Archive for the 'Second Amendment' Category

There isn’t anything off limits.  The core doctrine of the progressives is to un-empower you, and that means disarm you.  Oh, they have other doctrines, but they all depend upon and are corollary to disarmament.

They are controllers, and they can’t fully control you if you are armed.  Someone once said “This is all designed to break the bonds of dependency and love between families and church, cause feelings of isolation, and create dependency on the government.  At its root, it is the wicked desire to control other people.  The tools of control are loneliness, poverty and isolation.  Community becomes government.  The desire to control others is the signal pathology of the wicked.”

Mark Smith outlines it all for us.  BLUF: 37 legal briefs in the Rahimi case trying to persuade the SCOTUS to back off of the Bruen standard.

The communists see this as their big chance to water down the Bruen test (analogous laws on the books and enforce at the time of the founding) and attempting to return the Supreme Court to tiers of scrutiny.

We’ll see, but I’ve made my prediction known.  The women on the court (including Roberts) water down Bruen and side with the communists.

California.  LOL.

Women’s caucus.  LOL.

But my prediction is that all of the women on the supreme court (including Roberts) will be emotionally moved by the brief and side with the women of California.

Courthouse News.

The plaintiffs’ attorney Amy Bellantoni made little headway in trying to persuade the panel to issue a permanent injunction because, as she argued, the issues are very straightforward given the Supreme Court ruling in Bruen.

“Bruen has put this issue to rest,” Bellantoni said. “Bruen was a public carry case.”

That argument was a little too hasty for the judges, however, because Bruen requires that gun laws be evaluated by looking at the “historical tradition of firearm regulation” and that hasn’t happened yet in this case, VanDyk said.

“What Bruen said is that you look at the historical evidence,” VanDyk said. “Why shouldn’t the state have an opportunity to provide that historical evidence? I think you’d agree that the court doesn’t just have to take your word for it that it doesn’t exist.”

Here’s a quick note to U.S. Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyk.  You only said that because you’re an illiterate moron with the attention span of a chimpanzee.  That’s not the Bruen standard at all.  You just made that up because you’ve never read the document or you didn’t understand it when you did.

The Bruen standard is when the second amendment is implicated in an activity, that activity is presumptively lawful.  The burden is then on the state to prove that analogous laws existed controlling that activity at the time of our founding.  The burden isn’t on the plaintiff’s attorney to prove that such a law didn’t exist.  You should be telling the state to go find the law or else you’ll block the ban, not telling the Plaintiff’s attorney to do the state’s job.

Dummy.

U.S. Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyk is a Trump appointee.  Good job, Donald.  Some random guy in the phone directory could have done a better job.

Here’s Professor Mark Smith fleshing this out all over again for you, albeit speaking to the current case before the supreme court called Rahimi.

That also reminds me of something I’ve believed a very long time. There is no such thing as justice in America unless by accident. Judges are too stupid to know the law, and juries only get things right by accident. One can claim a right to due process, but unless that’s really “due process” under a viable and authentic justice system, there is no justice. Going before the system in America is like taking a roll of the dice.

I heard Professor Mark Smith make the observation recently in one of his videos that 18-year olds can vote and serve in the military and therefore age limits of 21-years is inane.  This is true enough, but ignores our rich history.  Then via David Codrea, I see that the SAF is glomming on to the same sort of argument.

“We remind the court that the Second Amendment refers to a right ‘of the people’ without mentioning age, and certainly young adults fall within the definition of ‘the people’ ever since they’ve been allowed to vote, and generations before that when they were considered part of the militia, and have been accepted into the military.”

Okay I’m really tired of this crap and it needs another reply (I’ve observed this before).

I invite you to come take a walk around the King’s Mountain Military Park and read the placards, all of them, every word.  You’ll learn many things.  General Cornwallis’ plan for the South was to rely on Tory militia to defeat the patriots and be able to move North to capture Virginia and then engage Washington’s troops.  King’s Mountain saw the defeat of that strategy.

Cornwallis could never have won anyway, given the damage the Mosquito did to the health of his troops, the fact that a full thinds of them were in the infirmary on any given day, the constant depletion of soldiers and resources from the insurgency in S.C. (Francis Marion), and the Continental Army regulars.

But King’s Mountain was still a massive blow to Cornwallis.  The men in the mountains of N.C. and Tennessee heard of the threats made by the British army and the Tory forces.  They didn’t wait.  At the time, the crops needed tending (it was the fall of 1780 and they needed to be harvested if the families were to survive).

Rather than the fathers going to war against the Tory forces (commanded by one British officer), they sent their sons into battle.  They kitted them up, and lined up along the roads as they left and sang hymns beseeching God’s protection and victory.  The boys travelled by night, many miles, in order to engage the Tory forces.

The average age of the sons of America who fought as patriots that fateful day was 14 years old.  They had learned to survive in the bush, and shoot and all of the things they did, by simply growing up with good men as their fathers.

Stop it with all of the arguments that people can vote and go into the army at 18 years old.  I don’t care about voting, I don’t care about military service.  The boys who won the battle of King’s Mountain were 13 and 14 years olds.

Just stop it.  I think it’s stupid every time I hear that argument trying to justify firearms use.  Boys with good fathers can use firearms at any age the father deems appropriate.

Because families are the central building block of society.  The government is not.

Firearms ownership and use is a right of the militias.  It is an individual right.  It is a God-given right of all men everywhere.

Well, except for the balancing act she alluded to in her decision, she got it all right.  Because she’s honest and did what she was supposed to do – follow where the superior court led.

LA Times.

A conservative panel of federal judges ruled Monday that a 30-year ban on butterfly knives in Hawaii is unconstitutional under the U.S. Supreme Court’s new “history and tradition” standard for reviewing the legitimacy of gun and other weapons laws nationwide.

“Hawaii has not demonstrated that its ban on butterfly knives is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of regulating arms,” Judge Carlos Bea wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The ruling, which may be appealed, has implications beyond Hawaii, including in California and other states that also ban or severely restrict butterfly knives, which have been targeted by lawmakers because they can be easily concealed and flipped open.

California bans “switchblades” — which include butterfly knives — when they have blades 2 or more inches in length. A separate lawsuit challenging that ban is pending.

The decision reflects the growing reach of the Supreme Court’s pro-gun rights decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen, in which the nation’s highest court ruled that restrictions on people’s 2nd Amendment right to bear arms are constitutional only if they are deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition or analogous to some historical rule.

Since then, trial and appellate judges have found themselves sifting through century-old state statutes to determine the legality of hundreds of modern weapons restrictions in states all across the country — including on knives and billy clubs, assault weapons and ammunition magazines, and on the possession of guns by certain classes of people, including adults under 21 and people who are subject to restraining orders.

Bea wrote that Hawaii’s 1993 ban on butterfly knives did not meet the criteria because nothing like it existed around the historical benchmarks chosen by the Supreme Court as relevant for such analyses: 1791, when the 2nd Amendment was passed, or 1868, when the 14th Amendment was passed. The latter amendment prohibits states from depriving people of property without due process of law.

Although the Bruen decision specifically addressed firearm regulations, Bea wrote that was only because the case in Bruen was about gun regulations in New York. The same “framework” applies to knives, which are also “arms” under the 2nd Amendment, he said.

[ … ]

Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor who focuses on 2nd Amendment law, said the 9th Circuit’s decision “is emblematic of what’s happening across the nation right now.

“Courts are striking down regulation of arms left and right.”

Winkler said the Supreme Court “has put states in the impossible position of showing that any law that regulates weapons for public safety [has] clear analogues in the 1700s and 1800s,” which he added “just leaves courts to draw analogies to laws that were designed for a different society.”

“It really makes no sense,” he said.

[ … ]

Hawaii put forward several such laws, dating back to 1837, including laws that banned or regulated bigger blades such as Bowie knives and “Arkansas Toothpicks,” daggers, brass knuckles, canes concealing swords and knotted ropes with metal weights at the end called “slung-shots.”

An 1837 law in Georgia — which the court called Hawaii’s “best historical analogue” — said no one shall “keep, or have about or on their person or elsewhere … Bowie, or any other kind of knives.”

Bea wrote that the Georgia law didn’t clearly include “pocketknives” — which in his decision would include butterfly knives — so it wasn’t necessarily relevant. And anyway, he wrote, “one solitary statute is not enough to demonstrate a tradition of an arms regulation.”

