The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
I’ve never liked saying Happy Memorial Day, but I do hope you all get to enjoy some time with family and friends. Summer here officially started (weather wise) Thursday. I guess we don’t get a spring. But there are upsides:
It’s hard to find good Q up here in yankeeland, so I have to make it myself. An 8lb Boston Butt for pulled pork either tonight or tomorrow (depending on when it gets finished), and some armadillo eggs to tide us over until the butt is ready.
Phil Van Cleave made the very sensible decision make his own recording of his entire interview with Katie Couric. That should be a lesson to all of us who might find themselves in a position to deal with the media. If VCDL hadn’t done their own recording, Couric would have simply denied that they manipulated anything, and that would have been that. Who are you going to believe? The crazy gun nuts?
This story got legs because VCDL knew better than to trust the media. None of us should. I’ve been ignoring requests from media for years. I just won’t talk to them. Now this story has some real legs because there was proof. Hell, even NPR agrees she was out of line. The only sad part about all this is that, unlike Dan Rather or Brian Williams, Couric honestly doesn’t have much of a career left to destroy. She’s never been a journalist. She’s a propagandist.
“Katie Couric asked a key question during an interview of some members of our organization,†he said. “She then intentionally removed their answers and spliced in nine seconds of some prior video of our members sitting quietly and not responding. Viewers are left with the misunderstanding that the members had no answer to her question.â€
I’m shocked! PJ Media has more to say about it here, noting:
The documentary’s director, Stephanie Soechtig, said in a statement: “I never intended to make anyone look bad and I apologize if anyone felt that way.†Of course not.
Yeah, I don’t believe that for a minute. Couric is no better than Dan Rather or Brian Williams. There is no integrity left in journalism anymore. The fact that they did this begs the question of how often they do this to others?
UPDATE from Bitter: Last night NPR reported on this controversy and said flatly:
“This manipulation — and that’s what it was — would not pass muster at NPR under its principles for fairness in handling interviews.”
This is getting real traction across many, many outlets. And they are frequently laying the blame at the feet of Katie Couric. From NPR:
“The deception reflects poorly on Couric, too. She conducted the interviews, serves as the movie’s executive producer and has promoted it extensively. She saw a polished cut of the documentary before its release.”
This decision was released right before I left for Louisville. The Third Circuit contains Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey, and has not, in general, been a very Second Amendment friendly circuit.
Heller and subsequent decisions in our Court make clear that the de facto ban on machine guns found in § 922(o) does not impose a burden on conduct falling within the scope of the Second Amendment. Turning first to Heller, we note that that opinion discusses machine guns on several occasions, and each time suggests that these weapons may be banned without burdening Second Amendment rights.
I’ll be honest, I think that’s a misreading of Heller. The Heller opinion does strongly imply that perhaps bans on M16s might be permissible, but it does not explicitly state it. The Court’s opinion calls the reading of Miller that would rule the NFA’s machine-gun provisions unconstitutional “startling.”
Read in isolation, Miller’s phrase “part of ordiÂnary military equipment†could mean that only those weapons useful in warfare are protected. That would be a startling reading of the opinion, since it would mean that the National Firearms Act’s restrictions on machineguns (not challenged in Miller) might be unconstitutional, machineguns being useful in warfare in 1939. We think that Miller’s “ordinary military equipment†language must be read in tandem with what comes after: “[O]rdinarily when called for [militia] service [able-bodied] men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.â€
I think the Court is correct, except I think the only fair way to determine “common use” is to examine whether the weapon is part of “ordinary police equipment,” the police being the nearest modern analogue to the militia. If the Heller “common use” test were untempered by any analysis of police equipment, the government could evade the “common use” test by banning any new defensive technology before it has a chance to end up being commonly used, as the State of Massachusetts tried to do with electric stun guns (which SCOTUS struck down recently).
So was the NFA truly banning unprotected weapons that have no common defensive use, or was it merely trying to evade Second Amendment protections by preemptively banning it before the people had a chance to speak? To look at that, you have to look at what the police are choosing to arm themselves with, since police carry guns for self-defense, and not to conduct battlefield operations. Are machine guns in common use among police? I don’t know, but the courts should be asking that question before simply categorically declaring machine guns outside of Second Amendment protections.
Over at “The Federalist,” it is reporting that the author, Devin Watkins, went down to the DC Police Station and applied for a license to carry, leaving the “good cause” section blank. He was told by the officers that they had been instructed to ignore the court order that good cause may not be considered in applications. It never ceases to amaze me how lawless of a lot of big city officials are. If they deny anyone a license for lack of good cause, everyone up and down that chain of command should be held in contempt.
As it stands now, DC is claiming it never told officers any such thing, and that they will be complying with the court order as long as it is in effect. They also say anyone denied a permit for lack of good cause my reapply.
I arrived back from Louisville to an urgent client project with a deadline of Friday, so I’ve been unable to post. We will be returning to our regularly scheduled blogging shortly. I’ll probably have a few things later this afternoon. Do you ever feel like taking vacation isn’t worth it? One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that two weeks is the minimum to really unwind and forget about work. Anything under that and you tend to just shift work around, rather than really accommodate for vacation time.
Got back home sooner than expected, despite taking a more scenic route through West Virginia, avoiding Maryland. We discovered if you do a custom route on Google Maps, it’s fine unless it has to recalculate, in which case it defaults to the shortest route. Ordinarily, that would be fine except that the shortest route could get me thrown in a Maryland State Prison. Google has a multi-destination feature on the web version, but the mobile and tablet versions don’t. They allow you to avoid “Highways,” “Tolls,” and “Ferries,” but they don’t have an option for “Anti-Gun States.” Maybe I should make a feature request.
My source from the NRA Board Meeting had reported in, and attendance this year was 80,452. This is the second highest attended Annual Meeting. Houston still holds the overall record of 86,228. Houston was when we were under the most significant attack we faced after the antis successfully exploited Sandy Hook to go after us. Also, on Friday, traffic gridlocked in Louisville. Saturday the venue was managing the parking situation pretty poorly. There’s a good chance this could have been a record breaker if not for the venue. In Nashville last year, attendance was 78,865, and before that in Indianapolis, 75,267. I’m afraid that for us Pennsylvnians, NRA has outgrown our venues. Pittsburgh gridlocked with under 70,000.
In a way, as the event grows it gets less fun for me. It’s harder to move around the floor and you don’t run into people as much. If I missed you this year, sorry about that. Even the law seminar has gotten so big, there were several readers there who I’ve met before that I’ve missed because the room really is that big.
Matt Carmel’s Palm Pistol, which was made for shooters with disabilities, has finally made an appearance at NRA. He told me he’s still trying to get the FDA to list it as an approved medical device.
It’s definitely non-traditional, but the carbine actually worked pretty well from an ergonomic point of view. I really would like to be a fly on the wall when the Obama Administration is forced to approve a firearm as a medical device. He’s filing under both 21 CFR 890.5050 “Daily activity assist device”, and an 21 CFR 890.5370 “Nonmeasuring exercise equipment.”
