Category Archives: Second Amendment

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, March 26, 2019: 

The 90-day waiting period for banning bump stocks ended on Tuesday for every owner of the now-illegal firearm accessory, with one exception: Clark Aposhian. With the assistance of the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), Aposhian obtained a temporary stay of the new administrative decree. It only protects him, but it opens the door for its eventual reversal.

Said NCLA’s lead counsel, “Today [March 22] the [U.S. 10th Circuit] Court of appeals told the ATF that it could not rush through the bump stock ban without meaningful judicial review. The court understands the stakes and is refusing to let an innocent owner be declared a felon, as scheduled [on March 26].”

What’s at stake is the very functioning of the federal government under the Constitution. The NCLA makes that clear from its mission statement:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, March 27, 2019: 

Ryan Liskey has a problem. A law-abiding citizen and gun owner living in Virginia, he happens to own a bump stock. On Monday it was legal for him to do so. On Tuesday possession became illegal. Liskey raised the key question:

Do they [the ATF] have authority to do this? No. Is it a machine gun? No.

 

So do I follow an unconstitutional edict from the Department of Justice or do we stand our ground?

If Liskey “stands his ground” and is arrested for owning the newly illegal piece of plastic, and convicted, he becomes a felon, risking huge fines and up to 10 years in federal prison.

All without Congressional assent, thanks to the burgeoning administrative state exemplified by the ATF.

But just how is that arrest going to take place if Liskey fails to comply with the new administrative edict emanating from the ATF? When Justice Department officials were asked that very question last year when the ban was being announced (albeit with the 90-day waiting period which ended on Tuesday), they waffled:

We have no plans to go door to door, nor do we have the resources. The Department of Justice primarily relies on voluntary compliance by citizens. Most firearms owners are law-abiding citizens.

Numerous lawsuits against the administrative ruling have been filed, and all but one has been tossed. The single exception affects a single individual, Clark Aposhian, who had the help of the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), Aposhian obtained a temporary stay of the new administrative decree. It only protects him but it opens the door for the decree’s eventual reversal.

Said NCLA’s lead counsel, “Today [March 22] the [U.S. 10th Circuit] Court of appeals told the ATF that it could not rush through the bump stock ban without meaningful judicial review. The court understands the stakes and is refusing to let an innocent owner be declared a felon, as scheduled [on March 26].”

What’s at stake is the very functioning of the federal government under the Constitution. The NCLA makes that clear from its mission statement:

The following letter appeared in a full-page ad that Baldwin put into the Helena, Montana Independent Rccord last Thursday. I am pleased to make it available here due to its importance.

My Open Letter To Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Et. Al

Published: Thursday, March 21, 2019

I know I am speaking for tens of thousands of my fellow Montanans and tens of millions of my fellow Americans when I say what I’m about to say.

“Red flag” gun confiscation laws violate every principle of liberty upon which our country was founded. There is no due process associated with “red flag” laws. A judge’s order to seize the firearms from an American citizen who has not been accused of a crime, charged with a crime, convicted of a crime—or who never even threatened to commit a crime—based on the accusation of a single individual is anything but due process.

Our accuser could be

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, March 11, 2019: 

According to the Guinness Book of Records, Marilyn vos Savant has the highest recorded IQ in the world. She said that, without proofs, any opinion is an empty opinion: “Proofs are excellent lessons in reasoning. Without logic and reasoning, you are dependent on jumping to conclusions or – worse – having empty opinions.”

Enter the anti-gun media. When the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published its study of gun violence, “State gun laws, gun ownership, and mass shootings,” last Wednesday, in which it concluded that states with “weak” gun control laws suffered more mass shootings than those with “strong” gun control laws, the MSM were jubilant. Here, at long last, was proof – proof!– that more guns meant more mass shootings. The study put the lie to the “more guns, less crime” narrative supported by the NRA (“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”)

The headlines reflected their jubilance:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, February 14, 2019: 

More than 17 million Americans have obtained their concealed-carry permits, and about four out of every 10 of them carry a firearm with them at least some of the time.

This has been the cause of much angst among the anti-gun crowd, which still believes that more guns will equal more crime. Exactly the opposite has been proven to be the case.

It was Guy Smith, writing in his Gun Facts blog, who first alerted his readers to a study showing that “people with concealed carry licenses are 5.7 times less likely to be arrested for violent offences than the general public and 13.5 times less likely to be arrested for non-violent offenses than the general public.” Referring to another study, Smith noted that “the four-year violent crime arrest rate of CCW holders is 128 per 100,000 [but] for the general population it is 710 per 100,000. In other words, CCW holders are 5.5 times less likely to commit a violent crime [than the general public].”

But it was John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, who went one step further:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, February 11, 2019: 

For years the Giffords Law Center (GLC) has released its annual scorecard on how well states’ gun laws match its bias toward more infringement of the Second Amendment. It then “proves” that those infringements of law-abiding citizens’ rights reduce “gun deaths” in those states. Its latest release illustrates the point.

Consider its ranking of Wyoming, a state that historically has allowed its citizens maximum freedom in exercising their Second Amendment rights:

In 2018, Wyoming legislators put their constituents at risk by enacting a dangerous Stand Your Ground law and passing legislation allowing people with concealed carry permits to bring guns into places of worship.

 

The state has very weak gun laws and a remarkably high gun suicide rate. Wyoming could save lives by, among other things, passing universal background checks and imposing waiting periods on gun purchases.

On the other hand it ranks California as its “best state” in its survey:

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

The day before signing South Dakota’s “constitutional carry” bill into law, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem tweeted:

 Our Founding Fathers believed so firmly in our right to bear arms that they enshrined it into the Constitution. Tomorrow [Thursday] I will sign SB47 into law. This constitutional carry legislation will further protect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding South Dakotans.

This echoed the sentiments of the bill’s sponsor, Senate President Pro Tempore Brock Greenfield: “We’re simply trying to create a situation in which we recognize that the Second Amendment is paramount and will not be infringed.”

SB47 does much more than that.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, January 14, 2019:  

The Department of Justice just updated its decades-old study asking criminals where they got the guns they used in committing the crime for which they were currently incarcerated. After asking 287,000 prisoners in 2016 where they got the gun they used, 90 percent of them “did not obtain it from a retail source” and less than one percent obtained it from a gun show.

Half of them obtained their firearm from the “underground” market, while just six percent said they stole it. The survey reported that “most of the remainder had obtained it from a family member or a friend, or as a gift. Seven percent had purchased it under their own name from a licensed firearm dealer.”

In other words, current or pending laws banning “assault weapons” (usually variants of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle) almost totally miss the mark,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, January 7, 2019:

Not happy with the progress being made by banks and credit-card companies in their move to restrict lending to gun manufacturers, Andrew Sorkin published his thinly veiled support for more surveillance of and restrictions on individual gun buyers in the New York Times in late December.

In his piece entitled “How Banks Unwittingly Finance Mass Shootings,” Sorkin made clear his anti-gun worldview in the opening paragraph of the results of his Dealbook Investigation: “Omar Mateen used six credit cards to buy two guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition before he opened fire inside the Pulse nightclub [in June 2016].”

Sorkin rounded up evidence that other “mass shooters” had used credit cards to purchase firearms and accessories and concluded that “Many of the killers built their stockpiles of high-powered weapons with the convenience of credit. No one was watching.”

Now they should, said Sorkin. He took his “evidence” and called on the heads of a number of national banks who, he said, were horrified at what he had found. But they backed away from implementing any sort of tech wizardry that would target individuals buying too many firearms and too much ammunition in too short a period of time: