Category: Gun Rights

NRA notes that all the fear mongering from DC and Chicago has not come true:

In 1979, the group now known as the Brady Campaign said “over 50 million handguns flood the houses and streets of our nation. . . . If we continue at this pace, we will have equipped ourselves with more than 100 million handguns by the turn of the century. One hundred million handguns. Will we be safer then?”

Then they note:

Since 1980, the number of handguns has increased 50 percent, and the nation’s murder rate has decreased 52 percent. After Chicago imposed handgun registration in 1968, murders in the city increased.  After D.C. banned handguns in 1976, its murder rate rose 201 percent through 1991, while the U.S. rate increased 12 percent. After Chicago banned handguns in 1982, its murder rate increased 49 percent through 1994, while the U.S. rate decreased one percent. And in the year following the repeal of D.C.’s handgun ban, its murder rate decreased 24 percent. In sum, the number of handguns is at an all-time, and the nation’s murder rate is at a 45-year low.

Sorry guys, you lose, and the nation wins. We get our right preserved and a lower crime rate. There a risk with fear mongering based on flimsy data. You lose credibility when the sky doesn’t fall. That same thing could have been true for NRA too, but anyone who was paying attention knows they were trying to ban guns, and erase the Second Amendment. Even as a teenager, from a non-gun-owning family,  I knew that.

NRA and the California Rifle and Pistol Foundation are suing to overturn California ammunition regulations on Second Amendment grounds. The risk here is there’s dicta in Heller that would prejudice a court toward upholding what could be argued is a “commercial qualification” on the right to keep and bear arms. That’s not to say this can’t be done, but it’ll be interesting to see whether the lower Courts will take the Supreme Court’s strong hint about the nature of the Second Amendment right. The recent 7th Circuit ruling in Skoien doesn’t give me much room for optimism that the lower courts are willing to take the Second Amendment seriously. In that case the hope is that the Heller Five is strong enough to rule for a broad right.

I’m not overjoyed by this. Reid has given me plenty of reasons to be unhappy with him on other issues, but it’ll be good for gun rights.

For this country, that’s mostly history, for some others it’s their current reality.

I would characterize this as a very bold lawsuit on the part of SAF. But we will, at some point, have to go after discretionary licensing. But we are going after both the right to carry and discretionary licensing in one lawsuit. I would say this is quite a leap, but I thought Parker was when it first came out too, and we all know how that turned out (it became Heller). Same situation too. Someone’s going to do it. I’d prefer it be someone who makes a very thorough and strong case than some amateur, or worse a kook.

Hat tip to Ian Argent.

Even Clayton Cramer, who used to work for HP, can find some good in the California Senate race. Carly Fiorina has come out against bans on scary looking semi-automatic rifles.

I just had to tell Fitzpatrick’s campaign, who is very likely to carry the NRA endorsement he won in the primary into the general election, he was not welcome at my 100% NRA club, despite the efforts of a volunteer who was also a member. What kind of message do you think that sends if Fitz wins and faces a tough vote on our issue. Do you think he’s going to go to bat for people that told him to get lost? Gun owners far too often think they are in a position to dictate. This is not true. Gun voters are a minority. We only have power through participation and engagement.

It’s important for gun owners who care about Second Amendment issues to be involved in their local clubs. The great problem activists face is that club culture should be a lot more about shooting than politics, so a balance needs to be kept in that regard.  Second Amendment activists need to keep that in mind when approaching clubs and club members. Priority number one is to shoot, stay safe, and have a good time. Political engagement should be somewhere down the priority list, but it needs to be there in some way. The trick is to make politicians think they have something to gain (and therefore something to lose) through the engagement process. This doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t, pre-occupy a club, but it has a great benefit for supporting the other activities clubs would like to do.

Tam talks about collecting pistols chambered in .32 ACP over at her other blog, the Arms Room.

Josh Blackman looks at the 7th Circuit’s ruling in the Lautenberg Amendment (strips Second Amendment rights from domestic violence misdemeanants) case in a thorough manner, and notes:

Don’t expect SCOTUS to resolve this question. There is no way the Court grants cert on an issue as muddy as giving guns to people who commit domestic crimes. Additionally, there is no Circuit split here.

This challenge could arise in other misdemeanor contexts–mainly white collar crimes. Should someone who is found guilty of tax evasion or medicare fraud be disarmed forever? That, will likely be the next challenge.

I agree. I don’t see the Court wanting to go there right now. If the Heller majority wasn’t strong enough to say something about standards of review, but to merely hint, I’m worried about whether it would hold together under this kind of stress, despite the fact that there are more stories out there like this guy’s than there are cases of legitimate wife beaters.

I guess the question would hinge on whether the Court avoided setting a standard of review because the majority isn’t agreed on the strength of the standard, or because someone doesn’t like the idea of setting a standard this soon. To me the Court pretty strongly hinted that the standard of review ought to be quite strict. That doesn’t mean lower courts aren’t going to ignore it.

We may not find very favorable outcomes in the 7th Circuit. Recall the even two Republican appointees, Posner and Easterbrook, are both vociferously opposed preserving the Second Amendment and wish to destroy it as in individual right., and only one judge, nominated by G.W. Bush, was willing to dissent.

I think we can all agree that it’s important to keep guns, like the one pictured to the left, out of the hands of Chicago’s gangs. It is clear which kinds of firearms criminals in Chicago prefer. Chicago has its list of banned “unsafe” handguns out. No Lawyers, Only Guns and Money notes that it gets most of the manufacturers of what anti-gun folks would call “Saturday Night Specials,” including derringers. Chuck Michel is calling it the Goldilocks approach to gun control. I note that it bans some of the more major manufacturers too. Daisy is listed, and they make air guns. All North American Arms spur trigger models are banned. Hi-Points are banned entirely, along with all the Ring of Fire companies. The SIG Mosquito is banned by name. But most of these guns are collector’s pieces, so what crime control purpose could they serve?

We all know the answer to that. They are trying desperately to carve out any space they can find where the Courts will allow them to apply bans, and clearly they’ve decided to hang their hats on the evils of the spur and sheathed trigger. It’s not that Chicago really believes in this as a crime measure, so much as they want to get the courts to say nice things about being able to ban guns for certain reasons, like being unsafe. If this list is upheld, expect Chicago to make frequent additions to make sure your average poor Chicagoans can in no way afford to buy protection for themselves. Having been forced by the Supreme Court to give up bans, having it be a privilege for the Chicago elite is the next best thing.

In this sense, Chicago is being far smarter than DC, because it’s hard to argue that the Government’s general ability to regulate products for safety can’t apply to handguns. But the presence on this list of manufacturers who make cheap, but not unsafe handguns could cause the list to fall, and the Courts may frown on the discretion allowed bureaucrats to deem a handgun “unsafe.” While I would be nervous how the courts will treat this list, it could also pay off for us as readily as Chicago. Chicago is being smarter than DC, but that’s not saying much, and is not to say they are being all that smart.