Sebastian – Page 104 – Shall Not Be Questioned

More From the Clinton Files

Dave Hardy has a follow up article about his visit to the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock published in this month’s America’s First Freedom. This one is also well worth the read.

The Brady Campaignâ€™s correspondence with the Clinton White House, revealed here for the first time, illustrates how well and persistently it has stuck with the agenda laid out by its first real leader. The goal is to make handgun ownership illegal: Along the way, remember that half a loaf is better than none, and if you have to, settle for just a slice. Take whatever you can get, and keep on asking for more. Anything that makes gun ownership more burdensome or risky is a step toward that goal.

I have linked this before in a news links post, but I would encourage you to read this very frank memo Dave found, from Jody Powell to George Stephanopoulos in 1994 speaking of the risks of pursuing the gun control agenda. In addition to the letter, it also includes gun control proposals that the previous version I linked did not include. I will quote from the letter:

In my humble estimation, the reason we never get the political benefit from gun control that the polls seem to promise is because our proposals are substantively weak. We have yet to propose anything that people believe will make any difference. The people who are generally for gun control don’t make it a voting issue because it has no real impact on their lives. On the other hand. the inconvenience and hassle of wading through another round with indifferent and incompetent bureaucrats and the fear that this is only the first step toward more radical measures are quite real to people who own guns. As much as I hate to say it, the NRA is effective primarily because it is largely right when it claims that most gun control laws inconvenience and threaten the law-abiding while having little or no impact on violent crime or criminals.

Read the whole thing. It’s quite an eye opener. The Clinton White House obviously went ahead with some of these proposals, resulting in the federal assault weapons ban in September of that year. Powell asked the Clinton Administration to consider carefully what the consequences could be of pursuing this agenda:

I support registration in principle. But two questions need to be asked. Are the people causing the problem going to comply voluntarily? If not, do you have a way to effectively enforce compliance? If the answer is “no” in both cases. consider whether the benefits are worth making Bob Dole majority leader.

And in 1994, Bob Dole would indeed became Senate Majority Leader. Obviously Powell supported many of these policies, but he understood the issue well, and tried to communicate the dynamic to the White House. The Obama Administration was a picnic in the park compared to the Clinton Administration. Unlike Obama, Clinton knew how to work Congress. Obviously Clinton did not achieve half of what he and the Brady Campaign wanted to accomplish, but he accomplished much much more than Obama.

ATF 41P Published in Federal Register

Josh Prince has the story. This starts the clock ticking, causing the regulation to take effect on July 13, 2016. He has created a website called Fight ATF 41P. At this point, it appears that Prince’s initial analysis is still valid, and we didn’t have any surprises sprung on us between the rule published by ATF and in the Federal Register. There was a lot of discussion on this topic when it originally came up the other week, and many were disappointed that Form 1s and Form 4s could no longer be e-filed for trusts and corporations.

The reason we ended up with 41P in the first place is because so many people were using trusts to get around the CLEO signoff requirement that ATF was overwhelmed with processing trusts, since trusts had to be vetted to ensure there were no problems with it, and there often were. ATF had been saying in NRA’s Firearms Law seminar for a while that they were looking carefully at the CLEO requirement, including possibly eliminating it, to cut down on the number of trusts. Unfortunately for ATF, there’s also constructive possession issues with NFA items that is likely to cause trusts to remain popular. For these reasons, it can’t really be argued that use of trusts for NFA items is a form of “malicious compliance,” but it certainly has the same features. One of the key objections to 41P is that it’s not abundantly clear who responsible persons are. It’s probably wise advice to take the broad view there. I don’t see any reason not to replace one headache at ATF with another.

Do You Support a Constitutional Convention?

Early in the 20th Century, the Progressives ran through a slew of Constitutional Amendments, including authorizing an income tax, direct election of Senators, Prohibition, and Women’s Suffrage. Many conservatives are calling for a Constitutional Convention of the States, where Amendments would be directly proposed. We discussed this a few weeks ago in regards to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s proposals. Such a convention could provide an opportunity to clarify the rights protected by the Second Amendment, and make it clear to the courts the right is to be taken seriously. Now Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame has an article in USA Today talking aboutÂ the idea of a new Constitutional Convention.

As I said, I have my doubts about Abbott’s proposals. I find many of them self-serving from a politician’s point of view. For instance, we shouldn’t make it harder for judges to strike down unconstitutional laws, which Abbott’s proposals would do.

Like Prof. Reynolds, I’m not quite ready to endorse the idea of another convention, but it’s starting to sound like it’s not such a bad idea. When you consider that any proposed amendments would still need to be ratified by 3/4 of the states, it doesn’t sound quite as dangerous as it could be if we just had to eat whatever came out of the sausage grinder.

What do you think? Should we emulate the progressives inaugurate our young century with a flurry of constitutional amendments?

You Know Gun Control Folks are Desperate if NPR is Running This

NPR, yes NPR is running the story, “For Some African-Americans, Gun Ownership Underscores Segregated Past.“Â No respectable news outlet would have even entertained that headline when I got into this issue 16 years ago, let alone NPR. You never would have seen the New York Times publishing a factual piece on smart gun technology by a writer known to be pro-Second Amendment. You never would have seen the Boston Globe publishing a sympathetic man with a gun pieces. For people new to this issue, these final days of the Obama Administration may seem like a strange time to declare that the media is more willing to be fair to us these days than they were two decades ago, but it’s true. If you think things are bad now, the 1990s were much worse.

Demographics of NRA

Ammoland is hosting an article by an NRA instructor and Friends of the NRA committee member that allegedly reveals demographic figures:

* 40% women
* 40% minority mostly Asian and Hispanic.
* Sure a lot of white guys but the average age is down from 60 to 40-45.

He bases his figures on Friends of the NRA, which he claims tally race and gender. As a former committee person, with Bitter being Â former committee chair for a Friends of the NRA dinner, this is news to me. Or is he counting the racial, ethnic and gender makeup of his own dinner, which is in no way representative of the Association as a whole? Maybe the field rep told him he’s been seeing a lot more women and minorities. Who knows? But NRA does not release demographic information about its membership.

I appreciate the enthusiasm, but this is essentially nonsense. I do agree, based on looking around at NRA Annual Meeting for the past nine years, NRA seems to be getting a good bit more female, somewhat younger, and slightly less white, just anecdotally. But the stereotypical NRA member is still very much the stereotypical NRA member. I would not draw broad conclusions about what I see at Annual Meeting, let alone a Friends of the NRA dinner in Los Padres, California. As much as I’d love these statistics to be true, I sincerely doubt they are even close to actual numbers.

Weekly Gun News – Edition 23

President Obama says he wants us to look toward the future. We’ll, we’ve been one step ahead of him. Thanks for all who have commented. I may have more comments as we ponder what we can accomplish in a FOPA II. Personally, I’d like a complete overhaul of GCA 68 and to get suppressors removed from the National Firearms Act. Call it the “Gun Control Modernization Act” so when the media reports it the other side’s barely engaged followers can’t be sure whether it’s good or bad. But enough about that, my tabs are filling and browser crawling:

What a shocker: The jihadist guy in Philly plead down a gun charge, and also the gun he used was a stolen police gun.

Professor Adam Winkler thinks one way to reduce gun violence is to raise the age at which you can buy a gun to 25. Eugene Volokh writes about the obvious constitutional issues involved with that.

Dave Kopel offers some legal analysis of Obama’s executive orders. Very thorough. Given how much interaction is on the Volokh Conspiracy gun posts, it’s a very good thing for us they got picked up by WaPo.

From on Volokh from Eugene Kontorovich: Obama’s gun seller policy seeks to chill rather than regulate. That was my belief too. The guidance document is a threat to prosecute, maybe.

Stephen Kruiser: “NRA Wisely Refuses Obama’s Invite to Gun Control Publicity Circus.” NRA is very good at managing their brand, and if they had gone, it would have cheapened it.

Joe Huffman: “As has been said by others, if they donâ€™t want you to have a gun itâ€™s probably because they want to do something to you and you would use the gun to resist…”

Glenn Reynolds: #ThanksObama, linking to a story about new membership queries crashing NRA’s switchboard.

Eric Raymond: Why I joined the NRA.

SayUncle: Magpul All the Things,Â ATF Social Media FailÂ and simulating an active shooter scenario, only correctly.

Charles C.W. Cooke: “But, that caveat aside, I see no real problem with either [Obama’s]Â breakdown or with the empathy that it has invited. Insofar as his tears are a taken as an expression of genuine grief â€” rather than used to bully the dissenters into acquiescence â€” thereâ€™s nothing wrong with them at all.” Also, “Nobody should hope for violence in Oregon.”

Cooke also gets one out in the New York Times, talking about the delusion of Smart Guns. I’m shocked they ran that.

John Richardson on single issue voting.

I agree: “2016 will usher in a fresh wave of assaults on Second Amendment rights.”

The Huguenots and the Second Amendment. Both Bitter and I are descended from Huguenots.

They must believe a lie told often enough will be regarded as true: The 90% of guns traced from Mexico come from the US meme is running around again.

