No one wants to confiscate your guns

Right up until they do.

From New Zealand:

The country has no national registry, making it incredibly difficult to track which weapons need to be bought back as previous gun laws did not require AR-15s to be entered into police databases, making it almost impossible to track how many exist and how many need to be bought back. More than 1.2 million guns are estimated to be in New Zealand.

I have never believed those who say that the purpose of registration is not to make confiscation easier and I have never believed those who claim that no one wants to confiscate guns in America.

Well trained to carry guns to a van

So an interesting story that I've seen a couple links to, most recently on Weaponsman.  Apparently some older gentleman in England, assuming that the government was going to come take his guns after the Dunblane shooting in 1996, hid them all in the walls of his house.

Let's ignore for the moment those people who constantly scoff that "no one is coming to take your handguns", since in this case the British government did just that in 1996, making most handguns illegal for private ownership and confiscating them using the registration lists that had been kept since 1903.

Let's also ignore, for the moment, those people who constantly scoff that "no one is coming to take your rifles", since in this case the British government has done just that, making illegal "Semi-automatic or pump-action rifles that fire centre-fire ammunition (e.g. Colt AR-15)".  I find this last amusing (in a sick and disgusting way) since I took that quoted sentence from a Wikipedia page on British firearms law.  Notice how they make the connection between "semi-automatic" and "AR-15" so seamlessly?  If you are not a gun owner or enthusiast you may be thinking that banning "military style" rifles is not so bad.  The problem is that the above quote is pure political theater.  Explanation:

• Centre-fire ammunition means every single bullet in the world that is not a .22 calibre rifle round (these are rim fire).

• Semiautomatic means fires once every time you pull the trigger, which can be roughly translated to "almost" every rifle in the world.  This technology has been around since 1885 and been the norm for close to 100 years.  The exceptions are bolt action and lever action, where you pull back a bolt or operate a lever to chamber the next round, respectively.  Notice, however, that "pump action" rifles are also banned, which makes no sense if lever action rifles are not, since they aren't any slower to operate.  It would be interesting to find out if lever is considered pump for the purposes of British law.  It wouldn't surprise me given the shoddy work done on this particular page.

What the above statement actually means is that almost every target, hunting, or self defense rifle is banned from ownership by the British and has been for quite a few years.

So why am I making a big deal about this story?  If you have been on my blog much at all you probably know my feelings on firearms.  I am a fan of the ability of people to defend themselves. That is a basic human right. The end result of the 113 year old assault on gun owners in the United Kingdom has been a defacto ban on self defense, even non-lethal self defense.  Tony Martin, a farmer, is serving a life sentence for killing a burglar with an unregistered shotgun.  The burglar in question, along with his friends, had robbed numerous elderly people in the area, beating some of them severely.  Mr. Martin defended himself and, as a result, will spend the rest of his life in prison.

However, there is an amusing aspect to the story of the weapons cache near Cardiff and it lies in the following quote:

The weapons have been removed safely by trained police officers.

It requires someone with absolutely no knowledge of firearms to think that this sentence makes any coherent sense at all.  A two year old could safely remove the weapons.  They were unloaded, packed in grease, wrapped in newspaper, and stored in the walls for up to thirty years.  The way that you safely remove them is to pick them up and walk out the door.  The idea that weapons are only safe in the hands of "trained police officers" is a joke.  In this case, I can guarantee you that these officers had not actually had any special training in carrying old rifles out the door to the waiting van.  They have probably had no more and possibly less training in firearms use than the average gun owner in the United States who, according to the types of people who write these articles, are one negative feeling away from going on a shooting rampage and can't be trusted to even read about guns, let alone own or shoot one.

I would laugh, shake my head, and move on, except that the media is slowly convincing people that anyone with a firearm is a potential mass shooter.   It reminds me of the joke that when a female reporter asked about the wisdom of teaching Boy Scouts to shoot, thereby equipping them to be violent killers, the teacher responded that all women are equipped to be prostitutes, but that doesn't make them so.  It is a joke that very effectively points out the ludicrous nature of the anti-gun argument.

Meanwhile, violent crime in Britain continues to rise, just without firearms; people continue to be murdered and assaulted in Britain, but not with firearms; and the political left in the United States continue to attack our freedom to keep and bear arms, to deny us the means to successfully defend ourselves and our loved ones.

Even paranoid people have real enemies

How would you feel about this scenario?  You have a hobby.  You are thinking about buying a very expensive item.  You have the money and can afford it but there are some legal issues involved.  The government, in the name of safety, has restricted access to these items and each model has to be approved by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as "safe" before it can be sold.

They duly approve your model and you drop $3000 into the latest and greatest.

