Shall Not Be Questioned – Page 1656 – The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …

Gun Furniture

I don’t agree with the hippy sentiment on display here, but If you have a lot of junk in your safe, and not much in the way of furniture, there’s a British artist out there that might have some ideas to help you out.

This one chair looks like it uses Kalashnikov receivers that are pretty much intact.Â Believe it or not, I think importation of some of that furniture into the USA would be a violation of ATF regulations concerning importation of machine guns, as a receiver that was once part of a machine gun is regulated as such.Â I believe the ATF requires machine gun receivers to be cut into several pieces in order to be considered demiled.

Texas Bill Undermining Property Rights

Via Jeff comes some new bills in Texas. The Castle Doctrine bill, which I support, is on its way to Rick Perry. The other bill has to do with forcing employers to allow concealed handguns onto their property which I do not support. Employers should have the power, as property owners, to regulate what is and what isn’t allowed on their property. I haven’t been pleased that the NRA has been pushing this stuff, because I don’t really appreciate them undermining property rights. Gun rights are important, but property rights are too, and I won’t support boosting one at the expense of the other.

To understand why employers do this, you have to get yourself inside the mind of the HR worms. Human Resources departments only really have a few functions, and one of their most important functions is to prevent the company from being sued, and most employers care a lot more about not being sued than they care about their employees lives. Some nut case comes in and starts shooting up the place? Well, that’s too bad, but they’ll be quick to drag that policy out to show they aren’t legally responsible for the incident, because, after all, they took reasonable steps to try to stop it. We know that’s total bunk, because it’s no one is going to bother to get a license to shoot his coworkers, but in the corporate world, much like in politics, it’s all about CYA, and the HR department, you can bet, isn’t going to care if you die because of workplace violence as long as they don’t get blamed for it.

So what can we do? I don’t think pissing all over the employer’s property rights, or more government regulation is the answer. Why don’t we address this through tort reform, so that companies aren’t liable for violent criminal acts committed by employees, or for negligence not related to one’s job duties? It seems to make sense to me that the employee himself should be held to account for these types of incidents rather than the employer. If a fellow employee hits my car in the parking lot, I wouldn’t sue the company would I? Why would the company be liable for a workplace shooting incident or if some dipshit employee has an ND in the bathroom? You could even tie this immunity to not having a policy that forbids license holders from carrying on the premises.

Think it would work? I don’t see why not. Sure, some companies won’t get it, but I much prefer using the carrot and stick approach, rather than flushing private property rights down the toilet.

UPDATE: Somehow I closed comments on this.Â Didn’t mean to.Â It’s open again.

Sitemeter

I notice Jeff is saying so-long to sitemeter.Â I’m not sure about it myself.Â I’ve been using GoStats longer, and I only find sitemeter useful for a few things.

But if any of you want to eliminate this problem, just block cookies from Specificclick.Â Cookies aren’t really so much a security problem as a privacy problem, in that sites can use it to track your browsing habits. Â Personally, I don’t really care if they know what I browse, so I don’t generally block cookies, but for those of you who are concerned, turning off cookies, and only explicitly allowing them for sites where they do useful things, will solve the problem for you.

Another New Blog

In addition to encouraging children and guns, I also figure it would be nice to highlight an Armed Canadian.

A little bit of history here: The United States has invaded Canada twice.Â Both times we were forced to retreat.Â You never know when someday we might once again decide we have it in for the crown, and I hope the Canadians will still be able to put up a good fight.Â It’s no fun if it’s easy :)

The Twelve Mile Circle

A few months ago I came across this Wikipedia Article describing a portion of the border of Delaware and New Jersey:

Its existence dates from a deed to William Penn from the Duke of York on August 24, 1682, which granted Penn:

all that the Towne of Newcastle otherwise called Delaware and All that Tract of Land lying within the Compass or Circle of Twelve Miles about the same scituate lying and being upon the River Delaware in America And all Islands in the same River Delaware and the said River and Soyle thereof lying North of the Southermost part of the said Circle of Twelve Miles about the said Towne.

The fact that the circle extends into the Delaware River makes for a fairly unique territorial possession. Most territorial boundaries that follow watercourses split the water course between the two territories by one of two methods, either by the midpoint of the watercourse (the Grotian Method, after Hugo Grotius) or, more often, midpoint of the main flow channel, or thalweg. However, due to the text of the deed, within the Twelve-Mile Circle, all the Delaware River to the low-tide mark on the east (New Jersey) side is territory of the state of Delaware.

I’m not sure that type of water border is really that unusual though, because if I’m not mistaken, the entire portion of the Potomac River belongs to Maryland and Washington, D.C., with Virginia and later West Virginia not starting until the shore. The interesting thing here is there’s a small piece of land on the New Jersey side that actually belongs to Delaware:

That’s not a mistake. I’ve seen it on other maps too. I’ve always thought it would be great fun to have a “shoot trap with a shotgun that’s illegal in New Jersey” party on that little bit of land, plant a Delaware flag and lay claim, and just generally annoy the hell out of the anti-gun ninnies in New Jersey by taking Delaware’s “weak” gun laws over to that side of the river, and having a fun time.

