Michael R. Weisser's Blog, page 35

What The 2nd Amendment Means And Doesn’t Mean.

Yesterday this website carried an op-ed by one of our Contributing Editors, Greg Gibson, whose son was murdered on the campus of the college he was attending, a terrible story that became a book written by Gibson, Gone Boy, which has become something of a small classic in the literature about violence caused by guns. Greg has gone on to do some important gun-advocacy work, he also has a rather unique perspective on the issues of gun violence and gun control, and his comments about the 2nd Amendment created quite a storm on several Facebook pages where I posted what he wrote.

[image error]              Basically, Greg was defending the 2nd Amendment based on the assumption that the Framers didn’t intend to give gun rights to the kind of people who shouldn’t have guns:  criminals, nut-cases, or what Gibson refers to as “teenagers with still-developing brains.” Most of the comments about his piece came from activists who, for various reasons, don’t believe that gun owners should get any kind of Constitutional protection at all. Here was a typical comment that I received: “militia means a standing army not right wing nut jobs carrying assault rifles and terrorizing communities.”

The 2008 Heller decision, which said that Americans could keep a handgun in their home for self-defense, was decided by looking at the historic and legal precedents of two words: ‘keep’ and ‘bear,’ as in ‘to keep and bear arms.’ And even though many of the examples advanced on both sides of the SCOTUS debate were only marginally connected to the 2nd Amendment. Scalia was able to cobble together enough instances of early statutes and events to make his case.

What is most interesting about the Heller decision, however, is not what the majority and minority opinions say about the historical and legal meaning of the relevant text, but what isn’t said. And what isn’t said is any discussion about the word ‘arms,’ because Scalia dispensed of this issue in less than 100 words out of his 20,000-word opinion, by noting that Constitutional protection of private gun ownership only covers weapons that are commonly found in the home, and not “unusual” weapons like the kinds of weapons designed for use in war.

There’s only one little problem with Scalia’s formulation however, an argument that was unstintingly accepted by the minority opinions as well. The reason we suffer 125,000 gun injuries each year is because we give ourselves free access to these self-same weapons of war. Americans aren’t killed or wounded in large numbers by the millions of shotguns lying around in basements here and there. The 12 people killed in Chicago last weekend didn’t die because the shooters used several of the millions of hunting rifles manufactured by Remington, Winchester, Ruger or Savage Arms.

We suffer gun violence because legally or illegally, lots of our fellow citizens are walking around with handguns made by Glock, Smith & Wesson, Sig, Ruger, Colt, etc., all of which were designed and used as weapons of war. Gaston Glock designed his pistol for the Austrian army; his gun is now carried by armed forces worldwide, including the armed forces of the United States. Sig just landed the contract to supply their pistol to the U.S. Army, and celebrated this financial whirlwind by releasing 50,000 of the guns for civilian sale.

We are the only Western country which has decided that handguns, which are designed for only one purpose (to kill human beings) should be allowed to be purchased and owned with no greater degree of regulation than what we impose on someone who wants to buy and take a  shotgun into the woods.

The issue isn’t whether or not we should keep the 2nd Amendment. The real issue is whether the 2nd Amendment should protect the ownership of guns whose design and lethality has nothing to do with anything other than committing an act of violence in the extreme. You can be an Originalist all you want, but the Framers couldn’t have meant to enshrine murder as a Constitutional ‘right.’

 

Greg Gibson: Taking Back The 2nd Amendment.

The Second Amendment is truly remarkable. We alone among nations have, not only the unfettered right to keep and bear arms, but an access to guns that is unequaled by any other stable society in the world. This constitutional right bespeaks a deep faith in the civility, wisdom, and maturity of all Americans – a fundamental trust in the average citizen that is unparalleled anywhere else in the world.

[image error]People talk about American exceptionalism, and we ARE exceptional as a nation, in part because of our right to keep and bear arms, and the ways in which this right has become a part of our heritage. It is more than a privilege, more than an custom. It is a unique and glorious right.

And look what we’ve done with it. Just open the paper, turn on the TV, take out your phone.

Guns falling into the hands of madmen, domestic abusers, and teenagers with still-developing brains. Guns to keep people safe from people with guns. Guns on night stands. Guns in pockets and purses. Guns in shopping malls, on college campuses. 300 million guns.

35,000 gun deaths a year. 125,000 injured. Hundreds of thousands suffering the grief, trauma, and displacement that trail in the wake of gun violence. Whole communities turned into vengeful, dysfunctional battlegrounds.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

We’ve defiled this right. Through our own inaction and inattention we’ve let custody of the Second Amendment slide into the hands of ideologues, profiteers, and fear-mongerers, overseen by a cowardly Congress unable to act on the will of the people.

Don’t you think it’s time we reclaimed our Second Amendment?

Sensible people like you and me. Gun owners and non-gun owners. Red people. Blue people. Plain, unassuming, reasonable men and women, standing millions strong, facing down fanatics of every stripe.

We’re here for our Second Amendment, guys. We want our amendment back… NOW!

 

Do Comprehensive Background Checks Reduce Gun Violence? Not So Far.

Last week I posted a detailed paper on the Social Science Research Network in which I examined the arguments made by public health researchers and gun-control advocacy groups about the relationship between gun laws and gun violence; i.e., the stronger and more comprehensive the gun-control laws, the more gun violence goes down.

[image error]              You can download and read the paper here, but I can save you some time by summarizing what I said. In brief, the point I made about the more gun laws = less gun violence is that the causal relationship between these two factors is vague, at best, and the way in which Brady and Giffords go about defining and judging the efficacy of different laws leaves some pretty big gaps.

The problem with trying to figure out whether any particular law will have any particular effect is that the only way to come up with a reasonably-accurate analysis is to compare the relevant behavior both before and after the law is passed.  But even studies which compare before-and-after behavior on what would appear to be a simple issue like speed limits and accident rates, often cannot take into account all the myriad social factors which affect a certain type of behavior beyond the existence or non-existence of a certain law. And if we know one thing about the behavior which produces gun violence, or any kind of violence for that matter, the origins, incidence and reasons for this behavior are terribly complicated and not given to any kind of simple or single cause.

On the other hand, for the first time we finally can look at the effects of a major change in gun laws, not just in terms of whether the new law made any real difference in gun violence rates, but whether the legal change met the expectations and claims of the advocate community which pushed for the change. I am referring to requiring FBI-NICS background checks for all gun transfers, which is probably Gun-control Nation’s single, most cherished goal, particularly because it happens to be the gun law where even gun owners appear to be falling into line; a recent public health survey found that more than 80% of both gun owners and non-gun owners agreed that comprehensive FBI-NICS checks were a good thing.

According to Brady, only 7 states currently impose comprehensive background checks on all gun sales. But four of these states – Colorado, Delaware, New York, Washington – passed their laws after the unspeakable tragedy at Newtown-Sandy Hook. As of 2014, all four states required that any change in the ownership of any kind of gun had to be validated by the intervention of a gun dealer who would initiate a background check. None of these states had a comprehensive background check law prior to 2014.

And here are the results by state, gun-violence rate and two years prior and two years after passage of a comprehensive background check law:

State
2012
2013
2015
2016


CO
2.22
2.01
2.51
2.91


DE
5.02
4.11
5.61
4.62


NY
2.22
1.93
2.07
1.98


WA
1.84
1.66
2.26
2.00

 

Note that New York was the only state which showed a decline in gun violence after a comprehensive law was passed, but this anomaly is probably explained by the aggressive, anti-gun program of the New York City cops. In Erie County, which includes Buffalo, the 2013 gun-violence rate was 4.1, it then dipped in 2015 to 3.88, but in 2016 went back to 4.1.

In a recent study that attempted to differentiate the impact of comprehensive background checks (CBC), as opposed to CBC which also required specific licensing for each gun sale (permit to purchase or PTP), researchers found “no benefit of a CBC system without a PTP law.”  But what if comprehensive background checks, rather than yielding no result, actually coincide with a significant increase in gun-violence rates? Oops! That’s not what gun-control laws are supposed to do. Not at all.

NRA In Trouble? Don’t Bet On It.

It’s hard to remember but less than two years ago the boys in Fairfax were sitting on top of the world, enjoying not just the election of the first President who they endorsed before he was even the Party’s candidate, but also experiencing a level of access that was the envy of every other lobbying group in and around Washington, D.C.

[image error]Then in quick order we had Vegas, then Parkland, then Santa Fe, then Maria Butina, then 3-D guns, and ‘America’s oldest civil rights organization’ finds itself in a dizzying free-fall which may be dragging the NRA down to a level of public criticism and condemnation which it has never experienced before.

Earlier this week our friends at the Center for American Progress released an internet showing that a majority (54%) of the 1,000 sampled voters held an ‘unfavorable’ view of the NRA, with 57% saying that corporations should not provide benefits to NRA members. To be fair, the polling company, GBA Associates, works for Democratic candidates, and the respondents’ political leanings were more blue than red, which certainly skews the results somewhat. On the other hand, if this survey is at all representative of the current national mood about guns, the NRA has some catch-up work to do, because even Republican-leaning voters are expressing unease about the current stance and direction of the gun-rights organization.

The real issue, of course, is whether the NRA is feeling this discontent here it counts most – in the bottom line.  In 2016, the organization’s total revenue was $366,889,703, of which $181,265,880 came from membership dues and event revenues and $124,433,466 represented contributions (along with some $28M in advertising fees, etc.) For 2015, total revenue was $336 million, derived from $180M in dues and revenues and $95M from contributions.

Unfortunately, as impressive as these numbers appear, digging a bit below the surface shows that the emperor may be starting to lose some of his clothes. Revenue from dues are flat, which means that membership isn’t increasing. And while contributions increased substantially from year to year, other revenue vehicles, such as their vaunted Carry Guard insurance program, isn’t ringing bells at all. In fact, what has really created a storm cloud on the group’s financial horizon is their inability to put together a liability insurance package covering training and media communications, both of which could cause significant financial problems in the years ahead.

Don’t get me wrong.  The NRA happens to be without doubt the best membership organization of all time when it comes to the care and feeding of its members. I also belong to the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society and the National Parks Foundation. Know how often I hear from those groups?  Once or twice a year. How often do I hear from Wayne-o or Chris Cox?  Multiple times every day. Anyone who wants to believe that the NRA is teetering around on its last legs is somewhere in the middle of a dream sequence that has no reality behind it at all.

Even if it turns out that the House goes from red to blue because a strong gun-control message works in swing districts here and there, this doesn’t mean that a new, gun-control alignment will suddenly appear on Capitol Hill.  Right now, the Blue Dog Coalition, a Congressional group which calls themselves ‘conservative Democrats,’ has 18 members, of whom several, in particular Mike Thompson from California, have been fighting the good fight for gun reforms over the last several years. But to win back the House, this group would find themselves augmented by additional members coming from districts where gun control will never be the order of the day.

Like it or not, a majority of Americans believe that a gun represents a good thing to have around the house. This trend didn’t reverse when Democrats last controlled the Hill, and I wouldn’t be quite so quick to consign our Fairfax friends to the ash-heap of history – there are still lots of Americans around who love their guns.

Here We Go Again: More ‘Fake News’ From Gun-control Nation.

I really hate to use the phrase ‘fake news,’ but the recent attempts by Gun-control Nation to rev up the noise level, first Butina, then plastic guns, seems to me increasingly to embrace a narrative which is simply not true. First, we had a big ta-ra-rum about the alleged backdoor funneling of Russian money to the Trump campaign via the NRA; now we have the bigger ta-ra-rum about how plastic guns are a national security threat.

[image error]Today we’re back to Butina again in the form of a Buzzfeed story making its rounds through Gun-control Nation, a story which alleges that Butina and her boyfriend, a sleazy so-called political consultant named Paul Erickson, were laundering all kinds of dough as part of a “Russian campaign to influence American politics.”  Federal investigators have now leaked the fact that they are looking at the transfer of more than $100,000 from Butina’s Russian bank account to American accounts, much of the money then pulled out from ATM’s and spent God knows where or how.

What does all of this have to do with Russia and the NRA?  Practically speaking, next to nothing. First of all, the amount of money handled by Butina, no matter where it went, is chump change to the point that if the Russians thought they would get an inside edge with Trump by using the NRA as a cash conduit to his campaign, they never bothered to ask themselves how much political campaigns actually cost.

And by the way, the $30 million which the boys in Fairfax gave Trump may have represented about 9% of all the money he raised but taking that much dough out of the NRA piggy bank didn’t even dent the balance sheet of America’s first civil-rights organization at all. Know how much money the NRA was sitting on at the end of 2016?  Try over $200 million bucks, and that was after giving The Donald his $30 million rake-off, okay?

In other words, the NRA needs to fool around with illegal Russian money like it needs a hole in its head. And despite what Mother Jones thinks, the fact that Butina helped pay for a bunch of NRA supporters and stooges to go to a fashion show in Moscow, from the point of ‘influencing’ the election, doesn’t count for zip. The NRA goes out of its way to encourage foreign gun owners and foreign gun makers to get involved with the domestic firearms market. After all, the NRA’s job is to build support for private gun ownership, remember?

The most interesting aspect of the latest Butina noise from Gun-control Nation is that, if anything, the Buzzfeed story contradicts the idea of Butina and Erickson acting as conduits for Russian influence over the election because almost all of the suspicious cash transfers being tracked by investigators took place after November 2016. Here’s a Buzzfeed quote: “In summer 2017, the two made about $93,000 in wires, checks, transfers, and cash transactions that were deemed suspicious, including more deposits to Butina’s Russian account.” What do these transfers have to do with the election? Not one thing, as in nothing.

The story goes on to say that Butina’s handling of cash, including paying a D.C. limo service, is not only being examined by banking investigators, but is also being look at by ‘counterintelligence officials’ who want to figure out how the funds were used. This little twit, Maria Butina, is the subject of a counterintelligence operation? If that’s really true, then I have to agree with Trump when he said that the intelligence agencies’ claim about Russian interference were running the flag up the wrong pole.

I’m not saying that the Russians didn’t try to tilt the election towards Trump – the evidence is overwhelming that something was going on. But if Gun-control Nation wants to really do something constructive about gun violence, get real and start talking about something which matters and stop spending time on Maria Butina and plastic guns.

Want To End Gun Violence? Switch To Knives And Clubs.

Every once in a while, I find myself unable to understand why some of my friends in the public health research community keep doing the same gun research over and over again. The latest example comes from two very distinguished researchers, Anthony Braga and Philip Cook, who spent a good part of last year analyzing gun injuries in Boston which the cops believed were all associated with crimes. After examining all the police reports, as well as coroner reports (for the injuries which turned out to be fatal) covering 592 shootings between 2010 and 2014, the researchers reached an astonishing conclusion: the more powerful the caliber involved in the attack, the better chance that the victim would wind up dead.

[image error]             To their credit, Braga and Cook at least admit that they aren’t exactly tilling new ground. The notes cite a number of other studies which say the same thing, beginning with Zimring’s classic study published in 1972. So how is it that 45 years later, Braga and Cook come up with the same results that Zimring previously published, but nevertheless, feel the necessity to say the same thing again? Because over the years since Zimring’s work first appeared, public health gun research is increasingly designed to substantiate the development and/or implementation of more gun regulations, which means that most public health gun studies end up suggesting, supporting or endorsing various gun-control laws.

The reason we suffer from an inordinate amount of gun violence, is because our regulatory system is set up to focus primarily on the behavior of people who own and use guns, rather than on the design and lethality of guns themselves. And what has happened in the nearly 50 years since Zimring first published his seminal article, is that the gun industry has introduced technologies which allow them to manufacture and sell highly-concealable guns which also happen to be extremely lethal because the alloys and polymers now used to make guns can withstand much higher pressures from much more powerful shells.

Guns like the Glock Model 43 or the Sig Model 938 didn’t exist when Zimring did his research.  These guns fire a standard, military round – 9mm – but are no bigger and weigh little more than a droid. The whole point of the gun industry is to make consumers feel that carrying a tiny, but extremely lethal gun will not only protect them from all sorts of bad things, but can be stuck into their pocket and carried around like any other consumer item – no fuss, no mess, no bother at all.

When Zimring conducted his 1972 study, most of the attacks involved .22-caliber guns, with some .32 and .38 calibers, but nowhere did he find many crime guns chambered for 9mm, 40 S&W (which wasn’t even invented in 1972) or 45acp. These are now standard street calibers, and the only reason that .22LR ammunition sells as much as it does is because: a) it’s cheap, and, b) it’s also used in rifles for target shooting and sport.

What conclusion did Braga and Cook come up with once they learned that highly-lethal handgun calibers are now ‘standard issue’ in the street? According to them, their research “suggests that effective regulation of firearms could reduce the homicide rate.”  And what kind of regulation are they talking about? Regulating what kind of guns can be made and sold, because “simply replacing larger-caliber guns with small caliber guns with no change in location or number of wounds would have reduced the gun homicide rate by 39.5%.” To which Braga and Cook add one more remarkable line: “It is plausible that larger reductions would be associated with replacing all types of guns with knives or clubs.”

With all due respect to my friends Braga and Cook, I get the distinct impression that this entire article was written tongue in cheek. I mean, are we reduced to talking about effective gun regulations based on requiring the substitution of knives and clubs? Maybe so.

So What If Ghost Guns Make It Impossible To Regulate Guns?

I’d like to congratulate my friends in the gun control movement for getting everyone so riled up over this completely phony issue of 3-D, plastic guns that even the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said he would ‘look into it,’ and the Washington Post published a major editorial saying that by letting Cody Wilson post his 3-D drawings on the internet, ‘carnage’ was a step away.

[image error]             Why doesn’t WaPo publish an editorial saying that they have ‘proof’ Martians have landed at Area 51?  It would have the same degree of honesty and credibility as saying that “Ghost guns are already a problem; they are used not just by lone shooters but as part of criminal enterprises.”

In fact, these guns haven’t been used by anybody because they don’t work. Not only don’t they work, but the first thing you have to do after downloading Wilson’s blueprint, is to glue a 6-ounce piece of steel into the receiver which makes the gun detectable by even the most primitive security scanners, a point somehow completely missed by some sheriff who wrote a separate op-ed for WaPo warning everyone about the danger posed by ghost guns.

When it comes to molding public opinion, nobody on either side ever concerns themselves with narratives based on facts. However, this so-called threat to national security has finally given the gun-control gang an issue around which they can mobilize public opinion and win a hot-air battle against the gun-nut bunch. Which brings up a question: To the degree that Cody Wilson’s own rhetorical flourishes about ending government gun regulations of all kinds might actually come true, what would be the effect if the current regulatory environment defined by the Gun Control Act of 1968 went away?

First of all, it would mean that several thousand ATF staffers would be out of work – no great loss. It would also mean that the public health gun researchers at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and elsewhere would have to find some other topic to justify their whining about not having enough research funds to explain why gun laws reduce gun violence – also no great loss. But would the ability of someone to buy a gun with no more legal concerns than what’s involved in buying a Hershey bar lead to total carnage and a national security threat?

Let me begin by breaking the news to my gun-control friends. If I could walk into a gun shop tomorrow  and buy a gun without having to fill out any paperwork at all, it would never occur to me to do anything illegal or inappropriate with that gun. I’m not a law-abiding citizen because I own guns; I’m law-abiding because I just am. And so are just about everyone else in America whether they own guns or not. The U.S. happens to be an extraordinarily law-abiding country and the one category where we do rank above everyone else is automobile theft, which happens to be a function of the fact that just about every one of us owns a car.

You would think the way my friends in the gun-control gang lament gun violence, that everyone who commits a violent act against someone else is someone who has gotten their ‘wrong hands’ on a gun.  In fact, of the more than 1 million arrests made each year for aggravated assault, less than 7 percent try to beat the sh*t out of someone else by using a gun. So how come the other million who really try to hurt another person don’t use a gun? It’s not like they can’t get their hands on a gun, right? Guns are all over the place.

Sooner or later the sturm und drang over ghost guns will die down because nothing stays in the middle of the 24/7 news cycle for more than a week. Which means the gun-control gang will have to find a different way to rile everyone up. Which means they’ll give me a new topic to write about. I can’t wait.

Does The 2nd Amendment Protect Carrying A Gun Outside The Home?

While my friends in the gun-control community continue to go ga-ga over something as silly and unimportant as plastic guns, a decision just came down from the 9th Circuit Federal Court which could have a much greater impact on the whole issue of gun violence and how America will and will not regulate guns.  I am referring to an appeal brought before the Court by a resident of Hawaii, George Young, who was denied an application both to openly a gun as well as to carry the same gun concealed.

[image error]             Basically, what the Court said in a 2 – 1 opinion, was that the State of Hawaii couldn’t have it both ways. Either they had to let Young carry a weapon outside the home openly, or they had to let him carry his weapon concealed. But to deny him any ability to leave his home armed was to deny his 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ The Court found that Hawaii’s statute denying carrying of weapons except in cases of engaging in ‘protection of life and property’ was too vague and could not sustained under current 2nd-Amendment interpretations, up to and including the Heller decision rendered in 2008.

