Author Topic: We the Well-armed People (gun and knife rights stuff ) Second Amendment  (Read 895647 times)

Crafty_Dog

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Poll: Gun laws do not matter
« Reply #2200 on: December 29, 2021, 03:08:11 AM »
GUN CONTROL

Voters: Gun laws make ‘no difference’ in crime wave

BY SEAN SALAI THE WASHINGTON TIMES

A new poll finds that more than eight of 10 U.S. voters believe strict gun control laws in major cities either make no difference in the current retail crime surge or make it worse.

The survey by the Trafalgar Group revealed that 47.1% of respondents from all political affiliations said that “the strict gun laws in most major cities” make “no difference” in the current retail crime surge and 37.3% believe they make it “worse.” Just 15.6% of voters said they believed the gun laws make the retail crime surge “better.”

Pollster Robert Cahaly, who founded Trafalgar Group in 2016, said the findings echo a recent polling trend that shows a growing voter backlash against progressive police reform policies.

“There seems to be a growing consensus among urban residents that less police, releasing criminals and failure to prosecute are making them feel less safe,” Mr. Cahaly said. “They are frustrated that unlike most who live in rural and suburban areas, city residents don’t feel they have the right to protect themselves due to gun restrictions that only hurt law-abiding citizens.”

The poll showed that large numbers of likely Democrat, Republican and independent voters find strict gun laws ineff ective, although Democrats proved likeliest to find them helpful.

While 30.1% of Democrats said strict gun laws make the retail crime surge “better,” only 9.8% of independents and 7.3% of Republicans said the same.

The survey echoes recent polls that show a sharp slide in support for gun control laws.

A Quinnipiac poll released Nov. 19 found that 47% of registered voters support stricter gun laws and 48% oppose them — the lowest level of support for stricter gun laws since late 2015 in Quinnipiac’s annual polling.

On Nov. 17, a Gallup poll found that 52% of Americans say that the “laws covering the sales of firearms” should be stricter — down from 57% in 2020 and 64% in 2019. This was also the lowest level of support in Gallup’s annual poll since 2014.

“This year’s decrease is driven by a 15-point plunge among independents,” Gallup said in a press release, adding that support for stricter gun control laws often drops while Democrats control the White House.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted Dec. 10-11 found that only 33% of Americans approve of how President Biden is handling the issue of gun violence, with 66% disapproving.

This year’s drop in voter support for stricter gun control laws has not come with a drop in incidents of mass shootings. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 683 mass shootings with at least four victims injured or killed this year as of Dec. 27.

Rick Green, founder of the Patriot Academy program that trains young conservative leaders, attributed the sagging support for stricter gun control laws to conservative messaging on crime.

“Restrictive gun laws have never worked and never will because they empower the criminal who ignores them, while disarming the citizen who becomes a victim,” Mr. Green said. “Government should be encouraging gun ownership and training, rather than making it harder for citizens to defend themselves.”

Mirroring likely voter turnout demographics, 39.3% of respondents in the new Trafalgar poll identified as Democrats, 35.6% as Republicans and 25.1% as independents. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.99% at the 95% confidence level.

The firm distributes its survey questionnaires using a mixed methodology of live callers, integrated voice response, text messages, emails and two other proprietary digital methods that it doesn’t share publicly.

According to Trafalgar, the survey of 1,076 likely general election voters was conducted Dec. 17-21. The poll was conducted on behalf of the nonprofit Convention of States Action, which advocates for returning federal powers to the states

G M

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Re: Byrna SD: less lethal self defense
« Reply #2201 on: December 29, 2021, 07:33:53 AM »
Paintball re-engineered and repurposed for pepper spray and self defense.

https://byrna.com/collections/non-lethal-self-defense-byrna-sd

Comments, Crafty, G M?

OC spray has it’s place. I carry it every day, but when you need a gun, you need a gun.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: We the Well-armed People (gun and knife rights stuff )
« Reply #2202 on: December 29, 2021, 02:51:55 PM »
If it ain't a gun but looks like a gun my thought is you can get shot for looking like you have a gun.

G M

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Re: We the Well-armed People (gun and knife rights stuff )
« Reply #2203 on: December 29, 2021, 05:50:13 PM »
If it ain't a gun but looks like a gun my thought is you can get shot for looking like you have a gun.

Happens all the time.



G M

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Crafty_Dog

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WT: 9th Circuit rules shutdowns of gun stores for pandemic was unconstitutional
« Reply #2209 on: January 24, 2022, 03:58:56 AM »
Court rules shutdown of gun stores for pandemic was unconstitutional

BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The coronavirus pandemic cannot be an excuse to shut down gun stores, a federal appeals court ruled last week, delivering a belated spanking to a California county that shuttered stores and firing ranges in the early days of the virus.

Los Angeles County and Ventura County both imposed shutdown orders in 2020, with Ventura’s closure lasting 48 days and Los Angeles’ lasting 11 days.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in two rulings last Thursday, said those orders left gun owners without a way to obtain ammunition or practice at firing ranges and denied those seeking to be owners a chance to obtain weapons — all in violation of the right to bear arms under the Constitution’s Second Amendment.

“Neither pandemic nor even war wipes away the Constitution,” wrote Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, in a concurring opinion.

The shutdowns happened even as the counties allowed other business. Ventura County, for example, let hardware stores, bicycle shops and boatyards remain open, and the county allowed people to go golfing. The county never explained why those activities were more “essential” than firearms purchases or practice, the appeals court said.

Those who violated the shutdown orders faced arrest and jail.

The ruling comes as the U.S. enters its third year of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. The shutdowns of the early days sparked massive legal battles with houses of worship, in particular, arguing that closing their doors was a violation of Americans’ religious rights.

In the case of the California gun orders, lower courts had upheld the county policies, finding they were a fair approach to a fast-moving health crisis.

The appeals court, in its ruling, said policies infringing on core constitutional rights must meet a higher standard than that. The policies must be narrowly tailored to meet a compelling government interest. The court ruled that neither county offered that kind of justification.

The ruling was 3-0. All three judges were appointed by Republican presidents — a rarity on the famously slanted 9th Circuit.

Indeed, Judge Lawrence Van-Dyke, who wrote the chief opinion for the panel, also wrote a separate opinion predicting that his colleagues will demand what’s known as an en banc review of the panel’s decision and will eventually vote to overturn the ruling.

“Our circuit has ruled on dozens of Second Amendment cases, and without fail has ultimately blessed every gun regulation challenged, so we shouldn’t expect anything less here,” Judge VanDyke wrote.

He said that’s a result of the 9th Circuit’s convoluted jurisprudence on gun-rights issues, which makes it easy for judges to justify any gun control measure policymakers come up with.

To prove the point, Judge Van-Dyke then wrote a very tonguein- cheek 15-page opinion coming to the exact opposite conclusion of the court’s ruling this week. The mock opinion caricatured the arguments he expects the court’s more liberal members to make the case justifying the gun shutdown orders.

Judge VanDyke peppered his “alternative draft opinion” with mocking footnotes.

“Guns are dangerous, after all, so the government’s interest in ameliorating such danger is always important. At first we were worried this case might be a problem, because the regulations here don’t really have any nexus to the dangerousness of guns. But COVID-19 is dangerous too, so that substitutes in nicely,” the judge wrote in one of his blistering footnotes.

He ended the mocking draft with a sign-off to his opposing colleagues: “You’re welcome.”

Crafty_Dog

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ccp

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Remington settles law suit
« Reply #2212 on: February 15, 2022, 02:34:09 PM »
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/newtown-shooting-gun-maker-sandy-hook-remington/2022/02/15/id/1056894/

does this open the lawyer flood gates?

I can only imagine the lawyer listers sharing this information
(OR NOT)

 as they try to be the first in the long lines of people who are happy to find deep pockets to go after - any deep pockets.




DougMacG

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Re: Remington settles law suit
« Reply #2213 on: February 15, 2022, 05:05:35 PM »
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/newtown-shooting-gun-maker-sandy-hook-remington/2022/02/15/id/1056894/

does this open the lawyer flood gates?

I can only imagine the lawyer listers sharing this information
(OR NOT)

 as they try to be the first in the long lines of people who are happy to find deep pockets to go after - any deep pockets.
---------------------------------------------------
As I understand it, the case was allowed to go forward as it had to do with the marketing of the product.  A gun owner uses a gun to stop and deter crime.  The ads should emphasize that.  Mass murder is mis-use of the product. 

Use of a car as a getaway car in a bank robbery is not Ford or GM's fault - unless they promoted that use.

