As if with Heller, Caetano & Bruen under SCOTUS belt, there’s any further rational questioning.
What the Framers intended: A linguistic analysis of the “Right to Bear Arms”
Category: RKBA
Orthodox Jewish camp in Schoharie County sues to keep its guns in place
Administrators at TheZone summer camp have concealed-carry permits and are requesting an injunction to a new state law
GILBOA — New York’s gun rights activists are a diverse lot, ranging from rural hunters and Second Amendment supporters to Black pastors in urban churches who say they want to protect their flocks from armed white supremacists.
Now, the operators of an Orthodox Jewish summer camp have joined the gun rights debate, with a lawsuit seeking an injunction that, despite a contested state law, would let them continue to be armed for self-defense.
Eliyohu Mintz, CEO of TheZone summer camp, and camp Administrator Eric Schwartz cited numerous anti-Semitic threats as a reason they should be allowed to continue to carry concealed weapons despite a recent tightening of state gun control laws.
“New York State’s fabrication of ‘gun free’ zones through the enactment of the Concealed Carry Improvement Act in 2022 calculatedly leaves our most vulnerable people — children — defenseless and at the mercy of violent and predatory evildoers,” reads a legal action seeking an injunction against the new rule.
Mintz and Schwartz, who both have concealed-carry gun licenses, have gone to Federal Northern District Court seeking permission to keep carrying their guns at the summer camp.
In their injunction request, they name Schoharie County District Attorney Susan Mallery; Sheriff Ronald Stevens and Steven Nigrelli, the acting State Police superintendent, as defendants.
New York State recently cited Colonial laws to disarm ‘dissidents’ while attempting to justify their post-Bruen gun control legislation.
They are saying the quiet part out loud.
-Firearms Policy Coalition
Gov. Lee sets parameters for special session on the Second Amendment, public safety
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Gov. Bill Lee’s office released the topics of legislation for a special session that would take on public safety in tandem with Second Amendment rights.
The document lists 18 different topics from mental health resources to juvenile justice reform.
This special session on Aug. 21 follows The Covenant School shooting back in March that claimed lives — including three children.
Critics had hoped the session would focus on guns and what they call sensible gun reform. The governor, however, intends to focus on the state’s broken mental health and juvenile justice systems.
Near the end of the regular session, Gov. Bill Lee proposed a bill that would have allowed extreme risk orders of protection or so-called red flag laws. The bill would have made it easier for a judge to take away someone’s guns if they are deemed a threat to themselves or others. But the Republican supermajority killed the bill.
Here are the parameters of the special session this August:
- mental health resources providers, commitments or services;
- school safety plans or policies;
- offenses of committing mass violence or threatening to commit acts of mass violence;
- reports from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation regarding human trafficking;
- identification of individuals arrested for felonies;
- law enforcement’s access to information about individuals who are subject to mental health commitment;
- information about victims of violent offenses;
- stalking offenses;
- measures encouraging the safe storage of firearms, which do include the creation of penalties for failing to safely store firearms;
- temporary mental health orders of protections, which must be initiated by law enforcement, must require a due process hearing, must require the respondent to undergo an assessment for suicidal or homicidal ideation, must require that an order of protection be reevaluated at least 180 days and must not permit ex parte orders;
- the transfer of juvenile defendants age 16 and older to courts with criminal jurisdiction, which must include appeal rights for the juveniles and the prosecuting authorities;
- limiting the circumstances in which juvenile records may be expunged;
- blended sentencing for juveniles;
- offenses related to inducing or coercing a minor to commit an offense;
- the structure of operations of state and local courts
- making appropriations sufficient to provide funding for any legislation
ILLINOIS 5TH CIRCUIT COURT REVERSES, REMANDS FOID CARD CHALLENGE CASE
BELLEVUE, WA – The Illinois 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has finally reversed and remanded a lower court ruling in a case which could determine whether the Firearm Owner’s Identification (FOID) card requirement is constitutional.
The Second Amendment Foundation notes this will be the third go-round for the case in White County Circuit Court, but it could ultimately end up before the Illinois State Supreme Court, noted SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. The case was brought and funded by SAF and the Illinois State Rifle Association.
