Sebastian – Page 222 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Labor Day Weekend News

Well, we’ve had some fun with Joan Peterson, and it’s time to move on. A lot of people don’t know why I bother, but I’m really not trying to change her mind. Sometimes it’s just entertaining to shake the ant farm. I hope everyone has a happy Labor Day weekend. I will be smoking some beef and doing genealogical research.Â I had joked with John Richardson, whose ancestor was also at Antietam, fighting for the Confederacy, that his great grandparents were shooting at my great grandparents. Actually, based on some maps of the battle, and of their respective units, that very well may have been the case!

Given that my 3x great grandfather was wounded severely, but not killed, I think I have to be thankful that legendary southern marksmanship didn’t quite manage to find its mark in his case. We also discovered that my 4x great grandfather, who was a well known bottler in Philadelphia, was raising money for the recruitment effort for the war. So we know that his son likely didn’t join up to avoid being drafted — they were believers in the cause. But anyway, I’ve rambled on enough. Now for the news:

Prince Law offices has been doing quite a lot of posting on the new proposed regulations:

Pretty much everything you wanted to know.

SayUncle notes that NFATCA petitioned ATF for rule changes, ATF came up with a bunch of different rules, and then cited NFATCA. NFATCA wanted to get rid of the LEO sign-off requirement. They have a response here. Though, I have to say, if their petition for rule-making raised concerns about background checks and trust, that was a mistake.

ATF Form 4473 and the Prohibited Persons List. This article notes that there is serious difficulty implementing New Jersey’s law about the terror watch list. You see, it’s a secret list. As in, really secret. FFLs can’t run that check.

Ted Nugent’s wife gets arrested at DFW International Airport for forgetting a gun in her carry-on.

Dave Hardy: “The law has the concept of justified homicide. The average person has the concept of ‘good riddance.’”

Well, that didn’t work out the way they thought it would, did it?

California gun owners are about to get fracked.

Bloomberg: The Godfather of Gun Control. The resurgence in energy for gun control I think can be squarely credited to two people. The person who deserves the most credit is Barack Obama. The person who deserves the second most is Mike Bloomberg.

I hope this woman gets a really big judgement against the Pennsylvania State Police for this. I think the only way to stop raids like this from happening is to take away the toys.

The Continuing Saga of “We Have to Talk”

Bryan Strawster, who stands on the other side of Joan in this debate in Minnesota, has had “more than one hundred and thirty comments that I have submitted to Joanâ€™s blog that have never been posted,”Â and indicates he’s willing to have a talk anytime in a fair an open forum. Weer’d Beard says much the same, and notes Joan’s response to my post:

Nope. There will be no discussion on that blog which regularly demeans me and calls me names. We will have the â€œdiscussionâ€ on my blog if you want.

So disagreeing with Joan is equivalent to “demeans me and calls me names?” I’m pretty sure most people who have read me for a while know I am accepting and even welcome dissenting opinion. I might turn on the snark sometimes, but I’d like to think were all adults here.

In fact, Joan seems to have done an entire post in response to my original piece, which confirms she’s more desiring to speak at us than speak with us:

But the “gun guys” missed my point, as is often the case. I am always amazed that these folks pick out several of the smaller details about which to quibble but ignore the main point- the victims of the shootings.

No, we didn’t miss your point. Your post’sÂ title said “We need to talk,” and implied that there wasn’t somehow a conversation already going on. So do you want to talk or don’t you?

So when the “gun guys” on my blog want me to come to their sites to have a “discussion” while calling me names and demeaning me on their sites, it’s really not too possible to have a “discussion” with them.

And we are supposed to ignore the regular demanding of us on her site? I could just as easily take offense to the things she says daily about the “law abiding gun owners,” and trying to paint us all as “fearful and paranoid” nut cases just a hair’s breath away from murdering loved ones or shooting up a coffee shop. But I understand spin, and the fact that both sides, in any public debate, engage in it.

When Joan says “I guess I struck a nerve,” that nerve is pretending to want a conversation when clearly she does not. What she wants is an echo chamber, and she’s welcome to it. She’s pretending to want a conversation but intent on allowing nothing of the sort. That is what some may classify as “disingenuous,” and perhaps even “hypocritical.” Maybe that’s the kind of “calling me names” or “demeaning me” Joan is speaking about here, but there’s an old saying that if the shoe fits ….

In Order to Have a Discussion, There Has to be Two Sides

Joan Peterson, Brady Campaign Board Member and Minnesota gun control activist, laughably says:

We do need to have a serious discussion about what’s going on in our country concerning guns and gun permit holders.

I’m all for it. Let’s have a discussion. Does this mean she’ll stop censoring dissenting opinion in her blog comments? How can you have a “serious discussion” when you refuse to allow any kind of open discussion on your blog. I mean, I get it’s your sandbox, and you can do what you want, but let’s not pretend you want to have a serious discussion when people who try regularly find themselves silenced when they say things you don’t want to hear. When you are ready to have a serious discussion, we are certainly ready and willing. But that’s going to require everyone to be adults.

We need to talk about the wisdom of letting citizens carry guns around with them wherever they go. We need to talk about why it is dangerous to ramp up fear and paranoia amongst people who have been led to believe in myths and outright lies about our nation’s President.

OK, let’s talk. But we’ll have to do it here because your side won’t allow for open discussion in any forum you control. It’s part and parcel for the gun control movement. I haven’t seen any of the half-dozen or so anti-gun blogs that have existed that didn’t censor dissenting viewpoints, or disallow any kind of discussion outright.

That’s not the marker of a movement that has strong arguments and is self-confident. That’s a movement that knows it has no arguments. We have been having “serious discussion” about these topics. The problem is, you guys aren’t convincing anyone.

The Legalities of the New Executive Order

I’m seeing some confusion circulating among people in the blogosphere and on social media as to the effects of Obama’s executive order on reimportation. It should be noted that this would only apply to a small subset of firearms that were sold to foreign countries. Ordinarily, military arms are illegal to import into the United States unless they are determined by the attorney general to be “particularly suitable for sporting purposes,” which the Attorney General has since 1989 (via another executive order) interpreted to mean only suitable for hunting. However, there’s a provision of the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 that made it legal to import any firearm that is a Curio and Relic, regardless of its sporting purpose suitability. This means anything that’s on the C&R list, or anything more than 50 years old is importable by law. This EO won’t do anything to affect the import of surplus military arms that originated overseas, like the Mosin-Nagant, Enfields, or Mauser. Even the M1 Garand and M1 Carbine are C&R, and are therefore blanket importable, regardless of what the Attorney General may want to determine about its sporting purpose.

But by law the State Department gets to have a say when it comes to weapons that have been exported by our government to foreign governments. If those governments wish to dispose of those firearms by selling them to private importers in the United States, they have to have sign-off from the State Department. That’s where this EO comes in. Basically, the Korean government still has a lot of M1 Carbines and M1 Garands sitting in warehouses that they’d like to sell to US collectors or to the Civilian Marksmanship Program. The Obama Administration has been unwilling to sign off of any of these re-importations to date. All this executive order does is make that official policy. In short, it doesn’t actually change much from the status quo. Without the requirement for State Department signoff, those M1s would be legal to import without any permission from the US government.

It’s still a dick move by the Obama Administration, but don’t feel like you need to go scrambling through your sofa cushions for loose change to go panic buy all the Mosin-Nagants you can get your hands on. Those are safe.

Thursday News

Let’s see what I have here in the tabs:

Embattled police chief Mark Kessler releases a new videoÂ that could be charitably described as intimidating, less charitably as a bona fide threat. The fun part it’s looking like he’s going to spill the dirt on the local politicians. I’m told the reason most of these small coal towns have police chiefs is to keep the state police from looking around too much, and asking too many questions.

Toomey is feeling the heat. Good. At best Toomey was hoodwinked by Schumer and Manchin. At worst he was part and parcel to the deception that the turd sandwich of a deal was actually good for gun owners. Neither speaks well.

Clayton has a bleg out looking at some of the history of mental health prohibitions. More here.

Bloomberg dumped 350 large into the Colorado recall elections. The least we can do is making buying New York style gun control in Colorado more expensive for Bloomberg.

More on that “Sickness in our Souls” Colorado Senate President John Morse was speaking about.

Ignorance and hubris makes for a humorous combination.

Down Range TV has an excellent article about guns in the home with children.

The bright side of the new executive orders.

It’s Never Been About Crime

A Harvard study look at the gun issue and doesn’t find any correlation between gun control and crime or suicide rates. This will do nothing to dampen the enthusiasm for gun control because gun control has never been about controlling crime, it’s been about controlling culture, namely our culture, rather than the criminal one. It’s not that many who support gun control want to live in a world without criminals having guns, they want to live in a world without people like you and me.

Obama Issues Executive Orders to Screw Us

Well, Obama promises, and Obama delivers on when it comes to screwing gun owners. We have two new executive orders on guns. First:

Closing a Loophole to Keep Some of the Most Dangerous Guns Out of the Wrong Hands

Current law places special restrictions on many of the most dangerous weapons, such as machine guns and short-barreled shotguns.Â These weapons must be registered, and in order to lawfully possess them, a prospective buyer must undergo a fingerprint-based background check.

However, felons, domestic abusers, and others prohibited from having guns can easily evade the required background check and gain access to machine guns or other particularly dangerous weapons by registering the weapon to a trust or corporation.Â At present, when the weapon is registered to a trust or corporation, no background check is run.Â ATF reports that last year alone, it received more than 39,000 requests for transfers of these restricted firearms to trusts or corporations.

Today, ATF is issuing a new proposed regulation to close this loophole.Â The proposed rule requires individuals associated with trusts or corporations that acquire these types of weapons to undergo background checks, just as these individuals would if the weapons were registered to them individually.Â By closing this loophole, the regulation will ensure that machine guns and other particularly dangerous weapons do not end up in the wrong hands.

The idea that criminals and other prohibited persons are using NFA trusts as a construct to skirt background checks is laughable. This is a middle finger extended in our direction, and not much more than that. How is this going to work? There are some corporations that legitimately own NFA firearms, such as museums. Does everyone in the corporation have to go through the FBI fingerprint check? Does each person in the corporation or trust have to undergo LEO signoff? There’s a lot of devil that will be in the details here. But that’s not all:

Keeping Surplus Military Weapons Off Our Streets

When the United States provides military firearms to its allies, either as direct commercial sales or through the foreign military sales or military assistance programs, those firearms may not be imported back into the United States without U.S. government approval.Â Since 2005, the U.S. Government has authorized requests to reimport more than 250,000 of these firearms.

Today, the Administration is announcing a new policy of denying requests to bring military-grade firearms back into the United States to private entities, with only a few exceptions such as for museums.Â This new policy will help keep military-grade firearms off our streets.

Yeah, surplus military weapons sold after the era of the M1 are going to be machine guns are aren’t re-importable already by statute. What Obama is keeping out here are historical pieces like the M1 Garand and M1 Carbine. This is also just a way to put the screws to us.

Keep it up Mr. President. We’ll keep defeating you, boxing you into a corner, and otherwise destroying your agenda. You can lash out at us in a childish tantrum all you want. In the end we will prevail over you.

UPDATE: Looks like the AP is already helping the Administration spin this as the greatest thing since sliced bread rather than the load of horse shit it really is.

UPDATE: John Lott takes the AP to task.

Intermediate Scrutiny Bleg

Dave Kopel is looking for papers, treatises or law review articles on Intermediate Scrutiny, which I can only surmise is for something related to the Second Amendment, since that seems to be the preferred method of review by the federal courts, and the most common method for essentially denying the Second Amendment really means anything, I think this is an important topic. If you have any advice for Dave, leave a common over at the first link. I don’t really know of anything helpful, so all I really had to offer was snark.

Off Topic: On the Syria Thing

I normally don’t comment on foreign affairs, both because it’s off topic, and because I tend to agree with Tam these days when it comes to foreign intervention. But since our imminent intervention in some other damned fool thing in the Middle East is what’s dominating the news, I thought I might opine.

I don’t really think the United States has a dog in a fight between Baathist Alawites and Sunni fundamentalist Al-Quada supporters. I also am not too concerned about how efficiently they can kill each other. But I am concerned about how efficiently they may be able to kill Americans depending on who gets their hands of all the fun toys when the dust finally clears.

If WMDs were enough justification to insert ourselves into Iraq, why isn’t it justification enough to insert ourselves into Syria? Especially given we know the Syrians have WMDs. We’ve seen them use them on their own people within the past few weeks. We’re not going on a bunch of outdated intelligence and fuzzy pictures presented in front of the United Nations like we were in 2003.

If all we’re going to do is launch some air strikes and lob a few cruise missiles, I’d prefer to save the money and trouble. I’d also prefer there to be some Congressional approval. If Bush can do it, so can Obama. I don’t think such things should be done by a President unilaterally. I’m also not too enthusiastic these days about the whole Middle East Democracy project. We tried that experiment, and I’m not convinced the results are worth it. Going in an taking the WMDs away from the combatants, and then letting them resume doing whatever it is they want to do to each other, is a fine, limited goal. Beyond that I don’t care what they want to kill each other with.

If the Obama Administration decides to go into Syria to secure the WMDs, I’m fine with that, provided Congress also approves. I was fine with the Bush Administration doing the same thing in 2003. Beyond that, there’s plenty of room for partisan bickering. But I think keeping WMDs out of the hands of unstable, mass-murdering fascists and religious fanatics ought to be something both parties can get behind.

Some Are More Equal than Others

No special privileges for government officials. I like the assertion that this amounts to Titles of Nobility, forbidden by the Constitution.

Surely the creation of two classes of citizens, one more equal than the others, isn’t the sort of thing the Framers intended. Why didn’t they put something in the Constitution to prevent it?

Well, actually, they did. Article I,Â Section 9Â of the Constitution prohibits the federal government from granting “titles of nobility,” and Article I,Â Section 10Â extends this prohibition to the states — one of the few provisions in the original Constitution to impose limits directly on states. Surely the Framers must have considered this prohibition pretty important.

Read the whole thing, as they say. Now all we need is to find federal judges who’d be willing to go for this idea. Of course, many of them probably like their special privileges.