Guns – Page 435 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Our Opponents Really Are Un-American

I don’t really require someone to buy into much to consider themselves a good American. As long as you accept our basic tenants of human liberty, and foundational principles of our nation, I’m pretty open to the idea that we may disagree, but we disagree as fellow Americans. But one of those foundational principles, I think has to be that the Declaration of Independence is the moral justification for this country’s entire being. If you don’t accept the Declaration, well, then we really aren’t anything more than some misguided subjects of the British Crown. You might be an American in the sense that you were born here, but pardon me if I don’t agree you’re a good American. Such is the case with some of our opponents:

I am having a really difficult time figuring out what is so controversial about what Herman Cain is saying. Here’s the video they are so roundly criticizing:

It seems to me that Cain is speaking of “alter and abolish” in the terms of our normal democratic process of putting our government up before the people every 2 to 4 years and the people deciding whether they want to keep it or toss it.

Pardon me, but if you can watch this segment here, and think Cain is calling for every member of that audience to take up arms, and March down to Washington, and overthrow the government, you not the ones that should be calling us paranoid. You are, in fact, delusional, or just very much out of touch with the kind of crowd Cain is speaking to.

I am also comfortable in saying that if you don’t believe that Americans have the power to “alter or abolish” their government, even if it’s through peaceful means, through the ballot box, and through the hearts and minds of fellow Americans, this isn’t the country for you to be living in. If the Declaration of Independence makes you uncomfortable, I am quite fine with saying you’re a poor American. I think some of our opponents need to think long and hard about which country they belong in.

MAIG Mayor Makes Ridiculous Argument Against HR822

The Mayor of Milwaukee, and MAIG Mayor Tom Barrett says that HR822 is a bill fit for the nation’s gun traffickers:

Gun traffickers with a permit to carry concealed weapons from another state would be able to easily travel to our state with a variety of firearms in tow, and police would be unable to stop them until they actually witnessed an illegal gun sale.

Do we have evidence of a wave of gun traffickers are getting concealed carry permits? And since when can the police in Wisconsin “stop” someone for transporting a firearm with no other probable cause to believe a crime is being committed. Last I checked transporting firearms was not a crime.

This just goes to show the utter ridiculousness of MAIG and our opponents. It’s like Bloomberg is asking all his flunkies to do op-eds and the Mayor of Milwaukee decided to phone it in instead of spending any time making a serious argument.

Let Us Review the Definition of “Assault Rifle”

Since some folks can’t seem to get it straight, and are undermining efforts to get away from the boat anchor our opponents tied around our necks, it’s worth a review:

Can be fired from the shoulder.
Capable of Select Fire
Fires a cartridge of intermediate power, between a pistol and full length rifle cartridge.
Feeds from a detachable magazine.

If any one of these aren’t true, it’s not an assault rifle by definition. Even the dictionary on this computer says:

A rapid-fire, magazine-fed automatic rifle designed for infantry use.

Last I checked, there weren’t any infantry that were issued semi-auto rifles. The fact of the matter is when people hear the word “assault” being used as an adjective to describe a noun, they are automatically going to be more inclined to agree that whatever that noun is describing ought to be banned. Assault is a crime, after all, or something you do in war. It would be interesting, for instance, to poll on “assault weapons” verses “personal defense weapon,” and see how the results differ, even though PDWs are nearly universally NFA weapons, with the exception of civilianized versions that are made carbine length and only fire semi-automatically.

The fact that we’ve not gotten to just over half of Americans opposing a ban on “assault weapons” is mostly through a decades long education among the general public,Â and other gun owners in particular, to make them understand the truth in the issue. Had it not been for that term, this would likely have happened much faster, and it’s questionable whether there ever would have been support enough to pass the 1994 ban in the first place.

While I’m not a huge fan of the particular term NSSF has chosen to label semi-automatic rifles that are based on military patterns, I completely understand why they feel the need to do it, and support efforts to move away from a term that automatically makes folks think of a crime. To the extent that people on our side have embraced that term, it’s done nothing but play into the hands of our opponents.

Any politician is going to take polls with a grain of salt, but they largely do this on the gun issue because they all believed the polls about how people felt about assault weapons, until they passed the ban, and many of them lost their seats over it. Even Bill Clinton acknowledges that. Maybe it’s arguable that MSR isn’t the best term… but what I don’t think is arguable is that the “assault weapon” boat anchor has been a huge problem for our side, and we should move away from that language.

NRA Ad on F&F

As election season approaches, we can expect to see more in this vein:

Getting holder out would be a great victory, but if Holder hangs on this will be a campaign issue if the Republicans will be willing to make it one (which so far, they have not been). Either way, NRA will hopefully have the money to run ads like this in important markets for Obama, like Pennsylvania, during the 2012 elections.

So either he fires Holder, or we use Holder as a boat anchor to drag down the entire administration’s re-election prospects. Not too concerned about how we carve this turkey, as long as Obama doesn’t get to pick the next justice on the Supreme Court. Let’s hope that Justice Ginsburg can hang in there just a little longer.

The Guns Will Come Out, Tomorrow

Concealed carry takes effect in Wisconsin tomorrow. My Google alerts have, since the bill was signed into law, been filled with stories of various local political bodies, and fearful businesses and community groups wringing their hands over what this is going to bring. You’d think, given that this has happened in so many other states with relatively little fanfare, people would be able to take an objective look at things, and conclude that there won’t be colander-faced gangs roaming the highways of the Badger State tomorrow trying to steal your “juice.” But hysterical people are going to be hysterical, no matter what the evidence, and anti-gun folks are some of the more hysterical people I’ve run across in politics.

There’s also at least one other aspect of this that ought not be ignored. From a friend in Wisconsin:

WI will cut its Brady score in half next time they bother to count.

And that, friends, is a good enough reason as any to celebrate this Halloween.

Winning: Headlines I Never Thought I’d See

A lot of my readers have been in this issue for a long time. What got me concerned about Second Amendment rights was the federal government thinking it was constitutionally unproblematic to ban “assault weapons,” all the way back in 1994. Those of us who paid attention back then remember how the media treated the issue, and remembered how shooters, collectors, and people concerned about the Second Amendment couldn’t get a fair shake. So chalk this up to headlines I’d never thought I’d see:

CBS Carries NRA’s Water On Flawed Gallup Poll

For those of us who remember the media environment in the 90s: did you ever think you’d see left-wing media complaining that CBS News was carrying NRA’s water? Granted, Media Matters are paid shills of George Soros and Joyce, but it’s still satisfying to see. The media environment has gotten considerably better just in the past few years; good enough it’s actually getting harder to find really ridiculous reporting on the issue. That might be bad news if you’re a gun blogger, but it’s good news for the Second Amendment. Granted, the major papers still editorialize against us regularly, but the actual reporting is better, and our point of view is getting a fairer shake. Our opponents are aware of this, and it’s probably part of the reason support for gun control has been declining. Media Matters can try to spin this all they want, but that Gallup poll is bad news for gun control advocates, and everyone knows it.

More on Instructor Certification Non-Discrimination

Following up on the post from Friday, about the State of Texas threatening to revoke certification of a Texas man who ran a radio ad stating he won’t teach muslims, I have some additional thoughts for folks who are troubled by this. Let me state up front that this whole issue is an example of why requiring training to exercise a right is problematic. If this guy were in Pennsylvania, where we do not require training, this would be largely a non-issue, because the man would be free to teach whoever the hell he wanted, and not much would be implicated in terms of the right to bear arms. He is still free to teach or not teach who he wants in Texas, but the question at hand is whether it’s appropriate for the State of Texas to prohibit discrimination as a condition of holding a certification to teach their required concealed carry course.

My position is that it’s not inappropriate for the state to mandate this. By the state issuing instructor credentials, and requiring anyone wishing to carry a firearm to take instruction from a certified instructor, it makes those instructors an instrument of the state, and an instrument of state policy. In this instance, I believe the state may instruct the people carrying out its public policy that they may not discriminate. In fact, I believe that’s what’s morally required, given the exercise of a right is at stake.

I’ll put this in different terms, since prejudice against muslims is more prevalent today, and not as widely condemned. I’ll take it back 80 years or so, to the Jim Crow era. Texas has the same policy, except they allow discrimination by certified instructors. You’re a black man, and want to get a permit. You can’t find any white instructor who will teach you, and there aren’t any black instructors in your area because getting the certification is difficult and expensive, and there are only a handful of black instructors in the whole state. For the most part, this hypothetical black man has been disenfranchised out of his right to bear arms. If I were a fair minded federal judge, and this case came before me, I’d toss the training requirement, and make it clear to the State of Texas that it either needed to fix the discrimination problem, or go without training.

I don’t like training being a condition of accessing a right, because the cost alone puts its exercise out of reach of many. In my opinion, if the state is going to require training to access a right, it had damned well do its best to make sure the required training is widely available and affordable, and part of that can be an anti-discrimination policy that applies to instructors that are certified by the state under its training program.

Many states solve this problem by either not requiring training, or accepting privately certified instruction, and perhaps Texas should as well. That would largely remove the state from the equation in regards to this guy in Texas, though I would still argue if he were NRA certified, he should lose that certification too because I just flatly don’t agree with the kind of discrimination he’s practicing on general principle, and NRA, as a private entity, is perfectly free to set non-discrimination policies for the instructors it certifies.

Help We Don’t Need

I’m not a fan of this guy, and I wouldn’t blame the State of Texas for revoking his instructor certification:

“We will attempt to teach you all the necessary information you need to obtain your [Concealed Handgun License],” the ad says. Then towards the end, it adds: “If you are a socialist liberal and/or voted for the current campaigner in chief, please do not take this class. You have already proven that you cannot make a knowledgeable and prudent decision under the law.”

