The Obama Administration is h objecting to the re-importation of World War II-vintage rifles lent to South Korea in the fifties and sixties.

According to The Korea Times, the Obama administration has blocked efforts by the South Korean government to sell over a hundred thousand surplus M1 Garand and Carbine rifles into the United States market. These self-loading rifles were  introduced in 1926 [sic - it was 1936] and 1941…Along with AR-15 type rifles, the M1 rifles are the quintessential firearms of responsible citizenship, precisely the type of firearms which civic responsibility organizations such as the Appleseed Project teach people how to use.

The M1 Garand was the rifle that won World War II for the US.

M1 Garand (click to expand)

Big, beefy, weighing in at ten pounds when loaded with an eight-shot bloc clip of 30.06, it’s not exactly the kind of thing you take out to rob a liquor store.

The Carbine – which is also called “M1″, but is completely different?:

The Carbine

It’s a light little thing, issued to sergeants, officers vehicle crews and behind-the-lines guys who weren’t expected to do much shooting but needed something more intimidating than a pistol in case they did need to get out of a jam.  It round was a little less powerful than a .357 Magnum – but the longer barrel makes it a little more accurate.

They’re sixty years old.

According to a South Korean official, “The U.S. insisted that imports of the aging rifles could cause problems such as firearm accidents.

I”m going to suggest that the market for these rifles is the least accident-prone one anywhere.

It was also worried the weapons could be smuggled to terrorists, gangs or other people with bad intentions.”

I sat and chewed on that for a while.  Mexican drug gangs with access to all the modern AK47s and G3s  their bottomless coffers of money can buy – thirty and twenty round fully-automatic rifles – would trade up for bigger, heavier, less-concealable eight or fifteen round semi-automatic rifles?

President Obama was elected on the promise that he supported individual Second Amendment rights. His administration’s thwarting of the import of these American-made rifles is not consistent with that promise.

Writing over at Culpable Stew, Aaron Klemz read my piece earlier this week, and flew into a violent, petulant rage, throwing things and losing control of his bodily functions and making bystanders wonder if he had some serious medical condition.

(I figured I’d shut down the left’s “so and so had a cow…” “argument” once and for all).

Anyway, Klemz thinks he’s got me (and Gary Gross) on my “cop-killer bullet” story from earlier this week – the bill written by Ted Kennedy that would have given the Attorney General the power to determine which bullets were “cop-killer” bullets.   The bill got shredded, losing by about a 2:1 margin.

Klemz’ rationale?  The language protects us!

But here’s the thing, in both Gross’ piece and Berg’s attempt to pile on, they love to cite legislative language except for the section which mandates exactlyhow the Attorney General will determine which ammunition is armor piercing (that would be section 926(d)):

Enh. I saw it. It didn’t change anything.  But here it is, with emphasis added:

(b) DETERMINATION OF THE CAPABILITY OF PROJECTILES TO PENETRATE BODY ARMOR–Section 926 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:“(d)(1) Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this subsection, the Attorney General shall promulgate standards for the uniform testing of projectiles against Body Armor Exemplar.

“(2) The standards promulgated under paragraph (1) shall take into account, among other factors, variations in performance that are related to the length of the barrel of the handgun or center-fire rifle from which the projectile is fired and the amount and kind of powder used to propel the projectile.

“(3) As used in paragraph (1), the term `Body Armor Exemplar’ means body armor that the Attorney General determines meets minimum standards for the protection of law enforcement officers.”

Back to Klemz:

Oh, you mean they’ll actually have to do objective tests? And that these standards, like all regulatory determinations, will be subject to oversight from the courts? And you mean that this determination is made in comparison to “standard ammunition?” Oh, and you mean that not only does the ammo have to be actually armor piercing according to objective tests, it has to be also “designed and marketed as having armor piercing capability?” That’s some “stroke of a pen.”

And this amendment failed nearly 2 to 1?

Yeah.  Proof that Congress isn’t always stupid.

There are two ways to look at any piece of legislative language; from the perspective of one who takes government language at face value and trusts government to act on the intent spun for legislators, and from that of someone who actually pays attention to history.

Liberal Attorneys General and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms (and now Explosives!) that report to them have a shameful record of manipulating gun control laws to maximize their control and the number of otherwise law-abiding gun owners they can prosecute under some grounds or another.

So if you are a liberal who looks at phrases like “shall promulgate standards for the uniform testing of projectiles” and says “Look! Standards!  In writing!”, then you are ignorant of the BATFE’s history.  During the Clinton Administration, the BATFE took the “standards” for importing firearms set under the 1994 “Crime Bill” and perverted them into a byzantine maze that seemed to be designed to entrap people who tried to be law abiding gun owners, but didn’t make a hobby of reading federal non-legislative regulation.  The “standards” observed during the “assault weapon ban” were…well, non-standard.  They made no sense.  Full-powered battle rifles like the HK91 would be allowed if they had a “thumbhole” sporting stock, while the less-powerful SKS would be banned because…it had a folding bayonet?  The rules were kept intentionally vague, and changed often, largely (it was believed) to entrap more law-abiding citizens – because it was almost impossible to stay ahead of the BATFE and the Attorney General’s “standards”.

And the “armor-piercing bullet” “standard” is, if anything, even more prone to abuse; your 30.06 hardball that you take deer hunting might be armor-piercing (because it’ll definitely shred most body armor), or it might not (because it’s pretty conventional), or it might be above certain loadings and muzzle velocities, or it might be any of the above depending on the “standards” the AG sets and – most importantly – the way the BATFE interprets the “standards”.

The bill lost 2-1 not because Republicans hate cops (as Klemz slanderously hints), but because of the record of the BATFE and, by extension, the federal government and setting standards like this.

(Klemz, with typical sorosblogger subtlety, entitles his “article” “Defending Cop Killer bullets, because that’s what they do”.  Well, no.  Unlike the Dems, the GOP has always proposed the laws that actually protect cops, and the rest of us too.  Of course, while Dems like Dayton are at the moment running away from their gun-control history, once you get them into places where they have complete control, like Chicago, we see the real truth; Liberals really hate  cops or black children).

(Isn’t the “disagreeing with me is a symptom of hatred” thing just a hoot?)

Remember all those shootings in Obama’s Chicago?  The gang warfare that’s made Chicago just about the most dangerous city between Juarez and Kandahar?

Maybe not – the national media has been pretty hands-off on “gun violence” in Chicago since The One’s ascenscion.

And it turns out that it’s even worse than the shooting figures indicate; in the event they catch a shooter, they can’t seem to put ‘em in jail:

The Chicago Sun-Times tells “the story of why they won’t stop shooting in Chicago.” The newspaper said the story is told “by by the wounded, the accused and the officers who were on the street during a 2008 weekend when 40 people were shot, seven fatally.” Two years later, nearly all the shooters from that weekend have escaped charges. “You don’t go to jail for shooting people,” says Dontae Gamble, who took six bullets that weekend, only to see his alleged shooter walk free. So far, not one accused shooter has been convicted of pulling the trigger during those deadly 59 hours from April 18-20 of that year, a Sun-Times investigation found.

Only one suspected triggerman — a convicted armed robber caught with the AK-47 he allegedly used to blow away his boss — is in jail awaiting trial. Three other victims said they know who shot them but refused to testify. Six murders from the weekend remain unsolved. Time’s running out to catch the bad guys who shot 29 other people because there’s a three-year statute of limitations on aggravated batteries with firearms. The Chicago police batting average for catching shooters has fallen to an alarmingly low level. Detectives cleared 18 percent of the 1,812 non-fatal shootings last year. They were slightly better in catching killers — 30 percent of murders were cleared. Even though detectives cleared 18 percent of non-fatal shootings last year, almost half of those were cleared “exceptionally,” records show. That means more than 90 percent of those gunmen weren’t charged.

But FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, don’t let people defend themselves Mayor Daley!  If you can’t do it, why should they?

Murders are way, way up in Minneapolis this year.

No, that’s not a victory.   That’s an endless tragedy, and an indictment of Minneapolis’ long-term strategy of using the North Side and Phillips to warehouse the poor. 

No, the victory  is buried in this piece in the Strib about the launch of a community program to combat the violence.

Read it carefully, and observe what you don’t see:

Project Exile, a program that has been successful elsewhere, will focus on convicted felons in possession of firearms, who officials say are responsible for the dramatic uptick in homicides. The city had 19 killings in 2009, a 27-year low. With more vigorous prosecution, the officials argue, gun offenders not only will be put away longer, but they’ll think twice before arming themselves on the streets… [US attorneyB. Todd] Jones said his prosecutors will begin by meeting weekly with staff from [Hennepin County attorney] Freeman’s office to review every gun case in Minneapolis to determine which should be brought to federal court. They’ll look at the most serious and dangerous offenders, and at which statutes are likely to result in the most effective consequences. Under some federal statutes, certain offenders can face mandatory minimum sentences of up to 15 years. Others average from two to five years.

What’s missing?

Go back 20-25 years; there would have been an unctuous proclamation from someone like Alan Spear or Wes “Lying Sack of Garbage” Skoglund about the need to pass “tough” new gun control. 

And make no mistake about it – the left’ll be working on it.  But in this post-McDonald world, they’ll have to do it vewwwwwy quietly.

But at least outwardly?  Who’d have thunk in 1990 that by 2010 Minneapolis’ ultraliberal leadership would essentially be repeating the NRA party line?

Perhaps we need a victory parade?

On the surface, h this NPR piece on the affect of the McDonald decision on Chigago’s fascist,racist gun laws has the superficial appearance of balance:  it’s got two pro-Second Amendment quotes and three antis, which is closer than you might be used to from the “elite” media.

But read between the lines:

Those who support fewer restrictions on guns point to incidents like a recent break-in on Chicago’s West Side — the kind of frightening event that happens far too often in crime-ridden neighborhoods.

“Happened at about 4 in the morning,” says Jose Perez, who lives two doors down from where an armed intruder was breaking into the house of an elderly man and his family. Perez woke up — and heard gunshots.

Pretty common in Chicago these days.  But it’s the shooter that was unusual:

“The guy broke the basement window in the back,” Perez continues. “Mr. Gant heard the noise with the window shattering open. … He got up, I guess got his gun out and the guy made it to the first-floor porch. The other guy fired first and then Mr. Gant fired after him — ended up striking the guy and killing him.”

Thank God, Perez says, the Korean War veteran was able to defend himself, even though this happened a month before the Supreme Court ruling, when owning a handgun in Chicago was still against the law.

The kind of thing that happens all over the US, every day.

“I think he did the right thing,” Perez says. “They’re 80 years old, him and his wife, and the grandson was with them, you know, and he’s about 12 years old. If the intruder would have came in, it would’ve been a tragedy, probably — found the whole family dead, shot up, you know?”…

…So even though it was illegal at the time, having a gun in the home may have saved lives.

The score so far:  Pro, 1 (a neighbor, portrayed in perfect lower-middle-class Chicago vernacular):  Anti, 0.

“It’s a pure case of self-defense, and it’s the kind of thing that needs to happen in the city of Chicago, if you expect the crime rate to drop,” says Richard Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association.

Standing outside of Chicago’s City Hall as the City Council was enacting new restrictions on handgun ownership, Pearson argued the city was still going too far. He thinks it will prevent citizens from protecting themselves in their own homes.

The score so far:  Pro, 2 (neighbor, and a representative of an organization NPR has been turning into a boogeyman for the past forty years):  Anti, 0.

But Dr. Richard Keller views guns in the home through a different lens.

“My father had a handgun,” Keller says. “When I was 17 years old, he used it to end his own life.”

His father’s suicide was a shocking, confusing and life-changing event for Keller. In his line of work now, Keller sees many similar self-inflicted gunshot victims: He is the coroner of suburban Lake County.

Tragic, certainly.

But the suicide rate statistic is a red herring; many nations with gun laws every bit as strict as pre-McDonald Chicago’s have suicide rates that dwarf our rate nationwide: Japan’s is over double our rate; Sweden, France, Hong Kong and Canada all have higher rates of suicide than the US.

Dr. Keller:

“I’ve seen cases where if they — very likely, if they had not had a handgun in the home, they would not have used it upon themselves,” Keller says.

That must have been an interesting interview – a coroner interviewing his patients about their motivations.

It’s an absurd statement – when other nations’ suicide rates are higher, clearly something other than the availability of guns is at issue.

Modern psychology is still trying to unpack suicide – but it seems fairly clear that those who use handguns are not “looking for attention”. They want out, fast.  As Japan’s example shows, those who want to check out that bad will find a way, whether guns are available or not.

Keller:

I have plenty of job security. There will always be deaths. I don’t need things going on that are likely going to increase the business of the coroner’s office.

Most civil liberties cause some problem for some government official.  As Alito noted in his majority opinion, it’s not a reason to abandon the liberty.

So that’s Pro,2: Anti, 1.

Thom Mannard of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence challenges the assertion that having guns in the home makes families safer.

“The evidence shows that handguns in the home are more likely to be used in a suicide, an unintentional shooting or a homicide with family members in that home than ever used in self-defense,” Mannard says.

Really?

Says who?

Got any research on that?

We don’t know.  The NPR reporter didn’t bother to ask, or to link to it.

I suspect it’s a latent 17 year old chanting point – the infamous New England Journal of Medicine study from the nineties that “showed”  that a gun in the home was 43 times more likely to kill the owner or “someone the owner knew” than a burglar.

Of course, most of the “43″ were suicides; of the remainder, most were drug dealers killing other dealers, or customers who owed them money, or classmates shooting each other for Starter jackets – all of them “people the gun owner knew”.  It also included cases of estranged spouses shooting abusive ex-spouses in justified self-defense; the principals most definitely “knew each other”.

The study didn’t control for any of this, or account for deterrence rather than killing of criminals, or for the backgrounds of the gun owners.  It really turned out that if anyone in the home with the gun had a crime record or record of drug or alcohol abuse, the odds of deterring a crime or killing someone the owner knew were about even; for those without, it was conservatively more than 400:1 in favor of guns.

Was that the the information that was the basis of Mr. Mannard’s statement?

We don’t know.

We rarely do when the mainstream media interviews anti-gunners; they never ask for them to prove their assertions.

Never!

So that’s Pro, 2 (regular schlub and boogeyman):  Anti, 2 (both allowed to make unsupported assertions and references to evidence that’s been pretty roundly shredded!).

Jens Ludwig, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, has done research that he says suggests allowing fewer guns leads to fewer gun deaths.

Mr. Ludwig, unlike many anti-gun researchers, is an academic of some integrity – hence, he has produced work that showed that gun control has no effect on homicide rates.  But their other resarch is not by any means airtight as the NPR report suggests by its utter lack of questioning.

So that’s Pros 2 (a regular guy and a boogeyman), Antis 3 (all of whom make claims that NPR didn’t even dream of asking them to substantiate, or at least didn’t bother to publish the substantiation).

To be fair, it’s as good as we can expect from NPR.

To be honest, we should still expect better.

I’ve been saying for close to twenty years that gun control is the debate that tips the hard left’s hand on civil liberties.  While Democrats have claimed to be the party of the little guy for the past eighty years, gun control was always the debate where the Democrats lined up with the “elites” against the peasants – and, as Glenn Reynolds notes, where the peasants organized themselves over the course of the past fifteen years and beat the “elites”.  And beat them so thoroughly that most of the Democratic Party has abandoned the issue.

Is it symptomatic that we’re seeing what may be  the first Daily Kos diary on trying to make guns a liberal issue?

Liberals can quote legal precedent, news reports, and exhaustive studies [Although they usually don't - Ed]. They can talk about the intentions of the Founders. They can argue at length against the tyranny of the government. And they will, almost without exception, conclude the necessity of respecting, and not restricting, civil liberties.

Except for one: the right to keep and bear arms.

When it comes to discussing the Second Amendment, liberals check rational thought at the door. They dismiss approximately 40% of American households that own one or more guns, and those who fight to protect the Second Amendment, as “gun nuts.” [I believe the term was "bitter, gun-clinging Jeebus freaks", or something to that effect - Ed.]  They argue for greater restrictions. And they pursue these policies at the risk of alienating voters who might otherwise vote for Democrats.

And there the writer is correct.  The 1994 Republican landslide was as much a reaction to the 1994 Crime Bill as to Hillarycare.  In Minnesota, it’s a better-than-fair guess that Rod Grams beat Ann Wynia for the Senate seat because of the backlash over the Crime Bill and the organization of Minnesota’s Second Amendment movement.

And they do so in a way that is wholly inconsistent with their approach to all of our other civil liberties.

Those who fight against Second Amendment rights cite statistics about gun violence, as if such numbers are evidence enough that our rights should be restricted. But Chicago and Washington DC, the two cities from which came the most recent Supreme Court decisions on Second Amendment rights, had some of the most restrictive laws in the nation, and also some of the highest rates of violent crime. Clearly, such restrictions do not correlate with preventing crime.

It’d be unseemly to say “I told you so” to someone who is agreeing with me…

So rather than continuing to fight for greater restrictions on Second Amendment rights, it is time for liberals to defend Second Amendment rights as vigorously as they fight to protect all of our other rights. Because it is by fighting to protect each right that we protect all rights.

The obvious answer, of course, is that while grass-roots idealistic “liberals” may indeed be about “fighting to protect all rights”, the overall high-level goal of the movement is to empower government.  And while having the peasants running around making statues of the Virgin  Mary out of elephant dung doesn’t infringe government power, a bunch of citizens with guns does.

Atypically of a Kos kolumn, it’s worth a read; well-reasoned enough to have been written by a conservative on the issue.

Typically for a Kos kolumn, the commenters largely belie the notion that the hard left has learned to think on this issue.

Richard Daley, mayor of the most corrupt, crime-ridden city in the United States, a place where gangs roam freely, shooting and terrorizing at will, wants to defy the  spirit of the McDonald decision by ramming through gun laws marginally less intrusive than the Sullivan Act:

“As long as I’m mayor, we will never give up or give in to gun violence that continues to threaten every part of our nation, including Chicago,” said Daley, who was flanked by activists, city officials and the parents of a teenager whose son was shot and killed on a city bus while shielding a friend.

Oh, Daley.  Daley, you corrupt, authoritarian psycho.  Did you explain to the stage props with the murdered son that the people who killed their son don’t obey gun laws?

The ordinance, which Daley urged the City Council to pass, also would :

• Limit the number of handguns residents can register to one per month and prohibit residents from having more than one handgun in operating order at any given time.
• Require residents in homes with children to keep them in lock boxes or equipped with trigger locks.
• Require prospective gun owners to take a four-hour class and one-hour training at a gun range. They would have to leave the city for training because Chicago prohibits new gun ranges and limits the use of existing ranges to police officers. Those restrictions were similar to those in an ordinance passed in Washington, D.C., after the high court struck down its ban two years ago.
• Prohibit people from owning a gun if they were convicted of a violent crime, domestic violence or two or more convictions for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Residents convicted of a gun offense would have to register with the police department.
• Calls for the police department to maintain a registry of every handgun owner in the city, with the names and addresses to be made available to police officers, firefighters and other emergency responders.

Those who already have handguns in the city — which has been illegal since the city’s ban was approved 28 years ago — would have 90 days to register those weapons, according to the proposed ordinance.

Residents convicted of violating the city’s ordinance can face a fine up to $5,000 and be locked up for as long as 90 days for a first offense and a fine of up to $10,000 and as long as six months behind bars for subsequent convictions.

Just goes to prove the old adage; “you can lead East Germans to the hole in The Wall, but you can’t make them go through”.

To:  Mayor Richard Daley

From: Mitch Berg, Real American

Re:  Your priorities

Mayor Daley,

Your city is overrun by gang-bangers who, despite your gun ban, make your city more violent than Baghdad today.

Your city is broke – and that great legacy of your city’s corrupt, stupid system, Barack Obama, is doing the same to the rest of the nation.

So now that the Supreme Court has strapped your city’s moronic gun ban – itself a racist concoction and a legacy of your notoriously corrupt father’s tenure in office – into the chair and gotten the switch ready to flip, I suppose it makes sense that you’ll focus on the “real problem”, the law-abiding gun owner:

As expected, Mayor Daley and Chicago’s City Council are circling the wagons to defend against an unfavorable decision by the Supreme Court concerning the city’s gun ban.

Daley said the city would have in place a new ordinance aimed at making it difficult to purchase and own a gun in Chicago.

“We’ll publicly propose a new ordinance very soon,” Daley said at an afternoon press conference concerning the gun ban.

Great to see you’ve got your priorities straight.

That is all.

As Real America celebrates the judicial whack the SCOTUS gave the City of Chicago, even the ChiTrib notes how miserably Chicago’s gun ban has failed; Justice Alito, in his majority opinion, noted:

“[A group of Democratic Illinois legislators who proposed calling in the National Guard to try to re-take Chicago's blood-drenched streets] noted that the number of Chicago homicide victims during the current year equaled the number of American soldiers killed during that same period in Afghanistan and Iraq,” the opinion stated.

“If (the) safety of . . . law abiding members of the community would be enhanced by the possession of handguns in the home for self-defense, then the Second Amendment right protects the rights of minorities and other residents of high-crime areas whose needs are not being met by elected public officials.”

If you can say anything about the government of Chicago, it’s that it doesn’t meet the needs of the people for safety.

And if there’s anything we can count on Richard Daley for, it’s that he’ll do his best to reinforce failure.

Just what kind of idiot is Chicago’s mayor?

In an interview with the Tribune, the mayor said his primary goal would be to protect police officers, paramedics and emergency workers from being shot when responding to an incident at a home.

Right – because cop-killers obey gun bans.

Now, if the NRA doesn’t print Daley’s next statement on T-shirts, and if the GOP doesn’t post it on billboards, and if the Illinois Tea Party isn’t harping on it at the top of their lungs, then all of them need to leave their jobs and never come back:

 He said he also wants to save taxpayers from the financial cost of lawsuits if police shoot someone in the house because the officer felt threatened.

Got that?   The law-abiding should remain unprotected so Daley’s cops don’t get the city in trouble for blazing away at people in their own homes.

It’s East Germany on Lake Michigan.

Come to think of it, maybe they do need the National Guard. 

They should storm City Hall.

Today, the United States Supreme Court issued a legal groin-kick with steel-toed boots to the idea that the human right of self-defense exists at the sufference of governments and bureaucrats, in ruling for Otis McDonald XXX to XXX in his seminal lawsuit against the Duchy City of Chicago.

Monday’s decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws, ordering a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that they would eventually fall.

Still, Alito noted that the declaration that the Second Amendment is fully binding on states and cities “limits (but by no means eliminates) their ability to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values.”

