Month: January 2013

My apologies for being offline most of the day, but today was an in-office day where I had stuff that needed to get done while I was there. Tonight was a club meeting, and I had Bitter spending the day printing letter templates she pre-wrote. As legislative chair, I had to give my report. I had felt my report was getting kind of dry and uninteresting. What a difference a month makes. I got what I needed from the Board for further action, partly thanks to the vote of confidence from the previous occupant of my offices (both of them) vote of confidence.

My idea was to give people a bit of a helping hand in communicating with lawmakers. The response was quite a bit more than I expected. Usually it’s hard to get people to take that next step, but they did at my club tonight. This is where the hope meets the change, I think, only not in the way the Administration likely wants. People are scared. They should be. Everything we’ve achieved in the past 12 years is on the line now. I will crawl over broken glass to do whatever I can to beat this back, and if we do, I don’t want to stop there. There have to be consequences to our opponents for raising the stakes.

Reading the gun control measures specifically cited in NY Governor Andrew Cuomo’s State of the State report, it reminds me so much of what happened to Massachusetts gun owners in the late `90s. If you were a legal gun owner who had your state-issued firearms identification card, it was good for life unless you were convicted of a disqualifying offense and it was revoked. Then, one day, the legislature told gun owners that “valid for life” really meant “valid until we want more money from you.”

In New York’s case, it’s the same for grandfathering. One day, gun owners were told that they could keep the regular capacity magazines they already owned for their guns. Now, they are being told that those magazines will no longer be legal:

Because magazines are not generally stamped with a serial number or other mark that would identify the date of manufacture, it is virtually impossible for law enforcement to determine whether a large capacity magazine was manufactured prior to 1994, and, as aresult, we effectively have no ban in New York State. In order to fix this problem, Governor Cuomo will propose tightening our assault weapons ban and eliminating large capacity magazines regardless of date of manufacture.

The same is being said for pistol licenses. “Good for life” will no longer mean what you think it means. It means constant renewal, even when you’re not convicted, arrested, or even accused of any disqualifying offense, which presumably also means more money for the government.

Currently, licenses for handguns are issued by the county in which the gun owner lives. With few exceptions, licenses are valid for life. As a result, while certain checks—for example, checks against criminal convictions, involuntary commitment records,convictions for crimes of domestic violence, open orders of protection—are run at the time a license is issued, once a license is obtained, there is no subsequent check to determine whether the holder is still eligible to own a gun. Governor Cuomo will propose a single standard across the state to ensure that appropriate checks can be run to bar convicted felons and other prohibited people from possessing firearms.

There are other issues mentioned, but none in quite as much detail as the two above. I’ll let the folks who specialize in NY gun laws break down what the rest of the big push from the Governor will mean in practical terms.

Oh, and I should mention as a warning to New York gun owners: When Massachusetts converted their firearms identification cards from “good for life” to renewable, the state admits that they didn’t bother to tell thousands of gun owners. Even years after it changed, the state pro-gun group would get phone calls from guys who were just stopped with rounds of shotgun ammunition in the car or coming in from a day of hunting, and they were promptly charged with having an expired FID card – even though the card they held said it was good for life. Oh yes, innocent people who think they are following the law will be hurt by these changes if they go through.

So, New Yorkers, get involved with your state groups and try to get a repeat of Illinois.

On November 17, 1993, I was not yet 20 years old. That was the day the federal assault weapons ban was voted on (See my History of the Assault Weapons Ban). I had a lot going on in my life then. My mother’s cancer had just been deemed terminal, and she would die shortly after the ban went into effect. I was also a sophomore in college. While I was aware of the debate, and definitely opposed to any ban, I did not think anything like that could pass in this country.

“How could they pass that? It’s clearly a violation of the Second Amendment,” I thought.

I knew enough about guns to know the difference between a semi-auto rifle and a machine gun. I had attended gun shows with an uncle in the late 80s, and was corrected when asked about the machine guns.

“No, those aren’t machine guns. They are civilianized. They only fire semi-automatically.”

“You should get one.”

“No, that’s a commie rifle, boy.”

It was a Chinese Norinco, which can’t be imported anymore. He was looking for M1 Carbines, which I recall were a cheap and plentiful back then. My Uncle got a few M1 Carbines during the last hellish period gun owners went through, and he wasn’t buying them strictly for defense against criminals, if you know what I mean. The supposed “insurrectionist” theory of the Second Amendment is always how I understood it growing up, even though I came from a house that did not have firearms.

I spent most of that time believing it just couldn’t be passed, and even if it was passed, surely it has to be unconstitutional. I had no idea that it could be, and that it was a reality in California already. I was wrong. When the Assault Weapons Ban passed, and went into effect, that was the point that I became concerned about this issue to start paying attention to it, and the more I learned, the more angry I got. This culminated in my first purchase of a semi-auto Romanian AK-47 variant in 2000 for about $300. I bought 1000 rounds of ammo with it for 80 bucks. I joined the NRA for the first time. After that, I learned there were people who did not believe the Second Amendment was any individual right at all. Then I learned of the lies and deceptions on the part of gun control advocates. I read a lot of papers and publications by Dave Kopel, Dave Hardy, Steve Halbrook, and Don Kates, all of whom I have subsequently met since I took up blogging. Their scholarship was instrumental in bringing me to where I am now.