The five-page order was unanimous, with Justices John B. Barberis and Barry L. Vaughan concurring with Justice Thomas M. Welch, who delivered the opinion.
Noting that, “The State has filed a motion for summary relief arguing that the basis of the court’s dismissal—that it was impossible for Brown to comply with the statute—is not one of the bases upon which a charge may be dismissed before trial,” Justice Welch confirmed the defendant, Vivian Claudine Brown “agrees that the cause should be remanded.”
“We’re delighted the courts will finally have an opportunity to hear arguments in the actual case which challenge the constitutionality of the FOID card,” Gottlieb said. “Hopefully, this time around, we won’t see the case bogged down by more procedural issues which have allowed the court to avoid addressing the main issue at hand, which is whether the FOID card requirement actually passes constitutional muster.”
The case dates back to when Brown was originally charged with unlawful possession of a firearm without also possessing a FOID card, in May 2017.
“This case has been bouncing around for six years,” Gottlieb noted, “and it is high time to move forward.”
Federal District Court issues Temporary Restraining Order on Hawaii’s ‘new’ Concealed Carry law.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.hid.165717/gov.uscourts.hid.165717.66.0.pdf
The TRO Motion is GRANTED to the extent that the following
provisions are enjoined:
-the portions of § 134-A(a)(1) that prohibit carrying firearms
in parking areas owned, leased, or used by the State or a
county which share the parking area with non-governmental
entities, are not reserved for State or county employees,
or do not exclusively serve the State or county building;
-the entirety of §§ 134-A(a)(4) and (a)(12);
-the portions of § 134-A(a)(9) prohibiting the carrying of
firearms in beaches, parks, and their adjacent parking
areas; and
-the portion of § 134-E that prohibits carrying firearms on
private properties held open to the public.
FPC Files For Injunction Against Washington “Large Capacity” Magazine Ban
Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced that it has filed a motion for summary judgment in its Sullivan v. Ferguson lawsuit, which challenges Washington’s unconstitutional ban on common firearm magazines. The motion can be viewed at FPCLegal.org.
“There can be no serious dispute that the magazines Washington bans are ‘in common use’—there are hundreds of millions of them [] owned by tens of millions of Americans as private surveys and industry and government data all corroborate,” argues the motion. “Indeed, courts across the country have repeatedly found that these magazines are commonly owned and widely chosen by Americans for self-defense and other lawful purposes. That fact decides this case, and Plaintiffs are entitled to judgment in their favor.”
“There are few things more offensive than politicians arbitrarily preventing people from possessing the tools they deem necessary to protect their lives, loved ones, and communities,” said Cody J. Wisniewski, FPCAF’s General Counsel and Vice President of Legal, and FPC’s counsel in this case. “The magazines that Washington bans are constitutionally protected and it does not have the power to infringe on the rights of Washingtonians by banning them. We’re hopeful that the Court will see the error of Washington’s ways.”
FPC is joined in this lawsuit by the Second Amendment Foundation.
Federal judge in Colorado blocks law raising age requirement for gun purchases
A federal judge in Colorado on Monday temporarily blocked a state law that raised the legal age requirement for purchasing a firearm to 21.
Chief U.S. District Judge Phillip A. Brimmer ruled in favor of the gun rights group, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, who had filed a lawsuit against Gov. Jared Polis.
The state law, SB23-169, was one of several sweeping gun reform measures approved by the state legislature and signed by Gov. Polis in the spring. It sought to prohibit people under the age of 21 from purchasing a gun, with exceptions for active members of the U.S. armed forces, peace officers, and people certified by the Peace Officer Standards and Training board.
RMGO argued in their lawsuit that law was unconstitutional. The group said if people are allowed to vote when they turn 18, they should be allowed to purchase a gun.
“Since the day this legislation was introduced, we knew it was unconstitutional,” said RMGO executive director Taylor Rhodes in a written statement. “Under the Golden Dome, at the unveiling of this proposal, RMGO warned the bill sponsors this would quickly be struck down by a federal judge. Today, our crystal ball became a reality.”
