Category Archives: Constitution

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, April 18, 2019: 

It’s unlikely that Joe Thoele, a member of the board of Effingham County, Illinois, had any idea that his unhappiness over Springfield’s anti-gun measures would spark a national resistance movement. A year ago all he wanted to do was send a message to the anti-gun politicians in his state’s capitol: “I would just like to send a statement to Springfield that I don’t want them to be infringing on our Second Amendment rights as legal gun owners.”

Thoele persuaded six of the seven other members of the board to pass a resolution declaring his county (population 34,000) a “sanctuary” county. After all, if political entities such as counties and states could declare themselves sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, why couldn’t they declare themselves sanctuaries for legal gun owners?

Effingham County’s resolution not only targeted a number of anti-gun proposals and laws emanating from Springfield, but also

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, April 10, 2019: 

President Lincoln would not have been able to contain himself. In his sixth debate with Senator Stephen Douglas in October, 1858, Lincoln relieved himself of a quote that reverberates down to today:

Has [your argument] not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?

In an effort to justify its existence – stridently anti-gun – the Giffords Law Center (GLC) published a report with as much substance as Lincoln’s pigeon. Its position has been that guns are dangerous and that therefore no one should own one. It reported on how guns are being mishandled in schools in America.

It based its report on data obtained from another equally anti-gun group, the Gun Violence Archive, founded in 2014 and staffed with 20 eager researchers trying to find something – anything – to bolster Giffords’ position. After researching the past five years, it found some 60 “incidents” where guns were mishandled in some way in schools. Its email promotion of the study was breathless: “This week Giffords Law Center released indisputable evidence that armed adults frequently mishandled guns in schools.”

Hang on tight. It gets better.

Three of those “incidents” occurred in Pennsylvania. Philly.com reported that at the Russell Byers Charter School in Center City, a middle school student bumped into a staffer’s bag during class last year and realized that it contained a firearm! That “incident” was included in the study. At a Washington County high school, a student found a loaded gun that a security guard had left behind in the Men’s Room. That outrageous “incident” made its way into the study. And in Chambersburg in Franklin County, a group of elementary school students found a teacher’s loaded gun on top of a toilet! One more “incident” to prove the point.

It gets even better. Three students were injured in a school in Seaside, California, when a teacher accidentally fired his gun in a classroom during a safety demonstration. In another instance, a first grade substitute teacher in Blountsville, Alabama, was arrested after “his gun accidentally discharged” and a bullet fragment hit one of his students.

That’s it.

A perusal of the other “incidents” reveal how far GLC, using the data from GVA, has to reach to prove its point: guns are dangerous, teachers are stupid and not to be trusted, professionals make mistakes, and therefore no one should be allowed to own one.

Consider:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, April 10, 2019:

Now that Missouri has a Republican governor, that state’s legislative body is trying again to pass its “Second Amendment Protection Act,” legislation that would nullify most federal gun-control legislation. Last week, a Missouri Senate Committee held a hearing on that bill that would ban any person in the state, including any public official or employee of the state, from attempting to enforce any “acts, laws, executive orders, administrative orders, court orders, rules or regulations” that infringe on the right of Missourians to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

A similar bill that passed the state legislature in 2014 was vetoed by then-Democratic Governor Jay Nixon. Hopes are high that the state’s current Republican governor, Mike Parson, will sign the new bill into law when it hits his desk.

The bill, SB367, defines “infringement” as including, but not limited to

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, April 9, 2019: 

Using a “man bites dog” story bordering on the hilarious, the anti-gun Giffords Law Center overreached in its attempt to make its case that guns are dangerous, especially in schools.

Giffords Law Center (GLC) was founded in 2017 upon the merger of the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a public-interest law firm originally known as the Legal Community Against Violence, and Americans for Responsible Solutions founded by former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

The GLC relied on statistics obtained from the left-of-center Gun Violence Archive (GVA) for its “proof,” published last week, claiming that over the last five years (GVA began operations in 2014) there were more than 60 “incidents” where firearms were “mishandled” by their owners on school campuses.

That is more than enough evidence to convict, according to GLC’s chief counsel: “What this shows is, yes, there’s always the concern of somebody intentionally misusing a gun, but the point I think that these incidents make is that children will be at greater risk in our schools if there are more guns in the schools.”

And, Skaggs added, these incidents of mishandling of firearms were done by “professionals” — security guards employed by the districts. Imagine the horror, bloodshed, and mayhem that would follow if teachers were armed as well:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, March 15, 2019: 

Following the horrific murder of 20 young children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, in December 2012, families of the victims filed a lawsuit against the maker of the weapon Adam Lanza used in the massacre.

The lawsuit was tossed in 2016 when a lower court ruled that Remington Arms, the maker of the Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle Lanza used, was immune thanks to the PLCAA — the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act — that Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law in October 2005.

But anti-gunners never give up. Upon appeal, the Connecticut Supreme Court just ruled that the lawsuit may proceed despite that ruling, claiming that Remington used illegal marketing strategies that somehow enticed Lanza to purchase that particular weapon and use it in his killing spree.

The bias of the court’s Chief Justice Richard Robinson was clear from his comments following the resurrection of the lawsuit:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Sunday, March 10, 2019: 

When the British Medical Journal (BMJ) released the results of its study of gun violence on March 6, its conclusions matched the media’s anti-gun narrative. Immediately, members of the media breathlessly reported them without noting the study’s limitations. From The Hill: “States with stricter gun control regulations have fewer mass shootings: study.” From Yahoo: “State by state, more gun ownership equals more mass shootings, study shows.” From Vox: “Study: where gun laws are weaker, there are more mass shootings.”

To his credit German Lopez, in his 10-page analysis of the BMJ report for Vox, did mention that the study’s conclusions were tentative and that more work needed to be done to confirm them. Deep into his article, on page five, Lopez wrote:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, March 6, 2019:

As Democrats celebrate taking over several states in the 2018 mid-term elections, there is a movement to restrict their egregious planned infringement of precious rights. It’s called the “sanctuary county” movement, the “Second Amendment Sanctuary” movement, or the “Second Amendment Preservation” movement, and it’s based on the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

And the political subdivision closest to “the people” is the county. There are 3,000 counties in the United States, and most of them elect their chief law-enforcement officer, the county sheriff. Reuters reported on Monday that “a rapidly growing number of counties in [five] states are declaring themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, refusing to enforce gun-control laws that they consider to be infringements on the U.S. Constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”

Those states, so far, are Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Colorado, and New Mexico.

Voters in Washington State

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, March 4, 2019: 

A surprising study released late February concluded that when physicians and other healthcare professionals contribute their own funds to political action committees, those committees, in turn, reflect pro-Second Amendment viewpoints.

The study, completed by Jeremiah Schuur, M.D., and published at the JAMA Network Open — “open access medical research and commentary” — supported by the American Medical Association, compared political contributions during the 2016 election cycle (from January 1, 2014 through December 31, 2016) to various House and Senate candidates running for office.

Schuur was surprised at the outcome: