This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Guns

  • A Brief Review of 2nd and 10th Amendments

    The Bill of Rights

    That small firecracker storm stirred up by yesterday’s posting of an article about a newly-minted Congress critter from California showed that this incipient Congress critter is ignorant of both Federal and state laws about everything.

    Here’s my attempt to clear up that ignorance as simply as possible.

    First of all, the US Constitution has Amendments that specify such things as what authority is delegated to the Federal government, and what is delegated to the states and to the people of the United States.

    The specific Amendment regarding this comes out of the Articles of Confederation, which was the original document meant to provide for a national and expanding, federal government. When the Articles of Confederation were dumped, the resulting Amendment designating states’ rights was created during the drafting of the US Constitution.

    The 10th Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights to create a class of powers, known as reserved powers, exclusive to state governments. The amendment specifically reads as follows: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

    Now, that’s quite clear language, in my view. It is plain English, unlike some of the bills passed by either or both Houses of Congress, bills in which gobbledygook is meant to cover the cracks in the system that come from quarrelsome parties in Congress. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/amgovernment/chapter/state-power-and-delegation/

    I will repeat it. Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

    The U.S. Constitution is silent on the dispersion of power between states and localities within each state. This means that because local jurisdictions are not mentioned specifically, then local power lies within the purvey of the states themselves.

    The other Amendment which is brought up here so frequently is the Second Amendment, which is as follows:  A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    That’s pretty clear, too. At the federal level, your right to own guns is inviolate. The most recent example of a localized attempt to overstep the US Constitution as well as state law occurred  when the Mayor of Deerfield, IL, not only passed an ordinance banning guns in Deerfield, but also included a search-and-seizure procedure with no notice to homeowners, which was tested in court, and was found to not only violate Illinois state laws by not providing due process or warrants, but also violated the US Constitution. She lost, and lost badly.

    That was the first test of this kind of thing. I believe more will follow. Prepare yourselves mentally for that, and if necessary, get to be friendss with an attorney who knows both state and US Constitutional laws.

    It was this bout of illegal activity by one person that prompted the County of Effingham downstate to offer itself as a sanctuary county for gun owners. That ‘sanctuary county’ program continues in Illinois,  as I indicated a few weeks ago, with many counties following suit and more with the sanctuary proposal on their legislative books.

    Try to speculate on what will happen if state legislatures decide to go full potato about it, and declare themselves sanctuary states for gun owners.? We’d probably have another test of both state and federal laws. That would be my guess. That’s how you do things in this country. It is “We, the People”, not ‘The Government’.

    The newly-elected and very arrogant individual Swallwell from California voiced threats toward anyone who fails to obey a federal gun ban, including dropping a nuke on you. I’d like to see him try that.

    He is not only ignorant of the US Constitution, he is also colossally ignorant of laws in general.

    The US Constitution’s 2nd Amendment is a federal law, whether he likes it or not. It is backed up by the 10th Amendment. His authority is a lot more limited than he can possibly imagine by the language of the 10th Amendment:  “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

    Bear that last phrase in mind: “or to the people”, and review the Deerfield debacle. This Amendment has withstood the test of time and the court system.

    The 10th  Amencment is quite clear. It is within the rights of each and every state government to create legislation regarding owning guns. It is, in fact, reserved to the states to create such laws as they see fit, which has resulted in the State of Illinois passing rather stringent but valid FOID and CCW laws, both of which meet legal requirements and state laws, and constitutional terms at the federal level. This is what tripped up the Mayor of Deerfield.

    I want to remind everybody reading this that Prohibition, a Constitutional amendment passed by Congress and ratified by the states, did not work and was repealed within a few years. Among other things, it provided room for the rise of organized crime, which started with Al Capone.

    It is extremely necessary on the part of all of us to be aware of these vultures and give them as much room as possible to expose themselves for what they really are.

    Without awareness of them and their agenda, we lose the very things we value most.

  • Crime Plummets After QuikTrip Stores Add Good Guys with Guns

    good guy
    Awr Harkins
    QuikTrip convenience stores added good guys with guns in Wichita, Kansas, and the results were so good that they are expanding the program to stores in other areas.

    The NRA noted, “After implementing the new strategy at its Wichita, Kansas locations and seeing success, QuikTrip, the massive gas station and convenience store chain said it would expand the policy to other stores.”

    KWCH reports that the good guys with guns will be armed security, but QuikTrip also left the door open to armed clerks in situations where the clerks “have previous experience and necessary licenses.”

    QuikTrip stores in Tulsa will soon get good guys with guns, as those stores are the targets of repeated crime.

