ACLU: Unhappy with Background Checks in Potential Reid Gun Control Bill

The ACLU talks some sense about gun control, civil liberties,
and privacy, as
reported by Daily Caller:

As Senate Democrats struggle to build support for new gun
control legislation, the American Civil Liberties Union now says
it’s among those who have “serious concerns” about the
bill....

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller, a top lobbyist
for the ACLU announced that the group thinks Reid’s current gun
bill could threaten both privacy rights and civil liberties.

The inclusion of universal background checks — the poll-tested
lynchpin of most Democratic proposals — “raises two significant
concerns,” the ACLU’s Chris Calabrese told TheDC Wednesday.

While not against background checks in all cases, Calabrese
says:

“However, we also believe those checks have to be conducted in a
way that protects privacy and civil liberties. So, in that regard,
we think the current legislation, the current proposal on
universal background checks raises two significant concerns,” he
went on.

“The first is that it treats the records for private purchases
very differently than purchases made through licensed sellers.
Under existing law, most information regarding an
approved purchase is destroyed within 24 hours when a licensed
seller does a [National Instant Criminal Background Check System]
check now,” Calabrese said, “and almost all of it is destroyed
within 90 days.”

Calabrese wouldn’t characterize the current legislation’s
record-keeping provision as a “national gun registry” — which the
White House has denied pursuing — but he did say that such a
registry could be “a second step.”

He notes that government databases sometimes stretch in use
beyond their original intent.

Calabrese says that [Nevada Democratic Senate leader Harry]
Reid’s legislation fails to include...“privacy best practices.”

“Contrast this with what the existing [Reid] legislation says,
which is simply that a record has to be kept of a private
transfer,” Calabrese highlighted, “and it doesn’t have any of the
protections that we have in current law
for existing licensees.”

“We think that that kind of record-keeping requirement could
result in keeping long-term detailed records of purchases and
creation of a new government database.”

“And they come to use databases for all sorts of
different purposes,” Calabrese said. “For example, the
National Counterterrorism Center recently gave itself the
authority to collect all kinds of existing federal databases
and performed terrorism related searches regarding those databases.
They essentially exempted themselves from a lot of existing Privacy
Act protections.”....

Reid’s legislation is hauntingly vague about who would
physically keep information about American gun purchases, but it’s
crystal clear that records will be kept.

While I'd rather the ACLU consistently take on gun laws head-on
as restrictions on an explicit constitutional civil liberty, it's
nice to see they care.

Read More

4 More Ways Obama's Gun Control Speech Sows Mistrust

As I
noted earlier today, President Obama professes to be worried
about a lack of trust and empathy in the gun control debate, even
as he accuses his opponents of blocking life-saving legislation out
of sheer partisan perversity. Here are a few other ways in which
Obama's speech in
Denver sows mistrust:

He conflates a failed background check with stopping a
criminal from obtaining a gun.  "Over the past 20
years," Obama says, "background checks have kept more than 2
million dangerous people from buying a gun." That claim is based on
two faulty assumptions: 1) that everyone who fails a background
check is dangerous, which plainly is not true, given the
ridiculously broad categories of people who are legally barred
from buying firearms, and 2) that a criminal intent on obtaining a
weapon will give up if he cannot get it over the counter at a gun
store, rather than enlisting a straw buyer or turning to the gray
or black market.

He falsely equates "assault weapons" with military
guns. Obama inaccurately calls one of the guns used
in the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, massacre an "assault rifle," which is
a military weapon capable of firing automatically. He calls the
guns he wants to ban "weapons of war," again implying that they
fire continuously, when in fact they fire once per trigger pull,
like any other semi-automatic firearm.

He says there is no logical connection between
"universal background checks" and gun registration. "We're
not proposing a gun registration system," Obama insists. "We’re
proposing background checks for criminals." But there is no way to
enforce a background-check requirement for every gun transfer
unless the government knows where the guns are. Federally licensed
gun dealers are readily identified and can be required to keep sale
records. Individual gun owners who might dare to sell their
property without clearance from the government cannot be identified
unless the government compiles a list of them. Hence Obama's
assurances amount to saying, "Don't worry. We will make a big show
of passing this new background-check mandate, but we won't really
enforce it."

He pooh-poohs the idea that there could ever be anything
adversarial about the relationship between Americans and their
government:

You hear some of these quotes: "I need a gun to protect myself
from the government." "We can't do background checks because the
government is going to come take my guns away." 

Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you.
(Applause.) They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am
constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders
put in place. It's a government of and by and for the people.

One of the constraints on the federal government is the doctrine
of enmuerated powers, which says every act of Congress must be
justified by a specific constitutional grant of authority. Where is
the clause that empowers Congress to say how many rounds you can
put in a magazine or whether your rifle can have a barrel shroud?
Furthermore, as Obama surely has heard by now, there is this thing
called the Second Amendment, and it is hardly frivolous to argue
than an arbitrary and capricious piece of legislation like the
"assault weapon" ban Obama supports would violate the
constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Yet to Obama's mind,
anyone who makes such an argument is one of those "people who take
absolute positions" and therefore can be safely ignored. After all,
the government is us. 

Read More

ACLU: Unhappy with Background Checks in Potential Reid Gun Control Bill

The ACLU talks some sense about gun control, civil liberties,
and privacy, as
reported by Daily Caller:

As Senate Democrats struggle to build support for new gun
control legislation, the American Civil Liberties Union now says
it’s among those who have “serious concerns” about the
bill....

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller, a top lobbyist
for the ACLU announced that the group thinks Reid’s current gun
bill could threaten both privacy rights and civil liberties.

The inclusion of universal background checks — the poll-tested
lynchpin of most Democratic proposals — “raises two significant
concerns,” the ACLU’s Chris Calabrese told TheDC Wednesday.

While not against background checks in all cases, Calabrese
says:

“However, we also believe those checks have to be conducted in a
way that protects privacy and civil liberties. So, in that regard,
we think the current legislation, the current proposal on
universal background checks raises two significant concerns,” he
went on.

“The first is that it treats the records for private purchases
very differently than purchases made through licensed sellers.
Under existing law, most information regarding an
approved purchase is destroyed within 24 hours when a licensed
seller does a [National Instant Criminal Background Check System]
check now,” Calabrese said, “and almost all of it is destroyed
within 90 days.”

Calabrese wouldn’t characterize the current legislation’s
record-keeping provision as a “national gun registry” — which the
White House has denied pursuing — but he did say that such a
registry could be “a second step.”

He notes that government databases sometimes stretch in use
beyond their original intent.

Calabrese says that [Nevada Democratic Senate leader Harry]
Reid’s legislation fails to include...“privacy best practices.”

“Contrast this with what the existing [Reid] legislation says,
which is simply that a record has to be kept of a private
transfer,” Calabrese highlighted, “and it doesn’t have any of the
protections that we have in current law
for existing licensees.”

“We think that that kind of record-keeping requirement could
result in keeping long-term detailed records of purchases and
creation of a new government database.”

“And they come to use databases for all sorts of
different purposes,” Calabrese said. “For example, the
National Counterterrorism Center recently gave itself the
authority to collect all kinds of existing federal databases
and performed terrorism related searches regarding those databases.
They essentially exempted themselves from a lot of existing Privacy
Act protections.”....

Reid’s legislation is hauntingly vague about who would
physically keep information about American gun purchases, but it’s
crystal clear that records will be kept.

While I'd rather the ACLU consistently take on gun laws head-on
as restrictions on an explicit constitutional civil liberty, it's
nice to see they care.

Read More

4 More Ways Obama's Gun Control Speech Sows Mistrust

As I
noted earlier today, President Obama professes to be worried
about a lack of trust and empathy in the gun control debate, even
as he accuses his opponents of blocking life-saving legislation out
of sheer partisan perversity. Here are a few other ways in which
Obama's speech in
Denver sows mistrust:

He conflates a failed background check with stopping a
criminal from obtaining a gun.  "Over the past 20
years," Obama says, "background checks have kept more than 2
million dangerous people from buying a gun." That claim is based on
two faulty assumptions: 1) that everyone who fails a background
check is dangerous, which plainly is not true, given the
ridiculously broad categories of people who are legally barred
from buying firearms, and 2) that a criminal intent on obtaining a
weapon will give up if he cannot get it over the counter at a gun
store, rather than enlisting a straw buyer or turning to the gray
or black market.

He falsely equates "assault weapons" with military
guns. Obama inaccurately calls one of the guns used
in the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, massacre an "assault rifle," which is
a military weapon capable of firing automatically. He calls the
guns he wants to ban "weapons of war," again implying that they
fire continuously, when in fact they fire once per trigger pull,
like any other semi-automatic firearm.

He says there is no logical connection between
"universal background checks" and gun registration. "We're
not proposing a gun registration system," Obama insists. "We’re
proposing background checks for criminals." But there is no way to
enforce a background-check requirement for every gun transfer
unless the government knows where the guns are. Federally licensed
gun dealers are readily identified and can be required to keep sale
records. Individual gun owners who might dare to sell their
property without clearance from the government cannot be identified
unless the government compiles a list of them. Hence Obama's
assurances amount to saying, "Don't worry. We will make a big show
of passing this new background-check mandate, but we won't really
enforce it."

He pooh-poohs the idea that there could ever be anything
adversarial about the relationship between Americans and their
government:

You hear some of these quotes: "I need a gun to protect myself
from the government." "We can't do background checks because the
government is going to come take my guns away." 

Well, the government is us. These officials are elected by you.
(Applause.) They are elected by you. I am elected by you. I am
constrained, as they are constrained, by a system that our Founders
put in place. It's a government of and by and for the people.

One of the constraints on the federal government is the doctrine
of enmuerated powers, which says every act of Congress must be
justified by a specific constitutional grant of authority. Where is
the clause that empowers Congress to say how many rounds you can
put in a magazine or whether your rifle can have a barrel shroud?
Furthermore, as Obama surely has heard by now, there is this thing
called the Second Amendment, and it is hardly frivolous to argue
than an arbitrary and capricious piece of legislation like the
"assault weapon" ban Obama supports would violate the
constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Yet to Obama's mind,
anyone who makes such an argument is one of those "people who take
absolute positions" and therefore can be safely ignored. After all,
the government is us. 

Read More

Obama: Nancy Pelosi As Speaker Of The House Would Make My Job A Lot Easier

President Barack Obama heaped praise on Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) Wednesday during a San Francisco fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, making it clear that he had a strong interest in helping Democrats regain control of the House in order to give Pelosi the speakership again.

"My job is to make sure we move the country forward, and I think we can best do that if Nancy Pelosi is speaker of the House once again," Obama said, explaining his belief that she supported a number of broad second-term policy goals that have already been waylaid by partisan division in Congress.

Obama went on to lay out a laundry list of agenda items, from gun control, to early childhood education, to climate change and patching up the nation's cracking infrastructure, conceding that they weren't always politically popular.

Read More...
More on Barack Obama

Read More

3D Printing Will Make Gun Control Laws Irrelevant, J.D. Tuccille Tells RT America

Yesterday, RT America ran a
report on the impact of 3D printing on the debate over firearms and
gun control laws. RT's Marina Portnaya interviewed me for the
report, and I told her
what I've written

before: 3D printing has the ability to decentralize
manufacturing to the DIY level and thereby render legal
restrictions irrelevant. If prohibited or restricted items can be
created in the privacy of your home or office, the law doesn't
matter. We also discussed chemical printing and CNC machines, but
as is often the case, only a brief bit on 3D printing made it into
the report, There's no
embeddable version available The embedded video is below, or
you can see it
here. My contribution begins at the 3:00 mark.

Read More

The 8 Best Smart TVs You Can Buy

Smart TVs have become more prevalent as the technology becomes cheaper and more widely available.& These are web-connected TVs that come prepackaged with apps and streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, meaning you don't need to buy a separate box like an Apple TV or Roku. Just about every major manufacturers has its own take on a Smart TV.& We rounded up our favorites here.

The Samsung LED F8000 is one of the company's flagship models for 2013

Samsung recently announced its 2013 line up of Smart TVs. Samsung's Smart TV technology is some of the most advanced around.&Users can interact with their television using voice, gestures, or the remote control. But what really makes Samsung's 2013 models stand out is built-in software called S Recommendation that helps you find shows to watch and the integrated web cameras and sensors for motion and voice control. Price:&The LED F8000 comes in three sizes: 46 inches, 55 inches, and 65 inches, and are&priced at, $2,199, $2,699, and $2,999, respectively.

Samsung's 2013 Plasma Smart TV is the company's other flagship.

Samsung's other 2013 flagship TV, is the the F8500 Plasma.& Samsung promises the F8500 will offer the ultimate picture quality with the deepest blacks and the brightest picture available. "The F8500 delivers the same brightness levels and eight times the black expression of regular LED TVs, thanks to new luminance enhancements and Samsung’s proprietary Deep Black Algorithm and Real Black Pro II for improved black expression,"&according to Mark Hodgkinson. But besides hardware features, the F8500 is also packed with all of Samsung's current SmartTV software. Users will have access to the SmartHub, five panels that show: what's on TV, Movies & TV Shows, Photos, Videos, and Music, Social, and Apps. Besides these intuitive hubs, the television can give viewers recommendations tailored to what they like and you can speak with it telling it to change the channel to ESPN for example. You'll be able to buy it at the end of March. Price: The set comes in two sizes: 60 inches and 64 inches, and sells for $3,199 and $3,699, respectively.

LG's 60-inch 3D LED SmartTV is easy to set up and comes with a "Magic Remote"

LG's Smart TVs are some of the most advanced around. Each set has built-in WiFi and comes with LG's Magic Remote Control. The Magic Remote Control allows you to simply wave and click while browsing the Internet or using the LG Dashboard that manages apps and content. Price: Currently on sale at Best Buy $1,299.99

See the rest of the story at Business Insider Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

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