Snowflakes in Hell

Scott Bach, who is President of the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs, and an NRA Board member, has this to say about the Heller ruling:

That such a question was even the subject of controversy, or that there were dissenting Justices, is a sad testimony to the state of our nation. It is also a testimony to one of the worst hoaxes and frauds ever perpetrated by gun ban extremists: the phony claim that the phrase “right of the people” really means “right of only those people in state militia service” when firearms are involved.

There is no basis for such an assertion. Yet for years, those unable to legislate the Second Amendment away have shamelessly pursued a scheme to interpret it out of existence by convoluting its words and rewriting its history. They have actually argued, with a straight face, that one provision of the Bill of Rights doesn’t really apply to all Americans – just to some Americans.

Read the whole thing.  It’s sure to displease this particular hoaxster, since the The Court has no doubt put the brakes on his attempt to ban muskets.

Every year, the Independence Institute, which Dave Kopel is Research Director of, throws an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Party (not in that order).  Here are the pictures from 2008, held this past Saturday, June 28th.  I will say, I am impressed by a second amendment scholar with such a wide collection of marksmanship badges.

Here’s what 20mm rounds fired from the M61A1 Vulcan Gun on an F16 can do to a Chevy Suburban.  They say only 70 rounds were fired, which is basically a tap on the 6,000 rounds-per-minute Vulcan.

Joe Horn, who last year shot two burglars that had broken into his neighbor’s home in Pasadena, TX has been cleared by a grand jury.  It would seem that “because he needed shooting” is still an affirmative defense in the great state of Texas.

UPDATE: A time honored tradition, apparently.  The lesson here would appear to be: don’t break into houses in Texas.

UPDATE: A commenter adds:

… The law is not that you can just go and protect your neighbor’s house if you feel like it, the law is that you can protect your neighbor’s house if they have asked you to look after it for them. Also, the grand jury failed to indict not because of this particular law but because he shot the suspects in his own yard, proving to the grand jury that the suspects were then a danger to him, NOT simply a threat to his neighbor’s property…

That’s pretty much my understanding of the case here as well.  His argument was that the burglars came onto his property and threatened him.

Today is also the last day to vote for your favorite blogger to go to Blackwater with Todd Jarrett, and win a chance to go yourself.  It should be a pretty good time.  This time, instead of pimping myself, I’m going to ask if you haven’t voted for me, to pick some of the other bloggers who might need a few extra votes to push them over the top.  Some suggestions for bloggers who I think want to go but might need a few extra votes.

1. Keyboard and a .45
2. The Unforgiving Minute
3. Squeaky Wheel Seeks Grease
4. Captain of a Crew of One
5. Rustmeister’s Alehouse
6. Sharp as a Marble
7. The Ten Ring
8. The View from North Central Idaho
9. Traction Control

These are the folks I think are interested in going, but aren’t likely lock-ins.  So if you’ve already voted for me, thank you.  If you still want to vote for me, knock yourself out, but please consider voting for some of the other blogs on the list.  The most important thing to do is vote, since that helps all blogs.  They are only asking for your e-mail for the purposes of the contest, and you don’t have to opt-in for recieving e-mail from them.

If you’re not on this list, it means I don’t think you’ll need much help, or didn’t realize you were interested, so I’ll leave it to you to decide whether or not that’s a compliment or an insult.

DC has released this handy guide, which SayUncle tears apart.

Tonight is the last night to shoot the e-postal match.   I’m going to have to ask everyone who has results to e-mail them to me, if possible with a picture of your target.  I shot the match last night and scored a 10 out of 20 with my Ruger Mk.III with a Millett SP-1 red dot sight riding on top.  That’s about what I typically score outside, so this shoot is a pretty good approximation of the difficulty of the sport of silhouette.  I meant to shoot rifle silhouette, but when I pulled my .22LR rifle out of the case, I realized the bolt was missing, so I had to go home and search frantically for it.  I have found it, so I may go back tonight and shoot rifle.  You have until midnight to get your targets into me, but if you get them to me the next day, I don’t complain too much.  It’ll take me a few days to compile the score.

I did not manage to shoot air gun, as I had wanted to.  Just not enough time.

This time in Pittsburgh.  A Titanic exhibit gets flooded when a water main bursts.

Hat tip to Stormy Dragon

Looks pretty much like the same agenda they had pre-Heller.  Just as a warning to gun owners, everything except the terrorist watch list that they propose probably would be upheld by the courts.  And even the terrorist watch list issue I’m not sure about.  There’s still a fight to be had.

