Courtesy of Blackfork we have this video of a “man-haul” at the CMP North Store at Camp Perry. One of these days I need to finish up my paperwork so I can do a “man-haul”. However, I think I’ll be going down to CMP South in Anniston, Alabama as it is closer. The video of those M-1D Garands has me drooling!
David Ignatius, in an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, says the gun lobby is holding Mexico hostage. Forgive me but I thought it was the drug cartels and narco-terrorists that were doing this.
Ignatius blames both the Arizona illegal alien law and the lack of a permanent director for ATF on the gun lobby. I know it is a stretch but that is what the Washington Post pays him to do. He claims that Arizona enacted SB 1070 because it was concerned about the violence from the Mexican drug cartels who in turn get their guns from the US which is because we have such lax gun laws which in turn are because Congress and the Obama Administration are afraid of the gun lobby. I’m sure we can all see the logic there. Not!
Likewise, there is no permanent director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives because the Administration is not willing to take the heat of a confirmation hearing. Ignatius follows this with the obligatory quote from Paul Helmke of the Brady Campaign.
“The absence of a chief has hamstrung ATF’s ability to aggressively target gun trafficking rings or corrupt firearms dealers and has demoralized its agents,” Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, wrote in a June 10 letter to Obama. Nearly two months later, the job is still empty, and there are no leading candidates.
Obviously, neither Ignatius nor Helmke saw my post on Andy Traver despite the fact that someone at DOJ was doing a Google search and found it. Nor have they ever gone to the website CleanUpATF.org where the demoralization of ATF field agents is usually traced to incompetent managers and the Office of Legal Counsel.
The rest of the op-ed goes into all the usual (and fallacious) arguments about 80% of confiscated weapons come from the United States, etc.
I guess it is worth reading if you have been suffering from low blood pressure lately and need a boost. Gun owners who have hypertension should avoid it at all costs.
Daniel Schmutter thinks New Jersey’s gun laws are ripe for challenge. He should know. He is the attorney representing the Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs in their lawsuit against the State of New Jersey over the state’s one firearm a month rationing law. He also authored amicus briefs in both the Heller and McDonald cases on behalf of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms.
In an op-ed piece in the second-largest newspaper in New Jersey, The Record, he examines what the McDonald decision means for New Jersey’s restrictive firearms laws. First, he says gun control advocates who say most of the state’s gun laws would pass muster because they are “reasonable restrictions” are wrong. He notes that neither Heller nor McDonald said “reasonable” gun laws are valid under the Second Amendment. Furthermore, “reasonable” is not a legal standard that offers any basis for saying a law would survive a challenge or not.
As it turns out, New Jersey gun law offers fertile ground for challenge, not merely because the state has such strict laws but because New Jersey law is exceedingly aggressive toward the law-abiding gun owner.
New Jersey’s regulatory scheme is highly unusual in that it approaches gun control by categorically banning guns and then carving out extremely limited exceptions to the prohibitions.
Thus, for example, possession of handguns is generally prohibited unless the possession falls within certain narrowly defined exemptions, such as possession inside one’s home or place of business.
This has two main effects. First, it shifts the burden of proving lawful possession to the gun owner. Second, it keeps the circumstances under which one may lawfully possess a handgun very narrow.
Schmutter asks what would happen if one were to substitute “book” for “gun” in the law. It would force readers and book owners to make absurd contortions in order to exercise a fundamental right. By Schmutter’s hypothetical example, you wouldn’t be allowed to have Tolstoy’s War and Peace because it was a long book and had too many pages (think restrictions on standard capacity magazines) unless you were a Russian lit scholar at Princeton or Rutgers.
He concludes,
The New Jersey Legislature must face the reality that the gun owner and the book owner alike must be treated with equal constitutional dignity. After McDonald, we now see that the emperor has no clothes.
New Jersey gun law is upside down, and if the New Jersey Legislature does not fundamentally reform its scheme of regulating guns, the courts will likely do it for them.
Jeff at Alphecca.com and the “Tribal Elder” of People of the Gun needs your help to keep his blog going.
