The big WHAT IF...

[Cohiba]

OK.
Play it out...ALL THE WAY.
WHAT IF...
A federal ban on AW happens to pass.
Lets say for the sake of argument that its dis-similar to the last one in that it doesnt deal with cosmetics but ID's models.
And Lets say that it bans future production of magazines holding more than 10 rounds.
The effect will be like a stone in the ocean.
Because in 1993 there were very few black rifles in peoples homes. Most folks didnt own glocks and AK's. Yes, the price for the preban guns went up because demand increased but if you wanted one, you could get one. Same with magazines. if you wanted a 13 round G-21 mag, it cost more but you could have it.
So a new BAN would have to take that into account and prohibit the transfer or preban weapons, right? I mean...its not 1993. There have been millions of AR-15's produced and sold in just the last 24 months. much less since 2004. Millions...tens of millions. Add to that the number of other weapons that would be considered AW and were are talking maybe 100 million that didnt exist prior to 2004.
So there will have to be some prohibition on transfer. Now states like SC who dont currently have a private transfer law on the books will face adopting a federal guidline or making thier own. In essence closing the "GUNSHOW LOOPHOLE" and requiring transfers to be recorded. And thereby creating a de facto registration of AW's.
Or there very simply could be an adjustment that requires AW's to be registered. Just like we have seen in numerous places.
Otherwise those 100 million or so weapons are still out there floating around, changing hands ect ect.
So how does a registration occour?
Well, a person would be required to take the item to a specified location during certain times, with proof of ID and have the serial number recorded. That takes time and a certain amount of time would be give. A cuttoff date set and fines imposed for those who fail to meet the timeline.
But still, some people will not register.
So how do "they" know about the millions who dont register? The only place that the serial number is recorded against a persons ID is on the ATF form. NOT in some database. The model's are not given when a call in background check is conducted.
So "they" are going to have to #1 obtain every form at every FFL for every firearms transfer. Then they will have to sort through every one of those forms and identify which weapons fall into the catagory of banned items at which point they will have to contact by mail the persons listed on the ATF forms and notify them that they failed to register a weapon listed in the BAN.
Now lests say for the sake of argument that no one moved and everyone gets the letter.
Some...MANY of those weapons have changed hands...legally. SO how are "they" to know that John Smith sold that AR-15 at a gunshow in 2009? If John Smith says he sold it then they will have to settle for his word on it, yes?
Or are they going to visit John Smith and search his home looking for it? If not then they are going to take everyones word for it that they dont own XYZ anymore.
So John Smith says he sold it...and he has a handwritten bill of sale made out to Bill Jones...Think that will do it?
How long will it take to track down and confim the location of say 50 million firearms?
Who's going to foot the bill?
How is such a monumental task to be overseen by an agency? It would be years before the most primary of tasks (ie collection and prossesing FFL forms) could be finished.
And it would have to be completed before the next step could occour because...
If on DAY one of the lifting of the '94 Ban John Sith bought an AR-15 and on the Day before the new ban went into effect he sold it to a gun store who then sold it to another customer, then theres 2 forms, 10 years apart, with the same item listed. So starting the prosses of contacting owners will be useless until all the forms are gone through.

 

[Tigerstripe]

seems like thats the way its going.

 

[Rosea Carpa]

Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, ?If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace?; and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty. - Thomas Paine



If you want me to lay down my sword and shield..... Come and take it away from me.

 

[Cohiba]

Did women gain the right to vote by calling senators?
Did civil rights advance due to letter writing campaigns?

The only thing that is adressed as grievance in this country is when a large portion of free people disobey
Stay in line, keep your hands to yourself, no talking back...these work well to herd kindergardners.

But for free men to disagree but continue to obey is cowardly.
If you know something is wrong and you remain silent, your consent.
It is wrong to require a person to ask permission to carry a gun for defense.
It is wrong to restrict a free mans access to personal weapons, at the least as effective as those of the government that serves him.
It is wrong, plain and simple.
And it is the men who say they agree with these things but continue to follow the rules that make the rest of us criminals.
We know these things. We feel them in our gut or at least should.
Its not freedom...it guilded chains.

If the people of NY or Colorado want things changed they should all walk down to the nearest police station with an 8 round 1911 magazine in hand and demand to be arrested.

People, you are stronger than you know.

?Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.? ? Henry David Thoreau

 

[Rosea Carpa]

And until enough people have woken up You won't be able to do Anything. You only run the risk of being a Waco or Ruby Ridge Until enough people Have woken up to stand together And say enough is enough. And we are still at the point were more people care about their iPhone than they do about their rights!

 

[armaborealis]

The anti gunners have gotten smarter. Their goals this time:

1) "Gun Trafficking" Bill: This would turn some of the most aggressive drug war tactics on gun owners. It lowers the bar for a straw purchase to intent to do a straw sale (so if a confidential informant alleges that you were going to sell a felon a gun, bam, trafficking charges!). It ups the penalties to 25+ years to encourage plea deals (you flip to be a CI yourself and get a good deal). It allows civil asset forfeiture; this allows the police to seize your property (house/car/bank accounts) if they have probable cause of a trafficking crime. You must then go to court to get your stuff back, which can take years and cost five figures plus in legal fees.