In fact, Scalia’s 2008 Heller opinion specifically avoided the issue of carrying a gun outside the home, because the D.C. law which Heller appealed only dealt with whether or not a resident of the District could keep a loaded, self-defense gun in the home. The relevant section in the 2nd Amendment is the phrase, ‘keep and bear arms,’ with decisions since 2008 coming down on both sides of this issue when deciding whether ‘keep’ and ‘bear’ refer to only inside the home or outside the home as well.

If you go back and read Scalia’s Heller opinion, what I find interesting is that virtually the entire 20,000-word text is devoted to historical and legal discussions about the words ‘keep’ and ‘bear.’  On the other hand, the word ‘arms’ is given very short shrift, Scalia dispensing with it altogether by noting that modern military weapons, like an M-16 rifle, could lie outside of 2nd-Amendment protection because such a gun isn’t commonly found in the home (page 54 et. seq.) In other words, for purposes of defining the types of weapons which fall under 2nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ Scalia is basically saying that a gun used by the military may, in fact, be what he calls a ‘dangerous and unusual’ weapon, which should not be owned by civilians at all.

If my friends in the gun-control community decide to appeal the 9th Circuit’s ruling, which I’m sure they will, and/or if the issue of 2nd Amendment protection for carrying a gun outside the home finally arrives at the doorstep of the Supreme Court, perhaps some consideration might be given to looking at the whole issue not from the point of view of prohibiting or regulating the behavior of people who own guns, but rather, in terms o the lethality of the guns themselves.

Because it just so happens that if we define a gun not in terms of whether it can be found in a gun-owner’s home, but rather in terms of whether the gun was designed for military use and is used by the military today, then all of a sudden, the whole question of what constitutes a gun whose existence in civilian hands is covered by the 2nd Amendment begins to change.

The fact is that the most popular handgun in America – Glock – was designed specifically as an army gun and is carried by troops in the field, including U.S. troops, all over the globe. Ditto the guns manufactured by Sig, whose M17 model just became the official sidearm of the Regular Army of the USA.  Ditto the Beretta M9, the list goes on and on.

The reason that other advanced countries don’t suffer our level of gun violence is because they recognize that arms designed for the military are too lethal to be in civilian hands. How come this issue never seems to be arise when my friends in the gun-control community decry the violence caused by guns?

 

Why Not Make A Big Deal Out Of ‘Ghost Guns?’ Got Something Better To Do?

Today, in a rare show of unanimity, the Giffords group, Everytown and Brady all got together to announce they would be going into federal court in Texas to stop a threat both to public safety and national security because  kid named Cody Wilson, who owns a company called Defense Distributed, can put plans online which show how to build a plastic gun. Not surprisingly, Senator Chuck Schumer is getting ready to introduce a bill that will prevent Cody and others from posting plastic gun designs online, something which Schumer claims would create an ‘enormous’ danger and needs to be stopped.

The problem with all this heated rhetoric, and the fundraising exhortations which accompany it, is that what one gun-control activists referred to in an email as an ‘immediate’ crisis is neither immediate nor a crisis at all.  If you think that people can’t get their hands on extremely lethal guns fresh out of the factory which don’t have serial numbers, can’t be traced and cost a fraction of what it costs to make a plastic gun, then the truth is, you don’t know anything about guns.  And this lack of gun knowledge happens to be consistent within the ranks of the gun-control gang, make no mistake.

I can walk into Walmart this afternoon, plunk down $90 bucks, and walk out with a Gamo P-25 pellet gun without showing any kind of identification at all. I don’t need to be of a certain age, I don’t need to pass a background check, and I don’t have to worry about whether I have the machinery, parts or skills to assemble a gun.  I just have to buy some pellets and I’m good to go.  Oh, in case you’re wondering, the ammunition is also legal to purchase and own in most places, even if I’m 12 years old.

Are these guns lethal?  You have to know how to aim them at a lethal spot, like someone’s head. But they can cause plenty of damage and there are pellet rifles which fire ammunition at the same speed or faster than the ammo which comes out of a 22-caliber gun.  By the way, these guns are picked up by the cops at various crime scenes, certainly much more frequently than anything that might be considered a plastic gun.

