As of July 1, Kansas residents are again be able to lawfully carry concealed handguns without a permit.
Introduced in the state Senate in January with an impressive 26 co-sponsors, the Sunflower State’s new “Constitutional carry” bill swept the senate 31-7 and cleared the house in March by a bipartisan 85-39 margin, reports Chris Eger, an NRA-certified firearms instructor, at guns.com.
What’s the big deal about requiring background checks for private firearm sales? If you want to sell your gun to your neighbor, you just telephone the National Instant Check hotline and ask to have your potential buyer checked out . . . right?
Wrong. Although it’s reported the Nevada state Legislature, in its semi-annual scramble to close as required by midnight June 1, has just enacted a measure allowing for (but not requiring) private parties to access the Silver State’s state-run “background check” apparatus, that’s a first so far as I know, and it’s still not clear quite how it will work. I’m told the state police will apparently be given five days to respond to a written request.
I sell books both online (www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sortby=0&vci=51238921) and in our brick and mortar bookstore, inside the Charleston Antique Mall in Las Vegas.
(A version of this column appears in the May 10 issue of “Shotgun News.”)
Back in mid-February, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives announced it was considering a ban on the popular M855 variety of .223 rifle ammunition — the popular “green-tip” fodder for the AR-15 rifle — by re-categorizing the round as “armor piercing.”
Vin’s latest post at https://www.academia.edu/s/965353a49d , where Nese Devenot invites members of the psychedelic community to “come out of the closet”:
I believe a false dichotomy is being embraced by some correspondents here, a dichotomy which is beneficial to the oppressors, but not to the oppressed — who would be better advised to form common cause, rather than arguing “I’m more oppressed than you are; you insult me by comparing the threat of jail under which YOU now labor, to the disabilities which the law sought or still seeks to impose on MY group.”
John Geer was killed a year and a half ago, but it wasn’t until a judge ordered officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, to release 11,000 pages of documents earlier this year, detailing their 17-month cover-up of the case, that details of his homicide by police became known.
Owner of a local kitchen design business in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, John B. Geer, 46, stood with his hands on top of the storm door of his Springfield, Va., townhouse in broad daylight and calmly told four Fairfax County police officers who had their handguns pointed at him: “I don’t want anybody to get shot. . . . And I don’t wanna get shot, ’cause I don’t want to die today,” reported Tom Jackman of the Washington Post on Jan. 31.
So, there you are at the yard sale, confronted by boxes of old books, records, and miscellany. What do you look for?
“Buy what you like,” has long been good advice. Until you learn to grade for condition — and to tell a first edition from a later reissue or even (God forbid) a book club — please don’t go paying more than pocket change on the assumption you can “get rich on e-Bay.”
Thomas B. Roberts, professor emeritus at Northern Illinois University, edited the books “The Psychedelic Future of the Mind” and “Psychoactive Sacramentals: Essays on Entheogens and Religion,” the latter of which was acknowledged as a valuable source in my latest novel, “The Testament of James.”
Dr. Roberts (no known relation to the Beatles’ Doctor Robert) was kind enough to post a four-star review of “Testament” to Amazon this week, titled “Entheogenic-Religious Fiction,” also posting it to a number of addresses on his “psychedelics” list, which is also much appreciated.
The book “The Archaic Revival” (HarperCollins 1991), which is a compilation of writings by and interviews with the late entheogen pioneer Terence McKenna, concludes with an interview conducted by Nevill Drury as it appeared in the Autumn, 1990 (Vol. 11, No. 1) issue of the Australian magazine “Nature and Health.”
An excerpt of the most relevant portion (for our purposes) can be found at http://www.salvia-divinorum-scotland.co.uk/quotes/mckenna/prejudice.htm :
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has long prohibited towns and cities from enforcing local firearm ordinances that impact the ownership, possession, transfer or transport of guns or ammo.
But gun-rights groups have long complained that scores of municipalities ignored the 40-year-old prohibition by passing their own, piecemeal gun control enactments, which rarely got tested in court, The Associated Press reports.
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