Snowflakes in Hell

When vacuuming under the sofa with the hand attachment, you hear the catch something with the suction. Pulling it out you realize it’s the phone you haven’t seen for a while. Every six months or so, I detail strip the house for a thorough cleaning. Since Bitter is away, and I am bored, now is one of those times. I’m hoping my missing Fenix LD10 flashlight shows up at some point.

The Republican candidate in the NY-32 race has dropped out, according to Jacob. The interesting thing is that NRA had endorsed the Republican early on, before Doug Hoffman had any real momentum. It’s probably not too late to switch the endorsement, but I don’t know if a orange card mailing could be prepared in time. I’m going to guess that Scozzafava will remain on the ballot. I hope this doesn’t effect Hoffman’s chances of taking the race. The Republican in this race was more liberal than the Democrat, so there’s a chance she was taking votes away from Bill Owens too.

Dave Kopel has an interesting piece in the Denver University Law Review on using blogs to bring law to the masses. Law is not a subject I knew much about until I started reading legal blogs, and then once I got into Second Amendment law, I devoured as much on the subject as I could read.

I think law is something that comes rather easily to engineers, since it’s basically just boolean logic system, but written in plain English. If (A || B || C) && !D && !E is true, you’re violating the statute. There is a system to it, and legal structures are less complicated than even simple microprocessors. Law also has obscure exceptions to generally given rules, which is something you also come across a lot in computer engineering. Computer engineers deal with bugs, just as judges must deal with poorly drafted legislation that yields absurd, clearly unintended results.

To a thought process that’s heavily oriented towards systems and logical structure, law provides, in many ways, much more interesting puzzles and conundrums. Unlike with circuits, where there’s just a right way and a wrong way to do things, law provides much more opportunity for philosophical exploration.

Take a look at Countertop’s coverage of the White House visitor log. I for one am glad we elected such a centrist and measured President. Such a sharp, sharp contrast from that extremist Bush.

Eugene Volokh refutes a line of reasoning that tried to argue that guns rights could be limited only to the home by making first amendment analogy to obscenity laws. Having lost on the big question, those who disagree with the Second Amendment will now try to do their best to limit its scope. Folks like Eugene Volokh will be important for our side in fighting that battle within the legal community.

A welcome step forward in the First State.

The diving boards that used to be ubiquitous at pools when I was a kid have disappeared because of lawsuits. Now it looks like baseball bats might go the same way.

A group of local enthusiasts of squash artillery are going to try to find out when they attempt a world record. These things are generally really big air guns. They are making their attempt in Utah, in hopes of taking advantage of the thinner atmosphere at elevation to get better distance. I guess that’s what they have to do now, is go for elevation, since at 700mph, you’re pushing the sound barrier. I can’t imagine pumpkins would survive intact because of the supersonic shockwave.

A few days ago Politico ran a story about how Lieberman was going to block Harry Reid’s plan on Health Care, and now he says he’s going to back Republicans in the 2010 elections. Someone in the Dem leadership or in the White House must have pissed in his Wheaties for him to take it this far.

The libertarian in me says that a landlord is a property owner, and ought to have pretty much plenary control over his property. But landlord-tenant law has been part of the landscape in state law for some time, and it seems to me that this kind of policy is something that directly impacts the health and welfare of residents, much like having a fire extinguisher or a smoke detector. I would think this is something the Tennessee state legislature can fix with a simple law change.

Jim Shepherd has an interesting report on the various species conservation groups.

Overlooked in the economic hubbub is the toll a bad economy takes on wildlife advocacy groups. Many depend solely on memberships and donations for their revenues. For many of those groups, the numbers have dropped – some precipitously. In fact, I’m hearing the numbers at a couple of the larger and more active groups have dropped as much as fifty percent. That is a serious knock on even their bottom lines.

It could be that some members were upset when 20 groups signed up to support Obama’s cap & trade agenda. Of course, that doesn’t explain nearly every loss, but getting involved in unrelated issues is usually a very good way to drive off members.

For some groups, there are other problems, including costly litigation with ousted former executives. Quail Unlimited, the oldest and largest of the quail groups, is under criminal investigation by the ATF unaccounted firearms; those investigations and management problems have splintered that organization, left it without an executive management team, and have state QU groups vowing to fix the organization – even if it means starting from scratch. In the meantime, the organization as surviving – but is essentially ineffective nationally.

Well that is interesting. I wonder if they are an FFL. But more importantly, where are the guns? Did someone decide they were an unwritten perk to membership? Speculation, but interesting.

While their situation is unusual, membership losses have led many groups to reduce staff and cutback on programs. Their ongoing wildlife programs have been invaluable resources to many state wildlife agencies also feeling budget squeezes.

Yesterday, I spoke with David Allen, President and CEO of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation about the situation. Allen was candid about the problems many organizations face. After all, he told me, RMEF had faced many of their own “challenges” over the past few years. RMEF, he says, is regaining momentum – and members – by focusing on realities and their core constituency -hunter conservationists.

“Some groups have been living beyond their means,” he said, “you can’t live in anticipation of money. Here, for example, I tell the staff ‘we won’t spend money we don’t have’. It meant downsizing our undertakings and cutting expenses, but it is just an economic reality.”

Allen says finances aren’t the single biggest challenge facing organizations. That, he says, is a one-word threat: complacency. Complacency, he says, is reflected in the fact that there are 1,000,000 elk tags sold annually – but only twenty percent of those hunters are RMEF members. While it’s unrealistic to presume all off them would ever become RMEF members, Allen makes a good case that the absence of that remaining eighty percent of elk hunters- as is true in any affinity wildlife group – deprives the organization of the two things that fuel their work: funds, and volunteers.

He remains convinced, however, that the single biggest concern for all wildlife groups can be summed up in a single word: habitat. Fighting habitat loss, unfortunately, takes time, money and volunteers. Today, many of the organizations are lacking in money and volunteers – and that may mean their time is running out.

“As a group,” he adds,”we also tend not to support each other and act as a group until there’s a crisis – then we overreact.”

Will all the groups survive? “Not without some consolidation, I’m afraid,” Allen said,”we have to find ways to get together for some of these groups to survive. I’m not optimistic everyone will.”

It’s good to hear that RMEF is surviving by being true to their main members and not hoping on board with the HopeChange plans just to curry favor in a temporary administration with declining numbers.

Gun Pundit points out that it’s continuing to drop. I would point out to the Brady Campaign that this is almost entirely a result of educational effort by gun owners to other gun owners, and did not require their usual prescription of government mandates. Instructors, Match Directors, Range Safety Officers, and various other opinion leaders in shooting have been beating people over the head with Jeff Cooper’s four rules for years, and it’s working. The shooting industry these days also provides lots of options to keep firearms ready for self-defense, but safe from small hands. Also all done without government mandates.

This is a success story that involves shooters taking responsibility for the health of their community, and it’s worked. Perhaps if gun control groups are really interested in lowering death counts, rather than trying to take away our rights, they could work with us to create other such voluntary culture shifting paradigms? I wouldn’t count on it.

Seattle recently passed illegal ordinances controlling guns in violation of state preemption,and the NRA is suing. This sounds oh so familiar. I happen to share Stefan Tahmassebi’s (Deputy General Counsel for NRA) opinion on this issue, as heard on Cam & Company:

Stefan is a regular on Cam’s show with the weekly Civil Rights Roundup on Wednesdays.

If you’re going to insult someone, and then later claim it was all just a joke, and in good fun, you should really at least make the joke funny.

The ruling can be found here in PDF format. There’s a lot of things to say about it. For one, it gives you an idea of what one must go through to get all the required licenses to get a gun in New Jersey. It looks like the problem for this guy started when one of his references said something negative. Eventually they decided to go this route:

At the end of oral argument on the appeal, the trial court asked the parties whether they would have any objection to the court communicating directly with appellant’s former employers regarding his fitness to own a gun. The parties consented to this unusual procedure.

