Archive for the 'Guns' Category

Nonprofit Quarterly recently carried a commentary on Lindsey Graham and his comments on AR-15s that took a detour into the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  Rick Cohen’s thoughts make for interesting reading.

Our impression of American behavior during disasters has been that people generally pull together, that adversity brings out the best in us. Sure, we know that people do very bad things, but the press often notes how people also go out of their way to help and protect their neighbors. In fact, that feeling of mutuality was what we thought undergirded the nonprofit sector in a democratic society.

It must be that we fell for some Panglossian view of America, if we are to believe Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, Graham grilled Attorney General Eric Holder about the proposed ban on assault weapons. We haven’t seen the news reports that verify what Graham says happened—or sort of happened—to spark his support for carrying around military-style assault weapons:

“Can you imagine a circumstance where an AR-15 would be a better defense tool than, say, a double-barrel shotgun? Let me give you an example, that you have (sic) an lawless environment, where you have an natural disaster or some catastrophic event — and those things unfortunately do happen, and law and order breaks down because the police can’t travel, there’s no communication. And there are armed gangs roaming around neighborhoods. Can you imagine a situation where your home happens to be in the crosshairs of this group that a better self-defense weapon may be a semiautomatic AR-15 vs. a double-barrel shotgun?

I’m afraid that world does exist. It existed in New Orleans, to some extent up in Long Island [after Hurricane Sandy], it could exist tomorrow if there’s a cyber attack against [the] country and the power grid goes down and the dams are released and chemical plants are — discharges.

What I’m saying is if my family was in the crosshairs of gangs that were roaming around neighborhoods in New Orleans or any other location, the deterrent effect of an AR-15 to protect my family, I think, is greater than a double-barrel shotgun.”

As far as we can tell, Graham must be referencing a gang of white vigilantes in New Orleans’ Algiers Point neighborhood who, armed with shotguns and assault weapons, allegedly opened fire on African Americans “with impunity” after Hurricane Katrina; the militia was reportedly on the lookout for anyone who “didn’t belong” in the neighborhood, as reported by ProPublica and The Nation. If so, maybe Graham’s fears would have more of a basis in reality if he looked a little more like Holder and was facing a white militia armed with AR-15s.

It is in vogue to tell this revisionist history of Katrina.  We’ll deal with this shortly, but before we do that and in order to set the stage for our response, we will now be the ones to take a detour into another crisis to watch how a nation behaved.  We’ll address AR-15s, catastrophies and totalitarian governments, but for now let’s briefly revisit the fall of the Berlin wall, the role of one church, and the actions of the East Gernam Army.

OathKeepers has an interview with Lt. Colonel Gunter Spens, in which he describes the fact that the East German Army simply refused to obey orders to stop the protests at the wall and stayed on base.   True enough for part of the story, and as much as I admire Oath Keepers, it isn’t as simple as this and there is more to the story.  This is the church that brought down the wall.

In the GDR, atheism was the norm. Churches like St. Nikolai were spied on but allowed to remain open.

“In the GDR, the church provided the only free space,” Fuhrer said in an interview with Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. “Everything that could not be discussed in public could be discussed in church, and in this way the church represented a unique spiritual and physical space in which people were free.”

In the early 1980s, Fuhrer began holding weekly prayers for peace.

Every Monday, worshippers recited the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. Few came at first, but attendance grew as the Soviet Union began opening to the West.

The prayer service, Fuhrer said, “was something very special in East Germany. Here a critical mass grew under the roof of the church — young people, Christians and non-Christians, and later, those who wanted to leave (East Germany) joined us and sought refuge here.”

As a college student in those years, Sylke Schumann was one of the hundreds, then thousands, who joined the vigils in the sanctuary at St. Nikolai and then marched in the streets holding candles and calling for change.

“Seeing all these people gather in this place … from week to week and more and more people gathering, you had the feeling this time really the government had to listen to you,” Schumann said.

In October 1989, on the 40th anniversary of the GDR, the government cracked down.

Protesters in Leipzig were beaten and arrested. Two days later, St. Nikolai Church was full to overflowing for the weekly vigil. When it was over, 70,000 people marched through the city as armed soldiers looked on, but did nothing.

