2012 – Page 50 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Midnight Raid on Controversial Filmmaker

Looks like it’s not a good idea to embarrass the regime. That’s pretty severe rhetoric for Glenn Reynolds, but I don’t blame him for being animated about this. The implications are serious. I had started to jump on this, but reading further about the fact that this filmmaker was on probation for Bank Fraud, and forbidden from using computers, having others use computers on his behalf, except for vocation, and was also forbidden from using an alias, I am less certain. A person on probation doesn’t ordinarily have rights as a normal, free person does. A person on probation agrees to give up certain liberties in exchange for not serving their sentence in federal prison. I’ll quote Popehat on this:

Based on 6 years as a federal prosecutor and 12 as a federal defense lawyer, let me say this: minor use of a computer â€” like uploading a video to YouTube â€” is not something that I would usually expect to result in arrest and a revocation proceeding; I think a warning would be more likely unless the defendant had already had warnings or the probation officer was a hardass. But if I had a client with a serious fraud conviction, and his fraud involved aliases, and he had the standard term forbidding him from using aliases during supervised release, and his probation officer found out that he was running a business, producing a movie, soliciting money, and interacting with others using an alias, I wouldÂ absolutely expect him to be arrested immediately,Â whatever the content of the movie. Seriously. Nakoula pled guilty to using alias to scam money. Now he’s apparently been producing a film under an alias, dealing with the finances of the film under the alias, and (if his “Sam Bacile” persona is to be believed) soliciting financing under an alias. I would expect him to run into a world of hurt for that even if he were producing a “Coexist” video involving kittens.

Read the whole thing. I’m persuaded by the argument that if the FBI was the entity doing the questioning, that might pose an issue. But in the articles I’m finding, it sounds like he was questioned by federal probation officers, and it was the LA County Sheriff that brought him in. Not that Obama hasn’t shown himself to be about as useless as an ashtray on a motorbike as President, but I’m not sure this is thuggery yet, though I could be convinced. My bigger fear is that this is going to be taken as appeasement, and is just going to promote more violence.

UPDATE: Further follow-up at Popehat.

One Way to Look at Interviews

From SayUncle:

A thing hiring people tend to forget is that not only are they interviewing you, youâ€™re interviewing them.

I worked very briefly for a company the last month of 2011, where the company failed the interview (from my point of view) but being unemployed, and against my better judgement, I took the job, hoping it wouldn’t be that bad. The company was complete chaos. Executive management berated employees, and whipped them to work longer hours, and weekends. They blamed employees for their own failings. I started getting drawn up into the dysfunctional vortex after a few weeks, and facing the threat of unexpectedly losing a weekend for which I had made plans which cost me money already, I drew up and turned in my resignation, and walked out. Surprised I wouldn’t give notice, I pointed out we were still in the “probationary period” of the employment relationship, and I did not feel notice would be mutually beneficial. The “probationary agreement” I signed recognized I would not get full full benefits for 90 days, and could be terminated at any point without notice. Surely they didn’t think that probationary period only worked one way?

I saved my weekend, got to take the trip I paid for. I had been talking to a friend whose company I had invested in years ago, who had suddenly developed a need for my skills. He had agreed to bring me on the day before, whenever I wanted.Â I never got so much as a call from an HR person at the company I left, telling me this was not an uncommon occurrence. I never thought I’d just walk out on a job, but having spend the better part of 5 of the 10 years at my last job putting up with abuse from a sadistic CEO, I wasn’t about to go through that again.

There’s a lot of etiquette out there that suggests you don’t do this or that, but I think that depends on a mutual respect, which is often absent among many employers. One bit of advice I give young people starting out in their careers, especially if they are particularly skilled or talented, is don’t take shit from employers, and don’t pretend courtesy is a one way street, where you have to be courteous to them, but they can abuse the hell out of you.

Fortunately, that part of my life is behind me. One of the reasons I invested in the I work for now company was because of the philosophy on how to treat employees, and how to build a company without selling your soul. I’ve known the CEO here for a long time, and if he gets uppity, I think I’m still like the 3rd largest shareholder of the company :) But we’re a small outfit, with ambitions to grow bigger. Speaking of which, I’m currently shopping for commercial real-estate, particularly a kind of industrial or warehouse space. If anyone knows about that process and can offer advice, I’d be grateful. Especially gotchas, or things to watch out for.

