amendment Organization is a staunch advocate of Gun Rights, but those rights are defined by our laws. We believe it is imperative that Responsible Gun Owners follow the law. In this case, that means the New Jersey Gun Owners should comply with the law… and fight it! Part of fighting it involved educating people about why these types of laws have little or no effect in regard to saving lives and why people might want or need large capacity magazines in the first place. 2AO is staunchly against magazine capacity restrictions, as stated in this set of Position Statements. Recommending that New Jersey residents comply with the law is not “compromise,” it is accepting the current reality.

Okay Rob, but what happens when it proves impossible to overturn that restriction?  Then what?  What do you answer to God when you’re incapable of properly defending your family because the criminals bust through your front door carrying standard capacity magazines while you have none?  It’s happened, you know.

This is the only amusing thing from this whole abomination.

Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said New Jersey’s newly implemented high capacity magazine ban endangers the lives of officers by also limiting their magazine size when they are off duty.

This week, Breitbart News reported that December 11, 2018, was the effective date for a New Jersey “high capacity” magazine ban that makes it a fourth-degree felony to possess a magazine holding more than ten rounds, even if that magazine was legally acquired.

Kerik is now tweeting a letter from the Bergen County prosecutor that says the ban also applies to off-duty officers …

Of course, he doesn’t answer how the ban can “endanger” the lives of cops while it has no affect on the more ordinary among us.  Nor does anyone say how they are going to enforce this ban.

Then there is also this.

We at 2AO would respect the intention and actions of anyone actually performing true civil disobedience. A group or individual heading to a gun range in New Jersey this afternoon with standard magazines of a capacity greater than 10 rounds and publicly, proudly and overtly using them as a public act of protest, for example. Obviously, those persons would be risking arrest but they would also obviously be following in the footsteps of other great Civil Rights Protesters. Sneakily keeping magazines with a capacity greater than 10 rounds in your home and hoping you never get caught is not Civil Disobedience, it’s just being a criminal.

I think Rob is tilting at windmills and [Sneakily] forcing a distinction without a difference.

David Codrea has thoughts as well.

Trib:

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto was joined by Gov. Tom Wolf, members of City Council and state Democratic lawmakers Friday in proposing legislation that would ban semiautomatic rifles and certain ammunition and firearms accessories within city limits.

Citing the 11 people killed in the Oct. 27 mass shooting at Squirrel Hill’s Tree of Life synagogue, Peduto said the ban is necessary to protect the safety and welfare of Pittsburgh residents. He vowed to build a coalition among municipalities and residents across the nation to fend off legal challenges from gun rights activists that are certain to come. Peduto said he’s written letters to more than 100 cities seeking support.

Who knows how this would go if appealed to the Supreme Court?  Consider Scalia’s idiotic words, “[the] American people have considered the handgun to be the quintessential self-defense weapon.”

I’ve said before that Scalia did America no favors by his ruling in Heller.

That sounds like a tautology, yes?

“From a licensed firearms dealer” is the crux. Anyone who believes a determined individual can’t obtain a firearm from other sources needs to explain recent headlines from Baltimore or Chicago.

The inescapable truth is anyone who can’t be trusted with a gun can’t be trusted without a custodian. There are plenty of other ways to mass kill. g

What are they going to do, certify folks buying fertilizer at Lowe’s or Home Despot?  Um … wait, I’d better not give them ideas.  It’s just something else for the controllers to control.

It just isn’t the right one.

Shareholder advocacy is nothing new for the Episcopal Church. With an investment portfolio worth about $400 million, the church has long used some of those investments to influence companies based on Christian principles and General Convention resolutions that set church policies and priorities.

What’s new is one of the investment tactics the church plans to implement in the new year to address gun violence.

General Convention passed a resolution in July that calls on Executive Council’s Committee on Corporate Social Responsibility to research investing in gun manufacturers to give the church a new voice in how those companies do business. The goal: “to minimize lethal and criminal uses of their products.”

“We’ve never purposely gone out and bought [shares in] what we’d consider a bad actor in order to press the company to change behavior,” said Brian Grieves, the outgoing chair of the committee, which oversees the church’s shareholder advocacy.

The resolution, B007, was proposed by Western Massachusetts Bishop Douglas Fisher, a member of Bishops United Against Gun Violence, who will take over for Grieves as committee chair in January. Fisher’s diocese is home to the headquarters of Smith & Wesson in Springfield, and in March he participated in a rally outside the gun manufacturer led by high school students in the wake of a deadly high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Fisher acknowledged a “sense of frustration” among anti-gun violence advocates in response to Congress’ inaction. “The federal government is doing nothing about the public health crisis of gun violence,” he said. “So where can the church engage this big issue?”

Here’s how.  Believe first in Jesus, that He is the only begotten Son of the living God, in His birth, death, burial and resurrection, His vicarious atonement, in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and the infallibility of His Word, and then you’re more likely to get your politics right.

Focus first on leading people to Christ, and then preach good doctrine.  But since you don’t really believe in anything any more, you’re nothing but a vapid, vacuous and boring social club, and no one listens to you or comes to your “services” any more.  So no one will listen to you on this either.

I understand that you’re just following the lead of your masters, but you’re small potatoes, dude.

Views from Ohio:

“If I have a gun and I shoot somebody, I should have to describe why I did that,” Kasich said in an interview.

He also expressed frustration that Ohio’s GOP-controlled Legislature would not pass a “red flag” law to allow relatives or police to ask a court to remove temporarily any guns from a person they fear might be a threat to themselves or others.

“There’s no ‘red flag’ law,” Kasich said. “I pleaded with them to put the ‘red flag’ law in there. They didn’t do it.”

Let me say in the clearest language possible: No, Kasich, a person is not required to testify against himself.  That’s a protection we’re guaranteed in the Fifth Amendment to the constitution.

That may be uncomfortable to you, but I don’t care because it’s a right of all citizens.  One very important reason for it is that it’s based on Biblical law, which requires two or more witnesses, independent of the accused, to convict a man for a crime. Coercion is unbiblical and immoral.

As for your red flag law, that’s an equally unconstitutional and immoral infringement upon the rights guaranteed under the constitution.

Via WiscoDave, as you knew would happen:

Mother Jones reports that Rep. Mike Thompson (D-CA) met with gun control groups that included the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety, the Center for American Progress, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Gabby Giffords’ group. He asked them what they wanted, and a bill to criminalize private gun sales was on their wish list.

So Thompson will sponsor legislation requiring a background check before someone may buy a gun from his neighbor, a co-worker to get a background check before buying a gun from a co-worker, and so forth. The bill will go so far as to require a son to get a background check before a father can give him a gun as a gift.

Expect it to pass the House, and I predict that enough GOP senators will go along for it to pass the senate.  I also predict that Trump will sign it into law, but we’ll have to see if it’s this specific bill or some other version of it that exempts gifts between family members (which he’ll call a win and trot out as his protection of gun owners, demanding gun owner votes in the next election cycle).

Reuters:

New Jersey may enforce a new law that lowered the number of bullets that guns can hold, a divided federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia upheld a lower court’s refusal to temporarily enjoin the law, which was passed in June and reduced maximum magazine capacity to 10 rounds from a 15-round limit adopted in 1990.

What?  You didn’t expect the black-robed tyrants to ensure your rights, did you?  And make sure to notice that this limit never applies to LEOs who do virtually as they please and are the most dangerous people on earth (via David Codrea).

According to Michael Harriot at The Root, police killed more Americans in 2017 (1,129) than military combat, terrorism, airplane crashes, mass shootings, and Chicago gang violence combined. Furthermore, of those 1,129 slain, most (718) were suspects in nonviolent offenses, stopped for traffic violations, or were found innocent of any crime whatsoever. The recent case of Jemel Roberson in suburban Chicago is one more reason to remove law enforcement from Swalwell’s exempt list.

Because gun control isn’t about controlling guns.  It’s about controlling you.

Not unexpected news from Florida:

Florida has joined a coalition of major pension funds and investment companies that have adopted a set of principles aimed at encouraging gun manufacturers and retailers to act responsibly.

Ash Williams, executive director of the State Board of Administration, which oversees the state pension fund and other investments, said the agreement carries no mandates for gun-related companies. But he said it is designed to raise awareness of issues that could impact the value of investments in the firearms industry.

“We’re not telling anybody, any private company, exactly what they should be doing. Our concern is motivated very simply by one thing, as fiduciaries anything that poses a risk to the value of the assets that we own on behalf of our beneficiaries, we want to make sure we’re managing it properly,” Williams said in an interview with The News Service of Florida.

“By extension, if there is a risk or peril to the stock value of a company that we own in our portfolio, we want to make sure that company is, A, aware of it and, B, attentive to it. That’s all this is,” he said.

In signing the “Principles for a Responsible Civilian Firearms Industry” last month, Florida joined more than a dozen public pension funds and investment companies that have adopted the document.

“We believe that enterprises involved in the manufacturing, distribution, sale and enforcement of regulations of the firearms industry are well-positioned to support pragmatic transparency and safety measures that contribute to the responsible use of firearms,” the document said.

Safety measures.  Like stop selling semi-automatic firearms, invest in so-called “smart guns,” and do anything else the collectivists want, like go out of business entirely.

All by plan.  The answer is simple.  If you’re a firearm manufacturer, ensure that your employees own a majority of the stock and tell the hand-wringers to go pound sand.

Elizabeth MacBride is doing just that.  Take a look.

“The firearms made by our member companies are designed to perform in austere and less-than-ideal conditions when lives are literally at stake,” wrote the NSSF spokesman. “To date, authorized-user technology developments have only introduced points of failure that could put the lives of lawful and authorized users at risk when they need those firearms to preserve lives.”

I asked iGun founder Jonathan Mossberg about how reliable the iGun is. He says the gun already passes military specification testing, including “a 3,000 round torture test including freezing and dropping.”

“We have already built a personalized firearm that is more reliable than most commercial firearms available,” he wrote.

Based on conversations with companies and engineers developing military weapons with chip technology, reliability is a valid worry – but it’s an existing worry for every gun. Weapons without chips or ID technology fail now (we don’t know how often, but they do).

“The market should decide which technology and which product to buy based on its merits as the market does now,” Mossberg said.

It’s important to note that in the gun community, where the belief in the singular defensive power of guns is common, a higher risk of a gun failing means a higher risk of dying in a confrontation.

This would be amusing if it wasn’t so sad.  Read it again if you must.

First of all, she said that the iGun founder “wrote.”  In other words, she sent him an email and he responded.  This is reporting, apparently.

Second, freezing and dropping has nothing at all to do with anything.  That she didn’t know how to press the issue with him is an indication that she shouldn’t have been writing this piece.

Third, she (or her sources) acknowledge that failure of the technology is a “valid worry,” but she dismisses that “worry” because a failure can happen anyway.  This shows absolutely no knowledge or understanding of anything mechanical or electronic.

The fact that a tire on an automobile can burst while driving and throw the automobile into a spin is no reason for sticking a nail in the tire.  The nail increases the probability of failure.

Let’s turn to the next bit of propaganda on smart guns, written within a few days by none other than Ms. Elizabeth MacBride.

There’s a revolution building in gun design, one with far-reaching implications in military and civilian weaponry, says one of Israel’s top tech investors.

“We believe that in less than 5 years every gun that will be produced will have a smart chip in it,” said Ron Zuckerman, a long-time executive, investor and angel whose list of successes includes co-founding Sapiens International Corp., which develops software for the insurance industry, serving as CEO of Brazilian telecom GVT and as co-founder of influential Israeli venture funds, including Magma. Now a California-based angel, he is an investor in many tech startups.

One of those is a small tech company, Secubit, that is focused on one of the hottest areas in the gun world: tech-enabled weapons. Zuckerman estimates there is a $50 billion market for high-tech guns, including military, law enforcement and civilian. The company’s first market is the military, where there is a growing interest in tech-enabled weapons as war becomes more distant and mechanized.

Yea, there’s “growing interest” in smart guns in the military, just as in law enforcement.  Right.  That she would publish shit like this is embarrassing.  To her.

So in case readers have forgotten it, my bet is still on the table.

I am a registered professional engineer, and I spend all day analyzing things and performing calculations.  Let’s not speak in broad generalities and murky platitudes (such as “good enough”).  That doesn’t work with me.  By education, training and experience, I reject such things out of hand.  Perform a fault tree analysis of smart guns.  Use highly respected guidance like the NRC fault tree handbook.

Assess the reliability of one of my semi-automatic handguns as the first state point, and then add smart gun technology to it, and assess it again.  Compare the state points.  Then do that again with a revolver.  Be honest.  Assign a failure probability of greater than zero (0) to the smart technology, because you know that each additional electronic and mechanical component has a failure probability of greater than zero.

Get a PE to seal the work to demonstrate thorough and independent review.  If you can prove that so-called “smart guns” are as reliable as my guns, I’ll pour ketchup on my hard hat, eat it, and post video for everyone to see.  If you lose, you buy me the gun of my choice.  No one will take the challenge because you will lose that challenge.  I’ll win.  Case closed.  End of discussion.

Ms. MacBride?  Questions?