Ten years later they retroactively decide that your model is not safe after all and prohibit them.  You'd think that a reasonable compromise would be to grandfather in all the current owners, wouldn't you?  Or maybe you think that the government, having approved the sale in the first place, would reimburse the owners for the property they are seizing, if in fact they are so unsafe due to a previously unnoticed design flaw.

Nope.  Due to the twisted firearm laws in Canada, each firearm has to be analyzed by the RCMP and categorized as unrestricted, restricted, or prohibited.  In 2002 they classified Swiss Arms rifles as unrestricted.  Anyone with a firearms license could buy one.  They are not cheap.   Now they have changed their mind and announced that anyone who owns one is required to turn them in to the nearest RCMP office for destruction.  Gratis.  No reimbursement.

Well, you might ask, obviously there is a serious safety flaw in these particular rifles.

Nope.  No mass shootings, no explosions, no incidents of any kind.  Just someone at the RCMP deciding that they didn't like this particular rifle.  Hey you, the guy who shelled out $3000 for a rifle, we are taking it away from you.

Guess what.  You aren't being paranoid when you think the anti-gunners will do everything they can to take away your guns.  Canadian guns laws are arbitrary and pointless.  All power is given to the RCMP to determine, with no public input or notification, what types of guns should or shouldn't be allowed to you, the general public.  You aren't a citizen, you are a serf, if you have no input into issues that affect you.

For more information:

Rob Anders, MP, Petition: 

Canadiangunnutz.com 

Registration leads to confiscation

So to everyone who said I was being paranoid and ridiculous when I said that the only purpose for gun registration was so that they would have lists of gun owners when they decided to take them away,

from the Hartford Courant in Connecticut

Authorities should use the background check database as a way to find assault weapon purchasers who might not have registered those guns in compliance with the new law.

Full story here

What do you do if the government takes away a Constitutional right?

Conspiracy theories and wild speculation aside, there are certain rights that are guaranteed in the Constitution.  I'll leave the more general subject of the Ninth Amendment, the one which basically states that just because some rights are listed we haven't automatically lost our other rights, for another time.  However, I think it is fairly obvious that the federal government has been slowly encroaching on the rights of the people for many decades.  They have interpreted the Commerce Clause to allow them to do virtually anything, the political left and some libertarians screamed about the violations inherent in the Patriot Act (although they didn't seem to worry that it was passed overwhelmingly by both Houses and generally were unable to find a specific instance of anyone actually losing a right), they have expanded the Eminent Domain laws beyond any reasonable interpretation with the Kelo case, and they have slowly pushed until most seventeenth century Americans would probably be horrified at what aspects of our lives we have allowed a "limited" federal government to control.

The Obama administration has accelerated that push, abrogating powers of the other branches of government to itself by bypassing Congress on immigration policy, making appointments without the advice and consent of the Senate, discussed methods to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally, and most recently suggested that whole classes of firearms could be banned by executive order if Congress fails to follow the bidding of the President.

It is the last which I wish to address here because the Second Amendment is, in my opinion, the lynchpin of the Bill of Rights.  Regardless of what many either believe or profess for political reasons, the purpose of the Second Amendment was to allow the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government.  That was made abundantly clear in the writings of those who drafted the Constitution.  It is hardly arguable.  The Second Amendment was not about deer hunting, it was not about target shooting or sport, and it was not about self defense.  To quote from the Declaration of Independence:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,

If the Second Amendment were to be gutted, if our right to keep and bear arms (a clear individual right, regardless of what is bandied about in the press and on the left) is taken from us, what means to we retain to deter the government from abrogating any other right?  The only means that the people have to maintain their control over the government is the threat of eventual force. 

Which brings us to the question of what we should do and when we should do it.  I am not suggesting that the government should be overthrown.  Interestingly enough, in the years since the founders wrote the Declaration, and in direct defiance of its principles, it has been made illegal to advocate overthrowing the government so I won't go there.  The question remains, however, what should be done about a government should it abrogate an enumerated right?  Do we meekly submit or do we resist?  If it is not the government but a single branch of the government that is operating by executive fiat, do we meekly submit or do we resist?  At what point do we have to physically resist rather than complaining to our blog readers and our friends?

One man has written that the time has come, that the line, for him, has been drawn in the sand.  He makes a compelling case that if we allow the government to take our means of self defense against them that there will be no going back.  I had intended to just post a link but I felt that it was important to set the background for what he discusses.  It is not lightly that anyone should advocate armed resistance against a tyrannical government but I think he makes a clear and convincing argument that is worth some thought.

http://dcclothesline.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/if-they-come-for-your-guns-do-you-have-a-responsibility-to-fight/