Category: Guns

Smith and Wesson is also pulling out of California. I don’t expect they’ll be the last. My understanding is that any semi-automatic pistol already on the roster of approved handguns is grandfathered, but as soon as a manufacturer makes a single change or improvement to the gun, it has to be re-certified, which is when the micro-stamping requirement kicks in. I know this sucks for folks out in the Golden State, but in reality, I think the more manufacturers that stop selling their wares, the stronger the case gets against micro-stamping being an unconstitutional requirement.

The anti-gun people are unable to get gun bans through thanks to Heller and McDonald. Given that, requiring manufactures to employ a theoretical and unproven technology under the guide of crime fighting is the next best thing, because it has the effect of banning firearms in a way the courts will likely allow them to get away with. Or so they think. The question is whether the federal courts are capable of seeing through such a transparent means to unconstitutionally limit the availability to firearms to law-abiding civilians.

Dave Hardy has a summary of Oral Arguments today before the Supreme Court. Sounds like the justices were tough on both attorneys, so not too much tea leaf reading. This case centers around whether you can buy a gun for someone else if that someone else is not a prohibited person. In Abramski’s case, he bought a gun in his home state of Virginia, took the gun to Pennsylvania and transferred it through an FFL there to his Uncle. He was charged with lying on 4473 in regards to whether he was the actual buyer. Abramski’s contention is that unless the other buyer is prohibited, it’s lawful to buy a gun for someone else, and ATF is exceeding its authority on 4473.

Yesterday an Alberta Clipper dumped a good 7 inches of global warming in the driveway, so this morning involved sweeping the cars off and shoveling it all away so the sun and salt can get to work. When I started, it was still single digits out, and now it’s warmed up to a balmy 11 degrees on Fahrenheit scale. That’s -11C for you Canadians who no doubt wonder why I’d complain about such warm weather. But for me it’s enough to make me wear my big silly looking Russian hat. Hey, it’s warm. Shows 64 degrees in my office now, because the furnace has some trouble keeping up, but compared to outside it’s the South Pacific in here. But the news links wait for no man, not even Al Gore:

But I thought AR-15s were battlefield weapons, only useful for mass murder?

Bearing Arms also has a story from the City of Brotherly Corruption. Seems some gun buyback money got “diverted.”

Some of our opponents act like nobody ever killed everyone else until about 500 years ago when firearms were invented.

S.E. Cupp: “Spare us the gun lecture, Harvey”

NRA responds to Harvy Weinstein as well. If Weinstein is stupid enough to think this will hurt NRA, he’s never read this book by Brian Anse Patrick. The more they hate, the stronger we get.

Gun Nuts Media offers a Shot Show 2014 recap, and some advice on how to travel with guns on an airline.

Glenn Reynolds in USA Today: One legacy of Obama is that government conspiracy theories don’t seem so crazy anymore.

Randy Barnett: How the NSA program is like gun registration. But our opponents tell us all right-thinking people favor gun registration. It’s common sense.

It’s a shame this guy can’t use the David Gregory defense. Laws are for the little people, little person.

This bill seems to be to be some duct tape added to the giant ball of fail that is Florida’s criminal law, so in that sense I tend to agree with Bob Owens of Bearing Arms that “[t]his is bad legislation piled up on top of bad legislation, instead of legislators admitting that they made a mistake.” Florida’s criminal laws seem particularly nutty and laced with unintended consequences from legislators showing how they are “tough on crime.” But having read this post at Legal Insurrection, and read the HB89 bill, the characterization of this as the “Warning Shot” Bill is greatly overblown by the media.

The bill in no way, shape or form authorizes warning shots, and the media is grossly irresponsible for suggesting it does. Why? Because when it passes, there will be people who have an entirely false belief they have state sanction to fire warning shots. This matches the media’s gross irresponsibility of characterizing elimination of the duty to retreat as a “shoot first” bill that lets you blast away at anyone you feel a little scared of. When you spread this kind of nonsense, there are certain people who are going to believe it. It makes a culture of violence more likely, not less. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I suppose they don’t care about the body count, as long as it advances their agenda of reinstitution the duty to retreat from your attacker before resorting to use of deadly force to protect yourself.

All this bill says is that if you’re justified in using deadly force, you’re justified in also threatening to use deadly force. Could that be a warning shot? Maybe. But this bill never mentions warning shots. As Legal Insurrection points out, even under this bill, Marissa Alexander would still be in jail.

Headed out to lunch today since this is the first day this month that neither of us are sick. Just in time to get snowed in by the latest snowstorm that I’m sure The Weather Channel has assigned some stupid name to. Now for some news links …

Private militias in Mexico refuse to disarm, because they are fighting the drug cartels. I’m sure CSGV stands ready to condemn them.

Ruger CEO explains why they are abandoning the California market. I expect more companies will do this. That was probably the point of this legislation. They have to figure out ways to ban guns that the courts might let them get away with. Here’s a legislative and legal history of the CA handgun roster. More from John Richardson too.

Gun Dealers need to wake up.

How to get the government to read the constitution?

First Amendment victory: freedom of the Press was meant to protect a technology, not an industry.

I thought only “corporate gun lobby” bullies did the whole hate thing?

Is Slidefire about to Akins themselves? I’m not entirely certain how that sled works, but my understanding has always been if you have some mechanical contraption actuate the trigger, but your action is to press some device that counts as a single function, you’ve got a machine gun on your hand.

This is a good question regarding Sean Penn. I think there have always been different rules for Hollywood in California. Though misdemeanors can typically be expunged, which would restore rights provided the expungement fully restores rights, causing the conviction to be free of legal effects.

TN gun rights case going to the Supreme Court.

Part 5 of Miguel’s series looking at the MAIG e-mails in more detail.

Gun wars to heat up in 2014? I would imagine the Democrats are not going to be all that eager to take the issue up in an election year when they are facing a number of vulnerable seats in red states.

The Supreme Court has denied cert on an appeal for the Montana Firearms Freedom Act. There was never any chance the Firearms Freedom Acts were going anywhere.

 

Josh Prince revises his previous post, noting that some of the protections that appeared to be missing are apparently still in place. It didn’t appear to mention the prohibition on creating a registry. Is that part of permanent legislation too? Or are we still missing that? It seems to me that preventing ATF from consolidating all those records in West Virginia into a registry is a pretty key provision to lose.