Gun Free Zone

We are the children of the “right now” age. I am old. I remember my mother going to the Grayhound bus depot and paying them to deliver two huge boxes to her hometown in the midwest. This was the only way to get a package that big that far in a reasonable amount of time.

Reasonable amount of time? About a week or so. At which point my grandparents would go to the bus depot to get pick up the packages.

When I was a child working on motorcycles I would create a parts list and then once a month we would go into the big city and I could purchase parts at the motorcycle dealership(s).

We would dig through our Scholastic book pamphlet and pick out the books we wanted. Three or four weeks later our books would arrive. We’d look though the Sear’s catalog and place an order. A few weeks later it would arrive.

The other day I needed replacement “Plackers”. I spent less than two minutes online to locate what I wanted, purchased more for much less than I could locally and they were delivered as soon as we had cleared our driveway.

Everything today happens quickly. I can send an email around the world in less time than it takes to print that same letter. I can have a response back before I close my email program.

My introduction to The Internet was when I noticed that if we dropped UUCP messages in one node in Michigan it would show up in California with a timestamp only seconds different than the arrival time.

We are spoiled. Everything should be moving as fast as online shopping and online communications.

Not everything is fast

Read More

I saw this and it made the blood pound in my ears.

In 1942, when the Holocaust began, the Jewish population of Germany was around 200,000 (men, women, children). The size of the German Wehrmacht was over 8 million (not counting police). Don't pretend that a small number of Jews with firearms could have prevented the Holocaust. https://t.co/28ElFY0qun pic.twitter.com/kLQF2POp5J

— Mark Pitcavage (@egavactip) March 22, 2023

According to his bio, he’s a historian and senior fellow with the ADL.

He’s also a fucking moron and a chicken-shit coward.

Yes, in 1942 the Wermacht had roughly eight million troops.

So the fuck what.

By 1942 the Wermacht was getting it’s frozen balls shot off in Russia, sandblasted in North Africa, fighting in France, and was occupying Poland and Czechoslovakia.

It was stretched thin on a three front war.

The Wermacht was not killing Jews.

That job fell on the German Order Police, the Ordnungspolizei.

The Order Police were mainly middle-class, middle-aged men who were not fit for frontline combat.

The Holocaust was mainly carried out by Order Police reservists.  Rounding up and shooting unarmed Jews was considered such a low risk job, far from combat that the men sent to do it were not combat troops.

The Order Police battalions that conducted the Holocaust numbered at most 95,000 men.

That’s less than half the Jews in Germany and much less than the 3.3 million Jews in Poland.

So it wouldn’t have been 200,000 Jews versus eight million Wermacht combat troops.

It would have been 3.5 million armed Jews versus 95,000 poorly trained police reservists who just want to get back to their kids at home.

I’m going to quote the Gulag Archipelago:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Now do the math.

What would have happened if the Jews of Germany and Poland had been armed, and every time the reserve Order Police went to liquidate a Jewish village, five or six were killed?

How many times would that have to happen before these men just fucked off and refused to search homes for Jews?

Could the Holocaust been ground to a halt?

Could it have been slowed down a little?

How many Jewish lives could have been spared?

A good historian should understand this.

The problem is that the ADL has become a Leftist shill organization and would rather push gun control.

Fuck the ADL and fuck this guy.

I’m gonna keep my guns and teach my children how to stage and ambush with intersecting fields of fire.

The following is taken from an announcement from the SAF
H/T to B.Zh

I reached out to Michael & Associates, PC for a short write up about their firm. They have been doing great work for the Second Amendment community for years. They are based out of California.

Thank you very much for their hard work supporting the Second Amendment.

This is what they sent:

Michel & Associates, PC is one of the nation’s most recognized and well-respected firearms law firms. Our attorneys are among the world’s most experienced successful Second Amendment advocates. Our extensive firearms law and litigation experience enables us to address increasingly complex issues to help our clients. Our attorneys have expertise in the mandates of federal and state firearm laws and regulations. We wrote the book on gun law in California: California Gun Laws, A Guide to State and Federal Firearms Regulations (www.calgunlawsbook.com).

Michel & Associates’ attorneys appear at agency and legislative rule-making proceedings that impact firearms owners’ interests, assist in drafting firearms legislation, represent clients in firearm licensing matters, represent firearms manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers in product liability litigation, defend against firearms-related criminal charges, and challenge ill-conceived or unconstitutional state laws and local ordinances in court.

We advise manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, clubs, ranges, and firearm owners on regulatory compliance requirements, defend against criminal or government agency regulatory enforcement actions, and represent various clients challenging gun control laws on Second Amendment and related grounds.

Our clients include non-profit associations, industry trade associations, gun show promoters, firearm importers, manufacturers, distributors, and retail dealers, indoor and outdoor shooting ranges, law enforcement agencies and officers, special-effects companies, prop houses, armories, pyrotechnicians, and individuals and companies facing firearms-related federal or state licensing and compliance issues or criminal charges.

