Shall Not Be Questioned – Page 700 – The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …

What We’ve Been Up To

You might be able to guess by this conversation between my friend Jason and myself:

Jason: Doh! Had a catastrophic magazine failure.
Sebastian: What happened?
Jason: Body came apart and rounds went flying everywhere.
Sebastian: At the glue seams?
Jason: Yeah. But it wasn’t the glue. The plastic failed.
Sebastian: Ack
Sebastian: I wonder if painting some epoxy on the outside and letting it cure would strengthen the magazine body.
Jason: Maybe. I’m going to try making the walls a little thicker.
Jason: The failure was due to a mistake in the scad file. Its not a design problem.
Sebastian: Good to hear

In case you didn’t figure it out, we’re attempting to design a “high capacity” or “extended” magazine that can be printed on a 1200 dollar 3D printer. Whether we succeed or fail, I will report on the effort. Jason is doing most of the work, since he’s the one who owns the printer. My contribution to the project was designing the follower. Obviously we can’t print a spring with a printer that extrudes ABS plastic, so we won’t be making that ourselves. What are they going to do? Outlaw springs? A spring would not be remarkably hard to make, but just to save the frustration we’re going to use a spring from a broken magazine for the same gun.

Turns out this is a lot harder than would have been anticipated. I had to make changes to the follower last night, and Jason has had to make several modifications to the magazine body. There’s also been modifications necessary on the printer. My feeling is this would be fairly easy to make work on an expensive commercial device, and that the limits of home 3D printing are being pushed to the limits on this project.

It is our intention to definitively show that banning magazines is a fool’s errand in a world where people have easy access to this kind of technology. Once we have a working design, anyone with the Makerbot printer, some glue, and a spring, could download our magazine design, print it, and have it work. I will publish the design here, because I want it to spread far and wide. I’d like to see Paul Helmke try to argue we need to ban CAD drawings too, or restrict 3D printing technology. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. We’re going to do our best to prove that.

Stay tuned to this blog for further updates on our progress. I might invite Jason back to post on some of the stuff he’s worked on, since the last time readers here heard from him wasÂ in 2007 when his Calico M950 blew up in his face (both he and the gun are fine now). I have created a new category for this topic.

Like a Cheap Bourbon

ATF’s not-so-fast and not-so-furious has been aging four the past four years like a cheap bourbon no one wants to drink (especially not the Mexicans, who, rumor has it, are going to declare ATF’s liaison to that country persona non grata.) Uncle notes that the Mexican gun canard started up around the same time.

Refreshing Words to Hear

The big “excuse” to get the Pennsylvania government out of the liquor business is the infusion of cash the state desperately needs that would come when licenses to sell wine & liquor would be sold or auctioned off when it comes time to privatize the retail stores. It’s an easy way to sell the idea to people who don’t really care about the issue one way or another. So imagine how refreshing it was to read that our Governor took a direct free market argument to the General Assembly today.

Government can’t create jobs. And when it tries it usually makes a mess of it. Industries are built on a singular vision, not by committee. My administration is committed to a study that looks at how best to get us out of a business we should never have entered. I’m talking about the liquor business. This isn’t about the money. It’s about the principle. Government should no more run the liquor stores than it should run the pharmacies and gas stations.

To say that government messes it up is an understatement. I’ve watched state employees sell liquor to visibly intoxicated & borderline violent people. (That was fun to watch the male store employee refuse to back up the female clerk who was trying not to sell to the guy & wanted to call the cops for assistance.) The store I visited today had an anti-alcohol poster up in the window. (I bought 3 items in spite of the poster – sherry for a dish, bourbon for man, and wine suggested by Food & Wine for our pizza later this week.) When we visited a store this weekend, the clerk was yelling at a customer when we walked in. The volume of the argument did not go down once others entered the store. (I will concede the clerk was right, but there’s no reason to scream at the customer.)

The system doesn’t save us money, and we have fewer and crappier choices because of it. At least if it was a free market system, I would know the stores suck because my neighbors have crappy taste. Right now, it’s due to bureaucratic incompetence. So yay to Tom Corbett for making the free market case for privatizing the liquor & wine stores. The fact that it will help the state put its financial house back in order is just a side benefit. This needs to be done for the right reason – the government doesn’t belong in the liquor business.

Castle Doctrine Passes Senate

We’re clear of one house of the General Assembly. The vote was 43 to 4. The only four Senators to vote against were Farnese, Hughes, Kitchen and Tartaglione. Even Leach was a yes, if you can believe that. Now we just need to clear the House.

