Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

-Ephesians 5:11-13

Category Archives: Second Amendment

Lawsuits Challenge Oregon’s Draconian Gun-control Law

Friday, 02 December 2022 14:27
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, December 2, 2022:  

Oregonians, by the slimmest of margins — 27,000 votes out of 1.9 million cast — passed Measure 114, touted as one of the nation’s strictest gun-control laws. It is also doomed to failure at the U.S. Supreme Court, if the two lawsuits just filed against it get that far.

In Bruen, the high court ruled in June not only that New York’s gun permit requirements violated the Constitution, but also affirmed the right of a citizen to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense.

The Supreme Court just added to those rulings with another one, this one overturning California’s ban on magazines carrying more than 10 rounds of ammunition. In that ruling the high court directed the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to “revisit” its ruling supporting California’s 10-round magazine ban.

Nevertheless, voters in the Beaver State passed Measure 114, which is to become effective December 8. Anyone who wishes to purchase a firearm would first have to gain permission to do so by paying a fee of $65, completing an application, attending an “approved” firearms safety course at his own expense, submit a photo ID and fingerprints, and then pass an in-depth background check that includes questions about his mental health.

Assuming he obtains permission, he would then be unable to purchase a magazine containing more than 10 rounds of ammunition, under Measure 114.

The first lawsuit, filed on November 18, was brought by the Oregon Firearms Federation against the governor and the attorney general of the state. It claimed that the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen requires that any state attempting to infringe on the Second Amendment must justify that infringement:

The standard for applying the Second Amendment is as follows:

 

When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

 

Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s unqualified command.

The lawsuit claims that Measure 114 cannot be justified and should be tossed.

The second lawsuit, filed on November 30, was brought by the Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition against Oregon’s attorney general and the head of the Oregon State Police. Its focus was on the 10-round magazine ban, claiming that “absent relief from this court, defendants will violate the constitutionally protected rights of Oregon’s law-abiding citizens,” adding that such a ban “will do nothing to address or ameliorate … public policy concerns [over gun violence].”

To bolster its case, the lawsuit refers to both the California ruling — Duncan v. Bonta — as well as Bruen. On June 30, the Supreme Court issued in Duncan v. Bonta a “GVR” — grant, vacate, and remand — to the lower court. This requires the 9th Circuit Court to “adjudicate” its prior ruling in a manner consistent with the high court’s ruling.

It also noted that the Bruen decision protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms outside the home: “When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.”

These arguments are to be heard by U. S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut today in Portland.

Biden Rants Against Guns Again, but Little Chance Anything Passes in Lame-duck Session

Saturday, 26 November 2022 15:53
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Saturday, November 26, 2022:  

Like a windup doll, White House resident Joe Biden took off after assault weapons following two recent mass shootings. Early on Thanksgiving Day he told reporters, “the idea … we still allow semi-automatic weapons to be purchased is sick. It’s just sick. It has no, no social redeeming value. Zero. None. Not a single, solitary rationale for it except profit for the gun manufacturers.”

He thinks he might be able to get something passed during the upcoming lame-duck session of congress — that lull in the storm between the midterm elections and the installation of a new Congress in January: “I’m going to do it whenever I — I got to make that assessment as I get in and start counting the votes.”

The votes aren’t there, Joe. For a sweeping gun-control bill banning the purchase, possession, or sale of semi-automatic firearms to pass the Senate, it must first pass a nearly insurmountable barrier: the filibuster.

As the liberal Brennan Center for Justice explains:

Once a bill gets to a vote on the Senate floor, it requires a simple majority of 51 votes to pass after debate has ended.

 

But there’s a catch: before it can get to a vote, it actually takes 60 votes to cut off debate, which is why a 60-vote supermajority is now considered the de facto minimum for passing legislation in the Senate.

But there’s the “silent” filibuster rule that may end any chance of Biden getting anything passed:

But since the early 1970s, senators have been able to use a “silent” filibuster. Anytime a group of 41 or more senators simply threatens a filibuster, the Senate majority leader can refuse to call a vote.

Dead. Done. Gone.

So ol’ Joe can count votes until the end of time and there’s little chance anything the Democrats can dream up to infringe further on citizens’ Second Amendment rights will see the light of day between now and January.

But that doesn’t mean ol’ Joe won’t keep trying. Somehow he thinks that with sufficient repetition of the lie that the problem is guns, not the people using them, voters will support a ban on them.

In August, following the Uvalde, Texas, shooting at Robb Elementary School (where, it will be remembered, law enforcement delayed responding to the threat for 74 minutes!), Biden repeated the canard: “A 20-year-old kid can walk in and buy [a firearm]? … What’s the matter with us?” He added: “I’m determined to ban assault weapons in this country. Determined. I did it once, and I’ll do it again.”

Of course, he is referring to the Clinton gun ban of 1994 that ended after ten years of evidence showing that it did nothing to reduce gun violence.

According to Biden, it’s the firearms themselves that somehow are the cause of the shootings. In August he repeated the fable: “We’re living in a country awash with weapons of war. Weapons that weren’t designed to hunt, they’re designed to take on an enemy … what’s the rationale for these weapons outside of a war zone?”

He added:

We have to act for all those kids gunned down on our streets every single day that never make the news…. You have to act so our kids can learn to read in school, instead of learning to duck and cover.

Journalists unpacking the lies spouted by ol’ Joe in just this statement alone could make a nice living doing so.

In his statement following the recent shooting in Colorado Springs, Biden touted his support for a law that further infringes on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, the real target (sorry) of the legislation:

Earlier this year, I signed the most significant gun safety law in nearly three decades, in addition to taking other historic actions. But we must do more. We need to enact an assault weapons ban to get weapons of war off America’s streets.

Biden is referring to what the mainstream media called the “most important piece of gun legislation since 1994,” which includes the odious and unconstitutional federal funding for red flag laws to states wanting to pass them.

All those red flag laws have managed to do, according to the Associated Press, is “remove the firearms from people 15,049 times since 2020,” but with no evidence of any measurable related decrease in gun violence.

Naturally, rights are in danger any time Congress is in session, but even more so during the lame-duck session, as enough Republicans In Name Only could climb on board a complete firearms ban to end the filibuster, providing a path to the legislation’s passage, while escaping punishment from voters.

Newsmax Gets It Wrong on Colorado Springs Shooting

Tuesday, 22 November 2022 13:10
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, November 22, 2022:  

Just hours after the horrific mass shooting at Club Q — a gay and lesbian nightclub in Colorado Springs — Eric Mack, a journalist with Newsmax, did the automatic thing: he reached out to the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) for some data. Without analyzing the actual data Mack appeared to be content with simply adding up all their “Mass Shootings in 2022” and wrote this:

After a week of a pair of mass shootings — an LGBTQ club in Colorado and the University of Virginia — the U.S. total has gone over 600 for the year at a record-setting pace, according to Gun Violence Archive data.

Mack added, “A mass shooting is defined as one where four or more people are injured or killed by firearms, which does not include the shooter being stopped.”

It was easy then for him to conclude that “mass shootings” are on the upswing: “Nearly 700 mass shootings occurred in 2021, up from 610 in 2020 and just 417 in 2019.”

Except that in 2019 there were only 30 mass shootings, according to the FBI. And in 2020, instead of 610 such incidents, the FBI reported only 20, a 50-percent decline over 2019!

AWR Hawkins, the Second Amendment writer for Breitbart, explained why: “The GVR standard [when counting mass shootings] is a much lower threshold for qualifying incidents as ‘mass shootings’ than has traditionally been used. In fact, it allows incidents in which there were no fatalities to be counted.… It also allows gang incidents, drive-by shootings, and other common street crimes to be counted as ‘mass shootings.’”

Investigative journalist Lee Williams, writing for Armed American News, was much more explicit:

According to their new report titled: “Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2020,” the FBI defines active shootings as:

 

Shootings in public places

 

Shootings occurring at more than one location

 

Shootings where the shooter’s actions were not the result of another criminal act

 

Shootings resulting in a mass killing

 

Shootings indicating apparent spontaneity by the shooter

 

Shootings where the shooter appeared to methodically search for potential victims

 

Shootings that appeared focused on injury to people, not buildings or objects

 

 

Shootings were excluded from the FBI’s list if they were the result of:

 

Self-defense

 

Gang violence

 

Drug violence

 

Contained residential or domestic disputes

 

Controlled barricade/hostage situations

 

Crossfire as a byproduct of another ongoing criminal act

 

An action that appeared not to have put other people in peril

Williams noted, “By comparison, the Gun Violence Archive excludes nothing, even if the shooting is gang or drug related — the two main causes of most violence in the country today.”

Why do mainstream journalists turn so readily to GVA for data on mass shootings? Wrote Wiliams, “Anytime four or more people are killed or even slightly wounded with a firearm, it’s labeled a mass shooting, and politicians, gun control advocates and the mainstream media treat their reports as if they’re gospel.”

GVA includes everything, and lets those writers seeking to promote their anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment agenda decide for themselves how they will use the data. The GVA website records police shooting injuries and deaths, mass shootings, individual gun related incidents, suicides, injuries, teen, child, and adult related injuries and deaths.

