Category: RKBA

Jewish Americans Arm Themselves in Wake of Israeli Horror

“There’s another order coming from Hamas to kill the Jews. I happen to be Jewish, and I don’t want to be killed.”

That’s the succinct explanation Joshua, a doctor in Los Angeles, gave for why he decided to buy his first gun this week. He’s far from alone. New owners and trainers alike described scenes of gun stores and safety classes full of Jewish Americans hoping to protect themselves from the kind of slaughter that played out on October 7th when Hamas terrorists streamed over the border into Israel and ruthlessly slaughtered more than 1,400 men, women, and children.

“I was at a local gun store a couple of days ago, where my wife was doing her firearms training test, and it was full,” Joshua, who–like several others who spoke to The Reload for this story–did not want his real name revealed in large part due to safety concerns, said. “There was a line outside to get in for people to do their tests, or buy firearms, or practice on the range. And I would say it was 90% Jewish people and Israelis.”

He said the motivation of those in line was clear.

“We all know what happened in Israel. It was a horrific attack on civilians by Hamas with the tally now up close to 1,500 dead,” Joshua said. “It’s the worst attack against Jews since the Holocaust. I never thought I’d say this, but it’s almost worse than the Nazis. They buried the bodies or cremated the bodies. The Nazis hid their atrocities. Hamas is live streaming their atrocities where they kill babies, shoot the elderly waiting at bus stops, rape women, and mow down young people at a music festival for peace.”

35-year-old Simon, an Israeli-American also living in Los Angeles, recoiled at the awful attacks. Then he too bought a gun.

“Watching the events unfold in Israel since October 7th has been gut-wrenching and unreal,” he told The Reload. “Unfortunately for us Jews around the world, our security situation has worsened. Now is the time to arm myself and protect my family. So, I’ve decided to purchase my first firearm and undergo firearm, general situational awareness, and home defense training.”

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Second Amendment matters in a time of crisis
The importance of good guys with guns

Hamas attacked as Israelis were wrapping up the seven-day Jewish festival of Sukkot on Oct. 7. As many as 1,200 Israelis and some Americans were murdered, thousands wounded, and hundreds more taken hostage. Hamas terrorists went into civilian areas and attacked defenseless people who were walking down the street or shopping in stores.

A Sept. 20 Jerusalem Post headline prophetically warned: “Israelis should carry guns on Yom Kippur, police say.” But as of 2022, only 148,000 Israelis carried permitted guns in public for protection — just 3% of the adult Jewish population. Twenty years earlier, more than 10% of adult Jews in Israel had permits.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid called the recent police statement dangerous. He echoed sentiments common among Democrats in the United States: “Calling the citizens of Israel to come with weapons to the synagogue on Yom Kippur is not a security policy. It is dangerous populism.”

Concealed carry is much more widespread in the United States than in Israel. In 2022, 8.5% of American adults had permits. Outside of the restrictive states of California and New York, about 10.2% of adults had permits. And these numbers don’t even account for the fact that there are now 27 constitutional carry states where it isn’t necessary to have a permit to carry.

California, with one of the lowest concealed handgun permit rates and the strictest gun control laws in the country, shouldn’t hold itself out as a model for the rest of the country to follow. The periods after 2000, 2010 and 2020 show a consistent pattern: California’s per capita rate of public shootings is always much greater than in the rest of the country.

On Sunday Oct. 8, the day after the attack, Israel radically changed its policy on who could carry guns publicly. “Today, I directed the Firearms Licensing Division to go on an emergency operation in order to allow as many citizens as possible to arm themselves. The plan will take effect within 24 hours,” Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir posted on X.

In response to terrorist attacks for decades, Israel put more police and military to protect people, but they found that no matter how much money they spent, they couldn’t cover all the possible targets.

Before Israel began letting civilians carry handguns in the 1970s, terrorists committed attacks in Israel almost entirely with machine guns. Afterward, terrorists usually used bombs.

The reason was simple: Armed citizens can quickly immobilize a gun-wielding attacker, but no one can respond to a bomber once the bomb explodes. Still, armed citizens have occasionally succeeded in preventing bombings.

Like their Israeli counterparts, American police recognize their own limitations.

