iftttwall

Connecticut news outlets report long lines as the
deadline looms for state residents to undergo the registration
process that will magically render their firearms and
standard-capacity magazines legal, in contrast to those evil,
forbidden, yet identical, guns and mags that remain unregistered
after the turn of the year. Thousands of registrations have been
recorded, yet whether that counts as substantial compliance with
the law depends on something that’s unknowable: how many objects
subject to the law are in the state. As I’ve written before,
however, defiance of such laws is the historical norm.

According to
NBC Connecticut:

Long lines extended again from Connecticut State Police
headquarters in Middletown Tuesday morning as gun owners raced to
comply with new gun laws that go into effect on Jan. 1.

New gun laws were enacted after the tragic shooting at Sandy
Hook Elementary School in Newtown in December 2012 that took the
lives of 20 first graders and six staff members. Tuesday is the
year-end deadline for gun owners to register certain assault
weapons as well as high-capacity magazines. …

As of Christmas, 25,000 people had registered assault weapons
and 17,000 registered high-capacity magazines, Malloy said Monday.
That number is sure to rise after hundreds of people waited in line
on the final two days of 2013, rushing to meet the deadline.

25,000 registered “assault weapons” with hundreds more to go?
But Governor Andrew Cuomo in (much larger) neighboring New York
estimates the number of similar weapons in his state at
one million, while a widely ignored 1991 ban in New Jersey on
the arbitrarily defined category of weapons was estimated to apply
to
100,000-300,000 such guns, before the
politics-fueled buying frenzies of the last two
decades.

I’m willing to bet that 25,000 registered assault weapons
represents a minority of the firearms that are legally required to
be registered under the law. Considering that the vast majority of
“assault weapons” use magazines restricted under the new law, and
that most people purchase multiple magazines for their rifles,
17,000 registrations in that category should be seen as wildly
underwhelming.

That shouldn’t be surprising at all, since
defiance of registration laws, let alone confiscations, is the
historical norm in the United States, Australia, Canada,
France, Germany … Politicians made that particular bed by being
repeatedly untrustworthy,
abusing registration records to seize recorded weapons, or
otherwise letting even tolerable governments degenerate into the
sort of regimes that make you wish you had a gun.

In a white paper on the results of gun control efforts around
the world,
Gun Control and the Reduction of the Number of Arms,
Franz Csaszar, a professor of criminology at the University of
Vienna, Austria, wrote, “non-compliance with harsher gun laws is a
common event.” He estimated that Germans registered 3.2 million of
17-20 million affected weapons when registration was implemented in
that country in 1972. Austrians, he says, registered perhaps a
quarter to a third of weapons subject to a similar law in 1996.

When California imposed “assault weapon” registration in 1990,
The New York Times
reported “only about 7,000 weapons of an estimated 300,000 in
private hands in the state have been registered” at the time the
grace period came to a close.

So take those “long lines” in Connecticut with a grain of salt.
Government officials are capable of turning a dinner party into an
extended, bureaucratic ordeal. But they can’t make compliance with
intrusive and repressive laws seem like a goood idea.

Thousands of gay Americans will be
ringing in the new year as legally recognized married couples, part
of an irreversible, dynamic shift in growing cultural acceptance of
same-sex relationships. 2013 was a bellwether year for gays in the
United States, but it also brought to the forefront debate over the
difference between government-enforced discrimination and private
freedoms of association. Reason’s Scott Shackford looks at the
developments, victories, challenges, and what’s ahead in gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues.

View this article.

The world’s very first sale by a
government-licensed recreational pot store is
scheduled for 8 a.m. tomorrow at 3D Cannabis Center in Denver.
Somewhat confusingly, the buyer, designated by the leaders of
Colorado’s legalization campaign, will be someone who would
ordinarily be considered a medical user: Sean Azzariti, an Iraq war
veteran “who can now legally use marijuana to alleviate the
symptoms of post-traumatic disorder,” a condition that was not
covered by Colorado’s medical marijuana law. But recreational
consumers will be the main source of new business for outlets like
3D Cannabis Center, which is conveniently located at 4305 Brighton
Boulevard, on the way into town from the airport. (The “3D” refers
to the shop’s former designation: Denver’s Discreet Dispensary.)
When I interviewed 3D’s owner, Toni Fox, about a year ago, she said
she hoped her proximity to Interstates 25 and 70 would help attract
business. “I would think that I would be able to sell out of the
cannabis that I had every day,” she said, “because the demand is
going to be so great.”

Over the short term, Fox and other dispensary
owners expanding into the recreational market stand to benefit from
the shortage
that is expected to last at least until marijuana from the first
plants grown for general consumption is harvested this spring. “The
medical marijuana prices have been cut unfairly in the for-profit
market, because of the competition,” she said. “When recreational
opens up and there’s a limited supply, I don’t have a problem
resetting my prices to street value and hopefully making a profit
finally.” Under state law, dispensary owners have a three-month
head start in the licensing process. Denver, which is where most of
the pot shops will be located, has
banned new competitors until February 1, 2016, so the existing
dispensaries have a lock on the market until then. So far 102
retailers in Denver have
received state licenses.

Although the Justice Department has
indicated that it will leave the pot shops alone as long as
they are strictly regulated, banks continue to worry about the
legal consequences of accepting deposits from cannabusinesses,
which could be viewed as money laundering. When she opened her
dispensary, Fox persuaded the bank she had used for her
construction business to serve her new venture, but most marijuana
retailers are not so lucky. Many are forced to deal exclusively in
cash. “I cannot help but be concerned about the safety and security
threats caused by outdated federal banking regulations,” Fox says
in a
press release from the National Cannabis Industry Association
(NCIA). “The widespread perception that cannabis retailers hold
large amounts of cash, despite top-notch security and monitoring,
creates an inherent danger for businesses owners, employees, and
communities alike.”

Deputy Attorney General David Cole has said the
Justice Department is talking to officials at the Treasury
Departmentment’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
(FinCEN) about how to address this problem, but so far no
solution has emerged. “Members of Congress, state regulators,
community leaders, cannabis business professionals, and even many
local banks are calling for reform to the absurd interpretations of
law that inhibit banking services for cannabis-related businesses,”

says Betty Aldworth, the NCIA’s deputy director. “There is
absolutely no justifiable reason to allow this threat to public
safety to continue in those states where the regulated sale of
marijuana has been made legal. A lack of access to banking services
is, quite frankly, the single most dangerous thing about the legal
sale of marijuana for medical or social use. It is long past time
for FinCEN and the Justice Department to catch up with the American
public and answer the call for safe, regulated markets by allowing
banking services.”

Despite all the hardships involved in growing and selling a
product that the federal government continues to treat as
contraband, Fox is excited about Colorado’s pathbreaking
experiment. “I am so grateful to be a pioneer and to be able to
change people’s perceptions of this plant and change the world,”
she says. “We’re going to change the world by ending
prohibition.”

More on what to expect when the pot shops open here.

The world’s very first sale by a
government-licensed recreational pot store is
scheduled for 8 a.m. tomorrow at 3D Cannabis Center in Denver.
Somewhat confusingly, the buyer, designated by the leaders of
Colorado’s legalization campaign, will be someone who would
ordinarily be considered a medical user: Sean Azzariti, an Iraq war
veteran “who can now legally use marijuana to alleviate the
symptoms of post-traumatic disorder,” a condition that was not
covered by Colorado’s medical marijuana law. But recreational
consumers will be the main source of new business for outlets like
3D Cannabis Center, which is conveniently located at 4305 Brighton
Boulevard, on the way into town from the airport. (The “3D” refers
to the shop’s former designation: Denver’s Discreet Dispensary.)
When I interviewed 3D’s owner, Toni Fox, about a year ago, she said
she hoped her proximity to Interstates 25 and 70 would help attract
business. “I would think that I would be able to sell out of the
cannabis that I had every day,” she said, “because the demand is
going to be so great.”

Over the short term, Fox and other dispensary
owners expanding into the recreational market stand to benefit from
the shortage
that is expected to last at least until marijuana from the first
plants grown for general consumption is harvested this spring. “The
medical marijuana prices have been cut unfairly in the for-profit
market, because of the competition,” she said. “When recreational
opens up and there’s a limited supply, I don’t have a problem
resetting my prices to street value and hopefully making a profit
finally.” Under state law, dispensary owners have a three-month
head start in the licensing process. Denver, which is where most of
the pot shops will be located, has
banned new competitors until February 1, 2016, so the existing
dispensaries have a lock on the market until then. So far 102
retailers in Denver have
received state licenses.

Although the Justice Department has
indicated that it will leave the pot shops alone as long as
they are strictly regulated, banks continue to worry about the
legal consequences of accepting deposits from cannabusinesses,
which could be viewed as money laundering. When she opened her
dispensary, Fox persuaded the bank she had used for her
construction business to serve her new venture, but most marijuana
retailers are not so lucky. Many are forced to deal exclusively in
cash. “I cannot help but be concerned about the safety and security
threats caused by outdated federal banking regulations,” Fox says
in a
press release from the National Cannabis Industry Association
(NCIA). “The widespread perception that cannabis retailers hold
large amounts of cash, despite top-notch security and monitoring,
creates an inherent danger for businesses owners, employees, and
communities alike.”

Deputy Attorney General David Cole has said the
Justice Department is talking to officials at the Treasury
Departmentment’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
(FinCEN) about how to address this problem, but so far no
solution has emerged. “Members of Congress, state regulators,
community leaders, cannabis business professionals, and even many
local banks are calling for reform to the absurd interpretations of
law that inhibit banking services for cannabis-related businesses,”

says Betty Aldworth, the NCIA’s deputy director. “There is
absolutely no justifiable reason to allow this threat to public
safety to continue in those states where the regulated sale of
marijuana has been made legal. A lack of access to banking services
is, quite frankly, the single most dangerous thing about the legal
sale of marijuana for medical or social use. It is long past time
for FinCEN and the Justice Department to catch up with the American
public and answer the call for safe, regulated markets by allowing
banking services.”

Despite all the hardships involved in growing and selling a
product that the federal government continues to treat as
contraband, Fox is excited about Colorado’s pathbreaking
experiment. “I am so grateful to be a pioneer and to be able to
change people’s perceptions of this plant and change the world,”
she says. “We’re going to change the world by ending
prohibition.”

More on what to expect when the pot shops open here.

Today, the New York
Times has published yet another article aiming to prove to
readers that genetic testing, especially direct to consumer
testing, is useless and perhaps even misleading. In her article,
“I
Had My DNA Picture Taken, With Varying Results,” by Kira
Peikoff, a bioethics graduate student at Columbia University, takes
genotype screening tests from three different companies is,
shocked, just shocked, to discover that the results do not
all agree.

This stunt has been pulled before, most notoriously by the
Government Accountability Office (GAO) back in 2010. In my article,
“A
Genetic Testing Dupe?,” reporting on the GAO’s study, I too
noted that I had received differing results from the two testing
companies I had used. Was I misled? Not at all.

I explained that the companies tested for different allele
variants related to disease risks, which they clearly explained in
their reports to customers. In my case the two companies I used
disagreed about my risks for colorectal cancer, melanoma, and heart
disease – all of which is explained by the way the companies select
research data for determing those variant alleles for which they
test.

Ms. Peikoff, to her credit, also explains this, but then
pretends that it is somehow confusing. She then goes to on explain
that environmental exposures also play a big role in future disease
risks. Please tell us something we don’t know.

As I reported in my article, I had already had a polyp removed,
suffered a second-degree sunburn as a child, and my parents died of
heart disease, so I would be taking those facts, as well as the
genetic information the companies supplied, into account as I
thought about my disease risks.  As I concluded:

The differential tests results do not bother me, and I would be
surprised if many gene testing pioneer customers find the
information they receive all that confusing. The results are
probabilistic calculations based on a selection of low risk
susceptibility alleles. The right way to think about the current
direct-to-consumer genotype screening tests is that they are a
preliminary technology. They offer supplementary, not dispositive
information about various health risks. The tests are not perfect,
but they are the beginning of the process through which consumers,
physicians, and purveyors will learn how to better interpret and
use genetic information over time.

We are in the Apple II era of genetic testing. It would have
been silly to ban the Apple
II just because it was not as easy to use or immediately
comprehensible as the MacBook Air. Standardization
of test results will come as more information about the interaction
between genetic variants and environmental influences accumulates.
The current tests function as training wheels for curious consumers
who will be using the whole genome and epigenetic screening tests
that will be widely and cheaply available by the end of this
decade. As one of those curious consumers, I don’t want or need
federal regulators to protect me from my own test results.

That’s still the case, although that has unfortunately not
stopped the
Food and Drug Administration from banning direct-to-consumer
genetic testing from
23andMe.