Category: Gun Rights

Upgrading Your Order for Free

What do you call somebody who ordered a $400 television and received a $2,000 rifle? A very lucky man:

Seth Horvitz tells DCist that he had purchased a flat-screen HDTV for he and his wife from one of Amazon’s affiliated sellers. What arrived was a decidedly non-TV shaped box containing a Sig Sauer SIG716, a $2,000 rifle manufactured by Swiss Arms AG.

Semi-automatic firearms like the SIG716 are actually illegal in Washington, D.C. and even transporting them through the state is a serious crime. Horvitz called the cops upon discovering the box’s content, which was smart since keeping it in his home — or transporting it in his car — could have landed him in serious trouble otherwise. Attempting to return it could also have been very, very bad.

Considering the laws in Washington DC I think I would have kept my mouth shut. As the story points out transporting the firearm is illegal so one can’t bring it to the intended recipient, the intended recipient can’t collect it, and it can’t be taken to the police. On top of that mere possession of the rifle is illegal in the city. Basically Mr. Horvitz was in a catch-22 and his best option would have been to shut up, hide the rifle or smuggle it out of Washington DC, and if anybody came looking for the missing rifle to claim he never received any package (while possibly noting that he still hasn’t received the television he ordered, implying concern about packages being stolen).

This is another example of why gun control is absurd. The simple act of receiving a package accidentally runs the risk of landing one in very hot water with the local authorities. Fortunately the Washington DC police haven’t decided to prosecute Mr. Horvitz for being in possession of an illegal weapon but they could change their minds.

A hat tip goes to The Firearm Blog for this story.

Being Easily Offended

How can you easily offend the mayor of Washington DC? Easy, promote firearm ownership and safety to the denizens of that forsaken city:

A billboard in downtown D.C. promoting gun ownership and gun safety drew criticism from Mayor Vincent Gray.

“I think it’s offensive,” Gray said. “You know we work very hard to be able to enforce our gun control laws.”

[…]

Gray called the billboard irresponsible.

“To promote the use of guns in the city I think really is just anti-safety,” Gray said.

What’s irresponsible about firearm ownership and safety? Oh, that’s right, it’s offensive to the mayor because the Supreme Court told him that he couldn’t prohibit people living in the city from owning firearms. He’s offended because the Supreme Court stepped on his power trip.

The Ensuring Witch Hunts

Since the shooting in Aurora, Colorado it appears as though permit holders in theaters have become the new witches. Three individuals were valid carry permits were asked to leave a theater by police officers in Cookeville, Tennessee and now a permit holder was removed at gunpoint by police in a theater in Milford, Connecticut:

The theater house lights were illuminated as Officers entered. Patrons were told to raise their hands and file from the theater. As they exited they were patted down and escorted outside.

Officers identified the suspect and with weapons drawn, ordered the suspect to put his hands up. He allegedly remained in his seat while using his cell phone.

He allegedly did not comply with the Officers’ commands, and was taken into custody by force. Officers allegedly removed a loaded handgun from the suspect’s waistband at the small of his back.

The armed man, Sung H. Hwang, age 46 of New Haven, was handcuffed and removed from the theater. Hwang possesses a valid State of CT permit to carry a pistol.

If I’m ever in a theater (or anywhere else) and police officers come in demanding I raise my hands and submit to a pat down I’m going to do what Mr. Hwang did, simply ignore them. Nobody should readily comply with police officers acting outside of the law. Unless officers have a warrant or are arresting you there is no reason you should be expected to submit to a pat down.

Furthermore there was no reason for the police to draw their weapons on a man who wasn’t being hostile. If you or I pulled our weapon on somebody playing on their cell phone we would likely find ourselves in jail, the same should apply to the police.

When all was said and done Mr. Hwang was arrested, the charges being Breach of Peace and Interfering with Police. I don’t know how either charge applies as sitting in a theater isn’t breaching peace and simply ignoring the police doesn’t qualify as interfering with them. It’s too bad the same state that employes the police also controls the courts because Mr. Hwang, as far as I’m concerned, was kidnaped by the police officers and is due compensation for the wrong that was committed against him.

I’m already sick of this witch hunt against permit holders in theaters.

Legislation Being Pushed to Ban Online Ammunition Sales

The gun control advocates just can’t exploit the shooting in Aurora enough. First Schumer puts for an Amendment to a cyber security bill that would prohibit the transfer of magazines with a capacity greater than 10-rounds and now Lautenberg is putting forth legislation to ban online ammunition sales:

The Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act works through four components:

· It requires anyone selling ammunition to be a licensed dealer.
· It requires ammunition buyers who are not licensed dealers to present photo identification at the time of purchase, effectively banning the online or mail order purchase of ammo by regular civilians.
· It requires licensed ammunition dealers to maintain records of the sale of ammunition.
· It requires licensed ammunition dealers to report the sale of more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition to an unlicensed person within any five consecutive business days.

