Gunleaders Blog

First things first.  These are not in any way “high capacity” or higher than normal capacity.  Advocates or agenda driven people have tried for years to reclassify what “normal capacity” is down to what are essentially 3 shots in a shotgun, a common fowling restriction, 3-5 shots in a rifle again a common hunting limitation and for anything else, zero.  Nada.  Zilch.  Nothing.  Only a total ban will do.  Of course, Heller threw a wrench in that last one but that hasn’t stopped the police statists from clamoring for new restrictions on your right to defend yourself.  The bottom line is that the “standard” capacity for a 9mm service pistol is 17-19 rounds.  That’s what is commonly available on the market today with what the manufacturers deliver with the guns.  These arms are “in common use” by the American people and a “lower capacity” will serve only to put peoples lives in danger.

The policies of prohibition make the world safe for terrorists, predatory sex criminals and rampage killers.  They are unafraid of being caught and prosecuted, nor are they afraid of unarmed resistance and all but the most hardened terrorists do fear injury or death.  The Colorado theater attack, Mumbai, and the LA bank robbery scene showed that for a protected attacker, a low capacity firearm is not sufficiently effective to stop the threat.  So what the police statists want is to put everyone in mutual danger. Handgun rounds are generally weak and shot placement is key in successfully stopping a threat.  An armored or even heavily clad attacker can require hits to a non-center of exposed mass area in order to stop the threat, but if the attacker is wearing a bullet resistant vest or garment under normal clothing, hits on center mass will not stop the threat but you won’t know this by looking at the attacker.

This guy…  The tactics of these political terrorists show their ultimate goals, and that taking the so called “high road” in a political fight with them will end up in defeat for the takers of the “high road”.  This is not a political fight with rules like boxing, or even hockey.  This is a political WAR in which there is no “unfair”, there is only victory and defeat.  There is no room for 2nd place, honorable mention and the 2nd place finisher in this war will be the first loser.  If crazies like this are talking about this strategy on the police state side, gun owners had better get off their duffs and start doing the same but do it harder.

Really though, the probably the most succinct, simple and yet wise beyond the mere words reason that this time around capacity limits are off the table is so eloquently abbreviated as:  BFYTW

The gun owners need to take note:  Manufacturers, distributors & dealers must not stay silent on this issue.  Any law which requires the manufacturing to change will add cost.  That cost will be borne by gun owners.  Manufacturers got a free pass from gun owners back in 1994 – 2004.  They continued to supply police departments and federal law enforcement agencies with “restricted” aka illegal magazines, passing the cost of lower capacity magazines on to consumers.  There is no legitimate need for a “highly trained”, on duty 24×7 police officer or federal agent to have any more rounds in the magazine than a grandmother defending her home from a burglar or rapist.   We should turn Spitzer’s proposal around and insulate manufacturers who don’t agree with Spitzer’s proposal and will refuse to do business with entities who try stuff like this.  This would be great for the economy, but we need to take it further by insisting that manufacturers, distributors and dealers won’t sell normal capacity feeding devices to anyone but DOD military contracts.  We can call this program “Locaps for me means locaps for thee!”

We have lost sight of the forest through the trees.  This article shows us some insight into what the ATF really does.  The theme of the article seems to be that operation gunwalker (the drive by media like to call it fast and furious) wasn’t intended to walk guns into Mexico and that the operation’s darling was, as his former partner allegedly referred to him, “an asshole”.

Yeah. if he or she is employed by ATF, that is a GIVEN.  The ATF mission is not noble.  It is their job to confiscate firearms and imprison gun owners.  If they can’t find the dirt to do this, they’ll make up the dirt.  These scumbags are the modern day American equivalent of the Nazi SS, only the ATF is indiscriminate in its hatred of gun owners.

Who cares whether the operation was intended to walk guns, it DID walk guns into Mexico with deadly consequences.

So, the article says -

Some call it the “parade of ants”; others the “river of iron.” The Mexican government has estimated that 2,000 weapons are smuggled daily from the U.S. into Mexico. The ATF is hobbled in its effort to stop this flow. No federal statute outlaws firearms trafficking, so agents must build cases using a patchwork of often toothless laws

Yet it took exactly 4 seconds for Google to bring up this, which was response number one.

Customers can legally buy as many weapons as they want in Arizona as long as they’re 18 or older and pass a criminal background check. There are no waiting periods and no need for permits, and buyers are allowed to resell the guns

What’s the point of this?  There’s no waiting period on posting a 750 word blog post either and the founding fathers clearly never envisioned the ability to publish biased opinion pieces with half truths and outright lies with such lightning like speed.

After initially supporting Group VII agents and denying the allegations, they have since agreed that the ATF purposefully chose not to interdict guns it lawfully could have seized.

