Ken's Weblog

People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.

Tag: gun control

  • A rare bit of good news

    From the Texas State Rifle Association:

    Attorney General Ken Paxton issued the following statement on today’s decision by the Travis County District Court that the City of Austin violated Texas law when it refused to allow duly-licensed residents to lawfully carry firearms in City Hall. The court also ordered the city to pay a fine to the state of Texas for each day it prevented investigators from the office of the Attorney General from lawfully carrying firearms.

    “The district court’s ruling preserves and protects the Second Amendment rights of Texans and sends a strong message to the city of Austin that they are bound by the same laws as all other Texans. The city of Austin cannot violate the open carry law or any other law the Texas Legislature has enacted simply because they disagree with it,” Attorney General Paxton said. “If the city of Austin appeals the district court’s decision, my office will continue to strongly defend the right of law-abiding Texans to keep and bear arms in accordance with our handgun laws.”

    In July 2016, Attorney General Paxton filed a lawsuit against the city of Austin after a resident with a concealed gun permit complained of being turned away from City Hall on several occasions. Today, the Travis County District Court agreed with the attorney general’s office that the city violated the open carry law and should be fined for each day it prevented the attorney general’s investigators from lawfully carrying, resulting in a $9,000 fine.

    During a trial in Travis County District Court earlier this month, a legal team for Attorney General Paxton’s office successfully argued that Texas law prohibits the City of Austin from restricting lawful citizens from carrying concealed weapons at Austin City Hall.

    I’ve never had any reason to go to City Hall, although I walk past it every day. Maybe I should go in just to rub it in their faces that they’re being forced to treat the peasants as if we’re actually citizens, and not slaves.

  • Judge admits the obvious

    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.

  • Quote of the Day

    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.

  • Good response to Socialists

    Addition to the “20 Questions” Response…. S, a regular reader and commenter here, had some comments to add to last week’s “20 Questions” post, but for some reason his comments kept getting knocked off the blog. I still don’t know what that was about, but when he sent the comment to me via other means I found it much worth saying. So here it is.

    The answer to all twenty questions is the same:

    You and I are different. I will not use violence to achieve my personal goals. I make my way in the world using peaceful, voluntary, mutually beneficial trade. I use violence only when necessary to defend my life and property from violence initiated by others. Even then, my response will be appropriate to the threat and circumstances.

    You and your ilk use violence to get what you want. Whether it is market outcomes that displease you or tools you fear and loathe violence is your first and only tool. It’s quite pathetic really, how limited your imaginations have become. You can’t even imagine solutions to most problems that don’t involve violence. I typically have to choose from a myriad of options when negotiating a solution to a problem that troubles me; all you can ever do is demand new laws.

    You’re also a coward, and unwilling to do the dirty work required by your reliance on violence. So you rely on others to pass “laws,” hire men armed with the very same guns that so terrify you, give them costumes and costume jewelry, steal the money to pay for these parasites from their victims, and then set them upon me.

    There’s your answer. There is no frontier here, only a bleeding edge. Because you will try to have me killed if you can’t make me agree with you, while I will go my peaceful way and do my best to ignore and shun you. I have trades to make and a life to live. There’s really no point to further discussion with you, since the outcome has already been decided. By you.

    Couldn’t say it as well myself. In fact, I didn’t. [The Ultimate Answer to Kings]

    This was written in response to a gun control advocate, but it applies just as well to any other sort of Socialist (including the ones who run the Republican Party).

  • Quote of the Day

    …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

  • Know Thine Enemy

    The Seven Varieties of Gun Control Advocate. The right of decent private citizens to personally possess, transport, and responsibly use arms without government interference is the ultimate freedom and the main pillar supporting all other liberties. Few cultures have allowed their general population access to weapons, the tools of power, to the same degree as the United States. Instead, most societies have restricted the keeping and bearing of arms to a select few power brokers and their agents, often resulting in oppression on a grand scale.

    Despite a massive amount of historical evidence to the contrary, there is a substantial body of Americans, many occupying positions of influence, who contend that the abrogation of the Second Amendment is the quickest path to domestic tranquility. Since this is as absurd as advocating blood-letting as a cure for anemia, it would seem advisable to question the motives and mentalities of the gun control advocates themselves.

    In my observation, weapon prohibitionists can be broken down into seven major categories. Even though their motives may vary they all pose a mortal threat to liberty. [Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership]

  • Gun control doesn’t always matter

    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.