Category: Rights

The old line from a James Bond movie is;
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action
Paul will affirm that I don’t believe in ‘coincidence’, and I allow for ‘happenstance’ only in very limited instances.
From that, take what you will about what is termed ‘mistakes’ here.

Florida case shows inherent flaw with red flag laws

Red flag laws are a particularly onerous piece of gun control legislation. While a number of states have such laws on the books, all of them have serious problems. Part of that is because they start from a presumption of guilt and then you have to essentially prove your innocence.

But there tend to be layers to problems, and red flag laws aren’t uniquely devoid of those, apparently.

Take this case from Florida recently highlighted by USA Carry:

A case in point. The Lakeland, FL police department petitioned for a Red Flag Risk Protection Order through the Florida Statute 790.401(3)(a) and (b), in May 2020. Under the Order, a man I will call “E.P.” (identity protected because it is an active case) was taken into custody and his firearms and ammunition were seized.

His Hearing on the Order was scheduled for June 12, 2020 “in the court facility located at 255 N. Broadway Ave., Bartow, FL.” This date and time were confirmed on June 3, 2020, by the police department’s attorney, and again in a court notice issued before June 12. So, E.P. arrived at the appointed date and place at 1:30 pm and waited until 3:00 pm. He testified that “he was not let into the courtroom, nor was he aware that the Hearing would take place virtually or how to attend.” The Hearing was held at a remote video conferencing event, without notice of this change to E.P.

At that hearing, the court determined, incorrectly, that E.P. had “elected not to attend” and entered a Red Flag Protection Order against him. He was prohibited from having custody or control of, or purchasing, possessing, receiving, or attempting to purchase or receive, a firearm or ammunition for up to a year, and was required to surrender any and all guns or ammo not already in the custody of the police to law enforcement. E.P. appealed the Order on the basis that it was made without giving him the chance to appear or a notice that the proceedings would take place by means other than those designated in court documents. This non-legal layman understands that a Notice of Hearing must be issued by the court, received, and followed by involved parties about the specifics given.

From May of 2020, the Order was in effect, and not until August 13, 2021, was the Order invalidated. The Appellate Court ruled that E.P.’s Due Process rights were violated by the failure to notify him that the Final Hearing would take place virtually instead of in the court facility listed in the Order. His right to be heard was deprived and the Order was reversed in his favor. I also recognize that his Second Amendment rights were violated.

Note that E.P. spent much time and money to correct the mistakes made by the government court system and to restore his inalienable rights to his guns, ammo, and property… his Second Amendment and Due Process Rights.

Now, as the above-linked piece points out, for poorer people, this simply isn’t an option. E.P. was in a position to seek legal assistance, but a lot of people really just can’t do so. That means they’re stripped of their Second Amendment rights, sometimes because of a bureaucratic screw-up and not because they represent an actual danger to anyone.

E.P. did what he was supposed to, but the state didn’t. Yet because of their mistakes, he was ordered to surrender any and all firearms he might still possess, was denied the ability to even shoot a gun lawfully, and had to spend time and treasure fixing the issue.

Nothing about that is right and there are no repercussions for those who make such mistakes.

If this were the only issue with red flag laws, that would be enough, but it’s not. Red flag laws can be used by those with a grudge against the person, and we’ve seen attempts to do just that. How many have we not heard about?

This is especially troubling since red flag laws aren’t even needed. Those who represent a risk to themselves or others can be held for psychological evaluation for up to 72 hours as it is. Those planning a mass shooting can be arrested under existing laws as well.

There’s really no reason for red flag laws, and yet, here we are.

ANTI-GUNNERS IN THE GRASS

Something insidious is underfoot, a strategy so subtle it is likely going unnoticed in your own neighborhood, school district, small town, larger city and in your county.

If you don’t wake up and pay attention, you may instead wake up some morning to discover you slept through a takeover of your community. Now is the time to stop it.

Comrade Workman

For more than a year, I have been receiving emails from an organization calling itself the “National Democratic Training Committee” which seems to support every far-left item on the liberal agenda and every far-left politician. Buried down near the end of each of these messages is this ominous note: “Listen, there are 518,000 elected positions in this country. Imagine if Democrats fought for every race — no matter how small. Imagine a world where our values of compassion and dignity for all people are upheld on every school board, on every city council, and in every state legislature.”

Got your attention, yet? This group also includes a hard link to find out more about running for public office. Just click on “I want to run for office” and the Democratic Training Committee will start indoctrinating — oops, we mean “training” — you for what they hope will be a winning campaign.

To paraphrase their own message, “Imagine if puppets for this group won every race — no matter how small. Imagine a world where their values became law, overruling your values, from the level of school board up through the state legislature.”

