Archive for the 'Gun Control' Category

NY Daily News:

The Texas gun store that sold the assault rifle used in the 2017 Sutherland Springs church massacre lost its bid Monday to have a lawsuit over the sale dismissed.

Well then.  By that same logic, I fully expect we’ll see victims of automobile accidents suing Ford and Dodge very soon, right?  Shouldn’t we expect to see that?

It’s everywhere, including Maine:

AUGUSTA, Maine — Former Portland police Chief Michael Sauschuck’s nomination for Maine public safety commissioner advanced past a legislative panel along party lines on Friday despite support for gun control policies that became the main focus of an hourslong hearing.

The nomination of Sauschuck, 48, of Windham, a Marine veteran who served for more than 20 years for Portland’s department before taking a city administrative job last year, has never been in danger, but he quickly emerged as by far Gov. Janet Mills’ most controversial Cabinet pick.

That became clear during an almost-six hour confirmation hearing before the Legislature’s public safety committee, when people from all over Maine testified that Sauschuck posed a threat to Second Amendment rights. More than 100 people signed up to testify on the nomination, including more than 60 opponents who hit solely on guns.

While in charge of police in Maine’s largest and most liberal city, Sauschuck was a prominent progressive voice in the state’s traditionally restrained law enforcement community, publicly campaigning for gun control policies and establishing a diversion program for drug users.

Prior to the hearing, an estimated 200 gun-rights supporters turned out for a State House rally. Gun-rights groups including the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of Maine and the Free Maine Campaign implored their supporters to oppose Sauschuck.

Sauschuck advocated for an unsuccessful 2016 referendum that would have expanded background checks to private gun sales that lost because of wide opposition in rural Maine. He opposed a 2015 change that nixed Maine’s concealed handgun permit requirement and has backed gun magazine limits.

In his testimony, Sauschuck highlighted his work in Portland in establishing procedures to provide peer support to officers and dealing with people who have mental illnesses.

He was firm when lawmakers asked about his stances on guns, giving gun-rights Republicans few reasons to vote for him while saying both that he was serving constituents and his department by speaking out on gun issues.

“That’s not to say that in a position that deals with statewide issues and statewide agencies that you don’t have the ability and the opportunity to work with other people and to learn their perspective and to deal with those kind of things,” he said.

A key argument made in support of Sauschuck was that his department will largely enforce Maine laws, which only legislators can change. Darrell Crandall, a former Aroostook County sheriff who is now a commander for the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency in northern Maine and opposed the 2016 referendum, said he trusted Sauschuck “to follow the laws as they exist.”

But Franklin County Sheriff Scott Nichols, who was one of three Republican sheriffs to oppose Sauschuck and also was a vocal referendum opponent, said “any leader” listens to their lieutenants and “their opinions matter when it comes to making policy.”

“She could have chosen a lot of people out there that were very well-qualified that don’t have the baggage,” he said of Mills.

Mills’ record in Augusta is mixed on guns. As a legislator in the first decade of the 2000s, she received A ratings from the National Rifle Association — which led to attacks on her from the left during her 2018 primary. She backed many gun control measures, including expanded background checks. As attorney general, Mills helped craft a proposed “red flag” law in 2018 that would have allowed guns to be seized from people deemed dangerous by a court.

She nominated a controller for the position because she’s a controller.  He believes in permitting a constitutional right, standard capacity magazine limits, and universal background checks, and he’s unrepentant about it.  That’s fine with me, as I don’t want candidates to get in front of people and lie.  I also don’t mind his drug user diversion program.

But I do mind his gun control, and I think he should be ashamed to have worn the USMC uniform.  They say there are no ex-Marines, only former Marines.

Folks, Michael Sauschuck is an ex-Marine, a blight on the other good people who were in the military with him, and a traitor to his oath.

Star-Telegram:

House Speaker Dennis Bonnen wants to make one thing perfectly clear.

Gun rights are safe and sound this session, despite some grumbling from grassroots activists.

“I’ll bet my critics an AR-15 that their gun rights won’t be infringed,” he posted recently on Facebook.

This comes after some Texans began criticizing the Angleton Republican for “betraying” efforts to pass more legislation.

“For the first time in decades, a Speaker has appointed anti-gun Democrats to chair the two most important House Committees for Texas gun owners,” according to an article by The Texas Firearms Coalition.

At issue: state Rep. Poncho Nevarez, D-Eagle Pass, who was named to head the Homeland Security & Public Safety Committee, and state Rep. Nicole Collier, D-Fort Worth, who was appointed to head the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee.

“It has come to my attention that a small handful of gun rights fringe groups have called my leadership into question. Let me set the record straight,” Bonnen wrote on Facebook. “For 22 years I have been an advocate for Texan’s 2nd Amendment Rights.

“I have not wavered at any point.”

Collier received an F rating last year from the National Riffle Association.

“I’m here to promote the legislative process,” she said Tuesday. “Speaker Bonnen has set the tone for the new session and has expressed his trust and confidence in his colleagues in the House.”

Nevarez received a D rating from the NRA.

In 2015, Nevarez became the center of media attention after open carry supporters had a heated exchange with him.

Kory Watkins, then a spokesman for Tarrant County Open Carry, posted a video online that showed open carry advocates being aggressive with Nevarez, telling him he “won’t be here very long, bro,” because he didn’t support open carry.

The House soon approved new rules letting lawmakers put panic buttons in their offices that would summon Texas Department of Public Safety troopers if they needed to remove people from their offices.

The fear this session is that anti-gun bills in the House will get hearings but “pro-gun bills either will not get a hearing or won’t get a committee vote in time to reach the House floor for debate and voting,” the Firearms Coalition article stated.

It went on to encourage Texas gun owners to reach out to top Texas Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, to weigh in on “Bonnen’s betrayal.”

“The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make the political price of betrayal so high that no elected official can afford it,” according to the article.

Bonnen responded to the concerns on social media. He said his committee appointments “represent diverse views — just as any well functioning democracy should.”

But he said he also named a majority of pro-gun members to committees that will consider gun legislation.

“The fact that some fringe groups can’t count to 5 for a 9 member committee is really not my problem,” he wrote.

And he believes committee chairs will “allow reasonable bills which reflect the values of Texans” to make their way through the session.

“I have not wavered at any point.”  I agree.  You appointed full-on communists to posts of importance.  There was no vacillation with you.

The notion that the Texas Firearms Coalition is a “fringe” group is patently absurd, and I predict he’ll pay a steep price for his treasonous behavior.

By saying that “reasonable bills” will make their way through session he means that the committees will hear them, stall, vote a split decision too late to do anything about them in the once every two years meeting of the Texas Legislature, and then can the whole idea if it doesn’t do homage to state control over gun rights.  And then he’ll make excuses for the committees about the wording being wrong, or LEOs opposing the bills because of “public safety,” or some such bullshit.

Watch and see if I’m wrong about this.  You can tell him what you think about all of this at the following email address: dennis.bonnen@house.texas.gov.

News from Representative Chris Lee of Hawaii.

“The open carry states are ones where everybody gets shot so I think we have a very good record in Hawai’i for gun safety protection and and the fourth lowest gun violence in any state in the union.  It’s a combination of things but one of most important parts of it is that we have strict gun laws.”

Representative Lee says it could be years before the Young case is settled but the top priority for Hawai’i lawmakers is public safety.

“I’ve owned guns in the past; I don’t today but we have an obligation on our part in Hawai’i to make sure that we have the adequate legal protections in place to make sure that it’s not gonna be the wild, wild west …

Drama queen much, Ms. Lee?

From the comments, “The open carry states are ones where everybody gets shot.” Oh yeah, Vermont is a really dangerous state.

Texas too, huh?  Blood in the streets, it is.  Everybody is getting shot.  Everybody.  Because open carry, that’s why.  Everybody.

No exaggeration.  Everybody.  From open carry.

