Shall Not Be Questioned – Page 760 – The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …

Brady Desperation Getting Nasty

Having flubbed their amicus brief in the case of D’Cruz v. McCraw must have really stung the Brady folks, because yesterday they released this bit of nastiness directed at 18 year old James D’Cruz. This is clearly desperation on their part, to resort to ad-hominem attacks on teenagers. But I guess that’s easier than filing an amicus brief properly. Just to give you an idea of how pathetic this attack is, I recognized some of the quotes in here, and decided to do a bit of research. The first quote the Brady’s cribbed from D’Cruz’s Facebook:

“Death is but a doorway”, October 6 at 5:28pm,

The full quote is “Death is but a doorway, time is but a window, I’ll be back.” That quote is from Vigo the Carpathian. Who is Vigo the Carpathian? The chief villain in the movie Ghostbusters II. I can see why the Brady Campaign is concerned with James quoting Vigo. Vigo was a powerful magician:

Clearly if we don’t stop James from being able to own a handgun, it’s only a matter of time before he’s being controlled by the spirit of a 17th century Moldavian tyrant that is alive and well Â in a painting in the Manhattan Museum of Art. But some of these other quotes are scary, right?

“in this field of hundreds begging for their lives, we shall spare none,”

That is a quote from William Tecumseh Sherman. We usually like to encourage an interest in history among young people, but I will concede that James’s fondness for quoting Sherman may be disturbing to some Georgians, and perhaps a reason to keep him away from matches and gasoline, lest he fail to govern his impulsively and try to burn Atlanta to the ground. The other quotes are from various books and movies. One obviously cribbed and paraphrased by a screenplay writer from that famous out of control psychopath Earnest Hemmingway, “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

It’s amazing how low the Bradys are willing to go these days. But cribbing quotes out of context from some kid’s Facebook has to take the cake. I am glad they decided to do this before a holiday, and when North Korea is busy trying to start a war, because it’s likely no one is going to pay any attention to it.

Mexican Gun Violence

The Belmont Club has a story of a Mexican farmer who decided to fight back against the cartels:

One big story that hasnâ€™t yet made it across the Spanish-English divide is the epic ofÂ Don Alejo Garza, an elderly farmer who fought a one-man stand against a drug gang.Â When they gave him a deadline to leave his property or else, Garza sent his ranch hands home and armed himself. There he waited. When the gang came in the dead of the night he met them with a fusilade and killed four and wounded two before the numerically superior drug enforcers finally took him out with gunfire and hand-grenades. The Mexican Marines arrived on the scene to findÂ bodies all over and an old man at the center of it all.

One man fighting back with small arms managed to rack up a pile of bodies fighting back against a barrage of heavily armed opponents. I’m going to guess Senor Garza was probably a pretty good shot. It’s a shame that he was ultimately was murdered anyway. But how many cartel members did he remove from society who won’t go on to murder others? How many elderly farmers fighting back with small arms would it take before the cartels ran out of violent thugs? How long before they decided keeping a lower profile was the better option to declaring open warfare against Mexican civilians?

And here’s a question for our Brady friends. What if Garza armed himself with a gun smuggled in from the United States? I can promise you the grenades the cartels eventually used to kill him didn’t come from gun shows, FFLs or private sales here. I’m sure they will say he’d have been better off abandoning his property to the cartels anyway, because he’d still be alive. We’re all better off, in their minds, surrendering to evil. I say there are worse things than death. My hat is off to Senor Garza. May he rest in peace. If there were 1000 more farmers like him I don’t think the violence in Mexico would continue for long.

Illinois FOID Challenge Passes First Hurdle

You may remember the Motion to Dismiss in the case of an Ohio woman who wanted to have a functional firearm while visiting Illinois. This is the case by the Mountain States Legal Foundation. Illinois filed a Motion to Dismiss the case, for failure to make a claim upon which relief could be granted. I was initially skeptical they were going to easily overcome this motion, but it would appear that they have. The motion was denied by the federal judge hearing the case. What made me think the motion was difficult to overcome was that she had an Ohio license to carry, but it appears that’s not a fact in this case:

Ohio issues licenses to individuals to possess and carry concealed weapons … If Mishaga has such a license, then perhaps, she may legally possess a weapon in Illinois without a FOID Card pursuant to this exception. Mishaga does not allege that she has such a license. For the purposes of the Motion, the Court must assume that she does not, and so, must assume that this exception does not apply to her.

So they beat the first challenge. It would seem that Illinois law would allow non-residents to be issued FOIDs. Perhaps it’s time for Illinois State Police to change their policies in this regard, lest they continue to fight this expensive lawsuit.