Of course, this could also increase an already tense situation:

Regardless of the Supreme Court’s admonition to the two states against further litigation on this subject, they were back before the court as late as November of 2005, when New Jersey’s desire to approve plans by BP to build a liquefied natural gas terminal along the New Jersey shore of the Delaware River fell afoul of Delaware’s Coastal Zone Act. The court on January 23, 2006 appointed a special master to study the border dispute, a process likely to take years. Meanwhile the Delaware House of Representatives considered a (symbolic) bill to call out the National Guard to safeguard the State’s interests, while New Jersey legislators made comments about the Battleship New Jersey, moored upriver from the site.

Hell, I’ll join the Delaware National Guard in that case. I’m pretty sure Delaware could take New Jersey in a gunfight ;)

Their Blood is On Your Hands, Bloomberg

Most of us have heard by now about this:

Nicholas Todd Pekearo and Eugene Marshalik, two of the city’s nearly 4,500 auxiliary police officers, responded to the shooting and approached Gavin, who crossed the street and fired at them. Auxiliary officers are civilian volunteers who wear uniforms, are unarmed and help patrol streets.

The volunteer auxiliary officers were hit, and died in the line of duty. I have to hand it to any man or woman who would risk their lives like this in an attempt to save others, and these two officers should be regarded as heroic for what they did.

In Bloomberg’s response to this whole thing:

He also called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Thursday to urge her to act – and said that if she didn’t she’d have blood on her hands, the mayor said.

No, I’m sorry, this is pissing me off, Mike. If anyone has blood on their hands it’s you. That’s right you, you prat. I whole heartedly support the idea of volunteer auxiliary police, but you do not put people in to harm’s way by asking them to put themselves into a position to confront violent criminals without having the proper tools to defend themselves. Firearms are not mystical devices that take years of proper training to master. I could teach your volunteer police officers to shoot competently enough in a weekend to deal with an armed crazy walking the streets of your city shooting at people.

No, it’s not Nancy Pelosi who has blood on her hands for ignoring the gun issue, it’s people in positions of power like Mayor Bloomberg who refuse to accept that his city’s gun control laws are an abject failure, and have only chosen to disarm the innocent and leave them easy prey for people like David Garvin.

Those two brave auxillary officers can be counted as two more victims that have been sacrificed at the altar of Bloomberg’s religious beliefs on gun control.

Target: Pennsylvania

First we get an alert from the NRA about another barrage of hearing arranged by the usual suspects in Philadelphia. Then I pull up the Brady Homepage and notice a PATH graphic with link displayed prominently. Aside from the usual loads of bullshit like:

Under current law, a person can go into a gun shop and buy 10, 20, even 30 handguns without incident.

Except for the fact that the dealer has to fill out an ATF form and submit it to them inform them that they’ve made a sale of more than one handgun to an individual. Under Pennsylvania law, licensees are also required to inform the sheriff of the county the sale takes place in that he made a sale involving more than one handgun. So while PATH would love to have you believe you can just do this under the table without regulation, they would be deceiving you.

The advocates of one-gun-per month have never been able to offer up sound evidence that this type of trafficking, rather than more informal purchases through friends and family, is a significant source of crime guns. Considering the amount of ATF and state oversight that’s already in place on multiple gun sales, I find it difficult to believe it’s significant.Â It should also be pointed out that Richmond, VA, in a state that already has a gun rationing law, has a much higher level of violent crime than Philadelphia.

It’s interesting to see what groups form PATH, which is your usual suspects in the Pennsylvania anti-gun movement, including Cease Fire New Jersey, who want to bring the Garden’s state’s wonderful gun control laws to Pennsylvania, so presumably we can have the same overall violent crime rate that they do.Â Oh, but I forgot, we already do have pretty much the same crime rates.Â Of course, some of New Jersey’s numbers are higher.Â And they achieve all this without a major city like Philadelphia!

It’s For the Children

In the interest of encouraging young people to get into blogging, particularly those related to shooting sports, I’m adding Geek vs. World to the blogroll. Joseph is 15, and, much to the surprise of anti-gun folks everywhere, enjoys shooting, and has not yet shot himself or anyone else accidentally with a firearm. Hopefully he will continue to show that children and guns, with proper education and instruction, can coexist peacefully, and be fun for the whole family.

Can Any LTC Info Be Public?

I’m very much against an individual’s name, address, or any other part of carry licenses that identify an individual being a matter of public record, but some info I think is good to have as public record. For instance:

Number of licenses issued by an authority
Number of licenses revoked by authority
Aggregated demographic info of license holders
Number of licenses denied
Crimes committed by license holders

I think all these things serve a legitimate public interest and so I have no problem with them being public. It’s mostly a matter of making sure people with guns that could be stolen, or people hiding from violent ex’s, who might be the reason they sought a license to carry in the first place, aren’t getting their information published in newspapers so the bad guys know exactly where to find them.

Bucks County: “Not Public Record”

PA License to Carry information is not considered public record by Bucks County.

UPDATE: Still waiting to hear from Delaware County, Montgomery County, and the City of Philadelphia. Â Chances are if none of them will release, no one else will either. Â I might check with Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, because they issue more LTCs than any other jurisdiction in the country.