Category: Gun Rights

It’s going to be a high caffeination day, because my rear is dragging. Sunday night I got woken up by Comcast Internet at work bouncing up and down like a pogo stick for an hour, which shoots texts to my iPhone. Last night we had a power outage here that lasted 40 minutes, starting about 3:30AM. The sudden disappearance of white noise from the fan and the beeping of all the equipment down here got me right up. Thank God for coffee and Coke Zero. Now the links:

Over at the NRA-ILA column in the Daily Caller, a handy guide to anti-gun propaganda.

Subway stabbing victim can’t sue NYPD for failing to protect him, despite New York prohibiting most effective means of self-defense.

A good reason not to have a firearms registry.

Massachusetts is taking up more gun control, similar to New York’s.

ABC misleads yet again.

Losing self-defense rights if you refuse demands to abstain from conduct.

We put our money and votes where our mouths are. “Gun rights supporters donate four times more and are more politically involved than gun control advocates, according to a poll from the Pew Research Center published this weekend.” RTWT

California seems to be engaging in their own nullification law.

Why gun owners need to take fire danger bans on shooting seriously.

Nanny Bloomberg’s soda ban goes down on appeal 5-0. He didn’t even get one judge.

What caliber for Brown Bear? 5.45×39 would not be my first choice.

Bob Owens has a different take on the “guns are for white people” article. I would agree that we can probably do better. A lot of gun rags are pretty “Gun Culture 1.0” centric, which is I don’t read them.

Tam has gotten around to reading the Heidi Yewman piece.

Well, OK, I guess that wasn’t too “mini” was it?

Earlier I had mentioned that motions were filed to enjoin the State of Illinois from enforcing its prohibition on carry until such time as the new law was implemented. It seems the District Court judge has denied the motion and agreed with Illinois that the case is now moot. It looks like this will be appealed, but I don’t know what the timeline will look like.

It looks like some lawmakers in Saipan are looking to tighten their gun control laws, already likely unconstitutionally strict. I doubt even most people could point where Saipan is on a map, or even know it’s an unincorporated territory of the United States. The Supreme Court, in the Insular Cases, ruled that fundamental constitutional rights are to be enforced even in unincorporated territories of the United States. Therefore the ruling in McDonald v. Chicago has applied the Second Amendment to the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands. Their current laws are such:

The Commonwealth Weapons Control Act forbids the manufacture, purchase, sale, possession or carrying of firearms other than as provided by law.  In order to carry a firearm, the holder must have a license.

Shooting galleries are allowed, exempting patrons from the licensing requirement.  6 C.M.C. 2251.

.22 Caliber rifles and .223 caliber centerfire rifles and .410 gauge shotguns and their appropriate shells are allowed.  All other firearms are considered contraband and are not allowed in the Commonwealth.  6 C.M.C. 2301.

The CNMI is assigned to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. It seems hard to imagine that prohibitions this strict would pass constitutional muster even under today’s relatively early Second Amendment case law. It would seem that some local politicians are aware of that.

The weekend is over, and as we look ahead to the next week, it’s time to dump all the stories I didn’t have time to say anything about and hope some fresh ones come by. I’ve noticed the news cycle on our issue is picking up a bit over the weekend.

Jim Geraghty notes that Obama has seemingly stopped talking about gun control. US News wonders when the gun fight is coming back to Congress. It’ll be yesterdays news until there’s a fresh tragedy to exploit. In the mean time, there’s surely something else he can find to play up division.

Have some Reasoned Discourse(TM) with your afternoon coffee. But I thought we were supposed to have a national conversation? Miguel has ever more from people who just want to have a conversation.

The media in New Jersey is starting to pressure Chris Christie to sign the gun control bills into law. This is but just one example. I’ve passed on several other NJ media stories along the same vein.

Why gun sales are falling. I think it’s good that the panic is ending, but it’s not a good time to get complacent, especially when there’s now going to be real money arrayed against us.

The New York Times has a double standard when it comes to recall elections. They are only good when it’s to get rid people who the Times editorial staff don’t like.

Speaking of media narratives, once again we see the drunk gun owner meme popping up in North Carolina. Any time we allow restaurant carry with a prohibition on consuming alcohol, this comes up.

Don’t bring a bat to a gunfight. This guy was apprehended, so no Darwin Award for him, but he definitely out-dumbed this guy.

Megan McArdle doesn’t think we need tougher standards for self-defense.

Larry Correia takes a look at Profiling and Stand Your Ground.

Charles Cooke notes that Stand Your Ground is nothing new. No, it’s not. It’s been the law in most western states since they’ve been states.

Dave Hardy takes a look at the a claim by the media on who benefits from SYG and notes some serious subterfuge.

Publicola: Women and Children first.

Tactical mythbusting: revolver brass in the pocket. I’ve always been suspicious of the story of the police trainer who took a mugger’s gun and gave it back to him. He had spent his days teaching retention, which involved repeatedly taking guns and giving them back. The lesson is you do what you train, but I’ve always been suspicious of the story.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit thinks special privileges for retired cops might violate the Constitution’s prohibition on titles of nobility. I had never considered that, but I think it’s interesting. Not quite the same argument, but it’s worth noting that while the Silveira case was a disaster in terms of the Second Amendment, they did prevail on the equal protection argument under the 14th Amendment, tossing the exemption for retired cops from California’s assault weapons ban. I’d like to see the courts treat any gun control law which contains exemptions for law enforcement as automatically suspicious. Police carry firearms for the same reason citizens do: self-defense. But we probably have a ways to go there. Maybe Prof. Reynolds’ idea is a good start.

I am by no means an expert on statistical analysis, but I’ve probably had more training in it than most people, and this looks like a crock of horse shit to me so far. I’m not sure what the graphs they are publishing here even mean, or even how they were arrived at. At best I can tell it’s boiling down self-defense situations to something extremely simplistic by people who are not subject matter experts in that field. Self-defense can’t be boiled down to a probability calculation. Because it involves people, it’s not something you can model mathematically.

I also don’t understand how you can treat gun violence as an epidemiological issue when it’s not a disease. I think you are already making an awful lot of assumptions if you’re starting out with that approach. I see no good coming from this, which is why we need to continue to fight funding to this garbage.

UPDATE: The paper is here. This is the sentence which can clue you off that it’s junk science:

This debate cannot be settled satisfactorily by verbal arguments alone, since these are often driven by opinion, and lack a solid scientific backing. What is under debate is essentially an epidemiological problem: how do different gun control strategies affect the rate at which people become killed by attackers, and how can this rate be minimized? This question can be addressed with mathematical models that describe the interaction between a criminal shooter and one or more people that are the target of the shooter.

Emphasis mine. That sentence right there ought to raise alarm bells. If complex human behavior and interactions could be mathematically modeled, we’d be quite comfortable with the idea of armed robot police. We’d have pretty good artificial intelligence. Even for relatively predictive human activities that can be done relatively well by computers, like driving and flying, we’re still not at the point where we’re comfortable turning everything over to machines.

The results then clearly depend on the assumptions underlying the model, and this is very important to keep in mind when reading this paper, or any paper that deals with mathematical models in biological and behavioral sciences.

Yes, certainly, but you can bet that the media and policymakers will completely ignore these caveats and dive straight into the conclusion, in order to give their own preconceived notions the air of science, and only some stupid gun owning neanderthal with barely any education would argue with science.

UPDATE: One other severe criticism I have with their model is that it only considers homicide. Do we not care if someone, I don’t know, gets their head beaten against a sidewalk and suffers permanent brain damage? Do we not care about whether someone can avoid a lengthy hospitalization and recovery from, say, multiple stab wounds? Do we not care about rape? (Why do they so hate women?) Do we not concern ourselves with how often these kinds of horrors can be avoided by merely drawing the weapon on the attacker? You can’t just boil down human violence to homicides. That’s highly simplistic and completely invalid.

UPDATE: Joe Huffman has more to say in regards to this. I’m still getting caught up with everyone, having effectively taken Wednesday through Friday off blogwise, so I’m running a bit behind on what folks are talking about out there in the gun blogosphere.

North Carolina finally gets HR937 done. John Richardson has the word on the agreement, which is now on the way to Governor McCrory. It’s quite disappointing that they had to leave the Permit to Purchase provision stand, but it probably wasn’t worth sacrificing the rest of the bill over that. One wonders whether North Carolina will ever get rid of that oddity from the era of Jim Crow.

Looks like she’s dumping the fat kids and picking up gun control as her cause célèbre.

Aides say the first lady isn’t making gun violence a new and distinct issue, but is folding it into her work encouraging youth to focus on getting an education.

Yeah, because not enough gun control is the reason the youth today aren’t getting a quality education.

MPN News asks the question. No, there isn’t a middle ground to be had. Tom Coburn, of all legislators, offered them a middle ground, and because it only included universal background checks and nothing else, it was rejected by those who demanded more controls — controls that would have driven up the cost to transferring a gun to 50 dollars or more and created universal de facto registration. So you tell me: is there a middle ground? The great untold story of this whole struggle was that they were offered a compromise, and they rejected it. It’s not about background checks. It has never been about background checks. It’s about adding as many burdens, traps and expenses as they think they can get away with. Background checks are just marketing — a way to make the bitter pill go down for people who don’t really pay attention to these things.