David Codrea:

The comment period for the HHS proposal will end in 62 days, on March 10. Comments can be submitted via an online form at Regulations.gov.

David is covering the proposed mental health rollout by the Justice Department as part of the new executive orders on gun background checks.  Go to the Examiner article for links to online forms for submitting comments.  This is something I will be doing.

We’ve covered this before, and you know my position.  The mental health profession cannot sustain the weight and burden being placed on it by the presuppositions inherent in the new rules.  It behooves us all to make comments so as to protect our neighbors as well as veterans who are swept into this category from PTSD and related maladies.

Kurt Hofmann:

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reports that U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has written a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, asking how the BATFE will be defining “armor piercing” ammunition, which would thus be denied to the general public.

I’m glad that Kurt is following this.  I was unaware that this was still an issue, preferring to think instead, perhaps wishful thinking, that this was all just a bad idea floated by the tyrants to see how we would react.  This has become habit for them, i.e., law-making by federal register.  So would 5.56 mm “green tip” ammunition become illegal?

The secret courts have approved three more months of NSA phone snooping.  Of course they did.  And the number of times this has been done by the secret courts?  Thirty six.

I do love Jerry Miculek, but it appears that he has talked S&W into making a 9mm, eight shot revolver.  I’m not sure what Jerry was thinking, but I won’t be buying one.  Thanks, but I’ll stick with my .357 magnum (and maybe spring for a .44 magnum and .22 magnum).  I’m certain that Guns.com has it wrong when they say:

While there will always be people who want 9mm revolvers in service-sized and snub-nosed packages — 9mm offers a lot more power over standard .38 Special loads in a considerably shorter cartridge and doesn’t have the sting, flash and bang of full-house or even reduced-power .357 Magnums — in truth 9mm revolvers have never seen a lot of success in the U.S.

Sorry, this just has to be flat-out incorrect.  The 9mm cannot possibly offer more power out of a revolver than the .38 or .357 magnum.  The point of the 9mm in the striker-fired pistol is the high chamber pressure, which approaches 35,000 psi because of the confined space.  Put into a revolver without the enclosed chamber and the pressures won’t reach that high.

On a related note, there are two competing issues regarding chamber pressure in handguns.  First, the larger the round (and thereby the higher the charge), the higher the chamber pressure – up to a certain point.  For very large calibers such as the .45 ACP, the enlarged barrel opening through which pressure can relieve (almost half an inch diameter) causes a lower chamber pressure for the .45 (which approaches 25,000 psi).  The turnaround point for chamber pressure (i.e., the peak pressure where larger barrels reduces the pressure and smaller barrels reduces the load) is the S&W .40, which is why the .40 has such a “snappy” feel to it when you shoot it.

Mike Vanderboegh covers the issue the dishonestly named affordable health care act, veterans, PTSD and guns.  To all of my military and former military readers, please, please, please go read Mike’s piece.  And be very careful what you say to doctors, who you choose for doctors, and for what maladies you seek treatment.  Big brother is listening.

Finally, WRSA has a piece on urban centers and government center of gravity (CoG) operations within that context.  It’s an interesting article and I recommend it to you, along with the comments.  I have a piece coming at some point on David Kilcullen and his focus on what he sees as the future of state warfare being in littoral, urban centers.  I’m still developing my thoughts on the subject.

A North Carolina family is demanding answers.

North Carolina prosecutors promised Monday to get to the truth — “wherever the truth leads”—  in the death of a mentally ill teenager whose family claims police shot him in cold blood over the weekend.

Keith Vidal, 18, of Boiling Springs Lakes, was shot and killed Sunday afternoon, authorities said.

At least three law enforcement agencies responded after the family called for help just after noon, saying Vidal was in the midst of a schizophrenic episode.

Vidal was declared dead of a gunshot wound at a hospital.

Jerry Dove, chief of the Southport police, one of the responding agencies, said at a news conference that Detective Byron Vassey, a nine-year veteran of the department, had been placed on administrative leave. He wouldn’t say whether Vassey was believed to be the officer who fired the shot.

[ … ]

Mark Wilsey, the young man’s stepfather, told reporters that the family called police to help subdue Vidal because he was holding a small screwdriver and threatening to fight his mother during a schizophrenic episode.

But the situation appeared to be under control, with two officers restraining the 90-pound Vidal, when the third officer arrived and shot Vidal point-blank, Wilsey contended.

