Tag: Irrelevancy the Anti-Gunner’s Other Nightmare

Federal Judge Slaps Down California’s Prohibition Against Possessing Standard Capacity Magazines

I’ll end this week in a high note. California passed a law that would prohibit the mere possession of standard capacity magazines. That law was set to take effect tomorrow but a federal judge slapped it down for obvious reasons:

A federal judge on Thursday blocked a California law set to take effect Saturday that would have barred gun owners from possessing high-capacity ammunition magazines.

The judge ruled that the ban approved by the Legislature and voters last year takes away gun owners’ Second Amendment rights and amounts to the government taking people’s private property without compensation.

California law has prohibited buying or selling the magazines since 2000, but until now allowed those who had them to keep them.

“Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of otherwise law-abiding citizens will have an untenable choice: become an outlaw or dispossess one’s self of lawfully acquired property,” San Diego-based U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez wrote.

Granted, the State seizing property without compensating its rightful owner isn’t new. Civil asset forfeiture has allow the State to get away with doing so for decades now. However, this prohibition didn’t even have the pretext of a law, other than itself, being broken, which is a new step in legal depravity and apparently one that went too far for one federal judge.

I also find myself laughing at the fact that the judge noted that this law would turn “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of otherwise law-abiding citizens” into criminals. If that criteria was always applied then no laws would get passed since all of them turn otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals. Although I believe it was unintentional, that judge was a man after my own heart when he issued that statement.

Gun Control is Futile

I know that I’ve beaten this horse to death but people still call for gun control so I have to keep pulverizing the equine’s carcass. Today we’re going to travel to Brazil, where gun control laws are pretty strict.

The reason gun control is futile is because a gun is something that can be easily built with a few modest tools. Police in Brazil recently confiscated a homemade machine gun. Unlike a lot of homemade guns, this one is actually pretty nicely finished and decently designed:

The pistol shown above, chambered to the .380ACP round, has an unusually decent overall finish and came with a very large capacity (30-round +?) box magazine. The tubular receiver extends to a muzzle area extension made of a brass-like material. The magazine housing just ahead of the trigger guard is a box-like structure, the ejection port being vertically-located there. Since no fire-selector or applied safety devices are visible, it would seem that the contrivance is a full-auto-only gun (confirmed in one of the videos), as it’s often the case with such DIYs. Sights? Who needs them?

Truth be told, guns aren’t unique in being impossible to control. Anything that has been created can be copied. But the simple the device is the more easily it can be copied. Trying to control the spread of any technology is futile and it only becomes more futile with simpler technologies.

You Gotta Pump Those Numbers Up

With Hillary running for president and Obama occupying the White House, last year was a good year for the firearm market. Gun sales were up, ammunition sales were up, and the number of issued carry permits were up. Even a socialist paradise like Minnesota saw a record number of issued carry permits:

Law enforcement issued more than 71,000 permits to Minnesotans allowing them to carry a firearm in public, a record one-year total and a sharp increase from 2015, state officials said Wednesday.

As of Wednesday, the total number of valid permits in Minnesota was 265,728, the highest total ever reported in the annual release from the Department of Public Safety’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Roughly one year ago, that total was 217,909.

Of course, those are rookie numbers and, unfortunately, I’m expecting that number to drop. Politicians who favor gun control are the best thing going for the firearm market. When people are told they won’t be able to buy something in the near future they rush out and buy it. Standard capacity magazines will fly off of the shelf when politicians start whispering about passing legislation restricting magazines to 10 rounds. AR-15s and AK-47s will fly off of the shelf when politicians start whispering about banning modern rifles. The best way to bolster the sale of something is to get a politician to threaten to ban it.

The New Face of Gun Ownership

If you listened to gun control advocates you’d believe that all gun owners are middle aged fat white guys who want to killed anybody who is political liberal or has dark skin. The reality is quite different. Gun owners are a diverse bunch and are becoming more diverse every day. Some people joined the ranks of gun owners because they enjoy the sports, some became interested through the video games they played, and some joined because they realized they needed a means of defending themselves. Now people are joining the ranks of gun owners because they are concerned about the direction the United States government is going:

But instead FBI background checks for gun transactions soared to a new record for a single day – 185,713 – during the Black Friday sales on 25 November, according to gun control news site The Trace.

Some of this has been put down to gun retailers selling off stock at reduced prices, but there have also been reports of more “non-traditional” buyers, such as African Americans and other minorities, turning up at gun shops and shooting ranges.

Lara Smith, national spokesperson for the Liberal Gun Club, says her organisation has seen a “huge” rise in enquiries since November’s election and a 10% increase in paid members.

Some of the new members are reluctant first-time gun owners, says Smith, concerned that isolated acts of aggression against minorities could escalate into something more violent and that a Trump administration will dismantle key constitutional rights, leading to a “more fascist rule than the US has ever had”.