NYSRPA Beats a MAIG Mayor

I’m starting to think the best way to deal with Bloomberg’s illegal mayors is to play whack-a-mole with them. When they express ambitions for higher political office, we squash them like bugs. We’ve have a reasonable amount of success spoiling the political aspirations of MAIG mayors here in Pennsylvania, and it looks like Jacob is managing to play whack-a-mole with MAIG mayors successfully in New York as well. This would be the strategy of waiting for the enemy to come to you, rather than engage in a costly and tiresome campaign of search and destroy. If we can make MAIG membership poison for seeking higher office, especially Republicans looking to win primaries, it’s one way to weaken Bloomberg substantively. *

* A note for our anti-gun friends, who seem to freak out on Twitter when I blog in metaphor: I am not speaking of literally going to war with Bloomberg’s Mayors, nor am I litterally speaking of search and destroy missions. I don’t even have the choppers for that (though I do have some loudspeakers that could blareÂ WalkÃ¼renritt).Â Also, I am not literally speaking of poisoning anyone, nor do I think Bloomberg’s Mayors are small, burrowing rodents with poor eyesight who need to be beaten over the head. I do not mean to insult moles, which are fine and honorable creatures, by suggesting that.

I Guess I’m Building Another AR

I’ve been itching to build another AR for a while, but our Friends of the NRA Dinner last night got me the parts to get started, even though I didn’t quite win everything I wanted. The fine folks at Geissele Automatics, who are a local business right down the PA Turnpike in Norristown, donated a few free-float modular AR handguards, and three AR triggers, including one of their match triggers. Those items went to silent auction, except one of the triggers which went to the stretch raffle. I put bids in on all of them, and flooded the stretch raffle with tickets. I also bid on an AR-15 lower in the live auction, but that got Â bit rich for me. So I ended up with the hand guards. The triggers got bid up and I ended up out. I was pleased there were enough AR guys there to keep the bidding going in the right direction for the dinner.

So now that I have a start with the handguards, I guess I should think about a barrel. I’m looking for a 20 inch barrel that will shoot military spec ammo decently, but can also do reasonably well with heavier, longer bullets. I realize these things are tradeoffs, so I’d be looking to trade to shooting lighter, shorter bullets. I’m thinking perhaps that has a Wylde chamber would be beneficial too, though I’m not sure about that yet. I’d probably be best off going with a stainless barrel. I’m not looking for super top of the line, because I don’t want to fork out 400 or more for a barrel. So if anyone has suggestions for how to proceed, I would be grateful for the advice.

Quote of the Day

Sorry for the absence, but we had our Friends of the NRA banquet tonight, and for just our county managed to bring in an order or magnitude more warm bodies than the typical CSGV protest I’ve seen outside the White House, and these people were actually forking over hard earned cash to support youth shooting.

But today’s quote comes from Tam, who comments on New York City actually adopting the Big Gulp Ban, opening up the market for smuggling high-capacity drink containers:

… and best of all, even if you get intercepted crossing the Hudson with your illicit Styrofoam cargo and the NYPD opens up on you, it’s not like they could actually hit you (and the Palisades make a safer backstop for them than Fifth Avenue does…)

Zing!

H&K Distances itself from Recoil Magazines

Maybe you don’t suck, and perhaps we don’t hate you.

Report Release on Florida Stand Your Ground

Via Dave Hardy, who notes “Not too surprising, since as I recall Florida never had a retreat requirement in the first place.” If I recall, Florida followed more closely to common law. Someone committing a felony you could shoot dead, which is going to be most cases in which a citizen defends themselves. You were required to retreat if you could do so safely otherwise.

The article is here, and of course, the best part is:

Gun control advocates immediately criticized the report as “disappointing,” saying it did not go far enough to determine the true impact of the Stand Your Ground law.

“If the state wanted to work with a real data analysis, then fund it. It became pretty clear that they are going to fail to do that,” said Ginny Simmons, director of the Second Chance on Shoot First campaign.

That’s Bloomberg’s group, for those of you wondering. The fact is that Stand Your Ground just doesn’t have much impact. The number of cases where duty to retreat would even have come up in Florida before the law are vanishingly small, and despite the fact that gun control groups lied their way into making SYG and issue in the Trayvon Martin case, it never would have been at issue either before or after the law went into effect.

Gun Polling in New York State

Someone sure wants to know what deep blue states think of gun control. Consider this Quennipiac poll:

52. Do you think the laws covering the sale 
of guns in New York State should be made more strict, 
less strict, or kept as they are now?