Apparently that didn’t go well for him either, as his previous associates said he was a nut job, and shouldn’t have a gun. This is a bad plaintiff to make a constitutional challenge, unfortunately, but probably the biggest risk to our gun rights is cases like this being moved forward. There are plenty of people that get kicked around by NJ’s system that would make far more sympathetic plaintiffs. But let’s get back to the case:

We conclude that the trial court’s conduct of the proceedings on the appeal from the denial of appellant’s application for a permit to purchase firearms did not conform with the requirements of procedural due process set forth in Weston. Therefore, the order affirming the denial of that application must be reversed and the matter remanded for a rehearing conducted in conformity with Weston.

So essentially the guy won, because the trial court did not follow the legal procedure in order to approve or deny permits. But the court also addressed the constitutional issued raised. The issue was one of vagueness, arguing that a previous New Jersey ruling upholding the “unfit persons” standard needed to be reconsidered in light of Heller.

However, the Court expressly indicated that its holding did not require invalidation of statutes that require a license to purchase or possess a firearm.

The Court did not require it because it was not at issue in the case. The New Jersey Superior Court has before it a direct challenge to an aspect of licensing. It’s not intellectually serious to so casually dismiss the constitutional issue, as if the Court in Heller had upheld licensing. Licensing wasn’t before that court, it is before this court. So you can’t act as if they upheld licensing. They did not.

The appellant in this case also challenged based on the time it took to issue a denial. Court in New Jersey have long held the statutory requirement that permit be issued within 30 days is effectively without meaning.

Moreover, we do not believe the Legislature could have intended that a person who is unfit to own a firearm would be able to obtain a firearms purchaser permit based on such an automatic approval. Our gun control laws have the purpose of “keeping firearms out of the hands of all dangerously unfit persons, noncriminal as well as criminal.” Burton v. Sills, supra, 53 N.J. at 94; see also Heller, supra, ___ U.S. at ___, 128 S. Ct. at 2816-17, 171 L. Ed. 2d at 678 (noting that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill”). This salutary purpose would be seriously undermined if a person could obtain a permit to purchase a firearm based solely on a court’s failure to conduct a hearing within the thirty-day period required by N.J.S.A. 2C:58-3(d).

Except Heller does not support what you specifically mentioned New Jersey’s gun control laws were meant to do, which was “keeping firearms out of the hands of all dangerously unfit persons, noncriminal as well as criminal.” Heller didn’t say “longstanding prohibitions against on the possession of firearms by noncriminals the police say are dangerous.” There’s an element of having to be convicted or adjudicated in the Heller language, which this man was not.

Pretty clearly the Superior Court was not interested in taking Heller seriously, and I can’t say I’m surprised to see that kind of attitude coming out of a New Jersey court. New Jersey’s gun laws are a disaster for lawful gun owners, but the unfortunate thing for Garden State gunnies is there’s a lower hanging fruit out there. The real danger is that inexperienced people will begin challenging New Jersey laws immediately, before we’ve had a chance to get that low hanging fruit.  After which we’ll have more tools at our disposal to go after New Jersey’s permitting system, among other things.

SayUncle covers a media story that distorts a NJ Superior Court ruling that said NJ’s licensing and permitting system did not violate Heller.  One thing about New Jersey law though, the permits to purchase for handguns, and the FID card, are all shall-issue in New Jersey by law. Police can’t arbitrarily deny. The problem in New Jersey is the law that says they have to be issued within a certain period of time, and the police routinely ignore it. The courts in New Jersey generally aren’t all that interested in making the police follow the law. If you qualify for an FID or Purchase Permit in NJ, you will eventually get it, if you’re willing to follow through with things. But it can take a while. Years if you have a really bad local PD.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has the story here. Out of the 12 Mayors they have endorsed, 8 of them are members of Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and two of the races are currently MAIG towns. Any victories here will be touted as victories against NRA and against the “gun lobby” and will be used to boost CeaseFire PA’s credibility and political capital.

As I’ve said, MAIG isn’t a joke. They are probing for vulnerabilities. If they find we’re vulnerable at the local level, you can expect consistent challenges to preemption, and expect Mayors to use their own credibility to destroy your Second Amendment rights at the State and National level. We have to be as vigilant at the local level as we are at the state and national level.

Joe shows the T-shirt he wore through a TSA security checkpoint. I ended up in a conversation with a TSA agent once because of the shirt (or maybe it was a hat, I can’t remember exactly) I was wearing, because he was interested in buying a gun for himself, and was wondering what a good beginner pistol was. This was heading out of Philadelphia.

There are a lot of ways to get the conversation started.

… MAIG mayor Larry Langford of Birmingham, AL is found guilty  on federal corruption charges. I guess not really gone, because apparently being a criminal isn’t a problem for MAIG to continue to list you as a member of the coalition.

A video from Protest Easy Guns:

Did you know that they were developed for trench warfare? That they were meant for spray fire? That they were more dangerous because of the way they fired? Man, it’s just like they handed her that and said “Just get up there and talk, we don’t care if you have no idea what you’re talking about. Just make shit up that sounds scary.”

Assault rifles weren’t invented until the early 40s, and not deployed in warfare until 1944 — long after the era of trench warfare. Assault Weapons were invented by the California Legislature in 1989. A semi-automatic firearm can’t “spray” anything, except maybe oil if you over lubricate it.

Normally I’d give them hell about not allowing comments, but to be honest, I don’t on YouTube either, because YouTube comments will melt your brain.

Over at The Arms Room.

It seem this case could use some. If the guy is otherwise law abiding, does it really make sense to spend federal resources on prosecuting a guy like this? I know a US Attorney would probably say that if we took that attitude, the law would have no meaning, but I think I’d still be willing to cut a guy a break. It’s not like he robbed a bank, you know.

Not much I agree with Andrew Sullivan on these days, but I agree with what he says here:

If I were a GOP strategist, I’d obviously urge an independent-focused message based on skepticism of government mixed with a real practical agenda for change. I’d focus on the Congress, not Obama. [...] On social issues, the emerging pattern is clear: Americans are increasingly troubled by abortion on demand (although a plurality clearly favors legal abortion), they are increasingly hostile to gun control, and they are increasingly supportive of gay equality. These trends appear to be real and holding over time. It makes me feel quite the centrist. For the GOP, the message is pretty clear: mellow a little (but not much) on abortion. stick to your, er, gins on the Second Amendment, and for goodness’s sake, stop the gay-bashing.

That’s an agenda I’d buy into. But is the GOP listening?

I have here, thanks to reader Alex, a copy of the county by county numbers for 2008 for the number of Licenses to Carry issued in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The numbers are only a good estimate, taken by adding up the number of applications approved for a five year period for each county sheriff.  In total Pennsylvania issues 638,000 LTCs, or a total of 7% of the adult population.  Highest issuing counties, on a per capita basis, are Armstrong (20%), Cameron (19%), Potter (18%), and Centre (18%) counties. All predominantly rural, though Centre county is home to Penn State. Lowest on a per-capita basis is Philadelphia (still at 2.7% of the adult population) followed by Delaware, Montgomery, Chester, Northampton and Bucks (at 5.2% of the adult population).

Given these numbers, it’s amazing Arlen Specter thought it was a good idea to vote with Mayors Against Illegal Guns and vote against the Thune Amendment. Keep in mind many people in Pennsylvania have LTCs, but do not carry regularly. A little known fact, but Pennsylvania’s laws for transporting handguns in a vehicle without an LTC are as strict as New Jersey’s, so there are folks who have them just for transporting handguns in their vehicles.

If you live in a town with a MAIG mayor, this might be a big wake-up call to see these kinds of numbers. I’ll bet a lot of Bloomberg mayors have no idea how many LTC carriers they have in their county. All of which, presumably, would like their LTCs to be valid in other states, even if they are just transporting a handgun to go shooting, rather than for personal protection.

Kevin Baker shows at least one business in Arizona that there’s a cost associated with excluding gun owners.