September 2019

Today, Beto O’rourke made a speech at Kent state, where he made the claim that the only people who could be trusted to own guns is the government.

Angus McThag asks if the President is, once impeached, allowed to run for office again. The answer to this question is found in Article I, Section 3:

The Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments. When sitting for that purpose, they shall be on oath or affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two thirds of the members present.
Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States: but the party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law.

There is your answer.

I went to Amazon to order a new Master Bench Block for an AR-15. It is a tool. It is not a firearm, a firearm part, or an accessory. Apparently, anything that is related to the AR-15 has been removed from Amazon. Brownell’s and Midway USA both have them.

The reason that I began shopping with Amazon is that they were convenient and had whatever I needed at a good price, all on one website. Since that is becoming less true every week, I will resume shopping on other sites. My guess is that Amazon is making some companies very happy.

What Pelosi is doing is a masterful job at exercising a coup. Using a whistleblower report that no one has yet seen, and relying on a newspaper report that itself relied on third hand information to begin impeachment proceedings has me wondering of she hasn’t planned this all along.

As Trumps approval numbers remain high at 53%, there is no Democrat challenger that is likely to win the Presidential election next year. With that in mind, the Democrat party cannot survive another 4 years of Trump placing judges in the Federal court system. Especially since Ginsberg is unlikely to survive until 2025. A 6-3 majority of Republican SCOTUS justices just can’t be allowed to happen, if you are part of the Democrat leadership.

If the Democrats can put enough pressure on RINOs and on Republicans in Senate seats that are from tossup states like Maine, this impeachment may just be successful in the Senate. From there, I see one of two courses of action to follow:

1 Impeach Trump, and immediately impeach Pence, which would place Pelosi in the Whitehouse. This, I think, is the least likely.

2 Impeach Trump some time in January or February and watch as Pence takes over the Presidency for the last few months of the term. Since he doesn’t have the name recognition, his chances of beating any of the Democratic contenders is fairly low.

Once the Democrats are in charge of both houses of Congress as well as the Whitehouse, they are free to enact full amnesty and register some 30 million former illegals as new Democrat voters within 30 days of inauguration. A gun ban will follow, as will every Socialist policy they can cram through in the first 100 days.

It’s almost like it was planned and orchestrated for years.

Judge Alex Kozinski   Silveira v. Lockyer, 328 F. 3d 567 (2003)

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that “speech, or … the press” also means the Internet, see Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844, 117 S.Ct. 2329, 138 L.Ed.2d 874 (1997), and that “persons, houses, papers, and effects” also means public telephone booths, see Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967). When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases — or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. See, e.g., Compassion in Dying v. Washington, 79 F.3d 790 (9th Cir.1996) (en banc), rev’d sub nom. Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 117 S.Ct. 2258, 138 L.Ed.2d 772 (1997). But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we’re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.
It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it’s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.
The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have succumbed to the temptation to pick and choose. Had they brought the same generous approach to the Second Amendment that they routinely bring to the First, Fourth and selected portions of the Fifth, they would have had no trouble finding an individual right to bear arms. Indeed, to conclude otherwise, they had to ignore binding precedent. United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 59 S.Ct. 816, 83 L.Ed. 1206 (1939), did not hold that the defendants lacked standing to raise a Second Amendment defense, even though the government argued the collective rights theory in its brief. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 586-587; see also Brannon P. Denning & Glenn H. Reynolds, Telling Miller’s Tale: A Reply to David Yassky, 65 Law & Contemp. Probs. 113, 117-18 (2002). The Supreme Court reached the Second Amendment claim and rejected it on the merits after finding no evidence that Miller’s weapon — a sawed-off shotgun — was reasonably susceptible to militia use. See Miller, 307 U.S. at 178, 59 S.Ct. 816. We are bound not only by the outcome of Miller but also by its rationale. If Miller’s claim was dead on arrival because it was raised by a person rather than a state, why would the Court have bothered discussing whether a sawed-off shotgun was suitable for militia use? The panel majority not only ignores Miller’s test; it renders most of the opinion wholly superfluous. As an inferior court, we may not tell the Supreme Court it was out to lunch when it last visited a constitutional provision.
The majority falls prey to the delusion — popular in some circles — that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth — born of experience — is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks’ homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process. See Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 Geo. L.J. 309, 338 (1991). In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. Id. at 341-42. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the institution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 417, 15 L.Ed. 691 (1857) (finding black citizenship unthinkable because it would give blacks the right to “keep and carry arms wherever they went”). A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.
All too many of the other great tragedies of history — Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few — were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 578-579. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
Fortunately, the Framers were wise enough to entrench the right of the people to keep and bear arms within our constitutional structure. The purpose and importance of that right was still fresh in their minds, and they spelled it out clearly so it would not be forgotten. Despite the panel’s mighty struggle to erase these words, they remain, and the people themselves can read what they say plainly enough:
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.
The sheer ponderousness of the panel’s opinion — the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of constitutional text — refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel’s labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it — and is just as likely to succeed.

