Category: Gun Rights

Tam has another link to training fail, which seems to becoming more common. While I think gun bloggers have a role in pointing this stuff out, I think there’s no better evidence for the phenomena of lots of newly minted gun owners than the training fail phenomena. If it’s correct that guns and shooting are going completely mainstream as a hobby, you’re going to see a lot more unqualified people getting into the business in an attempt to cash in on the larger pool of newbs floating around out there that wouldn’t know good training from bad.

So I put this phenomena in the “good problem to have,” category, because of what it means. It would be interesting to see as well, whether NRA’s had an uptick in problem instructors, since NRA’s credential is not all that difficult to obtain, and widely recognized. While they probably would want to keep quiet about that if it were the case, it would be more evidence there are a lot of new shooters floating out there on the market looking for training.

Maybe I shouldn’t have changed the blog name:

Farmers in rural areas have been reporting increasing damage to their crops by wild boar, deer and other animals. To make firearms more accessible, a bill that would loosen the currently tight restrictions on hunting rifles has been proposed in the Diet. But, the Sankei Shimbun (Dec 4) reports, the police remain adamantly opposed to changes in the law.

You hear this a lot in foreign countries, but you have to wonder how often it’s true that “police” opposition in these countries is also nothing but political appointees.

Extrano’s alley speculates it could happen, and we should force the point. It wouldn’t honestly surprise me if we could be successful here. To say that the massive increase in NFA transactions, many of which are in the forms of trusts, has been a problem for ATF is an understatement. Trusts are particularly problematic because they are harder to clear than individuals. Many people are driven toward the use of trusts because of being unable to obtain LEO sign off. In this day in age, it really is a useless requirement, and should be dropped. I no more know my local police chief than I know the examiner who would process the NFA paperwork.

Granted, there are still a lot of good reasons to use trusts over individual. If Bitter and become NFA collectors, we’ll likely go the trust route, just because if both of us are on the trust, we can both be in legal possession of the same object. This is not true if you do it individually. If you lent your wife your can to take to the shooting range, unless you were with her, that would be an illegal transfer. A trust eliminates that.

The better solution to deal with the backlog would be to remove silencers from the NFA and deregulate them. They are representing most of the growth in NFA interest. Eliminating the requirement for SBRs would help as well.

SayUncle notes the violent insurrectionist rhetoric from Mayor Bloomberg. Note that it’s only wrong when we do it. The fact that Bloomberg even thought “If the NYPD were an army, how big an army would it be?” is scary enough in and of itself.

Here’s by bit of insurrectionism: that people like Bloomberg can end up in positions of such power are one of the reasons I think gun ownership is important. Not that I think Bloomberg has plans to march the NYPD across New Jersey and invade Pennsylvania (though that would be fun), but that in the event of a breakdown in civil order, there’s something to keep the ambitions of such a dangerously grandiose individual in check.

One of the problems our opponents have with characterizing our views is that they make the assumption that we feel directly threatened, rather than believing widespread gun ownership among the civilian populace acts as deterrent to the ambitions of the powerful, and creates a political ecosystem that makes it more unlikely those ambitions will be followed through with to the sacrifice of everyone else’s liberty.

No doubt looking to give gun owners a giant black eye, the New York AG is busy going after gun show promoters, blaming them for the actions of criminals. Jacob has video of the press conference dog and pony show. He notes:

This whole thing smells of a setup.

First off, when was the last time a State Attorney General put on a full court press for a bunch of misdemeanor appearance tickets? Second is the timing. H.R. 822 will be going to the Senate soon for a vote. This has to be an attempt to derail that bill.

Sounds about right. Also, look at these dangerous guns they’ve gotten off the street:

• 3 AR-15 (Assault Rifles)
• 1 semi-automatic rifle called a “Mauser” (from Czech Republic)
• 1 Savage 7mm Rifle
• 1 Remington Model 710
• 1 Colt 7.72 x39
• 1 Enfield Military rifle
• 1 Browning .22 cal, model 235
• 1 Ithaca .22 gauge
• 1 Remington 25.06

Semi-auto Mauser? Really? Either way, I’m glad that gang members won’t have access to an “Ithaca .22 gauge” or a collections of various deer rifles in calibers no one has ever heard of (because they don’t exist). Looks like some hardened criminals Schneiderman is going after here. This isn’t justice, it’s revenge. When you go after otherwise good people for technicalities like this, all to make a political point, you aren’t a public servant, you’r a thug.

The ploy it not going to work anyway. We are going to lay waste to New York’s gun laws bit by bit, and restore the Second Amendment. I savor that even more than New Jersey, because there will be a lot more or the right kind of people in New York unhappy with it, starting with this asshole of an AG, who apparently doesn’t have any real criminals in his state worth going after. He also apparently does not have anyone on staff who knows about guns.

Apparently the UK’s Daily Mail yanked a pro-gun rights piece off its page because the ideas therein were deemed too dangerous. As Joe pointed out in a post just now, you can go read the too-dangerous-for-print post over here.

I’m continuously struck by how radical a document our constitution is. Too radical for us to really follow, apparently, and too dangerous for Europeans to even speak of, or debate. This is 200 years after most of them were dead.

I’ll give him the J frame Smith and the modern M&P. I’ll grant the 870 is a pretty decent shotgun for home defense, as are most shotguns. But the Taurus Judge? Really? I’m also not to hot on using N-frame S&W for self-defense unless what you’re defending yourself against is an angry bear. Nonetheless, it’s good to see something like this being discussed somewhere other than blogs and forums.

Dave Hardy has the details on some of the other provisions. Evan Nappen has more details on the shotgun regulation, including the language of the appropriations restriction in that regard:

SEC. 541. None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to pay the salaries or expenses of personnel to deny, or fail to act on, an application for the importation of any model of shotgun if–

(1) all other requirements of law with respect to the proposed importation are met; and

(2) no application for the importation of such model of shotgun, in the same configuration, had been denied by the Attorney General prior to January 1, 2011, on the basis that the shotgun was not particularly suitable for or readily adaptable

It doesn’t completely eliminate enforcement of “sporting purposes” for shotgun importation, it basically just kills ATF’s proposed rule. If a shotgun has already been determined to be not particularly suited to sporting purposes, ATF will still be able to keep it out of the country. They just won’t be able to do any reclassification on the basis of a sporting purposes test.

This has now been signed into law, by the way. I have to say that NRA has gotten very good at playing this game. While everyone was busy getting themselves all worked up about HR822, and Bloomberg and Menino were having their dog and pony show in the Senate, NRA was quietly pushing funding riders that would go unnoticed by our opponents until it was too late. I consider getting Congress to take a whack at the Gun Control Act’s “sporting purposes” language, even if it’s just a modest funding restriction, to be a significant achievement, and certainly a step on the road to possibly getting that provision removed at some point in the future.