Now, it’s our turn.

———-

If you know me, you know I love a good analogy from military history.

The late sixties?  Those were, metaphorically, the years when the Germans rolled across Europe at will; gun control essentially won the battle for the hearts and minds of…well, much of the American “elite” and “intelligentsia”, and it felt like there was litte Real America could do about it.

1987, when Florida became the ninth state, and by far the largest, to adopt “shall-issue” concealed carry?  That was the Dieppe Raid raid; a bold counterstroke that showed Real America may have been down, but not out.

1991, when Dr. Sanford Levinson released The Embarassing Second Amendment in the Yale Law Review?  That was the battle of El Alamein; not a definitive battle in and of itself, it showed the world that the anti-freedom juggernaut was not invulnerable, and could be defeated.

2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in Heller that “Right of the People” meant people, not “National Guard”?  That was the bloody, ugly battle of the Atlantic, and the air battle over Germany, which made what was to follow feasible in the first place.

And this, today?  The McDonald decision?  It’s D-Day.  It’s the day all the preparatory work – the Yaltas, the raiding, the negotiations, the legal scholarship, the bombing, the posturing – all comes to an end.  It’s the day the big players – the Churchills and Hestons, the Mussolinis and the Lillehaugs, the Montgomeries and Guras, the Hitlers and the Heather Martens, the Pattons and the Kopels, the Swiss and the Laurence Tribes, the Goerings and the Daleys, the Eisenhowers and the Scalias – find their work, if not “done”, at least receding to the rear.  It’s now the job of the infantry.

That’d be us.  The grass roots.

The decision makes the court’s opinion in Heller, that the Second Amendment is a right of the people, binding on lower levels of law – as it should – but doesn’t toss out local laws wholesale.  Again, rightly.  A principled judicial conservative doesn’t legislate from the bench.

And so it’s up to us – the grass roots, the “infantry” of the Human Rights movement – to take up the battle now.  To take this battle to every pillbox of fascism and racism, the gun-grabbing city halls and state legislatures and county commissions, and turn the flamethrower of reason, the satchel charge of the Constitution, and the bayonet of human liberty on them, and destroy them, one by one, all of them.  To pound them out of existence through the weight of our numbers, the unstoppable passion of our attack, and the rightness of our cause.

And many of us “infantry” in the Higgins boats today won’t be here in the front lines when the news finally comes down that Gun Control, holed up in its bunker in San Francisco, has stuck a metaphoric (and ironic!) gun in its legal and social mouth and brought an end to the war.  This, as Churchill said, isn’t the end, or even the beginning of the end.   It’s the end of the beginning.

And it’s our job – every one of us Real Americans – to bring this thing to its end.  A prudent end, with Real, law-abiding Americans in control and criminals cowering in fear; a just end, with banana-republic tyrants like Richard Daley groveling for forgiveness before the souls of the thousands killed for want of the human right to self-defense, perhaps waddling through the afterlife with the symbolic muzzle of a metaphorical Mosin-Nagant jammed into his nether regions as cosmic penance; a sane end, with “gun control” spoken with the same dirty sneer that “McCarthyism” or “racism” get today.

And that end got a little closer today.

And it’s all in front of us.

Congratulations, Real America.  Take a day to celebrate.  Tomorrow, you’ll earn it all over again.

God Bless America.

By a vote of 5-4 breaking upon straight “party” ‘lines, the Supreme Court of the United States at long last  ruled that the Second Amendment is as much a “right of the people” in New York or Tucumcari or Chicago as the Heller decision two years ago said it was in Washington DC; it’s a right of the people, not the militia or the police or, as usual in big Democrat-controlled cities, the favorited elites with political clout.

The decision rules that the Fourteenth Amendment “incorporates” the Second, making it a right binding on state and local law.

Alito, Thomas, Scalia, Roberts and Kennedy stood with freedom, liberty and human rights.

Sotomayor, Ginsberg, Stevens and Breyer took the side of oppression, smug elitism and racism.

 While this decision doesn’t end the racist, authoritarian notion of “gun control” aimed at the law-abiding, it does give Real Americans the constitutional wherewithal to stomp it out of existence in the legislatures, city councils and lower courts around the country.

This is not total victory – no conservative justice would ever impose legislation from the bench onto the whole country.  But it’s a huge start.

More – much more – as this amazing day progresses.

God Bless America.

Chief Justice Roberts has announced tomorrow will be the last day of the Supreme Court term.  And it’s gonna be a doozy:

In eagerly awaited rulings, the nation’s highest court is expected to decide the constitutionality of a national board that polices auditors of public companies…

…AKA “Sarbanes Oxley”, itself a huge issue…

…and whether gun rights extend to every state and city in the nation.

Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSBlog writes:

I predict that Justice Alito will write the Court’s opinion in McDonald recognizing that the Second Amendment is incorporated.  But given Justice Alito’s sensitivity towards law enforcement, I doubt that the opinion will call into question a broad swath of firearms regulation.

That’s as it should be, frustrating as it may be in the short run; the case should set the stage for a  huge legislative effort to overturn fascist gun-control laws.  And if all goes well tomorrow, it’ll give Real America the constitutional tools it needs to exactly that.

I will, to say the least, be watching, and writing on the McDonald decision at my earliest opportunity.

It’s come down to Tuesday.

Next Tuesday is the final day of the Supreme Court session.  They are due to release their decision in McDonald Vs. Chicago.  It will likely make the Second Amendment binding on state governments at some level or another. 

We’ll come back to that.

If the good guys beat the orcs on Tuesday, it’ll be the capstone on a generally good year for freedom; the Second Amendment Human Rights movement has made many advances. 

But nobody ever expected the orcs to roll over and play dead; un-American anti-liberty sentiment is deeply entrenched in some of our nation’s more benighted, nanny-state-prone areas:

["Brady Campaign for Victim Disarmament" state legislative director Brian] Malte points to states such as California, Illinois and much of the Northeast, where he says gun advocates have largely failed to make inroads. And gun-control advocates have played offense some this session, too. In New York State, for example, the Assembly passed “microstamping” legislation, before the bill stalled in the Senate, although supporters hope to revive it this fall. The bill would require that semiautomatic pistols made or sold in the state stamp cartridges with the make, model and serial number of the gun when it’s fired.

I’m not a gun manufacturer.  But if I were, I’d make sure the dies on the inside of my New York-bound chambers all gave the make, model, serial number, and a big clear “F*ck Michael Bloomberg”.   By the way, while I’ve heard some moderate gun-controllers throw this out as a “reasonable” possibility, all it’ll do in the short term is make for tidier criminals and a market for cartridge-catcher bags, and in the long run add to the state of New York’s level of criminal expertise in grinding off microstamp dies, to say nothing of making revolvers the preferred weapon of gangland assassins.

 In California, the Assembly passed a bill that would ban the practice known as “open carry,” which allows people to carry an unloaded gun in plain sight, even if the person also is carrying ammunition as well.

That should solve the violence problem.

The point is this; Tuesday may bring human-rights advocates a victory – but the legislative battle is going to go on.  A victory on Tuesday will clear some of the more insipid legal obstacles – but the orcs are still out there, and need to be killed off (rhetorically and politically), one at a time.

To: Family Resource Council

From: Mitch Berg

Re:  Get a Grip

To whom it may concern,

You have gone on record against…shall-issue concealed carry laws?

A new piece from the Family Research Council blasts Grover Norquist (President of Americans for Tax Reform; Member of the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association) for joining the board of GOProud, an organization of conservative gay Republicans. Among the alleged sins on the GOProud agenda :

Equalize “concealed carry reciprocity” amendment with gay rights via state rights. Support guns being carried and recognized across state lines, in order to further the agenda that gay marriages legal in only a few states be recognized legally in all. (July 2009)

Have you lost your minds?

For starters – self-defense is a human right, without which the innocent are murdered and society is made even more vulnerable to tyranny.

There are those who make the case that gay marriage is a human right.  I disagree, and so do y’all, but the way to make the case that it is not, is not to undercut other human rights.

And if you want to influence policy, you might want to remember that most of your group’s supporters are also Second Amendment supporters, and shall-issue is one of the most important Second Amendment initiatives there is.

So get right, or get off my side.

That is all.

There’s a “gun buyback” going on in Minneapolis and Saint Paul even as we speak:

Shiloh Temple International Ministries 1201 W. Broadway Mpls., MN.
Contact: Deseria G. [phone number redacted]
Gospel Temple COGIC 247 Grotto Street N. St. Paul, MN.
Danny G. @ [phone number redacted]

You will receive $50.00 gift card for revolvers.
You will receive $100.00 gift card for semi-automatics.
NO QUESTIONS ASKED!!

I took the liberty of calling Deseria G, the contact in Minneapolis.  After identifying myself as Mitch Berg, with the Northern Alliance Radio Network and a howling-mad conservative, I asked first where the money came from.

“Bake sales, events at basketball games and community events”, she started.  “Donations from the Minneapolis Police Department…”

Huh?  The perennially cash-strapped MPD is ponying up for a program as demonstrably useless as a gun buy-back?

“…and from [an inner city healthcare non-profit] – because this is a public health issue…”

I didn’t feel like arguing; she seemed like a pleasant enough person, highly motivated for her mission. 

But I had to ask:  “So it’s your position that these gun buy-backs actually reduce crime?”

“It’s aimed mainly at our youth, the ones who are doing the crimes”.

I thought about following up “do you honestly think the gang-bangers are going to trade their gats in for gift certificates?   Do you think you’re going to get anything other than guns cleaned out of attics, non-functioning relics, and pieces stolen from peoples’ parents or neighbors?”, but I wished her a good day and thanked her for her time.

Andrew Rothman writes, by the way, to note that the only reason the buy-back is legal is the “Gun-Show Loophole”. 

But that brought on another question; the publicity flyer notes the rules for the exchange:

Rules of engagement:
A. gun must be transported to either site in clear see threw freezer Bag.
B. gun must be separated from ammunition.
C. flyer should be on your person or in freezer bag. That is your pass to transport gun to site.

Erm, I’m wondering if the cops are strictly down with that?  A flyer gives people a de facto carry permit for twelve hours?  Seems dodgy to me, but then what do I know?

C’moooon, McDonald!

The Supreme Court released opnions on four cases on Monday, the third-to-last day for such releases (as I understand it, and stop me if I’m wrong) this term.

That leaves them 20 opinions to release over the next two Mondays, including McDonald Vs. City of Chicago, the likely-to-be-landmark Second Amendment case that, if all goes well, will force all state and local governments to treat the Amendment as the founding fathers wrote it; a right of The People . Not the National Guard or police; not people with political and administrative clout.  The People.

Anyone wanna lay odds they hold off until the last decision of the last day of the session, June 28?

Minnesota now has 75,000 carry permits, according to the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance.  That’s running just a tad ahead of the national average.

Just over seven years after its passage, the Minnesota Citizens’ Personal Protection Act of 2003 has resulted in over 75,000 people who now have active carry permits, a 500% increase over the number in effect before the law was reformed.

According to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, there were 75,583 active permits as of May 31, 2010.

Still no problems.

“Increasingly, personal protection is becoming more widely and socially accepted,” said David Gross, a criminal defense attorney, member of the GOCRA board, and long-time advocate for the right of self defense. He points at the recent controversy manufactured by gun control advocates over law-abiding citizens carrying holstered guns into Starbucks coffee shops. Starbucks refused to give in to demands that it ban gun-carrying customers.

“That is literally visible here in Minnesota, too,” he said, “The number of ‘bans guns’ signs continues to dwindle as businesses return the respect shown by gun owners.”

Back in 1987, when Florida became the ninth “Shall Issue” state (there are 40 today) , Florida state senator Ron Silver coined the phrase “Gunshine State”, expecting the state to turn into “Dodge City East”.  He famously admitted he’d been utterly wrong within the next five or six years.

It’s happened here, too:

Even vocal opponents of the law, like former Olmsted County Sheriff Steve Borchardt, revised their opinions as law-abiding Minnesotans remained law abiding after earning permits.”The fact is the sky didn’t fall,” he told KARE11 in 2005. “The fact is it worked pretty seamlessly.”

Which hasn’t stopped the left from continuing to lie about shall issue – but you get the impression the smart ones don’t have their hearts in it.

Firearm sales have been on a historic boom for the past five years.

Over that same time, violent crime and murder rates  have been not only dropping, but the drop has accelerated:

Data from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation show that America has been on a firearms buying spree since the end of 2005. Meanwhile, the FBI recently released preliminary 2009 crime data indicating that violent crime has been dropping at an accelerating rate since the end of 2006.

Graphic from Pajamas Media

Correlation doesn’t equal causation, as such – but it’s a piece of evidence that can lead you to a cause. 

For example, the fact that the “Assault Weapon” ban sunsetted just before this drop in crime started might not be proof that “assault weapons” have next to no effect on crime rates – but it certainly indicates the sky didn’t fall when Grandma got to buy MP5Ks again.

Or the fact that Chicago, which utterly bans civilian guns, seems to be immune to the rest of the nation’s crime drop isn’t in and of itself evidence that gun bans kill people – but it’s evidence enough that you’d be dumb to rule it out as a conclusion.

Bring on McDonald!

Taxi driver kills 12 in the western UK:

Armed with two weapons – a .22 rifle and a shotgun – Bird drove down the coast from Whitehaven where the first attacks took place, leaving a trail of carnage in his wake. Residents of the county were warned to stay indoors as police followed the deadly route, discovering more bodies as they went. At one point Bird abandoned his Citroen Picasso for another car which he then crashed near woods in the picturesque Lake District town of Boot. The body of Bird, a 52 year-old divorced father-of-two, together with his guns were found nearby.

Imagine how bad it’d be if the UK hadn’t completely banned guns!

(Although journalists can take comfort in the fact that nobody’s aiming up their butts).

I’ve bagged on the City Pages’ Matt Snyders a time or two for his flights into context-challenged, myopically-biased political writing.

But fair is fair; this piece on the “gun show loophole” is excellent, well-balanced, and…fair.

It kicks off with a conversation with this blog’s good friend Andrew Rothman…:

“If there’s an unequivocal opposite to growing up around guns,” says Andrew Rothman, “it’s being raised by New York Jews.” He puts down his glass of water and wipes his dark goatee with a napkin. It would be quite the outlandish statement were he not talking about himself.

“I grew up believing guns were bad,” he continues. “That’s what my parents taught me. But they also taught me to read. That was their first mistake.”

…and somehow managed to go to press without a quote from this blog’s other good friend (and my own carry permit training instructor), the ubiquitous Joel Rosenberg.

Snyders, by his own account, attended three gun shows trying to find a seller who’d let him buy a piece without running him through all the legal hoops – as the media and the gun-control groups who tell them what to think assure is is inevitable:

“So, um, what’s the difference between a Glock and a Beretta?” I asked.

A stupid question in this environment, and also a suspicious one. It’d be like attending the Cannabis Cup and asking a vendor the difference between hashish and marijuana.

“Well, Glocks are easier to use, I suppose, with a trigger-on-trigger safety, instead of an external lever,” he says. “Beretta, on the other hand, is a more traditional pistol with a hammer instead of a slide.”

I opt for neither, going instead with the Hi-Point. He hands me a clipboard containing a questionnaire—the background check required of all licensed firearms dealers. The so-called “gun show loophole” refers to sales between two individuals. The occasional guy walking around with a rifle and makeshift price tag are not required to check in with the national criminal database each time they make a sale…

…”You have your permit to purchase, right?” asks the vendor.

The answer to the question was an unfortunate no.

“No permit to purchase?” he said. “You’re shit outta luck, my friend.”

You might be surprised that the City Pages would cover the issue fairly – indeed, I was. 

Again.  Because it was in the winter of 1994, as the ”shall issue” movement was just gathering steam in Minnesota, that I saw the first fair, balanced piece about concealed carry…

…in the City Pages.  Written by none other than Steve Perry.  So it’s not without precedent.

Snyders took Rothman’s carry permit training class – and like a lot of beginners, did pretty good.  He also catches the appeal of shooting like few people I’ve read on the left:

After five minutes and 25 rounds of warm-ups, it’s time for the test. An inexplicable wave of adrenaline washes through my arms and torso as I clumsily load five 9mm rounds into a magazine. I slap the magazine into the handle grip of a midnight-black semi-automatic Glock 17, and take aim.

Pop! Pause. Pop! Pop! Pause. Pop! Pop!

After seeing the five shots land true, Rothman instructs me to reload ten more rounds and squeeze them off. I oblige. Nerves settled, I begin to understand the elusive appeal of the gun. To be in control of a tool this powerful and deadly is to experience a visceral, almost intoxicating degree of autonomy. It’s sort of like the initial few days of giddy emancipation one feels after receiving a driving license, all contained in a flex of an index finger.

I won’t tell the other guys,” Rothman says as the target reels back six additional feet, “but you’re shooting a perfect score so far.”

The words of encouragement proved to be a jinx. The next two shots veer five inches off-target, one high and to the left, the other just high. Ignoring the occasional spent shell casing peppering my head, I continue to blast away, each shot about two seconds apart. I regain control and finish with a score of 146.

I’m now eligible for a permit to carry in Minnesota.

Kudos on the score and the story.

(But I got a 149…)

In thirty hours over the weekend, Chicago had a bloody weekend:

[I]n a 30 hour period, 25 people were shot, and one man died from his injuries.

The fatal shooting happened early Sunday in the 5100-block of S. Laflin.

This barely a week after Mayor Daley risibly trumpeted the safety benefits of Chicago’s total ban on guns in the hands of the law-abiding in one of the most “Baghdad Bob”-like press conferences in history.

Chicago Police Superintendent Jody Weis said nearly half of the shootings appear to be gang-related.

He said there are no suspects in any of the cases.

I’m dying to get to the next liberal who tries to make the case that banning guns for the law-abiding has any value at all.

Bring on McDonald, baby.

In the video I posted last week, Chicago’s buffoon-in-chief Richard Daley stood in front of a table full of confiscated firearms and picked up a rifle (ironically, an old Russian Mosin-Nagant, the rifle of Stalin’s army), and “jokingly” offered to demonstrate the value of Chicago’s draconian-yet-ineffective gun ban by shooting a round up the reporter’s “butt”.

Well, the second rule of shooting is “know your backstop…”

Apparently in Richard Daley’s special little world, every gun is used for some kind of depravity or another:

Daley went on. “This gun saved many lives—it could save your life,” he said—meaning, I think, that getting that gun off the street might have saved many lives, including mine.

And he went on some more. “We save all these guns that the police department seizes, you know how many lives we’ve saved? You don’t realize it. First of all, they’re taking these guns out of someone’s hands. They save their own life and they save someone else’s. You cannot count how many times this gun can be used. Thirty, forty times in shooting people and discharging a weapon. I think it’s very important.

In other words, “Chicago has one of the highest murder rates in the US and is being paralyzed by gang warfare; imagine how awful it’d be if the law-abiding citizen could defend him or herself!”

“Next will be hand grenades, right? We’ll say that hand grenades are OK. I mean, how far can you go in regards to mass weapons? To me, any gun taken off saves thousands of lives in America. I really believe that, I don’t care what people tell me. You have to thank the police officers for seizing all these weapons. We lead the country in seizing weapons. This is unbelievable.”

Yeah.  Yeah, it is.

Daley reportedly has a vacation home in Michigan – a “shall issue” state.  It’s a wonder he hasn’t been shot thirty or forty times by now.

Under a month ’til McDonald!

I shoot because shooting is fun; it’s the best stress relief one can get alone; it’s the best way there is to ensure ones’ safety from violent crime. 

But why am I a Second Amendment activist?  The honest truth – it’s exactly, precisely because of displays like this (safe for work, albeit crude and deeply stupid); it’s Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, who was asked whether his city, ravaged by gang gun violence, is benefitting from having the strictest gun controls in the US:

Is Chicago’s idiotic (and possibly soon-to-be-unconstitutional) gun ban effective?

“Oh!” Daley said. “It’s been very effective!”

He grabbed a rifle, held it up, and looked right at me. He was chuckling but there was no smile.

“If I put this up your—ha!—your butt—ha ha!—you’ll find out how effective this is!”

For a moment the room was very, very quiet. I took a good look at the weapon. It had a long bayonet. (Was it seized during the Civil War?)

“If I put a round up your—ha ha!”

I am a second amendment activist because it’s a thumb in the eye of authoritarian scumbags like Richard Daley.

(Via Ed)

Will this story appear in the Strib?

A shooting occurred uring an armed robbery attempt in Excelsior overnight. It happened at the Lakeshore Market on Highway 7 shortly after 10:30 pm. Two men wearing masks entered the store and encountered a clerk with a gun. Police chief Brian Litsey says at least one of the robbers was shot and wounded.

Being Excelsior, there’s a decent chance that the shooter will not be considered the real criminal.

Still, chalk one up for the good guys.

Two years ago,, when the Heller case set the precedent that the Second Amendment right “of the people” meant “people” and not “the National Guard”, it left two questions:

1. Would the case apply to the states?  Heller referred to the federally-controlled “District of Columbia”; McDonald, which was argued last March and whose decision is due next month, should fix this.
2. What are the “reasonable restrictions” that the court referred to?

It’s an important question – because the orcs who oppose the human right of self-defense like to believe that human rights are commodities, and they are the dealers:

Mark Snyder, an amateur biathlete, wanted to buy a
.22-caliber bolt-action rifle for target shooting and figured the
process would take about a week. After nearly six weeks, six visits to
police departments and $300 in fees, he secured his rifle.

“I was not expecting a free ride,” said Mr. Snyder, 45, “but this is
an obstacle course they put in place.”

“Suuuuuure it’s your right “as a person”; now go get me a…shrubbery“.

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the District of Columbia’s 32-year
ban on handguns in 2008, a victory for the gun-rights lobby that
seemed to promise a more permissive era in America’s long tussle over
gun ownership. Since then, the city has crafted rules that are proving
a new, powerful deterrent to residents who want to buy firearms.

Legal gun owners must be registered by the city, a red flag for many
in the gun-rights community concerned that registration lists could be
used to confiscate firearms. The District limits the number of bullets
a gun can hold and the type of firearm residents can buy. It requires
that by next year manufacturers sell guns equipped with a special
identification technology—one that hasn’t yet been adopted by the
industry.

This shows Real Americans two things:

• We’re going to have to win this battle in every single legislature, city council and Congress in the land, and…
• …more importantly – given that so many of the people who drive opinion on the left are so very un-bright -  the years and years we’ve spent educating people  aren’t over.

By the way, DC’s murder rates has dropped since Heller.  Who woulda seen that coming?