Year: 2013

Hard to believe school officials thought this was a good idea in Arizona:

A school district in a generally rural section of northwest Tucson, Arizona is asking the parents of high school students and junior high school students to pledge never to use guns or violence to resolve problems.

Well, if that problem is someone breaking down my door at 3AM, pardon me if I don’t think that might be a problem that needs to be solved with guns. From the pledge:

“I will teach, including by personal example, my teenager about the dangers and consequences of the misuse of guns and weapons, and I will keep any guns I own under lock, away from school grounds and away from my children.”

And yeah, back to the example, that might be a problem if I’m getting my door kicked in at 3AM. I’m guessing this is probably a school district with some problems, but parents who live in neighborhoods with problems have rights too.

A well thought out and written article on the Second Amendment, but it comes to a common and what I think is wrong conclusion:

This may have been fine when the Amendment was first conceived, but considering the changing context of culture and its artifacts, might it be time to amend it? When it was adopted in 1751, the defensive-power afforded to the citizenry by owning guns was roughly on par with the defensive-power available to government. In 1751 the most popular weapon was the musket, which was limited to 4 shots per minute, and had to be re-loaded manually. The state-of-the-art for “arms” in 1791 was roughly equal for both citizenry and military. This was before automatic weapons – never mind tanks, GPS, unmanned drones, and the like. In 1791, the only thing that distinguished the defensive or offensive capability of military from citizenry was quantity. Now it’s quality.

This is a pretty common argument. I’ll grant him, for the sake of argument, that the Second Amendment is primary founded on resistance to tyranny, even though our Courts seem to be more focused on the self-defense aspects of the right.

The chief mistake people make in this line of thought is to assume war is killing. That is not really the case. War is the use of force in an attempt to impose your political will onto others. Killing is just a means to accomplish that. If it were just about killing, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could have been settled in about thirty seconds, but they weren’t. Our goals in both cases was to impose a less outwardly militant democratic system of government on a population that had no tradition of it. When it comes to defeating an opposing army, all the things that make governments so remarkably powerful matter quite a lot. When it comes time to actually impose your political will, those things matter a lot less. A man in a tank can’t impose his will on me, he can only kill me. To impose his will he has to get out of the tank, plane, or ship, and essentially go from being a soldier to being a policeman, and at that point, we become a lot more equal. If our government ever wants to kill us, lots of us, we’re screwed. We have a much better chance resisting the imposition of someone else’s political will. It can be argued that firearms aren’t as important in that equation as other things, and I might agree with that, but such resistance is not beyond the reach of motivated individuals. The philosophies and attitudes that the right to keep and bear arms engenders in a population is likely just as important, if not more important, as the instruments of exercising that right.

This person thinks gun owners who rush and panic to buy “assault weapons” ahead of a government gun control law in Maryland are acting like children. Must be hard to look down on your fellow citizens to such a strong degree.

Fudging the numbers for murder.

Clayton notes that heart surgery is best avoided. We’re glad to see he’s on the mend. My grandfather had his valve replaced in his mid-60s and while his recovery was much longer, afterwards he felt better than he had in years.

More talk about the army switching side arms.

Interesting Massachusetts gun rights case.

Stop and frisk ruled unconstitutional by a US District Judge, because the targets are disproportionally minorities.

ALEC fights back against Dick Durbin.

California politicians are looking to savage your rights anew.

The New Hampshire Supreme court rules that for a gun to be considered loaded, it actually has to be loaded.

Moms pushing for gun control in Morristown.

Can I get an amen?

Inside NRA University.

Detroit man says Stand Your Ground kept him out of prison.

Writing in the Inquirer, area attorney Gregory Sullivan writes about the recent Third Circuit decision in Drake v. Folko, upholding New Jersey’s carry restrictions:

Letting the permit law stand is consequently the best result. But why are federal judges even involved in this area?

Do we question why federal judges are involved in cases like freedom of the press or freedom of religion? No, because it’s a fundamental right guaranteed by our constitution. It doesn’t emanate from penumbras like some recently discovered rights. It’s right there staring you in the face.

Moreover, the Constitution provides no help on how to assess gun regulations.

I don’t think “shall not be infringed” is any less clear than “Congress shall make no law.”

Prior to Heller and McDonald, our gun laws were the subject of frequent and robust debate in state legislatures. They were being revised as needed, and voters maintained ultimate control over them. With the Heller-McDonald catastrophe, that control is almost completely lost. The complex policy questions on gun-carry laws will now be decided, ultimately, by a small group of lawyers in Washington at the Supreme Court.

Yes, that’s generally how enforcement of constitutional rights are supposed to work. Does this guy read the same Constitution the rest of us do? Rights are supposed to be beyond the reach of the political process. That’s the whole point. There are certain debates state legislatures shouldn’t be able to have, like whether or not to allow newspapers to be published freely, what kind of books you can own, and yes, whether or not an ordinary Joe can carry a firearm.

Paul Barrett, the author of “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun” is someone I’d classify as outside the gun culture looking in. He’s been willing to learn and take the subject seriously, which is more than you can say for a lot of journalists. A comment tipped me off to an article in Bloomberg Businesses Week he essentially comes to the same conclusion I did over the weekend in regards to appreciating Starbucks by grabbing your AR and heading out for some coffee.

They have the right in most states to carry firearms openly. But the now-annual Starbucks Appreciation event is a gratuitous attempt to rile the portion of the populace made uncomfortable by open display of firearms. In a country with sharply divided attitudes toward guns, why purposely provoke one’s neighbors?

So what do I win here? It’s a reasonable question. Normalizing rifle OC? Well, I don’t OC, and I certainly wouldn’t ever OC a rifle around suburbia for the hell of it. So it’s no real prize for me, or most of us. I’d also note that there are still a few states where OC is illegal, even for pistols, and this kind of display is going to make fixing that more difficult as politicians start debating whether they really want to open this potential can of worms.

What’s interesting in all this is I believe the folks who engage in pistol OC have actually somewhat accomplished their task. Pistol OC won’t grab headlines very much these days, and the police are starting to understand the law better. In that sense, it has become more normalized. It’s now dog bites man as far as the news is concerned. This would be great except, and people will hate me for saying this, OC has always been attractive to attention seekers. I’m not saying everyone is, but it’s hard not to observe that some in the OC crowd really want their 15 minutes. I’ve been wondering if the rifle OC phenomena isn’t driven by a need to up the ante in order to keep the attention coming in.