I don't know what the content of the marketing in question was.  I doubt they promoted mis-use or crime, but if so, there is liability.
« Last Edit: February 15, 2022, 05:07:13 PM by DougMacG »

Crafty_Dog

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More on Remington
« Reply #2214 on: February 17, 2022, 08:49:18 PM »
https://www.guntalk.com/post/nssf-sandy-hook-settlement?fbclid=IwAR2-m-KsjSfRpPKW7oX-rTlIxsfs40eZmQxiiZZs9AWrhY4fAci-k6foSHM

Yesterday it was announced that the insurance companies representing the former Remington Outdoor Company* had settled the lawsuit brought against it by families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), which is the trade association for the firearms industry released a statement providing important details that will mostly likely not be reported on by most media outlets.



The decision to settle in the Soto v. Bushmaster case was not made by a member of the firearms industry.  The settlement was reached between the plaintiffs and the various insurance carriers that held policies with Remington Outdoor Company (ROC), which effectively no longer exists.

As part of bankruptcy court proceedings, the assets of ROC were sold at auction in September of 2020.  Remington Outdoor Company, which owned the Bushmaster brand, effectively ceased to exist as a going concern.   The lawsuit, however, continued against the estate of the Remington Outdoor Company, essentially ROC’s insurers and their insurance policies in effect at the time.

The settlement also does not alter the fundamental facts of the case. The plaintiffs never produced any evidence that Bushmaster advertising had any bearing or influence over Nancy Lanza’s decision to legally purchase a Bushmaster rifle, nor on the decision of murderer Adam Lanza to steal that rifle, kill his mother in her sleep, and go on to commit the rest of his horrendous crimes. We renew our sincere sympathy for the victims of this unspeakable tragedy and all victims of  violence committed through the misusing of any firearm. But the fact remains that modern sporting rifles are the most popular rifle in America with over 20 million sold to law abiding Americans and rifles, of any kind, are exceedingly rarely used in crime.

The Connecticut Supreme Court wrote in its Soto v. Bushmaster (4-3) opinion, “[T]he plaintiffs allege that the defendants’ wrongful advertising magnified the lethality of the Sandy Hook massacre by inspiring Lanza or causing him to select a more efficiently deadly weapon for his attack. Proving such a causal link at trial may prove to be a Herculean task.”  NSSF believes the Court incorrectly allowed this one claim to go forward to discovery. We remain confident ROC would have prevailed if this case proceeded to trial.

Finally, this settlement orchestrated by insurance companies has no impact on the strength and efficacy of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which remains the law of the land. PLCAA will continue to block baseless lawsuits that attempt to blame lawful industry companies for the criminal acts of third parties.


*Vista Outdoors is the current owner of the Remington brand and was not involved in the lawsuit or decision to settle.


Crafty_Dog

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DougMacG

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We the Well-armed People, Ukraine example!
« Reply #2216 on: March 01, 2022, 06:07:26 PM »
From ccp Ukraine post, Charles C.W. Cooke from National Review:
"Here is what I would like to happen in Ukraine:  Outraged by Russia’s aggression, armed Ukrainians in both the country’s military and its spontaneously formed civilian militias are able to fight hard enough in all regions that the demoralized and confused Russian army retreats with its tail between its legs." 


   - Teachable moment:  Isn't that exactly what we should be preparing for here as our central government slips from the world's greatest power to a country less interested in economic and military strength?  Isn't that exactly what the Founders insisted on preserving for the ages, the ability for citizens to 'spontaneously form armed civilian militias all across the land that would be, in aggregate, more powerful than either a foreign invading force or a threat from within?

The gun control people ask something like this, why do you need more than x bullets to hunt a squirrel? 

Answer:  A squirrel, deer or single attacker is not the largest potential threat we face.  An invading army is.


G M

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Re: We the Well-armed People, Ukraine example!
« Reply #2217 on: March 01, 2022, 06:17:59 PM »
From ccp Ukraine post, Charles C.W. Cooke from National Review:
"Here is what I would like to happen in Ukraine:  Outraged by Russia’s aggression, armed Ukrainians in both the country’s military and its spontaneously formed civilian militias are able to fight hard enough in all regions that the demoralized and confused Russian army retreats with its tail between its legs." 


   - Teachable moment:  Isn't that exactly what we should be preparing for here as our central government slips from the world's greatest power to a country less interested in economic and military strength?  Isn't that exactly what the Founders insisted on preserving for the ages, the ability for citizens to 'spontaneously form armed civilian militias all across the land that would be, in aggregate, more powerful than either a foreign invading force or a threat from within?

The gun control people ask something like this, why do you need more than x bullets to hunt a squirrel? 

Answer:  A squirrel, deer or single attacker is not the largest potential threat we face.  An invading army is.

The second amendment has zero to do with hunting.

DougMacG

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Re: We the Well-armed People, Ukraine example!
« Reply #2218 on: March 01, 2022, 06:58:58 PM »
quote author=G M
"The second amendment has zero to do with hunting."
---------------------

Well he said it.  Joe Biden at SOTU: "magazines that hold a hundred rounds, what are the deer wearing Kevlar vests?"

I guess he didn't read G M's post, or the Founding Fathers or the constitution.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: We the Well-armed People (gun and knife rights stuff )
« Reply #2219 on: March 01, 2022, 07:28:20 PM »
"Answer:  A squirrel, deer or single attacker is not the largest potential threat we face.  An invading army is" e.g. Mexican cartels.

Crafty_Dog

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Key Second Amendment SCOTUS cases
« Reply #2220 on: April 01, 2022, 02:11:03 AM »
https://www.uslawshield.com/key-second-amendment-supreme-court-cases/

Key Second Amendment Supreme Court Cases
March 17th, 2022|Tags: National, Nonvideo|0 Comments
Second Amendment Supreme Court Cases
The Second Amendment protects and reinforces your right to bear arms. But what exactly is that right? How is it defined by the law? As the ultimate interpreter of American law, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) tells us what the Second Amendment does—and doesn’t—protect.

Here’s a simplified breakdown of Second Amendment Supreme Court cases and their impact on our self-defense rights.

New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (Pending)
The Problem
Robert Nash and Brandon Koch were denied a New York concealed carry license because they failed to show “proper cause.” New York’s licensing requirements define proper cause as a special need to defend yourself beyond the general desire to always be prepared. The two men, joined by the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association (a gun rights group), argued that denying the right to carry handguns outside the home for self-defense goes against the very purpose of the Second Amendment.

The Ruling
The Supreme Court heard arguments for this case in late 2021 and has not yet announced a decision. Whatever they decide, it’ll be the first time they’ve directly addressed a major issue regarding an individual’s right to bear arms since McDonald v. City of Chicago in 2010. And it could fundamentally alter how our self-defense rights may be regulated in the future.

As soon as this Second Amendment Supreme Court case is decided, we’ll give you a full breakdown on what it means for your rights.

United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875)
The Problem
A group of individuals partially responsible for the 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana were convicted under the Enforcement Act of 1870 for depriving other citizens of their First and Second Amendment rights.

The Ruling
In this Supreme Court case, every conviction was overturned. The Court noted that the Second Amendment protected individual rights only from the federal government. And the Fourteenth Amendment protected certain rights from state governments, not other people. Because individuals had infringed upon the rights of others, neither protection applied. It was the responsibility of the state government to protect its citizens from other citizens.

This ruling acknowledged that the Constitution doesn’t give us the right to bear arms, it simply protects it from Congress. This left states free to ignore the protections of the Bill of Rights and potentially restrict the rights of entire populations. Although it took 135 years, this was eventually overturned in McDonald v. City of Chicago.

Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 (1886)
The Problem
Herman Presser led a group of roughly 400 men brandishing guns and other weapons (including a sword) in a military-style parade through the streets of Chicago. Presser and the men were part of a social club that supposedly trained people for the duties “expected” of them as citizens, including military practices. However, it was illegal (and still is) in Illinois not only to form private military organizations, but also to do any kind of military drills in the city without permission from the governor. Presser argued this infringed upon his Second Amendment rights because it prevented the people from being prepared to “answer the call of the nation” and protect liberty.

The Ruling
The Supreme Court held yet again that the Second Amendment applied only to the federal government, not state governments. (This ruling was also overturned in McDonald v. City of Chicago.) But there was a small win in this Second Amendment Supreme Court case. SCOTUS noted that there IS a limit to how far states can restrict gun ownership; states can’t ban the people from owning weapons, “so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining the public security…”

United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939)
The Problem
Jack Miller and Frank Layton were prosecuted for transporting a 12-gauge shotgun with a barrel length of less than 18 inches from Oklahoma to Arkansas without the registration or tax stamp required under the National Firearms Act (NFA). The two men argued that the NFA and restricting or taxing specific types of firearms violated the Second Amendment.

The Ruling
The Supreme Court held that the NFA, which places registration requirements on machine guns, short-barreled weapons, destructive devices, and other unique firearms, does not violate the Second Amendment. SCOTUS reasoned that the weapons regulated by the NFA aren’t reasonably related to maintaining a “well regulated Militia,” so aren’t protected by the Second Amendment.

