How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.
—Winston Churchill, The River War, 1899.

As the commentariat sharpens its pencils and waits for further information on the motives of the Army doctor responsible for the Fort Hood massacre to emerge, it seems safe to predict that the liberals will not identify Islam’s propensity to inculcate fanaticism, xenophobia, and murderous violence as the key factor.

Most likely, they will blame guns and, following several leading liberal social scientists, insufficient American domestication and statism. If Americans just bowed to Socialism and accepted the complete universal authority, supervision, and direction of the paternalist state along with Max Weber’s Gewaltmonopol des Staates, and gave up retarditaire habits of owning weapons and relying in extreme situations on self defense, then we would be civilized like Europeans.

Jill Lepore quotes some leading authorities in the New Yorker:

The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany. Why? Historians haven’t often asked this question. Even historians who like to try to solve cold cases usually cede to sociologists and other social scientists the study of what makes murder rates rise and fall, or what might account for why one country is more murderous than another. Only in the nineteen-seventies did historians begin studying homicide in any systematic way. In the United States, that effort was led by Eric Monkkonen, who died in 2005, his promising work unfinished. Monkkonen’s research has been taken up by Randolph Roth, whose book “American Homicide” (Harvard; $45) offers a vast investigation of murder, in the aggregate, and over time. Roth’s argument is profoundly unsettling. There is and always has been, he claims, an American way of murder. It is the price of our politics. ...

Pieter Spierenburg, a professor of historical criminology at Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, sifts through the evidence in “A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present” (Polity; $24.95). In Europe, homicide rates, conventionally represented as the number of murder victims per hundred thousand people in the population per year, have been falling for centuries. Spierenburg attributes this long decline to what the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” (shorthand for a whole class of behaviors requiring physical restraint and self-control, right down to using a fork instead of eating with your hands or stabbing at your food with a knife), and to the growing power of the centralizing state to disarm civilians, control violence, enforce law and order, and, broadly, to hold a monopoly on the use of force. (Anthropologists sometimes talk about a related process, the replacement of a culture of honor with a culture of dignity.) In feuding medieval Europe, the murder rate hovered around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds. Duels are more mannered; they also have a lower body count. By 1500, the murder rate in Western Europe had fallen to about twenty. Courts had replaced duels. By 1700, the murder rate had dropped to five. Today, that rate is generally well below two, where it has held steady, with minor fluctuations, for the past century.

The American homicide rate has been higher than Europe’s from the start, and higher at just about every stage since. It has also fluctuated, sometimes wildly. During the Colonial period, the homicide rate fell, but in the nineteenth century, while Europe’s kept sinking, the U.S. rate went up and up. In the twentieth century, the rate in the United States dropped to about five during the years following the Second World War, but then rose, reaching about eleven in 1991. It has since fallen once again, to just above five, a rate that is, nevertheless, twice that of any other affluent democracy.

What accounts for this remarkable difference? Guns leap to mind: in 2008, firearms were involved in two-thirds of all murders in the United States. Yet Roth, who supports gun control, insists that the prevalence of guns in America, and our lax gun laws, can’t account for the whole spread, and a few scholars have argued that laws allowing concealed weapons actually lower the murder rate, by deterring assaults. Some Europeans suspect that Americans haven’t undergone the same “civilizing process,” as if, unmoored from Europe, Colonial Americans went murderously adrift. Spierenburg speculates that democracy came too soon to the United States. By the time European states became democracies, the populace had accepted the authority of the state. But the American Revolution happened before Americans had got used to the idea of a state monopoly on force. Americans therefore preserved for themselves not only the right to bear arms—rather than yielding that right to a strong central government—but also medieval manners: impulsiveness, crudeness, and fidelity to a culture of honor. We’re backward, in other words, because we became free before we learned how to control ourselves.

Myself, I agree with Fred Boynton in Barcelona (1994):

0:25 into the 1:50 trailer

It’s not that Americans are more violent than Europeans. It’s just that we’re better shots.

Why would anyone possibly want to carry a weapon in a National Park?

In classic liberal newspaper fashion, the Yellowstone Insider performs some grave chin-stroking over the successful passage of Senator Tom Coburn’s S. Amendment 1067 (Text: pg. 1—pg. 2, attached to bill H.R. 627 regulating the credit card industry.

Wyoming does indeed have a concealed-carry law—you can see for yourself on the state’s website—and does indeed recognize concealed-carry permits from other states. ... However, Wyoming is one of the many states that allows citizens to openly carry a legally registered weapon. ...

(T)he fact that Park Rangers must add gun enforcement to their list of duties is not the most desirable of outcomes. Generally speaking, the vast majority of gun owners are responsible citizens. The problem, however, doesn’t lie with responsible gun owners; it lies with irresponsible gun owners, and they, too, exist; there were issues raised by gun owners openly brandishing their weapons during Obama speeches in Arizona and Minnesota this summer, as they went out of their way to openly carry legal semiautomatic weapons in large crowds waiting to see the President. Poaching, too, is still an issue in Yellowstone. And, quite bluntly, we can’t think of many instances in Yellowstone National Park where anyone would need a weapon; we’re not talking about an environment where animal attacks or human crime occurs with any degree of regularity.

In the Daily article, local attorney Kent Spence of Jackson’s Spence Law Firm says he would feel more comfortable camping in the Yellowstone backwoods carrying a weapon capable of taking down a bear, though he admitted pepper spray would be his first line of defense. We’re not so sure every other gun owner would be as comfortable or responsible should a bear attack.

You really have to admire liberal journalistic reasoning in action. Making something legal is alleged to create a new law enforcement responsibility for Park Rangers. Most of us would have supposed that eliminating a potential violation would have the opposite effect.

And you certainly would not want to be “irresponsible” in the event of a grizzly bear attack. Who knows? The indignant bear might sue.

Yes, Pepper Spray is definitely the answer. (Old joke)

I favor the .500 Linebaugh brand of Pepper Spray myself.

Scott Wong, at PhxBeat, explains that the black guy with the gun outside the Obama Health Care Town Hall meeting in Phoenix was just affirming his Second Amendment rights.

Neatly dressed in a white shirt, black tie and gray slacks, the man, who only gave his first name as Chris, also had a pistol holstered at his side as he engaged in heated debates with those rallying in support of Obama’s heath-care reform plan.

A Phoenix police spokesman said plainclothes detectives were monitoring about a dozen protesters carrying guns, though no one broke any laws or was arrested.

Arizona is an “open-carry” state, which means anyone legally allowed to have a firearm can carry it in public as long as it’s visible. A permit is required if the weapon is carried concealed.

“Because I can do it,” Chris said when asked why he brought guns to the rally at 3rd and Washington streets. “In Arizona, I still have some freedoms left.”

On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer fretted over health care reform protesters legally carrying guns: “A man at a pro-health care reform rally…wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip….there are questions about whether this has racial overtones….white people showing up with guns.” Brewer failed to mention the man she described was black.

Following Brewer’s report, which occurred on the Morning Meeting program, host Dylan Ratigan and MSNBC pop culture analyst Toure discussed the supposed racism involved in the protests. Toure argued: “...there is tremendous anger in this country about government, the way government seems to be taking over the country, anger about a black person being president….we see these hate groups rising up and this is definitely part of that.” Ratigan agreed: “...then they get the variable of a black president on top of all these other things and that’s the move – the cherry on top, if you will, to the accumulated frustration for folks.”

Not only did Brewer, Ratigan, and Toure fail to point out the fact that the gun-toting protester that sparked the discussion was black, but the video footage shown of that protester was so edited, that it was impossible to see that he was black.

1:34 video

David Michaels

Barack Obama’s appointments have, in several cases, been more extreme than most observers would have expected, selecting not just liberals, but figures on the left renowned for the extremism of their positions.

Walter Olson notes that Barack Obama’s nominee for head of the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration, politicized epidemiologist David Michaels is not only an activist ally of the Tort Bar, but actually has a record of advocating linking gun control to workplace safety regulation.

That Pennsylvania deer hunter who parks his pick-up at the plant in the morning with his .30-30 in a gun rack behind the seat, planning to get in an hour or two of hunting after work, could lose his job if David Michaels receives confirmation.

The controversial OSHA nominee and left-leaning public health advocate also seems to have strong views on firearms issues. That’s by no means irrelevant to the agenda of an agency like OSHA, because once you start viewing private gun ownership as a public health menace, it begins to seem logical to use the powers of government to urge or even require employers to forbid workers from possessing guns on company premises, up to and including parking lots, ostensibly for the protection of co-workers. In addition, OSHA has authority to regulate the working conditions of various job categories associated with firearms use (security guards, hunting guides, etc.) and could in that capacity do much to bring grief to Second Amendment values.

Everybody today is watching this amusing skirmish in the culture wars.

Butler, Missouri car dealer Mark Muller turns the tables on oh-so-superior CNN interviewer Carol Costello foiling an attempted slam interview. Costello was intending to put Muller on the spot by confronting him in a live interview over a sales promotion at his dealership awarding a AK47 semi-automatic rifle with the purchase of a new pick-up truck.

But Muller quickly proves to be a lot more likable than the smarmy and condescending Costello. He answers frankly, as she continually targets him with hostile questions invariably presented as what “some people might say.” And the rube car dealer proves entirely capable of embarrassing the slick professional reporter by demonstrating repeatedly her weakness on details (like his name).

5:51 video

From Suzanna Logan.

Kurt Hoffman finds the liberal perspective on guns just a bit bizarre.

One puzzling characteristic of citizen disarmament advocates is their bizarre apparent belief that “gun violence” is somehow “worse” than other forms of violence. One would think that being stabbed, beaten, bludgeoned, strangled, etc. to death would be just as bad as being shot to death, but apparently that’s not a universally held belief.

I was reminded of this peculiar attitude yesterday when reading “New York’s Gun Battle,” an article in the Gotham Gazette about current attempts to make gun laws in New York state even more restrictive than they are now (the Brady Campaign ranks New York the 6th most draconian state in the nation):

Bloomberg’s push to rid New York City of illegal guns has seen results. The number of guns recovered from crime scenes in the city dropped by 13 percent from last year. The number of people shot to death dropped from 347 in 2007 to 292 in 2008. Overall, murders increased from 2007 to 2008, but only due to an increase in crimes committed with knives.

The implication is that Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-gun jihad has been successful, despite an increase in murders, simply because fewer of those murders were committed with guns. Somehow, we are to believe that murders committed with knives are less tragic than those committed with guns. That’s something in which to take comfort in your last seconds of consciousness, as you bleed out from your slashed carotid artery.

As the Washington Times explains, registration isn’t really about crime, it’s about future confiscation.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, announced last week that she wants to register guns. Her next move will be to try to confiscate them.

The speaker picked a television show with a viewership of 4.6 million to float the Democrats’ coming gun-control push. Questioned on ABC’s “Good Morning America” about the prospect of new gun-control laws now that “it’s a Democratic president, a Democratic House,” she responded, “We don’t want to take their guns away. We want them registered.”

Politicians and bureaucrats routinely claim that registration helps solve crimes. If a registered gun is used in a crime and left at the crime scene, registration supposedly lets the police trace the gun back to the criminal. Though this turn of events might work on fictional TV crime shows, it virtually never occurs in real life. Criminals’ guns are rarely left at crime scenes. When guns are left behind, it usually is because a crook has been seriously injured or killed and the police are poised to catch him anyway.

The few guns left at crime scenes rarely – if ever – are registered to the perpetrator. If they are registered at all, it is to someone else, whose piece was stolen. Despite what Mrs. Pelosi might think, those who use guns to commit major crimes such as robbing and killing are unlikely to respect her request to file paperwork so the government can catalog the tools of their trade.

Numerous examples disprove gun-control propaganda. Hawaii has had licensing and registration of guns for about 50 years. After all of the administrative expenses and inconvenience imposed on gun owners, police there cannot point to a single crime that has been solved as a result of those programs. Given Hawaii’s remote island geography, this should be an ideal place to keep track of guns because movement in and out of the state is limited and legal importation is controlled. If registration is going to work anywhere, it should work there. Unfortunately, criminals seem to be able to get their hands on guns virtually anyplace in the world.

Other jurisdictions with a history of strict handgun bans, such as the District of Columbia and Chicago, have even required registration of hunting rifles and shotguns for more than 20 years. Neither the District nor Chicago can point to any crimes that have been solved using registration records. ...

Because registration doesn’t help solve crime, it is important to ask why government wants to register the people’s firearms. History provides the answer. In countries from Australia to England, registration has been used to create lists of guns that later were confiscated by their governments. Despite Mrs. Pelosi’s assurances to the contrary, Americans’ fear that registration will lead to confiscation is well-founded. Indeed, Mrs. Pelosi’s own state of California already has used existing registration lists to confiscate so-called assault weapons just a half-dozen years ago.

When someone is stalking you, you need a gun right now, but when Robert J. Averich meets a young woman in trouble in a gun shop, he is obliged to tell her that she’ll have to wait for federal criminal checks and take safety classes before she can protect herself.

Me, I would have explained that she might want to buy a black powder replica right now (requiring no waiting period) to keep on hand while going through the process.

Local papers like the Waynesville (Missouri) Daily Guide cover matters of interest often overlooked by the New York Times and Washington Post and report them very differently.

Last November’s election and the radical policies of the Obama administration have resulted in widespread ongoing gun and ammunition stockpiling and hoarding prompted by direct fears of new regulations and even federal gun confiscation.

The week Barack Obama was elected president, the amount of criminal background checks related to the purchase of firearms jumped 49 percent over the previous year, FBI statistics show.

It’s a trend that hasn’t ceased to stop, as background checks for firearm purchases have continued to increase in the months following the November election, when compared to the same time a year ago.

February alone witnessed a 23.3 percent jump, and January and December weren’t too far ahead, with 29 and 24 percent increases, respectively.

Fears of possible anti-gun legislation that’s being considered by the Obama administration might be contributing to the rise in sales, as well as the teeter-tottering economy.

The angst seems to be somewhat legitimate, although at this time it’s unclear whether a push to reinstate the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, commonly referred to as the “assault weapons ban” will be successful.

“Well, as President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,” Attorney General Eric Holder said during a press conference last month that focused on growing violence in Mexico.

According to the State Department, drug cartels are using “automatic weapons and grenades” in confrontations against Mexican army and police units. The idea is by putting the ban back in place, the flow of guns into Mexico would be reduced.

Enacted in 1994 under then-president Bill Clinton, the assault weapons ban prohibited 19 specific firearms in addition to the possession, manufacturing and importation of the semiautomatic assault weapons and ammunition clips with more than 10 rounds for civilian use.

Though a bill to reinstate the act hasn’t been introduced in Congress yet, and Holder hasn’t given a timeline for when that might happen, numerous other pieces of legislation have been. Six U.S. House of Representative bills are currently being considered, the most troubling of which, gun-rights advocates say, is H.R. 45, known as the Blair Holt’s Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009.

If the legislation is successful, it would require a license for handguns and semiautomatic firearms, including those people already own. License applicants would have to under go a background check and take a written firearms examination, meant to test the applicant’s knowledge of safe storage and handling of guns, as well as the risks associated with the use of firearms in a home, legal responsibilities of owners of such weapons and “any other subject, as the Attorney General determines to be appropriate.”

Furthermore, “the bill would make it unlawful in nearly all cases to keep any loaded firearm for self-defense. A variety of ‘crimes by omission’... would be created. Criminal penalties of up to ten years and almost unlimited regulatory and inspection authority would be established,” according to Gun Owners of America, a non-profit lobbying organization led by former senator Bill Richardson.

The bill would also make it unlawful to sell or transfer a “qualifying firearm” to any person who is not licensed.
Other legislation includes H.R. 17 which would reaffirm the right to use firearms for self-defense and the defense of a person’s home and family; H.R. 1074 would permit the interstate sale of firearms as long as the laws of the states are complied with and adhere to federal law.

Bill Morris, Military Pro owner, said sales at his shop have increased as rumors about possible legislation circulate.

“A lot of customers are afraid that the guns they enjoy shooting so much for sports are going to be restricted,” Morris said. “A lot of the firearms people use for hunting and have used for a long time are being threatened.”

Barack Obama, who seems to me more and more to resemble Jimmy Carter with a tan, is stealthily trying to terminate the program permitting commercial airline pilots to carry handguns begun in April of 2003 by diverting $2 million from the qualification training program to hire “supervisory” staff, whose job, it appears, will be to harass armed pilots through unnecessary field inspections.

The Washington Times has an editorial.

And Kim Priestap, at Wizbang, remarks:

Every time I turn around I read about a new, irrational, idiotic, incompetent, and harmful program that Barack Obama wants to implement.

Alan Gottlieb, at Citizens’ Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, responded with well-justified indignation:

How dare the president, or anybody in his administration, take measures to erode the safety of air travelers,” Gottlieb questioned. “The armed pilot program provides a guaranteed level of security to the public. There may or may not be an air marshal aboard every airplane, but there is definitely a pilot in the cockpit.

“We trust commercial airline pilots with $500 million aircraft,” he continued. “We can certainly trust them with $500 pistols to defend those planes, and the lives of their passengers.

“Certain individuals have never liked the armed pilot program,” Gottlieb acknowledged. “These anti-gun, anti-self-defense bureaucrats seem more interested in their own power, and protecting their little empires, than they are in protecting the public. And now, Obama is catering to their anti-gun bigotry.”

A student at Central Connecticut State University who had the temerity to argue that allowing concealed carry of firearms on campus might save lives in cases of violent episodes like the murders at Virginia Tech soon found himself asked to come down to the campus police station to identify what firearms he owned and where he kept them.

Questioning a fundamental article of liberal faith at many Northeastern colleges today is sufficient to brand a student as an outlaw and potential threat to society.

CCSU Recorder:

For student John Wahlberg, a class presentation on campus violence turned into a confrontation with the campus police due to a complaint by the professor.

On October 3, 2008, Wahlberg and two other classmates prepared to give an oral presentation for a Communication 140 class that was required to discuss a “relevant issue in the media”. Wahlberg and his group chose to discuss school violence due to recent events such as the Virginia Tech shootings that occurred in 2007.

Shortly after his professor, Paula Anderson, filed a complaint with the CCSU Police against her student. During the presentation Wahlberg made the point that if students were permitted to conceal carry guns on campus, the violence could have been stopped earlier in many of these cases. He also touched on the controversial idea of free gun zones on college campuses.

That night at work, Wahlberg received a message stating that the campus police “requested his presence”. Upon entering the police station, the officers began to list off firearms that were registered under his name, and questioned him about where he kept them.

They told Wahlberg that they had received a complaint from his professor that his presentation was making students feel “scared and uncomfortable”. ...

Professor Anderson refused to comment directly on the situation and deferred further comment.

“It is also my responsibility as a teacher to protect the well being of our students, and the campus community at all times,” she wrote in a statement submitted to The Recorder. “As such, when deemed necessary because of any perceived risks, I seek guidance and consultation from the Chair of my Department, the Dean and any relevant University officials.”

More gun makers and gun owners ought to be hanging “For Sale” signs on their current properties and getting ready to move West. Why would Auto Ordinance want to stay in the Catskills or Smith & Wesson in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, when there’s Montana?

Great Falls Tribune:

Montana lawmakers fired another shot in battles for states’ rights as they supported letting some Montana gun owners and dealers skip reporting their transactions to the federal government.

Under House Bill 246, firearms made in Montana and used in Montana would be exempt from federal regulation. The same would be true for firearm accessories and ammunition made and sold in the state.

“What we need here is for Montana to be able to handle Montana’s business and affairs,’’ Republican Rep. Joel Boniek told fellow lawmakers Saturday. The wilderness guide from Livingston defeated Republican incumbent Bruce Malcolm in last spring’s election.

Boniek’s measure aims to circumvent federal authority over interstate commerce, which is the legal basis for most gun regulation in the United States. The bill potentially could release Montanans from both federal gun registration requirements and dealership licensing rules. Since the state has no background-check laws on its own books, the legislation also could free gun purchasers from that requirement.

“Firearms are inextricably linked to the history and culture of Montana, and I’d like to support that,’’ Boniek said. “But I want to point out that the issue here is not about firearms. It’s about state rights.’’

The House voted 64-36 for the bill on Saturday. If it clears a final vote, the measure will go to the Senate.

House Republicans were joined by 14 Democrats in passing the measure.

Hat tip to Bryan DiSalvatore.

This 9:07 video describes how Britain’s bans on handgun ownership and self defense have resulted in unprecedented, previously unimaginable levels of violent crime. The British policeman, formerly equipped with a nightstick, now carries a pistol and wears body armor.

The election of leftwing democrat Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency has been widely reported to have provoked a public stampede to purchase firearms likely to be banned by the democrat-controlled Congress during the new administration. Strong evidence of the accuracy of those reports of surging gun sales in the following BATF notice.

Form 4473 is the document which must be filled out whenever someone purchases a firearm.

BATF online:

A notice will be posted at the expiration of this temporary authorized change.

Barack Obama carefully avoided advocacy of new gun control measures during his presidential campaign, but that does not imply that there is the slightest likelihood of his vetoing any gun control legislation emanating from the new Congress.

Alan Korwin warns about H.R. 1022, the renewal of the (so-called) Assault Weapons Ban, introduced by gun control fanatic Carolyn McCarthy and 67 co-sponsors in February 2007. Korwin predicts that, in the new Congress, the same bill will include a much more spectacular feature.

Slipping below the radar (or under the short-term memory cap), the Democrats have already leaked a gun-ban list, even under the Bush administration when they knew full well it had no chance of passage (HR 1022, 110th Congress). It serves as a framework for the new list the Bradys plan to introduce shortly.

I have an outline of the Brady’s current plans and targets of opportunity, I’m working on getting that news out asap after these ban lists, probably be ready in the next few days. It’s horrific. They’re going after the courts, regulatory agencies, firearms dealers and statutes in an all out effort to restrict we the people. They’ve made little mention of criminals. ...

Attorney General gets carte blanche to ban guns at will:

Under the proposal, the U.S. Attorney General can add any “semiautomatic rifle or shotgun originally designed for military or law enforcement use, or a firearm based on the design of such a firearm, that is not particularly suitable for sporting purposes, as determined by the Attorney General.” Note that Obama’s pick for this office (Eric Holder, confirmation hearing set for Jan. 15) wrote a brief in the Heller case supporting the position that you have no right to have a working firearm in your own home.

In making this determination, the bill says, “there shall be a rebuttable presumption that a firearm procured for use by the United States military or any federal law enforcement agency is not particularly suitable for sporting purposes, and a firearm shall not be determined to be particularly suitable for sporting purposes solely because the firearm is suitable for use in a sporting event.”

In plain English this means that ANY firearm ever obtained by federal officers or the military is not suitable for the public.

That presumption can be challenged only by suing the federal government over each firearm it decides to ban, in a court it runs with a judge it pays. This virtually dismisses the principles of the Second Amendment.

The last part is particularly clever, stating that a firearm doesn’t have a sporting purpose just because it can be used for sporting purpose—is that devious or what? And of course, “sporting purpose” is a rights infringement with no constitutional or historical support whatsoever, invented by domestic enemies of the right to keep and bear arms to further their cause of disarming the innocent.

WorldNetDaily takes Korwin’s posting and accompanies it with a big brass band.

A perfect storm is developing for Second Amendment opponents that could allow President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for attorney general – Eric Holder – to “ban guns at will” despite the 2008 affirmation from the U.S. Supreme Court that U.S. citizens have a right to bear arms.

And this particular threat is only the first of what will undoubtedly be many.

John Clarke remembers the old days.

I was excited as I headed toward the bus stop. My dad was coming from downtown Denver on the 5:15 and he was bringing home “our” Christmas present. We had been saving our quarters, dimes and nickels so we could get a new .22 rifle. I could see my dad making his way past the other passengers with a Winchester .22 pump in his hand. It was beautiful. We were still saving for a proper case, so he was carrying it openly.

As we walked up the block to our house, we talked to several neighbors as they admired our new rifle. We lived in a densely populated part of east Denver, so we had to wait until the next day to drive to the outskirts of town and shoot, but it was worth the wait. I still own and love that beautiful little gun.

What would happen today if my dad had gotten on an RTD bus in the middle of Denver with a rifle? I can only imagine how many SWAT teams would be involved.

Read the whole thing.
———————————————-

When I was five or six years old, somebody gave my father an ancient Damascus-barreled 10 gauge double-barrel shotgun. It was intended to be a wall-hanger. Damascus barreled guns were believed back then to be universally unsafe to use with smokeless shotgun shells, and this one was in poor condition. One of the two hammers didn’t cock. The bores were pitted, and the barrels had dents and a certain amount of rust.

My father thought little of the old gun, and he knew perfectly well that I had no possible way of laying hands on any 10 gauge shotgun shells, so before long I had pestered my way into being allowed to appropriate it as a toy. There we were, back in the 1950s, a gang of little kids, playing cowboys and Indians with a motley collection of cap pistols and one enormous antique double-barreled shotgun which any one of us could barely carry.

Can you imagine the adult reaction today to a pack of kids lugging around an enormous old shotgun? Back then, adults just looked on with a smile.

Richard Munday, in the London Times, observes that citizens of modern democracies are typically less safe in the event of terrorist attack today than they were a century ago in gas-lit London when policemen carried only a truncheon and ordinary citizens were allowed to own and carry weapons.

For anybody who still believed in it, the Mumbai shootings exposed the myth of “gun control”. India had some of the strictest firearms laws in the world, going back to the Indian Arms Act of 1878, by which Britain had sought to prevent a recurrence of the Indian Mutiny.

The guns used in last week’s Bombay massacre were all “prohibited weapons” under Indian law, just as they are in Britain. In this country we have seen the irrelevance of such bans (handgun crime, for instance, doubled here within five years of the prohibition of legal pistol ownership), but the largely drug-related nature of most extreme violence here has left most of us with a sheltered awareness of the threat. We have not yet faced a determined and broad-based attack.

The Mumbai massacre also exposed the myth that arming the police force guarantees security. Sebastian D’Souza, a picture editor on the Mumbai Mirror who took some of the dramatic pictures of the assault on the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, was angered to find India’s armed police taking cover and apparently failing to engage the gunmen.

