Snowflakes in Hell » Guns

Department of Education Shotguns

Sebastian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:02:41 +0000

Ed Friedman explains what they are for. Who would have thought fraudsters and embezzlers in the Department of Education were so dangerous? Maybe the Federal Government needs to think about its hiring practices.

NRA: More Popular than Obama

Sebastian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:40:45 +0000

Good for us, bad for the Administration. Maybe it’s time for him to come around a full 180 and help push a major piece of pro-2A legislation through Congress. Maybe then we can lend President Obama some of NRA’s popularity with voters. Unfortunately, I give the odds on that somewhere south of having Rahm Emanuel showing up naked and screaming obscenities on Chris Cox’s lawn one morning.

Interview With Matt Carmel

Sebastian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:00:59 +0000

Check out this interview with Matt Carmel, owner of Constitution Arms, where he discusses his struggle to sponsor a Little League baseball team, and then sponsor a Rugby Team.

Paradox of the Day

Sebastian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:37:12 +0000

Tam asks a really perplexing question:

The Department of Fish & Game won’t let you shoot Bambi with full metal jacketed 7.62×51mm M80 ball because it would be inhumane.

The Hague Accords won’t let you use .308 Winchester 150gr. Ballistic Silvertips on enemy personnel because it would be inhumane.

Discuss.

Good question.

Premature Celebration

Sebastian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:29:56 +0000

The Brady Center are elated over two recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision in regards to gun rights. Two two cases are Commonwealth v. Runyan and Commonwealth v. DePina. Both cases rest a great deal of their reasoning on the fact that the Second Amendment is not incorporated against the state. In the latter DePina case, the entire Second Amendment claim would seem to rest on the lack of incorporation, and also on a related state case Commonwealth v. Davis, which gutted Massachusetts’ right to bear arms provision from its Constitution.

There is some glimmer of hope for the Brady Center though, in the Runyan case, the other leg on the Second Amendment claim was that Massachusetts safe storage law is distinct from that of the District of Colombia. The Massachusetts SJC notes:

Under this provision, an individual with a valid firearms identification card issued under G.L. c. 140, § 129C, is not obliged to secure or render inoperable a firearm while the individual carries it or while it remains otherwise under the individual’s control. A gun owner may therefore carry or keep a loaded firearm under his or her control in his or her home without securing it with a trigger lock or comparable safety device. The gun owner’s obligation to secure the firearm in accordance with the statute arises only when the firearm is stored or otherwise outside the owner’s immediate control.

That may be so, but the exception only provides for carrying or immediate control. Does that apply to sleeping with a loaded gun in your bedside drawer? It’s interesting that the SJC notes in Footnote Seven:

We note that the Court in Heller, supra at 2820, declared that its analysis should not be taken to “suggest the invalidity of laws regulating the storage of firearms to prevent accidents.” We do not, however, decide whether the defendant’s alleged violation of G.L. c. 140, § 131L (a ), could survive a motion to dismiss if the Second Amendment were made applicable to the States through incorporation under the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause.

To be honest, the SJC probably did us a favor by dismissing Runyan, because I don’t really like the facts of the case. Runyan came about because the mentally disturbed eighteen year old son of defendant Richard Runyan was firing a BB gun at his neighbor’s home. When police arrived, they asked the son if there were other guns in the house, which lead to the discovery of an unsecured rifle. Runyan was not home at the time. If G.L. c. 140, § 131L (a) is to be held unconstitutional, Runyan isn’t the case to do it with. The facts of the case are not good. It would be far better to pursue this claim with a defendant who was home at the time police discovered an unsecured firearm. Runyan also possessed an expired license for the rifle, as required by Massachusetts law, so that further complicates the claim. As it is, Massachusetts used to issue lifetime licenses, but later changed the law, so there are a lot of Massachusetts gun owners walking around with licenses that don’t have expiration dates on them, but are nonetheless expired because they were unaware of the change in the law.

We may have better luck going forward, but I would say this wasn’t the case, and that the Massachusetts SJC probably isn’t a favorable venue for future cases.

Flinging Pooh At Walls

Sebastian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:59:48 +0000

Maybe I need a better analogy, but I said a few days ago in a comment that gaining progress in politics is a lot like flinging pooh at a wall and betting on which pieces of s**t stick. To be successful, you need to fling a lot, until you find the right kind of turd, then repeat the performance as many times as you can.