Some things to note in this Second Amendment Supreme Court case are that Miller’s court-appointed attorney never showed up because he was never paid and, unfortunately, Miller was shot to death before a decision was given. So, no one was able to argue why they believed the law was unconstitutional. This means SCOTUS heard only the government’s side of things.

Barrett v. United States, 423 U.S. 212 (1976)
The Problem
Pearl Barrett, a previously convicted felon, was charged with violating the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA) after purchasing a gun that was involved in interstate commerce before reaching the retailer’s shelf. Barrett believed this charge didn’t apply to him because he had nothing to do with the gun before it showed up at his local federally licensed dealer.

The Ruling
The main takeaway of this Second Amendment Supreme Court case is that the Court again upheld gun control laws. SCOTUS said the section of the GCA barring felons from receiving any gun through interstate commerce applied to any firearm that had ever moved in interstate commerce, regardless of if that was before the felon purchased it; the GCA was meant to “keep firearms away from the persons Congress classified as potentially irresponsible and dangerous.” But applying Barrett’s logic would essentially create a loophole, preventing felons only from purchasing guns directly from retailers located in other states. At the end of the day, Barrett was a convicted felon, and his purchase of a firearm was illegal.

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United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995)
The Problem
Alfonso Lopez, Jr. was convicted of violating the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 after bringing a revolver (unloaded) and cartridges to his Texas high school. Lopez argued that regulating or banning guns in local schools was well outside the power of Congress under the Commerce Clause and was unconstitutional. But the federal government argued that bringing a gun to school would cause more gun violence and crime, which would lead to economic problems.

The Ruling
This case was actually a major Commerce Clause case, but it’s in this list of Second Amendment Supreme Court cases because when SCOTUS ruled the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 unconstitutional, they further limited how the federal government could regulate (or restrict) gun rights.

 

District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008)
The Problem
Special Policeman Dick Heller and several other residents of the District of Columbia all wanted a gun for self-defense. At the time, D.C. prohibited the carrying of any unregistered firearms yet barred all handgun registration. D.C. also required all lawfully owned guns to be kept unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock, including in a person’s own home, with few exceptions. Heller felt this ban prevented someone from properly defending themselves at home and violated the Second Amendment.

The Ruling
In this Second Amendment Supreme Court case, the Court made several rulings upholding our constitutional right to keep and bear arms. It found that:

The Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms for the purpose of self-defense, unrelated to militia or military activity. And because handguns are today’s primary defensive weapon of choice, they’re also protected.
The phrase “bear arms” meant: “to wear, bear, or carry . . . upon the person or in clothing or in a pocket, for the purpose . . . of being armed and ready for offensive or defensive action in a case of conflict with another person.”
A “well regulated Militia” is not the state’s military forces.
The D.C. regulation effectively banning handgun possession and the law requiring firearms in the home to be kept inoperable at all times, both violated Second Amendment protections.
The Second Amendment is not unlimited or absolute. Reasonable restrictions may be upheld (such as limits on firearm possession, carrying in schools and government buildings, and “dangerous and unusual” weapons).
Unfortunately, the District of Columbia is under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress and the federal government, not a state. So, while SCOTUS made several key decisions on what the Second Amendment means and protects, the case shed no light on whether states could regulate and/or ban firearms.

McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010)
The Problem
Otis McDonald, a 76-year-old man from Chicago, wanted a handgun for self-defense but was not able to get one under local law. A city ordinance required all handguns to be registered, yet Chicago refused all handgun registrations after a 1982 citywide ban. McDonald argued that the Second Amendment applied to the states as well as the federal government and that this ban was unconstitutional based on the rulings in Heller. The City of Chicago argued that states should be able to regulate firearms based on local conditions.

The Ruling
The Supreme Court held that Second Amendment protections apply at the state level through “selective incorporation” under the Fourteenth Amendment. SCOTUS repeated that individual self-defense was at the core of the Second Amendment. Meaning, the constitutional right to bear arms (and its protections as stated in Heller) prohibits states from enacting bans on handguns for self-defense in the home. This Second Amendment Supreme Court case decision overturned the Second Amendment rulings in Cruikshank and Presser.

Caetano v. Massachusetts, 136 S. Ct. 1027 (2016)
The Problem
Jaime Caetano was charged with owning an illegal weapon after displaying a stun gun during a dangerous encounter with her abusive ex-boyfriend in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) upheld the state prohibition on stun gun possession, stating stun guns weren’t protected by the Second Amendment because they were:

“Not in common use at the time” of the amendment’s enactment;
Dangerous and unusual as a “modern invention”; and
Couldn’t be easily adapted for military use.
The Ruling
This Second Amendment Supreme Court case is often left off most lists because it didn’t impact any gray areas. When SCOTUS took the case, the facts were so clear they were able to issue a per curiam decision (issued by the court rather than a specific justice) without even having to hear oral arguments. To put it in perspective, from 1946 to 2012, SCOTUS issued a per curiam decision in only 7% of cases.

The Court made it clear the SJC’s reasoning for upholding the Massachusetts law violated the Second Amendment, based on both the decisions in Heller and McDonald. They repeated that the Second Amendment protects weapons for self-defense purposes and not just for military reasons, and it applies to weapons “that were not in existence at the time of the founding.” SCOTUS also clarified that simply being a “modern invention” did not make it dangerous and unusual.

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas in a concurring opinion, also scolded Massachusetts for failing to protect its citizens from others who are dangerous, reminding us that the Second Amendment protects our right to defend our lives when the states “are unable or unwilling” to do so:

“If the fundamental right of self-defense does not protect Caetano, then the safety of all Americans is left to the mercy of state authorities who may be more concerned about disarming the people than about keeping them safe.”

Second Amendment Supreme Court Case Silence
In the years since McDonald, there were over 75 federal court opinions upholding state restrictions on the Second Amendment that the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review.

For example, in April 2021, the Supreme Court refused to hear challenges to a lifetime ban on firearm possession for those convicted of a non-violent misdemeanor. And before that, in June 2017, the Court declined to review a case involving San Diego County’s strict concealed carry permit requirements. But not all the justices agreed with this silence. Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, commented:

 For those of us who work in marbled halls, guarded constantly by a vigilant and dedicated police force, the guarantees of the Second Amendment might seem antiquated and superfluous. But the Framers made a clear choice: They reserved to all Americans the right to bear arms for self-defense. I do not think we should stand by idly while a State denies its citizens that right, particularly when their very lives may depend on it.

Crafty_Dog

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Mr. Magoo and the Progs going after ghost guns
« Reply #2221 on: April 11, 2022, 03:24:02 AM »
President Biden on Monday will announce new firearm regulations to require serial numbers and background checks for so-called “ghost guns,” while also picking a new nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, senior administration officials said.

Mr. Biden will name Steve Dettelbach, a former U.S. attorney from Ohio, to lead the ATF after the president’s previous nominee, David Chipman, was forced to withdraw.

Officials said Sunday that the Justice Department will publish a final rule on “ghost guns” — untraceable weapons made from kits — that would classify the components used to make them as firearms requiring serial numbers to aid in tracking them.

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Manufacturers who sell the kits would need to be licensed and would be required to run background checks on potential buyers of the kits.

The moves come as violent crime is at or near record levels in many cities across the U.S., and ghost guns increasingly are used in crimes. Mr. Biden’s job-approval ratings have plummeted as voters increasingly express concern about issues such as inflation and crime.

But Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has said the administration’s focus on ghost guns will have “little to no effect on violent crime” that has risen nationwide.

SEE ALSO: White House paints rosy picture as recession fears increase

“Despite this continued rise in violent crime, the DOJ has decided to follow the president in focusing its time and taxpayer resources on policies that will not work, including addressing the so-called ‘Iron Pipeline,’ ghost guns, and lawful firearms dealers,” Mr. Grassley told Attorney General Merrick Garland in February. 

Mr. Grassley cited data from the ATF and the FBI to indicate that “ghost guns” were used in less than 0.36% of homicides between 2016 and 2020. He also has said the Justice Department’s statistics show that just 7% of firearms used in a crime are acquired from legal firearms dealers.

Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, called for a crackdown on ghost guns on Sunday and blamed Republicans for blocking gun legislation.

“I am calling on the administration to go all after ghost guns, by putting out regulations that will stop them,” Mr. Schumer said at a press conference. “The federal government has the ability through regulation to stop these ghost guns.”

Last week, Maryland joined Washington, D.C., and 10 other states in curbing or banning the use of ghost guns.

• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.

ccp

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obama harvard law buddy heads ATF
« Reply #2222 on: April 11, 2022, 12:36:32 PM »

ccp

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dettlebach
« Reply #2223 on: April 11, 2022, 12:43:25 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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Crafty_Dog

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NRO on Ghost Guns
« Reply #2225 on: April 12, 2022, 10:08:45 AM »
second

The Ghost in the Machine Gun

Welcome to the Tuesday, a weekly newsletter about big guns and small points of English usage. To subscribe to the Tuesday — and, please do that! — follow this link.

