On the civil rights front as seen by gun owners, collectors of weapons, and assorted other practical folks, it always seems to be a matter of “win a few, lose a few.” The past few days seem to indicate a “lose a few” sequence.

The Draconian ammunition law in California which we discussed here a few weeks back has, despite a blizzard of mail from honest people all over the country to the Governor’s Office in Sacramento, has been signed into law. Read The Governator’s justification for it HERE.

Elsewhere in the nation, a little six-year-old boy took a camping tool to school with him to eat his lunch. The innocuous device included a fork, a spoon, and – gasp! – a tiny knife blade. Deemed to have violated the Zero Tolerance policy of no “weapons” on school grounds, the tyke was banished to some sort of local “reform school,” though common sense may finally be prevailing. Read about it HERE.

And, finally, a seventeen-year-old Eagle Scout with dreams of West Point was practical enough to have some emergency gear in his car including water, an MRE, blankets, and a two-inch blade folding pocketknife given him by his grandfather, a police chief. All were locked in the vehicle and inaccessible to him while he was in school. He has been suspended for a record period of time over this, with a blot on his record that may profoundly impact his hopes for West Point. Details are HERE.

For God’s sake…

Back in the blissful 1950s, I and most other elementary school boys I knew carried scout knives or pen-knives to school in our pockets daily. I don’t recall any knife fights by the swings or the sandboxes at recess. I remember bringing an unloaded Smith & Wesson K-22 revolver to junior high school as a science class “show and tell” thing, with both the teacher’s and the principle’s permission, in the early 1960s. In high school, many of us boys had rifles and shotguns locked in our cars during hunting season, with ammunition of course, so we could get in a couple of hours of hunting after school. There were no shootings in the parking lots. And that wasn’t in Mayberry, RFD; it was in the state’s capitol city.

Things are going in sad directions…

The California house and senate have reportedly passed an egregious law that will profoundly hamper honest citizens’ ability to purchase ammunition there.

Cabela’s, one of the nation’s leading retailers of ammunition for hunting, target shooting, and home and personal defense, has stated that it will not sell ammunition in California if the Governor signs it into law. Links HERE and HERE.

If you live there, or even if you just care, you owe it to yourself and “the cause” to write a polite, sincere letter to Governor Schwartzenegger. This would be a truly ominous and ugly precedent.

Since blog reader feedback on the last couple of entries – regarding new Smith & Wesson products – had gone so heavily toward discussion of the internal lock feature on S&W revolvers, I had planned to make that the topic of this blog entry. However, the recent death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy eclipses it for news value, as it did on TV news stations for the past few days, which seem to have been “all Ted Kennedy, all the time.”

There’s actually a connection between the two topics. Kennedy vehemently supported mandatory internal locks on all firearms, and all manner of other Draconian measures that would have profoundly infringed on the civil rights of the firearms owning community…and sometimes did.

We can all understand the visceral reaction he must have had to his two gifted brothers being shot to death by assassins.  What was harder to understand was his blaming of objects for human hatred, and his willingness to punish and dis-empower good people because of the acts of bad ones.

They called him “the lion of the Senate” when he died, but his advocacy of banning private citizens’ ownership of certain firearms because it would somehow enhance the public good, smacked more of “lyin’ in the Senate.”

I’ve worked for decades as a Trustee of the Second Amendment Foundation with SAF stalwart Dave Workman. HERE brother Workman provides a rich trove of links and reading for those who want to refresh on what the late Senator from the Bay State tried to do to gun owners and their rights, occasionally succeeding to a degree.

As you remember the last of the Generation of Princes in America’s Royal Family, remember him whole.  His commitment to civil rights seemed to be limited to the ones he approved of.  I recall Ted Kennedy’s private bodyguard being arrested for attempting to carry a fully automatic Beretta machine pistol into a Government building.  Apparently, the guns he didn’t want the peasants to have were OK for protecting the Royal Family, whose immense wealth allowed them to hire high-priced private Praetorian Guards…

I’m just glad I managed to get through all that without mentioning Mary Jo Kopechne.

When was it, exactly, that the left became the “blues” and everyone else became the “reds”? I was from that generation that grew up huddling under elementary school desks in “atomic bomb drills” and being told by teachers that Communism was evil, and now folks like me are called “Reds” ?!?!?

A new “blue” scheme currently underway (yes, founder Dave Duffy has checked it out, and assures us it is true) is the already drafted Ammunition Accountability Act. You can read about it here.

Let’s think about that. The technology to make ammunition “accountable,” – cartridge by cartridge, shell by shell, casing by casing, projectile for projectile – is largely vaporware and almost entirely unproven. It will be hugely expensive. Affordable ammunition for practice, competition, hunting and home defense will become a thing of the past.

Notice also the very early expiration date at which all previously owned “old, low-tech” ammo would become illegal to possess. One must ask, what would the law abiding citizen do with it? It could not be sold. Property lawfully purchased and responsibly owned would become contraband: there would be huge ex post facto issues here, and some serious Constitutional issues as well. And that’s before we start looking at vast collective tonnage of “hazardous materials” that some Governmental entity would be responsible for storing or destroying. Did any of the idiots who drafted this stuff even discuss the ramifications with EPA and OSHA?

If, like most rural folks, you’re a gun owner, you’ve found an old box of ammo or maybe just a single cartridge in an unexpected, forgotten place. After a certain date, if this BS becomes law, that would make you a law-breaker. Roughly half of our population – far more than half in rural areas – owns or have owned guns and ammunition, which means that if such laws come to pass, they will unnecessarily criminalize half of our citizenry.

Look this stuff up. Find out if yours is one of the states that might put you in the crosshairs of this insanity. And start writing every elected official (and appointed official, such as chiefs of police who would have to enforce this stupidity) and let them know where you stand.

This drafted legislation reaches a literally mind-boggling level of ignorance and foolishness, and if it goes unchallenged, the “blues” will have a lot of us “singing the blues.”

Why do Latvians oil their gardens?

So their buried AK47s won’t rust before the Russians attack them again.

The joke comes to us from gun-savvy, politically wise Peter Buxtun. Oppressed nations have a long history of their citizens burying their guns. Some in the US worry that the time might be coming for them to do the same.

The January/February 2009 issue of Backwoods Home magazine has a fascinating article by Charles Wood about how he did just that. He sealed a Ruger Mini-14, suitably greased and accompanied by a quantity of ammunition and useful accessories, in PVC pipe and dug it up fifteen years later. The experiment ended with a functional semiautomatic .223 autoloading rifle in fine condition.

Mr. Wood notes, however: “…it took me several days with a shovel and a rake to locate the rifle.” Burying a gun is like burying treasure. If you have a map, you have to worry about someone else getting their hands on said map, because whoever has the map has the treasure…or in this case, the treasured gun. If I was going to your house looking for genuine criminal contraband, I’d ask the judge to sign a warrant that included GPS devices and computer hard drives so we could check places where said contraband might be hidden. If you bury stuff, you need a good memory and stable landmarks, not to mention the ability to cover the “burial site” unrecognizably, and the absolute certainty that no one watched you bury it and you never mentioned it to a soul.

They’re selling “survival guns” now with the PVC pipe to bury them included. Mossberg’s JIC (“Just In Case”?) package includes a stockless 12-gauge pump shotgun and the pipe in which to inter it. I can picture myself standing next to a customer buying one, and feeling my evil sense of humor rise, and hearing myself say loudly, “Hey, does anybody know where they sell metal detectors around here?”

If folks do come with black helicopters to take our guns, they’ll doubtless have metal-finding technology that will reach deep. I’m told that burying them vertical helps reduce their profile to metal detectors, as of course does greater depth. However, metal detection technology ain’t my side of the house, and I’ll defer to those with genuine expertise if they’d care to post comments here.

The old saying is that redress is found in four boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, the soapbox, and finally the bullet box. The ballot box has failed us this time around, but we have another crack at it coming up in a couple of years. The “jury box” has been pretty good to us, since the highest court in the land resoundingly confirmed the individual right to bear arms in SCOTUS’ Heller decision this past June. I’m on the soapbox right now, and so are a lot of us. The bullet box is a LONG way off.

And I don’t think we need to bury it yet.

At the same time, it wouldn’t hurt to keep your Jan/Feb ’09 issue of Backwoods Home handy, where you can review Charles Wood’s good advice if in case it turns out that I have been overly optimistic.

The Jacksonville (FL) Times-Union newspaper got itself splashed all over the Internet recently with a front-page story about panic-buying of guns after the election. The story itself was old news: the heavy buying had started before the election, ramped up to epic proportions as soon as the results were in, and continues unabated as I write this. Publishing the story on 11/23/08, the Jacksonville paper was behind its usual fast track in gathering news that is actually new. What caught the nation’s attention was one individual quoted in newsman Charlie Patton’s story:

“In a comment bound to infuriate some gun owners, Mikhail Muhammad, state and Jacksonville chairman of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, said the increasing gun sales were a reaction by ‘the radical element in the white community.’ ‘We call it white supremacy anxiety disorder,’ Muhammad said.”

It may have infuriated “some gun owners,” but it caused this one to laugh.