“Then all of a sudden, this Southport cop came, walked in the house [and said]: ‘I don’t have time for this. Tase him. Let’s get him out of here,'” Wilsey said.

An officer used a stun gun on Vidal, “he hit the ground [and] this guy shot him,” Wilsey said.

Wilsey said that when he demanded to know why his stepson had been shot, the officer replied, “‘Well, I’m protecting my officers.'”

According to a report at The Daily Caller, Vidal was pinned on the ground by two officers when the third said “we don’t have time for this,” and shot him.  There was never any report to dispatchers of a problem.

The first unit on scene reported a confrontation in the hallway, but told Brunswick County Dispatchers several times that everything was OK. Unit 104 from Southport arrived on the scene at 12:48:41, fourteen minutes after the first officer had already been on scene. Seventy seconds later, Unit 104 radioed out that he had to fire shots at the subject in order to defend himself.

The event report mirrors what family members told the media. Wilsey said his family called the police to help with his schizophrenic son Keith Vidal who had a small screwdriver in his hand. Officers used at Taser on Vidal and then shot him, according to Wilsey.

Wilsey said officers came into their home after they called for backup help when Vidal was having a schizophrenic incident.

Wilsey said officers had his son down on the ground after the teen was tased a few times and an officer said, “we don’t have time for this.” That’s when Wilsey says the officer shot in between the officers holding the teen down, killing his son.

This report is even more detailed.  Two officers had him down on the floor, and the third officer, despite his claiming to think of the safety of “his” officers, shot in between the two officers who were holding Vidal down.  And just as a reminder, Vidal was a mere 90 pounds, only ten more than my dog.  The only person I ever knew who was 90 pounds had anorexia.

This has all the marks of cold blooded murder (at least second degree murder).  Yet I expect the blue wall to close in behind the officer who fired the shot, the flow of information to dry up, and no charges ever filed even if the officers lose their jobs.

We’ll see and I will continue to track this.  But this is the sort of thing people are coming to expect from police.  We already know never to talk to the police.  People generally learn the hard way, but learn they will.  Do not call the police even when you need help.  You just might die or get some innocent person shot.

At least, that’s the message being sent by law enforcement all over America.

NJ.com:

Gov. Chris Christie continues to support New Jersey’s gun-control laws, a spokesman said today, even as his attorney general declines to defend one of the toughest laws of all in a major case before the state Supreme Court.

Twice last year, the Republican governor’s administration did not defend a state law on handgun permits that was being challenged in state appellate courts, attorneys in the cases and court officials told The Star-Ledger today.

Instead, Christie left it to county prosecutors to defend the state’s handgun law against constitutional challenges — a legal move that experts say is rare in New Jersey.

One of the cases, a lawsuit brought by Richard Pantano of Monmouth County, is now pending before the state Supreme Court. Christie’s attorney general — who usually defends all state laws in civil cases — is not participating in that case.

A spokesman for the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office today confirmed they will defend the law instead of the attorney general.

In a separate case decided Monday, an appeals court upheld two gun-control measures and noted the attorney general “regrettably” declined to defend the state’s laws despite being the state’s “chief law enforcement officer.” The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office defended them instead.

“The governor supports New Jersey’s already tough gun laws,” Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak said today …

Pantano’s case is probably the most important gun rights case ever brought in New Jersey, and concerns the state of New Jersey being a may-issue state and whether a citizen must prove to the CLEO that there is documented peril before getting a concealed carry permit.

Absent.  That’s where Chris Christie’s attorney general is.  Absent without leave, or if you wish UA (unauthorized absence).  Oh, the attorney general has the approval from Christie to be absent, but not the electorate.

Remember, this is the man who would be running for President of the U.S.  He supports New Jersey’s strong gun laws, but he doesn’t want to show the rest of red state America that he does by giving the progressive media a chance to highlight his gun grabber credentials before the world.

He is a coward, and his cowardliness doesn’t change the fact that he is a gun grabber from way back.  He made is fame in New Jersey pushing tough gun laws.  America should remember his duplicity when it comes time to enter the voting booth.

Prior: Chris Christie On Guns Tag

We’ve already discussed a couple of horrible embarrassments uncovered in the ruling on the New York SAFE Act gun ban recently issued by Judge Skretny, but more on that in a moment.

