May 2015 – Page 3 – Shall Not Be Questioned

2A Rally Photos

Yesterday was the 10th Annual 2A Rally at the PA Capitol. Pictures can be found here. I have not gone for several years. Mainly because we’re not facing any major threats. The situation in Pennsylvania is this: With the GOP firmly in control of the legislature, we’re not likely to see any bad bills. With Governor Wolf in the Governor’s mansion, we’re not likely to get anything done. So for the next four years, it’s a stalemate unless the Democrats manage to gain seats in the legislature. The other issue is numbers. Illinois does their IGOLD rally day which was turning up thousands. That’s many people makes an impression on legislators, especially when you can get repeatability every year. We’ve always struggled with that in Pennsylvania. Illinoisans had issues that galvanized their grassroots. We don’t have anything like that here in Pennsylvania.

I’m not saying don’t go, but if you do, I’d head in after the speeches to your lawmaker’s office and try to speak with them one-on-one about your concerns as a gun owner. If you can bring someone else from the district too, that would be even better. I’m big on the impact of direct contact with lawmakers. Not so much on rallies and protests, unless you can turn out numbers that wow lawmakers. That’s a hard thing to do without an issue or threat that galvanizes people.

Should Police Carry Glocks and Other Glock-Like Handguns?

Bob Owens tossed this grenade last week, and I expected to see a lot more explosion. If there’s anything that gets debate going faster than a post that people will take as “your gun sucks,” I’ve never run across it. But it’s largely gone by without much argument in the blogosphere. I noticed that Miguel agrees, and Glenn Reynolds did too.

But really, I wouldn’t consider any response worth my time if the person isn’t a trainer. Those are the people who see a lot of examples and have experience with the limitations of the people they train. The only experience I’ve had with drawing my Glock under stress has been under the stress of competition, and even that’s been a while. I do regularly practice drawing with my finger indexed properly, but not under extreme stress, so I really don’t know if I have enough experience to comment.

All I can say is I’ve stopped fingering triggers on the draw after I conditioned myself not to do it. What would I do under the stress of a deadly force scenario? I don’t know, and I don’t think most other people know either until it happens. That’s why we train. I’ve seen studies about how fine motor control goes to hell when you have a bunch of adrenaline running through you, but if you look at things strictly through that lens, then we should all be carrying broadswords and battle axes, rather than handguns. Yet people do manage to successfully and safely defend themselves with pistols on a regular basis, including striker-fired pistols without manual safeties.

So you won’t see me write up a lengthy post on why Bob is wrong, because to be honest, I don’t have the expertise. I’m not a trainer. But I still plan on carrying a the same Glock I’ve carried since 2002. What do you think?

Court Victory in Rhode Island

Clayton Cramer is reporting that the Rhode Island Supreme Court has struck down the state’s may-issue permitting regime. This is a short opinion, and not one based on the Second Amendment, but rather the right to keep and bear arms provision of the Rhode Island Constitution, and previous case law in that state. It does not squash the “good cause” requirement under Rhode Island law entirely, but the court would seem to take a very liberal reading of it. The Court quashes the Chief of Police’s denial, and orders him to reconsider the case, offering the plaintiff the right to come back into court if he is unsatisfied with the final decision. The Court doesn’t come out and say it directly, but it would appear he’ll get his permit.

Here We Go Again: George Zimmerman Gets Shot

Apparently the media’s zero to sensationalist time is pretty damned low, as they are already couching their headlines to make it seem like Zimmerman has claimed yet another victim. USA Today headline, “George Zimmerman Involved in Shooting.” If you follow through to the article, you’ll note that he was apparently shot by someone else, and was taken to the hospital. Also note that in the background section of the story, they fail to mention that Zimmerman only fired at Martin because Martin was pounding Zimmerman’s head into the pavement. CNN is pimping the same headline. This guy is going to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder. Given the trouble he’s had with women since, I’ve said he should look into the monk’s life. That might be all that’s really left for him. At the very least, moving to a different part of the country would probably be wise. I’m kind of tired of seeing this guy in the news.

Calls to Turn Weaponized IRS On NRA

A few weeks ago, Yahoo News published a hit piece on NRA. I figured this was likely ginned up by some of our opponents in the gun control movement. Most of the mainstream outfits would love a story like that, but the fact that it only appeared on Yahoo, to not much fanfare from the rest of the media, hinted to me that whoever wrote it probably did not follow the barest of journalistic standards, and quite possibly was an operative from the other side, especially given that the author is associated with a left-leaning group Center for Public Integrity, which is supported by supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and has a board stocked with people who are not friendly to Second Amendment freedoms.

