Category: RKBA

Indiana Republicans reintroducing legislation to end requirement for handgun carry permits

INDIANAPOLIS – Indiana Republican lawmakers are working to reintroduce legislation that would allow many Hoosiers to carry handguns without a permit.

Several lawmakers in both the Indiana House and Senate are writing bills.

Known as “constitutional carry” or “permitless carry,” it’s a change to Indiana law some Republican legislators have been working on for years.

“It’s still to me, it’s an infringement of our constitutional rights to mandate, require somebody to jump through hoops, go get fingerprinted, pay a fee – you still have to pay to get your fingerprints done – wait God only knows how long,” said State Rep. Jim Lucas (R-Seymour), one of the lawmakers planning to introduce this type of bill.

It would still prevent anyone not allowed to carry a gun now from doing so, Lucas said.

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A Girl and a Gun club empowers female gun owners

Born and raised in Wyoming, Kathleen Wilkinson, 67, was familiar with weapons but had never done any shooting. That all changed when her husband, a Top Gun pilot, passed away in 2020.

Having moved to Grand Junction in 1978, the newly-widowed Wilkinson decided to visit her sister in Oklahoma at a ranch she managed. While there, Wilkinson decided to try shooting for the first time at the ranch’s shooting range. She was able to borrow a rifle, a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, and a .22-caliber revolver. Like a Rambo Goldilocks, the rifle kicked too hard, the 9mm was hard to manage and very loud, but the .22 was just right. With it, she hit the target nearly every time, and that got her hooked.

As soon as she returned home, Wilkinson purchased a .22 revolver. While waiting for the background check, she followed the store employee’s suggestion to visit the Rocky Mountain Gun Club (RMGC). Wilkinson discovered the club rented guns and had a Ladies Day open to nonmembers, and immediately made plans to attend.

On her way out, she saw a flyer for A Girl and A Gun Shooting League’s local chapter. It only took Wilkinson one day to decide she wanted to join.

Gun classes

A Girl and A Gun’s (AG/AG) mission is to encourage women of all demographics to be educated about firearm usage and safety and to promote shooting and competitive shooting sports. Events are designed for all levels of experience, from novice to recreational to competitive.

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These 12 Incidents of Defensive Gun Use Prove Armed Civilians Make Situations Safer

I testified earlier this month at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Chicago on underlying causes of the spikes in gun violence in that city and around the country.

Although Sen. Dick Durbin’s interruptions of my opening statement stole the show in many respects, it shouldn’t be overlooked that the Illinois Democrat also solicited disparaging remarks on the right to keep and bear arms from another witness—Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown.

In direct response to one of Durbin’s questions, Brown remarked that armed civilians make police officers’ jobs more difficult, and that he never has seen a lawfully armed civilian make a situation safer.

This was certainly disappointing and should not take away from Brown’s important points with respect to underlying problems  of prosecutorial leniency and anti-police sentiment that devastates police morale.

But Brown also is quite mistaken about the reality of defensive uses of firearms. Americans—including those residing in Chicago—routinely use their guns to defend themselves and others from crime, rendering themselves and their communities safer from violence.

Almost every major study on the issue has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, according to a 2013 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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GO TIDE

Several gun rights bills filed before 2022 legislative session

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WAFF) – Alabama lawmakers will be back in Montgomery in less than a month for the 2022 legislative session and there are already several bills pre-filed by lawmakers with many dealing with gun rights.

Conceal carry without a permit

A third of the pre-filed bills deal with needing a concealed carry permit to carry. Senate Bill 1, sponsored by Senator Gerald Allen, would allow Alabamians to carry or possess a firearm in certain areas. Some of these areas are wildlife management areas and private property.

You would still not be able to carry a firearm in police and other law enforcement buildings, as well as, inside a prison or other detention centers. However, it is not a violation if someone has a firearm locked in their vehicle at a sheriff’s office that issues permits.

Another bill, House Bill 44, covers the same thing as Senate Bill 1 and is sponsored by 39 republican state representatives, including Speaker of the House Representative Mac McCutcheon.

House Bill 6 and Senate Bill 12 would allow people to carry, or have in their vehicle, a pistol or other concealed firearms without a permit. The bill would also remove the presumption of intent to commit a violent crime if someone has a firearm without a permit. This means if a person is just carrying a pistol, holstered or secured, in a public place, it is not illegal under these bills.