Another writer who fell into the GVA data trap is Mother Jones Editor Mark Follman. In 2015 he used their data to claim that there were 355 “mass shootings” that year, but then discovered the mistake, and corrected it:

At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have compiled an in-depth open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four “mass shootings” this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and [just] 73 such attacks since 1982.

We are persuaded that Newsmax writer Eric Mack made an honest mistake. We are not persuaded that mainstream media writers are as innocent of misusing GVA data.

Church Sues New York State Over Law Prohibiting Worshipers From Carrying Firearms

Wednesday, 09 November 2022 12:03
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, November 9, 2022:  

Eight days after the Supreme Court ruled in June against New York in its Bruen decision that the state’s restrictions on concealed carry permits were unconstitutional, and declared further that all citizens, including New Yorkers, had the constitutional right to carry firearms outside their homes for self-protection, the Democrat-controlled state Legislature enacted a “work-around” law to circumvent Bruen.

The law — S51001 — declares a total ban on the carrying of firearms in “any place of worship or religious observation.”

In a lawsuit brought by First Liberty Institute (FLI) on behalf of Pastor Micheal Spencer and his church, His Tabernacle Family Church, with locations in Horseheads and Ithaca, New York, the complaint states that

It is thus now a felony in New York to carry a firearm in a place of worship, regardless of whether one has a license to carry a firearm and regardless of whether the place of worship expressly authorizes — or even encourages — the carrying of firearms on its property.

Pastor Spencer and a number of his parishioners have shown skill at arms and, until passage of the law defying Bruen, regularly carried firearms during church services to protect the flock.

What makes the new law especially pernicious is its flagrant disregard of the Bruen decision. It specifically targets churches, as the law allows other property owners to give permission to their visitors or customers to carry on site.

The complaint refers not only to Bruen as precedent, but also to another Supreme Court decision — Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo — that was decided in 2020 that struck down then-Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “Covid occupancy” requirements which unfairly applied to churches.

Wrote the lawyers from FLI:

Those decisions should have taught New York to proceed with extreme caution where First or Second Amendment rights are at stake going forward.

 

Instead, the state recently doubled down on its rights-denying tendencies — by infringing two fundamental liberties at the same time.

 

New York now puts houses of worship and religious adherents to an impossible choice: forfeit your First Amendment right to religious worship or forfeit your Second Amendment right to bear arms for self-defense.

The complaint focuses on Democrats’ deliberate intention to single out churches in its attempt to circumvent Bruen:

New York’s attempt to force houses of worship and their parishioners to choose between their First Amendment rights and their Second — an outlier policy shared by no other state in the Nation — stands as an act of defiance to the Supreme Court’s recent and emphatic holdings protecting both.

 

First, by prohibiting the exercise of a fundamental constitutional right in places of worship while permitting its exercise on a wide variety of other private property, and denying to religious leaders the authority it gives other private property owners to decide whether to permit the carrying of firearms, the state discriminates on the basis of religious status, singles out houses of worship for especially harsh treatment, and treats comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise.

 

Additionally, S51001 runs into the Establishment Clause by entrenching on core matters of internal church governance.

 

The state may have power to dictate many things, but how worshippers should conduct themselves at worship services on church property is not one of them.

Attorneys from FLI pointed out that the legislation passed within days of the Bruen decision had been carefully crafted months earlier, in anticipation of the ruling:

While Bruen and Roman Catholic Diocese should make New York [Democrats] particularly sensitive to protecting … citizens’ First and Second Amendment rights, they seem to have prompted exactly the opposite reaction.

 

Barely before the ink on Bruen could dry, New York embarked on a campaign “to offset the impact of the court’s decision” — a campaign that also tramples First Amendment rights….

 

Of course, New York was able to move so quickly because it began preparing legislation to undercut any eventual Supreme Court decision before it was even handed down and regardless of what it might say about the Constitution’s demands….

 

New York officials have made abundantly clear both their contempt for Bruen and their intention to vigorously enforce all aspects of S51001 notwithstanding the constitutional rights upon which it tramples.

The “workaround” law puts Pastor Spencer and his church — and all other churches in New York — at greater risk than before:

Pastor Spencer believes that someone planning to harm or kill his flock will not be deterred by S51001, and may in fact by emboldened by it since it leaves [all] houses of worship defenseless against those bent on doing violence to people of faith.

The complaint filed on behalf of Pastor Spencer and his church concludes that what New York Democrats have done is deliberately attack not only their church (and all other churches in the state), but also the constitutional basis upon which all religious institutions in the state and the nation operate:

It is therefore a constitutional vice, not a virtue, that New York has disarmed all religious people all at once, whether they kneel in prayer or stand in worship.

 

In short, S51001 is a compendium of constitutional infirmities, infringing in one fell swoop on Pastor Spencer’s and the Church’s rights to freely engage in religious exercise, to exercise autonomy over the Church’s internal affairs, and to carry firearms to ensure the safety of all persons on the Church’s premises.

The complaint exposes the agenda of New York Democrats: not only their complete and total disregard for and antipathy toward the Supreme Court’s decisions relating to this case, but their vicious animosity toward religion in general. The complaint exposes the real culture war: the church versus the state.

Pastor Spencer and his church are demanding a trial by jury to hear their complaint.

Biden Eclipses Obama’s Record as the Country’s Greatest Gun Salesman

Monday, 07 November 2022 19:21
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, November 7, 2022:  

During the Obama administration monthly gun sales soared, jumping from about 850,000 in October 2009 to more than 1.3 million in October 2016, a gain of more than 50 percent.

With gun sales now averaging more than 1.25 million a month, what it took the Obama administration to accomplish in eight years the present administration has accomplished in two.

Of course, the present resident of the Oval Office has had some help. Crime in Democrat-controlled cities, thanks to progressive George Soros-backed district attorneys, has also soared. Of the 30 cities experiencing the highest crime rates, Democrats run 27 of them.

The momentum in gun sales was aided and abetted by the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision in June. In that decision not only did the highest court in the land rule that New York’s “may issue” restrictions on concealed carry licenses violated the Second Amendment, the high court went further: it ruled that the Second and the Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution protect an individual citizen’s right to carry a handgun for self-protection outside the home.

Writing for the 6-3 majority in the case — New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas held:

When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct [here the right to bear arms], the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.

 

[Any state or local] government [contesting that right] must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.

 

Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s “unqualified command.”

This was huge, and is resulting in dozens of lawsuits being filed successfully against states with laws that are in violation of those same amendments. That would include Illinois, with its infamous Firearm Owner’s Identification (FOID) card, as well as North Carolina, Minnesota, Nebraska, Hawaii, Michigan, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, which have similar “permit to possess” requirements.

With an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 present gun control laws now subject to repeal or serious modification, gun owners are seizing the opportunity to exercise their Second Amendment right by purchasing firearms in record numbers.

That momentum favoring the Second Amendment should flow over into the midterm elections on Tuesday. Voters in Oregon will have a chance to toss the state’s present “permit to purchase” requirement, while voters in San Jose, California, will have the opportunity to rein in the City Council’s demand that all gun owners pay a fee to exercise the right to purchase a firearm as well as buy liability insurance for the privilege.

In addition, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF, which just released the October numbers), a “sizeable number” — estimated at between five million and eight million — of those twenty or so million people purchasing firearms so far this year are brand-new gun owners. They are likely to be very possessive of their right to keep and bear arms, and are equally likely to vote against politicians running on a platform to infringe on that right.

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Other House Members Demand FBI and DOJ Remove Records of Americans Coerced Into Waiving Their Second Amendment Rights

Wednesday, 26 October 2022 15:24
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, October 26, 2022:  

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and 14 other House members sent a letter to the FBI and DOJ on Monday demanding that they remove any and all traces of a spurious form the agencies used to intimidate and coerce law-abiding Americans to give up forever their right to own a firearm.

The “unnumbered” form (all legal, official government documents must be “numbered” so that they can be accessed easily) with the chilling title “NICS Indices Self-Submission Form” was signed by an unknown number of American citizens, usually during home visits by FBI agents.

The egregious infringement of Second Amendment rights came to light back in 2019, thanks to efforts by Gun Owners of America (GOA). When pressed by the GOA to answer its demands that it cease use of the illegal form and confirm that it was no longer being used to intimidate Americans, the FBI and DOJ ignored the group.

Then the GOA filed a Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) demand to force the agencies to respond.

Oh, said the agencies, this test of Americans’ gullibility happened back in 2017, and ended in 2019 — nothing to worry about. Just move along.

First, the form. The unnumbered form demands:

Please clearly print your full legal name on the line immediately below:

 

I, [print your name here], voluntarily request permanent entry into the NICS Indices of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

 

I UNDERSTAND THAT COMPLETION & SUBMISSION OF THIS FORM WILL RESULT IN DENIAL OF MY RIGHT TO PURCHASE, TO POSSESS, AND TO USE ANY FIREARM.

 

In addition, I understand that once I am in the NICS Indices, I may not be permitted to withdraw my name or information from the NICS Indices….

 

I have a mental-health condition that may cause me to: (check all that apply):

 

_____ Be a danger to myself or others

 

_____ Lack mental capacity adequately to contract or manage the details of my life

And then, in an Orwellian twist, the form demands that a physician or mental-health professional attest to the citizen’s mental capacity to sign the form!