My journey from concerned citizen to activist took from 1994 to 2006 or so. We’re not going to have that kind of time today. It took a serious loss in 1994 to wake me up to the fact that the Second Amendment was actually controversial, and that there were forces at work who wanted to see it redacted from the Constitution, and it’s true intent ignored. The threat we’re facing today is more severe than in 1994. Confiscation is being openly discussed. Don’t think it can’t happen, and spend twelve years to really get involved. If gun owners today, especially people who like black rifles, are as complacent as I was, we could be facing a meltdown, and one which will take decades to fix, if it can be fixed at all. Don’t be like I was.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention Clayton’s scholarship, which I didn’t find until I was already pretty deep in the rabbit hole. Probably somewhere around the 2003-2004 timeframe.

SAF is promoting a National Gun Appreciation Day on January 19. Like NRA’s School Shield Program, this is something that is helping drive the narrative. I’ve seen several media outlets covering this. From that standpoint, I think this is started out well. But much like NRA’s pitch on School Shield, I have some concerns, or really, two concerns.

The first concern is that this seems to trying to recreate the same kind of buzz that happened with the Chick-fil-a appreciation that happened last year. I think there are some distinctions here worth considering. The first is that Chick-fil-a appreciation was effectively an organic phenomena. It started with a Facebook statement from Mike Huckabee, and went viral from there. The day after the media story hit about the Cathy family views, cars were lined up at the drive-thru of every Chick-fil-a in the country. That could happen easily because Chick-fil-a is a mass market product that people are familiar with, and a lot of people tend to go to somewhat regularly. It’s fairly easy to suggest “Let’s go grab some lunch at Chick-fil-a,” if you’re a conservative minded person and want to throw some support. Our issue is a bit different, in that we’re not a mass market product, given that the vast majority of gun owners buy a few guns in a lifetime and aren’t frequent range goers. That said, there is an impressive array of center-right groups behind the effort, so this has some potential to broaden our support, but it also raises the stakes. But I’m very wary of top down efforts to affect a mass demonstration. The right does much better with organic efforts. The gun show lines snaking around the corner are an organic phenomena. The shelves stripped bare at gun shops across the country are an organic phenomena. When top down approaches are used, there’s always a risk of the event flopping, which the media will happily report. That’s going to leave the groups who got behind it diminished, and leave gun owners diminished heading into the fight of our lives. Some will probably be calling NRA wanting to know why they aren’t on this effort, but you probably have your answer in what I’m writing here. You can use a top-down approach for mass demonstration, but there are risks to doing it in a very public way. When the left does it, and they do it effectively, the organizing tends to happen out of the public view. You generally don’t notice until you have, like NRA did the Monday after Newtown, a hundred or so people standing outside your office waving Creedo signs in your face.

The second concern, and perhaps the greater concern reflects something I heard last night on Cam & Company. In his weekly roundtable with Mike McCarville. Cam was getting feedback from Mike about what gun show attendees were thinking and doing, in terms of whether they were writing their lawmakers and making their voice heard. The unfortunate response was that many of them felt very strongly that by going to the gun show, or by buying guns and some ammunition, they were making a statement. Folks, if this belief becomes widespread, we’re going to lose. Communicating with lawmakers is crucial at a time like this. Last night I got a call from NRA’s lobbyist in Illinois, and he mentioned that everyone’s phone calls, faxes, and e-mails were absolutely crucial to helping defeat those bills (for now). If we can’t repeat that play everywhere else in the country we are screwed. More importantly, if Obama turns his machine against us, and most of our people are feeling like panic buying equals doing something, we’re not going to know what hit us. You’ll feel the same way you felt when you went to bed on election night or woke up the next day and wondered how this could happen. A lot of people who participate in something like this are going to feel like they did something, and if this event scores big time positive media, they will have. If it doesn’t, we may send off a lot satiated people, who feel good that they did something, who in fact, did not. Something right now is communicating with lawmakers. It’s what we just saw in Illinois. It’s what the other side is desperately trying to encourage their people to do, because they know that’s what works.

So am I saying don’t participate? No. I’m not saying that at all. The stakes are very high for an event like this to fail. My purpose is to try to get people to understand how I think about activism, and make a case for my concerns. If you can clear off your schedule on Saturday the 19th, you should. I will be donning my Second Amendment t-shirt and trying to find people in lines waiting to get in ranges and shops. I’m going to try to help people contact their lawmakers, and to convince them of the necessity of doing so. I would encourage everyone else who can make the time to do the same. I would like this event to be a success, because if it is, not only will there be a media payoff, but it’ll help get gun owners in one place so I can try out the plan I’m developing to help our people more easily communicate with lawmakers in my local district.