Republicans at RNC Don’t Budge In Face of Latest Anti-Gun Onslaught

We’ve spilled a lot of digital ink on all the people pushing for gun control in the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. We’ve seen it from celebrities and athletes, to say nothing of politicians, even Biden who only calls for assault weapon bans on days that end in the letter “y.”

A lot of people are shocked that Republicans aren’t tripping over themselves to back gun control.

And let’s be real, if that was going to happen, it would happen at the Republican National Convention. Kicking off just a couple of days after the attempt on Trump’s life, you’d imagine emotions would be high and if they were ever going to do it, it would be here and now.

Only, as the Washington Times notes, it ain’t happening.

Republicans at their party convention said their commitment to gun rights and expanding concealed carry wasn’t diminished by the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

The party, according to delegates and lawmakers at the Republican National Convention, remained steadfastly opposed to sweeping gun control laws such as a ban on so-called assault weapons such as the AR-15-style rifle used by Mr. Trump’s would-be assassin.

Addressing a gathering of Second Amendment activists at the convention, Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas said the attack Saturday on Mr. Trump only proves that firearms in the hands of law-abiding individuals are necessary.

“There are 400 million guns currently in circulation. Guns aren’t going anywhere,” Mr. Hunt said. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, and that guy is now dead because a good guy with a gun shot him.”

He added, “Imagine how many moral lives were spared because that sniper acted and took him out immediately.”

I just want to jump in here and point something out for all those anti-gun voices that laugh at the “good guy with a gun” thing: Law enforcement are good guys, too.

Many times, the good guy with a gun is a cop of some stripe, but the issue with counting on that is that cops aren’t always present and able to protect you. Trump had an entire detail charged with protecting him and we see how that went.

Moving on…

Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida assured gun-rights activists at the gathering, which was sponsored by U.S. Concealed Carry, that the platform’s drive-by treatment of the Second Amendment did not mean Republicans were less concerned about the issue.

“Everyone has always and will forever associate the conservative movement as right in line with the principle of 2A — ’shall not be infringed,’” she said. “Just because we don’t explicitly talk about it in a political platform for a single cycle doesn’t mean that we are not absolutely adherent to the belief that Americans have the right to defend themselves.”

Ms. Cammack said Republicans in Congress are working on passing national reciprocity legislation that would enable legal gun owners to carry concealed firearms across state lines, similar to how a driver’s license works.

That’s great.

Of course, it should have passed nearly eight years ago when Republicans controlled every branch of government, but better late than never, I suppose.

Regardless, it seems Republicans at the RNC aren’t remotely interested in buckling to the anti-gun agenda, especially in the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life. No one is taking it lightly or think it’s not a big deal, either. We just all seem to understand that nothing we said before Saturday’s attack has fundamentally changed. Gun control wouldn’t have prevented that attack and claiming otherwise is ridiculous.

That hasn’t stopped the usual suspects, mind you, but they’re so fanatical about pushing an anti-gun agenda, rationality isn’t really in their wheelhouse.

I’m just heartened to see gun rights remain respected at the RNC under the current circumstances.

Bob Newhart, Dean of the Deadpan Delivery, Dies at 94

Bob Newhart, the beloved stand-up performer whose droll, deadpan humor showcased on two critically acclaimed CBS sitcoms vaulted him into the ranks of history’s greatest comedians, died Thursday morning. He was 94.

The Chicago legend, who won Grammy Awards for album of the year and best new artist for his 1960 breakthrough record, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, died at his Los Angeles home after a series of short illnesses, his longtime publicist, Jerry Digney, announced.

The former accountant famously went without an Emmy Award until 2013, when he finally was given one for guest-starring as Arthur Jeffries (alias Professor Proton, former host of a children’s science show) on CBS’ The Big Bang Theory…..

UPDATE: Known Wolf

Trump shooter Thomas Crooks threatened to ‘shoot up’ his high school and ‘put bombs in the bathrooms’ years before his failed assassination attempt on the former president.

Thomas Crooks threatened to ‘shoot up’ his high school when he was just 15-years-old in an incident that wasn’t taken seriously at the time but is now being probed by the FBI, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Federal officers on Thursday visited Crooks’s former classmate Vincent Taormina, 20, to quiz him about the shooter’s ‘hatred’ of politicians and the threats he made as a freshman at Bethel Park High School.

Speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com Taormina said, ‘We had like this anonymous place you could post things or tell on someone on our computers at school and he posted something like ‘Don’t come to school tomorrow,’ and something else that made it sound like he’d put bombs in the cafeteria bathrooms.

‘Half of us just didn’t come to school the next day – I didn’t. But it wasn’t taken seriously.

‘We all texted one another and it came out pretty quickly that it was Thomas and his friend group who’d made the threats to shoot [the school] up.’

The threat came during Crooks’s freshman year at Bethel Park High and saw both it and the local middle school shut down

According to Taormina investigators were keen to hear more about the threats made by the younger Crooks in 2019 which were not, he said, taken seriously at the time.

Continue reading “”

Man fatally shot after breaking into Orion Township house to attack ex-girlfriend

OAKLAND COUNTY, Mich. (FOX 2) – A 67-year-old suspect was fatally shot after breaking into a residence to attack his ex-girlfriend in Orion Township Wednesday morning.

The suspect was fatally wounded by the ex-girlfriend’s stepson inside the house, on Elkhorn Lake Road around 10 a.m. Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said.

The woman and her stepson retreated to an upstairs bedroom after Galen Gavitt broke into the residence using an ax. Once inside, the stepson – who had his own gun – barricaded the door and the woman hid in the attached bathroom.

Gavitt fired a shot through the door, causing the man, 36, to duck for cover on the floor. Gavitt came into the room, pointed a gun at the woman’s stepson and told him ‘I’m here for her’ Bouchard said.

“(Gavitt) moved towards the bathroom door, and at that point, the stepson fired one round from his weapon, which struck the assaulting suspect, who is down, deceased. So it kind of played out very quickly,” Bouchard said.

Gavitt had previously threatened to kill the woman, and already had a personal protection order and extreme risk protection order filed against him.

His ex-girlfriend had lived with him for 17 years in Tuscola County before she sought refuge in her stepdaughter’s house in Orion Township.

Gavitt broke into the home using the ax to break a basement window. Both the woman and her stepson were not injured.

Bouchard said that it appears Gavitt got his ex-wife’s weapon and took that to the Orion Township house to shoot his former live-in girlfriend. Gavitt’s own two firearms had already been confiscated from the state’s so-called Red Flag law by police in Tuscola County.

Although the investigation is ongoing, the sheriff said that the stepson’s actions appeared justified as Gavitt was going after his ex-girlfriend with a gun that he had already fired before forcing his way into the bedroom.

Bouchard said he didn’t know how the man bracing against the door was missed by the blind gunshot fired from Gavitt.

“By the grace of God,” he said. “It depends on where in the door it went through.”

Remember the Bond movie reboot Casino Royale back in 2006?

Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals: Carry Bans for Under-21s Violate the Second Amendment

Minnesota’s ban on concealed carry for adults younger than 21 violates the Second Amendment, according to a three-judge panel on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld a district court decision that found the state’s statute unconstitutional.

On Tuesday, the Eighth Circuit affirmed the lower court decision, giving the Second Amendment Foundation, Firearms Policy Coalition, MN Gun Owners Caucus, and several individual plaintiffs a huge victory… as well as teeing up a potential appeal to the Supreme Court by Minnesota Attorney General and longtime anti-2A advocate Keith Ellison.

The opinion, authored by Eighth Circuit Judge Duane Benton, is relatively brief and mercifully short of legalese. First, the panel weighed in on standing, and rightfully allowed the litigation to proceed even though the original plaintiffs have now reached the age where they can apply for a carry license. Plaintiffs aging out is a real problem when challenging restrictions on young adults, but the 2A groups found a 19-year-old to serve as an additional plaintiff in Worth v. Jacobson, and the panel ruled that the “organizational plaintiffs have an unbroken chain of standing” thanks to the addition.

With standing resolved, Duane and the other two members of the panel then turned to the question at hand; whether Minnesota’s prohibition on concealed carry for adults younger than 21 passes constitutional muster. The panel dismissed the claims by the state that young adults aren’t part of “the People”, nor do they possess the full flower of their individual rights until they turn 21. As Benton pointed out, “Reading the Second Amendment in the context of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment unambiguously places 18 to 20-year-olds within the national political community.” And if they’re a part of the national political community, then they possess the right to keep and bear arms.

Unless, of course, Minnesota could demonstrate a national tradition that prohibited some adults from exercising their Second Amendment rights based solely on their age. The state pointed to various ordinances and regulations, including 18th and 19th century prohibitions on college students keeping guns on campus, but the court found all that none of them were a close enough analogue to pass muster.

 Minnesota did not proffer an analogue that meets the “how” and “why” of the Carry Ban for 18 to 20-year-old Minnesotans. The only proffered evidence that was both not entirely based on one’s status as a minor and not entirely removed from burdening carry—Indiana’s 1875 statute—is not sufficient to demonstrate that the Carry Ban is within this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. See Bruen, 597 U.S. at 65 (a “single” “postbellum” “state statute” is insufficient weight to meet the state’s burden).

Minnesota has not met its burden to proffer sufficient evidence to rebut the presumption that 18 to 20-year-olds seeking to carry handguns in public for self defense are protected by the right to keep and bear arms. The Carry Ban, § 624.714subd. 2(b)(2), violates the Second Amendment as applied to Minnesota through the Fourteenth Amendment, and, thus, is unconstitutional.

This is the first Second Amendment case to be decided since the Supreme Court used two fairly dissimilar 18th century statutes to uphold the modern prohibition on gun possession for those subject to a domestic violence restraining order in Rahimi, and it’s good to see that the Eighth Circuit didn’t try to abuse the Court’s narrow decision to uphold the state’s carry ban by citing statutes that barred minors from possessing guns or other historical laws with a tenuous connection at best to the law the plaintiffs challenged.

FPC President Brandon Combs hailed the decision, saying it “confirms that age-based firearm bans are flatly unconstitutional. All peaceable people have a natural right to carry firearms in public, and adults under the age of 21 are no exception,” while Second Amendment Foundation Executive Vice President and founder Alan Gottlieb called the ruling “a significant victory for the rights of young adults.”

Now the ball is is AG Ellison’s court. Will he seek an en banc review of the panel’s decision… and would the Eighth Circuit even grant his request given that both the trial court and the appellate panel are in agreement? Unless Ellison is willing to take the loss, his choices are limited to asking the Eighth Circuit for a do-over with the entire appellate court weighing in, or taking his appeal directly to the Supreme Court. He has a tough decision to make, because now that the Eighth Circuit panel has issued its ruling, it won’t be long before the state is formally enjoined from prohibiting young adults from applying for and receiving their concealed carry license.