Sebastian – Page 93 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Weekly Gun News – Edition 33

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.Â 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 generationÂ 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?

Not Good News for Bloomberg

Millennial women seem to care about protecting gun rightsÂ at least as much as abortion, despite having an uncomfortable leaning toward the assault weapons banning kooky socialist from Vermont. As I’ve said before, it doesn’t really matter whether the Millennials don’t have the gun banning fervor of those that came before them. If they care enough about the issue, they’ll vote on it. If they keep voting for people like Hillary and Bernie, they’ll soon find they don’t have any gun rights. How much do they really care then?

Connecticut Ruling Not As Bad as First Feared

Following up on an earlier post today,Â after seeing the opinion onlineÂ and reading it, it’s not as bad as it first appeared. I should have waited. The Court in Connecticut did not reach any decisions on the merits of the PLCAA claim. If I’m reading this correctly, the CourtÂ ruled that the Remington’s et al’s assertion that the court had no jurisdiction over the case was incorrect, and if they wanted to make their claim they would have to do so in a Motion to Strike, rather than a Motion to Dismiss.

PLCAA reads, “A qualified civil liability action may not be brought in any Federal or State court.” The defendants tried to argue that this means the state court had no jurisdiction over the case at all since it’s not a qualified civil liability action. But the judge ruled that many of the defendants claims speak to the legal sufficiency of the plaintiff’s complaint, and if they are going to argue legal sufficiency, they can’t do that in a Motion to Dismiss which argues that the Court in question has no jurisdiction to hear such arguments.

I don’t know Connecticut’s rules, but it would seem that Remington’s attorneys can take another bite of the PLCAA apple without having to go to trial to do it.

Has NRA Finally Decided to Kick Ted Nugent to the Curb?

After years and years of Uncle Ted embarrassing the NRA with his bullshit, a more beautiful sight I can’t imagine beholding:

NoNugent

NRA’s Program Guide to Annual Meeting would seem to be delightfully Nugent free. Taking music to a new level this Â year, apparently without Ted Nugent. I’d like to think this isn’t just a happy coincidence. I hope it isn’t. Jacob has long said if NRA wants Nugent to go away, all NRA had to do was stop paying him to show up. Is it too soon to hope that’s finally happened?

Judge Allows Bushmaster Suit to Move Forward

The lawsuit brought by victims of Sandy Hook families sued Remington arguing that it amounts of negligent entrustment to sell AR-15s to civilians. Really, the correct thing to do in this case by the law is to grant the motion to dismiss, but a judge hasÂ now declined to do that.Â It’s not uncommon for judges to refuse to follow the law when it comes to matters like this, so I am not surprised. Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) generally provides immunity to Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) from suits resulting from the criminal misuse of their products, but it allows exceptions for negligence per se and negligent entrustment. Of course, the idea of selling a legal product to customers could possibly be considered negligent entrustment is a fantastic notion, but probably provided this lawless judge with enough grounds toÂ write an opinion that didn’t sound completely like extending a middle finger to Congress and the rule of law.

In truth we were in trouble when we couldn’t get this case removed to federal court, where judges are less likely to ignore the law this blatantly. Superior Court judges in Connecticut are not elected, but they serve at the whim of the Chief Court Administrator. With Malloy threatening their budget, there might have been the fear that this is a bad time rock the boat andÂ displease the governor. The law is never above politics.

Shutting Down the Signal

I’ve seen this article over at Forbes pop up quite a bit, about how a Canadian hacker can do a better job of finding gun sales online than Facebook can. There’s a lot of things I believe that might seem conspiratorial, like the fact that anti-gun groups, namely Bloomberg’s groups, are feeding the media these stories. But that’s really become standard practice, so the surprise would be if they weren’t doing it. Maybe this one was spoon fed, but maybe it wasn’t. But the strategy at work here is pretty smart (from their point of view).

Having the machines look for patterns is going to create a lot of false positives, because machines kind of suck at this. If that wasn’t the case, you’d never have to retrieve anything out of your spam folder, and in some ways that’s an easier problem if you have enough samples to evaluate.

I think the anti-gun folks know this, and that the real target are the false positives that will be generated. Social Media is a key place we promote the shooting culture, share information, and self-organize. Facebook is now my number two referrer (behind SayUncle). The false positives are going to occur most often when people are talking about guns, sharing pictures, and spreading the culture. If people can be made to fear sharing that information, because of their accounts keep getting suspended when they do, it would hobble us as a social movement pretty severely.

