I’m still in shock at the senseless violence that’s occurred in Aurora, Colorado. My thoughts and prayers are with the families of those affected and with the family of the shooter, who seem to be in as much shock as the rest of us.
Here’s the truth: some people do evil things for reasons beyond politics, and those who blame violent entertainment for violence are usually ill-equipped to answer how nice movies didn’t prevent the violence. Most importantly, beyond all our political fooferall, there are people who desperately need our love and prayer right now. Maybe we should be focusing on them.
Everyone who gets involved with guns has their favorites, and when I started this list, I had a nice, large collection of guns that I’ve owned, fired, or just plain fascinate me in every possible way…. and then I realized I have a life and I could easily spend hours making up this post.
So I’m going to keep this simple: my favorite long gun, my favorite semi-auto handgun, and my favorite revolver. And then you can tell me your favorites.
My favorite long gun:
Winchester Model 1892 – I’m Accepting Donations
Winchester Model 1892
I love shotguns and rifles with varying degrees of love, but there is just something special about the Winchester 92. The beautiful lever action and its widespread Hollywood-generated mythos just make for an awesome, gorgeous gun. I have to confess: I don’t own one. Yet. I do, however, accept donations.
Runners up: M1 Garand, Mosin-Nagant Model 1944
My favorite semi-auto handgun
Beretta 92fs – How a Semi-Auto Should Feel
Beretta 92fs
There are tons of great semi-auto fans out there and I know I’m going to step on some toes when it comes to those who prefer Glocks, Rugers, Sigs, or God help us all, Hi-Points… but the Beretta 92fs is one of those guns that just feels right. There’s a reason it’s been the standard sidearm for the US military. It feels like a handgun should feel. I’m not a fan of the feather-light semi-autos that are like air in your hand. I want a gun that has some heft to it, and the 92fs delivers. It’s accurate as hell, comfortable and simple to handle, and fun to shoot.
Runners up: Smith and Wesson M&P, Colt M1911A1 (again, accepting donations)
Favorite revolver:
Ruger LCR – Perfection
Ruger LCR
This one’s been a long time coming for me because I’ve toyed with revolvers for a while, but never bit. Revolvers, especially snubbys, always had too many shortcomings for me: lack of accuracy, too much kick, too tight on the double action pulls. I’d handled a few, but was never really impressed with them – until now. I put my hands on this baby for the first time this past February and, following that event, knew that this gun would be mine. I finally picked one up a couple of months later and I have to say: Ruger got it 100% right. It’s super-accurate for snubby, handles kick a lot better than expected, and the double action pull is smooth as butter. Not only my favorite revolver, this has quickly become my favorite gun. It’s a perfect balance of power and ease of use. The LCR comes in 3 calibers: .22, .38, and .357. I recommend the .357 simply because it gives you the option for .38 or .357 and the added few ounces weight help to reduce the kick even on the .38.
Runners up: Ruger SP101, Smith and Wesson Police Special
So what’s your favorite? What boomstick lights your fancy? What piece of 2nd Amendment awesomeness do you hope to add to your collection? Comment below (or on one of the places where this article pops up).
Thanks for tuning in this week to Gun Week. We’ve gotten some positive feedback and may do this again in the future. In the meantime, if you own guns, I’d love to get your feedback on these articles. If you don’t own a gun, but have considered buying one, I highly recommend that you take the advice of people far more skilled than I on the subject. Massad Ayoob is a master at understanding the laws regarding the use of guns, and any of his books on gun use comes highly recommended. My other favorite source of information (if anything, just for the great attitude he has towards the subject) is Hickok45, whose Youtube gun reviews and commentary are extremely popular for a reason.
We’ve gone over why we should own guns and the various gun law issues. So the question arises: is the 2nd Amendment absolute? Should we be allowed to have nuclear weapons, RPG’s, and other instruments of death that are restricted to the military? How far should these restrictions extend?
