Apparently outsiders moving into Montana heard “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” as “When in Rome, sneer at them and try to frustrate their backwards ways.” Maybe when I retire, I need to buy a house in this neighborhood, do the ariel surveys for the hunters, and put out word in the community that if they want to come on my land and hunt, and annoy my neighbors, they are welcome. I really hate this kind of attitude among people who are recently relocated to an area, and think everything should be as it was in the place they left. Montana is a lot more than pretty scenery.
Category: Guns
Deceptions of Anti-Gunners
From Dave Kopel’s book, Aiming for Liberty: The Past, Present, And Future of Freedom and Self-Defense
The story of the nonexistent “cop-killer” bullet begins in 1976 in Massachusetts, when a handgun-confiscation initiative was defeated in a landslide. Then in 1982 in California, a handgun “Freeze” initiative also lost overwhelmingly. The gun-pohibitiation lobbies began to realize that they wold have to work more incrementally, rather than pushing for prohibition outright.
The prohibition lobbies also realized that the police were one of their worst problems. Wile a few police chiefs or sheriffs could always be found to support prohibition, the vast majority of police — both commanders and line officers — were extremely skeptical of gun control. Something had to be done to turn the police (or at least their Washington lobbyists) against the National Rifle Association.
The something, ironically, was an obscure type of ammunition invented by police officers two decades before. These bullets were known as KTW bullets, after the initials of the three persons who invented them: Dr. Paul Kopsch, and police officers Daniel Turcus and Don Ward.
The chapter goes on to describe what these so-called cop-killer bullets were actually created for, which was shooting through barriers. It also mentions their appearance in the Lethal Weapon series of movies, which is probably responsible for driving public misconceptions about guns during the late 80s and early 90s than a lot of others.
The problem with this gambit is that it worked, at least for a while. The anti-gun groups’ ability to drive misconceptions and public opinion on the gun issue used to be a powerful weapon against us, but it’s diminished quite a bit in the past decade. As much as I’d like to give new media the credit, I think it comes down to a lot of factors, one of which is changes in the shooting culture from the sporting orientation of older generations, to a more self-defense oriented mindset that started with the baby boomers in the 80s and 90s. There was a lot of changes in policing in the 80s and 90s as well, which may have helped the gun prohibition movement to drive divisions there as well.
Dominguez Case in California Ends in Plea Deal
Remember the case of that guy who got caught at LAX because he was picking up a friend to go shooting with a trunk for of so-called “assault weapons?” He plead guilty to Misdemeanor CCW and had his guns returned. Good work on the part of his attorneys. It’s a travesty that he was guilty of anything, but at least this lets him go on with life, and he won’t be a prohibited person. You’ll notice in the memo that the LAPD were trying to consider multiple firearms, including a Broomhandle Mauser, “assault weapons”, when they were no such thing according to the legal definition.
Who’s On the Brady Brief?
One of the organizations who signed onto the Brady Brief in McDonald is one I hadn’t heard of before, which is the International Brotherhood of Police Officers. If you click on the link, you will see who they are affiliated with. Surprised?
Second Amendment Research Center Defunct
Saul Cornell’s Joyce funded center is no more. Apparently Professor Joe Olson got a rather hilarious e-mail about the same. We continue to rack up victory while detractors among us continue to claim Heller was really a defeat. Their prattle gets more and more ridiculous by the day.
Gun Control and Discrimination
From a chapter two in Dave Kopel’s book Aiming for Liberty: The Past, Present, And Future of Freedom and Self-Defense
Michigan’s law requiring a government permit in order to buy a handgun was enacted after Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black man, shot and killed a person in a mob that was attacking his house because he had just moved into an all-white neighborhood. The Detroit Police stood nearby, refusing to restrain the angry crowd.
Indicted for first degree murder, Sweet was acquitted after a lengthy trial at which Clarence Darrow served as his attorney. Black newspapers such as the Amsterdam News and the Baltimore Herald vigorously defended blacks’ right to use deadly force in self-defense against a mob.
Darrow summed up for the jury: “eleven of them go into a house, gentlemen, with no police protection, in the face of a mob, and the hatred of a community, and take guns and ammunition and fight for their rights, and for your rights and for mine, and for the rights of every being that lives. They went in and faced a mob seeking to tear them to bits. Call them something besides cowards.”
The name Clarence Darrow should ring a bell. Even progressives have historically supported the right to bear arms and the right to self-defense. The opposition it received from the modern left for the latter part of the 20th century is largely an anomaly, quite possibly a result of history largely ignoring the role the right to keep and bear arms had in the Civil Rights movement. Kopel’s chapter continues:
Black and civil rights workers armed for self-defense. Daisy Bates, the leader of the Arkansas NAACP and publisher of the Arkansas State Press during the Little Rock High School desegregation case, recalls that three crosses were burned on her lawn and gunshots fired into her home. Her husband, L.C. Bates, stayed up to guard their house with a .45 semi-automatic pistol. Some of their friends organized a volunteer patrol.
After the Bates’s front lawn was bombed, Mrs. Bates telegrammed Attorney General Herbert Brownell in Washington. He replied there was no federal jurisdiction, and told them to go to the local police. “Of course that wasn’t going to protect us,” Mrs. Bates remembered.
State or federal assistance sometimes did come — not when disorder began, but when blacks reacted by arming themselves. In North Carolina, Governor Terry Sanford (who later served as an anti-gun US Senator) refused to command state police to protect a civil rights march from Klan attacks — until he was warned that if there were no police, the marchers would be armed for self-defense.
