Tag Archives: confiscation

"News Media", authoritarian swine, gun grabbers

Prohibited Persons And “Ghost Guns”

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The Associated Press ran a story about the terrible proliferation of privately manufactured “ghost guns” in the hands of those who can’t legally possess firearms. They probably should have taken a closer look at their own data.

California law enforcement seize 54 ghost guns last year from people who can’t legally own firearms
California law enforcement took away 54 so-called ghost guns last year from people who can’t legally own firearms, a 38% jump in the number of the hard-to-trace weapons seized since 2021 under a unique state program, officials said Monday.

I’ve written about the “unique state program” before. It doesn’t work very well. From 2018 to 2019, their backlog of people to shake down more than doubled, to over 23,000. Following that trend, I suspect the backlog is around 100,000 now. But as for what they are getting…

Oh, dear; a 38% increase. Terrible, eh?

Wait a sec.

The ghost guns, which are privately made firearms without a serial number, were part of nearly 1,500 guns taken statewide last year through an only-in-California program called the Armed and Prohibited Persons System, known as APPS.

54 out of 1,500 is just 3.6% of the total. It turns out PMFs aren’t really too popular with bad guys. Hardly a surprise to anyone who pays attention, what with some five million stolen guns already on the street. And that estimate was from nearly four years ago; the number is probably closer to six million now.

 

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"News Media", authoritarian swine, gun control, gun grabbers, Law, Politics, resistance

Scaremongering in Virginia? Not so fast.

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The Roanoke Times’ Dan Casey is playing confiscation propagandist.

CASEY: Don’t believe the scaremongering on gun legislation
Probably by now, you’ve heard a hue and cry about the “great Virginia gun confiscation scheme” that’s about to be hatched in Richmond.

Yes, we have heard about it.

According to the more lurid propaganda now circulating, the Virginia National Guard will be going door-to-door, searching homes, seizing firearms, leaving law-abiding gun owners vulnerable to attacks by criminal hordes and organized gangs such as MS-13.

Casey hangs around some odd web sites if he’s seeing that. Despite my extensive reading on firearms policy and law, I haven’t run across claims that will happen. I have seen analyses of ramifications of filed Virginia legislation.

Relax. It’s not going to happen. Probably there’ll be some changes to gun laws, and some long-overdue tightening of statutes that were increasingly relaxed during two decades of Republican rule.

But nobody’s going to be going door-to-door seizing firearms. And any legislation that passes is likely to be quite familiar to Virginia’s 8.57 million residents.

Consider just two major proposals on the table.

So he ridicules the possibility of bans and confiscation, and supports his position by bringing up firearm purchase rationing and the elimination of state firearms law preemption, as if that’s all that’s being proposed.

Let me bring up another bill that was filed. I can’t think of how Casey missed it, given the very subject he mocks: VA Senate Bill 16: Assault firearms and certain firearm magazines; prohibiting sale, transport, etc.. Since the Democrats have the house, senate, and governorship it seems likely this will pass. I hardly expect the senate majority leader to let it die… since Sen. Dick Saslaw himself is the original sponsor.

That bill completely bans several large classes of common firearms. There is no grandfathering. No “buyback” provision to compensate owners for their loss. Casey somehow hasn’t noticed this. What did he think prompted Rep. Don McEachin to say, “Ultimately, I’m not the governor, but the governor may have to nationalize the National Guard to enforce the law”?

That was no “idle, ill-thought-out comment.” That was a carefully crafted proposal made in a planned interview with a national media outlet, in response to most of the state’s counties and towns announcing that they would not enforce that law if passed.

Sure, afterwards, the governor claimed the bill would be amended to grandfather in existing firearms so long as the owners register them like good little serfs. But 1) it hasn’t been amended, 2) no substitute bill with grandfathering has been filed, and 3) the governor is already budgeting for personnel to enforce SB 16, and for an increased corrections budget for people incarcerated under the proposed — and not even passed yet — gun people control laws.

When governor, senate majority leader, and a congresscritter tell us that they are going to try to take guns, tell us how many millions of dollars they plan to spend trying to take guns, tell us how many people they plan to hire to try to take guns, and tell us how much money they expect to spend to imprison those that don’t want their guns taken…

Virginians should take them at their word, Casey’s clumsy attempt at dismissal through obfuscation and misdirection not withstanding.

[Permission to republish this article is granted so long as it is not edited, and the author and The Zelman Partisans are credited.]

