“Pajamas TV sounded a little too Hefneresque (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), so it quickly became PJTV, and now Pajamas Media is being “rebranded†as PJ Media.”
It’s funny because I had considered changing the blog name to SIH for a bit, but was talked out of it. Ultimately I just decided to jettison the old name entirely. So far, I don’t think it’s worked out too badly, despite the fact we had a few little issues here and there. Hopefully PJ Media will have a successful transition as well.
The charges allege that the officers — five are still on the force and three are retired — were involved in illegally transporting more than a dozen handguns as well as M-16 assault rifles and shotguns and a variety of stolen property, the people briefed on the case said.
Even though this is a case of actual illegal guns being trafficked into New York City, I’m not going to hold my breath that we’ll hear anything about it from MAIG or Mayor Bloomberg. It does go to show if you make the market lucrative enough, people will enter it and meet the demand.
The arrests on Tuesday were based on charges that include conspiracy to transport firearms across state lines, conspiracy to transport defaced firearms across state lines, conspiracy to sell firearms across state lines and conspiracy to transport and receive stolen property across state lines, one of the people said. The stolen property included slot machines, the person said.
And here I’ve been hearing from the gun control groups that gun trafficking was legal, and that we didn’t have the proper tools to fight it. So clearly we need a federal trafficking law. Funny that when guns fall under the FBI’s purview, they don’t seem to have any problem finding charges to bring.
I think it’s important to pass this because the number of hunters in the state can be viewed as a proxy for how much support the entire shooting community can command if politicians start thinking about displeasing us, so a decline in hunting can hurt people who are just shooters, and interested in the right to bear arms. There isn’t quite so easy a proxy for shooters, except for LTCs, which as of yet do not approach the number of hunting licenses issued in the state.
Ladd Everitt speaks about his confrontation with Professor Adam Winkler on his own blog. I think you can surmise from Everitt’s tone that the one aspect of Winkler’s book that really gets his goat is that it lent us credibility on an argument that Everitt finds abhorrent, which is that some gun control laws, even some still on the books today, originated for racist or xenophobic reasons. He runs around in circles trying to come to terms with Winkler’s book, rather unsuccessfully, when he sort of awkwardly stumbles into what I think  is probably the meat of his argument:
It is therefore confusing that Winkler would assert, “I do think that gun laws historically have been tied to race and racism and we should take that seriously when we’re thinking about a gun control law today.â€Â Why? If African-Americans have moved beyond the past and strongly support contemporary gun control proposals (which even Winkler acknowledges are not motivated by race), why should it be an issue?
Except the latest polling shows that support for gun control even among the black community has been slipping, and now stands at about 30% of blacks believing that supporting gun rights is more important than supporting controls (in contrast to 53% of whites). Everitt misses the point of enumerating rights, which is to put them outside the scope of the political process, and leave them retained where they belong and from whom they originate; the people. 65% of the population simply can’t get together and vote away the rights of the other 30%. So when some Americans have greater access to their rights than other Americans, this concerns me, regardless of whether or not a majority of people having their rights trampled on support it or not.
But Everitt actually misses the main reason why I think exposing the racist and xenophobic history of many of our guns laws is important — because we’re still living under many of them. The history of the Sullivan Act has been well documented, and is still active law in New York. A source in the previously linked law review article cites that it was meant to:
strike hardest at the foreign-born element . . . . As early as 1903 the authorities had begun to cancel pistol permits in the Italian sections of the city. This was followed by a state law of 1905 which made it illegal for aliens to possess firearms ‘in any public place’. This provision was retained in the Sullivan law.
It’s very important to discredit these laws as being abhorrent, and outside our tradition when it comes to how we treat constitutional rights. If the motivation for many gun control laws was disarming disfavored groups, rather than a heart-felt desire to improve public safety and lower crime, the courts may be more inclined to look skeptically on them. Indeed, as we have noticed with the latest Heller II case, where the Sullivan Act was cited, shows the importance of discrediting it and other laws on the books which share its history.
And that, folks, is probably what really has Everitt up in arms; our idea that many of these laws have racist origins is getting mainstream acceptance from the legal establishment. If Ladd is an astute observer, he will notice that this happened previously with the notion that the Second Amendment is an individual right rather than a collective right, and he is well aware how that ended for his cause. So here we go again, with another idea he finds abhorrent, gaining mainstream acceptance. Let us hope this ends the same way for him.
UPDATE: For the curious, the picture featured in this post is that of Big Tim Sullivan himself.
SayUncle links to a piece on the Genessee County, Michigan Sheriff using narcotics stops. This is a practice that has already been thrown out by the Supreme Court, and as such it is well-established precedent for the purposes of overcoming qualified immunity. So you could probably reach the Sheriff personally in a 1983 suit. I’m also fairly certain anyone caught in these roadblocks can get all the evidence against them tossed as fruit of the poisonous tree. So there is recourse here if you want to nail these guys personally. Though, I’m not sure how much you’ll recover if you were just stopped. Someone who had to hire a lawyer to fight charges that were a result of evidence obtained from the illegal stop might have a decent case though.
