In a letter dated today to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, and Ranking Member Charles Grassley, and House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith and Ranking Member John Conyers, NRA is calling for a Congressional investigation and hearings on Operation Fast and Furious.
Month: March 2011
Bias? What Bias?
From the Washington Post reporter James Grimaldi:
The controversy highlights the difficulty ATF agents face in complex cases against increasingly sophisticated gunrunning rings, said former and current government officials. Because of weak gun laws and investigative limitations imposed at the urging of the gun lobby, many gunrunning cases end with little more than paperwork violations against buyers who procure guns for others. Such so-called straw purchaser cases rarely amount to more than charges of lying on federal documents.
Not only bias, but ignorance. Is Mr. Grimaldi aware of what the penalty is for lying on those documents? The crime is to be found in 18 USC 922(a)(6):
It shall be unlawful for any person in connection with the acquisition or attempted acquisition of any firearm or ammunition from a licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, licensed dealer, or licensed collector, knowingly to make any false or fictitious oral or written statement or to furnish or exhibit any false, fictitious, or misrepresented identification, intended or likely to deceive such importer, manufacturer, dealer, or collector with respect to any fact material to the lawfulness of the sale or other disposition of such firearm or ammunition under the provisions of this chapter;
Penalties can be found in 18 USC 924:
(2) Whoever knowingly violates subsection (a)(6), (d), (g), (h), (i), (j), or (o) of section 922 shall be fined as provided in this title, imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.
It’s unlikely you’ll do 10 years for robbing a bank in this country, so I think to characterize the crime here as “little more than paperwork violations,” is ignorant at best, and deliberately disingenuous at worst. These are serious federal crimes, and despite what Mr. Grimaldi would have you believe, neither NRA, or the vast majority of gun owners, have ever voiced objections to using these laws to prosecute criminal traffickers of firearms. In fact, we’ve encouraged the law to be used in this manner.
Anti-Gun Amendments Readying in PA House
A floor vote for HB40, the Castle Doctrine vote, is proceeding, but our opponents in the legislature are planning on trying to add anti-gun amendments, including the “Florida Loophole” nonsense and Lost and Stolen. NRA is alerting that you need to contact legislators now. Our goal is to get a clean bill out of the House so this can proceed quickly.
What We’ve Been Up To
You might be able to guess by this conversation between my friend Jason and myself:
Jason: Doh! Had a catastrophic magazine failure.
Sebastian: What happened?
Jason: Body came apart and rounds went flying everywhere.
Sebastian: At the glue seams?
Jason: Yeah. But it wasn’t the glue. The plastic failed.
Sebastian: Ack
Sebastian: I wonder if painting some epoxy on the outside and letting it cure would strengthen the magazine body.
Jason: Maybe. I’m going to try making the walls a little thicker.
Jason: The failure was due to a mistake in the scad file. Its not a design problem.
Sebastian: Good to hear
In case you didn’t figure it out, we’re attempting to design a “high capacity” or “extended” magazine that can be printed on a 1200 dollar 3D printer. Whether we succeed or fail, I will report on the effort. Jason is doing most of the work, since he’s the one who owns the printer. My contribution to the project was designing the follower. Obviously we can’t print a spring with a printer that extrudes ABS plastic, so we won’t be making that ourselves. What are they going to do? Outlaw springs? A spring would not be remarkably hard to make, but just to save the frustration we’re going to use a spring from a broken magazine for the same gun.
Turns out this is a lot harder than would have been anticipated. I had to make changes to the follower last night, and Jason has had to make several modifications to the magazine body. There’s also been modifications necessary on the printer. My feeling is this would be fairly easy to make work on an expensive commercial device, and that the limits of home 3D printing are being pushed to the limits on this project.
It is our intention to definitively show that banning magazines is a fool’s errand in a world where people have easy access to this kind of technology. Once we have a working design, anyone with the Makerbot printer, some glue, and a spring, could download our magazine design, print it, and have it work. I will publish the design here, because I want it to spread far and wide. I’d like to see Paul Helmke try to argue we need to ban CAD drawings too, or restrict 3D printing technology. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We’re going to do our best to prove that.
Stay tuned to this blog for further updates on our progress. I might invite Jason back to post on some of the stuff he’s worked on, since the last time readers here heard from him was in 2007 when his Calico M950 blew up in his face (both he and the gun are fine now). I have created a new category for this topic.