It’s not just Bloomberg’s money I fear, but the skills the man has that got him that money. I doubt it’s lost on the leaders of his gun control organizations that the spread of the culture is a real problem for them finding success going forward.

Busy Times, Hence Why I’m Posting Not So Much

I’m in the middle of a client demo this week, so if blog content has seemed light the past several weeks, that is why. It all builds up to this. We’ve been developing an RFID solution for one of our clients, and I volunteered to be developer, project manager…. basically a one man band. In truth, I like to fly that way. IÂ am in my element when there’s a project within my capabilities and I am confident I don’t need to bring on a team to help out. Things are going well, but you do want to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts when your client’s CFO is reviewing your work. There’s always things that will go wrong testing in a real environment as opposed to the ideal conditions in a “lab.” You want to keep the client interested byÂ meeting and exceeding their original vision. You have to show potential and value when that’s what you’re brought in to do. That’s what we do.

If my client had gone to one of the big technology consulting firms with an idea like this, Very Big Consulting would have come back with a seven figure quote, and team of a dozen people for two years. Most of that staff from Very Big Consulting would be kids right out of college with no real world experience. You’d have a senior guy “running” the show who billed at a rate some talented lawyers would envy, but whose real job would be keeping the ~~victim’s~~ client’s decisionÂ makers happy (think awesome golf and dining opportunities) while not doing much to actually accomplish anything. Whether the project actually has any chance of succeeding would be left in theÂ hands of the more capable workers among the team from both the ~~victim~~ client and Very Big Consulting. If you’re lucky, you may have something that is a fragment of your original vision when you’re done. If you’re very lucky, it might even be at least somewhat functionally useful.

We’ve cleaned up more than a few messes from Very Big Consulting for some of our clients our 16 years of operation. In fact, probably one of our biggest obstacles is convincing new clients, “No, really, we’re different than those other consulting firms. We’ll bring in capable people across the Board. We don’t look at you as a resource to be milked. We won’t bring in a team unless we need a team.” So I’m hoping for this client we deliver a proof of concept that we can develop into a real product to benefit their customers. When all is said and done, it’s very doubtful the client will spend more than low-six-figures, let alone seven. But we are not Very Big Consulting. And it’s for that reason I have to be a bit scarce these few weeks.

Nothing Like Mocking Gun Owners for a Cheap Laugh, Eh?

Samantha Bee of TBS’s Full Frontal tries to fraudulently obtain an Eddie Eagle costume for the purpose of mocking the NRA and gun ownership. She doesn’t succeed, but the video is pretty awful. Count the number of gun safety violations. What a stuck up ignoramus she is. Hard to believe people actually watch that trash.

I’ll use it again, because it’s appropriate:

Picard Trump Meme

New Jersey Eases Gun Regulations

I’ve seen some talk around gun blogs that the Christie Administration’s recommendations on reforming New Jersey’s gun regulations is a token gesture. I will agree the permit to carry reforms could have gone farther, and I wish they had. But given what New Jersey folks have had to put up with, I think Governor Christie’s new guidelines, if not resisted by underlings and local powers that be, represent fair progress towards making the state not quite as hostile to gun owners.

They are permitted “reasonably necessary” deviations – but those have not been clearly defined, according to the Attorney General’s Office.

The office listed a number of permissible stops, including “collecting and discharging passengers; purchasing fuel, food and beverages, medication, or other needed supplies; using a restroom; contending with an emergency situation; or driving around a traffic jam.”

The “reasonable deviations” clause has always been a favorite in New Jersey to trap unsuspecting gun owners, and it’s good to have clarity. I don’t know to what degree local authorities have to follow what the Attorney General and Governor’s office say, so it remains to be seen whether this will be an improvement in reality, but in theory it’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Baghdad Bob Award Goes to Bloomberg’s Trace

Just yesterday I asked, in response to a record March in NICS checks:

Do the folks like Bloomberg and his paid lackeysÂ still want to argue that gun ownership is really in decline?

Apparently, the answer is yes, yes they do. Do I think this will go on forever? No. It some point the market will stop booming. But it’s hard to argue there hasn’t been significant expansion in the gun culture. You know, the gun culture Bloomberg wants to destroy. With that, The Trace gets the Baghdad Bob award for reporting.

Bagdad Bob The Trace