All about guns, legislation and politics in New York
Hearings on H.R. 822 will continue today in the House. Several antigun amendments were defeated, including two by Jerrold Nadler which he whines about in his press release.
Carolyn McCarthy went a different route by sending a letter to all 50 Governors trying to get them to oppose the bill. This seems highly unlikely to work as 41 states are either shall issue or constitutional carry right now. Gov. Cuomo has not said anything publicly on the bill.
H.R. 822 is scheduled to have a hearing today in the House Judiciary Committee. One co-sponsor chickened out and pulled his name from the bill yesterday, Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee.
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey has created a petition to try and block the nationwide CCW reciprocity bill H.R. 822. It is located here on the Whitehouse’s “We the People“ website which lets people create petitions on various issues as a way to lobby the administration.
We had a relatively good legislative session this past year. The only bad bill to see any action was microstamping in the Assembly and it took a lot of arm twisting for A-1157 to pass with a 77 vote majority. Only 5 years ago they would typically pass with much fanfare and 20+ votes a dozen or so gun control bills in the Assembly followed by motions to discharge in the Senate. This change of direction in Albany is the result of the slow, but steady progress we’ve made over the past decade with our PAC in electing good people and removing some bad ones.
Contrast this with California, where gunnies seem to have given up on elections and pinned their hopes on the courts. Governor Brown just signed three bills into law including 1.) long gun registration, 2.) prohibition on unloaded open carry and 3.) diverting certain fees from background checks to other purposes. Even if somewhere down the road one or more of these laws is ruled partially or entirely unconstitutional, that would not change how legislators treat the gun issue. The first thing they did after losing the Chicago gun ban case was to rewrite the law so that it was 99.9% as obnoxious as the one the courts struck down. There is no reason California legislators would not do the exact same thing.
The reason for this is because politicians don’t win or lose elections because of legal challenges to the laws their write and that is all they ultimately care about: winning and losing. If decades of research proving that gun control does not crime control did not stop legislators from passing gun control laws why should anyone assume that years of court cases will? Facts don’t matter to politicians nearly as much as they should.
Gun owners need to be involved in the election/selection process from primaries to general elections, from town board and city council to statehouses and Congress. That is the only way to defeat gun control and it’s advocates.
Bloomberg’s campaign against nationwide CCW reciprocity does not appear to be going well. Since it began a few of weeks back H.R. 822 added two more co-sponsors bringing it up to 245 in the House.
The antis look to be trying to create a new meme where calling oneself pro-gun is the same as calling for violently overthrowing the government. It’s mostly CSGV doing it, but the Brady’s have joined in on the act.
While it is true that one of the primary purposes of the 2nd Amendment is to ensure The People can defend themselves from an out of control government, nobody is now seriously calling for overthrowing our government, especially as gun rights have been on a roll for the past several years.
The antis have to keep reinventing new boogymen every so often to keep the issue fresh like “cop-killer” bullets in the 80s-90s and “assault weapons” in the 90s-00s. Now in the aftermath of Heller and McDonald they seem to be giving up on any semblance of being concerned with public safety and just going for batshit nuts instead. That isn’t going to help their cause with the average citizen.
“Americans have the right and advantage of being armed – unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.” (James Madison, The Federalist Papers #46)
The sound you are hearing is RINOs crying that Chris Christie announced yet again that he is not running for president next year.
The current buzz around whether or not Chris Christie plans on entering the already crowded presidential race is something we have all seen before. A shrinking minority of RINOs, mostly from the northeast, are unhappy that the majority of declared candidates are center-right and are making noise, desperate to show that their brand of center-left/Democrat lite ideology is still a force to be reckoned with within the Republican party. It is the exact same thing that went on with Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki.
I don’t see Chrisitie jumping in, but even if he did I cannot see how he would survive the primary. While I think he has a more agreeable personality than either Rudy or George, he is simply too far out of step with the majority of registered Republicans to win the nomination.
CSGV is somehow trying to make hay out of Gov. Chris Chrisitie’s position on gun control:
The link goes to propaganda outlet Media Matters:
This isn’t news. NRA didn’t endorse him in ’09 and Christie has not changed his position since taking office. Since he has said he’s not running for President in ’12 this is a non-issue.