Tag Archives: croatia

California Just Required Registration for Untraceable Guns—Like the One I Made

by EllieRadcliffe Posted on July 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 857 into law, requiring Californians who build their own firearms to apply for a state-issued serial number. Previously, guns assembled from parts kits officially flew under the radar. No background checks were required, and no serial number had to be stamped into the finished firearm, making them effectively untraceable.

In 2013, I attended a “gun build party” in southern California, in which I and a dozen others built AK-47s and other Kalashnikov variants from parts kits. My AK, according to the host of the build party, was an Egyptian “Maadi.” Its parts had traveled to the United States by way of Croatia, which most likely received the weapon some time during the Yugoslav wars. He told me that often parts kits come from former conflict zones, and that sometimes the wooden stocks have tally marks notched in them. From my Mother Jones story about the gun build party:

Although US customs laws ban importing the weapons, parts kits—which include most original components of a Kalashnikov variant—are legal. So is reassembling them, as long as no more than 10 foreign-made components are used and they are mounted on a new receiver, the box-shaped central frame that holds the gun’s key mechanics. There are no fussy irritations like, say, passing a background check to buy a kit. And because we’re assembling the guns for our own “personal use,” whatever that may entail, we’re not required to stamp in serial numbers. These rifles are totally untraceable, and even under California’s stringent assault weapons ban, that’s perfectly within the law.

Now that’s no longer the case in California. Homemade weapons have long been a pastime for gun enthusiasts, but some law enforcement agencies have become concerned as they’ve started showing up more frequently at crime scenes.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, today’s bill is part of a more sweeping package of gun safety proposals that California Democrats recently pushed through, including a ban on semiautomatic assault rifles with detachable magazines and requiring background checks for ammunition purchases. Brown signed several of these bills earlier this month, which has been met with an effort to overturn them.

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California Just Required Registration for Untraceable Guns—Like the One I Made

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Bill Clinton in 1996: GOP Opposed Commerce Department Because It Was Run By “A Black Democrat”

by GuadaluMJXP Posted on June 6, 2014

Mother Jones

During a January 1996 staff session, while then-President Bill Clinton and his staff were working on his upcoming State of the Union speech, Clinton let loose in a long rant about a Republican proposal to gut the Commerce Department. One reason for the GOP opposition to the government agency was race, he noted. Republicans in Congress, Clinton said, only began to dislike the Commerce Department after he appointed an African-American to head the department.

“The reason they want to get rid of the Department of Commerce,” Clinton said, “is they are foaming at the mouth that Ron Brown is better than all of those Republican corporate executives who got those cheeky jobs because they gave big money to Republican presidential candidates. And here is this black guy who is a better Secretary of Commerce than anybody since Herbert Hoover, which he was a success at.”

Notes from this meeting were released by the Clinton Library as part of a larger document dump on Friday. Throughout the spring, the library has released batches of internal documents from the Clinton White House.

Clinton’s diatribe immediately followed a discussion of how he should pitch the successful outcomes of the administration’s crime policy, which dovetailed into a larger discussion of Republican opposition to Clinton’s administration. “I mean, they’ve taken a laundry list, and everything we did, if it’s really working, they really want to get rid of it,” Clinton said. That’s when the president began griping about the Republicans targeting the Commerce Department for possible elimination, indicating that race was a factor. “They will get rid of the Department of Commerce so they’ll never have to remember that Ron Brown, a black Democrat, was better than all their big, corporate muckety-mucks that make American jobs. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s unbelievable.”

An unnamed aide asked Clinton if that sentence should go into the State of the Union address. There was laughter in the room. “No,” Clinton responded, “but I mean, they need a rabies shot.”

Clinton appointed Brown, the first African-American to lead the Commerce Department, in 1993. But in April 1996, while Brown was on an official trip in Croatia, Brown’s plane crashed, killing the commerce secretary and 34 others.

Bill Clinton on Republican Opposition to Ron Brown Clinton Library

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Bill Clinton in 1996: GOP Opposed Commerce Department Because It Was Run By “A Black Democrat”

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Hillary Clinton Takes on the Benghazi Crackpots

by CorneliusDowse Posted on May 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Politico has “obtained” the Benghazi chapter from Hillary Clinton’s upcoming memoir, and their writeup includes this:

Clinton addresses lingering questions about how military assets were deployed to try to rescue personnel at the besieged compound, writing that Obama “gave the order to do whatever was necessary to support our people in Libya. It was imperative that all possible resources be mobilized immediately….When Americans are under fire, that is not an order the Commander in Chief has to give twice. Our military does everything humanly possible to save American lives — and would do more if they could. That anyone has ever suggested otherwise is something I will never understand.”

Me, me! Call on me! I understand. Allow me to blogsplain it to you….

Seriously, though, this is pretty much the right attitude for Clinton to take. Of all the nonsense that’s been spewed about Benghazi, the never-ending series of “stand down” conspiracy theories has undoubtedly been the stupidest. Every time one got swatted down, another one popped up to take its place. It was a fast-response team from Italy. No wait. It was a team Gen. Carter Ham was going to send in until Obama ordered him not to. It was a garrison in Tripoli. It was a C-110 team in Croatia. It was a different team from Tripoli. By the time all these theories had been aired, it was apparent that half the United States military was thought to be within striking distance of Libya on the night of the Benghazi attacks.

And as little sense as most of the Benghazi conspiracy theories make, this one made even less. There’s simply no reason that any president of the United States would get in the way of a rescue mission in a situation like Benghazi. But none of that ever mattered. To this day, there are millions of Fox News watchers who are convinced that the deaths in Benghazi could have been prevented but President Obama refused to allow it. Why? Well, if he’s secretly bent on undermining the strength and influence of the United States, it all starts to make sense, doesn’t it? And I wonder where anyone could have gotten that idea?

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Hillary Clinton Takes on the Benghazi Crackpots

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