The club, which has nine chapters and members in all 50 states, aims to provide a forum for people whose political beliefs do not fit the traditional right-wing gun enthusiast stereotype.

This is great news in my opinion. I believe the mantra that an armed society is a polite society so expanding the ranks of gun owners can only help make our society more peaceful. I also believe that the best way to maintain and expand gun rights is to expand the demographics of gun owners. Historically gun control advocates have had a great deal of success in more politically liberal areas such as New York and California. If more political liberal individuals become gun owners then gun control will become a toxic issue for the politicians they give money to, campaign for, and vote for.

There are many good arguments for owning firearms. Barring personal preference or issues such as a mental disposition that may lead you to harm yourself or others there are few good arguments against owning firearms.

Apparently CNC Machines Don’t Exist

Cody Wilson stirred up a lot of controversy when he released designs for the Liberator, a single shot pistol constructed with a 3D printer. Why did a pistol constructed of materials that were guaranteed to fail after firing relatively few shots and couldn’t be scaled up to a powerful caliber? Because most gun control advocates have no concept of how guns work. That leads them to fear imaginary devices such as the mythical Glock 7 from Die Hard, which lead to the passage of the Undetectable Firearms Act. Another reason is that most gun control advocates are apparently unaware that computer numerical control (CNC) machines are a thing:

Even after reading his book, I’m still not sure what he means by this. Sure, plenty of open-source zealots favor software that can be edited, freely, by anyone. However, there is a crucial distinction here: no software, until the one created by Wilson and his followers, has ever been used to create a physical device that fires lethal bullets.

The Liberator was not the first gun created using software. In fact most modern guns are initially created using computer aided design (CAD) software, frequently simulated in software before being created, and sometimes built using a CNC machine. Software has been used to create guns for a while now. What Cody Wilson did wasn’t revolutionary, it was evolutionary. He managed to make a firearm with inferior equipment and materials that provided the most basic requirements to qualify as a firearm. I don’t mean to understate his contribution to firearms manufacturing but his real revolution, in my opinion, was to illustrate how irrelevant gun control is, especially as we march into a future where home fabrication will become easier and be able to utilize better materials.

Technology has always been the death knell of centralized control. While gun control advocates cling to their belief that a powerful central government can make all of the bad things go away the rest of the world is moving on and doing what it damn well pleases. I don’t fear gun control because I realize it’s a lost cause. Cody Wilson helped illustrate that to the world with the Liberator.

Carry Permit Applications Spike in Florida

While gun control advocates are always quick to tell people they need to be more vulnerable, common sense seems to reign supreme. It’s not uncommon in the wake of a mass shooting for carry permit applications to spike. The most recent mass shooting in Orlando is a prime example of this:

Thousands of Floridians are looking to take personal safety into their own hands after the massacre at an Orlando nightclub last month.

In May, the Florida Department of Agriculture distributed more than 20,000 applications to people interested in a concealed weapon permit or other firearm license. That number jumped to more than 36,000 in June, according to recently released numbers.

The applications are either sent by mail or downloaded from the department’s website.

One of the reasons mass shootings are so frightening to the average person is because they demonstrate just how helpless unarmed individuals are against an armed individual. Gun control advocates, unwilling to face that fear, pray to their god, the State, to make all the bad things go away. People willing to face that fear take matters to mitigate their risks in case they find themselves in such a position. A byproduct of this practical attitude is that the general public becomes less vulnerable as more people within it are able to resist armed attackers.

The Next Stage In 3D Printed Firearms

Proving once again that technology overcomes legal restrictions, a new stage in 3D printed firearms has been reached. Instead of a single shot pistol that’s difficult to reload we now have a 3D printed semiautomatic 9mm handgun:

Last weekend a 47-year-old West Virginia carpenter who goes by the pseudonym Derwood released the first video of what he calls the Shuty-MP1, a “mostly” 3-D printed semi-automatic firearm. Like any semi-automatic weapon, Derwood’s creation can fire an actual magazine of ammunition—in this case 9mm rounds—ejecting spent casings one by one and loading a new round into its chamber with every trigger pull. But unlike the typical steel semi-automatic rifle, Derwood says close to “95 percent” of his creation is 3-D printed in cheap PLA plastic, from its bolt to the magazine to the upper and lower receivers that make up the gun’s body.

Heres a video of it firing:

As the article notes, the gun isn’t perfect. The plastic around the barrel apparently starts to melt after firing 18 rounds if sufficient cooling time isn’t given. But the pace at which 3D printed firearms are evolving is staggering. In a few short years we’ve gone from the single shot Liberator pistol to a fully functional semiautomatic pistol. It won’t be long until practical 3D printed firearms are designed.

What does this mean? It means prohibitions against firearms are less relevant. Prohibiting something that any schmuck can make in their home isn’t possible. Alcohol prohibition and the current war on drugs have proven that.

