HYPOCRISY UNLIMITED: Hollywood’s Secret Counterfeit Vaccine Network.

Last week, I had a remarkable phone call with a person—I’m equivocating to protect their identity, although I assure you that person was either male or female, not in the least transgendered—from my former home in the Los Angeles area, regarding Hollywood and COVID-19 or, as it’s known hereabouts, the CCP virus.

Ironically, this was exactly one week before the deadline for Oscar voting. Although no longer working in the industry, I’ve been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since the mid-’80s, but never have I received so many emails, texts, and phone calls reminding me to vote.

This tells me that other members may be as bored with the process as I am. Who wants to vote in the event, let alone watch it?

Besides being reactionary in its obsession with race and sexual identity, “woke” Hollywood just isn’t fun (or entertaining) anymore.

Even less fun for all of us was COVID-19, but for Hollywood, it was especially inconvenient because of the stringent California laws that the studios took to with alacrity. You had no career without mRNA certification. You were supposed to be vaccinated just to get on the studio lot.

The phone call I mentioned above was with a person who works in the entertainment industry and said they obtained—through connections—vaccination record cards for use by major Hollywood celebrities and others.

These aren’t counterfeits, but actual cards purloined from a hospital pharmacy where the vaccines were sold and included batch numbers but without names attached. In essence, they were contraband.

The person claims to have been inspired to do something for people in the face of forced vaccination after news emerged that the virus might have been the result of a lab leak in Wuhan, China, and that the government had been lying about the pandemic in general.

My interlocutor says they began selling the cards in early April 2021. Between then and early October 2021, calls were apparently coming in every day for contraband cards.

The individual estimates that they sold at least 250 of the cards during that period. When asked whether they were afraid of the Justice Department and IRS because of this, the answer was affirmative.

The celebrities for whom this person made these counterfeits were almost uniformly liberals or progressives, at least publicly. In other words, if you asked them, they supported mandates, masks, and so forth, sometimes adamantly. Behind the scenes was another matter.

The stories this person told me were amusing, nauseating, and, in some sense, edifying all at once. We’ve long known that Hollywood types are some of the most hypocritical people on the planet—living large while endlessly lecturing the little folk on climate and the rest—but this may take the proverbial cake.

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MARINES DITCH FAMOUS SCOUT SNIPER PROGRAM

The Marine Corps is dismantling its iconic Scout Sniper platoons – a facet of each infantry battalion for generations – and is doing away with the coveted 0317 Military Occupational Specialty.

The product of a grueling training pipeline that yields field-ready precision marksmen qualified on the M40, M110, and M107 series rifles, the Marine Scout Sniper program is facing permanent disbandment as a result of a shifting focus in the country’s amphibious warfare service.

A leaked Feb. 21 unclassified message from Lt. Gen. D. J. Furness, the deputy commandant for plans, policies, and operations, detailed that the current 18-member Scout Sniper Platoons assigned to the Corps’ infantry battalions will quickly transition to 26-member Scout platoons – in other words, cutting the snipers in favor of a unit that would provide more “continuous all-weather information gathering.”

Spots in the Scout Sniper Basic Course will be zeroed out in the coming fiscal year while a nascent sniper capability will be continued in the Corps’ Reconnaissance and Marine Special Operations units under a new Military Occupational Specialty – 0322 MOS (Reconnaissance Sniper) – via a revamped, shorter training program.

The problem with that is, as these groups typically operate detached from standard infantry units, the highly specialized skill will in effect vanish at the battalion level, which will be left to get by with the current designated marksmen already at the company level. Under current doctrine, DMs typically only have a three-week course under their belt and train to engage targets out to 500 meters, rather than the much longer ranges that Scout Snipers train to achieve.

The USMC Scout Sniper Association is urging the Commandant of the Marine Corps to reconsider what the group terms an “ill-advised” policy decision that will gut the program that has been tweaked and perfected over the past 80 years.

“This announcement by the Deputy Commandant, Plans, Policy, and Operations on Tuesday is the result of misguided assumptions and decades of neglect of the community of men who are Scout Snipers,” said the Association.

“It’s unlikely that any officer who commanded and employed Scout Snipers in combat agrees that removing a sniper capability from the infantry battalion makes sense. Replacing an 18-man Scout Sniper Platoon with a 26-man Scout Platoon will not solve the ‘all weather information gathering’ problem. Retaining the skill set and the combat capability of Scout Snipers by offering a viable career path to Scout Snipers and providing them with more engaged leadership might.”

The shift away from having dedicated sniper platoons in each infantry battalion comes as the number of battalions themselves is dwindling.

The Corps’ three active-duty divisions would field a total of 27 infantry battalions between them if they were at full strength, but that hasn’t been the case for a long time. Long reduced to just 24 battalions all told, in 2020 the current commandant unveiled a plan to case the colors of three additional infantry battalions and the 8th Marine Regiment to make room to form a new Marine Littoral Regiment, the latter optimized to leapfrog rapidly across islands and coastal spaces with a smaller footprint when compared to the current force.

The result is a Corps with just 21 active-duty infantry battalions, shortly, in addition to cuts in tiltrotor, attack, and heavy-lift aviation squadrons and disbanding of all of the branch’s tank battalions.

NEW: SIG SAUER MCX SPEAR CONSUMER VARIANT OF THE ARMY’S XM7 RIFLE

SIG Sauer this week officially introduced the version of the military’s new Next Generation rifle that won’t require talking to a recruiter.

Last April, the New Hampshire-based firearms giant made headlines around the globe by pulling down the award for the Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapons, a series of 6.8mm rifles and light machine guns and their companion suppressors that are planned to replace the current 5.56 NATO small arms in front line service. The rifle, originally introduced as the XM5 and recently renamed the XM7, is based on the company’s gas-piston action MCX platform and uses SIG’s in-house developed SLX suppressor system.

While the as-issued XM7 currently being sent to the Army runs a standard 15.3-inch barrel (as measured over its muzzle device) and SIG released to the public a limited run of suppressed 13-inch barreled commemoratives last year that required two tax stamps, the MCX Spear will be fully NFA-compliant in at least most of its variants.

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Shootout during alleged attempted burglary in central Bakersfield, 2 injured

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KBAK/KBFX) — Two men are in the hospital after a shoot-out, police say happened during an attempted burglary in central Bakersfield Thursday night.

According to Bakersfield police, on Thursday, February 23, 2023, at around 7:04 p.m., officers were called to a home in the 2300 block Pine Street regarding reports of a shooting.

When officers arrived, they found a man suffering from a gunshot injury.

Police said the investigation found that the man arrived home and saw an unknown vehicle parked in his driveway and several unknown men running out from his home towards the parked vehicle.

One of the men had a gun and began firing at the victim while he was inside his car, according to police. The victim, a licensed concealed carry permit holder possessing a gun, returned fire. Police said during the exchange of gunfire, the victim sustained a non-life-threatening injury.

The suspects were able to drive away in the suspect vehicle.

Bakersfield Police Department detectives responded to the scene and assumed the investigation.

Police said 43-year-old Melvin Carter of Palmdale, was identified as one of the suspects after arriving at a hospital with a gunshot injury sustained during the shoot-out with the victim. Carter is in serious but stable condition.

Police said pursuant to the investigation, 36-year-old Frederick Minnoy III of Bakersfield was taken into custody for his role in the attempted burglary and shooting. Minnoy was transported and booked into the Kern County Jail for attempted murder, conspiracy, and attempted residential burglary.

The Hard “Nope”

It was a post at Bookroom Room that led me to jump aboard this particular train of thought – that most of us have certain concepts embedded in us so firmly that absolutely nothing will ever get us to violate them. As Bookworm put it, “Because as I’ve contended for years, every person has one absolute truth. It’s the one thing they know to their bones is true and the world must align with that truth … For my mother, who would have been a fashionista if she’d had the money, style and beauty were her truths. She sucked up all the lies about Barack and Michelle Obama until the media talking heads said that Michelle was the most beautiful, stylish first lady ever, above and beyond even Jackie Kennedy. That ran headlong into Mom’s truth and, after that, she never again believed what the media had to say about the Obamas.”

It’s a concept worth considering – our own truths, which we will stubbornly hold on to, refusing any threats or blandishments. It varies from person to person, of course. Some have only small and irrelevant truths, which are never seriously threatened, and there are those who have no real truths at all, save perhaps self-aggrandizement – but even so, for some keeping to their truth is a hard struggle, deciding to hold to that truth against everything – especially if they have status or a living to make, in denying that truth.

Sam Houston, as governor of Texas on the eve of the Civil War, refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy, required by a newly-passed law upon secession from the United States. Twice elected president of an independent Texas, and the general who had secured freedom from the Centralist dictator, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna nearly fifteen years before, Houston had labored mightily to secure annexation of Texas to the US. Secession from the Union must have nearly broken the old man’s heart. Most accounts have it that he paced the floor of his office for an entire night, considering whether he would take the oath … or not. He did not; he resigned all office and retired to his home in Huntsville, where he died several years later. When all was said and done, Houston was a believer in the Union, and devoted to Texas. When it came to secession and swearing an oath of fealty to the Confederates – a hard “nope” for the hero of San Jacinto.

My own personal biggest hard “nope” has to do with so-called anthropogenic global warming/global cooling/climate change concept alleged to be caused by human activity and industry. I don’t care how much the autistic Swedish teenager scowls at us all, or Al Gore flies from his many lavish mansions, to one important conference after another, to lecture us all about our carbon footprint.

Earth’s temperatures and conditions have swung wildly over millennia, without any help from human beings at all. Canada and the north-central US were once covered by a mile of ice. The Sahara desert was once a grassland interspersed with marshes, rivers and lakes. In Roman times, it was temperate enough in England to grow wine grapes, while around 1000 AD it was warm enough for subsistence farming in Greenland … and then the climate turned colder all across Europe, until the River Thames froze solid enough between the 14th and 18th centuries to host so-called Frost Fairs on the solid ice. Avenues of shops opened on the ice, racing events, puppet shows and all manner of entertainments took place. The massive explosion of an Indonesian volcano in early 1815, on the other hand, led to a so-called year without summer in the northern hemisphere in 1816. The climate of earth has changed drastically, without any human input over conditions – even before humans existed, so what the heck have gas stoves or gasoline engines – or even coal-fired power plants have to do with it?

I’ve got another couple of hard “nopes” – but anthropogenic climate change is just the main one at present. What are some other personal hard “nopes” among you all? Discuss as you wish.

That Warren Burger Quote Gun Grabbers Love Is Ahistorical — Not To Mention Sort Of Fake

Idon’t know how many times people have dropped this alleged quote from the late “conservative” Justice Warren Burger into my social media feeds:

The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies — the militia — would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.

If you find yourself in a debate over the Second Amendment, sooner or later someone is going to let you know that Burger believed an individual right to gun ownership was one of the “greatest pieces of fraud” perpetrated on the American people. Burger’s line is ubiquitous—it can be found in The New Yorker, Slate, Politico, NPR, every major newspaper, and in every anti-gun columnist’s pieces.

The first problem with the popular online iteration of the quote is that it’s actually cobbled together from three separate sources to give it more impact. Don’t get me wrong: Burger is mistaken in all instances, but he is mistaken in different contexts.

The second problem is that the quote often reads as if Burger—the “conservative” who voted with the majority in Roe v. Wade—offered this argument as a member of the Supreme Court. No high-court decision has ever defined the Second Amendment as anything but an individual right. And Burger never uttered a word about the Second Amendment while sitting on the court. For that matter, he never rendered a gun decision on any court, nor ever wrote a legal paper on the issue. And it shows.

Then again, the “collective right” theory was only a recent invention of revisionist historians and anti-gun activists when Burger adopted it. It’s also a tough one to sell to anyone who cares about history. Nearly every intellectual, political, and military leader of the founding generation, from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Franklin to George Mason to Samuel Adams to George Washington to Patrick Henry to James Madison and so on, is on the record defending the individual’s right to bear arms. There is not a single record of anyone in that era challenging the notion.

Anyway, the part of the quote about the gun lobby is taken from a 1991 PBS interview in which Burger erroneously argues that the 18th-century conception of “well regulated” was the same as the contemporary one. The notion that the state, much less the federal government, would be empowered to “regulate” what kind of weapons you owned would have been alien to a person in 1789. “Well regulated” simply means a well-pulled-together militia, rather than a rabble.

Burger maintains that the real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies would defend state populations. This is an ungrammatical and ahistorical reading of the amendment. Sure, there was a debate over standing armies and control of the militias. But, as the late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in Heller, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” is the operative clause in the Second Amendment. The “well regulated Militia” part is the prefatory clause.

It makes zero sense to read the prefatory clause as a nullification or even limitation of the operative clause. It is tantamount to arguing that because the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, it’s not an individual right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The Second Amendment explicitly mentions “the right of the people” — people who generally used their own weapons as militiamen — just as it does elsewhere in the Bill of Rights when protecting individual rights. Many colonies enshrined the individual right to bear arms in their constitutions before the Bill of Rights was even written, most of them in much more explicit terms. No state defined it as a collective right. Some Federalists argued that special protections in the Bill of Rights were unnecessary because there were so many guns in private hands that it was unimaginable any tyrannical army could ever be more powerful than the public.

The other two parts of the quote are lifted from different passages in a column Burger wrote for the Associated Press. Here the former justice expands on his idea that guns should be regulated like cars.

“[A]lthough there is not a word or hint in the Constitution about automobiles or motorcycles,” Burger says, “no one would seriously argue that a state cannot regulate the use of motor vehicles by imposing licensing restrictions and speed limits based on factors of driver’s age, health condition, and driving record, and by recording every purchase and change of ownership.”

It is because automobiles and motorcycles — or transportation as an ideal — are not explicitly protected by the Constitution that you can heavily regulate those things. The better analogy would be due process or speech rights. (Although Burger wasn’t a great fan of the First Amendment, either.)

Besides all that, Burger should have known that Americans, even in 1991, did not have “unfettered” access to “machine guns.” In 1986, the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act law made ownership of fully automatic weapons pretty rare.

Burger also should have known that the Gun Control Act of 1968 established the first federal age limits for buying guns. Today there are tens of thousands of laws regulating gun ownership in the United States. That is not “unfettered” by any definition.

In fact, it doesn’t seem like Burger knew very much about the topic at all.

Teaching us to Hate Guns and Despise Gun Owners

We all know how to sell something. We also know how to discredit an idea or action. All we have to do is ignore its benefits and inflate its costs. Are those lies exactly? A comedian can lie to us, but we don’t go to a comedy club to hear the truth. Here is how the mainstream media and anti-rights politicians teach us to hate guns and to despise gun owners.. and yes, they lie about it.

Tell half the truth about armed defense. The easiest way for the media and gun-prohibition-politicians to blame gun owners is to show us the harm that criminals do with guns and to ignore the lives saved when honest citizens use their firearms. The mainstream media tells us about the horrific murderer who used a gun. The news ignores the common events of armed defense that happen every day. It is hard to overstate this since the media bias isn’t a few percent, but over a thousand-fold. That level of distortion is commonly called a lie.

We can test that right now. See if you can remember a time when the news told you about a murderer who used a gun. Of course you can, but do you remember when the news media showed you an example of armed defense where the good guys and good gals stopped the attacker and saved lives? That happens more than 4,600 times a day and yet you can’t remember seeing more than one or two news stories about it. It is easy to blame guns and gun owners for murder and robbery when the mainstream news media hides half the story.

Misrepresent gang activity as firearms accidents. If you look, you will find more and more stories of young men engaging in violent crime. We now see 12-year-olds as part of armed carjacking gangs. It is easy to assume that when a 11, 12, or a 13 year old gets shot that it was a firearms accident. That might be true in a small rural town but 12 year olds are part of violent gangs in our failed cities.

It is certainly true that many youngsters are shot as innocent bystanders but that isn’t a “firearms accident” at all. We have to make the clear distinction between a firearm accident and involuntary manslaughter. The great news is that both the number and the rate of real firearms accidents have been falling for years. Firearms education prevented accidents.

Mix suicides in with homicides. The largest fraction of gun-related deaths are from suicide. Long ago we passed laws that made suicide illegal. Notice that someone who is willing to take their own life is not concerned with breaking the law. We passed “red flag” laws that take firearms from gun owners. We took their guns but we didn’t offer them mental health counseling. We’ve also seen some states impose mandatory waiting periods of 3 to 14 days before you can pick up the gun you bought.

The claim is that mandatory waiting periods will reduce the rate of suicide. We are told that we might impulsively use the next gun we buy to commit suicide, but you would not use the firearms you already have in your home. You read that correctly and waiting periods for existing gun owners don’t make sense.

Suicide is a real problem that deserves more than an imaginary answer. The number of suicides rises and falls each year, but we have not found clear evidence that gun-control laws reduced the rate of suicide. I have seen the large and sustained effort that firearms manufacturers, ammunition manufacturers, gun shops, and individual gun owners have put into mental health counseling for gun-owners in crises. They helped establish and fund programs like Walk-the-talk America and Hold My Guns.

Confuse gun owners with criminals. We don’t see the rate of crime drop after states impose gun-control laws. The reason is obvious since honest people obey gun laws but criminals are the ones who commit crimes. Unlike us, criminals don’t use gun shops to get their guns. Criminals get their guns the same place they get their drugs. They buy them on the street from other criminals.

The news media tells us that making it harder for honest citizens to get guns will somehow change the way criminals behave. That is magic rather than reason, but the media tells us that honest gun owners are to blame for what criminals do with guns.

Blame gun owners for mass-murderers. Honest gun owners are blamed each time a mad-man commits murder in a “gun-free zone” where the victims are disarmed by law. We were told that we need to have mandatory background checks to stop mass murderers. We were not supposed to look at that statement too closely since mass-murder is pretty much a one-and-done career. When we looked, we found that some mass murderers did have a criminal record that should have disqualified them from having a gun. That prohibition scheme doesn’t work when prosecutors don’t prosecute criminals.

What surprised us is that the crazy mass-murderers actually told us why they wanted to kill. We’ve read their journals and their manifestos. They want to be famous and will kill to get what they want. The news media is all too eager.

We were not told that 49-out-of-50 mass murders occur in gun free zones. We’re not shown that honest gun owners stopped 104 attempted mass-murders in the last seven years. Where we were allowed to go armed, we stopped more than half of the attempted mass-murders in the last few years. If that comes as a surprise to you then you know that the mainstream media has been lying to you. Armed citizens are the cure rather than the disease that caused public-violence and celebrity-murders.

Call out gun owners as an emotional threat. We’ve seen politicians question our right to defend ourselves. The news media and anti-rights activists demean not only guns and gun owners but the people who tolerate them.

We’ve talked about facts, but we haven’t talked about feelings very much. There is a reason for all this animosity directed at gun owners.

Gun owners are guilty of wrongthink. Questioning the effectiveness of gun-control laws undercuts the utopian fantasy of gun-control. We think we are discussing facts but we are actually shattering their dreams. We are considered a threat since we ask ordinary people to question the utopian vision of gun-control.

It is comforting to think that getting rid of guns would get rid of violence. Some politicians and activists are strongly attached to that fairy tale. Unless we shout our support for gun-control, we are considered a threat since we make the utopians feel insecure.

How dare you put your safety and the safety of your family ahead of my comforting fantasy! 

We talked about facts, but if you want to make someone uncomfortable then question their dreams. That explains the vitriol thrown at ordinary citizens who want to protect themselves.

Facts matter to those who are influenced by facts. Dreams matter to those who live in dreams. I will not call my virtue a vice simply to make other people comfortable. Life is too precious for that. I have dreams of the future too, and so do you.

One Year in the Russo-Ukrainian War: the Big Pixels

Last Friday we looked at the seven points we discussed a year earlier the day the Russo-Ukrainian War broke out. As promised, today we look at seven points a year in everyone needs to hoist onboard.

Though I nibble on the edges a bit, these are not detailed, tactical “lessons learned.” Land combat details simply are not my bag. No, these a big pixel items. Mostly land centric like the war, but are directly transferrable to the maritime and other domains.

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February 28

1525 – Aztec king Cuauhtémoc is executed on the order of conquistador Hernán Cortés at Itzamkanac, in modern southern Mexico for allegedly conspiring to kill him and other Spaniards while on a journey to modern Honduras

1646 – In Lynn, Massachusetts, Roger Scott is tried, convicted and sentenced to be whipped for striking back at the Tithingman, who had hit him on the head with his staff for sleeping in church.

1794– The US Senate voids Pennsylvania’s election of Abraham Gallatin to the Senate due to him not having been a resident of the U.S. for the required length of time.

1827 – The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad is incorporated, becoming the first railroad in America offering commercial transportation of both people and freight.

1847 – The Battle of the Sacramento River during the Mexican–American War is a decisive victory for the United States leading to the capture of the city of Chihuahua.

1849 – Regular steamship service from the east to the west coast of the United States begins with the arrival of the SS California in San Francisco Bay, 4 months and 22 days after leaving New York Harbor.

1878 – Congress overrides President Hayes veto of the Bland–Allison Act, which required the the U.S. Treasury to buy a certain amount of silver and put it into circulation as silver dollars, returning silver as legal tender money.

1893 – BB-1, the USS Indiana, the lead ship of her class and the first battleship in the United States Navy comparable to foreign battleships of the time, is launched.

1925 – A 6.2 magnitude earthquake strikes northeastern North America near the Charlevoix-Kamouraska area along the Saint Lawrence River causing extensive damage in several villages along the river, but no reported deaths, or injuries.

1933 – The Reichstag Fire Decree is issued by German President Paul von Hindenburg, on the advice of Chancellor Adolf Hitler, a day after the Reichstag fire. It nullifies many of the key civil liberties of German citizens and is used by the Nazis government as the ‘legal’ basis for the imprisonment of anyone considered to be opponents of the Nazism.

1935 – DuPont scientist Wallace Carothers invents Nylon.

1953 – James Watson and Francis Crick announce to friends that they have determined the chemical structure of DNA; the formal announcement takes place on April 25

1954 – The first color television sets using the NTSC standard are offered for sale to the general public.

1958 – A school bus in Floyd County, Kentucky hits a wrecker truck and plunges down an embankment into the Levisa Fork river. The driver and 26 children die in the worst school bus accident in U.S. history.

1966 – A NASA T-38 Talon crashes into the McDonnell Aircraft factory while attempting to land at Lambert Field, St. Louis, killing astronauts Elliot See and Charles Bassett.

1972 – The United States and China sign the Shanghai Communiqué, a pledge to work towards the normalization of the two nations

1983 – The final episode of M*A*S*H airs, holding the record for the highest viewership of a season and series finale.

1991 – 1oo hours after beginning offensive ground operations against Iraq to liberate Kuwait, President Bush, following advice from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell to cease further incursion into Iraq, declares victory and an immediate cease fire, effectively ending the first Gulf War.

1993 – Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms stage a raid on the compound of the Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists, an offshoot group of the Davidian Seventh-day Adventist Church, in Waco, Texas, with a warrant to arrest the group’s leader David Koresh.
4 ATF agents and 6 Davidians die in the initial raid, starting a 51 day standoff.

1997 – After robbing the North Hollywood branch of the Bank of America, Larry Phillips and Emil Mătăsăreanu engage multiple officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in a running street gunfight, wounding 12 officers and 8 citizens, until Phillips is wounded and commits suicide and Mătăsăreanu is wounded and dies before emergency medical personnel arrive.

2001 – The 6.8 magnitude Nisqually earthquake, with the epicenter in the southern Puget Sound, causes over $1 Billion in damage in the Seattle metropolitan area, injures over 400 people and causes 1 person to suffer a fatal heart attack.

2013 – Pope Benedict XVI resigns as the pope of the Roman Catholic Church, becoming the first to do so since Pope Gregory XII, in 1415.

Retconning Heller: Five Takes on New York Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen

New York Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen was the first significant Second Amendment case that the Supreme Court had heard in over a decade since its decision in District Columbia v. Heller. It was one of the most highly anticipated case of the 2021-22 Term and serves as the first indication of how the addition of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett might alter the trajectory of the Court’s Second Amendment case law.

If Heller could have been characterized as a “minimalist” opinion at the time of its decision and McDonald v. Chicago as an almost overdetermined extension of Heller by its application to the states through incorporation, Bruen tends towards maximalism, dramatically expanding the scope of the Second Amendment and threatening a variety of gun control laws that lower courts had upheld while the Court stayed its hand. Given that there is now a solid majority (if not a super-majority) willing to support a robust Second Amendment, whatever Bruen’s ultimate scope, it is unlikely that the Court will be as quiescent as it was in the decade following Heller.

This essay offers some preliminary observations about both the opinion itself, as well as its likely effects, some of which are starting to manifest. Our first take concerns the question of opinion assignment. Why did Chief Justice Roberts—whose support for the Second Amendment had been suspect—assign the opinion to Justice Thomas?

Takes two and three concern Justice Thomas’s substitution of text, history, and tradition for tiered-scrutiny; and his call for courts to adopt analogical reasoning should the former fail to provide answers to resolve particular cases. In rejecting tiered-scrutiny, Thomas argued that the lower courts had misread the Heller decision itself; that Heller rejected tiered-scrutiny in favor of a textual, historical, and traditional inquiry. In order to make Bruen seem less like an abrupt departure, we argue, Justice Thomas had to “retcon” Heller—reading back into the latter decision the analytical framework adopted in Bruen. We also question how helpful his explanation of the method for analogizing to other extant gun regulations when history and tradition have run out is likely to be to lower courts who have to rehear cases involving dozens of issues delineating the scope of the Second Amendment settled over the last fifteen years since Heller.

Take Four wonders about the status of what we earlier termed “the Heller safe harbor”—the list of “presumptively lawful” regulations that the Court said were not called into question by the decision. Critics at the time questioned whether these could be squared with the self-conscious originalism of the rest of the opinion. This tension is only heighted by Bruen’s text-history-tradition only approach.

Finally, in keep with our longstanding interest in lower court reception of destabilizing, possibly transformative Supreme Court opinions, we look at the reaction of the lower courts, post-Bruen. While approaches differ, a surprising number of these opinions seem to recognize Bruen for the sea-change it portends and are attempting to implement it in good faith. Although as was true with cases like United States v. Lopez and Heller itself, some courts are also trying to avoid the wider implications of Bruen using any available argument, however specious; and we detect in some an “uncivil obedience” intended to raise the Supreme Court’s costs of holding the line laid down in Bruen. A brief conclusion follows.

SSRN-id4372216 retcon heller

Proposed Tennessee bill would expand concealed carry law to include all firearms

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (WTVC) — A new bill in the Tennessee legislature wants to change concealed carry laws throughout the state to include all firearms.

But opponents, including the Tennessee Highway Patrol, are saying the expansion is concerning for law enforcement.

House Bill 1005 seeks to change the reference from “handgun” to simply “firearm,” allowing citizens to publicly carry semi-automatic weapons.

The proposed change raise questions about criminality versus civil liberties.

Currently it is legal to carry a handgun through the streets in Tennessee.

However, this bill could change that, making it legal to carry any firearm with a permit.

“I don’t want him (motions to child) having to, you know, walk around see who’s carrying guns all over the place,” said Patrick Blackwell.

Blackwell says he worries about the example this bill could set for his child if it becomes law.

During the subcommittee meeting lawmakers say it would also include AK 47s.

“I’m reading this bill, and this would allow any individual to carry an AK 47 out front of a building and up and down Broadway. Am reading that correctly?” asked Rep. Bill Beck.

“Yes sir.”

The bills sponsor, state Rep. Rusty Grills says this would provide Tennesseans with their right to bear arms and defend themselves.

“It’s our job as legislators, in my opinion, to make sure that every Tennessean’s constitutional rights are protected,” says Grills.

But some members of law enforcement, aren’t a fan of the bill.

“The idea of someone being able to carry any kind of rifle or high capacity is a concern for law enforcement. How do we address them? They walk in this building, we’re charged with protecting it,” said Colonel Matt Perry.

Supporters of the change say the guns would still need to be purchased legally.

But that’s the problem, according to some lawmakers.

“I think that’s part of the challenge in this bill is that law enforcement will not know who has legally purchased a weapon, who has illegally purchased a weapon, if it’s an automatic or if it’s semiautomatic, if it has been modified, if it has not been modified,” says Rep. Antonio Parkinson.

WTVC asked Tennessee residents their opinion.

“I think it creates more fear and incites more fear than it offers protection,” says Kat Wright.

But David Ramsey has a different outlook on the bill.

“When you are in a place where they’re more gun friendly, you’re going to think twice before you commit a crime if you know, half the people there could be carrying a gun,” says Ramsey.

The bill recently passed through the civil justice subcommittee and is scheduled for discussion in the full committee on March first. The Senate bill hasn’t made any progress yet.

Iowa, Ohio, Weigh In-State Ban on Federal Gun Control Enforcement

Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, and other red states are weighing in-state bans on the enforcement of federal gun controls deemed infringements on gun rights.

Montana has such a ban and on February 10, Breitbart News reported that Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) told the ATF their AR pistol stabilizer brace rule cannot be enforced in Montana.

Missouri also has such a ban, as does Nebraska and Arizona.

The Wall Street Journal noted that Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, and other red states are now weighing bans on federal gun control enforcement.

Iowa state Rep. Jeff Shipley (R) is pushing the ban in his state and the push is supported by Carroll County Attorney John Werden.

Werden said, “I don’t see this as a liberal or conservative issue. I see it as a states’ rights issue.”

The Des Moines Register observed that Iowans voted to adopt a constitutional amendment on November 8, 2022, and the amendment exceeds the gun rights’ protections contained in the Second Amendment.

The amendment says, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The sovereign state of Iowa affirms and recognizes this right to be a fundamental individual right. Any and all restrictions of this right shall be subject to strict scrutiny.”

Seems? Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’.

Op-ed writer seems to misunderstand data on guns

One reason I cannot be accused of living in a pro-gun echo chamber is that I have to ready a lot of anti-gun op-eds in the course of my work here. I know all the arguments they’re going to make and where they’re coming from because I read their words on a daily basis.

But when it comes to guns, many just don’t understand the topic as well as they’d like to think.

They regurgitate talking points and used biased data from gun control groups and pretend that they’re well-versed on the topic.

However, a writer with the Philadelphia Tribune took the discussion of gun control in a bizarre direction.

While new gun control laws such as strengthening background checks for gun buyers and raising the age to purchase a firearm to 21 are needed, it would be misleading to suggest new gun laws alone will reduce gun violence.

That’s because most gun crimes are committed by those who illegally possess guns, according to a study of inmates in federal and state prisons, conducted by Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research.

Since most violent crimes are not committed by legal gun owners and there is little chance of significant new gun laws passing anytime soon in the state Legislature or Congress, local officials must focus on cracking down on illegal gun possession.

More effective policing, vigorous prosecution and stricter sentencing of violent criminals using illegally obtained weapons will be needed to reduce crime.

The last three paragraphs look pretty sensible. The author is right, for example, that most criminals possess their firearms illegally. He’s right that there’s little chance new gun laws will pass anytime soon. While I’m not sure that increased enforcement of current gun laws will produce the results he desires, I can at least accept that’s a potentially viable path.

By his own words, though, lawful gun owners aren’t the problem, so why should we pass more gun control laws in the first place?

Even if we dismiss the fact that this is a constitutionally protected right we’re talking about here, just what reason would we have to restrict who can buy guns by age even further than we already do or increase background checks?

Perhaps the author is concerned about the 647 “mass shootings” reported by Gun Violence Archive. If so, he should be aware that most of those were criminals shooting people in the first place, not 19-year-olds buying AR-15s and shooting up schools. Gun Violence Archive doesn’t differentiate between gang warfare and active shooters killing everyone in a crowded movie theater, for example, so the vast majority of those shootings aren’t what people think of when they hear the term “mass shooting.”

Either way, the author is somehow failing to comprehend the information clearly in front of him.

Honestly, I’m amazed he finished the piece, what with the cognitive dissonance that had to be tearing at him. Or, maybe he just didn’t understand it enough to feel such a thing.

Either way, he discredits his own claim that more gun control laws should be passed and it sure looks like he knows it.