Category: Gun Rights

They are calling for it now:

Yet Miami Mayor Manny Diaz, president of the mayors’ conference, says there is little time to spare. He says his group wants the assault weapons ban reinstated and federal legislation to limit gun purchases.

“Typically, when these things happen in our cities, statements are made, and then the issue goes away,” he says. “It doesn’t go away for us. We need help.”

It won’t go away for you until you have the courage to remove dangerous people from society, rather than trying unsuccessfully to remove dangerous objects.  We can’t all live in a padded cell.  The really interesting bit of this article, though, is the graphic:

So we know these things a) are not new, and b) tend to spike with bad economic times.  All things considering, it’s pretty clear gun laws don’t have much of an effect.

If the polls released over the past few days are making the Brady’s crap their pants, this news is going to have them reaching for the Imodium.   The Missouri House has passed a bill that eliminates the restrictions that people with concealed weapons licenses face on college campuses.   Best part?  It passed 106-41.  A House committee in Texas also recently passed the same bill, 5-3, sending the bill to the full House for consideration.

We’d like to congratulate the new NRA State Liaison for Missouri on the victory there.  Prior to her new position in State and Local Affairs, she was the Media Liaison who handled blogger outreach, sending us press releases and answering our questions.  So we’re very happy for this accomplishment.

It appears that Paul Helmke and Richard Feldman are back for another round of point/counterpoint today.

The Germans are known for probably the best idea humanity has ever come up with, and unfortunately, also one of the worst.  This decidedly lies betwixt beer and Hitler, but is not in the realm of good ideas, if you ask me:

Germany may require gun owners to lock weapons in safes that can only be accessed with a fingerprint, as the country considers tightening firearms laws after last month’s school shooting, a government minister said.

That sounds all well and good until you slice your finger open cleaning your gun for a match the next day, and then can’t get into your safe in the morning because you marred your fingerprint.  It also makes you susceptible to problems like this, which are common to a lot of electronic locks.  There are also ways to defeat thumbprint scanners, and electronic locks, if you’re clever.  In the case of many electronic locks, you don’t even have to be that clever.

Personally, I don’t think you can beat the old fashioned dial combination lock for both security and reliability.  Properly taken care of, they will last a long time.  Incidents like what happened in Germany are exceedingly rare.  Thieves breaking into houses to steal guns are a lot more common.  I think it would be short sighted for the German Government to mandate a type of lock that is easier for thieves to defeat, in order to prevent something much more rare.

This one involves Paul Helmke and Richard Feldman.  Feldman puts the smack down on Helmke.  If you’re wondering, yes, it’s this Richard Feldman.   I managed to scrounge up a copy of Feldman’s kiss and tell, and have been meaning to write a review on it.  Feldman has turned on NRA, but I don’t think he’s turned on the movement as a whole, as his buddy Bob Ricker did.  The book drips with ego, and his conclusions about NRA are largely wrong, in my opinion, but it’s worth reading if you can pick up a used copy like I did.  I don’t recommend people feed the monster by buying it.

If Paul Helmke had a cow over Gallup for releasing a six month old poll now, he’s really going to lose his lunch over the CNN poll that says the same thing.

Since 2001, most Americans have favored stricter gun laws, though support has slightly dropped in recent years: 54 percent favored stricter laws in 2001, compared with 50 percent in 2007, according to Gallup polling.

Now, a recent poll reveals a sudden drop — only 39 percent of Americans now favor stricter gun laws, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll.

It will no doubt create a Maalox Moment over at the Brady Campaign offices.  I would suggest the maximum relief chewables.  They have a calming, candy like flavor, and they are a good source of calcium.

Pelosi is suggesting some kind of compromise will be found on “assault weapons”:

During an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Pelosi said that the Congress will work to find some middle ground between the previous ban, which expired in 2004, and the precedent laid by the Supreme Court in a ruling enumerating more concrete gunowners’ rights last term.

There is no middle ground.  The first ban was useless.  Any “compromise” legislation is going to be even more useless.  We’re not going to go away happy you only half screwed us.  Pass anything and watch what happens in 2010.  We won’t show any mercy to your blue dogs who cross us.

