Quote of the day—Dean Weingarten

Purchasing or legally making a firearms silencer is one of the most effective steps a Second Amendment support can take to undermine the National Firearms Act and incrementally restore Second Amendment rights. Second Amendment supporters are well on the way to removing the NFA through an unusual tool: Overwhelming compliance.

Dean Weingarten
October 16, 2020
80% Silencers, the Political Ramifications
[Make silencers “in common use” then SAF and SCOTUS will do the rest.—Joe]

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13 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Dean Weingarten

  1. Once again, a close reading of the law reveals a “loophole” that the writers of the law never noticed.
    I always note with pleasure that complaining about someone exploiting a “loophole” in your shiny new law means that someone else has better reading comprehension that you do. When that “Someone Else” loves liberty more than the author of the new law, that’ just an extra helping of delight.

  2. Hmm. That’s assuming they’ve believed their own BS all these years. The “common use” standard was only a rationalization; a way to keep newly developed (and by definition “uncommon”) arms out of the hands of their enemies (the free People of America). I, giving them some credit for intelligence, never suspected that they, the interventionists, themselves believed their arguments had any true merit.

    Nor are they obligated to uphold any appearance of consistency in reasoning. In 1994 for example, magazines of more than ten rounds capacity were already very much in common use.

    It comes down to one thing and one thing only; that which the interventionists feel is in their best interests in terms of consolidating and concentrating power. Given the power, and the potential power, of the 21st Century surveillance state, small arms at this stage in the game will be less relevant than they might have been in the early 20th Century, and so the legal status of Silencers could go either way.

    The most cynical interpretation would be that they might de-regulate Silencers to allow more of their criminal agitators to arm up and terrorize society more effectively. That interpretation then hinges purely on one question; what is in the best interest of the globalist, or “universal” state religion of power?

    That is of course assuming that “they” anymore believe the legality of certain arms to be a significant factor at this stage. An argument could be made that if private arms in America, and the West in general, were going to be a factor in deterring or repelling the interventionist state, in favor of a free state, it would need to have happened already; that the time for it has already passed, that while we may think we know what we’d be fighting against, we certainly no longer understand what we’d be fighting for, that therefore even were we to “win” we’d still lose.

    This view says that none of this nit-picking and harassment by government against the People matters in any technical sense whatsoever, but rather its value lies purely in the psychological. It makes it plain, and demonstrates it to the world, who, and what ideology and doctrine, is in charge and who isn’t, and that is all that matters. So long as we’re “walking on eggshells” as we are with every step we take, expending our resources needlessly and fruitlessly, being nonproductive while looking over our shoulders at what the state might think about us, the interventionist mission is thus accomplished! The details of our behavior, or our material possession of this or that, would matter not at all. The only thing that matters is the state of mind we’ve been put into.

    The general possession of arms has been seen as a guarantee of liberty, but of course that can be true only if the People both understand and uphold the concept and principles of liberty. I say that that time has come and gone, that it can no longer make any meaningful difference which way the laws of Man go because we’ve already rejected the “perfect law of liberty”. It’s now come down to gang verses gang.

    • One step at a time. Also note that the Heller decision, declaring “in common use” as one test for a protected class of weapon, was in 2008. This was long after 1994. Hence your attempt to make some point about what was in common use when the 1994 AWB went into effect is moot.

      I was once extremely suspicious of the push to get concealed carry licenses available in all states. “Vermont Carry” (now called “Constitutional Carry”) should have been the real goal I thought. The thought went that if we grant them the authority to require a license for the exercise of our constitutional right then how can we get to Vermont Carry? My concerns were misplaced. We now have Constitution Carry in a large number of states.

      • “common use” did not save ARs/other AWs in MD, if you want an example post-Heller.

          • SCOTUS rules by not ruling. The lazy bastards take up only a very small percentage of cases that are appealed to them.

        • That ruling was utterly insane, and one that flies in the face of both Heller and common sense.

          AR-pattern guns are used for every conceivable legal application from hunting to home defense to competition to law enforcement.

          There are tens of millions of them in circulation, and anyone arguing against that is either lying, or applying a standard of “in common use” that is utterly absurd.

  3. I know that whenever I shoot with one at the range, people nearby notice and appreciate it. They usually say they with they could afford it, or that the law wasn’t as stupid as it is. The new shooters sometimes ask why everyone doesn’t have them, and are surprised that they are expensive / difficult to get. Then they see the the oh, that’s a silencer? but it isn’t silent at all, just not so obnoxiously loud.” they start to understand they are lied to all the time by the media.

  4. The two key phrases are “constituency” and “political capital”

    Constituency is the number of people impacted by an issue. Getting anything done legislatively requires expending political capital. Legislators aren’t going to do that for anything that doesn’t have a big enough constituency.

    That’s exactly why I’ve done everything I can to encourage people to get into NFA–The more people we’re able to get into NFA, the sooner we’ll be able to get the whole mess repealed: We need to make the constituency as big as possible.

  5. Anyone who believes that jumping through all of BATFEces hoops to make or obtain a suppressor AND pay them $200 to do so is actually doing ANYTHING to undermine or nullify the NFA in any way is DELUSIONAL.

    • But a few folks jumping through those hoops is the only way to expose enough people to them. To get the law changed.
      It wasn’t that long ago that NFA people were pretty much closet cases. But for people like Joe, Rolf, and my old boss, who spend time teaching others about NFA products. We see things changing.
      It’s laborious, yes. It sucks. But mostly peaceful.
      And peaceful suck. Is much better the violent one.

    • Actually, it helps.

      First and foremost, it exposes the lies about them. 30 years ago, if you pulled out a muffler on a fudd range, people would treat you like a criminal. Today, the reaction is “That’s a lot louder than I expected, but it’s still cool. How do I get one?” That shift is HUGE.

      Second, the booming popularity of all things NFA means that there’s no way that NFA branch can possibly keep up. The constant 10+ month waits mean that there are constant calls to congress to fix and/or eliminate the process. The fact that so many NFA buyers tend to be older, wealthier, and more politically connected/savvy than the average citizen, also makes it a lot more likely that those calls will be listened to by members of congress.

      Sooner or later, the fact that all these people got into mufflers is going to lead to them being deregulated–either by congress, or by the courts.

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