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Academics, authoritarian swine, gun control

Yes, the outlaws would still have those outlawed guns

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Jill Filipovic, of no discernable expertise in firearms policy, thinks outlawing guns will disarm criminals because there wouldn’t be anything to steal.

Welcome to reality.

Fewer guns mean fewer killings, and we all know it
The NRA and other “gun rights” proponents claim that if guns are restricted, only outlaws and bad guys will have guns. But if it were harder to buy guns, they would also stay out of the hands of irresponsible men and women, whose negligent treatment of their weapons results in a great number of deaths and injuries every year, many of which involve children. Many criminals, too, aren’t the plotting masterminds we imagine them to be. A tougher road to gun ownership would mean that impetuous gun crimes, or crimes of passion, would simply be less likely to happen.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 232,400 guns are stolen per year. Most are never recovered.

So let’s guess that in the past ten years, 2,324,000 guns hit the streets. Could be a lot more; some estimates of stolen guns run as high as 600,000 per year. And of course, there were plenty already out there before those. Based on trends, I’d guess at least 1,300,000 were stolen in the next ten years back.

So just in twenty years we have in the neighborhood of 3.5 million completely unaccounted for guns in criminal hands. (Plus all the years before that; I suspect the stolen guns total for my lifespan is in excess of 5 million.)

That, Ms. Filipovic, is why we tell you that if you somehow managed to outlaw all guns, the outlaws will still have them.

Heck, you victim disarmers have never managed more than a 13.44% compliance on simple registration, from otherwise law-abiding people. Do you think you can get 100% compliance on a ban from actual criminals with untraceable weapons?

[Permission to republish this article is granted so long as it is not edited and the author and The Zelman Partisans are credited.]

 

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Ed. note: This commentary appeared first in TZP’s weekly email alert. If you would like to be among the first to see new commentary (as well as to get notice of new polls and recaps of recent posts), please sign up for our alert list. (See sidebar or, if you’re on a mobile device, scroll down). Be sure to respond when you receive your activation email!

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authoritarian swine, gun grabbers

Belling the Cat, Revisited

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Back in 2017, shortly after the Mandalay Bay shooting sparked yet another wave of anti-rights advocacy, I noted a little compliance problem. I described what it would take to start firearms confiscations (and presumably arrests). TL;DR: It wouldn’t be pretty.

“The sheer immorality of victim disarmament aside, one would hope every law enforcement officer out there would stop to consider all the possible ramifications of kicking in several million doors because the occupants are well armed.”
— Moi, back in the ’90s

But hey; that assumed they wouldn’t know who had what, or where. But what if they could somehow manage registration this time? There’s a reason the socialist Dems are pushing universal “background checks” — preemptively-prove-your-innocence prior restraint –so hard. It isn’t to fight crime, since criminals already bypass such checks with illegal channels. It’s to get a record of all transactions, so they can collate lists from those 4473s. If they can get this through the Senate and the White House (which I do not rule out despite Trump’s — “I’m pro-2A except for bump stocks, age limits, ex parte protective order SWATting…” — statement), the next step would be changing the law to allow the ATF to collect 4473s (which they’ve been doing anyway, during FFL inspections) and enter the information into an electronically searchable database. Once they’ve got that, the next step is to require is gun owners to register themselves and their guns, since anyone who did NICS is already in their files.

Then owner licensing.

All that might take a while, but if the Dems get the White House in 2020, it’ll speed up.

So let’s look ahead and guess what they might do with total registration. Again, we know it won’t have anything to do with fighting violent crime. It’s about us. They really need us disarmed to carry out the Green Raw Deal. Will it work?

No. As it happens, we already have fine examples of owner licensing and firearm registration, coupled with confiscations: California and Illinois.

A year ago, California was using their lists to confiscate firearms from people who’d “lost” their right to keep and bear arms (such as it is in the People’s Republik). They had a backlog of 10,225 people to shake down. In a multi-agency, two-day operation, they attempted to confiscate weapons from 47 people.

They recovered one gun.

A year later, that backlog increased to more than 23,200. When they know where to go. What to look for.

Then there’s Illinois, where their record keeping is, in actuality, so bad that they issue Firearm Owner IDs — licenses — to felons. Who pass background checks. On those rare occasions, when they realize someone has become prohibited, less than half the time does the person turn in his weapons; probably 6,000 per year still armed. And they can’t figure it out until one of those known criminals goes on a killing spree.