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Data shows there’s more diversity at a gun range than a university faculty lounge

“Gun-ownership in America is diversifying, because of safety fears,” says a headline over at The Economist. As those of us in the Second Amendment community have known for a while, the sociopolitical climate since the start of the pandemic – egregious criminal–coddling behavior by the state, releasing dangerous prisoners because of COVID, nationwide “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots, rising violent crime, looting / shoplifting, hate crimes, falling trust in law enforcement – contributed to a sudden surge in gun purchases by groups historically not inclined to own them. The Economist reported the following:

Of the 7.5m Americans who bought firearms for the first time between January 2019 and April 2021—as gun-buying surged nationwide—half were female, a fifth black and a fifth Hispanic, according to a recent study by Matthew Miller of Northeastern University and his co-authors.

The 7.5 million number may well be a low estimate; one estimate from the NSSF is that there were 8.4 million new gun owners in 2020 alone. As I’ve written before in these pages, adding up numbers for 2020 and the first half of 2021 points to a potential 11.6 million first-time gun owners. The team here at Bearing Arms has written a lot about growing diversity in the Second Amendment community. We see this not only in data collected nationally and over the long-term, but also experience it first-hand at gun ranges. (As an immigrant who grew up without guns and didn’t touch one well into his adult life, I’m living proof of this demographic shift myself.)

However, diversity is a whole lot more than ethnic bean counting or about the superficial differences – religion, sexual orientation, etc. – among us. What counts the most, in my opinion, is diversity of thought and opinion, and the ability to express those freely without the fear of retaliation or retribution. This is where I think gun owners are simply outstanding; respect for individual freedom, for not treading on someone else lest our freedoms be tread upon, appears to come naturally to lawful gun owners. There is some data on political diversity among gun owners. Anecdotally speaking, the gun owners at my local club cover the gamut from traditional blue-collar tradesmen to Ph.D. holders, from the MAGA coterie to Medicare-for-All supporters.

Contrast that with a typical university faculty lounge and the difference is night and day. There is hard data showing how limited diversity is among university faculty. They may look different, have different national origins or sexual orientations, but politically they are incredibly alike. There’s also plenty of publicly available data that shows how faculty donations to candidates for office is overwhelmingly left-wing. Consider these recent examples: 96% at Harvard University, 97% at Yale University, and 98% at Cornell University.

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The Economist: Growing Diversity of Gun Owners Is ‘Bad for Gun-Control Advocates’

The Economist pointed to the growing diversity of gun owners in America and noted that it is “bad for gun-control advocates.”

According to The Economist, a study by of Northeastern University shows that of the millions of first time buyers between January 2019 and April 2021, “half were female, a fifth black and a fifth Hispanic.”

Moreover, The Economist noted that “the share of black adults who joined the gun-owning ranks, 5.3%, was more than twice that of white adults.”

The demographics are a marked shift from 2015, when first time gun buyers “skewed white and male.”

Gun ownership changes things, thus The Economist observed that people who own guns “are more politically active around gun issues than non-owners.”

The Biden Family’s arrogance and corruption are astounding. Joe Biden issued several new executive orders on gun control while his son, Hunter Biden, is accused of lying on his gun background check. https://t.co/2HDrArsSZa

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) April 8, 2021

Therefore, a drop in gun control support at this point in American history is not altogether surprising. On November 17, 2021, Breitbart News pointed to Gallup’s findings that support for stricter gun control was at its lowest point since 2014.

Gallup’s findings are in line with The Economist’s opinion that the growing diversification of gun owners is “bad for gun-control advocates.”

The Right to Defy Criminal Demands: Negligence and the Robber’s Explicit Demands

I’ve just finished up a rough draft of my The Right to Defy Criminal Demands article, and I thought I’d serialize it here, minus most of the footnotes (which you can see in the full PDF). I’d love to hear people’s reactions and recommendations, since there’s still plenty of time to edit it. You can also be previous posts (and any future posts, as they come up), here.

Let’s return to situation 3 from the Introduction: Craig comes to rob Danielle’s store; he is demanding money, and Danielle has reason to think that, if she doesn’t comply, he’ll injure some of the patrons. Does this make Danielle legally liable if she refuses to comply, on the theory that she has an affirmative duty to protect her business visitors, and failing to give in to the demands violates that duty?

No, several courts have ruled, expressly recognizing a “no duty” rule. The most prominent case is Kentucky Fried Chicken of California, Inc. v. Superior Court, from the California Supreme Court:

[A] shopkeeper does not have a duty to comply with the unlawful demand of an armed robber that property be surrendered…. Recognition of a duty to comply with an unlawful demand would be contrary to public policy as it would encourage similar unlawful conduct….

