Uncle thinks it’s happening. I agree. I’m noticing local teenagers putting “Zombie Response Team” on their cars. When your phenomena becomes popular among the high school geek population, who’ve probably never seen a gun that wasn’t in a video game, I’d say it’s over the shark pretty soon, if not already.
Year: 2011
Rebranding
Looks like it’s all the rage today. At least I’m in good company, but I completely understand feeling stuck with a name that you just don’t think works for you. As Glenn Reynolds notes,
“Pajamas TV sounded a little too Hefneresque (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), so it quickly became PJTV, and now Pajamas Media is being “rebranded†as PJ Media.”
It’s funny because I had considered changing the blog name to SIH for a bit, but was talked out of it. Ultimately I just decided to jettison the old name entirely. So far, I don’t think it’s worked out too badly, despite the fact we had a few little issues here and there. Hopefully PJ Media will have a successful transition as well.
Mayors Against Illegal Guns’ Misdirected Mission
Looks like Mayor Bloomberg should be spending his energy looking at his own police department rather than spending his energy preventing the law-abiding from exercising their rights in his city:
The charges allege that the officers — five are still on the force and three are retired — were involved in illegally transporting more than a dozen handguns as well as M-16 assault rifles and shotguns and a variety of stolen property, the people briefed on the case said.
Even though this is a case of actual illegal guns being trafficked into New York City, I’m not going to hold my breath that we’ll hear anything about it from MAIG or Mayor Bloomberg. It does go to show if you make the market lucrative enough, people will enter it and meet the demand.
The arrests on Tuesday were based on charges that include conspiracy to transport firearms across state lines, conspiracy to transport defaced firearms across state lines, conspiracy to sell firearms across state lines and conspiracy to transport and receive stolen property across state lines, one of the people said. The stolen property included slot machines, the person said.
And here I’ve been hearing from the gun control groups that gun trafficking was legal, and that we didn’t have the proper tools to fight it. So clearly we need a federal trafficking law. Funny that when guns fall under the FBI’s purview, they don’t seem to have any problem finding charges to bring.
The Sunday Hunting Controversy
The Reading Eagle has pretty good coverage of the debate. NRA notes that a hearing is being held this Thursday, and is asking folks to contact their legislators. The main group lining up in opposition are the Farm Bureau. Despite the claim that farmers are opposed to this, there’s evidence that’s not as universally true as the Farm Bureau would have you believe. The reason for this bill is that hunting has been in decline in Pennsylvania for some time, with young people citing lack of free time, and older people citing lack of game.
I think it’s important to pass this because the number of hunters in the state can be viewed as a proxy for how much support the entire shooting community can command if politicians start thinking about displeasing us, so a decline in hunting can hurt people who are just shooters, and interested in the right to bear arms. There isn’t quite so easy a proxy for shooters, except for LTCs, which as of yet do not approach the number of hunting licenses issued in the state.
Ladd Everitt Responds to Racial Issue
Ladd Everitt speaks about his confrontation with Professor Adam Winkler on his own blog. I think you can surmise from Everitt’s tone that the one aspect of Winkler’s book that really gets his goat is that it lent us credibility on an argument that Everitt finds abhorrent, which is that some gun control laws, even some still on the books today, originated for racist or xenophobic reasons. He runs around in circles trying to come to terms with Winkler’s book, rather unsuccessfully, when he sort of awkwardly stumbles into what I think  is probably the meat of his argument:
It is therefore confusing that Winkler would assert, “I do think that gun laws historically have been tied to race and racism and we should take that seriously when we’re thinking about a gun control law today.â€Â Why? If African-Americans have moved beyond the past and strongly support contemporary gun control proposals (which even Winkler acknowledges are not motivated by race), why should it be an issue?
Except the latest polling shows that support for gun control even among the black community has been slipping, and now stands at about 30% of blacks believing that supporting gun rights is more important than supporting controls (in contrast to 53% of whites). Everitt misses the point of enumerating rights, which is to put them outside the scope of the political process, and leave them retained where they belong and from whom they originate; the people. 65% of the population simply can’t get together and vote away the rights of the other 30%. So when some Americans have greater access to their rights than other Americans, this concerns me, regardless of whether or not a majority of people having their rights trampled on support it or not.
