Mary­land Hand­gun Per­mit Restric­tions Found Uncon­sti­tu­tional by Fed­eral Judge.

Happy
details from the Asso­ci­ated Press:

Maryland’s require­ment that res­i­dents show a “good and
sub­stan­tial rea­son” to get a hand­gun per­mit is uncon­sti­tu­tional,
accord­ing to a fed­eral judge’s opin­ion filed Monday.

States can chan­nel the way their res­i­dents exer­cise their Sec­ond
Amend­ment right to bear arms, but because Maryland’s goal was to
min­i­mize the num­ber of firearms car­ried out­side homes by lim­it­ing
the priv­i­lege to those who could demon­strate “good rea­son,” it had
turned into a rationing sys­tem, infring­ing upon res­i­dents’ rights,
U.S. Dis­trict Judge Ben­son Everett Legg wrote.

“A cit­i­zen may not be required to offer a ‘good and sub­stan­tial
rea­son’ why he should be per­mit­ted to exer­cise his rights,” he
wrote. “The right’s exis­tence is all the rea­son he needs.”

Plain­tiff Ray­mond Wool­lard obtained a hand­gun per­mit after
fight­ing with an intruder in his Hamp­stead home in 2002, but was
denied a renewal in 2009 because he could not show he had been
sub­ject to “threats occur­ring beyond his res­i­dence.”
Wool­lard appealed, but was rejected by the review board, which
found he hadn’t demon­strated a “good and sub­stan­tial rea­son” to
carry a hand­gun as a rea­son­able pre­cau­tion. The suit filed in 2010
claimed that Mary­land didn’t have a rea­son to deny the renewal and
wrongly put the bur­den on Wool­lard to show why he still needed to
carry a gun.

The Sec­ond Amend­ment Foun­da­tion
spon­sored the suit, and Woollard’s lawyer was Sec­ond Amend­ment
vin­di­ca­tor Alan Gura, who also won the
Heller and
McDon­ald
suits at the Supreme Court that estab­lished our right to own
com­monly used weapons for self-defense in the home, against both
fed­eral and state encroach­ment. By mov­ing the Sec­ond Amend­ment
argu­ment here beyond the home, this case promises to help expand
Sec­ond Amend­ment rights even beyond the Heller and
McDon­ald standard.

My July 2009
inter­view with Gura. My 2008 book on the Heller case,

Gun Con­trol on Trial.

UPDATE: Thanks com­menter Chris Bren­nan:

The full deci­sion.

[Hit and Run]

It will be inter­est­ing to see where this goes (if any­where) as Cal­i­for­nia has roughly the same law. In prac­tice, “good and sub­stan­tial rea­son” is a euphemism for “rich and/or pow­er­ful.” For exam­ple, some years ago I was told that I could get a con­cealed weapon per­mit in Orange County for a $15,000 bribe “cam­paign contribution”–certainly not a sum that an ordi­nary per­son stuck liv­ing in a high-crime neigh­bor­hood could read­ily afford. Iron­i­cally, that price was too low, and that sher­iff was ejected from office for it.

The good news for us peas­ants is that the gov­ern­ment seems to have finally caught on that they really don’t need to worry about an armed cit­i­zenry demon­strat­ing the pur­pose of the Sec­ond Amend­ment, for the rea­son I quoted a few years ago, but it is a good way to lose the next elec­tion. While elec­tions are mean­ing­less in terms of their impact on the gov­ern­ment, they do mat­ter to the indi­vid­ual politi­cian who losses his place on the gravy train.

The phi­los­o­phy of gun con­trol: Teenagers are roar­ing through town at 90 MPH, where the speed limit is 25. Your solu­tion is to lower the speed limit to 20, out­law any vehi­cle that has a round hood orna­ment or that can carry more than 10 gal­lons of fuel, require sen­si­tiv­ity train­ing and manda­tory annual test­ing for all licensed dri­vers, require all vehi­cle pur­chases to be doc­u­mented at a deal­er­ship (with a 10-day wait­ing period), and spec­ify the locks on the garage where the vehi­cles are stored (with their wheels removed and stored in a locked con­tainer on the other side of the home). Mean­while the most dan­ger­ous inter­sec­tions are changed from stop­lights to yield signs, and res­i­den­tial and school zone reg­u­la­tions are tight­ened with ‘no-stop’ rules so strict that even police can­not stop to set up a speed trap, thus giv­ing the speed­ers free reign in the very areas they are likely to do the most damage.

Tony B.

A Journalist’s Citizen’s Guide to Firearms Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. Cour­tesy of The Ari­zona Rifle­man.

[The Ulti­mate Answer to Kings]

An amus­ing joke about the main­stream media’s abysmal and will­ful igno­rance on the sub­ject of firearms.

…Guns will never be con­fis­cated in the US: when mar­tial law is declared, the gun own­ers will be given badges and arm-bands and sent out on patrol. As long as the Pres­i­dent at the time is a right-winger and white, the gun nuts won’t put up a fuss.

Unknown Lib­eral

Guns and Mum­bai.

India’s gov­ern­ment not only failed to pro­tect its cit­i­zens from ter­ror­ism, it wouldn’t allow them to pro­tect them­selves. Check out this para­graph from the Wall Street Jour­nal:

At about 9:45 p.m., two gun­men, slen­der and in their mid-20s, ran up the cir­cu­lar dri­ve­way at the entrance to the Tri­dent. They shot the secu­rity guard and two bell­hops. The hotel had metal detec­tors, but none of its secu­rity per­son­nel car­ried weapons because of the dif­fi­cul­ties in obtain­ing gun per­mits from the Indian gov­ern­ment, accord­ing to the hotel company’s chair­man, P.R.S. Oberoi.

On the other hand, at least some Indian offi­cials are tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for their fail­ure, which is more than we can say about any­one in the U.S. gov­ern­ment after Sep­tem­ber 11.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

I’ve seen this sort of claim a num­ber of places, but I dis­agree, because this isn’t a case of an indi­vid­ual going postal in a shop­ping mall or a school. In those parts of the US where ordi­nary peo­ple can legally carry hand­guns, the per­cent­age who do so is very low–so low that there would be at best one or two peo­ple with a pis­tol around if some­thing like this hap­pened here. Real life isn’t like Die Hard–one guy with a pis­tol going up against a trained infantry squad is just going to die with­out accom­plish­ing anything.

For the peo­ple on the spot to stop a ter­ror­ist attack like this, it’s also nec­es­sary for the cul­ture to be such that all or nearly all of the peo­ple are armed at all times. That’s not the case in the US, and I know of no rea­son to think it’s the case in India either. In fact, the only inci­dent I know of in my life­time where an armed cit­i­zenry repelled heav­ily armed ter­ror­ists was in Soma­lia, when the city of Mogadishu drove off a ter­ror­ist attack by the Evil Empire. It was a costly vic­tory, though–thousands of Soma­lis died fight­ing about a com­pany of Impe­r­ial Stormtroopers.

460 Row­land — .44 Mag­num Per­for­mance from a 1911 Plat­form.

Just learned about a new wild­cat car­tridge. The 460 Row­land car­tridge gives bet­ter than .44 mag­num per­for­mance by switch­ing the bar­rel, guide rod, and spring on a stan­dard 1911 pis­tol. Felt recoil is sim­i­lar to reg­u­lar .45 Auto, but, due to the com­pen­sator, directly back instead of twist­ing up. The case, made by Star­line, is 1/16″ longer than a .45 Auto case, to pre­vent cham­ber­ing it in a reg­u­lar 1911. Can be reloaded with stan­dard .45 Auto dies.

A $300 drop-in con­ver­sion kit is avail­able from Clark Cus­tom Guns

Press release: http://www.clarkcustomguns.com/460press.htm

Con­ver­sion kit order page with links to reload­ing data: http://www.clarkcustomguns.com/rowland.htm

Demo video: http://www.gunsandgears.tv/movie1.php?file=460_demo.flv

Guns and Gears Tele­vi­sion promises a .460 Row­land car­bine soon: http://www.gunsandgears.tv/

Photo below from This Real Guns arti­cle.

