OKLAHOMA CITY – Officials with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said their agency could lose up to $8 million under a gun bill that passed the Senate on Thursday. OSBI is already freezing positions, and officials tell NewsChannel 4 they’re looking at furloughs. Aside from public safety concerns, the OSBI is looking at how a pair of gun bills could trim their budget even more .More than a quarter million people in Oklahoma have a license to carry a gun.The OSBI issues and renews those licenses, and that money helps fund the agency.

Source: “We’re not going to have the resources,” OSBI officials say gun bills would cost agency millions in funding | KFOR.com

Good! Why would Gun Owners who are proven and certified Good Guys and Gals have to pay extra for Law Enforcement? Tack a fee to criminals for every time they are arrested, they are the ones making cops necessary.

Florida’s CWP Fees can only be used for permit-related business. Apparently it has grown enough that our fees for the 7-year license have (will) come down again to $60 for the first time and $50 for renewal.  Legislators in the past have been tempted to try and divert those funds, but they were slapped hard and told not to touch the CWP Piggy Bank.

The 1,000th person shot apparently was a 16-year-old boy wounded in the knee shortly before 4 p.m. near 131st Street and Champlain Avenue in the Altgeld Gardens public housing complex, according to data compiled by the Tribune.
In recent years, Chicago hasn’t reached 1,000 shooting victims until June. Last year, Chicago recorded its 1,000th person shot on June 4, Tribune data show. In 2013, the city hit that mark on June 26, and the year before that, June 9.
This year’s toll is more than 66 percent higher than the same time last year, according to Tribune data…
…Chicago’s homicides this year are up by 64 percent, with 161 reported by the department through Sunday, compared with 98 over the same period last year, official police statistics show. In the early to mid-1990s, homicides peaked at more than 900 a year

Source: Grim milestone: More than 1,000 people shot in Chicago this year

And the culprit will be gun, the NRA and every Gun Owner in the Country because that is the easy version to take to the airwaves and print.  Of course that the rel culprit is a corrupt city government that is more interested in retaining power than actually getting its hands dirty and fix the problem. And unfortunately it seems that the corruption from City Hall has affected from the Police Department to the local courts and simply nobody is trusted by the public to do their jobs.

It makes me sad for the good people of Chicago, but elections keep having consequences.

Will federal/state intervention be the only way to reduce the violence in Chicago?

While stumping for her mother, Chelsea Clinton talked a little bit about gun control and the Supreme Court.  Her conjecture is that the Court was inconsistent in how it interpreted the Second Amendment and that was all Justice Scalia’s fault.

I’m not exactly sure what inconsistencies Chelsea Clinton is referring to.  There have been three notable SCOTUS decisions on the issue of gun control in the last several years: DC v. Heller, McDonald v. Chicago, and Caetano v. Massachusetts.  The first two (Heller and McDonald) upheld the right to keep and bear arms as an individual right that belongs to the people and applies to both the Federal Government and the states.  Caetano, while not exactly being about guns (the case was about possession of a TASER), established that the 2A applies to “bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”  It should be noted that Caetano was both unanimous and decided after Scalia’s death.

The way Court has treated the 2A and gun rights actually seems pretty consistent since 2008: the people have the right to keep and bear arms, even if those arms weren’t around when the Founding Fathers were drafting the Constitution.

I may be persuaded to agree that MAYBE the majority opinion on in Heller was a little muddled, since the Court didn’t completely reverse Miller.

We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.’ 307 U. S., at 179. We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of “dangerous and unusual weapons.

Heller did establish, however, that handguns are in common use and therefore protected and a total ban on them is unconstitutional.

The handgun ban amounts to a prohibition of an entire class of “arms’ that is overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose. The prohibition extends, moreover, to the home, where the need for defense of self, family, and property is most acute. Under any of the standards of scrutiny that we have applied to enumerated constitutional rights, banning from the home “the most preferred firearm in the nation to “keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family,’ would fail constitutional muster…  It is no answer to say, as petitioners do, that it is permissible to ban the possession of handguns so long as the possession of other firearms (i.e., long guns) is allowed. It is enough to note, as we have observed, that the American people have considered the handgun to be the quintessential self-defense weapon.