I wonder if my curios and relics federal firearms license (C&R) qualifies me as a dealer (I know I can get dealer discounts as several online firearm retailers)? If it does this legislation is so easily bypassed that it’s not even worth talking about. Even if a C&R doesn’t qualify somebody as a dealer I’m still not sure what the point of this legislation is supposed to be. Effectively it merely has the to potential make somebody wait a little longer to obtain large quantities of ammunition, and that’s only if they care about their purchase being reported. I’m also not sure where Lautenberg came up with the claim that online ammunition sales are anonymous:

U.S. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ), Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY4) and advocates from the gun safety community announced new legislation being introduced this week to make the sale of ammunition safer for law-abiding Americans who are sick and tired of the ease with which criminals can now anonymously stockpile for mass murder.

When you purchase ammunition online you must have it shipped somewhere and it must be paid for in some manner, almost always with a credit or debit card. I’m not sure if Lautenberg is aware of this but credit and debit cards are generally tied to a person’s name, address, and social security number. To say online purchases are anonymous is misleading at best. Then again I shouldn’t expect honesty from a politician, they lie for a living.

UN Arms Treaty Failed to Achieve Consensus

It’s funny, every state in the world seems to be preoccupied with disarming their serfs citizens but they can’t come together and agree on how best to disarm their citizens:

The US, followed by Russia and China, said they needed more time to consider the issues.

The BBC’s Barbara Plett at the UN said it was a disheartening end to a month of intense negotiations.

However, the conference chairman said he was confident a treaty could be agreed by the end of the year.

Some delegates accused the US of bowing to domestic pressure from the powerful gun lobby in the run up to presidential elections, our correspondent says.

On Thursday, a bipartisan group of 51 US senators threatened to oppose any agreement that infringed on the constitutional right to bear arms.

This is good news for us serfs, it means that we have a little longer under the United Nations (UN) comes to an agreement on how we’re going to be disarmed. Unfortunately I don’t think we’re going to enjoy this gridlock forever:

Despite the setback, conference chairman Roberto Garcia Moritan said the eventual adoption of an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) was inevitable.

The UN is nothing more than a big group of states coming together to better tyrannize use lowly individuals. States have a vested interest in disarming their people because states exist solely off of expropriating from their people. Eventually the people get sick of having all of this shit taken from them and decide to hold a good old fashion armed rebellion, which ends with a new government being put into place that either starts off as or eventually becomes tyrannical and must be overthrown (it’s such a vicious cycle, you would think we’d learn to stop creating states to steal from us). With all of that said there is some hope as the United States, China, and Russia make great deals of money on exporting arms. All three states have a vested interest in preventing this treaty from passing.

Schumer is Sending All the Wrong Signals

I’m sure you’ve heard that Senator Chuck Schumer has introduced an amendment to the Cyber Security bill that would prohibit the manufacture and transfer of magazines with more than 10 rounds of capacity:

Democratic senators have offered an amendment to the cybersecurity bill that would limit the purchase of high capacity gun magazines for some consumers.

Shortly after the Cybersecurity Act gained Senate approval to proceed to filing proposed amendments and a vote next week, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a sponsor of the gun control amendment, came to the floor to defend the idea of implementing some “reasonable” gun control measures.

Needless to say it’s sponsored by all the usual suspects:

The amendment was sponsored by Democratic Sens. Frank Lautenberg (N.J.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Jack Reed (R.I.), Bob Menendez (N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Schumer and Dianne Feinstein (Calif.).

Of course this amendment makes little sense. It’s being introduced as a method to protect individuals by restricting the maximum number of rounds a criminal can have in their firearm but the Aurora, Colorado shooter’s 100-round AR-15 magazined jammed. Considering that fact wouldn’t the proper response to the Colorado shooting be to encourage people to buy ridiculously high capacity and notoriously unreliable magazines?

I know many gun bloggers are going to tell you to contact your “representatives” and demand that they oppose this amendment. That’s good and all but I think we should have a backup plan, let’s figure out how to easily manufacture reliable standard capacity magazines. Obviously this is the agorist in me speaking but I think it’s time we started ignoring these idiotic prohibitions. If we can manufacture registered parts of AR-15s on a 3D printer producing magazines shouldn’t be too difficult. Attempting to ban something that every yahoo with basic metalworking equipment can produce in a few minutes is impossible and it sends a signal to the state, we’re done complying with your stupid rules, regulations, and prohibitions. To quote Howard Zinn, “Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority.”

