Instead of trying to come up with an original post while crammed into a hotel room with 2 small kids on our annual excursion to the coast I’ll post a roundup of observations from my fellow gunbloggers.

Starting off we have some Thomas Jefferson coverage with The Declaration of Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms and more coverage of Citizens, Not Subjects over at Sispey Street Irregulars.

You can read the Declaration of Independence from Boots & Sabers and Walls of the City.

Borepatch looks at what the Founding Fathers would think of the Tea Party movement. New Jovian Thunderbolt has some awesome videos of Anvil Shooting, a 4th of July tradition.

Les Jones has a bunch of cool infrared pics of fireworks, and Breda has John Adams’ thoughts on the even of Independence.

I will update this post as the day progresses, and I have time between trips to the beach.

Flag credit to Jonathon Colman

And it looks like WA Ceasefire’s Ralph Fascitelli got a reminder of this at the recent hearing on an attempted WA ‘assault weapon’ ban. From Dave Workman’s Examiner column:

Prior to the hearing, as several Open Carry activists gathered in the hallway of the John A. Cherberg Senate Office Building, Washington CeaseFire’s Ralph Fascitelli approached a member of the State Patrol’s security team and, after pointing out that there were visibly armed citizens in the building, demanded of the trooper: “Do you know if they’re loaded?”
Sources have confirmed to the Gun Rights Examiner that Fascitelli appeared both irritated and unnerved, and he wanted the State Patrol troopers to check every firearm at the door of the building to see if they were loaded. He was told by the WSP that troopers do not have the authority under state law to do that.

That, Mr. Fascitelli, is what is known as freedom.

Its been a while since I’ve updated you with additions to GunBlogger’s new feeds. In no particular order I’d like to welcome the following blogs: The Clue Meter, Ry Jones, Rivrdog, Vin Suprynowicz, Dave Workman, Liberal CCW, Around Orlando, New User of Guns, Sharp as a Marble, One Inch Group, Gunblogger Conspiracy, Gun Nuts Media and Snarky Bytes

Whew! That’s quite a list. If you have a blog you want to see added please contact me.

“I, Sylvanus Wood, of Woburn, in the county of Middlesex, and commonwealth of Massachusetts, aged seventy-four years, do testify and say that on the morning of the 19th of April, 1775, I was an inhabitant of Woburn, living with Deacon Obadiah Kendall; that about an hour before the break of day on said morning, I heard the Lexington bell ring, and fearing there was difficulty there, I immediately arose, took my gun and, with Robert Douglass, went in haste to Lexington, which was about three miles distant.”

Read the rest of Mr. Wood’s account here at Eye Witness History

THE HORRID MASSACRE IN BOSTON, PERPETRATED IN THE EVENING OF THE FIFTH DAY OF MARCH, 1770, BY SOLDIERS OF THE TWENTY-NINTH REGIMENT WHICH WITH THE FOURTEENTH REGIMENT WERE THEN QUARTERED THERE; WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE STATE OF THINGS PRIOR TO THAT CATASTROPHE

Read about it at Wikipedia and The Boston Massacre Historical Society

HT to View From The Porch

Salem, Oregon—Today, the Oregon War Veterans Association (OWVA) publicly announced its decision to file a lawsuit against Western Oregon University (WOU) for its violation of the Second Amendment right to carry a gun and its decision to expel veteran Marine, Jeff Maxwell. The university suspended Maxwell for a year upon discovering he carried a concealed handgun onto campus.

Read the rest of the story here on the OWVA blog

It is hard to be optimistic about the future of our country when I keep reading things like this:

Bank nationalisation gains ground with Republicans

Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator for South Carolina, said that many of his colleagues, including John McCain, the defeated presidential candidate, agreed with his view that nationalisation of some banks should be “on the table”.

The US Constitution is now a dead document. The political parties in power are simply fighting over the scraps, with no significant difference between them. And without anything to constrain the power of the federal government anything can happen. And it will. The gigantic bailouts and so called stimulus bills are only the start.

America is a good country, but as the cliche goes — “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

ETA: Glenn Beck had John Lott on to talk about this.

The point is, they’re going to have — look at what we’ve done to the banks in terms of the current financial situation, where we forced them through different laws to make loans that they didn’t want to make, make loans to people who didn’t have any down payments on it. That’s going to be on steroids when you have government there as a direct owner and it’s not going to be as obvious because you won’t have regulations that you can point to. You can just have the presidents of the bank doing what they’re being told by the politicians behind the scenes to go and do.

