Front Sight, Press

Can you say, “black market” boys and girls? I thought you could…

Before the midnight deadline Gov. Schwarzenegger acted on 685 bills that were on his desk. He signed 456 and vetoed 229.

One of the bills that he signed was Assembly Bill 962. It requires handgun ammunition to be kept behind the counter where customers cannot access it without assistance. It also requires gun shop owners to thumbprint people who buy handgun ammunition, as well as record their identification and provide that information to police.

Schwarzenegger released a statement explaining why he signed this bill.

"To the Members of the California State Assembly: I am signing Assembly Bill 962.

This measure would require vendors of handgun ammunition to keep a log of information on handgun ammunition sales, store ammunition in a safe and secure manner, and require the face to-face transfer of ammunition sales.

Although I have previously vetoed legislation similar to this measure, local governments have demonstrated that requiring ammunition vendors to keep records on ammunition sales improves public safety. These records have allowed law enforcement to arrest and prosecute persons who have no business possessing firearms and ammunition: gang members, violent parolees, second and third strikers, and even people previously serving time in state prison for murder.

Utilized properly, this type of information is invaluable for keeping communities safe and preventing dangerous felons from committing crimes with firearms.

Moreover, this type of record keeping is no more intrusive for law abiding citizens than similar laws governing pawnshops or the sale of cold medicine. Unfortunately, even the most successful
local program is flawed; without a statewide law, felons can easily skirt the record keeping requirements of one city by visiting another. Assembly Bill 962 will fix this problem by mandating that all ammunition vendors in the state keep records on ammunition sales.

As Governor, I have sought the appropriate balance between public safety and the right to keep and bear arms. I have signed important public safety measures to regulate the sale and transfer of .50 caliber rifles, instituted the California Firearms License Check program, and promoted the use of microstamping technology in handguns. I have also vetoed many pieces of legislation that sought to place unreasonable restrictions and burdens on firearms dealers and ammunition vendors.

Assembly Bill 962 reasonably regulates access to ammunition and improves public safety without placing undue burdens on consumers. For these reasons, I am pleased to sign this bill."

Source: News10/KXTV

The statement says, “Utilized properly, this type of information is invaluable for keeping communities safe and preventing dangerous felons from committing crimes with firearms." I sure would like to see some proof of that. Like your local serial killers and gangbangers are going down to Wal-Mart and getting thumb-printed before they buy their cases of 9mm? Do they buy their cocaine and meth at Walgreens? Give me a break.

Minister who held gun rally at church leaves to promote firearm rights

Ken Pagano, who drew world attention to his small Valley Station church by hosting a rally celebrating God and guns in June, has resigned from his ministry to promote gun rights and church security.

He’s working part-time at a local gun range and has helped form a group called the International Security Coalition of Clergy, along with a New York rabbi and others who are promoting the use of armed and trained security at houses of worship.

Pagano said that although New Bethel Church in Valley Station supported his organizing of the “Open Carry Celebration,” he felt he had become “maybe a little too much of a liability” and brought notoriety to the small congregation.

“I didn’t intend for it to turn out that way, but it did,” said Pagano, 49, a retired Marine who had been pastor of the congregation for a decade. “If we had just had a celebration service and it died down, it might not have been as big a deal. But it still generated quite a bit of interest, which wasn’t bad for me, but as a pastor I was concerned about the congregation.” …

…Pagano organized the Open Carry Celebration at his church on June 27, where participants were encouraged to wear unloaded guns on their holsters. The approximately 200 attendees — church members and visitors that included several members of a private militia — recited patriotic songs and the Pledge of Allegiance and watched a series of Internet videos arguing for the right to bear arms and arguing that gun bans put people at risk.

Source: Courier-Journal

This is huge, maybe bigger than Heller in some ways:

The Supreme Court says it is now prepared to resolve an issue about gun ownership it left unanswered when it made its historic 2008 ruling striking down the District of Columbia’s strict handgun law.

The justices announced Wednesday they will hear an Illinois case asking if their ruling last year in District of Columbia v. Heller extends to the states.

The lawsuit the justices agreed to hear was originally filed within hours after the high court’s ruling that overturned a ban on possessing handguns in the nation’s capital. Chicago and Oak Park, Ill. have similar bans that are now being challenged.

The case is led by the lawyer who successfully argued Heller before the high court last year and is sure to become the focus of all interests in the gun debate but the legal question that is now before the Court is a bit more mundane.

Incorporation is the technical word for making a Constitutional Amendment applicable to the states. When the Bill of Rights was passed, the Founders specifically rejected a proposal to incorporate the Amendments. Instead, the laws were only applicable to the federal government.

But starting in 1897, the high court has undergone a piecemeal process of incorporating various parts of the Bill of Rights. Today’s cases are asking the justices to extend the federally protected Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms to the states. Something has yet to do.

Last year, in a 5-4 decision, the high court ruled that individuals do have a Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. But Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion specifically avoided the question of whether or not that ruling extends to the states. Since then, lower courts have divided on the matter.

In the Illinois case, the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against the gun advocates saying that there was no high court precedent allowing it to apply the Second Amendment to the states.

The Court isn’t expected to hear arguments in the case until next year.

Source: Fox News

Sometimes it seems that life is just a process of losing things: innocence, youth, dreams, health, time and life itself. One might wax mystical about it and say that it is the way we achieve freedom from all that binds us to this temporary existence. It sounds good on paper, but it’s a drag when it’s happening.

Days tick by like minutes. They say that old men spend their time looking back. I’m getting older, and I don’t want to slip into that trap, but it’s hard sometimes to stay out of the past, to forget the rush of time and stay focused on what yet needs to be done.

A friend sent me a picture of her daughter who is starting the fourth grade this year. As I looked at the child’s picture, it occurred to me that, in the year I was in the fourth grade, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Whoa. Talk about “seeing your life flash before your eyes.”

Today we remember another day as traumatic as the Kennedy Assassination, the 9-11 attack. Eight years ago, 19 religious fanatics hijacked commercial airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and into a field in Pennsylvania. I can’t add much to what has already been said about the searing wound this act did to the national psyche. I suppose we will commemorate it for the next fifty years or so, until the memory slowly fades from the collective psyche, in the same way the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 is fading today.

The 9-11 attack essentially destroyed the Bush presidency. The administration was quick to declare the attack to be “an act of war” and to define itself as a “wartime presidency.” I believe that this was a profound error. In my opinion, the 9-11 attack was a crime perpetrated by a group of suicidal lunatics. When an event is determined to be “an act of war” there are legal implications to such a definition. Civil rights are handled differently during wartime than in peacetime. The president has certain powers during wartime that are not available to peacetime presidents. These include the authority to commit the armed forces to battle and the suspension of habeas corpus. The Bush administration was too quick to seize the opportunity and use 9-11 as the raison d’être to settle old scores in Iraq. It would prove to be their undoing. It resulted in the most unpopular presidency since Reconstruction.

Today, Al Qaeda is a shattered band of renegades scurrying around the tribal areas of Pakistan; Saddam is dead; the Bush presidency is just a bad memory; Barak Hussein Obama is president of the United States, but the trauma of 9-11 remains. Troops are still deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and we’re still arguing about it. There is still just a big hole where the World Trade Center used to be. We still prattle about “the war on terror.” Has anything been learned, or are we pretty much where we started out, but with a Texas-sized grudge toward all things Islamic?

One thing we obviously haven’t learned is that you cannot wage war against an idea. You can only wage war against people and their governments. You can’t shoot an idea or carpet bomb a concept. It just doesn’t work. We also haven’t seemed to learn that you don’t make friends with people by shooting at them. These things seem like no-brainers to me, but some folks still don’t get it.

I hope we have learned that we can never allow the United States to be governed by fear. Also, I hope we have learned that not all Islamic people share the same ideology with the Al Qaeda nut cases. We’ll see. I’m not at all sure.

A moment of silence for all of those who died in the attack and the wars that followed.

A moment of somber reflection on how stupid we can be.

A moment of hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil, and that maybe, through it all, we will come through it wiser, steadier, and maybe even better.

Tonight while President Obama was giving his health care speech, we witnessed something truly appalling. When Obama got to the place where he declared that his health care reform policy did not provide for health care for illegal aliens, Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted, “You lie.” I don’t recall any other president being heckled that way during an address to Congress. Even at his lowest ebb, no one treated George W. Bush that way. Even Bill Clinton at the worst of his tenure was not heckled and insulted like this.

I have been trying to get on www.joewilson.house.gov with no success. Apparently, there are a couple of other folks who are outraged by the representative’s behavior. The intemperate representative quickly issued an apology, saying that “I let my emotions get the best of me…” Sorry, Joe, but that’s not good enough. Barak Obama is our president. He is President of the United States of America. His office and his person demand our respect, regardless of whether we agree with him on policy points or not. An insult to the president is an insult to us all, regardless of our politics or affiliations. I would suggest that Rep. Wilson resign since he is obviously incompetent to hold the office of a United States Representative.

Our culture and society depend upon respect for our traditions and institutions. There is a basic level of respect and civility that we extend to our institutions and representatives, not because of the personalities involved, but because we have recognized that these institutions of society and government are necessary and valuable. I’m not terribly wild about Justice Sonia Maria Sotomayor. I think she’s a racist and sexist, but by golly, she’s also a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and I’m going to treat the lady with respect regardless of whether I like her positions or not.

When our elected leaders fail to model the respect and decorum required by the institutions of our society, how can we possibly hope to solve the difficult problems facing us? Representative Joe Wilson has brought shame on his party and his state. His behavior was uncivilized to the extent of being barbaric. We can only hope that in the next election, South Carolina will produce a better quality of representation.

Xavier nails it on the snubnose:

I loaded the snubnose revolver for Frieda, and she aligned the sights. She struggled to pull the trigger back, and when the little revolver finally barked, it almost leapt from her hands. She looked at me in astonishment. She looked back at her target, and trembled as she began to pull off another round. Bam! A look of genuine concern crossed her face.

"You don’t have to keep shooting it," I told her. "We can unload it."

"Good," she replied. All too often when a woman enters a gun store to purchase a gun, they are met with ignorance if not outright condescension. Over and over I have met women who purchased a snubnose revolver as their first handgun. The only reason I can fathom for this is a salesman wanting to make a sale, and him knowing that the female new to shooting, will go for the smaller gun.

Frieda had fallen into that trap. Unfortunately, the snubnose revolver is one of the most difficult handguns to shoot well. The long, often heavy double action trigger combined with the short sight radius make it a challenge for experienced shooters. For a person in the learning stages, the trigger, sight radius and recoil are a recipe for failure and frustration. A cold range was called, and we went out to put up new targets…

Read the Whole Thing Here

You know I love the snubbies. I may have another gun, but I always have my snubnose. Nevertheless,  and I have been saying this for a long time, the snubnose is not the ideal gun for new shooters and it drives me crazy when gun shop clerks automatically put inexperienced women into snubbies. That is a terrible way to start out a new shooter. The snubnose wasn’t my first handgun and it shouldn’t be yours.

However, if you are just dead set on buying a snub gun for your first handgun, I would suggest a nice heavy one like a S&W 640 with a full-sized grip. A good grip on a snubnose revolver makes a huge difference in the level of comfort you will experience when practicing with it.

Three Pittsburgh police officers killed by gun-loving maniac; afraid Obama would limit gun rights

Source: Daily News

If this pathetic maniac did actually care about gun rights (which I doubt seriously, but I can only take the story at face value as reported by his friend), he did the exact thing that will drive the government to institute far more restrictive gun laws than what we have now – an insane, pointless multiple murder of three peace officers who were just trying to do their jobs, just like the four who died in Oakland two weeks ago. And he did his crime with the number one item on the gun banners list: the AK-47. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies!

This has been a particularly bad weekend for mass shootings. In Binghamton, NY, another failed personality walked into his immigrant assistance center and killed 13 innocent people before ending his own life. In Graham, Washington, a father killed his five children and then himself. A week ago we witnessed a massacre at a nursing home in North Carolina. Three weeks ago a kid in Germany killed fifteen people at a high school. At about the same time, another failed personality murdered a dozen innocent people in Alabama… and the hits just keep on coming.

The horrible irony is that these events make the case for both sides of the gun rights debate. They make a compelling case for why guns should simply be banned: “If they didn’t have those AK-47’s, they couldn’t do these things.” I argue against that logic, but it gets harder every day. On the other hand, these tragic incidents are solid proof that more law-abiding citizens should be armed, trained and prepared to defend the innocent against these chaotic psycho-terrorists. They prove once again that “gun free zones” make the best targets.

The horrible irony is that Obama himself seems to be working pretty hard to stay off of gun control, given his background and political orientation. That may change, but so far, he hasn’t actually done anything toward instituting gun control. Yet, these kinds of events will push Obama and the rest of the government to try to do something to put a stop to the mayhem, and the easiest political vector is gun control. In the political world, it pays to be seen as doing something.

The horrible irony is that freedom is a form of slavery, as George Orwell so famously put it. Freedom is slavery to personal responsibility and rational decision-making. Freedom is a slavish commitment to independent living and legal democracy. And, when freedom is abused badly enough, it vanishes. As Texas Fred is fond of saying, “Freedom is not free.”

The horrible irony is that eighty million Americans used their guns responsibly today, but nobody noticed because they didn’t make the news. That won’t matter, though. People won’t stand for this level of mayhem. We’ll be lucky if we get through this with snubbies and double-barrels.

Fairfax, Va. – Today, U.S. Senators Mike Crapo (R-ID), Max Baucus (D-MT), Bob Bennett (R-UT), Jon Tester (D-MT) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) introduced legislation to restore the Second Amendment rights of visitors in national parks and wildlife refuges. The current Department of the Interior (DOI) regulations were amended by the Bush Administration in 2008, allowing law-abiding citizens to defend themselves by carrying a concealed firearm in national parks and wildlife refuges. However, early this year, a federal district court in Washington, D.C. granted anti-gun plaintiffs a preliminary injunction against implementation of the new rule. The NRA has been working for the past several years in the regulatory, legal, and legislative arenas to achieve this policy change.

This bill would provide uniformity across our nation’s federal lands and put an end to the patchwork of regulations that governed different lands managed by different federal agencies.  In the past, only Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands allowed the carrying of firearms, while National Parks and Wildlife Refuges did not.

Source: NRA-ILA

The end must surely be near…

Tester, Baucus leading charge against gun control
By MATT GOURAS of the Associated Press

HELENA - Two Montana Democrats are leading the charge against gun control - even helping force the military to continue selling surplus brass to gun aficionados who want cheaper ammunition.

U.S. Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester are not simply placating gun advocates with a vague promise to vote against gun control in Congress. They are forcing former political foes to recognize that Democrats could be their strongest allies while the party controls Washington, D.C.

It’s creating uncertain bedfellows on an issue that wins or loses races in places like Montana.

The pair have been taking the lead on issues that only the most ardent gun rights advocates were talking about. Just last week they joined Republican U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg of Montana to pressure the Defense Department in a move that is credited with overturning a short-lived brass ban…

…It was also Tester and Baucus who were among the first taking shots at an Obama administration statement in favor of renewing the assault rifle ban, telling their fellow Democrats to expect strong opposition.

The strong pro-gun moves are forcing the gun rights community to recognize that the key Democrats could be their strongest allies. Tester said the gun lobby knows it can trust him and Baucus - and gun-control Democrats know not to even bring up the issue.

“We are going to be an asset to them, no doubt about it,” said Tester. “We are going to do what we think is right, based on what we think is right, not what someone else in the Senate thinks is right or what our party thinks is right.”…

…The alliance is not lost on gun control advocates.

“It’s not like Democrats are automatically on one side and Republicans on the other. It can cut both ways,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “It is still very frustrating to us.”

Just a couple weeks ago, gun advocates who reload their own ammunition were sent into a frenzy over a Defense Department decision to stop selling surplus bullet brass. Just about as quickly as groups such as the National Rifle Association could get involved so did Tester and Baucus - and the ban was quickly lifted.

“It’s about living up to what is in the Constitution. It’s a good document, it’s gotten us to where we’re at,” said Tester. “It would be the same thing if the government came out and limited our right to assemble.”…

Baucus has old wounds in the gun control battle. He voted for gun control back in the early 1990s - and nearly lost his Senate seat in 1996. That campaign was so bitter that the Montana Shooting Sports Association ran an advertisement comparing Baucus to Hitler. Things are different now. The author of that advertisement, MSSA founder Gary Marbut of Missoula, personally attended a ceremony last summer where the National Rifle Association gave Baucus its election year seal of approval….

…“I think it’s very important for us Westerners to be eternally diligent, to not let any daylight between Montanans and the Second Amendment,” Baucus said. “We have strongly held views about the Second Amendment, more so than other states - and we represent Montana and not those other states.”

Source: The Missoulian

Seriously, I think this is an extremely positive trend that should be encouraged. I’m a gun rights partisan, not a Republican partisan or a Democrat partisan. Those who further my cause are my friends and those who work against it are not. I would like to see the day when the Democrats stop writing us off as hopeless and the Republicans stop taking us for granted.

On balances, over the past 16 years, the Republicans have done a better job on gun rights than the Democrats, but the Republican record has not been spotless. George Bush said he would sign a new assault weapons ban if it reached his desk and the Bush Justice Department filed an amicus brief in the Heller case in support of the DC handgun ban. Justice Scalia’s opinion on the Heller case contained enough weasel language that little or nothing really changed except that residents of DC can legally possess a handgun if they are acrobatic enough to jump through the myriad legal hoops required to obtain one – not exactly what I would call a clean reading of the Second Amendment.

We know about Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder. They are Brady Campaign stooges who have never had an original thought in their lives. We know about Frank Lautenberg, Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Schumer. They are enemies of freedom and the Constitution. But with other Democrats who want to come over to our way of thinking and affirm the right to self defense, I’ll welcome them with open arms, even if I disagree with them on other issues.

The gun control and concealed carry debate that has swept over campus recently and has persisted in our nation for so long is, and always will be, fundamentally pointless and stupid. The problem is not whether we should have guns or not; what really matters is whether we can change our society to where gun control becomes a moot point…

Read the Whole Thing Here