December 2013 – Page 4 – Shall Not Be Questioned

How’s That Registration Working Out for Ya?

Connecticut officials are warning of dire consequences for failure to comply. After all, where to gun owners belong if not in jail?

Mr. Lawlor, like most government officials, seems to think he and his buddies have invented policy out of whole cloth, and that the population has no choice but to shuffle along and obey. But weapons registration laws have a historyâ€”a consistent history,Â as I’ve written, of noncompliance and defiance.

They know we won’t comply. And to them, that’s just fine. Because then, in their minds, you’ll end up where you belonged in the first place. Really, if you think about it, if you were an owner and a gun was stolen, are you going to call the cops about it? So how do these laws really help things? They don’t. They just make it more likely gun owners are going to be uncooperative with police when it comes to enforcing laws.

The Gun Battle in the States

Reuters notes that the gun control battle is shifting to the states, with a slight edge going to pro-gun bills. The New York Times does a summary of the issues, which show that it’s considerably more than a “slight edge.” It also shows that a number of those bills that were passed, that are in the pro-gun control column, are minor bills like NICS improvements…. hardly a big win on their parts.

MAIG Mayor Purposefully Puts the Poor in Danger

Imagine a situation where an armed robber breaks into your home, but maybe you do or don’t have a means to defend yourself. What you do have is a phone with access to 911, and let us pretend for a moment that the local cops can get there in time to save you. What would keep you from using the phone in that situation?

Well, thanks to the efforts of Bloomberg-ally and MAIG Mayor Tom Leighton, you might lose your home if you call the police. You may face permanent eviction if you dare call the police while in danger. If you live paycheck-to-paycheck and can’t afford another place to live, then maybe you hide in the closet and hope for the best instead of calling the police.

See, this MAIG mayor has instituted a â€œone-strike ordinanceâ€ that allows his city to shut down any property for up to six months (without a hearing or notice) if the property is ever the site of a single gun or drug crime.

Another town instituted a similar rule that, instead of shutting down a property, fines the landlords as punishment, and a victim of domestic violence was threatened with eviction after the police were called to help her. When the boyfriend showed up again and stabbed her in the neck, she was too fearful of losing a roof over her young daughter’s head to call the police. Even as she was bleeding from her wounds, she pleaded with her neighbors not to call the police on her attacker because she and her daughter would be the ones punished and left without a home.

That case has resulted in litigation, and despite seeing the impact of this rule on a domestic violence victim, MAIG Mayor Leighton stands by using the one-strike ordinance, even if the ultimate result is to punish the poor for calling police when trouble lurks in their neighborhoods.

By supporting efforts to disarm citizens, Leighton forces them to rely on police. Now he’s punishing those who do rely on the police and who cannot afford to move if their landlords evict them because they dared call the police while in danger.

Politics in Law Enforcement Procurement

The mayor of Jersey City is mandating a gun control survey be completed by every vendor bidding on firearms or ammunition contracts for the city. The answers to the survey will be considered as much as price, safety, and other specs of the firearms and ammunition.

Assuming that they get any gun control surveys back at all, the likely result in this will not be pretty for the actual officers in Jersey City whose lives may well depend on their firearms and ammunition. Their guns will no longer be selected based on meeting needs of the officers, but on willingness to support select political agendas.

Of course, that assumes that the police will even find vendors willing to support gun control in order to win the contract of one department. The reaction of the consumer market will not be pretty if it is announced that a particular manufacturer responded to the survey with enough anti-gun remarks to win support of the Jersey City mayor and his Bloomberg-backed allies in MAIG.

A Desperate Move by the Antis

The latest move is to head on over to Europe to lobby those European gun makers to enact gun control. Because surely those European gun makers will be more enlightened, because they’re all so Euorpeany.

They want the European gunmakers, for example, to refuse to allow their weapons to be sold through unlicensed gun dealers. They also want the manufacturers to renounce political meddling in the U.S. through contributions to lobbying groups like the National Rifle Association.

It demonstrates how little they know about how the gun industry works. Manufactures don’t make shipments to unlicensed gun dealers. That would be illegal. They will sell to their US division, who are federally licensed to import. That importer will sell to a licensed distributor, who will sell to a licensed dealer, who sells to the general public. How exactly is, say, Berretta, supposed to control what happens to it after the point of retail sale?

