An open carry ban and long gun registration are up now. Phone calls need to be made. Even Canada is giving up on long gun registration. It won’t be long before California has worse gun laws than Canada.
Month: August 2010
Misplaced Grief
The family of a victim of the Craigslist Killer blames the gun shop that sold him the gun. The killer apparently sole the identity of someone who could legally purchase the pistol. There’s no sure way to defend against this, despite what John Rosenthal says:
“You couldn’t do this in Massachusetts,’’ said John Rosenthal of Stop Handgun Violence, a Newton-based group. “That’s why he went to New Hampshire.’’
It might be harder in Massachusetts, since you’d have to apply in the right jurisdiction, but does Rosenthal really want to suggest if someone was using a stolen identity that they wouldn’t issue? They’d be sure to catch it? Maybe it’s a little harder in Mass, but everyone can be fooled, and serial killers are notoriously intelligent and resourceful. I’ll bet one could be had on the streets of Dorchester with no ID required at all, if one were so inclined.
Mall Ninjary on Parade
Many thanks to Tam and PDB for entertaining me this evening with images of this fellow:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BRb9AlEGN4[/youtube]
This is really one of those things you hope you never see. There’s enough muzzling of other things there to seriously disturb. But it gets better. Thanks to an intrepid reader of Tam’s, it turns out this guy has a record over at Bullshido (warning, not safe for anyone). That lead me to find this guy’s YouTube channel, which is perhaps the finest collection of mall ninjary I’ve seen on the Internets. How can you argue with quality training like this?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry5r4btM_OU[/youtube]
The neighbors must love it. I really hope the other guys in that video didn’t fork over good money to get muzzled in some dude’s back yard. This one had me practically blowing soda out of my nose:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCo6kOMExIQ[/youtube]
That kind of training might even be too over the top for teaching Hollywood actors how to look cool. I’m not even sure it does look that cool. Either way, based on the site over on Bullshido, what are this guy’s qualifications? It seems it comes down to this:
We discovered that a Ralph Severe of Texas was trained and employed as a private security guard at one time, some of Severe’s videos show him conducting interviews in some sort of LE/Security uniform. We can reasonably assume that Severe may indeed have some legitimate LE training, but that his resume may be embellished to imply more expertise than he perhaps deserved.
Said another way, it could perhaps be this, “I am the Sergeant of a three-man Rapid Tactical Force at one of America’s largest indoor retail shopping areas.”
Obama Administration Fighting Surplus Korean M1s
South Korea wants to surplus a bunch of M1 Garands and M1 Carbines that have been gathering dust in warehouses around the R.O.K. Â The Obama Administration obviously thinks we’ll shoot ourselves, or sell them to terrorists if we are allowed to get our hands on them:
“The U.S. insisted that imports of the aging rifles could cause problems such as firearm accidents. It was also worried the weapons could be smuggled to terrorists, gangs or other people with bad intentions,†the official told The Korea Times.
“We’re still looking into the reason why the U.S. administration is objecting to the sale of the rifles and seeking ways to resolve the problems raised,†he said.
The Obama Administration has no legal authority to prevent the importation of these rifles. Under a provision of the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986, rifles and shotguns that are Curios and Relics are permitted to be imported, the “sporting purposes” language in the 1968 Gun Control Act be damned. That’s probably why they are resorting to back channel pressure to prevent the South Korean government from selling them as surplus.
This goes to show that the Obama Administration may be unwilling to take us on head on, but they are willing to screw us through the back channel.
