Month: January 2011

This appears in this month’s First Freedom. It’s a fairly comprehensive article on FOPA:

When the struggle started in 1979, Jimmy Carter was in the White House. Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. Peter Rodino of New Jersey controlled the two judiciary committees that would have to approve the bill. And when the long haul was ending some seven years later, the measure had passed through the Senate, but Rodino still chaired the House Judiciary Committee and was proclaiming the bill “dead on arrival.” At the outset, NRA was a fraction of its current size, rejoicing in having grown from 600,000 members to a full 1 million. The NRA Institute for Legislative Action was barely four years old. The Internet was still far in the future, and anti-gunners had a solid lock on the mass media, where gun owners were depicted as demonic and the NRA as the prince of darkness—all images perpetuated by what is today known as the Brady Campaign, the American Bar Association and the u.s. Conference of Mayors.

The fight seemed impossible, yet we won. FOPA, as it became known, didn’t just change the restrictive Gun Control Act of 1968, it overruled no fewer than six anti-gun Supreme Court decisions and about one-third of the hundreds of lower court rulings interpreting the Gun Control Act.

Read the whole thing. It goes into detail ordinary people having their lives ruined by an overly aggressive ATF. I’ve said before, our opponents like the hew and haw that we’ve cropped enforcement, but that’s largely a creature of their own making. They’ve created an environment where there can be no common sense, but common sense to them involves no one having guns. You can’t negotiate when that’s the starting point.

Dave ends the article with talk about the Hughes Amendment, but think it was probably necessary to pass FOPA, even despite it:

In 2011, we seem to be at the beginning of a new stage in the American gun culture. Firearm sales are at record levels, many anti-gun politicians fear to touch the issue and the courts are recognizing the constitutional right of gun ownership. Would we have survived this far if, for the last 25 years, gun dealers had been subject to arrest on paperwork errors and their entire inventories confiscated even if they were found not guilty; and gun shows had regularly seen half a dozen honest collectors hauled away in handcuffs? It’s safe to say that the entire picture of gun ownership would be different. 1986 was the last, best shot at getting these protections. To kill the bill, lose seven years of development and alienate the majority of representatives who had rebelled against their leadership by signing the discharge petition would have ended hopes for stopping the many abuses.

The truth is we lost the battle for machine guns in 1934. It’s a shame people back then didn’t fight for them, but they didn’t, and that’s what we’re stuck with today.

Arizona Rifleman had a gun stolen:

However, they also stole my Glock 19 pistol (9mm, serial MLV023). It had a full magazine of Federal HST JHPs.

I normally take both the computer and gun inside at night, but I was going to have a drink or two with friends last night so I left it in the car to be responsible. That seems to have been not a good idea in this particular case.

I’m not sure what Arizona law in particular is on this matter, but in Pennsylvania there’s no legal limit or restrictions on drinking while carrying, short of what a sheriff will revoke your LTC for. The best place for the gun is on your person, or in a safe. While not mixing guns and alcohol is probably the best bet, if you’re sober enough to drive a car, you’re sober enough to keep the gun on you rather than leave it in a vehicle.

Leaving guns in cars is a bad idea, and our opponents never realize what happens when the laws they advocate promote that habit. They’d prefer people not carry a gun at all, but people can and do carry guns legally. What is going to happen when the law bans guns from certain places, is guns are going to get stolen from cars and end up on the black market.

Arizona Rifleman thought he was doing the responsible thing, but the truth is I’d rather someone have a few drinks and have a gun on them, than to leave the gun in the car. The risk of the gun getting stolen out of the car is a lot higher than the risk of an accidental shooting. We’ve been conditioned into believing that somehow people under 0.08 BAC are sober enough to drive a 2 ton bludgeon down the road at 60 miles an hour, but too irresponsible to keep a gun on their side. This is nonsense.

Our opponents need to accept they have irrevocably lost the guns in public argument, and start thinking about how we can keep people from leaving guns in cars.

(Oh, and PS, banning guns in cars is not the answer)

UPDATE: I should note that the circumstances here were a bit different than I had assumed. See Arizona Rifleman’s comment below. Arizona law here was not an issue, and under the circumstances, I think he made the correct decision, except for hindsight.

SayUncle notes that there’s a rumor circulating that ATF is going to eliminate the CLEO signoff requirement for Title II firearms. He’s skeptical it will happen. I’d also say it’s unlikely, but I’ll lend the idea some credence. In NRA’s Firearms Law Seminar last year, one of ATF’s lawyers mentioned that they are overwhelmed by the number of NFA trusts they need to review and check up on, to make sure they are all proper, and were looking for ways to alleviate the problem. It’s quite possible, in an attempt to reduce the amount of trusts they have to review, ATF is looking to ease the conventional transfer process, so fewer NFA owners resort to using trusts.

Trusts make a lot of sense in some circumstances, but they are often resorted to because CLEO sign-off is unavailable, in circumstances where a standard transfer would suffice. I would suspect the vast majority of trusts are for items like suppressors and short barreled rifles, rather than machine guns. I would love to help ATF eliminate this backlog by deregulating both of these items, but that’s something only Congress can do.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the Hughes Amendment, which prohibited new machine guns to be transferred to civilians in 1986, that argues it was never properly passed. Now there’s video. The problem you run into with this line of thinking is that the Supreme Court follows the Enrolled Bill Doctrine.

So whether or not procedures and rules were followed really doesn’t matter. Hughes was in the enrolled bill, and thus the courts recognize it as law. This is as much a waste of time and energy as tax protesters arguing the 16th Amendment was never properly ratified.

Apparently they are talking with the Administration about gun control. I am so glad we kicked those anti-gun Democrats out of Congress, let me tell you.

Remember, politicians have an overwhelming urge to appear to be doing something, and even though gun control is what you do instead of something, it’s easy for them to do. The question then becomes, what are we going to need to do to make this issue go away? One, call your Congressperson and tell them you want no more gun laws. Make that crystal clear. The more Congress hears from gun owners, the more you’re helping NRA’s federal lobbyists either stop this outright, or mold it into something that’s harmless, like with the NICS Improvement Act last time through. If we’re silent, we’re going to get something rammed down our throats that we’re not going to like.

Daniel Webster, co-director of the Joyce funded “Center for Gun Policy and Research” at Johns Hopkins, admits that current strategies for defecating on our Second Amendment rights aren’t working, and aren’t spurring the right kind of debate. He believe we need to look for new, and innovative ways to defecate on Second Amendment rights, such as raising the age at which you can buy a gun, or denying Second Amendment rights based on some measure of precognition (precrime?). As to the age, raise it to what? It’s already 21. 25? 35? Is this a right or a privilege?