Author Archives: Joe

The price of sex

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I found this rather interesting:

“The price of sex is about how much one party has to do in order to entice the other into being sexual,” said Kathleen Vohs, of the University of Minnesota, who has authored several papers on “sexual economics.” “It might mean buying her a drink or an engagement ring. These behaviors vary in how costly they are to the man, and that is how we quantify the price of sex.”

By boiling dating down to an economic model, researchers have found that men are literally getting lots of bang for their buck. Women, meanwhile, are getting very little tat for their . . . well, you get the idea.

Sex is so cheap that researchers found a full 30% of young men’s sexual relationships involve no romance at all — no wooing, dating, goofy text messaging. Nothing. Just sex.

…

“Every sex act is part of a ‘pricing’ of sex for subsequent relationships,” Regnerus said. “If sex has been very easy to get for a particular young man for many years and over the course of multiple relationships, what would eventually prompt him to pay a lot for it in the future — that is, committing to marry?”

Did you answer, “Love”? You’re adorable.

With reliable birth control, lower social sigma, and less economic dependency the cost of sex to women has lowered and they are able to lower their “price”. The Internet makes “shopping” for availability, “quality” and “price” much easier for males. Hence the competition among “sellers” has increased and the price has dropped. There are some women that are even competing over sexual access to men. In essence some women are “paying” some men instead of the reverse.

One would then think that the price for two wives or at least a wife and a girlfriend should now be low enough that I might be able to afford it. But the last time I checked with Barb she assured me that was not the case. It is kind of hard to understand her when she is growling like that but I think she said she would have to sell all my organs to pay off the debt incurred.

Quote of the day—Kurt Hoffman

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If you oppose the people’s Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms in defense of their families, lives, homes and liberty, perhaps it is you who have some explaining to do.

Kurt Hoffman
October 12, 2011
Brady Campaign offended by truth about Second Amendment
[If someone opposes a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights I think they are past the explanation stage. Either they are ignorant and need to go back to their high school government class or they are opposed to the basis of our nation and should leave the country. They simply don’t belong here. You can’t get much more fundamental about our political underpinnings than the Bill of Rights.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Joan R. Neubauer

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All of this is the stuff of a conspiracy theory that most of us would dismiss as so much rumor. Disturbingly, we have documentation that proves otherwise. Fast and Furious may have been the name the administration chose for this operation as a means of further curtailing our Second Amendment rights in a fast and furious manner. We the People must remain vigilant. For without the Second Amendment, the other nine could never stand.

Joan R. Neubauer
Conspiracy Theory: Fast and Furious an Attempt at Further Gun Control
October 11, 2011
[Yes. It is more and more disturbing. If this were a movie plot it would be dismissed as “too far out there”. The big questions now are, as in the movies, how and will the good guys win?—Joe]

Boomershoot 2012 speaker

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We have a speaker lined up for Boomershoot 2012 dinner.

Author Paul M. Barrett who I met in Reno at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous last month has agreed to be our speaker.

More information about the dinner and his talk, “The Ironies of Gun Control” can be found here.

Quote of the day—Clark

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Due to forces of technology (CNC controlled machine tools, cheap computation, open source ethics, and social sharing of designs) gun control is utterly dead. It’s a corpse, staggering along, not yet aware that it’s been gut shot, it’s blood pressure has dropped to zero, and its brain (such as it is) is about to die the True Death.

Try to outlaw gun powder and we’ll move to railguns and big capacitors. Try to outlaw primers and we’ll see plans for electronic ignitions up on wikileaks by the end of the day.

Go back a step and outlaw the sparkplugs and the capacitors and …yeah, it’ll work as well as the restrictions on cold syrup have ENTIRELY shut down meth production.

Gun control will stagger on for a bit, but there’s no putting some genies back in their bottles, and home printed firearms are one of those genies.

One hundred years from now everyone from Chinese peasants to American bankers (or do I have that backwards?) will have all the firearms and ammo they want, in the same way that 15 year old have all the hot monkey sex pr0n they want today.

It’s called technology, and it’s the universal solvent.

Clark
October 6, 2011
The Third Wave, CNC, Stereolithography, and the end of gun control
[I have nothing to say except H/T to Mad Rocket Scientist.—Joe]

Interesting times ahead for Microsoft

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I’ve seen reports that there are now more smart phones sold than P.C.s. This is part of the reason Microsoft has been putting so much effort into Windows Phone Seven (and beyond). Now people are saying:

Realistically, Microsoft’s last chance to make a dent in Apple and Google’s mobile aspirations is with Windows Phone 7.5. While the operating system is generally well regarded, many still believe it lacks the killer feature that will help it overtake the considerable leads held by its rivals.

The Nokia deal is about to reach first fruition with the shipment of the first Nokia phones with Windows Phone 7.5. If that doesn’t flop I expect Microsoft will still push on to Windows Phone Eight. I know a little about this and because this information is proprietary can’t say what the main push will be with it. I will say that I wasn’t entirely convinced it was the proper strategy. Maybe it is. But they had some very tough decisions to make and none of the options available were anything close to a sure thing and doing everything in the timeframe required simply isn’t possible.

Without a strong position in the phone and tablet markets which are cutting into the desktop and laptop sales Microsoft is facing completely new territory. As much as I liked working for Microsoft I’m glad I’m not working there right now.

California outlaws open carry

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From the LA Times:

Gov. Jerry Brown announced early Monday that he had outlawed the open carrying of handguns in public in California, a controversial practice that top law enforcement officials had denounced as dangerous.

Combined with the near impossibility of getting a concealed carry license in most of California this will, almost for certain, go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Quote of the day—Henry Louis Mencken

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The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.

Henry Louis Mencken
Minority Report, H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks [78], 1956
[I’ve seen this in engineering as well as politics. Someone who doesn’t really understand the problem has great enthusiasm for a simple solution that on the surface is very appealing. This enthusiasm and confidence can sometimes be very difficult to combat because it can take a great deal of effort to educate the people advocating the solution on the error of their ways. And in fact it may be impossible to educate them because they are too stupid to understand. Gun control is one such example.

This brings us to another Mencken quote, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

I have no idea how to deal with this in politics. I have enough trouble with it in engineering where most of the people are rational and reasonably smart. This is part of the reason that government powers should be severely constrained. Political decisions are frequently very complex issues with incomplete data sets. Even if you had rational people involved, which you frequently don’t, and they had the general populace’s best interests at heart, which they almost never do, getting a consensus on the solution that best fits the available data is nearly impossible. In politics data, if present, is cherry picked. Proper data analysis is completely absent.

It is far better to let the free market provide the “remedy for all the sorrows of the world” because the solutions attempted will be varied. The non-solutions will quickly end up in the dustbin. The partial solutions will be tweaked and retried. The true solutions will dominate and another “sorrow of the world” will be reduced or eliminated.—Joe]

Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun

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Author Paul Barrett attended the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno last month. I spent several hours talking to him then and have since corresponded some with him. He send me an “Uncorrected Proof” of his new book, Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun. I finished reading it yesterday.

I liked the book. As he told us in Reno this is the story of how Gaston Glock came to dominate the handgun market in the U.S. It is primarily a book about a business and how success came from not only a great product as the right time but also how anti-gun people were his best salesmen. Paul loves the irony (his next book, unrelated to firearms will have it’s share of irony as well), it shows, and it makes the book all the more pleasurable to read.

Barrett and I come from about as disparate backgrounds as two U.S. citizens could. I grew up on a farm in Idaho with German roots which perhaps go back prior to the the birth of our nation (we are still investigating but it may be one of my great+++ grandfather Huffman’s was on the first U.S. census). I don’t own a Glock and probably have fired less than 50 rounds in a couple different Glock pistols. Barrett lives and works in New York City and his mother is Jewish. She escaped Europe as a little girl. Many of her relatives died in the camps during WWII. This difference lead to more irony as our discussion dove deeper into the issues around guns and it will surface again in my review of the book.

Our different perspective on things was a stressor during our conversations. Things we both thought were obvious to the most casual observer were, “You can’t possibly be serious!” moments for the other. I struggled with this stress and I’m pretty sure he did too. We both wanted this “relationship” to work.

If you want a one sentence summation of my thoughts on his book it is, “Gun owners as well many others will find the story of Glock fascinating and the irony will make you smile.” As I dig into specifics keep this in mind. I am deeply embedded in the movement to expand of the civil rights of gun ownership. So when the book touches on subjects I am an expert on and I think it is even slightly off base it really gets my attention. My disagreement on these items should not be taken as an overall disparagement of the book. It is a very enjoyable read and I recommend it.

There a lot of things that surprised me in the book. Of course there was the behind the scenes story of the creation of the gun, it’s marketing, the legal issues, and the criminals who embezzled from and even tried to murder Gaston Glock. That was all fascinating. But what surprised me was how thoroughly Barrett researched the topic and got into “the gun culture”. He attended the NRA convention, went to a small arms trade show in Germany. He spent a weekend with Massad Ayob. He shot in an IPDA match. He tells us that most police are not particularly good shooters and practice less than many private citizen gun owners. He refers to “the smell of Hoppe’s No. 9”, Heinlein’s famous quote, “An armed society is a polite society”, John Moses Browning, and tells the Suzanna Gratia Hupp story. He explains how a gun can malfunction by “limp wristing” it. He points out anti-gun advocates and that the New York times in particular tried to get Glock handguns banned by making claims for which there was no evidence. He points out Josh Sugarmann’s deliberate deception about “assault weapons”. He briefly tells the story of the efforts to ban “Saturday Night Specials” giving the reader the anti-gun people view:

… Saturday Night Specials had no redeeming social value; they couldn’t plausibly be marketed for target shooting, hunting, or police work. By their very nature, according to this view, cheap handguns were meant only to kill people and therefore were “unreasonably hazardous.”

Then he shoots them down with:

The plaintiffs’ argument had visceral appeal to gun foes, but also significant weaknesses: As a matter of economics and fairness, it didn’t address the concerns of people living in violence-ridden neighborhoods who might seek to defend themselves with cut-rate handguns.

He writes of how Glock advertising their pistol was “significantly more powerful with greater firepower and is much easier to shoot fast and true” drew fire from people like Sugarmann who wrote, “The rise of handguns to dominance in the marketplace has corresponded with an increase in their efficiency as killing machines”. And then he shots them down with the well aimed, “This tough rhetoric appeals to many liberal citizens and scholars. But when drained of emotion and set against firearm realities and crime trends, it loses force.”

I saw this again and again in his book and in my discussions with him. He even started to buy his own handgun but the paperwork required by New York City had a rather chilling effect. I was amazed with the details he knew about culture and the battles we have fought against less than ethical opponents.

With all the points he gets right I was occasionally shocked with his conclusions after correctly laying out the facts. Chapter 1 is about the 1986 FBI shootout in Miami. One of the lessons learned there was that a determined bad guy can take many, many hits (Michael Platt absorbed 12 shots before being stopped) and still be a threat. He correctly reports that law enforcement all over the U.S. concluded from this and other events that a six shot revolver wasn’t adequate for officer safety. Yet Barrett says things like, “It’s not obvious why a civilian handgun owner requires seventeen rounds in a magazine of a Glock pistol.” When I read that I wanted to scream at him, “Because if it is going to take 12 rounds to stop him he is going to really pissed off if I only fired ten!” And that doesn’t even get into the situations where there are multiple assailants and not all of your shots are going to be hits on a moving target that is shooting at you.

