February 2012 – Page 4 – Shall Not Be Questioned

What Are The Odds? Or How Important is This Election

A commenter from earlier gave us an idea of just how important the 2012 election is for gun owners:

From the perspective of anyone who supports the RKBA, this election should be about, â€œHow much do you want to bet that Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts will all still be living by the end of 2016?â€ By then, their ages would be 80, 80, 68, 66, and 61.

At the risk of being a bit morbid, this begs the question of just what is the likelihood that one of the Heller 5 is going to kick the bucket between now and the end of what would be Obama’s second term. Given this rather morbid site, one can actually make a rough calculation, based on statistics for people that age in the DC area. Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas have roughly the same chance of dying, at 16%. Thomas is younger, but being African-American skews him into the same bracket as the older Scalia and Kennedy. Roberts is only 4%, being the youngest member of the court, and Alito only 6%, being not much older.

But the loss of one of the Heller 5 would result in a failure for the Second Amendment, and for basic failure analysis, you multiply the probabilities of the individual components functioning properly over that time to arrive at a 46% probability that if Obama gets a second term, the Second Amendment is toast. I’m not comfortable those odds, and I sure as hell hope other folks who care about the Second Amendment aren’t either. Reality is that the Justices, being upper middle class and with great health care coverage, will probably beat statistical averages. But that should still scare you. This also only considers death, and not health problems that force a retirement, or a justice just getting old and tired.

The odds of getting a pro-2A Justice from Obama are zero percent, and even if the GOP takes the Senate, I still don’t put the odds up above zero. Any of the Republican field will have a considerably higher probability of nominating a pro-2A Justice, just because the pool of candidates they have to choose from has a much higher probability of containing a pro-gun Justice than the pool Obama can pick from.

On Rhetoric From NRA And Others

This article in the Daily Caller is reflective of the rhetoric you often encounter from NRA and others when it comes to Obama’s record on guns:

As a state senator in Illinois,Â he supportedÂ a one-gun-a-month limit on gun purchases, supported laws making it illegal to use a gun for self-defense, and opposed laws that allow law-abiding citizens to get permits to carry guns on their persons. As a U.S. senator, he supported bans on high-capacity magazines and he supported the assault weapons ban. And at the same time, with a straight face, he claimed to support the Second Amendment.

This is, of course, all true. But there are nine very important issues with Obama left out there, and those issues are named Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer, and Ginsburg. Five are in favor of the Second Amendment, and four would likely erase it from the Constitution given the chance. That chance comes down to one of those five, two of which are in their 70s, not retiring or dying in the next four years. To me this is the most important issue we face. Everything else literally pales by comparison.

Let’s turn to some of Wayne LaPierre’s rhetoric at CPAC 2012, laced with words like conspiracy, but I think, unfortunately, without making a solid case as to exactly why Obama is such a threat to the Second Amendment if he gets a second term. I’m glad that Wayne did go on to mention the Court, if only to smear Kagan and Sotomayor, but I don’t think Wayne really got to the true magnitude of the threat. The entire speech is unfortunately unsophisticated and simplistic.

One of my great criticisms of Wayne’s rhetoric is that he’s poor at tailoring it to specific audiences. This speech for CPAC, which is full of highly engaged young conservatives, is something you’d deliver to a room full of blue collar senior citizens at a gun club. The CPAC audience can receive, and is probably eager for, a more sophisticated political message – something I know Wayne is capable of delivering because his roots go back to being a policy wonk.

I’m reminded of a humorous story Bitter tells, when Wayne came to visit her college — the first time that NRA had ever spoken at a women’s college. Her particular school had a very high percentage of international students which, along with many of the domestic students, made International Relations the top major at the school. In addition, more than a quarter of the student body studied abroad for at least a semester during their time in college. Wayne’s speech focused pretty heavily on “faceless, nameless, unelected UN bureaucrats.” That’s a good message for gun owners, but many of the members of the audience called those same bureaucrats Dad or worked for them during their last internship.

The problem with NRA’s messaging lately has been that they are continuing to speak to the membership they had a decade or two decades ago with the same platitudes that have always worked for them, while probably simultaneously wondering why the average age of their membership is so high. NRA needs to reach different audiences, and that means tailoring NRA’s messaging to the specific audience the message is being delivered to. I believe that for NRA to enjoy continued success, it needs to be able to speak to the suburbanite in a business suit as readily as it speaks to the retired farmer. The NRA of the 21st century is going to necessarily look and operate very differently than the NRA of the 20th century. Maybe if I have some time later, I’ll lay out what I think the 21st century NRA should probably look like.

