Tag: 2nd amendment

Zuckerberg’s Meta Censors US Paralympian in Bid to ‘Foster a Safe Community’

When will Meta pull the plug on someone representing the United States at the Paralympic Games in Paris, which start later this month?

When their sport uses a gun, of course.

According to a Wall Street Journal report late last month, McKenna Geer, a member of the U.S. team, will be competing in the air rifle event. However, last month, she said she was censored for posting about shooting-related things. Which, as you know, people who shoot for sport are known to do.

Geer, 28, has a condition known as amyoplasia arthrogryposis, which affects the muscles. You’d think that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta — which runs Facebook and Instagram among its social media holdings — would read the room in terms of shadow-banning her. You’d be wrong.

“Earlier this month, Ms. Geer shared a photo on Instagram of the air rifle she used to qualify for the Paralympic Games,” the Journal reported on July 24.

“The company flagged the photo as out of line with its guidelines and informed her that nonfollowers wouldn’t be able to view her account or content in Instagram’s search, explore suggested users or similar features.”

The company’s explanation?

“Our Recommendations Guidelines help to promote content that fosters a safe community on Instagram,” it said.

Geer, who apparently knew this was a possibility, took to Instagram on July 17 to write about Meta’s decision.

“I have always feared the day the media would censor my sport and speech just because I use firearms,” she wrote. “That day has finally come.”

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Official White House Social Media: “Ban Assault Weapons, It’s Time”

The White House X account posted, “It’s time,” on Wednesday alongside an image reading, “Ban Assault Weapons.”

The alarming post was thrashed online, with commenters roasting the Biden-Harris White House for hoping to destroy the Second Amendment.

One X user pointed out the irony that Harris’ running mate Tim Walz drove tens of thousands of his constituents to buy “assault rifles” in response to the deadly BLM riots of 2020 that destroyed major Minnesota cities under his watch.

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NJ’s AR-15 ban is unconstitutional, but 10-round magazine limit OK, federal judge rules

New Jersey’s ban on the AR-15 rifle is unconstitutional, but the state’s cap on magazines over 10 rounds passes constitutional muster, a federal judge said Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Peter Sheridan’s 69-page opinion says he was compelled to rule as he did because of the Supreme Court’s rulings in firearms cases, particularly the 2022 Bruen decision that expanded gun rights.

Sheridan’s ruling left both 2nd Amendment advocates and the state attorney general planning appeals. The judge temporarily delayed the order for 30 days.

Pointing to the high court’s precedents, Sheridan suggested Congress and the president could do more to curb gun-related violence nationwide.

“It is hard to accept the Supreme Court’s pronouncements that certain firearms policy choices are ‘off the table’ when frequently, radical individuals possess and use these same firearms for evil purposes,” he wrote.

Sheridan added: “Where the Supreme Court has set for the law of our Nation, as a lower court, I am bound to follow it. … This principle — combined with the reckless inaction of our governmental leaders to address the mass shooting tragedy afflicting our Nation — necessitates the Court’s decision.”

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Pro-Gun Organization Wins Lawsuit Against ATF’s Trigger Prohibition

On July 23, 2024, The National Association for Gun Rights was victorious in a summary judgment from the Federal District Court, Northern District of Texas, which overturned the ATF’s prohibition on forced reset triggers.

The ruling was issued by Judge Reed O’Connor, which vacated the ATF’s prohibition on forced reset triggers, declaring resoundingly that the ATF went beyond the scope of its statutory powers by redefining forced reset triggers as machine guns. The ruling was partly based on the Supreme Court’s recent Cargill decision overturning the ATF’s bump stock prohibition regulation.

Hannah Hill, Executive Director of the National Foundation for Gun Rights (the legal arm of NARG) declared, “We are absolutely thrilled that the court has dealt such a decisive blow to the ATF’s unconstitutional agency overreach. The ATF under the Biden/Harris regime has utterly trampled the Constitution and the rule of law in their eagerness to destroy the Second Amendment. The ATF may appeal this ruling, but precedent and momentum are both on our side, and we fully anticipate the absolute end of the ATF’s unlawful, unconstitutional ban on forced reset triggers.”

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Kamala Harris’ Gun Control Schemes Are No Laughing Matter

Joe Biden lied about guns, Second Amendment rights and nearly everything else so often that even his staunchest supporters stopped taking him seriously. The country’s 46th President beclowned himself with his own falsehoods.

Biden was a classic fabulist. He invented stories and assigned himself the starring role. Whether he was singlehandedly confronting hunters armed with standard-capacity mags in a Delaware swamp, exaggerating the efficacy of the 1994 federal Assault Weapon Ban or making up colonial cannon prohibitions, Biden received more Pinocchios than Disney, which is one of the reasons why he’ll be sitting in a beach chair rather than behind the Resolute Desk for the next four years.

By comparison, Kamala Harris has been much more circumspect about her anti-gun plans, and despite her maniacal cackle, could prove a more serious opponent to our Second Amendment rights than her former boss ever imagined possible.

Last year, most likely at the insistence of Barack Obama, Biden put Harris in charge of the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which Biden said would “centralize, accelerate, and intensify our work to save more lives more quickly.”

The Office has no website. Its budget has never been made public. Its staffing levels are not known. It operates in secret, without oversight and wields tremendous power. Only three staffers were identified. One has a long association with Obama.

Almost immediately, it became clear that the Office was an incubator and a clearinghouse for anti-gun policy that it pushed out to blue states.

In December 2023, Harris hosted a gaggle of state lawmakers at the White House to showcase the Office’s new gun-control policies. The names of the attendees were not released, nor were the details of the meetings. None of the meetings were recorded or transcribed.

After overseeing the Office, Harris’ anti-gun rhetoric has sharpened, and it is clear what she has in store for law-abiding gun owners if she replaces Biden on a permanent basis.

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DOJ Doubles Down On Claim That Medical Marijuana Patients ‘Endanger Public Safety’ If They Own Guns

The Justice Department is doubling down on its position that medical marijuana patients who possess firearms “endanger public safety,” “pose a greater risk of suicide” and are more likely to commit crimes “to fund their drug habit”—justifying, in the government’s eyes, a federal ban on gun ownership by cannabis consumers.

Following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month that upheld the constitutionality of governments setting certain gun restrictions in a case centered around domestic violence-related prohibitions, the justices remanded a pending cannabis and Second Amendment rights case back to the lower court for reconsideration.

Late last week, plaintiffs and DOJ submitted briefs in a separate case that responded to the potential implications of the high court’s latest decision for the federal statute barring gun ownership by cannabis consumers.

In the filings submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, DOJ urged the panel to affirm an initial district court ruling that deemed the cannabis and firearms ban to be constitutional, while appellants are requesting a reversal of the order.

This is the latest development in the two-year case, with a group of Florida medical cannabis patients arguing that their Second Amendment rights are being violated because they cannot lawfully buy firearms so long as they are using cannabis as medicine, despite acting in compliance with state law.

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Ammo Vending Machines Arrive At Grocery Stores In Red States 

Nothing says ‘Merica like supermarkets with automated vending machines stocked with ammunition. A select number of supermarkets across Alabama and Oklahoma have these new machines. This means you can leave the store with milk, eggs, and boxes of 9mm and .223 rounds. 

American Rounds installed AI-powered ammunition vending machines in several Alabama and Oklahoma supermarket stores. These vending machines are said to feature built-in AI technology, card scanning capability, and facial recognition software to verify that buyers are 21 or older and match the identity on the license. 

“Our automated ammo dispensers are accessible 24/7, ensuring that you can buy ammunition on your own schedule, free from the constraints of store hours and long lines,” American Rounds notes on its website. 

American Rounds shows six supermarkets, including two Fresh Value stores in Alabama and four Super C Mart stores in Oklahoma, have these new retail automated ammo dispensers. 

In an interview with Newsweek, Grants Magers, CEO of American Rounds, said that the company’s AI-powered ammunition vending machines have recently been expanded to eight across four states. 

“We have over 200 store requests for AARM [Automated Ammo Retail Machine] units covering approximately nine states currently and that number is growing daily,” Magers said. 

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Supreme Court Throws Out Pro-Gun Group’s “Assault Weapons” And Magazine Ban Case

On July 2, 2024, the United States Supreme Court rejected certiorari in National Association for Gun Rights v. Naperville. The case is currently going through the discovery, trial, and summary judgment phases at the district court.

“Today’s decision tells the lower courts they’re more than welcome to trample Bruen to their hearts’ content – at least for the time being. The question all along has been whether the Supreme Court was okay with the lower courts’ outright and unanimous defiance of the plain holdings of Bruen. Today we got our answer: for now at least, the Second Amendment IS a second-class right, and it will remain so until the Supreme Court decides to stop ducking the issue,” declared Hannah Hill Executive Director for the National Foundation for Gun Rights. 

The US District Court rejected a preliminary injunction blocking the enforcement of the law, which plaintiffs subsequently appealed to the 7th Circuit. The 7th Circuit issued a ruling upholding the district court’s denial of preliminary injunction, determining that AR-15s are not firearms under the Second Amendment in complete defiance to multiple precedents established by the Supreme Court.

The National Association for Gun Rights appealed to the Supreme Court, calling on the high court to overturn the 7th Circuit’s ruling and establish a nationwide precedent definitively throwing out gun prohibitions. 

Justice Clarence Thomas published a statement describing the 7th Circuit’s ruling “nonsensical” and declared “It is difficult to see how the Seventh Circuit could have concluded that the most widely owned semiautomatic rifles are not “Arms” protected by the Second Amendment.” Thomas added that when the case returns to the Court in a final judgment posture, the Supreme Court “can – and should” review the 7th Circuit’s decision if it maintains it preliminary injunction reasoning.

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Watchdog sues for ATF records about shooting death of Arkansas Airport Official

The watchdog group Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) seeking Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) records regarding the fatal shooting of Little Rock, Arkansas, resident and Executive Director of the Clinton National Airport: Bryan Malinowski.  

Malinowski was shot and wounded by ATF agents in shootout an ATF raid on his home in March. He died of his injuries. When originally asked for pertinent records, ATF produced only heavily redacted search warrant court filings. 

The lawsuit was filed June 10, 2024, after the ATF failed to respond adequately to an April 16 FOIA request for: 

  1. All emails and text messages sent to and from ATF officials regarding Little Rock resident Bryan Malinowski who died in an ATF raid on March 19, 2024.
  2. All records related to the raid on the home of Bryan Malinowski, including but not limited to, re-operational briefing documents, raid plans, investigative reports, memoranda, warrants and audio and video recordings.

On April 22, 2024, Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to ATF Director Steven Dettelbach, asking for details about “the deadly pre-dawn raid conducted by ATF in Little Rock, Arkansas, while executing a search warrant on the home of Bryan Malinowski, a local airport executive.”

An affidavit, which was unsealed after Malinowski’s death and produced to Judicial Watch, alleged he unlawfully sold guns without a license.

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U.S. Supreme Court Sends Marijuana And Gun Case Back To Lower Court, Emboldening DOJ’s Defense Of Firearm Ban

The U.S. Supreme Court has sent a case concerning gun rights for marijuana consumers back down to a lower court after issuing a potentially relevant ruling in a separate Second Amendment case, and the Justice Department is now reiterating its position that cannabis use warrants a ban on firearm ownership.

The high court has remanded several gun cases to their respective lower courts in light of the ruling in United States v. Rahimi, which affirmed the government’s right to restrict gun rights for a man with restraining orders for domestic violence. The cases heading back to lower levels include at least one related to the cannabis ban, and DOJ is now arguing that the SCOTUS decision “undermines” a federal court’s ruling that deemed the prohibition for marijuana consumers to be unconstitutional last year.

In a supplemental letter brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where the United States vs. Daniels case was remanded by SCOTUS, the Justice Department said history “supports the government’s authority to disarm categories of persons whose firearm possession would endanger themselves or others.”

“Consistent with that principle, Congress may temporarily disarm unlawful users of controlled substances during periods of active drug use, when they present a special danger of firearm misuse,” it said. “The Supreme Court’s decision in Rahimi also is in tension with this Court’s opinion in United States v. Daniels, which made some of the very methodological errors that Rahimi corrected to find Section 922(g)(3) unconstitutional as applied to a marijuana user. The district court’s judgment should be reversed.”

DOJ has argued in multiple federal cases over the couple year that the statute banning cannabis consumers from owning or possessing guns is constitutional because it’s consistent with the nation’s history of disarming “dangerous” individuals.

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