2A News: February 19, 2016 Newsletter by Jeff Pittman

MSFOA meeting

The 2016 annual meeting of the Mississippi State Firearm Owners Association is scheduled for Saturday, Feb. 27 at 2:00 p.m. at Bass Pro Shops in Pearl, MS. Memberships and renewals will occur prior to the 2:00 meeting, so come early. I understand it will be in the upstairs classroom. Join us!

SCOTUS

You know that US Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia died last week. You may recall that he literally wrote the Heller Decision. You can read all the left wing — right wing arguments in the media, but know that this is bad, very bad. Scalia was probably the second-most conservative on the divided Court, after Clarence Thomas.

Two of the potential replacement candidates are reported to be US Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former AG Eric Holder. Note that both were confirmed as AG by the US Senate, and I see no reason why the Senate would vote differently for either nomination. Holder remains in contempt of Congress (the House) due to his stonewalling a subpoena of documents related to ATF’s felonious Fast & Furious gunrunning scheme. President Obama reportedly will nominate a candidate in about 3 weeks.

These appointments are my sole concern when voting for president.

The White House announced that neither President Barack Obama nor first lady Michelle Obama will be attending the funeral of Justice Scalia.

This would be a really good time to donate to the Second Amendment Foundation.

Election

• Rock star Second Amendment attorney Alan Gura (who argued the Heller & McDonald cases) says Senator Ted Cruz is the best choice for president. Gura rarely (never) discusses presidential candidates, so this is a big deal. Grass Roots North Carolina also endorsed Cruz.

• We have a report that Sen. Marco Rubio voted to ban guns in “county and municipal parks” and other recreational areas and facilities while he was a commissioner for the City of West Miami in 1999.

• Donald Trump claims to be against gun control. Let’s see who he’s been supporting, shall we? (In other words, he IS a politician.)

• The Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus is nearly unanimously supporting rabidly anti-gun Hillary Clinton for president. These are largely the same group who file the anti-gun bills in MS, so no surprises really.

Legislation

See Gunmag.com’s Legislative Update Feb. 10, 2016

Gun Free Zones

Study: Not only do mass shooters prefer gun free zones 2:1 over other places, but there’s a much lower probability of an armed citizen slowing or stopping the shooter (duh).

Church shooters

In Lafayette Township, OH, the Medina Assembly of God is proposing to build a gun range in the Medina County Park District where guns up to 50 caliber would be fired. The idea is to make the range an outreach ministry. Works for me.

DGUs

Cops get a waiting period after a shooting before talking. So should you. Your lawyer should know this. Cops also don’t have to wait in jail.

Justice?

We have a report that the two perpetrators of the massacre at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1998 have been out of prison for years — released because Arkansas law mandated that juveniles be released on their 21st birthdays, with their records sealed. The perpetrators were 13 and 11 years old at the time that they killed 5 people and wounded 10 more in what was then the second-deadliest US school shooting.

We also hear that one of them has since been arrested with a gun after his release, while the other has since applied for a concealed carry permit.

This is why we sometimes charge juveniles as adults. Apparently at that time, Arkansas law did not allow juveniles to be tried as adults, but that law was changed a year after this incident.

Hopefully the next time these criminals try to hurt someone, it won’t be helpless people in a gun free zone.

Enemies

• The Mississippi Police Chiefs Association has issued a statement opposing a bill clarifying your right to legally carry a gun in church with the church’s permission.If memory serves, the association originally didn’t want us carrying anywhere, but now says its position is that carry with a permit is OK, but they don’t like legal carry without the government’s permission slip. But the bill they’re upset about this time is concerning church carry, not elsewhere. So maybe they just don’t want us going to church — clinging to guns and religion or something like that. Because they say you can have your rights everywhere else, just not at church.Meanwhile, William Perkins, editor of The Baptist Record, the weekly news journal of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, voiced his support for the church carry bill.

• Alabama Sheriffs Association Executive Director Bobby Timmons says that his association is opposing a proposal that would allow otherwise law-abiding gun owners to have a loaded firearm in their vehicle without a permit. Besides fighting the measure this year and last, in 2013 Simmons sent a letter signed by all 67 Alabama sheriffs to lawmakers in a successful bid to block similar legislation then. Sounds like they are on the criminals’ side.

• General Motors reportedly fired a vendor employee for using a gun to stop a murder-in-progress on the property outside the office at the GM Technical Center in Warren, MI. GM’s vendor apparently did reinstate him, but only because they saw the PR fallout, and both GM and the vendor deny the firing.