And even this report doesn’t tell the whole story.  I was a member of a church during this time that received regular (underground) reports from East German churches about the events of that era.  When society has rejected God and embraced totalitarianism, the men can become lovers of power or drunkards and whore chasers.   Not all men do, but many succumb to this fate.

But oftentimes the women – mothers and grandmothers who want their children to be raised with a sense of morality and the knowledge of God – toe the line.  Secretly they teach their children.  Their children learn to love their mothers and the instruction, and like ticking time bombs that explode later in life, that instruction proves determinative.

And toe the line the women did.  The crowds were heavily populated with mothers and grandmothers, and the boys who populated the East German Army remembered their instruction.  They wouldn’t discharge their weapons at their own blood, and whether it was the instruction in underground churches or the simple fact that the boys wouldn’t kill their mothers or mothers of colleagues, no rounds were fired.  It had little to do with orders to stay in garrison.  If the East German Army had deployed (as some of them did), they would simply have watched as the wall fell without a shot.

Now, let’s return to the issue of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina.  Except for the horrible racist, Aryan gangs who abused the black folk, it was a veritable Shangri La indeed.  Except for the white folk everyone would have gotten along just swimmingly.  White Aryan gangs in the middle of New Orleans.  You simply can’t make this up.

Except that this isn’t reality.  Revisionist doesn’t even begin to describe that view.  That view is an outright fabrication and falsehood.  A more accurate and honest accounting shows how rough the time was.

In the City of Vultures, a New Zealander is one of the few remaining police officers who has stayed behind to protect the helpless.

James Gourlie, 30, formerly of Christchurch, is one of six officers who have remained out of a district force of 200.

“This is my district. I will not abandon my district, my county, my workmates or these people,” he told the Herald On Sunday last night.

Mr Gourlie was speaking while preparing for another night patrol from the Hampton Inn, which he and fellow officers took over after their police station was overrun. For its single entrance, and the war zone outside, they have dubbed the hotel “The Fortress”.

It’s been six days and five nights of lawlessness since Hurricane Katrina hit. In the vacuum left by Katrina, anarchy has reigned. Human vultures have preyed on the helpless, pillaging homes and shops, committing murder and rape.

The decision to stay while hundreds of fellow officers fled has left them bitter. Mr Gourlie returned after getting his American wife Jennifer out of New Orleans.

When one fellow officer and friend pulled out for Texas on Friday, taking two automatic rifles and a shotgun, he earned his colleagues’ anger.

“They’re preserving their lives but they’re risking their friends,” said Mr Gourlie, of the “cowards” who have left. “You know what the New Zealand and Australian way is – and that ain’t the Anzac way. You sacrifice yourself for your mates.”

There are incidents every day involving weapons, although Mr Gourlie is thankful he has not yet had to shoot anyone. The times the officers have intervened, those desperate for help have wept and offered thanks.

A fellow officer was killed after warning looters away from a store. A looter pushed a gun against his head and pulled the trigger. “It was heartbreaking to see this police officer lying on his back, blood pouring out of his head.”

There are gangs of armed thugs in the convention centre. One young hood the officers pulled up was carrying a civilian version of a military M-16 rifle.

“There’s shooting. The thugs inside, they have come outside. They are running up and down, disturbing people with impunity. They know we can’t cross the road and engage them because we don’t know where their cohorts are. We are so vastly outnumbered, especially at night,” said Mr Gourlie.

There has also been murder and rape. In one awful case, a 15-year-old girl had suffered both, her body stuffed into an oven with her throat slit.

“I would expect something like this in a war zone in the Middle East. You’d be stupid not to be afraid. It’s how you face it that counts.”

The gangs in the centre have now destroyed the generators, and last night was the first Katrina’s survivors have spent without light. “That’s one of the reasons why people are so afraid today.”

I am certainly no admirer of Lindsey Graham.  His criticism of Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul over their filibuster was petulant, and his friendship with John McCain shows that he wants to stay in power rather than hold government accountable.  But from the mouth of the unexpected sometimes comes wisdom, even if by accident.

