Tag: gun

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crime and punishment defense & war Second Amendment rights

Brace Yourself & Your Gun

gun, gun brace, 2nd Amendment, gun rights, gun control

Many foes of Second Amendment rights want to outlaw guns for everybody except military, police, Secret Service, sundry federal agencies, and bodyguards for left-​leaning celebrities.

Since this isn’t politically feasible given at least intermittent legislative and judicial support for the right to bear arms, anti-​gunners often pursue various piecemeal bans. The hope is that these will add up to an overall prohibition. Or at least provide an excuse to go after any particular gun owner for neglecting to comply with some subsidiary prohibition.

The anti-​gun forces seemed to have been having some success with an outlawing of “stabilizing braces” on short-​barreled rifles. A voluminous ATF rule sought to partially or wholly ban these braces — basically an added pistol grip —  even though the same agency had earlier said such braces were okay. 

And why wouldn’t it be okay to have a pistol brace if it’s okay to have a thing that shoots bullets?

Maybe the idea is that if you’re in a situation where you have to fight for your life using a gun, and a brace would help, trying to survive is okay, sure, but you shouldn’t have too much of a chance to survive. A stabilizing brace might give you an unfair edge? I’m guessing.

In mid-​June, the Northern District of Texas tossed this ATF gun-​brace-​ban rule. Which, according to Judge Reed O’Connor’s decision in the case, Mock v. Garland, is “arbitrary and capricious.” As Shooting News Weekly puts it, “Oof.”

Unlike the similar looking (at least to me) “bump stock,” braces do not change the mechanism of firing. And bump stocks were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court about the same time. While stabilizing braces seem here to stay, a decision by the Supreme Court may still be required.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment insider corruption international affairs

Hunter’s Pseudo-​Crime

Hunter Biden has been found guilty of buying a gun while being a crack addict.

Yes, that’s a federal crime.

The jury “heard testimony from Hunter Biden’s ex-​wife and former girlfriends,” UK’s Mirror explained yesterday, “and were shown photos of him with drug paraphernalia and other salacious evidence to make the case that he had lied when he checked ‘no’ on the form at a gun shop asking whether he was ‘an unlawful user of, or addicted to’ drugs.”

While the U.S. President’s son is guilty as charged, the prosecution was almost as bogus as Trump’s.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R‑Ky.) put it best, on X: “Hunter might deserve to be in jail for something, but purchasing a gun is not it. There are millions of marijuana users who own guns in this country, and none of them should be in jail for purchasing or possessing a firearm against current laws.”

Elon Musk, who owns X (ex-​Twitter), concurred: “I agree. He (and others) should be in jail for impugning the integrity of the United States by taking bribes for political favors, but not for this pseudo-crime.”

But pseudo-​crimes are what the Department of Justice, and your local lawfare Democratic prosecutors, specialize in. 

“They picked the gun charge because it was the only one not attached to Joe Biden,” explained Natalie F. Danelishen. “They also convicted Hunter Biden because they needed a fall guy so that Trump’s 34 felonies look less like political prosecution. Now ‘Justice’ seems fair. It’s a chess game.”

Exactly. No matter what the president says, or Merrick Garland says, or the talking heads on cable news say, it’s a scam.

Set Hunter free — and prosecute him, his uncle and his father for their evident corruption.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The CDC on Self-Defense

CDC, gun control

This April, a Nashville homeowner shot an intruder intent on burglary.

Also this month, a St. Louis apartment dweller shot an intruder who threatened to kill his family.

A Newport Beach homeowner recently shot an intruder as well.

Aside from the obvious, what do such incidents, often in newspapers, have in common? The government is hiding research about them.

In December 2022, Fox News reported that to appease gun control activists, the Centers for Disease Control had deleted reference to a study on how often guns are used in self-​defense from its published research.

The CDC-​commissioned study by Gary Kleck showed that “instances of defensive gun use occur between 60,000 and 2.5 million times” annually. But in 2021, after being lobbied by the gun control activists, the CDC pretended that Kleck’s study didn’t exist.

Kleck said: “CDC is just aligning itself with the gun-​control advocacy groups.… ‘We are their tool, and we will do their bidding.’ And that’s not what a government agency should do.”

CDC’s conduct was not new. In 2018, Capital Research had asked why the agency was “Hiding Its Defensive Gun Use Statistics.”

For decades, we’ve had abundant data on how gun owners defend themselves from violent bad guys. CDC, which investigates something or other related to this subject, won’t share all that it knows.

We can’t legally require the media to stop hiding critical information. But we should be able to require our government to stop doing so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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A Gun with His Name On It

Trump, Glock, self defense, 2nd Amendment

An “X” post by a Trump spokesperson implicated the former president in a crime.

What followed implicates the U.S. Government in something far worse.

But first, to clarify:

  1. By “X” I mean “Twitter.” Remember, Elon Musk changed the name of his social media company.
  2. By “Trump” I mean, of course, Donald John Trump, former president of the United States running the same office, a man surrounded by armed guards at all times.
  3. By “crime” I mean an infraction of federal law, not a willful abuse of someone’s rights at common law. 
  4. The crime in question is the act of receiving “any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce” by a person “under indictment … a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.” Trump’s been indicted quite a number of times, recently, and therefore isn’t legally allowed to buy a gun.

The initial tweet said Trump admired a Glock that had his name stamped on it. It was the “Donald Trump edition,” gold-​colored, retailing for under a thousand bucks. Trump’s on video saying he wants one of these handguns.

When X went all a‑twitter with the implications, spokesman Steven Cheung took down his post and the campaign issued a corrective: “President Trump did not purchase or take possession of the firearm. He simply indicated that he wanted one.” 

This is all explained by Jacob Sullum at Reason, who goes on to indicate that the law makes no real sense. The obvious absurdity of not allowing a well-​guarded presidential candidate to guard himself with gun of any kind, that’s one thing. Flouting the Second Amendment by prohibiting the innocent, i.e. not yet proven guilty, from bearing arms, looks far worse — a policy of rights suppression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Corrigendum notice: a correction was made late on the date of publication [Trump is not a “Jr.,” as originally stated].

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Tulsa Shooter Stopped Dead

handgun, gun, gun control,

Some killers are easier to stop than others. 

The coronavirus pandemic is proving very hard to stop.

But one good guy with a gun and presence of mind can stop a different kind of would-​be killer — an active shooter — instantly. This is what happened last week outside of a Tulsa marijuana dispensary.

Apparently angered by some earlier altercation with somebody, a woman started shooting at customers. By the time the Tulsa Police arrived, she was dead. A bystander with a concealed carry permit had returned fire, stopping her before she could hurt anyone. He was questioned and released by police, who reviewed video of the scene.

At BearingArms​.com, Cam Edwards decries the under-​reporting of the story. One local news station even “completely miss[ed] the fact that an armed citizen saved lives,” instead making it sound as if the guy just walked up to the woman at random and shot her.

“Journalistic malpractice,” Edwards calls it.

It’s easy to see why a story like this might get lost in the shuffle given everything else that’s going on now. But even in (relatively) normal times, many in the media tend to strenuously ignore — sometimes even willfully distort — the facts about how persons bearing arms have used deadly force to stop others wielding deadly force from killing innocent people.

What we always hear is true: guns are not independent agents. 

Persons wield weapons for good or ill. 

And it is decidedly good when an armed civilian draws and fires a weapon to stop an evil shooter from doing criminal harm.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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handgun, gun, gun control,

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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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