WA Gun Sales Spike Following Gun Ban Bill Passage
Gun sales in Washington State have spiked in the aftermath of last weekend’s passage of legislation to ban the future sale, manufacture and importation of so-called “assault weapons,” according to a report from KOMO News.
The story quoted longtime Bellevue gun dealer Wade Gaughran, owner of Wade’s Eastside Guns, who said sales have jumped 400 percent this month. The House adopted the gun ban legislation, House Bill 1240, in March. He said the legislation violates the Second Amendment, and he predicted it will likely be overturned by the courts.
According to KOIN News in Portland, Oregon, the bill bans more than 50 specific firearms. It is noiw back in the House for concurrence on two amendment adopted by the Senate.If approved, the bill then goes to Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee, who will likely sign it within days.
Gaughran has estimated the gun ban will affect about 30 percent of his business. He does not believe it will accomplish what the proponents say it will, which is a reduction in violent crime in the Evergreen State. Historical crime data supports his position.
Gun control has been hampering Washington gun owners since the passage of Initiative 594 in 2014. That measure was bankrolled by the billionaire-backed Alliance for Gun Responsibility, a Seattle-based gun prohibition lobbying group.
Crime data from the FBI Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and Seattle Police Department have shown the steady increase in homicides since 2015, the first full year I-594—mandating so-called “universal background checks”—was in effect.
In 2015, Washington reported 209 homicides, including 141 involving firearms, according to the FBI/UCR. By 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, Washington suffered 325 murders, including 209 involving firearms.
In 2015, Seattle passed a special “gun violence tax” on the sale of firearms and ammunition. It was supposed to generate between $300,000 and $500,000 revenue annually and finance programs to reduce so-called “gun violence.” It has failed on all accounts.
In 2016, the first year the gun tax was in effect, Seattle police reported 19 homicides. Last year, Seattle racked up 52 murders. The revenue has never come close to projected levels.
Gaughran told KOMO he’s been selling modern semiautomatic rifles for some 35 years. In all that time, he said, “we’ve never had one traced back that was used in a serious crime and I’ve sold thousands and thousands of them.”
The Climate Lunatics Have a New Food Target
Climate change lunatics who want to ban beef and force everyone to eat bugs have a new target.
According to AFP news, climate “scientists” are targeting rice farming as a “dangerous,” emissions heavy practice. They say flooded rice fields, which then naturally ferment hay and other plants, produce too much methane.
According to National Geographic, rice is a main and key food source for 3.5 billion people.
“Rice is a food staple for more than 3.5 billion people around the world, particularly in Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa. Rice has been cultivated in Asia for thousands of years. Scientists believe people first domesticated rice in India or Southeast Asia. Rice arrived in Japan in about 3,000 years ago. The Portuguese most likely introduced it into South America in the 16th century,” the magazine reports. “Today, the world’s largest rice producers are China, India, and Indonesia. Outside of Asia, Brazil is the largest rice producer. Rice grows in warm, wet climates. It thrives in waterlogged soil, such as in the flood plains of Asian rivers like the Ganges and the Mekong. “Deepwater rice” is a variety of rice that is adapted to deep flooding, and is grown in eastern Pakistan, Vietnam, and Burma.”
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka recently adopted a number of climate change policies on reducing fertilizer and caused a major food crisis.
“In April 2021, then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced an abrupt ban on the import of chemical fertilisers to force the country of 22mn to embrace organic farming. The prohibition lasted only about six months, but analysts said the ill-fated policy not only stoked an economic crisis, it would leave Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector hobbled for years,” the Financial Times reports. “Over the past 18 months, the country has become a cautionary tale for global agriculture. Vital inputs such as fuel and fertilisers are in short supply, with prices soaring. Yields from rice and other staples have halved in many areas and the once largely self-sufficient Indian Ocean island now depends on international aid to combat a hunger crisis.”
There’s no doubt a new climate attack on rice will have a catastrophic impact.
By Leo Wolfson, State Politics Reporter
An African American Second Amendment scholar is bringing a perspective challenging many of the mainstream narratives that firearms increase crime in America. Instead, he believes gun control laws exacerbate racial bias in the criminal justice system.
