Tag: gun control

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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Biden Seeks to ‘Outlaw’ AR-15s After Failed Trump Assassination

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden spoke to the NAACP and called for Congress to “outlaw” AR-15s and similar rifles in the wake of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

Biden began by saying, “If you’re going to speak about violence, you’re going t to speak about guns.”

He said, “An AR-15 was used in shooting Donald Trump, this was the ‘assault weapon’ that killed so many others, including children. It’s time to outlaw them. I did it once and I will do it again.”

Biden also repeated his false claim that “more children in America die of gunshot wounds than any other reason.”

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Congress ‘Can Regulate Virtually Anything’

Two years after Harvard gave him the boot and three years before Congress banned LSD, Timothy Leary set out on a road trip from Millbrook, New York, in a rented station wagon. The 45-year-old psychologist and psychedelic enthusiast was accompanied by his girlfriend, Rosemary Woodruff, and his two teenaged children, Susan and Jack. They had planned a month-long family vacation in Yucatan, Mexico, after which Leary and Woodruff would stay behind to work on his newly commissioned autobiography. Leary and his companions arrived in Laredo, Texas, on the evening of December 22, 1965, and crossed the international bridge to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

At the customs station on the Mexican side of the bridge, Leary recalled in his 1983 memoir Flashbacks, he learned that the visa he needed would not be approved until the next day. That turned out to be the least of his troubles.

“All the grass is out of the car, right?” Leary asked as he started driving the station wagon back across the bridge. Jack had flushed his, but Woodruff said she had been unable to retrieve her “silver box” of pot from her bag because “there were two uniformed porters leaning against the car.” Since trying to toss the contraband off the side of the bridge seemed inadvisable, Susan hid it in her clothing.

At the inspection point on the U.S. side, Leary explained that he “didn’t enter Mexico” and had nothing to declare. After a suspicious customs agent picked up what looked like a cannabis seed from the car floor near Leary’s feet, the encounter escalated into searches of the vehicle, the passengers, and their luggage. A “personal search” of Susan discovered what the U.S. Supreme Court would later describe as “a silver snuff box containing semi-refined marihuana and three partially smoked marihuana cigarettes”—about half an ounce, all told.

Leary claimed ownership of the stash, which earned him a 30-year prison sentence. That astonishingly severe penalty was based on two federal charges: transportation of illegally imported marijuana and failure to pay a transfer tax on the contraband.

Those puzzling charges provide a window on the constitutionally dubious origins of federal drug prohibition, which was smuggled into the U.S. Code disguised as tax legislation. Federal gun control laws followed a similar route, expanding along with conventional conceptions of congressional power.

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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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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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Gullibility 101

We watch Washington D.C. like we’d watch a ship steaming way too fast toward a crowd on the pier.  Our nation’s capital is so filled with corruption, ladder-climbing, and plain stupidity that it’s embarrassing to watch. This is America?!?

Yet the Democrats we know personally are not guilty of those sins. Many are smart, hard-working, kind, educated people and yet they voted for the wasted shell in the oval office — a man who is not only suffering from dementia, but has never been very bright, or very good. A lot of these lovely people appear to be planning to vote for him again. How can that be? How can even a third of our compatriots think Biden is okay? I believe it to be one of the most startling paradoxes of our time. These proud, sophisticated, overeducated folks are, unlike the power brokers of the party, simply naive. They’re hopelessly gullible. How they can possibly be both — naïve and sophisticated — is beyond me. For these lefty-leanies, the Brooklyn Bridge is always for sale at half price and someone else will pick up the difference. Let us list the facets of the Democrat fairytale:

  1. They assume that other people are just like them — hardworking, clean, healthy, nice, fun-loving. It just doesn’t occur to them that the man dragging two kids across the border isn’t their father and is only interested in selling them. The fact that most of these illegals are young men of military age doesn’t ring any bells for the average Democrat. Somehow the only reaction to these intruders is to feel sorry for them — not to be cautious about their motives, or to be concerned about what diseases they may carry or where their education stopped.
  2. They think people are what they portray themselves to be. To them, there is no angry, sexually abused, misfit of a young man behind the exuberant makeup and the green sequined dress. From their point of view, college professors are wise, good, and superior and have no intention of disabusing your child of his upbringing. No priest or Boy Scout leader has any perverse designs on your kids. How cynical to suspect that they’re anything other than caring and compassionate. Ambrose Bierce, in his hilarious book The Devil’s Dictionary, defines cynic as a person “who sees things as they really are.” Then I guess I’m a cynic. Won’t you join me?
  3. This attitude slithers out from the left’s assumption that there is basically no evil, no sin, that people are all basically good (except Republicans, of course). A middle-class leftist can look at a drag queen reading to three-year-olds and not see anything perverse and nasty. A thief is just someone overreacting to some 200-year-old atrocity done to someone else’s ancestor. A rapist just needs counseling. The 85,000 missing kids? Oh look! There’s a squirrel!
  4. Speaking of naivete — this one is a doozy. These fanciful folk think that a law passed is a law obeyed — to the letter. Don’t like guns? Ban them and they will be no more. In fact, there will be no more violence. Look at what happened with bipartisan Prohibition — did everyone just suck it up and quit drinking? No. The Mafia was born.

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US surgeon general declares gun violence a public health emergency

The U.S. surgeon general on Tuesday declared gun violence a public health crisis, driven by the fast-growing number of injuries and deaths involving firearms in the country.

The advisory issued by Dr. Vivek Murthy, the nation’s top doctor, came as the U.S. grappled with another summer weekend marked by mass shootings that left dozens of people dead or wounded.

“People want to be able to walk through their neighborhoods and be safe,” Murthy told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “America should be a place where all of us can go to school, go to work, go to the supermarket, go to our house of worship, without having to worry that that’s going to put our life at risk.”

To drive down gun deaths, Murthy calls on the U.S. to ban automatic rifles, introduce universal background checks for purchasing guns, regulate the industry, pass laws that would restrict their use in public spaces and penalize people who fail to safely store their weapons.

None of those suggestions can be implemented nationwide without legislation passed by Congress, which typically recoils at gun control measures. Some state legislatures, however, have enacted or may consider some of the surgeon general’s proposals.

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Schumer Seeks Bill to Ban Bump Stocks After Supreme Court Ruling

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on June 14 called for legislation to outlaw bump stocks after the Supreme Court struck down a President Donald Trump-era ban on the gun accessory.

A 6–3 opinion by the high court found that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) exceeded its authority when it interpreted a federal firearms statute to outlaw the use of bump stocks. Bump stocks are attached to the butt end of a rifle, causing them to fire again by bumping against the finger on recoil.

“As I warned the Trump administration at the time, the only way to permanently close this loophole is through legislation. Senate Democrats are ready to pass legislation to ban bump stocks but we will need votes from Senate Republicans,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement.

The ATF in 2018, with the support of President Trump, reversed its earlier position and declared bump stocks illegal in response to the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, in which a gunman used firearms equipped with bump stocks to fire multiple guns more rapidly, killing 60 and leaving hundreds wounded.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito filed a concurrence on June 14 that emphasized Congress’s role. “There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns,” he said. “Congress can amend the law—and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.”

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee,called the Supreme Court decision “deeply disappointing.” 

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