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) called such a demand “ironic”:

There is a certain irony to saying to someone: you have to be mentally competent to sign this statement that says you’re not mentally competent to have a gun!

In its follow-up letter last month, the GOA stated in no uncertain terms that what the FBI/DOJ was pulling was illegal:

The FBI has no statutory authority to create or to use such a form….

 

Yet the FBI has been using the signing of its form as the sole basis to deprive Americans of their constitutional rights….

 

The FBI has yet to inform Gun Owners of America of this form’s discontinuance, or of any corrective actions taken to rectify the situation or to restore the rights of those affected.

When there was still no response from either the FBI or the DOJ, firebrand conservative Marjorie Taylor Greene rounded up 14 of her supporters to launch another demand that the rogue agencies come to heel.

She wrote:

Congress has been made aware of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) illegal use of a form entitled the “NICS Indices Self-Submission Form.”

 

This form was created by FBI personnel and used by FBI agents to coerce and intimidate Americans who were not convicted of any crime into signing away their right to obtain a firearm, a right protected by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution….

 

We demand immediate confirmation that:

 

(i) The Department of Justice has identified and taken action to “remove” offending records from any “database” relating to those who have signed the rogue FBI form;

 

(ii) The FBI (under the authority of the Attorney General) took action to “remove” the offending records from the NICS system; and

 

(iii) The FBI has halted its use of the illegal and unconstitutional NICS Indices Self-Submission Form.

The “rogue” form smells to high Heaven. It is unnumbered. It was used to intimidate, pressure, and coerce naïve Americans to sign it. There is no way that a citizen, even under pressure, can “sign away” his intrinsic, God-given rights. They may be stolen from him, but he cannot arbitrarily, unilaterally give them up.

That’s the rub: If Americans are unfamiliar with their rights, then they go away, especially under pressure from agents with guns and badges standing over them in their homes.

That may be the “test” the form was developed to conduct.

Second Amendment Being Restored to Its Rightful Place, Thanks to Bruen Decision

Wednesday, 19 October 2022 14:17
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, October 19, 2022:  

In Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (aka “Bruen”), decided in June, he wrote:

The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not a “second-class right,” subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.

 

We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.

The ruling in Bruen was twofold: 1) that New York State’s law requiring a citizen to show “proper cause” before being granted the privilege of carrying a concealed weapon was unconstitutional; and 2) that the right to carry a handgun in public is guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

That ruling has unleashed a tsunami of lawsuits by Second Amendment supporters, to the point where far-left news outlet CNN complained that the decision has “put gun control laws in jeopardy nationwide.” Noted CNN:

In the three months since the 6-3 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, scores of new lawsuits have been filed against gun restrictions at the federal, state, and local levels….

 

Since the June ruling, federal judges in at least a half-dozen different cases have already cited the Bruen decision to rule against gun restrictions that have included local assault weapons bans, prohibitions on the manufacture of homemade firearms and bans on older teenagers publicly carrying handguns.

The outlet noted with chagrin that a federal district judge in Delaware declared that state’s ban on “ghost guns” (guns that are made at home without serial numbers) not valid under the high court’s ruling. In addition, reported the network, assault weapons bans inflicted on Coloradans in two local jurisdictions were placed on hold, and Texas’ public-carry ban on individuals aged 18 to 20 was struck down as well.

CNN failed to note, probably by design, that many other rulings following the Bruen decision have begun to restore the Second Amendment to its rightful place in the Bill of Rights.

Here is just a partial list of Second Amendment victories scored since Bruen:

  • To avoid going to trial over its ban preventing concealed carry licensees from carrying more than 20 rounds of ammunition, the chief of Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department repealed the ban in September.
  • The Supreme Court, following its Bruen precedent, tossed Massachusetts’ lifetime ban on anyone convicted of a nonviolent misdemeanor involving the possession or use of a firearm from ever being able to purchase a firearm in the future.
  • The Attorneys general of New Jersey, California, and Hawaii concluded that, based on Bruen, a citizen no longer must show a “justifiable need” to carry a firearm.

Second Amendment scholar and attorney Dave Workman listed other targets for lawsuits following the Bruen decision, including Illinois, which requires citizens to have a Firearm Owner’s Identification (FOID) card in order to purchase a firearm or ammunition. New Jersey has a similar law, as do North Carolina, Minnesota, Nebraska, Hawaii, Michigan, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

There is a case pending in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — Dominic Bianchi v. Brian Frosh — challenging Maryland’s ban on semi-automatic rifles. Attorneys general from 25 states have filed an amicus (friendly) brief supporting the case, which was brought immediately after the Bruen decision by the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Workman estimates there are some 20,000 to 25,000 restrictive gun laws in the United States. If he is anywhere close to right, the rising tide of lawsuits is likely just the beginning.

Federal Judge Stops New York’s Attempt to Reinstate Gun-control Law

Friday, 07 October 2022 15:12
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, October 7, 2022:  

Glenn Suddaby, a District Judge in the Northern District of New York, dismantled on Thursday many of the more outrageous provisions of the law the state’s Democrat-controlled legislature hastily passed following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen in June.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul called an emergency session of the legislature following that ruling (which affirmed the right of every citizen to carry a firearm in public and in the process ended New York’s previous restrictive law) in order to nullify it.

Without separation of powers whereby the judicial branch is called to counterbalance the legislative branch and rein in its natural propensity to overreach, the governor of New York and Attorney General Letitia James would immediately disarm every citizen in the state in the name of “keeping the citizens safe.”

Here is the siren song of tyranny sung by Hochul when she learned of Suddaby’s emasculation of the state’s new law: “It is deeply disappointing that the judge wants to limit my ability to keep New Yorkers safe.”

This is the same song sung by the state’s Democratic Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins when she presented the bill to the governor for signing back in June: “We are confident that we are providing New York, again, an opportunity not only to be able to have their concealed carry, but also to make New Yorkers safe.”

And the state’s far-left attorney general, Letitia James, plans to appeal: “While the decision preserves portions of the law, we believe the entire law must be preserved as enacted.”

Suddaby wrote:

Simply stated, instead of moving toward becoming a shall-issue jurisdiction, New York State has further entrenched itself as a shall-not-issue jurisdiction. And, by doing so, it has further reduced a first-class constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense … into a mere request.

We let Judge Suddaby speak for himself:

On June 23, 2022, the Supreme Court held that N.Y. Penal Law … which conditioned the issuance of an unrestricted license to carry a handgun in public on the existence of “proper cause,” violated the Second and Fourteenth Amendments by impermissibly granting a licensing officer the discretion to deny a license to a law-abiding, responsible New York State citizen based on a perceived lack of a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.

 

On July 1, 2022, New York State passed the Concealed Carry Improvement Act (“CCIA”), which generally replaced the “proper cause” standard with

(1) a definition of the “good moral character” that is required to complete the license application or renewal process,

 

(2) the requirement that the applicant provide a list of current and past social-media accounts, the names and contact information of family members, cohabitants, and at least four character references, and “such other information required by the licensing officer,”

 

(3) a requirement that the applicant attend an in-person interview,

 

(4) the requirement of 18 hours of in-person and “live-fire” firearm training in order to complete the license application or renewal process, and

 

(5) a list of “sensitive locations” and “restricted locations” where carrying arms is prohibited.

The reader is invited to download his entire 53-page decision if only to gain access to the lessons in constitutional limitations he provides.

As a teaser, here is how he dismantles the attempt to reinsert the need for an applicant to prove his “good moral character” as a requirement for an applicant to obtain permission to carry concealed in the Empire State:

The CCIA’s “good moral character” standard appears fatally flawed in two respects.

 

First, it omits the qualifying phrase “other than in self-defense.”…

 

Second, and more importantly, the Court interprets the Supreme Court’s decision in [Bruen] as endorsing a standard that effectively compels (or at least expressly permits) a state to issue a carry license unless the licensing officer finds that the applicant is likely to use the handgun in a manner that endangers oneself or others (other than in self-defense) according to a standard that can fairly be called “objective”.

 

However, instead, the CCIA [the New York law] expressly prohibits the issuance of a license unless the licensing officer finds (meaning unless the applicant persuades him or her through providing much information, including “such other information required by review of the licensing application that is reasonably necessary and related to the review of the licensing application”) that the applicant is of “good moral character,” which involves undefined assessments of “temperament,” “judgment” and “[trust].”

 

Setting aside the subjective nature of these assessments, shouldering an applicant with the burden of showing that he or she is of such “good moral character” (in the face of a de facto presumption that he or she is not) is akin to shouldering an applicant with the burden of showing that he or she has a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community, which is prohibited under [Bruen].

 

In essence, New York State has replaced its requirement that an applicant show a special need for self-protection with its requirement that the applicant rebut the presumption that he or she is a danger to himself or herself, while retaining (and even expanding) the open-ended discretion afforded to its licensing officers.

There it is, in black and white: The citizen applying for a license to carry is presumed to be unqualified and of poor moral character unless he or she “persuades” the licensing officer that he or she is of good moral character.

Under New York’s now-emasculated law, it would be one short step away from demands for “papers please!” by the Gestapo under Hitler’s National Socialism in the 1930s, if not for the separation of powers provided in New York State’s constitution.

