Category: Gun Rights

Miguel links to an excellent article about what kinds of things influence juries. The conclusion is that the weapon you use does make an impression on a jury. It should be, but we share this planet with a lot of other highly irrational people. I agree with Miguel’s conclusion this means we need to get more women into shooting. Another conclusion to draw from this is to let your wife do the shooting. Women are treated less harshly by jurors in self-defense shootings. This effect also seems to apply to police shootings as well. Strangely enough, women are treated more harshly for using a Glock than other weapons.

Personally, I wouldn’t worry too much about this in terms of weapon choice. We shouldn’t let our irrational fellow citizens make our choices for us.

Dave Hardy has some great thoughts on the whole topic, noting that the total number of firearms the Mexican government are holding that were seized is far greater than the number of firearms the Mexican government has submitted to the ATF for tracing.

Another thought I had recently is how do we trust all these guns are recovered from actual narco-traffickers, and not recovered from ordinary non-criminal citizens who smuggled, or had a relative smuggle, a firearm back from the United States to protect themselves and their families. Guns are generally unavailable to anyone other than criminals in Mexico.

That’s not the kind of smuggling I’m interested in stopping. As far as I’m concerned, the Mexican government is interfering with a fundamental human right, and I consider guns smuggled for such a purpose no morally different than people who smuggled Jews out of Nazi Germany. That’s not to say we know guns smuggled into Mexico are used for that purpose, but it’s something to think about.

Looks like the City of Portland is trying to bring the issue to head. Maine has a strong pro-gun culture traditionally, but it’s also accepted quite a lot of people fleeing from Massachusetts.

I was in Hawaii when I heard that NRA filed suit against the federal law that bars 18-20 year olds from purchasing firearms. I was pleased even more to learn that the case was brought in Texas, which is in the more gun friendly Fifth Circuit, and seemed to have a carefully selected plaintiff that got around the Texas state law that generally prohibits handguns to 18-20 year olds (there’s an exception for military and honorably discharged veterans, and the plaintiff is a veteran). But John Richardson points out over at No Lawyers that the case is also challenging Texas’ prohibition on carry licenses to 18-20 year olds. What?

Why complicate the case with that question? Truth is, there’s not much that can justify removing a constitutional right for 18-20 year old individuals, and the courts will probably say a lot of useful things in deciding such a case. I think NRA is on really solid ground with that part of the case. Since it’s federal law, it didn’t even really need incorporation. But Texas is hardly an outlier in restricting licenses to carry a firearm to those 21 or older. Indiana is actually the only state I know of that will issue to 18-20 year olds (though I think there are a few more). I don’t think this is the circumstance where I want to get the courts to recognize a right to carry a firearm. While the Fifth Circuit (same circuit that ruled the Second Amendment was an individual right in Emerson) is certainly more gun friendly than, say, the Second, I would note that they still upheld Lautenberg under their standard of review.

Benson is also a very broad case, that basically throws everything and the kitchen sink at Chicago. This would indicate NRA is preferring to back broad cases. I don’t think this is a wise strategy, as I think we’re better off moving cases forward that ask the courts to decide on narrowly tailored questions, with plaintiffs carefully chosen, and optimized for those circumstances. This is SAF’s strategy, so far. That’s not to say I think NRA’s strategy is doomed, by any means, but it seems to me that SAF has the better strategy here. I’d be interested to hear more legally trained observers opinion on this.

UPDATE: OK, it seems I read hastily, and they are actually two separate cases.

Jerry Moran (R-KS) reports that his bill, which basically strips the Department of Veterans Affairs of their power to strip Second Amendment rights from veterans that have a fiduciary appointed to them. This was a despicable Clinton era practice. Moran’s legislation requires a judicial act in order for someone to be adjudicated. This is part of a larger veterans benefits bill, so it should have no issue getting a floor vote, getting past the Senate, and getting President Obama’s signature.

Strangely enough the Bradys are opposing this bill. Really? You still have a process for adjudicating someone, it just requires taking it to court rather than a unilateral decision by a government bureaucrats. The Brady position seems pretty radical to me, for a group that says they just want reasonable gun laws.

And apparently it’s all a vast, NRA fueled Yankee conspiracy, at least that’s what the Canadian media is implying. Word now is that the bill to repeal the long gun registry is doomed, because there are some Liberal Party politicians in rural ridings who are going to vote against it. Here’s my advice to Canadian Gun owners, just to fuel the conspiracy: You need to single out these rural, Liberal Party MPs and make examples out of them by voting them out of office, and make sure it’s apparent that the gun vote was significant. You will likely have to coalition with other malcontents, but it can be done. Crap like this is what you’re up against, but politicians will ignore that if they start to think the gun vote can remove them from office. That’s how we did it here. There’s no reason it can’t work in Canada too. Step one is to put the fear of the gun vote into the politicians. The rest will follow.

Common Gunsense is a blog run by a Brady board member (their board positions, much like the NRA, are uncompensated, so not a Brady employee), and we once again get the narrative that all the guns in Mexico are coming from the United States, and discusses this situation:

Her remarks were discussed while listening to a Colombian mother and her two daughters talk about the tragic story of watching their husband and father assassinated by a gun before their very eyes. They were in their home when members of the para military came to their door wielding weapons. This man was an elected official in his small town in Columbia. The woman and her two daughters escaped but the situation in Columbia was too dangerous for them. They sought political asylum in the U.S. and are now living in a suburb of Minneapolis. They were brave enough to stand before us and share their tragic story.

They weren’t assassinated by the gun, Ms. Japete, they were assassinated by narco-terrorists wielding guns. And what purpose does it serve for only the corrupt government, and narco-terrorists being the ones that are armed? What if instead of running, our Colombian friends had the ability to shoot back? How many narco-terrorists would they find willing to make housecalls like this if they knew there was a high likelihood several of them wouldn’t make it back? These are unpleasant thoughts, to be sure, but when you have armed people showing up to your home willing to you harm, you’re out of pleasant solutions, you have before you a choice of evils.

But even aside from that, Ms. Japete needs to explain how this was purchased legally in the US. Or how these guns were purchased legally in the US (have you ever seen anything like this at a gun show? Or at a shop? I sure as hell haven’t). I’d also, using this same article, ask her to go through this mental exercise:

Monterrey is Mexico’s wealthiest city, its third largest, and until a few years ago, one of its safest. But in the last six months the metropolis has been turned upside-down. Drug gangs have set up scores of roadblocks on major highways, murdered the mayor of a prominent suburb, intimidated the media, and taken control of many neighborhoods. The military, federal police, and local police are everywhere but are almost as feared as the gangs. Systematic police and mayoral assassinations are causing entire towns to go dark.

Take this out of Monterrey for a minute and try to imagine what would happen in Texas or Arizona if drug gangs were trying to take over whole inhabited towns and the government and police stood by and did nothing. Do you think the narco-traffickers have a large enough supply of thugs to keep manning those roadblocks after a few of them get picked off from a distance every night? Is anyone going to be willing to take the job after the first few nights? If you think Texans or Arizonans wouldn’t do such things, you don’t know Texans or Arizonans very well. Hell, I don’t even think Californians would take it for very long.

When you start to understand this, you understand why this violence is only peripherally spreading into the United States. I am not at all suggesting that the availability of your average person to arm themselves is the only variable at work here; a fairly uncorrupted police and military force is still our primary line of defense, but Mexico is the prime example of what happens when you disarm every day people so that they can be properly terrorized. Whether that’s by government or criminal thugs is of little matter. The people of Mexico have two choices. Submit or die. North of the border, there is at least a third option.