We’ve discussed nullification many times before, and this article shows the popularity of this concept, except without the teeth.

Last month, Effingham County, Illinois became a Second Amendment Sanctuary County. The proposal passed the County Board after eight members voted in favor of it. Only one was against, according to a USA Today report.

Last year, a similar proposal in Spokane Valley, WA was floated in the City Council. This comes as a response to the gun control proposals that many members of the U.S. Congress have made in recent years. Moreover, several states also passed firearm restrictions. Illinois and Washington are two of the most prominent ones.

Under said proposals, local law enforcement would ignore the new gun control policies. They would not arrest residents who don’t comply with the new state/federal firearm policies.

“It was a way of standing up for 2nd Amendment rights,” former Spokane Valley City Councilman Ed Pace told UnCut Report (UCR) in a recent interview. When Pace was in the City Council, he proposed making Spokane Valley, WA a 2nd Amendment Sanctuary City.

“If state and federal governments restrict constitutional rights, cities need to stand up for their residents and protect their rights,” Pace elaborated.

Oh bullshit.  What are you going to do with this symbolic action, and how are you going to “stand up for residents and protect their rights?”

What are you going to do, throw ATF agents in the state penitentiary when they come to arrest firearms owners?  Do the CLEOs side with you on this?  Does the governor side with you, and will the state police back you up?  Will you hang judges who hear cases on firearms owners who have broken federal laws?

Unless you answer those questions for me, this is a lot of hot air.

Joel clearly prefers the Leupold, so for instance when someone else pays the bill (e.g., military) the choice is clear.

For me, not so much.  The Leupold Mark 5 costs $2500, while the Athlon Argos costs $400.  They’ll both shoot well out to 600 – 800 yards.  Yes, the picture must be clearer to Joel, but for an additional $2100, it had better be.

The question is what do you want to do with a scope?  Do you want to be a competition precision rifle shooter, or a hunter and shooter who can do it well to 600 yards and moderately beyond?  At some point a man must begin to think about cost unless he is wealthy.

But contrary to what Joel said, who was addressing those folks who think you can put a $400 scope on a $5000 precision rifle, I don’t know anyone who thinks that.  If you can afford a $5000 rifle, you can afford a $2500 scope.  I can afford neither.

As seen on reddit, a layman’s explanation.

In 1934, rich people decided that they didn’t like poor people sneaking onto their land to hunt game, which was happening a lot because there was this economic thing called the “Great Depression” and poor people were “starving”.

So they called up a bunch of their pet congresscritters, and ordered a custom made law called the National Firearms Act of 1934.

This placed a $200 dollar tax on rifles with a barrel shorter than 16″ or an overall length less than 26″, shotguns with a barrel shorter than 18″ or an overall length less than 26″, and firearm sound suppressors of any kind. This ensured that those nasty poor people couldn’t afford guns which they might smuggle onto rich people’s land to hunt rich people’s deer, or suppressors that might prevent them from getting caught in the act.

Nowdays, $200 isn’t a whole lot of money, but the law is being exploited in a new way to restrict access. You see, this tax gets you a “tax stamp”, without which possession of the firearm is a felony. But the law doesn’t put any upper limit on the wait before the paperwork gets approved. So these papers are processed by one elderly guy named Frank, whose eyesight isn’t so good any more, and a typical application takes six months to two years to come back.

Naturally, modern folks who own guns aren’t too keen on this, but modern folks who hate guns have their pet congresscritters who are dead set against repealing any law that makes firearms ownership inconvenient, even if it makes no sense at all. Also, there is a whole three-letter agency devoted to enforcing this thing, and they don’t want to lose their jobs, so they have plenty of interesting and highly inventive arguments about how this is critical to the future of the nation, and how everyone died multiple times every week before 1934 because we didn’t have this.

So people looked into ways to do normal things while in compliance with the letter of the law.

So, the thing that looks like a stock on that thing that looks like a rifle is technically an arm brace, which makes that thing technically a pistol, which makes the National Firearms Act technically not apply to it. Now, you could say that this is a loophole which complies with the letter of the law while totally ignoring its spirit, but you could also say that the law has no spirit, and is nothing but a big technicality designed to f*** with people from the very beginning.

But however we got here, the fact remains that the thing in the photo is perfectly legal as it is, but with a slightly different stock it’ll get you a decade in the federal penitentiary.

This is why gun owners get kind of shirty about this kind of thing.

This is the same reason why some of the gun community – including the NRA – will never support repeal of the NFA, GCA and the Hughes Amendment.