But Everitt actually misses the main reason why I think exposing the racist and xenophobic history of many of our guns laws is important — because we’re still living under many of them. The history of the Sullivan Act has been well documented, and is still active law in New York. A source in the previously linked law review article cites that it was meant to:
strike hardest at the foreign-born element . . . . As early as 1903 the authorities had begun to cancel pistol permits in the Italian sections of the city. This was followed by a state law of 1905 which made it illegal for aliens to possess firearms ‘in any public place’. This provision was retained in the Sullivan law.
It’s very important to discredit these laws as being abhorrent, and outside our tradition when it comes to how we treat constitutional rights. If the motivation for many gun control laws was disarming disfavored groups, rather than a heart-felt desire to improve public safety and lower crime, the courts may be more inclined to look skeptically on them. Indeed, as we have noticed with the latest Heller II case, where the Sullivan Act was cited, shows the importance of discrediting it and other laws on the books which share its history.
And that, folks, is probably what really has Everitt up in arms; our idea that many of these laws have racist origins is getting mainstream acceptance from the legal establishment. If Ladd is an astute observer, he will notice that this happened previously with the notion that the Second Amendment is an individual right rather than a collective right, and he is well aware how that ended for his cause. So here we go again, with another idea he finds abhorrent, gaining mainstream acceptance. Let us hope this ends the same way for him.
UPDATE: For the curious, the picture featured in this post is that of Big Tim Sullivan himself.
Not Going to Fly
SayUncle links to a piece on the Genessee County, Michigan Sheriff using narcotics stops. This is a practice that has already been thrown out by the Supreme Court, and as such it is well-established precedent for the purposes of overcoming qualified immunity. So you could probably reach the Sheriff personally in a 1983 suit. I’m also fairly certain anyone caught in these roadblocks can get all the evidence against them tossed as fruit of the poisonous tree. So there is recourse here if you want to nail these guys personally. Though, I’m not sure how much you’ll recover if you were just stopped. Someone who had to hire a lawyer to fight charges that were a result of evidence obtained from the illegal stop might have a decent case though.
Chris Cox on HR822
Countering some of the objections by our opponents that HR822 is violative of states rights:
This is an inalienable right that neither the federal government, nor any state government, may infringe upon. In addition, the 14th Amendment gives Congress the power to protect us from states that infringe on our inalienable, constitutional rights.
By the way, these are the same gun-ban groups that don’t give any consideration to states’ rights when they lobby for sweeping federal gun bans, ammunition bans, and magazine bans.
I don’t think states have rights anyway. People have rights. States have powers which are delegated to it by the people. I’m glad he’s calling out the disingenuousness of our opponents when they hang their hat on the 10th Amendment. They weren’t so concerned about state-by-state policy when they were busy banning scary looking rifles as equally in Pennsylvania as they were in Montana.
Justice Stevens on Heller and McDonald
Quoting from an interview appearing in Time:
I would change the interpretation of the Second Amendment. The court got that quite wrong. Gun policy should be handled by legislatures and by states, not by federal judges appointed for life.
The Second Amendment is never really going to be safe until we stop hearing things like this from left-leaning judges. The only thing that’s going to save the Second Amendment is getting judges on the bench who are willing to uphold it.
Canadians Set to Scrap Long Gun Registry, But Fight Not Over
Canada’s Tory government is coming very close to scrapping their long gun registry, after years of promising to do so. But the fight with the gun control groups in Canada is not over. Now they are calling for more restrictions on what our opponents here refer to as “assault weapons” in exchange for scrapping the registry. Those of us in the states might be surprised to learn that there are guns you can get in Canada that are unavailable to Americans because of our importation restrictions. For those unfamiliar with Canadian gun laws, you can learn about them here. Also, check out the statistics on gun ownership in Canada, and what kinds of firearms are available. Apparently the Mini-14, and Czech Vz 58 are becoming popular among Canadian shooters, and this naturally has the kind of people who worry that others might be having fun in hysterics.
Where Did You Get That Idea?
Sometimes the stuff that comes out of Truth About Guns just boggles the mind. I have no idea how Robert Farago came to the conclusion that NRA was ripping gun bloggers a new one, but that was most decidedly not my takeaway from NRA press release, which seemed aimed more at the accusations of one Dudley Brown of National Association for Gun Rights, who has been spreading paranoid nonsense around the Internets in an attempt to derail the bill. This has been covered extensively here and elsewhere in gun circles. So I have no idea how TTAG came to characterize this as an attack on gun bloggers.