Category Archives: Second Amendment

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, August 14, 2019: 

In spite of fading support for universal background checks, as reported by CNN on Tuesday, there are still some in the White House and nearly all of the mainstream media who are deliberately keeping the conversation in favor of background checks going.

According to CNN, lawmakers are reconsidering the political risks of pushing for universal background checks in this highly toxic political environment leading up to elections next year. “It’s a sign of a possible divide between Trump and his party,” wrote CNN, and that many Republicans “have appeared skeptical” about Trump’s belief that he needs to “do something meaningful” following the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio last week. It added that “several conservative allies and Republican lawmakers have privately voiced opposition to his push for [universal] background checks.”

This hasn’t fazed the New York Times in the slightest, declaring that

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, August 12, 2019: 

Once the media hype dies down, the present push for more infringements on the rights of law-abiding gun owners will fade away as well. It is helpful to remember what is perhaps the single most important legacy of the Trump administration: the outing of the mainstream media as nothing more than howling dogs barking at each other over the back fence. They have been exposed as mouthpieces for the Deep State. They are like the Boy Who Cried Wolf: if you always tell lies, people will eventually stop believing you; and then when you’re telling the truth for a change, when you really need them to believe you, they won’t.

It’s also helpful to remember that the president has no ideological foundation rooted in the Constitution. He’s the ultimate pragmatist, a businessman seeking only to solve problems the most expeditious way possible. He also would like very much to get reelected next November.

Put all that together then, and the New York Times is right: Said the paper, the president’s past “flip-flops” on background checks “raises questions about his real commitment to legislation that would improve the background check system.”

Liberal Politico agrees:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, August 9, 2019: 

During Friday morning’s free-ranging meeting with the press, President Trump once again reiterated his determination to pass “meaningful,” “common sense” background checks and red flag laws.

When asked about resistance from the National Rifle Association, Trump quipped, “They’ll come around.” (After all, following Trump’s demand that his ATF ban bump stocks, there was nary a puff of resistance from the NRA.)

This is the opening that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is using to demand that President Trump call back the Senate from summer recess to vote on further infringements of the Second Amendment.

Pelosi referred to that opening in her demand letter:

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

Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the 650,000-member Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), endorsed the Safe Students Act of Representative Thomas Massie’s (R-Ky.) on Wednesday. In his endorsement, Gottlieb noted that the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, an act that made schools into gun-free zones and that would be repealed by the Safe Students Act, has been an unqualified failure:

The Gun-Free School Zones Act was passed by Congress in 1990, and it’s been a disaster. It has not prevented a single tragic school shooting, but instead has given students, teachers, administrators, and parents a false sense of security that evaporates the moment some madman ignores the law and invades a school campus to commit mayhem.

 

By declaring schools to be “gun-free,” the law has simply turned schools into risk-free, target-rich environments for disturbed people willing to harm innocent children and teens.

On the other hand, Massie’s bill, if it becomes law, would allow local and state jurisdictions the freedom to decide on the issue for themselves. Said Gottlieb:

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: