Category: Gun Rights

I should be happy that HR 38 has passed the house, but I can’t muster a whole lot of excitement. We’ve done that before, and the Senate has always been the problem house. I’d like to think “We got this!,” but I know realistically we have a hard time getting 60 votes in the Senate. If FixNICS isn’t enough to give a handful of GOP Congressmen cover enough to vote in favor, how do we get to 60 votes in the Senate? Unless the filibuster rule changes, and at this point, I think it should, the Senate is a body that can confirm judges and pass budget bills, and that’s it. Maybe the FixNICS sweetener will get it 60 votes.

I got invited to participate in a Town Hall by Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick last night, and we tried to get in a question about his vote on HR 38. It was interesting that he fielded two callers asking about the Bill, but neither of them knew he had just voted against it, or knew much about it. We made clear to staff queuing callers that we did know how he voted, but the clock ran out and we never got our question in. To the callers he did take, he stated he had issues with the bill, but supported it in concept. Of course, he never stated what those issues were, because he’s a worm. He even wormed his way out of saying whether he voted for or against it. Allowing your constituents to get arrested by the State of New Jersey for bearing arms is not supporting the Second Amendment, no matter how often you say you support it.

All three of them, Fitzpatrick, Meehan, and Costello, are scared to death of Bloomberg’s money, and the ads he could afford to run in this media market. None of this was a factor when the gun control movement was in dire financial straits. Bloomberg coming in with big money was all it took to undo years of progress we had made with lawmakers in this area. I had wondered why Bloomberg wasn’t running ads here, whereas he was in other swing or blue state GOP districts. Now I know; he had their votes in the bag already.

Costello was OK on the issue before Bloomberg brought his billions. Fitzpatrick’s seat has a had a history of anti-gun Republicans, and the Curt Weldon, who held Meehan’s seat for years, was always squishy too. So this isn’t new. But we’re going to need a lot more organization in the Southeast if we’re going to counter Bloomberg’s money. We’re going to need people to care, not take their rights for granted, and be willing to show up and be counted. That’s been the struggle. NRA seems to no longer be interested in real grassroots organization, and has instead started promoting a culture  that only serves to feed anger and outrage on issues unrelated to guns. How are we going to use all that anger? We have to do this ourselves.

Let us not just talk about Delaware Valley Republicans, who invented the anti-gun Republican, after all. I’d also like to talk about retiring Congressman Massey and Texas Rep. Louis Gohmert, who is spreading the same bullshit. You see, Rep. Massey never supported H.R. 38, if you talk to his constituents. But once it became apparent he’d have to post a vote on it, he started spouting a bunch of nonsense about the FixNICS component of it. So now he gets to go down as Paul Revere sounding the alarm against a boogeyman of his own creation while posting a vote against us. Representative Gohmert seems to have joined him in this.

And yet, a lot of our people are buying this posturing hook, line and sinker. They are politicians. They don’t like the bill. They don’t want to vote for the bill. But rather than coming out and just stating they don’t and have never supported federal civil rights enforcement, they invented a narrative that turn them into the heroes. Even GOA, run by the Pratt family, who I’ve suspected have strong reservations about federal civil rights enforcement, didn’t feel they had the juice to come out against H.R. 38, but they sure were willing to spout bullshit. Another person I’ve long suspected of opposing federal civil rights enforcement is Dudley Brown, and he did not defy expectations either. Do you know why Bloomberg and the anti-gunners were against combining the two bills? Because they feared it would get us the 60 votes we needed to actually pass National Reciprocity, which they know will be a disaster for them. FixNICS is the same kind of thing we’ve done a million times. What’s the old saying? You can lead a bureaucrat to water, but you can’t make him do his fucking job? Or something like that.

I get that GOA and NAGR hate NICS, and I don’t think it’s worth a whole lot either. But as long as it’s the law of the land, and for the foreseeable future it will be, we have an interest in seeing it function well and do what it’s supposed to do. If extra funding for NICS gets us the biggest civil rights victory since FOPA, I’m willing to make that trade.

Here’s the vote tally. It is not too much of a surprise my worm of a RINO Congressman voted no. Maybe I’ll volunteer for Dean Malik in the primary. Malik may or may not have a chance, and it would throw that seat to the Democrats, but that’s probably what’s going to happen anyway. Both the Fitzpatricks have been awful on this issue, and awful in general.

