Gun Rights – Page 127 – Shall Not Be Questioned

You Mean Like When Hurricanes Hit Florida?

CSGV is apparently unaware that hurricanes making landfall is a regular occurrence in some parts of the country, like Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and North Carolina. All of these states have “weak” gun laws by CSGV standards. Category 1 hurricanes making landfall in these places might dominate the news cycle for a day or so, and then the media moves on.

But while we’re on the topic of defense, CSGV acts like there are no guns in New Jersey or New York. I can assure you there are, and the media has been reporting on such if you care to dig.

A sign outside a home in Long Beach, LI, summed it all up for storm weary New Yorkers. It read, â€œLooters will be shot by local vet.â€

In the mean time, I’ve been keeping in contact with a few people in the Garden State who’ve been without power, but nonetheless sufficient armed. Good people armed in the wake of large scale natural disasters like this does more to prevent violence than it does to foment it. A lesson that is totally lost on Mayor Bloomberg, who is refusing help from the National Guard for the 5 Boroughs, 3 of which were utterly battered by this storm:

â€œWe donâ€™t need it,â€ Mayor Bloomberg said on Wednesday during a press update on the cityâ€™s ongoing Hurricane Sandy cleanup. â€œThe NYPD is the only people we want on the street with guns.â€

So for Bloomberg, even the guns wielded by our National Guard are undesirable. And how many of your towns have signed onto this radical and un-American agenda? You know what that sounds like to me?

Good people need to be able to defend themselves in the wake of events like this. We will bring the Second Amendment, true Second Amendment right, and not the nonsense Mayor Bloomberg disingenuously claims to support, to the people of New York. In this struggle I believe we will ultimately prevail. But a lot of that depends on next Tuesday, and who gets to pick the next several Supreme Court justices.

Can You be a Menace on Your Own Property?

That’s part of the question in an Alabama case that the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund is getting involved with down there. It’s definitely an interesting case based on the details provided in this news account.

A developer/landlord was convicted of misdemeanor menacing after he was merely holding his shotgun (not pointing it, from the description in the article) on his property while ordering a former tenant who owed millions in back rent off site. The former tenant was removing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of items from the property that the landlord said were considered part of the property until the back rent was paid – items like sinks, stoves, and booths that might, depending on the nature of the contract, actually be considered part of the building. In other words, the tenant wasn’t on site to grab his coat or family pictures that he left behind. He was ordered from the property, and the police were called.

The police officers at the time didn’t feel like the developer was committing any crimes in how he handled himself with the trespassing tenant. However, the trespasser filed charges later. So now there’s a question over whether or not Alabama residents may legally possess a firearm on their own property while ordering a trespasser to leave.

RIP, Mr. Dobrowolski, You’ve Earned It

Oldest known Auschwitz Survivor dies at 108. He lead an underground effort to continue educating Poles, after the Nazis had forbidden the education of “inferior races.” Today I am determined there shall be no more “inferior races” in this world. And what is the best way to make men equal? I think we know the answer more than many.

The “Terror Gap” Nightmare

If you listen to our political opponents, no one who gets flagged by the no-fly list can possibly be trusted with a firearm – even in the home or used for hunting. They are clearly a danger to society. We hear stories about babies ending up on the list and all sorts of other problems that come from similar names. However, here’s one that was supposedly an exact match of name, social security number, and date of birth.

Yet, he’s cleared to carry a concealed firearm based on a recent background check, he was cleared to ride on an Air Force flight on his way to a foreign country, and he was given a place to stay on the Pearl Harbor naval base while the bureaucrats took time to clean up their mess.

In other words, a guy who is no apparent danger to our country and has no record that should indicate he’s a problem should be a prohibited person according to anti-gun politicians and groups. No accountability, no recourse, just take away people’s fundamental rights. Thank goodness they aren’t going to win that fight. Instead of losing his right to own firearms, the guy in this story was just out five days of hotel expenses in Hawaii and a trip to see his wife who is serving our country.

Jindal: “It’s time we protected gun rights.”

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has an op-ed on the need to pass Amendment 2 in November. I appreciate that he broke it down to explain it to those who just assume that gun rights are “protected” without really knowing anything about the legal debates:

Simply put, this amendment to Louisiana’s Constitution acknowledges the fundamental right to keep and bear arms for legitimate purposes, and it requires any restriction on gun ownership be subject to strict scrutiny.

It’s our own Second Amendment, if you will, a new constitutional provision to repair the damage done by past judicial interpretations. You see, over the years, Louisiana courts have applied a “rational basis” legal standard to interpreting our right to bear arms. In reality, that means that the state has almost unlimited authority to confiscate, prohibit or infringe on this fundamental right. Make no mistake, I have no intention of allowing such a bill to leave my desk without a veto, but our liberties should not be held hostage to whims of future legislators and governors. By applying the “strict scrutiny” test, we elevate the protections in our constitution to the same level we provide our right to free speech.

Jindal also goes into the arguments about the federal courts being only vote away from rewriting the Second Amendment and what Congress has done to try and keep some of the assaults on gun rights that happened after Katrina from happening again, but the theme is definitely that Louisiana needs its own protection of the fundamental right just in case the whims of Congress or the federal courts change. I hope that gun owners who don’t normally follow the issue closely down there get a chance to read this piece.

Open Thread On Cultural Shifts

I’ve often wondered about the rapid shift in the center of our issue to more strongly favor gun rights over gun control. It happened very quickly. In the space of just a bit more than a decade, we went from the high water mark for the gun control movement to the gun control movement being at death’s door, and needing to reinvent itself to achieve relevance.

I’ve seen some data that shows a generation gap on the issue, with the very old tending to favor gun control at a greater rate than other age demographics. This leads me to a postulate: the Greatest Generation were considerably more supportive of gun control than Baby Boomers and subsequent generations are. The shift in the center that’s happened in the issue has come about because the Greatest Generation has largely died off in the past decade.

Another postulate: if there was a generational shift in the issue, to what extent did racism and xenophobia play into it? Using my grandparents as my example from that generation, they were far more openly racist than is socially acceptable today. To what extent did support for gun control by older generations exist because of social anxieties about blacks asserting their rights and demanding to be treated as equal members of society, along with the social unrest that went with that?

Keep in mind I’m speaking generally, and there have always been a separation between elites and ordinary people. But I think it’s a safe observation to suggest that elites in the 30s through 60s were considerably more supportive of gun control than they have been since. Another postulate I would put out there is that our current success is not so much driven by a generational change, as the fall of the Northeast as an economic and cultural center, and the rise of the South, Midwest, and Mountain States, which have never had a cultural inclination toward gun control. In short, Southern elites are not out-eliting our elites, which I consider a good thing.

The Romney Assault Weapons Ban That Wasn’t

Being very close personally with someone who worked at GOAL during the Romney Administration, there is a lot to like and a lot to dislike about Mitt Romney’s record on our issue. What’s not to like has gone largely undiscussed. What’s been discussed far more often is the assault weapons issue, which alternately has people or the media suggesting Romney made Massachusetts’s assault weapons ban permanent, or accusing him of being the Governor who passed Massachusetts’s Assault Weapons Ban in the first place. Both are untrue. The ban passed and signed byÂ Governor CellucciÂ in 1998 never had an expiration. The problem came about in 2004 because Massachusetts Law makes several references to the federal ban. Without the supporting language from the federal ban, the definition of what exactly an assault weapon is in Massachusetts would have become uncertain. Fine, right? Well, no. Massachusetts is not a state where ambiguity in the law is decided in favor of a gun owner. The definition of assault weapon contains the language “shall include, but not be limited to,” which is like music to the ears of a prosecutor wanting to warn the fair citizenry that they exercise their right in his fiefdom at their peril. The limiting language in the Massachusetts definition was tied to a Federal Law which was about to disappear.

In 2004 that anti-gun leaders of the Massachusetts Legislature started to raise false concerns about needing to make Massachusetts’s assault weapons ban permanent, given that the federal ban was about to expire. This was never true, but presented an excuse to convince other legislators to revisit, and simultaneously greatly expand the definition of what an assault weapon is in Massachusetts, making the ban cover far more firearms. They went ahead and drafted a bill. Fortunately for gun owners in Massachusetts, GOAL was able to essentially gut the bill, and preserve the existing language in the definition, which included the federal list of exempted firearms. In addition they got a number of other easements to the bill which are detailed in their press release speaking about Romney’s record on guns. The anti-gun sponsors of the original bill were not pleased, but the rest of the Massachusetts Legislature went along with the GOAL plan of preserving the existing definition in the law, and slipping in some easements through under the radar. This wasn’t about making the ban permanent. Massachusetts Law would have still made assault weapons illegal, just with a far more nebulous definition of what exactly an assault weapon is.

While the anti-gun sponsors were not happy about what their bill had turned into, they got a lot happier when Governor Romney was misadvised about the bill he was signing and made the now infamous signing statement:

â€œDeadly assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts. These guns are not made for recreation or self-defense. They are instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people.â€

That was essentially cover for them, especially given that the media ran with this, and has kept running ever since. GOAL was inundated with calls from angry gun owners, who took the media and anti-gun legislators word on what the bill actually did.Â No one, not reporters, anti-gun folks, or angry citizens, bothered to read the actual law. While it takes some work to follow, but it’s pretty easy to see the effect of the first three sections of the law, if you look at the statute it is modifying, by inserting a concrete reference to the federal law with the addition of a date. The rest you need a deeper understanding of Massachusetts gun law to follow, but the “assault weapons” parts aren’t hard.

