Archive for the 'Second Amendment' Category

Lee Williams writing at Ammoland.

The story was written by one of the Trace’s senior fabulists, Jennifer Mascia, who is “currently the lead writer of the Ask The Trace series and tracks news developments on the gun beat.” Mascia has also led the Trace’s hilarious we’re journalists, not activists, propaganda campaign on social media.

Mascia claims her story was a response to a reader’s question: “Many gun owners claim to buy assault-style rifles for defense. So how many documented cases are out there where someone actually defended themselves with an assault-style rifle?”

You can read the rest at Ammoland.  Jennifer is trying to assist the controllers in changing the subject from “in common use for legal purposes” to actually having used a weapon for self defense.  First of all, she doesn’t know anything about that regardless of what she claims.  No one can go to news reports and find every instance they need for a comprehensive study.  For example, use of the weapon might have been to flash the rifle muzzle at home invaders only for the invaders to run.  With that said, I think I could come up with quite a few instances myself, but that’s not really the point of this, and we’ll get to more later on this subject when you listen to Professor Mark Smith below.

Let’s turn our attention to Jennifer for a moment.  I’ve had an exchange with Jennifer before.  Let’s review, shall we?

I had a rather protracted conversation with someone who writes under the nom de guerre Tommy Gnosis.  Not that I care that deeply, but something sounded strange about the comments, like they had no particular bearing, were inconsistent, or feinted support for individual rights but didn’t do a good job of hiding the fact that it was all just a distraction.

So I did a little bit of research.  Tommy Gnosis is someone named Jennifer Mascia, who has her own web site.  In fact, she was one of the authors of the now defunct “The Gun Report” for the New York Times.  Recall that report?  That awful, hideous, dreary rundown of shootings every day?  As if all we have to do is remove those awful guns from society and sin goes away because evil is located in things rather than the heart of man (a noted neo-Platonic and stoic view).

Anyway, I did an IP trace and found that the address was owned by Bloomberg.  It makes sense, since I also found out that she works for Bloomberg via Everytown For Gun Safety.  Her Disqus account is active, and features snark, misdirects, sarcasm, insults, and most of all, prose designed to demoralize and demonstrate the complete impotence of whatever group she is berating at the moment.  The prose is designed to cause depression and dejection.

Here is the lesson.  Bloomberg is paying her to visit web sites – particularly gun rights web sites – and spread discontent and dejection.

The exchange continues.

Hi Herschel,

I am not paid to comment here, or anywhere, nor have I ever been. There is no “tactic.” I have never worked for a political organization or a nonprofit, only media companies, and before that, restaurants. No one at Everytown knows I comment here. I actually don’t work with the advocacy arm of Everytown. The news site will be staffed with journalists, not lobbyists. We have zero to do with elections or phone banks. We won’t be working with Everytown staffers.

Her Disqus account was by “Tommy Gnosis.”  I outed her and she posted as “Guest.”  She responded that she isn’t paid to comment anywhere.  There is no “tactic.”  She claimed no relationship at all to Bloomberg.  Now we find out that her use of an IP address that pointed back to Bloomberg was no coincidence.  She is indeed trafficking in propaganda, and she is in the employ of Bloomberg.  Let’s continue with Codrea’s second article on Bloomberg’s next move.

“Tommy Gnosis is someone named Jennifer Mascia,” Herschel Smith at The Captain’s Journal posted in March. He was describing someone who, under cover of anonymity, “visits web sites — particularly gun rights web sites — and spreads discontent and dejection.”

That’s consistent with the “elaborate subterfuge” technique for “infiltrating and disrupting alternative media online” used by those with an agenda. Per Canadian research, such “Internet trolls aren’t just mean — they’re sadists and psychopaths.”

That would also seem consistent with the control-all megalomaniac who hired her, in a company-he-keeps kind of way. Mascia is one of two paid flacks “attached prominently to the Everytown news project,” an experiment in virtual Astroturf that billionaire Michael Bloomberg will be rolling out this summer.

David then goes on to explore her past as daughter of a mob hit man.

