Archive for the 'Second Amendment' Category

Source.

TALLAHASSEE (FLV) – Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida House Speaker Paul Renner said Florida will pass constitutional carry legislation.

DeSantis was asked at a press conference if his administration will be able to pass constitutional carry.

The governor responded and said “I’ll let Paul [Renner] answer that because I’m ready, so you guys gonna do it?”

“Yes,” Renner responded.

NEW: Florida House Speaker @Paul_Renner and Gov. Ron DeSantis say state will pass constitutional carry

Question: "Are you gonna be able to pass constitutional carry?"
DeSantis: "I'm ready, so are you guys gonna do it?"
Renner: "Yes." pic.twitter.com/KFAXDQw3Uj

— Florida’s Voice (@FLVoiceNews) December 15, 2022

Let’s hope it happens this time, but another delay is highly possible given the weak state of legislative leadership in Florida.

I’m especially interested in seeing open carry legalized in Florida, as I know The Armed Fisherman is.  If we can get open carry, it won’t be necessary any longer to do stuff like this.

It’s my understanding that constitutional carry includes open carry, but if they don’t formulate the law this way, that is, if they formulate a bill that only removes the permitting scheme, this fight will have to continue.

Reason.

From U.S. v. Reyna, decided yesterday by Judge Robert Miller, Jr. (N.D. Ind.) (for a case reaching the opposite result, see this post):

[ … ]

Guns with obliterated serial numbers belong to “those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes” so possession of such guns isn’t within the Second Amendment’s scope. Heller. Guns with obliterated serial numbers are useful for criminal activity because identifying who possessed a firearm is more difficult when the serial number is destroyed. By using a gun without a serial number, a criminal ensures he has a greater higher likelihood of evading justice.

Mr. Reyna might be right that a deserialized gun is just as useful for self-defense as a gun with its serial number intact, but that doesn’t suggest that deserialized guns are typically used by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.

Nice try.  Now do Bruen.

Do like Judge Benitez ordered and go find me laws written at the time of the 2A requiring serialization of firearms.  I dare you.  Supply us with a complete catalog of said laws.

We all know how you want the 2A to read: “Given that intermediate scrutiny allows us to prioritize our view of public safety, the right of law enforcement to know at all times what you’re building in your basement shall not be infringed.”

But the 2A isn’t really about the rights of law enforcement is it, and Bruen did away with the idiotic notion of scrutiny, didn’t it?

Source.

A small Iowa town of 800 residents likely has no need for a police force armed with 90 machine guns to keep the peace.

That, at least, is the view of federal prosecutors, who on Wednesday announced the indictment of Adair Chief of Police Bradley Wendt on charges of making false statements to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to obtain numerous machine guns over a four-year period on behalf of the Adair Police Department, which during Wendt’s tenure has never had more than three officers.

Instead, according to prosecutors, weapons were resold for profit through Wendt’s private gun store or another store owned by a friend who also is facing charges.

According to court filings and a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Wendt used his position as police chief to obtain 10 machine guns for the official use of the police department, but later resold at least six of those weapons for “significant profit.”

In addition, Wendt obtained 13 guns for his Dennison- and Anita-based gun store, BW Outfitters, under the pretense they were to be used as demonstration models for potential future purchases by the department. Another 10 weapons were obtained in the same manner for Williams Contracting, a business Williams owned that is federally licensed as a firearms dealer.

Prosecutors say Wendt sought to purchase or demonstrate approximately 90 machine guns between July 2018 and August 2022. Some of the weapons were used for public machine gun shoots, where Wendt and Williams charged customers money to be able to fire the weapons.

The indictment describes the firearms as fully automatic weapons not legally available to the public, including an M60 machine gun, a belt-fed weapon widely used by the U.S. military since the Vietnam war that was purportedly obtained for official use by the Adair Police Department.

Wendt also sought repeatedly to obtain for the department a rotary M134 minigun capable of firing 50 rounds per second, usually mounted on military helicopters. The ATF denied the requested transfer.

“The Adair Police Department does not own a helicopter,” the indictment notes.

Wendt is charged with 18 counts of making a false statement to the ATF and one for unlawfully possessing a machine gun. Williams is charged with three counts of false statements and with aiding and abetting. Prosecutors are also seeking forfeiture of at least 35 machine guns involved in the case.

“Brad Wendt is charged with exploiting his position as chief of police to unlawfully obtain and sell guns for his own personal profit,” Eugene Kowel, a senior FBI agent based in Omaha, said in a statement. “The FBI is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to investigate and hold accountable those who violate their oath of office to enrich themselves.”

Well, that last part is a pregnant bit of prose, yes?

So no doubt he wanted to enrich himself.  He’s corrupt like so many other LEOs.  But if the FBI is so committed to hold those accountable who violate their oath of office, how about those ATF agents who violate the 2A?

For whatever reason, Matthew 7:3-5 comes to mind.

There is a solution to all of this, of course.  Undo the infringement of the NFA, GCA and Hughes Amendment.  Then no one will be able to enrich themselves this way by selling machine guns.

Reuters.

A federal judge has blocked New York from restricting the carrying of guns on private property under a Democratic-backed law adopted following the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling that struck down the state’s strict gun permitting regime.

Tuesday’s ruling by U.S. District Judge John Sinatra in Buffalo struck down a provision in the law that made it a felony for a licensed gun owner to possess a firearm on any private property unless the property owner allowed it with a sign or by giving express consent.

From the decision.

Property owners indeed have the right to exclude.  But the state may not unilaterally exercise that that right …

We believe in property rights, even against the state.  That certainly includes property owners who do not wish for you to bear arms on their property.  But you see what NY did there, yes?  They exercised that right on behalf of property owners.  In other words, they didn’t respect the rights of property owners to make the decision on their own property.

What NY did runs exactly counter to the notion of property rights, and thus the judge reached the right decision.

Ammoland.

Judicial Races

Equally large were gun voters’ judicial victories, where we made a clean sweep of NC Supreme Court and NC Court of Appeals races. Thanks to victories by strong constitutional conservatives Richard Dietz and Trey Allen, Republicans will now control the NC Supreme Court by a 5-2 margin – something that will serve North Carolinians well as we continue to struggle over redistricting and our as-yet-unimplemented voter ID law.

Congressional Races

Despite having a partisan, Democrat-led NC Supreme Court throw out and essentially redraw congressional districts, we were still able to send Chuck Edwards to the U.S. House in District 11. Edwards is a strong Second Amendment advocate who has been of considerable service to gun rights supporters in the General Assembly.

NC General Assembly (NCGA) Races

In unofficial results, it appears that gun voters achieved a super-majority in the NC Senate, with 30 seats, and 71 seats in the NC House, just one seat shy of a supermajority. Here too GRNC-PVF was highly successful, winning in 8 of 10 targeted Senate races and 10 of 16 targeted House races.

Well then, it’s time to get busy.  So now when another shooting happens, I don’t expect the GOP led Congress to buckle.  I expect the concealed handgun permitting process and the requirement to get CLEO approval of handgun purchase permits to be trashed by state law and replaced with constitutional purchase and carry.  I don’t expect the courts to roll over when anyone tries to send them gerrymandered redistricting plans.  I expect the GOP to vote pro-2A as a complete bloc rather than being splintered off.  I don’t expect open carry to be messed with or rescinded.

Is this too much to ask?  If so, we can be about our job of replacing you just like we’re going to replace that awful governor.

Friend of TCJ Stephen Stamboulieh got himself a win in New York.

DECISION AND PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION that Defendant Hochul is DISMISSED from this action as a party. Plaintiffs’ motion for a Preliminary Injunction (Dkt. No. [6]) is GRANTED in part and DENIED in part in accordance with this Decision. Defendants, as well as their officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys (and any other persons who are in active concert or participation with them) are PRELIMINARILY ENJOINED from enforcing the following provisions of the Concealed Carry Improvement Act, 2022 N.Y. Sess. Laws ch. 371 (“CCIA”): (1) the following provisions contained in Section 1 of the CCIA: (a) the provision requiring “good moral character”; (b) the provision requiring the “names and contact information for the applicant’s current spouse, or domestic partner, any other adults residing in the applicant’s home, including any adult children of the applicant, and whether or not there are minors residing, full time or part time, in the applicant’s home”; (c) the provision requiring “a list of former and current social media accounts of the applicant from the past three years”; and (d) the provision contained in Section 1 of the CCIA requiring “such other information required by review of the licensing application that is reasonably necessary and related to the review of the licensing application“; (2) the following “sensitive locations” provision contained in Section 4 of the CCIA: (a) “any location providing… behavioral health, or chemical dependance care or services” (except to places to which the public or a substantial group of persons have not been granted access) as contained in Paragraph “2(b)”; (b) “any place of worship or religious observation” as contained in Paragraph “2(c)”; (c) “public parks, and zoos” as contained in Paragraph “2(d)”; (d) “airports” to the extent the license holder is complying with federal regulations, and “buses” as contained in Paragraph “2(n)”; (e) “any establishment issued a license for on-premise consumption pursuant to article four, four-A, five, or six of the alcoholic beverage control law where alcohol is consumed” as contained in Paragraph “2(o)”; (f) “theaters,” “conference centers,” and “banquet halls” as contained in Paragraph “2(p)”; and (g) “any gathering of individuals to collectively express their constitutional rights to protest or assemble” as contained in Paragraph “2(s)”; and (3) the “restricted locations” provision contained in Section 5 of the CCIA. Plaintiffs are EXCUSED from giving security. The State Defendants’ request for a limitation in the scope of this Preliminary Injunction and for a stay of it pending appeal (Dkt. No. [48], at 115-16) is DENIED. Signed by U.S. District Judge Glenn T. Suddaby on 11/7/2022. (sal)

But it’s not just his win – it’s a win for liberty.  We encourage everyone to dismantle tyranny everywhere they find it, and in whatever station of life they find themselves, in Stephen’s case, the field of law.

Congratulations to Stephen, one of the premier 2A legal advocates in the country.  We like to celebrate wins, and especially wins by friends!

Source.

A federal judge based in Mississippi has released a scorching order expressing frustration with the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment opinion issued last summer and ordered the Justice Department to brief him on whether he needs to appoint an historian to help him decipher the landmark opinion.

The opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen changed the framework judges must use to review gun regulations. Going forward, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a gun law could only be justified if it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Judge Carlton Reeves – who is considering a case concerning a federal statute prohibiting felons from possessing firearms – said he is not sure how to proceed.

“This court is not a trained historian,” Reeves wrote in an order released last week.

“The justices of the Supreme Court, as distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians,” he continued.

“And we are not experts in what white, wealthy and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” he said.

The Bruen decision, he said, requires him to “play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.”

Well if you haven’t been looking to the historical context, what have you been doing with your decisions?  And don’t conflate your own ignorance with that of the Justices.

So here are some suggestions for you.  Read the primary source literature – such as the writings of the founders themselves, and also the newspapers of the era.  I think you’ll find that free men were allowed to possess firearms, that rapists, murderers and kidnappers were punished with death (as they should have been), and that there wasn’t generally a belief in the rehabilitative power of imprisonment.  So a man who is convicted today of assault and battery with intent to kill, for example, is likely to have been put to death in Colonial times even if he would be released today.  Much of this is a problem of our own creation.

Then after studying the primary literature, study the secondary source literature.  You can learn all about American history, like you should have done in your “education.”

Then maybe you won’t be a dummy.

David Kopel debunks a stupid set of claims with a made-up set of indices that proves nothing, all promulgated by the idiots at Duke University (among others).  We’ve run into these dummies before.

The authors, one at Duke, and one at Wesleyan University (who has probably never shot a firearm in her life), should read Kopel’s analysis and be ashamed for the poor “research” and bad analysis and writing they did.

Anyway, if you want to read all about this stupid notion of the lethality index, read Kopel’s analysis of what these writer claim.  I found the most interesting part of Kopel’s article to be these few paragraphs.

Miller and Tucker write:

The Founders lived in a period when they could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that “a gun is a gun is a gun,” because the basic flintlock hadn’t really become significantly more lethal in the previous 150 or so years. If the Constitution had been written in the middle of the nineteenth century, instead of the 1780s, the Founders would have been much more aware of the pace of innovation. (p. 2511).

This is incorrect. The American colonists from Europe who arrived in the early 17th century came mainly with matchlocks. In a matchlock, pressing the trigger lowers a smoldering hemp cord to touch the gunpowder in the firing pan. Over the course of the century, Americans shifted to the more expensive flintlock. In a flintlock, pressing the trigger causes a sharpened flint (held in the gun’s “jaws”) to fall forward. The flint strikes a piece of metal, and the shower of sparks ignites the gunpowder in the firing pan.

Unlike matchlocks, flintlocks can be kept always-ready. There is no smoldering cord to give away the location of the user. Flintlocks are much more reliable than matchlocks, and all the more so in adverse weather.

Americans made the shift from matchlocks to flintlocks sooner than did European armies or European civilians, because the flintlock was so vastly superior for use in the dense woods of the eastern seaboard, and for Indian fighting, which was very different from the rigidly organized, linear tactics of European warfare. For the same reasons, American Indians greatly preferred flintlocks to matchlocks. The TLI of a 17th century musket is 19 and the TLI of an 18th century flintlock is 43. So the transition of firearm type in the American colonies more than doubled the TLI. There is no reason to believe that the American Founders were ignorant of how much better their own firearms were compared to those of the early colonists.

Besides, the men who penned and approved the 2A had spent their lives and fortunes on overthrowing tyranny, which is the singular point of the 2A.  It would be idiotic to believe they would have written the 2A any other way based on a “lethality index” created by ne’er-do-wells in the twenty first century.

Dean Weingarten.

A three-judge panel issued an opinion on the case in the Fifth Circuit on December 14, 2022.

The three judge panel refused to consider either the separation of powers issues, or the Chevron doctrine, claiming they were irrelevant because the panel ruled bump stocks were machine guns.

The Fifth Circuit was asked to consider the case en banc,  which is to say, before the entire court, by a member of the Court. A majority of the members of the Fifth Circuit agreed to hear the case, en banc.

The trend of the case follows the GOA case in the Sixth Circuit. The Sixth Circuit agreed to hear the bump stock case en banc. The Sixth Circuit split evenly, with eight members voting to rule the bump stock regulation invalid and eight-member voting to rule for the government.  In the case of a tie vote, the district court ruling was upheld. The GOA case was denied a writ of certiorari on October 3 of, 2022.

The Cargill v. Garland oral arguments were heard by the Fifth Circuit, en banc, on September 13, 2022.

There is a good chance the Fifth Circuit will reverse the opinion of the district court. A majority of the Court agreed to hear the case, starting fresh, en banc. If the Fifth Circuit reverses the opinion and finds for Cargill, the case will create a split in the Circuits between the Tenth, the Sixth, and the Fifth circuits.

This gives the Supreme Court a strong incentive to hear the case.

Maybe.

But it’s either cowardice or mere stupidity that anyone can look at the description of a machine gun in the law and conclude that a bump stock turns a semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun.

The Supreme Court isn’t immune from cowardice and stupidity.  Therefore, I hold out no hope that the SCOTUS will reverse this awful decision.

As I’ve said before, I have no bump stocks and no arms braces.  But that’s not the point.

It doesn’t matter whether I have them – the only thing that matters is whether free men should have to suffer the infringement of controllers who want to disarm them.  And … whether a federal bureaucracy has the authority to make law in lieu of the Congress.

This is Mike on the recent shooting in Raleigh.  Well, not exactly the shooting, but rather, what the police did afterwards.

I live in North Carolina and I can comment on what Mike is saying.  While it’s true that there is no law against handguns in hospitals in NC, it’s also true that hospitals are private property.  They are owned and operated by corporations – they aren’t public property. The same thing goes for churches. Guns in churches is allowed in NC as long as the owners agree to it. It’s private property.

All hospitals I know about have rules against the carry of handguns on their premises.  You can either abide by their rules or refuse to patronize their establishment. However much I might disagree with their stupid decision, property rights supersede my right to carry. As gun owners, we can always work to change corporate policies. That’s the solution here.

Having said that, what Mike says is true.  They have metal detectors upon entry to the ER and it’s not possible to get around the rules.  The police were not needed.  They wanted to inject themselves into the fray, unnecessarily so.  They added nothing at all to the security that night.  The shooting had ended, and the shooting occurred nowhere near the hospital.  One wonders exactly what the police thought they were doing, and why?