“We need to take a harder look at those programs, rather than pursuing what we call the modern orthodoxy,” said Nicholas Johnson at the University of Wyoming’s Firearm Research Center on Thursday night. “The community would be better if we took a case-by-case policy look. We need a hard-look approach that is pursued with rigor.”
He questions gun control laws from a perspective he acknowledges many will find uncomfortable, showing a connection to racial and criminal justice questions. He said those who believe bias pervades the criminal justice system should also be opposed to the modern gun control movements, where he says the same biases translate into gun law enforcement.
In his “A Race-Sensitive Hard Look at Firearms and the Black Community” presentation, Johnson explains that studies show many of the same laws leading to disproportionate incarceration of African Americans and other minorities are interconnected with gun control laws that Democrats and many of the same people impacted by the policies support.
“The conservative tough on crime policies cross paths with the liberal paths to solve gun control at all costs,” he said. “Conservatives and liberal progressives have tried to outdo each other to be progressively punitive.”
The Fordham University School of Law professor wants lawmakers to consider firearms regulation from a new lens.
NRA was the first National Gun Control Organization
There are many in the gun community that are angry with Trump for the bump stock ban. I have never blamed Trump for the travesty that was the bump stock ban, because I don’t think that he is the one who sold out gun owners. Let’s be honest here- the NRA greenlighted the bump stock ban. This is nothing new, the NRA was pro gun control for most of its history.
In the 1920s, the National Revolver Association, the arm of the NRA responsible for handgun training, proposed regulations later adopted by nine states, requiring a permit to carry a concealed weapon, five years additional prison time if the gun was used in a crime, a ban on gun sales to non-citizens, a one day waiting period between the purchase and receipt of a gun, and that records of gun sales be made available to police. Florida becoming the 26th state to get rid of concealed weapons carry as a crime meant getting rid of that NRA proposal after 100 years.
During the 1930’s, the NRA helped shape the National Firearms Act of 1934. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to make gun control a feature of the New Deal. The NRA assisted Roosevelt in drafting National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act, the first federal gun control laws. These laws placed heavy taxes and regulation requirements on firearms that were associated with crime, such as machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and silencers. Gun sellers and owners were required to register with the federal government and felons were banned from owning weapons. Not only was the legislation unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in 1939, but Karl T. Frederick, the president of the NRA, testified before Congress stating, “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
After the assasination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald with an Italian military surplus rifle purchased from a NRA mail-order advertisement, NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth agreed at a congressional hearing that mail-order sales should be banned stating, “We do think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.”
The NRA also supported California’s Mulford Act of 1967, which had banned carrying loaded weapons in public in response to the Black Panther Party’s impromptu march on the State Capitol to protest gun control legislation on May 2, 1967.
Then came 1968. The assassinations of JFK, jr and Martin Luther King prompted Congress to enact the Gun Control Act of 1968. The act brought back some proposed laws from 1934, to include minimum age and serial number requirements, and extended the gun ban to include the mentally ill and drug addicts. In addition, it restricted the shipping of guns across state lines to collectors and federally licensed dealers. The only part of the proposed law that was opposed by the NRA was a national gun registry. In an interview in American Rifleman, Franklin Orth stated that despite portions of the law appearing “unduly restrictive, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”
It wasn’t until a mini-revolt was staged at the 1977 NRA convention that there was a change in direction. A group of gun owners pushed back and deposed the old leaders in a move called the “Cincinnati Revolt.” Led by former NRA President Harlon Carter and Neal Knox, the revolt ended the tenure of Maxwell Rich as NRA executive vice president and introduced new bylaws. The Revolt at Cincinnati marked a huge change in direction for the NRA. The organization thereafter changed from “hunting, conservation, and marksmanship” and towards the defense of the right to keep and bear arms. The catalyst for this movement was that the NRA wanted to move its headquarters from Washington, DC to Colorado. The new headquarters in Colorado was to be an “Outdoors center” that was more about hunting and recreational shooting than it was the RKBA.
I became a member of the NRA about a decade later and remained an annual member, until I became a life member about 15 years later. I believed for years that the NRA was fighting the good fight for gun owners. It wasn’t.