These bills are sponsored by Senator Tim Melson of Florence and representatives Shane Stringer and Proncey Robertson.

Bills on federal regulation

Not only are politicians looking inward at state laws but they are also looking out to the federal government.

Senate Bill 2 and House Bill 7 would both create the Alabama Second Amendment Preservation Act. This act would prohibit state law enforcement from enforcing any federal law, or other legislation, regarding the regulation of firearms, firearm accessories or ammo.

The bills would also set up penalties for whatever agency violates the proposed bill. The penalty for a first offense is a class C misdemeanor with a fine no less than $500 or more than $5,000. For all other offenses, it is a class B misdemeanor with a fine no less than $1,000 or more than $7,000.

Under Senate Bill 2, a state political subdivision will also not receive grant funds if it adopts a rule or other policy which violates this act. They would be denied those funds the following fiscal year of the conviction.

The bills are sponsored by Senator Gerald Allen and representatives James Hanes and Arnold Mooney.

A different bill, House Bill 13, would prohibit state law enforcement from enforcing any federal bill or other legislation pertaining to the regulation of firearms, firearm accessories or ammo, just like Senate Bill 2. However, this only pertains to those made and sold in Alabama.

Under existing constitution law, Congress is given the authority to regulate interstate commerce. This bill would provide that firearms, ammo and firearm accessories that are made in the state and are only traded within the state are not subject to federal law or regulation.

The 2022 Alabama Legislation Session begins on January 11, 2022.

A Flawed Case Against Black Self-Defense
In the face of state failure, neglect, and overt hostility, black Americans need the right to bear arms.

The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, by Carol Anderson, Bloomsbury Publishing, 258 pages, $28

Carol Anderson claims the Second Amendment is rooted in the goal of suppressing slave insurrections and therefore is irredeemably racist. Yes, racism has infected other constitutional provisions. But for the Second Amendment, Anderson argues in The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, the affliction is incurable.

“The Second Amendment is so inherently structurally flawed, so based on Black exclusion and debasement, that, unlike the other amendments, it can never be a pathway to civil and human rights for 47.5 million African Americans,” Anderson writes. She compares the “current-day veneration of the Second Amendment” to “holding the three-fifths clause sacrosanct,” arguing that both were “designed to deny African Americans humanity and rights while carrying the aura of constitutional legitimacy.”

Reading these claims, I expected a full-frontal attack on the contrary ideas I have developed in my own scholarship. Moving to the endnotes, I was surprised to find my work liberally cited. Anderson and I have worked through much of the same material but reached dramatically different conclusions about the utility, legitimacy, and importance of the right to arms in general and for black folk in particular.

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What Questions Should Second Amendment Supporters Ask Candidates For State Offices?

Second Amendment supporters should be familiar with the federalist structure that was established by the Constitution. In many ways, it has proven to be a very robust bulwark to protect our Second Amendment rights. Yes, the situation may suck in some of them, but the damage has been limited compared to what happened to gun owners in places like England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

In 2022, Second Amendment supporters have a chance to strengthen the defenses of the Second Amendment. Most states will be electing governors (and other statewide offices), and almost all will elect state legislatures. The stakes are high, and it will be crucial to ask candidates for office the right questions to avoid disappointments like Larry Hogan.

We can start with people running for state legislatures. These are races where grassroots efforts can make a big difference, especially in primary elections.

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Tracing Spurious Claims

Since leading anti-gun researchers acknowledged no connection between the 2020 surge in firearms sales and violence, unscrupulous anti-gun advocates must cite underwhelming statistics as meaningful evidence.

That’s what The Trace did, in an article written in collaboration with FiveThirtyEight. We’d expect a more sophisticated analysis from FiveThirtyEight, but this is what Nate Silver’s outfit gave the world:

“New Data Suggests a Connection Between Pandemic Gun Sales and Increased Violence.”

Ominous, right? The operative word here is “suggests.” They can’t use anything stronger because this is a very rudimentary analysis – there is no identification of causality. There is no actual statistical test to even indicate an association between the two variables.

Bloomberg’s activist-journalists looked at ATF reports showing the number of firearms traced broken out by the time between retail sale and tracing. They report that the number of firearms traced within a year of retail sale increased significantly from 2019 to 2020. The so-called journalists try to humanize the data by pointing to a pair of examples, developing the strongest emotional levers they could muster. Those cases are, of course, awful but are unlikely to be representative of all such traces.

So, the number of firearms traced within a year increased in a year in which the number of all guns sold increased. That seems proportional. The Trace covers this point, too: the ratio of guns traced within seven months of retail sale to all gun sales has increased annually since 2013. That sounds much more dramatic than the proportion increased from about 0.11% to 0.3% from 2013 through 2020.

That is eleven-one-hundredths of a percent to three-tenths of a percent. Naturally, that means that 99.7% of firearms are not traced within seven months of their acquisition.

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New York aims big on gun control — and misses, again

In hunting, there is an old adage: “aim small, miss small.” The point is that, if you want to hit a target, aim for a small part rather than the whole target. It is often the difference between a total miss and a marginal hit. In the area of Second Amendment law, the most promising legislative measures are the ones that aim small on the edges of the constitutionally-based right — the strategy used by abortion opponents. The problem is that politicians rarely want to aim small when they are trying to score big with voters.

An example is the recent New York public nuisance law seeking to make gun manufacturers liable for gun crime. Not only is the law likely to be a large miss, it will likely deliver another blow to gun control efforts by adding precedent protecting Second Amendment rights.

I’ve discussed the New York public nuisance law aimed at gun manufacturers, a law that doubles down on a failed legal theory using torts as a substitute for direct legislative bans or barriers. As expected, gun groups like the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) as well as 14 firearms manufacturers, distributors, and retailers are now filing suit. They should have an excellent shot at a preliminary injunction.

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Report: Florida on Track to Become 22nd Constitutional Carry State

A report by the South Florida Sun Sentinel suggests Florida is on track to become the 22nd constitutional carry state.

Constitutional carry is a “priority” for the Republican-led Florida legislature, the Sentinel reported.

Rep. Anthony Sabatini (R) has already introduced legislation to do away with the concealed carry permit requirement for Floridians. Open carry without a permit would also be legalized by Sabatini’s bill.

Moreover, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has already made it clear he will sign constitutional carry legislation, should it reach his desk.

Florida Gun Rights’ Matt Collins posted a video online asking DeSantis, “If constitutional carry made your desk, would you sign it?”

DeSantis responded, “Of course.”

There are currently 21 constitutional carry states in the U.S. Those states are Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

BLUF:
Millions are still moving along the path from reflexive support for gun control to passionate support for the right to bear arms. These voyagers are rapidly changing our culture. Last month’s public opinion polls are already out of date. The shift away from supporting gun-control is accelerating. The shift toward passionate and committed defense of citizen self-defense will be deep and lasting.

The Ruling Class won’t be able to stop it.

Why Political Moderates Walked Away from Gun-Control

Most of us have fired a gun at least once. Many of us have a gun in our home today. Gun ownership has increased steadily over the decades and is now common. Running counter to that trend, Democrat politicians became increasingly hostile towards gun owners in the last ten years. The Democrat party took that position while public opposition to gun-control grew. Today, democrat voters want gun-control as much as ever, but we saw the undecided middle and political independents step off the gun-control bandwagon. Here is why they abandoned the idea of gun-control.

The world became more dangerous.

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RUTGERS STUDY: NEW GUN OWNERS ARE ‘IMPULSIVE.’ NEW GUN OWNERS BEG TO DIFFER

Antigun think tanks and politicians push narratives that private citizens don’t “need” firearms for self-defense so they shouldn’t have them. That narrative has fallen apart over the past two years of rampant rioting and civil unrest as the same groups called to defund police.

The same antigun collectives are pushing a new narrative to dehumanize new gun owners with the tactic of shaming Americans into not exercising their Second Amendment. New gun owners have their own thoughts.

New Antigun ‘Science’

Researchers from Rutgers University,  as reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer, saw the historic surge of firearm sales over the past two years and had to do something. They slapped together a behavioral study on 2020 – 2021 first-time gun buyers.

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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.”

Moving steadily along

[Ohio]Senate votes to allow concealed carry of guns without training or background checks

The Ohio Senate passed legislation Wednesday that will allow any Ohioans 21 and older to carry a concealed weapon, so long as they’re allowed to possess it under state and federal law.

Currently, Ohioans must pass a background check and demonstrate proof of eight hours of training to obtain a concealed carry license. Senate Bill 215 nixes these guardrails, along with a requirement that armed people “promptly” inform police officers that they’re carrying a concealed weapon during a stop.

All Senate Republicans, minus Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, voted for the legislation. Democrats opposed the bill.

Both the House and Senate have now passed separate but similar versions of “constitutional carry” or “permitless carry” legislation, as it’s commonly known. Lawmakers will have to agree on a final version to send to Gov. Mike DeWine.

A DeWine spokesman said Wednesday the governor is reviewing the bill and noted he has “long supported the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms.”

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‘The Second Amendment wears lipstick’ — Study shows gun ownership among women on the rise

CLEVELAND — The number of women who own a gun is on the rise. A recent study from Harvard University shows that 42% of gun owners in the country are women. That’s a 14% rise over the last five years. The same study found nearly 3.5 million women became gun owners between January 2019 and April 2021.

“It’s a responsibility. It’s a huge responsibility,” said Amanda Suffecool.

Suffecool calls herself an “accidental activist.” A firearms instructor and radio host, Suffecool is also an advocate for gun rights in America.

“Unfortunately, the world is not the warm, fuzzy place it used to be,” said Candy Petticord.

Petticord is also a firearms instructor and a mom of 12. She started shooting five years ago.

“I woke up,” she said when asked why she decided to buy her first gun. “I realized yes, I’m the mom. I’m the caregiver but I’m also the protector when my husband is away. So the kitchen knives, forks and spoons weren’t going to do the job.”

In the Harvard study, a quarter of the woman who own a firearm said self-defense was the reason they wanted to buy a gun. In another study from the female gun ownership group A Girl and A Gun, the women they surveyed gave many reasons. The top included the cultural upheaval in the Summer of 2020, the 2020 elections, lack of law enforcement resources, and uncertainty because of the pandemic.

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Not one thing SloJoe wants would have stropped that

Biden Uses Sandy Hook Anniversary to Call for More Gun Control

Joe Biden put gun control back on the front burner, using the ninth anniversary of the Sandy Hook mass shooting to call for stricter gun control laws, according to CNN.

Calling the shooting—committed by a disturbed young man who murdered his mother and took her legally-purchased firearms to the school in Newtown, Conn.—an “unconscionable act of violence,” Biden said he wants the U.S. Senate to pass three pieces of legislation. One expands background checks, another would prohibit gun ownership by “abusers,” and the third would reportedly create “community violence intervention” programs under the “Build Back Better” program.

CNN’s report portrayed Biden’s wish list as “limited scope” measures. But the president’s gun control agenda is hardly that. It includes a ban on so-called “assault weapons” and original capacity magazines. There would be waiting periods and other hoops through which law-abiding gun owners would have to jump while criminals would continue ignoring the laws and remain fairly well-armed.

This comes as Rasmussen Reports a new daily presidential tracking poll showing Biden’s popularity remains at a low, with only 21 percent of likely voters strongly approving of his job performance. On the other side, 47 percent of likely voters “strongly disapprove” of his job performance.

An unidentified “senior White House official” admitted to reporters that none of the president’s agenda items are enough “to fully solve this problem.” So Biden wants Congress to act.

That may not be likely with the midterm elections on the horizon in 2022. There is lots of speculation Republicans may capture at least one house of Congress, and possibly both the House and Senate, effectively slamming a door on Biden’s agenda.

For the present, CNN noted anti-gun Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy is hopeful “negotiations could resume in the coming weeks to produce some bipartisan reform.” But what does that mean? When CNN talks about “gun reform” and “gun safety,” they’re talking about gun control. Grassroots gun rights activists call that “camo-speak,” because it camouflages what gun control advocates are actually seeking.

The White House “official” said Biden is still looking for a nominee to head the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Earlier this year, Biden had to embarrassingly withdraw the nomination of former ATF agent David Chipman because of his advocacy of gun bans and tighter gun regulation. Gun rights activists from across the country flooded Capitol Hill with opposition to Chipman.

Meanwhile, Biden is under fire for being unable to handle the current crime crisis in major cities, with violent crime and homicides on the rise. According to Fox News, “At least 12 major cities, including New York, have already set historical murder records in 2021. Robberies and assaults are also on the rise, and retailers in major cities across the country are reporting an uptick in organized smash-and-grab crimes during the busy holiday shopping season.”

Bill to allow concealed firearms without a license in Ohio clears Senate panel

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Ohio Senate could vote as soon as Wednesday on legislation to allow people to carry a concealed handgun without a permit and no longer require them to notify law enforcement during proactively traffic stops that they’re armed.

