An Interesting Trend

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”

― Ian Fleming

On March 26, 2019, bump-fire stocks magically became machineguns, without any enabling legislation. And so sorry; due to the Firearm Owners “Protection” act of 1986, you can’t register a machinegun manufactured after May of ’86.

On December 16, 2019, Pennsylvania Asshole General Josh Shapiro issued a legal opinion redefining 80% frame/receiver kits (and anything else that you can turn into a firearm with $65,000 and 13 hours of work… that is, everything) to be firearms, without bothering with legislation. PA State Police (PSP) Commissioner Colonel Robert Evanchick immediately declared background checks would have to be conducted on 80% frame/receiver sales (naturally) but they don’t have a process for that yet. So no one can sell them in PA, until they get around to dreaming up a process.

On December 19, 2019, the ATF invented a new class of firearms without any basis in statutory law: the non-NFA GCA Short-Barreled Shotgun. Now no one can sell the Franklin Amory Reformation… until the ATF eventually gets around to creating the necessary forms.

For those who might have — somehow — retained some doubts about the matter, enemy action is confirmed. Expect to see a lot more of these bureaucratic shadow-bans.

Thanks, Vichy NRA.

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This is a lawyer?

Jay Honohan, whom the Iowa City Press-Citizen alleges is a local attorney, wants him some gun control. Sadly, he’s not very well informed on the subject.

“There is a case holding the government can regulate. It is US v. Miller (1939). In which a unanimous court held against a felon owning a sawed off shotgun. Judge Scalia even cited that case as support for the regulations he mentioned.”

If Honohan is really a lawyer, I fear for his clients’ welfare. Just on MILLER, he is flat wrong on three points.

Swalwell’s Cunning Plan

I’ve been going through presidential delusionist Eric “Duke Nukem” Swalwell’s A National Framework to End Gun Violence. This is the plan he presented yesterday to his almost-dozens of confused supporters.

It’s a rambling mess, intermixing gun control with various sorts of social engineering. I’m focusing on the anti-2A stuff here; the social engineering may call for another column, but only after a good, stiff drink.

The gun control take-away is:

• Duke Nukem has confirmed — again — that he really is dumber than a box of rocks.
• He knows virtually nothing about firearms or law.
• This is the Green Raw Deal of victim disarmament.

Feel free to stop reading now. But if you are interested in Dukie’s brilliant plan, here goes.

But that never happens*

Damn.

Four dead, 1 hurt in Darwin mass shooting
Four men are dead, a woman has been wounded and the alleged gunman responsible is in hospital after a bloody rampage in five different locations in Darwin.

I’m sure the victim disarmers insisting that we emulate Australia because they haven’t had a mass shooting since… (which was not true even before this) will be happy to explain why this doesn’t count either.

Lessee, known criminal, on parole, under electronic monitoring somehow gets a gun anyway.

And it’s a pump-action shotgun. That’s a Category C or D weapon; highly restricted. Licensing — based on specific and limited needs, if allowed at all — permission slips to transfer, usually can’t be transported off your property.

Another gun control success story.

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* Barrycade Obummer.

She learned nothing in that class

Irony.

‘I have to continue’: A Parkland survivor speaks about her activism
It’s been four months since a gunman fired into Aalayah Eastmond’s Holocaust history class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, part of a rampage that left 17 people dead.

Eastmond and other survivors have since become frontline voices against gun violence as they continue to crisscross the country urging change.

She should have studied this.

March for Our Lies*: Such Dedication

The victim disarming gun controllers of March for Our Lives planned a die-in gun control protest in Atlanta today.

Atlanta ‘die-in’ gun-law protest cancelled due to weather
The group announced on various social media pages that the event had been cancelled because of “safety concerns arising from the weather forecast.” The group said it planned to reschedule the rally and protest.

That seemed odd. I took a look at weather radar: No precipitation.

Current conditions: 73 degrees and cloudy.

Forecast: 70% chance of scattered thunderstorms around 3PM, well after their demonstration of resolve panty-twisting.

In short, June in Georgia. It’s about the same here right now, except we’re up to 80 degrees.

I can imagine the scene in the MFOL coordinators’ basement.

“Hey, guys; there’s a chance of thunderstorms later today.”

“Thunderstorms?”

“Yeah, rain, lightning, thunder..”

“Thunder?”

“Sure, you know… boom.”

“Boom? OMG! Shots fired! Lockdown! Safe space! Teddy bears and emotional support puppies!”

“Cancel the die-in! The NRA is coming!”

“Run away! Run away!“

I imagine they’re all cowering in closets.

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* Not a typo.

What’s this “we” shit, Hogg?

Such a hero.

David Hogg Brings Gun Control Message To Mayors Conference In Boston
“We can’t keep hosing the blood down our streets, repairing the shattered windows and bullet-riddled doors and burying our young because when we bury our young we bury our future,” Hogg said.

Seriously? You have cleaned and sanitized a blood spill? You’ve patched bullet holes?

C’mon; have you ever even fixed a smashed window?

Let’s take it a little farther. You hid in a closet, clutching your smart phone during a shooting in a building. But did you ever stare down the barrel of a full-auto battle rifle; not some varmit round like .223/5.56, but full-power 7.62 NATO.

I’ve done all of those. Yet, somehow, I still respect individual rights. I oppose your victim disarmament schemes.

Partly because I have done all those, and think people should be able to defend themselves.

You prefer a closet.

And unarmed victims for the predators your laws don’t dissuade. It must be the old saw: You don’t have to outrun the lions, just your helpless friends.

I prefer to stop the lions.

While you hide in a closet.

Deja Vu

Where have I seen this before?

NYT: Please, Please Buy This Gun Company
What if the big banks that have provided financing to Remington during its bankruptcy were to back — and partner with — one or more of the big private equity firms in an effort to transform the company into the most advanced and responsible gun manufacturer in the country?
[…]
And they would not be out to kill the business; quite the opposite: They could create a profitable model for the rest of the industry using technology and sound sales policies to reinvent the modern-gun manufacturer.

Hey, it isn’t as if Dick’s is losing business — and business partners — as a result of going all social justice, right? Um, wait…

Smith & Wesson. Ring any bells, Sorkin?

So what does this posterboy for historical ignorance suggest?

A reimagined Remington with a new management and mandate could develop smart-gun technology. It could back fingerprint technology meant to prevent anyone who is not the gun’s owner from shooting it, a measure that could greatly reduce suicides and the potential for guns to be stolen.

Except no one has ever developed a really workable “smart” gun system. There’s a market for one that really does work (and doesn’t make the firearm unaffordable).

Armatix. Any dings yet, bub?

It could add an identity stamp to ammunition fired from any of its guns.

Again, no one has managed to do that reliably outside of a lab. If they could, it would open up the still-large California market. I suspect manufacturers would like to peddle their wares there. But… It. Doesn’t. Work.

It could also establish and standardize responsible sales policies for retailers to sell its firearms.

Those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Bankruptcy. Sold for pennies on the dollar. It took S&W years to recover, and it’s still struggling.

Make no mistake: There is absolutely a market for a gun company focused on safety technology. A poll conducted by Johns Hopkins University researchers and published online by the American Journal of Public Health showed 59 percent of Americans were willing to buy a smart gun.

Will someone step up to make it happen?

Let me explain something that a business reporter clearly has trouble comprehending.

• Companies that base their business model on the assumption that their products and customers are evil fail. Customers prefer companies that provide what they want at a reasonable price. They don’t want moralization, to be called evil for things someone else did. (Well, except church-goers, I suppose.)
• Engineering is hard: An electronic system that can distinguish and allow specific firearms users has to survive an environment where temperatures range from sub-zero Farenheit to well into the hundreds, corrosive sweat, rain, grit, solvents, lubricants, not to mention transitory g-forces into the thousands of g’s. The system has to fit into the gun without making it unwieldy. It has to be affordable.
• Engineering is hard. A microstamping element has to be made of a material rigid enough to not deform under impact, yet sufficiently resilient not to shatter under the same impact. Ordinary shop stamping tools wear out. Microstamp dies are far more delicate. Which also means you can remove the stamp with a nail file, rendering it useless.
• Engineering is also expensive. Firing pins wear out. Microstamping firing pins (a common gun control dream) will also wear out, and need to be replaced; either with a new registered pin (and gun owners mostly hate registration), or a custom-manufactured pin with the same number: expensive.

Just admit it, Sorkin. You don’t want a social justice driven Remington. You want to drive the company out of business.

A message for Fred Guttenberg

Dear Mr. Guttenberg,

Yes, your daughter was murdered. That’s very sad, and it should never have happened.

But that does not justify you advocating for the large-scale violation of the human/civil rights of tens of millions of people who didn’t do it.

universal background checks, laws that will allow police to confiscate guns from people deemed dangerous, banning ‘high-capacity’ magazines and raising the age to purchase long guns from 18 to 21.

The bucket o’ chum who killed your daughter passed a background check. The courts and law enforcement failed to take his guns (as they could have done under the laws at the time). Law enforcement failed to arrest him for multiple reports of assault, vandalism, and felonious threatening. The FBI failed to investigate multiple — credible — reports that shooter was planning a school shooting. Reports have it that chumboy used low-capacity 10-round magazines, not “high-capacity” standard magazines. Age restrictions don’t stop criminals who buy illegal guns in blackmarket deals (also bypassing background checks) to shoot up schools.

Mr. Guttenberg, if you wish to play the victim card, lay it on the Coward County Sheriff’s Office — which pretty much failed to perform any part of their jobs — and the FBI (ditto), not millions of innocents.

And you might ask why DCF claims the shooter was a “vulnerable adult due to mental illness,” which would mean that he had been adjudicated mentally deficient, meaning that he was a prohibited person. If that’s the case, he should have been reported to NICS, and not allowed to purchase a gun. When authorities became aware that he possessed a firearm, he should have been arrested on felony prohibited-person-in-possession charges.

Your daughter wasn’t murdered because of a lack of laws infringing the rights of those who didn’t do it. She died because courts, law enforcement, the school, and DCF failed to enforce existing laws.

At this point in a gun control discussion, I tend to wonder what makes you think criminals will obey new laws any more than they did previous law. This time…

What makes you think the authorities will enforce new laws any better than currently ignored laws.

That’s almost funny

So here’s this… freaking moron calling for an assortment of gun control laws:

Letter: Congress: Pass gun legislation or be voted out
Another school was on lock down on the 19th anniversary of the shooting in Colorado. Where are the bills to rein in this terror of our young people? Where is the bill to eliminate the bump stock that makes a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic weapon? Where is the bill to require an individual to be age 21 to purchase a weapon? Where is the bill to have background checks done? Where is the bill to stop the sale of large capacity magazines? This is what is needed.

The shooter referenced was a prohibited person who unlawfully purchased a weapon, bypassing age restrictions and background checks.

The weapon was a shotgun. Not semiautomatic. No high capacity magazine. In fact, from vague descriptions, it sounds like a double-barrelled shotgun. No magazine.

No bump-fire stock, you ditz.

The shotgun was sawed-off. Illegally. More existing laws broken.

He unlawfully concealed it. He unlawfully carried it into a school.

Rule Fucking 1.