Antigun

ALERT: Universal BG Check EO Coming

From the GOA and from Breitbart news: President Biden is set to announce a new rule going into effect. Universal background checks will be going into effect for ALL firearms transactions. Any firearm that changes hands will soon require a background check, per a soon to be issued executive order from Biden.

How can Biden do this? A unique reading of changes made to 18 USC 921 that were made by the “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act” when Biden signed it into law on June 25, 2022. Yes, the word “bipartisan” is actually in the law’s title. The Republicans sold gun owners down the river. The law’s sponsors were none other than Florida’s Marco Rubio and Rick Scott.

Here is what the law did:

Section 12002 of the BCSA amends a subparagraph of the GCA definition of “engaged in the business” as it pertains to federally licensed firearms dealers, by striking the language “with the principal objective of livelihood and profit,” and replacing it with “to predominantly earn a profit.” As amended, the definition at
18 U.S.C. §921(a)(21)(C) reads as follows:
[“Engaged in the business,”] as applied to a dealer in firearms, as defined in section 921(a)(11)(A), [means] a person who devotes time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business to predominantly earn a profit with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms, but such term shall not include a person who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his collection of firearms.

(text that was added is in bold, text eliminated is struck through)

By choosing to interpret it in a way that is most restrictive, this EO will direct the ATF to consider anyone who sells a firearm for more than they bought it for as being an unlicensed dealer. In one fell swoop, they have virtually eliminated all private sales. This also explains why the ATF has such a hard on for kitchen table dealers as of late. Read the entire thing here. (pdf warning)

An article released by the New York Times today is reporting that, “The regulations required to put the new law into effect — expected to be released soon — would require anyone who earns a profit from selling firearms to obtain a federal license and conduct background checks. Previously, dealers were required to join the federal system only if they derived their chief livelihood from selling weapons. Failing to register carries a penalty of up to five years in prison and $250,000 in fines.”

This is huge. In one fell swoop, the Biden administration has enacted the most sweeping change to gun control law in decades. The rules will be backed up by a renewed push to prosecute businesses that refuse to register by accessing bank records, storage unit leases, and other expenses associated with running an off-the-books gun business.

Make no mistake- if this is in fact the case, we are looking at a national firearms registry, and the only real purpose for registration is confiscation. It’s plain that the left is looking to completely circumvent Congress and will simply use executive orders and the administrative rule making process to create whatever laws and regulations that they wish, and in this case they were helped out with the help of Republican Senators.

I have said it plenty of times before- Just because the Democrats are your enemy doesn’t make Republicans your friend. Again and again, we see that Republicans only SAY that they are pro Second Amendment during election time, but then sell us down the river once they get our votes. Now they have figured out that the way to stay in power is to do what you are told. All Republicans care about is staying in power, and the writing is on the wall- play music to the tune dictated by the Left, or they will make sure you are gone. So Republicans are selling us out.

Things are going to get a lot worse before they get even worse. The year 2024 is going to be a cast iron bitch.

By Divemedic, ago

Discourse

Like I have said before, they don’t want to have a discussion, they just want to dictate terms. That’s why replies are blocked:

So I will place my answer here: No. Your move.

By Divemedic, ago

They Don’t Want Discussion

Try to have a serious discussion on gun rights, and the left either shuts it down, or turns it into childish sexual innuendos:

By Divemedic, ago

More on Super Safety

So a question was raised, asking if this super safety is similar to the Forced Reset Trigger that the ATF already decided was a machine gun. The ATF has deliberately reworded the statute in order to make it more to their advantage:

On March 25th, 2022 the ATF raided Rare Breed Trigger’s vendor and inhibited them from shipping triggers. Currently, the ATF is trying to classify these triggers themselves as a machine gun. The ATF issued an open letter to Federal Firearms Licensees on March 22 of this year. If you don’t have the time or inclination the read the letter about Forced Reset Triggers, the important part is below:

“ATF’s examination found that some FRT devices allow a firearm to automatically expel more than one shot with a single, continuous pull of the trigger. For this reason, ATF has concluded that FRTs that function in this way are a combination of parts designed and intended for use in converting a weapon into a machine gun, and hence, ATF has classified these devices as a ‘machine gun’ as defined by the NFA and GCA.”

“Accordingly, ATF’s position is that any FRT that allows a firearm to automatically expel more than one shot with a single, continuous pull of the trigger is a ‘machine gun,’ and is accordingly subject to the GCA prohibitions regarding the possession, transfer, and transport of machine guns. They are also subject to registration, transfer, taxation, and possession restrictions under the NFA.”

