2010 – Page 108 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Look Who Has a Soccer Team

Abby Spangler of Protest Easy Guns has successfully sponsored a soccer team. I don’t expect Matt Carmel will take this lying down. I wouldn’t be surprised if Matt wasn’t the genesis if this idea. No matter, I’d rather have 10 Matts on my side than 100 Abby Spanglers any day of the week. Maybe you guys will do better when you stop copying our side’s ideas. I might start to be impressed when Abby comes really close to getting Medicare to fund her gun ownership prevention ideas.

How They Do It in Texas

Anywhere else they would have hung this guy out to dry. The money quote in this is “Criado said the concerned citizen did not have a concealed handgun license but ‘we donâ€™t see any reason to charge the citizen who fired at the suspects believing they had killed the officer.'”

I often joke with Texans that in PA, for the most part, you can open carry without a license (which you can’t do in Texas with a license except on private property), and for concealed carry only have to worry about court houses (Texas has a number of off limits places, including some establishments that serve primarily alcohol). You can legally have a few beers at a bar and not run afoul of the law in Pennsylvania. But if you actually have to use your gun there’s no better jurisdiction than Texas. I think it’s the only jurisdiction left in the country that actually comes close to “because he needed a shootin'” being an affirmative defense.

Mixed Victory in Georgia

Perdue signed SB 308, but vetoed SB 291. We had a bit of a disagreement with the Georgia folks on this one a while back, where I may have gotten one aspect of how the two laws would be treated wrong. As I mentioned in the latter post, I suspect NRA’s Lobbyist did not want to give Perdue a way to avoid dealing with the airport issue directly. His veto statement is thus:

SB 291 changes a variety of provisions withinÂ GeorgiaÂ law regarding firearms. Among others, this bill would allow firearms to be carried into unsecure areas of airports. I have already signed SB 308, which clarifiesÂ Georgiaâ€™s public gathering statute and preserves the rights of private property owners. I believe this language is sufficient and adequately clarifies the law forÂ GeorgiaÂ firearms license holders. For this reason, and despite unwarranted intrusion into this state matter by ill-advised federal officials, I VETO SB 291.

I think the case for banning guns in Atlanta Airport is weakened by SB308, but I’m going to bet that the airport authorities will continue their defiance, using the still existing prohibition on guns in “government buildings,” which are defined as any place housing a “government entity,” meaning “an office, agency, authority, department, commission, board, body, division, instrumentality, or institution of the state or any county, municipal corporation, consolidated government, or local board of education within this state.” Â I’d be hard pressed to believe there aren’t City of Atlanta agencies who are based at the airport.

Maybe Perdue thinks he already addressed the airport issue, but then why veto SB291 on that grounds? I think he’s trying to have his cake and eat it too. I’ll be very surprised if the end result of all this is the airport carry issue being fixed in Georgia. Aside from the fact the airport still has a plausible claim on state law, one of the things that Atlanta did last time they were sued is bring federal preemption issues into the mix, citing the Airport Security Directive from the TSA, which applies to all airport areas, sterile and non sterile. They claimed because this empowered airport officials with security for the whole airport, the airport officials could decide to ban guns if they felt that was necessary for security. Because this is a federal empowerment of local officials, the SupremacyÂ Clause applies, and the airport’s operators’ judgement have precedent over state law. This would have been novel legal theory if the District Court hadn’tÂ boughtÂ it, and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it. If that’s upheld by the Supreme Court, local officials would be permitted to ban guns at any airport. Without crystal clear language in state law, this is a dangerous game we’re playing with this issue, with national implications. I do hope going forward we win on this issue, but I would suggest waiting for a fix in state law would be wise before further litigation proceeds.

A More Apt Comparison

In the comments yesterday, someone suggested I was comparing apples to oranges comparing the new iPhone to Bitter’s Droid. Engadget has a more fair comparison, but I think the new iPhone still looks pretty good, depending on what features are important to you.

I have one more tech post for today, but no fear, we will not turn into a tech blog. Just not much going on in the gunnie world right now. Expect that to change when McDonald is released not too long from now.

Jersey Legal AR

We would like to welcome Cemetery to the club, though we would seriously advise against trying to devise a black powder .223 load. I’d also note you can get 10 round Jersey legal magazines you can actually grab on to. Basically a blocked 20 rounder, which ought to be legal in the Garden State.

Flunking Econ 101

This isn’t much of a surprise, but the results are still rather stunning:

Who is better informed about the policy choices facing the countryâ€”liberals, conservatives or libertarians? According to a Zogby International survey that I write about in the May issue of Econ Journal Watch, the answer is unequivocal: The left flunks Econ 101.

I could have told you that. Read the whole thing. What’s amazing isn’t that they do worse than conservatives and libertarians, but how much worse they do.

