Sebastian – Page 504 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Get Your Blood Dancing Shoes On …

… it’s another Tragedy Hoedown! Our opponents have been busy since yesterday using the latest mass shooting in Carson City to promote their political agenda. CSGV wants to know how the mentally ill individual got an AK-47. If I had to wager, the guy has a history of mental illness that has gone unreported by his family and by the authorities, if he’s had run-ins. But rather than our opponents focusing on what’s wrong with our mental health system, that so many people who need help are not getting it, they’ll push the gun control agenda, because that’s what they are about. The gun violence thing is just a nice candy coating to help the policy prescriptions go down, and make everyone else thing they are just such nice and caring people. I believe they are caring people. They care a lot about getting those icky guns out of our society.

But there is, so far, some lessons for the gun community in this.Â We know that there was an armed person at the scene:

“I wish I had shot at him when he was going in the IHOP,” said Swagler, who owns Locals BBQ & Grill. “But when he came at me, when somebody is pointing an automatic weapon at you â€” you can’t believe the firepower, the kind of rounds coming out of that weapon.”

I don’t blame the guy for not running in and being a hero, but this is a pretty typical fear reaction. The solution to this is training, and lots of it. I will admit this is a case where I should follow my own prescription more than I do, because I don’t feel I’ve been training enough these days. I haven’t been to a practical shooting competition in quite a while. Competition is the best way I’ve found of learning to shoot under pressure. Most importantly, it lets you know what you can and can’t do under stress, and conditions your reactions. A lot of people who carry a gun regularly are honestly just pretending. They aren’t really serious about being prepared to use it. It’s not a talisman, it’s a tool, and if you’re not confident in using it, this is probably how you’re going to react.

UPDATE: Another report has him taking cover in his restaurant. If that’s the case, he did not have a shot he failed to take. The report I linked made it sound like the shooter was coming toward him, and he did not take the shot out of fear. Like I said, I don’t blame the guy for not charging in to be the hero; that’s what SWAT teams with rifles and body armor are for.

Who Gets Gun Permits in the Garden State

Apparently city councilmen who are otherwise disqualified from owning a gun:

Camden Police Chief Scott Thomson signed off on two gun permits in July for a Camden city councilman with a criminal record that bars him from purchasing a firearm under state law, according to law enforcement sources and documents.

I should note this is probably just a permit to purchase, rather than to carry, which are issued by judges in New Jersey rather than police chiefs. Our opponents will tell us that New Jersey’s background check system is among the most thorough in the nation, but yet this still made its way through.

Momentary Setback

No Lawyers, Only Guns and Money is reporting on a loss in District Court. I think we’re probably going to lose in District Courts a lot. What matters is losing in higher courts. This will be appealed. Even if, on appeal, the case loses, it may still create a circuit split that will force the Supreme Court to make a final decision.

A Constitutional Crisis Over Abortion

I have to agree with Dave Kopel here, on the position of several GOP hopefuls that the 14th Amendment could be used to ban abortion:

Moreover, the next President is going to have to address a fiscal crisis that will devastate the United States economy soon if it is not solved. Dealing with the fiscal crisis is going to be quite difficult politically, in part because there are many millions of people who benefit from the current, and unsustainable, levels of federal spending. The tax consumers may be very highly resistant to any reduction in the amount of money that flows to them. So there will be no shortage of national division and acrimony. Thus, 2013 would be an especially bad time to precipitate a constitutional crisis over a social issue.

Aside from that, social conservatives ought to realize that the financial crisis, and coming fiscal crisis (if we do not get spending under control) is a greater threat to families and family values than any social issue we currently face.

What you’re seeing now, early in the primary season, is that the GOP hopefuls are wary of firing up the SoCon base against them, so they are pandering to it. Depending on libertarians to save you in a primary is not generally a winning formula, because libertarians eschew organization.

Grenadewalker

This scandal is getting stranger by the day, as it’s revealed that the US attorneys released a man who confessed to making IEDs from black market grenades and converting semi-auto weapons to automatic weapons.. As Mad Saint Jack says, clearly we have to close the Grenadeshow Loophole.

Bloomberg Blaming the Feds

It should be no surprise that Bloomberg’s response to 24 shootings in 24 hours was to blame Washington for a lack of federal gun controls. Kate Pavlich notes:

Note to Bloomberg: guns don’t shoot themselves. As shown above, the shooter had an extensive criminal history. This isn’t an issue of gun control, this is an issue of criminal control.

We’ve noticed Katie Pavlich writing on our topic often, as well as appearing in studio at NRA News. We’re hoping this continues. It should be noted the shooter’s extensive criminal history that made him federally disqualified to even so much as touch a firearm, let alone carry one. What federal gun control that does Bloomberg think would have disarmed him? Make it illegal for him to transport a gun back to New York? Sorry, already illegal. Make it illegal for him to purchase a gun? Sorry, already illegal. And how much do you want to bet the shooter in this case didn’t get his gun from a gun show, which still would have been illegal even if he had done it.

