Shall Not Be Questioned

Moms Demand Action and Everytown (which is to say Bloomberg) are planning on flooding legislative sessions with activists. One wonders whether their “more than 100 volunteers” will once again be paid protesters, or whether they’ve found some real moms who care enough about the issue to give up a weekday. Florida has a very active session planned:

• Bill to legalize open carry in Florida. Open carry isn’t my thing, but I don’t see why it ought to be criminalized.
• Legalize carrying of firearms in non-sterile parts of Airports. If someone is intent on shooting up the place, they aren’t going to be deterred by a sign or a law on the books somewhere.
• Allow firearms to be carried on college campuses. College students are adults. I don’t think it’s ever made any sense to restrict permit holders from carrying on college campuses.
• Allow concealed weapons permit holders to carry guns at any legislative meeting, committee meeting, county or local government meeting. Local government meetings are a magnet for kooks and crazies, which is why I’d like to carry a gun if I go to one. Again, not going to deter anyone intending to shoot up the place.
• Legalize carrying firearms by permit holders in career centers? What the hell is a career center? This is a prohibition I’ve never heard of in any other state.
• Require that courthouses provide temporary storage for permit holders. This is already the law in Pennsylvania, so I don’t see why Florida shouldn’t join the fun.
• Expansion of stand-your-ground to place the burden on prosecutors to prove that there is no viable self-defense claim. This is what they’ll fight tooth and nail.
• Ballot measure on eliminating the 72-hour waiting period for LEOs to buy personal handguns. I’d vote “no” on this. I don’t see why they shouldn’t have to follow the same rules as the peasantry.

That’s pretty ambitious, but Marion Hammer is a force of nature, unlike Shannon Watts, and the Demanding Moms, who are a force of Bloomberg. I know which one I’d be more scared of if I were a Florida legislator.

Passed by 57 Yeas to 43 Nays. Fortunately there’s no filibuster for this kind of action, so a bare majority is all that was required. It’s worth looking at the no votes, and seeing what that may portend for National Reciprocity or the Hearing Protection Act, should it come before the Senate. The following Senators voted “no” from states that Trump won:

• Robert Casey (PA)
• Tammy Baldwin (WI)
• Claire McCaskill (MO)
• Gary Peters (MI)
• Debbie Stabenow (MI)
• Sherrod Brown (OH)
• Bill Nelson (FL)

Most of these folks are up in 2018. If we can avoid any “I am not a witch!” moments this election cycle, and not vote for the person Claire McCaskill spends $2 million campaigning for in the Missouri GOP primary, we might have a shot at flipping some of these.

I warned people that Bloomberg’s ballot initiatives would blow the door open to more gun control and risk turning the state, and I’m sorry to see that is actually happening:

House Bill 1387 would impose an annual registration and licensing system on the most popular and commonly owned semi-automatic firearms sold today by classifying them as “assault weapons.” In addition, it would prohibit the sale and transfer of standard capacity ammunition magazines labeling them as “large-capacity magazines.” The transfer and sale of these firearms and magazines would be prohibited to anyone other than a federally licensed firearms dealer, a gunsmith or to law enforcement for destruction.

You can bet that if the legislature doesn’t pass these, and make no mistake, you should call and make sure they don’t, Bloomberg is going to spend big to get this on the ballot. Don’t let it happen: this is a precursor to confiscation. That’s not a hyperbole, it’s happened both in California and New York City, where registration lists were used to confiscate firearms later made illegal or reclassified as illegal. If you want to keep your guns, you have to stop this.

In the Washington Post, from Jeffrey Swanson, a Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine:

The gun restriction rule is a well-meaning policy that gets some things right, notably its support of federal efforts to improve detection of risky people who should not have legal access to guns. But despite its good intentions, what the policy actually does is take away the gun rights of a large category of individuals without any evidence that they pose a risk of harm to self or others, and without legal due process protections commensurate with abridging a constitutional right.

As I’ve said, Bitter’s late grandfather had a designated payee, because he could not manage the finances of his farm properties in his old age. But there was no safety issue at all with him possessing firearms. He just could not handle money.

It is unfortunate that Republican lawmakers are using a rather heavy-handed regulatory tool — the Congressional Review Act — to repeal the gun restriction rule, rather than modifying it to reflect what the evidence tells us about mentally ill persons and violence risk.

I believe we have a bill that intends to do just that. It was introduced in the last Congress by Senator Cornyn, and opposed by Bloomberg’s group. Despite the rhetoric of the opposition, common sense is nowhere to be found.