He refers to “the loophole that remains for private gun transactions” and says, “An estimated 40 percent of handguns are acquired by private transaction, for which no background check—no paperwork at all—is necessary. That makes no sense.”. Again, this guy lost many relatives to the Nazis in WWII. He is smart guy. Even if he has not read the story of the Belgium Corporal surely after digging that deeply into our culture he could formulate an argument about the risks of firearms registration rather than saying, “That makes no sense.” Barrett likes irony and here I, the German (descendent), am making the case to a descendent of a Holocaust survivor that Jews need to protect themselves from tyrannical governments.

He advocates for “ballistic fingerprinting” apparently without doing the usual research. Had he even read the Wikipedia entry he would have realized this scheme had serious and probably fatal flaws which make the database useless for anything other than gun owner registration.

Again and again I saw this. It was as if he had all the facts, he understood the anti-gun people frequently deliberately lied, relied on emotional appeals, and had their hypothesizes discredited. But when it came time to express his own opinion he wasn’t quite ready to give up many of their conclusions.

There are hints of condescension in places but this may have been editors or marketers rather than the author. A flyer included with the book states, “The Glock is a favorite among concealed-carry buffs”. I found that very insulting. Are people who attend church “religious buffs”? Or are people who marry someone of a different skin color “interracial marriage buffs”?

The back of the “UNCORRECTED PROOF : NOT FOR SALE” book includes some small print that looks like the promotion plans:

  • National review and feature attention
  • 20-city radio satellite tour
  • Author events and interviews out of New York
  • Outreach to law-enforcement blogs
  • Paid search campaign
  • Advertising on sites such as TownHall.com
  • Coordinated outreach with academic marketing to colleges and universities with law-enforcement studies programs
  • Advance reader’s edition available for distribution to urban law-enforcement agencies and mayors in cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Miami, Kansas City, and New Orleans
  • eBook edition promoted in all advertising, promotion, and social media outreach

Why the emphasis on law enforcement and not a single mention of gun owner outreach? There are about 80 million gun owners in the U.S. Far, far more than there are police officers. Don’t they think gun owners can read? In addition to the obvious, to my readers, gun blogs there are many gun magazines which reach millions of readers, and there are even online stores that specialize in gun books.

I also found a minor mistake where he implied the “assault weapon ban” was part of the Brady Act. I reported this to him and he thinks he might still be able to get the “glitch” corrected before the book is released in January 2012.

It is still a good book. That his full time job is as a writer shows. I envy his writing skill. I highly recommend this book.

See also other reviews by Ry, Robert Farago, Jim Shepherd (and here), and my previous comments here, here, and here.

Update: Aaron has a review too.

Update2: Review by BobG.

Windows Phone 7.5

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I just updated my phone to Windows Phone 7.5. I love the new I.E. I can finally read my blog on it without enlarging the page and then scrolling from side to side. http://field.modernballistics.com/ is now much more usable too.

Maps now, finally, has “Favorites” and voice directions (I used to hear the void directions being tested for hours from my office when I worked at Microsoft).

The upgraded took longer than I liked but it went smoothly enough. Time to upgrade Barb’s phone now.

Quote of the day—Janet Reno

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The most effective means of fighting crime in the United States is to outlaw the possession of any type of firearm by the civilian populace.

Janet Reno
U.S. Attorney General during the Clinton administration
1991
[Ms. Reno was mistaken. Had such a law been passed there would have been a great deal more “crime” than she would have imagined or been able to handle.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Paul M. Barrett

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Feldman is trying to organize a politically moderate gun owners’ association as an alternative to the NRA. So far, he has not had much luck with that project.

Paul M. Barrett
Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun page 267.
[Richard Feldman,Esq. doesn’t have anything on his web site about trying to do this but Barrett knows him personally and perhaps has inside knowledge that I am not privy to. That aside, this would appear to be the worst error I found in the book. I have a lot of good things to say about the book and will do so in another post. I really liked the book so don’t let my disagreement with Barrett about the quote above adversely color your thoughts about the book. That would be very unfair.

The error in the quote above is as follows: I know many people who have left the NRA and having nothing good to say about the organization. All of them left because the NRA was too “moderate”. They felt the NRA compromised when they shouldn’t have. The anti-gun groups try to paint the NRA as extremist but that is certainly not the viewpoint from the majority of gun owners that I know. That Feldman hasn’t “had much luck with that project” would indicate to me that there may be a problem with his vision. Admittedly the “market” for political gun organizations is a bit crowded and it is always difficult to break into a new market even if you do have a lot of money and/or an exceptional product. My impression is that Feldman has neither. The “product” Feldman is selling, if he is in fact trying to do this, is not going to find a very large market. The people that yearn for a more “moderate” NRA either advocate against guns and gun owners or don’t care about the issue. Neither of which would join such an organization.

Barrett has done a very good job with this book. He has done a lot of research and he accurately reports on many subtle points that I would not have expected him to have found. I’m a little surprised he didn’t realize the statement above does not match the reality as I know it. Perhaps he does recognize it as an error on Feldman’s part but he didn’t comment on it beyond the “not had much luck” quip.

I found similar things in the book on other topics. He has all the facts right and then fails to draw the obvious conclusion or sometimes a jarringly different conclusion from what seems obvious to me. But these are mostly little things. I really liked the book and will report about it at length very soon.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Legal Community Against Violence

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As outlined in Petitioners’ brief, the Second Amendment is a limit on the national government alone and does not constrain the District of Columbia’s legislative authority. See Br. of Petitioners at 35-40. For analogous reasons, the Second Amendment does not serve as a limit on the States and their political subdivisions. Although the Court need not address this issue in this case—which does not involve a challenge to a law passed by a State or one of its political subdivisions—it is well established that the Second Amendment does not apply to the States.

Legal Community Against Violence
January 11, 2008
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA AND MAYOR ADRIAN M. FENTY,
Petitioners,
v.
DICK ANTHONY HELLER,
Respondent.
BRIEF OF AMICI CURIAE MAJOR AMERICAN CITIES, THE UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF MAYORS, AND LEGAL COMMUNITY AGAINST VIOLENCE IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONERS
[Sometimes you have to just shake your head in disbelief. D.C. is under the control of the Federal Government! Congress can override any law or act of the D.C. politicians. How did these guys get through high school let alone law school without discovering that the District of Columbia is not a state or one of its political subdivisions? Maybe they are living in the alternate reality where D.C. of those 57 states that Obama said he has visited.

What is for certain is that anti-gun people have very little concern for facts. As near as I can determine they are lying, live in an alternate reality and/or are suffering from Peterson Syndrome.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Dennis Henigan

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For the NRA, it was not supposed to be this way. After the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment granted a limited right to have a gun in the home, the NRA bragged that it was just the “opening salvo” in a legal war to use the courts to dismantle the nation’s gun laws.

Yet three years, 400 legal challenges, and “millions of dollars in [NRA] legal bills” later, all the gun lobby has had to show for its efforts is a growing body of case law affirming the right of the people to have strong gun laws short of a total handgun ban. Just last week, the same Texas judge who was previously overruled for ruling that domestic abusers have a right to own guns threw out the NRA’s lawsuit claiming that teens have a right to buy semi-automatic handguns. Never before have so many courts so cogently affirmed the constitutionality of so many strong gun laws in such a short span of time.

Dennis Henigan
October 6, 2011
How Many Second Amendment Cases Will the NRA Lose?
[The NRA is mostly a strawman in this context. SAF is who the Brady Campaign should be (and probably is) worried about.

The total number of victories is a poor metric of how the battle is going. More important is how many Supreme Court victories each side has to their credit. In the last three years, how’s that been going for you Dennis?

Gloat while you can Dennis. I’ll be saving these words for your eating pleasure a few years from now.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Independent Democratic Conference

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PROPONENTS OF A MORE REFINED FIRST AMENDMENT ARGUE THAT THIS FREEDOM SHOULD BE TREATED NOT AS A RIGHT BUT AS A PRIVILEGE – A SPECIAL ENTITLEMENT GRANTED BY THE STATE ON A CONDITIONAL BASIS THAT CAN BE REVOKED IF IT IS EVER ABUSED OR MALTREATED.

