Marswolf

I can't think of anything in the Kel-Tec that was patentable. The thing that made it innovative was the very small size. Again, if one prefers a Ruger to a Kel-Tec for whatever reason, then they should buy a Ruger. I just think Ruger's announcement of the LCP was hilarious. They just went on and on about how innovative they were when all they did was copy an existing design and make very minor, changes, which some people like and some don't. I've owned two P3ATs, as well as a P32. The first 380 required a few minutes of buffing. The second one has required nothing and has been completely reliable. Maybe with both Kel-Tec and Ruger making these small guns, the supply will finally catch up to the demand. Which would I buy now? The one in stock. And if both were in stock, I'd probably buy another P3AT just because it is very slightly smaller. This is a gun that I literally carry in my back pocket. I didn't like the extra 1/16 inch length of the 380 compared to the 32. I really don't want the gun any bigger.

http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=406A0F4A-4BB9-4AAD-957B-AD5EBF112C9F Save Setting The Meaning of the DC Gun Case Decision By Henry Mark Holzer FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, June 30, 2008 The Supreme Court's decision striking down Washington, D.C.’s restrictive gun ban represented an individual interpretation of the Second Amendment, affirming each American’s right to keep and bear arms (with some restrictions)—as opposed to a collectivist interpretation giving that privilege only to the state. However, in the media buzz (and conservative rejoicing) over the opinion, it should be not overlooked that many questions remain unanswered. Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for the 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court in the recent landmark Second Amendment gun case, District of Columbia v. Heller, is a major contribution to American constitutional law. It is at once a rich exposition of the Second Amendment’s historical context, a textbook demonstration of Originalist analysis of an important constitutional amendment, a surgical dissection of virtually every word of the amendment, and a point-by-point refutation of the dissents of Justice Stevens (for himself and Justices Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer) and Justice Breyer (for himself and Justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg). (Apparently Justice Scalia is too much of a gentleman to have reminded the dissenters that they, too, employed an Originalist-type methodology, but doubtless only as a matter of convenience to justify their losing “militia†argument.) Scalia’s opinion is also a ringing endorsement of the individual rights view of the Constitution and, in its rejection of the dissenters “militia†and “balancing†arguments, a repudiation of the collectivist approach to the enumerated and unenumerated rights of the first nine amendments. In this regard Scalia wrote that “the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.†In other words, when the founders wrote, and the states approved, the Second Amendment (as with the entire Bill of Rights), they removed from the other two branches all power to prevent American citizens from using firearms to defend their homes. Also very important is that Scalia’s opinion makes clear that subsidiary questions about the scope of the Second Amendment right enunciated by the Court in Heller will in the future be decided by Originalist principles, not, as Justice Breyer’s dissent argued, on the basis of a cultural/social balancing act, with the justices holding the scale. Because Heller dealt with one of the most sensitive constitutional/cultural issues in America today, for the past several days the print, broadcast, and internet media have understandably been saturated with news and commentary about the decision. Unfortunately, much of it has been over the top, like the statement by the founder of the Second Amendment Foundation: “This ruling also makes it abundantly clear that laws which ban the possession of firearms, or make it simply impossible through regulation for citizens to exercise their right to keep and bear arms, are unconstitutional and cannot stand.