Sebastian – Page 205 – Shall Not Be Questioned

EPA Creating Lead Shortage?

Come 2014, all ammunition sold to civilian gun-owners in America will have to be imported, a result of President Obamaâ€™s crackdown on sulfur dioxide and lead emissions and accompanying harsh Environmental Protection Agency regulations, said former Florida congressman, Lt. Col. Allen West.

Well, any lead that comes from ore will be imported, not necessarily the ammunition. From what I understand about the lead market, the vast majority of lead consumed comes from recycled sources. In other words, you spend a typical day at the range shooting mostly old car batteries, wheel weights, etc down your barrel. Granted, I don’t think relying on imported lead is a good thing, but I also don’t think it’s necessarily something to panic over either.

UFA Renewal Up for Consideration

Looks like this proposal would extend the law for another ten years. Introduced by Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC). Who I’d note carries an A rating from NRA and GOA. There’s no constituency to prevent an extension of the UFA. We’ll see what happens once this hits the Dem controlled Senate.

UPDATE: Note that the bill can be found here. It’s straight up extension for ten years. None of Schumer or Israel’s bullshit. Other blogs are reporting that a UFA expansion bill is up for consideration. Israel’s Bill is still listed as only being introduced. It hasn’t even been referred to a committee.

Post-Holiday Link Dump

It was nice to take a break from blogging over the holiday as well, but I still keep track of everything so I don’t miss any real big news.

Why we oppose registration. There have been numerous instances if it being used to facilitate confiscation in this country. It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you. More here.

A new anti-gun tactic?

Sheriffs in Colorado don’t have standing to sue over the recent gun control laws. This doesn’t kill the case, however.

The logic of violence.

Fortunately, I did not encounter any MAIG placemats this Thanksgiving.

Uncle makes a prediction on a new Glock. I hope he’s right.

A civilian legal G36? Looks better than the previous attempt.

NSSF is considering leaving Newtown. I wouldn’t stay where I’m not welcome.

Evolving Christian attitudes towards personal and national defense.

But I thought they just wanted a few common sense gun laws?

Back to the Grind

I hope everyone had a nice holiday weekend. I’m trying to get back into the swing of things, after a few days off. I spent a good part of the weekend visiting family and attempting to get more family pictures to scan. My aunt had kept a box of things she collected from my grandmother’s house after she died back in 2004. I enjoy reading old letters, because they are first hand historical documents, not history told through the lens of elites who can sometimes warp history to conform to their own biases.

I found this letter, written 5th October 1936, from a Mary Kidner who was traveling around the country with husband and children, living out of their car, and looking for work. This letter was written from a logging camp in Blodgett, Oregon, where they had stopped to find work. This letter was sent to my great-great Aunt Madeline, who forwarded it along to my then 12-year-old grandmother, asking her if she could use it in school. It’s not a terribly well written letter, but it gives an idea of what at least someone’s family life was like during the Great Depression. As bad as we might think we have things now, most of us aren’t raising a family in our automobiles and roaming the country looking for any chance of work. One thing it make me thankful for is that I wasn’t raised during the Great Depression.

One other little side rant is that the letter is hand written. I understand the schools are now going to stop teaching kids handwriting. This horrifies me, because I believe it makes the kids partially illiterate. As soon as they stopped forcing me to use long hand in the schools, I reverted to printing. I probably couldn’t write a letter in long hand today without great pain. But I did learn it, and can read it. The idea that a whole generation are going to be raised with a letter like this being no better than gibberish to them is shameful. The endarkenment continues.

Happy Thanksgiving!

May you all have a happy and enjoyable Thanksgiving, and may your table be free of propagandists for the regime.

Carving Your Turkey Jerry Miculek Style

Of course, for hunters who don’t think their hunting guns are in any real danger should note this reaction from our favorite Brady Board member, who has been on a tear of inanity lately, and who I must credit for pointing me to this video:

The thing is, he mentioned at about 2:20 or so into the video that you could see the damage done to the soft tissue. Since we all know that no one is going to “carve” a turkey by shooting the raw bird, this reference must have been for how well one can inflict soft tissue damage on a human being. Or did he mean to a deer perhaps? Does one want to do a lot of soft tissue damage to a deer? What would be left of the deer for eating? I don’t know. I’m just asking. Why would he mention this at all? A .460 Magnum is a powerful gun all right. He made his point but he had to carry on for 4 minutes showing the slow motion video of the turkey exploding over and over again. I’m sure the video was meant to be funny. It’s pathetic actually.

In the interest in developing some holiday season understanding between the two sides, I will describe all this to our pearl-clutching opponent. The “humor” is that as soon as one mentions they have a rifle chambered in .460 Weatherby Magnum, which few would disagree deserves application of the term “elephant gun,” it becomes immediately apparent to the astute viewer what is about to transpire if the intended target is a turkey. That is, what we would technically call “way too much gun” for the intended target. The end result does not disappoint. All living things have what we would refer to as “soft tissue.” Hunters are very aware of what rifle bullets do to “soft tissue.” That your brain immediately drew the analogy to “human” says a lot more about you than it does about us, or Jerry Miculek, doesn’t it?

What Can be Attached to UFA Renewal?

A good argument is happening in the comment section about the kinds of things that could possibly be attached to UFA renewal. Some things to keep in mind in that regard.