This is an example of that, only the turd fell off the wall. Time to try again. And really, we never really meant to fling that turd anyway. It was a mistake in turd selection. The goal is to try to get the Delaware Housing Authorities to respect the Constitution. We can accomplish that through legislation or a lawsuit. For various reasons (good reasons in my opinion), NRA is more comfortable with the former than the latter. But we can use the latter to push along the former. I suspect this is going to be one strategy going forward. We can spritz our turds with olive oil before flinging now. It helps with adhesion.

IGOLD 2010 A Great Success

Sebastian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:18:55 +0000

With six to seven thousand people descending on the Illinois Capitol in Springfield, here’s a round up of all the main stream media coverage of the event:

All Your Joyce Funded Research Needs Now Online

Sebastian — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:08:45 +0000

Need some data to back up your anti-gun views? Now Joyce is helping make your life easier. You can find the site here. All the research on the site is funded by the Joyce Foundation, of course.

Joe Grace Opposes Pro-Flintlock Measure

Sebastian — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:40:55 +0000

If you had asked me what pro-gun bills might be at the top of my priority list, I might have ranked making sure Pennsylvania has an official state gun somewhere down with a house resolution making next February “Gunsmith Awareness Month”. That said, I don’t have any issue with Pennsylvania making the rifle named after the state (don’t let those dirty Kentuckians tell you it’s a Kentucky Rifle) its official gun.

Capitol Ideas is reporting that CeaseFire Pennsylvania is taking a position against this muzzle loading, black powder, flintlock being our official state gun, suggesting that “The last thing the Pennsylvania General Assembly should be doing is designating an official state rifle.” Next time I see some gang member toting around a muzzle loading flintlock, I might at least understand the opposition, even if I don’t agree with it. But do we really have to have a debate about this?

Joe Grace would no doubt prefer a debate about “Lost and Stolen” ordinances, and he says as much, but Joe needs to explain why he’s gotten almost two dozen municipalities to pass these ordinances, yet we have zero prosecutions. Two of those municipalities are Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. You’d think if this was such an important crime fighting tool, it might have been used once or twice by now.

IGOLD 2010 Live Coverage

Sebastian — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:13:34 +0000

Looks like Thirdpower will be at Illinois Gun Owners Lobby Day (IGOLD), but if you want to track the happenings live, check out Illinois State Rifle Association’s Twitter Feed.

OSU Campus Shooting

Sebastian — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:05:28 +0000

Dave Hardy points out the response from their director of public safety. These are the bureaucrats they believe you should rely on for your protection. I went to school in West Philly. The area we were in wasn’t too bad, but outside of University City, things could get dicy. I remember similar advice being doled out by campus security.

I never had any illusions about whether our campus security would protect me — I knew they wouldn’t. During a heated Teamsters strike, I once witnessed a group of Teamsters threatening a driver who tried to run their picket line. He started an altercation with one of the picketers, who then swarmed and surrounded him, and were obviously looking to teach him a lesson. Campus security bravely stayed on their radios until the Philadelphia Police arrived several minutes later to deal with the malfeasance, and haul off several of the union thugs.

I did not carry during my time in college, since I didn’t get an LTC until I was 28. But I do think students who meet the requirements for a state license to carry ought to be able to carry on their campus. I can understand a university’s concern about firearms in dorms, but there are ways we can deal with that problem that don’t have to leave qualified students defenseless, especially on urban campuses surrounded by bad neighborhoods, like the university I attended.

Oregon is a POC State

Sebastian — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:16:33 +0000

SayUncle covers a pretty disturbing story about a guy in Oregon who was fired from his government job because he was supposedly disgruntled, and bought some guns, which the police noticed. Uncle asks, “Seems they knew he bought guns from the background checks. He did not purchase multiple handguns in a week which makes me wonder how the police got this info.”

The answer is easy. Oregon is a Point-Of-Contact state for the NICS system, which means Oregon, like Pennsylvania and many other states, has its own system. While funding restrictions prevent the feds from storing information related to background checks, there is no such restriction on the state point-of-contact. The POC provision was put in place by the Brady Act, which allows states to run systems that is an alternate to the National Instant Check System. It’s possible the police have access to the Oregon Instant Check System records, which is how they found out about his purchase.

The Pennsylvania State Police have been abusing PICS for years to operate what we still claim is an illegal registry of firearms sales in Pennsylvania. We’ve had cases where gun owners, being pulled over in traffic stops, have had guns seized from them because when they were run, they were not “registered” to them. Most often this happens because the gun was brought in when they moved here, or any number of other reasons. We’ve also had cases where gun owners have been involved in self-defense incidents, where no charges end up being filed, but during the investigation to police come for the rest of their guns that are in the registry.

This is not uncommon among POC states, and one of the reason some state groups are pushing to have PICS eliminated, and to use the federal system. Our Uniforms Firearms Act was supposed to forbid making a registry out of the PICS data, but the State Supreme Court, in a great example of mincing words, said because the database is incomplete, it’s not a “registry” by law, and therefore the State Police were permitted to keep it. Sounds like a registry to me. Gun owners should start to consider whether, perhaps, they might be better off using the federal system, rather than allowing state level abuses of POC systems. It hasn’t worked out for Pennsylvania gun owners very well, and it looks like it’s not working out very well for Oregonian gun owners either.

Ask an NRA Board Candidate

Sebastian — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:18:57 +0000

Same as last year, we will be conducting interviews with selected candidates for NRA Board. Also the same as last year, I’ve set up a form so that people can submit topics they’d like to see covered or submit questions.

[contact-form]

In the interest of respecting the candidates’ time, I won’t be able to ask every question, but I will try to cover the best ones submitted. Questions will be kept entirely anonymous to the interviewee, and will not be revealed, so don’t be shy about asking anything. The interviewee will have no idea whether it’s a reader question or one of mine.

I’ve included every candidate we’ve endorsed in the question list, but I won’t be interviewing all of them. Though, I will make a special effort to get an interview with a candidate if there are a lot of questions for them.

NRA Board of Directors Endorsements

Sebastian — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:00:59 +0000

Carol Bambery
As everyone who reads Dave Hardy knows, Carol Bambery is one of the hardest working Board members at NRA. For us, her skills and background with the National Firearms Law Seminar stand out because she works hard on this program to help keep other attorneys up-to-date on the latest issues in the gun legal world. Carol also serves as Vice Chair of the Women’s Policies Committee and also worked to make sure that women’s voices were heard in both McDonald and Heller with special briefs. Carol is the kind of hard worker who can often be overlooked by those who don’t pay close attention, but that should indicate she’s not doing this for any glory. She’s in it because she’s clearly passionate about our rights.

Graham Hill
Graham would make a great addition to the Board based on his background working the Hill for sportsmen and gun owners. His addition to the Board would be a great infusion of fresh energy and perspective. He knows how to make things happen, and I believe he’ll serve gun owners of all stripes particularly well. You can read his bio in the magazine that shows he’s got experience with the favorite EBRs while being selected as Hunter of the Year for SCI and promoting access to the shooting sports for the disabled. This guy is truly well rounded – a shooter and hunter who also knows how to work with Washington.

Ken Hanson
Ken Hanson is an accomplished Second Amendment attorney with a long record of pro bono work on gun rights. He hold the legal chair of the Buckeye Firearms Association, and the author of “Ohio Guide to Firearms Law” now in its Third Edition. Ken was also Counsel of Record for briefs filed in both D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago for both the Buckeye Firearms Association and the US Concealed Carry Association. In addition to that he fought a number of cases in Ohio State Courts, including the Ohio Supreme Court, fighting to preserve Ohioans right to carry and upholding state preemption. Ken’s record of accomplishment on the legal front is highly impressive, and I think he’d make a great addition to the NRA Board.

Cleta Mitchell
Anyone who has met Cleta remembers Cleta. To say she knows her stuff is an understatement. As an attorney in DC, she specializes in political law – an area that is never easy to practice given the many shades of gray purposefully added to so many laws and regulations dealing with those issues. We know her involvement in the efforts to overturn McCain-Feingold, and Bitter picked up details on non-profit/advocacy law during a lecture from her a couple of years ago. In her bio, she reports that she was part of the effort to defund ACORN. For that alone, she deserves to be the top vote getter this election.

Bob Sanders
Bob brings a very useful background and specialty to the Board – two decades with the Department of Treasury. As an attorney who represents gun owners and folks in the industry, his specialized knowledge is worthwhile for many of the issues that NRA deals with in its various divisions from ILA to reviewing court cases. We consider this an asset worthy of your vote, as do other Board members who cite him as a great candidate.

Pete Brownell
Pretty much anyone who knows guns knows the Brownell name. In addition to being a great company, Brownell’s is also an unwavering supporter of the Second Amendment, and does quite a lot with the community. We’re very pleased with Brownell’s efforts with new media outreach, and believe Pete can bring some of that knowledge and expertise to the NRA Board. Pete already serves on a number of related board, including Knife Rights, POMA, USA Shooting, and Pheasants Forever.

Tom King
Tom has been an early supporter of NRA’s outreach efforts to leaders in New Media. In addition to that, he’s a successful blogger in his own right, being one of the few members of the NRA Board to have a blog hosted with a mainstream media outlet. Tom is President of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, and is a seasoned fighter for gun rights in New York State, which as you can imagine, is not an easy state for gun owners. Regardless, his record speaks for itself. New York State has not passed any anti-gun or anti-hunting legislation for a decade, and gun owners have managed to make some progress in the other direction. New York is an important state for gun owners, and it’s important to keep Tom on the NRA Board.

Sandra Froman
Bitter did a very long post about Sandy’s endorsement-worthy background during her last campaign. Much of that still holds true today. Froman is one of the most feisty advocates you’ll meet at NRA. She is out raising money to endow the programs side of the organization and testifying before the Senate against Sotomayor. She is a wildebeest hunter who got into the issue due to self-defense after a man tried to break down her door. As a Harvard Law & Stanford graduate female from the Bay Area, her activism is the kind that makes the folks at PETA, HSUS, and the Brady Campaign cry at night. Keep them shedding tears and vote for Sandy.

Governor Matt Blunt
We decided to endorse Gov. Blunt as a fresh political voice on the board. There are a handful of lawmakers on the Board of Directors with varying levels of involvement and sway in the world of politics. We believe that Gov. Blunt would bring a youthful new energy as a politician, provided he participates on the Board. Learn more about Gov. Blunt’s biography here.

Jilted Again

Sebastian — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:17:07 +0000

Looks like we were a bit premature in celebrating Matt Carmel’s success in his quest to sponsor a sports team:

Matt Carmel’s quest to get the name of his business, “Constitution Arms,” on a team uniform has come up short again, with a rugby league that initially accepted his sponsorship doing an about-face under pressure from other sponsors.

He says this will mark the end of his quest. This is how bad the culture has gotten in New Jersey.

Firearms Law Seminar

Sebastian — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:03:16 +0000

Looks like I’ll be attending the Firearms Law Seminar this year at the NRA convention in Charlotte. This is something I’ve always meant to attend, but things have been so busy previous years this is the first year I really have a chance.

If I were a lawyer, this would count toward Continuing Legal Education, but they do have a reduced fee for lay persons who want to attend. I think this should be very interesting and educational. Some of my favorite names in Firearms Law will be presenting.

Brady Thinking, Late 19th Century Style

Sebastian — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:04:51 +0000

Cemetery:

[...] one of the complaints, of smokeless cartridges, by police, was that during gun fights, they could not see where the bad guys where. Because there was no smoke to place their locations.

So Brady thinking would dictate, because it’s about LEO’s safety much like bullet encoding and microstamping, that smokeless technology be outlawed.

Sounds about right to me.

Matt Carmel Gets His Team

Sebastian — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:01:41 +0000

Morris Rugby has accepted Constitution Arms as a sponsor for their rugby team, since they were rejected by the little league. Rugby is probably responsible for more bloodshed than guns anyway.

Indiana Gets its Own Hawkins Ruling

Sebastian — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:11:22 +0000

In PA the ruling was called Commonwealth v. Hawkins, and ruled that an anonymous, unsubstantiated report of a “man with a gun” was not sufficient evidence to justify a Terry stop. Now it looks like Indiana has a version of the same.

Dick Jokes

Sebastian — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:03:35 +0000

I don’t know how many leaders in the gun control movement drive pickups, but it seems to me this would be the perfect kind of trailer hitch cover for them. Why not make the statement everywhere they go?

Daley Counterattacks

Sebastian — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:59:00 +0000

Looks like Daley is firing a return volley at the Second Amendment just as his city’s handgun ban looks to have a very limited future. What’s surprising is he openly admits this is a counterattack:

“The aggressiveness of the gun advocates is just one reason it’s more important than ever that we work for common-sense gun laws focused on stopping the flow of illegal guns into our communities and keeping the guns out of the hands of the criminals,” Daley said, standing next to tables loaded with weapons confiscated by Chicago police.

Dave Hardy notes that there would be vagueness issues with at least one of the laws. I’m not sure what the point is of closing any gun show loophole in Illinois either, since you are required to have an FOID card to possess firearms in that state. What the point of the licensing if they are still going to claim there’s some kind of “loophole”?

The whole point of these, however, is just to get back at gun owners. Daley won’t be happy unless he’s pissing on the Second Amendment, and he doesn’t appreciate the residents of his city demanding their rights. He’ll teach you!