Dave Kopel has an excellent article in the New York Sun.  Interesting factoid I didn’t know:

As a Monroe County court accurately observed in the 1994 case Citizens for a Safer Community v. City of Rochester, “The Courts of this State have concluded that the language of federal law interpreting the Second Amendment (which is identical in its language to Article 2, section 4 of the Civil Rights Law) should be used in interpreting the provisions of this state law.”

Some New York courts have interpreted the New York right to arms restrictively, but these decisions were explicitly based on misunderstanding of the same language in the Second Amendment. The cases treating the Civil Rights Law as almost meaningless are of dubious validity now that Heller has made is clear that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” is a broad and important individual right.

So basically, the ruling in Heller reinterprets, under New York State case law, the meaning of their state right to keep and bear arms provision.  That doesn’t speak well for the future of the Sullivan Act.

I’ll put this in the category of “stupid airsoft tricks” if I had such a category.  I have to admit though, it’s kind of cool:

With high explosives.  I love the “End of Miller” bit too.

At least you are if you’re Oak Park, IL village manager, you think so.  Here’s an unintended consequence of Heller that’s going to be good for us.  You see, currently Chicago has no shooting culture.  It’s been, pretty much, completely eliminated because of the Chicago and surrounds’ gun bans.  Heller offers an opportunity for those cities to rebuild a healthy shooting culture.  I can’t think of a better use for an old warehouse than a nice, indoor, 50 yard indoor shooting range.  Can you?

Even Philadelphia hasn’t managed to eliminate its shooting culture, and we even have a few pro-gun state reps that represent constituents in the city.  There are constituents for the right to keep and bear arms within the City of Brotherly Love, and definitely within its suburbs (I’m living proof).  Suburban reps tend to either support guns rights, or are moderate on it.  Only in a few near-city suburbs do you get radical anti-gun representatives.  Even as bad as Nutter is on guns, his rhetoric is nothing like Mayor Daleys.  Nutter has to decieve to do what he wants.  Daley has no such restriction.

That may likely change.  Given the calls the Oak City, IL manager has gotten from people wanting to own handguns, it seems that it might change rather quickly.  If the anti-gun folks lose Chicago and New York as solid anti-gun enclaves, it’ll be over for them.  Once people have friends who are shooters, or relative, or neighbors, it gets a lot harder to maintain the level of ignorance needed to get them to sign onto the gun control agenda with any enthusiasm.

I don’t generally think too poorly of people using old clothes as rags.  I even do this myself.  But if you’re going to use a nasty old pair of Hanes whitey tighties, please don’t leave it at the range on the bench for other people to have to avoid it like the nasty, skid stained, plague infested monstrosity it is.  That is all.

Apparently in a French military demonstration, sixteen adults and children were wounded when someone mixed up blanks with live ammunition.  I wonder what kind of demo would involve shooting blanks at someone?  A firing squad demo?

This from an NPR article from today:

Village Manager Joe Wade says Morton Grove isn’t going to wait for a court battle. It’s going to act.

“The village of Morton Grove has every intention to comply with [the Supreme Court ruling],” Wade says. “We’re going to propose an ordinance that would eliminate the possession-of-handgun ban within the village.”

So that pretty much confirms it.  I did send an e-mail to them earlier, but have yet to hear back.  We shall see what happens here.

A truck, carrying a load of fire extinguishers, catches on fire in Lancaster Township, Pennsylvania.

This has to win a creativity award for the most utterly ridiculous gun control proposal I’ve ever seen in my life:

We propose a new way to prod gun makers to reduce gun deaths, one that would be unlikely to put them out of business or to prevent law-abiding citizens from obtaining guns. By using a strategy known as “performance-based regulation,” we would deputize private actors — the gun makers — to deal with the negative effects of their products in ways that promote the public good.

It then goes on to speak of a performance based system where gun makers would be rewarded for drops in gun violence, and penalized for increases in gun violence.  This presumes that there’s anything manufacturers can do about the fact that their products make their way onto black markets.  But they have an idea for that too:

How would gun companies go about reducing gun deaths? The main thing to emphasize is that this approach relies on the nimbleness, innovation and experimentation that come from private competition — rather than on the heavy-handed power of governmental regulation. Gun makers might decide to add trigger locks to their guns, or to work only with dealers who meet certain standards of responsibility. They might withdraw their semiautomatic weapons from the consumer market, or even work hand in hand with local officials to fight gangs and increase youth employment opportunities. Surely they will think up new strategies once they have a legal obligation and financial incentive to take responsibility for the harm their products cause.

