January 2011 – Shall Not Be Questioned

A Song for Your Stalker Romance

We’ve been listening to Alfie Boe’s Bring Him Home ever since it (finally) arrived from the UK a week or so ago. One of the songs he covers is “On the Street Where You Live,” a favorite of mine from My Fair Lady.

This evening, after comparing a few versions of the song, Sebastian made the following observation. This might be a romantic song, but if you tried to sing it today, you’d only end up with a restraining order. For those of you unwilling to enjoy a show tune, here are the key lyrics:

I have often walked down this street before;
But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before.
All at once am I Several stories high.
Knowing I’m on the street where you live.
Are there lilac trees in the heart of town?
Can you hear a lark in any other part of town?
Does enchantment pour Out of ev’ry door?
No, it’s just on the street where you live!
And oh! The towering feeling
Just to know somehow you are near.
The overpowering feeling
That any second you may suddenly appear!
People stop and stare. They don’t bother me.
For there’s no where else on earth that I would rather be.
Let the time go by, I won’t care if I
Can be here on the street where you live.

ATF Facing Budget Cuts

The Washington Post is reporting up to 30%. This is, naturally, making our opponents quite upset. Times are tough, and cuts have to be made, and I think it’s fine for taxpayers to demand they get their money’s worth from federal law enforcement dollars. As previously mentioned, I don’t think gun laws qualify.

More on ATF Shotgun Study

Michael Bane thinks this might be the start of other shotgun rulings. It’s certainly possible, but the root problem is how to interpret the sporting purposes clause. Congress wrote a bad law, which is bound to lead to poor interpretations of it. ATF’s assertion, at it’s core, is that there would be hardly anything that wouldn’t be importable if IPSC and IDPA were considered to have a sporting purpose, and thus it would render meaningless something Congress clearly intended to have meaning.

There’s two thinks I think we need to advocate here. One is that the sporting purposes clause be eliminated. The second is that destructive devices are increased to any firearm firing fixed ammunition with a bore diameter of greater than one inch. This is hardly radical, since the UK allows shotguns up to two inches, and doesn’t have any overall restriction on bore size. At the very least, we should demand any shotgun be legal outright, not under exception.

Senate Investigation of Project Gunrunner

I’ve been reluctant to speak about the accusations going around the blogosphere about the extent that ATF was facilitating trafficking to Mexico. Not that I would put something like this past ATF, but serious accusations require evidence, and until today I hadn’t seen any. Having been in a position of having sensitive information shared with me, it never seemed a good idea to broadcast the fact publicly, rather than directing the information quietly to folks who have the power to do something with it. Otherwise you risk tipping off whoever’sÂ ox is going to get gored, and hand them an opportunity to destroy evidence and discredit your source.

But now we have real evidence that whoever Codrea and VanderboeghÂ have been speaking with is the real deal, and is actively working with the office of Senator Chuck Grassley, as shown in this letter here, and also here, and as detailed on David Codrea’s examiner site.Â Grassley’s office notes that there has been “detailed documentation” which “lends credibility to the claims and partially corroborates them.” We will see where Grassley’s office goes with this.

The whistle blower in this case deserves quite a bit of praise. Federal whistle blower protections are applicable on paper, but are nearly non-existent in practice. Working with Grassley’s office is probably a career ending move for the agent in question, and on top of that he will need to retain a lawyer during this whole process. It’s not clear who’s come forward with this information at this point, but my hat’s off to them.

Defeat for Gun Control

The House Judiciary Chairman is saying no on hearings on gun control. I guess the GOP is good for something at least.

Anatomy of a Felony

Provided to us courtesy of Mayor Bloomberg:

Investigator: â€œSo, youâ€™re not one of those, you know, dealer guys, right?â€
Seller: â€œNo. No tax, no form, you donâ€™t have to do transfers or nothing.â€
Investigator: â€œYeah, yeah.â€
Seller: â€œJust see an Arizona ID and thatâ€™s it with me.â€
Investigator: â€œSo no background check?â€
Seller: â€œNo.â€
Investigator: â€œThatâ€™s good, because I probably couldnâ€™t pass one, you know what I mean?â€
The seller sold the gun for $500.

This transaction is already a felony under existing federal law. Why is this a case for new laws? If the guy’s going to sell the gun anyway, is he going to give a crap if the law requires a background check on top of it? More from John Richardson here. They keep saying these transactions are legal, but they aren’t.

Our Friends the Republicans, Part II

Looks like they are looking at regulating the Internets in a supremely stupid manner. The GOP really is just Statism Lite, except it is neither less filling, and it sure as hell doesn’t taste great.

UPDATE: Look who’s involved:

And the International Association of Chiefs of Police, which will be sending a representative to tomorrow’s hearing, previously adopted a resolution (PDF) calling for a “uniform data retention mandate” for “customer subscriber information and source and destination information.” The group said today in an e-mail exchange that it still supports that resolution.

Good to see they aren’t limiting themselves to defecating only on Second Amendment rights.

No Right to Own a Gun in New Jersey

Eugene Volokh relays a case where a man was denied buying a gun because he slammed doors very hard.

Magazine Ban Defeated in Maine

Maine is one of the states the antis have been trying to turn to their side for years. It looks like we barely missed getting a magazine ban discharged to the floor by a 5 to 5 vote. I would suggest that if our opponents don’t have the juice in Maine, the prospects for stopping the federal magazine ban are pretty good. Still, I wouldn’t take anything for granted in this environment.

FYI, Maine’s NRA State Liaison is John Hohenwarter, who we interviewed here a few months ago, in regards to Pennsylvania matters. This is a significant victory for us, but you can bet they aren’t going to give up after this setback.

A Shame

Not much information on this story, but it looks like a retired cop and gun collector died, with no one to take care of the estate. The local criminal population quickly moved in and started stealing from the collection. Once guns started showing up in traces, the police moved in on the abandoned property.

The real shame of it is, this guy pretty clearly was quite a collector, and you an guarantee each and every one of those firearms is now going to be destroyed. If there really are Title II firearms among the collection, as the article says, they will be lost forever to the civilian market. I would be surprised if there are not also historical pieces that will be lost.