Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

The Washington Free Beacon:

“He was an aggressive advocate, as attorney general, for gay marriage. He was an aggressive advocate demonstrating hostility to the First Amendment and political speech,” Cruz said in a committee meeting on Thursday. “Most significantly, he has been an aggressive advocate for undermining the Second Amendment.”

Cruz said he was particularly concerned by Bennett’s involvement with an amicus brief in the Heller case arguing that the Second Amendment was only intended to protect state militias from federal interference and should not apply to state laws. In Heller v. D.C., the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms. In McDonald v. Chicago, the Court explicitly rejected the argument made in the brief Bennett signed on to by extending its conclusions in Heller to the states.

And yet the Senate confirmed him with 23 republican votes.  It didn’t have to be this way.  Trump could have nominated someone else.  I know about precedent finding a judge within the Ninth Circuit area for a nominee, but what do you say to gun owners in California who feel already beaten up and thrown down?

Do you tell them that Trump looked out for their interests and protected their rights?

News from California.

Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a bill by Assemblyman Tom Lackey allowing retired law enforcement officials to openly carry firearms.

The new law, Assembly Bill 1192, gives retired peace officers permission to openly carry firearms with a high-capacity magazine.

With the previous passage of the Safety For All Act of 2016, it was against state law for any person to carry a high-capacity firearm as of July 2017. The new legislation redefines “honorably retired” to “include a retired reserve officer who has met specified length of service requirements,” according to the bill by Lackey, R-Palmdale.

I wonder whether there is a cop anywhere in America that I would actually consider to be a “peace officer” rather than a cop or LEO.

Under California Penal Code 26350 it is a crime to openly carry a firearm, even if it is unloaded.  They can openly carry because they are special and you aren’t.

Understand?

David Codrea:

Before judging him for that, consider the environment that is New Jersey. Then consider the overwhelming force the state can bring to bear, and its predisposition to using it, especially if it’s to enforce citizen disarmament. It’s easy to anonymously declare “Molon Labe” on the internet. In meatspace, resistance is more effective when the aggressor doesn’t get to dictate the time and place, especially if that place is your home and you have family inside.

Oh sure, I’ve got that.  I’m not sure if and when he’ll ever get them back, though, or how this ends.

Throwing down with a SWAT team in your front doorstep isn’t a good option.  When it comes to it, 4GW will be necessary to end this infringement.

In the mean time, I’m not sure why any thinking man would choose to live in New Jersey.  As for the cops, they are swine.  Every one of them who participated in this, and all of their colleagues back at the station since they allow this sort of thing to happen.

I guess that includes all of them since I folded in both the participants and the non-participants.

Chronicle:

At least four children have accidentally shot themselves in the Houston-area this year. All of those children were 6 years old or younger, and three of them died from their wounds. The most recent incident on Tuesday at a Hockley-area home left a 4-year-old boy in critical condition.

Young children generally don’t associate guns with death, and therefore, can’t be trusted anywhere near the weapon, Houston child psychologist Michelle Forrester said.

Forrester, who has been a licensed psychologist practicing in Texas since 1995, works with children under the age of 8. On the heels of two incidents in which Houston-area children accidentally shot themselves, Forrester opined that young children, including those who grew up with firearm education, shouldn’t even be in the same home as a gun.

[ … ]

But Forrester said young children are curious and apt to explore a home. In some instances, they might inadvertently break the combination to a lock box, she said.

They’ll apparently just hand a psychology degree to anybody these days I guess.  Perhaps she ought to take a course in probability and statistics.  She’d find another reason to hate guns, but at least she’d have to retool her argument and wouldn’t sound so ignorant and uneducated.

We’ve discussed nullification many times before, and this article shows the popularity of this concept, except without the teeth.

Last month, Effingham County, Illinois became a Second Amendment Sanctuary County. The proposal passed the County Board after eight members voted in favor of it. Only one was against, according to a USA Today report.

Last year, a similar proposal in Spokane Valley, WA was floated in the City Council. This comes as a response to the gun control proposals that many members of the U.S. Congress have made in recent years. Moreover, several states also passed firearm restrictions. Illinois and Washington are two of the most prominent ones.

Under said proposals, local law enforcement would ignore the new gun control policies. They would not arrest residents who don’t comply with the new state/federal firearm policies.

“It was a way of standing up for 2nd Amendment rights,” former Spokane Valley City Councilman Ed Pace told UnCut Report (UCR) in a recent interview. When Pace was in the City Council, he proposed making Spokane Valley, WA a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary City.

“If state and federal governments restrict constitutional rights, cities need to stand up for their residents and protect their rights,” Pace elaborated.

Oh bullshit.  What are you going to do with this symbolic action, and how are you going to “stand up for residents and protect their rights?”

What are you going to do, throw ATF agents in the state penitentiary when they come to arrest firearms owners?  Do the CLEOs side with you on this?  Does the governor side with you, and will the state police back you up?  Will you hang judges who hear cases on firearms owners who have broken federal laws?

Unless you answer those questions for me, this is a lot of hot air.

As seen on reddit, a layman’s explanation.

In 1934, rich people decided that they didn’t like poor people sneaking onto their land to hunt game, which was happening a lot because there was this economic thing called the “Great Depression” and poor people were “starving”.

So they called up a bunch of their pet congresscritters, and ordered a custom made law called the National Firearms Act of 1934.

This placed a $200 dollar tax on rifles with a barrel shorter than 16″ or an overall length less than 26″, shotguns with a barrel shorter than 18″ or an overall length less than 26″, and firearm sound suppressors of any kind. This ensured that those nasty poor people couldn’t afford guns which they might smuggle onto rich people’s land to hunt rich people’s deer, or suppressors that might prevent them from getting caught in the act.

Nowdays, $200 isn’t a whole lot of money, but the law is being exploited in a new way to restrict access. You see, this tax gets you a “tax stamp”, without which possession of the firearm is a felony. But the law doesn’t put any upper limit on the wait before the paperwork gets approved. So these papers are processed by one elderly guy named Frank, whose eyesight isn’t so good any more, and a typical application takes six months to two years to come back.

Naturally, modern folks who own guns aren’t too keen on this, but modern folks who hate guns have their pet congresscritters who are dead set against repealing any law that makes firearms ownership inconvenient, even if it makes no sense at all. Also, there is a whole three-letter agency devoted to enforcing this thing, and they don’t want to lose their jobs, so they have plenty of interesting and highly inventive arguments about how this is critical to the future of the nation, and how everyone died multiple times every week before 1934 because we didn’t have this.

So people looked into ways to do normal things while in compliance with the letter of the law.

So, the thing that looks like a stock on that thing that looks like a rifle is technically an arm brace, which makes that thing technically a pistol, which makes the National Firearms Act technically not apply to it. Now, you could say that this is a loophole which complies with the letter of the law while totally ignoring its spirit, but you could also say that the law has no spirit, and is nothing but a big technicality designed to f*** with people from the very beginning.

But however we got here, the fact remains that the thing in the photo is perfectly legal as it is, but with a slightly different stock it’ll get you a decade in the federal penitentiary.

This is why gun owners get kind of shirty about this kind of thing.

This is the same reason why some of the gun community – including the NRA – will never support repeal of the NFA, GCA and the Hughes Amendment.

Too many people have too much money invested in Class 3 weapons.  Suppose you spend $25,000 on a Class 3 weapon, or several of them, and someone comes along and tells you that your investment will tank in the near future and your guns will be worth no more than a used gun of that make and model within a single day.

Would you support it, looking at it only from the perspective of money?  The better question is what, other than a true commitment to the RKBA under God, would make you support it?

Wired:

25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin and uploaded the blueprints for the pistol to his website, Defcad.com.

He’d launched the site months earlier along with an anarchist video manifesto, declaring that gun control would never be the same in an era when anyone can download and print their own firearm with a few clicks. In the days after that first test-firing, his gun was downloaded more than 100,000 times. Wilson made the decision to go all in on the project, dropping out of law school at the University of Texas, as if to confirm his belief that technology supersedes law.

The law caught up. Less than a week later, Wilson received a letter from the US State Department demanding that he take down his printable-gun blueprints or face prosecution for violating federal export controls. Under an obscure set of US regulations known as the International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Wilson was accused of exporting weapons without a license, just as if he’d shipped his plastic gun to Mexico rather than put a digital version of it on the internet. He took Defcad.com offline, but his lawyer warned him that he still potentially faced millions of dollars in fines and years in prison simply for having made the file available to overseas downloaders for a few days. “I thought my life was over,” Wilson says.

Instead, Wilson has spent the last years on an unlikely project for an anarchist: Not simply defying or skirting the law but taking it to court and changing it. In doing so, he has now not only defeated a legal threat to his own highly controversial gunsmithing project. He may have also unlocked a new era of digital DIY gunmaking that further undermines gun control across the United States and the world—another step toward Wilson’s imagined future where anyone can make a deadly weapon at home with no government oversight.

Two months ago, the Department of Justice quietly offered Wilson a settlement to end a lawsuit he and a group of co-plaintiffs have pursued since 2015 against the United States government. Wilson and his team of lawyers focused their legal argument on a free speech claim: They pointed out that by forbidding Wilson from posting his 3-D-printable data, the State Department was not only violating his right to bear arms but his right to freely share information. By blurring the line between a gun and a digital file, Wilson had also successfully blurred the lines between the Second Amendment and the First.

“If code is speech, the constitutional contradictions are evident,” Wilson explained to WIRED when he first launched the lawsuit in 2015. “So what if this code is a gun?”

The Department of Justice’s surprising settlement, confirmed in court documents earlier this month, essentially surrenders to that argument. It promises to change the export control rules surrounding any firearm below .50 caliber—with a few exceptions like fully automatic weapons and rare gun designs that use caseless ammunition—and move their regulation to the Commerce Department, which won’t try to police technical data about the guns posted on the public internet. In the meantime, it gives Wilson a unique license to publish data about those weapons anywhere he chooses.

You can’t stop the signal, man.  The controllers can’t win.  It’s impossible.  It’s as impossible as FedGov winning a counterinsurgency campaign.

The DoJ decided to make peace.  Here’s a suggestion to the rest of the controllers: make peace.  You won’t like it very much if you don’t.

UTT:

The right to keep and bear arms exists with or without a U.S. Constitution and with or without a United States of America.  The right exists in nature and is, therefore, a right that exists for all humans.  If the right to defend and protect oneself exists, then we have the right to bear the tools to do so.

The Second Amendment does not GIVE us the right to bear arms, it PROTECTS it.

Marxists and Jihadis know the inalienable rights to self-defense and free expression are bedrocks of free Western societies, and that is why they attack it with such fervor.

Using the Islamic Law of Slander under the mask of “Islamophobia” jihadis have persuaded many Western leaders to shut down all expression which offends muslims.

This is, as the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood calls it, Civilization Jihad by OUR hands.

Now, Islamic leaders (aka “Jihadis”) are working with the help of their Marxist friends to disarm free people while arming themselves.

Case in point:  the jihadi Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is forcing Britons to surrender  even kitchen knives using the lie that he seeks to “protect” the community.  Meanwhile, stabbings in London continue to skyrocket because they are being perpetrated by muslims who are not surrendering their weapons, not even their kitchen knives.

Here in the United States, sources inside the muslim community tell UTT Muslim Brotherhood mosques and organizations are encouraging muslims to purchase firearms and join the NRA, while at the same time the jihadis’ Marxist collaborators are pushing to disarm Americans.

Using their seditious Marxists allies in the media, every domestic left-wing and jihadi attack – including those in Alexandria (VA), Las Vegas (NV) or Orlando (FL) – is used to demonize weapons and create momentum for anti-gun legislation, instead of highlighting the Marxists and jihadis actually doing the killing.

We’ve known this for quite some time, but John reminds us.  ISIS, for example, were gun controllers.

Any one of its members who breach this promise will have their hands cut off.

“No drugs, no alcohol and no cigarettes allowed,” it added.

No public gathering other than those organised by ISIS will be allowed at any stage. No guns will be allowed outside of its ranks.

With all due respect to John, I don’t like the expression that “The right exists in nature.”  Nature promises absolutely nothing to you, any more than it promises that the Wildebeest won’t perish by being eaten by Crocodiles as it crosses the rivers.  Nature doesn’t recognize rights.

Only God grants rights and responsibilities, and only God can take them away.  The state doesn’t exist to protect you or your family except from foreign invasion (a duty at which it has failed, and miserably so).  God has given that solemn duty to you.

It’s not surprising that Islamists are coupling with the NRA, as the NRA exists as the largest and most successful gun control organization in the world.  We have the Hughes amendment, the Gun Control Act of 1968, and the NFA because of the NRA.  Now we have the bump stock ban (a pretext for banning semiautomatic firearms in the future), and also at some point in the future we may have universal background checks.

You have enemies on all sides.  Some of them pretend to be your friends.  Only a doltish fool would disarm under such circumstances.

Insty:

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Further Protests as Venezuela Begins Running Out of Water.

“Locals have been protesting since 3 am due to lack of water on the Charallave-Ocumare highway, and are now requesting the presence of the media,” wrote onlooker Rocely Romero in Twitter.

The last major water shortage in Venezuela was in February 2016, when authorities announced a weekend “maintenance” session designed to maintain sufficient water levels during a period of drought. An estimated three million in Caracas consequently went without water, where the average temperature at that time of year is 68F.

The lack of clean water is the latest in a string mass shortages experienced in Venezuela under the rule of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.

That the world’s most oil-rich nation has to import crude oil, and that a semi-tropical country can run out of water, should tell you everything you need to know about socialism.

To the statists, they own even the water you drink.  And no, that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about socialism.

There are many more things to understand, but the most salient is this.

Until now, anyone with a gun permit could buy arms from a private company.

Under the new law, only the army, police and certain groups like security companies will be able to buy arms from the state-owned weapons manufacturer and importer.

In 2012.  But socialist militants get guns.  Crime is out of control, whether by mere people looking for the next morsel, or government thugs attempting to tamp down on the violence.

Again, gun confiscations and gun controls preceded everything else.  It is the framework in which statism is born and people are killed.

The common thread that runs through all of it is a rejection of the Almighty and replacement of His authority with wickedness.

David Codrea:

“(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law. . . [and] (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”

In other words, the law is what the UN or any of its despotic member regimes say it is–as is your “law-abiding” status. And, of course, there is no declaration that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Only God can take away what only God gives.  Rights are determined by the Almighty and no one else.  There is also this amusing article by Ted Bromund, The Ten Dumbest Things I Heard About Guns at The United Nations.

It’s tempting to dismiss them outright, but that’s a mistake.  No blue helmet is going to confiscate my weapons, but the U.N. is a problem to the extent that their views are used in America to foist gun controls, and that can happen in a myriad of ways.

But always remember: Only God can take away what only God gives.