This is huge

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H/T to Sebastian and a tweet from Firearms Policy.

This court victory is not on the scale of Heller or McDonald but it is still huge.

Firearm Policy describes it in a rather obscure manner:

The Court issued its order granting Plaintiffs’ Motion for Summary Judgment. It is therefore ORDERED, ADJUDGED, and DECREED that Plaintiffs’ Motion for Summary Judgment is GRANTED. The Court DECLARES that 18 U.S.C. § 922(a)(3), 18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(3), and 27 C.F.R. § 478.99(a) are UNCONSTITUTIONAL, and Defendants are ENJOINED from enforcing these provisions.

SO ORDERED on this 11th day of February, 2015.

For reference purposes 18 U.S.C 922 is here* and 27 C.F.R. § 478.99  is here**.

But as Sebastian elaborates:

This case challenged the ban on interstate transfers of handguns through an FFL.

…

The court applied strict scrutiny, and despite the government’s attempts to argue they needed the restriction in order to prevent criminals from circumventing state guns laws, the judge wasn’t buying it. What’s also very interesting is that he argues that the Brady Act changed the game for the GCA ’68 restrictions, with the idea that in an era of instant background checks, some GCA requirements cannot stand up to strict scrutiny.

Furthermore, the court said the interstate sale of handguns would not pass intermediate scrutiny either.

GCA ‘68 is under attack and just lost on a major issue. This has huge implications to Washington State residents and other suffering from repressive regulation in their home state. If you can go to a more free state and buy a handgun then you can bypass home state registration by keeping the gun out of state. You also avoid the expensive and difficult to obtain permission to purchase a gun as you thumb your nose at the local tyrants. All those guns banned by California, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York will now become extremely difficult to enforce.

Assuming this is upheld upon appeal and applied nationwide it will be interesting to see what sort of response the state legislators come up with. Will they attempt to make it illegal for you to purchase a gun in another state? In my case I can easily, and correctly, claim I keep any gun purchased in Idaho in Idaho and don’t “import” it back to Washington state. Then what? How is this different from someone visiting Washington or Colorado and purchasing some Marijuana?

Other GCA ‘68 restrictions that I suspect will soon be subject to attack is the restriction upon imports and the “sporting purpose” restrictions.

Can the government legally prevent you from importing a book when similar books, perhaps differing only in the edition or type of cover, are available for sale in the U.S.? Of course not. It makes no sense. The same with importing of firearms. I could see there being legal grounds for the government to impose taxes on such imports but they couldn’t be exorbitant.

The “sport purpose” test has to be almost in imminent jeopardy of falling. What constitutionally protected right can be dependent upon it having a “sporting purpose”. Constitutionally protected rights are not for sport.

* 18 U.S.C. § 922(a)(3):

It shall be unlawful … for any person, other than a licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, licensed dealer, or licensed collector to transport into or receive in the State where he resides (or if the person is a corporation or other business entity, the State where it maintains a place of business) any firearm purchased or otherwise obtained by such person outside that State, except that this paragraph (A) shall not preclude any person who lawfully acquires a firearm by bequest or intestate succession in a State other than his State of residence from transporting the firearm into or receiving it in that State, if it is lawful for such person to purchase or possess such firearm in that State, (B) shall not apply to the transportation or receipt of a firearm obtained in conformity with subsection (b)(3) of this section, and (C) shall not apply to the transportation of any firearm acquired in any State prior to the effective date of this chapter;

18 U.S.C. § 922(b)(3):

It shall be unlawful for any licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, licensed dealer, or licensed collector to sell or deliver – … any firearm to any person who the licensee knows or has reasonable cause to believe does not reside in (or if the person is a corporation or other business entity, does not maintain a place of business in) the State in which the licensee’s place of business is located, except that this paragraph (A) shall not apply to the sale or delivery of any rifle or shotgun to a resident of a State other than a State in which the licensee’s place of business is located if the transferee meets in person with the transferor to accomplish the transfer, and the sale, delivery, and receipt fully comply with the legal conditions of sale in both such States (and any licensed manufacturer, importer or dealer shall be presumed, for purposes of this subparagraph, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, to have had actual knowledge of the State laws and published ordinances of both States), and (B) shall not apply to the loan or rental of a firearm to any person for temporary use for lawful sporting purposes;

**27 C.F.R. § 478.99:

§ 478.99 Certain prohibited sales or deliveries.

