October 2012 – Page 6 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Jindal: “It’s time we protected gun rights.”

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has an op-ed on the need to pass Amendment 2 in November. I appreciate that he broke it down to explain it to those who just assume that gun rights are “protected” without really knowing anything about the legal debates:

Simply put, this amendment to Louisiana’s Constitution acknowledges the fundamental right to keep and bear arms for legitimate purposes, and it requires any restriction on gun ownership be subject to strict scrutiny.

It’s our own Second Amendment, if you will, a new constitutional provision to repair the damage done by past judicial interpretations. You see, over the years, Louisiana courts have applied a “rational basis” legal standard to interpreting our right to bear arms. In reality, that means that the state has almost unlimited authority to confiscate, prohibit or infringe on this fundamental right. Make no mistake, I have no intention of allowing such a bill to leave my desk without a veto, but our liberties should not be held hostage to whims of future legislators and governors. By applying the “strict scrutiny” test, we elevate the protections in our constitution to the same level we provide our right to free speech.

Jindal also goes into the arguments about the federal courts being only vote away from rewriting the Second Amendment and what Congress has done to try and keep some of the assaults on gun rights that happened after Katrina from happening again, but the theme is definitely that Louisiana needs its own protection of the fundamental right just in case the whims of Congress or the federal courts change. I hope that gun owners who don’t normally follow the issue closely down there get a chance to read this piece.

It Doesn’t Matter What You Think, It Matters What They Think

From the Brady Center event, I think it’s worthwhile to point out a question asked by the Center to Justice Stevens on the subject of those horribly, wrongly-informed American people who believe they have rights even though the Brady lawyers know better:

I don’t care how long I’ve been working the activism side for this issue, it will never cease to amaze me the sheer number of gun owners who believe that just because they – and likely all of their friends and family – believe something to be a right, it’s protected by the legal system. That’s simply not true. When it comes to keeping gun ownership legal, it really doesn’t matter what the founding documents actually say. All that ultimately matters is how the government interprets it and enforces any laws they pass on the issue of gun ownership.

It kind of reminds me of a story I was told by a Massachusetts gun owner who was talking to a Pennsylvania gun owner at the NRA convention in Pittsburgh back in 2004. After hearing about the variety of gun laws there and the licensing nightmare that determines what kinds of guns you’re allowed to own and how you can use them, the Pennsylvania guy just responded with, “But this is America!” Yeah, buddy, it is America. Welcome. I just hoped he started paying more attention to the issue after hearing those stories.

Open Thread On Cultural Shifts

I’ve often wondered about the rapid shift in the center of our issue to more strongly favor gun rights over gun control. It happened very quickly. In the space of just a bit more than a decade, we went from the high water mark for the gun control movement to the gun control movement being at death’s door, and needing to reinvent itself to achieve relevance.

I’ve seen some data that shows a generation gap on the issue, with the very old tending to favor gun control at a greater rate than other age demographics. This leads me to a postulate: the Greatest Generation were considerably more supportive of gun control than Baby Boomers and subsequent generations are. The shift in the center that’s happened in the issue has come about because the Greatest Generation has largely died off in the past decade.

Another postulate: if there was a generational shift in the issue, to what extent did racism and xenophobia play into it? Using my grandparents as my example from that generation, they were far more openly racist than is socially acceptable today. To what extent did support for gun control by older generations exist because of social anxieties about blacks asserting their rights and demanding to be treated as equal members of society, along with the social unrest that went with that?

Keep in mind I’m speaking generally, and there have always been a separation between elites and ordinary people. But I think it’s a safe observation to suggest that elites in the 30s through 60s were considerably more supportive of gun control than they have been since. Another postulate I would put out there is that our current success is not so much driven by a generational change, as the fall of the Northeast as an economic and cultural center, and the rise of the South, Midwest, and Mountain States, which have never had a cultural inclination toward gun control. In short, Southern elites are not out-eliting our elites, which I consider a good thing.

Making the Case Against Obama

CNN is covering the NRA’s stepped up campaign for this election season:

The new commercial charges that Obama is jeopardizing people’s rights to defend themselves and specifically mentions the president’s nominations to the Supreme Court – Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

Finally! Bitter is working up some video of the Justice Stevens event, which I’m hoping can show how important the court issue is. Stevens was put on the bench by Gerald Ford, but at the time gun control was still a bipartisan issue. We’ll need to understand the importance of the Court as a movement no matter who controls the White House. It’s worth remembering that Bush wanted Harriet Meyers on the Supreme Court instead of Justice Alito. It was outrage from within the GOP, and among the various interest groups on the right in DC that brought her nomination down. Getting our people primed for a Court fight is one reason I want to see this issue get more coverage than it does.

Where Would Gun Control Be …

… if it wasn’t for rich assholes?

New York City’s billionaire mayor said Wednesday he will fund a super PAC to help candidates who favor gun control in local, state and federal elections nationwide. A person familiar with the plans put the commitment at $10 million to $15 million.

That’s pocket change for Bloomberg. But the guy didn’t make his money by being a moron. He may be a tyrannical nanny-stater, but he’s sharp, and that’s what makes him the biggest threat to our rights out there.

Quote of the Day: Big Gulp

Zermoid wins the Internets in the comments:

There is something very wrong with America when you can have a serious discussion about â€œyou wonâ€™t need to smuggle in a Big Gulp. You can buy one legally.â€

So we apparently do not have pre-ban Big Gulps and post-ban Big Gulp’s.

To Shake their Salt in the Tyrant’s Face

A minor wordplay on Robert Churchill’s book. Bitter and I went up to ~~Mordor~~ New York tonight for dinner and a concert. Since King Bloomberg deems salt unfit for his subjects, I decided I needed to engage in a minor act of defiance:

In truth the food was fine without the salt, but it had to be done. I return to the Kingdom of Bloombergia in a couple of weeks, and it is my intent to smuggle in a Big Gulp. It’s interesting that I can’t order an Imperial Pint of Coke in New York, unless I ask them to put rum in it too, in which case it’s fine. I still await the day when I can carry a firearm through the streets of New York without Bloomberg or any other New York mayor being able to do a damned thing about it.

The Romney Assault Weapons Ban That Wasn’t

Being very close personally with someone who worked at GOAL during the Romney Administration, there is a lot to like and a lot to dislike about Mitt Romney’s record on our issue. What’s not to like has gone largely undiscussed. What’s been discussed far more often is the assault weapons issue, which alternately has people or the media suggesting Romney made Massachusetts’s assault weapons ban permanent, or accusing him of being the Governor who passed Massachusetts’s Assault Weapons Ban in the first place. Both are untrue. The ban passed and signed byÂ Governor CellucciÂ in 1998 never had an expiration. The problem came about in 2004 because Massachusetts Law makes several references to the federal ban. Without the supporting language from the federal ban, the definition of what exactly an assault weapon is in Massachusetts would have become uncertain. Fine, right? Well, no. Massachusetts is not a state where ambiguity in the law is decided in favor of a gun owner. The definition of assault weapon contains the language “shall include, but not be limited to,” which is like music to the ears of a prosecutor wanting to warn the fair citizenry that they exercise their right in his fiefdom at their peril. The limiting language in the Massachusetts definition was tied to a Federal Law which was about to disappear.

In 2004 that anti-gun leaders of the Massachusetts Legislature started to raise false concerns about needing to make Massachusetts’s assault weapons ban permanent, given that the federal ban was about to expire. This was never true, but presented an excuse to convince other legislators to revisit, and simultaneously greatly expand the definition of what an assault weapon is in Massachusetts, making the ban cover far more firearms. They went ahead and drafted a bill. Fortunately for gun owners in Massachusetts, GOAL was able to essentially gut the bill, and preserve the existing language in the definition, which included the federal list of exempted firearms. In addition they got a number of other easements to the bill which are detailed in their press release speaking about Romney’s record on guns. The anti-gun sponsors of the original bill were not pleased, but the rest of the Massachusetts Legislature went along with the GOAL plan of preserving the existing definition in the law, and slipping in some easements through under the radar. This wasn’t about making the ban permanent. Massachusetts Law would have still made assault weapons illegal, just with a far more nebulous definition of what exactly an assault weapon is.

