Sebastian – Page 99 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Private Transfer Bans and Murder Rates

Clayton Cramer has this video outlining his study on the effects of private transfer bans on murder rates:

I think it would probably make sense to control with states that didn’t pass private transfer bans. If murder rates are declining generally (as they were in the mid to late 1990s), or rising generally (as they were in the late 1960s), it would mask the true effect. I think it would be more accurate to say that, for instance, California’s murder rate increased faster than states that didn’t pass such a ban. Maryland and Pennsylvania are both listed as success stories, but during those periods in question, murder was falling generally.

New Jersey Drops Charges Against Corrections Officer

Be careful when you leave America, as the old Uncleism says. A Pennsylvania corrections officer got nicked on a gun charge in New Jersey after being a victim in a DUI accident on the way back from Atlantic City. I was worried about this guy, since he got in trouble after Chris Christie suspended his campaign. Fortunately, it’s now being reported that the charges against the corrections officer have been droppedÂ by the Gloucester County prosecutor.

This is how lasting cultural change begins. I know a lot of people were skeptical about Chris Christie’s candidacy, and I don’t honestly blame them. But it would seem that the powers that be in New Jersey are seeing real pressure about being outside theÂ borders of the American norm. I have little doubt had this guy not been a corrections officer, but instead been ordinary Pennsylvania LTC possessing Joe Sixpack, the result would be different, but it is at least progress to see a New Jersey prosecutor do the right thing without needing a pardon from the Governor.

Board Elections and the Norquist Recall

By now many of you are getting your ballots for NRA Board. We used to do endorsements, but not being able time or money wise to go to Arlington for a few days and sit in on committee meetings, I can’t tell you I’m connected enough these days to offer a truly informed opinion. I can tell you the Board members we’ve gotten to know over the time we were more active. In the past we’ve endorsed Tom King. I think Tom is supporting Trump this year, but we won’t hold that against him :) We’ve also endorsed Carol Bambery before, along with SandyÂ Froman, and Graham Hill. You can see our whole list from this cycleÂ previously here. I would not change my votes. In the past we’ve only endorsed people we either know directly, or who we’ve heard from people we know directly need some help and are worthy of help.

I’d also note that Ted Nugent is up this year. While he apologized for posting that last anti-semitic post, the excuse he offered was that he was not careful. I think he’s given way too many black eyes to NRA the past several years, so I’m not inclined to vote for him. He’ll make it anyway on name recognition, but I won’t be part of electing him to another term.

As for the recall of Grover Norquist, I will be voting no on that. In the past I’ve expressed skepticism over Norquist because if you look up “DC insider” in a dictionary, you’ll find a picture of Grover. Sometimes those folks have different agendas, but I’m told Norquist has been very effective at helping NRA out. Also, the “charges” against him look like bullshit and quackery to me, and apparently the person leveling them didn’t even bother showing up to the hearing to make his case.

Todd Rathner is a fellow Board Member and a lobbyist. He’s been spearheading a lot of these knife rights bills, and is generally pretty effective at getting shit done. So if he’s saying it would be a huge mistake to boot Grover I believe him.

Many voting yes and advocating for a yes vote are doing so because Norquist has advocated positions in favor of amnesty. Whether I agree with Norquist on that issue or not, I am steadfastly against NRA taking any position on immigration policy, so I’m happy to vote no on the recall of Grover Norquist.

A Fun Analogy with Firearm Regulations

Seen on the Book of Face:

It’s funny because it’s true!

Maryland Appeals Assault Weapons Case to En Banc Court

Maryland (or Murrlnd, as it is known around here) has decided to appeal Kolbe v. Maryland to the entire panel of 4th Circuit judges. As NRA’s Annual Firearms Law Seminar notes, the 4th is pretty stingy with En Banc review, and this case did not overturn the ban, merely vacated the lower court ruling and sent it back for rehearing. So there’s a good possibility the 4th will deny the appeal. Let us hope. We need this case to delay, delay, delay, as long as we can delay it. We need to buy time to hope for favorable changes on The Court.

