ATF is charging some people for harvesting serial numbers from defunct pre-86 machine guns, and placing them on new ones. Uncle notes that it’s mismanagement of the NFRTR that made this possible.
Category: Crime
AZ Star Didn’t Do the Math
In all other high-income democracies, it would have been very difficult for Loughner legally to have obtained his weapon. Some of these countries have very few private guns (e.g., Japan, United Kingdom), while others have fairly many (e.g., Canada, Australia, Israel, Switzerland, Finland), but have more restrictive gun laws than the United States.
Actually, Israel has few private guns. But either way, this is news to me. If you actually look at the data, you have to pretend Eastern Europe is largely non-existent for this to be true. Why is it that I, a lowly engineer from a second tier school, can do better statistical analysis than a Harvard Ph.D.? Maybe because I’m not receiving oodles of money from the Joyce Foundation.
Bean Bags?
Dave Hardy points to this Fox News article that has an astonishing revelation in the case of the murder of Border Patrol Agent Terry:
Terry told us contrary to Border Patrol claims that bean bags were not deployed that night, she claims sources inside the agency have told her family, “Eight bandits came down the trail, Brian’s team yelled, ‘Policia, Policia,’ and he said they started retreating. These eight bandits. But then two of the border patrol shot the bean bags and then they opened fire.”
Imagine you’re running contraband over the border, and a group of men are charging down a trail yelling “Police! Police!” but actively firing their guns. What’s your reaction going to be? I’m going to go on a gut feeling that the police don’t actively fire firearms at suspects unprovoked and am going to make the eminently reasonable assumption that I’m being ambushed by other banditos yelling “Police!” to keep me from shooting back. Either way, hearing crack of gunfire and probably hearing the rounds break branches on the way out, it’s not unreasonable to take defensive action at that point, even if you’re smuggling contraband over the border.
If this was an approved tactic, someone needs to answer for it, because it’s extremely irresponsible. Not only does it put the border patrol agents in jeopardy, the gunman in this case could have a plausible self-defense claim. Even if they were police, shooting preemptively, not in self-defense, is murder, and how can a reasonable be expected to tell the difference between live rounds and bean bags?
The True Cause of Gun Violence
It’s time for the Brady Campaign to close up shop. The Violence Policy Center can stop Googling their “research.” CeaseFire PA doesn’t need to put in the miles to drive to Harrisburg anymore. Why? Thanks to the insights of a teenager, we have identified the root problem of irresponsible & criminal behavior with guns.
A Super Bowl party being thrown by teenagers got out of hand in Brookline after fights broke out and a shot was fired, police said.
The juvenile who threw the party at his Creedmore Avenue home on Feb. 6 told Channel 11 News alcohol was being consumed at the party, but that it shouldn’t have been there. …
“If only the Steelers had won, none of this probably would have happened,†said the teen who threw the party.
That’s right, we can solve the problem of violence by making the Steelers win every single game. The shooting couldn’t possibly be blamed on teens who shouldn’t have been having a Super Bowl party with drinks to begin with. It’s also impossible to believe that the teen who fired the gun already had a warrant out for his arrest. A bunch of juvenile delinquents who won’t accept responsibility for any of their actions & view fighting as a reasonable solution to problems – nah, that couldn’t be to blame. It’s all on the Steelers.
Felonyspy
Find out who are the convicted felons in your neighborhood. I have no idea how accurate this data is, but I am not at all opposed to felony convictions being public record. I support efforts like this. The only thing that gives me pause is that many felonies shouldn’t be. But this site seems to show the charge, so I can decide whether or not I care whether my neighbor was convicted of importing lobsters in the wrong type of bag, or whether he molested ten year old girls in another state.
At Least It’s Not Gun Violence
Because according to our opponents, it’s not really as big a concern if it wasn’t a gun. Check out this story from the City of Brotherly Love, on what happened when a mother tried to take away her 16 year old son’s Playstation, “Kendall went into his sleeping mother’s bedroom, hit her 20 times with a claw hammer and ultimately killed her,” ultimately, they say, because the claw hammer didn’t quite finish the job so then, “he dragged her downstairs and tried to ‘cremate her’ in the kitchen oven. When that failed, he continued, he beat her in the head with a chair leg before dragging her body outside and hiding under debris in an alley behind the house.”
Thank God this juvenile did not have access to a firearm! Someone might have gotten hurt.