Flurry of Bills in Other States

I have to hand it to Ashley, who is NRA’s State Liaison for Missouri, Indiana and Oklahoma, because there’s been quite a lot of positive activity as of late. In Indiana, she’s working to legalize suppressors in hunting, as well as a bill that would allow for charity gaming (important for Friends of the NRA’s fundraising). Meanwhile in Missouri, there are four bills ready to be considered. Lowering the carry age from 21 to 18, a bill to legalize open carry, another to prevent discrimination in hiring and firing of concealed carry permiteesÂ (the fourth is just technical changes to the license system).

I’m not sure what I think about the last bill, but it doesn’t create quite the instinct to shake the bowcaster like the parking lot bills do. I guess I feel like if the state is going to make me get a permit to carry, well, protecting me from discrimination as a result of it is kind of the least they can do. But it still strikes me as the less-than-ideal solution to this problem.

I don’t know how many of these bills will make it to final passage, but this is an ambitious agenda, and I thought it was worth offering some kudos to Ashley.

Cows on the Loose!

I have to admit that I didn’t feel too happy when I first read the story about Canadian police officers who decided to shoot cows that had other ideas about being lead to slaughter, but mostly because riddling the cow with 9mm fired from a Glock seemed like a waste of perfectly good beef. I guess Canadian cops don’t carry rifles in their patrol cars.

What Crazy Looks Like

Sometimes, you can just tell, before you even read the article.

Strategy on the UN Arms Trade Treaty

Heritage has released a paper outlining a US strategy for resisting the Arms Trade Treaty. Since the meme out there these days is that gun owners are paranoidÂ and Barry is really our best buddy, ask yourself for a moment whether you trust Barack Obama to look out after the best interest of America’s gun owners? No, I don’t either, and he’s already started going after gun owners in his 2013 budget.

While there’s little chance that the Senate will ratify a broad ATT, as I’ve mentioned before, the risks to US shooters is significant. Imagine no Glocks, Anschutz’s, no foreign ammunition, foreign shotguns, rifles, etc. Why? Because every other country signed the ATT, and refuses to export to the US because we’ve defied the treaty and don’t live up to “international standards.”

Myths of the Gun Control Lobby

Forbes has an excellent article on the Myths of the Gun Control Lobby. Finally a reporter has started calling out the other side on the bullshit:

Caroline Brewer of the anti-gun Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has reported that â€œThe research weâ€™ve seen indicates fewer and fewer people owning more and more guns.â€ Yet one can only wonder where they are getting that information. In reality, public support for personal gun ownership is growing.

I can tell you where they are getting that information — they are pulling it out of a place most decidedly devoid of sunlight. That said, they don’t get everything correct:

A National Crime Victimization Study (NCVS) which asked victims if they had used a gun in self-defense found that about 108,000 each year had done so. A big problem with the NCVS line of survey reasoning, however, is that it only includes those uses where a citizen kills a criminal, not when one is only wounded, is held by the intended victim until police arrive, or when brandishing a gun caused a criminal to flee.

NCVS does count those. The issue many had with NCVS survey method is they did not get to questions about defensive gun use unless the person reported themselves as a victim of crime first. Thus it’s believed NCVS undercounts DGUs. It will be greatly disappointing to the writer of the Propiganda Professor, a darling of our opponents, that the serious academic studies on DGUs, some by our own government, show the number to be in the hundreds of thousands on the low end, despite what he and his friends in the gun control movement might want to imagine.

I believe a large number of DGUs do go unreported. A friend of mine had a DGU in Philadelphia, but didn’t fire. As soon as he drew on his attackers, they fled.Â He called 911, who’s attitude was, if there wasn’t someone bleeding out on the sidewalk, it wasn’t important enough to warrant Â further attention. I know this is anecdotal, but I think there are many cases like this. How many do you know of, or have directly experienced?

Emily Miller Discovers D.C. Transport Laws

D.C.’s transport laws are absurd, as is detailed by Emily Miller of the Washington Times, and definitely outside the laws in most states, but it might be surprising to know that Pennsylvania’s transport laws for handguns aren’t any different. The only difference is a License to Carry (from any state) is a blanket exception to our transport laws, and those are readily issued to anyone who asks for one and can legally possess a handgun.

Emily Miller, now that she’s become a gun owner, is figuring out that there are some elements of society that want her to be put in prison for a long time, with people who are really violent, all for making common mistakes that ordinary people make all the time, like running out of gas, or forgetting to go to the bathroom before leaving the house. OK for ordinary people to do, but not gun owners. Not in our Nation’s Capital.

