Category: RKBA

With House Passage, What’s Next For Background Check Bills?

Now that the House, as expected, has approved a pair of gun control bills dealing with background checks on firearm transfers, the measures are headed over to the Senate. On today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co we delve into Wednesday’s floor debate on H.R. 8 and H.R. 1446 as well as taking a look at the prospects for passage of the gun control bills on the Senate side of the Capitol.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, wasting little time and taking advantage of the opportunity to preen in front of the cameras, said shortly after the House vote that he plans on bringing both bills to the floor of the Senate.

“In the past, when they sent it over to us last time, it went into [fomer Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell’s legislative graveyard,” Schumer said during a press conference Thursday. “The legislative graveyard is over. H.R. 8 will be on the floor of the Senate, and we will see where everybody stands. No more hopes and prayers, thoughts and prayers. A vote is what we need, a vote, not thoughts and prayers.”

“Certainly hundreds of thousands — maybe millions — of people walking the streets today because we passed [the 1994 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act] would be dead,” Schumer, who authored the Brady Act requiring background checks on all U.S. firearm buyers, said during the briefing.

He continued: “But when we passed the law, little did we know, it had some loopholes in it that we didn’t know at the time. We didn’t know there would be an internet, so we didn’t prohibit internet sales without a background check.”

That’s an incredibly dumb comment for a couple of reasons. First, the Internet was actually a thing back in 1994, though we were restricted to dial-up back then.

The issue isn’t online sales of firearms, because every retail gun sale already has to go through a background check, whether online or in-person. What Schumer is really talking about are private transfers of firearms, and those too were a thing back in the 1990s.

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Washington State: Pair of Anti-Gun Bills Fail to Pass Before Legislative Deadline

[On Tuesday], two anti-gun measures were not brought up on the floor before the official deadline to pass. Senate Bill 5078 and House Bill 1283 failed to get passed out of their chamber of origin and are considered dead for the session.

Senate Bill 5078, bans the manufacture, possession, sale, transfer, etc., of magazines that “are capable of holding”, or hold more than, 17 rounds of ammunition (the substituted bill increased the restricted count from 10 to 17). This includes conversion kits or parts from which any such magazine may be assembled. These so called “high capacity” magazines are, in fact, standard equipment for commonly-owned firearms that many Americans legally and effectively use for an entire range of legitimate purposes, such as self-defense or competition. Those who own non-compliant magazines prior to the ban are only allowed to possess them on their own property and in other limited instances, such as at licensed shooting ranges or while hunting. Prohibited magazines have to be transported unloaded and locked separately from firearms, and stored at home locked, making them unavailable for self-defense. Any violation of this measure is a gross misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of 364 days in jail and/or a fine of up to $5,000.

House Bill 1283 could cause the lawful open carry of a firearm to become a felony offense. While the substitute measure removes certain language from the original measure that triggered the felony charge if an individual “felt threatened,” the substance of the bill remains the same.

Schumer pledges Senate vote on gun bill passed by House: ‘No more … thoughts and prayers

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Thursday vowed that the Senate would vote on the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2021, which passed the House Thursday in a 227-203 vote.

A prior version of the H.R. 8 bill, which would require background checks for all U.S. firearm purchases, passed the House in 2019 but did not receive 60 votes in the Senate to clear the filibuster.

“In the past, when they sent it over to us last time, it went into [former Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell’s legislative graveyard,” Schumer said during a press conference Thursday. “The legislative graveyard is over. H.R. 8 will be on the floor of the Senate, and we will see where everybody stands. No more hopes and prayers, thoughts and prayers. A vote is what we need, a vote, not thoughts and prayers.”

The House also passed H.R. 1446, the Enhanced Background Check Act, by a 219-210 vote Thursday. That bill would extend the amount of time to complete a federal background check before a gun purchase is approved.

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It’s good to see others with large venues getting onboard with the knowledge that gun use for self defense strongly outweighs their use by criminals.

These 11 Examples of Defensive Gun Use Undermine Push for More Gun Control

March is Women’s History Month, yet Congress appears ready to celebrate in the worst way possible by creating more barriers for women who seek to exercise their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

While COVID-19-related bills have taken up much of the national spotlight, several gun control bills are primed for passage this week in the House. This is hardly surprising, given that just last month, President Joe Biden called on Congress to enact a plethora of new federal gun legislation.

Unfortunately, however, none of these proposals is meaningfully directed at the root causes of gun violence. Many gun control advocates have fooled themselves—and far too many others—into believing that we create safer communities by placing increasingly burdensome restrictions on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.

The reality, however, is that firearms are used far more often for lawful purposes than they are used to commit acts of criminal violence.

Almost every major study on the issue found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times a year, according to a 2013 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We have good reason to believe that many of these defensive gun uses aren’t reported to police, much less make the local or national news.

For this reason, The Daily Signal each month publishes an article highlighting some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read accounts from 2019 and 2020 here.)

The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in February. You may explore more by using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database.

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Which is the same question asked of them for many years:
What makes you believe that another law will suddenly make a criminal stop violating all the other laws they’ve been violating?
Since it won’t, as demonstrated by past performance of the criminal element from the dawn of history to date, what they want isn’t about stopping criminals from committing crimes, but controlling the populace.

A Simple Question For Democrats About Universal Background Checks

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her anti-gun allies are moving forward with votes on a pair of gun control bills dealing with background checks for firearm purchases, armed with a new poll showing broad support from the electorate when it comes to requiring background checks on all sales of firearms. A new Morning Consult poll finds that 84-percent of respondents backed the idea when they were asked, though I suspect that if the question had been worded a little differently we might have seen a very different result.

Do 84-percent of Americans think a person should go to federal prison if they transfer a firearm to their neighbor who’s afraid of her abusive ex showing up at her door? Do 84-percent of Americans think that it should be crime to sell a gun to your cousin without a background check, but legal for you to sell a gun to your aunt without one? I highly doubt it, but that’s exactly what H.R. 8 would require if it were to become law.

We’re gonna hear a lot of talk from Democrats in the next few days about the popularity of universal background checks, but the fact is that most Americans simply don’t know about the details of the Democrats’ proposals and how they could impact legal gun owners.

Beyond the polling, however, I have a serious question for the supporters of H.R. 8, and I hope that Republicans in the House press their anti-gun colleagues for an answer.

How will this bill prevent any illicit private transfer of a firearm? 

Democrats claim that H.R. 8 will stop criminals from getting a gun, but have you noticed that they never actually explain how the bill will do that?

“If you are a criminal, you are a felon, you are deranged, well by God you shouldn’t have access to a weapon, that’s what this bill does. It has the support of about 90% of Americans,” Illinois Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos said.

Bustos says one bill would close the so-called “gun show loophole” by making it illegal for unlicensed persons to transfer firearms to someone else without a background check.

Most criminals don’t get their guns through legal means in the first place, and the bill doesn’t change the fact that convicted felons and those adjudicated as “mentally defective” cannot legally buy or possess a firearm. So how exactly does this bill prevent access to a gun from those not allowed to own one?

Simply put, it doesn’t. At best it allows for a criminal charge after the fact, but even then prosecutors would face significant challenges. They’d first have to find the gun in question, trace it back to the illicit purchaser, who would then have to provide evidence that the gun was purchased without a background check from a private seller after the universal background check bill became law.

In the year after Washington State approved a universal background check measure of its own, there were a total of ten arrests and two convictions of individuals who attempted to purchase a gun when they were prohibited from doing so, but it looks like both of those convictions came as the result of background checks performed on retail sales of guns, not private transfers.

New Mexico also approved universal background checks back in 2019, and in the first year that the law was on the books there were zero arrests for conducing a private gun sale without going through a background check. Are we really supposed to believe that criminals in the Land of Enchantment simply stopped all black market sales, or does it make more sense that criminals simply continued to ignore this law just as they ignore the laws against, say, home invasion or armed robbery?

Democrats maintain that H.R. 8 will prevent criminals from getting their hands on a gun, but I’ve never heard them explain how the legislation will do that. Something tells me that we won’t get any such explanation during the debate of H.R. 8 either, but every pro-2A House member should call them out for their obfuscation and demand that they tell the American people the truth about this bill; it won’t and can’t prevent a single illicit private transfer of a firearm, and is utterly useless as a public safety strategy.

