Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

Cowboy State Daily.

Jones was referencing Senate File 148, which would preempt any local firearms regulations that contradict Wyoming statute.

It’s done well so far. The Wyoming Senate passed it by a vote of 30-1 on Feb. 8. It passed its second of three readings before the Wyoming House on Wednesday.

“I think it will pass,” Jones said. “If it doesn’t pass, a municipality could feasibly implement their own gun control, as long as they exempt firearms manufactured in Wyoming.”

SF 148 clears up an oversight that’s created some confusion over gun policy in Wyoming, Jones said, adding that Wyoming has long had a “preemption statute.”

That means gun rights policy set by the state preempts those proposed by a municipality or other localized but essentially entity, such as the University of Wyoming campus, he said. Private property owners and privately owned businesses still retain the right to restrict guns as they see fit on their premises.

The Wyoming Freedom of Firearms Act was passed in 2010. That protects Wyoming gun or gun accessory manufactures from undue federal regulations, Jones said.

However, for undetermined reasons, the preemption statue wasn’t properly referenced in the Freedom of Firearms Act, Jones said. So technically, a municipality or other entity can pass its own additional gun restrictions – they just wouldn’t apply to guns made in Wyoming.

And since outside of a few custom firearm makers, firearms manufacturers are based outside of Wyoming, those local gun restrictions would apply nearly all commonly owned firearms.

SF 148 fixes that, making it clear that the preemption statue applies to all firearms, not just those made in Wyoming, Jones said.

SF 148 was prompted in part by a challenge to UW’s prohibition against carrying firearms on campus, Jones said.

In 2018, Lyle Williams of Unita County was ticketed for open-carrying a firearm in the university’s convention center during the state Republican party’s annual conference.

That citation was challenged on the grounds that both open and concealed carry are allowed by state statute in Wyoming. But in 2020, Albany County District Court Judge Tori Kricken ruled in the university’s favor.

In her decision, Kricken cited the fact that the preemption statute as cited in the Freedom of Firearms Act applies only to guns made in Wyoming, Jones said.

That’s a stupid reason for a judge to reach a decision like that.  There is no excuse for a lame judiciary who looks to the jot and tittle of the law but ignores the sweep and intent.

Anyway, this needs to pass so that residents of Wyoming can once again not have to worry with progressive do-gooders.  For example, Jackson, Wyoming is likely to try something similar in nature within city limits.  Have you looked recently at the makeup of the city council in Jackson?

Source:

As a progressive democrat, I generally try to avoid any set of ideas that smacks of conspiracy theory. That caveat being stated, I have followed gun control legislation and its failures, as have many ofus, for some time. Most of us are familiar with the words of the Second Amendment to the Constitution:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The author may be “familiar with the words of the Second Amendment” but not the punctuation; there is but one comma, the second one in the above misquote. Nor can “krypton981” read English well.

It appears to me that the concept of a well regulated Militia would involve not only the government, for the purposes of regulation, but also entities such as the National Guard, rendering those entities entirely sufficient. The Republicans, however, appear to conveniently ignore the first phrase, and devolve interpretation merely to the right of anyone in this country to “bear arms”, (including underage children who may be “given”a gun). The right to bear arms is not, of course, mentioned in the amendment, although that phrase is vociferously used as an argument against gun control or even gun safety.

This should be a fun reminder to gun lovers everywhere. Let’s see:

“A healthy breakfast being necessary to the start of a great day, the right of the people to keep and eat food shall not be infringed.”

Who or what has the right to keep and eat food? The breakfast, the day? Who has the right to keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment language? The Militia, the State? No, it’s the people. Breakfasts and days don’t eat food, nor do Militias and States have rights.

And it’s no theory; it was a conspiracy to overthrow the crown of England that gave us the Second Amendment codifying God’s immutable right for the people to keep and bear arms.

In response to the headline: perhaps not, but homeschooling sure enough is.

Photo from the article: attributed, artfulblogger/Flickr/cropped/ CC BY 2.0

From the article:

The only thing more predictable than boys being fascinated with weapons is them eventually sketching one in class. But that’s not allowed anymore. What is it that makes a little boy — practically straight out of the womb — take an interest in weapons and emulate gun-toting, swash-buckling heroes? Even doctors aren’t sure. As one pediatrician told me about my then 16-month-old son who turned every stick into a sword, “We don’t know why. They just do it.”

Doctors don’t know why because they are almost exclusively Godless servants of money, turned agents of the State for profit. But “we” do know. In a post here at TCJ, Ignorance, Feigned or Real, we show that inherent sin is provable, both in nature and from Scripture.

Now, weapons are not evil, sinful, or a sign of sin, but necessary for living in a world overtaken by the results of the fall of man into sin. Sin entered into the world through Adam’s disobedience to God, and all men inherited this sinful nature from him (Romans 5:12). Seemingly, the Holy Bible being its own authority and believing what the Bible says about inherent sin upset some lurkers. Oh well. Jesus loves me; this I know because the Bible tells me so. If the Bible is good enough for God, it’s good enough for me. Where were we?

All men are sinners. As one does not have to teach a child to strike another child and steal his toy, so too, the very need for self-defense is evident, even inherited knowledge in an infant. If the child will commit assault and theft quite without any training in the matter, why should he not, evidently in his nature from Adam, recognize the need, yay, the divine right of self-defense to preserve life and immediately, even as an infant, undertake to train himself in this requirement? We see no discontinuity in the idea.

Even a heathen doctor could have told this mother; we do this because we are men, and we must keep you from harm. It is our duty. Seems simple enough even to somebody who’s never read the word of God. Now, as we know, this duty of men comes from God and is evident in nature. Woe to them who makes the State or women rulers of households and keepers of men as chattel.

You can read the rest of the sad tale of child abuse at the hands of government communists indoctrinating children in the ways of sinful effeminacy if you desire. Get your children out of government-run schools!

A leftist finally says the quiet part out loud; a government monopoly on force is their desire.

Article Source

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney (D) addressed the shooting death of Temple University police officer Christopher Fitzgerald and made clear his view that one cannot claim to back the blue if they do not back gun control.

Breitbart News reported that Fitzgerald was shot and killed while investigating a carjacking Saturday night. The alleged cop killer, 18-year-old Miles Pfeffer, was arrested Sunday morning without incident.

The Philadelphia Inquirer quoted Kenney reacting to the slaying, saying, “There’s too many [guns] and they’re too easy to get.”

Kenney added, “You can say you back the blue, but if you don’t back gun control and gun availability, you don’t back the blue. We owe it to them to do everything we can to stop this nonsense and stop this tragedy.”

Video H/T @greg_price11

James Wesley Rawles, at Survival Blog:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen decision (issued June 23, 2022) was a pivotal ruling.  Following up on the District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and the McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) decisions, Bruen reaffirmed private gun rights, quite solidly. Up until those three decisions, the Supreme Court had conspicuously ignored taking up any Second Amendment cases, for more than 50 years. But now, the highest court has made it quite clear that the right to keep and bear arms is nigh-on absolute.

I’ve mentioned the Bruen decision before in SurvivalBlog. But today, I’d like like to examine it more closely.

The majority opinion for Bruen was written by one of my heroes, Justice Clarence Thomas. He had previously lamented that the Second Amendment had been treated as “a disfavored right.”  But in the 2022 decision, Justice Thomas set things write. He forthrightly wrote that the only gun regulations that can be deemed constitutional are ones that don’t infringe on conduct that is plainly covered by the text of the Second Amendment and that are “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition.” This part of Bruen means that any gun law enacted at any level must have a demonstrable parallel in regulations that were in place at the time of the ratification of the Bill of Rights — meaning circa December, 1791. Thus, Bruen sets a very high bar for legislators to hurdle. If lawmakers cannot cite a similar law that existed after the War of Independence but before December, 1791, then any statute pertaining to arms of any description would be unconstitutional!

It’s an interesting rehearsal of some little known history, and with Bruen, history matters. In light of the decision, one has to ask by what authority does the F exist in ATF? Read the rest.

WaPo.

Gun control advocates have long sought ways to circumvent the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), a federal immunity law that shields the gun industry from liability. State lawmakers in Democratic strongholds across the country contend they have achieved that feat through the passage of “public nuisance” gun laws.

