This is probably going to make the Brady people scared as hell, not to mention making old Bill Ruger turn over in his grave. We already have drum magazines, but this offers the possibility of the same capacity in a more standard size.
Month: June 2010
Debunking the Myths
I mentioned a few days ago about the Boomersphere, and how it spreads around disinformation. PolitiFact is taking on the common e-mail I’ve been forwarded a few times by concerned boomers. I have mixed feelings on things like this. On the one hand, anything that gets people fired up for action on this issue is good. On the other hand, I like people to get angry about stuff the politicians are actually doing. PolitiFact does a good takedown, and gets the issues largely correct, which most people outside of this issue don’t. But even a treaty to which the United States is not a party is going to have effects on our being able to import guns from other countries, which has a huge effect on shooting here, since many of the popular guns sold these days are imported. To me that’s reason enough to oppose there being a treaty at all.
Dirtiest AR I’ve Ever Seen
I can’t believe the thing even kept functioning in this condition. Hell, Mike Rowe could make a whole episode just out of cleaning that gun.
Light Blogging Yesterday
Sorry for the light blogging yesterday, but my schedule got really screwed up by a morning overturned trash truck on the PA Turnpike. They closed the westbound direction, and diverted everyone eastbound. That created a horrible traffic jam, as the next eastbound exit is not normally heavily trafficked. I can normally get to work in 40 minutes. It took me more than two hours. I reserve a little bit of time each morning to throw up posts, and that got eaten up by the mess. Combine that with a club meeting in the evening, and I am recording secretary so I have to be there to record, and I just had no time for it. When you pack your schedule up like that, losing even an hour has bad consequences for the day.
In addition to that, I’ve been working on putting together a new machine for X-Plane. Currently I do X-Plane on the same Linux box that hosts the blogs. You guys probably don’t notice me, but I sure as hell notice you when I’m in the virtual skies. I’m asking that box to do too much running a graphic intense OpenGL and CPU hogging app, along with all the Apache and MySQL instances. We have four cores and 8 gigs of RAM on this box, so it doesn’t cause it to screech to a halt, but it slows me down. In addition to that, Linux users are third rate citizens in the X-Plane world. MacOS is the primary platform it runs on. But Macs high end enough to run X-Plane are expensive, and I just love Apple too much to consider running MacOS on a PC. I would never do that to Steve. Never. I’ll just have suffer through flying the new Version 4 Virtual 737s on the inferior platform. BTW, I highly encourage checking out the demo video for the x737 project. These guys do excellent and detailed work. There’s a lot of hidden craftsmanship in putting together these planes.
Palm Pistol in 3D
Matt Carmel, proprietor of Constitution Arms, maker of the Palm Pistol, which will be forever remembered as the gun that was almost an FDA approved medical device for disabled people, have developed a 3D model of their Palm Pistol, and they’ve given me permission to post it here. You will need to use Adobe Reader to view it, as third party PDF readers don’t seem to work. Adobe Acrobat lets you hide parts clicked on, so you can strip away some of the outer shell and see what’s inside it. Neat! I didn’t even know Acrobat could display 3D models. It looks really nice when viewed up close.
Gun Death Touted Again
Looks like the VPC is trying to smear Tennessee with the whole gun deaths meme. I notice that they only mention that gun deaths include suicides in passing, even though suicides represent the vast majority of their numbers. I did some analysis of violent crime compared to Brady state ranking a while back and found no correlation between Brady Grade and the levels of violent crime. VPC is trying to conflate the issue by arguing that more guns mean more gun deaths, when all they are showing is that in state with higher levels of gun ownership, more people choose to kill themselves with a gun. That’s not exactly shocking, and not exactly a compelling reason to limit access to guns. If you think about where government it leads — taking dangerous things away from people, because they might hurt themselves — it’s not a pretty place. Certainly not a free society. I don’t wish to live in a padded room. I suspect most other Americans don’t either.
Clarification on “Mixed Victory”
I should note for some commenters, that I should have acknowledged what an improvement SB308 makes to Georgia’s carry laws. I did not mean to overlook the significant improvement that represents for Georgia gun toters. The reason I focused heavily on the airport issue is because it has implications outside of Georgia. Some might recall a few years ago HB89 was passed, which specifically allowed for carry on public transit. Pretty soon after the bill was signed into law, the City of Atlanta declared that the new law did not apply to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. GeorgiaCarry.org, joined by pro-2A Representative Tim Bearden quickly filed suit in federal court. You can see all the pleadings and briefs for the case here.
