Category: Gun Rights

SayUncle covers a pretty disturbing story about a guy in Oregon who was fired from his government job because he was supposedly disgruntled, and bought some guns, which the police noticed. Uncle asks, “Seems they knew he bought guns from the background checks. He did not purchase multiple handguns in a week which makes me wonder how the police got this info.”

The answer is easy. Oregon is a Point-Of-Contact state for the NICS system, which means Oregon, like Pennsylvania and many other states, has its own system. While funding restrictions prevent the feds from storing information related to background checks, there is no such restriction on the state point-of-contact. The POC provision was put in place by the Brady Act, which allows states to run systems that is an alternate to the National Instant Check System. It’s possible the police have access to the Oregon Instant Check System records, which is how they found out about his purchase.

The Pennsylvania State Police have been abusing PICS for years to operate what we still claim is an illegal registry of firearms sales in Pennsylvania. We’ve had cases where gun owners, being pulled over in traffic stops, have had guns seized from them because when they were run, they were not “registered” to them. Most often this happens because the gun was brought in when they moved here, or any number of other reasons. We’ve also had cases where gun owners have been involved in self-defense incidents, where no charges end up being filed, but during the investigation to police come for the rest of their guns that are in the registry.

This is not uncommon among POC states, and one of the reason some state groups are pushing to have PICS eliminated, and to use the federal system. Our Uniforms Firearms Act was supposed to forbid making a registry out of the PICS data, but the State Supreme Court, in a great example of mincing words, said because the database is incomplete, it’s not a “registry” by law, and therefore the State Police were permitted to keep it. Sounds like a registry to me. Gun owners should start to consider whether, perhaps, they might be better off using the federal system, rather than allowing state level abuses of POC systems. It hasn’t worked out for Pennsylvania gun owners very well, and it looks like it’s not working out very well for Oregonian gun owners either.

Looks like we were a bit premature in celebrating Matt Carmel’s success in his quest to sponsor a sports team:

Matt Carmel’s quest to get the name of his business, “Constitution Arms,” on a team uniform has come up short again, with a rugby league that initially accepted his sponsorship doing an about-face under pressure from other sponsors.

He says this will mark the end of his quest. This is how bad the culture has gotten in New Jersey.

In PA the ruling was called Commonwealth v. Hawkins, and ruled that an anonymous, unsubstantiated report of a “man with a gun” was not sufficient evidence to justify a Terry stop. Now it looks like Indiana has a version of the same.

Looks like Daley is firing a return volley at the Second Amendment just as his city’s handgun ban looks to have a very limited future. What’s surprising is he openly admits this is a counterattack:

“The aggressiveness of the gun advocates is just one reason it’s more important than ever that we work for common-sense gun laws focused on stopping the flow of illegal guns into our communities and keeping the guns out of the hands of the criminals,” Daley said, standing next to tables loaded with weapons confiscated by Chicago police.

Dave Hardy notes that there would be vagueness issues with at least one of the laws. I’m not sure what the point is of closing any gun show loophole in Illinois either, since you are required to have an FOID card to possess firearms in that state. What the point of the licensing if they are still going to claim there’s some kind of “loophole”?

The whole point of these, however, is just to get back at gun owners. Daley won’t be happy unless he’s pissing on the Second Amendment, and he doesn’t appreciate the residents of his city demanding their rights. He’ll teach you!

IGOLD 2010 is tomorrow. Let’s hope for a strong turnout so maybe gun owners in Illinois can teach Mayor Daley a lesson for a change.

I was eager to read his opinion on this topic, because despite being friendly on the gun issue, he’s a bit of an outsider to it. He didn’t really commit one way or another, but he brought up an interesting point:

Beyond the legal and practical issues, of course, there is the question of whether open carry activists are helping or hurting the cause of gun rights by popping up in coffee shops and restaurants with weapons on their waists. Respectable, law-abiding people carrying guns openly in public places could help normalize gun ownership and armed self-defense among people who are unfamiliar with both. The experience of a Walnut Hill, California, pizzeria owner who decided to welcome gun carriers is consistent with that hope:

“Frankly, I wasn’t sure how I would feel in that type of situation, and it really turned out to be a total nonissue,” Ms. Grunner said.

“The families were great,” she said. “These were very gracious people.” The fact that customers wore sidearms, she said, “just faded into the background.”

Then again, the sight of people with pistols on their hips could serve to confirm prejudices about gun owners among people who believe they fetishize their weapons and seek to project a macho image. The goal of encouraging support for liberalized concealed carry policies depends to some extent on normalization yet at the same time assumes open gun toting will make people uneasy. I’m not sure people can be simultaneously reassured and alarmed.

This statement, in combination with some other statements folks have made in the comments, makes me wonder whether your opinion on open carry is largely driven by your perception of what the dominant thinking is around you, and that perhaps the open carry folks have a more optimistic outlook on the attitudes of their fellow Americans than non-open-carry supporters.