Like a Cheap Bourbon
ATF’s not-so-fast and not-so-furious has been aging four the past four years like a cheap bourbon no one wants to drink (especially not the Mexicans, who, rumor has it, are going to declare ATF’s liaison to that country persona non grata.) Uncle notes that the Mexican gun canard started up around the same time.
Refreshing Words to Hear
The big “excuse” to get the Pennsylvania government out of the liquor business is the infusion of cash the state desperately needs that would come when licenses to sell wine & liquor would be sold or auctioned off when it comes time to privatize the retail stores. It’s an easy way to sell the idea to people who don’t really care about the issue one way or another. So imagine how refreshing it was to read that our Governor took a direct free market argument to the General Assembly today.
Government can’t create jobs. And when it tries it usually makes a mess of it. Industries are built on a singular vision, not by committee. My administration is committed to a study that looks at how best to get us out of a business we should never have entered. I’m talking about the liquor business. This isn’t about the money. It’s about the principle. Government should no more run the liquor stores than it should run the pharmacies and gas stations.
To say that government messes it up is an understatement. I’ve watched state employees sell liquor to visibly intoxicated & borderline violent people. (That was fun to watch the male store employee refuse to back up the female clerk who was trying not to sell to the guy & wanted to call the cops for assistance.) The store I visited today had an anti-alcohol poster up in the window. (I bought 3 items in spite of the poster – sherry for a dish, bourbon for man, and wine suggested by Food & Wine for our pizza later this week.) When we visited a store this weekend, the clerk was yelling at a customer when we walked in. The volume of the argument did not go down once others entered the store. (I will concede the clerk was right, but there’s no reason to scream at the customer.)
The system doesn’t save us money, and we have fewer and crappier choices because of it. At least if it was a free market system, I would know the stores suck because my neighbors have crappy taste. Right now, it’s due to bureaucratic incompetence. So yay to Tom Corbett for making the free market case for privatizing the liquor & wine stores. The fact that it will help the state put its financial house back in order is just a side benefit. This needs to be done for the right reason – the government doesn’t belong in the liquor business.
Castle Doctrine Passes Senate
We’re clear of one house of the General Assembly. The vote was 43 to 4. The only four Senators to vote against were Farnese, Hughes, Kitchen and Tartaglione. Even Leach was a yes, if you can believe that. Now we just need to clear the House.
Standing Against Federal Overreach
New Jersey? Really? Legally, the Supremacy Clause is a problem for this legislation, but laws like this have useful symbolic value. But seriously, can you believe even New Jersey is looking to nullify federal law when it’s gone too far? I’m generally pretty unenthusiastic about the Firearms Freedom Laws, but that’s mostly because I think this isn’t the right time, rather than it being a bad idea. But it is the right time for states to stand up to the TSA nudo-o-scoping, so for once I’ll cheer on the folks in Trenton.
Good to Know I’m a Racist
This is simply unbelievable. This is from NPR’s Senior Development VP Ron Schiller:
And not just Islamophobic, but really xenophobic. I mean, basically, they are – they believe in sort of white, middle America, gun-toting … I mean, it’s pretty scary. They’re seriously racist.
Cut their funding… now.
Do They Believe in Due Process?
Sometimes they say and write things that make me question it. The other side, at least rhetorically, has claimed to have accepted the post-Heller realties, but I don’t think at root they’ve given serious thought to what that means. Under Heller, it’s accepted that it’s permissible to deny firearms to those mentally ill, but the recognition of the Second Amendment as a fundamental right means the process of finding someone mentally unstable enough to merit stripping them of their liberty has to meet due process requirement, and this requires an adjudication by a court or other lawfully composed body, in fair and open hearings where the accused has a right to be heard and have representation. Every state has a process for this. The Federal Government, including the Veterans Administration has a process for this. The question should not be why dangerously mentally ill individuals are not getting the help they need.
The Second Amendment being a fundamental right means that it is not sufficient to just merely add someone to NICS, with no due process, and that’s not dependent on any statistic, graph or anecdote. Heller should have ended that debate. What other fundamental constitutional right can be denied in such an arbitrary and capricious manner? I challenge our opponents to answer that.