Category: RKBA

How to Fix Damage Done to 2nd Amendment by Joe Biden

The Biden-Harris administration has done more harm to the Second Amendment than all previous administrations combined. Biden and his unelected, behind-the-scenes shot-callers have been methodical in their multifaceted war on our civil rights.

The next administration — if it’s one that actually respects the law and its citizens — will have a lot of work to do to restore the Second Amendment to what the Framers had in mind. It will be a daunting task. The Biden-Harris administration has hammered law-abiding Americans with dozens of infringements — aided and abetting by the legacy media and a variety of anti-civil rights groups, some of which received taxpayer dollars.

What follows is a list of suggestions for how to restore our civil rights. The list is neither complete nor comprehensive. It’s more of a starting point and, unlike the Constitution, a living document. It includes actions that can be taken immediately and long-term goals that may require Congressional support.

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Side bar news flash, all firearms can be used to inflict mortal wounds.

Sugarmann Still Twisting the Narrative as Anti-Gun Groups Attack Ruger

As Second Amendment supporters, we may not have heard it all, but we sure have heard a lot. And by what I’m speaking about is the bovine excrement served as rhetoric from the anti-civil liberties camp. Josh Sugarmann is about as deceptive as they come concerning verbiage used to damage the Second Amendment. Sugarmann is the force behind so-called “assault weapons,” noting an ignorant public won’t be able to discern the difference between semi-automatic firearms and fully-automatic firearms. Recently Sugarmann went on a deceptive tear against Ruger, and the other anti-civil liberty vultures followed suit – or perhaps coordinated.

Two weeks ago in Lewiston, Maine, we saw once again the horrific price our nation pays as the gun industry relentlessly innovates for lethality—and mass shooters repeatedly use military-bred semiautomatic assault weapons for the exact purpose for which they were designed.

Soon after this most recent attack, the VPC released a 13-page backgrounder on the Ruger assault rifle reportedly used in the shooting, which one gun magazine describes as “easy to carry, fast to the shoulder, and packing the punch of an old school .30-caliber battle rifle.”

The report’s release is just one way in which the VPC continues to focus attention on America’s unregulated gun industry and works to hold it accountable for the deaths and injuries that result from its products.

At the same time, nearly 134 Americans die each day in gun suicides, homicides, and unintentional deaths.

As illustrated above, Sugarmann continues to use the term he coined, “assault weapons” pairing the descriptor with the modifier “military-bred” – whatever that is. The 13 page “backgrounder” referenced is worth a gander if you have the stomach for garbage. The report lists alleged mass shootings that were conducted with Ruger manufactured firearms.

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BLUF
Post-Bruen, just as what happened after Heller, many federal courts are trying to stymie the obvious results of the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decisions. A continued effort by Second Amendment advocates will be required to ensure proper enforcement of these landmark rulings.

Seventh Circuit Strains to Uphold Illinois’ Gun and Magazine Ban

At this point, gun owners and other productive Americans don’t anticipate much good news out of Chicago. On November 3, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit lived up to those expectations when it upheld Illinois’ ban on commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms in Herrera v. Raoul.

In early 2023, Illinois enacted the ill-titled Protect Illinois Communities Act. That legislation, among its numerous anti-gun provisions, prohibits commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms such as the AR-15 and ammunition magazines with a capacity greater than 10 rounds. Current owners of prohibited guns are only permitted to retain their property if they register their firearms with the government. The plaintiffs in the present case challenged Illinois’ statute on Second Amendment grounds.

This may have seemed like an open-and-shut case to some who follow Second Amendment jurisprudence.

In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects ownership of arms “in common use” for lawful purposes. In case there was any confusion about what “arms” that might entail, Heller decision author Justice Antonin Scalia cleared that up in 2015 when he signed onto a dissent from the denial of certiorari in Friedman v. Highland Park. In the dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas explained,

Roughly five million Americans own AR-style semiautomatic rifles. The overwhelming majority of citizens who own and use such rifles do so for lawful purposes, including self-defense and target shooting. Under our precedents, that is all that is needed for citizens to have a right under the Second Amendment to keep such weapons.

Commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms have only become more common since Heller and the Highland Park case. In 2022, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the firearm industry trade association) estimated that since 1990 more than 24 million modern sporting rifles (their term for commonly-owned semi-automatic rifles) have entered circulation in the U.S. A 2023 Washington Post poll found that “6 percent of Americans own an AR-15, about 1 in 20.” Given compelling research finding that polling systematically undercounts the number of gun owners in the U.S., that number may be far higher.

The standard capacity firearm magazines Illinois prohibits are not just common, but ubiquitous. Many of the most popular handguns and rifles in America are designed to use magazines with a capacity greater than 10 rounds. Americans own hundreds of millions of firearm magazines with a capacity greater than ten rounds.

If Heller weren’t enough, in 2022 the U.S. Supreme Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion made clear that in order for a firearm regulation to pass constitutional muster it must fit within the text, history, and tradition of the Second Amendment right. As the dissent in the present case noted, “’in common use’ is a sufficient condition for finding arms protected under the history and tradition test in Bruen.” However, for a firearm restriction to be permissible it must meet that further burden.

Specifically, the Bruen opinion explained,

[w]hen the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s “unqualified command.”

Given that the concept of an “assault weapons” ban targeting semi-automatic long guns came about in the 1980s only after gun control advocates failed to ban their preferred target (handguns), such prohibitions have no place in the American tradition.

To uphold the Illinois ban, the Seventh Circuit set about contending that the AR-15 falls outside the definition of “bearable arms” discussed and protected in Heller. According to the Judge Diane Wood,

the definition of “bearable Arms” extends only to weapons in common use for a lawful purpose. That lawful purpose, as we have said several times, is at its core the right to individual self-defense.

Wood contended that firearms that are prominent in military purposes fall outside this definition and are therefore not arms covered by the Second Amendment. Wood then claimed that the AR-15, despite its solely semi-automatic function, resembles the fully-automatic military M16 sufficiently for it to also fall outside the Second Amendment’s protection.

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A Well-Outfitted Militia: German Translation of the Second Amendment Offers Insight

There’s a perennial debate in gun politics in the United States. The gun control side makes various specious arguments claiming that the Second Amendment protects muskets and not modern arms, that the right to keep and bear arms belongs to a select militia like the National Guard, not We the People, and that “well-regulated” authorizes the de facto destruction of our rights via regulation.

Those of us who have studied the copious scholarly research on the text and history of the Second Amendment know that those arguments are bunk. We know that the right to keep and bear arms is not dependent on militia service. We know that the right extends to modern arms, much like the First Amendment is applicable to modern forms of communication. We know that “well-regulated” means in proper working order, not choking off that right while pretending to nurture it.

To further support the originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment, there’s insight offered from an uncommon source: the re-translation into English of founding era documents originally translated into German. The following is the abstract from an academic paper published in the American Journal of Legal History:

A Well-Outfitted Militia: German–American Translations of the Second Amendment and Original Public Meaning
By Brandon Kinney

This article seeks to uncover the original public meaning of the Second Amendment by scrutinizing unusual and previously unexamined sources: German–American translations of the Bill of Rights during the Founding Era. Translations offer a unique perspective of political culture, because they served as thoughtful analysis and contextual commentary on the source text.

Using six German–American translations in the Founding Era, this article argues that the public understanding of the Second Amendment during the Founding Era was one that recognized the individual right to own firearms for individual use unconnected to militia service as well as a constitutional endorsement of an armed population as the best bulwark to preserve the liberty of the national people.

Though the exact text of the translations differ across publishers and states, they retain thematic and syntactic similarities that suggest a public consensus over the meaning of the text. The notion that the Second Amendment protects an individual right rather than a collective one is borne out by additional translations well into the mid-nineteenth century.

Printers adjusted their translations of the amendment after the militia as a military institution had fallen into disuse but preserved or strengthened the clause protecting the individual right to arms rather than letting it ‘fall silent’.

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There’s a Federal court case in Texas where a man filed a Form1 to make a MG and ATF (of course) denied it. This keeps up and SCOTUS just may get involved, and I’m not the only one thinking that, at the very least, the 1986 ban on new ‘transferable’ guns may get the axe under the “Bruen test” .

Attorney with local ties takes gun rights case to federal appeals court

An attorney and Nixa resident with ties to the area has a case related to gun rights making its way through the federal appeals court system after it was rejected by the U.S. District Court, Western District of Missouri, headquartered in Springfield.

The case has been appealed and will now move to the Eighth District Circuit Court of Appeals, primarily based in St. Louis.

Mark Blount, representing himself, is arguing against the National Firearms Act prohibition on possession of ordinary military weapons manufactured after 1986, with the defendants listed as the United States of America; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF); Merrick Garland acting as Attorney General of the United States; and Bernard G. Hansen, acting as Special Agent in Charge of the ATF Kansas City Field Division.

The case background describes Blount’s complaint regarding the National Firearms Act, the Gun Control Act and the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986, all considered by Blount as unconstitutional, based on his argument the laws collectively infringe upon and deprive him of “ancient, inalienable, private, individual, absolute, ancestral sovereign common law right to keep and bear arms, retained by ancestors, the Founders of this country, and enumerated in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, by prohibiting Plaintiff from possessing machine guns of all descriptions manufactured after 1986.”

Blount specifically complains his constitutional rights are being infringed upon because, according to court documents, he “plans on purchasing an M-16 rifle, M-4 rifle, Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), or other machine gun which comprises the standard issue equipment of a service member in the United States military, manufactured after 1987, to wit, an ordinary military weapon, or converting the AR-15 rifles that he already lawfully possesses to automatic weapons,” and the acts criminalize his “planned course of conduct.”

The case was dismissed by the District Court, in part, on the grounds that Blount’s argument that his rights were being infringed upon was based on a “conjectural or hypothetical interest” rather than an “invasion of a legally protected interest that is concrete and particularized and actual or imminent.”

In other words, it was rejected on the grounds his argument was based on an illegal act he planned on committing rather than the real possibility of prosecution after committing it, and that he failed “to allege anything beyond a speculative fear of prosecution.”

While the judgment didn’t address Blount’s argument of those laws as unconstitutional, he outlined it in an eight-page document sent to the Quill. In general, he says, the right to bear arms is a constitutional right that has been passed down from the founding fathers, and he describes it, in part, as a fundamental right “upon which rights every other right is based, which rights we had inherited as the lineal, legal, and bloodline descendants of the ancestral class of rights-holders, free Englishmen.”

Blount is a Duke University School of Law graduate. He is married to Ashley Huddleston-Blount, whose family is from West Plains. Huddleston-Blount’s family is from West Plains, and her grandparents owned a small cattle farm in Oregon County and were known throughout the area. She is descended from the Huddlestons who were in the West Plains area as early as the start of the 1820s.

Of Course Gun-Control Fails in Practice, but Does it Work in Theory?

The murderer who attacked children in a Nashville Christian school wrote a diary. Parts of it were published and then taken down. This murderer hoped that she was the only one with a gun and that her victims were unprotected. Many people want the same thing.

In theory, disarming honest citizens makes your country safer. Last month, Israelis again confirmed that gun-control is a failure. Gun-prohibition assumes that murderers and terrorists will obey the law, that they will only buy a firearm through legal channels. In practice, disarming your neighbors gives you all the vulnerability of disarmed victims with none of the benefits of actually disarming murderers. Despite those repeated failures both in the US and abroad, anti-rights politicians want ordinary citizens disarmed. So do academics in both the US and in Israel.

Palestinians killed about 1,200 Israelis during their attack on October 7th. That would be proportional in size to Mexican drug gangs entering the US and murdering everyone in Galveston, Texas. The Palestinian attackers deliberately targeted schools and youth centers.

The real and undeniable advantage of armed citizens is that they are there when the attack happens. They can respond immediately. They also have local knowledge of who the innocent victims are and who are the bad guys that don’t belong. In practice, a government response that takes hours to protect unarmed victims is a unilateral surrender to murderers and terrorists.

Israel asked to import 24 thousand rifles from the United States. Biden said no precisely because some of those rifles might end up in the hands of Israeli civilians. We wouldn’t want civilians to be able to stop terrorists, now would we. Biden also stopped the export of all US civilian firearms for 90 days. I suspect that the Israelis forgot to include another “10-percent for the big guy.”

Please note that this is the same Biden administration that abandoned 83-billion dollars of military equipment in Afghanistan. I’d bet that some of that equipment is now in the hands of Hamas terrorists who are fighting Israel.

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The Gun Joe Biden Doesn’t Want You To Have Just Protected His Own Granddaughter

Secret Service reportedly opened fire Sunday night on three suspects attempting to break into an unmarked government vehicle parked in front of the Georgetown home of Naomi Biden, President Joe Biden’s granddaughter. Reports allege that the three offenders fled the scene after the gunfire started.

These types of scenarios are exactly why Americans advocate for the Second Amendment, but unfortunately, not all citizens have the same protection the Biden family is afforded.

Residents of Washington, D.C., are forced to navigate an onslaught of regulation and red tape before they can use firearms for self-preservation. According to D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, residents have the “authority to carry firearm[s]” only in “certain places and for certain purposes.” Concealed carry requires a variety of applications and training, while “open carry is prohibited.”

MPDC / DC POLICE DEPARTMENT WEBSITE

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State Rep. Dan Caulkins files petition to U.S. Supreme to review Assault Weapons Ban decision

DECATUR, Ill. (WRSP) — State Representative Dan Caulkins (R-Decatur) has petitioned the Supreme Court of the United States to review the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision on Illinois’ weapons ban law on due process, equal protection, and Second Amendment grounds.

Caulkins believes the issue is the denial of due process under the 14th Amendment arising from Justices Elizabeth Rochford and Mary Kay O’Brien participating in the case despite overwhelming reasons they should have recused themselves.

He feels that both justices received disproportionate contributions from the leaders of the co-equal branches of government in the aggregate sum of more than $2.5 million calling into question their impartiality and independence.

He says that both justices received the endorsement of G-PAC, which states: “Each endorsed candidate supports our #1 legislative priority when the General Assembly is called into session: banning assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.”

Both Justice Rochford and O’Brien received disproportionate campaign contributions, and both made a commitment to support the legislative policy of banning assault weapons,” Caulkins said. “Additionally, the donations to these justices came from Gov. JB Pritzker and House Speaker Chris Welch which calls into question the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers.

Given the size of the campaign contributions and who gave the contributions, there not only is a question of fairness and impartiality, there also is a question of the independence of the Justices which calls into question the validity of the state court decision.

Caulkins said the due process under the 14th Amendment argument calls into question the fairness of the proceedings at the Illinois Supreme Court, but the petition also asks for a review of the substance of the case which centers on the three readings requirement in the Illinois Constitution, the Second Amendment, and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The petition states:

There exists no rational basis to criminalize one person indistinguishable in any manner based on conduct from another immunized from the criminal liability or to speculate that the prohibited present a greater risk for mass shootings than the grandfathered based on the date an assault weapon was acquired.

The grandfathered who are immunized from criminal liability for possession have no greater training than the prohibited merely because the grandfathered already possess an assault weapon. Or, if the grandfathered are presumed to be safe (lawful) to possess assault weapons by mere possession, then the prohibited would satisfy the same safety presumption if allowed to acquire and possess.

The fortuity of time of acquisition bears no connection to safety or danger. The resulting arbitrary classification on the face of the Assault Weapons Partial Ban fails all levels of scrutiny test and should be invalidated on this additional basis.

This petition is about the thousands of plaintiffs who joined my lawsuit and were denied a fair proceeding at the Illinois State Supreme Court,” Caulkins said. “The Illinois Supreme Court does not have an objective standard for recusals. The Court relies on individual justices to determine if there is a conflict. The end result is an unfair process that leads to biased outcomes. We are asking the U.S. Supreme to review this case based on the lack of fairness as well as the merits of our arguments against the weapons ban law.

And on the other hand, there’s a subset of people who understand that when SCOTUS restores fundamental rights as they should be, they follow right along, like they should.
Now, I don’t advise cheating Uncle, or driving while intoxicated, but goobermint needs to stop with restricting rights by any piddly means it can devise.

Judge Nixes Lifetime Gun Ban for Non-Violent Misdemeanor Offense

In a case very reminiscent of Range v. Garland, in which the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Bryan Range’s conviction for lying about his income on a food stamp application decades ago should not have resulted in a lifetime prohibition on keeping or bearing arms, a federal judge in Pennsylvania has ruled that a man’s 2005 DUI arrest and conviction on misdemeanor charges cannot disqualify him from exercising his Second Amendment rights.

Though Edward Williams was convicted of a misdemeanor offense, it was also a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Williams didn’t serve any time behind bars, however. Instead, he was sentenced to 90 days of house arrest and ordered to receive treatment for drug and alcohol abuse. Since the potential sentence was more than a year in prison, however, the misdemeanor conviction meant that Williams was considered a prohibited person going forward, and he was no longer allowed to possess or purchase a firearm.

Williams first tried challenging the statute in question back in 2017 and was denied, but applied for a re-hearing after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Bruen last year. This time around, in a case argued by 2A attorney Joshua Prince and supported by the Firearms Policy Coalition,  U.S. District Judge John M. Younge applied the Court’s text, history, and tradition test to the Williams case, as well as the Third Circuit’s decision in Range v. Garland, and found that Williams cannot be denied access to his right to keep and bear arms as a result of a non-violent misdemeanor conviction, even if it was punishable by years behind bars.

The Government has not met its burden in proving that the prohibition on Plaintiff’s possession of a firearm due to his DUI conviction is consistent with historical firearms regulations.

Finding a historical tradition of similar firearms regulations “requires that the government identify a well-established and representative historical analogue, not a historical twin.”

A modern regulation that would not have been contemplated during the Founding Era can be found relevantly similar to then-existing regulations by considering “how and why the regulations burden a law-abiding citizen’s right to armed self-defense.

That federal law has, over the past century, allowed for the disarmament of certain types of convicted criminals does not satisfy the constitutional issues raised by applying Section 922(g)(1) to all convictions punishable by more than a year of imprisonment.

Instead, the Court must consider more longstanding limitations on firearm possession to “demarcat[e] the scope of [the] constitutional right.”

The historical firearms regulations provided by the Government are not sufficiently analogous to the case considered here to satisfy its burden.

Younge noted that while he remains “quite concerned about the prospect of granting access to firearms to persons who have demonstrably abused alcohol”, he remains unconvinced that “the general dangerousness of drunk driving and of combining firearm use and alcohol consumption establishes that DUIs must therefore be considered sufficiently analogous to historical examples of ‘dangerous’ conduct that have previously served as grounds for disarmament.”

Younge acknowledged the government’s citing of laws that prohibited the carrying of firearms while intoxicated, but argued that none of those regulations “allude to disarmament lasting beyond the individual’s state of intoxication, and none provided for permanent disarmament, as Section 922(g)(1) does.”

I agree with Younge that drunk driving is a serious concern, and not something that should be easily dismissed, but the fact is that Williams wasn’t barred forevermore from getting behind the wheel of a car because of his misdemeanor conviction. He can obtain a driver’s license and purchase a vehicle despite his DUI conviction that’s now nearly 20 years old, but he can’t legally purchase or possess a firearm. That’s a punishment that doesn’t fit the crime, as far as I’m concerned.

I’m sure the DOJ will appeal this case to the Third Circuit, but given their decision in Range it’s unlikely that Merrick Garland is going to get the response he’s looking for from the appellate court. By the time Williams v. Garland gets to SCOTUS the justices will have had a chance to weigh in on Bryan Range’s case, and if the Court does adopt a “dangerousness” standard for depriving individuals of their Second Amendment rights in Rahimi, then both Range and Williams have an excellent chance of having the lower court decisions in their favor approved by a majority of Supreme Court justices as well.

There’s a subset of people in the U.S. who hate the idea of RKBA and the Supreme Court’s rulings and will do anything possible to sabotage them

Federal Judge Declares No Right to Acquire a Gun

If we possess a right to keep and bear firearms, it stands to reason that we must also have the right to acquire one, but according to a federal judge in Colorado no such right exists.

U.S. District Judge John L. Kane, an 86-year-old appointee of Jimmy Carter back in 1977, made the eyebrow-raising decision in a case known as Rocky Mountain Gun Owners v. Polis, which challenges Colorado’s newly-enacted three-day waiting period on all gun sales. Kane denied the group’s request for an injunction that would have halted enforcement of the waiting period while the litigation continues, ruling the plain text of the Second Amendment only covers the right to keep and bear a firearm, not to purchase or acquire one for lawful purposes.

Plaintiffs contend that the words “keep” and “bear” in the Second Amendment are implicated by the waiting period required by the Act. In Heller, the Supreme Court examined the “normal meaning” of those words at the time of the Nation’s founding, reviewing definitions from contemporaneous dictionaries. As the Court explained, the 1773 edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language “defined ‘keep’ as, most relevantly, ‘[t]o retain; not to lose,’ and ‘[t]o have in custody.’”.

 The Court then turned to the word “bear” and determined that it means to “carry.” The Court clarified that, when “bear” is “used with ‘arms,’ however, the term has a meaning that refers to carrying for a particular purpose—confrontation.” So, putting all the pieces together, the Court found that the text of the Second Amendment “guarantee[s] the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.”

From this reading of the plain text, it is clear the relevant conduct impacted by the waiting period—the receipt of a paid-for firearm without delay—is not covered. Still, Plaintiffs attempt to equate the words “obtain” and “possess.” But these terms are not equivalent. To “keep,” under the definitions provided in Heller, meant to retain an object one already possessed. It did not mean to receive a newly paid-for item, and it certainly did not mean to receive that item without delay. Likewise, “hav[ing] weapons” indicates the weapons are already in one’s possession, not that one is receiving them.

So you have the right to possess a firearm but not the right to obtain one? Kane’s reasoning would leave the door open for all kinds of restrictions on the acquisition of arms. Why not a six-month waiting period? How about a $500 administrative fee for every firearm purchase, or mandating purchasers come up with a half dozen character references before a gun can be sold. Taken to its extreme, Kane’s position would leave open the possibility of a complete and total ban on gun sales. It’s ridiculous to separate the right to obtain a firearm with the right to keep and bear it, but that’s exactly what the judge did here.

Kane went on to say that even if commercial sales of firearms are protected by the Second Amendment’s language, Colorado’s waiting period is likely to withstand court scrutiny because there were no “Guns-R-Us” outlets at the time the Second Amendment was ratified. It could take days, weeks, or even months for a would-be gun owner to acquire a firearm while they waited for a shipment of muskets to be delivered to their nearest city or town. Of course, there was no law requiring people to wait before purchasing a firearm if one was readily available, nor were there any prohibitions on private transfers of arms. If your neighbor had a fowling piece that you wanted to purchase, you could walk or ride to his farm and make a trade or a cash transaction without the possibility of punishment from the state.

Further, says Kane, though there aren’t any statutes in the historical record that mirror Colorado’s modern waiting period, there are some old laws that he believes are a close enough analogue to allow the state’s three-day waiting period to pass muster; laws forbidding the carrying of firearms while intoxicated.

Perhaps the state could impose a more narrowly tailored requirement, but that is not the inquiry here. The intoxication laws prevented all individuals from becoming intoxicated and engaging in the prohibited conduct. They did not apply only to those people who would have certainly used a firearm irresponsibly while intoxicated. Despite Plaintiffs’ arguments, the “how” and the “why” of the intoxication laws and the Waiting-Period Act are sufficiently similar to demonstrate that the Act is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The purpose of the waiting period, according to Colorado’s legislature, is to “help prevent impulsive acts of firearm violence, including homicides and suicides.” According to Kane, because the ostensible reason for the waiting period is similar to the rationale on historical prohibitions against carrying while under the influence, that’s enough to make the two laws analogous. Of course, under that theory, virtually any gun control measure could be deemed a part of the historical tradition, so long as lawmakers contend that its purpose is to prevent “impulsive” acts of gun violence.

If the majority in Bruen believed that opinion would put a stop to the Second Amendment shenanigans in the lower courts, it should be clear to them by now that is most certainly not the case. We’ve seen judges declare that commonly owned arms like semi-automatic rifles are not protected by the Second Amendment, wide swathes of public spaces can be deemed “sensitive” and off-limits to lawful carry, and the right to keep and bear arms does not encompass the right to obtain one.

Each of these decisions is a gross misreading of Bruen as well as a green light for fundamental infringement on our Second Amendment rights, but until SCOTUS intervenes these abuses will continue.

Comment O’ The Day:
It’s a good way to start something they can’t win.

‘Nationwide gun emergency’ discussed by U.S. House Democrats at roundtable meeting

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Democrats held a Monday roundtable forum on changing U.S. gun laws following a recent mass shooting in Maine, where 18 people were killed. 

The top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, invited witnesses to discuss gun violence solutions, and said that the gun industry lobby, the National Rifle Association and Republicans push back against gun reform.

“We’re going to examine the nationwide gun emergency that’s taking place, the endless rounds of gun violence and massacres that are plaguing our society,” Raskin said.

Some of those witnesses included gun safety advocates, educators, survivors of gun violence and people who seek to intervene in community violence.

“There is a light at the end of the tunnel with this issue,” Democratic Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost of Florida said. “The gun lobby is more afraid, now more than ever, as they see a multiracial, multigenerational army of Americans who are not willing to relent from the demand for common sense gun reform.”

Democrats on the committee who participated in the forum included Reps. Greg Casar of Texas, Eleanor Holmes Norton of the District of Columbia and Dan Goldman of New York.

Democrats said they opted to organize the roundtable after being turned down in their request for a formal hearing to Republicans who control the chamber. “We could not convince the majority to have a hearing about the state of the nation with respect to gun violence,” Raskin said.

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Rolling Stone Blames Gun Industry For Mass Shootings – Reveals Greater Fear Of Patriot Rebellion

It’s the old leftist anti-gun standby:  Pretend as if the 2nd Amendment was drafted only to protect hunting and self defense against criminals.  Ignore the fact that the Founding Fathers explicitly created gun rights for the purpose of repelling and overthrowing a corrupt government.  Pretend as if Americans are not supposed to have access to military grade weapons when that is exactly what the 2nd Amendment was enshrined to protect.

Under the Constitution, the American militia was intended to act as the defense force for the nation.  And, the militia was made up of every able bodied male citizen.  The militia was the military (in a sense), and the militia had access to all the weapons needed to fulfill their role.  This included repeating rifles (automatic rifles), cannons, explosives and even naval ships in private hands.  The Founders never intended for a standing military to exist, nor did they ever intend for a standing military to act as a proxy in place of an armed citizenry.

As James Madison noted:

“Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.”    
– James Madison, January 29, 1788, Federalist No. 46     

And, as George Mason asserted:

“I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers.”
– George Mason, June 4, 1788, Address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention

It should be treated as a revealing condition that the establishment and corporate media consistently attack the civilian ownership of guns which they argue are “made for war.”  These guns which they refer to as “assault rifles” (because it sounds scary) are used in less than 3% of all gun crimes in the US.  They are also a small percentage of overall mass shootings in the US, yet they garner almost 100% of the anti-gun lobby’s attention.

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Next Gun Control Fight Likely to Target Ammo

Over the weekend the New York Times ran a lengthy story on the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant and its role in producing ammunition for the civilian market in addition to the U.S. military. The Times report explicitly tied ammo produced at Lake City to mass shootings, with the paper reporting that Lake City ammunition has been “bought by murderers, antigovernment groups, and others.”

Not just to complain about, but potentially to legislate or regulate as well. I’ve been covering 2A issues long enough to recognize the pattern here; a major media outlet “uncovers” something it portrays as a problem, and then anti-gun politicians and gun control groups start demanding action be taken. The New York Times report itself doesn’t contain too many comments from anti-2A activists, but it doesn’t need to. That’s what follow up stories are for. Instead, the purpose of the initial report is to establish some reason to be concerned; in this case, the presence of Lake City-produced ammunition turning up at crime scenes.

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‘Like A Machine Gun’ Isn’t A Machine Gun

Ever since Las Vegas, bump stocks have been horrifically demonized. Granted, the Las Vegas shooting was horrific enough that it shouldn’t surprise us that it did.

Soon after, the ATF reversed their decision that they weren’t machine guns.

That reversal came at the direction of then President Donald Trump. He did that, at least in part, to cut the legs out of an effort in Congress that would have gone a lot further than bump stocks and binary triggers. It could have screwed up any trigger modifications for any reason.

Regardless of the reason, though, the ATF actually overstepped their authority, so it’s not surprising that it triggered a lawsuit.

Now, it’s headed to the Supreme Court and Elie Mystal at The Nation has thoughts.

On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear another gun case. That alone should make people hide under their desks at school, because at this point in our bloody republic, every time the Supreme Court decides to entertain the gun lobby, more children are likely to die.

The case involves a challenge to the federal ban on “bump stocks.” Bump stocks are a modification that can be attached to semiautomatic rifles to make them perform as fully automatic weapons. A shooter pulls the trigger to fire the weapon, and the bump stock uses the recoil from that action to pull the trigger again and again, resulting in a near continuous rate of fire, just like a machine gun.

