Category: Guns

Standing has always been a useful concept for courts who don’t want to hear or decide on the specifics of a case, to have a convenient way to dispose of the case without having to reach there. So the FBI has been taking NICS check data and cross referencing it to the Terrorist Screening Database for a number of years now.

Here you have two theories of standing. One is that because the cross reference didn’t in any material way affect your ability to buy a gun, you have no standing to sue. Only someone who is singled out for different treatment because of the cross reference has standing. The other theory is that because your purchasing information has been used in a way not authorized by law, that the mere act of having your data cross referenced to another database creates standing in and of itself.

Guess which theory of standing was adopted by the federal courts so far? If that theory holds, no one would have standing since the FBI doesn’t use the screen to influence the person’s NICS status. It presumably just creates an alert. The cross reference might be illegal on the part of the FBI, but no one can challenge it.

Gun owners there are on borrowed time, at this point. Washington State has a fairly iron-clad preemption law, but that didn’t prevent the Washington Supreme Court from upholding Seattle’s gun and ammunition tax. You can find the full opinion here.

One wonders how much Seattle could get away with taxing guns. $50 per gun? $100 per gun? A dollar per round of ammo? It wasn’t even close. Only a single justice argued that Washington’s preemption statute forbids any ordinance touching on firearms at all, which it clearly says.

Patrik Jonsson, whose reporting on the gun issue has always been pretty fair, writes: “There’s evidence that black gun ownership has spiked since the 2016 campaign began. While white Americans have led the liberalization of gun laws in the past decade, black gun carry is becoming a test of constitutional agency.” Gun control historically targeted minority communities for disarming. It’s just now we’re nice enough proceed with a fiction that because the fees, the requirements that you have a squeaky clean record, and the high level of education required to comply with the patch work of laws and regulations apply to everyone, that means we don’t worry about disparate impacts on minority communities, even though we worry to death about that in every other context.

NRA should be very concerned that this movement is happening outside their umbrella, and adjust its rhetoric accordingly. At the very least, outreach and coordination with Black gun rights groups is in order.

I’m glad people are really starting to notice:

When it comes to voting rights, any obstacles outrage liberals; even free government-issued IDs are viewed as disenfranchising poor and disproportionately black people. But when it comes to the right to own a gun for self-defense, liberals don’t hesitate to pile on fees, ID requirements, expensive training and onerous background checks.

That’s too bad, because many law-abiding citizens in crime-ridden neighborhoods really do need a gun for self-defense. Since poor, urban blacks are the most likely victims of violent crime, there is little doubt that they stand to benefit the most from owning guns. Research, including my own, has demonstrated this.

Your position on gun control I think is a good proxy for how committed you are to democratic popular sovereignty. The instinct for elites throughout history is to disarm the lower, non-ruling classes. You don’t have to pay much attention to a disarmed population. You can look down on them with scorn and indignation, and there’s not much they can do about it. Certainly if you want to oppress minority populations, it’s a lot easier to do that to a disarmed population rather than one that can shoot back.

Gun control has always been a weapon of the elite ruling classes to keep the masses in a state of subjugation. When all you have is the vote, you don’t really have much. Elites can manipulate the masses into voting the way elites want them to vote, or can outright manipulate the system (see Venezuela). An armed population will always have an actual say in how things are run.

Ladd Everett is going to hate this:

But doesn’t “common sense” gun control help to protect marginalized communities? Well plain and simply, no it doesn’t. In fact most gun control actually has the opposite effect leaving marginalized communities unarmed and defenseless in the face of violence. Gun control actually has quite the racist history. Many of the first gun laws enacted by the united states government were in order to keep slaves and free black people from owning or carrying firearms except under supervision of their master for fear of slave rebellions. The uprisings led by John Brown and others and the slave armies formed during the Civil War proved their fears to be true. For those enslaved, guns meant freedom. Decades later during the height of the black civil rights and liberation movements Martin Luther King, Jr. was denied a gun permit after his house was firebombed in 1956, Malcolm X urged African Americans to defend themselves using any means necessary, the Black Panthers held open carry marches, and the National Rifle Association delved into gun politics for the first time.

No wonder Ladd has been upset lately that the left is abandoning him. All that research on the history of gun control, and its use for disarming marginalized communities, was done by our academics, and people are listening.