Standing Against Federal Overreach

New Jersey? Really? Legally, the Supremacy Clause is a problem for this legislation, but laws like this have useful symbolic value. But seriously, can you believe even New Jersey is looking to nullify federal law when it’s gone too far? I’m generally pretty unenthusiastic about the Firearms Freedom Laws, but that’s mostly because I think this isn’t the right time, rather than it being a bad idea. But it is the right time for states to stand up to the TSA nudo-o-scoping, so for once I’ll cheer on the folks in Trenton.

Good to Know I’m a Racist

This is simply unbelievable. This is from NPR’s Senior Development VP Ron Schiller:

And not just Islamophobic, but really xenophobic. I mean, basically, they are â€“ they believe in sort of white, middle America, gun-toting â€¦ I mean, itâ€™s pretty scary. Theyâ€™re seriously racist.

Cut their funding… now.

Do They Believe in Due Process?

Sometimes they say and write things that make me question it. The other side, at least rhetorically, has claimed to have accepted the post-Heller realties, but I don’t think at root they’ve given serious thought to what that means. Under Heller, it’s accepted that it’s permissible to deny firearms to those mentally ill, but the recognition of the Second Amendment as a fundamental right means the process of finding someone mentally unstable enough to merit stripping them of their liberty has to meet due process requirement, and this requires an adjudication by a court or other lawfully composed body, in fair and open hearings where the accused has a right to be heard and have representation. Every state has a process for this. The Federal Government, including the Veterans Administration has a process for this. The question should not be why dangerously mentally ill individuals are not getting the help they need.

The Second Amendment being a fundamental right means that it is not sufficient to just merely add someone to NICS, with no due process, and that’s not dependent on any statistic, graph or anecdote. Heller should have ended that debate. What other fundamental constitutional right can be denied in such an arbitrary and capricious manner? I challenge our opponents to answer that.

Oh, And They Need Traver Too

So say the Chicago Tribune:

The head of ATF is a key law enforcement position. It’s particularly critical now, as the U.S. grapples with weapons smuggling from this country to Mexico. As Tribune Newspapers reported Friday, ATF ran a weapons-tracking operation that went terribly awry, allowing hundreds of firearms into Mexico that were later used in crimes.

It went terribly awry, so clearly ATF needs anti-gun leadership at the top. The bureaucrats solution to failure is more funding. The spoils of success is more funding. They can’t lose. It’s a shame we the taxpayers certainly can.

ATF Says More Funding Needed

Now there’s other ATF agents appearing in the media to counter the whistleblowers on operation not-so-fast and not-so-furious:

Several agents said the bigger problem was not in Mexico, but shortfalls in staffing and gun laws in the U.S., which had prevented the ATF from adequately monitoring multiple sales of semiautomatic rifles to suspicious buyers.

“We have roughly the same amount of people we had when they founded us in 1972,” one agent said.

He said Congress and the Obama administration had refused to support the ATF’s proposal to require federally licensed gun sellers to report multiple sales of long-barreled rifles, as they were with handguns, to a single buyer.

“Can someone tell me how I can find out if Joe Blow just bought 50 guns at a gun store? If they do, I’ll be happy to sit outside the door and ask him why he bought them. But otherwise, I won’t know until they start showing up at crime scenes,” the agent said.

Trying to wrap my head around this one. ATF can’t keep track of guns that have been voluntarily reported to them by dealers, so the solution is to mandate even more data? There’s been some speculation, both at Uncle’s and Truth about Guns. I think empire building is a likely explanation, but I’ll speculate on a twist to that theme. The plan was hatched by bureaucrats who have little knowledge or concern for how to do proper police work. The idea would have been to allow firearms to walk, which presumably then would get trafficked to Mexico, be seized at crime scenes in Mexico, and then be traced back to the straw buyers, who could be squeezed to turn on the larger traffickers. If you’re an ATF bureaucrat looking to advance his career, the idea of making a large bust like this using data aggregation techniques, instead of sound police methods, would be pretty irresistible. Obviously agents on the ground who are familiar with sound police methods realized the inherent hazard of this type of operation, and blew the whistle.

This also would explain why they want mandatory long gun reporting, because that would mean even more data. More importantly, it would mean even more data ATF doesn’t have to take responsibility for by walking guns. They could get out of the business of telling dealers to make sales for people who are obviously trafficking.

This kind of law enforcement by data mining isn’t a substitute for good police work. Unfortunately, it would seem there’s a lot of folks in ATF leadership that thinks it is, and the desire for the big career making score is allowing guns to get into the hands of thugs and murderers.

The Need to Move Swiftly

Today, the full Senate is scheduled to take up Castle Doctrine according to an NRA email sent last night. Considering we waited the entire legislative session to see any serious action last year, the lightening speed of this is just amazing. However, there’s good reason.

Today is also the day that the Governor hands down the budget with massive cuts expected. And on top of that debate, we have to deal with redistricting. It’s a busy legislative session for a lot of reasons, so it’s a good thing we’re getting the major work on Castle Doctrine done now.