At the end of that article, you’ll notice a quite lengthy update, where NRA has addressed many of the allegations against it. When I first saw this article, I thought that it was probably a coding error on their web site, because to be honest, the firm they hire to do that kind of work has been sloppy in the past. Because we’re often using the PVF web site to look up grades, I can’t tell you how many times it’s just been broken. Though, it’s been pretty good recently, so maybe they’ve hired some better people.

Of course, none of this has stopped our author, Alan Berlow, from noting the calls for the Obama Administration to sick his weaponized IRS on NRA, calls that are coming from the rabid dogs at Coalition to Stop Gun Ownership.

A key thing people get confused about when it comes to campaign finance laws is what constitutes political activity. To use an example, here’s an add NRA ran in Colorado ahead of the 2014 elections:

Some folks might say this is clearly political activity, but it does not call for people to support for, or oppose any bill or measure. It does not mention any candidate for federal office. This is educational outreach, rather than political activity. This ad could even be funded under the auspices of a 501(c)(3). In fact, a good bit what NRA does that many people might think is “political” isÂ done under a 501(c)(3), NRA’s Freedom Action Foundation.

This article was pretty obviously a targeted hit piece. That’s even more apparent when you consider none of the other MSM outlets, who’d love to be all over a story like this, really touched it. The only other outlets I saw talking about it are Townhall and Brietbart.

Weekly Gun News – Edition 1

I decided I should probably have a consistent name for this feature. Since I tend to do about one link post a week, I’ll call it “Weekly Gun News.” If it’s a particularly good news week, maybe I’ll have “Extra Gun News.” I started doing news links after Sandy Hook, when there was just too much going on to talk about everything, but a lot of stuff I didn’t have time to talk about was important. Since then, I’ve kept up the practice.

How did a Traffic Officer armed with a pistol take out two shooters armed with rifles? Bob Owens has the details.

Miguel: California is learning that gun confiscation is really really expensive. If they think it’s expensive now…

Cheer up Oregon, not all the news is bad: a reciprocity bill is moving along. I guess the Democrats feel like they need to do something for us on the one hand, if they spanked us with the other.

John Richardson has all the details on the Oregon Background Check bill. Clayton Cramer notes that bad ideas spread, and that there’s no evidence background checks accomplish anything, and are probably even harmful. He should know, since he published a paper on it.

John Richardson has a look at Bad Apple Lawyers, a parody on Brady’s “Bad Apple Gun Dealers.” He starts with anti-gun Law Professor David Kaireys. You’ll see him in the media here fairly often, as a reliable go-to guy when a reporter wants a good anti-gun viewpoint couched in the respectability of a professor of law.

What Virginia has in store for it if the state continues to blue. Two factors drive Virginia bluing: out of control growth of the federal government and population loss in the Southwest part of the state. Cuts to the Navy probably don’t help either, since it’s a major industry in the tidewater area.

Constitutional Carry looks to be dead in Maine for now. Maine was always a bit of a stretch goal.

Sadly, I think he’s right: Charles C.W. Cooke doesn’t think the Bill of Rights would pass if it was proposed today.

I like NRA’s new snarky articles, this one mocking Josh Horwitz. Mockery is probably the most effective rhetorical weapon one can employ, and there’s a lot that’s ridiculous and humorous about the gun control movement.

Bloomberg outspent us 5 to 1 in Vermont and got nothing for it. That’s because influencing legislators isn’t a money game. First, lawmakers know astroturf when they see it and second, they know where the passion is on this issue.

I was very surprised to see a balanced article on the ivory ban coming out of the New Bedford newspaper. An ivory ban is a gun ban in some cases, therefore we fight.

Rep. Paul Schemel and state Sen. Richard Alloway are hosting a concealed carry seminar in Waynesboro this weekend.

Hey, TTAG is seeking out Millennials to appear at a shooting range with NBC’s Ronan Farrow. Getting a bunch of young people you don’t know and who have never spoken to reporters on camera before? What could possibly go wrong? Maybe we’ll luck out and NBC actually has good intentions here *snicker*

Popehat has more on free speech in the wake of the Garland shooting.

IJReview gives NRA HQ the Buzzfeed treatment, in a good way.

The Chattanoogan talks to Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clark, “Instead, what jumped off the pages was the reason the Klu Klux Klan became near-extinct. Once blacks were able to arm themselves to protect against kidnapping and lynching, things really began to change in terms of black freedom.â€

The Masonic Fraternal Police Department? This has to be the strangest thing I’ve read all year.

Slate discovers that Bernie Sanders, despite being an unashamed socialist, may be a bit too gun nutty for the modern progressive, saying gun control is “one issue of overwhelming importance to the Democratic base,” which is pretty laughably naive. Slate is such a joke these days.

Briefs have been filed in the Peruta case. Clayton Cramer notes that one of his papers on VPC’s Concealed Carry Killers, has made it into one of the briefs.

Reason questions why the left wants federal control over policing. Because it’s about the control, and the left has always believed you can run things better with the right people in charge. They being the right people, of course.

Knife Rights a New Front in the Second Amendment

Andrew Branca notes that Freddy Grey’s knife was, in fact, illegal. We need to repeal all knife laws. Laws against sharp pointy things are even more ridiculous than gun control. Even Bloomberg News is recognizing that Knife Rights have become the new gun rights. Of course, I wouldn’t agree gun rights have gotten old, but the Second Amendment isn’t just about firearms, it should be about all personal weapons, armor, and other accouterments.

Against my better judgement, I became involved in a comment discussion on this article that appeared in Raw, accusing the NRA of not caring about the rights of African-Americans, because they weren’t standing up for the Second Amendment rights of Freddy Grey. I viewed my goal in this to dispel myths, rather than sling insults back at people. I do not speak for NRA, but in my opinion, when defending the organization online, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using “we” if you’re a member. It is, at the end of the day, your organization, and it helps people understand this isn’t just about some nefarious gun lobby:

Myth Number 1: NRA doesn’t care about the rights of someone like Freddy Grey.Â For one, even though NRA is not directly involved in knife rights, KnifeRights.org is a lot of the same people, and there’s cooperation. We are working to try to repeal and preempt the kinds of laws that got Freddy Grey into the situation that got him killed.

Myth Number 2: NRA doesn’t care about the rights of blacks. Gun rights is only for white people.Â No, we stand for the right of all peaceable people to keep and bear arms for self-protection. Gun control is actually far more burdensome for poor blacks to exercise their rights than it is for white people who can more often afford license fees, training classes, and to live in communities they aren’t likely to get harassed by the cops.

Myth Number 3: NRA is just the sales arm of the gun industry.Â It’s amazing how many people have a genuine and sincere belief that this is actually true. I believe it’s a deliberate self-deception at times, because if you’re for restricting the freedoms of millions of Americans, some of whom might be a lot like you, that kind of makes you a real killjoy. But if you’re fighting against some nefarious imagined “gun industry,” well, that’s just sticking it to the corporate man, and you one can think oneself a hero of the common man.

These were the common myths. Of course you had plenty of crap like this:

Niger [Innis]? he’s another self hating black man, who hates his race. Tell me about Wayne LaPiere’s lack of racism. Tell me about Pedophile Nugent’s lack of racism. When the NRA leaders stop making speeches about rebelling against the government, and attacking blacks and Mexicans, I’ll believe there;s no racism in the NRA. until then, the NRA is nothing but an organization dedicated to scaring ignorant white people into buying guns, out of fear of a black president and brown and black people.

He’s not speaking about the actual National Rifle Association, but instead a caricature of the organizationÂ constructed partly by the writer’s vivid imagination, partly by agitators who work very hard to divide Americans against one another, and partly by Ted Nugent, who is the former type’s wet dream, since he self-caricatures.

As an organization, NRA needs a lot more people like Sheriff Clark speaking for the organization, and a lot fewer people like Ted Nugent. Knife Rights, for its part, responded very well, I thought, to the current events happening in Baltimore.

The Great Slide Backwards

As many of you have probably heard, Oregon passed a ban on privates sales. My goal with this post is to outline the implications of losing more states to the anti-gun blue menace. I keep thinking a lot lately about the book “The Big Sort,” which offers a theory as to why America is becoming more and more polarized:

We’ve built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood and church and news show â€” most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation. Our country has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred, that people don’t know and can’t understand those who live just a few miles away. The reason for this situation, and the dire implications for our country, is the subject of this ground-breaking work.

Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington are the victims of what people have un-affectionaly dubbed Californication; the outmigration of Californians to like-minded neighborhoods in other states. Even Austin, TX has been Californicated to a large degree. The Big Sort, by putting us into homogenous neighborhoods, makes the task of Gerrymandering safe and uncompetitive districts easier for the politicians. Now, gerrymandering can be a tool of the defending party, by loading up new blue neighborhoods into established ones, but that has its limits. In Oregon, Colorado, Washington, and Nevada, we may have reached those limits. Once the state flips, and the new party manages to gain control for theÂ gerrymandering process, it’s over for the defending party absent a serious realignment.

It was no real surprise to anyone that states like New York, Connecticut, Maryland and Delaware slid back after Sandy Hook. Gun rights has been living on borrowed time for decades in those states. New Jersey, Connecticut and New York’s laws can all be explained by the fact that both Democrats and Republicans in New York won a decades long project to drive their gun cultures into extinction, and Connecticut and New Jersey are a result of that infection spreading. California’s transition happened much more quickly. Within my lifetime, California’s gun laws weren’t appreciably worse than those in other states. So how do politicians accomplish the extinction of their gun cultures?

