Month: March 2011

So Castle Doctrine managed to get to the Senate floor as a clean bill – one of the biggest hurdles we will likely face with this legislation at this point in the game.

Federally, nothing that the gun controllers are pushing seems to show much sign of life at the moment. Obama still hasn’t made his big speech on gun control.

This year’s elections are mostly county seats, with a few judicial spots, & some municipal offices. (That reminds me to go check which MAIG mayors are up this year. Maybe we can clean house a bit.)

Well, now that it’s time to sit down & get serious about planning for Pittsburgh, I also decided to attend a meeting to start a Friends of the NRA dinner in our area. The last committee was one family & they always asked for assistance, but never wanted any help. The dinner was never very full, and it finally died last year. Last night’s meeting had more than 20 people at it, though I’m sure we’ll be lucky to get half of that at the next meeting. But that’s okay, because there was at least some energy in the room. Energy is good. We’ll have to pitch to a lot of cantankerous old men to get people out to the dinner, so we’ll need energy.

It’s nice to be able to focus on the fun part of the issue again. Most of us did not get involved in the movement on the political and philosophical arguments alone. Most of us got involved in the issue because shooting is fun. Whether you are poking holes in paper, knocking little steel animals over, or busting clays, few people can do it without a smile on their face. Even though the program is for a fundraising dinner, it’s to raise money to expand the programs that introduce that joy of shooting to even more people. And who can be against joy for the people?

A bill has been introduced in the Constitution State to ban any magazine that holds more than ten rounds. There is no grandfathering. People in possession will have to turn them in for destruction or transfer them out of the state. This means if you have a firearm that doesn’t have a magazine available that holds 10 rounds or less it’ll become an expensive paperweight.

This is different from federal law in that it requires that the magazine be detachable, but there is not even a pretense of grandfathering. It does allow for a high capacity magazine to be “permanently altered so that it cannot accommodate more than ten rounds,” but there’s no language present as to what would fulfill that requirement. The penalty is a Class D felony, so they are treating possessing a box with a spring in it like you robbed a bank.

As always, police are exempt, because presumably they need to be able to murder a large number of people in a short amount of time, which is all we’re told these magazines are useful for.

Some of you might recall the Firearm Owners Protection Act, which as Dave Hardy has reported, is one of the landmark achievements of our movement (despite the Hughes nonsense). That act is also known as the McClure-Volkmer Act, named after the bills sponsors in each house of Congress. Jim McClure has passed away at 86.

Congressman Harold Volkmer was the bill’s sponsor in the House. At 79 he continues to serve on the NRA Board of Directors.

Dave Kopel, Paul Gallant, and Joanne Eisen take a quite detailed look at the figures being toted by proponents of the International Arms Trade Treaty at the Untied Nations. It is rather long, but I’ll reproduce here part of the conclusion:

To the extent that we have been able to reverse engineer the Geneva Declaration Organization’s calculations, we have found repeated instances where the organization made choices which re- sulted in much higher estimates. Sometimes, those estimates have produced results that are out of line with other evidence.

Until the data and calculations are made available to the public, policymakers and concerned global citizens should give no weight to the unsubstantiated factoid of 740,000 deaths.

Not surprising that they are distorting the true numbers. They’ve never been able to win on facts.