Category: A Victory!
To the civilized mind, there is a great deal about which to be bewildered as regards the Liberian Civil War. The first installment ran from 1989 until 1997 and killed perhaps a quarter-million people. The details are labyrinthine and convoluted.
The players included eclectic names like Prince Johnson, Chuck Norris, General Mosquito, and his counterpart General Mosquito Spray, Samuel Doe, Roosevelt Johnson, and Charles Taylor. I have it on reliable information that this Charles Taylor was no relation to the Chuck Taylor of Converse All-Stars sneakers fame.
There resulted a tenuous peace that lasted some two years and ultimately saw Mr. Taylor installed as President of Liberia. In 1999 the Second Liberian Civil War conflagrated, claiming another roughly quarter-million dead. Charles Taylor was arrested in 2006 and tried in the Hague for crimes against humanity. This included wanton murder, rape, weapons proliferation, and the widespread use of child soldiers.
Charles Taylor was the driving force behind some of history’s greatest atrocities.Taylor was sentenced to fifty years behind bars. At his sentencing, the Presiding Judge said: “The accused has been found responsible for aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes in recorded human history.”
As he was 58 at the time of his sentencing Taylor should be released sometime around his 108th birthday.
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
Joshua Milton Blahyi was born on September 30, 1971. During the First Liberian Civil War, he served as a military commander in the employ of the Liberian warlord Roosevelt Johnson. The world knows Blahyi by his eclectic nom de guerre. To the public, Joshua Blahyi went by General Butt Naked.
Imagine if all the cops, National Guard troops, and authority figures in the greater Chicago area suddenly retired en mass. Now visualize a pile of some 150,000 or so AK47 rifles left outside Wrigley Field alongside a sign reading, “Free, Take One. No More than three Magazines per Customer. ” Voila, you have Liberia circa 1989.
Joshua Blahyi was born into the Liberian Sarpo tribe and appointed a Krahn high priest. This animist belief system orbited around a variety of “bush spirits” that must be appeased before good things can happen. Blahyi’s principal deity was one Nyanbe-a-weh–“a high-ranking god in the West African Black-witch coastal line division.” It turned out that Nyanbe-a-weh had some peculiar tastes.
At the hands of men like Joshua Blahyi the blood flowed in torrents across Liberia.In the service of Nyanbe-a-weh and Roosevelt Johnson, Blahyi ultimately killed some 20,000 people. He also engaged in regular human sacrifice as well as cannibalism, particularly of children. Blahyi ultimately came to believe, rightly so I suspect, that Nyanbe-a-weh was actually the Devil.
Unconventional Combat Gear
That brings us back to Joshua Blahyi’s catchy stage name, General Butt Naked. Blahyi frequently led his troops into battle wearing nothing more than his shoes and an assault rifle. He believed that only in nudity could he be rendered immune to bullets.
Before engaging in combat, Blahyi and his men would usually sacrifice a small child to satisfy the blood lust of Nyanbe-a-weh. Blahyi stated that he needed, “Someone whose fresh blood would satisfy the Devil. We would kill an innocent child and take out the heart, which was divided into pieces for us to eat.” Blahyi also claimed that he, “Met Satan regularly and talked to him.”
Blahyi said during an interview with the South African Star, “So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink the blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colorful wigs and carrying imaginary purses we’d looted from civilians. We’d slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, and drunk yet strategic. We killed hundreds of people—so many I lost count.”
Whilst in combat Blahyi claimed he had special powers that rendered him invisible. Blahyi’s soldiers, many as young as nine, would fight naked or while wearing women’s clothing. The mercenary unit he commanded became widely known as the Naked Base Commandos. They were full-bore psychopaths.
The Guns
The countless internecine squabbles that blanketed Africa during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s served as proxy fights for the Cold War superpowers wishing to expand their influence and ideologies remotely. While that occasionally meant military advisors, aircraft, and armor, for the most part, it was simply small arms, lots and lots of small arms. By the time the First Liberian Civil War kicked off in 1989 the entire continent was covered in a thin patina of Kalashnikov rifles.