Independent Democratic Conference
September 2011
Page 34 in CYBERBULLYING—A Report on Bullying in a Digital Age
[I love the word “refined”. It makes the proposed degradation of a specific enumerated right so much more palatable. It’s a lot like “progress” and “liberal”. All very nice words. Surely reasonable people can agree we would all be better off if the government were to punish those that were divisive.

Via Thirdpower and Eugene Volokh.—Joe]

When looters run out of places to loot

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Socialism is reaping the usual results in Greece:

Airliners will be grounded, trains halted and tax offices shut when Greek state workers strike against austerity measures on Wednesday, defying a plea by the government to rally behind its effort to fend off national bankruptcy.

Most probably don’t really understand what is happening. They think they can just demand the government hire people and people will have jobs. What their simple model doesn’t take into account is that they are no different than looters with the government doing the actual theft. The one level of indirection and the facade of respectability allows them to believe they are not engaged in immoral behavior.

The truth is that while economic laws are less well understood and probably more subtle than the laws of physics they are no less certain. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. They have been looting the people who produce for so long the producers have either left the country, given up, or have simply run out of wealth to loot.

I’ve often wondered what it looks like when those who know no life outside of looting run out of places to loot. We sort of saw what happened in the USSR in the ‘80s but that was before the Internet and they were a much more closed society than Greece.

Popcorn anyone?

Quote of the day—Richard Samuel Najjar

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…[P]olitically motivated entities like the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun (formally Handgun Control, Inc.), the oddly named Violence Policy Center, and Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Handguns rely on discredited studies that were rejected elsewhere, or by pulling numbers out of thin air to craft an argument while they attempt to smugly and piously stand in the way of continuing reforms. Gun control was a failure. Gun control is dead. It’s time to bury it once and for all.

Richard Samuel Najjar
October 1, 2011
Comment to Cause and effect or coincidence? Gun control scrapped …crime plummets
[The only nit I have to pick with this is I wouldn’t say gun control is dead. As long as there exists an anti-gun organization with fulltime staff or an electable politician that supports gun control we have work to do.—Joe]

Gun cartoon of the day

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CondoBoardMeeting

The artist is sharing their nightmare not reality. Reality is readily available should they have chosen to get the facts.

See the story that goes with this cartoon here. It contains things like:

Lost in the impassioned arguments about the Second Amendment and the right to defend oneself from government and each other is the question of what “open carry” might do to the already fragile fabric of society.

Lost on the writer is that most states have no laws prohibiting open carry and probably 100 million of us get along just fine living in those open carry states with millions carrying either openly or concealed.

Another example of the deficiencies of writers understanding and analysis:

Instead, let’s talk about what makes us civilized, and what makes America free. Guns don’t make us free.

Actually, I think a pretty good case can be made that the gun is civilization. And while guns in and of themselves do not make us free the restriction of firearm ownership and use is a sure sign that a civilization is not free.

I would claim the writer is just another ignorant bigot but the last paragraph makes me wonder if there isn’t something more than ignorance going on here:

Deep in its corporate-sponsored heart, you have to wonder if this is what the NRA really believes those learned gentlemen had in mind when they ratified the words, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State…”

“Corporate-sponsored heart”? I hear whispers of animosity toward capitalism in that paragraph. Is this just another socialist who knows they must destroy the means to resist their master plan to rid society of free markets and free minds?

Quote of the day—Kelsey Leal

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I come from a family of liberals. We believe that people that don’t work should live better lives than those that do.

Kelsey Leal
October 3, 2011
[Kelsey is my soon to be daughter-in-law.

This was in response to me giving her a bit of a hard time about not even recognizing the name of the Cato Institute. When I explained it was a Libertarian think tank part of her response was the quote above. It achieve the desired results. I was speechless.

She says she was joking—mostly.—Joe]

Banning the ATF not guns

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There are rumors the ATF is about to be thrown under the bus. Although there are people calling this rumor “a bombshell” (via Say Uncle and son-in-law John) it isn’t really all that new (from almost three months ago):

The unfolding scandal over a gunrunning investigation allegedly botched by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives could do what years of criticism of the long-beleaguered agency never quite accomplished — result in its demise.

People on both sides of the issue commented on it:

“I think something like that is likely to happen,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

…

Christopher Cox, legislative director for the NRA, the agency’s longtime nemesis, also said arguments for shuttering or breaking up ATF are building.
 
“Their criminal investigation tactics are going a long way to proving that point,” Cox said. “If they cease to be an effective law enforcement organization, they will cease to be legitimate, and the calls for restructuring or abolishing of ATF are going to become more and more valid.”

Sebastian says, Careful What You Wish For and he has some good points. The concern that the FBI has credibility and respect the ATF doesn’t and we would rather have a money starved easily demonized bunch of screw ups instead of the FBI, the Secret Service, or the U.S. Marshalls enforcing the regulations has been the whisper from behind the scenes since as least the Regan years when the first serious thoughts of disbanding them came up.

Things have changed with the FBI since the 1980’s. Remember Ruby Ridge and Waco? The ATF created the messes but it was during the FBI “cleanup” that the FBI shot the woman holding the baby and burned down the church with the women and children in it. The FBI has it’s own public relations issues to be concerned about.

I’ll leave making a recommendation on this specific topic at this specific time to others more politically savvy but if we are to make progress trimming down the size and scope of government agencies need to start disappearing. Why is now not as good a time as any to get rid of the ATF? The ATF is heavily involved in a major scandal, the Heller and McDonald decisions imply that many of their duties are constitutionally suspect if not right illegal. Because they are so weak this might be the time to get rid of them simply because it is politically possible.

If now is the time then to “avoid overloading the FBI” with either new tasks and/or the training of large numbers of new personal Congress should simultaneously cut back on a lot of the obsolete laws. Here is my list of gun laws that could be put on the chopping block along with the ATF:

  • The ban on interstate gun sales. We have NICS, run by the FBI already, which covers the concerns put forth for the original proponents of the law.
  • The registration and tax on suppressors. Make a NICS check on them a requirement with 4473 like paperwork shouldn’t be that much of a political sell because all the functionality of the existing system would still exist except for the tax revenue which almost for certain doesn’t pay for itself as well as being constitutionally suspect.
  • The laws against on short barreled rifles and shotguns. This only made sense when there were plans to ban handguns (originally part of NFA 34). That didn’t happen and isn’t going to happen (see Heller).
  • Postal restrictions against mailing of firearms. We can ship them via UPS, FedEx, etc. Why not USPS?
  • The classification of some 12-gauge shotguns as “destructive devices”.
  • The “sporting purpose” tests for firearms. The Heller decision makes it very clear that the Second Amendment isn’t about duck hunting. This particularly affects imports. Unless it as part of some trade war it makes no sense that guns and ammo which are perfectly legal to manufacture and own inside the U.S. cannot be imported. Either ban them as part of a coherent (as if trade wars can make sense but that is another topic so please don’t get into it at this time) trade policy or get rid of the bans.
  • The ban of sales of firearms to citizens who have no U.S. residence. Just because someone has been living and working in another country for a few months or even years does not mean they should be prohibited from exercising their specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms when they return for a visit.

I’m sure there are lots of other nonsensical laws and regulations that could be cut at the same time which our opponents would be hard pressed to defend. And with all the grief the ATF has had because of their “mistakes” perhaps the agencies that take on the remaining functions will “play nice” compared to the ATF.

If we could ban the ATF and “ease the burden” on the FBI at the same time would it be worth taking the risks associated with having the remaining ATF functions divided up among other agencies? I’m thinking it might be.