« March 2010 | Main | May 2010 »
April 2010
Further thoughts on effects of pardons
Snowflakes in Hell has some thoughts on the effect of a conviction and then pardon in State A, on the person's gun rights if he moves to State B.
I had a related issue once posed in relation to, I believe, Florida. A restoration of all civil rights, including gun rights, means a convicted person is no longer barred from gun ownership. Florida allowed such a restoration but the statute (perhaps unintentionally) allowed it only for residents. So what happens if a person is convicted and moves to another State and then asks for restoration? I think there's a problem with Equal Protection and also with the Article IV prohibition on a State denying nonresidents the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.
Bus passengers fight back in Belize
Story here, via Consul at Arms.
Two robbers hijack a moving bus in Belize; one orders the bus driver to slow and to open the door. The driver does so, whereupon a ballsy passenger gives the hijacker a kick that send him out the door. The other tries to shoot, his gun jams, and the passengers give him a fatal overdose of Whupass.
Bus driver and owner: "The only decision or what I would say if they could grant me licenses for all my drivers to keep a gun on the bus for safety. That is the only way to be on the safe side.”
Permalink · non-US · Comments (1)
Suit over gun ownership by pardoned felons
Story here. I'd guess that the legislature forbade ownership by anyone convicted of a felony, and forgot to insert an exception for ones who are pardoned. If that's the case, there may be an interesting separation of powers question. If the State constitution gives the governor the power to pardon, can the legislature interfere with the normal effects of that?
Hat tip to Sixgun Sarah...
Permalink · prohibitted persons · Comments (1)
Those were the days!
From The American Rifleman, April 1928:
"'U.S. Rifle, cal. 30, model 1898 (Krag) ......$1.50.' So reads the all too brief description of one of the finest, truest, and most companionable rifles ever produced, in the rifleman's treasure-house, the D.C.M. price list.....
For an arm intended largely for competitive target work, the usual choice will probably be a National Match Springfield or a D.C.M. Sporter, costing $40.00 and $46.00, respectively."
Permalink · shooting · Comments (2)
Can we run this guy for President?
Texas governor Rick Perry, out jogging without a security detail but with a .380, pops a coyote who was giving his daughter's dog some hungry looks. His spokesman explains there is no report: "People shoot coyotes all the time, snakes all the time," Mange said. "We don't write reports."
Permalink · Politics · Comments (4)
Mayor Daley talks of suing in the World Court
Story here. I suppose narcissism has difficulty seeing limits....
Hat tip to Sixgun Sarah....
Thoughts on picking a non-judge for the Supreme Court
An interesting article in the National Law Journal.
I'd agree that the tend of the last few decades -- select only Federal Court of Appeal judges, on the theory that they have experience and a track record -- is one that treats judging as something separate from knowing the law. I compared the various Justices who sat on the Warren Court -- the days when Frankfurter and Black and Harlan sparred on the real meaning of the 14th Amendment, etc., and also the early years of the Rehnquist Court. I got:
Earl Warren – attorney general and governor of California.
Felix Frankfurter – private practice, then a law prof, and economic advisor to FDR.
Hugo Black – went straight from the US Senate to the Supreme Court. Judicial experience consisted of sitting as a police court judge for a year.
William O. Douglas – Law prof, then a seat on the Security & Exchange Commission.
John M. Harlan – private practice, ass’t US Attorney, and one year on a circuit court.
Bill Rehnquist – private practice, Ass’t Attorney General.
Lewis Powell – private practice
Thurgood Marshall – private practice, chief counsel for NAACP, four years on a Circuit court, then Solicitor General.
Thomas Clark – private practice, then Attorney General.
Leader of Deacons for Defense passes on
Robert Hicks, one of the last surviving leaders of Deacons for Defense, has died at age 81.
"But his role in the civil rights movement went beyond armed defense in a corner of the Jim Crow South. He led daily protests month after month in Bogalusa — then a town of 23,000, of whom 9,000 were black — to demand rights guaranteed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And he filed suits that integrated schools and businesses, reformed hiring practices at the mill and put the local police under a federal judge’s control.
It was his leadership role with the Deacons that drew widest note, however. The Deacons, who grew to have chapters in more than two dozen Southern communities, veered sharply from the nonviolence preached by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They carried guns, with the mission to protect against white aggression, citing the Second Amendment.
And they used them. A Bogalusa Deacon pulled a pistol in broad daylight during a protest march in 1965 and put two bullets into a white man who had attacked him with his fists. The man survived. A month earlier, the first black deputy sheriff in the county had been assassinated by whites.
When James Farmer, national director of the human rights group the Congress of Racial Equality, joined protests in Bogalusa, one of the most virulent Klan redoubts, armed Deacons provided security."
Via Dave Kopel, at the Volokh Conspiracy.
Permalink · 14th Amendment · Comments (0)
Followup on Customs & ATF seizure of airsoft pellet guns
Story here. Customs seized a lot of airsoft rifles, apparently thinking they were machineguns, and then gave them to ATF. PajamasMedia filed a FOIA request for supporting documents ... and got a reply which is utterly incomprehensible.
Permalink · BATFE · Comments (3)
Giving up hope
On the Brady Campaign grading system, Arizona scores two points out of 100. That means we're beating Florida (six points) Texas (nine points), and many others. I checked out the details of their grading system, hoping that we could get down to zero, but it's going to be hard. We got two points for not having required universities to allow handgun carry on campus. I don't know if we're going to be able to override that in the near future. I suppose we could appeal to Brady to deduct five points since soon a person will be able to CCW without a permit, which would move our score to a negative three.
Permalink · antigun groups · Comments (9)
AR-15 popularity
NSSF notes their survey data indicating that 8.9 million Americans shot an AR-15 platform rifle last year. That'd be over a quarter of all shooters. This may be useful in light of Heller's reference to "dangerous and unusual weapons" being unprotected.
89 year old lady fires in self-defense
Story here. She had a .22, went for a headshot, missed, but the thug for some reason decided to depart. I guess he figured the odds were good for him against an 89 year old, but not so good for him against an 89 year old and a pistol.
Via Fear and Loading.
Permalink · Self defense · Comments (3)
Family histories
I was just remembering a matter involving my my late ex, Frances.
After I discovered that the name Hardy is an alias, taken by my outlaw judge great-grandfather, our son Mark found it very interesting, but Frances found it rather appalling. Mark wanted to write a paper for school on the subject, and she made him pick some other topic.
Her maiden name was Frances Avery, and she'd mentioned that her family descended from an Ephraim Avery, a minister who had made the move from Connecticut to the Ohio frontier after some scandal. By pure luck, I found the scandal. I called her from a pay phone outside a law library, and said I'd happened upon a book that devoted an entire chapter to her ancestor. She said that was great, and then I noted the title was Great Murder Trials of the 19th Century or something like that. I later joked with her that at least when my ancestors killed their man, they killed their man.
Update: Here's his headstone, courtesy of Findagrave.com.
Permalink · Personal · Comments (2)
Supremes rule in US v. Stevens
Opinion in pdf here. At issue was 18 U. S. C. §48, which outlaws the commercial creation, sale, or possession of videos or other depictions," in which “a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed,” if that conduct violates the law where “the creation, sale, or possession takes place.” As the 8 person majority noted, this would include hunting and humane killing (since the prohibition on "wounded or killed" is separate from the ones on maiming, etc.. It is also evident that this would apply even if the hunting were legal where filmed, since the ban kicks in if the filmed activity is illegal where possessed or viewed, so hunting is included then a video of it would be illegal to possess anywhere in which that form of hunting isn't allowed. NRA, SCI, and others had intervened to point this out.
There was an exemption for depictions with “serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical, or artistic value.” The dissenter (Justice Alito) maintained that hunting videos would be protected by it, but the majority notes (1) it requires "serious" value, leaving a person to guess how serious is serious and (2) the list doesn't include simple entertainment, and it's unclear that hunting would fit under religious, political, scientific, etc..
Permalink · General con law · Comments (2)
DC voting "rights" bill ended
Good riddance. Some legislators, while wanting to violate Article I, thought giving up violating the 2nd Amendment was too high a price.
Former president of Blackwater indicted on NFA charges
Story here.
Permalink · National Firearms Act · Comments (14)
DC voting "rights" bill
The WashPo is publishing the thoughts of six spokesmen, relating to the proposal to (a) give DC a seat in the House; (b) offset this Demo seat by giving Utah an extra, likely Republican, seat and (c) attach a rider rolling back most of DC's onerous gun restrictions.
What I find appalling in the commentaries is that only Bob Levy deals with the problem that (a) and (b) are clearly unconstitutional. Congress can't go around handing out seats in the House, or deciding that a constitutional violation that favors the Democratic Party is OK so long as the Republican Party is given an equal benefit by another constitutional violation. The core of constitutional government involves a lot more than equalizing benefit to the two major parties.
Article I §2: the House shall be chosen by "the people of the several States." DC is not a State. The electors of the House members must have the qualifications of electors "of the most numerous branch of the State legislature." DC has a city council, not a legislature, and not a bicameral one. Every representative must be "an inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen."