States can’t keep up now, when they know who has how many guns, and where. Go national with another 100,000,000 targets of unknown locations and arms. It would be impossible for them to perform confiscations through unconstitutional law enforcement actions, much less bound by constitutional due process requirements.

With registration — however they attempt it — the government cannot successfully confiscate through normal processes even if they bypassed posse comitatus and use every man, woman, and whatever in the military.

Remember California Representative — and presidential hopeful — Swalwell’s threat of overwhelming military force? That was neither joke nor hyperbole. It was a trial balloon, to see how people — including the usually anti-military left — would react to the idea of waging war against gun owners. Because law enforcement methods demonstrably do not work, and they know it.

Imagine 2020. Trump and the Republicans caved on major campaign promises: border security, killing Obamacare, gun control especially. Sure, Trump still talks the talk, but his actions prove him a liar. And the Senate Republicans let reciprocal carry and hearing protection die.

They alienated their voter base, who turn to anti-Republican protest votes or just stay home. Democrats take the House, Senate, and White House. President Whomever (they’re all pro-Green Raw Deal socialists, and anti-rights) declare a gun violence national emergency. A flurry of disarmament bills pass as fast as the first background check bill of the 116th Congress.

And the military mobilizes; designated cat-bellers.

Pre-Obama, I would have rated the odds of the military going along as being pretty low. But the leadership has been purged and social justice is damned near written into the UCMJ. I’m not taking bets on what they’d do.

But Swalwell and others have told us what they want to do. A declaration of war on America. I suppose they imagine it as a civil war between professional military forces and Bible-clutching deplorables; good reality TV, while they sip Chardonnay.

They should be so lucky. They would be declaring open hunting season, with Clinton Rules of Engagement.

I don’t want that. And neither should they. No one sane does.

Carl is an unpaid TZP volunteer. If you found this post useful, please consider dropping something in his tip jar. He could really use the money, what with truck repairs and recurring bills. And the rabbits need feed. Truck insurance, lest I be forced to sell it. Click here to donate via PayPal.
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authoritarian swine, gun control, gun grabbers, Poll, Sellouts and traitors

Poll: Would military personnel deploy nuclear weapons?

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By now, I hope you are aware of threats by California Democrat Rep. Swalwell to use nuclear weapons to enforce gun control laws (newsletter subscribers will get an early look at a detail column on the subject; others will wait until Tuesday).

He’s trying to walk back the threat as sarcasm (it wasn’t) or hyperbole to demonstrate that the government has gun owners out-gunned.

Nonetheless, he is working on the assumption that military personnel will be willing to — illegally — exercise overwhelming military force, including Weapons of Mass Destruction, against American civilians to enforce gun control laws.

A couple of decades ago, military personnel were surveyed on a similar issue; the infamous Twenty-Nine Palms Combat Arms Survey. The results were very disturbing.

Swalwell has now upped the ante by suggesting that military personnel would go so far as to conduct nuclear weapon strikes against Americans for the sake of gun control.

I would like to limit this poll to current military personnel and veterans. I suggest reviewing the Posse Comitatus Act before taking the poll.

Please share this poll, to reach as many people as possible. If limited to regular TZP readers, I expect I’ll see a strong bias in responses.

The Question: “The U.S. government declares a ban on the possession, sale, transportation, and transfer of all non-sporting firearms (“assault weapons”). A thirty (30) day amnesty period is permitted for these firearms to be turned over to the local authorities. At the end of this period, a number of citizen groups refuse to turn over their firearms. Consider the following statement: I would fire upon U.S. citizens who refuse or resist confiscation of firearms banned by the U.S. government.”

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Action, authoritarian swine, gun control, gun grabbers, resistance, self defense, So Much Stupid!, spirit of rebellion

Go For It

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In the wake of the Santa Fe school shooting, where an under-age scumbag stole a pump-action shotgun and a revolver to kill ten and wound more, I started seeing a different set of disarmament clarion calls. The criminal enablers are abandoning demands for bans on “assault weapons,” universal background checks, and age limits. Now it’s a flat out total ban on everything.

A typical example:

Okay, Now I Actually Do Want To Take Your Guns
Anyway, I just wanted to drop you a line and let you know that I now actually do want to take your guns.

All of your guns.

Right now.

All righty then. Start with the criminals. That should be easy; via NICS, you have a list of everyone who already isn’t allowed to have guns. A good many of them are subject to current court orders and probation/parole that will allow the police to search their homes without new warrants. Go for it. Prove you can make it work.

