I won the gun blogger contest with ParaUSA. Heading to Blackwater’s training facility to shoot between 1,000 & 1,500 rounds with Todd Jarrett.
Also, a little birdie told me that ParaUSA will be going live with their AR-15 that you got a sneak peak of here.
And a big thank you go those of you who voted for me!
The NYT author who said Knoxville was referred to as “the couch” by locals but could not actually name a local who called it that has a bit on Knoxville in Garden and Gun magazine. In other news, there’s a Garden and Gun magazine. I actually did know that as my dentist’s office has it.
While shooting with my nephews, one got a bit excited and ran forward from the firing line before we called it cold to check the target. I kinda put my arm in front of him and said the range was hot. He stopped. Then he mentioned the four rules; all the range rules; sight alignment & trigger squeeze; and all manner of other things we discussed. He looked at me and said:
Sorry, but it’s a lot to keep up with.
It is, indeed.
HR 6310 will allow the firearms and ammunition industry to pay the FAET on a quarterly basis, the same payment schedule as every other industry that supports conservation. Currently firearms and ammunition manufacturers must pay the FAET bi-weekly. This payment schedule forces many manufacturers to borrow money to ensure on-time payment, and industry members spend thousands of man-hours administering the necessary paperwork to successfully complete the bi-weekly payments — monies that are due long before manufacturers are paid by their customers. This legislation will not lower the amount of conservation dollars collected by the tax.
National Review looks at his time at the Joyce Foundation:
During Obama’s tenure with the Joyce Foundation, donations to anti-gun groups increased dramatically. For example, in 1997 and 1998 the Violence Policy Center received $221,000 and $360,000 from the Foundation; those grants and donations increased to $1 million in 2000 and $800,000 in 2002. In all, during Obama’s tenure, the group received $15 million from the Joyce Foundation.
Barack Rob Van Winkle Obama’s record on gun control can be found here.
So, after all the festivities this Fourth of July, we had the in-laws over. And I had the pleasure of teaching two nephews (age eight) and my niece (age seven) gun safety. I printed off the four rules and had them each read the rules. Told them they’d be quizzed on the rules later too. They memorized and were reciting the rules pretty quickly. They were very excited about shooting.
After, we broke out the Gamo 220 Hunter, a rest, and a mat for shooting. Explained the rules of the backyard range (i.e., don’t cross the firing line; range hot and cold, etc.). I take the first shot so they know how the gun sounds.
First round of targets were at about 10 yards and I had stuck some Shoot-N-Cs to a 3/4 inch board. First nephew lines up his shot after I explain how to address the gun in the prone position; how to line up the scope; squeeze the trigger and do not snap it; etc. First round connects. Second nephew barely missed and I told him he pulled the gun. The niece missed as well. I attributed that to nervousness.
After that, all three were dead on. We shot all manner of can, water bottle, box, and more Shoot-N-C targets. They all took their targets home to show their friends.
I told them they could come back any time and we’d do it again.
Junior was invited. She came and watched the first shot by her cousin and then grew bored. Hard to keep a four year-old entertained when there’s a lot of just standing around.
The News Sentinel’s Jim Balloch has a piece on the decision:
The decision does not specify to what extent guns may be regulated. Expect some big battles to come over that issue.
And:
But more was at stake here. Whatever your view of guns, you should endorse this decision and be sickened by – even angry – over the shameless and disingenuous attempts of dissenting Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens to reserve part of the Bill of Rights for state governments and deny it to citizens.
Ouch.
I’d like to thank R. Neal for linking to this PDF creator. This has saved me so much time standing in front of a damn scanner. The only issue I have with it is that it won’t do multiple worksheets in Excel and you have to do each worksheet separately.
Title 18, section 925(d) of the United States Code provides that certain types of firearms may be imported into the United States. Among these are firearms “generally recognized as particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes.” … [T]he ATF determined that the BD44 was not importable under section 925(d)(3) because it was not “generally recognized as particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes.” Plaintiff challenges the ATF’s decision. Plaintiff argues that the ATF’s interpretation of section 925(d)(3) is arbitrary and capricious, and seeks damages for lost income resulting from his inability to sell BD44s to prospective military re-enactors
Additionally, plaintiff said all bans are unconstitutional. The court ruled in light of Heller that plaintiff’s challenge fails that test.
Seems to me that the way to challenge this would be under the sporting purposes language. After all, one could import a weapon suitable for self-defense and that would seem to pass what was laid out in Heller.
More info here and here. Looks like another case of someone screaming SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED and representing themselves. I told someone offline that we need to get someone to challenge the MG ban. And not because I think MGs will be unbanned. Rather, because I don’t want someone challenging the ban doing more damage.
Seems we’ll be arguing the details for a while.
Petition to Allow Concealed Handguns In The UK.
I dunno but I think I’d start by getting handguns unbanned and making self-defense legal again first.
Over 700 comments. I don’t know that any I read (I only skimmed as last I checked there were only 100) took the ACLU’s side.
Because it’s fun to stir shit up and get under people’s skin, and because the blogging will be quiet for the holiday weekend, I just had to link this comment by Bruce Baugh at Obsidian Wings:
I’ve said this before and will again: the very heart of the “widespread gun ownership checks tyranny” argument has been tested and failed completely.
For twenty years or more, political discourse in a whole lot of online forums was swamped by people telling the rest of us how the US was getting ever more tyrannical, and that the day would come when on some flimsy pretext the government would abandon habeaus corpus, engage in unlimited surveillance of everyone it felt like spying on, arrest people on arbitrary grounds and then abuse them any way the captors felt like, and so on.
It turns out they were right about that part.
They also told the rest of us that when this happened, they would rise up en masse. They would free unjustly held prisoners, put terror into the hearts of agents of tyranny, maybe even overthrow the tyrant him/herself. (As the ’90s went on, the hypothetical tyrant was increasingly likely to be portrayed as a woman.) And did they? Did they hell.
There are no martyrs from the RKBA crowd. Their organizations sometimes join in efforts mostly initiated and staffed by others, but apart from objections to a handful of specific proposed restrictions on gun sales and such, one hears of no RKBA leadership on any of the rest. To the contrary, one hears a great deal of cheerleading for warmaking abroad and tyranny at home as long as all the right people get it, and one hears silence. Where are those freed prisoners? Nowhere. Where are those terrified agents? Nowhere. It was all the purest bloviation.
It’s really very rare for such ambitious claims about what one will do oneself and what one’s allies will do in a moment of profound crisis. But Bush/Cheney gave us all the chance. And all of you going on about how guns keep the republic safe and free are completely full of it. All the things you warned us about came to pass, and where are you? Right here with the bulk of us, and well behind some – there are individual posters here who as single people have done more actual good for American liberty than half the membership of the NRA and such groups.
It’s liberal lawyers, academics, journalists, and the like who are actually pressing the government, pretty much, and liberals at large funding them, while conservatives and libertarians (with way, way too few exceptions) either cheer and keep voting for the tyranny or sigh and shake a finger and then keep voting for it. The RKBA claims about guns’ role in society are demonstrably false for America at the beginning of the 21st century, and no amount of dithering over 18th century will change that. The Second Amendment as constituted is useless not because of then, but because of now, because of you its champions.
PS: It will of course be a glad thing if the bloviators ever do get serious about fighting tyranny, because tyranny is really bad and needs all the opposition it can get. But I’m not holding my breath waiting – it seems like we are instead well into the phase where all the loyal cheering section for the tyrant busily tries to pretend they didn’t say things. I fully expect lawsuits against Google, the Internet Way-Back Machine, and the like from right-wing legally minded folks who wish their embarrassing words better hidden.
But hey, always glad to see clues, if and when they break out.
You see, tomorrow is not only the day we celebrate that time when Santa and the baby Jesus joined forces to defeat the Seleucid Empire using candles and divided up a fish to drive the uwole-clad British to the sea, where they saw their shadow which meant six more weeks of telethons.
Wait, that’s not right. I get my holidays confused. But regardless, it’s also when my wife’s family reunion is happening. So, no blog for you.
Have a happy independence from the British day.
And come back with all your fingers.
My dad’s got one of those. He used to shoot nickels out of the air with it. And he will attest that one should never take them apart.
Uncle links to some Gun Law News analysis of Heller’s footnote 27, which concludes “Any law, to pass a constitutional challenge on Second Amendment grounds, must pass a strict scrutiny test.”
There’s no way in hell 2nd Amendment regulations will have to survive strict scrutiny. Sure, gunners will argue for strict scrutiny, but they’ll never find 5 votes for it.
The Gun Law News blogger makes a good effort, but there are a few things he might have missed:
Strict scrutiny is the highest level of review and it is almost impossible to pass. It is only applied when courts want to use a test that will be failed. And it is almost never applied outside of 14th Amendment cases involving racial classification.
Ever since strict scrutiny was invented, the S.Ct. has been backing away from it, which is why sex/gender discrimination under the 14th Amendment is covered by intermediate scrutiny. Intermediate scrutiny is the test used for discrimination cases that aren’t about race. It’s a high standard, and anything that smells bad fails this test. It was invented so that judges could either (a) reach for a test the case will fail or (b) make it look like the regulation passed a high bar of analysis.
Below intermediate and strict scrutiny is the lowly rational basis review. This is the test judges apply when they want a law to be upheld. Virtually no law fails this test.
Outside of the discrimination context, laws don’t really bump up against this scale. Rational basis appears a lot in cases, but the higher levels of scrutiny aren’t applied. Instead, various balancing tests are used. In the first amendment context, for example, courts weigh the appropriateness of time, place and manner restrictions, look for narrow tailoring, etc.
The crux of Gun Law News’s argument is that Heller says the courts are going to apply the substantive due process tests from discrimination cases to 2nd Amendment laws. To get there, the blog reads the court’s reference to “any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights” as including strict scrutiny. But I’m not aware of any S.Ct. application of strict scrutiny to any enumerated rights.
And while it’s true that footnote 27 says 2nd Amendment laws must pass a test higher than rational review, that test will likely be some sort of balancing or line-drawing test, just like with all the other enumerated rights.
What all of this adds up to is that the S.Ct. hasn’t ruled that strict scrutiny applies. And because strict scrutiny has at times been unwieldy in the race cases, I can’t imagine 5 votes for it. Strict scrutiny for 2nd Amendment cases would mean that almost no regulation of guns is permissible, and I just don’t see the court going that far.
Disclaimers: I’m not a constitutional law scholar or practitioner. My clients deal with these issues sometimes, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert. I haven’t read Heller all the way through yet. It’s on my list for this weekend. All of the above is just, like, my opinion, man.
Senior Norfolk Judge Henry Coke Morgan held in a local federal case the day after Heller was decided that the individual right created by the Second Amendment does not impose any obligations whatsoever on state or local governments: only the federal government.
Discussion about technology making Heller obsolete here and here.
My thoughts are that arms doesn’t just mean guns. Of course, part of Heller stated that common weapons were protected. One way to limit more technologically advanced weapons would be to ban them so that they never become commonly used, like the .gov did with machine guns.
Armed and Safe looks at gun laws for AOWs: 10 years and a quarter million dollars–for a handle
Don’t even get me started on the shoulder thing that goes up.
Al Qaeda’s Plan C is smaller scale stuff. Some of us have been saying that for a long time.
Anti-gun crusader Bloomberg talks about how guns get into his city. And he basically blames everyone but his city. It’s a bit ironic that the NYPD can’t account for one out of three weapons.
We keep seeing articles that state Heller means it’s OK to vote Democrat now because they can’t ban guns. And a few bits that make it seem they’re pro-gun. The flipside now is that McCain’s association with anti-gun groups is also being highlighted. There is a bit of a difference, though. McCain has since changed his tune. And has had an A rating from NRA since 2007.
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
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