Category Archives: Individual Rights

Legal Doublespeak About National Gun Registration

Barack Obama, Constitution, GUNS, Individual Rights, Law

Gun owners must be wondering what in bloody blue blazes the malfunctioning media is talking about when referring to the gun legislation just defeated in the Senate as a background-check bill.

“Don’t we already have those?”, they’d be asking themselves. And they’d be right.

If you’ve purchased a gun from a dealer, and you have a Concealed Pistol License, you’ve undergone a background check. I have. According to the law in my state, the firearms dealer must run you through the NICS—National Instant Criminal Background Check System— for an instant check prior to delivery.

Most states have similar laws.

Yesterday, President Barack Obama delivered a canned performance of righteous indignation, with activists beating on breast behind him over the defeat of the savior bill. A “shameful day for Washington,” raged Obama, who is master of the cliche.

The defeated Manchin-Toomey amendment has been misrepresented by the jokers of the media as no more than “a compromise on a fraction of the comprehensive gun control package the president called for after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary.”

However, the extent of the Obama media’s doublespeak becomes clear when the legal implications of Toomey-Manchin are unpacked by Second-Amendment scholar David Kopel.

The “badly miswritten” Toomey-Manchin Amendment was “in fact a major advancement for gun control,” writes Kopel at The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog written by law professors.

Particularly interesting is what Kopel has discovered with respect to “The provision which claims to outlaw national gun registration.” It “in fact authorizes a national gun registry”:

Let’s start with registration. Here’s the Machin-Toomey text.

(c) Prohibition of National Gun Registry.-Section 923 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
“(m) The Attorney General may not consolidate or centralize the records of the
“(1) acquisition or disposition of firearms, or any portion thereof, maintained by
“(A) a person with a valid, current license under this chapter;
“(B) an unlicensed transferor under section 922(t); or
“(2) possession or ownership of a firearm, maintained by any medical or health insurance entity.”.

The limit on creating a registry applies only to the Attorney General (and thus to entities under his direct control, such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives). By a straightforward application of inclusio unius exclusio alterius it is permissible for entities other than the Attorney General to create gun registries, using whatever information they can acquire from their own operations. For example, the Secretary of HHS may consolidate and centralize whatever firearms records are maintained by any medical or health insurance entity. The Secretary of the Army may consolidate and centralize records about personal guns owned by military personnel and their families.
The Attorney General may not create a registry from the records of “a person with a valid, current license under this chapter.” In other words, the AG may not harvest the records of persons who currently hold a Federal Firearms License (FFL). Thus, pursuant to inclusio unius, the AG may centralize and consolidate the records of FFLs who have retired from their business.

UPDATED: ‘See a Shrink, Lose Your Guns’ (And To Hell With HIPAA)

Government, Individual Rights, Law, Psychiatry, Regulation

“Expect a reduction in the use of counseling services among gun owners,” BAB warned on December 24, 2012. If he thinks that his doctor is likely to pass on information about his mental state to federal or state authorities, how likely is a gun owner to seek help for psychological/marital/familial problems? Not very likely.”

And indeed a troika of traitors—Senators Pat Toomey (R) and Joe Manchin (D), with Chuck Schumer working behind the scenes—are seeking “an amendment in the bill to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act),” caution the Gun Owners of America.

“…you could have your guns taken away because your private shrink thinks you’re ‘dangerous’ and could send your name directly to the FBI Instant Check system. Did you think it was terrible that 150,000 military veterans had been added into the NICS system because they’d seen a VA shrink about their PTSD? Well guess what? Now it’s going to happen to the rest of the population … by the millions!”

As with all government regulation, there will be unintended consequences that’ll immeasurably compound the problem the proposed, new gun legislation is intended to “remedy.”

Fearing the loss of a natural right to self defense, individuals will avoid seeking help for life’s stressors.

UPDATE: TO HELL WITH HIPAA. “HIPAA Laws,” reports The Blaze, “are likely being compromised and the 4th and 5th Amendments violated,” as New York gestapo proceed to confiscate “weapons and permits where someone has been prescribed psychotropic drugs.”

KNIFE LAWS; Yes, We Have Them

Constitution, Crime, Criminal Injustice, GUNS, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism

Undoubtedly, Piers Morgan should be pleased about America’s “bewilderingly complex, startlingly severe” “State and local knife-control laws.”

As an example, and as the Independence Institute’s David Kopel points out (in a journal article forthcoming in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform), “Washington is one of the many states without knife preemption. Leslie Riggins was arrested in 1988 in Seattle, while waiting for a bus, because he had a knife in a sheath on his belt. He was charged with possession of a fixed blade knife.”

Considering that a knife—I’m sorry, a knife-welding individual, not that Piers can tell the difference—went on a rampage today, at the Lone Star College campus, Texas, knifing 15 students—one would expect to hear a lot more in the future about closing that knife loophole.

Yes, loopy, isn’t it?

The not-so peerless Piers (pukes like Piers are everywhere) should know how that, “In the U.K., private ownership of firearms is virtually banned. Professional criminals can still get guns, of course, but for your typical thug, knives are the weapon of choice. Thus there has been a steady outpouring of concern over burgeoning ‘knife crime’ in recent years…”

Knives

UPDATE II: Who Made ‘Jim Carrey Talking Ass’ So Mighty? You! (Carrey & The ‘Idiocracy’)

Celebrity, GUNS, Hollywood, Individual Rights, The Zeitgeist

“Jim Carrey is a talking ass,” sings a bloke on Reason TV, below. Very funny. True too. But let’s get serious. Carrey is a bad actor in more than one way. His venomous contempt for my right to defend myself aside; Carry is without talent. His slapstick schtick is pathetic, repulsive. So tell me this: Who made him the celebrity he is, and who’ll continue to patronize his rotten films? YOU! And you won’t change a bit, despite the man’s manifest contempt for your right to life*, will you?

*Inherent in the right to life is the right of self defense, as a right that cannot be defended is a right in name only.

Lyrics:

It takes a talking ass
to oppose a vaccination
when your Ph.D. is in
making funny faces

It takes a talking ass
to tell people they can’t arm when
you don’t walk around
without an armed bodyguard

It takes a talking ass
to call fans dumb and demented
when you are the one
who wants something uninvented

It takes a talking ass
to be out there passing blame
when you’ve shot someone
on every TV ever made

Lyrics:

Sometimes dudes’ minds are skewed
and they choose to go a-killin’
’cause they saw a Batman villain
killing, well … ring a bell?

Sometimes stars get armed guards
when they make a million buck-ers
then call you heartless motherfuckers
to want the same … is it the fame?

Polio and smallpox they no longer kill en masse
because of vaccinations they are a thing of the past
but you tell parents to skip them and the science you contrast
because just like in your movies … you’re talking our your ass

UPDATED I: “Idiocracy” pegged the Jim-Carrey humor brilliantly in the segment, “Ow my B-lls!”

UPDATE II (3/29): Chime in on Facebook. From the thread:

I’m proud to say I have never watched anything by Carrey the cretin. I know his “worth” from flicking through channels. I might have paused b/c of a Kim Basinger scene (she is utterly gorgeous). Did she do one with him? Maybe not.