The Second Amendment Itself is Common Sense Gun Reform

From youtuber Styxhexenhammer666, a parallel universe version of Razorfist/the Rageaholic.  From a couple months back, but hits the nail on the head.

The Democrat Anti-Rights Sit-In

In the 1960s sit-ins, the purpose of the sit-in was as a demand for equal rights.

The reason was to sit down and show that you’re as good as anyone else and deserving of the same treatment.

While there’s an argument for property owner rights that a business should be able to reject service to anyone, this was also a cultural argument as well as a legal rights one, such that the property owner would get the idea that he was wrong and that those doing the sit-in were deserving of respect and that their patronage should be appreciated rather than rejected.  Both ways, it was a movement to demand rights.

What the Democrat crybullies are engaging in today is not a movement to demand rights, but to remove rights:

This is a demand by authorities for more authority.

This is a demand by those in power for more power.

This is a demand by those who control the country that the rights of the citizen be overruled.

They want due process suspended, they want gun rights suspended, they want your rights suspended.  They’ve already managed it in a handful of states – despite the Constitution as written forbidding it – and now they want the rest of the nation to kneel.  And their current method is by throwing a tantrum, mocking the actual sit-ins of the 1960s, and demanding that Congress vote to ignore the Fifth Amendment right to due process of law so they can suspend your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Those guys at the lunch counter weren’t recognized as having a right to eat at the same counter that other folks did.  Those rights weren’t recognized by the Democrats in power in the South.  If they went to buy a gun in the South to protect themselves from the racist Democrat KKK night riders, when they went for a permit the racist Democrat sheriff would deny it and leave them defenseless.

Today, elected Democrat representatives who already have power are now squatting in the halls of power and demanding more powers and authorities to go after the citizenry – all to strip rights from those who now have them.

The guys at the lunch counter were fighting against Jim Crow laws.  They were fighting for rights.

The Democrat representatives are fighting for more Jim Crow laws.  They’re fighting against rights.

Field Day 6/20/16 – Another Gun Grabber Roundup

May as well start with the dumbest first.  HuffPo is calling for complete disarmament of the US citizenry.

One may say that the Supreme Court, after 250 years in which the Second Amendment was read as allowing only a well-regulated militia to have guns, recently reinterpreted it to mean that there is an individualized right to own guns. This suggests that we may have to get to domestic disarmament through the back door.

Make the gun manufacturers liable for harm done with their products. Ban the sale of ammunition. And vote for a president that will add to the Supreme Court those who will read the Second Amendment as written.

Above all, domestic disarmament is a true, compelling vision which cannot be said about the small gun control measures that are currently promoted by some of the most enlightened people among us.

That’s a whole new level of smugness right there.  Also, the Second Amendment as written would guarantee access to arms by American citizens, especially weapons used in a military capacity.  It’s very clear what it says, as are the numerous state Constitutions that mirror it.

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And the next stupidest, via HotAir, from Democrat Senator Chris Murphy:

Today’s gun vote wouldn’t stop recent mass shootings, admits leading proponent

Asked by guest host Jonathan Karl whether the so-called “gun show loophole” would have done anything to stop Orlando, Murphy stammered and finally responded as though he was Miss Teen Connecticut answering a pretty tough question about what his favorite color is.

MURPHY: So, it may have in the sense that if you partner together with the bill that stops terrorists from getting guns…

KARL: But wait a minute. He didn’t buy those guns at a gun show. And he would have passed the background—he did pass a background check.

MURPHY: He did pass a background check, but if the Feinstein bill was in effect, the FBI could have put him on the list of those who are prohibited from getting guns. And what if he went into the gun store and was denied? He could have just gone online or to a gun show and bought another one. *

KARL:  OK. But what I’m trying to get at is that every time there’s one of these terrible tragedies, there’s these proposals. Your proposal would have done nothing in the case of Orlando. It would have done nothing to stop the killing in San Bernardino, and in fact, was unrelated to the killing in Newtown. So why are we focusing on things that have nothing to do with the massacres that we are responding?

MURPHY: First of all, we can’t get into that trap.  I disagree. I think if this proposal had been into effect, it may have stopped this shooting. But we can’t get into the trap in which we are forced to defend the proposals simply because it didn’t stop the last tragedy. We should be making our gun laws less full of Swiss cheese holes so that future killings don’t happen.**

Couple important takeaways here.

1st, let your lefty, gun-grabbing brother-in-law see this so he can stop telling you that you are an accomplice in the murder of innocent people just because you exercise the right to self protection. And repeat it on your social media as many times as it takes: These laws will not stop bad people from doing bad things with guns. Full stop.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

We already know that the Orlando terrorist beat his ex-wife.  He could’ve been denied based on that, but apparently his ex-wife never bothered to call the police.  He wouldn’t have had a security job, nor been able to buy a gun legally.  Wouldn’t have happened.

Speaking of wife-beaters not allowed to own guns, from ThisAin’tHell.  Short version is a reporter went into a gun store to try to buy an evil toddler-killing black rifle and was denied.  He claimed it was because he was a reporter.  Really, it was because he slapped around his wife.

The folks at Maxon Shooter Supplies and Indoor Range, who claim to be TAH fans, send us a link to the story about them in the Chicago Sun Times, wherein the Times sent Neil Steinberg, one of their reporters, to write about his experience buying and firing an evil black, scary gun (known in journalistic circles as an assault rifle). Steinberg does the handwringing thing about guns and journalistic integrity thing during his drive to Des Plaines, Illinois to the Maxon “lemonade stand” as the owner described it to me.

Driving to Maxon Shooter’s Supplies in Des Plaines on Wednesday to purchase my first assault rifle, I admit, I was nervous. I’d never owned a gun before. And with the horror of Sunday’s Orlando massacre still echoing, even the pleasant summer day — the lush green trees, fluffy white clouds, blue sky — took on a grim aspect, the sweetness of fragile life flashing by as I headed into the Valley of Death.

