FPC VICTORY: Federal Judge Blocks New York’s “Places of Worship” Handgun Carry Ban

BUFFALO, NY (October 20, 2022) – Today, Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced that United States District Judge John Sinatra, Jr. has issued a temporary restraining order against New York’s ban on guns in “any place of worship or religious observation.” The order in Hardaway v. Bruen, which is effective immediately, can be viewed at FPCLegal.org.

“The Constitution requires that individuals be permitted to use handguns for the core lawful purpose of self-defense,” wrote Judge Sinatra in his opinion. “And it protects that right outside the home and in public. Nothing in the Nation’s history or traditions presumptively closes the door on that right across every place of worship or religious observation. As in Bruen, where the Court stated that, ‘[n]othing in the Second Amendment’s text draws a home/public distinction with respect to the right to keep and bear arms,’ nothing there casts outside of its protection places of worship or religious observation. New York’s exclusion violates ‘the general right to publicly carry arms for self-defense.’ It, too, is one of the policy choices taken ‘off the table’ by the Second Amendment.”

“Today another court blocked an unconstitutional gun law, this time the ‘places of worship’ carry ban New York imposed as punishment for the Bruen decision,” said FPC Director of Legal Operations Bill Sack. “Today, the Court recognized what we have long argued: That no one should be forced to forgo one constitutional right in order to exercise another.”

FPC is joined in this lawsuit by the Second Amendment Foundation.

Second Amendment Being Restored to Its Rightful Place, Thanks to Bruen Decision

In Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (aka “Bruen”), decided in June, he wrote:

The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not a “second-class right,” subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.

We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.

The ruling in Bruen was twofold: 1) that New York State’s law requiring a citizen to show “proper cause” before being granted the privilege of carrying a concealed weapon was unconstitutional; and 2) that the right to carry a handgun in public is guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

That ruling has unleashed a tsunami of lawsuits by Second Amendment supporters, to the point where far-left news outlet CNN complained that the decision has “put gun control laws in jeopardy nationwide.” Noted CNN:

In the three months since the 6-3 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, scores of new lawsuits have been filed against gun restrictions at the federal, state, and local levels….

Since the June ruling, federal judges in at least a half-dozen different cases have already cited the Bruen decision to rule against gun restrictions that have included local assault weapons bans, prohibitions on the manufacture of homemade firearms and bans on older teenagers publicly carrying handguns.

The outlet noted with chagrin that a federal district judge in Delaware declared that state’s ban on “ghost guns” (guns that are made at home without serial numbers) not valid under the high court’s ruling. In addition, reported the network, assault weapons bans inflicted on Coloradans in two local jurisdictions were placed on hold, and Texas’ public-carry ban on individuals aged 18 to 20 was struck down as well.

CNN failed to note, probably by design, that many other rulings following the Bruen decision have begun to restore the Second Amendment to its rightful place in the Bill of Rights.

Here is just a partial list of Second Amendment victories scored since Bruen:

  • To avoid going to trial over its ban preventing concealed carry licensees from carrying more than 20 rounds of ammunition, the chief of Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department repealed the ban in September.
  • The Supreme Court, following its Bruen precedent, tossed Massachusetts’ lifetime ban on anyone convicted of a nonviolent misdemeanor involving the possession or use of a firearm from ever being able to purchase a firearm in the future.
  • The Attorneys general of New Jersey, California, and Hawaii concluded that, based on Bruen, a citizen no longer must show a “justifiable need” to carry a firearm.

Second Amendment scholar and attorney Dave Workman listed other targets for lawsuits following the Bruen decision, including Illinois, which requires citizens to have a Firearm Owner’s Identification (FOID) card in order to purchase a firearm or ammunition. New Jersey has a similar law, as do North Carolina, Minnesota, Nebraska, Hawaii, Michigan, Maryland, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

There is a case pending in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals — Dominic Bianchi v. Brian Frosh — challenging Maryland’s ban on semi-automatic rifles. Attorneys general from 25 states have filed an amicus (friendly) brief supporting the case, which was brought immediately after the Bruen decision by the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Workman estimates there are some 20,000 to 25,000 restrictive gun laws in the United States. If he is anywhere close to right, the rising tide of lawsuits is likely just the beginning.

