Massad Ayoob's Blog, page 121

WHY GUN PEOPLE NEED TO TRAVEL CAREFULLY

We who travel with firearms need to be careful not to run afoul of the fifty-piece patchwork quilt of United States gun laws.  This goes double on commercial aircraft and triple when we travel to other nations.  Take it from someone who regularly has to go up to airline ticket counters and say, “My name is Massad Ayoob and I have two handguns,” though I try to phrase it more diplomatically than that.

A case in point follows, submitted by one of my friends and graduates. Names are deleted to prevent embarrassment:

An interesting story I thought I would pass forward. My Dad, Wife, Mother, and I went on a trip to the Grand Cayman Islands. We had a great time and did some scuba diving. Dad has some property there and we enjoyed the week with great food and company. 

 

On the way back, Dad got pulled aside after the screening. To make a long story short, the coat he had was one we used to go shooting in Oct of 2013. It had a hole in the pocket where one live round (.38) fell into the liner of his coat. The Caymans have a zero tolerance policy for firearms related offenses. He was immediately arrested from the airport, taken to jail, and booked. We had to get the US Consulate involved in this process from the Embassy and he had significant legal fees etc… A mess. They consider a bullet the same as a gun generally. 

 

The lessons we learned were many, but one is …. check your coat. Despite the fact he had flown several times (2 different trips in the US with that coat) he had a bullet in the liner the entire time. The second and most important detail to share is that he had his concealed carry permit with him in this wallet. This single item, while causing a fuss in some restrictive states with over-zealous officers, saved his ass in Cayman. This made the difference between a day or two of inconvenience and a large fine vs. a week long ordeal and possibly worse! They saw the permit as plausible reason for him to have a bullet in the jacket and also proof he was not a felon in the U.S. either. I’m sure the fact he is a doctor and owns land there and has been there 20 times in the last 35 years didn’t hurt either. Thought I would share…

 

Thanks for sharing, bro.  I shot Saturday’s qualification with a 1911 .45, which is going to be my companion for some weeks to come, with seven-round magazines.  Reason: one jurisdiction I’ll be going through limits people to that cartridge count.  I won’t have my usual backup gun, which mounts a laser sight, with me either: another city I’ll be visiting on that trip has a local ordinance which makes such accessories a crime.

 

The best online resource I know of for staying up to date on the various regs in various places is handgunlaw.us.  For you Android and iPeople, the best app I’ve seen is Legal Heat.

 

Follow Ayoob’s Law Number Nine: Never break the law. Know the law better than the other guy, and you should never have to break it.

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SCHEDULING TRAINING

Todd Louis Green, one of the brightest stars in the handgun training world today in my opinion, made this excellent point recently on his blog.

I totally agree with Todd.  I learned early that if you don’t read you can’t write, and if you don’t learn you can’t teach.  The person who thinks he has it nailed and will teach without continuing education has doomed himself – and his curriculum – to fossilization.  That’s why lawyers have CLE (continuing legal education) requirements annually, and docs have CME, and cops have mandatory in-service training.

Sometimes, though, the schedule gets in the way.  For me, February was a case in point. Pistol champ Mike Seeklander  ran a course tantalizingly close to me, but by the time it was announced I was committed to teach elsewhere.  By all accounts, the course was excellent – half of the people I shoot with regularly went, and loved it – but I was trapped in the front of a classroom in the frozen North.  I’m hoping to catch Seeklander’s program later this year.

February also saw one of the best training smorgasbords ever served to law-abiding armed citizens, Tom Givens’ Polite Society conference in Memphis.  I had been scheduled to teach for half a day and soak up learning from top people in the field for the rest of the Friday-Saturday-Sunday event.  Alas, I had to cancel because I was scheduled to appear at a trial which would encompass that Friday, and it would take me all day Saturday to drive to Memphis.  My teaching slot (and classroom slot) were quickly filled by others. The trial postponed at the last minute, too late to get into the seminar.  Significant Other and I went to a pistol match as a consolation prize.

I’ll be taking a solid week of training in March, long since locked into the schedule, and plan to make that one come Hell or high water.  I hope to wallow in new ideas like a shark in a feeding frenzy.

Just ‘cause I’m old enough to look like a fossil don’t mean I gotta be one.

Mike Seeklander coaches Terri Strayer on a weak hand shooting technique.

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SYG IGNORANCE: THE CURE IS KNOWLEDGE

Blatant misinformation about Stand Your Ground laws and principles continues to abound.  Sometimes, when you have to tell someone “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” it’s not an insult, but simply a statement of fact.