Earlier, in my editor’s office, I had ticked off the reasons for me not to buy a gun: this was a journalistic stunt; done repeatedly; supporting an industry I despise. But as I tell people, I just work here, I don’t own the place. And my qualms melted as I dug into the issue.

At 5:13 Sarah from Maxon called. They were canceling my sale and refunding my money. No gun for you. I called back. Why? “I don’t have to tell you,” she said. …

A few hours later, Maxon sent the newspaper a lengthy statement, the key part being: “it was uncovered that Mr. Steinberg has an admitted history of alcohol abuse, and a charge for domestic battery involving his wife.”

Well, didn’t see that coming.

This would be on the 4473:

From the Maxon Facebook page;

Mr. Steinberg was very aggressive on the phone with Sarah, insisting he was going to write that we denied him because he is a journalist. “Journalist” is not a protected class, BTW. We contacted his editor and said that, while we don’t normally provide a reason for a denial, in this case to correct the record before you publish, here’s why; we pasted a couple links of press accounts of his past behavior and his admission of same. He’s free to believe or disbelieve that’s why he was denied, but that *is* why he was denied. There was no “We’ll see you in court!!!!” type of language from us – we simply want to set the record straight. That it undermined his thesis and rendered the column incoherent isn’t really our problem, is it? Thanks for your support.

 

Democrat Joe Manchin – Let’s Get Rid Of Due Process Of Law

Via WeeklyStandard and HotAir:

The problem we have—and really, the firewall we have right now, is due process. It’s all due process. So we can all say, ‘yeah, we want the same thing,’ but how do we get there. If a person is on a terrorist watch list like the gentleman—the shooter—in Orlando, he was, twice by the FBI, we were briefed yesterday about what happened. But that man was brought in twice. They did everything they could. The FBI did everything they were supposed to do. But there was no way for them to keep him on the nix list or keep him off the gun buy list. There was no way to do that. So can’t we say that if a person is under suspicion, there should be a five year period of time that we have to see if good behavior, if this person continues the same traits? Maybe we can come to that type of an agreement. But due process is what’s killing us right now.

Haven’t committed a crime but the government wants to restrict your rights because you’re on a secret list somewhere?  No problem!  Just do away with due process.

How to get rid of the 2nd Amendment?  Easy – just get rid of the 5th Amendment first!

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

5 years of rights restriction based on being put on a watch list?  A watch list that Ted Kennedy had to fight to get off of?

How about… no.

The Inexorable Push of Gun-Grabbers: “Maybe Obama Should Take Your Guns” and The Return of the Regulatory State

Alternately titled “leftists saying what they really want, but also using it as clickbait“:

The president zoomed in on exactly the right point Tuesday: What about the rights of those killed by gun violence to live free from terror?

There is no right to freedom from fear.  It also could never be achieved.  Some people fear the dark.  Some fear light.  Some fear clowns.  Some fear bees.  Some fear the unknowable, unfeeling empty vastness of space.

As a technical point, those killed aren’t alive, so they can’t live free from anything.

President Obama said a lot about guns in his teary press conference Tuesday, but the one thing that he is not saying, despite all the howling from the right, is that he intends to take away Americans’ guns. Yet equally significant is the realization that individual citizens are unwilling to free themselves of the destructive weapons that are wreaking havoc on our society. Numerous Americans care more about their individual freedoms than our collective freedoms, and they are unable to see how these individualistic desires undermine the essential fabric of a democracy.

All freedoms are individual freedoms.  If individuals within a group have no freedom, there is no freedom.  Restricting individual rights to free speech also means restricting a “collective” right to free speech by removing voices that the government doesn’t like.

Much like the bumper sticker slogan, my guns must not be working right, because they haven’t wreaked any havoc.

This democratic fabric includes the Second Amendment that has been contorted, misinterpreted, and applied in a way that destroys its intended meaning and threatens the safety and stability of our nation.

Here comes the usual “the Second Amendment doesn’t mean what it says” argument.  The only people contorting it and misinterpreting it are those trying to destroy its meaning in order to disarm the populace.

And as the president pointed out on Tuesday, this grotesque emphasis on the Second Amendment impairs other Americans’ ability to freely exercise many of the other 26 amendments.

Try exercising your Third Amendment rights without any way to resist.

Come to think of it, your First is easily extinguished, as we’ve seen on college campuses where a mob can simply push a reporter out of public spaces.  Your Fourth is pretty hard to defend if you can’t protect your own home.  Your Fifth is a lot easier to have ignored if the police and prosecutors simply threaten you.

As President Obama forges a lone path toward gun regulation, we must wonder how we as a society have arrived to a point where “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” has morphed into allowing individual citizens to possess firearms for their individual protection with little to no concern about the security of a free state.

There’s not much security to a free state when only the government and its agents have guns.  In fact, that’s not a free state at all, that’s a tyranny.  That’s exactly what the founders were discussing.

And then there’s this asshole comment:

It is well documented that gun sales and gun-related deaths have increased since Obama came into office, but the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (PDF), which opened the floodgates and redefined the Second Amendment, rarely receives mention.

Murder is down.  In 2007 there were 17,128 murders.  In 2013 there were 14,196.  Numbers have been on the decline for decades.

Murders with firearms are down.  2010 saw 8,874 murders with firearms.  2014 saw 8,124.

DC v Heller didn’t change the Second Amendment functionally for most of the nation.  Many state constitutions already cover the right to keep & bear arms even more specifically as a personal right of self-defense.  There were no “floodgates” to open.  Places that have historically been anti-gun are still throwing up barricades to exercise of rights that are still being fought against in court.

The court’s decision in the case went against 70 years of legal interpretations of the Second Amendment that stated in United States v. Miller that the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of” the state militia, and the Amendment “must be interpreted and applied with that end in view.”

Brown v Board of Education went against nearly 60 years of legal interpretations justifying segregation, too.  It also corrected a historic wrong.

US v Miller was a bullshit ruling.  The arms-infringing National Firearms Act of 1934 which Miller was challenging says that a shotgun with a barrel under 18″ requires a $200 tax stamp to own, buy, or sell.  $200 in 1934 amounts to $3500 today.  It’s a financial barrier to firearms ownership and exercising of rights.  It’s a poll tax for guns.

The court magically ruled that a shotgun under 18″ barrel length isn’t suited to any kind of militia use or any other use (despite the fact that agencies from the FBI to USBP to IRS all use 14″ barreled shotguns today in manners that are entirely consistent with the uses the judges said they couldn’t be used).

Miller was a bank robber who argued against laws that would’ve sent him to jail not so much for bank robbery, but for effectively owning a piece of pipe that was less than 18″.  The court decision was made in such a way that Miller could never travel to the Supreme Court to challenge the ruling, and Miller was killed before the ruling came down and he could’ve effectively challenged it.

It’d be like if the Miranda decision were never made because Miranda were killed before being able to make the challenge to SCOTUS.  Mind you, Miranda was a kidnapper and rapist who was convicted both on initial trial and on retrial after SCOTUS review – it’s said good court decisions can often come from bad people.

In Heller and then in McDonald v. City of Chicago, the Supreme Court in a pair of 5-4 decisions determined that federal, state, and local governments could not create restrictions that could prevent an individual the right to possess a firearm in the home for self-defense. The intent of the Second Amendment had shifted from allowing citizens to own firearms so that they could band together in an organized and regulated militia run by either local, state, or federal governments to allowing citizens to own guns for their own purposes so long as they fell under the individual’s definition of self-defense.

Let’s reference Blackstone, which is part of where the Second Amendment came from:

a public allowance under due restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression

And that’s just pulling a quote from wikipedia.  The founders knew that restrictions turned into strangulation of rights, and that’s why they eliminated that part – and stuck simply to a codified recognition of protecting the tools of self-preservation.

To borrow from Tom Gresham:

“A well-educated people, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed.”  Now, ask if this means that only well-educated people could keep and read books, or does it mean that everyone can have books as a means to produce a well-educated people?

Clickbaity McDailyBeast goes on:

Not surprisingly, countless Americans purchased more and more firearms to protect themselves from the “inevitable” moment when the government or “Obama” was going to forcefully take their guns away. Not surprisingly a byproduct of this new interpretation of the Second Amendment has been a rise in unregulated militias or American terrorist groups who challenge the authority of federal, state, and local governments.  Ammon Bundy and his posse of men who call themselves the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom who just this week forcefully took over a federal building in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon are just one such iteration of this emboldened unregulated militia movement in America.

Actually, this “new interpretation” is pretty much what most state constitutions have always said.

“American terrorist groups”?  I think the Bundys are basically the same kind of people the president would support if they were a union blocking a factory.  The Bundys just want to take over their agricultural means of production – which means public land they don’t feel like paying for.  No real difference from the union members who try to take over industrial means of production except that the unions try to take from private citizens they view as class enemies while the Bundys want to take over from a government they view as a class enemy.

Frankly I find both of them reprehensible, but neither are very good terrorists.  Unions haven’t been effective terrorists since the Wobblies, and ranchers haven’t made effective terrorists since the Johnson County War.

The Oath Keepers, formed in 2009, are one of the largest unregulated militia movements in the nation, and regularly you can find them injecting themselves unnecessarily into conflicts. In Ferguson, Missouri following the death of Michael Brown, Oath Keepers arrived carrying semi-automatic riffles so that they could prevent looters from destroying property, and many of them said that they saw nothing wrong with taking the life of a looter to prevent the destruction of property. They also advocated that Ferguson residents obtain firearms so that they could protect themselves from the police.

So they wanted to protect people who lived there from armed mobs that were burning their homes and businesses?  And they wanted Ferguson residents to protect themselves against police they viewed as threats to the community?

I tend to view the Oathkeepers as a bit silly, but reading it from this Daily Beast goofball, he makes them seem positively balanced.

Also, I don’t think trying to provide stability for a community, however misguided, makes them terrorists.

Instability, terror, and death are the inevitable outcomes of a heavily armed citizenry, yet in the 1846 case Nunn v. State of Georgia, an integral case that the Supreme Court used in the Heller decision, the state of Georgia—my home state—argued that arming citizens and allowing them to openly carry firearms created a safer environment. And the referencing of this decision only continues the Supreme Court’s idyllic reimagining of America’s Southern states.

Lolworthy.

Georgia in 1846 was a slave holding state where African Americans were counted as three-fifths of a person and were not allowed the right to vote.

The 3/5ths compromise was so that states that weren’t slave states wouldn’t be outnumbered in congress by slave states.  Slave states wanted black slaves counted as whole persons for purposes of distribution of representatives.

Firearms at this time were regularly used to keep blacks in line and sustain the South’s racist, oppressive society.

Dumb.  Gun control was used to keep blacks in line – The Racist Roots of Gun Control is a good read that explains it.  If only the powers that be in racist slave states had firearms, they would’ve had them to “keep blacks in line” as well – and if they needed more arms, they would’ve expanded the authority of the state.

Short version of that section is basically he thinks that guns=racism.

But far from rejecting that old logic, we’ve embraced it, and the application of the South’s antithetical principles have brought instability, danger, and a disregard for human life to rest of the United States. Armed and dangerous and unregulated militias are on the rise, in addition to the numerous lone-wolf attacks that befall schools, offices, shopping centers, and public spaces at a disturbing frequency.

