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Want To Restore Law & Order? Call In The Army.

June 4, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 13 Comments

              I think it’s entirely appropriate that on the same day thirty-one years ago that the Chinese government ordered its military to open fire on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, that Donald Trump should militarize the U.S. Government response to the demonstrations about George Floyd. After all, as Nick Kristof reminds us in yesterday’s op-ed, this is the same guy who believed that the soldiers shooting at unarmed protestors were demonstrating the government’s ‘strength.’

              It’s gotten to the point that taking the asshole Trump seriously for anything he says is a fool’s errand at best.  It’s not that he doesn’t know the difference between fiction and fact; it’s that he got away with saying anything he wanted to say in New York because he was just another piece of local news.  Back before he ran for President, if he told a local reporter that he was willing to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, nobody would care. But if you’re the President and you say you want to buy Greenland, it’s international news.

              I don’t think Trump has the faintest idea about what it would mean to order the U.S. Army to come out and try to quell the demonstrations that are still erupting in response to the murder of George Floyd. He says it because he wants everyone to believe that a ‘tough guy’ is really in charge. But there’s a second thing going on here as well.

              Remember when a guy named Fred Guttenberg confronted Brett Kavanaugh during the latter’s confirmation hearing to challenge him about guns? Fred is the father of his beloved daughter Jaime, who was gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in 2018, and he has been appearing at various public events to talk and agitate about gun violence since that time. Back in February he got thrown out of the House chamber during Trump’s State of the Union address; frankly, everyone should have walked out.

              Now Fred has decided that enough with theatrical protests, it’s time to get real. And with the help of both Brady and Everytown, he has filed a complaint against Smith & Wesson for falsely advertising their assault-style guns. The complaint alleges that S&W markets their AR-15 in a way that “attracts, encourages and facilitates” mass shooters and should include a statement in its marketing materials warning consumers about the extreme lethality of the gun.

              It would be an important step forward for Gun-control Nation if the other side would get real and admit that maybe, just maybe, some of these so-called ‘sporting guns’ aren’t being sold for sporting purposes at all. There isn’t a single gun maker who produces an AR-style rifle whose advertising shows anything other than some camo-clad military ‘warrior’ sitting somewhere and just waiting to nail a terrorist coming over the hill. You think the guy pictured in the header to this story is waiting for Bambi to come out from a tree?

              The cops started becoming more military-minded in terms of weapons when they formed SWAT teams in response to the urban riots that occurred in some inner-city ghettos beginning in 1965. The big gugga-mugga between the cops and civilians took place at the Los Angeles Black Panther Headquarters in 1969 when more than 200 cops, including a newly-formed SWAT team, exchanged thousands of rounds of both semi-auto and automatic fire, but nobody was killed. Leave it to Hollywood, because a rather stupid show called S.W.A.T ran for one season on television in 1975-76.

              But let’s remember that we have a President who, to all intents and purposes, spends the greater part of his day watching TV shows, while the exceedingly dumb son-in-law pretends to be running the Executive Branch. And if you want to run a political campaign that will somehow gain you enough votes to win a 2nd term, you look around for some kind of narrative which becomes the symbol for whom you really are. Which is exactly why what Fred Guttenberg is saying about how the gun industry markets the AR-15 is completely and totally true.

              Right on Fred, right on.

Don’t Look Now, But Obama Ain’t The Only One Trying To Take Away Our Guns.

May 14, 2015

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There’s a gun nut in Alabama named Mike Rogers who represents the 3rd Congressional District, an area which includes the town of Anniston.  And every gun nut like me knows Anniston because it’s the headquarters of the Civilian Marksmanship Program, aka the CMP.  One of the easiest ways to get certified as a gun nut is to buy a rifle from the CMP.  I bought two of the surplus M-1 Garands , one an original made at Springfield, the second a 1950’s makeover turned out by Harrington & Richardson located right up the road in Spencer, MA.

Congressman Rogers, like most Republicans, has no trouble pushing government spending if the money is somehow connected to the military and the result is to create civilian jobs.  So he’s attached an amendment to the 2016 military spending bill which changes the law covering the CMP. If the amendment stays in the bill, from now on civilians will not only be able to purchase rifles, but all “firearms” that the Army considers to be surplus and thus available for anyone to buy.  And it further turns out that the Army happens to be sitting on 100,000 old Colt 45 pistols that were first brought into service in 1911 and then replaced by the Beretta 9mm beginning in 1981.

colt1911a1                There are probably more pistols built on the Colt 1911 frame than any other handgun ever made.  Commercial models newly manufactured by various companies sell quite well; hundreds of thousands manufactured overseas have been imported back into the States.  I have probably owned at least a dozen Colt 1911s since I bought my first commercial model in 1976, but the ones that were made for the military and are stamped “United States Property” are few and far between.  As opposed to the M-1 Garand and Carbine, of which the Army has probably sold off several million guns, the pistol has never been made available to the civilian market, although on occasion one pops up here or there.

The problem that gun nut Rogers has encountered, however, is that the Army doesn’t appear willing to go along with his scheme.  Last week the military sent a memorandum to Congress citing concerns about public safety, accountability and possible violations of federal gun laws that needed “additional study” before the CMP’s charter could be revised.  In brief, the Army feels that these handguns, as opposed to CMP rifles, would be released to the public through unverified, online sales, therefore could not be traced by the ATF, and would therefore be a violation of the Gun Control Act of 1968. And don’t think that the Army made this up on its own because the document cites as its source for this information none other than the DOJ.

This document is a quintessential example of the blind leading the dumb, or maybe the other way around.  The CMP ships all its guns from and to federally-licensed dealers; purchasers must fill out a NICS background check form and agree that NICS must approve the transaction before the gun is released.  Judging by my experience when I bought my Garands, the CMP creates a larger paper trail for each transaction than anything done in the local shop. Incidentally, although the Army cites DOJ as the source for this misinformation, the DOJ no doubt was given this nonsense by those regulatory geniuses at the ATF.

Given the stink that was made over the ATF’s attempt to ban some 223 ammo, you would think that the gun lobby would be yelling and screaming about what is a bone fide violation of 2nd-Amendment rights.  But while some of the pro-gun blogs are blazing away, so far the NRA has uttered nary a peep.  And I’ll bet they continue to keep their mouths shut, because for all their talk about being the first line of ‘defense’ for gun owners’ rights, these stalwart defenders of the Constitution aren’t about to say jack when it’s the  Army and not Obama who wants to keep us from owning guns.