You can’t pick up a gun magazine without seeing advertisements for Kimber’s pistols on every third page or so. They certainly look debonair in print. In the hand, they feel wonderful, what with all the judiciously sloped edges and modern touches. It’s obvious that they place a great priority on the idea of the gun as art.
That’s fine. There’s certainly a place for that. Unfortunately, Kimber’s production practices fall woefully short when it comes to the idea of the gun as a functional weapon.
In the Heller and McDonald cases, the Supreme Court found that the 2nd Amendment protects the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms, but under current jurisprudence, that right ends at the front door of the home. Though both decisions contain dicta implying that the right to carry arms outside the home is protected, the lower courts disagree, citing a lack of specific direction from the Big Nine.
There are several cases currently awaiting the Court’s review on the matter. Woollard v. Sheridan challenges the unrealistic and corrupt permitting system used by the state of Maryland to deny the right of self-protection to ordinary folks, even those who have proven that they are in imminent danger. The plaintiff in Williams v. Maryland never even tried to get a permit, knowing that denial was a foregone conclusion. He was convicted of illegally carrying, and his conviction was upheld in a very arrogant 4th Circuit ruling. Continued...
Representative Issa and Senator Grassley released a joint report [pdf] on their investigation into the ATF’s Fast and Furious operation. It covers their recent interviews with ATF officials in Mexico.
Acting ATF Attaché Carlos Canino gave his thoughts on the situation:
You don’t lose guns. You don’t walk guns. You don’t let guns get out of your sight. You have all these undercover techniques, all these safety measures in place so guns do not get out of your custody or control. I mean, I mean, you could follow, you could do a surveillance for 1,000 miles . . . either use planes, trackers, you use everything under the sun, but at the end of the day, those guns do not leave your control. At some point those guns do not get into the streets.
Law enforcement is known to let drugs and other contraband “walk” from time to time if a minor infraction might lead them upstream to the bigger fish. Continued...
I had the day off, so I decided to pore over Anders Breivik’s self-serving manifesto. It’s obvious that he took some inspiration from Timothy McVeigh in the execution of his plans. As others have noted, he cribs some of his personal mythology from the Unabomber manifesto in justification of his actions.
Madmen like Breivik and Kaczynski write this stuff to preserve their place in history, and we read it in a vain attempt to find some reason, some explanation, for their atrocities. Of course, there isn’t any: some people are simply evil. To give attention to their ramblings is to play into their hands. Yet here I am laboring through all 1480 interminable pages.
After all the conspiracy theories, historical revisionism (which he claims to abhor), and claims to be a knight in a shadow order of renewed Templars, we come to Breivik’s planning notes. This is where it becomes clear that he’s not only deluded, but quite incompetent as well. Continued...
Before shooting 84 people in Utøya, Anders Breivik used ammoninum nitrate to blow up government buildings. Sound familiar?
Breivik was a member of the right-wing Fremskrittpartiet (“Progress Party”), a group taking a hard-line stance against the lenient immigration policies traditionally held by Scandanavian governments. This is one of their promotional posters:
The caption translates as, “the perpetrator was of foreign origins!” Breivik himself appears to have been less than fond of Muslim immigrants.
So, what happens now? Likely the same thing that happened here in 1995. The Norwegians will see increasing calls for stricter gun control laws and regulation on vehement discource. Those holding conservative or libertarian views will be painted with Breivik’s broad brush.
Extremism isn’t exclusive to nation or a culture. This isn’t just an American phenomenon. We all need to be aware of the darkness that lies at the outer margins of any political ideology.
I came home to two different emails tonight. The news is good, and unintentionally amusing. Both messages regard Monday’s Department of Justice announcement that gun dealers in the southwest would be required to report multiple sales of rifles to the ATF. The first is from the NRA-ILA:
House Committee Passes Amendment to Defund Illegal Obama Firearm Sales Reporting Requirement
Today, during consideration of the FY 2012 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill, pro-gun U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.) offered an amendment to prohibit the use of funds for a new and unauthorized multiple sales reporting plan proposed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The Amendment was passed by a vote of 25-16.
The Rehberg Amendment, which was strongly supported by NRA, will defund the Justice Department’s controversial and illegal move requiring federally licensed firearms retailers in states bordering Mexico to report multiple sales of semi-automatic rifles.
That’s good news, and my hat’s off to Denny Rehberg. Continued...
Arizona Senator Lori Klein justified pointing a loaded gun at a reporter by claiming, “I just didn’t have my hand on the trigger.” I wasn’t aware that made it acceptable. I’ll have to run it past the folks I shoot with and see how they react.
Evidently, Ms. Klein bought the Ruger LCP to supplement her “.40 caliber revolver.” Though she mentions the usual politician backstory of childhood hunting trips with dad, she does not mention any contemporary training, nor does she seem to understand the gravity of carrying a pistol.
She is fond of the Ruger because it’s “so cute.” I’m sure cleaning up blood and settling lawsuits diminishes the “cute” factor by quite a bit. She needs to leave her guns at home until such a time as she can get some sort of training. Until then, she’s a dangerous liability to everyone around her.
~ “God that thing is ugly,” Huyler said when they first saw it, riding across from the wreck of the Winter Storm in the tiny shuttle with the ship’s black-skinned, gray-suited avatar. “And these people are supposed to be decadent aesthetes?”
~ “There is a theory that they are ashamed of their weaponry. As long as it looks inelegant, rough and disproportionate they can pretend that it is not really theirs, or not really a part of their civilization, or only temporarily so, because everything else they make is so subtly refined.”
Look to Windward is (chronologically) the second novel of Iain M. Banks’ Culture series. In his mythology, the Culture is a post-scarcity society, facilitated by artificial intelligences and near-perfect manufacturing technologies. The human lifespan averages four centuries, and the people want for nothing. The political structure is a benign anarchy, with policy decisions made largely through direct (and instantaneous) democracy. Continued...
The Justice Department announced today that gun shops in Arizona, Texas, California, and New Mexico will have to report all sales in which multiple “high powered” rifles are involved.
There are two problems with this. The first is that the horses have already run free. Lone Wolf Trading Company and the other dealers implicated in the Fast & Furious controversy were cooperating with the BATFE. The sales were done under the orders and direct supervision of the Bureau, the dealers were reporting them in real time, and those guns still got across the border into Mexico.
So, Justice wants to generate (by their estimates) an extra 18,000 reports per year, most of which will do nothing more than tie up payroll and manpower the ATF doesn’t have, and which will end up sitting in boxes and gathering dust in the Martinsburg office. How is an insignificant stopgap like this supposed to staunch the bleeding? Continued...
OK, folks. 9mm Parabellum isn’t any more accurate than 9mm Luger. It’s not more reliable. It does not have more “stopping power.” They are the exact same thing.
The 9mm Parabellum was designed and named by Georg Luger. Despite the fact that he never called the loading 9mm Luger, some American manufacturers referred to it as such because the pistol bearing his name became quite popular after the first World War. It made marketing easier.
Luger was not a Nazi. He died well before there was such a thing. Nor did General Patton “change the name” from Luger to Parabellum to make it sound “more American.”
I mean, where do people get this stuff?
Does the right to keep and bear arms include the right to fire them? According to today’s 7th Circuit opinion [pdf], it does.
In order to keep a functional firearm in the home, Chicago residents must acquire a permit. Part of getting the permit involves proving proficiency through a live-fire course at a range. However, the city has an ordinance that prohibits anyone from opening a range in which the average person can do so. Read that again. Yep.
The 2nd Amendment Foundation sought an injunction against enforcement of the ordinance last year, but Judge Kendall upheld its constitutionality in District Court. The case moved to the 7th Circuit in April, and they were not pleased with the city.
Stung by the result of McDonald v. City of Chicago, the City quickly enacted an ordinance that was too clever by half. Recognizing that a complete gun ban would no longer survive Supreme Court review, the City required all gun owners to obtain training that included one hour of liveâ€range instruction, and then banned all live ranges within City limits.
Continued...