Unfortunately like the author says, Ameica is indeed like this concerning violence and danger, even if his intended target – white gangs – is a fabrication of his imagination.  And during this period of peril for the citizens of New Orleans did the National Guard keep order?  No, to their everlasting shame they spent their time confiscating weapons from law abiding citizens.

And yet, the National Guard had no evidence that New Orleans wouldn’t devolve into something like the L.A. riots, leaving people helpless and defenseless.

America as we have know it is dead.  It is no more.  The cities are violent and the government totalitarian.  America is more bifurcated than it has ever been in history.  Ninety million people are out of the labor force, and something approaching half of America pays no income tax.  Keynesian economics has failed like a star burning out.  The first medium size city has gone bankrupt, taking with it nearly one billion dollars in pensions for state workers.  Note that this doesn’t include Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment payments, welfare, social security or any other federal program.  One billion dollars – just on state pensions, just with one medium size city.

While the states are going down, the federal government is working hard at making itself more totalitarian than before.

The ATF doesn’t just want a huge database to reveal everything about you with a few keywords. It wants one that can find out who you know. And it won’t even try to friend you on Facebook first.

According to a recent solicitation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the bureau is looking to buy a “massive online data repository system” for its Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information (OSII). The system is intended to operate for at least five years, and be able to process automated searches of individuals, and “find connection points between two or more individuals” by linking together “structured and unstructured data.”

Primarily, the ATF states it wants the database to speed-up criminal investigations. Instead of requiring an analyst to manually search around for your personal information, the database should “obtain exact matches from partial source data searches” such as social security numbers (or even just a fragment of one), vehicle serial codes, age range, “phonetic name spelling,” or a general area where your address is located. Input that data, and out comes your identity, while the computer automatically establishes connections you have with others.

Many other specific requirements are also to be expected for a federal law enforcement agency: searching names, phone numbers, “nationwide utility data” and reverse phone searches. The data will then be collected to help out during investigations and provide “relevant information and intelligence products.”

To do this and similar things they are spending the wealth of your children and children’s children.  Ben Bernanke is trying ever so hard to keep hyperinflation under control and interest rates low in order to keep the deficit from exploding, but sooner or later America’s unfunded liabilities will come due and no amount fiat money will suffice.  Fractional reserve banking will prove to people when hard times hit that their money doesn’t exist and cannot be withdrawn from their accounts.  It’s just a waiting game, because the system cannot be saved.

The American experiment – subtended by wealth redistribution, race baiting, totalitarianism and the creation of taker class that leeches off of workers – is over.  It has been replaced by Fabian socialism.  But all is not lost.  America will be reborn in a different form.  Hard times are approaching, and there are some salient and hard questions that are a function of those hard times.

Will police, soldiers and Marines raise their weapons against American civilians?  The Louisiana National Guard did.  To each and every officer, soldier and Marine I tell you, you’d better not.  God will condemn you for it.  Your orders must be legal and moral to require your fealty, and notwithstanding the [il]legality of such an order, it would be immoral.  Will you confiscate weapons if so ordered?  You’d better not – God will condemn you for it.  Each man lives his appointed days, and then he will face judgment.  Do not face God having removed means of legitimate protection of the family.  And do not face God having been the stooge for a tyrant.  It matters little how long you live.  It matters much how you live, and how you perish.

To parents, you must teach your children and instill in them a reverence for and love of liberty.  Even for the old among us, you may very well end up training the very men who would otherwise be your tyrants, but who will remember their upbringing instead.  Mothers and grandmothers, you essentially saved the day in East Germany.  Don’t underestimate your role.  Teaching the children is the most important job on earth.

Men, don’t be naive.  God apparently granted a special dispensation to East Germany for a bloodless coup.  It won’t happen that way anywhere else.  The National Guard in many states has already shown that they will assist totalitarianism.  The race riots in Los Angeles were nothing compared to what it will be like in the event of an economic collapse in America.

