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JSD Supply hit with ATF cease and desist letter

May 13, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

The ATF is going to enforce the new “ghost gun” rules as vigorously as possible. We all know this.

However, those rules haven’t gone into effect just yet. There are still a couple of months left before they’ll really be able to do anything about homemade gun kits.

Or, at least, that’s what I thought.

It seems they’re already making some moves in that regard.

This morning, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) served JSD Supply with a cease & desist order.
The order originated from the ATF’s Philadelphia field office. It stated that JSD Supply could not sell both unfinished frames and firearms parts to the same person no matter if they were purchased at different times. If JSD Supply sold a frame to someone, then the customer comes back to the site and buys a gun part; then, according to the ATF, the company sold the customer a complete firearm without a federal firearms license (FFL) in violation of the Gun Control Act (GCA).

Now, in fairness to the ATF, they do go on to claim this has nothing to do with the rule change that hasn’t gone into effect.

As Ammoland notes:

The ATF claims this action is independent of the new rule change that was unveiled last month during a White House Rose Garden ceremony and is due to go into effect this August. The order claimed it has always been Illegal under the GCA to sell parts and frames to the same person even if the transactions were separate. The ATF calls this “structuring.” Many sites sell both parts and frames, including major players in the firearms industry such as Brownells and Midway.
As of Thursday morning, JSD Supply’s website was taken offline until the company received legal advice on how to move forward. JSD Supply has been at the center of attention since NBC News released a hit piece on the company in conjunction with Pennsylvania Attorney General and governor candidate Josh Shapiro.

In other words, it became politically palatable to go after JSD Supply.

Honestly, folks, this is disgusting. It’s also why the ATF and gun owners have such a stormy relationship. There’s absolutely no reason for this.

The truth of the matter is that I don’t really see how “structuring” is illegal in the first place. Either the frame is a gun or it isn’t. If it’s not, then it doesn’t matter what else is sold with it.

I mean, is there really a difference between me buying an incomplete frame from one dealer and a parts kit from another?

“Why would you do that unless you’re trying to skirt the rules?” some gun-grabber might ask.

Well, because one place has a better price on an incomplete receiver than the place I want to get the other parts from? Maybe I really like Company X’s unfinished frames but Company Y’s slides and trigger groups.

The fact of the matter is that we don’t have to justify our purchases for any lawful good to anyone.

I don’t see how JSD Supply did anything wrong.

What I do see is an ATF that can’t wait to jump on the new rules against unserialized firearms and is looking for any opportunity to hit those who sell parts for them.

Dana Loesch blasts Dr. Oz for gun control misinformation

May 13, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

I’m still not sure about the world we live in. A guy from Saturday Night Live was in the Senate and Donald Trump was president. It’s just weird.

Yet as odd as that was, the idea of Dr. Oz as a senator may be worse.

Al Franken was at least funny.

Oz, on the other hand, has a history of questionable advice with no basis in science. For our purposes, though, the worst may be his history of espousing support for gun control. We’ve covered it previously, of course.

We’re far from the only ones talking about it, either. It seems Dana Loesch has thoughts as well.

Popular radio host Dana Loesch accused Pennsylvania Republican Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz of pushing “disinformation” about gun control and gun violence statistics.
Loesch laid out her argument in a lengthy Twitter thread responding to a 2018 claim from the Trump-backed candidate stating that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been barred from “comprehensively” studying gun violence.
“Right now, the @CDCgov is NOT funded to study gun violence in this country. It’s time we treat shootings as a public health problem. Contact your congressperson today to demand they fund the #CDC to comprehensively study gun violence. #EndTheBan congress.gov,” Oz tweeted.
“I have a major problem with Republicans who push disinformation like this. #2A#DrOz,” Loesch responded, noting that the CDC was never barred from the comprehensive study of gun violence.
“The only people who talk like this are Bloomberg gun-control types. This demands explanation — not excuses or dodging. Remember the people who cover for it, too,” Loesch continued, noting that the CDC had studied firearms but had failed to report their findings for political reasons.

She’s not wrong, either.

Look, Dr. Oz can claim he’s pro-Second Amendment all he wants, but he’s saying that at a time when he desperately needs people to believe it. An anti-gun Republican simply cannot win a primary in most places and he wants to be in the Senate.

But his history doesn’t mesh with what he’s saying now.

The ironic thing is that he could have sat down and said, “Yeah, I bought into the hype. The idea of guns being the problem was pushed so heavily that I and a lot of other people accepted it, but when I looked at the data, I saw I was wrong.”

I could have respected that. I would have applauded that.

Yet old Dr. Oz said no such thing. Instead, he simply pretended that the newspaper columns with his name on them weren’t really what he thought, they were his partner’s words and his name. Then we have this tweet from 2018 where he’s pushing the Big Lie, that the CDC was barred from doing research.

No, they were barred from pushing a gun control agenda. They could research all they wanted, but they needed to come at it neutrally. They refused to do it and advanced the lie that they were barred from doing so.

Oz perpetuated that lie and hasn’t offered a single apology for it.

Loesch calling him out on Twitter is just one of many voices that have done the exact same thing.

I’m sorry, folks, but if you want to trust someone like this to defend your gun rights, go right ahead. I’d much rather not have the anxiety of wondering when he’d stab us all in the back.

Report shows how guns are traded illegally

May 12, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

While I vehemently support the Second Amendment, I’d be a fool to pretend guns don’t end up on the black market and in the hands of bad people. Then again, I don’t know anyone who pretends such a thing, at least not on the pro-gun side of things.

In 2018, a police officer in Cherry Hills Village, Colorado was shot by such a weapon.

Now, a news station has done some digging, and what they found was interesting.

What happens after a gun is used in a crime? The FOX31 Problem Solvers discovered that sometimes it can be complicated to track.
One handgun used by a teenager to shoot a Cherry Hills Village police officer in 2018 was traded with or sold to several other teens before a different man later used the weapon to shoot at a semi-truck driver in Aurora.
Evidence obtained by the Problem Solvers after both shooting cases were closed shows how a web of young people had access to the same gun, and that they used various methods, including Facebook, to get rid of it before it was linked to the crimes.
Social media often shows gun exchanges
“It’s a rather involved case in the sense that there were a lot of people that had possession of the firearm that was used after the shooting occurred,” said former Aurora Police Det. Andy McDermott, who worked as a lead investigator.
“It’s not unusual at all to see someone utilize a firearm in a crime and then pass that on only to receive another one,” McDermott said. “Sometimes, they’ll trade. Sometimes, they’ll purchase. Sometimes they’ll steal them, but it’s very common to see them exchanged, and we see a lot of that through social media.”

It’s an interesting piece, to say the least.

Now, let’s unpack the political side of this for a bit.

Colorado is a universal background state. If you want to buy or sell a gun there, you’re supposed to go to a licensed gun dealer and have them conduct a background check. As we can see, that’s simply not happening if for no other reason than a licensed dealer won’t perform a check on a teenager.

There are numerous state and federal laws being violated with each and every one of those transactions, last that are meant to prevent them from taking place.

Yet they do.

And that’s the problem with gun control. It’s predicated on being able to stop the behavior in an entire class of people who, by their very nature, don’t obey the law in the first place.

This is the black market in action, folks. This is the kind of thing it looks like, and do you really think making me go through a background check to buy a gun from a guy I went to high school with is going to really make an impact on something like that?

Really?

This is the reality, though, and this is why gun control doesn’t work as advertised. No law will stop or change this behavior, either.

Op-ed's anti-gun “gotcha” not the win they think

May 12, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

When it comes to the debate on guns and gun control, we’re going to see a lot of people think they have figured out counters to any argument. This exists on both sides of the aisle, to be fair.

However, sometimes, you see something in an op-ed that’s just beyond idiotic.

That’s exactly what I encountered in the Milwaukee Independent today. This is a classic example of an attempt at a “gotcha” moment, but let me show you how this all plays out:

Nina Shapiro reported at Forbes in an article titled The Leading Cause Of Death In Children And Youths Is Now Guns:
“Access to firearms by children, by unlicensed owners, and absence of safety measures when it comes to both intentional and unintentional gun-related injuries and deaths, are among the reasons that the incidence of this horrific, truly avoidable tragedy is on the rise.”
The latest con from the GOP is that they are all about “the children.”
They are worried that trans people will show up in the “wrong” bathroom and scare or threaten “the children.”
They are hysterical that teaching American history will cause White children to “feel bad.”
They are locking up women and threatening them with life in prison because they had a miscarriage that Republicans suspect might have been a self-induced abortion.
They are happily jumping on the 2022 GOP version of the Tsar’s antisemitic blood libel, claiming their political opponents are “groomers” targeting children.
They are enthusiastically embracing the Qanon slogan: “Save the children!”
Until you mention children killed by guns.
Then, Republicans retreat into a bizarre cone of silence or simply turn and run away from the conversation altogether. Or, worse, they continue grooming their own young people to become school shooters, as you can see below.