From my point of view, I think most people, if forced to take a side, probably wouldn’t support carrying a gun in public if it meant they were going to see guns everywhere they went. I don’t want the public thinking about how they feel about it, because I worry we’ll lose support. But I suspect open carry folks believe that if the public is forced to think about it, the public will eventually take their side, and we’ll gain support. Which side is right? Probably depends greatly on the surrounding culture. I suspect neither side is right in every circumstance, but it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. The Starbucks incident may end up being a watershed moment in the debate.

It’s the sad truth.

Vermont is one of our signature states, really. No gun laws, really, to speak of, and virtually no crime. But there’s a suicide angle being pushed there in order to pass a “safe storage” law. This particular safe storage law exempts law enforcement. I guess they don’t care about kids of police officers. It mandates either trigger locks, or reasonably secure locked container. It’s worth remembering that the Supreme Court in Heller essentially threw away a similar law in DC as being unconstitutional.

I’m not opposed to safe storage, by any means, but I believe the best way to deal with this problem is through efforts to educate gun owners, and educate children about the dangers of guns, rather than impose legal sanctions. This is what we’ve done for the past several decades, and gun accident rates have been falling for most of the century. As for suicides, though studies have shown that suicide by gun rates are higher in places with more guns, overall suicide rates are not affected by the availability of firearms.

This New York Times article I think covers the issue very well. This reporter took time to understand the issue, and I appreciate that. NRA I expect will never say anything to disparage open carry. It’s a bad idea for the main gun rights group to do such a thing, but Alan Gottlieb of SAF is starting to speak publicly about it:

“I’m all for open-carry laws,” said Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, a gun rights advocacy organization in Washington State. “But I don’t think flaunting it is very productive for our cause. It just scares people.”

Bob Barr is also advising we exercise caution:

Whether Starbucks will succumb to the mounting pressure by anti-gun groups such as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and alter its tolerant policy, remains to be seen.  For their part, however, firearms advocates might be better advised not to press the issue publicly by pointedly visiting Starbucks establishments with firearms openly displayed.  Sometimes quiet advocacy speaks louder than waving a red flag in someone’s face.

I agree it’s probably now time to help Starbucks get past this issue by not open carrying in their establishment in order to make a point. At least not in areas where open carry isn’t common (if you want to open carry in the Starbucks in Sierra Vista, AZ, near Tombstone, knock yourself out, you probably won’t be alone) or accepted. In addition to fearing Starbucks might reverse, I’m worried about having to fight this same battle over and over again with other establishments. Even if they don’t cave to the Brady Campaign, so far they have 28,000 new names they can try to fundraise off of. They win even if they lose, just by being able to make it an issue.

Gun rights are still polling very well. A full sixty nine percent of Americans don’t believe that cities should have the power to ban handguns. Seventy percent believe the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to own a gun. Only 14% say it’s not. A plurality of Americans don’t believe we need stronger gun laws, at 49% saying we don’t, against 42% saying we do.

There is one thing we do have to worry about:

Support for more gun control is considerably higher among those 18 to 29 than among those in any other age group.

That is very worrisome, and an indication to me, we might need to think, strategically, about how to deal with this as a movement. If we don’t do that, we’re in trouble over the long haul.

I wanted to share with you a comment from a few days ago from “One of the Women” we had lunch with post-McDonald:

Regarding those four women lawyers you were at lunch with after McDonald oral arguments, I was one of them. Two of those women lawyers had arrived in the dead of night, alone, and had to park their cars in an isolated area in a parking garage at Union Station. 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. Each woman was alone. It was dark. Neither woman is physically strong. Each had to navigate her way across a dark parking lot to a dark elevator room, down an enclosed elevator, through a dim and unpopulated area inside Union Station.

And each woman had to do it absolutely unarmed. One of the women is soon to be 60 and could have been beaten to a pulp by most any male over the age of 16. The area was accessible by anyone. And the laws in D.C. prohibited her from the most obvious self-protection — a small, hand-held firearm. A 60-year-old woman attorney with an absolutely spotless record, and D.C. laws would not allow her to have the means of self-protection with her. There was no security officer any where near, and a phone call for help would have required an officer driving to Union Station, driving up four levels of a parking garage, and looking for a dead or mangled body.

Abby Spangler needs to start thinking of women and of women’s safety.

Absolutely. Bitter and I did the same walk, later in the morning than they did. I had to leave my gun at home, because despite the fact that I can legally carry in Virginia, I can’t have a gun in the District, even locked in my vehicle, unloaded and in a locked container. For all intents and purposes, my Second Amendment rights did not exist for that weekend. As great a victory as Heller was, and as great a victory as I believe McDonald will be, we still have a long way to go.