“A deputy in uniform has an extremely difficult job in stopping these attacks,” said Sarasota County, Florida, Sheriff Kurt Hoffman. “These terrorists have huge strategic advantages in determining the time and place of attacks. They can wait for a deputy to leave the area or pick an undefended location. Even when police or deputies are in the right place at the right time, those in uniform who can readily identify as guards may as well be holding up neon signs saying, ‘Shoot me first.’ My deputies know that we cannot be everywhere.”

Police1, the largest private organization for law enforcement officers, surveyed its 749,000 members and found that 86% of them believed that casualties from mass public school shootings could be reduced or “avoided altogether” if citizens had carried permitted concealed handguns in public places. An incredible 94% of mass public shootings occur in places where civilians are banned from having guns.

And 77% of Police1 members supported “arming teachers and/or school administrators who volunteer to carry at their school.” No other policy to protect children and school staff received such widespread support.

When a life-threatening crisis strikes, there might not be time for police to arrive. Amid such a massive assault by Hamas, it was simply impossible for the Israeli police and military to protect all civilians.

Unfortunately, some lessons are learned the hard way. If only more Israelis had been armed at the time of the attack, more of them would be alive today.

I’m often stunned by what it takes to get some people to open their eyes and decide they need to provide for their own defense.

S. Florida Jewish Community Arming Up After Hamas Attack in Israel

The Hamas attack in Israel has set of alarms within the Jewish community in southern Florida, according to WPLG News, and many people in that community are buying guns and signing up for training courses.

Concerns may not be lessened by President Joe Biden’s trip to Israel or his planned speech to the nation Thursday evening.

The report reinforces an article in AmmoLand News, which focused on the fact that U.S. citizens might provide an obstacle to such terrorism in this country because the Second Amendment protects their right to be armed. There is no such right in Israel, and some leading advocates want gun regulations relaxed.

The Daily Caller quotes firearms retailer David Kowalsky who notes many of his new clients are “Israeli and Orthodox Jews.”

“Just wanting to be trained to protect their families and have a firearm at home or on their person,” he said. “Since last Saturday we have seen a tremendous public display of how prevalent anti-Semitism is and hate speech and how they want to rid the world of Jews.”

That appears to be true, as demonstrations around the U.S. sympathetic to Palestinians, and critical of Israeli counterattacks in Gaza, have been reported.

According to the WPLG report, “Dozens of South Florida gun shops and shooting ranges are seeing a spike in gun sales and a desire to train since Israel was ambushed by Hamas terrorists.”

Over the weekend, FBI Director Christopher Wray was “ominously warning there is a rising number of terror threats against the US — and that the biggest concern involves potential lone wolves,” according to a story in the New York Post.

WPLG quoted a Jewish woman identified as Endi Tennenhaus, who said “most of the men in her synagogue” were in the process of arming themselves.

“We said, ‘What about the women?’ We need to do the things we need to do to prepare,” Tennenhaus told a reporter. “To stay safe and to be able to use a gun, God forbid if we ever should need one.”

The report noted many Jewish women had been buying guns, as well as men, and the women were taking firearms training.

Kowalsky’s gun store is providing additional classes to meet the demand.

Florida is one of the 27 states where permitless carry is now legal. But the Jewish community appears strongly interested in the kind of training that goes beyond mere safety in the home.

In Israel, when Hamas terrorists attacked starting with a music festival—killing hundreds of people in the process—nobody was armed. In southern Florida, it is evident members of the Jewish community will not allow that to happen here.

Weapons of War: What They Are and Why We Need Them

The new gun control buzzwords being used today by the left are getting more and more creative. They have to keep coming up with new jargon and slogans to keep up their fear-mongering campaign about how guns are bad and why we must ban them. Today, however, we will discuss one such term that is both ridiculous and true at the same time: “weapons of war.”

The phrase is a relatively new one being used by the left, in fact, it’s the new favorite of high-profile Democrats like President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. They both tweet about them quite frequently in their attempts to gaslight the owners of sensible firearms, but more importantly, they use them to gin up fear from people who are already ignorant of what these guns are. Their fear-mongering campaign is quite effective too.

So what exactly are weapons of war, and why are they so scary? Why do they pose such a threat to society that we must ban them entirely? Depending on who you talk to, weapons of war can mean a lot of things, but the most infuriating part of that is the Democrats can’t define them because they know it will destroy their narrative. A weapon of war is just that, a weapon that is used in war; it’s pretty simple. But the argument gets convoluted from there because that definition applies to most of all firearms past and present. Again I ask, what is a weapon of war?

Here’s one bona fide weapon of war, an M1903 Springfield rifle. The rifle was the general issue rifle to all U.S. Soldiers and Marines during World War I and II, with total service in U.S. military usage until 1970. It is a five-round magazine-fed, bolt action rifle that is chambered in the 30-06 caliber cartridge. It isn’t a semiautomatic rifle; it doesn’t have a detachable magazine, doesn’t have a pistol grip or a flash hider on the muzzle. But it is most assuredly a weapon of war that American forces have used in at least three separate conflicts. The rifle is legal to own, with no restrictions, and is used by countless Americans for hunting, recreational shooting, and even long-range competitive shooting matches. But they won’t mention that because then it wouldn’t be scary enough.

Another example of a gun used in war is the Mossberg M500A2 12 Gauge shotgun. This weapon is used by the Marines, Army, and other branches of the military for a wide range of missions. It is a pump-action shotgun that holds between six and nine rounds depending on the configuration. Even with a pistol grip attachment on the stock or forend of the firearm, it does not make it fire any faster or make it any more deadly than it already is. The one modification that this shotgun can have is what is known as a choke, which is inserted into the muzzle and can either reduce or increase the spread of the pellets when they exit the muzzle. Once again, this shotgun, and many like it, is used by millions of Americans for home defense, property protection, hunting, recreational shooting, and more. But again, the Democrats and gun control advocates cannot use that as an example of a weapon of war because it just isn’t scary enough.

The weapons of war the Democrats want to ban are like the one I am using in the featured image of this story. It is an LWRC M6 SPR (Special Purpose Rifle), chambered in 5.56mm, and is a lightweight, air-cooled, gas-operated, magazine-fed, shoulder-fired semiautomatic rifle with a maximum effective range of approximately 800 yards. The round it fires is also about the same size as a .22 caliber bullet, one of the smallest sizes of bullets on the market. It can only be fired as fast as I can pull the trigger. It does not create a massive hole in one’s body when shot, and it most certainly does not blow organs out of the body either.

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Poll Shocker: Majority of Young People Say Guns Make Homes Safer

The Guardian is reporting what amounts to a stunning revelation of research supported by the anti-gun Joyce Foundation which says—probably to the foundation’s chagrin—an overwhelming majority of young people (76%) say gun ownership “makes a home safer.”

Anti-gunners have been insisting for years that guns in the home make families less safe.

The same 2019 study said 42 percent of boys and men in the 13-21 age group expect to own a firearm at some point, after years of efforts to convince the younger generation to avoid gun ownership. The survey results may be viewed here.

Another report, from the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL), supported by Everytown for Gun Safety and the Southern Poverty Law Center, also produced some interesting findings which included:

  • While youth think that gun violence is a problem, they think it flows from the actions of individuals, especially those they perceive as “criminal,” “irresponsible,” “mentally ill” or “bad.” These descriptions tend to be racialized and classed.
  • Youth separate legitimate and illegitimate uses of guns. “Legitimate” uses include protection (e.g., against “home invaders”), hunting and target shooting.
  • Youth perceptions of safety are also racialized, classed and shaped by ideologies surrounding geography and folk-theories about urban-rural differences.
  • Youth from rural areas perceive guns as a ‘fact of life’. Geographical regions are used as shorthand for particular community relations to guns/gun violence.
  • Young, white, cisgender boys/men are frequently introduced to gun use through gendered bonding activities like hunting with fathers, grandfathers and friends.

The Guardian report tends to negatively portray the notion of gun ownership, which perhaps unintentionally exhibits the viewpoints of people who dislike firearms ownership. The story quotes Kelly Drane, research director at the Giffords Law Center, who acknowledges, “Gun ownership has diversified dramatically.”

More women and minorities are buying guns, and according to the Guardian article—referring to the PERIL study—the reason Latinos and Asian Americans are buying firearms is because they are concerned about “the increased threat of racist extremism.”

The PERIL study also showed that about one-third of youths under age 18 “believe they are safer with guns than without them.”