When last we spoke about my in laws and their auto purchasing woes, they were in possession of a car with a VIN that doesn’t match the car they were driving. The dealer overnighted paperwork to them with the correct VIN, but this set of papers misspelled my FIL’s name. So now they are trying to get that fixed. 

The open carriers are scaring the soccermoms and this is hurting the rest of our guns rights. Antigun mothers usually don’t care enough about guns to make it an election issue, which is a good thing, because women are generally not in favor of gun ownership, but they are usually ambivalent to it. However, when women see this as a threat to themselves or their kids, they start to care. Seeing people open carrying guns right after a bunch of high profile mass shootings is doing just that. As an example: here is a recent exchange online that was about the MSNBC poll on guns:

Soccermom

See, I’m not actually anti-2a, even though it seems a lot of people assume so (not you). Do I like guns? No. Do I realize that there are way too many guns to ever make plausible restrictions or controls on them? Yup. Do I have to explain my my tendency to feel anxious or threatened when I see someone I don’t know with a gun? Yeah, I’m pretty sure I have that right too. It’s pretty much a moot point though, there will never be sensible gun laws in this country because we’re well beyond putting a cap on anything. I realize that. But where are my rights and protections? Everyone can wave around a gun in public, but I shouldn’t feel a certain way about it because it’s an amendment? 🤣🤣🤣 Yeah. Once again, not directed at you. I don’t want my kids around people open carrying either. And no, I’m not a liberal who’s like, “Confiscate all the guns!” From who? The people that are way better armed than the liberals?

Divemedic:

So you aren’t opposed to people being armed, you are opposed to people doing things that make you nervous? Doesn’t that make it your problem, not theirs? After all, your position isn’t about what the open carrier is doing or not doing, but is about the way you feel.

Soccermom

 No, I’m opposed to seeing guns. It’s not just that they make me anxious; I don’t want my children around them either. And it is about what the open carrier is doing. Why does an open carry person’s rights supersede my own?

Divemedic

So if a person said that “I’m opposed to seeing women’s legs and collar bones. It’s not just that they make me anxious; I don’t want my children seeing that either. And it is about what the woman is doing. Why does an woman’s rights supersede my own?” Does that mean that you would be willing to cover up? If not, why does your opinion change when it is YOUR ox being gored?

Soccermom

 On that same token, I don’t really want to see people walking around with open knives or bottles of acid or anything like that. People are basically stupid and I don’t trust people I don’t know to not do stupid things like accidentally shooting someone.
“Doesn’t it make it your problem, not theirs?” Well, yeah, that’s why I said that it was a moot point. I literally just wanted to say why I don’t exactly relish the idea of seeing a bunch of idiots in Target waving their guns around.
And you’re basically saying that I don’t have a right to be opposed to something. I’m not changing laws, not marching on Washington DC, I will literally never do anything about gun control laws. Ever. But I am absolutely fucking protected by the Constitution to say that I feel uncomfortable around guns.

Attorneyguy

Why does open carry bother you more than concealed? The number of guns isn’t affected by whether they are inside or outside the clothing.

Soccermom

Why do I have to have a reason? Obviously, if I don’t see them, I’m not aware of them. It doesn’t make me feel better to be near someone armed or safer, quite the opposite actually.

Divemedic

 I am not saying that you don’t have a right. After all, people have a right to not vaccinate their children. If you get enough people who share an opinion, their votes can effect policy, no matter how misguided that policy may be. That is how we got slavery, prohibition, and segregation.
Therefore, it behooves us to show people when their position is based upon emotion instead of logic. That means that people will hopefully vote from a logical position instead of an emotional one.
The Constitution protects arms the same as your speech.

Soccermom#2

 I get what Soccermom is saying. I don’t want to see people brandishing weapons in public. I prefer the illusion of Disneyland to the street wars of Chicago.
However, to me, people with cars are a bigger threat and probably kill more people than guns. I also don’t like to walk past large dogs barking crazy behind short fences.

Divemedic

I don’t like tattoos. There are people who don’t like sitting at the same lunch counter with African Americans. That doesn’t mean that tattoos should be outlawed, nor does it mean that we should return to “whites only” lunch counters.
The way that one feels about other people and their actions doesn’t supersede the rights of those other people.

Soccermom

 I truthfully give not one iota of fuck about the second amendment. It doesn’t apply to me. I mean, cops get killed when someone wrestles their gun away from them and they’re trained to not let that happen. So what if some idiot doesn’t have their gun fully secured on their person and someone snatches it and opens up on a Walmart?

MSNBC has a poll: “Do you think that people should be allowed to carry guns in public?”

As of the time I write this (September 21 at 11:10 am) the vote shows more than 93% (783k) saying “Yes! The Second Amendment guarantees it.”

That flies in the face of this story.

RK Guns has a stripped lower available for $49.99. They offer it with no transfer fee when you order online and have it sent to your local Rural King store. Since there are 115 locations nationwide, perhaps you can easily find one near you.

Add a $39 lower parts kit, a complete upper for $185, a stock and buffer kit for $24, and you can have an AR-15 for less than $300.