While the anti-gun sponsors were not happy about what their bill had turned into, they got a lot happier when Governor Romney was misadvised about the bill he was signing and made the now infamous signing statement:

â€œDeadly assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts. These guns are not made for recreation or self-defense. They are instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people.â€

That was essentially cover for them, especially given that the media ran with this, and has kept running ever since. GOAL was inundated with calls from angry gun owners, who took the media and anti-gun legislators word on what the bill actually did.Â No one, not reporters, anti-gun folks, or angry citizens, bothered to read the actual law. While it takes some work to follow, but it’s pretty easy to see the effect of the first three sections of the law, if you look at the statute it is modifying, by inserting a concrete reference to the federal law with the addition of a date. The rest you need a deeper understanding of Massachusetts gun law to follow, but the “assault weapons” parts aren’t hard.

So Romney has never signed a gun ban, and anyone who suggests he has is missing the facts. He did other things, such as raising fees to try to balance Massachusetts’s budget, rather than raising taxes. Massachusetts has long required people to obtain licenses to possess firearms. Among those fees he raised were gun licenses, and the price hike was not trivial. The price was quadrupled without concern to what effect this would have on the exercise of people’s rights. The burden is not minor for someone who doesn’t have much money. That’s enough reason to distrust Romney on the issue as much as a gun ban is. I don’t blame gun owners who are wary of Mitt. But I’d like to see that wariness based on facts, and not bullshit peddled by the media.

A View of Legislation

Again, drawing from Tam’s post on last night’s third rail licking by President Obama, I want to highlight a random comment that I think is illustrative:

Lets face facts on the actual possibility of a re-introduced AWB.

1. It will either have a sunset, or be overturned. In the current political climate EVERYONE has bigger fish to fry and no matter what you do you cannot regulate crazy.

2. As callous or shocking as this may sound, an AWB would be nothing short of lucrative for pretty much every member here.

What makes the poster here think that, once the legislative sausage grinder starts to turn, that surely it would have a sunset, or be overturned? Why did the original AWB have a sunset in it? Because ban proponents had to include it to win votes. We were damned lucky we got that sunset. It was a product of the unique circumstances in place when the ban was considered, and there’s no guarantee a new ban would have one. None of the state level bans have included sunsets (Massachusetts’s ban was always permanent). None have been repealed. Unfortunately, statements like this express a grave naivety about how the legislative process works.

If you’re a gun lobbyist, and you’re fighting an assault weapons ban and losing, you may be able to use wavering legislators to help make a bill less bad. But the exact nature of how that works out is very much going to be dependent on circumstances and individual legislators. What would a new assault weapons ban look like? We honestly don’t know. The best course of action is not to find out.

And the Press Goes Wild

The Google Alerts on “assault weapon” is lighting up like a Christmas tree this morning since the President came out and said what he really thinks. Papers from the Washington Post to the Chicago TribuneÂ are atwitter on the subject. From Tam:

What I love about this is how every time he gives the gun control issue the most tentative touch with the tip of his tongue (what he actually said was “Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced,”) the media grabs him by the back of his head and turns it into a great, big sloppy slurp (“Obama Calls for Renewal of Assault Weapons Ban” blares the headline.) These guys are writing the NRA’s ad copy for them.

I tend to agree this is a good thing. We want Obama talking about this issue and the media playing it up as much as possible. The worst thing Obama ever did to NRA was to do and say nothing. It’s hard to demonize someone who really hasn’t gone after you, except for “under the radar.” Well, he’s not flying too stealthy anymore, and I’m going to bet there are people in Fairfax editing copy of that statement as we speak.