May 2016 – Page 4 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Nova Armory Update

At the end of the day, there are a lot more of us then there are of them, and we’ll show up when necessary. The Zoning Board unanimously voted to keep Nova Armory’s occupancy license in tact.Â From Virginia Citizens Defense League:

We had a HUGE turnout – truly flooding the room to standing room only proportions earlier in the evening.

There was only ONE anti who spoke, almost the entire rest of the room was wearing VCDL stickers. She gave several lame excuses why NOVA Armory should have their permit revoked AND she didnâ€™t want NOVA Armory to be able to reapply EVER! (I love it when the antis overreach. Makes my job so much easier. They simply canâ€™t help themselves, bless their pointed little heads.)

That even shocked the Zoning Board.

The Board members asked some very key questions and that gave me my first hint that they viewed this as a frivolous case.

I was particularly pleased that we had so many women speakers! I love to see women at these things as it destroys the stereotype of gun owners being only men.

RTWT. Hopefully no one will mind if I crib a photo, but I’ll link back to the source. Click on the photo to see what strong activism looks like. I’ll give Phil Van Cleave credit, he can turn them out when we need them.

The Continuing Saga of Nova Armory

I’ve been meaning to write about this for two weeks, but just haven’t found the time. You might remember a story that popped up a year or so ago that busy body whack jobs in Arlington County, Virginia were trying to prevent a gun shop from opening up there. The shop, Nova Armory, managed to open, but not until after the crazies managed to get a few state reps to use their offices to attempt to intimidate the landlord into cancelling the lease. A few weeks ago, Nova Armory filed a suit, arguing that there was a Conspiracy to Injure Another in His Trade or Business. This is now relevant again, because as Miguel reports, the busy bodies are busy getting the county to revoke Nova Armory’s Certificate of Occupancy at a hearing tonight. If you live in Arlington County, now is a good chance to go stand up to these whack jobs.

I don’t know much about how steep of a hill it is to climb with this kind of lawsuit in Virginia courts, Â but I wouldn’t be afraid of looking into suing in federal court, especially if they revoke occupancy. I would file in federal court under 42 U.S.C. Section 1985(3), “Conspiracy to Interfere with Civil Rights.”

A lot of folks on our side incorrectly speak of using civil rights laws to shut down what is mere advocacy, but in this case, by using State Legislators and County Government to attempt to shut down Nova Armory’s business, they have actually taken measures to deprive Nova Armory of their Second and 14th Amendment rights. Absolutely if this were happening because residents of Arlington County didn’t want a Black-owned business opening, and engaged in a conspiracy to take actual measures to shut it down, that business owner would have a case. This is no different. The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is necessarily the right to buy, sell, and trade in arms as well. Granted, Heller lit the way for government to regulate arms sales with that infamous clause we’re all too familiar with, “The Courtâ€™s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on … laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” But this is going much farther than regulation.

In this case, they are not imposing conditions or qualifications, but arguing that no gun store may operate in Arlington County, and they’ll act extra-legally if need be to ensure it doesn’t happen. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in which Virginia resides, has been more friendly to a lot of Second Amendment claims than others. I’d say dragging these fiends into federal court is worth a shot. You can’t negotiate with people who do things like this. You just have to hit back and hit back hard.

Weekly Gun News – Edition 36

Time to clear the tabs out. Often when I do this I end up with a few more posts where it turns out I had more to say about a link than I originally thought I would.

Hillary tears are even sweeter than hippie tears: Bernie Sanders wins West Virginia. That should have been Hillary country, but telling coal miners you’ll put them out of a job in coal country is usually not a winning strategy.

The New Hampshire legislature has sent Constitutional Carry to the Governor yet again. She vetoed it last time.

The Governor of Arizona signs two gun bills and vetoes one. I’ll be honest, I don’t really understand the bill he vetoed, which seems to have to do with an interstate gun compact (which I’ve never heard of). The two he signed were campus carry and enhanced preemption, kind of like what we had for a bit here in PA.

Clayton Cramer: Can Assault Weapon Bans survive rational basis scrutiny? They can survive any kind of scrutiny if we end up with an Court packed by Hillary appointees!

Missouri is considering a bevy of pro-gun bills, including “stand your ground” or removing the duty to retreat. Miguel highlights part of Bloomberg’s campaign to stop it, which grossly misunderstands self-defense and how it works in practice and law. More on that campaign here.

SayUncle: The Trumpeting. You kind of have to laugh at it, because the alternative is depressing.

Shooting Illustrated will become an official journal of the NRA, meaning you can get it with your membership. I received some complimentary copies for a while, and it absolutely deserves to be elevated to one of the member choices.

Jim Shepherd things we may be seeing Gun Culture 3.0 forming. To me it looks more like Gun Culture 2.5. His idea for manufacturers doing “fitting days” is great, though.

Our opponents are always surprised to find there are assholes on the Internet. Do they think top NRA officials haven’t received death threats? Lots of nastiness out there on both sides.

This looks to me like something pitched from gun control groups. If I see Theme and Variation out there in the media on this motif I’ll know for sure it is. Why? Because it’s a great narrative for them, and all they have to do is claim it’s so, and fine one chief somewhere to quite, and bam, cops are against liberalizing gun laws.

Remember folks, they aren’t against money in politics, they are just against your money in politics. Bloomberg is spending big on state level races. This will eventually make things very difficult for us.

Is there really anyone out there who get their political opinions from vapid celebrities? Sadly, I know the answer to that and it is, well, sad. I haven’t been to a movie in years, and I don’t miss it. Don’t feed the monster!

Democrats in New Jersey are dead set against even loosening their may-issue regime even slightly. I don’t notice that Delaware, which has a may-issue regime far more liberal than even Christie has proposed, is a cesspool of crime.

John Richardson got the gun question from his doctor and lied. That’s probably the easiest path forward, but the truth is that it’s none of their damned business unless you’re being treated for a mental health issue that makes you a danger to yourself or others.

Is Trump the Death of Social Conservatism?

Ace of Spades notes:

But I don’t think I’m going to be adapting my views to the socially-conservative mainstream any longer, because I’m not sure these views are actually the Republican mainstream any longer. I knew social conservatism wasn’t quite as believed as was claimed; I knew many politicians claimed to be pro-life who were in fact pro-choice, and I knew many of the Beltway class of advisers, think-tank workers, etc. were pro-choice, or more pro-choice than the GOP was as a formal matter. They were certainly more pro-gay (if not always actually pro-gay-marriage).

This is what I’ve been saying.Â Trump took every southern state East of the Mississippi. The SoCo emperor has been shown to have no clothes. Whether you vote for Trump or not, I think there’s opportunity here for those who don’t believe in fighting culture wars using government. I’m just now sure how to exploit it.

I think the overall issue of this election is that the workingÂ class never recovered from the Financial Crisis of 2008, all the while DC elites were busy waging culture wars rather than helping said working class. Trump is the backlash. To a large degree Bernie is that same backlash reflected in the Democratic Party, but they’ve been able to keep Bernie down better because the Dems are actually less Democratic.

At the end of the day people will vote their pocketbook before anything else, and Trump and Sanders are talking pocketbook issues. That’s why “free shit” works on people, provided other people are paying for it. Cracking down on immigration sounds great if you’ve seen your wages depressed through competition with people who can live on less than you do. I think people who work for a living are tired of culture warrioring, which is honestly an hobby for elites. While they are falling further and further behind, the elites are arguing about bathrooms. Think of the absurdity of that, and you can understand why they’re willing to elect someone like Trump or Sanders.

Is Facebook Suppressing Gun Content?

Bob Owens has an interesting story over at Bearing Arms about whether Facebook is deliberately suppressing gun related content.

Several people in the industry Iâ€™ve spoken with in the industry have claimed that theyâ€™ve seen Facebook pages which were growing steadily see a dramatic decline in terms of reach and shares over the past year.

At the same time, they claim page â€œlikesâ€ have plateaued, and that their pages are seeing no growth. Several specifically claimed that their content seems to be buried well down in the feeds of their readers, which is also something our readers have complained about with a fair degree of regularity.

I notice my Facebook traffic has been pretty regular, but I make almost no effort to cultivate my social media presence, nor do I pay Facebook to “boost” posts. I’ve always felt that the reason Facebook throttles my reach is because they want me to pay up.

That said, there is almost certainly a concerted effort to shut down our “horizontal interpretive community” and prevent us from organizing. These efforts are, of course, funded by one obnoxious billionaire. Well, I hate to tell him, but you can’t stop the signal. Our folks are always going to find a way to communicate and organize. Who knows, the community-based gun blog might even become a thing again.

Suddenly The Media Doesn’t Like Background Checks

At least when they are applied to them:

The law enforcement agencyâ€”whose once-pristine reputation has been tarnished in recent years byÂ scandal, congressionalÂ investigationsÂ and, more to the point,Â aggressive investigative reportingâ€”is for the first time ever running background checks on thousands of journalists who want to attend this summerâ€™s Republican and Democratic Party nominating conventions.

