2014 – Page 11 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Tracking the Judicial Nominees

John Richardson has a great post outlining his research on a North Carolina judicial candidate whose name sounded a little familiar. It turns out that it’s because of his anti-gun statements in legal proceedings during his previous jobs.

Being an informed voter is vital to protecting your rights. For a quick guide, NRA has already released at least some of their grades for this year.

In Pennsylvania, we’re still waiting on some votes to take place on preemption (though it did just pass the House for the last time today, now it goes to the Senate), so we only have Congressional grades at this point.

Gun Nut Movie Review Disagreement

Caleb watched The Purge so you don’t have to and then reviewed it from a self-defense perspective. However, even though I have not seen the movie, not ever seen a single preview for this movie, and have less experience doing self-defense training with firearms, I know there is something fundamentally wrong in his review.

…if youâ€™re under imminent threat, you get everyone in a central, easily defended location. I would consider the house to be under imminent threat for the entire 12 hours of the Purge, so before the event started, everyone would be ushered into the safe-room/bunker, which would be nicely equipped with cots, video games, food, weapons, and security monitors, and weâ€™d all stay there. For 12 hours. Spending 12 hours with your family is a small price to pay for not getting murdered.

There are plenty of families for whom spending 12 uninterrupted hours together would be a guaranteed recipe for murder. I personally think his advice should have come with a disclaimer on that one.

I was mostly disappointed to learn that movies don’t always teach good self-defense techniques. This means that I might need to reconsider the method learned from my favorite crappy sci-fi flicks: nukes solve everything.

Blaming Ebola on the NRA

At first, I couldn’t believe the headline. But it’s real. MSNBC is really arguing that NRA is responsible for Ebola issues in the United States. Really.

The stupid is just a little much today.

Gun Control Off the Voter Radar

In this profile of planned gun control group election spending, there’s a key nugget of information quite relevant for the gun control crowd:

The subject barely registers in polling that shows voters far more focused on the economy and terrorism. This weekâ€™s Associated Press-GfK poll showed less than 1 percent of likely voters named guns as the nationâ€™s top issue â€” a view that many House and Senate contests reflect.

It’s not completely surprising given headlines that make it appear like the new normal includes workplace beheadings and organ-liquifying diseases around the country.

That said, that also means our people also aren’t that engaged on the political front, or they are more motivated by other issues than guns. If something else is pissing them off to get engaged for our candidates, that’s still great. Though, if that description fits you, make sure campaigns and politicians know that you’re also motivated by gun rights. Telling a campaign coordinator that you’re motivated by Second Amendment issues goes much father than telling a pollster.

A Blessing and a Curse

By now, most of you have probably heard about Defense Distributed’s october surprise. They have chosen to make CNC milling more accessible to the masses with a machine that you can use to make receivers for about $1500. It looks like the mill starts with an 80% lower. The Wired article talks about how milling machines typically cost tens of thousands of dollars, but there are affordable mills out there that you could do more with.

My friend Jason, who has experimented with making firearms and written about it here on this blog, has a Taig mill. It would cost you a few hundred more dollars to build a protective enclosure around it, which he would recommend, since he once had a bit break off and fly across the room and embed itself in the wall before he decided to build one. This is, of course, about double the price of DD’s mill, but with a full blown Taig setup, you can make receivers from a block of aluminum.

Nonetheless, this move significantly increases the accessibility of home built firearms, and I believe that is going to be both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing, because it is now irrefutably true that gun control can never work. It is a curse because there are plenty of political elites who haven’t yet figured that out, and this gives them a new issue.

3D printing and CNC milling is new as a mass market technology (it’s existed for a long time, but only as industrial technology that was priced beyond what an ordinary consumer could afford). Being a new technology it’s going to scare people. People are more easily frightened Â by technologies they don’t understand, and between all the billionaires arrayed against us, and a media able and eager to whip up public fears about guns, we could end up in a tough spot.

Our opponents in the gun ban movement have always had more luck with issues that don’t affect all that many gun owners. Remember that when the assault weapons hysteria was at its zenith in the late 80s and early 90s, not very many gun owners were familiar with the AR-15 or AK family. High-power shooters were still using the M1A, largely. That unfamiliarity bred opportunity for our opponents, because as long as you could keep your M1s, M1As, M1 Carbines, and Mini-14s, they had a lot more leeway to get theÂ ratchet on the nut, which could always be tightened later.

The way I see it, the gun ban crowd has several options to deal with this:

They could change the definition of an unfinished lower. This could be done at a whim, as what constitutes an 80% lower is ATF policy, not federal regulation. It wouldn’t even require ATF going through formal rule making. They could declare tomorrow that now that 80% lowers are firearms, and create a new 70% standard.
They could require an FFL for all manufacturing and end home gun making. This would require an act of Congress. It would be completely useless to control people manufacturing with criminal intent, but there are plenty of people out there among the public, and even more in elected office, who are quite happy to criminalize behavior that frightens them, and they don’t think anyone should be doing anyway.
They could restrict CNC and 3D printing technology as a whole. I view this as the least likely option, but if more people find things to do with this technology that scares political elites, you could see a move for this.

So far we have not had any majorÂ issues with criminals utilizing this technology. I believe the reason for this is economic — you can buy a gun off the streets in most crime ridden neighborhoods cheaper than you could make one using a CNC machine or a 3D printer. If a criminal want an untraceable gun, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to dremel the serial number off a gun than to make one from scratch in a garage. But that won’t get us off the hook. A lone wolf criminal or nutcase using this technology in a high-profile incident could be all the pretext the politicians, media, and gun control crowd need to get the ball rolling to restrict home gun building and gun smithing.

I believe Cody Wilson* is playing with fire. I’m not saying he shouldn’t do it, but we all should be aware of what’s going on here, and not kid ourselves. This might convince some people who were already disposed to be skeptical of gun control that it is now impossible, but it’s just as likely to frighten the hell out of the type of people who are easily frightened by new and scary things. Which type of person do you think there are more of?

* Pssst, Cody…. The BYO community could really use a decent home anodization kit. Just saying.

Another Response to Jan Morgan

I believe this response goes farther than either Caleb or I did in excoriating Jan Morgan from banning muslims from her gun range, much of which I agree with. Reading some of the comments over at Caleb’s post, I was struck by how many folks don’t really get the context under which we’re arguing, so I thought I’d take a minute to explain it.

The key law at work in this context is Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws discrimination based on race color, religion, or national origin in “public accommodations.” When most people talk about the Civil Rights Act, they usually mean the 1964 Act. There could be some debate about whether a gun range is a public accommodation under the act, but I think it would be quite surprising if a court were to agree that it is not. There had been an attempt in the Civil Rights Act of 1875Â to use the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to reach a similar result, but the Supreme Court said no. The 1964 act relied heavily on Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce. So it has been established law for some time that this type of discrimination is unlawful.

There are some who argue that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went too far in regulating private behavior and limiting property rights. Barry Goldwater was one of the more famous opponents to Title II of the Civil Rights Act, but it’s likely his opposition cost him his bid for the Presidency. I do believe the libertarian argument against Title II of CRA64 is a legitimate one, is not based in a desire to perpetuate racism, or beyond debate. But politically,Â I’ve written before,Â opposition to CRA 64 is a non-starter, and probably will continue to be for some time.

It’s worth making sure people understand what the law currently says about what Jan Morgan is doing, and why I think that makes her a distasteful person to have on “our side.” Opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has never been a winning political position, and she’s bound to lose any lawsuit. This was attention grabbing, pure and simple.

Alan Gura in Harvard Law Review

The Second Amendment as a Normal Right. It is rightfully harsh on how some federal circuit courts have treated the Second Amendment. Here’s an expert:

Suppose a state were to prohibit abortion at 20 weeks of gestation absent a doctorâ€™s certificate of â€œmedical emergency,â€ invoking â€œdocumented risks to womenâ€™s health and the strong medical evidence that unborn children feel pain during an abortion at that gestational age.â€30 In a world where Kachalsky-style â€œscrutinyâ€ applied to the abortion right, it simply wouldnâ€™t be the courtsâ€™ job to second-guess a legislatureâ€™s regulatory oversight of the medical profession in the important interests of patient safety and prevention of cruelty. Yet when Arizona enacted just this law, the Ninth Circuit wasted no time striking it down:

Allowing a physician to decide if abortion is medically necessary is not the same as allowing a woman to decide whether to carry her own pregnancy to term. Moreover, regulations involve limitations as to the mode and manner of abortion, not preclusion of the choice to terminate a pregnancy altogether.31

The court properly made quick work of the theory that a fundamental right is not infringed when everyone is free to exercise it upon proving need.32 â€œThe presence of a medical exception does not make an otherwise impermissible prohibition constitutional. The adequacy of the medical exception has no bearing on whether the prohibition is permissible in the first place.â€33 Regardless of what the legislature may earnestly believe to be required in the interests of health and safety, the Supreme Court has guaranteed a womanâ€™s right to terminate pregnancy until viability.34 â€œThe twenty-week law is unconstitutional because it bans abortion at a pre-viability stage of pregnancy; no health exception, no matter how broad, could save it.â€35

Heller and McDonald leave no doubt that the Second Amendment must operate similarly, as a normal constitutional right…

Read the whole thing. The courts seem to know how to treat rights when a case involves a right that judges favor.

More Female-Oriented Political Advertising

Speaking of reaching out to more women, this is one of the first ads I’ve seen from NRA that really tries to hit at female voters.

It’s message is much closer to that of other female-centered general political advertising. It’s personal and has a specific story, which is a refreshing change from many of the ads running from the NRA commentators which are general “the world sucks and the sky is falling” kind of themes.

The fact is that advertising like this is much easier to identify with, even if someone has never been in that situation. A similar humanizing ad from Sen. Mitch McConnell is getting attention specifically because of how much it makes him seem like a real human instead of just some robot in Washington.

Just like a candidate isn’t likely to jump all over a sexual assault victim, they aren’t likely going to try and attack this woman who obviously believes that McConnell was key to her daughter’s return. These are ads that make lower information voters feel good and make them think, “Yeah, I can identify with that person if I was ever in that situation. If I can identify with them, then maybe I should consider the candidate they are backing.”

The only concern I have about NRA’s ad is that it may be assuming too much in that lower information voters have any idea who Bloomberg is backing. He’s a great guy to demonize because few people like wealthy billionaires who haven’t lived their lives telling them what to do, but that doesn’t mean they know which candidates he’s backing or exactly how he’s involved in their local races. It would be most effective if the ad was shared by local folks along with a message of which area candidates are anti-Bloomberg. Maybe that’s what we’ll see happen. With about an hour on Facebook, it’s already nearing 700 shares.

Pretty Gun Gear

I am just now starting to really like some of the efforts to market more feminine gun accessories.

For years, the extent of actual gun gear related to women was having something come in pink. Pink is fine. Plenty of women like pink, and it’s great that their market is served. But when I see pink guns, I think of how much my 6-year-old niece would like it.

I have never liked pink. When I was a girl, my preference was purple. As an adult, it’s all shades of brown and shiny like rose gold – which another company just released to the market recently.

But when I saw this pop up on Jacqueline Janes’s Facebook page, I fell in love.

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This is beautiful, and feminine, without a trace of pink.

It’s almost like men in the industry are starting to realize that adult women probably shouldn’t be exclusively marketed to like 10-year-old girls. Or, maybe women have finally taken over enough spots in the shooting world that they could now voice their opinions that the novel pink offerings are cute and all, but they aren’t really attractive. (In the case of the pretty fleur-de-lis hand guard, it’s a woman-owned company from the looks of it.) It’s nice to really start to see more variety in the pretty gun gear market.

Discriminating Gun Range?

Bob Owens has the story about a gun range that has decided to exclude muslims. I’m with Caleb of Gun Nuts Media on this one. This does not show gun owners in a good light, and merely serves to reinforce the stereotype of gun owners being ignorant bigots. This kind of discriminationÂ is also illegal, so this is certain to invite a lawsuit which Jan Morgan will lose.

She could refuse to rent to someone who came in and said “Please, I would like to rent a semi-automatic rifle so I can practice killing infidels.” But refusing to rent to someone for just being muslim would violate the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on discrimination in public accommodations.

It’s my view that this is a shameless publicity stunt done by a woman who makes money feeding the worst instincts of the political right. One problem I think the right has is too many people who make a living doing that.