Category Archives: Gun Rights

Quote of the day–Sebastian

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They used to say that the difference between conservatives and liberals were that conservatives thought liberals were stupid, and liberals thought conservatives were evil. Now it would seem they think conservatives are terrorists.

Sebastian
August 24, 2009
The Media’s Shallow Understanding
[I suspect it isn’t really “shallow understanding”. It’s about attempting to demonize in any way possible those who oppose their agenda. People believe what they want to believe and anything that supports their belief system will be latched onto with far less fact checking than if it contradicted their belief system. I’ve been guilty of this too. But there have also been times when I thought (borrowing a literary tool from Say Uncle), “Self, this is too good to be true. You better check this out.” And nearly every time it was too good to be true.

In the case of the present day “militia movement” I can’t help but remember in the mid-90s I knew the names of several different militias both in the Pacific Northwest and other parts of the country. I read about them, by name, in the paper and heard about them in the social circles I communicated with. I saw their displays at gun shows. I occasionally even talked to member of militias. This time? The only “militia movement” I have heard about all traces back to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

I think it’s too good to be true for the left and they latched onto it without checking into it. Someone should check it out and, if my hunch is correct, slap them down. With appropriate timing and proper location it could be a good political tool.–Joe]

Quote of the day–Chuck Bloom

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As a strong supporter of the country’s National Parks System, I just don’t see a logical reason why anyone would want to carry a concealed weapon into such naturally beautiful places like Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Redwoods, Crater Lake, Grand Teton or any of the national parks.

Is someone seriously afraid of being accosted or robbed by Old Faithful or El Capitan? Are there criminals hiding out in the Petrified Forest?

These places should be off limits to such practices because of the presence of children. Just because you have the right to pack heat on a vacation doesn’t mean you should.

Chuck Bloom
Plano, Texas
… but what about the children?
August 21, 2009
[A extraordinary clear example of scrambled thinking on the gun issue. Perhaps the reason he doesn’t see a logical reason for carrying a gun in the national parks is because he is severely logic impaired.

What does being “a strong supporter of the country’s National Parks System” or their natural beauty have to do with concluding there is no “logical reason” to carry a concealed weapon?

Even his straw-men of “being accosted or robbed by Old Faithful or El Capitan” is extraordinarily weak.

Criminal do their thing where they have the opportunity, means, and high probability of accomplishing their goal. If their thing involves robbing or hurting people the remote location and disarmed status of their victims in the remote parks can be good hunting grounds. One does not have life insurance for only when their risk is high, such as when traveling by car. They have life insurance for all occasions. And so it is with carrying defensive tools. If you knew you were going to be attacked you wouldn’t go there. But you don’t know so you carry defensive tools wherever and whenever you can. And not all of the threats are human:


Sign in Glacier National Park


Bear in Glacier National Park.

And finally, “because of the presence of children”? Come on, can any anti-gun person offer a plausible defense for that statement? Do children not need to be defended against violent attacks? Is it better to let them be injured or killed than for them to see a bear get shot? Is it better for them to see their mother raped and/or killed than to see the attacker stopped in his tracks by a gun in the hands of his or her parents?

I actually did use my gun while hiking through a state park with my kids several years ago. There was a rattlesnake near the edge of the trail. It was a threat both to us and other hikers that perhaps would not have seen and avoided it. From a safe distance I put a 9mm FMJ bullet through it’s head. The kids did not seem to have suffered any short or long term adverse effects from the use of the gun in their presence. They even seemed relieved after the threat was neutralized.–Joe]

Projection or imagined telepathy?

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As pointed out by others MSNBC cropped the video of the black guy with a rifle at the Obama protest down enough to not show his skin color. Then they talked about gun owners being white racists against Obama.

I have to wonder what the basis for that belief was and why they would put effort into falsifying the evidence to fit their, obviously, false beliefs. Do they think they have some sort of telepathy such they can read the minds of others? Or is it as Say Uncle pointed out:

So, you were assigning stereotypes to a broad group of people? Supposedly trying to address bigotry in this country while being bigoted yourself seems to lessen your point. It’s OK, they’re only gun owners.

Although there are a people who believe they have telepathic powers I believe projection is far more common and all the evidence appears to fit that diagnosis.

