The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
We have yet another news story from New Jersey, taken to task by Armed and Safe, selling the .50 caliber ban as an enhancement of gun rights, because it would allow reenactors to carry large caliber muskets, which are now illegal in New Jersey.
Sorry no. An enhancement would just be repealing the ban on large bore muskets, which is stupid to begin with. An enhancement doesn’t involve trading one stupid gun ban for another stupid gun ban.
So the brown truck of happiness brought my new energy efficient, little server to power the blog from here on out. We now have a cavernous 2GB of RAM to operate in, and the 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor should handle web serving fine. We’re running on Ubuntu Linux 8.10 Server. Now I have just have to find something good to send to Glenn Reynolds so we can open this sucker up and see what she can do.
Glock is provided for scale, though I think it makes it look bigger than it really is. It’s actually quite small, and hardly makes any noise. Not bad for $250 bucks.
[Ammunition encoding] is no different than trying to circumvent the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press through a discriminatory tax on ink. Believe it or not, as recently as 1983, the First Amendment was so poorly understood that a challenge to just such an ink tax went all the way up to the Supreme Court. When it got there, in the famous case of Minneapolis Star & Tribune Co. v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue, the Court appropriately swatted the tax down as undermining the First Amendment.
Of course, our opponents will tell you it’s all about crime control, but it’s not. On it’s face it’s about making the people who developed the encoding technology rich, but no doubt people in the gun control movement also see it as an opportunity to destroy the gun culture, and with it, our political power. Fortunately, Heller might give us some tools to fight it.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, who’s editorial staff know nothing about guns aside from what Bryan Miller tells them, and who don’t seem interested in learning, think it’s high time Pennsylvania jumped on board the gun rationing bandwagon:
As soon as next month, the state Senate could vote on a measure approved by the state Assembly that would impose a one-handgun-per-month limit. At the same time, the Assembly’s calendar contains another smart gun-safety measure that would ban .50-caliber sniper rifles capable of targeting a plane.
It is ridiculous to believe that criminals in New Jersey are submitting themselves to extreme scrutiny by the police to get purchase permits in order to feloniously sell their purchase to criminals. It’s even more ridiculous to think that someone with a 24lb rifle could successfully shoot down a plane. The Inky should send one of their reporters to a range to shoot, and it could be shown that even some .22 caliber rounds easily penetrate aircraft aluminum. All a .50 does is make a bigger hole. That’s it. The serious anti-material and armor piercing rounds are not available to civilians.
That effort deserves the full support of lawmakers from South Jersey, including Senate Majority Leader Stephen Sweeney (D., Gloucester). But Sweeney is not yet on board with the proposal, and seems to be quoting from the NRA’s bullet points about the need to enforce existing gun regulations more fully.
My hat is off to you Stephen Sweeney, for realizing what the real solution is to criminal gun use. Everyone should contact Senator Sweeney here, and thank him for not supporting this nonsense.
In stark contrast to New Jersey, the rules for handgun purchases in the Keystone State are shockingly lax. As such, handgun trafficking is more widespread, since it’s so much easier for straw buyers to acquire weapons. That’s why many of Philadelphia’s toughest neighborhood streets are awash in illegal handguns.
Except it’s a felony to illegally transfer a handgun in Pennsylvania without going through an FFL and passing a background check. Anyone who seriously checks into Pennsylvania’s gun laws cannot conclude they are lax. The Inquirer editorial staff want you to take their word on that. To them, apparently lax is being able to go to a gun shop and buy a gun.
For a state that has such widespread gun trafficking, and such lax gun laws, we seem to have a violent crime rate that’s awfully close to New Jersey’s. New Jersey’s violent crime rate is actually remarkably high for a state that has no major cities.
We gun owners have nothing to worry about, says David T. Konig, who is described as a Second Amendment expert:
“My sense is that Obama does not want to interfere with an issue that will, for the time being, be left up to the states,” says David T. Konig, Ph.D., professor of history and director of the Legal Studies Program, both in Arts & Sciences, and professor of law. “The issue will turn to controls, such as sales at gun shows or other limited restrictions on purchases.”
Sales at gun shows and other limited restrictions on purchases? Perhaps this is among the very things we are concerned about. What the article doesn’t mention is Konig is a Second Amendment expert who filed an Amicus with The Court on the losing side of the argument.
So says the Lt. Governor of Georgia, in regards to folks who want to continue to improve Georgia’s carry laws, which doesn’t make Robb Allen too happy.
Looks like we might get another win. This doesn’t get us incorporation, but this is why multiple suits were filed.  A win is a win, even if it doesn’t set precedent.
January 6th, 2007 is when I penned my inaugural post:
This is the inaugural post of this blog, because I think that one of the greatest things we shooters can do for ourselves is to introduce new people to our community. My friend Loretta, who came to visit over the holidays, did not have any existing prejudice towards guns, but I have taken people shooting for the first time who have. There’s nothing that quite opens people’s minds like seeing firearms as the tools that they are, and shooters for the ordinary people that they are, than a trip to the range.
I still think that. I started gun blogging when things were pretty good for us. Now, things aren’t looking as good. I’m expecting that year three is going to be a lot more interesting, and I mean that in the old Chinese sense, than the first two years.
In the past year, Heller is the big news, and probably our greatest card to play moving forward. But while Heller was a great achievement, because it answered the big question, we now will be stuck arguing the scope of the Second Amendment in front of an increasingly unfavorable panel of federal judges appointed by Obama. There will be many challenges, and I’m sure more than a few setbacks and losses, but I am an optimist by nature, and believe we’ll get through them, and start making progress again.
AP’s typo, not mine. Note that Assemblyman Reed Gusciora believe that this is an assault rifle.
Peter has a pretty good review of Steve Halbrook’s book “Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II“Â Just a reminder, the Second Amendment Book Bomb is still ongoing, and you can now get copies of Steve Halbrook’s current book, “The Founders’ Second Amendment,” from Amazon.