2) Universal Background Checks: This would broadly define and ban any transfer. The language in S43 is such that if you hand a buddy a gun on your private property to shoot on the back 40 you are both felons. If you go to a friend's house to teach them the NRA Home FIrearms Safety course with one of your guns and dummy ammo, you are both felons once they touch it. If you borrow a gun at a for-profit competition like IDPA then you're a felon. If you go on a trip for >7 days and leave your roommate with your guns in the safe, you're a felon. If you loan a buddy a shotgun for hunting and he is in possession of it after dark, you're a felon. It also includes a 4473 paper trail documentation requirement. The paper trail is required to resolve the registration requirements above.

3) Assault weapons bans based primarily on the characteristics of being a magazine fed semiauto. That is really what it boils down to, with some exceptions. Mag bans too. This is the lowest priority as they need the other two first for enforcement to be viable. They need snitches (gun trafficking bill) and a paper trail (UBCs) to enforce these bans, so they are willing to wait on this.

Our Options

First, we are on the defensive in the federal arena. The voters put a Democrat majority in the Senate and an antigun president in the White House. All the talk about pushing for repeal of Hughes Amendment, nationwide CCW, etc is just fantasy. It will be difficult to even add "poison pill" amendments in the Senate. A counterattack would be nice but isn't really politically viable. So we're looking at holding ground -- defense.

I strong disagree with abandoning any possible line of defense prematurely.

The first line of defense is the soap box. This is using your first amendment rights to assemble (at a rally or through a group like SAF/NRA/GOA/NYSRPA/etc), to write, and to speak so as to persuade and motivate others.

The second line of defense is the ballot box. This is using your right to have an elected Representative, and the right to petition that representative, to get them to vote the correct way.

The third line of defense is the jury box. This is hoping to get the laws thrown out by the courts, or hoping that a jury of your peers refuses to enforce the law (jury nullification). To help here you can fund lawsuits (for example, through SAF), volunteer as a test case (or become one...), or serve on a jury and nullify (remember, jury nullification is like fight club: the first rule of jury nullification is to not talk about jury nullification, especially in the selection process...). This is where civil disobedience comes in. That is why they are making the penalties for these laws so draconian: they want you to lose your house, lose your car, go to jail for years or decades, and lose your rights to vote for an act of civil disobedience. This can loop back to the soap box; draconian punishment may arouse such outrage among onlookers that it affects the dialogue (as did pictures of Bull Connor siccing police dogs on peaceful protesters in the civil rights era).

The fourth line of defense is potentially the moving box. Our forefathers did this when many fled religious persecution and other such laws in England or elsewhere. The problem is that if federal gun laws are passed you have to move to another country, and America is still one of the freest on Earth.

The final line of defense is the cartridge box. This is invoking the natural right of revolution as the founding fathers did. Anyone who has been involved with war knows that this is a terrible, destructive option where everyone will lose something of value. Obviously this is a spectrum from breaking windows to "the troubles" in Northern Ireland to full on Civil War. All are destructive and bad.

Tactics

It is foolish to abandon any of the defensive lines. If you think it is pointless to write your reps or speak out then you are basically ceding 2/5 of the political battlefield. You are staking your hopes on the jury box. The odds of success may be low, but it is worth contesting the early ground to slow the opponent's advance and possibly get lucky and stop them.

Look at where we are now: due to the effectiveness of the soap box, the federal AWB is unlikely to pass. Colorado killed their ban on CCW on campus and their AWB through massive soap box and ballot box efforts. Even in California, confiscation has been pulled off the table (for now). Killing proposals early means we have less to fight in the courts.

Furthermore, the early lines are easier to exercise and get support for. Anyone who thinks it takes more courage to write a postcard than to face loss of their home and decades of imprisonment is crazy. Likewise, someone who is not willing to face the penalties of civil disobedience is unlikely to engage in armed resistance (which carries a death penalty...). Courage is a habit, one developed over time with practice and training. It takes repetition to build a firmness of resolve. Moreoever organizing in a group gives people courage as well. If you can get more people participating in the soap and ballot boxes then you will likely find more willing to take the risks of civil disobedience if things come to the jury box.

Finally, there is a moral obligation to exhaust every possible route before going to the latter three boxes. You have an obligation to your family to try to avoid going to jail for life by taking a stand in the courts. You also have an obligation to your community to try and avoid having to become a political refugee. And you certainly have an obligation to man and your creator alike to avoid finding yourself in a desperate situation on the final box.

I agree that the battle may not be won solely on letter writing or phone calls or NRA membership. It is foolish to think that it does not start there, though.

 

[Cohiba]

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
-- Samuel Adams

 

[Yoda]

Way back at the start of this thread someone posed the question "Did civil rights and women's suffrage win with letter writing campaigns to their senators?". the answer, of course, is yes, but only when the topics came to dominate the national news and political commentary.
We have to remember that Senators and Representatives are in their jobs to make money and power for themselves and their sponsors. They are very self serving individuals. If you want their help you have to enable or threaten their goals.
There are two ways to motivate a government official to work for your cause:
1) make him fear loss of his seat at the next election.
2) make him hopeful he will gain a seat at the next election.
That's all there is. Anyone who thinks politicians are patriotic is a dumb ass.