He was “downsized” at the auto dealership where he has been working for the last few years. As a result, he is working longer hours for less pay. According to Jeff, “So, I took the job. I’m broke but I’m getting about a hundred more than if I signed up for unemployment. At least I’m earning my few dollars.”
Jeff is a gun blogger who has been around for years. Checking his Sitemeter stats, he has over 2 million visits. Knowing how hard it was to get to 10,000 visits, that illustrates how long he has been around and how important his site has become over the years.
If you can spare a few bucks, drop something into his tip jar. I did and I hope you will, too.
Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article with pictures and a video on the Appleseed Project. As others have commented, for the Times it was remarkably balanced. In other words, they didn’t condemn gun owners as bloodthirsty savages. They did, however, try to associate the Appleseed Project with the Tea Party movement, militias, and anti-government sorts.
The Appleseed Project has responded with a detailed rebuttal to the Times story. It is worth reading the whole thing.
To summarize their rebuttal, they make five major points.
First, Appleseed is not “militia”. They note Appleseed only offers instruction in rifle marksmanship and in the history of the American Revolution. They do not stress nor teach military or small unit tactics.
Second, Appleseed is not just “white”.
Appleseed is filled with students and instructors of all races, creeds, genders, and identities. We make no distinction for color, religion, sexual preference, political beliefs or any other discriminatory category. Our program is comprised at all levels of all Americans, and we explicitly urge all Americans to come. We have no patience for those who would take this great nation and divide it up by race, or who would single out someone else for ridicule or derision.
Third, Appleseed is not anti-government, anti-military, or anti-law enforcement.
Appleseed has zero tolerance for anti-government, anti-military, or anti-law enforcement attitudes, comments or advocates. To the contrary, we offer free spots on our shooting lines for active duty military personnel and have been called onto military bases to teach troops deploying for overseas duty in combat theaters.
Fourth, Appleseed is not “right wing”. They note they have no interest in partisan politics and have attracted students from across the political spectrum.
Finally, Appleseed doesn’t have some “secret plan.”
We wish we had a Secret Plan to get more people involved but we don’t. There is no inner group, no special level, no wizard behind the curtain. There is only this: Our ancestors were left with two paths: submission or bloodshed. They chose the latter so that we could be left with a third path: citizenship and civic participation. To take this third path we must get off the couch, turn off the TV, and get involved in our communities. Those who would blather about a “choice” between submission and bloodshed in modern American do not understand what American was meant to be, or is.
Civic participation is not our secret plan. It is our openly stated mission.
I wish them luck in getting their rebuttal published in the New York Times. After all, it is the Times who decides what is the news fit to print – not the rest of us.
For a better review of the Appleseed Project, I suggest reading Massad Ayoob’s review of it in Backwoods Home magazine. Mas not only participated but was awarded his Rifleman Patch.
After the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, the British rulers of India banned all non-Europeans from owning firearms. It was their way of keeping the Indian people defenseless, if not totally submissive. Even Gandhi, the foremost proponent of non-violence, termed this act “the blackest” of the many misdeeds of the British rule in India.
The Indian Government replaced that law in 1959. Its replacement “granted every citizen the right to bear arms, regardless of race or social standing.” That was then and this is now.
As noted in an article in the Indian newspaper The National,
Along with highly restrictive curbs on the sale of ammunition and the creation of a national database of firearm owners, the new regulations also require gun-licence applicants to prove a “grave and imminent threat” to their lives in order to be approved.
Indian gunowners are outraged and have finally formed The National Association of Gun Rights India (Nagri) to fight for their gun rights. They have patterned it after the NRA. They aim to lobby lawmakers as well as fund legal cases to make it easier to own and carry firearms.
This month the organisation began a membership drive – and in doing so, they have provoked a debate about the role of fire arms in the land of Mahatma Gandhi.
“The bottom line is it’s about freedom,” said Abhijeet Singh, 37, an entrepreneur and one of Nagri’s founders.
“The first line of defence has to be the citizen. It always has been like that, it will always continue to be like that.”
Their opposition, Control Arms Foundation of India (Cafi), takes the same approach as the Brady Campaign and seeks to blame the gun and not the criminal.
