Last year, the Senate version of this bill was addressed by about five people, including me.

Yesterday, 210 people took a day off work to come to Annapolis and speak out against SB43 (for those not in the know, not only would it ban my AR15, but also my Glock pistol and any other semiauto pistol that potentially could be retrofitted with a threaded barrel–essentially it’s a total gun ban). We jammed the hallway outside the committee hearing room such that the MDSP had to let us in the room in shifts.

Casey Anderson, Peter Hamm, Sue Peschin, and Paul Helmke from the Brady Campaign spoke for Team Hoplophobe. When I arrived, I peeked in on the press conference given by Mike Lennett, the bill’s sponsor, and Casey and Peter recognized me. Nice to know the opposition knows who I am, I must be doing something right. Peter actually introduced me to Paul Helmke, and said I was “Sebastian, the sensible gun nut.” Heh. I guess…that’s a compliment when you think about it. It was a lighthearted moment on an otherwise serious day.

I was interviewed by Fox45 news and Channel 4 (is that a DC channel? I didn’t recognize the reporter or their logo) news; the first question I was asked was universally “what do you need with an assault weapon.” I explained that it wasn’t a question of needs, but a question of rights, but then quickly moved into the pragmatics of the issue–I responded that the most commonly used target and competition shooting rifle in the US was the AR15, probably followed closely by the M1A. I pointed out that the weapons they were looking to ban do indeed have sporting purposes, and that hundreds of thousands of law abiding Americans use them lawfully every day. I reminded the reporters that the BATF itself will tell you that so called “assault rifles” are used in less than 1% of gun crimes, and that taking these firearms away from law abiding citizens won’t do much to stop crime. We’ve seen at the Federal level that the DC snipers, the North Hollywood shooters, etc weren’t detered by a Federal AWB…why should we support a MD specific one?

I didn’t get to see if I made TV, but if anyone has a link, let me know.

After the Ceasefire Maryland/Brady Campaign folks gave their testimony about street sweeping machine guns, the North Hollywood Bank Shootout, firing from the hip with shoulder fired weapons, the evils of machine guns (notice…a lot of blather about weapons that are already regulated at the Federal level by the NFA of 1934) and just about every other possible thing you can say to make it clear you know nothing about firearms (and kudos to Sens. Brochin and Jacobs for grilling them on these silly talking points), Paul Helmke actually admitted that yeah, this bill wouldn’t do much to stop criminals. “But you have to start somewhere.” Unfortunately no Senator asked why he wanted to start with a class of weapons that criminals seldom use or can afford, or why the bill also lumps in essentially every semiauto pistol on the market.

Finally it was time for the 210 freedom loving types to have our say.

There was passionate testimony from a former police officer (August Bowman, if I remember the name) which focused the committee on the language in the bill that more or less bans every pistol on the market (few pistols can’t be retrofitted with a different barrel). An MSI member spoke on the ridiculous stats manipulation used by Ceasefire to justify the infamous “48 hours” document (and another testimonial from an attorney that explained that gun trace data actually does NOT usually indicate a crime has occured reinforced his position–every time a weapon is transferred legally, somebody dies with it in their collection, it’s stolen, recovered from a criminal, or any of a number of other reasons, a trace is performed–so every gun trace is NOT indicative of a violent crime, in fact the BATF actually says about 90% of traces aren’t crime related at all). Another gentleman from the 10th Calvary Rifle Club spoke about his grandfather’s days as a black Baptist minister on the Texas/Louisiana border; he said that his grandfather had to travel around their community with an armed guard of several men with shotguns and rifles, as the local KKK chapter didn’t think much of his teachings (something about the radical idea that they deserved equal protection under the law, imagine that!). He made an impression I think–hopefully a few of the committee members realized that a law like SB43 would simply have made an easy victim of people like his grandfather. Afterwards, I spoke with him about ways that gun rights supporters can reach out to the black community; if there’s one place we’re falling down on the job, it’s there. If we’re going to win in MD, we’re going to need to do a better job educating the black community about gun rights as civil rights; our friend actually said that there was a strong underground movement of law abiding black folk in DC and Baltimore that was indeed armed and ready to defend itself. That was encouraging.

By the time I got to speak, I was merely entering my thoughts onto the record, as the Senators had taken off for the most part, and the gallery had cleared out.

All in all, I’m encouraged to see that we outnumbered them about 210 to five or six. Peter Hamm actually congratulated us on the impressive turnout. If all those folks had worked on Bob Ehrlich or John Giannetti’s campaign, perhaps we wouldn’t be in this pickle…but it’s still nice to see that we can absolutely pound the Brady folks when it comes to turn out.

As for the bill’s fate, last I heard was that Sen. Jacobs was fairly certain it would die in committee. But this is a dangerous one, and needless to say it bears watching.