The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
In Maryland. John Richardson offers some analysis of the decision. My only analysis is this: Judge Legg, who decided this case, was put on the federal bench by world class RINO and gun banner George H.W. Bush. Just remember that if the contest comes down to a choice between Obama and Romney. There is a difference.
UPDATE: More here from the media.
UPDATE: Joe notes a quote from Judge Legg, and sends a nice donation to the Second Amendment Foundation. This was their case.
Gun Control Supporters in Washington State are pushing a bill that would make leaving a firearm where a child can find it reckless endangerment. Reading the bill, which shows the context of Washington State’s reckless endangerment law, I’m not sure why something like a kid taking a gun to shoot up a school couldn’t already be covered with the existing language. I also note that the bill also raises the fee to get a permit to carry, I guess just as an extra middle finger extended in the direction of gun owners by the legislator sponsoring this bill. It’s amazing how their utter contempt for gun owners and gun ownership helps to sabotage their best unintended efforts, and unmask what they are really about.
I don’t really have too much of an issue with parents being liable for the actions of their children if they did something negligent to help facilitate their criminal behavior, but I don’t think mere possession should be a high enough standard to trigger a criminal charge. Years ago, Bitter’s mother, as a juvenile in rural Oklahoma, had to gain possession of a shotgun in order to protect herself from a home invader. The threat of a shotgun was enough to dissuade the gentlemen from further intrusion. How would gun control advocates feel about their daughter being home alone as a teenager with a home invader threatening her? Better just to give the guy whatever he wants? Call 911 and hope the cops arrive in time? My friend and sometimes co-blogger Jason, who is only a couple of years older than me, was on his trap team in high school, and used to take a shotgun to school. Farther back, there’s Justice Scalia, who spoke about lugging a slung rifle on the New York City subway system from Queens to Manhattan every day.
We were a far less violent society during the time when kids had relatively easy access to firearms. That’s a fact, and not something our opponents can debate or refute. The fact that CAP laws are even proposed is just another symptom of an ill society where no one wants to take personal  responsibility for anything, and we ask the state to step in and assume the role of responsible parent. Our opponents act like the issue of these CAP laws is just slam-dunk common sense; that you’re crazy for thinking the issue might be a bit more complicated, and it might not be so easy a tradeoff. I don’t think it is an easy tradeoff. I’d not go so far as to suggest that juveniles be issued permits, and be able to tote a Glock 19 around town, but generally speaking, for most other dangerous things, like driving, we ease kids into the responsibility when they are old enough to understand the risks. I would go as far as saying I’d like to return to a world where schools had shooting teams, and it was no big deal for a high school aged kid to lug a rifle to school on the New York subway system because there was a rifle match after school.
There are always a lot of ideas floating around out there, as to how to rein in an out of control government. You’ll hear solutions, like going back to Senators being appointed by state legislatures, rather than being elected, which I’m not sure would really fix much. But I think the enablement of the modern state really boils down to only a few things.
One of the big issues is the Courts moving to very loosely interpret the non-delegation doctrine. Non-delegation essentially means that Congress can’t assign its legislative responsibility to other bodies. For instance, in a post I did this weekend, I mentioned how Obama could turn a lot of gun owners into criminals overnight. Under a strict interpretation of non-delegation, this wouldn’t be possible. The realm in which administrative law could operate would be very narrow, and laws which only ambiguously described powers of an agency wouldn’t be unconstitutional. I think many liberty-minded people tend to overlook the importance of the non-delegation doctrine in beating back the leviathan state.
The second area is more familiar, in that the courts have granted Congress a very broad power under the Necessary and Proper clause. For instance, in Raich, the medical marijuana case, the court ruled that it was within Congress’ power to prohibit marijuana in the stream of interstate commerce, and that it was also necessary and proper, in order to preserve Congress’ regulation of the national market, to reach into strictly intrastate activity.  It’s always seemed to me the courts pay a lot of attention to the “Necessary” components of “Necessary and Proper,” and not a whole lot of attention to the latter. I think to re-invigorate  liberty, it might be necessary, and proper, I might add, for the courts to say that Congressional actions may be necessary, but it surely isn’t proper. This could be interesting as the Court examines Obamacare.
