Looks like Legal Insurrection (a legal blog) and Judicial Watch think there might be gold in them thar documents. If David Gregory hadn’t been a celebrity, he’d be in jail already. It’ll be interesting to see if the DC OC marchers will see such displays of prosecutorial discretion in their favor. Yeah, I don’t think so either.
Year: 2013
Ten!
Kevin Baker’s blog turns 10. Kevin has been at this game longer than most of us, and he was one of the blogs I was reading before I blogged. How hard is it to blog ten years? Hard. There’s always dry patches, and times when you just aren’t feeling it, or times like this week, where you’re busy, and even if you weren’t, the news cycle is on some other topic that you don’t write about. So getting to 10, and still producing good material is quite an achievement.
I’d Like a Phaser Too
A Massachusetts Democrat introduces a bill in the House that would mandate smart guns, because he says the technology totally exists. I think what we really need is a Smart Congress Law… a technology that would automatically recognize the Constitution and only allow lawmaking duly authorized.
Obama’s Troubles
Given we only cover the gun fight, I haven’t spoken too much about Obama’s scandal woes, with the IRS harassing political enemies, Benghazi, and now this AP/DOJ scandal. But that’s not to say there’s no gun rights connection at all. The weaker this Administration is, the safer our gun rights are going to be. An embattled Obama Administration is not going to have the political clout to twist arms in order to flip votes. It will have less time, energy, and political capital to spend pushing any gun control agenda. So let us hope this Administration remains embroiled in scandal. It can only help our gun rights.
MAIG Mayor Defeated
Someone sent me this article that the Mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, a MAIG mayor, has been defeated. Any defeat of a Bloomberg Mayor is good news, but the question is whether his involvement was a factor in the election, and whether the new Mayor of Omaha, Jean Stothert, won’t also be joining. Targeting MAIG mayors would actually be somewhat easy, since a lot of these small town elections can be swung by only a handful of votes. Unfortunately, while a lot of our folks know the villain Bloomberg well, they don’t pay close attention to what their mayors are doing when it comes to guns. Does your town have a MAIG mayor? If so, you and a handful of friends may be enough to sway the election.
Sorry Again for Posting Delays
Been sitting in our new space all day waiting for PECO to show up to fix our power. After a few problems with a bad fiber splice to our building, FiOS is now up and running. But we still have no power. I’m having to run everything off my deep cycle marine battery and an inverter. Apparently PECO installed the meter, and it’s been spinning happily since they installed it two weeks ago. The only problem is that it’s not powering our bay, so we’ve been kindly providing power to another tenant for two weeks now. PECO says we’ll need to call an electrician, because all they care about is that we have power, but I’m pretty sure they activated our account with the wrong meter. It may be a bit of a fight to make them understand it’s their problem, and not ours. Then I suppose they’ll need to figure out who’s supposed to be paying for the electricity they are charging us for.
I guess the government isn’t the only bit of frustration when it comes to starting up a new business.
Guns are Good Fundraisers
We all knew this, but apparently it’s still a bit of a surprise to the media. The Chester County Sheriff’s Department managed to raise around $20,000 raffling off an AR-15 and a bolt-action rifle.
This particular raffle drew the ire of the anti-gun crowd even after the Sheriff’s Department made very clear in the media that winners would undergo background checks. It really just goes to show that they aren’t about legal gun ownership at all.
Yeah, Been There, Done That
Joan Peterson, our favorite Brady Board Member, brings up the topic of concealing while bowling. Been there, done that.
Would you expect that there would be people at the local bowling alley carrying guns for self protection? I mean, what could possibly go wrong? There’s a lot of moving around when you bowl and a lot of families with kids at a bowling alley, depending on the time of day. Also, most often, beer and other alcohol is served at most bowling alleys.
Personally, I don’t drink when I bowl. Bitter will tell you that I take my bowling very seriously. It’s a family thing. I learned to bowl from my mother and grandmother. I even have a big trophy in my living room I won with my mother. I think I cracked 200 in the only game I’ve ever bowled with Bitter, and I hadn’t bowled for a while. I sometimes miss it, but just don’t have the time. But I have been bowling several times since I started carrying, and I don’t find it to be a particular challenge.
Either way, the story Joan links to tells the tale of a man who hit his pocket revolver with a bowling ball in it went off. To our opponents, guns are just bad, you see. There’s no way to do anything with them that’s responsible, especially not carry them. If you carry a gun you are being reckless. That’s just all there is to it. They regularly point to “trained” people who also do stupid things. What they don’t accept, and will never accept, is that there are people on this planet to revel in ignorance, and that no amount of training will relieve them of. To our opponents that means no one should carry, but how is that any way to run a free society? By that standard, we should absolutely, positively never give anyone a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roads. Just today, Bitter and I were on our way to a meeting, and noticed a guy swerving wildly on the road. I figured it might be a drunk, but upon very cautiously passing him, we noticed he was reading a magazine — literally staring down at a magazine he had propped open on the steering wheel. At that point we both were so very glad that our state legislators, in their infinite wisdom, chose to protect the public from the dangers of texting while driving. What Joan Peterson wants is the same kind of “every problem is a nail that requires the hammer of legislation,” that lead to our legislators trying to outlaw a symptom of “some people are morons and there’s just not a whole hell of a lot you can do about it.”
Going to Need a Bigger Gun
I might need to start carrying my Smith & Wesson 629 if this kind of headline keeps appearing in my neighborhood. Maybe open carrying long arms in the ‘burbs isn’t such a bad idea after all.
On Federal Preemption
It’s hard to work through the news of the day to find something to write about waiting for the Verizon guy to run the fiber connection into our bay. But typing a post out on the iPad I can do. A topic that was discussed with some of the academic folks at NRA Annual Meeting is saving the folks in Blue America using the federal government. At this point, it’s mostly wishful thinking. National reciprocity is the only preemptive measure NRA has put on the table, but that is a measure that benefits Red America more than Blue America. In the long term, as I’ve said in a previous post, we can’t tolerate two Americas.
There are several powers of Congress under which this can be accomplished. The familiar ones are the commerce clause and Congress’ Section 5 power of the 14th Amendment. But the Supreme Court has slowly been taking a more narrow information of the commerce clause, and any exercise of the 14 Amendment power runs squarely into the case of City of Boerne v. Flores, which essentially says that the federal courts, and not Congress get to determine the scope of a right.
But when it comes to preempting state bans, and other state restrictions, I think there maybe a power of Congress upon which such an action may most firmly rest:
To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;
To provide and maintain a navy;
To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;
To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
I would argue that it is both necessary and proper for Congress to execute laws that preempt state laws that prohibit or frustrate the ability of ordinary citizens to own, transport, and practice with ordinary small arms, such as, but not necessarily limited to, the AR-15, Beretta 92F, M1911, etc. Congress needs individuals familiar with arms and shooting, in order to have an effective militia from which it may draw to raise an army. I even think in this age of terrorism, National Reciprocity could be plausibly based on Congress’ militia powers.
We ought to be skeptical of federal power, which can used for ill as readily as good, but I don’t see any other means to prevent the spread of this cancer of ignorance. Either we restore a healthy shooting culture to Blue America, or we watch the cancer slowly spread. Colorado was a real wake-up call that we may need to rethink our priorities. If they can beat us in Colorado, it won’t be long before we start losing in other swing states. It wouldn’t be long before they had the votes to screw the rest of us federally anyway. It’s something to think about.