The Uninvited Ombudsman Report – No. 32

Taken from this week’s “Page Nine” Alan Korwin’s “The uninvited Ombudsman Report”
STARTERS:
Change the world by taking a reporter shooting --NSSF.org reports: Sara Sedlacek, a reporter for Iowa's West Liberty Index and a self-described liberal "with a cookie-cutter image of what 'gun-club people' were like," recently visited her local gun club in search of a story.
After her first and subsequent visits, she not only tried shooting for the first time, but also learned -- a lot -- and wrote, "I walked into that gun club with the worst thoughts about the place and I walked out with a completely different opinion. It never hurts to try to learn a little more about the things you don't like and the people you don't agree with. You may find out you didn't know enough about them to have an opinion in the first place."

1- OSHA's Gun Ban
The lamestream media told you:
Nothing, though the dangerous and highly unregulated Internet circulated numerous stories on proposed OSHA regulations that would have a subtle side effect of... closing all federally licensed firearms dealers in America.
The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:
It is hard to imagine a hotter hot button than a brazen attempt to delete the right to keep and bear arms from the people. It is even harder to imagine a bureaucrat or politician who doesn't know that.
With that as a backdrop, OSHA proposed treating ANY workplace that contained even a handful of small-arms cartridges, for any reason, "a facility containing explosives."
Under that designation, no one could carry "firearms, ammunition, or similar articles," with narrow exceptions (like for security guards). You would need demolition certifications for clerks, searches of customers coming in, closures during thunderstorms -- this would have forced any normal gun store, firing range or gunsmith shop to close down.
Click on 'Read More' to continue reading.

It came within a hair's breadth of slipping by everyone and passing into law. NSSF, SAAMI and the NRA-ILA, with an outpouring of support from grassroots activists, have fortunately succeeded in temporarily delaying the proposed OSHA gun ban.
I have reasonable faith that the industry and gun-lobby forces, now alerted, will craft a proper improvement to this OSHA proposal that would have wiped out America's gun stores and ranges. I don't plan to devote much time to that effort, unless it seems to be going astray. Imposing impossible-to-meet and completely irrelevant explosive-demolition regulations on firearms dealers and their staffers was a brilliant and unexpected attack on gun rights.
What I do think we need to examine though is how OSHA got on that track. These things don't happen by accident. Someone was behind this incredibly sneaky, underhanded and enormously novel tactic for banning guns in America. Someone out there feels mighty proud of the attempt, even if it has been stopped, for now, and I have no doubt such minds will concoct future efforts.
Who are the perpetrators? How do we bring them to justice? How do we expose and humiliate their tyrannical effort and dastardly clever approach to civil rights denial? How do we treat the attorneys who wrote it and are going to claim they were just following orders, that they had no idea this would effect gun ownership, and saw nothing amiss in the proposal?
Who among you is willing to do the legwork, file an FOIA request, poke around a little?
You've got to hand it to the anti-rights mob that dreamed this up. A tremendous sneak attack that almost succeeded -- it was stopped within mere hours of execution. No one saw it coming. It's a whole new fresh approach to banning guns the antis have not used before.
Wouldn't it be nice to sneak through a regulation of our own in some bland dull policy rewrite and say... any elected, appointed or hired individual who attempts to deny a person's rights without full open debate shall be subject to imprisonment? Why would an honest government official object?

2- Gun Turn-In Fraud
The lamestream media told you:
Chicago authorities are delighted at the results of their highly publicized gun turn-in campaign, which yielded more that 6,700 guns, collected at 23 churches in a day-long event. It was so popular police ran out of the $100 debit cards being offered to anyone who turned in a firearm. Police collected 5,960 hand guns and 745 replicas and rifles. Dubbed, "Don't Kill a Dream, Save a Life," it is an effort to lower the inner city's murder rate by getting guns off the streets.

The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:
In a textbook case of lapdog reporting, CBS, ABC, the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune and countless others have promoted the government announcement you see above, handed to them by the police, with no independent reporting whatsoever.
A real report would give you details on what actually occurred, but that would require work on the part of the "reporters" and so was avoided. A real report would never use an officially provided phony phrase such as, "off the streets," that uniformly appeared in every published story.
Real news might describe the amount of stolen property recovered that could be returned to the rightful owners, the number of guns that were actually functional, guns of high value given away for a fraction of their price and what would become of them, junk, rusty and worthless guns used to bilk the city organizers, and what the word "replica" means in context of $100 debit cards issued for each one.
Guns of course are not "on the street," they are in people's homes. "Home" however doesn't have the villainous sound that "on the street" does, so it was not provided to reporters.
How many hardened criminals turned in their functioning firearms to get a $100 debit card was not reported, leaving the impression that the church-going crowd who participated in this hollow publicity stunt actually have little impact on the city's high murder rate.
The announcement that the city would give away $100 to anyone who could show up with anything approximating a gun undoubtedly lead some enterprising residents to gather up every gun-like object they could find. It is unknown if BATF kept records of multiple gun turn-ins, which would be required when guns are sold through dealers instead of to the police.
Reporters failed to ask how people turning in guns at churches for $100 each would lower the inner-city crime rate. "Inner city crime" is a code phrase used by the media to avoid describing blacks and other hostile minorities packed into stinking gang-riddled ghettos glorified in rap "songs."
Possession of a handgun in Chicago is illegal without complex permitting, fee and paperwork requirements, so it's unclear how people got all these guns in the first place, or why the police hadn't effectively enforced the city's laws. No reports connected the possibly illegal city-treasury cash giveaways with failure to enforce the laws. No arrests were announced, presumably because police suspended the laws for the day to run the campaign (after having been ineffective in enforcing the possession bans passed by lawmakers). No action against the police for failing to enforce the law is planned. No news on the disposition of all those fine guns has been announced.
Chicago does plan to run the event again, seeing how the media lapped it up. With a city population of roughly three million, there are probably more guns and replicas out there. Plans to calculate the program's effect on crime and the inner-city murder rate have not been announced, but it sure did make some people feel good.

3- Parker Case Timing
The lamestream media told you:
The mayor of Washington D.C. is working diligently to overturn the bad decision of the D.C. Circuit Court that would allow his residents to keep highly dangerous registered handguns assembled and functional in their own homes. He has decided to file papers asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.
In a statement of unparalleled ignorance, the mayor of the murder capital of the country said, "Our handgun law has saved countless lives -- keeping guns out of the hands of those who would hurt others or themselves." To meet the 90-day deadline to file a petition for certiorari, the city will file for a 30-day filing extension.
The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:
An insider with a good understanding of the situation suggests:
Note your calendars, the petition will come around Sept 4 or 5. Asking for time extensions are not favored, so you wouldn't ask the Court for one unless you really needed the time and were going to use it; the limit that can be requested is 60 days. They could have requested less. So if they asked for 30 days, they're going to use them.
Second, review will be granted. Possibly with 9 out of 9 votes [Note: I'm less confident than that]. There is a circuit split on a constitutional question in a case that will be have noticeable impact on the nation's capital and have profound implications nationwide. SCOTUS exists for the primary purposes of resolving legal issues of exactly this nature. This goes to the heart of what they get paid to do.
Third, review will be granted sometime between Oct 15 and Nov 5. Hopefully time extensions will be granted for filing briefs, and if so this could be set for oral argument sometime in March 2008. We will probably not get a decision until the Court's last week in June.
[Note: The most profound observation seems to me to be the widespread recognition that this is a court of people, not laws, and that vote counting is what matters. I do not like that, but it seems to be the case, and is widely acknowledged (under the radar). Pundits are attributing votes before the case is heard and before briefs are written, based on the known biases of the nine Justices. One or two are absolute yeas and nays regardless of what transpires, another one or two are highly likely yeas and nays, and everyone expressing optimism about the outcome, in either direction, are fools. What is likely is that the decision will be narrow to this specific case, not address the at-home-only and registration issues, and the dissent will be incendiary.]
If you would like to read this type of reporting in your local paper, send the editor a note asking them to reprint the "Page Nine." If enough of us ask, we may be pleasantly surprised by the results.

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