Gun Rights – Page 32 – A Geek With Guns

Guns are for Me, Not for Thee

The aftermath of shootings are predictable. Government agents and their cronies go on spiels about how we need to reduce the number of guns. At the same time they’re telling us that they need more guns:

WASHINGTON — The union representing airport screeners for the Transportation Security Administration says Friday’s fatal shooting of an agent at Los Angeles International Airport highlights the need for armed security officers at every airport checkpoint.

“Every local airport has its own security arrangement with local police to some type of contract security force,” said J. David Cox Sr., president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents the screeners. “There is no standardization throughout the country. Every airport operates differently. Obviously at L.A. there were a fair number of local police officers there.”

You have to love the state’s logic. It tells us that guns are both good and evil, that we need more and less, and that two plus two equals five. I think the rampant inconsistency inherit in statism is a major part of what I’m an anarchist.

There is also some dark humor to be found in the fact that the state wants to have more armed guards after every shooting but doesn’t want more people outside of its employ carrying guns. Apparently our lives aren’t as valuable as theirs.

Minnesota Carry Day and Safety Education Expo 2013

Looking through my recent posts I discovered that I had forgotten to actually publish this post. In the spirit of better late than never I hereby notify my readers that there will be a firearm carry and safety expo on November 2_nd at Zylstra Harley-Davidson in Elk River, Minnesota:

Minnesota Gun Owners Get Their Own Political Action Committee

Advocates of gun control have been trying to buy their way in politics for ages now. Seeing Michael Bloomberg’s actions in other state, including Virginia, to push for gun control the gun owners of Minnesota have decided to perform a political preemptive strike and start their own political action committee:

The Minnesota Gun Owners Political Action Committee will mobilize Minnesotans to support pro-Second Amendment candidates through grassroots efforts. The PAC also plans to endorse and financially support candidates in the primary & general elections in Minnesota’s 2014 elections for the legislature & statewide offices.

Why not? Politics is all about money. If you can’t entice politicians with money they’re going to go with somebody else. Part of the reason I find politics to be some hopeless is because I, unlike Bloomberg, am not a billionaire who can afford to buy politicians. Combined Minnesota gun owners may be able to outspend Bloomberg and preserve our current gun ownership privileges (I’m sorry, but I can’t refer to them as rights since we need the state’s permission to own firearms before we can legally do so).

Be Sure of Your Target

I’ve been thinking over the story of the 13 year-old shot by police for holding a pellet gun. Officers hit the teenager seven times out of a believed eight rounds fired. At first this lead me to one of two possibilities. Either the officer took glee in unloading rounds into the teenager or he had poor shot placement.

But another thought has crossed my mind regarding this incident. Since a police officer performed the shooting many people, including advocates of gun control, seem willing to assume fault on behalf of the teenager. We have little more than the officers’ words to go by since the teenager is dead. After 30 years of living on this planet one of the lessons I’ve learned is that police officers aren’t more honest than other individuals. In fact I’ve found that police officers are quite often dishonest. I’m not willing to simply believe the officers’ stories. Even the outcome of the investigation may be in question because the same organization that shot the teenager is performing the investigation. Having a monopoly on law enforcement and justice has its benefits.

Now let’s assume that the person who shot the teenager wasn’t a police officer but an average Joe with a carry permit. Do you think people would be blaming the teenager or the permit holder? My guess is that the permit holder would be the one receiving the brunt of the blame. We need only look at the shooting of Trayvon Martin to get an idea of how things may have gone down. Before any evidence was brought forth people would be calling for the permit holder’s head. The media would be reporting about how the horrible permit holder purposely shot the small child for no reason whatsoever. We would learn about how the kid worked at several local charities, excelled in school, and never did anything wrong. Every bit of dirt on the permit holder would be dug up and put under a microscope. The fact that the permit holder felt threatened by what he thought was a real rifle would be brushed aside. It would be written off as a lame excuse to get away with murdering a child in cold blood. Even if the evidence later exonerated the permit holder his life would be ruined by the media’s character assassination.

This is something to think about. As permit holders we are under far more scrutiny than police officers. While the average person, media, and courts tend to side with the police the same is not true for permit holders. I guess they believe that an officer’s costume and badge somehow make him morally superior to the common man. But my point is that life will be far different for us than it is for a police officer. While police officers get a paid vacation after shooting somebody we get to spend time in a cage. Media outlets will generally consider the evidence and explanations put forth by police officers after a shooting. As permit holders we don’t receive the same treatment. Ever grain of dirt will be brought out for the public to see.

The bottom line is this: we need to be absolutely sure of our targets. We have to be so sure of our targets that we’re willing to go to jail for the remainder of our lives over not defending ourselves. Equality under the law, at least here in the United States, is a myth. Police officers, as the state’s enforcers, receive special privileges that us serfs do not. Keep this fact in mind at all times and let it guide you in whatever manner you see fit.

The War on 3D Printers Has Begun

The United Kingdom has begun its war on 3D printers. Police in Manchester reported seizing parts for a 3D printable firearm:

British police have seized a 3D printer and components “suspected to be a 3D plastic magazine and trigger.” Police made what they’re calling a “milestone” discovery when executing a number of warrants in the Manchester suburb of Baguley late last night. The Greater Manchester Police Department says it’s the first seizure of this kind in the UK, where personal firearms are illegal without a hard-to-obtain permit. The parts have been sent for forensic analysis to establish if they could be used to construct a genuine firearm, and a man has been arrested “on suspicion of making gunpowder.”

In a prepared statement, Detective Inspector Chris Mossop called the discovery “really significant.” Mossop says that, if the components are genuine, “then it demonstrates that organized crime groups are acquiring technology that can be bought on the high street to produce the next generation of weapons.” He goes on to note that, as the components are plastic, they are easy to conceal and smuggle past current detection methods. “A lot more work needs to be done to understand the technology and the scale of the problem.”

I was fortune enough to attend a Sky Talk about the Liberator, the famous 3D printable handgun. The first thing anybody interested in 3D printable firearms should know is that the current technology is in the very early prototype stages. Plastic, as it turns out, isn’t the most sturdy material and firearms, being little more than controlled explosions inside of pipes, require a fairly sturdy material. Even if the Manchester police captured parts for a 3D printable firearm the bust wouldn’t have been significant. But they didn’t seize parts for a 3D printable firearm, which brings us to another issue police departments trying to enforce gun control laws are going to run into:

In what could turn out to be a major embarrassment for the Greater Manchester Police Department, the “3D-printed gun parts” could well be spare parts for a printer. Verge user Theobald02 points out that the parts look like upgrades to the Replicator 2 (the printer pictured above, which was also seized by the police). The “trigger” is part of an extruder, while the “magazine” is a holder for non-Makerbot filament spools.

3D printers allow for the rapid creation of new parts. This makes enforcing laws against manufacturing impossible to enforce. Police departments may seize 3D printed parts but will have no way to know exactly what those parts are meant for. Laws against thought are impossible to enforce and 3D printers are devices that effectively allow one to translate his or her thoughts into physical objects.

Make no mistake, the state is going to do its damnedest to crush 3D printers. The technology’s potential is too disruptive. If 3D printers became widely available they could destroy centralized manufacturing. Most centralized manufacturers are joined at the hip with the state. Those manufacturers provide the state whatever it needs and the state will protect those manufacturers from possible competition. This raid by the Manchester police is only the beginning. Thankfully, in the end, the state will lose. Suppressing a technology has never worked in the long run and it’s not going to work this time.

Decentralized Security

Centralized systems are traditionally fragile. Universal healthcare systems tend to have supply issues that lead to rationing. Highway systems managed by the state tend to be under construction for good portions of the year (at least here in Minnesota) with nothing obvious to show for it. And centralized security systems tend to be easily bypassed. While the world seems doomed to continue down the path to centralization at least some people are noticing the need for decentralization:

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Noble said there are really only two choices for protecting open societies from attacks like the one on Westgate mall where so-called “soft targets” are hit: either create secure perimeters around the locations or allow civilians to carry their own guns to protect themselves.

“Societies have to think about how they’re going to approach the problem,” Noble said. “One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves are so secure that in order to get into the soft target you’re going to have to pass through extraordinary security.”

Allowing the populace to arm themselves is one of the more effective solutions for decentralizing security. All of the “blood in the streets” and “shootouts at high noon” that were predicted by gun control advocates have never arisen. In fact no area that as loosed its prohibitions against carrying firearms has experienced an increase in violent crime. The logical conclusion is that removing those prohibitions isn’t dangerous for the overall population. It also creates a great deal of uncertainty for violent person because they cannot know for sure who is and isn’t armed.

Bruce Schneier often talks about whether or not plots can be developed around security systems. It’s very difficult for a violent person to build a plot around random bag checks because of their randomness. But it is easy to develop a plot around modern police protection. For starters, police response times aren’t instantaneous. If prohibitions against carrying firearms exist and a violent person’s goal is to kill people he knows that he will have several minutes until the police arrive. Several minutes is a lot of time when we’re talking about mass murder. In addition to having several minutes of free reign a violent person also has a decent idea of the tactics used by the police.

Both of these things go away when prohibitions against carrying firearms are lifted. Since a person with a firearm can be anywhere response times are not guaranteed to be in minutes. Likewise, most people who carry a firearm have no received any standardized training, so the tactics used will be less predictable.

It’s much more difficult to design a plot around an armed population than a centralized armed force. Centralization is one of the key things exploited by practitioners of fourth generation warfare, which is a tactic that relies on decentralized forces to attack centralized forces. The more centralized a system is the more fragile it becomes. In many countries the police have a virtual monopoly on force. Those countries have an extremely fragile security system that can be exploited by decentralized forces. It’s nice to see at least one member of the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) acknowledge this fact and I hope others will over time.

Why I Have No Time for Arguments in Favor of Prohibiting Criminals from Obtaining Firearms

One of the gun control community’s rallying cries is preventing criminals from obtaining firearms. I have very little time for this argument. It’s not that I want violent people to have a means of inflicting violence but, as Zero Hedge points out, the fact that we’re all criminals:

As James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and former defense attorney, notes in his excellent lecture on why it is never a good idea to talk to the police:

Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are ”nearly 10,000.”

If the federal government can’t even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?

As Supreme Court Justice Breyer elaborates:

The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.

For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.

If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

The number of crimes that exist in this country is so absurdly high that the word criminal effectively has no meaning. Felon is another word that has no real meaning. There are so many crimes that qualify as felonies today that most of us unknowingly violate approximately three of them every day. To say that all criminals or felons should be prohibited from owning firearms is the same as saying everybody should be prohibited from owning firearms. Under the current legal system of this country we’re all criminals. That’s something you should be thinking about the next time a gun control advocate starts arguing that we need background checks for all firearm transfers.

Minneapolis Police Unhappy with Gun Control… When it Applies to Them

Officers of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) are throwing a fit because the National Football League (NFL) prohibits anybody who isn’t an on-duty office from carrying a firearm into its stadiums. This policy means off-duty police officers must suffer the same treatment as us lowly serfs and view football games unarmed. Needless to say, they’re unhappy that they’re not being treated as privileged individuals:

The letter went out Sept. 11, 2013, telling all team owners and presidents that firearms are strictly prohibited within NFL facilities.

The crackdown on firearms concerns Minneapolis Police Federation President John Delmonico. He believes a call for off-duty officers to give up their weapons at the gate violates an officer’s rights, as determined by state law.

The Minneapolis Police Federation sites state law, Chapter 624, which gives police officers full police powers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In other words, they should be allowed to carry their weapons in any public place in the city.