Here, Howard Nemerov imparts a much needed dose of the curative after a typical BS editorial in a major newspaper:  http://pjmedia.com/blog/e-j-dionnes-stand-your-ground-fantasies/ .

Knowledge is the only cure for ignorance.  However, when you have metastasizing willful ignorance – sometimes complicated by long-festering intentional deception – it takes repeated and massive doses of truth to fight the infection.

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Dunn Is Not Done

The verdict is in – Guilty on four of five counts, but a hung jury mistrial on the fifth and foremost – yet State v. Michael Dunn is far from over. The sentencing phase is still to come, and State’s Attorney Angela Corey has promised a second trial in the death of Jordan Davis.

We’ve now heard from two jurors, both of whom emphatically said race was not an issue in their deliberations. It certainly is to the media, though, and thanks to the media, it’s a huge issue in public opinion.

Pundits are saying that Dunn will spend the rest of his life in prison with multiple twenty-year sentences for attempted murder, including Florida’s mandatory sentencing for crimes committed with guns and shots fired.  I won’t be counting those chickens until they’re hatched. That outcome presumes consecutive sentences.  The judge, who strikes this writer as having been very fair and impartial throughout the proceeding, has the option of giving the sentences concurrently.  By some estimates, that could mean only twenty years total.  One pundit expected 80% service of sentence before eligibility for parole: down to sixteen years.  Credit for time already served in jail awaiting trial, and Dunn might be down to fifteen years, getting out of prison when he’s still younger than me.

Re-trial? Ms. Corey might want to rethink that. We know now that three people on the jury held out for self-defense in the shooting death of Jordan Davis.  25% of the jury.  That smells like reasonable doubt to me.  Some of Dunn’s advocates claim the teens were seen removing something from their SUV and hiding it before returning to the shooting scene. I don’t recall any such witness testimony actually going before the jury. However, if such a witness surfaces and proves willing to testify in the second trial, the “phantom shotgun” Dunn claimed Davis wielded is going to be a whole lot more solid, and his story a whole lot more credible, and it could turn into a Not Guilty.

If you haven’t already, go to legalinsurrection.com and read the incisive commentary by Andrew Branca, an attorney and lethal force law expert who sat in the courtroom throughout the Dunn trial, as he did throughout the Zimmerman trial.  It’s simply the most bullshit-free analysis of the issues in each case as they unfolded in court. Don’t neglect the extensive reader commentary found with each entry, much of it from seasoned criminal lawyers.

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DUNN AND ZIMMERMAN

So here I am, in five-below-zero Cleveland on a Monday morning, watching CNN’s sandbag interview of George Zimmerman, and listening to Nancy Grace and assorted other talking heads conflate his case with Saturday’s verdict on Michael Dunn in the Jacksonville “loud music” homicide.

It makes me want to wander outside into the snow. There’s less bullshit out there in the cold, clean air.

The Dunn verdict gives me no heartburn.  He sent bullets toward three young men who were fleeing from him and had themselves shown him no overt threat; that suffices to sustain the jury’s guilty verdicts on three counts of attempted murder, and for firing at the vehicle.  There is much rage that the jury could not agree on a verdict on the charge of murdering the fourth young man, Jordan Davis.  The defendant came across well with his testimony, unsupported by any other testimony, that he perceived Jordan to be bringing a gun to bear on him when he fired the fatal shots.

Did that suffice to give at least one juror reasonable doubt as to guilt? To believe that Dunn might well be telling the truth?  That seems to be the primary assumption of commentators so far.  It’s certainly a possibility, but it might also have been that the jury simply couldn’t agree on premeditated murder vis-à-vis lesser included offenses.  In his closing statement, prosecutor John Guy told the jury that the state didn’t want anything less than a Murder One conviction.  It may turn out to be a case of “be careful what you ask for, you might just get it.”

Just hypothetically, if Michael Dunn was telling the truth and there was a shotgun in the other vehicle when he opened fire upon it, the defense claim that the young men in that vehicle dumped the evidence is rendered largely moot by Dunn’s own actions. When he fled the scene, he didn’t just trigger the whole “flight equals guilt” thing; he removed from the scene the one person who could have told police that there might be a shotgun they should be looking for.  It puts him somewhat in the position of the guy who kills his parents and then pleads the court’s mercy as an orphan.  The cops can’t find something they don’t know to look for.