Teach the children.  Defend the family.  It isn’t just a right, it’s your God-given duty.  And never, ever relinquish your weapons.  That would be as immoral as the actions of totalitarians in confiscation.  You shall not cooperate with the totalitarians and be approved by God.  Never give up.  God is on your side.

As I had hoped, Beretta isn’t full of windbags and liars.  They are honest folk.  They said they would leave Maryland, and they are.

New legislation is forcing gun manufacturing company Beretta to uproot and take their business elsewhere.

Established in 1526, Beretta holds the distinction of being the oldest active firearms manufacturer in the world. The U.S. factory is located in Accokeek, Maryland, and has been a staple of the local economy for years.

Beretta warned that stricter gun control laws would push the company outside of state lines, but that didn’t stop Maryland legislators. Jeffrey Reh, a spokesman for Beretta who also serves as the President of Stoeger Industries under Beretta, announced that the company would begrudgingly uproot and take its business elsewhere. He said, “We don’t want to do this, we’re not willing to do this, but obviously this legislation has caused us a serious level of concern within our company.”

He added that Beretta paid approximately $31 million in taxes, employs 400 people, and had invested $73 million in the business over the past several decades. Despite being such a prominent player in the local economy, Beretta was unable to prevent legislators from passing tighter gun control laws. Ironically, Beretta manufactures some firearms that are now banned in Maryland.

Good.  I hope it’s painful and hard for Maryland.  I hope they lose business of all kinds, and I hope they feel it right in the pocketbook.  Take note of the next bit.

One legislator stated: “Other than target shooting, the only other reason [for a semi-automic firearm] would be for self-defense… [Why would you need a] rifle that accommodates 20 rounds semi-automatic for deer hunting? … It’s only very infrequently that someone commits a crime with an assault weapon – why do you need one for self-defense?”

Of course, it’s tempting to respond something like, “Well, if you weren’t such a dumb ass you would know that there have been home owners who had to use just such weapons with high capacity magazines to defend their very lives.  And you know, under duress you might miss.  And you know, multi-man home invasions are becoming the tactic of choice for criminals nowadays.  If you weren’t a dumb ass you would know these things.  Dumb ass.”

But tempting as it is, the best response is also the simplest: “I need all the high powered weapons and high capacity magazines I can get in order to hold tyrants like you accountable.”

Closer every day, inch by inch.

David Codrea links the text of the upcoming Connecticut gun law.  It’s long but I read the majority of it.  Taken as a whole, I must say that it seems to me to be the most restrictive gun law ever devised in American history.  One particularly salient feature is the new ban on magazines (see line 998).

Except as provided in this section and section 24 of this act: (1) Any person who possesses a large capacity magazine on or after January 1, 2014, that was obtained prior to the effective date of this section shall commit an infraction and be fined not more than ninety dollars for a first offense and shall be guilty of a class D felony for any subsequent offense, and (2) any person who possesses a large capacity  magazine on or after January 1, 2014, that was obtained on or after the effective date of this section shall be guilty of a class D felony.

So also with guns.  Read it for yourself.  So now, Connecticut gun owners.  All of those magazines and many of the guns you just purchased in expectation of the upcoming ban will soon be illegal.  Owning them will be a felony.

Tyrants in Connecticut have turned you from a law-abiding, upstanding citizen into a felon.

So what are you going to do about it?

Pathetic rag The Raw Story on Mike Huckabee on Obama and guns:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) declared on Wednesday that President Barack Obama and gun control advocates are possibly planning on confiscating the nation’s privately owned firearms and imposing a Nazi Germany-like “dictatorship” in this country. According to Media Matters, Huckabee made the remarks in response to a caller on his radio show.

“I’m very concerned,” said the caller, “it seems like there’s so many people who have not read and do not understand how quickly Germany was turned into, it was a democracy, then turned into a dictatorship by everyone having to register their guns and then they went door to door and collected them.”

Rather than correct the caller that in 1938, the Nazi Party loosened gun regulations that had been imposed by the Versailles Treaty in the wake of World War One, lowered the age limit for gun ownership and de-regulated the possession of shotguns and rifles for everyone but Jews, Huckabee chose instead to stoke the caller’s fears.

