The War on Guns Is Lost

Occam's Banana said:
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I hear the California market for Copium is booming rn...

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Occam's Banana said:
National gun reform requires an unlikely trifecta — Democratic control of the Presidency, House, and a filibuster-proof Senate. That’s happened once since 1994, it lasted for about six months, and even then Democrats were not able to pass any significant gun reform legislation. Without that hat trick, experience shows that our federal laws will not materially change, no matter how many shootings take place, or how heinous any particular shooting is.
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IOW: The war on guns is lost - and they know it.

This would essentially close stores that sell guns in our state, since virtually all such stores are corporate entities. That would not eliminate gun violence, [...]
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LOL

LMAO, even.
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Occam's Banana said:
https://twitter.com/GIFFORDS_org/status/1691189954901094402
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Signs of Civil Disobedience in Illinois Gun Registration Efforts
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/...e-in-illinois-gun-registration-efforts-n77716
{Cam Edwards | 27 November 2023}

There’s just a little more than a month left before Illinois gun owners must register their so-called assault weapons with the state police or risk the possibility of criminal charges if they’re caught with their modern sporting rifle, and so far it looks like many gun owners are willing to run that risk. As of November 21st, fewer than 3,500 gun owners have registered some 6,600 newly banned firearms with the state police; about 0.001 percent of the state’s 2.4 million legal gun owners.

So far state officials are downplaying the lack of compliance, suggesting there’ll be a flood of new registrations as we get closer to the January 1 deadline.

On Oct. 31, when about 2,000 people had registered their grandfathered-in assault weapons about a month into the policy being in effect, Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly said the registration process had been “slow but steady.”

"We’ll just see how the process continues to work and we’ll share the data as we continue on a daily basis to do so,” Kelly said during an unrelated event in Springfield.

Two days later in Lake Forest, Gov. J.B. Pritzker downplayed any suggestion that not enough people owning the prohibited guns were registering them, saying it was too early to make such an assessment and suggesting registration would pick up closer to Jan. 1.

"I can tell you, at least for me, that I think all of us take our time sometimes when we know the deadline is two-and-a-half months (away), that we’ll find the time eventually to go online, which is what they need to do and to register as they’re required to do,” Pritzker said.
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Maybe Pritzker’s right, but if I were him I wouldn’t bet his billion-dollar fortune on his assumption that gun owners are just waiting for the last minute to comply with the state’s mandate. Sure, some folks may be holding off in the hopes that the federal courts will put a halt to the Illinois law before the reporting requirements kick in, but with scores of county sheriffs and even some prosecutors saying that they don’t plan on proactively enforcing the “assault weapons” ban my guess is that when the deadline rolls around there are still going to be an awful lot of gun owners who haven’t informed the state that they possess a now-banned rifle, pistol, or shotgun.

After Pritzker signed the gun ban into law, an estimated 90 of Illinois’ 102 county sheriffs issued letters stating they “believe that (the new gun law) is a clear violation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution” and that they wouldn’t enforce it.

At public hearings in Springfield and Chicago earlier this month, state police heard concerns about the ban and its registration requirement from several gun rights advocates. One Republican lawmaker predicted that “hundreds of thousands” people would “absolutely not comply” with registering their weapons.

“We know this public hearing is taking place because (of) the governor and his radical-left agenda,” state Rep. Brad Halbrook, a Shelbyville Republican who is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group composed of his chamber’s most conservative legislators, testified before the state police. “He and his Democrat legislators passed this bill and then laid it at your feet to have to deal with it.”
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So far Halbrook’s prediction looks to be pretty accurate. The number of registered guns will undoubtedly go up, of course, but I’d still be shocked if there was a big surge in the days before the mandate takes effect. When New York mandated a similar registration of “assault weapons” as part of the SAFE Act in 2013, we saw “massive noncompliance” on the part of gun owners more than two years after the deadline passed. Attorney Paloma Capanna had to sue the state police to get the numbers, and learned that just 44,000 guns out of an estimated 1 million “assault weapons” had been registered with the state police.

Capanna said that the high rate of noncompliance with the law could only be interpreted as a large-scale civil disobedience, given the high level of interest and concern about the law on the part of gun owners.

“It’s not that they aren’t aware of the law,” said Capanna. “The lack of registration is a massive act of civil disobedience by gun owners statewide.”
​

Don’t be surprised to see the same phenomenon play out in Illinois, especially with the vast majority of sheriffs indicating they have no plans on enforcing the gun ban or its registration requirements. The odds of getting hit with a misdemeanor charge for maintaining possession of a so-called assault weapon without informing the state is fairly low, at least for downstate gun owners in more conservative counties, and that may be enough potential protection for them to run the risk of criminal charges and engage in their own act of civil disobedience by refusing to comply with the state’s mandate going forward.
 
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https://twitter.com/RealSpikeCohen/status/1735981410056372237
& https://twitter.com/RealSpikeCohen/status/1735994423178059975
{Spike Cohen @RealSpikeCohen | 16 December 2023}

The best part about the gun debate is that it's increasingly just academic.

