June 17
1462 – One of the warlords of ancient Wallachia, Vlad III Țepeș Dracula the Impaler, attempts to assassinate the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, at Târgovişte, Romania but the Sultan and his army manage to escape and hastily retreat back to Turkey.
1579 – On his voyage of circumnavigation, Sir Francis Drake claims the land he calls Nova Albion – modern California – for England.
1631 – Mumtaz Mahal dies during childbirth. Her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, builds a mausoleum for her tomb, the Taj Mahal.
1773 – Cúcuta, Colombia, is founded by Juana Rangel de Cuéllar.
1775 – During the siege of Boston, Colonial Militia defending Breed’s Hill, on the Charlestown peninsula across the Charles river from Boston, inflict heavy casualties on assaulting British troops before running out of ammunition, and being forced to a fighting retreat in good order over Bunker Hill to Cambridge, leave the British in control of the peninsula.
1876 –1,500 Sioux and Cheyenne led by War Chief Tħašúŋke Witkó – Crazy Horse – repulse an attack by General George Crook’s forces at Rosebud Creek in Montana Territory.
1877 – The Nez Perce inflict serious casualties, killing 34 of the 106 troopers and civilian volunteers of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Regiment in the first battle of the Nez Perce War at White Bird Canyon in the Idaho Territory, southwest of the present day city of Grangeville.
1885 – The Statue of Liberty arrives in New York Harbor.
1898 – The United States Navy Hospital Corps is established.
1901 – The College Board introduces its first standardized test, the forerunner to the SAT.
1930 – President Herbert Hoover signs the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act into law.
1932 – Around 1000 World War I veterans, called the Bonus Army, amass at the United States Capitol as the Senate considers a bill that would give them certain bonus benefits earlier than originally promised
1933 – At the Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, 4 FBI agents and captured fugitive Frank Nash are gunned down by gangsters attempting to free Nash.
1948 – United Airlines Flight 624, a Douglas DC-6, en route from Chicago to LaGuardia Airport in New York City, crashes near Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, killing all 43 passengers and crew on board.
1960 – The Nez Perce tribe is awarded $4 million for 7 million acres of land undervalued at 4¢ an acre in the 1863 treaty.
1963 – In the case of Abington School District v. Schempp, the Supreme Court rules against requiring the reciting of Bible verses and the Lord’s Prayer in public schools.
1972 – 5 White House operatives are arrested for burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee during an attempt by members of the administration of President Nixon to illegally wiretap the political opposition.
1985 – Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on mission STS-51-G with Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud aboard as a payload specialist, the first Arab and first moslem in space.
1992 – A “joint understanding” agreement on arms reduction, later codified as START II, is signed by President Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
1994 – Following a televised low speed/high drag highway chase, O. J. Simpson is arrested for the murders of his ex wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.
2015 – 9 people are killed and 3 wounded in a shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
2021 – President Biden signs legislation enacting June 19th as the Juneteenth National Independence Day federal holiday.
Gov. Greg Abbott signs new law mandating armed security at all Texas schools
SAN ANTONIO – Security at your child’s school will look different this upcoming school year.
During a meeting at the capital, Gov. Greg Abbott signed HB 3 into law mandating all public schools to have at least one armed security officer or armed school personnel at each public school campus statewide.
According to the Intercultural Development Research Center, the price tag to pay an armed security guard for an entire school year could cost up to $100,000.
“I’m glad my tax money is going towards that. I support it,” San Antonio resident April Reyna said.
This new law would allot $330 million to build security centers on campuses. Legislators in Austin claim this new law will strengthen the state’s School Safety Center, responsible for disseminating safety information to all schools. The law will also mandate annual audits of school protocol and require staff members to get mental health training.
“We have to provide the support systems to our personnel working in our communities,” San Antonio resident Jenny Kazmierczak said.
Some people believe adding armed personnel to campuses would increase protection.
“I think if we have the good guys armed, I think it would minimize deaths,” Reyna said.
However, others disagree.
“I hope that there are other measures to address this problem. This is not the isolated solution,” Kazmierczak said.
As concerns grow, some people are wondering whether some schools will have to dip into their own locally generated revenue to keep the burden of funding an additional salary from falling on schools and local taxpayers.
Paging Khan Noonien Singh. Paging Arik Soong.
Scientists Create Synthetic Human Embryo Models in Major First.
In a major scientific first, synthetic human embryo models have been grown in the lab, without any need for the usual natural ingredients of eggs and sperm.
The research – first brought to wider attention by The Guardian – has prompted excitement about the potential for new breakthroughs in health, genetics, and treating disease. But the science also raises serious ethical questions.
The embryo structures were produced from stem cells cultured from a traditional embryo in the lab. Stem cells can be programmed to develop into any kind of other cell – which is how they are used in the body for growth and repair.
Here, stem cells were carefully coaxed into becoming precursor cells that would eventually become the yolk sac, the placenta, and then the actual embryo itself.
A paper on the breakthrough has yet to be published, so we’re still waiting on the details of exactly how this was achieved.
The work was led by biologist Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz, from the University of Cambridge in the UK, together with colleagues from the UK and US. Last year, a team led by Zernicka-Goetz was able to successfully grow synthetic mouse embryos with primitive brains and hearts.
We should point out that we’re still a long way from creating babies artificially. These are embryo-like structures, without a heart or a brain: They’re more like embryo models that are able to mimic some, but not all, of the features of a normal embryo.
“It is important to stress that these are not synthetic embryos, but embryo models,” wrote Zernicka-Goetz on Twitter. “Our research isn’t to create life, but to save it.”
One of the ways in which this research could save lives is in helping to examine why many pregnancies fail at around the stage these artificial embryos replicate. If these earliest moments can be studied in a lab, we should get a much better understanding of them.
We could also use these techniques to learn more about how common genetic disorders develop at the earliest stages of life. Once there’s a greater knowledge about how they start, we’ll be better placed to do something about them.
At the same time, there are concerns around where this kind of synthetic embryo creation could lead. Scientists say strong regulations are needed to control this kind of research – regulations that at the moment don’t really exist.
“These new assays in vitro will pave the way for future studies that aim to unravel the mechanisms of human development, as well as the effects of environmental and genetic anomalies,” says biologist Rodrigo Suarez from the University of Queensland in Australia, who wasn’t involved in the research.
“As with most emerging technologies, society will need to balance the evidence about the risks and benefits of this approach, and update the current legislation accordingly.”
As pointed out by bioethics researcher Rachel Ankeny from the University of Adelaide, who wasn’t involved in the research, today scientists abide by a ’14-day rule’ which limits the use of human embryos in the lab, requiring that human embryos can only be cultivated in vitro for a maximum of 2 weeks.
Rules like this, as well as new ones that may be brought in as this research continues, force us to ask fundamental questions about when we consider ‘life’ beginning in an organism’s existence – and how close to a human embryo a synthetic embryo must be before it is considered essentially the same.
“We need to engage various publics about their understanding of and expectations from this sort of research, and more generally about their views on early human development,” says Ankeny.
“These biological processes are deeply tied to our values and what we think counts as human life.”
The research has yet to be peer-reviewed or published, and was presented at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.
Well, here we are, exactly 2 weeks after Dad precipitated himself to the garage floor and broke his hip.
He’s doing pretty well in the ‘skilled’ nursing home he’s been in for a week. He’s getting physical therapy Monday through Friday, and seeing slow but steady improvement. He seems in good spirits and is well motivated as he, and everyone else, wants him to recover enough to make it home ASAP.
I doubt he’ll make it home by the end of July, but unless things go awry, I think sometime in August is quite possible.
We now return you to our regular programming
Keeping that nice cushy seat on the .gov gravy train means a lot more to a politician than almost anything else.
Key Republican won’t help Dems force gun control vote
Earlier this week, I wrote about how House Democrats intended to push a vote on gun control despite leadership having no interest in scheduling one.
To do that, they’ve got to have a few Republicans cross the lines and side with them while having literally every Democrat in the House hold the line.
It seems they’ve hit a bit of a snag, though.
One of the Republicans they were likely counting on has decided he wants no part of this plan.
A rare House Republican who supports stricter gun measures said he won’t back a Democratic effort to end-run Speaker Kevin McCarthy and force a vote on a trio of bills to implement those restrictions.
“At some point we need to start thinking about getting things done rather than sending messages across the floor of the House,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., said in an interview Thursday.
“It’s a very intellectually dishonest way of proceeding when you don’t have any strategy” to pass the bills through the Senate, he said.…
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., unveiled the strategy to try to go around McCarthy, R-Calif., at a Democratic meeting this week, two sources said.
Fitzpatrick was one of Democrats’ few, if only, natural allies to get a majority of the House to support the move. His opposition deals a major blow to the push, which will require at least a half-dozen House Republicans to sign the discharge petition to force a vote.
So why would Fitzpatrick not join in this. After all, one of the measures being pushed is one he co-authored. Wouldn’t he like to see it pass?
Fitzpatrick says he wants to focus on building support for the measure itself, but I think there’s more to it than that.
While he likes gun control, he’s still part of the Republican Party. He knows good and well that helping with an end-around the House leadership like this might get this bill passed, but it’ll also make it less likely he’ll have the party’s support at various points down the road.
You know, like re-election?
He may want gun control, but I’m sure there are a lot of other things he’d like to do that would be a lot harder if he goes against his leadership.
Yet with Fitzpatrick out, the odds of gathering the other Republicans needed to push gun control votes aren’t looking good. He was, perhaps, their best shot. With him gone, it’s unlikely they’ll get enough others to cross party lines and join them.
As I said earlier this week, though, that’s probably good news for vulnerable Democrats. A lot of them don’t want to raise much of a stink on gun control because they know it might not play particularly well back home. They’ll be good foot soldiers for the party, but it may put a spotlight on them they’d rather not be in.
People like Reps. Hakeem Jefferies and Lucy McBath haven’t thought that through.
Then again, they apparently figure they’re safe, so screw everyone else.
Either way, it looks like this effort isn’t going to happen and that’s likely good news for gun rights.
However, even if it had, those measures would still have had to go to the Senate where they’d be filibustered into oblivion. This really isn’t about gun control and never was. It was about trying to hurt Republicans in purple districts because they think gun control is a winning issue.
That’s all it ever was and don’t fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
And, frankly, it went out the window. Maybe Fitzpatrick realized it and simply refused to play that particular game.
Committee approves proposal to regulate Marion County firearms, but state law has to change first
Proposal to control access to guns in Marion County
On Wednesday, the City-County Council’s Public Safety and Criminal Justice Committee approved a proposal that would regulate gun access in Marion County. Nine council members voted in favor of the measure, and four against.
The proposal’s first provision would create a ban on the sale of assault-style weapons such as AR-15s. A second would increase the minimum age to purchase a weapon from 18 to 21. The third would end permitless carry of handguns.
Last month, Hogsett announced that one of his office’s top priorities during the next legislative session would be convincing the General Assembly to change state law surrounding gun regulation.
Currently, individuals do not need a permit to carry a firearm in Indiana. Indiana has a preemption statute that prevents local governments from regulating firearms.
Multiple council members said Wednesday that Indianapolis should be able to enforce its own laws on firearms.
“I implore our state legislature to remove this ban and allow our city to rule for the benefit of our people,” said Democratic council member Dan Boots.
Republican council members like Joshua Bain voted against the proposal.
”We’re going to continue to blame guns, other tools like that, for what is ultimately a spiritual issue that’s affecting our society,” he said.
But IMPD Chief Randal Taylor, who supports the measure, said more concrete solutions are needed.
