Archive for the 'Second Amendment' Category

Bristol Herald Courier:

Because the controllers would rather innocent people be harmed or killed than allow means of self defense.  But here McAuliffe has said something important.  It’s fashionable right now for the gun controllers to parrot this notion that it’s a fiction, a myth, just outright falsehood, that guns actually help in self defense.

They will cite some questionable statistics taken from the inner cities of, say, Chicago, Atlanta or St. Louis, where blacks are killing blacks, to try to convince you or others that you shouldn’t have a gun.  But you’re not in inner city Chicago or Atlanta, and you are an otherwise peaceable man or woman.  So there argument doesn’t apply to you.

Speaking of which, there is this report from Tennessee.

A homeowner was transported to NorthCrest Medical Center Saturday morning with minor injuries after defending his residence from the armed suspects who invaded it.

According to Springfield Police, around 2 a.m., three men armed with guns entered a residence on the 800 block of Kings Drive and demanded money. Once inside, one of the homeowners fired one round at the suspects from a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, according to police. The suspects returned fire as they fled the residence and fired a shot back at the homeowner, striking him in the hand.

The suspects are described as three black men between 18 and 20 years of age wearing bandannas.

There are many reports just like this every day.  And Terry McAuliffe and his ilk are all liars in the superlative degree.

David Codrea:

“As the leader of the Nevada Association of Public Safety Officers – the largest statewide affiliation of law enforcement associations in Nevada, representing more than 1,500 law enforcement professionals – I am calling on Attorney General Laxalt to do his job,” NAPSO executive director Rick McCann tells Reno Gazette-Journal readers.  “As the state’s top cop, he can and should work with both Nevada’s Department of Public Safety and federal officials at the National Instant Criminal Background Checks System (NICS) to find a path forward, ensuring that law enforcement in our state are protected when they risk their lives to protect ours.”

He’s referring to the Michael Bloomberg-led Question One “background check” initiative that passed in Nevada in November …

Recommending new laws or fabricating imaginary ones has nothing whatsoever to do with an AG’s job.  He just made that up.

Here’s something else he just made up: “Our job is basically to protect officers around the state.”  Who told him that is his job?  Where did he get this information?  What does protecting police officers have to do with being a police officer?  What does protecting police officers have to do with the oath he took upon his swearing into office?

I think you know the answers.

Ramesh might have thought he was doing someone a favor in posing this list, a list he apparently thinks is easy.

Here is his setup.

The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence sent out a press release today with four proposed questions for Judge Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing. The questions don’t seem to me to be either illuminating or challenging. Here they are, stripped of prefatory language:

1.) Do you agree that the 2nd Amendment right is not unlimited or absolute, that it does not trump other constitutional rights, and that it is subject to reasonable limitations for public safety?

2.) Do you believe current federal law requiring Brady background checks for gun sales from licensed dealers, and prohibiting certain people from completing gun purchases, is constitutional?

3.) Do you believe that the 2nd Amendment protects gun owners and/or gun industry participants with immunities or protections from liability for negligence?

4.) Do you believe states have the ability to develop gun laws to keep their citizens safe?

He pans the list as not being very good or smart on the part of the Brady bunch, because he has easy answers, and Gorsuch should listen to them, or something.

1) Yes, I agree. 2) It would be improper to commit to rule in particular ways on issues that may come before the Court. 3) Statutory protections already in law are certainly constitutional, and will likely make the question of whether the Constitution itself confers any protections from liability moot. 4) Yes, within constitutional limits.

Well, these answers would be a massive problem for Gorsuch in terms of the opinions of gun owners, most of us anyway, and would be just fine with the Brady bunch except for the third one, and the fact that Ponnuru thinks these answers are easy or obvious just shows the gaping divide between Northeastern progressives (and beltway dwellers) and the rest of red state America.

So here are my answers: (1) No, (2) No, (3) Yes, unless it pertains to gun owners negligently shooting others, not including stand your ground laws (here the Brady campaign is disingenuous because they intend to include the right to hold gun manufacturers liable for damages caused by their products when it’s the users who should be responsible, and they’ve rolled in “gun owners” into immunities and protections, a stipulation that can never obtain any more than immunity in death by negligent use of a car can obtain – this sleight of hand should have been pointed out by Ramesh), and (4) No.

