Illinois Finally Lets Residents Carry Guns - Kind Of.

January 8, 2025

mikethegunguy Blogs, Guns , , , , , 3 Comments

Back in 2010, SCOTUS decided that the only state which did not issue concealed weapons permits - Illinois - had to get in line with the 2008 Heller decision and let state residents carry guns. After a lot of back and forth between the governor and the legislature, a bill was finally approved which went into effect this past weekend. And much to everyone’s astonishment, the website that has to be used for the CCW application actually works! It’s working so well that the State Police processed and approved more than 13,000 applications by Tuesday and is gearing up for more to come. There are over 3 million gun licenses floating around Illinois, and while nobody knows how many license-holders will want to carry their guns, the $150 application fee hasn’t yet been seen as a barrier against the exercise of this precious 2nd Amendment right.

Sheriff Tom Dart

Sheriff Tom Dart

Meanwhile, gun owners had even more reason to cheer because on Monday a Federal judge, appointed by President Obama no less, issued a ruling declaring Chicago’s ban on retail gun sales to be unconstitutional which means that, at some point, city residents won’t have to take a trip out of town in order to buy a gun. The city was given time to respond to the ruling and, if the experience in Washington, D.C. is any guide, folks in the Windy City shouldn’t expect to be able to go walking into the neighborhood gun boutique any time soon.

For that matter, those Illinois residents who take the time and trouble to get their hands on a concealed-carry license aren’t going to be walking around whistling Dixie either, if only because the provisions of the new law that define where, when and how a concealed weapon can be carried within the state are a wonder to behold. And not only is the law complicated and laced with all kinds of exceptions and variations on the rules, there’s even confusion about how to enforce it on the part of law enforcement agencies themselves. The law, for example, doesn’t let you bring a concealed weapon to a street fair but allows you to walk through the fair if you are on your way home. Try enforcing that one - yea, right.

Meanwhile, the other problem with the licensing process, according to one expert - Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart - is that the application process is so flawed that people with histories of violence or mental illness will still be able to be approved. At issue is the use, or I should say, non-use of the LEADS database, which is a catch-all compendium of data from federal, state and local law enforcement agencies that is used to access information about just about anything and everything, including gang membership, stolen boats, missing persons, foreign fugitives, snowmobile registration and God knows what else. By the way, it also contains a fairly complete record on violent crime. Dart claims that LEADS should be used to approve applications for CCW in Illinois; the new CCW law specifically prohibits its use. The Cook County sheriff is known to be an opponent of concealed carry, and while his stated objections to the new law have gained him some kudos with the gun control crew, he hasn’t exactly endeared himself to those who hold the opposite point of view.

I’m not a law enforcement expert, nor do I claim to hold a degree in Constitutional law. But I do wish occasionally that some of the howlers and yowlers on both sides of the gun debate would consider being a bit more modest when it comes to being for or against guns. Like it or not, walking around with a concealed weapon is an issue of public safety, and if sheriffs in states like Colorado and New York have the right to state their unwillingness to enforce new gun control laws, then a sheriff in Illinois who believes that a new gun control law won’t do what it’s supposed to do is also obligated to make and state his case.

What Does New York’s Safe Act Really Mean?

January 4, 2025

mikethegunguy Blogs, Guns , , , , , Leave a comment

Last week a Federal judge in New York rendered the first decision on New York’s new gun law, the Safe Act, that was rammed through the Legislature by Andy Cuomo on the heels of the massacre at Sandy Hook. New York’s new law effectively bans the sale of AR-style rifles to state residents and also set semi-auto magazine limits at a maximum of seven rounds. Judge William Skretny, appointed by Bush 41, is known as a careful, almost scholarly reviewer of legal texts, and in this instance he went to great lengths to analyze the pros and cons of the new law.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo

Gov. Andrew Cuomo

Basically his decision contained both good news and bad news for gun owners in New York. The good news is that Judge Skretny invalidated the 7-round magazine capacity as being ‘arbitrary’ and not shown to really protect public safety as New York State claimed. The bad news is that he also found that the ability of the State to deny access to certain types of weapons did not undermine the 2nd Amendment guarantees of self-protection and was consistent with “the state’s important interest in public safety.”