I think if you could reform both these doctrines, it would go quite a long ways to getting the federal government out of every sphere of public, and sometimes private life. There are certainly many other constitutional insults one could mention, but if I had to pick two, these would be my choices. I think that could be important, if sympathetic individuals decide that amending the Constitution is the only way to achieve this. I’m starting to believe that folks who love liberty shouldn’t be afraid to use the amendment process. The progressives certainly were not afraid of it, and achieved much through the process.
Josh Horwitz has completely lost touch with whatever reality he once previously inhabited, and moved into an alternate parallel universe where Gun Control Act of 1968 nor the Brady Act were ever passed. While that’s not the case, certainly, I’m not sure why voting and gun ownership shouldn’t be relatively easy, considering they are both fundamental rights, according to our courts. I tend to believe if it’s constitutional to make me show government issued photo ID before purchasing a firearm, it’s constitutional to make me do the same before voting.
But that’s aside. The point of Josh’s article was to chide the gun owner in Michigan who went to the polls openly armed, and then carried through the school which was being used as a polling place. I tend to believe it’s constitutional to ban firearms at polling places and schools, with schools being listed specifically in Heller as being among the sensitive places. Â But the fact is that it’s not unlawful to openly carry in a school in Michigan, so that should have been the end of the law enforcement encounter with the man who was carrying.
A man legally open carrying in a school or polling place certainly isn’t enough to try to tie the man, as Josh Horwitz often does, with the likes of “John Wilkes Booth, Timothy McVeigh, Sharron Angle and Ted Nugent.” The fact that Horwitz would put Sharron Angle and Ted Nugent in the same class as John Wilkes Booth and Timothy McVeigh shows his complete lack of any moral compass, and a sense of perspective so completely warped as to completely discredit anything he says. I’ll agree with Horwitz that you shouldn’t need ID to exercise the fundamental right to vote if he agrees you shouldn’t need ID to exercise the fundamental right to keep and bear arms.
SayUncle talks about the AOW regulations being a mess and relatively arbitrary. To some degree, this is a problem that’s been created by Congress, which defines a pistol thusly:
The term “any other weapon†means any weapon or device capable of being concealed on the person from which a shot can be discharged through the energy of an explosive, a pistol or revolver having a barrel with a smooth bore designed or redesigned to fire a fixed shotgun shell, weapons with combination shotgun and rifle barrels 12 inches or more, less than 18 inches in length, from which only a single discharge can be made from either barrel without manual reloading, and shall include any such weapon which may be readily restored to fire. Such term shall not include a pistol or a revolver having a rifled bore, or rifled bores, or weapons designed, made, or intended to be fired from the shoulder and not capable of firing fixed ammunition.
Originally the NFA was intended to include pistols, under a 5 dollar transfer tax. But language was added to remove pistols from National Firearms Act, leaving a rather ambiguous and sloppily definition of Any Other Weapon. Later, in the Gun Control Act of 1968, this definition was clarified, by defining a pistol like this:
(29) The term “handgun” means –
(A) a firearm which has a short stock and is designed to be
held and fired by the use of a single hand; and
(B) any combination of parts from which a firearm described in
subparagraph (A) can be assembled.
So basically the reason that ATF considers anything with a vertical foreword grip as an AOW is because it’s then no longer “designed to be held and fired by the use of a single hand.” It is not unusual for Congress to pass ambiguous and poorly worded laws. But most agencies deal with this kind of ambiguity through the use of Administrative Law, meaning you propose and manage a body regulations that go into more detail than Congress chose to. ATF has traditionally resisted handling anything through administrative law, because it’s a defined process legally, and can’t changed on a whim. Most of the Code of Federal Regulations regarding ATF just restates the United States Code, rather than going into any detail about how things are defined and how to make determinations.