The issue is “like a machine gun” and “machine gun” isn’t the same thing in the least. Especially not in the eyes of the law.

The ATF doesn’t have broad authority to just create law. It has the power to interpret laws passed by Congress, but it can’t just make up law as it goes.

Otherwise, ATF Director Steve Dettelbach could just mandate the assault weapon ban he’s said he wanted.

He can’t do that because there’s nothing in the law that allows for that.

What the ATF did with bump stocks, though, is not much different from a mandated assault weapon ban because the justification used doesn’t actually fit with bump stocks.

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Louisiana to Enact Constitutional Carry in 2024?

Louisiana is likely to pass a Constitutional Carry bill and enact it into law in 2024. The particulars of the bill are unknown. The 56th Governor of Louisiana is John Bel Edwards. Edwards vetoed a constitutional carry bill in June of 2021.

The next governor of Louisiana was elected on October 14, 2023. Louisiana has an unusual primary election, where all candidates are on the ballot. If one candidate obtains more than 50% of the vote in the primary, they are elected governor. On October 14, Jeff Landry (R) won the primary with 51.6% of the vote. Landry is expected to take office on January 8, 2024.

A constitutional or permitless carry bill was passed overwhelmingly in 2021. The vote was 72 to 28 in the House. A similar bill in the Senate passed 27 to 11. There were enough votes to override a veto, but the Louisiana Governor is very powerful. Governor John Bel Edwards had enough clout to veto the bill and make it stick.

Governor-elect Jeff Landry said, before the October election, he would see constitutional carry passed while he is in office.

Representative Danny McCormick has made Constitutional Carry his signature issue. In his 2023 race, he raffled off a Sig P365 9mm pistol as part of his campaign. From shreveporttimes.com:

His said his bill would “restore Second Amendment rights in Louisiana.”

“There’s nothing more unjust than to make citizens pay for a right they already have,” McCormick repeated this week.

McCormick said he has raffled off guns in the past, each time raising thousands of dollars.

The tickets are $10 for a $699.99 Sig P365 Macro pistol that is advertised as “what a concealed carry pistol should be.”

Supporters of McCormick’s legislation refer to it as “constitutional carry” because they believe the Second Amendment already grants that right.

“With your help we will make Constitutional Carry the Law in 2024,” McCormick said in his email to supporters.

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California-Style Gun Control: Does Not Work as Advertised

California has a well-earned reputation as one of the most anti-gun jurisdictions in the United States, with its state and local codes crammed with virtually every cockamamie scheme to suppress firearm ownership conceived within the last 50 years. The state’s current governor, Gavin Newsom, is not only determined to cement this reputation statewide, he’s trying to bring California-style gun control to the country at large by promoting an ill-conceived amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would impose draconian gun control coast to coast. But actual data shows California holds another dubious distinction that puts a lie to the efficacy of its highly-touted “gun safety laws”:

…it is the state with the highest number of mass murders committed with firearms.

Yet highly-publicized mass shootings play an outsized role in influencing gun control policy in the U.S. because they create the (grossly distorted and exaggerated) impression that ordinary, law-abiding people are at a high risk of being killed with a firearm at the places where they learn, work, and play. They also receive breathless media coverage that seeks to exploit the public’s grief, fear, and outrage over these events to give impetus to hastily-pushed gun control, before details inevitably emerge that show these measures would have been useless in stopping the crime. Where this manipulation prevails, however, it results in overreaching policies that intrude on Second Amendment rights with virtually no effect on either “mass shootings” or the more anonymous forms of firearm-related deaths.

California is a case in point, as revealed by data compiled on the website Statista.com.

The Statista survey looked at data between 1982 and October 2023 concerning episodes of a single attack with a firearm in a public place that resulted in four or more fatalities between 1982 and 2012 or in three fatalities from 2013 onward (definitions that track a database compiled by MotherJones.com).

Those figures show that California had by far the most such incidents during the survey period, at 26.

This is as much as the combined amount of the next two states with the highest totals, Florida and Texas. It is also more than the combined total of the 20 states with the lowest frequency of such events (excluding states with no such incidents at all).

It is true that California is the most populous (38.9 million) of the U.S. states, so it is not necessarily the deadliest state for mass shootings per capita. But the strongly pro-gun states of Florida (22.6 million) and Texas (30+ million) have a combined population that exceeds that of California by some 13.7 million people. Thus, whatever California thinks it is doing with regard to countering mass public murder committed with firearms, it is working no better at a population level than what is occurring in two of the most gun-friendly states of the Union.

None of this is to diminish the fact that any firearm-related murder is a terrible event, no matter where or how it is committed.

But along with gun control, Gavin Newsom also likes to promote what he insists is a “science-based” approach to “public health.” In that vein, any honest assessment of California’s notoriously strict gun control regime has to acknowledge that the numbers don’t add up to success when it comes to preventing “mass shootings.”

I think Mr Lowy has merely found a new higher paying grift with no higher management to take a cut.

Gun Control Activists Claim Second Amendment Violates Human Rights

The parents of a student killed in the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida have teamed up with Brady’s former chief litigator to file a “first-of-its-kind” complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging that “US gun policy violates basic human rights law” and deprived the Joaquin Oliver of his right to life.

Jonathan Lowy, who left Brady to start the group Global Action on Gun Violence, is spearheading the lawsuit with help from the head of George Washington University Law School’s Civil and Human Rights Clinic, and unlike most litigation involving Second Amendment issues, this one was launched with a slickly-produced ad campaign crafted by Zulu Alpha Kilo.

Lowy, you might recall, is also heading up the Mexican government’s lawsuit against most major U.S. gun manufacturers. While a U.S. District Court judge tossed out the case, the First Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments over the summer about whether or not to reinstate the suit.

In this case, Lowy and plaintiffs Manuel and Patricia Oliver, who founded the anti-gun group Change the Ref after their son was murdered, aren’t asking a U.S. court to rule that the Second Amendment is a violation of human rights. Instead, they’re taking their argument to an international body that has no real jurisdiction over the United States.

The fact that this lawsuit was launched with its own public relations campaign is telling, because the whole thing looks to be one big PR stunt. The complaint itself is a laundry list of strident anti-gun talking points, including the oft-repeated claim that there is no real right to keep and bear arms protected by the Second Amendment.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was understood for over two centuries to only concern the “well-regulated militia” which the Framers intended to protect and therefore mentioned in the text, not private gun ownership.

But in 2008 the Supreme Court of the United States created a new right to handguns for self-defense which was not mentioned by the Second Amendment’s Framers or in the text, and then the Court vastly expanded that right in 2022, requiring historical precedent for gun laws and making public safety considerations of little relevance in determining the constitutionality of gun laws.

These rulings have led courts to strike down numerous gun laws, and may constrain future regulations. The United States appears to be the only nation in the world that has chosen to put gun industry profits over public safety and gun rights over human rights.

See what I mean?

The historical evidence for an individual right to keep and bear arms is overwhelming, as the Heller opinion and a cursory knowledge of U.S. history makes clear. Lowy’s contention that the U.S. has put “gun rights over human rights” may make for a good bumper sticker slogan for gun prohibitionists, it’s another patently absurd claim. Guns don’t have rights (and honestly, I’ve never been a big fan of that phrase for that reason) but people absolutely do, including the human right of self-defense, as my colleague Tom Knighton discussed yesterday. It’s become a standard talking point on the Left that a lack of gun control is a violation of human rights, but strangely these same folks never want to talk about the slaughter of civilians in nations that have very restrictive gun control regimes, or the 20th century death toll in totalitarian nations that disarmed its citizenry.

The petition claims there are several supposed “major flaws in U.S. gun law”, including (but certainly not limited to) a lack of an  “assault weapons” ban, no “investigation or vetting of purchasers” beyond background checks; no “universal” background checks for sales by private citizens; no federal “licensing, registration or vetting for firearm purchases”, “no limits whatsoever on how many guns a civilian may purchase, either in one transaction or in any period of time”, and the protections from civil liability found in the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

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Gun rights groups to seek Supreme Court ruling on assault weapons

Gun rights advocacy groups say they intend to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the state’s assault weapons ban after a federal appeals court on Friday refused to block enforcement of the law.

In a statement Saturday, the Illinois State Rifle Association said it was not surprised by the 7th Circuit panel’s 2-1 decision, which said plaintiffs in the consolidated cases had not met their burden to show they were likely to win in a constitutional challenge to the law.

“It has always been and is our intent to take our case to the U.S. Supreme Court where we believe we can get a favorable ruling for law-abiding gun owners in Illinois,” the organization said. “We will continue to stand up for the Second amendment and Illinois law-abiding gun owners and against our anti-gun Governor Pritzker and General Assembly.”

In addition, the National Foundation for Gun Rights – which provided attorneys involved in the consolidated case – said it will appeal as well.

“Semi-auto bans like Illinois’ strike right at the heart of the Second Amendment and are completely inconsistent with multiple Supreme Court precedents,” the organization said in a statement. “We will keep fighting and are preparing to appeal this outrageous ruling.”

The 7th Circuit’s decision on Friday left in place the state’s assault weapons ban as well as local bans enacted by Cook County and the cities of Chicago and Naperville.

The state of Illinois and the city of Naperville both enacted their bans in response to a mass shooting last year at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park that left seven people dead and dozens more injured or traumatized.

Authorities say the alleged shooter in that incident used a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 semiautomatic rifle and carried three 30-round magazines. That type of gun and magazine are now banned under the state’s assault weapons law.

The majority opinion from the 7th Circuit focused on whether that type of weapon, or others like it, were protected under the Second Amendment.

That opinion, written by Judge Diane Wood and cosigned by Judge Frank Easterbrook, drew a distinction between the types of “bearable” arms commonly used for self-defense and the type of weapons typically reserved only for military uses.

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