But anti-gun campaigners say arming citizens is not the way forward. The Control Arms Foundation of India (Cafi), which was set in up 2004 in response to rising gun crime in the north-east, estimates there are already some 46 million firearms in India, making it the country with the second largest number of guns in civilian hands after the US.
“If I say I am going to protect myself then I exempt the state from doing its job. What India are we living in? This is not some failed state,” said Arundhati Ghose, a former India ambassador to the UN who campaigns for Cafi.
The founder of NAGRI counters that is nonsense. He notes that criminals can get more firepower and be less traceable if they go to the black market.
This is a group that bears watching. It would be nice to see real gun rights come to the second largest country in the world.
Yesterday, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, the CalGuns Foundation, the NRA, the Folsom Gun Club, and two individuals brought the third suit in California over the state’s new handgun ammunition law. Today, Alan Gura and the Second Amendment Foundation filed their third lawsuit after their win in McDonald v. Chicago.
The newest case involves a Baltimore County, Maryland man who’s renewal of his handgun carry permit was turned down by the Maryland State Police because he couldn’t demonstrate “a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger.” The case, Woollard et al v. Sheridan et al, was filed in U. S. District Court for the District of Maryland. In addition to Raymond Woollard, the Second Amendment Foundation is also a plaintiff.
The Second Amendment Foundation said in their release,
The lawsuit alleges that “Individuals cannot be required to demonstrate that carrying a handgun is ‘necessary as a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger’ as a prerequisite for exercising their Second Amendment rights.” Plaintiffs are seeking a permanent injunction against enforcement of the Maryland provision that requires permit applicants to “demonstrate cause” for the issuance of a carry permit.
On Christmas Eve, 2002, Mr. Woollard and his family were attacked in a home invasion by a burglar. He and his family finally subdued the intruder and had to wait 2 1/2 hours for the police to arrive. The police were confused as to whether he was in Baltimore County or not. The home invader was convicted of 1st Degree Burglary and given a sentence of three years probation.
Mr. Woollard was granted a handgun carry permit after this incident. His permit was renewed in 2005 after the home invader (who lives a mere three miles from him) was released from prison on probation violation charges. When Mr. Woollard went to renew his permit in 2009, he was denied a renewal because he didn’t provide proof that he was in danger. He appealed this denial to the Handgun Permit Review Board. They affirmed his denial saying “has not submitted any documentation to verify threats occurring beyond his residence, where he can already legally carry a handgun.”
The lawsuit is suing the Maryland State Police and the Handgun Permit Review Board on Second and Fourteenth Amendment grounds. The suit contends,
28. Individuals cannot be required to prove their “good and substantial reason” for the exercise of fundamental constitutional rights, including the right to keep and bear arms.
29. Individuals cannot be required to demonstrate that carrying a handgun is
“necessary as a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger,” or that they face a greater than average level of danger, as a prerequisite for exercising their Second Amendment rights.30. Maryland Public Safety Code § 5-306(a)(5)(ii)’s requirement that handgun carry
permit applicants demonstrate “good and substantial reason to wear, carry, or transport a handgun, such . . . that the permit is necessary as a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger,” violates the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, damaging Plaintiffs in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
The suit seeks to permanently enjoin the Maryland State Police and Handgun Permit Review Board from requiring a showing of “apprehended danger as well as “from denying a permit to carry firearms on grounds that the applicant does not face a level of danger higher than that which an average person would reasonably expect to encounter.” The suit is also asking for Mr. Woollard’s permit to renewed, cost of the suit, and attorney’s fees.
I see this lawsuit as well as the Westchester County, NY case as a direct frontal assault on “may issue” states. A win in either or both of those cases would mean that one doesn’t have to be rich, famous, or well-connected in order to secure a carry permit.
The whole complaint can be found here.
UPDATE: Dave Hardy at the Of Arms and the Law blog has a very perceptive observation.
And to think — it was only a few years ago that Brady and others were suing gun manufacturers right and left, as part of a campaign to bankrupt the industry, a campaign that had a good chance of succeeding. Today, they’re on the defensive (to the extent they act at all) and the progun side is on the offense. Since almost all of it has occurred over the last month or so, it’s more than an offense, it’s a legal blitzkrieg.