You will note that ATF even states that Congress defined a machine gun as:

Any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger

The ATF has engaged in some linguistic gymnastics to say:

FRT devices allow a firearm to automatically expel more than one shot with a single, continuous pull of the trigger.

Note that this isn’t what the statute says. Why is this important?

The FRT, Bump stocks, and the Super Safety all cause the operator of the weapon to hold their finger in position so that the recoil of the weapon causes the shooter’s finger to pull the trigger very quickly.

  • In the case of the Bump stock, the entire weapon is moving.
  • With the FRT, a spring is forcing the trigger to reset by using the bolt to push the trigger forward
  • The Super Safety is using the motion of the bolt to engage and disengage the safety, which on the AR will reset the trigger. The rate of fire is about 400 rounds per minute. Seems fast until you realize that the cyclic rate of the M-16 and the M-249 are right about 800 rounds per minute.

The ATF is going to go after any device that causes rapid fire. The way that an AR’s fire control system works means that it is fairly easy to modify for rapid fire that comes in about half the rate of FA. The ATF would declare all AR’s as machine guns if they thought they could get away with it.

By Divemedic, ago

Doesn’t Count

People keep pointing out that New Zealand and Australia banned virtually all guns and haven’t had a mass shooting since. I have pointed out that this is bullshit for years, and now we have yet another mass shooting in New Zealand to prove that they are lying.

A man in New Zealand killed 2 and wounded 5 before being found dead. The way that Australia and New Zealand compile statistics, this shooting isn’t considered a homicide because no one was convicted for the killings. The law there requires that someone be convicted for killing another for the crime to count as a homicide.

By Divemedic, ago

Laser Weapons


I would find out how much damage a 5 watt laser would do to a camera’s CMOS or CCD. You can buy one for about $400. That camera would be transmitting video of my house only until about 5 minutes after the UPS guy delivers my new purchase. I bet that he runs out of cameras before I run out of photons.

Or you could always call the cops, but it wouldn’t be as much fun.

In Florida, such an act would be illegal under 784.048:

A person who willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly follows, harasses, or cyberstalks another person commits the offense of stalking, a misdemeanor of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083.

By Divemedic, ago

Police Substations

The new hotness among governments in light of the Bruen decision is expanding places that are off limits to carrying concealed weapons. Make the entire city a special carve out of areas that are sensitive, and therefore off limits to carrying concealed weapons, and you can back door your way into a general gun ban.

It isn’t a new concept. Disney tried it by claiming that their license to import fireworks made the entire Orlando theme park complex off limits, and Universal Studios claimed that the presence of the “Digital Audio Visual Effects (DAVE)” college on the grounds of their studios made the entire theme park that was on the same property off limits to carry.

For the last several years, the one that appears to be spreading in Florida is the “Police Substation.” It works like this: a business agrees to let police sit inside of their establishment to do paperwork and take a break, and in exchange they get to put stickers on the entrance claiming that “This is a police substation for XXX police department” and viola- the business is now a police station and is thus off limits for legal concealed carry. The Lauderhill Mall is doing it– so is the Central Baptist Church in Sanford. The Westgate mobile home park in Largo has allowed police to use one of the vacant trailers on the property as a substation. Many hospitals are doing this as well. I have seen at least three of them in the past six months that have posted signs just like this.

I can’t find an answer in the statutes or in any Florida case law on this. Is a business location off limits to carry if they allow police officers to occasionally use a portion of the property as a resting or public relations base, if the property is primarily used as a business or other location, and the police are usually not there? I am writing emails to several prominent attorneys who do firearms rights advocacy to get an answer on this one. Anyone else here have any authoritative information in this?

By Divemedic, ago

Figures Don’t Lie, but Liars Figure

In this editorial piece disguised as news and statistics, Yahoo tells us that there are only about only 16.7% of Americans actually own firearms.

the top twenty percent of all gun owners actually owned 55% of the guns. In terms of absolute figures, ten million people owned 105 million guns – for an average of ten guns per person, and the remaining 87 million guns were owned by 34 million people – for an average of 2.6 guns per person. The population of the U.S. was 263 million in 1994 – indicating that only 16.7% of Americans had actually owned a weapon.

So their claim is that 44 million people own all of the guns. That is complete and total bullshit, and I can prove it. Let’s use concealed weapons permits as an estimate of the number of gun owners. Florida alone has approximately 2.6 million active concealed weapons permits. With 12% of all Florida residents having a concealed weapons permit, this would mean that three in four gun owners have a CWP. That would be a very high percentage, indeed.

How many people in Florida have weapons but no CWP? That is impossible to know, but what we do know is that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement conducts 1.5 million instant background checks for firearm purchases per year. The anti-gunners are claiming that all of these firearms are being sold to the same people over and over.

I just don’t see it. It is far more likely that, when called by some random “survey taker” that the person answering the phone either says, “Guns? We don’t have any guns here,” when asked, or they simply refuse to take the survey. I just don’t think that surveys are a reliable means of “research” on any topic like firearms. I might as well take a survey of high school boys, asking them about their number of sexual partners. I’m equally as likely to get an accurate count in either case.

These estimates of gun ownership rates are simple guessing. In fact, the Rand corporation estimates that as many as 28 percent of Floridians are firearm owners, and Florida is outpaced in ownership rates by at least 9 other states. According to that study, rates range from 3.4% in Massachusetts to more than 33% in Mississippi. Even with this method, these “studies” are little more than guesswork.

Just in the 20 years between 1999 and 2019, over 42 million rifles were manufactured (pdf alert). Between 20% and 50% of all rifles manufactured in the USA are AR-15 pattern rifles, including all of the variants like the AR-10, and all of the miscellaneous caliber variations.

What we DO know is that there have been 460 million background checks run through the NICS system since it went online in December of 1998 (pdf alert). Just in the year 2020, there were 39.6 million NICS checks done. Now granted that NICS isn’t a complete count of gun ownership because it fails to capture sales done between private parties, guns stolen from dealers and common carriers, and multiple firearms sold in one transaction. Some sales will likewise be overcounted because checks are occasionally done through NICS for CWP permits that don’t result in a transfer, but NICS is the closest thing that we have to counting the number of firearms transfers in the US. Are we to believe that the number of firearms sold in the US from 1900 to 1998 is only 35 million, when Americans are busy buying more than 30 million firearms a year? Those guns sold in the 1980s aren’t going away. Guns last a long time. I myself own firearms that are over 100 years old.

No, they say. It’s because a few people are busy buying dozens of gun and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition every year, they claim. The left would have you believe that there are just 34 million people buying those ~40 million guns in a year- more than one per person on average, year after year, while 6 out of 7 Americans aren’t buying any guns at all. Sorry, but that is complete bullshit. I wrote about this in June of 2016, and I guessed at the time that there were somewhere between 400 and 500 million firearms in the US. Since that time, there have been another 219 million NICS checks.

Looking at ammunition sales, American citizens (all civilian sales, including the cops) are buying around 10 to 12 billion rounds of ammunition- about $11 billion dollars worth- in a year. In fact, the American civilian market buys a third of all ammunition manufactured worldwide to all consumers- including the world’s militaries. To put that in perspective, that is more ammunition than was used by the entire US military during each year of World War 2, when the average was just over 10 billion rounds a year and the US armed forces had more than 15 million personnel.

My guess (and mine is just as valid as theirs) is that there are somewhere between 700 and 800 million firearms in the US, and I would also guess that the southeast US is seeing household gun ownership rates that are somewhere near 70%. What all of this means is that, outside of the major antigun metroplexes of NYC, Boston, Baltimore, San Francisco, and LA, more than half of households have at least one firearm, and more than a quarter of those households own at least one “assault weapon.” I would be willing to bet that my guess is closer to reality than the 17% figure that they are waving about. I’m not alone in that opinion. Even in 2016, there were bloggers guessing that there were more than 600 million guns in circulation.

Now I know what you are thinking- you had a lot of guns before the boating accident, and don’t think that millions of “super owners” is out of the question. Keep in mind that those of you reading this are most likely in the “gun culture” and are among the upper 1 or 2 percent of gun owners. I know people who own 100 or more firearms. Still, the most common gun owner has his dad’s hunting rifle in the closet, or a single handgun in his nightstand drawer and hasn’t been to the range in years, if ever. Even in the south, only about a quarter of gun owners regularly visit the range.

If even one percent of the gun owning public decides to respond in kind to being called an enemy of the people, there will be somewhere around 1.8 million people who are armed, pissed off, and know how to shoot. Many of them spend their weekends hitting small targets at thousands of yards, because they think it’s fun. They will not be lined up in neat ranks out in a field somewhere, just waiting for you to nuke or drone strike them.

The US police cannot even begin to control the gang problem in our inner cities, and the membership of those gangs is only around 800,000 or so and the gang members aren’t actively hunting cops, no matter what the cops try to claim. This is a fight that cannot be won, but they don’t care because liberals are not the ones who will be getting killed. Or so they think. That is dangerous thinking indeed. The people of each side who are the least stable will be the ones who decide when the violence begins and how far it goes.

By Divemedic, ago