BLUF
That’s why I don’t really care what 97Percent wants or claims to be about. They’re no different than Giffords, Brady, Everytown, and every other group that wants to annihilate our Second Amendment rights.

Don’t get too excited about “common ground” survey results

For many, the goal is to find common ground on issues relating to guns and gun control. It’s their hope that if they can find enough points of agreement, gun control laws can be passed.

Even if I accepted this premise, though, I know what will happen. Those laws will be passed, only we see no results (at best) so now they want to find “common ground” on still more regulations. Little by little, we’ll see our rights whittled away.

Yet the question remains, does the common ground exist?

According to a recent report, it does.

The majority of gun owners are concerned about gun violence and support policies to reduce gun-related injuries and deaths, according to new research from Tufts University and gun safety organization 97Percent.

Three-fourths of gun owners surveyed said they are concerned about the frequency of school shootings, and 71 percent said the same of mass shootings, according to the research released on Monday. Seventy percent said they also want to help find a way reduce gun-related injuries and deaths.

Most gun owners, including Republican ones, said they support several proposed laws to prevent people with a high risk of violence from accessing guns.

Gun safety organization 97Percent, which touts itself as a bipartisan group of both gun owners and non-gun owners, noted in its report on the research that this defies the current perception that there is an “intractable divide” over gun control in the U.S.

And since 97Percent paid for this study, it’s not surprising that the result was exactly what 97Percent wanted.

It’s part of why all such “studies” need to be questioned vigorously.

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Proposed “sensitive places” law scaled back after public outcry

When Hawaii County lawmakers held their first public hearing on an ordinance restricting where concealed carry holders can exercise their right to keep and bear arms, they heard from dozens of gun owners and residents who complained that the proposal was far too broad and infringed on their Second Amendment rights. Somewhat surprisingly, several county council members expressed reservations of their own, and the bill was tabled for a few weeks while tweaks were made.

Today, the public got its first look at the revised proposal, and while the measure still contains several “gun-free zones” that aren’t likely to stand up to court scrutiny, this is the first blue-state response to the Supreme Court’s decision in NYSRPA v. Bruen that I’ve seen that at least half-heartedly recognizes the right to bear arms for self-defense in public rather than attempting to regulate it out of existence.

The original list of “sensitive places” outlined in the county’s concealed carry ordinance bore a close resemblance to the expansive number of “gun-free zones” included in New York’s “Concealed Carry Improvement Act”, hospitals and healthcare facilities; schools (both K-12 and colleges and universities) and day care centers, playgrounds and parks, all houses of worship, public transit, private property “open to the public”, and all businesses that serve alcohol among them.

The newly revised proposal removes many of those “gun-free zones” outright, while modifying others.

[Council Vice Chairman Aaron] Chung’s amendment, which had input from the Hawai‘i Police Department, adds a clause saying guns would be prohibited except where permission is granted at schools, colleges, universities or places where people are assembled for educational purposes. It removes language that originally included where people are assembled for literary or scientific purposes as well. The same clause was added in reference to day care centers, but playgrounds, parks and/or other places where children gather remain in the proposed bill.

I don’t think the ban on parks and playgrounds is going to hold up in court, given that there’s no evidence the state of Hawaii or Hawaii County treats them as “sensitive” in any way. There are no metal detectors or fences surrounding all parks, and no dedicated police presence at all parks or playgrounds either.

As I said, the new bill isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s still a substantial improvement.

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Moderna CEO admits to past lies: “COVID is simply the flu, harmless to the healthy.”.

On October 17, 2022 during a news conference, Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of the drug company Moderna, made the following statement about COVID, the so-called plague that allowed his company (and others) to make billions pushing their jabs on a terrified public:

“I think it’s going to be like the flu. If you’re a 25-year-old, do you need an annual booster every year if you’re healthy?

“You might want to… but I think it’s going to be similar to flu where it’s going to be people at high-risk, people above 50 years of age, people with comorbidities, people with cancer and other conditions, people with transplants.”

Gee, where I have heard these exact words for the past two-plus years? Could it have been on this very same webpage, said by me as well as numerous other cool-headed experts who — rather than panicking — looked at the actual data? From my first detailed post about COVID in March 2020, using all the early real data:

The death rate is mostly confined to the older population with already existing health issues, like the flu.

This early conclusion was later confirmed again and again in the months that followed. From September 2020, for example, in citing CDC data I wrote:

The Wuhan virus killed you only if you had an average of slightly less than three serious chronic health conditions. And generally you had to be elderly, with the average age of death 78 years old. Otherwise, just like the flu you might have been sick for a few days, but you would have recovered and been able to go on with your life as normal. This data once again demonstrates that the masks, the shut downs, and the economic disaster were all unnecessary.

I of course was hardly the loudest voice, or the only one. Many others with much greater expertise than I kept saying the same thing. All were pilloryed, doxed, blackballed, and censored for saying so. “How dare you? You are killing grampa by not panicking! You should be burned at the stake!”

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Studies Show Guns ADD Risk of Negative Outcomes – The Standard Model Part 3

Why Guns Are Not USED or USEFUL for Self-Defense – The Standard Model Part 2/5

Bystander shoots armed man threatening Gainesville paramedics

GAINESVILLE, Ga. – Police say knife-wielding man was shot by a neighbor after he threatened medics in a Gainesville neighborhood Monday morning. That man has since been charged.

Gainesville police say that around 7:30 a.m., officers got a call about a man carrying knives, damaging cars, and threatening people on Shades Valley Lane.

Before they could get there, one resident took matters into his own hands when the man allegedly tussled with medics, who were in the area tending to another person.

“It was about four shots,” said John Morea, who awoke to the incident. “Somebody outside popped him, and that was it.”

Police say Darrion Suave Fraley was taken to Northeast Georgia Medical Center, where he is expected to recover. The neighbor who reportedly opened fire and a second person were also hurt, investigators said.

The 34-year-old man’s family members told FOX 5’s Rob DiRienzo that he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and Monday morning’s incident was the result of an imbalance in his medication.

“When you’re up at 7 o’clock, and all of a sudden you hear gunshots, and you’re in this neighborhood, that doesn’t make sense,” Morea said.

Investigators have not released the identity of the armed neighbor.

Fraley was charged with criminal attempt to commit murder, two counts of obstruction of an EMT, possession of a gun during the commission of a crime, possession of a knife during the commission of a crime, and aggravated assault. He was still in the hospital as of late Monday afternoon.

“They’re very brave for doing that. It takes a lot to take that on yourself,” said Carmella Neal, who lives near the scene. “I’m thankful they did it for the safety of others.”

Anti-Gun Junk ‘Science’ Misleads Ignorant with Deceptive Fallacies

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “Firearm sales in the United States broke records at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic,” U.S News & World Report notes. “Now, researchers have found that firearm injuries to children also increased during the pandemic’s first two years compared to the preceding year.”

A reasonable conclusion would be that the two occurrences are somehow related. The way this is presented implies that increased gun sales have resulted in more children suffering firearms injuries, or in the parlance of the citizen disarmament lobby, hurt BY guns. Right?

Wrong, of course.

The obvious logical fallacy is that correlation equals causation. It does not. An extreme example to illustrate why is the nonexistent ice cream/rape “connection,” claiming both sales and sexual assaults go up in hotter weather and falsely concluding that one influences the other.

We’re being led down another deceptive path as well with loaded terms. To see what we’re supposed to envision, enter the word “children” in Google’s image search. The results, happy munchkins doing happy munchkin things, are pretty much what everyone is going to expect.

