The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
SCOTUS has denied cert in the Kolbe case challenging Maryland’s assault weapons ban. They have also denied cert in Norman v. Florida challenging Florida’s ban on open carry.
Heller and McDonald are all we’re getting out of this court. That much is apparent. We need to change one, possibly two justices on the Supreme Court of we’re going to take the Second Amendment any further. That’s just the way it is.
Apparently Gabby Giffords’s group is pushing to shut down web sites that sell CNC equipment and 80% lowers. I’m old enough to remember when “Information wants to be free!” was a core ethos of the early days of the Internet. Seems quaint now.
The gunman who killed his wife and four others in a rampage in Northern California earlier this month had been barred from having guns but built two semi-automatic rifles at home that he used in the shooting, authorities said. Federal officials are sounding the alarm about an increasing black market for homemade military-style semi-automatic rifles and handguns.
California already requires home building to apply for and affix a serial number to home made firearms so they can be registered. I’m going to bet our Northern California whack job here didn’t comply with this particular requirement.
Don’t ever let anyone get away with arguing that the assertion, “gun control laws are useless because criminals break them anyway,” is an argument for having no laws at all. We punish people for crimes like assault, robbery, murder because those crimes in and of themselves are a moral wrongs, and those crimes have victims who deserve justice. Absent the rule of law, victims would seek their own, much harsher justice. We form governments largely to prevent this.
Since nearly everything you can do to misuse a gun involves violating one of these malum in se laws, and since all those crimes are generally quite serious, the purpose of these gun control laws can’t be to seek justice after the fact, but rather deterrence. And if the purpose of these laws is deterrence, why is it improper to argue it fails at its basic purpose?
To get back to the point, you can try to make the 3D printing and CNC genie go back into the bottle, but it won’t. You can pass laws to outlaw making guns at home, but who will it deter? It’s fair to argue it’s only going to deter people with no criminal intent. If that’s the case, what good is the law? Wouldn’t a law that fails at its basic purpose, but only serves to limit the freedom of people who are no threat to anyone be unjust?
Since getting off PICS is one of our legislative goals, Everytown has to push this notion that PICS is a model system. Anyone who’s ever gone to buy a gun in this state and been delayed because PICS was out to lunch would probably beg to differ. Of course, what they are touting as a model is Pennsylvania’s reporting procedures, which to me doesn’t matter one way or another if those records are being reported to PICS or NICS. It sounds like they are being reported to both. So why the redundancy? Why spend tax dollars on PICS when we could just use NICS and let the feds pay for it.
We know the answer: if we used PICS, it would throw a big wrench in the State Police’s illegal-legal registry. And we can’t have that now, can we?
Regularly scheduled blogging will resume after the Thanksgiving holiday, and I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving. I am taking some time off from work and getting things done at my club that need to be done, like getting the place ready for a campus wide IP network that I’ve talked about here before. Planning has been finished for some time, and now it’s time for doing.
Additionally, the Democrats have taken over my Township this past election, and what is the first thing they aim to do? Spend my tax dollars lobbying for gun control on behalf of Mike Bloomberg. At the local level, they are preempted from actually passing ordinances regulating firearms, so I don’t really care what any Supervisor thinks on guns one way or another. But I sounded the alarm and got a handful of people to show up to the Supervisor’s meeting to deliver a message: fix the damned pot holes, and if you want to see gun control, give our State Rep a call on your own dime.
But it’s not all drudgery. I like new toys. My club just obtained a new Cub Cadet Challenger 500, and boy is it a fun machine to tool around in. The 2001 Kawasaki Mule 3010 it replaces was a more sedate and practical work horse, but for some tasks I really like the Cub better. The big thing the Mule has going for it is bench seats, which is easier to get in and out of. That’s important in a working vehicle. But the Cub gets around the property better, has a winch standard, and doesn’t have any divider between the bed and the cab, so you can actually fit 10 foot boards in it diagonally without having to shoot them into the air over the cab where you have to be wary of low hanging branches. It’s a one mile loop around the property, so I appreciate the Cub’s greater speed and nimbleness. That basically means less time wasted getting from point A to point B.
Yesterday, the Superior Court issued its decision in Commonwealth v. Ford, 196 ED 2016, in relation to whether natural corrosion (i.e. rust) over a firearm serial number constitutes a violation of Pennsylvania’s Uniform Firearms Act for purposes of possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.