                     Tot    Rep    Dem    Ind

More strict          61%    40%    79%    55%
Less strict           8     14      4     11
Kept the same        28     44     16     31
DK/NA                 3      2      2      3

                     Men    Wom    Wht    Blk    Hsp

More strict          50%    72%    56%    83%    78%
Less strict          14      3     10      4      8
Kept the same        34     22     32     13     13
DK/NA                 2      3      3      1      2

Of course, if you want to know where that attitude comes from in New York:

                     UpStat NYC    Sub

More strict          49%    74%    62%
Less strict          12      5      7
Kept the same        35     19     29
DK/NA                 4      2      1

The same poll also shows overwhelming approval for gun rationining, once again, mostly from NYC. I’ll bet if you excluded Long Island and the other downstate counties, New York would look a lot different in terms of its attitude on gun laws.

US v. Rock Island Armory: Not a Loophole in the NFA

In the previous thread about someone trying to foolishly mount a challenge to NFA and all the other federal gun laws, the topic of US v. Rock Island came up. I went searching through my archives, convinced I had done a post about this, but it turns out I hadn’t, and that it was just a long running argument in the comment section. So I figured it was worth a full post just to get better information out there about the impact of this case. There’s a lot of folks on the Internet toutingÂ Rock Island as a case which invalidates the National Firearms Act, and creates some not-widely-known loophole that makes machine guns legal, either broadly, or in the District it was decided in.

But if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.Â United States law regulating machine guns rests on two prongs. The first prong is the National Firearms Act, passed in 1934 as an exercise of Congress’ power to tax. The second is the Gun Control Act of 1968, as amended by the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986, which contained the infamous Hughes Amendment. The Gun Control Act is based on Congress’ powers under the commerce clause.

In 1934, when the National Firearms Act was passed, it was believed that outright gun bans would be constitutionally problematic, both from the point of view of the Second Amendment, but also from the point of view of valid exercises of Congress’ powers to regulate interstate commerce. The proponents of the National Firearms Act decided to rely on the Congress’ power to tax, which was used, and upheld, to regulate narcotics under the Harrison Act, and it was relatively less risky than relying on the commerce power. The $200 tax on manufacture and transfer, in 1934 dollars, effectively doubled the price of existing machine guns, and was considered an effective means of discouraging their possession by mere peons like us.

By the time 1968 rolled around, the federal government’s ability to regulate using its interstate commerce power had been greatly expanded. The Gun Control Act of 1968 was purely a criminal provision, and not in any way connected to the taxing power. Additionally, the 1986 inclusion of the Hughes Amendment, codified under 18 USC 922(o), created a special problem for prosecution under the NFA provisions for machine guns manufactured after May 19, 1986.

In Rock Island, the US Attorney simply made the mistake of prosecuting under the wrong section of the United States Code, when they charged someone under the NFA for failing to pay a tax it refused to collect.Â From the case:

The superseding indictment alleges that Defendants committed acts in respect to the making and registration of “firearms,” i.e., machineguns,^[1]Â in the years 1987 and 1988 which violated parts of the National Firearms Act, Chapter 53 of the Internal Revenue Code, 26 U.S.C. Â§Â§ 5801Â et seq.Â Specifically, Count I alleges in part that Defendants conspired “(a) to manufacture firearms in violation of Title 26, United States Code, Sections 5822^[2]Â and 5861(F) [AND] (B)^[3]Â to knowingly deliver into interstate commerce firearms in violation of Title 26, United States Code, Sections 5822 and 5861(j)….”^[4]Â Count 2 alleges that in 1988, Defendants made machineguns “in violation of the registration provisions of Title 26, United States Code, Section 5822,” which is alleged to have violated 26 U.S.C. Â§ 5861(f). Count 3 alleges that Defendants delivered into interstate commerce the same machineguns as in Count 2, and that these machineguns “had not been registered as required by the provisions of Title 26, United States Code, Section 5822,” in violation of 26 U.S.C. Â§ 5861(j).

Since its passage in 1934, the registration, taxation, and other requirements of the National Firearms Act (“NFA”) have been upheld by the courts under the power of Congress to raise revenue.^[5]Â However, 18 U.S.C. Â§ 922(o), which became effective on May 19, 1986, prohibits possession of machineguns, and thereby repealed or rendered unconstitutional the portions of the National Firearms Act which provided for the raising of revenue from the making, possession, and transfer of machineguns made after such date. As the government conceded at oral argument, the United States refuses to register or accept tax payments for the making or transfer of machineguns made after 1986.^[6]Â Thus, Â§ 922(o), as applied to machineguns made after May 19, 1986, left the registration and other requirements of the National Firearms Act without any constitutional basis.

