By Bob Livingston
#twill #secondamendment #tcot #sbalich #maga #courts #law
The demise of the Robert Francis (call me Beto) O’Rourke presidential campaign has served to tamp down the anti-gun rhetoric coming from the Democrat presidential contenders.
For a while there was no gun law too extreme for them to embrace — not even outright gun confiscation. Even previously (somewhat) pro-gun commie Bernie Sanders has moved toward supporting a gun ban.
The United States Supreme Court heard a challenge to a New York law that essentially prohibited gun owners from taking their weapons outside the home. Highlighting the flaw in the widely acclaimed (by the right) opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia in the Heller case, New York effectively recognized the right to have a gun in the home, but nowhere else. Gun owners were subject to arrest if they tried to transport their gun to another location, or even take it to the gun range for practice.
When it became clear that the law was headed for a Supreme Court challenge, New York instructed law enforcement to not enforce it and claimed it would create a workaround that would allow gun owners to transport their weapons to certain approved places. SCOTUS listened to arguments from both sides of the case, labeled New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. City of New York.
Afterwards, court observers opined that the court seemed inclined to dismiss the case as moot, given New York’s enforcement change. This means states inclined to nibble around the edges of the 2nd Amendment by putting small infringement on top of small infringement may continue unabated.
The gun control rhetoric may have tamped down, but not the efforts.
They’re much more bold with it in Virginia. The November election there left gun grabbers giddy. The state has Democrats controlling both sides of the legislature and Democrat Governor Blackface Northam has signaled he’s “working with our secretary of public safety” on ways to confiscate firearms from law-abiding citizens.
Virginia state legislators are preparing and pre-filing bills for the January 2020 legislative session. Among the bills in the works is one that institutes universal background checks on firearms transfers between individuals and makes it a Class 1 misdemeanor for any person knowingly to authorize a child under the age of 18 to use a firearm unless he’s under adult supervision. This is the same legislature that will also be considering a bill to allow minors to get an abortion without parental or a judge’s consent.
The gun bill would prohibit 15, 16, 17 year olds from sitting alone on a tree stand, plinking targets or defending themselves in their homes.
Another proposed bill will ban the “importation, sale, possession, etc., of assault firearms.” There is no grandfather clause in the bill, which means that every law abiding Virginian owning an “assault weapon” (which is a nebulous term that means whatever the politicians want it to mean) would instantly become a criminal.
But it’s not just the political left seeking to restrict your God-given right. So-called “conservative Republicans” like Senators Lindsey Graham and Rob Portman and Representatives Mike Turner, Adam Kinzinger and Dan Crenshaw have endorsed “red flag” laws, which are gun confiscation laws. President Donald Trump has likewise signaled support for red flag laws, dismissing due process fears with a shrug and statement, “We’ll worry about due process later.” That’s unacceptable and unconstitutional.
U.S. Attorney General William Barr recently announced that the Department of Just(Us) was launching a new federal gun control program titled Project Guardian. He promised to enforce federal gun regulations “with a vengeance.”
“I have long believed that the first duty of government is to protect the safety of our citizens,” Barr told the press gathered to cover the kick-off of the gun buying crackdown.
According to local media covering the announcement in Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. prosecutors will coordinate with state and local law enforcement officials to consider potential federal charges when a suspect is arrested for weapons possession, is believed to have used a gun to commit a violent crime or drug-trafficking offense or is suspected of being a violent gang member.
“Gun crime remains a pervasive problem in too many communities across America,” Barr said in a statement.
Barr is not new to federal gun control schemes. In the 1990s he oversaw a program called Project Trigger Lock. Under that scheme, U.S. Attorneys would work with local law enforcement to find ways to move violent crime and gang crime cases into federal court.
The truth is, almost all politicians and government bureaucrats support gun control. Many hide it out of political considerations, or they use nebulous language to shroud their gun control efforts in feel-good propaganda. For instance, change agents are substituting the words “gun control” laws with “gun safety” laws. Some of the most nefarious legislation ever passed was done so in the interests of “safety.”
When politicians start telling you they want to pass laws for your or your children’s safety you’d better sit up and take notice. Your liberty is about to be whittled away.
Politicians and their propagandists have engaged in a decades-long program to confiscate weapons by stealth by promoting the nonsense that private arms in the people’s hands is unAmerican and unsafe because guns are “dangerous.” This is twisted double-speak, but people buy into it more and more every time a mass shooting makes the news.
Earlier this year, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said the 2nd Amendment was an orphan, a “disfavored right” in the Supreme Court. It is in lower courts as well. We’ll see whether Thomas is correct when we see the court’s response to New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. City of New York and how the courts react to challenges to the laws about to come out of Virginia.
Rights are never stolen from the people in one fell swoop. They are gradually eroded away — and often under the guise of “safety,” “security,” and “for the children” — until one day people awaken in chains.
Somehow any process of gradualism escapes detection. Gradualism extends false hope and the illusion of reality. Meanwhile, the sheep are led to slaughter.
Gun laws are coming. Denial of due process is already here in the form of asset forfeiture — and it was in the works and supported by many politicians under the Barack Obama regime, which sought to steal the guns of people on the No-Fly List even though they were not even suspected of having committed a crime, much less been convicted.
The politicians realize that mass forced confiscation will not work. It would result in the deaths of thousands of federal agents, if they could find enough of them to attempt such a thing. Nor have efforts at soft confiscation — requiring self-reporting and voluntary surrender of arms and accessories suddenly deemed illegal — been anything more than marginally successful in recent years.
The truth is, the local sheriffs, rank-and-file police and military members are by-and-large pro-gun, and their families and friends are as well. For the most part, they would be loath to join federal agents in a forced confiscation program, although we have seen several instances where local police have employed red flag laws have to remove weapons from individuals. At least one man has died over red flag law confiscation. So local police are not averse to confiscation programs.
Americans seem to be waking up. On Black Friday the FBI processed 202,464 gun background checks. That’s second-most in history, trailing only the 203,086 processed on Black Friday in 2017.
In Virginia, citizens on the county level are beginning to gather to push back against the coming gun laws.
“I’ve never seen anything like this, and I’ve been doing this for over 20 years,” said Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Defense League. “It’s a sleeping giant that had been pretty much not paying attention to politics, and now they’re awake, and now they’re flooding these sanctuary county hearings. Flooding them.”
They should have been awake before. It’s not like the signs haven’t been there for more than 40 years that gun confiscation is the government agenda. They’ve likely awakened too late.
