Here’s an interesting prognosis for Constitutional Carry through 2021 by Charles CW Cooke of National Review.

Cooke believes that “Its popularity keeps spreading inexorably across the country,” and sees the number of states requiring no permit for all or most of the state reaching 15 to 17 this year, based on research by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC). First, let’s look at where it’s law right now:

Their list of participants to date numbers 12, a few of which you might quibble about the definitions they’re using.

State	Effective date
Vermont	Since they became a state
Montana (99.4% of state)	September 15, 1991
Alaska	September 9, 2003
Arizona	July 29, 2010
Wyoming	July 1, 2011
Arkansas	August 16, 2013
Kansas	July 1, 2015
Mississippi	July 1, 2015
Maine	October 15, 2015
West Virginia	May 26, 2016
Idaho	July 1, 2016
Missouri	January 1, 2017

For example, the nonpermissive 0.6% of Montana includes the incorporated city limits — all  of them. And Wyoming only extends the right to state residents, not visitors or passers-through. But consider this list in the light of a paragraph from Cooke:

15 years ago there was only one (two if you count Montana, which I’d classify as a “mostly constitutional carry” state) — and that 30 years ago most states had extremely restrictive permitting processes to boot — this is nothing short of remarkable.

Three states were added last year (the bottom three in the table above, from John Lott. FIve more states are likely to be added this year: IN, KY, NH, ND, SD. Four more are prohibitive longshots (CO, MN, TX, UT) where, according to the CPRC’s John Lott, legislatures are unlikely to pass or governors likely to veto, as the governor in Utah already has done; but it’s in play in those legislatures, (Consider the example of NH, where it passed twice and was vetoed twice, but now progresses through the legislature under the gaze of a supportive governor).

There is a network effect going on here, because in each state, liberals, most Democrats, and the media have bitterly opposed these laws and have predicted bloodbaths, while the actual law has come and gone without any remarkable event. (You might say that Constitutional Carry extends to the citizen inclined to obedience to law and authority the same carry rights that criminals everywhere are already expected to be practicing).

Given that network effect, Lott and Cooke project that several states where pro-gun attitudes among the public are motivating pro-gun attitudes in Congress, will likely go CC in the next four years, i.e., by 2021.

This movement started slow, but has been accelerating of late. Lott’s prediction is conservative in that it predicts no further acceleration. In addition to the benefits offered to residents of and visitors to permitless carry states, the probable passage of license full faith and credit recognition would draw the fangs of some of the most rabid antigun districts.

Well, in 1996, Australia outlawed and confiscated semi-auto and slide-action rifles and shotguns. And crime in Oz came to a standstill.

We kid, we kid.

After giving the law ten years to stabilize things, here’s what a chart of the last ten years’ gun violations in the city of Melbourne looks like:

The Age writes:

Despite Australia’s strict gun control regime, criminals are now better armed than at any time since [the 1996 ban and confiscation].

“Despite.” Heh. Whom do they think benefits most from prohibition of anything?

Shootings have become almost a weekly occurrence, with more than 125 people, mostly young men, wounded in the past five years.

While the body count was higher during Melbourne’s ‘Underbelly War’ (1999-2005), more people have been seriously maimed in the recent spate of shootings and reprisals.

More woundings, fewer fatalities? That tells us this: Australian doctors, nurses, and emergency trauma responders, too, practice continuing education, attend international trauma conferences, and keep improving their skills. (Of course, experience in all those GSWs helps in and of itself). Who knew?

Crimes associated with firearm possession have also more than doubled, driven by the easy availability of handguns, semi-automatic rifles, shotguns and, increasingly, machine guns, that are smuggled into the country or stolen from licensed owners

Did you catch that: “increasingly, machine guns”? Gee, there’s another surprise: you make it just as impossible as you can for someone to own a modern handgun or rifle, and he’s going to think. “As well hung for a sheep as a lamb,” and go for the MG. Not to mention that it is easier for a maker of improvised weapons to make an open-bolt full-auto SMG than it is to fashion a closed-bolt, functioning-disconnector semi-auto firearm. One is reminded of Oleg Volk’s classic photo commentary on this:

Indeed.

The Age found certain troubling factors indicating that the South Australian city was not the glowing example of peace, love and brotherhood that Australian politicians promised when they warmed up the smelters in ’96.

• There have been at least 99 shootings in the past 20 months – more than one incident a week since January 2015
• Known criminals were caught with firearms 755 times last year, compared to 143 times in 2011
• Criminals are using gunshot wounds to the arms and legs as warnings to pay debts
• Assault rifles and handguns are being smuggled into Australia via shipments of electronics and metal parts.

