David Codrea:

Yet another citizen is facing criminal charges for not realizing that gun laws vary from state to state.  Hayley Leach, a Colorado woman, was arrested when she attempted to check her gun in at Albany Airport for her return flight home, News 10 ABC reported.

[ … ]

It’s reminiscent of earlier similar cases, including that of Donna Marie Gracey, the Florida woman with a concealed carry permit who was arrested last month for having it in New Jersey, or the ordeals of Shaneen Allen and others. None of them had criminal intent.

I don’t fly to states where I can’t carry a gun.  I don’t visit them in any way, including driving to or through them.  I try not to send my money there either (Kimber, S&W, Mossberg, etc., are you listening carefully to what I’m saying?).  In fact, I will not even get on board a flight where it’s possible that I’ll have a layover or exigent landing for weather or some other reason in a state where I can’t carry a firearm.

You shouldn’t either.

By the way, you are aware, aren’t you, that the great land of gun control, New Jersey, has a sordid and wretched  history with hitmen, and a not so great history of allowing people to defend themselves from such people?

Guess that gun control stuff hasn’t worked out so well after all.

The Week:

Or, as one member of the range put it, “When it comes to gun laws, there’s the whole country, and then there’s New York.” While that may be a slight exaggeration, New York is indeed the polar opposite of lax states like Utah, Alaska, and Arizona, and is arguably the toughest in the country to own a gun. Here, no one is actually entitled to possess a firearm, at least not until the police give the go-ahead.

“Your right can never be taken away from you,” continued Leung, “but your privilege can be revoked at any given time. The NYPD is the licensing entity. They can add any kinds of stipulations they want. And they don’t have to explain why.”

It makes sense to keep guns on a short leash, Leung acknowledges, because “you want people to realize this is not a toy …

As we were talking, a middle-aged man in a grey suit who was carrying a black plastic case sat down at the table next to us. He unlocked it, removed a 9mm Beretta and nonchalantly placed the pistol on the table. Then he took out a box of bullets and started loading them into a magazine, one by one.

First a comment about putting a “box of bullets” on the table and filling his magazine.  They weren’t “bullets,” they were cartridges.  Second, this is extremely bad form.  No magazines get loaded until on range, with weapons pointed downrange.  This is true of everywhere I shoot, many places.  They have no concept of range safety.

Second, this range owner is a sad testimony to the mentality of pitiful New Yorkers who unwisely rely on the police for protection they cannot (and have no intention to) provide.  The police have usurped God’s authority, who commands the ability of self defense and defense of the little ones.

If the police have usurped God’s authority, the people have abdicated their responsibility and duty before the Almighty.  They will answer for that one awful day, along with collectivists who put them in that position to begin with.  Evil with the one doesn’t obviate the other.  I’m sorry for my New York readers who are good, honest folk and who don’t live in NYC.  But if you’re like this range owner, you deserve everything you get.

Hell will freeze over before I ever abdicate my God-given rights to own guns to a cop or judge.  Oh, and since I haven’t mentioned it in a few weeks, to Remington, Kimber and any other gun manufacturer in the empire state: why are you still there?

What will it take with you?  My most recent rifle purchase was a Winchester Model 70 rather than a Remington 700.  My Model 70 will be made right down the road from me in Columbia, S.C.

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

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?

In what will surely be many to come, the New York gun ban has claimed its first victim.

It was only a matter of time before New York’s draconian new gun law, the obscenely misnamed “SAFE Act,” claimed its first victim Since the oppressive new law was forced through with such haste (and “under a veil of secrecy in the dark of night,” as the NRA put it), and signed by Governor Cuomo (who is already scrambling to change this “Most Stupid Gun Law Ever Made“) into law immediately (because the required three-day public comment period apparently frightened supporters of the law), it ends up not having been much time for that first victim.

Our alleged “gun criminal” is Benjamin M. Wassell, and his supposed “crime” is selling both an AR-15 pattern rifle and a (similar, but larger) AR-10 pattern rifle, both of which had supposedly been upgraded by Mr. Wassell with such now-verboten “assault features” as a pistol grip …

Read it all at Examiner.  The question now is what will New Yorkers do?  You know, the riflemen?  You have a fellow rifleman who has been charged under the new communist law, so what will you do now?