Sucks to be treated like a criminal so you can exercise your constitutional rights doesn’t it? Gee, what other group of people has to endure that regularly that you sycophants like to malign when your masters tell you to? I find myself fresh out of sympathy.

AR Bleg

I’ve been wanting to build a custom AR for a couple of years now, but a distinct lack of disposable income has been a real drag on my plans. At this point I don’t know much about what the current goodies are. The rifle would be primarily used for target shooting, possibly in matches (if I decide to get back into that kind of shooting). I’m looking for recommendations on:

Barrels. I dot know much about barrels and twist rates, etc. It’ll be a .223 AR, probably mostly shooting your standard 55gr XM193 at distances out to 200 yards 99% of the time.
Triggers. I’ve looked at the Geissele triggers, but they are spendy. Worth it though? Geissele is a local company, so it would be nice to support them.
Stocks. Magpul makes an adjustable stock I think might work.
Uppers. I notice they have uppers that allow the charging handle to operate on the left side of the upper instead of the traditional straight pull back. I’d tend to lean against this since I prefer to stick with a more standard AR, but I’m wondering if anyone has any feedback on that style of upper.
Parts Kits. I’d get the trigger separately, but is there any quality difference in the non-trigger parts? I would tend to imagine there wouldn’t be much difference.

I’ll probably build this slowly over time, when I can come up with some spare coin to grab a needed component. Any advice one can offer would be appreciated.

We Will Survive Trump, Or Hillary

Seen on the Internets, via Tam:

At this point we’re going to get a probably anti-gun president or a definitely anti-gun president.

What I’m trying to avoid is the constant losertalk of “OH MY GOD BURY YOUR GUNS AND BUY ALL THE PRIMERS” that I had to put up with in ’08 and ’12. We’ve beat this before and we’ll beat it again. Now send some dough to the NRA-ILA, SAF, and GOA, then hop out of the wagon and help pull this thing.

I am by no means pleased Trump is the presumptive nominee, but I do not join with many on the right with all the doom and gloom. If there’s one thing I won’t be in the business of this election it’s predicting Donald Trump.

I actually don’t think Trump will be too bad on the gun issue. I know, I know… he’s said anti-gun things in the past and he’s duping people and lying to us. The truth is they are all lying, except the rare pol who’s actually a shooter. They arrived at their position on this issue by cold political calculation, and as many other interests as Trump has goofed and fumbled, he’s been more consistent with us. Â So I don’t worry about Trump on the gun issue too much. Though on everything else…. that’s a different story.

But even if the worst case happens and Hillary is President for the next four or god forbid eight years, we’ll weather. Oh, we may have setbacks. Some may be quite severe. But if you look at the success of the concealed carry movement, the gun rights movement is probably the only movement active today that could pass an Amendment to the federal constitution, and I think we should be prepared to pull that wagon should it become necessary. I hope folks at NRA are reading. I think we will likely need to think about a federal constitutional amendment to do what the Second Amendment should have done in the first place. It’s a hard wagon to haul, but I think we can do it.

Cruz and Kasich Out of the Race

Still quite busy with clients. Tomorrow should be better. But Cruz and Kasich have thrown in the towel. Part of me wants to celebrate with a drink! But then I have to consider that makes Trump the presumptive nominee for the 2016 race, which makes me want to have several drinks, maybe enough that I black out until after the elections in November.

I know at least one lobbyist in DC who is happy with the current state of affairs because the right people are hyperventilating over the idea of Trump being the nominee. I think the silver lining (for me at least) is that the SoCo groups in DC that claim to speak for christians and evangelicals are the most hyperventilating of the hyperventilators. So are the K-street consultants that have made a living ruining talented candidates with their bullshit, then moving on to ruin the next campaign. Trump won nearly every state east of the Mississippi, including southern states in the Bible Belt; states that Huckabee did very well in talking about what kind of “Jesus juice” he drank. All Trump did was say he was a Presbyterian. So where does the DC religious right political establishment stand from here? Their best hope is for Hillary to beat Trump, as seems likely if you believe the polling (which I don’t). I could almost enjoy this except for the fact that a lot of other issues I care about will likely get flushed down the crapper too.

The choice is made! The Traveler has come!

TrumpDestructor

Stripping Second Amendment Rights by Fiat

It would be a pity for this story to get buried under the Obama smart gun smoke and mirrors, but you might remember from last July, the Obama Administration proposed a broad ban on certain Social Security recipients from exercising their Second Amendment rights. Kate Pavlich is reporting the Administration is now planning to move ahead with that regulation. Anyone taking Social Security through a designated payee could be placed in the NICS system as someone who is mentally ill, and thus prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms.