2010 – Page 107 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Misleading Article on Philly Gun Ordinances

The Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting that the Supreme Court has upheld the local Philadelphia gun ordinances. This is false. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania on Monday denied the appeal of the National Rifle Association, who was dismissed based on standing, and not on the merits. This is still very much an undecided issue. You can read the opinion here. All this really means is that the Supreme Court is letting stand the lower court ruling on the standing issue. This most certainly did not uphold any of Philadelphia’s ordinances on Lost and Stolen.

When it comes to gun issues, it’s always best to ignore the Philly papers. They don’t know what they are talking about most of the time.

More Preemption Issues in Pennsylvania

I don’t when local officials are going to get it through their thick skulls, but they cannot regulate guns. That’s clearly establish law at this point. But it’s not stopping Lackawanna County:

Commissioners approved rules and regulations prohibiting smoking, skateboarding and other activities in county parks, including new restrictions on guns. The rule says, “No unlicensed firearms or weapons are allowed in a park.” Discharging a firearm is also prohibited.

Discharge is probably something they can regulate under the UFA, but this essentially prohibits open carry, which is legal in PA without a license.

Meanwhile, Sheriff John Szymanski said he also plans to challenge the new rule – arguing the county should make it more strict.

“We don’t allow firearms in the park,” said Mr. Szymanski, whose department oversees law enforcement of county parks. “It’s a public facility, and if you walk around with a gun, you’re going to intimidate a lot of people. Our position is we’re not allowing it and we’re going to ask for clarification on that point.”

The wording of park rules, unchanged or made more strict, could set off a constitutional debate on gun rights in Lackawanna County, experts say. County solicitor John O’Brien said they are reviewing the language and looking to see how it can be updated.

What bothers me is this isn’t a debate. You can’t do it. Period. We had this debate a decade ago, it went to the Supreme Court, and we won. Either they are electing incompetent solicitors in all these towns, or they just don’t give a crap what the law is.

This is Truth

Joe Huffman has an observation about good shooters:

This episode also confirmed my hypothesis that if someone brags about how good a shooter they are it is near certain proof they are crap. All the great shooters I have personally met are extremely modest or at least silent about how great they think they are.

That’s been my observation as well. I shoot with some great shooters at my club, none of which speak about how great a shooter they are on a regular basis. I know some who have a competitive nature, but that’s different from talking about what hot shit you are all the time.

Quad Stack Magazines

This is probably going to make the Brady people scared as hell, not to mention making old Bill Ruger turn over in his grave. We already have drum magazines, but this offers the possibility of the same capacity in a more standard size.

Debunking the Myths

I mentioned a few days ago about the Boomersphere, and how it spreads around ~~dis~~information. PolitiFact is taking on the common e-mail I’ve been forwarded a few times by concerned boomers. I have mixed feelings on things like this. On the one hand, anything that gets people fired up for action on this issue is good. On the other hand, I like people to get angry about stuff the politicians are actually doing. PolitiFact does a good takedown, and gets the issues largely correct, which most people outside of this issue don’t. But even a treaty to which the United States is not a party is going to have effects on our being able to import guns from other countries, which has a huge effect on shooting here, since many of the popular guns sold these days are imported. To me that’s reason enough to oppose there being a treaty at all.

Dirtiest AR I’ve Ever Seen

I can’t believe the thing even kept functioning in this condition. Hell, Mike Rowe could make a whole episode just out of cleaning that gun.

Light Blogging Yesterday

Sorry for the light blogging yesterday, but my schedule got really screwed up by a morning overturned trash truck on the PA Turnpike. They closed the westbound direction, and diverted everyone eastbound. That created a horrible traffic jam, as the next eastbound exit is not normally heavily trafficked. I can normally get to work in 40 minutes. It took me more than two hours. I reserve a little bit of time each morning to throw up posts, and that got eaten up by the mess.Â Combine that with a club meeting in the evening, and I am recording secretary so I have to be there to record, and I just had no time for it. When you pack your schedule up like that, losing even an hour has bad consequences for the day.

