Sebastian – Page 144 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Bottle Shows & Gun Shows

For the past year, I’ve been on the hunt for bottles from my 4x great-grandfather’s bottling business, so I’ve been to a few antique bottle shows. I had no idea antique bottle collecting was really even a thing until I discovered I am descended from one of the larger Philadelphia bottlers. Today we went to a show just north of Baltimore to see what we could find.

I’m generally surprised by how similar they are in look and feel to a gun show. Standard gun shows are a bit more of a commercial enterprise, but if you’ve ever been to a decent gun show that caters to collectors, an antique bottle show is more like that. There are people who specialize. I seek out bottle collectors who either specialize in Philadelphia bottles, or who have large numbers of them in their collection. One guy I saw specialized in poison bottles. I’ve discovered that it’s a local market. You wouldn’t generally expect to find a bottle collector from Georgia with a bottle from Philadelphia, though I do check. Most bottle collectors source new bottles by digging privies, which of course is different from how gun collectors find their guns. I doubt many people dropped their roscoe down the shit hole after squeezing off a fresh one, but they did that with bottles a lot.

Demographically, the shows are more similar than you would think, bottle shows also feature a plentiful percentage of middle aged and old white guys (racist!). Bottle shows seem to have more older women than gun shows, but gun shows seem to have more young women. I’d say there are also younger men and families at a typical standard gun show. Though, I can see why someone might not want to bring their kids to a place where there’s a lot of fragile valuable things.

I doubt I’ll ever be a true bottle collector, but I can see the appeal. I didn’t think at any time that the guy who collects poison bottles did so because he wants to poison people. It’s a shame there are some people on this planet who don’t give the same consideration to people who collect firearms.

How to Avoid Carjackings

Always be sure to lock your car door:

Sorry for the Dead Air: Winter Doesn’t Wait

Had to spend a good part of the day shoveling 9 inches of global warming off the driveway, so I don’t have to get up in the wee hours to do it before getting off to the office. In truth digging the cars out, then scraping the layer of ice off the windows, took more time than the driveway. It sucks when snow follows rain.

Where’s Al Gore when you need him?

The Endarkenment Continues

Tam this morning:

Not only do we think Our Guy can do no wrong, but when Their Guy is in the big chair, we blame everything bad on him. The elected executive of our republic has metamorphosed into some Frazer-esque sacral king, on whose luck rides the success or failure of the harvest and the path and frequency of Gulf coast hurricanes.

Six years into this Administration and I’m frankly tired of politics, and not all that makes me feel disillusioned is to be found on the left. I had hoped that the Internet age would turn out to be a more enlightened than the age of mass media which precedes it. But then social media came along, and I suddenly realized that the Internet could be worse; much worse.

I’m still an optimist, though. My theory is that with the baby boomers retiring, and suddenly finding themselves with a lot of time on their hands, they’ve decided to resettle old scores, and turn the whole country into Del Boca Vista,Â writ large.

Things will settle down once Xers move toward retirement to take over from the boomers. We’ll be too busy helicopter grandparenting to generate this much drama.

How’s that SAFE Act Working Out for Ya?

Murder in New York City is up 20%. Now, it’s quite possible to argue this is a side-effect of electing a socialist mayor who picks fights with the NYPD, but it’s quite certain in this case that gun control isn’t helping, a fact that New York State Rifle and Pistol Association has been pointing out.

Unfortunately, I don’t think any of the supports of the bill care that it’s ineffective. They knew that when they passed it. All the politicians care about is that after Sandy Hook and Webster, something had to be done, and SAFE was something, so therefore it had to be done. This is the most powerful force in politics, and when it’s set in motion, bad results are nearly always guaranteed. Now crime is up 20% in New York, and the usual suspects will be clamoring for something to be done. God help us on what that something is going to be.

Perhaps the Most Absurd Argument by Antis I’ve Seen in Some Time

Last legislative session Ohio passed a comprehensive pro-gun reform bill, as many of you may remember. Earlier this week, the Executive Director of Ohio Coalition Against Gun Violence “writes in opposition to HB 234, which deals with gun regulations,” to a Cleveland paper. Now, I’m not any kind of high-price political consultant, nor do I hold any kind of political science degree, but I think I’m on safe grounds when I say that the time to “write in opposition” to a bill is before the bill is passed and signed into law by the Governor. I had to check the date on the article to make sure it wasn’t post dated. But it gets better.

One of the provisions of the law is that it made an Ohio CHL a substitute for a NICS check. This is pretty common in other states which meet the federal standards. But Ms. Thorne doesn’t like that:

Let’s say your neighbor Bob wants a gun or applies for a concealed weapons license. He has to pass a background check before he can get either. Everything checks out, so now he’s a “good guy with a gun.” One day, Bob commits a crime. Previously, since Bob now has a record, he can’t buy more guns. However, under the new law, his concealed weapons license allows him to bypass that background check, allowing him to buy more dangerous weapons.