“People do forget that,” said Huckabee. “And by the way, know that when you bring that up you get people who get crazy on us, and they’ll start saying, ‘Oh there you go comparing to the Nazis.’ And I understand the reaction, but it’s the truth. You cannot take people’s rights away if they’re resisting and if they have the means to resist, but once they’re disarmed and the people who are trying to take over have all the power, not just political, not just financial, but they have the physical power to domesticate us and to subjugate us to their will, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it other than just plan to die in the course of resistance.”

I’m delighted that Raw Story brought up this issue about correcting the record.  No, not correcting Mike Huckabee, but correcting this unserious Harcourt study.  The comprehensive study by Stephen Halbrook is much more honest, and points out that at least the following weapons features were banned for everyone: silencers, tactical lights on weapons, detachable high capacity magazines (more than five rounds) and telescoping stocks.  Does this list sound familiar?  Halbrook also remarks concerning Nazi gun control:

… the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was consolidated by massive searches and seizures of firearms from political opponents, who were invariably described as “communists.” After five years of repression and eradication of dissidents, Hitler signed a new gun control law in 1938, which benefitted Nazi party members and entities, but denied firearm ownership to enemies of the state.

As I’ve said before, no one has ever claimed that Nazi gun regulations didn’t benefit the totalitarians in Nazi Germany.  Someone always has the guns.  The issue is who, and under what circumstances, and for what purpose?

That Harcourt would publish such an unserious study is embarrassing for him whether he knows it or not.  It’s probably not possible for The Raw Story to be embarrassed about anything.  But take careful note of the argument that is repeated in the silly article.    It’s not really gun control if it only affected the Jews.  Can you imagine a more racist, bigoted position than that?

Prior:

Obama, Hitler And Gun Control

Hitler Joins The Gun Control Debate

Rifle Shooter has a piece up comparing and contrasting pistol caliber carbines.

James Tarr compares the Colt AR6951, Rock River Arms LAR-9, Lone Wolf Distributors G-9 and JR Carbine.  He finds pros and cons with each, but to me Colt is dead until they move to a free state.  The JR Carbine had forend components come loose under recoil.  Of course, this is fatal in my opinion.

I would select the RRA carbine for lack of any other test, but that’s probably because I have a RRA 5.56 mm rifle and like it.  I have two carbines (5.56 mm AR-15 and M1 Carbine), but no pistol caliber carbine.  I have shot a Colt fully automatic carbine.

At the present I’m not convinced enough in the utility of a pistol caliber carbine to spend a great deal of money on one.  I can see the utility of a SBR in pistol caliber in the AR platform so that one could attach a tactical light and reflex sight for close quarters home defense, but this can also be accomplished with hand guns.  My have polymer frame semi-automatics and perhaps the best CQB weapon ever invented by mankind, a S&W .357 magnum revolver.

Why do I need a pistol caliber carbine?  Perhaps for my wife to shoot to avoid any recoil?  What would other aspects of utility be for the pistol caliber carbine?  Readers can weigh in on this question.

UPDATE: I should have added that I do not and will not have a SBR because I will never register a firearm with the ATF.

I had previously commented on the various names we’re called, from Stone Age Vigilantes, to Tinfoil Hat Bircher NRA Peckerwood With A Long Gun, to the realm of people without much education or any sort of consistent dental care who live in trailers with 30 cats and have an NRA sticker on their $400 car, to finally gun paranoiacs.

But I think I’ve found the one I like the very best in all the world.  Crazy gun-toting insurrectionists.  Well, I’m not crazy, but if believing in the right and duty under the second amendment to prevent tyranny makes you an insurrectionist, then there are a lot of us around.

In the same spirit, panty waist Dominic Tierney thinks he has us in a logical paradox.

In the current debate over gun control, the pro-gun lobby has an ace card up its sleeve: We need weapons to prevent government tyranny, they say. These self-styled champions of liberty see guns as the ultimate insurance policy to protect the Constitution. The problem is that most of those making this argument also strongly support a massive U.S. military — exactly the behemoth we must be armed against. It’s the great gun gobbledygook.

