Category: Anti-Gun Folks

McCarthy pretty much admits she’s just lashing out at the NRA:

“I am making a statement. I will never forget why I am here. This is a push back to the NRA.”

Her bill makes it a felony to fail to report a lost or stolen firearm with 24 hours of discovery. You could spend a year in jail and have to pay a 1/4 million dollar fine. Your life would essentially be over, and you would be a prohibited person… all for being the victim of a crime.

Bellesiles’s is being investigated by the Chronicle for Higher Education for his tale about a student’s brother who was KIA in Iraq.

I guess a big question I would have for the Brady folks, is are they really willing to accept the implications of the Second Amendment being a fundamental individual right? For instance, is Chicago’s ban on gun shops constitutional? If so, why? It seems absurd you would have a right to possess something, but not buy it. There would also be an implied right to manufacture and trade in firearms, as incidental and necessary for keeping and bearing. Would it be correct to allow books to be owned and read in the city, but not sold?

Is their ban on firing ranges constitutional? Wouldn’t the right to keep and bear arms necessarily have to extend to the right to practice and drill with arms? Could Chicago ban adult literacy education centers within the city’s borders? Or ban teaching of English Literature Appreciation? Ban spelling bees? Outlaw teaching of foreign languages?

Is the 100 dollar fee they are charging for licenses just fine too? What if they charged a 100 dollar fee to be paid before having an abortion? What if they charged 100 dollars for a marriage license? Or charged 100 dollars for a demonstration permit? The Courts have generally frowned on license fees in exercise of fundamental rights that are punitive in nature, rather than to cover filing and processing costs.

“Oh, but the Second Amendment is different.” Well, in some important ways, yes. We generally accept that the Second Amendment right can’t be an identical mirror of the First, or exactly like other rights. But it would almost seem the gun control groups want to deny that an examination of how we treat other rights is facially illegitimate. This strikes me as absurd, but I suspect they push that idea because they don’t like the implications of “fundamental right.”

You can probably guess by who. We’ve been fighting this stupid idea in Pennsylvania for more than a year now. But why should we have all the fun? McCarthy is pointing to a study by the highly scientific and unbiased group Mayor’s Against Illegal Guns. It’s interesting that McCarthy says this law is working in states that have adopted it, when none of the municipalities in Pennsylvania, all of whom claimed this legislation was highly necessary, have prosecuted a single person using it.

Someone in the DC area might want to infiltrate this gathering and take notes. I should note that Mike Castle, one of the hosts, is running on the GOP ticket for Joe Biden’s senate seat in Delaware, and is no friend to the Second Amendment. This is a stacked forum, meaning none of the panelists are pro-2A.

Jim Lindgren is continuing to research Bellesiles news claims over at Volokh:

I have now read through every DoD casualty report from last fall for both Iraq and Afghanistan and news obituaries for most of them, and I have found none that was even remotely possible as the case that Bellesiles wrote about in the Chronicle. This post discusses the serious questions this raises for the veracity of Bellesiles account.

Go read the whole thing. Lindgren boils it down to this:

That leaves two Iraqi War deaths by hostile small arms fire during his course, one on Nov. 4 and another on Nov. 22. The newspaper accounts of both deaths do indicate a sniper as the killer, but both deaths are reported as occurring on the same day as the soldiers were shot, so they cannot be the source of Bellesiles’s tale of a wounded soldier languishing for weeks, at one point perhaps too injured to be flown to Germany.

I’m still finding it difficult to believe he’s crazy enough to still be spinning tales from whole cloth, but I don’t rule out the possibility that he is a pathological liar.

They are trying to convince Chicagoans not to buy guns. This convinces me they don’t have much confidence they are going to be able to throw up much in the way of obstacles. But it’s a free country, and Joyce is free to mislead people about the dangers of guns. The real victory is that they would seem to no longer believe they can count on force of law to do this for them, and must now fall back to how we’re supposed to do things in a free society: persuasion.

Then:

Our ultimate goal-total control of handguns in the United States-is going to take time. My estimate is seven to ten years. The first problem is to slow down the increasing number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered. And the final problem is to make the possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition-except for the military, policemen, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors-totally illegal.

Pete Shields, July 1976, President of National Coalition to Control Handguns, which was later renamed Handgun Control Inc, and finally Brady Campaign.

Now:

It is settled law. If I were taking a law school exam today, I would say, yes, you have got an individual right to have a gun in your home for self-defense.

Paul Helmke, President of the Brady Campaign, June 28, 2010, 34 years later.

How the mighty have fallen.