Is this an opening against "May Issue" CCW?

Via Dave Hardy, news that a U.S. District Court judge is requiring that an Iowa sheriff take a basic course on the U.S. Constitution after denying a local activist a CCW permit because his views are unpopular.

This is a paradigm case, one in which the issues are very clear. But the problems Paul Dorr encountered are those of nearly everyone who is denied a CCW permit in a "may issue" state: a sheriff gets to decide, arbitrarily, based on extra-legal factors, whether you, too, can join the privileged few and discreetly carry a firearm. One can hope that legislators and judges in New York and California have taken note of the Dorr case.

Hours before McDonald: Will Chicago Democrats obey the law?

Chances are that the Supreme Court will apply the 2nd Amendment to the states (via the 14th) and overturn Chicago's handgun ban. Will Daley and the Democratic Party obey the law or will separate enforcement actions be needed? Remember: this is the party and administration that carried out the "terrorist bombing" of Meigs Field in defiance of the Feds, not over some Constitutional dispute or in support of human rights, but rather, to build a park.

Shouldn't the press stop calling the Brady Center for its opinion?

Read a national-interest news story on firearms law and chances are high that the reporter solicited and quoted the opinion of the "Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence" (formerly Handgun Control, Inc). In the early '90s, when they got the Brady Bill passed and signed into law and stood prepared to destroy American firearms culture and support for RKBA altogether by defining each part of a firearm as a "firearm" and restricting private ownership to 20 such "firearms", or even in 2000, when the group raised over $1.6MM to attempt to influence that year's elections, this made some sense.

Nowadays, it's not too much of a stretch to claim that the Brady Campaign has effectively zero support. To date in the 2010 fiscal year, the Brady Campaign (PAC) has raised only $2,500, putting them in the ballpark of e.g. a typical Prohibition Party presidential campaign or Libertarian Party candidate for anarcho-capitalist dogcatcher.

To be fair, the "Brady Center"--the side of the operation that isn't a PAC or a lobby group, brought in nearly $3 MM in 2008, according to the Better Business Bureau. For a "national" organization, that's pathetic. The ACLU Foundation (the non-lobbying side of that operation), to provide a point of contrast, brought in over $66 MM in 2007 and the National Parks Conservation Association raised $61 MM. Things have gotten so bad for the Brady Bunch that they're having a "fire sale" of sorts, selling a mailing list they previously told members they'd keep private.

The Brady Center's political Brady Campaign has withered away to nothing, and the "educational" Center itself was in 2008 operating on what, for a national organization of its visibility and former prestige, was a shoestring budget. (If the trend in Campaign fundraising correlates to that of the Center, one expects that this year the Center will see far less than $3 MM.) It isn't unfair to say that support for the Brady Campaign is nonexistent and that the Center isn't far behind; only a single donor was willing to pay the Campaign to do what it does, and the Center is able to raise but a minuscule sum.

Phoning Paul Helmke for a quote when writing a firearms-law news article is like giving equal time to a third-party paper candidate when covering local politics or phoning a conspiracist, unscientific crank when writing a piece on climate change. It's false balance. That a group that has faded to nonexistence gets equal time is a sign of bias against RKBA in the press if there ever was one. The Brady Campaign and Brady Center are no longer newsworthy and should not be treated as such.

Hat tip to Alan Korwin for the $2500 number--it took a bit of searching to find the source.

Lying about open carry: if the small lie doesn't work, switch to a big one.

First there was talk of an "assault rifle", now the popular press is making claims that people have been brandishing firearms at the so-called "town hall" meetings concerning health care reform?

What next? Will the word "discharging" be used for carrying? "He discharged his assault rifle into the crowd"?

There is plenty of footage of most of this open carry, and there have been hundreds of witnesses. So far, neither film nor witness reports show that anyone at these events has brandished a weapon.

An assault rifle is by definition a switchable full automatic. And to brandish one must by definition take the weapon into hand. That's not disputable; these are the common meanings of the terms and to use them any other way is to report falsehoods, that is, to lie. End of story.

Subtlety: something rarely seen on an editoral page.