Report: FBI Deliberately Downplays Role of Gun Owners in Stopping Mass Shootings

Wednesday, 05 October 2022 16:11
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, October 5, 2022:

In its summary of recent findings about how often legally armed bystanders actually intervene to end mass shootings, John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) was far too forgiving of the FBI for massively and deliberately lying. Based on its research going back to 2014, the CPRC noted that the FBI’s manipulated numbers indicate that just over four percent of mass shootings were ended by an armed bystander.

The CPRC, on the other hand, reveals that number to be almost six out of ten, a massive difference reflecting the agency’s part in the decades-long war against private ownership of firearms.

The CPRC said the FBI “misclassified” many of those mass shootings while “overlooking” others in order to present a slanted, anti-gun perspective to the national media seeking the same end. And there were many others that the agency missed counting altogether.

Said the CPRC softly, “Some see a pattern of distortion in the FBI numbers because the errors almost exclusively go one way: minimizing the life-saving actions of armed citizens.”

For example, the mainstream media, relying totally on FBI statistics to present their anti-gun bias, scorned the idea that the actions of the hero in the Greenwood Mall mass shooting in July, Elisjsha Dicken, represented any kind of pattern. The AP said that it is “rare in [the United States] for an active shooting to be stopped by a bystander.” The New York Times echoed: “After [the] Indiana mall shooting, one hero is no lasting solution to gun violence.”

And said The Washington Post: “The Greenwood incident is unique … because it became one of the rare instances of an armed citizen successfully intervening to end a mass shooting.”

Just how rare? According to lies fed by the FBI to the willing sycophants in the media, there were 252 “active shooter incidents” between 2014 and 2021, and just 11 of them were “stopped by an armed citizen.” That’s 4.4 percent.

But the CPRC counted 360 active shooter incidents in that same time period and found that an armed citizen stopped 124 of them. That’s 34 percent.

And when mass shooting incidents occur in places where concealed carry laws are effective, the percentage of “stops” jumps to 58 percent. It only makes sense that in “gun-free” zones bystanders are typically unarmed and thus unable to defend themselves or others from an active shooter.

Further, noted the CPRC, even it doesn’t count incidents involving just one person being targeted, of which there no doubt are many.

And many more shootings are ended before they begin merely by the presence of an armed bystander.

For years the CPRC has brought these massive “discrepancies” to the attention of the bureau, and for years the bureau has ignored them or made no attempt to correct their slanted statistics. Said the CPRC, “The FBI failed to address them.”

Happily, others who see how the FBI distorts its data aren’t so reticent about calling out the agency. Gary Mauser, professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University in Canada, said:

Whether deliberately through bias or just incompetence, the FBI database of active shooters cannot be trusted….

 

Relying on media stories would greatly underestimate the true number of defensive gun uses.

The CPRC agrees: “There is no reason to think that the news media covers all the cases where civilians stopped attacks.”

Where the CPRC failed to call out the FBI directly for fudging its data, however, Theo Wold, former DOJ assistant attorney general during the Trump administration, was much more forthright:

So much of our public understanding of this issue is malformed by this single agency. When the Bureau gets it so systematically — and persistently — wrong, the cascading effect is incredibly deleterious. The FBI exerts considerable influence over state and local law enforcement and policymakers at all levels of government.

 

Man With 3-D Printer Blows Up Gun Buyback Scheme

Monday, 03 October 2022 15:51
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, October 3, 2022:  

A man using the moniker “Kem” told Utica, New York’s WKTV how he scammed the local police department’s gun buyback program. He saw tweets exposing how people with 3-D printers were taking advantage of gun buybacks. He received a 3-D printer for Christmas and decided to seize the opportunity: print out some lower receivers in various calibers and turn them in for a reward.

Here is his story:

I 3D-printed a bunch of lower receivers and frames for different kinds of firearms….

 

[Utica Police Department officials asked] “How many firearms do you have?” And I said, “110.”

 

[Haggling began, and] it ended with a guy and a lady from the budget office finally coming around with 42 gift cards and counting them in front of me … $21,000 in $500 gift cards.

New York’s Attorney General Letitia James, recently in the news over her politically motivated lawsuit against Donald Trump, was delighted with the “success” of the Utica buyback effort:

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that 296 firearms, including 177 ghost guns, were turned in to law enforcement at a gun buyback event hosted by her office and the Utica Police Department….

 

“Gun violence is a scourge that devastates neighborhoods and endangers New York families,” said Attorney General James. “Gun buybacks, such as the one we hosted yesterday, are one of the many ways I am working to combat this crisis, reduce crime, and protect New Yorkers from harm. Every gun that was turned in is a potential tragedy prevented and a potential life saved, and I thank the Utica Police Department for their invaluable support and collaboration.”

“Kem” scorned her celebration:

I’m sure handing over $21,000 in gift cards to some punk kid after getting a bunch of plastic junk was a rousing success….

 

Gun buybacks are a fantastic way of showing, number one, that your policies don’t work, and, number two, you’re creating perverse demand.

 

You’re causing people [like me] to show up at these events, and, they don’t actually reduce [gun] crime whatsoever.

“Kem” is exactly right. Keith Taylor, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, called such programs a waste of taxpayer money:

It’s a waste of resources if the entities that are sponsoring [gun buyback programs] believe that it’s going to have a positive effect on reducing crime.

But it’s great for gun owners seeking to offload worthless, rusty, nonworking firearms at taxpayers’ expense:

But if the purpose is the provide a means for individuals to get rid of weapons from their households that they don’t want to have anymore, it absolutely is a good option.

Mark Anderson, professor of economics at Montana State University, went further:

Who’s choosing to turn their gun in? It’s probably not the person on the margins whose gun we’re trying to get off the street.

 

That gun from Grandpa is not the one that is going to be involved in a crime….

But such “successes” do make for great PR, as indicated by the boast above by Attorney General James.

Not every gun turned in “is a potential tragedy prevented,” as James claims. Of the 177 “ghost guns” — i.e., 3-D printed ones — at least 110 of them were manufactured just for the occasion.

James’ PR statement said nothing about that. However, when her office was informed about “Kem” and his scam that cost Utica taxpayers $21,000, the agency took umbrage: “It’s shameful that this individual exploited a program that has successfully taken thousands of guns off the streets to protect our communities from gun violence.”

They added, “We have adjusted our policies to ensure that no one can exploit this program again for personal gain.”

But what about the exploitation of taxpayers funding a scam that has virtually no measurable impact on gun violence, but instead serves as just one more way to promote the canard that guns cause crime — not the criminals using them?

Far-left Philadelphia Mayor Bans Guns From Public Places, Despite State Preemption Law

Wednesday, 28 September 2022 16:18
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, September 28, 2022:  

Knowing full well that his executive order released Tuesday and declared to be effective immediately would be challenged in court, Jim Kenney, the thug mayor of Philadelphia, in concert with his Soros-backed district attorney, Larry Krasner, challenged the state anyway, declaring: “Bring it on!”

He and his far-left progressive DA have been working successfully to emasculate the city’s law-enforcement culture, resulting in record-setting gun violence by criminals released thanks to lenient/nonexistent prosecution of their crimes. Tuesday’s executive order prohibiting firearms at city parks and recreational centers is just an extension of Kenney’s agenda to limit and ultimately eliminate the private ownership and possession of firearms.

This is, of course, is a necessary step in turning a free republic into a communist dictatorship.

Said Kenney: “There’s no place for guns anywhere, but especially in pools, playgrounds, or rec centers.” This is consistent with his oft-stated belief that only police should have guns: “I would get every gun off the street and every gun shop should be closed.”

That would result in only criminals, the elite, and the state having firearms, thus eliminating any chance for law-abiding citizens to challenge the politicians instituting their tyranny.

Said Krasner, twice elected DA thanks to millions supplied to his campaigns directly by George Soros and indirectly by his many political action committees: “Even if you have a permit to carry, and you go on these premises, you’ve got a problem with me.”

Krasner already has a problem with the Republican-dominated state Legislature, which is considering whether he should be impeached for dereliction of duty. The committee looking into the matter has — not surprisingly — been stymied by Krasner’s unwillingness to comply with their subpoenas.

Lars Dalseide, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association (NRA), sarcastically noted:

Every law-abiding Philadelphian hopes and prays that the violent criminals Mayor Kenney and his woke district attorney carelessly [deliberately] release onto the streets abide by his directive.

 

A more prudent and effective approach would be to arrest, prosecute, and punish these savage criminals for their violent crimes.

He then noted that the Kenney/Krasner directive will go nowhere thanks to Pennsylvania’s preemption law holding that local municipalities may not enact laws stricter than those allowed at the state level:

The simple fact is that Pennsylvania state law prevents local jurisdictions from passing laws that are inconsistent with or more restrictive than state law.

 

This ban is more restrictive and therefore illegitimate.

Under the Kenney/Krasner administration, gun violence in Philadelphia has soared. According to Kathryn Ott Lovell, the city’s commissioner of Parks & Recreation, there have been nearly 300 incidents of gun violence in the city’s recreation facilities alone since 2019.

The Washington Times reports that:

Violent crime has surged during Mr. Krasner’s term, with Black residents overwhelmingly the victims.

