Month: January 2012

Emily Miller, who has been documenting her attempt to acquire a pistol legally in the District of Columbia, is apparently finding that obtaining crippled 10 round capacity magazines for some of the guns she wants is now rather hard. It would seem it’s turned on its head from the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban. While for most firearms, >10 round magazines were always plentiful during the ban, for a few models, finding the standard magazines was difficult. I remember paying 130 dollars for a new standard factory magazine that held 15 rounds for my Glock 19. Ironically, 17 and 30 round magazines I seem to recall being much cheaper.

Either way, these are the reasonable gun laws that are supported by our opponents. Remember, they don’t support prohibition, and never have, according to them, but they sure don’t mind supporting what amounts to practical prohibition. Imagine how hard this would be for a poor person living in a crappy neighborhood who has to work two jobs to pay rent and put food on the table? Heavens… we don’t want those kinds of people having guns now, do we? Maybe we should be asking CSGV and Brady why they hate poor people.

Stranger over at Extrano’s Alley is doing a series on some of the history behind the Gun Control Act. This post is November.

It was only a matter of time before technology to detect the presence of a gun on a person at a distance became a reality, but they are working on something in NYC to do just that. You can certainly bet Bloomberg will want to step up this project, in the hopes of landing more innocent gun owners in prison.

There is already arguably Supreme Court precedent in this area in the Kyllo v. US, in which the Court ruled that using special technology not available to the general public requires a warrant. Kyllo, however, involved the home, so the Courts would have to extend that protection to the streets. But it’s not inconceivable that would be the case. Bloomberg has never been remarkably concerned about American liberties, however, so it doesn’t surprise me this is coming out of New York.

I think Professor Reynolds has hit on the perfect adjective to describe the gun laws in New York City, as he notes the Sullivan Law’s unsavory origins, and notes:

Corrupt and racist. And vigorously supported by Mayor Bloomberg. Barbaric indeed. New York needs to join the mainstream of states enacting sensible gun laws — laws that don’t oppress minorities or entrap honest citizens.

It’s becoming increasingly accepted, even among left-leaning academia, that the origins of many of our nations gun laws were based in racial anxieties, and a desire to disarm minorities. Similarly, Clayton Cramer has done research on California’s restrictions on concealed weapons, which had supporters of the bill engaging in epitaph-fueled racist comments on the Assembly floor.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think this means that modern supporters of these measures have racist motivations, but they’ve been singularly unable to face the ugly history of many of these laws, nor face that even in modern circumstances, the laws can have a disproportionate affect on the ability of minorities to exercise their constitutional rights.