What drives Mascia is anybody’s guess, but chances are her father having been an underworld killer with multiple hits under his belt had an influence. That probably comes as a surprise to many gun rights advocates, unaware that Al Jazeera told its readers “America’s best hope for tracking gun deaths is a mob enforcer’s daughter,” and Bloomberg’s Moms Demand Action gushed on social media that her story was “Amazing.”

[ … ]

As for pushing Jennifer around, I’ve made clear that if you want to come in this back yard and run with the big dogs, you’d better be prepared for some rough business.  And as for Jennifer herself, you weren’t entirely honest with us, were you?

David Codrea’s First Article

David Codrea’s Second Article

Well there you have it.  She’s bought and paid for by Michael Bloomberg.  She came in under a nom de guerre to spread hate and discontent.  I outed her.  Even then she denied it because she’s a liar.

So why is she trying to assist the controllers in this one specific issue?  Listen carefully to Mark Smith below.  They want the supreme court to change the test in Bruen and Heller from “in common use for lawful purposes” to something else, and they have chosen the Rahimi case for all of their hate towards gun owners.  They see this as their golden opportunity.

I’ve told you what I think.  I think the women on the court, including Barrett and Roberts, side with the controllers and end of changing the rules back to something the DOJ and ATF likes much better.  I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.  There was no particularly compelling reason for them to have taken this case to begin with.

One commenter to the video below remarks, “As I recall, when the DOJ bought AR-15s a few years back, the Request for Purchase form listed them as “personal defense weapons.” Can’t have it both ways.”  I’ll add to this.  If the AR-15 is so bad for use in defense situations, tell me why the U.S. government agencies have so many rifles – some noted as “assault rifles” – in their inventory as personal defense weapons?

Source.

D.C. will pay $5.1 million as part of a class-action settlement with gun owners who were arrested under laws that have since been found to violate the Second Amendment, according to the settlement agreement.

U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth gave preliminary approval to the settlement agreement on Monday following years of litigation. Lamberth had previously ruled in September 2021 that D.C. arrested, jailed, prosecuted and seized guns from six people “based on an unconstitutional set of laws” and violated their Second Amendment rights.

The laws — a ban on carrying handguns outside the home and others that effectively banned nonresidents from carrying guns at all in D.C. — have since been struck down in federal court. They were part of a “gun control regime that completely banned carrying handguns in public,” Lamberth wrote in the 2021 ruling.

Now, D.C. will pay a total of $300,000 to the six plaintiffs and $1.9 million in attorneys fees, with the majority of the rest of the money set aside for more than 3,000 people estimated to qualify for the class-action.

The D.C. attorney general’s office declined to comment. Attorneys for the six gun owners did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The settlement agreement follows litigation in several major federal court cases over the last 15 years that have led judges to strike down highly restrictive D.C. gun laws, slowly leading to more legal gun ownership in a city where illegal weapons have dominated.

[ … ]

A succession of court rulings chipped away at other restrictive D.C. laws. In 2014, a federal judge in Palmer v. District of Columbia struck down D.C.’s total ban on carrying handguns in public and enjoined the District from banning nonresidents from legally registering firearms. And in 2017, a federal judge invalidated D.C.’s requirement that people show “good reason” to obtain a concealed-carry permit — significantly opening the door to more legal guns.

In this case, the six plaintiffs — including four non-D.C. residents — were arrested between 2012 and 2014 on gun-related charges. They filed a lawsuit in 2015.

Those arrested include the lead plaintiff, Maggie Smith, a nurse from North Carolina who was pulled over by D.C. police for a routine traffic stop in June 2014, according to court documents. Smith, who had no criminal record, informed officers her car contained a pistol that was licensed in her home state — for which police promptly arrested her, seizing her gun and taking her to jail, where she stayed overnight.

Ah, that “routine traffic stop” that so very often is just a pretext for more invasive actions by the Stasi, and are never really routine.

Well good.  I hope this hits them good and hard.  Unfortunately this will all be paid by the taxpayers, and the best option would be to shut down city council and all gun registration employees and schemes.  Maybe that would save some money.  And make things more peaceable in D.C.

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.