Too many people have too much money invested in Class 3 weapons.  Suppose you spend $25,000 on a Class 3 weapon, or several of them, and someone comes along and tells you that your investment will tank in the near future and your guns will be worth no more than a used gun of that make and model within a single day.

Would you support it, looking at it only from the perspective of money?  The better question is what, other than a true commitment to the RKBA under God, would make you support it?

Wired:

25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin and uploaded the blueprints for the pistol to his website, Defcad.com.

He’d launched the site months earlier along with an anarchist video manifesto, declaring that gun control would never be the same in an era when anyone can download and print their own firearm with a few clicks. In the days after that first test-firing, his gun was downloaded more than 100,000 times. Wilson made the decision to go all in on the project, dropping out of law school at the University of Texas, as if to confirm his belief that technology supersedes law.

The law caught up. Less than a week later, Wilson received a letter from the US State Department demanding that he take down his printable-gun blueprints or face prosecution for violating federal export controls. Under an obscure set of US regulations known as the International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Wilson was accused of exporting weapons without a license, just as if he’d shipped his plastic gun to Mexico rather than put a digital version of it on the internet. He took Defcad.com offline, but his lawyer warned him that he still potentially faced millions of dollars in fines and years in prison simply for having made the file available to overseas downloaders for a few days. “I thought my life was over,” Wilson says.

Instead, Wilson has spent the last years on an unlikely project for an anarchist: Not simply defying or skirting the law but taking it to court and changing it. In doing so, he has now not only defeated a legal threat to his own highly controversial gunsmithing project. He may have also unlocked a new era of digital DIY gunmaking that further undermines gun control across the United States and the world—another step toward Wilson’s imagined future where anyone can make a deadly weapon at home with no government oversight.

Two months ago, the Department of Justice quietly offered Wilson a settlement to end a lawsuit he and a group of co-plaintiffs have pursued since 2015 against the United States government. Wilson and his team of lawyers focused their legal argument on a free speech claim: They pointed out that by forbidding Wilson from posting his 3-D-printable data, the State Department was not only violating his right to bear arms but his right to freely share information. By blurring the line between a gun and a digital file, Wilson had also successfully blurred the lines between the Second Amendment and the First.

“If code is speech, the constitutional contradictions are evident,” Wilson explained to WIRED when he first launched the lawsuit in 2015. “So what if this code is a gun?”

The Department of Justice’s surprising settlement, confirmed in court documents earlier this month, essentially surrenders to that argument. It promises to change the export control rules surrounding any firearm below .50 caliber—with a few exceptions like fully automatic weapons and rare gun designs that use caseless ammunition—and move their regulation to the Commerce Department, which won’t try to police technical data about the guns posted on the public internet. In the meantime, it gives Wilson a unique license to publish data about those weapons anywhere he chooses.

You can’t stop the signal, man.  The controllers can’t win.  It’s impossible.  It’s as impossible as FedGov winning a counterinsurgency campaign.

The DoJ decided to make peace.  Here’s a suggestion to the rest of the controllers: make peace.  You won’t like it very much if you don’t.

Via WRSA, pardons for the ranchers.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday pardoned two imprisoned Oregon ranchers whose sentencing on arson convictions sparked the 2016 occupation of a wildlife refuge, part of a long-simmering dispute over federal land policies in the U.S. West.

The armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon followed a judge’s ruling that sent Dwight Hammond and his son, Steven, back to prison to serve more time after their initial release. Police shot one of the occupiers dead during the 41-day midwinter protest.

The takeover was another flare-up in a decades-old conflict over federal control of millions of acres of public land in the Western United States. In Oregon, about half of all land is controlled by the federal government.

Right.  “Arson.”

It’s really important to remember what these charges are all about, and it isn’t arson.  Here it is.

Dwight and Steven admitted to having started two fires, for which the court found them guilty. One of the fires was a prescribed burn in 2001 that, according the court record, accidentally spread onto 139 acres of BLM land. Those 139 acres happened to be located on one of the family’s federal grazing allotments. The other fire, from 2006, was a back-burn. Steven had set the fire on the family’s private property in order to protect their winter feed from a lightening fire that had started on adjacent BLM land. That fire accidentally spread to one acre of BLM land.

They were going to have to sell their ranch in order to pay fines and legal fees.  Sell their ranch.  Folks were interested in buying it.

But for what purpose?  Uranium and gold.  That’s right, the Clinton Foundation / Clinton Global Initiative and deals cut with the BLM were behind all of this.  These men weren’t guilty of arson.  It was an accident, and a small amount of land was burned anyway, and for good reason.

So tonight Trump made his selection known.  It’s Judge Brett Kavanaugh.  I’m sure there will be much more to come on this, but here are some initial thoughts.

Jacob Sullum at Reason did a very good expose on him, and finds that he is supportive of second amendment rights, but not so much for the fourth amendment.

Kavanaugh seems to take a narrower view of Fourth Amendment rights. In 2010 he dissented from the D.C. Circuit’s decision not to rehear a case in which a three-judge panel had ruled that police violated a suspected drug dealer’s Fourth Amendment rights when they tracked his movements for a month by attaching a GPS device to his car without a warrant. Kavanaugh rejected the idea that the tracking constituted a search because of the quality and quantity of information it collected, although he anticipated the argument that ultimately persuaded a majority of the Supreme Court: that the physical intrusion required to plant the tracking device amounted to a search.

That rationale would not support invoking the Fourth Amendment in cases where information is collected without trespassing on someone’s physical property, as when police use cellphone location records to figure out where a suspect was at particular times on particular dates. Last month the Supreme Court ruled that looking at such data is a search, meaning it generally requires a warrant.

Kavanaugh also dissented in a 2008 case involving a man named Paul Askew, who was stopped by D.C. police because his clothing was similar to an armed robber’s. The cops patted Askew down for weapons, as permitted under the 1968 Supreme Court ruling in Terry v. Ohio, but found nothing. Later they unzipped his coat, supposedly to facilitate an eyewitness identification, and found a gun.

The D.C. Circuit concluded that police went too far when they unzipped Askew’s coat and that the gun, which became the basis for a weapons charge, should not have been admitted as evidence against him because it was the product of an illegal search. Kavanaugh disagreed, saying unzipping the coat could be justified as “an objectively reasonable protective step to ensure officer safety” after Askew “actively resisted” the pat-down or because “police may reasonably maneuver a suspect’s outer clothing—such as unzipping a suspect’s outer jacket—when, as here, doing so could help facilitate a witness’s identification at a show-up during a Terry stop.”

So we shouldn’t expect him to side against a SWAT team, for instance, and in favor of a victim of home invasion by a SWAT team, as long as a judge signed a warrant and officer safety was paramount.

Frankly, it sounds as if he is in the same mold as Alito, who never saw a police action he didn’t approve.

Also, while this may sound odd, regardless of the second amendment cases currently percolating through the lower courts, I am hopeful that the SCOTUS doesn’t hear one until there is another reliable 2A Justice on the Supreme Court.  Raymond Kethledge is just such a judge (although it could certainly be the case that he never makes it on to the SCOTUS).

A bad decision by the SCOTUS on gun rights is worse than no decision, and I trust neither Roberts nor Alito.  As for the NFA (and class 3 weapons), the GCA and the Hughes Amendment, that will have to be handled legislatively.  Don’t look to the courts to undo that those abominations.

In the mean time, remember that the Supreme Court cannot confer or remove rights.  Only God can remove what God has granted, and in the case of RKBA, it is based on His immutable nature and will, inasmuch as it involves the protection of that which is made in His own image.  It will never change.

Always look to the fountain and spring of your rights, never to the vicissitudes of man’s feelings or the machinations of the state.

UPDATE: Dave Kopel has a very incisive and lengthy article on Kavanaugh up at Reason.  Here is his summary paragraph.

Judge Kavanaugh’s text, history, and tradition methodology for Second Amendment cases will not please people who believe that all gun control is impermissible, nor will it please advocates who want to make the Second Amendment a second-class right.

I believe that all gun control is constitutionally impermissible.  And this doesn’t make me happy.  On the other hand, he won’t make the gun controllers happy either.  If you ponder for a moment on the kind of judge Trump is likely to nominate, it would be someone just like this.  Trump believes that it is within the purview of the ATF to unilaterally ban bump stocks with no legislative action, as well as sundry other infringements.

Repeal of the NFA, GCA and Hughes Amendment will require legislative remedy.  The judiciary won’t do it.  Yet Kavanaugh won’t be a reliable gun control vote on the Supreme Court, so this is a partial victory in that he won’t be in the camp with Ginsburg and Breyer.

UPDATE #2: The thought occurs to me that if you believe in the so-called “war on drugs,” or a war on anything on American soil, you either [a] have never been to war and know nothing about what it’s like (my son has been to war) and are still willing to weigh in on something completely beyond your comprehension, or [b] you have been to war and are perfectly fine with this sort of thing being perpetrated on the American people.

In the first case, you’re an imbecile whose views are worthless.  In the second case, you are a sociopath.

Via reader Randall, WBTV:

GASTONIA, NC (WBTV) – A woman was seriously injured following an officer-involved shooting in Gaston County late Sunday night. 

According to the Gastonia Police Department, officers were looking for Jarvis Lynn in the area of  Gray Street around 11:30 p.m. A warrant states officers received a call about a noise disturbance in the area. Police said Lynn had a pistol at the time of the shooting.

That’s when officers reportedly shot Lynn’s sister, in an attempt to shot Lynn, officials say.

Gaston County EMS said the woman was taken to CaroMont Regional Medical Center with life-threatening injuries but, police say, she has since been released from the hospital.

The N.C. State Bureau of Investigation is investigating the shooting.

The officer who shot the woman has been placed on administrative leave with pay pending the outcome of the investigation which is standard practice. The woman is not facing charges.

Lynn was charged with refusing to follow officer’s commands, assault, breaking and entering, larceny and damaging property. He had previously been convicted in 2011 on drug charges.

Oh dear.

Minutes down the road from me.  Folks, it appears as if the LEO was the most dangerous person that night.  You just cannot discharge a weapon unless you know your backstop.  End of discussion.  You just can’t do it.  You can tackle, you can throw your body around, you can use OC spray, you can call for backup, but you cannot discharge your weapon when other people are around.  It’s dumb.  It’s dangerous.  It shouldn’t be done.

Gun owners know that.  Why doesn’t the police?  Also, I’m not sure the article is correct.  This might be the Gaston County Police rather than the Gastonia Police Department.

Global News:

A Bella Coola man is recovering in Vancouver General Hospital after he was attacked by a sow — or female — grizzly bear.

Jordan Carbery said he spotted some movement outside his home sometime after 5 a.m on Tuesday. He went outside to investigate and saw some cubs in a cherry tree.

One of the cubs fell out of the tree, which was near the entrance of his home. That caught the attention of the mama bear.

“I looked over to see a sow grizzly bear looking right at me and heading straight for me,” he said.

He tried to run back to the house.

“Suddenly I was just run over,” he said. “It felt like two football players tackling me.”

Carbery found himself on the ground and “next thing I realize is that the bear had my head in its mouth and was picking me up.”

“My scalp tore and it dropped me,” he said.

The bear grabbed him again, he said, and let him go.

He tried to fend off the bear by kicking at it. “I kicked her in the face three times at least,” Carbery recalled, “and then I tried to hit her in the face in the snout. She was like a prize boxer. She was so fast.”

Carbery managed to create enough separation between him and the sow to make his way into the house.

Since he was in an area with no cellphone coverage, he had to drive himself to hospital.

As he ran out his to his car, the bear charged at him again.

Good Lord.

Sir.  I don’t mean to pile on when you’re in such pain, but why did you leave home without a gun?  The first time, and the second time?

Why, oh why?

Financial survival, that is.  But for a company, is there any other?

Whatever.  I don’t do H&K myself.  Too pricey, not good enough.  I suspect they’re much like Colt was years ago, where they had relied way too much on military contracts and listened to the gun-buying public way too little.  Colt relied on the contract for M16s / M4s, and by that time had fired all of their wheel gun mechanics.  They completely missed the resurgence in interest in revolvers.

If you want to see any current evidence for the drop in quality control at H&K, watch Tim’s most recent video of his “new” HK USC .45 Carbine.  Pitiful.  Just pitiful.  Broken front sight, magazines that don’t work, FTF.  Just pitiful.

News from Tega Cay:

Quintin Huseman said he was running near Lookout Park and Shoreline Parkway in Tega Cay on Saturday morning with his two dogs, Gracie and Lilly, when they were attacked by a coyote.

Lilly’s bite wasn’t too bad and Gracie scared the coyote away.

“It happened really quick. The coyote snuck up on her,” Huseman said. “By the time I turned, it was already coming towards me, and all I could think is, it was rabid.”

Huseman said he called police to report the incident.

“The concern I have is the two dogs are 90 pounds each, the coyote is probably three-quarters of the size of one of the dogs,” Huseman said.

I’ve never found it to be an issue at all to carry a gun with me when walking my dog.  I do it all the time.  Running is a different story from what I understand.  I don’t run so I don’t know from first-hand experience.

But runners ought to find a way to carry a gun when running.  There is equipment you can use.  Get it.  Develop a discipline of wearing and practicing with it.

It may save your life or the lives of your beasts.  Oh, and by the way, it was probably not a Coyote.  It was probably a Coywolf with mixed DNA.