(a) Interstate sales or deliveries. A licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, licensed dealer, or licensed collector shall not sell or deliver any firearm to any person not licensed under this part and who the licensee knows or has reasonable cause to believe does not reside in (or if a corporation or other business entity, does not maintain a place of business in) the State in which the licensee’s place of business or activity is located: Provided, That the foregoing provisions of this paragraph (1) shall not apply to the sale or delivery of a rifle or shotgun (curio or relic, in the case of a licensed collector) to a resident of a State other than the State in which the licensee’s place of business or collection premises is located if the requirements of § 478.96(c) are fully met, and (2) shall not apply to the loan or rental of a firearm to any person for temporary use for lawful sporting purposes (see § 478.97).

Quote of the day—Scott Montgomery @BvuePD

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I’m not going to give my life for someone else. Someone else is going to have to take my life.

Scott Montgomery @BvuePD
Bellevue Washington Police Officer
February 10, 2015
Said during the presentation of Active Shooter Preparation at Newport High School in Bellevue Washington
[I went to this presentation half, maybe even three quarters, expecting the presentation to urge people to lockdown the building and hide under desks. This tactic was explicitly rejected.

I will have a full write up later today but the short version is that I was very pleased with what the police are now advising people to do in an active shooter situation.

They have explicitly rejected the concept of people acting like “sheep” and wait for the paid “sheepdog” to arrive and save them. Yes, he used “sheep”, “wolves”, and “sheepdogs” as labels. They are advising people think for themselves and mentally prepare to do what is best for themselves and other innocent life.

The above quote was given in the context of his mindset and that of his fellow officers when engaging an active shooter. And that should a private citizen have to fight they should have the same mindset.—Joe]

You don’t get to be your own museum

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The other day I was unpacking some boxes with targets in them. Some people might say I have a problem with collecting targets but I know that I can quit any time I want.

I sorted them and stored most of them in a cabinet. A bunch of random stuff went in a pile to for my next trip to the range. but there was one from JPFO I just couldn’t take to the range. And as near as I can tell they don’t sell it anymore. But Barb correctly says, “You don’t get to be your own museum.” And since I don’t really have a good place to store it anyway I scanned it:

AllInFavorOfGunControlJPFO

It is copyright 1991.

Quote of the day—CombatMissionary

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There are predatory people around, and if we don’t kill them, they will kill, rape, rob and do anything else to us that they feel like. I know. I’ve dealt with them. There IS no education or reform package that works on them short of death. The recidivism rate for sociopaths after death is given is 0%.

CombatMissionary
June 19, 2014
Comment to The Naive Idiocy of Teaching Rapists Not To Rape
[While a little bit simplistic there is a lot of truth in this.

The counter arguments include that there are sociopaths who are socially functional and don’t break the law any more than the population at large. And putting predators in prison reduces their predatory scope even doesn’t “reform” them.

That said when said predators are in the act of a violent crime using lethal force to defend against them, even if it results in the death of the predator, is a praiseworthy act. And a good argument can be made such an outcome is preferable to the predator going through the legal system.—Joe]

One of these is not like the others

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I was doing some reloading and came across something I have never seen before. One of these is not like the others:

IMG_2061

These are Winchester Small Pistol primers (WSP). Lot number YAL201G.WP_20150209_001

I found this primer without an anvil in the first 1000 of a case of 5000. I’ll be watching for this sort of anomaly in the future. But it’s not something I have seen before in reloading over 60,000 rounds so the odds of it being of critical importance is a little low. Not that I would necessarily have caught it before, but I’m going to do my best to make sure I catch flaws like this from now on. I just never imagined I should inspect the primers before using them.

These are primers I purchased five to ten years ago so I doubt there are many, if any, from this lot still “in the wild”.

Quote of the day—Bacon @Baconmints

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The next gun owner I meet who isn’t a complete douchebag, will be the first. #gunsense #tinycockclub #fuckthenra

Bacon @Baconmints
Tweeted on December 23, 2014
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

Via a Tweet from BFD‏ @BigFatDave.—Joe]

You never know

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Sometimes you know a blog post or tweet will get some attention. I expected the days of effort I put into the Smart Gun stuff would get some attention and it did. Other times something I put a few seconds into gets attention which I didn’t expect it all.

Today I went to a Steel Challenge match at Renton Fish and Game Club. I tweeted about how wet it was after the days of rain we have had around here. No one seemed to care and I didn’t expect anyone would.

Expected a similar non-reaction when I tweeted:

Interesting. There were three people that made it a favorite and two retweeted it. The combined followers of the people that retweeted is over 40,000 people.

You just never know how must attention something you say or do is going to get.

Quote of the day—Samuel Thomas Nichols

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…[O]ne thing for sure is that this country needs to disarm along with the rest of the world. And, I do not mean just the citizenry, but the police and the military as well. Impossible, you say? No, but it would be difficult and will never happen unless people are willing to give up their greed, their lust for more than they need, their envy, their covetousness, and their gluttony.

In my view of reality there is no moral justification for the possession of firearms and I for one am sick of meaningless diatribes as: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” It is a meaningless phrase because the truth has always been: “People with guns kill people.”

Samuel Thomas Nichols
January 26, 2015
Blowing in the Wind
[Via email from Bob S.

Wow! Even the military! And how is the military supposed to function without guns? Just explosives, biological, and chemical weapons?

While his view of reality is almost for certain distorted by his nephew being shot multiple times by the police you still should never let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]

Quote of the day—A. Barton Hinkle (@ABartonHinkle)

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Rights, including the right to own firearms, do not need to explain themselves, and the bearers of rights do not need to justify the exercise of them. That is the very definition of a right. The burden of proof more properly rests on those who want to take rights away.

A. Barton Hinkle (@ABartonHinkle)
December 28, 2014
Opinion/Commentary: Gun-control advocates often lack firepower of facts
[Via email from Richard Feldman.

I have nothing more to add.—Joe]

Rounds in the last month

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Exactly one month ago, on January 6th, I reported on the number of rounds I have reloaded. Here is an update on the number total number of rounds:

223.LOG: 2027 rounds.
22LR.log: 0 rounds.
3006.LOG: 467 rounds.
300WIN.LOG: 1351 rounds.
40SW.LOG: 36840 rounds.
45.log: 0 rounds.
9MM.LOG: 18643 rounds.
Total: 59328 rounds.

The change is all in .40 S&W. Last month it was 34,941 compared to the 36,840 for a delta of 1,899 (I lost one primer). This compares to an average of about 250/month in the previous 18 years.

I’ll soon be running out of .40 S&W bullets and will then switch over to 9mm until I run out of powder. Then I probably will move on to .300 Win Mag while I search and wait for pistol powder.

GunBot Reloading Powder is my friend.

Quote of the day—Sue Cozza @suecozza

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@homebuilderpa cant wait till you shoot your wife, or kids, or neighbors…@ZeitgeistGhost @DaliDager @JoeHuffman @NRA

Sue Cozza @suecozza
Tweeted on February 5, 2015
[Many anti-gun people want you and your family injured or dead. Don’t ever forget that.—Joe]

Interstate Transportation of Firearms and Ammunition Bill

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HR 131, recently introduced by U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.)

“Current federal law guarantees the right of law-abiding persons to transport firearms between two locations where they have a legal right to possessand carry them, regardless of state or local laws that would otherwise apply. The firearm must be cased or otherwise not readily accessible. Unfortunately, anti-gun local officials are using overly restrictive state licensing laws to harass and prosecute travelers who have made every effort to comply with the law, resulting in seized guns that are sometimes never returned, delayed travel, legal fees, and sometimes even unnecessary guilty pleas.

H.R. 131 would ensure the law has the effect Congress intended when it passed more than 25 years ago. Specifically, the legislation would make clear that transportation of both firearms and ammunition is federally protected, as well as expand the protections afforded to travelers to include “staying in temporary lodging overnight, stopping for food, fuel, vehicle maintenance, an emergency, medical treatment, and any other activity incidental” to the trip. Additionally, the bill would place the burden of proof clearly on the state to show that the traveler failed to comply with the law.”

Emphasis mine. So some state clowns have been flouting federal law in going after people who travel innocently through their states with gun.
Continue reading →

Another report on smart guns

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Guns.com has a video report on smart guns (via email from the author).  The bottom line:

Politics aside, there seem to be two major hurdles facing smart guns – funding for development and the potential prohibitive cost of integrating the safety technology. Armatix’s iP1, for example, is a .22-caliber pistol that retails at $1800, more than four times the cost of a regular small caliber pistol.

I think there are a lot more than two “major hurdles”. Examples include reliability, target market, and market acceptance.

National Institute of Justice smart gun report

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In my continuing journey into become an expert on “smart guns” I offer you this report from the National Institute of Justice (original document here). I’ve read the first 25 pages of the nearly 100 page document (with 10 pages of footnotes).

The title is “A Review of Gun Safety Technologies”. I haven’t found anything really new to me in it yet. And there is certainly no technology that I would be comfortable having a government mandate even if I didn’t have some strong free market principles to overcome.

Machine generated twitter accounts

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This image came from this tweet via a tweet from Linoge:

B7O-0oeIUAA9pbR

It’s a good example of Markley’s Law but what I found far more interesting was that the Twitter account it came from appears to be fake. I’m pretty sure this account is machine generated and the three tweets from that account are copied at random from the Twitter universe.

See also the followers of this account. I suspect they are all machine generated as well.

If I had the time and the interest I see what Twitter accounts they follow which are in common. I suspect it is a means of generating fake followers for some real account.

Quote of the day—Upton Sinclair

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It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair
1935
I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
[This observation applies to a great number of career paths but probably more so than any to those paid by organizations such as The Brady Campaign, The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Every Town For Gun Safety, and The Violence Policy Center.—Joe]

Interesting

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The entire Seattle Smart Gun Symposium video is on YouTube. But they have the video “unlisted”. It is embedded on the Washington Technology web page however.

Also, I had one person on a Smart Gun Symposium panel request I remove their name from my blog. It was very polite and they indicated they wished that we remain in contact in regards to technical issues with the technology so I complied with their request.

I find this all very interesting.

My previous posts on the Symposium are:

Responsible Body Armor Possession Act

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HR 378

The title is of course misleading, as is all the speech of authoritarianism. Is it to protect the possession of responsible body armor? But an inanimate object can be neither responsible nor irresponsible. Is it to protect responsible bodies with armor? If so, why does it limit said armor? Is it to protect the responsible possession of body armor? How then would body armor be possessed in an irresponsible manner? Are there hoards of people possessing their body armor in some obnoxious fashion, say, wearing orange body armor with red clothing? One is given to wonder.

With all the Progressives pretending to be concerned, to the point of hyperventilating, about all the carnage carried out with guns, you’d think the one thing they’d want to see, besides a monopoly on gun possession for criminals, is more people wearing more effective body armor. Oh wait…

Authoritarians are of course insane, so in that sense there is nothing to see here.

One has to wonder what the authoritarian Republicans will do with this. My gut tells me they’ll be very much in favor of it, but will at the same time feel uncomfortable about letting their support be known. How that will manifest itself in their political actions I cannot guess. This sort of thing is an on-going problem for them (damn those liberty-minded little Hobbits!).

Please try to avoid getting caught up in the matter of the technical details of the various classes of body armor. This has nothing to do with any of that you know.

