June 2013 – Page 6 – Shall Not Be Questioned

From the State that Bought You the Lautenberg Switcheroo

They get a Mulligan on gun control.Â From ANJRPC:

Today, the New Jersey Assembly Budget Committee passed Senate President Stephen Sweeneyâ€™s “centerpieceâ€ gun legislation (S2723Â /Â A4182) in a “do-overâ€ vote, following the embarrassing failure of the bill to pass a roll-call vote of the Assembly Law & Public Safety Committee on June 6.Â Â Assembly Democratic leadership brazenly rigged the system by moving the legislation to the Budget Committee, where they could better control the outcome and ensure the billâ€™s passage.

The bill passed along party lines, with 8 Democrats voting yes, and 4 Republicans voting no.

The Sweeney legislation throws out existing FID cards and replaces them with either a privacy-invading driver license endorsement or other form of ID; suspends Second Amendment rights without proof of firearms training; imposes a 7-day waiting period for handgun purchases; ends all private sales; and effectively creates a registry of ammunition purchases and long gun sales. Democrats have touted the bill as a “national model.â€

The bill now moves to the Assembly for a full floor vote, which is likely to occur on Thursday, June 20.Â Â Please immediately callÂ both your Assembly membersÂ and tell them to oppose all new anti-gun legislation, including A4182.Â Â If passed by the Assembly, the bill could go back to the Senate next week for concurrence with Assembly amendments.

There was testimony from gun rights activists at todayâ€™s hearing, including ANJRPC Executive Director Scott Bach, who sharply criticized the Sweeney bill and ripped the process of swapping committees in violation of legislative rules.Â Â “Anywhere else in the country that would be called vote-rigging,â€ Bach said. “Here, it masquerades as â€˜legislative processâ€™.â€

A recording of the hearing will beÂ posted hereÂ within 24 hours. Scroll to Monday, June 17, 2013, then click “listenâ€).

Please watch for future ANJRPC alerts and updates.

Usually when you bring a bill up for a vote, if it loses, that’s too bad — it’s the end of the bill. Not in New Jersey, where apparently you can pull it in the middle of a vote when it becomes apparent it’s not going to go the way you want.

Bloomberg Body Guard Gets Seven Years for Attempted Murder

I guess it’s not just the Mayor’s Mayors that are illegal. Apparently Bloomberg’s armed bodyguards, some of the only folks that are legally allowed to be armed in New York City, are trying to get in on the game too.

Leopold McLean, 49, shot his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend outside her home in November 2010.

The shooting took place after the veteran NYPD officer had dropped off Mayor Bloombergâ€™s daughter Georgina at home after a Knicks game.

McLean spottedÂ LePaul Gammons outside his girlfriendÂ Assia Winfieldâ€™s Jamaica, Queens home.

He shot him twice in theÂ buttocks and back using his service weapon asÂ GammonsÂ ran away .

Remember folks, neither your nor I are deemed responsible enough to tote a heater around the Big Apple. To the credit of judge and prosecutor, they didn’t just sweep this under the rug.

UPDATE: SayUncle: “Clearly, Virginia gun laws are to blame.”

IL Attorney General Asking SCOTUS for Yet Another Extension

This is getting ridiculous. Apparently her excuse is that their poor Solicitor General is just such a busy guy. You know how this could have been avoided? Not running this whole thing down to the wire. I think at some point they just need to get slapped with an injunction preventing them from enforcing the current law. It’s time to stop playing games.

All it Takes is Parents Standing Up

A school in Virginia has reversed its zero tolerance policy after parents got up in arms when two 7 year olds were suspended for pretending pencils were guns. Local politicians tend to want to avoid controversy like the plague. One might think it might takes hordes of parents to make a difference, but really one or two determine sets of parents can often be more trouble than local elected officials want to deal with.

Testing out New Twitter Plugins

The Twitter plugin I use has gone the way of the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon, and to make matters worse, it has finally broke with Twitter’s latest API change. I am testing out a new plugin to do Twitter integration, so bear with me. In addition, the social media icons on the blog were handled by the Twitter plugin. I’ll be looking for a replacement there too.

Manchin Clamoring to Counter NRA Ads

Forcing Manchin to have to spend money defending his anti-gun position is a good idea:

But for Manchin and his top aides, the dispute with the NRA has become increasingly personal. Manchinâ€™s chief of staff, Hayden Rogers, a lifetime NRA member, has let his membership to the group lapse. Rogers even pulled the pro-NRA sticker off his own truck.