The Problem Is Ordinary Killers, Not Exotic Guns

Finding a really nice classic Mustang is not always easy and is never cheap, and, for years, a handful of very committed car enthusiasts have been making an end-run around the classic-car market and the restoration industry both by more or less building entirely new cars from the parts catalogue. This is something that is a lot easier to do with very popular classics such as the Mustang than it would be with (alas!) the 1966 Volvo P1800 I very stupidly bought as a broke college student. In reality, building a new Mustang from the catalogue entails a lot more than ordering the parts and putting them together — there is a reason most cars are built in factories rather than in artisans’ workshops. But you can do it, if you really want to.

You can build a gun from scratch, too, if you have the inclination and the skills. Contrary to what a great many people seem to think, there isn’t any law against it. There never has been, at least at the federal level. There are many kits you can buy to build old-style black-powder muskets and Kentucky rifles — a relatively easy project whose main challenges are related to woodworking rather than mechanics. But you can build sophisticated modern firearms, too. If you are a skilled machinist and have the right equipment, you can build one entirely from scratch. If that is too much for you, then you can build one from commercially available parts that simply need to be assembled — but you will have to pass a federal background check when purchasing the “receiver,” which is what the ATF considers a firearm when it is complete or almost complete.

The distinction between firearm and firearm parts is necessary in that firearm parts often are replaced or modified. For example, regular shooters eventually have to replace their rifles’ barrels, which simply wear out. Buying a new barrel for an old rifle is not the same as buying a whole new rifle, legally or practically. Likewise, some shooters will change the stocks or “furniture” on their weapons, change the grips or sights, upgrade certain mechanical parts (especially triggers), etc. At its simplest, a firearm is just a length of pipe that is closed at one end. Because it would be impractical to classify all of these the various parts as firearms under federal law, a more sophisticated distinction has to be made.

A gray area — and here I mean a political gray area; the law at this time is reasonably clear — is the issue of receivers that are sold incomplete. A receiver becomes a firearm under federal law only when it has reached a certain stage of completion. Finishing an unfinished receiver is not like snapping together LEGO bricks — it usually requires some basic machining equipment and skills, though in some cases 3D printing can be used as a workaround. A firearm made from an unfinished receiver, like one made entirely from scratch, never has to go through the background check required by a retail sale, because, as far as federal law is concerned, there never was a retail sale of a firearm at all — only the sale of some firearm parts that were used in the production of a homemade firearm.

These homemade guns, which do not have serial numbers and which require no background check to acquire, are what is meant — purportedly meant, anyway — by the scary-sounding and imprecise term “ghost guns,” the latest terror totem of the anti-gun lobby. I write purportedly because many of the firearms reported as “ghost guns” are not homemade firearms at all but ordinary commercially sold firearms that have had their serial numbers removed or obscured. As often is the case when it comes to crime in the United States, good national data are difficult to find because of inconsistent reporting practices across jurisdictions.

When I first started reading about the upsurge in “ghost guns,” my first thought was to wonder why a criminal would go to the trouble of relying on a process that involves drill presses and mechanical skill rather than do what U.S. criminals have been doing for generations; i.e., using stolen guns or guns bought in criminal transactions. As it turns out, that is pretty much what our criminals are still doing, though some cities and states report significant increases in ghost-gun seizures. There have been a few murders involving ghost guns, and those cases predictably have received a disproportionate amount of attention. To give you an idea of the situation on the ground, the gun-control group Everytown conducted a review of federal “ghost gun” cases — 114 of them over a decade, a number that should tell you something — and found that there were 2,513 such firearms connected to criminal activity. But — and these are Everytown’s findings, not mine — the crime associated with those 2,513 firearms was illegal manufacturing or dealing in 2,200 cases, not robbery or murder or assault. Put another way, almost all of the crimes associated with so-called ghost guns were, in Everytown’s review of the data, the crime of simply possessing such a weapon in the first place or selling one.

That is not surprising. Consider a point of comparison: Contrary to what many people think, it is legal to own a fully automatic weapon in the United States, provided it was manufactured before 1986, though the process of acquiring one is closely regulated and the supply of such weapons is relatively small. Almost all of the crimes associated with legally owned fully automatic weapons in the United States are violations of firearms regulations. The number of murders committed with legally owned fully automatic weapons in the United States in the past 80 years or so could be counted on your fingers. (And, in every case that I have found, those crimes were committed not by civilian owners of machine guns but by police and military personnel using service weapons. It is possible I have missed one or two.) The same is true for many other exotic armaments and accessories, such as sound suppressors, which also are legal to own and increasingly common, especially among the very busy hunters working to keep the feral hog population under control here in Texas.

(The fear of “silencers” is a largely American thing probably driven by Hollywood; in many European countries, suppressors are sold over the counter, and some European firing ranges go as far as to require them as a courtesy to other shooters. I envy this every time I am at the range next to a guy firing a .458 Winchester magnum rifle with a muzzle brake, a device that reduces recoil but makes a firearm about twice as loud. Apparently, my corner of Texas is rife with guys who are dealing with problem elephants.)

For most periods in U.S. history — and ours is no different — the most common firearm used in a crime is whatever the most common handgun of the day happens to be: A generation or two ago, it was .38 revolvers, and now it is 9mm pistols. We spend a great deal of time (and political energy) worrying about so-called assault rifles, which are used in murders only exceedingly rarely — all rifles put together, from AR-type firearms to Elmer Fudd deer rifles, account for about 3 percent of the firearms used in murders. We also are for some (probably cinematic) reason preoccupied with particular unusual weapons that are seldom if ever used in violent crimes: For example, California went bananas a few years ago over .50-caliber rifles, which are now banned in the state. I have been able to find no case in which a .50-caliber rifle was used in a murder in California, and their use in violent crimes is pretty rare everywhere else. (Don’t take my word: Check the Violence Policy Center’s review.) There is a pretty good reason for that, of course: There’s a very nice .50-caliber rifle on the shelf of my local firearms dealer — it is almost six feet long, weighs almost 50 pounds, and costs $13,000.

The more you know about the ballistic facts on the ground, the sillier these scaremongering stories sound. The anti-gun lobby talks in fearful terms about the so-called military-style rifles available to the American buying public, but there are some pretty common hunting rifles that fire cartridges that are five to six times as powerful as the standard 5.56mm used in AR-pattern rifles. This makes perfect sense when you consider that it takes a lot more oomph to kill a Cape buffalo or a bull elk than it does to kill a Russian, which is what the 5.56mm round was designed to do. (Hence its full formal name, 5.56×45mm NATO.) The gun-grabbers who proclaim that they have no interest in taking away granddad’s deer rifle are being pretty silly, from an empirical point of view.

The supposed allure of “ghost guns” is that they are “untraceable.” Which they are — like pretty much every other firearm in the United States. We do not maintain a national gun registry, and, in spite of what you see on television, there isn’t really any such thing as a “registered” or “unregistered” firearm as a matter of federal law and the laws of almost all the states. When police find a firearm that they believe to have been used in a crime, they can, if they choose, consult federal records that will show them which federally licensed firearms dealer sold that gun. Criminals are not as a class of people very intelligent, but even so there are not very many who: (1) are eligible to buy a gun legally from a dealer; (2) actually do so; and (3) leave that gun at the scene of a crime. But that is the only way in most cases that government records could be used to trace a gun from a crime scene to its owner. (Most cases: A couple of states maintain legally questionable databases that might provide more information.) Most firearms change hands at least once — and often several times — before they end up at a crime scene or in the hands of investigators. The thing about career criminals is — they’re career criminals. They don’t buy criminal implements from federally regulated providers. In many cases, they can’t: A large share of our murders are committed by people who already have at least one felony conviction.

Once you start looking at the statistics, you’ll notice a lot of small percentages and weak correlations — a tiny share of “assault rifles” used in murders, Hollywood-style machine guns practically nowhere in evidence, “ghost guns” more common than I would have expected (9 percent of the firearms confiscated by police in Philadelphia, for example) but still pretty rare, etc.

Where you will see much stronger correlations is in who is shooting the guns: About 90 percent of murder suspects in cities such as New York and Chicago have prior arrest histories; in Charlotte, half of the murder suspects have had prior gun charges dismissed, which is a genuine scandal; the No. 1 thing people being convicted of violent felonies have in common is a prior arrest for a violent felony, which is the case for two-thirds of violent felons.

(For context, be aware that the majority of murder victims are criminal offenders, too, a finding that has held true in the big cities for half a century. A 2012 survey of New York murder victims found that 20 percent of them were on probation or parole or had an active arrest warrant, 10 percent were confirmed gang members, 71 percent had prior arrests, etc. Only one in five male murder victims in New York did not have a prior arrest.)

If prior offenders make up 90 percent of our murderers, and “ghost guns” are involved in less than 1 percent of our murders, why are we concentrating on the “ghost guns” rather than on the murderers?

The tripartite answer is politics, theater, and cowardice.


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The AFT ghost gun rule
« Reply #2226 on: April 13, 2022, 11:32:21 AM »

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Learn to run guns or be ready to ride in a railcar
« Reply #2227 on: April 13, 2022, 02:03:59 PM »
https://gatesofvienna.net/2021/11/a-handgun-against-an-army/

The second amendment wasn't about deer hunting or plinking at cans.

Crafty_Dog

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WT: Disarm and Prepare to Die
« Reply #2228 on: April 26, 2022, 02:57:53 AM »
Disarm and prepare to die

As crime rises, armed citizens stop more violence than cops

By Tony Shaffer and Tim Wilson

There is a growing body of evidence that law-abiding citizens reduce violent crime. As data continues to be gathered by the FBI, CDC and interested parties from both sides of the firearms discussion, it is becoming ever more apparent that the Second Amendment, where fully implemented, does far more good than harm. The latest revelation to appear in FBI data from 2020 would seem to indicate that armed citizens now stop more crimes than law enforcement, something that should provoke those who advocate gun control to consider whether their policies do more harm than good.

As violent crime rates have risen dramatically in many big cities, another surge in gun sales has also occurred, with many millions of new gun owners realizing that, if law enforcement cannot protect them, their Second Amendment rights provide the best form of selfdefense. At the same time, data is now emerging to show the benefits to society of having armed, law-abiding citizens carrying their weapons.

The lawmakers in the large cities, mostly progressive Democrat-led, want you to disarm — to do the opposite of what your best interests are. They are not interested in data. They are not interested in science, technology or facts. They want you disarmed and don’t care if, as a result, you can die.

Let’s review the facts of why it is important to follow the data and ignore the political rhetoric.

First, we are finally seeing admissions that Defensive Gun Use, which is incredibly hard to measure due to an understandable reticence to even admit to such events, especially in light of such high profile legal attacks as those made on the McCloskey’s in St. Louis in June 2020 by the local district attorney. The CDC now estimates Americans use their guns defensively between 500,000 and 3,000,000 times each year, that is to say from anywhere over 1,300 times per day to over 8,000 times each day. The vast majority of DGUs do not involve shooting, with display alone usually being sufficient to deter would-be criminals.

Second, we see violent crime rising mainly in major cities, with little or no such rise occurring in suburban and rural areas with less gun control. To give this some perspective, the seven worst cities for murder account for more than 15% of all the murders occurring in the U.S. And these cities, which all have strict gun control laws making possession by lawabiding citizens much more difficult than elsewhere, have seen murder rates rise by 30 to 50% in one year (from 2019 to 2020). Meanwhile, the rest of the country has seen little increase in the number of murders, with about half of all counties still not registering a single murder in 2020.

Third, we now have a significant piece of data from the FBI on Justifiable Homicide. In 2020, justifiable homicides by civilians exceeded those by Law Enforcement for the first time, by 343 to 298. This implies that lethal force was used for self-defense by law-abiding citizens who also convinced authorities they were genuinely in fear of their lives when they fired their firearms and took the life of others. In consequence, it is also possible to imply from these numbers that armed, law-abiding citizens stopped more violent crimes than police, and it is further likely that they also stopped many other crimes such as rape and car-jacking.

Finally, we have seen constitutional carry spread from Vermont (historically always liberal towards the Second Amendment) to 18 other states over the last 20 years (with five more states now considering bills favoring constitutional carry). Despite all the rhetoric and emotional claims of opponents and advocates of increased gun control, we have seen violent crime in all these states decrease consistently and persistently (except in some large cities in those states which maintain strong gun control measures, all of which happen to be controlled politically by Democrats).

President Biden has declared, absent of supporting facts of any sort, that gun violence is a public health epidemic. His solution to the observed rise in criminal violence is to ban and/or severely limit access to firearms by law-abiding citizens.

His so-called “commonsense” policies will decrease the ability of all Americans to exercise their Second Amendment right, claiming that this one part of the Bill of Rights is “limited.” Solid data on murder, homicide and violent crime plus the experience of decades of relaxing gun controls at state levels suggest he is completely wrong. There are no limitations to the right of self-protection or self-defense. Any infringement cannot be tolerated.

Self-defense is a fundamental right of every human being. In order to protect themselves, Americans are uniquely blessed to have the right to keep and bear arms enumerated as the Second Amendment. Constitutional carry needs to become the national standard. Anything less is un-American!

Tony Shaffer is president of the London Center for Policy Research, a retired U.S. Army officer and a former senior intel-ligence operative. Tim Wilson is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, a retired British Army officer and a proud American citizen

Crafty_Dog

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The Implications April 3, 1776 for Second Amendment Theory
« Reply #2229 on: May 03, 2022, 06:52:11 PM »
On This Day in History > April 3, 1776:
Congress authorizes privateers to capture British ships

"On April 3, 1776, Congress authorizes privateering vessels to capture British ships during the American Revolution. Because of the heavy dependence on shipping in the 18th century, it was immediately necessary for Congress to create its own navy after the Revolution began. Congress created the Continental Navy in the fall of 1775. Several states created their own navies as well, but these small navies were no match for the gigantic British Royal Navy which had the largest naval force in the world.

To help in the fight against the British Navy, Congress and several states authorized privately owned merchant vessels to combat and capture British owned naval or merchant vessels. This practice was called "privateering" because the vessels were privately owned. Privateering was essentially the same as piracy, but privateers were not considered pirates by the authorizing nation. Privateering vessels would be outfitted with guns and cannons by their owners and could capture vessels flying an enemy flag.

Privateers were issued a "Letter of Marque and Reprisal" which authorized them to engage in privateering. After an enemy vessel was captured, the vessel was brought to an American port and presented to a judge who would look over the Letter and see that the capture had been handled according to the law. If all was well, the spoils captured on the ship were sold and the proceeds split between the ship's owners and crew, with a small percentage going to the American government as well. The splitting of the spoils in such a capture made privateering quite lucrative, so lucrative in fact that sailors were much more likely to want to serve on a privateer than on a ship run by the Continental Navy.

The contribution of privateers during the American Revolution cannot be overestimated. While the Continental Navy had about 60 ships with 3,000 soldiers during the course of the war, there were two to three thousand privateers with more than 70,000 sailors aboard! Continental Navy vessels carried around 2,800 guns on board, while privateers carried more than 20,000 guns!

With this massive firepower, privateers captured over 3,000 British vessels during the war, while the Continental Navy captured around 200. In addition to the captured vessels and their cargoes, privateers captured more than 10,000 British sailors. Primary locations for privateering included Long Island Sound, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the coasts of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, the Caribbean and even British waters off the coasts of England and Ireland.

How lucrative was privateering? Some estimates put the spoils of American privateers during the Revolution at around $300 million dollars. Clearly, many fortunes were made from the practice. Britain estimated that 10% of all the cargoes it shipped to America were captured by the privateers, earning the privateers the honor of being one of the most influential forces giving America it's victory in the Revolutionary War."

2020 Revolutionary-War-and-Beyond.com

===============================
My comments:   
 
Some very interesting implications for Second Amendment theory here-- it sure sounds like the Founding Fathers envisioned calling upon citizenry owning ships capable of acting as ships of war against the British navy!  After all, they were already defending themselves from the Pirates of the Caribbean (attempt at humor here) and the Spanish.  What else can the Letters of Marque language mean?

Similarly, the American Revolution began at Lexington and Concord when the British came to confiscate our guns.  A little mentioned historical fact is that this included the Colonialists' cannons.

Why would they have had cannons?  Because they were left over from them having to defend themselves from the French in the French Indian Wars because the British Crown was not around to defend them.

Nothing has changed.  Today we have the quasi-military level of the Narco Cartels claiming our border regions-- and our government-- Federal, State, and Municipal is nowhere to be found. 

Our Second Amendment and Ninth Amendment say that as Americans we have the Natural Law Right of effective Self-Defense.

'Murica!
Marc


G M

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Re: "The Glock Switch" converts pistols to full auto
« Reply #2231 on: May 06, 2022, 07:58:58 AM »
https://thenationaldesk.com/news/americas-news-now/atf-sees-rise-in-quarter-sized-glock-switch-that-turns-handguns-into-machine-guns-bureau-of-alcohol-tobacco-firearms-explosives-bullets-semi-automatic-weapon

"It is an officer safety situation because if they came up against someone who was firing a gun like this, that has this kind of power, they aren't going to be outmatched necessarily because they are very well trained, but they are definitely out-gunned. They don't have that kind of firepower and it's scary," said Taylor.

LIE.