Currently most Anti-Gun movements are using both tactics, they help get people elected and they threaten to remove the opposition.

This is the way the game is played. If the pro 2A crowd wants to keep firearms we have to asses all government officials and somehow make them realize that our support / opposition is more valuable to them than the Anti-Gunners'. As long as they win / keep their seats they don't care. Republicans have won conservative votes for decades by promising the hold back the tide. They then go and act the same as the Liberals. I voted for George W Bush, then the bastard gave us the Department of Homeland Security? WTF indeed.

It will require unity amongst conservative America and it will require a true, undeniable, single voice. someone who is articulate enough to boil our position down to a few words and in a position to get enough voices to repeat it, wear it on tshirts and bumper stickers, literally say it everywhere until the politicians decide it is useful / detrimental to their personal objectives.

Contrary to popular thought I doubt the government is willing to risk a civil war. That would destroy the power and wealth they are fighting so hard to acquire. The threat of a conflict, however is a mighty tool and they are wielding it against us. A revolution in America today wouldn't look like anything anyone had ever seen before. But it would definitely be bad. And our enemies would just love to see us in a fight like that. I've heard it posed that foreign enemies are at the root of all this internal political strife. Just look at all the money that came into O'Bama's campaign from outside of the country. Who would stand to gain the most if we fell apart?

The people who would suffer the most are the huge population of welfare dependents, carefully cultivated over generations.
never encouraged or expected grow and learn to take pride in themselves. Never given the freedom so hard won and quite available to any who is willing to work for what they have. Any of them who do learn to think for themselves and to choose to earn their own way is called an Uncle Tom and shunned like a traitor. It's very sad. Those people would lose their livelihood and go to a panic in a matter of hours. There would be no stopping the destruction without military level action. Just look at any big city riot. The socialist party would be loathe to have to "expire" so many votes just to stop the madness.

 

[armaborealis]

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
-- Samuel Adams

Excellent quote!

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;

Soap Box failure:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation...

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury...

We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.

Ballot Pox (political system) failure:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance...

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected;

Jury Box failure:

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States;
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury;
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

 

[Cohiba]

The country has been run for too long by people seperated from the people.
Issues about the welfare of the people decided by people who have never owned a home, paid a morgage, driven themselves to work, nursed a sick child because they could afford to go to the doctor...
The Leadership in this country have set themselves up, in the most strict definition, as feudal govenors.
Gerrymandering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering)district lines to refelect a populace. A program that only works when a racial or economic class remains in that area. (ie keep the poor poor and race based neighborhoods)
The system began as a system of leadership.
We the people decide what we want done and we elect a person to go to Washington to represent us.
Thats not what we have.
What we have is a person who says what he wants and trys to get as many people behind him.
Those same people have no interest in listening to you after they have the chair.
Like it or not this governement is not "FOR THE PEOPLE".
It has never been.
Since the inception the framers knew that to win the war against England money was the key.
Money to bribe the french fleet, money to build munitions, feed troops ect. Who were they going to get it from? Colonist? BS!
Industry, traders, fleet merchants.
And when the interest of those people differ from the interest of "the people" the people lose.
The north American Indians were "the people" and we did everything possible to exterminate them.
Women were "the people" and we denied them any imput in how thier world should work.
Blacks in this country were "the people" but laws didnt treat blacks as equal.
Gays "are the people" (regardless of your moral view) and we are just now (2013) allowing marrige.
The history of this county is rampant and open disregard for the rights of the people.

 

[V65Magnafan]

North of the border, they tried long gun registration.

No registration certificate carried on or with the gun meant a few years in jail, confiscation of all other firearms. Lifetime ban. Tens of thousands of dollars in legal expenses.

People lost their jobs, their homes, their marriages.

Last year, the conservative government ended the long gun registry. Many thousands of long guns suddenly appeared for the first time in a while.

I keep telling people, look to the north. They were the trial balloon. Twenty years ago, Canada had the same firearms freedoms we have, including CWP and handgun hunting. One school massacre and the disarmament freaks were ready with media, legislation, and ways to force pro-gun legislators to vote for the bill.

BTW, handguns still must be registered. My son's friend had the police walk in and confiscate his dad's guns shortly after his death. Son doesn't have a gun license.

 

[John Canuck]

I bet some handgun owners wish they had never admitted to having them in the first place. I'm sure nobody has any unregistered handguns in Canada. I no longer live there so I know I don't...

 

[PANZER22]

Are there countries with better systems that you can move to?...............Most of the Middle Eastern, African, and some South American countries permit open carry and use of firearms (most full auto)...RPGs are a common sight on the streets.......Concealed bombs are a popular item also........Toyota trucks with 50 cal and 20mm machine guns mounted in the beds are the rage.

Some of us might like this and blend right in. :mrgreen:

 

[Cohiba]

makes sense...toyota's and all. :lol: