Category: RKBA

Actually everyone should prioritize it.

Conservatives Must Prioritize The Second Amendment
We need to look at all our civil and natural rights as being connected.

Without the right to defend ourselves, all other political battles become irrelevant. At different times, for different reasons, it is perfectly acceptable for different conservatives to prioritize different issues. But at no time should any conservative compromise on the right to self-defense.

Not only is the threat of a tyrannical government ever-present, but street violence is an ever-present danger, too. The threat to life posed by a rapist in the night is just as much a threat as that from a totalitarian regime. If the conservative movement really is a pro-family movement, then no law-abiding American citizen should be denied the right to protect himself and his family.

To compromise on gun rights is to necessarily compromise on abortion, taxes, immigration, school choice, welfare, right to work, and any other political issue. All other political questions are irrelevant if you and your family are at the mercy of a tyrannical government or a violent street thug. What good is your right to free speech if it can be taken away at a point of gun? What use is your right to life if you cannot defend yourself?

Americans understand we are born with rights and it is the duty of the government to preserve those rights. But as conservatives, we understand humans and human institutions cannot always be trusted. Americans understand we are born with rights and it is the duty of the government to preserve those rights. But as conservatives, we understand humans and human institutions cannot always be trusted. Yet, knowing human nature, we also know we can trust the government not to infringe our rights if we make the prospect of doing so too costly. Officials must know they can be held to account.

As we witnessed with the resent passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, Senate and House Republicans who campaigned on protecting the Second Amendment were not only willing but happy to give a win to the anti-gun left with a whole slew of new gun-control provisions for absolutely nothing in return. In fact, Utah’s Senator Mitt Romney wanted the deal to be even more extreme. Elected Republicans have this mentality because conservative voters have given them a pass to cut corners off the Second Amendment. So long as the left appears more radical than they are, voters think the GOP can do no wrong, even as our right to bear arms is eroded. They, and we, must learn you cannot claim to support the Second Amendment if you compromise on it.

If removing the right to defend yourself really made everyone safer, then perhaps the anti-gun groups would have a point. But it is just not true. According to the CDC’s analysis of several studies in 2013 during the Obama administration, there were “about 500,000 to more than 3 million” defensive gun uses per year. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives are saved by guns every year. Since nearly 70 percent of criminals committed their crimes with an illegally obtained firearm, more gun regulations will only hinder a minority of gun-related crimes.

In general, regulations only serve as barriers for lawful Americans ability to exercise their right to defend themselves and their families. Common gun-control initiatives, such as waiting periods and protracted background checks, can deny access to life-saving firearms. If a riot were to break out in your hometown, like the George Floyd riots of 2020, and you needed to protect your family that very day, a waiting period would make you and your family defenseless in your time of greatest need. Regulations like expanded background checks, which are already required for every retail gun purchase, serve as an excuse to deny Americans their rights; the background-check system is flawed, as about nine out of ten denials are the result of false positives. Additionally, the background-check system provides a paper trail so the government can expand its illegal registry of gun owners. An ATF official could easily search thousands of firearm records and produce a list of lawful gun owners’ home addresses with a simple use of Control+F. These records are the first step towards gun confiscation.

At its core, any call for gun regulation—be it on the right or left—ignores a far more worrisome problem: humanity’s capacity for evil. The anti-gun crowd targets the gun is because they are afraid of focusing on the true culprit in gun violence, namely, the person behind the gun. There is rarely an attempt to understand why a young man would become so twisted as to murder innocent children. The media and politicians gloss over that hard question and immediately jump to asking how soon they can pass the next useless firearm regulation.

We need a serious national conversation focusing on why a young man would commit such a vile act, not on how he accomplished it. Conservatives need to stop thinking gun rights are an issue about which we can compromise. Do not fall for the lie that we can give over our Second Amendment rights in exchange for a win on some other policy issue. We need to look at all our civil and natural rights as connected. Compromising with the left on the right to self-defense gives them the green light to stomp on everything else.

They’re also mistaken that the 2nd amendment ‘gives’ us rights.. Of course, even the Supreme Court, way back in the 1800s, properly recognized that it was a restriction, on the government, not the people!

What Liberals Get Wrong About the Second Amendment

Must we really respond to the “musket” argument again?Apparently so. It’s all the rage among Democrats right now.New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (Democrat) and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (Democrat) both think it’s quite brilliant to claim that, if we care what the framers of the Constitution meant, then the Second Amendment applies only to “muskets”!In The New York Times, a couple of professors (Democrats, but you knew that) asked: “Is a modern AR-15-style rifle relevantly similar to a Colonial musket? In what ways?” They liked their argument so much, the op-ed was titled, “A Supreme Court Head-Scratcher: Is a Colonial Musket ‘Analogous’ to an AR-15?“[Frantically waving my hand]: Yes, professors, it’s exactly analogous.The Second Amendment does not refer to “muskets”; it refers to “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” “Bear” means to carry, so any handheld firearm carried by the military can be carried by the people. Just as the musket was once carried by our military, the AR-15 is a handheld arm (technically, the less powerful version of the automatic M-16) carried by our military today. As soon as the U.S. military goes back to muskets, then muskets it is!

But I’m not here to refute idiotic arguments. These guys may as well claim that the First Amendment protects only speech delivered in pamphlets and sermons, but nothing communicated on television, the internet, or with poster boards and Magic Markers.

