Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

If they weren’t Corporations under the Internal Revenue Code, they wouldn’t have this problem!

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More than two dozen churches and a socially conservative organization this week filed a federal lawsuit challenging New York’s restrictions on guns in sensitive areas.

The lawsuit is the latest effort to challenge New York’s law approved in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that found a century-old concealed carry law was unconstitutional. State lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed to a measure that limited where guns can be carried as well as created new requirements for a concealed carry license.

The churches and the group, New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, pointed to the rise in threats against houses of worship, arguing that such a ban violates their Second Amendment rights as well as a natural right to self-defense while attending a religious service.

“The disarming of citizens while attending places of ‘worship or religious observance’ is not taking place in a vacuum,” the lawsuit states. “Religiously motivated or targeted attacks continue to be a risk to every congregation nationally and in the State of New York.”

The gun law approved in July limits where guns can be carried. Locations like mass transit, parks, as well as houses of worship are considered “sensitive locations” under the law known as the Conceal Carry Improvement Act. Heavily trafficked locations like Times Square also bar concealed carry firearms.

NGO doing Red Flag dirty work for police in East TN. Does anybody want to venture a guess as to how many civil rights violations are in their “record storage?” If a man is assaulting women and if he’s that big of a danger to others, why isn’t he in jail?

Full Job Description

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Hundreds of Virginians have had their guns confiscated from them through red-flag laws since those rules went into effect more than two years ago, according to data in the Virginia Firearms Transaction Center.

Red-flag laws allow police to seize firearms from a person if a judge deems him or her to be a threat to himself or others, even if that person has not been convicted of a crime, charged with a crime or even accused of a crime.

Virginia judges have issued at least 327 emergency substantial risk protection orders, which allow police to temporarily confiscate firearms to address an immediate risk. Judges have issued 257 permanent substantial risk protection orders, which confiscate the guns permanently, unless overturned through the court system. The data runs from July 1, 2020, when the law went into effect, through August 2022. The data does not state how many guns were confiscated from the individuals.

“Red Flag laws are an invention of the gun-control crowd and are unconstitutional due to their usurpation of Due Process,” Philip Van Cleave, the president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, told The Center Square.

Trump is part of the “gun-control crowd,” it would seem

Erich Pratt, senior vice president of Gun Owners of America, told The Center Square that these laws are contrary to due process protections.

“Red Flag gun confiscation orders turn our legal system on its head,” Pratt said. “For centuries, the standard has been ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ But Red Flag laws reverse that standard into ‘guilty until proven innocent,’ because they throw real Due Process out the window – revoking someone’s Second Amendment rights without a jury trial or right to counsel. Not surprisingly, at least a third of red flag orders are initiated against innocent people – and the guns which are erroneously confiscated can take up to nine months to return. These laws have even been used to disarm women – such as the case in California where a cheating husband used the state’s red flag law to disarm his wife, who was a concealed carrier.”

Well, they’re all innocent until proven guilty. Is Pratt talking in circles?

According to a Sept. 24 report compiled by the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office, Slaughter and a deputy responded to a complaint that a man at the Montana Expo Park was acting suspiciously by taking photographs of vehicles. According to the fairgrounds director, the man was driving around the property in a black SUV with Canadian license plates, but never entered the show.

After a discussion under the fairgrounds’ grandstands, Slaughter “informed them they had to leave, to which they did.”

[…]

“I don’t know what their investigation was, it’s important that you print that,” Slaughter said, noting again the two investigations he was told about; looking for Canadians smuggling guns to the north, and investigating an American who was not licensed to sell firearms.

Slaughter said that had the federal and Canadian agencies contacted his office prior to Saturday’s incident, he would have been able to call off questions of who the agents were, or what they were doing, allowing the investigations to proceed.

BLUF: Probably so.  It removes the offending piece.

We’ve covered this in previous posts.  I still believe this is all a gigantic trap.  It’s a way for the ATF to come to your door, demand your firearms, measure them, take data on them, log your serial numbers, and then make up their minds depending on the capricious “decision of the day.”  The entire point is to expand the gun registry.

Also see Tim’s discussion.

Also make sure to drop by David’s piece on this.

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Despite a new research paper by two Clemson University economists proving that black lynching decreased with greater firearm access, North Carolina still clings to its Jim Crow pistol permit. The state remains the only former Confederate state with the pistol permit law enacted here in 1919.

Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed a repeal of the Jim Crow law in 2021, despite support for repealing the law by the N.C. Sheriffs’ Association. In the past, the state Sheriffs’ Associations opposed repeal, but updates to the national instant background checks make the law redundant and a hassle for residents.

