Gun Maker to Eric Holder: If You Try to Mandate My Smart-gun Technology, I’ll Burn it Down

National Review has this article today by Frank Miniter that describes an April 13, 2013 meeting between U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and W. P. Gentry, president of Kodiak Arms.  Gentry told Holder about technology his company had been working on called the Intelligun.  Gentry showed Holder how the "smart gun" technology he had been developing worked.  He told Miniter:

“This interested Eric Holder,” Gentry says. “He wondered how we might be able to control who was or wasn’t authorized. I stopped him right there. I looked right across a table at Eric Holder — yeah, the attorney general of the United States — and told him, ‘If you try to mandate my smart-gun technology, I’ll burn it down.’ The Intelligun is designed to save lives, not restrict freedom.”

Gentry told Miniter that the meeting ended after that exchange.

Something you won't here from the mainstream media, but that Miniter pointed out, manufacturers (and the NRA) aren't against the technology.  They just want the market, not the government to dictate when it is available.  The problem is that the government keeps getting in the way:

If he can keep the government out of the way, Gentry says, he sees a lot of possibilities for the technology. Theoretically, a villain couldn’t take a gun from a police officer or armed citizen and then use that gun — as the Navy Yard killer did. Also, a parent would have another safety mechanism to help prevent a child from firing a self-defense gun.

Unlike the Armatix "smart gun" the Intelligun doesn't rely on sending a signal to a bracelet or other device worn by the gun owner.  The best way to describe it, it's kind of like installing grips similar to those with Crimson Trace laser sites.  You install a conversion kit (currently on a 1911 pistol), changing out the grips and the mainspring.  It  doesn’t read a person’s fingerprints but instead takes a series of photos of a person’s fingertips and overlaps them. The sensor then looks for enough points that match an algorithm.  Gentry expects to have the technology ready for other popular models within the next year.

Bob Marshall Makes National Review's Bad Primary Candidates List

It's primary season and National Review Online had this article by John Fund yesterday on a couple of tea party aligned candidates that Fund considers to be disasters for the GOP if they win their nomination contests.  Virginia's own Delegate Bob Marshall (R-Prince William) makes the list.

Marshall is currently one of several candidates hoping to replace retiring 10th District Congressman Frank Wolf.  The so-called GOP establishment has circled the wagons around Delegate Barbara Comstock.  But Comstock is no RINO (Republican in Name Only), which is usually who Tea Party aligned candidates target.  Comstock has an "A" rating from the NRA, and beat back a Bloomberg funded candidate to win reelection in Northern Virginia in 2013.  She has also secured the endorsement of conservative radio talk show host Mark Levin, no fan of the GOP establishment and a big fan of the Tea Party, and movement conservatives like Morton Blackwell.

There is a "fire house" primary scheduled for Saturday, April 26 to decide the GOP nominee.  While not a party convention that usually only the most dedicated activists attend, a fire house primary still has lower turn out than an actual primary.  Fund notes that Marshall has performed well in these low turnout environments in the past, like in 2008, when he lost a U.S. Senate primary to former governor and NRA Board member Jim Gilmore by just 66 votes out of more than 10,300 votes cast at a state GOP convention. And that could be the problem.  If he wins there will be a lot of past statements that Democrats will use against Delegate Marshall:

Marshall’s problem is that his extreme rhetoric marks him as easy prey for Democratic attack ads in November. In my view, he is a dead-weight loser — and I almost never reach such a conclusion about a conservative candidate in a competitive district.

Last Thursday, the Washington Times did an analysis of his record and noted that “Marshall has said disabled children can be God’s vengeance against women who have had abortions.” Indeed, in 2010, Marshall spoke at a rally calling for an end to state funding of Planned Parenthood. “When you abort the firstborn of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children,” he claimed. “This is a special punishment, Christians would suggest.”

After an uproar, Marshall waited five days to offer a quasi-apology, saying he had been misconstrued. But days after this walkback, he took to the House floor and claimed his statement had “been repeated endless times in print and in the electronic media without anyone producing the smoking-gun tape.” In reality, his words had been posted on YouTube for several days and can still be found there.

“He’s Todd Akin on steroids,” adds one Northern Virginia conservative activist who has endorsed no one for the seat. He noted that after last year’s Supreme Court decision striking down a gay-marriage ban in California, Marshall said, “For all I know, [Justice Anthony] Kennedy is a homosexual.” When asked by the Washington Times about his comment, he defended it: “Clearly, some of the people making these decisions must be rationalizing their own bad behavior.” Justice Kennedy, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, has been married for 51 years and has five children.

Marshall has support from the Tea Party in his home county.  The fact that tea party booster Mark Levin is on Comstock's side, may be what she needs to overcome Marshall's claims that she is not conservative enough.  Anyone who has listened to Levin knows he is not going to support a squish.  In the end however, she has to turn out more people than the other candidates on April 26.

A Great Profile of Remington and the New York Town in Which it is Based

Charles Cooke of National Review has this great profile of the firearm manufacturer that has a long history in the New York town in which it is based. It's a good read.

National Review Profile of Creigh Deeds

Jim Geraghty has a profile of Democratic Candidate for Governor Creigh Deeds today on National Review Online. He details how Deeds' rural background and his campaigning as a moderate is sometimes at odds with reality. In other words, Deeds sometimes appears to swerve away from principle when it serves his political ambitions. For instance:

More fundamentally, Deeds’s perception of what’s best for his district shifted dramatically leftward when he started preparing to run for governor. He knew that to win the Democratic primary, he would have to appeal to voters in the significantly more liberal northern suburbs. During his run for attorney general in 2005, by contrast, he won the nomination without a primary, so he could tailor his message for a bipartisan statewide audience all along. Deeds’s ads that year touted his "conservative values”: teaching abstinence before marriage and fidelity within marriage as “moral obligations and not matters of personal opinion or personal choice”; putting before the voters a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage; broadly defined Second Amendment rights; and a ban on partial-birth abortion. Now he says supporting the gay-marriage vote was “a mistake,” he opposes all limits on abortion, and he supports closing the “gun show loophole” on firearms sales, citing the Virginia Tech shootings — even though the shooter in that tragedy did not purchase his weapons at a gun show, so even if the proposed restriction had been in effect, it would not have prevented the massacre. It is unlikely that the Creigh Deeds of 2005 would recognize the Creigh Deeds of 2009, much less vote for him.

SurveyUSA released poll results yesterday showing Republican Bob McDonnell with a 15 point lead. I am a little skeptical of the poll results as this is the same poll that showed McCain beating Obama in Virginia last year. And remember, Deeds was far behind the pack in the primary before winning 50% of the vote in a three way race.

There is a long time between now and November 3rd.

E. J. Dionne's Snarky Guns in the Capitol Column

On Monday, the E. J. Dionne, Jr had a snarky little column in the Washington Post titled Arm the Senate. In this column the opines about the hypocrisy of the Senate because guns are banned at the Capitol but a bipartisan majority of the members voted for the Thune Amendment on National Concealed Carry Reciprocity allowing individuals who have concealed carry permits to be able to carry across state lines. People carrying concealed from one state to another would have to abide by the laws in the state in which they are carrying regarding where they can carry etc. Many of the Senators including Virginia's Jim Webb stated this is would help deter crime.

Dionne writes:

If they believe that, why don't they live by it?

Why would freedom-loving lawmakers want to hide behind guards and metal detectors? Shouldn't NRA members be outraged that Second Amendment rights mean nothing in the very seat of our democracy?

Dionne's article prompted Martina Leinz, President of the Northern Virginia Chapter of the Million Mom March, to write the usual rant against the NRA and the so-called "gun show loophole" in a letter to the editor published yesterday:

At gun shows in Virginia, and other states, private sellers aren't required to conduct background checks, so anyone can purchase anything, even high-powered assault weapons, no questions asked. Congress has failed to close the gun-show loophole, and pro-gun Republicans and Democrats alike continually try, at the NRA's urging, to repeal sensible measures such as outlawing guns on college campuses, in bars and in national parks.

I did not post about this article on Monday because it was typical Dionne and Washington Post tripe but I ran across the Leinz LTE and a good rebuttal on National Review Online, so I thought I would take a moment to share the rebuttal as well as the Dionne piece for context.

On the Corner blog at NRO, Ramesh Ponnuru wrote:

It is a clever idea for a column, and it took me a little while to think through why I think Dionne's logic is unsound. But unsound I think it is. I think supporters of conceal carry can readily concede that a regime of metal detectors and armed officers trained to protect people and surrounding the workplace is superior to conceal carry as a way of protecting congressmen and their staff. But 1) nobody is proposing to implement such a regime for every 7-11 clerk working the night shift somewhere in this country, 2) doing so would be impractical, and 3) doing so would come with non-monetary costs that we are prepared to pay in the case of Congress but not for society generally.

The hypocrisy of the ant-rights crowd, especially those in the elected class, is to try and disarm people like you and me all the while they have armed guards and security. At least a bipartisan majority in the Senate understand that the rest of us have a right to protect ourselves and our families while the elected elite are protected by security guards.