Firearms Friday: A Rambling Summary

Those of you who have been following this blog for any significant length of time pretty much know where I fall on a variety of political issues especially with regard to the second amendment. However, I still get questions from time to time regarding where I stand on a variety of topics so I have decided to dedicate a couple of posts to summarizing those views. Of course, given the day that I am posting this, it is only right that I start with the topic that seems to garner the most support and criticism… Firearms ownership.

Simply put, I believe that law abiding citizens, in accordance with the second amendment, have the right to own firearms. In fact, I believe that many of the laws in force overstep the boundaries of government and should be revoked particularly as it pertains to those that fall under the purview of the ATF. Generally speaking, restrictions and registrations are infringements upon our rights and should deemed as such.  

‘Gun free zones’ are an insane propaganda piece to promote a false sense of safety when, in fact, they merely ensure limited if any resistance ensuring targets of opportunity for those who wish to commit evil acts. This is why you are seeing so many shootings in these shocking areas. Not because we have a ‘gun problem’ in this country but because we instill a false sense of security and ignore the evil that exists in this world.

However, there are many laws in place that I support as it relates to firearms ownership as I believe a basic background check has the potential to be an effective tool should the necessary implementation of existing laws and technology be applied. I have seen too many posts noting that NICS is down and we already know that the system has not been optimized. In the end, NO other legislation should be passed until the existing measures are fully operational.

As it pertains to those who break the law I firmly believe that those who commit a crime with a firearm should be given sentences longer than those who commit the same crime without the use of a firearm. Those who unlawfully purchase or sell a firearm should also be given harsh sentences. In the end, the individual should be punished for what they did not the entire community.

Basically, people should not rely on the authorities to keep them safe when we are capable of doing so ourselves. For the great work that they do, they can’t anticipate what is going to happen, they are limited to responding to situations. We need to protect ourselves. The government can’t solve our problems… we must be self-reliant and self-sufficient and acknowledge the limitations that should be placed on government.

Firearms Friday: Executive Orders

This past week was an interesting one to say the least as the President postured in front of the media looking to continue to falsehoods of a decades old failed policy. In a press conference filled with a flood of forced tears, the President announced a series of executive actions regarding gun control. And that last word is key to this whole equation as the posturing and proclamations are all about control which was again driven home by the “Guns in America” town hall that was held last night two days after his speech.

While the discussion that night was more evenly distributed between those on both sides of the issue… the highlight for many was the statements made and questions asked by Taya Kyle, widow of Chris Kyle, who, in part, said, “The laws that we create don't stop these horrific things from happening. That is a very tough pill to swallow," This was in addition to her additional statements stating that criminals would not be stopped from getting guns even if background checks were expanded. 

However, the moment when she truly shined, far brighter than the president, was when she posted her response to the town hall event the following day on CNN. The paragraphs that stood out to me are as follows:

Cars are tools that is involved in about as many deaths as guns. If you are a driver prone to drinking and driving, should we only allow you to drive an ultracompact car? Not an SUV which could kill more people? No, we take away the drunk driver's access to legally drive any car. This is about freedom to do as you like until you prove incapable of showing good moral judgment.

In this country, we give freedom and take it away once you prove to be unworthy of the freedom we have given you. Nobody suggests taking away cars or going through a battery of tests to determine whether or not you might be a drunk driver one day.

My congressman, Representative Joe Pitts, also made his thoughts known at the end of the week following the President’s statements and actions. A portion of his weekly email newsletter read as follows:

On Tuesday, President Obama announced a series of executive actions he would take, as well as proposals for Congress to consider, on the regulation of gun ownership. The President is proposing to spend more money on mental health, though he has not said where that money will come from. From now on, the background check system will be operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, rather than normal business hours. Doctors will be allowed to tell law enforcement about mentally ill individuals, but only until they have completed treatment.

The largest change will be expanding the scope of federal background check requirements. Federal law requires a federal firearms license for firearms dealers.  Under the President’s new rule, you would need a license and must conduct background checks if you repetitively buy and sell firearms with the principal motive of making a profit, even if that’s not your livelihood.

I am a strong supporter of background checks, and I have voted that way. Two years ago, I voted to increase funding for the background check system by 20 million dollars. But I have also sworn an oath to support the Constitution, and that includes the Second Amendment. It is also important to note that these actions would not have actually stopped any of the most horrific mass shootings that have occurred in recent years.

The last paragraph is or particular note in this who smoke show by the White House. Funds to improve background checks in general and the NICS system in particular have been voted upon and passed many times over in Congress. This is a non-issue. The focus should actually be on two parts of the actions that the President would like to take… patient confidentiality should not be something that is breached. While I can see the need to know those who are mentally unstable this should also be seen in the same way that it is in the legal system… sane until proven otherwise.