Except they haven’t brought violence.  Those “lone wolf” attacks aren’t from “unregulated militias”, they’re from individual lunatics who can’t be stopped with laws and who are frequently jihadis – adherents to a terrorist ideology.

Right now the Second Amendment is being applied in a way that takes away the rights of thousands of Americans each year, and the president must address this crisis to ensure the safety and stability of not just the American citizens who are threatened by gun violence, but also the ideals and institutions that govern our society that are being threatened by the archaic notions of stability from a racist and oppressive society and the unregulated militias of today that openly advocate armed conflict against the government.

Nice try playing the race card.  Gun control was used against the black man to control the black man.  Take the guns from the free men of all colors today and you just put your faith in government, which between 2000 and 2008 I’m sure this clown would’ve opposed as Bu$Hitler would’ve been his boogeyman of the day.  Take all the guns from the free men of Georgia in 1846 and you have a slave state controlled by a government that would expand its authority until blacks (and poor whites) were controlled anyway.

Obama is not going to take away America’s guns. I would argue that he should, as countless Americans have displayed a gross misuse of the social responsibility that comes with gun ownership, except that using force to attempt to disarm people of their firearms might inevitably lead to more violence and bloodshed.

Obama is not going to take away America’s presses.  I would argue that he should, as countless Americans have displayed a gross misuse of the social responsibility that comes with the written word, except that using force to attempt to silence people might inevitably lead to… he’s gonna disarm them first, right?  Well then no problems!  On to our glorious utopian future!

Gun owners should want to regulate and reduce their gun usage for the greater good, but our society is too consumed with the myopia of employing lethal force to resolve minor disputes that it cannot imagine an environment without widespread gun usage. And countless Americans are unable to see that their gun usage actually jeopardizes the very freedoms and liberties they have chosen to fight for and defend via the barrel of a gun.

Ah, the “greater good”.  He should’ve said “for the children” instead.  Gets more feels that way.

Lethal force isn’t used for minor disputes, unless you consider human life something of minor consequence… of course being a big control freak statist… he probably does.

Widespread gun ownership, bearing arms, and possession of arms, does not necessarily mean usage.  I burn down targets at the range, but I have yet to use a firearm in to resolve any dispute inside the US.

Actually, declining gun usage and ownership, and trusting the state with arms and force is what jeopardizes freedoms and liberties, because no man can legally take another man’s rights away – but a government can, and governments do.

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On to stupidity part 2 “America should regulate bullets“:

When I chaired the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, I was grateful that we had authority to regulate lead in household paint. Banning the use of lead-based paint in homes has prevented brain damage in countless children over the years.

So why wouldn’t Congress allow us authority over another dangerous consumer product often made with lead?

Specifically, why not bullets?

Although it may seem unbelieveable, at one point I was a child.  I don’t remember ever looking at walls and thinking “I should start chewing on paint chips”.  When I was at an age younger than that, my family lived in and worked in an environment that would be considered dangerous for a child today… but my parents kept me from eating screws, nails, and construction debris.  Congress wasn’t needed to protect me as a child.  Nor was it needed before 1972 when it was created.

As to why not bullets?  Because ammunition is a key component of arms.  And because you’re trying to come up with a backdoor regulation scheme to go after something you don’t personally like.

Why not have some chaste religious zealot decide that the risk of STDs that condoms don’t actually prevent means the CPSC can regulate condoms in order to cut down on sex that the zealot doesn’t like?

This idea isn’t new. In 1974, the CPSC’s first chairman made clear his belief that the agency could probably regulate ammunition, and a court agreed — whereupon a frightened Congress passed laws making it impossible even to try. Now is the time for the president to begin pushing to correct that mistake.

I can’t help but hear that last line said like Dick Jones in Robocop saying: “I had to kill Bob Morton because he made a mistake… now it’s time to erase that mistake.”

The slavering regulatrix can’t even begin to fathom that there are people who don’t regard her totalitarian state as something desirable, nor that their representatives would seek to prevent tyranny which she demands through any means possible.

How can we do more when the National Rifle Association has persuaded Congress to put roadblocks in front of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research into gun deaths? When more than half of Americans oppose tighter gun control even after a year of such bloodshed?

Support for gun control has been falling dramatically.  People know being disarmed doesn’t make them safe, and doesn’t make anyone safe.

The NRA opposes CDC “research” because it’s “research” that will be pushed into the kind of conclusion that statists desire.  Stats will be massaged until they get the “right” answer demanding more regulation, more control, and less freedoms.

James Holmes bought more than 4,000 rounds online before his 2012 rampage in a Colorado movie theater. Twenty years ago, when purchases were offline, it would have been tough to spot someone like that. Today it would be easy.

Why should my old agency be the one to do the regulating?

No one should be doing regulating.

James Holmes is a wonderful example of how there are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men.  Holmes was working on neuroscience/neurosurgery before he snapped.  He was being trusted enough to become the kind of person you call when you need someone to stab around in your brain.  On paper, he looked like a fine upstanding young man.  He also spent time making IEDs and rigging his apartment to explode.  Take away ammo and he’d use something like a pressure cooker bomb and fireworks.  Or he might just kill patients for decades on the operating table.  It’s not the tool he uses to cause the harm, it’s the person doing the harm.

When someone who may be dangerous is prevented from buying ammunition, any gun he has hidden becomes like a car without gas: a useless hunk of metal.

Yeah, and he can go buy a few gallons of gasoline and he has a firebomb ready to go.  He can also start playing with chemicals and explosives like were used at the worst mass killing at a US school in history – the Bath School Disaster of 1927.

There are many ways to move ahead. We could license ammunition purchases like drivers, ban online purchases and mandate background checks for buyers. But it would be pointless for me to outline the precise steps that should be taken up front — except for the first one: ending Congress’s disgraceful attempt to chill research. Funding to study regulating ammunition should begin now.

Congress was wise enough to see through that.  It’s not “research”, it’s funded justifications for tyranny at the expense of a constitutionally recognized right.  The author of this anti-freedom screed outright says she wants more restrictions on a right, and she wants to backdoor it with a bureaucracy that’s largely unaccountable, and she already has her answers.  If the CDC came out with the same conclusions the FBI shows in crime stats (referenced above) that gun crimes are down, and that they found John Lott’s study (More Guns, Less Crime) is the case, she’d demand more research until such time as her answer is reached.

This would be like Congress funding research for the CDC to analyze the effects of unpleasant speech on the public in order to go after the First Amendment, or funding research into the the effects of lethal chemicals and execution methods to undermine the Eighth Amendment.

Times and cultures change.

Tyrants never do.

Executive Actions, Everytown for Gun Control, and The Leftist-Statist Function of Laws

From Politico, a story on how the Obama administration is saying it’s going to target citizens engaged in lawful commerce and exercise of their rights:

According to gun industry insiders and others familiar with the proposals, the changes include requiring an expanded number of small-scale gun sellers to be licensed — and therefore conduct background checks — whenever selling a weapon. This wouldn’t close the so-called gun show loophole, though it has the potential to narrow it.

The administration is also expected to impose tighter rules for reporting guns that get lost or stolen on their way to a buyer.

They won’t go after straw purchasers, but they’ll come up with more rules and regulations for those engaged in exercising rights specifically outlined by the Constitution.

as one of the major proponents of a change, Everytown has recommended adding several factors to the definition — including selling guns in their original packaging, reselling a gun shortly after acquiring it, maintaining a certain quantity of guns for sale or selling more than 25 guns a year — as possible signals that someone needs a license.

For people who are engaged in shooting sports, that’s not really that many.  There are already laws on the books that target people who are actually in the business of dealing guns without a license.  If law enforcement wants to go after someone for selling guns without a license because it’s their undeclared business, they can – and it’s a matter for law enforcement to figure out “is this guy a dealer, or is this guy someone who’s well-to-do and buys and sells a lot or is he liquidating inherited guns or is he X Y Z that’s not criminal?”

Another victory for advocates is likely to be a requirement for all licensed dealers and manufacturers to report to federal authorities any guns that are stolen in transit to a buyer as missing from their inventory. Currently, advocates say, thieves often target packages addressed to gun retailers in the hopes of stealing unregistered guns that are harder to trace. And while buyer and seller might sort out refunds or replacements on their own, they’re not required to report the missing guns to the National Crime Information Center.

There’s already a form for that.  Buyer and seller don’t sort out refunds or replacements on their own if packages turn up missing – one or both parties will report the package missing for insurance purposes.  Plus they don’t want a gun stolen in transit to end up as their problem once the thief uses it.

White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett also raised gun-control advocates’ hopes for new domestic violence provisions last month. In a post on the actress Lena Dunham’s website, Jarrett noted that guns are the most likely cause of death for women who are victims of domestic partner violence.

Somehow I’m unsurprised that Valerie Jarrett is exchanging notes on the web with Lena Dunham.  Probably won’t post much to Dunham about efforts to fight against sexual assault on children.

Gun-control activists acknowledged that changing the rules for licenses might have limited impact on what sellers actually do in the short term. But in this political environment, they’ll take whatever measures they can, no matter how incremental.

“Setting cultural norms,” said Everytown research director Ted Alcorn, “is something that laws do.”

And there’s the point.

This isn’t about doing anything that prevents crime or violence.  This is about a boot stamping on a human face forever.  These are the moral busibodies who will torment free men endlessly.

They’re going after a Constitutional right and trying to push people away from it culturally.  They’re trying to destroy the right by making it culturally nonexistent.  They’re trying to make it harder and harder to buy and sell guns.  The numbers game is just the camel’s nose.  Right now they want 25 guns a year… next it will be 15, then 10, then 5, then 2, then 1, then 0.

The same game has been played in many states with magazine restrictions.  30 is too many!  20 is too many!  15 is too many (NJ, CO)!  10 is too many (CT, CA, MA, MD)!  7 is too many (NY)!  5 is too many!  3!  2!  1!  0.  When gun control advocates are asked what the number they “need” is, they will never settle on a number to stop on.  After Newtown, the argument was “30 children will be killed” and they demanded mag restrictions… why?  If 30 children is terrible, why is 15 children okay?  Or 10 children?  Or 5?  Or one?   Because of course it’s not the number, that’s just a way to get a restriction that can then be pushed further.

Currently NY is pushing for an ammo ban that will drop allowable purchases to an absurdly low level:

If enacted, the legislation would place strict limits on the number of bullets a gun owner can purchase over a 90-day period, and ban gun dealers from selling ammunition for a firearm to anyone unauthorized to own such a weapon.

The bills are aimed at owners of high-capacity rifles, but they would also affect owners of handguns with much smaller magazines, even six-shooters.

The provision would limit the amount of bullets a gun owner can buy to no more than twice the amount of the capacity of the weapon ever 90 days, which means someone who owns a six-shooter could only buy 12 bullets every three months, the Brooklyn Eagle reported.

48 rounds a year with a typical revolver.  One box of ammo (minus two rounds) for the year.

You can’t maintain a lot of proficiency with that little ammo… of course, to the gun-banner, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature.  Restrict the ability to shoot, then say people are incompetent, then take away the guns.  It’s a win-win for the leftist statist.

It also uses laws to set cultural norms – you can’t introduce someone to shooting with 4 rounds per month.  You can’t go plinking with 1 round per week.  With a double-barrel shotgun, you’d have 4 rounds per 3 months, 16 per year, so it’d take you years just of nursing your state-approved amount to go shoot sporting clays.