[ … ]

“The court has to provide more clarity and direction for the lower courts,” Winkler said, “because the Bruen test has proven absolutely unworkable and unpredictable.”

It makes no sense to fisk this decision completely because it’s the right decision.  However, I do have some thoughts on it.

First, men should be able to carry swords if they choose to.  Silly debates on the mechanical operation of knives makes these judges look like school children, and besides, none of them ever used a knife anyway unless it’s an electric powered knife for cutting turkey because their wife told them to.  Their wives could probably have done a better job of cutting the turkey.

Seriously, most of these judges are so effete that they wouldn’t know how to use fire starter, tie a bowline or taut line hitch, build a campfire, or be able to open a box with a knife without cutting themselves.  They certainly wouldn’t know how to operate a 1911, and yet they’re adjudicating laws for the rest of us.

Next, notice the silly Adam Winkler and his hand wringing over this sort of thing.  He says, “impossible position of showing that any law that regulates weapons for public safety [has] clear analogues in the 1700s and 1800s,” [which he added] “just leaves courts to draw analogies to laws that were designed for a different society.  It really makes no sense.”

It makes perfect sense, and it’s clear enough to you and me.  Winkler just doesn’t like it.  He adds to our understanding of his frustration by emoting “the Bruen test has proven absolutely unworkable and unpredictable!”

The test is completely workable.  The test is to find analogues from the time of the signing of the constitution, or at the latest the lives of the founders (while they were still here on earth).  Can’t find an analogue?  Too bad.  You fail the test.  There is no reason to search any more.

There were no analogues on the carry of knives from the time of the founding.  Even as children the founders carried long guns to school with them to be able to hunt on the way to and from school to fill the dinner table.  And that stupid “analogue” on Bowie knives from 1837 from Georgia is no analogue at all.  It’s too late.

All this searching they’re doing is to try to force fit later laws and regulations into the framework of the Bruen test.  There was also no law or regulation of firearms serialization at the time of the founding either.  They can pull their hair out as far as I’m concerned.  In fact, the more time they waste on trying to convince the court that they’ve actually found something when the law is too late to meet the Bruen standard is time they don’t have to spend on wrecking the lives of other people.

The only downside for us is that this all slows the process down.  It would be better if they just gave up and understood that they can’t meet the Bruen test.  In absence of that, I’ll take a waste of their time.

Finally, why do writers go to silly men like Winkler to assess the facts of these cases, when they’ve got real scholars like David Kopel, Dave Hardy, Stephen Halbrook, Mark Smith and so many others?

Winkler doesn’t like the Bruen test.  That’s fine with me inasmuch as I don’t care what Winkler thinks.  That’s a much different thing than saying that it’s unworkable and unpredictable.  The test is entirely workable and quite predictable.  Winkler gets an ‘F’ from The Captain’s Journal on class participation today.

As you likely know, Justice Alito has given the federal government until Tuesday, or in other words, extended the stay on Judge’s Reed O’Conner’s vacatur of the new ATF rule to serialize incomplete lower receivers.  Of course, we don’t know where this is all headed.  The SCOTUS could remand this for decision consistent with Bruen, or sustain the vacatur for parties involved, or they have other options.  Since this emergency appeal by the DOJ has been accepted by the SCOTUS, doing nothing is now not possible.  They will do something, but we’ll have to wait until Tuesday to find out (or perhaps Wednesday).

Below, professor Mark Smith does a service by reviewing the history of firearms serialization in both the U.K and America.  There is basically no history of serialization in America, and certainly no history of requiring firearms to be serialized at the time of our founding.  In other words, there is no analogue law to which the DOJ and ATF can turn.  It isn’t enough to say that firearms loaned to the militia by the government were serialized.  That was for a different purpose, i.e., tracking government property.  The ATF rule pertains to privately owned firearms.

Watch all of Mark Smith’s presentation.  But before you get to that, remember that the founders toted long guns to school with them in order to hunt on the way to and from classes.  Those were either purchased from a smith (with no serialization) or self-made (of course, with no serialization).  The founders would have opposed such schema.

In 1 Samuel 13:19f, we read this.

Now no blacksmith could be found in all the land of Israel, because the Philistines said, “Otherwise the Hebrews will make swords or spears.” So all Israel went down to the Philistines, each to sharpen his plowshare, his mattock, his axe, and his hoe. The charge was two-thirds of a shekel for the plowshares, the mattocks, the forks, and the axes, and to fix the cattle goads.

This is considered by commentators to be a great evil.  Matthew Henry comments, “See how politic the Philistines were when they had power; they not only prevented the people of Israel from making weapons of war, but obliged them to depend upon their enemies, even for instruments of husbandry. How impolitic Saul was, who did not, in the beginning of his reign, set himself to redress this. Want of true sense always accompanies want of grace. Sins which appear to us very little, have dangerous consequences. Miserable is a guilty, defenceless nation; much more those who are destitute of the whole armour of God.”  In Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, we read this.  “Now there was no smith found throughout … Israel—The country was in the lowest state of depression and degradation. The Philistines, after the great victory over the sons of Eli, had become the virtual masters of the land. Their policy in disarming the natives has been often followed in the East. For repairing any serious damage to their agricultural implements, they had to apply to the neighboring forts.”  John Gill remarks “this they did to prevent their having arms, and the use of them, that they might not rebel against them, and fight with them, and overcome them; it was a piece of policy to keep them subject to them.”

Subjection of others is always the goal.  As I’ve observed before, the desire to control others is the signal pathology of the wicked.  Men who would become the almighty desire to steal the power and authority of the most high God to themselves, and the result is always tyranny.  Those rulers are always fake, a ghost of righteousness, a phantom, unreal, a vapor in the wind.  There is nothing righteous about tyrannical rulers, but the history of tyranny is dark.  In the twentieth century, some 212,000,000 souls were lost at the hands of tyrannical governments across the globe.

The firearms serialization schema is sinful, and points to deeper problems of the soul among those who call for such control over other men.  Control over other men never leads to righteous results.

Never compromise with this wickedness.  Oppose it at every turn.  Take names and hold grudges.

Prior: The American Tradition of Self Made Arms

This slipped past me and I didn’t post on it, but the ATF frame and receiver rule has been vacated by judge Reed O’Connor.  More specifically, this is the Vanderstok, et. al., v. Garland case.

This mostly affects folks like Blackhawk Manufacturing, Polymer80, and so forth, who manufactured the 80% lowers.  But it’s a win for the 2A.

Here is the decision.

I’m willing to bet that the ATF will not appeal the decision, but we’ll wait and see.

Via WoG, Idaho Dispatch.

The Independence Day parade is back in the city of Boise.

The parade was gone for a few years. This year, a new group has come together to host the event.

The information about the event can be found on the new website, Idaho 4th of July Parade from Boise (boise4th.com)

Participants have been preparing their floats and entries for the event, which is now just a few days away. Dated June 27, but sent out June 28, just 6 days ahead of the festivities, an email landed in their inboxes that caused some to pause.

The organizers of the parade have decided to add an addendum to the rules that were originally sent to entrants. The text of the addendum reads,

“Additionally, in consultation with local public safety officials, the parade organizers add the following parade entry requirement which all entries must follow:

No open carry of weapons or firearms will be permitted. The only exception to this is sworn law enforcement officers, uniformed military Honor Guard personnel or those participating in an authorized armed Color Guard.

This additional parade entry requirement ensures the focus on the parade’s intent to safely celebrate our Nation’s founding. The parade organizers greatly appreciate your adherence to this amended entry requirement.”

Greg Pruett of the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance responded to the addendum email sent to parade participants by saying,

“Just as we anticipated, the Supreme Court’s decision to undermine the right to keep and bear arms on public property in Idaho has already begun. Of all the days for the organizers of the parade to put restrictions on the second amendment, it has to be on “Independence Day.” These restrictions by private organizations on public property is only going to get worse. How long before Mayor McLean decides that all Boise city parks will be ran by a nonprofit organization who will then ban firearms throughout the city. It’s coming, unless the legislature acts and fixes the problem.”

Pruett is referencing the Idaho Supreme Court decision that came out just days ago. Idaho Dispatch reported on that here: Breaking: ISAA Loses in Idaho Supreme Court, Calls For Special Session of the Idaho Legislature – Idaho Dispatch

Maybe the Idaho supreme court should read state law too.  Idaho is a preemption state.  Cities, town, townships, etc., cannot be more restrictive than state law.

Really folks.  This is Idaho.  Idaho.