What is more interesting is that Heller paved the way to overturn any future AWB as the guns targeted by those bans (semi-auto facsimiles of military rifles) are the most popular long guns sold in America, and therefore are definitely in common usage.  Combining Heller and Caetano – protection of guns in common use and protection of arms not known by our founders – is the big medicine to knock out virtually every argument for an AWB.

Since 2008, because of Heller and Mc.Donald, America has seen a tidal wave of gun rights expansions.  All 50 states now have a CCW provision and many states are adopting constitutinal carry.  Illinois, which was the last holdout, was forced into adopting CCW by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, who very explicit quoted McDonald in their decision.  There has been some push back against gun rights in the very bluest of states, but at the national level, we are winning.

This is where Chelsea Clinton’s statement becomes troubling.  The implication in her statement being (at least IMO) is that if Hillary can stack the court in her favor – fill Scalia’s seat with a liberal justice – the Supreme Court could uphold gun control legislation if a challenge to a piece of gun control legislation were to make up to the Court.  Chelsea seems to believe that her mother could somehow persuade SCOUTS to effectively reverse if not completely overturn Heller, McDonald, and Caetano.  I don’t know how Hillary would be able to do that, then again, I don’t know how Hillary has managed to get away to doing everything she has done, so there.

My point is, SCOUTS has rung the liberty bell of gun rights three times.  They cannot unring it.  They cannot go back and say “all those gun rights that we affirmed were in the Constitution,  we’re taking them away and giving power to the state.”  More importantly, If you want America to survive a Hillary presidency,  I wouldn’t even think about trying to unring that bell.  The American people would not stand the complete reversal of America’s trajectory on gun rights.

Given all of Obama’s executive actions, America is approaching a tipping point where we don’t care what comes down from DC, we’re just going to ignore it.  There have been dozens of law enforcement agencies across America that have sworn no to uphold any executive action on gun control.  A revolution doesn’t require gunfire.  It just requires the majority of people so stop obeying the law.  You literally can’t arrest us all, especially if local law enforcement is revolting.  I could almost guarantee you that if Hillary coerced SCOTUS into reversing Heller and McDonald, the majority of Americans would say something to the effect of “Well, Queen Bitch Clinton managed to scare five traitorous cowards into tearing up the Constitution. F*ck them.  F*ck her.  F*ck that decision, were not listening anymore.”

Chelsea’s little “if we put one more liberal on SCOTUS and my mom can get everything she wants” daydream, is a dangerous fantasy.  If replacing one associate justice is all it takes to undo the Constitution, than the future of this country is on thin ice.

On a side note.  While I was doing research on this post I had a thought.  The majority opinion could, conceivably, overturn some parts of the NFA if the Court ever accepted the case.

We may as well consider at this point (for we will have to consider eventually) what types of weapons Miller permits. Read in isolation, Miller’s phrase “part of ordinary military equipment” could mean that only those weapons useful in warfare are protected. That would be a startling reading of the opinion, since it would mean that the National Firearms Act’s restrictions on machineguns (not challenged in Miller) might be unconstitutional, machineguns being useful in warfare in 1939. We think that Miller’s “ordinary military equipment” language must be read in tandem with what comes after: “[O]rdinarily when called for [militia] service [able-bodied] men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.” 307 U. S., at 179. The traditional militia was formed from a pool of men bringing arms “in common use at the time” for lawful purposes like self-defense. “In the colonial and revolutionary war era, [small-arms] weapons used by militiamen and weapons used in defense of person and home were one and the same.” State v. Kessler, 289 Ore. 359, 368, 614 P. 2d 94, 98 (1980) (citing G. Neumann, Swords and Blades of the American Revolution 6–15, 252–254 (1973)). Indeed, that is precisely the way in which the Second Amendment ’s operative clause furthers the purpose announced in its preface. We therefore read Miller to say only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns. That accords with the historical understanding of the scope of the right, see Part III, infra.