Of course, 99 shootings is a bad summer weekend in Chicago, but we do feel Australia’s pain.

As we have seen repeatedly, laws restrict only the honest people. The criminals, who cheerfully move millions of tons illegal freight, whole warehouses of contraband, and entire armies of personnel, criminal immigrants and trafficking victims alike, worldwide, are not finding it too much of a challenge, to move some 8-pound rifles and 2-pound pistols.

The Bronze’s answer? More laws against more stuff, because people are not impressed by the extant skein of laws.

[T]he state government is planning to introduce new criminal offences for drive-by shootings, manufacturing of firearms with new technologies such as 3D printers, and more police powers to keep weapons out of the hands of known criminals.

Now, the State Government of South Australia is a matter for the South Australians themselves, and not to be made idle sport of by distant Yanks, but we do seem to remember it is the very same government whose brilliant energy policy, based upon wind power, recently left the citizens without electricity for days on end, due to the fickle winds not responding to the magical incantations of the SA politicians. No doubt they will pass some law against the wind, or perhaps the want of wind, and it shall have as much effect as these well-meant but ill-considered gun laws.

And then there’s this finding:

The majority of firearm-related crimes are committed by those aged 20 to 34 – almost 1500 offenders were recorded for this age group last year, more than two-and-a-half times the number five years ago, according to the Crime Statistics Agency.

Gee, most criminals are young men. Who knew? We mean, aside from every criminological text, study and paper ever penned since the monographs of Sherlock Holmes. (In fact, a disproportionate percentage are young minority men, but The Age is a bit too PC to follow that thread). It never ceases to amaze us that reporters will still write about a discovery like this as if it were news. In other news, studies have determined that the majority of water is wet.

The part about smuggling is worth quoting at length. First, they try to blame legitimate owners:

2014, Australia reached a disturbing milestone – the moment when there were more legally-owned firearms in the country than before the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre.

The national gun buyback scheme launched by then Prime Minister John Howard led to the voluntary surrender of more than 700,000 firearms, but more than a million new weapons have been legally imported since.

But then they admit that the problem may lie elsewhere.

But the “diversion” of newly imported weapons – either through theft or illegal sale – is one of the biggest sources of black-market firearms, a senior law enforcement source says.

Despite Australia’s strict border controls, the smuggling of high-powered military-style firearms is also a growing problem, particularly with the country’s reliance on shipping by sea cargo and the rise of the so-called “dark web”.

Australia is a nation with no land borders anywhere, and no significant domestic firearms industry. If gun control was going to work anywhere, it would work here.

The investigation of an armed robbery of an armoured car outside a Sunbury McDonald’s last year revealed the arsenal of powerful weapons now in the hands of local criminals.

Victoria Police raids on the crew allegedly responsible for the $290,000 theft uncovered a cache of military-style weapons, including a US-made M16 assault rifle and a Thureon machine gun – a firearm never before seen in Australia. Thureons would be used in other crimes over the next year.

That bust led to the seizure of six fully-automatic assault rifles and 96 handgun frames in the US, and dozens of machine gun and handgun parts, and 10 kilograms of ammunition, in Victoria and NSW.

The raids came from the formation of a special state, national and international task force known as Operation Ironsight.

Police admitted they had only recovered four of the 11 assault rifles believed to have been smuggled into the country.

The weapons that were seized in the US were set to be smuggled into Australia in the false bottom of a shipping container. Gun components can be extremely difficult to detect when mixed with metal objects or car parts, sources say.

Given that only a fraction of sea cargo can be physically examined at the point of import, law enforcement and border authorities are deeply concerned about the vulnerability of Australia’s docks and freight terminals.

Joint operations between the AFP and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have also intercepted a high-powered handgun concealed inside an Xbox console and parts for an assault rifle hidden in a DVD player. Both were ordered by Australians through a black market website and shipped by post from the southern United States.

Why do criminals risk prison to smuggle these goods? We would say, based on our studies of insurgency logistics (which have some similarities to criminal organization logistics), that there are several factors.

1. They are highly motivated to acquire firearms;
2. Smuggling is usually effective. Most smuggled goods get through (drug agencies have long suggested 90%) and many, if not most, smugglers are never caught;
3. Rewards are immediate, certain, and significant. Punishment is delayed, uncertain, and often less significant (in the value system of a criminal);
4. A low level of smuggling suffices;
5. The flow of cargo can’t be interrupted and can’t be inspected, only spot-checked or inspected in the event of a tip-off or surveillance-driven break;

However firearms get onto the black market, the trade can prove very lucrative for the organised crime groups that control it.