This is where people get confused when they read Rock Island. It’s conventional wisdom among gunnies that machineguns are regulated under the National Firearms Act, and that is true. But lesser understood is the fact that they are also regulated under the Gun Control Act. The GCA is part of the US Criminal Code, unlike the NFA which belongs to the Internal Revenue Code. A lot of folks read “left the registration and other requirements of the National Firearms Act without any constitutional basis,” and assume this to mean the regulations regarding machine guns have been struck down. They have not been. If you manufacture a machine gun without a federal license to do so, you will go to jail.

What Rock Island said was, because 922(o) (Hughes Amendment) prevents the Treasury from accepting any payment of tax under the NFA, for any machine gun not legally possessed or manufactured before May 19, 1986, that the government can then not turn around and charge someone for failing to register the machine gun, and pay any tax, because the government admits that it refuses to collect that tax and accept the registration. That only means that the government may not prosecute this crime under the National Firearms Act. It is still empowered to prosecute individuals under the Gun Control Act, 18 USC 922(o). Since the United States lost theÂ Rock Island case, that’s been standard operating procedure for US Attorneys in cases involving machine guns manufactured after May 19, 1986.

For someone possessing a machine gun legally possessed or manufacturedÂ before May 19, 1986, but not legally transferred, they may still be prosecuted under the National Firearms Act, because the government will accept the tax in that instance. In short, if I buy my friend Jason’s submachine gun from him privately, I’m guilty of violating the National Firearms Act, because the government wouldÂ have accepted that tax for that transfer. If I take my AR-15 and convert it to an M16, I’m guilty of violating the Gun Control Act, Section 922(o), not the National Firearms Act, because that was obsoleted by the Hughes Amendment for guns manufactured after the magic date.

So the courts weren’t creating any loophole. They merely ruled that if the United States wishes to prosecute someone for possession or transfer a machine gun that was not lawfully registered before May 19, 1986, they had to do so under the Gun Control Act, not the National Firearms Act.Â I hope this makes sense. Rock Island does not create any loophole in the machine gun laws, and I thought it was worthwhile to clear this up before someone believes this Internet rumor, tests it, and ends up in federal prison.

More on the Wintenmute Study

Thirdpower has been kind enough to update his post, and provide a link to the actual study. In terms of the study being a flop, I was partially correct. I say partially, because I figured there’d be more surveying of attitudes towards gun policy, and there wasn’t. What there was, beyond what was mentioned in the press release, there wasn’t any red meat to be found. One things is for sure, Wintenmute wasn’t happy that NSSF and NRA broadly alerted on this survey, and discouraged dealers from participating:

Our results may have been affected by external factors, chief among them being efforts to deter subjects from participating. Two days after the first questionnaire was mailed, Larry Keane, general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), posted a notice at the organizationâ€™s Web site â€œstrongly discouraging retailers from participating in this survey.â€ Â […]

[…] The National Rifle Association (NRA) issued a notice to retailers at its Web site on June 29, â€œrecommend[ing] that you do not respond to the survey.â€35 The organization also sent its notice as a personalizedÂ E-mail, apparently to the organizationâ€™s entire membership.

What’s good about the interference is it raises doubts about the validity of this survey, which are going to tend to smaller dealers, less connected to the community as a whole, who are difficult to reach with the message. Doubts are also raised, I believe, by the claim that the survey response rates were typical. Is this typical of business surveys?

The survey design required up to three mailings of the questionnaire, with a reminder postcard sent to all subjects between the first and second questionnaire mailings. Taking the mailing date of the first questionnaire as day 0, the postcard was sent on day 7, and subsequent questionnaires were sent to nonrespondents on day 21 and day 42. A cash incentiveâ€”three uncirculated $1 billsâ€”was included inÂ the first mailing. Respondents were also offered the opportunity to request a copy of publications arising from the survey.

It’s interesting to see what they are surveying. It’s actually very little in terms of what they politically support.Â Perhaps they realized polling gun dealers about that would largely be a fool’s errand. I think this is more geared to understand whether certain phenomena in the gun market we claim are really true. Here’s what they are pretty clearly trying to glean:

Do tactical rifles represent a large portion of the market? (evil Assault Weapons)
How large is the market for inexpensive handguns? (evil Saturday Night Specials)
Are sales to women actually high?
How important are gun shows in in the overall sales equation for FFLs?
Is business good?

Fortunately for us, I’m not how much red meat there is here, because this can’t be a representative sample because our interference has essentially denied them that. Nonetheless, you can expect to see this touted as irrefutable evidence that a) EBRs are not commonly owned, and that b) women aren’t buying guns in large numbers, and c) the gun industry is struggling, d) they are selling inexpensive guns to straw purchasers and e) gun dealers support gun control.