Michel & Associates has challenged dozens of laws and regulations on Second Amendment grounds. Litigation and test cases moving through the courts today will establish the parameters of the right to keep and bear arms for future generations. We are proud to be on the front lines of the self-defense civil rights battle.

Update

Please go visit the California Rifle and Pistol Association. Give them some love for all they are doing for the Second Amendment community.

B.L.U.F. A big win out in California where parts of the Unsafe Handgun Act were enjoined. If this injunction stand it is possible that new handguns will be added to the California Roster for the first time since 2013. Side note, the say that there are some 800 handguns on the roster, this is misleading. A firearm can be on the roster multiple times because each sku is considered a different handgun. I.e. a changing the finish of a handgun makes it a different handgun in the eyes of the state.

The Question

On 2022-08-01 the plaintiffs(good guys) filed a Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief in the Federal District Court of Central California. The complaint asks does the California Unsafe Handgun Act (UHA) violate the Second Amendment by denying The People of California access to new firearms in common use throughout the country? and does the UHA violate the Commerce Clause by interfering in interstate economic activities?

Or as the plaintiffs put it:

and:

On 2022-09-22 the parties agreed to drop the second question regarding discrimination against interstate commerce.

The defendant response consists of nearly 18 pages of the Attorney General denies each and every allegation unless they are admitting to a statement of law. In that case he still denies each and every allegation and denies even the quoted regulation if it is misstated. For other paragraphs he says he just doesn’t know.

In short the AG’s answer is “Nope.”

The state then claims affirmative defenses. An affirmative defense is when the other party is required to prove. The first is that the state claims that the plaintiffs failed to state facts sufficient to bring action against the state. Given that the state denies all the allegations this makes sense.

Then there is that old bugaboo. They claim that the plaintiffs lack standing and if they did they there are adequate remedies within the law for their complaint.

The Stages

Read More

Just saying…

One subject I believe (without any polling) the vast majority of us support is real gun safety. When a child is injured or killed by a gun, it hurts us all. I believe that the best way to keep that from happening is for children to learn from an early age what to do if they find themselves around a gun without adult supervision. To that end, this is a short story about how I helped get a firearms safety course taught in our local elementary school. I cannot take credit for anything much beyond being a catalyst to launch the program, but sometimes just a spark is all it takes.

In 2019, the Connecticut General Assembly passed a very poor law, the Safe Storage Law, Public Act No. 19-5. However, a part of the act did do a very good thing. It changed the language of an existing statute, directing the State Board of Education to develop, “guides to aid local and regional boards of education in developing firearm safety programs for students in grades kindergarten to [eight] twelve, inclusive, in the public schools” from “may” (which they never did) to “shall”. That guide (found here) was finally published in the Spring of 2021 and is actually a useful document.

When CCDL (Connecticut Citizens’ Defense League) notified its membership of the new guide, they encouraged members to contact their local School Boards to support actually teaching a firearm safety course in their local school. I wrote an email about the training to the Chair of the Barkhamsted, CT BOE, and the Chair forwarded my email to Jim Agostine our new Superintendent of Schools. Jim emailed me and initiated a phone conversation. Jim was most receptive to the idea, having used the Eddie the Eagle program for second graders in his previous school system. I offered to do some basic research on the program, including costs, and he took the idea to the School Board.

As with everything involved with government, nothing happens overnight, and in small towns that can be in spades. Nevertheless, Jim’s initial approach to the Board got a favorable response and we continued to develop the information necessary to go forward. However, things did stall a bit and I offered to send a letter to the Board with a formal request to implement the training for one grade in the Elementary School. While I have no real standing in town other than being a resident and taxpayer, apparently it helped. The town got the funding for the Eddie the Eagle program materials, our Resident Trooper volunteered to help deliver the training, and it happened in the Spring of 2022! Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the event, but the good news is that it will be taught again this Spring to this year’s second grade class. Our hope is to expand it to teach a second course to the fifth grade class each year as well, but that is still in the future.

While this is not a very exciting story, it did show me that we can make changes at the local level if we are just willing to speak up and to provide help and encouragement. It won’t always happen as smoothly as this did for me, but I was extremely lucky to make contact with an official who was already disposed to support my request on the first try. Find that person and your odds of success skyrocket. I want to believe that it also helped that I was willing to do some basic research about programs and help make contact with possible instructors, but the real work was done by Jim and his staff and would not have happened without his enthusiastic support.

It also introduced me to the Eddie the Eagle program. While I had heard of the program, I had never looked into the details. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend visiting the site to see for yourself. The NRA did a great job and spent your money well for once, but I’ll warn you, once you watch the movie you won’t get the jingle out of your head! This is true Gun Safety and the more we can get it out there, the safer our kids will be. Even if your school isn’t willing to teach the program, you could present it within you gun club or other organization. Just do it!