2015 – Page 43 – Shall Not Be Questioned

ATF Waves the White Flag (For Now)

NRA-ILA is announcing ATF is waving the white flag of surrender, for the time being.

The announcement that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) will suspend its proposed framework to ban M855 ammunition validates the NRAâ€™s assertion that this effort was nothing more than a political maneuver to bypass Congress and impose gun control on the American people.

I think we can all pat ourselves on the back here. Gun owners seem to be more effective at standing up to the Obama Administration than the GOP. Punch back twice as hard.

Continue to Comment on M855 Ban

Friday, people were e-mailing me about the M855 issue that the ATF had removed the language about the M855 exception from its 2015 Published Ordinances. I will say that a lot of people in the media, including the gun media, got details wrong. ATF is now claiming it was just a mistake. First, the Published Ordinances are not actual law. How ATF makes actual law, at least in this case, is defined by the Administrative Procedure Act. Now, it may well be that the comment period is a sham, and the ATF plans to implement the ban anyway. In fact, that would seem certain.

But that’s NOT to say it means it’s pointless to submit a public comment, which closes on March 16. I’m planning to ask whether I can submit one on behalf of my local club as legislative chair. The law spells out what ATF must do. Yours might raise an important issue that ATF fails to address that could get the regulation invalidated. There’s never a point where you should assume the fix is in and not keep playing the game. Make their defiance of the law grossly apparent to any judge who they end up before.

Magazine Ban Upheld in 9th Circuit

I’m a little late on this news, because I had originally wanted to read the opinion, but I did not end up finding the time.Â The magazine restrictions by Sunnyvale, California were upheld in the 9th circuit last week. All these stories are basically the same: a lot of judges hate the Heller decision, because they don’t particularly like the Second Amendment, so they will use any reasoning they can to gut it.

While this case will no doubt be appealed, I’m not certain if I feel comfortable taking a magazine case to the Supreme Court, for fear it’ll lose. I’d rather get more case law first, and at least get lower courts out of the mindset of open resistance to the will of the Supreme Court on the Second Amendment.

Media Finally Noticing “Lost & Stolen” is a Sham

I congratulate Christine Vendel of PennLive for finally noticing something we’ve been screaming about for quite some time:Â that all towns claiming the sky was falling, and they needed a “lost and stolen” law to combat illegal firearmsÂ trafficking, were completely full of shit.Â The article acknowledges there isÂ no enforcement, which we’ve also been blowing the whistle on to no avail.

This was never the problem our opponents claimed it to be, and now they are incredulously claiming, “It’s not measured by the number of fines. It’s measured by compliance.” So everyone who’s trafficking guns to criminals is just magically obeying the new law? This so laughably lacks credibility, it’s hard to believe they would even try to throw that turd at the wall.

This was never about stopping illegal trafficking.Â The goal was to weaken state preemption by pushing a non-issue that would easily pass in a number of towns. It was preemption they were after. So how did it work out for them?

The end result is Act 192, which strengthened the preemption law.

Bottle Shows & Gun Shows

For the past year, I’ve been on the hunt for bottles from my 4x great-grandfather’s bottling business, so I’ve been to a few antique bottle shows. I had no idea antique bottle collecting was really even a thing until I discovered I am descended from one of the larger Philadelphia bottlers. Today we went to a show just north of Baltimore to see what we could find.

I’m generally surprised by how similar they are in look and feel to a gun show. Standard gun shows are a bit more of a commercial enterprise, but if you’ve ever been to a decent gun show that caters to collectors, an antique bottle show is more like that. There are people who specialize. I seek out bottle collectors who either specialize in Philadelphia bottles, or who have large numbers of them in their collection. One guy I saw specialized in poison bottles. I’ve discovered that it’s a local market. You wouldn’t generally expect to find a bottle collector from Georgia with a bottle from Philadelphia, though I do check. Most bottle collectors source new bottles by digging privies, which of course is different from how gun collectors find their guns. I doubt many people dropped their roscoe down the shit hole after squeezing off a fresh one, but they did that with bottles a lot.

Demographically, the shows are more similar than you would think, bottle shows also feature a plentiful percentage of middle aged and old white guys (racist!). Bottle shows seem to have more older women than gun shows, but gun shows seem to have more young women. I’d say there are also younger men and families at a typical standard gun show. Though, I can see why someone might not want to bring their kids to a place where there’s a lot of fragile valuable things.

I doubt I’ll ever be a true bottle collector, but I can see the appeal. I didn’t think at any time that the guy who collects poison bottles did so because he wants to poison people. It’s a shame there are some people on this planet who don’t give the same consideration to people who collect firearms.