Tennessee GOP committee warns governor on special session
If Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee was hoping to bring his fellow Republicans around on the idea of a special session to pass his version of a “red flag” law and other gun-related legislation before officially calling the session into being, his hopes were dashed this weekend when the state’s Republican Party Executive Committee adopted a resolution instead asking the governor to drop his plans altogether.
According to the Chattanooga Free Press, the resolution’s language was suggested by committee member Tina Bensiker, who says she’s concerned that many of the ideas that have been floated would violate the rights of Tennessee residents, while failing to take a bite out of violent crime.
“I feel at this point a lot of this is really emotion as opposed to rational and reasoned,” Benkiser added. “My concern, and a lot of others’ concerns, is that some of the proposals we’ve heard really violate due process of law. And that is a fundamental concern. And when you start talking about potentially infringing on people’s constitutional rights, that needs to be thought out over a long period of time with people who have thought, debated, looked at the language and fleshed all that out. Not something to be rushed through.”
Benkiser said she hopes Lee will take heed of the GOP action.
“I understand that people sometimes act out of emotion when something horrendous has happened, as happened here in Nashville, but really to friends of his. I understand that, and I think the natural reaction is to want to do something and to want to do something now. But like I said, when you’re talking about constitutional rights, at the end of the day, you need to take the time to think that out.”
Other committee members are concerned that the statehouse could turn into a circus once the special session gets underway, pointing to the protests on the floor of the state House earlier this year that resulted in the expulsion of two Democratic lawmakers. Those legislators recently won special elections in their heavily Democratic districts and are vowing to introduce a host of gun control measures during the special session, and some on the GOP Executive Committee believe the special session would once again inflame tensions and create a flashpoint for anti-gun activists to rally around.
Study Shows Gun Laws Don’t Matter, Race Does
33 people were shot over the weekend in Chicago. Urban gangland violence like that is what real “mass shootings” look like and finally a Journal of the American Medical Association paper addressed the problem by shifting the blame to something it calls “structural racism”.
The JAMA paper, which was quickly picked up by CNN as “Structural Racism may Contribute to Mass Shootings” and by Bloomberg as “Mass Shootings Disproportionately Victimize Black Americans”, acknowledged what conservatives have been saying about gun violence.
“There was no discernible association noted in this study between gun laws and MSEs [mass shootings] with other studies showing similar findings,” it noted.
The issue wasn’t gun laws, it was race. “The study found that in areas with higher black populations, mass shootings are likelier to occur compared to communities with higher white populations,” CNN reported. “The findings disrupt the nation’s image of mass shootings, which has been shaped by tragedies like the Las Vegas festival shooting and Sandy Hook in which most of the victims were not black,” Bloomberg added.
Faced with an immovable statistical object and the unstoppable force of equity, the JAMA paper blames the whole thing on structural racism. The study correlates urban areas and neighborhoods with high concentrations of single-parent households” to mass shootings. It then demonstrates that “structural racism” must be at fault because of “the percentage of the population that is black.” Black people in the study are interchangeable with racism.
Such is the state of woke medical science which tries to fix racism with more racism. The study never comes up with any plausible explanation of how structural racism causes people to shoot each other. At one point it claims that “racial residential segregation practices are predictive of various types of shootings” in a country where segregation had been abolished since 1964.
The study’s definition of segregation is so senseless that it lists majority black cities like Detroit, a 77% black city, as being 73% segregated, and Baltimore, a 62% black city, as being 64% segregated. A city with a strong black majority and black leaders is racially segregated and its people are suffering from “structural racism”. That’s why there are so many mass shootings.
But if segregation is the issue then why does Atlanta, which had actual segregation, have only 18 mass shootings, while Chicago has 141? Southern cities show up as less segregated and less violent in the paper’s data. A history of segregation is clearly not the issue. This isn’t about the past, whether it’s the historical revisionism of the 1619 Project, or any other.
If segregation were the issue, crime would have been far higher during segregation than after it.
About those 116 gun deaths per day…
Headlines over “gun deaths” will always draw eyes. Some people will immediately click the link, then share it all over social media, just so they can say, “See! I told you guns are bad!”
There are usually problems with this, though.
