I think I ended up skipping last week, but I need to clear tabs and get caught up on the news. A lot of people think bloggers spend most of their time writing, but in reality the most time is spent in finding things to write about. When time is really short, like this week, it’s hard to keep up with the rss feed. So let’s pick some good items to link today:
Colorado Senate votes to repeal the magazine ban. It’s onto the House. The GOP marginally controls the Senate, but the Dems still control the house. Last year the Senate passed a repeal bill as well, but it died in the Dem controlled House. If you live in Colorado, call your State Rep and demand a yes vote.
Gun control is on the move in Hawaii.
Joe Huffman discusses Hillary’s plans to get rid of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. To be fair, making gun control the centerpiece of her campaign hasn’t been working out very well for her lately, despite the New York Daily News trying to win a Baghdad Bob award. Bernie has circled back to defend his vote in favor of PLCAA.
Now that the North Marianas gun ban was tossed by a federal court, they instituted a $1000 a gun tax instead. If the Dems get the White House, expect to see things like this upheld as they try to narrow Heller and McDonald into meaninglessness.
Another vapid celebrity teams up with Bloomberg. This can’t be good for the Brady Campaign. Vapid celebrities were pretty much all they had left!
I’ve been thinking of removing my Twitter account entirely, and stuff like this is pushing me to make a decision about this. Twitter hardly brings any traffic.
Charles C.W. Cooke takes the time to craft a serious response to Samantha Bee’s mocking of gun owners. I can laugh at myself, and I’ve seen some parodies of gun people that are funny, but Bee’s was not. It was awful, and not funny, and not worth taking seriously in my opinion.
Looks like the Haverford Township Police are deleting critical Facebook posts, regarding their extreme overreaction to someone removing an airsoft AK-47 from a vehicle and taking it into their home. Even if it had been a real AK, the response was incredibly disproportional to what was reported. AK-47s are legal in Pennsylvania. That said, it’s always a good idea to use a case.
Pennsylvanians are buying 97 firearms every hour. I’m sure it’s all the same couple of nuts stocking up their bunkers.
Let’s violate ALL the rules! The results are about as bad as you’d expect.
Clayton has a new paper out studying North Carolina’s permit to purchase law.
The anti-gun folks like to think they are a real grassroots movement when they can use Bloomberg’s money to give a few hundred people a bus ride and box lunch to a protest. These kinds of fundraising dinners happen every week in counties all over the country.
Looks like Constitutional Carry might be coming to Oklahoma.
The Supreme Court is probably the most important issue in a generation this year, but the people want bread and circuses.
Anti-gun Dem rambles on so long she accidentally made a pro-gun bill she opposed better.
Off Topic:
Glenn Reynolds is writing in the WaPo on jury nullification. One of the more important liberty topics, if you ask me. My other obscure, not really on the public radar issue is non-delegation.
Restoring my faith in humanity: people are sharing less of their lives on Facebook. Now if only they would stop using it to promote their kooky and/or ignorant political viewpoints, it might become tolerable for regular usage again. I use it for friends and family, and as an archival repository for family history. I figure in the future there will be digital archeologists using defunct Internet sources. By then all of Facebook’s archives will probably fit on a thumb drive.
Millennials like socialism until they get jobs. Yep. Sucks having to pay for other people’s free shit, don’t it?
Between your other post about “Shutting down the signal” and your Twitter musings, I was thinking about some kind of de-centralized social media protocol based on bit-torrent.
A small daemon that could run on your router passing 140-240 characters of text and URL links?
I think there’s a lot of potential for open-source distributed systems. It would be very freedom promoting. I’m just not certain what it would look like. Technologically it’s certainly possible. USENET, back in the day what kind of distributed, but there was a central component to it. But for it to work, it would need to be reliable and easy to use, and be easy for non-technical people to set up.
I gave serious thought about USENET in a way, before I posted. That is, the worst it had to offer vs its benefits. Reliability was not my concern. Ease of (Ab)use was.
GNU Social
I’m on freezepeach.xyz
spqrzilla
North Marianas anti-gun government officials just opened themselves up to a world of hurt by this insane tax.
Now any pistol buyer in North Marianas, by purchasing the pistol and paying the $1000 tax will have standing to sue the government officials in Federal Court for violating their constitutional rights. And since this tax was such an obvious and blatant violation of protected rights, those officials might be held personally liable for damages.
Make them pay!
See, this is why I think that this “tax” might actually be a good thing for us in the long run: It’s so obviously unconstitutional that I don’t think the courts won’t really be able to ignore it.
If we can get someone reasonable into office this November, and get a good replacement for Scalia onto the court, there’s a damned good chance that The SCOTUS will overturn this “tax.”
Such a decision would almost certainly make a direct challenge to the entire NFA possible.
Looks like the Mariana’s district court falls within the 9th Circuit. So the 9th Circuit could take the case on appeal, and while we might get a pro-2A decision on a lucky panel, the 9th Circus would probably let the tax stand if the case were heard en banc.
So would at least four of the eight sitting SCOTUS justices, I’d wager.
It helps if you think of the judiciary as more of a super-legislature for resolving policy questions than a body that carefully reads and applies the law impartially. I mean, maybe the 9th Circuit will surprise us on Peruta, but the odds are against it. Something like 2/3 of the judges in the 9th were nominated by Democrats.
:-\
On its face, you would appear to be correct. There are certainly 1A precedents that are directly analogous (regarding taxing the exercise of a right). The problem is, this is different because Gunz!!! And there are really not very many meaningful restrictions on any level of government when it comes to the ability to levy taxes. So good luck with that.
How to aikido this right around on them: As taxes on guns are passed at state and local levels, pass a federal law that says any taxes paid on equipment, supplies or services necessary to exercise an explicitly mentioned Constitutionally protected right shall be consider tax credits (not deductions) against Federal income tax. (Shall not apply to emanations of penumbras.)
And there you go: a fire-arm buying spree in anti-gun strongholds.
Oklahoma vs Hawaii actions are just more evidence for the growing division between the Free States and the Anti-gun States.
How fitting, that the Democratic Party which sustained racial segregation laws for so many decades is now the Party which attacks the 2nd Amendment rights of the poor and the powerless.
When will we see our own Civil Rights Act? A new Federal law to enforce restoration of 2nd Amendment rights within anti-gun States and anti-gun Cities?
We’ll have to do some major reform/trimming of federal gun laws first.
I never signed up for Twitter it seemed too silly to use and became toxic quickly. I also refused to post personal photos on facebook or give personal details. I would argue politics and points of views. Mostly because I was tired of the propaganda that friends would post.
I agree that any resident of N Marinas now has standing to sue for violation of right They just need to buy a gun. Since there are no sellers there I guess the next bet is to impart one.
I really suspect this is to discourage a seller from setting up shop.
I suspect that the Marianas tax is legal based on the $200 tax on certain firearms imposed by the NFA ’34.
This would be a good question for Eugene Volokh.
Not under Heller‘s precedent, it isn’t.
A tax high enough to constitute a serious barrier to firearms ownership for an everyday person, and that cannot be passed off as simply covering administrative costs, can’t possibly be tenable under Heller.
That’s only important if at least five people in gowns say it is.