Currently Browsing: Guns
Jul 20, 2017
Posted by Sebastian in Anti-Gun Folks | 14 comments
Mother Jones has an article about the Phillips suit against Lucky Gunner, et al over selling the Aurora killer ammunition. Mrs. Phillips notes:
Working for the Brady Campaign became a flurry of media appearances and meetings with politicians, police, and survivors. The Brady leadership also encouraged Lonnie and me to sue Lucky Gunner, the dealer that sold the stockpile of ammo to Jessi’s killer. We agreed that dealers should have to take some responsibility. Shouldn’t they have to vet a buyer of military-grade weaponry? Or a buyer of bullets en masse? The primary goal of our lawsuit was to make the gun dealer change its business practices—at a minimum, to ask for proof of identity and do a background check.
The PLCAA does not exempt suits for negligence per se, which means that if Lucky Gunner violated the law, they can be liable despite the PLCAA protections. This is exactly the kind of lawsuit PLCAA was meant to stop: roughly the equivalent of suing a gas station that sold a tank of gas to a drunk. Lucky Gunner broke no law. They did not have any idea what the killer intended, just as no gas station could possibly know someone filling up is a drunk who might later that day get tanked and plough into a van with kids. The Aurora killer was not a prohibited person, because despite being out of his gourd, he never came in contact with the mental health system to become prohibited. He purchased his firearm legally after passing a background check.
Today, after nearly five years of activism, Lonnie and I continue to struggle. We filed for Chapter 11 protection in January because we could not afford to pay the legal fees for Lucky Gunner.
I’ll assume here that she means Chapter 13 protection, because that would be the typical filing for this kind of personal bankruptcy. But I think it’s terrible that she’s having to apply for personal bankruptcy when it’s the Brady Campaign that encouraged her and her husband to file a frivolous that was doomed the failure, and where the statute allows recovery of attorneys fees for such suits deemed frivolous. They should have warned them, and been ready to pay up when the inevitable happened. Sounds to me like they might have a pretty good case against the Brady Campaign and its lawyers!
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Jul 19, 2017
Posted by Sebastian in Anti-Gun Folks | 7 comments
These days, you don’t see much in the way of ridiculous op-eds on guns being published in the papers. Neither the media or the NRA are paying much attention to the gun issue today, and media is all too happy to attack NRA over their latest nothing-to-do-with-guns attack ads.
Every single one of these old lady’s complaints could be successfully addressed by training. It would relieve her of our ignorance on this topic. But I suspect she’s not about to seek training, because the parade of ignorance that is her op-ed wasn’t about that.
But I do have to hand it to her writing an op-ed about guns. She seems more interested in the gun rights battle these days than NRA is, at least.
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Jul 18, 2017
Posted by Sebastian in Guns | 23 comments
Good news if it passes:
Included in the NDAA was an amendment I offered that would allow the Army to release excess 1911 pistols from storage and transfer them to the Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP) for them to inspect, grade, prepare for sale and sell the pistols to the public.
Now if we could just get an exception to the “once a machine gun, always a machine gun” rule and allow semi-auto converted surplus M14s to be sold through CMP.
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Jul 14, 2017
Posted by Sebastian in Anti-Gun Folks | 11 comments
When it comes to issue advocacy or issue activism, I’ve never believed it’s beneficial to do battle with a caricature in your head about what the other side is like. You have to study their arguments, study their behaviors and inclinations, and how they organize themselves.
At the end of the day, if you don’t feel like you could successfully hold your own on their side of the debate table, using their arguments, you’re probably not being thorough enough in understanding your opponents. To defeat their ideas, and confront who they are, you need to actually know them.
That’s one reason I will read Ladd Everitt’s column. I want to share some tidbits from his latest:
The modern-day NRA is a white supremacist group that — because of the success of its lobbying at the federal, state and local level — is given broad legal authority by the government to sell weapons to the general public for profit.*
NRA is a multi-billion dollar a year organization, and only a small fraction of its revenue comes from the gun industry, either directly or indirectly. Brownells the company is, first and foremost, an accessories company. So is MidwayUSA. Both are some of NRA’s biggest corporate contributors, most of it being through the “Round-Up” program. That means that the donations are still sourced from individuals in small amounts. This is not bullshit. These are verifiable facts.
I’ve spent a lot of time at NRA meetings, much of which has been in environments frequented by ordinary members. I have never heard any white supremacist rhetoric in my entire history at Annual Meeting. In fact, I seem to recall last year NRA honored Josephine Byrd, the plaintiff on the Wilmington Housing Authority case, to the cheers of 20,000 or so apparent “white supremacists” in the room. I can also recall this past meeting, a line of people lined up to meet Colion Noir. Sound like the behavior of white supremacists? I don’t think so, especially given the number of people lined up were black. I also recall this supposed white supremacist pro-gun community rallying behind Shaneen Allen. I could go on.
I’m not going to claim that all 5 million NRA members are bastions of racial tolerance and understanding. Like any group with that many people in it, there are going to be some that are racist assholes. But I’m not really angry with Ladd for saying this. In fact, I hope he keeps doing it.
They are All-In at this point on a strategy to make conservative whites repeat gun customers for life (this includes white law enforcement officers as well, as recently highlighted by Radley Balko in the Washington Post).
Yes. Please keep this up, because this is not the rhetoric of a person who is concerned with winning. I think both Balko’s article and Ladd’s statement here are important. Our opponents have spent a lot of time and money trying to demonstrate to the public that the cops are on their side. There’s an important reason for that. Here you see them conceding the point. They might not be directly conceding it, but you can’t accept that Radley Balko has a point without also acknowledging a lot of NRA’s member support comes from cops and law enforcement families.
NRA has made a huge gamble, or perhaps that ought to be yuge gamble, in lashing their ship to Donald Trump. NRA’s bet is that essentially the Democrats will not come back from the wilderness by doubling down on the Obama coalition. To make a come back, they will need to soften their rhetoric and come back to the center, remembering that the Dems last time came back by a process that encouraged pro-gun Democrats.
My fear is and will remain that it’s a very risky bet, because I’m not sure the Dems are wrong about demographic trends. NRA hasn’t done as well as it needs penetrating outside its traditional demographic. It’s made some progress, but I worry not enough. But NRA has been playing Trump’s game since before Trump made it cool, and they are very good at it.
I will continue to rail against NRA dragging itself into the right culture wars, because I do ultimately think while we may see short term benefit in it, long term it’s not a winning strategy. But I’ve made big bets against the NRA before and turned out to be wrong.
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Jul 14, 2017
Posted by Sebastian in Gun Rights | 28 comments
The same people that organized the gigantic post-inaugural Women’s march decided to target NRA headquarters. The number I’ve heard is 212 people, including press. Pictures would seem to back that up.
As I saw on social media: “I’ve taken shits bigger than that rally.” That’ll show em! How many do you think will make the 17 miles to the DOJ building in DC? It’s a pretty long walk even to the Metro.
I will continue to assert: the left doesn’t give a shit about gun control. Ladd Everitt’s theme lately is trying to convince Progressives not to buy guns. He’s come seriously unglued over this. This is not what a successful movement looks like.
And why on earth would you march people 17 miles in July when you know you have commitment issues, and most of the people who care about gun control are old? The whole idea is a recipe for fail. But I’m not one to interrupt my opponent when they are in the middle of making a mistake.
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Jul 12, 2017
Posted by Sebastian in Gun Rights Organizations | 30 comments
NRA breaks its silence on the Philando Castile case:
Do I believe that Philando Castile deserved to lose his life over his [traffic] stop? I absolutely do not. I also think that this is why we have things like NRA Carry Guard, not only to reach out to the citizens to go over what to do during stops like this, but also to work with law enforcement so that they understand what citizens are experiencing when they go through stops like this.
I guess all things are taking a back seat to what’s really important: signing people up for Carry Guard. Radley Balko has an article in the Washington Post: “How the NRA’s allegiance to cops undermines its credibility on gun rights.”
A law-abiding gun owner was shot and killed by a cop after doing everything he was supposed to do. It then took more than a year for anyone from the nation’s largest gun rights organization to comment, and when she did, she offered a vague, heavily qualified, quasi-criticism of the cop while implying not only that Castile contributed to his death but also that he might be alive if only he were carrying an NRA Carry Guard card.
Actually, Castile did a number of things that you should never do in a stop, but in my opinion the officer did not handle the situation well either. More training on both sides of a stop is a valid answer, but I really don’t like using this to hawk Carry Guard.
Where I really part with Balko is that I don’t want the NRA taking sides on the militarization of police any more than I want them to be militantly pro-police for the sake of taking sides a culture war that has nothing to do with gun rights. NRA has fostered police involvement for years through it’s LE program, and I’m fine with that. That’s part of NRA’s mission.
But I’ll be bluntly honest, I’m not happy where NRA’s PR firm, and Dana Loesch in particular, seem to be taking the organization.
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Jul 12, 2017
Posted by Sebastian in Guns | 3 comments
What I think the June NICS figures boil down to is that there will never again be a better driver for gun sales than the Obama Administration alongside the “inevitability” of a Hillary Administration.
But the repeated media stories about an utter collapse in gun sales don’t appear to be true. We’re still nearly double what we were when Obama took office. Will it continue to drop? Time will tell, but I think as long as we live in uncertain times, sales will remain above historical levels.