The Second Amendment is nearly the only prescriptive policy in a document that liberals have been trying to pump their nutty ideas into for 50 years. Unfortunately for them, there’s nothing in the Constitution about a right to dance naked in strip clubs, contraception, marriage or sticking a fork in a baby’s head.

But on the right to bear arms, our Delphic framers were nearly Tolstoyian with their explosion of words: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” (An earlier draft of the amendment specifically defined “militia” as “composed of the body of the people,” but was rejected as redundant.)

In the boldest affirmation of their worldview, the framers announced our natural, God-given right to self-defense — against the government, against criminals, and against assailants the government can’t or won’t stop. Free people prepared to defend themselves are the nucleus of the republic. It’s the most beautiful thing in the whole Constitution. Here, at last, the Founding Fathers told us something specific they want us to do: Teach the boys to shoot.

The “right to bear muskets” crowd — protected by taxpayer-supported armed guards, or cordoned off from the public by phalanxes of security officers in the lobby of, for example, NBC’s television studios in Rockefeller Center, before they return to their homes in crime-free, lily-white neighborhoods — tell us to focus on the freakishly rare mass shooting.

The highest estimates of mass shootings — including by gang warfare, drive-bys, drug wars and domestic murder-suicides — put the number of deaths at under 400 per year, or approximately the same number of Americans who drown in swimming pools every year. Four hundred, out of more than 20,000 murders annually.

Which is why, despite the media’s best effort to terrify suburban moms about weirdos shooting at crowds, nearly half of Americans prefer self-reliance to the government taking away our guns and promising to protect us.

In 2020, the Year of Our Floyd, gun sales went through the roof. The previous high for gun sales was in 2016, with about 16 million guns sold. But in 2020, as BLM tore through our cities, Americans bought 22.8 million guns. The following year saw the second-highest record for gun sales, at 19.9 million purchases.

By now, 44% of Americans report living in a gun-owning household. Thirty-two percent say they personally own a gun.

As much as I’d like to institutionalize the crazies — for their sake, as well as ours — the risks from bad faith actors at present are too high. With anti-gun zealots on the rampage and the U.S. attorney general siccing the FBI on parents who complain at local school board meetings, the most likely result would be marijuana-crazed schizophrenics continuing about their days unmolested, while gun owners get locked up.

In any event, it appears that the lunatics aren’t heavily armed, anyway. Here’s a demographic breakdown of gun ownership in 2022, according to Gallup:

Republicans 50%
Democrats 18%
Conservatives 45% (Oddly, Gallup calls them “self-identified conservatives,” as if Gallup would never use this cruel epithet without consent of the accused.)

Liberals 15%
Men 45%
Women 19%
Southerners 40%
Eastern residents 21%

Gallup left out one category. The subgroup most likely to own a whole buttload of guns, but not admit it: gang members and other recidivist felons protected by George Gascon and other Soros D.A.s.

Being a rational people, Americans are more worried about those guys than the random rifle-bearing psycho in a woman’s dress.

Russian Invasion Offered Hard Lesson on Gun Control, Ukrainian Says

Gun control in Ukraine has proved to be highly problematic in the wake of the Russian invasion, a Ukrainian activist told a gathering of journalists and friends of DonorsTrust in Washington recently.

Natalia Melnyk, communications director for the Ukraine-based Bendukidze Free Market Center, said that in Ukraine, before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded, “You could not own handguns legally; only hunting weapons if you had a license.”

“All handguns were ‘award’ weapons, randomly distributed by our Ministry of Defense. Usually, you needed to have some connections to get these weapons,” she said at the event sponsored by DonorsTrust, a nonprofit libertarian- and conservative-leaning donor-advised fund.

Amid the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Melnyk noted the development of arming citizens—but with restrictions and even then not all citizens.

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“In areas not under immediate attack, the government said to these territorial units, ‘If you are not under immediate danger of attack, please return the weapons. We will safely store them in a warehouse. If something happens, you can come and get them.’ Of course, [the Ukrainian people] said, ‘No, thank you.’”

Melnyk criticized the Ukrainian government’s move to arm citizens while at the same time imposing restrictions, such as mandatory storing of guns in a warehouse.

“We do see improvement, but it resembles two steps forward, one step back … because that idea about returning weapons is also very recent. We jumped from that idea to the idea that we do need weapons for self-defense,” she said.

The Ukrainian government is currently discussing further plans for arming citizens, Melnyk said in her June 16 remarks at the City Tavern Club in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington.

“It never was such a big issue in the broader Ukrainian society, because we were a peaceful nation,” she said. “A lot of people honestly believed [and] I was one of them: ‘Why would you need a weapon? We are not going to war, and if you are not a hunter … why do you need it?’”

But after the Russian invasion, “it appears we really do need it,” she said.

Melnyk described the cultural change toward caring about self-defense after Russia invaded. “It was nearly impossible to get a time slot at a shooting range because so many Ukrainians went in to learn how to actually handle a gun, because they have no idea,” she said.

“It’s not the case of the Ukrainian government sending Ukrainian people to die,” Melnyk told The Daily Signal, explaining a common misconception of those observing the Ukrainian crisis from the outside. “This is the conscious decision of thousands of Ukrainians to protect their freedom, protect their land, and to protect the future of their children.”