My brother Keith is a graduate of Emory Law School and practicing attorney in Georgia, and clerked for a federal judge.  I know that he has fealty to scholarship and takes his commitment to study, hard work and defensible and logical prose very seriously.  That said, lawyers take it on the chin, and properly so, and my brother once told me the best lawyer joke I ever heard (“99.99% of all lawyers give the rest of us a bad name”).  We’ll come back to this later.

David Codrea is covering John Lott’s analysis of the ruling by Judge Skretny, and has some excerpts and observations that warrant our attention.

“The decision relied heavily on testimony by George Mason University criminology professor Chris Koper, who argued ‘that the criminal use of assault weapons declined after the federal assault-weapons ban was enacted in 1994, independently of trends in gun crime,’” Lott wrote. “But Koper’s two studies on the 1994 federal assault-weapons ban don’t support his claims.”

They state:

“[T]he evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect [of the weapons ban],” the initial study reported.

“[W]e cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence,” the second study concluded. “And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”

John Lott and I had an odd run-in several months ago, and he has with Mike Vanderboegh as well.  But not being trifling or holding grudges, let’s observe that Lott’s analysis is important.  So one important feature of the analysis is that the very studies cited by the Judge do not bear out the claims.  But then there is this gem.  The ruling also cites the online magazine Mother Jones.  Just so that you heard that, let’s repeat it.  Judge Skretny’s ruling uses information from … Mother … Jones!

Earlier we learned from Kurt Hofmann that there is logical contradiction in the ruling.  The very logical process the Judge uses to deem the magazine cartridge limit in the SAFE law “arbitrary” isn’t applied to the guns themselves, and should have been.  Furthermore, we’ve seen that the Judge Skretny’s ruling invokes the ridiculous and laughable notion of spray firing from the hip (for semiautomatic weapons, no less) to rule pistol grips on long guns to be legitimately within the sweep of the law, ignoring (or simply not learning) that no one, not military or civilian, spray fires from the hip, and such a practice would not only be the most ineffective thing a rogue shooter could do, it would get you permanently kicked out of every range in America, and for very good reason.

So the list of silly, ridiculous, sophomoric stunts in the ruling is growing.  First, there is the notion of pistol grips and spray firing from the hip; second, the failure to consistently apply the same logic to guns as he does magazines; third, misinterpretation of the very studies he cites to support his conclusions.  Finally, the use of anything from Mother Jones in a legal ruling certainly must be a tacit admission of bankruptcy of thought and ability to do analysis (and for the record, even with my admittedly incomplete assessment of mass shootings, I do take issue with the completeness of the Mother Jones assessment which leaves out the Hartford Beer Distributors shooting, the Geneva County massacre, the Texas Tower shooting [Charles Whitman, who used bolt action long guns] due to the dates of inclusion, and others).

The ruling is quickly becoming a laughingstock.  I am wondering if these Judges just turn over their hardest work to juvenile clerks who get their news from Jon Stewart, Daily Kos and Mother Jones?  So returning to the joke my brother told me, there is sometimes profound truth in humor, no?

Related:

Guns And The Mentally Ill: A Professional Assessment

New York, Pistol Grips And Spray Firing

Kurt Hofmann, In Upholding NY’s SAFE Act, Judge Makes Surprising Inadvertent Admission

David Codrea, Federal Judge Upholding SAFE Act Gun Ban Relied On Unsupported Assumptions

NBC:

The Obama administration is proposing two more executive actions that it says will help prevent individuals who are prohibited from having a gun for mental health reasons from obtaining a firearm.

The Department of Justice, arguing that current federal law contains terminology about mental health issues that is too vague,  proposed a regulation that would clarify who is ineligible to possess a firearm for specific situations related to mental health, like commitment to a mental institution. “In addition to providing general guidance on federal law, these clarifications will help states determine what information should be made accessible to the federal background check system, which will, in turn, strengthen the system’s reliability and effectiveness,” the administration said in a fact sheet distributed to reporters.

The second executive action, proposed by the Department of Health and Human Services, would allow some medical organizations more leeway to report “limited information necessary to help keep guns out of potentially dangerous hands” to the federal background check system. “The proposed rule will not change the fact that seeking help for mental health problems or getting treatment does not make someone legally prohibited from having a firearm,” the White House added.