The NRA was always influenced by a group of Fudds who supported hunting, but hated guns that weren’t for hunting. The bureaucrats who were a part of the NRA’s organization always tried to steer towards hunting, eventually caused the organization to morph into an organization that used the threat of Democrat gun bans for fundraising.
LaPierre was able to use the large flow of money to fund his luxurious life on the company dime, including over $13 million each year for travel and a postemployment golden parachute worth $17 million. LaPierre testified in the NRA’s bankruptcy hearings about his annual weeklong trips to the Bahamas on the company dime.
All they were good at was bargaining away gun rights to the Democrat gun banners in exchange for money and power. That’s why my political donations for the past 15 years went to other gun rights organizations, and yours should, too.
EDITED TO ADD:
Thanks to an anonymous poster, we get this quote, directly from the pages of the March 1968 edition of The American Rifleman, the NRA’s official monthly publication:
the NRA has consistently supported gun legislation which it feels would penalize misuse of guns without harassing law-abiding hunters, target shooters, and collectors”
NRA president Karl T. Frederick
Note that they make no mention of RKBA as anything other than support for the hobby of hunting. The article goes on to declare the NRA’s support for firearm registration, waiting periods, as well as prohibitions on sales of ammunition and firearms across state lines. The also express support for the prohibition of firearms to what they termed as :undesirables.”
The NRA is not, and apparently never has been, a true supporter of the Second Amendment and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. They should rename it the National Hunting Association. It can collapse and die for all I care. We don’t need them.
The State acknowledges that Mr. [Ryan] Busse offers no historical testimony, but argues that he addresses several issues still relevant under Bruen. The State says Mr. Busse’s testimony is relevant to whether the firearms at issue are covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment. State’s Opp. at 9. But as established above, that is an open-and-shut question. And while Mr. Busse includes some discussion of the features of so-called “assault weapons” he does not opine on whether those features represent a “dramatic technological change” that would allow the State to engage in the “more nuanced approach.”
The State also exposes its shocking ignorance about the very firearms it regulates when it attempts to equate only caliber with power, while suggesting both of those are apparently unrelated to velocity. Every child in this country at some point learns Newton’s second law, which is that force equals mass times acceleration. The caliber of a bullet pertains to its mass (though is not totally determinative of it, as .223 and .22LR have similar calibers but very different projectile weights), and the speed at which a particular mass moves determines how forcefully it impacts the intended target.
It is not Plaintiffs’ “view” that .223 Remington is one of the weaker centerfire cartridges. It is an indisputable fact that it is. That is why, as Plaintiffs showed in their motion, a handful of states actually banned .223 for deer hunting out of fear it was not powerful enough to reliably kill a deer, unlike far more powerful common centerfire rifle rounds like .308. (Virginia argued that their caliber regulation is necessary because the use of rifles of a caliber less than .23 to dispatch deer would result in an unacceptable number of crippled wounded and/or lost deer.).
Mr. Busse knows all of this. On his Twitter account on July 5, 2022, he explained that “the typical hunting gun fires a much larger bullet (might be 200 grains or more) some at similarly [to .223] fast speeds. Those rifles are technically MUCH more powerful than an AR15.” Just this week, on April 12, 2023, Mr. Busse similarly tweeted that “The AR15 does not fire particularly high-power rifle rounds when compared to single rounds of most hunting rifles. Single .223/5.56 cartridges of the AR15 are only fractionally ‘as powerful’ as a cartridge like the .30-06.” Perhaps Plaintiffs should have retained Mr. Busse to rebut Mr. Busse.
Given his knowledge, his effort to deceive this Court by comparing the centerfire .223 round to the far weaker rimfire .22LR, a much slower and smaller round typically used for hunting small game or low-recoil target shooting, demonstrates Busse’s unreliability as an expert witness.
— Plaintiffs’ reply to defendants’ opposition to motions to exclude expert testimony in Rupp v. Bonta, challenging California’s “assault weapons” ban
Never forget, even for an instant, that the one and only reason anyone has for taking your gun away is to make you weaker than he is, so he can do something to you that you wouldn’t let him do if you were equipped to prevent it. This goes for burglars, muggers, and rapists, and even more so for policemen, bureaucrats, and politicians.
