Taking guns away from lawful owners isn’t practical

RALEIGH — When officers from the U.S. Marshal Service, the N.C. Department of Adult Correction, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, and other agencies approached a home in eastern Charlotte on April 29, their purpose was to serve warrants on a fugitive named Terry Clark Hughes Jr.

The fugitive fought back, costing four men their lives: Adult Correction officers Alden Elliot and Samuel Paloche, Deputy U.S. Marshal Thomas Weeks, and CMPD’s Joshua Ayer.

Hughes was a habitual felon. In 2011, he was convicted in Person County of breaking and entering. In 2012, he was convicted in Alamance County of speeding to elude arrest — having fled a checkpoint at more than 100 miles an hour — and possessing a firearm, which as a felon he lacked the right to do.

So, when the task force arrived at the Galway Drive house on April 29, among the charges Hughes faced was the illegal possession of guns. Alas, he still had guns. He used them to murder four men before his outrageous conduct cost him his own life.

The officers were there, in other words, to enforce a gun-control law with nearly universal acceptance. And yet, in the aftermath of this horrific incident, progressive politicians couldn’t help themselves. Rather than tailor their reactions to the facts of the case, they engaged in a robotic plug-and-play.

In his April 29 statement, for example, Joe Biden called the officers “fallen heroes.” Yes, they are.

But the president also said this: “We must do more to protect our law enforcement officers. That means funding them — so they have the resources they need to do their jobs and keep us safe. And it means taking additional action to combat the scourge of gun violence. Now. Leaders in Congress need to step up so that we ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, require safe storage of guns, and pass universal background checks and a national red flag law. Enough is enough.”

Several days later, after President Biden met with family members of the fallen heroes as well as others wounded in the firefight, he insisted lawmakers needed to “keep the weapons of war” out of the wrong hands.

The hands of habitual felon Terry Clark Hughes certainly had no business holding firearms of any kind. But it was already illegal for him to do so. That was one of the main reasons the officers were there to arrest him in the first place.

As for the funding of state and federal law enforcement, I see no evidence it played any role here. Safe storage of guns? While the North Carolina General Assembly has already legislated on this matter, it also had no relevance to the case. Nor did the absence of red flag laws (since any report to authorities by family members that he possessed a gun would already have triggered yet another warrant for his arrest) or broader background checks (since he already knew he was precluded from owning a gun and wouldn’t have tried buying firearms from anyone required to use the National Instant Criminal Background Check System).

That leaves only Biden’s stated desire to ban all assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Assuming he means semiautomatic rifles such as the AR-15 — automatic weapons are already illegal for the vast majority of Americans to own — there are tens of millions of such rifles currently in private hands across our country. Most have magazines holding more than 10 rounds.

To put the matter bluntly, there is no practical way of confiscating these weapons from their lawful owners. Let’s focus on actual criminals like Terry Clark Hughes.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His latest books, Mountain Folk and Forest Folk, combine epic fantasy with early American history (FolkloreCycle.com).

A Big Week for SCOTUS and the Second Amendment

On Thursday, the Supreme Court is set to consider whether to accept challenges to “assault weapons” bans in Illinois and Maryland at this week’s conference. But that’s not the only 2A issue coming before the justices this week. A case called Srour v. NYC is also scheduled for consideration in conference this week. That lawsuit is taking on New York City’s “good moral character” standard for residents trying to exercise their right to keep a rifle or shotgun in their home; a statute found unconstitutional by a district court judge, but allowed to remain in effect thanks to an inexplicable decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Attorney Amy Bellantoni first asked SCOTUS to intervene on behalf of her client back in March, but her request for an emergency application to vacate the Second Circuit’s stay was summarily rejected by Justice Sonia Sotomayor on April 4th. The following week, Bellantoni resubmitted her request to Justice Clarence Thomas. Instead of accepting or rejecting the request, Thomas has submitted the question to the full Court.

In her initial request, Bellantoni notes that the district court judge who found New York’s “good moral character” and “good cause to deny” clauses unconstitutional did so after the state failed to come up with a single historical analogue that could justify the broad and vague powers granted to the licensing authorities.

The district court went on to analogizing Respondents’ ‘moral character’requirement to the ‘proper cause’ factor for a concealed carry handgun license thatwas stricken by this Court in Bruen. Both statutes require individuals to “prove”something to a government official before being able to exercise a protected right.

Harkening to Bruen’s discussion contrasting outlier “may issue” regimes likeNew York’s, “under which authorities have discretion to deny concealed-carrylicenses even when the applicant satisfies the statutory criteria,” with “shall issue”regimes, “where authorities must issue concealed-carry licenses whenever applicants satisfy certain threshold requirements, without granting licensing officials discretion to deny licenses based on a perceived lack of need or suitability,” the district court correctly observed that Respondents’ regulations “land very close to the problematic “may issue” laws criticized in Bruen.”

… The district court concluded that 10-303(a)(2) and (a)(9) “suffer from the verysame constitutional flaws under Bruen.” Observing that Section 10-303 fails to define “good moral character” in further detail, the court held that “without doubt, the very notions of “good moral character” and “good cause” are inherently exceedingly broad and discretionary. Someone may be deemed to have good moral character by one person, yet a very morally flawed character by another. Such unfettered discretion is hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with Bruen.”

The district court then turned to whether Respondents met their burden under the Bruen test, but found they failed to produce any historical analogue for investing officials with the broad discretion to restrict an individual’s Second Amendment rights based on a lack of moral character.

Respondents offered examples of criminal laws, loyalty oath requirements, and surety statutes — laws preventing “dangerous or potentially dangerous” people from possessing firearms, which the district court found are “hardly analogous to denying someone their Second Amendment’s rights based on a City official’s discretionary determination that that person “lacks good moral character”…The latter is far broader and sweeps in significantly more conduct.”

When New York City officials appealed the judge’s order to the Second Circuit, they quickly got the relief they were asking. A three-judge panel stayed the lower court decision and allowed the NYPD to continue to use “good moral character” (or the lack thereof) as a reason to approve or deny permits, pointing to a similar preliminary ruling regarding pistol licenses that are being challenged as part of Antonyuk and other lawsuits taking on the state’s Concealed Carry Improvement Act. But Bellantoni argues that the Second Circuit provided no real analysis before reaching its decision. If it had, Bellantoni believes the panel would have had no real choice but to uphold the district court’s finding.

Had “due consideration” been given, the Second Circuit would have realized that Antonyuk (i) is not binding on the appeal, as it involved review of a preliminary injunction, not a merits-based determination; (ii) its ‘moral character’ analysis is confined to handgun licensing (plaintiffs challenged the “Concealed Carry Improvement Act”); (iii) New York State’s moral character statute for handguns is markedly narrower than NYC Admin.

Code 10-303(a)(2) (still, any amount of discretion conflicts with the plain text); and (iv) contains no analysis of this Nation’s historical traditions of regulating rifles and shotguns, which is decidedly sparse. To be sure, when it comes to long guns, even the New York State Legislature acknowledged in 1965 that there was no ‘National tradition’ of licensing rifles and shotguns, never mind disarming the entire citizenry until a government official feels they possess “good moral character.”

We have no way of knowing which, if any, of the Second Amendment cases that are pending in conference will be granted cert by the Supreme Court, but there’s a strong argument to be made in favor of accepting all three of the legal challenges that will be discussed behind closed doors this week.

The Srour case may be the most limited in terms of impact, given that NYC is an outlier when it comes to its gun licensing laws, but there are still millions of New York City residents who are being subjected to the arbitrary and capricious whims of the NYPD Licensing Bureau before they can exercise a fundamental civil right. All three cases are worthy of the Court’s attention, and the longer the justices delay in hearing them, the worse these deprivations of liberty become.

Judge Fast-Tracks Review of ATF’s Universal Background Check Rule Amid Legal Challenge by GOA, Texas

A federal judge has expedited the legal proceedings against a new rule by the ATF that mandates universal background checks on private firearm sales. U.S. District Court Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk’s decision on Friday sets the stage for a rapid review of the contentious rule, which has faced strong opposition from gun rights advocates and several states.

The rule, slated to be enforced starting May 20, 2024, would significantly expand the scope of background checks, requiring them even in private transactions that have traditionally been exempt. This includes sales by individuals not classified as being “engaged in the business” of selling firearms. According to reporting by Breitbart News, this change blurs the lines between private sellers and licensed dealers, potentially impacting millions of gun owners across the country who wish to buy or sell a firearm to or from a private seller.

Gun Owners of America (GOA), the Gun Owners Foundation and the State of Texas, along with other states (Louisiana, Mississippi and Utah) and advocacy groups (including the Tennessee Firearms Association and the Virginia Citizens Defense League), have filed a lawsuit arguing that the rule not only exceeds the regulatory powers of the ATF but also infringes on constitutional rights. The plaintiffs claim the rule would unfairly classify ordinary citizens who sell firearms as dealers, subjecting them to rigorous licensing and background checks.

Judge Kacsmaryk has ordered the ATF to respond to the motion for preliminary relief by 5 p.m. tomorrow, May 14, 2024, with the plaintiffs’ reply due by the following day by 5 p.m. as well.

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Tennessee Appeals Court Rules Against Wildlife Agents Who Planted Cameras on Private Land
The three-judge panel concluded unanimously that while the state law at issue is constitutional, the wildlife agents’ application of it was not.

In December 2022, Reason reported that both state and federal wildlife agents routinely trespass onto private land and plant cameras. Two Tennessee homeowners successfully sued the state over the practice, and a three-judge panel ruled in their favor. The state appealed the decision, and this week the court of appeals ruled in the homeowners’ favor.

At issue is a state law allowing officers of the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency (TWRA) to “go upon any property, outside of buildings, posted or otherwise,” in order to “enforce all laws relating to wildlife.” In the case of Terry Rainwaters and Hunter Hollingsworth, TWRA officers not only entered their respective properties but also installed trail cameras to look for hunting violations, all without a warrant and ignoring “No Trespassing” signs. A lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice (I.J.) on behalf of Rainwaters and Hollingsworth asked the court to declare the law unconstitutional and issue an injunction against the TWRA, barring it from carrying out any further unwarranted intrusions.

Under the “open-fields doctrine,” Supreme Court precedent dating back to Prohibition holds that undeveloped land on someone’s property lacks the same rigorous Fourth Amendment protections as their home and the “curtilage,” the area immediately surrounding the home.

In March 2022, a three-judge panel from the Benton County Circuit Court ruled in the homeowners’ favor, finding that the state constitution provided more protections than the Fourth Amendment. It determined that the state law allowing the TWRA practice created an “intolerable risk” of abuse and was “facially unconstitutional,” but it stopped short of issuing an injunction. The state appealed the decision the following month.

In a hearing before the Tennessee Court of Appeals Western Section on June 20, 2023, I.J. attorney Josh Windham argued that the state law is unconstitutionally broad. “It allows TWRA officers to enter and roam around private land, fishing for evidence of crime,” Windham said. “It doesn’t require consent. It doesn’t require warrants. It doesn’t require probable cause….It’s a blank check for officers to invade private land whenever and however they please.”

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I suggest he provide the example

Climate Professor Thinks We Should ‘Cull’ the Human Population to Reach Emissions Targets

Professor Bill McGuire is a well-known vulcanologist and climate scientist who doesn’t care much for humanity. He tweeted out a scathingly brilliant idea if you’re in the mortuary business or work as a grave digger.

“If I am brutally honest, the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic #climate breakdown, is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.” https://t.co/hzga69EhV3
— Bill McGuire (@ProfBillMcGuire) May 11, 2024

Ooopsie. McGuire deleted the tweet a few hours later but had no regrets. The trouble is, we just don’t understand how brilliant he is.

Really? Many would beg to differ.

Even his peers were aghast at his suggestion.

“Eco-fascism,” indeed.

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Sometimes, you wonder if corrupt crap like this isn’t done on purpose, simply to test the opposition’s mental acuity.

Judge Aileen Cannon is a Heroine
She is scheduled on June 21st to hear oral argument on whether special counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed

The liberal news media is full of false stories about how Judge Aileen Cannon of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida has delayed former President Donald Trump’s trial unnecessarily for allegedly mishandling classified documents. But, in fact, the Biden Administration and its Attorney General, Merrick Garland, are themselves to blame for the current delay. Special Counsel Jack Smith claims to be an inferior officer of the United States, but in fact he holds no such office. Smith is a mere employee of the Department of Justice, and he lacks the power to initiate prosecutions. Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission, 585 U.S. __ (2018) holds that only officers of the United States can take actions that affect the life, liberty, and property of citizens.

Judge Cannon has asked for oral argument on June 21, 2024 on former President Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment on the ground that Smith was unconstitutionally appointed to his current job because he is not an inferior officer. Washington, D.C. super-lawyer, Gene Schaerr, has filed an amicus brief in United States v. Trump on behalf of former Attorney Generals Edwin Meese III and Michael B. Mukasey, as well as me and Professor Gary Lawson, arguing that Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed to be an inferior officer, and Judge Cannon has asked Gene Schaerr to participate in the oral argument, which he has agreed to do.

The Appointment Clause of Article II, Section 2 provides that: “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.” Jack Smith claims to be an inferior officer of the United States appointed by the Head of the Justice Department, but he is instead a mere employee.

We argue in our amicus brief that Congress has never by law vested in the Attorney General as the Head of a Department the power to appoint inferior officers even though Congress has explicitly vested that power in the Heads of the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Transportation, and Agriculture. The only power, which Congress has given to the Attorney General is the power to make a sitting U.S. Attorney a Special Counsel with jurisdiction to prosecute cases nationwide and outside his or her home district. Thus, the Delaware U.S. Attorney, David C. Weiss, currently has nationwide jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute Hunter Biden as a Special Counsel, and this appointment is completely constitutional. Similarly, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, was quite legitimately given nationwide jurisdiction to prosecute former Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, in Washington, D.C. Fitzgerald got Libby convicted and sentenced to time in jail.

Jack Smith, however, was a private citizen, and not a sitting U.S. Attorney, when Attorney General Merrick Garland named him to be the Special Counsel who would investigate and prosecute Donald Trump. Smith’s appointment as an inferior officer was thus unconstitutional, and therefore the cases against former President Donald Trump, which Smith is prosecuting in Florida and in Washington D.C. must be dismissed. Again, Congress has never by law vested in the Attorney General the power to appoint inferior officers

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Queen Greta has exposed the truth about the green movement.

So, Greta Thunberg has a new cause. She’s found a new crusade to throw her weight behind. Forget saving the planet – now she wants to save Palestine.

Yes, the pint-sized prophetess of doom has swapped raging against industrialism for raging against Israel. Mother Nature will just have to wait – her erstwhile valiant defender is busy fixing the Middle East now.

Yesterday, Greta was snapped at the protest in Malmo, Sweden against Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest.

She looked the part. She had a keffiyeh draped over her shoulders and a smug look on her face: the two must-haves of every puffed-up bourgeois activist who gets off on fuming against Israel.

The keffiyeh really has become the uniform of the self-righteous. Go into a hip coffee shop or overpriced Soho burger joint and I guarantee you’ll see a Gen Z’er decked out in the Palestinian scarf.

Whatever happened to the sin of “cultural appropriation”? Not long ago, the right-on raged against white dudes who wear their hair in dreadlocks and white women who don kominos. “Stop stealing other people’s culture!”, they’d yell. Yet now they themselves spend their days in Arab attire.

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Joe Biden’s Weapons ‘Pause’ Will Get More Israeli Soldiers, Civilians Killed

President Joe Biden’s reckless halt of weapons to Israel will result in countless Israeli soldiers being killed in buildings that would otherwise have been destroyed.

According to a military source, Israeli soldiers will have to take cover in buildings as Hamas continues its attack in Rafah as the Biden Administration revealed it withheld 2,000-lb. and 500-lb. bombs. 

D.C. bureaucrats have urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to refrain from invading Rafah without defense for its civilians. The PM has long insisted that ground invasion into the region is necessary in order to remove Hamas from power. Biden’s halt of a weapons shipment to the Jewish state made that near impossible. 

During a CNN interview this week, Biden warned that the U.S. would stop supplying weapons to Israel if the IDF attacks Rafah.

The source claimed that everything in Rafah is rigged to blow up, including all of the buildings. He also warned that Hamas has been preparing for Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to enter the region. 

“We are being engaged in numerous buildings, and tunnels rigged in a manner we have not yet encountered,” the source said. 

Hamas had plenty of time to prepare after Biden’s opposition forced Israel to delay an operation in Rafah for three months. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) practice in Gaza has often been to identify buildings where Hamas has hidden, warn residents to leave, and then bomb the buildings.

Dozens of soldiers died earlier in the war in booby-trapped buildings. The IDF is prepared for a slow, methodical campaign in Rafah. But that also means Israel will have to accept a higher number of military casualties than it otherwise would have. Via Breitbart News. 

In a soon-to-be-released report from the Biden Administration, it does not indicate that Israel violated terms for its use of U.S. weapons. According to two U.S. officials and a third person briefed on the situation, the report is expected to be critical of Israel. 

Congressional aides claim the delay in bomb shipment’s value as “tens of millions” of U.S. dollars.

In addition to Republicans demanding answers from the Biden Administration on its efforts to withhold weapons from Israel, 26 Democrats sent a letter to U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan expressing concerns over the situation. 

In a rare unison, Republicans and several Democrats believe the U.S. should not abandon its top ally. 

“With democracy under assault around the world, we cannot undermine our ally Israel, especially in her greatest hour of need. America’s commitments must always be ironclad,” the letter read. 

Representative Massie finally posts his correcting the domestic enemy Nadler, who should one day be prosecuted under 18 US Code § 241.

Analysis: The Pulitzer for Propaganda Goes to…

In 2023, the Washington Post published a series of articles about AR-15-style rifles. The series was scientifically illiterate, error-ridden, propagandistic, and willfully misleading.

Naturally, it has just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Here are the facts, not that these matter even a little bit to the Pulitzer committee, members of which declined to answer questions for this column.

The AR-15 and rifles based on its design are two things at once: They are perfectly ordinary firearms that have been sold to civilians in the United States for the better part of a century, and they are cultural totems. They are cultural totems for the gun nuts who love them and for those who wish to prohibit their sale. The AR-pattern rifle has a lot in common with the most common rifles and handguns sold in the United States: It has a semiautomatic rate of fire (meaning that it fires once each time the trigger is pulled but doesn’t require any additional steps between trigger pulls, as opposed to, e.g., a bolt-action rifle, which requires that the shooter manually operate a handle that ejects the spent shell after a shot and then chambers another round for the next shot), and it is fed from a detachable box magazine. These features—semiautomatic firing and detachable box magazines—are what make the AR-style rifle useful for many purposes—including mass shootings. But they are features that the AR-style rifle has in common with most rifles sold in the United States and with nearly all handguns sold in the United States. As the engineering of semiautomatic rifles grows ever finer, even pursuits traditionally dominated by bolt-action rifles—long-range precision target shooting and hunting—have seen semiautomatic rifles make incursions, in much the same way that sports cars today mainly have a feature that would have been anathema to a sporting driver a generation ago: automatic transmissions.

The Washington Post series is very focused on the round the AR-style rifle fires, which it describes as “uniquely destructive”—a demonstrably false, quantifiable claim (as I noted at the time). AR-type rifles come in dozens of different chamberings, but the vast majority are chambered for the round that was long the standard-issue cartridge for the U.S. military: the 5.56mm NATO cartridge, which is nearly identical to and effectively interchangeable with the .223 Remington round. (AR-type rifles chambered for the 5.56mm round can typically fire the .223 without issue, though some older .223 rifles cannot safely fire the 5.56mm.) The Post writers claim that it is the speed of the 5.56mm round that makes AR-style rifles “uniquely destructive,” but this is false as a matter of elementary physics. Velocity is not what determines how much damage a projectile does to a human body—kinetic energy is. Chances are excellent that at some point this year you will be struck by something moving about 1 million times faster than the fastest bullet, and you will never even notice it, because the mass of the object in question is so small. Cosmic rays are an example of this. But the principle holds true at a larger scale: There are many cartridges that produce faster bullet velocities than the 5.56mm does. The 5.56mm generally comes out of the muzzle at about 3,250 feet per second (fps), which is a good deal less than hunting calibers such as the .220 Swift (more than 4,000 fps) or the .30/378 Weatherby (5,000 fps). Hunters and long-distance target shooters often prefer faster-moving cartridges because they are easier to shoot accurately: Bullets are not powered like little rockets but are more like rocks fired out of a slingshot, meaning that they begin to drop as soon as they leave the muzzle and gravity begins acting on them; faster bullets reach the target more quickly and thus have less time to fall and so require less adjustment for distance.

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Man shot during W. Gulf Bank home invasion

HOUSTON (KIAH) – Houston Police Department (HPD) responded to a shooting at the 1400 block of W. Gulf Bank around 12:30 a.m. this morning. Upon arrival, they found a male shot dead just inside an apartment. According to HPD, the victim walked up to the home and walked right by the two people standing in front. They asked him what he was doing and then forcibly tried to remove him from the apartment. One of the homeowners had a gun and shot the suspected home invader.

Supreme Court rules in favor of veteran who sued over GI Bill limits

The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in favor of a veteran who unsuccessfully tried to use both his Post-9/11 GI Bill and Montgomery GI Bill benefits, saying that Veterans Affairs officials erred in limiting his education support.

The 7-2 decision could have far-reaching impact on student veterans who use up their VA benefits but still wish to continue degree programs. Lawyers for the plaintiff have estimated as many as 1.7 million veterans nationwide could benefit from the ruling, but federal officials have estimated the number to be less than 30,000 individuals.

The case has been closely watched by veterans advocates for nearly nine years because of its potential ramifications. VA pays out more than $8 billion in education payments annually, and the Supreme Court ruling could boost that figure even higher.

The legal fight centered on Jim Rudisill, a 43-year-old Army veteran who was wounded in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq in 2005. Rudisill used all of his Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits shortly thereafter, but later wanted to tap into his unused Montgomery GI Bill benefits to attend Yale Divinity School as part of the process to become an Army chaplain.

When VA officials denied that move, Rudisill sued, claiming they were unfairly limiting his options. Writing for the majority, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called the government’s denial “nonsensical” and reversed lower court rulings supporting VA’s position.

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