I don’t expect them to be all “machine guns for everybody” in a district in the Philadelphia Suburbs, but this isn’t going to help the GOP pick up those working class voters they will need to stay in power in an area where, among educated people, Progressive Democrats are successfully creating a monoculture. This was not the issue to show “independence” on.

Oh well, we didn’t need their votes anyway. On to the Senate …

As we await the House vote on National Reciprocity, of course we have to be our own worst enemies. Seen from Evan Nappen on the Book O’ Face:

GOA has always hated NICS. NO new prohibited persons are created here. Letting a prohibited person get a gun does not help the dealer OR the person. If you have outstanding parking tickets and a warrant is out for you — pay your tickets, and PRESTO, you are no longer a prohibited person. Fix NICS will help get National Reciprocity over the goal line in the Senate which is the toughest fight.

That’s what bugs me: the implication that this bill does something new. If you have an outstanding warrant, you’re already a prohibited person under the law. That’s been the case since 1968. It’s that “Are you a fugitive from justice?” question on the 4473. And Evan is exactly right: no one benefits from the system clearing people that shouldn’t clear.

There’s a big question of whether Brian Fitzpatrick will vote with us. He’s one of three PA GOP lawmakers who is not a cosponsor. A lot of people here know stories of people getting into trouble in New Jersey with guns, and Fitzpatrick’s district shares its border with New Jersey. I’d really like to not have to “sanitize” my car every time I have to cross over the river.

Yep: Nothing like having to quash “fake news” from our “friends” the day before a critical vote on a major piece of legislation.

Apparently Gabby Giffords’s group is pushing to shut down web sites that sell CNC equipment and 80% lowers. I’m old enough to remember when “Information wants to be free!” was a core ethos of the early days of the Internet. Seems quaint now.

The gunman who killed his wife and four others in a rampage in Northern California earlier this month had been barred from having guns but built two semi-automatic rifles at home that he used in the shooting, authorities said. Federal officials are sounding the alarm about an increasing black market for homemade military-style semi-automatic rifles and handguns.

California already requires home building to apply for and affix a serial number to home made firearms so they can be registered. I’m going to bet our Northern California whack job here didn’t comply with this particular requirement.

Don’t ever let anyone get away with arguing that the assertion, “gun control laws are useless because criminals break them anyway,” is an argument for having no laws at all. We punish people for crimes like assault, robbery, murder because those crimes in and of themselves are a moral wrongs, and those crimes have victims who deserve justice. Absent the rule of law, victims would seek their own, much harsher justice. We form governments largely to prevent this.

Since nearly everything you can do to misuse a gun involves violating one of these malum in se laws, and since all those crimes are generally quite serious, the purpose of these gun control laws can’t be to seek justice after the fact, but rather deterrence. And if the purpose of these laws is deterrence, why is it improper to argue it fails at its basic purpose?

To get back to the point, you can try to make the 3D printing and CNC genie go back into the bottle, but it won’t. You can pass laws to outlaw making guns at home, but who will it deter? It’s fair to argue it’s only going to deter people with no criminal intent. If that’s the case, what good is the law? Wouldn’t a law that fails at its basic purpose, but only serves to limit the freedom of people who are no threat to anyone be unjust?

Since getting off PICS is one of our legislative goals, Everytown has to push this notion that PICS is a model system. Anyone who’s ever gone to buy a gun in this state and been delayed because PICS was out to lunch would probably beg to differ. Of course, what they are touting as a model is Pennsylvania’s reporting procedures, which to me doesn’t matter one way or another if those records are being reported to PICS or NICS. It sounds like they are being reported to both. So why the redundancy? Why spend tax dollars on PICS when we could just use NICS and let the feds pay for it.

We know the answer: if we used PICS, it would throw a big wrench in the State Police’s illegal-legal registry. And we can’t have that now, can we?

From Joshua Prince:

Yesterday, the Superior Court issued its decision in Commonwealth v. Ford, 196 ED 2016, in relation to whether natural corrosion (i.e. rust) over a firearm serial number constitutes a violation of Pennsylvania’s Uniform Firearms Act for purposes of possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number.

The case involved a prohibited person, who was caught with a firearm. They charged for that and because the serial number was obscured by corrosion. The defendant moved to suppress the firearm, under the grounds that the search was illegal. Police claimed “exigent circumstances” in entering the residence (in this case, someone screaming in the house), which the defendant contested.

The Superior Court ruled that the Court of Common Pleas was correct to deny the suppression of the handgun, ruling exigent circumstances existed for the warrantless entry into he home, but that the lower court was wrong to allow the charge of obliterated serial number when it was obliterated by the natural process of rust rather than an overt obliteration.