All it would take is an executive order from Obama to change the definition of a pistol, and make millions of gun owners instant felons overnight. For instance, AR-15 pistols with fore grips that are not vertical, are still considered to fall under the definition of pistol. There are a lot of target pistols as well, such as the Ruger Charger, that also have forward grips. But that’s not etched in stone (i.e. Law), or even wood (i.e. regulations). and one could imagine a plausible standard that was based on weight and balance rather than on the presence of absence of a forward grip. Think about that when you head to the voting booth this November.
Eugene Volokh takes a look at a case in District Court in South Dakota, now on appeal, which essentially rules that you can’t have a felon in your home if the felon could possibly know where your gun is and have access to it. Based on the circumstances of the case, the man in question did indeed facilitate a felon having possession of a firearm, but it’s in the jury instructions that the District Court makes this very hazardous:
So if you have house-guests that you have “reasonable cause to believe†have a felony conviction, or have once been in a mental hospital, or are nonresident aliens (even if legal aliens), and they see where your gun is, you might well be guilty of a federal felony on the theory of this case.
And under this standard, how many out there among us are felons? I’ve had non-resident aliens over, I’m pretty sure. I generally don’t leave guns laying around the house when guests are over, but I could easily see an antique 1911 in a shadow box, or a rifle hung over a fireplace triggering this standard. Remember folks, they are less regulated than teddy bears.
Think Progress has been busy trying to debunk the myth of NRA power, and the latest is really the icing on the cake, where they parrot the anti-gun leadership talking point that gun ownership is really on the decline, and fewer and fewer people are participating in the shooting sports. Reality just does not bear this out, so I am going to have to give Think Progress a Baghdad Bob reward for this article:
 
Convince the Governor Dayton he needs to sign the castle doctrine legislation. If you won’t do it for me, do it for her.
We’ve covered the works of Pat Wray here before. He’s an outdoor writer, who once ran unsuccessfully for NRA board, and is a “useful idiot” when it comes to giving anti-gun politicians hunting creeds. Here Mr. Wray is one again rearing his ugly head pretending that the right to keep and bear arms just doesn’t matter.
It’s hard for me to to believe this guy is this dense. Heller and McDonald are decided by a 1 vote margin, two of the five majority justices are pushing up there in age, and this guy seriously says “it’s hard for me to interpret Supreme Court nominees as an assault on my gun rights?” The Second Amendment is one vote away from being interpreted clear out of the Constitution, and as we’ve covered on this blog before, we’re looking at a flip of the coin, statistically, as to whether one of those justices dies off before the end of Obama’s second term. And that’s not even considering the possibility of retirements.
The question is, it this guy really not seeing it? Or is he helping lead the herd to the slaughter? I can forgive the former, but if it’s the latter, you can’t claim to be pro-Second Amendment, or give a whim about the right to keep and bear arms. I get that some people are liberal gun owners, and like Obama on other issues, but what’s wrong with just admitting that those other issues are more important to you than your RKBA, but acknowledging President Obama isn’t the best President in the world when it comes to gun rights. Signing two pro-gun measures attached to must pass bills does not a pro-gun record make. Supreme Court justices are the most important thing in this election, and Obama is guaranteed to put folks on the bench who will erase the Second Amendment.
They ask if the AK-12 will be as popular as the AK-47, and talk about how the AK-12 is intended to revive Russia’s declining small arms industry. I doubt the AK-12 will find much of a market outside of Russia, since it basically the same rifle, only with a better selector and rail. If you’re the military of a wealthy nation, you can afford German, Austrian, Belgian or American rifles. If you’re not, how important to you is rail and a better selector? And then there’s the Chinese arms industry.
But I think the real news here is, NPR is covering the firearms industry?