How to Avoid Carjackings

Always be sure to lock your car door:

Sorry for the Dead Air: Winter Doesn’t Wait

Had to spend a good part of the day shoveling 9 inches of global warming off the driveway, so I don’t have to get up in the wee hours to do it before getting off to the office. In truth digging the cars out, then scraping the layer of ice off the windows, took more time than the driveway. It sucks when snow follows rain.

Where’s Al Gore when you need him?

The Endarkenment Continues

Tam this morning:

Not only do we think Our Guy can do no wrong, but when Their Guy is in the big chair, we blame everything bad on him. The elected executive of our republic has metamorphosed into some Frazer-esque sacral king, on whose luck rides the success or failure of the harvest and the path and frequency of Gulf coast hurricanes.

Six years into this Administration and I’m frankly tired of politics, and not all that makes me feel disillusioned is to be found on the left. I had hoped that the Internet age would turn out to be a more enlightened than the age of mass media which precedes it. But then social media came along, and I suddenly realized that the Internet could be worse; much worse.

I’m still an optimist, though. My theory is that with the baby boomers retiring, and suddenly finding themselves with a lot of time on their hands, they’ve decided to resettle old scores, and turn the whole country into Del Boca Vista,Â writ large.

Things will settle down once Xers move toward retirement to take over from the boomers. We’ll be too busy helicopter grandparenting to generate this much drama.

How’s that SAFE Act Working Out for Ya?

Murder in New York City is up 20%. Now, it’s quite possible to argue this is a side-effect of electing a socialist mayor who picks fights with the NYPD, but it’s quite certain in this case that gun control isn’t helping, a fact that New York State Rifle and Pistol Association has been pointing out.

Unfortunately, I don’t think any of the supports of the bill care that it’s ineffective. They knew that when they passed it. All the politicians care about is that after Sandy Hook and Webster, something had to be done, and SAFE was something, so therefore it had to be done. This is the most powerful force in politics, and when it’s set in motion, bad results are nearly always guaranteed. Now crime is up 20% in New York, and the usual suspects will be clamoring for something to be done. God help us on what that something is going to be.

Perhaps the Most Absurd Argument by Antis I’ve Seen in Some Time

Last legislative session Ohio passed a comprehensive pro-gun reform bill, as many of you may remember. Earlier this week, the Executive Director of Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence “writes in opposition to HB 234, which deals with gun regulations,” to a Cleveland paper. Now, I’m not any kind of high-price political consultant, nor do I hold any kind of political science degree, but I think I’m on safe grounds when I say that the time to “write in opposition” to a bill is before the bill is passed and signed into law by the Governor. I had to check the date on the article to make sure it wasn’t post dated. But it gets better.

One of the provisions of the law is that it made an Ohio CHL a substitute for a NICS check. This is pretty common in other states which meet the federal standards. But Ms. Thorne doesn’t like that:

Let’s say your neighbor Bob wants a gun or applies for a concealed weapons license. He has to pass a background check before he can get either. Everything checks out, so now he’s a “good guy with a gun.” One day, Bob commits a crime. Previously, since Bob now has a record, he can’t buy more guns. However, under the new law, his concealed weapons license allows him to bypass that background check, allowing him to buy more dangerous weapons.

No. If Bob is convicted of a crime that strips away his gun rights, he cannot possess or purchase firearms, and his concealed carry license will be taken from him. This is finding a loophole where there is no loophole. Bob won’t be able to pass a NICS check or have a CHL to present to the dealer. He’ll have to either put up a straw buyer (illegal), buy the gun on the streets (illegal), or steal one (illegal) like every other criminal.

It’s time that we all start taking responsibility for the presence of gun violence in our society. Studies show this public health risk doesn’t discriminate. Gun violence is not just limited to urban areas. In fact, gun violence is increasing across the country, while decreasing in cities.

This is called making up facts. Gun violence is pretty much limited to urban areas, and even there, usually only in a handful of places. Gun violence absolutely does discriminate, or our nation wouldn’t be spending so much time debating about horrifyingly high numbers of black-on-black violence. But nonetheless, gun violence has been going down across the country, not up. And it’s been doing this while we’ve been liberalizing our gun control laws nearly across the board.

The solution lies in personal conversations to create culture change. We can’t be afraid to talk about gun violence.

We’ve been talking about gun violence for years. Our assertion has always been it’s the culture of violence that’s the problem, and it’s not going to be solved by taking guns away from ordinary people, which is what gun control does (criminals still get them). It’s been our assertion that gun control laws interfere with the right of the people who need firearms for self-protection the most: the majority of people who are stuck living in violent neighborhoods who are not themselves violent. We’ve been having this debate, and we’ve been winning. Suddenly the other side acts like the debate has never been had. It has been, and you lost.