Happy 2014 everyone. Let us hope that 2014 is more pleasant for us than 2013 was. If you had told me this time last year that by this time the following year, that our only substantive losses would be New York, Maryland, Connecticut and Colorado, well, Colorado would still have confounded me, but I would have been surprised as hell. We all thought we were going to have to bend over for something federally. Our opponents got greedy and overcommitted. I feel like none of the gun control groups want to admit that gun bans are dead, and the best they can hope for is a modest background check bill. More importantly, I doubt they want to admit that to their donors.
Here is the news:
This photo is sending chills up and down people’s spines. It should. Especially for those of us in Pennsylvania, because this is our future if gun owners don’t get their shit together. This has never been about crime.
This is a bunch of self-gratifying nonsense. They don’t propose anything the anti-gunners haven’t already tried and failed at. The only difference now is they have a boatload of money from a moralizing crusading billionaire. But hey, self-gratification is one thing anti-gunners are good at.
Gun laws at work. I think Uncle is correct. Prohibited is prohibited. There’s no LEO exception to the federal prohibition on the mentally ill possessing firearms, except for the “look the other way” exception that you know none of us would be given.
Lowest police officer shooting death rate since 1887. I’d like to know whether accidental shootings by police is going up or down as well.
America’s Internal Checkpoints. Well worth reading. I’d like to believe if more Americans knew about this stuff, they’d be outraged, but I’m not really sure about that anymore.
PA Game Commission wants to reel in more students to hunting.
Chris Christie declines to defend gun laws. He must be serious about 2016 then.
Where’s the coalition to stop ax violence?
Someone turns an STG-44 into a gun buyback. It makes one cringe.
Regarding Christie, he really didn’t have to do anything for the court to uphold the laws. I wouldn’t give him any more credit where it’s simply not due. However, the glass is half full composure of the Happy Warrior (6) brings me toward the idea that Christie knows gun control is not a winning issue for a Republican presidential hopeful to have in 2016. Romney sure didn’t win over gun owners with his record in Mass.
Josh Prince says there is a federal exception, citing 18 USC 925(a)(1).
Text can be found here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/925
My layman’s reading suggests the “exception” is actually bestowed upon certain firearms, rather than an individual, and based on the wording of the exception, ANY prohibited person might side-step a prohibition by possessing a firearm that has been a part of one of the exempted actions at some point in it’s existence, though I’m certain this wasn’t the intent of the drafters.
He’s right. I forgot it only excepted (d) and (g)(9) rather than all of (g) and (d). So a nutcase is OK, as long as he’s not also a wife beater.
“This photo is sending chills up and down people’s spines.”
It’s sad when that many gun owners are sending chills up and down the wrong spines.
That many people already gathered at a government site, and no one could come up with enough torches and pitchforks to make their trip worthwhile?
I agree. Right now I really resent the actions of a lot of these gun owners if it is the case that they are actually registering guns (as opposed to generating random numbers). Strength in numbers. I’d much rather see a PROTEST at these offices. And the fact that these serials can be made up is just as much reason to show this law is a failure and does absolutely nothing but unnecessarily infringe on the rights of law abiding gun owners, adding yet another obstacle to those who just want to be left alone by government.
Maybe it’s worth an article on the tactical strategy of this sort of thing.
Part of it also might be that they want to keep their jobs. A growing number of companies in the aerospace field that have employees working in CT have told them that registering their guns and providing of having done so is required to keep their well paying jobs. I won’t name the companies since there is little in writing, but if one follows the field, several of the big names have enacted that policy. Some of them have told their vendors and contract firms that their employees need to comply as well. At least one large staffing firm has told their contract workers who work in CT but rent in NH to register or destroy all of their firearms and provide proof. They are in the process of implementing this policy across the company at all locations, and another large staffing firm will no longer provide contractors to any company in the firearms or sporting goods sector. One manager recently freaked out after reading about the slaughter of the French nobility at Agincourt by English archers. His company has provided some support to archery companies until a few of us told him about the deadliness of bows and arrows.
How would those companies know if their employees even owned firearms, particularly if the government itself doesn’t know?
I worked for the aerospace divisions of a mega-corporation back in the days when a few of their employees at one facility took the corporation to court for coercing us into donating to the United Way, which they did. Those employees’ complaint was that the United Way supported organizations that supported gun control. They won their suit. (The coercion continued of course, but was reduced to brow-beating, at my facility, and they shortly gave up on the few of us who were both hard-ass enough, and valuable enough as employees, for them not to want to reignite the issue formally. In any case, they could not be as overt with coercion as they had been.)
Anyways, as I see the issue the companies cannot do anything legally until an employee is arrested and convicted. Of course that can become extremely complicated when security clearances are involved, which can be lifted arbitrarily in some scenarios, and I can think of more than one guy I worked with who lost his job for political reasons that we all knew, when our division would have one of its periodic housecleaning “layoffs.” Call it a general staff-reducing layoff, and they can get rid of people for causes that wouldn’t otherwise be legal.
i just hate like hell that i live in a state where we did see substantive losses. but i’d be lying if i didn’t say that, even here, it could have been a lot worse.
On the StG: At least those police officers were kind enough to tell the owner the real value of the WWII rifle they had in their possession and let them sell it instead
Say what?
They didn’t even demand to see a tax stamp for that machine gun?
Amazing.
Re: lowest police shooting deaths since 1887.
A low point like this is just an opportunity for them next year to throw out the old percent increase trick. “Look, police shot and killed in the line of duty are up 14% in 2014! We need to ban rifles with pistol grips!”
Watch.