Killing a gun culture really comes down to three things: gun bans, purchase restrictions, and carry restrictions. Note I don’t put licensing on this list. New York lived with the Sullivan Act for years with a healthy gun culture, and Illinois has (outside of Chicago) maintained their culture despite licensing. Licensing doesn’t necessarily kill a gun culture, but it can. Massachusetts is an example of a licensing regime that managed to kill off its culture. The Bay state successfully ratcheted up its requirements, dues, and greatly expanded the legal risk of gun ownership to the point where almost no one officially bothers anymore. California’s decline started with Roberti-Roos, their assault weapons ban, which after Sandy Hook became a template for states looking to finish off their gun cultures. It worked very well in California, and very quickly. I think assault weapons bans are probably the fastest acting gun culture poison out there.

Oregon gun owners should be very worried. Your new private transfer ban law will not be a culture destroyer itself. It’s too easy to ignore and nearly impossible to enforce. We’ve lived with a similar law for handguns for years in Pennsylvania, and it’s probably the most often broken gun law in this state. But this could be a harbinger of things to come for Oregon, and Â the other Californicated states. My advice for people in Oregon:

Yeah, I know your new law technically makes it illegal to hand a gun to someone else to teach them to shoot. Ignore it. Continue what you’ve been doing. It’s technically illegal to hand a handgun to another person in Pennsylvania if that person doesn’t have a License To Carry. I’ve never heard of someone getting arrested for doing it in a context where they weren’t committing some other crime. These laws are useless. The politicians know they are useless and impossible to enforce, but they want to go back to their wealthy white liberal constituents in Eugene, Portland, etc and tell them what a swell progressives they are, and how much they care about “victims of gun violence.”
Fight any new gun bans like your gun culture depends on it, because it does.
Fight any new restrictions that would make someone first purchase confusing or overly complicated like your gun culture depends on it, because it does.
Fight any carry restrictions, like your gun culture depends on it, because it does.
Punish, as best you can, those that did this to you. As much as I hate suggesting this, if you live in a culturally pro-gun area with a Democratic rep, you ought to replace that rep even if they are pro-gun. Once you hit the point where the rest of the Dem caucus doesn’t have to care what their rural pro-gun contingent thinks, you do yourself no favors helping keep that party in power. Pennsylvania has traditionally had many pro-gun Democrats, but here the fact that gun control splits their caucus still matters to the party, though we’re reaching the point where that will no longer be true if they ever regain the legislature.

I wish I could say the problem will get better, but it’ll likely only get worse. California and other parts of the west are running out of water. This problem has been exacerbated by the drought, but it would be running out even without the drought. The root problem is poor planning, and an inability to do large water projects thanks to NIMBYs and environmentalists. It may be reality that one day the people of Los Angeles and San Francisco turn on the water taps and nothing comes out. If that happens, millions will leave the state, and that will be a disaster for the whole country, and especially states like Oregon, Washington, and Colorado.

Currently about 1/3rd of the population of this country lives effectively without meaningful Second Amendment rights. As we lose more and more states, that number is only going to rise. We have to do something, and that’s going to require more creative thinking than our movement has traditionally been accustomed to.

Cody Wilson Sues State Department

Two years ago, Defense Distributed was preempted by the state Department from postingÂ plans for the Liberator Pistol online, arguing they were a controlled munition. Many of us in the tech business got a strong case of deja vu, remembering a similar government assertion in the 1990s that didn’t end up going all that well for the government.

In that grand tradition, Cody Wilson of Defense distributed has filed suit against the State Department, arguing First Amendment grounds. Lest anyone think this is some kind of fringe suit, it has the backing of SAF, and Alan Gura is among the attorneys on the case.

The New York Times describes this as “trailblazing,” but really this is just a continuation of the argument that happened over encryption in the 1990s. I predict this will not go well for the government. It shouldn’t go well for the government.

Modern Day Philly Militia

Once upon a time, Sebastian compared the historical concept of a militia to something like that of a modern volunteer fire department. I thought that was a pretty good analogy at the time, but since then I’ve learned that Philadelphia actually has a private military organization.Â The First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry is a purely volunteer, privately organized cavalry troop thatÂ has been called into federal military service as needed since 1774.

Our opponents in the gun control movement have often derided the idea of “private militias,” even though they played a significant role in the founding of this country. The history page of the First Troop notesÂ that even though they had been operating in defense of Â Philadelphia alongside the Continental Army, it wasn’t until 1811 that “a law was passed authorizing a regimental organization of the cavalry.” They weren’t even incorporated under state law until 1863.

Today First Troop requires prospective members to also be currently serving in the National Guard, but reading the troop’s history page is an interesting look back at volunteers who felt a duty to country and community. As our founders understood it, the concept of a privately organized citizen militia was not about “insurrection,” as our opponents claim, but about service.