[T]he standard of a “reasonable prudent person under the circumstances” is the general standard of care [for property owners’ duty to protect their visitors]…. [But] in particular situations a more specific standard may be established by judicial decision, statute or ordinance.

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BLUF:
As with any crime, and to be clear, willfully violating the Constitution is a criminal act. You have to look at motive, means and opportunity. Joe Biden has the motive to violate our rights and the means to do so. And although I believe it will happen sooner rather than later, unless fate or the 25th Amendment intervene, for the next three long years he’ll have opportunity for all the infringing he and Kamala desire.

The Question On Gun Owners’ Minds: What Will Joe Biden’s Next Pivot Be?

The Biden-Harris administration is trapped inside a hostile media spotlight, a victim of their own incompetence. They’re like a cornered animal – desperate for a way out, but clearly willing to settle for anything that would shift the public focus off of their ever-growing list of failures.

They’re a consistent bunch, that much is true. They consistently lurch from one self-inflicted crisis to another, while we pay the price for their mistakes.

It began with Joe’s unconditional surrender of Afghanistan and was followed by the Build Back Better bust and the deadly fiasco on our Southern border. Added quickly to the mix were skyrocketing inflation, lots of empty shelves, the Supremes embarrassing denouncement of a clearly unconstitutional vaccine mandate, COVID tests becoming unobtainium while omicron surged.

All the while, the filibuster remaining as strong as it was a year ago thanks to good Sens. Manchin and Sinema, and the fact that Russia is making ready to launch an invasion of the Ukraine, which could trigger a third world war, in which Joe Biden (!) would be the defender of the free world.

The Biden-Harris administration tried to get the focus off of its near-daily faux pas by uploading a Jan. 6-themed “democracy is under threat” speech onto Joe’s teleprompter. The speech caught hold of the media’s news cycle for about a day, but the respite didn’t last long, despite hard-sell attempts by Pelosi et al.

Next, Joe tried pivoting to voting rights, but when voting rights advocates themselves boycotted his speech, his pivot lost its luster. The speech itself – “Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” – was about as easy for most Americans to stomach as a fistful of ghost peppers. It was, in fact, more of a cry for help – another what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-Joe exemplar.

Now, what has me and some of my much smarter and more experienced friends losing sleep, is trying to fathom what Joe will try next. It is time, we fear, for Joe to pivot once again toward gun control, as he did right out of the box a year ago.

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A not so modest proposal for mandatory training

In the past week or so, we’ve seen a push by anti-Second Amendment folks to call for mandatory training prior to people being able to exercise their right to keep and bear arms. And not just to carry a gun, but to simply own one.

Now, we oppose this when it comes to gun rights for obvious reasons. However, it’s very clear that many don’t. As such, I figured I’d offer something of a compromise.

In particular, if gun control folks are going to be insistent on mandatory training, then I’m going to push back with calls for mandatory training before exercising other rights.

To start with, we should require mandatory training before allowing people to vote.

After all, an uninformed electorate could lead to all kinds of problems. I mean…<gestures toward the White House>.

We should require all citizens wishing to vote to undergo a mandatory training course prior to being able to cast a ballot. The course should require some degree of basic civics as to which elected officials can do what they cannot.

It should also include the constitutional limits to the government so that these voters don’t get led astray by promises that won’t pass legal muster. You know, things like free money, forgiveness of college loans, things like that.

Additionally, we should also require mandatory training before anyone can attend a house of worship of any faith.

After all, you wouldn’t want someone to walk into a mosque and do everything wrong, deeply offending our Muslim neighbors, now would you? The mandatory course would include a basic primer on all faiths worshipped in the United States so people can make an informed decision as to where to worship and what to do when they arrive.

The fact that such a course would amount to the coursework for a theology degree is completely irrelevant.

We should also require mandatory training before exercising one’s freedom of speech. After all, some people talk a lot of nonsense. I mean, I saw someone advocating for communism just yesterday. That shouldn’t be allowed!

So clearly, before people speak, they should be required to undergo a mandatory training class. I mean, they might offend someone by advocating for socialism, communism, or some other faulty line of thinking.

And while we’re at it, we need to mandate training for journalists. No, I’m not talking about journalism school–something that’s not actually required for one to become a journalist–but a government-mandated training course one must go through, lest they report inappropriately. I mean, we can’t have journalists giving government officials a hard time like they did President Trump, right?

What? What’s that? You think this is all out of line and unconstitutional?

Well, that may be, but if you’re someone who thinks I should be forced to undergo training before exercising a right protected by the Constitution, then why shouldn’t you be forced to undergo training before exercising some right precious to you?

It’s been said that the Second Amendment is treated as a second-class right. The idea of mandatory training in order to exercise it illustrates this idea perfectly. Especially since we know that many of these other proposals I just made would be shot down in a heartbeat.