"The court in D.C. v. Heller erred in finding an individual right in the Second Amendment, but it would also err in not applying this to the states via Fourteenth Amendment incorporation", goes the argument by the the L.A. Times's editorial writers.

I expect such subtlety from The Economist, perhaps, but not even from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Chicago Tribune; it's thus surprising and somewhat refreshing to see it in the L.A. Times. Its readers would do well to learn from the example: "Is it Constitutional" is a wholly different question from "Do I like the consequences?"


Damon Root, writing for Reason, has given a brief but thorough argument for incorporation. Please point me to law review articles if you find them.

Why the RKBA movement turns off highly-educated urban dwellers.

A little speculation, spurred on by some of the remarks made at the Bill of Rights Day event held today in Phoenix:

Educated people, even highly educated people, are seemingly more prone to holding crazy positions on two topics more than any others: gun control and anthropogenic global warming. To slander scientists and make silly statements about the state of climatology is nearly a tribal trust signifier among both conservatives and libertarians; among highly educated urban dwellers--especially academics and graduate students--to oppose any and all forms of gun liberalization is a similar shibboleth. Try challenging either on facts, or asking the latter just where passage of shall-issue concealed carry has proved problematic. The answers you get will be amusing.

Both AGW deniers and hoplophobes deserve public and private shaming, as their positions are not rational. But it's worth keeping in mind that they're not rational and tailoring one's rhetoric accordingly. One cannot say that anticapitalists have dominated environmentalism, but they're screaming the loudest. To the uninitiated, that is what environmentalism is: opposition to humanity, liberty, civilization, and markets. This is why it's important to be the visible environmentalist. You want your peers to think of you, and not the unwashed, half-deranged lifestyle-activist, when they think of people who take seriously scientific studies of Man's effect on the climate (or, more generally, his fouling of the nest).

The RKBA movement has its own lifestyle-activists, who signal clearly (if incorrectly) to the uninitiated that people who advocate liberalization of firearms laws are Not Like Us. Do you know the type? Think of the person who believes that the purpose of the right to keep and bear arms is to give a universal heckler's veto over the government by means of murder. Some official isn't following your ab initio interpretation of the Constitution? Shoot him and put his "head on a pike", to borrow the phrase I heard one too many times tonight. A thousand Carl Dregas, that's the ticket. Every man, woman, and child, rightly or wrongly, can draw a line in the sand and shoot officials who cross it. Natural rights all the way!

I propose a rule. You can call it Kalafut's Rule, if you will. If you consider yourself a respectable person, do not hide your beliefs. It is better that your neighbors and colleagues think of you and not the screaming, outlandish bozo when they read of activism concerning this issue or that, or when they hear that a bill that you would support has been introduced at the legislature. If you've taken the only honest position on global warming that isn't "I don't know enough", be the visible supporter of the AGW hypothesis. And if you support RKBA, be the visible RKBA supporter.

Joe Horn, Texas, Alan Korwin give Castle Doctrine a bad name

UPDATE: Korwin ain't so bad.

A runaway jury in Texas refused to indict Joe Horn ("I'm gonna kill 'em!...Move, yer dead!") on any criminal charges whatsoever related to his murder of two men burglarizing his neighbor's home. Grand jury proceedings in Texas are sealed, so we do not and likely will never know the reasoning, but the matter is already being linked in the popular press (one example) to Castle Doctrine laws removing the duty to retreat during a criminal invasion of one's home or business, no doubt in part because Horn himself mentioned the change in the law to the 911 operator.

This despite Horn's actions (even according to the law's author) not falling under castle doctrine protection. The letter of the law is clear: the Castle Doctrine bill creates a presumption that a person breaking into one's home or business is there to cause, primarily or incidentially, bodily harm, and clarifies (as the Supreme Court affirmed for Federal case law, way back in 1895) that there is no duty to retreat.

What it does not do is allow a man, in a fit of stupid machismo or for any other reason, on witnessing a crime in which others are not in iminent danger, to load his firearm, shout "Move yer dead!", seek out trouble, and shoot the culprits in the back. The Castle Doctrine only applies if trouble comes to the shooter! Nevertheless, that the Castle Doctrine gives semi-literate rubes like Horn or W.C. Frosch even the idea that they have a right to shoot people not invading their homes or businesses--in Frosch's case, a kid cutting across his lawn--will make it all the more difficult to get Castle bills passed in states which impose a statutory duty to retreat.

Alan Korwin, publisher of Gun Laws of the United States, isn't making the situation any better. From his 17 July 2007 "Page Nine" e-newsletter:

News reports generally failed to mention that the two dead criminals, caught red-handed burglarizing Horn's neighbor's house, were in the country illegally. News media policy is to ignore or avoid the illegal immigration aspects of crimes when possible, because they believe it might expose a stereotype, create a stereotype, or is not important, though nearly everyone who reads their tripe believes it is very important. Reasons for the difference in opinion are unclear.

Texas has robust "Castle Doctrine" laws protecting homeowners and the innocent, and making things tough on home invaders even if they aren't illegal aliens committing crimes here. Horn said on tape that he knew of those laws, and the officer on the other end of the line acknowledged the laws were in place, but tried in many ways to convince Horn to do absolutely nothing and let the burglars rob his neighbor.

Korwin may publish books on the law, but he's no lawyer, and it shows. That Hown knows of the Castle Doctrine law does not justify--legally or morally--his actions when the Castle Doctrine simply does not apply. Yet nevertheless Korwin is taken, popularly, to be an authority on firearms law. His invocation of the Castle Doctrine will make it more difficult, at the margin, for us to get these laws passed elsewhere.

As will, of course, his stressing of the burglars' immigration status. To imply that their status is a mitigating factor for Horn is vile, moreover, even a half-wit understands that Horn could not have possibly known the burglars were unlawfully in the country when he shot them in the back. To answer Korwin's question, the reason newsmen didn't report the burglars' immigration status is because, legally, it doesn't matter, and morally, it doesn't matter. That "illegals have no rights" is a right-wing myth, the product of Mugabe-like or Hitler-like imaginations. "If you shoot someone in the back, and it turns out that they don't have a government permission slip, that makes it OK." The press, better educated than the plebs, understand that immigration is irrelevant and have no obligation to report on it simply because morons and bigots think it's important.

Korwin is reminding me in some ways of Jack "Pal" Smurch from Thurber's classic The Greatest Man In The World. What kind of self-respecting, thoughtful human being thinks immigration status of the victim is relevant to the question of whether or not someone should be indicted for murder? The same sort of childish lout who writes of a "lamestream media" and who believes Oregon Petition hype about anthropogenic global warming. Flying around the world didn't make Smurch anything but the boor he was, and likewise publishing success hasn't transformed Korwin into Eugene Volokh or Dave Hardy. A boor can become successful in business, he can be dressed up in a suit, given awards, receive ass-kissing admiration from better men, but he remains a boor. Class doesn't follow success.

Lack of class has hurt the pro-RKBA movement in the past and, at the margin, will continue to hurt it. Unfortunately, there's no good way to even induce the classless to clean up.

Machine guns and all that.

It's been an interesting (lunar) month for me, in that I've had my mind changed about two matters of policy by some method other than study. First Joe Cobb has me thinking that free banking is sensible even most of its advocates like it for merely ideological reasons, now today, after having, thanks to a very classy RKBA enthusiast at the Tucson Rifle Club who hosted a group from the University, fired a full automatic, I have changed my mind in a sense, having formed opinions about the matter.

1. Federal regulation of full automatics is working, but needs some liberalization.
   
   Opponents of the right to keep and bear arms love to point out when a pro-RKBA line of thought would allow for ownership of "machine guns", or even to ask RKBA proponents if people should be allowed to own full automatics. People already own full automatics, and it hasn't been a problem. The answer should not be "no", the answer should be "yes, they already do, and it hasn't been a problem." Why ban something that hasn't been a problem. That was my position already, but I add to it a corollary: firearms regulation is largely about matters of degree, but the amount of mischief one could carry out with a submachine gun like the MP5 is not so much greater than that of an ordinary pistol to justify moving to an outright ban. Likewise the switch from AR-15 to M-16 gives but a marginal advantage. Keep pulling that trigger, and one can empty a clip quite quickly.
   
