David Hogg, co-founder of the March for Our Lives gun-control group, recently tweeted what he thinks the Second Amendment means.
“After reading about the history of the second amend and talking with a lot of hist & law professors- I believe the second amendment has been intentionally misinterpreted. It was never meant as an individual right it was created to protect state militias like the national guard,” read Hogg’s tweet.
That legal theory he is parroting has been debunked by historians, by many legal scholars and by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) clearly said, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”
What Hogg tweeted next further demonstrated his ignorance.
“It says well regulated militia for a reason. The ‘shall not be infringed’ part means the federal government is not allowed to forcibly disarm state militias. I’m not alone in this interpretation. Over 100 years of jurisprudence back me up on this,” read Hogg’s follow-up tweet.
“Hogg mentions ‘jurisprudence,’ but it seems he does not really understand the term. When contemplating the philosophy of law in the United States as it relates to the Second Amendment, the longest held view of what it protects is an individual right; a view that goes back more than 230 years. There are countless quotes from our Founders—many of whom were deeply involved in the process of writing, debating, and ratifying the Second Amendment—referring to the right of individuals to possess firearms. Even those quotes that mention a ‘militia’ do so in the context of it being comprised of individual citizens who are expected to supply their own arms,” reported the NRA Institute for Legislative Action (ILA).
NRA-ILA also cited several other cases in their analysis, before summing up Hogg by saying, “Ultimately, David Hogg is simply another anti-gun activist, and like most others, he is prone to making false claims about a subject for which he has little understanding.”
This militia argument has been so thoroughly debunked that it is disappointing, brain-numbing and counterproductive to have to again refute it, but such is the anti-intellectualism of today’s gun-control movement; unfortunately, this includes, in this case, David Hogg, a student who Timesays is now “studying the history of conservative political movements” at Harvard. Given these tweets, he isn’t getting much of an education.
The Marine Corps is dismantling its iconic Scout Sniper platoons – a facet of each infantry battalion for generations – and is doing away with the coveted 0317 Military Occupational Specialty.
The product of a grueling training pipeline that yields field-ready precision marksmen qualified on the M40, M110, and M107 series rifles, the Marine Scout Sniper program is facing permanent disbandment as a result of a shifting focus in the country’s amphibious warfare service.
A leaked Feb. 21 unclassified message from Lt. Gen. D. J. Furness, the deputy commandant for plans, policies, and operations, detailed that the current 18-member Scout Sniper Platoons assigned to the Corps’ infantry battalions will quickly transition to 26-member Scout platoons – in other words, cutting the snipers in favor of a unit that would provide more “continuous all-weather information gathering.”
Spots in the Scout Sniper Basic Course will be zeroed out in the coming fiscal year while a nascent sniper capability will be continued in the Corps’ Reconnaissance and Marine Special Operations units under a new Military Occupational Specialty – 0322 MOS (Reconnaissance Sniper) – via a revamped, shorter training program.
The problem with that is, as these groups typically operate detached from standard infantry units, the highly specialized skill will in effect vanish at the battalion level, which will be left to get by with the current designated marksmen already at the company level. Under current doctrine, DMs typically only have a three-week course under their belt and train to engage targets out to 500 meters, rather than the much longer ranges that Scout Snipers train to achieve.
The USMC Scout Sniper Association is urging the Commandant of the Marine Corps to reconsider what the group terms an “ill-advised” policy decision that will gut the program that has been tweaked and perfected over the past 80 years.
“This announcement by the Deputy Commandant, Plans, Policy, and Operations on Tuesday is the result of misguided assumptions and decades of neglect of the community of men who are Scout Snipers,” said the Association.
“It’s unlikely that any officer who commanded and employed Scout Snipers in combat agrees that removing a sniper capability from the infantry battalion makes sense. Replacing an 18-man Scout Sniper Platoon with a 26-man Scout Platoon will not solve the ‘all weather information gathering’ problem. Retaining the skill set and the combat capability of Scout Snipers by offering a viable career path to Scout Snipers and providing them with more engaged leadership might.”
The shift away from having dedicated sniper platoons in each infantry battalion comes as the number of battalions themselves is dwindling.
The Corps’ three active-duty divisions would field a total of 27 infantry battalions between them if they were at full strength, but that hasn’t been the case for a long time. Long reduced to just 24 battalions all told, in 2020 the current commandant unveiled a plan to case the colors of three additional infantry battalions and the 8th Marine Regiment to make room to form a new Marine Littoral Regiment, the latter optimized to leapfrog rapidly across islands and coastal spaces with a smaller footprint when compared to the current force.
The result is a Corps with just 21 active-duty infantry battalions, shortly, in addition to cuts in tiltrotor, attack, and heavy-lift aviation squadrons and disbanding of all of the branch’s tank battalions.
Idon’t know how many times people have dropped this alleged quote from the late “conservative” Justice Warren Burger into my social media feeds:
The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies — the militia — would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.
If you find yourself in a debate over the Second Amendment, sooner or later someone is going to let you know that Burger believed an individual right to gun ownership was one of the “greatest pieces of fraud” perpetrated on the American people. Burger’s line is ubiquitous—it can be found in The New Yorker, Slate, Politico, NPR, every major newspaper, and in every anti-gun columnist’s pieces.
The first problem with the popular online iteration of the quote is that it’s actually cobbled together from three separate sources to give it more impact. Don’t get me wrong: Burger is mistaken in all instances, but he is mistaken in different contexts.
The second problem is that the quote often reads as if Burger—the “conservative” who voted with the majority in Roe v. Wade—offered this argument as a member of the Supreme Court. No high-court decision has ever defined the Second Amendment as anything but an individual right. And Burger never uttered a word about the Second Amendment while sitting on the court. For that matter, he never rendered a gun decision on any court, nor ever wrote a legal paper on the issue. And it shows.
Then again, the “collective right” theory was only a recent invention of revisionist historians and anti-gun activists when Burger adopted it. It’s also a tough one to sell to anyone who cares about history. Nearly every intellectual, political, and military leader of the founding generation, from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Franklin to George Mason to Samuel Adams to George Washington to Patrick Henry to James Madison and so on, is on the record defending the individual’s right to bear arms. There is not a single record of anyone in that era challenging the notion.
Anyway, the part of the quote about the gun lobby is taken from a 1991 PBS interview in which Burger erroneously argues that the 18th-century conception of “well regulated” was the same as the contemporary one. The notion that the state, much less the federal government, would be empowered to “regulate” what kind of weapons you owned would have been alien to a person in 1789. “Well regulated” simply means a well-pulled-together militia, rather than a rabble.
Burger maintains that the real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies would defend state populations. This is an ungrammatical and ahistorical reading of the amendment. Sure, there was a debate over standing armies and control of the militias. But, as the late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in Heller, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” is the operative clause in the Second Amendment. The “well regulated Militia” part is the prefatory clause.
It makes zero sense to read the prefatory clause as a nullification or even limitation of the operative clause. It is tantamount to arguing that because the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, it’s not an individual right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The Second Amendment explicitly mentions “the right of the people” — people who generally used their own weapons as militiamen — just as it does elsewhere in the Bill of Rights when protecting individual rights. Many colonies enshrined the individual right to bear arms in their constitutions before the Bill of Rights was even written, most of them in much more explicit terms. No state defined it as a collective right. Some Federalists argued that special protections in the Bill of Rights were unnecessary because there were so many guns in private hands that it was unimaginable any tyrannical army could ever be more powerful than the public.
The other two parts of the quote are lifted from different passages in a column Burger wrote for the Associated Press. Here the former justice expands on his idea that guns should be regulated like cars.
“[A]lthough there is not a word or hint in the Constitution about automobiles or motorcycles,” Burger says, “no one would seriously argue that a state cannot regulate the use of motor vehicles by imposing licensing restrictions and speed limits based on factors of driver’s age, health condition, and driving record, and by recording every purchase and change of ownership.”
It is because automobiles and motorcycles — or transportation as an ideal — are not explicitly protected by the Constitution that you can heavily regulate those things. The better analogy would be due process or speech rights. (Although Burger wasn’t a great fan of the First Amendment, either.)
Besides all that, Burger should have known that Americans, even in 1991, did not have “unfettered” access to “machine guns.” In 1986, the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act law made ownership of fully automatic weapons pretty rare.
Burger also should have known that the Gun Control Act of 1968 established the first federal age limits for buying guns. Today there are tens of thousands of laws regulating gun ownership in the United States. That is not “unfettered” by any definition.
In fact, it doesn’t seem like Burger knew very much about the topic at all.
This is why you don’t hire graduates of Ivy League snob schools. Those colleges deal in snobbery and networking, not actual education.
One reason I cannot be accused of living in a pro-gun echo chamber is that I have to ready a lot of anti-gun op-eds in the course of my work here. I know all the arguments they’re going to make and where they’re coming from because I read their words on a daily basis.
But when it comes to guns, many just don’t understand the topic as well as they’d like to think.
They regurgitate talking points and used biased data from gun control groups and pretend that they’re well-versed on the topic.
While new gun control laws such as strengthening background checks for gun buyers and raising the age to purchase a firearm to 21 are needed, it would be misleading to suggest new gun laws alone will reduce gun violence.
That’s because most gun crimes are committed by those who illegally possess guns, according to a study of inmates in federal and state prisons, conducted by Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.
Since most violent crimes are not committed by legal gun owners and there is little chance of significant new gun laws passing anytime soon in the state Legislature or Congress, local officials must focus on cracking down on illegal gun possession.
More effective policing, vigorous prosecution and stricter sentencing of violent criminals using illegally obtained weapons will be needed to reduce crime.
The last three paragraphs look pretty sensible. The author is right, for example, that most criminals possess their firearms illegally. He’s right that there’s little chance new gun laws will pass anytime soon. While I’m not sure that increased enforcement of current gun laws will produce the results he desires, I can at least accept that’s a potentially viable path.
By his own words, though, lawful gun owners aren’t the problem, so why should we pass more gun control laws in the first place?
Even if we dismiss the fact that this is a constitutionally protected right we’re talking about here, just what reason would we have to restrict who can buy guns by age even further than we already do or increase background checks?
Perhaps the author is concerned about the 647 “mass shootings” reported by Gun Violence Archive. If so, he should be aware that most of those were criminals shooting people in the first place, not 19-year-olds buying AR-15s and shooting up schools. Gun Violence Archive doesn’t differentiate between gang warfare and active shooters killing everyone in a crowded movie theater, for example, so the vast majority of those shootings aren’t what people think of when they hear the term “mass shooting.”
Either way, the author is somehow failing to comprehend the information clearly in front of him.
Honestly, I’m amazed he finished the piece, what with the cognitive dissonance that had to be tearing at him. Or, maybe he just didn’t understand it enough to feel such a thing.
Either way, he discredits his own claim that more gun control laws should be passed and it sure looks like he knows it.
So nice when they provide such clear photography for future positive ID
The presidents of West Virginia University and Marshall University penned a joint letter to legislators opposing the bill in late January.
“We believe that our boards of governors are best suited to decide whether guns should be permitted on campus,” the letter reads. “We therefore do not support statewide campus carry.”
The presidents of West Virginia State University, Concord University and Shepherd University wrote a separate letter saying they strongly support the Second Amendment but “have serious reservations about the significant public safety challenges” that the bill would present.
“Introducing firearms into this already challenging environment could have unintended consequences,” the letter says, referencing increased suicide rates and concern that the presence of firearms could stifle the free exchange of ideas.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported that at a public hearing last week, 40 people spoke and nearly everyone opposed the bill.
Marshall University professor Chris White said the bill doesn’t have enough safety measures in place. Formerly a Marine Corps infantryman, he referenced months of training that military and police officers go through “to earn that Second Amendment right and carry those weapons in public.”
“None of those safety controls will be imposed on our students or anybody else who comes on to campus,” White said, according to WVPB.
I was lucky this phobia wasn’t around when I was in school, because I spent a lot of my time in high school art class sketching guns.
The only thing more predictable than boys being fascinated with weapons is them eventually sketching one in class. But that’s not allowed anymore.
What is it that makes a little boy — practically straight out of the womb — take an interest in weapons and emulate gun-toting, swash-buckling heroes? Even doctors aren’t sure. As one pediatrician told me about my then 16-month-old son who turned every stick into a sword, “We don’t know why. They just do it.”
If you’ve raised a little boy, you know what I’m talking about. And the only thing more predictable than them being fascinated with weapons is them eventually doodling one in class. An alien with a laser gun. An elf with a sword. Rambo with a machine gun.
When they do, they’ll encounter a host of school polices banning images of weapons, ostensibly to prevent school shootings and other violence. Some make exceptions for historical context (such as a Revolutionary War soldier with a bayonet).
If your child is lucky, he’ll be told to put the drawing away. If he’s unlucky, he’ll be sent to the principal’s office and then to the school counselor, where he may even be given a suicide assessment.
No Drawings with Guns Allowed
My first encounter with this type of policy was when my youngest boy came home from a Fairfax County, Virginia, elementary school with his shirt inside out. On the front was an image of a Lego Ewok holding — eek! — a tiny axe.
I recently encountered this policy again with my 10-year-old son. He had gotten in trouble for drawing a police officer holding a gun. A police officer.
Author’s son’s drawing.
In an email, my son’s teacher said she explained to him that drawing weapons in class is not allowed and encouraged him to “stick to dragons and landscapes.”
Bill filed in Illinois to ban "armor plates, body armor, and military helmets." All existing items would have to be declared to the state police, and current police, retired police, and private security guards would be exempt. https://t.co/QvsS2pV2mJpic.twitter.com/HBRncq8R7H
The Associated Press, or AP, is supposed to be unbiased, though we’ve all seen countless examples of them being anything but.