Another Avenue for Fixing DC’s Gun Laws

Looks like they are going to go for the purse strings:

As they did with the D.C. voting rights bill, gun rights advocates are likely to move an amendment to the D.C. budget measure that lays waste to the cityâ€™s firearm registration and possession laws. DC Vote, the taxpayer-funded advocacy group lobbying Capitol Hill for voting representation, issued a statement Monday urging supporters â€œto pack the hearing room … and show our solidarity in opposition to these attacks on D.C. democracy.â€

If democracy means crapping on people’s rights, I’m all for attacking it. There’s a reason we’re not a democracy. I could be wrong, but I think there are complications, in terms of house rules, for attaching a non-budgetary item to a budgetary bill. Hopefully not though. It’s time to get this done.

UPDATE: This story is a year old. Sorry folks. Showed up in my Google Alerts as new.

Wasting Taxpayer Dollars in Allentown

Apparently harassing people who aren’t breaking the law can cost a city.

More on the New Jersey Suit

Commenter Patrick noticed that this lawsuit against the State of New Jersey is a facial challenge, rather than an as applied challenge. Meaning the argument is that the law is wrong in all circumstances. Read his entire analysis. One thing I’d add, though cautiously, because I’m not sure about this, is if sections of New Jersey’s carry laws are Â found facially unconstitutional, the law is essentially treated like it never existed:

The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and the name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void and ineffective for any purpose since unconstitutionality dates from the time of its enactment and not merely from the date of the decision so branding it; an unconstitutional law, in legal contemplation, is as inoperative as if it had never been passed … An unconstitutional law is void.

Since the facial challenge only applies to a few sections of New Jersey’s carry laws (which you could get slapped with if you stop by a Starbucks drive through for some coffee on the way to a match), I don’t think it will affect people who have been convicted for carrying without a license in New Jersey, nor make it suddenly lawful to carry a firearm in the Garden State. But New Jersey law does provide for issuance to non-residents, and you can bet I’ll be the first in line to apply if that ends up being the case. What I don’t know if whether someone could then challenge his conviction as-applied if the current permitting statutes are found unconstitutional.

High Speed Rail

I’ve never understood the left’s fascination with high speed rail. Maybe it’s because it makes them feel unenlightened that Europe so heavily invested in it, while the US ignored it. Maybe it’s because they hate the automobile that much. But whatever the reason, Megan McArdle, who has been in China on a business trip, shows why the US isn’t going to have China’s high speed rail system. Today she points out that the efforts to make high speed rail a reality in the US could have a detrimental effect on freight rail, which is truly green.

I am not against high speed rail per-se. It makes sense where cities are packed tightly together, like the Northeast Corridor Washington to Boston route. But for passenger travel to distant cities, planes are probably going to more economically efficient, and likely more energy efficient as well (depending on how fast the trains go, how full you can keep them, and the types of grades they have to traverse). Speed is costly in terms of energy. It doesn’t take a trivial amount of power to keep something as large as a train running 200 MPH at sea level or close to sea level, and even at that speed, it’ll still take close to 14 hours to get from New York to Los Angeles. That’s more than twice as long as a typical flight to Los Angeles. Even New York to Dallas would be a whopping 8 hours.

More Bad Polling New for Brady Folks

From Gallup:

For the second year in a row, a record-low 44% of Americans say laws governing the sale of firearms should be made more strict, while 42% say gun laws should be kept as they are now. Twelve percent say gun laws should be made less strict.

Let’s hope for more record lows to come for those supporting stricter gun laws.

NRA Influence on Voters

Dave Hardy links to a new poll that shows NRA’s impact in the elections this cycle. Overall, this looks really good. A total of 44% of voters polled claim they listen to what the NRA has to say in an election all, most or some of the time. Among independents this number is 42% on those polls.

â€œThese numbers show that the tea party and the NRA were the two major voices that influenced voter opinion in the midterm elections,â€ said Brad Oâ€™Leary, publisher of The Oâ€™Leary Report.

I suspect NRA’s numbers may even be better in a year where they aren’t endorsing a lot of Dems who voted for Health Care and other measures unpopular with the Tea Party movement. But this is an overwhelming amount of influence. And the Brady’s wonder why politicians don’t want to cross us?

Pretty Outrageous

From Students for Concealed Carry on Campus:

Dr. Bill Holda, president of Kilgore College in Kilgore, TX, will have to do some fast backpedaling if heâ€™s to have any hope of outrunning his recent comments about the 1991 massacre at a Lubyâ€™s Cafeteria in Killeen, TXâ€”the second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, surpassed only by the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.Â Dr. Holda recently angered both survivors of the shooting and concealed carry advocates by claiming that some of the victims of the massacre (which became a rallying cry for supporters of lawful self-defense) actually shot each other.

It’s not even close to true. This was before Texas passed right-to-carry. The only one shooting anyone that day was the killer. This statement was made in response to a bill introduced in Texas that would repeal the current prohibition of carrying on college campuses.