After all, how is something a right if you must pass a course first in order to use it? At that point, it becomes a privilege.

If you have an issue with any of those proposals above, then you should at least show some consistency and stand against mandatory training for gun ownership.

When the anti-self defense writer uses ‘information’ from the Brady pro gun control group, he immediately showed his views were not based on actual biblical principles, even though scriptures were used to support them. (Remember, satan himself quoted scripture for his own nefarious purpose)
But read both at your convenience

Guns or Roses?

The issue of Christians owning and using guns, especially against other humans, has been debated almost since firearms and gunpowder appeared in Europe in the 13th century. In today’s fragmented religious environment, many opinions are advanced in churches, in the public square, and on media. Seventh-day Adventist Christians, often influenced by polarizing political, social, or cultural viewpoints, debate this issue both publicly and privately. We asked two authors with contrasting opinions to engage in an imagined conversation with a respected Adventist friend who holds a different opinion about this divisive topic, each explaining their viewpoint from a Christian and Adventist biblical worldview.—Editors.

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‘Trust but verify‘ works for me.

BLUF:
“One thing I’ve learned is the Second Amendment is one of the most important amendments and you look at all my voting record. Listen, you watch this Congress itself—we believe in the Constitution,” McCarthy said.

Exclusive — Kevin McCarthy Pledges as Speaker He Will Not Consider Amnesty or Gun Control Legislation

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview taped in December that the House would not consider any legislation that grants amnesty to illegal aliens if he becomes the speaker next year.

“We know first and foremost one of our greatest strengths is the rule of law, so you have to have an immigration system based upon the rule of law. You have to secure the border. The immigration system is broken and we’re going to fix it. Yes,” McCarthy replied when asked if he could pledge no amnesty would be considered under his leadership.

“Yes,” he reaffirmed when pressed again.

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Of Course Violence against Government Can Be Justified

The media have been making a big deal over a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll which finds that 34 percent of Americans believe violence can be justified against the government. It’s a poll meant to feed the hysteria over the Capitol Hill riot and embarrass Republicans into supporting “voting rights” bills and so on.

Despite the framing of most reaction stories, the question wasn’t about January 6. It was: “Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to take violent action against the government, or is it never justified?”

Ever? Of course it is. It’s a failure of our civic education that 100 percent of respondents didn’t answer yes. The ability to resist a tyrannical government is a foundational American idea. It was the justification for the founding revolution. It, not hunting or skeet shooting, is the core reason for existence of the Second Amendment — which, Joseph Story, an associate Supreme Court justice, said best, “offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers.”

Incidentally, the participants were asked to provide instances when violence against the state would be justified, and all of them are perfectly reasonable:

Government violates or takes away rights or freedoms/Oppresses people – 22 percent

Government no longer a democracy/ Becomes a dictatorship/Coup/ Military takes over – 15 percent

Government violates constitution — 13 percent

Government abuses power/Tyranny — 12 percent

Government is violent against citizens/Safety at risk – 11 percent

Contemporary liberals often view this form of rhetoric as an endorsement of treason because they view our rights as an arbitrary and malleable cluster of edicts handed down by the government. What sneering contemporary critics fail to comprehend is that the founding generation believed that those who would undermine the universal and inalienable liberties of the people laid out in the Constitution were traitors.

Now, I don’t believe there was any justification for the rioting on January 6. But if the Post was interested in extracting even marginally useful information, it would have asked if people thought there was a justification for January 6 violence, rather than a separate question about the veracity of the 2020 election followed by a broad question on violent resistance. Though a specific question almost certainly wouldn’t have brought back the intended result.

It appears that West -By God- Virginia has a Second Amendment Protection Act law not unlike Missouri and a few other states.

AG offers guidance on handling gun law conflicts

CHARLESTON — A state law passed early in 2021 regarding federal gun laws now has related policy guidelines.

House Bill 2694 stipulates that state gun laws will trump federal gun laws and no West Virginia law enforcement agency on any level “shall participate in enforcement efforts focused on federal gun control measures when those laws conflict with state laws regarding firearms.”

“The right to keep and bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution,” Attorney General Morrisey said Thursday when announcing the guidelines. “Yet, there is a deep concern on the part of many Americans that the federal government will try to encroach on our Constitutional rights through presidential executive orders or through acts of Congress. The publication of this guidance will help our state’s law enforcement understand what they can and cannot do in this respect under West Virginia statute.”

Morrisey said enforcement of federal firearms laws is a federal responsibility, not the responsibility of West Virginia law enforcement agencies when federal gun laws are in conflict with state Code.

For example, he said, a West Virginia state or local law enforcement agency, department or officer “may not assist federal authorities in executing an arrest warrant just for violation of federal gun laws when the person to be arrested may lawfully possess such firearms, firearms accessories or ammunition under state law.”

