tyranny

AWB 2022, the way I read it

Here is the a quote from the text of the new AWB that is bothering me the most:

(a) In General.—Section 922 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by inserting after subsection (u) the following:

(v) (1) It shall be unlawful for a person to import, sell, manufacture, transfer, or possess, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, a semiautomatic assault weapon.

(2) Paragraph (1) shall not apply to the possession, sale, or transfer of any semiautomatic assault weapon otherwise lawfully possessed under Federal law on the date of enactment of the Assault Weapons Ban of 2022.

(3) Paragraph (1) shall not apply to any firearm that—

(A) is manually operated by bolt, pump, lever, or slide action, except for a shotgun described in section 921(a)(40)(G);

(B) has been rendered permanently inoperable;

(C) is an antique firearm, as defined in section 921 of this title; or

(D) is only capable of firing rimfire ammunition.

The same applies to magazines.

(w) (1) It shall be unlawful for a person to import, sell, manufacture, transfer, or possess, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, a large capacity ammunition feeding device.

Granted, there is a so-called “grandfather clause” but it says that a weapon (or magazine) is only grandfathered to possess. If you wish to sell, transfer, or otherwise dispose of it, it is no longer grandfathered. Not only that, but it is a crime to have that weapon and not securely store it.

What is an assault weapon? Well, the bill defines it as:

A semiautomatic rifle that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine; and has any 1 of the following:

  • Any grip, including thumbhole stocks, Thordsen-type grip or stock, or any other characteristic that can function as a grip.
  • A folding, telescoping, or detachable stock, or a stock that is otherwise foldable or adjustable in a manner that operates to reduce the length, size, or any other dimension, or otherwise enhances the concealability, of the weapon
  • a grenade launcher.
  • a barrel shroud.
  • a threaded barrel.

A semiautomatic rifle that has a fixed ammunition feeding device with the capacity to accept more than 15 rounds, except for an attached tubular device designed to accept, and capable of operating only with, .22 caliber rimfire ammunition.

Any part, combination of parts, component, device, attachment, or accessory that is designed or functions to accelerate the rate of fire of a semiautomatic firearm but not convert the semiautomatic firearm into a machinegun. (Binary trigger, slide fire, and anything else they feel like adding)

Semiautomatic pistols that accept detachable magazines and have any 1 of the following:

  • A threaded barrel
  • A second pistol grip.
  • A barrel shroud.
  • The capacity to accept a detachable ammunition feeding device at some location outside of the pistol grip.
  • is semiautomatic version of an automatic firearm. (So all Glocks, Skorpions, and any other PDW)
  • manufactured weight of 50 ounces or more when unloaded. (Desert Eagles)
  • A buffer tube, stabilizing brace or similar component that protrudes horizontally behind the pistol grip. (All AR pistols)

A semiautomatic shotgun that has the capacity of more than than 5 rounds and has any 1 of the following:

  • a folding, telescoping, or detachable stock.
  • a Any grip, including thumbhole stocks, Thordsen-type grip or stock, bird’s head grip, or any other characteristic that can function as a grip.
  • a forward grip.
  • a grenade launcher.

All belt fed firearms.

Then it goes on to name a bunch of firearms by name. It looks like they went through a gun catalog and just listed all of the scary looking guns. All of the parts of those firearms, including their frames.

They called a CZ Scorpion an AK type firearm, for crying out loud. It also outlaws taping, clipping, or attaching magazines to each other.

With that being said, my read on this is that it has no chance of passing the Senate, and the Dems know it. They are merely trying to pass this bill so they can go back to their base and tell them that they tried.

By Divemedic, ago

Closer to CW2

After SCOTUS declared Maryland’s AWB and magazine ban unconstitutional, the Marlyand AG has refused to comply.

Democrat Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh was defiant: “Military-style firearms pose grave risks to public safety, as recent mass shootings in other states have made clear. Despite the Bruen ruling, the state’s law remains in effect. Marylanders have a right to be protected from these dangerous weapons.”’

Three of the four boxes have failed. The government is refusing to comply with its own laws. What else is left?

By Divemedic, ago

This Is Why

People ask why a person needs an AR-15. The Uvalde shooting is a great illustration as to why. Dozens of police were in fear of a single loser with an AR-15, but have no problem harassing an unarmed mother who is telling the truth about their cowardice.

Perhaps if she had an AR-15, they would leave her alone, too.

On a side note, this is why I have security cameras. To catch wrongdoing. The videos of cops parking outside of my house and flashing the lights at me would look great in the courtroom when I sued them.

By Divemedic, ago

Effective Gun Ban

We all know that the Democrats want a 1,000% tax on assault weapons. This law is very broad and will tax most guns out of existence (pdf warning):

semiautomatic rifles that have the capacity to use a magazine that isn’t a fixed magazine, and any one of the following:

  • a pistol grip,
  • a forward grip,
  • folding, telescoping, or detachable stock.
  • a barrel shroud,
  • a threaded barrel,
  • a “functional grenade launcher.”

Or a semiautomatic rifle that has a fixed magazine with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds, except for an attached tubular device designed to accept, and capable of operating only with, .22 caliber rimfire ammunition.

any semiautomatic pistol that has the capacity to use a magazine that isn’t a fixed magazine, and any one of the following:

  • a threaded barrel
  • a second pistol grip (these are already NFA weapons. I don’t know what effect this law will have)
  • a barrel shroud
  • the capacity for inserting the magazine anywhere outside of the pistol grip (such as the CZ Scorpion and other PDWs)
  • if it looks like a machine gun
  • weighs more than 50 ounces (this is obviously aimed at AR pistols)
  • a Stabilizing brace
  • a buffer tube (again, aimed at AR pistols)

The tax will also apply to any ammunition magazine, belt, drum, etc. that holds more than 10 rounds of ammo, but specifically excludes fixed tubular .22LR magazines.

Plus a bunch of other stuff. Then it goes on to charge the tax on any of the frames, parts of the firearms covered, and parts of magazines. This is, in effect, a ban most firearms and their parts by taxing them into oblivion. Essentially the same thing that happened with the NFA. The only firearms that seem exempt are bolt, lever action, and rimfire.

Imagine a basic AR-15 that costs $11,000 and using $110 magazines.

Since it is a tax, the Senate doesn’t even have to vote on it. It can be passed through budget reconciliation.

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

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

Leftist Violence

In my post on “educating a leftie,“ I gave examples of just one year of leftist violence. In fact, other than the minor skirmishes of J6, the left has been the one to instigate all of the political violence in the past 6 years.

The latest example is this morning’s attempted assassination of a sitting Supreme Court Justice by a self described Democrat who had hoped to kill a conservative court member to flip the composition of the court so that he could “save” gun control and abortion.

Unlike the J6 trespassers, he will be granted bail by the end of the month, while some present in the Capitol are facing 40 years in Federal prison. There are two justice systems in the US now.

By Divemedic, ago

I’ve Been Thinking

I asked a couple of days ago why they were making such a big deal about the police not doing their jobs. I was wondering what the end game was, and I think I have it. They are following the Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” and the CIA insurgency manual. If you are unfamiliar with them, I did a three part series on them back in 2020. You can find part one here, part two here, and part three is here.

When an attempted overthrow of a government is in the works, one of the things that needs to happen is a loss of trust in the government’s ability to run things and provide needed services to its citizens. They do this by using violence and mayhem to both make the citizens feel unsafe, and to sabotage infrastructure so that people are crying out for basic services.

Once the people don’t trust the government to do that job any more, they turn to the revolutionaries to do it for them, and the revolutionaries step in and “fix” the problem that they themselves created. I think we are seeing a variation of that. The left already hates the local and state police. Now all they have to do is get the right on board.

American Greatness thinks that this is exactly what is happening to the police, and I can’t say that I disagree with them. That is no way means that I am going to support cops who stand around and arrest parents while children are being murdered, but I see what is happening.

By Divemedic, ago

Laws, Redux

Ignorance of the law, the judges and cops are fond of saying, is no excuse. In 1925, this is what a complete copy of all Federal laws looked like:

That one volume represents all of the laws that were passed by Congress in the first 150 years of this country’s existence. That Federal Law library has now expanded immensely.

What was one volume in 1925 expanded to become 22 volumes just 90 years later. Here is a picture of one of the 53 titles of the United States Code:

The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. About 600 crimes a year are added to the Federal Code, so we should be somewhere near 14,000 Federal crimes in the US Code by now.

A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves, which include things like rape, murder, or theft. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves, such as owning a machine gun made after 1986, when owning one made in 1985 is perfectly legal.

In 1982, the Justice Department tried to determine the total number of criminal laws. In a project that lasted two years, the Department compiled a list of approximately 3,000 criminal offenses. This effort, headed by Ronald Gainer, a Justice Department official, is considered the most exhaustive attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws. In a Wall Street Journal article about this project, “this effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.” Or as Mr. Gainer characterized this fruitless project: “[y]ou will have died and [been] resurrected three times,” and still not have an answer to this question. (There are 53 titles now.)

So you see, even the Justice Department of the US government is not sure of how many laws there are, yet each and every one of us is responsible for knowing every one of them, along with the court cases that modify and define them, upon penalty of prison: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.”

All of that pales in comparison to the regulations. Congress isn’t the only body that passes laws. There are also several dozen Federal bureaus, who have had the power to write laws since 1940. The laws that they write are called regulations, and they are found in the Code of Federal Regulations.

The laws passed by Congress are just the beginning. In 2018, the Code of Federal Regulations numbered over 250,000 pages. Only a fraction of those pages involved regulations based on something spelled out in legislation. If a regulatory agency comes after you, forget about juries, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, disinterested judges and other rights that are part of due process in ordinary courts. The “administrative courts” through which the regulatory agencies impose their will are run by the regulatory agencies themselves, much as if the police department could make up its own laws and then employ its own prosecutors, judges and courts of appeals.

The result of all of this is that each and every one of us is responsible for reading, understanding and following over one million pages of laws, regulations, and court decisions- with complete understanding. If one were to begin studying these laws at age 12 by reading 50 pages per day, by age 67 you would have read all of them. The only problem is that, at the current rate, the government would have added another 500,000 pages of laws and 28 years of reading to your quest while you were busy reading.

There are nearly 1.7 million regulatory crimes that a person can commit in this country as of 2020.

Remember, though: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you are spraying insect killer on some ants using a bug spray that says spray from 6 inches away, but you spray from 8 inches, you are a Federal criminal. If you are buying a gun and you live in Florida, you had better use the abbreviation of FL as your address, because using the old abbreviation of FLA is a felony and can land you in prison.

Why is this happening? Ayn Rand gives us an insight into this:

The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

Truer words were never spoken. More laws equals more crimes, which equals more criminals, which equals more power for those enforcing the laws.

There is only one destination for the path we are on: tyranny, enslavement, and the complete control of everything. That will eventually lead to revolution. Whether or not that will happen in my productive lifetime is anyone’s guess.

By Divemedic, ago