“I’ve always said that I would much rather someone decide not to shoot someone, work on someone’s heart, and not do these crimes in the first place,” Taylor said at the meeting. “And I’m still all for that. However, we don’t seem to be winning that battle right now.”
And it’s no joke because I got one of those contraptions in just before I retired.
A California state senator told a gathered crowd of parents at the California Senate Judicial Committee to flee the state on June 13 during a hearing on a bill which would put parents who don’t affirm their child’s “gender transition” in danger of child abuse charges.
Sen. Scott Wilk, R-Santa Clarita, is one of the two lone Republicans on California’s Senate Judiciary Committee, and he has served in the California Legislature for 11 years. He was also the lone voice warning against language in AB 957, which a Democratic senator had amended on June 5 to rewrite the California Family Code to list “gender affirmation” alongside a child’s need for “health, safety, and welfare.”
Abigail Martinez shared the heartbreaking story of losing her daughter to transgenderism.
June 16
1760 – During the French and Indian War, Robert Rogers and his Rangers surprise French held Fort Sainte Thérèse on the Richelieu River near Lake Champlain. The fort is raided and burned.
1829 – Goyaałé of the Bedonkohe Chiricahua Apache – known to the Spanish as Geronimo -is born near what is now Turkey Creek Arizona.
1858 – Accepting the Illinois Republican Party’s nomination as that state’s US Senator, Abraham Lincoln delivers a speech at Springfield, Illinois in which he declares “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”
1884 – The first purpose built roller coaster, LaMarcus Adna Thompson’s “Switchback Railway”, opens in New York’s Coney Island amusement park.
1897 – A treaty between the governments of the Republic of Hawaii and the United States to annex the nation is signed, to take effect the next year.
1903 – The Ford Motor Company is incorporated.
1911 – IBM is founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York.
1933 – As part of the ‘New Deal’, the National Industrial Recovery Act is signed into law by President Roosevelt, allowing businesses to avoid antitrust prosecution if they establish voluntary wage, price, and working condition regulations on an industry-wide basis.
1944 – George Junius Stinney Jr., age 14, convicted in South Carolina for the rape and murder of two preteen girls, becomes the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the 20th century.
1963 – Aboard Vostok 6, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space.
1977 – Oracle Corporation is incorporated in Redwood Shores, California, as Software Development Laboratories (SDL), by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates.
1981 – Ronald Reagan awards the Congressional Gold Medal to Ken Taylor, Canada’s former ambassador to Iran, for helping 6 Americans escape from Iran during the hostage crisis of 1979–81
2010 – Bhutan becomes the first country to institute a total ban on tobacco.
2012 – The United States Air Force’s robotic Boeing X-37B spaceplane returns to Earth after a classified 469-day orbital mission.
2016 – Shanghai Disneyland Park, the first Disney Park in Mainland China, opens to the public.
‘Smart Gun’ Inventor Explains Why He’s Trying to Get a California Gun-Control Law Struck Down
The man behind the first gun with an integrated biometric lock set to come to market is backing a suit against one of California’s most restrictive gun laws.
Kai Kloepfer, Biofire founder, told The Reload his company wrote an amicus letter supporting plaintiffs in a case against the state’s Unsafe Handgun Act (UHA) because it believes the law holds back firearms safety innovation. That law bans the sale of any handgun that isn’t on the state’s approved roster, which hasn’t seen a new handgun model added to it since 2013. Biofire wrote to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month urging them to strike down the law in Boland v. Bonta.
“Our argument is the roster doesn’t serve the needs of Californians because it arbitrarily restricts the options that are available,” Kloepfer told The Reload. “California is to guns as Cuba is to cars. You can’t take advantage of all the advancements in technology, including in safety, that have been made since the guns the roster grandfathered in.”
The company’s involvement in the case is at least a public relations win for the California Rifle and Pistol Association and other plaintiffs in the case. It could also help sway the appeals panel reviewing the case that the law does more harm than good in its stated goal of protecting Californians from unsafe handguns. The move also indicates how Biofire plans to convince gun buyers, who have long been skeptical of “smart gun” technology, it is working in their interests.
Kloepfer said the company, like other gun manufacturers, isn’t planning to become directly involved in general gun-rights legal activism. However, he said they do plan to pursue legal action when a law impacts their business.
“What we do engage in are areas directly involved with smart guns. And, in particular, we have this very strong stance of being against mandates of this technology,” Kloepfer said. “It doesn’t make any sense for the market. It doesn’t make any sense for our customers. It doesn’t make any sense for us. So, areas like Boland as well as, obviously, the now-repealed New Jersey mandate for smart guns and things like that. We do get involved in direct smart gun topics or topics that impact our ability to serve our customers.”
California passed the UHA in 2001. Initially, it barred the sale of any new handgun models without a loaded chamber indicator or magazine disconnect safety. In 2013, the state mandated new pistol models must include so-called microstamping technology. In theory, microstamping imprints an identifiable mark on every spent casing with the goal of helping police solve crimes. But, as Kloepfer pointed out, there has never been a production gun anywhere in the world that incorporates the technology, and critics argue the technology is impossible to implement in a practical firearm.
“Our understanding is that the roster requires microstamping, which has never been implemented in any sort of commercially available firearm,” he said. “Biofire does not have microstamping in it. Similar to every other manufacturer, we have not seen a viable approach there.”
The real-world effect of adding the microstamping requirement, which New York is now considering implementing, was a complete ban on selling any handgun models created after 2013. Outside of law enforcement officers, who are not subject to the handgun roster’s restrictions despite unrostered guns’ status as “unsafe,” Californians have been mostly limited to buying pistols first introduced to the market more than 15 years ago.
Boland v. Bonta is already changing that, though. In March, Federal District Judge Cormac J. Carney issued a preliminary injunction against the UHA because he found it likely unconstitutional.
“These regulations are having a devastating impact on Californians’ ability to acquire and use new, state-of-the-art handguns,” Judge Carney wrote. “Since 2007, when the [loaded chamber indicator] and [magazine disconnect safety] requirements were introduced, very few new handguns have been introduced for sale in California with those features. Since 2013, when the microstamping requirement was introduced, not a single new semiautomatic handgun has been approved for sale in California.”
California filed to appeal the ruling. However, it only requested a stay on Judge Carney’s ruling in regard to the loaded chamber indicator and magazine disconnect safety requirements. The court agreed to that request. That means the microstamping requirement will remain enjoined as the appeal proceeds.
Kloepfer said Biofire has a version of its gun that includes a loaded chamber indicator and magazine disconnect safety. But he argued those features shouldn’t be required either, and the company would continue to support the case against the law.
Biofire has already brought in thousands of pre-orders for its first “smart gun” model and plans to ship the first batch of $1,500-$1,900 firearms by the end of the year.
“We’ve seen really tremendous demand so far,” Kloepfer said.
The gun is only available for direct purchase through Biofire’s website at this point, but Kloepfer said the company hopes to expand in the coming months.
“We just very simply don’t have the inventory capacity to stock at distributors or things like that,” he said. “So, as we get larger and start to sort of fulfill a lot of this backlog of demand, the goal is definitely to build positive relationships with distributors, especially ones that our customers are excited about.”
Oral arguments in the Boland v. Bonta appeal have been scheduled for August 23rd.
If You Draw The Gun, Be Prepared to Use it—Video
This video has tons of lessons we can learn from. I just want to mention one of the more obvious take-aways and encourage you to study the clip to extract all you can. Now the main point I want to focus on, taken the wrong way, leads to some bad advice on defensive handgun tactics and self defense law.
Setting up the Defensive Gun Use Video—
I’m not quite sure from where or when this video comes, but a good guess would be central or south America. I’m not sure about the country, but one person—the guy in the blue shirt—is openly carrying a handgun on his right hip. So wherever it is, civilians must be able to carry firearms openly, or this guy has a military or law enforcement occupation.
It appears the incident happens in a street-side store. The shop keeper is behind a counter and there is a customer wearing a red shirt who is standing at the counter. When the video begins, the shopkeeper is pointing outside the shop, and it appears he is speaking to the armed man wearing the blue t-shirt. Because the video has no audio, I am speculating, but it seems that maybe he is pointing at the man in blue and telling him to go away and not come into the store.
The man in blue enters the store and walks up to the counter a few feet away from the man in red. Both men face each other and begin talking or arguing. Perhaps—again I’m speculating—the argument started outside the shop, the man in red came into the store, the shopkeeper told the man in blue to stay away, but the man wearing the blue shirt came in to argue with the man in red.
Regardless of the exact reason, the men argue. The man in red reaches into his waistband and pulls out a handgun. Now here is the part I want to focus on.
The Purpose Behind Drawing Your Gun Matters—
The man in red drew his firearm, pointed it at the man in blue. Almost immediately the man in blue blades his body and starts drawing his gun. This might have caught the man in red off-guard as he seems to pull the gun back deliberately, and point it straight upward away from the man in blue.
The man in blue responded quickly, but still, because the men stand roughly 6 feet apart, he could point the gun directly at the man in blue before he can respond.
Now certainly people use force unjustifiably, but it doesn’t appear as though the guy in red had a legally justified reason to shoot the guy in blue. Based on what I see in the video, I think he drew and pointed the gun at the man in blue to scare him, and not to use it. This is an incredibly bad idea.
We see that the man in blue didn’t give up and run away. He reasonably perceived the man in red, posed a deadly threat, and used his firearm to stop him. I can’t say for sure how many shots the man in blue fired, nor how many hit the target, but the initial group caused the man in red to drop his gun.
Yes, quite often the display of a firearm CAN be a deterrent, but it doesn’t happen all the time. And if you’re not justified in using the gun, it can amplify the problem, and give the other person a reasonable justification to use deadly force against you.
I don’t know if the guy in red saw the man in blue had a handgun on his hip and thought he wouldn’t use it, or if he just didn’t see the gun and thought he had the only gun in the equation. Either way, drawing it without actually intending to use it was a fatal mistake.
Have the Right Mindset—
If you draw your gun, you better be justified in using it, and prepared to press the trigger. Don’t ever draw the gun as a tool for intimidation only.
Now I also want to touch on some bad information I’ve heard circulated on social media and from students in classes. Maybe you’ve even heard this said.
“If you draw your gun, you have no choice but to use it, because if not, you’ll get charged for brandishing, assault, attempted murder, etc.”
That is bad info.
Now I know I just got done saying if you draw your gun you better be ready to press the trigger, and just showed a video of what happens when you draw your gun and don’t use it. But there is a difference between drawing the gun because you’re justified and ready to use it, and drawing the gun and pressing the trigger just because you drew it.
If you only draw the gun when you are legally justified in using deadly force, then you are also justified in drawing the gun and NOT using deadly force. The only problem is when you draw the gun and you’re NOT justified in using deadly force. It’s not just a matter of semantics. For this guy, it cost him his life. For someone else, it could cost them their freedom.
See the Video For Yourself—
That is just one of the many lessons to pull from this video. Take a look at the video below and leave a comment on something you noticed.
Progressive Judge Says Commerce Clause Overrides the Bill of Rights
U.S.A. — At least one judge in the Third Circuit believes the Commerce Clause overrides the Bill of Rights. In a recent decision of The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in the case Range v Lombardo, on June 6, 2023, the en banc court ruled some felony convictions are not sufficient to restrict Second Amendment rights, based on the historical record. Eleven of 15 judges concurred with the majority opinion. Four judges dissented.
One of those was Judge Janet Richards Roth, appointed to the Third Circuit by George H. W. Bush in 1991. She was born in 1935 and started her governmental career working as a typist and administrative assistant in the Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State, in 1956. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 1965. Judge Roth assumed senior status on May 31, 2006. She is a few days short of her 88th birthday (June 16).
Judge Roth makes a strong case, based on Progressive philosophy, the Commerce Clause overrides the Bill of Rights. She gives the usual litany of Progressive “arguments”: Things have changed since the ratification of the Bill of Rights. The federal government has to have more power than the Bill of Rights allows. That was then. This is now. Here is part of the dissent from Judge Roth of the Third Circuit P. 96 of 107 :
In Bruen, the Supreme Court considered whether a regulation issued by a state government was a facially constitutional exercise of its traditional police power.
Range presents a distinguishable question: Whether a federal statute, which the Supreme Court has upheld as a valid exercise of Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause, 2 is constitutional as applied to him.
The parties and the Majority conflate these spheres of authority and fail to address binding precedents affirming Congress’s power to regulate the possession of firearms in interstate commerce. Because Range lacks standing under the applicable Commerce Clause jurisprudence, I respectfully dissent.
Judge Roth explicitly states the modern expansion of the commerce clause, to include virtually all activity that has any effect on commerce, overrides the Bill of Rights because the scope of modern commerce is far greater than commerce at the founding.
This case involves the Second Amendment. Roth’s logic as easily applies to the First Amendment and others. Virtually all First Amendment usage involves items that have a connection to interstate commerce – printing presses, telephones, computers, satellites, fiber optic cables, etc. Church pews are made of wood shipped across state lines, paid for by credit cards recognized by interstate banks. Nearly all homes affect interstate commerce. Under the expansive interpretation, the federal government could regulate all use and sale of homes and inspect them at any time, in spite of the Fourth Amendment. Under the expansive, Progressive interpretation, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments are swallowed up. Virtually all of life is encompassed by the absurd extension of the Commerce Clause created by Progressive judges.
Most of what Judge Roth writes about modern times applied to commerce at the time of the ratification of the Bill of Rights.
Gavin Newsom’s campaign to repeal the Second Amendment
Whatever else Gov. Gavin Newsom ’s (D-CA) campaign for a 28th Amendment gets wrong about guns, at least it implicitly admits that the Democratic Party’s gun control wish list is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment .
After all, why propose an amendment if the Constitution doesn’t forbid what you want to accomplish?
Leaving Newsom’s admission aside, however, his 28th Amendment would accomplish nothing, at least nothing good. At worst, it would lay the legal groundwork for confiscating every gun in the United States.
Newsom has offered no text for his amendment, only four “principles” he wants written into it. This allows him to propose “barring civilian purchase of assault weapons” without ever having to define exactly what an “assault weapon” is.
Define it too narrowly and gun manufacturers will create new models that skirt the definition. Define it too broadly by saying it is “any semi-automatic firearm with a detachable magazine,” for example, and you outlaw almost half the handguns in the nation. If the text of Newsom’s 28th Amendment is ever written, he’ll have to choose. The first option renders his amendment useless; the second would mean it never gets the votes to become law.
Not all of Newsom’s principles are so vague. Raising the legal age to buy a firearm from 18 to 21 is an easy bright line to enforce, but there isn’t any evidence that it would reduce gun crimes at all. But how can we raise the age to 21 when people may vote when three years younger than that?
Newsom’s third principle calls for a “reasonable waiting period for all gun purchases.” What is “reasonable” is not defined. We know from existing state waiting periods that they reduce gun suicides for those over 55, but they have no effect on gun homicide rates overall.
Finally, Newsom calls for “universal background checks” for gun purchases. But all commercial gun purchases are subject to universal background checks already. What Newsom is really calling for here is background checks for all private firearm transfers. Anytime anyone transfers gun ownership, from father to son, for example, or from neighbor to neighbor, Newsom wants the federal government to know about it.
Some states have tried this, and compliance is nonexistent. It is estimated that only 3.5% of private transfers in Oregon, for example, complied with that state’s universal background check law. The only way to achieve anything approaching effective compliance would be for the federal government to create a national gun registry and force all owners to register their firearms with the feds. That is the Democrats’ real goal with a universal background check system: a new government database that knows who owns every gun in the country and where they live.
Newsom’s gun grabbing pitch is predicated on the suggestion that mass shootings are a rational security threat and that the public, after “another few dozen of these in the next year or two,” will accept repealing the Second Amendment.
But mass shootings make up just 1% of all gun deaths each year. If Newsom wants to do something about gun violence, he should attack the George Soros district attorneys in his state and across the country who refuse to prosecute minorities charged with gun possession crimes. Democrats need to focus on enforcing existing gun laws before they try to create new ones.
June 15
763 BC – Assyrian astrologers record a solar eclipse that is later used to fix the chronology of Mesopotamian history.
1215 – To make peace between the king and a group of rebel barons, King John of England is forced to affix his seal to Magna Carta, a declaration of certain rights protected from the power of the English throne.
1389 –The invading army of the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Murad Hüdavendigâr, barely defeats an army of Serbs and Bosnians led by the Serbian Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović on the east central plain of Kosovo. Both leaders are killed as both armies are nearly wiped out.
1502 – Christopher Columbus lands on the island of Martinique on his fourth voyage.
1520 – Pope Leo X threatens to excommunicate Martin Luther in Exsurge Domine.
1607 – Virginia colonists finish building James’s Fort – later Jamestown – on the James river southwest of modern Williamsburg, to defend against Spanish and Indian attacks.
1648 – Margaret Jones is hanged in Boston for witchcraft in the first such execution for the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1776 –Delaware votes to suspend government under the British Crown and separate officially from Pennsylvania.
1804 – New Hampshire approves the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratifying it.
1836 – Arkansas is admitted as the 25th U.S. state.
1844 – Charles Goodyear receives a patent for vulcanization, a process to strengthen rubber.
1846 – The Oregon Treaty of 1846 extends the border between the United States and British North America, established by the Treaty of 1818, westward to the Pacific Ocean.
1859 – Ambiguous language in the Oregon Treaty due to incomplete mapping of the region, leads to the “Northwestern Boundary Dispute” between American and British/Canadian settlers.
1864 – Arlington National Cemetery is established when 200 acres of the Arlington estate formerly owned by Confederate General Robert E. Lee are officially set aside as a military cemetery by U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.
1877 – Henry Ossian Flipper becomes the first African American cadet to graduate from the United States Military Academy.
1878 – Eadweard Muybridge takes a series of photographs to prove that all four feet of a horse leave the ground when it runs; the study becomes the basis of motion pictures.
1904 – A fire aboard the steamboat SS General Slocum causes it to sink in New York City’s East River killing 1,021 of the 1,342 people on board.
1916 – President Woodrow Wilson signs a bill incorporating the Boy Scouts of America with a federal charter.
1934 – The United States Great Smoky Mountains National Park is founded.
1944 – During World War II, the U.S. invades the island of Saipan, capital of Japan’s South Seas Mandate.
1970 – Charles Manson goes on trial for the Tate–LaBianca murders.
1992 – In the case of United States v. Álvarez-Machaín, the Supreme Court rules in that it is permissible for the United States to forcibly extradite suspects in foreign countries and bring them to the United States for trial, without approval from those other countries.
2012 – Nik Wallenda becomes the first person to successfully tightrope walk directly over Niagara Falls.
2022 – Microsoft retires Internet Explorer after 26 years and introduces a new browser; Microsoft Edge.
The phrase "I'm deviating from the script, and I going to get in trouble" raises alarming implications, particularly when considering the presence of a puppet master. The notion that someone is pulling the strings, manipulating events is deeply unsettling and demands careful…
— Razgriz (@DamianNB) June 15, 2023
The phrase “I’m deviating from the script, and I going to get in trouble” raises alarming implications, particularly when considering the presence of a puppet master. The notion that someone is pulling the strings, manipulating events is deeply unsettling and demands careful reflection. @DamianNB