Guns – Page 440 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Gun Culture 1.0 v. Gun Culture 2.0

SayUncle says he doesn’t get ranges that ban carry. I think it’s one of the sillier things you’ll find out there in the gun community, but their is an explanation for why it’s more common than it should be. The most frequent retort is that insurance is the reason, but I don’t actually believe that’s the case most of the time. As someone who is currently an officer at a local club, I can probably speak to what’s driving some clubs to adopt this.

Part of it goes back toÂ Michael Bane’sÂ assertion of there being a Gun Culture 1.0, and a Gun Culture 2.0. I’m reluctant to use this analogy, because there’s not really as clean a division among the gun culture as it implies, but it is useful for illustrating the mentality difference from those in the culture who are self-defense oriented, and those that are more connected to the traditional hunting and shooting culture. There is significant overlap between the two cultures, but there are even generational differences in how one approaches the subject of concealed carry, for instance.

The vast majority of clubs are run by people from Gun Culture 1.0. This is certainly true of my club. Except my club does allow concealed carry, you just have to keep it concealed, and aren’t permitted to draw or shoot your carry piece except in an emergency. Pennsylvania has had concealed carry longer than most other states (since 1989), so even most people in Gun Culture 1.0 here carry, even if they aren’t shooting IPSC, IDPA or any of the other action or practical shooting disciplines. The reason clubs are run by Gun Culture 1.0 is because those are the people with the time to invest in overseeing a club. It takes a lot of work, and it’s not something most people in their 30s and 40s have time for. I barely have time for it, and I just basically try to do my job and not much else.

The other major factor that plays into rules like this is that most club boards are responsible for dealing with range incidents. If the club is large enough, the board is typically going to see a parade from the small minority of people who’s gun handling and safety mentality is either poor or non-existent. It’s relatively easy to fall into a mindset that your members are not to be trusted, since you’re dealing with grave stupidity on a regular basis. You’ll never see the 99% of people who are safe. You’ll spend a lot of time interacting with the 1% who aren’t.

I’ve always wondered whether it would be better to set high standards for getting into a private club, but once those standards are met, you are essentially bound only by a handful of safety oriented rules. Our club has a qualification, but it’s essentially being able to hit a rather large piece of paper at ten yards with a pistol. You have to be a real wild man with a gun to fail our qualifier. If you were going to allow someone to, say, draw from holster, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to make them qualify to do so, so someone can verify they know how to do the task safely. The unfortunate fact, at least based on my experience at clubs, is that if you allowed it broadly, it’s not going to be too long before someone puts a round in their leg, or even worse, someone else’s leg. There are a few local commercial ranges that allow draw from holster, but both have armor plating between stalls. Most clubs don’t have the money for that kind of setup, and most people don’t want to be next to a Cletus who can’t avoid finger f***ing his trigger guard every time he draws if the only thing separating you is a few feet of air.

My club probably implements a reasonable compromise between Gun Culture 1.0 and 2.0, when it comes to carrying on the premises. Not all do, and that’s unfortunate. But it’s also a product of the fundamental nature of clubs, and the membership. Clubs are civic organizations, and not really structured like businesses. People in the GC 1.0 age group are more familiar with and better at navigating that kind of organization than people in the GC 2.0 age group, who tend to want to think of shooting facilities as a product they buy or don’t buy, rather than a civic, membership driven enterprise. This is understandable, but without GC 2.0 stepping up, eventually we’re going to lose a lot of good places to shoot, and that will really be unfortunate.

LAPD Missing Some Submachine Guns

Apparently some 30 MP5s have disappeared from the LAPD arms locker. And LAPD spokeswoman is saying they were MP5s altered to fire blanks. This didn’t make sense to me, because I thought you only needed a blank firing adapter on firearms that needed gas pressure to cycle the action. The MP5, as I recall, is a roller locking, delayed recoil mechanism. Can anyone who’s an expert comment on this? Can you fire blanks from an MP5 unaltered? Even if you need a blank adapter, I can’t imagine it’s difficult to remove, as is claimed by the LAPD spokesperson.

A Sign of the Times

I figured the Obama Administration was never going to live up to people’s high expectations. What I did not expect is that Congress would need to insert a funding amendment that would essentially tell the Administration that it can’t traffic firearms to drug cartels anymore. This funding rider passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. I am pleased that not trafficking firearms to drug cartels is a position that draws support from both parties.

Funding riders like this have actual teeth. While F&F arguably broke a number of federal laws, misappropriating funds is also a crime, and one that’s easier to prosecute for.

“Florida Loophole” in the Press

This time in St. Louis, but still using Philly as an example. We’ve documented previously that these articles have been popping up all over. The purpose of this article is to help defeat HR822, it would seem. It’s worth noting that HR822 does not extend to residents in their home states, so both before and after HR822, this Florida issue is still completely a matter of state prerogatives.

The city argues that it needs latitude in determining who is a threat, because of long-standing problems in the court system. A Philadelphia Inquirer report last year noted that while prosecutors in other big cities win felony convictions in half of violent-crime cases, in Philadelphia, prosecutors had been winning only 20 percent.

It seems to me that this is the real problem to fix. You can’t have a revolving door justice system and expect to turn your city as a whole into a kind of low-level prison, where we all have to deal with more restrictive laws because the City can’t serve basic functions such as controlling crime. It is also absolutely inappropriate to consider arrests, rather than convictions, in determining who is permitted to exercise a constitutional right.

We are the Mainstream

When I see CSGV crying in their cornflakes about Living Social shooting coupons, it catches my attention. I assumed they just swiped a link from one of the many I highlighted last week that revealed more than 11,100 people may have hit up the range due to Living Social bargains.

Instead, they are complaining about a current Chicago deal that treats folks to a wine tasting after they are done shooting. For only $65 bucks, you also get a meal in the deal. The best part is the purchase count. The total as I’m typing? 2,027. And the number keeps rising as I refresh.

UPDATE: As a commenter points out, the deal has sold out since this posted with 2,110 sold. When I initially looked at the deal, it was less than 2,000 sold.

Philly Mayor’s Opposition to HR822

WyattÂ offers his opinion to the Mayor on blaming the Â the city’s problems on guns. Nutter’s noting that many Florida permits are going to high crime areas does not surprise me. Philadelphia routinely uses the “character or reputation” clause to deny people improperly. You can appeal, but that goes to a Board stocked with the Mayor’s cronies, and they always uphold denials. You can appeal a denial to the Court of Common Pleas, but you have to hire a lawyer to do that, and a Florida license is a lot cheaper than a lawyer.

This Florida issue wouldn’t be an issue if Philadelphia issued LTCs under the same standards employed in the rest of the state.

Campus Carry …

… who needs it?

Henigan Carrying the Water

You almost have to feel sorry for Dennis Henigan sometimes. To spend your entire life working on an issue only to watch it circling the bowl the past few years can’t be easy on anyone. It also has to be difficult to try to justify something I have to believe Henigan knows was wrong, but since the Administration’s heart was in the right place, so maybe that’s all the matters in Henigan’s mind. Otherwise, to try to carry the Obama Administration’s dirty water, after everything he hasn’t done for them, just makes you a tool.

I have a difficult time following Henigan’s logic, suggesting that “grievously weak federal gun laws” are to blame here. If our government is going to sanction criminal trafficking of firearms, what federal law is going to make a bit of difference?Â Henigan suggests,

If dealer sales of assault rifles were restricted, as they were for 10 years until 2004 when Congress and President Bush allowed the federal assault weapon ban to expire, it would not be necessary for law enforcement to track down the guns after they leave the gun shop.

Except in most cases the weapon an issue here is the Krinkov pistol, which were readily available during the ban, because they did not qualify as assault weapons under the federal definition, and most certainly aren’t rifles by any definition. Henigan further asserts,

The Attorney General’s most severe critics even oppose the new ATF rule requiring real-time reporting to ATF when border state dealers sell multiple semi-automatic rifles to a single buyer, a red flag for trafficking. The same members of Congress who denounce ATF for failing to stop trafficked guns from crossing the border into Mexico also oppose a rule that would give ATF the information it needs to arrest the traffickers and interdict the guns, before they get to the border.

Henigan has to be insane if he truly believes the nonsense he’s spewing here. The multiple sales requires accomplishes nothing in terms of interdicting guns. A piece of paper sent to a bureaucrat at ATF is not going to physically intervene and prevent that weapon from being illegally trafficked over the border, or illegally sold to a criminal in this country. Data is worthless if it is not acted on, and to act on it requires significant resources.

Even accepting Henigan’s position that this was a case of “flawed enforcement tactics,” one has to wonder how he expects, given that ATF lacks “the leadership and authority it needs to do its job well,” and was thus unable to track the weapons the dealers were voluntarily telling them about, how it’s going to cope when it gets hundreds of times that data, with the criminal transactions drowning in the noise of the legal ones. Dennis doesn’t mention that in his simplistic and naive analysis.

But the Administration certainly went through a lot of trouble to try to drive up the trace numbers in an attempt to justify bigger budgets and more laws and regulations, so I suppose carrying its water is the least Dennis Henigan can do.

The D.C. Standard

Emily Miller went through the D.C. process for legally obtaining a gun. In this article, she mulls over the questions asked on the form the D.C. police require before approving you:

Also, if youâ€™ve ever been convicted of â€œvagrancyâ€, youâ€™re out of luck. Iâ€™m not sure why hanging around the 7-Eleven parking lot too long makes you unqualified to have a gun, but someone in the city government does.

They are also worried about someone who has operated a “bawdy house” from possessing guns. And even after she’s done with this particular form, and gets it notarized, there’s still 17 more steps to go. There is no way we can allow this to stand, and I don’t care what the courts say. After we get HR822, repealing DC’s gun laws and removing the subject of firearms regulation back to Congress needs to become a priority.

It could be argued that Washington D.C. has so few gun owners, this is not a wise use of limited legislative resources, but I disagree. If the D.C. City government had taken the Supreme Court decision in Heller seriously, it easily could have restructured its laws with due respect for the fact that it was a fundamental constitutional right. It chose not to. D.C. chose to see what it could get away with. This charade is now being repeated in Chicago.

I want to set up D.C. as an example, to convince other jurisdictions that it’s better to accept the inevitable than to continue playing games with people’s Constitutional rights. The only way to do that is to say D.C. is bound only by the United States Code and federal regulations when it comes to gun laws, and take their toy away from them by modifying home rule so they can never regulate firearms again. Right now jurisdictions like D.C. and Chicago are betting they can thumb their noses at us with impunity. We have to show them that this is a grave error, and will only result in losing more than they would have if they had just behaved themselves from the beginning.

NAGR’s Continuing Opposition to HR822

Here’s some excerpts from Dudley Brown’s latest e-mail alert:

Subject: Anti-gun bill getting worse!

I can see suggesting letting the feds involve themselves in concealed carry is a bad idea, but let’s not get ridiculous here. Unfortunately, ridiculous is where this is headed:

As I type this, all-out war has been declared on your gun rights in Washington, D.C. by the House Judiciary Committee.Â Your National Association for Gun Rights has been warning you that H.R. 822 is a Trojan Horse.

Those bastards! Wanting to enforce the Second Amendment against the states using their 14th Amendment powers. If this is all out war, bring it on. I’m also incredulous at the implication this is a TrojanÂ Horse. The fact that HR822 could, perhaps later, open the door to more serious federal involvement in an issue we might come to later to regret is arguable. But you can’t, out of one side of your mouth, argue that the people pushing HR822 are “well-meaning” and out of the other side suggest they are foisting a Trojan Horse on gun owners. Perhaps Brown is only guilty of using poor metaphors here, but Trojan Horse has implications as to the intentions of the people offering the gift.

Just today, Republicans helped pass an amendment that orders the Feds to investigate the â€œsafetyâ€ of mail-in CCW permits from states like Florida, Utah and New Hampshire.

This is a common tactic to pick up more votes. Some softy gets an idea in his head that he’d like to have more information about something or another and you get things like this. I would also point out that our opponents have done quite a bit of this, where they commission studies that are sent to committees intended to reach a fore drawn conclusion. Turnabout is fair play, and that’s all I have to say about this particular amendment.

So-called â€œpro-gunâ€ Republicans even KILLED an amendment that would have allowed permit holders to defend themselves in the District of Columbia, one of the most dangerous cities in the country.

A more aggressive bill was tried before and died in the Senate. We’re going to want something that can pass. Every time you tweak a bill, you’re either going to pick up or lose votes. Passing legislation is about holding on to a majority needed to get a bill passed, and that’s going to mean HR822 needs to be less aggressive than its predecessors. You can always go back later and tweak with a separate bill when everyone realizes the sky hasn’t fallen. This isn’t about the Republicans on the committee being anti-gun, it’s about keeping the bill in a form that’s more likely to see passage.

Brown continues on to speak of the many anti-gun amendments which were defeated in Committee markup, which was entirely predictable. He suggests that the Senate has a whole host of anti-gun Amendments they would like to tack on as well, so that’s where the bill is going to certainly become anti-gun. I think that’s unlikely, but it’s worth noting that the Senate can’t pass a bill unilaterally. If we can’t get a clean bill out of the Senate, the bill can die right there.

His letter ends with a plea to call judiciary members and get them to oppose HR822, which puts Dudley on the same side as groups such as MAIG, the Brady Campaign, CSGV, and the Violence Policy Center, as well as big city police chiefs, and your usual Joyce funded puppets.

As I said, I don’t bemoan anyone who’s nervous about or opposed to federal intervention in this area. Before Heller and McDonald, and before we had a court strategy, I agreed with those folks. But Brown is way out of line here with his rhetoric and tactics, which have gone way beyond the line of good faith disagreement. He has joined with our opponents in word and in deed.