-Alexander Hope
April 17
1492 – Queen Isabella, King Ferdinand and Christopher Columbus sign the negotiated Capitulations of Santa Fe for his voyage to Asia to acquire spices, granting him the titles of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Viceroy, Governor General, the honorific Don, and also the tenth part of all riches to be obtained from his intended voyage.
1521 – The trial of Martin Luther over his religious teachings begins during the assembly of the Diet of Worms.
1524 – In the service of King Francis I of France, Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano is the first European to reach New York harbor during his voyage of exploration of the Atlantic coast of North America between what is now Florida and New Brunswick.
1861 – The state of Virginia’s secession convention votes to secede from the United States, later becoming the eighth state to join the Confederate States of America.
1905 – In the case of Lochner v. New York, the Supreme Court decides that the “right to free contract” is implicit in the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
1907 – The Ellis Island immigration center sets a record processing 11,747 people in one day.
1961 – A group of Cuban exiles financed and trained by the CIA lands at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro.
1969 – Sirhan Sirhan is convicted of assassinating Robert F. Kennedy and sentenced to death with the sentenced later commuted to life imprisonment.
1970 – The Apollo 13 astronauts return to Earth safely when their Command Module Odyssey splashed down in the Pacific ocean, southeast of American Samoa.
1978 – The leader of the Parcham faction of People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, Mir Akbar Khyber, is assassinated in Kabul.
2013 – While emergency services personnel were responding to a fire set by an arsonist at the West Fertilizer Company storage and distribution facility in West, Texas, ammonium nitrate in the structure explodes, killing 15 people and injuring 160 others.
2014 – NASA’s Kepler space telescope confirms the discovery of the first Earth-size planet, Kepler-186F orbiting in the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Kepler-186 in the constellation of Cygnus.
Woodrow is accidentally accurate here.
He admits he wants you to give up your safety.
He wants you to become vulnerable for their social justice experiments.Other people's safety isn't our problem, Steven. That's more in your ballpark. We protect ourselves & our families. https://t.co/Tyf3eDxvhy
— 2A History (@2aHistory) April 16, 2023
Robbery suspect who was shot by witness at Chase ATM was wanted for murder
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — A stranger stepped in to help a man he witnessed being pistol-whipped by a suspected robber in southwest Houston Saturday night, according to police.
On Sunday, ABC13 learned that the suspect was wanted for murder out of Louisiana.
Investigators said the stranger saw the robbery as it was happening at a Chase Bank in the 10400 block of Westheimer Road.
A man pulled into the bank to withdraw money from the ATM when the armed suspect came around the corner and ordered him to hand over money, according to police.
Detectives said the victim reportedly began to comply until the suspect began to pistol-whip him.
That’s when police say someone driving by saw the crime happening and pulled out a gun to defend the victim.
The man shot the suspect in the leg and foot after several shots were fired. The suspect was taken to the hospital in stable condition, according to Houston police.
Investigators interviewed the victim and passersby, who were not harmed.
According to ABC13’s Safety Tracker, in the zip code where the incident happened, 77042, there have been at least 103 robberies in the area in the last year.
There Is Zero Reason For Republicans To Cooperate With Dianne Feinstein’s Request.
There’s zero reason Republicans should cooperate with Schumer and the president on their judicial agenda, either tactically, politically, or even morally.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein is no longer able to perform her duties as a U.S. senator. That is, at least, the reality according to her staff, who asked the Senate majority leader to temporarily replace her on the Judiciary Committee as she approaches two months of absence over health issues.
This isn’t surprising, of course: Dianne Feinstein is 89 years old. While Americans used to joke about the fossils who ran the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Feinstein was already a full decade older than the oldest Soviet premier to ever die in office when she ran for re-election — a full five years ago.
Her mental decline has been known on Capitol Hill for years, with staff guiding her around the halls, and yet still just this year Sen. Chuck Schumer decided to let her remain on the Senate committee responsible for accomplishing the president’s judicial agenda.
She served on that committee until early March. Then finally, after six weeks away recovering from shingles, her California colleague, Rep. Ro Khanna, publicly called for her resignation. Democrats like Khanna had grown weary — between Feinstein and Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, the party’s judicial agenda had been stalled since the top of March.
Hours after Khanna’s tweet, she asked to be temporarily replaced in her duties on the essential committee. Democrats are eager to comply.
But are Republicans so eager? They shouldn’t be. There’s zero reason — zero — that Republicans should cooperate with Schumer and the president on their judicial agenda, either tactically, politically, or even morally.
Republicans have the power, too: Committee assignments are decided at the beginning of the session, either by unanimous consent or, if contested, by the vote of at least 60 senators. Democrats certainly hope they can just brush this through under the former, but what reason does Sen. Josh Hawley, or maybe Sen. Mike Lee, or Sen. J.D. Vance have to let that one pass them by?
Then if one senator says no, the whole thing’s got to come to a vote, and while people like Sen. Mitt Romney might be happy to fill benches with left-wing judges in the name of “decency” or some other principle long ago extinguished by left-wing activists, getting nine other Republicans to join him might prove more difficult.
The task of persuading 10 Republicans to cooperate with the president’s judicial agenda will prove even more difficult if Sen. Mitch McConnell — himself just out of the hospital (and seven years older than Josef Stalin was when he died) — holds the line. While populist conservatives may have little love for the minority leader, they must give him credit for hard-nosed judiciary tactics.
No one’s talking about government funding here, or defense, or some other thing sacred to the old guard of the GOP. At issue is an essentially lawless administration seeding the court with the types of judges who will uphold their lawlessness. Why cooperate in that?
Weak-kneed Republicans might suggest not cooperating with the Democrats on this issue would be poor form or set a bad precedent. Those Republicans might need reminding that mild-mannered Brett Kavanaugh was falsely accused of being a serial rapist in front of the entire country. Poor form? Bad precedents? In the context of today’s political battles, those ideas hold little sway.
And let no man mention “normalcy.”
There are no more “live pairs,” wherein past senators have refrained from voting themselves to give opposing colleagues the courtesy of a necessary absence. That tradition has passed on.
Yes, senators have died in office or resigned mid-Congress before and their replacements have often been accomplished by simple consent, but first, no senator has ever asked to be temporarily replaced, and second, those were normal times. We’re beyond those now; and not only because of Kavanaugh or the sexual accusations against Clarence Thomas or even the religious interrogation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, but because this Democratic Senate has declined to even deliberate on judicial nominees. There’s been no debate, no regular order, on the White House’s list of new judges — just a simple vote to move them through.
With what evidence can any Republican claim they would be given the same quarter if one of them threw themselves upon their colleagues’ mercy? The party that voted to impeach President Donald Trump twice was disciplined and committed in its opposition to his judicial nominees.
Even today, if left-wing activists and their allies in the press had their way, the courteous tradition of the “blue slip” (which allows senators to hold up nominees from their own states) would be abolished.
Congressional observers might point to the previous Senate, which was tied and so voted to allow for nominees to be discharged from committee even if the vote was locked in a tie, but that rule was agreed to only for that Congress and is no longer in effect. Because of this, Democrats need a majority to work the committee.
Without any procedural normalcy, returned comitatus, or shared judicial philosophies, there are no reasons to continue to cooperate with the president’s judicial agenda. And without Republican collaboration, that agenda will stall.
Politico’s liberal D.C. newsletter, Playbook, predicted Republican intransigence could lead to two different outcomes: pressure for Feinstein’s resignation, or Democrats rallying “to her defense.”
To that, a casual observer of the past seven years of vicious Democratic politics might respond: “let them rally.” The reality is Republicans have nothing to lose from resisting Democrats’ push to replace Feinstein, and everything to gain. This battle is far too deep in the weeds for independent voters to care, Democratic voters are already motivated against Republicans enough, and Republican voters are inclined to reward a little courage in the fight.
The GOP didn’t make this situation: The Democrats put an 89-year-old woman and an emotionally and mentally traumatized man into the U.S. Senate in the name of pure power politics. That play is not working out for them. Republicans can let them rally away, but they’d be fools to let them confirm.
Illinois Supreme Court justices refuse recusal in gun ban challenge despite funding from defendants
Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a defendant in the case, gave each of the 2 justices $1 million for their election campaigns.
The Illinois Supreme Court has denied a motion to disqualify two justices from hearing a challenge to the state’s new gun ban over perceived conflicts of interest. The two justices also declined to recuse themselves.
Before Elizabeth Rochford and Mary O’Brien were elected to the Illinois Supreme Court in November 2022, Gov. J.B. Pritzker gave each of their campaign funds half a million dollars from both his campaign account and a revocable trust, totaling $1 million to each. The two justices also received six-figure donations out of a campaign fund controlled by Illinois House Speaker Emanual “Chris” Welch,” D-Hillside.
Both Pritzker and Welch are top defendants in a Macon County challenge of Illinois’ gun and magazine ban brought by state Rep. Dan Caulkins, R-Decatur. The county judge there issued a final judgment that the law is unconstitutional. The state appealed the case directly to the Illinois Supreme Court after a separate case was found by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to have a likelihood of success on the basis the law violates equal protections.
Late last month, Caulkins’ attorney filed a motion for the two justices to recuse themselves, or for the Illinois Supreme Court to disqualify them from hearing the challenge. Attorney Jerry Stocks argued “unreasonably large campaign contributions” from Pritzker and Welch “undermine public confidence” in the judiciary.
Asked in early March if the justices should recuse themselves because of the donations, Pritzker said that’s “ridiculous.”
Skynet smiles
Why Post-Bruen Gun-Carry Restrictions Might Backfire
Formerly may-issue states continue to thumb their noses at the Supreme Court by passing some of the country’s most restrictive concealed carry laws. In doing so, they run the risk of undermining licensing schemes altogether.
Last Monday, Maryland became the third state impacted by the Supreme Court’s ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen to pass a complete overhaul of its concealed carry laws. In a pair of bills, the state assembly greatly increased the application fees for new “wear and carry” permits, expanded its training requirements, and added new “sensitive places” throughout the state where licensed carry would be a crime. The off-limits areas include almost all publicly-accessible private property, like stores or restaurants.
The bills followed a familiar blueprint already established by states like New York and New Jersey, who were the first two states to rebuke the Court with onerous new laws. Fellow affected states, Hawaii and California, appear poised to do the same.
But those states are tempting judicial fate with their replacement laws, as evidenced by the parameters laid out by Justice Thomas in his Bruen opinion. The early track record of legal challenges to New York and New Jersey’s carry laws, where there have thus far been at least five injunctions between the two, can also attest to that fact. But even aside from the constitutional issues, on a more practical level, establishing a political norm of using licensing regimes to make exercising gun rights as difficult as possible creates new skepticism over the very idea of licensing laws.
The Supreme Court went to great lengths in its Bruen opinion to make clear that it was not yet prepared to call into question the legitimacy of standard “shall-issue” licensing laws.
“To be clear, nothing in our analysis should be interpreted to suggest the unconstitutionality of the 43 States’ ‘shall-issue’ licensing regimes, under which ‘a general desire for self-defense is sufficient to obtain a [permit]’,” Justice Thomas wrote in his opinion. “Because these licensing regimes do not require applicants to show an atypical need for armed self-defense, they do not necessarily prevent ‘law-abiding, responsible citizens’ from exercising their Second Amendment right to public carry. Rather, it appears that these shall-issue regimes, which often require applicants to undergo a background check or pass a firearms safety course, are designed to ensure only that those bearing arms in the jurisdiction are, in fact, ‘law-abiding, responsible citizens.’”
This carve-out for “shall-issue” regimes was likely the result of a compromise done to mitigate political backlash and shore up support among justices. It remains unclear how “shall issue” permitting laws really fare when closely examined under the text and historical tradition test articulated later in the ruling.
Nevertheless, the American people currently are broadly in favor of that compromise. A November 2022 poll from Marquette University’s law school found that 64 percent of U.S. adults favor the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen ruling. Similarly, a separate Marquette poll found that 62 percent favor allowing the concealed carry of handguns with a permit or license required. Conversely, permitless carry laws routinely poll poorly despite their continued success in red states.