However, here is the most troubling aspect of the announcements made on Tuesday night… restricting gun sales and requiring a FFL for those who sell firearms for a profit. In the end, the FFL requirement through the ATF can potentially be used as a means to restrict sales well beyond the broad brushstrokes that the president likes to paint. There is nothing happy about these trees:

Thanks to a carefully drafted statute enacted in 1986, the president had relatively little room to maneuver in this regard. Those reforms were part of the NRA-supported Firearm Owners’ Protection Act. They were enacted specifically in response to abusive practices by the ATF, which included treating occasional sales of personal firearms as unlicensed “dealing” or seizing private firearm collections, on the pretext that they were the “inventory” of illegal “dealers.” 

At the end of the day, the administration’s big move on background checks was, instead, a 15-page brochure or “guidance” which explains the relevant federal statutes and regulations concerning firearms dealing and summarizing its view of the controlling case law.  Even though the president cannot unilaterally expand the law, he can still instill fear in gun owners and intimidate them into believing that private transfers are now illegal.  ATF can take his directive push the envelope with marginal cases that would be ignored in a less agenda-driven administration. They may well be looking to “make an example” of somebody, especially in the realm of sales advertised online. 

Obviously, chilling otherwise lawful firearms transfers could be just as effective as restricting such activity with passage of a new law or regulation.  There can be little doubt the president knows this and why he and administration officials have repeatedly said, “even 1 or 2 sales” can make one a dealer.

Based on evidence from past practices, the administration will likely try to have it both ways – revoke licenses for “dealers” who don’t sell a “sufficient” number of firearms, but prosecute those who sell a small number of firearms without a license.  In the 1980’s for example, there was evidence of ATF revoking the FFL of a person because he only sold three guns during the year, while simultaneously prosecuting another person for selling three guns that year without a license. And during the Clinton administration, after ATF had forced low-volume private sellers to become FFLs, the agency then aggressively reduced the number of FFLs for lack of business activity. 

There is a lot of posturing by the President as he concludes his second term in office. It is almost as if he really doesn’t care about the facts or what is right, he just wants to feel the warmth of the spotlight for as long as possible and try to grab as much power and control as he can before heading out the door. Sadly, the events this week are only the beginning to a very long year… hopefully we can get things back on track by the time November comes around.

Firearms Friday: Bad Glock!

I have always been a fan of Glock. The prices are reasonable, the guns are accurate, and I have never had any issues with the firearms that I have used on the range. Additionally, replacement and enhancement parts are plentiful and reasonably priced. It is for these reasons that I carried a Glock for a while. Never had any issues and still don’t have any issue with the actual firearms themselves. Period.

However, I recently received an email from a local gun shop (not my usual gun shop) that had me a little perturbed. In the subject line I read “ALERT: Response to Glock Blue Label Program Termination” and immediately had to open up the message to find out what this was about. I was expecting some kind of pricing dispute (the prices aren’t really that good) or some other kind argument that resulted in this termination. As soon as I began reading, I knew that this was a much different scenario. Please note that I have omitted the name of the gun shop as it is not necessary for the purposes of this post. The letter to customers begins as follows:

While I can understand Glock’s concern in the matter and wanting to find some way of accounting for all Blue Label sales, the sharing of information such as this is not something that I support. I am very familiar with this particular gun shop and know for a fact that they sell to a lot of military and law enforcement personnel. They always have great prices and are a high volume seller that does everything by the book and according to the law. There is no doubt in my mind that they are in the right. If anything, this whole debate demonstrates a lack of trust that Glock has with their dealers/distributors. While these first two paragraphs are bad enough, the details just kept on getting worse:

So, this wasn’t just a letter, phone call, or email… a Glock representative was physically in the store making these demands. Furthermore, he was focused on the ATF Form 4473 which, as you know, contain a lot of personal information including name, address, birthday, social security number, etc. Anyone who has bought a firearm at a gun shop has filled out this form. While dealers are required to keep these forms on premise they are only referenced under extreme and specific circumstances… Glock’s request does not meet the criteria. Thankfully, this local shop cares about their customers, their privacy, and their rights.   

This is a matter of personal privacy and individual freedom. This is a fight that we have been having for years now… the right to keep this information private. If access is granted to manufacturers why wouldn’t the government insist on the same access? It is a slippery slope but what do you expect when the hill is covered with this kind of BS. So, I fully support this gun shop in taking a stand against Glock and I encourage all dealers who participate in the Blue Label Program to take a stand as well. We have to do all that we can to protect and preserve our rights at every opportunity and not let instances like this slowly chip away and cause cracks in our foundation.