The case involved a prohibited person, who was caught with a firearm. They charged for that and because the serial number was obscured by corrosion. The defendant moved to suppress the firearm, under the grounds that the search was illegal. Police claimed “exigent circumstances” in entering the residence (in this case, someone screaming in the house), which the defendant contested.
The Superior Court ruled that the Court of Common Pleas was correct to deny the suppression of the handgun, ruling exigent circumstances existed for the warrantless entry into he home, but that the lower court was wrong to allow the charge of obliterated serial number when it was obliterated by the natural process of rust rather than an overt obliteration.
We were lucky here, because bad defendants make bad law. We’re fortunate, in this case, that we had judges that could look beyond that. This should give you an idea of the importance of judicial elections in Pennsylvania.
At the risk of embarrassing one of my readers by elevating his comment to a post, I thought this was as succinct a statement about the issue as I can think of:
Most of the areas that still experience discomfort and lack of familiarity with firearms are the places that have basically banned them and driven off all the gun owners. In NY State (an example I’m personally familiar with), the city is basically a gun free zone with zero ownership, no ranges, no concealed carry, no stores, etc. Upstate has fudds who practice in their backyards and can’t understand why people need assault weapons to hunt deer (literal quote). These guys are all old as fuck and they aren’t leaving behind a generation or three of gun owners because all of their children left the state for greener pastures (me included). A lot of these states coincidentally have serious problems besides the gun issue, so I wouldn’t exactly beat a path back if they made my hobby legal again.
The only way to change those places is to override the legal barriers to the hobby (either though Congress or the federal court) so people can begin participating legally again. Without that, you’ll never get ranges, stores, clubs, etc. And without those things you don’t get voters that care about the issue.
If I had to boil it down to a single sentence: “These guys are all old as fuck and they aren’t leaving behind a generation or three of gun owners because all of their children left the state for greener pastures.”
My club is about 1/3rd New Jersey residents, and I’m noticing a sharp uptick in the number new applicants from the Garden State. I expect that will accelerate as things get worse for the remaining gun owners, and the few remaining places to shoot on the other side of the river are closed. The average age at my club is 64 years old, and we’re not getting younger. A lot of them have kids that have moved away. Granted, there’s young shooters out there in the area, but we’re still holding onto many vestiges of Gun Culture 1.0, and it is difficult to convince a bunch of old guys who have been doing things a certain way for years that they need to change. But there is a hook you can use: most of them express profound disappointment in the lack of young people in the shooting sports. The truth is that there are plenty of young people in the shooting sports, even in the ‘burbs of Philadelphia: they just aren’t shooting your shooting sports.
My club is a Silhouette club. That’s what we shoot. It’s been a dying sport for a while now. I shot it for a while, but I’ve largely stopped. Why? It’s extremely difficult. It takes years to become competent at it, and if you’re just kind of OK, it’s about as much fun as watching paint dry. I don’t regret trying it, and it taught me a lot about shooting. But the sports the kids are shooting are basically life size video games. Is it any wonder the traditional sports are dying?
Change is difficult, time consuming, and painful, but worth it. The great trick is making people comfortable with change. I’m a big fan of doing what we can to rescue what culture we have, and not losing places to shoot to generational rot.
Complaining that we shouldn’t be blamed and punished for the actions of mad men is all well and good, but one has to understand a few realities:
Mass shootings give the ruling classes the excuse to preen about showing the latter group how much they care… manipulating their emotional reaction to tragedy in order to bring them closer to their position. The actions of the former group forces us to circle the wagons out of self-preservation, which puts is at an inherent disadvantage in influencing Those Who Care Oh So Very Much to support us.
It will never look good defending your hobby in the face of dead children. Yes, I know that by the same logic, people who drink are more responsible for dead children than you or I are for enjoying firearms, but that doesn’t matter. Drunk driving deaths, domestic abuse, and alcohol poisonings are all statistics, not headlines. And most people drink. People will fight for what they enjoy, but aren’t going to fight for what you enjoy.
“But Sebastian, that’s why we make the self-defense argument,” I can hear people saying. Yes. It is. But understand that while that argument is a lot more effective, it also has limits. The self-defense argument will appeal to people who have the emotional disposition to accept it. You aren’t going to win the first group with that argument, who either live in ridiculously safe neighborhoods, or who can afford private security. They’ve never given self-defense a second thought. There are also members of the second group who will not be receptive to that message.
