Category: Second Amendment rights

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crime and punishment Second Amendment rights U.S. Constitution

Resisting Registration

Caldara, gun rights, 2nd Amendment, Colorado

Jon Caldara won’t register his guns. He also won’t remain silent about his refusal.

He has lots of company in Boulder, Colorado, with respect to the former, if not the latter, form of resistance — his unwillingness to compromise his right to bear arms.

The town recently began requiring owners of “assault weapons” to either ditch them or register them with the Boulder police. Owners choosing registration must submit to background checks “to ensure that the weapon holder is legally able to be in possession of the firearm.” If you pass, you get certificates acknowledging rightful ownership.

But if you lose the certificates, apparently you lose your ownership rights.

The city defines an “assault weapon” as a “semi-automatic center-fire rifle” or a “semi-automatic center-fire pistol” with various characteristics. In short, the target is “ugly guns,” as foes of gun control sometimes put it. (“Non-assault” weapon: papier-mâché weapon.)

Many Boulder citizens are quietly refusing to comply with the mandates. They “see this as a registry,” according to Lesley Hollywood, executive director of Rally for Our Rights.

Caldara, head of the Independence Institute, is speaking out despite the risk. Why? Because “somebody has to. . . . In this town that spouts tolerance for alternative lifestyles . . . when it comes to a lifestyle they don’t like, there is no tolerance . . . Tolerance means tolerating things you dislike, that you find scary.”

This idea goes even deeper than tolerance, though. It’s about “freedom” and “rights.” 

There is nothing frightening about Mr. Caldara’s unregistered guns, but much to fear from Boulder officials assaulting his rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Caldara, gun rights, 2nd Amendment, Colorado
Categories
general freedom ideological culture Popular Second Amendment rights too much government

Il Duce Cuomo

Cuomo, Mayor, New York

A federal judge has ruled that the National Rifle Association has a plausible case against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo; the NRA’s lawsuit, alleging that the organization’s rights have been violated by the governor, is going ahead.

As related by Jacob Sullum in two pieces over at Reason, Cuomo sure looks guilty. 

Indeed, the governor’s own words convict him: “If the @NRA goes bankrupt because of the State of New York, they’ll be in my thoughts and prayers. I’ll see you in court.” 

Precisely.

What has Cuomo done? “I am directing the Department of Financial Services,” he commanded, “to urge insurers and bankers statewide to determine whether any relationship they may have with the NRA or similar organizations sends the wrong message to their clients and their communities.”

Is this just regulatory business as usual, as defenders of Cuomo harrumph? Or is it a real violation of rights?

It can be both. 

This is more than “bully pulpit” power, it is actual, gun-under-the-table power — the kind you give to regulators when you set up regulatory bodies rather than establish general principles under a rule of law.

It is a problem on every level of our society, especially the federal government. But states like New York are obviously not immune.

And it reminds me of Mussolini’s method, of The Leader taking control and bullying businesses and groups to do his bidding. (For the “public safety” and to “end violence” — of course.) The essence of fascism.

It’s good to see Il Duce Cuomo get some legal pushback. 

In this Land of the Allegedly Free.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
education and schooling government transparency national politics & policies Popular Second Amendment rights

A Faulty Gun Report

While statistics are generally unreliable, data about gun crimes often qualify as “anti-data.”

“This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, ‘nearly 240 schools . . . reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting,’” National Public Radio told us yesterday. Like previous stats we’ve seen cited on social media, that seems unbelievably high. 

And yes, it is — “far higher than most other estimates,” reporter Anya Kamenetz noted. “NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened.”

Were they fibbing? Well, never underestimate the power of incompetence. 

Even that’s harsh: remember that reporting requirements are a burden. And filing bureaucratically-designed forms with the Education Department may be no easier than filing tax returns with the IRS. One of the biggest errors in one school district report resulted from a simple data entry error.

That is not a sophisticated statistical problem, but a simple typo.

Not that there aren’t some difficulties of a not-so-easy-to-understand nature in the story. For one, the degree to which the report was off is said to lie within “the margin of error.”

So, how big was the error, exactly? What’s the number? Well, of the 240 supposed “shootings,” NPR claimed to be “able to confirm just 11 reported incidents.”

Yet the Education Department bureaucrats will only affix an erratum note to their ridiculous report. 

Nor will it be withdrawn or replaced, as it should be.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
Common Sense First Amendment rights national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Free Designs

3d printing, gun, gun rights, Second Amendment, First Amendment, gun control

The relationship between the First and Second Amendments is closer than commonly believed.

This is especially clear in the 3D gun printing story, the subject of yesterday’s Common Sense, “Progressive Designs.” As I finished the copy, a news story broke: U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik “muzzled Defense Distributed with a court order,” as Declan McCullagh puts it. 

And then, as McCullagh goes on, a mirror site appeared. Though Cody Wilson, the man behind Defense Distributed, immediately took his plans offline, “the Calguns Foundation, the Firearms Policy Coalition, and other civil rights groups” published plans for “AR-15, AR-10, Ruger 10-22, Beretta 92FS, and other firearms” on their sites.

This made my footnote especially relevant, for it was there that I noted that “plans like this have been available on the not-exactly-easy-to-access Dark Web for some time.” And now Cody Wilson’s precise “freely downloadable computer-aided design (CAD) files,” though “dark” on his site, are bright elsewhere.

McCullagh admits that though it is certainly “possible that Defense Distributed may lose this legal skirmish and be prevented from returning its instructions to the DEFCAD site,” since such plans are now everywhere, and not easily stoppable, constitutionally, the “Second Amendment, it turns out, is protected by the First.”

Which is, of course, natural enough — for the Second Amendment’s protections of self-defense has held power-lusting politicians at bay, keeping Americans freer than citizens anywhere else. What other country has better free speech protections?

All freedoms help each other, reinforce each other.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Progressive Designs

Progressive, magazine, H-Bomb, plans, free speech, First Amendment

In February 1979, Professor George Rathjens called the editors of The Progressive, urging them not to publish a story in the works, which included a journalistic best guess as to the design of a hydrogen bomb. The Progressive refused to squelch the story, and the professor of poli-sci (not nuclear physics) contacted the Department of Energy, which sued to suppress the article.

The Progressive defended itself on free speech grounds.

Fast forward to today, with progressives screaming to squelch the freedom of speech and press of Defense Distributed, an Austin, Texas, organization, which expressed its intention to publish easily downloadable plans* to print plastic guns using 3D printing technology.

This hit the news first as the result of a court decision early in the month,** but now Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) blames the Trump administration, not the court. “Donald Trump will be totally responsible for every downloadable, plastic AR-15 (gun) that will be roaming the streets of our country.”

Why blame the administration? Because the administration settled its lawsuit holding up the publication.

Amusingly, back in 1979, the government dropped its suit against The Progressive.

Progressives were definitely not for nuclear bombs 40 years ago, and The Progressive had its own agenda in publishing a version of the article that saw print in the magazine’s November 1979 issue. Now progressives express more alarm about private individuals having weapons, not about the government’s weaponry. 

But the biggest change? It has something to do with free speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* I say “easily downloadable” because plans like this have been available on the not-exactly-easy-to-access Dark Web for some time.

** The decision is clear: “Arguments for tighter restrictions on firearms are, in this case, directly opposed to arguments for the unfettered exchange of information on the internet.”

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Categories
Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom judiciary local leaders moral hazard nannyism Second Amendment rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Ought Implies Cantifornia

microstamping, bullet, California, law, guns, gun control

“Strip away the absurdity,” writes Scott Shackford at Reason, “and it’s essentially a very technical ruling.”

Shackford is explaining a bizarre recent judgment of the California Supreme Court.

Politicians in Sacramento had, years ago, passed a gun control measure requiring gun manufacturers to “implement microstamping technology that would imprint identifying information on bullets as they were shot from semi-automatic weapons.” In 2014, Smith & Wesson announced that it would pull some guns from the California market rather than comply. Why? The technology just wasn’t ready yet.*

Since California’s Civil Code contains a section reiterating an old commonsense principle to the effect that the “law never requires impossibilities,” the National Shooting Sports Foundation sued to block the law.

But the group just lost.

The Court did say it could protect citizens from punishment, but it refused to nullify the legislation on constitutional grounds.

Unanimously.

Why do this? Apparently to protect California politicians in their ongoing social engineering schemes.

The dollar costs of trying to comply with impossible demands are huge, of course. But the biggest costs may be more subtle.

In moral philosophy, it is a truism to say that “ought implies can.” In natural law as understood long ago, an impossible law was thought not a law at all, justifiably ignored by anyone and everyone.

In a just state, flouting of maddening regulations like California’s would lead not merely to the defense of the absurdly put-upon citizen — as this court ruling still allows — but also to the nixing of the “impossible” law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Shackford notes that “a cynic might theorize that this is the law’s actual intent.” I wouldn’t limit that suspicion to folks given to cynicism. Pragmatists and political scientists and almost anyone else would be placing bets on that, too.

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