In addition to that, I’ve been working on putting together a new machine for X-Plane. Currently I do X-Plane on the same Linux box that hosts the blogs. You guys probably don’t notice me, but I sure as hell notice you when I’m in the virtual skies. I’m asking that box to do too much running a graphic intense OpenGL and CPU hogging app, along with all the Apache and MySQL instances. We have four cores and 8 gigs of RAM on this box, so it doesn’t cause it to screech to a halt, but it slows me down. In addition to that, Linux users are third rate citizens in the X-Plane world. MacOS is the primary platform it runs on. But Macs high end enough to run X-Plane are expensive, and I just love Apple too much to consider running MacOS on a PC. I would never do that to Steve. Never. I’ll just have suffer through flying the new Version 4 Virtual 737s on the inferior platform. BTW, I highly encourage checking out the demo video for the x737 project. These guys do excellent and detailed work. There’s a lot of hidden craftsmanship in putting together these planes.

Palm Pistol in 3D

Matt Carmel, proprietor of Constitution Arms, maker of the Palm Pistol, which will be forever remembered as the gun that was almost an FDA approved medical device for disabled people, have developed a 3D model of their Palm Pistol, and they’ve given me permission to post it here. You will need to useÂ Adobe Reader to view it, as third party PDF readers don’t seem to work. Adobe Acrobat lets you hide parts clicked on, so you can strip away some of the outer shell and see what’s inside it. Neat! I didn’t even know Acrobat could display 3D models. It looks really nice when viewed up close.

Gun Death Touted Again

Looks like the VPC is trying to smear Tennessee with the whole gun deaths meme. I notice that they only mention that gun deaths include suicides in passing, even though suicides represent the vast majority of their numbers. I did someÂ analysisÂ of violent crime compared to Brady state ranking a while back and found no correlation between Brady Grade and the levels of violent crime. VPC is trying to conflate the issue by arguing that more guns mean more gun deaths, when all they are showing is that in state with higher levels of gun ownership, more people choose to kill themselves with a gun. That’s not exactly shocking, and not exactly a compelling reason to limit access to guns. If you think about where government it leads — taking dangerous things away from people, because they might hurt themselves — it’s not a pretty place. Certainly not a free society. I don’t wish to live in a padded room. I suspect most other Americans don’t either.

Clarification on “Mixed Victory”

I should note for some commenters, that I should haveÂ acknowledgedÂ what an improvement SB308 makes to Georgia’s carry laws. I did not mean to overlook the significant improvement that represents for Georgia gun toters. The reason I focused heavily on the airport issue is because it has implications outside of Georgia. Some might recall a few years ago HB89 was passed, which specifically allowed for carry on public transit. Pretty soon after the bill was signed into law, the City of Atlanta declared that the new law did not apply to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. GeorgiaCarry.org, joined by pro-2A Representative Tim Bearden quickly filed suit in federal court. You can see all the pleadings and briefs for the case here.

To make a long story short, since I covered some of this in the previous post, the City of Atlanta proffered two arguments to keep their ban on carrying of firearms. The first argument was that HB89 did not apply to airports. The second, and far more worrisome argument was that federal law authorized local authorities to enact security measures, including banning guns if they felt it was necessary, and thus, through theÂ SupremacyÂ Clause of the constitution, was beyond the reach of state law. To clarify something that was misleading from my previous previous post, the theÂ District Court only addressed the first argument, and dodged on the second. On appeal, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals made reference to the federal preemption argument in a very brief ruling. It should be noted that this is not law, but if such an argument were to be upheld, it would apply to Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, all of which reside in the 11th Circuit. Fortunately for us, the Courts did not need to reach whether federal law empowering airport operators to implement a security plan can trump state law in matters of regulating non-sterile areas of an airport.

So in short, I’m happy for Georgians that some of their bad law was fixed, but there’s a giant can of worms that still exists with this airport since Perdue vetoed SB291. It’s an issue that warrants extreme caution going forward, not only for Georgians, but for the other states in the 11th Circuit, and for the country as a whole if a case goes that far.