There was much fail in Michael Dunn’s actions.  The innocence he claimed was nowhere near as clear as Zimmerman’s, based on his statements at the scene, and the totality of the evidence.  The cases don’t really belong in the same discussion, and neither has a damn thing to do with Florida’s Stand Your Ground law.  Dunn emerges as, at best, a bad example of stupid behavior whose only positive legacy will be learning points for more responsible armed citizens.  Zimmeman remains a whipping boy for the willful ignorance of those who prefer superficial sensationalism to research into the actual principles of law and justice.

Part One of the CNN Interview:

 

Part Two of the CNN Interview:

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AH, HISTORY…

Here’s an entry promised earlier…

After a shooting, witness’ recollections may vary widely.  Add to that what we would now consider sloppy investigation – the way it was done on the Frontier in Old West times – and 19th Century history starts to get a little fuzzy by the time it filters down to 21st Century readers.

While doing some research recently on the Northfield Bank Raid in Minnesota in 1876, that became apparent. No two historical accounts place the exchanges of gunfire at that hectic scene in the exact same order. “Jesse James was inside the First National Bank and killed the cashier!” “No, Jesse was outside, and it was his brother Frank who murdered the cashier inside!” “No, Jesse wasn’t even there, and he was turning his life around anyway…”

“The gunman killed by an armed citizen with a skillful 80-yard rifle shot was Bill Chadwell.” “No, it was another bad guy, named Stiles.”  “You’re all nuts, Stiles was just one of Chadwell’s aliases!”  And so it goes.

Hell, historians agree that Jesse James was killed by the “dirty little coward,” Robert Ford, but no one seems to agree on what he killed him with. Some historians can’t even agree with “they’s own selfs.” In “Jesse James: Legendary Outlaw” by Roger Bruns, we find on page 83, “…Bob Ford drew his Smith & Wesson .45 and shot the infamous outlaw through the back of the head.” However, turn the page and on P.85 we find this photo caption: “Bob Ford, the assassin of Jesse James, posed for this photograph with the weapon he used to kill the infamous outlaw.” The revolver in that photo is clearly a 7 ½” barrel Cavalry Model Colt Single Action Army.

In “The Escapades of Frank and Jesse James” historian Carl Breihan wrote, “Without hesitation Bob drew his Smith & Wesson and sent a slug crashing through Jesse’s head. This nickel-plated revolver, Serial No. 3766, Model No. 3, was the same weapon Jesse had given Bob as a present some days before.” (P.277)  He adds, “Inquest records show that the gun used by Bob Ford was a Smith & Wesson and not a Colt as generally believed. Charley Ford said, ’Bob had a Smith & Wesson, and it was easier for him to get it out of his pocket.’ Bob Ford admitted, in part, “I could see that it was all over with Jesse when that Smith .44 slug tore through his head.” (P.280)

And some would have it that Ford killed James with one of James’ own guns, snatched from a two-holster gun belt James had just unbuckled and set on a table.  Colt or Smith & Wesson? .44 or .45? Bob’s gun, or Jesse’s?  A gun snatched from Jesse’s holster, or given to Bob by Jesse, or …?

Ah, history…

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AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME

In the last entry, I promised to discuss some historical matters here, unless something more newsworthy came up.  Something certainly did.

I recently received the following from the office of  Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. A career prosecutor with a stellar record, and always fair to armed citizens and cops alike, this former state Attorney General probably has a better handle on real world crime and punishment and justice issues than anyone else in the United States Senate. She is sponsoring Senator Cornyn’s Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2014.   Here’s what she has to say:

“Dear Colleague—

“We ask that you join us in cosponsoring The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2014 (S. 1908)—critical legislation that will protect the Second Amendment rights of our constituents while they are travelling or living away from home. The United States Constitution guarantees every American the right to travel freely from state-to-state, and our fundamental right to self-defense should be fully protected when we do so.

“The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of2014 would allow individuals with the right to carry a concealed firearm in their home state to exercise that right in any other state that also allows that practice. Under this legislation, persons concealed carrying outside of their home state would still be required to abide by the rules and regulations of the state in which they are physically present. In other words, this legislation would treat concealed carry permits just like drivers’ licenses. For instance, if you are licensed to drive in State A, but are driving through State B, you are required to follow the posted speed limits and other rules for operating a motor vehicle in State B. This legislation works the same way with respect to concealed carry rights.

“The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of2014 fully protects state sovereignty, because it does not establish national standards for the practice of concealed carry, does not allow for a national concealed carry permit, and does not allow individuals to circumvent their home state’s permitting laws. Additionally, this legislation would not allow individuals to carry firearms who are prohibited from doing so under current federal law.