I’m afraid the Vegas shooting was the perfect kind of event to trigger subsequent whack jobs. I am a firm believer that media sensation is what drives these events. We know that mass shooters spend a lot of time planning attacks. They do not occur in a vacuum. The Vegas murderer (I won’t name his name, that’s what they want) set the standard for what would earn headlines. The whole thing was ready made for the next crazy asshole, which is why I think we’re seeing a rash of them now.
So what can the average gun owner do? Relieve ignorance. Breed familiarity. Understand the emotional state of the person you’re trying to reach. Don’t be this guy meme:
Invite people to shoot. Bring them to your clubs. Not a member of a local club? Join one. I don’t care if they are a bunch of Fuddy Duddy old codgers. You can’t change something from he outside, and we have to preserve those places to shoot for future generations. Familiarity is the immunization that will protect the second group from the first. We’re not going to win this by ‘sperging on the Internet (says the blogger). Get out there in the community and help build it.
This may be a bit of hate click trolling on the part of the Boston Globe, but here you do have a major newspaper calling for…. taking people’s guns.
The logic of gun control lies, at bottom, in substantially reducing the number of deadly weapons on the street — and confiscation is far and away the most effective approach. Is there any conceivable turn of events in our politics that could make confiscation happen? And what would a mass seizure look like?
You really don’t want to know what it would look like. They later go on to suggest that they’ll be kind to us and offer $500 per gun confiscated, instead of the $200 per gun offered by Australia.
Part of the problem is the sheer scale of the enterprise. An operation on par with the Australian buyback — claiming one-fifth of American guns — would mean tens of thousands of police officers collecting some 60 million guns. It is, on some level, simply unimaginable.
But perhaps gun-control advocates can propose something smaller — something more targeted.
Yes, it is unimaginable. So is the push back you will put in motion by passing this kind of policy. What scares me is, eventually, the Democrats will return to power. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. And if Democrats are still talking like this when they regain power, we are in for some very dark times.
The author goes on to suggest that California’s program of actively confiscating firearms of prohibited persons would be a model that would have stopped the Texas shooter. How? The feds didn’t have his record you ignorant prat. There isn’t some kind of voodoo the feds can use that will make a record in a filing cabinet on an air force base in New Mexico suddenly end up in the NCIC.
Ultimately, if gun-control advocates really want to stanch the blood, there’s no way around it: They’ll have to persuade more people of the need to confiscate millions of those firearms, as radical as that idea may now seem.
But yeah, I’m a paranoid conspiracy nut for thinking that people out there want to take my guns. I’m crazy for thinking that’s the goal. Outrageous for even suggesting that’s a serious proposal. Yeah, piss off.
Dave Kopel looks at the issue in The Hill, and notes, tongue in cheek:
In the spirit of these proposals, here are some ideas for tough federal gun laws — most of which should have been enacted years ago.
For people convicted of domestic violence, even a misdemeanor, how about a lifetime prohibition on firearms possession?
Further, a government license should be required for anyone who wants to manufacture, import, or sell firearms. The license should be mandatory not only for formal businesses, but also for individuals who make repetitive transactions for the purpose of profit. This would cover people at gun shows who put up signs declaring themselves to be “unlicensed dealers.†Anyone who engages in the firearms business without a federal license should be punished by up to five years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.
Almost no one knows what our current gun laws are. But based on my social media feeds, that sure doesn’t stop everyone from thinking they are fucking experts.
Robert Verbruggen has a great article in National Review that gets to a serious problem you will notice in research touted by anti-gun groups and people who really fucking love science. Let me quote:
We shouldn’t care about “gun murders†or “mass shootingsâ€; we should care about murders in general and mass killings in general, regardless of how they’re accomplished. (Up to a point it’s essentially tautological to claim that more guns translates to more problems with guns, because a society with no guns by definition cannot have any problems with them.) As I’ve noted numerous times before, there is no simple, consistent correlation between gun ownership and murder or homicide rates in general, either among developed countries or among U.S. states. More sophisticated studies face a variety of serious methodological obstacles — I don’t find any of them that compelling — and have reached varying conclusions. The research on mass shootings in particular is in an even more primitive state.
There’s the old quote from Archie Bunker that comes to mind: “Would it make you feel any better, little girl, if they was pushed out of windiz.”