In Other News Fire is Hot

Surprising nobody, Obama decided to use the recent Aurora, Colorado shooting to argue for more gun control:

President Obama has added his voice to the push for limits on Americans’ gun use in the wake the massacre last week at a movie theater in Colorado.

Obama, speaking Wednesday evening to the National Urban League, affirmed his belief in Americans’ right to own guns, but he singled out assault rifles as better suited for the battlefield.

“I believe the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms,” Obama said. “But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities.”

One cannot believe in an individual right to bear arms but then also believe individuals don’t have a right to bear arms. That’s effectively what Obama said. In fact his statement would have been more accurate if he stated, “I believe the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms that I approve of. However weapons I don’t approve of should be given exclusively to those under my direct command.”

Thanks to the National Firearms Act of 1934 AK-47s are heavily regulated firearms since they are machine guns. The Hugues Amendment then prohibited the transfer of any machine gun to non-police and non-military personell that wasn’t registered by May 19, 1986. Needless to say the price of AK-47s is through the roof because there is a very finite supply of transferable rifles and zero prospect of new ones entering the market. There are AK pattern rifles available for civilian sale but they are strictly semi-automatic and no different than any other semi-automatic rifle that can be fed with detachable magazines (in fact a Springfield M1A, which fires a 7.62x51mm cartridge, is more power than most AK pattern rifles yet is seldom mentioned by advocates of gun control). Of course Obama specifically mentioned AK-47s because the average American links AK-47s to terrorism and communists just as they link anarchism to chaos and violence.

Thankfully gun control has become the thirteenth flood of politics. It’s gets mentioned mostly in whispers but is rarely acted on. On top of that I’ve given up complying with the state some time ago, if they try to prohibit me from owning my AK pattern rifle I’m just going to give them the middle finger and keep owning it. If the state wants to stop me from existing peacefully then I will leave it up to it to initiate the violence.

Unintended Consequences of Gun Control Advocation

Unintended consequences are always interesting. Take gun control for example, the idea behind it is to reduce the number of guns in public hands but it has been one of the biggest sellers of firearms. Whenever gun control advocates come out and start talking about firearms they want to see banned it’s inevitable that sales of those firearms will go up. I think this stems from the success enjoyed by advocates of gun control in the ’90’s. During that time they managed to mandate background checks be performed on firearm purchasers and prohibited the manufacture and sale of new magazines exceeding 10-rounds in capacity and deceptively named assault rifles for “civilian” use. Like clockwork the gun control crowd is demanding new gun control measures in the wake of the Aurora, Colorado shooting and, as expected, gun sales are increasing:

The number of people seeking to buy guns in Colorado has soared since last week’s mass shooting in the US state’s town of Aurora, say law officials.

In the three days after the shooting, applications for the background checks needed to buy a gun legally were up 43% on the previous week.

[…]

Law officials said gun sales have in the past had risen after significant events, including the election of President Barack Obama and the shooting in Arizona which killed six people and injured Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in January 2011.

This is often attributed to fears that a mass killing could prompt the government to reconsider the Second Amendment to the US constitution, which gives people the right to bear arms.

I’m sure many of the people buying firearms after the Colorado shooting are doing so in response to the shooting itself and not the push for more gun control (after all, people want to have a means to defend themselves) but the irony of gun sales going up whenever gun control advocates start pushing is entertaining.

Failing to Grasp History

One thing is certain, a large number of people fail to learn from history. A letter printed in the Star Tribune demonstrates this fact:

After 9/11, it became much tougher to fly, with new bans and restrictions on what you could bring onto any commercial airliner, all in the name of safety, protecting us from people bent on mass killing. The rules may not be perfect, but they seem to work very well.

The big problem here is that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has failed to catch a single terrorist. In fact the shoe bomber, plot involving liquid-based bombs, and the underwear bomber all have two things in common; they happened after 9/11 and the implements meant to destroy the planes managed to get on the planes.

Those of us who pay attention to security-related news have a term for the new practices implemented since 9/11, security theater. The so-called security measures are nothing more than a show meant to make you feel safer but fail to actually make you safer. They’re expensive boondoggles that waste valuable resources on unproductive failures.

When the manufacturing of methamphetamine spiraled out of control, limits and actual databases were created to block the staggering amount of head-cold products being used to make meth. Not perfect, but working pretty well, according to recent statistics.

I’m guessing the author is referring to the restrictions on pseudoephedrine. You know, those restrictions that have failed to curb meth production and have added $1.5 billion to the actual cost of medicines containing pseudoephedrine? In fact this point ties in with the author’s previous point because the TSA have been caught assisting drug dealers in smuggling methamphetamine.

The author is correct about one thing, the laws aren’t perfect, in fact they abysmal failures that waste valuable resources that could be productively used elsewhere.

When drunken driving became an epidemic in this country, we cracked down and made the penalties much harsher. Not perfect by any means, but much better than it was.

I’m sure the author isn’t referring to civil rights violations like sobriety checkpoints that usually failed to catch any drunk drivers. Perhaps he was referring to Prohibition, which lead to a massive spike in the rate of violent crime. Interesting, according to that study, not only did Prohibition lead to a spike in violent crime but so did the war on drugs. Once again the author is correct, the means are not perfect, in fact they are likely worse than the problem they were supposed to fix.

When psychotic people, intent on killing as many people as possible, can buy unlimited ammunition, riot gear, assault weapons and bomb material with a simple driver’s license, a 30-minute background check (as in Colorado) and free shipping through the Internet, I have to question anyone who doesn’t support fair, equitable, common-sense decisions limiting how and what can be purchased.

And those of us who pay attention to history must question you for suggesting we implement policies that have been shown to fail. In fact the government itself admitted that the deceptively named assault weapon ban “has failed to reduce the average number of victims per gun murder incident or multiple gunshot wound victims.” On top of that, so-called assault weapons are rarely used in crimes [PDF]:

Proponents of renewing the ban claim that assault weapons are currently used in two-thirds fewer crimes than before the AWB,76 but other empirical evidence suggests that “assault weapons. . . are rarely used in crimes.”77 Fewer than ten percent of all murders and manslaughters involved long guns (of which semiautomatic rifles are a small subset).78 Contrary to the common perception, assault weapons are used in only about one percent of all police gun murders.79 The Justice Department study mandated by the AWB80 was also equivocal: noting that assault weapons are not commonly used in crimes and that Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) tracing statistics were down since the AWB, but that there were generally more weapons available to the public which could possibly reach criminal hands.81

Do note that the research paper wasn’t written by a pro-gun organization but by an individual that was hoping to find publicly acceptable forms of gun control. When those in favor of gun control fail to make an argument for banning so-called assault weapons then the cause can’t be considered anything but pointless.

Limiting purchases and monitoring through a database may never be perfect, but it certainly could reduce the carnage we witness over and over in this country.

JEFF HEIMER, Blaine

Except we already tried a ban on so-called assault weapons and, as I’ve shown, it didn’t reduce violent crime. Trying something that failed again, only harder, isn’t going to make it work. We have to face the fact that crazy violent people will do crazy violent things. No amount of legislation, restrictions, or other controls can change that. The only thing we can do is allow individuals to equip themselves to best deal with such situations when they arise.

The Rhetoric Currently Being Used by Gun Control Advocates

I’ve been searching around to see what the gun control advocates are currently saying and I came across some rather questionable content on Joan Peterson’s blog (she’s a Minnesotan who keeps trying to squash gun rights). What I found most interesting was the picture she included in her article to show the equipment used by the Aurora, Colorado shooter:

I recognized that guy from somewhere and after some digging I found him:

It would seem that the shooter in Colorado had access to military equipment that the military itself doesn’t have access to yet. In fact I believe I found the source image and where it was obtained from:

I wonder why they photoshopped his gun out of the picture. Oh, yeah, because that gun is a nonexistent prototype just like the armor but is far more obvious. It would behoove the gun control advocates to do a little research before Googling “scary looking guy in body armor” and using the first picture that appears (in all fairness I had to Google “future warrior 2020” to get the picture because “scary looking guy in body armor” turned up nothing close).

So we have proof that the gun control crowd are circulating pictures of, at best, prototype equipment and passing it off as the equipment used by the shooter in Colorado. The remainder of Joan’s article is nonsensical, mostly accusing the National Rifle Association (NRA) of, well, all of the world’s problems. I’m not sure how the NRA comes into this because they certainly do not advocate the use of firearms to commit massacres. In fact they advocate firearm safety and even host firearm safety training seminars. She also fails to provide citations for any of the numbers she uses. Considering the picture she used to demonstrate the equipment used by the shooter I’m not surprised she failed to provide citations for any of the numbers she use. When you’re stretching the truth or simply making things up it’s difficult to find citations.