In Britain we might recall the prolonged failure of armed police to contain the Hungerford killer, whose rampage lasted more than four hours, and who in the end shot himself. In Dunblane, too, it was the killer who ended his own life: even at best, police response is almost always belated when gunmen are on the loose. ...

The Mumbai massacre could happen in London tomorrow; but probably it could not have happened to Londoners 100 years ago.

In January 1909 two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however, shot back – and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police, who could not find the key to their own gun cupboard, borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, while other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down.

Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary Londoners carrying guns in the street than we are at the idea of an armed robbery. But the world of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson, pocketing his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. The arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace.

That armed England existed within living memory; but it is now so alien to our expectations that it has become a foreign country.

News Release:

Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Lyle Laverty today announced that the Department of the Interior has finalized updated regulations governing the possession of firearms in national parks and wildlife refuges. The final rule, which updates existing regulations, would allow an individual to carry a concealed weapon in national parks and wildlife refuges if, and only if, the individual is authorized to carry a concealed weapon under state law in the state in which the national park or refuge is located.

Link to Federal Register Update & FAQ

John Lott notes that the state’s monopoly of force works well at disarming law-abiding citizens, only to leave them defenseless in emergencies. Today’s mass shooting incidents could never have occurred in the pre-Gun Control era in America, when ordinary citizens were routinely armed.

In India, victims watched as armed police cowered and didn’t fire back at the terrorists. A photographer at the scene described his frustration: “There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything. At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ‘Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!’ but they just didn’t shoot back.”

Meanwhile, according to the hotel company’s chairman, P.R.S. Oberoi, security at “the hotel had metal detectors, but none of its security personnel carried weapons because of the difficulties in obtaining gun permits from the Indian government.”

India has extremely strict gun control laws, but who did it succeed in disarming?

The terrorist attack showed how difficult it is to disarm serious terrorists. Strict licensing rules meant that it was the victims who obeyed the regulations, not the terrorists.

Obama’s new Attorney General Eric Holder has always supported “reasonable regulation” of firearms. Guess what? As Deputy Attorney General, he also favored “reasonable restrictions… reasonable regulations on how people interact on the Internet.”

0:39 video

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Remember the Obama Campaign denouncing NRA criticisms as falsehoods and claiming Obama had no animus toward private gun ownership?

The Chicago Tribune reports an Obama transition team detail that provides a glimpse of the future administration’s real perspective on private firearms ownership.

A 63-item questionnaire for prospective members of Barack Obama’s White House team has upset the Illinois State Rifle Association because it includes a question on firearms that the organization reads as hostile to gun owners.

“Do you or any members of your immediate family own a gun?” asks Question 59. “If so, provide complete ownership and registration information. Has the registration ever lapsed? Please also describe how and by whom it is used and whether it has been the cause of any personal injuries or property damage.

Even CNN has noticed that the Obama Transition web-site has changed its mind about disclosing the specifics of the new administration’s intentions and agenda.

Somebody might start opposing them. Better make them a surprise.

Last week, President-elect Barack Obama launched a Web site with detailed information about his plans for technology, Iraq, and health care policies.

Now they’re gone.

The “agenda” Web pages on Change.gov seem to have mysteriously disappeared on Sunday. By Monday morning, they were replaced with a vague statement saying that Obama and running mate Joe Biden have a “comprehensive and detailed agenda” that will “bring about the kind of change America needs,” with the individual pages deleted entirely.

A version of the now-deleted homeland security agenda recovered from the cache feature of Microsoft’s Live Search is far more detailed, promising to convene a nuclear terrorism summit, declare the Internet “a strategic asset,” and establish a $2 billion fund to “counter al-Qaeda propaganda.” Those happen to be identical to the promises that candidate Obama made earlier this year; they have not been deleted from the campaign Web site. ...

Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s transition communications director, would not say what was going on or whether the deletion meant that some of the campaign promises would be dropped. He sent CNET News a one-line e-mail message saying: “That section of the Web site is being retooled.”

Under “Domestic Policy,” the transition web-site formerly promised to enact a variety of gun control proposals favored by anti-gun groups. The NRA Institute For Legislative Action still remembers what those were:

Making the expired federal assault weapons ban permanent.

In other words, restoring a ban on firearms which are not actually assault weapons by calling them “assault weapons,” relying on public confusion based upon cosmetic resemblances.

Repeal the Tiahrt Amendment.

The Tiahrt amendment, and appropriations rider introduced in 2003 by Rep Todd Tiahrt (R – 4th District Kansas) prohibits the release of federal firearm tracing information to anyone other than a law enforcement agency conducting a bona fide criminal investigation. Anti-gun activists oppose the restriction, because it prevents them from obtaining tracing information and using it in frivolous lawsuits against law-abiding firearm manufacturers.

“Closing the gun show loophole.”

An attempt to prohibit private sales of firearms by individuals not licensed as Federal Firearms Dealers.

“Making guns in this country childproof.”

“Childproofing” is a codeword for a variety of schemes intended to ban firearms by imposing impossible or highly expensive design requirements, such as biometric shooter-identification systems.

————————————————-

Hat tip to Ben Slotznik.

Dan Cooper

USA Today, on October 27th, gleefully added Dan Cooper, founder and president of Cooper Firearms of Montana, manufacturers of high end hunting rifles to the roll of defectors to the Obamaswami.

Dan Cooper, a proud member of the National Rifle Association, has backed Republicans for most of his life. He’s the chief executive of Cooper Arms, a small Montana company that makes hunting rifles.

Cooper said he voted for George W. Bush in 2000, having voted in past elections for every Republican presidential nominee back to Richard Nixon. In October 1992, he presented a specially made rifle to the first President. Bush during a Billings campaign event.

This year, Cooper has given $3,300 to the campaign of Democrat Barack Obama. That’s on top of the $1,000 check he wrote to Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign in 2004, after he was dazzled by Obama’s speech at that year’s Democratic National Convention.

Cooper changed sides, he said, “probably because of the war. And also because the Republican Party has moved so far right in recent years.”

He also likes Obama’s message about “the retooling of America, which involves the building of middle-class jobs and helping American small business be competitive with those overseas.”

Mr. Cooper is entitled to his own political opinions, of course. But believing that Barack Obama is anything other that a firm enemy of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and a reliable ally of opponents of the field sports both in the form of environmental extremists and lunatic fringe advocates of Animal Rights is pathetically naive. And lending his name to this particular politician’s campaign was bound to be less than well received by Mr. Cooper’s fellow shooters and sportsmen.

So USA Today, three days later, was obliged to report

Montana gunsmith Dan Cooper has been ousted as chief executive of the rifle company that bears his name after pressure from gun owners who are angry that he is supporting Democrat Barack Obama. ...

The USA TODAY article sparked outrage from some gun owners and bloggers, including an open letter on a blog called Firearms and Freedom, urging people to boycott the company’s products. Many gun enthusiasts believe Obama will try to restrict their right to bear arms, although he has said he respects the Second Amendment.

In a portion of the interview that was not included in Tuesday’s story, Cooper said, “I don’t believe that what’s being said about Obama and his policies about guns are accurate. I have had a conversation with the senator … he is a stanch supporter of the right to hunt and the right to bear arms.”

The company posted a statement Wednesday night on its website that said:

“The employees, shareholders and board of directors of Cooper Firearms of Montana do not share the personal political views of Dan Cooper. Although we all believe everyone has a right to vote and donate as they see fit, it has become apparent that the fallout may affect more than just Mr. Cooper. It may also affect the employees and the shareholders of Cooper Firearms. The board of directors has asked Mr. Cooper to resign as President.”

This is sad and unfortunate, but I think the employees, stockholders, and the board of Cooper Firearms were right. Gun ownership and the right to hunt are seriously threatened by the democrat party and its radical supporters. Sportsmen and shooters are a minority attacked and under siege. If we do not stand together to defend our rights, if we do not vigorously oppose leftwing candidates like Barack Obama, we will find ourselves in the position of citizens of Great Britain very shortly.
——————————————
Hat tip to Xavier.

Virginia Senator Jim Webb wouldn’t sign on as Barack Obama’s running mate, but he’s willing to overlook the obvious major differences between Obama’s ultra-liberal positions and his own in order to endorse, and assure us that he trusts, Obama. He trusts Obama even to defend the Second Amendment, he says.

1:00 radio ad

Our family tradition of hunting and shooting are a way of life to me, and no government will ever take that away. I am an NRA member and I know that my friend Barack Obama will protect our second amendment rights. So don’t be misled about Barack Obama…I trust him to protect our right to keep and bear arms.

On what possible basis, Senator Webb? Barack Obama has the most leftwing voting record of any senator. Obama scores to the left of socialist Bernie Saunders. His gun control record is impeccable. He’s a 100% supporter of Gun Control.

And Obama isn’t only endorsed by you, he’s endorsed by the Brady Campaign.