Firearms Friday: Green Is The New Black

When it comes to firearms the federal government is very concerned with color. It seems as though they are obsessed with how something looks rather than taking a closer look at what it actually is. The most prevalent obsession is about black rifles in which they clump together all kinds of firearms, attribute fantastical powers to them, and don’t bother looking at the actual functionality of the various semi-automatic platforms. This is an ongoing problem that continues to bother many of us as the claims made are false and the solution that these “lawmakers” have is to strip away the rights from everyone.

Now many politicians are focusing on a different color… green. And I am not referring to environmental issues. They are determined to prohibit the sale of green tip ammunition which, not so coincidentally, is used primarily in the AR15 (“black rifle”) platform. The increased popularity of the AR pistol platform seems to have provided the impetus for the ATF’s proposed ban just as it did for the recent opinion released by the ATF that the Sig Brace can no longer be shouldered. In reality, anyone who thinks that an AR pistol can be concealed as a handgun has never bothered to consider the facts in that scenario. However, there is huge hole in the ‘logic’ behind this proposal as was outlined by Robert Farago on TheTruthAboutGuns.org:

“Mark Glaze [Executive Director of Every Town For Gun Safety] wants American gun owners to use ammunition that doesn’t pierce the “bulletproof” vests of police officers, but the fact of the matter is that any commercially available 5.56 ammunition will do that same job. The vests worn by cops simply aren’t designed to stop rifle rounds… Nor is there any ammunition in the intermediate or large rifle caliber range that will fail to penetrate a Level IIA vest. .308 Winchester? .30-06 Springfield? 7.62×39? All of these calibers will pass straight through a “bulletproof” vest, no matter what kind of projectile is used — “armor piercing” or not.”

Yes, this is the same Mark Glaze that made the following confession last year to The Wall Street Journal shortly after resigning as the executive director of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns: “Mr. Glaze said the movement hasn’t solved one of its signature problems: Many mass shootings wouldn’t have been stopped by tighter regulations proposed by gun-control advocates, even if they might have prevented other gun crimes.”

The ATF’s proposal really isn’t about the banning of a popular surplus ammunition, this is the back end work that continues to happen in order to limit the availability of ammunition for this platform. While it may be seen as a leap in logic for some to see this as an affront to our rights, when looking at the larger picture the common motivation is quite clear... they are trying out flank the banning of the AR platform since their direct assault failed. And, as Glaze has previously admitted, any legislation that does pass will not satiate the emotional fervor that they, and other similar groups, have instilled in many people. These types of policies just don’t work!

Firearms Friday: SNAFU

When Sig Sauer originally started producing the Sig Brace they insisted that reviewers, especially those on YouTube, not shoulder the brace so that the ATF wouldn’t get their feelings hurt. The brace was designed with a specific purpose at its inception in that it would assist those unable to shoulder an AR-15 by allowing them to put the brace on a pistol length platform and wrap the brace around their forearm allowing for one handed operation. Since the ATF was fine with people shouldering an unaltered pistol, the brace was frequently being employed as a means to circumvent NFA requirements and making AR pistols function similarly to the highly regulated short barrel rifle.

The Sig Brace even came with (and probably still does) a letter from the ATF securing the legality of the brace and the multiple purposes that it serves. Everything was fine for a while but as soon as the first video was posted of the brace being shouldered, the letters to the ATF came pouring in. The astounding thing is that these correspondences were not from the registration and regulation happy crowd, they were from law abiding gun owners basically asking the federal agency if they were really really sure that shouldering was okay.

Well finally the ATF had enough and like most people in politics they decided to flip flop and declare that the shouldering of the brace was no longer allowed. That’s right, we had a good thing going and we are the ones that screwed it all up. So now we are going to have to wait and see if Sig Sauer decides to fight the ruling and eventually we will find out if the ATF will reverse their decision again.

But, for the time being, here are four simple words for some of the gun owners out there: “Shut The Heck Up!”

Of course, there are many of us that see the Bureau of Always Totally Fudged more as a waste of money rather than an effective means of regulation. After all, who are they really regulating anyway? That’s right, it is the law abiding gun owner (some obviously a little too overzealous in their caution) not the ones that would use any of the NFA items in a nefarious way. The $200 tax stamp, extra paper work, and additional background checks are only ensuring that they know where all the legal firearms are and doing nothing to remove them from the hands of criminals. 

Heck, maybe the ones who need to be controlled are the hoplophobes who like to randomly tackle citizens legally carrying a firearm into a Florida Walmart. Those people are nuts… and fortunately now they’re going to jail. Who’s the real criminal here?

Mike Judge Was Right!

When it comes to firearms, the lack of education in this country is astounding. While the raging liberals want to paint us as the ‘uneducated hicks’, it is all too apparent that these people are the ones that have failed to educate themselves. In fact, when it comes to firearms safety and general knowledge, it is safe to say that we are heading toward what Mike Judge called an ‘idiocracy’.

Recently, examples have been floating around the internet and across social media sites making astoundingly stupid statement accompanied with the hashtag “gunsense”. These nonsensical holophobes have been spewing skewed statements in an effort to sway the uneducated. Below are the top three ridiculous posts that seemed to have gained irrational traction:

1. A “Full Auto” Bolt Carrier Group is legal!

Just because you put a loud muffler on your Honda Civic doesn’t mean that it is a race car! If you bother to look at the design of the AR-15 (semi-auto) vs that of the M16 (auto) you will know that the bolt carrier group (BCG) is not what determines whether the gun can fire in full auto. A ‘full auto’ BCG is simply a reinforced version of the standard AR15 BCG. There are many other parts that are needed to turn an AR15 into an M16 as can be seen in the following comparison diagram:

Please also note that such a conversion is HIGHLY illegal and the ATF will put you in prison for doing so.

2. What does AK-47 mean?

Mikhail Kalashnikov (K) designed an automatic (A) rifle for the Soviet Union in 1947 (47). As it is officially known in the Soviet documentation as Avtomat Kalashnikova (AK) and it was designed in 1947 (47) the rifle was assigned the designation AK-47. Also note that the models that you see in gun shops are NOT automatic rifles, they are semi-automatic. While legal in many states, automatic rifles are highly regulated and inordinately expensive.

3. What does 10/22 mean?

Unless you have a large bore rifle and 22 people lined up in a row, this is simply not happening. All you have to do is look up 10/22 on Wikipedia and you can figure out what the 10/22 designation really means:

“The Ruger 10/22 is a semi-automatic rim fire rifle chambered in .22 Long Rifle. It has a removable 10-round rotary magazine which allows the magazine to fit flush with the bottom of the stock.”

Well, I can’t expect people to be logical so let me break it down for you… the rifle ships from the factory with a standard 10 round magazine (10) and is chambered in 22LR (22). Put them together and you get the designation 10/22.

This is the same kind of crap that has been bandied about for years but now the dissemination of such falsehoods is accelerated by the ignorance found on the internet. It is this kind of crap that pushes countries into a nanny state where even knives are being regulated. The solution is not to inflame ignorance and strip the rights away from law abiding gun owners. The problem lies within the people who do not value life and in those who refuse to assign blame for heinous acts on the individual rather than inanimate objects. Fix the people, educate the public, and change the way these acts are perceived and you will find the results that you desire.

Put Them Away!

Photo from the dedication of the Brad Fox Memorial. 

As many of you have read on this blog in the past, I am not a proponent of gun laws that don’t make any sense. Specifically, laws that go after those who LEGALLY purchase and own firearms. The people that we need to go after are those who hold the law in complete disregard. This is why I was thrilled to read the news this week that a woman was sentenced under the Brad Fox Law. We don’t need ‘gun laws’ we need criminal laws like this one.

Just over two years ago, in September 2012, Plymouth Township Police Officer and Marine Corps veteran, who served two tours in Iraq, Bradley Fox was shot and killed in the line of duty. The criminal behind the heinous act illegally bought the murder weapon in a straw purchase. The law, signed by Governor Corbett in January 2013, establishes a minimum five-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of multiple straw purchases.

This law is a step in the right direction and is already having a positive impact on the judicial system. However, this law, while well intentioned, is tremendously flawed. If we are to honor Officer Fox and all those who fall victim to criminals, we must change this law and truly make the penalties a deterrent.

The first issue that I have with this piece of legislation is that it applies to ‘multiple’ straw purchases. The penalties should be applied to every straw purchase. If you buy a single firearm for someone who is not allowed to legally own a firearm, you should be put away for a long time.

This brings me to the second issue that I have with the law… the sentencing guidelines are too lenient. Five years is not enough. If someone violates federal gun laws (specifically referring to the ATF) there is a minimum sentence of 10 years in federal prison and up to a $10,000 fine. While much of the ATF regulations and NFA laws are outdated and complete crap, the penalties are in line with what should be handed down to someone who knowingly violates laws involving firearms.

In the end, the problem does not lie in the inanimate objects or the law abiding citizen, it is in the black hearts and twisted minds of individuals. These people, those who commit the crimes and, as in this instance, those who help to facilitate these crimes, need to be deal with and done so harshly. After all, we don’t have a ‘gun problem’ in this country we have a people problem and a public that is too willing to blame anything and anyone else rather than looking the problem right in the face and sending them to prison for a very long time.