Chicago gun ban tossed

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The US District Court of Appeals for Northern District of Illinois struck down Chicago’s gun ban. Legalese here, or a plain English  analysis here. They said:

The ban covers federally licensed firearms dealers; even validly licensed dealers cannot sell firearms in Chicago. The ban covers gifts amongst family members; only through inheritance can someone transfer a firearm to a family member. Chicago does all this in the name of reducing gun violence. That is one of the fundamental duties of government: to protect its citizens. The stark reality facing the City each year is thousands of shooting victims and hundreds of murders committed with a gun. But on the other side of this case is another feature of government: certain fundamental rights are protected by the Constitution, put outside government’s reach, including the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense under the Second Amendment. This right must also include the right to acquire a firearm,although that acquisition right is far from absolute: there are many long-standing restrictions on who may acquire firearms (for examples, felons and the mentally ill have long been banned) and there are many restrictions on the sales of arms (for example, licensing requirements for commercial sales). But Chicago’s ordinance goes too far in outright banning legal buyers and legal dealers from engaging in lawful acquisitions and lawful sales of firearms, and at the same time the evidence does not support that the complete ban sufficiently furthers the purposes that the ordinance tries to serve. For the specific reasons explained later in this opinion, the ordinances are declared unconstitutional.

If you’re sans a zans for cans…

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…then use your bare hands (from a man from different lands).

And he didn’t even cut himself. I could’ve benefitted from this knowledge a few times in the past. Much less messy than shooting it with a 10 mm pistol. I’ll have to try it of course, as soon as I get home tonight.

ETA; soup, vegetable and fruit cans, etc., are not made of tin. They’re made of high quality steel. The others, like regular beverage cans, are aluminum, but you knew that. I’m not sure where the term “tin can” came from originally. Maybe they were tin at some point, but the steel cans are soldered, i.e. “tinned”, and maybe it comes from that. If get interested enough I can always google it.

Tin is very weak compared to steel, and it isn’t magnetic. We do use a fair amount of tin in bullet casting of course, so I always keep some handy.

Quote of the day—John Manley

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@tl671 @jbiros @linoge_wotc @know_one999 @tdubb Well, clinging to phallic symbols to feel like a man SHOULD be a want, not a “need”, but ok.

John Manley (@johnironmanley)
Tweeted on May 30, 2013
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a tweet from Linoge.—Joe]

Barb likes Idaho sunsets

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Barb arrived in Idaho late (as in nearly Midnight) on Christmas Day. The next day she helped me finish up the installation of the solar panels at Boomershoot Mecca. I had left one of the brackets at the hardware store in Orofino when I went into town to get the right type and size screws for mounting them to the side of the shipping container.

We did some more Wi-Fi experiments involving more cross-field snow hiking with a battery, fence post, and a Nanostation.

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At the end of the day there was a nice sunset. Barb very impressed with it so we took a bunch of pictures from different locations as we drove back to my brother’s place for the night.

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Boomershoot Mecca improvements

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I arrived at Boomershoot Mecca at 9:00 AM on December 22nd to see this:

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It was a little bit cold and very dark and dreary. I started the generator, turned on the lights and started work inside. I had a bunch of Wi-Fi experiments to do to see if I could get a connection to my brother’s house 1.65 miles away. This involved configuring several Nanostations and tromping across snow covered fields with a Nanostation, a battery, and fence post trying to get around the hills between the two sites with the fewest number of hops.

I also installed another inverter. I really need to organize all the wires better. I have the tie wraps. I just need to use them.

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The new inverter is the box in the lower left corner of the picture. It can output 2500 Watts continuously. The batteries won’t last long at that rate (at over 230 Amps at 12 Volts I don’t expect much more than an hour) but it will allow me to run everything simultaneously if I really want to. This includes a new piece of surprise (for Boomershoot staff) equipment that consumes 1000 Watts all by itself but dramatically improves the speed of some operations during the production of Boomerite targets. Typically we run on generator power but for just building some test targets or testing production procedures the new inverter will let us do that without having a generator on site and without turning off the lights.

When I came back on the 24th it was literally dripping wet inside. This is a picture of the ceiling of the shipping container:

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I need to spend some effort into deciding what to do about the condensation.

On Christmas Day the sun was bright and I observed the existing solar panel producing 121.5 Watts. The panel is rated at 130 Watts so I was a bit surprised that even with the low angle winter sun I was getting that much power out of it.