The new law also provides that no member of state or local law enforcement may be required to act in a law enforcement capacity to enforce a federal statute, executive order, agency order, rule or regulation determined by the West Virginia Attorney General to infringe upon citizens’ Second Amendment rights, Morrisey said.

Law enforcement officers are also protected and cannot be terminated or decertified for refusing to enforce a “federal statute, executive order, agency order, rule or regulation determined by the West Virginia Attorney General to infringe upon citizens’ Second Amendment rights.”

“This guidance from the Attorney General on HB 2694 will help protect West Virginia from new federal gun control schemes, and ensure our law enforcement officers are immune from retaliation for defending the Second Amendment rights of all West Virginians,” Kevin Patrick, vice president of the West Virginia Citizens Defense League, said in the announcement.

West Virginia Sheriffs Association Executive Director Rodney Miller said the move is fully supported.

“Law enforcement across West Virginia wholeheartedly supports the Second Amendment and lawful possession of firearms by our citizens and are happy to have joined the Legislature, the Attorney General and concerned gun groups in this effort to ensure that responsible firearm ownership is defended without question,” he said. “We, as citizens of this state, are concerned with overreach that could deny all of us the ability to lawfully possess firearms and utilize them as proud Mountaineers have always done responsibly.”

The policy guidance is posted on the Attorney General’s website (https://bit.ly/3zagUlE) and is being sent to state and local law enforcement agencies.

The Times May Be A-Changin’

Over time, we’ve seen changes in focus by the hoplophobic elements of society. Originally, it was all about banning handguns or at least “Handgun Control Inc.” The “assault weapon”, that is, the AR ban of 1994-2004 followed, with no discernible effect on crime, homicide, etc. Movement mutation continued, with groups dropping wording advocating bans, moving to claims of fighting pure “violence” and promoting gun “safety”.

Now they want to address “root causes” of violence instead of just restricting legal gun ownership, though still advocating extending background checks while “not taking anyone’s guns”. Intervening within high-crime communities, and with those at high risk of committing and becoming victims of violence, is appropriate, though far more difficult than they may imagine.

Throughout, we’ve had no reason to believe that these anti-gun activists have had any real change of heart. Their “conversation” always comes around to the desirability of somehow limiting the rights of law-abiding American gun owners in some way, even if in “just” creating more hoops to jump through in order to purchase, keep or bear our arms.

However, there is a fundamental factor that will trump all their intentions, both open and disguised. That is us, the people (and voters) of democracies. As Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics follows culture” and culture is changing. Much of this is due to the past 2 years of violence approved and applauded by “progressive” politicians who thought this would garner minority votes. Their groupthink about ethnicity blinded them to the reality that people of all ethnicities, communities and societies want crime stopped lest it hit them.

People are simultaneously realizing that they can’t count on being protected and must plan to do that for themselves. Thus the huge rise in gun purchases by more diverse buyers than ever, including women, minorities (especially African-American women) and self-described liberals. It’s been speculated that this increase in valuing self-protection with firearms may transfer to an increase in valuing Second Amendment rights—and now, that’s no longer speculation.

The Trafalgar Group, a non-partisan polling operation, just released a poll in which over 84% of respondents believed that “strict gun laws” either make no difference in or worsen the current surge in retail thefts. Less than 16% believed such laws can make this better.

In November, Quinnipiac found that 48% of those surveyed opposed stricter gun laws versus 47% who support them—following a trend beginning in 2015, now over the tipping point to plurality opposition. Gallup’s polling in November correlates, with a new low of only 52% of Americans caring that “laws covering the sale of firearms” should be stricter (down from a high of 64% in 2019, falling through 57% in 2020).

Meanwhile, ABC/Ipsos found that 66% of Americans disapprove of how President Biden is addressing gun violence (which could imply wanting more or less strict laws). Republicans’ opposition to more gun laws has strengthened, Democrats’ preference for more strict gun laws is lessening, predictably. But the most important political demographic—independents—have shifted dramatically in favor of, shall we say, individual independence on this issue.

In the latest National Firearms Survey published in July 2021, nearly 1/3 of respondents acknowledged owning guns, more than half of those carry them and almost 1/3 of them reported having to use them defensively in one or more of the estimated nearly 1.7 million episodes of self-defense. In 82% of these DGUs, it wasn’t necessary to fire. Almost 80% of these incidents occurred in the defender’s home or on their property, with the rest mostly occurring in public or at work, still a very substantial number.