I’m of Syrian descent on my paternal side, and Scotch-Irish on the maternal. “A mutt,” as Barack Obama recently called himself, like so many of us. When my eldest was ten, I took her with me on safari in South Africa, in the time of apartheid. It gave her a new appreciation of American freedom, a new understanding of her mom and dad telling her what it was like to grow up when there was segregation in parts of our own country. And an understanding of what it was like to be the ones discriminated against, because under the three-tiered system of White/Colored/Black that was apartheid, the kid and I were “Colored.”

One thing all of us can be thankful about as we review the results of November 4 is that this country finally elected an African-American as its President, and did so thanks to a huge percentage of the Caucasian vote. It will go far – though how far, we don’t know yet – to exorcise the demons of racism that have haunted our nation’s history for so long.

Hell, it’s no secret to anyone who reads Backwoods Home magazine or this blog that the candidate I really wanted was African-American. Unfortunately, Condoleeza Rice was apparently too fed up with thankless jobs to run for the one that would have put her in the Oval Office.

I’m feeling an urge to phone the Black Panther HQ in Jacksonville and talk to Mikhail Muhammad. If it’s about “white supremacy anxiety disorder,” I’d like to hear his take on why so many African-Americans are buying “assault rifles” and “high capacity” magazines right now. I’d like to ask him why the website www.newblackpantherjax.com says in its “10-Point Platform,” “ARMS IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE!” (Point 2) and “The Second Amendment of white America’s Constitution gives a right to bear arms” (Point 7). Hell, I might even ask him if he knew that Martin Luther King was a gun owner. He was also a Republican.

Let’s consider the principle of Occam’s Razor. Often, the simplest explanation is the correct explanation.

Ya think it just might be that all Americans of every color are desperately buying certain guns because a President has been elected, and a Party given great power, who made it clear that they don’t want those American citizens to have access to those guns anymore?

The front page story in question.

Racial elements in the last Presidential race were more layered than they looked.

Black and white alike have been buying guns in the current “run.” Scene is Trail Boss Gun Shop in Sierra Vista, AZ.

American Hunters and Shooters Association is telling gun owners not to worry, that Obama and Biden don’t want to impinge their right to own and use firearms. Unfortunately, AHSA is a Trojan Horse, a false front of gun-banners masquerading as supporters of firearms owners civil rights. The truth is out there…and here’s where to find it.

Rich Pearson is head of ISRA, the Illinois State Rifle Association. I’ve known him for years and he’s a good, honest man. He and his people have been fighting for years against Obama and his ilk on their home ground. Obama voted for all sorts of gun bans, and against a state resolution that would have offered some protection to good citizens who used their firearms in self-defense. You can read about it all HERE.

The NRA and its Institute for Legislative Action have finally brought out their hard-hitting TV ads exposing the truth about Obama and Biden and where they stand on (read, against) firearms owners’ civil rights. The Obama campaign is trying desperately to ban these ad spots. (Silencing your political opponents…now there’s some meaningful “political change.”) You can read about what’s going on, and see the ads, HERE

Meanwhile, the Missouri state administration has come down hard on the Obama campaign for its unethical attempts to silence criticism in other ways. See it HERE

The disingenuous campaign of disinformation by the Obama campaign has been frighteningly effective. The outdoors people seem to be much less behind McCain over Obama this year than they were behind Bush over Kerry four years ago.

Feel free to send these links to your friends and relatives who believe in freedom and civil rights.

Time is short.

It isn’t just that Obama and Biden are inimical to our rights as gun owners.

It’s also that they’ve lied to every single American citizen about their position on these issues.

Tom Gresham, who does the great GunTalk call-in radio show and Personal Defense TV (which will be on the Sportsman Channel and assorted other cable venues, instead of its old home on the Outdoor Channel, when its third season airs beginning next month) was doing an interview with Alan Gura, the masterful attorney who orchestrated the free people’s victory in the Heller decision.

It occurred to Tom that this was an occasion suitable for a fine commemorative firearm. He approached Paul Pluff, the public relations guru at Smith & Wesson, and Paul was as excited about the idea as Tom. The Second Amendment Foundation got into the act, and voila: the commemorative is here.

It’s a Smith & Wesson Model 442, the “hammerless” Centennial Airweight, a short barreled five-shot .38 Special revolver. It’s an excellent choice for concealed carry, and particularly apropos since Washington, DC is fighting the Supreme Court’s decision tooth and nail. The city’s initial response was that it would register only revolvers instead of semiautomatic pistols.

This neat little pocket-size gun would fit even DC’s registration standards. I can think of no better way to thumb one’s nose at anti-rights Washington mayor Adrian Fenty…and, God knows, some well-deserved nose-thumbing is certainly due in that direction.

Next year will make three decades that I’ve been involved in shooting cases as an expert witness in the courts. I took my first case in New York City in 1979. It’s been an instructive part of my life.

One thing I’ve learned is that most private citizens who go through legal ordeals after they’ve had to use a gun in self-defense find themselves feeling terribly, terribly alone. They’re being demonized by the anti-gun media locally, and find themselves shunned by neighbors, friends, co-workers, and customers. Their identity as the good person, the good neighbor, the competent professional at whatever they do, has been subsumed by the new identity given them by the press: He Who Kills.

It’s easier for cops. They have unions and fraternal organizations to stand up for them, and to stand with them. They’re surrounded by peers who think, “That could have been me who had to shoot that dirtbag and bring down this crapstorm. There, but for the grace of God, go I.” The private citizen forced to do the same thing generally doesn’t have much of that peer support.

One guy who understands is my old friend and colleague Marty Hayes. He’s an ex-full time cop who went from patrolman to chief law enforcement officer, and who for the last several years has worked full time to bring responsible armed self-defense training to law-abiding private citizens as well as to law enforcement. First as Director of the famous Firearms Academy of Seattle, and now also as the founder of the Armed Citizens’ Legal Defense Network, he understands that people who’ve defended themselves and their families may need support in many ways in the aftermath of the incident.

Gail Pepin recently did an interview with Marty for the ProArms Podcast. It’s on Episode 005. The interview explains what the organization is about and what it does. I’m on board with the Network as an advisor. So are John Farnam, Dennis Tueller, Jim Cirillo, Jr., and some other folks who’ve spent decades dealing with violent encounter survival at both the street level and the court level. I for one think the Armed Citizens’ Legal Defense Network is an idea whose time has come. You can go to the Network’s website, which has lots of good info. As my old friend Farnam would say, “Strongly recommended!”

I apologize for being kind of in and out on the blog lately. In the eight weeks of June and July, I was on the road for six. Internet, etc. was not always accessible.

It was fun, though, to read some headlines on the ground where the news was taking place. I was driving through Virginia and DC when the Washington Post front page headlined the story of the city’s resistance to the Supreme Court itself. Sure enough, when Dick Heller, the eponymous plaintiff in the landmark Heller v. DC SCOTUS decision went to register his Colt Government Model .45 pistol, he was turned down. Even though he had only seven-shot magazines for it, the District told him it was unacceptable. Don’t you know, they have a separate law in the city banning as “assault weapons” any firearm that can possibly take a larger than twelve-round magazine. They lump them in with prohibited “machine guns.”

Will Dick Heller take them to court again over this? Well, do bears go potty in the woods? And do winos do the same on the streets of the District, for that matter?

The aftershocks of Heller are even more amusing in the Chicago area, where Mayor Daley (aka King Richard the Second) is not handling it well and promises to fight. Uh, yeah. The vehemently anti-gun Chicago Tribune first responded to the Heller decision with the editorial suggestion that the Second Amendment be repealed. Shortly thereafter, the Trib’s editorial board apparently got smacked with the clue bat and publicly suggested that it would be unwise for the mayor to whiz away millions of taxpayers dollars fighting an unbeatable reality.

Chicago, like DC, banned handgun possession long ago within the city limits. There isn’t even a firearms retailer in the city proper, though a ring of fine gun shops surrounds Chicago in the suburbs. The satellite community of Morton Grove became notorious as the first municipality to ban handgun possession. It was followed by Wilmette, Winnetka, Oak Park, and Evanston.

Morton Grove has given up and surrendered the ordnance. Ditto, I’m told, Wilmette. Didn’t want to explain to the voters why they urinated away millions of dollars fighting the law. I’m reasonably well connected in Chicagoland for someone who doesn’t live there, and my sources tell me that while Oak Park wants to fight, Winnetka will probably cave. Evanston has reportedly been asked by the Brady Center to wait to throw in the towel until they’ve looked at the anti-gunners’ “alternate” legal proposal that they’re feverishly drawing up now.

It’s good to have the enemies of our rights on the defensive for a change. Morton Grove is where they used to manufacture those hideously kitschy plastic pink flamingoes. A few years ago, SWAT Magazine did a hilarious spoof on “Hunting the Morton Grove Pink Flamingo.” If I can lure one of those plastic pink posers onto my range, maybe I can shoot it with one of my Colt .45 auto pistols, in tribute to Dick Heller and the SCOTUS approved demise of a pathetic exercise in politically correct stupidity.