The United States Department Of State: Now Qualifies As Domestic Terrorists

H/T Pat Dollard.

Article by Robin Taylor, courtesy of the US Practical Shooting Association. Taken from the May/June 2009 issue of Front Sight Magazine.

Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC)
 
It’s not about Trade, it’s about Control

By Robin Taylor, USPSA Staff

If you’re lucky, you have never heard of the “International Trade in Arms Regulation” treaty, or ITAR. Administered by the State Department through something called the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), this treaty is supposed to keep track of “defense” exports. Unfortunately, what you don’t know is about to hurt you.

Unintended Consequences

DDTC’s ITAR process hummed along out of the public view for years, focusing on the major international trade in firearms and military equipment until President Bush II moved to make the directorate 75 percent self-funding. In one fell stroke, he gave the agency the power to set its own budget, and levy its own taxes.
The results have been predictable. New rules published on Sept. 28, 2008 explosively increased fees.

Furthermore, DDTC has expanded its tax base to include all “arms” trade in the United States. Civilian firms with no military or export connection whatever are getting ominous letters from their wholesalers (Brownells sent a letter to all its vendors) asking if they are “in compliance” with the mysterious ITAR.

Subsection I(a) of the ITAR includes all firearms, barrels, “military” scopes, and all “components, parts, accessories and attachments” for any listed item. Subsection III includes manufacturers of ammunition, bullets, and technical data for the production of the above. If you cast bullets at home and sell them to your neighbors, you need to file with the DDTC. However, your Dillon press is exempt.

Flipping through the pages of Front Sight, “cartridge cases. . .bullets,” “firearms,” and “accessories and attachments” to firearms takes in pretty much our entire advertising base. We checked, and the magazine extensions USPSA competitors use have been ruled a “defense article” and all manufacturers of same must register with DDTC. The C-More optical sight? Tubes for a 170mm magazine? Moon clips for a revolver?

As best we can tell, every advertiser in this magazine other than Dillon and a few soft goods firms must register and be tracked as a “manufacturer” or “broker of defense articles” under DDTC’s purview.

If you don’t think that affects your ability to exercise your second amendment rights (albeit indirectly), or to enjoy shooting, take a minute and think about it. ITAR calls for government registration of all arms manufacturing. Not only will the government know exactly who makes how much of what, should the government decide NOT to issue a registration permit to any of those people, they’re out of business, immediately.

Basic registration has climbed from a few hundred dollars for a multi-year registration four years ago to $2,250 per year. Fail to pay this, and you risk federal prosecution. Should you actually export, the fees climb dramatically.

“For that money you get absolutely nothing,” says Jason Wong of the Firearms Law Group. (Wong advises clients including Sig Sauer, U.S. Ordnance, and Gemtech on compliance with federal firearms laws and export controls, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).) “I don’t mind paying my taxes, because that goes to pay for schools and roads and stuff, but this is something else.” While we know of a few accessory makers (of grips) that have been given a pass on registration, according to Wong, they’re the exception.

“It’s not just us,” said a representative from an accessory catalog. “I went to a Commerce Department training session and State Department reps came on one day. They said they’re targeting every company in every industry, so that they will know everyone involved before it’s all over.”

Airplane components, computer chips, optics for anything from night vision to missiles, thanks to the “accessories” clause, DDTC’s reach is astoundingly broad.

“Every industry group has this same complaint,” said our catalog representative. “The only way we can know if something is covered is to get a (State Department) ruling on it.”

Until recently, the whole ITAR process operated in a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” manner. If you built non-military parts and didn’t export, nobody at “State” really cared. Looking at it from a bureaucratic point of view, registering the little fish cost them time and money, and for what? Now that DDTC relies on registration to fund itself, that situation has changed.

“Now nobody says anything because they’re afraid. They know if they stand up, it’ll cost them $2,250 a year,” said an accessories maker that chose to remain anonymous. Some not-so-friendly competitors notified DDTC that his firm was making parts without a permit, and the hammer fell.

2008’s Year-End Surprise

Under its new rules, DDTC collects its registration fees at the end of the year, using a sliding scale depending on how many export licenses you requested. If you didn’t get the memo (”it was on the website. . .”), that means you pay for each of last year’s licenses when you renew your ITAR registration. Licenses that were almost free now cost $250 each.

