I'd appreciate your thoughts on a photo I ran across...

What is meant by "Child-proof" anyway?

In a recent post I directed you to read President-Elect Obama's plans for gun control. One of the measures he mentions is requiring "child-proofing". Having two young sons, I was immediately curious as to what was meant by this and how one would go about child-proofing a firearm. Here is the best explanation I found:

From keepandbeararms.com

In addition to laws aimed at suing gun owners who do not "safely" store their firearms (defined by the anti-gunners as unloaded, locked in a safe and separated from ammunition, i.e., useless for defense), four basic technologies are being promoted as "reasonable" precautions which need to be mandated by law: loaded chamber indicators, "child-resistant" triggers, locks, and "personalized" magnetic or electronic devices. Perhaps we would do well to explore these options, and see if it is really in the public interest to sue gun makers for not incorporating them into all of their designs.

The common factors shared by all of these devices are that they either interfere with the primary function of the gun, that is, to fire upon demand, or they are presented as acceptable substitutes for knowledge, responsibility, accountability and judgment. Bearing this in mind, don't be surprised to find that adding complexity to any mechanism can result in less, not more reliability and safety. But in the Newspeak of the gun prohibitionists, restraints are meant to enhance performance.

A loaded chamber indicator on a Beretta 92 Compact L did not stop 14-year-old Michael Soe from feloniously killing 15-year-old Kenzo Dix during a practical joke. The fact is, Soe's father left a loaded gun where an untrained, impulsive and judgmentally-challenged adolescent could find it. In their lawsuit, backed by CPHV, Dix's parents maintained, among other charges, that the chamber indicator was inadequate because the gun was not inscribed with a warning as well. Presumably, were Beretta to do so, they would still be deemed negligent for not including such warnings in Spanish, French, Mandarin Chinese and Tagalog.

"Child-proofing" a trigger means you make it harder to squeeze. This may, in fact, keep kids under two or three who live with total idiots from firing a gun left in their care. The increased trigger pressure will also make it a lot harder to hit what you intend to, increasing the chances of missing your target in a defensive situation and hitting something (or someone) else. And if old widowed Mom lives alone and has arthritis, forget a handgun as an option against things that go bump, smash, and slash in the night.

Locks come in two basic flavors, external, including lock boxes and trigger locks, or mechanisms built into the gun, as with Intraloc's new design. These can prevent a child from firing your gun, although some guns can fire when equipped with trigger locks, as proven in an NRA-conducted demonstration. The problem with both is, they give a criminal aggressor a head start in an attack, generally around 2 - 3 seconds (minimum) in an ideal laboratory setting, or, say, enough time for him to cross a room, hit or stab you several times, or empty a clip from his non-handicapped gun. Should the assailant not be considerate enough to attack you in a laboratory, you can add the factor of being roused from slumber, in the dark, fearful and trembling, and suddenly cognizant of the fact that if you mis-key the combination you can add at another 2 - 3 seconds or more to your defense; and if you mess up again with many models, you could be locked out for good.

Finally we come to the technology hailed by the rabidly anti-gun Los Angeles Times as the panacea which "shoots holes in (the) gun rift" and provides common ground to both sides in the gun debate: "personalized" firearms, or guns that only shoot if their owner is wearing a special ring. A quick rule of thumb- if the LA Times is for it, it must be bad for gun owners.

This technology is lauded not only as a solution to the accidental gun death problem, but as something that will especially protect police officers who have been disarmed by violent perps. It's also seen as the cure-all for stolen guns under the premise that these weapons will have no market value without a ring.

The two approaches currently touted are magnetic devices, such as Magloc's conversion kit, and Colt's prototype "smart gun", which activates its firing mechanism using radio-frequency technology developed by Sandia National Laboratories from a $620,000 National Institute of Justice grant.

One of the obvious flaws of relying on such gadgetry was pointed out by writer J. Neil Schulman, author of "Stopping Power- Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns" and "Self Control Not Gun Control" in a published rebuttal to The Times: "My usual firing hand might have been incapacitated...I might...need to pass my firearm to someone I trust. "

While Magloc claims to have a mechanism which disables the lock-out, activating it requires a conscious effort (and a distraction) on the part of the ring-wearer that he may or may not be capable of carrying out. It also presupposes that anyone who has allowed himself to be disarmed by an attacker has not also been effectively rendered vulnerable to whatever savagery the attacker brings to bear. And as for stolen "smart guns", keep in mind that what can be installed can be removed, and what can be circuited can be bypassed. Besides, rings (and fingers) can be removed.

Add to this a cost factor which will discriminate against Americans of modest means by denying them access to defensive weapons should such technology be required; Colt's "smart" technology will add around $300 to the price of their gun.

Still, ceding to rationality has never been the long suit of the gun ban crowd. Expect the New Orleans suit to press onward, as well as the suit against Beretta (their motion for dismissal was denied). On top of that, other cities are watching carefully, and contemplating similar lawsuits of their own, notably the birthplace of our Constitution, Philadelphia, where Mayor Ed Rendell wants to add the twist of penalizing gun manufacturers for the illegal purchase, possession and use of their products. Such a suit has already been brought at the federal level against Intratec after one of their pistols, traced back to a Mississippi pawnshop, was used to kill a Chicago police officer during an apartment break-in.

Look for legislation requiring that guns be "child-proofed", as has been introduced in New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Don't be surprised to see laws banning the sale of all "non-smart" firearms, as has been proposed by Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening.

And lest you think that only the manufacturers, retailers and trade associations are on the hook, be prepared for personal liability suits should a mishap occur with a gun from a private home that has not been stored "safely" according to what Bill Clinton means by "safe."

Interesting Blog

I was doing a little research for my next posting and ran across this blog. Check it out!

http://www.waronguns.blogspot.com/

Obama's plan for gun rights! You must follow this link!

The other day, Tom Gresham, host of Gun Talk Radio, spilled the beans about Obama's plans for gun control. The news had been put out by Obama's own transition team on their website. However, as the show was being broadcast and apparently as listeners were logging ontot the transition team website, the statements about gun control were pulled off the site!

Luckily for all of us, Tom Gresham saved the URL and snapshot of the site. Check out: http://74.125.45.104/search?q=cache:lZ5nLB1m2TMJ:www.change.gov/agenda/urbanpolicy/+gun+site:change.gov&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

Or you can go to Tom's page: http://www.guntalk.com/site.php?pageID=15&newsID=55

You have to read this to believe it!

Massad Ayoob on Ammo Selection

One of our greatest modern gun experts, Lt. Col. Jeff Cooper, USMC, Ret., once made the observation that the bullet is more important than the gun. The gun, he explained, is merely the launcher. It is the bullet that actually does the job.

This is true for an armed citizen’s home defense gun, as surely as it is for the battle weapon of one of Col. Cooper’s brother Marines. Ditto for the police officer’s ammunition. And ditto again for the bullet a rural American citizen uses to harvest game for the family table.

The military is bound by the codes of international warfare, going back to the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Accords, all of which predated napalm, chemical warfare, and the concept of thermonuclear war. Interestingly, the Judge Advocate General’s office has already determined that these restrictions apply to declared wars between recognized nation-states, not things like the current “war on terrorism,” but that’s another story.

The Geneva Conventions and Hague Accords require that the bullets used not be designed to expand. Essentially, they call for full metal jacket projectiles that just punch neat, clean holes through the bodies of enemy soldiers. Ironically, in the name of human decency, virtually every state in the union forbids the use of such ammunition against deer, bear, or other big game. The reason is that it tends to result in slow death and is not humane.

In warfare, the bullet that wounds an enemy soldier becomes a greater “force multiplier” than the one that kills him. A dead soldier means one less enemy. A wounded soldier means at least three less of the enemy: one down, and two more to carry him off the field of battle.
I am sure that this makes good sense to the generals behind the lines, and the bean counters behind them. However, the soldier who is bad breath distance away from an Al-Qaeda fanatic with an AK47 doesn’t just want his opposite number wounded, he wants him instantly out of the fight at the moment the bullet hits him.

Bullet has lodged in the translucent gelatin, leaving a “wound path” clearly visible behind it. Note that damage is greatest early in the path, before resistance has slowed the bullet and reduced its energy.

At this point, both the semantics and the ethics of the matter start to become complicated. No young man fighting for his country wants, when he thinks about it, to end the life of another young man fighting for his country. However, that young man desperately wants the other young man not to kill him or one of his comrades. Therefore, the job of the bullet he launches is instant incapacitation.

This may cause death. When you get into it deep enough, you realize that the righteous combatant does not shoot to kill, he shoots to stop. A mortal wound is not enough. Many an American soldier who was mortally wounded went on to kill so many of the enemy before he ran out of blood and died that the majority of those on the sacred list who won the Congressional Medal of Honor won it posthumously. Every combat soldier who fought in heavy battle can tell you stories of enemy soldiers who, wounded unto death, still took one or more Americans with them. These men had been killed, but not stopped.

In the big picture, the firearm is a tool. We homo sapiens are the tool-bearing mammal. We are also, ipso facto, the weapon-bearing mammal. We have become the dominant species—the alpha, the top predator if you will—because we have learned to tailor our tools to the given task.
Therefore, Logic 101 tells us, if we must tailor the tool to the task, and if the tool is the gun and we know that the gun’s bullet is more important than the gun itself, why, we realize with our superior human brains that selection of ammunition is absolutely critical.

The history of law enforcement ammunition selection is a good one to study because it encompasses all four of the basic models of selection that the civilian will have available. It is from experience that common sense is born, and the police sector has that experience.

Four models

There are essentially four models that police used for selection of ammunition over the years. They might be described as the Traditional Model, the Advertising Model, the Laboratory Model, and the Experiential Model.

Police calibers today, in order of popularity. .40 S&W is far and away the most used. .45 Auto and .357 SIG are increasing in popularity. 9mm use is waning greatly in law enforcement.
The Traditional Model was used for the first two thirds of the 20th Century—longer by some of the more institutionalized departments—and it failed miserably. The .38 Special revolver was the standard then, using 158-grain round-nose lead ammunition with a muzzle velocity of 755 feet per second, generating some 200 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle.

This ammunition, from the beginning, performed dismally at its intended purpose. The rounded tip of the bullet slipped through flesh with a wedge effect, leaving behind it a dimpled channel similar to an ice pick wound. It would kill, but slowly. However, it had little “stopping effect.” The round became known on the street as “the widow-maker,” because you could empty your gun into your attacker and he could still make your wife a widow before he went down. Because the bullet tended to go through and through, there was great danger of striking an unseen bystander behind the intended target with the exiting projectile. Because of its low energy, this same bullet that penetrated too much on humans penetrated too little on hard barriers, such as car doors and windows, often bouncing off a felon’s windshield.

In the late 1920s and the ‘30s, efforts were made to find something more powerful. These included the .38/44 round, simply a high velocity 158-grain .38 Special; the .38 Super Automatic from Colt, with a pointy nose 130-grain full metal jacket bullet at some 1200 foot per second, generating perhaps 420 foot-pounds of energy; and the .357 Magnum cartridge jointly introduced by Smith & Wesson (the gun) and Winchester-Western (the cartridge). In the Magnum, the 158-grain bullet was retained, but with a flat point and much greater velocity and energy.

These hotter loads were better man-stoppers if heavy bone was struck and shattered, or if the bullets hit a liquid part of the body, such as the brain or a full bladder. Otherwise, they simply zipped through the body with even more exit force than a .38 round nose, and most police chiefs banned them for fear of their corollary damage capability to bystanders.

The .38 Special round nose stayed dominant for the first two thirds of the 20th Century, simply because of tradition. “It’s what we’ve always had.” “We’ve always done it this way.” Not until the 1960s did things get better. Lee Jurras in Shelbyville, Indiana, founded the Super Vel ammunition company and produced a line of light weight, high velocity hollow point rounds. With these, the .38 Special now had an expanding bullet that would open up or “mushroom” in the body. It delivered much more “shock effect” and was much less likely to exit. It was also much less likely to ricochet, which round nose bullets were and are infamous for doing.
Accuracy is usually a welcome side benefit of purchasing premium ammunition.

Now was born the Experiential Model. Police departments that took the bold step of adopting the new ammo were inundated with queries from other agencies as to how it had performed. When learning of its highly satisfactory results, the inquiring agencies adopted it themselves.
With widespread adoption came more collective experience. Police had at last fallen back to their core competence—being trained investigators—and applied it to equipment selection. The result was much better ammunition and a quantum leap in both officer safety and public safety.

In the mid-1970s we saw the first large-scale application of the Laboratory Model. In what is now recognized as a classic example of junk science, the National Institute of Justice spent seven figures on a study to determine RII, or Relative Incapacitation Index, of handgun ammunition. Using an old formulation of ballistic gelatin as flesh simulant, the testers went on the assumption that whatever bullet created the greatest temporary cavity in the substance would deliver the greatest “stopping power” in living tissue. They then set about quantifying stopping power value, with tables that indicated the old .38 round nose might be a better stopper than the Army .45, and that a 9mm automatic with ball ammunition would be more potent than the .45. “Softnose” bullets received the same value as hollow points.

The expensively funded study had the prestige of the U.S. Government behind it, and departments flocked to buy ammunition that rated well in the RII studies. Unfortunately, they were doomed to disappointment.

The RII results flew in the face of three quarters of a century of observed reality. The first test of junk science versus real science is, “Do the results from the laboratory correlate with known factors from the field?” If they do not, we know something went wrong in the lab. Many of the hypothetical conclusions that the RII study put forth as written in stone were in fact 180 degrees off from a large body of observed reality. That early warning signal was ignored, and the results were tragic.

High tech bullets in premium ammunition are what most cops use today, and most hunters are going in the same direction. Top: Remington brass jacket Golden Saber, and Winchester’s SXT. Below: Federal’s proven .45 Hydra-Shok and Speer’s popular, effective Gold Dot bullet with bonded jacket and core.

Many of the quick-expanding bullets favored by the RII study would not penetrate deeply enough into a human body to reach the vital organs of a large man from certain angles. In Michigan, a policewoman fired two light, fast .38 hollow points into a gunman’s chest, and apparently believing that this had done the job, lowered her service revolver. Instead of collapsing, however, the assailant raised his gun and shot her in the head, killing her instantly. He survived to stand trial. In Miami, a bullet that had done well in the RII tests was fired into the chest of a gunman who, unfazed, then shot and killed the man who shot him and his partner, both FBI agents, and wounded several more agents before being killed by bullets in the head and neck.

This resulted in the FBI Wound Ballistics Workshop of 1988 in Quantico, Virginia. Among those present were Dr. Martin Fackler, head of wound ballistics research for the US Army’s medical training center, Letterman Institute. Fackler had developed an improved ballistic gelatin model that he had scientifically correlated to swine muscle tissue, which in turn is comparable to human muscle tissue. He hypothesized that wound depth was much more important than previously thought, and recommended ammunition that could send a bullet at least twelve inches into his ballistic gelatin.

The FBI agreed. By this point, the 9mm semiautomatic pistol had ascended to dominance over the six-shot service revolver in the police world, and the FBI adopted a heavy, slow moving 9mm bullet that weighed 147 grains and traveled at a subsonic velocity of less than 1000 feet per second.

Even this did not work terribly well. The bullet often went deep, but also frequently failed to expand reliably, and penetrated too far. Most departments that adopted it were so disappointed in the street results that they either changed ammunition or went to more powerful pistols.
Once-traditional 158 grain round nose lead .38 Special ammunition is now recognized as obsolete, and a poor choice for anything but target shooting.

Meanwhile, in a classic example of the Experiential Model, Detroit homicide detective Evan Marshall had begun a collection of thousands of police gunfight reports, and attempted to rate the stopping power of the ammunition used based on what actually happened in gunfights. He was soon joined by ballistic researcher Ed Sanow. In a separate study commissioned by the Police Marksman Association, Richard Fairburn analyzed gunfights submitted to his data base by various agencies, and his results were almost identical to those of Marshall and Sanow in identifying the best performing police handgun rounds.

Meanwhile, the Advertising Model—taking the manufacturer’s grandiose claims for having the newest and deadliest ammo at face value—had quickly failed. Winchester’s early Silvertip performed dismally in most handgun calibers, though it would later prove itself in subsequent generations of improved ammunition. Federal’s Hydra-Shok series worked superbly in .45 caliber, but performed less effectively with some smaller diameter bullets. The police soon learned to trust only the Laboratory and Experiential Models, preferably in combination.
Combined models

Experience has taught police that what actually happens on the street is more important than what happens in the artificial environment of the laboratory. The 9mm round now acknowledged to work the best is a 124-grain to 127-grain high tech hollow point at a velocity of 1250 feet per second. NYPD, with some 30,000 officers carrying this type of ammo, the Speer Gold Dot +P 124-grain, is happy with the performance of its 9mm service pistols. Ditto the Orlando, Florida, Police Department, which uses the Winchester Ranger 127-grain +P+ in their standard issue 9mm SIGs.

Most other departments have gone to more powerful rounds. The .40 S&W caliber is the overwhelming top choice of police departments today, followed by the .357 SIG and the .45. Created to duplicate the best ballistics of the .357 Magnum revolver in a semiautomatic pistol, the .357 SIG spits a 125-grain jacketed hollow point at 1300 to 1400 feet per second, delivering 500-plus foot-pounds of energy. Departments which have adopted it are delighted with the performance, reporting a high frequency of one-shot stops. The Virginia State Police, who issue the .357 SIG Model P229 pistol, told me that they were particularly pleased with the number of felons who dropped and stopped fighting after receiving non-fatal wounds in non-vital parts of the body.

In .40 caliber, the original 180-grain hollow point at subsonic velocity has worked better than expected, but the star performers in .40 ammo tend to be high tech bullets such as the Winchester SXT or Ranger T, the CCI Gold Dot, and the Remington Golden Saber with 155-grain bullets at 1200 foot-seconds or 165-grain bullets at 1140 to 1150 feet per second. Using the 165-grain Ranger in their .40 caliber Glocks, the Nashville, Tennessee, Police have amassed a long series of impressive one-shot stops.

In .45 caliber, the matured Federal Hydra-Shok design is something of a gold standard, and the Winchester SXT, Remington Golden Saber, and CCI Gold Dot also have delivered impressive performance in the field. These bullets reliably open up and get the job done. In .45 Auto, the 230-grain bullet at some 880 foot seconds has become standard in police work. Note that all of these are high-tech projectiles, what is known in the trade as “premium ammunition.”
Premium ammo

High tech bullets are more expensive to manufacture. The bonded core of the Gold Dot, the interlocked bullet body and jacket of the SXT, the post in the center of a Hydra-Shok’s hollow point, and the driving band that surrounds the base of a Golden Saber bullet are all more expensive to manufacture and therefore cost more. Why do police departments that buy on bid specify this premium ammunition? Because it works better, and with human life on the line, they cannot afford to economize.

America’s most popular police service pistol today is this Glock 22. It holds 16 rounds of .40 S&W ammo like this Black Hills EXP, which delivers 485 foot-pounds of energy per shot.

The same is true for the hunter, to a degree. Life may not be on the line, but performance is still important. If you are shooting a small deer at relatively close range with a high-powered hunting rifle, conventional hunting ammo bought in a “value-pack” at Wal-Mart will probably be good enough. However, if you are aiming at a thousand pound moose, and winter meat for the family hinges on the bullet performing its job, it’s more than worth a dollar a cartridge to have a high-performance bullet designed for this particular task.

This is why hunting rounds like the Federal Premium and the Winchester Supreme sell so well in gun shops. This ammunition is bought by the serious hunters. Their research, and the anecdotal experience of their friends who have used it in the game fields, has convinced them to pay a few dollars extra to guarantee as much as possible the best performance when there is an opportunity for only one shot and the results are critical.

In the end, the smart hunters have done exactly what the cops did. They went with the reality of what worked in the field, in a way that was quantified and given credibility in the laboratory. This approach mirrored the collective, institutionalized learning experience of law enforcement in ammunition selection.

Some call it a combination of the Experiential Model and the Laboratory Model. Some might call it Reality Based Selection Protocol.

And some just call it common sense.

Obama Announces Gun Ban Agenda

"Yes We Can . . . Ban Guns"--Obama Announces Gun Ban Agenda Before The Final Vote Count Is In

Friday, November 07, 2008

Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign slogan, "the audacity of hope," should have instead been "the audacity of deceit." After months of telling the American people that he supports the Second Amendment, and only hours after being declared the president-elect, the Obama transition team website announced an agenda taken straight from the anti-gun lobby--four initiatives designed to ban guns and drive law-abiding firearm manufacturers and dealers out of business:

"Making the expired federal assault weapons ban permanent." Perhaps no other firearm issue has been more dishonestly portrayed by gun prohibitionists. Notwithstanding their predictions that the ban's expiration in 2004 would bring about the end of civilization, for the last four years the nation's murder rate has been lower than anytime since the mid-1960s.

Studies for Congress, the Congressional Research Service, the National Institute of Justice, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have found no evidence that gun prohibition or gun control reduces crime. Guns that were affected by the ban are used in only a tiny fraction of violent crime-about 35 times as many people are murdered without any sort of firearm (knives, bare hands, etc.), as with "assault weapons." Obama says that "assault weapons" are machine guns that "belong on foreign battlefields," but that is a lie; the guns are only semi-automatic, and they are not used by a military force anywhere on the planet.

"Repeal the Tiahrt Amendment." The amendment--endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police--prohibits the release of federal firearm tracing information to anyone other than a law enforcement agency conducting a bona fide criminal investigation. Anti-gun activists oppose the restriction, because it prevents them from obtaining tracing information and using it in frivolous lawsuits against law-abiding firearm manufacturers. Their lawsuits seek to obtain huge financial judgments against firearm manufacturers when a criminal uses a gun to inflict harm, even though the manufacturers have complied with all applicable laws.

"Closing the gun show loophole." There is no "loophole." Under federal law, a firearm dealer must conduct a background check on anyone to whom he sells a gun, regardless of where the sale takes place. A person who is not a dealer may sell a gun from his personal collection without conducting a check. Gun prohibitionists claim that many criminals obtain guns from gun shows, though the most recent federal survey of convicted felons put the figure at only 0.7 percent.

They also claim that non-dealers should be required to conduct checks when selling guns at shows, but the legislation they support goes far beyond imposing that lone requirement. In fact, anti-gun members of Congress voted against that limited measure, holding out for a broader bill intended to drive shows out of business. "Making guns in this country childproof." "Childproof" is a codeword for a variety of schemes designed to prevent the sale of firearms by imposing impossible or highly expensive design requirements, such as biometric shooter-identification systems.

While no one opposes keeping children safe, the fact is that accidental firearm-related deaths among children have decreased 86 percent since 1975, even as the numbers of children and guns have risen dramatically. Today, the chances of a child being killed in a firearm accident are less than one in a million.

Copyright 2008, National Rifle Association of America, Institute for Legislative Action.This may be reproduced. It may not be reproduced for commercial purposes.

Leary Lecturer to address Heller Decision at University of Utah College of Law

With the U.S. Supreme Court’s release in June of District of Columbia v. Heller, advocates of both gun rights and gun control scrambled to sort through the meaning of the decision, the first case in which the Supreme Court expressly held that the Second Amendment grants an individual a right to bear arms.

Eugene Volokh, one of the nation’s preeminent legal scholars on the subject, was not at all surprised. The decision affirmed a position he had long advocated. The majority opinion in Heller cited three law review articles written by Volokh, a proponent of gun rights at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. More than a mere gun rights advocate, Volokh is known as an iconoclast challenging established ideas. For example, he has urged law students in his firearms regulation course to get a better basic understanding of guns and how they work by providing an optional field trip to the firing range.

This year’s William H. Leary Lecture at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law features Prof. Volokh. His talk is entitled “Implementing Originalism: What District of Columbia v. Heller Shows Us.”

The free lecture, the 43rd annual Leary Lecture, will be presented on Monday, Nov. 10 at 6 p.m. in the Sutherland Moot Court Room at College of Law. Volokh’s lecture will be preceded at 5:30 p.m. by a reception in the Rosenblatt Foyer. The College of Law is located at 332 South 1400 East in Salt Lake City, Utah 84112.

Volokh says his lecture will offer a close reading of the case, trying to show, “at a leisurely pace and in a detached way, how it is that the Court is actually implementing originalism.”
Heller struck down a District of Columbia gun control law as unconstitutional. It was the first Supreme Court decision in seven decades that directly addressed the Second Amendment.
Originalism refers to a type of approach to constitutional interpretation used by some justices of the Supreme Court. However, the precise meaning of the term and its applications are subject to debate.

Volokh, noting that both the majority and dissenting opinions in Heller rely on originalist arguments, sees lessons to be learned from the decision about Supreme Court’s use of originalism.

“I want to give a talk in an unhurried way,” Volokh says. “I want to go through the opinion with the audience. This talk should engage people interested in this as a gun rights case, people interested in originalist jurisprudence more broadly, and people interested in how judges craft their legal arguments.”

Volokh, 40, is the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Professor Volokh was born in Kiev and immigrated to the United States as a child. He began taking college courses at the age of 10 and received his undergraduate degree in mathematics and computer science from UCLA at the age of 15. He worked as a computer programmer before returning to UCLA for law school, where he earned his Juris Doctor, graduating first in the class of 1992.

After college, he worked as a law clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court and for Judge Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. At UCLA, Volokh teaches constitutional law, criminal law, and academic legal writing, and has also taught firearms regulation law and copyright law.

Volokh is the author of the textbooks The First Amendment and Related Statutes (2008), The Religion Clauses and Related Statutes (2005), and Academic Legal Writing (2007), as well as more than 50 law review articles and more than 80 non-academic opinion pieces, published in The Wall Street Journal, The National Review, Slate and many others.

He also maintains The Volokh Conspiracy, a blog, at www.volokh.com. Volokh is a member of The American Law Institute. Volokh lives in Los Angeles with his wife and his 5 and 3-year-old sons.

Free parking is available east of the College of Law. A TRAX station is also within walking distance. For more information: (801) 581-6833.

I'm serious...

All members of my family are now members of the NRA. The boys are junior members and Kate is a full fledged grown-up member. The junior membership is discounted and they send a magazine more aimed at the youth. Full members get a magazine subscription called 1st Freedom. It has articles and stories regarding 2nd Amendment rights, self defense, the shooting sports, and NRA updates.

I am serious about the importance of joining today, so I thought I would lead by example and give my whole family the memberships I've been benefitting from for years.

To join, simply go to www.nra.com and follow the link "join or renew" in the upper right hand corner of the page.

Join the NRA today!

You can't be in Washington D.C. Everyday talking to congressmen and women and Senators from the 50 states. You don't have millions of dollars to spend on lobbying for gun rights. The NRA is there for us. They are organized for the purpose of lobbying our government and protecting our rights.

President-Elect Obama and his transition staff have already stated their intention to reinstate the Assault Weapons Ban, and to they intend to expand it and make it permanent. That's right, no sunset clause here folks.

We need to take action now to prevent this violation of the 2nd Amendment from happening. The best way to do that is to join the NRA today! If you own a gun or want a gun, you need to be a member of the NRA. Let's all help eachother out!