A gun battle at the Colorado legislature over ammunition magazine limits pits Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, against the state’s most strident gun-rights group, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners.
The two groups were allies in 2013, fighting the Democratic-controlled legislature from passing stricter gun laws. Now, Caldara is furious that the gun group opposes a possible compromise that would increase magazine limits from 15 to 30 rounds
via Colorado gun allies split over compromise on increasing magazine limit.
Here’s the scenario: Imagine that a bad law is passed. It is so bad, that any citizen can go to jail because there is no way to prove he did nothing wrong but the law says he can go anyway. At best, he has to hire a lawyer, post bail and go to a judge where he must swear he never broke the law.
Now imagine that legislators manage to come up with a bill that would invalidate 99% of the original law and thus making the last 1% almost a joke. Now imagine there is a group of morons led by Moron Supreme demanding that they either get 100% or the original law stands.
Welcome to Colorado politics and Dudley Brown.
The Colorado legislation is negotiating the repeal of the 15 round magazine capacity law and substituting it for a 30 round magazine capacity. After lot of pushing and cajoling, this is the best that can be done in this session. And let’s face it, it pretty much covers everybody with the exception of those who may have a Beta Mag or 40 round AK mag or other equivalents.
Bit of background: The Colorado High Capacity Magazine Ban prohibited the ownership of new magazines with a capacity of more than 15 rounds. If you bought your 15+ mag prior to the law becoming in effect, you are supposedly fine…supposedly. You can get pulled over by cops, they see the 15+ mags and arrest you for breaking the law because, How do you prove you didn’t buy those mags after the ban? By getting a lawyer, posting bail and then going to a judge where you will swear up and down on a stack of blessed-by-the-Pope bibles you had those mags since before Monica played Hoover with Bill. The judge accepts your statement and you are let go. If the judge hates you because your dog has been pooping his brother-in-law lawn…..
So, with a very few exceptions, this bill in the legislature seeks to cover 99% of the people with 15+ mags but it seems it is not good enough for the No Compromise (read No Brain) Dudley Brown and some of his cohorts with Rocky Mountain Gun Owners. And yes, it is our friend and spammer Dudley from the National Association for Gun Rights. Why? Because NO COMPROMISE! which basically means they rather see people go to jail for bullshit infractions than actually make progress. This would be the equivalent of finding a stack of one-dollar bills on the street, count them and then tossing it back because it is only $99 instead of a cool $100 and you won’t take anything but the whole amount.
God keep us from Dudley Brown and Kory Watkins ever getting together to “lobby” for Gun Rights.
Grrrrr …
Politics is a messy, ugly, stupid sport. Sometimes to make progress on an issue, you take less than what you really want, and then push for more in future legislative sessions.
Regardless of whether or not this passes, there’s NOTHING that prevents them from working in the next session to completely eliminate the ban. The way politics tends to “work” (I use that term loosely). It may be actually easier to completely repeal the ban if this 30-round law is passed first.
If you want to work within the political system, you kind of have to play these stupid games. If you don’t want to work within the political system, then fine – don’t. But if you do – then do it the way that it “works” to make at least some progress.
The thing is “No Compromise!” sounds butch to some and it is a nice way to raise funds. It is mostly directed to people that enjoy baloney but have never been involved or have seen the process to make it. As you said it is messy and ugly.
What people need to learn is that there are two different types of compromise in lawmaking.
One is what I suspect people think of most of the time – it’s where you give up something horrible to get something good, e.g. the 1986 law that eliminated the ability to purchase modern automatic weapons in exchange for some protections.
The other – which AFAIK is what this proposed Colorado law is – means that you give up NOTHING and simply don’t get 100% of what you want. This is a typical thing that happens with lawmaking. If you can get this, especially when you have one house of the legislature that is unlikely to support your 100% proposal, you TAKE IT. You go back in future legislative sessions to finish the job. Nobody’s happy that you didn’t get everything you want, but you still made things better WITHOUT making them any worse.