Senators Barack Obama and Joseph Biden know that we make it too easy for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons in this country. They know that our weak gun laws have too many loopholes, which lead to over 30,000 deaths and 70,000 injuries from guns every year.

“Senators Obama and Biden know that we can reduce those deaths and injuries from guns by strengthening our Brady background check system, getting military-style assault weapons off our streets, and giving law enforcement more tools to stop the trafficking of illegal guns.

But the National Rifle Association, to which both Senator Webb and I belong, says Obama would be “the most anti-gun president in American history.” The NRA notes:

Obama voted to ban hundreds of rifles and shotguns commonly used for hunting and sport shooting
(Illinois Senate, SB 1195, 3/13/03)

Obama endorsed a ban on all handguns
(Independent Voters of Illinois/Independent Precinct Organization general candidate questionnaire, 9/9/96, Politico, 03/31/08)

Obama voted to allow the prosecution of people who use a firearm for self-defense in their homes
(Illinois Senate, S.B. 2165, vote 20, 3/25/04)

Obama supported increasing taxes on firearms and ammunition by 500 percent
(Chicago Defender, 12/13/99)

Obama voted to ban almost all rifle ammunition commonly used for hunting and sport shooting
(United States Senate, S. 397, vote 217, 7/29/05)

Obama opposes Right-to-Carry laws
(Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 4/2/08, Chicago Tribune, 9/15/04)

Jim Webb’s word to gun owners and Virginians clearly is not worth very much. He really has become a democrat. Shame on Webb.

The Obama campaign’s attempt to respond to a National Rifle Association attack ad with dishonest quibbling combined with attempts at intimidation through use of government regulatory power provides an alarming sample of what a future Obama administration’s governing style might be like.

Allahpundit has the video and details.

It seems astonishing that democrat campaign professionals are so willing to believe that sportsmen and gun owners can be bamboozled by a few disingenuous protestations of support for a right to private gun ownership which has actually been a dead-letter in Obama’s home state of Illinois for years.

Obama has been consistently a supporter of the sort of gun ownership rights (from his point of view) currently regrettably still in legal existence, temporarily representing the residuum of private liberty awaiting elimination via future regulatory measures not yet presently politically achievable.

Does this 67 year old author look dangerous?

Jerome Tuccile reports how the arcane complexities of state firearm regulations can be selectively enforced by local officials to punish a critic.

Prolific writer Peter Manso, author of, among other books, biographies of Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando, has been indicted on a dozen firearms charges by a Massachusetts grand jury and faces years in prison.

Did he brandish a gun in public? Threaten a neighbor with a drive-by shooting?

No, the guns were all stored, quite securely, in his locked and alarmed home. In fact, police discovered the weapons only when they responded to a burglar alarm while the writer was away. Either the guns were in plain view—evidence that Manso expected no legal trouble for their possession—or else, as Manso’s attorney alleges, “Truro police searched Manso’s house illegally while responding to the alarm.” ...

The main problem seems to be that Manso’s Firearms Identification Card expired after the passage of new legislation in 1998—previously, FIDs lasted a lifetime; now they expire every six years. The new law has caused endless problems in the Bay State, since authorities have not been very effective about informing gun owners of the change. ...

Manso claims that he’s been maliciously targeted by the police because of his controversial work on a new book that casts a skeptical look at the work of local authorities in investigating the murder of a writer named Christa Worthington.

Boston Globe

Former State Representative (54th District Texas, R) Dr. Suzanna Gratia-Hupp testifies before a Senate Committee including Chuck Schumer to her own tragic experience with the consequences of gun control restrictions on law-abiding citizens carrying concealed weapons, and concludes by identifying the most important basis for the Constitutional right of citizens to keep and bear arms.

5:23 video

Hat tip to Rich Duff.

WUSA9.com reports that the District of Columbia is insolently evading compliance with the Supreme Court decision affirming an individual right to bear arms based on the Second Amendment by playing games with definitions.

Dick Heller is the man who brought the lawsuit against the District’s 32-year-old ban on handguns. He was among the first in line Thursday morning to apply for a handgun permit. But when he tried to register his semi-automatic weapon, he says he was rejected. He says his gun has seven bullet clip. Heller says the City Council legislation allows weapons with fewer than eleven bullets in the clip. A spokesman for the DC Police says the gun was a bottom-loading weapon, and according to their interpretation, all bottom-loading guns are outlawed because they are grouped with machine guns.

———————————————————
Apparently, Dick Heller has started filing petition signatures to get on the ballot to run for Eleanor Holmes Norton’s seat in the House of Representatives on the Libertarian Party ticket.

DC Wire:

Heller, Duggan reports, was at the doors at 6:30 this morning. He did not bring his weapon with him as D.C. regulations require, however. He did raise his frustrations with the District’s continued ban on semiautomatic weapons. It’s that issue that city officials and gun rights advocates both say is likely to land the city back in court at some point.

But we’re burying the real news here. It seems that Heller may not have brought his gun with him to register, but he was armed with a load of candidate petitions, Duggan said.

Seems that Heller is planning to run for the House seat currently held by Eleanor Holmes Norton. Heller is seeking signatures to be on the ballot as a libertarian candidate.

A man identifiying himself as J. Bradley Jansen, who said he was Heller’s campaign manager, said Heller must get 3,000 signatures and has until the end of August to collect them.

Heller came back on Friday and registered a Harrington & Richardson Longhorn nine-shot .22 revolver. WaPo

DC residents can theoretically, therefore, still arm themselves with the top-loading Mauser C-96 Broomhandle semiautomatic pistol, the same gun Winston Churchill used on the dervishes at the battle of Omdurman in 1898.

The one in this 1:06 video is chambered in 9mm Parabellum. The original 7.63 Mauser cartridge is much hotter.

A little overenthusiasm on the part of New Jersey’s State Legislature in drafting one more anti-gang measure may send a harmless 20-year-old sales clerk to jail for three years for BB-gun possession.

MyCentralJersey.com:

Caught speeding in Highland Park in April in his father’s Acura RSX, Ryan Narciso found out the hard way about a recent change in a New Jersey gun law that could send him to prison for three years.

The 20-year-old sales clerk at a shop at Menlo Park Mall and former Middlesex County College student had a pellet handgun in the car, according to an indictment filed last week in Superior Court, New Brunswick. ...

Narciso’s father, an architect, bought the pellet gun at a garage sale a few years ago to fend off squirrels that made their way into the attic of the families home on Mount Pleasant Avenue in Edison, the father and Narciso’s lawyer, Amilcar Perez of Perth Amboy, said.

Under a new state law, Narciso’s possession of the weapon qualifies as a Graves Act offense. Narciso could face what prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys call a “hard three,” meaning three years with no prospect of parole.

But a state official Wednesday acknowledged that the draconian measure made its way into law by mistake.

The Graves Act, adopted in 1981 and named after Frank X. Graves Jr., the late state senator and law-and-order mayor of Paterson known for patroling the city, outlined mandatory-minimum prison sentences for anyone guilty of using a gun in the commission of a crime in New Jersey. A burglar caught with a handgun, for instance, faced a solid three years behind bars for the gun crime alone.

With little or no fanfare, lawmakers stiffened the Graves Act in the last session. They folded the amendment into anti-gang legislation that Gov. Jon S. Corzine signed into law in January.

Now, the simple unlawful possession of any firearm can bring mandatory penalties for anyone who pleads guilty to or is convicted of that crime alone.

Randy Barnett, in today’s Wall Street Journal, relishes the results of Heller, and praises Justice Scalia’s work. I love his editorial’s title, which constitutes all by itself an absolutely devastating rejoinder to the jurisprudence of people like Justices Stevens and Breyer.

Justice Scalia’s opinion is the finest example of what is now called “original public meaning” jurisprudence ever adopted by the Supreme Court. This approach stands in sharp contrast to Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissenting opinion that largely focused on “original intent” – the method that many historians employ to explain away the text of the Second Amendment by placing its words in what they call a “larger context.” Although original-intent jurisprudence was discredited years ago among constitutional law professors, that has not stopped nonoriginalists from using “original intent” – or the original principles “underlying” the text – to negate its original public meaning.

Of course, the originalism of both Justices Scalia’s and Stevens’s opinions are in stark contrast with Justice Breyer’s dissenting opinion, in which he advocates balancing an enumerated constitutional right against what some consider a pressing need to prohibit its exercise. Guess which wins out in the balancing? As Justice Scalia notes, this is not how we normally protect individual rights, and was certainly not how Justice Breyer protected the individual right of habeas corpus in the military tribunals case decided just two weeks ago.

So what larger lessons does Heller teach? First, the differing methods of interpretation employed by the majority and the dissent demonstrate why appointments to the Supreme Court are so important. In the future, we should be vetting Supreme Court nominees to see if they understand how Justice Scalia reasoned in Heller and if they are committed to doing the same.

We should also seek to get a majority of the Supreme Court to reconsider its previous decisions or “precedents” that are inconsistent with the original public meaning of the text. This shows why elections matter – especially presidential elections – and why we should vet our politicians to see if they appreciate how the Constitution ought to be interpreted.

Good legal scholarship was absolutely crucial to this outcome. No justice is capable of producing the historical research and analysis upon which Justice Scalia relied. Brilliant as it was in its execution, his opinion rested on the work of many scholars of the Second Amendment, as I am sure he would be the first to acknowledge.

Ilya Somin, at Volokh Conspiracy, advises Gun rights supporters not to rejoice too soon.

For many years, gun rights advocates have fought to persuade the Supreme Court that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms. That battle has now been won in Heller. Indeed, all nine justices (including the four dissenters) seem to agree that there is some individual right to bear arms that goes beyond a “collective right” protection for state militias.

However, the experience of the struggle for judicial protection of constitutional property rights suggests that recognition of the mere existence of a right isn’t enough. If the scope of the right is defined narrowly by courts, recognition won’t mean much in practice.

Read the whole thing.

As predicted, Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, which was naturally decided by Justice Anthony Kennedy in his capacity as decisive swing vote.

On first glance, I would say that the Court’s ruling primarily represents a strong rebuke to intellectually farcical sophistry and the kinds of whimsical and creative legal analysis which divorce themselves from the Constitution’s historical background, the expressed views and intentions of the framers, commentaries on the Constitution, and the entirety of history before 1932.

Justice Scalia writes at length, and with ill-concealed contempt, for efforts to eliminate the individual right to keep and bear arms by facile manipulation of the prefatory “well-regulated militia” clause, happily following the jurisprudential practice of recent decades of including a thorough and comprehensive survey of the relevant history.

And he concludes:

There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both the text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms.

But, no sooner does Justice Scalia arrive at his bold conclusion than he begins retreating from its implications and striving actively to limit its practical consequences.

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. ...

Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.” 307 U. S., at 179. We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of smallarms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.

In the end, the ruling merely affirms the existence of the individual right to keep and bears arms, and strikes down the District of Columbia’s ban on handgun possession in the home and its requirement that lawful firearms kept in a home be inoperable. It specifically declines to address licensing requirements (which Heller failed to challenge). Insofar as the Court affirms a right of self defense, it has done so only with respect to one’s home.

The moderation of Scalia’s opinion is likely to make its power as a decision stronger rather than weaker though, and District of Columbia v. Heller signals a major reversal in the direction of Constitutional Law at the Supreme Court level.

While we’re waiting for the Supreme Court decision in Heller, Larrey Anderson, at American Thinker, has a bit of fun applying ordinary language philosophy to the oh-so-inscrutable meaning of the Second Amendment.

It is depressing to imagine how a Court which finds execution by lethal injection for child rape violative of the cruel and unusual punishments clause of the 8th Amendment is capable of reading the Second Amendment.

Tom Goldstein at the SCOTUS blog:

There is very little information that can be gleaned with confidence about the authorship of the remaining opinions from the Term.

It does look exceptionally likely that Justice Scalia is writing the principal opinion for the Court in Heller – the D.C. guns case. That is the only opinion remaining from the sitting and he is the only member of the Court not to have written a majority opinion from the sitting. ... So, that’s a good sign for advocates of a strong individual rights conception of the Second Amendment and a bad sign for D.C.

It would certainly be nice if he’s right.

Iraqis are permitted to own fully-automatic AK-47s in US-occupied Iraq. But the BATF won’t let you own an Akins Accelerator, a gizmo which attaches to the trigger mechanism of a Ruger 10/22 to achieve full-auto function.

0:37 video

———————————————————————————-
6/23 CORRECTION:

Mr. Akins has posted in the Comments section, correcting my erroneous description of the Akins Accelerator. Mr. Akins says:

Nothing attaches to the trigger mechanism and it does not achieve full auto function because the trigger is functioned once for each and every shot. The entire barrel/receiver/trigger group reciprocates backwards under recoil removing the trigger completely from the finger and compressing a spring which then forces the barrel/receiver/trigger group back forward again.

Mr. Akins also provided a link to an illustration of what goes on.

link

The head of the Brady Campaign told ABC News he expects to see the Supreme Court throw out DC’s handgun ban.

The nation’s leading gun control group filed a “friend of the court” brief back in January defending the gun ban in Washington, D.C. But with the Supreme Court poised to hand down a potentially landmark decision in the case, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence fully expects to lose.

“We’ve lost the battle on what the Second Amendment means,” campaign president Paul Helmke told ABC News. “Seventy-five percent of the public thinks it’s an individual right. Why are we arguing a theory anymore? We are concerned about what we can do practically.”

While the Brady Campaign is waving the white flag in the long-running debate on whether the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms or merely a state’s right to assemble a militia, it is hoping that losing the “legal battle” will eventually lead to gun control advocates winning the “political war.”

“We’re expecting D.C. to lose the case,” Helmke said. “But this could be good from the standpoint of the political-legislative side.”

Britain’s Government has banned ownership of pistols, rifles, self defense, and hunting. Participants in the Countryside March against the Blair Government’s Hunt Ban wish Britons had defended their liberties before it was too late. Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for defending his home, certainly wishes so even more.

9:07 video

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

CBC’s Rex Murphy identifies Canada’s two billion dollar Gun Registry as a classic example of “feel good legislation” representing a pretense at solving a problem, but completely ineffective. From watching this one, I get the impression that Canada has a lot better news commentary than we do.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Kenneth P. Vogel notes that Obama was actively involved in liberal efforts to restrict the rights of gun owners even before he held elective office.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has worked to assure uneasy gun owners that he believes the Constitution protects their rights and that he doesn’t want to take away their guns.

But before he became a national political figure, he sat on the board of a Chicago-based foundation that doled out at least nine grants totaling nearly $2.7 million to groups that advocated the opposite positions.

The foundation funded legal scholarship advancing the theory that the Second Amendment does not protect individual gun owners’ rights, as well as two groups that advocated handgun bans. And it paid to support a book called “Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns.”

Obama’s eight years on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which paid him more than $70,000 in directors fees, do not in any way conflict with his campaign-trail support for the rights of gun owners, Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Obama’s presidential campaign, asserted in a statement issued to Politico this week.

LaBolt stressed that the foundation, which has assets of about $935 million, doesn’t take “detailed policy positions,” but rather uses its grants to “fuel a dialogue about how to address public policy issues like reducing gun violence.”

As with most foundations, Joyce did not record how individual board members voted on grants, but former Joyce officials told Politico that funding was typically approved unanimously.

LaBolt said Obama, an Illinois senator, “does not remember each of the over 1,500 individual grant requests and his assessment of their merits, but he considered all requests in light of the foundation’s goal of developing a robust public dialogue around reducing gun violence.”

Obama joined the board in the summer of 1994 as a 32-year-old lawyer who had yet to run for public office, but he already had a reputation in Chicago as an up-and-comer, particularly on issues related to low-income communities — a key foundation focus.

By the time he left the board in the winter of 2002, as he was gearing up for his 2004 U.S. Senate bid, Obama had served six years in the Illinois state Senate and had also considered leaving politics to become the group’s full-time president, by his own acknowledgment.

Obama’s service on the board of the Joyce Foundation and a few other Chicago-based nonprofits including the Woods Fund of Chicago remains one of the least scrutinized parts of his career. But it’s one that could hamper his efforts to woo populations of rural pro-gun voters in Pennsylvania, which votes April 22, and in a general election match-up with the presumptive Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Read the whole thing.

Barack Hussein Obama is a radical leftwing democrat from Chicago, a city where private ownership of handguns is banned. But the upcoming Pennsylvania primary will play a crucial role in the bitterly contested race for the democrat party’s nomination, and Obama, as the Politico reports, is not letting his record of total and complete support for gun control and gun confiscation stop him from going after the votes of Pennsylvania gun owners.

After all, Obama knows just how stupid those deer hunting hicks really are. All he has to do is make a deal to gain the endorsement of a backwoods democrat state rep from Elk County to vouch for his acceptability to sportsmen, and do a little of his personally patented fancy footwork around the issue, and he’ll get plenty of rube votes.

He’s not pro-Gun Control. Goodness gracious, mercy me, no! He’s a Constitutional Law professor, and supports the individual right to keep and bear arms (for hunting and target shooting). He’s merely for “reasonable and common sense” regulations, which you can bet will limit you to owning very limited types and calibers of firearms and ammunition, and which will allow you to own guns as long as you obtain the necessary permits and register each and every one, and then keep them locked up, inaccessible, and unusable except at the properly licensed shooting range or hunting facility at which you actually be permitted to use them under proper supervision, of course.

Barack Obama did not hunt or fish as a child. He lives in a big city. And as an Illinois state legislator and a U.S. senator, he consistently backed gun control legislation.

But he is nevertheless making a play for pro-gun voters in rural Pennsylvania.

