Gun News

Tenth Amendment Center
Well-crafted non-binding resolutions can play an important part in a strategy to stand for liberty on virtually any issue. On this episode, Michael Boldin will talk about some of the core principles that make up a "well-crafted resolution," and share what he sees as the best model "2nd Amendment" resolution available to date. By a mile.

Sheriff Grady Judd provided more details and released the dashcam video from the Uber driver's vehicle who shot and killed a man in unincorporated Polk County.

Stephen Willeford -- a good guy with a gun -- describes what happened on November 5th, 2017 in Sutherland Springs, Texas at the First Baptist Church when a madman with a gun killed 26 churchgoers. Willeford, a trained, long-time NRA Member, engaged the active shooter thus saving many lives and setting a heroic example. Help us complete GOOD GUYS WITH GUNS featuring not only Stephen Willeford as a good guy, but Stewart Rhodes of OATH KEEPERS, Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, Sheriff Mack and others. See www.Good-Guys.us for more information and how you can donate to help complete this important film.

Gun Researcher’s SCOTUS Litmus Test Is Perfect, Pick the Person Dems Hate Most
BY BEN MARQUIS
JULY 3, 2018 AT 2:21PM

Ever since it was announced that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy would be retiring from his seat on the high court, Democrats and the liberal media have exploded with apocalyptic hyperbole about potential future court rulings.
That is because Kennedy’s replacement will be chosen by President Donald Trump and confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate, and Democrats know that the eventual nominee — whoever it may be — will most likely be ideologically opposed to their progressive agenda.
But as talk of potential nominees circulate through the media and each one is portrayed as perhaps the worst possible jurist ever in the history of the court system, it can become easy to get lost in all of the various analysis and opinions that most people use to inform their decisions as to how they will view those potential nominees.
However, one rather simple rule of thumb has been proposed by preeminent statistician and gun-rights researcher John Lott, writing in Townhall, that should make the process of whittling down the potential nominees to find the best future justice a relative breeze.
“Here is a simple rule: You can judge the caliber of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee by how angry the Democrats get,” Lott wrote.
Indeed, the angrier and more outraged liberals are by a potential nominee, the better that potential nominee will likely be as a sitting justice on the court.
“The smarter and more influential the nominee, in an important sense the more qualified they are, the angrier Democrats will get,” according to Lott.
Lott looked back at all of the nominees for the Supreme Court who have been put forward by various presidents over the past several decades, and he discovered the smartest and most achieved judges were the ones who endured the lengthiest confirmation processes.
Lott surmised that the increased opposition to incredibly smart nominees stemmed from the same sort of sentiment that often sees lawyers dismiss and excuse incredibly smart potential jurors, out of concern that they may be capable of influencing the opinions of others around them
To wit, Democrats don’t want to see a smart and successful conservative originalist jurist on the Supreme Court because they may prove effective at swaying their colleagues to adopt their conservative constitutionalist positions.
Instead, Democrats would prefer potential jurists be of the “dumbed down” variety, as they would be more likely to defer to other justices already on the court and rulings from lower-court judges who have been on the bench for a while.
Thus, they fight tooth-and-nail against smart and successful Supreme Court nominees — just look at how hard Democrats fought against the nomination of Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch — and how they really didn’t fight all that hard against nominees viewed as less intelligent or successful, such as Harriet Miers.
Lott said it makes sense from a partisan point of view for political parties to staunchly oppose the best and brightest nominees put forward by their opponents, but insisted that the current complexity of the laws seemingly required that only the best and brightest — no matter their ideological alignment — would be capable of performing adequately as a Supreme Court justice.
“Democrats will claim that they’re simply upset about the views of Trump’s forthcoming nominee, but what really worries them is the intelligence or influence of the pick,” Lott concluded.

To be sure, there will be much ado about the eventual nominee’s stance on abortion, gun rights, the power of the administrative state and a host of other issues, but in truth the opposition to that nominee will be less about the actual issues and more about their ability to be an influence instead of being influenced.
So, as the handful of potential Supreme Court nominees are discussed among the many analysts and pundits in the liberal media, look for the one who freaks the left out the most, and there you will quite likely find the best candidate overall for the job.
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Trump Administration’s Proposed Rulemakings a Win-Win for America's Firearms Industry, National Security

FRIDAY, MAY 25, 2018
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On Thursday, the Trump Administration published two rulemakings designed to enhance the competitiveness of American companies in the firearms and ammunition sectors, remove burdens for small businesses, and modernize export controls for the post-Cold War era. The moves will benefit both the domestic firearms industry and improve national security. The publication of the proposals also triggered a 45-day comment period during which members of the public can provide feedback on the plans and share their own experiences with the underlying regulations.
The rulemakings are part of a larger, longstanding project to modernize America’s export regime for military and “dual-use” equipment and technology. Dual-use items are those considered to have both military and civilian applications. The governing philosophy of the project is to “build a taller fence around a smaller yard” by strengthening controls on the most militarily sensitive items while allowing less sensitive material with well-established civilian uses and markets to be subject to a more business-friendly regulatory climate.
They two big players overseeing U.S. exports are the State Department, which administers the International Trafficking in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and the U.S. Commerce Department, which handles the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). The items regulated by the ITAR are on what is known as the U.S. Munitions List (USML), while those subject to the EAR are on the Commerce Control List (CCL).
Whether on the USML or CCL, however, the items are still subject to close government oversight, including the requirement in most cases that any person or entity wishing to export them to any foreign nation get a federally-issued license to do so.
Nevertheless, items on the USML controlled under ITAR are generally treated more strictly, with national and international security considerations trumping all other factors in the granting of licenses. Any business that manufactures an item on the USML, or even just a part or component of such an item, also has to register with the State Department and pay an annual fee, which is currently set at $2,250. This registration is required even if the manufacturer has no intent to ever export the items. Compliance fees, including for licenses, are also generally higher for USML items, given the complexity of the regulations and the more stringent vetting given to license applications.
Manufacturers of items on the CCL, or their parts or components, do not have to pay an annual registration fee to the Commerce Department. Moreover, regulation of these items is more flexible to promote the goal of increasing U.S. manufacturers’ and businesses’ worldwide competitiveness.
By properly apportioning export control between the two lists, the government will be able to apply maximum resources to overseeing the most consequential and sensitive equipment, while giving American businesses who manufacture consumer products a larger footprint in international markets. The result is greater security and a more robust U.S. economy.
Currently, most firearms and ammunition (with the exception of certain sporting shotguns and shotgun shells) are controlled under ITAR and the USML. This has led to a host of problems for gun-related businesses in the U.S. and made it more difficult for U.S. businesses in this sector to be competitive internationally.
First, many American firearm businesses are small operations that do not export their products and never intend to do so but still have to pay annual registration fees to the State Department because what they do is considered “manufacturing.” So if a U.S. company that manufacturers springs wants to branch out into magazine or recoil springs for firearms, for example, it has to pay the State Department’s registration fee, even if those springs are exclusively sold in the U.S.
On the other hand, if a foreign company wanted to use those springs in the firearms it manufactures abroad, it would have pay more for doing so because of all the ITAR red tape the U.S. spring maker would have to go through to export the springs. This makes the U.S. springs a less attractive option.
Two other problems that arose with the ITAR during the Obama administration concern what is considered controlled “technical data” and who is considered a regulated “manufacturer.”
As we reported at the time, part of building the “taller fence” for export control involved an initiative to tighten up rules for the “export” of “technical data.” In practice, this meant that publishers of technical information about firearms and ammunition – including exploded parts diagrams, gunsmithing tutorials, and handloading information – risked being swept up into the ITAR’s regulatory scope, particularly for items posted online.
Obama’s State Department also issued a confusing “guidance” document that expansively defined firearm “manufacturing” to include various common gunsmithing operations performed on existing firearms. This drove many smaller gunsmiths to limit or quit their business activity for fear of triggering the ITAR’s registration requirements or of incurring inadvertent violations that could bring ruinous penalties.
All of these problems would be alleviated if the Trump administration’s rules were enacted as proposed, as most non-automatic firearms of .50 caliber or less, as well as their parts, components, accessories, and magazines of up to 50 rounds capacity, would be moved from the USML to the CCL.
Another Obama-era ITAR change made it much more difficult for private individuals to travel abroad with personally owned firearms for lawful purposes such as hunting or competition because of an added requirement to document the “export” through an official website designed for commercial exporters. That requirement, unfortunately, would persist under the current version of the Commerce Department proposal but might be changed if affected parties explained their concerns during the comment period.
A further basis for comment could include the rules’ treatment of sound suppressors. Although these items are very common among hunters and recreational shooters both in the U.S. and abroad and do not provide the U.S. or its allies with any special military advantage, the published proposals would leave them on the USML.
The easiest way to file comments is through the U.S. government’s online regulatory portal, Regulations.gov. The State Department’s proposed rule and comment form are available at this link. Use this link for the Commerce Department’s proposal.
President Trump promised to be a friend to America’s gun owners, and these proposed rules show him making good on that pledge. Your input will encourage the Commerce and State departments to see these rules through to final enactment and help guide the process in the most positive direction possible. The NRA has long advocated for these changes and is extremely pleased to see progress being made toward that end.
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Photo of anti-gun protest at Minnesota State Capitol, March 7, 2018: AP Images

Soros-backed “Student” Movement Against Guns Vows “Revolution”
Written by Alex Newman

As part of the ongoing plot to disarm the American people, a national AstroTurf movement of “students” organized and supported by the radical Left and globalist billionaires is planning a national “walk out” from schools. The so-called “March For Our Lives” movement, which has the backing of front groups for establishment billionaires such as George Soros and Michael Bloomberg, intends to exploit traumatized children to advance further restrictions on gun rights and the Second Amendment following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. One of the “leaders” of the phony grassroots movement urged college students to “join the revolution,” too. Patriotic Americans and those concerned about children must expose the scam.

On March 14, anti-gun students duped into demanding that their own rights be infringed upon plan to walk out of class for 17 minutes at 10 a.m. Then, on March 24, and again on April 20, anti-gun students are also planning marches, including one in the nation's capital. All over the country, establishment-owned newspapers are hyping the “student” marches while ignoring the pro-gun students speaking out. Estimates by organizers suggest as many as 500,00 people might march on D.C. to demand further assaults on their freedom. Authorities in some jurisdictions are even forcing teachers to participate in the protests, according to news reports. And a number of celebrities known for hostility to gun rights are expected to attend, including TV “comedian” Jimmy Kimmel, infamous for hosting the least-viewed Oscars ever.

According to the “March for Our Lives” website, there were more than 725 events scheduled “worldwide.” While many of those will no doubt be duds, and some are even being hosted in totalitarian nations ruled by mass-murdering communist regimes that have already disarmed their victims, that is a significant number. Multiple radical left-wing U.S. politicians are pushing the “student” movement, too, including disgraced Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who was accused of rigging the Democrat primary, and self-described socialist Bernie “the Bolshevik” Sanders, who went to the Soviet Union for his honeymoon.
“March For Our Lives is created by students across the country who will no longer risk their lives waiting for someone else to take action to stop the epidemic of mass school shootings,” claims a permit application for the event in the nation's capital. Ironically, the application for the permit was filed by Women's March organizer Deena Katz. The Women's March, of course, became infamous last year after one of its key leaders, Islamist Linda Sarsour, was exposed as an advocate of Sharia law for America. Other leading forces in the Women's March include tax-funded abortion giant Planned Parenthood, which kills over 325,000 American preborn babies every year.

For decades, establishment globalists, violent communists, murderous Islamists, and hostile foreign powers have actively sought to disarm the American people. And for decades, they have been unable to make much progress. Under Obama, the would-be gun grabbers came closer than ever before. But even with Democrats largely in charge, public hostility to infringements on the God-given right to keep and bear arms was so fierce that it prevented any major develpments. Ironically, Obama may go down in history as the best gun salesman ever, with record numbers of firearm purchases throughout his term.

But now, by exploiting traumatized children to manipulate people's emotions, the gun grabbers smell blood in the water — already, Florida lawmakers passed a handful of infringements by pairing them with a plan to allow certain armed personnel at schools. And the establishment's moneyed interests are sparing no expense to strike at gun rights while they think they can. Obviously, there is major funding behind the effort. On the marchforourlives.com website, potential organizers of their own local marchers are promised that “information on accessing grants to support sibling marches will be emailed directly to registered host organizers.”

Some of those who have donated to support the anti-gun AstroTurf movement include left-wing Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and crony capitalist Eli Broad, both of whom pledged $1 million. President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner's brother Joshua donated $50,000, according to reports. TV personality and globalist New Age guru Oprah Winfrey gave half a million, as did movie producer Steven Spielberg and George Clooney, along with a barrage of other liberal Hollywood figures. Gucci, the overpriced “fashion” label that recently featured its models carrying severed heads down the runway, put up half a million, too. And billionaire globalist George Soros, the self-styled “god,” has been pouring money into a variety of far-left organizations that are bankrolling the “student” movement.

As this writer reported last week at FreedomProject Media, the student movement is, in fact, the very definition of AstroTurf — a term used to describe both artificial grass surfaces and phony “grassroots” movements controlled by powerful forces behind the scenes. Of course, there are undoubtedly some “useful idiots,” as they are known, who have been duped into believing that disarming law-abiding Americans would help prevent school shooting. After all, these are children, and most of them are victims of a dumbed-down government “education” regime that values ideological indoctrination more than academics or learning.

But even putting the gullibility, immaturity, and naivete of youngsters aside — that is part of the reason society does not let them vote, contract, marry, or carry guns — it is an undeniable fact that powerful establishment figures have been guiding and orchestrating this movement from the start. And ironically, the fact that the establishment's most well-funded leftist groups are behind the fake “student” movement was first revealed to a wide audience by the left-wing activist website Buzzfeed.com.

According to its report, “The Parkland Teens Fighting For Gun Control Have The Backing Of These Huge Organizing Groups,” there are “large progressive organizations, donors, and a high-powered public relations firm” backing the “March for Our Lives” movement. The article documented the fact that some of the nation's most well-funded left-wing establishment groups are helping the phony students' movement with everything from money and buses to organizing, promotion, and public relations work.

Among the organizations and outfits identified in the piece are Everytown for Gun Safety, a front group for billionaire anti-gun extremist Michael Bloomberg — a globalist who enjoys constant protection from heavily armed private security. While his AstroTurf group has wasted millions of dollars with nothing to show for it but rapidly expanding protections for gun rights across America, Bloomberg and his minions seem to think that parading children around might help turn the tide. And to that end, news reports suggest that his front group is pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the AstroTurf “student” movement.

Another prominent organization behind the “student” movement is MoveOn.org, the fringe left-wing outfit funded by convicted criminal Soros. Of course, Soros has become a lighting rod for criticism — and not just for going on national TV to admit he had no guilt for helping National Socialists (Nazis) strip Jews of their property. Today Soros spends his ill-gotten wealth trying to corrupt Christianity, foment riots, and flood the West with Islamic migrants to undermine liberty and nation-states. He also thinks the most murderous regime in human history, the Communist Party dictatorship enslaving China, functions better than the U.S. government and should “own” what he calls the “New World Order.”

MoveOn.org, which Soros has lavishly funded with millions in donations over the years, has sent out millions of e-mails urging people to get involved with the phony “March For Our Lives” events. On March 7, the radical Soros-backed group even boasted publicly of its role in the “student” movement, thanking its members who have “contributed to our work supporting student-led organizing” and taking on the NRA. Among other actions, the group has been circulating petitions, helping to lead the “students,” calling on companies to oppose gun rights, “asking schools to support students,” distributing “I stand with students” stickers, and much more.
“MoveOn members are mobilizing for the March for Our Lives on March 24, in D.C. and around the country,” the group bragged on its website. “MoveOn members around the country will be joining the events, and we’ll be asking MoveOn members to step up and be among organizers for local marches and actions that are looking for leaders.” In other words, despite the “fake news” pushed by the establishment media, well-trained left-wing activists are literally bragging that they — and not students — are leading the “student-led” marches.

Last but certainly not least: Big Labor is pushing disarmament by exploiting traumatized children, too. The American Federation of Teachers, one of two radical left-wing unions that purports to speak for educators, has reportedly played a key role in advancing the “student” movement. Indeed, according to news reports, the AFT even bused children to Florida's Capitol so they could lobby politicians to violate their oaths of office to support the state and U.S. constitutions, both of which enshrine the pre-existing human right to keep and bear arms. No word on whether the unions will oppose schools coercing teachers into protesting against guns.

Even the leading “students” involved in the AstroTurf movement are attracting suspicion. David Hogg, for instance, who has been endlessly promoted by the establishment media, has become one of the public faces of the effort. But ironically, a growing body of evidence suggests that he is serving as a puppet for his radical activist mother, Rebecca Boldrick. Big League Politics reported on a Tweet sent out by Hogg's account that tags Facebook to ask that they remove a fake account in Hogg's name — but the screenshot of the Facebook page shows Boldrick is logged in, not Hogg. Other "students" are also being coached and manipulated by others.
“Now it appears likely that Hogg’s mother has a much larger influence over the actions of the gun control activist’s public presence,” the online news service reported. “This also opens up the question of whether or not Boldrick is simply using her son’s newfound fame to promote her liberal agenda.” Apparently Boldrick was a “VIP” with CNN, the widely ridiculed “fake news” kingpin often derided as the “Clinton News Network” or the “Communist News Network.” Hogg's father, meanwhile, is a former FBI agent, and with the nation wondering how the FBI and local law enforcement could fail so catastrophically, it sure helps to change the subject to “guns.”

All the while, the media has been concealing this information, including the establishment backing of the “student” movement. It has also refused to report on some of the more outlandish statements by organizers. Hogg (or his mother), for instance, took to Twitter to urge college students and others to “get out and join the revolution!” The precise nature of the “revolution” Hogg envisioned was not made clear. But historically, when “revolutions” have succeeded in disarming their intended targets, mass slaughter by government — known as democide; responsible for hundreds of millions of murders — begins in earnest.

In short, despite what the establishment media wants you to think, there is no grassroots uprising of brainwashed children demanding civilian disarmament. In reality, this “student” movement is the very definition of AstroTurf. Of course, even if these were legitimate student protests and not establishment AstroTurf funded by totalitarian-minded globalists and billionaires, it would still be ludicrous to set public policy based on the opinions of children. But for the sake of freedom and human life, it is crucial that the American people expose the fake media and its fake narrative aimed at disarming the public.
Photo of anti-gun protest at Minnesota State Capitol, March 7, 2018: AP Images
Alex Newman is a contributor to The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook.
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CNN Forced to Admit Town Requiring Guns Has Stunning Crime Stats
BY BEN MARQUIS
MARCH 7, 2018 AT 3:16PM
As has become typical, the debate over the Second Amendment and gun control reached a fever pitch following the recent mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
Even as some liberals chastise gun owners and condescendingly declare, “Nobody wants to take away your guns,” other Democrats put forward legislation that would ban most common semi-automatic firearms and others even suggested Australia-style confiscation laws.
It should go without saying that the mainstream media is fully supportive of such proposals, chief among them CNN, as evidenced by its incessantly favorable coverage for the anti-gun side and staunch opposition to the point of denigration for those who advocate for the Second Amendment.
However, there is a small town in Georgia that went an entirely different route in regard to guns and gun ownership nearly four decades ago. Breitbart noted that even CNN had to admit that a law mandating gun ownership for those Georgia residents has had an effect on gun violence in the area.
That town would be Kennesaw, Georgia, and they passed a local ordinance into law in 1982 that required the head of every single household in their jurisdiction to keep a firearm in their home for the purpose of home defense.
According to a piece from CNN, the town of about 33,000 people has suffered only one murder in the past six years, and has a crime rate of less than 2 percent. In other words, as economist John Lott has long noted, “More guns, less crime.”
The decidedly anti-gun media outlet made certain to mention that the law is generally unenforced by local police — meaning some households may not actually have the mandated firearm — and were also sure to point out that there could be other factors at play in regard to the exceptionally low crime rate aside from the mandatory gun ownership.
But even if the law isn’t strictly enforced, it undoubtedly has an effect, as Kennesaw Police Department Lt. Craig Graydon stated, “It was meant to be kind of a crime deterrent.”
Since the law has been around for so long, Kennesaw has received attention from all over the country — and even other nations around the world — in regard to the ordinance as various locales consider whether something similar might be right for their own communities.
“We get a lot of calls, conversation, and it seems to keep crime control, gun safety, things like that on the minds of many of the residents, because people are constantly talking about the gun law,” Lt. Graydon said. “So that’s been somewhat of a benefit to us.”
That appears to be how Mayor Derek Easterling views the law as well. “If you’re going to commit a crime in Kennesaw and you’re the criminal — are you going to take a chance that that homeowner is a law-abiding citizen” he said.
“The first thing that most people say when they meet us, you know as a community is ‘oh, it’s not what I expected,'” explained Easterling of the attention his town has received. “I don’t know what they expect of people who arm themselves with guns at home, or what they’re looking for, but really we’re not that.”
One resident of the town who has willingly obeyed the ordinance is Wayne Arnold. He told CNN that in addition to several handguns, he also keeps one of the incredibly common AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles chambered in .223 caliber handy, just in case.