Refusing to compromise the second way is politically dumb. If you’re involved with politics, you have to play this game, unless your side has complete control of everything. With a Democratically-controlled House and the same Democratic governor that signed the original magazine ban, if you can get this 15-to-30 law passed, you do it.
The Dems have been playing the “no compromise” game right, by playing the long con. By making incremental changes they have slowly moved the country to the far left. It is a very simple process:
1) Get a slightly left-wing bill passed with “compromise”
2) Wait an election cycle for the left-wing bill to become the new normal (aka. center)
3) Get another bill passed that is just a little bit more left-wing than the last one with “compromise”
Doing that, they have moved the ball pretty far.
This puts the GOP (and anybody opposite of the left-wing Dems) on the defensive. We don’t feel like we can make the same play back, we try for the hail-Mary and fail. We need to try and beat the Dems at their own game – and we have, the recall in CO was a start. The increasing popularity of CCW is another.
Get the 30-for-15 swap. Then wait for the crime rate to either not got up or better yet, go down. Use that at ammo (pardon the pun) against the Dems that voted for the original law and try to take a majority in the CO house. Go big or go home doesn’t work in politics. You can try, and the backlash is huge (see Obamacare). Take ’em down a little at a time and can move the who country pretty damn far.
EXACTLY correct, J-
Look at how much progress has been made in many places with regard to the right to carry. Has it happened overnight? No. It’s happened step by step over years.
Look at what happened in Kansas. They couldn’t carry concealed legally AT ALL in 2005. If the folks in 2005 had demanded CONSTITUTIONAL CARRY OR BUST they would have gone bust. They took what they were able to get … and in later legislative sessions, pushed for more.
As of July 1 of this year, Kansas WILL HAVE CONSTITUTIONAL CARRY. It simply wouldn’t have happened if they’d demanded “all or none” a decade ago. They’d have gotten none.
It’s how politics works. That doesn’t mean anyone has to like it. But it’s how it works.
i am no friend of dudley, but on this one Miguel, i think you are missing it…….
Curious, why?
No one’s saying keeping any magazine restrictions in place is great. But this is certainly a step in the right direction, and AFAIK not in any way in the wrong direction.
This one of those times where if I were a legislator I think I could win us some major gains, but would be torn down by the more rabid gun owners that can’t see the forest for the trees.
I could agree to “universal background checks” on paper. But here are my conditions (just a start):
1) No registry
2) Private can process a limited number of private, face-to-face transfers per year by calling the NICS hotline themselves.
3) Interstate purchases of handguns and long guns are legal from FFLs
No, 2 is straight out of Illinois law. Every gun sale had to be checked against the State Police. ISP kept no record of the sale, that was required for the owner, but any citizen with a FOID could call the ISP hotline for a transfer.
If I felt that there was enough backing, I might even push for a Federal CCW standard. Effectively, your stat could have state wide CCW at some lower standard, but if they offered a permit that met the Fed standard that permit was good in all 50 US states, DC, and territories.
Another “compromise” I’d aim for is to try and get SBS and SBR off the NFA. Bullpups have made that rule totally irrelevant. Say, make the penalty for “illegally” modifying a gun harsher, but in exchange you can assemble whatever you want from OEM parts or by a licensed gunsmith. You can’t chop down your 870 yourself without a tax stamp. That would be a crime. You can order a 14 inch barrel from the manufacturer and install that as a replacement part without a tax stamp, or have a licensed gunsmith chop it for you.
Calling, online or App. and if Denial is issued, a memo number must be given for an appeal.
Yeah. I’m jut pulling stuff off the top of my head. The details will have to be hammered out.
I think it would be a good idea if the parties involved had to keep a record of the sale with some kind of unique number for each transfer that the ATF held onto. No details of the names or serial number of the guns. Only “on xx/xx/xx date, transfer no. XXX-XXX-XXX was a proceed” something like that. That way there is some sort of proof that the transfer was called in, but nothing like a registration could be created from that info.
Then if the unique number was a no go, there could be appeals process.
I’d also like to remove some of the restrictions on getting an FFL. Modernize it for the Gunbroker/gunshow dealer. Safe storage and the background check should be enough. If I want to deal online in my spare time, that should be fine. I do it on eBay. Take my wife’s stuff to weekend crafts fairs. I don’t need a business zoned address for that. In exchange, I will up the punishment and budget for enforcement for straw man purchases and “back door” dealers. Make it easier to have more good FFLs and work harder to bust the minority of bad ones. That’s compromise.
OK think about it like this. We push for the limit to go to 30 this year. We get it passed.
Next year we go to 50.
Saying ‘No Compromise’ is a grand and lofty battle cry, but it’ll never build a coalition. In many ways, when I think of the word in the context of the gun freedoms battle I tend to use compromise in that manner that one compromises bridges or morals. The operating difference, as I see it, is that this time we are trying to compromise THEIR laws. If we turn it around, we would LOVE it if they only ever supported full-on gun bans, because we know we can beat those. The incrementalism is the hardest thing for us keep fighting, because they work so hard at wrapping each step in an air of ‘reasonable’ness. Knocking the ban from 15 to 30 is stealing a page from their book, but it does feel like settling, and we’ve spent a long time, as a culture, settling. It’s a hard line to walk. Back to what I opened with, though- infighting, such as we see between NAGR and NRA supports, for example, is another layer of ideological purity testing. Insisting on purity is good as a concept, but won’t build a coalition of diverse views, and that is why we keep finding ourselves in the minority. If we had the votes or the numbers that we could win while excluding people who would be otherwise allies, we wouldn’t be here right now; we would be the majority party.
I read a write up by a fellow very conversant in the fight for the restoration of gun rights.
He made a very cogent point that how with Gun Culture 2.0 coming of age and getting involved in the fight; they are having to go through growing pains not unlike the NRA in the 1970s.
And it doesn’t help that they(we, I’m 26) for the most part don’t grasp the nuisance of stuff like the NFA or GCA.
I said here before: It is our responsibility to teach them and theirs to learn. There are no free rides.
I’d prefer the complete dumping of the law. IMO any limit on magazine size is unconstitutional. And IF the 30 round limit passes, what is the impetus to LATER possibly change the law again?
That said, incrementalism is good. And if we change the limit to 30 rounds, show there is no problem, logically eliminating the limit should be the next step. Logically the next step, however we are dealing with overly emotional gun phobics and weak kneed politicians. If Colorado gets 30 round limits, it
1) makes mag limits acceptable.
2) removes 99% of the impetus to change the law in the future.
I’d take 30 rounds now, and plan to add a rider to another gun bill to get rid of the limit sometime in the future. But this needs a champion in the legislature and some good allies. Always remember the GOP is called the stupid party for a reason.
The issue that I take with some of the people who argue that ‘thing this’ or ‘thing that’ is unconstitutional is that what is or isn’t constitutional is a matter of record for the Supreme Court. I can look at the Constitution of the United States and interpret what it says, but my interpretation is not binding; it CAN BE, of course, but that requires years of legal challenges, courts, lawyers, and eventually a preponderance of Supreme Court Justices that agree with me. I live in the real world, and not the hypothetical. The law that is being enforced against me may not be right, and may indeed be unconstitutional, but it is a fact nonetheless, and arguing the abstract doesn’t commute a jail sentence. My preferred course of action is that we go for the 30 rd limit now, and keep working on changing the culture, changing the politicians, and working towards a day that we can have a majority of people that agree that the round count limitation is stupid, and repeal it. If we keep working hard, we can make that happen in pretty short order (witness the above mentioned carry progress in Kansas). If we burn all our political capital and still don’t get the law overturned, we are worse off than when we started.
[…] one could have been mostly out of the way last year, but thanks to the efforts of Dudley, his insatiable need to collect funds and gum up the works, […]