By highlighting his background in constitutional law and downplaying his voting record, Obama is engaging in a quiet but targeted drive to win over an important constituency that on the surface might seem hostile to his views.

The need to craft a strategy aimed at pro-gun voters underscores the potency of the issue in Pennsylvania, which claims one of the nation’s highest per capita membership rates in the National Rifle Association.

It also could provide clues as to whether Obama, as one of the Senate’s more liberal members, can position himself as an acceptable choice to a conservative-minded demographic in later primary contests and in the general election.

“Guns are a cultural lens through which they view candidates,” said Jim Kessler, vice president for policy at Third Way, a progressive think tank. “If you are seen as way off on that issue, then you seem way off on everything. If you are seen as OK, if the lens is clearer, then they continue to look at you and size you up on other things.”

“For Obama, who is less known and is from Chicago, a city guy and an African American, the feeling is that he is anti-gun,” Kessler continued. “By handling the Second Amendment correctly, he starts to get a hearing among these folks.”

Obama aides would not discuss the campaign’s strategy. While the effort so far in Pennsylvania appears modest, it is noteworthy for a race that has largely avoided such direct engagement with gun owners.

The campaign has asked gun rights advocates like state Rep. Dan Surra, a Democrat from rural Elk County with an “A+” rating from the NRA, to form a coalition of supporters who can vouch for Obama.

“It is clear out there that I am for Obama, and they have reached out to me as a sportsman and a gun owner,” Surra said Thursday. “There has been an outreach to pro-gun legislators, pro-gun people who are sympathetic to Obama’s message.”

The campaign sent an e-mail this week to the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, saying it would “appreciate all sportsmen taking time to learn the facts: Our candidate strongly supports the right and traditions of sportsmen throughout Pennsylvania and the United States of America.”

And with an endorsement last month from Sen. Bob Casey Jr., Obama got a boost within a community that the Pennsylvania Democrat has courted assiduously. As part of an initiative to move beyond his party’s traditional bases during the 2006 Senate campaign, Casey visited stock car races, demolition derbies and gun clubs. Campaign operatives to both senators are now working closely together.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton does not appear to be making the same level of effort. She has reminded audiences in the last few months that she learned to shoot a gun during childhood vacations in Scranton and bagged a duck as an adult. But neither the state Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs nor her pro-gun Democratic supporters have heard of any specific campaign outreach. ...

Obama has long backed gun-control measures, including a ban on semiautomatic weapons and concealed weapons, and a limit on handgun purchases to one a month. He has declined to take a stance on the legality of the handgun prohibition in Washington, D.C., which the U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing, although Obama has voiced support for the right of state and local governments to regulate guns.

In the Senate, he and Clinton broke on one vote, in July 2006. Siding with gun-rights advocates, Obama voted to prohibit the confiscation of firearms during an emergency or natural disaster. Clinton was one of 16 senators to oppose the amendment.

A two-page white paper on Obama’s website doesn’t mention his voting record.

Instead, he introduces himself as a former constitutional law professor who “believes the Second Amendment creates an individual right, and he greatly respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms.”

“He will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns for the purposes of hunting and target shooting,” the paper states. “He also believes that the right is subject to reasonable and common sense regulation.”

Melody Zullinger, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs who received the Obama campaign e-mail on his gun record, said Obama sounds like he is “speaking out of both sides of his mouth.”

“I was at one of our county meetings last night and I mentioned this to [federation members],” Zullinger said Friday of the Obama outreach. “Everyone basically blew it off and weren’t buying it.”

Obama’s approach is similar to one advocated by Third Way, which issued a seven-step blueprint in 2006 to close the “gun gap” with Republicans. In a memo on its website, the group urges progressives to avoid silence on gun issues, and instead “redefine the issue in a way that appeals to gun owning voters.”

AP:

Germany’s parliament on Friday approved a new law that bans switchblades and the carrying of replica firearms.

The law, which takes effect Saturday, is largely an attempt to help police officers avoid accidentally mistaking replica firearms for real weapons.

Under the law, people can still sell, purchase and possess the replicas. Toy weapons that cannot be mistaken for real guns are not affected by the law.

The law also forbids the carrying of any knives with a blade longer than 12 centimeters (4 3/4 inches), and all switchblades.

A fine of up to €10,000 (US$15,000) can be imposed upon people breaking the new law.

Dennis Praeger asks a few questions which have often occurred to me upon reading press reports of these kinds of incidents.

Question 1: Why are murderers always counted in the victims tally?

The day after the mass murder of students at Northern Illinois University (NIU), the headline in the closest major newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, was: “6 Dead in NIU Shooting.”

“6 dead” included the murderer. Why wasn’t the headline “5 killed at NIU”?

It is nothing less than moronic that the media routinely lump murderers and their victims in the same tally.

This is something entirely new. Until the morally confused took over the universities and the news media, murderers were never counted along with their victims. To give a military analogy, can one imagine a headline like this in an American newspaper after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor: “2,464 Dead in Pearl Harbor Attack”? After all, 55 Japanese airmen and nine Japanese crewmen also died in the attack. ...

Question 3: Why are “shooter” and “gunman” used instead of “killer” or “murderer”?

If a murderer used a knife to murder five students, no news headlines would read, “Knifeman Kills Five.” So why always “shooter” and “gunman”?

The most obvious explanation is that by focusing on the weapon used by the murderer, the media can further their anti-gun agenda.

“Gus McCauley of Americans Against Guns” interviewed on a Fox 1/2 Hour News video

Hat tip to Xavier.

“First they came for the fully-automatic machine guns, and I’d didn’t protest because I didn’t own a machine gun…”

As the BBC reports, even joke guns and toys swords must be registered and stored locked up in today’s Britain.

A Cornish village drama group has had to register a toy gun with the police to comply with health and safety rules.

Carnon Downs drama group in Cornwall have also had to keep their plastic cutlasses and wooden swords locked up for the pantomime, Robinson Crusoe.

Producers of the show called the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) rules “farcical”.

A spokesman for the HSE said the rules were designed to make risks “sensibly managed”.

The climax of the show is a fight in which actors use replica 4ft-foot long plastic cutlasses.

There is also a toy gun which produces a flag saying “Bang”.

The directors contacted police after receiving advice from the HSE and the National Operatic and Dramatic Association.

The HSE have a page on their website called Entertainment Information Sheet 20 which lays down strict rules for the handling of guns, swords and other weapons on set.

Drama group co-director Linda Barker said: “The cutlasses count as weapons even though they are replicas and made of plastic and apparently they could be mistaken for real ones.

“Our only gun was a panto pistol which produces a flag with the word bang on it.

“Our local police at Truro were fantastic and they have registered the gun, the two plastic cutlasses and our six wooden swords.”

She added: “It gets a bit farcical when you are dealing with plastic swords. It is not as if anyone is likely to be scared by them.”

Neighbourhood beat officer Pc Nigel Hyde said: “We have been informed and made a note.

“It seems a bit unusual but other forms of replica weapons have been used to carry out crimes and the consequences have been serious.”

A spokesman for the HSE said: “We do not want to stop people putting on pantos or having fun as long as the risks are sensible managed.”

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

LA Times:

A D.C. ban on home handguns may not be constitutional, the solicitor general tells the Supreme Court, but rights are limited and federal firearm restrictions should be upheld.

In their legal battle over gun ownership and the 2nd Amendment, gun- control advocates never expected to get a boost from the Bush administration.

But that’s just what happened when U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement urged the Supreme Court in a brief Friday to say that gun rights are limited and subject to “reasonable regulation” by the government and that all federal restrictions on firearms should be upheld.

Reasonable regulations include the federal ban on machine guns and other “particularly dangerous types of firearms,” he said in the brief. Moreover, the government forbids gun possession by felons, drug users, “mental defectives” and people subject to restraining orders, he said.

“Given the unquestionable threat to public safety that unrestricted private firearm possession would entail, various categories of firearm-related regulation are permitted by the 2nd Amendment,” Clement said. He filed the brief in a closely watched case involving Washington, D.C.’s ban on keeping handguns at home for self-defense.

The head of a gun-control group said he was pleasantly surprised by the solicitor general’s stand.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence, said he saluted the administration for recognizing a need for limits on gun rights.

Disgusting.

Adam Freedman, in the Sunday New York Times, demonstrates the characteristic talent of members of the contemporary intelligentsia in his facile ability to reduce the discussion of the meaning of the Bill of Rights to an exercise resembling an archaeologist or historian poring over philological treatises on ancient punctuation and orthographic convention in order to guess at the meaning of some cryptic expression found upon a potsherd from a vanished civilization.

Of course, it is only possible to reject the concept of a right of citizens to be armed and able to defend themselves in the first place by achieving a level of estrangement from the philosophical perspectives, values, and ideals of the framers so extreme as to look upon their thought-world as unfamiliar, alien, and irrelevant to oneself, contemporary political life, and current jurisprudence as the outlook and perspective of some Greek hoplite or Egyptian charioteer.

It isn’t difficult in the least to find the meaning of a right to arms in English history, or extensive discussions of a right to arms (for purposes of self defense in both the private and the public sense) in writings of the framers themselves as well as in those of the writers on political philosophy and government who inspired them. One can easily consult the leading earlier treatises (Blackstone) on the laws of England and (Joseph Story) on the US Constitution to determine the nature of the previous status of such a right.

The avoidance of reliance on far more relevant evidence and the resort to the parsing of grammar and punctuation is simply another variation of the old lawyer’s maxim: If justice is on your side, argue justice. If the law is on your side, argue the law. If neither is on your side, pound upon the table.

Glenn Reynolds offers, in the New York Post, his view of the Supreme Court’s options in the DC Gun Ban case.

It can find that the Second Amendment doesn’t really do anything – that it’s merely a relic of an older era. But that’s a rather dangerous approach: What other parts of the Constitution might be considered relics? And can a judicial approach that leaves a tenth of the Bill of Rights meaningless possibly be sound?

It can find that the Second Amendment doesn’t grant individual rights, but only protects the right of states to arm their militias (or “state armies,” as some gun-control advocates put it). This would make the DC case go away, but at some cost: If states have a constitutional right, as against the federal government, to arm their militias as they see fit, then states that don’t like federal gun-control laws could just enroll every law-abiding citizen in the state militia and authorize those citizens to possess machine guns, tanks and other military gear.

Other consequences of “state armies” seem even more drastic. As Tom Lehrer put it:

We’ll try to stay serene and calm /

When Alabama gets the bomb.

Finally, the court can find – in accordance with the views of law professors as diverse as Harvard’s Laurence Tribe and, well, me – that the Second Amendment supports an individual right on the part of law-abiding citizens to possess firearms of the sort that are in ordinary use. As with other rights, such as freedom of speech, this is subject to reasonable regulation that stops well short of a ban.

This last would be the least radical approach, as it’s consistent with public opinion (most Americans think the Second Amendment gives them a right to own a gun) and with the 40-plus states whose own constitutions already provide for a right to arms. It would probably be the easiest to implement, too, as federal courts could (to a degree at least) look to state law for some guidance on how to implement it.

Finding otherwise would be ticklish for the court in another way. In recent decades, the Supreme Court has found many rights that aren’t specifically spelled out in the Constitution – rights to things like abortion, contraception or sodomy. If the court now follows up by denying a right that does seem to be spelled out, it would put its own legitimacy in the public eye at grave risk.

Houston Chronicle:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court will discuss gun control today in a private conference that soon could explode publicly.

Behind closed doors, the nine justices will consider taking a case that challenges the District of Columbia’s stringent handgun ban. Their ultimate decision will shape how far other cities and states can go with their own gun restrictions.

“If the court decides to take this up, it’s very likely it will end up being the most important Second Amendment case in history,” said Dennis Henigan, the legal director for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Henigan predicted “it’s more likely than not” that the necessary four justices will vote to consider the case. The court will announce its decision Tuesday, and oral arguments could be heard next year.

Lawyers are swarming.

Texas, Florida and 11 other states weighed in on behalf of gun owners who are challenging D.C.’s strict gun laws. New York and three other states want the gun restrictions upheld. Pediatricians filed a brief supporting the ban. A Northern California gun dealer, Russell Nordyke, filed a brief opposing it. ..

The Second Amendment says, “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Gun-control advocates say this means that the government can limit firearms ownership as part of its power to regulate the militia. Gun ownership is cast as a collective right, with the government organizing armed citizens to protect homeland security.

“The Second Amendment permits reasonable regulation of firearms to protect public safety and does not guarantee individuals the absolute right to own the weapons of their choice,” New York and the three other states declared in an amicus brief.

Gun-control critics contend that the well-regulated militia is beside the point, and say the Constitution protects an individual’s right to possess guns.

Last March, a divided appellate court panel sided with the individual-rights interpretation and threw out the D.C. ban.

The ruling clashed with other appellate courts, creating the kind of appellate-circuit split that the Supreme Court likes to resolve. The ruling obviously stung D.C. officials, but it perplexed gun-control advocates.

If D.C. officials tried to salvage their gun-control law by appealing to the Supreme Court — as they then did — they could give the court’s conservative majority a chance to undermine gun-control laws nationwide.

On the one hand, the movement of legal scholarship in recent decades towards acknowledgment of the real meaning of the Second Amendment based on the historical content of the political theory of the period and numerous statements by the framers argues that Supreme Court consideration would necessarily recall the Second Amendment fully from exile, and produce nationwide enforcement of an individual right to keep and bear arms.

But, on the other hand, realism notes that the consequence of overturning every form of state and local gun prohibition, and very possibly the National Firearms Act of 1934 which effectively prohibited private possession of fully-automatic weapons are bound to seem highly unpalatable to most justices. Moreover, these days, intensely combative, ideologically charged decisions have a strong tendency to result in 5-4 decisions, turning upon the (commonly European-informed) private moral intuitions of Justice Anthony Kennedy.

On the whole, given the opportunity of having the fate of an important but widely disputed, Constitutional right decided, potentially for many decades, effectively by Justice Kennedy alone, I’d rather wait for a different Court.

Nick Rivera debunks Hizzoner’s campaign narrative.

It’s among the most well-known and often-implemented strategies in the universe of presidential politics: appeal to the party’s base during the primaries and tack back towards the center during the run-up to the general election. This process doesn’t necessarily dictate that the presidential candidate “flip-flop” on any of his or her positions. He or she merely emphasizes one set of policies for the partisans who will be voting in the presidential primaries and then, several months later, emphasizes a different set of policies for the American electorate at large.

However, in recent years, a somewhat different tactic has emerged as a favorite among presidential candidates: the art of flip-flopping by presidential candidates who staked out positions that were popular when running for statewide office but became politically inconvenient when faced with appealing to the party base in the run up to presidential primaries. ...

In yet another example of a politician advocating one position while running for state or local office and a completely different one upon running for president, Rudy Giuliani has decided that he now supports a very strict interpretation of the Second Amendment. While Giuliani’s critics have been quick to point out Giuliani’s sudden change of heart with regards to gun control, Giuliani’s defenders have argued that Giuliani’s positions are consistent with the principle of federalism—arguing that while he may have supported strict gun control laws for New York City, he believes that individual states have the right to reject such gun control laws.

Unfortunately for Giuliani and his supporters, Giuliani’s current “federalist” interpretation of the Second Amendment directly contradicts his gun control record as mayor of New York…

Read the whole thing.

California’s formerly-Republican Governor has signed two anti-gun bills embodying controversial theories.

Assembly Bill 821 bans the use of lead bullets in a number of California hunting zones inhabited by the California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) on the basis of the belief that the few surviving California Condors could ingest bullets from wounded-and-lost game animals or from hunter’s gut piles, then fail to regurgitate or quickly pass such foreign objects, consequently succumbing to lead poisoning.

Journalists report studies supporting such deaths, but those familiar with the digestive processes of raptors generally may well find it difficult to believe that indigestible lumps of metal are likely to remain inside the birds long enough to produce poisoning. Vulturine birds like other raptors eject indigestible portions of prey or carrion, such as bone or fur or feathers, in the form of pellets.

Arnold Schwarzenneger also signed the patently absurd Assembly Bill 1471 which mandates the application of imaginary non-existent technology in semiautomatic pistols. After January 1st, 2010, semiauto pistols in California must be

designed and equipped with a microscopic array of characters that identify the make, model, and serial number of the pistol, etched or otherwise imprinted onto in two or more places on the interior surface or internal working parts of the pistol, and that are transferred by imprinting on each cartridge case when the firearm is fired.

California’s democrat-majority assembly pretends to believe that an ability to trace ejected cartridge casings to specific individual firearms would be of great value in crime solving. That theory, of course, overlooks the possibility of smart criminals simply picking up their spent cases at shooting scenes, the truly diabolical taking a file to the microscopic array, and the just-plain-practical throwing the murder weapon into the Pacific.

In reality, of course, the impact (and concealed intention) is really simply to ban semi-automatic pistols in the state of California.

Governor Schwarzenegger ran originally as a Republican and a reformer. When he found himself taking large hits in the polls as the result of massive political advertising by state employee’s unions and hostile coverage by the liberal establishment media, he sold out and made peace with the democrat legislature, the unions, and the liberal activist lobby groups. Now he gets flattering press coverage for precisely this kind of betrayal.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation observed:

Governor Schwarzenegger has now effectively banned more firearms than Senators Kennedy, Feinstein and Schumer combined,” said Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF senior vice president and general counsel. “The governor has proven to gun owners and sportsmen that he is just another liberal anti-gun Hollywood actor—he just plays a moderate Republican on TV. Mr. Schwarzenegger has now exposed himself for what he really is, the most anti-gun and anti-sportsmen governor in America.