Highland Park Mayor Rotering Says the Nation Is ‘Enslaved to Guns,’ Calls for Nationwide Ban

The disconnected and feckless responses of local leadership to the shootings in their cities over the July 4th weekend have been nothing short of abysmal. If you do a perusal of the cities that suffered violence this past weekend, you’ll find that the majority are run by Democrats.

Color me shocked.

My colleague Sister Toldjah wrote about the truly disgraceful and tone-deaf response by Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney to a mass shooting in Philadelphia.

During a press conference, Kenney – after going on a rant about gun violence – essentially told a CBS Philly reporter in so many words “f*** it, I can’t wait to get out of here” because he could never stop worrying about what would happen next in the city that elected him:

“There’s not an event or a day where I don’t lay on my back and look at the ceiling and worry about stuff. So everything we have in the city over the last seven years, I worry about. I don’t enjoy Fourth of July, I don’t enjoy the Democratic National Convention. I didn’t enjoy the NFL draft. I’m waiting for something bad to happen all the time. So I’ll be happy when I’m not here, when I’m not mayor and I can enjoy some stuff.”

When he was asked to confirm that he was “looking forward to not being mayor,” Kenney responded with a smile and said “yeah.”

He’s a Democrat, of course.

Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering is no better. Instead of updating the national press about the ongoing investigation into shooter, Robert “Bobby” Crimo, and the state of the survivors, Rotering is pushing the gun control narrative, complaining to NBC’s Meet the Press NOW that this nation has not done enough to stop gun violence.

“People need to recognize these guns are absolutely meant to destroy human life. And again, I question national leadership’s decision to allow these to continue to be in the United States.”

It’s as if Rotering thinks Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer can just wave a magic wand and make them all go away. Rotering acts like there is no such thing as the Constitution and the Second Amendment, let alone human agency and free will. Not to mention those pesky Supreme Court decisions from Heller to Bruen which continue to uphold that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed.

The founders failed to include a mass shooter clause, much to the Democrats’ chagrin.

At least Rotering admits that Illinois and Highland Park already had gun control measures in place before the July 4th shooting occurred.

As much good as it did them.

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Well, it’s not the guns that are the problem. It’s the hands the guns are in.

When Gun Laws Don’t Prevent Gun Crime

On Monday, in the city of Highland Park, Ill., a deranged goblin of a man opened fire on a July 4 parade, killing seven innocent people and wounding three dozen others. After an intense search, the culprit was apprehended and taken into custody. Yet again, a mass shooting has sullied America.

And, yet again, it is unclear what lawmakers can do to prevent the next one. Just weeks ago, the Senate passed a gun-control bill that Chris Murphy described as “the most significant piece of anti-gun violence legislation in nearly 30 years.”

Today, posturing as if nothing has been done recently, Democrats are asking for more. But what, exactly, does that mean? A red-flag law? Illinois already has one. A permitting system for the purchase and ownership of guns? Illinois has that, too. “Universal” background checks? That’s already Illinois law. What about “assault weapons” and “high-capacity” magazines? Highland Park has banned both since 2013. Concealed carry?

That was prohibited at the parade under an Illinois law that renders it illegal to carry firearms at “any public gathering held pursuant to a license issued by any governmental body.” Straw purchasing? That’s already illegal, and, besides, the gun was obtained legally. Can the courts be blamed, perhaps? They cannot. In 2015, the Seventh Circuit upheld Highland Park’s ban on “assault weapons” and “high-capacity” magazines, and the Supreme Court then declined to take up the case. As for Heller, McDonald, and Bruen — thus far, nothing that has flowed from them even intersected with this case.

California added Montana to a list of states banned from state-funded travel in 2021.
Because they are, relatively speaking, so rare and so unpredictable — and because America is so free — mass shootings remain one of the most intractable forms of crime. The ubiquity of firearms all but guarantees that a person who wishes to obtain one will do so before too long. The breadth of the First Amendment makes it tough to track threatening or unusual conversations. Absent a set of reforms that would gut the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, there is no way for American authorities to keep tabs on everyone who comes across as a little weird.

But if states are going to institute systems designed to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, it is not too much to ask that they use them. In the aftermath of almost every mass shooting, we learn that the suspect was “known to authorities” — which, in almost every case, means that the shooter was known to his community, too.

And so it was here. The Highland Park shooter did not spring ex nihilo from the shadows; he repeatedly telegraphed his intentions. In one video, uploaded in August 2021, he foreshadowed his attack on the July 4 parade. In another, he dramatized a school shooting. In a third, he fantasized about getting into a shooting war with police. Per officials in the city, local cops had interacted with him twice in 2019 — once when he attempted suicide, and once when he threatened to “kill everyone” and had 16 knives, a dagger, and a sword confiscated as a result. Illinois has a broad “red flag” law in place, and it requires gun buyers to have a current permit. Why, we must ask, did these incidents not trigger prophylactic action?

We would put a similar question to the press. Study after study after study shows that mass shootings are highly “contagious,” and that, as NPR put it in 2019, “intensive media coverage seems to drive the contagion.” This is a free country, and its media must be free to act as they see fit. But perhaps they could see fit to take that into account? As of Tuesday afternoon, every major press outlet in the United States remains fixated upon the shooter. In our fame-drunk culture, this indulgence can be deleterious. A little less of it would be welcome. As a matter of course, we ask gun owners to be responsible, and we ask citizens to be vigilant. Is it too much to ask the press whether the need to squeeze a few extra clicks out of a story is worth the risk of encouraging the next shooter?