William Layer:

To anyone who can diagram a sentence the Second Amendment is crystal-clear, not a Delphic pronouncement. The Founding Fathers, well versed in Latin grammar, knew exactly what they meant when they passed the Second Amendment. The meaning is in the main clause — “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” — a complete sentence. “A well-regulated militia” is, in Latin, an ablative absolute, it introduces the main idea. Would Second Amendment opponents be happier if it read, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state”? The idea remains the same, but given the progressivist idea of a “living Constitution,” they would nullify the Second Amendment by asserting knowledge of the Bill of Rights superior to that of its author, James Madison.

Historian Leonard Levy’s “Origins of the Bill of Rights” reaffirmed an individual right. Wrote Levy: “The right to bear arms is an individual right. … if all it meant was the right to … serve in the military … [it] would never have reached constitutional status in the Bill of Rights. The very language of the amendment is evidence that the right is a personal one, for it is not subordinated to the militia clause.” The state constitutions of the revolution and early national period also acknowledged an individual right.

The Founders’ classical education made them realistically fearful of government power. They knew well what had befallen the Roman Republic and that tyrannies were only possible when the people lacked the means to resist. The chaos and oppression of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution’s short-circuiting of the Stuart’s divine right ambitions were fixed in their minds as was the English Bill of Rights (1689) which, although limited to Protestants, secured an Englishman’s right to arms. However, the roots go even further back, to the “Trained Bandes,” locals called up to defend the realm as Elizabeth I did when the Armada threatened England. Englishmen provided their own accouterments according to their station. Likewise, the chronic war with France in which for over a century frontier settlements were attacked, settlers massacred or carried off into Indian slavery meant colonists had to protect themselves.

New England towns either supplied weapons or, as had Plymouth in 1632, ordered freemen to arm themselves for defense against ever-present Indian dangers. When Queen Anne’s War (War of the Spanish Succession) broke out in 1702, New England militias were called to support the British assault on French Canada. Militiamen brought their own weapons; those who did not own a musket were issued one that they could keep when mustered out. The battles of Lexington and Concord at the start of the American Revolution could not have taken place without an armed citizenry. Who, then, was the militia? To George Mason, it consisted of “the whole people.” Under the Militia Act of 1792, every man between 18 and 54 “who when “so enrolled and notified … shall within six months thereafter, provide himself … with a musket, bayonet and belt, two spare flints, a cartridge box with 24 bullets, and a knapsack.”

The left’s assertion that America’s creators couldn’t foresee a firearm beyond a flintlock is the logical fallacy of presentism — we know better today. Were the Dark Ages better than the Pax Romana because 900 A.D. came later than 300 A.D? Contrary to modernist fallacies, innovation, not stasis, was the characteristic of 18th century society. They might not have foreseen the M-16 but they knew the devastation of the massed firepower of .69 caliber Brown Bess and that weapons evolved. The matchlock was superseded by the wheelock, the wheelock by the flintlock, as the rifle was to supersede the musket. In 1770, British Army Major Patrick Ferguson had invented a breechloading flintlock rifle and effectively deployed his riflemen at Saratoga in 1777 (Ferguson’s rifle could have revolutionized warfare). By 1819, 19 years after the Constitution’s ratification, the U.S. Army adopted the Hall breechloader.

What of the Second Amendment, then? It is most certainly individual, but more importantly, it does not grant a right; it affirms an existing one as surely as natural law recognizes every man’s right to self-defense.

Mr. Layer makes a very good case, one we’ve all read before, but he emphasizes an important point.  If the statement was meant to be taken as the right to serve in the military, it makes no sense for it ever to have risen to the level of the Bill of Rights to begin with.

And readers will know without being told that I generally don’t like stopping at “natural law,” a tip of the hat to enlightenment thinking.  Carl Becker destroyed the enlightenment mind in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers.  This is a “must read” for all men who would be educated.

Let’s go ahead and drive this back to its real point of origin.  God grants men the right to self defense, as well as the right to enter into covenant with a government, that covenant having blessings as well as curses.  Self defense properly interpreted means not only personal defense from evildoers who would cause him or his family harm, but self defense from a tyrannical government.

Ted Cruz:

“The Fourth Circuit used to be the most conservative court in the country,” Cruz said. “The Fourth Circuit now, they’ve invented this new test for the Second Amendment.”

The test, Cruz explained, says “the Second Amendment doesn’t protect a weapon if it would be useful in a military context.” The senator noted the absurdity of such a test, given the amendment reads:

“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.” (Emphasis added.)

“This test isn’t just sort of questionable, it isn’t just a little bit out there. It is nuts!” Cruz exclaimed. “The Second Amendment was designed explicitly to protect weapons that would be useful in a military conflict.”

He added, “If we were living back in 1789, your musket would be really useful in a military conflict!”

“You want to know the first gun control law in America?” Cruz asked the audience. “The first Congress passed a law mandating that all able-bodied men must own a musket.”

“That’s an individual mandate we could live with,” Mark Levin quipped.

The Fourth Circuit made a very good decision in the case of Nathaniel Black.  They didn’t seem to care about that decision and specifically violated their own precedents and showed they couldn’t care less about consistency in the case of U.S. Versus Robinson.  Now they have gone off the deep end.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld Maryland’s ban on semiautomatic guns with certain military-style features that the state passed after the 2012 mass shooting at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school.

The 10-to-4 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit vacates an earlier panel decision that cast doubt on the constitutionality of the ban that is similar to laws in seven states, including California, Connecticut and New Jersey.

The ruling from the Richmond-based court goes further than other appellate courts that have reviewed similar laws in stating clearly that “assault weapons and large-capacity magazines are not protected by the Second Amendment.” The majority opinion, written by Judge Robert B. King, refers to the banned firearms as “weapons of war” that the court says are most useful in the military.

In a strongly worded dissent, Judge William B. Traxler Jr. said his colleagues have “gone to greater lengths than any other court to eviscerate the constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms.”

That they have, and they have also added language to both the second amendment and Heller that isn’t there.

“It’s unthinkable that people could say that those weapons of war are protected by the Second Amendment,” Frosh said Tuesday. “Especially when you look at the carnage at Newtown and elsewhere around the country.”

[ … ]

Like Maryland, Connecticut’s ban was expanded after a gunman used a military-style semiautomatic weapon to kill 20 students and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The 81-page opinion issued Tuesday opens with a detailed description of that day, including the number of rounds of ammunition fired, and goes on to describe mass shootings involving similar military-style firearms in a long list of other U.S. cities.

“We have no power to extend Second Amendment protection to the weapons of war that the Heller decision explicitly excluded from such coverage,” King wrote in the 4th Circuit opinion, referring to the Supreme Court case known as District of Columbia v. Heller.

The court also found that Maryland lawmakers were justified in passing the ban in the interest of public safety because magazines holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition “enable shooters to inflict mass casualties while depriving victims and law enforcement officers of opportunities to escape or overwhelm the shooters while they reload their weapons.”

Forget the fact that Charles Whitman used a bolt action long gun (Remington 700), that storied Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock used a Winchester Model 70 .30-06, that Marines initially in Iraq during the push to Baghdad used the same rifle for long distance shooting, and that Marines in Now Zad, Afghanistan, used 12 gauge shotguns for room clearing operations.  Left unsaid is why the laws don’t regulate assault hammers.  This is what happens when idiots try to make legal decisions who have no knowledge of the facts.

It’s also what happens when men and women who have no moral compunction about violating their oath of office get to make judgments that affect the rest of the country.  Recognizing the right of every citizen to have the weapon that best allows him to defend his own family isn’t an expansion of the second amendment.  And Heller said nothing about forbidding semi-automatic firearms from its scope, semi-automatic firearms having been around for more than a century when Heller was decided, in use by both civilians and the military.

This neat, clean bifurcation between civilian and military weapons is non-existent, an imaginary phantom concocted by judges to make themselves feel better for depriving citizens of their rights, pretend sociology wrapped up in legal language.  These are God-given rights, not subject to the whims or vicissitudes of judicial political leanings.

Here is the ruling.  Frosh said “It’s unthinkable that people could say that those weapons of war are protected by the Second Amendment … Especially when you look at the carnage at Newtown and elsewhere around the country.”  Well think it, collectivist hack.  I’m telling you flat out that weapons of war are protected by God, and included within the scope of the second amendment.

Whether citizens of Maryland choose to stay and fight or move to a free state, remember Matt Bracken’s advice.  “If you have eighteen guns and twelve of them are declared illegal, how many do you have?  Eighteen.  Your move.”

Via WRSA:

David Codrea:

Add to this the Episcopal positions on Obamacare and on wealth redistributing “global warming/climate change/environmental justice.” We’ll not find much in agreement with the reasons conservatives in general and gun owners in particular supported, voted for, and have been consistently defending Donald Trump against all comers.

The position of the Episcopal church on gun rights is something we’ve noted before.  They don’t believe in gun rights.  Combine that with the other positions they take that could affect said rights, and you might have a volatile mixture of beliefs that undermines liberty.

We just don’t know unless Gorsuch is questioned in detail on these issues.  Suffice it to say that I share David’s skepticism of Gorsuch until he’s proven himself with opinions that line up with the text of the constitution.  Not infringing “lightly” on second amendment rights doesn’t even come close.

The Austin Chronicle:

In 2015, Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law two provisions expanding gun rights in Texas. With House Bill 910, Texas joined 14 other states that allow open carry of firearms in public spaces with a valid permit. Senate Bill 11 implemented campus carry. The two laws, widely praised by advocates as extensions of Texans’ liberty, also ushered in a firestorm of opposition in Austin and around the state. Groups like Texas Gun Sense cold-called local businesses to see which ones would allow open carry on their grounds, hoping that economic consequences would affect businesses’ choices – and in many cases it did. Lists, including one compiled in these pages, swelled with names of restaurants and businesses opting out.

Protests against campus carry were particularly robust at UT-Austin, where organizers were dogged in resisting a law that ultimately went into effect Aug. 1, 2016, the 50th anniversary of Charles Whitman’s Tower shooting. On the first day of classes, #CocksNotGlocks protesters set off a fresh round of outrage that reverberated internationally. Gun advocates and Lege regulars scratched their heads at the level of opposition, many of them feeling the two laws functioned as a substitute for constitutional, or permitless, carry, the ultimate goal of many gun rights groups.

Constitutional carry finds itself on the legislative agenda this year. Rep. Jonathan Stickland, R-Bedford, has pledged his support for such a measure via HB 375, which would eliminate the licensing requirement for carrying a handgun, essentially deregulating open carry. Stickland announced his commitment to passing the law at a Jan. 23 press conference hosted by Texans for Accountable Government and Lone Star Gun Rights. “There’s been a lot of education involved,” he said, explaining why he believes the measure faces better odds this session than two years ago, when the pro-gun caucus was more fragmented. “There are a lot of groups that are coming together and saying, ‘You know what? It’s wrong that Texans have to beg for permission for their Second Amendment rights. It’s wrong that we’re forcing people to pay a fee and take a class for their Second Amendment rights.'”

But Stickland may not have as much support as he suggests. Andrea Brauer, execu­tive director of Texas Gun Sense, suggested the conservative representative is very much in the minority on the issue. Rather, she said, the priority among Capitol Republicans remains eliminating the licensing fees for open carry enthusiasts while leaving the class requirement in place, though no lawmaker has filed a bill quite yet. “I’m not hearing people say [permitless carry] is a priority except for Jonathan Stickland,” she continued.

Where are the Texans?  Look folks.  I know it’s a lot of work to stay active in these matters.  But I noticed some gun bills in formation in Arkansas a few days ago, some good some very bad, and I spent the time to get the email addresses of every state senator and a number of pastors of high profile churches in Arkansas to send out blast emails linking articles I intend to write if this begins to go badly for Arkansas.  And I don’t even live in Arkansas.

You guys have got to spend the time to be active or we’ll always be relegated to second or third class, or lower.  Our liberties are at stake.  Fill their ear up with our demands.  They won’t hear it from anyone else, will they?

David Codrea:

• What did the Founders mean by “A well regulated militia”?
• What did the Founder mean by “being necessary to the security of a free State”?
• What did the Founders mean by “the right of the people to keep and bear arms”?
• What did the Founders mean by “shall not be infringed”?
• How can past Supreme Court opinion specifying protected arms as those being “in common use at the time” not apply to the types of firearms needed for militia service?

I’ve already made my feelings know about the Gorsuch selection.  He’s got some very good points and he’s certainly not someone HRC would have picked, and thank God for that, but the liberties in the constitution are sacrosanct.  They are inviolable.  They are stipulations in a covenant that shall not be broken.

David recommends tweeting Ted Cruz and recommending these questions for Gorsuch.  I did.  You should find your own way to communicate with your elected representatives, and especially those on the judicial committee.