History of the Sheriff
Under Anglo-Saxon rule it was the duty of the citizens themselves to see that the law was not broken, and if it was, to catch the offenders. All the males in the community between the ages of 12 and 60 were responsible for this duty. They were organized in groups of about ten families, and each group was called a “tything”: At their head was a “tythingman.” Each member of the tything was held responsible for the good behavior of the others. Ten tythings were led by a “reeve.” If one member committed a crime, the others had to catch him and bring him before the court, or the “moot” as the Saxons called it. If they failed to do so they were all punished, usually by paying a fine. If anyone saw a crime he raised a “hue and cry” and all men had to join in the chase to catch the criminal and bring him before the court. Under Alfred the Great, (A.D. 871-901), reeves began to be combined, forming “shires” or counties. Each shire was led by a reeve. For minor offenses, people accused of crimes were brought before the local “folk moot.” More serious cases went to the “Shire Court,” which came under the “shire reeve” (meaning “keeper and chief of his county”), who came to be known as the Sheriff. After the Normans conquered England in A.D. 1066, they adopted many Anglo-Saxon law keeping methods, including the system of tythings, the use of the hue and cry, and the Sheriff’s courts. In A.D. 1085, King William ordered a compilation of all taxable property in a census, and decreed that the Sheriff was to be the official tax collector of the king.
Read the whole thing. I found it to be quite interesting.
UPDATE: If you think about it, this type of system is probably what made English liberty possible. If the King was dependent on the community to enforce the King’s law, then the laws had to largely reflect the values of those communities. You wouldn’t be much interested in catching law breakers over laws that went against the values held in that community, would you? You’d probably spend a lot of time looking the other way. So English law didn’t develop in the same manner as other countries, and when they came here, they brought the law with them. Obviously neither the English nor Americans use this type of system for law enforcement anymore, but the American distrust of centralized police forces is probably rooted in this tradition, and has probably helped keep locally controlled policing, despite the efficiencies that could be gained from centralized police forces. Though most states have State Police, at least in Pennsylvania, they have jurisdiction over our highways, and in any communities that don’t hire local police.
Top Ten Reasons for Not Supporting NRA Anymore
Thanks to Miguel for a good laugh over the weekend. Over this week I’m going to try to get in a series of posts about the NRA, how it works (or doesn’t work, as the case may be) so that folks can understand it better.
Blind Justice
A judge in New Jersey rules that blind people have Second Amendment rights too.
UPDATE: Clearing out my tabs, it seems I forgot how this story was put together. Now let me do it the right way:
A blind gun collector is in Court defending his Second Amendment rights. It looks like this guy has made the news before, when he won his appeal of his FID denial for being blind back in 1994, and once again in 2004 after they tried to revoke him because of a conviction unrelated to firearms possession (being unruly in a bar). Now they apparently want to revoke him because he was the victim of a burglary while he was in the hospital after shooting himself, and while in the hospital was the victim of a burglary.
You don’t have Second Amendment rights in the Garden State, despite McDonald. The time will soon come to put the smack down on this nonsense. Maybe it would be a wise things for Mr. Hopler to give up his hobby, but that should be his choice, not the states.
San Francisco Becoming Food Fascists
Apparently the Center for Science and the Public Interest, our nations leading Food Nazis, are going around the bay area trying to ban the Happy Meal. I’m relatively disappointed that our restaurant industry is, so far, taking a relatively passive approach to resisting these Food Fascists, these Meatball Mussolinis. If McDonald’s came out and said, “We’re going to stand up for the right of Americans to eat whatever they want, and CSPI can go to hell,” health problems be damned, I’ll hit McDonald’s for lunch every day for the next two weeks. I’ll even regret not having kids to take there for a Happy Meal.
Can You Tell This is a Government Operation?
Only the federal government could screw up printing money. The BBC is noting that the US keep printing billions of dollars worth of coins that no one wants to use:
In hidden vaults across the country, the US government is building a stockpile of $1 coins. The hoard has topped $1.1bn – imagine a stack of coins reaching almost seven times higher than the International Space Station – and the piles have grown so large the US Federal Reserve is running out of storage space.
And it’s apparently going to continue, “because the law requires the US Mint to issue four new presidential coins each year even if most of the previous year’s coins remain in government vaults.” Brilliant. I would not that this Act passed in 2005, meaning this was Republican brilliance. The only way to get Americans to adopt a coin dollar is to stop producing the Greenback. No politician wants to be on the record as voting for that, so we get idiocy instead.
Personally, if it costs the federal government half a billion, to three-quarters of a billion dollars each year to print replacement greenbacks, I’m in favor of switching to coins. But I suspect many Americans are emotionally attached to the Greenback, and my view is a minority one.
Lessons in Gun Safety By Dennis Henigan
Dennis Henigan would like to remind you of a few things about guns, all of it spoken like a person who is unfamiliar with them. Henigan notes that an NRA certified instructor accidentally discharged a firearm in an instructor class, noting, “I think it’s safe to say that the NRA instructor in this case is unlikely to appear in future ‘I’m the NRA’ promotional ads.” He’ll probably lose his certification, given that NRA courses don’t allow for live rounds in classrooms. He goes on to note that trained police officers have made these mistakes too, but then goes off the rails here:
First, because of the nature of guns, accidental shootings remain a constant threat. Yes, individuals can be trained to be extremely careful around guns and most gun owners no doubt regard themselves as very safety conscious. But human beings are prone to mistakes – they can be clumsy, or distracted, or rushed, for example – and guns are sufficiently complicated mechanisms that even the slightest mistake can result in tragedy.
This is not the nature of guns. Guns do a very simple thing. When you pull the trigger, it fires a bullet. There is absolutely nothing “sufficiently complicated” about this. It’s one of the simplest user interfaces known to man.
That’s why there is seldom such a thing as an accidental discharge. The vast majority of unintentional discharges are negligent, including this one. The DEA agent that Henigan mentions, the poster child for the “only ones,” made his act of negligence when he removed his side arm from his holster for no good reason, in front of a group of school children. This instructor obviously violated a number of fundamental rules. Henigan seems to suggest that guns are really too complicated and dangerous for everyone, and though he does not say it, one can read into his statements that he would even include police in that.
I think this illustrates the difference in Henigan’s view of his fellow citizen as opposed to our view of our fellow citizen. Guns are not the complicated devices Henigan is making them out to be. It is completely possible to teach the vast majority of people how to live with them safely. What anti-gun people like Henigan do is take the very small minority of stupid or careless individuals who probably shouldn’t handle anything dangerous, and hold them up as examples as to why no one should have something dangerous like a gun. Because some can’t be trusted, none of you can be. This is not a recipe for a free, and certainly not a recipe for an adult society. Henigan is suggesting the infantilization of America, which raises the question of who gets to be the parent?
Henigan once again makes the comparison to automobiles, a favorite of our opponents:
When it comes to cars, we tolerate the risk of accidents because we regard automobile transportation as essential to our daily lives (though, unlike guns, we have extensive safety regulations on cars and drivers to reduce the risk of death and injury). We are told that we must similarly tolerate the risk of gun accidents because of the overriding protective benefit of guns in enabling self-defense against criminal attack.
We have such regulations on firearms too. There’s not much end user regulation on cars, only driving in public, much the same with firearms. And I would point out that the legal and safety issues surrounding driving an automobile on public roads are far more complex than carrying a firearm in public. The training reflects that.
But to demonstrate what a loss of freedom Henigan’s logic would lead to, and the levels of infantilization it would create among the American populace, we can compare the risks of accidental firearms deaths to other activities. I’ll pick activities that don’t involve necessity, just to help make the analogy with Henigan’s way of thinking. Firearms have a yearly accident rate in this data of approximately 1 in 350,000. That’s comparable to the completely unnecessary activity of being a private pilot, which also carries significant external risk, air transport having about the same accidental death rate as firearms. Not much higher than that is water transport accidents. Are private pleasure craft really necessary? Drowning in a swimming pool is roughly comparable, and swimming pools are not necessary at all. Combine that with other household drownings and it’s far higher than firearms. Off road motor vehicles have about the same one year odds as firearms do as well. But how many households have a private plane? Or a boat? An ATV? A pool? Far fewer than have firearms. It’s safe to conclude all these activities are more dangerous. Would Dennis Henigan bemoan an increase in boating activity? Does he celebrate that we’ve had a serious decline in private pilots over the past two decades?
Of course he doesn’t. The reason is that Dennis Henigan doesn’t hate or fear any of these things, only guns. If accidental deaths were really his concern, he’d be railing against boats, swimming pools, and private planes, and all-terrain vehicles as unneeded menaces to society. But he doesn’t. That’s one thing the anti-gunners seriously need to explain if they want to have any credibility in complaining about the dangers of guns.