Month: November 2013

So demands a town in Massachusetts. In recent years, it seems like in places where the left runs things, it’s being treated less and less like a right than it was before the Heller and McDonald rulings.

The selectman said state law requires Massachusetts gun owners to keep their firearms locked away or rendered inoperable.

The problem, he said, is that police do not have the authority, granted by a local ordinance, to enforce the law and inspect the safeguarding of guns at the homes of the 600 registered gun owners in town.

To channel Glenn Reynolds: tar and feathers. This is police state level stuff. If I lived in this town, I’d already be planning the lawsuit.

UPDATE: More from Days of our Trailers on this topic.

Bitter has had her say about Dick Metcalfe’s response, and now I’m going to address the questioned he asked for those who disagreed with many aspects of his article.

Difficult as it may be for some to believe, To those who have expressed their vigorous opposition to the content of the December column (and to my continued existence on this planet), I would pose these questions:

1. If you believe the 2nd Amendment should be subject to no regulation at all, do you therefore believe all laws prohibiting convicted violent repeat criminals from having guns are unconstitutional? Should all such laws be repealed?

Do I believe the courts will hold them as constitutional? Or do I personally think they are unconstitutional? There are a lot of things I think the courts should do that they won’t, because our courts are often more concerned with not upsetting legislative and precedential apple carts than they are about fealty to the Constitution. My personal belief is that the law as currently structured is unconstitutional, but because it violates 5th or 14th Amendment due process rights rather than violating the Second Amendment directly. Congress and States could pass a prohibition on firearms as part of sentencing for certain crimes. I even think some misdemeanors could come with temporary prohibitions as part of a sentence for a crime. But criminal defendants should know what’s on the line when they accept a plea or go to trial. Retroactively going back and suggesting that anyone convicted of X has now been stripped of their right to bear arms ought to be a violation of their due process rights.

2. Do you also believe all laws establishing concealed-carry licenses are unconstitutional?

I believe that fundamental rights should not be subject to licensing by the government. If the courts had real courage they’d toss every single state licensing requirement for ownership or carrying of firearms out the window. But they won’t, because we already lost that battle when the Court discovered marrying was a fundamental right, but nonetheless subject to licensing by the state. I actually think licensing carry is more odious to the Constitution than licensing ownership, because people don’t generally change residences all that often, but I might want to carry in 5 different states in a day under normal and regular circumstances. Nonetheless, I fully expect the courts will endorse licensing of gun ownership and carry. If we’re exceedingly lucky, the courts will rule that state officials can’t exercise much discretion over who gets one. It’ll take less, but still a large amount of luck to get the courts to rule that states can’t require applicants to articulate a justifiable need. Most likely, I think, is the courts will bend over backwards to maintain the status quo in regards to carry laws.

3. Do you have a concealed-carry license anyway?

Yes, because I want to be able to carry, and even if I didn’t, I’d have one anyway because my state makes even unloaded carry of a handgun in a vehicle legally problematic if you don’t. Yes, I’d rather not go to jail.

4. Are you thereby violating the Constitution yourself?

Who even argues this? I think DUI checkpoints ought to be unconstitutional too, but does that doesn’t mean I’m violating the Constitution every time I decide to pull over one rather than run down the cops, or getting in a high speed chase with them? The Constitution is meant to restrain government, not private behavior. If they want to put up hoops between me and my rights, it’s up to me to decide whether or not I want to jump through them. Like Bitter mentioned, I think this hits to the root of what people are upset about. It’s not that he tried to open a discussion, it’s more than he doesn’t even understand the framework through which rights theoretically function. Readers and advertisers of Guns & Ammo have simply decided that this is unacceptable in today’s climate.

Via John Richardson, I saw that Dick Metcalf published a response to all the turmoil he created with his recent gun control column in Guns & Ammo. I applaud Jim Shepherd for giving him the space to do it since I think we can learn quite a bit from his response. I’ll start with the easy and obvious parts that had me rolling my eyes.

