ANY ITEM that looks like a gun will have to be licensed under several changes to the Weapons Act being considered by the Queensland State Government.
Even guns made out of materials as unlikely as soap or plastic may have to be kept under lock and key if they could “reasonably be taken to be a weapon”.
The draft act says an imitation is a “reasonable copy” of a weapon that is not capable of causing death or injury.
“If it looks like a gun and feels like a gun, it will have to be licensed,” said a government source.
[…]
Category Archives: Gunz!
Pre-Teen Girl Loads Rifle, Scares Would-Be Burglars
When three teenage burglars pried open the door of a northwest Albuquerque home they had no idea they would be met by a brave little girl, police said Wednesday.
Alyssa Gutierrez, 11, took matters into her own hands Tuesday when police said when Miguel Marquez, Eduardo Zubiate and Jesus Quintana broke into her home.
Gutierrez armed herself with a loaded rifle.
“I was planning, if they came right next to me, I would shoot them,” Gutierrez said.
But Gutierrez, who will start sixth grade next week, never got the chance because she’d spooked the burglars.
This young lady is hardcore and unafraid, ready to defend herself against becoming yet another statistic in not just home invasions and burglary, but against possibly worse. She knew the serious nature of handling the firearm and knew how to handle it. Not sure I’m all up with an 11-year-old left home alone, even though she seems incredibly mature and one-year away from the age where many kids are left alone while parents work or run errands, but that’s beside the point: even at 11-years-old this young woman knew how to handle her defense proving once again that no one is ever too young to learn defensive techniques, firearm safety, and how to handle, etc. firearms, period.
(h/t BrooksBayne)
Discussing the Second Amendment: An Equal Rights Issue
Click image for video
When James Carville waved his arms about and said that’s how he defines “arms” in the Second Amendment, that was one of my favorite moments on television, ever. Also the part where he talked about owning guns but being against … owning them. (We also discussed Petraeus, Kagan, and Byrd.)
Arms are firearms. Even machine guns. Arms are arms. My favorite from the comments:
Everyone knows that when you hold a gun the gun takes controll of you and you kill. It is never the person’s fault. If we get rid of guns killing will stop.
Even Gary Larson got it right in one of his “Far Side” comics: “Ray guns don’t vaporize Zarbonians. Zarbonians vaporize Zarbonians.” We have a breakdown in society when it comes to the family, honoring life, and people are surprised that others would implement tools with which to harm them?
When you prohibit law-abiding citizens from owning guns then only criminals will have them because criminals, by definition, are people who don’t follow laws. There is ample proof that when people are allowed to conceal-carry the crime rates drop.
I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, too: guns are a feminist statement. Some women believe in cosmetic girl power, the Hollywood romanticized portrayal of chicks like Lara Croft who can raid tombs and also display an uncanny mixed martial arts ability when it comes to hand-to-hand combat. Hey, I’ve had training in hand-to-hand, too, but I also realize physical limitations in certain instances and I want to level the field between the sexes.
Can you imagine what would have happened to this woman had she not had a firearm with which to defend herself?
‘I’ve got a big shotgun, I’m not going in a tiny bathroom.”
Or what about this woman?
Can you imagine what sort of statistic these women would have become? People are willing to play politics with the lives of women, not to mention innocent men as well, because of some BS political correctness and ignorance-fueled fear of firearms. Those who want to take away the Constitutional rights of people to protect themselves, are you going to be there to protect those people? You honestly expect the police, who have no Constitutional obligation to protect you, as demonstrated by the Supreme Court in Castle Rock vs. Gonzales, to care for you? In fact, several cases affirm this lack of Constitutional obligation.
Slight digression: How is that empowerment for women anyway, to make your protection the responsibility of the state? Not very independent.
So heck yes I’m for the Second Amendment. Unapologetically.
Glenn Reynolds has a few excellent write-ups about the Chicago case.
Also check out the gun ban’s racist roots.