To make a long story short, since I covered some of this in the previous post, the City of Atlanta proffered two arguments to keep their ban on carrying of firearms. The first argument was that HB89 did not apply to airports. The second, and far more worrisome argument was that federal law authorized local authorities to enact security measures, including banning guns if they felt it was necessary, and thus, through the Supremacy Clause of the constitution, was beyond the reach of state law. To clarify something that was misleading from my previous previous post, the the District Court only addressed the first argument, and dodged on the second. On appeal, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals made reference to the federal preemption argument in a very brief ruling. It should be noted that this is not law, but if such an argument were to be upheld, it would apply to Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, all of which reside in the 11th Circuit. Fortunately for us, the Courts did not need to reach whether federal law empowering airport operators to implement a security plan can trump state law in matters of regulating non-sterile areas of an airport.
So in short, I’m happy for Georgians that some of their bad law was fixed, but there’s a giant can of worms that still exists with this airport since Perdue vetoed SB291. It’s an issue that warrants extreme caution going forward, not only for Georgians, but for the other states in the 11th Circuit, and for the country as a whole if a case goes that far.
Look Who Has a Soccer Team
Abby Spangler of Protest Easy Guns has successfully sponsored a soccer team. I don’t expect Matt Carmel will take this lying down. I wouldn’t be surprised if Matt wasn’t the genesis if this idea. No matter, I’d rather have 10 Matts on my side than 100 Abby Spanglers any day of the week. Maybe you guys will do better when you stop copying our side’s ideas. I might start to be impressed when Abby comes really close to getting Medicare to fund her gun ownership prevention ideas.
How They Do It in Texas
Anywhere else they would have hung this guy out to dry. The money quote in this is “Criado said the concerned citizen did not have a concealed handgun license but ‘we don’t see any reason to charge the citizen who fired at the suspects believing they had killed the officer.'”
I often joke with Texans that in PA, for the most part, you can open carry without a license (which you can’t do in Texas with a license except on private property), and for concealed carry only have to worry about court houses (Texas has a number of off limits places, including some establishments that serve primarily alcohol). You can legally have a few beers at a bar and not run afoul of the law in Pennsylvania. But if you actually have to use your gun there’s no better jurisdiction than Texas. I think it’s the only jurisdiction left in the country that actually comes close to “because he needed a shootin'” being an affirmative defense.
Mixed Victory in Georgia
Perdue signed SB 308, but vetoed SB 291. We had a bit of a disagreement with the Georgia folks on this one a while back, where I may have gotten one aspect of how the two laws would be treated wrong. As I mentioned in the latter post, I suspect NRA’s Lobbyist did not want to give Perdue a way to avoid dealing with the airport issue directly. His veto statement is thus:
SB 291 changes a variety of provisions within Georgia law regarding firearms. Among others, this bill would allow firearms to be carried into unsecure areas of airports. I have already signed SB 308, which clarifies Georgia’s public gathering statute and preserves the rights of private property owners. I believe this language is sufficient and adequately clarifies the law for Georgia firearms license holders. For this reason, and despite unwarranted intrusion into this state matter by ill-advised federal officials, I VETO SB 291.
I think the case for banning guns in Atlanta Airport is weakened by SB308, but I’m going to bet that the airport authorities will continue their defiance, using the still existing prohibition on guns in “government buildings,” which are defined as any place housing a “government entity,” meaning “an office, agency, authority, department, commission, board, body, division, instrumentality, or institution of the state or any county, municipal corporation, consolidated government, or local board of education within this state.” Â I’d be hard pressed to believe there aren’t City of Atlanta agencies who are based at the airport.
Maybe Perdue thinks he already addressed the airport issue, but then why veto SB291 on that grounds? I think he’s trying to have his cake and eat it too. I’ll be very surprised if the end result of all this is the airport carry issue being fixed in Georgia. Aside from the fact the airport still has a plausible claim on state law, one of the things that Atlanta did last time they were sued is bring federal preemption issues into the mix, citing the Airport Security Directive from the TSA, which applies to all airport areas, sterile and non sterile. They claimed because this empowered airport officials with security for the whole airport, the airport officials could decide to ban guns if they felt that was necessary for security. Because this is a federal empowerment of local officials, the Supremacy Clause applies, and the airport’s operators’ judgement have precedent over state law. This would have been novel legal theory if the District Court hadn’t bought it, and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it. If that’s upheld by the Supreme Court, local officials would be permitted to ban guns at any airport. Without crystal clear language in state law, this is a dangerous game we’re playing with this issue, with national implications. I do hope going forward we win on this issue, but I would suggest waiting for a fix in state law would be wise before further litigation proceeds.