Burglar critically wounded after Memphian comes home, opens fire

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) – A burglary suspect is fighting for his life after an attempted heist took a turn Tuesday afternoon at a Northeast Memphis apartment complex.

According to the police report, the bandit had forced entry into an apartment along West Quailbrook Cove at Greenbrook at Shelby Farms.

The resident told police that he came home around 3:15 p.m. to find a masked stranger in all-black clothing attempting to take his TV off the wall.

He said the burglar reached for a black bag once he realized he was caught. But before the suspect could retrieve what he was reaching for, the tenant pulled out his gun and shot the bandit twice.

The suspect then fled with his bag through the apartment’s back door.

The resident admitted that he shot at the suspect twice more while he was running. He told police that he witnessed the burglar fall, get back up, and continue fleeing without his loot.

After an extensive search, officers found the suspect with critical gunshot injuries more than a half mile away on Honeybrook Road.

He was then rushed to a local hospital for treatment.

Inside the dropped bag, officers recovered the victim’s PlayStation 5, four pairs of sneakers, a Roku remote, and a PlayStation controller.

The suspect remains in the hospital as of Tuesday night and has yet to be identified.

BLUF:
The Court’s reading of the Commerce Clause since Wickard has had wide-ranging consequences for Americans’ liberty and the powers the Constitution reserves to the states. Much federal overreach is accomplished in the name of this Clause, a provision that virtually no one, not even the Antifederalists, objected to at the time of the ratification debates. It’s well past time for the Court to reassert the Clause’s original meaning. Justice Thomas is leading the way.

Twenty-One Years Later, Justice Thomas Is Still Right About the Commerce Clause.

Marijuana stinks, enervates malaise into America’s youth, and even has a tendency to induce panic attacks. But let it not be said that marijuana has no benefits. After all, thanks to marijuana, or more accurately, Congress’s regulation of it, Justice Clarence Thomas has written opinions reminding Americans, and his fellow Justices, that Congress’s powers are not unlimited.

In a recently decided Supreme Court case called United States v. Hemani, the Court reversed a conviction of a man who had been prosecuted under a federal statute that prohibits anyone who uses a controlled substance from owning a firearm. The government prosecuted Ali Hemani under the statute because, while owning a firearm, he used marijuana.

The majority opinion in Hemani asked whether Hemani’s prosecution violated his Second Amendment rights and found that it did. Justice Thomas agreed with that conclusion but wrote a separate concurring opinion in which he asked the more fundamental question: Did Congress have the authority to pass this law in the first place?

The Constitution vests in Congress certain powers, and Congress has no power not vested in it by the Constitution. When Congress passes a law, it must be able to point to a specific power enumerated in the Constitution that allows it to do so. When a representative introduces a bill, he must point to the specific section of the Constitution that permits him to do so, called a Constitutional Authority Statement. Although the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment, does place further limits on those congressional powers, the Bill of Rights is irrelevant where Congress lacks the power to pass a law in the first place.

As Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion explains, Congress likely lacked authority to pass the law at issue in the Hemani case.

The Commerce Clause empowers Congress to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” As scholarship has made clear, and as Advancing American Freedom has argued several times in amicus briefs, at the time of the founding, the word “commerce” simply meant the trade of goods and “among the several states” meant — well — among the several states.

In other words, the Commerce Clause allows Congress, as Justice Thomas put it, “to regulate the buying and selling of goods and services trafficked across state lines.” By the time Hemani owned his firearm, it was no longer in interstate commerce — it was not being bought or sold across state lines. As such, Congress had no power to regulate it under the Commerce Clause.

Nor is this the first time Justice Thomas has had an opportunity to remind Americans about the Commerce Clause in a case involving marijuana. In a 2005 case called Gonzales v. Raich, federal officials, acting under a statute enacted by Congress supposedly under its Commerce Clause power, seized marijuana plants that individuals were growing in their backyards for personal medical use.

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Doubling Down on Wrongness: Anti-Gun Jurisdictions Don’t Let Little Things Like the Bruen Decision Get In Their Way.

Why is it that, after being told their gun laws are unconstitutional, so many areas that are run by anti-gun extremists seem to respond with something along the lines of, “Oh yeah? Watch what we do next!” We saw this type of response after the landmark NYSRPA v. Bruen decision that affirmed law-abiding gun owners have a right to carry firearms for self-defense away from the home.

Like spoiled children who run to their room when told they can’t do something by their parents, anti-gun extremists ran to anti-gun legislatures to ram through more anti-gun laws that seek to circumvent the Bruen decision. We saw several states, including Hawaii, New Jersey, and New York, quickly pass and enact new laws to restrict the lawful carry of firearms.

The laws in both New Jersey and New York—based on expanding so-called “sensitive places” where carry is prohibited to the point where virtually nowhere is deemed suitable for lawful carry—have suffered losses in court, while Hawaii’s may soon be dealt a crushing blow to its anti-self-defense regime by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In apparent preparation for a loss, anti-gun extremists ran to the Hawaii legislature shortly after the Supreme Court heard the challenge to its unconstitutional law, filing yet another feeble attempt to potentially circumvent a ruling by the Court.

Meanwhile, Bearing Arms recently reported the U.S. Virgin Islands, has adopted “a massive gun control bill,” even as the U.S. territory is already facing a lawsuit challenging existing policy relating to the issuance of their gun permits.

In December of last year, the Second Amendment Section of the Civil Rights Division of the DoJ announced its intent to sue the Virgin Islands Police Department for “an unconstitutional permitting process” in the V.I. As part of that announcement, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who’s in charge of the Civil Rights Division and created its Second Amendment Section, was quoted in a release, stating . . .

The newly-established Second Amendment Section filed this lawsuit to bring the Virgin Islands Police Department back into legal compliance by ensuring that applicants receive timely decisions without unconstitutional obstruction.

So, similar to other anti-gun jurisdictions, the most virulently anti-gun operators in the V.I. responded to being told they were doing something wrong…by doubling down on the wrongness.

Bearing Arms describes the VI effort as an attempt to moot the lawsuit challenging the permit issuing process, a procedure Hawaii should have probably considered in light of the hard questions its counsel faced during the Supreme Court hearing on its initial attempt to circumvent Bruen.

But along with the apparent attempt to moot the suit regarding carry permit issuing in the island territory, Bearing Arms reports there’s also language seeking to impose bans on popular semi-automatic firearms and magazines capable of holding more than 15 rounds, as well as adding restrictions on where permit holders may lawfully carry firearms for self-defense—the so-called “sensitive place” restrictions on carry that jurisdictions like New Jersey and New York implemented that led to their laws being challenged in court.

Similarly, semi-auto and magazine bans are also being challenged by Harmeet Dhillon’s team of attorneys, most notably in Denver, Colo., and Washington, D.C.

So, as with others, the V.I. appears to be thumbing its nose at the Second Amendment and the Trump administration by doubling down on anti-gun efforts when told they are already doing something unconstitutional. Disappointing, but hardly surprising.

We will be sure to continue to post updates on these cases, as well as what we presume will be other cases coming out of other anti-gun government agencies at the state, local, or territorial level.

AP Poll Shows Dems Not As Worried About Threat to Gun Rights They Don’t Value.

Our friends at the Associated Press have polled about 2500 Americans in an effort to take their collective temperature on the level of security they feel in some of their most fundamental civil rights, They include freedom of speech, religion, voting rights and — you guessed it — the right to keep and bear arms.

The non-news here is that the Democrats who were polled are largely dismissive of any perceived threats to their gun rights in the current climate while Republicans surveyed in the AP-NORC America 250 poll were less sanguine. Of course, you’d expect those who find less value in the right to keep and bear arms to be less worried about efforts to limit that right.

And for those of you who haven’t been paying attention, those efforts are alive and well and progressing in almost all of the usual suspect states. According the Grok’s AI gnome miners, here’s a selection of anti-gun measures enacted in the last year or so

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Like All Gun Control Measures, 3D Censorware Mandates Are Doomed to Fail.