And beyond that? Beyond that, Americans would do well to set incidents such as this one in their proper context. Random acts of violence are, indeed, terrifying, but they are terrifying because they are so rare. When allocating our limited time and resources, we ought to remember that while the most spectacular criminals garner all the attention, a devastating attrition continues unabated in the background. On the day before the shooting in Highland Park, 15 people were killed in Chicago.

Thus far in 2022, there have been 250 murders in Philadelphia, 175 murders in Los Angeles, and 102 murders in Washington, D.C. Bringing down those numbers will take hard work, intelligent policing, a willingness to enforce the laws already on the books, and a commitment to engaging with the problem in its most common form — and not just when it provides clicks, outrage, and a chance to poke one’s political enemies in the eye.

Why the Second Amendment Applies Especially to Travelers

The United States Supreme Court has defended and restored the bear half of the right to keep and bear arms, in the recent Bruen decision.

Much work remains to be done. It is clear that the people have a right to bear arms outside the home. One of the major purposes is for the defense of self and others.

An area left undefined in Bruen is the right to bear arms in defense of self and others while traveling, particularly while traveling across state lines.

There was no prohibition on carrying arms at the time of ratification in 1791. Carrying arms for defense, while traveling, was common and accepted. Even the strictest colonial restrictions on the bearing of arms, the East New Jersey law, enacted in 1686, had an exception for people who were traveling. The colonial law, which was in effect for about six years, was cited by both sides in the Bruen decision: From  P. 6 of amicus curiae briefs on Bruen. 

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Hmmmm. Pritzker is wrong. I guarantee, with near metaphysical certitude, he knows he’s wrong too and is simply lying because he thinks that most people are too stupid to realize he’s lying.

Their swords and every terrible implement of the soldier are the birthright of Americans…. The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments but where, I trust in God, it will always remain, in the hands of the people  —Tench Coxe ( a member of the “second rank” of this nation’s Founders and a leading proponent of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, wrote prolifically about the right to keep and bear arms

Illinois Democrat Gov. J.B. Pritzker: Founding Fathers Would Not Support ‘Constitutional Right to an Assault Weapon’

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) reacted to the Highland Park parade attack during a Monday press conference by suggesting America’s Founding Fathers would not support a “constitutional right to own an assault weapon.”

Pritzker tweeted a video of his comments on the attack, saying, in part, “Our Founders carried muskets, not assault weapons, and I don’t think a single one of them would have said that you have a constitutional right to an assault weapon with a high-capacity magazine.”

In another portion of his comments Pritzker said, “It does not have to be this way, and yet we as a nation, well, we continue to allow this to happen. While we celebrate the Fourth of July just once a year, mass shootings have become … our weekly American tradition.”

The muskets used by the Founding Fathers–the muskets they used to defeat the British military and secure freedom–were very much like the military-issue muskets British Redcoats used when shooting at colonists and members of George Washington’s forces.

U.S. House candidate and former Navy SEAL Eli Crane reacted to Pritzker’s statement on muskets vs. “assault weapons” by telling Breitbart News, “The gap between the firepower of U.S. citizens and the military now is far greater than the gap that existed between colonists and the combination of regimented and ad hoc military forces that had just defeated Britain.

“Think about it. The military has Predator drones–that can drop a Hellfire missile and erase your home without you even knowing it was above you–and they have nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers. Now compare that to what we’re allowed to own today. There’s just no comparison. The American people are greatly outgunned by the 21st century military, far more so than were the colonists in the 18th century.”

No, We Don’t Want Women to Have the Same Rights as Guns

Nearly every time the pro-life movement achieves a significant legislative or judicial victory, progressives create either memes or protest signs riffing on conservatives’ commitment to gun rights. These takes were out in full force after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, both because of the magnitude of that ruling and because the previous day, in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court struck down a New York law that required individuals to demonstrate a need to carry guns outside the home.

Leftists on Twitter said they wished that “women in America had the same rights as a gun.” They must have tweeted these wishes in fits of passion without really thinking about them, because putting women on the same legal footing as guns would be pretty sexist. If Democrats had their way in Bruen, women would have to demonstrate to the government a need to leave their homes. Here’s what else would happen if we were to treat women like guns:

Men would need a permit to bring women outside the home. While Bruen made it unconstitutional for the government to require people to demonstrate a need to carry guns beyond their doorstep, most states in the union require gun-owners to possess concealed-carry permits. The requirements for these permits vary from state to state, but most require applicants to be a minimum age (usually 18 or 21) and take a class on firearm safety. Putting such regulations on women going beyond their doorstep would seem more fitting for a country like Afghanistan than for the United States.

Women would not be allowed to attend school. We often hear about gun-free zones after school shootings. The Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 criminalizes the possession or discharge of a firearm in a school zone. If we were to treat women like guns, K–12 schools would become “woman-free zones.” Similarly there are many college campuses that do not allow students to carry on campus. There were times in our country’s history when men and women were not allowed to attend school together, and those were not good times. Progressives describe the decision in Dobbs as “going backwards,” but that would be more apt if we treated women the same as guns.