I spoke with Dave Skinner at STI about their experience with the DDTC’s escalating fees. Almost half their business is with overseas clients.

“In three years (the changes) took us from $750 per year, to $1,750, to $18,500 per year in export costs.”
Pauletta Skinner handles most of STI’s export operation. She renewed STI’s registration early, fearing another doubling in fee prices akin to 2006-2007. Instead, the 2008 fee rose by one thousand percent - 10 times the previous year’s fee. “I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I called them back because I thought it was a typo.”

Apparently DDTC put the change on their website, but didn’t notify registrants directly. When the bill came, STI was caught short. With no way to back up and pass the costs on to the customer, STI faced an ugly choice: Write a check for an extra $16,000, or cease operations immediately.
“We’re still reeling at the increase in costs,” says Dave Skinner.

Now put yourself in the shoes of Brownells, parts resource for gunsmiths worldwide. Brownells has a staff of five to deal with permitting issues for their international shipments. Huge swaths of their 36,000-item catalog are controlled by ITAR.

“We would have been happy with only that kind of a jump,” said David Dean when I asked about STI’s $16,000 surprise. “We do hundreds and hundreds of licenses, but I can’t give any details about the proposed fee since this issue is still being negotiated.”

Each foreign order over $99 for controlled items requires an export license from DDTC. For a company whose international business is likely in the millions, that’s a lot of permits. Brownells is still running under what was a two-year registration. They paid the new base fee to keep their registration alive, but that huge per-permit fee hangs like an axe over their business model. As Dean explained, even under the new rules, there are several possible ways to calculate fees. There is a “3 percent of value” option, but according to Sandy Strayer at SV, even the top hands on the DDTC response team weren’t sure how to calculate it.

Hence the protracted negotiations. If Brownells is lucky, they’ll “only” have to pay 3 percent of their export gross to the State Department.

While the registration end of this is problematic, that’s just the beginning.

Read the continuation here: Paper Cuts: The ITAR Recordkeeping Requirements

From Sheridan Folger at American Daily Review

Obama's Gun Ban List Out, Strategy Clear: Disarm the troops then the citizens.

Our trusted American Cold War Veteran and active duty Army friends have brought some startling news to our attention.

We have done well in our vigil to defend the 2nd Amendment and prevent many of the following things from taking place, however this is one battle that will not end.

The Obama administration is subversively attacking our 2^nd amendment rights in an effort to effectively eliminate them. They will disarm our veterans and active duty troops because they can ‘easily’ do so by government order. We have already heard and seen the possible legislation that would lump PTSD in the disqualifier category.

To quote Scott L’Ecuyer, Director American Cold War Veterans Inc, “You go to fight for your country, when you return home the government disarms you!”

To read the rest of the post and see related video, click this link.....

An Anti-Gun Myth

An Anti - Gun Myth

A deceptive picture of anti-gun regulations and their effectiveness was painted by Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, in a recent interview in his home state of Indiana. And he's probably using the same approach in other states..

Helmke claims firearms regulation is pitiful in the Hoosier state. He notes Indiana received only eight of a possible 100 votes on the scorecard prepared by his Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence -- points he says come largely from "not doing bad things."

First, the Brady scorecard is not gospel. And if eight points is enough to rank 31^st of 50 states on the strength of its gun laws, it tells you something about the grading curve. Forty-two states earned 28 points or less; only one state scored higher than 63 and that was California at 79.

Here the reader would conclude California, which has the most gun control of any state, must be one of the world’s safest places.

Not so. It has a 14 percent higher violent crime rate and a 23 percent higher murder rate than the rest of the country.

So the Brady Campaign’s “good” scores appear to be a bad thing; the “bad” grades not something that should shame Hoosiers.. Federal crime data indicates the scorecard message actually is just the opposite of what the anti-gun organization seeks to convey: -- Most of the 38 states with Brady scores of 20 points or less experience total violent crime, murder and robbery rates below the national rates. -- For the 10 states with the lowest total violent crime, murder and robbery rates, Brady’s average scores were 12, 12 and nine points, respectively.

When Mr. Helmke says Indiana “hasn’t done anything on guns one way or the other” (tho that’s highly misleading) I say good for us … sounds like we’re a whole lot better off that way.

Another point that is not exactly gospel is Mr. Helmke’s assertion: “If someone wants a gun, I’m not against that.”

I am not about to suggest he is disingenuous in that statement. But what all of us gun owners/gun hobbyists/shooting sportsmen have observed over the years is a relentless effort by the Brady organization and others like them to take an inch and go for a mile. They have demonstrated their long-term objectives are far more aggressive than closing the gun show “loophole” and requiring firearms training for gun purchasers, which doesn’t exactly ensure there will be no gun violence.

We have seen the Brady Campaign launch one tactic after another to restrict or ban gun ownership.

The Brady Campaign’s Legal Action Project sought to counter right-to-carry laws adopted across the country by encouraging corporations to ban firearms in parked and locked automobiles on business property. Of course, that’s where many right-to-carry licensees would keep their guns if the firearms were not allowed in the workplace. The Brady group proposed employee violators should be fired, but Brady lost legal battles on that tactic in Florida.

Another approach by Brady is a cooperative effort with Working Assets, a credit card, cell phone and long distance service venture, to achieve judicial change.

“As judges retire one by one, the two groups want them replaced with radicals who believe that a total ban on handguns and on using guns for self-defense is ‘reasonable’ gun control,” reports the American Hunter in its August, 2008, issue.

Responsible gun owners believe in and preach firearms safety. We teach it to our children. We demand it of hunting partners. One of our groups, the NRA, supports and sponsors many firearms safety programs across Indiana and nationally. And we believe if you use a gun irresponsibly, “dangerously” or in a crime you should pay a heavy consequence.

But we haven't heard of any gun safety courses being provided by Brady -- just information about how unsafe firearms are.

And we are starting to hear them again talk up the idea of "assault weapon" bans -- a tactic in which they always provide the media with illustrations of military-type rifles and yet write proposed legislation with wording that would encompass tons of semi-automatic firearms used by hunters and shooting sportsmen. That is one more step in the Brady gun ban agenda.

Their concept of taking guns out of the hands of every United States citizen is unsound.

Criminals are going to have guns, whether they come from vast inventories in various offshore locations or are produced in your neighbor’s basement. Gun manufacture is not necessarily high-tech. That was vividly demonstrated to me on a tour of one of our state prisons when the warden displayed three lethal firearms that had been secretly manufactured by inmates … mostly using common, everyday items!

And it is wrong to suggest we would all be safer if guns were banned. That hasn’t worked in Australia, despite anti-gun efforts to massage the statistics, and it’s not working elsewhere.

Some people in Washington seem to forget or discredit the wisdom of our Founding Fathers.

However, I believe Thomas Jefferson was correct when he wrote in his “Commonplace Book”:

“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms … disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes … Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

Organized efforts to rid the country of guns have attempted to convince citizens of states voting on right-to-carry laws that the provision could lead to shoot-outs like the Old West.

Again, the anti-gunners’ position has proven to be upside down: crime rates have dropped dramatically in state after state adopting right-to-carry. That's because the bad guy can’t be sure who may be carrying a weapon and knows how to use it.

Major L. Caudill, USMC (Ret) addressed the subject this way: “When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone … It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force.”

Some politically powerful folks in Washington have been making a lot of noise about working hard with the new administration toward getting a gun ban law.

Many Americans clearly resent that prospect, as evidenced by their buying and registering firearms in record numbers in the last few months. And they are also buying large quantities of ammunition as the learn the gun-banners are planning another type of gun control -- making ammunition cost-prohibitive by requiring serial numbers on all bullets and cartridges or creating astounding taxes on ammo.

These citizens know those measures would violate the Second Amendment, as confirmed last year by the Supreme Court. And they would be bad for America.

Roger Metzger

PS. A very real legislative effort now in the United States House is called HR45 Blair Holt's Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009/Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009. To learn more about it and its proposed infringements on the Second Amendment, go to http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h45/text or just Google HR 45 Blair Holt.

The Gungrabbers Are Coming For Your Guns Just As We Warned They Would!

Cross posted from Faultline USA.

By J.D. Longstreet

Is The New Government In Washington A Rogue Government?
*****************************************************************************

Now that the Socialists have taken over the government of the United States, they need to insure they can maintain their control and they cannot be sure of that as long as we citizens are armed. So they MUST relieve you and I of our firearms. Enter “Blair Holt's Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009”.

There’s a better than even chance that you haven’t heard about it. With the Mainstream Media in the United States comfortably ensconced in the pockets of the Democrats very little is being said, if anything, about the Blair Holt's Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009. Rest assured, dear reader, it is pending federal legislation in Congress today! (H.R. 45) Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois, a Democrat, introduced the bill on January 6, 2009.

“The main objective of the bill is to provide for stricter gun control. A person would be prohibited by law from possessing a firearm unless approved by a state run system or been issued a license that would have to be renewed every five years within thirty days of the expiration date.
The Attorney General would set up a tracking system of all sales with dealers having to be licensed. Production figures of each licensed manufacturer would be made public.

All those current licensed gun owners would have two years to become certified by the Attorney General or risk losing private property or becoming a criminal.” (From Wikipedia: HERE.)

When you read the bill you quickly realize it targets all gun owners in the U.S.A.

This bill is an outrage! It seeks nothing less than to strip you and me of our 2nd Amendment constitutional right to keep and bear arms. When you read the bill you will also learn that two years after the passage of the bill, ALL FIREARMS in a citizen’s possession must be registered, not just those purchased after the bill passes, and this apparently applies to antique firearms as well. Further… every five years, if you own a firearm, you must go through a complete renewal process for each weapon you own! If you don’t do it, for whatever reason, there will be stiff penalties, which include the confiscation of your firearms and jail time with sentences as high as ten years in some cases.

And that is not even the worst of it. Nosiree! The bill also authorizes government searches without warrant, the creation of a federal bureaucracy to monitor firearm possession, etc.
There is an excellent summary of the bill HERE.

 

Is it time for the next Boston Tea Party? There is an excellent article on that HERE.

With Democrats in control of the US Government, American citizens always need to guard such liberties as gun ownership even more closely. THIS is what happens when you trade freedom for security!

Back in September of 2007, we wrote the following: “What’s happening, all of a sudden, to bring on these “gun stories?” Well, the Left is feeling it’s oats right now. They have reason to believe they will win the 2008 Presidential election and… if they do… and if they retain control of the two houses of Congress, you can “bet the farm” that gun control legislation will be among the first items on the New Congress’ agenda of things to pass.”

I’m not a prophet, but I AM an ole country boy, with a smidgen of common sense, and THAT is all it took to divine where a government run by democrats would take us.

Why is gun control so popular among the Leftists of the world? Simple. As long as we citizens are armed we can shut down the Left any time we feel they have stepped too far over the line to be tolerated. They know that. They also know that they have come very close to that line on a number of occasions. They got the message. So now the socialists in charge of the US government feel they have to power to disarm us and secure their grasp on the throats of the American citizen and they’re going for it. What they fail to grasp is the fact that those of us on the Right understand that Obama, and his fellow socialists in the Congress, are on the point of the spear of the movement to transform America from a democratic republic to a socialist hellhole. It’s not going to happen without a fight.

Some of the democrats also understand that they cannot depend upon the US Military to back them up in this move to solidify their hold on America by shredding the Constitution and stripping their fellow Americans of their Second Amendment rights. The US Military are American citizens, too, and they have their own private collection of weapons. Plus, the vast majority of them favor the right to keep and bear arms… and… they took an oath to protect this country from all enemies, whether foreign or domestic. The democrats cannot trust them to back the government’s move on it’s own citizens.

Look, it’s very simple: For the Democrat’s socialist dream to be successful American citizens must give up their guns. We’re not going to do that. So, the current socialist government of the United States is going to try to take them.

The gun won this country from the Mother Country. The gun secured the remainder of the country between the two oceans and the gun has made us a free people and the gun has kept us free. So far, we have not forgotten that.

Congress had better understand. Americans are not going to give up their guns. If they pass this hellish bill into law, it will make criminals out of well over 85% of all Americans. I still have faith that my fellow Americans are willing to fight to protect their constitutional rights and their country even if that means opposing what millions of Americans consider as a rogue government in Washington.

As the US Navy Chaplain said during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor while he helped load the anti aircraft weapons firing at the Japanese warplanes slaughtering our service men and decimating out fleet: “Pass the Ammunition boys, and we’ll stay free.”

Get ready, my fellow Americans. It gives me a great deal of pain to warn you that all hell is about to break out within America.

Contact your Elected Officials today!

http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

J. D. Longstreet

No-Fly Gun Ban

Cross posted from Page Nine.

The lamestream media told you:
Nothing.
 
The Uninvited Ombudsman notes however that:

A recording has emerged of Obama's chief of staff, perhaps the second most powerful man in the White House, seeking to make the secret No-Fly List a gun-rights denial list http://tinyurl.com/bw2dvb.

Instituted "for security purposes," people are added to this list with no trial, no hearing prior to listing, no warning, and no due process or defined method for getting off the list. It is managed by unelected and unnamed bureaucrats, and your right to travel freely is denied once you're on. Emanuel's proposal is to make anyone on the list a prohibited possessor under federal law, what Sarah Brady calls, "potential terrorists," with vigorous backing from her tiny but loud group.

No doubt the list includes some legitimate suspects, but since everyone goes through (supposedly) thorough screening before boarding a plane, the purpose of the travel ban is unclear. If the suspects are actually up to something, more needs to be done than merely preventing them from traveling by air. As with many elements of the new U.S. "security environment," the parts don't add up, and the control of the public appears to vastly outweigh the effects on true enemies.

The real risk lies in using the list, which no one in the public can see, to add people and deny their Second Amendment rights without cause or due process. Wikipedia estimates the number of people on the list as somewhere between 2,500 and one million, and growing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List

 Tags: No-Fly List

Stealth Gun Control Passed With Stimulus Bill

Cross posted from Pat Dollard's.

 

Gun Owners Of America:

The Obama administration is putting a lot of pressure on Congress to slam through the most recent $800+ billion bailout package before anyone has an opportunity to read it.

The Obama administration intones that the details are unimportant. The only thing that matters is the “bigness.” And, by shipping a bill of nearly $900 billion (plus interest) to our children and grandchildren, the package is really, really big –- bigger, in fact, than the budget of our entire government for the first 170 years of our country’s existence.

But now that some of the details are finally starting to leak out of Washington, Gun Owners -– and a lot of other analysts -– are beginning to look at the fine print. And some of it is particularly scary.

Of particular concern to gun owners are sections 13101 through 13434 of HR 1, which would set up the infrastructure to computerize the medical records of ALL AMERICANS in a government-coordinated database.

True, the bill doesn’t mandate that the data will be in a giant computer under the Oval Office. But it does mandate that your medical records be reduced to a computerized form which is available to it in a second.

This it would do by establishing a National Coordinator for Health Information Technology –- tasked with, among other things, “providing information to help guide medical decisions at the time and place of care.”
It should be scary enough that a government bureaucrat is directed by statute to try to influence your doctor’s decisions with respect to your medical care.

But of even greater concern to gun owners is the fact that a government-coordinated database (which government can freely access) will now contain all records of government-provided and private psychiatric treatment -– including, in particular, the drugs which were prescribed.

Remember last year’s “NICS Improvement Act” otherwise known as the Veterans Disarmament Act? This law codified ATF’s attempts to make you a prohibited person on the basis of a government psychiatrist’s finding that you are a “danger” –- without a finding by any court. Well, roughly 150,000 battle-scarred veterans have already been unfairly stripped of their gun rights by the government.

But people who, as kids, were diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder… or seniors with Alzheimer’s… or police with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder… or people who are now theoretically covered by the new law… these people have, generally, not suffered the consequences of its sanctions YET. And the chief reason is that their records are not easily available to the government in a central, easily retrievable, computerized form.

The bailout bill would change all of that. It would push increasingly hard to force your private psychiatrist or government-sanctioned psychiatrist to turn over your psychiatric records to a massive database. This would be mandated immediately if your doctor does business with the government.

This would supposedly save Medicare money in connection with medical treatment. And, the sponsors insist, they would work very hard to protect your privacy.

But this turns the concept of “privacy” on its head. The privacy which is MOST important is privacy from the prying eyes of government –- not privacy of government data against the prying eyes of others. After all, many government data bases have been hacked in recent years, with mountains of information stolen.

So, once the government has access to these computerized psychiatric records, the stage will be set for using that database to take away the gun rights of those with Alzheimer’s, those with ADD, and those with PTSD.