I've seen a response to the effect that Congress often defines DC as a State in the laws that it enacts. Sure, Congress can do anything by defining a word; a definition just enables brevity by making a word (for purposes of that one statute) mean several different things. For example, in the Gun Control Act, "State" is defined to include not only DC but Puerto Rico and all US possessions. That doesn't mean that the Virgin Islands and Guam each get two senators.
Permalink · General con law · Comments (13)
Safe at last!
Department of Defense has reacted to the Ft. Hood shootings by imposing regulations on private arms possession. Muslim fanatic Nidal Hasan would certainly have stopped in his tracks if he knew he would have to violate regulations in order to carry out a mass murder. Now we only need to promulgate regulations forbidden unlicensed possession of explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then never get around to printing up the licenses, to bring Al-Queda to its knees.
Colo. Ct of Appeals rules in favor of on-campus carry
News story here. It appears that the Court of Appeals ruled that the Statewide pre-emption statute covered universities, and requires that CCW permittees be allowed to carry.
Permalink · State legislation · Comments (4)
California legislator moves to ban open, unloaded, carry
Story here. CA allows carry if it's open and the firearm is unloaded, but some think that's just beyond tolerance. Brady Campaign says “They are pushing the gun culture onto the community " and a California police chief complains that officers have to check before knowing the gun is unloaded.
Brady Campaign's quest for relevance
After flip-flopping on health care, Michigan congressman Bart Stupak has decided not to run for re-election. Whereupon Brady Campaign gives him rather belated praise for having, ten years ago, cosponsored its failed proposal for background checks on private sales. And has to admit he didn't cosponsor their proposal since, but they hope he would have done so had he not stepped down.
Egad. Not so long ago, Brady was pushing background checks, "assault gun" bans, checks for private sales, and whatnot. Today they're hassling Starbucks (without result) and seeking publicity for praising a political has-been for something he did ten years ago. Which failed.
Does anyone sell relevance on Ebay?
Permalink · antigun groups · Comments (0)
Order re: defendant transfers rights to his firearms before conviction
Here's an interesting recent district court ruling regarding firearm confiscation.
A gunowner named Edward Brown faced the fact that he might be convicted of felony tax fraud. If he was convicted, at that instant he becomes a prohibited person and the firearms are subject to forfeiture. As a condition of bail he turned his guns in to Federal authorities, to await the outcome. He then signed a document saying that if he became unable to possess firearms, his guns were to be turned over to a Bernhard Bastian. He was convicted, and Bastian asked for the guns.
A motion was filed, and a federal magistrate ruled that the guns might be turned over. Later, the government moved to forfeit the guns as substitute property (I assume meaning as part of the bail, which Brown had violated by fleeing).
The federal District Judge ruled that the magistrate's order was binding, since the government had not appealed it. It also finds that the order was valid. The government cited cases saying that a convicted felon cannot transfer his guns after conviction because that would be exercising "constructive possession" of them -- controlling them even tho they are not in his hands. The District Court rejects this idea, and also notes that Brown had transferred ownership before he was convicted. It notes that applying that idea to a transfer of ownership while the owner could legally transfer would raise Fifth Amendment issues (taking of property without compensation). It cites cases saying that, even after conviction, a defendant should be able to transfer ownership of non-contraband guns.
Permalink · prohibitted persons · Comments (2)
Owners STILL seeking guns seized during Katrina
Story here.
We're from the government, and we're here to save you...
A report from the Justice Dept Inspector General, in pdf, on how well the department is working to prevent terrorism. Let's see...
1) ATFE and FBI are engaged in turf wars over explosives cases. They retain two separate labs for investigation, and race each other to crime scenes in the belief that the agency who gets there first becomes lead agency.
2) FBI has a backlog of untranslated terror-related audio files. They can even say how big it is, but it's somewhere between 4,700 and 47,000 hours of audio. That's not counting other untranslated files and documents. "Our audit concluded that not translating or reviewing counterterrorism and counterintelligence materials can increase the risk that the FBI will not detect information that may be important to its counterterrorism and counterintelligence efforts."
3) Justice has a National Gang Information Center. It has no operating budget, and receives about three requests a year from local law enforcement.
Permalink · BATFE · Comments (3)
Replacements for Justice Stevens
David Kopel gives his thoughts on likely replacements.
Permalink · Supreme Court caselaw · Comments (5)
Hutchens hopefully on way out as Orange County Sheriff
And Crime, Lies, and Videotape is celebrating.
AZ approves "Vermont style" concealed carry
Story here. It now goes to the governor, who will likely sign it. Egad, for most of my life AZ followed the rule of most western States -- carry openly without limit, but nobody except a peace officer can carry concealed, and there are no permits, either. Not that it really made any difference, since CCW without a permit was a misdemeanor punished with a modest fine and seizure of the gun, or the person could plead to a larger fine and get the gun back. A person bent upon committing a violent crime was unlikely to worry much about a misdemeanor and fine.
Permalink · State legislation · Comments (9)
Tourniquets and combat medicine
A Wall St. Journal article on advances in combat medicine notes that the tourniquet is making a comeback, with some troops carrying them strapped to their thigh for fast use.
The military ought to do more looking into BlackHawk's Integrated Tourniquet System uniforms. Tourniquets are actually built into the uniform, at shoulder, elbow, thigh and knee. Pull open a velcro pocket, and the strap and handle are right at hand.
Open carry in Nevada
Story here.
Hat tip to reader Mike Hoaglan...
Chicago's Superintendent of Police Bugs Out
Story here. Apparently he was giving a video interview on problems in a high crime area when gunshots were heard nearly, he said "I've gotta run," and vanished. Officers at the scene of the shooting say wherever he ran to, it wasn't their crime scene. A retired police sergeant has filed a complaint, accusing the Superintendent of cowardice.
Prohibited gun purchaser, 1939 version
From Arizona's 1939 Code:
Under that code, the two classes of persons forbidden firearms purchase (but not possession) were (1) juveniles under age 14, who could not be sold handguns, and (2) Indians, who could not be sold rifles or handguns. (At that, there was no penalty provided for the purchaser, so a juvenile or an Indian would managed to obtain a forbidden firearm could keep it).
Permalink · prohibitted persons · Comments (6)
Mixed news
Good news: the Taliban are lousy shots.
Bad news: the M4 has major reliability problems in dust. (The spokesman tries to spin it as 98% reliable -- meaning it only jammed one round out of fifty). [Mixed news: a year and a half after the test, the Army has announced it will consider replacements or improvements -- in late summer, maybe.
Permalink · shooting · Comments (16)
Even in AZ we have a few...
From an Arizona Republic Op-Ed:
"This week, I drove over 15 miles to eat at a healthy place that served soup and salad. I saw a customer bearing his gun, while holding hands with his 5-year-old son. I got sick to my stomach and left the restaurant."
And later:
"What are these people scared of?"
Hmm... let's see, two people, neither of whom confronts an immediate threat. One sits down to dinner, the other become physically nauseous due to terror. Who's afraid here?
Musket drill, circa 1791
According to this page, the American 1791 drill manual was almost a literal translation of the French manual of the same year. Count on governments to make a complicated process even more complicated. In place of taking aim, the manual instructs:
"Let the muzzle be below the level of the eye a little, and the right elbow kept lowered, without being pressed against the body; shut the left eye; look along the barrel with the right eye; sink forward the head towards the butt in order to level; and place the fore finger on the trigger.
83. Apply, with force, the first finger on the trigger, without lowering or turning the head more, and remain in that position.”
UPDATES:
1) I've seen the ORIGINAL of a late 17th century manual on musket reloading, in Library of Congress Rare Books collections. It had not a word in it, after the title page, everything was huge (maybe 12 x 18") images of what the next position looked like. I wonder for a while and then realized -- at that time, how many musketeers would be literate anyway? You showed them the picture and gave a verbal explanation. This original was amusing because on the back side of the pages were brown ink doodles of guys in 17th century clothing.... doodles by a person or persons dead for centuries.
2) The evolution of commands begins, if I recall correctly, in the 17th century, when the Dutch rediscover the Roman system from reading Josephus.... don't divide your army into three gigantic units, or "battles," divide them into smaller units, for flexibility. Then, because tactics became more complicated than push ahead and see who wins, they started with "short sentence" commands, eventually evolving to the modern drill form, where the first word or words clue what the command will be, and the second gives the signal to execute it. RIGHT ... FACE. STAND AT ... EASE. COLUMN OF FILES FROM THE RIGHT ... COLUMN RIGHT.
By the Civil War, things were getting complicated. If I remember, the skirmish line (groups of four sent ahead and free to take cover, etc.) had 27 bugle commands to follow, to advance, move in different directions, and rejoin their regiment in different ways. The system was intended to let units deploy into 2 or 4 man deep lines for fighting, without or without skirmishers, and then quickly reform into columns of 4 or so men to move down narrow roads, then repeat the process quickly (since your opponent was not going to watch passively while troops tried to form a firing line).
In honor of April 1....
A few great BBC pranks--
A 1957 special on harvesting the crop from spaghetti trees, and
A more recent special on flying penguins that migrate to South America in the winter.
Permalink · humor · Comments (1)
Shocking court decision in Ohio
It's unbelievable. Be sure to read the post to the very end.