For example, these reports rarely provide any context and they also tend to involve a fair bit of sensationalism in presenting all firearm-related fatalities as the same.
As of Aug. 1, at least 25,198 people have died from gun violence in the U.S. this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive – which is an average of roughly 118 deaths each day.
Of those who died, 879 were teens and 170 were children.
Deaths by suicide have made up the vast majority of gun violence deaths this year. There’s been more than 14,000 deaths by gun suicide this year, an average of about 66 deaths by suicide per day in 2023.
The majority of these deaths have occurred in Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois and Louisiana.
The grim tally of gun violence deaths includes 488 people killed in police officer-involved shootings. Thirty-four police officers have been fatally shot in the line of duty this year.
So about 56 percent of those deaths were suicides and nearly 500 were killed in officer-involved shootings, meaning they were justified homicides.
Now, this is going to be used to push gun control. It’s going to be used to justify more and more restrictions on our basic civil liberties, and they dishonest hacks won’t even pretend there’s a difference in these categories of shootings.
Suicides are awful and tragic, as are homicides, but the two things are very different.
The solutions to suicides aren’t the same as those for homicides. The motivations are completely different, so addressing the underlying causes is going to be completely different.
Gun control doesn’t stop suicides. At best, it shifts people to use another method, but it doesn’t stop suicides. Granted, it doesn’t stop homicides, either.
Yet anti-gun voices in the media love to lump all gun deaths into one big bucket. They want as big of a number as possible to scare people with. You can’t do that with just the homicide numbers. So, suicides it is.
Yes, these are all “gun deaths” if you just want the total of people who were killed due to a gunshot. For many people, though, that’s all that matters.
And it’s telling, because most of these people claim they don’t want to ban gun ownership, but then can’t differentiate between criminals’ acts and someone who took their own life due to their own mental illness.
They want them lumped because the evil, at least in their minds, is the guns themselves. If it was really about saving people’s lives, they’d focus on the underlying conditions at play here. Everything from mental health treatment to job programs would be on the agenda.
The fact that they’re not is telling. It’s just not telling us anything we didn’t already know after decades of watching and listening to the anti-gun agenda.
Kabuki Theater
Rep. Don Beyer (So nice when they provide pictures for PID)
Democrats demand 1,000% excise tax on ‘assault weapons,’ high-capacity magazines
Democrats failed to move the same idea when they controlled the House last year
More than two dozen House Democrats put forward legislation Friday that would slap “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines with a 1,000% excise tax, a change that would raise the price of a $500 weapon to $5,000 in a bid to reduce access to guns across the country.
Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., and 24 other House Democrats introduced the legislation Friday. It’s the second time Democrats have put forward the idea.
Beyer and 37 Democrats proposed the same idea last year when Democrats controlled the House, but it never moved.
The text of Beyer’s new bill was not out as of the weekend, and it was unclear if any changes were made from his 2022 version. His bill from last year imposed the tax on any magazine or related device that can accept more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
The same 1,000% tax would be imposed on any “semiautomatic assault weapon,” which last year’s bill defined as a semiautomatic rifle or pistol with a fixed magazine of 10 rounds or more or that have other various features.
Under that rule, a weapon that normally costs $2,000 would force customers to pay more than $20,000, a change Beyer argued last year could help “curb the epidemic of gun violence.”
“Congress must take action to stem the flood of weapons of war into American communities, which have taken a terrible toll in Uvalde, Buffalo, Tulsa and too many other places,” Beyer said then. “Again and again assault weapons designed for use on the battlefield have been used in mass shootings at schools, grocery stores, hospitals, churches, synagogues, malls, theaters, bars and so on.”
The National Rifle Association has argued gun control advocates invented the term “assault weapon” to “deliberately confuse the public and advance the political cause of gun control.” The NRA says the term “assault rifle” applies only to automatic weapons, while gun control advocates are looking to put controls on semi-automatic weapons.
Fully automatic weapons discharge rounds continuously while the trigger is pulled, and the NRA has said these weapons are used by the U.S. armed services but are not easily obtained by the public, unlike semi-automatic weapons that fire just a single round.