If the truth be known (perish the thought) this is one of many signs indicating that Congress is preparing for war with the American people. Many of them are no doubt blissfully unaware of that prospect, but it must be understood that blissful unawareness, and the vehement defense thereof, is a key component of such campaigns, right up to, and through, the the very end.

Fire, prosecute, and scorn them

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Via Dave Hardy and Kelsey Harkness, we have the December 8, 2014 Staff Report on Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Involvement in “Operation Choke Point”. It contains these key findings:

  • The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the primary federal regulator of over 4,500 banks, targeted legal industries. FDIC equated legitimate and regulated activities such as coin dealers and firearms and ammunition sales with inherently pernicious or patently illegal activities such as Ponzi schemes, debt consolidation scams, and drug paraphernalia.
  • FDIC achieved this via “circular argument” policymaking: there was no articulated justification or rationale for the original list of “high-risk merchants.” Yet a list of “potentially illegal activities” included in FDIC’s formal guidance to banks justified itself by claiming that the categories had been previously “noted by the FDIC.”
  • FDIC’s explicitly intended its list of “high-risk merchants” to influence banks’ business decisions. FDIC policymakers debated ways to ensure that bank officials saw the list and “get the message.”
  • Documents produced to the Committee reveal that senior FDIC policymakers oppose payday lending on personal grounds, and attempted to use FDIC’s supervisory authority to prohibit the practice. Personal animus towards payday lending is apparent throughout the documents produced to the Committee. Emails reveal that FDIC’s senior-most bank examiners “literally cannot stand payday,” and effectively ordered banks to terminate all relationships with the industry.
  • In a particularly egregious example, a senior official in the Division of Depositor and Consumer Protection insisted that FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg’s letters to Congress and talking points always mention pornography when discussing payday lenders and other industries, in an effort to convey a “good picture regarding the unsavory nature of the businesses at issue.”
  • FDIC actively partnered with Department of Justice to implement Operation Choke Point, and may have misled Congress about this partnership.

    • Because of this pressure by the FDIC private companies which create and sell compliance and risk management training software incorporated things such as:

    image

    The pressure was far from subtle. The official referred to in the following is Jim LaPierre, Regional Director of the Kansas City Region:

    The official told the banker, “I don’t like this product, and I don’t believe it has any place in our financial system. Your decision to move forward will result in an immediate unplanned audit of your entire bank.”

    This is what you get with government employees who believe they are masters rather than public servants.

    A good start on the way to restore public trust would be to release the names of the scoundrels so they can be publically scorned. While I am sure there are many more here are some names from the report:

    • Anderson, James L.
    • Bar, David
    • Benardo, Michael B.
    • Bowman, John B.
    • Bresnick, Michael
    • Brueger, Kathleen S.
    • Brown, Luke
    • Butler, Janice
    • Delery, Stuart
    • Dujenski, Thomas J.
    • Eberley, Doreen R
    • French, George
    • Gray, Andrew
    • Gruenberg, Martin J.
    • Jackson, Michael L.
    • LaPierre, Jim
    • Lowe, Anthony M.
    • Osterman, Richard J.
    • Pearce, Mark
    • Plunkett, Sylvia H.
    • Miller, Jonathan N.
    • Miller, Rae-Ann
    • Sagatelian, Marguerite
    • Sawin, April D.
    • Spitler, Eric J.
    • Sweet, Joel
    • Watkins, James C.
    • Valdez, Victor J.
    • Weatherby, Katheryn M.

    The public servants who “debated ways to ensure that bank officials saw the list and ‘get the message’” need to be sent a very strong “message”. They should be fired, prosecuted, and held personally responsible for the harm done to the business affected and the general public by their illegal and immoral actions.

    Quote of the day—Archer

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    I can find no excuse – zero, none – that someone running for office or training to be a police officer hasn’t found the time to peruse the operating instructions for our Republic.

    Got Constitutional questions? RTFM.

    Archer
    December 16, 2014
    Comment to Filed for future use
    [I have nothing to add.—Joe]