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friendly_iconoclast

friendly_iconoclast's Journal
friendly_iconoclast's Journal
December 21, 2019

AG Healey folds on attempted rifle ban, acknowledges guns are legal

https://www.nssf.org/nssf-welcomes-massachusetts-ags-enforcement-notice-clarification


WASHINGTON, D.C. — The National Shooting Sports Foundation® (NSSF®), the firearms industry trade association, accepts Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s agreement to clarify the Enforcement Notice that included “’Copies’ or ‘Duplicates’ of the Enumerated Weapons.” The Attorney General’s agreement to clarify this notice effectively ends the legal challenge by NSSF, Pullman Arms of Worcester, Mass., along with three other Massachusetts firearms retailers.

“We are pleased this matter has come to a successful resolution,” said Lawrence G. Keane, Senior Vice President of Government Relations and Public Affairs and General Counsel for NSSF. “We sought clarification to the Enforcement Notice to allow firearms retailers to know exactly what the law stated and ensure they were operating within the confines of that law. For two and a half years, these business owners were left in the dark and today, they finally have the clear answers they sought.”

In 2016 Attorney General Healey charged that firearms retailers were violating the intent of a state law against so-called “assault weapons” by making small tweaks to certain firearms and issued the Enforcement Notice. The Notice warned retailers those so-called “copies” or “duplicates” of the firearms specifically listed in the state law were illegal for sale.

NSSF and the stores had to file the case to challenge the Notice because it was too vague to apply. The complaint identified the difficulties in applying the Notice to listed firearms after the Attorney General’s office ignored multiple requests to clarify the Notice as to those firearms. The Office did not take steps to clarify the notice for two and a half years, and only recently notified the Plaintiffs that the listed firearms are not illegal “assault weapons.” The Office agreed to amend the Notice after NSSF prevailed against multiple motions designed to dismiss or stall the case. Because the Notice has been clarified, the goals for the case have been achieved, and there is nothing else to fight about in this action.

December 21, 2019

Massachusetts AG Healey folds on attempted rifle ban, acknowledges guns are legal

Then (2016)- "AG Maura Healey: We will win gun lawsuit"

https://www.masslive.com/politics/2016/10/ag_maura_healey_we_will_win_gu.html


https://www.democraticunderground.com/10141597906


BOSTON — Attorney General Maura Healey on Friday predicted that she will win a lawsuit filed by a national gun rights group over her interpretation of the state's assault weapons ban.

This summer, Healey angered gun rights supporters when she interpreted a ban on assault weapons to make illegal certain types of guns that are similar to assault weapons. Around 10,000 of those so-called "copycat" assault weapons were sold last year in Massachusetts.

The lawsuit, filed by the National Shooting Sports Foundation and four gun shops, argues that Healey's interpretation of the law violates due process and is "unconstitutionally vague, invalid and unenforceable."

Healey spoke Friday at a rally on Boston Common urging voters to cast ballots Nov. 8 for candidates who support gun control.



https://www.nssf.org/nssf-welcomes-massachusetts-ags-enforcement-notice-clarification

December 11, 2019

NSSF Welcomes Massachusetts AG’s ‘Enforcement Notice’ Clarification

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association, accepts Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s agreement to clarify the Enforcement Notice that included “’Copies’ or ‘Duplicates’ of the Enumerated Weapons.” The Attorney General’s agreement to clarify this notice effectively ends the legal challenge by NSSF, Pullman Arms of Worcester, Mass., along with three other Massachusetts firearms retailers.

“We are pleased this matter has come to a successful resolution,” said Lawrence G. Keane, Senior Vice President of Government Relations and Public Affairs and General Counsel for NSSF. “We sought clarification to the Enforcement Notice to allow firearms retailers to know exactly what the law stated and ensure they were operating within the confines of that law. For two and a half years, these business owners were left in the dark and today, they finally have the clear answers they sought.”

In 2016 Attorney General Healey charged that firearms retailers were violating the intent of a state law against so-called “assault weapons” by making small tweaks to certain firearms and issued the Enforcement Notice. The Notice warned retailers those so-called “copies” or “duplicates” of the firearms specifically listed in the state law were illegal for sale.

NSSF and the stores had to file the case to challenge the Notice because it was too vague to apply. The complaint identified the difficulties in applying the Notice to listed firearms after the Attorney General’s office ignored multiple requests to clarify the Notice as to those firearms. The Office did not take steps to clarify the notice for two and a half years, and only recently notified the Plaintiffs that the listed firearms are not illegal “assault weapons.” The Office agreed to amend the Notice after NSSF prevailed against multiple motions designed to dismiss or stall the case. Because the Notice has been clarified, the goals for the case have been achieved, and there is nothing else to fight about in this action.


December 16, 2019

I don't believe requiring serial numbers will impact illegal use very much, if at all

Criminals will move to entirely homemade guns, as see:

https://www.google.com/search?q=homemade+submachine+guns&source=lmns&bih=713&biw=1536&client=firefox-b-1-d&hl=en-US&ved=2ahUKEwiRyImngLvmAhUDWt8KHZk4ARsQ_AUoAHoECAEQAA

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-23/queensland-police-find-sophisticated-gun-manufacting-workshop/8051244

Queensland Police have charged five people after finding homemade machine guns, a weapons factory and drug labs during raids on the Gold Coast.

Police and Australian Border Force officers searched four homes and two businesses last Friday.

At an industrial shed in Nerang, police found four machine guns, a commercial pill press, weapons manufacturing equipment, silencers, a 3D printer and drugs.

Detective Superintendent Jon Wacker said he believed it was the first time police had seen machine gun manufacturing in Queensland...



https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/homemade-submachine-guns-seized-near-edmonton-1.3558129


Homemade submachine guns seized near Edmonton

Jackie Dunham
CTVNews.ca Published Wednesday, August 23, 2017 12:15PM EDT Last Updated Wednesday, August 23, 2017 1:35PM EDT

Alberta law enforcement officials have seized four prohibited firearms, including two homemade MAC-11 submachine guns, and arrested two suspects in Edmonton following an eight-month investigation.

The guns were allegedly manufactured at a “professional grade” machinist shop, located just west of Edmonton, according to a press release by Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams (ALERT) on Wednesday. The owner of the shop was not aware of the guns, the release said.

ALERT Edmonton’s Guns and Gangs unit, with the help of Edmonton police and RCMP, confiscated a Beretta handgun equipped with a suppressor, a modified Suomi submachine gun with two oversized magazines and two homemade MAC-11 submachine guns with suppressors and oversized magazines.

Investigators are still looking into how many MAC-11 submachine guns were produced. They believe some of the weapons have already made their way to the criminal market.


...while legal gun owners will buy serialized kits, to save money and/or just to make something themselves-
like the narrator found out, making stuff is fun.

December 16, 2019

Russia and the Republicans: How Vladimir Putin got an American subsidiary

https://www.salon.com/2019/12/14/russia-and-the-republicans-how-vladimir-putin-got-an-american-subsidiary/

Russians went looking for allies on the American left for decades. Then they found Trump and the Republicans

...I remember wondering at the time why Moscow was even bothering with the splintered, weakened left of the '60s and '70s, and yet there they were, wasting their time in Broadway lofts and on factory floors in small towns in North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi. It must have seemed to the KGB and Soviet leaders that they would find allies among those working for integration and voting rights during the Civil Rights movement, and they did. The Republican Party of that era would hardly have been a fertile hunting ground.

But it would turn out that they were sniffing around the wrong end of the political spectrum. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the new batch of Russian hardliners who replaced them would find their natural-born allies about 250 miles south in the Republican National Committee in Washington — and eventually in the current occupant of the Oval Office.

We’ve got a president of the United States who praises Russian President Vladimir Putin every chance he gets, yet spent the NATO summit last week looking like his mommy was making him eat his peas and carrots. He’s pressuring the other members of the Group of Seven to let Russia back in the club. At a recent meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky, he told the president of Ukraine he hoped Zelensky could “make a deal” with Putin, clearly indicating whose side Trump was on in the dispute over Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Trump and his Republican puppets have spent the last three months spreading Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine, not Russia, who hacked our 2016 election. When Trump pulled U.S. troops out of northern Syria, he turned over abandoned American bases to the Russians...

...Forget that whole “sneaking Sally through the alley” thing Trump pulled with the Russians in 2016. Even during the week the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach him for trying to strong-arm yet another foreign government into damaging one of his political opponents, Trump met privately with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office. He’s not even trying to hide it anymore. The Republican Party is right there with him.


December 2, 2019

Two peas in a pod: Abortion restrictionists and gun control advocates, part deux

Both prohibitionist groups have revived the thesis of my original post- by getting up to the
same sort of dishonest horseshit that prompted the original OP:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/117235299

https://www.democraticunderground.com/117235299#post26

'True believers' of all sorts are more alike than different-not that they'll ever admit it...

It's hardly a new or original observation- it is the underlying thesis of Eric Hoffer's The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer

...The book analyzes and attempts to explain the motives of the various types of personalities that give rise to mass movements; why and how mass movements start, progress and end; and the similarities between them, whether religious, political, radical or reactionary. As examples, the book often refers to Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Christianity, Protestantism, and Islam. Hoffer believes that mass movements are interchangeable, that adherents will often flip from one movement to another, and that the motivations for mass movements are interchangeable; that religious, nationalist and social movements, whether radical or reactionary, tend to attract the same type of followers, behave in the same way and use the same tactics, even when their stated goals or values differed.


First, the gun prohibition side is heard from

https://www.democraticunderground.com/126213486


Children are murded in schools because of a Constitutional Amendment that makes it easy to murder children in schools.

...And to be fair, the Second Amendment, in my view, was never intended to allow for personal, in home ownership of guns by everyone. But Antonin Scalia, that darling of the so-called originalist school, claimed to find that right hidden in the actual words of an Amendment that never mentions any such right...


Ahem. What Scalia actually said was, with added emphasis:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf


(2) Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons. Pp. 54–56.


And the writer of the immediately proceeding item knew Scalia wrote this-

because they also wrote post 16 below

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1172208076#post7

Scalia specifically said that the 2A allows strict gun control

According to him, the only right you have is to own a handgun in your own home. That is all.




Much of the linked thread is taken up by a persistent argument that a (so far) nonexistant court precedent is the true
and only interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Now onto the 'abortion safety' movement:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142401723


Ohio bill orders doctors to 'reimplant ectopic pregnancy' or face 'abortion murder' charges
Source: theguardian.com

A bill to ban abortion introduced in the Ohio state legislature requires doctors to “reimplant an ectopic pregnancy” into a woman’s uterus – a procedure that does not exist in medical science – or face charges of “abortion murder”.

This is the second time practising obstetricians and gynecologists have tried to tell the Ohio legislators that the idea is currently medically impossible...



Some things just never seem to change very much, do they?


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