Gun control groups are getting out the endorsements for Hillary early. Coincidentally, Sanders is surging again.

Looks Like the French Shoot Back Too

I don’t know if this guy is a cop or not, but it looks like he bought some space for innocents to escape. He’s far more restrained with that gun than I would be. I wouldn’t bet I’m quick enough on the draw to pop that dude with the bat if he were to come at me, and I’d have drawnÂ andÂ aimed at batman once he got that close. But if he’s not a cop, he’s probably carrying that piece illegally, and that might be the reason for restraint. I also don’t speak French, so likewise that makes it hard to understand.

Police officer or no, confronting a band that size wielding deadly weapons, badly outnumbered, armed with just a pistol takes some gonads.

One Mention of Guns in State of the Union

After an enthusiastic day of promoting this #EmptyChair hash tag, President Obama makes one mention of “gun violence” in the State of the Union, and never even bothers to mention or explain the empty chair symbolism. If anyone was playing along with the drinking game, you could have gone all the way to double shots of Everclear for your “drink” and still only gotten a minor buzz. I was surprised.

I was surprised by how much of the SOTU was about him. He needed a third arm for all the time he spent patting himself on the back. I don’t know if the gun control folks ever feel like chumps, but if you don’t, you should, because you are. He doesn’t care about your cause. He doesn’t care about your loss. This is all about him, and you’ve been played.

State of the Union Drinking Game

By the time we get to a President’s last SOTU before Congress, it pretty much doesn’t matter the party, I’m generally sick of seeing their faces and listening to their crap. Both Obama and Bush were tiresome. If we have President Trump at least I’ll tune in to see what crazy shit he has to say. I don’t know whether Trump would make a good president, but he is at least entertaining. But I figure we could do a little drinking game. I’ll be playing along on Twitter if anyone wants to follow along, and since I don’t have anywhere to go, and have a heroic liver.

Take one drink if he says:

Common sense in a gun context
Gun violence
Gun safety
Gun lobby

Take two drinks if:

Points out a victim of gun violence in the audience. Yes, if he says any of the other one drink items, this is additive.
Mentions anything about believing in or respecting the Second Amendment.
Mentions how this doesn’t happen in other countries.
Mentions how much gun owners support his measures.

Take three drinks if:

Scolds Congress for a lack of action on gun violence.
Starts crying.
Makes any reference to the NRA by name.

Chug the bottle if he:

Pulls out his own roscoe and starts waving it around at Congress threatening them if they don’t do something about gun violence.

Good luck! And remember kids, drink responsibility and don’t drink and drive. Which probably means you shouldn’t play this game. I’m not sure there is any responsible way to play this, and if he does pull a rod, I certainly won’t be held responsible!

What Would Gun Law Reform Look Like?

There’s a lot of talk about common-sense gun laws out there, and it’s been a long time since I sat down and thought out ways we could rethink our current laws to make them better for us, but that also reflect the strong political reality that we’re going to end up living with some controls on firearms. Here I’m not speaking of compromising with the gun control crowd, but to try to get to more “common sense” as in real common sense that would be acceptable to the American people and also the subset of us that are into firearms. First we would have to start with where public opinion currently is:

Strong majorities favor background checks as a concept. I don’t think they get all the ins and outs of the issue, but the idea polls well.
Strong majorities favor banning crazy people, violent felons and probably even some violent misdemeanants from possessing firearms.
Strong majorities favor giving law enforcement tools to enforce the above.

This is the wall we are up against. This is whatÂ decides how far this issue can go. Public opinion has moved a lot in the past few decades, and we’re definitelyÂ in a better position than we were in 1968. So we know the public’s primary creeds. What do ours look like? I’d argue it boils down to this:

Banning rifles, pistols and shotguns, semi-automatic or not, or a subset thereof, is non-negotiable. I think that’s branded into DNA at this point.
Registration, or any scheme that represents de-facto registration is non-negotiable. This is the primary reason we oppose laws that only allow FFLs to conduct firearms transfers. A lot of folks don’t understand that we already have partial de-facto registration, and how this would make it complete. It’s a tough issue to make people understand.
The right to keep arms is also the right to carry arms. This is essentially the concealed carry movement, and now the constitutional carry movement.
We strive for uniformity in gun laws across jurisdictions so they are easy to follow and understand. This started with the movement in the 1980s to pass state-level preemption. National Concealed Carry is also part of this uniformity movement.

Given that, what are could our gun laws look like if we renegotiated them today? If there were to be a FOPA II, what would it look like? What would be the key features? Are by base premises about right, or way off?