The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
Vote was 14-4. Says Marion Hammer:
“Every time they leave the house with a concealed weapon, they run the risk of it being accidentally or unintentionally or inadvertently exposed, and being observed by a law enforcement officer who’s having a bad day,” Hammer said.
Right here. Seeing someone with a gun is not even legal cause to stop someone in Pennsylvania, let alone draw a gun on them.
UPDATE: Listening to the whole video, and listening to the tone in the cop’s voice, I think that guy was actually close to being shot. Probably best to just keep quiet and be very compliant in that situation. The lawsuit can come later. I’m not sure whether it’s exceptionally brave, or exceptionally stupid to amp up a cop who has a gun drawn on you.
Yesterday the legislature passed a bill creating a dove hunting season, and today the Governor signed it. This bill was opposed very strongly by the Humane Society of the United States, who say that people don’t want this gentle bird of peace to be hunted. Apparently enough Iowa legislators thought, “Screw that, peace is tasty wrapped in bacon and basted with maple syrup,” to get this done.
Hundreds of gun owners, firearms manufacturers and people who shoot for sport came to the Legislative Office Building in Hartford Wednesday to criticize a bill that would make it illegal to own large-capacity ammunition clips — those capable of holding 10 rounds or more.
Several people at a lengthy public hearing before the judiciary committee went on record in favor of the ban, including the mayors of the state’s three largest cities, but critics vastly outnumbered supporters.
The Connecticut bill is not as carelessly drafted as McCarthy’s, but it would still make it unmanageable to comply, as there is no grandfathering. All magazines possessed would have to be turned in for destruction. Do you know where all your magazines are? I don’t. I keep track of the guns. The magazines just end up places, and I have dozens and dozens of them. And how many gun owners are going to know about the new requirement? How many are going to find out about it at a traffic stop, after the cuffs go on?
“Large-capacity ammunition magazines are designed to enable shooting mass numbers of people quickly and efficiently without reloading,” Mayors Bill Finch of Bridgeport, John DeStefano of New Haven and Pedro Segarra of Hartford said in a joint letter to the committee. “We have a responsibility to protect our citizens and to ensure that another Tucson, Arizona incident never happens again.”
So your police don’t need them either right? Right? I mean, if that’s what they are for. But it’s probably not surprising that Connecticut’s bill exempts police officers. Great turnout by people in Connecticut. Hopefully the pressure stays on, and this can be defeated.
This includes four members of the Pennsylvania delegation, Fattah, Brady, Schwartz and Doyle. I am happy to report not a single one of these co-sponsors is from the Republican Party. I’m really happy to see them holding party discipline on Second Amendment rights. Normally, with 100 co-sponsored, I’d be worried. I’m less worried without GOP sponsors on the bill.
Still, call your reps. It can’t hurt.
It’s a joke. And if that’s not enough, this morning I read they were debating the legality of assassinating Kadaffi. Really? “He’s a genocidal asshole,” isn’t good enough for the European electorate? Sometimes it seems like European countries need to get permission from the UN before their generals take a dump in the latrine. I’d say, under the circumstances, this kind of debate should last about as long as it takes to arm the missiles. This guy has been a prick since I was a kid. I’m tired of seeing his ugly mug on TV.
You really have to wonder, without American leadership of NATO, if Soviet tanks had ever rolled through the Fulda Gap, how far they would have gotten before the Europeans got their UN resolution, then debated the legality of blowing up the tanks, and argued over who’d lead the endeavor?
I’m kicking around some ideas for a title to the project. “Gun Project” is not terribly catchy. I’m thinking of “Manufacture to Murder,” or a play on the actual model and manufacturer of the crime gun we wind up using. (Editor’s note – I like it; much better than “gun project”.) The Washington Post adds another part to their Hidden Life of Gunsseries. They trace guns used to kill cops.
Oh, I can think of some choice names to call this article. I’m sure you can too.
I talked to Bob Schmidt and Bernie Zapor from the St. Paul ATF yesterday. They told me that even if the MPD wants to give us gun trace data, they are forbidden from doing so. They told me that instead, we’ll have to get our trace data from court records, which is not what I understood from Ben Hayes, the ATF agent who gave a presentation at the Chicago seminar. However, that is apparently how the Washington Post got the data for their series.
Now you can see the importance of Tiahrt, which keeps this data restricted to law enforcement uses through an appropriations rider NRA gets attached every budget. I’m actually impressed the Washington Post was so eager to disparage the Second Amendment they went through the trouble of digging through court records to get around Tiahrt.
I started doing a little online browsing to see what handguns cost these days. If you want to get a sense of how gun makers try to sell people on new cosmetic features and gadgets, check out the Smith & Wesson website.
You sir, know nothing about the subject you’re shooting your ignorant mouth off about. I’m also noting the macabre tone of these notes, chasing a police homicide here, an armed robbery or murder there. All for the greater public good, you see. Nothing to see here. Move along. We’re just out to condemn the object, you see, not the person wielding it. We’re good people.
Success! Sort of. A federal judge just sentenced a guy named Kingston Gaulden to 33 months for being a prohibited person with a firearm. An ATF agent filed an affidavit saying that the .40 caliber Smith & Wesson gun found with Gaulden was traced back to a gun store robbery in St. Louis Park on Dec. 8, 2009.
A gun store robbery! What luck!
At the center, I spoke with Chief Charlie Houser. Houser gave me a tour of the center and I got to see firsthand how much manual labor goes into sorting records for tracing. They have stacks of out-of-business records from gun sellers across the country. They get 1.3 million records each month. These have to be scanned by hand into their system and stored as a picture file. They used to put the records on microfilm, but don’t any more.
However, by order of Congress, they cannot use optical character recognition software on the scanned documents. That would create a searchable database. And that is prohibited. Houser says if he doesn’t have at least 7 of his 10 scanning machines running 16 hours a day, they’ll be overrun with records. At times, they’ve gotten so backed up they’ve had to get shipping containers put in the parking lot so they can store boxes.
Interesting. So now we know how they are storing them. The problem here is that it would be pretty easy to go from pictorial snapshots to actual full blown gun registry if Congress were to ever allow them to OCR the electronic forms. Almost makes you think whether you should perhaps not write so clearly on your next 4473 transaction.
Before Tiahrt, Nunziato’s Tracing Center would send an officer data related to the gun they were trying to trace. He says “it would say the address used by the person who purchased the gun was also an address used by somebody that possessed the gun that was involved in a killing in Chicago.” And he says the ATF would provide the name and number of the officer in Chicago investigating that killing.
I’m not understanding how Tiahrt prevents ATF from doing this. What it does do is prevent Joyce funded reporters from getting their grubby hands on the data and drawing conclusions on it about limiting constitutional freedoms in this country. For that, I am grateful.