So, which is it?  Did they intentionally walk guns or didn’t they?  If DOJ says they did purposefully not interdict the guns involved in the operation, are they lying?

Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case

Wow.  They must have gotten unprecedented cooperation from AG Holder.  Maybe they could share what they have with the House Oversight committee?

“ATF did not exercise proper oversight, planning or judgment in executing this case. We at ATF have accepted responsibility and have taken appropriate and decisive action to insure that these errors in oversight and judgment never occur again.”

Ok, so who are being charged as accomplices in Agent Terry’s murder?

Day after day, they visited local gun dealers and pored over forms called 4473s, which dealers must keep on file. These contain a buyer’s personal information, a record of purchased guns and their serial numbers, and a certification that the buyer is purchasing the guns for himself. (Lying on the forms is a felony, but with weak penalties attached.) The ATF agents manually entered these serial numbers into a database of suspect guns to help them build a picture of past purchases

So what you have here is a public admission that ATF agents were gathering serial numbers of weapons and other personal information in order to build a database of purchases.  This, ladies and gentlemen is called a “registry”.  We have talked about this before, and there have been a smattering of reports on this, recently in Alaska.  ATF will go around to gun shows, or stores and demand 4473’s.  They will then take the information, photo it, copy it or otherwise amass this information and enter it into a database.  In some cases they will interdict your sale, go to your house and your neighbors houses to inquire whether you’re suitable to own a gun; fishing for any reason they can fabricate a crime.  They did exactly this in Richmond & several other gun shows.  The common theme here is – They get the gun serial numbers and YOUR personal information.

They’re not getting rid of that information either.

So allegedly the AUSA took the position that multiple purchases weren’t a crime:

“[P]urchasing multiple long guns in Arizona is lawful,” Patrick Cunningham, the U.S. Attorney’s then–criminal chief in Arizona would later write. “Transferring them to another is lawful and even sale or barter of the guns to another is lawful unless the United States can prove by clear and convincing evidence that the firearm is intended to be used to commit a crime.”

So they were all gung-ho to put all that 4473 info into their “suspect gun owner database” but when it comes to entrapping otherwise innocent citizens, or using their goons to raid someone’s house for a paperwork violation … but there is 1 think that will absolutely stop the ATF in its tracks.  A government holiday.

It was the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, so the agents didn’t receive the fax until Tuesday, according to a contemporaneous case report. By that time, the legally purchased guns had been gone for three days. The agents had never seen the weapons and had no chance to seize them. But they entered the serial numbers into their gun database. Two of these were later recovered at Brian Terry’s murder scene

So allegedly prosecutors maintained a strict threshold for winnable cases and didn’t want losers.  Multiple purchases being legal and all, they were probably tired of hearing from the yapping Pomeranian of federal law enforcement trying desperately fabricate some kind of crime.

Phoenix-based ATF agents became so frustrated by prosecutors’ intransigence that, in a highly unusual move, they began bringing big cases to the state attorney general’s office instead. Terry Goddard, Arizona’s Attorney General from 2003 to 2011, says of federal prosecutors, “They demanded that every i be dotted, every t be crossed, and after a while, it got to be nonsensical.”

Nonsensical.  After all, it’s not like we’re talking about stripping someone of their freedom or anything.  What’s interesting is the article next goes into accusing Dodson, the so called gunwalker whistle blower of beginning the gun walking.  What’s important here is not who started it, who perpetuated it – they all work for ATF.  The important point here is what happened when the prosecutors told ATF multiple purchases was legal.  Instead of taking the hint, ATF doubled down, as they have repeatedly done throughout history.  They went back to the drawing board to fabricate a crime where there was none.  It’s this mentality of “get them on something, even if we have to make it up” is what got us gunwalker, wide receiver before it and a host of other ATF high profile operations with cool sounding names that ultimately ended up showing ATF for what it is.  It’s this institutional and adversarial mission that got us here.

So Katie Pavlich has responded, calling the Fortune article basically rubbish.  She may be right, but the overarching problem here isn’t Dodson, Voth, Melson, Holder- it’s the entire institution here. It’s not that they’re actually investigating crimes it’s that they’re trying to manufacture crimes.  Sure, the Gunwalker crew should all go to prison, but they won’t.  And Fortune clearly shows that when faced with a “non-crime” ATF decided they had to turn it into a crime.  They tried desperately to point the finger at US Gun dealers, fought hard for a rule change in the CFR to mandate reporting of LAWFUL sales of multiple rifles so they could add to their registry & when that didn’t work, they directly funneled guns into the hands of narco-terrorists and it got one of our citizens – A decorated Marine & Border Patrol agent, murdered.

Who cares whether Dodson wore shower shoes to work or was an asshole or whether Voth was too, or Melson?  What matters is ATF’s conduct as an organization.  Yes, punish the gunwalker crew but the takeaway from this has to be more.  The gun registry that ATF maintains needs to be eliminated.  These gun who stings, they have to go too.  In fact, there shouldn’t be ANY ATF undercover operations ever again.  They can investigate but they don’t need armed teams of raiders to do that mission. If they can convince ethical law enforcement agencies of a criminal violation, that agency can take the lead.  ATF has proven itself time and again to be incapable of operating within the law.  Why do gun owners just accept this?

 

What gun owners should know about Ken Cuccinelli

The current Virginia Attorney General wants to be Governor.  For gun owners in Virginia This would be even worse than his tenure as AG.

Remember, Ken Cuccinelli is the candidate who proudly declared he would not defend George Mason University against a lawsuit challenging their campus firearms ban.  Yet after he was elected he betrayed those gun owners who voted for him by flip flopping.  But even before this, he had a checkered reputation on supporting the right to keep and bear arms.  In March of 2010 he issue the “Greason opinion” holding that a city or locality in Virginia could lease property to a private entity, and that private entity could ban firearms.  This is ridiculous for many reasons but among them is that Alexandria Police set up checkpoints to search bags, etc.  These checkpoints do not include only the area for the festival, they include public streets with residential housing and businesses in the “quarantine zone”.  These residents & business people effectively lose their rights under this crazy scheme.

There’s also preexisting case law to the contrary:

“It is not conceivable that a city can provide the ways and means for a private individual or corporation to discriminate against its own citizens…The Judgment of this court is not rendered without the full realization of the impact of this decision on the State Park system in Virginia. The future course rests in the hands of the elected and appointed representatives of the Commonwealth. This opinion follows the law as set forth in all decided cases touching on the subject matter, and it is rather significant that no legal authority has been cited by the defendants to justify any other conclusion. The contention that a normal lessor-lessee relationship should be permitted in leases of public property must give way to the constitutional rights of the citizens as a whole.

A decree will be entered in the form of a declaratory judgment stating the Plaintiff’s rights to use and enjoy the facilities at Seashore State Park have been violated under the Constitution of the United States, and a permanent federal injunction will be granted…” Tate v. Department of Conservation and Development 133 F. Supp. 53 (E.D. Va. 1955).”

When Cuccinelli was challenged on his defense of GMU, he listed a host of reasons.  He had  to do it, they’re his client, it’s the AG’s job, etc.  All of the reasons he’s ever given have been debunked in one forum or another.  Whether you believe him or not, he was under no legal obligation to defend GMU.   Numerous state & US Attorneys General have declined to represent their clients when the need suited them.  For example the UT AG defeated the University of Utah’s gun ban in their supreme court.  Also in Kentucky, private counsel appears to have defended (& lost ) Kentucky University and their gun ban.

Christopher Derek Hunt, Lexington, KY, for appellant.Barbara Ann Kriz, Baker, Kriz, Jenkins, Prewitt & Jones, PSC, Lexington, KY, for appellees.Gregory N. Stivers, Kerrick, Stivers, & Coyle, PLC, Bowling Green, KY, for Amici Curiae Council of Postsecondary Education, Eastern Kentucky University, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.Leslie B. Goff Sanders, Webb Sanders PLLC, White House, TN, for Amicus Curiae The National Rifle Association.Wesley Reed Butler, Barnett Benvenuti & Butler PLLC, Lexington, KY, for Amicus Curiae Kentucky Hospital Association.

See http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ky-supreme-court/1600102.html

When a rogue judge placed a stay on the NPS regulation 36CFR 2.4, recently implemented thanks to the hard works of over 4 dozen grassroots gun rights organizations, the AG declined to defend the regulation in court.

Should Cuccinelli have recused himself?  Maybe.  By his pre-election proclamations once can certainly say on the surface, GMU would have been better getting private counsel.  Who would hire a lawyer who proclaimed he would not defend them?  At the very least a conflict of interest existed.

Either way, he is unapologetic.  Time Magazine, January 10, 2011, page 16:

The Cuccinelli doctrine comes with asterisks.  He boasts of bucking the gun lobby when he affirmed George Mason’s right to limit firearms on campus.

Cuccinelli continues to defend the actions of Virginia Tech withholding information on a killer on the loose.

Regardless of what other Attorneys General have done, clearly Mr. Cuccinelli will compel his “clients” to go elsewhere when it suits his needs.  See Cuccinelli v. Rector and Visitors of University of Virginia, __ Va. __, __ S.E.2d __ (2012).

The overarching theme here is that Mr. Cuccinelli has a world view that is at odds with gun owners.  For every reason he gives to “explain” his conduct, voters should ask themselves:

How does Mr. Cuccinelli benefit if I and other gun owners believe him, as we believed him when he promised not to defend GMU’s firearms ban?  If we let him “explain away” his bad conduct, we are in a heap of trouble.