 It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment ’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.

The way I read that is: The militia clause allows for the possession of machine guns as military arms necessary for a militia of the people, furthermore, machine guns were in common use by civilians at one time, which is EXACTLY WHY the NFA was passed.  Even if the machine gun clause of the NFA was upheld by SCOTUS on challenge, I believe that the Hughes Amendment could be overturned.  The government’s refusal to issue new tax stamps is a de facto ban on arms necessary for a militia, and therefore unconstitutional.

Two news items straight from academia:

1)

Selena Spier, a student at Pitzer College, painted a mural of a gun with flowers coming out of the barrel.  Pitzer College is a private liberal arts college in  in Clairmont, CA.  Pitzer’s mission statement is a follows:

“Pitzer College produces engaged, socially responsible citizens of the world through an academically rigorous, interdisciplinary liberal arts education emphasizing social justice, intercultural understanding and environmental sensitivity. The meaningful participation of students, faculty and staff in college governance and academic program design is a Pitzer core value. Our community thrives within the mutually supportive framework of The Claremont Colleges, which provide an unsurpassed breadth of academic, athletic and social opportunities.”

Uh oh… They encourage Social Justice, AKA Progressive Jihadism.  That is never good.  You KNOW that something is going to happen now.  No bygones will be let to be bygones.  Somebody made a public statement about something, this case in the form of art.  Now, in the interest of Social Justice, somebody else who’s opinion doesn’t align exactly 100%, or just needs some attention, is going to engage in a Robespierrian wave of terror.

This manifested itself in one student, Gregory Ochiagha, responding to the mural with a campus wide email stating:

“It’s truly in bad taste to have a large depiction of a gun in a dorm space—especially when students of color also reside there…  My Black Mental and Emotional Health Matters. I shouldn’t be reminded every time I leave my dorm room of how easy my life can be taken away, or how many Black lives have been taken away because of police brutality. This is emotionally triggering for very obvious reasons. And if you want to belittle or invalidate by [sic] black experience, I live in Atherton, come thru, let’s have that idiotic conversation.”

OK.  I’m going to have this idiotic conversation.  By “Atherton” I assume Mr. Ochiagha means Atherton, California.  A city of about 7,000 people, it is listed by Forbes as having the No.2 most expensive zip code in the country with a median home price in excess of $4 Million.  It sounds like Mr. Ochiagha grew up in the ghetto.  I can’t imagine all the police brutality he must have faced from the town’s 21 police officers.  Mr. Ochiagha is lucky to have gotten out of Atherton alive.  His experiences must have earned him some sort of hardship scholarship to attend a $63,880/year day care college.

I know, it terrible of me to belittle his black experience.  It’s just that when one dives deeper into an understanding of police brutality and police shootings, you find out that wealth, education, and class are  better predictors of a violent encounter than race.  Statistically speaking, a young black man living in the second most expensive zip code in the country, attending am elite private college is unlikely to face much in the way of abuse by police.

Given the way he phrased his statement “I shouldn’t be reminded every time I leave my dorm room of how easy my life can be taken away, or how many Black lives have been taken away because of police brutality.”  It sounds like he himself has never experienced police brutality.  He is being triggered by proxy because of violence other people, he has never met, have been the victims of.

That’s a lot like saying you have PTSD from the War in Iraq, not because you were deployed, but because you marathon watched Generation Kill on HBO GO.

Of course he’s going to get what he wants. “Spier plans to modify her mural. ‘I spoke with Gregory earlier and we agreed on a modification that preserves the integrity of the original piece while avoiding any potentially triggering content—it’s a change I was absolutely happy to make in the interest of creating a safe and inclusive environment for everyone in my community.‘”  He brow beat somebody else into changing their work to appease his feelings.