Pistol permits emerged as popular legislation in the segregated South by using subjective denials by law enforcement, such as “good cause,” to keep handguns out of the hands of black state residents. To this day, blacks in North Carolina are denied access to pistols at a rate nearly three times as high as the white population.

We’re not sure why he wanders off of North Carolina to cite a Georgia case. We left that part out; you can read the whole thing at the source.

Gun purchases are way up with many non-traditional firearm owners and minorities, particularly black and Hispanic women. They, too, are entitled the same Constitutional protections as every other law-abiding citizen. More than five million people became first-time gun owners during the pandemic, and many new gun owners identify as politically liberal.

Woke district attorneys and city governments are proving to many that the government is not equipped to protect the populace but may not even have a desire to protect residents. Naturally, rising crime is creating a greater demand for armed protection in the absence of the rule of law in many urban areas.

Not every North Carolinian has a desire to train to receive their concealed carry license. Some want a constitutional carry system – which is now law of the land in half of U.S. states. Given universal federal background checks, the pistol permit system is not fair or just for those who want to purchase a handgun as a collectible, self-defense, or target shooting.

Other Southern states clearly cited racism as a reason to repeal this law, so North Carolina no longer has a valid excuse to cling to Jim Crow’s past. Most importantly, governments should do a better job of treating all free citizens as free, while punishing violent criminals and all those who misuse firearms harshly.

Constitutional Carry in North Carolina is overdue.

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On September 23, 2022, Judge Maryellen Noreika issued a preliminary injunction against Delaware in the case of Rigby v Jennings. The case is about whether the State of Delaware can outlaw homemade guns and the distribution of materials and software to make homemade guns.

*gasp* Ghost Guns!

The decision is a win for supporters of Constitutional rights but has some troubling verbiage. Judge Maryellen Noreika was appointed by President Trump in 2018.

Judge Noreika relies on the “Final Rule” from the ATF, which is under dispute in several cases, as to what is a “firearm.”  Further arguments fall apart if the definition of a firearm reverts to the decades-old definition.

Judge Noreika then makes a claim, supported by a Colorado case, that if a commercial transaction may be regulated, then all transactions may be regulated.  Footnote 11, p. 11:

Sections 1459(a) and 1463(b) do not solely target commercial transactions. There is no reason to believe, however, that the non-commercial character of a transaction changes the analysis. See Colorado Outfitters Ass’n v. Hickenlooper, 24 F. Supp. 3d 1050, 1074 (D. Colo. 2014) (“Logically, if the government can lawfully regulate the ability of persons to obtain firearms from commercial dealers, that same power to regulate should extend to non-commercial transactions.”),vacated on other grounds and remanded, 823 F.3d 537 (10th Cir. 2016).

This is a jump of logic and directly against the dicta in Heller, which states the Second Amendment allows:

“laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

There must be a differentiation between the commercial sale of arms and non-commercial transactions, or the above statement is nonsensical.

Somebody is going to tell us about an acre of wheat grown for private use that “could be” sold out of state.

GOA.

Here are the TEN gun control provisions hidden in the FY 2023 Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations bill:

1. Massive ATF Budget Increase to Facilitate Biden’s Pistol Ban
2. Gun Registration Funding
3. Gun Confiscation Law Funding
4. Financial Benefits for Families of Deceased ATF Agents Killed or Injured on the Job while Enforcing Gun Control
5. Ammunition Background Check Study
6. Gun Control Research, Unbound by the Dickey Amendment
7. Anti-gun Community Violence Interventions
8. “Domestic Violence Firearms Lethality Reduction Initiative”
9. “Violent Anti-Government Ideology” Research
10. Gun Control Earmarks

You know they want to know who is buying ammunition and what sort.  Don’t bother trying to control the guns, they say.  Control the supply of ammunition.

Here is the full take down of the garbage in the bill.

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… two legal challenges to the Trump administration’s prohibition are pending at the Supreme Court – including one that has been rescheduled for consideration 20 times. The lack of a decision about whether or not the court will hear the litigation has led to speculation among experts who follow the issue closely that the court’s 6-3 conservative majority may not agree on how to proceed.

The court twice declined emergency requests from gun groups to delay implementation of the ban in 2019. And it declined to hear a similar challenge in 2020.

“The six conservatives on the court right now aren’t really on the same page about guns as much as people think they are,” said Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. Some in the court’s conservative wing, he said, “might be afraid to take the case if they’re not sure that they’re going to get their way.”

In addition to once again raising the issue of guns at the nation’s highest court months after it decided a landmark Second Amendment case, the new litigation also delves into how much power federal agencies have to create regulations when the law those rules are based on is unclear. Conservatives for years have sought to limit that agency discretion and their arguments seem to be gaining traction with the high court.

[ … ]

Feldman points to another reason why the Supreme Court may have been slow to take up the issue of bump stocks: So far, gun rights groups have been losing in appeals courts. The justices often like to see a disagreement in circuit courts – known as a “circuit split” – before wading in to resolve a dispute and provide guidance to lower courts on a thorny legal question.

“Right now,” Feldman said, “there is no circuit split.”

But that may soon change. In a separate case, the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has scheduled arguments in a challenge to the bump stock ban for Tuesday. Meanwhile, at least one of the justices has signaled a receptivity to the arguments being made by the gun rights groups.

The ATF, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in 2020, “used to tell everyone that bump stocks don’t qualify as ‘machineguns.’ Now it says the opposite. The law hasn’t changed, only an agency’s interpretation of it.

“Why should courts,” Gorsuch asked, “defer to such bureaucratic pirouetting?”

Good question.  Here’s the answer.  They shouldn’t.

The bump stock decision was perhaps the worst mistake Trump ever made because of the precedent it set.  I don’t have a bump stock, but that isn’t the point.  The right to own one without interference from the FedGov is enshrined in the 2A.

But more importantly, with all due respect to Justice Gorsuch and his observation on pirouetting (which is correct since the ATF has taken contradictory positions on this as they have on many other things), this is about the question whether a bureaucratic organization has the authority and power to write law.

Here’s the answer.  They don’t.  Beyond that, even the ban on machine guns, I claim, runs afoul of the 2A.  So if the ATF had always taken the position that bump stocks met the definition of machine gun and they had never pirouetted on this issue, it still doesn’t make it right.  Pirouetting isn’t what makes this sinful.  It’s the failure to follow the constitution.

However, with the law and order justices, and also with the progressives, I doubt this issue will find traction in the SCOTUS and I have serious doubts they will overturn this ridiculous rule and put the ATF in its place.

So you see, if they don’t overturn it, the conservatives want to have their cake and eat it too.  On the one hand, they want to disgorge the authority of the bureaucrats from making law (de facto authority because they’ve done it unchallenged), but on the other hand, when it comes to bump stocks their Ox may be gored.  So they will find another route to do their disgorgement of the controllers if they ever do it all.

Will the Supreme Court finally deal the death blow to the bump stock ban?  Color me skeptical.

Breitbart.

Payment processor Visa Inc. said Saturday that it plans to start separately categorizing sales at gun shops, a major win for gun control advocates who say it will help better track suspicious surges of gun sales that could be a prelude to a mass shooting.

But the decision by Visa, the world’s largest payment processor, will likely provoke the ire of gun rights advocates and gun lobbyists, who have argued that categorizing gun sales would unfairly flag an industry when most sales do not lead to mass shootings. It joins Mastercard and American Express, which also said they plan to move forward with categorizing gun shop sales.

Visa said it would adopt the International Organization for Standardization’s new merchant code for gun sales, which was announced on Friday. Until Friday, gun store sales were considered “general merchandise.”

“Following ISO’s decision to establish a new merchant category code, Visa will proceed with next steps, while ensuring we protect all legal commerce on the Visa network in accordance with our long-standing rules,” the payment processor said in a statement.

Visa’s adoption is significant as the largest payment network, and with Mastercard and AmeEx, will likely put pressure on the banks as the card issuers to adopt the standard as well. Visa acts as a middleman between merchants and banks, and it will be up to banks to decide whether they will allow sales at gun stores to happen on their issued cards.

Gun control advocates had gained significant wins on this front in recent weeks. New York City officials and pension funds had pressured the ISO and banks to adopt this code.

Visa was the holdout, and they buckled.

I see a lot of firearms purchases being made in cash in the future.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit remarks.

SOCIAL CREDIT SCORING COMES TO AMERICA: Visa, Mastercard, AmEx to start categorizing gun shop sales.

Imagine if they were doing this about abortion. Or if legislatures tried to make them do so.

A reader comments: “Have you seen this yet? It sure feels like there is a very coordinated effort throughout the woke financial sector to create ‘private’ gun control. I wonder if it is being driven by interaction with the ATF, etc like the censoring of private speech by coordination between government and social media. Also, wouldn’t this enable the card companies to create a gun registry? The credit card transactions include our names and what we bought and the card company knows our addresses, etc. Seems like another example of actual fascism where government coerces private companies to do their bidding.”

Based on experience, the likelihood that this is happening without government encouragement is very low.

Government => Social Media => Censorship of speech.

Government => Financial Corporations => Censorship of products.

Government = Corporations.

Benito Mussolini would be very proud of his legacy.