Senate Bill 215 cleared a Senate committee on Tuesday after hours of testimony, mostly in opposition to the measure. The Republican-sponsored bill comes after the Ohio House passed similar legislation last month; should SB215 pass the Senate, it remains to be seen whether lawmakers would decide to send that bill or the House bill to Gov. Mike DeWine’s desk.

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NY State Lawmaker Thinks Constitutionality Is Irrelevant

When a law is challenged in court, what’s really being challenged is whether that law is constitutional or not. The constitutionality of any given law is something we should always be questioning. Just because we think it may yield some benefit or not is irrelevant. What matters is whether that law should exist within the framework the Founding Fathers provided.

However, it seems that some people don’t really believe that.

One such person got to write their opinion at Newsweek:

Kyle Rittenhouse’s recent acquittal portends a dire future: one in which anyone can bring a loaded weapon anywhere, and where daily encounters can turn into deadly shootouts within seconds. Luckily, states are free to regulate the concealed carry of weapons, while balancing the rights granted by the Second Amendment. But right now, the Supreme Court is considering a case that could have sweeping implications for the safety of my constituents and many other Americans. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, the Court must grapple with the very real tensions between public safety and constitutional rights.

…

Many gun regulations, like so much else in our legal system, do have a racist and anti-immigrant origin story and are frequently applied unequally to people of color. But my state’s concealed-carry permit law comports with a long, if imperfect, history and tradition of regulating guns in public spaces. Conservative justices have long held these traditions sacrosanct when interpreting the Second Amendment. It remains to be seen whether this fealty to history comes from a genuinely held belief, or is simply a convenient means to an end. Regardless of how the Court rules, my colleagues and I stand ready to continue legislating in the best interest of the communities we represent. As one of the people closest to this problem, I believe elected officials like me should be closest to crafting the solution.

In other words, this New York state lawmaker believes that he and his colleagues should be free to pass whatever laws they want and the courts should give deference to their decisions rather than consider the constitutionality of those laws.

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Comment O’ The Day
If the environment is more favorable for criminal activity (no cash bail, cheering on property destruction, refusal to prosecute, defunding police, etc.), it should come as no surprise that there will be an increase in demand for guns, both from criminals who seek to exploit the favorable conditions for their endeavors and also from law-abiding citizens who seek to defend themselves from lawlessness.

Only any idiot would think this is a chicken/egg paradox

The Paradox of the 2020 Gun-Sales Spike

In a City Journal piece over the summer, I cast some doubt on the idea that 2020’s massive homicide spike — a 30 percent increase — had been driven by strong gun sales. America has so many guns that even a really strong year for sales doesn’t boost the supply that much, and most crime guns tend to be fairly old anyway.

Most interestingly, places with the biggest gun-sales spikes didn’t also have the biggest shooting spikes, according to a then-new study in Injury Prevention. I further noted, however, some NYPD numbers suggesting that while guns purchased less than a year ago accounted for 10 percent of crime-gun traces in 2019, they were 18 percent in 2020. 

Now we have national data to update both the geographic and the gun-trace findings. Oddly enough, they both hold up. Comparing all of 2020 with all of 2019, the states with the biggest gun-sales spikes were not the same as the states with the biggest homicide spikes. But nationwide, new guns did show up quite a bit more in police departments’ gun traces. 

Here’s a simple, per capita way of comparing changes in homicide rates with changes in gun sales (as measured via background checks for gun purchases, with a few states with quirky data excluded). There’s no obvious connection between the two, and the picture is the same when you plot the percentage change in one variable against the percentage change in the other.


The new trace data, however, are less kind to the latest additions to America’s gun stock. In 2019, about 20 percent of traced guns had been purchased less than a year prior; in 2020, this rose to about 30 percent. (The Trace has some more ways of cutting these numbers here, as does my colleague Charles Fain Lehman here.)  Continue reading “”

RKBA and self defense is not just nationwide, it’s international.

Morning Joe: Hard for Russia to Subdue Ukraine — People Have a Million Guns!

Wait! Was that an NRA spokesman on Morning Joe today, making the case for the Second Amendment?

Nope, turns out it was actually David Ignatius. But the hyper-establishment Washington Post columnist/editor and Morning Joe foreign-policy maven unwittingly made a strong case for the right to keep and bear arms!

Commenting on the price Putin would pay if he ordered an invasion of Ukraine, Ignatius said:

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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.