“Right now, we have the debate in Congress over the District of Columbia wanting a vote on the floor of the House, something we all want. That’s a civil rights issue,” she said, pledging to find “middle ground” on the issue. “And, yet, they want to put a gun…bill, attach that to that. I don’t — I don’t think that that should be the price to pay to have a vote on the floor of the House.”

The gun issue is a civil rights issue too, Madam Speaker, no matter how much you wish it weren’t so.  If you wish to remain Speaker, you’ll learn to accept that.  Your predecessor, Tom Foley, didn’t think it was a civil rights issue either, and I doubt very much he expected to pass the gavel to Newt Gingrich in short order.  Don’t make the same mistake he did.

UPDATE: I should point this out too:

Pelosi indicated that new regulations might entail registration and prohibitions on transporting some firearms across state lines.

This will make it impossible for competitors to attend Camp Perry, unless they live in Ohio.  It will end high power competition in this country.  If you are represented by a blue dog Democrat, I would highly advise contacting them, and mention you are very unhappy about the Speakers remarks, and are skeptical your Congressman will support your gun rights as a member of the same party.  The only way we’re going to put Pelosi back in her pen is to get the blue dogs upset with her.

UPDATE: This should give Pelosi some pause.

Two examples today of old timers who don’t understand the changes in the shooting culture.  One is here, in a letter to the editor calling for more restrictions on “assault rifles.”  Even more disappointing that he apparently realizes these are just ordinary semi-automatics, yet somehow still thinks they are more dangerous than, say, this.

Then this more lenthy article from an old man who doesn’t get it:

I don’t understand the allure of these weapons.  I once shot a deer at 300 yards with a 1935 bolt action Remington 30-06.  Not a bad shot for a seasonal shooter.  I am an advocate of wildlife management by granting State Licenses and state regulation of hunting seasons.  We ran all of the predators off so now we have to manage the deer population.  It is what it is – I am not making any judgement about what was done before – only about what needs be done now.

Did you think the same thing when high power shooters were shooting these, or these?  Or are those OK because they don’t look scary because there’s no polymers or pistol grips?  It’s time for guys like this to come down off their high horses and understand something: people get into shooting all kinds of different ways, and go in all kinds of different directions with the hobby.  That’s a good thing, because it’s numbers that allow him to keep going afield, and keep competitiors on the line at matches.  I don’t care if someone only has an AR-15 to take it out to a public range every once in a while and plink.  That used to be me, in fact.  It is a lot of us.

The Virginia legislature is voting today to override the measures Tim Kaine vetoed, namely allowing carry in restaurants.

In other news, it looks like VSSA is twittering.  I really need to get into this twitter thing.

I support Vermont style carry, as ideal.  I agree with folks who argue that criminals will carry guns no matter what the law says.  But the point of my previous post is finding a framework that works within the confines of Heller, such as this:

For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues.

Now, this is dicta, which means it’s not legally binding precedent, but it’s quite likely to be latched on to by lower courts.  We also have plenty of state cases that have long interpreted carrying a concealed firearm as outside of the right to bear arms.  But The Court also says this:

Putting all of these textual elements together, we find that they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation. This meaning is strongly confirmed by the historical background of the Second Amendment.

My argument is essentially that open carry is actually a severe burden on the right to carry a firearm in case of confrontation, and probably was also a burden even when the practice started becoming accepted as social custom in the 19th century.  The reason it became social custom is because it likely served as a signal, e.g. a quick way to discern someone with criminal intent from someone without criminal intent.

The various licensing scheme actually serve the same purpose, in that when law enforcement encounters someone who is armed, they have a quick way to sort friend from foe.  It’s still just a signal.  I think this can have implications for constitutional construction around Heller, in that perhaps the governments only interest is this kind of sorting function.  If that’s the case, it doesn’t necessarily have to lead to licensing, thought hat’s one way to satisfy the interest.

But given the choice between constitutionally protected open carry with concealed carry being a privilege that can be subject to outright prohibition, or allowing the regulation of concealed carry, but not its prohibition, I think the latter is actually less destructive of the right.

I agree that’s not an ideal choice, but that could be what the courts force on us.  Heller isn’t really to blame so much for this, as longstanding constitutional traditions that seem to allow government some measure of regulating arms carried in public.  I think it behooves us to think about how to create a legal framework the courts will accept, but that protects the most amount of freedom.