 

The homicide rate in 2020 was the highest in three decades. The number of homicides was 499, up 40% from 2019, according to police department figures.

In response to the Kenney/Krasner regime’s attack on law enforcement, citizens have been arming themselves at record rates. According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, concealed carry permit applications are “up 600% from recent years.”

Krasner’s “progressive” policies, aided and abetted by a supportive far-left mayor, include ending criminal charges against those caught possessing marijuana, ending cash bail for criminals charged with “minor” crimes, and demanding lenient sentences for certain crimes. In addition, the progressive reordering of justice in Philadelphia includes reviewing past cases and sentences in order to seek re-sentencing to lesser punishment, or even release from prison.

In his first month as district attorney, Krasner fired 31 pro-law-enforcement assistant attorneys and replaced them with his own brand of progressives.

While the Kenney/Krasner cabal has issued an order that on its face is illegal and contravenes state law, it is indicative of what the world would look like if thugs and criminal politicians like these two were allowed to operate freely: crime would soar, justifying still more government restrictions on the freedom of private citizens to defend themselves, leading ultimately to total government control. That’s the agenda of thugs like Kenney and Krasner and their funders.

Pushback Growing Against Credit-card Companies “Red-flagging” Gun Purchases

Friday, 23 September 2022 16:29
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, September 23, 2022:  

Florida’s chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, issued a warning on Wednesday to credit-card companies threatening to track gun purchases with a special code:

It is clear that the actions by these credit card companies are part of a larger effort to curtail God-given constitutional rights of Americans….

 

The second amendment is foundational to our American way of life. The idea that law-abiding Americans would be put on some kind of corporate watchlist is disturbing. Our rights come from our Creator, not the government, and especially not big corporations.

Unless Visa, MasterCard, and American Express persuade Patronis that they aren’t implementing the code recommended by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), he will sue them, and work with the Florida legislature to prevent them for operating in his state:

If we come to the legislative session and companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express are generating these reports to create a chilling effect against the purchase of firearms, then I’ll work with the Legislature to pass a law penalizing businesses who are targeting the right to bear arms….

 

We can also take it a step further by barring these companies from doing any business with the State of Florida. We will send a message out to these large corporations that if you are interested in doing business with Florida, you need to make sure that you’re protecting Floridians right to arm and defend themselves.

Patronis is confident that he is standing on solid Constitutional footing. Referring to the recent federal court ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton, he added, “We’ve seen a groundbreaking ruling come out of the Fifth Circuit limiting corporations’ ability to curtail American’s constitutional rights, so we are on solid legal footing to pursue a bill protecting Floridians 2nd Amendment Rights.”

Patronis is the just latest high-profile figure to push back against the threat posed by credit-card companies tracking gun purchases using a special code.

Those companies announced two weeks ago that they were “ready” to implement the special tracking code allegedly to detect suspicious sales and to prevent potential mass shootings. The perfidy was official, as a MasterCard spokesman said that “it will be implemented by merchants and their banks as we continue to support lawful purchases on our network while protecting the privacy and decisions of individual cardholders.

A spokesman for the National Rifle Association (NRA) disagreed, saying:

The decision to create a firearm-specific code is nothing more than a capitulation to anti-gun politicians and activists bent on eroding the rights of law-abiding Americans, one transaction at a time.

The driving force behind the move by ISO to urge credit card companies to start tracking gun sales was the union-owned Amalgamated Bank, with a majority interest held by Workers United, an SEIU affiliate. Its CEO, Priscilla Sims Brown, said having that data available “could” help reduce violent gun crime:

We could identify and detect where there may be gun sales that are intended for black markets, where we see patterns of gun purchases being made in multiple gun shops.

 

We could see the patterns of behavior that would indicate to us that there is something not right here.

Shannon Watts, founder of anti-gun Moms Demand Action, affirmed the move to track gun purchases: “These new merchant codes will help banks and financial institutions track suspicious and potentially illegal gun purchases.” She failed to clarify exactly what she meant by “suspicious” or “potentially illegal” gun purchases, or who would make those decisions.

The blatant move to allow credit-card companies to identify and track individuals exercising their constitutional rights didn’t sit well with New York Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who led 100 of her fellow pro-gun, pro-Second Amendment colleagues to sign a letter of protest against those credit-card companies. She said:

I am adamantly opposed to this attempt to track the information of law-abiding gun owners and am calling out this attempt to infringe on our Constitutional, Second Amendment rights.

 

As Far Left gun grabbing politicians seek to further erode our Constitution, I’m working to ensure credit card companies are not aiding in their anti-Second Amendment agenda.

 

I am demanding immediate answers to protect American citizens’ ability to exercise their Constitutional right to bear arms without fear that the Far Left is tracking their information or that this information will be used against them.

In her letter to Alfred Kelly, CEO of Visa, she said:

We write you today with grave concern regarding your implementation of a new firearm specific Merchant Category Code (MCC).

 

This implementation follows an equally concerning decision by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to create this MCC, which is an assault on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding American citizens.

She called out the Amalgamated Bank for its role in pushing for the new surveillance tool, calling them “red flags”:

Amalgamated Bank stated its intent to utilize software to flag allegedly suspicious purchases made by Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights and file these red flags with law enforcement.

She also stated that there was no definition of who would be “suspicious” and who would not be, leading to the tracking and registering of every purchaser of a firearm:

There is no accepted, consistent, scientific, or legitimate way to determine from this data what is and what is not a “suspicious” purchase.

 

A gun control advocate could view any desire to own or obtain a firearm as per se suspicious.

 

Instead, this is a transparent attempt to chill the exercise of constitutionally protected rights and to circumvent existing legal restrictions on the creation of firearm registries by the government.

On Tuesday, two dozen state attorneys general sent a letter to the CEOs of each of the major credit card companies (American Express, MasterCard, and Visa), raising the issue of the legality of such a move:

We, the undersigned Attorneys General, write to express our concerns about the legality of recent actions you have taken or are considering taking at the behest of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

 

As our respective States’ chief legal officers, we are tasked with protecting the constitutional rights of our citizens, defending our consumers from privacy intrusions and other abuses, and enforcing antitrust laws.

 

Accordingly, we share our concerns and ask that you take immediate action to comport [do what is right concerning] our consumer protection laws and respect the constitutional rights of all Americans.

If those credit-card companies fail to “comport” and back off, they will face legal action:

Press releases from public officials make clear that the new merchant code was created and adopted in concert with various state actors, which may additionally create the potential for both civil and criminal liability for conspiracy to deprive Americans of their civil rights….

 

Be advised that we will marshal the full scope of our lawful authority to protect our citizens and consumers from unlawful attempts to undermine their constitutional rights.

 

Please keep that in mind as you consider whether to proceed with adopting and implementing this Merchant Category Code.

Attorneys General from the following states signed on to the letter: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wyoming, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Hampshire, and Virginia.

New Software Negates Latest “Ghost Gun” Rules

Wednesday, 14 September 2022 21:22
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, September 14, 2022:  

A new software program (protected under the First Amendment) is protecting the Second Amendment. The software allows a 3D printer to create a “jig,” a simple but necessary piece of plastic that is used in assembling a firearm at home.

After the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) issued its latest infringement on the Second Amendment, software developers quickly created open source (free to the world) software to allow owners of 3D printers to print out their own jig. In essence this is an end-run around the latest ATF transgression of precious rights.

The continuing flow of misinformation from the ATF sets up the straw man to justify its latest violation of the Second Amendment:

To help keep guns from being sold to convicted felons and other prohibited purchasers, the rule makes clear that retailers must run background checks before selling kits that contain the parts necessary for someone to readily make a gun.

 

To help law enforcement trace guns used in a crime, the rule modernizes the definition of frame or receiver, clarifying what must be marked with a serial number – including in easy-to-build firearm kits.

 

To help reduce the number of unmarked and hard-to-trace “ghost guns,” the rule establishes requirements for federally licensed firearms dealers and gunsmiths to have a serial number added to 3D printed guns or other un-serialized firearms they take into inventory.

It admitted that its latest transgression generated a lot of pushback from gun owners:

On May 7, 2021, the Department of Justice issued a notice of proposed rulemaking, and during the 90-day open comment period, the ATF received more than 290,000 comments, the highest number of comments submitted to a proposed rule in ATF’s history.

Here’s the loophole in the new regulation that software developers are exploiting: if the jig isn’t part of the “kit,” then there’s no firearm under the latest definition and hence no required background check. Specifically, the rule states that when an unfinished frame or receiver is “distributed or possessed with a compatible jig or template,” it is now automatically considered to be a firearm. Leave out the jig, however, and the” kit” is incomplete and doesn’t fall under the rule.

On its website, Tactical Machining in Orlando, Florida, offers this update to its customers:

As many of you know or heard, ATF’s lawless and corrupt ruling went into effect on August 24, 2022. At the advice of our counsel, Tactical Machining was advised to maintain a holding pattern. Since then, we have some developing updates.

 

Per ATF, 80% AR-15 lowers are still legal!

 

In recent testimony during lawsuits against the ATF, they have admitted in open court that the “Final rule” does not restrict the sale of 80% lowers IF they are not sold with a jig/instructions or Templates.

 

Our local ATF agent tasked with enforcing the new rule changes also confirmed, in writing, that all of Tactical Machining’s 80% products are legal to buy and sell since we stopped offering our jigs.

Jim Jusick, Tactical’s design engineer and manager, quoted this from that letter from the ATF:

As we’ve been instructed, and our understanding here in Orlando, the unfinished receiver, with a jig, instructions, or template is NOT A FIREARM.

 

The combination of such an item (unfinished receiver) with other parts (excluding the jig) does not reach the standard for Readily Convertible.

 

In other words, your manufacture and selling of unfinished receivers with a lower parts kit [without the jig] does not meet the [newly defined] firearm threshold.

Just as was the case with radar detectors, developers were always one step ahead of the enforcers. In their zeal to criminalize all gun owners and eventually disarm them, the enforcers continue to play catch-up ball with the developers.

Smith & Wesson CEO Fires Back Against Anti-gun Democrats

Friday, 26 August 2022 11:38
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, August 26, 2022:  

Mark Smith, the CEO of Smith & Wesson, the 170-year-old iconic firearms manufacturer, finally had enough. After being bullied, harassed, and excoriated by the anti-gun Democrat-laden House Committee on Oversight and Reform over his unwillingness to be subjected to the committee’s intended effort to sully the gun maker’s reputation, his company published a letter in response.

Smith did not hold back:

A number of politicians and their lobbying partners in the media have recently sought to disparage Smith & Wesson.

 

Some have had the audacity to suggest that after they have vilified, undermined and defunded law enforcement for years, supported prosecutors who refuse to hold criminals accountable for their actions, overseen the decay of our country’s mental health infrastructure, and generally promoted a culture of lawlessness, Smith & Wesson and other firearm manufacturers are somehow responsible for the crime wave that has predictably resulted from these destructive policies.

 

But they are the ones to blame for the surge in violence and lawlessness, and they seek to avoid any responsibility for the crisis of violence they have created by attempting to shift the blame to Smith & Wesson, other firearm manufacturers and law-abiding gun owners.

 

It is no surprise that the cities suffering most from violent crime are the very same cities that have promoted irresponsible, soft-on-crime policies that often treat criminals as victims and victims as criminals.

 

Many of these same cities also maintain the strictest gun laws in the nation. But rather than confront the failure of their policies, certain politicians have sought more laws restricting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, while simultaneously continuing to undermine our institutions of law and order.

 

And to suppress the truth, some now seek to prohibit firearm manufacturers and supporters of the Second Amendment from advertising products in a manner designed to remind law-abiding citizens that they have a Constitutional right to bear arms in defense of themselves and their families.

A firearm, adds, Smith, never committed a crime:

To be clear, a Smith & Wesson firearm has never broken into a home, a Smith & Wesson firearm has never assaulted a woman out for a late-night run in the city, a Smith & Wesson firearm has never carjacked an unsuspecting driver stopped at a traffic light.

Without saying as much, it’s clear he isn’t going to appear before the committee to be attacked, intimidated, and sullied. On that heavily weighted Democrat committee are such notorious anti-gunners as Carolyn Maloney, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Rashida Tlaib, and Cori Bush.

That committee successfully attacked the CEOs of two other gun makers who agreed to submit to its harassment. Smith originally agreed to join them, but when it was clear that their motives were strictly political, he told them he wouldn’t “be available” to be subjected to their inquisition.

In response, Maloney, who for the moment (she just lost her primary) chairs the committee, notified Smith that her committee has issued a subpoena to obtain various documents that the committee would use to build a case for more infringements on rightful gun owners.

In her committee’s initial demand for his attendance, she made clear exactly how the inquisition would operate:

As the chief executive officer of a major firearms manufacturer that sells millions of assault weapons, your testimony is crucial to understand why your company continues to sell and market these weapons to civilians, what steps your company plans to take to protect the public, and what additional reforms are needed to prevent further deaths from your products.

In other words, Maloney and her anti-gun majority had already declared Smith & Wesson guilty, and Smith would be given the privilege of attempting to defend himself and his company.

He saw the ruse, and politely bowed out.

The committee tried to reschedule, and again Smith refused.

Maloney ran out of patience, and on August 1 announced that her committee is issuing a subpoena:

I am writing to notify you that I have issued a subpoena to Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. (“Smith & Wesson”) for documents related to your company’s manufacture and sale of AR-15- style firearms.

 

Your company collects hundreds of millions of dollars selling assault weapons that are used in mass shootings, including the horrific murder of seven Americans and the wounding of dozens more during a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois.

 

This subpoena was necessitated by your unwillingness to voluntarily comply with the Committee’s investigation, including your refusal to testify about your company’s troubling business practices at the Committee’s July 27, 2022, hearing, and your refusal to voluntarily produce key information about your company’s sale of assault weapons to civilians.

Time is working against Maloney and her anti-gun committee, and both she and Smith know it. Come January she will no longer chair the committee or even be in the 118th Congress.

The momentum for the private ownership of firearms continues to build. On April 1, the National Rifle Association celebrated the 25th state — Georgia — to pass constitutional-carry laws. As the NRA noted:

The NRA paved the way for constitutional carry by first leading the charge for right-to-carry nearly 40 years ago.

 

Today, every state, and the District of Columbia, provides for the carrying of a firearm for self-defense outside the home in some form, and half the nation recognizes [that] the Second Amendment protects law-abiding citizens’ right to self-defense as an inherent and inalienable right.

So, Smith ended his letter making clear that he would be happy to participate in future discussions with honest and honorable members of Congress seeking information, and not harassment and humiliation:

We will continue to work alongside law enforcement, community leaders and lawmakers who are genuinely interested in creating safe neighborhoods. We will engage those who genuinely seek productive discussions, not a means of scoring political points.

As for his company’s customers, Smith added:

We will continue informing law-abiding citizens that they have a Constitutionally-protected right to defend themselves and their families. We will never back down in our defense of the 2nd Amendment.

Florida School District Places an AR-15 in Every School

Thursday, 18 August 2022 12:23
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, August 18, 2022: 

A spokesman for the Indian River County School District in Florida told a local news outlet last week they had installed enhanced safety measures at the start of the school year:

In addition to the safety measures our local law enforcement agencies have placed on our campuses to ensure the safety and security of each student, teacher, and staff member on campus, we are blessed to have highly trained law enforcement officers assigned to each campus.

 

One Student Resource Officer/Deputy is at each of our 13 elementary schools and 4 middle schools, and 3 SRO/SRD’s are at each of our traditional public high schools.

The enhanced “safety measures” include providing each school with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle available instantly in the event of a threat. And the local sheriff warned potential shooters they are prepared to meet any threat. Said Indian River County Sheriff Eric Flowers:

If they’re coming at us with an AR-15 we’re gonna return with the same or greater firepower….

 

If something were to happen … [the resource officers] would have ready access to that AR-15 and their shield to be able to respond immediately….

 

Our folks are there to protect the kids. Our folks are bringing guns, they’re the good guys. When bad guys show up with guns, they’re gonna find our guns.

 

They’re gonna find out that we’re well prepared and that we’re prepared for that threat. Us bringing guns to campuses only keeps the schools safer.

 

We’ve seen what’s happened in Parkland. We’ve seen what happened in Uvalde. Our folks are not gonna stand by and wait for something bad to happen to kids in Indian River County….

 

Our folks are not gonna be running backwards to get a shield, running backwards to get a rifle. They’re gonna go directly at the threat and the teams that come in behind them can bring in that additional gear as they’re responding.

The National Rifle Association noted, “Our banks, airports, baseball games, office buildings, movie stars, politicians – they’re all more protected than children at school,” and applauded the school district’s move, saying:

Hats off to Indian River County Sheriff Eric Flowers for doing what’s right and protecting students!

 

Parents want to drop off their kids at school and be assured they are safe.

The move by the Indian River County School District, with more than 15,000 enrolled students, has national political implications. First, it burnishes the reputation of the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who has consistently supported the Second Amendment. And it’s a direct challenge to the current anti-gun agenda at the federal level with its recent move to infringe further on Second Amendment rights.

This is to say nothing about dampening any enthusiasm a criminal might have for seeking a school with armed student resource officers and deputies protecting the little ones. Seeking unarmed potential victims, those miscreants will be forced to look elsewhere lest they find armed resistance determined to neutralize their threat.

Hats off to the Indian River County School District for doing the right thing.

FBI and Texas State Wrong on How Many Armed Citizens Stop Mass Shootings

Saturday, 13 August 2022 20:55
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Saturday, August 13, 2022:  

Ed White, a journalist for the Associated Press covering the story of an armed citizen stopping a shooting in an Indiana mall in July, said such an incident is very rare:

A bystander’s decision to shoot a man who opened fire at an Indiana mall was a rare occurrence of someone stepping in to try to prevent multiple casualties before police could arrive….

 

It isn’t common for mass shootings to be stopped in such fashion. From 2000 to 2021, fewer than 3% of 433 active attacks in the U.S. ended with a civilian firing back, according to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University.

In covering the same incident, The Washington Post echoed the refrain, calling it “a rare instance of [an] armed civilian ending a mass shooting,” adding:

The Greenwood incident is unique, however, because it became one of the rare instances of an armed civilian successfully intervening to end a mass shooting, adding more fuel to a national debate about the role of bystanders during an active shooter attack.

The Post’s journalists referred to data captured by the FBI as the basis for their reporting:

In practice, this is an uncommon occurrence during mass shootings. In recent studies of more than 430 “active shooter incidents” dating back to 2000, the FBI found that civilians killed gunmen in just 10 cases.

John Lott, head of the Crime Prevention Research Center, exposed the error on Wednesday in his report “How the FBI Undercounts Armed Citizen Responders to Mass Killers — and Media Play Along.” He reported that the FBI showed that only 11 out of 252 active shooter incidents in its database were stopped by an armed citizen.

But the FBI undercounted the number of incidents they collected between 2014 and 2021. According to Lott’s research, there were a total of 281 active shooter incidents, and 41 of them were stopped by armed citizens.

Lott called the discrepancy “overlooked cases” that the FBI failed to count. And of course, the mainstream media never bothered to look past the FBI’s conclusion and reported the error as fact.

Lott asked the FBI about those “overlooked” discrepancies: “The FBI declined to address them.” He asked the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University to address the discrepancy that also showed up in their results, and received this from them:

We do appreciate you sending potential active shooter cases for the FBI team to review for inclusion in their active shooter dataset. As promised, I sent the email chain to the FBI team yesterday.

 

As I’m sure you know, the FBI Active Shooter reports are released on an annual basis.

 

My assumption is that any amendment retroactively adding cases would likely be included in a release with the [next] annual report.

Lott also contacted Ed White, the AP writer, within hours of his article being published, pointing out that the data he was using was not accurate. But White never corrected his reporting of the incident.

Which means that the false underreporting of armed citizens foiling attempts at mass shootings will continue to be picked up by the compliant anti-gun media and reported as fact.

Meanwhile, Lott and his organization continue to collect reports of those armed citizens stopping mass shootings in their database, which at present lists in detail more than 60 such instances in the time period 2014 through 2021.

Lott treated what appears to be a coordinated effort to mislead the media, and the public, kindly:

Although collecting such data is fraught with challenges, some see a pattern of distortion in the FBI numbers because the errors almost exclusively go one way, minimizing the life-saving actions of armed citizens.

Armed citizens don’t foil just mass shootings. Gun owners defend themselves against aggression between 500,000 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and 1,884,348 (Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz) times every year. As this writer noted previously:

Also left unreported by any media is the number of times an individual with criminal intent is deterred not just by the presence of an armed citizen, but by the mere suggestion that the citizen might be armed.

 

As horrific as the recent mass shootings are, one needs to balance the mainstream media’s 24/7 blood-red coverage of those events with the fact that, without armed citizens present, there would be many more such ghastly atrocities being committed.

Politicians’ Canards Promoting Passage of Assault Weapons Ban

Monday, 08 August 2022 16:27
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, August 8, 2022:  

Hoping to ride the momentum from passage of the first major anti-gun legislation in 30 years — the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — Joe Biden and various anti-gun politicians are pushing the Senate to pass another anti-gun House bill, this one banning all “assault” weapons.

And they’re using the same lies and exaggerations.

Said Biden in July:

Assault weapons need to be banned.

 

They were banned. I led the fight in 1994.

 

And then, under pressure from the NRA [National Rifle Association] and the gun manufacturers and others, that ban was lifted in 2004.

We won’t waste readers’ time correcting the errors in this statement, but instead will focus on what he said next:

In the 10 years it was law, mass shootings went down.

 

But after Republicans let the law expire in 2004 and those weapons were allowed to be sold again, mass shootings tripled.

 

Those are the facts.

This was echoed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “We know that an assault weapons ban can work because it has worked before.… we witnessed gun crime with assault weapons drop by up to 40 percent.”

Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Federation, told The Epoch Times:

Supporters of the bans are calling their assertions “facts,” in an effort to mislead the public. Many of the Democratic Members of Congress were purposefully misleading in their assertions that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban reduced crime.

 

This level of willful ignorance would be comical if … what they are trying to do wasn’t so blatantly unconstitutional.

John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, agreed: “The number of murders with rifles actually increased slightly when the ban went into effect.” He pointed out that the percentage of all firearm-related murders with any type of rifle was 4.8 percent prior to the ban, and remained essentially constant during the ban. After the ban expired in 2004, rifle homicides dropped to 3.6 percent of all gun-related homicides.

Reuters reported that Biden, Pelosi, and other opponents of the Second Amendment used a 2021 study from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine to promote the bill. When this writer attempted to obtain a copy of that study, however, he found that it was not readily available to the public.

However, in its summary review of the study the university provided this highly revealing disclaimer about the study’s results:

In conclusion, with a few exceptions, there is a surprisingly limited base of rigorous scientific evidence concerning the effects of many commonly discussed gun policies. This does not mean that these policies are ineffective; they might well be quite effective. Instead, it reflects shortcomings in the contributions that scientific study can currently offer to policy debates in these areas….

 

[N]one of the policies we examined would dramatically increase or decrease the stock of guns or gun ownership rates in ways that would produce more readily detectable effects on public safety, health, and industry outcomes.

 

The United States has a large stock of privately owned guns in circulation—estimated in 2014 to be somewhere between 200 million and 300 million firearms (Cook and Goss, 2014).

 

Laws designed to change who may buy new weapons, what weapons they may buy, or how gun sales occur will predictably have only a small effect on … homicides … which are affected much more by the existing stock of firearms.

Let’s recap: this study is one that House Speaker Pelosi and others used to promote the bill that is now headed to the Senate. But other studies are much clearer: The 10-year ban on semi-automatic rifles didn’t reduce gun violence by any scientifically measurable amount.

In fact, in 2013, after reviewing all the available data, FactCheck (funded by the left-wing Annenberg Foundation) noted that it is “premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun crime.”

Research done by Criminology & Public Policy in 2019 found that the ban “didn’t appear to have much of an effect on the number of mass shootings.” The group reported a year later, in January 2020, that such bans “do not seem associated with the incidence of fatal mass shootings.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said its own studies on the issue were “inconsistent” and concluded that “evidence was insufficient to determine the effectiveness of the 1994 ban.”

The Congressional Research Service concurred: “Public mass shootings account for few of the murders … related to firearms that occur annually in the United States.”

And so, when someone like Biden or Pelosi, or even hard-left Democratic Representative Lloyd Doggett representing Austin, Texas (who sports an “F” rating from the NRA), spouts off with something like this:

[Assault weapons are] easier for a teenager to get than to buy a beer. We’ve turned our churches, our schools, our shopping centers, our entertainment venues, almost any place into a battleground with one massacre after another…

then we know he’s making it up out of whole cloth, and he likely knows it. Such fabrications hide the true intent: these bills have nothing to do with gun control, but everything to do with people control.

Forbes notes that the most recent bill has little chance in the Senate, where Democrats would need 10 Republican defectors to gain the 60 votes needed for passage.

17 State AGs Sue ATF Over Unconstitutional Expansion of Powers

Friday, 29 July 2022 13:54
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, July 29, 2022:  

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich submitted a complaint on Wednesday against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). Attorneys general from 16 other states, along with some gun-rights groups, joined him in the complaint.

At issue is the ATF’s attempt to prohibit the making of “ghost guns” by private individuals by declaring the parts needed to make them as firearms themselves and therefore subject to ATF regulation.

As Brnovich noted, the ATF seeks to “regulate unfinished, non-functional parts as if they [are] complete firearms.” This move “overshoot[s] the authority granted to it by Congress. The rulemaking is unconstitutional.”

The issuance of the agency’s “final rule,” says the complaint,

unconstitutionally subverts Congress’ authority, exercising quintessentially legislative powers in a manner that could never pass either (let alone both) houses of Congress today, which is precisely why defendants have no intent whatsoever to ask for legislative authorization to take such unprecedented actions.

In other words, the ATF action is another example of the administrative state — the unconstitutional fourth branch of government — run amok.

The complaint makes clear, from the agency’s own words, that its purpose is to eliminate ghost guns altogether by regulating their parts into oblivion:

The Final Rule can be viewed as an effort by ATF to eliminate the market for 80% frames and receivers (and DIY homemade firearms) entirely, through arbitrary standards, intimidation, and threats of criminal charges for vague federal crimes.

 

In fact, ATF admits that the Final Rule “will reduce the overall supply and demand for … firearm parts kits,” and “estimates … that 98% of such companies “will end up dissolving their businesses”….

 

The Final Rule can best be understood as an effort to eliminate entirely the market for DIY firearm parts that can be manufactured into functional firearms by law-abiding, “do-it-yourself” gun owners.

The 161-page complaint declares that

The Final Rule upends existing federal gun law, imposing onerous burdens on federal firearms licensees and private gun owners alike, and creating out of thin air a new federal crime with respect to what ATF terms “privately made firearms,” all in clear disregard for the statutory text that Congress enacted.

To create that “new federal crime,” the ATF first must create a new definition of ghost gun. The new definition reads:

Privately made firearm (PMF): A firearm, including a frame or receiver, completed, assembled, or otherwise produced by a person other than a licensed manufacturer, and without a serial number placed by a licensed manufacturer at the time the firearm was produced.

Under the new definition, any PMF that doesn’t have a serial number (none of them do) automatically becomes illegal to own.

The complaint states that the “ATF does not have the power to create new crimes,” just as the Executive Branch cannot, either through the president or one of its agencies, create criminal statutes. Under the Constitution, only Congress can do that:

Defendants may only exercise the authority conferred upon them by statute, and may not legislate through regulation in order to implement [the agency’s] perceived intent of Congress or congressional purpose behind federal gun control statutes.

The complaint spells out how the Constitution works, and how the ATF works to violate it:

Article I, § 1 of the U.S. Constitution provides that “[a]ll legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”

 

Article I, § 7, Clause 2 of the Constitution mandates that “[e]very Bill … shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate” and “shall … be presented to the President of the United States … before it become a Law….”

 

The [ATF’s] Final Rule violates these provisions, usurping legislative powers. The Final Rule represents an attempt by an administrative agency to implement policy change and enact omnibus federal gun control legislation through bureaucratic regulation, rather than through legislation.

The complaint provides a helpful analogy:

The Constitution protects the corresponding right to sell firearm components, magazines, ammunition, and accessories, just as the freedoms of speech and press protect the right to buy and sell newspapers, books, paper, and ink.

 

Indeed, it would not mean much if there was a right to make a firearm, but no ability to purchase the materials necessary to do so.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court of North Dakota, asks the court to rein in the ATF by declaring that

the Final Rule is unlawful and an ultra vires [“beyond the powers”] agency action and of no force and effect;

 

the Final Rule is an act “not in accordance with law” and of no force and effect;

 

the Final Rule violates the Separation of Powers doctrine embodied in the United States Constitution; and

 

the Final Rule violates rights protected by the Second Amendment and is of no force and effect.

Unfortunately, the complaint doesn’t address the issue of the constitutionality of the ATF itself, or of Congress’ original abrogation of the separation of powers doctrine by granting legislative authority to the ATF in the first place. As the complaint itself states, in its effort to perform an end run around the constitutional limitations built in by the Founders,

ATF has created an informal definition, within another informal definition, within a regulatory definition, within another regulatory definition, within a statutory definition, of a statutory term.

This will continue until such time as the ATF is abolished, or the Second Amendment is abolished by it.

House Committee Seeks Apologies From Gun Makers After Recent Mass Shootings

Friday, 29 July 2022 13:50
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, July 29, 2022:  

The Democrat-laden House Oversight Committee demanded apologies from CEOs of gun manufacturers Ruger and Daniel Defense on Wednesday for selling weapons used by murderers in recent mass shootings.

The chairwoman of the committee, Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), asked the CEO of Smith & Wesson to show up for the grilling as well, but he declined. In her letter “inviting” the three company presidents to the inquisition, she wrote:

The information you provided has heightened the Committee’s concern that your company is continuing to profit from the sale and marketing of weapons of war to civilians despite the harm these weapons cause, is failing to track instances or patterns where your products are used in crimes, and is failing to take other reasonable precautions to limit injuries and deaths caused by your firearms.

She picked on those three companies deliberately, as their products were involved in the Uvalde, Texas, and Highland Park, Illinois, shootings.

This set the stage for her grilling of the two CEOs who agreed to subject themselves and their companies to the attack. The weapons are the offending criminals in those recent shootings and, by clear inference, so were the company executives.

Behind her was a white board showing how much each company made in recent years from the sale of their products.

She began:

The gun industry has flooded our neighborhoods, our schools, and even our churches and synagogues with these deadly weapons.… How many more American children need to die before your compan[ies] stop selling assault weapons?

Each president began to present a reasonable response to such a provocative and intentionally offensive question, but each time Maloney cut them off, citing time limitations. She, of course, had plenty of time to rant but precious little time was granted for any response.

However, Daniel Defense president Marty Daniel was able to declare: “These acts are committed by murderers. The murderers are responsible.”

Ruger’s president, when given a chance to respond to the outrageous question posed by Maloney, refused to answer directly but instead argued that a gun is “an inanimate object,” adding that “it is wrong to deprive citizens of their constitutional right to purchase a lawful weapon … because of the criminal acts of [a few] wicked people.”

He said, “The difference is in the intent of the individual possessing it,” and then added that her committee ought to look at the criminals using the weapons illegally rather than on the makers:

We respectfully submit [that] should be the focus of any investigation into the root causes of criminal violence involving firearms.

A Republican member of the committee, Jody Hice (R-Ga.), called out Maloney for her misleading and offensive questioning: “It’s absolutely disgusting to me and unthinkable … the height of irresponsibility and lack of accountability [by Maloney]. My colleagues seem to forget that the American people have a right to own guns.”

Another Republican on the committee, Clay Higgins (R-La.), called out Maloney and her cohorts: “What my colleagues are doing [here] is unbelievably beyond the pale of anything reasonable or constitutional. Will we have that debate reasonably … through the legislative branch? Or will [the issue] be settled on the front porch of Americans, when the FBI and ATF show up to seize legally owned weapons?”

Happily, the confrontation that Maloney hoped would capture national exposure and attention failed miserably. As of this writing, there were fewer than 5,000 views of the committee’s inquisition that was posted on YouTube.

Delaware “Assault Weapons” Ban Unconstitutional, Declares New Lawsuit

Wednesday, 27 July 2022 10:45
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This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, July 27, 2022:  

Following the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting, Delaware’s Democratic Party — which controls the offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and both chambers of the state’s legislature — rushed through nine gun-control bills in response. They largely ignored not only protections guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but also broader protections guaranteed by Article 1, Section 20 of the Delaware Constitution: “A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and State, and for hunting and recreational use.”

And they largely ignored as well the recent ruling by the Supreme Court in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. Following that ruling, the high court remanded (returned) pending lawsuits impacted by that ruling to the states to comply accordingly.

On Wednesday, the Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association and several other groups and individuals sued Delaware state officials charged with enforcing the new law, asking the U.S. District Court of Delaware to render the law unenforceable.

The Delaware law makes it illegal to make, sell, purchase, or possess so-called assault weapons, including semi-automatic handguns and semi-automatic rifles such as the immensely popular AR-15 platform. It also bans possession of “large capacity” magazines, arbitrarily defined as containing more than 17 rounds of ammunition.

The law provides a long list of the newly-prohibited handguns and rifles and then, to make sure that if any were not included in the list they would also be banned, defined “assault” rifles as having detachable magazines and pistol grips, a flash suppressor, having a barrel shroud, and — unbelievably — the capability of launching grenades as well.

The lawsuit declares that “the State of Delaware recently enacted in law [a bill] which flouts the fundamental civil rights of Delawareans … by making them criminals — felons — for exercising one of their most exacted rights enshrined in both the Delaware Constitution and the United States Constitution.”

House Bill 450 and its companion Senate Bill 68 were signed into law on June 30 (the Uvalde shooting occurred on May 24) by Democrat Governor John Carney, who said at the time that “we have an obligation to do everything we can to prevent tragedies like we’ve seen around the country from happening here in Delaware.”

He said nothing about how similar bans have failed to prevent such shootings, nor did he say anything about the mental states of the shooters. It was all about inanimate objects and punishing their innocent owners in order to make a political statement.

From the lawsuit:

When House Bill 450 was signed into law on June 30, 2022, the State of Delaware criminalized possession, transportation and sale of common firearms used by law abiding citizens for lawful purposes — mislabeling them as “assault weapons” — making it a felony for law-abiding citizens to exercise their fundamental right to keep and bear such arms.

The plaintiffs

seek declaratory and injunctive relief not only on the basis that the Regulatory Scheme violates their rights under the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, but also on the fact that the Regulatory Scheme violates their rights under Delaware Constitution, Article I Section 20; their rights to Due Process under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and Article I, Section 7 of the Delaware Constitution; their right to Equal Protection under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The lawsuit referred to the Bruen decision coupled with the Heller decision (District of Columbia v. Heller, decided by the Supreme Court in 2008) which “assert that the Second Amendment protects the carrying of weapons that are those ‘in common use’ at the time.”

It derided Delaware officials who passed the law, using the phrase “assault weapons” in the text:

The banned semiautomatic firearms deemed as “assault weapons” under the Regulatory Scheme, like all other semiautomatic firearms, fire only one round for each pull of the trigger.

 

They are not machine guns.

 

What is more, the designation “assault weapons” is a complete misnomer, “developed by anti-gun publicists” in their crusade against lawful firearm ownership.

Further, banning such “assault weapons” has historically had almost no impact on mass shootings:

According to a widely cited 2004 study, these arms “are used in a small fraction of gun crimes.” See Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control [for] evidence [that] indicates that “well under 1% of [crime guns] are ‘assault rifles.’”

More recent data confirms Kleck’s 2004 conclusions. FBI crime statistics found that of the average of 14,556 homicides committed annually for the past decade, rifles typically account for just 314 of them. And in 2019, the latest year for which records are available, Delaware suffered 48 homicides, with none of them attributed to a rifle.

Of the five judges currently sitting on the U.S. District Court of Delaware, two were appointed by President Donald Trump, one was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, and the other two were appointed by Presidents Obama and Biden.

The New American will keep its readers advised of developments in the case.

Many of the articles on Light from the Right first appeared on either The New American or the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor.
Copyright © 2021 Bob Adelmann