Category: Gun Rights

With a lot of states passing what are essentially meaningless laws “nullifying” federal gun laws, or new federal gun laws, that are essentially symbolic acts with little meaning, why not look at passing something that actually might have meaning? I had an idea that perhaps we should encourage states to pass laws refusing extradition or warrant service on gun charges that would not also constitute a violation of federal law? In other words, if someone has a SAFE act warrant out on them, or they get pinched in New Jersey for, say, having a paperwork problem with an FOID card, no authority in the other state can act on the warrant, and no extradition is to be permitted?

Can anyone think of any reason why this wouldn’t work? You essentially cover the felon-in-possession issue with the federal law clause, so if someone has a gun charge in another state because he’s a prohibited person, the extradition could proceed in that case, but not in the case where the person was otherwise law abiding. I can think of several conditions that would satisfy people worrying about criminals getting away.

No extradition is to be granted, and no arrest or search warrant is to be executed for any person under jurisdiction of this state, by any authority of this state, for any criminal charge or civil proceeding relating to possession, carrying, transporting, transfer,  sale, or manufacture of firearms, ammunition, firearms accessories or ammunition components, provided that such possession, carrying, transporting, transfer,  sale, or manufacture of firearms, ammunition, firearms accessories or ammunition components:

1. Does not violate of federal law.
2. Would be lawful under the laws of this state.
3. Were not used in the commission of a separate felony or misdemeanor, unrelated to possession, carrying, transporting, transfer,  sale, or manufacture of firearms, ammunition, firearms accessories or ammunition components, under the laws of this state or the foreign state.

Any state agent found to have facilitated an extradition, arrest or search in violation of this law shall be fined not more than $10,000

Am I missing anything?

I have quite a lot of stuff today, so let’s get to it:

From Ann Althouse, who notes Dick Morris saying that Janet Reno threatened to spill the beans on Waco if Clinton fired her.

The medical profession would seem to persist in the notion that guns are a public health issue about which their profession should do something about. Maybe we need to start making lists of gun friendly doctors so we can avoid the insufferable busybodies. More here from the Daily Caller.

Holder wants your tax dollars to fund smart gun research.

Hey, did you know we legalized short barreled rifles in a deep blue state? You still have to comply with the National Firearms Act, but this shows it’s not just red states we’re on the move in.

Like a layer cake of fail. To be fair, a lot of CC people are prone to poor carry choices as well, but they aren’t advertising them to the world to be mocked. The original telegraph article is here.

Why you should be sympathetic to Cliven Bundy. Meanwhile, Slate plays right for ginning up a racial argument for something that has nothing to do with race.

Glenn Reynolds has a new law review article out, “The Second Amendment as Ordinary Constitutional Law.”

The assault weapons rebellion. What if there were an assault weapons law, and no one complied? Gun owners in these states really shouldn’t avoid jury duty in these states. Get on there and acquit your fellow gun owners. If authorities won’t prosecute cases because they can’t get convictions from juries, it doesn’t really matter what the law says.

Clayton Cramer has to be risking carpel tunnels this past few weeks with a review of “This Nonviolence Stuff’l Get You Killed,”  a review of Stephen Halberook’s “Gun Control in the Third Reich,” and a dismantling of Justice Stevens flexible history when it comes to his views on the Second Amendment.

Also, another mass stabbing. Five dead. Maybe mass killers have figured the mass shooting has jumped the shark, and can’t garner the media frenzy it used to.

NRA has endorsed Mitch McConnell in the GOP primary. This will no doubt upset a lot of tea party folks, but NRA has a long standing policy of endorsing friendly incumbents over friendly challengers, and for good reason.

The New Jersey GOP is way behind when it comes to the gun issue. Several years ago I was speaking with a higher-up person in the New Jersey GOP who agreed that they had not done enough to cultivate this voting constituency, but nothing seems to change.

How to estimate Pi using a shot pattern. It’s actually Monte-Carlo sampling.

Looks like the politicians in Chicago are learning from big city pols in other preempted states, that you can shift blame for your failures by blaming the weak gun laws, which you obviously can’t do anything about. Previously, they blamed laws in the ‘burbs, or in other states.

Looks like cultural condescendence towards gun owners extends to the hispanic-left as well.

SayUncle notes that the media is always quick to blame right-wingers for mass shootings, and go all quiet like when it turns out to be a Democrat with ties to the KKK.

Growing pains among New York’s pro-gun community. I wouldn’t classify it as growing pains. It’s a sign of life. In any state with a healthy gun rights movement there are many competing egos. It’s often not helpful at all, but it’s like the rain. Not much you can do about it.

A new SAFE compliant semi-auto rifle. I like this a lot more than the Fugly AR abomination. Looks like they probably put the recoil spring along the gas system, similar to the LR-300. This eliminates the need for a buffer tube.

Off topic:

Uncle Sam reviving the feudal practice of collecting debs from next of kin. The feds continue to piss away their legitimacy.

Instapundit on establishment criticism of Rand Paul: “If you criticize GOP candidates more harshly than you’re criticizing Democrats, you’re doing it wrong.” “Doing it Wrong” could be the GOP byline for this past decade.

Five police officers found lying, and why it is so rare.

This will be a shorter one, since this has been a relatively slow week. I spent all of yesterday patching systems to deal with the Heart Bleed vulnerability in OpenSSL, including the system this blog runs on. People are saying it’s likely an accident, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’s a deliberate fault injected into the source code by the NSA. Either way, the news:

What…. is the muzzle energy of an experimental Navy railgun that hurls a 20lb projectile at Mach 7? Sean got the right answer. About 21,201,337 ft/lbs. Wow. At that speed you don’t even need explosives. The impact energy is more than sufficient.

The truth accidentally slips out.

Civil rights victory in Tennessee. Knife rights!

Why are anti-gun activists so violent?

Bob Owens reviews the R51. I still want one, but I might wait until they work the bugs out.

PDB: Guns I Hate. I have a Mk.III that was also designed by lawyers. Note how successful the LCP has been? That was designed by George Kellgren rather than by lawyers.

Obama requests 1.1 billion of your tax dollars to promote gun control.

The Democratic candidate for governor in Idaho calls NRA’s questionnaire ‘biased and loaded’ and is refusing to answer it. OK, A.J., feel free, but we take question marks to be Fs, and good luck trying to win an election in Idaho with your attitude.

Charles W. Cooke: Smart Guns are a Dumb Idea.

MDA is fighting against legalizing open carry of pistols in Texas. In the vast majority of states, the only thing MDA has accomplished is to make them more pro-gun.

Eric Holder wants you to wear his special bracelet if you want to be able to use your firearm. No word on whether he’ll be smuggling smart guns and bracelets to Mexican drug cartels too.

Teacher suspended for starting a rail gun project with his students. I’ll believe we have a STEM shortage when the powers that be start acting like it.

Turns out MAIG isn’t all that helpful to associate with if you have higher ambitions for public office, even in Connecticut.

Your papers. Zeh are not in order. Cradle and grave of liberty, indeed.

In regards to the whole Brendan Eich’s purging from the Mozilla Foundation, Tam notes that we’ve engaged in a good bit of that type of thing in our community. In fact, a very sharp analogy to the Brendan Eich situation is one that had its genesis with this very blog. But I do think it’s a bit different. If Eich had been the CEO of a gay dating site, and had spoken in favor of Prop 8 in the media, and then his donations to anti-gay candidates was uncovered, I would, of course, fully expect the gay community to eat him alive. They’d actually be fools if they let that slide.

What happened to Eich would be more the equivalent to us discovering that say, Roku’s CEO had once donated a few thousand bucks to a pro-gun control PAC*. That would generally not register very high on our giveashitometer as a community. What we tend to get really outraged over are members of the community betraying us; we don’t like turncoats. For people who just disagree with us, we’re more likely to argue to the point our opponents are ready sharpen a pencil to gouge out their ears, or defenestrate their Internet router, than we are to try to ruin their personal lives. I wouldn’t say we’re totally incapable of the same kind of mob mentality, but I’d say on the whole, most of us don’t have time for that kind of crap.

* Just using that as a hypothetical example. I don’t even know who their CEO is, let alone his voting or donating habits.

It’s Monday, and once again it’s time to free the tabs. I’m in the middle of working on a new blogging system with Bitter, so we can more easily share interesting stories, so she can share more of the editorial burden. There’s always a handful of stories I keep in the tabs that might illustrate some concept, or that merit more than just a link, and many that are just link worthy, because I don’t have much else to add. So on with not adding much:

Can we design around the SAFE act? Of course we can, but the result is the world’s ugliest rifle. Unfortunately for the antis, they are just as capable as what they banned. Dave Hardy also looks at the development of the pistol grip. Uncle: “They’re complying with the stupid law to show how stupid it is.”

While thousands of New Yorkers rallied outside against gun control, dozens of anti-gunners were inside calling for yet even more gun control in New York. But there’s no slippery slope or anything. That’s paranoid right-wing delusion.

Looks like someone let an NRA candidate questionnaire leak in Oregon.

If you can believe it, the California Democrats say the solution to Leland Yee running guns is to pass more bans. It’s hard to believe they can be this literally stupid. But if course that has to be the answer, because if people like Yee can still get illegal firearms, that calls into question the whole regime doesn’t it? Instapundit has more.

New study on concealed carry shows it deters murder. Meanwhile, in Chicago, crime continues to plummet, and we’ve had the first concealed carry holder defend himself. As Professor Reynolds is fond of saying: the science is settled!

The Tavor is selling well. It’s on my want list and I don’t really dig bullpups all that much.

“The only brave thing you did was leaving the house with that sweater.”

Scott Brown has a gun problem. Yeah, abandoning us sure helped him win re-election in Massachusetts, didn’t it? Sure as hell isn’t helping him now.

Lots of civil disobedience going on in New York too.

Civil Rights Victory in Kansas! This should probably dispel the myth that NRA doesn’t support open carry.

Mexicans exercising their fundamental human rights to self-defense and the tools to affect it.

Shannon Watts stigmatizes veterans with PTSD.

Proliferation of automatic weapons in Australia. Most of them home made. But they told me the idea that under very strict gun control, people would only make their own illegal guns, was right wing lunacy?

To be clear to fools and useful idiots like Bill Maher, it’s freedom I’m in love with, not the guns. If you believe in keeping something from me because it’s dangerous, you don’t really believe in freedom. You believe, in fact, that I’m an infant.

John Lott: Bloomberg’s fabricated numbers.

Josh Prince: “Does a PA Bar Applicant Have to Disclose that He/She Filed For or Obtained a License to Carry Firearms?”

As I noted last week, you can tell we’re getting back on track with moving forward because there’s more hysterical articles appearing in the media talking about blood in the streets if we get our way.

Attorney Jonathan Goldstein and Shira Goodman, Director of CeaseFire PA, go head-to-head in a Lancaster City forum.

Off topic:

The Overprotected Kid. This is rather long, but worth reading. The play they are establishing in Wales is much like the play I grew up with, only way cooler. Much better than play dates and soccer practice.

Apple and Google’s wage-fixing scheme. I’m a long way off from suggesting tech workers need a union, but it would be nice to compete on a level playing field.

The rise and fall of professional bowling. Both my grandmother and mother were avid bowlers, and I used to watch professional bowling with my grandmother on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. I used to be an avid bowler myself, but a combination of time and a lack of places to bowl cheaply put a damper on it.

Skynet inching closer to reality.

I meant to get this out last week, but things were entirely too busy, so I’ll have to get it out now, with less analysis than I’d like, so people have a chance to make it in before the midnight deadline. ATF is proposing to alter the definition of what counts for the purposes of being adjudicated “mental defective” and “committed to a mental institution.” This has special concern for Pennsylvania gun owners, given ATF has begun counting 302 commitments for the purposes of such adjudication. The 302 commitment has absolutely no due process requirements at all. All it takes is basically a cop and the attending physician at the loony bin and you’ve got yourself a 302 prohibition both at the state and federal level.

I’d encourage folks to read Attorney Josh Prince’s submission regarding ATF 51P:

While the comment period closes on Monday, April 7, 2014, at midnight, we are requesting that our readers review our Comment, which can be downloadedhere, and submit Comments in support, especially in relation to 1) excluding those individuals, who where committed under the age of 18 from the purview of Section 922(g)(4); 2). excluding those individuals, who, post-commitment, served the state or federal government in a capacity where they were provided a firearm; 3). excluding those individuals, who, post-commitment, obtained Federal Explosives Relief; and 4). excluding any commitment that lack all of the due process guarantees. You can find our arguments relating to these issues and others in Section V (pg 34) of our Comment.

I’d also remind folks that this isn’t about whether or not mental health prohibitions should apply at all, that’s an argument that has to be made to Congress and not ATF, but we want ATF to interpret Section 922(g)(4) in a manner that’s respectful of due process and doesn’t strip the rights of Americans who present no danger to themselves or others.