Weekly Gun News – Edition 27

You’ll have to bear with me here. Last Friday I lobbed the tip of my finger off with a mandoline slicer. I couldn’t get it to stop bleeding. While I applied pressure to the wound,Â deciding whether cauterization on a hot stove burner would be more or less painful than dealing with emergency care, Bitter threatened to knock me out with a frying pan and drag me there unconscious if need be, so away I went. There’s too much CYA and waiting in emergency medicine today. Horrible experience. The stove would have been less painful.Â They tried to convince me to throw out my slicer, since they see a lot of injuries from mandolines, but to meÂ if I want to slice the tips of my fingers off, damnit, this is America. Patch me up and get me on my way! I am wearing a sock around my finger to cover the little super glue strip thing they put over it. Supposedly it’ll fall off when it’s time. But it does make typing problematic. Links are easier:

Charles C.W. Cooke: Heller was not an empty decision. It was a pretty strong opinion, if you read it as a whole, rather than cherry picking, as the lower courts do. Hopefully future courts will someday take it seriously.

Apparently Jeb Bush tweeting about getting a gun as a gift is pissing off all the right people.

Tam: “Well, which is it, Atlantic Magazine? Is the AR platform an underpowered jammomatic, like you had Major General Scales write? Or is it a nearly-automated, death-spraying killing machine, like you had Mark Obbie write?” (Quoted from the Book of Face)

Joe Huffman takes a look at how concealed carry has grown over the past decade or so. Herring was a fool to tinker with concealed carry in Virginia, given those numbers. Not all those permit holders are Republicans, you know.

Speaking of that, gun sales are surging in blue Delaware.

You really have to wonder when the other side is going to realize that absent PLCAA repeal, which Hillary will fight for, the whole lawsuit strategy is just a waste of time and money.

Randy Barnett, who I think would make a great compromise candidate for Obama, writes in USA Today about Scalia’s effort to restore the right to keep and bear arms.

Clayton Cramer has a new paper circulating on whether gun rationing laws have any effect.

Charles C.W. Cooke notes that the Dems’ borking of Robert Bork set the precedent. As an interesting side note: if it had been Bork confirmed instead of Anthony Kennedy, we never would have won Heller. Bork was opposed to the individual rights interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, though I believe he’s come around now.

Also from Charles C.W. Cooke: “Heller Is Reason Enough for the Republican Senate to Take Its Time Replacing Scalia.”

Daily Caller: Scalia Replacement Is the Line in the Sand For Gun Owners.

Kane says she won’t run for another term as Attorney General. She shouldn’t even finish out her current one.

Moron: Congressional Candidate Dan Muroff says it’s “not sporting” to use a semi-automatic weapons for self-defense. It’s not sporting to break into my house in the middle of the night. This ain’t a golf game, Dan.

The US is the only industrialized country to lead in selfie deaths. Clearly we must regulate cell phones more strictly, and it’s just common sense to ban selfie sticks.

The Washington Post thinks the anti-gun groups should stop bellyaching over McAuliffe.

Constitutional Carry gets pulled from the schedule in West Virginia.

Ted Nugent would have saved himself a lot of grief if he had just said this from the beginning. Or you know, just been more careful.

Expect to see more stories like this which play down the massive increase in the number of permit holders.

Pennsylvania ranks 4th overall in carry permits per capita.

Off Topic:

Joel Kotkin: The Religious Right is Being Left Behind. Whether one thinks it’s bad or good, it is hard to deny it’s demographics.

I’ve always thought that John Boehner was a dim bulb. This just confirms it.

Millennials like socialism, but they have no idea what socialism is. When socialists ideas are tested on their own, millennials don’t like them.

Fact Check Site “Politifact” Fails to Get It, Again

People often rightly complain that these fact check sites are partisan hack jobs, and much of the time I think that accusation carries some weight. But much of the time it reeks of laziness, combined with not really wanting to take the time to understand the issue at hand in any detail.

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe stated that Virginia law bars private sellers from getting background checks.

“Under Virginia law, if you are a non-federally licensed dealer, you cannot get a background check even if you want one.Â We changed that law.”

