2012 – Page 59 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Rapid Tracing of Firearms

Ian Argent is surprised by how quickly the police turned the trace around for a country where registration is supposed to be illegal. The truth is that this country has had a form of registration since 1968. The concept of the registry created by the Gun Control Act of 1968 is that given a particular gun, the police can quickly find the last legal owner, but they could not find out whether a particular person did, or didn’t own guns, nor could they find out how many guns that person owns. But for the purposes of tracing a gun to a person, this country already has registration.

Up to the 4473, those records are already largely computerized. To find out which dealer a particular gun was sold to doesn’t take ATF any time at all. None of the big manufacturers or distributers are doing A&D records by hand anymore, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ATF has direct access to this data without a person having to be involved. Once the dealer has been identified, the question is whether that dealer is in business. If not, then it’s just a quick call over to the big ATF vault in West Virginia where all the 4473s of defunct dealers are sent, and put on microfilm. ATF is forbidden from computerizing these records by law (because that would make a registry, where they could link people to guns, in addition to linking guns to people). If the dealer is still in business, I believe all that is required is to send over a trace request, the dealer looks up the 4473, and there you have the trace. If the gun was sold more than 20 years ago, and the dealer lawfully destroyed that record, the trace fails at that point. Traces to fail rather often, as dealers are only required to keep records for 20 years, and the records in West Virginia are likewise sometimes incomplete.

But that’s why the trace can happen so quickly. It doesn’t take a whole lot of manual labor to accomplish one. Generally speaking, the amount of time it takes for a dealer to retrieve a 4473, or for an ATF agents in West Virginia to do the same from their files. You’re talking a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

Shooting Olympian to Address GOP Convention

Provided that a hurricane doesn’t interrupt the GOP convention, they have invited shooting Olympic record holder Kim Rhode to speak at the event. In fact, I’m very impressed by the fact that the GOP does not shy away from mentioning her shooting records in her biography. There’s no sugarcoating it, they are straight up talking about Rhode’s accomplishments as a serious competitive shooter. It’s a context that doesn’t threaten people, but makes clear that shooting is an American pastime.

Kim Rhode, the co-host of the Outdoor Channelâ€™s Step Outside program, is the only American Olympian to win five medals in an individual event in five consecutive Olympic Games. Sheâ€™s the most successful female shooter at the Olympics, the only triple Olympic Champion and the only woman to have won two gold medals for Double Trap. Most recently, she brought home gold in skeet shooting at the 2012 Summer Games in London, equaling the world record of 99 out of 100 clays. When double trap was eliminated from the Olympic Games, she set a new world record in skeet at the 2007 world cup competitions, going on to win the silver at the 2008 Summer Olympics in womenâ€™s skeet.

Also, of the 11 Olympians attending, she’s one of three selected to speak.

Some Questions for Mike Bloomberg

It’s now becoming clear that just about all of the injured in today’s mass shooting outside the Empire State Building were injured by the police response rather than by the shooter himself. This begs some questions:

How do you expect to have police that know how to shoot when you’ve done everything possible to extinguish any kind of responsible shooting culture in your city?
How many police officers do you think learn to shoot because they interact heavily in the civilian gun culture by taking part in competitions, belonging to shooting clubs, and generally shooting for recreation?
NRA has an entire division dedicated to law enforcement training. Have you ever considered inviting them to New York?
Law enforcement is a profession that tends to run in families. Indeed, a good many gun bloggers come from law enforcement families. Part of that is indoctrinating the next generation in the ways of the gun. If there is no civilian gun culture, how are the martial arts of this profession going to be passed down?
What if there is a Mumbai style attack in New York City? You’re now advertising to the world that your officers can’t shoot. The terrorists are listening.

There will probably be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over this. Some will undoubtedly want to disarm police officers. Cooler heads will call for more training. More training would obviously be a good thing, but the best thing for New York would be a restoration of a responsible civilian gun culture where police officers can find means to hone their skills recreationally, where there’s a body of knowledge and competence from which to draw from, and where there are places to shoot and plenty of people practiced in the art of shooting, from whom much can be learned. In other words, allow New York to be more like the rest of America, and you might find that suddenly your officers can reliably hit a target from yards away without having to expend a magazine and seriously injure innocent bystanders.

UPDATE: I guess we’ll see how some folks in Idaho stack up in the LAPD combat course.

That Didn’t Take Long

A few weeks ago I pointed out we seemed to have a new anti-gun blog in our midst. Thirdpower is reporting that Reasoned Discourse(TM) has already broken out. You’d think there would be at least one pro-gun control person out there dedicated enough to their point-of-view to actually, you know, argue it, and make their case. But it seems squashing opposing opinions is easier for them. Maybe that says something about the strength of their point of view.

Fighting for Preemption

Bloomberg’s publishing arm has been on a tear recently to try to frame the gun issue from Bloomberg’s point of view, and make the NRA look bad. This article doesn’t quite work, as the six comments so far in support of NRA would seem to indicate. I think most people get that you can’t have a patchwork of laws on a topic where violations are typically felonies or high-level misdemeanors. Most cities, including Philadelphia, actually can’t make more than petty crimes by ordinance according to state law, but cities in other states often have much greater leeway for making serious crimes. The ability to preserve that is part of why Bloomberg is making this a big deal.

Gun Group Sues Honolulu Police

Interestingly, this is a First Amendment case. The claim is that the City of Honolulu, engaging in Reasoned Discourse(TM) on their Facebook page, by deleting unfavorable posts, constitutes unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. That’s very interesting, and I’m not an expert in First Amendment law, but from what I do know, I think they probably have a good chance of prevailing here.

The Truth About Gun Sales

An excellent article in Forbes, which is bad news for our opponents, because it’s not only fear driving the trend:

Other Gallup polls are even more interesting. The number of women gun owners in America has gone up from 13 percent in 2005 to 23 percent today. Also, the number ofÂ Democratic households with firearmsÂ in their homes skyrocketed from 30 percent in 2009 to 40 percent today.

If they want to know why Obama doesn’t talk about gun control, this is why. They also note other increases, particularly in women, and even some preliminary data that seems to show the long term decline in hunting has, at least for now, reversed itself.

Mass Shooting at Empire State Building

Story developing, but two dead including the gunman. This probably isn’t the time to try to score political points by suggesting New York’s strict gun laws have failed. Let the other side be the ones who exploit tragedy for gain. I have a lot of readers in New York, so I hope everyone’s OK.

On Sword Fighting

An excellent overview of a lost art, comes to us via Instapundit. It would seem so much of what we know today is wrong, including this absurd notion by the proponents of gun control that man doesn’t know or shouldn’t be concerned with the concept of violence outside the realm of firearms. From the article:

Only recently in the last decade or so has this extraordinary and all but forgotten material finally come to be properly examined and studied. Reconstruction of these remarkable teachings offers an unparalleled view into how fighting men prepared and trained themselves for duels, street-fights, and battlefield encounters. Their manner of fighting with swords is not the classical Western style we see today, which is largely a contrived 19th-century gentleman’s version of a narrow, aristocratic Baroque style. What the surviving sources show us is wholly different from the familiar pop-culture version, as well as being dramatically distinct from what has gone on for years in assorted reenactments and contrived living-history efforts. Rather, Medieval and Renaissance sword fighting was a hell of a lot more violent, brutal, ferocious, and astonishingly effective. The way in which these swords were held, the way they can be maneuvered, and the postures and motions involved, differ substantially from common presumptions and modern-era fencing styles.

Read the whole thing. Maybe, much like 80s movies featuring gunplay look silly and ridiculous to modern, trained eyes, that movies featuring swordplay will get better, and find better ways to realistically portray it.

UPDATE: Some video from the author:

Millennials Not Buying Cars

I used to think this was a sign of the end times, with kids these days not wanting to drive like normal, independently minded people. But then someone pointed out to me the government has systematically destroyed the value of drivers’ licenses for young people, and by the time they are old enough for the licenses to matter, they are off to college where the need to drive is less, then once out of college, they don’t have jobs to make payments on new cars anyway, and are often buried under mountains of student debt. So perhaps Ford and the other companies need to get together and tell the auto insurers, who pushed a lot of this nanny state crap, that the gig is going to be up for both of them if they don’t do something to restore the market. Perhaps making it easier for young people to drive, as it was when I was younger, is the key to fixing this problem, rather than dumb corporations trying to slick up their marketing, and wondering why it’s not working.