†According to him, then, under the Heller decision paroled armed robbers can own machine guns. Despite the hyperbole, SAF’s founder really knows what Heller actually decided, but many others—among them most laypersons and even many lawyers—do not. The reason is that like other federal and state appellate courts the Supreme Court of the United States can decide only the specific issue before it, and in Heller that was very limited. To make the point, here’s an extreme example: In a case presenting the question of whether it’s cruel and unusual punishment to deny vegetarians special food in prison, the Court could not properly rule on the constitutionality of capital punishment. In many appellate court opinions, however, one often finds rambling discourses about all sorts of things that have little or nothing to do with the facts and law of the case at hand, let alone the actual issue to be decided: irrelevant facts, extraneous history, faulty reasoning, inapplicable precedents. Sometimes, an appellate opinion will even purport to make a ruling despite it lacking any basis in the facts of the case and not resolving the actual issue before that court. Lawyers often refer to these discourses and rulings as obiter dicta (from the Latin, meaning “a remark in passing; a casual observationâ€; or in law, “something said by the judge while giving judgment, that is not essential to the decisionâ€). Thus, in the vegetarian prisoner example, if Justice Souter’s opinion drifted into a discussion about the evils of Seventeenth Century English prisons, and then roamed into Fifteenth Century capital punishment, and then segued into how the Eighth Amendment probably barred capital punishment, all of that discourse would be (among other things!) dicta. It’s important to understand this phenomenon of dicta because it underscores the necessity of focusing narrowly on exactly what appellate courts are being asked to decide. The first thing Justice Scalia did in his opinion was to lay out what the case was all about. He explained what the District of Columbia law prohibited, what the aggrieved citizen (Mr. Heller) was seeking, what decision the trial court made, and how the Court of Appeals viewed the case and what it ruled. (My comments are bracketed.) The District of Columbia generally prohibits the possession of handguns. It is a crime to carry an unregistered firearm, and the registration of handguns is prohibited...Wholly apart from that prohibition, no person may carry a handgun without a license, but the chief of police may issue licenses for 1-year periods... District of Columbia law also requires residents to keep their lawfully owned firearms, such as registered long guns [e.g., rifles], “unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock or similar device†unless they are located in a place of business or are being used for lawful recreational activities. * * * . . . Dick Heller is a D. C. special police officer authorized to carry a handgun while on duty at the Federal Judicial Center. He applied for a registration certificate for a handgun that he wished to keep at home, but the District refused. He thereafter filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia seeking, on Second Amendment grounds, to enjoin the city from enforcing [1] the bar on the registration of handguns, [2] the licensing requirement insofar as it prohibits the carrying of a firearm in the home without a license, and [3] the trigger-lock requirement insofar as it prohibits the use of “functional firearms within the home.â€.. The District Court dismissed [Heller’s] complaint . . . . The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, [narrowly] construing his complaint as seeking the right to render a firearm operable and carry it about his home in that condition only when necessary for self-defense [my emphasis] reversed . . . . It held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms and that the city’s total ban on handguns, as well as its requirement that firearms in the home be kept nonfunctional even when necessary for self-defense, violated that right. (My emphasis.) Based on the D.C. law’s prohibitions, Heller’s application to register a handgun, the trial court’s decision, and the Court of Appeals’ construction of what the issue was and its resolution, the first sentence of Justice Scalia’s opinion was: “We consider whether a District of Columbia prohibition on the possession of usable handguns in the home violates the Second Amendment to the Constitution.†(My emphasis.) Well, not exactly. A mere two paragraphs later, Scalia would write that the Court of Appeals had held that “the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms and that the city’s total ban on handguns, as well as its requirement that firearms in the home be kept nonfunctional even when necessary for self-defense, violated that right.†(My emphasis.) So, why was his first sentence limited to “usable handgunsâ€? In our search for the issue actually before the Heller Court, and to understand what that case actually decided, we have to look to the penultimate paragraph of Justice Scalia’s opinion for the Court, some sixty-three pages later: “In sum, we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.†(My emphasis.) This, and only this, is what the Supreme Court majority decided in District of Columbia v. Heller: the handgun ban and the inoperative requirement for home possession. Because Heller is hedged by those four elements—“home,†“lawful,†“immediate,†“self-defenseâ€â€”and, as I show below, because other important questions remain unanswered, judicial interpretation of the Second Amendment rather than ending with Heller has just begun. For example, Part III of Justice Scalia’s opinion states that: Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.. For example, the majority of the 19th-century courts to consider the question held that prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons were lawful under the Second Amendment or state analogues...Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should 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. We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. [An earlier Supreme Court case] said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time [1791].†* * * We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of “dangerous and unusual weapons.†(My emphasis.) Thus we are reminded that “like most rights†the gun “right†acknowledged by the Heller majority can be regulated, even restricted. It is regulation and restriction—and definitions of “home,†“lawful,†“immediate,†and “self-defenseâ€â€”which will give rise to the many Second Amendment cases yet to come, concerning who can possess firearms, what kind of weapons they can be, where guns can be carried, when they can be sold and to whom, whether outdoors they must be in plain view, and more. As important as are these questions, and the many others implied in them, there are two more that are even more so. One is what “standard of review†the court to apply to, say, a New York law, requiring all handguns carried outdoors to be concealed lest the public be scared by being exposed to all that hardware. Although “standard of review†is a technical question for judges and constitutional lawyers, its answer could determine just how much of a gun right really exists. If the courts’ “standard of review†of gun laws is very deferential, such a New York law would probably be upheld because the state had a good reason to enact it, and the regulation/restriction did not bite too deep into the Heller-established right. If on the other hand, the courts’ “standard of review†is much stricter and the Heller-established right is really a solid, virtually untouchable right, such a New York law would be considered too regulatory/restrictive and held unconstitutional. As important as is this standard of review question, an even more vital Second Amendment issue is buried in footnote 23 of Justice Scalia’s opinion. It raises the “incorporation†issue (see www.henrymarkholzer.com at “50 of the Worst S/Ct Decs†in the Table of Contents under the case of Gitlow v. New York, for a discussion of the Incorporation Doctrine). In footnote 23 Justice Scalia’s majority opinion expressly left open “a question not presented by this caseâ€â€”one, when answered, will be at least as important as the Heller decision itself: Does the Second Amendment apply to the states by “incorporation†through the Fourteenth Amendment? Given the virtually wholesale incorporation of the entire Bill of Rights to the states already through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—e.g., speech, press, religion, counsel, search and seizure, self-incrimination—it is likely that the answer to the Second Amendment “incorporation†question will be affirmative. If so, given the many unanswered questions raised by Heller, and all the state anti-gun legislation already on the books, Second Amendment litigation could well become a growth industry for constitutional lawyers. Henry Mark Holzer, Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, is a constitutional lawyer and author most recently of The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, 1991-2006, A Conservative’s Perspective.

You can have a gun in the courthouse if it isn't posted and in the courtroom, if court is not in session. I won't even get into the § 39-17-1302(a) thing....

Well, you wouldn't want an expensive gun right out there in front of God and everybody. You'd hate to lose an expensive handgun when someone takes it from you.

Yep, Clark has a Douglas MacArthur complex. He's very important. Just ask him.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4097602514885833865&q=don%27t+talk+to+the+police&ei=WuM9SM6yHZP8rQL4p6iSBA

I just don't understand the rationale for doing that. The Kel-Tec works fine and is even slightly smaller. Snob appeal? I don't care. It just seems odd.

Well, yeah it's an obvious ripoff of a Kel-Tec. I guess the Ruger is a good handgun, since the Kel-Tec is a good handgun. But I would think that just blatantly stealing the Kel-Tec design would be an embarrassment to Ruger. They could have at least put tail fins on it.

That's the bottom line. BTW, I don't think most folks in this country care much about liberty or anything else as long as they get their "entitlements." When the Republicans figured that out, they became Democrats, at least in action.

Back to the topic please everyone. Supreme Court ruling - remember?

I really don't know a lot about Dave Grossman. I know he was a Lt. Colonel, but there about as many useless Lt. Colonels running around the Pentagon as a gofer as Kelloggs has cornflakes. According to his bio, "Col. Grossman is an Airborne Ranger infantry officer, and a prior-service sergeant and paratrooper, with a total of over 23 years experience in leading U.S. soldiers worldwide." Nowhere can I find that he actually fought in combat. Anyone know about that? Looks like he makes his living by being a self-proclaimed expert and BSer. My personal first experience with killing was when we were ambushed while I was on a patrol in Vietnam. When we got back to the assault base (firebase) I got sort of quiet and one of the guys came over to see about me. He asked if it was bothering me and I told him that I had heard it was supposed to bother me. What was bothering me was that it wasn't bothering me. I felt pretty good about it. I had killed someone who was trying to kill me and had properly supported my team. I suspect I would have felt the same if I was in my house or on the street and someone tried to harm me or my family. Seems to me that society puts pressure on folks to feel bad about killing scum, even when obviously justified and you did a service for the world in killing him. I'd suggest you tell the whiners to go do themselves and feel proud for your service.

I'll give them a call tomorrow.

Just to clarify something about Cherokee National Forrest carry, the reason we can not carry there is because it is a Wildlife Management Area and Tennessee code does not allow general carry, even with a permit, in a WMA. Naifeh shot down a bill that would have changed that this year.

Thanks Tower. Will do.

I recall someone mentioning a Carry Permit class in Church Hill or Mt. Carmel that was free. I have a friend who has decided to get a permit and a free class sounds good to him. Does anyone have any information about this? Stuff like contact information and who can take the class (he's from Blountville) would be great but just knowing which department gives the class would be fine.

Must be a boy scout. He seems prepared.

I did something somewhat similar on the weight thing back in the 70s. I was only a few pounds overweight, but wanted to get back down to an optimum weight. I got a good nutrition table book. Every time I put anything into my mouth, I looked up the calorie count and added it to my page for that day. Just keeping a running total made me aware of stuff like how many calories I was adding to a salad by including a tablespoon of those little canned salad shrimp.

I'm going for Coca-Cola Zero tonight. They have an old-time music jam session in Blountville every Friday night from 6-10. Non-adult stuff is appropriate for that. But maybe I'll stop by the store and get something on the way home.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. I don't see nothin' in there about no stinkin' personal protection.

I just don't see that in the document. I don't think one can reasonably limit arms to those that existed at the time of the ratification of the amendment or that one could carry. I guess I just define arms more generally, but the definitions I find basically just say "weaponry". As one definition specifically pointed out, ICBMs, bombs, and other nuclear devices are all arms. I just have a problem with eliminating rights by playing with the definition. Just like DC now plans to say that pistols are not arms, but revolvers are. If you start playing their game, you've already lost.

I have to disagree with you on this - sort of. I think 2A grants a right to have pretty much any "arms" you choose. After all, one of the purposes of the amendment was to let citizens have firepower to overthrow a repressive government. I see these restrictions on arms you can have to be unconstitutional. Now for practical as well as philosophical reasons, I don't think citizens should be able to have a lot of military weapons. But the solution shouldn't be some back door unconstitutional banning of these weapons. I see the 1934 NFA as unconstitutional. I understand that Justice Alito agrees with me. The solution should have been amending the Constitution to define what arms a citizen may legally possess. I suspect that if this had been done in 1934, we would have reasonable restrictions on holding military type weapons and would have headed off the individual gun restrictions the gun grabbers are doing today. Unfortunately, I don't think we could get a reasonable amendment through these days. That window has closed.

Actually, that sounds pretty good. I kept surfing from one of the links on that page and ended up at http://flickr.com/groups/recipes/. Looks like I'll be stealing recipes for a few days.

I'd say that the price will stay high until the demand finally goes down. Lots of people seem to want the Ruger name.

And all I got were C-rats.

I have to agree Chip, the decision is sufficiently vague to open us up to all sorts of regulation short of absolute bans. That can of worms was opened with the NFA and a Court unwilling to strike it down. Alito seems to be the only Justice willing to actually interpret the Constitution as it was written. I'm very disappointed in Scalia. I suspect it was a compromise to get the votes needed to uphold an obviously correct lower court ruling. So, I think we are going to see all sorts of legislative attempts to register and limit gun use, using this ruling as justification. It's going to be a bumpy ride.