There are extremists on both sides. One side, of course, denies that the 2nd Amendment means what it clearly says. These people should be ignored and mocked. The other side, of course, says that no citizen should be denied a weapon that the government can’t get its hands on. These people… are actually pretty close to the original intent of the 2nd Amendment: namely, the right to defend yourself against government tyranny.
Exercising My 2nd Amendment Rights
Having said that… there are reasonable restrictions on guns that reasonable people should agree with. In deference to the gun supporters, no, I don’t think that citizens have a right to carry an RPG around in public. While we have the right to repel government tyranny, there has to be a reasonable limit on what a potentially untrained citizen can do with weapons that do more than put a bullet in a bad guy. During the revolution, there were limited numbers of citizens who owned such devices, but they were limited mostly to rich people who needed to protect goods. However, I doubt the framers ever considered the concept of a private citizen owning a nuclear weapon that could destroy a city. Frankly, it was just too foreign of an idea to consider.
And that leads us to restrictions. Over time, the legislatures and courts around this land have worked to define exactly which “arms” are protected under the 2nd Amendment. Recently, the Supreme Court (in DC v. Heller) agreed that handguns are protected as “arms” under that Amendment and that Federal enclaves like DC (later extended to states in McDonald v. Chicago). However, the SCOTUS has also ruled that there are reasonable restrictions that the government can apply to gun ownership in the interest of public safety. While traditional purposes for guns like self-defense and hunting are protected, weapons that kill indiscriminately (like RPGs and nukes) are not protected – and this is an example of a reasonable restriction.
So… what about restricting the places guns can exist? Is it a reasonable restriction, for instance, to restrict guns on school campuses? Well, it may be reasonable to restrict access to guns by children, but it’s also a big, fat joke. “Gun Free Zones” are some of the most dangerous places to be in America because if I’m a criminal who wants to kill a bunch of people, I’m not going to go somewhere where people can shoot back. Think about it this way: some of the deadliest shootings in American history have occurred at places that were “gun-free zones”.
Virginia Tech Massacre, VA: Walking Evil walks onto campus armed to the teeth and systematically murders 32 people and injures 17 before putting a bullet in his own head.
Luby’s Cafeteria, TX: during a time when you couldn’t legally carry a gun in public in Texas, a jerkwad of a human being walked into a cafeteria and killed 23 people and injured 20 before killing himself.
Columbine High School, CO: 2 douchebag high school students illegally acquire weapons and illegally enter their gun-free high school where they kill 13 and injure 21 before finally finishing themselves off.
All gun-free zones. All used as target galleries by people who didn’t care about the law. The Luby’s Cafeteria shooting was interesting because one of the results of that event was that one of the survivors ended up running for the Texas Legislature and worked to get concealed carry laws passed in Texas, meaning that the next time some asshat walks into a restaurant in the Lone Star State and pulls a gun, he’s likely to be facing down a dozen citizens ready to return the favor.
OK, since gun-free zones are a joke, are there other reasonable restrictions? Surely no one needs clips that hold 30 rounds, do they? Or automatic weapons? Or what about those “cop-killer” bullets? Those are all scary things and normal people wouldn’t ever want those, would they?
Well… see, that’s just window dressing. Restricting the number of bullets in clips didn’t keep the Columbine shooters from doing their evil, did they? It just means that if you want to fire off a bunch of rounds, you need to buy more clips. Cop-killer bullets? Any bullet can kill. The idea that one bullet is more special than another bullet is an absolute joke. Over the years, gun control advocates have waged war against magic bullets that could supposedly pierce cops’ body armor or could somehow do so much damage that the world would somehow come to an end. The actual studies on these bullets showed that the fears were unfounded.
Automatic weapons? Let’s be honest: most people have no idea what an automatic weapon is. Heck – even the cheesy little NRA video that I had to watch to get my CCW license used “automatic” and “semi-automatic” interchangeably. Honestly, tho, when it comes to fully automatic weapons, I’m ambivalent. I can understand the allure and the usefulness of these weapons under the Founders’ standards, but can also understand how dangerous they can be in the wrong hands. Maybe requiring an additional level of training would be in order.
And this leads me to the one big area that I support that I’m not sure others will: I believe in training. I believe that good training makes for good gun owners, so much so that I believe that every gun owner should be required to undergo training in matters of use and law before they’re allowed to carry their guns. HOWEVER… once they’re trained, I fully believe that everyone who’s not a violent felon or adjudicated mentally unfit should have the right to carry open or concealed without restriction. And if you think this will lead to a “Wild West” scenario, then you’ve been watching too much TV and not paying attention to places that have looser gun laws where crime rates go down when these freedoms are enacted.
So what kind of weapon should you carry? Well… we’re going to cover that tomorrow.
First – I updated yesterday’s post because I forgot one big point about why you should own a gun: hunting.
Now, on to guns! Or more accurately: gun laws.
If there’s anything that the Trayvon Marin case has taught us, it’s that the average citizen – and occasionally, gun owner – knows about as much about gun laws as they do about quantum physics. On the one hand, you have puppet masters and their marionettes screaming about the evils of “stand your ground” laws.
Again, as The Great Ayoob says in the above video, you have a right to defend yourself with deadly force in the United States. No state in the union can take that right away from you. They can, however, restrict that right using laws like the “duty to retreat” and “concealed carry”. We’ll talk about reasonable restrictions tomorrow, but for today, let’s reiterate some basic points.
First, let’s talk basic self defense. Again, you have the right to defend your life and the lives of those around you if you, as a reasonable person, believe that you are presented with a real and present danger to your life, serious bodily injury, or serious sexual assault. If a bad guy is coming after you with a knife, you have the right to pull a gun to defend yourself.
Where you live, however, defines how you can use that gun. A few states require you to at least attempt to retreat, even in your own home (“officer, he was coming to kill me and I tried to get away, but couldn’t”). Other states have a castle doctrine or stand-your-ground law that removes this duty to retreat, so long as you are in your home or, depending on the state, in your car or your place of business. Other states have a variety of the stand-your-ground law, where you have no duty to retreat at any time in any situation, and you have a near-absolute right to defend your life without retreating an inch.
As I’ve said before, I am not a lawyer. You should consult your state’s laws if you have any questions.
Posted Here for Totally Non-Gratuitous Reasons
Second, let’s talk about carrying your gun. Again, this depends on where you live (hence why you should call on your Senators to back the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act, which will protect your rights to carry your weapons if you cross state lines into any state that allows you to carry your weapons (Illinois and DC being the only notable anti-freedom locales in the US). The House has already passed the bill, and now it’s in the hands of Harry Reid’s Senate.
God help us all.
It’s important to know how you can carry your gun. Most states have some sort of concealed carry license that requires you to receive some level of training and maybe do a background check so that you can carry your gun in a way that it can’t be easily seen by the public – and that shares that rights to some degree with other states. Some states allow you to carry your gun on your hip in full view of the public. Some of those states have restrictions on open carry that are, well…. Interesting. North Carolina, for instance, protects the right to open carry in the state constitution, but the right is whittled down by a restriction that doesn’t allow you to cause terror to the public. In other words, you have a constitutional right to carry your sidearm in a holster in full public view… right up until someone gets nervous. As soon as that happens, you may be found to be “armed to the terror of the populace” and you may find yourself in trouble. Again, check your state’s laws (and the laws of states you visit) for more information.
Having said that – I’ve got some opinions here. Surprise, surprise. My take is this: if you haven’t been convicted of a violent felony or adjudicated by the courts to be mentally deficient or found to have an intelligence quotient that would qualify you as mentally disabled (below 80), you should have the right to open or concealed carry without a license. If you’ve been convicted of a non-violent felony or a misdemeanor, you’ve served your full time including probation and parole, and you’ve gone 10 years without having another conviction, then I believe your full gun rights should be restored.
While I’m dreaming, I’d also like a pony and 100 bajillion dollars.
I guess the simplest point to all of the law questions is: be educated. 20 years ago, it was more difficult and sometimes you could slide on simply not knowing things. Heck, 20 years ago, a woman carrying a gun in her purse often wouldn’t have a moment’s worth of trouble from the police who figured that an armed woman was better than a dead one. Now the laws have changed, concealed carry is a state law (meaning that the state has a financially vested interest in you following the law that criminals aren’t going to follow anyway), and the cops presume that you’ve Googled all state laws regarding weapons carrying. There’s a bit more freedom, but far less leeway. Hunting laws are similar: there’s much less flexibility in their enforcement than there was in previous times, so you need to keep up to date on the laws, limits, and licensing.
Today, we open up Gun Week here at PachydermsBlog, and we’re going to do so with a doozy. We’re going to talk about the 2nd Amendment, that controversial piece of legislation that keeps Americans armed and Gun Control advocates frightened and scrambling to redefine exactly what the Constitution clearly says.
So, I’m going to let Penn Jillette explain it to you:
He explains it masterfully, much more quickly than I’m about to. First, he takes the text of the amendment, which reads thusly:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
For years, the debate has raged over the exact interpretation of this amendment. Gun rights groups have tended to focus on the 2nd half (shall not be infringed) while gun control groups have focused on the first half (a well-regulated militia). The typical GC interpretation of this amendment is that since there’s a qualifier in the passage about a militia, then the 2nd Amendment only applies to the states’ right to call up a militia, and since the national guard has replaced the militia, there is no need for common citizens to bear arms.
Jillette, however, disagrees – as do gun rights groups. Their claim is that the qualifier in the Amendment was never designed to restrict access to guns, but instead provides historical context as to why the right of the people should not be infringed. They argue that since the state has the right to arm itself, the people should be able to preserve the right to rebellion by taking up arms against it.
So… the truth? Honestly – a little bit of both.
First – the early nation did rely on the state-risen militia for regional defense. It didn’t have the money to fully fund a full-time military and so the people, as they had under the English crown, could expect, at times, to be called up to serve as a part of their state’s militia, to act as a supplement to the national military. However, we also have to understand the historical context as well. The people writing this amendment had just fought a war for freedom against the British Empire using citizen soldiers and militia.
It’s also important to understand that the early legal theorists who studied the amendment shortly after its inception did so in direct contrast to the English Bill of Rights that allowed the right to bear arms on one hand, and then restricted that right to the very wealthy on the other, by allowing Parliament to pass laws that restricted gun ownership under the guise of protection of wild game. At the same time, they also recognized that the right to bear arms was conditional: that there were circumstances where the government had the right to restrict the bearing of arms – however, they were very clear in their belief that the ultimate purpose of the second amendment was to allow the people a path to rebellion against tyranny. And what’s the best way to repel tyranny enforced by military might? Guns.
Keep in mind: fighting tyranny is exactly what the Bill of Rights is about. James Madison stated that he supported the idea that “the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government, whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purposes of its institution.” The first 10 Amendments are built around this concept: protecting the citizenry and restricting Congress (1st, 9th, 10th, and the later 27th – along with the unratified Congressional Apportionment Amendment), the military (2nd, 3rd), and the courts (4th-8th). None of these amendments are designed, in any way, to restrict the right of the people.
In fact, as Jillette and Teller point out in the video above, the idea that there’s some sort of “breath” in the amendment doesn’t jive with the simple statement that the 2nd half of the amendment clearly states: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Usually this is where the discussion turns to the gun control advocates crying like children about how if the 2nd Amendment allows guns, then it should allow common citizens to carry nuclear weapons, and common sense would dictate that this is a bad idea, right? RIGHT?
Well, we’ll get to that later this week. In the meantime, be calm and content with the fact that the framers distrusted the human greed for power enough to stick an amendment in the Constitution that forces the government to remember that its citizens are armed.
For two months now, all we’ve heard is how an evil white guy in Florida gunned down a poor, innocent black kid in cold blood, and I’m sick of it.
I’ve spoken out on this on Facebook and message boards quite a bit, but it’s time to lay everything out, both in terms of understanding the situation, the law behind it, the people involved, and the fluff on both sides of the argument. If you don’t agree with me, feel free to start your own blog on the matter.
Here’s the facts that we actually know at this point:
On February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch guy and concealed weapon license holder that lived in a neighborhood with rising crime rates, saw a person he thought was behaving suspiciously. He phoned it in to the non-emergency number at the Sanford, FL police department at 7:09 PM. At around 7:11-7:12, Martin begins running and Zimmerman begins to chase him. The operator tells him “We don’t need you to do that”. Zimmerman says “OK” and gives his best address location to the operator. At 7:13, he hangs up.
Martin’s girlfriend was on the phone with him around 7:12 and was told that someone was following him. She reported that there was a verbal confrontation at some point during the phone call.
At about 7:25, there is a physical altercation during which Zimmerman pulls a Kel-Tec PF9 pistol and fires a single shot at very close range. The slug hits Martin in the chest. At 7:26, support personnel arrive and perform lifesaving measures on Martin, who is declared dead at 7:30 PM. Zimmerman tells the police officer on site that he had shot Martin.
According to witnesses, there was a physical altercation that involved Martin on top of Zimmerman, hitting him with his fists. Medical reports released after the event show that Zimmerman had wounds to his face, nose, and back of head, and the back of his jacket was wet and covered with grass, consistent with him lying on his back in the wet grass. Zimmerman’s hands were not bruised (indicating that he did not hit Martin). Martin’s autopsy report showed that his hands were bruised, as if he’d been hitting someone. The autopsy report also showed that Martin had THC (a byproduct of marijuana) in his system at the time of his death, but the quantity as of today is not known.
Zimmerman was placed into police custody and taken downtown where he was photographed, interviewed, and investigated. The state attorney’s office called it self-defense and declined to pursue charges against him at the time.
After protests by the victim’s family and rising national pressure, Florida Governor Rick Scott assigned a different state prosecutor to the case. On April 11, 2012, the new prosecutor charged Zimmerman with 2nd Degree Murder.
Here’s where we have to start talking about legal specifics. I am not a lawyer, so please consult a legal professional if you have questions about this:
Self-defense law in the United States is simple and is accepted nationwide. If a reasonable person believes they or someone else is at risk of loss of life, serious bodily injury, or serious sexual assault, then they have the right to use deadly force in defense.
There are two doctrines that are tied to self-defense. The first is called “duty to retreat” and it states that a defendant who is claiming self defense must prove to the court that they attempted to avoid the conflict and took reasonable steps to attempt to retreat before they used deadly force. 19 states use this doctrine.
The second doctrine is called “stand your ground”. This doctrine states that if you are in a conflict that you did not provoke and you have to use deadly force to defend yourself, you are under no duty to retreat. 31 states use some form of this doctrine that varies from an absolute stand-your-ground law (24 states) to a limited version that only applies to home, business, car, etc. (7 states)
Under Florida Law, Second Degree Murder in Florida is defined as “The unlawful killing of a human being, when perpetrated by any act imminently dangerous to another and evincing a depraved mind regardless of human life, although without any premeditated design to effect the death of any particular individual, is murder in the second degree”. (FL State Code 782.04 (2)). In other words, it is an unlawful killing of a human being with malice, but without premeditation. A classic description of 2nd Degree Murder is if a person became angry, grabbed his usual self-defense gun, and then shot the person he was angry at.
This is what we know so far. Unfortunately, there’s so much stupid heat over this tragedy that we’ve forgotten the real facts of this case:
A young man is dead, possibly because of his own actions.
Another young man’s life is ruined, possibly because he defended his life against an aggressor.
For years, the debate has raged over the exact interpretation of this amendment. Gun rights groups have tended to focus on the 2nd half (shall not be infringed) while gun control groups have focused on the first half (a well-regulated militia). The typical GC interpretation of this amendment is that since there’s a qualifier in the passage about a militia, then the 2nd Amendment only applies to the states’ right to call up a militia, and since the national guard has replaced the militia, there is no need for common citizens to bear arms.
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The Annoyed Elephant
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