MONA, UT – MARCH 5: An AR-15, .233 or 5.56 caliber bullet is shown here at Barnes Bullets on March 5, 2015 in Mona, Utah. The ATF is considering a controversial ban on some bullets of this caliber which is commonly used in AR-15 rifles. (Photo Illustration by George Frey/Getty Images)
The city of Seattle has the authority to impose a tax on guns and bullets according to Judge Palmer Robinson of King County Superior Court. Judge Robinson ruled in favor of the City of Seattle this week after the National Rifle Association (NRA), the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the Second Amendment Foundation, and others filed suit to protest the city’s tax on guns and bullets. The groups argued that the city did not have the authority to pass the law.
Under the law, called the “gun violence tax,” gun and ammo sales in Seattle are subject to a tax of $25 per firearm at sale and $0.05 for every round of ammunition at sale ($0.02 for every round of .22 caliber ammunition and smaller). Seattle’s City Budget Office estimates that the gun violence tax will raise between $300,000 and $500,000 per year: revenue raised under the tax will be used for education as well as violence prevention.
[tweet_quote display=”Judge Robinson ruled that the law is permitted as a tax measure to raise revenue and not gun control.”]Judge Robinson ruled that the law is permitted as a tax measure to raise revenue and not gun control[/tweet_quote] – a slight distinction but one that matters in this case. As in other matters (including the health care law which was challenged in the Supreme Court), whether a measure is considered a tax has a significant impact on whether it may be enforceable.
In his ruling, the judge relied heavily on the primary purpose of the law, as stated, as well as how the revenue would be spent. Judge Robinson ruled that the funds raised were for broad purposes and not regulatory in nature – that, he says, made it a tax. And, the judge ruled, Seattle has the right to impose certain kinds of taxes, including this one. He dismissed the case against the city, clearing the way for the tax to become effective, as planned, on January 1, 2016.
A related law which requires gun owners to report a lost or stolen firearm within 24 hours is already in effect in Seattle. Gun owners in Seattle who fail to report lost or stolen firearms can be slapped with a $500 civil penalty. Under federal law, firearms businesses holding a federal license, must report lost or stolen guns but not individual gun owners.
A similar law is already in place in Cook County, Illinois, the nation’s second-largest county. Cook County imposes a $25 tax on the sale of firearms; an additional tax on gun cartridges is slated to take effect on firearm cartridges on June 1, 2016. One of the goals of those measures, according to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, was to reduce gun violence in the county. However, according to reports in the Chicago Tribune, gun violence continues to escalate in the city of Chicago with the numbers of persons shot in 2015 already eclipsing the numbers of those shot in 2014 by more than 10%.
The Second Amendment Foundation has vowed to appeal the ruling in Seattle and other groups are mounting challenges to stop Cook County’s ammo tax from taking effect this summer.
“There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust
“I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
Mark Twain on Jane Austen
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
Virginia Woolf on James Joyce
“[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.”
William Faulkner on Mark Twain
“A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”
Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe
“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
W. H. Auden on Robert Browning
“I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.”
William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley
“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”
H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw
“An idiot child screaming in a hospital.”
Martin Amis on Miguel Cervantes
“Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last (on page 846 — the prose wedged tight, with no breaks for dialogue), you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that ‘Don Quixote’ could do.”
Gore Vidal on Truman Capote
“He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”
Dylan Thomas on Rudyard Kipling
“Mr Kipling … stands for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise.”
So many of these feel like they were written in the twitter era. Especially the Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway quotes.
So these two guys go through the Star Wars movies minute by minute and do like twenty to forty minute podcasts on them. And they JUST started Phantom Menace (They've already done the Orig. Trilogy, and then did hour long specials on the Christmas Special and the first Ewok movie). It's a great little podcast and I recommend it to everyone.
i am at the hospital today with my mom and there is this little robot that just boops around and makes cute noises and says excuse me when it passes. when it delivers the medicine it’s carrying, it chirrs and says little things like, “hi, do you want to take a selfie?”
basically, i eagerly await the arrival of our adorable robot overlords.
OH NOOO
My brain is weird because I saw this little logistics robot and found the company’s youtube page. Look at all the interesting automated logistics systems they make!
Poutine by itself? Strangely compelling. Poutine in a burger with a really hard Italian bun so the gravy softens up the bread? Amazing. May be better than garlic fries, which is the staple french fry of bay area baseball games.
Also the Giants beat the Nationals 12-6. So a fantastic time was had by all.
At the Giants game. In honor of the visiting ex-Montreal Expos (aka the Washington Nationals) I’m eating some poutine fries.
Somebody built a hovercraft deloreon and is boating around McCovey Cove. When the gullwing doors opened the stadium exploded in cheers. Then they played a clip from Back to the Future!
Spider-Gwen is another fun comic. A great little "What If?" universe where Gwen Stacy became Spider-Woman instead of Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man. Lots of crazy changes happens as a result.
Seriously guys, Ms. Marvel is an awesome comic. I really recommend it, and you guys can pick it up on the cheap right now (the first eleven issues are on sale for $0.99/ish for today only). It's fun, diverse, and makes me smile which is more than I can say for a lot of comics these days.
It's really too bad that the Falcon 9 exploded, but I suppose it had to happen eventually. At the moment it has a 17-1-1 success rate, which is still better than a lot of space program's rockets (the heavy-lift Proton family used by the Russians has a 13% failure rate). The most interesting thing, though to me is that apparently the Dragon capsule could have survived had they been able to deploy the parachutes on-the-fly (all the available data also suggests that the Dragon 2's escape system would have allowed the manned variant to have escaped this explosion).
I don't think I can explain how strange the Golden State Warriors Champions parade was. Those two people on the snail? That's the Mayor of Oakland and MC Hammer. So weird.
I absolutely love the CG art style on the new Peanuts movie. I also love that the Peanuts characters are going to be voiced by children. And the new trailer looks absolutely fun.
Switch pitchers! And the interesting thing is that Venditte pitches INCREDIBLY different as a lefty than as a righty. I forget which is which, but with one arm he pitches over the shoulder and the other he pitches side-armed. He has vastly different pitches for the different arms. It's crazy.
One of the crazy benefits people are talking up for Venditte is the idea that because he's using both arms he could have higher total pitch counts and last longer than his non-ambidextrous competition. I actually have no idea if official scorers at the stadiums he plays at end up splitting his pitch count up by arm, but they probably should. Right now Oakland is testing the waters with the guy and he's got an ERA of 0.00 as a closer. But if he has the longevity and is a real knockout pitcher he could be an intense long-reliever or even starter.
And finally: on tumblr I joked that over-involved parents should start forcing their kids to be ambidextrous so they'd have this toolkit to set them apart. My uncle actually did try to force my cousin to throw left handed but it never worked out. Instead he ended up in hockey, where he plays for RIT's Division I hockey team.
This happened a couple of days ago, but I only came across it now. Switch pitching, man. Absolutely crazy. Pat Venditte is now the subject of a baseball rule, resulting from this insane series of events in minor league ball where Venditte, a switch pitcher, faced Ralph Henriquez, a switch hitter:
So I’ve finished installing OS X on the updated machine (though I still have a few files and applications to install). A dramatic increase in performance has resulted; previously it took ~212 seconds to turn on the computer now it takes less than 20. I still haven’t tested the Blu-Ray player functionality — that will require finding a program to play the disks — but the drive does work (though it is a bit of a noisy son of a bitch).