There was a time when even the NAACP recognized the importance of the right to bear arms in protecting other civil rights. I will continue to bring other choice quotes from Dave Kopel’s book as I make my way through it.
Background Check Issues
Utah is warning that it needs more funding for its state background check system or “it could be forced to cut off all background checks next year unless lawmakers prop up its anemic budget.” The problem with this is you have a constitutional right hinging on the smooth operation of the system. I can’t think of any better way to get background checks thrown out than states messing with the system and causing real infringements on the exercise of the right.
Utah is among the states that are Points-of-Contact for the purposes of the Brady Act, meaning their state system serves as a substitute for the NICS check. One way Utah, and other states, could save money during these difficult times is by eliminating their state systems and relying solely on the federal NICS system. Most states rely on the federal system.
Pigeon Shooting
We haven’t heard much about the bill banning pigeon shoots, but I suspect now we will begin hearing about it once again. That Philadelphia Club is going to end up being the reason why we end up with a ban. I am not a fan of the sport, but I think a ban is improper, and I don’t trust HSUS not to try to get more. Pigeons are disease carrying vermin, and I don’t have much love for them either. For that matter, so is Wayne Pacelle :)
Lautenberg Using MAIG As Cover
Lautenberg is claiming that the MAIG ad favoring denying Second Amendment rights without any due process shows “Show Srong Support for Lautenberg Measure to Prevent Gun Sales to Terror Suspects” The danger of this group is growing by the day.
Looking at the Brady Brief
The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence brief was put online today, and can be read here. Joe Huffman already notes a serious contradiction within its fundamental argument. There are a few things that stood out to me as well. Â Note that my criticisms here are a layman’s criticism, and can’t be taken as a serious view of the brief’s legal merit. But I will have a go. From the Brady Center brief:
Such firearms regulations are paradigmatic examples of the exercise of state “police powers to legislate as to the protection of the lives, limbs, health, comfort, and quiet of all persons.†Gonzales v. Oregon, 546 U.S. 243, 270 (2006) (internal quotation marks omitted). Because of the gravity of the states’ responsibility to protect public safety and welfare, they are generally afforded “great latitude†in exercising those police powers. Id. Firearm regulations are clearly an appropriate exercise of those powers, for the “promotion of safety of persons and property is unquestionably at the core of the State’s police power.†Kelley v. Johnson, 425 U.S. 238, 247 (1976).
Gonzalez v. Oregon was a case that involved the applicability of the Controlled Substances Act to Oregon’s “Death with Dignity” law. The context of the case had nothing to do with fundamental rights, and everything to do with the powers delegated to the Attorney General under the CSA vs. the state police power. Additionally, Kelley v. Johnson is a case from 1976 that had to do with whether a police officer had a fourteenth amendment right not to cut his hair per the regulations of his department. Forgive me if these cases don’t seem to shed any light over what kind of deference the state police power ought to be given when it comes to Second Amendment rights under the 14th Amendment.
The forceful governmental interests in protecting public safety and welfare that justify the states’ exer- cise of their police powers can also justify limitations on the exercise of constitutional rights. This is particu- larly true when the exercise of the right at issue in- volves conduct that affects the welfare of the commu- nity. See, e.g., Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 303-304, 308 (1940) (Although the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause protects both the “freedom to believe and freedom to act,†“[t]he first is absolute but … the second cannot be.â€)
Cantwell was the case that incorporated the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion under the Fourteenth Amendment. But what’s really amusing is that the statute at question was whether the State of Connecticut could require a license for those soliciting for religious or charitable purposes. Get that? Whether they could license a fundamental right, and the answer was no. The Brady’s are even cherry picking the quote. The full quote from the ruling is:
The constitutional inhibition of legislation on the subject of religion has a double aspect. On the one hand, it forestalls compulsion by law of the acceptance of any creed or the practice of any form of worship. Freedom of conscience and freedom to adhere to such religious organization or form of worship as the individual may choose cannot be restricted by law. On the other hand, it safeguards the free exercise of the chosen form of religion. Thus the Amendment embraces two concepts,-freedom to believe and freedom to act. The first is absolute but, in the nature of things, the second cannot be. Conduct remains subject to regulation for the protection of society. The freedom to act must have appropriate definition to preserve the enforcement of that protection. In every case the power to regulate must be so exercised as not, in attaining a permissible end, unduly to infringe the protected freedom.
Emphasis mine. Give a bit of a clearer picture as to what the court was saying? So clearly, applicable to the Second Amendment, one doesn’t have the right to rob, brandish, or threaten with a firearm, just because one has a right to keep and bear. But the power to regulate this “freedom to act” must not “unduly infringe on the protected freedom.” The Cantwell Court goes further to say:
Without doubt a state may protect its citizens from fraudulent solicitation by requiring a stranger in the community, before permitting him publicly to solicit funds for any purpose, to establish his identity and his authority to act for the cause which he purports to represent. The state is likewise free to regulate the time and manner of solicitation generally, in the interest of public safety, peace, comfort or convenience. But to condition the solicitation of aid for the perpetuation of religious views or systems upon a license, the grant of which rests in the exercise of a determination by state authority as to what is a religious cause, is to lay a forbidden burden upon the exercise of liberty protected by the Constitution.
That contrasts sharply with the Brady claim that regulations “such as licensing for gun dealers and owners” are among the types that should be upheld by the Courts in their quest to establish how we are to protect this important fundamental and enumerated right. This is just one brief aspect of the brief, but there is no doubt much more that could be picked apart. I will leave that for others who are more skilled an qualified on legal matters than I am.