I installed some “windows” on the south side of the shipping container:

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Not really. It’s two more solar panels. They are getting so cheap that I decided it was worth while to just install them vertical rather than spend the effort to mount them at the optimal angle.

I also drove the grounding rod another foot or so into the ground. I pound on it with a sledge hammer until my joints and muscle ache too much or I run out of time. I’ve made a lot of progress considering how hard and rocky the ground is there. It’s getting close to the proper depth. It’s an 8’ long galvanized rod and I think I now have only about 18” above ground.

Grandson pictures

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Part of Christmas vacation 2013 was spent with my grandson Bryce.

On the way to Idaho with son James, DIL Kelsey, and grandson Bryce we stopped in Ellensburg for lunch. While James and Kelsey were busy with some other things Bryce and I had some time to ourselves. I decided he looked good in a hat:

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James really wanted to take him on his first ride on the snow. So on Christmas Eve we borrowed a plastic toboggan from my brother Doug and went off over the hillside to slide down the hill. Kelsey and Zoe participated as well.

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Casualty:

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It wasn’t really a casualty. Zoe just liked rolling around in the snow.

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Video/slide-show here.

This was his first Christmas (Eve).

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The little red rocking chair he is sitting in was made by my grandmother King’s father for my grandmother. Hence it was made by Bryce’s Great, Great, Great Grandfather.

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Quote of the day—Brett LoGiurato

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The two new moves on gun control are further proof that President Barack Obama will continue to go ahead with any and all possible moves on guns. It also signals that, for the foreseeable future in Congress, any new measures on gun control are dead.

Brett LoGiurato
January 3, 2013
Obama’s Two New Moves On Guns Are Further Proof That Gun Control In Congress Is Dead
[This is true at the Federal level. They had their last stand and they lost.

But it is not true at the state level.

Here in Washington we have two gun control initiatives coming up this year. One is pro-gun and the other is anti-gun. My guess is that the good guys will win but the wider the margin the better the long term results. If we really stomp on them again like the 71%-29% victory with I-676 in 1997 we can essentially remove the current crop of anti-gun people in this state from the political map. Washington Ceasefire, the anti-gun group behind I-676, has not been a political force since their massive loss. Remember, we win because they screw up. They pushed for an assault weapon ban after Newtown which motivated the gun rights people. Then when they backed down we had the political momentum to stop everything they had on their wish list and silence them at the Federal level for the foreseeable future.

Other than defeat gun control politically what you can do is to defeat it culturally. Take someone to the range. New shooters, people that used to shoot but not recently, participate in or start a league, and get people to participate in IPDA, USPSA, Steel Challenge, or Boomershoot. The more regular shooters we have the less likely the anti-gun people are to get votes or even get traction in the media. Besides, as @LittlKit says, “It’s just fun!”

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—Joe]

Joe’s dialect

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Via the New York Times, the way I pronounce words and the vocabulary I use puts me in these areas of the country:

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That’s a pretty good fit.

Quote of the day—Charles Santagati

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What if every public venue had a remote transmitter on its premises which sent a signal to the safety lock locking the trigger making any gun within its protected zone unable to be fired? What if any attempt to tamper with the lock or interrupt a signal from a transmitter resulted in automatically locking the trigger, which then could only be unlocked by a bonded gunsmith?

…

[W]e already have this technology. All that remains is a serious commitment and collaboration among government leaders, gun manufacturers. the NRA and concerned citizens.

Charles Santagati
January 2, 2014
Letter: Remote locks could provide gun control
[I don’t know how Santagati crosses back and forth between his reality and the one I am familiar with but I suspect it involves not taking his medications in a timely manner. He has no idea what he is talking about.

The stupid and ignorance is so rampant in his blatherings that I’ll only hit the high points of the ones that might not be obvious to casual observers.

  • To “interrupt a signal from a transmitter” would involve little more than piece of aluminum foil.
  • No mechanism could distinguish the addition of a piece of aluminum foil from nearby pop can and/or simply being outside the zone of influence of the transmitter. Hence there would be no way for the gun to disable the trigger due to such an effort to block the transmitter.
  • There is no way to build a mechanism that “could only be unlocked by a bonded gunsmith”.
  • There is no way to retrofit the hundreds of millions of existing guns with such technology even if it existed and even if the owners were to cooperate which they wouldn’t.
  • If such a gun could be built and retrofitted to all existing guns the transmitters to disable them would widely available to the bad guys via either normal channels or the black market. Your ability to protect yourself in your own home could be neutralized by any thug with more than a half dozen functioning brain cells.
  • The Second Amendment does not protect the right to keep and bear functional arms when authorities decide it is in the “public good” to “turn off the transmitter”. That right exists at all times. To require guns be disabled at the command of others would be a violation of civil right and punishable by law.

This is part of why we win. The other side thinks they are so smart and so clever when in fact many of them really are this stupid, ignorant and/or delusional.—Joe]

Saving Mr. Banks

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On New Years Day Barb and I went to see Saving Mr. Banks. It is a Disney movie which IMDB.com describes as:

Author P. L. Travers reflects on her difficult childhood while meeting with filmmaker Walt Disney during production for the adaptation of her novel, Mary Poppins.

That doesn’t begin to do the movie justice.

I never really cared for Mary Poppins. For one thing I almost never like musicals. And Mary Poppins just seemed to be a bunch of pointless skits strung together. But Barb and I saw a trailer for Saving Mr. Banks a few weeks ago and it looked like it might have some promise.

The major plot line of the movie was that Travers needs the money but is exceedingly reluctant to allow Disney to change her vision of the characters and story. She holds back on signing the rights while simultaneously “working” with the screenwriter and music composers. It’s a contentious relationship with Travers pitted against everyone she meets at Disney who do their best to understand her and accommodate her outrageous demands. The demands include changing the grammar of lines in the script which describe a scene and banning of the use of the color red in the entire movie.

Scenes from Travers childhood in Australia are intertwined with scenes from Disney Studios in 1961. As the exceedingly personal and troubling origins of the Mary Poppins characters are revealed Travers becomes more a sympathetic person rather than just a grumpy old lady. I sometimes thought the world would have been a better place if the adult version of Travers had been dropped off in the middle of the Outback and forgotten.

Even though you know how the essence of how the movie has to end it has a tremendous amount of stress as it reaches its climax and then resolves the conflicts.

Barb wasn’t affected nearly as much as I was, so it probably is something about my abnormal empathy for females, but I found it emotionally overwhelming and draining.

That said, it was a very good movie. I liked it much better than Mary Poppins.

Unarmed man goes on shooting rampage

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You can’t make this stuff up.

I suppose the reasoning would go as follows;
Since cops are the Only Ones trained and competent enough, and with good enough judgment, to carry guns, anything they do that causes harm to innocents must therefore be someone else’s fault. QED. Move along. Nothing to see here. Relax and enjoy your shoes.

I’m all for wiping the personnel roster completely clean, right down to the janitor, in some departments, and starting over. It’s the only way to clean out a bad culture. Otherwise the culture perpetuates itself even as the personnel come and go.

In New York City even that may not be near enough, since the whole town is corrupt and its corruption radiates out for miles and miles like a volcano’s ash cloud.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible

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Just as a governor of an engine maintains the speed of the engine at a particular speed setting, government, in the most general sense, is a means of keeping things consistent and predictable.

Some examples of a consistent and predictable government:

  • You can safely predict that if you drive on your side of the road at or slightly below the speed limit, and follow the other “rules of the road” you can drive down the highway without being stopped by armed men representing the government demanding you pay a fine.
  • You can safely predict that if someone takes or damages your property without your permission, and they are caught, they will be punished for their actions.
  • You can safely predict that if you have a agreed upon contract with another person or corporation that the contract can and will be enforced according to the terms of the contract.
  • You can safely predict the same laws and regulations will be applied to everyone equally.

This consistency and predictability promotes the general welfare to such a great extent that it is probably impossible to accurately forecast and it can only be crudely measured under extraordinary circumstances.

This difficulty in measurement works both ways. Just as it is difficult to know how much benefit there is to consistent and predictable government it is also difficult to know how much disadvantage there is to inconsistent and unpredictable government. Politicians use this to their great advantage by giving favor to special interest groups and individuals.

But regardless of the difficulty of measurement we know, without any doubt, that inconsistent and unpredictability is the exact opposite of government in the most general sense. It is bad government. It does not create “social justice”. It cannot be considered “doing the right thing even if it is unlawful.” It means people do not have a stable environment. It creates uncertainty and risk that ripples through our entire society. It encourages, nay, requires, people to seek special treatment from the political elite to protect themselves and to punish enemies and competitors.

Yet it is happening now. It is happening in our country.