The Assn. of 3D Printing supports the legislation in New York and California, but “it’s not going to work,” [Chairman Bill] Decker said. “It’s more of a political statement than anything else.”

Criminals still will come up with ways to make guns from 3-D printers, either by altering their designs or taking their printing projects elsewhere, Decker said.

The more aggressive the technology becomes, the more likely that it also blocks unintended items, said Rory Mir, director of open access and technology community engagement at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group. Some harmless pipes might look like gun parts, or an S-shaped wall hanger might resemble an auto sear trigger used to modify a semiautomatic weapon into a machine gun.

“These sort of censorship algorithms don’t work, and they wind up capturing and blocking a lot of lawful speech,” Mir said.

If print instructions are submitted for a cloud-based artificial intelligence search, it also risks the privacy of people’s artistic and proprietary creations, Mir said.

— David A. Lieb in In California and New York, a push to take aim at guns made with 3-D printers

Arizona’s Democrat Governor Signs Range Protection Bill Into Law

Milton Friedman once said that he didn’t believe that the solution to all our political problems is to simply to elect the right people. Instead, he claimed “the important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.”

For Arizona gun owners, Gov. Katie Hobbs is hardly the right person for the job. She has used her veto power to block numerous pro-2A reforms during her time in office, including campus carry legislation and a measure blocking the use of industry-specific Merchant Category Codes for gun stores this year.

So it’s downright shocking that Hobbs has now signed HB 2763 into law. The bill, authored by State Rep.Quang Nguyen, puts some added protections in place for state-owned shooting ranges like the Ben Avery facility in Phoenix. Under the bill, the range could not be closed or shut down unless such a move receives the approval of the Arizona legislature, not just the the Arizona Game and Fish Commission, which oversees the range’s day-to-day operations.

In a press release, Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms chairman Alan Gottlieb praised Nguyen for his work in protecting the world-class facility.

“I can say without fear of contradiction that protecting the Ben Avery shooting range and similar facilities around the Grand Canyon State is of paramount importance to Arizona gun owners,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “Future generations of Arizona hunters, competitors and recreational shooters will benefit from this bill’s passage.

“The Citizens Committee takes this opportunity to congratulate Rep. Nguyen for his tireless efforts to guide HB 2763 through the legislature and finally to the governor’s desk,” he added. “We’re disappointed that not a single Democrat lawmaker in either the House or Senate voted in support of this legislation, while we are proud of Rep. Nguyen and his Republican colleagues, led by House Speaker Steve Montenegro, who passed this important measure despite that partisan opposition.

“It should be noted that Rep. Nguyen has appeared at the Gun Rights Policy Conference, which is co-sponsored by the Citizens Committee, and I am personally grateful for his dedication to Arizona gun owners,” Gottlieb observed. “I have come to know him as a lawmaker who can be counted on to defend the Second Amendment and the rights protected by Article 2, Section 26 of the Arizona constitution, adopted way back in 1912 when Arizona achieved statehood. He can rightfully be proud of this achievement.”

It’s astounding to me that Nguyen’s bill couldn’t get a single Democrat to vote in support. After all, you don’t normally see lawmakers turn down the opportunity to exercise power.

It’s even more amazing that Hobbs signed HB 2763 given its lack of support among Democrats in the legislature.

With a six-seat majority in the state House and a four-seat majority in the state Senate, Republicans are now in a position to thwart any effort by AZ Game and Fish Commission leaders to shutter the shooting complex, at least in the short term. It’s still up to gun owners in Arizona, however, to ensure that the legislature remains as supportive of the Second Amendment as it is right now, and to replace Hobbs this November with a governor who will sign every single pro-2A measure that gets to her desk instead of selectively doing the right thing when it suits her political agenda.

Is it good to have democracy? Is it good to dumb culture down to the lowest common denominator? Is it good to have religion as a state religion or as a coercive mechanism to instill good behavior? All of these things that we wrestle with today were discussed by people who in some ways were not confused by technology, they were empirical. They just wrote down the world that they saw.
Victor Davis Hanson