Our victory is assured.

Put aside Bruen, or Heller, or McDonald, or any of the other gun rights victories in courts.

Put aside the massive increases in gun ownership, in every demographic.

Right now, there are more guns than people in the US.

Tomorrow, that gun/people ratio will grow, as it has for years, and shows no sign of stopping.

Every day, 3D manufacturing technology continues to improve.

You're already able to make a functioning gun at home, using free, publicly-available printing files.

As that technology improves, we will reach the gun singularity, wherein you can make a gun at home of the same or better quality than you'd get from a manufacturer.

Soon after, you'll be able to print better weapons at home than the meandering bureaucracy at the Pentagon can procure.

We won't need to be terrorist groups or cartels to get machine guns from the CIA and ATF. We'll just make our own, and our stuff will be better than theirs.

And thanks to Tor nodes, VPNs and other privacy tech, they won't even be able to know who's making them, or where they are.

Yes, I believe we're winning the academic debate.

Yes, I think that the court decisions will still largely be in our favor.

Yes, I think more and more states will repeal their own gun laws, nullify bad federal gun laws, and forbid municipalities from implementing new ones.

Yes, I think the public is increasingly realizing the futility of trying to ban guns, when criminals don't care if you ban their guns.

But ultimately, it doesn't matter.

Recreational drugs that aren't alcohol are still as illegal as they were 50 yeard ago, and tens of billions are spent every year to wage a war against them.

And they're easier to get than ever before.

And you can't 3D print your own drugs at home.

(Yet.)

Right now, saying you can't own a gun is as effective as saying you can't own a bag of weed.

Soon enough, it'll be as effective as saying you can't own a paper airplane.

And when we reach critical mass, guns will become like weed; effectively decriminalized almost everywhere, despite whatever the feds have to say about it at that point.

Rest assured, we are winning.

So enjoy the debate, because it's little more than entertainment anyway.

"But they banned guns in [insert cherry-picked country here] and their murder rate is lower!"

1. I could cherry-pick countries with strict gun laws, whose murder rates are several times higher than ours. El Salvador, Jamaica, Nigeria. So many cherries to pick.

2. The country you cherry-picked had a relative handful of guns that were all recorded and easy to confiscate. We have more guns than people.

3. Going back to my original point, guns will soon be easy to make, at home, everywhere. Including your cherry-picked country.

4. Read this thread by @MorosKostas about international homicide rate comparisons before bringing the subject up again:
 
Occam's Banana said:
Signs of Civil Disobedience in Illinois Gun Registration Efforts
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/...e-in-illinois-gun-registration-efforts-n77716
{Cam Edwards | 27 November 2023}

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Anti Federalist said:
Report: Only 1% of Illinois Gun Owners Comply with ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban

https://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amend...s-gun-owners-comply-with-assault-weapons-ban/

AWR HAWKINS 16 Jan 2024

WBEZ reported that only one percent of individuals holding Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) cards had complied with Illinois’s “assault weapons” ban registration requirement as of January 11, 2024.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) signed the “assault weapons” ban into law on January 10, 2023, after which his office released a statement that said, in part, “The new law also requires existing owners of semi-automatic rifles to register their ownership, ensuring that law enforcement knows the location of these weapons of war and who to hold accountable if they fall into the wrong hands.”

Owners of firearms, which Democrats categorize as “assault weapons,” were required to register their guns before January 1, 2024. WBEZ’s report on compliance as of January 11, 2024, shows that there has been little to no additional registration by the deadline, as the Chicago Sun-Times reported that “only 1% of people with firearm owners identification cards in the state had registered.”

The Sun-Times spoke with Illinois State Police about the non-compliance, who said, “Decisions on how to enforce [the ‘assault weapons’ ban] will be up to each law enforcement and prosecutorial jurisdiction within Illinois.”

On December 29, 2023, the Courthouse News Service noted that enforcement of the “assault weapons” ban largely falls on the sheriffs of Illinois’s 102 counties. And just days after the “assault weapons” ban was signed, Breitbart News pointed out that 80 sheriffs made it clear that they would not enforce it.
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THREAD: Trump Bans Bump Stocks [UPDATE: struck down by SCOTUS]

Occam's Banana said:
https://x.com/shannonrwatts/status/1801975437381316721
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They're coping and seething and seething and coping ...

The Group Helping the Supreme Court Rewrite America’s Gun Laws Is Worse Than the NRA
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/supreme-court-nra-gun-laws-bump-stocks.html
{Dahlia Lithwick & Mark Joseph Stern | 15 June 2024}

[bold & underline emphasis added - OB]

The Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on bump stocks on Friday, legalizing a device that can effectively transform semiautomatic rifles into machine guns. Predictably, the court split 6–3, with the Republican-appointed justices carving a massive loophole in federal law at the behest of the firearms industry. Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion is rooted in historical misrepresentations and utterly implausible manipulations of the statutory text. It enables future mass shooters to equip their AR-15s with an attachment that increases the rate of fire exponentially, to up to 800 rounds per minute.

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the decision on Saturday’s episode of Amicus. They were joined by David Pucino, an expert in firearms law and legal director of the Giffords Law Center. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: Justice Thomas makes the claim that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms did a complete 180 on how it viewed bump stocks, suddenly changing their minds after the Las Vegas massacre and deciding that, actually, they are machine guns. That’s just not true, right?

Mark Joseph Stern: This idea that ATF said bump stocks were 100 percent legal, then turned around in response to political pressure and said they were unlawful all along—that’s a misrepresentation of history. What really happened was that gunmakers were developing various tools to help make semiautomatic rifles fire at a higher rate. ATF looked at these and said some were potentially legal while others were not, on a case-by-case basis, without making a formal determination at the agency level. Some were snuck through under false pretenses as an accommodation for disability. And when ATF decided to take a holistic look at this issue after the Las Vegas shooting, it decided that, when bump stocks operate a certain way—basically, enabling automatic fire—they are illegal.

That, to me, is doing exactly what an agency is supposed to do. ATF looked at the facts on the ground. It looked at its mandate from Congress. It looked at its own past decisions. And it harmonized them as best it could in accordance with what experts at the agency say the facts are. To see Thomas slander ATF as caving to political pressure, then using this charge to overrule the determination of ATF’s own firearm experts—it seemed to me the height of arrogance.

David Pucino: I think it’s important to remember that there was really careful work going on at ATF to make these determinations on a case-by-case basis. The agency was faced with a problem: Folks in the firearm industry were trying to get around the laws on the books. When an agency comes out and says, “This is what the law is,” the industry is going to try to get around it. And the agency has to decide if they’ll succeed.

What’s really striking here is that ATF was doing that engagement, and the Supreme Court came in and usurped it here in a way that’s totally unworkable if you apply it beyond the favored political constituency of the gun industry. It’s absurd to have the Supreme Court putting all this work into deciding the mechanics of a firearm and whether it meets the statute and trying to overrule an agency that made those same determinations. That’s not a workable way to do government. If every difficult regulatory decision made in this country that might’ve gone one way or another goes up to the Supreme Court, that’s all the justices would ever be doing. You’d need a thousand Supreme Courts to handle it.

The volume of work that comes out of the administrative state is not something that the Supreme Court can analyze in this way, at least not in any sort of reasonable manner, and I don’t think they would ever even pretend to. But what you have here is a particular, favored constituency that is bringing these questions. And then, all of a sudden, the court decides to drop everything and figure out how this gun works. Now, the way ATF does that is to sit down and actually look at the firearm. They’re going to bring in their experts and make those determinations. But the way the Supreme Court does it is they look at an amicus brief by the Firearms Policy Coalition and co-sign it.

Lithwick: That’s the group that created the six graphics and a gif that Justice Thomas used to illustrate how semiautomatic rifles work. Why was it notable that he copied and pasted their material into a Supreme Court opinion?

Pucino: The National Rifle Association is not what it used to be, and that’s created a gap. And what has gone into the gap are a bunch of further-right organizations that are trying to take the mantle of the NRA by being as extreme as possible. Foremost among them is the Firearms Policy Coalition. Friday was a real moment for them. It’s one of the most extreme groups; it uses extraordinarily violent rhetoric. And it’s putting out material that’s getting blessed by a majority opinion of the Supreme Court. You have to take a step back and look at where we are—I don’t think that’s anything you could imagine happening even 10 years ago.

Lithwick: You’re both hitting on a big theme of this term, which is the Supreme Court making it impossible for agencies to do pretty much anything. And it seems awfully important when you have Clarence Thomas substituting his judgment for ATF’s with what Justice Sotomayor pointedly calls “six diagrams and an animation.” The majority was just like, I know everything, here’s a Peanuts comic strip. It seems as if Thomas was trying to explain his tortured interpretation to the public, to make it accessible, but eliding the agency’s own expert views in the process.

Pucino: The idea that you can get the amount of expertise that goes into technical determinations made by ATF by simply looking at briefs and diagrams—I mean, just, no. Obviously not. The amount of time that even clerks, let alone justices, require to do a deep dive on these issues, the depth of understanding they’re going to need—it won’t come anywhere near that of an expert who’s working on this full time. This is their whole job. It’s what they’re trained to do.

Stern: You can really only justify Thomas’ reading, in my view, if you start from the conclusion that the bump stock ban is unlawful and work your way backward, butchering the text to mean something it just doesn’t. This isn’t how ordinary people use the English language and, as Sotomayor showed, it isn’t how members of Congress who voted on this law used English when they wrote it in 1934. If “textualism” can be deployed in such an underhanded and cynical way, I don’t think it’s really getting us anywhere. It’s just another pretext for the Supreme Court to reach whatever result it wants.
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