No. If Bob is convicted of a crime that strips away his gun rights, he cannot possess or purchase firearms, and his concealed carry license will be taken from him. This is finding a loophole where there is no loophole. Bob won’t be able to pass a NICS check or have a CHL to present to the dealer. He’ll have to either put up a straw buyer (illegal), buy the gun on the streets (illegal), or steal one (illegal) like every other criminal.

It’s time that we all start taking responsibility for the presence of gun violence in our society. Studies show this public health risk doesn’t discriminate. Gun violence is not just limited to urban areas. In fact, gun violence is increasing across the country, while decreasing in cities.

This is called making up facts. Gun violence is pretty much limited to urban areas, and even there, usually only in a handful of places. Gun violence absolutely does discriminate, or our nation wouldn’t be spending so much time debating about horrifyingly high numbers of black-on-black violence. But nonetheless, gun violence has been going down across the country, not up. And it’s been doing this while we’ve been liberalizing our gun control laws nearly across the board.

The solution lies in personal conversations to create culture change. We can’t be afraid to talk about gun violence.

We’ve been talking about gun violence for years. Our assertion has always been it’s the culture of violence that’s the problem, and it’s not going to be solved by taking guns away from ordinary people, which is what gun control does (criminals still get them). It’s been our assertion that gun control laws interfere with the right of the people who need firearms for self-protection the most: the majority of people who are stuck living in violent neighborhoods who are not themselves violent. We’ve been having this debate, and we’ve been winning. Suddenly the other side acts like the debate has never been had. It has been, and you lost.

ATF Comment on M855

RealClearPolicyÂ wrote and article about the M855 issue, and managed to get this comment from BATFE:

Green-tip rounds were classified as AP [armor piercing] in 1986 because the steel penetrator is what is considered the core. It’s the regulatory process, and everyone can argue semantics and perhaps it’s not written very well, but that is the story behind it. … Having the additional component behind the tip isn’t enough to get it out of AP classification.

Only if you unilaterally rewrite the law, which is what they did. If the law is actually followed, any rounds which contains lead, which M855 does, cannot fall under the definition of armor piercing.

(B) The term â€œarmor piercing ammunitionâ€ meansâ€”

(i) a projectile or projectile core which may be used in a handgun and which is constructed entirely (excluding the presence of traces of other substances) from one or a combination of tungsten alloys, steel, iron, brass, bronze, beryllium copper, or depleted uranium; or

(ii) a full jacketed projectile larger than .22 caliber designed and intended for use in a handgun and whose jacket has a weight of more than 25 percent of the total weight of the projectile.

So does it fall under subsection (i)? No, because it’s not made entirely from those elements. Does it fall under (ii)? No, unless you count the steel penetrator as part of the jacket, which would be twisting the definition of jacket to an extreme.

h/t to Dave Hardy.

Judge Issues Stay in Pittsburgh Case

After a Pennsylvania court refused to issue a stay in the Lancaster preemption case, in Allegheny County, a judge has issued a stay in NRA’s lawsuit there. This means that the case by NRA against Pittsburgh over that city’s illegal firearms ordinances won’t be able to proceed until the Pennsylvania courts resolve the constitutionality of Act 192.

Opponents of Act 192 argue that it violates Pennsylvania’s constitutional requirement that a bill may only be of a single subject matter. As we noted previously, enhanced preemption was attached to a bill about metal theft. Pennsylvania courts have generally been deferential to the legislature on matters of germaneness, but it’s not a slam dunk case for either side.

Regardless of the outcome, Act 192 has been a powerful message to local municipalities that the General Assembly means what it says when it comes to Pennsylvania’s 1974 preemption law. Guns rights are a matter of statewide concern, and the General Assembly is the only body that may lawfully regulate firearms in this commonwealth. For 40 years local municipalities have thumbed their noses at the law, and that’s changing one way or another.

Another Anti-Second Amendment Court Ruling.

The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts rules that a stun gun is a “dangerous and unusual” weapons, and thus not protected by the Second Amendment, so banning them is fine. No need for a Second Amendment analysis, as there is just no right at issue here.

We acknowledge that stun guns may haveÂ value for purposes of self-defense, but because they are notÂ protected by the Second Amendment and because a rational basisÂ exists for their prohibition, the lawfulness of their possession and use is a matter for the Legislature.

How long is the Supreme Court going to let lower courts thumb their noses at them? The next level of appeal for this is the Supreme Court of the United States. Maybe it might be worth trying a non-firearm case. Also, note, the Court here only recognized there was a Second Amendment right to a gun in the home. That’s it. It’s like they never even bothered to read the rest of the decision, which recognized the right as not being one limited to the home.

What They Think of You

NRA Testimony starts at about 4:25. After that, anti-self-defense advocates start at 5:20. We’re all just a bunch of unstable people just itching to shoot people, apparently. It even includes a defense attorney arguing that it’s wrong to put the burden on the state, when it comes to self-defense.

Note that NRA was the only one to speak in favor of the law. Where were all the gun owners?