Month: October 2013

They want to adopt the 5150 hold as the national standard. Under California law, anyone who ends up with a 5150 is barred from firearms possession for a period of five years. Pennsylvania law is actually nearly identical on this matter, except that we call it a 302 commitment, and the ban is for life instead of 5 years, though in both cases you can petition to have your rights restored. The 302 commitment is routinely abused, as any firearms attorney in this state will tell you, and it sounds like California is no different.

Davis said his case files are filled with people who say “stupid stuff” and then lose their gun rights for nothing more than a brief emotional outburst.

Among them: A man fired by his employer who cried, “I wish I was dead,” during the exit interview; a woman who filed a sexual harassment claim against a supervisor and had not eaten or slept because of workplace stress; and a motorcycle accident victim who had taken too much medication – leading hospital staff to fear he was attempting suicide.

The medical establishment has repeatedly demonstrated hostility to the right to keep and bear arms, therefore I am against giving them power over that. I’ve heard of too many cases like this, where individuals with 302 commitments for bogus reasons end up having to very quickly find a place to store their firearms, to avoid having them turned over to the police and destroyed. Remember, when you get a 5150 or 302, if you already have a collection, if you can’t find anyone to take it within a very short amount of time of your commitment, you lose it. Whether a $500 Glock or a $20,000 collection is no matter. There has to be due process here, and what gun control advocates want to do doesn’t amount to that.

The Pennsylvania Game commission is enjoying an influx of new money thanks to the Great Obama Gun Panic of 2013. I hope they manage to use some of that money for upkeep of public ranges in Pennsylvania, given that the vast majority of guns and ammunition purchased during the panic is more likely to be used for target shooting than for hunting. Pittman-Robertson places an excise tax on all guns and ammunition at the federal level, and grants that money to state game agencies. This has been a generally accepted tax within the shooting community for some time, but could potentially be called into question from a constitutional standpoint, because it’s unconstitutional to tax the exercise of a right.

Even being out for the count most of yesterday, there wasn’t a whole lot of gun news out there anyway. But there has been some.

The laws, they are for the little people.

Apparently if you work to un-elect your elected representative, and that representative happens to be a woman, it’s war on women!

How much energy does your bullet need to bring down big game?

Which long gun for home defense?

When will gun control proponents learn that demonizing gun raffles only make them more successful?

Washington Council of Governments takes up the gun issue, and drops most of it. As best I can tell, the Council of Governments is kind of like a United Nations for Washington Metro Area Counties. I had never heard of it.

 

Gun control supporters in Washington State are about 70 of the way to their goal of getting a background check measure on the ballot. The ballot measure, Initiative 594, can be found here. The vast majority of people who will vote on it, one way or another, will never read it. That is the idea. What will appear on the ballot won’t include the details. Again, this bill would make it a crime to teach someone to shoot, because it criminalizes any temporary transfer not “necessary to prevent such imminent death or great bodily harm.” They are essentially trying to get Schumer’s background check bill passed in Washington State on the sly, by hiding it behind a ballot measure that will tell voters exactly none of those little details and gotchas. The details of Schumer’s proposal and Washington’s Initiative 594 are similar, but the essence is the same. Temporary transfer is criminalized except through narrow exceptions. It will cost a great deal of money to try to educate enough gun owners as to what this ballot measure really does, and to whip up opposition. But Bloomberg is smart to fight on these grounds. Every gun owner in Washington is going to get to get involved if we’re going to have a prayer of defeating this.