“It gives me the ability to protect myself as opposed to being somewhere where you weren’t allowed to have a firearm or it was frowned upon,” Arnold said.
“People kind of get the image that it’s the Wild West, where everybody walks around with a firearm strapped to their side, and it’s not like that,” he added. “It’s strictly a home defense system type of deal. There’s no shootouts down the street.”
Please share this story on Facebook so everyone can see that even anti-gun CNN had to admit that a small town in Georgia that mandates gun ownership in the home has an incredibly low violent crime rate.
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The Legalities of Defending Yourself
Posted on January 17, 2018
Dear Fellow Survivalist;

I don’t know about you, but I’m a firm believer in our Second Amendment rights. As I understand the Bill of Rights, they aren’t the government giving rights to the citizens, but the government acknowledging those rights. The right to defend ourselves comes from God, not from Uncle Sam. That’s an important distinction.
I both carry concealed and have guns in my home, for the purpose of defending myself and my family. My wife carries too, for the very same reason. There might be times when I am not there to protect her; in those cases, she needs to be able to protect herself. So I taught her how to shoot, just like I taught my two daughters how to shoot.
But there’s a huge legal difference between the right to own firearms or the right to carry firearms, and the right to use deadly force. A concealed carry license doesn’t make anyone 007, they don’t have a license to kill. Nor does someone being in your home automatically give you a license to kill in some states. It has to be self-defense and the fact that you have to defend yourself has to be something that others can clearly see.
Self defense generally means that you or someone else is in “imminent danger of life or limb.” Okay, so what does that mean? The first part, “imminent danger,” means that it that you are at risk RIGHT NOW! It doesn’t mean that the risk has passed; nor does it mean that you think a risk might manifest. It has to be something that exists in that moment. The legal phrase, “life or limb” simply means that there is a risk of being seriously hurt or killed. How seriously is something that the courts have to decide in each and every case.
There’s another concept that is commonly used in self-defense cases; that’s the “reasonable man doctrine” (or standard). What that says is that any reasonable person, in the same circumstances, will believe that your actions were reasonable.
This can be tricky, because it depends a lot on the culture where you live. Not just the legal culture of your state, but of the jurisdiction that you were in when you had to defend yourself. Some actions could very well be seen as reasonable in Texas, and considered totally unreasonable in New York. Probably the hardest part of dealing with the legalities of self-defense, is understanding how this applies where you live.
Remember the controversial case of Trayvon Martin, who was killed by George Zimmerman in 2012? Zimmerman was on duty as a neighborhood watch volunteer, when he had an altercation with Martin, a young man. During the altercation, Zimmerman ended up shooting Martin fatally.
There were several things that made this case controversial, including the racial element. But the one I want to focus on was that Martin was supposedly unarmed, while Zimmerman was. That would cause any such case to be controversial, in just about any circumstances.
If a woman were defending herself from a man, the reasonable man doctrine would hold that it was reasonable for the woman to use a firearm to defend herself. Some other situations, like a man facing off against two or three assailants would be just about as obvious. Unless the man were a martial arts expert, he would need some sort of weapon. But here we have a man fighting a man, not so clear-cut a situation.
What won the case for Zimmerman was that he was an older man who was somewhat out of shape, fighting off an attack from a younger, physically fit one. In such a case, it was deemed reasonable for him to use whatever weapon was at his disposal; in this case, a gun.
Could Zimmerman have defended himself without a gun? Maybe. But the key here is that he felt that he was at risk of life and limb and the court agreed with him. So he was exonerated. The media didn’t like it, seeing it as a racially-motivated killing, but every I was dotted and every T crossed, according to the law.
Watch Out for the Urban LegendsThere are a number of “urban legends” about shooting in self-defense, which just plain aren’t true. These can land you a nice long vacation in jail. So, let’s look at what’s wrong with them.
Legend #1 – If they’re in your home, you can shoot them.
What’s wrong here is that just being in your home doesn’t constitute an imminent threat to life and limb. They may break into your home, steal your stuff, but not threaten you in any way. In that case, using deadly force is unjustified. Likewise, if they turn their back on you, to leave, they are no longer a threat, even if they beat you half to death before that.
Legend #2 – If you have to shoot them, make sure you kill them.
Any time you use a firearm in anger, it should be with the intent to kill. We train to shoot center mass, because in a real-life situation, your shooting skill will be severely degraded. However, while you aiming with an intent to kill, your real purpose is to stop them from being a threat to you. Once they are no longer a threat, you are not justified in shooting them again. So don’t! If you can, stop as soon as it is clear that they are going down.
This legend stems from the idea that if you kill them, you won’t have to face them suing you. But you will still have to face their family suing you, and their chances of winning will be much greater. You’ll also face much stiffer criminal charges, as it will be seen as murder, rather than self-defense.
Legend #3 – If you have to shoot them outside, drag them in the house.
There are a couple of major problems with this one. First of all, if they aren’t in your home, how can they be an imminent threat? About the only way that would be possible is if they are shooting at or into your home. In that case, you are justified in the use of deadly force in self-defense. The other big problem is that you are tampering with evidence, which in and of itself is a felony. Not only that, but it will make the police investigating the incident think that you have something to hide, so they’ll keep digging, trying to find what that is.
I hope this helps you. Please keep in mind that this information is rather generalized. You really need to understand the law in your state, as self-defense laws vary from state to state. The NRA website is a great place to find that information, as well as checking with your local gun shop.
So keep safe and keep your cool if faced with the need to use deadly force. And as always, keep your powder dry and your survival gear close at hand.
Dr. Ric

p.s. I need to add a disclaimer here. I am not a lawyer, so don’t take what I’ve written above as legal advice. I am merely trying to provide you with information, so that you can defend yourself. If you have any questions, seek the advice of competent legal authority.
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From Duty to be Armed to Permission to Carry
By Publius Huldah

“If the central government has the authority to tell a state it must accept permits from all the other states, then it also has the authority to tell a state it may not accept a concealed permit from any other states. If the central government can do these things it can set up a national concealed carry permit scheme and in essence bring into existence a national arms registry. That is exactly where this is headed.” Attorney Richard D. Fry 1

Some are touting the federal Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 (HR 38) as a bill which would expand our right to carry. But if you will walk with me for a few minutes, I’ll show you a better path to take.
Let us look at the applicable First Principles, to which I propose we return.
1. Gun control is not an enumerated power delegated to the federal government
Our federal Constitution doesn’t delegate to the federal government any power over the Country at Large 2 to restrict our arms. Accordingly, all pretended federal laws, regulations, orders, opinions, or treaties which purport to do so are unconstitutional as outside the scope of powers delegated. They are also unconstitutional as in violation of the Second Amendment.
The only power the federal government has over the Country at Large respecting arms is set forth at Article I, §8, clause 16 with respect to providing for the “organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia”. Pursuant to this clause, Congress passed the Militia Act of 1792 which required every able-bodied male citizen (with a few exceptions) between the ages of 18 and 45 to acquire a rifle, bayonet, ammo, ammo pouch, and report to his local Militia Unit for training. 3
2. What does your State Constitution say about the right to keep and bear arms?
Each State has its own Constitution which addresses its State Militia and the right to be armed.
Now listen: No State may lawfully make any law which contradicts its State Constitution or which interferes with Congress’ power to “organize, arm, and discipline, the Militia”.
Accordingly, any State Statute which purports to require a permit before one may carry a gun is probably unconstitutional under that State’s Constitution; and is certainly unconstitutional under the federal Constitution because Congress may lawfully require able-bodied male Citizens to acquire firearms and ammo and report to their local Militia Unit for training!
Do you see?
Now let’s look at Title 18, US Code, Part I, Chapter 44, which HR 38 proposes to amend.
3. Title 18, US Code, Part I, Chapter 44 is unconstitutional
It sets up a complex federal regulatory scheme over firearms, every word of which is unconstitutional as outside the scope of powers delegated, and as in violation of the Second Amendment.
HERE it is, look through it (§§ 921-931).
4. What HR 38 actually does
HR 38 proposes to amend this existing federal regulatory scheme to insert a new provision [to be § 926 D] to require States which have a statute which permits residents of their State to apply for a permit [!] to carry a concealed firearm
to allow persons from other States:

who aren’t prohibited by federal law from possessing firearms [!]; and
who are carrying a photographic ID issued by a government body [!]; and
who are carrying a concealed carry license or permit from the other State [!],

to possess or carry a concealed handgun (other than a machinegun or “destructive device”) which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.

So! Even though a State Constitution, such as that for Connecticut, 4 prohibits the State Legislature from making ANY laws restricting firearms (such as imposing requirements for registration, a permit, government issued photo ID), a Citizen of Connecticut who exercises his constitutionally recognized right to carry without registration or a permit or a government issued photo ID, wouldn’t qualify under HR 38 for concealed carry in another State.

To qualify for concealed carry in other States, the Citizen of Connecticut would need his State Legislature to pass a law [which is unconstitutional under the Connecticut and federal Constitutions], so that he could comply with an unconstitutional federal statute [HR 38], so that he could carry in other States which also would have to pass unconstitutional laws imposing permit requirements on those who carry concealed.

Do you see how a God-given right [self-defense] is thus converted into a privilege which is regulated, granted, or denied, by civil government?

HR 38 also provides that any person carrying a concealed handgun in a State under the reciprocity provisions may also carry concealed in the public parts of National Parks and certain other lands under federal control. Lest you think this a gain, consider that: (1) The Constitution doesn’t authorize the federal government to operate national parks and such like, and (2) the federal government has no lawful authority to impose registration requirements for carrying arms anywhere!

5. What’s the solution?
Read our Declaration of Independence and federal Constitution. Then you won’t fall for unconstitutional gimmicks like HR 38.
The gun rights organizations could perform valuable services to our Country by working for:

the repeal of the entire unconstitutional federal regulatory scheme respecting arms;
the repeal of all unconstitutional State regulatory schemes;
the revitalization of the State Militia to replace the federally controlled National Guard; 5 and
by providing more classes for Citizens in arms training.

And please stop lobbying for unconstitutional federal legislation!
Endnotes:
1 From the late Attorney Richard D. Fry’s email of Dec. 10, 2015 to US Senator Moran, a co-sponsor of SB 498, the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2015. Richard, who was my Friend, sent me a copy of his letter.
2 Pursuant to Article I, § 8, next to last clause, Congress has general legislative powers over the District of Columbia, military bases, dock yards, mints, federal courthouses and post offices, and such other places needed for Congress to exercise its enumerated powers. The exercise of such powers by Congress over these small federal enclaves is restricted by the Bill of Rights – including the 2nd Amendment. So Congress is prohibited from making, for these federal enclaves, any laws which infringe the Right of The People to keep and bear Arms. Congress may properly require individuals visiting federal prisons, the psych ward of military hospitals, the mint, federal courthouses, and such like, to leave their arms in their vehicles. But Congress may not require Citizens to obtain and carry a permit or photo ID as a condition precedent to carrying a firearm.
3 The “Militia of the several States” were creatures of State Statutes – not of the federal government. Dr. Edwin Vieira’s short video shows how the State Militia were replaced by the federally controlled National Guard.
4 The Constitution of the State of Connecticut says at Article I: “SEC. 15. Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of himself and the state.”

5 See A SERIOUS QUESTION FOR THE NRA, by Dr. Edwin Vieira, re revitalization of the Militia of the several States. Dr. Vieira’s mind is a delight.

August 21st
Improved RFID Technology in Smart Guns Threatens Second Amendment

Tuesday, 20 August 2013 Written by Bob Adelmann

The development of RFID (radio frequency identification) chips (here shown next to a grain of rice) has advanced to the point where gun makers will shortly be offering “smart guns” for sale in the United States, according to Anthony Gucciardi, who has been watching the movement with increasing concern for years.

The advancement will allow the manufacturer and the federal government to “turn off” the firearm and render the weapon useless at any time, a tactic that will be used "to take away legal firearms from the hands of law-abiding citizens,” according to Gucciardi.
Read more...
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Venezuelans Now Regret Letting Government Take Their Guns Away
Not long ago, millions of Venezuelans decided to become loved by the left and voted away their right to keep and bear arms. Now they regret it.
June 11, 2019By Warner Todd Huston
Not long ago, millions of Venezuelans decided to become loved by the left and voted away their right to keep and bear arms. But now that their government has descended into a socialist nightmare where everyone is starving to death, these same people are now regretting their votes to give away their right to self-defense.
It is an object lesson for the folks here in the U.S. who want to travel down the same path as Venezuela; gun-free, socialism and all.
Venezuela implemented its gun ban six years ago before their world took its last steps into the living hell it has become. Now they have no defense against the junta and the socialist criminals controlling their nation.
Trending: National Parks Quietly Dump Signs Saying Glaciers ‘Will Be Gone’ By 2020 Due to Mythical Global Warming
“Hollywood’s favorite strongman banned arms for citizens. It has not ended well for those starving to death under a socialist dictatorship,” actor James Woods noted on Twitter.

James Woods ✔@RealJamesWoodsHollywood’s favorite strongman banned arms for citizens. It has not ended well for those starving to death under a socialist dictatorship... #DemocratsAreDangerous https://www.foxnews.com/world/venezuelans-regret-gun-prohibition-we-could-have-defended-ourselves …
Venezuelans regret gun ban, 'a declaration of war against an unarmed population'As Venezuela continues to crumble under the socialist dictatorship of President Nicolas Maduro, some are expressing words of warning – and resentment –regarding the country’s earlier gun control bill...
And boy is he right.
As Fox News reported on Friday:
“Guns would have served as a vital pillar to remaining a free people, or at least able to put up a fight,” Javier Vanegas, 28, a Venezuelan teacher of English now exiled in Ecuador, told Fox News. “The government security forces, at the beginning of this debacle, knew they had no real opposition to their force. Once things were this bad, it was a clear declaration of war against an unarmed population.”
Under the direction of then-President Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly in 2012 enacted the “Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law,” with the explicit aim to “disarm all citizens.” The law took effect in 2013, with only minimal pushback from some pro-democracy opposition figures, banned the legal commercial sale of guns and munitions to all – except government entities.
Naturally, Chavez sponsored a “gun buy-back” program before implementing his confiscation. Few Venezuelans were much interested in the government’s cash. So, by the end of the year, Chavez forcefully seized 12,500 guns. But that was just the start
And when Chavez mercifully died, the country’s next president, Maduro, continued the confiscation policies…
In 2014, with Nicolás Maduro at the helm following Chavez’s death but carrying through his socialist “Chavista” policies, the government invested more than $47 million enforcing the gun ban – which has since included grandiose displays of public weapons demolitions in the town square.
And since then? Well, the government has become despotic and has run roughshod over the Venezuelan people, jailing and shooting them at will. And the people now have no defense to stop Maduro from subjugating them.
“Venezuela shows the deadly peril when citizens are deprived of the means of resisting the depredations of a criminal government,” said David Kopel, a policy analyst, and research director at the Independence Institute and adjunct professor of Advanced Constitutional Law at Denver University. “The Venezuelan rulers – like their Cuban masters – apparently viewed citizen possession of arms as a potential danger to a permanent communist monopoly of power.”
No doubt.
Make no mistake, America. This is what Democrats want to happen here, America. They want the American people disarmed so that there is no resistance to their authoritarian reign. Democrats are fascists at heart but they know that your privately held firearms are the biggest threat to their power. Don’t give away your protection willingly.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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kali9/Getty Images

Class In North Carolina Teaches Firearm Safety To Kids As Young As Six
By ASHE SCHOW
@ASHESCHOW
May 24, 2019 Michael Pegram*, a North Carolina man who is an experienced firearms instructor, noticed there were no classes to teach children firearm safety — so he decided to create his own.
“There was no other class like this,” Pegram, who founded Echo Firearm Training, told WBTV. “So, I decided to come up with it.”
Pegram’s organization now offers classes for children as young as six to learn how to safely operate and handle firearms. North Carolina is a concealed carry state, and many children grow up in homes with parents who own guns, so it makes sense to take the time to teach them respect for such tools.
“It’s the parents’ choice of what their kids should be around,” Pegram said. “I’m just offering a class to let them learn to be safe, if they’re going to be around them.”
Pegram’s class for children takes about four hours and includes classroom teaching and time shooting. Children use a Nerf gun for the class, but children who Pegram feel are responsible enough are allowed to shoot a .22 or a nine-millimeter, under his supervision.
“A lot of times they’re not shooting a nine-millimeter,” Pegram told WBTV. “But once in a blue moon, if they know what they’re doing, and I know they can do it, we have done that.”
WBTV interviewed parents about the class earlier this week. At first, the parents seemed concerned about children so young being around firearms but acknowledged that the class might not be a bad idea for older children.
“My daughter’s five years old,” one parent, Bryan Moore, told the outlet. “And thinking of her shooting a gun, it’s kind of crazy.”
Rebekah Biercz told WBTV the class seemed “like a bad idea.” Biercz softened her view when it came to older kids, however.
“If we’re going to have guns in this country, one of the things we need is really strict training classes,” she said.
“On one hand, maybe it’s good to teach gun safety,” Moore added. “But then on the other hand, that would be my one concern, is it would make kids comfortable handling guns, and could lead to more accidents, possibly.”
Another father, Patrick Young, told WBTV that keeping guns away from kids would make it likely they would “want to mess with it.”
WBTV spoke to nine-year-old Aiden Roberts, who had taken Pegram’s class.
“If you see a gun tell your parents,” he told the outlet. “Never point a gun at people.”
While a headline may make the class seem like a bad idea, Pegram is not some random person off the street teaching kids. He has more than 30 years of firearms experience, is an NRA-certified handgun instructor and range safety officer, has a concealed carry permit, and is also a concealed carry permit instructor. Further, according to his bio, he has 24 hours of South Carolina Law Enforcement Department (SLED) training. His company, Echo, offers a range of courses for adults, including basic safety and defense courses. He also has a class for teachers on how to respond to an active shooter.
*Neither Pegram nor any of his students are pictured above.

Students leave during a community vigil held to honor the victims and survivors of yesterday's fatal shooting at the STEM School Highlands Ranch, late Wednesday, May 8, 2019, in Highlands Ranch, Colo. (Photo: David Zalubowski, AP)