Hey, felons et al have been prohibited from possessing firearms for fifty years. Since they’re so compliant with the law, they probably… oh. Wait.

For fifty years you haven’t been able to disarm the criminals. 64% of firearms-wielding murderers have prior felony convictions, yet mysteriously got around of fifty years of laws meant to prevent just that.

Nearly 91% of firearms used in murders are stolen (just like the guns used in Santa Fe, stolen from a locked cabinet). Well, that’s one way around NICS (which has been in place for two decades).

Somehow, despite knowing exactly who they are (because everyone knows how accurate NICS is), you haven’t managed to get guns out of the hands of those already stripped of Second Amendment rights through adjudication.

But now you want to go after… everyone else. The 99.9978% of gun owners who didn’t commit any heinous crimes.

Just in case you evil bastards — out to ensure safe workplaces for criminals — forgot, you don’t know to the nearest 10,000,000 how many gun owners are out there. It might be 50,000,000. Or 60,000,000. Maybe 81,000,000. 100,000,000. Some think (with a fair bit of credibility) that the number is over 120,000,000; more than a third of the nation.

You don’t know how many, so you certainly don’t know who they are, much less where. And their guns? How many, what kind, and where? You don’t know. Could be 265,000,000. Might be 750,000,000.

But you’re convinced that bans are so effective. Just ban everything and the owners will be happy to give up their property. Hey, it worked for Prohibition and the War on Drugs… oh.

Allow me to clue you in:

  • People don’t like to have their property stolen, by freelance crooks or the uniformed type.
  • Since you haven’t managed to disarm the criminals, the rest of us especially won’t care to give up our defensive property.

But let’s pretend that 90% of gun owners go along with your crime enablement scheme (-giggle-). That leaves anywhere from 5,000,000 to over 12,000,000 heavily armed, noncompliant SOBs (or, HANSOBs, as I’ve referred to them elsewhere).

You’ll have to go take their guns. Kick in their doors because they’re well armed.

I’d say, “Best o’ luck, bubba,” but I don’t wish stormtroopers the best of anything. I suggest that Davie Holmes lead the first few confiscation teams to show the guys how it’s done, and to encourage them. And he’d better bring along his ban buddies to help, because the HANSOBs would have every single local, state, and federal LEO, and the entire active and reserve military outnumbered, even assuming the lowball estimate of gun owners and a silly compliance rate. (No one has gotten better than 20% compliance just on registration; and ask Mass how that bump-fire ban went; I heard they got 3. Not 3%; Three stocks.)

But if you gun grabbers choose to go that literal route, be aware of what you’re getting yourselves into.

Wait a sec: Excuse me, I need to place a bulk order for popcorn. I intend to hunker down, sit back, eat popcorn, and enjoy “The Statist-Hunting Show”. It wouldn’t be civil war; Holmes and his buds should be so lucky.

Yes, if you declare that you’re going out to hunt those nasty noncompliant gun owners (who hadn’t done anything… up till now), I consider it extremely likely they’ll return the favor. Please recall that those HANSOBs will probably include a lot of combat vets and people who can — and routinely do — pop prairie dogs in the head at a thousand yards; the guns you’d be trying to take are the guns with which they do that.

Happily for Holmes and his ilk, a lot of them will be of libertarian leanings, like me; we won’t go hunting; that would be an initiation of force. But the fervor of their self defense, should the victim disarmers make that necessary, will astonish and terrify the bastards. On the other hand, libertarian-types are probably a small minority.

Individuals, small groups. No organized “militia” you can defeat or negotiate with. Rather chaotic, in fact.

And should Dave Holmes prove to a be a cheese-nibbling chickenshit, who won’t take point, who thinks he can send out the jackbooted thugs while he rests comfortably at home, four words:

Clinton Rules of Engagement. In fragmenting Yugoslavia, Billy Jeff Clinton determined that noncombatant media, friends, associates, friends of friends were valid military targets, as they gave support to the “enemy,”

That’s another favor those HANSOBs will probably be happy to return.

Now, That’s Entertainment.

Go for it. Bell that cat.

Carl is an unpaid TZP volunteer. If you found liked this post, please consider dropping something in his tip jar. He could use the money, what with truck repairs and bills.

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Ed. note: This commentary appeared first in TZP’s weekly email alert. If you would like to be among the first to see new commentary (as well as to get notice of new polls and recaps of recent posts), please sign up for our alert list. (See sidebar or, if you’re on a mobile device, scroll down). Be sure to respond when you receive your activation email!

