Antigun

I Should Know Better

Here is the online discussion I am in:

Rando Karen: Get rid of all the automatic weapons there is no need for them. You certainly don’t need them to hunt & you’re not taking away the 2nd amendment right. If the house & the senate don’t pass this kind of a bill then maybe they don’t need their jobs. Let’s vote in those that will pass a bill that makes sense to the American people & get rid of those that want to lobby with the NRA & spend our hard earned tax dollars.

Divemedic: Name one automatic weapon being manufactured and sold to anyone but police and military.

Antigun Rando: Splitting hairs for deflection, delusIon, and avoidance. Good job!

DM: How is that splitting hairs? The OP said outlaw automatic weapons. No one is selling any.

AR: Semi automatic is still automatic. It also doesn’t say “fully automatic” which is what you’re erroneously running away with.

DM: Wrong. Automatic means that the firearm fires more than one shot with each function of the trigger. Semi-automatic means one shot is fired with each function of the trigger. Important difference. There is no “fully automatic” in the law or in mechanics. That is a term invented by people who don’t know what they are talking about.

By Divemedic, ago

Waiting for More Details

There has been reportedly been a deal reached on gun control, with 10 republicans signing on to support it. I will wait for more details since the text hasn’t been written yet, but it doesn’t look too bad. The overwhelming sense I get is that this is mostly a mental health bill. One thing that is concerning, however, is that this law will include a red flag law.

I don’t think for a second that this law will never be abused. After all, I already know from first hand experience that Domestic Violence restraining orders are routinely abused by people that want to get revenge on former paramours. A woman even was awarded one against David Letterman because, as she reported, he was beaming secret messages to her through his TV show.

I would feel better if there were a legal mechanism in place that allows for the punishment of those who abuse these legal processes in the form of what has become known as “lawfare.”

By Divemedic, ago

Microstamping

New York now, among other things, requires that all handguns sold in the state have microstamping technology installed in them.

New York citizens buy approximately half a million firearms a year. In contrast, Floridians buy about three times that many, 1.5 million.

My prediction is that this law will do nothing for solving crime, but that isn’t the goal. The goal here is to make owning a firearm impossibly expensive.

In case you are interested, Texans buy the most guns (1.6 million), Florida the runner up (1.4 million), then California (1.1 million), Pennsylvania (1 million), and Tennessee rounding out the top 5 with 700,00 firearms sold per year.

All of this because of an average of less than 20 fatalities a year involving shootings on school campus. Not mass shootings on school campus, ALL shootings on school campus, even those that happened when no students were present (at night, summer break, weekends, etc.) and it was simply one drug dealer shooting another.

By Divemedic, ago

Preordained Results

The DOJ has assembled a panel of “experts” to study the Uvalde incident.

  • Sheriff John Mina, Orange County, Florida Was a Republican, now a Democrat
  • Chief Rick Braziel (retired), Sacramento, Calif. He was one of the law enforcement officers who publicly lobbied for registering ammunition sales in California.
  • Deputy Chief Gene Deisinger (retired), Virginia Tech, Va. He has been covering for bad policing since at least 2013: While this may be true, Deisinger said he is frustrated by the widespread criticism of law enforcement without providing any real alternatives. “One of my criticisms of North American culture is that we are really good at criticizing what somebody else did or failed to do,” Deisinger said.
  • Director of Public Safety Frank Fernandez (retired), Coral Gables, Fla. He has been involved in the gun control movement for most of the last decade: “An 18-year-old with an AK-47 and an AR-15 is completely unreasonable,” said Frank Fernandez, director of public safety in Coral Gables, Florida, and the chairman of the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s firearms committee. “That is a weapon that is meant for destruction. It’s not a weapon that you can use to go hunting. That is a weapon … used in the theater of war.”
  • Albert Guarnieri, FBI Unit Chief. This is the only panelist I couldn’t find a thing on.
  • Major Mark Lomax (retired), Pennsylvania State Police, Pa. While campaigning for Sheriff of Bucks county as a Democrat, his position on guns was: While he supports the Second Amendment, he believes strongly in licensing and training and sees on need for assault weapons such as AR-15s.
  • Laura McElroy, CEO, McElroy Media Group. This woman has been a media “spin master” for police departments like Chicago, Tampa, and others. She specializes in putting a good face on incidents where cops screw up.
  • April Naturale, Assistant Vice President, Vibrant Emotional Health This woman is everywhere. She claims to specialize in traumatic stress. She has responded to the war in Ukraine, she was involved with the Feds, the UN, and COVID-19 (pdf warning), the shootings in San Bernardino, Sandy Hook, Hurricane Katrina, and numerous other mass shooting events. It’s like she goes everywhere there is a tragedy that was exploited by the left.
  • Chief Kristen Ziman (retired), Aurora, Ill. Has been a part of the effort for more gun control in Illinois for years. She was involved in a scandal where she got intoxicated and left her service weapon behind in a bar before getting a subordinate to take the blame so her chances at becoming a Police Superintendent would not be ruined.

Every one of them is an antigun, pro police Democrat. I can already tell you what the findings of this whitewash will be.

By Divemedic, ago

Same Old Arguments

The left is still hammering the “collective rights” theory. This attorney thinks that SCOTUS got it wrong on the Heller decision.

Carrying their logic to its extreme, if there is no limitation on the right to own a gun, all 330 million citizens of the United States must be part of a “well regulated Militia.” Are you? I’m not.

Actually, you ARE a part of the militia, whether or not you know it. The militia is actually composed of two parts: The organized militia (the National Guard) and the unorganized militia, which is comprised of all male US citizens between the ages of 17 and 45. See 10USC246:

§246. Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

(b) The classes of the militia are—

(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and

(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

This so-called lawyer doesn’t have a clue what he is talking about, but that doesn’t stop him. He goes on:

No one would seriously argue you have the right to own a land mine or a nuclear-armed submarine.

Who says? The Second Amendment says “shall not be infringed,” and I believe that it DOES protect the right to own a nuclear armed submarine. Now, I am equally sure that many people would agree that citizens SHOULDN’T own a submarine armed with nuclear weapons. In that case, there is a process for changing that. It should not be difficult to get three quarters of the state legislatures and a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress to agree to add an Amendment to the Constitution that reads something along the lines of “No person shall be permitted to own a nuclear warhead.” I mean, the process is outlined right there in the paperwork.

What I can’t find in that Constitution is a clause that permits the government to ignore any clause which it, in its own judgment, finds inconvenient or irrelevant. That is EXACTLY what he argues, however:

The fundamental constitutional proposition many Republicans overlook is that no right is unlimited. That there is a limitation of our rights is fundamental to being civilized. So, for instance, the Supreme Court long ago held that your right to self-expression stops at the tip of the other guy’s nose. You have the right to own a car, but you don’t have the right to drive it at 100 mph through Downtown San Diego.

Of course no right is unlimited. He is just making a poor argument. No one has a right to own a car. There are all sorts of reasons why a person’s ability to own a car may be restricted, as any decent lawyer would know. I would also agree with him that a person doesn’t have the right to drive downtown at 100 miles per hour. A person does, however, have the right to own arms, to include firearms. What a person doesn’t have is the right to stand in the middle of a crowded street and fire that gun into a crowd, and no one is saying that they should, absent a legitimate exception like self defense.

If we are to allow the government to simply ignore the parts of the Constitution that they disagree with, then we can all agree that the founding documents of this nation are no longer relevant and are null and void. In that case, we might as well admit that might makes right, and we are a dictatorship after all.

If I lived in San Diego, I would not hire this moron as an attorney. He doesn’t seem very competent or knowledgeable.

By Divemedic, ago