A month after a deranged mother-murderer shot up that elementary school in Connecticut in 2012, California state Sen. Leland Yee, 65, described by the Los Angeles Times as \u201ca hero of gun regulators,\u201d helped introduce what was seen as one of the toughest pieces of gun control legislation in the country, an attempt to ban all across California the “bullet button.”<\/p>\n
If you don\u2019t know a \u201cbullet button\u201d is, it\u2019s another device, like the old \u201cthumbhole stock,\u201d designed specifically to comply with the ridiculous language of absurd \u201cgun-control\u201d laws.<\/p>\n
California years ago banned \u201clarge\u201d (meaning \u201cregular\u201d) magazines which can be quickly changed by pushing a magazine release lever, see, requiring that rifles have \u201cfixed\u201d magazines that can be removed only by using a tool.<\/p>\n
Scratching their heads, manufacturers came up with a release lever that can be operated only with a tool \u2013 pushing in a recessed button with, say, the tip of a bullet — in order to comply with the law. Gun-banners, of course, responded by trying to ban the new, legal configuration (designed to meet a requirement THEY had set), shrieking that it\u2019s merely an attempt \u201cto \u201cget around the law\u201d \u2013 kind of like saying that if you drive 59 miles per hour, you\u2019re trying to \u201cget around\u201d a law designed to prevent high-speed driving by setting a 60 mph speed limit. <\/p>\n
“We must limit access to weapons that can result in such catastrophe and mass murder,” Sen. Yee said.<\/p>\n
Yee’s legislation was eventually folded into a package of proposals that were vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown last October. <\/p>\n
After the veto, Yee said he was “recommitted” to passing his legislation, claiming it would “protect the public while keeping an appropriately narrow scope.” <\/p>\n
Although I don\u2019t know why it would surprise anyone \u2013 you thought politicians had principles and were only trying to \u201cprotect the children\u201d? \u2013 there was thus apparently some shock in certain quarters in late March when state Sen. Yee was busted by FBI agents on arms trafficking and corruption charges.<\/p>\n
Mr. Yee has not been convicted of anything and is entitled to a presumption of innocence. But what FBI agents contend in affidavits filed with the court is that Yee secretly offered to connect an undercover FBI agent with an international arms trafficker in exchange for campaign contributions — $30,000 to date. <\/p>\n
During the investigation, the undercover agent mentioned his desire to spend as much as $2.5 million on automatic “shoulder-fired” weapons and missiles, the complaint said.<\/p>\n
The complaint quotes Yee as saying “Once things start to move, it’s going to attract attention. We just got to be extra-extra careful.” <\/p>\n
Among the other 25 defendants rounded up were Yee’s campaign aide, Keith Jackson, and Raymond Chow, a supposedly \u201cformer\u201d gang leader in San Francisco\u2019s Chinatown better known there as “Shrimp Boy.” <\/p>\n
Yee, a former San Francisco mayoral candidate, had been running to be California\u2019s next secretary of state. After spending one night in jail he withdrew from that race. The following day the Legislature voted to suspend him from the state Senate. On March 31 Yee’s lawyer indicated he would plead not guilty, although Gov. Jerry Brown called on him to resign anyway.<\/p>\n
In an affidavit filed in federal court on March 23, FBI special agent Emmanuel Pascua said Yee attracted the attention of the FBI through Chow, who was described in the complaint as “the Dragonhead, or leader, of the San Francisco-based Chee Kung Tong organization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yee lost his campaign for mayor of San Francisco in November, 2011. That left him with $70,000 in campaign debt. As Yee prepared to run for secretary of state, Pascua said he and Jackson sought donations to retire that debt from an undercover agent. <\/p>\n
In January, Pascua said Yee met with Jackson and the undercover agent at a coffee shop, where they discussed getting the weapons from Russia. “Do I think we can make some money? I think we can make some money,” Yee said, according to Pascua’s affidavit. “Do I think we can get the goods? I think we can get the goods.”<\/p>\n
Pascua reports Yee, Jackson, and the undercover agent met again in February, at which point the state senator dismissed ethical concerns about the weapons deal, saying “People want to get whatever they want to get. Do I care? No, I don’t care. People need certain things.\u201d<\/p>\n
So when law-abiding citizens — de facto members of the militia — want to acquire firearms of military usefulness, a right which the Constitution says may not be infringed, “We must limit access to weapons that can result in such catastrophe and mass murder.” But when gangsters are willing to hand our leading gun-control politicians tens of thousands in bribes — pardon me, \u201ccampaign donations\u201d — to facilitate arming said gangsters with fully automatic assault weapons, that\u2019s OK, because \u201cPeople need certain things\u201d?<\/p>\n
Got it.<\/p>\n
# # #<\/p>\n
Meantime, I see where the federals have made another attempt to drive Cliven Bundy\u2019s cattle off the land, 80-odd miles east of Las Vegas, Nevada.<\/p>\n
But \u2013 surprise \u2013 about a thousand patriots found their way to little Bunkerville, and after spending millions of dollars to collect a few hundred thousand in \u201cdelinquent grazing fees\u201d (and killing and burying dozens of the cattle they were supposedly there to \u201cround up,\u201d including two valuable bulls) the armed BLM thugs and their escort of Homeland Security combat troops backed down on April 12.<\/p>\n
Despite being flanked by helmeted troops with their rifles leveled, about a hundred everyday American citizens (including former military, former law enforcement officers, and a contingent from the admirable constitutional Oath Keepers organization) advanced on the pen where the federals were holding some 400 head of Bundy\u2019s cattle, just south of Interstate 15, and set them free. \u201cIf anyone on either side had popped off a round, it would have been a massacre,\u201d I\u2019m told by someone who was there.<\/p>\n
Why hadn\u2019t the invaders already trucked the cattle away? Congratulations to Utah Gov. Gary Herbert for writing a letter to the BLM, informing them he didn\u2019t want any of those rustled cattle brought into Utah, where cattle from this remote corner of southeast Nevada are usually sold.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll be filing a longer piece on the Showdown at Bundy Ranch — and the real motives of the federals, which have nothing to do with \u201csaving baby tortoises\u201d — for the next issue of the quarterly \u201cRange\u201d magazine, based here in Nevada.<\/p>\n
In brief, though, as I write in the May 19 issue of Shotgun News (on newsstands now!): Cliven, who fired the feds as \u201cadvisors\u201d for his range management plan decades ago, points out that grazing rights in Nevada are adjudicated by the state, not the federal government, and that his family\u2019s exclusive grazing rights to those lands have been confirmed by the state for more than a century.<\/p>\n
More than a decade ago, the BLM managed to get a federal judge of less than average intelligence to buy their contrary argument, that the federal government OWNS the majority of the lands in Nevada, and that Bundy is therefore \u201ctrespassing\u201d on \u201cfederal land\u201d which Washington acquired in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — 15 years before Nevada became a state.
