Month: November 2014

Because here it comes:

Democrats in the Oregon Legislature say the outlook to expand background checks on gun purchases is better in 2015 than it has been in years, thanks to Senate seats they picked up in the Nov. 4 election and passage of an initiative with similar provisions in Washington.

Now defeating legislation in legislatures is something we’re pretty good at. This isn’t the ballot, so we have a better chance. I had wondered why Bloomberg didn’t target Oregon. I would think it’s a logical next step. But I suspect he got promises from Kitzhaber that he would push for a bill in exchange for Bloomberg’s support in his reelection. So Bloomberg decided to give him a chance to live up to his promise. If we beat this in the legislature, Bloomberg can always fall back to the ballot and get what he wants anyway. First he’ll try to get his money’s worth out of Kitzhaber, which is cheaper than a ballot fight, but he’s got the pockets to go for a full ballot fight if Kitzhaber disappoints him.

Perhaps after years of strict gun control and astronomical violent crime rates, the Russians government is finally coming to their senses. But this part is also interesting:

In addition, the amendment softened requirements for foreigners bringing arms into the Russian Federation or purchasing arms on Russian territory. The grace period for foreigners awaiting a license from the Interior Ministry for firearms has been increased from 5 to 10 days.

Not that it would make me any more likely to visit Russia, but it would help. I’d be more wary of their drivers, to be honest. The article notes that “The legislation also forbids carrying a weapon while under the influence of alcohol,” which I suspect disqualifies a more than significant part of the population.

As happens every week or so, I have more stuff in the tabs than I could possibly comment on:

Not News: DC Police Show a profound lack of respect for Second Amendment rights.

As Joe Huffman likes to say: Don’t ever let anyone convince you they aren’t after your guns.

Say Uncle: Registration leads to confiscation.

They don’t really care about jobs, if those jobs are in disfavored industries that employ and empower their political enemies.

The 11th Circuit has upheld the Florida law prohibiting doctors from asking about gun ownership. I had thought there were First Amendment issues, and I still think that, but apparently the courts don’t agree. Maybe if the AMA and other medical groups would stop pushing doctors to be political operatives, this kind of thing would not be necessary.

Sunnyvale’s magazine ban is going before the 9th Circuit. The 9th has been more friendly to gun rights than I expected, but given that one of our influential scholars on this has already pre-conceded this ground, I don’t expect it to go well.

Dan Malloy actually lost in Newtown. I’ve been looking, and that’s the only place I’ve seen that, along with the original Ammoland article. Doesn’t fit the narrative.

Apparently O’Malley was silencing dissenting voices in law enforcement over the implementation of the new draconian gun control laws in the Old Line State. Not surprising. Law enforcement rank and file are not on their side. It’s that protecting the narrative thing again.

New Jersey raises the fee for a handgun carry permit, among a general increase in fees for various governmental services. I’m not sure how they expect this will raise money, given that NJ practically doesn’t issue handgun carry permits, unless maybe they are seeing the writing on the wall and figure they at least can get more coin if the courts force them to issue.

Dave Hardy notes just how badly journalists can misunderstand gun laws. Yet out of the other side of their mouths, they’ll tell everyone how common sense these laws are, even though they don’t understand them.

I guess I’m not the only one who noticed that Giffords and Kelly have been very quiet since the election. Her old seat was lost to a Republican. There’s also the issue, I think, that Bloomberg is showing that gun control is only successful when backed by rich billionaire assholes willing to spend millions on it, and Giffords and Kelly are not rich people.

Watch out Florida. Looks like they are eyeing a ballot measure there for a transfer ban.

This looks like the kind of common sense gun reform we can all get behind. I’m often surprised by how byzantine some aspects of Texas’ gun laws are.

Miguel on gun control advocates:

“We cannot have people shooting! It is loud and bothers me. I don’t wanna hear it”
“OK, we are then gonna approve the use of silencers so the noise does not bother you.”
“You can’t let people use silencers! It is not safe because I cannot hear the shooting!”

Some good discussion happening on the previous thread, perhaps because we had some dead air this past Friday and I’m late posting today. I thought I’d add a few more ideas to the discussion.

In theory I like alternative background check systems, such as BIDS. If every person who was prohibited from owning firearms was an armed robber or murderer, I wouldn’t be that concerned. But a lot of people are prohibited for relatively trivial non-violent crimes, and BIDS would require putting their personal information, useful for identity theft, out there in public. Encryption isn’t going to help, because if a lot of people have keys, it’s only a matter of when, not if, a hacker compromises those keys. You could reduce the amount of information in the system, to make theft of the information more difficult, but then you’re running a stronger likelihood of a false positive.

Ultimately, I’m not that concerned that the government knows I’m a gun owner. It’s difficult to hide that anyway, and there’s a lot of non-governmental avenues by which an unfriendly regime could determine I own, did own, or was at least interested in firearms. I am much more concerned about the government knowing what I own. In thinking about any system, the great object is to prevent this. If the government knows you are or maybe were a gun owner, as long as you have a plausible, legal way out of that status without having to tell the government, you have deniability. If they know what you own they can come take it whenever they want, and there’s nothing you can do. Turn them over? Say no, and you’re a criminal. Tell them you sold that gun years ago? Criminal. You’re not allowed to do that. Had it dump into the lake on a canoe trip? Well, “Lost and Stolen,” you know. It’s registration that enables confiscation. To accept it, means accepting the anti-tyrrany purpose of the Second Amendment doesn’t exist.

Background checks poll well. Registration not as much, but it still polls better than it should. The only way you’re going to turn the numbers around is by informing people what the transfer restrictions proposed by our opponents actually do, such as making it illegal to take a friend shooting to see if he or she enjoys it. I think the the argument that universal background checks are also universal registration is also worth using, but to do that you will have to explain how we already have partial registration via the 4473. Not many gun owners realize that a fairly comprehensive registry could be built in a matter of years just based on the contents of the ATF warehouse in West Virginia.

For those interested in how to beat gun control at the ballot, I would strongly recommend Dave Kopel’s piece “Against All Odds” that appeared in America’s First Freedom. It accounts how we beat a handgun ban on the ballot in Massachusetts in 1976. Then we were able to outspend our opponents, but it also was a huge grassroots effort. GOAL commanded 2000 volunteers to defeat the ban, and that’s the kind of manpower we’ll need to defeat Bloomberg’s transfer ban and registration scheme as this whole sad struggle moves forward.

Miguel jumps on the news that Bloomberg’s outfit has silently been pouring money into the State of Nevada for the past several months, and have now dropped the bombshell of having collected 250,000 signatures to get their “Universal Background Checks” fraud on the ballot for 2016.

It is my opinion that we are going to lose this fight as bad or worse than we lost Washington, if the ballot title is as equally misleading. So that begs the question, what do we do? The way I see it, this is our reality:

• The concept of background checks for gun purchases is overwhelmingly popular with voters. They lack the passion to push for legislative change through a Republican process, but put it on a ballot, and voters think it’s a nice idea that translates into “keep guns away from criminals.” If they see it on a ballot, backed up by enough advertising, they will vote for it.
• Bloomberg and other rich asshole billionaires can afford to outspend us 10 to 1 or even 20 to 1 in every state that has the ballot and it won’t put a dent in their fortunes. Ballot initiatives mostly come down to who can spend the most money, so they will win just based on sheer spending alone.
• Voters don’t actually read ballot initiatives. The title says it all. If the title talks about universal background checks, we will lose. People have no idea the implications, because they are rationally ignorant. If we could get it called the Universal Registration Initiative of 2016, we’d probably beat it.

The next question is what do we do to counter it. I see a few paths forward:

• Develop a more acceptable compromise bill that implements background checks upon change of title, but without the registration component, which is far more dangerous. You can exempt CCW holders, and allow people to obtain a background check certificate that certifies someone is clear, and then the private sale can happen. In this case all the government would know is that Joe Blow obtained a background check certificate. They wouldn’t know if he bought, or what he bought. Maybe he just got it to go shopping. Remember, as long as there’s a way to transfer a firearm without a 4473, there are legal avenues for you NOT to have that gun when they come knocking for it. In order for this to shut Bloomberg down, it would have to be done at the federal level. It’s too late for Nevada, even if something like this passed next week. Of course, I wouldn’t accept anything like this as the federal level unless we got something in return, so attach to the bill eliminating restrictions on interstate transfers. Why do we need them? Now everyone gets a background check.
• Keep fighting Bloomberg on the ballot measures until we beat him. I don’t believe this will work, because even if this ends up on the ballot in Arizona, I think it will win. See the part about background checks as a concept being popular with voters. I don’t think he’ll get the margin in Arizona, but even in a best case scenario, we beat him in Arizona, he still wins two state for our every one.
• Forget fighting defensively, and shove National Reciprocity and some Federal Preemption under the 14th Amendment so far up Bloomberg’s ass that he chokes on Section 5. Hold open carry protests outside his residences in New York City as a giant FU. Emotionally that might feel good, but at the end of the day he’s still going to continue winning ballot fights, because he has the money for it.
• Fight it in court. I don’t believe the courts will invalidate the applicability of background checks to private transfers in title, but I think there is a better chance to get the courts to rule that applicability of background checks to temporary transfers is overly broad and thus unconstitutional. Even California, for instance, exempts transfers for up to 30 days. I think it would also be possible to argue that as applied to CCW holders, the statute is overly broad. However, the other side is likely to argue that the registration component, processing through the FFL and 4473, is a key government interest. Personally, I’d love to have them in court arguing that, because it makes the case that this isn’t about background checks, but about sneaking universal gun registration in through the back door. Either way, the courts take a while, and without more pro-2nd Amendment ruling from higher courts, I think we’re a long way from being able to fight this effectively with lawyers.

I don’t like any of these options, really, but the purpose of the post is to get people thinking and talking. Sometimes you don’t have a choice between winning and losing. Sometimes the choice is between losing a lot, or losing a little.