I couldn’t find many specifics about the weapons used to prosecute this tidy little genocide, but I did study a lot of pictures. AKs seemed to predominate in both fixed and folding versions. There were also quite a few FN FAL rifles and Combloc PKM belt-fed machineguns. Additionally, there seemed to be a smattering of HK G3 rifles as well as PPS-43 and Uzi submachine guns.
Specifics
The Avtomat Kalashnikova was, so the story goes, the brainchild of a WW2-era Soviet tank driver named Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov. Comrade Kalashnikov was the 17th of 19 children born to Russian peasants. In 1930 most of the Kalashnikov family was deported to Siberia as part of Stalin’s purges.
The earliest AK47’s were formed around a stamped steel receiver, but this was found to be inadequately robust for hard field use. The definitive AK47 was therefore built upon an expensive milled steel receiver. This rugged tire tool of a rifle weighed some 7.7 pounds empty, fed from a 30-round detachable steel magazine, and cycled at 600 rounds per minute.
In 1959 the AK47 got an extreme makeover. The stamped steel receiver was finally perfected, and the gun assumed the new designation AKM (Avtomat Kalashnikova Modernizirovannyj). This version weighed 7.28 pounds empty and was much easier and cheaper to build. The AKM used the same magazines and had the same cyclic rate of fire as the AK47. All totaled around 100 million AK-variant rifles have been produced, and they are still churned out around the globe today.
The FNFAL has been rightfully referred to as the “Right Arm of the Free World.” Designed by Dieudonne Saive in 1947 and initially chambered for the German 7.92×33 kurz round, the FAL ultimately fired the 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge. The gun weighed between 8.3 and 9.8 pounds depending upon particulars. The FAL’s designer, Dieudonne Saive, was also the guy who polished up John Moses Browning’s last semiautomatic pistol design into the P35 Browning Hi-Power.
There are around 30 million military weapons currently in circulation in Africa. The disintegration of the Libyan state and subsequent looting of government arsenals provided literally countless more. The ready availability of weapons combined with an entrenched tribal system results in a near-constant state of war someplace on the continent. Sprinkle a little radical Islam across the top for flavor and you have the chemical formula for pure unfettered chaos.
The Rest of the Story
In 1996 Joshua Blahyi met Jesus. He claims he had a vision from God who told him, “Repent and live, refuse and die.”
Blahyi began sleeping on a pew in a nearby church. Afterward, he said he met Jesus in a blinding light who addressed him as a son. Blahyi handed over his weapons and amulets to his immediate commander and declared, “My new Commander is Jesus Christ.”
I once met a guy on a psychiatry rotation who claimed to be indwelled with three spirits named Dagon, Demidagon, and Begored. He shot a complete stranger in the belly five times with a .38 because the voices in his head told him to do so. When we met he was thirty days out from a five-year penitentiary stay for this unsettling infraction.
As near as I could tell, this guy did nothing but lift weights for five years straight. He was, as a result, an incredibly imposing figure. After he presented to the Emergency Department he also intentionally ingested a drywall screw along with the needle off of a hypodermic syringe.
My buddy’s formal diagnosis was schizophrenia. He was also remarkably articulate and intelligent. He explained to me that as a teenager he had prayed to Satan to send these three guys to keep him company. Yes, it was freaky weird and super creepy. Thanks for asking.
Regardless of where you fall on the subject of demonic possession, in the case of Joshua Blahyi, it is hard to argue with success. Blahyi’s life turned completely around in that single instant. Today he is 49 years old and runs a residential facility that teaches his former child soldiers life skills. He seeks out the families of those he killed requesting forgiveness. He proclaims Jesus and salvation at every opportunity. I found a YouTube video of him preaching. He seemed quite sincere.
Joshua Blahyi was once described as, “the most evil man in the world.” Since he found Jesus, however, his life has been characterized by service, repentance, and forgiveness. In General Butt Naked’s stark transformation from bloodthirsty psychopath into pastor, evangelist, and mentor we see manifest the simply breathtaking power of forgiveness.
Everytown for Gun Safety, the billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobbying group, was making headlines over the weekend because a state-by-state new scorecard named California as “first in the nation” for having the most restrictive gun control laws.
In a report published by the Sacramento Bee, Everytown—often mischaracterized by the establishment media as a “gun safety” organization—and its subsidiary, Moms Demand Action, were taking credit for tough gun laws. A volunteer with the California Moms chapter was quoted boasting, “For over a decade, our grassroots army has worked in lockstep with our gun safety champions to keep California families safe from senseless acts of gun violence — this ranking showcases how far we’ve come and the road ahead.”
However, there was a glaring omission in the story. California, according to a recent report from Statista, also produced the biggest homicide body count of any state in the union in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available.
During 2022, the website notes, 2,197 Californians were murdered, a fact about which the gun control crowd has so far remained quiet.
As reported elsewhere by Ammoland News, the latest restrictive gun law known as SB2 is being challenged in federal court, and based on a ruling by a federal court panel Saturday which restored a preliminary injunction granted by District Judge Cormack J. Carney in December, the law could be in big trouble. The case is known as May v. Bonta, filed by the Second Amendment Foundation and the California Rifle & Pistol Association.
Everytown made headlines a few days ago when CNN reported the group’s prediction that some 298,000 lives “could be saved from the nation’s wave of gun violence” if only all states would adopt restrictive gun control laws like California.
But a quick look at the “Top 8” states on the Everytown honor roll might give lawmakers in the other 49 states cause to step back and take a deep breath.
Trailing California in the top spots are New York (762 slayings in 2022, according to Statista), Illinois (881 slayings, most of them in Chicago), Connecticut (136 murders), Hawaii (28 slayings; tiny state), Massachusetts (148 killings), New Jersey (254 murders reported), and Maryland (511 slayings).
Contrast those states with places such as Montana, identified by Ammo.com as the state with the highest percentage of gun ownership (66.3%) and a 2022 body count of just 49, yet with the low ranking of 47 on Everytown’s list of 50, and the gun control group’s credibility suffers. Neighboring Wyoming has the most guns per capita, the Ammo.com report noted, with 245.8 guns for every 1,000 residents. Wyoming is 44th on Everytown’s list, even though with all those people owning guns, the state produced only 14 murders in 2022.
Two more important points were listed by the Ammo.com report:
- “The top five states for gun ownership comprise only .8% of the nation’s firearm-related homicides (185 homicides between all 5 states).
- “The bottom five states for gun ownership accounted for 4% of the nation’s firearm-related homicides (1,038 firearm-related homicides).”
Rounding out the Top 5 states for gun ownership are Alaska, Idaho, and West Virginia. Everytown’s scorecard places them at 41st, 48th, and 27th, respectively.
This tale of irony is being overshadowed by the opening of the civil trial against the National Rifle Association and three of its senior leaders in recent years—Wayne LaPierre, Wilson “Woody” Phillips and John Frazer—unfolds in a New York courtroom. The civil lawsuit was brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has leveled allegations of financial misconduct, according to UPI. The 74-year-old LaPierre last Friday announced his resignation from the position as executive vice president, which he has held for more than three decades. The resignation is effective Jan. 31.
By no small coincidence, Everytown for Gun Safety is headquartered in New York, same as the NRA, though the latter has been around since 1871.
Also coincidental to the Everytown grade for California is the state’s adoption of three laws, including SB2, which prohibits licensed concealed carry in a broad list of so-called “sensitive places.” Perhaps not surprisingly, some California law enforcement agencies have announced they will not enforce provisions of SB2 while it is being adjudicated.
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms was quick to criticize the Everytown scorecard.
“One of the signals this is bogus research is the way Everytown graded Washington State, where the Citizens Committee is headquartered,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb in a statement to the media. “Washington is position ninth on the list, and is described avs ‘making progress.’
The state has adopted increasingly restrictive gun laws in recent years, and the number of homicides has more than doubled since 2014, according to FBI data and statistics from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. Seattle just set a new homicide record in 2023. If that’s what Everytown calls ‘making progress,’ we would be better off going back to living in caves.”
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
Federal law enforcement officials have launched a new initiative to inform the public of what they say is a growing problem that involves the illegal modification of semi-automatic firearms into fully automatic weapons.
Officials from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives launched a series of public service announcements designed to raise awareness on the dangers of these machine gun conversion devices, which are often referred to as “switches,” “chips” or “auto sears.”
The devices can be 3D-printed at home, but are often sold online, sometimes under misleading names to avoid detection by law enforcement, and billed as being legal to possess.