And then: “If you are a non-Christian Arab or Muslim, I will not teach you the class with no shame; I am Crockett Keller, thank you, and God bless America.”

I’m not of the opinion that Second Amendment rights are limited to Christians or Republicans, and if you’re licensed by the state to administer a concealed carry class, you should do it without regards to race, religion or national origin. I agree that this man has a right to be a bigot, but he doesn’t have a right to be a government certified bigot. To treat every non-Christian Arab or muslim as a potential cold blooded killer is exactly the same kind of bigotry that’s perpetrated against many law-abiding gun owners by the folks who hate gun ownership. It’s not going to help us, and it’s definitely an example of how not to win.

Thinking Through Resistance

From Jewish Week, comes Guns and the Holocaust:

The idea that Jews or any of the other persecuted groups facing the Third Reich, the most lethal killing machine in human history could have somehow blasted their way out of Germany or German occupied territory with handguns or rifles from their homes is profoundly absurd.

Yes, armed partisan groups that contained Jews were effective in fighting the Nazis. With perhaps as many as a million fighters interspersed in Europe, they were like an additional army and yes, guns made them effective. But for the most part they worked in coordination with the Allies who provided arms and intelligence. Less organized resistance didn’t fare as well.

I think they are vastly understating the effectiveness armed resistance had against the Nazis. To put down the uprising in Warsaw, for instance, the Germans had to bring in crack SS troops, who during that period were not on the front fighting the Americans or the Russians.

But aside from that, Jewish Week is, quite improperly in my view, looking at this through a lens of military effectiveness. I could care less whether individual resistance to a murdering regime makes a huge difference in the overarching military picture. I do care greatly about an individual person’s right to decide if he’s going to die, he’s going to die a free man, and to take at least a few of those bastards out with him. If everyone was imbued with that attitude, what would it take to wage genocide?

I think can speak for many of us when I suggest that no one is going to stuff me into a cattle car alive. So just using a single individual as an example, not examining any greater resistance movement, what kind of resources would it take to get compliance to implement a Nazi-like final solution? You can’t send a few Gestapo agents to knock on the door and haul someone off, because they’ll all end up shot. You can send Stosstruppen to break down the door, and try to take someone by surprise, but now you’re already having to expend more resources, and I’m betting odds a prudent man would still be able to shoot a few members of the raiding party before being killed himself. I suppose they could always just bomb the house, or send a shell into it, but then you have one tank, or one plane, or one artillery piece that’s not serving on the front line. How many tanks, bombs, or artillery pieces would be needed to clear out an entire neighborhood?

I’ve long said, you won’t stop your government from killing you if that’s what it means to do, but you can raise the cost of doing so to an unacceptably high level. It’s not really about winning militarily, so much is it’s about allowing people to maintain their person dignity, and raising the cost of mass murder. That’s what Jewish Week is overlooking.

Another Second Amendment Victory

This time in North Carolina court:

The trial court concluded that, whenÂ HellerÂ said that bans on felon possession of guns were â€œpresumptively valid,â€ this presumption could be rebutted, and in this case it was rebutted, given the age of Johnstonâ€™s conviction and his apparently blameless life since then. The court also suggested that its analysis might also apply to people whose last convictions were as recent as seven years ago, especially when the convictions were for nonviolent crimes; but it didnâ€™t have occasion to issue any specific holding on thatÂ point.

I agree that not all felony convictions should be disabling, especially when you have lawmakers that want to do things like mislabeling syrup to be a felony. It’s also interesting that the Court noted:

There are additional and substitute procedural safeguards which could go far towards preventing the erroneous civil deprivation, or continued civil deprivation, of a citizenâ€™s rights under the Second Amendment. For example, a felonâ€™s potential subjection to the civil disability could easily be dealt with in felony sentencing by findings of fact and rulings on the civil deprivation of the right after giving the felon an opportunity to be heard on the issue. An expansion of the persons allowed to ask for review, and a provision allowing such review at a meaningful time on the issue of whether the person poses a continuing threat to public safety, can satisfy a procedural due process requirement for a meaningful post-disqualification review. The fiscal and administrative burdens that these procedures would entail would not be great if the issue of future dangerousness and consequent civil deprivation of a fundamental liberty were dealt with in the sentencing phase of a trial or plea. The burden of an expanded procedure for review of a felonâ€™s continued dangerousness may only be excessive if all felons continue to be deprived of firearms rights by conviction alone. If, however, that deprivation is limited to those who are found to pose a continuing danger in the sentencing phase after having been given an opportunity to be heard on the issue, then the additional burden of allowing periodic review of the continuing validity of that determination should not be unduly burdensome for a government that seeks to preserve the fundamental rights of its citizens.

I’m glad to see this, because I have always believed a blanket ban on felons is an improper means of handling the issue, and that a prohibition on firearms possession should be something placed on a person convicted during sentencing. Of course, legislatures would be free to require this punishment for certain crimes, but not necessarily all crimes. It’s hard to see how public safety is served by a blanket ban that also covers non-violent felonies.