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authoritarian swine, gun control, gun grabbers, Politics, resistance

Swallowing his words

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Congresscreep Eric Swallow Swalwell [CA-15] is a coward. A not-very-bright coward.

Not bright, based upon his little confiscation screed:

Instead, we should ban possession of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons, we should buy back such weapons from all who choose to abide by the law, and we should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons. The ban would not apply to law enforcement agencies or shooting clubs.

I say he is a coward because he hides from criticism. I attempted to write to his office with some pointed questions about his grand plan to disarm America. I had to look up a zip code within his district to get past his filter (he doesn’t want to hear from nonconstituents). But because I want answers to my questions, I gave my real — non-California-because-I’m-sane — address.

Rejected. He really doesn’t want to hear from nonconstituents. I’ve written to a lot of congresscritters for other states, and this is the first time I couldn’t get through at all.  If he’s going to call for national human/civil rights violations, he should man up and take national feedback.

So if any of our readers are still trapped in his district in Occupied California, please send this to him. And feel free to give him my email address.

Mr. Swalwell,

RE: Ban assault weapons, buy them back, go after resisters: Ex-prosecutor in Congress, May 3, 2018
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/05/03/ban-assault-weapons-buy-them-back-prosecute-offenders-column/570590002/

“Instead, we should ban possession of military-style semiautomatic assault weapons, we should buy back such weapons from all who choose to abide by the law, and we should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons. The ban would not apply to law enforcement agencies or shooting clubs.”

A few questions:

1. “Military-style semiautomatic assault weapons.” Can you name a single country on the planet that uses semiautomatic rifles as standard issue to its regular troops? It’s something of a hobby of mine, and I haven’t been able to find a nation with standard issue semiautomatic rifles since the 1990s. In fact, other than some specialty cases (snipers, for instance), semiautomatic rifles are not considered suitable for combat by national militaries. So what makes these “military-style”?

2. Darned few people are going to be willing to give up firearms, costing up to several thousand dollars, for a paltry $200-$1000. I seem to recall a Fifth Amendment that mentions something about “just compensation.” But hey, post-Kelo, who cares about justice, right?

3. Have you floated your little confiscation plan by working cops? Not political appointees, or other chairwarmers, but the working guys who would have to go kicking in millions* of doors BECAUSE the occupants are well-armed?
(* 60,000,000 is a conservative estimate of gun owners; if only 90% complied, you’d have to send your jackboots after 6,000,000 — six million — noncompliant sonsabitches with guns. When the California legislature considered this in the 1990s, the head of one police union predicted the largest outbreak of blue-flu in history.)

4. Will you personally lead an entry team on confiscation raids, or are you too cowardly to put your money where your mouth is? Put up, or shut up.

You talk a brave game, but HOW do you plan to do this?

There are, by varying estimates, 55,000,000 to 120,000,000 million gun owners in America. Estimates of the firearms they hold range from 265,000,000 to 750,000,000 — three quarters of a billion. No one knows who all those owners are, much less where. Ditto with the guns (estimates of AR-pattern rifles alone, manufactured since the end of the “Assault Weapon Ban”, are in the neighborhood of 16,000,000; just one type of “assault weapon” by the usual politician definition).

You’re from California; you should know what happened when the state merely mandated registration (not confiscation): a whopping 2.33% compliance rate. Connecticut got 13.44%.

Again using that 60,000,000 number, imagine you reverse the compliance ratios and get 90%, leaving those 6,000,000 pesky noncompliant SOBs. Heavily armed SOBs.

The FBI estimates the number of law enforcement personnel in America (local, state, federal) at 698,460. You’re outnumbered by almost 9 to 1. So you toss in all military personnel (who also tend to be gun owners… oops); active, reserve, guard…

And you’re still outnumbered by more than 2 to 1.

5. HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ENFORCE your little police state wet dream? With what?

You like the Australian example. You might note that after 22 years and multiple amnesties, the Australian government now estimates compliance at 20%. And they have more guns now, than before the grab.

6. Are you crazy, stupid, or both?

Carl “Bear” Bussjaeger
Author: Net Assets, Bargaining Position, The Anarchy Belt, and more
www.bussjaeger.org
NRA delenda est
http://zelmanpartisans.com/?p=4493

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authoritarian swine, gun control, gun grabbers

Door Kickers

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I’ve noted the theoretical problems with door-to-door weapons searches. Let’s see how that works in the real world.

