Category: Firearms Law
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Everyone Favors Gun Control
Recently, another Republican voter tried to kill Donald Trump. This one was a Vivek Ramaswamy supporter and one of those “Never Trump” people. That attack, as well as the ongoing problem of mass shootings in the US, has led many people to again contemplate limiting access to firearms. Or at least, that’s how the media…
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The Biden Administration Did NOT Close the Gun Show Loophole
The Biden administration is claiming that it has closed the gun show loophole, but the actual change they made is very minor and will make no difference. What we typically call the “gun show loophole” is simply the part of federal law that allows individuals to sell their personal guns to other individuals without performing…
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Mass Murder and Selective Enforcement
After the mass murder in Maine last week, we again have a lot of conservatives saying that the problem is the person, not guns. OK, fine. The person had made terroristic threats. The police did nothing. His ex-wife was literally in hiding because he was a threat to her life and the life of their…
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Stupid People Calling Stupid People Stupid
Congress, am I right? Here’s a video of a Republican repeatedly calling Democrats stupid because of the Biden administration’s decision to ban pistol braces because the ATF has determined that they are almost always being used to convert a pistol into a short-barreled rifle. Yes, a pistol brace could be used by someone to help…
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Proportionality
Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance states that if a society tolerates intolerance, that allows intolerant people to destroy tolerance over time. Therefore, a tolerant society must not tolerate intolerance (or intolerant people). In practice, it isn’t really an ethical paradox because intolerant people have chosen to violate the social contract, and are therefore no longer protected…
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The Assault Rifle
There’s this ongoing political conversation wherein liberals say, “We must ban assault rifles,” and then conservatives respond with an overly pedantic definition of “assault rifle” in order to mock the liberals, who rightly see the conservative response as a steaming pile of horseshit. But maybe we should all be clear on what an assault rifle…
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Changes to ATF Pistol Brace Rule
The federal government has quite complex rules regarding what firearms are legal and under what circumstances. Because the laws were not written well, the executive branch agency responsible for enforcing those laws has had no choice but to make sense of them. Recently the ATF changed their interpretation of a gun part called a “pistol…
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The American Death Cult
The Atlantic just published a gem of an essay by Elizabeth Bruenig entitled A Culture That Kills Its Children Has No Future which rails against Americans, generally, for being nihilistic trash. It really resonated with me after spending the last 5 years working against fascism and trying (mostly without success) to get liberals to help…
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The “Gun Show Loophole” Explained
I still occasionally get questions from all kinds of people — including those who own guns — about the “gun show loophole”. It’s poorly understood because the entire characterization of it is wrong. When we think of a “loophole” what we typically mean is a detail of the law as written that has been discovered…
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The Rittenhouse Trial
The following is commentary from November 15, 2021 by Mitch Fryer of Armed Margins and represents the best things we’ve seen so far about the Rittenhouse trial. This trial is really a mess in terms of the complexity of Wisconsin law, the shenanigans of trial participants, and the events of the day in question, but…