Month: October 2013

With the shutdown news still dominating the cycle, here is the news:

I tend to agree with Clayton that shutdown theater won’t do the GOP any favors in the short term. The best way to turn people against Obamacare is to let them see what they’ve been voting for the past 5 years. Meanwhile, shutdown theater continues, and the media continues to spin it as all the GOP’s fault.

Does Jerry Brown want to be the next blue-state governor to sacrifice his political ambitions on the altar of gun control? Hillary certainly hopes so!

Should training be legislated? I’d still be worried there’s great potential there for some animals to be more equal than others.

Apparently there were NYPD in the gang of motorcyclists who beat up the driver. Dave Hardy points out that for Bloomberg, there were no gun deaths at least.

Gun control advocates should heed NRA’s words. That presumes that the gun control movement is actually about preventing violence, instead of just being all “Eeew… guns!”

The AP laments that B. Todd Jones is suck in a rough place. World’s smallest violin playing right here.

ATF tries to block publication of a Fast and Furious whistleblower’s book. First Amendment? What’s that?

Know your history!

Comcast, owners of NBC Sports, are dropping sponsorship of the SHOT show. NBC is owned by Comcast, who’s CEO is a huge lefty Democratic donor and was a bundler for Obama. I saved 1400 a year by dropping their crappy, overpriced cable service a few years ago and haven’t missed it.

Secession movement of some Colorado counties continues. It is actually legally permissible for a state to break apart. It has to be agreed to by the state legislature, and then Congress has to admit the break-off state into the union. It hasn’t happened since West Virginia was formed from Virginia after Virginia voted to secede at the start of the Civil War.

Gun control groups go from celebration to despair. Congress has bigger fish to fry for the moment, and no one gives a crap about their issue. The Colorado recalls also are still going to be fresh in the minds of politicians.

Anger over the SAFE Act in New York is still bringing out standing room only crowds. The unfortunate thing for New Yorkers is that the upstate people can’t outvote down state. We’re counting on the courts to save New York now, which is hardly a great place to be.

In the mean time, I would be educating those crowds in New York on jury nullification. If you think the law is unjust, you don’t have to convict anyone for violating it, no matter what lies the judge tells you. It doesn’t honestly matter what the law says, if prosecutors can’t find juries to convict on SAFE act charges, then for all practical purposes the activities it prohibits are legal. Juries are an ultimate check by the people on governmental power. Learn about your duties, try to get on juries, and vote to acquit. Hang juries if you have to.

Evie Hudak is similarly situated to Morse in terms of her district and margin in the last election. She was previously targeted for recall but organizers came up short on signatures. Now they are trying again. I’m torn between suggesting we shouldn’t press our luck and being amazed at what can happen when our people rise up in anger. Elections are the ultimate throw down in terms of the political game. That’s where you find out what each side is really made of, with reputations being both made and squandered. The first two went well. Should we risk all that on a third? Given that I tend toward caution, and I’m up in the air about it, that probably means trying a third is a wise decision.

An Indiana cop is facing felony charges for carrying in Illinois. One complication of the courts allowing licensing of a right is that it makes how to deal with things like carrying in another state awkward. The courts could certainly mandate that each state recognize the license of every other states, and Congress could also do this under their Section 5 powers of the 14th Amendment.

But the only instance we have of the courts going along with the licensing of a right are with unenumerated rights, namely the right to marry and the right to vote. The right to marry would probably be among the natural rights our founders would have agreed with, but licensing its exercise doesn’t create nearly the complications as with the right to keep and bear arms. The right to vote, prior to the 20th century, was not seen as a right, and the founders probably would not have viewed it as such. This is why we had to use constitutional amendments to grant suffrage to non-whites, women, and 18-21 year olds. But in the 20th century, the courts have ruled it’s a fundamental right, but still allow states to register voters. Again, however, the complications of registering voters is not nearly as apparent.

But the right to bear arms isn’t anything like the right to marry or the right to vote. Generally speaking, weddings are planned events. This makes it much less burdensome to require a license to do so. Every state will issue a license to people who are not residents of that state. They are only required a license to actually marry, they may enter the state to get a license or with the intention of marrying. Likewise, a person can only vote in their local jurisdiction, and only vote once. There’s very little need to travel or move while exercising these other unenumerated rights. The right to keep and bear arms, unlikely voting or marriage, is a mobile right. Indeed, while people are traveling interstate, it could be argued that’s when the need is most acute. Hopefully the courts will come to realize that licensing such a right is ultimately unworkable.

These days, it’s a good thing for us that expressions of anger and outrage have generally been enough to stay the hand of politicians who otherwise would dig themselves some gun control. That hasn’t been the case everywhere, however, and it’s important not to miss opportunity as some of these draconian laws go into effect.

The fact is that most people who shoot, hunt, or otherwise engage in activities that give them some general sympathies for the Second Amendment barely pay attention to politics at all. These are often the same people who tell pollsters they favor universal background checks, but then get pissed off and upset when they find out that means they can’t sell a gun to a friend without going through a dealer.

Well, those people are starting to find out exactly how badly they’ve been screwed up there in the Nutmeg State, as people are going to buy ammunition and being told they can’t. In Colorado, you have a District Attorney graciously telling victims of the severe flooding that he won’t prosecute anyone for storing their guns with friends, family or neighbors. Technically, it is a violation of Colorado’s new law to do such a thing, because it amounts to doing a private transfer without a background check.

Once a lot of gun owners start to understand what this stuff really means, a lot of them who don’t ordinarily pay attention get angry, and this is a prime opportunity for us. How many Elmer Fudds up in Connecticut are now going to go buy ammo for hunting season and realize that the law they thought was only about “assault weapons” was really about them too? If I were a dealer in Connecticut, I’d hand every angry patron a voter registration and tell them who did this to them. I’d even help them fill it out and mail it in for them. Then I’d hand them an application to join the NRA.

Our great successes come when we can successfully turn anger into action. As these new, draconian laws start to go into effect, we have a prime opportunity to make that conversion.

A federal district court ruling last month ruled that a Connecticut law which bans all felons from being precious metal dealers is unconstitutional, because the law failed to establish any rational basis for doing so regarding any number of felonies that don’t have elements that would be of concern to someone dealing in precious metals. Eugene Volokh points out that this is very similar to the law which bars all felons, violent or non-violent, from possessing firearms. Though he does note that the ruling is quite out of step with how the courts typically do rational basis analysis, and he expects it to be overturned on appeal.

But I tend to think there has to be some limit on the power to strip people of their right to keep and bear arms due to a criminal conviction. Otherwise what is to prevent a state from arguing that even traffic offenses are disabling? Clearly if you misuse an automobile in an irresponsible manner, we can’t trust you with a gun, can we? It would pass rational basis review. But it has to have its limits. Likewise, even under present law, a woman could be stripped of her right to keep and bear arms for pushing her husband out of the way while storming out of the house during a heated argument if the husband and/or police and prosecutors wanted to make an issue of it.