21 Year Old Temple Student Wins Gunfight with Armed Robbers

A Temple student got into a gunfight with two would be armed robbers:

Sophomore Robert Eells, 21, of Chalfont, Bucks County, was sitting with at least one friend in front of their home in the 2300 block of North 12th Street shortly before 2 a.m. when three assailants approached and demanded money.

When Eells failed to comply, the assailants opened fire, police said. Eells, struck in the stomach, fired a couple of rounds toward the would-be robbers, wounding one suspect, a 15-year-old boy, in the chest and a leg.

So not only did he act appropriately, but continued the fight even after being shot. Two people were shot in the confrontation, and the guy landed those hits while being shot himself. Campus carry is not a crime in Pennsylvania, but the schools are free to set policy. Sounds like this happened off campus, so the school shouldn’t have anything to say. But this is one anecdotal tale that suggests college students are plenty responsible to exercise their right to bear arms. The police spokesperson said the student is not likely to face charges, and the two robbers are being charged with simple assault, robbery, and attempted murder.

The History of the Collective Right

Dave Kopel has a recent article that talks about how the collective rights theory of the Second Amendment sprang into life and then was eventually abandoned. The short of it was that collective rights theory didn’t really exist until the 20th Century, being created by a 1905 Kansas Supreme Court case, Salina v. Blaksley. It made its way into the federal court system in 1935, by a judge who was later impeached and removed from office by Congress.

Yet the collective-right theory itself contained the seeds of its own destruction. Emboldened by the collective rightâ€™s negation of the Second Amendment, politicians and gun-ban lobbies intensified the pressure for draconian gun control, and so scholars began looking into the actual legal history of the Second Amendment. One such scholar was a University of Arizona Law School student named David Hardy. His 1974 article in theÂ Chicago-Kent Law Review, â€œOf Arms and the Law,â€ marked the beginning of the historical rediscovery of the Second Amendment.

For a while, the legal academy tried to ignore the mounting historical evidence that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. But in 1989, left-leaning University of Texas professor Sanford Levinson penned â€œThe Embarrassing Second Amendmentâ€ for theÂ Yale Law Journal.

His article also speaks about the other side of the coin as well

WhileÂ Verdugo-UrquidezÂ was working its way through the appellate courts, Handgun Control Inc., (which later renamed itself the Brady Campaign) hired attorney Dennis Henigan. In a 1989 article for theUniversity of Dayton Law Review, he recast the (untenable) collective right cases as actually standing for a narrow individual right: â€œIt may well be that the right to keep and bear arms is individual in the sense that it may be asserted by an individual. But it is a narrow right indeed, for it is violated only by laws that, by regulating the individualâ€™s access to firearms, adversely affect the stateâ€™s interest in a strong militia.â€

This would be the theory later adopted by Justice Stevens.

Read the whole thing. I think it’s important to put this bit of our movement’s history in context, as well as understand how our opponents fit in.

Labor Day

I’m doing my best to avoid labor today, engaging in activities such as napping, reading, and trying not to think too hard. Dave Kopel commemorates Labor Day with a more serious post:

One part of that debt is the essential role that labor leaders such as Walter Reuther and Lane Kirkland played in providing bipartisan support for resistance to the evil Soviet empire, an empire whose ultimate objective was to reduce all the workers of the world to slavery.

I once had a European born coworker comment to me that one oddity of the American labor movement is that remained, for the most part, pretty thoroughly anti-communist when compared to their European counterparts, who’s labor movement was pretty inexorably woven with Marxist and communist ideas, many having ties to the Soviet Union. That’s reflected in the fact that we celebrate Labor Day today, instead of May 1st, as its celebrated in much of the rest of the world.

A Gun in Every Room

The Firearms Blog has a post that shows the lengths some people will go to in order to secure their firearms in inconspicuous places. I think if you’re that worried, the easier solution is to just carry it around with you. There’s a gun in every room that I’m in too, because I generally keep the Kel-TecÂ holstered in-pocket, even around the house. It’s a good idea, even if you aren’t that paranoid, Â because you want to remain conditioned not to stuff other objects into the gun pocket. The other issue I have with the stash method is, in homes I’ve seen that have been broken into, they’ve been ransacked. They are likely going to find your stashed guns, and then just steal the cases. They can break into the cases somewhere else at their leisure.

We have a few quick opens that we don’t currently use. I think quick opens are ideal for childproofing your self-defense guns, and we don’t have children. To prevent theft, a floor safe is the best option.