Oh no. Joe Manchin’s top aides are abandoning the NRA! What matters is what West Virginians think, and our voters have long memories, and we love giving the boot to traitors. Meanwhile, MSNBC argues NRA darkened Obama, bringing out one of the leading defenses of the left: when all else fails, accuse your opponent of being racists.

Court Tosses Out Colorado Magazine Restrictions

Sadly, not the magazines you were thinking.

Quality of Life & Gun Ownership

ExurbanKevin has a story out of north central Massachusetts that highlights the issues with may issue concealed carry laws. The Fitchburg, MA police chief takes pride in the fact that he denies carry permits to about 90% of new applicants. To those 90%, he adds the restriction that they may only use their firearms for hunting and target practice.

What’s interesting about the story that isn’t explicitly stated is that the other town he mentions, Leominster, will issue a concealed carry license without restriction to new applicants, or at least they would 10 years ago. I know because I got mine through Leominster.

In fact, due to the Massachusetts gun laws, I couldn’t look for housing after I graduated college like most recent grads–finding the cheapest place with the fewest possible roommates in the neighborhood least likely to result in a stolen or damaged car.

My first step was drawing a circle around the city in which I would be working to encompass any city within reasonable driving distance where the gas wouldn’t make me go broke before I even took home a paycheck. Then, I checked with the local gun community about all the cities within that circle. The cheapest and closest apartments I could find were in a city that refused to issue concealed carry licenses. That was off the list. Eventually, after taking several other options off the list either due to the unknown issuing policies or because it was widely known they add restrictions to licenses, I found a place that I could just barely afford in Leominster.

I admit that I really liked Leominster. My apartment wasn’t in the greatest of neighborhoods, but the crime rate was sure as hell better than the neighboring Fitchburg (which does not issue for carry, and, according to what I’d heard, did not issue then, either). It was a cute apartment; my car remained safe, as did my boyfriend’s when he came to visit. The times I did have a scare–when there was a domestic dispute involving some death threats outside my bedroom windows and when maintenance accidentally left my door partially open after fixing the a/c–I didn’t have to worry about restrictions on my license getting me into trouble. I could grab my gun out of my purse and have it ready if needed. As a woman living alone in an area where family was a good 14 hours away, a boyfriend who lived about 4 hours away, and my closest good friends were back in Western Massachusetts a good hour or more away, I appreciated the fact that I had a tool to defend myself if needed.

But the fact remains that I had to spend substantially more money in rent and living expenses in order to have that peace of mind. That single decision by the police department to issue or deny my right to self-defense changed the entire equation about my lifestyle choices. At least I had the economic freedom to have a little wiggle room that would allow me to choose a jurisdiction that recognized self-defense. For those less fortunate, they still don’t have those options, and that’s a problem we need fix.

On Sending Weapons to Syria

Michael Bane asks:

I’m a little puzzled why we’re going to give small arms to Al Qaeda in Syria without requiring universal background checks on each one of those so-called “rebels.” I mean, it’s for all those little Middle Eastern children, isn’t it? And is there gong to be a registry of the serial numbers of all those small arms so we can trace them back to the individual terrorist we gave the guns to when those guns are used against Americans â€”Â as they inevitably will be? And I’m concerned that those containers full of small arms being shipped Al Qaeda Syria mayÂ allÂ feature magazines with a magazine capacity greater than 10 rounds! AndÂ realÂ assault weapons!

And here we’ve been told, again and again, by Obama’s supporters that small arms are useless in the face of a government armed with airplanes, tanks, artillery, and weapons of mass destruction. This is pretty good evidence that none of these people actually believe their own bull.

A Response from MSNBC

MSNBC has quoted us on an article, based on my Thursday post on the topic.Â This article was actually released Thursday night, but I have not honestly had time to link it until now. It’s actually a pretty balanced article, on the whole. But I never know ahead of time when contacted by a reporter whether it’s something looking for some balance, or whether it’s going to be a hack job. Unfortunately, when it’s MSNBC, my gut tells me hack job. In this case that wasn’t the case.

No doubt MAIG is going to try to drive that 1.5 million number as hard and far as they can. The question is whether any politicians will buy it. Regardless of whether it’s real grassroots or not, it’s likely MAIG has accomplished more here than the Brady Organization has, even in the past.