Another Anti-Gun Extremist Promoted for Biden’s Cabinet

President Biden’s nominee to serve as United States Secretary of the Interior, U.S. Representative Deb Haaland (D-NM), is yet another cog Biden hopes to fit into his administration’s anti-gun machine. Perhaps it would be more newsworthy if we only reported on Biden nominees that don’t support gutting the Second Amendment, but then we might have nothing to say.

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Isn’t it interesting how no 2nd amendment advocate claims this about the 1st amendment?

BLUF:
The Second Amendment is not in conflict with the First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, or any of our other rights protected by the Constitution, and our rights don’t have to be exercised one at a time. We don’t give up our Fourth Amendment rights when we peaceably assemble, so why should we lose our Second Amendment rights when we gather in support or opposition to a piece of legislation or governmental action?

Well, the obvious answer is that we shouldn’t have to give up our Second Amendment rights in order to exercise our right of free speech, public assembly, and private worship. Unfortunately, that’s the world that gun control activists want, and it’s one reason why you’re seeing the rise of Second Amendment sanctuaries around the country; a grassroots response to the creeping authoritarianism of gun control.

New Anti-Gun Argument: 2A Getting In The Way Of Other Rights

The Second Amendment has long been treated as a second-class right by gun control activists and even some unarmed Americans who simply aren’t as concerned about protecting a right that they’re not currently exercising. Unfortunately for those opposed to the right to keep and bear arms, 2020 was a banner year for new gun owners with an estimated 8.5-million Americans purchasing a firearm for the very first time.

As you can imagine, gun control activists are not happy about these developments, and their opposition to exercise of our Second Amendment rights is leading some down a dangerous road; arguing that we must restrict the right to keep and bear arms in order to protect other civil rights.

Law professors Joseph Blocher of Duke and Reva Seigel of Yale make that case in a new piece at The Atlantic, proclaiming that we need more gun control laws to protect “citizens’ equal freedoms to speak, assemble, worship, and vote without fear.”

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South Dakota: Two Pro-Gun Bills Head to the Governor’s Desk for Signature

Wednesday, March 3rd the South Dakota House gave final approval to a pair of pro-gun measures, Senate Bill 100 and Senate Bill 111.  These two important bills now head to the desk of Governor Kristi Noem for her signature.  Please contact Governor Kristi Noem and ask her to sign Senate Bills 100 and 111 into law.

Senate Bill 100 provides protections for gun stores, ranges, or any other entity that engages in the lawful selling or servicing of firearms, components, or accessories. SB 100 also prevents the prohibition, regulation, or seizure of citizens’ Second Amendment rights during a declared State of Emergency.

Senate Bill 111 reduces the cost for some types of concealed carry permits.

He just doesn’t want us to know what he thinks about it.
And because of that, we do know.

Garland Doesn’t Seem To Know Much About Anything During Questioning

When the Senate confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland to be Joe Biden’s pick for Attorney General kicked off, we quickly learned that there were a number of public policy topics that he’s “never given much thought to,” and didn’t have any opinions to share. Those included issues of illegal immigration and whether or not transgender athletes should be able to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. As the hearings continued, there emerged even more topics that Garland professes to not know very much about. This time the questions dealt with the Second Amendment and the limits of the President’s power to infringe on those rights via the pen and the phone. When Ted Cruz pressed him on some specifics, Garland claimed to be “unfamiliar” with the subject and said that he “cannot offer an opinion.” (Free Beacon)

President Joe Biden’s pick for the top law enforcement post in America told the Senate that he is uninformed about important gun issues, as he faces what could be a close confirmation vote.

Merrick Garland told Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) he was unfamiliar with key gun policy areas in written answers made public Wednesday night. He said he did not know enough about the topic to say whether Biden could unilaterally deny gun sales by permanently delaying background checks. He used the same explanation when asked if Biden could ban the sale of popular rifles like the AR-15—something Biden promised to make law during his campaign.

“I am unfamiliar with this issue and cannot offer an opinion on that question,” Garland said of the unilateral AR-15 ban.

These answers conflict with statements Garland made in February, suggesting that there were changes to gun control policy that Biden could make unilaterally without the need for new legislation from Congress. But now he’s saying that he really doesn’t know what, if any limits there are to the President’s powers in that regard. Just as a reminder, this guy has been on the bench on one of the most influential appeals courts in the country for decades and he came very close to making it onto the Supreme Court. And he hasn’t given any thought to the Second Amendment?