That’s especially true regarding matters pertaining to the Second Amendment.
These days, the right to keep and bear arms may have a firmer foundation on which to rest following the Bruen decision. It’s rather clear that there can be no total gun ban and that any restriction has to conform to a particular framework that won’t be easy for any law.
A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on the Second Amendment is upending gun laws across the country, dividing judges and sowing confusion over what firearm restrictions can remain on the books.
The high court’s ruling that set new standards for evaluating gun laws left open many questions, experts say, resulting in an increasing number of conflicting decisions as lower court judges struggle to figure out how to apply it.
The Supreme Court’s so-called Bruen decision changed the test that lower courts had long used for evaluating challenges to firearm restrictions. Judges should no longer consider whether the law serves public interests like enhancing public safety, the justices said.
Under the Supreme Court’s new test, the government that wants to uphold a gun restriction must look back into history to show it is consistent with the country’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
In several instances, judges looking at the same laws have come down on opposite sides on whether they are constitutional in the wake of the conservative Supreme Court majority’s ruling. The legal turmoil caused by the first major gun ruling in a decade will likely force the Supreme Court to step in again soon to provide more guidance for judges.
“There’s confusion and disarray in the lower courts because not only are they not reaching the same conclusions, they’re just applying different methods or applying Bruen’s method differently,” said Jacob Charles, a professor at Pepperdine University’s law school who focuses on firearms law.
Sure, there’s a bit of confusion. The Bruen decision has set a stage most courts have never seen before. They now have to consider whether the Founders would have approved of such a law by looking at whether or not they approved of something similar during their own time.
But is it really a bad thing?
The only downside is that it’s taken us this long to get to this point. While the AP is apparently concerned that the status quo has been upturned, I’m more upset that the status quo was allowed to become the status quo in the first place.
It’s just insane that it came to this.
Yet here we are. We now have an opportunity to right the ship and put the onus on things back where they were. No longer can courts just claim it’s in the government’s interest to restrict our rights – something they’d never say about the First or Fourth Amendments, it should be remembered – but must instead look at the matter objectively and compare it to historical precedent.
The AP may lament this “turmoil,” but I only lament that we didn’t have this upheaval a long time ago.
Is there any more of an obnoxious protest movement than the one propagated by the climate cult? They glue themselves to roads and pour soup on famous works of art, all the while never having to reckon with the fact that their predictions of doom have been continually disproven by the passage of time.
Remember Al Gore’s now-defunct doomsday clock? Or the claim that the Arctic would be ice-free by now? And did polar bears ever go extinct? There’s also another cataclysmic event on the way, as prophesied by the church of climate.
Sen. Josh Hawley got a taste of that on Thursday when a climate protester rushed the stage he was speaking from. Watch until the end because he does a good job turning the tables.
Someone just ran on stage and interrupted Josh Hawley's speech at the Heritage Foundation.
The whole rushing-the-stage thing is bad enough. It shows a profound disrespect for basic boundaries while highlighting the clinical narcissism these climate protesters possess. Everything must revolve around their obsession, and conveniently, that obsession seems to involve defending China a lot. That’s exactly what this woman did as she screamed “China is not our enemy,” while being dragged out of the room to the laughter of the audience.
Isn’t it strange that Greta Thunberg never goes to Beijing and that so many in the climate movement want to let China off the hook for leading the world in carbon emissions?
Ask yourself, who benefits the most from the world shifting to “renewable” energy? That would be China, which provides or controls much of the rare earth materials needed to produce things like batteries and solar panels (neither of which are renewable, by the way). Someone should really look into how much of the climate cult is being funded by Chinese interests, wouldn’t you say?
Returning to the clip, Hawley makes a really good point at the end of it.
HAWLEY: It’s interesting. This administration wants to use the climate crisis as a justification for its agenda in Ukraine and elsewhere. Maybe they ought to visit with that gal.
That’s exactly what’s going on. John Kerry, Biden’s climate czar, has already made it clear that the administration is going to ignore human rights abuses, if it means getting a “climate” deal done with China. Never mind that such deals are worthless and amount to absolutely nothing.
Then there are the connections between the Biden family and the Chinese to consider. It just so happens that the president’s climate agenda plays right into the hands of Xi Jinping. What a coincidence, right? Thankfully, Republicans are finally pushing back, and there seems to be an anti-China consensus forming. That’s going to put Chicom-simping Democrats in an awkward position going forward.
Oregon – The Oregon Court of Appeals [lead by Judge James Egan, Chief Judge at Oregon Court of Appeal] has struck down the Second Amendment Sanctuary Ordinance in Columbia County, an ordinance Oregon Firearms Federation has been defending with Gun Owners of America.
In his vicious attack, Judge Egan equated ordinances protecting the Second Amendment with white supremacists and anti-semites.
In the opening page of his opinion, Egan attacks the ordinance and the people who argued for it saying :
“In other words, Intervenors came before this court and referenced UN mandates, which as explained below is a well documented trope meant to invoke white supremacist, antisemitic fear of a takeover of our country by outsiders and minorities who are manipulated by an elite class of supervillians.
On occasion, however, individual members of the court must call out illegitimate quasi-legal arguments and theories for what they are-viz., antisemitic and racist tropes.”
On page 6 of his screed, he titles one section: “The Antisemitic and Racist Origins of the Ordinance.”
He claims that constitutional sheriffs “embrace racist and white nationalist ideologies.”
Democrat California Sen. Dianne Feinstein appeared unaware of her own retirement announcement Tuesday, telling a group of reporters at the Capitol that she hadn’t made a decision on her future despite announcing just hours before that she would not be seeking reelection in 2024.
According to multiple reports, a Feinstein staffer quickly notified the senator that a statement had already been made on her retirement, prompting her to say she was unaware the information had been released.
Reporters present for the interaction quickly took to Twitter to report on Feinstein’s apparent confusion.
Asked by reporters about her announcement to resign, @SenFeinstein says “If I haven't made that decision, I haven't released anything.” A staffer then told the senator that a statement had been released. Feinstein responded saying “I didn’t know they put it out.”
“Asked by reporters about her announcement to resign, [Feinstein] says ‘If I haven’t made that decision, I haven’t released anything.’ A staffer then told the senator that a statement had been released. Feinstein responded saying ‘I didn’t know they put it out,’” one reporter wrote, later clarifying he meant “retire” instead of “resign.”
“Feinstein on her retirement: ‘I haven’t made that decision. I haven’t released anything.’ Staffer: ‘We put out the statement.’ Feinstein: ‘You put out the statement? I didn’t know they put it out,'” another wrote.
The second reporter later corrected her reporting by saying that it sounded like Feinstein said, “I should have known they put it out” rather than “I didn’t know they put it out.
According to another report from Raw Story, which included an audio clip of Feinstein speaking to a reporter, she wasn’t aware that she was retiring at all.
“Oh, no, I’m not announcing anything. I will one day,” Feinstein told the outlet in an interview only an hour after her retirement was announced.
This isn’t the first instance in which Feinstein’s memory and cognitive abilities have been questioned. Last year, a number of her Senate colleagues anonymously expressed concern that her memory was fading and that she no longer had the ability to serve.
Fox News Digital reached out to Feinstein’s office for comment and received a statement from a spokesperson attributing the confusion to the timing of the retirement announcement.
“The senator approved it going out today, just confusion on timing. The senator was out of the office for votes, a meeting, lunch and more votes when the announcement was sent,” the spokesperson said.
On Saturday, I wrote about the 230,000 children who failed to show up for class when public schools reopened after the pandemic. It’s a tragedy without parallel in American history as many of the no-shows are very young — K through 3rd grade. Critical skills learned in early education were not taught to these kids, who are now hopelessly behind.
The pandemic didn’t necessarily cause the problem. It exposed problems that already existed and were exacerbated because of incompetence and, as it turns out, wrongheaded teaching.
Consider the fact that 65% of American fourth-grade students can barely read. This is a result of a radical shift to a new way of teaching children how to read.
What was wrong with the old way? Well, it was old.
When somewhere like the AP or any news organization starts talking about gun control stories, there’s always some level of poor understanding involved. That’s almost to be expected. After all, even under the most charitable interpretation of what’s going on, the reporters covering these stories and commentators discussing them aren’t exactly experts on firearms.
So, it’s not shocking they’d get some things wrong here and there.
The Republican-led House in Missouri on Wednesday voted against a proposal to ban minors from openly carrying firearms without adult supervision in public.
The proposal failed by a 104-39 vote, with only one Republican state representative voting in support of it.
Democratic state Rep. Donna Baringer told the Associated Press that police in her district were concerned about “14-year-olds walking down the middle of the street in the city of St. Louis carrying AR-15s,” and are demanding change.
“Now they have been emboldened, and they are walking around with them,” Baringer said regarding concealed carry by children in Missouri. “Until they actually brandish them, and brandish them with intent, our police officers’ hands are handcuffed.”
Now, to start off with, it seems pretty straightforward. A bill banning minors from carrying openly without adult supervision is something that even many gun rights advocates might consider supporting. Many won’t, though, and mostly because such a law is way too broad. Many of us went hunting on our own as kids and such a measure may restrict one’s ability to do that.
But then things get wonky with where the AP goes next.
Open carry and concealed carry are very different things, though neither should be restricted. What does a 2017 concealed carry measure have to do with a refusal to pass a blanket prohibition on teens carrying firearms without an adult right there with them?
Nothing.
Then again, this is the AP. There’s absolutely no reason they wouldn’t mention such a thing, likely in hopes of people conflating the two.
However, there are reasons why this bill didn’t go anywhere, and it had nothing to do with some strong desire to see 14-year-olds marching down the streets of St. Louis with AR-15s.
Not that I’d legitimately expect there to be any significant reporting on just why that is.
After all, in that entire piece, there’s exactly one quote from anyone who opposed the bill, despite the story being about the measure’s defeat. Instead, it’s all about how hard it is to pass gun control in Missouri.
And the AP thinks we still believe they’re unbiased? That’s downright hilarious.
Look, if parents are doing their job, the chances of Junior carrying a gun openly in public without their permission is effectively nil. It’s just not going to happen. If they’re not going their job, there’s no law in the world that will stop it from happening. That’s just the hard facts of life.
SANTA FE — Bennie Hargrove’s twin sisters started middle school afraid to get out of the car.
Their older brother, then 13, was shot and killed 1 1/2 years ago by a Washington Middle School classmate, police say, who’d taken a handgun from home.
The family’s story was among those shared Thursday as New Mexico lawmakers passed a bill that would make it a crime, in some circumstances, to store a firearm in a way that allows a child to get it.
The House endorsed the legislation on a 37-32 vote, sending it to the Senate. Some Democrats crossed party lines to join Republicans against the bill.
“This bill is about keeping children safe,” Rep. Pamelya Herndon, D-Albuquerque, said, alluding to Bennie’s death. “We had two minors. One had access to a gun and one is dead.”
The measure triggered a combative three-hour debate in the House as Republican legislators contended the bill inappropriately targeted law-abiding gun owners. They also expressed frustration as Herndon wouldn’t offer a “yes” or “no” answer to some questions.
Rep. Stefani Lord, R-Sandia Park, said the language in the bill was too vague to give gun owners an understanding of what conduct would be illegal. She added that it could endanger someone who needs quick access to a firearm for protection.
“It’s not fair to the survivors of domestic violence who fear for their life,” Lord said.
Rep. Bill Rehm, an Albuquerque Republican and retired law enforcement officer, said the bill is particularly problematic for police officers. He said he “didn’t put up my gun” after coming home from work but that his children knew never to touch it.
“For us to legislate how the rest of the responsible citizens of the city must act because of an irresponsible person is not good policy,” Rehm said.
The proposal, House Bill 9, would make it a crime to store a firearm in a way that negligently disregards the ability of a minor to access it.
Criminal charges could be brought only if the minor later brandishes or displays the firearm in a threatening way or uses it to kill or injure someone.
It includes some exceptions to intended to protect good-faith efforts to safely store a firearm.
Adult gun owners, for example, couldn’t be charged if they’d stored the firearm in a secure container or other place a reasonable person would believe is secure; the firearm was locked and inoperable; the minor broke into the home; or the gun was used in self-defense.
Someone needs to figure out what in the wide world of dystopian Buck Rogers in the 25th Century sci-fi fantasy world is going on in Maryland’s legislature. Antigun lawmakers there are advancing legislation that would require firearm manufacturers to attach RFID trackers to each and every firearm so government officials could track their whereabouts at all times.
Not only is this a clear invasion of privacy rights and Constitutional protections against illegal search-and-seizure, this is an idea that’s not even technologically possible. This is the stuff of Hollywood – and antigun politicians that don’t understand the first thing about firearms or manufacturing processes.
Maryland’s Delegate Pam Queen introduced HB 704, a bill titled, “Firearms – Tracking Technology.” The bill’s description reads:
Prohibiting a person from engaging in a certain bulk firearm transfer unless each firearm that is part of the transfer contains a certain embedded tracker; requiring a seller or other transferor who engages in a bulk firearm transfer to transmit to the Secretary of State Police certain information; providing that a violation of the Act is a civil offense and subject to a fine of up to $2500; and requiring the Secretary to establish a certain database to store information about each bulk firearm transfer in the State.
The “embedded tracker” would be required to be fixed to the firearm frame or receiver, emit unique tracking information and not be readily capable of being removed, disabled or destroyed without rendering the firearm inoperable or destroying the frame or receiver. To be clear, Delegate Queen would require that embedded tracker to emit this unique information to Maryland’s State Police for permanent storage in a state-run database. Anyone not complying with this is subject to $2,500 in fines.
Big Brother Would Watch
What this bill does would be nothing short of state authorities peering into an individual’s gun safe. The state would also know when and where a firearm would be moved – whether that’s for hunting, a day at the range target shooting or when and where an individual is legally carrying a firearm for licensed concealed carry. This bill would require firearm manufacturers to create and include these trackers on firearms. Those exercising their Constitutional right to keep and bear arms would be required to forfeit their Fourth Amendment Constitutional right to privacy and their right protecting them from illegal search-and-seizure, since the state would automatically collect and store this information in real time. This legislation would also call into question Fourteenth and Fifth Amendment protections of Due Process, since it requires the government to collect information on Americans simply exercising their Second Amendment rights. And this legislation would have a chilling effect on the exercise of Second Amendment rights as Marylanders would be less likely to lawfully purchase a firearm to avoid the invasion of privacy.
That’s not even taking into consideration the technological hurdles that would be required to meet this requirement. Makers of so-called “smart guns,” or authorized-user technology that is supposed to allow owners to fire guns through the use of RFID emitters, fingerprint recognition or passcodes or other technology, haven’t been able to produce a safe and reliable model. The Obama administration made this a priority and the Department of Justice (DOJ) couldn’t identify a working prototype that was capable of testing.
It was only in the past few decades that laws criminalizing domestic violence came to be widespread and enforced. But now, the U.S. is in danger of backtracking on that legal framework precisely because of the nation’s historical legacy of turning a blind eye to domestic violence.
On Nov. 10, 2022, a judge in the Western District of Texas struck down the federal law that prohibits access to guns for people subject to domestic violence protection orders. He did this based on a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, NYSRPA v. Bruen, which held that, to be constitutional, a firearm restriction must be analogous to laws that were in existence when the country was founded. In other words, disarming domestic abusers violates the Second Amendment because those types of laws didn’t exist at the founding of the country.
In a separate, but related, case, the 5th U.S. Circuit of Court of Appeals on Feb 1. sided with the Texas judge, ruling that the federal ban was unconstitutional. The Justice Department has indicated that it will appeal.
At present, federal law prohibits persons subject to final – rather than temporary – domestic violence protection orders from purchasing or possessing firearms. In addition, 39 states and the District of Columbia have similar prohibitions on their statutes, with many expanding the restrictions to include individuals under temporary, or ex parte, orders prior to a full hearing.
Ruling that these laws are unconstitutional will put mainly women and children in danger. More than 50% of women who are murdered are killed by intimate partners, and most of those homicides are committed with guns. A 2003 study found that when an abusive man has access to a gun, it increases the risk of intimate partner homicide by 400%.
Moreover, 68% of mass shooters have a history of domestic violence or killed an intimate partner in the mass shooting.
Enforcement of gun restrictions is spotty, with further research needed as to how systematically they are ordered and whether restricted individuals relinquish firearms they already possess. Nonetheless, research shows that firearm restrictions on domestic violence protection orders save lives. Multiple studies conclude that these laws are associated with an 8%-10% reduction in intimate partner homicide.
Specifically, there are statistically significant reductions in intimate partner homicide when the firearm restriction covers both dating partners and those subjected to temporary orders. This decrease is seen in total intimate partner homicide, not just intimate partner homicide committed with guns, nullifying the argument that abusers will use other weapons to kill.
Moreover, these laws have broad support across the country – more than 80% of respondents to two national polls in 2017 and 2019 said they favor them.
Americans – whether male or female, gun owner or non-gun owner – tend to agree that domestic abusers should not be able to purchase or possess firearms while they are subject to a domestic violence protection order. Most seem to realize that such reasonable restrictions serve the greater good of keeping families and communities safe.
A disregard for data
The ruling in Texas was based on an originalist legal argument rather than the data. Under the judge’s interpretation of the Bruen decision, because colonial law – written before a time when women could vote, let alone be protected in law from violent spouses – didn’t restrict domestic abusers’ gun rights, then it simply isn’t constitutional to do so now. In effect, the ruling, should it stand, would mean the U.S. is unable to escape the nation’s historic legal disregard for domestic violence.
It also disregards the harm that allowing domestic abusers to keep hold of guns does. Multiple studies demonstrate that domestic violence firearm restriction laws are effective and savelives.
That research shows that, should the Texas ruling stand, people who suffer abuse at the hands of an intimate partner are at greater risk of that abuse being deadly.
Lisa Geller, director of state affairs at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, contributed to this article.
CLAIM: During the State of the Union Address President Joe Biden claimed mass shootings tripled after the “assault weapons” ban expired.
VERDICT: Misleading/Mostly False.
Biden said, “In the ten years the ban was law, mass shootings went down. After we let it expire, in a Republican administration, mass shootings tripled.”
It should be noted that Biden has made this claim before, in one form or another, following a high-profile shooting.
He did so on May 24, 2022, following the Uvalde elementary school attack. The Washington Post quoted him saying, “When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.”
Ironically, the Post also called Biden’s claim into question:
Biden claimed that mass shooting deaths tripled after the law expired. He appears to be relying on a study of mass shooting data from 1981 to 2017, published in 2019 in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery by a team led by Charles DiMaggio, a professor of surgery at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. That group found that an assault weapons ban would have prevented 314 out of 448, or 70 percent, of the mass shooting deaths during the years when the ban was not in effect. But the data used in that study has come under attack by some analysts.
…The new mass-shooting database shows that there were 31 mass shootings in the decade before the 1994 law, 31 in the 10 years the law was in force (Sept. 13, 1994 to Sept. 12, 2004) and 47 in the 10 years after it expired. As noted, some of that increase stems from population growth.
Breitbart News reported that the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) released a report in 2004, as the “assault weapons” ban was coming to an end. The information in that study dovetails perfectly with the Post’s observation, inasmuch as the NIJ researchers could not credit the “assault weapons” ban with any of the reductions in crime or shootings which were sporadically reported elsewhere.
The Washington Timesquoted University of Pennsylvania professor Christopher Koper, author of the NIJ report, saying, “We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence.”
The NIJ report continued, “The ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”
The NIJ report put matters into perspective by pointing out that “assault weapons” were “rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban.”
Biden’s claim about mass shootings tripling and the sunset of the ban being causal is misleading, because no reliable connection between the end of the ban and an increase in shootings has been made.
Biden’s claim is also mostly false because the information from sources like the NIJ explicitly indicates the “assault weapons” ban cannot be credited with a drop in gun violence to begin with.
memory loss.difficulty concentrating. finding it hard to carry out familiar daily tasks. getting confused. struggling to follow a conversation or find the right word.being confused about time and place.mood changes.
The Second Amendment sure looks easy enough to understand. Some have tried to make an art out of misreading it, of course, by focusing on the militia clause at the beginning, rather than literally any other part of the text.
Still others don’t even get that far. They know roughly what the amendment is supposed to be about, but they don’t really get that it draws a hard line in the sand on guns.
I understand that many citizens cling to their individual right to bear arms, as guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment. However, there have been many instances in which people have sacrificed their rights or been inconvenienced in order to save lives.
Many people were upset when laws were passed requiring seat belts and motorcycle helmets. After 9/11, there were many policies enacted that effectively restricted some of our freedoms. I remember years ago a man tried to board an airplane with a bomb in his shoe. Because of that, we must remove our shoes to be screened at airports.
The writer, unsurprisingly, goes on to call for gun control.
Look, there’s a big difference between seat belt and helmet laws and gun control. There’s also a huge difference between dealing with TSA and gun control.
None of those laws actually interfere with your rights, particularly with regard to one’s constitutionally protected rights. They might make you do a few things you’d rather not, but you can still generally go anywhere you want.
Gun control is nothing like that at all. This isn’t an inconvenience, it’s the state determining what we can and cannot do with regard to protecting ourselves and our families.
This letter writer starts by talking about the mass shootings in California, but he fails to note the very laws he’s demanding simply didn’t work. They didn’t stop either shooting.
What we can see here isn’t a cogent statement of reality, but someone who clearly doesn’t understand the Second Amendment at all.
But the underlying problem is the same. This individual isn’t some raving exception who doesn’t comprehend what the masses get. He’s representative of a large number of people who really do think gun control is little more than an inconvenience.
For them, it’s easy to dismiss the bloody history of the 20th century with its genocides as something that simply couldn’t happen here. I’m sure Jews living in the Weimar Republic thought the same thing, or those living in Cambodia prior to the Khmer Rogue taking over, or the Armenians living under Turkish rule. They likely thought nothing would happen to them, and they were correct right up until the moment they weren’t.
Guns in this nation make damn sure we don’t have to be that trusting and hopeful.
Then we have the fact that most guns used on a day-to-day basis appear to be used defensively. Good people use these guns–the very guns the writer wants to see banned–to protect themselves.
Removing those guns? That’s not an inconvenience. Over a long enough time, it’s a death sentence for someone.