[End the War on Free­dom]

I like the idea, but I’d be afraid to try it with my own M1911–I sus­pect that it might be a bit much for a ninety year old frame.

3 Sus­pects Break In, Only 2 Get Out Alive. A Wood­land Hills home­owner shot and killed one of three sus­pects who
burst into his home Fri­day after­noon in an appar­ent attempted home
inva­sion rob­bery, police said. [CBS 2 News]

It’s pretty unusual for the main­stream media to admit that peo­ple use guns to defend them­selves. Such sto­ries are nor­mally either buried com­pletely or “san­i­tized” to remove any men­tion of how exactly the crim­i­nals were stopped.

It’s also worth com­par­ing the out­come in this inci­dent to another recent story, of the type the media prefers.

“I’ve Been to Chuck E. Cheese with a Gun”.

What hap­pens when a Mid­dle Eastern-looking man and a young black man walk into a Long­Horn with loaded pis­tols on their belts?

“Wel­come to Long­Horn, will it just be the two of you?”

The host­ess told us there would be a 20-minute wait. We stood at the door­way and talked. Nobody said a word or even looked at us funny. A few peo­ple glanced down at my belt as they walked up, but hon­estly, a new iPhone would have caused a big­ger fuss than our guns.

At Cre­ative Loaf­ing Atlanta, vaguely lib­er­al­ish sen­si­tive guy Andisheh Nouraee traipses around Atlanta and its envi­rons with a gun and waits for reac­tions. Take­away: No one even says “boo.”

In April, Geor­gia passed a law that expanded the list of places that it’s A-OK to carry a gun to include restau­rants, includ­ing those that serve booze, and those that don’t, like Chuck E. Cheese, plus pub­lic transit:

“So I just want to be clear,” I asked [Atlanta pub­lic tran­sit sys­tem] MARTA police Chief Wanda Dun­ham. “If I had a turkey sand­wich in one hand and a gun in the other hand, MARTA police would ticket me for the turkey sandwich?”

“If you’re eat­ing it,” she replied. “Only if you’re eat­ing it.”

An inter­est­ing study in the robust minding-one’s-own-business ethos that makes Amer­ica great. Read the whole thing.

[Hit and Run]

There’s a bit of fuss today about the rul­ing by the Nazgûl in the Heller case. As I expected, they took the same posi­tion that Ashcroft did sev­eral years ago, which is (short­ened considerably):

“The Sec­ond Amend­ment means what it says, just like the rest of the Bill of Rights, and we’ll ignore it when­ever we want to, just like the rest of the Bill of Rights.”

The out­come is entirely pre­dictable, of course; so much so that I just copied and pasted the above quote from a pre­dic­tion I had made on a web forum yesterday.

Pro-Gun Law Help­ing Crime Vic­tims Defend Them­selves?.

You don’t say.

Good for the Detroit Free Press for run­ning this story.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

One week after a fatal car­jack­ing in Ham­tramck, an 18-year-old would-be car­jacker was killed when his poten­tial vic­tim opened fire. Police said Michael Evans of Detroit bran­dished a hand­gun as he approached a 36-year-old man from Troy as he got into his vehi­cle after hav­ing din­ner with friends. The Troy man used his reg­is­tered hand­gun to shoot Evans in appar­ent self-defense.

The shoot­ing, which occurred in front of Detroit Police head­quar­ters at 1300 Beaubien, remains under inves­ti­ga­tion, but pros­e­cu­tors likely won’t charge the uniden­ti­fied Troy man if his ver­sion of events checks out.

Notice that the car­jacker didn’t think any­thing of bran­dish­ing a gun and try­ing to car­jack some­body right in front of the Detroit Police head­quar­ters. This case clearly illus­trates which is the more effec­tive self-defense strat­egy: car­ry­ing a gun or rely­ing on the cops.