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.
I’m not John Browning by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems to me that a microstamp would seriously impede the smoothness that a semi-auto depends on to work well.
I suggest that SWAT teams need to try it first and see how it works.
Great post. I heard the decision might be Monday morning on SCOTUSBlog, but regardless we are on the verge of a great victory. Something I’ve been working for for 15 years; others have been working even longer.
On the subject of Microstamping, I have the following to say:
So, here I am a law abiding good-guy and like to target shoot. I have just been to the gun range and fired 50 rounds. I leave those 50 rounds in the trash can with microstamped codes on each case. What stops a criminal from picking up those casings and keeping a couple in his pocket to drop at a crime scene?
Let’s say he picks up the empty brass casings from 5 or 10 different people. Then he goes and commits a crime.
At the crime scene, he takes a few shots with his gun, but leaves the microstamped shell casings from the guns of 5 or 10 different gun owners. Now there are shell casings from possibly 5 or 10 people at a crime scene. All of whom are innocent, but will be investigated by police about the crime.
The lawyer says “ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there are shell casings from 5 different guns traced to 5 different owners at the crime scene.”
Can you say reasonable doubt?
bubbasan: I agree… to slam a stamp into the round will either require diverting energy from the rest of the cycle of function. Pistols with these microstamps will probably be more likely to jam up as a result. And I can’t imagine how it will be hard at all for a criminal to simply file off the stamp!
Carnivore: I think that would be counterproductive to the criminal since it would leave more evidence pointing towards the criminal, like witnesses at the range, sign-in sheets, etc.
re california bill to ban open carry, see great video on the bill sponsor and her weak argumentsd at anti-saldana bill video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgJmg1lVQ7M
Scooby – I can see in theory where a VERY small “stamp” in the bolt face, leaving a tiny stamp in the base of the cartridge case, could work without muciking up the action too much, in theory…
Carivore if you are bothering to pick up all of your brass hand it off to someone who reloads.
Mitch if the stamp is small enough not to interfere it will be small enough to not make an impression in x percentage of rounds fired without any wear or tampering.
Scooby – I don’t think you are thinking of the possibilities of how a criminal could get spent brass anonymously at hundreds of places around the country. Three of the ranges I go to have brass laying around from multiple shooters. They are public ranges with no sign-in logs or any record of who is there.
If I have a 45ACP revolver when I commit a crime, but leave brass I picked up from a 45ACP semi-auto at a crime scene, but evidence points to an innocent guy whose brass I picked up, not me.
jpmn – My point is that I don’t pick up my brass and don’t want to chase after every casing so it is there for someone else to pick up if they wanted to and leave at a crime seen to implicate someone other than themselves.
More to the point Carnivore if I’m a range attendant / employee and every now and again a fellow shows up and offers me $200 for 10lbs of brass and I don’t have to sort it – sure I’ll fill up a bag and give it to him. The drug dealers on the corner where I used to live had revenues in excess of $10k a day, ya gotta know they’ll spend a couple hundred every now and again for “camouflage”.
“ladies and gentlemen of the jury, there are shell casings from 5 different guns traced to 5 different owners at the crime scene.”
And ballistic testing showed that only the defendant’s gun was used to shoot the victim.
Yes, lots of criminals hang on to their crime weapons long after fleeing the scene so they can be caught with it later. Or if they are even caught its because there is other evidence placing them at the crime like eye witnesses and cameras; nothing of which have anything to do with ballistics. Or are you talking about New York’s Ballistics Database which has yet to lead to a single prosecution?