   What sort of liberalization do I have in mind? Allowing the three-shot burst version of the M-16 (currently in use by the military, as leadership found full auto to be troublesome!) would make sense; from one shot to three, as opposed to the spraying that keeps hoplophobes up at night, is a matter of nearly infinitesimal degree, yet it restores the civilian parity with the military that is such an important part of American tradition. More importantly, lower the cost of all full autos by allowing some new ones on the market. The high cost of a full auto resulting from the ban on sale of any manufactured after 1986 is almost surely one of the reasons legally owned machine guns are just about the least likely firearms to be used in crime. People who own full autos tend to be characterized by affluence, not anomie. But the cost is also surely keeping most responsible shooters out of the market unnecessarily, threatening the very concept of a well regulated militia and perhaps making the notion that there is no legitimate civilian use of a fully automatic weapon a self-fulfilling claim. $2000 is a good enough barrier to entry; $12000 is excessive.
   
   
2. The police should not have fully automatic weapons, or at the very least should be prohibited from using them except when engaging criminals with fully automatic weapons.
   
   The difference between a fully automatic and a semiautomatic weapon is largely a matter of degree, yes, but the difference is important in some situations. Favored by the militaristic SWAT teams which have become common without enough citizen protest or discussion, submachine guns like the MP5, especially when equipped with high-tech "red dot sights", are so comfortable and easy to use that they make killing the target like playing a videogame. To a maniac hell-bent on murder, it doesn't make a difference, but the delay, the necessity to pull a semi-automatic weapon's trigger once per shot, may very well keep testosterone-pumped, three-quarter-witted "peace officers" from making deadly mistakes, especially during the no-knock, military-style raids which should be illegal in the first place.
   

A quick hit

From this week's Chronicle, letters section.

To the Editor:

Alan Contreras's "In Defense of Self-Defense" (On the Contrary, The Chronicle Review, June 15) is so uninformed by facts and so drenched in NRA-produced fictions (you don't have to be a card-carrying member to be fully deluded by the nonsense the organization has spread) ... that one has to ask why The Chronicle felt it a good idea to print it. Some bizarre notion of the need for balance in the wake of the several intelligent criticisms of guns in American culture The Chronicle printed in the wake of the Virginia Tech murders?

The problem in this reasoning, of course, is that there is no need for balance when one side of a debate bases its position on facts, and the other depends fundamentally on myths and simplistic and obfuscating moral binaries. The framing of good guys versus bad guys, central to Contreras's argument, is simply not helpful in considering the dangers of guns to people. ... Good people sometimes drop their guns, which discharge — harming or killing others. Good people have their guns stolen by bad people. ...

The evidence that good people with guns do a significant amount of harm is very strong. But the evidence that they do much good with their firearms is flimsy and challenged by data. The use of guns in legal acts of self-defense against crime is actually quite rare. ...

Sorry, Mr. Contreras, but your "right" to compensate for your lack of biceps does not trump the societal imperative of a safe environment for all those who are endangered by your gun every day that you carry it. Only when the gun issue stops being presented within the simplistic frame of individual liberty and self-defense, and is reframed in a public-health perspective — where the dangers presented by guns to everyone in their vicinity, including their legal owners, are the focus — will we have an adequate and sane policy on guns.

And only when media sources work harder to disentangle themselves from the fiction that this is a legitimately two-sided argument, with reasonable cases to be made pro and con, will we get a real effort to solve the problem of guns in American society. The bottom line is that there is no rational case to be made for the omnipresence of guns in American society. ...

Alexander Riley
Associate Professor of Sociology
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, Pa.

Riley is right about one thing: this is not a legitimately two-sided argument. The case for self-defense is supported by both ethics and the statistics; the case against has to do with painting the opposition as being deluded by a somehow sinister NRA and spreading irrational fears about guns discharging when dropped. And just how are people endangered by the mere presence of Contreras's gun?

Anyone who really harbors such bizzare fears is either too ignorant to speak on the subject or too afraid to be rational. Presumably Riley does not yet have tenure. If he approaches his specialty as he approaches this issue, he'll never deserve it.