Carry Permits “Get Out Of Jail Free” According to Brian Lentz

I have my issues with Pat Meehan, and the Meehan family (who run the Philly GOP), but we have to make sure Brian Lentz goes down to stinging defeat. Statements like this are part of the reason:

â€œSo they essentially get a ‘get-out-of-jail free’ card when theyâ€™re stopped carrying a loaded firearm.Â They produce a Florida permit and our local law enforcement must honor that which is unacceptable given the arrest record and the background of many of these individuals.â€

See, you get out of jail free, because you flash a legal license. Everyone knows, of course, the default for carrying a gun should be to go to jail.

He says the Sunshine State is less strict when it comes to handing out permits, looking only at convictions and not a personâ€™s character.

The Sunshine State is not less strict. They require training, fingerprinting, and a 120 dollar application fee. So far they can point to one bozo out of thousands in the Commonwealth who have Florida licenses. Most Florida license holders, including myself, also have PA LTCs, and only retain Florida’s CWL for expanded recognition from other states.

Philadelphia sure does look at a person’s character though. Unpaid parking tickets? Well, no, you can’t have a permit. What kind of person owes the City of Philadelphia money? Had a gun stolen once? Well, we can’t have you exercising your right to bear arms. You’re not a suitable person.

The UFA, namely the Amendments of Act 17, were supposed to make Philadelphia shall-issue like the rest of the state. But they haven’t. Philadelphia routinely revokes permits for trivial and unlawful reasons. They represent only a smal fraction of statewide permit holders, yet represent a hugely disproportionate numer of revocations. Why do some people seek recourse in a Florida license? Because it’s cheaper than hiring a lawyer to fight a denial or revocation.

Lentz and all his gun hating buddies in the General Assembly need to understand this very simple fact: We’re going to flip the House back this fall, and if you shove this down our throats, we’re going to shove a whole lot of things down your throats you aren’t going to like, which include eliminating or severely limiting the discretion local jurisdictions may exercise in issuing Licenses to Carry Firearms. You want us to be responsible with guns, we’re going to demand officials beÂ responsibleÂ with the law. If they can’t be, we’re going to change it. Think carefully before going down this path.

Saving Hunting in Pennsylvania

Senator Wayne Fontana is looking at legislation to expand mentored hunting to adults, instead of just children. As an adult who has never hunted, but would like to try, this is a program I’d take advantage of. The big problem for me is finding time to do hunters education. Hunting requires an awful lot of investment up front to get into it. Shooting not so much. I’m reluctant to put so much time into something I may not do more than once or twice, depending on how much I get out of it.

The Verizon iPhone the Modern Day Flying Car?

I was told when I was a kid we’d have flying cars by now. Well, no flying cars. There’s also been persistent rumors of a Verizon iPhone. Screwed again. That’s a shame too, because the specs for the new iPhone are impressive. The 3GS wasn’t enough to compel me to upgrade from my 3G, but the 4G iPhone is something I’d love to upgrade to now. The specs from today’s WWDC:

Thinner, though slightly heavier than the 3GS, but with stainless steel construction which doubles as an antenna for the radio equipment.
326 ppi display running at 960×640. This I have to see. It’s shocking to me how much better Bitter’s Droid screen looks over my 3G, but this leapfrogs the Droid, which has a 256 ppi display at 854 x 480 resolution.
Forward facing camera, finally, along with a standard rear facing with a 5 megapixel display and LED flash, similar to what the Droid has.
Uses the Apple A4 processor, which runs at a 1GHz. It’s the same one the iPad uses, and the iPad is fast. This eliminates one of my primary complaints about the 3G, which is that it’s slow enough to make browsing painful. The 3G is powered by a Samsung ARM CPU at 412 MHz, the 3GS by a 600MHz version. Bitter’s Droid is powered by a chip similar to the A4, the TI OMAP3, which is an ARM CPU running at 550MHz, with a graphics unit running at 430MHz.
Much better battery life. Apple is claiming 300 hours of standby time, 40 hours of music, 10 hours video, 10 hours of browing over Wifi, or 6 hours over 3G, and 7 hours of talk time. That’s pretty impressive. A lot of that is because the A4 processor sips power.
Apple has finally untied multitasking. Jailbroken phones have been doing this for a while, and the underlying OS, being MacOS, has always been capable of doing it. But previous iPhone OSes have disallowed it because of battery life concerns.

It’s a good release. Apple needed to leap over the competing smart phones rather than merely match them, and so far it looks like they’ve done it. You can bet the competition will be out with bigger and better versions of their products, but it’s a compelling reason to upgrade. The question is, am I willing to put up with another two years of AT&T? Their upgrade offers are attractive, but I’d hate to take the bait, and then find out there’s a Verizon iPhone in early 2011. But perhaps the Verizon iPhone is the modern day flying car after all, and I’ll just be stuck with outdated technology for no good reason. It’s a difficult call.