“State law governs the facts that we can carry our guns off-duty in any public facility and any facility in the city of Minneapolis, which encompasses the dome,” Minneapolis Police Federation’s John Delmonico said.

I might be motivated to give a couple of fucks if the officers were arguing in favor of carry permit holders as well. But they’re not. The officers are just pissed off because they believe their badge should bestow them with special privileges. What’s the point of having the badge if it doesn’t allow one to break laws and rules without consequences?

Since the NFL is a private organization they should be able to make whatever rules it desires, right? Many libertarians have pointed out that the NFL should be able to declare what people can and cannot do on its property. I wouldn’t consider NFL stadiums private property. Stadiums are almost always financed with tax dollars. In my book receiving tax money makes me a part owner and I should be able to declare or ignore whatever rules I damn well please. If you want to be private property then you should have to pay for your facility yourself.

Of course this issue is unimportant to me, other than to demonstrate the fact that police want special privileges, because I don’t go to NFL games.

3D Printing with Metal

In the pursuit of manufacturing everything with 3D printers, a material limitation has continuously been encountered. Unless you’re willing to purchase a very expensive machines. Research is beginning to take off in this area though, which means more affordable 3D printers capable of working with metals are on the horizon. One organization that is beginning to look into 3D printing with metals is the European Space Agency (ESA):

The European Space Agency has unveiled plans to “take 3D printing into the metal age” by building parts for jets, spacecraft and fusion projects.

The Amaze project brings together 28 institutions to develop new metal components which are lighter, stronger and cheaper than conventional parts.

What’s interesting about the ESA’s pursuit is that it intends to manufacture parts capable of surviving high stress environments such as jet engines. One of the limitations of 3D printing with metal currently is the fact that printed metal parts tend to be weaker than mental parts created through other manufacturing techniques. If the ESA can create printed metal parts that are nearly as strong as metal parts created through other means we could be on the verge of something wonderful.

Obviously my interest is partially focused on firearms technology. I would love to live in a world where any state law against firearm ownership could be bypassed by the press of a button on a 3D printer. We’re at the early stages of such a world but the material limitations of current consumer 3D printers is providing some difficulties. Once that limitation is overcome we can print reliable firearms without the state having any knowledge.

Immunity from Consequences has Consequences

What happens when you grant a monopoly on violence to an organization and then grant that organization a monopoly on determining whether or not it used too much violence? Incidents involving over 100 round fired into a car occupied by unarmed individuals with no consequences for the shooters:

CLEVELAND, OH (WOIO) – Cleveland Police Chief McGrath announced results of disciplinary hearings for patrol officers involved in the deadly November police pursuit on Tuesday morning.

[…]

According to Chief McGrath, 64 patrol officers were found guilty of breaking policy. No one will be fired, and the longest suspension will be 10 days. 19 Action News has learned some officers were cleared.

[…]

On November 29, 2012, police chased a car with two people from Cleveland to East Cleveland. Officers first saw the car speeding and heard what appeared to be a gunshot coming from it. The driver refused to stop, and officers reported seeing a weapon in the car, but no gun was ever found. The 28-minute chase ended with officers firing 137 shots into the car, killing the driver, Timothy Russell and the passenger, Malissa Williams.

Firing 137 rounds into a vehicle in a city is pretty irresponsible by itself. But unloading that wall of lead because you heard something that sounded like gunfire is totally irresponsible. To make matters worse, the officers involved in the incident received nothing more than a paid vacation. In other words, the officers who demonstrated total irresponsibility suffered no negative consequences, which will almost certainly encourage such behavior in the future.

As a side note, advocates of gun control often ask why us advocates of gun rights are opposed to allowing the police to decide who can and cannot own firearms (advocates of gun control generally hide this demand under the label of “background checks”). The answer is simple: police officers in this country frequently demonstrate a complete lack of responsibility when it comes to firearm usage. I, for one, cannot see the logic in putting people who are irresponsible with firearms in charge of deciding who gets to own a firearm.