Liberty Belle over at Redistributing knowledge has helped organize a Porkulus Bill Protest in Seattle today (President’s Day).

The protest against the porkulus is on for President’s Day!

Date: Monday, February 16th
Time: 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Where: Westlake Park in downtown Seattle, 401 Pine St., in the open area by the big arch.

The idea is to use what we’ve learned about dissent over the last eight years. We need loud protests with lots noise and visuals. So, what should you bring?

Bring AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN! Bring your families, your friends, neighbors, bring everyone!

Bring SIGNS!! Get those craft making juices flowing and make signs and banners and pictures and paintings. Just imagine that you are a left-wing college student with nothing else to do and that should help you get started!

Bring something to sit on and appropriate clothing.

Most importantly, JUST BRING IT!!!

H/T to Michelle Malkin for this.

Dave Workman has a guest opinion up at The Tuscon Citizen today.

One should not be required to obtain a license or pass a government-administered test to exercise any constitutionally-protected civil right. If the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s taught us anything, it is that all civil rights are sacred, one is no less important than another, and all of them are worth defending because a threat to one puts all rights in peril.

Dave Workman is senior editor of Gun Week as well as an excellent holster maker.

The Senate confirmed Pres. Obama’s choice for Attorney General, with the help of 19 spineless Republicans. If one of these folks is your representative I suggest you give them an earful. And come next election do everything you can to defeat them.

Now, can we expect the NRA to adjust their ratings of these Senators based on this vote? I sure as hell hope so.

Alexander (R-TN)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bond (R-MO)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Collins (R-ME)
Corker (R-TN)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hatch (R-UT)
Isakson (R-GA)
Kyl (R-AZ)
Lugar (R-IN)
McCain (R-AZ)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Sessions (R-AL)
Snowe (R-ME)
Specter (R-PA)
Voinovich (R-OH)

Thanks go to the 21 who stood up against this anti-gun bigot. You can read the full roll call here.

HT to The Freehold

Here is what the GOA had to say about Holder in a January 13, 2009 letter:

Holder, who served as Deputy Attorney General from 1997-2001, supports a 3-day waiting period for handgun purchases, one-gun-a-month rationing, licensing and registration of all gun owners, mandatory so-called smart gun technology, a lifetime gun ban for certain juvenile offenses and regulating gun shows out of existence.

As Janet Reno’s top deputy, Eric Holder was the go to guy on gun control issues. In a 1999 statement, Holder told members of Congress not to cave in to “the special interest that value the cold hard steel of guns more than the lives of children, neighbors and police officers,” and urged them to pass legislation that would have destroyed the gun show industry.

… yesterday, December 7th, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

You can listen to FDR’s speech here at Wikipedia. We need to never forget, and we need to remember that something like this can happen again. The world is not at peace, and treachery can come in many forms.

Well, this is some merry news to end off the year with! The US Dept. of the Interior has changed its rules regarding the carrying of concealed weapons in the National Park System so that legally licensed individuals may now carry their weapons in the Parks.

The full news release is available from the doi.gov website. I think (IANAL) this becomes a law as soon as it is published in the Federal Register — which seems like a silly way to do things, but they are the Federal Government after all. They don’t have to make sense.

“The Department believes that in managing parks and refuges we should, as appropriate, make every effort to give the greatest respect to the democratic judgments of State legislatures with respect to concealed firearms,” said Laverty. “Federal agencies have a responsibility to recognize the expertise of the States in this area, and federal regulations should be developed and implemented in a manner that respects state prerogatives and authority.”

I can only hope that this isn’t the last victory before the Obama administration starts stripping away our rights again.

The NRA has an announcement on this, as does the CCRKBA.

I ran across this post over at Pass the Ammo via GunBloggers.com. I made what I thought was a fairly reasonable reply to the posting.

Later in the day I wanted to check out the rest of the site, and noticed that my reply was missing. I was pretty sure I’d done it right, but anything is possible. I happened to have it open on the laptop so I re-posted it this morning. Its gone again. Now, this doesn’t really bug me that much, I don’t have any ‘right’ to have my comment posted, but I do think that silently deleting opposing viewpoints gives the false impression that everyone agrees with you.

update It ends up that my post was the victim of an overzealous Askimet spam filter! Spammers certainly have made it harder to manage comments on blogs these days, and Askimet usually does a reasonable job of things. Sorry to Pass the Ammo for thinking the posts were being dropped on purpose.

So, I give you my original comment:

Please don’t.

I felt the same way in 1992, and by voting for Ross Perot helped hand the country over to Bill Clinton.

All through the primaries I swore I would not vote for McCain this time around.

But I have to act like a grownup now. The economy is sliding into a recession, people wrongly blame the Republicans for that. We WILL have supreme court judges retire in the next 4 years. Congress will likely be under democrat control. Bush has already tipped us over into the nationalization of banks and the use of public funds for private benefit. Obama will only make this worse.

If you vote for anyone but McCain you will be helping to hand the country over to the socialists, and once they reinforce their hold there will be no turning back. This is a turning point in the history of the United States. Can we survive as a nation of Free Men?

Pretty much sums up how I feel about the whole lot of them.

H/T to Sith by SithWest

I’d better start this off with a disclaimer – I’m glad the Republicans picked her to be the Vice President. She’s a breath of fresh air to the party. But we need to stop treating her like she’s the Conservative incarnation of Barack Obama.

Let us be realistic about this. She’s not running for President. And if elected won’t have much, if any, effect on our lives. John McCain is still the one who will be signing or vetoing the laws. He’s the one who will still be making deals with the Democrats. He’s the one we have to hold accountable for carving away at our rights. Out enthusiasm for Sarah Palin is understandable. Just look at who we had to choose between during the primaries this year. If we’d had someone like Palin running maybe we wouldn’t have to settle for John ‘Lets gut the 1st Amendment’ McCain.

I stand by the slogan of my newest political shirt from We’re Screwed ’08. No matter who wins this election the US Constitution is still guaranteed to be be on the losing side. McCain has a history of compromise and disrespect for the Constitution. I don’t expect him to give that up just because his running mate is an NRA member and has held an AR-15.

The Palin nomination seems a bit like a magician’s trick of mis-direction. “Don’t mind the white haired man, just look at the pretty lady” as he signs away the rights that our forefathers fought so hard to protect. John McCain is still the one with the real power here. Palin might make a good Presidential candidate some day but that isn’t what this election is about.

What this election is really about is the choice between the lesser of two evils. Who will do less damage to the Constitution during their time in office? That’s who I have to vote for, no matter how unhappy it makes me to do so.

from 2003-2007 according to this article from the Kitsap Sun. IIRC WA is one of the best armed states (although I need to re-discover my source for that). They interviewed a number of people from the Kitsap Rifle and Revolver Club, of which I am a member. The article is pretty good, much better than I expected when I first heard that it was being written.

One of my favorite geeks, Eric Raymond, has returned to blogging with a couple of great posts related to yesterday’s Heller decision. He lays out a good argument for voting for McCain, even though he isn’t the ideal candidate. And he says he is willing to be a test case to challenge Pennsylvania’s Concealed Carry License requirements. I wish him luck, although I don’t want to see him spend any time in jail.

esr is also well known in the open source world for his books, “The Cathedral & the Bazaar“, “The Art of UNIX Programming and “The New Hacker’s Dictionary“. You can read more about his background on his Wikipedia page.

Needless to say, he has now been added to the GunBloggers list. Welcome back Eric!

The ruling will be here at the SCOTUSblog eventually.

The ruling is here in pdf

Today we are supposed to be getting the Supreme Court’s decision on the DC vs. Heller case. I think its a sad state for the country when we are hanging on the words of 9 Justices. The US Constitution is clear and un-ambiguous. The rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are for the People, and therefore individuals. Only Alaska and Vermont have figured this out with their no-license concealed carry laws.

To those of us who understand and believe in the constitution today’s ruling means nothing other than an indicator of how difficult it is going to be to continue the fight for freedom. It will be a gauge of how far we have slipped from the path of Liberty and Freedom for All. Washington DC’s laws, as well as that of thousands of other states and cities, are clearly un-constitutional. Here in Washington State we are having to fight the Mayor of Seattle who wants to violate State Law by banning CPL holders from carrying on City property. Washington’s laws clearly restrict the city from making any laws more strict than those enacted by the legislature. But he’s is trying it anyway.

Vast amounts of taxpayer money are wasted every year fighting against our own government, trying to rein in the power that they constantly seek to grab. I can only hope that an affirmative ruling from the court will curb some of this bureaucratic power struggle.

I’m sitting here watching the liveblogging from scotusblog, waiting to see if the Supreme Court issues its ruling on the Heller case today.

No matter which way it goes the fight will never end. If we win, the anti-gunners will find other ways to infringe on our rights. If we lose we will continue the fight in Congress. I expect that they will release the decision last, but maybe that’s just my TV watching mentality.

Nope. No decision today. Draw out the drama until the end I guess.