Gun Shows Today

You may or may not have heard of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association vs. City of New York.  This is a challenge to a New York City regulation that says people with premises licenses for their handguns (which is required to have a pistol in your home or business) may not take their unloaded, inaccessible, and secured pistols anywhere except one of the licensed gun ranges in the city.  You may not go to a range outside the city, to your home in upstate New York, to a competition of any sort.  You are allowed to take your gun to a gunsmith, but only if you get advance permission from Read More >>

And from New York!  Avitable v. Beach (N.D.N.Y., 2019).   Important points: Second Amendment protects possession of stun guns and Tasers.   New York State argued that Tasers are not in "common use," by comparing the number in private hands "to the relatively small number of civilian-owned machine guns that were sold prior to the 1986 federal ban on those weapons."   “Avitable argued that he preferred one of these electric weapons over using his rifles or shotguns because he would prefer not to kill in self-defense,  (A good argument--it shows Read More >>

Mass murders with firearms justify stricter gun control laws: that’s the core assumption of the news media and politicians (which are pretty much identical). So what is the weapon that is the big killer in American mass murders? So big that more than half of all mass murder victims since 1657 were killed with this weapon, one that was not invented until the 20th century. My current research project is a comprehensive history of mass murder. I have identified 360 mass murders (defined as three or more persons murdered or wounded in a 24 hour period). This includes 5,948 dead. And the Read More >>