But despite their seeming harmlessness on their own, simply owning one of the conversion devices carries the same legal penalty as carrying an illegal machine gun, even if you don’t even have a weapon to modify.
The public service announcements feature U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada and leadership from the ATF Los Angeles, highlighting the dangers of the illegal conversion devices and the stiff legal penalties for those found in possession of them.
“These devices are not gun accessories. They are illegal and considered machine guns under federal law,” says ATF LA Field Division Special Agent in Charge Christopher Bombardiere.
He adds that the ATF has recovered more than 31,000 of the devices in the last five years and compared the problem to the rise of ghost guns — untraceable firearms that are assembled using spare or 3D-printed parts and which have no serial number.
Law enforcement officials say the devices can switch a semi-automatic pistol or rifle into fully automatic in as little as 60 seconds. “One pull of the trigger can release all the ammunition in the magazine,” they said.
Estrada said simply possessing one of these “switches” can carry a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and federal law enforcement officials are being extra diligent to keep the devices off the streets.
If you know of anyone who may be purchasing, making or stockpiling these devices, you are urged to contact your local ATF office. They can also be safely turned over at a local office.
A machine gun is described under the National Firearms Act as follows:
- Any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.
- The combination of parts designed and intended for use in converting a weapon into a machine gun.
To view one of the public service announcements published by the ATF, click here.
How to explain Americans’ astonishing personal arsenal? Start with politics, fear, and marketing.
Let’s start with a few facts about firearms in the U.S.: Americans own 393 million guns, the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey reports.
Firearms can be found in 44% of U.S. households, according to a 2020 Gallup survey.
And, tragically: Almost half of Americans know someone who has been shot, a 2017 Pew Research Center report noted.
How did we get here? Marketing, politics, racism, fear, and other forces have contributed to America’s exceptional proliferation of guns.
Soon after the end of the Civil War, gunmakers with surpluses sought peacetime customers. They convinced dry goods stores to sell handguns alongside flour and sugar; they ran classified ads in newspapers; and they told parents that a rifle would help “real boys” to develop “sturdy manliness.” Private gun ownership dramatically expanded.
The end of slavery catalyzed the formation of armed groups, some seeking to protect newly freed Black men, others to terrorize them. After Reconstruction failed, supremacist military groups like the White League in Louisiana used guns to threaten and sometimes murder Black men attempting to vote.
While the popular imagination holds that gunslingers sauntered down the dusty streets of Western towns, that’s largely a myth, according to UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, JD. “Frontier towns—places like Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge—actually had the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation,” Winkler wrote in the Huffington Post. When visitors arrived in Dodge City, Kansas, they encountered a billboard announcing, “The Carrying of Firearms Strictly Prohibited.”
Indeed, by the early 1900s, 43 states limited or banned firearms in public places. Gun control would become sharply divisive only with the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, made law after the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. The legislation limited interstate sales of firearms but did too little to satisfy gun control advocates including President Lyndon Johnson.
By the late 1990s, fear became a potent selling point as cultural attitudes changed. In a 1999 poll, most gun owners said they kept guns for hunting and target shooting; only 26% cited protection as paramount. By 2015, however, 63% cited self-defense as a primary motivation for gun ownership, according to a 2015 National Firearms Survey. In reality, having access to a gun triples a person’s risk of suicide and nearly doubles the risk of being a homicide victim, according to a 2014 Annals of Internal Medicine meta-analysis. For a woman living with an abusive partner, the risk of being murdered increases fivefold if the partner has a gun, according to an American Journal of Public Health study led by Jacquelyn Campbell, PhD, MSN, a faculty member of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy at the Bloomberg School.
As gun owners increasingly emphasized self-defense in recent decades, restrictions on carrying concealed firearms evaporated. Whereas in 1990 concealed carry in public spaces was illegal in 16 states (including Texas), by 2013 all 50 states and Washington, D.C., allowed some civilians to carry hidden guns.
At the same time, gunmakers have redesigned their wares. “Technology has focused on making smaller and smaller handguns, with more lethality, and with almost no attention to safety,” says Josh Horwitz, JD, who directs the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. For example, the popular $450 Smith & Wesson M&P Shield 2.0 pistol is 6 inches long and carries 15 9mm cartridges. And children now have their own firearms, like the 2½-pound, .22-caliber Crickett (“my first rifle”). Its gunstock comes in pink, camo, and “amendment”—Second Amendment text overlaid on American flags.
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1791
Congress ratifies Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment.
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1934, 1968
First major federal gun control laws are passed.
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1977
Activists opposed to gun control seize control of NRA at national convention.
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1985–86
Congress creates “gun-show loophole” by limiting federal firearm licensing requirements.
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1993
“Brady Bill” requires background checks for gun buyers at federally licensed dealers.
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1994, 2004
Federal Assault Weapons Ban becomes law; then Congress lets it lapse.
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1996–2019
Congress imposes limits on CDC gun research, shrinking federal funds for studies.
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2005
New law gives gun industry unprecedented protections against lawsuits.
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2008
Supreme Court votes 5–4 to recognize individual right to bear arms for “defense of hearth and home.”
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2009, 2020
Gun sales spike during Obama presidency and surge again as pandemic begins.
Horwitz says lobbyists and owners of military-style weapons increasingly embrace “the insurrectionist idea.” Since 2009, he has warned of armed citizens who claim that “threatening violence against government officials is within normal bounds of political discourse.”
The multiplication of “stand-your-ground” laws marked another shift in American attitudes, with Florida taking the lead in 2005. Today, 34 states give gun owners the right to use deadly force outside of the home with no duty to retreat or use other means to protect themselves. The laws “make it much easier for a person to legally kill someone,” writes University of Texas sociologist Harel Shapira, PhD, who credits the laws with “the militarization of everyday life.”
“In almost any aspect of public health, culture and policy are reinforcing and reflecting each other,” says Daniel Webster, ScD ’91, MPH, director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy. “You gradually see carrying a gun around as normative.” Forty years ago, if someone brought a gun to a party, Webster says, “you would have been shocked. It would have been incredibly abnormal.” Now, gun ownership is a lifestyle choice, one rooted in the individualism “baked into our culture and our laws.”
In recent decades, the National Rifle Association has identified its greatest foe as the government itself. After Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, NRA President Wayne LaPierre told members that the bill “gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”
“The gun lobby thrives on fear and drives fear,” says Horwitz. In many ways, he adds, “this is about white men feeling less powerful.”
Horwitz notes that gun sales rose during the past year. “People are afraid of other people with guns, so now they’re buying guns. Breaking that cycle is really important. Are we too far down the road? I don’t think we are, but we’ve got to make major changes in how we approach gun violence, soon.”
With the anniversary of January 6th behind us, we’d think all the insurrection rhetoric would be behind us, at least for a time.
Unfortunately, that’s asking way too much.
You’d think that, at some point, the people screaming about it would recognize that if the political demographic most likely to be armed and pay for training out of their own pockets were interested in overthrowing the government, they’d bring more than signs to the party.
But alas, that isn’t entering most people’s brains.
Yet I can’t help but think at least some understand that on some level.
I say this because of a new bill in the House that I was made aware of Thursday evening.
Washington (January 11, 2024) – Following the anniversary of the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol, Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) introduced the Preventing Private Paramilitary Activity Act, legislation that would create a federal prohibition on paramilitary groups through civil and criminal enforcement. The prohibition would hold individuals liable who directly engage in certain types of conduct, including intimidating state and local officials, interfering with government proceedings, pretending to be law enforcement, and violating people’s constitutional rights, while armed and acting as part of a private paramilitary organization.
…
“Patrolling neighborhoods, impeding law enforcement and storming the U.S. Capitol, private paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and the Proud Boys are using political violence to intimidate our people and threaten democratic government and the rule of law,” said Congressman Raskin. “Our legislation makes the obvious but essential clarification that these domestic extremists’ paramilitary operations are in no way protected by our Constitution. I’m grateful to Senator Markey for his partnership on this critical effort to protect the rule of law, deter insurrection and defend our democracy.”
A copy of the legislation can be found HERE.A one-page overview of the legislation can be found HERE.
The legislation creates different tiers of criminal penalties based on whether violations result in injury or property damage; provides harsher penalties for repeat offenders; and allows for a probationary sentence for first-time offenders. It also creates civil remedies by authorizing the Department of Justice to seek injunctive relief against paramilitary activity, and by creating a private right of action for individuals harmed by paramilitary activity to seek injunctive relief and/or damages. The legislation contains clear exceptions for activities such as historic reenactments, state-sanctioned trainings, and veterans’ parades.
