2011 – Page 58 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Bloomberg Blaming the Feds

It should be no surprise that Bloomberg’s response to 24 shootings in 24 hours was to blame Washington for a lack of federal gun controls. Kate Pavlich notes:

Note to Bloomberg: guns don’t shoot themselves. As shown above, the shooter had an extensive criminal history. This isn’t an issue of gun control, this is an issue of criminal control.

We’ve noticed Katie Pavlich writing on our topic often, as well as appearing in studio at NRA News. We’re hoping this continues. It should be noted the shooter’s extensive criminal history that made him federally disqualified to even so much as touch a firearm, let alone carry one. What federal gun control that does Bloomberg think would have disarmed him? Make it illegal for him to transport a gun back to New York? Sorry, already illegal. Make it illegal for him to purchase a gun? Sorry, already illegal. And how much do you want to bet the shooter in this case didn’t get his gun from a gun show, which still would have been illegal even if he had done it.

21 Year Old Temple Student Wins Gunfight with Armed Robbers

A Temple student got into a gunfight with two would be armed robbers:

Sophomore Robert Eells, 21, of Chalfont, Bucks County, was sitting with at least one friend in front of their home in the 2300 block of North 12th Street shortly before 2 a.m. when three assailants approached and demanded money.

When Eells failed to comply, the assailants opened fire, police said. Eells, struck in the stomach, fired a couple of rounds toward the would-be robbers, wounding one suspect, a 15-year-old boy, in the chest and a leg.

So not only did he act appropriately, but continued the fight even after being shot. Two people were shot in the confrontation, and the guy landed those hits while being shot himself. Campus carry is not a crime in Pennsylvania, but the schools are free to set policy. Sounds like this happened off campus, so the school shouldn’t have anything to say. But this is one anecdotal tale that suggests college students are plenty responsible to exercise their right to bear arms. The police spokesperson said the student is not likely to face charges, and the two robbers are being charged with simple assault, robbery, and attempted murder.

The History of the Collective Right

Dave Kopel has a recent article that talks about how the collective rights theory of the Second Amendment sprang into life and then was eventually abandoned. The short of it was that collective rights theory didn’t really exist until the 20th Century, being created by a 1905 Kansas Supreme Court case, Salina v. Blaksley. It made its way into the federal court system in 1935, by a judge who was later impeached and removed from office by Congress.

Yet the collective-right theory itself contained the seeds of its own destruction. Emboldened by the collective rightâ€™s negation of the Second Amendment, politicians and gun-ban lobbies intensified the pressure for draconian gun control, and so scholars began looking into the actual legal history of the Second Amendment. One such scholar was a University of Arizona Law School student named David Hardy. His 1974 article in theÂ Chicago-Kent Law Review, â€œOf Arms and the Law,â€ marked the beginning of the historical rediscovery of the Second Amendment.

For a while, the legal academy tried to ignore the mounting historical evidence that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. But in 1989, left-leaning University of Texas professor Sanford Levinson penned â€œThe Embarrassing Second Amendmentâ€ for theÂ Yale Law Journal.

His article also speaks about the other side of the coin as well

WhileÂ Verdugo-UrquidezÂ was working its way through the appellate courts, Handgun Control Inc., (which later renamed itself the Brady Campaign) hired attorney Dennis Henigan. In a 1989 article for theUniversity of Dayton Law Review, he recast the (untenable) collective right cases as actually standing for a narrow individual right: â€œIt may well be that the right to keep and bear arms is individual in the sense that it may be asserted by an individual. But it is a narrow right indeed, for it is violated only by laws that, by regulating the individualâ€™s access to firearms, adversely affect the stateâ€™s interest in a strong militia.â€

This would be the theory later adopted by Justice Stevens.

Read the whole thing. I think it’s important to put this bit of our movement’s history in context, as well as understand how our opponents fit in.

Labor Day

I’m doing my best to avoid labor today, engaging in activities such as napping, reading, and trying not to think too hard. Dave Kopel commemorates Labor Day with a more serious post:

One part of that debt is the essential role that labor leaders such as Walter Reuther and Lane Kirkland played in providing bipartisan support for resistance to the evil Soviet empire, an empire whose ultimate objective was to reduce all the workers of the world to slavery.

I once had a European born coworker comment to me that one oddity of the American labor movement is that remained, for the most part, pretty thoroughly anti-communist when compared to their European counterparts, who’s labor movement was pretty inexorably woven with Marxist and communist ideas, many having ties to the Soviet Union. That’s reflected in the fact that we celebrate Labor Day today, instead of May 1st, as its celebrated in much of the rest of the world.

A Gun in Every Room

The Firearms Blog has a post that shows the lengths some people will go to in order to secure their firearms in inconspicuous places. I think if you’re that worried, the easier solution is to just carry it around with you. There’s a gun in every room that I’m in too, because I generally keep the Kel-TecÂ holstered in-pocket, even around the house. It’s a good idea, even if you aren’t that paranoid, Â because you want to remain conditioned not to stuff other objects into the gun pocket. The other issue I have with the stash method is, in homes I’ve seen that have been broken into, they’ve been ransacked. They are likely going to find your stashed guns, and then just steal the cases. They can break into the cases somewhere else at their leisure.

We have a few quick opens that we don’t currently use. I think quick opens are ideal for childproofing your self-defense guns, and we don’t have children. To prevent theft, a floor safe is the best option.

Lesters Ammo: Works Sometimes

I have to admit, I laughed.

We’re Winning: Positive Press on Suppressors

Who would have thought, even five years ago, you’d have mainstream media articles being written about the utility of silencers.

Continuing the Manufactured Controversy

The Arizona Star is continuing to beat on the manufactured controversy with the Glock raffle, even though by this point it’s pretty clear that it has backfired:

Yet, it comes as a complete surprise to the Pima County Republicans’ interim leader, Mike Shaw, that anyone might object to raffling off a gun to raise money to defeat Democrats in the next election.

But it shouldn’t be a shock – and given the publicity the Pima County GOP has received from its galling decision, it’s perhaps not an unwelcome surprise.

So about that list of adjectives:

Crass, insensitive, vulgar, displaying a lack of empathy or compassion, dumbfounding, offensive, callous, boorish, thoughtless – all words that would fit.

The only people I’ve heard complain about this are the left-leaning Arizona media, the Pima County Democrats, and irrelevant anti-gun groups. The grassroots response was to get into the raffle, so much so they decided to raffle a rifle as well. To borrow Robb’s analogy, would it be outrageous to auction off a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue if a year ago someone plowed into a school bus, and they found a half drunken bottle of Johnny Walker Red in his back seat? Would that be “Crass, insensitive, vulgar, displaying a lack of empathy or compassion?” or would it just be normal?

As the Tucson Citizen points out “By the way, Giffords owns a Glock.Â Where’s the outrage?” Well, that just doesn’t fit the narrative.

Quote of the Day

From Dave Hardy:

As was suggested in comments to earlier posts, it’s becoming increasingly hard to deny the suspicious that the object of getting guns to the Sinaloa Cartel was … to get guns to the Sinaloa Cartel.

It makes you wonder if this operation goes beyond the simple explanations, like that it was meant to create a basis for more domestic gun control, and gets into a much broader purpose, that could develop into a major scandal. If the media weren’t completely in the tank, I might suggest this could be an administration destroying scandal.

Kate Pavlitch is reporting that senior administration officials were briefed on the operation. I keep wondering whether mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times are going to give up the charade that this was just good intentions gone sour, rather than push the idea there were never any good intentions in Fast and Furious, and that it accomplished exactly what it was intended to.

UPDATE: I should say, if this scandal gets into cloak and dagger territory, it will really speak to the incompetence of this administration. If you’re going to go that route, do you really want to leave a key component of your strategy in the hands of…. ATF? I’d like to think no one would be that foolish.

Upgrade Complete

The upgrade to a new ext4 file system is complete. Hopefully this will help the blog performance significantly. I had some complications. Apparently none of the LiveCD distributions support JFS. Another good reason to get rid of it, but it made getting the final backup a little more difficult than I anticipated.