Good news is at least a few student disagreed with him:

“I love our radical liberalism. However, I’m not in love with the trend of shutting down voices that don’t align with liberal ideologies.” – Alessandra Elliott

““I actually love the mural and thought it was obvious that it was about the flower power movement/a message of anti-violence.” – Jennifer McNamara

But they both sound like white women, so their opinions don’t matter.

2)

A professor at an unidentified western state college has decided that it is her duty to render one of her students a unperson for the egregious act of thoughtcrime.

See, one of the professor’s students, a girl name Sarah, demonstrated an interest in firearms by stating that she fired an AK-47 over winter break and that she was looking forward to obtaining her CCW permit.  This last statement was not made to the professor but to another student and the professor overheard it.

This, by the way, led to an incredibly woefully ignorant and bigoted statement by the professor:

“I overheard her confiding that she was looking forward to getting her concealed-carry permit. (Disclosure: I don’t teach in Texas.) I hadn’t known we had such permits in our state but apparently we do. Or did. Students could legally come to the campus armed until recently, when our legislature banned weapons from all state university campuses.”

“Disclosure: I don’t teach in Texas.”  Oh god forbid she teaches in Texas.  Do you know that THOSE PEOPLE are like?  They are not safe for civilized, gun-fearing liberals to be around.  You can just feel her hatred for the Texas drip from the page.  Knowing that she went to MIT (because everybody who went to MIT feels the need to mention it whenever the situation allows, and when it doesn’t allow – name dropping is the true mark of an Ivy Leaguer), her hatred and steryotyping of everyone below and Mason Dixon and Lone Star State is not socially acceptable, but encouraged.

“I hadn’t known we had such permits in our state but apparently we do. Or did.”  Yes, your state does have such permits.  All 50 states do.  It’s not just Texas anymore that you can walk down the street wearing a gun.  We permit holders are everywhere.  I know, you must be terrified that they let us crawl out from our double-wides and moonshine shacks and mingle among you decent folk.

Now that the professor knows the truth about Sarah, that she is one of us.  The professor is having second thoughts about writing Sarah a letter of recommendation to a carrer boosting, credential program.  Sarah likes guns and the professor is now tempted to destroy Sarah’s chance at a rewarding career because of it.

But it’s not what you think.  The professor doesn’t hate guns.

“I belonged to a family with guns. They were used for hunting and trap shooting. I can’t remember ever not knowing where both the shotgun (a Browning over and under with the most lovely filigree you ever saw), and the rounds (little red tubes with shiny, cupped copper bottoms) were stored. They were in separate locations, as per standard gun-safety practices, but eventually they both disappeared. At some point my mother let it be known that she had gotten rid of them.”

Let me make one thing clear.  If you are anti gun, but you try to make yourself look like a moderate by talking about daddy’s trap gun or grandpa’s squirrel rifle and that you are not scared of guns because you shot a .22 at pop cans when you were a kid; that is the anti gun equivalent of saying you are not a racist because you have one black friend, and you’re not scared of black people because your black friend is a CPA from the suburbs.  Guess what?  You’re still anti gun… and a racist.

But back to Sara and the fact that the professor agreed to write her a recommendation BEFORE she found out Sarah liked guns, and now the professor is trying to figure out how to wiggle out of it while maintaining the moral high ground.

Allow me to clue you in on something professor, you lost the moral high ground already.  You’re a bigot and you are trying to act on your bigotry without getting in trouble.  You sort of know this already, because your are feeling uneasy about your moral quandary.  You just don’t get WHY you feel uneasy because you are putting your political ideology above a passionate student’s future.  You are going to stand in the way to Sarah’s career because her political leanings don’t align with yours.  That makes you a good Liberal and a terrible person.

If you had the courage of your convictions, you would have published this article with your real name and where you went to school, so that Sarah, and her parents, and all the other students, and their parents, know that if they want the chance to live productive lives and own guns, they needs to make sure that they don’t let you get anywhere near them.