UPDATE II: Sebastian at Snowflakes in Hell makes a very good point about Maryland. It is in the 4th Circuit but is the outlier in terms of concealed carry. The other states in the 4th Circuit – Virginia, West Virginia, and the Carolinas are all “shall issue” states.
UPDATE III: The Baltimore Sun didn’t even cover this in today’s paper. The Washington Post did have a story but it was buried on page B6. I’m sure they be screaming bloody murder if and when Woollard wins.
I received this from the NC WRC today:
Crossbow Hunting
The use of crossbows is now a legal hunting method by licensed hunters anytime bow-and-arrow hunting is allowed. However, state law requires that anyone buying or otherwise receiving a crossbow in North Carolina must first obtain a pistol permit from the sheriff’s office in their county of residence or hold a valid concealed handgun permit. Questions about obtaining pistol permits and issuance of concealed handgun permits should be directed to the local sheriff’s department.
The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission does not regulate the sale or purchase of firearms and crossbows.
They must be getting a lot of calls about the requirement to have a pistol permit or CHP before you can buy a crossbow in North Carolina. I would say it is time for the General Assembly to get their act in gear and remove the permit requirements from crossbow purchases. They must have gotten scared after seeing Carol Bouquet as Melina Havelock in the James Bond movie “For Your Eyes Only” when they imposed that requirement.
A great post at MArooned: Something To Be Proud Of… on Obama having to choose between The View over the Boy Scouts.
Jay at MArooned hit it on the head especially on the rage meter.
The View or the Boy Scout National Jamboree at Ft. A.P. Hill? Hmm.
Well, we know which one Obama chose as ABC is running ads touting his appearance on The View. Besides, those Boy Scouts are meeting on an icky military base!
I haven’t been active in Scouting for 35 years. That said, I was an Eagle Scout (bronze palm) and a Brotherhood member of the Order of the Arrow (Tali Tak Taki 70) and I still remember the Scout Law.
The Washington Times had an editorial today on Senator Olympia Snowe’s (R-ME) support of Elena Kagan to be the newest Supreme Court Justice. She based part of her support for Kagan on the Second Amendment.
Snowe’s office sent out a press release announcing her support for Kagan that said, in part,
“Also, she has affirmed forcefully that adherence to Court precedent is a vital command for the Court. And in that light, in my view as a longtime, ardent supporter of Second Amendment rights, it was critical that General Kagan stated during her testimony that the precedents set by the Supreme Court in the Heller and McDonald cases – which upheld a personal right to possess a firearm — are ‘deeply rooted in this nation’s history and traditions’ and are ‘settled law;’ that she has ‘absolutely no reason to think that the court’s analysis was incorrect in any way;’ and, that she will apply these cases as law ‘going forward.’”
As the Washington Times notes, “We’ve been down this road before” with Justice Sonia Sotomayor and her contention that the Second Amendment was settled law.
Once the “wise Latina” donned the robes of her lifetime office, any pretense of upholding the individual’s right to bear arms was jettisoned. Ms. Sotomayor signed onto the gun rights dissent of Justice Stephen G. Breyer last month, which stated, “I can find nothing in the Second Amendment’s text, history or underlying rationale that could warrant characterizing it as ‘fundamental’ insofar as it seeks to protect the keeping and bearing of arms for private self-defense purposes.”
The editorial examines Kagan’s past statements regarding guns and the Second Amendment. They think her “new” statements were nothing more than a means to provide cover to “squishy” Republicans – or what the rest of the world would call RINO’s. The editors think Kagan will follow the same path as Sotomayor when, and if, Second Amendment cases reach the Supreme Court – lipservice now, knife in the back later.
They conclude that,
No senator, Democrat or Republican, can claim he supports gun ownership and then turn around and elevate someone to the nation’s highest court who will work to undermine the fundamental nature of the Second Amendment. A vote for Ms. Kagan is a vote for a nominee who will join with Justices Breyer and Sotomayor to scale back – and try to eliminate – the individual’s right to gun ownership.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the Senate’s confirmation of Elena Kagan, the old saying, “As Maine goes, so goes the Nation” is probably correct. A filibuster cannot stop her now.
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