Also, gun industry money is a fraction of NRA’s total contributions. Most of NRA’s money is raised in small increments from its members through traditional fundraising. While losing industry money would certainly hurt a little, it would far from cripple NRA, and you can bet if they were successful in doing this (which they won’t be), NRA would have a fundraising letter out next week talking about how anti-gun forces are bullying manufacturers into cutting off funds, and won’t you pretty please donate 25, 50, 75 or 250 dollars to help NRA make up the short fall.

And before the fundraising letter would even hit the mail, any cooperating European manufacture will have their US market share destroyed by our grassroots. The manufacturers are will aware of this, so all this is doing is costing the anti-gunners money. Though I’m sure they will enjoy the European Vacation on their organization’s dime.

A Subversive for NRA Board?

Caleb has been alerting the community about someone running for NRA Board who aims to make the organization more reasonable, as in to support gun control. This is not really much of a concern, because the Board is carefully engineered to avoid any uppity faction from being able to place members on the Board. There are often times when I think the Board’s size and structure is a bug, but in this case it’s a feature.

Brandon Webb has two paths to a board seat. He can be nominated by the nominating committee, which is about as likely as the snowstorm overhead right now heading down to Miami and covering Miguel rather than me. The other option is to be nominated by petition, which if I recall requires the signatures of 250 voting NRA members, which is lifers or people with 5 unbroken consecutive years of annual membership. That’s not an impossible mountain to climb, but that’s just to get on the ballot.

I can recall only one petition candidate successfully winning since I’ve been following this stuff, and that’s Maria Heil, and she managed to win only through very dogged campaigning on a personal level. In short, I don’t think Webb stands a chance of even getting on the ballot, let alone actually winning. But it’s worth it to point out that there’s a subversive with interest in running, so I would check out Caleb’s post.

One last thing is that this idea has been floated before, but never gone anywhere. Webb is just the first person to think of it who isn’t absolutely on the other side.

Brady Campaign Continues to Deny Reality

The Brady Campaign and LCAGV continue to live in an alternate reality where recalling not just one, but three Colorado politicians doesn’t really mean anything.

â€œThereâ€™s been disproportionate attention paid to the Colorado recall, where the corporate gun lobby was able to create the perfect circumstances for a handful of extremists to carry the day,â€ saidÂ Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign.

What I really don’t understand about their “logic” here is whether NRA did it, or it was largely spontaneous grassroots organizing, three enemies of the Second Amendment still lost their seats by voting for gun control. At the end of the day, I think that reality matters more than who really deserves credit. Gross is trying to spin his way out of the fact that the Colorado recall efforts likely spooked the Democrats into being a lot more skeptical of the bridge he’s and his allies are trying to sell them.

Tuesday News

The snow is falling again, and our office is closed. It’s the wet, heavy stuff this time that i the bane of conifers everywhere. But my office is always open, so I don’t get out of doing work. There might actually be enough going on for two link posts in as many days:

The Firearm Industry Consulting Group is filing a comment for 41P, the changes in NFA trusts, that is very detailed. They are preparing to sue over any rule change ATF may implement.

Clayton Cramer summarizes the UConn School of Law Symposium on the Second Amendment.

I think at this point George Zimmerman should seriously consider the monastic life.

New York won’t release SAFE Act compliance numbers. As Uncle says, know what it leads to. Don’t register if you want to keep them.

An affordable 3D metal printer? Looks pretty crude, but does it work? Something like that isn’t going to lay down quality metal, but even pot metal beats plastic.

Someone needs a refresher in how rights work. Seeking medical treatment is a right too. You just don’t have a right to demand someone else provide it to you, any more than you have a right to demand I give you one of my guns.

Remember, if you think people are out for your guns you’re a paranoid wing nut.

UFA Renewal Passes Senate

Passed by unanimous consent, which is effectively the same as 100-0, but it looks like Chuck Schumer is going to remain disappointed. This is not a victory of any sort — we simply avoided losing more ground — but I don’t mind Schumer remaining disappointed.

New Anti-Gun Blog

It’s called Armed with Reason, and it actually looks like they might not yet have discovered Reasoned Discourse^TM, meaning when the argument turns against them, they squash dissenting viewpoints.

I’d head on over there and start making good and reasonable arguments. If none of them get approved, we can declare them as closed-minded as other pretenders to the throne of Reasoned Discourse.