Two Wolves & a Sheep Voting on Dinner – Anti-Gunners & the Media

Emotionally charged questions that leave out important context to a debate? Check.
Misrepresenting pro-gun groups? Check.
Lies? Check.
Radical policy statements that go ignored by reporters? Check.
Callers who are convinced it’s all a conspiracy? Check.

Why, I do believe we have all the mandatory requirements for an hour of conversation about Second Amendment rights on NPR.

It started this morning with alerts for multiple tweets from NPR’s Philly station WHYY claiming that representatives from @PAGunRights would be on their station debating anti-gun advocates. Well, this would be news to anyone who has ever contributed to the PAGunRights.com site since no current or former volunteer contributor that I know of was speaking to them.

Even though NPR was claiming that “individuals” (plural) from the pro-gun side would be on the show, they actually on had one speaker for the Second Amendment from NRA-ILA. Meanwhile, they hosted two anti-gun folks, one professional group leader and the other a member of Bloomberg’s group. Fair and balanced means two against one, apparently. Not to mention, the host was blatantly biased. Here as some examples of the absurdity pushed by the NPR host:

When asking NRA’s representative about their support for state preemption laws, the host phrased the question as, “Why is NRA against police chiefs?” No, I’m not kidding.
When CeaseFirePA’s leader called for lost and stolen violations to be felonies AND for them to remain municipal offenses, at no point was he questioned about what the means for completely changing the legal system in Pennsylvania which limits felonies to state charges. Nope, upending the entire state justice system apparently requires zero follow-up.
While CeaseFirePA’s leader claimed anti-gun people didn’t know about a hearing on the strengthened preemption bill which essentially asserts that they violated sunshine laws, the host let it slide when he later contradicted himself admitting that their legislative supporters knew about it three days before a committee hearing. Fortunately, NRA was able to at least point out that legislators did not violate any laws.
The host let a caller propose making lost and stolen reporting a federal offense, but never once questioned how that would work. Instead, it was treated as a perfectly reasonable suggestion instead of raising any kind of question about which federal agencies would be responsible for handling it or how exactly charges of violating the ordinance would work when there are already few federal prosecutions for actual straw purchasing cases.

Back to the content of the guests and the callers, MAIG’s Pennsylvania representative on the show advocated for lost and stolen laws to be felonies as well, but also specified that he encouraged a patchwork of laws across Pennsylvania that will ensnare lawful gun owners. It looks like Bloomberg’s position on NYC laws are spreading.

The callers I heard were just absurd. I think it’s funny the rightwing talk radio has the reputation for attracting conspiracy callers because there was woman who was convinced that because one NRA employee could not recall an exact number for campaign contributions donated to all Pennsylvania politicians, it was clearly evidence that NRA was simply buying off lawmakers. Never mind that it was pointed out that it is all a matter of public record that she herself could look up. Never mind that NRA has hundreds of thousands of members in the state. It never even occurred to her that there was any reason a legislator would vote for the Second Amendment other than being bought.

A number of other callers were mysteriously disconnected before being allowed to speak, so the only voices I heard were anti-gun. I know what to expect out of NPR on the issue of Second Amendment rights, but this was over-the-top even by their standards.

Legality of Drones

SayUncle asks and interesting question, in response to this story about an animal rights drone being brought down by shotgun fire, namely whether you own the airspace. Under common law, the answer was yes; you were regarded as owning, “from the depths to the heavens”. But the advent of air travel changed common law. Now the answer is yes and no, as to whether you own the airspace over your house. There’s a Supreme Court case regarding this,Â U.S. v. CausbyÂ (1946), where a chicken rancher sued the federal government over fighter planes flying low over his property. The ruling held the old common law could not survive in the modern world, but that landowners have the rights to the space over their houses that are essential for your enjoyment of the land.

“if the landowner is to have full enjoyment of the land, he must have exclusive control of the immediate reaches of the enveloping atmosphere. Otherwise buildings could not be erected, trees could not be planted, and even fences could not be run” . . . Thus, a landowner “owns at least as much of the space above the ground as he can occupy or use in connection with the land,” and invasions of that airspace “are in the same category as invasions of the surface.”

As far as the FAA is concerned, objects like RC planes must be operated within line of sight, and not fly over 500 feet. This is federal, so state case law might be different. But the FAA only recently allowed military UAVs to operate in US airspace. There is no corresponding FAA regs for civilian UAVs.

So it would seem that if you have a UAV buzzing around your property operated by animal rights groups, you’re perfectly entitled to shoot it down, exercising your rights as a property holder to end the trespass of an object that’s interfering with your enjoyment of the land.