Antigun

President Biden said that the Second Amendment is not absolute before going on to explain that you couldn’t own a cannon when the Bill of Rights was ratified. This remark is identical to one he made back in February that I have already debunked.

The Amendment didn’t say that, for two reasons: First, the Amendments to the Constitution don’t say that people can do anything. The Amendments say that the GOVERNMENT can’t do things. The government can’t infringe on the right keep to bear arms, is what it says. Second, people DID own cannons. Privately organized and funded artillery companies in the colonies date all the way back to the 1630s. A century later, in the 1740s, there are records of Benjamin Franklin helping organize artillery companies while stressing that they were made completely of volunteers and armed at their own expense.

One of the driving forces behind the first major battles of the Revolutionary was because the British soldiers were coming to confiscate privately-owned arms – including cannons and mortars – such as ones that were being held by veterans of the French and Indian War as war trophies.

In fact, there were people who owned entire warships. See my post on this from 2013.

During the course of the Revolution, approximately 1,700 letters of Marque were issued to privateers. In the War of 1812, President James Madison issued more than 500 letters of Marque to privateers. These letters of marque created what was, essentially, legal piracy, and it was sanctioned by the government and even deemed necessary. So how did these privateers arm their vessels? With cannons that they purchased as individuals.

Our colonial navy had approximately 1,200 cannons on board less than 65 ships. The privateers, on the other hand, had almost 15,000 cannons – all privately owned.

The National Firearms Act of 1934, which is, by far, the most restrictive piece of Federal legislation related to the ownership of arms, says nothing about cannons. It wasn’t until 1968 that things we regard as modern artillery were regulated further when ‘destructive devices’ were added to the law.

But muzzleloading cannons, like the ones used during the Revolutionary War remain conspicuously absent in any legislation. You could buy a cannon as an individual in the Revolution era, and you can still buy one today as an individual.

Elon recently continued his shift to the right by claiming to support the 2A. He then showed that his journey isn’t complete when he went on to say that he supports Universal Background Checks and thinks “assault weapons” should be restricted to range owners and “people who live in gang areas.”

I am not going to be to hard on him. In this case, it is obvious that he isn’t a dogmatic liberal who supports his cause over facts and logic. It looks to me like he is a new convert away from leftist dogma, and it takes some time to see that everything you have believed in the past is wrong because the information you relied upon to come to those beliefs was bullshit. The confusion over assault weapons was a deliberate misinformation campaign.

The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

Josh Sugarmann, 1988

He will come to realize the truth. This is one of those times when attacking him for his mistaken belief would be counterproductive. Someone needs to educate him without attacking him.

Daniel Defense to be sued. Notice how they always claim that no other industry gets protection from lawsuits, but Ford never gets sued when a drunk driver kills a kid in an accident?

Governments are jumping on the boogieman of so-called ‘ghost’ guns, which as you all know, are privately made firearms. That isn’t how they are defining it, though. Just like how the anti-gunners redefined “assault weapons” to be a moving target that no one really can define or understand, ghost guns are a made up term that can mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean.

Cities are passing bans against possessing or even looking longingly at ghost guns, which they are defining as any gun without a serial number. This casts a wide net that will capture such things as C&R firearms. Many firearms made before GCA68 became the law of the land do not have, and were not required to have, serial numbers. To engrave a collectable firearm with a serial number would destroy its value, while not engraving that firearm with a serial number makes you a criminal.

Yet passing a law that prohibits privately made firearms will do as much to stop criminals as it did to stop illicit drug dealers. When a person can make a submachine gun for less than $100 of Home Depot parts and some common hand tools, there is little that can be done to stop them. They are making firearms in caves in Pakistan, and in the jungles of the Philippines:

The sheriff’s office in Santa Fe has released a video showing that not only did Alec Baldwin point a firearm at his camerawoman, he had his finger on the trigger when he did it. The raw footage from the day of the incident shows Baldwin practicing his draw. He draws multiple times with his finger on the trigger, and at 2:34, you can see him thumb the hammer back and pull the trigger. (hat tip to Emily Post)

I don’t expect that this will cause any Greek philosophers to admit they were wrong, but this seems to prove that my initial position was correct:

Alec Baldwin took a firearm that he didn’t bother to check to see if it was loaded, pointed it at someone, and pulled the trigger. These acts resulted in the death of another person. This makes that person’s death the result of his (and possibly others’) negligence. Her death, her blood, is on his hands. Saying that “he wasn’t trained” doesn’t absolve him of his responsibility for what happened, any more than it would absolve him if he crashed a plane he was flying without first receiving pilot training.