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.

UPDATE II: The Mad, Moronic, Unapologetic Showmen & Women Of Mainstream Media (The Bombing Suspects & The Know-Nothings Of Big Media)

Celebrity, Intelligence, Journalism, Media, Objectivism, Propaganda, Terrorism

Over the course of a few hours today (April 17), the hysterical and histrionic US media—front men and women for CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the rest—have gone from asserting the arrest of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, to screening amateur images of their fantasy felon, to decamping to the courthouse in expectation of an arraignment, to confessing without a smidgen of shame that nothing of the sort had transpired.

We lied. OK, we fibbed. Let’s move on. Quick. There is to be no meta reporting about the misreporting.

“No arrests in Boston bombing.”

How ironic, then, that readers have demanded that I justify, even atone, for my assessment of the sum-total of one coequal (female) branch of the media-military-congressional complex:

“Big hair, an overbite, botox and mind-numbing banalities.”

UPDATE I: “FBI scolds media…” Justifiably. Still, pot, kettle, black.

UPDATE II (April 18): BEATING JON STEWART TO CALLING THE MEDIA’S BLUFF. You’d have saved time—and spared yourself the confusion generated on the Colosseum of cretins that is American mainstream media—had you, my reader, come straight to Barely A Blog for news and commentary served up straight. Think about it: Jon Stewart, a comedian who cleaves to fact (if not to liberty’s principles), only aired the truth later that evening.

Barely a Blog beat Jon Stewart to it. BAB called the media’s bluff @ 11:20 am on that day (April 17).

Show your appreciation.

UPDATE III: THE SUSPECTS & THE KNOW-NOTHINGS OF BIG MEDIA. “Arrogant, blasé, completely casual, brazen”: These are some of the adjectives the big mouths of big media are using to describe the demeanor of the 2 Boston bombing suspects in the footage released by the FBI.

These security and counter-intelligence loudmouths festooning cable and news networks and carrying forth on TV know nothing; they know no more than you do. They are just moving their giant gobs, performing as the compulsive exhibitionists that they are.

The Power Of Poverty

Government, Justice, Old Right, Socialism, The State, Welfare

Ever wonder why people who don’t have jobs are always chilling? “Only America has figured out how you get to be poor and have money at the same time,” explains that irrepressible exile Fred Reed. Listen up, America, to the lessons Mr. Reed learned from a chap (a prototype) called “Git-Some”:

When I got to Washington, DC, I decided that I ought to be poor. It’s a good deal. You get lots of free stuff and you don’t have to work. If I had knowed about poverty when I was fourteen, and what a good thing it was, I’da give up my paper route. I mean, who in his right mind would get up at four-thirty in the morning in January, with eight inches of snow on the ground, and ride across lawns on a bike with four hundred pounds of the Wheeling Intelligencer in a basket, so people could read about crooked politicians and clip grocery coupons? And then I’d catch the school bus.
That teacher lady said I was pretty smart, and she hoped I’d go far, but I reckoned she’da been happy if I just went to the next country over.
When you got out of high school, you had to get a job, and get up mornings even if you didn’t want to, and do something all day that you probably didn’t like. Unless you were poor, and then you could sleep in and do what you wanted all day. I didn’t know it then, though.
Best thing if you want to be poor is to go to Washington, the Yankee Capital, and take up poverty. Then the feddle gummint gives you a house for free. … The gummint gives you Medicaid in case you fall on your head, and Food Stalmps … welfare ain’t a lot of money. It ain’t a lot of work, either. But it’s enough to live on really good if you think about it.

Uncle Fred don’t lie. Ask Kristina Cogan, who receives $80,000 worth in government benefits for being “poor.”

MORE from Fred.

Shoddy Security At Boston Marathon Says DEBKAfile

Crime, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Israel, Media, Terrorism

As is its wont, America’s lapdog media is neglecting to track the facts in the April 15, Boston Marathon bombings, favoring shock and awe—a sensational, ratings-oriented focus. The same news networks are telling you that security at the event had been impressive. Really? Israel’s DEBKAfile strongly disagrees:

“… The lack of adequate security jumps to the eye after twin bombings struck the high-prestige Boston Marathon Monday, April 15, killing three people, including an 8-year old boy and injuring 140 – seventeen critically.
This was the world’s oldest annual marathon, with 28,000 runners representing athletes from every US state and more than 90 nations. Yet there was no sign of dogs along the route trained to sniff out explosives or a police helicopter overhead with sensors for detecting explosives or traces thereof on the person of anyone present around the finishing line after the blasts.”

So badly has the definition of news disintegrated that newsmen seem incapable of thinking critically and pursuing the right questions. They know one thing: they want a shock-and-awe fix.

Israeli civilians understand the deep and dark reality in the heart of their enemies; the existential meaning of painstakingly packing parcels of shrapnel, ball-bearings, nails and rat poison to lodge in the bodies of their civilians. Someone wants Americans to experience the same dark reality.

Although our networks rarely cover this aspect of Israeli life, “the task facing Israeli medics has become a routine. Surgeons must slice open the surviving victims of these fiendish devices, picking from the flesh and burrowing in the bone for embedded shards of shrapnel, ball bearings, and nails. The rat poison is a diabolic touch, intended to intensify internal bleeding. If they survive, victims are left maimed and wracked with life-long disfigurement and pain.” (“TO BE OR NOT TO BE BLOWN UP”)

Now we hear that our doctors are also treating “victims maimed by what looked like ball bearings or BBs. Doctors also said they removed a host of sharp objects from the victims, including nails that were sticking out of one little girl’s body.”

Diabolical.

Local experts, the president and his henchmen, instinctively tend to implicate their fellow countrymen as the possible culprits in the Boston Marathon bombings.

DEBKAfile, on the other hand, posits that a Saudi cell consisting of Al Qaeda of Arabia (AQAP) might be responsible for setting off the devices:

debkafile’s counterterrorism sources can disclose however that the investigation has in fact homed in on a suspected terror cell of three Saudi nationals, very possibly tied to Al Qaeda.
The flat they share in the Revere, Massachusetts, near Boston, was searched after the questioning of one of the suspects, a Saudi student, who was hospitalized with badly burned hands. One of his flatmates was taken into custody over “visa problems.” A third is on the run. All three hail from a prominent Saudi family belonging to a tribe from the Asir province bordering on Yemen.
The search for the wanted man led to the grounding of a plane at Logan International Airport Tuesday. The investigation has meanwhile broadened out to places in and outside Boston in a search for the cell’s accomplices.
The origins of the Saudi cell, if confirmed, strongly suggest that Al Qaeda of Arabia – AQAP –succeeded in planting a cell in the United States for the bombing attack in Boston – and possibly more than one in other parts of the US. Asir Province is known as a hotbed of resistance to the Saudi throne in Riyadh.