Saturday, June 25th, 2005

Time	Event
8:19a	It looks like the last one is almost gone. Thursday, Mark Koscielski lost his last-but-one appeal before the Minneapolis City Council, and he's been ordered to stop selling guns by July 1.  And so, the streets will now be safer? Well, no.  Understandably, with the city of Minneapolis having gone to great trouble, over many years, to put him out of business, he's more than a little irritated, and fed up.  Word is that he's so irritated that he's going to take advantage of some subtlties in the law.  Here's one:  once he surrenders his Federal Firearms License on July 1, he'll no longer be required to -- or able to -- do a NICs check on purchases.  He can't support himself by the sale of guns after that, of course, but there's no law I'm aware of that will prohibit him from liquidating what will have been his stock in trade, but which will, upon surrender of his FFL, become his collection.  I'm sure he'll keep a couple, for personal use, but he'll have hundreds and hundreds of guns to dispose of, and in Minnesota, private sales are legal. I think you can expect that Mark will go to more trouble than required by law to check out purchases -- he'll look at a drivers license to see if whoever wants to buy one is over 21 -- but he simply won't be able to do a background check, to see if the purchaser is a convicted felon. And the streets will now be safer, right?  Nah. (12 Comments | Comment on this)
9:59a	Some notes toward a piece on talking with moderate antis It's not exactly a secret that one of the things I do is self-defense evangelism, particularly around the issue of guns and carry permits.  Some folks, of course, are beyond hope, and since I can't get in their face in person -- the whole "reluctant participant" thing, among others -- upon occasion, I'm more than a little mocking of them*.  Dealing with those folks is always frustrating, and unavoidable -- to the extent one has to deal with them.  Since few (well, none, as far as I know) of the folks who were all in a twist over the passage of the Minnesota Citizens Personal Protection Act have moved to largely carry-permit-free oases in the sea of crime (you know:  Washington DC, Chicago, NYC, etc.) out of their shock and horror that such a commonsense, mainstream law passed in Minnesota, they're going to be around.  (Quick sidenote:  I'm frequently surprised at how reckless some of these people are, even despite their history for recklessness.) ( Read more... ) ______________________ * For whatever reason, Larry recently took down his rather, err, strange web page, and replaced it with this.  Fortunately for all who like a good joke, the wonderful wayback machine captured the previous versions. (7 Comments | Comment on this)

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