But that equilibrium, in which Americans broadly favor both concealed carry rights and licensing laws, could ultimately become upended if more and more states continue to make lawful carry all but impossible. If push comes to shove and one has to go, it’s more than likely that the American people (and the Supreme Court, which has tended to act only after public opinion on guns has shifted) will choose licensing laws.
The recent experience in North Carolina is a perfect example of this. For years, gun-rights advocates favored repealing the state’s permit-to-purchase law for handguns, but to no avail. Meanwhile, at least nationally, the policy continued to poll favorably among the public. However, following the COVID pandemic and a series of scandals involving local sheriffs delaying permit applications, enough political momentum was finally there to get the repeal bill through the legislature. Two years later, with improved majorities, Republican lawmakers were able to get the repeal into law after overriding a veto.
Legal rulings striking down many of these likely unconstitutional Bruen replacement laws may arrive before sentiment shifts enough to make a difference. But litigation often takes many years, and the Supreme Court has thus far shown an unwillingness to intervene in New York’s law despite its restrictions being the first enacted and arguably the most burdensome. Therefore, relief from the courts might not be in the offing for some time.
As permitless carry approaches a political wall in the near future, continued efforts by gun-control advocates to undermine workable permitting schemes elsewhere across the country risks shifting the Overton window toward more permissive gun-carry systems, whether among the general public or the courts.
Since gun-control advocates very much don’t want to see that happen, they may be forced in the near future to give up the push for restrictive “shall issue, may carry” licensing schemes.
Rewatched “V for Vendetta” — movie with a subplot about a govt that seized power and the pharmaceutical companies that got rich by developing a virus and the vaccination for the same virus. Man, some of these sci-fi writers have far out imaginations. https://t.co/nAW6scdwd6
— Don Kilmer (@donkilmer) April 16, 2023
April 16
1457 BC – At the valley of Megiddo, Egyptian forces under the command of Pharaoh Thutmose III and a large rebellious coalition of Canaanite vassal states led by the king of Kadesh engage in a battle considered the first be accepted as recorded in reliable detail
73 – Masada, a Jewish fortress on the eastern edge of the Judaean Desert, falls to the Romans after several months of siege, ending the 1st Jewish–Roman War.
1582 – Spanish conquistador Hernando de Lerma founds the settlement of Salta, Argentina.
1746 – The Battle of Culloden is fought between the Jacobite Stuarts and the British Hanoverian forces. After the battle, many Highland traditions are banned and the Highlands of Scotland were cleared of inhabitants with many clan members moved to North America.
1818 – Following the end of The War of 1812, the U.S. Senate ratifies the Rush–Bagot Treaty, limiting naval armaments on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain.
1862 – During the Civil War, the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia, becomes law.
1908 – The Natural Bridges National Monument is established in Utah.
1943 – First made by him in 1938 during experiments with ergot fungus found on grain, Albert Hofmann accidentally discovers the hallucinogenic effects of the research drug Lysergic Acid Diethylamide – LSD.
1945 – U.S. Army troops liberate Nazi prisoner of war camp Offizierslager IV-C at Castle Colditz.
1947 – An explosion on board the French registered vessel SS Grandcamp at Port of Texas City, Texas, Galveston Bay, causes the city to catch fire, killing almost 600 people.
1961 – In a nationally broadcast speech, Cuban leader Fidel Castro declares that he is a Marxist–Leninist and that Cuba is going to adopt Communism.
1963 – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pens his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama for protesting against segregation.
1972 – Apollo 16 is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida with astronauts
John Young, Thomas ‘Ken’ Mattingly and Charley Duke aboard.
1990 – “Doctor Death”, Jack Kevorkian, participates in his first assisted suicide, aiding Janet Elaine Adkins in a campground near Pontiac, Michigan.
2007 – Seung-Hui Cho, previously diagnosed with severe depression, uses two handguns to shoot and kill 32 people and wound 17 more at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, in Blacksburg, Virginia, before committing suicide.
2008 – In the case of Baze v. Rees, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that execution by lethal injection does not violate the 8th Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment.