Category: Gun Rights

Amtrak protested endlessly that they couldn’t allow guns on trains. Well, it turns out they can:

Under the policy, beginning Dec. 15, guns can be brought aboard trains that have checked baggage service. Gun owners must inform Amtrak officials 24 hours ahead of departure. Unloaded firearms must be packed in hard-sided containers and will be stored in train lockers.

Not sure why 24 hours advanced notice is required. Airlines don’t require that. Of course, the Brady Campaign says this is just going to make it that much easier for “makes it easier for terrorists to bring weapons on trains with intent to do harm.” Looks like the Brady folks are responsible for the twenty four hour notice thing.

Come on guys. What purpose does that serve other than to harass gun owners? You want to know why we can’t really have dialog? Stuff like this is the reason why. Is a terrorist going to give Amtrak 24 hours notice? Ian Argent had some useful observations yesterday:

Once the gun is out in the world, the owner can do anything with it. The law-abiding one will, of course, limit himself to the lawful activities. But not one of New Jersey’s many strict and serious firearms laws could stop me from loading up my legally-purchased and legally-owned limited-capacity magazines and my legally-purchased and legally-owned handgun, and going out to cause mischief. It’s worth noting, by the way, that, given my lifestyle and normal mode of dress, I could be carrying my handgun and a hundred rounds of ready ammo at any time I carry a pocketknife (which is most of the time) and had I been doing so there is essentially no chance I would have been discovered doing so.

Of course, I don’t do any such thing. For one thing, that much ammo is HEAVY. I could get by with probably 2 extra magazines. But, more seriously, I don’t carry because it is against the law, and I don’t have a pressing need to.

I have been carrying for about eight years now, and the only time I’ve ever had to present my license is because I was legally required to tell the officer I was armed (TX requirement). If I had been carrying illegally for eight years, without a license, I would have been able to get away with it. Given that reality, who do the Brady folks think is being deterred by these laws? Certainly not criminals. Definitely not terrorists. If one has a gun, the law can only amount to punishment after the fact, and since most of the unlawful things you can do with a gun carry hefty jail sentences, it seems rather redundant. Unless your goal is to punish the otherwise law abiding for not following the rules, or to frustrate the exercise of the right.

The Brady goal has nothing to do with crime or terrorism. Their goal is to frustrate the exercise of a fundamental constitutional right to the extent that they can get away with it. Nothing convinces me more of that than the fact that they pushed a 24 notice requirement on Amtrak.

I was happy to see, this Sunday, a takedown of the gun show nonsense our opponents have been relentlessly pushing. They followed up once more today with an article on the same topic:

There are four problems. First, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Institute for Justice have found that only 1 or 2 percent of offenders obtained their weapons from gun shows. Second, the activity at issue — private, person-to-person firearms sales — is not limited to gun shows, so calling it a “gun-show” loophole is disingenuous.

The article then goes on, tying gun control to other freedom issues, and generally pointing to the insanity of prohibition. It’s good to see at least one main stream publication pushing a pro-freedom agenda.

The Belmont Club has a story of a Mexican farmer who decided to fight back against the cartels:

One big story that hasn’t yet made it across the Spanish-English divide is the epic of Don Alejo Garza, an elderly farmer who fought a one-man stand against a drug gang.  When they gave him a deadline to leave his property or else, Garza sent his ranch hands home and armed himself. There he waited. When the gang came in the dead of the night he met them with a fusilade and killed four and wounded two before the numerically superior drug enforcers finally took him out with gunfire and hand-grenades. The Mexican Marines arrived on the scene to find  bodies all over and an old man at the center of it all.

One man fighting back with small arms managed to rack up a pile of bodies fighting back against a barrage of heavily armed opponents. I’m going to guess Senor Garza was probably a pretty good shot. It’s a shame that he was ultimately was murdered anyway. But how many cartel members did he remove from society who won’t go on to murder others? How many elderly farmers fighting back with small arms would it take before the cartels ran out of violent thugs? How long before they decided keeping a lower profile was the better option to declaring open warfare against Mexican civilians?

And here’s a question for our Brady friends. What if Garza armed himself with a gun smuggled in from the United States? I can promise you the grenades the cartels eventually used to kill him didn’t come from gun shows, FFLs or private sales here. I’m sure they will say he’d have been better off abandoning his property to the cartels anyway, because he’d still be alive. We’re all better off, in their minds, surrendering to evil. I say there are worse things than death. My hat is off to Senor Garza. May he rest in peace. If there were 1000 more farmers like him I don’t think the violence in Mexico would continue for long.

You may remember the Motion to Dismiss in the case of an Ohio woman who wanted to have a functional firearm while visiting Illinois. This is the case by the Mountain States Legal Foundation. Illinois filed a Motion to Dismiss the case, for failure to make a claim upon which relief could be granted. I was initially skeptical they were going to easily overcome this motion, but it would appear that they have. The motion was denied by the federal judge hearing the case. What made me think the motion was difficult to overcome was that she had an Ohio license to carry, but it appears that’s not a fact in this case:

Ohio issues licenses to individuals to possess and carry concealed weapons … If Mishaga has such a license, then perhaps, she may legally possess a weapon in Illinois without a FOID Card pursuant to this exception. Mishaga does not allege that she has such a license. For the purposes of the Motion, the Court must assume that she does not, and so, must assume that this exception does not apply to her.

So they beat the first challenge. It would seem that Illinois law would allow non-residents to be issued FOIDs. Perhaps it’s time for Illinois State Police to change their policies in this regard, lest they continue to fight this expensive lawsuit.

Looks like they are going to go for the purse strings:

As they did with the D.C. voting rights bill, gun rights advocates are likely to move an amendment to the D.C. budget measure that lays waste to the city’s firearm registration and possession laws. DC Vote, the taxpayer-funded advocacy group lobbying Capitol Hill for voting representation, issued a statement Monday urging supporters “to pack the hearing room … and show our solidarity in opposition to these attacks on D.C. democracy.”

If democracy means crapping on people’s rights, I’m all for attacking it. There’s a reason we’re not a democracy. I could be wrong, but I think there are complications, in terms of house rules, for attaching a non-budgetary item to a budgetary bill. Hopefully not though. It’s time to get this done.

UPDATE: This story is a year old. Sorry folks. Showed up in my Google Alerts as new.

From Gallup:

For the second year in a row, a record-low 44% of Americans say laws governing the sale of firearms should be made more strict, while 42% say gun laws should be kept as they are now. Twelve percent say gun laws should be made less strict.

Let’s hope for more record lows to come for those supporting stricter gun laws.