Because, you know, mental health professionals can use their skills so well as a predictor of propensity to violence, oh, er, uh, because mass shootings are a function of mentally unstable people who just suddenly snap, oh, er, well, whatever.  Everybody just shut up.  At least they’re doing something about something.  And that’s what we all want our government to do, right?  Something?

Eugene Volokh:

Laws that ban so-called “assault weapons” often define them with reference to various features, such as a rifle’s having a bayonet mount or “a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon” (to quote the New York assault weapon ban upheld by N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Cuomo (W.D.N.Y. Dec. 31, 2013)). One reason given for focusing on rifles with such pistol grips is that, in the words of the court, this “feature[] aid shooters when ‘spray firing’ from the hip.” … I’m not an expert on firearms tactics, but I’m very skeptical of this.

Eugene isn’t merely asking the question in a vacuum.  It’s right there in the ruling:

But for the contested features, like a pistol grip and thumbhole stock, New York points to evidence that these features aid shooters when “spray firing” from the hip. (Bruen Decl., ¶ 19); see Heller II, 670 F.3d at 1262–63 (quoting Siebel Testimony, supra). As the Second Circuit has held, “This factor aims to identify those rifles whose pistol grips are designed to make such spray firing from the hip particularly easy.”

Eugene is skeptical because that’s one of the stupidest things I have ever read anywhere, not just in a legal ruling.  Spray firing from the hip.  And the ruling seems to rely on that explanation – and not just for real assault rifles (the formal definition of which we have discussed, including selective fire), but for semi-automatic weapons.  Semi-automatic weapons!  Spray firing from the hip.

This is not intended or taught in any tactical maneuver in any branch of the military that I’m aware of, including and most of all Marine Corps squad rushes.  It would be a stupid, juvenile waste of ammunition and would get people killed (friendly more than anyone else).  Furthermore, a rogue shooter in America wouldn’t hit anything (except by accident) with such a tactic.  It would be the least effective thing a rogue shooter could possibly do.

The Weapons Warrant Officer for Marine Corps 2/6 wouldn’t allow their deployment to Iraq in 2007 (where my son was a SAW gunner) without the SAWs being equipped with optics.  And this judge relied on the notion of “spray firing” to make his ruling, marking one of the dumbest things ever to go down in the annals of legal history.

Moron.  Next time just ask somebody who knows this stuff.

David Codrea:

Much of the current mess we find ourselves in can be attributed, at least in part, to gun owner detachment, apathy, and unwillingness to personally share in the burdens of gun rights activism. That’s a shame, because it really doesn’t require a lot of effort to get and stay engaged, and the personal rewards and friendships made can be invaluable.

Of course, he’s right, and this could be extrapolated to lack of involvement in education (I am an advocate of home schooling for reasons I will explain at some point in the future), lack of involvement in the politics of wealth redistribution, and so on down the line.  I have chosen to spend at least some of my free time (there isn’t much of it) on gun rights.  As I’ve said, I write until I cannot do it any more since I have a day job, and annoy many of my closest friends by shamelessly pimping my content (sometimes I wonder why I still have any friends).  But just when it seems that it’s all a waste, we need a sermon like the one David is preaching.  Go read his piece.

One more thing concerning David.  All I can say is “come South, young man, come South.”

Kurt Hofmann:

And again, Judge Skretny clearly knows that a law requiring that magazines not be loaded with more than seven rounds gives a clear tactical advantage to the criminal willing to violate that law, over the “law abiding gun owner” who is not willing to do so, but seems somehow to have failed to realize that a law banning “assault weapons” similarly favors the criminal who ignores the law.

Oh, this is rich.  Kurt is doing what he does best.  He points out that the very reasoning the stupid judge uses to deem the magazine cartridge limit “arbitrary” isn’t applied to the guns themselves, and should have been.  And this judge is supposed to be a degreed lawyer with judgment and wisdom.  Yea, not so much.  Kurt is a better one that he is.  Read Kurt’s assessment here.  I’ll have more observations on this ruling later.

Mike Vanderboegh is still pressing ahead with his toys for totalitarians program.

Looney said he was informed by Capitol Police Sgt. Timothy Boyle of the present late Monday.

The majority leader said he didn’t accept it and a spokesman for the police said the three empty magazines have been turned over to the Connecticut State Police major crime squad.

Sorry, but this doesn’t do it for me.  Someone took possession of it, and I want to know who?  And why aren’t they being prosecuted under the new law?  I repeat: someone took possession prior to the police.  If they don’t prosecute, they are ignoring enforcement of the law.  I want to see a Connecticut resident in prison for it – preferably someone associated with making the law to begin with.

Instapundit:

Concealed carry means fewer murders, says new study.

Of course, but the first thing to remember when reading these studies and citing them is that they will be followed by another “study” done by some progressive group of researchers, and regardless of what the data proves, we have God-given rights to possess weapons.  My rights do not depend on data to substantiate or undergird them.

I had said before that The Daily Caller gun pieces annoy me.  Here is another example of why.  The world’s greatest hunting rifle.  They’ve found it.  The … world’s … greatest!  Ever!  It reads like they’re shilling for the company which produces it (and I won’t even mention it by name, regardless of how good it is supposed to be).  Folks, when I purchase a gun or ammunition I’ll give the low down – the good, the bad and the ugly (I like Rock River Arms, but I hate their customer service, and I love my Springfield Armory XDm and their customer service, but I had an out of round barrel on my .45 after 2000-3000 rounds, and I absolutely hate Armscor ammunition because of the bad manufacturing tolerances, and I have a review coming soon on my Kel-Tec PMR-30 that will have both good and bad, etc.).  Because I don’t shill for anybody.

Infowars has a piece on the U.S. government purchasing Potassium-Iodine tablets for Fukushima fallout in order to block the uptake of radioactive iodine to the thyroid.  But there’s a problem.  The longest-lived radioactive iodine isotope is I-131 which is about 8 days.  The radioactive iodine from Fukushima is all gone (unless it is a daughter product from the decay of Tellurium, but that is mostly gone too).  Folks, don’t ever put anything in your mouth and swallow it because the government says to.

Washington Times:

Magpul Industries, a firearms-accessories maker, announced Thursday that it will relocate its extensive manufacturing facilities to Texas and Wyoming, in angry response to the Colorado legislature’s passage of sweeping gun-control legislation in 2013.

At the same time, the company plans to maintain a toehold in Colorado in order to continue to fight the gun bills passed by the Democratic-dominated state legislature and signed in March by Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper.

“Moving operations to states that support our culture of individual liberties and personal responsibility is important,” said Magpul CEO Richard Fitzpatrick, who started the privately-held company in 1999 from the basement of his home in Longmont, Colo. “This relocation will also improve business operations and logistics as we utilize the strengths of Texas and Wyoming in our expansion.”

Magpul officials plan to split up the company’s corporate and manufacturing arms, both of which are now located in Erie, Colo. The corporate headquarters will relocate to Texas, and a site-selection committee has narrowed the final destination to three locations in the state’s north-central region.

Meanwhile, Magpul’s manufacturing and distribution facility will move about 80 miles north to Cheyenne, Wyo. Company officials say they plan to lease a 58,000-square-foot building for two to three years while they construct a 100,000-square-foot custom facility in the Cheyenne Business Parkway.

Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead, a Republican, said in a statement that “Wyoming and Magpul are a great match.”

“Bringing an innovative and growing manufacturing operating to Wyoming is a significant step for the state,” Mr. Mead said. “We offer Magpul an attractive tax environment, stable and reasonable regulations, not to mention a firm commitment to uphold the Second Amendment.”

Magpul must have gotten some deal on taxes to have decided to split the manufaturing and corporate offices like this.  Unless I knew the details, it sounds like an odd move.

Trust me when I say that we’ve been watching.  Magpul promised to leave, and we would have been furious with them if they had broken that promise.  My next rifle is a Winchester Model 70 Sporter, .270, made right down the road from me in Columbia, S.C., at the FN plant.  It’s on order and paid for.  I liked what I saw, but one factor in my decision was to avoid purchasing a Remington from New York, first because of the union shop, and second because I won’t reward a communist state like New York.

We gun owners are patient, but diligent to reward those with whom we agree.  Hopefully, all other gun and parts manufacturers are watching.

First in dealing with this subject, a bit of background is in order for my readers who were not around for my military coverage and commentary.  My son Daniel was in the 2/6 Marines and conducted a combat tour of Iraq in 2007 to Fallujah.  At this time, the foreign fighters were retreating from Ramadi due to robust Marine Corps (and other) operations there combined with the so-called tribal awakening.  Fallujah was a bad place, and the baddest of the fighters had ensconced themselves there.

The people were so aligned with the insurgents that upon the initial patrols by the Marine Corps, the Marines found themselves to be surrounded by the children of the city, carrying black balloons, the balloons being used to assist the insurgents to sight mortar fire.  As I said, it was a bad, bad place.  The people were willing to send their children out to assist the insurgents.  My son was a SAW gunner, and in addition to patrols and other city-wide operations, he shot insurgents crossing the Euphrates river attempting to enter Fallujah.

Robert Bateman isn’t limited to one idiotic article (indeed, he has written a multitude of them) – he has penned yet another one.

Way back in 2007, I personally invited Wayne LaPierre, the director of the National Rifle Association, to live in Baghdad. I had been there, less than 24 months earlier, and I thought LaPierre might appreciate the opportunity to live in a society which lived up to his standards. Surprisingly, he never took this offer up, nor did he ever visit the troops in Iraq, or Afghanistan for that matter, which is, well, normal for him. He likes his guns, but he is really not cool with being surrounded by them, like he would have been, had he ever visited our troops in Baghdad, or Helmand, or Kabul…or basically anywhere.

In Iraq, every single household (with a male that is) may have one assault rifle. This seems to be Mr. Wayne LaPierre’s ideal. And interestingly, we have a country (a couple, actually) where his vision exists. Iraq and Afghanistan.

This article isn’t really about Wayne LaPierre so much as it’s about Bateman’s false presuppositions.  So I talked with Daniel today and he gives me the following assessment.

Bateman is a dumb ass.  The insurgency in Fallujah ended because we locked down the city and made it to where the people had to deal with it or live in utter isolation from everyone else and with no means of transportation, with two ways into and out of the city.

Lt. Col. William F. Mullen (now Col. Mullen) was the unmitigated sovereign of the city.  Nothing happened without his approval.  The Iraqis may have had a right to automobiles too, but we took them away.  If Mullen had wanted to confiscate AK-47s from the folk we could have done that.  The chain of command in Baghdad left us alone, and we did what we wanted to do.

Every family had a fully functional, fully automatic AK-47.  It wasn’t a problem.  I was never shot at except by the insurgents, and mainly the foreign fighters – bad people from Syria, Egypt, Iran, blacks from Africa, and some fighters with slanted eyes from the Far East.  I looked in the face of every man I killed, and some of them had slanted eyes and were of Far Eastern descent.

We did confiscate some weapons caches, but only the ones hidden by the insurgents when the people gave us the intel.  The AK-47s were used by some of the people to fight the insurgents, but they weren’t used on us.  We were fighting the insurgents, and mainly foreign fighters.  We were not afraid of the AK-47s owned by the families.  The families helped us shut down the insurgency when we made it clear that they had to do that.

Now, it may be that this experience doesn’t apply to Baghdad, but that’s the point, isn’t it?  Guns are just machines, and can be used for good or ill.  Because Bateman cannot control people like he wishes (as the good social planner we wants to be, given that the Army has turned into a cadre of fruitcakes and social “scientists” – I use the word sarcastically), he wants to control their machines.

But this doesn’t work either.  The foreign fighters brought their own weapons with them.  The families would have been left utterly defenseless without their own AK-47s, which is the way Bateman wants us left.  Bateman wants us defenseless because that’s what the state wants.  The concern to them isn’t our own protection – it is the protection of the state from it’s people.

So that summarizes a brief conversation with my son.  Much more could be said, but I’ll leave it there.  Oh, and to Mr. Bateman, Daniel thinks you’re a dumb ass.  Or did I mention that already?

NYT:

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that New York’s strict new gun laws, including an expanded ban on assault weapons, were constitutional, but struck down a provision forbidding gun owners to load more than seven rounds into a magazine.

The ruling offered a victory to gun control advocates at the end of a year in which efforts to pass new legislation on the federal level suffered a high-profile defeat in Congress, although some new restrictions were approved in state capitals.

The judge, William M. Skretny of Federal District Court in Buffalo, said expanded bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines were legally sound because they served to “further the state’s important interest in public safety.”

Mike Vanderboegh is also covering this.  I’ve told you guys before – really, I’ve told you before – that it is a mistake to look to federal courts and the Second Amendment to protect your rights at the state level.  It’s the wrong strategy.  All politics is local, and that includes gun politics.

Kurt Homfmann resolves to be a gun criminal.  What will the gun owners of New York do?