Crafty_Dog

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Important Connecticut Supreme Court Decision, Second Amendment & Knives
« Reply #2232 on: May 20, 2022, 09:31:02 AM »
Posted previously, but for some reason the Search command has a hard time finding it so posting it again:

https://jud.ct.gov/external/supapp/Cases/AROcr/CR315/315CR113.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0lYyk5nyw9lSutNaf7kRWQuEyuSjfX-grwJ8BZ7UgMNqDG-MGLpJ1ONt0


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Here is the NRO article
« Reply #2239 on: May 31, 2022, 06:25:35 PM »
By KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
May 31, 2022 6:30 AM
Welcome to the Tuesday, a weekly newsletter about thus and such. To subscribe to the Tuesday, follow this link.

The 2 Percent Solution

On Sunday, I answered as briefly as I could – which in many cases was not very briefly at all – some common questions about the gun-control debate. I have a few even-less-brief observations for Tuesday, but I think you will find them useful.

I begin with what seems to be a mystifying paradox at the center of our gun-control efforts: We only want to enforce the law on the law-abiding, while we ignore the law-breakers almost entirely in our gun-control debate.

Almost every single substantive gun-control proposal put forward by our progressive friends is oriented toward adding new restrictions and regulatory burdens to federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them: what they can sell and what they cannot sell, to whom they can sell, under what conditions they may sell, etc. But, as I often remark, gun-store customers are just about the most law-abiding demographic in the United States, even accounting for situations such as that of the Uvalde killer, who was able to purchase his firearms legally because he had no prior criminal record. The best information we have comes from the Department of Justice, which found in 2019 that less than 2 percent of all prisoners had a firearm obtained from a retail source at the time they committed their crimes. A different 2013 study by researchers at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins found that only 13 percent of the offenders in the state prison population obtained their firearms from a retail source.

Criminals mostly don’t get their guns at gun stores — because they mostly can’t.

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In contrast to those modest figures of 2 percent or 13 percent, the great majority of murders committed in the United States — upwards of 80 percent — are committed by people with prior arrest records, often by people with prior convictions for violent crimes or prior weapons offenses — and almost none of our gun-control proposals is targeted at this group.

If you have not bought a gun from a gun dealer, then you might not appreciate just exactly how law-abiding and how i-dotting and t-crossing you have to be to make the purchase: Not only are you excluded for a felony conviction, you also are excluded for misdemeanor convictions involving domestic violence or any other misdemeanor for which you could have been sentenced to more than one year in jail, irrespective of the sentence you actually received; you are excluded if you are a “fugitive from justice,” meaning someone with an active arrest warrant who has left the state to avoid arrest; you are excluded if you have been dishonorably discharged from the military; you are excluded if you are a drug addict or a user of illegal drugs; you are excluded if you are an illegal alien or an alien legally present on a nonimmigrant visa; you are excluded if you have been judged mentally deficient by a court of law or committed to a mental institution; you are excluded if you are subject to a restraining order; you are excluded from purchasing a handgun if you are not a resident of the state in which the purchase is being made; you are excluded if you are buying a gun for anyone other than yourself; you are excluded if the information on your government-issued identification does not match current records and the information on your application, a provision that is enforced with such exactitude that an application may be rejected if it says “111 Main St.” instead of “111 Main Street.”

Democrats who complain that it easier to buy a gun than it is to vote are lying for partisan political purposes and should be dismissed with contempt.

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That being said, there are some deficiencies in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) that should be part of the conversation. One is that NICS depends on a variety of agencies for reporting, and these agencies are not always reliable. For example, the shooter in the Sutherland Springs church attack should have been excluded from buying firearms, but the U.S. Air Force neglected to report his criminal history to the FBI, which manages NICS. (A judge has held the Air Force partially responsible for the deaths in that case.) Other problems: Non-federal fugitives are not often reported as such, and in the majority of cases the state with the warrant does not know whether the fugitive has left the state; some localities are slow or negligent in reporting restraining orders or misdemeanor convictions, and some apparently don’t even know what needs to be reported; mental-health reporting has long been slow and desultory — the number of mental-health records in the NICS database jumped from 234,628 in 2005 to 3.8 million in 2014 not because of some sudden spike in mental illness in the United States but because the feds made a priority out of it and put money into helping states and municipalities meet their reporting obligations; the United States does a notoriously poor job of tracking illegal aliens and enforcing immigration law; the process basically relies on self-reporting for illegal drug use.

That lattermost issue is dramatically illustrated by the case of Hunter Biden, who almost certainly violated federal law by lying about his longstanding drug problems when purchasing a handgun in 2018, but was never charged — and, let’s be frank, never will be charged and knew he was never going to be charged, even if caught — under the very law his father boasts of having “shepherded through Congress.”

These are real shortcomings in the system. But, even with that being the case, I should reiterate here that the data very strongly suggest that people who buy firearms from firearms dealers very rarely commit crimes of any kind with those firearms — less than 2 percent of the prisoners in the federal system and about 13 percent of those in the state systems had a firearm obtained from a retail source when they committed their crimes. (And even those figures may overstate the prevalence of retail-sourced firearms in that they probably include some straw purchases and firearms stolen from retailers.) Given the very weak statistical relationship between buying a gun from a gun dealer and committing a crime with that gun, why is there so much focus on federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them?

The answer is that this conversation has almost nothing to do with violent crime, and almost nothing to do with policies aimed at reducing violent crime.

The gun-control debate is first and foremost a culture-war issue for Democrats. There is a great deal of violent crime in the United States, and that crime is concentrated in big cities over which Democrats enjoy an effective monopoly of political power. The people who commit most of the murders in the United States — and the people who most often die in those murders — check a lot of Democratic-voter demographic boxes: They are very disproportionately low-income African Americans in urban areas. Democrats are desperate to put a more Republican-looking face on the violent-crime problem, preferably one that is older, white, middle-aged, rural, southern, and Evangelical. That is the reason for the focus on the National Rifle Association in particular and on gun dealers and “gun culture” in general. As is so often the case in our contemporary politics, what we are talking about matters mostly because it is a way of not talking about something else.

I am not particularly an admirer of the National Rifle Association. The NRA once was a very effective — and notably bipartisan — single-issue advocacy organization, focused on the legal rights and interests of U.S. gun owners. Contrary to the myth that has grown up around it, the NRA has never been powerful because it throws around a great deal of money — which it doesn’t do: In the 2020 cycle, the NRA was not among the top 1,000 political donors or among the top 250 in lobbying outlays. It is true that the NRA is currently in a weakened condition after a series of self-inflicted wounds, but even back in 2012 it was No. 301 among campaign contributors and only No. 181 on lobbying outlays. The NRA’s strength has never been its pocketbook — it has always been the fact that it represents millions and millions of American gun owners who prioritize Second Amendment issues when they go to the polls. The NRA’s political clout has always been of the most genuine kind — the kind you cannot purchase. If you think clout like that can be bought, ask Mike Bloomberg about his efforts on the gun-control front.

The NRA went wrong when it made itself into a subsidiary of the Republican Party and allowed itself to be taken over by people who wanted to be Fox News pundits — a textbook example of Yuval Levin’s observation about self-interested people who use institutions as platforms. (I do not and never have given a fig about Wayne LaPierre’s million-dollar salary and his natty Zegna suits — frankly, I am surprised that he isn’t paid more: Very effective nonprofit executives do pretty well.) The NRA was better off — and Americans’ gun rights were more secure — when the group still had a few high-ranking Democrats on its side, and when its employees were not famous. You probably can’t name one employee of Squire Patton Boggs, a Washington lobbying powerhouse, and that suits the firm and its clients just fine. It is true that the NRA’s position as culture-war lightning rod was not entirely a matter of the organization’s own choosing, but it has leaned into the role more than it had to.

If this were a matter of public policy, the thousands of people who were standing outside the convention center in Houston to shout obscenities at the NRA would be standing outside the office of the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Chicago and raising absolute hell about the failure — about the refusal – of the federal government and most big-city DAs to prosecute straw-buyer cases. If this were about policy, Joe Biden would be in New York with Kathy Hochul in a headlock demanding to know why career criminals arrested on murder charges are being released — without bail! — into the streets of our largest city. Or, short of that, President Biden could take a brief walk down the street to the ATF headquarters and find out why the agency won’t even bother to go around and pick up guns in sales that it knows were wrongly approved. But none of that happens.

The reason none of that happens is that this is not about crime — it is about culture war and cultural enemies.

Don’t take my word for it: Ask Charles Blow of the New York Times, who demands that “Gun Safety Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear,” as the headline puts it — not what is effective, not what is reasonable or prudent, but whatever it is that Republicans don’t want. Blow is unusual only in that he is relatively open about the fact that this is a culture issue for him: “Gun culture,” he writes, “is a canard and a corruption.”

(Set aside, for the moment, that a marquee columnist for the New York Times apparently does not know what the word “canard” means.)