Correlation And Causality Are The Same Thing, Right?

Opponents of self-defense are becoming more desperate as they become more irrelevant. Advocates of self-defense have thoroughly crushed the claims of their ideological opposites over the years so you would think the issue would be put to rest. But it isn’t. Instead opponents of self-defense have been busily massaging data until it fits their narrative. Their latest exercise in massaging data was to look at the rate of firearm ownership and the number of officers killed per state:

Using a regression statistical analysis, the authors found that occupational homicide for law enforcement was correlated with higher rates of firearm ownership. The analysis controlled for the violent crime rate, which indicated that these higher rates of homicide couldn’t simply be attributed to more frequent violent crimes occurring in states with higher rates of gun ownership. Instead, higher rates of law enforcement homicides were associated with more frequent encounters with violent criminals and with more frequent exposure to situations where privately owned firearms were present.

However, there were limitations to this study related to the gun ownership rates. There is no standard measure of annual firearm ownership rates—while the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System is widely considered to be the best measure available, questions about gun ownership were only included in the survey for three years: 2001, 2002, and 2004.

I think the first thing worth pointing out is there’s no way to know how accurate the study is because there is no standard measure of firearm ownership. The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System is a survey so the answers are based on the information voluntarily divulged by participants. Firearm ownership, which the study has asked directly about, is something people are more likely to not volunteer information about.

The second thing that needs to be pointed out is that this study established a correlation:

The authors conclude that higher levels of private firearm ownership increase the likelihood that law enforcement officers will face life-threatening situations on the job. The authors state that a 10 percent increase in firearm ownership at the state level correlated to 10 additional law enforcement homicides over the 15-year period that was examined in this study.

Apparently the authors don’t understand that correlation does not imply causality. Correlation justifies further study of a phenomenon that appear related. But you shouldn’t state a conclusion based on a correlation. There are other possible explanations for a correlation between firearm ownership and the number of officers killed on the job. For example, officers being killed on the job may convince people to purchase firearms for self-defense. In that case a higher number of officer deaths could lead to a higher rate of firearm ownership.

So today’s lessons are, one, studies based on data of an unknown quality are questionable at best and, two, correlation does not imply causality.

Professionally Built Illicit Firearms

As an advocate of self-defense and an agorist I always enjoy stories that involve both. Opponents of self-defense have worked hard to put laws in place that restrict access to firearms. But laws are mere words on pieces of paper and cannot stop human action. We’ve seen countless examples of illicitly manufactured firearms but they generally appear to be rather crude. Now a mystery manufacturer appears to be illegally producing professionally built firearms and distributing them in Europe:

Pictured is an unknown 9mm machine pistol which has been seized in the Netherlands and more recently in the UK. ‘R9-Arms Corp USA’ appears to be a fictional company, suggesting it has been manufactured illicitly. The model is made to a very professional standard with a milled receiver and slide, perhaps even produced in a former legitimate arms factory in a country such as Croatia. It appears to accept an Uzi type magazine and can fire semi or fully automatically.

The ATF in the USA were consulted on its origin and apparently had no matches on record.

Manufacturing a firearm isn’t rocket science. Firearms are pretty simple mechanical devices and the tooling needed to manufacture one is already fairly affordable and only becoming more so every day. But manufacturing them on a large scale without getting caught still requires skill and it appears Europe has somebody with the necessary skills.

In addition to providing a means of self-defense outside of the state’s control the act of illegally manufacturing and distributing firearms also ensures taxes aren’t siphoned to the very beast that attempts to hinder people’s access to self-defense tools. It’s a win-win. Hopefully we will see more mystery firearm manufacturers in the coming years.

This Is How The Brady Campaign Treats Those It Exploits For Public Relations

After the shooting in Aurora, Colorado the Brady Campaign found a family to sucker into filing a frivolous lawsuit against Lucky Gunner, the website the shooter ordered his ammunition from. The judge threw out the case and ordered the plaintiff to pay Lucky Gunner’s legal fees. Everybody following this lawsuit has been wondering if the plaintiff would appeal the decision. Now they’ve made an official statement saying they won’t:

Since a federal judge ordered the parents of a victim killed in the Aurora theater massacre to pay more than $200,000 in the defendants’ court costs, they said they’re forced to drop their appeal of the ruling because another loss may force them into bankruptcy.

[…]

With attorneys from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the couple sued Lucky Gunner and other retailers with the intended goal of changing company policy and ultimately public policy in regard to gun and ammo sales as opposed to monetary gain.

This should serve as a cautionary tale not to get involved with the Brady Campaign. If the family is concerned that they would be forced into bankruptcy if they appealed the decision then the Brady Campaign must not be covering the costs. You would think the organization would do the right thing and back up the plaintiffs it has been abusing for public relations purposed. But like so much trash the family has apparently been discarded.