There were contracts and bankruptcy laws that cover the situation where a corporation has expenses and debts that exceed their capacity to pay. Yet these laws were ignored when certain “to big to fail” corporations actually did fail. The U.S. government bailed out GM using money allocated for other uses. This misallocation of money was done under both the Bush and Obama administrations. It was not within their authority to make such changes in the laws.

It is against the law to sell or transfer firearms to people with felony criminal records. Yet the ATF demanded that many gun stores do exactly that in operation “Fast and Furious”. The publically stated reason was to “purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders.” But they did nothing more than “hope”, if that, on the tracking part of the operation. Many observers concluded the real reason for the operation was to aid in the creation of new, and probably unconstitutional, gun laws in the U.S. It was not within the authority granted to the ATF by Congress to arm violent criminals nor to enable crime for the purposes of creating new laws which violate the rights of innocent people.

We have laws that specifically state that purchases of multiple long guns do not require any special reporting as is required for handguns (18 USC 923(g)(3)(A)). Yet in some states the ATF requires the same special reporting for long guns just as it does for handguns. The ATF is a law enforcement agency. It does not have the authority to make laws. For them to do this is no different than for some local sheriff to create a 9:00 PM curfew for all dark skinned people or a registry of homosexuals. It is not within their authority to make such changes in the laws.

We have a law that says all health insurance plans must conform to certain minimum standards of coverage. Yet President Obama, without changing the law, told insurance companies they could continue selling the banned policies. It is not within his authority to make such changes in the laws.

The IRS was used as a tool to harass political enemies. It is not within their authority to use the tax system to oppress innocent people.

The NSA captures almost all Internet traffic and stores it, apparently indefinitely. This includes all email and your most personal financial and medical information. They do this in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment.

We have laws that specifically forbid the violation of, or even conspiracy to violate, civil rights (18 USC 241 and 18 USC 242). Yet individuals and governments routinely violate these laws without consequence.

We do not have the rule of law in this country. We have the rule of people who imagine themselves philosopher kings with all the corresponding hazards.

This JFK quote keeps running through my head:

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

A peaceful “revolution” involves changing the laws and replacing public servants. But nearly all the servants seem to believe they are the masters and laws are ignored with impunity. So, if JFK was correct, doesn’t that mean violent revolution is inevitable? And doesn’t it also mean that those in political power made it so?

Quote of the day—Aristotle

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It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens: upon the same principle, if it is advantageous to place the supreme power in some particular persons, they should be appointed to be only guardians, and the servants of the laws.

Aristotle
From the Wikipedia entry for Rule of Law
[And so it is with the U.S. Constitution. But the current political reality is that we have something much closer to Plato’s idealized philosopher king, who is above the law.

This is exceedingly dangerous territory. This line of thinking gave rise to totalitarianism in the 20th century. Do not think it can’t happen again.

It is happening now.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Stephen Halbrook

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There are parallels between the firearm bans and registration requirements enacted by the Weimar Republic and those proposed by President Obama. Only law-abiding persons obeyed those laws. Weimar authorities warned that the lists of gun owners must not fall into the hands of “radical elements.” The lists fell right into the hands of the Nazis when they assumed power. Gun owner data can be misused by the government today just as it did in the IRS scandal, and it can be hacked for nefarious purposes.

Stephen Halbrook
Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State”
[If were one to use the set of people being spied up by the government as the ‘Enemies of the State’ then it would appear our government has a lot of enemies. That would explain why so many people in government want us disarmed. We are their enemies.

And in addition to that provided in Halbrook’s book there is a substantial quantity of data to support the assertion that we must not allow ourselves to be disarmed.—Joe]

Not sure what happened in 2013

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So rather than try to talk about it; here’s a pickled egg.image

The color comes from beet juice in the pickling solution. The eggs are boiled and peeled, and after a few weeks in the fridge in the solution, the color permeates the white, and you can see that it’s already started into the yoke.

Here’s the beet prep from last October;
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We use the greens in salad and whatnot all summer. In the fall they get kinda tough, but I keep them, either blanched and frozen, or pickled, as a green for use all winter.

Here’s a 19th century cider mill I rebuilt in the 1970s and again just a few years ago;
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We make between around 90 and 150 gallons per year all told, using apples I pick at a local orchard. McIntosh and Liberty apples make my favorite sweet (as opposed to hard) cider. The real serious producers will blend juices from different varieties, including crab apples, to get the flavor they want, but straight Mac is usually just right as it is. You can’t find cider like this in stores, but rarely, and then it costs eight or nine dollars a gallon. I don’t get it. But it doesn’t matter if you make your own.

Here’s some square dowel joinery I was doing for another antique cider mill I have in process;
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I won’t discuss how it’s done because I don’t know how. I just had to improvise using the limited tools on hand at the time.

And last, here’s a tomato from my garden;

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They call it the “Taxi” for the obvious reason. They’re delicious too, and I suppose any ripe tomato right off the vine is vastly superior to any tomato that’s been picked for shipping. The deer got most of my tomatoes this year, but I got revenge this hunting season. Now I have vegetables and venison in the freezer. Life is good

Quote of the day—Jeffrey Goldberg

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Gun-control advocates, and their friends in Congress and state legislatures, must admit to themselves that the fixes they propose are mainly symbolic. There is a striking timidity to the gun-control movement. America is awash in guns — about 300 million are now in private hands. Mainstream, incremental, gun control measures, if enacted, would not reduce the number of guns in society, and they would only work at the margins of the problem. In other words, laws that would have prohibited the Newtown killer’s mother from acquiring her weapons would have been more helpful.

Jeffrey Goldberg
December 20, 2013
Jeffrey Goldberg: Why Newtown didn’t change America
[If you read his entire post you will discover Goldberg has a good understanding of the gun politics. The only thing he messes up above where he expresses his belief that “laws that would have prohibited the Newtown killer’s mother from acquiring her weapons would have been more helpful”.

He apparently does not understand a couple of things. It’s too bad because that understand is critical to his reaching the correct conclusion. Those items are:

  1. Firearms are used to protect innocent life. Hence any restrictions on firearms must take into account the reduction in benefits as well as the reduction in risks.
  2. Prohibiting firearm ownership to people with no propensity to commit violent illegal acts, such as the Newton killer’s mother, would not be “helpful” in the sense Goldberg might imagine it. In addition to the Constitutional issues flooding the courts there would be significant percentage of existing gun owners that would choose to act outside the law to demonstrate just how “unhelpful” they could be.

I applaud Goldberg’s call to gun control advocates to recognize they are mainly symbolic and do not advocate for practical benefits. But he still needs addition education and, contrary to the gun control advocates, I think he is rational and honest enough to learn.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Mike Weisser

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Advocacy organizations can play an important role in any public debate regardless of their size. But the trick is to figure out who you’re really talking to and whether or not they will listen to what you have to say. If Moms wants to have a real impact on the argument over guns, why don’t they talk to gun owners and stop wasting their energy on convincing people who don’t need to be convinced? And you don’t talk to gun people by throwing up a website or a Facebook page and ‘invite’ them to post a comment or engage in a chat. Maybe that strategy works when you’re selling a product, but it’s rank arrogance to confuse marketing a product with marketing an idea.

Mike Weisser
December 29, 2013
The Confrontational Gun Control Strategy That Just Might Work
[The anti-gun people have an incredible amount of arrogance. And ignorance. And profound disregard for the U.S. Constitution.

Don’t expect them to ever understand why they do and should loose the battle they are fighting. They have mental problems and even as they are swept into the dustbin of history by the legislatures and the courts they will still believe they are right. Their mindset does not, and will never, have a significant difference from that of the KKK of the last century. We are the “gun n***ers” of the 21st Century and they want us “put in our place”.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Paul‏ @hairymodelwanaB

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The only reason men want a gun in their pocket it because their penis doesn’t work, be a man not a weak excuse for one

Paul‏ @hairymodelwanaB
Tweeted on May 17, 2013
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday!

And what does Paul think the reason a woman would want a gun in their pocket I wonder. Penis envy?

Occam’s Razor would suggest self-defense is the better answer.—Joe]

Soul sucking

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While at Wade’s yesterday Barb overheard someone asking about purchasing a suppressor. After we left I gave her more details about the process.

  • The creation of a trust or sign-off by local law enforcement.
  • The submission of paperwork to the ATF.
  • The nine months to a year wait for the ATF to process the paperwork.
  • The background check for the people on the trust.
  • The $200 tax stamp.
  • The 4473 and background check when you pick up the suppressor.

Her comment was, “That’s a soul sucking experience.”

Yup. You have to have your soul sucked in order to exercise a specific enumerated right. This isn’t the way this country is supposed to be run.

Nicely wrapped, but not a surprise

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Barb and I saw this on the wall at Wade’s yesterday:

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