The Senate is still controlled by Democrats. If you start playing those games, you open up the possibility that our House additions get stripped off, and then they start trying to make their own additions. You’re also opening up the very real possibility that it escalates to big fight in the Senate on gun control. I don’t think MAIG and Brady have had any real success flipping votes on Manchin-Toomney, despite a lot of blustering, but I don’t really want to find out. Â How confident are we that when Schumer floats the restrictions on hobbyists doing gun smithing at home, that we’ll get 40 Senators who will to stand up to him? How confident are we that the “nuclear option” won’t come into play, and they can pass it with only 51 votes? How much do we trust the conference committee process that will work out the differences between the House and Senate versions?

We cannot attach anything to legislation. You have to have friendly politicians willing to go out on a limb to do that. It presumes that we have friends in the GOP who are willing to go out on that limb over the UFA. I don’t think we do. Certainly no more than we have GOP friends willing to get out on the “Repeal the NFA” limb. They aren’t going to risk a flight on the issue.

Everything is a political calculation. There are scarce few politicians in any legislative body that are true friends because they share our ideology. The vast majority are our friends because it is in their self-interest to be our friends. Even with the ones that are ideological friends, they still understand politics is a game. No office holder wants to start playing weak hands. There might be a chance of stopping UFA, but if it happens, it’s only because Congress is completely dysfunctional. They weren’t willing to play this card in 2003, so it’s hard to see why they’d want to now. That’s largely why I’d rather dig my heels in over Chuck Schumer and Steve Israel’s expansion proposals. If UFA is going to die as a whole, it’s either going to do so quietly, or it’s going to do so because the Democrats overreached and poisoned the well.

Still a Great Victory for Colorado Gun Owners

Despite the fact that it appears Evie Hudak is going to preemptively resignÂ in order to preserve Democratic control over the Senate, her resignation is still a significant victory for Colorado gun owners. She would still have her seat had the pressure not been applied. No politician wants to be faced with the loss of a seat, and I view her preemptive resignation as an act of desperation on the part of Colorado Democrats. It is indeed time to focus on 2014. If Colorado gun owners truly seek repeal, the current Democratic leadership, who gladly sold the state to the interests of the Obama Administration and the Mayor of New York City, has to be replaced.

At the very least, now having three heads makes it unlikely Colorado Democrats will seek to embrace more gun control for the foreseeable future.Â Hickenlooper would be a choice prize himself. I don’t know how possible that is, but unfortunately the Colorado GOP has a habit of backing lackluster candidates.

What Will Happen to the Undetectable Firearms Act?

The Undetectable Firearms Act was introduced into the 100th Congress back in the year 1988 by our good friend William Hughes. Yes, that Hughes. It was in response to the big plastic gun scare that was whipped up by Handgun Control Inc, former name of the Brady Campaign, back in the days when they were relevant. NRA opposed the original bill, but dropped opposition to the bill once its requirements no longer met the the criteria of any actual guns currently in production. In other words, the bill had no actual, practical impact.

If nothing is done, the UFA will expire on December 9th. This is not the first time it has has been set to expire. The first expiration date was ten years after the first enactment, in 1998. In 1998, it was extended for five additional years. In 2003, it was again extended for an additional ten years. Given that it’s been readily extended by both parties, I have no expectation that we have a prayer of stopping extension. The big threat is that the UFA will be expanded to include a ban on manufacturing a polymer receivers or magazines by non-FFLs, even if the polymer used is doped with a chemical that renders it radiopaque, or is made from a polymer that is dense enough to be easily x-ray detectable. This is because it also must contain enough metal that it sets off an x-ray machine calibrated to the security exemplar.Â The existing UFA law regarding metal content only applies to the entire firearms, minus grips, stocks, and magazines. By creating a separate requirement, applicable only to non-licensees, it effectively bans home fabrication, or smithing done under the auspices of a dealer FFL, which is typically sufficient for gunsmiths. Additionally, it also creates a requirement to have a manufacturer’s FFL to create magazines, which is not currently the case.

I am not optimistic we have the juice to stop UFA renewal outright. We haven’t any time in the past, when this outlawed what only existed in the imaginations of our opponents. But 3D printed plastic guns have been all over the news. Even people at work are asking me about it the topic. We might all know this is really nothing new, and that a plastic gun is about as much of a threat to the person pulling the trigger as it is to the person it’s being pointed at, but the public does not generally know these things. This law getting expanded to restrict hobbyists is a very real possibility, and something worth contacting your congress critters over.

More on that Well-Regulated Thing

Dave Hardy looks at the history books and finds the term well-regulated being used in contexts where it unambiguously means well-functioning, orderly, and organized.Â One of the big turds that Dick Metcalfe stepped on, was to parrot the other side’s distortion that “well-regulated” meantÂ “tightly controlled and subject to much regulation.” Research on this matter has clearly shown that it was not understood that way at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified. It goes back to the analogy, almost a tired one at this point:

“A well-educated electorate, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to print and read publications shall not be infringed.”

But our opponents don’t want to accept the plain English, even now, long past the point where well-regulated could possibly be interpreted as a tactic endorsement for controls by anyone who actually has honestly done the research.

Growing up, I never had any ideas that the Second Amendment meant anything other than what it plainly says, because I can read. I didn’t find out the words were a controversy until I was an adult, and the audacity of those on the other side, to subvert the plain language, is part of the reason I got into activism. I went through most of the Clinton years not understanding how the Assault Weapons Ban was even remotely constitutional, and wondering why nothing was done about it. When I found out, I became angry.