Garland similarly dodged a question about the death penalty. He said he had “developed concerns” over the procedure in recent years, but that was about it. We already know where Joe Biden stands on the subject and Garland will go along with whatever Biden says, so it seemed rather pointless to wiggle out of that one.

What Garland is doing here seems obvious. He doesn’t want to wade into any hot-button topics for fear of antagonizing the Senators from either party and giving some of them an excuse to not vote for him. He’s hardly the first cabinet nominee to play these games and he won’t be the last. But the guy is asking to be approved to be the chief law enforcement official in the country. If he’s really “never thought about” any of these questions and “doesn’t have an opinion” on them, how is he claiming to be qualified to do the job he’s asking for? That’s an awful lot of studying to have to do on day one to get up to speed.

Senator Tom Cotton (R – AR) has already begun pumping the brakes on Garland’s confirmation, insisting that more and better answers are needed. But it still doesn’t seem like he’ll be able to derail the confirmation entirely. Mitch McConnell has already said he plans to vote to confirm him and Chuck Grassley voted for him in committee. That’s really all he would need to avoid the optics of sending Kamala Harris down to break a tie to put him in at the Justice Department. But if these non-answers were to somehow convince both of them to vote no, we’d be back to waiting for Joe Manchin to make up his mind. This fight may not be quite over yet.

Dems Tell Manchin: Nuke Filibuster If You Want Background Checks

I take absolutely no joy in saying this, but my job is to tell it like it is and not try to blow sunshine up anyone’s backside: the gun control bills that are expected to start moving in the House this week are almost guaranteed to be approved and sent to the U.S. Senate. H.R. 8, which would impose a one-year federal prison sentence on gun owners who transferred a firearm without first going through a background check, and H.R. 1446, which would allow the FBI to delay transfers done through an FFL for ten days (and indefinitely in some circumstances) as opposed to the three-day limit currently allowed by law, aren’t going to get out the House with wide margins, but bills only need a bare majority to pass there.

It’s the Senate where things are going to get tricky for gun control legislation, since 60 votes are going to be necessary in order for the bills to pass. Joe Manchin seems adamant that he’s not going to provide the final vote necessary to nuke the legislative filibuster, but the Left is doing its best to remind Manchin that if he doesn’t, there’s no guarantee that the universal background check bill will get to Biden’s desk.

Manchin nevertheless remains as intransigent as ever on the filibuster question in general. Asked on the Hill this past Monday about the circumstances under which he’d reconsider his support for it, he yelled “Never.” “Jesus Christ!” he said to reporters. “What don’t you understand about ‘never’?” And Manchin has already seen and made peace with Republicans in the Senate killing background check expansions twice this decade—once in 2013 and once in 2015. It should be said that these failures give lie to the idea, promoted by Manchin and others, that the filibuster facilitates bipartisanship. On both occasions, checks actually won the support of a bipartisan coalition of senators, and Manchin’s bill might have passed in 2013 with a bipartisan 54-vote majority were it not for the filibuster and its 60-vote threshold. Instead of Congress passing a policy supported by the vast majority of the American people and offered up by cooperative and cordial members of both parties, Congress passed nothing.

It is likely that this will happen again. Asked about the BCEA’s chances on CNN recently, Pat Toomey was pessimistic. “It’s theoretically possible,” he said, “but I’m not aware of a significant change in heart.” Absent that change in heart, all gun legislation will be doomed—not just background checks but the rest of the proposals for Congress that President Biden ran on, including a new assault weapons ban, a ban on online gun and parts sales, and the repeal of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which shields gun manufacturers from lawsuits over the use of their guns in criminal activity. Biden wasn’t the most ambitious of the primary candidates on gun policy, but his proposals would still be the most sweeping gun control measures implemented since Biden helped pass the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act and the original Federal Assault Weapons Ban as a senator in the early 1990s.

