I was wondering how long it would take them to trot this sickly pony out. Sponsored by Carolyn Maloney, HR 1369 would mandate a $10,000 fine for firearms owners who fail to maintain liability insurance.

It shall be unlawful for a person who owns a firearm purchased on or after the effective date of this subsection not to be covered by a qualified liability insurance policy.

There are two rationales behind this. The first is that firearms liability policies will be expensive, and in many places, impossible to get. This will have a chilling effect on gun ownership.

The second is …

Frankly, I'm not surprised Mayor Bloomberg sank to this. I'm just surprised it took this long. He's running an advertisement urging Georgians to write their Senators in support of "comprehensive background checks."

If you're just tuning in, that's shorthand for "registration."

The problem is, if you're an urban Manhattanite who's never actually seen a person from Georgia, you might want to check with the locals before attempting to depict them. Remind your hired spokesmodel that pressed dress slacks don't really go with the flannel shirt and camo hat. You might also want to make sure he rehearses his southern accent so he doesn't sound like a bad parody.

You might also consider some firearms training, as your model has his finger on the trigger of that shotgun. He's likely to crank a round into the cameraman at stage left.

Of course, this isn't the first time the anti-gun lobby has done this.

Colorado Governor Hickenlooper has signed all three of the gun-control laws that landed on his desk. The first consequence will be the imminent departure of Magpul Industries from the state. From their FaceBook page:

We have said all along that based on the legal problems and uncertainties in the bill, as well as general principle, we will have no choice but to leave if the Governor signs this into law. We will start our transition out of the state almost immediately, and we will prioritize moving magazine manufacturing operations first.

The bill to which they're responding is HB 1224 [pdf], which bans all large-capacity magazines.  As defined in the bill:

"Large-Capacity Magazine" means: a fixed or detachable magazine, box, drum, feed strip, or similar device capable of accepting, or that can be readily converted to accept, more than fifteen rounds of ammunition or more than five shotgun shells.

Pump shotguns are excepted so long as the tubular magazine does not exceed a capacity of 28 inches. That's a capacity of 8 3.5" shells. It's worth mentioning that Republican lawmakers tacitly accepted this as it doesn't ban "common shotguns."

The problem is, Colorado's ban on "high capacity" magazines bans all removable magazines.

Negotiations are still underway in the Senate for a unified package of gun-control bills to be introduced next month. One conspicuous piece of legislation that will not be part of it is S. 150, Dianne Feinstein's revised Assault Weapons Ban.

Majority Leader Harry Reid excised S. 150 in a meeting on Monday. His rationale was,

Right now her amendment, by the most optimistic measures, has less than 40 votes. I am not going to put something on the floor that can’t succeed.

Does that mean it's dead? No. Feinstein can still reintroduce it as an amendment to another bill. …

Last summer, Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress on the grounds that he stonewalled their investigation into the tragic Fast & Furious operation. The President invoked Executive Privilege in the matter, and it was effectively swept under the rug.

The President's action allows information to be withheld, but it doesn't make the contempt conviction go away. As a result, the Justice Department has been attempting to negotiate some sort of compromise on the matter.

Evidently, those talks aren't going very well. The most shocking thing about it is the very literal contempt Holder shows for Congress …

Charles Schumer had been in talks with Tom Coburn to introduce S. 374, also known as the "Protecting Responsible Gun Sellers" Act.

Those talks fell through, and Schumer chose to forge ahead with his own version, now entitled the "Fix Gun Checks" Act. If that sounds familiar, it's the same bill he introduced last year, which was read on the floor but died in committee.

As I mentioned last week, we didn't have the text of the bill because it was being written in committee. Now we do [pdf]. It passed as an amendment by a 10-8 margin, with the vote being along purely partisan lines.

Read on for a synopsis.

Mark Kelly and his wife Gabrielle Giffords recently founded a gun-control group called Americans for Responsible Solutions. They advocate for the same three things as their peers: universal background checks, an arbitrary limit on magazine capacity, and a ban on military-style rifles.

So why did Mr. Kelly recently buy an AR-15 and "high capacity" magazines?

Even to buy an assault weapon, the background check only takes a matter of minutes. I don't have possession yet but I'll be turning it over to the Tucson PD when I do. Scary to think of people buying guns like these without a background check at a gun show or the Internet. We really need to close the gun show and private seller loop hole.

I'm hoping somebody can help me make sense of this. So, because the background check only takes minutes, we should mandate it to cover private sales? It's OK to buy an "assault rifle" as long as the intent is to immediately surrender it to the police?

At current prices, an AR-15 costs as much as the GDP of Bolivia. I'm apparently to believe that he blew that money to make some ham-handed point. That, or his response is a matter of "this riding crop? These condoms? I'm, uh, buying these for my dad. Not, um, not for me."

I'm having trouble not using the word "hypocrisy." Oh wait, I just did.

Owning NFA items such as suppressors and machine guns can be a tricky proposition. They're expensive, they're subject to a $200 tax and a long approval process, and they're illegal in Georgia unless you can prove otherwise.

Both the Form 4 and the ATF's own opinion imply that proof of registration must be provided to an officer of the ATF upon request. No other parties are mentioned, so many owners assume the ATF are the only folks who have a right to demand it.

However, most states have their own spin on this. According to Georgia Code …

A whole slew of budget cuts took effect on Friday. I'm a little peeved that NASA's losing another $970 million. The beleaguered ATF will be taking a $60 million dollar hit, which would conceivably hamper their ability to enforce all those new gun-control laws folks keep proposing. Additionally, the FBI is losing $480 million, at least some of which is going to have an impact on NICS background-check processing. Expect delays.

Frankly, the whole thing reminds me of Gingrich's boondoggle in 1995, but I don't think the current President has the savvy to turn it to his advantage in the manner than Clinton did.

It goes without saying that this is going to be the political headliner for the near future. As such, the push for gun control in Congress is going to fade from public view and lose momentum.

That doesn't mean it's over, though.

Joe Biden gave us this sage advice on self-defense while doing a talk for Parents magazine:

We live in an area that's wooded and secluded. I said, Jill [his wife], if there's ever a problem just walk out on the balcony here … put that double-barreled shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house. I promise you whoever's coming in is not gonna…

He trailed off after that and rambled that the AR-15 was more difficult to aim and use. He closed by imploring the audience in hushed tones to "buy a shotgun."

OK, let's round up the number of things wrong with that statement.

Magpul has put their money behind their words in a big way.

Due to the highly restrictive language in HB 1224, if passed, and we remained here, this measure would require us to cease PMAG production on July 1, 2013.

In short, Magpul would be unable to remain in business as a CO company, and the over 200 jobs for direct employees and nearly 700 jobs at our subcontractors and suppliers would pick up and leave CO. Due to the structure of our operations, this would be entirely possible, hopefully without significant disruption to production.

The legislators drafting these measures do so in

…

The Supreme Court's decisions in Heller and McDonald affirmed an individual right to keep and bear arms. However, those cases only addressed a central issue of keeping guns in the home. Though the Court found the right to self-defense to be "most acute" there, in no way did either decision imply that it ended at the doorstep.

Yet Maryland, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have all claimed that their arbitrary and burdensome systems of issuing (or rather, refusing to issue) permits to carry a firearm outside the home somehow pass constitutional muster. So, we've brought lawsuits. We won in the 7th Circuit, and we won in the 4th Circuit. New York? Not so well.

Last November, the 2nd Circuit ruled that,

Plaintiffs misconstrue the character and scope of the Second Amendment. States have long chosen to regulate the right to bear arms because of the risks posed by its exercise. As Plaintiffs admit and Heller strongly suggests, the state may ban firearm possession in sensitive places, presumably on the ground that it is too dangerous to permit the possession of firearms in those locations. (…) Thus, as the Supreme Court has implicitly recognized, regulating firearms because of the dangers posed by exercising the right is entirely consistent with the Second Amendment. (…) We are also not convinced that the state may not limit the right to bear arms to those showing a “special need for self-protection.”

The root of all three challenges is the constitutionality of "good cause" requirements for the exercise of a right. No other enumerated right requires such a showing.

Though we couldn't get Woollard heard before the Supreme Court last session, the ensuing split between Circuit courts begs resolution by them. Alan Gura has chosen Kachalsky to be the case to argue.