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Jul 11, 2017
Posted by Sebastian in 2nd Amendment | 20 comments
While I was taking a break over the week of the 4th of July holiday, a ruling was handed down by a federal court in California enjoining the state from carrying out its confiscation of standard capacity magazines. Dave Kopel’s article about the case is the best I’ve seen, so read the whole thing.
The court ruled that the Second Amendment was implicated in the magazine ban and such a ban failed intermediate scrutiny. To me this should trigger strict scrutiny, but intermediate scrutiny, prior to Second Amendment law, was still a pretty high standards if Courts actually applied it. The problem with what the lower courts have done is they’ve taken to just reclassifying rational basis review as some higher level of scrutiny, and so far SCOTUS has allowed them to get away with it.
The court here also ruled that the taking was an issue, that essentially the state can’t confiscate property without fair compensation.
It will take courts willing to buck precedent in the future if the makeup of SCOTUS improves, so that we can move cases forward. There are judges out there that think what the lower courts have done with Second Amendment law is wrong and are willing to help us address that. It should be noted that Judge Benitez, who wrote the opinion in this case, was appointed by George W. Bush. It is possible for us to improve our lot even with very imperfect presidents in the White House.
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Jul 11, 2017
Posted by Sebastian in Gun Rights, Pennsylvania | 14 comments
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has denied appeal on FOAC et al. v. Lower Merion Township, basically upholding the ruling in Commonwealth Court that their ordinance banning firearms and discharge in township parks was illegal.
Our current preemption law usually works when we can take these ordinances to court, but getting them there is difficult.
Also from Josh Prince: “It is time for the citizens of Pennsylvania to stop paying millions of dollars, each year, for a broken and duplicative system, when the FBI offer NICS to us for free.” PICS is awful. At some point I’d like to see a bill in Congress to eliminate POC states. That way there’s only one entity to keep an eye on. POC state agencies have gotten away with a lot worse malfeasance than the FBI, and the FBI does a much better job with uptime on NICS than the PSP does with PICS, which is very outage prone for as much as it’s costing taxpayers.
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Jun 28, 2017
Posted by Sebastian in Weekly Gun News | 38 comments
It’s been a few weeks since I did a gun news post. Weekly is just an indicator that it’s not monthly. It doesn’t mean I have to do one every week, right? Unfortunately I got a call from my cousin informing me that my Uncle had passed away quite unexpectedly during the night. In truth I was raised calling them Aunt and Uncle but they are not blood relations. He was my dad’s best friend from childhood. But other than my own father, he probably had more impact on who I am today than any other male figure in my life. I did not grow up in a gun owning family. He is the reason I took up shooting and the gun rights cause. If he had not been the influence on my life that he was, none of you would be reading this blog. So things might be a bit scarce this week.
Police departments can either pay for their officers to have decent training, or they can pay that money out in settlements.
Cert has been denied in the case of Sessions v. Binderup, which leaves the 3rd circuit decision standing.
I have to agree with Miguel on this one… Everytown is reaching. NRA doesn’t comment on a lot of things, and they aren’t obligated to respond to every single person who is ever shot. I do think NRA missed an opportunity to show they don’t just care about OFWGs, but this is ridiculous. Somehow I believe Shannon Watts is behind this one.
Looks like CNMI is looking to reinstate its handgun ban, despite Heller. And why not? Heller has been effectively rendered meaningless by the lower courts.
Some sneakiness going on in Indiana. Seems you can’t carry in buildings with courtrooms in them, so some local communities are claiming there are court rooms in municipal buildings.
John Feinblatt of Everytown: “In the wake of Scalise shooting, gun control couldn’t be more urgent.”
Over at Reason: “Why Did a Conservative Judge Uphold an Assault Weapons Ban?” Judicial minimalism are judges abrogating their responsibility to the Constitution and the people. It forwards this silly notion that the silly people we elect and send to Washington somehow so represent that who needs any kind of pesky constitution? It’s time for the dinosaurs who practice this travesty retire from the court.
There are a lot of things about this NRA Carry Guard offering that seem poorly considered.
WaPo: “These GOP lawmakers are pushing for more gun rights after baseball shooting”
Delaware has been living on borrowed time for a while. But probably not as much borrowed time as New Jersey if it gets a Dem governor in 2018. You can definitely forget about pardons if that happens.
On the other hand, this proposal in Delaware seems worthwhile, even if it falls short of actual shall-issue.
Dave Kopel: “Bad police training may have killed Philando Castile.”
More Dave Kopel: “The Hearing Protection Act and ‘silencers’”
Training Scars: Brass in Pockets.
NJ Supreme Court says you can answer the door with a defensive weapon. More here.
Well, well. It looks like Shannon Watts might be running for office after all. I didn’t know Polis had ambitions to be Governor. She better be better at campaigning than she is at running MDA if she wants to have a shot.
Concealed Carry as a Martial Art.
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