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Posted on 01/08/2013 10:45:12 AM PST by Red Steel
Editor’s note: The following was sent to Montana’s congressional delegation on behalf of the Montana Shooting Sports Association.
Because there is much discussion among gun owners of Montana about proposals by Sen. Diane Feinstein and others for Congress to enact various types of gun control, I though you would appreciate knowing what I hear from Montanans about this.
I speak to you as a person intimately familiar with firearms, with public policy about firearms, as a person accepted in state and federal courts as an expert on firearms, firearms safety and use of force, and as the president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, Montana’s primary organization asserting the right to keep and bear arms, also affiliated or associated with the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and the Second Amendment Foundation.
On behalf of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, I wish to express our unequivocal opposition to any ban on any class or type of firearms, any new registration requirements on any class or types of firearms, any restrictions on manufacture, sale or possession of ammunition feeding devices of any configuration or capacity, and any government intrusion into firearm transfers between private citizens. Any congressional actions in any of these areas would be an infringement upon the rights the citizens of Montana have reserved to themselves.
The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article II, Section 12 of the Montana Constitution — these sections of these foundational documents are not government permission to keep firearms. They are statements whereby the people have reserved these rights to themselves specifically from government interference.
These statements do not create any rights, but simply recognize preexisting “natural rights” which are restricted from government interference. As you consider whatever “gun control” (actually people control) may be offered by Sen. Feinstein or others, I hope you will keep these facts clearly in mind.
“Gun-free zones” are a terrible failure of public policy. Virtually all mass shootings, including the one in Connecticut that has sparked the current wave of media hysteria, happen in places where public policy has incorrectly assured people that they are safe, but where the policy has actually created risk-free zones for madmen, and pools of defenseless victims conveniently offered up for slaughter by failed policy.
Former police officer Ron Avery says, “The only way to check violence in progress, where the victim can neither hide nor flee, is by equal or greater force in a timely manner.“ If Congress feels compelled to “do something” in the wake of the Connecticut shooting, it should repeal the pretense of all federally-mandated or federally-inspired “gun-free zones.”
For any inside the Beltway who actually believe in the effectiveness of “gun-free zones,” I recommend that the White House, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, the U.S. Supreme Court and all federal courthouses be declared “gun-free zones,” and that all armed guards and protective personnel in those places be removed. If “gun-free zones” are effective for our kids, they’re good enough for our servants.
Various gun bans, licensing or registration schemes, and/or bans or restrictions of ammunition feeding devices will fail. I won’t bother you with discussion of the fact that any such restrictions will have no effect on criminals or madmen. I believe you already know that.
I do hope to inform you about how strongly the gun owners of Montana feel about their right to keep and bear arms. I have asked around among a considerable number of friends, acquaintances and contacts in Montana. I have not learned of anyone who would comply, for example, with a new federal law requiring them to register or surrender their semi-auto rifles to authorities.
Let me be very clear: Montanans will not comply with any new federal restrictions. The most any such restrictions would do would be to create a huge, new, armed, outlaw class of citizens. And I very much doubt that most Montana law enforcement personnel would cooperate in enforcing any such federal restrictions.
Clearly, the vast numbers of citizens who have bought new firearms in the past month, especially the hundreds of thousands of expensive semi-auto rifles, did not buy these new firearms simply so they’d have them available to surrender if Congress should pass a law demanding they do so.
Since Montana law enforcement personnel are unlikely to enforce any such restrictions, the effect of passage of such restrictions would ultimately be for federal officers to come to Montana to enforce them. Because most Montanans will simply not comply with any new federal restraints on a right they have reserved specifically from government interference, the obvious result would be armed conflict between Montanans and federal enforcers. (I offer this not as a threat or a challenge, but simply as an observation.)
I certainly hope you would not set Montana on the path to an armed conflict with federal enforcers by aiding or supporting passage of any new federal restrictions. That would not be in the best interest of your constituents.
Instead, if you feel compelled to pass some actually corrective legislation in response to the media hysteria over the Connecticut shooting, I highly recommend that you get rid of those dangerous and illusory “gun free zones.”
Gary Marbut, of Missoula, is the president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association.
What could would it do? They don’t care about the 2nd or the 10th by themselves, why would they care about them combined?
Really? Where is the evidence that it has had any effect on the feds or even the police? All I can see is that his actions caused the collapse of the militia movement back in the 90s.