We were lucky here, because bad defendants make bad law. We’re fortunate, in this case, that we had judges that could look beyond that. This should give you an idea of the importance of judicial elections in Pennsylvania.

At the risk of embarrassing one of my readers by elevating his comment to a post, I thought this was as succinct a statement about the issue as I can think of:

Most of the areas that still experience discomfort and lack of familiarity with firearms are the places that have basically banned them and driven off all the gun owners. In NY State (an example I’m personally familiar with), the city is basically a gun free zone with zero ownership, no ranges, no concealed carry, no stores, etc. Upstate has fudds who practice in their backyards and can’t understand why people need assault weapons to hunt deer (literal quote). These guys are all old as fuck and they aren’t leaving behind a generation or three of gun owners because all of their children left the state for greener pastures (me included). A lot of these states coincidentally have serious problems besides the gun issue, so I wouldn’t exactly beat a path back if they made my hobby legal again.

The only way to change those places is to override the legal barriers to the hobby (either though Congress or the federal court) so people can begin participating legally again. Without that, you’ll never get ranges, stores, clubs, etc. And without those things you don’t get voters that care about the issue.

If I had to boil it down to a single sentence: “These guys are all old as fuck and they aren’t leaving behind a generation or three of gun owners because all of their children left the state for greener pastures.”

My club is about 1/3rd New Jersey residents, and I’m noticing a sharp uptick in the number new applicants from the Garden State. I expect that will accelerate as things get worse for the remaining gun owners, and the few remaining places to shoot on the other side of the river are closed. The average age at my club is 64 years old, and we’re not getting younger. A lot of them have kids that have moved away. Granted, there’s young shooters out there in the area, but we’re still holding onto many vestiges of Gun Culture 1.0, and it is difficult to convince a bunch of old guys who have been doing things a certain way for years that they need to change. But there is a hook you can use: most of them express profound disappointment in the lack of young people in the shooting sports. The truth is that there are plenty of young people in the shooting sports, even in the ‘burbs of Philadelphia: they just aren’t shooting your shooting sports.

My club is a Silhouette club. That’s what we shoot. It’s been a dying sport for a while now. I shot it for a while, but I’ve largely stopped. Why? It’s extremely difficult. It takes years to become competent at it, and if you’re just kind of OK, it’s about as much fun as watching paint dry. I don’t regret trying it, and it taught me a lot about shooting. But the sports the kids are shooting are basically life size video games. Is it any wonder the traditional sports are dying?

Change is difficult, time consuming, and painful, but worth it. The great trick is making people comfortable with change. I’m a big fan of doing what we can to rescue what culture we have, and not losing places to shoot to generational rot.

This may be a bit of hate click trolling on the part of the Boston Globe, but here you do have a major newspaper calling for…. taking people’s guns.

The logic of gun control lies, at bottom, in substantially reducing the number of deadly weapons on the street — and confiscation is far and away the most effective approach. Is there any conceivable turn of events in our politics that could make confiscation happen? And what would a mass seizure look like?

You really don’t want to know what it would look like. They later go on to suggest that they’ll be kind to us and offer $500 per gun confiscated, instead of the $200 per gun offered by Australia.

Part of the problem is the sheer scale of the enterprise. An operation on par with the Australian buyback — claiming one-fifth of American guns — would mean tens of thousands of police officers collecting some 60 million guns. It is, on some level, simply unimaginable.

But perhaps gun-control advocates can propose something smaller — something more targeted.

Yes, it is unimaginable. So is the push back you will put in motion by passing this kind of policy. What scares me is, eventually, the Democrats will return to power. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. And if Democrats are still talking like this when they regain power, we are in for some very dark times.

The author goes on to suggest that California’s program of actively confiscating firearms of prohibited persons would be a model that would have stopped the Texas shooter. How? The feds didn’t have his record you ignorant prat. There isn’t some kind of voodoo the feds can use that will make a record in a filing cabinet on an air force base in New Mexico suddenly end up in the NCIC.

Ultimately, if gun-control advocates really want to stanch the blood, there’s no way around it: They’ll have to persuade more people of the need to confiscate millions of those firearms, as radical as that idea may now seem.

But yeah, I’m a paranoid conspiracy nut for thinking that people out there want to take my guns. I’m crazy for thinking that’s the goal. Outrageous for even suggesting that’s a serious proposal. Yeah, piss off.