This is an inalienable right that neither the federal government, nor any state government, may infringe upon. In addition, the 14th Amendment gives Congress the power to protect us from states that infringe on our inalienable, constitutional rights.
By the way, these are the same gun-ban groups that don’t give any consideration to states’ rights when they lobby for sweeping federal gun bans, ammunition bans, and magazine bans.
I don’t think states have rights anyway. People have rights. States have powers which are delegated to it by the people. I’m glad he’s calling out the disingenuousness of our opponents when they hang their hat on the 10th Amendment. They weren’t so concerned about state-by-state policy when they were busy banning scary looking rifles as equally in Pennsylvania as they were in Montana.
I would change the interpretation of the Second Amendment. The court got that quite wrong. Gun policy should be handled by legislatures and by states, not by federal judges appointed for life.
The Second Amendment is never really going to be safe until we stop hearing things like this from left-leaning judges. The only thing that’s going to save the Second Amendment is getting judges on the bench who are willing to uphold it.
It looks like this past week was a busy one for the gun control crowd, busy giving us insights into their thinking, and windows into their minds. Professor Adam Winkler has been on a book tour to promote “Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America,” in which he brings up the subject of many early gun control efforts having racist roots. This infuriates Ladd Everitt, who confronts Professor Winkler at one of his events:
This is another example of the gun control crowd failing to understand our positions, or even really grasp the core of what we argue. I don’t think anyone who’s an opinion leader in this issue, that has discussed the racist roots of gun control, has suggested that Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, the Brady Campaign, or any of its supporters, are pushing gun control because they are racist, or that their efforts are motivated by a desire to racially discriminate. All we’re suggesting is that the racist motivations of past gun control efforts should be acknowledged and openly talked about. That is the Professor’s position as well, and it is also mine.
But I will go slightly farther than perhaps Professor Winkler would be willing to go, and suggest that even today, gun control, in effect, can have racial consequences, even if it is not motivated by racial considerations per se. I will give you an example, in using the issue of “Florida Loophole,” in Pennsylvania. The City leaders have lamented that people in high-crime neighborhoods are being issued Florida licenses, presumably because they have been turned down for a license by the City of Philadelphia.
Pennsylvania law allows police to deny a license to “An individual whose character and reputation is such that the individual would be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety,” which the City of Philadelphia has interpreted quite broadly, even going to far as to suggest unpaid parking tickets are sufficient to deny permits under this clause. Philadelphia will also deny your license if you have ever been arrested, even if the arrest was minor and long ago. There is an appeal process to contest a license revocation, but it costs time and money. A typical suburban resident has sufficient access to the legal system to be able to successfully challenge an unfair denial, so suburban jurisdictions, even ones who probably would not issue licenses at all if they had a choice, tend to use this criteria fairly. Philadelphia routinely gets away with unfair denials because its residents are poorer, and don’t have the same access to the legal system. A Florida license, for which Florida only counts convictions, rather than arrests, is a cheaper alternative for being able to legally carry for self-protection. But City officials have been champing at the bit to get the “Florida Loophole” closed, leaving those residents with no recourse.
It’s worth noting that suburban applicants are going to tend to overwhelmingly be white and middle or upper class. City applicants stand  better chance than not of being African-American, given they are the city’s predominate ethnic group. It is outrageous to me that some Americans have better access to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms than other Americans. I have no doubt the motivation to close the “Florida Loophole” is not racial. Indeed, many proponents of closing the loophole are African-American, including Mayor Nutter and Commissioner Ramsey. But the end of result of what they advocate is that African-Americans in Philadelphia, who live in high-crime areas and who may be lower-income, will have less access to their constitutional rights than the white folks in the suburbs. This is what I mean when I suggest the law has racial implications, even if it is not racist in its motivations. The implication should concern any American who believes in the Bill of Rights, and equal protection under the law.
Ladd Everitt proposes we airbrush this from the debate, probably because it makes him uncomfortable. To be sure, I don’t think Everitt is a racist; i’m sure he’d be happy to disarm both black and white equally. But we don’t live in a country where a gun ban is possible anymore. Given that, I think it’s important to ensure that all Americans, regardless of color or income, have the same access to exercise their rights as everyone else. The Florida issue has uncovered a fundamental unfairness in the way Pennsylvania law is written, and how it is being implemented. It should be fixed. I’m willing to talk about the Florida issue as part of that solution, but I am absolutely not willing to airbrush the racial implications of the current status-quo. All law-abiding Pennsylvanians should have equal access to their right to carry a firearm for self-protection. I would like to think that’s a base principle we could all get behind, and leave the disagreement limited to whether the standard needs to be tougher, more lenient, or just less subjective.
Professor Winkler and I may be at opposite sides of that particular debate, but his willingness to take our side seriously, and make serious arguments in return, is a breath of fresh air in an issue dominated by the Ladd Everitts, Joan Petersons, and Abby Spanglers of the world. And that’s not even speaking of the boneheads on our “side.”
