The nuisance move was put forward by a small group of anti-gun shareholders led by a group of nuns from Oregon. Normally it wouldn’t have had a prayer of passing, but the proposal was made in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting. As a result, some of Ruger’s large institutional shareholders like BlackRock and Vanguard Group signed on in order participate in the growing corporate gun control movement and to signal how terribly concerned they were about “gun violence.â€
And: semi-automatic weapons have no role in contemporary civilian life. For Winslow, the wounds conjure up painful memories of when, working in a front line hospital in a war zone, he was called to the morgue to pronounce death on casualties — coalition soldiers or American civilians — brought in from the field. He looked for dog tags, examined the remains and signed preliminary death certificates. He recalled the surgeon’s note that accompanied the body of a young U.S. Army captain, shot in the neck: “It was an honor to care for this brave American soldier. May God rest his soul.â€
Yesterday, I spent time on the phone with Rob Hansel of Lone Wolf Distributors and John Heikkinen of Flint River Armory. The two companies sometimes do business together and recently had a rather large transaction go awry as a result of Intuit QuickBooks’ apparent anti-gun policy. The conversations were both interesting and enlightening, the latter because these issues highlight ongoing business practices with dishonest undertones on the part of Intuit.
Some federal courts have dealt with a different firearm age limit, upholding the 21-year-old age requirement for handgun sales by licensed dealers. That rule passed Congress in the Gun Control Act of 1968, long before the AR-15 became one of the nation’s most popular guns, and doesn’t ban young-adult handgun possession.
Michael Connelly, executive director of the U.S. Justice Foundation, a public interest law firm that supports gun-rights advocates, said, “I think an effort to ban people between 18 and 21 from purchasing AR-15s would be vulnerable to a Second Amendment challenge, particularly in light of the current makeup of the Supreme Court.”
A provision which lifts the ban on non-National Firearms Act, short-barreled firearms with a pistol grip in Texas will take effect next month.
The modification to the Lone Star State’s firearms laws, HB 1819 makes tweaks to the state’s suppressor regulations as well as making firearms such as the Mossberg 590 Shockwave legal to transfer.
Gun-control advocates often argue that gun-control laws must be more restrictive than the original meaning of the Second Amendment would allow, because modern firearms are so different from the firearms of the late 18th century. This argument is based on ignorance of the history of firearms. It is true that in 1791 the most common firearms were handguns or long guns that had to be reloaded after every shot. But it is not true that repeating arms, which can fire multiple times without reloading, were unimagined in 1791. To the contrary, repeating arms long predate the 1606 founding of the first English colony in America. As of 1791, repeating arms were available but expensive.
Americans own an estimated 265m guns, more than one gun for every American adult, according to the most definitive portrait of US gun ownership in two decades. But the new survey estimates that 133m of these guns are concentrated in the hands of just 3% of American adults – a group of super-owners who have amassed an average of 17 guns each.
The unpublished Harvard/Northeastern survey result summary, obtained exclusively by the Guardian and the Trace, estimates that America’s gun stock has increased by 70m guns since 1994. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who own guns decreased slightly from 25% to 22%.
Police chiefs are struggling to recruit enough officers willing to carry a gun to tackle a Paris-style terror attack, because they fear they will be treated as criminal suspects if they use their weapon in the line of duty, the country’s top firearms officer has warned.
After November’s terrorist gun and bomb attacks on Paris, senior security officials believe Britain needs an extra 1,500 armed officers. But because half won’t make it through rigorous training and selection, police chiefs need 3,000 volunteers to come forward.
While the technological ingenuity and legal maneuvering of makers such as Wilson and Imura may strike us as quintessentially modern, in fact the work of these garage gunsmiths hearkens back to the first experiments with gun-making in the late Middle Ages, an era before firearms became the province of corporations—and centuries before their subjection to any kind of government regulation or oversight.
The story begins with that most dastardly of medieval inventions, gunpowder, first developed in China probably during the Tang Dynasty before gradually making its way to Western Europe by the middle of the 13th century. Initially the use of gunpowder weapons on the medieval battlefield was limited to larger artillery pieces such as the pot-de-fer and theribauldequin. Soon, though, gunsmiths began experimenting with smaller, increasingly portable weapons that could be carried more easily across a battlefield.
Lawyers for the Department of Justice submitted a memorandum Friday in the United States District Court, Southern District of California, in support of defendant’s motion to dismiss Lycurgan, Inc., dba Ares Armor vs. B. Todd Jones [successor name to be substituted], in his official capacity as Head of the San Diego Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The case involves Ares’ contention that ATF erred and overstepped its authority in declaring the firm’s EP80 polymer precursor receivers (“80 percent receiversâ€) to be complete receivers, and thus “firearms†as defined by the Gun Control Act of 1968.
But there’s more to the industry’s concerns than the fear that the punch bowl might soon disappear, if indeed sales haven’t already peaked. And in spite of the boost Obama’s given their sales, many would rather have a president who was less obviously hostile to their industry and their livelihoods. Johanna Reeves, executive director of the F.A.I.R. Trade Group – the Firearms Import/Export Roundtable – expressed it this way: The Obama administration, and the ATF in particular, are “pushing the envelope and testing the boundaries to see how far they can go.â€
The ATT and other U.N. programs play into this. As Reeves and a colleague put it in a recent piece on the treaty, their concern is that the “legitimate trade and industry will bear the brunt of ‘norms’ that will develop out of these instruments, norms that will further restrict the ability of U.S. firms to import and export firearms and ammunition.†Indeed, the worries stem fundamentally from the trade’s realization that the gun-control battle is moving from the national political level, where the Second Amendment has rarely looked healthier, to the international, national administrative, and state and local levels. In other words, the challenges are becoming more diffuse and harder to combat — or even, in the case of administrative restrictions, to follow.
“Being shut out from mainstream payment processors makes us feel like we are part of some type of shady business when, in fact, there is more regulation and documentation required for federally licensed firearms dealers than most businesses,†said Trevor Blandford of Terminal Performance Associates in Caroline, Va.
Speaking to both fugitives and freemen in 1854, Frederick Douglass advocated, “A good revolver, a steady hand and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap…. Every slave hunter who meets a bloody death in his infernal business is an argument in favor of the manhood of our race.†Douglass, like others in the early freedom movement, would come to view slavery as basically a state of war.
Eight months after locals formed self-defense groups, they say they are free of the cartel in six municipalities of the Tierra Caliente, or “Hot Land,†which earned its moniker for the scorching weather but whose name has come to signify criminal activity.