The Guardian:

In Washington state, a freshly implemented ballot initiative and a raft of new bills may produce some of the tightest firearms regulations in the US. But standing in the way is a group of rural law enforcement officers who say point blank that they won’t enforce any of it.

The Klickitat county sheriff, Bob Songer, is one of them. He told the Guardian that the initiative passed last November “is unconstitutional on several grounds. I’ve taken the position that as an elected official, I am not going to enforce that law”.

Songer also cited ongoing litigation by the National Rife Association gun industry lobby and others which aims to demonstrate the laws violate both the second amendment and the state’s constitution. He also said that if other agencies attempted to seize weapons from county residents under the auspices of the new laws, he would consider preventively “standing in their doorway”.

In November, the state’s voters handily passed an initiative, I-1639, which mostly targeted semi-automatic rifles. As of 1 January, purchasers of these weapons must now be over 21, undergo an enhanced background check, must have completed a safety course, and need to wait 9 days to take possession of their weapon. Also, gun owners who fail to store their weapons safely risk felony “community endangerment” charges.

Feeling the wind at their backs after the ballot, gun campaigners and liberal legislators have now gone even further in the new legislative session. Bills introduced in the last week to Washington’s Democrat-dominated legislature look to further restrict firearms. Some laws would ban high capacity magazines and plastic guns made with 3D printers. Others would mandate training for concealed carry permits, and remove guns and ammo during and after domestic violence incidents.

Washington’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, who proposed several of the bills, said in an email: “Now is the time to act. Washingtonians have made it clear that they support common-sense gun safety reforms.”

Kristen Ellingboe, from Washington’s Alliance for Gun Safety, which has long campaigned for more firearms restrictions, said that “for a long time our elected officials thought that gun violence protection was somehow controversial, but they have been behind where the people of Washington are on this issue”.

But like other west coast states, Washington exhibits a deep cultural and political divide between its populous, coastal cities and its more sparsely populated rural hinterland.

I-1639 passed on a roughly 60-40 split; in the big, blue counties west of the Cascade Mountains, such as King county, where Seattle is located, the margins were even bigger.

However, 27 of Washington’s 39 counties rejected the ballot measure. Many of those counties are in the state’s more rural, sparsely populated districts.

It is in these counties that many – including sworn officers – are promising to resist the laws.

In Ferry county in eastern Washington, more than 72% of voters rejected I-1639. In the county’s only incorporated city, Republic, the police chief Loren Culp asked the council in November to declare the city a “second amendment sanctuary”. That vote has been delayed until March, but in the meantime, like Songer, Culp says he will not enforce.

The sheriff in Ferry county, Ray Maycumber, told the Guardian that he would not be enforcing the laws either, at least until the NRA’s litigation is completed.

“There’s a window of time when I get to make the assessment”, he said. Should the NRA not succeed, he said, he would “consider if I want to go on in the job”.

The “sanctuary” idea has caught on with other rightwing activists. Matt Marshall is the leader of the Washington Three Percent, a patriot movement group which has held several open carry rallies in downtown Seattle in the last year.

Marshall is attempting to persuade rural Washington counties to adopt local second amendment sanctuary ordinances. Next week, together with the Patriot Prayer founder and former Senate candidate Joey Gibson, he is addressing a meeting of Lewis and Pierce counties to try to persuade them to adopt resolutions which would mean that the gun laws were not enforced.

The refusal of law enforcement officers to enforce the new restrictions plays into a longer history of so-called “constitutional” sheriffs resisting the gradual tightening of gun laws. There are also hints, in the stance, of the doctrine of “county supremacy”, long nursed on the constitutionalist far right, which holds that county sheriffs are the highest constitutional authority in the country.

Oh no.  Please, not more of the nullification crap that’s never going to happen?  I don’t really care if there are Sheriffs who refuse to enforce these laws.

Here is my question for those Sheriffs: “When hard times come, and the state police, or the ATF, or some other agency, comes to enforce those unconstitutional laws, will you then use the power of your office to arrest those trying to enforce the laws and throw them in jail?”

Actually, I have two other pragmatic and related questions.  “Do your direct reports all support you in this project?”  And “Do you have an understanding with the local judges to keep them in prison so that your project doesn’t get scuttled on the legal system?”

Tell me those things, and then I’ll make up my mind on your project.

WSJ:

Dustin Coleman has bought a booth at the National Rifle Association’s annual convention for his shooting accessories company for the past three years.

But last month, he canceled his reservation and donated the $1,400 rental fee to a rival group, the Firearms Policy Coalition. His reason: The NRA, the nation’s leading Second Amendment group with 5.5 million members, is no longer pro-gun enough.

It’s their own fault.    It doesn’t matter if there was “overwhelming legislative support for proposals that went far beyond these specific devices,” and there is still no evidence to this day that bump stocks were used in the Las Vegas shooting.  I defy the authors to produce it.  A picture proves nothing at all, and given that the ATF was never allowed to examine the firearms by the FBI, I doubt anything the FBI has to say about the incident.  This is one of the reasons I recommended that independent analysts be contracted to examine the firearms and crime scene.

The NRA could have thrown their weight around, threatened to score every vote, pour money into reelection campaigns coming up, and expose every politician for their work behind the scenes.  Or in other words, the NRA could have done their jobs.

Instead, Trump did it for them in an end run around the constitution.  That tells me that the politicians were scared.  Good.  They should have been, and we should have queued this up for them to deal with in order to expose them.  The NRA gave Trump cover to keep the politicians covert.

I don’t want to hear any excuses.  I consider all of them completely unacceptable.

Is the NRA in trouble with its base?  That depends.  The Fudds will always defend the NRA – right up until their bolt action hunting rifles and shotguns are confiscated and taken down to the local armory for “safe keeping.”  Or in other words, right up until their own Ox gets gored.

David Codrea:

Is it realistic to expect companies to turn down lucrative law enforcement deals? Probably not, because the activist portion of gun owners is but a fraction of the total population, those selling to enforcement agencies inarguably make some of the finest guns in the market, and the citizen militia system needed to take up the slack has been suppressed by a political design that in turn has been allowed by apathy. But what we can do is be aware of who’s involved in such deals, use what sway as customers that we have to influence corporate decision-making, individually boycott those companies we take umbrage with, and importantly, to patronize the enterprises that have taken a public stand on the side of “We the people” even when it affects their bottom lines.

Most of the sway we have is in pressing back against it when gun manufacturers toy with support for gun control efforts, such as when Marty Daniels courted “Fix-NICS.”  I doubt that we would be successful in persuading large manufacturers like Savage or Ruger to examine the politics of their contracts before they fulfill them.

But the answer to David’s question is ‘yes’, and I’m not sure that can be changed.

Fox News:

Liberal billionaire Michael Bloomberg bemoaned the lack of a private armed security force at Johns Hopkins University, his alma mater, due to the murder rate in Baltimore.

The former mayor of New York City, who’s likely to run for president in 2020, has long been an advocate for gun control, but his comments on Tuesday raised eyebrows and accusations that his support of an armed private force on campus were at odds with his views on gun control.

“When you have a city that has the murder rate that Baltimore has, I think it’s ridiculous to think that they shouldn’t be armed,” Bloomberg told reporters after a meeting at Maryland’s Statehouse in Annapolis with Democratic lawmakers and state Attorney General Brian Frosh, according to the Baltimore Sun.

Bloomberg: “I believe in guns, but only for my peeps who protect and defend me.  You don’t get them.  Suck it, peasants.”

Journal Sentinel:

My God.  Look at that thing!  Hey, I still haven’t heard any takers to my hard hats and ketchup challenge.

CNSNEWS.com:

(CNSNews.com) – “In 1994, you said that gun control is a dead end,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told Attorney General-nominee William Barr at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

“Do you still believe that prudent controls on weapons won’t reduce violent crime?” Feinstein, a staunch gun control advocate, asked him.

“I think that the problem of our time is to get an effective system in place that can keep dangerous firearms out of the hands of mentally ill people,” Barr replied.

That is — should be priority number one. And it’s going to take some hard work. And we need to get on top of the problem. We need to come up with agreed-to standards that are prohibitors of people who are mentally ill. We have to put the resources in to get the system built up the way we did many years ago on the felon records and so forth.

We have to get the system working. And as I say, it’s sort of piecemeal a little bit right now. We need to really get some energy behind it and get it done.

And I also think we need to push along the ERPOs (Extreme Risk Protection Orders), so we have these red flag laws to supplement the use of the background check to find out if someone has some mental disturbance. This is the single most important thing I think we can do in the gun control area to stop these massacres from happening in the first place.

Later, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) asked Barr to update Congress on his view of the Second Amendment.

Barr said that even before the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision, which upheld the individual right to bear arms, he believed that was so.

“I personally concluded that the Second Amendment creates a personal right under the Constitution,” Barr said.

It’s based on the Lockean notion of the right of self-preservation. It’s tied to that. And I was glad that — to see Heller come out and vindicate that initial view that I had. And so there’s no question under Heller that the right to have weapons is — firearms, is protected under the Second Amendment and is a personal right. At the same time, there’s room for reasonable regulation.

And you know, from my standpoint, what I would look for is — in assessing a regulation is, what’s the burden on law-abiding people? And is it proportionate to whatever benefit in terms of safety and effectiveness will be conferred?

As I said just a moment ago, let’s get down to the real problem we’re confronting, which is keeping these weapons out of the hands of people who are mentally ill. And I think all the rest of this stuff is really essentially rhetoric until we really get that problem dealt with, in terms of regulatory approaches.

Readers are advised to study every word of his testimony.  And then do it again.  This is very important.

Sessions was probably owned by the deep state in some manner or other, but in any event he was just stolid and dense.  He focused his energies on making sure we had huge resources devoted to combatting marijuana.  Barr seems much more smarter, and therefore much more dangerous.

As to whether the founders believed they were following the enlightenment and John Locke as opposed to the Apostle Paul and John Calvin, I cannot say.  Men much smarter than me – R. J. Rushdoony, C. Gregg Singer and Douglas Kelly – have engaged in detailed debates about that, and I encourage you to read their analyses rather than listen to me.  It’s likely based on what I know that there was a sufficient mix of enlightenment thinkers and Calvinists that each side could claim credit for what’s in the constitution, and it was the best compromise they could come up with given the makeup of the group.

As to the actual right to self preservation, I claim, without apology, that neither you nor I have such a right outside of the decrees of God stipulated in the Holy Writ.  And it’s there in clear detail, so yes, we have that right.  The right of self defense and defense of home and hearth lies in the decrees and therefore in the nature of God.  It is ensconced firmly there, not in the second amendment.  The constitution is a covenant between men, not a source of anything, much less human rights.

But according to Barr, there’s “room reasonable regulation.”  Regulation decided by men, running counter to God’s holy decrees if necessary.  And according to Barr, it’s necessary if the benefit to public safety outweighs whatever right a judge or politician says you have.

Red flag laws.  Trump likely knew all about Barr’s views before nominating him.  Barr will also likely give high priority to finding passage of such laws as constitutional.  He’ll put his best lawyers on it.  He’ll also work hard to come up with lists of “prohibited persons,” and who knows at this time what a prohibited person will look like?

He defers to community witch doctors deciding the fate of God-given rights based on “mental illness,” when it’s been demonstrated over and over again that mental illness, whatever that is, has nothing whatsoever to do with propensity to violence.  So he believes in myths and is willing to use the force of the DoJ to back up his beliefs.

These are dangerous times, and I predict Trump’s nominee will end up being one of the biggest threats to 2A rights in American history if he stays in his position.  Obama managed to do virtually nothing to restrict gun rights compared to Trump and his cabinet.  All with the approval of the NRA folks in Fairfax, VA.