Do not 2nd Amendment adherents also believe in Freedom of Speech?

Ah, yes, rather than address the specific issue, he resorts to implying that those who disagree don’t believe in freedom. This is a message to Dick: The Bill of Rights is a limit on government powers to silence you (in the case of the First Amendment), not a promise for any job you want with any private company you desire to work with and a free pass to say anything you want or behave any way you want without consequence from other private citizens. By trying to play this card, Metcalf is going into what I like to call Full Dixie Chicks Mode. The Chicks were outraged that their political rantings weren’t fully accepted by their audience and were stunned that the same audience simply decided not to buy future products. It’s the same situation here. The Bill of Rights does not provide a guarantee that someone has to keep giving you money when you say something that they fundamentally disagree with.

Do Americans now fear open and honest discussion of different opinions about important Constitutional issues? … In today’s political climate within the community of firearms owners, even to open a discussion about whether 2nd Amendment rights can be regulated at all, is to be immediately and aggressively branded as anti-gun and anti-American by outspoken hard-corps pro-gunners who believe the answer is an absolute “NO!”

This is denial, folks. The fact is that serious conversations on various gun control schemes and whether or not they pass constitutional muster happen all of the time in our issue. This site has played host to many of them, and they don’t devolve into the simple scream of “NO!” that Metcalf claims happens when someone even opens the discussion. Look at the kind of legal and academic discussions that happen at the Volokh Conspiracy on this issue. The fact is that we, the audience that Guns & Ammo needs to sell to, have already been having these discussions for years. Don’t blame the audience for how they read your column, Dick. Evidence abounds that the audience is more than capable of having the discussions you claim they can’t handle.

I am also fully aware that the different rights enumerated in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and following amendments are different, and are regulated differently. But they are all regulated in some form or fashion, hopefully appropriate to their particular provisions.

Okay, this one made me laugh out loud. Ask Sebastian, I couldn’t hold back the chuckle. Dick, can you please enlighten me on the extensive regulatory system at either the state or federal level on what concessions we citizens have to make on quartering of troops? I’d like to know more about these regulations that apply to how we compromise on the Third Amendment.

This actually highlights a larger issue that Sebastian has noticed as well. It’s pretty clear that Metcalf thought he could just spout off amendment numbers without really thinking about what he was saying. He probably never expected that a reader would question why he said what he did about the Third Amendment because he probably assumes that his readers know little to nothing about the Third Amendment. That’s where he, and much of the industry, continues to misjudge the audience.

I’m not going to argue that every pro-gun person is a published academic or a scholar on obscure constitutional law. However, the pro-Second Amendment audience is far more serious about the issue today than they were 10 or 20 years ago. Like any political movement, there are certainly people who only understand it at the bumper sticker level, but the vast majority have a better understanding of the legal complications than they did two decades ago. The shifting landscape and the realization that no matter what the anti-gun groups try to claim, they really are trying to come after pretty much every gun ever made, have forced that education on most gun owners.

Even looking at the questions that Metcalf poses to “challenge” his opponents in the end of his response, it seems clear to me that he didn’t stop to choose his words carefully. He opens up the door to debate on whether or not licensing carry is a violation of the Second Amendment, but then ends by asking if the possession of a license by a citizen is therefore a violation itself. That doesn’t even make sense, and it’s certainly not an argument that I have ever seen made anywhere hosting a serious debate. I’ve seen it argued that participating in the licensing system is empowering a perception that discretionary licensing of rights is acceptable, but never to say that the mere possession of a license is the actual constitutional violation. The fact that Metcalf apparently sees no distinction between those two arguments is just baffling and certainly leaves me with the impression that he is the one who isn’t serious about having a discussion on the gun issue.

When I read Metcalf’s response, what I see is a man who is feeling extremely defensive, and not at all ready to acknowledge that the industry and world around him are changing. I’m not sure that any sentence sums up his disconnect from the community any better than this:

Do voices from cyberspace now control how and why business decisions are made?

It’s as if he doesn’t even comprehend that those “voices” are the very customers and readers of Guns & Ammo and purchasers of the firearms products advertised in the pages. Not everyone may be a subscriber, but they are all part of the target market.

The industry is shifting. The markets are adapting. The audience, as a whole, is more sophisticated. I think the evidence suggests that it’s Metcalf who isn’t ready to have a serious discussion on these topics, not his audience.

Another topic people have been speaking about lately is “How do we create a pro-gun insurgency within the Democratic Party.” This is a great, worthwhile topic, because if the gun issue enjoys bipartisan support, our fortunes won’t rise and fall with a single party. So what drives success? What’s driven our success, and this works regardless of party affiliation, is the single issue voter, and it is through the single issue voter that we can win among Democrats too.

Reality is that most of us here aren’t single issue voters, but I think most of us are near single issue voters. In other words, I’d be hard pressed to vote for anyone who’s a hard core Bloomberg-backed gun control supporter, regardless of party. But I’d also be hard pressed to vote for a true communist, fascist, socialist, or theocratic candidate just because I agreed with him on gun rights. I voted for Bob Casey in 2006, despite Santorum carrying an NRA endorsement in that race, and knowing that Casey’s A rating was a promise (at the time, now we know it was a lie) rather than a record, because Santorum had pissed me off on too many other issues. So the single issue has its limits. But nonetheless it ranks very high in my political calculus, as it does most of yours. We have to have these folks in both parties in order to win, and that means getting more people to politically identify as gun owners. It doesn’t matter worth a damn whether someone owns a gun or not, what matters is whether they politically identify as gun owners. One of my biggest fears is that we continue to improve our standing in polling and public opinion, but start losing the single-issue voters necessary to keep winning elections. The former doesn’t mean squat if you can’t keep the latter growing too.

In truth we’ve already seen how a pro-gun insurgency works in the Democratic Party, because it happened between 2004 and 2006 with the Blue Dog wave that swept the Democrats into power. The Democrats had been in the political wilderness for some time, and gun control got much of the blame from Democratic strategists, so they started running candidates whose views on gun rights reflected those of the districts they were running in. Combine that with broad dissatisfaction with the GOP, and you had a recipe for the Democrats taking the House and Senate. We actually did quite well in the 2006-2010 Congress. Better than we’ve done since, in fact. The problem is that the Democratic strategists thought they could piss off their districts on every other issue and that gun rights would be enough to save them. They were wrong.

So how did we get from a Democratic House and Senate being willing to pass things like National Park Carry to where we are now? Well, because the Chicago political machine are talented snake oil salesmen who have convinced Democrats that gun control is a winning issue rather than a losing one. Additionally, conventional wisdom in progressive-left circles is that Obama has created a new progressive-left coalition that is destained to forge a permanent majority, so they no longer have to care what those cousin humpers in flyover country really think. This delusion is believable, because the Republicans have been floating some spectacularly awful candidates, and have been weakened severely by infighting between the tea party and the establishment. But the Democrats can’t count on that to go on forever. Part of making the Democrats pro-gun again is just to create a perception that gun control is a losing issue by continuing to defeat anti-gun Democrats, and to do that, we need single-issue Dems that are willing to cross the aisle when it counts. I think the overwhelming defeat of Angela Giron in Colorado is strong evidence that such folks exist.

So that’s what we ultimately need: single issue voters in the Democratic Party willing to vote in Democratic primaries for pro-gun candidates, and become involved enough in their local party races so that the people in the party know that there’s a gun vote to be pandered to. More importantly that those party leaders know that that gun vote will cross the aisle in a heartbeat if an anti-gun candidate wins. There really isn’t any insurgency involved. It just takes winning elections.