    KTUL spoke with QuikTrip’s Mike Thornbrugh about adding good with guns in the Tulsa area. He said, “The police and sheriff’s department has bent over backwards to help us, and we really appreciate it. But there’s simply not enough of them to make a dent. That’s where the armed employees come in.”

    Imagine my surprise. The rest of the article may be found at Breitbart News

  • California shooting: Twelve dead at Thousand Oaks music bar

    California shooting: Twelve dead at Thousand Oaks music bar

    A gunman has opened fire at a bar in the city of Thousand Oaks. The shooter stormed the venue armed with guns and smoke grenades. A deputy sheriff was killed during the attack.

    Tattooed trenchcoat-wearing ex-Marine, 29, is identified as gunman who massacred twelve people during student night at country bar: Suspect killed himself after hurling smoke grenades onto dance floor and slaying cop in California

    • Ian Long, 29, opened fire at Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, Southern California, at 11.20pm 
    • He was dressed in all-black and let off at least 30 shots from a pistol with extended mags 
    • Long also let off smoke grenades to confuse the terrified crowds
    • He killed himself after killing 11 people inside the bar and a sheriff’s sergeant who responded to the scene
    • There were around 100 people inside the bar, including some who were under 21, who were there to dance
    • The College Country Night is a regular fixture and youngsters from nearby colleges can go and stamp black X’s on their hands to mark that they won’t drink 
    • Some of those inside were students at Pepperdine University and others are thought to have gone to California Lutheran University – both are Christian schools 

    Source: California shooting: Twelve dead at Thousand Oaks music bar | Daily Mail Online

  • A Follow-up on the Gun Ban That Failed

    This is a follow-up to the news from last summer about the Mayor of Deerfield, IL, a bedroom community near a shopping center, declaring a gun ban and trying to seize guns that belonged to the residents, even thought those people were following the very strict, strictured rules of the Illinois FOID and CCW. A suit was filed against her ban and it was overturned, partly because the mayor’s methods were unreasonable and also because they violated the Illinois state laws on gun ownership.

    https://www.effinghamdailynews.com/news/local_news/gun-sanctuaries-spreading-across-illinois/article_50eb5881-4f97-56d0-b3aa-feb45c264c14.html

    Since then, the resolution declaring Effingham County a sanctuary for guns has started a statewide trend of opposition to legislation directed toward firearms. But it remains to be seen if it has any real effect in Springfield.

    So far, 30 Illinois counties have passed “firearms sanctuary” resolutions that oppose bills before the state legislature and declare that the counties will not enforce laws that infringe on the Second Amendment. The resolutions have not been tested by any new laws, but it appears the resolutions would not affect how law enforcement operates. – Article

    The article includes a color-coded map of the counties in Illinois which have voted themselves into gun owner sanctuary status as of July 2018. This is partly because they are good game hunting counties, which represents a certain amount of income.

    The map also shows by color coding which counties are in the process of voting to declare themselves gun sanctuaries, as well as those which are planning to move in that direction. I cannot imagine moving back to Macon County, but the southern and western parts of the state are very attractive. And the further you get from Chicago, the more you see that the state of Illinois is a farm state, not an industrial platform.

    There’s an NRA video about it here:

    https://www.nratv.com/videos/cam-and-company-2018-sanctuary-counties-for-gun-owners-are-a-growing-trend

    The article is dated July 2018. It’s the most recent information I could find on this. It’s the vox populi* part so disliked by politicians who want to stick their noses into everything – they don’t want your opinion, nor do they care what you want, unless it’s voting time.

    *Vox populi = voice of the people

  • Oh, Gun Laws Were Tougher, Were They?

    https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2018/10/kat-ainsworth/time-magazine-gun-laws-were-much-tougher-150-years-ago/?bt_alias=eyJ1c2VySWQiOiAiMTIzZDMzYWQtY2QzNi00ZjQyLThjODMtNTg4MDAxYTM1YTU4In0%3D

    Last week marks 50 years since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Gun Control Act of 1968 into law on Oct. 22 of that year. It was the first major gun control measure in the United States in 30 years, but its passage earned this dismissive take in the pages of TIME: “better than nothing.”

    http://time.com/5429002/gun-control-act-history-1968/  “Forget the democratic processes, the judicial system and the talent for organization that have long been the distinctive marks of the U.S. Forget, too, the affluence (vast, if still not general enough) and the fundamental respect for law by most Americans. Remember, instead, the Gun,” the magazine had noted earlier that year, in a cover story about the role of guns in the United States, which was prompted by the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. “All too widely, the country is regarded as a blood-drenched, continent-wide shooting range where toddlers blast off with real rifles, housewives pack pearl-handled revolvers, and political assassins stalk their victims at will. The image, of course, is wildly overblown, but America’s own mythmakers are largely to blame. In U.S. folklore, nothing has been more romanticized than guns and the larger-than-life men who wielded them. From the nation’s beginnings, in fact and fiction, the gun has been provider and protector.”