Among specific points brought up regarding what this bill will restrict was, “training to engage in such behavior.”
But let’s be honest, what lawmakers claim a bill will do and what the text says can be quite different. I was already uncomfortable with what I was reading, since “patrolling” has a specific meaning in a lot of contexts, but I can also see someone applying it to a pro-gun march with some folks open carrying.
Was that what this bill was trying to address?
So, I took a look and, frankly, I’m not exactly thrilled with what I see.
For one thing, the word “patrolling” is mentioned several times in the press release announcing the bill and is expressly prohibited in the text of the bill, but is never actually defined by the bill. That means the definition of “patrol” is likely to be subjective.
But there’s worse.
For example, from the bill itself:
‘‘§ 2742. Unauthorized private paramilitary activity
‘‘(a) OFFENSE.—It shall be unlawful to knowingly, in a circumstance described in subsection (b), while acting as part of or on behalf of a private paramilitary organization and armed with a firearm, explosive or incendiary de8 vice, or other dangerous weapon—
‘‘(1) publically patrol, drill, or engage in techniques capable of causing bodily injury or death;
‘‘(2) interfere with, interrupt, or attempt to interfere with or interrupt government operations or a government proceeding;
‘‘(3) interfere with or intimidate another person in that person’s exercise of any right under the Constitution of the United States;
‘‘(4) assume the functions of a law enforcement officer, peace officer, or public official, whether or not acting under color of law, and thereby assert authority or purport to assert authority over another person without the consent of that person; or
‘‘(5) train to engage in any activity described in paragraphs (1) through (4).
Now, based on this alone, all sorts of things will fall under this regulation and, theoretically, be prohibited. Arguably, even your kid’s tae kwon do class would be illegal, since that would be training in “techniques capable of causing bodily injury” at a minimum.
Luckily, it’s not quite that stupid. It does require certain other conditions to be met as well. The problem? Those conditions are kind of a low threshold to clear.
Note that the above section clearly states that a circumstance from section (b) must be met, so that seems to say that if any of those apply, we’ve got a problem. I’m not a lawyer, so I may be misreading this, but it seems they’re pretty easy to meet, including crossing state lines, using “instrumentalities of interstate or foreign commerce,” involve a gun or explosive device, uses a so-called-high capacity magazine, or takes place within the United States.
And since the next to last listed uses the word “or” before going on, it makes it pretty clear that only one needs to be met.
The problem here is that just traveling on a road at all could be construed to be using an instrumentality of interstate commerce.
While it’s unlikely to be enforced that way, it sure looks like the fact that you’ll drive to a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class could meet this criteria.
However, a far more likely issue arises when we look beyond that.
For example, if you’ve never been in the path of a natural disaster, you probably don’t realize what it’s like to find your local law enforcement overwhelmed. People can and do decide to take advantage of that and a lot of people join together to protect their neighborhoods. One could say they patrol the neighborhood.
It would seem this bill would prohibit that.
More than that, though, it seems that a lot of firearm training classes could be negatively impacted. After all, are we not learning “techniques capable of causing bodily injury or death” when we attend? I mean, isn’t that the point?
Plus, you’re going to take a road at some point or another, meeting at least one of the circumstances laid out in the bill, as well as using a firearm–again, that’s kind of the point–and probably a magazine that holds more than 10 rounds, which is how the bill defines “high capacity magazine.” Literally any firearm training class seems like it would violate the law.
Any.
Now, again, I’m not a lawyer. It’s possible that there’s some quirk in how this is written that my layman eyes are missing that prevents it from meaning what it sure looks like it means, but I doubt it.
If there’s any good news to be found in this travesty of a bill, it’s that this is in the House, which the GOP controls. What’s on the page right now will likely never come to a vote. The absolute best-case scenario for this bill would be for the committee to gut this thing and rebuild it to not be a complete and total abomination.
Even then, I don’t see this going anywhere. It’s far more likely to get assigned to a committee where it can die a lingering death.
If it doesn’t, the gun training industry is going to need to lawyer up.
