Tag: 2nd amendment

St. Louis mayor wants to ban AR-15s, AK-47s on city streets

St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones will introduce new legislation that would ban AR-15s, AK-47s, and similar “military-grade” weapons on city streets.

In a Tuesday morning press conference, Jones announced her intent to introduce new gun safety regulations with support from the Board of Aldermen.

Jones said the legislation would be designed to:

  • Prohibit military-grade weapons on city streets
  • Prevent the transfer or sale of guns to minors
  • Take action on military-grade guns and similar untraceable firearms
  • Prepare St. Louis for the passage of Blair’s Law to ban celebratory gunfire
  • Prohibit anyone convicted of insurrection or hate crimes from having guns in St. Louis

“My daughter was killed with a military-style weapon, which was an AK-47. People of the military know what type of impact those type of weapons do,” said Erica Jones, whose daughter, Whitney, was murdered on Aug. 13, 2015, in the Walnut Park area.

She said Whitney, 24, was the mother of a five-year-old. She was studying to become a nurse and worked two jobs.

“Her oldest sister held her when she took her last words,” Erica Jones said. She said the crime remains unsolved.

“What do you tell a 13-year-old young man who cannot see his mother, he cannot smell her, he cannot touch her?” she said.

Jones was one of many advocates who shared their stories at a listening session hosted by Mayor Jones on Tuesday.

“Gun violence is a plague. And it’s painful touch has stung families across our region,” the mayor said.

She said on average, 1,351 people die from guns in Missouri each year. Jones said this push comes in an effort to tackle gun violence in St. Louis City.

“Gun violence is a public health crisis that impacts families and communities in every neighborhood across our city,” she said. “We’re coming together around a shared vision: A safer, stronger St. Louis that is ready to stand up for our values.”

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Licensed Federal Firearms Dealers Say Biden Is Targeting Them

Federal Firearms License holders (FFLs) are accusing President Biden of targeting them after his administration revoked the licenses of 122 FFLs during the last fiscal year.

FOX News reported that the Biden Administration revoked 90 in the previous fiscal year.

The highest number that was revoked during any fiscal year in Trump or Obama administrations was 81.

Breitbart News spoke to FFLs at various gun stores and they indicated they are now operating in an atmosphere where a clerical error–a line left blank on a background check or an area improperly completed–could mean they lose their FFLs.

On July 7, 2023, the Truth About Guns pointed out that in the current fiscal year “ATF has conducted 6,609 inspections of Federal Firearms Licensees … That’s closing in on 2022’s annual total of 7,502 for the entire year. ATF inspectors are conducting an average of 647.33 inspections across the nation per month, topping 2022’s monthly average of 587.66.”

FOX News indicated that FFLs believe they are “being unfairly targeted for political reasons over paperwork errors as part of an agenda to combat gun violence which President Biden has vocally pushed.”

Anthony Navarro, one of the FFLs who lost his license last year, noted that the errors that cost him his license were made regarding people who were not prohibited from purchasing guns.

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Supreme Court reinstates regulation of ghost guns, firearms without serial numbers

The Supreme Court is reinstating a regulation aimed at reining in the proliferation of ghost guns, firearms without serial numbers that have been turning up at crime scenes across the nation in increasing numbers.

The court on Tuesday voted 5-4 to put on hold a ruling from a federal judge in Texas that invalidated the Biden administration’s regulation of ghost gun kits. The regulation will be in effect while the administration appeals the ruling to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans — and potentially the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined with the court’s three liberal members to form the majority. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas would have kept the regulation on hold during the appeals process. Neither side provided an explanation.

The Justice Department had told the court that local law enforcement agencies seized more than 19,000 ghost guns at crime scenes in 2021, a more than tenfold increase in just five years.

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Law Profs Tout Qualified Immunity for Unconstitutional Gun Restrictions

Some ideas are so terrible that combining them into a cocktail of awfulness makes rotten sense. So it is with gun control and qualified immunity: Why not mix impunity for violating basic rights with denial of a specific right so as to maximize the harm? At least, that’s the inspiration that struck two law professors who propose qualified immunity for enforcing even overtly unconstitutional gun control measures. While the duo sees the idea as much as a means of weakening officials’ protections from liability as for promoting restrictions on private arms, it’s a dangerous innovation that could entrench authoritarianism.

“Gun regulation seems to have hit a legal brick wall,” complain Guha Krishnamurthi, associate professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, and Peter Salib, assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center in Notre Dame Law Review Reflection. “In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, the Supreme Court threw out what had been the standard approach for applying the Second Amendment to gun laws.”

Krishnamurthi and Salib argue that Bruen impedes “regulatory innovation” and leaves lawmakers “shackled to the regulations of the distant past.” That’s an interesting way of regretting that government is bound to respect constitutional protections for individual rights. But the two legal thinkers have a fresh regulatory innovation to propose for bypassing such protections—or, at least, a fresh way of applying a controversial legal doctrine to achieve their desired ends.

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Arkansas Law Protecting Medical Marijuana Patients’ Gun Rights Officially Takes Effect

A new law officially takes effect in Arkansas on Tuesday to clarify that medical marijuana patients can obtain concealed carry licenses for firearms.

The governor signed the bill in April, just days after it sailed through the legislature with strong majority support.

The newly effective law stipulates that a person’s status as a qualified medical cannabis patient in the state cannot be used “in determining whether an applicant is eligible to be issued a license to carry a concealed handgun.”

State statute has also been amended to clarify that participation in the medical marijuana program doesn’t mean that a person is a chronic or habitual user of a controlled substance, which could otherwise disqualify people from obtaining the concealed carry permit.

The state Department of Health (DOH) will be barred from disclosing a person’s patient status to the state police as part of any investigation into concealed carry eligibility.

While some states have moved to more broadly preserve firearm rights for cannabis patients and consumers, the new law signed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) is more narrowly tailored to the concealed carry issue.

Arkansas does not require people to have a permit for concealed carry, but some Arkansas firearms owners prefer to have one because of the protections it can bestow when traveling in other states and because of the clarity it provides during police encounters.

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The Ranks of Gun Owners Grow, and So Does Their Resistance to Scrutiny

Believe it or not, people are reluctant to tell total strangers about their potentially controversial activities. In particular, Rutgers University researchers say, gun ownership is something many Americans decline to reveal when questioned by people they don’t know. That’s especially true of women and minorities newly among the ranks of gun owners amidst the chaos of recent years. Academics are unhappy that privacy-minded respondents impair their understanding of the world we live in, but such evasion is an inevitable consequence of decades of fiery debate and punitive gun policies.

Fibbing to Nosy Strangers

“Some individuals are falsely denying firearm ownership, resulting in research not accurately capturing the experiences of all firearm owners in the U.S.,” says Allison Bond, a doctoral student with Rutgers University’s New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and lead author of “Predicting Potential Underreporting of Firearm Ownership in a Nationally Representative Sample,” published last month in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. “More concerningly, these individuals are not being reached with secure firearm storage messaging and firearm safety resources, which may result in them storing their firearms in an unsecure manner, which in turn increases the risk for firearm injury and death.”

Bond frames the problem of dishonesty among survey respondents as posing a danger to those surveyed since they don’t receive proper firearm safety information. But her deeper concern is with the validity of research into firearms culture and policy in a country where experts don’t have anywhere near as good a handle on the prevalence of gun ownership as they had believed.

“The implications of false denials of firearms ownership are substantial,” claim the authors. “First, such practices would result in an underestimation of firearms ownership rates and diminish our capacity to test the association between firearm access and various firearm violence-related outcomes. Furthermore, such practices would skew our understanding of the demographics of firearm ownership, such that we would overemphasize the characteristics of those more apt to disclose. Third, the mere existence of a large group of individuals who falsely deny firearm ownership highlights that intervention aimed at promoting firearm safety (e.g., secure firearm storage) may fail to reach communities in need.”

It should be emphasized that the report authors didn’t conclusively identify anybody who denied gun ownership as a gun owner. Instead, the report dealt in probabilities, with the researchers building profiles of confirmed gun owners. They then applied the profiles across their sample of 3,500 respondents to estimate who was likely fibbing about not owning guns. The results depend on the probability threshold applied, but they came up with 1,206 confirmed owners, between 1,243 and 2,059 non-owners, and between 220 and 1,036 potential but secretive owners lying about their status.

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Federal Court Delivers Blow to ATF’s Ban on ‘Ghost Guns’

A federal judge delivered a blow to the Biden administration’s gun control policy by reversing a federal ban on so-called “ghost guns” and argued that the ATF overstepped its authority.

Texas-based United States District Court Judge Reed O’Connor on Friday ruled that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) erred by saying that unfinished gun parts are guns and can, therefore, be regulated. His ruling said that parts aren’t guns under federal law.

“This case presents the question of whether the federal government may lawfully regulate partially manufactured firearm components, related firearm products, and other tools and materials in keeping with the Gun Control Act of 1968,” wrote O’Connor in his order (pdf). “Because the court concludes that the government cannot regulate those items without violating federal law, the court holds that the government’s recently enacted final rule … is unlawful agency action taken in excess of the ATF’s statutory jurisdiction. On this basis, the court vacates the final rule.”

His order also stated that the ATF is trying to regulate a gun component as a “frame or receiver,” even after the agency determined “the component in question is not a frame or receiver.” Elaborating, he wrote: “It may not. Logic dictates that a part cannot be both not yet a receiver and receiver at the same time. Defendants’ reliance on that logical contradiction is fatal to their argument.”

Pro-firearms groups and websites cheered the ruling, saying that it was an attempt to claw back what they described as attempts by the Biden administration to grab guns via federal rulemaking. The case was brought by the Firearms Policy Coalition, a pro-Second Amendment group.

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Gavin Newsom proposes 28th Amendment to restrict gun rights

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday said he is proposing the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which will restrict gun rights. 

The proposed amendment would raise the minimum age to purchase firearms to 21, implement universal background checks, create what Newsom called a “reasonable waiting period for gun purchases” and ban civilians from buying so-called “assault weapons,” according to the governor’s announcement on Twitter.

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ATF Says a Quarter Million Guns Registered Under Pistol-Brace Ban

Only a fraction of the guns affected by the ATF’s new rule were registered with the agency during the four-month grace period that ended this week.

The ATF told The Reload on Friday it has received just over a quarter million applications to register pistol-brace-equipped firearms. Registering the affected guns was one path toward avoiding possible criminal punishment for possessing the guns under the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) after the agency implemented a rule reclassifying the firearms as subject to NFA restrictions. The ATF waived the tax requirement for registration to encourage owners to comply before the deadline.

“The final rule provided possessors of such firearms the option to comply with the registration requirements of the National Firearms Act through a tax-free process using either the ATF eForms System or a paper application process with a deadline for such applications of 11:59 PM (ET) on May 31, 2023,” Erik Longnecker, Deputy Chief of the ATF’s Public Affairs Division, told The Reload. “As of June 1, 2023, ATF received 255,162 applications for tax-free registration.”

That number represents just a fraction of the braced guns believed to have been sold in the decade since the ATF first classified a version as outside the scope of the NFA. In the impact assessment for the rule, the ATF estimated that three to seven million devices exist. However, the Congressional Research Service puts the number much higher at somewhere between 10 and 40 million.

That puts the registration rate for pistol-brace-equipped guns at between 0.6 percent and eight percent.

Longnecker noted that owners of the affected guns could also comply with the rule by either dismantling the firearms and destroying the braces or turning them over to the ATF. He said the agency does not know how many Americans may have taken those routes.

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Hunter Biden, Second Amendment Warrior?

President Joe Biden has long been an advocate for strict restrictions on guns, so his son makes something of an unlikely advocate for expanded gun rights. But Hunter Biden may soon find himself on the opposite side of his father’s gun control crusade in at least one aspect. The younger Biden is reportedly considering a challenge to a federal law that bans illegal drug users from owning guns.

The issue hits close to home for Hunter: The Department of Justice is investigating a gun purchase he made in 2018. This is a time period during which he has admitted to regularly using crack cocaine. That could put him afoul of the law against drug users having guns.

Hunter Biden’s “lawyers have already told Justice Department officials that, if their client is charged with the gun crime, they will challenge the law under the Second Amendment, according to a person familiar with the private discussions granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly,” reported Politico. “That could turn a case that is already fraught with political consequences into a high-profile showdown over the right to bear arms.”

Here’s hoping?

The provision in question—part of the Gun Control Act of 1968—is, frankly, insane, preventing any person “who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance” from buying a gun. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has interpreted this provision to mean that anyone who has used any illegal drug in the past 12 months cannot legally purchase a gun.

And the time may be just right for challenging it. This Supreme Court has proved willing to strike down overreaching gun laws.

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