Category: Gun Rights

A pretty good article in Townhall on Chicago’s continuing battle against the Second Amendment.

Bryan Miller was thankful yesterday for the federal restrictions on machine guns.  As one commenter pointed out:

Bryan Miller is right — the 1934 law strictly regulating machine guns has been effective, resulting in almost nonexistent cases of misuse by their legal owners. So gun control groups are satisfied about that, right?

WRONG — most gun control groups favor banning ownership of machine guns from those who now own them legally and without misuse.

And that is why we we’re obstinate in opposing them.  The federal machine gun regulations are actually very instructive.  For 50 years you had, by any gun control advocate’s standards, a successful program of licensing (in the form of a tax stamp) and registration, that resulted in very few crimes from legally possessed machine guns — and yet in 1986, they banned them anyway.

The City of Easton, Pennsylvania, home to Crayola Crayons, has declined to pass a “Lost and Stolen” ordinance.

City Council voted for the measure yesterday.  This really gets my goat:

“Who really cares about it being unconstitutional?” said Councilwoman Tonya Payne. “This is what’s right to do, and if this means that we have to go out and have a court battle, then that’s fine … We have plenty of dead bodies coming up in our streets every single day, and that is unacceptable.”

So we get to disregard limits on government just because one City Councilwoman things it’s “what’s right to do?”  There was a time when people thought that holding slaves was the right thing to do.  We properly did away with that with the 13th Amendment.  Then some people thought that making African-Americans second class citizens was “the right thing to do.”  The Fourteenth Amendment, and the several Civil Rights Acts that were passed under its authority, put that sorry bit of history behind us.

Our state and federal constitutions are an individual’s only defense against the predations of politicians who think they know what’s right for other people.  One thing you shouldn’t do in society that properly limits government power is to create crimes that reverse the burden of proof from the state to the accused, because the authorities just know that a certain person must be guilty.

Straw purchasing is already a serious crime.  Either the state has the evidence it needs to meet its burden of proof, or it does not.  What you don’t get to do is to pass another law that allows prosecution to proceed on a technicality, based on an assumption of guilt for the more serious crime.  Someone who is not guilt of straw buying will end up with a hefty fine, and or will spend time in jail because of this ordinance.  This is not how our system of justice is supposed to function.

The Arizona Daily Star thinks we’re all a bunch of negative nancys:

And there are genuine problems we all should be worried about: A continuing credit crunch, stock-market declines, growing numbers of business failures, 1.2 million lost jobs so far this year and nearly as many homeowners expected to endure foreclosure.

So what’s going on with gun sales? We’ve investigated Obama’s gun agenda. It is not a whacko left-wing attack on Second Amendment rights. It is a safety agenda, pure and simple.

A British couple gets arrested for possession of a suppressor.   The proper thing for the AUSA to do here is to exercise discretion and not bring charges.  A grand jury should refuse to indict.  These aren’t people who belong in jail.

I’d say they’d make a great Second Amendment case in order to chip off part of the National Firearms Act, but their not being American citizens would needlessly complicate things.

Does anyone from the Brady Campaign want to come on and defend this application of our “reasonable common sense gun laws?”

We’ve had a few responses to Bill Schneider’s column in The New West.  First, at The Ten Ring.  Ride Fast also has a pretty good fisking of it.  Bill is actually someone I wouldn’t mind having a debate with, because I’d really like to understand his thinking.  I mean, I get that some people aren’t single issue gun voters.  What I don’t get is why guys like Schneider deride the voting choices of people who do feel that way.

It’s Bill Schneider’s right to think the Second Amendment is not important.  That is what he is saying, despite what he says.  When you aren’t voting on it, that means it’s not that important to you, and if you voted for Barack Obama, you voted against the Second Amendment.  Here’s Schneider’s conclusion:

Don’t alienate the majority of gun owners. Don’t automatically dismiss gun owners with sincere suggestions because they don’t perfectly match your doctrine. Don’t instantly shoot this commentary full of freedom holes, which I’m sure you can do, at least until you think about it. Have you just read a mainstream strategy for growing the constituency willing to help you protect our right to bear arms?

I have.  I’ve thought about it a lot Bill.  But how do I build a coalition with someone like yourself who is not willing to actually do the things necessary to preserve it?  I mean, pretty clearly we agree on some things, especially if you think there shouldn’t be a new Assault Weapons Ban.  But you voted for a guy who advocates passing exactly that.  How do I build a coalition with you if you vote against our interests?  I’d really like to understand that.

If this is how Barack Obama respects the Second Amendment, I’d sure hate to see how he’d disrespect it.  I suspect that would involve a trip to the National Archives, a match, and some lighter fluid.