[ … ]

Of course, the American people can always play the Red Dawn card and launch an insurgency. But guerrillas usually need external support to win. Britain could be an option as an ally, except that, last summer, Mitt Romney insulted London’s preparations for the Olympics.

Tierney has no earthly idea what an insurrection in America would look like, and I’m not going to waste time explaining it any more than I already have.  But there is nothing great, or gun, or gobbledygook about his alleged paradox.  Tierney has a small mind.

Military fathers and gun owners like me (and Mike Vanderboegh) might tell Tierney that we have no problem with arming our men in uniform to fight Islamic totalitarians overseas rather than our own soil (if only we would decide to win the campaigns), while also preventing the armed forces from ever taking up arms against the American people.

I would also point out that the Marine Corps was created 10 November 1775 by an act of the Second Continental Congress, who created the Corps before the declaration of independence and after the pattern of the British Marines as an imperial force.  These are the same fathers who gave us the constitution and its bill of rights.

They saw no paradox and neither do I.  But its important to ask the men the important questions just in case we have an evil, totalitarian dictator at the helm.

Michael Bane has canceled his show in Colorado due to the new Colorado gun law Hickenlooper signed (h/t Bob Owens), Magpul is leaving (although I still want to see plans and a schedule), and now, IDPA has canceled their planned competition in Colorado.

Organizers of a Colorado shooting competition have cancelled the event because of the state’s recently passed gun-control laws.

The International Defensive Pistol Association was scheduled to hold its Rocky Mountain regional championship July 4-6 in Montrose. Organizers said an estimated 300 shooters were expected to attend the event.

The cancellation stemmed from a combination of concern about legal liabilities under the new laws, and political opposition, said IDPA spokesman Paul Erhardt.

“The attitude toward Colorado is not very pleasant among firearm owners,” he said.

Gunmaker Ruger cancelled another event, the Ruger Rimfire Challenge World Championship, which was to be held in Byers July 19-21.

The Colorado legislature recently passed three gun-control measures. The laws restrict magazines to no more than 15 rounds, require universal background checks on sales and charge gun buyers for the checks.

Several hunting groups and individuals have said they will boycott hunting in Colorado this fall. Some Colorado-based manufacturers of magazines and their parts said they will relocate operations because of the gun laws.

Good.  As I’ve said, there is no better teacher than consequences.  Wisdom demands experience, and Colorado is getting some experience in the power of gun owners as we speak.

I hope they learn the lesson hard.

Obama moves to shame Congress into approving gun control.

President Obama moved Thursday to put the muscle of the White House and his network of supporters behind a gun control package tracking toward the Senate floor, calling on voters to pressure Congress into backing it as the proposal runs into resistance on Capitol Hill.

The president, in a set of brief remarks from the White House Thursday surrounded by the mothers of shooting victims, raised concern that the shock from the Newtown elementary school shooting could soon fade.

“Less than 100 days ago that happened. … Shame on us if we’ve forgotten,” Obama said. “I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.”

Let’s recast that shame in a more truthful light.  Shame on you Obama for surrounding yourself with the props of hurting mothers in order to pass your Fascist measures.  Shame on you for lying to the gullible American people and claiming that any measure you take would have changed the outcome of a dedicated person bent on doing harm.  Shame on you for deceiving the public into thinking that this has anything to do with school shootings.

Shame on you for inferring that any change you make to the laws governing law abiding people has any affect on criminals.  Shame on you for pushing measures more suited to communist China (who supports your gun control efforts) than a free America (I can recall such a thing, although many youth today cannot).  And finally, shame on you for nurturing a Fascist ideology that would turn our freedoms on their head and focus power in the hands of ruling elites who confiscate not only firearms but wealth too.  Shame … shame … shame.

God will soon condemn you, and your empty philosophies of liberation theology and warmed over Fabian Socialism won’t be able to save you on that awful day of judgment.

Hartford Courant has a silly editorial demanding that we hold gun manufacturers liable for crimes committed with their products.  Ain’t going to happen.  In one more small victory for freedom, the Senate blocked the wicked witch of the East, Caitlan Halligan in her bid to fill a vacancy on the D.C. circuit court of appeals.