Anti-Gun is now the “Right Flank” of the Democratic Party for PA2010

Supporting gun bans, wanting to reargue Heller, and completely dismantling the state gun laws to overturn the Pennsylvania Supreme Court puts you on the pro-gun side of the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania, at least according to this article on PA2010.com. Really? That would be news to the many pro-gun Democrats in this state who actually support the rights of gun owners.

During the primary battle, we learned that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Dan Onorato, was one of the farthest left candidates you could find on the gun issue. The only guy to his left was Joe Hoeffel. The only Democratic gubernatorial candidate who gun owners could come reasonably close to voting for if they were voting single issue was Jack Wagner.

We captured video from most of the Democratic forums before the primary and studied his statements on “public safety,” and those hit on a range of policy issues on the matter of Second Amendment rights:

	Onorato	Hoeffel	Wagner	Williams
Ending Preemption (overturning Ortiz)	Support	Support	Oppose	Support
Semi-Auto Ban	Support	Support	Support	Support
Mandatory Locks on Guns (overturned in Heller)	Support	Support	Oppose	Oppose
Castle Doctrine	Oppose	Oppose	Maybe	Oppose
Shut Down Gun Stores Near Homes, Schools, or Parks	Maybe	Support	Maybe	Support
Limit on # of Guns	Maybe (through local laws)	Support	Oppose	Support
Eroding Reciprocity	Support	Support	Maybe	Support
Ban Gun Ownership w/out criminal conviction	Support	Support	Support	Support

On this list of what I consider to be “big” issues right now, Onorato goes against gun owners 75% of the time. The other two issues are unknowns, or he would support other government officials in their quest for more gun control. That’s not what we usually consider “on our side” in the gun owning community. (Hoeffel strikes against us 100% of the time, Williams at 88%, and Wagner at 25% of the time with another 38% of the issues as possibly against us.)

If you want to look at the issue from the gun control handbook from CeaseFirePA, their big issues show a similar breakdown. Onorato is with them 85% of the time, and they classify the remaining 15% of the positions as unknown, not in opposition to their agenda. (Hoeffel is with them 100% of the time, Williams 85%, and Wagner 46%. In fact, Williams is actually against them with the other 15% of the proposals which actually makes him more solid on the issue with gun owners than Dan Onorato.)

For context on how Onorato’s positions compare to legislators who have recently voted on some of the policies Onorato is pushing or opposing, here’s another chart. I’ve broken these charts down by NRA grade. (It was too wide with all of them in one, so forgive the repetition, it’s to prove a point.)

	Onorato Not Rated	Lentz F	Manderino F	Vitali F	Wagner F
Ending Preemption HB 1044	Support	Support	Support	Support	Support
Semi-Auto Ban HB 1045	Support	Oppose	Support	Support	Support
Castle Doctrine HB 40	Oppose	Support	Oppose	Oppose	Support

This table shows that Onorato is farther to the left on recent gun rights policy debates than two of the four F-rated lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee.

	Onorato Not Rated	Waters D-	Brennan D	Caltagirone D	Shapiro D	Costa C
Ending Preemption HB 1044	Support	Support	Oppose	Support	Oppose	Oppose
Semi-Auto Ban HB 1045	Support	Support	Oppose	Support	Oppose	Oppose
Castle Doctrine HB 40	Oppose	Oppose	Support	Support	Support	Support

Let’s look at some who probably fall on the left of the issue, and another who falls squarely in the middle of the issue based on previous grades. Onorato’s policies fall in line with the D- lawmaker, but he’s exactly the opposite of two D legislators and our single C-rated guy on the committee. That doesn’t seem to be very “right flank” to me.

	Onorato Not Rated	Casorio A	Kula A	Pallone A	White A	Petrarca A+
Ending Preemption HB 1044	Support	Oppose	Oppose	Oppose	Oppose	Oppose
Semi-Auto Ban HB 1045	Support	Oppose	Oppose	Oppose	Oppose	Oppose
Castle Doctrine HB 40	Oppose	Support	Support	Support	Support	Support

All of these lawmakers are probably the “right flank” of the gun issue for the Democratic Party since they are all A-rated or higher. Most of them carry the NRA’s endorsement. And Dan Onorato doesn’t agree with them on anything – from banning guns to gutting gun laws to even a law dealing with self-defense in your own home.

So, based on statements and specific policy plans, both gun owners and gun controllers agree that Dan Onorato is not on the “right flank” of the Democratic Party on gun issues. So I’m challenging the fine folks at PA2010.com to back up his claim that Onorato is in any way considered to be pro-gun. It would enlightening, especially to all of the Democrats I talked to this weekend who are planning to vote against their party on this specific issue in this race come November.