Projection is very common in the anti-gun camp and it’s one of the first thing you should look for when you encounter an anti-gun person. Do they say they are afraid of what someone might do if they carried a gun while at a school/church/restaurant/wherever? The evidence is overwhelming that people with guns in those places do nearly exactly the same things that other people without guns do in those places. It’s actually their fear of what they might do if they had a gun in those places. Never mind that a police officer with a gun in the same location is just fine for nearly all of these people–disregarding the fact that police officers accidently shoot innocent people at a much higher rate than private citizens do.

So in this case the media representatives feel, without a factual basis, badly toward gun owners. They then search for something that could justify their bad feelings. Racism is an easy “hook to hang their hat on” since there once was a great deal of racism against people of color in this country and President Obama has the necessary pigmentation to be a target of white racists. But it’s the feelings of the media that drove the conclusion that someone else must be racists rather than the evidence of racism that drove their feelings.

This can be generalized to freedom in general. People are afraid of making their own decisions and they attempt restrict others decisions via some “wiser” authority with the justification being that someone else might make a bad decision–regardless of the fact that government “one size fits all” decisions for nearly everything cost more and are less effective than private solutions. Hence because of their feelings of fear of their own decision making ability drove the demands that others not make decisions for themselves rather than actual fear of others making their own decisions.

I suppose another psychological model that could be applied is one of stress reduction. It’s more stressful to believe that you are bigoted than to falsify the evidence to indicate someone else is bigoted.

In the case of the generalized freedom issue the stress reduction model works there too. It’s impossible to predict the future in any detail so having someone else to blame for making the wrong decision relieves the stress of making the, possibly wrong, decision yourself–even if the situation of nearly everyone is worse than if they made their own decisions. It appears to be more stressful for many people to see a disparity of outcomes than for everyone to have the same bad outcome. As a friend, Susan K., told me many years ago there are people who would rather everyone earns $1.00/hour than for the minimum wage in a truly free market (no government imposed minimum wage) to be $100/hour if there were other people earning $10,000/hour. I found this hard to believe but I’m now convinced it is true as long as there is some method by which the person desiring this sort of outcome can put some sort of whitewash, such as using phrases such as “social justice”, over the ugly truth.

As a side note I’ve heard it said that Bill Gates earned, on the average, about $100/second or $360K/hour while at Microsoft. This may have contributed to the great pressure put on Microsoft by the U.S. Justice Department during the 1990s and the European Union legal action that continues to this day.

Human psychology is a strange thing. What we call rational thought and socialization is only a very thin veneer over something far, far different which it pokes its ugly head through the veneer far more frequently than we realize.

Quote of the day–Larry Pratt

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There are those who don’t like Americans owning guns at all, let alone carrying them about. They can be counted on to run about squawking like Chicken Little that the sky is falling – a calamity brought about by the presence of an armed citizen in public. We are warned that: “Somebody might grab the gun and do something bad! The armed citizen will intimidate others! Tempers will flare and blood will run in the streets!”

These are the same alarms that are sounded when any measure designed to facilitate citizens keeping and bearing arms is advanced. And the alarms are always false. One would think that consistently being wrong would be embarrassing, but one would be wrong about those who assume that common citizens are untrustworthy and dangerous.

Larry Pratt
August 20, 2009
He Had a Gun and Nothing Happened
[Embarrassing? They have no shame, how could they be embarrassed? Their minds are locked into the reality of an alternate universe, sort of a Mirror, Mirror like place. And even though their concepts and assumptions are demonstrably false here they try to take over our universe. If we could just get Spock to transport them swap them back with their counterparts in the other universe things would be so much better.–Joe]

That was kinda cool but…

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Late last night I got a link from Instapundit to my Did we just win? post. Early this morning I got a link to the same post from Say Uncle. A little bit later the same post was linked by Michael Bane.

Reynolds and Uncle were characteristically brief but Bane said something that was almost embarrassing to me:

Joe Huffman of The View From North Central Idaho and the majordomo of the Boomershoots has emerged as an important voice in the gun blogosphere, and I think today’s column shows why…

I didn’t think the post was all that strong. I was pushing the envelope with it. I really was overstating things some. I knew it, but figured I could put up a plausible defense of it if I really had to.

But regardless of how shaky the ground I was on something on the order of 7000 (adding a “fudge factor” for the RSS readers which don’t show up on Sitemeter) people read it in a single day. The day isn’t quite over yet and here are the numbers compared to a typical day of about 600 visits:

I’ve spoke about gun rights before crowds of 500 to 700 before. That was a little intimidating but I was very well prepared and confidant of my material. But a crowd of 7000?

It kinda cool that 7000 people in one day read at least a sentence or two of something I wrote. But it’s also kinda…well different. I grew up on a farm and went to two room grade school nearby that had eight grades for a total of about 30 kids. I didn’t have a lot of social contact until I went to a high school where I was in the biggest class ever (the record still holds) which was 125 graduating seniors. The entire town of Orofino, at it’s peak, was only about 3500 people. Yet, twice that many people in a single day read what I wrote and a well known (in some circles) T.V. personality says I’m “an important voice in the gun blogosphere”. Wow. As Sebastian said while I was writing this, I’m just another guy with an opinion.

I think maybe I should be more careful of what I write.

Quote of the day–Rick Perlstein

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Carrying a gun to a political meeting is an obscenity. Anyone who does it, even if they are within their legal rights, should be ashamed. Our founders fought a revolution (and, yes, took up arms) to build a society where political disputes are not settled through force or intimidation–and that’s the only purpose of bringing a weapon to a political discussion: to intimidate.

It is utterly unacceptable, and every politician should have the guts to say so.

Rick Perlstein
August 18, 2009
Outlook: In America, Crazy Is a Pre-existing Condition
‘ … the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy …’
[Just so you know what they think of you.

I wonder what he thinks of the White House response–that open carry at political events is no big deal. Does he think President Obama has no guts?

I think he may have just had the wind sucked out of his sails.–Joe]

Did we just win?

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We’ve known for several years (see posts here, here, here, and here) that we were winning on the gun control battlefield. The expiration of the “assault weapon” ban and the Heller decision were just the two best known battles. There were thousands, perhaps millions if you count the wins of the hearts and minds of neighbors, friends, relatives, and co-workers.

I recognize open carry is on the path to victory but I figured it would be in the form of open carry at picnics, highway litter cleanup, and maybe as an organization at parades. People need to be desensitized to gun ownership. And concealed carry just doesn’t help that much. When and how we do that desensitization can matter a great deal.

I’ve been open carrying in a few circumstances for a couple months now (here and here). There has been no obvious notice taken and certainly no adverse effects have occurred. Yet, had anyone asked my advice about open carry at a political protest about the nationalization of health care I would have told them I didn’t see any good could come out of it. Obviously these people didn’t ask for my advice or take similar advice from someone else.

In my opinion these people took a huge risk. They were throwing the dice in a game that affected tens of millions of people in this country. I’m not exactly risk adverse, after all I play with explosives for the fun of it and even have my children help make the explosives. But I wouldn’t have taken the risk they did.

And what happened? It’s as if we had been slowly advancing against the enemy. We were a little surprised to win the battle on carry in National Parks and we almost won a battle for nationwide reciprocity we couldn’t have imagined even coming up for a vote had we thought about it after the election last November. But the enemy was still putting up resistance and we thought they were still formidable opponents. Then they collapsed. The White House (or Red Shed as a commenter recently called it) said it was no big deal to open carry. Public opinion is affected by statements from the White House. Having the most anti-gun administration in U.S. history say it’s no big deal to open carry is huge.

We knew recent poll results showed us winning. But I thought that would take time to translate into our enemies fleeing before us. But it appears now that the brave actions of a few open carry advocates broke through the empty shell of the anti-gun organizations and there are going to be a lot of Sad Pandas tonight and people looking at their bottles of cheap rum.

Now, more than ever, we have a chance to push these bigots into political extinction. When they are on the run they have their backs to us and cannot organize and put up effective resistance. We need to acquire the proper state of mind and pound them as hard as we can as fast as we can. There are still pockets of resistance in New Jersey, Chicago, California, etc. but we may have just won the war.

Update: This post just got linked to by Glenn Reynolds. I would like to suggest my new visitors also look at some of my other posts:

Thanks visiting.

Quote of the day–Brannon P. Denning and Glenn H. Reynolds

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The Fulton case demonstrates an important consequence of Heller’s individual right holding: the normalization of firearms possession. In the past sometimes treated as a deviant act, something not to be permitted without the indulgence of the sovereign, firearms possession is now something contemplated by the Constitution–something not deviant, but normal, with the burden shifting from those who would possess firearms to those who would deny their possession. This burden-shift may turn out to be the most consequential result of Heller, at least in the day-to-day work of state and federal courts.

Brannon P. Denning
Glenn H. Reynolds
August 1, 2009
Heller, High Water(mark)? Lower Courts and the New Right to Keep and Bear Arms
[I wouldn’t normally quote the same person (or people) two or more days in a row. But this is a special day and this quote is very applicable because of this and other indicators that open carry of firearms is being accepted. If open carry of firearms is accepted then that means firearms ownership in general is more acceptable.

See also my post from last night and this followup post.–Joe]

I’m in a daze

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I read the headline and article before seeing Dave Hardy’s blog post and I’ve been wandering around my underground bunker doing a few household chores and I tried to get my mind around what this means.

I’m not sure I would necessarily agree with Dave, but I can’t say that I disagree when he says, “Time for Brady Campaign employees to circulate resumes” in response to the Washington Post running a headline that says, “White House Backs Right to Arms Outside Obama Events“.

Maybe after I sleep on it overnight I’ll have something of my own to say.

Interesting goal

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This surprised me:

He added that the Orange County couple’s ultimate goal is an initiative to divide California into two states – one of which would recognize the fundamental right of gays and lesbians to marry.

I’ve heard, many times, that most of California, geographically, is pro-gun. If they could just get rid of the big population centers the place would be politically tolerable. It seems both sides (I acknowledge not all gays are anti-gun, but there is a strong correlation) want a divorce.

California having such a huge population has a large influence on great number of things nationwide. Presidential elections might be the most obvious but there are thousands of other things as well. The contents of school books, safety standards, air pollution standards, and even gun laws that first show up in California have a nasty habit of spreading to other states. If there were two states where their used to be only one that influence would diminish.

I wonder what we can do to encourage such a separation.

Gun ‘buy backs’ and destruction

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I received an email from Rob B. that articulated some half-congealed thoughts of my own:

I consider it a “sin” to destroy operable items. This goes for the weapons destroyed and the Cash for Klunkers victims.

Certainly there is the occasional firearm that needs to be removed from circulation due to poor and irreparable condition or unsafe design or modifications. Certainly there are vehicles which are much the same.

This isn’t about that.

This is about materials made by the labor of man, which cost some fraction of man’s treasure to obtain being destroyed because they are unpopular.

This is roughly equivalent to burning books.

Destroying something made by the labor of an individual (or group of them) destroys some small portion of life, for that person (or group) spent their time and energy (life) making it.

Destroying anything useful diminishes the overall value pool.

This is not good, particularly when done for light, transitory or fallacious reasons.

Simply put, this is wrong.

Rob

Sebastian has a different opinion:

My only moral problem with the programs is that it entices people to turn in items that have significant historical value, which are then destroyed and lost for history. If anti-gun groups and big city politicians want to raise the market floor on junk guns, I have no real problem. It’s their money, and I’d rather than dump it into worthless, feel good programs like this than actually use it to challenge gun rights.

Sebastian is a little ambiguous about who’s money is involved that he is okay with. If it’s anti-gun groups, then I don’t have much problem with it–other than that articulated by Rob. But if it’s tax payer money then I do have a problem with it. This would be a lot like tax money, paid by blacks, being used for schools that teach blacks are inferior and should not be allowed to hold public office or vote. Or tax money used to buy and destroy private libraries and churches. It is the government taking money from you to enforce a restriction on your specific enumerated rights.

We have long known the anti-gun people won’t win any prizes for their logic skills and destroying guns is just one more example. If there were a limited supply such as moon rocks or members of an endangered species then firearm destruction would have some significance from a reduction of supply standpoint. But guns aren’t like that. The best they can hope for is to raise the price on used guns, but $50 or $100 as a market floor just doesn’t do anything significant other than increase the likelihood that someone will get into the business of stealing guns (a “no questions asked” market for stolen goods reduces the total risk).

So one has to conclude the gun-buy backs are advocated by people that have one or more of the following characteristics:

  • Willing to use tax money to demonize and restrict the exercise of a specific enumerated right
  • Irrational
  • Desirous of increased theft of firearms

Did I miss any?

Quote of the day–Brannon P. Denning and Glenn H. Reynolds

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Political scientists and law professors alike have written extensively on signaling and agenda-setting by the Supreme Court. Despite being dicta—the issues mentioned were not before the Court and were not necessary to resolve those that were before it—the Heller safe harbor seems to us to have been a clear signal, clearer perhaps than any sent in Lopez, that lower courts should not declare open season on any and all federal gun laws. It seems to us that the lower courts have certainly heeded this signal.

Brannon P. Denning
Glenn H. Reynolds
August 1, 2009
Heller, High Water(mark)? Lower Courts and the New Right to Keep and Bear Arms pages 15-16.
[H/T to Say Uncle.

That’s the bad news, which I already knew even from my limited legal viewpoint. There is good news in part III of the paper. Much of it was new to me.–Joe]

New shooter report

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A friend of Barb’s and mine for over twenty years contacted me recently and asked to take me up on my offer to teach her to shoot. We went to Wades this afternoon. I had her shooting my Ruger Mark II. It has a six inch bull barrel and her arms got tired quickly. I went back out to the front desk and utilized my “free rental” (comes with being a member) for a Browning Buck Mark. It was much lighter and she did better.

At about 10 feet nearly all of her shots were within the black. After about 20 rounds she told me, “Maybe I should buy a gun.” I said we could talk about it after we got outside. I did a little bit of shooting with the Buck Mark and my Gun Blog 45 then we left.

In the parking lot I asked her about why she wanted a gun. The answer was the economy is probably going to get worse and Obama may make it difficult to get a gun. She wanted a gun to be able to protect herself and her youngest daughter who lives with her. She asked how much a gun costs and if a .22 would be okay for her needs. I suggested she should practice some more and try to get the strength to be able to shoot something a little bigger. But, the most important selection criteria was that she feel comfortable shooting it. If that means a .22 then that would be best for her.

I emailed her a link to this class which would let her shoot a number of guns as well as cover other important issues of gun ownership such as self-defense legal issues. She responded with:

I will sign up the class with my brother.

…

Thank you so much for teaching me. You are a great teacher. …you can post the comment to the blog too. 🙂

We are winning the gun rights issue one new shooter at a time.

Quote of the day–Bruce Schneier

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Surveillance infrastructure can be exported, which also aids totalitarianism around the world. Western companies like Siemens, Nokia, and Secure Computing built Iran’s surveillance infrastructure. U.S. companies helped build China’s electronic police state. Twitter’s anonymity saved the lives of Iranian dissidents — anonymity that many governments want to eliminate.

Every year brings more Internet censorship and control — not just in countries like China and Iran, but in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and other free countries.

The control movement is egged on by both law enforcement, trying to catch terrorists, child pornographers and other criminals, and by media companies, trying to stop file sharers.

It’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. No matter what the eavesdroppers and censors say, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.

Bruce Schneier
August 3, 2009
Building in Surveillance
[Schneier doesn’t mention this but the concept of “bad civic hygiene” has wider application than just surveillance technology. It also applies to the TSA, gun control, and even government provided health care (do you want health care decisions for gays made by people like Fred Phelps–or vice versa?). It’s another way of expressing concern about failures of my Jews In The Attic Test.

Some people have a lot of concern about Microsoft contributing to this sort of thing. I have been, and am, involved in projects that have the potential to cause concern. I have been very pleased to see that not only the corporate policy is appropriate to protect innocents but also the attitude of the people I work with is on par with my standards in this regard.–Joe]

This could be fun

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Whenever I get a chance to ask anti-gun people questions in public I do my best to take advantage of it.

People in the Indianapolis area have their chance today:

INDIANAPOLIS – Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and a former Fort Wayne mayor, plans to speak in Indianapolis on Saturday.

Helmke is scheduled to speak on what he calls weak guns laws in Indiana and the nation at the Lecture Hall building on the campus of Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis beginning at 6 p.m. The event is being sponsored by a group called Hoosiers Concerned About Gun Violence.

Helmke says a recent Brady Center analysis of crime data shows that Indiana ranks fifth in the nation in the number of crime guns exported to other states. He says Indiana also ranks fourth in its per-capita rate of total crime gun sales.

If you go then dress appropriately, be polite, and leave your tin-foil hat at home.

We have a lot more work to do

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I like to imagine that once we reach some critical threshold in the courts the victories will be almost automatic and our opponents will scatter like rabbits at the sight of a large predator. It may be true that we reach that point but we aren’t there yet:

The latest example is a decision late Thursday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which said that a criminal defendant may not be allowed to present a Second Amendment defense to a federal jury in Utah. It came after the appeals court granted an extraordinary emergency appeal, called a writ of mandamus, from the Justice Department after the district judge agreed to allow those jury instructions.

The defendant, Rick Engstrum, has an earlier misdemeanor domestic violence conviction and has been charged with possessing a firearm in violation of a federal law that applies to anyone “who has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.” He has pleaded not guilty.

(The prosecution arose when Engstrum broke up with his girlfriend, who subsequently told police that he had a gun in his bedroom. Engstrum voluntarily showed police the gun, which he inherited from his father; there’s no evidence he has ever used the firearm, let alone threatened anyone with it.)

Engstrum, reasonably, wanted to argue to the jury that the Second Amendment renders that law invalid, at least when applied to people who show no risk of future violence. (Remember, this is a Utah jury, which raises the odds that jurors are familiar with the right to keep and bear arms, and may even have heard of the concept of jury nullification.)

The Justice Department rejected this idea out of hand. By a 2-1 margin, a Tenth Circuit panel agreed, concluded that the Second Amendment didn’t apply, and prohibited those jury instructions. “If the case proceeds to trial, the district court is directed not to instruct the jury on this Second Amendment defense, including not giving the proposed jury instruction,” they wrote.

The defense isn’t allowed to even bring up the Second Amendment.

We need incorporation and then we need to attack a whole barge load of infringements one tiny step at a time. The Heller decision was just the tiniest of steps in the right direction.

There is a lot of work ahead of us.

Quote of the day–Dave Workman

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The VPC and Freedom States crowd would have us all believe that every armed citizen is just like George Sodini, and that he is like all of us; a killer waiting to strike.

While they are loathe to admit it, there is really no difference between gun bigots and racial or religious bigots. One form of class hatred is no less divisive than another.

Dave Workman
August 7, 2009
New anti-gun strategy: Demonize CCW holders
[The bigot meme is getting more visible. Although I can’t take any credit for bringing Workman up to speed on it. Alan Gottlieb and he were the ones who first infected me.–Joe]

Everything you need to know about carrying guns in public

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If I were to tell you that everything you needed to know about guns could be learned from T.V. shows and the movies you would, and rightly so, tell me I was full of crap. If I went even further and said you could learn what you needed to know about carrying guns in public from watching an ad for a video game you would, and rightly so, consider calling the guys from the funny farm.

It’s very clear that the Joyce Foundation needs to put more effort into making sure their guy is taking his meds. Because he just said:

This is without a doubt the embodiment of the gun lobby’s dangerous and irresponsible myth: that an “armed society is a polite society.”

But this old XBOX advertisement that was banned several years ago shows the complete opposite. Depending on your worldview and experience, viewers will undoubtedly have many different responses to this video. But we think it makes a dramatic and cogent argument for keeping all guns — concealed or openly carried — out of our public spaces.

Can anyone demonstrate where even a hint of this type of thing has ever happened? We have millions of people legally carrying guns in public each day and this type of thing has never happened. Not even close–except in his hallucinations. And he thinks it makes a “cogent argument”?

Wow. Did he get his logic training from a comic book?

State nullification of laws

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Interesting post here about the Firearms Freedom Acts (such as in Montana and Tennessee) and concludes:

While many advocates concede that a federal court battle has a slim chance of success, they point to the successful nullification of the Real ID Act as a blueprint to resist various federal laws that they see as outside the scope of the Constitution.

Some say that each successful state-level resistance to federal programs will only embolden others to try the same – resulting in an eventual shift of power from the federal government to the States and the People themselves.

I’m not sure comparison can be made to the Real ID Act. The Real ID Act was impractical to implement (as well as being useless), had to be done by the states, and the states among other things said we aren’t doing it unless you give us a LOT more money. Defying Federal firearms laws requires a win in the courts or use of force against Federal law enforcement. Neither of which I see as very likely.

I agree with the goal, I’m just not convinced it will work unless there were a large number of states that went along with it. In which case a Constitutional Amendment would be feasible.

I suppose you could think of it as a form of communication to the Feds saying, “Back off” or as a symbolic middle finger. Which has it’s value. But mostly I just see it as having entertainment value.

Five round limit for shotguns?

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This guy apparently wanted free room and board at tax payer expense so yesterday he, indirectly, requested the local police transport him to his new accommodations:

According to information from the Birmingham Police Department, the Birmingham Police 911 Communications Center received a call about 7:00am CT Wednesday, August 12, 2009, from a man stating his intent to kill a Birmingham Police Officer.

The man called the officer by name and further stated that if he could not find that officer, he would kill every Birmingham Police Officer until he found that particular officer.
Detectives gathered information received by the communications center and later identified the caller as the suspect Marlon Simmons.

After obtaining a warrant for the subject, the Birmingham Police Crime Reduction Team (CRT) located the subject at his home at 7232 2nd Avenue North.

The subject was taken into custody without incident, but was found to have a rifle and handgun in his possession.

Nothing particularly blog-worthy there but what is interesting to me is the following:

While executing the search warrant investigators recovered an SKS type rifle, AR-15 rifle, 12 gauge semi-automatic shotgun, hobby cord (fuse), body armor, and assorted ammunition.

According to ATF Agents the shotgun was illegal due to its magazine capacity that is between 10 to 20 shotgun shells.

Huh? There is a Federal law on shotgun magazine capacity? Sure, if it is a “Street Sweeper” or some other specific shotgun with a scary name or looks I know the U.S. Attorney General declared them “destructive device” and got them banned. But the above article sounds a little more generic than that. So doing a little more research I came up with this, an ATF letter stating (emphasis added):

A shotgun with a telescoping stock or a magazine greater than 5 rounds is prohibited from importation into the United States under the provisions of section 925(d)(3) of Title 18, United states code (U.S.C.). Assembly of such a shotgun from imported parts is prohibited under 18, U.S.C. Section 922(r). The implementing regulations in Title 27, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 478, Section 478.39 (formerly Part 178, Section 178.39) prohibit assembly of such a shotgun that contains more than 10 of the imported parts listed in paragraph (c) of the regulation. Please see the enclosed brochure for further information. Assembly of such a shotgun using 10 or less of the listed import parts is not prohibited. The shotgun is also subject to whatever State laws and local ordinances may apply.

I’ve looked up all the Title 18 and 27, section and subsection mumbo-jumbo and was unable to find any references to a five, or any other number, round limit. Did I just miss it? Or did the AG make a declaration that anything over five rounds was “not being particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes”?

I’ve sent a couple emails out to lawyers to see if I can get this clarified.

Update: My lawyer friend Mike came back with the answer:

This has to do with the import ban on “assault weapons” first put in by (former) NRA member George H.W. Bush in 1989. Under the GCA, the Secretary (now the AG) can bar importation of firearms that are not “particularly suitable for sporting purposes”. The import ban made a list of “assault weapons” unimportable per se. The 10 parts rule is contained in the reg cited. I remember that it was popular for a while to buy an American made Fal receiver and assemble it with 9 foreign parts.

The original AWB in 1994 had the following definition:

Section 921. Definitions
      (a) As used in this chapter –
                    (30) The term “semiautomatic assault weapon” means –
       
                (D) a semiautomatic shotgun that has at least 2 of –
          (i) a folding or telescoping stock;
          (ii) a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the
        action of the weapon;
          (iii) a fixed magazine capacity in excess of 5 rounds; and
          (iv) an ability to accept a detachable magazine.

After the AWB ban expired in 2004 the ATF kept the definition in their policies to determine what is “particularly suitable for sporting purposes”:

Nonsporting Firearms – such as handguns which do not meet the sporting purpose criteria on ATF Form 4590, any rifle or shotgun with a folding stock or folding bayonet, and shotguns having a fixed magazine with a capacity of more than 5 cartridges and certain military style semiautomatic rifles and shotguns.

I think we have another opportunity for our congress critters to do some reform on our gun laws in the form of an amendment to some “must pass” legislation. In light of the Heller decision the “sporting purposes” definition needs to go. The Second Amendment isn’t about “sporting purposes”.