Guns and Murder Internationally
Our opponents at the Brady Campaign, and other places, are fond of saying that the United States would be the safest country in the world if it were true that more guns meant less crime. They often cherry pick data from favored European Countries, and hope no one bothers to look at the whole picture. Thanks to the folks at Lucky Gunner, I decided to take a look. I’m using this data from the Small Arms Survey. We will take the most wealthy countries, which I’ll define as those who have a per capita GDP of $14,000 or more. We will toss out any countries that are very undemocratic (Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman), or that have instability problems (Lebanon), figuring these countries don’t have good incentives to report accurate crime statistics. That gets rid of most of the Middle East. We’ll also get rid of very small countries, like Luxembourg and Malta, figuring they are very small, and because I don’t want to compile that much data. We’ll keep the focus on major, reasonably democratic and wealthy countries. I’ll use the murder rate data found here. My raw data can be found here. But I’ll show the chart:
Each dot represents an individual country. See my data if you’re curious about which countries. If you do an r-squared correlation on the data, it does not correlate whatsoever. That means there is absolutely no correlation between the number of guns in civilian hands in any given country and the murder rate. Murder rates and GDP correlate slightly, and gun ownership and GDP per capita don’t correlate all that much either. Some might complain that I included African countries, which were above the cutoff I chose. That does not improve the correlation in the slightest if you get rid of them. Some might argue I kept the cutoff too low. If you draw the line above Russia, it improves the correlation slightly, but still no real correlation. If you draw the line at Hungary, you get some correlation. In order to get a strong correlation, you have to pretend that Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Portugal aren’t real counties. In order to get strong correlation, you have to cut the number of countries down to the point where the US can give you the correlation you’re looking for. If you just take the top European Countries (GDP/capita > 28,000) again, there’s no correlation, with only a very slight downward trend.
In short, our opponents can only get correlation by using a very small sample size, so that the United States (which legitimately does have a very high gun ownership, and higher murder rate than most other very wealthy countries) can drive a correlation. If you use more objective criteria, you don’t get what they want.
Anatomy of a Felony
Provided to us courtesy of Mayor Bloomberg:
Investigator: “So, you’re not one of those, you know, dealer guys, right?â€
Seller: “No. No tax, no form, you don’t have to do transfers or nothing.â€
Investigator: “Yeah, yeah.â€
Seller: “Just see an Arizona ID and that’s it with me.â€
Investigator: “So no background check?â€
Seller: “No.â€
Investigator: “That’s good, because I probably couldn’t pass one, you know what I mean?â€
The seller sold the gun for $500.
This transaction is already a felony under existing federal law. Why is this a case for new laws? If the guy’s going to sell the gun anyway, is he going to give a crap if the law requires a background check on top of it? More from John Richardson here. They keep saying these transactions are legal, but they aren’t.
Doesn’t Add Up
ATF made a major bust, and like most bureaucrats looking for a larger budget, makes a nice display of some of the guns they supposedly captured. Is it just me or are there cans on some of those rifles? Where’d they come from? And is it just me, or does one of those look like it’s clicked into the full auto position on the receiver? And what’s with the Ma Deuce in the background? Did they buy that at a gun show or dealer too?
More pictures here. Definitely suppressors on those AKs. Another angle here. We really need to give news photographers lessons in how to take pictures of guns so experts can evaluate the evidence floated. Video here. Pretty clearly there’s equipment in this spread that’s not ordinary, and not available at your average gun dealer.
UPDATE: Tam points out in the comments that they are likely kinks with fake suppressors welded to the barrel to meet the overall length and barrel length requirement of the National Firearms Act. So fake suppressors are the rage among drug cartels these days?
UPDATE: More from Tam:
They’re not paying retail for these things; they’re probably trading dope to somebody here in the states. I don’t think they get too wound up over whether something’s full auto or not. These guns aren’t for firefights; they’re for ambushing opponents, intimidating locals, and shooting witnesses. Cyclic rate isn’t all that important.
Also, not every foot soldier of the cartels gets an autorifle from el patron. In those pictures from that border shootout there were clearly a few thumbhole stocks.
The majority of the guns down there (at least once you get far enough from the border) are probably walking off army bases or coming up from South and Central America. But for us to claim that No Guns No How are coming from the US civilian market makes us look a bit naive.
UPDATE: I think Tam wins the internets on this thread. If you look at this picture, I’m pretty sure I recognize the Century Arms tags that come with the firearm, that they attach to the trigger guard.