NSSF also found that 49% more Hispanic Americans (no, none use “Latinx”) purchased firearms in 2020 than in 2019. With 40% of all gun purchases during the past 2 years coming from new gun owners, it’s no surprise that Hispanics (as well as African-Americans) are increasingly voting more for individual rights than for government “protection”.  In Berkeley, California, of all places, the Latino Rifle Association has grown by hundreds of members since 2020. Its “leftists . . . socialists, progressives” members realize that “The police and the government aren’t taking care of me, so I have to do things on my own.”

Funny thing, that’s what conservatives have recognized for generations. And a much bigger organization, the National African-American Gun Association, has added tens of thousands of new members since 2016, accelerating (along with many local gun clubs oriented toward minorities) during the past 2 years.

Even our less demonstrative Anglophone cousins, Canadians and Kiwis, aren’t cooperating any more with government orders to turn in their newly banned guns than Americans have. Neither are turning in their formerly legal, acceptable firearms—only 160 of an estimated 100,000 affected firearms have been surrendered in Canada in a year and a half. In New Zealand, the 2019 ban of most repeating arms “has had no impact on a rise in gun crime and violence”, except for a steadily increasing rate of the offense of still possessing such firearms.

This is precisely the cultural change that precedes and triggers political change. Most Americans already knew that protecting individual rights is the uncompromisable basis of the success of American society and polity. Many others know that now and more are learning. While Donald Trump improved the Republican share of the Black and Hispanic votes (especially among men), this wasn’t about him or the party. It is about the importance of each person’s rights as an American.

Most expect that the Supreme Court will affirm the Second Amendment with a ruling in Bruen voiding New York City’s may- (= non-) issue handgun carry permitting, along with the 8 other states that persist in that tyranny. The “progressive” left will keep caterwauling if they don’t get their way. But should the decision go otherwise, their wailing would be nothing compared to the anger of the majority who are now convinced that individual rights are more important than political correctness. And that would assuredly lead to even greater political change in favor of ensuring those rights.

To paraphrase St. George Tucker, “the true palladium of liberty” isn’t just “the right of self-defence.” The right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense and opposing tyranny is necessary to a free people in a free state. But it is a means to the goal, along with representative democracy lustily embraced, which is “to keep our republic” (h/t B. Franklin). The ultimate mark of liberty is individual autonomy, where the rights of the individual are placed above government’s privileges, which are only bestowed by us individuals.

Nation of Cowards is now back in print

Nation of Cowards is a collection of amazingly well thought out essays. Jeff Snyder is clearly among the most knowledgeable, well-read scholars writing about guns today. He clearly shows gun control advocates for what they really are. Most importantly, he makes a passionate, intellectual argument on the ethical aspects of gun ownership. He argues convincingly that aside from being unconstitutional and elitist, gun control is also deeply unethical. This book belongs in the library of anyone who believes that people have a right to defend themselves.

A must read for those with an interest in not only the 2nd Amendment, but all of the rights we are possess. The author effectively opens your mind to strong thinking about the ideas associated with gun control.

BLUF:
The Chronicle of Higher Education today is out with an article bemoaning J.D. Vance for saying “professors are the enemy.”
I wonder where he could possibly have gotten such an outlandish idea?

THE LEFT VS. THE CONSTITUTION

One reason the left hates the American Constitution, and wishes to replace it, is that its embedded principles along with much of its explicit text is foursquare against the two main purposes of the left: class struggle and race struggle. Never mind the drive to abolish the electoral college, or the Senate, or admit new states to increase the odds of Democratic election victories. Just take in how the left wants to rewrite—which means abolish—the Bill of Rights.

The Boston Globe is currently running a feature series about how to “edit” the Constitution, which of course means replacing it in practice with an egalitarian Constitution that would place much more power to control people and resources in elites like the kind of people you find in the editorial suites of the Boston Globe. How convenient.

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GunSense Vermont takes the side of criminal entities

To the editor: This is in response to a letter to the editor from GunSense Vermont than ran in the Nov. 30 edition of the Montpelier-Barre Times Argus.

I have to wonder why “thoughtful people” and GunSense Vermont (GSVT) are appalled by the Rittenhouse verdict. Kyle Rittenhouse, who defended himself from a violent and life threatening attack, was charged, tried and acquitted by a jury of his peers. This is a clear example of self defense against known criminals.

Thoughtful people should wonder who GSVT is trying to protect — pedophiles, domestic abusers, or repeat offenders who illegally possess firearms? Rittenhouse’s attackers were all of the above, and GSVT takes the side of such criminal entities in their commentary.

Were the activities on that day a peaceful march like GSVT would have you believe? No, these law breakers were involved in a violent riot complete with looting and vandalism. The Rittenhouse verdict sends the right message, upholding the rule of law. Every citizen has the right to defend himself and herself.

Speaking of shooting defenseless victims, have you heard what Alec Baldwin has been up to recently? Where is your outrage, GSVT?

Randy Gray

N. Springfield, Vermont, Dec. 14

This is the kind of academic we should always be on guard to watch for.
This is a real, actual ‘enemy domestic’ of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
And, they infest the schools and universities, filling our children’s mind with this collectivist, authoritarian statist, mush.

Read – carefully- what she wants. Her revisions are what’s called ‘positive rights‘. What she wants the government to do, in effect granting rights from goobermint power.

Her definition of how the 1st and 2nd amendment were written are defined by her and her ilk as ‘negative rights‘. Rights already possessed by the people, that the goobermint is restricted from abridging or infringing.

Remember, when more than one politician down through history has said: ‘Any government that’s large enough to give you everything is powerful enough to take it all away.‘ One should believe them.

REDO THE FIRST TWO AMENDMENTS

BY MARY ANNE FRANKS
Speech and guns: two of the most contentious issues in America today, with controversies fueled not only by personal passions and identity politics but by competing interpretations of the Constitution. Perhaps more than any other parts of the Constitution, the First and Second Amendments inspire religious-like fervor in many Americans, with accordingly irrational results.

As legal texts go, neither of the two amendments is a model of clarity or precision. More important, both are deeply flawed in their respective conceptualizations of some of the most important rights of a democratic society: the freedom of expression and religion and the right of self-defense. These two amendments are highly susceptible to being read in isolation from the Constitution as a whole and from its commitments to equality and the collective good.

The First and Second Amendments tend to be interpreted in aggressively individualistic ways that ignore the reality of conflict among competing rights. This in turn allows the most powerful members of society to reap the benefits of these constitutional rights at the expense of vulnerable groups. Both amendments would be improved by explicitly situating individual rights within the framework of “domestic tranquility” and the “general welfare” set out in the Constitution’s Preamble.

Making such an edit to the First Amendment would provide stronger and fairer protections for the right of expression, including by acknowledging, as many state constitutions do, that every person remains responsible for abuses of that right. (Such a modification would, for example, help undo the damage caused by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United and remove constitutional barriers to reasonable campaign-finance laws that promote democratic legitimacy.) In addition, the implicit principle of the separation of church and state should be made explicit:

Every person has the right to freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly, and petition of the government for redress of grievances, consistent with the rights of others to the same and subject to responsibility for abuses. All conflicts of such rights shall be resolved in accordance with the principle of equality and dignity of all persons.

Both the freedom of religion and the freedom from religion shall be respected by the government. The government may not single out any religion for interference or endorsement, nor may it force any person to accept or adhere to any religious belief or practice.

Both amendments would be improved by explicitly situating individual rights within the framework of “domestic tranquility” and the “general welfare” set out in the Constitution’s Preamble.

The Second Amendment’s idiosyncratic and anachronistic focus on militias and “arms” degrades the concept of self-defense. The right to safeguard one’s life should not be conflated with or reduced to the right to use a weapon, especially a weapon that is so much more likely to inflict injury and death than to avoid it. Far better would be an amendment that guarantees a meaningful right to bodily autonomy and obligates the government to implement reasonable measures to protect public health and safety:

All people have the right to bodily autonomy consistent with the right of other people to the same, including the right to defend themselves against unlawful force and the right of self-determination in reproductive matters. The government shall take reasonable measures to protect the health and safety of the public as a whole.

Mary Anne Franks is the Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair at the University of Miami School of Law and the author of “The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech.”

For your consideration…………..

Charles Cooke:
I’ll be teaching an online course: The History of the Second Amendment

Hullo, everyone. I’m just popping in to let you all know about an online course I’m teaching early next year called The History of the Second Amendment. It’s with a new startup called Chapter, which noticed that pretty much every course they were offering was either progressive or progressive-adjacent, decided that it didn’t want to become an echo chamber, and so asked me to teach one, too. I suggested the history of the right to keep and bear arms as a topic, they agreed, and here were are.

Chapter describes its system as “like a book club, but way more fun.” Each week, I’ll provide a reading list (which could be articles, reviews, videos, podcasts, or primary source documents), along with insights and tips on each one. There will be a community forum in which you can discuss each topic, as well as a rolling Q&A in which I will answer questions — both on their website and, if the topic warrants it, by video. Because people are busy, everything will be “asynchronous” — that is, you can take part whenever you’re free, rather than at times that are set by me. The course will last four weeks, it will cost $40 (actually: $35 for Ricochet members), and it will run the gamut.

— Week One will be on pre-Revolutionary America. We’ll explore how the right to keep and bear arms came over with the colonists from Britain, before making its way into the heart of American law.

— Week Two will be on the Founding Era. We’ll ask why the Second Amendment was added to the federal constitution, what were the Founders’ intentions in including it, and what did militias have to do with a right “of the people”?

— Week Three will be on the post-Civil War period, during which the Second Amendment took on a new meaning — especially during the era of Jim Crow — and was changed by the 14th Amendment.

— Week Four will be on the Second Amendment as it exists today. We’ll cover contemporary American jurisprudence, the Heller decision, and the political rebirth of the right.

The course will start on January 24th, 2022. If it interests you, can sign up here: https://getchapter.app/@cooke/guns. And if it doesn’t? Well, I shall cry into my golf cart batteries. Chapter has agreed to knock $5 off the price for Ricochet members if you use the code RICOCHET when checking out, so if you do sign up, make sure you do that.

‘Surveys’ are brethren to ‘Polls’ i.e. hocus pocus to advance an agenda. Knowing who participated, informs you what the agenda is.
And the one thing missing in the whole deal about “policy effects” is a question about how all this interacts with the Constitutional restrictions that are slowly being acknowledged and put back into effect

Survey: Gun Policy Experts Find Some Common Ground Amid Broad Disagreement

Gun policy has become increasingly polarized over the past several years and it often seems like compromise is impossible, but new data suggests that may not be the case.

While wide gaps remain in attitudes toward gun policies, research indicates some areas of agreement among gun policy experts–often beyond the typical proposals that dominate the conversation around guns. That’s according to survey data published on Tuesday by the RAND Corporation. Researchers found that experts across the ideological spectrum were largely united on policy outcome objectives and even shared some common interest in specific policies such as prosecuting prohibited possessors who seek firearms and expanding mental health prohibitions.

“Our results strongly suggest that differing favorability ratings in the permissive and restrictive groups were explained largely, and indeed almost exclusively, by differences in estimates of what the true effects of the policies will be, not by differences in which policy outcomes predict the groups’ favorability ratings,” the study said. “Indeed, both groups’ most strongly preferred policy goals were to reduce firearm suicides and firearm homicides.”

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Next Step for the Parents’ Movement: Curriculum Transparency.
Parents have a right to know what’s being taught to their children.

In 2021, public school parents vaulted to the forefront of America’s fractured political landscape. Around the country, parents objected both to Covid-related school closures and to racially divisive curricula. Parental frustration helped secure sweeping GOP wins last month in Virginia, highlighted by Glenn Youngkin’s victory over former governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin has promised to rein in public-school radicalism and “ban critical race theory” on his first day in office.

Perhaps the central moment in the Virginia gubernatorial race was McAuliffe’s comment during a debate: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Like most Virginia voters, we couldn’t disagree more. Research shows that greater academic success follows when parents actively engage in their children’s education. To be sure, this doesn’t mean that we should decide the finer points of curricular design by plebiscite; nor does it mean that a minority of objecting parents should dictate school pedagogy. But public schools are institutions created by “We the People” and should be responsive to the input of parents and the broader voting public at the state and local level.

At a minimum, parents should be able to know what’s being taught to their children in the classroom. Transparency is a virtue for all of our public institutions, but especially for those with power over children. To that end, we have drafted a template—building on one of our earlier efforts at the Manhattan Institute and the work of Matt Beienburg at the Goldwater Institute—to inform state legislatures seeking to foster school transparency. The policy proposal is designed to provide public school parents with easy access—directly on school websites—to materials and activities used to train staff and teachers and to instruct children.

The last year and a half has demonstrated the need for transparency measures. As many public schools migrated to “virtual only” learning in response to the pandemic, parents received a first-hand look at the divisive, racialist curricula being taught to their children. They learned that public schools were forcing third-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, showing kindergarteners dramatizations of dead black children and warning them about “racist police,” and telling white teachers that they were guilty of “spirit murdering” minorities. These were not isolated incidents.

These revelations prompted parents to demand to know exactly what was being taught to their children. They felt that the public-school bureaucracies had been hiding controversial materials and exerting undue influence over their children, all in the service of fashionable left-wing ideologies.

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1, Behar has the intellectual capacity of an amoeba.

2, This was already addressed by SCOTUS in Heller. to wit:
Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment.
We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First
Amendment protects modern forms of communications,…….
., and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern
forms of search……….., the Second Amendment extends, prima
facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms,
even those that were not in existence at the time of the
founding

Joy Behar: It’s Time To ‘Tweak’ 1st And 2nd Amendments Because Founding Fathers Didn’t Have AR-15s And Twitter

“The View” co-host Joy Behar said Tuesday that the 1st and 2nd Amendments to the U.S. Constitution needed to be “tweaked a little bit” because the Founding Fathers did not have things like AR-15s and Twitter.

Co-host Whoopi Goldberg began the discussion with the news that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had stepped down a day earlier and noted that he had been proactive in policing hate speech — namely because Twitter was first to eject former President Donald Trump from its platform.

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