You are a bigot and a coward and you don’t deserve to entrusted with the shepherding of student’s lives.

The last post was brought to my attention while Crap Diving through the Facebook page of CSGV. I would be remiss in my duty if I did not post the traditional collage of comments from the Ladittes:

Are we witnessing the creation of the Justin Beiber of Gun Control? 😀

Shapira’s work investigates what drives people to join gun-owning communities and what this means for democracy. The communities, Shapira observes, not only shape and transform individuals drawn to gun culture but also society at large.
“We are seeing individuals taking on the roles of government when it comes to self-defense and issues of enforcement of the law,” Shapira said. “What might this mean for democracy and democratic institutions? What does an armed society hold for the future of America’s democracy?”

Source: UT Sociologist Wins Carnegie Fellowship for Research on U.S. Gun Culture | UT News | The University of Texas at Austin

That quote apparently has been extracted from sociologist Harel Shapira’s  “The right to kill: Guns, justifiable homicide and the future of American Democracy.” I cannot say with certainty since his work does not appear to be available online. But for the sake of the argument, let’s play that it is an accurate quote and play the game.

[highlight2]”We are seeing individuals taking on the roles of government when it comes to self-defense and issues of enforcement of the law.”[/highlight2]

What in heck’s name does that mean? Goverment issues/controls/gives self-defense?

So, out of the gate we are witnessing an intellectual fallacy: Self defense is the inherent right of an individual to repel any unwarranted attack. Governments are not individuals and should not have the power to restrict or invalidate a person’s ability to defend him/herself.  My take is that Mr. Shapira believe in the old British Monopoly on Killing:  “The state- that is the Crown- insisted on monopolizing for itself the act of homicide” and you were not allowed to defend yourself unless you were in “situations in which flight from the scene was entirely blocked, and even in such cases one had to retreat ‘to the wall’ (the legal phrase) before one could without blame stand one’s ground and, if necessary kill.” The quotes are from the book  “No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society by Richard Maxwell Brown that I reviewed almost three years ago and is such a great little window into the mind of power absolutists disguised as gun control or gun safety advocates.

It is said that power perceived is power achieved. Governments love to make people believe they are all-powerful but Gun Rights directly sabotage that concept. Government is barely functional and quite inefficient when the country is at peace. But the moment something catastrophic happens, it becomes a parade of clown cars crashing into each other and incapable of providing timely relief to those affected. A simple comparison between New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the orders my Mayor Nagin to forbid guns and confiscate firearms in the midst of that chaos led to looting, arson and killings. It took over 46,000 troops and LEOs brought from outside to control the situation. Hurricane Wilma plunged six million South Floridians into life without electricity for three weeks and under gasoline rationing, yet, you never heard of looting or the traditional criminal activity when regular life hits the pause button. It was not that we were better behaved than the people in NOLA or that our streets were patrolled by  the 101st Airborne, it was simply the knowledge that You Loot, We Shoot is not just a cute phrase but a promise to the criminal element.

So maybe that is what Mr. Shapira means when he states we are taking over enforcing the law: That we simply refuse to be victimized until the proper authorities arrive to draw the chalk line around our corpses, but instead we will take whatever action is needed to defend ourselves, our families and even our country when the Government fails. I wonder if he used the word “vigilante” in his paper.

[highlight2]“What might this mean for democracy and democratic institutions? What does an armed society hold for the future of America’s democracy?”[/highlight2]

Mr. Shapira, a small reminder that the USA is not a democracy but a Constitutional Republic. With that out-of-the-way, what does an armed society means? Simply insuring that an overzealous government cannot suddenly impose its will by force. That the strong will think twice on attacking a perceived weakling because he might armed. That a marauding gang of gay-stompers suddenly become bleeding bags of torn flesh when they are stopped by their intended target. In summary, the best combination of both Freedom and Peace.

Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote.

And there is always our favorite version of this quote:

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

“Gun Control: A measure to ensure that guns always point in one direction.”
― CrimethInc.