Sebastian – Page 470 – Shall Not Be Questioned

An Armored Personnel Carrier, Really?

Not a fan of the #occupy movement. Yesterday at #OccupyPhilly, they decided to block the Market Street Bridge. While most of them dispersed when the cops started getting out the handcuffs, about 24 of them decided to lock arms and continue blocking traffic. This made me wonder whether you get a 24 for 1 taser deal when you taser one of a group of 24 hippies locking arms. I don’t know, but if the experiment was tried, I’d like to know the results.

Regardless, back to the title of this post, it would seem that the Tampa police decided they’d drag out the Armored Personnel Carrier to break up the Occupy folks. Really? We need to bring out military equipment to clear out a bunch of hippies camping in a park?

Survival Bags

Over at Shooting Illustrated. Some of them have provisions for off body carry. Pretty neat.

FAA Cutting off Free Access to Charts

I’m subscribed to a number of aviation newsletters. One today pointed this bit of Crony Capitalism in my direction that’s certainly going to have an impact on the Flight Sim community in a big way. Basically, they are cutting off public access to aeronautical charts:

Industry officials told Aviation Consumer that the market will likely reject significant increases in cost for apps and online products. Smaller providers and free websites may simply go out of business. Larger companies may try to keep their subscribers but with higher subscription prices. The pervasive fear in the industry is that this could lead to only one or two entities controlling the market for the distribution of government-produced information that is essential for flight safety. Aeronav spokeswoman Abigail Smith told Aviation Consumer the agency is determined not to let that happen but the new fees, whatever they are, will have to be enough to cover costs.

I understand trying to cover costs, so less taxpayer money is required to fund this part of FAA, but why not just charge for individual access, rather than routing access through a handful of vendors with contracts? By making some buyers more equal than others, the large players are guaranteed to be the primary beneficiaries.

With the lot that’s running the country now, you have to wonder if someone is getting paid off. It’s the Chicago Way.

Educating Hunters…. On Suppressors

NRA-ILA’s hunting policy division is busy trying to educate hunters on something that might surprise you: the usefulness of suppressors. As many of you are well aware, suppressors, or silencers, have been regulated heavily by the federal government since the 1930s, and are subject to the National Firearms Act. The popularity of suppressors is soaring, to the point where ATF has been complaining in legal seminars I’ve attended that they are having a hard time keeping up with all the NFA paperwork, especially as Trusts are quickly becoming the preferred mechanism for papering Title II firearms and accessories.

I was surprised when NRA did a Facebook post after a victory legalizing suppressorsÂ that there were a number of people expressing discontent, and blathering ignorance that’s been drilled into people’s heads by decades of Hollywood movies and unfamiliarity. It’s looking like NRA is trying to address that. Does this mean we’re close to being able to push some legislation to deregulate them? I don’t know. It’s difficult to get Congress to act, and our Republican friends tend to act on the gun issue more out of political benefit than true love. But I think we’re moving in that direction.

While Our Opponents Were Distracted …

… getting all hysterical about HR822, and starting a dog and pony show in the Senate,Â It looks like another victory is afoot in Congress:

Cox pointed to three provisions in particular that would be made law under the minibus: language that would prohibit the Justice Department from consolidating firearms sales records, from electronically retrieving the records of former firearms dealers and from disclosing information on people who have passed firearms background checks.

The bill includes a host of one-year gun protections and new language barring the Justice Department from requiring imported shotguns to meet a â€œsporting purposesâ€ test. The legislation also bars the use of funds to transfer the functions of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to other agencies and to promulgate or implement any rule requiring a physical inventory of any licensed firearms business.

I’m particularly happy about the part I bolded there. I’m guessing this is a funding rider that prevents ATF from spending money to enforce this provision. That effectively renders the sporting purposes test meaningless for shotguns. This prevents ATF from implementing its plans, which we discussed with John Frazer of NRA-ILA here.

SWAT Magazine Looks at Rimfires

Our Opponents’ Double Standard

It looks like the feds are going to charge the guy who took pot shots at the White House with attempting to assassinate the President. From the article:

Authorities suspect Ortega has been in the area for weeks, coming back and forth to the Washington Mall.Â Before the shooting, he was detained by local police at an abandoned house. U.S. Park police say Ortega may have spent time blending in with Occupy D.C. protesters.

Apparently the Secret Service raided the Occupy DC folks looking for this guy. If this had been a tea party, I can promise you that it’d be all over CSGV’s insurrectionist timeline. In fact, if this guy had even a hint of being right wing, I can promise you Brady would be all atwitter about another dangerous nut with a gun.

But since the left-wing occupy movement has embraced this guy as one of their own, he’s going to get a pass from these groups, who apparently only care about some kinds of gun violence. If you want to understand why Bloomberg is the future of gun control, this is why. It’s really hard to take them seriously anymore. I follow CSGV, Brady, VPC and ProtestEasyGuns because it’s worth a laugh, not because I’m worried about what they are going to do next.

We’ve Come A Long Way

Tam takes a look at what thinks looked back in the 90s and early 2000s. She includes a link to a forum post from circa 2000, asking people what they thought things would be like in 2010. Needless to say most people are not optimistic, and the people who everything thought were wild dreamers were actually closer to reality.

Ten years ago, a major party Presidential candidate was running on a platform of universal licensing and registration for all gun owners. The guy NRA was backing only went so far as calling for the assault weapons ban to be renewed (though, no one really thought he meant it, and it turned out he didn’t).

Now we’re getting pretty close to having national reciprocity, and our opponents are happy if they can get members of Congress to even mention them by name. Things have definitely changed in ten years, but we still have a ways to go.

Transparency Fail

Our Vice President is the Gift the Keeps on Giving:

â€œAt 1:00 PM, the Vice President will attend a meeting of theÂ Government Accountability and Transparency BoardÂ in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. At 2:30 PM, the Vice President will meet with representatives of the National Sheriffs’ Association in the Roosevelt Room.Â These meetings are closed press.â€

I swear, I couldn’t make this stuff up.

While We Were Distracted

A number of other issue have cropped up while we’ve been distracted by HR822. They’ve learned that often the best defense is a good offense.Â One is that it seems Obama is taking some actions against shooting on federal land. The other is that, rather than fighting HR822 in the House, Bloomberg and his anti-gun cadre have gone on the offensive in the Senate. Dave Kopel appeared on Cam & Company a few nights ago to discuss this. Here is the video:

UPDATE: Interior has backed off.