As more and more gun cases pile up in what Judge Skretny calls the “terra incognita” of post-Heller jurisprudence, the trend seems to be moving towards a recognition of the government’s ability to regulate and even ban certain types of weapons (most notably ‘assault’ rifles) as long as such measures do not deny access to other types of weapons that are commonly used for self defense. Ironically, the claim by the NRA and its friends that high-capacity, semi-automatic rifles afford the greatest degree of self protection is being turned against them by multiple Court decisions which find that the defensive utility of these guns based on their lethality is exactly what justifies their regulation given the public safety responsibilities vested in the state.

The NRA has spent the last thirty years noisily promoting the notion that an armed citizenry is our most effective method of dealing with crime. And if nothing else, the coincidence of increased gun sales and a decline in violent crime over the past 20 years would seem to bolster their case. The NRA further argues that banning ‘assault’ rifles is a red herring because even though such weapons are used on rare occasions for mass assaults, like Aurora, the overwhelming bulk of shootings involves handguns as the weapon of choice.

Which was exactly the point made by Judge Skretny and other jurists who have been hearing gun cases since Heller was decided in 2008. The fact that AR-15 rifles are touted by the NRA and the manufacturers as more effective self-defense weapons than handguns is exactly why the government may be able to ban them while leaving 2nd Amendment guarantees intact. The dangerousness of guns can be played both ways, because the fact that high-capacity, military-style weapons are used in only a few instances of gun violence doesn’t invalidate the government’s right to keep them out of everyone’s hands, particularly if citizens can still own other weapons, like handguns, that provide a reliable means for self defense.

In their raptures over Heller the pro-gun lobby conveniently ignored the majority decision’s explicit statement that the 2nd Amendment was not an unlimited “right.” Instead, the author of the Heller decision, Antonin Scalia, made it clear that further judicial activity would have to take place in order to more clearly define the degree to which government could limit access to guns. If the New York and other recent decisions are straws in the wind, nobody at the NRA headquarters should assume that unlimited gun ownership will continue into the future; in fact it may soon become a legal doctrine whose best days have already passed.

Drugs And Guns: The Latest From Camden

January 3, 2025

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New York Shipbuilding Yard

New York Shipbuilding Yard

The last time anyone got a good job in Camden, NJ was during World War II, when the city, located across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, was the location of the largest shipyard in the world, the New York Shipbuilding Yard, which turned out more than 500 naval vessels before it closed after the war. Camden is still the headquarters of the Campbell Soup Co., but the corporate executives stay in a gated building out of habit since nobody even remembers when the plant turned out its last can of soup. The irony is that Camden’s waterfront sits directly across from Philadelphia, where waterfront property values have skyrocketed because of an influx of luxury hotels, high-end restaurants and trendy boutiques.

In Camden, on the other hand, the word ‘blight,’ which is usually how poor neighborhoods are described, would probably apply to the entire town. And while Camden isn’t quite as dangerous as East St. Louis, the city recorded 57 homicides in 2013, which puts its murder rate up there with places like Cali and Medellin, the location of the world’s most active and vicious narcotics cartels. That should hardly come as a surprise, however, because the one industry which seems to be thriving in Camden is the drug business, whose chief gang, headed up by three brothers, - Omar, Edwin and Edgar Urbina - have been running an open-air drug market for years in Camden’s North End. The November raid that resulted in the arrests of the gang leaders and nearly 50 suppliers, deliverers, baggers and other gang associates, also brought about the seizure and requisite display of a stash of cash, six guns and five ounces of cocaine.

Even if a lot of drugs sold by the Urbinas and other Camden gangs go into the hands and veins of local residents, what has always made Camden a center for the drug trade is its location adjacent to many wealthy communities whose residents and police departments find it convenient to encourage drug purchases in another town. The drive-by nature of Camden’s drug business encouraged local law enforcement to begin stopping, searching and occasionally arresting non-residents who drove a little too slowly through the town. But when the Camden PD laid off half its officers following a budget standoff with Chris Christie, what had been a badly-managed effort to control the local drug market only got much worse.

What I find interesting in this situation is the fact that nobody seems to find it unusual or unsettling that the products sold by the drug gangs in Camden come from thousands of miles away. In fact, whenever a major dope dealer is arrested, there’s always some mention of a connection to a drug cartel in Mexico, Colombia or somewhere else. But the same law enforcement experts who tell you that it’s impossible to interdict the movement of drugs into and through the United States, will also tell you that if we extend NICS background checks to private transactions, we’ll be able to put a real dent in the movement of illegal guns.

When I was a teenager living in Staten Island, NY, we knew about Camden, and it was rumored that some of the drugs that came into my neighborhood had been purchased in drive-buys by some of my friends. That was fifty years ago and it’s clear that the situation hasn’t really changed. If anything, the growth of affluent suburbs around Philly has made Camden even a bigger and better hot-spot for illegal drugs. If the drug gangs have no trouble going to Mexico for cocaine, how difficult could it be to get their hands on a few guns?

Purchase on Amazon.

Purchase on Amazon.

What Does That NRA Small-Arms Treaty Really Say?

November 19, 2024

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Case O' Guns

Case O’ Guns (Photo credit: Gregory Wild-Smith)

Last month the Obama Administration joined 114 other countries and signed the UN Arms Trade Treaty, immediately setting off howls of protests by the NRA and its Congressional supporters insisting that this was just another example of the Administration’s desire to disarm America and take away all our guns. According to Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) the treaty undermines the 2nd Amendment guarantees of gun ownership because, among other provisions, it requires importers to identify end-users for whom small arms have been bought.

I have read every word of the treaty, it’s not a terribly lengthy document, and I think it would be worthwhile if I spend one post explaining what the treaty actually says. Not that I’m assuming that anything I say will change anyone’s mind about the treaty, or the 2nd Amendment or anything else related to guns. But in all the hysteria that has been drummed up about this document by the NRA and its allies and friends, I have never seen the treaty text itself. So here goes.

The treaty begins with a preamble that “reaffirms the sovereign right of any State to regulate and control conventional arms exclusively within its territory, pursuant to its own legal or constitutional system.” This statement isn’t buried in some footnote; it’s found at the very beginning of the treaty itself. Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t this mean that our government, and not the United Nations, gets to figure out how guns will be handled within the United States?

But what about the question of end users, because here’s where the NRA believes there lurks an attempt to create not just a national, but an international registry of all guns. I quote again from the treaty text: “Each State Party shall maintain national records, pursuant to its national laws and regulations, of its issuance of export authorizations or its actual exports of the conventional arms….” Now note what it says about imports: ” Each State Party is encouraged to include in those records: the quantity, value, model/type, authorized international transfers of conventional arms actually transferred, details of exporting State(s), importing State(s), transit and trans-shipment State(s), and end users, as appropriate.”

This is in fact no different than what U.S. exporters and importers must now do to comply with State Department and ATF regulations on export and import of small arms. But the operative word here is encouraged; not required, just encouraged. Signatories to this treaty are not bound by any requirements to either compile lists of import end-users (which we compile already) or deliver such lists to any international body. The only required record-keeping involves the destination of exports, and correct me if I’m wrong, but only American citizens possess 2nd Amendment guarantees.

The NRA, the Washington Times, and all the other pro-gun stalwarts who make a living by ginning up the fears of gun owners every time that someone says anything even remotely connected to gun control might do us all a favor and stop concocting arguments out of whole cloth. I know, I know, Obama’s a liberal which means he hates guns and he’ll do anything to take them away. But maybe it’s time to stop worrying about Obama and start thinking about how to convince rational and reasonable people that responsible gun ownership is the American way.

The real enemy of gun owners isn’t Washington and isn’t the UN. The real enemy is any discussion in which facts and logic give way to noise and a lack of common sense. I don’t need the NRA or Mayor Bloomberg to tell me about guns. I can read as well as the next person and figure out what’s really going on. So can you.

 

 

 

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Can Hunters Do What Beavers Do?

November 17, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs, Guns , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Previous posts explained the primary role played by hunters in exploring, opening and ultimately settling the Western wilderness, an experience motivated by financial rewards from the trade in furs. But it would be a mistake to assume that this took place only as we pushed West. In fact, from the moment that white Europeans first set foot on the East Coast, moving inland was as much a taming of the wilderness as would later happen when we began moving across the territory that we owned by dint of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

According to the biologist and agriculturalist Toby Hemenway, within a decade after the first landing by the Mayflower in 1620, at least 100,000 beaver pelts were shipped back to Europe, and by 1640 as many as 800,000 beavers had been slaughtered over the previous ten years. The demand for animal fur, largely beaver but also including bear and wolf, continued to grow over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the point that more ships crossed the Atlantic carrying furs than were used to catch and carry fish.

Trappers and hunters who extended the fur trade beyond the Missouri after 1810 found that Europe’s demand for furs was now subordinate, in many cases, to home-grown demand from within the United States. Cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston now had large populations whose tastes in clothing meant that furs were treated and re-sold within the domestic market rather than being sent overseas. When fashion began changing in the 1840s and fur garments gave way to leather goods, the Western hunters shifted away from slaughtering beavers and quickly made the buffalo almost extinct as well.

While hunters and trappers were still exploring and opening the Western wilderness, in the East the process of moving from farming to industry had begun. Factories began springing up all over New England by the 1840’s, with textile, firearms and clothing manufacturing combining natural resources like furs and hides from the West with abundant energy from the fast-moving streams in the East. The growth of a huge internal market based on cheap resources from the frontier combined with cheap energy from what had previously been the frontier launched a half-century of economic expansion that no other country has experienced before or since.

Beavers at work: stream, marsh and woods.

Beavers at work: stream, marsh and woods.

What lay behind this enormous economic growth was the handiwork of hunters whose ability to kill off beavers brought about a crucial change in the ecosystem that allowed all those New England factories to create the goods and satisfy both domestic and foreign demand. The deep gullies and fast-moving streams that created energy for factories was not a natural feature of the New England landscape; it was what happened to slow-moving and gentle ponds when, as Toby Hemenway says, they were fed by “beaverless watersheds.” Beavers create environments that hold maximum amounts of water and soil on the land. Remove the beavers and the water turns into a cascade.

Beaver activity creates a natural cycle of environmental replenishment. Ponds become marsh, then meadow then woodland, and then the beavers build another dam, and the cycle repeats again. We’ve tried to do the same thing in many places where the hunters killed off the beavers, because this let us us build factories. Except the factories then collapsed. A paper factory in Monroe, Massachusetts first gained a workforce when it opened in 1866 because farmers in the surrounding Monroe Plateau were happy to trade their plows for a steady wage. The town lived off the mill for more than one hundred years, but when it was shuttered in 1985, the town basically shut down as well.

Monroe, Massachusetts

Monroe, Massachusetts

Nobody has come up with a plan for these towns; fancy catchwords like rural reindustrialization can’t do for this environment what the beaver could do for its environment with a flat tail and some sharp teeth. I can tell you, however, that most of the remaining residents in Monroe and other small, country towns love to hunt. Who knows? Previous generations of hunters sparked an economic miracle, maybe it could happen again.

Based on my book, Hunters in the Wilderness. Volume II in the series, Guns in America, to be published in December.

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Want To Avoid Getting Shot? Stay Away From Where The Shootings Occur

November 15, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs, Crime, Guns , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Lotka-Volterra equation

Lotka-Volterra equation

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that what the novelist Walter Mosley said about guns is true: “If you carry a gun, it’s bound to go off sooner or later.” Which is kind of obvious because after all, if you don’t carry a gun it can’t go off, right? But the trick, if you’re concerned about gun violence, is figuring out when and why a gun goes off, and once you know that, what to do about it. We seem to be much better at figuring out the when and the why, but an article published yesterday in the Journal of Public Health, may point a way towards also figuring out the what.

The authors, two Yale sociologists, Andrew Papachristos and Christopher Wildeman, have constructed a model for predicting gun violence based on studying gun homicides from 2006 to 2011 in an area of Chicago that had some of the highest rates of gun violence in a city that’s know for gun violence. The study found that 6% of the area’s population was involved in 70% of the murders, and nearly everyone in this population group had prior contact with criminal justice or public health. The data allowed the authors to construct a predictor of future gun homicides based primarily on social networks, a methodology that is now going to be used by the police to identify and visit with these high-risk kids and adults. As Papachristos puts it, “It’s who you hang out with that gets you into trouble.”

Papachristos and Wildeman are planning to extend their research to cover the entire city of Chicago, and perhaps the Chicago PD will be able to mount a citywide program to monitor the social networks that breed the violent use of guns. But the idea that guns are being used to commit violent crimes by people who know each other and band together is hardly new. In fact, it’s not only humans who behave this way - the same type of behavior can be found in animals and even insects, and this has been known for nearly a hundred years.

Back in the 1920s a statistician named Alfred Lotka and a mathematician named Vito Volterra developed a statistical analysis (known as the Lotka-Volterra equations) that are used by ecologists to predict how different species occupy and protect their home territories. This equation was then picked by a UCLA anthropologist, Jeffrey Brantingham, to study the territoriality of street gangs in Los Angeles and the links between each gangs’ territorial imperatives and gun violence. What Brantingham found was that the further away from the gang’s headquarters, the less gun violence was committed by members of each gang. The closer to the gang headquarters, the more shootings took place. The behavior of the gangs was no different from the behavior of hyenas or bees. Want to avoid being attacked? Stay away from the place where the guys with the guns are found.

The research just published by Papachristos and Wildeman defines gun violence territory not from a geographic, but from a social network perspective. It’s not about which street you walk on, it’s who you hang out with that predicts whether you’ll get shot or use a gun to shoot someone else. But when all is said and done, aren’t the findings by Papachristos and Wildeman on the one hand, and Brantigham on the other, really two sides of the coin? After all, people tend to spend their time with people they know. Call them a ‘group,’ a ‘gang’ or whatever, the tendency of humans to associate with one another in an organized manner is as old as humanity itself. It also seems to be as old as the existence of all living species. Maybe the cops should spend a little less time giving out parking tickets and spend a little more time at the zoo.

 

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Obama’s Putting Together an Arsenal Thanks To The TSA

November 12, 2024

mikethegunguy Blogs, Crime, Guns , , , , , , , 1 Comment

There’s been a rumor floating around (thank you Glenn Beck) that Obama has been putting together a secret army that will surround the White House and protect him when the real Americans - the 3 percenters and all the other patriots - finally rise up, take our country back and preserve our God-given, constitutional rights. So I’m here to announce that I have found Obama’s arsenal, and if you don’t believe me, just ask the TSA.

English: A TSA officer screens a piece of luggage.

English: A TSA officer screens a piece of luggage. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You see, the TSA is responsible for security at all the airports, and even though there are warnings and signs all over the place telling passengers to stow their weapons in checked luggage, the folks who screen carry-on bags before passengers go to their gates just keep finding more and more guns. In 2011 the TSA found more than 1,200 guns, in 2012 the number was over 1,500. If the 2013 rate continues, by the end of the year the number will exceed 2,000. That’s nearly 4,000 guns in three years. Not a bad haul.

Of course some of the guns don’t look like they would be carried by any kind of army, unless it’s an army that has a special need for really small-caliber weapons. In the three weeks from September 27 through October 17, for example, TSA confiscated 99 guns, of which 6 were 22 or 25 caliber, but there were also 27 pistols that were 9mm, 40 or 45-caliber, and that’s plenty of firepower for any army, whether in the pay of the President or not. And the good news is that most of the guns were loaded, 84 of the 99 found over those three weeks, which means that the Presidential militia doesn’t even need to stop off at Dick’s Sporting Goods or Cabela’s to get ready to rumble because gun-toting Americans have made sure that the guns they’re taking on airplanes are ready to go.

Unfortunately for the President, his arsenal seems to be mainly handguns; after all, it’s not all that easy to stash an assault rifle (oops - a modern sporting rifle) into your carry-on before getting on a plane. But Americans have always been an ingenious lot, so while the Presidential militia may be short on long guns, they’ll have enough explosives to help them carry the day. In the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport someone walked through the line with a live, 40mm grenade; in Grand Junction there was 6 lbs. of black powder, detonation cords and a timing fuse; and a live blasting cap was found on a passenger in Richmond, Virginia. I know, I know, they all just ‘forgot’ that they were carrying explosives onto a plane. When was the last time you forgot that you were carrying explosives? When was the last time you carried explosives anywhere?

Getting back to the would-be passengers whose guns were taken away - know what? It was clearly a violation of their 2nd Amendment rights. And worse, they just wanted to bring their Glock into a ‘gun-free zone’ so that the rest of us would be protected from the nuts who figure they can shoot the place up because nobody’s got a gun. In the light of District of Columbia versus Heller we really need to re-think our policy about allowing guns on planes. And Obama needs to stop using the TSA to build his secret weapons cache.

Four thousand guns in three years? By the time Obama leaves office the TSA will probably be sitting on 10,000 guns. Any chance that the TSA will let me buy the whole pile to increase the used gun inventory in my store?

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