Now, here’s the big problem with it.

You see, no one denies that children are, in fact, killed by firearms. It’s a horrible tragedy, to be sure. However, many more lives are saved with firearms than are claimed by them via homicide. Like 10 times the number is the lowball estimate.

Further, absolutely no one “turns and runs away” from such a discussion. Most will point out such facts.

They’ll also argue that children’s lives won’t be saved by gun control. After all, the vast majority of children’s lives claimed by someone with a gun aren’t the result of an accident or even an irresponsible parent, but the willful act of someone with a firearm illegally.

But I don’t think the author really wants to play this game. After all, even if every child killed by a firearm could be saved with new gun control laws–something literally no one can guarantee–the truth remains that abortions happen far more often than kids being shot. After all, the CDC reported nearly 630,000 abortions were performed in 2019 alone.

That’s well above the 10,186 reported by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Now, I know what the anti-gunners will say. They’ll claim that abortion just removes clumps of cells, not actual babies.

Yet they do that while pretending that our rejection of their claim that gun control will save kids’ lives is some moral failing while pro-life folks see their rejection of those being babies as the same thing.

I’m not going to get into the abortion issue because that’s not what we do here. However, if you’re going to pretend you’ve found some “gotcha” moment, you’d better have something better than this nonsense, because you’re damn sure trying to punch well above your weight class.

In truth, I soon quit reading what he had to say because it’s the same mentally-deficient thinking we see all too often from anti-gun zealots who think they’ve got something to say important only for them to turn out impotent.

Cincinnati man convicted of having “ghost” machine gun

May 12, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

In the United States, you can own a machine gun. Sorta.

You have to jump through a pile of hoops and you also have to hope someone has one for sale. Since nothing made after 1986 is available for civilian ownership, that means the market is limited for legal weapons of that type.

If gun control works as advertised, absolutely no one but a small handful of people would own such firearms.

Well, as per usual, there went that plan.

A federal jury has convicted a man with illegally possessing a machine gun and possessing a pistol and ammunition after previously being convicted of a felony.
According to court documents and trial testimony, in March 2020, 31-year-old Jesse Carter illegally possessed a pistol, a machine gun and more than 400 rounds of ammunition.
The machine gun was a“ghost gun” with no markings.
According to US Attorney Kenneth Parker, ghost guns are often assembled from kits, do not contain serial numbers, and are sold without background checks, making them difficult to trace.

Carter is looking at 10 years in prison.

Now, about that machine gun…

I can hear some going on about how this being a “ghost gun,” it’s evidence we need rules outlawing these firearms. However, I’d also like to remind folks that P.A. Luty built and published plans for a submachine gun that didn’t require parts from anywhere other than your local hardware store.

You’re not going to stop someone like Carter with laws.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the machine gun in question was Luty’s design. You see, while “ghost guns” are often built from kits, that’s not a requirement. The term is used to describe any unserialized firearm. It could be a traditionally manufactured firearm with the serial number obliterated or it could be any of a number of other things.

You’re not going to legislate these things into oblivion. It’s never going to happen.

That’s especially true now in the era of the 3D printer.

But here’s the thing. I cannot lawfully obtain a machine gun without making a whole lot more than I currently do. It’s purely the domain of the wealthy.

Yet someone who cares nothing for the law can and will get a full-auto weapon if they so desire, even if they have to make it themselves. They’re not prevented from doing so by any rule or regulation. They’re only, at most, inconvenienced a bit.

But if someone like this rolls up and decides he wishes to harm me and mine, I’m outgunned. This person can throw a lot more rounds my way than I can in return. While it may not be good marksmanship, the probability of an accidental hit goes up when there are a ton of rounds flying through the air.

We’re at a disadvantage when facing criminals as it is, and gun control advocates want to make that disadvantage even more pronounced.

The bad guys don’t obey rules, but some think the answer to the problem is to create more rules for them to ignore. It’s absolute insanity.