“Protection” Cited As No. 1 Reason For Gun Buys, As 911 Delays Increase

Twenty-six percent of participants in a 1999 Pew Research survey who owned a gun said protection was the primary reason they exercised their Second Amendment rights. By 2013, the figure jumped to 48 percent. Results in 2017 indicated it climbed yet again, up to two-thirds, and this year’s results, released in late August, are higher—72 percent.

It’s a tidal change in attitude that began with the Y2K bug and apparently continues after the widespread violence and social unrest that plagued the COVID 19 pandemic. The dramatic increase in the time it takes first responders to arrive, regardless of where you live or affluence of the community, is one of the diving factors. Seconds count when an attacker is at the door, in your face or on a loved one.

Volume of 911 calls is a driving factor, but there’s another. Law-enforcement officers are leaving the job in record numbers and young adults, who might otherwise enroll in an academy and soon work a beat, succumb to the fashionably inaccurate perception of the profession. As a result, applicants across the nation continue to decline, and those who pass the stringent requirements don’t fill vacancies fast enough.

In April ABC News warned, “Police departments across the country are facing a ‘vicious cycle’ of retirements, resignations and fewer hires, according to policing experts, leaving the communities they protect with understaffed departments and potentially underqualified officers.”

One study found 911 response time in New Orleans nearly tripled from 2019 to 2022. The same report found New York’s figures jumped from 18 minutes to 33 minutes. For comparison, Big Apple law enforcement response time in 1999 was 10.3 minutes, according to the New York Times.

In Nashville, Tenn., Metro Police averaged 73 minutes to respond in 2022. Urgent calls are life-threatening and tracked separately when they come into emergency dispatch. According to a February report from WSMV4 TV—an NBC affiliate in Nashville, Tenn.—“…response time for emergency calls increased from 10.7 minutes to 15 minutes, in the last three years.” Four minutes, 18 seconds seems like the blink of an eye when at work, it’s eternity when a family member is attacked.

The nation’s capital isn’t immune either. WTOP News there found residents experienced an additional 90-second delay in response to Priority 1 [the most urgent] calls to 911 just in the 12 months of 2021.

The numbers make it obvious. More law-abiding citizens than before understand owning a firearm and training are the best way to survive, especially when seconds count, and police are minutes away.

All your printers are belong to us

Background checks for printer purchases

New bill intro by Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar, A-8132, Requires a criminal history background check for the purchase of a three-dimensional printer capable of creating firearms; prohibits sale to a person who would be disqualified on the basis of criminal history from being granted a license to possess a firearm.

From the bill memorandum:

Three-dimensionally printed firearms, a type of untraceable ghost gun, can be built by anyone using an $150 three-dimensional printer.

Three-dimensional printed guns are growing more prevalent each year. There were 100 taken off the streets of New York City in 2019. That number skyrocketed to 637 in 2022.

Concurrently, ghost gun shootings have risen 1,000% across the nation. Currently, three-dimensional printers allow people to make, buy, sell, and use untraceable guns without any background checks.

This bill will require a background check so that three-dimensional printed firearms do not get in the wrong hands.

The Guardian floored that Gen Z isn’t more anti-gun

As a member of Gen X, I look at the younger generation as they’re portrayed in the media and have concerns. Luckily, I know that generations aren’t monolithic. Just as the Baby Boomers weren’t universally hippies and my generation wasn’t all building dot com businesses.

With Gen Z, I expect much the same.

So what does this have to do with guns? Well, it seems The Guardian is floored that a generation that has dealt with mass shootings isn’t completely freaked out over guns.

In the US, Gen Z grew up doing active shooter drills and watching school massacres and other acts of violence unfold on TV. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that many of them have been high-profile faces in the movement for gun reform. But at the same time, research shows many young people, like those Alvarado works with, remain open to – even interested in – gun ownership. What connects those two threads, experts say, is shared trauma and exposure to violence…

While one response to that sense of dread has been to join the gun violence prevention movement, another is to embrace firearms. The 2023 Peril study showed that about one-third of youth under 18 believe they are safer with guns than without them. 39% of participants reported having easy access to a gun, and about half of those answers were from young people who purchased a firearm themselves.