Firearms Recovery Operation Held In Santa Cruz County
Santa Cruz County law enforcement agencies teamed up with agents from the California Department of Justice Bureau of Firearms for a two-day operation on Tuesday and Wednesday to recover guns owned by individuals who are prohibited from possessing them, according to the Santa Cruz County Law Enforcement Chief’s Association.

In this case, California started with a gun owner database, which they compared to other databases to see who suddenly became a prohibited person. So, unlike my worst-case (for the cops) “belling the cat” scenario, they should have a good firearms hit rate. Right?

So how did it go? Multi-agency teams. Two days. 47 addresses.

One bust. For one gun.

At that rate, it’s going to take them 426 days just to clear the current backlog of 10,000 newly prohibited persons they think they know about. Never mind all the folks continually being added to the list even as they work.

But — as the infomercial says — Wait! There’s more.

One bust. For one gun. Perhaps that means that Californians are just really compliant with gun people control laws, unlike the old days of 20 years past when the state saw a whopping 2.33% compliance rate with registration, and those prohibited folks properly disposed of their firearms. Except…

California does have registration. And universal preemptively-prove-your-innocence checks. If they properly disposed of their guns, that should have been in the state’s records and there’d be no reason to send the confiscation squads.

Are state records that bad? Did 46 out of 47 people lawfully transport their firearms out of state? Did 46 out of 47 unlawfully transfer them within the state? Did the cops simply not try very hard?

Was 1 out 47 simply a slow learner? Or maybe he didn’t even know about that protective order.

If it took California 2 days to not find 46 registered weapons in the hands of 46 registered gun owners, how long will it take to fail the other 9,953 (and counting) times?

On the bright side, this may identify another challenge to California’s obscene gun laws. You may recall that New York City was forced to end their warrantless “stop and frisk” program not merely because it was unconstitutional. Courts have long upheld unconstitutional practices if the government could demonstrate an overriding need for the sake of public safety. The judge in the NYC case tossed “stop and frisk” because, according to the city’s own data, it didn’t work, obliviating their “public safety” argument.

California’s restrictions and confiscation attempts don’t work either.

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Ed. note: This commentary appeared first in TZP’s weekly email alert. If you would like to be among the first to see new commentary (as well as to get notice of new polls and recaps of recent posts), please sign up for our alert list. (See sidebar or, if you’re on a mobile device, scroll down). Be sure to respond when you receive your activation email!

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gun control

Disingenuous Doctor

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For new arrivals, I’ve been writing to “news” outlets and the writers of published gun-related misinformation. Call it education or calling them out on lies, I’m trying to correct bad reporting. Mostly, I an simply ignored, which indicates they know they’re wrong, and are disseminating BS deliberately. Once it’s clear that the outlet/writer is not interested in allowing facts to run, I’ve been posting my attempts here.

Today’s entry is a little bit different.

A focus on gun safety – not control – leaves 2nd Amendment intact
Our civil rights are under attack, and have been for some time. The freedom to assemble etched out in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is under attack by the Second Amendment — and it shouldn’t be. Jason Aldean’s concert was a peaceful assembly ravaged by a lone gunman who, for all intents and purposes, had the right of gun ownership.

What is it with doctors lying about firearms issues lately? 744 words of misdirection and falsehoods. I sent a proposed guest column of 721 words to rebut. To the Orlando Sentinel’s partial credit, they didn’t ignore me completely, as usually happens.

They told me to pare it down to 250 words or less and they’d consider it for a Letter to the Editor.

I couldn’t do it. There were too many Levy lies for 250 words. I got it down to 444 (remember, even my original column was shorter than Levy’s offering), by leaving out some specific references, and using more abbreviations and… not-so-great grammar.

They turned it down. So here it is.

Disingenuous Doctor

Doctor Marc Levy’s October 27, 2017 column, “A focus on gun safety – not control – leaves 2nd Amendment intact,” is as lacking in candor as the very column title, suggesting that delaying and infringing on rights somehow protects them.

In bringing up the Dickey Amendment and tying it to research, Dr. Levy implies that the amendment stopped federal funding of firearms-related violence. Just to be clear, this is false. The federal government funds much firearms-related violence research. As one recent example, there is “In-State and Interstate Associations Between Gun Shows and Firearm Deaths and Injuries: A Quasi-experimental Study,” primarily funded by the NIH.

Levy attempts another bit of misdirection in noting that Obamacare has a provision that prevents the collection of information on firearms. I’m sure that a doctor in Florida is well aware that Medicare/Medicaid sidestepped the law by implementing a rule requiring doctors to use Electronic Medical Records software, produced by nongovernmental agencies, which include questions on patient access to firearms in the intake questionnaire. Any doctor with Medicare/Medicaid patients will be asking that, while the CMS innocently proclaims, “WE aren’t requiring it.”

Dr. Levy also appears to be a fan of “universal background checks” (more accurately called preemptively-prove-your-innocence”), so that criminals and other prohibited persons could not obtain guns. He avoids the little problem that most firearm-equipped criminals already obtain their weapons unlawfully, and that the Supreme Court’s HAYNES decision upholds
criminals’ Fifth Amendment rights to not self-incriminate by reporting their unlawful activity; i.e.- criminals cannot be required to undergo background checks.

Levy mentions “assault rifles” as he wonders why we don’t track firearms purchases. Either he is unaware that assault rifles are heavily restricted, regulated, taxed, and registered; or he doesn’t want readers to realize that he’s talking about semiautomatic sporting and defense tools. Perhaps he meant to say “assault weapons,” a term with no legal meaning in Florida or federal law; only a handful of states use the entirely subjective term.

The doctor claims that all “responsible” gun owners approve of his restrictions: registration, taxation, limits on ownership, prior restraint on the exercise of a right, and more. Since I do not, that is demonstrably false, unless Levy has invented his own bizarre definition of “responsible.”

Similar claims that “90% of Americans favor Universal Background Checks” don’t hold water. A few years ago in Washington state, polls alleged that 90% of Washingtonians wanted UBCs; but when it went to an actual vote (Initiative 594), fewer than 60% voted in favor, missing the claim by over thirty points, and more than 40% opposed.

Since recent research shows that background checks do not reduce firearms-related homicide rates (“Do gun laws reduce gun homicide rates?,”), the 40% had a valid point.

Levy sidesteps other questions. Estimates of American gun owners range from a ridiculous fifty-five million to a possibly overly optimistic one hundred-twenty million. Estimates of firearms range from two hundred sixty-five million to a three quarters of a billion. Given the lack of knowledge demonstrated by that remarkable uncertainty, how does Levy propose to determine who has what? How does he propose to pry “extra” firearms out of the homes of those with “too many?” Does he expect dubious owners, who won’t tell a telephone poller what arms he possesses, to self-report to a government intent on registration and confiscation? Or does he advocate searching every single, individual domicile in the country? That’s a lot of doors to kick in, and when the California legislature first proposed mass confiscations of “assault weapons” several years ago, a police union spokesman announced they’d see the largest outbreak of “blue flu” in history if implemented.

Perhaps Dr. Levy and the other estimated one million doctors in America will volunteer to do the door-kicking; they outnumber the FBI’s estimate of fewer than 700,000 law enforcement officers anyway.

Consider those fifty-five to one hundred-twenty million gun owners; then consider the roughly thirteen thousand firearms-related homicides. If each homicide represented an individual shooter and gun, that’s 0.01-0.02% of all firearm owners and 0.001-0.005% of firearms. While personal tragedies, statistically homicides are “black swan” events.

Those tiny fractions of a single percentage point do not point to a gun problem or gun owner problem. There is a criminal problem. Perhaps Dr. Levy should lobby for a gangbanger tax to fund criminal violence research.

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authoritarian swine, gun control, gun grabbers, resistance, spirit of rebellion

Belling the cat

22 Comments

As seen at Slate:

Two Guns Per Person
Why is this legal? I’m not talking about why we don’t require reporting multiple sales of long guns to federal authorities (which we don’t). I’m not talking about the bump stocks the shooter used to make his semi-automatic weapons fire like machine guns. I’m talking about why people are allowed to own more than, say, two firearms without a really good reason.

TL;DR: The Second Amendment doesn’t say how many guns you can have. Nobody needs more than two guns. If someone wants a third gun, it’s full NFA procedures and taxes.

Doug Pennington notably does not address how to figure who might have more than two firearms. Nor does he explain how the powers that be will go about collecting the extant extras. Certainly he isn’t volunteering to collect them; possibly he’s seen my observation regarding the wisdom of kicking in millions of door because the occupants are well-armed.

Perhaps he believes all the government has to do is pass a law and everyone will meekly “turn them all in”.

That doesn’t seem to be working in Chicago where repeat felons — prohibited persons who lawfully shouldn’t have any guns — are found with… guns. It’s almost as if they don’t obey laws.

In 1990, California instituted “assault weapon” registration and got a whopping 2.33% compliance rate.

The NY SAFE Act yielded a slightly better 4.45% compliance rate.

Connecticut gun owners are a little more obedient. That state saw a huge “assault weapon” registration 13.44% compliance rate, although they must have been disappointed with the “high capacity magazine registration 4% compliance rate.

Come on, Pennington; you can’t even get people to comply with universal preemptively-prove-your-innocence checks.

“Conclusions The enactment of CBC policies was associated with an overall increase in firearm background checks only in Delaware. Data external to the study suggest that Washington experienced a modest, but consistent, increase in background checks for private party sales, and Colorado experienced a similar increase in checks for sales not at gun shows. Non-compliance may explain the lack of an overall increase in background checks in Washington and Colorado.”

(That was funded in part by the anti-rights Joyce Foundation and they still couldn’t show compliance.)

If blue states like California, New York, and Connecticut have such poor participation rates with simple registration, imagine how places like Georgia will respond to door to door confiscation.

So, Mr. Pennington; who is going to bell your cat? You haven’t volunteered. When California toyed with the idea, a police union spokesman declared that if confiscation were ordered they’d see the largest outbreak of blue flu in history. And we bloody well won’t kick in our doors.

Let’s pretend law enforcement will play. Consider:

  • The FBI estimates a total of 698,460 law enforcement officers in America (federal, state, local).
  • Estimates of gun owners range from 60 million to 120 million.

Let’s use the conservative gun owners number: 60,000,000. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that The Pennington Edict magically reverses the usual compliance ratios and only 10% don’t turn in their extra guns.

6,000,000 vs. 698,460

The cops are going after heavily armed Americans, so they’ll use SWAT teams. This suggests a typical team size of 12, for 58,205 teams (sure, we’ll also pretend every cop is put on this, ignoring all real crime).

Each team will have to conduct 103 raids. Figure 8 hours for the standoff (remember, you’re going after cantankerous curmudgeons already proven to be uncooperative), and another shift to do the paperwork: 16 hours per raid. 16 x 6,000,000 = 96,000,000 man hours. Better give the guys time to sleep, another 8 hours. So each team runs a one raid per day

Assuming 58,205 teams (-giggle-), the snatch and grab is going to run well over three months. With 8 hours of overtime per day per 698,460 officers. This not only going to take a while, it going to be expensive.

And that doesn’t even factor in attrition, funeral costs, and death benefits. In reality the Pennington Patrols are kicking in doors of heavily armed, noncompliant SOBs. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an average of one officer lost per raid. Which means Pennington runs out of suckers before the HANSOBS run out of people and guns.

Fewer door-kickers, fewer teams, more raids per team… Suddenly this is taking longer than projected. Oh, well. At least there’ll be fewer officer drawing expensive overtime. Those pensions and death benefits though…

Maybe Pennington can bring in the military, too. Activate the Reserves alongside the active duty folks, add them to the cops…

And they’re still outnumbered by HANSOBs by more than 2 to 1.

I wonder how many of those LEOs and mil-folk are multiple gun owners. And how compliant they are.

That’s a best case scenario for the Pennington Proposal. What if there are 100 million gun gun owners, and they have a compliance rate closer to historical rates of 10%?

Now the 2,791,360 police and military are outnumbered by 90 million pissed off, noncompliant heroes. They’ll be outnumbered 32 to 1.

Sure, a lot of hold-outs will fold when the cops show up. But a lot won’t. The average won’t be pretty, or conducive to long-term police survival. Blue flu, Pennington; try to keep up.

If even one-half of one percent of the noncompliant shoot back, that’s 30,000 to 450,000 shooters (depending on the scenarios above).

Please recall that Pennington’s little trip down Tyranny Lane started with — as of latest claims — a single shooter killing 58 and wounding hundreds — in approximately ten minutes.

So tell us: How will you achieve your two-gun goal?

Who will bell the cat?

Ed. note: This commentary appeared first in TZP’s weekly email alert. If you would like to be among the first to see new commentary (as well as to get notice of new polls and recaps of recent posts), please sign up for our alert list. (See sidebar or, if you’re on a mobile device, scroll down). Be sure to respond when you receive your activation email!

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