"Tyranny is always better organized than freedom."
-- Charles Peguy
Short version: The bad news is that the Obama Administration wants Congress to resurrect the federal "assault weapon" ban and make it permanent. The good news is that, thanks to the reputation for effective grassroots political activism achieved by gun owners over the past couple of decades, Congress seems uninterested in resurrecting the ban.
Long version: For you young folks out there (along with our sometimes-ill-informed friends in the news media who read these alerts), a bit of history is in order. In 1994, Congress passed a federal ban on "assault weapons". The sponsors of this legislation deceptively misrepresented it as applying to automatic weapons, which it didn’t (the manufacture of automatic weapons for the civilian market had already been banned in 1986; pre-1986 automatic weapons remain legal but are very tightly regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934).
So what did this 1994 "assault weapon" law do? Well, it discriminated between functionally identical semiautomatic firearms based purely on their cosmetic appearance. Semiautomatic firearms with a militaristic appearance were classified as "assault weapons" and could no longer be produced for the civilian market, while functionally identical semiautomatics with a "sporting" appearance remained legal. Furthermore, the manufacture of all detachable magazines with a capacity over 10 rounds was banned, regardless of the type of firearm they were used in. So if you owned a handgun for self-defense that used a 13-round magazine, for example, you wouldn’t be able to buy magazines for it that were made after 1994.
The only way the sponsors of this bill were able to get it through Congress was by attaching a ten-year sunset provision that would cause the law to automatically expire in 2004. In the years following that expiration, Congress failed in its attempts to renew the ban. We suspect that this may have had something to do with the fact that a substantial percentage of those members of Congress who voted for the ban in September of 1994 were defeated in the election a couple of months later, including the Speaker of the House at the time, Tom Foley.
Now, let’s fast-forward to the 2008 presidential campaign. In May, presidential candidate Barack Obama, while speaking in the San Francisco area, stated that rural and small-town Americans "bitterly cling to guns or religion."
This statement, when viewed in conjunction with Mr. Obama’s anti-gun track record in the U.S. Senate and in the Illinois Legislature, led some of us to suspect that he doesn’t like the Second Amendment very much.
Mr. Obama apparently sensed that gun owners were wary of him, so he decided to try to comfort us. Later in the year at a campaign rally in Boise, Idaho, Mr. Obama said: "I won’t take away your guns."
A lot of gun owners did not feel particularly reassured by this statement. Sales of firearms and ammunition skyrocketed last fall, before and after the election. In fact, certain semi-automatic firearms that might be affected by a new "assault weapon" ban remain scarce and expensive due to the panic-buying that has been going on. Even ammunition in some of the more common calibers is scarce.
The skepticism expressed by those of us who "bitterly cling to guns" turned out to be well founded. On the day of President Obama’s inauguration, the official website of the new administration went online and included the following statement, which is still there:
"Obama and Biden would repeal the Tiahrt Amendment, which restricts the ability of local law enforcement to access important gun trace information, and give police officers across the nation the tools they need to solve gun crimes and fight the illegal arms trade. Obama and Biden also favor commonsense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent."
Well, that certainly didn’t take very long. What we find interesting is that President Obama’s gun-control proposals are filed under "urban policy." This led GOUtah! to wonder whether the President only wants these gun restrictions to apply to city-dwellers. Is the President implying that rural and small-town Americans will be exempt?
Well, apparently not. Earlier this week, Eric Holder, the new U.S. Attorney General recently appointed by President Obama, publicly recommended that Congress quickly begin work on a new and permanent "assault weapon" ban (with no exemptions for non-urban folks).
As you probably know, there isn’t a single peer-reviewed criminological study purporting to show that the 1994 federal "assault weapon" ban did anything to reduce crime. Furthermore, the murder rate and the violent crime rate in the United States actually went down after the ban expired in 2004. The anti-gun people had been predicting blood in the streets following the expiration of the ban, but this simply didn’t happen. In fact, we may reasonably conjecture that almost all of the "assault weapons" that are privately owned in the United States are owned by peaceable citizens. So why does Mr. Holder think we need to renew the "assault weapon" ban and make it permanent? Well, he wants to do it in order to help reduce violent crime in Mexico. Of course, Mexico already has extremely strict gun-control laws. But Mr. Holder claims that "assault weapons" purchased in the United States are being smuggled into Mexico and are contributing to the violence down there. So he wants Americans to surrender a big chunk of their Second Amendment rights in order to, supposedly, help reduce crime south of the border.
This seems like a strange request. But it gets stranger. A few days ago, the ATF announced out of the blue that its Form 4473 (the federal form you have to fill out whenever you purchase a firearm from a dealer) is now available in Spanish. Making it easier for people who speak only Spanish to buy guns in the U.S. while simultaneously wanting to impose vast new restrictions on tens of millions of law-abiding English-speaking American gun owners doesn’t jive with Mr. Holder’s claim that his primary goal is to reduce crime in Mexico.
We suspect that the powerful drug cartels in Mexico, which are responsible for most of the violence down there, have no trouble obtaining whatever kinds of weapons they desire on the black market, including weapons that are already virtually banned or very tightly regulated in the U.S. (machine guns, silencers, RPGs, etc.). And we suspect that Mr. Holder knows this. We also speculate that his real reason for wanting to reinstate the ban on "assault weapons" and magazines over 10 rounds is to simply curtail the rights of law-abiding Americans.
So is there any good news to report? Well, actually there is. A day or two after Mr. Holder announced his plans to ask Congress to pass a new "assault weapon" ban, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who pretty much controls Congress at the moment) said, in essence, "thanks, but no thanks."
In our previous Alert, in support of HB 357, we stated that all six states adjoining Utah allow people to carry a firearm in the glove compartment of a car without a permit, and that at least four of these states allow the gun to be kept loaded without a permit. However, it looks like we got this backwards based on our haste and our less-than-perfect memory. It’s apparently the other way around. Sorry about that.
During the 2006 legislative season, when a different "car carry" bill was being run here in Utah that would have allowed you to carry a loaded firearm in your car’s glove compartment without a permit, we checked on the packing.org website (which apparently no longer exists). Packing.org provided a more detailed analysis of state carry laws (which may have changed since then) than have other websites that we’ve been able to find. Please do not mistake this for legal advice of any sort. Before you carry in any state, please check the current laws of that state to make sure you’re in compliance.
Anyway, in 2006, packing.org’s analysis indicated that all six states adjoining Utah (Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho) allowed you to openly carry a loaded firearm in your car without a permit, with the usual caveats that you needed to be in legal possession of the gun, etc. According to packing.org, four of those states (New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho), also allowed you to have a firearm concealed inside your car in one fashion or another without a permit, although Idaho required the firearm to be unloaded if it was concealed. According to packing.org, Nevada law is completely silent on the issue of carrying a loaded and/or concealed gun in one’s car without a permit, and the Nevada courts, at least as of 2006, had interpreted this silence to mean that carrying in a car without a permit was acceptable as far as the state is concerned. However, some individual cities in Nevada had their own prohibitions against carrying in a car without a permit, at least as of 2006.
Again, we’re not lawyers. And the laws may have changed a bit since 2006. We’re just trying to show that surrounding states allow greater freedom than Utah does when it comes to carrying a firearm in one’s car without a permit. To our knowledge, these states haven’t reported any significant problems stemming from this sort of freedom.
On 25 February 2009 our friends at Gun Owners of America (GOA) released the following email alert on the cloture motion for S. 160, a possible positive for RKBA.
Thank you for all your activism so far!
Senator John Ensign of Nevada offered his amendment to repeal D.C.'s draconian gun ban today.
But Senators John Thune of South Dakota and David Vitter of Louisiana have also stepped up to the plate. They filed an amendment that would result in REAL national concealed carry reciprocity -- without adversely affecting no-permit states like Alaska and Vermont.
So now the battle lines are drawn! By the end of the week, the Senate will vote on whether to rule these two pro-gun amendments out of order.
The vote could come on a so-called "cloture" motion to cut off debate (and thus kill the Ensign and Thune/Vitter amendments). Moreover, if the underlying bill is then passed, the virulently anti-gun jurisdiction of the District of Columbia will be rewarded with a voting member of the House of Representatives.
But first, a little background on the two amendments:
You've all heard of the various "microstamping" proposals crafted by the anti-gunners to ban guns and ammunition nationwide.
The anti-gunners would do this by serial number "microstamping" requirements which are so onerous that guns (or ammunition) would become prohibitively expensive in all 50 states.
In the wake of the Heller case, the District of Columbia's reaction to the Supreme Court's decision declaring its gun laws unconstitutional was to pass legislation which will, as a practical matter, continue its current policy of denying gun licenses to its citizens. But, to add insult to injury, it added a whole bunch of additional anti-gun provisions.
One was a requirement that most guns used for self-defense be capable of "microstamping" a cartridge with a unique serial number. Aside from being useless for identifying any criminal who pockets his spent brass, this provision would, even if it were technologically possible, make guns so expensive that no one would buy them.
If a few more liberal jurisdictions follow suit, this could start a chain reaction so that gun manufacturers will eventually be forced to manufacture ALL guns to meet the new microstamping standards.
The Ensign amendment would completely repeal D.C.'s gun ban and, in the process, help stave off the push for microstamping.
Next, the Thune/Vitter amendment on concealed carry reciprocity is an idea whose time has come. Why should your right to self-defense stop at the state line?
But it must be the right kind of national reciprocity. It must protect states like Alaska and Vermont which do not require a permit to carry concealed at all and it must be done in a Constitutional manner that protects State's rights.
The Thune/Vitter amendment would do these things -- it is REAL national reciprocity.
But the problem is this: Nevada Senator Harry Reid has moved to cut off debate on the D.C. bill -- using a parliamentary maneuver known as a "cloture" petition -- for the sole purpose of ruling such pro-gun amendments out of order.
You see, Barack Obama and the liberals who run Congress hate guns. They hate guns so much that they would probably be willing to kill the District's voting representative in order to preserve the District's gun ban.
The next two days are crucial. While there will be votes in the Senate throughout the day on Thursday -- which may include either of the two pro-gun amendments -- it is likely that the true focus will be on Friday's cloture vote.
On 26 February 2009 our friends at Gun Owners of America (GOA) posted the result of the Senate vote on S. 160, as below.
The U.S. Senate voted on Thursday, February 26, to repeal the strict gun laws of the District of Columbia today, passing an amendment offered by pro-gun Senator John Ensign (R-NV).
For over thirty years, residents of D.C. have been subject to a near total gun ban. Even after last year’s landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down the District’s gun ban, D.C. Council members passed a law that, in many ways, was worse than then one the Court threw out.
For example, an important element of the D.C. law that was repealed today was a "microstamping" requirement. By 2011, the D.C. law mandates that all semi-automatic firearms sold in the District be capable of "microstamping" a cartridge with a unique serial number.
Such technology, even if it were possible to implement, would make guns so expensive that no one would buy them. If only a few jurisdictions passed such a law, it could start a chain reaction forcing gun makers to manufacture ALL guns to meet the new "microstamping" standards.
The Ensign amendment -- if signed into law -- will repeal the "microstamping" requirement and other gun restrictions and strips the City Council of its ability to deny Second Amendment rights to its citizens.
The underlying bill, however, remains a concern for gun owners.
The bill, S. 160, would expand the House of Representatives by two seats, one for D.C., the other temporarily for Utah.
Article 1, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution requires that Representatives be chosen from the states. D.C., of course, is not a state. At least not yet. The ultimate goal of most advocates of the bill is complete statehood for the District of Columbia, which would bring another two anti-gun Senators to Congress.
As the bill moves to the U.S. House, leaders there indicate they will try to strip the gun ban repeal from the bill.
Gun Owners of America will oppose any effort to strike the Ensign amendment by the House, or in a conference committee between House and Senate.
On 27 February, 2009 The Salt Lake Tribune reported in an article titled "Utah delegation balks at Obama's push for assault-weapons ban", that Utah Representatives Jim Matheson, a Democrat, and Rob Bishop, a Republican, oppose the administration's call for re-enacting the "assault weapons" ban.
Representative Matheson said "It looks as though with this announcement we've been handed our first big fight."
Representative Bishop said "I hope this administration doesn't feel a need to resurrect every bad idea." "Bringing this useless ban back is a terrible idea, and we will vigorously oppose it with bipartisan backing."
The other Utah Representative apparently could not be roused from his cot to comment.
"As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons."
-- Eric Holder, U. S. Attorney General, in an article printed in The Salt Lake Tribune, 27 February 2009.
That concludes the GOUtah! Political and Legislative Alert #316 for 1 March 2009. We hope this information will be of assistance to you in defending your firearms rights.
Remember that getting this information is meaningless unless You Act On It Today. If you just read it and dump it in the trash, your gun rights, and the gun rights of future generations go in the trash with it. Get involved, get active and get vocal!
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