Kevin has some pictures, including some video of a light artillery piece being fired.
Month: October 2009
Mugged By Regulators
Apparently a lot of other bloggers are pissed at the FTC. Â So why don’t left, righty, and centery bloggers all get together and push to get rid of the FTC? I’m not kidding either. They’ve proven they can’t handle the power they’ve been given responsibly, so lets agree to take it away from them, and put it back where it belongs — with Congress.
Here We Go Again
Joe and a few other blogs have reported that the NIH is getting into the gun research business. I don’t think studying the gun issue should really be part of NIH’s mission, just like it ought not to be part of CDC’s mission. CDC did a lot of anti-gun research in the 90s under Clinton, and it looks like NIH might be getting uppity on the issue under Obama. My worry is this is bureaucrats with an agenda who will spend their research dollars trying to verify their fore-drawn conclusions. In statistics, that’s often easy to do.
Freedom Group Going Public?
So says the Wall Street Journal, and it includes a quote from my co-blogger.
Exports Pennsylvania Can Be Proud Of
Early Barrett M82s
Virginians for Public Safety
It’s a small world in gun control advocacy. So small, the groups even write each other’s press releases. Or is Virginians for Public Safety an astroturfing operation on the part of Coalition to Stop Gun Violence? Maybe. Bob Ricker, formerly of AHSA, used to head up VPS. Amazing what a small incestuous world the gun control issue is.
More on That Ideological Purity
Ace of Spades makes some very cogent points on ideological purity in political struggles:
TMK [Commenter over at Ace’s] is permitted to pursue his Fantasy League Politics as he likes. In his Fantasy League Politics, there simply is no “left” which needs to be countered, and no “center” which needs to be courted. And, actually, there’s not even a “center-right” he needs to ally with.
In his Fantasy League Politics, only the harder, more frothy right exists, the same as in many Fantasy Baseball Leagues where either the AL or NL doesn’t exist. So he only drafts politicians from that particular division in that particular league.
There’s a common thread running through nearly every political movement that suggest setbacks have to do with a lack of ideological purity. The commonly heard refrain “If we just ran true conservatives, the Republican Party would never lose.” Â That’s not always false, and it’s probably more true than many party operatives would care to realize. But it’s not always true. A true conservative isn’t going to win in Massachusetts, New Jersey or California. I’m not even sure what a true conservative is, or should be, and over the years I’ve followed politics, I’ve become convinced those kinds of conversations don’t mean a whole lot.
Winning elections is about assembling a coalition of interests that can put you over 50%, or at least a plurality, of voters in a multi-way race. That coalition is going to necessarily be composed of interests who may not like each other’s goals and objectives a whole lot. But it is also necessarily composed of people who really hate the other side’s goals and objectives.
Even within interests, you have coalitions. NRA itself is really a coalition of Second Amendment defenders, sport shooters, hunters, carry folks, training oriented folks, law enforcement, club and associations, gun collectors, and just about any other firearms related interest you an think of. Even keeping our coalition within a coalition together is frighteningly difficult, even on the easiest of days. There’s very little room for ideological purity in the coalition game, because you have to accommodate interests that are just too diverse.
Threat great difficulty in coalition building is creating one that can stay together. If your coalition is group consists of A, B, C, D, E, and F interests, and F gets uppity, and can no longer abide by A through E, or A-E just can’t abide by the goals or methods of F, it might make sense to tell F to take a hike. That’s largely what NRA did in the 1970s when it ousted the “old guard” who wanted nothing to do with politics in the Cincinnati Revolt. It also happened again when NRA rid itself of more hard line elements that did not understand coalition politics, and that shouting louder was not an effective lobbying tool. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that was the point in time NRA started to become remarkably more effective.
It’s because of that I’m not a believer in purity, and not too interested in talking about what it means to be “pro-gun” or “pro-2A” I’m willing to take a wide variety of ideas in that space. I think we can argue about what is and what isn’t effective, but I think too often we’re not even speaking from the same frame of reference when doing so. That’s a problem that’s a bit harder to solve.
On True Believers
Seth Godin says that the Internet is full of true believers. This is true for tech products, but it’s also true for special interest groups as well:
The truth of the market is that the market you sell to isn’t filled with true believers. It’s filled with human beings who make compromises, who tell stories, who have competing objectives. And as a result, the truth of the market is that the products and services that win (if win means you can make a good living and make positive change) are rarely the products and services that are beloved without reservation by the true believers.
A lesson we could learn here in the Second Amendment community.
What Passes for Legal Reasoning
Laci the Dog, I’m pretty sure, should be called Laci the Troll, because I find it difficult to believe that a lawyer could be so obtuse on matters of law. As Mike W mentioned, her blog is relatively devoid of intellectual argument. This here is the latest justifying bans on semi-autos because they can be readily restored to fully automatic fire. She should stick to whatever law she practices, because firearms law is not her forte. The closest Supreme Court case we have on this topic is Staples v. US:
We concur in the Fifth Circuit’s conclusion on this point: “It is unthinkable to us that Congress intended to subject such law abiding, well intentioned citizens to a possible ten year term of imprisonment if . . . what they genuinely and reasonably believed was a conventional semiautomatic [weapon] turns out to have worn down into or been secretly modified to be a fully automatic weapon.”
The fundamental issue in Staples is whether or not Congress intended to eliminate the mens rea requirement that’s required in most crimes. The Court ruled that the government had to prove guilty intent when it came to possessing a semiautomatic firearm that was capable of firing automatically. In none of the Courts reasoning in Staples did they indicate that possession of any semi-automatic firearm was in violation of National Firearms Act. In fact, the majority rejected the argument that possession of a semi-automatic could meet the mens rea requirement. In fact, the Court in Staples makes the assumption that Congress did not intend to make semi-automatic firearms legally risky, let alone illegal.
So no, Laci, semi-autos aren’t covered by this law, no matter how much you wish it were so.