So Romney has never signed a gun ban, and anyone who suggests he has is missing the facts. He did other things, such as raising fees to try to balance Massachusetts’s budget, rather than raising taxes. Massachusetts has long required people to obtain licenses to possess firearms. Among those fees he raised were gun licenses, and the price hike was not trivial. The price was quadrupled without concern to what effect this would have on the exercise of people’s rights. The burden is not minor for someone who doesn’t have much money. That’s enough reason to distrust Romney on the issue as much as a gun ban is. I don’t blame gun owners who are wary of Mitt. But I’d like to see that wariness based on facts, and not bullshit peddled by the media.

A View of Legislation

Again, drawing from Tam’s post on last night’s third rail licking by President Obama, I want to highlight a random comment that I think is illustrative:

Lets face facts on the actual possibility of a re-introduced AWB.

1. It will either have a sunset, or be overturned. In the current political climate EVERYONE has bigger fish to fry and no matter what you do you cannot regulate crazy.

2. As callous or shocking as this may sound, an AWB would be nothing short of lucrative for pretty much every member here.

What makes the poster here think that, once the legislative sausage grinder starts to turn, that surely it would have a sunset, or be overturned? Why did the original AWB have a sunset in it? Because ban proponents had to include it to win votes. We were damned lucky we got that sunset. It was a product of the unique circumstances in place when the ban was considered, and there’s no guarantee a new ban would have one. None of the state level bans have included sunsets (Massachusetts’s ban was always permanent). None have been repealed. Unfortunately, statements like this express a grave naivety about how the legislative process works.

If you’re a gun lobbyist, and you’re fighting an assault weapons ban and losing, you may be able to use wavering legislators to help make a bill less bad. But the exact nature of how that works out is very much going to be dependent on circumstances and individual legislators. What would a new assault weapons ban look like? We honestly don’t know. The best course of action is not to find out.

And the Press Goes Wild

The Google Alerts on “assault weapon” is lighting up like a Christmas tree this morning since the President came out and said what he really thinks. Papers from the Washington Post to the Chicago TribuneÂ are atwitter on the subject. From Tam:

What I love about this is how every time he gives the gun control issue the most tentative touch with the tip of his tongue (what he actually said was “Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced,”) the media grabs him by the back of his head and turns it into a great, big sloppy slurp (“Obama Calls for Renewal of Assault Weapons Ban” blares the headline.) These guys are writing the NRA’s ad copy for them.

I tend to agree this is a good thing. We want Obama talking about this issue and the media playing it up as much as possible. The worst thing Obama ever did to NRA was to do and say nothing. It’s hard to demonize someone who really hasn’t gone after you, except for “under the radar.” Well, he’s not flying too stealthy anymore, and I’m going to bet there are people in Fairfax editing copy of that statement as we speak.

PLCAA in New York Courts

Earlier this month a New York appeals court overturned the dismissal of a lawsuit against Beemiller, Inc, the maker of the Hi-Point 9mm, which is being sued because of criminal misuse of their product. The lower court, correctly, cited the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. Law.com has a very good article with some background. John Richardson has more, including an NRA News interview with Steven Halbrook. The actual opinion cites the exceptions to the PLCAA as a reason for allowing the case to go forward, particularly the text which allows, “an action in which a manufacturer or seller of a qualified productÂ knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product, and the violationÂ was a proximate cause of the harm for which relief is sought.”

The complaint is against the dealer, the distributor, and the manufacturer. The case is actually quite interesting. The dealer in this was licensed from his home, and did business at gun shows. There’s nothing unlawful about this arrangement, but it’s alleged that the dealer knowingly facilitated straw purchases in violation of federal law, which, if true, would indeed put the suit outside of the PLCAA. Where it gets interesting is that the dealer in question was a high level officer, and is now the President of the distributor that’s being sued as well. Said distributor is the sole marketer and distributor of Hi-Point firearms. The court essentially ruled that the plaintiffs are entitled to discovery, given these facts.

The Brady Center is touting this as a major landmark victory. They have been attempting to poke holes in the PLCAA virtually from the moment it passed, since it has effectively ruined their strategy to sue firearms manufacturers, distributors, and dealers out of existence. I haven’t been able to find all the pleadings in this case to know for sure, but the circumstances here look fairly unique and narrow, with someone who is a dealer and also part owner of the sole distributor of a firearms manufacturer. Nonetheless, the Bradys would love to carve a PLCAA exception wide enough such that any firearm sold by a dealer to a straw buyer can result in a potential lawsuit at least reaching the discovery phase. All it takes is for this to happen in a single jurisdiction, and it’ll be open season on firearms dealers.