The Democratic Party and the progressive movement more generally are dominated culturally and financially by college-educated, affluent, white metropolitan professionals, mostly living in those two-thirds of U.S. households in which there is no firearm present. They present themselves as the champions of poor, black, urban communities about which they know almost nothing, and understand themselves as the enemies of lower-income, aging, white, rural communities — the stereotypical NASCAR crowd — about which they also know almost nothing. Never mind that much of the increase in gun ownership in recent years has been driven by women, African Americans, and recreational shooters in urban areas — the eggbound snake-handling hayseeds and would-be militiamen of Georgia and Alabama, whose cultural prominence is almost exclusively a matter of the progressive imagination, simply must be the face of gun ownership, at least for the purposes of culture war. Never mind that most of the violent crime involving guns in this country is carried out in zip codes where the voters elect Democrats almost exclusively, and never mind that the reason we do not act on those “common sense” gun-control measures on which almost all of us notionally agree — such as prosecuting straw-buying and other everyday weapons offenses — is the fact that doing this would irritate important Democratic constituencies in the big cities and among unionized government workers.

Even if we read the data in the way that is most generous to the gun-control cause, fewer than one in five criminals uses a gun acquired from a gun dealer, while more than four out of five murderers have prior arrest records. If we go by the DOJ findings, the share of criminals who use guns from gun dealers is more like 2 percent. And yet almost all of the new proposals from Democrats are new regulations and restrictions on firearms dealers, while almost none is focused on the relatively small body of prior offenders who carry out most murder and other violent crime. The progressives are protesting the NRA in Houston and not in front of city hall in Philadelphia or St. Louis.

Among the few proposals that are targeted at someone other than licensed gun dealers and their customers is the idea of so-called universal background checks, also known as “closing the gun-show loophole.”

According to the DOJ, the share of prisoners who obtained guns through gun shows was — commit this figure to memory — 0.8 percent.

Like I said, this isn’t about crime — it is about Kulturkampf.

A Few More Thoughts about This . . .

After nearly 3,000 Americans died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, nobody — nobody sane, anyway — said: “But the real killer is heart disease!” Terrorist attacks are consequential not only because of the numbers killed but also because they change the nature of public life — that is, after all, what they are intended to do. Likewise, the number of Americans who die in massacres such as the ones recently carried out in Buffalo and Uvalde represents a tiny share of the total number of Americans who die in homicides, most of those deaths being the result of ordinary, quotidian crime. An American public-school student is considerably more likely to die in a school-bus accident than in a mass shooting. But those homicidal spectaculars change the nature of school life, and of public life in general.

It is for this reason that they deserve our attention, not because they tell us anything about the lethality of any particular class of firearms or the prudence of changing the regulation of such firearms. The killer in Uvalde was armed with a semiautomatic 5.56mm rifle, not exactly a “weapon of war” (that phrase itself presents a complicated question; see below) but a very effective firearm, and, not coincidentally, the most common rifle sold in the United States. But the killer was barricaded in a room full of fourth-graders for an hour — he could have been armed with a revolver, a kitchen knife, or a brick and achieved the same results. Most of the victims at Sandy Hook were six or seven years old — it is difficult to imagine how magazine-size restrictions would make much of a difference in such a situation. The worst school massacre in American history was carried out nearly a century ago by a killer who used bombs rather than firearms. These kinds of crimes are not going to be prevented by the sorts of measures being put forward.

But surely it is the case that we could, if we were serious about this — which, as I argue above, we really aren’t — walk and chew gum at the same time, using straightforward law-enforcement methods to reduce the numbers of ordinary criminal murders while also working on new data-driven techniques to try to identify mass killers and prevent their crimes before they happen, while also taking commonsense measures to improve security at schools and in other public places.

One thing we are going to have to do is decide whether we still think 18-year-olds are adults. Some gun-control advocates would like to see all firearms sales restricted to those who are at least 21 years of age. This is not an isolated idea: Increasingly, our colleges are organized around the belief that students as old as 22 years of age are, in effect, children who require “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” and other measures by which school staff members act in loco parentis. In certain situations, a person can be charged with a felony sexual crime for having consensual sexual relations with an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old, even in places where the formal age of sexual consent is less than 18 years of age. And, of course, we generally forbid alcohol sales to legal adults younger than 21 years of age.

I am not what Michael Oakeshott would have called a rationalist, in that I am perfectly comfortable with some measure of organic inconsistency in the law, but I do not think that it probably is tenable in the long run to have an explicitly guaranteed constitutional right denied to people who are old enough to vote. Nor do I think that it is tenable to have people who otherwise enjoy the full rights of adulthood treated as though they were children in the context of higher education. What this means — although the notion is practically taboo — is that it is time to reconsider not the Second Amendment but the 26th Amendment, which forces the states to enfranchise 18-year-olds. If we are going to proceed as though adulthood starts at 21, then we need to raise the voting age to 21, too — because we don’t give children the vote.

Of course, we’ll have to do something about all those child soldiers in our military, with the median age of new Marines hovering around 19.

‘Weapons of War’

As I have pointed out many times, the 5.56mm semiautomatic rifles that progressives like to call “weapons of war” are not really that, inasmuch as they are not generally issued to troops in the United States or elsewhere. But do you know what is a weapon of war? Granddad’s deer rifle. The ubiquitous Remington 700 bolt-action rifle has long been a favorite of hunters, and it also is the go-to sniper rifle for military services around the world. Earlier American wars were fought with bolt-action .30-06 rifles functionally identical to what most American hunters used for generations.

Gun-control activists insist that AR-style rifles are not hunting rifles. A typical tirade found on the Internet: “An AR-15 is not a hunting rifle. Do you really need a high-powered rifle round and high-capacity magazine to take down Bambi? Last time I checked, Bambi wasn’t wearing a bullet proof vest or hiding behind cement barriers.” That isn’t Joe Biden, but it could be.

This is, of course, wrong on every count: The rifles in question not only are hunting rifles; they are today the most common hunting rifle in the United States. But they are not rifles that typically fire a “high-powered” round — in fact, the standard 5.56mm round has long been considered insufficiently powerful for humane deer hunting and has been prohibited at various times in various places for that purpose for that reason. Hog-hunting is one of the most popular kinds of pursuit in the United States, and many outfitters will not allow a hunter to use a 5.56mm rifle for hogs — because it is not powerful enough. The idea of shooting through concrete (Not cement! See below) barriers and body armor with that round is an uncertain proposal at best. You’d be better off with a traditional big-game hunting rifle, which is four or five times as powerful as the “higher-powered” 5.56mm. But, in any case, most of the popular hunter cartridges either began as military rounds (such as the .30-06) or still are military rounds (such as the .308 Winchester). As a practical matter, you aren’t going to find a rifle that is good for killing elk that isn’t also good for killing people.

And that fact matters . . . almost not at all, since rifles are almost never used in murders in the United States, accounting for only 2.5 percent of homicides. What murders in 2022 have in common with murders in 1922 is that the gun most commonly used in a murder is the most common handgun. Once upon a time, it was the Colt Single-Action Army revolver, and then it was the .38 Special, and now it is the 9mm pistol. In 20 years, it may be something else — but the shooters probably will be the same people, i.e., habitual criminals with prior records.

And gun-control advocates will still be focused on the 2 percent of criminals who buy guns from gun dealers, or possibly the 0.8 percent who get them from gun shows.

G M

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3D printed gun review
« Reply #2242 on: June 01, 2022, 02:49:34 AM »



ccp

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Re: We the Well-armed People (gun and knife rights stuff )
« Reply #2245 on: June 02, 2022, 06:42:36 AM »
reminder
without a subscription
NR only lets a person into a few articles then they block that person


Crafty_Dog

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Re: We the Well-armed People (gun and knife rights stuff )
« Reply #2246 on: June 02, 2022, 08:21:01 AM »
Noted.
==========

Stop Lying about the Historical Understanding of Gun Rights

An attendee views a gun on display at the NRA annual convention in Houston, Texas, May 28, 2022. (Callaghan O'Hare/Reuters)
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By CHARLES C. W. COOKE
June 1, 2022 11:23 AM

It has never been ‘mainstream’ to interpret the Second Amendment as guaranteeing anything other than an individual right to bear arms.
If it will please the court, I will happily fall onto both my knees, throw my arms up into the air, shake my head plaintively, and plead with America’s journalists, in the name of all that is good and right, to stop doing this:

The interpretation that the Second Amendment extends to individuals’ rights to own guns only became mainstream in 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark gun case, District of Columbia vs. Heller, that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns in their homes, knocking down the District’s handgun ban.

This claim was made yesterday in the Washington Post, by a staff writer named Amber Phillips, under the tag “Analysis.” It is, of course, a ridiculous, contemptuous, malicious lie, a myth, or, if you prefer to use a phrase that has become popular of late, disinformation. It has never — at any point in the history of the United States — been “mainstream” to interpret the Second Amendment as anything other than a protection of “individuals’ rights to own guns.” The decision in Heller was, indeed, “landmark.” But it was so only because it represented the first time that the Supreme Court had been asked a direct question about the meaning of the amendment that, for more than two centuries up to then, had not needed to be asked.

Three months before Heller was decided, 73 percent of Americans believed that “the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of Americans to own guns,” with just 20 percent contending that it “only guarantees members of state militias such as National Guard units the right to own guns.” That 73 percent supermajority (we might call it the “mainstream”) included a majority of non-gun-owners — which, well, of course it did, given that the alternative interpretation represents a preposterous conspiracy theory. To be within that 20 percent minority, one must ignore all of the history before the Second Amendment’s passage; all of the contemporary commentary as to its meaning; James Madison’s intention to insert it into the Constitution next to the other individual rights in Article I, Section 9, rather than next to the militia clause in Article I, Section 8, clause 16; the 45 state-level rights to keep and bear arms, many of which predated the Second Amendment; the meaning of “the people” everywhere else in the Bill of Rights; the fact that it would make no sense at all to give an individual a “right” to join a state-run institution from which the federal government could bar him; and all evidence of what the United States was actually like prior to 2008.

Writing in 1989, the progressive law professor Sanford Levinson explained in the Yale Law Journal that the theory that Amber Phillips is now laundering “is derived from a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even ‘winning,’ interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation.” Or, as Adam Liptak put it in the New York Times in 2007, the theory that Phillips has shared is based on “received wisdom and political preferences rather than a serious consideration of the amendment’s text, history and place in the structure of the Constitution.” Once one undertakes that “serious consideration,” one recognizes immediately that the “collective right” claim is, and always has been, a cynical, dishonest, outcome-driven farce. There is a good reason why even Barack Obama responded to the Heller decision by confirming that he had “always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms”: The alternative is a joke.

Phillips’s attempt to rewrite history isn’t new, of course. Back in 2000, the historian — “historian” — Michael Bellesiles wrote a ridiculous book called Arming America, in which he claimed that American “gun culture” was invented in the mid 19th century, and that prior to that, gun ownership in the United States had been rare. For this contribution to the canon, Bellesiles won the Bancroft Prize . . . and then lost it, after his argument was exposed as a ridiculous fraud. Clayton Cramer, one of the men who brought the hoax to light, noted that the reason so many “historians” had “swallowed Arming America’s preposterous claims so readily is that it fit into their political worldview so well. . . . Arming America said things, and created a system of thought so comfortable for the vast majority of historians, that they didn’t even pause to consider the possibility that something wasn’t right.”

Neither, it seems, has Amber Phillips. “How did we get here?” she asks, before proposing that “historians attribute it to a relatively recent political push by gun rights groups to reinterpret the Constitution” and blaming the “appointment of judges and funding of scholars who would interpret the Second Amendment more broadly.” One must ask to what Phillips’s “relatively recently” modifier applies? Does it pertain to the 1982 Senate report that concluded that it was “inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner”? Is that when this started? If not, how about in 1960, when Hubert Humphrey — the man who invented the Peace Corps and Medicare, and was a tireless opponent of nuclear-weapons testing — insisted casually that “one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms,” and submitted that “the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible”?

Perhaps Phillips’s “gun rights groups” went back in time a little earlier, to 1880, when the most famous legal scholar of the era, Thomas Cooley, observed that the meaning of the Second Amendment was “that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose”? Or to 1868, when, during the debate over the 14th Amendment, Senator Jacob Howard listed the “right to keep and bear arms” among the “privileges and immunities” that would now be extended to freed blacks? Perhaps they helped draft the 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the disgraceful Justice Taney warned that if black Americans were to be regarded as citizens, they would enjoy “the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went”?


Am I still underestimating it? Did this dastardly plot to read the English language plainly start even earlier? Was St. George Tucker on the Federalist Society payroll when he wrote in 1803 that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; . . . and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government”? Did it begin in 1791, when Representative Roger Sherman described the Second Amendment as protecting “the privilege of every citizen, and one of his most essential rights, to bear arms, and to resist every attack upon his liberty or property, by whomsoever made”? Or 1789, when the Philadelphia lawyer Tench Coxe observed of the unamended Constitution that “the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people,” and of the Second Amendment specifically that “the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms”? Surely, the scheme cannot have reached as far back as 1776, 15 years before the Second Amendment was ratified and 232 years before Heller, when Pennsylvania became the first state to affirm in law that “the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state”?

I could go on, but I won’t, because it’s not necessary. Instead, I will reiterate my plea to the press: Please, stop it. You’re not fooling the American public. You’re not fooling the courts. You’re just making fools of yourselves, and of the handful of motivated reasoners whom you’re misinforming. Democracy, Darkness — you know the rest.

G M

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WSJ: Why black Americans are buying more guns
« Reply #2249 on: June 10, 2022, 10:32:33 AM »
Why Black Americans Are Buying More Guns
The people who bear the brunt of rising violent crime are taking steps to protect themselves.

By Jason L. RileyFollow
June 7, 2022 6:13 pm ET


“The issue we face is one of conscience and common sense.” So said Joe Biden last week in a prime-time plea for more Second Amendment restrictions. The president is right on both counts, just not in the way that he and other gun-control enthusiasts imagine.

Voters have noticed that cities where shootings occur almost daily also have some of the strictest gun laws. Using common sense, they’ve concluded that more gun-control legislation probably isn’t the solution because criminals by definition don’t respect laws. Many of the same people likewise find it unconscionable that elected officials would make it more difficult for law-abiding residents of high-crime neighborhoods to arm themselves for protection.

Someone might remind Mr. Biden that the past two landmark Supreme Court rulings on gun control were fueled by black plaintiffs who simply wanted to defend their homes and their families. Moreover, they hailed from cities controlled by liberals who have done an extraordinarily bad job of protecting low-income minorities from criminals. In a 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, the court affirmed that the right to bear arms is an individual right and that you don’t need to be part of a militia to exercise it. One of the initial plaintiffs was Shelly Parker, a black computer-software designer who decided to challenge the district’s handgun ban in court after a 7-foot-tall neighborhood drug dealer tried to break into her home one evening and threatened to kill her. “What I want is simply to be able to own a handgun in my home, in the confines of the walls of my home—nothing else,” she told National Public Radio.

Two years later, in McDonald v. Chicago, the high court expanded on Heller. The lead plaintiff was Otis McDonald, a black Chicago retiree who wanted to own a handgun for protection from the gangs that terrorized his low-income neighborhood. Ruling in his favor, the court said that the Second Amendment applies with equal force to federal, state and local governments alike. When McDonald died in 2014, the Chicago Tribune obituary described him as “the man who brought down Chicago’s gun ban.”


It’s well known that gun sales have surged in recent years, but less well known is that blacks have led the trend. Retailers in an online survey conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group, reported that they sold 58% more guns to black customers in the first half of 2020 than a year earlier, the highest increase for any ethnic group. Personal safety tops the list of why people decide to buy a firearm. In a 2021 Gallup survey, 88% of respondents said they own a gun “for protection against crime,” which is up from 67% in 2005.


Social conditions have convinced more Americans that they need a gun, yet the political left has spent little time reassessing woke policies that lead to such thinking. Violent crime has been rising. Homicides in major cities have reached levels not seen in three decades. Meanwhile, liberal policy makers treat criminals like victims and police officers like criminals. Antigun police units tasked with keeping illegal weapons off the streets have been disbanded. Felonies have been downgraded to misdemeanors, and misdemeanors go unpunished, which only emboldens miscreants. Low-income minorities feel the brunt of these so-called reforms because they are by far the most likely crime targets.

The same “defund the police” progressives who have spent most of the past decade undermining the ability of law enforcement to combat crime are now using sensational but statistically rare mass-shooting tragedies as a pretense for curtailing the ability of people in vulnerable communities to defend themselves. The president wants to ban “assault weapons,” raise the purchase age to 21, and expand background checks. There’s no evidence that any of this will address the day-in-day-out gun violence that has driven so many Americans to become first-time gun owners.

The question is whether more restrictions on ordinary Americans in a nation that already has more guns than people will reduce the number of lives lost. Most mass shooters in recent decades have been over 21. The assailants in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, passed background checks and purchased their weapons legally. And from 1994 to 2004, we had a federal assault-weapons ban in place. The reality is that most gun crimes don’t involve such weapons, and a RAND Corp. assessment of these efforts found “inconclusive evidence for the effect of assault weapon bans on mass shootings.”

The source of the problem is the failure or inability of the government to protect us. Common sense dictates that we do what is necessary to protect ourselves in the meantime. Only a fool or an ideologue could believe that the best response to people who commit crimes with guns is launching a holy war against people who respect gun laws.