A brand-new Glock semi-automatic pistol purchased for $700 from a legal firearms dealer in the United States will fetch $8000 to $12,000 on the streets of Melbourne.

The economics of clandestine production are similarly attractive, of course. And the more pressure the police apply, the better the economics get, for the 90% (or whatever the number actually is) of criminals that do not get caught.

Ten or twenty years from now, most Australians will not be committing crimes, and a small minority of Australians will, just like any other nation. And in neither case will the Australian gun laws be a major factor.

Politics, n. From Greek poly-, “many,” and ticks, “small bloodsucking arthropods.” – Ed.

First, the good news: Fidel Castro is still dead, getting the guided tour of Hades from Che, and his “revolution,” which yielded a primitive absolute monarchy in all but name, is at death’s door. His elderly, sickly brother is soon to check out himself, and the next generation’s pampered family members being weaker of character than the crowned heads of Europe in 1914, Cuba may soon be a republic in more than just name.

Second, the bad news: the brothers Castro have no end of admirers in the Western elite, probably for their raw and brutal exercise of power rather than despite it. There are no end of fawning articles, to the point where they make the groveling Justin Trudeau look skeptical; we were reading one about “Fidel Castro and the Jews” that proclaimed him the great protector of Cuba’s Israelite diaspora, despite having driven over 90% of them into exile, the remaining handful into poverty (like everyone else), and sponsoring and arming anti-Israel and anti-Semitic terrorism globally. But the (presumably Jewish) author of the piece seemed to think he was great for the Jews. By that standard, you might as well call Hitler “rabbi.”

Just ’cause a guy hates Christians, doesn’t mean he’s good for Jews. That’s not how atheistic Communism works, kid.

Anyway, now that we’ve established (or really, a half-century of other, better writers have established) that Castro was bad for believers, unless the godhead they believed in was him, we might as well do like all those Woody Allen type New York nebbishes do, and write about, “Was he good for us?” By “us,” of course, meaning the People of the Gun. And the answer, of course, is, “Hell, no.” Here’s Larry Pratt at GOA, eight years ago (bold is our emphasis):

A look at the history of Cuba should make us run screaming in terror from anything smacking of socialism. Brain surgeon Miguel Faria has laid it all out for those who will check out his book Cuba in Revolution.

Faria is a refugee from Fidel Castro’s socialist “paradise.” He still has family trapped inside that socialist island prison — a prison that has imposed draconian gun controls throughout the island. Any prison will attempt to achieve total control of guns and restrict their possession to just the guards. Well, it turns out that the most effective tool for gun control in Cuba is the poverty spawned by socialism. Nobody can afford a gun.

Communist Cuba offers an interesting parallel to Nazi Germany. Both Hitler’s Germany and Castro’s Cuba were preceded by regimes that imposed gun control to keep guns out of the wrong hands. In both cases, gun control failed to keep the bad guys from getting all the guns they wanted and using them to consolidate their grip on power following seizure of the reins of government.

Hitler took several years to disarm the populationusing gun registration lists, but Castro moved against private gun ownership the second day he was in power. He sent his thugs throughout the island using the gun registry lists — compiled by the preceding Batista regime — to confiscate the people’s firearms. Different tactics, same objective. A defenseless people don’t give the all-wise leader any lip.,

So, perhaps you see American gun controllers as potential Castros, who lust for power. Some of them certainly are (Charles Schumer, come on down!). But many of your opponents in this are people of good will who happen to dislike guns and find blaming the firearm more psychologically comforting than facing the unpleasant fact that real evil walks in the world. It is no accident that there is a strong correlation between gun control and atheism, because true evil is more easily and clearly understood by people with a theistic viewpoint. (That is not to say that all atheists are anti-gun, not by a long shot. A pro-gun position can be reached by pure reason).

But while thinking gun rights supporters believe that opponents may ave committed an error of reasoning, gun rights opponents, often deprived by their atheism of any ability to understand true evil, reach a conclusion that our opposition is somehow the product of paid activity. So professional career left-wing and anti-gun PR executive Shannon Watts, a paid agent of Bloomberg,, often accuses her opponents of being paid by the NRA (dang, where’s my check? I pay them) and the NRA being paid and controlled by the gun manufacturers, because that’s the only way that they can understand people being so “wrong” as we are. Alternatively, they use the rubbery terms of the squishy semi-science of psychology to suggest we’re ill.