In another study from 2019, 42% of boys and men ages 13-21 reported they will likely own a gun in the future, while 76% of all respondents agreed that gun ownership makes a home safer. And between 2002 and 2019, rates of gun ownership among teens rose by 41%. During the pandemic, one-third of people who purchased guns were between 18 and 29 years old.

These swings coincide with rising ownership among demographics not historically linked to firearms, like women, Latinos and Asian Americans. In the latter two groups, new gun owners say that they are motivated to carry by the increased threat of racist extremism.

“Gun ownership has diversified dramatically,” said Kelly Drane, research director at Giffords Law Center in San Francisco.

Of course, many on the anti-gun side simply cannot fathom the idea that people might actually embrace gun rights to any degree, especially in the face of threats of violence.

The thing is, though, that’s not an irrational response to trauma as many people think. It’s completely rational.

Gen Z understands that violence is an unfortunate part of our lives, which means that it’s not going to go away with platitudes and protests. Sure, we can do that, but we also need to face the fact that gun control doesn’t make criminals stop doing bad things.

If you believe someone wants to hurt you, it’s completely rational to want to be able to use violence in an effort to defend yourself.

I’m actually glad see Gen Z stand up for defending themselves.

What I’m not glad to see is the gaslighting, an attempt to pretend that it’s not that they see the world as it is and is instead a trauma response.

Rationality is traumatizing, apparently.

Less than a month later, Bearing Arms story feels far darker

I write a lot of stuff here at Bearing Arms. More than one-third of all the content on this site has my name on it, and I haven’t exactly been here from the beginning.

As a result, I often write a story, and then forget it after a week or two. It’s impossible to remember everything I wrote unless something sparks my memory and not necessarily even then. It’s a lot to remember.

Yet it’s all there in the archive, waiting to remind me.

Most of the time, that’s not newsworthy. I’ll take a look at a story I forgot about and read it, then go back to the rest of my day. Yet looking for one on the site yesterday, I came across something that, at the time, wasn’t that big of a deal. It didn’t deal with American gun control or anything that would impact us. It was a group of people voicing their support for gun control.

I’ve literally written thousands of those stories.

What makes this one weird in the here and now is just who it was arguing against guns.

If you’re a gun owner and haven’t actively done everything you could to keep that on the down low, there’s a good chance someone has referred to you as some kind of domestic terrorist. After all, some people think the very act of owning a gun is a terroristic act.

These people are demented, of course, but they exist. Let’s also not forget that the NRA was called a domestic terrorist organization despite no evidence of an act of terrorism carried out by an NRA member.

Yet Hamas is a terrorist organization, according to the US State Department. They’ve been linked to all kinds of terrorist acts over the years.

And guess where they stand on people carrying guns?

The issue was a suggestion that Jewish settlers should carry guns. Hamas called it “incitement to murder” and denounced it, apparently arguing that settlers doing so would create a danger.

Well, now we know what that danger was.

I wrote that here on Bearing Arms on September 18th, about a day or so after the initial response by Hamas.

Now, understand that what we saw wasn’t the result of a two-day planning session. It wasn’t the result of something that just cobbled together over a lunch meeting. Hamas’ attack on Israel was a well-coordinated assault that probably took months to plan.

Including the month in which Hamas told Jewish settlers that they didn’t really need guns and that saying so was “fascist.”

Here at Bearing Arms, we are one of many sites dedicated to preserving our Second Amendment rights. Israel had no such protections, either from their constitution or sites like ours or our friends across the internet. They were relatively disarmed, even with calls to carry guns.

And Hamas capitalized on it.

It’s kind of hard not to now wonder how many of the groups that are calling for gun control here in the US have similar designs. Hamas knew what it was planning even as it denounced calls for settlers to carry guns because they preferred to have less resistance when they invaded. How many American groups of people also would like to carry out vile attacks on their opposition and want gun control so as to help facilitate that?

Well, they’re not going to find easy prey here and there are a whole lot of us who stand ready to make sure they don’t.

New Jersey faces challenge to ‘assault’ weapons ban

(The Center Square) — New Jersey is facing a challenge to its ‘assault’ weapons ban, with Second Amendment groups asking a federal judge to strike down the law.

In a new filing in U.S. District Court, the plaintiffs in three related lawsuits challenging New Jersey’s ban and other firearm restrictions argue that the gun control measures are unconstitutional and request a summary motion in favor of their claims.