“The practice of concealed carry increases public safety, protects fundamental constitutional rights, encourages responsible gun ownership, and is now allowed in all fifty states. We ask that you join us in strengthening the Second Amendment by cosponsoring the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2014.”

Folks, your blogger here thinks national concealed carry reciprocity is long overdue. Please reach out to those who represent you on Capitol Hill and strongly urge them to join Senator Ayotte in getting this important, life-saving legislation passed into law.

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THE “REEL” WEST

My generation grew up in the golden age of TV Westerns.  One we regularly watched in our home was “The Rifleman” starring Chuck Connors.  A fellow nostalgia buff took the time to splice together all of lead character Lucas McCain’s shootouts.  The body count he came up with was … 120.

Budget ten minutes to see it here:

Takeaway lessons:

My generation grew up with TV role models who racked up three-figure body counts, sometimes four at a time, and managed not to go out and perform mass homicides for real.

The Western gunfighters of mid-20th Century television apparently had bad-guy-seeking bullets. Notice how often the lead character shoots from the hip, with his muzzle angled starkly upward, and the camera then cuts to bad guys some distance away clutching their chests and falling.  Simple geometry tells us that if Chuck Connors had been firing live ammo, a huge number of his bullets would have gone harmlessly over the heads of his targets.

Those gunfighters also had time machines. Presumably, “The Rifleman” was set in the 1870s-1880s. The stylized large-loop-lever signature gun of the star is a Model 1892 Winchester.  The gun nerds tell us that the props Connors used consisted of a rotating battery of three of them, two ’92 Winchesters and one South American copy, the El Tigre.  A stud inside the trigger guard of the lever hit the trigger as the action closed, allowing his rapid spray of shooting. Of course, with this device in place, every time you jacked a round into the chamber, your gun would fire.

Those gunfighters could also defy the law of gravity. The Winchesters had open-top actions. When Connors did his trademark one-handed flip to chamber a round, in real life the cartridge would have fallen out of the top of the rifle before it came back level, and the chamber would be empty when he pulled the trigger.  Hollywood lore has it that Connors’ prop rifles were fitted with studs to keep the “five-in-one” blanks (so called because they were shaped to fit five different calibers) from falling out when he did that stunt.  Why didn’t the rifle go off when he merely chambered a round?  It wasn’t telekinesis: the stud inside the lever was adjustable.  Only thing was, you had to be in league with the scriptwriters and the propmaster, who would make sure that device was adjusted properly before that particular scene was shot.

Those gunfighters faced zombies before George Romero thought of them.  Watch carefully – in different episodes, the same character actors playing bad guys get blown away again and again.

Yes, it’s true…we gun people love to make fun of gun stuff that appears on the entertainment screens.  The hell of it is, though, those “Hey, wait a minute, I smell contradictory BS” moments come in the study of ACTUAL past gunfights, too…and unless something newsworthy comes up in the meantime, we’ll discuss THAT next in this space.

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O…M…G

Every now and then, even those of us who make our living with words are rendered speechless.  I offer you the press release:

Cabot, PA

January 29, 2014

 

Pennsylvania based Cabot Guns transforms the 1911 into a work of fine art depicting the great American debate of gun control on a mirror image set of left and right hand pistols featuring President Barack Obama, President George W. Bush, Piers Morgan and Ted Nugent.

 

A mirror image set of 1911 style pistols featuring artistic renderings of President Barrack Obama and Piers Morgan was displayed earlier this month at SHOT, the world’s largest consumer firearms tradeshow in Las Vegas, NV. The pistol set is named “The Left and the Right.”

 

Cabot Guns crafted this rare left and right-handed set of iconic 1911s over the last year. The pair are true mirror images of one another with the exception of the images on the handles. The grips of the right-hand gun depict President George W. Bush on one panel and Ted Nugent on the other while the left-hand pistol grips feature President Barack Obama and Piers Morgan. The pistol set illustrates elements of a great American debate on firearms. Fine art Scrimshander, Darrel Morris, was commissioned to carefully handcraft the art on each grip.

 

Cabot Guns President and Gun Designer Rob Bianchin had been contemplating the project for some time and wanted to use scrimshaw to detail the work. “As the guns are positioned in opposite directions, the grips show President Barack Obama facing to the left while President George W. Bush faces right,” said Bianchin. “While oriented towards one another, the right-hand pistol depicts Ted Nugent and the left-hand gun depicts Piers Morgan, representing the great ongoing debate in 2013.”

 

Nugent viewed the pistols during their exhibition at SHOT and described the work of Cabot Guns as ballistic art. “Cabot Guns treads the line between firearms and art. The medium of our art is our guns,” added Bianchin.

 

“The art of scrimshaw – engraving on bone or ivory – dates back to the 1700s,” noted Bianchin. “And the detail in Darrel Morris’ scrimshaw work is just fantastic.” Morris explained the process of scrimshaw; “Scrimshaw works are created by punching tens of thousands of tiny holes in the surface of the ivory and filling them with black oil paint. This technique takes hours and hours of meticulous labor, but it makes it possible to achieve very delicate gradations of tone resulting in incredibly lifelike images.”

 

It should be noted that the Cabot left and right pistol sets are true mirror image pistols. The left-handed pistol is built from the ground up from a block of billet steel; it is not a converted right-handed pistol. Not only is the ejection port engineered to the left, but all small controls have been inverted. Even the rifling in the barrel has been reversed.

 

A three-year-old start-up, Cabot Gun Company is based in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania. Cabot utilizes Penn United Technologies Inc. to produce its 1911s. Penn United Technologies is a world-renowned manufacturer of precision components for aerospace, nuclear, and other industries requiring precision manufacturing. “Each Cabot represents the work of over 70 of America’s finest engineers, tool makers and master craftsmen,” added Bianchin. “Our objective is to build an important and enduring American brand,demonstrating how the finest products in the world are built right here in America.”

 

Cabot Guns was launched in 2011. In a short time, the company has won two consecutive NRA National Pistol Championships. The Cabot 1911 has been described as “the Rolls Royce of 1911′s” by S.P. Fjestad, Author and Editor of the “Blue Book of Gun Values.

 

Media Contact: Robert Bianchin, (724) 524-1002 or robbianchin@gmail.com

For additional information on Cabot Guns please visit http://www.cabotguns.com. For information on Scrimshaw artist Darrel Morris visit http://darrelmorris.fineartstudioonline.com/

 

Respectfully,

Robert A. Bianchin, President

1-855-THE-1911

While I’ve never shot a Cabot 1911, they have earned high praise among those who are experienced with them.

I worry that my left-handed friends in the gun owners’ civil rights movement might take the Obama/Morgan version as an insult.  Perhaps they can come to terms with it by picturing each of their grip panels shedding a tear every time they press the trigger.

Personally, I’ve only met two of the four men depicted, and I respect them both: I’d be proud to own a pistol bearing President Bush’s image or Ted Nugent’s.

But there’s a reason why I should have the one with the pictures of the two of those men I haven’t met. Being right-handed, it occurs to me that I should buy the left-handed one with the pictures of President Obama and Piers Morgan…install an ambidextrous safety since I’m right-handed…and enter a quick draw contest.

In theory, I should have an advantage, since any self-respecting holster would want that pistol to be gone from it sooner.

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ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY

Yee-haw! Today, my buddy John Strayer and I are “one year helicopter crash free.”

A year ago  we and pilot Graham Harward managed to walk  stagger away more or less intact from what one commentator called a “hard landing.”  Yes, as a rule of thumb, “landing” upside down is hard whatever the conveyance.

We’re all completely recovered, and the scars are just souvenirs.  No lawsuits; we knew what we were getting into when we stepped aboard the helicopter.

The incident, like all such things, gave each of us involved a sharpened appreciation of the people we love, and the people we serve.  (We all got a pretty good dose of adrenaline and survival euphoria, too.)

Thanks to all for the kind support after it happened.  Lessons came from it. John had a gun in hand when we lost power, and the bird went down too fast for him to holster; I’ve mentioned his impressive trigger finger discipline in every firearms safety lecture I’ve given since, and discussed it more in Guns Magazine.

Another lesson, of course, is that our being helicopter crash free may just have something to do with neither John nor I having been in a helicopter since.  Our significant others both told us in no uncertain terms:

NO. MORE. HELICOPTERS. EVER!!!

We have replied,

bigger helicopters? With newer engines…?>

Our pilot, of course, has been flying ever since, doing contract helicopter work, and doing just fine.

But, seriously, thanks for caring.  They tell us to live every day as if it was our last.  If I had done that, I would have given all my stuff away and the funeral director would be wondering where the body is for the last 51 and a half weeks.  Perhaps it suffices to live every day as if it might be your last, and try like hell to do something good with the time.

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