• “To be clear, we do not welcome weapons of any kind in our stores and never have. While there are laws in place allowing for openly carrying firearms, we would very much prefer that customers not bring guns into our stores.” — Trader Joe’s (Trust me, I won’t be bringing a gun into your store.)

• We have reports that Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is so worried about threats from “unstable website users,” that he employs 16 armed guards 24 hours a day. That’s the same anti-gun Suckerberg who’s is banning all mention of guns from Facebook and Instagram and who probably colluded with the White House in the recent private sale ad ban. Because he thinks he’s an “Only One,” I suppose. Well I have news for the little twit: he’s no more important than anyone else.

• President Obama’s new gun control force is eight times the size of the Pentagon’s ISIS commando team.

Dept. of Idiocy

• The Secret Service took 28 years to read the law it’s supposed to be enforcing. Yeah, we have cops like that here too.

• Rich Wyatt, 52, a former police chief and the owner of the Gunsmoke gun shop on the canceled reality show “American Guns” has been arrested and indicted by a grand jury on a 13-count indictment charging that Wyatt conspired with others to sell guns without a license after he continued to sell firearms, despite surrendering his Federal Firearms License in 2012 for unspecified violations of federal laws. Wyatt is accused of changing the address of a store known as Triggers to the Gunsmoke address, but he never owned Triggers. When customers paid for guns at Wyatt’s shop they were sent to Triggers to fill out background check paperwork and pick up the guns. The indictment also alleges that Wyatt failed to report and pay taxes on $1.1 million in income.

• This week in Atlanta, a sheriff’s sergeant was assigned to escort 60 fifth-grade students and their teachers from Stark Elementary School to the Fox Theater for a field trip, where a Fox Theater “security officer” asked him to leave the building or store his service weapon in his vehicle. That’s Fox Theater. I’m thinking the deputy should have arrested the “security officer” for obstruction and interfering with a real officer.

• The Manatee Gun and Archery Club in Florida has a new rule:

“No private transfer of a gun on club property. No barter, trade or sale of guns without going through an FFL Dealer. No sale of guns between members of the club on club property.”

But members can make a private firearms transaction anywhere in Manatee County, or anywhere else in the State of Florida, except at their own gun club!

Liars

This time it’s The Atlantic.

The Only Ones

• An unidentified 30-year veteran investigator with the Honolulu prosecutor’s office “accidentally” fired his gun while cleaning it in that office, but the incident was never reported to Honolulu police or the state sheriff’s office. Supposedly an investigation into the matter is underway.

• Sgt. Ray Hughes, a corrections officer in Pennsylvania, was headed home after dinner with his wife in Atlantic City when they were hit by a drunk driver. Hughes is now facing a felony charge for bringing his gun into New Jersey.

• More than two dozen firearms that were supposed to be in the custody of the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department somehow escaped back onto the streets and were subsequently used in other crimes, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Fighting the good fight

A British SAS sniper used his suppressed IWI DAN .338 Lapua bolt action rifle from 3/4 mile away to behead an ISIS commander while the commander was teaching jihadi recruits how to behead victims. Ah, sweet karma.

You can’t make this up — Actual headline:

“Drunk Monkey Attacks Bar Patrons With Knife”

I gotta get me a monkey gun….

Industry news

Garmin Ltd. has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire (within 30 to 60 days) substantially all of the assets of DeLorme, a privately-held company that designs and markets consumer-based satellite tracking devices with two-way communication and navigational capabilities.

Products

• Winchester Australia is making a subsonic .22 WMRF load with a 45 grain hollowpoint bullet, labeled as “Subsonic 45 Max” at 1065 fps. Winchester Australia is apparently independent of Winchester USA and the ammo is not available here.

• The US Army’s Armament Research, Development, and Engineering Center has developed an integral dry weapon lubricant to replace CLP.

• The Bushmaster BA50. Sort of an AR in .50 BMG.

• Barrett (the 50 cal. people) now has Fausti Stefano-made high grade double barrel shotguns.

• I’ve seen two recent independent positive reviews of the new Lucid Optics affordable tactical optical instruments. But remember, with optics, you get what you pay for.

• A company called iGun Technology, reportedly a spin-off of (but not associated with) O.F. Mossberg & Sons, and run by Jonathan Mossberg, is developing a “smart” shotgun (the “iGun”) that employs an RFID-enabled ring. It fires only if it recognizes a ring on a finger. The ring has a black square made of onyx and contains codes that identify the owner. “It’s totally inert. There’s no batteries, nothing. Totally waterproof,” Mossberg says. So it’s presumably akin to the old MagnaTriggers and more closely technically related to RFID locks.

Quote of the Week

“There are jackasses out there [on the range], and your duty to society is to call them a jackass, on the spot.” — Tom G.