\nDid you follow that? Wouldn\u2019t that mean that the federal government \u201cowns\u201d all the land from Louisiana to Minnesota to Colorado to Iowa to Montana and points in between, having \u201cacquired it in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase,\u201d and that federal rangers can therefore evict any private party whom they believe to be \u201ctrespassing\u201d there, especially if they refuse to sign agreements under which federal officials tell them how to \u201cmanage\u201d their land to better protect some supposedly \u201cthreatened\u201d weed, bug, or toad?<\/p>\n
In fact, the U.S. Constitution sensibly dictates that Washington can own lands \u201cwithin the several states\u201d only for forts, dockyards, and other \u201cneedful buildings,\u201d and that to acquire these parcels it must \u201cpurchase them with the consent of the Legislature of the State\u201d in which those parcels are located. Needless to say, the federal government has never sought permission from the Nevada State Legislature to buy the lands in question; it has never purchased them; it has no bill of sale, nor does it pay property taxes on all these lands it \u201ccontrols and manages\u201d \u2013 more than 80 percent of the lands in the state — as any legitimate land-owner would.<\/p>\n
So in any dispute between the Bundys, who\u2019ve been on the land with full legal rights for a century, and the BLM — established in 1946 not to collect taxes or wield any police powers but merely to \u201cpromote beneficial use of the land\u201d — who\u2019s \u201ctrespassing\u201d?<\/p>\n
In the old days, the federals rested their management claims on the fact that the Territorial Legislature agreed prior to Nevada\u2019s admission into the union in 1863 that they wouldn\u2019t contest federal control of these lands. But \u201ccontrol\u201d is not ownership, nor is a territorial legislature a \u201cstate legislature,\u201d nor is it clear that such actions can be binding on a sovereign state after admission, given that all states are presumed to enter the union on an equal footing.<\/p>\n
The federals claim Bundy must be evicted because he\u2019s grazing cattle on a few thousand acres of desert scrub south of the small town of Mesquite without signing a grazing permit and paying grazing fees. But that\u2019s disingenuous. Wouldn\u2019t that imply that — once they get rid of Bundy — they\u2019ll then turn around and lease this range to some other rancher, who WILL sign a grazing permit and pay their fees? In fact they won\u2019t, and the way we know this is that the other 51 ranchers who ran cattle in Clark County in 1950 are all gone, because the federal aim is to set terms so uneconomical \u2013 forcing ranchers to pull their cattle off the range in the springtime, the only time there\u2019s enough rain to provide enough graze to fatten the animals — as to make ranching a losing enterprise. This is all supposedly to keep the little baby desert tortoises from being stepped on by the big nasty cattle, when in fact the main predators of desert tortoises are coyote and ravens, which the ranchers formerly suppressed, but which now swarm uncontrolled.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why no one now grazes the other 51 allotments in Clark County, leaving Cliven Bundy to correctly describe himself as \u201cthe last rancher from here to the Pacific Ocean\u201d — while \u201crescued\u201d desert tortoises so clog the shelters that officials are now euthanizing them.<\/p>\n
The federals contend they\u2019re doing all this to \u201cprotect the threatened desert tortoise,\u201d though I\u2019ve documented again and again over the years (citing such experts as Vern Bostick) that government wildlife experts admit the desert tortoise is \u201cat saturation levels\u201d in the wild, and that all evidence demonstrates the tortoises do better when cattle are on the land, with the ranchers putting in drips and tanks and maintaining the water features.<\/p>\n
(In fact, the Kern River Pipeline study found more tortoises on grazed land, but found the very highest concentration of the supposedly \u201dthreatened\u201d desert tortoise near urban golf courses. So saying we need to get ranchers and cattle off the land to \u201cprotect\u201d the tortoise is like saying we need to level all the man-made buildings on Manhattan Island to \u201cprotect the threatened\u201d pigeon, which in fact is eternally grateful to mankind for erecting all those wonderful window ledges.)<\/p>\n
Cliven\u2019s getting older and can\u2019t hold out forever. Someday Eastern environmentalists will succeed in getting federal officials to \u201cestablish\u201d their irrational Green religion at gunpoint, all the range cattle will be gone, and no one will be eating anything but hormone- and antibiotic-laced feedlot meat. Hope you enjoy it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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