    TIME Magazine says, in the final paragraphs of its own article, that there were hundreds of gun laws in the 1800s, and going back to the 1600s in early colonial America.

    What do people get wrong about the history of gun control? Are there any myths you find yourself debunking?

    “One of the great myths is the idea that gun-control laws are an artifact of the modern era, the 20th century. Gun laws are as old as America, literally to the very early colonial beginnings of the nation. From the beginning of the late 1600s to the end of the 1800s, gun laws were everywhere, thousands of gun laws of every imaginable variety. You find virtually every state in the union enacting laws that bar people from carrying concealed weapons. That’s something people don’t realize.”

    “When we were all colonies, there were laws in the 1600s making it illegal to discharge a weapon near a road, near buildings, populated areas or on Sundays, and that barred discharge of a gun during social occasions. In New Jersey, there was a law that said you weren’t allowed to discharge a weapon when you were drunk and the two exceptions were at weddings and funerals. In the old ‘Wild West,’ they took people’s guns away when they were in a populated area, only to be retrieved when they left. That exemplifies how laws were much tougher 150 years ago than in the last 30 years.” – TIME Magazine

    It appears that we’re supposed to just take their word for it, without any references or backups of any kind. I know that in general, after the Civil War, the South was essentially disarmed.

    However, in The New Republic’s article from 2013,  https://newrepublic.com/article/112322/gun-control-racist , the NRA’s origins stem from attempts to bar newly-emancipated blacks from owning guns.

    “As Keene notes, after the Civil War there was a rash of gun control laws aimed at disarming blacks. Southern blacks who had long been denied access to firearms were finally able to obtain them during the Civil War. Some served in colored units of the Union Army, which allowed soldiers regardless of skin color to take their guns home with them as partial payment of back-due wages. Other blacks purchased guns in the marketplace, which was flooded with the hundreds of thousands of guns produced for the war. Many predicted, accurately, that they might need those weapons to defend themselves against racist whites unhappy with the Confederacy’s defeat.” – Article

    We have to remember, also, that the reason we have a Constitutional law – a federal law – that gives us the right to bear arms is specifically because the British government not only taxed everything under the sun in Colonial America, but also confiscated weapons any time they had a chance.

    They also forced colonists to house and feed British soldiers without compensation, which is against the law now.  Read both the Articles and the Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

    While I wouldn’t mind having a couple of Marines in my house impatiently waiting for roast beef and gravy with new potatoes, I know they’d also be paying room and board to stay here.

    In regard to the Time Magazine article’s opinion about gun control, there was, a while back, a Ripley’s ‘Believe It Or Not’ cartoon about how 19th century Philadelphia’s streets were so hazardous with people shooting at each other that commuter trolleys were clad in steel armor to protect passengers. And while Hollywood glamorized shootouts in the Old West, they were really rather rare. Wm. Bonney, nee Henry McCarty, was a glory-hounding idiot whose sole purpose was to be known for what he did – shoot people to kill them.  And as I recall, the drive-by shootings in Chicago during the Depression were gang wars between Al Capone’s people and other hoodlums trying to cash in on Prohibition’s burgeoning illegal alcohol business. And there are, frankly, more drive-by shootings in Chcago now than there were during the Depression.

    The nutball who went into a synagogue and killed 11 people, including 4 police officers, had a hair up his backside, as did the “student” at Parkland HS in Florida earlier this year, the whack job from southern Illinois who shot up a GOPer softball game practice session, and the psycho who went to a hotel in Las Vegas last year for the sole purpose of shooting fish in a barrel at a concert near the hotel. They all want one thing: soft, easy targets combined with the element of surprise.

    Many of you have asserted that concealed carry laws reduce the number of lost lives. I would be quite comfortable patronizing a restaurant with a sign on its door that read “Responsible Concealed Carry Owners Welcome Here” if it meant a solid chance of stopping some warped creature from coming in and shooting the place up.

    Sometimes, I really do think these crackpots are in cahoots with the Lefterds.  Find a wacko with a chip on his shoulder over imagined wrongs (Trump won! Gaaaah!) and give him a pat on the back to go shoot people.

    And the response to that? Take away the soft target aspect by arming everyone; remove the element of surprise by posting notices that welcome CCWs. Stand up to “lawmakers” and these useless buggers whose butthurt crap is only relieved when they slaughter people.

    The hysterics about gun control are not going to quit. And it isn’t about gun control at all.  We all know that.

    It’s about destroying freedom.

  • Synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh

    pittsburg shooting

    There has been a mass shooting at a synagogue in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh.

    There are eleven dead and six injured, including four LEOs, and the shooter is in custody.

    Pittsburgh Public Safety Director Wendell Hissrich said police were dispatched to Tree of Life Synagogue at 9:55 a.m. after receiving calls that there was an active-shooter situation at the scene, in the city’s predominantly Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood.

    Law enforcement officials identified the suspect in the shooting as Robert Bowers, 48.

    The FBI special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh office, Bob Jones, said that it was the most “horrific crime scene” he’s witnessed in his 22 year-career with the bureau. Jones said that the victims were targeted “simply because of their faith” but that Bowers’ full motive was unknown.

    Bowers is said to have shouted that “all Jews must die” as he sprayed bullets, according to KDKA-TV. The attack took place during a baby naming ceremony on Shabbat, what is traditionally the busiest of days for synagogues.

    Just reported, he used an AR-15 in his attack on essentially a gun-free zone. He surrendered to LEOs only after he was shot several times; the only saving grace is no children were among the victims. Thoughts and prayers to the victims of this horrific attack, and standing by for the ghouls to start their inevitable dance in the blood of the innocents.

    View the entire article at Legal Insurrection

  • Army moves to Hollow Point Ammo

    kel tec 2k

    Poetrooper joins us this morning with some thoughts.

    I missed this back in February when I was engaged in that damned radiation and chemo therapy to kill the devil tumor in my throat. I suppose I shouldn’t say “damned” because together they kept me alive enough to still pound this keyboard although I could still be classified as WIA from friendly fire. Anyhow, I just ran across this article while surfing for accessories for the Kel-Tec Sub-2000 9mm carbine I bought a few weeks ago. It’s a sweet little piece that takes the same mags as my Beretta 92. And already having a bunch of those and a ton of stored 9mm, both ball and jacketed hollow point, it was a no-brainer addition to ol’ Poe’s armamentarium that lets me reach out beyond pistol range with a 9mm hollow point and touch bad guys with more muzzle velocity and more foot pounds of energy on impact, making it a more memorable experience for them; which is also the point of this move by the Army, making a close encounter with our bold warriors a more memorable experience for these unlawful combatants we face around the globe.
    9mm mags
    This is a very informative article, with lots of links on the legal issues surrounding the Army’s decision to begin issuing hollow point rounds for use in combat. Like most folks, I’d always thought any type of hollow point ammunition was banned by the Geneva Conventions although I’d also heard that proscription applied only to use against signatories of that treaty. As it turns out, the military legal eagles have finally stifled their reluctance to ratify that exception and the Army, and I assume the other services as well, will finally have pistol ammunition that affords a greater chance of killing or disabling an enemy contender. All I can say is, “It’s about frickin’ time.” Here’s the article from earlier this year:

    US Army Adopts hollow-point ammo M-17 M-18

    If Jonn covered this while I was MIA, please forgive an old man’s duplication.

    Thanks PT, nothing to forgive and it’s great to have you back.

  • Bredesen Spokesman: ‘Gun Nuts’ Are ‘Biggest Terrorist Organization on The Planet’

    Bredesen Spokesman: ‘Gun Nuts’ Are ‘Biggest Terrorist Organization on The Planet’

     

    A top spokesman for the Tennessee Democratic Party’s effort to get Phil Bredesen elected senator has said he views “white male” gun owners as “the biggest terrorist organization on the planet.”

    Mark Brown is communications director for Tennessee Victory 2018, a project of the state Democratic party that’s been working exclusively on electing Bredesen. The group is hosting Bredesen for a Johnson City meet-and-greet on Thursday afternoon.

    I don’t know how many of you identify as “white male gun owners”, but you people have issues.  I guess some of you Gun Nutz even support this Trump guy.

    In one post Brown wrote, for example, “Fuck reaching out to Trump voters, The idiots aren’t listening.”

    Ok idiots, listen up.  Mark Brown said in a 2015 post on his BookOfFace …

     “white male ‘Murican gun nuts” are “the biggest terrorist organization on the planet.”

    I am no terrorologist but it seems that we better do something about all these white male Trumtard Gun Nutz.

     

     

    Source: Bredesen Spokesman: ‘Gun Nuts’ Are ‘Biggest Terrorist Organization on The Planet’