The intra-party fight over the filibuster is already heating up, and it’s going to get even spicier in the weeks ahead. The Democrats insisting that the filibuster go away know their legislative majorities are likely going to come to an end in next year’s midterms, and if they want to enact their agenda they’re going to have to destroy it sooner or later. They’d prefer sooner, under the theory that they’d be able to pass more legislation that the country would love, and by the time Election Day rolls around in 2022 the American people will have forgiven them for blowing up one of the few remaining checks on pure majoritarianism in Congress.

The more Manchin digs in his heels, the more the anti-filibuster Democrats are going to lash out. Of course Manchin has an ace in the hole, so to speak. At any time, he could leave the Democratic Party behind and begin to caucus with Republicans, giving them the Senate Majority. That might make him an even bigger enemy to the Left than Donald Trump, but it wouldn’t hurt Manchin’s popularity at home in West Virginia, where every single county went red in the 2020 election.

I wish I could confidently predict how this will all end up, but my crystal ball is only telling me that gun owners should buckle up, because it could be a bumpy and chaotic ride once Biden’s gun control bills start moving.

Another one of the idiotic “I support the Second Amendment, But……”  crowd
There’s a very quick and simple answer for morons like this.
One name, Jack Wilson , end of discussion.
If they continue with their drivel, you tell them since facts have shown them to be in error, what’s the real reason they want to restrict the right to keep and bear arms?

Human Condition: Guns in church? What would Jesus carry?

I like guns — always have. I support the Second Amendment, and hope I’ll always have the right to own a gun.

But I’m concerned that our country is reverting to its Wild West days. Heck, even back then some towns had rules in place where you had to surrender your gun at the sheriff’s office before you went into the saloon.

According to Smithsonian magazine, Tombstone, Arizona, had more restrictive gun laws in 1880 than it has today. And that was when Wyatt Earp and his brothers were involved in the famed OK Corral incident.

So, I guess it’s kind of an insult to the Old West to compare them to present-day America.

All this makes me wonder about folks who want to carry guns to church. To church?

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Need for national concealed carry reciprocity at all-time high

Across the nation, local gun stores are continuing to feel the effects of skyrocketing demand and limited supplies for firearms. One store in Columbus, Ohio, says their stock could be wiped out in the next few weeks. And if people are lucky enough to purchase a firearm right off the shelf, reports of ammunition shortages will be everyone’s next hurdle. Across Texas, gun store owners are seeing how the surge in firearm sales throughout 2020 has affected the availability of both firearms and ammunition.

Last year’s drastic increase in gun sales and background checks may have been linked in part to Americans’ fears surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and growing unrest across the nation, but it’s also clear there has been a growing national awakening among Americans who want to defend themselves and their families. Along with growing gun sales and more people exercising the right to self-defense, there has been increased demand for firearm safety and training courses. The U.S. Concealed Carry Association (USCCA) has experienced exponential growth in education and training over the last year. In 2020 over 2,000 new instructors joined our ranks of 7,000 instructors across the country. It’s clear that as Americans’ interest in owning a firearm grows, so does their understanding that training and education is a necessary part of being a responsible gun owner.

Today, with the pandemic still on our front doorstep and a new administration underway that many fear will impose more strict gun laws, people are finding it increasingly necessary to responsibly protect themselves. In fact, January marked the highest overall number of firearm-related background checks ever recorded in our nation’s history.

With millions of new gun owners in the U.S. and 21 million gun sales last year alone – including a higher rate of women and minorities – it’s more important than ever that these responsibly-armed Americans are supported rather than criminalized. That is why our elected officials today need to work together to solidify national reciprocity for concealed carry permits to finally relieve law-abiding gun owners from the burdensome patchwork of state laws governing concealed carry.

Take, for example, a family from Indiana who’s traveling to visit relatives in Missouri, carrying with them a concealed firearm for safety. If this family travels the most direct and common-sense route – through Illinois – they are suddenly breaking the law and potentially facing criminal charges if stopped. Unless this family detours hours down through Kentucky to avoid crossing through Illinois – which doesn’t have reciprocity with any of its surrounding states – they’re breaking the law. Scenarios like this, coupled with antiquated concealed carry laws, force people to choose between traveling much longer distances to reach their destination or leaving themselves unprotected… ultimately, forfeiting their natural born right to self-defense.

Americans shouldn’t have to risk becoming criminals simply for crossing states lines while carrying their lawfully-owned firearm. That’s why it’s crucial that Rep. Richard Hudson’s (R-N.C.) recently introduced Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2021 (H.R. 38) becomes law – so that responsible citizens can exercise their right to self-defense while they are traveling or temporarily living away from home. This is especially important at a time when more Americans are opting out of air travel and choosing to drive long distances, often across multiple states, with their children and other loved ones.

It is clear that today, Americans greatly value their natural-born right to self-defense and their ability to carry a firearm. We’ve seen this ourselves at the USCCA with skyrocketing demand in firearms-related training and education. Now, Congress must act by making it possible for any law-abiding gun owner – anytime, anywhere – to travel freely with their firearm without the risk of breaking the law when traveling. Millions of responsible, law-abiding Americans are counting on the National Concealed Reciprocity Act, and it’s time to move it forward.

 

Almost Half the United States has Constitutional Carry

Do we see ‘blood running in the streets’ of these states?

No, we don’t.

So these mewling statist elitists are nothing more than wanna-be dictators who see power being taken away from the state and returned to the people, and don’t like it.

vvvv

Don’t mess with Tennessee’s handgun permit system | Opinion
Public welfare and safety will be jeopardized by pending legislation that would allow the permitless carry of handguns in public.

David Mitchell, Bill Gibbons and David Purkey Guest columnists
David Mitchell served as commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security from 2007-2011. Bill Gibbons served in that capacity from 2011-2016, and David Purkey served from 2016-2019.

Part of the privilege of serving as commissioner was responsibility for overseeing our state’s handgun permit system. We are proud of the permit system Tennessee has developed and maintained. We oppose the part of pending legislation (SB 765/HB 786) that would severely undermine our handgun permit system and ultimately make it meaningless by allowing the permitless carry of handguns in public, both concealed and openly.

Under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the citizens of our state have a right to keep and bear arms. However, the U.S. Supreme Court has clearly ruled that state legislatures have the power to regulate the carrying of firearms in the interest of public safety. There is no reasonable debate about the General Assembly’s authority on this issue….

“Under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the citizens of our state have a right to keep and bear arms. However,….”

But me no buts, tin horns. What about “….shall not be infringed.” do you not understand? Agreeing with Justice Scalia’s dicta (not part of the ruling, simply his own opinion, included in the decision like an editorial.) simply means you don’t understand SCOTUS decisions and merely agree with his mistaken personal opinion, which has been often considered, was some  weasel wording to get the previous court squish, Justice Kennedy on board.

The California Model: Soft On Violent Firearm Crimes, Hard On Law-Abiding Gun Owners

A frustrating aspect of the modern gun control movement is its seeming abandonment of reason. The same anti-gun politicians that attack the rights of law-abiding gun owners will advocate for more lenient treatment of those who misuse firearms to commit violent crime.

Consider California’s Assembly Bill 1509, which would alter the state’s scheme of sentence enhancements for serious crimes committed with firearms. The legislative counsel’s digest summarized the changes as follows:
Existing law imposes a sentence enhancement in the state prison of 10 years for personally using a firearm in the commission of specified felonies, 20 years for personally and intentionally discharging a firearm in the commission of those felonies, and 25 years to life for personally and intentionally discharging a firearm and causing great bodily injury or death to any other person during the commission of those felonies.

This bill would reduce those enhancements to 1, 2, and 3 years, respectively. 

Existing law imposes a sentence enhancement of 5, 6, or 10 years in the state prison for, with intent to inflict great bodily injury or death, discharging a firearm from a motor vehicle in the commission of a felony and inflicting great bodily injury or death in the commission of a felony.

This bill would reduce that enhancement to 1, 2, or 3 years in the state prison.

AB1509 was authored by Assembly member Alex Lee (D-25). The bill was coauthored by Assembly members Wendy Carrillo (D-51), Ash Kalra (D-27), Mark Stone (D-29), and Senator Scott Wiener (D-11).

Assemblywoman Carrillo has been a vocal proponent of further restricting the rights of law-abiding gun owners. On May 17, 2018, Carrillo spoke at a gun control rally in Sacramento, put on, in part, by the Brady Campaign. The lawmaker took to Twitter on February 5, 2019 to boast of meeting Gabrielle Giffords of the eponymous Giffords gun control organization, adding, “California has enacted strict gun laws that can lead the way to a national conversation. We need action. #GunReformNow.”

Similarly, Assemblymember Kalra has pushed for gun control. As a San Jose City councilmember, Kalra proposed an ordinance that would have required gun owners to comply with onerous storage requirements, ammunition sellers to register transactions, and re-victimized gun owners whose firearms were stolen by requiring them to report the theft within 48 hours.

In 2019, Senator Wiener advanced legislation to permanently ban gun shows at Daly City, Calif.’s Cow Palace. On August 31, 2019, the state senator took to Twitter to advocate for gun confiscation and other extreme gun controls, stating,

No more talk on guns

Action only

Kansas House passes bill to lower concealed carry age to 18

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A bill to lower the legal age to carry concealed firearms in Kansas from 21 to 18 won final passage Thursday in the Kansas House.

The state House approved the bill on a 85-38 vote, sending it to the Senate. The bill’s support came mostly from Republicans, who say that those under 21 are eligible to vote and serve in the military. Opponents say those under 21 are less mature and more prone to risk-taking.

People as young as 18 can already carry firearms in the open in Kansas. The legislation would require those under 21 to complete a background check and undergo safety training to carry concealed firearms, which is currently required for those 21 and older.

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Biden’s Gun Control Isn’t Intended to Fight Crime, It’s Intended to Criminalize Gun Owners.

The Biden administration is not trying to address an issue or fix a symptom. It is targeting a phantasm. The president has yet to address fully how to combat the larger issue of illegally acquired firearms used to commit offenses.

Based on the 2016 Survey of Prison Inmates, the Justice Department reported in 2019 that “among prisoners who possessed a gun during their offense, 90% did not obtain it from a retail source.” Read that again. Among those individuals arrested, convicted, and sentenced, 90% of the firearms used in gun-related crimes did not come from legal sources, which include gun shows.

Astoundingly, only 0.8% of prisoners who had a firearm during their offense legally “obtained it at a gun show.” So, less than 1% of all firearms used in gun-related offenses came from gun shows. This is fascinating, seeing that the current administration and congressional majority would have us believe the “gun show loophole” is one area where the plague of gun violence is spawning from and it is just “common sense” to address it. But yet again, the facts show this is an illusion.

What is not an illusion is this: If the Biden administration successfully shoves firearm regulation through Congress or enables it through executive action, Biden will be solely responsible for criminalizing the estimated 72 million people who legally own firearms, as if our prison and legal system weren’t overburdened enough. So much for common sense.

“Show me the man (business) and I’ll find you the crime” is a quote from a Russian communist, and is not how the justice system is supposed to operate in the U.S.

Anti-Gun Activists Salivating Over NJ’s Investigation Of Smith & Wesson

We’ve previously discussed the fishing expedition currently underway by New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal against American gunmaker Smith & Wesson, in which the AG is trying to get his hands on decades’ worth of internal marketing documents. Grewal hasn’t officially accused the company of any wrongdoing; rather, he wants to peruse those documents in the hopes of finding something that he can portray as a violation of the state’s laws against fraudulent advertising.

It’s a gross abuse of power, so of course gun control advocates love the idea. The New York Times’ Aaron Ross Sorkin has even penned a love letter of sorts to Grewal, expressing his full support for the witch hunt.

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BLUF:
Blumenthal commented on the legislation, saying, “The American people are responding to a political movement that has resulted from Parkland, Sandy Hook, Las Vegas — the shorthand of tragedies that have caused this political movement to be a force that has met this moment of reckoning.”

Ironically, universal background checks would not have stopped any of the three mass shootings mentioned by Blumenthal. That is because in two of them–Parkland and Las Vegas–the attackers passed background checks for guns. In the third, Sandy Hook, the attacker stole his gun, so no amount of point-of-sale background checks would have mattered.

OK, so Blumenthal merely reconfirms he’s a stupid liar.
Nothing unusual for a demoncrap.

Democrat Chris Murphy Introduces Universal Background Check Bill

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) introduced universal background check legislation to expand retail point-of-sale background checks to private sales as well.

On February 14, 2021, Biden urged legislators to put forward universal background check legislation and on February 18, 2021, Breitbart News noted Murphy was expected to do it.

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