There’s a website out there which is peddling the latest twist in self-made guns, known as ‘ghost’ guns, which refers to any gun which is built at home, doesn’t have a serial number and therefore can’t be traced.  These are the guns that, according to Schumer and the gun-control merry band, are the real threats to public safety and national security, because God knows what happens if something like this gets into the ‘wrong’ hands.

The website that has got everyone in the gun-control world hot and bothered is a site called Ghost Guns, which says it sells ‘unserialized’ and ‘unregistered’ guns, and claims to ‘help you build the very best mission ready and combat-tested weapon,’ which is just so much crap.  Combat-tested my rear you know what. And any time you see the phrase ‘mission ready’ you’re in make-believe, gung-ho land.

Here’s a picture of one of the guns being sold on their site:

[image error]

              Note the red circle that I have drawn.  That’s where you have to drill space in the frame to fit the trigger assembly which you then have to attach to the hammer, wind the spring around the sear, and make sure the whole thing works. They don’t tell you that you need to know how to use a tool which can accurately cut steel, which is the reason that what you are buying isn’t a real gun.

My friends in the gun-control community would be doing us all a big favor if they stopped getting hysterical about ‘ghost’ guns and try to figure out what to do about the 300 million real guns that are floating around. But why miss an opportunity to make a big deal out of nothing, right?

An Open Letter To Ted Nugent.

Hey Bro!  Why don’t you stop appealing to the lowest, common mental denominator and start talking seriously about guns?  Nobody doubts your fervent joy in hunting with a bow or a gun, nobody can argue with the fact that you honestly believe in 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’ But the fact that our current President uses profanity and insults to explain his positions on various public policies isn’t a reason that you should do the same. You make a very powerful argument when you tell Andy Parker that the Constitution gives him the freedom to protest your promotion of guns. But other than selling a few more concert tickets, calling him a ‘piece of sh*t’ or a ‘dumb fu*k’ does nothing to explain or justify your beliefs

[image error]If you would take the trouble to actually sit down and think through the issue of the Constitution and guns, you would discover that the most powerful defense of the 2nd Amendment was made not by your buddy Alex Jones, but by a pointy-headed, liberal intellectual named Sandy Levinson, whose 1989 Yale Law Review article first raised the issue of the 2nd Amendment as a ‘civil right.’ Basically, what Levinson argues was that if liberals wanted to be taken seriously in their defense of 1st Amendment guarantees, particularly the protection afforded speech, then they also needed to defend the 2nd Amendment’s protection of guns. Levinson’s liberal defense of private gun ownership, not surprisingly, became part of the argument made by gun-rights advocates in the run-up to the Heller decision in 2008.

Which happens to be the same argument that you are making, Bro, about the 2nd Amendment, with one difference. And the difference happens to be your continued attempt to present yourself as some kind of right-wing, radical noisemaker who won’t accept the slightest degree of compromise when it comes to the issue of guns. And maybe this is your way to keep your name in front of your fans, maybe it’s a way to sell a few more albums, maybe it’s simply something you do because you have nothing better to do except when you’re on a stage strumming your guitar.

But here’s the point, Bro.  There’s a good chance that the Congress may shift from red to blue next year, and if that happens, I guarantee you that a new gun-control law will wind up on 45’s desk. And if you think for one second that your buddy Trump wouldn’t shove the NRA under a bus if, all of a sudden, he has to make some kind of deal with Democrats on the Hill, then you don’t know your ass from your elbow about Donald Trump. Want to know how much he really values the loyalty of his friends? Just ask Mikey ‘I’ll do anything to protect the President’ Cohen – he’ll be glad to fill you in.

As of today, Americans believe two to one that gun laws should be stricter than they are right now. The last time we had numbers like this was 1993, right before we got both Brady and the Assault Weapons Ban. For gun nuts like you and me Bro, those laws are just a pain in the rear end, because neither us nor just about any other legal gun owner needs the government to tell us how to behave properly with our guns.

Which is why someone like you needs to be given a seat at the big table when it gets down to talking about a new gun bill. Not that you have to compromise your views, but what you should do is stop pretending that gun ‘rights’ are the next best thing to Godliness and start talking without indulging in the profanity and vulgarity that some of your fans enjoy, but for the rest of us just mark you down as being a big, dumb jerk.

I want people promoting gun ownership whom I can respect, not because I agree with what they say, but because they say it in a proper and decent way. Maybe you can, but maybe you can’t.