That is completely accurate, and a correct understanding of how the system works now. But that doesn’t stop Politifact from rating it “mostly false,” since you can pay an FFL to process the transfer. Way to miss the point, boneheads.

McAuliffe’s statement was completely accurate. Under the new law the State Police can run a person for free without having to have an FFL process the firearm into his inventory, and then process it out again, with all the accompanying forms and NICS checks. If a person at a gun show wants to check out a prospective buyer in a private transfer, he can go over to the Virginia State Police and ask for the check on the buyer.

Politifact is also not considering that the $25 to $35 dollar price dealers in Virginia will process private transfers for will go up if it’s mandated. That’s a bargain basement price around these parts, where transfers are mandated to go through FFLs for handguns. The cheapest FFL I could find around here that would do a transfer charged $35 bucks for it. Some shops charge as much as $50 bucks.

We’ve often argued that it would be preferable if there were a system where a person could run a check on themselves and then present it to a potential seller, who could then verify the certificate is genuine. There are ways to do this. Tom Coburn essentially offered that kind of system after Sandy Hook and Schumer rejected it. McAuliffe appears to have listened. Too bad Politifact didn’t.

Range Owner Sued for Refusing Muslims

Filed under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and also under Oklahoma’s anti-discrimination laws.Â Personally, I don’t think incidents like this reflects well on the shooting community. I think there are debates to be had over the definition off public accommodation, and whether current civil rights law successfully balances property rights and a right to free association with a functional, pluralistic society. There are fair points own both sides, but that’s not the issue I’m speaking about here.

I don’t defend radical jihadists. If you follow an interpretation of Islam that believes in spreading the faith through conquest, beheading unbelievers, razing villages and raping women, I don’t have any issue labeling you a barbarian and treating you as such. All the abrahamic religions are violent and barbaric if you want to dig through and find passages in the scriptures that support that kind of thing.

But if you follow a mellow interpretation of the faith, as the Kurds do, and as a lot of other muslims around the world do, I don’t have a problem with you. I’m not willing to paint every Muslim with the same broad brush any more than I would make Christians own Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, or gun owners own mass shooters. I care more about what you do, rather than what you profess to believe. If a couple of guys come onto a shooting range and start shouting “Death to America” as they shoot, I wouldn’t blame any range owner for booting them and tipping off the FBI.

I think people are right to be concerned about the spread in popularity if violent, fundamentalist interpretations of Islam. I don’t think that makes one bigoted. But to me, you take people as they come, as individuals first, and members of whatever group you may or may not like second.

Podcaster in Trouble

Thanks to John Richardson for letting everyone know about The Polite Society Podcast’sÂ Paul Lathrop’s legal troubles. Go read John’s post about it, but to make a long story short, Paul’s real world profession in trucking. While instructing a student, he seems to have gotten into a confrontation with another driver who went back to his truck, called 911, and accused Paul of threatening him with a gun. Paul denies the charge, and Paul’s student claims he never saw a gun.

I know it’s always been a big fear of mine that someone will get pissed off at me on the road and call in a false report of me threatening them with a gun, then have the police stop me only to find, surprise, a gun. Paul is not the first instance I’ve heard this happening. I seem to recall, though I can’t find a link, of someone beating a brandishing charge because the alleged victim described the gun as being silver, and the gun found on the accused was black. But you can’t always count on being that lucky, or have cops who will arrest first and let a judge sort out the he said, she said.

I’ve always heard lawyers say, “The first person to call 911 is generally presumed to be the victim.”Â Being the first to callÂ and conflict deescalation is something to keep in mind out there. But sometimes trouble manages to find you, even if you did everything right.

Tie Cases Will Be Reargued

So notes SCOTUSBlog. Typically when the Supreme Court is even numbered, splits uphold whatever the lower court ruling was. This indicates cases that split will be reheard when the next justice is confirmed. We have no Second Amendment cases before the Court currently, but the stakes in this election keep getting higher and higher, and yet the three ring circus carries on.

We’re going to need more than hope to hold the Senate firm on not voting on Obama’s nominee. It’ll take a lot of letters, e-mails and phone calls to keep Senators in line.

This may be all I have for today. The news cycle is not thrilling. Maybe a news post tomorrow.