It so turns out that, in that, too, the psychological denormalization of dissent, there’s a parallel with Castroism. Pratt again:

Another parallel between Cuba and Nazi Germany is the prostitution of psychiatry. Psychiatrists were willing tools of the Nazi regime to “diagnose” opponents as mentally ill. Cuba is no different. And the mental hospitals are horror chambers where victims of the Castro thugocracy are drugged into submission. Alternately, they are electro shocked into compliance.

Of course, if you’re a religious believer, you probably already are using a handy bin your faith provides — “evil” — to classify folks like the billionaire brothers Castro.

But their motivations matter only to the extent that understanding them is useful for defeating them. Because their defeat is a necessary precondition to the survival and success of that greatest of human conditions, liberty.

¡Viva Libertad! ¡Viva Cuba Libre! ¡Viva Brigada 2506!

As long-time readers know, we maintained a strict no-politics position for the first year or so of the blog. In the aftermath of a gigantic press by the President/media/billionaire-hireling contingent for more gun bans after the shooting of children by a nut case in Newtown, CT (who had got the guns by murdering his own mother), we’ve backslid on that quite a bit and occasionally let slip pro-gun political commentary. (Here. On Gab we’re politically unrestrained). We frankly prefer not to do it, and instead of talking politics we’d rather be geeking out over historic firearms and obscure events in military history, as well as expressing some SF Pride that has nothing to do with rainbow flags and quarterback manqué Colin Kaepernick on one hand, or grown men who dress up as Klingons or Wookiees on the other. NTTAWWT.

But this article is a bit of political, policy, and legal history. From time to time we marvel at the great strides that gun and self-defense rights in the USA (and, slowly, worldwide) have taken in our own lifetime. As long-term readers know, just 30 years ago most US states were quite restrictive on handgun carry (yes, you couldn’t get a permit in Texas, of all places). Gradually laws liberalized, and states went from can’t carry to can-with-permission-we-might-give-ya to mandatory-permission to, in almost 10 states now, your rights as a free man or women being permission enough. There is more to do, but history is moving in our direction.

History does not move, like an army, on its belly. It moves on ideas, on philosophy, and culture. Before every trend in today’s world, positive, negative or just plain sick, was a trend in the law, it was a trend in the culture, and before that it was an idea — which brings us back to the law. A few years before Florida opened the political movement towards shall-issue permits, it was an idea in the legal academy. Two things published this month should help you understand the genesis and growth of this idea.

The first is this obituary of legal scholar Don Kates, by legal scholar Gene Volokh. If you slipped a gun in your holster this morning, and you are not a servant of the State, you owe a debt to Kates, whether you have heard of him or not. With his passing, many law professors have expressed astonishment that one man could have been so influential in America’s understanding of fundamental laws and principles — when he, himself, was not a law professor. Whether that says more about Kates or about the self-regard of law professors is an exercise we’re pleased to leave to the reader.

The second is Nelson Lund’s analysis of the history of understanding the Second Amendment in the context of exceptional American liberties. It is abstracted on this page at Heritage, where you may also download the whole .pdf (highly in the context of exceptional American liberties.recommended). Proof of Lund’s genius is the degree to which he agrees with us. From the page:

Despite persistent elite enthusiasm for disarmament schemes, both the law and public policy have moved in the opposite direction during recent decades. Two developments stand out.

• In the 1980s, a tiny group of lawyers began to publish scholarly analyses debunking the dismissive interpretation of the Second Amendment that dominated courts in the 20th century. Notably, almost none of this pioneering scholarship was carried out by professional academics in the law schools.[8]
• In 1987, Florida became the first jurisdiction with large urban population centers to enact a statute permitting almost all law-abiding adults to obtain a concealed-carry license. Notwithstanding near-hysterical prophecies from many police chiefs and other putative experts, violent crime went down instead of up, and license holders almost never misused their weapons.[9] Florida’s successful experiment soon spread to other states, and social scientists have yet to find evidence of adverse effects on public safety.[10] It is now harder than it once was to stampede legislatures into enacting feel-good gun-control measures that do nothing to reduce crime.

As Lund makes clear, this whole thing is not inevitable, and it requires continued effort by those supporters of human rights and self-defense in the academy, the culture, politics, and the public to continue to improve this situation. He also illustrates how the homogeneous political elite, the Acela Corridor aristos, of both parties and all political flavors tend to bias against this right. It’s a most worthwhile document; to Lund from Kates’s failing hands falls  the torch of liberty, unextinguished.

May it long be a light for the world.