Gun Ban’s Racist Roots
In light of the Chicago ruling, an absolute must-read from La Shawn Barber:
The Black Codes, laws set up after the Civil War, continued to restrict the rights of newly freed slaves to own firearms, own or rent farmland, vote, sit on juries, testify against white men, sue and enter into contracts. As de facto slavery, the purpose of the Codes was to maintain the white hierarchy. Some things never die. What dies are the rights of people to protect themselves.
NRA Makes a Deal Against Free Speech
I don’t like the NRA’s strategy of ensuring its own longevity at the risk of other freedoms, which they seem to be forgetting about.
NRO yesterday on the NRA’s involvement:
Politico and others are reporting that the NRA has reached a deal to withdraw its opposition to the bill in exchange for an exemption for the NRA from its disclosure provisions.
[…]
This exemption will not apply to small, less powerful 501(c)(4) organizations, which will be hit the hardest by the onerous, burdensome, and expensive disclosure requirements of the DISCLOSE Act, but it will apply to the large, well-funded and well-connected NRA.
So, the NRA may end up providing the lobbying grease that allows this noxious and partisan piece of legislation to slide through the House, something that I seriously doubt most of the individual members of the NRA (who are strong believers in the First Amendment as well as the Second) would agree with.
House Democrats have offered to exempt the National Rifle Association from a sweeping campaign-finance bill, removing a major obstacle in the push to roll back the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.
The NRA had objected to some of the strict financial disclosure provisions that Democrats have proposed for corporations and politically active nonprofits and that had kept moderate, pro-gun Democrats from backing the legislation.
But if the NRA signs off on the deal, the bill could come to the House floor as early as this week. The NRA said it would not comment until specific legislative language is revealed.
An NRA official also noted that the group would not be supporting the bill but would not actively oppose it if the deal with the Democratic leadership holds up.
Regulation of free speech means that the speech isn’t free. You can’t cherry-pick which rights you want to support or the depth to which you are willing to support those rights and base it all on the litmus test of your personal ideology, as is the motivation behind the DISCLOSE act. Free speech didn’t begin with the mind of protecting popular, sanitized speech but speech that is diverse and thought-provoking.
The legislation in question is designed to restore more campaign finance rules in the wake of last year’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, which removed prohibitions on corporations and unions running TV ads opposing or backing candidates in the run-up to an election.
Democratic leaders fear the Citizens United decision could open the floodgates for corporate money to flow into this year’s midterm elections, which they believe would favor Republican interests.
So instead of working harder to incur favor with the interests they suspect of supporting republicans they’ll further isolate those interests by infringing their free speech, government control as a way to stifle private sector preference for their opposition. That’s how the left levels the playing field: they simply go tell teacher, in this case Uncle Sam, with the hope that government regulation will make up for their own inadequacies. The problem is that everyone then suffers from their inadequacies due to governmental suppression. This sounds more in like with the USSR than a free United States.
Bloggers would also be negatively impacted due to the DISCLOSE act. Reason:
At a House Administration Committee hearing last Tuesday, Patton Boggs attorney William McGinley explained that the sloppy statutory language in the “DISCLOSE Act” would extend the FEC’s control over broadcast communications to all “covered communications,” including the blogosphere.
[…]
A section of the DISCLOSE Act would exempt traditional media outlets from coordination regulations, but the exemption does not include bloggers, only “a communication appearing in a news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication…”
If the Democrats in Congress wanted to ensure that the FEC would not investigate political speech by bloggers, they would have written their exemptions to include bloggers instead of just traditional media outlets. The purposeful lack of exemption for bloggers looks ominous indeed — and could be used to harass smaller, unfunded bloggers out of the realm of political debate.
Regulated speech isn’t free speech and if this is something that the NRA wishes to support then I cannot in good faith support the NRA any longer.
*Editing to add: the NRA fails to realize that all freedoms are worthy of equal protection. Without free speech, who will stand up for the NRA? Are they really so naive to believe that if they give this much now no more will be taken from them in the future? This little deal is tantamount to mafia protection.
**Another: Some are arguing to support the NRA simply because it took a long time to build and is well-established. A system isn’t sacred. A system is only as worthy as the goodness of its action and this isn’t good.
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