Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

This is quite a backwards view of things by someone named Dominic Erdozain who apparently teaches at Emory School of Theology.

Tyranny is not too strong a word. Guns have begun to define the American experience, from small decisions about where you might travel to the massacres that haunt the news cycle like the visitations of a malevolent deity. Sold as freedom, they have created the very conditions that the liberal state was designed to prevent.

The singular idea behind the emergence of democracy was the protection of life from arbitrary power. What is liberty? wondered John Adams. Freedom from “wanton, cruel power”—from “imprisonments, whipping posts, gibbets, bastenadoes and racks.” Kings shed blood with little emotion, wrote Benjamin Rush, because they believed they governed by divine right. Republican governments spoke a different language. They taught the absurdity of the divine right of kings and asserted the sanctity of all life. This was not achieved through individual force but by collaboration and consent. In a democracy, power is diffused, and layers of restraint are placed between the restless will of the individual and the capacity to harm others. That was the “social contract.”

[ … ]

Unlike today’s gun advocates, who think of danger as other types of people, the founders understood tyranny as a universal propensity—a problem larger than monarchy or the more obvious villainies of history. The hard truth was that violence lurks in every heart, and “all men would be tyrants, if they could.” Such was the foundation of American constitutionalism and the elaborate checks and balances that defined it.

[ … ]

Everything in the American system—from bicameral legislatures to nervous protections against “standing armies”—reflected this shrewd and skeptical psychology. Power was dangerous and always looking to expand its franchise. The virtue of a representative, as opposed to a direct, democracy was that it was broken up, shared, and delegated.

This was the principle behind the well-regulated militia named in the Second Amendment. A militia placed “the sword in the hands of the solid interest of the community,” not the burning will of the individual. The militia was to defense what trial by jury was to justice: safety in numbers. It was protection against anarchy, insurrection, and the “hand of private violence.” The notion that, in providing for a militia, the founders were also providing for that hand of violence reveals a profound misunderstanding of their philosophy. Gun laws, as we now know them, enable the very brutalities that the political process was designed to contain.

So you can read the rest of this silly, trivial missive for yourself if you want to. For the founders, who had just spent their fortunes and risked their own lives and the lives of their wives and children to take on a tyrant, and who used guns to do it, he turns the whole affair around to be fear of tyranny by the individual rather than the king. Only someone who graduated from Oxford and Cambridge with no history or understanding of the American system or cultural milieu could manage such a thing.

So let’s rehearse this one more time. The term well-regulated, in common parlance of the day, meant that the gun functioned correctly, the sights were set and zeroed at the appropriate distance, the machine ran “like a clock,” as it were, and the shooters knew how to shoot. It had nothing to do with words in the code of federal regulations, which didn’t exist then.

The very revolution to which he is referring was precipitated by British gun control. He needs to read David Kopel more carefully. He isn’t the scholar he things he is. Kopel is a scholar.

On the whole, his essay is such a mess that it would take a day of writing to fisk the errors. Suffice it to say that he needs to go back to the drawing board and answer this question: has he fully addressed the number of innocent men, women and children who were disarmed and then killed by their own governments in the 20th century? See also here. Stephen Halbrook has a higher number.

The answer might shock him. If it doesn’t and he is already aware of all of this, he’s advocating for the extermination of innocent people at the hands of wicked governments, and he knows it.

That’s the point of the second amendment – not disarming individuals. Finally, whatever theological excuses he has for his advocacy of gun control, I’ve answered all of them. If he wants to give me new ones, I’ll gladly answer those too.

We did open carry with a permit (if you recall, I listened to and reported on the entire floor debate in the S.C. senate that day). And I told you that we needed to embrace incrementalism. Now it’s time to do more.

A bill passed in the South Carolina Senate on Thursday would allow gun owners to carry their weapon in public without a concealed carry permit and would provide free firearms training.

The bill was approved by a 28-15 vote after nearly two weeks of debate surrounding concerns from some lawmakers and law enforcement officials over the open carry aspect. The addition of free firearms training is what led to a compromise and ultimately ended the debate.

The proposal now returns to the House, where representatives will need to agree to the Senate’s addition of the free firearms training, and other changes, in order for the bill to make it to Gov. Henry McMaster’s desk.

If signed into law, South Carolina will join 27 other states – including nearly every one in the Deep South – that allow open carry without a permit.

[ … ]

Law enforcement leaders have expressed worry over people carrying guns without training or experience, and the possibility of encountering armed people at a shooting scene and not being able to determine who is a threat and who is trying to help.

Oh, you know law enforcement is going to be against it. When it came attached to a permitting scheme, they didn’t want to waste their power because they knew it was going to pass.

Now, they’re inveighing against it.  I would suspect that SLED is especially against it, including that corrupt, awful head of SLED, Mark Keel, whom we’ve discussed at length.

Here is the source.

Of course, anyone with two brain cells can see this for what it is, i.e., an infringement on the RKBA.

Insurance never pays for intentional acts, nor especially for illegalities. They know this. It’s just another attempt at disarmament.

Ever wonder why the youth are turning away from the gun controllers and embracing the RKBA?  Well, for one thing, guns are fun.  Second, guns are good for all sorts of things, including personal defense. Then if that’s not enough, take a look at what the controllers look like.

They all look simply awful.  Glum, gloomy and depressing.  Take a look at that awful governor. She looks like she could spit nails that someone in her state other than her is in the spotlight on gun control. How would you like to be married to that battle ax?

Watch the entire video. First of all, Stephen is and friend and one of the best second amendment attorneys out there so we should show him some support. Through GOA and his own firm he has shown resilience and class in dealing with the FedGov, and has achieved a good degree of success in his cases.

Second, after this video, you might be interested in the second one.  A defining and signal characteristic of communist societies is that they hire incompetents and promote the lazy.  Communism isn’t just for the central bureaucracy.  It’s for the distributed bureaucracies too.

As long as you’re incompetent but support the status quo, as long as you don’t rock the rulers’ boat, and as long as you make income for the elitists, you’re welcome in the bureaucracy administrating a lack of justice to the peasants.  If you work for the government, you might be a peasant too, but you’re their peasant.

Stephen is a prime example.  He’s a good and hard working attorney. He could never work for the FedGov and be happy.

Codrea.

“I admired Wayne LaPierre 20-30 years ago,” a comment left on The Captain’s Journal, a blog I frequent admitted. “Yes, he screwed up and started living high off the hog on the members’ dime… But there were some great victories… during his tenure, particularly the proliferation of shall-issue CCW and constitutional carry…That was all grassroots NRA lobbying.”

“Yes, they were wrong for supporting NICS and some other things, but I think it is unfair to tag Wayne’s tenure with some of the Fudd [stuff] the NRA supported in the past, like the NFA,” the poster continued. “The NRA once had the loyalty of a LOT of Democratic members and Democratic politicians… The NRA now has ZERO influence in places like New York, California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts… Wayne deserves to be held accountable… by the Board of Directors and the members, not by Letitia James or any… so-called court of ‘law.’”

Such sentiment is not unique among gun owners. Unfortunately, it’s also not correct.

Read the rest at Firearms News.

Tim Thurley.

Gun control groups had gotten most of what they’d wanted. That wasn’t surprising. They had actively participated in drafting legislation and worked directly with senior bureaucrats. Allan Rock’s policy advisor called their contributions “very instrumental.” In 1995 Heidi Rathjen of gun control group PolySeSouvient said, in response to Pierrette Venne’s question about what the group would do if Bill C-68 came into effect, that “…if [Bill C-68] is passed as it was tabled, without major amendment, then, as far as we are concerned, after what we’ve presented today, we will no longer fight for a federal legislation.” No major amendments were made. In 2015 she essentially re-endorsed their 1995 position, and blamed their continued activism on Harper-era tweaks and the post-1995 invention of “new” “assault weapons” — though many of the “assault weapons” her group wanted banned were on the market decades prior to C-68, were not prohibited by it, and remained legal until 2020.

C-68 was touted as the “end of the struggle to strengthen gun control in Canada.” While some advocates pledged to continue a push for a total ban on the remaining murkily-defined “military assault weapons,” the compromise was set. Subsequent Liberal and Conservative governments accepted the core philosophy and most core elements. The 2004 Conservative manifesto retained all of the central components except for the controversial, expensive, and ineffective  registration of hunting guns, a position eventually supported by Trudeau the Younger.

Gun-control groups used to be realistic about the scope of their goals and the Canadian way of life. They acknowledged hunting and sporting use, the importance of having “a supply of ammunition in the home” for predator defence in rural areas, and maintained that the Chief Firearms Officers should have discretion over license issuances or revocations when a person has been rehabilitated, a policy which C-21 would abolish. They didn’t even push for a total ban on handguns. In turn many gun owners came to see licensing as a point of pride. They saw it as a badge of honour indicating they belonged to the safest and most trusted citizens, clearly set apart from the criminal class and even safer than the general public.

[ … ]

These groups consider removing firearms from society an unalloyed good, yet consumer demand shows plenty see it differently. There are 2,300,000 licensed gun owners in Canada who rely on firearms for needs as diverse as agriculture, sport, wilderness protection, trapping, investment, heritage and hunting. Fifty thousand jobs and billions in GDP rely on them. Loss of livelihood is bad enough, but we also cannot ignore the loss of life that economic harm entails or that every dollar we spend or lose here could be spent on a nurse we do not employ, a soldier without proper equipment, or a diversion program for an at-risk youth.

For fun, I once roughly estimated the building costs for central storage units using comparable public contracts. It came to just over $600 million, before any operational costs. Six hundred million bucks is a lot of money in any scenario, but here’s the kicker: that’s for only 20,000 guns, in just the Northwest Territories. Where guns are critical to food security. Canada has about 12.5 million firearms. There’s a reason almost no serious comparator uses central storage, even in far smaller countries.

No one, especially the central government, is going to foot the bill for central storage of firearms, and especially not locked down and manning those storage locations with guards and stewards.

Rather, the goal is just to make all firearms illegal.  His work to compute the cost was a waste of time.

Notice how proud gun owners were of their licensure – and notice how earnestly and honestly gun owners negotiated the new laws.  But there will never be “end of the struggle to strengthen gun control in Canada.”  Governments don’t care one whit about “sporting” applications of firearms. They are trying to protect and ensure the survival of government, of the elitists, of the rulers, not a way of life or the ability to defend home and hearth. That’s why self defense with a firearm in Canada is illegal.

Negotiation and compromise is the road to hell.  Just don’t do it.  Ever.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/577/411/

Funny, that.

Samuel Alito argued that several hundred thousand stun guns meant they were in common use.

If someone had asked me to make observations about this issue, I would have said “No one can credibly argue that teachers shouldn’t be armed,” or “No one can credibly argue that schools need multiple, unlocked points of ingress,” or “No one can credibly argue that cops have the right to, under the color of law, prevent honorable and brace men from entering a premises to save their child.”

There are so many intelligent things to say.  These are only a few of them.  However, Jennifer Mascia is somehow able to find the most idiotic thing to say.

Source.

Florida House Speaker Paul Renner is shooting down any hopes of Florida becoming an open-carry state, at least for now.

During last Thursday’s remarks to reporters, Renner said while he supports the idea of open carry, it would be unlikely to see a law get passed this year.

“I’m a supporter of the Second Amendment across the board in many aspects,” said Renner. “There’s not an appetite in both chambers to get that done.”

Renner’s comments come after Rep. Mike Beltran, R-Riverview, filed legislation to make changes to the state’s current gun laws, including allowing people to openly carry firearms on college campuses.

“We always have to measure whether it’s worth the committee [and] House floor time to pass a bill that would be controversial that would take a lot of time, that we know is dead on arrival.”

The bill(HB 1619), would also allow guns to be carried in certain government buildings and at voting polls. The proposal comes just a year after the state made it legal for most Floridians to carry guns without a permit, as long as it’s concealed.

It was the first bill submitted when they came back into session. They had plenty of time to work on it.  What a bunch of pusillanimous cowards and spiritless, lying scoundrels.

Cops are against it, and that would be enough for the bootlickers to stop the bill, but they enacted gun control in the wake of the Parkland shooting and they won’t reverse course now. They would be seen as the duplicitous punks they are. So along with NY, Hawaii, California and Illinois, the communists in Florida (you know, the “law and order conservatives”) have left it all in place and don’t even mind telling you they don’t care about it immediately after the bill was filed.

Here is more perspective.

I had previously told you that I had as much use for the fourth circuit as I do for the muck between my toes.

And just to be clear, there is no reason at all for the supreme court to wait to hear a case like this since it’s going on all over the country now. As I said before, they’re running from it like little girls. Or maybe they want to do the bidding of the communists and wait for the makeup of the supreme court to change. To accomplish that, they would need the help of the two supposedly constitutional women on the court – Barrett and Roberts.