The lawsuits were filed by the Association of New Jersey Rifle, Pistol Clubs and Firearms Policy Coalition and others on behalf of gun owners who argue the state’s ‘assault’ weapons ban violates the Second Amendment and a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision “upholding the right of honest citizens to carry firearms for personal protection.”

“The common thread tying them together is the righteous claim that, at its core, New Jersey’s regulatory scheme blatantly violates the fundamental rights of the state’s law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms in common use for self-defense and other lawful purposes,” plaintiffs wrote in the motion.

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I will say that I don’t think we’ll see as widespread violence compared to Israel if things ever did go south. Mainly because we are known as the most heavily armed nation on the face of the Earth, and will go kinetic if the opportunity ever presents itself. That being said:

Rogan O’Handley

Many are warning about terrorist attacks in America by Hamas operatives

If you had any doubt about the veracity of those warnings, just look at how many demonstrations in support of Hamas took place this weekend just hours after Hamas slaughtered hundreds of civilians

These people are not playing around and violence against the innocent is their preferred method of communication

Biden removed Trump’s travel ban from terrorist nations and our border has been flooded with millions of fighting-aged men this past year alone, so those Hamas operatives are probably already here and waiting for the green light. Biden is not going to protect us. We must protect ourselves

Godspeed Patriots🇺🇸

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Ninth Circuit Rules California Law Banning Firearms Advertisements Likely Violates the First Amendment in NRA-Backed Case.

NRA scored a legal victory in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals against an overbroad California law that bans firearms advertisements that may be attractive to minors.

In June of 2022, the California Assembly passed and Governor Newsom signed AB-2571 into law. NRA filed suit shortly thereafter. The bill as originally drafted was so overbroad that it effectively banned advertising youth-hunter-education programs. The NRA’s lawsuit pointed that out, and the state promptly amended the statute so that it only bans advertisements of firearms products “in a manner that … reasonably appears to be attractive to minors.” But that didn’t fix the law’s overbreadth problem. It still banned advertisements featuring a parent hunting or shooting with their minor child.

The Ninth Circuit rightly recognized that the law was overbroad and banned truthful advertisements related directly to the Second Amendment—which the First Amendment forbids. The court remanded the case back to the trial court for further proceedings. The state, however, is refusing to accept the obvious. It has asked for an extension of time to seek a rehearing en banc, before 11 judges on the Ninth Circuit.

We look forward to continuing the fight in this case for our members.

The Case is captioned Safari Club International v. Bonta. United States Sportsmen’s Alliance Foundation and Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation are also parties to the case.

Gun-grabbing New Mexico governor will not give in

Just a few weeks back, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham declared a public health emergency to attain what she believed was the legal justification to override the 2nd Amendment. Her public health emergency was created out of thin air to give herself the power to mandate a 30 day ban on the public carry of firearms in Albuquerque and the surrounding county. She said, “No Constitutional right, in my view, including my oath, is intended to be absolute.”

The backlash was swift as police departments denied her support in enforcing the rule, the public defied the governor by carrying openly in public to make a point, and even the media, along with some of her fellow Democrats ridiculed her by saying she was overreaching her power. Apparently, this corrupt governor did not care and continued to demand that the police departments enforce her unconstitutional rule regardless of its unconstitutionality, She created an unjustified “health emergency” as a vehicle to push her “one woman dictate” over the people of New Mexico.

Grisham used the death of an 11-year-old boy in an attempt to create irrational fear and hype in her pursuit to violate the rights of the citizens she represents.  Standing on the graves of dead children has been an effective tool for gun-grabbing politicians, as it drums up irrational fear among parents and directs anger toward gun owners. The implication is that these heinous killings wouldn’t happen if gun owners would “compromise-away” their rights. In Grisham’s case, it would appear she used the tragedy to portray herself as the hero.

In response to the overreaching rule, A Federal Judge temporarily blocked Gresham’s ban on carrying guns in Albuquerque and its surrounding county. Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen said, “This order will not do anything to curb gun violence other than punish law-abiding citizens who have a constitutional right to self-defense.”