It’d be amazing to see this same objective pushed for other rights.  What if they pushed against the First Amendment and you were only allowed so many words per yea

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“If I have a cold, I can’t buy Sudafed without ID, but I can walk into any gun shop and walk out with enough bullets to arm a small army without showing any kind of ID,” Ms. Simon said in a joint release. “I can buy any kind of bullets regardless of what kind of gun I own. I don’t even have to own a gun to stock up on bullets. Nothing stops me from having friends buy even more bullets for me. The sky is the limit. The San Bernardino shooters had 6,000 rounds of ammunition. We need this legislation so that cannot happen here.”

Yes, you should be able to buy all the Sudafed you want as well.

There are also laws against murder and lots of gun laws in CA and that didn’t stop the San Bernadino terrorists.  There are also lots of gun laws in India and that didn’t stop the Mumbai terrorists.

“Setting cultural norms,” said Everytown research director Ted Alcorn, “is something that laws do.”

It’s to push people away from their rights by making them hard to exercise.  Push people away from their rights and then they can be taken away.

Hell, the left can make laws so inherently oppressive that people don’t even understand why or how they’re being oppressed anymore.

The San Bernadino Terrorist Attack and Gun Control Response

They already have a lot of these things waiting in a drawer to be cranked out the next time the have to push their agenda.  The NYT did a page 1 editorial on how we must ban guns for the children to prevent terrorism.  It’s full of the same things we expect to see every time they crank out their gun control screed, full of the same “no rights are without regulation so we can infringe them even if they say ‘shall not be infringed'”, etc. etc.

Obama went out saying that the ability of US citizens who are convicted of no crimes to buy guns is “an insane loophole”. Of course he’s talking about the terrorist watch list/no fly list, which as we’ve noted before has erroneously included people like the late Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy, who spent months trying to get it fixed – and when you’re a former president’s brother and one of the most powerful Democrats in the country and it takes months… what does that leave for the common man?  Even the leftist ACLU opposes the no-fly list.  Meanwhile, there are at least 72 people on the no-fly terror watch list who work for DHS or TSA.  Keep in mind that Obama was calling for the terror watch/no fly list ban before San Bernadino as well – something that since the San Bernadino terrorists weren’t on the watch list, would have made no difference then and would make no difference now.  This is just exploiting a crisis.  (And of course the way to keep potential terrorists from doing any terrorists acts is to have the AG charge them with terrorist activities.)

The calls for gun control rather than terrorist control have been everywhere in the last week.  AG Lynch said the Obama administration would call for more, Obama spent last Friday talking gun control and not terrorism; and then there’s the stupidity of the left as they call for bans, not just the lack of any understanding about a bullet button, but one Dem congresswoman saying that “multi-automatic round weapons are easily available“, and a host of bogus statistics and BS that come from people who don’t even know what they want to ban, but they know they want to take it away from you, the leftist-parody-of-itself saying the NRA funds terrorism, and then as the left peels back the mask to reveal it’s true face – the straight up calls for disarming everyone.

A true liberal position, the place to start, is to call for domestic disarmament. That is the banning of the sale of all guns to private parties coupled with a buyback of those on the street (Mexico just moved to so control guns). Collectors can keep their guns as long as they remove the firing pin or fill the barrel with cement. Gun sports can be allowed — in closed shooting ranges. And hunters can be allowed to have long guns (if they pass background checks) with no scopes, which are not sporting. But, these exceptions aside, liberals should call for a gun-free nation and point out the much lower murder rates and fewer deaths due to accidental discharge of fire arms found in those civilized nations where most guns have been removed from private hands — and often even from those of the police.

That’s a true progressive leftist position – there’s nothing “liberal” at all about stripping everyone of their right of self defense.  It is, however, a wonderful plan to create tyranny.

Field Day: San Bernadino, CA Terrorist Attack Info Post

There’s been so much about this in the last couple days, and I’ve read so many news stories that just to keep some of the running stories, data, info, and editorials/reactions together, I’m going to dump a bunch in one big field day post.

Right now, reporters are going through the home of the terrorists, because while other mass killers have their homes sealed off for weeks while they’re searched, this one has been breached by the media a couple days after the event.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Deputy Olivia Bozek, a spokesperson for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department told Grasswire by phone. “That is not a cleared crime scene. There’s still an active investigation going on.”

There are reports about a neighbor seeing Arab men going in and out of the house at all hours of the night, but that the neighbor didn’t report it for fear of being called racist.  Again, the kind of self-censorship that makes people not believe their own eyes:

A man who has been working in the area said he noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area in recent weeks, but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.

“We sat around lunch thinking, ‘What were they doing around the neighborhood?’” he said.  “We’d see them leave where they’re raiding the apartment.”

And now the media has gone through the house and trashed it digging up anything they want to get their mitts on, meaning that any fingerprints of any other suspects will not be found.

It’s led to some speculation already that the whole investigation is being handled in a shoddy way in order to taint evidence and deflect away from the fact that these terrorists were in fact terrorists.  Mass killers like the killers from Aurora, CO, and Newtown, CT, had their homes sealed for weeks while authorities went through those homes with fine-toothed combs.  Here we have many reports of other suspects and the crime scene is being destroyed.

https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/672871384935243776

The female terrorist, Tashfeen Malik, pledged loyalty to ISIS just before the attack.

And it is terrorism with all the hallmarks of an ISIS attack – the name Tashfeen Malik also has some interesting history discussed at the link.

We’ll also probably never see the video from the terrorists’ GoPro cameras, which were reported widely and then suddenly disappeared.  That’s an odd thing for a police department to report and then turn around and deny.

The idea of this being a directed failure by the FBI; allowing the crime scene to be destroyed might not be too far off the mark.  The political ramifications can be pretty severe, as easily illustrated:

When the president declares that we’re safe from the junior varsity team after they pull off a successful terrorist attack in a western capitol and then they proceed to pull off one in the US the same day… it makes him look phenomenally incompetent to the low-info people who still think he actually cares about the country, and it makes some of them start questioning why he’d let that happen.

I guess the photoshop offensive of putting ducks on the faces of ISIS fighters didn’t work so well.

The Daily Beast has a piece that gives some timeline, but leaves out a lot of relevant data – some of it not known at the time, some of it due to simple political bias.  It sums up with this:

Other plots have reminded us that we are at war. This one tells us that we are in a war like no other, a war in which a couple drops their baby with grandma, then goes to a holiday party to murder co-workers who not long ago threw them a baby shower.

At war with what exactly?  You better not say at war with jihadis or islamists!

Speaking to the audience at the Muslim Advocate’s 10th anniversary dinner Thursday, (Attorney General) Lynch said her “greatest fear” is the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric” in America and vowed to prosecute any guilty of what she deemed violence-inspiring speech.

Well, at least her greatest fear isn’t global warming anymore.  Now it’s people who talk bad about muslims.

Of course, you’d best not talk to muslims in any way that might offend them, because then it’s your fault they killed you:

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The media response has mostly been the standard leftist response – “ban all guns”, with an emphasis on blaming the NRA for everything.

For example: “Why does the NRA allow guns for terrorists?”  First off, the NRA doesn’t allow anything, because the NRA doesn’t control anything.  The government allows or disallows – and the people allow or disallow the government.

In light of the horrific shooting in San Bernardino, California, that killed at least 14 people, President Barack Obama spoke on Wednesday about the need to reform gun laws.

He also added, “For those who are concerned about terrorism of, you know, some may be aware of the fact that we have a no fly list where people can’t get on planes, but those same people who we don’t allow to fly could go into a store right now in the United States and buy a firearm and there’s nothing that we can do to stop them.”

There are 700,000 people on the terrorist watch list, and when these people tried to legally purchase guns, they had a success rate of 91%.

“Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law,” the GAO warned back in 2010.

This situation has a simple solution: Pass a law that stops known and suspected terrorists from buying guns.

I mentioned some of this yesterday, but being suspected of being a terrorist can be as simple as having a name like a terrorist… which happened to former Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy.  It also means that the government has a secret list that you can be added to arbitrarily and have your rights taken away with no explanation.

Even if one were to ignore the ramifications of basically making a right that “shall not be infringed” into one that is constantly and totally infringed, it’s worth looking at “would it have helped?”  In the case of the two San Bernadino terrorists, they weren’t on watch lists.  They weren’t on no-fly lists.  The proposed change would have done nothing to stop them.

Much like laws proposed after Dylan Roof killed people in a church in South Carolina after buying a gun illegally – he lied on the form 4473 (the background check) – and the FBI didn’t do their job and catch it – there’s nothing that any of these new laws would do to change things.  Stopping 700,000 people on a secret watch list from exercising a constitutional right without any kind of due process or oversight is not only abhorrent, but also it wouldn’t have even worked.

Of course, the point is to push for greater and greater rules for confiscation and disarming the American public.  As long as the US citizenry is armed, the worst oppression of the left are stymied.

And it is the same thing every time, because it’s the only chance the left has:

For as long as Obama and co. can conflate the question “Do you want more gun control?” with “Are you upset about what just happened?” they are able to win the day. But, once the two are separated, they lose – and badly. Why did we hear the same calls throughout yesterday’s saga, regardless of the forthcoming facts? Because, to the zealots and the bores, a mass-shooting news-cycle does not represent a source of perpetually changing information, but a static propaganda battle to be fought and won. It was only a matter of time before fortune put his hostages out on parade.

Among other things, the media’s mass shooting count is mostly bullshit.  Interestingly, numbers I heard yesterday from a right-leaning source that took leftist data and compiled it differently found that while the US dwarfed most European nations in mass shootings, with the US at roughly 330 since 2001 and individual European nations far behind it, if you combined most European nations to represent a much more similar population 500 million for the whole EU (though I think they took most populous nations instead), you get a much less crazy sounding US at 330 and EU at 360.

On the flipside of the coin, one of the other issues that has been brought up is the problem of lack of enforcement of existing laws.  The gang violence half of killings in the US comes in no small part from people with clean records becoming straw purchasers and buying guns illegally for someone else (again lying on the 4473) – a crime that is rarely prosecuted.

…data from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS), which found in 2010, of 6 million Americans who applied to buy a gun, less than 2 percent — or 76,000 — were denied. Of those, the ATF referred 4,732 cases for prosecution. Of them, just 44 were prosecuted, and only 13 were punished for lying or buying a gun illegally.

“If the prosecution of people lying on forms is really a priority for the president, then all he has to do is say, ‘I want my federal law enforcement officials to prosecute these kinds of cases,'” former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told Fox News. “Obviously there is a different level of priority given to these type of crimes in this administration compared with other administrations.”

Could just enforce the laws.  That would slowly make a difference in the day-to-day violence in the country.

But for a final piece from the media, rather than some reasoned comments, let’s go to what usually happens after a mass shooting – idiots masquerading as experts and making the public stupider:

It’s downright moronic the whole time he’s talking, but the worst is around the 1:30 mark.  Shorter version here.

“Manufacturers are allowed to build them that way with what’s called a bullet button and it’s just a – you take the tip of a button – a bullet and you press a button and it turns your semi-automatic legal weapon into an illegal assault weapon.”

This is so absurdly wrong, and would’ve taken three seconds to learn about.

In normal states, you can press the mag release button with your finger to drop the magazine from the firearm:

But California has a patchwork of ridiculous gun laws.  Without wading into them much, among them are limits on what firearms can have detachable magazines; as detachable magazines count as a “feature” towards being an illegal “assault” weapon to the state of CA.  Magazines that have to be removed with a tool don’t count as detachable, so a manufacturer solution was to come up with a mag release button that requires a tool… in this case, using a bullet as a tool to remove it.

Then you could have mostly the same rifle in California, even though you couldn’t change magazines quickly.  It has nothing at all to do with changing a rifle from semi-auto to full-auto.

But it sure has something to do with the media being stupid.

My Defense – Freedom’s Safest Place

Saw this ad by Colion Noir today.  Rather timely with regards to the San Bernadino terrorist attack, and a rebuttal to all those who are calling for disarmament of American citizens based on the illogical tyranny of a spurious list.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.

– William S. Burroughs

Syrian “Refugees”, Democrats, and Gun Control

Via AEI, a study from the Arab Center for Research and Policy studies:

…a disturbing subset of 13% of Syrian refugees say their view of ISIS is “positive” or “positive to some extent.”

Yeah, I’d say that’s disturbing.  That’s 1 out of 8 admitting they have a positive view of ISIS.  I’d wonder what the actual numbers are, because the poll may well be tainted by skepticism of the pollster.  Saying “yes, I like ISIS” to a pollster you don’t know could be an easy way to get your house hit by a drone strike, so I suspect the numbers are probably lower than reality.

On the other hand, an important nuance of this is that there may also be some in the “positive to some extent” category who hate Assad more than they do ISIS, or who loathe Sykes-Picot and the effects of it enough that they don’t mind ISIS breaking down borders.  They could also be the kind of people who think that ISIS is justified in their terrorist attacks, like US Secretary of State John Kerry.

Either way, 1 out of 8 admitting to positive views of the Islamic State should be a warning to any nation opposed to the Islamic State that it’s unwise to bring in swarms of Syrian refugees.

That’s yet another example of why so many people in the US are opposed to importing Syrian “refugees”.

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The Democrats have taken this opportunity to use it to push their favorite agenda – disarming the American people.

Via HotAir:

It looks like Senate Democrats are going to try to attach a new gun law onto the Republican bill trying to do more oversight on Syrian refugee entry into the U.S. Washington Examinerreports Democrats may try to slip that in the refugee bill next week.

The Senate could take up the House-passed refugee bill as early as the week of Nov. 30. At that point, Democrats will likely try to attach the gun control provision as an amendment, although it will be up to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to decide whether he’ll allow it.

Of course.  They never stop.

The Democrat idea is that anyone on the no-fly list or terror watch list should be disallowed from owning a gun.  Which sounds great, until you consider that it’s depriving someone of their Constitutional rights with no recourse, no trial, no conviction, and no knowledge of what’s happened or why.

The idea sounds reasonable enough until you dig into the details and realize that the proposed Democratic legislation is a shocking assault on the constitutional right to due process. What makes the proposal even worse is that the Democrats’ assault on due process isn’t necessary to accomplish what they say is their only goal: preventing “dangerous terrorists” from legally purchasing or possessing a firearm.

You don’t get told you’re on the list and if you’re a person of normal means you can’t get off the list.

Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy was put on the no-fly list in 2004 and it took him a month to get off the list – and that’s as one of the most connected, influential people in the US at the time.

U.S. Sen. Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy said yesterday that he was stopped and questioned at airports on the East Coast five times in March because his name appeared on the government’s secret “no-fly” list. …

“That a clerical error could lend one of the most powerful people in Washington to the list — it makes one wonder just how many others who are not terrorists are on the list,” said Reginald T. Shuford, senior ACLU counsel. “Someone of Senator Kennedy’s stature can simply call a friend to have his name removed but a regular American citizen does not have that ability. He had to call three times himself.”

A Kennedy aide said the senator nearly missed a couple of flights because of the delays. After the first few incidents, his staff called the Transportation Security Administration, which maintains the no-fly list. But even after those discussions about getting his name removed, the senator was stopped again, according to Kennedy spokesman David Smith. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge finally called to apologize about the mix-up, and the delays stopped in early April, Smith said.

“If his name got on the list in error, is that happening to other citizens and are they experiencing such difficulty in resolving the problem?” Smith said.

Good luck to the average citizen if they find the secret system has secretly chosen them for targeting:

Under the Democrats’ proposal, the government doesn’t have to tell you why your name is on the list. The proposed law allows the government to keep that information secret. And if you decide to take the government to court over it, the Democrats’ bill creates a brand new legal standard that tilts the scales of justice against you.

Unlike a standard criminal trial, in which a jury must decide beyond a reasonable doubt whether you have violated a criminal law, under this proposed law the government must only show a preponderance of evidence–evidence which will almost certainly be redacted–in order to strip you of your Second Amendment right to defend yourself and your family from terrorists…

This is an issue where the Democrats can scream that anyone opposed to their “common sense gun control” scheme is supporting terrorism, when really we’re just opposed to the idea of a totally unaccountable secret government system that disarms the citizenry with no recourse… which is exactly what they’re asking for.

And of course, as is pointed out at the Federalist, the government could already stop terrorists from buying firearms legally:

All the attorney general has to do to prevent “dangerous terrorists” from legally purchasing firearms is to indict them. That’s it. Charge these terrorists with terrorism, and their legal right to purchase firearms goes up in smoke. That’s because existing federal law states that anyone who’s been indicted for any crime that carries a prison sentence of more than one year–and felony indictment for conspiracy to commit terrorist certainly satisfies that standard–automatically becomes ineligible to purchase or possess a firearm.

But this isn’t about going after terrorists (as one example, otherwise the Tsarnaev brothers would’ve been kicked out of the country after Russia warned us about them being terrorists), this is about going after you.