Beyer’s new bill was introduced a day after more than 100 Democrats told House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., they are “disappointed” that House GOP leaders haven’t moved any legislation this year to curb gun ownership in America.
“As Members of the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, we call on you to schedule votes on gun violence prevention legislation as soon as possible this year,” they wrote in a public letter to McCarthy.
“Gun violence is the leading cause of death of children in America since 2020. Last year, 1,686 children were killed and another 4,485 were injured by gun violence,” the letter added. “Despite this preventable carnage, the House has yet to vote on even one gun violence prevention bill.”
Americans, for the most part, don’t like to be controlled. It is part of our collective DNA and has been from the time the first English settlers arrived in Jamestown, continuing on through the westward expansion, and through to today. That is why the gun prohibitionists have begun to couch their aims behind innocuous buzzwords.
First it was “gun safety”. I attribute that to Mayor Bloomberg and his PR flacks including the Demanding Mom herself Shannon Watts. They understood that if they couched their desire for control behind the concept of “safety” then there would be less objection. The mainstream media has bought into the terminology wholeheartedly.
Of course, if Bloomberg, Watts, the Biden Administration, and the rest of the gun control industry were truly serious about “gun safety”, they would be insisting upon classes like hunter safety and the NRA’s Eddie Eagle program be taught in every school in America. As it is the Biden Administration through the US Department of Education is withholding funding to schools for archery and hunter safety programs. They are using the so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act of 2022 as their excuse. So in their pursuit of “gun safety” and “safer communities” they will defund the exact types of programs that actually work for safety.
Now it appears that the successor word to “gun safety” will be “gun responsibility”. This comes from Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey. He, of course, is using the tragedy in his hometown of Uvalde, Texas as the pretense to urge for “gun responsibility.”
There is a difference between control and responsibility. The first is a mandate that can infringe on our right; the second is a duty that will preserve it. There is no constitutional barrier to gun responsibility. Keeping firearms out of the hands of dangerous people is not only the responsible thing to do, it is the best way to protect the Second Amendment. We can do both.
That all sounds nice but it is sophistry. As Bishop Robert Barron noted in his commencement address at Hillsdale College:
Their concern is not being truthful or just but rather speaking in such a way that they appear truthful or just and hence become convincing to others. Such sophists were, obviously enough, enormously useful to prospective lawyers and politicians in ancient Greece, and it should be equally obvious that their intellectual descendants are rather thick on the ground today.
McConaughey enumerates four key points for “gun responsibility” in his op-ed.
- Universal background checks
- Age 21 to buy an “assault rifle” (sic) unless one is in the military. “Assault rifle” is undefined.
- “Red Flag Laws should be the law of the land.”
- National waiting period for the purchase of “assault rifles” (sic).
So in the end, what McConaughey calls “gun responsibility” is just a rehash of many prior “gun control” proposals. They are all, as the gun control industry has said for decades, a “good first step.” A good first step to even more onerous control upon an enumerated right.
The gun control industry and their fellow travelers have to rely upon sophistry and buzzwords. Otherwise they have nothing.
Last month, U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton tossed out a lawsuit challenging Connecticut’s ban on concealed carry in state parks, ruling that the plaintiff in the litigation didn’t have standing to sue because there was no credible threat of him being arrested or prosecuted for violating the ban. That was an exceedingly odd decision, but it kept the ban in place (at least for now), which counts as a win as far as anti-gunners are concerned.
Now Arterton has followed up with another legal doozy, rejecting a preliminary injunction against the state’s newly-expanded ban on so-called assault weapons and large capacity magazines by declaring that the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence allows for bans on commonly-owned weapons, and that “only a ban on firearms that are so pervasively used for self-defense that to ban them would ‘infringe,’ or destroy, the right to self-defense” would violate our right to keep and bear arms.
Under Arterton’s interpretation of Heller, McDonald, Caetano, and Bruen everything from bolt-action hunting rifles to single-barreled shotguns could be banned without calling into question the right to keep and bear arms; presumably leaving only some (but likely not all) handguns protected by the Second Amendment’s language.
Unlike the broader category of handguns at issue in Heller and Bruen, the record developed here demonstrates that assault weapons and LCMs are suboptimal for self-defense.
A set of statutes that bans only a subset of each category of firearms that possess new and dangerous characteristics that make them susceptible to abuse by nonlaw abiding citizens wielding them for unlawful purposes imposes a comparable burden to the regulations on Bowie knives, percussion cap pistols, and other dangerous or concealed weapons, particularly when “there remain more than one thousand firearms that Connecticut residents can purchase for responsible and lawful uses like self-defense, home defense, and other lawful purposes such as hunting and sport shooting.”
Well hang on there. If, according to Arterton, only those arms that are “pervasively” used in self-defense cannot be banned, then firearms most commonly used for lawful purposes such as hunting and sport shooting have no protection whatsoever under the Second Amendment, regardless of whether or not the state of Connecticut still allows them to be sold.
You can read Arterton’s lengthy dissertation for yourself here, but I’ll caution you before you start that her opinion reminds me of the apocryphal quote attributed to W.C. Fields; if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance baffle them with bullsh**. Arterton definitely left me scratching my head on multiple occasions, such as her rejection of the use of FBI crime statistics that point to rifles of any kind being rarely used in homicide because the data supposedly “provides limited relevant insight” since they “these statistics do not track what types of firearms are used with enough precision to determine whether they are assault weapons.” Arterton, meanwhile, blithely took the state’s “expert” John Donohue of Stanford University at face value, though Donohue has maintained that the individual right to keep and bear arms was created by the Supreme Court in Heller and was not a pre-existing right protected by the Second Amendment in 1791.
A Silly Argument: The Second Amendment Insurrectionist Purpose
U.S.A. — One of the silliest arguments about the purposes of the Second Amendment is put forward this way. The newly formed Constitutional government would never have created an amendment with the purpose of destroying the government just created. Here is an example from the far-left eugeneweekly.com:
That newly created narrative included the supposed purpose of arming citizens in order to enable them to rebel against the very constitutional government which the Founders were establishing with its checks and balances. This despite the Founders having defined treason as taking up arms against that very government.
But this glaring contradiction persisted and found a home within the halls of the Supreme Court, whose collective wisdom may have suffered from the influx of unreported gifts by billionaires to a number of justices weighing in on the question.
The writer does not appear to have read the history of the Revolutionary War, the Federalist Papers, the arguments surrounding the Bill of Rights, the rudiments of the political theories the Constitution is based on, or the Constitution itself. Knowledge of any one of these fields provides ample refutation of the argument above.
One of the principle causes of the Revolutionary War was the attempt by the Government of England, specifically the King, to disarm the American colonists. The proximate start of the war resulted from an attempt by the Crown to confiscate privately and publicly owned weapons, resulting in the battles of Lexington and Concord. During the war, a British minister proposed disarming all the colonists in perpetuity. Having just defeated a government bent on their disarmament, the successful revolutionaries were not about to grant such power to the newly formed government of the Constitution.
Study proves there is NO CORRELATION between gun control laws and mass shootings
A new study by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder has found that there is no correlation between the strength of gun control laws and the number of mass shootings that occur in each state.
The United States has more than 10 times the number of mass shootings than any other developed country in the world. In the study, the researchers looked at 4,011 mass shootings – defined as four or more gun deaths in the same short period, not including the shooter – between Jan. 1, 2014 and Dec. 31, 2022. (Related: RFK Jr.: Seizing lawful firearms will not STOP mass shootings.)
Illinois, with its restrictive gun laws and comparatively low gun ownership of 22 percent, had 414 mass shootings and a per capita rate of 3.6 mass shootings per million people.
Washington, D.C., despite not being a state, was included in the study and the researchers were shocked to find that the district had the highest rate of mass shootings per capita at 10.4 shootings for every one million people. This is despite the fact that the country’s capital has some of the strongest gun control laws in the nation.
For states, Louisiana had the highest rate of mass shootings per capita at 4.3 shootings per million people – less than half the per capita rate in Washington, D.C. despite the lax gun laws and 52 percent gun ownership.
Hawaii and North Dakota had zero mass shootings from 2014 to 2022. They are followed by New Hampshire, Vermont and Wyoming, which all had one each, Idaho with two and Maine with three.
Environmental and sociocultural factors more likely to lead to mass shootings
Illinois Firearms Legislation Could Compel Gun Owners to Self-Incriminate
Firearms owners in Illinois are grappling with a series of constitutionally questionable gun laws. These extend beyond the legal challenge against the ban on semi-automatic weapons and their magazines, a case that has progressed through the southern and northern districts and now resides in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The controversy also touches on a potential violation of the 5th Amendment due to compulsory registration that firearm owners must complete.
The regulation in question doesn’t merely ban certain types of semi-automatic firearms and their magazines; it also obliges owners to register these items. This mandatory registration is due to start in October.
The alleged 5th Amendment infraction stems from the obligation imposed on Illinois gun owners to register by January 1, 2024. This mandate requires gun owners to provide the State with an inventory of all their newly outlawed firearms, including all “prohibited” semi-automatic guns and components. Essentially, the state of Illinois appears to be coercing its gun owners into self-incrimination, thereby undermining the 5th Amendment rights of American citizens.
The 5th Amendment asserts that no individual should be forced to answer for a serious crime unless indicted by a grand jury, among other protections. This amendment also guards against self-incrimination and deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
Lawyer Thomas Maag plans to file a legal challenge against the state of Illinois, citing the 5th Amendment. He voiced concerns about the forthcoming registration process, stating, “We’re really concerned when this whole registration period starts if it’s not previously enjoined, that, with the vagueness, with a whole host of issues, people would be incriminating themselves.”
Though Maag previously filed a 5th Amendment argument in the Southern District, it was deferred, and the law remains in effect. However, he intends to resubmit the challenge, with the aim of safeguarding gun owners from self-incrimination and potential criminal implications if they fail to register. The issue is likely to work its way through the courts, potentially leading to a temporary injunction against the registry element of the law before it takes effect in October.
Why Aren’t Female Victims of Domestic Violence Told the Best Way to Protect Themselves?
On Monday, July 17th, Lance Logan brutally murdered 64-year-old Carolyn Williams in her Hartford, Connecticut, home while she was on the telephone with a 9-1-1 operator. He also beat her 30-year-old son.
“He hit me again . . . . Stop it, stop, it, he has a weapon,” she told the 9-1-1 operator immediately before being murdered. Logan had prior convictions for domestic violence and a number of other felonies. Among his previous convictions was a 2016 domestic assault for which he faced a 5-year suspended sentence and 3-years probation, so he served no prison time.
Logan now faces charges of murder, assault in the second degree, and violation of a protective order. It was illegal for him to own guns, but he still obtained two firearms – a sawed-off shotgun and a pistol.
The case clearly illustrates the limits of protective orders when someone is intent on murdering the victim. If the murderer is willing to risk a life sentence for murder, an additional five years in prison and a $5,000 fine won’t deter him.
It is an important problem. Reportedly, 76% of women murdered by someone who had been an intimate partner were stalked.
Violence prevention advocates recommend a long list of safety precautions. These changes require women to uproot their lives.
Among the advice: women should change jobs, travel routes, the time of day they leave home or work, move in with a friend or family, change the locks on their home, or do their shopping and other chores with friends or relatives.
A few recommend that women practice martial arts such as judo, jiu-jitsu, karate, or boxing.
But the most obvious answer is missing from these lists: women should get a concealed handgun permit and a firearm.
As a victim of domestic violence who has suffered some broken teeth, fractured bones, and other permanent physical injuries, I am acutely aware of how important it is to protect victims.
Men are typically much stronger than women, particularly in upper body strength. Unfortunately, real life isn’t like the movies, where one woman can knock out and overpower several well-trained men. Even well-trained women often struggle to defend themselves against much larger and stronger men. Men also tend to be faster runners.
A firearm represents a much bigger change in a woman’s ability to defend herself. Men can readily hurt women without a gun, and if a woman is already in physical contact with the attacker so that he can take away their gun, they are already in trouble.
The peer-reviewed research shows that murder rates decline when people carry concealed handguns, whether men or women. But a woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about 3 to 4 times more than a man doing the same.
And this message is getting across to women. Between 2012 and 2022, in states that provide data by sex, concealed handgun permits increased 115% more quickly among women than among men. The percentage of women who say that gun ownership protects people from crime has also been growing faster. But while they are growing at a faster rate, women still only make up about 30 percent of permit holders.
Many states could make it much easier for stalked women to defend themselves. Even after taking the required training and applying for a permit, it can often take two to three months for a permit to be issued.
But even one month may be much too long for a threatened woman. Even women who have proven to a court that they face serious threats must wait to get a permit. One solution would be to allow women with court orders of protection to carry a concealed handgun while waiting for a permit to be issued.
Many single women with children may also find it difficult to pay fees for a permit, plus additional fees for fingerprinting and training. While there are now 27 Constitutional Carry states that don’t require people pay fees or waiting periods to be able to carry a gun, other states such as California can run $250 to $250 for five years, Illinois $150, and New York City $566.70. Training can easily add hundreds more.
Police are very important, but they almost always arrive after the crime occurs. Protective orders can help. But if we are going to be serious about protecting women like Carolyn Williams, we must let them protect themselves.
Comment O’ The Day
I don’t trust information about studies unless a link is given to read the study or a title of the study is given so that it can be found. Behind this study is Cynthia Miller-Idriss. She’s the same person who claims “Physical fitness has always been central to the far right.”
Our new study with @splcenter found that young people with easier access to guns tended to hold stronger beliefs that the government is restricting our freedoms and that the Second Amendment gives citizens the right to overthrow the government.
You guys are really telling on yourselves with this one. Gun rights bother you at least in part because they promote small government views.
Government, almost by definition, DOES restrict our freedoms. Those polled aren’t wrong in the least for seeing it that way. The constant struggle is keeping this necessary evil contained to the minimum required for a functioning society.
Orgs like Everytown are part of a broad spectrum of authoritarian social engineers. They want people to be docile, preferably stuffed into cities, owning nothing, and restricted to a narrow overton window of acceptable opinions and lifestyles. The Chinese social credit system is their model.
Guns are a threat to this (as is free speech, which is why that is also a target for them). Not even really guns themselves, but the individualist ideas they can awaken simply by accepting the natural right to bear arms. Because once you accept the natural rights framework, the Bloombergian government dystopia they want is unacceptable.
Notice how the very same people who want to ban guns also tend to want social media to censor more speech, want the government to tax everything they declare undesirable, want to punish thought crimes with a widening net of “hate speech” restrictions that shutter the overton window, and constantly find new things they want banned.
This is also why they insist on federal gun laws. They know Boise or Manchester are doing just fine with minimal gun control laws, which drives them insane. It proves the problem in their violent cities is their own fault, and not due to gun rights. The authoritarians can’t allow such counterexamples to exist.
Control, control, control. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Also, if people polled really said the 2A grants the right to overthrow govt, that’s nonsense. But I wonder if what they meant (these are young laypeople, after all) was that the 2A exists in part as a failsafe against a govt that has gone tyrannical. Because that is absolutely correct.
Worth repeating….
“30-40%” who are willing to tell a stranger over the phone that they have guns” just doesn’t punch quite right as a headline.
Boom: Up to 60% of Americans could own guns, twice estimate
A surge in “quiet gun owners,” much like the so-called “silent majority” in political circles, is leading firearms analysts to believe that far more Americans own weapons than the accepted 30% cited in polls.
At the highest end, it’s possible that up to 60% of Americans own guns, especially with the pandemic-era rise in gun buying among women and minorities, especially in suburban and urban areas.
At the lowest end, it’s likely that at least 40% of Americans own guns, according to a groundbreaking study of those who lie to pollsters about firearms.
The study from Rutgers University’s New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center is spreading like wildfire in the industry, which for years has tried to accurately estimate United States gun ownership and determine why polls show support for gun control, but then there is little follow through when legislation is proposed.
Reason Magazine’s J.D. Tuccille put part of the study in the spotlight in an early July post that began the buzz in the gun industry about the potential of far higher U.S. gun ownership.
He highlighted the study’s conclusion that nearly a third of those polled might be lying when they deny having a firearm.