Women could be bought and sold. If we are worried about objectifying women, calling to give them the same rights as literal objects is not helpful.

In short, this idea that “women should have the same rights as guns” would be more like The Handmaid’s Tale than any pro-abortion caricature of pro-life legislation ever imagined. Our political slogans are not meant to be the height of discourse, but we should expect them to be minimally coherent.

Hmmmm. Didn’t know they had one. Oops! I been a baaaad boy.

The Second Amendment Isn’t Only Guns: Virginia’s Switch Blade Ban Died Today.

Knife Rights’ Virginia Switchblade Ban Repeal Bill, SB 758, is effective today (July 1). The possession, carry, sale, purchase and manufacture of automatic (switchblade) knives will be legal in the state.

NOTE: The concealed carry knife bans in Virginia, including of switchblade (automatic) knives, will still remain in effect: “If any person carries about his person, hidden from common observation, (i) any dirk, bowie knife, switchblade knife, ballistic knife, machete, razor, … or (v) any weapon of like kind as those enumerated in this subsection…”

Holding a Virginia Concealed Handgun Permit doesn’t allow concealed carry of an automatic (switchblade) knife.

Knife Rights will never stop until all archaic knife restrictions in Virginia are repealed.

With the repeal in Virginia, only five states remain with a complete ban on civilian possession of switchblade (automatic) knives. Knife Rights has led the effort to repeal switchblade bans or restrictions in 19 states, starting with New Hampshire in 2010. Repeals have since been enacted in Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

Altogether, Knife Rights’ efforts have resulted in 39 bills repealing knife bans in 25 states and over 150 cities and towns since 2010.

Poll finds opposition to SCOTUS’ Second Amendment ruling

The reason the Supreme Court is appointed for a lifetime term is so they won’t have to consider public sentiment on controversial issues like, say, guns. Once they’re confirmed, they can’t be removed simply because their findings aren’t popular.

Yet that won’t stop some from looking to see how people feel about rulings made by the Court.

In a recent poll, there appear to be some interesting takes regarding guns.

The Monmouth poll shows just what restrictions people favor, including 60 percent saying they support a national gun registry, as one example.

It also found 83 percent support, to some degree, universal background checks.

Now, in the past, I’ve been critical of how these questions are asked, but Monmouth phrased it as, “Do you support or oppose requiring comprehensive background checks for all gun purchasers, including private sales between two individuals?”

That, at least, removes any ambiguity, so while I oppose the policy, I can at least accept the number.

The poll also argues that most disagree with the Bruen decision.

They asked respondents, “Do you agree or disagree that individual states should be allowed to limit who can carry a concealed handgun by requiring permit applicants to demonstrate that they need the weapon for their work or for protection?”

It found that 56 percent agree that states should be able.

On this, though, there is some ambiguity. The problem is that the phrase “for protection” isn’t quite how things worked. You had to show a specific reason why you needed to be able to protect yourself, as opposed to everyone else.

I suspect at least some of that 56 percent are supportive of a more general idea of “for protection” than the now overturned law allowed.

But not all of the poll’s findings are distinctly anti-gun.

Meanwhile, they also found that 63 percent feel that the law will either make them safer or have no impact on public safety, with just three percent saying they don’t know.

As for the subject of mass shootings, Monmouth asked, “Do you think the number of recent mass shootings in the U.S. is due more to the ease of getting guns or due more to a mental health crisis in the country?”

55 percent said it was the result of a mental health crisis compared to just 33 percent who blamed easy access to firearms, with 9 percent saying it was both.

The poll also looked at why those who admitted to having a gun decided to have one, with “personal safety” and “protect my property” both being a major reason for most of the respondents.

“[D]efend again possible government tyranny” was only a major reason for 28 percent. Yet it was noted as a minor reason for another 23 percent.

So what does any of this mean?

Well, for one thing, we haven’t done a good enough job educating the general populace about the benefits of firearm ownership, nor of the fact that gun control simply does not work. We also haven’t done a very good job of educating people about the importance of their rights as a whole. Far too many are apparently willing to deal their rights away for the illusion of safety, not recognizing that the illusion masks something far more sinister.

We all–and I’m looking at myself–need to do better about that.

NPR finally realizes that when seconds count, police are minutes away

When your society has reached a point where you can’t agree on whether or not a man can get pregnant, you know that rational discourse based on shared underlying facts is extremely difficult if not impossible. Generally speaking, but especially so in a society that has reached such a point, the government ought to stay completely out of the news business. Yet, unfortunately, we have taxpayer-funded left-wing propaganda in the form of National Public Radio (NPR).

NPR’s far-Left bias is well-known. Still, it’s amusing to see them finally realize something that gun rights advocates have said all along, that when seconds count, the police are minutes away.

The tragic history of police responding too late to active shooters

Confusion, chaos and wrong information appear to have contributed to law enforcement’s delay in stopping the gunman at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

The gunman spent more than an hour inside the school while police waited outside, authorities say. This was because the incident commander, school district police chief Pete Arredondo, treated the scene as a barricaded-person situation rather than as an active shooter situation.

Details of exactly what went wrong are still hazy as the investigation is ongoing.

Law enforcement experts say what happened in Uvalde is reminiscent of what occurred in prior mass shootings, including the attack at Columbine High School in 1999 and at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.

As shown by the Uvalde shooting and others before it, police are still making tragic missteps in the most critical moments of active shooter situations — regardless of training.

Police are human beings like the rest of us. They are not supermen or demigods. Exclusively depending on the police for one’s protection is a bad idea because of the fallibility of our fellow humans in uniform.

“Columbine changed everything,” Joseph Giacalone, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a retired New York City Police Department detective sergeant, told NPR. “When you have an active shooter, you have to end the threat. Because if you don’t, the person continues on killing.”

Cullen went on to say that this protocol has worked. During the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, he wrote, “it probably saved dozens of lives.”

This is something that the gun rights community has been screaming from the rooftops for a long time. Stopping aggression that’s imminent or already underway requires the immediate reciprocal use of defensive force.

Calling cops and waiting is a bad idea when an attack is imminent or already underway, because when cops do arrive, there is no guarantee that their response won’t end up in inaction, such in Uvalde or Parkland, or in shooting the wrong person, as was the case with John Hurley in Arvada, CO.

The article also addresses fear, command, the lack of intelligence (just one meaning of the word, unfortunately), and basic incompetence such as not checking if your radios are actually functioning.

Though this may be the standard now, instances have shown that fear may get the better of responding officers….

“It’s about the unifying of command. It’s about having an unseen coordinator. It’s about somebody dictating what has to go on inside and when somebody has to go on dealing with things outside,” he said. This was clearly a missing piece in Uvalde, Giacalone said….

More work needs to be done to address intelligence available to officers at these scenes, Giacalone said….

The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School occurred just outside the Coral Springs Police Department’s jurisdiction, yet the 911 dispatch center didn’t make any officers aware of the shooting for over four minutes after receiving the first 911 call, according to the commission report analyzing the shooting…

Additionally, officers reported their radios not working at all, causing many not to respond urgently when they heard gunshots.

Although it is good to see NPR tell its listeners and readers that police responses can be slow and ineffective, and address a wide range of factors such as training, command, intelligence, fear, and incompetence, it is a letdown to see NPR not acknowledge the best solution that gun rights advocates have been demanding all along: armed self-defense.

That may take another decade or two, but better late than never, right?

States with higher rate of gun ownership do not correlate with more gun murders, data show

Calls have rung out across the nation demanding gun control laws in a bid to curb violent crimes such as the recent series of mass shootings. Data, however, show that in states with higher percentages of households with at least one gun, crimes are not higher than in states with strict gun laws.

“Gun ownership is higher in states with fewer restrictions, and homicide rates in these states are lower. People can protect themselves,” George Mason University Professor Emerita Joyce Lee Malcolm told Fox News Digital of what she’s found through her research. Malcolm pointed to a study on burglars from 1986 that found 34% of burglars interviewed reported “to having been scared off, shot at, wounded or captured by an armed victim.”

Fox News Digital compiled FBI data from 2019 detailing murders and gun murders per 100,000 population for most states, as well as assembled Rand Corporation data released in 2020 showing the percentage of households with at least one firearm in 2016. The data does not reflect the skyrocketing violent crimes of 2020 and likely undercounts the current percentages of homes with at least one firearm as it does not reflect the influx of Americans who rushed to arm themselves in 2020.

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Justice Thomas referenced such shenanigans in the Bruen decision itself.
To be clear, even if a modern-day regulation is not a dead ringer for
historical precursors, it still may be analogous enough to pass constitutional muster. For example, courts can use analogies to “longstanding” “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings” to determine whether modern regulations are constitutionally permissible. Id., at 626. That said, respondents’ attempt to characterize New York’s proper-cause requirement as a “sensitive-place” law lacks merit because there is no historical basis for New York to effectively declare the island of Manhattan a “sensitive place” simply because it is crowded and protected generally by the New York City Police Department.

and (at the end of footnote 9)
….because any permitting scheme can be put toward abusive ends, we do not rule out constitutional challenges to shall-issue regimes where, for example, lengthy wait times in processing license applications or exorbitant fees deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry.

May just be me, but I read that as Justice Thomas slyly daring New York, and other states, to enact crap-for-brains laws like this.

Actually, not very much

How will the new federal gun law affect Missouri? It’s complicated
In 2021, Gov Mike Parson signed the Second Amendment Preservation Act, which bars local law enforcement from enforcing federal gun laws.

The federal gun safety bill passed with bipartisan congressional support in June was heralded as the first notable piece of federal gun legislation in nearly 30 years. Yet Missouri won’t feel its full impact — yet.

Missouri will benefit from the millions of dollars in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act set aside for mental health, crisis intervention and school safety programs. Retiring Sen. Roy Blunt co-sponsored the mental health component of the legislation.

But the provisions in the bill related to gun monitoring programs or red-flag laws cannot yet be implemented by state law enforcement because in 2021, Missouri passed the Second Amendment Preservation Act (SAPA), which bars local law officials from enforcing federal gun policy and could fine them for doing so.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the Missouri statute in February and the law is currently being challenged in Cole County court by St. Louis city and Jackson County. There isn’t a timeline on when the case could be settled, but until it is, SAPA is in effect in Missouri.

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If it’s from a Yale law professor, you can bet it’s unconstitutional

Yale law prof suggests new route to carry ban, but is it constitutional?

Short answer? Almost certainly not, based on what the Supreme Court said last week in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association vs. Bruen, but as we’ve already seen in states like New York, New Jersey, and California, anti-gun activists aren’t letting a little thing like a Supreme Court decision get in the way of their desire to disarm average, everyday Americans.

So what is Ian Ayres’ big idea? Basically, he wants to flip the current law in the vast majority of states to make concealed carry banned on private property unless the owners of that property decide to allow it.

You might be surprised to learn that when you ask someone to come and repair your dishwasher, they can legally carry a concealed weapon into your kitchen unless you expressly object. In all but three states and D.C., any visitor can, by default, carry a firearm into your home without your explicit permission. The repairman has a Second Amendment right to bear arms, but you have a right to control whether people carry guns onto your land.

A central attribute of property ownership is the right to exclude unwanted people from your land. Forty-seven states fail to adequately protect this right of landowners to control their property because they provide the wrong default rule regarding the right of invitees to bear arms. Property owners cannot make an informed choice if they don’t know they have to object (more than two-thirds of people are unaware of these default rules). And it is hard for a property owner to know that she needs to object when the objectionable firearm is concealed.

The same problem exists regarding private commercial land. All 50 states permit individuals to carry their firearms into private retail establishments by default. Private businesses must post “No Guns” signs to make their stores gun-free, and these signs must often meet strict requirements. Many retailers fear customer backlash if they post signs either restricting or permitting gun carry in their stores. So, they are inclined to stick with a state’s default rule regardless of their preferences.

If this idea sounds familiar it’s because New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has decided to implement this idea, at least when it comes to businesses, as part of plan to defy the Supreme Court and make it as difficult as possible for New Yorkers to exercise their right to armed self-defense in public.

There are two big problems with Ayers idea; one constitutional and one practical. As Ayers himself notes, every state in the union says that if you want to ban guns from commercial properties you can do so, but you must provide notice to the public in some form or fashion. 47 out of 50 states take the same view when it comes to non-commercial private property. These laws are widespread and longstanding, and there is nothing in the history or tradition of the right to keep and bear arms that supports what Ayers (and Hochul) are demanding. Given the negative implications that these policies would have on the right of the people to bear arms for self-defense in public and the fact that they have no similar analogues in American history, I don’t think there’s any way that they would be upheld by the Supreme Court.

From a practical perspective the idea is just as flawed. Ayers acknowledges that “it is hard for a property owner to know that she needs to object when the objectionable firearm is concealed,” and that wouldn’t change if all privately-owned spaces become gun-free zones by default. It would be just as difficult to determine if someone was carrying in violation of the law, but we’d also likely see far more individuals inadvertently doing so because of the reversal of the longstanding status quo. Ayers idea wouldn’t stop a single violent criminal, but would turn a lot of otherwise law-abiding citizens into accidental outlaws because they would no longer be able to legally carry in most of the places where they’ve been able to exercise their right to bear arms in the past.

Part of Ayers’ problem is that he, like many other gun control fans, still just doesn’t want to accept that the right to keep and bear arms is a real right. In his piece at The Hill, the Yale professor claims that the Second Amendment is about “individuals’ ability to defend their homes by arming themselves.” That is simply not true. The right to keep and bear arms is fundamentally about protecting yourself, not your property, and as the Supreme Court made clear last week, the right of self-defense doesn’t stop once you set foot outside your front door. If private property owners want to ban lawful carrying on their premises they can do so, but in a country with a right to keep and bear arms, the default position has historically respected that right and must continue to do so in the future.

‘unauthorized’… My foot.

Massive Trove of Gun Owners’ Private Information Leaked by California Attorney General

California gun owners have been put at risk by the Attorney General’s office after a new dashboard leaked their personal information.

The California Department of Justice’s 2022 Firearms Dashboard Portal went live on Monday with publicly-accessible files that include identifying information for those who have concealed carry permits. The leaked information includes the person’s full name, race, home address, date of birth, and date their permit was issued. The data also shows the type of permit issued, indicating if the permit holder is a member of law enforcement or a judge.

The Reload reviewed a copy of the Lost Angeles County database and found 244 judge permits listed in the database. The files included the home addresses, full names, and dates of birth for all of them. The same was true for seven custodial officers, 63 people with a place of employment permit, and 420 reserve officers.

2,891 people in Los Angeles County with standard licenses also had their information compromised by the leak, though the database appears to include some duplicate entries as well.

A video reviewed by The Reload shows the databases with detailed information were initially available for download via a button on the website’s mapping feature. They appeared to have been removed from public access by Tuesday afternoon and replaced with spreadsheets without the individualized identifying information.

The office of Attorney General Rob Bonta (D.) confirmed private information had been exposed and said they are examining the situation.

“We are investigating an exposure of individuals’ personal information connected to the DOJ Firearms Dashboard,” a spokesperson for the office told The Reload. “Any unauthorized release of personal information is unacceptable. We are working swiftly to address this situation and will provide additional information as soon as possible.”

The California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) slammed the leak and said it was looking into potential legal action against the state.

“Vindictive sore loser bureaucrats have endangered people’s lives and invited conflict by illegally releasing confidential private information,” Chuck Michel, CRPA President, told The Reload. “CRPA is working with several legislators and sheriffs to determine the extent of the damage caused by DOJ’s doxing of law abiding gun owners. Litigation is likely.”

The Reload is not publishing the leaked data in order to protect the privacy of those affected by the leaks. However, posts across social media indicate many others were able to obtain the documents during the time they were live on the state’s website. There are also several social media posts that indicate similar identifying information from the state’s dealer record of sales database and its “assault weapons” registry were part of the leak, though The Reload was unable to review copies of those databases.

The leak comes just over a year after California moved to provide detailed personal information of all gun owners in the state to educational institutions across the country despite objections over concerns about data security and individual privacy. It also comes as a similar policy to California’s restrictive gun carry law was invalidated by the Supreme Court, which will likely result in many more Californians being added to the same database the state just leaked.

In a press release announcing the leaky dashboard, Bonta said the goal was “increasing public trust between law enforcement and the communities we serve.” He said the dashboard was about ensuring transparency to “better understand the role and potential dangers of firearms.”

Instead, the leaked private information of gun owners is likely to increase the risk criminals will target their homes for burglaries–something the state’s dashboard reports happened 145,377 times in 2020 alone.

One Unconstitutional Law Implicates Many Gun-Control Regulations

Laws can be interpreted many ways. We seek guidance from the court to know what is legal and what is not. The US Supreme Court has largely ignored the right to bear arms compared to the number of decisions the court has rendered in other areas. We don’t have enough decisions to draw a clear map of where our rights begin and end. The court recently issued an opinion on the right to bear arms in public. This case redefined the legal landscape and gave us a few rules to go by. Let’s look at the unanswered questions to see if we may draw further conclusions.

The recent ruling said that states may require carry permits, but they must issue them to ordinary people who are not criminals. Ordinary people must be able to carry a personal firearm in ordinary places where people congregate. Licensing cannot be excessively delayed or expensive.

Now we want to apply this ruling to other situations. We first look to the text of the Bill of Rights. Based on the text, are the actions in question covered by the Second Amendment. When in doubt as to the scope or applicability, we then consider the history of use when the Bill of Rights was ratified. We are to draw analogies from that period to the present day.

There are no tiered level of examination or scrutiny. If the law in question materially limits the right to bear arms then, with remarkably few exceptions, the law is an infringement on the right to bear arms and unconstitutional.

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Former Idaho AG doesn’t know how rights work

When something is your right, it means it cannot just be taken away. Not unless you break the law and your rights are removed as punishment. If something can be taken, it is a privilege, and privileges can be removed anytime if whoever grants them decides to stop granting them.

This isn’t exactly high-level constitutional law stuff, either. This is a basic understanding the Founding Fathers had from the get-go. It’s why they fought a war against the most powerful nation on Earth. Having their rights respected was worth the risk.

Yet, for former Idaho Attorney General Jim Jones, rights don’t really work like that, apparently. That’s based on his writing over at The Hill.

Two groups of conservatives made contradictory decisions last week on whether there should be a balance between the safety of the American public and the rights of a small, but very vocal, minority. A group of 15 Senate Republicans broke with their party and voted for a modest gun safety bill. At the same time, the GOP-appointed majority on the U.S. Supreme Court made sure that there will be more guns in public places. The Senate’s action will save lives; the court’s action will likely add to the tally of gun deaths.

The six Republican-appointed members of the Supreme Court struck down a century-old New York law requiring a showing of “proper cause” to obtain a license to carry a concealed handgun. Although the ruling was an immediate blow to public safety, the longer-term effect of the decision will pose an even greater safety threat.

The court departed from a consensus view developed by lower courts over the last decade that allowed gun rights to be limited by concerns over public safety. Instead, it focused the inquiry solely on whether a restriction is based on “history or tradition.” If a similar historical analogue for a gun limitation cannot be found, it may well be unconstitutional, without regard to the effect on public safety.…

More than anything else, our governmental entities and public servants must understand that private rights ought to give way to the public good. We don’t believe a person’s First Amendment rights extend to falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. Second Amendment rights must also yield when they infringe upon the paramount right of the people to be safe in public places.

Uh…no.

Not only no, but hell no.

Of course, Jones invokes the old canard of yelling fire in a crowded theater, as most who try to justify an infringement on our gun rights tend to do, but you’d think a former attorney general would understand that this was a hypothetical presented by a justice during a case and that decision was ultimately overturned in part by Brandenberg v. Ohio. That case found that speech could only be regulated if it were likely to cause imminent lawless action.

Plus, let’s understand that if we take Jones’s word that private rights ought to give way to the public good, then the question becomes, where do we draw the line? It’s clear that Jones favors restricting our right to keep and bear arms as a means of trying to ensure public safety, but what else is on the table?

Can we seize his home so we can house the homeless? Can we seize his car so it can be used for public transportation? Can we lock Jones in chains and make him do road work for no reason other than we simply need the road to be built?

Where would such a line be?

The problem here is that the line would be subjective. What’s “far enough” for Jones wouldn’t be far enough for someone else. There are those who actually do support things not unlike the examples mentioned above, after all.

The way you deal with this is to draw a line with objective criteria. These are your personal rights, and they shouldn’t be infringed upon simply because someone thinks it’s good for the public. The truth is, the smallest minority is the individual. Empower them, and everyone is equally empowered.

Our gun rights aren’t up for debate. First of all, we don’t buy the idea that gun control yields any of the benefits Jones seems to believe. Yet even if we did, rights don’t work that way.

 And thank God for that.