In New York, New Jersey and Delaware, gun manufacturers, sellers and distributors can now be sued for endangering the public’s health and safety — or creating a “public nuisance” — through improper marketing or sales practices.

• The new statutes mark the latest round in a long-running battle between gun control advocates and firearm manufacturers over the federal immunity law. And this time the issue could land before the Supreme Court, according to legal experts, as several Democratic-led states take a more aggressive approach to restricting firearms.

The gun manufacturing industry is fighting back hard and contends the new laws are unconstitutional and in no way in compliance with the 2005 law.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s trade association, is leading the challenge.

Here’s where the legal fight stands between the NSSF and the states that have enacted these “public nuisance” laws:

• New Jersey: A New Jersey federal judge sided with the NSSF last month when he blocked the state’s law from being enforced, noting that it “is in direct conflict” with federal law. New Jersey has appealed the ruling.
• New York: The NSSF has appealed the dismissal of their New York lawsuit by a district court to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
• Delaware: A hearing for the NSSF’s district challenge in Delaware will be held Feb. 28.
• California: The group also plans to sue California later this year when its version of the law goes into effect.

Gun control advocates and legal experts who focus on the Second Amendment said the NSSF’s multistate approach bears all the hallmarks of how a special interest group can maneuver to give itself the best chance to bring a case before the Supreme Court, particularly one that may be viewed favorably by the majority.

The NSSF says its goal is simply to challenge the new laws in every jurisdiction where they are being implemented.

“There’s no grand strategy,” said NSSF senior vice president Lawrence Keane. “We are simply responding to the threat to our industry that is occasioned by these statutes being passed at the behest of these gun control groups.”

• But gun control advocates are skeptical the industry is not angling for a date with the Supreme Court.

Good.  I hope they’re able to “manufacture circuit splits.”  I don’t care whether that’s their strategy or not – I hope it redounds that that end.

I don’t much like Larry Keane.  He’s always been neck deep in NRA shenanigans.  But that doesn’t matter for this purpose.  The only other thing to do if the supreme court doesn’t take this up and then knock it down is for manufacturers to stop sales of all firearms to citizens in those states who enact such laws including and most especially law enforcement.

That would be financially harmful to the firearms industry, but less so than lawsuits that cause bankruptcy.

Hint: The solution isn’t politics; it’s you. Source:

There are the solutions we should use, the solutions we could use, and the non-solutions that politicians have used already. Let me bring you up to speed in a hurry.

The bad news is that we built this problem of mass-murder and celebrity-murderers. The good news is that we can fix it. Society changed in significant ways over the last 5 decades. We destroyed families so many young men grew up without fathers. No one taught these young men how to control their strength and their anger. We closed our mental-health facilities and put mentally ill patients out on the street. Recently, we refused to prosecute, convict, and incarcerate violent criminals. Each of those factors certainly contribute to our problem of mass-murder today.

We can disagree about what we meant to do as we changed our public policies but there is no argument about the resulting outcome of increased mass-murder in the last several decades.

Each of those are contributing factors, but they are not the main cause of the increase. We have to address the elephant in the room.

Something else changed in our society. We’ve read the journals and the interviews of mass-murderers and they told us exactly why they kill. They are willing to die so that they can be famous. The biggest problem is the dozens of 24-7 news channels who now give each mass-murderer a 10-million dollar publicity campaign if the murderer kills enough innocent victims. Those are not my words, but theirs. You don’t have to believe me but you should believe them. We created celebrity-murderers, and we should demand that the news media stop turning these mass-murderers into instant celebrities.

The media isn’t the source of the problem. Is there insufficient evidence that “News” is simply government propagandist information of questionable validity and almost zero usefulness? If the government and its media wanted to censor mass shootings and broadcast 24/7 every self-defense firearm use, they could. But that wouldn’t help the long-term plan of keeping people in fear, so they support civilian registration and disarmament.

It isn’t obvious yet, but we are closing the chapter on the brief history of mass-murders in the United States.

We stopped them. Ordinary people like you and I stopped mass-murderers. We learned to attack the murderer if he attacks us in a bar where we are disarmed. We learned to shoot the attacker if we are armed. We found out that shooting back works really well.

Where we are allowed to go armed, ordinary armed civilians stopped attempted mass-murderers over 104 times since 2004. An armed citizen isn’t there at every attempted mass-murder. If he is there, the armed citizen doesn’t choose to intervene every time. In the last few years we were effective at stopping mass-murderers 94-percent of the time when we tried. We stopped more than half of the attempted mass-murders where we were allowed to go armed.

Other than the gradual expansion of carry rights, the people are fighting against mass murder without any establishment support whatsoever. He offers many points, good details, and plenty of data. Read the rest.

Related: Not surprisingly, there is more than one gun news story out today about Chicago residents fighting back against gangs and other criminals with their own firearms. Good for them.

Source.

Discover Financial Services, a provider of credit cards, told Reuters it will allow its network to track purchases at gun retailers come April, making it the first among its peers to move ahead with the initiative aimed at helping authorities probe gun-related crimes.

The decision came after the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which decides on the classification of merchant categories used by payment cards, approved in September the launch of a dedicated code for gun retailers.

Proponents of the move, including gun control activists and Democratic politicians, say it will allow financial institutions to better assist authorities in investigating crimes involving gun violence in the United States.

There has been uncertainty around the implementation, with Visa Inc, Mastercard Inc and American Express Co yet to disclose a timetable for adopting the change. Although the codes will not show specific items purchased, some Republican politicians have spoken out against the move, arguing it could violate the privacy of U.S. citizens lawfully buying guns.

Isn’t that nice?  The ISO wants to know what you’re purchasing with your wealth.  The ISO, an international organization – although I’m sure that U.S. banks were all too willing to comply and the ISO is just a straw man.

If you have a Discover Card, be aware that this change is coming and make appropriate arrangements.

At least Louisiana is fighting back in what I guess is the only way they can.  Texas, I think, has similar laws now.

David Codrea.

The citizen disarmament lobby only bellows about “home rule” for counties and municipalities when preemption blocks their attempts to infringe. At the same time, the effort continues to impose gun bans at the federal level binding on the whole country.

“What works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne,” Barack Obama feinted when trying to justify localities ignoring “the supreme Law of the Land.”  Left unsaid was exactly what the hell it is that works in Chicago.

Yeah, they only care about home rule when it comes to infringing on gun rights, killing babies and allowing illegals to cross the border and stay, consuming important medical and financial resources.

David concludes, “By posturing as their moral superior and characterizing them in his legal opinion as de facto enemies of the state, this Egan character, sounding for all the world like an Antifa street thug, has shown himself to be the bigot relying on divisiveness and hate.”

Hatred is what binds the controllers together.  It’s the darkness of heart that is the common element in their worship of the state.

Update on the pistol permit repeal in North Carolina.

A Second Amendment bill in the North Carolina State Senate has progressed through the chamber and is now headed to the State House of Representatives. The North Carolina Senate voted 29-19 across party lines on Senate Bill 41, which would repeal the state’s pistol purchase permit law on Thursday.

The bill would also allow carrying of firearms in places of worship properties that have schools as well, but it’s not going to allow guns on school property at any time.

Since 1995, anyone attending a place of worship (churches, synagogues, temples, mosques) that is legally allowed to carry a firearm could do so on that property — as long as the property owner allows it.

Things change when a place of worship also serves as a school.

Senate Bill 41 would clarify the language of state law and allow the same right to carry a firearm on a church property even if they operate a school — but there are exceptions.

“This applies only to private churches that sponsor schools and only outside the hours of the circular and extra circular activities at the school,” Paul Valone, president of Grass Roots N.C. an advocacy group that supports the bill.

Does this stand a chance of overriding a veto by goober Roy Cooper?

The bill will have to be passed through the House of Representatives and sent to Governor Roy Cooper to become law. But if he vetoes the bill, a supermajority will be required to override it. While the republicans have reached that supermajority in the Senate, they’re one seat short in the House.

What a shame it would be to lose this battle to one vote in the House.  Hopefully there’s a least one vote on the democrat side who feels the pressure from his constituency.  Then again, there are supposedly other means to override a veto.  Also hopefully, the republicans are looking for ways under the rules of order to effect this override without that vote.