Yesterday was mostly a bevy of clients demanding attention, then later in the day, the weather was just too nice not to do some work I’ve been putting off in the backyard. So I didn’t get much in the way of posting done until late yesterday evening. I thought today would be a good day to have the weekly gun news, and hope for more worthy news later in the day.
Hey gun control folks, how’s that campaign using the Waco biker gang shootout to derail open carry in Texas going? The good news is that’s pissing off the right people. The people who are trying to use this to stop open carry should have to explain how open carry would have made a difference, given none of the bikers were open carrying.
Speaking of pissing off the right people, that seems to have happened with our recent court victory in DC.
It’s difficult to stand up for due process when the media can savage you like this. This is not the only article I’ve seen along these lines.
Of course they are: Obama Administration against CMP 1911 sales.
Dave Hardy’s “Of Arms and the Law” is three years ahead of the mainstream media news cycle! Apparently some Dem insiders were worried back in 1994, when Clinton decided to do gun control, that it might lead to Majority Leader Bob Dole. So one of them wrote George Snuffaluffagus, or however you spell it. Well, short of it is, they didn’t listen, and Bob Dole did become majority leader.
Another long time traditional gun blog bites the dust. It’s a rough climate out there for non-professionals. Everyone with a dime to gamble on new media ventures wants in on the gun thing, and who can blame them? Guns are the only “right leaning” issue coming out of the Obama years better off than when it went in. Of course, that’s largely because it’s not really a strictly right leaning issue.
The Supreme Court of the United States is weighing another gun issue in regards to San Francisco’s safe storage laws. Safe storage, of course, meaning it has to be stored in a manner that renders it useless for self-defense.
The key word here is that the man had a license to carry firearms. Warning shots are never a good idea.
NRA is planning  major voter outreach effort in 2016. Polls show approximately 1/5th to 1/4 of Democratic voters are inclined toward gun rights. If NRA really wants to be able to continue to target wayward politicians, they need to target those voters.
Tam notes that the media discovered there was, brace yourselves here, a cache of gun parts in a gun factory. Scarebleu!
Hey, maybe gun control can do great things for America, like it has for Brazil.
Well, that was mighty nice of them, given that’s what the law says: ATF rules that FFLs can rent handguns and ammunition to 18-20 year olds.
Progress in Minnesota. Unfortunately, it looks like Dayton has found his excuse to veto the whole ball of wax, without having to make it look like it’s all about guns. Omnibus Bills can work both ways when dealing with an intransigent executive.
Ace of Ace of Spades on Dems and gun control: “A religious devotion? An offering to the God of Government? The Democrats’ proposed laws increasingly look like prayers in legislative language.”
Pressure mounting to pass National Reciprocity. It would be fun to try to get this done under Obama, by attaching it to some Bill That Can’t Be Vetoed. But he could always throw a hissy fit, like Governor Mark Dayton of Minnesota. But if things go well for the GOP in 2016, it would be nice not to leave this as their, “Well, we did this for you, so shut up and keep voting,” issue.
Off Topic:
As someone who, as a kid, watched Letterman in his prime, I have to agree with Ace on this one: “Tonight, Dave Letterman retires. But he quit a long time ago.”
Richard Dreyfuss: “Election Coming: Nobody Knows Anything.” I’m not one to pay much attention to celebrities, but I don’t think this is a partisan issue. We don’t teach civics anymore. The generation coming up is woefully uneducated in civic life, civic matters, and history. I don’t think this is just me getting old.
This is a good piece on Elon Musk’s space dream. Oh, if only I had enough money in my 20s to be negotiating with cigar smoking drunk Russians to buy an ICBM. Even better if I could figure out I could build it cheaper myself!
How to take over a small country in 10 easy steps. This was a great laugh reading during a car ride over the weekend. Hat tip to Dave Hardy.
That letter from Jody Powell is quite damning, and one that should be circulated to all congressional Dems every time they contract a case of “sudden gun control syndrome.” I don’t know how anyone could put it any better in terms of the political ramifications of gun control laws.
You can generally tell if a gun control bill is a real threat by looking at who is sponsoring it. If it’s all far left urbanite Congressmen, it isn’t even meant to pass. (And though I’ll get crucified for saying it, if it’s Congressional Black Caucus members sponsoring it, you can relax knowing it won’t go anywhere. Don’t call me a racist; it’s the Dem leaders who assign the black people to put on this minstrel show, not me). If it has “moderate” support, it’s something they really want and intend to get.
Oddly, the presence of Republican co-sponsors does not necessarily mean it’s for real; Mike Castle, for instance, often signed onto extreme anti-gun measures. Many “moderate” Republicans are actually left wing extremists who would be rightly seen as what they are, if not for the R after their names.
If we can get National Reciprocity, I wonder if we can start pushing (via the 14th amendment and the LEOSA precedents) to require that the states must allow anyone to use “self-defense” as a “justifiable need” and limit “against the public interest” to “being a (federally) prohibited person.” IE, force shall issue without going to a federal system.
With the trifecta of reciprocity, issue for self-defense, and issue to anyone not a felon, that should basically clear the board for general carry. Then we can work on “sensitive areas.”
We could, but I think a higher priority should be to use the 14th Amendment to forbid states from enacting gun restrictions stronger than federal law. I think you might have a lot of trouble getting the necessary 60 votes for that in the Senate, however.
Ownership restrictions bother me a lot more than carry restrictions.
That’s basically forcing the states to interpret “against the public interest” as being no stricter than the federal “prohibited persons” restriction, a subset of the above suggestion.
The only other thing I’d like to see is removal of waiting periods and forcing shall-issue/immediate issue for purchase permits. The delays are ostensibly to allow background checks, which are nigh-instant these days (or should be, anyway). Maybe force that first before going for the carry loosening.
Goals… very power things, they.
At the end of all this should be Hughes and the eventual end of the NFA. We can do it. And I do agree with Sebastian regarding prioritizing the end of ownership restrictions.
“The generation coming up is woefully uneducated in civic life, civic matters, and history. I don’t think this is just me getting old.”
No, that’s not just you getting old, and even more unfortunate, it’s not a new phenomenon.
I never had a “civics” class, even under another name; none was offered or provided. And every “U.S. History” class I’ve ever taken (even up through college) covered the names and dates of every founding document, but not one (again, even up through college) covered the contents at any level of detail.
In short, everything I know about the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and Bill of Rights, I learned on my own, at my own time and expense, usually by simply reading the documents, but even that paltry measure is apparently too much to ask of our students and teachers!
(Then again, I can see why the teachers and school administrators wouldn’t want to cover the contents of those documents, especially the Bill of Rights. It’d be a painful thorn in the side of the indoctrinators for a student to understand them and insist on his/her right to parental and/or legal representation if the office admins wanted to search his/her person, backpack, or locker to support an accusation of “contraband”.)
It seems that some time ago a decision was made that the lockers are school property thus a warrant is not needed. I may be confusing it with my time in the Navy where that was the case. We were required to have the sailor present when the search was conducted.
The third-party doctrine is a pernicious blight upon the 4th amendment.
“The generation coming up is woefully uneducated in civic life, civic matters, and history. I don’t think this is just me getting old.”
I’m a generation ahead of you, so maybe this is me getting old, but I don’t think my (or older) generations know a single thing more — they just like to flatter themselves that they do.
I think it was either Mark Twain or H.L. Mencken who said, approximately, that the trouble with Americans wasn’t that they didn’t know enough, but that most of what they did know was wrong.
Along the way to my age, I was from time to time “educated” on civic matters or history or law by loons purveying utter nonsense. Many of us never overcame that education.
And last — my wife taught fifth grade history for a few years in the late 1980s and 1990s. I saw the curriculum content, and it was far better than what we studied in high school, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It contained information I hadn’t encountered during my proverbial “twenty years of schoolin'”, and didn’t learn until I was nearly forty. My theory is that more and better information is being taught now than then, but kids see no practical reason for learning or retaining it.
“My theory is that more and better information is being taught now than then, but kids see no practical reason for learning or retaining it.”
There might be some truth in this. It’s kinda like the “Why do I need to learn algebra? When will I ever use this in the real world?” knee-jerk response, when in fact your brain instinctively performs algebra to figure things out every day; the math class is just teaching to consciously harness and use the ability.
What were your wife’s students’ grades like? My history classes seemed to have poorer grade performance than even the dreaded algebra classes (which I loved, but I’m a math geek). Most of the students weren’t history buffs and weren’t engaged at all, and the dry reading and memorization of facts and dates gets pretty boring at times. The best civics/history information or curriculum in the world won’t help if the students aren’t engaged and convinced it is (or will be) useful.
“What were your wife’s students’ grades like?”
I have to admit I never followed up on that, nor heard my wife commenting on it one way or the other. I therefor assume the grade distribution was “typical” compared to other subjects. Probably a small-sample representation of the old bell curve.
I also can’t swear that the kids were tested in a very challenging way. The curriculum may have presented some excellent information, but maybe the expectations of retention were not proportionately higher.
I observe that most of us come to appreciate history more as we age. A simple example of that is, it is rare that younger people will get very into family genealogy, and people who do tend to be middle aged or older. Everyone I know says they could kick themselves for not questioning older relatives who have since passed away, as what they simply remembered had to be a treasure-trove of real history. I think it takes a certain amount of age experience before you begin to appreciate the “poetry” of day-to-day living.
On a bit of that tangent, I am more and more appreciating that my mostly-ordinary experience of living through the Vietnam Era was actually history, while at the time it just seemed like shit that was happening to me.
It seems Minnesota ‘s governor changed his mind and will sign the omnibus bill. Thanks to GOCRA, MNGOPAC, our legislators and the thousands of citizens who contacted Dayton’s office.
We did it! Second the thanks to MNGOCRA, MNGOPAC, the legislators and the thousands that inundated Dayton’s office with calls and emails. Grass Roots (not astroturf) can get it done. Having some homebrew tonight to celebrate.
I’d like to take a few moments to refute the claim that Sebastian made in the original post, about warning shots never being a good idea. If you’re about to board a ship, so that you could loot the passengers and cargo, then a warning shot across the bow shows that you mean business. Similarly, if you are in a bank, a good warning shot or two into the ceiling is a good indication that the bank tellers need to give you all the money in the vault right now, because otherwise people are going to get hurt. And, of course, a well-placed warning shot is a good way to get someone to talk, or to keep someone from trespassing on your turf.
Now, warning shots for self-defense purposes? Those are absolutely terrible! If you feared for your life, then why aren’t you shooting the guy? (Now that I think about it, for self-defense purposes, it’s probably generally a good idea to shoot most people who fire a warning shot*, because they are done specifically to demonstrate that your life is in danger. Granted, if it’s a gangster shooting your kneecaps while you’re tied in a chair, there might not be much you can do, but that’s a different issue entirely…)
*I have to say most people, and not all, because there are the idiots who follow Joe Biden’s advice, who otherwise mean well. While they may be a danger to themselves and others, they generally mean no harm otherwise, and you could probably find yourself in deep legal water if you shoot such a person.
You are correct. In those circumstances I would agree it would be a good thing. Though, you probably shouldn’t be robbing banks :)