IGOLD 2010 is tomorrow. Let’s hope for a strong turnout so maybe gun owners in Illinois can teach Mayor Daley a lesson for a change.

Jacob Sullum on Open Carry

Sebastian — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:50:56 +0000

I was eager to read his opinion on this topic, because despite being friendly on the gun issue, he’s a bit of an outsider to it. He didn’t really commit one way or another, but he brought up an interesting point:

Beyond the legal and practical issues, of course, there is the question of whether open carry activists are helping or hurting the cause of gun rights by popping up in coffee shops and restaurants with weapons on their waists. Respectable, law-abiding people carrying guns openly in public places could help normalize gun ownership and armed self-defense among people who are unfamiliar with both. The experience of a Walnut Hill, California, pizzeria owner who decided to welcome gun carriers is consistent with that hope:

“Frankly, I wasn’t sure how I would feel in that type of situation, and it really turned out to be a total nonissue,” Ms. Grunner said.

“The families were great,” she said. “These were very gracious people.” The fact that customers wore sidearms, she said, “just faded into the background.”

Then again, the sight of people with pistols on their hips could serve to confirm prejudices about gun owners among people who believe they fetishize their weapons and seek to project a macho image. The goal of encouraging support for liberalized concealed carry policies depends to some extent on normalization yet at the same time assumes open gun toting will make people uneasy. I’m not sure people can be simultaneously reassured and alarmed.

This statement, in combination with some other statements folks have made in the comments, makes me wonder whether your opinion on open carry is largely driven by your perception of what the dominant thinking is around you, and that perhaps the open carry folks have a more optimistic outlook on the attitudes of their fellow Americans than non-open-carry supporters.

From my point of view, I think most people, if forced to take a side, probably wouldn’t support carrying a gun in public if it meant they were going to see guns everywhere they went. I don’t want the public thinking about how they feel about it, because I worry we’ll lose support. But I suspect open carry folks believe that if the public is forced to think about it, the public will eventually take their side, and we’ll gain support. Which side is right? Probably depends greatly on the surrounding culture. I suspect neither side is right in every circumstance, but it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. The Starbucks incident may end up being a watershed moment in the debate.

Defense Carbines

Sebastian — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:19:59 +0000

Tam has a pretty good post on the subject. I have both a 20″ and carbine length AR. I shoot the 20″ more often because that’s what I compete with when I shoot CMP/high-power. I’ve shot a few practical matches with my carbine, but I would consider it my go-to gun in a home defense situation if I kept it at the ready. It’s the keeping it at the ready part I’ve never been able to bother with.

Maybe I’m just not all that committed to home defense, but it’s always been easier or me to rely on a pistol for those purposes. I have to remember to lug a carbine back down to the safe if I’m leaving home for any period of time, then to get it back out again when I return. While, I have home-defense-appropriate fragmenting ammunition for the rifle, unless it’s a seriously messed up situation where I have time to go downstairs and unlock the safe, I’m probably going to be using my Glock.

I’ve always considered a rifle or shotgun to be a pain in the butt to deal with for home defense. What solutions do you guys use that would that would allow it to be used for home-defense, but avoid the scenario where someone breaks into the house and steals it, or worse, uses it against the returning homeowners?

How to Commit a Gun Felony in Massachusetts

Sebastian — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:53:45 +0000

It’s the sad truth.

Smells Like Bullshit to Me

Sebastian — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:40:55 +0000

This story of a Russian kid designing a new electronic sniper rifle looks like bullshit to me, and considering it’s coming from Pravda, it probably is. The reason I think it’s a hoax is that we’ve never been able to make portable electromagnetic weapons that can shoot a projectile fast enough to rival chemically driven projectiles in energy, speed and ballistic performance. It’s quite possible the kid has successfully built a coil gun, but it’s not going to be killing anybody anytime soon. At least not hooked up to a portable power source weighing less than six kilos.

Secondly, even if the kid is a super genius, and developed something that can be accurately classified as a weapon, any device that propels a projectile beyond supersonic speeds will not be silent. At the least, the projectile will make a cracking noise as it travels faster than the speed of sound. Also, Newton’s Third Law will demand the rifle has recoil, and they claim it does not.

You can see a fairly sophisticated coil gun here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s getting a projectile moving pretty good, but not at speeds high enough to be an effective weapon, and it’s still going to be a smooth bore barrel. Someday maybe, but not now.

h/t to SayUncle