Because there was no United States in the first century when John received the Revelation.
Do you think it will take 200,000,000 million troops to invade the country called Israel (Rev 9:16)? Israel has 7.5 million people. Who do you suppose they're invading?
Exactly. It's spelled out plainly in Genesis 48 that the name Israel would go to Joseph's sons.
Listening to Sheriff Richard Mack talk the sheriff's responsibility and power might interest you. It is a lesson Donnie Smith must not have learned. The question posed at the 4:00 minute mark is one Mr. Smith would not truthfully answer and stay in office as it is apparent he has already shown his answer. Maybe you know some folks in Washington County who would benefit from this video and in turn stand up for our country.
NOTE: This video was made just weeks after the theater shootings in Aurora and well before the current media fueled hysteria following Sandy Hook.
Here we go.......The Lost Ten Tribes
Thank you.
Isaiah 18 is dead on
No kidding.
I wouldn't expect John to say "The United States of America", but I don't think hoping for an oblique reference is too much to ask.
He could have referred to the land of the Eagle, a land not yet known, a nation of immigrants, the new Babel, or any of dozens of phrases that wouldn't be out of place in a first century text, but would grow in meaning to unambiguously (or even, throw me a bone here, ambiguously) refer to us.
We ain't there.
Therefore in the end times, we are irrelevant.
Or The Book is wrong.
Rev 9:16 says 200,000,000, not 200,000,000 million.
Given God and Israel's track record I don't think I'd try it with less than a 25:1 advantage either...
Did you intend to link to the Urban Dictionary’s definition of wallow?
Some of us have waited "decades" for the Supreme Court to accept a Second Amendment case. The Heller decision in 2008 followed by the McDonald decision in 2010 have set the stage for a recovery from past infringements.
Here in Kalifornia the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals has dragged its feet and tied virtually all of our cases to one ten-year-old case which has evidently been settled with no actual determination of the meaning of the Second Amendment.
I would not characterize the behavior of U.S. citizens as cowardice, but rather we follow the teachings of our Founders. From the Declaration: "... accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. "
A federal so-called "Assault Weapons Ban" was tolerated, knowing that it would expire in ten years. Our patience was rewarded by seeing that it was not renewed.
A so-called "Assault Weapons Ban" was implemented in Kalifornia. It took three different laws to have any effect at all. Some relatively simple work-arounds allow one to keep one's arms. Some of the workarounds can be reversed in minutes to restore the full function of the original rifles.
Even the "normal-capacity magazine" law is practically unenforceable because the law does not forbid "possession", only manufacture, importation, or transfer.
I expect that our patience will be rewarded again when the Republican controlled House refuses to consider ANY further federal gun control.
If we are disappointed in that, then I would expect the Supreme Court to accept an emergency hearing and a declaration of unConstitutionality.
If the Supreme Court does not act, then I would expect many local sheriffs to defy the federal government by disallowing any federal action in their jurisdictions. We see some of that happening already with regard to the War on Some Drugs. (I don't expect that it will be my sheriff who takes my side.)
If the President, ... and the Congress, ... and the Supreme Court, ... and the local sheriff all fail us, then I will act.
I was kept in a state of anxiety throughout the debacle known as Watergate. I was eventually rewarded by seeing a corrupt President impeached and forced to resign and seeing five dozen of his minions convicted of felonies.
How the nation will handle the crimes of Obama, I don't know. But there is time, if we remain strong AND ARMED.
That would mean you have to register. No?
True. The regulating of militias was understood to be by the states only.
i think you like most of our politicians are misreading the mood of most americans who are informed and educated enough to see what is happening in the us and what the future looks like without a confrontation...gun control is just the tipping point of many abuses just like 1776
Ever wondered why Arkansas is mentioned in the book of Genesis?
(Noah looked out the ark and saw dry land.)
Hey, I know it's not real funny now but I heard it in Sunday school when I was a kid in the 50s, it was funny then.
*groan*
Only *#4* (you cute fuzzy bunny). hahaha
that bothers me*
The point of the entire exercise is that it is so easy to MISREAD something when there are OTHER points of view on the same *subject* that are equally valid, IMO. But yet we all tend to wallow in our conditioned (pre)conceptions whether subliminal or of the soapbox variety.
Just listen to that little voice in your head.
Unless you have a pet tapeworm....
BTTT!
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