You have to do a deeper dive to find the population being exploited here includes 19-year-olds and that the dramatic increases are happening due to gang activity participated in by minority populations:

“Firearm-related injuries in Black children grew from nearly 31% in 2019 to 40% in 2020 and 48% in 2021. Those cases also showed increases in patients with mental health issues and in injuries where the shooter was a friend.”

Increased firearm sales are extrapolated by increases in background checks. Who thinks teen gangs submit to those? In order for pandemic-related sales to significantly move statistics, the transference from the “legal” to the “illegal” market would need to be almost instantaneous, when in fact, ATF time-to-crime (“the amount of time between the retail sale of a firearm by a federal firearms licensee (FFL) and its recovery by law enforcement”) statistics show a national average period for 2021 of  6.21 years.

True, the Michael Bloomberg-“seeded” agenda “journalism” project The Trace tries desperately to  establish a connection, but after it’s all said and done must concede the relationship is only “suggested” and admit:

“[T]he increase in gun sales is not solely responsible for the increase in short time-to-crime recoveries [and] the number of guns recovered and traced by law enforcement does not always indicate the amount of gun crime in a given year. In other words, factors driving increases in the amount of short-time-crime guns in the ATF’s data may be separate from the factors contributing to gun violence.”

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FED. JUDGE LETS ANTI-GUN GROUP JOIN SAF MAG BAN CASE AS DEFENDANTS

BELLEVUE, WA – A federal judge in Tacoma, Washington has allowed a Seattle-based gun prohibition lobbying group to intervene as a defendant in the Second Amendment Foundation’s challenge of an Evergreen State magazine ban which became effective July 1.

The billionaire-backed Alliance for Gun Responsibility requested intervention only days after the law took effect. Their motion was supported by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson and State Patrol Chief John Batiste, who are defendants in the case. The Alliance supported the magazine ban as part of its gun prohibition political agenda, and Ferguson requested the legislation earlier this year.

“Apparently the Alliance is worried Ferguson isn’t capable of defending his own magazine ban in this lawsuit,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “Obviously, after the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision last June, the gun ban lobby fears the state may not be able to defend any of its gun laws, including a couple passed by initiative campaigns the Alliance financed.”

SAF is joined in the lawsuit by the Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc., Rainier Arms, LLC and two private citizens, Daniel Martin and Gabriela Sullivan. The case is known as Sullivan v. Ferguson.

“A few days after the high court handed down its ruling in Bruen,” Gottlieb recalled, “the Supreme Court granted certiorari to two other magazine ban challenges, in California and New Jersey. The court vacated lower court rulings in both cases and remanded the cases back to the respective appeals courts for further action in compliance with the language in Bruen.

“Based on the Supreme Court’s action in both magazine ban cases,” he added, “it is clear such restrictive laws might be in serious trouble, which explains why the Alliance is interested. Courts in California have already ruled that state’s magazine ban is unconstitutional, and that position may now stand when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has to reconsider the case under the new guidelines set down in the Bruen ruling.

“If the Alliance wants to hold hands with Ferguson,” Gottlieb said, “that’s their business. Maybe he needs the moral support.”

California Judge Blocks Release of Gun Owners’ Personal Information

Last fall, California’s oleaginous governor signed a bill into law that allows the distribution of personal information of the state’s gun buyers with academic researchers. Researchers like gun control advocate Garen Wintemute who runs the UC Davis California Firearm Violence Research Center, a producer of anti-gun “research” used to back efforts to limit Second Amendment rights.

Sharing California gun owners’ personal data is a situation that’s ripe for abuse. And given the state’s record of doxxing gun owners, it puts law-abiding citizens at risk. That’s why a group of gun rights orgs sued to block the data dumps. And the state’s abysmal record played into San Diego Superior Court Judge Katherine Bacal’s decision. As she wrote . . .

Defendant responds plaintiffs cannot establish irreparable harm because the personal identifying information has already been shared with researchers as recently as November of 2021. Opp. at 17. Yet this does not account for the potential ongoing and future harms that could occur by continuous use of the information. Additionally, although the most recent sharing of plaintiffs’ personal identifying information occurred in November of 2021, this does not necessarily mean that future requests for data would not occur in the interim. Furthermore, and while this motion has been pending, a massive data breach reportedly occurred that leaked personal identifying information from the firearm databases for concealed carry applicants in or about June of 2022. See ROA # 85 at 5. Accordingly, plaintiffs have shown that the balance of harms weighs in favor of issuing the injunction. (emphasis added)

Judge Bacal has issued an injunction blocking the distribution of the information. Here’s the Firearms Policy Coalition’s press release . . .

Today, Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced that San Diego Superior Court Judge Katherine Bacal has issued a preliminary injunction in its lawsuit challenging California Assembly Bill 173, which requires the state’s Department of Justice to share the personal identifying information of millions of gun and ammunition owners with other parties for non-law-enforcement purposes. The ruling in Barba v. Bonta, which was affirmed by the judge in full, can be viewed at FPCLegal.org.

“Defendant responds plaintiffs cannot establish irreparable harm because the personal identifying information has already been shared with researchers as recently as November of 2021. Yet this does not account for the potential ongoing and future harms that could occur by continuous use of the information,” wrote Judge Bacal in her ruling. “Additionally. . .this does not necessarily mean that future requests for data would not occur in the interim . . .and while this motion has been pending, a massive data breach reportedly occurred that leaked personal identifying information from the firearm databases for concealed carry applicants in or about June of 2022. Accordingly, plaintiffs have shown that the balance of harms weighs in favor of issuing the injunction.”

“The California government has proven time and time again that it can’t be trusted with the private personal information of its residents,” said FPC Director of Legal Operations Bill Sack. “Today’s ruling reinforces what FPC has been arguing all along; that you needn’t be forced to open your front door to immoral government intrusion in order to exercise your fundamental rights.”

FPC is joined in this lawsuit by the Second Amendment Foundation, California Gun Rights Foundation, San Diego County Gun Owners PAC, Orange County Gun Owners PAC, and Inland Empire Gun Owners PAC.

Columbia police say suspect was shot in self-defense

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

Columbia police say a woman they arrested after she showed up to a hospital with gunshot wounds early Sunday had earlier exchanged gunfire with two people in a parked vehicle.

Officers arrested Laronya Brown, 25, of Columbia, after finding out that a woman had been hospitalized with gunshot wounds following a shooting at about 3 a.m. in the 200 block of East Texas Avenue, according to a Columbia Police Department news release.

Police suspect Brown had driven up to and fired into a parked vehicle that had two adults inside, CPD said in the news release. A man inside the vehicle had been in a relationship with Brown, according to police.

Neither of the people in the parked car was hurt but Brown was hit when the man in the vehicle fired back in self-defense, police say. He is not being charged.

Prosecutors charged Brown with first-degree domestic assault, first-degree assault and armed criminal action. She was in the Boone County Jail without bond Monday. Her first court appearance was set for Monday afternoon.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: BEYOND DEMOCRATIC DESPOTISM

John Adams Wettergreen (d. 1989), writing in 1988 with a startling prescience of our present time:

In 1970 I believed that Tocqueville’s soft despotism was the aim of the bureaucratizers. However today we cannot be so optimistic as was possible in 1970. Today’s bureaucratizers are not soft despots at all. The political use of criminal law, such as began during the Watergate scandals and has begun to be regularized during the Reagan administration, is characteristic of tyranny-not Tocqueville’s ‘new,’ ‘soft’ one, but a harsh one. . . To the carrot-spending unlimited by law-the legislature has now added the stick-the penalties of the criminal law.

What Wettergreen perceived in the shadows more than 30 years ago is now evident to most everyone with eyes to see.