A few days back I heard an old man share a world view that was so simple it made sense. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard it before.
He said that if I move my fence 100ft onto your property, you protest and then I move it back to only 50ft on your property, to a politician that was compromise but to anybody else its still theft.
That’s pretty much how they think it works. What’s amusing is that they’ve never even given a try at true horse trading. I can’t think of a better way to get gun owners arguing about who to throw off the lifeboat than offering trading gun show loophole for, say, the Hughes Amendment, or taking suppressors out from under the National Firearms Act. Hell, you could probably find takers for putting semi-auto long guns under NFA in exchange for repealing the 86 ban on full-auto. That would be epic divide and conquer, but as I’ve pointed out in the past, there’s a reason horse trading, practically speaking, doesn’t happen except in smoke filled rooms full of politicians and lobbyists.
Thanks for the link. Your right true trading could be a real threat to are movement since we already see divides.
The fact that the gun community is divided is the crack that politicians can exploit to turn us on ourselves. I had my father ask me why we needed AR-15s for hunting and I had to correct him that the 2nd Amendment does not protect hunting and even if it did there are a great number of states where you can hunt with the AR-15 and just because PA isn’t one of them it doesn’t mean it should be illegal to have one.
Errr, not even for varmints? Or for deer if you use a wider round like the 6.8 SPC? (That’s like a .270 with a 100 ft. lbf less energy than a .30-30., ought to be effective and humane against deer with good bullets.)
Exactly, we’ve never truly had a horse trading session. The only compromise is how much they will take, not what we want in return. Though honestly, I would probably do this:
If only to normalize MGs and/or suppressors.
Accept there isn’t a gun show loophole. Unless you mean to ban the sale of private person-to-person sale of guns.
Yes I understand the whole gun show loophole. It was said (partially) in jest.
Fair enough. In that case I agree with you, let’s give them the gun show loophole.
There is one “good” justification for it: unless you really know the other person you’re selling to—and this is the official reason why such a big deal is made of gun shows, the unofficial is that these laws are generally drafted to put them out of business, which as our host has pointed out would be catastrophic for US gun culture—you can’t know if someone is prohibited due to the mental disqualifications (which aside from veterans seem to have enough protections).
Due to privacy issues, the NICS is the only way to discover this, and as has been pointed out in this blog, states like Pennsylvania still refuse to report to it, but that’s another matter. Clayton’s thesis that we need the NICS in a society where we refuse to lock up the severely mentally ill (well, until they commit a bad enough crime) is compelling, much as I dislike it.
Yup, the Hughes amendment offer would be interesting….
Luckily they will never ever go there. We should roll get some staffer to instead slip it into the next 600 page tax bill, as it is in the IRS section of the US code. With enough levels of indirection it should be possible to get it passed before anyone figures it out.
Nobody is brave enough to do that, Kevin.
Dear Sebastian, I read on “Opposing Views” yesterday a letter from Ron Paul on the school security issue. Although very pro-gun, he felt Wayne’s call for more FEDERAL government involvement in school security to be just as bad as left wing calls for federal government involvement in our lives. pocketbooks, and guns. I was wondering if you’d seen it and if you had any thoughts on it.
In the after-comments, liberals hammered him for being pro-individual gun rights, but conservative respondents were split pretty evenly. Libertarians lived him.
Respectfully,
– Arnie
Libertarians *loved him*.
I’ll have more about this in an upcoming post, if the MiFi signal will cooperate.
Thank you, sir!