The idea that 1/6 was this rare instance of violence that was a unique threat against our Democracy is ridiculous, but the left has droned on and on about this unique political violence. Let me take you on a journey.
“The bomb completely destroyed the area it was placed in and could have caused untold harm to human life if it had gone off closer to where the people had been gathered.” 1983 bombing of the Senate
Oops my bad, that was a Republican that was shot by a leftists who thought Republicans voting against Obamacare would “kill people” That one doesn’t count either.
Or how about the time that protestors stormed the supreme court and pounded on the doors to breach it, because they were mad at a SCOTUS nominee?
As if this is shocking news, the global warming Armageddon peddlers were wrong again. How many times have we heard that we’re all going to die if we don’t sacrifice economic growth to reduce global temperatures by an indiscernible amount? Democrats had a full-blown meltdown over the haggling about the latest spending bill when it seemed as if it were on life support. If we don’t pass the inflation reduction act, which quickly became a climate change bill—civilization will end. The New York Times had an op-ed declaring that the Democrats’ spending bill just saved the world.
The latest doomsday scenario to be proven incorrect is related to this past summer’s temperature, which was 1.5 degrees warmer than the 50-year average. Yet, it was way off the 5.4-degree projection cast by Professor James Hansen, one of the godfathers of the global warming hysteria. Hansen is known for his series of congressional testimonies in the 1980s that created public awareness. Steve Milloy used The Washington Post’s tool regarding temperature changes this past summer to expose the shoddy projection.
So WashDC's summer was 1.2°F warmer than the 50 year average, per this WaPo tool.
In 1987, James Hansen predicted global warming would be 5.4°F by 2020.
It’s a pattern that cannot be ignored. The climate change prognosticators said in 2007 that the Artic Ice Cap would melt by 2013. In 2013, the ice cap was intact and had grown by 538,000 square miles. That same year, it was the calmest hurricane season in almost 20 years. It was also the quietest tornado season that year in nearly 60 years. To flashforward to the present, the 2022 hurricane season is now the most undisturbed in almost three decades.
In the 1970s, people who predicted the total annihilation of humanity over global warming thought that ‘global cooling’ would create a massive food crisis as the North American continent would undergo another period of glaciation. That didn’t happen either, but we must listen to them now and waste trillions in economic output and growth to avert disaster. If we don’t heed their warnings, we could all be dead in 12 years or something. In other news, we have another great weekend of football, college, and professional. That’s much more important than anything these green people say since they’ve been wrong about everything.
Before the Uvalde school attacker perpetrated obvious felonies such as capital murder and aggravated assault — before he even pulled the trigger — he had already committed numerous crimes.
Among them was bringing a firearm on school premises, making a menacing public display of the weapon, and trespassing on school property. Some people think there ought to be another law, as if just one more penal provision would have averted the tragedy in Uvalde.
They are demanding that Gov. Greg Abbott call a special session so the Legislature can outlaw the purchase of semiautomatic rifles by adults between the ages of 18 and 20. Reflexively enacting this gun-control measure would be no quick fix for school shootings, however, in no small part because it is patently unconstitutional.
And it would be wrong. Young adults have the same rights as other adults, including the right to self-defense. The Heritage Foundation notes that “Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually.” Though no government agency tracks those incidents and records the ages of those who defended themselves, many are surely younger than 21.
We can’t answer lawlessness with more lawlessness or a disregard for the Constitution. Even the notoriously liberal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agrees with that.
This year, the court held that California violated the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when it imposed a blanket ban on the sale of semiautomatic rifles to young adults between the ages of 18 and 20. Holding that such rifles are not “dangerous and unusual weapons,” which would have left them unprotected under Heller, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the age-based ban unconstitutionally deprives young adults of their right to lawful self-defense within the home.
The Second Amendment argument against a young-adult rifle ban has only gotten stronger with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark opinion in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, handed down after the May 24 Uvalde shooting. As Justice Clarence Thomas explained in striking down New York’s scheme to prevent carrying a handgun for self-defense, the days of treating the Second Amendment as a second-class right are over.
Going forward, lower courts will have to scrutinize modern laws for consistency with the constitutional text and history. The court’s decision has already changed the Second Amendment landscape in Texas, according to a respected federal judge in Fort Worth. This past month, Judge Mark Pittman held that the Bruen decision overrules 5th U.S. Circuit Court decisions allowing a young-adult handgun ban.
On this basis, he has issued an injunction against a Texas law that prevents young adults from getting licensed to carry handguns in public. In addition, the Texas Constitution independently guarantees a Texan’s “right to keep and bear arms in the lawful defense of himself.”
A young-adult rifle ban from the Legislature, whether enacted in a special session or in the regular session beginning in January, would not make Texas schools any safer. It would not even go into effect before being enjoined as unconstitutional — on the strength of that Ninth Circuit ruling, which struck down an identical provision.
The heart-wrenching tragedy in Uvalde has generated universal agreement that something must be done to avert a repeat of what happened there. Identifying the villain of Uvalde was easy; calibrating a meaningful response to the attacker’s murderous rampage will be hard.
It will take months of difficult deliberation for the Legislature to understand and address the interrelated problems of gun violence, mental health, school hardening, and law-enforcement failures. But there can be no unconstitutional lawless shortcuts.
Instead of passing a young-adult rifle ban that will immediately fail judicial scrutiny, the Legislature should continue working on bills that will actually make schools safer, without trampling the constitutional rights of law-abiding Texans.
Robert Henneke is the executive director and general counsel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a think tank based in Austin.
PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, MD — A break-in Tuesday shortly after midnight led to a homeowner shooting the intruder and a resident of the home being shot during the incident, too, police say.
At approximately 12:20 a.m., officers with the Hyattsville Police Department were dispatched to the report of a burglary in progress at the home in the 5600 block of 30th Avenue. When officers arrived, they saw a car attempting to leave the residence. Officers stopped the vehicle and found a man in the car with a gunshot wound. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital where he later died. He has been identified as 23-year-old Giovanni Hayles and was a resident of the home.
The preliminary investigation reveals a suspect broke into the residence shortly after midnight. Officers found the suspect still in the home with a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead on the scene. A gun was recovered near his body. He has not yet been identified by the police department.
A Colleton County [South Carolina] homeowner who shot and killed an intruder last week is not facing any criminal charges for the incident.
This criminal investigation is still underway, and local authorities say it is not likely that the victim/homeowner will be charged. The victim /homeowner’s identity has not been released.
On Sept. 14th, the homeowner was inside his Madison Street house near Walterboro at about 10 p.m. when two armed men tried to break into his home. The homeowner shot one of the men: authorities who arrived to the scene found the suspect dead on the victim’s front porch.
When we arrived to the victim’s house, the “homeowner exited the home, unarmed, and confirmed he shot the man when he and another individual tried to break down his door,” said Shalane Tindal, spokeswoman for the Colleton County Sheriff’s Office.
Both of the suspects were armed with a handgun, said Tindal.
The second would-be-intruder fled from the scene in a dark-colored sedan. He has not yet been found, as of press deadline.
The suspect who was shot to death is identified as 25-year-old Brandon McDonald-Sharmk, of Colleton County, according to Colleton County Coroner Richard Harvey.
McDonald-Sharmk died at the scene from a gunshot wound, said Harvey.
“The homeowner cooperated with detectives, citing the location of the used firearm and providing footage from a home security camera. Detectives worked through the night to process the scene,” said Tindal, in a written statement. “This is still an active investigation and is believed to be an isolated incident.”
The Colleton Sheriff’s Office is asking anyone with information about this incident to contact their Criminal Investigations Division at 843-549-2211. Tipsters can also leave an anonymous tip by emailing submit-a-tip@colletoncounty.org.
This incident is not tied to another fatal home invasion that occurred two weeks ago in Cottageville. In that case, the suspect shot and killed the male homeowner. The suspect fled the scene, but was later captured in Georgia.
That’s what Texans appear to be saying about the idea of banning AR-15s and AK-47s, according to a new poll. 50 percent of likely voters told Spectrum News and Siena College they oppose efforts to ban “assault-style” weapons, a term the poll did not define but is generally understood to include the rifles. In contrast, 46 percent said they support a ban. An equal number “strongly” opposed and supported the policy.
Beto O’Rourke (D.) has based much of his campaign against incumbent Governor Greg Abbott (R.) on the need for further gun restrictions in Texas. He is best known for his viral commitment to seize the guns Texans told the pollsters they don’t want to see banned.
“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47,” O’Rourke said during a September 2019 presidential primary debate. “We’re not going to allow it to be used against our fellow Americans anymore.”
“Five of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history have taken place in this state in the last five years on Greg Abbott’s watch,” O’Rourke said in an ad featuring a Uvalde shooting survivor that was posted to his social media on Tuesday. “Those kids were not just up against that gunman and that AR-15 and those high-impact, high-velocity rounds that hit their body; they were up against a governor who would not lift a finger to prevent this from happening.”
The focus on gun control hasn’t benefited O’Rourke much in the polls, though. While the Siena poll found Texans were open to some new gun-control policies, with 85 percent supporting universal background checks, Abbott still holds a substantial lead in the race. Siena found 50 percent of respondents support Abbott while 43 percent support O’Rourke, moving Abbott’s lead in the Real Clear Politics average of the race down slightly to 7.5 percent.
O’Rourke hasn’t become any less brash in his approach either. He has crashed a post-Uvalde press conference to heckle Abbott and cursed out a man for laughing during one of his stump speeches on the topic.
The race’s outcome will provide a good guide for how American gun politics are playing out in the wake of a slew of major recent gun-related events. The Uvalde shooting and the first bipartisan federal gun restrictions in decades, combined with two years of recording setting gun sales and the Supreme Court setting a new standard for reviewing gun laws as it struck down restrictive gun-carry permitting regimes, have injected a lot of uncertainty into how the issue will impact voters’ decisions in November. With O’Rourke running on an aggressive gun-control platform against Abbott, who has signed several reforms that removed gun-carry and ownership restrictions, how the candidates fare may indicate where things have settled after those significant shakeups.
The election results may also provide insight into the politics surrounding AR-15s and AK-47s in particular. O’Rourke wants to confiscate them or, failing that, ban their sale to adults under 21. Abbott has opposed both ideas as unconstitutional. The fight in Texas mirrors the national one, with Democrats recently passing an “assault weapons” ban through the House of Representatives despite opposition from all but two Republicans. The push to ban the popular rifles, estimated to be more than 24.4 million in circulation, has been facing increasing headwinds even as they have been used in recent high-profile mass shootings. If Abbott can hold off O’Rourke, it could pull further wind from the sails of those pursuing a ban.
Another recent poll in the state provides a slightly brighter picture for O’Rourke’s confiscation plan. Support for “a mandatory program where the government would buy back semi-automatic assault-style rifles from citizens who currently own them” was 52 percent in the latest Dallas Morning News and University of Texas at Tyler poll. However, respondents were more likely to strongly oppose the idea than strongly support it.
As with the Seina poll, the confiscation scheme was the least popular gun policy polled. The Morning News poll also found 55 percent of Texans support arming teachers, which O’Rourke opposes and Abbott supports. That is in line with Seina, which found support at 53 percent.
Seina’s results on issue importance were also similar to a recent poll from The Texas Tribune and the University of Texas. The Tribune poll found Texans said guns were only the sixth-most-important issue in the race. Siena found it was the fifth behind economic issues, threats to democracy, immigration, and abortion.
All three polls found Abbott maintained a significant lead over O’Rourke.
The Seina poll was conducted among 651 likely voters between September 14th and the 18th.
Whistleblowers at the U.S. government’s official keeper of the global warming stats, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), claim their agency doctored temperature data to hide the fact that global temperatures plateaued almost 20 years ago.
Can the whistleblowers be believed in this claim, originally made in 2015? And in the further claim that NOAA then rushed this doctored data into print in time for the UN’s Paris global warming summit of world leaders, to dupe any doubters that the planet was in fact overheated?
Of course the whistleblowers can be believed, and not just because NOAA repeatedly stonewalled inquiries, even failing to comply with a congressional subpoena. No one paying attention can have any doubt that the governmental global warming enterprise has been a fraud. It’s been lies from the start, starting with the very mandate of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which astonishingly ruled out factors like the sun as being worthy of investigation.
Among those astonished was the Danish delegation to the IPCC. It discovered at one of the IPCC’s early meetings a quarter-century ago that its scientists could not present their study, newly published in the prestigious journal Science, showing a remarkable correlation between global warming and solar activity. To their further astonishment, to squelch dissent the IPCC cabal set out to destroy the reputation of its chief author, falsely accusing him of fabricating data.
Whistleblowers now know they will no longer be silenced.
Dissenters from the climate change orthodoxy soon learned that, if they refused to recant, they stood to lose their jobs, their funding, and their reputations. They also learned the corollary: to get hired, to get funded, to get promoted, they needed to produce the science the authorities wanted. Governments annually spent billions of dollars on climate change research, virtually all of it commissioned to prove that the science was settled — that man-made climate change represented an existential threat to the planet.
None of the billions spent on research amounted to anything — none of the models proved reliable, none of the predictions were borne out, none of the expected effects materialized. The Arctic ice cap hasn’t disappeared, polar bear populations haven’t declined, hurricanes haven’t become more common, malaria hasn’t spread, temperatures haven’t continued to climb. What did materialize was fraud after fraud.
Climategate — the 2009 revelations of hacked emails showing scientists labouring to manipulate data and cover their tracks — was followed by Climategate 2.0 (a second damning batch of hacked emails), by Amazongate (the revelation that the IPCC’s claim of coming devastation in the Amazon was based on non-peer-reviewed research by WWF eco-activists), Glaciergate (here the IPCC relied on speculation in a popular magazine) and other scandals.
The mega-fraud was the assertion that the science was settled, which the IPCC trumpeted with claims that 2,500 scientists from around the world endorsed its findings. Except those 2,500 — a number that was soon inflated to 3,000 and then 4,000 — didn’t endorse anything. They merely reviewed some of the studies heaved into the IPCC’s maw, many of them giving the research the thumbs down.
Likewise, a much heralded claim that 97 per cent of scientists believed the planet was overheating came from a 2008 master’s thesis by a student at the University of Illinois who obtained her results by conducting a survey of 10,257 earth scientists, then discarding the views of all but 77 of them. Of those 77 scientists, 75 thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produced the 97-per-cent figure that global warming activists then touted.
In fact, major surveys show that scientists in the tens of thousands do not believe that global warming represents a threat. With the departure of president Obama and his administration, which had blocked independent investigations from being pursued, whistleblowers in greater numbers will now dare to come forward, knowing they will no longer be silenced.
One of them is Dr. John Bates, a recently retired principal scientist at NOAA, who described how his agency manipulated data to manufacture a non-existent increase in global temperatures. In a press release last week, U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith thanked “Dr. John Bates for courageously stepping forward to tell the truth about NOAA’s senior officials playing fast and loose with the data in order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion.” This week a second press release from the same committee indicated that NOAA will be brought to account.
The blizzard of lies from NOAA and other corrupted agencies will soon be outed in excruciating detail. The greatest scientific fraud of the century will thus be laid bare, along with its craven and corrupt enablers in government, academia, industry and the media.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto-based environmental group.
A “vaccine” you’re told to get every two months is not a vaccine. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a vaccine. https://t.co/fyJtKkojX2
It's impossible to overstate the significance of the fact that even avowedly reasonable/moderate gun control groups refuse to criticize even ONE outdated, nonsensical, and/or counterproductive gun law at any level of government. https://t.co/pf7vK77qqm
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved on Tuesday a plan that would allow police to access private security cameras without a warrant.
The board voted 7-4 to approve Democratic Mayor London Breed’s plan which allows police to access up to 24 hours of live outdoor video footage from private surveillance cameras without a warrant as long as the camera owner gives police permission, according to SF Gate. To access video footage without a warrant, police must be either responding to a life-threatening emergency, conducting a criminal investigation with written approval from a captain or higher-ranking official, or deciding how to deploy officers to a large public event, according to the report.
Breed said the legislation would allow police “to respond to the challenges presented by the organized criminal activity, homicides [and] gun violence,” according to The Associated Press. Breed introduced the proposal in 2021 to combat rampant theft, rioting and looting.
Board President Shamann Walton voted against the legislation, saying it’s a violation of civil liberties, according to AP.
“I know the thought process is, ‘Just trust us, just trust the police department.’ But the reality is people have been violating civil liberties since my ancestors were brought here from an entirely, completely different continent,” he reportedly said.
The ACLU of Northern California also voiced their opposition to the policy in February, with staff attorney Matt Cagle saying the policy would “give unchecked power to the police, and make San Francisco less safe.”
The San Francisco Bar Association also opposed the legislation, writing to the board in early September that a better response to the challenges facing the community would be “improved policing services, not the sort of mass surveillance proposed here.”
Today in the Southern District of New York, Arwa Muthana, 30, of Hoover, Alabama, pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, aka ISIS, a designated foreign terrorist organization. On Friday, her husband James Bradley, aka Abdullah, 21, of the Bronx, entered a guilty plea to the same charge.
According to court documents, Bradley and Muthana are ISIS supporters who attempted to travel to the Middle East to join and fight for ISIS. Bradley expressed violent extremist views since at least 2019, including his desire to support ISIS by traveling overseas to join the group or committing a terrorist attack in the United States. In May 2020, Bradley stated to an undercover law enforcement officer (UC-1) that he believed that ISIS may be good for Muslims because ISIS was establishing a caliphate. Bradley further expressed his desire to conduct a terrorist attack in the United States and discussed potentially attacking the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. Bradley explained that if he could not leave the United States, he would do “something” in the United States instead, referring to carrying out an attack.
A federal judge has granted class action status for U.S. Marines in their fight against Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The ruling is another blow to the Biden administration and consistent with other court rulings that have found military branches are violating federal law.
Judge Steven Merryday of the U.S. District Court Middle District of Florida Tampa Division granted a classwide preliminary injunction for Marines serving in active and reserve duty who were denied religious accommodation requests from taking the COVID-19 vaccine.
Merryday preliminarily enjoined the Department of Defense from “enforcing against a member of the class any order, requirement, or rule to accept COVID-19 vaccination, … from separating or discharging from the Marine Corps a member of the class who declines COVID-19 vaccination, and … from retaliating against a member of the class for the member’s asserting statutory rights under RFRA [Religious Freedom Restoration Act].”
In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. Mark Twain
Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s intrepid “fact” checker, must have been salivating over his plan to “own the cons” when he retweeted Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ claim that “there’s no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks.” Abrams (D-Tinfoil Hat) claimed that a fetal heartbeat is just a Grand Plot by men to “take control of a woman’s body.”
Kessler weighed in with, “FWIW, ‘fetal heartbeat’ is a misnomer. The ultrasound picks up electrical activity generated by an embryo.”
“The so-called ‘heartbeat’ sound you hear is created by the ultrasound,” he added. “Not until 10 weeks can the opening and closing of cardiac valves be detected by a Doppler machine.”
Apparently, a memo went out on the Left this week with the new pro-abortion talking point to justify the murder of unborn children. Dr. Stacey Abrams, M.D., and Kessler wasted no time running to Twitter to shout the New Abortion Narrative.
FWIW, "fetal heartbeat" is a misnomer. The ultrasound picks up electrical activity generated by an embryo. The so-called "heartbeat" sound you hear is created by the ultrasound. Not until 10 weeks can the opening and closing of cardiac valves be detected by a Doppler machine. … https://t.co/OODSeeFMas
The continuing fallout from COVID lockdown policies — from the economic collapse to the supply chain issues, to energy, transportation, and food shortages — is reigniting calls and prompting the nationalization of industries in Europe, the U.S, Canada, and Australia.
The modus operandi of the Great Reset (AKA Build Back Better) is to intentionally collapse the current system with policies designed to create a crisis, havoc, and shortages. And the world has descended into chaos since the COVID lockdowns of March of 2020.
Once the inevitable societal chaos ensues, a huge coordinated push to promote nationalization or government takeover of the impacted industries ensues. It is always claimed that the “free market” failed, and now only government can come in and clean up the mess. The advocates of nationalization usually bill it as a “temporary” nationalization of the industries, much like “15 days to slow the spread” or “2 weeks to flatten the curve” were billed as temporary measures. See: Salon mag in 2022 noted “the long American history of taking over industries during a time of national crisis” and claimed that “temporary nationalization helped get America through the crisis” of World War II.
Stuart Chase, a key advisor to former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, envisioned an early version of the Great Reset in the 1930s and 1940s, complete with calls for government “control of energy sources—hydroelectric power, coal, petroleum, natural gas.; The control of transportation—railway, highway, airway, waterway; and the control of agricultural production.”
Chase loved the idea of managing all aspects of society. He asked at the end of his 1932 book, A New Deal, “Why should the Soviets have all the fun remaking the world?” Chase’s lust for Soviet ideology could be updated to 2022 by replacing the “Soviets” for “China”.
Here is Chase’s 2022 proposed updated motto:
“Why should China have all the fun remaking the world?”
Their socialist rhetoric starts to fall on deaf ears when the economy comes into play. It’ll have even less attention paid to it when people are trying to pay their utility bills this winter to stay warm.
Last week, during a House environmental hearing, Republican Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana laid a haymaker on the Democrats’ star environmental witness, Raya Salter. The witness isn’t a scientist, she’s a lawyer. Before she was a lawyer, she was a community organizer.
Higgins asked some basic, objectively obvious questions of Ms. Salter, but the star flamed out.
Higgins pointed out that everything around Salter from her cell phone to the table at which she was sitting was [born] from petrochemical products.
Instead of answering, she hectored Higgins with platitudes and entreaties to “search his heart” and to “ask his God what you are doing to the Black and poor of Louisiana.” If you were unaware, oil in particular, and energy, in general, are racist.
She got progressively angrier as Congressman Higgins pressed her for an answer — any answer that made sense. Higgins then asked what she would do with ocean-going vessels and the maritime industry. Presumably, she knew that other than US Carriers, and submarines that run on nuclear plants, ships of sea run on oil. She was flabbergasted. She launched back into her harangue about shutting down petrochemicals entirely, avoiding the obvious: that we can’t unless we want to go back to sailing ships and slaughtering whales for lamp oil.
What do you do with air travel?
YOU, SIR, NEED TO SEARCH YOUR HEART! The fossil fuel industry is destroying the earth and the natural world, and that is a fact, sir!
AOC is on the committee and launched into one of her “the worst displays of misogyny” rants at Higgins for daring to ask Salter questions she couldn’t answer. According to AOC, the world is ending in eight years, so one can understand Salter’s urgency to transition back to wooden ships and sail.
This week, another squad member, Rashida Tlaib wanted a moment in the sun to pad her environmental cred with ridiculous questions posed to bankers. She wanted commitments from all of the witnesses that their banks would refuse to lend to the oil industry. Unlike Salter, the panel consisted of reasoning adults, not harpies. The first banker asked was Jamie Dimon, of JPMorgan Chase, the largest of the Big Four banks.
Tlaib: “Does your bank have a policy against funding new oil and gas products, Mr. Dimon?”
Dimon: “Absolutely not, that would the road to hell for America”
Tlaib: “Yeah, that’s fine. You know what, sir, everybody who got relief from student loans and have (sic) accounts with your bank should probably take their account and close their account”
None of the other banks were quite as short and direct as Dimon but the message from the adults was clear: No, we won’t stop lending to the oil industry.
Rep. @RashidaTlaib challenges bank CEOs to agree to stop funding fossil fuels, is rejected by every single one
Without oil, everything grinds to a halt. We saw what happened when gas prices simply jumped. If the oil industry stopped because they couldn’t produce, the world economy would collapse in short order. The ore for batteries that Tlaib thinks will “save the planet” gets taken out of ore pits by monstrous earth movers running on diesel. All the ships bringing products to distant shores run on diesel. Trucks run on diesel.
For the foreseeable future, the world will run on oil. No ranting at Congressmen asking basic questions, or a congresswoman badgering bankers is going to change that fact.
Gun-control measures enacted in Boulder County have been placed on hold by the federal courts; left in doubt by a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and, as reported in The Gazette last week, stymied even more amid further court developments here in Colorado.
All of which should prompt advocates of more restrictions on firearms to ponder shifting tack in the campaign to curb gun violence. If the courts are turning out to be no friends of more gun control, perhaps it’s time for policy makers to move beyond tilting at the Second Amendment.
How about focusing instead on steps that likely would draw little opposition while making a real difference — like beefing up security at our children’s schools? Let’s have more police deployed as school resource officers. And tighter limits on access during the school day. There’s even a program that has been training faculty and staff in firearms use if needed to defend kids at dozens of participating school districts around the state.
Such alternatives to more gun control make all the more sense considering the inherent futility of attempting to legislate an end to gun violence. Rebranding firearms as “assault rifles” and banning them; limiting the capacity of gun magazines, and other knee-jerk responses were always more about sending a message in the wake of a shooting tragedy than about providing any realistic hope of heading off the next one.
Last Friday, a federal judge declined to combine four different lawsuits brought by right-to-arms advocates against Boulder County and the cities of Boulder, Louisville and Superior. The local governments had enacted similar firearms regulations, including bans on large-capacity magazines and on so-called assault weapons.
U.S. District Court Judge Raymond P. Moore, whose court is handling the lawsuit against Superior, declined that city’s request to merge all the court actions. The result could be conflicting rulings between various judges as to whether the local ordinances violate the Second Amendment. But as Moore observed, “if anyone thinks the district court is going to have the last say on this, they’re kidding themselves.” Perhaps there’s no harm, then, in giving each lawsuit its full day in court in light of the long legal journey that lies ahead.
The laws are not in effect thanks to court-issued restraining orders. That’s pending further proceedings and maybe even the resolution of the entire court challenge. Which could take years.
Underlying all of it is the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, which set a higher bar for gun restrictions to pass constitutional muster.
Given a new prevailing philosophy on the Second Amendment at the nation’s highest court — and lower courts’ pragmatic deference to it — the prospects for imposing new restrictions gun ownership appear a lot dimmer than they used to. Gun control could become the dog that won’t hunt.
Coloradans across the political spectrum should resolve to lower the odds of random violence where they can, in ways that actually work. Our schools — the scene of some of the worst shooting tragedies in Colorado and across the country — are a good place to start.
Denver Gazette Editorial Board
Standard practice these days.
If a person is considered too dangerous to possess a weapon, he’s too dangerous to be left out on the street.
The Justice Department plans to appeal a Texas judge’s ruling that a federal law blocking people under felony indictment from purchasing firearms is unconstitutional in light of the Supreme Court’s latest gun-related ruling.
U.S. District Judge David Counts found that the law’s prohibitions did not correlate with the Supreme Court’s June decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, in which the justices voted 6-3 (along conservative-liberal ideological lines) that law-abiding citizens have a right to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense purposes.
“The Second Amendment is not a ‘second class right,'” Counts wrote. “After Bruen, the Government must prove that laws regulating conduct covered by the Second Amendment’s plain text align with this Nation’s historical tradition. The Government does not meet that burden.”
Counts, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, was tasked with weighing the case of Jose Gomez Quiroz, who was indicted on felony burglary charges related to a June 2020 incident. He allegedly jumped bail, attempted to purchase an automatic gun, and lied on his Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives transaction form but was still able to purchase the gun.
Quiroz was later convicted of making a false statement during the purchase of the weapon and illegal receipt of a gun by a person under indictment. He sought to dismiss the verdict because “of the United States Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Bruen,” according to court filings from Sept. 19.
Although Quiroz’s burglary charge is still pending, Counts sided with his position that the high court established a new “standard” in how it views Second Amendment rights.
“No longer can courts balance away a constitutional right,” Counts wrote.
Counts also voiced his doubt that a felony indictment should prevent someone from owning a firearm.
“The nature of grand jury proceedings is one such area that casts a shadow of constitutional doubt on” someone making a false statement on a firearm form, Counts wrote. “Some feel that a grand jury could indict a burrito if asked to do so.”
In a subsequent filing, the DOJ requested an appeal of Counts’s ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
