1. President Biden (D-DE) and Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) have told us respectively that Federal law limits hunters to three shells for waterfowl hunting, and nobody needs ten bullets to kill a deer. While no responsible hunter would take the shot if he couldn't make a deer into venison with one bullet, there is no Constitutional right to hunt anything. The U.S. Military Academy defines as a lie not only a falsehood but a truth ("nobody needs ten bullets to kill a deer") intended to deceive, in this case to tell Americans who do not know their civics that the Second Amendment is about hunting and that the government can therefore restrict this Constitutional right to firearms suitable for hunting. The Second Amendment is a right to own arms for self-defense against human aggressors.
• If I am elected, I will not only vote against anti-Second Amendment legislation, I will discredit and derail the legislation by pointing this out to the entire House.
  
• On another note, the number of lives actually saved by New York's SAFE Act, which bans magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, ranges from none to zero while the number of elderly nursing home patients killed by the state's decision to put Covid-19 positive patients into nursing homes is in the mid to high thousands. Here is what Andrew Cuomo doesn't want voters to see.
  
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2. Biden, Cuomo, and PA Attorney General Josh Shapiro are not qualified to tell anybody what kind of firearms, including those with high-capacity magazines, are suitable for lawful self-defense.
   
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• Here is the professional opinion of Massad Ayoob, a nationally-recognized firearm and law enforcement instructor, and expert witness in Fyock vs. Sunnyvale. (Does not imply Mr. Ayoob's endorsement of my potential candidacy. I do recommend that gun owners read Mr. Ayoob's books including his emphatic guidance on when you must NOT fire or even brandish a firearm.) "Limiting the law-abiding citizen to a magazine of ten rounds or less will clearly limit their ability to protect themselves from violent criminals in certain situations. Such limits on magazine capacity are likely to impair the ability of citizens to engage in lawful self-defense in those crime incidents necessitating that the victim fire many rounds in order to stop the aggressive actions of offenders."
• In 2013, Georgia homeowner Melinda Herman hid from a home invader with her children. Only when the home invader found them did she open fire with a New York SAFE Act-compliant .38 caliber handgun and fired all six rounds for five hits. The home invader did not fall over the way people do in movies when they are shot once; he was able to walk out of the house and drive away before his wounds finally overcame him. If he had realized that the woman was out of ammunition, he might well have murdered her and her children. The invader, Paul Slater, was sentenced to ten years in prison.
• Here is a video in which a police officer needed 14 rounds of 9 mm ammunition to stop one knife-wielding acttacker, who almost succeeded in killing her anyway. This is reality and not the fantasy world in which Joe Biden, Andrew Cuomo, and Josh Shapiro appear to live.
  
• If police need firearms with high capacity magazines for effective self-defense against violent aggressors, then so do law-abiding citizens. Biden, Cuomo, and Shapiro are therefore no more qualified to tell law-abiding citizens what kind of weapons they "need" for self-defense than I am to practice medicine.
3. Smart guns are a dumb idea.
   
• A so-called smart gun, as depicted in (as I recall) a James Bond movie and also the book version of Logan's Run, uses biometrics or radio frequency identification to ensure that it will fire only in the hands of an authorized user. A dead battery, or jamming of the RFID system, can render the weapon useless in an emergency. If the system depends on the user wearing a wrist watch or ring with an RFID emitter, what happens if the user is wounded in his or her right arm and must switch the weapon to his left hand? The fact that police, who are often murdered with their own sidearms, have no use for "smart guns" should tell us everything we need to know about this idea.
• Nothing on this web site constitutes formal engineering advice, but I do think any "smart gun" manufacturer should be required to publish its failure mode effects analysis (FMEA) for its product's triggering system. A failure mode that results in failure to fire during a life-threatening emergency has the highest possible severity rating (10) on a 1-10 scale, just like a failure in a car's brake system.
  
4. The public should be reminded of the 2000 incident in which the Million Mom March, as supported by numerous Members of Congress including Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Nita Lowey (D-NY), Hillary Clinton, and others promoted House candidates while using 501(c)(3) tax exempt resources; I and other Second Amendment activists broke the organization's back by exposing this. If I am elected, I will remind the entire House and the entire country of this to derail any anti-Second Amendment legislation. The Million Mom March:
   
• Promoted House candidates on its Web site while using 501(c)(3) tax exempt resources
• Lied to its own supporters as well as the public about gun violence killing 12 or 13 children a day.
  
• Liquidated in 2001, perhaps due to fallout from the negative publicity and loss of support.
  
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• Filed a Form 990 tax return in which it told the IRS it made no efforts to lobby or influence legislation.
  
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5. Junk lawsuits against gun manufacturers for crimes committed with their products are no different than suing Sears Roebuck because a criminal bashed somebody over the head with a Craftsman hammer, or suing General Motors because a drunk driver ran over somebody with a Chevy. I could, as a juror, judge any such case in less than five minutes by asking two questions:
• Did the manufacturer sell the weapon to a Federally licensed dealer, i.e. somebody vetted by BATFE? If the answer is "yes," I would not only find that the plaintiff would not only take no relief from the court but would be liable to the manufacturer for legal fees, costs, damage to business, and punitive damages, with said damages to be assessed against the plaintiff's attorney upon whose advice the plaintiff relied.
  
• Did the dealer perform the mandatory instant background check? If the answer is "yes," then what I just said regarding the manufacturer would also apply to the dealer.
6. Responsible firearm ownership should be taught, perhaps in high school, regardless of whether people intend to own guns. The same celebrities who agitate for gun control set the worst imaginable examples of firearm use in movies, e.g. by pointing guns everywhere. I recall a movie in which one character objected to another pointing a gun at him, to which the second character replied, "Don't worry, the safety is on." These people are not qualified remotely to discuss gun control even if they act out movie roles that involve guns.
   
• All guns are always treated as if they are loaded. Never point a gun at anybody or anything you would not want to shoot. If you follow this basic rule, the most dangerous part of your visit to a firing range will be the drive to and from the range.
  
• You can, in most jurisdictions, use a gun on another person only in self-defense against a credible and immediate threat to your life or physical safety, e.g. against murder, robbery, aggravated assault, kidnapping, or rape.
  
• You cannot menace another person with a gun, e.g. by firing a shotgun into the air as recommended by President Biden, unless that person poses an immediate threat to your life or physical safety. Few if any police use or recommend warning shots. If you are in immediate danger, you cannot afford to throw away a round on a warning shot (or the time you need to fire it); if you are not in immediate danger, it is probably illegal to fire at all.
  
• Pennsylvania is not, as far as I know, a "stand your ground" state. My advice (not legal or professional law enforcement) is to retreat from the threat if you can do so in complete safety regardless of stand your ground laws. George Zimmerman's decision to stand his ground got him a thorough beating followed by six or seven figures in legal costs. As stated by Kenny Rogers in Coward of the County, "Walk away from trouble if you can."
  
• Kyle Rittenhouse's assailants did not permit him to walk away from the trouble they initiated, i.e. did not permit him to retreat in complete safety, which is what got them shot. I do not believe Rittenhouse is a hero; I think he used poor judgment by going to a likely trouble area in the first place. Once he was there, however, he had every right in the world to defend himself from violent attacks by individuals (some armed with deadly weapons) who pursued him when he tried his best to disengage from them.
  

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