President Barack Obama’s nominee to fill one of the vacancies on the powerful appeals court in Washington withdrew Friday, two weeks after the Senate blocked her from a getting a confirmation vote.

The National Rifle Association had opposed New York attorney Caitlin Halligan due to her involvement while Solicitor General for the state of New York in a lawsuit against gun manufacturers. The NRA said she had tried to undermine a federal law which prohibited lawsuits against gun manufacturers in cases involving criminal misuse of firearms.

The NRA made that claim because it’s true.

Caitlin J. Halligan, who in her tenure as Solicitor General of the State of New York, attempted to hold firearms manufactures and retailers responsible for crimes committed with guns. In 2006, Halligan also filed a brief arguing that handgun manufacturers were guilty of creating a public nuisance.  This caused an almost incredulous rejection by the New York Court of Appeals.

“The New York Court of Appeals has never recognized a common-law public nuisance cause of action based on allegations like those in this complaint. Moreover, other jurisdictions have dismissed public nuisance claims against firearms manufacturers on similar or other grounds… In light of the foregoing, we believe it is legally inappropriate, impractical and unrealistic to mandate that defendants undertake, and the courts enforce, unspecified measures urged by plaintiff in order to abate the conceded availability and criminal use of illegal handguns.” (People Of The State Of New York v. Sturm & Ruger Co., 309 A.D.2d 91, 2003).

When the New York Court of Appeals thinks you’re too radical, you have a problem.  There is much ground to be tilled before we’ve seen the last of Obama’s gun-grabbing efforts.  But this is a small victory, and one to relish.  Now, on to the next task, perhaps destroying the recapitulation of the U.N. gun grabbing efforts.

Ever to be late to the debate and wrong with the facts, Fluffington Post discusses Hitler and guns.

When the president of Ohio’s state school board posted her opposition to gun control, she used a powerful symbol to make her point: a picture of Adolf Hitler. When a well-known conservative commentator decried efforts to restrict guns, he argued that if only Jews in Poland had been better armed, many more would have survived the Holocaust.

In the months since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, some gun rights supporters have repeatedly compared U.S. gun control efforts to Nazi restrictions on firearms, arguing that limiting weapons ownership could leave Americans defenseless against homegrown tyrants.

But some experts say that argument distorts a complex and contrary history. In reality, scholars say, Hitler loosened the tight gun laws that governed Germany after World War I, even as he barred Jews from owning weapons and moved to confiscate them.

Advocates who cite Hitler in the current U.S. debate overlook that Jews in 1930s Germany were a very small population, owned few guns before the Nazis took control, and lived under a dictatorship commanding overwhelming public support and military might, historians say. While it doesn’t fit neatly into the modern-day gun debate, they say, the truth is that for all Hitler’s unquestionably evil acts, his firearms laws likely made no difference in Jews’ very tenuous odds of survival.

“Objectively, it might have made things worse” if the Jews who fought the Nazis in the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising in Poland had more and better guns, said historian Steve Paulsson, an expert on the period whose Jewish family survived the city’s destruction.

It’s difficult to imagine how it could be worse than gas chambers and ovens to commit genocide, but they aren’t reluctant to cite an absurd comment like that because it’s a failing organization.  It’s a wonder anyone will write for or talk to them.

The record is clear.

… the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was consolidated by massive searches and seizures of firearms from political opponents, who were invariably described as “communists.” After five years of repression and eradication of dissidents, Hitler signed a new gun control law in 1938, which benefitted Nazi party members and entities, but denied firearm ownership to enemies of the state.

Furthermore, regarding the specifics:

… control over weapons that have collapsible or telescoping capabilities, easy take-down and modularity, lights, no so-called “sporting purpose,” and magazines more than a pre-determined amount has its roots in Nazi Germany.

Again, the record is clear.  Today, potential enemies of the state includes everyone except law enforcement, and the controls that the current administration advocates are to be found in Nazi Germany.

No one has ever claimed that either the Obama administration or Adolf Hitler wanted the disappearance of all guns.  They just want guns in the “right hands.”