In defiance of the law and the Constitution, Grisham recently revised her public health order prohibiting firearms in parks, playgrounds and other public places where children go in Albuquerque. The governor also added a provision that tasks the state Department of Public Safety with organizing safe surrender events — also known as gun buybacks — in Albuquerque, Española and Las Cruces within a month. According to Maddy Hayden, a spokeswoman for the governor, the renewed order will remain in effect until Nov. 3.

As an additional slap in the face to New Mexicans, Grisham said, “We’re not letting up, and I’m continuing to make investments that drive down violence in our communities and protect our children.”

Throughout this entire battle, Grisham has failed to offer any solutions to solve the problem of “human violence,” and only seems to be focused on gun control. As usual, and like other gun-grabbing governors, Grisham appears to be avoiding responsibility for the violence that is created as a direct result of failed Democrat policies.

After several lawsuits last month in response to the Governors’ 30-day gun ban, U.S. District Judge David Herrera Urias issued the initial restraining order but has delayed a decision on whether to order a preliminary injunction against the edict. Grisham seems to be taking full advantage of every bit of power she can dig up in the meantime.

Michelle Lujan Grisham is the exact type of person our Founding Fathers warned us about. Her attempt to unilaterally suspend the right to carry is why the 2nd Amendment was written, and why so many New Mexico gun owners stood up and defied her unconstitutional order.

A closer look at more amici briefs in the next SCOTUS 2A case

United States v. Rahimi is a case dealing with a prohibited person being in possession of arms. Just the other day I covered one of the many amici briefs that have been filed in support of Rahimi, one that the Second Amendment Foundation wrote. There’s a lot of attention being paid to this particular case, for good reason. It’s quite possible that the U.S. Attorney General is going to use this case as an opportunity to twist and contort NYSRPA v. Bruen.  To date, there have been 21 and counting briefs filed in support of Rahimi and about 36 in support of the U.S. government.

The Rahimi question is whether or not a blanket prohibition on those subject to a civil domestic violence restraining order would be constitutional. Rahimi, during the course of some less-than-savory acts, got charged with being in possession of a firearm when under such an order. The case at hand is not about whether or not violent people or those who beat their domestic partners should or should not have firearms, but rather about if a civil – not criminal – process should lead to the loss of a constitutional right.

Discussed previously, SAF’s brief goes straight to “the only analogue that was around at the time of the founding” concerning blanket prohibitions had to do with British loyalists in a post revolution time.

A brief that was filed on October 4, 2023 by multiple “law enforcement groups” and “firearms rights groups” latches onto an argument that I’ve been making since day one – this is a due process case.

That brief represents the following groups: Bridgeville Rifle & Pistol Club, Connecticut Citizens Defense League, Delaware State Sportsmen’s Association, Gun Owners Action League (Massachusetts), Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, Maryland State Rifle & Pistol Association, Vermont Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, Vermont State Rifle & Pistol Association, Virginia Shooting Sports Association, Western States Sheriffs’ Association, and Women for Gun Rights (Formerly known as the DC Project).

The 37 page text makes the argument that we need not look any further than the facially unconstitutional due process violations that are involved.

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Old gun controls that were constitutionally repealed are not precedents for modern gun control

This week amicus briefs were filed in United States v. Rahimi, the only Second Amendment merits case currently before the Supreme Court. The docket page for the case is here. I will be blogging later about various briefs in the case. This post describes the amicus brief that I filed, available here.

The case involves the constitutionality of 18 U.S.C. sect. 922(g)(8), which imposes a federal prison sentence of up to 15 for persons who possess a firearm while subject to certain state-issued restraining orders. The amici are several law professors, including the VC’s Randy Barnett, the Second Amendment Law Center, and the Independence Institute, where I am Research Director. My co-counsel on the brief was Konstandinos T. Moros, of the Michel & Associates law firm, in Long Beach, California.

The bottom line of the brief is that subsection 922(g)(8(C)(i) does not infringe the Second Amendment; it restricts the arms rights of individuals who have been found by a judge to be a “credible threat” to others. In contrast, subsection 922(g)(8(C)(ii) does infringe the Second Amendment, because it does not require any such judicial finding.

The brief addresses the question of “who” may be restricted in the exercise of Second Amendment rights; the brief takes no position on questions of “how”–such as what due process is required, or whether the severity of 922(g)(8) ban is comparable to historic laws restricting the exercise of arms rights.

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