Ah yes, the old canards.  Since they admit that Heller might mean they can’t just flat out ban these guns, now they need to offer incentives for no one to make them.  Because a revolver is so measurably less deadly than a semi-auto pistol?  Does it even matter if the “gun death” being spoken of is a suicide?  How does supplying trigger locks work unless someone uses them?  If this is what Heller has reduced our oppoents to, perhaps Heller is a bigger victory than I had imagined.

UPDATE: As a reader points out, this is pretty much the same type of business as the lawsuits the PLCAA was meant to put a stop to.  I mean, would we hold Ford accountable for drunk driving rates, or Zippo accountable for reducing the incidence of arson?  Drug makers for reducing drug suicides?

Firearms and Freedom looks at the question of whether Heller closes the door to machine gun rights, and concludes it probably does.  I think both sides of the machine gun issue can find support for their arguments in Heller, but I agree with Peter that the federal regulations on machine guns are probably largely safe.  That’s not to say that I believe there’s not room for litigation on the issue, but I would consider us to be very lucky if we could even get the federal courts to rule unconstitutional the Hughes Amendment to the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986, which banned any new machine guns from being registered for civilian use.

… self-defense whacko.  Bitter helps AHSA decorate their offices a bit.

Looks like a Pittsburgh man was arrested for openly carrying, based on a Pittsburgh ordinance that’s pretty clearly unlawful.  Open carry is forbidden without a license in a City of the First Class (i.e. Philadelphia), but that’s actually part of Pennsylvania Law, not a city ordinance.  Pittsburgh apparently decided it needed such a law too, and just passed it, in violation of the proscription of the state legislature.  I guess they don’t like the fact that under state law, Pittsburgh isn’t a first class city.

Tam points out that half of our Heller dissenters were put on the bench by Republicans.  By any measure, shifting the federal courts more toward the center has actually been one of the Republican party’s most stellar achievement, and even here, the best we can really say is “Well, Republicans tend to get it right about half the time.”  Really, the federal judiciary should be owned by conservatives right now, but it isn’t.  Yet moving the court rightward has been an accomplishment.

Republicans: even doing our best work, we’re still pretty damned incompetent.

They say a picture is worth 1000 words.  Well, Breda has a picture that I think basically defines women’s empowerment.  That’s one women who’s not going to be satisfied wearing the hijab for long.  This is the kind of cross-cultural pollination that will end up freeing individuals from the burdens of their cultures.

The principles of The Enlightenment, that are manifested in this nation’s founding documents, are among the most subversive and radical ideas that have ever been put to paper by man.  They are more powerful than entire armies.  Plant the seed, and they will grow, and there will be nothing that traditional societal power structures can do to stand in their way.

Morton Grove has joined Wilmette in suspending its gun ban.

Morton Grove Mayor Richard Krier said the village would comply with the law.

The Heller dominoes are falling.  One thing I hadn’t considered in all of this is that many of these Chicago suburbs have far less financial resources than Mayor Daley has at his disposal.  These towns may have been happy to maintain handgun bans as a symbolic gesture, as “an expression of the kind of community we want to be.”  But when it comes to actually spending tax dollars to fight a case in federal court, potentially all the way to the United States Supreme Court, I think they might just decide to fold rather than fight.

UPDATE: More here.

Says Paul Helmke:

The “slippery slope,” however, is now gone. The U.S. Supreme Court took it off the table yesterday in their D.C. v. Heller opinion. Government is now barred from “taking away” the guns of law-abiding Americans.

Because of this Court decision, proposals such as Brady background checks on all gun sales, limiting bulk sales of handguns, restricting access to military-style assault weapons, and strengthening the power of law enforcement to shut down corrupt gun dealers can now be debated on their merits without them being seen as a “first step on the road to gun confiscation.”

Yeah, except the slippery slope argument was only ancillary.   I’m still going to argue that you’re wrong, and that the laws are unconstitutional.  This changes nothing for us, but it does change a lot for them.  Now all these proposals have to answer to a very high level of scrutiny, because, you see, they infringe on fundamental constitutional rights.  Time will reveal this.