Archive for the 'Second Amendment' Category

He was always a putz anyway. Who needs him?

Source.

A Texas judge has sided with a gun-rights lobby group that challenged a state law barring 18-to-20-year-olds in Texas from carrying a handgun outside the home.

US District Judge Mark T. Pittman, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, ruled Thursday the law violates the Second Amendment, guaranteeing the right to bear arms.

“The Second Amendment does not mention any sort of age restriction,” the judge wrote. “The Court thus concludes the plain text of the Second Amendment, as informed by Founding-Era history and tradition, covers the proposed course of conduct and permits law-abiding 18-to-20-year-olds to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”

The lobby group Firearms Policy Coalition sued the Texas Department of Public Safety for enforcing a law that prohibits those under 21 years of age from carrying a handgun outside their home, motor vehicle or watercraft. The group argued that young people under 21 had just as much right to bear arms in public as those who are older.

The founders discussed the carry of muskets on their walk to school and as a “constant companion during walks.”

FPC for the win!

Community caretaking should be left up to families and churches.  The state has no business involved in such affairs.

Stupid document it was.  Here are some updates.

Project Veritas original reporting.

Sen. Ted Cruz to FBI Director Wray: “DOJ has become thoroughly politicized. I think this is a problem that began during the Obama admin. I think it metastasized with career officials during the Trump admin. And I think it continues and is even worse today under the Biden admin.” pic.twitter.com/AzV7C0GC9r

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 4, 2022

Mike’s organization, American Contingency, was specifically called out in the FBI release.  Mike answers this, but the sad thing is that he was surprised by the FBI’s actions.  Mike cannot let his time with the FedGov in the SpecOps community go.  He still has too much trust in the gargoyles, pit vipers and demons inside the beltway.

Here once again the fact that John is “alarmed” is sad because we all know this about the FBI.  John is right about everything he says, but he’s behind the curve a number of years.

Maybe this will serve as a wakeup call to patriots throughout the country.  Perhaps some good will come of it.

Source.

I checked with Cloud Defensive because I didn’t have a URL for this and they responded that they had indeed issued this statement over their Instagram account (I don’t have an account at Instagram).

Good for Cloud Defensive.  Thank you for taking a stand.

Sent from reader Fred, this lawyer does a fine job of explaining some overlooked aspects of the Bruen decision.

In the case of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court ruled that law-abiding citizens have the right to carry firearms outside the home for self-defense. The Supreme Court explicitly affirmed that the Second Amendment protects twin rights: “to keep and bear arms,” with “keep” meaning to own or possess and “bear” meaning to carry outside the home.

But here’s the crucial part of the Bruen ruling that has escaped notice. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas emphasizes that the proper test of constitutionality—which the Supreme Court established in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)—“requires courts to assess whether modern firearms regulations are consistent with the Second Amendment’s text and historical understanding.”

Simply put, first you need to see what the text of the Second Amendment does (and does not) mention, and then you must look at what firearm regulations were in place at the time of the American Founding. Justice Thomas gives an example: “[W]hen a challenged regulation addresses a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century, the lack of a distinctly similar historical regulation addressing that problem is relevant evidence that the challenged regulation is inconsistent with the Second Amendment.”

The Founders knew all about mass killings which were part of the American experience dating back to the Jamestown colony. On March 22, 1622, Native tribes of the Powhatan Confederacy killed 347 English settlers—men, women, and children. Indian raids represented a serious threat for more than two centuries after the Jamestown Massacre. Two mass killings occurred in 1755 alone. In July, Shawnee Indians attacked Draper’s Meadow, a Virginia settlement. They killed at least five people, including an infant. Then, in October, the Lenape raided a settlement along Penn’s Creek in Pennsylvania, killing fourteen.

In 1774, Mingos and Shawnees launched a series of raids on Virginia settlements. Thousands of settlers were forced to flee. In a letter dated July 1, 1774, James Madison concluded that the attacking Indians were “determined in the extirpation of the inhabitants.”

Likewise, John Adams declared the need for armed self-defense. The next year, Adams described how “hardy, robust” people throughout the colonies had become “habituated” to carrying “their fuzees or rifles upon one shoulder to defend themselves against the Indians.”

Nor did Indian raids present the only danger. During the Revolutionary War, New Jersey’s Pine Barrens offered a haven for robbers, who would plunder, burn, and murder. One historical account explains, “The inhabitants, in constant terror, were obliged for safety to carry their muskets with them into the fields, and even to the house of worship.”

The Founders enshrined the right of the people to keep and bear arms in part because they knew of this history of mass killings. As the testimonies of Madison and Adams illustrate, the Founders recognized the importance of firearms to self-defense.

I’ve always claimed that if the founders wanted to word the 2A differently, they could have.  If they had wanted to repeal it, they could have.  If they had wanted to refrain from toting weapons around themselves (which they did all the time), they could have.

They didn’t, not on any account.

The second amendment is about self defense.  Some will claim that it’s about ameliorating tyranny.  Those folks are thinking small in my opinion.

Yes, it is, but the amelioration of tyranny is a subset of self defense.  Self defense is about defending the person, family, neighborhood and community against individual attackers, gangs, or the state if tyrants want to rule you.

It isn’t either-or.  It’s both-and.

David Kopel.

Today U.S. District Judge Raymond P. Moore issued a temporary restraining order against the ban on so-called “assault weapons” recently enacted by the town of Superior, Colorado, in Boulder County. The case is Rocky Mountain Gun Owners v. Superior.

Lead attorney for the plaintiffs was Barry Arrington, one of Colorado’s top lawyers on education law, and now the victor in a major Second Amendment case. Arrington previously served in the Colorado House of Representatives, and as a trustee of the Independence Institute, where I work.

Judge Moore formerly was a corporate lawyer (Davis, Graham and Stubbs, Denver), and then head Federal Public Defender for Colo. and Wyoming. He was appointed to the bench by President Obama in 2013, and confirmed unanimously.

Like several other towns in Boulder County, Superior recently outlawed semiautomatic centerfire rifles that have at least one supposedly bad characteristic, such as an adjustable stock; various semiautomatic shotguns; various semiautomatic handguns; and magazines with a capacity of over 10 rounds.

It was obvious that such arms are “commonly used by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes,” which is the Supreme Court’s rule from District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) for which arms are protected by the Second Amendment. First, the Colorado Attorney General and plaintiffs in an earlier case challenging the state of Colorado’s ban on magazines over 15 rounds had so stipulated. Colorado Outfitters Ass’n v. Hickenlooper, 24 F. Supp. 3d 1050, 1068 (D. Colo. 2014), vacated in part on other grounds and remanded, 823 F.3d 537 (10th Cir. 2016). (I represented 55 Colorado Sheriff plaintiffs in the case, which ended up with the 10th Circuit declaring that neither the Sheriffs nor the many other individual and organizational plaintiffs had standing.) Commonality was also found in the undisputed facts set forth in Fourth Circuit Judge Traxler’s dissenting opinion in Kolbe v. Hogan, 849 F.3d 114, 153-55 (4th Cir. 2017). The opinions of many other Circuit Courts provide additional, irrefutable proof of commonality; the banned firearms number in the millions, at least, and the banned magazines comprise over half of all magazines.

Pursuant to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, courts are supposed to decide Second Amendment cases on text, history, and tradition. Judge may not decide based on their own opinions about good policy, nor should they defer to legislative policy judgements. The policy  balancing was already conducted by the American people when they adopted the Second Amendment.

[ … ]

The Colorado plaintiffs also challenged Superior’s ban on open carry of handguns. Judge Moore denied the TRO motion against the open carry ban. As he accurately stated, Bruen affirms the right to bear arms, but also allows governments to decide whether the mode of carry shall be open or concealed. Since 2003 in Colorado, concealed carry permits have been available to adults with safety training who pass a fingerprint-based background check. A system that bans open carry while allowing concealed carry does not violate the Second Amendment.

At least one aspect of the ruling was correct.  All the judge can do is follow Bruen, and that decision allowed for bans on mode of carry as long as some mode of carry was allowed.

Of course, I disagree with that part of it as you know.

AP.

A bystander’s decision to shoot a man who opened fire at an Indiana mall was a rare occurrence of someone stepping in to try to prevent multiple casualties before police could arrive.

Police on Monday praised the quick actions of 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken, an armed shopper who killed 20-year-old Jonathan Sapirman after Sapirman killed three people and wounded two others at a mall in the Indianapolis suburb of Greenwood.

“Many more people would have died last night if not for a responsible armed citizen,” police Chief Jim Ison said Monday, repeatedly calling Dicken a “good Samaritan” and his response “heroic.”

It isn’t common for mass shootings to be stopped in such fashion. From 2000 to 2021, fewer than 3% of 433 active attacks in the U.S. ended with a civilian firing back, according to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. The researchers define the attacks as one or more people targeting multiple people.

It was far more common for police or bystanders to subdue the attacker or for police to kill the person, according to the center’s national data, which were recently cited by The New York Times.

In a quarter of the shootings, the attacker stopped by leaving the area, similar to what happened during the July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, where seven people were killed.

“There’s been this statement: ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’ That’s factually inaccurate because of the word ‘only,’” said Adam Lankford, a criminal justice expert at the University of Alabama who has written books and research papers about mass shootings.

And on and on the commentary drones.

To begin with, definitions are important.  Self defense events happen every day in America, whether at home or out and about.  I write on firearms and 2A rights, so I bypass chances to pen something else on self defense events literally every day to focus more on the mechanical and materials engineering of firearms, ammunition performance, method of carry, training, and the things that interest me.  The author has subdivided his topic as best as he can in order to make his most convincing case.  He has neglected literally thousands of cases of interest.

But even then, is he correct?  Maybe not.

UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh wrote in the Washington Post on April 20, 2015: “Have civilians with permitted concealed handguns stopped such mass shootings before?”  We provided Volokh with a list of such cases, which he used.

Below, we have collected news stories on more cases of permit holders stopping mass public shootings with their handguns (we separately collect cases where concealed handguns are used to stop other crimes).  There is no reason to believe that this list is comprehensive, given how little media coverage is devoted to these heroic acts.  In addition, we make no attempt here to list here the vast number of defensive gun uses in general that are reported daily in the US.

Permit holders stopped some mass public shootings that gained extensive news coverage, but only a few stories mentioned that it was a permit holder who stopped the attack. The stories frequently get other facts wrong.

The researchers list more than sixty times permit holders have stopped likely mass shootings in public.  I judge a few of them to be not applicable for various reasons, but that doesn’t negate the force of the copious data.

The author at AP did a lousy job of research, but then, that has become the standard for the legacy media.

To be sure, none of this has anything to do with God-given rights.  If a mass shooting can theoretically occur, and a carrier can theoretically stop it to prevent loss of life to himself or others, then it’s wise to carry and he or she certainly has the right to do so regardless of whether bogus research demonstrates that the result will be statistically insignificant.  What’s statistically insignificant to the writer is significant if you have a firearm trained on you as a potential victim.

This just all goes to show how absurd most reporting is.  Thus, unless the source is about some new firearm, some new ammunition or a ballistic test of older ammo designs for comparison, methods of maintenance, and the mechanical aspect of firearms, I’m not likely to link any legacy media source unless it’s to lampoon them or call out error.  And I won’t go behind a paywall even to do that.

That’s about all the legacy media is good for these days.  Some writer (and editor) actually thinks he’s earned his pay today for that tripe.