Archive for the 'Second Amendment' Category

By now you’ve seen the tyrannical declarations of the New Mexico governor.  Here they are in all of their sordid detail.  She doesn’t think oaths mean anything at all.

The Governor of New Mexico has just declared the 1st & 2nd Amendment “does not exist” due to an “emergency.”

Under this legal theory *all* of our “rights” are essentially eliminated.

Watch the most evil & tyrannical 60 seconds you’ve ever heard from a politician: pic.twitter.com/xLpMSTbyi2

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) September 9, 2023

I wonder if her husband, Manuel Cordova, thinks the same way about oaths?  Anyway, this declaration has drawn a firestorm of reaction.  I told my family that it wouldn’t last through the week.  In fact, it didn’t last that long.  There are already protests, and promises to disobey the unconstitutional edict, and even more importantly, her own enforcers aren’t on her side.

Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman, who once served as a Democratic party leader and was appointed by Lujan Grisham, on Saturday joined Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller and Police Chief Harold Medina saying they wouldn’t enforce the order.

“As an officer of the court, I cannot and will not enforce something that is clearly unconstitutional,” said Bregman, the top prosecutor in the Albuquerque area. “This office will continue to focus on criminals of any age that use guns in the commission of a crime.”

Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen said he was uneasy about how gun owners might respond.

Yeah, he should be.  Next up, on Monday morning the federal courts will face at least two emergency cases from briefs filed over the weekend.  One is friend of this blog Stephen Stamboulieh working for GOA.  Here is the brief.  The second has been filed by the National Association of Gun Rights.

Perhaps the district attorney knows about this and doesn’t want to be responsible for bankrupting New Mexico.  The governor has given every gun owner in Albuquerque a way to make quick money if this is true.

Finally, Fenix ammunition posted a warning to the Governor.  There are consequences to her actions.

The beacons have been lit.@GovMLG – we are going to flood your state with ordnance.

We’re offering free shipping on ammunition to your entire state until you resign, or until you’re impeached.

The choice is yours. pic.twitter.com/UE2wW8oJFN

— Feni Ammunition (@FenixAmmunition) September 9, 2023

For those who don’t grok the big picture, this has all been done under a “health” order.  The controllers got a taste of unlimited power under the Covid regime, and they liked it.  They are addicted to the power and want more.  This is a trial balloon, and the Governor must be disobeyed, stopped, and held accountable.

Other than actual firearms confiscations, this is a recapitulation of what happened in New Orleans during Katrina.  In this case, the stakes aren’t quite as high – there is no going about armed.  But if she could effect confiscation, she would.

On that subject, I sent out an email thread earlier today where I said this.

This is a very big deal.  She isn’t some loose cannon.  They’re probing for weaknesses.
This is similar to the firearms confiscations in New Orleans during Katrina.  I never got full resolution on exactly what happened with Katrina and there are open issues for me on that.

I exchanged email with Gen. Honore and he pointed the finger of blame at the Mayor of NO rather than himself or the NG (who accompanied the thugs who went door-to-door).  He tried to distance himself from it all and said he wasn’t involved.

I met two guys at a gun show in Charlotte who I think were involved as contractors going door-to-door. They were jerks.  The general’s finger pointing makes a bit of sense to me given Posse Comitatus.

I submitted a FOIA on whether the NG troops were armed and under arming orders, and if so, who issued the orders.  Whenever troops are armed, (1) range time and qualifications must be conducted, (2) arming orders must be issues, and finally, (3) the lawyers (JAGS) have to write and train the troops on RUF/ROE (rules for the use of force, rules of engagement – in this case, I suspect RUF rather than ROE).

I never got an answer to the FOIA.  I exchanged email with the state two more times.  The first time someone seemed to take it seriously and told me he would follow up. The second time, he ignored me.  It was never completed.  A number of years old now, it hangs out there as an incomplete FOIA.

Did Gov. Bobby Jendel have his AG issue arming orders?  Did the troops have ammo in their mags?  Did the JAGS write RUF?  Who conducted the confiscations?  Was it all at the hands of a rogue city major of NO?  Was General Honore involved? After all, he is a known gun controller.

Inquiring minds want to know.

This is just a recapitulation of firearm confiscations in NO, but under a different pretext. In this case, no one can go about armed.

The bottom line is that there will be massive disobedience, her enforcers won’t enforce her edict, if they do she be responsible for giving gun owners a get-rich-quick scheme on behalf of the government of New Mexico, she will be in court on Monday, and her state is going to be flooded with ordnance.  She is in way, way, way over her head.  She shouldn’t have listened to the current administration when they decided to launch the trial balloon in her state.

I wonder if she thought about “unintended consequences?”

UPDATE #1:

From Legal Insurrection, four lawsuits filed so far.

Hey Ted, conceal and open carry are state laws that I have jurisdiction over. If you’re really interested in helping curb gun violence, I’d welcome you to join our next police academy class. https://t.co/Odf9fNbO2W https://t.co/17ca1dYpLc

— Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham (@GovMLG) September 10, 2023

Imagine someone thinking that because she’s the governor, she can suspend state laws regardless of the House and Senate. That’s the “republic” we live in.

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.