San Diego Gun Owners recently brought me to their stomping grounds to teach a Deadly Force Instructor class. While there, I sat down with some of their folks to discuss current issues.
Catch it here:
or watch video here.
San Diego Gun Owners have been spectacularly successful as grassroots advocates for the civil rights of firearms owners.
“It seems that the opinion is that, hey, if you can bear it and it is an arm, you can’t ban it.”
The antis get that. They understand it perfectly. That’s why they’ve been falling over themselves trying to define what an “arm” is as narrowly as possible.
The gun is an “arm,” of course. However, according to the antis, the ammunition and the magazine are NOT “arms,” so they can be restricted or banned. According to the antis, knives, too, are not “arms,” so they can be restricted or banned (which just shows their hoplophobia doesn’t apply only to guns — for the worst of them, it applies to ANYTHING that COULD be used as a weapon).
So-called “assault weapons” are “arms” by any definition, so the antis are pressing the “dangerous or unusual” angle (even though the SCOTUS precedent specifies “dangerous AND unusual” [emphasis mine]) and claiming that semi-automatic rifles are particularly dangerous; they’ve already had to concede that with MILLIONS owned in America, such rifles are not unusual. And yes, they absolutely understand that swapping “and” for “or” changes the whole calculus; they’re just hoping the courts either don’t catch the switch, or use it as a plausible argument to uphold unconstitutional laws.
The antis understand all of this. They know they can’t win with the current rules and language, which is why they’re always trying change both. The precedents are on our side; all we have to do is convince SCOTUS to follow their own prior decisions and apply the same reasoning to the current crop of cases.
Just finished your DFI course last week. My hand still aches. Great training from a world class instructor. Thank you, Mas.
I watched “Young Washington” in our local theater. Besides being a bigger than usual audience, it was the first time in years I heard an audience applaud when a movie finished.
Go see it, Mas.
These were 14 minutes very well spent. I’m now a new subscriber to Gun Owners Radio Podcast. A very interesting discussion with two great voices. Thanks for sharing.
Crime control or concerns about the lives of children are nothing but mediocre excuses to pass gun control. If Democrats really cared about crime control, they would not be undermining the police, the justice system, and the prison system.
Anytime anything happens that could be used to justify more chipping away at the second amendment is immediately pushed by the left.