Frank Miniter: Student walkout at Colorado shooting vigil is a good sign
By Frank Miniter | Fox News
Colorado students walk out of school shooting vigilStudents who survived a mass shooting at a suburban Denver school walked out of a vigil for a slain student in anger and tears.
The very public scene of hundreds of Colorado students and their parents walking out of a vigil that was turned into political theater by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence was so embarrassing that the gun control group actually issued an apology.
Before leaving the Wednesday night event, students shouted, in front of journalists who the Brady Campaign invited: “this is not for us,” “political stunt” and “we are people, not a statement.”
The Brady Campaign had portrayed the event as a vigil in memory of Kendrick Castillo, a student hero who died from gunshot wounds after he and two other students charged one of the attackers Tuesday at the Highlands Ranch STEM School in Colorado.
COLORADO STUDENTS WALK OUT OF SCHOOL SHOOTING VIGIL AFTER POLITICIANS TAKE THE MIC
Eight other students were injured in the shooting. Two students were arrested and accused of the attack.
Instead of putting together an event to bring people together to mourn, the gun control group brought in activists and Colorado politicians – Democratic presidential contender U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Democratic U.S. Rep. Jason Crow – to push a one-sided political agenda.
The speakers said they weren’t there to just offer thoughts and prayers, but that they instead were there to push for more restrictions on the right to bear arms.
We saw this with events after the shooting at Parkland High School in Florida. T events, including a CNN town hall, weren’t open forums or vigils. They were orchestrated propaganda designed to push a political cause.
Law-abiding gun owners enjoy shooting competitions, hunting or simply want to defend themselves and their loved ones. They should not be blamed for the evil actions of criminals and those with serious mental health problems.
The CNN event even featured then-Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel. He vociferously stuck to the gun control narrative. He should have known – and we would all soon find out – that a school resource officer stayed outside during the attack. President Trump later called the officer a “coward.”
Turning grieving students into props for an agenda has become what these gun control groups and the mainstream media do after shootings. This has become so choreographed that the Brady Campaign was caught flat-footed when hundreds of students and their parents wouldn’t be extras in the production.
This is an important moment because it signals that a less ideological time is coming.
Groups like the Brady Campaign and the politicians who agree with them have been treating legal gun ownership as a problem that needs to be solved. They are blaming law-abiding gun owners for the actions of criminals as a way to impose more controls on the citizenry.
This political treatment of an important issue has made it difficult to even have an intelligent discussion about the problem.
How can an open and honest dialogue be possible when the mainstream media and so many Democrats prefer to blame America’s 100-million-plus gun owners?
Law-abiding gun owners enjoy shooting competitions, hunting or simply want to defend themselves and their loved ones. They should not be blamed for the evil actions of criminals and those with serious mental health problems.
Guns have been commonly owned by Americans since before the beginning of our republic, but school shootings are a modern trend. Yet they are not new.
The most deadly attack on a school actually occurred in 1927 in Bath, Mich., when a trustee from a local school board detonated 600 pounds of dynamite he placed inside the Bath Consolidated School.
Andrew Kehoe killed 44 people, including 38 elementary school children and his wife. He then committed suicide by detonating a final explosion in his truck that also killed another three adults and a child.
There is a lot of evidence, however, that some things have changed.
There is certainly a mental health crisis growing in our youth in America. Suicide rates among the young, especially those between 15 and 24, have climbed rapidly in recent years. Levels of anxiety and depression among young people are also up.
The reasons for this growing epidemic are numerous and many researchers are studying the problem. But it is clear that if we honestly target the actual problem things can be done.
Often, after a murderer strikes a school or another so-called “gun-free zone,” we find that the person responsible was calling out for help. Parents try, but they too often can’t find enough resources.
The bureaucracy has also failed us again and again. Too often the killers weren’t stopped before they acted, even though many people reported them to the proper authorities.
Various federal, state and local agencies have also too often failed to give the names of people prohibited from owning firearms to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), so these people can at least be stopped from legally buying a gun.
Political differences aside, imagine if the media actually treated gun rights groups honestly. The National Rifle Association (full disclosure, I write a weekly gun rights column for the NRA) has the School Shield program that sends teams of experts to schools to help them create safer environments.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for firearms manufacturers, has lobbied for FixNICS and many other initiatives to keep guns out of the hands of those who are prohibited from owning them.

Instead of demonizing these groups, imagine if the mainstream media were willing to be more factual and nuanced in their reporting. Solutions would become much clearer in such a climate.
The students who boldly walked out en masse as they chanted “mental health, mental health” from what shouldn’t have been a political event did shock the mainstream media into actually reporting on the story. That’s a big step toward finding honest solutions to a horrifying problem.
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Gun-control activist David Hogg has come under fire by the NRA for a tweet about taxes on gun sales. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

NRA Turns into David Hogg’s Worst Nightmare After Teen Pushes for Federal Tax on Firearm Sales

BY BRYAN CHAI
DECEMBER 9, 2018
Bear with me, but I almost want to give David Hogg some credit.
Despite becoming a literal human punching bag for everyone from holocaust survivors to schoolmate Kyle Kashuv, Hogg persistently continues to push his leftist narratives at any given opportunity.
If his messages weren’t such nonsensical garbage, I would probably give him some semblance of credit.

Hogg’s latest attempt to push his anti-Second Amendment propaganda has, to the surprise of nobody, exploded spectacularly in his face. Again.
Last month, Hogg took to Twitter to again needle the millions of law-abiding Americans who happen to own guns.

“Congress ought to create a federal tax on gun sales to fund gun violence research,” Hogg posted in late November.

The farcical nature of Hogg’s sentiments should be readily apparent. In essence, Hogg wants Americans who’ve done nothing wrong to foot the bill to study a parroted and tired leftist boogeyman.
But then again, using feelings instead of facts is par for the course for the 18-year-old activist.
Hogg was predictably slammed for his gibberish. This time, it was the NRA that put the outspoken Hogg in his place.
“It’s always satisfying when an anti-gunner reveals just how uneducated they are about firearms,” the NRA retorted on their Twitter account. “Recently, this distinction goes to David Hogg, who has repeatedly called for a federal tax on firearms and ammunition — which he must not realize already exists.”
Ouch.

Far be it for me to call out the general lack of education a teenager has in 2018, but Hogg deserves no such respite.
As the NRA Institute for Legislative Action notes, the “idea of a tax on firearms and ammunition predates Hogg by about a hundred years.”

“A moment on Google would have shown Mr. Hogg as much,” the NRA-ILA added in a zinger.

“The Firearms and Ammunition Excise Tax (FAET) was first imposed in 1919. In 1937, the Pittman-Robertson Act directed all revenue from FAET and related excise taxes to be used for hunting-related activities. The FAET includes a 10% tax on the sale price of pistols and revolvers and 11% of the sale price of other firearms and ammunition, and 11% tax on archery equipment. The tax is applied whether or not the equipment is likely to be used for hunting,” the NRA-ILA explained.
The cold, hard facts are right there in front of Hogg’s face, not that that’s ever stopped him before.
The NRA-ILA also pointed out that Hogg’s suggestion would directly take money from the Wildlife Restoration Trust Fund.
“More than $12 billion has been collected under the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937, including more than $761 million in fiscal year 2017 alone. Revenues from the tax are placed into the Wildlife Restoration Trust Fund and distributed to the states and U.S. territories,” the NRA-ILA said.

At this point, even if you generally support Hogg’s leftist stances, you probably want him to stop speaking. At some point, even the world’s best surgeons probably won’t be able to remove his foot from his mouth.
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Stephen Willeford -- a good guy with a gun -- describes what happened on November 5th, 2017 in Sutherland Springs, Texas at the First Baptist Church when a madman with a gun killed 26 churchgoers. Willeford, a trained, long-time NRA Member, engaged the active ...
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Kyle Kashuv Uses His Knowledge of Fellow Student David Hogg To Crush Him
The Kyle Kashuv-David Hogg Twitter war keeps on going, and Kashuv keeps on running up the score. For the very few Americans who might still be unfamiliar with the two, Hogg and Kashuv both survived the Parkland shooting.
BY CILLIAN ZEAL
SEPTEMBER 10, 2018 AT 6:10AM
The Kyle Kashuv-David Hogg Twitter war keeps on going, and Kashuv keeps on running up the score.
For the very few Americans who might still be unfamiliar with the two, Hogg and Kashuv both survived the Parkland shooting. Hogg went on to become the young voice of gun control, Kashuv a nationally known Second Amendment defender who believes security and and preparedness are the best way to defend against mass shootings.
When we recently saw the two facing off on Twitter, Hogg had tweeted something about how fighting bad guys with guns with good guys with guns is like fighting wildfires with more fires — it doesn’t work. Kashuv pointed out that controlled burns are actually one of the best ways to stop wildfires. Point and match.
The latest face-off has to do with Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general the National Rifle Association just endorsed for another term.
This was Hogg’s reply:

Now, it’s worth pointing out one thing here that Hogg’s lawyers probably should have alerted him to: Paxton isn’t a felon. He’s been charged in a securities case that dates back to 2015 and has been delayed multiple times. He’s also beaten two similar cases in the past, according to the Dallas Morning News.
The likelihood Hogg faces a lawsuit from Paxton is probably minimal (governors have other things to do with their time.) But Kashuv nailed Hogg for the tweet in a way that might be even worse than being sued.
He made Hogg look like an idiot.

Yes, Vic Mensa — the rapper who performed at the “March for Our Lives” anti-gun demonstration in Washington in March — has a previous conviction for a firearms offense in 2017.
According to USA Today, the rapper was pulled over by police after running a stop sign in Beverly Hills, California.
“Police found a loaded firearm in the car. Although Mensa had a license to carry in another state, the permit was not valid in California. After his arrest, Mensa was released on $35,000 bail.

Mensa — full name Victor Kwesi Mensah — pled guilty in July of 2017 and received two years probation.
If only he’d supported concealed carry reciprocity instead of performing at hypocritical gun control rallies, perhaps none of this would have ever happened. But I digress.
As for Hogg and Kashuv, it seems like Kashuv knows where to look when it comes to Hogg’s weaknesses.
I guess going to high school with a guy for a while will do that.
He knows that Hogg is full of bluster and that he makes not-infrequent mistakes, usually because he’s obviously sloppy and even more obviously likes attention. Vic Mensa got him that attention. Tweeting about Ken Paxton did, too.
Unfortunately, they worked at cross-purposes. As usual.

Does Eye Dominance Matter in Shooting?
by Matthew Maruster on August 28, 2018 in Firearms Ownership, Training
Most humans have a dominant hand that they favor. Similarly, we also have a dominant eye that sends signals to our brain faster and more efficiently. Outside of a little trivia about human eye physiology, understanding eye dominance can help you shoot better.
Determining Your Dominant Eye:
Maybe you already know which eye is your dominant eye, but if you don't it's quite simple:

Extend arms out fully, and form a triangle with both hands.
Use an object across the room, like a clock as a target.
Center the object within the triangle formed by your hands.
Close your right eye, and leave the left open- is the object still centered?
- If so, you are left eye dominant.
- If the object seems to disappear behind one of your hands, you are right eye dominant.

This simple process helps you determine which is your dominant eye.
Your dominant eye, which I'll refer to as (DE), is likely the same side as your dominant hand. But this is not always the case. There are many people who are cross-eye dominant. There is also a small percentage of people whose DE is not overly dominant, meaning the brain does not grossly favor signals coming from one eye over the other. You can see how much differently the dominant eye perceives things compared to your non-dominant eye (NDE). The effects of using your NDE for aiming usually result in poor accuracy.
Application:
Now that you know your dominant, ensure that when you are aiming, you are using that eye. This may involve closing the NDE and using only the DE for more precise shots. But what about shooting a pistol with both eyes open? Yes, it is preferable to keep both eyes open. You probably do this instinctively, but when you bring your sights up to eye level, you likely bring them up in front of your DE (see the photo). If you bring the gun up perfectly centered, you may turn your head slightly to the non-dominant side, in order to line the sights up with your dominant eye.
Positioning the sights in front of your dominant eye is important for accuracy purposes.
When you aim with both eyes open you are effectively going to see two images. As you train, your brain learns which of the two images to trust (the one coming from your dominant eye) and which to disregard (the one coming from your non-dominant eye). In this article, I dive a little deeper into the process of aiming with two eyes and how you can train your brain to focus only on the image coming from your DE. This takes time, and because not everyone's eyes are not perfect, some people find sighting like this very difficult. I would recommend anyone training with a handgun for defensive purposes, to learn how to shoot with both eyes open.
Cross-Eye Dominance Issues:
Cross-eye dominance is more easily managed while shooting handguns. You have a couple of options. First, you can still keep your dominant side hand grip, but simply tilt your head slightly, or bring the gun up in front of your DE. This is most simple and often the best way to adapt.
Or, you could choose to completely switch sides from your dominant side to your non-dominant side. Effectively switching from a right-handed shooter to a left-handed shooter, or vice-versa. This is not usually necessary while shooting handguns.
You are presented with a unique problem when shooting rifles because your head is only on one side of the gun. Again, you may switch sides from your dominant side to your non-dominant side. This method seems to work with most cross-eye dominant rifle shooters. The other option is to train your NDE to act as your DE. I have found some people catch on to this and can accomplish it almost intuitively. For some, this is simply not an option. No matter what, they simply are too reliant on the dominant eye image.
Wrapping Up:
Shooting and aiming are actually a pretty simple processes if we just break them down to their core components. So while I may use some technical descriptions to describe what is happening, I don't want to over complicate the process for you. Likely, much of the aiming process is happening instinctively, where you're using your dominant eye without realizing it. But if you are having consistent accuracy problems and it is not being caused by other factors, you may want to ensure you are not using your non-dominant eye for aiming.
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Shooter at Oklahoma restaurant shot and killed by two armed citizens
May 25, 2018
TFoxFoto / Shutterstock.com
Bad guy with a gun, meet good guy with a gun.
A shooter at an Oklahoma restaurant on Lake Hefner apparently didn’t expect to meet any resistance, but his calculations were dead wrong. 28-year-old Alexander Tilghman opened fire, injuring three, before two hero citizens stepped in to fire a deadly shot at the criminal and straight into the heart of the gun control narrative.
Hero citizens shoot gunman deadArmed with a pistol, the assailant opened fire on patrons walking into Louie’s Grill & Bar in Oklahoma City around 6:30 pm on Thursday. He shot and injured a 39-year old woman and two juvenile girls before two armed bystanders intervened and fatally shot the suspect outside the restaurant.
“It sounded like, you know, any kind of restaurant noise, a rack of plates crashing. It was just noise, glass breaking,” witness Ron Benton said. “But it was followed by a ‘pop, pop, pop’ sound, and a wall of people started making their way to the floor, and making their way around to the backside of the bar.”
The witness recalled the two citizen heroes springing into action, shouting at the man to drop his weapon before exchanging fire. He described the scene:
I spotted the [shooter] walking north up the sidewalk, and pointed him out to the guy who had the weapon, and then there was another guy who had one,” Benton said. “They were really screaming. They were like, ‘Stop! stop! stop! Please! Put the gun down! Please put the gun down!’ And I was pointing at him, I was like ‘Down! Put it down! Put it down!’ and they wound up exchanging fire.
Police identified Juan Carlos Nazario and Bryan Whittle as the two heroes who put an end to what could have been a deadly massacre.

The man shot and injured Natalie Wills and her daughter, 12-year-old Syniah Giles. A third victim, the daughter’s friend, was also injured by gunfire. A fourth person, an unnamed man, fell and broke his arm while fleeing. Two people were brought to the hospital but all four injured were reportedly in good condition as of Friday, Oklahoma City Police Captain Bo Mathews said.Dennis Will told reporters outside a hospital where the victims were taken that his daughter and granddaughter went there for a birthday. Witnesses say the shooter was outside by the restaurant, hiding in the trees.
He showed up wearing eye and ear protection, as if he were going to a gun range. He shot the victims as they walked inside. “She said they were getting ready to walk in the front door and evidently, the shooter was in the treeline and they were both shot by the front door,” Will said.
The attacker, who had an active license as an armed security guard, was the only fatality. The police said Friday that the shooter had no criminal record and did not know his victims. Police haven’t released a motive but are investigating the incident. There was no sign that it was terrorism.
Mayor David Holt tweeted that he was “in touch with the City Manager & the Police Chief” and “as OCPD has reported, the suspect is dead.” He said the police were asking people to stay away from the East Wharf area.
Good guys with gunsThe shooting comes after a similar incident at a Waffle House in Tennessee last month, when an AR-15 wielding attacker killed four before a bystander jumped in and disarmed him.
The NRA tweeted Friday that the Oklahoma incident was an example of “how the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The organization said it hoped the story would be a “wake-up call” for Republican Gov. Mary Fallin, who vetoed a bill that would have let citizens carry guns without licensing or training.

The gun control lobby pushes the idea that more guns makes situations like this even more dangerous. But that simply isn’t the case.
The problem isn’t guns. It’s evil people who use guns to hurt others.

NEWLY REVEALED GOVERNMENT STATISTICS HIDDEN FROM PUBLIC DISMANTLE LIBERAL GUN CONTROL NARRATIVE.
April 23, 2018 by Chris Enloe
Newly discovered statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which were allegedly “never publicly released,” dismantle the liberal gun control narrative that firearms are not regularly used in self-defense.
What do the statistics show?
As Reason noted, the CDC is legally unable to study gun control. However, in the 1990s, the federal agency sought to learn how many Americans use firearms in defense situations on an annual basis. They apparently just never told anyone about it. Still, what they found confirmed what Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck learned on the issue in the 1990s.
Kleck has maintained through the years that firearms are used nearly one million times each year in self-defense. He and research partner Marc Gertz have routinely suggested that number is closer to 2 million, though it has proved difficult to confirm their suspicions.
However, Kleck recently unearthed the “lost” CDC study, which confirmed his suspicions. Indeed, the CDC study, which the federal agency conducted from 1996 to 1998, found there are 2.46 million defensive gun uses in the U.S. each year.
In a new academic paper — titled, “What Do CDC’s Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?” — Kleck commented that the CDC’s survey was “high-quality” and asked the DGU question to a sample size of more than 5,000 adults.
Still, Kleck was disappointed the CDC’s DGU question was only asked to respondents who reported having a gun in their home. Because just 79 percent of respondents who reported a DGU owned a firearm in their home, Kleck believes the CDC’s statistics need to be adjusted upward.
If the statistics are adjusted correctly, they will prove firearms are used more often in self-defense situations than they are used in violent crime, Kleck says.
“[The] CDC’s results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals,” he writes.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to push the claim that there are only about 100,000 DGUs annually.
Source: The Blaze
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Casting Call for Actors to Cold Read Gun Facts Off a Teleprompter
A group of actors responded to a casting call and got red-pilled with some solid facts on firearms ownership. The actors were only told in advance that they would be doing a “cold reading” from a teleprompter, and that the gun facts were all heavily-researched and true.
The looks of confusion that come across the actors’ faces when they start reading real statistics on gun ownership, crime and other facts that are suppressed by the mainstream media are truly priceless. Actors live and breathe in one of the most liberal, anti-reality, gun-grabbing bubbles on the planet, but this group (surprisingly) took the news well.
Among the facts they stated in their cold reading: The US ranks first worldwide in gun ownership but is 28th in gun homicides, police shootings increase in states that ban open-carry and the vast majority of police chiefs and sheriffs (86.4 percent) actually support concealed-carry laws. All of the facts in the video are well worth restating, because there is a complete media blackout on the truth about firearms and the 2nd Amendment.
If you’re weary from watching the clueless and irresponsible Fake News media report endlessly on “semi-automatic machine guns” and “AK-47 attack mortars that are easier to buy than a toaster,” check out the video below.
Wait until you see the reactions of these actors when they are hit between the eyes with a cold, hard dose of the truth on gun ownership in the USA!

Armed Dad Who Saved Family From a Killer Wins Gun Argument With 1 Devastating Question
BY BEN MARQUIS
MARCH 27, 2018 AT 10:35AM

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The progressive left has been on the war path for the past month against firearms, the Second Amendment and all who support them — namely the National Rifle Association and gun owners.
The anti-gun folks have smeared the NRA as a “terrorist organization,” pro-gun politicians as “bought and paid shills” and law-abiding gun owners as being responsible for mass shooting deaths. They’ve even gone so far as to insinuate that the NRA and its members have “blood on their hands” and don’t mind seeing children die in a massacre.
In their obsession with banning AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles — really all semi-automatic weapons — the anti-gun leftists have even seemed to trivialize those lives lost or threatened by handguns, as if their deaths or traumatic experiences don’t matter as much as the far fewer number of victims who have been killed or threatened by so-called “assault weapons.”
That topic was recently broached by Kevin Dixie, a black father and gun owner who shared his account of how he saved his family’s lives with a firearm when they were threatened by an armed criminal.
Dixie explained how one night, as he was meeting his wife and children, he saw them approached and threatened by an armed individual. As his wife sought to shield the children with her own vulnerable body, Dixie sprang into action to defend them with his own gun.
“My training and my legally owned handgun stopped that individual from killing my family,” Dixie stated, prior to posing a devastating set of questions to the gun grabbers.
“How do you not give me a voice?” he asked. “How do you consider me to be a terrorist?”
Then came the question liberals likely wouldn’t want to answer.
“Are you telling me you don’t want my 11-year-old son and my 5-year-old daughter to be alive today?” he asked.
And that right there is the heart of the matter. As was evidenced at the anti-gun “March for Our Lives” protests over the weekend, pro-gun voices were excluded and silenced, and armed fathers like Dixie were referred to as terrorists who are no better than murderous criminals.
Dixie continued and paraphrased a common refrain he’s heard from some gun control advocates: “You get no sympathy from me because your family isn’t being murdered with AR-15s.”
“So because (the armed criminal) decided to use a handgun in this particular situation, we get no sympathy from them,” Dixie stated in response. “I can’t help but think that you don’t want me to have a voice and maybe I don’t come from a demographic area you can associate with, so we’re not important.”

Dixie shared his chilling story and thoughts on gun control and the Second Amendment as a guest on the debut of NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch’s new NRATV program “Relentless.”
He is the proud owner of No Other Choice Firearms Training, a company focused on firearms and self-defense training that also strives to educate and inform the broader community about guns in general and gun safety.
Dixie provides a powerful and important voice that needs to be part of the “national conversation” anti-gun liberals always demand, but never fully engage in.
The truth is, the left’s idea of a “conversation” about guns is for them to yell and scream and call gun owners murderers — or insinuate their lives are less valuable than those killed by specific weapons — until the other side acquiesces to their demands and agrees to submit to infringements of their natural rights.
But law-abiding gun owners have grown tired of being smeared as murderous terrorists who are worth less than others. We surely don’t intend to be lectured to any longer by those who don’t even understand the basic fundamentals of the weapons they want to ban and have zero respect for our constitutionally protected rights.
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Seattle Police Begin Gun Confiscations: No Laws Broken, No Warrant, No Charges
by Tyler Durden
Wed, 03/07/2018 - 02:52
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
A man in Seattle has had his gun confiscated by police after breaking no laws. The police took his gun without a warrant and without pressing any charges. Tyranny has officially taken hold on American soil.

This sets a precedent that government can now forcefully take guns away from an individual without a crime being committed or an arrest being made and without a warrant. In the name of fear and political exploitation of anti-gun rhetoric, a citizen’s Second Amendment rights have been ripped away from him by the government.
The new “red flag” law, which has taken hold in other states already, allows the courts and law enforcement to take away guns from individuals they deem are dangerous and they’ve just begun the confiscation. A man living in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle, Washington became the first individual in the state to have his firearm confiscated without any formal arrest or charges. The man was not identified by authorities.
Neighbors complained that the man had been “staring” at people through storefront windows while wearing a holstered firearm. He was not brandishing his weapon by any account, and open carrying is legal in the area, so he was abiding by the law. Other residents also complained that the man’s open carrying made them feel “uncomfortable” and “unsafe.”
“He was roaming the hallways with a .25 caliber automatic,” said Tony Montana, a man who lives in the same apartment complex as the gun owner and a person without any reasonable gun knowledge. Handguns are semi-automatic.
These lousy complaints from neighbors allowed police to use the newly passed state law to confiscate the man’s firearm because the man apparently stared at others. Maybe there’s a ban on staring at others in Washington we are unaware of. Under the extreme risk protection orders — also referred to as “erpos” or “red flag laws” — police (government officials) are now allowed to violate a person’s Second and Fourth Amendment rights (which are basic fundamental human rights) and take their legally acquired personal property if they are tattled on by offended liberals.
Tyranny has now taken hold on American soil.

POTUS and Congress: Leave the Second Amendment Alone!
In the wake of the tragic mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that left 17 dead and 14 others injured, gun control advocates on the Left, the mainstream media, and academia quickly shouted for more onerous gun controls and restrictions on Americans' Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

During a recent CNN town hall, neoconservative Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a purported supporter of the Second Amendment, stopped short of calling for a so-called "assault weapons" ban but nevertheless teamed up with Democrats on the stage in supporting some gun-control measures.

"I absolutely believe that in this country if you are 18 years of age, you should not be able to buy a rifle, and I will support a law that takes that right away," Rubio unapologetically stated on CNN's town hall event.

Rubio also expressed consideration for banning high-capacity magazines or curtailing the number of rounds permitted. "I have traditionally not supported looking at magazine clip size and after this and some of the details I have learned about it, I am reconsidering that position," Rubio said.

In the name of "safety," even President Trump is caving in for more gun restrictions, including favoring a ban on bump stocks. On Thursday, February 22, 2018, Trump tweeted:
I will be strongly pushing Comprehensive Background Checks with an emphasis on Mental Health. Raise age to 21 and end sale of Bump Stocks! Congress is in a mood to finally do something on this issue - I hope!
Shortly after, the president followed up with another tweet affirming his commitment to take action:
Will be meeting with Lawmakers today at 11:30 A.M. to discuss School Safety. Next week it will be with our Nation's Governors. It's been many years of all talk, no action. We'll get it done! [Emphasis added.]
Although the president has yet to come out in favor of calling for prohibiting the manufacturing and purchase of AR-15 rifles, Trump has previous expressed his support for more restrictive gun control measures. On page 102 of his book The America We Deserve, published in 2000, Trump stated:
I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weaponsand I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun. [Emphasis added.]
Trump was referring to the then-Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB), a ten-year ban that was passed by Congress and enacted into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994. The bill was allowed to expire in 2004; however many in the media and the Left are rallying for a new AWB bill.

Despite the good intentions of such lawmakers and those in media calling for more gun control, none of these measures will make schools safer, prevent future mass shootings, or contribute to making America great again. Guns don't kill, it's people that kill other people. Guns are not evil, they are amoral tools. As easily as a firearm could be used for senseless cold-blooded murder, it could likewise be used to protect and save lives. And if not for well-armed law-abiding citizens, there would likely be more mass shootings against innocent unarmed civilians.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was a gun-free zone under federal law. Expanding the whole country to be one giant gun-free zone, won't bring back those 17 lives nor will it prevent future shootings, instead gun control laws open the door for more unarmed victims for deranged lawbreakers to prey on.

True common sense gun control laws begin not with more onerous restrictions on the Second Amendment but by repealing the very laws that create the conditions for having unarmed victims, such as the Gun-Free School Zones Act, introduced by then-Senator Joe Biden and signed into law by globalist, "New World Order" advocate President George H.W. Bush in 1990.

Phone President Trump (202-456-1111) and ask him to oppose any gun control laws, such as raising the minimum age to legally purchase a rifle, using mental health as an opening wedge for curtailing the Second Amendment rights of Americans, reducing the capacity of magazine clips, banning bump stocks or AR-15 rifles, or enacting a new Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Instead, urge the president to leave the Second Amendment alone. Phone your representative (202-225-3121) and your two senators (202-224-3121)with the same message.

Then, send an email to the president and your representative and senators with the same message for additional impact.

Thanks.

Your Friends at The John Birch Society

The AP provides another example of how media pushes an anti-gun agenda
BY JOHN LOTT, JR., OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 12/03/17 04:00 PM EST
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

© Getty ImagesIt is usually pretty hard to definitively identify media bias. Often pressed for time, reporters are just unaware of opposing opinions or facts. And there is no way for readers to tell what information has been left out. But an Associated Press article, which appeared in hundreds of papers from the Los Angeles Times to the Houston Chronicle, provided a unique peek at how the media selectively picks anti-gun information in order to push for gun control.
The Associated Press article edited-down a 441-word version of a longer, 1,000-word article that appeared in the Indianapolis Star and a quote from the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. While the original articles in the Star and Journal Gazette were balanced, the AP cut down the piece by systematically excluding one side of the argument — any information that concealed handgun permit holders are law-abiding and don’t pose a risk to others.
The AP article was concerned with Indiana’s decision to allow legislators and staff to legally carry concealed handguns inside the state Capitol. It’s the 21st state to officially allow carrying of handguns in some fashion at the Capitol. The Star gave a little more information, noting that Indiana is one of just two states that restricts concealed-carry to lawmakers and their staffs when inside the Capitol. The other 19 states allow permitted citizens to carry in a wide variety of places.

The AP included quotes from four people. “It’s a constitutional right,” said Republican state Rep. Jim Lucas, one of the new law's sponsors. “Everyone’s right to protection should be recognized.”The other three people went on record as concerned about the dangers of allowing civilians to have guns in the state capitol.

“The possibility of the presence of firearms during tense personnel situations would worry human resources professionals,” said Christopher Schrader, government affairs director for Indiana State Council of Society of Human Resource Management.

Republican House Majority Leader Matt Lehman understood the desire to have guns for self-defense, but supported limitations on people carrying because, he said, in “confrontational [situations] someone might respond irrationally.”

The AP article concluded with an ominous quote from Democratic Rep. Phil GiaQuinta. The representative was worried about permit holders “intimidating” others and that a permit holder may misuse his gun because “tempers can fly at night.”

Is it reasonable to be concerned that people may misuse their guns? Certainly. But only the original article in the Indianapolis Star provided another perspective on these concerns. It cited a report by the Crime Prevention Research Center, an organization that I head:
On state government grounds across the country, the Crime Prevention Research Center hasn’t found any instances of injuries due to firearms….
The Crime Prevention Research Center has tracked only two instances in the nation where a handgun misfired in a statehouse and a handful of instances where lawmakers temporarily misplaced their weapons.
The AP also ignored that the Journal Gazette cited the same Crime Prevention Research Center report to note how rare any problems were. The Journal Gazette went so far as to note my organization’s “goal is to provide an objective and accurate scientific evaluation of the costs and benefits of gun ownership.”
Could space limitations explain the AP’s decision to only use quotes that point to potential dangers from law-abiding people carrying concealed handguns? The AP could have easily replaced one of the quotes with this information. The three people’s quotes took 53, 66, and 52 words, respectively. The entire quote about the Crime Prevention Search Center took only 52 words.
Instead, the AP pushed only the narrative that concealed handgun permit holders pose a danger to others.
But states have had concealed carry laws for decades. Six states even allow concealed carrying in state capitols without permits, and eight states allow people to openly carry their guns. There have been zero reported problems with non-legislators and non-staff being able to carry on statehouse grounds.
And permit holders are extremely law-abiding. While the U.S. population commits misdemeanors and felonies at a rate 37 times higher than police, police are convicted of misdemeanors and felonies at about six times the average rate for concealed handgun permit holders in Florida and Texas.
The Associated Press has quite a reach. Its article also created a misimpression for at least some Canadians. Based on the AP article, Russell Wangersky wrote a piece for 39 Canadian newspapers about the dangers posed by permitted concealed handgun holders. I contacted Wangersky after I noticed that he had accidentally confused Illinois and Indiana, and, unlike the AP, he was honest enough to update his piece with this note:
The error was not without value — I received a note from the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, John Lott, not only pointing out that mistake, but suggesting that I hadn’t told the whole story, in that in the 20 other states that allow the practice, there have not been any recorded weapons injuries or deaths as a result. Every piece of a debate informs the result.
The debate on guns would be very different if the national news media would report on some of the dozens of mass public shootings that have been stopped by concealed handgun permit holders. The media would also change public opinion if it reported on how virtually all mass public shootings take place in areas where citizens are banned from possessing firearms for protection.
Rarely is there such clear evidence of biased self-censorship by a news organization. The AP portrayed concealed handgun permit holders as a danger to others while editing out information showing that no such danger exists.
John Lott, Jr. is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and author of “The War on Guns” (Regnery, 2016).
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Supreme Court Delivers CRUSHING Blow To GOP As It Rules California In The Right
Posted by Layla Velasquez |
Jun 27, 2017

The Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal of a Second Amendment right case that protested California’s strict gun control laws.
In a crushing blow, the Supreme Court denied an appeal that would strike down California’s restrictive gun laws. California gun laws, according to the nation’s high court, are here to stay.
The court refused to hear the appeal of Peruta v. California, in which addressed a major Second Amendment question. The case itself had to do with California’s tight regulations on carrying concealed weapons in public. Currently, California citizens must apply for a gun permit through a very strict process, that relies on the often subjective and arbritary judgement of a government official. That is, the applicant must prove they have “good cause,” for wanting a gun, and simple self-defense is not enough.
The permitting process in California is often sardonically called a, “may issue,” system. Meaning, that an owner may get a permit, they may not. Gun rights advocates protested, stating that gun owners in the state’s major cities were being denied their Constitutional rights. They should be able to carry a gun outside their home.
The permitting process for concealed carry often subjective. Applicants must prove they have “good cause,” for wanting a gun, and the law deems simple self-defense as not good enough.
The case first went to a San Diego court, which upheld the law. But, then the advocates groups persisted, going to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The 9th Circuit heard the case in 2014. In a 2-1 decision, the court said that the Second Amendment did protect a person’s right to have a gun in public.
But, the decision was appealed, and the 9th Circuit Court had to reconsider the case in 2016. Trying to understand the Constitutional context of the right to bear arms, the court studied historical references. They found that an English law, passed in 1541, prohibited the carrying of a concealed gun in public without a license. This was the law of the land for centuries, and was likely the tradition in which the Constitutional framers wrote.
“Based on the overwhelming consensus of historical sources, we conclude that the protection of the Second Amendment — whatever the scope of that protection may be — simply does not extend to the carrying of concealed firearms in public by members of the general public,” Judge William Fletcher wrote.

The court then voted 7-4 in in favor of the law, stating that “The Second Amendment does not preserve or protect a right of a member of the general public to carry concealed firearms in public.”
Then the former Solicitor General Paul Clement filed an appeal with the Supreme Court to overrule the decision of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. But, the SCOTUS denied hearing the case. However, in a rare case of a published dissenting opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote an interesting memorandum addressing the issue.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas penned a dissenting opinion along with newly-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch, stating that the Second Amendment had become too disfavored in our political climate. The Constitutional Framers did not intend for gun laws to be this restricted.
They said that the court’s refusal to hear the case, “reflects a distressing trend: the treatment of the second Amendment as a disfavored right.”

Judge Thomas who spoke on behalf of both officials continued, “”We should have granted certiorari in this case. The approach taken by the en banc court is indefensible, and the petition raises important questions that this Court should address. … The en banc court’s decision to limit its review to whether the Second Amendment protects the right to concealed carry—as opposed to the more general right to public carry—was untenable. Most fundamentally, it was not justified by the terms of the complaint, which called into question the State’s regulatory scheme as a whole.”
Thomas also said that the issue of the Second Amendment is a pressing matter in today’s climate, and that politicians may be too sheltered by government provided security to see it.
“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,” he said. “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.”
He took exception to the idea that the Framers did not intend for the citizens to carry arms in public. “I find it extremely improbable that the Framers understood the Second Amendment to protect little more than carrying a gun from the bedroom to the kitchen,” he said.
The National Rifle Association issued a statement expressing their disappointment with the court’s refusal to hear the case.
“We are disappointed in the Court’s rejection of the appeal in Peruta v. California, which now leaves millions of law-abiding Californians with no ability to bear arms outside the home,” Chris Cox, the head of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, said. “As Justices Thomas and Gorsuch correctly stated, too many courts have been treating the Second Amendment as a second-class right. That should not be allowed to stand.”
But the NRA explained that they would not be swayed though. They would continue to fight the restrictive California gun laws until they are overturned.
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Self Defense - My Right- Your Right

JUDGE KEEPS CALIFORNIA GUN FIGHT ALIVE
State imposed registration demand, but failed to provide system that workedPublished: 40 mins agoA federal judge has rejected the state of California’s request to dismiss a lawsuit by gun owners against an online firearms-registration program that did not function...

Introducing Gunner Milton

Sniper Fire - A must watch ^

Sheila Matthews on Number of Americans on Psych Drugs

The entrance to a Dick's Sporting Goods store in South Plainfield, New Jersey. (Roman Tiraspolsky / Shutterstock)

Ammunition Company Slaps Anti-Gun Dick’s with $5 Mil Lawsuit
BY BEN MARQUIS
OCTOBER 30, 2018 AT 11:02AM
The Dick’s Sporting Goods retail chain drew the ire of the pro-gun community earlier this year when the corporation decided it would no longer sell firearms to individuals younger than age 21 and would no longer sell AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles to the general public in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting in Florida.
But now Dick’s is facing potential trouble in light of an unrelated incident that will nevertheless also enrage many within the pro-gun community, as the retail chain has been sued by an ammunition distributor and accused of both breach of contract and market manipulation in 2016.
Guns.com reported that Nevada-based ammunition distributor Battle Born Munitions has filed a lawsuit against Dick’s in federal court in Pennsylvania seeking to recoup more than $200,000 in various costs born by BBM as well as about $5 million in damages from a separate major contract for BBM that was lost due to Dick’s actions.
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According to the facts as laid out in the motion demanding a jury trial and judgment for breach of contract and fraud, BBM entered into an agreement with Dick’s in January 2016 to provide the retail chain with special ammunition packaged and stamped with Dick’s house brand “Field and Stream,” ammunition that was to have been delivered by November 2016 and fully paid for no more than two months later.
BBM, a State Department-registered and licensed international broker of arms and ammunition, subsequently farmed out and prepaid the order for the “Field and Stream” packaged and stamped ammunition of various calibers to two foreign manufacturers: Ingman, which was paid nearly $2.3 million, and RUAG, which received nearly $2.2 million, for a total capital investment of nearly $4.5 million.

However, Dick’s refused to accept delivery of the house branded ammunition in November 2016, according to the lawsuit, and didn’t pay for it at that time either. That forced BBM to warehouse the stock of specially branded ammunition at its own cost as it couldn’t be sold to any third-party retailer due to the special brand and licensing issues.
Dick’s eventually took possession of the ammunition and paid most of the outstanding invoices in August 2017, though BBM alleged that Dick’s took a 2 percent discount on the total cost that only should’ve applied if the company paid for the order within 30 days. BBM also said Dick’s had improperly deducted various chargebacks on parts of the inventory that the retail chain claimed, without providing documented evidence, didn’t meet their specifications.
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Adding together the improper discounts, chargebacks, warehousing fees, additional liability insurance for the warehoused ammo, BBM estimated that Dick’s owed the distributor roughly $200,000.
The motion also detailed a separate agreement entered into by BBM that would have netted the company $5 million in profit, only to have been canceled as a direct result of Dick’s failure to pay for the ammo order in a timely fashion.
In December 2016, BBM had arranged for the U.S. government-approved sale of 12 Bell helicopters to the government of Lebanon, a purchase order worth an estimated $48 million. BBM planned to purchase and transport the helicopters from Bell to Lebanon for a cost of $37.2 million but was required to make a 10 percent deposit of $3.72 million to get production started, the lawsuit said.
However, because of Dick’s failure to pay for the ammunition it had ordered and was supposed to have accepted one month earlier, BBM’s capital was still tied up with the foreign manufacturers, leaving the distributor incapable of making the deposit for the helicopters, BBM alleges. That resulted in Lebanon canceling the lucrative order in April 2017.
As if that weren’t bad enough, BBM also said in the motion that the reason for Dick’s refusal to accept the specially branded ammunition was the retail chain’s desire to manipulate the market on ammunition and drive up prices.
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Being a retail store, the value of stock in Dick’s is heavily dependent upon the retail chain’s inventory. Dick’s refusal to accept the ammunition it had ordered from BBM made it appear as though Dick’s had low inventory — which is attractive to investors — while in reality it merely had the specially branded inventory stored off-site — which could not be sold to a third-party, and was stored at the vendor’s expense — until such time as Dick’s needed it, presumably when prices were higher.
Recall that this occurred in the lead-up to the 2016 election, in which gun control was a predominant issue and it was widely expected that, if Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had emerged victorious, there would have been a run on firearms and ammunition, which undoubtedly would have caused prices to soar. Yet Clinton didn’t win, and there was no run on firearms and ammunition, which resulted in prices holding steady or dropping instead of rising as anticipated.

In the end, BBM alleged that Dick’s was in breach of contract, in that it ordered the house-branded ammunition and then refused to accept delivery or pay for the stock at the time or amount stipulated. BBM further alleged that Dick’s had fraudulently induced the distributor into entering into an agreement it had no intention of upholding, and charged the retail chain with negligent misrepresentation for misleading BBM into believing it would be paid on time.
Thus, BBM requested that the court grant it a jury trial and judgment that would compel Dick’s to pay BBM $200,938 in incidental damages and $5.2 million in consequential damages for lost profits, not to mention pre- and post-judgment interest on both awards as well as all court costs, litigation expenses and attorney’s fees as a result of the lawsuit.
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It will be interesting to see how this legal battle out in the coming months, and whether Dick’s is held accountable for its alleged breach of contract and market manipulation that substantially damaged the profitability and reputation of a vendor.
Regardless, the allegations only serve to remind the pro-gun community that the retail chain is not a friend of the Second Amendment.
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Ben Marquis
Contributor, Commentary
Summary More Info Recent Posts
Writer and researcher. Constitutional conservatarian with a strong focus on protecting the Second and First Amendments.
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APPEALS COURT DROPS ENORMOUS RULING ON SECOND AMENDMENT!
ANDREW WEST
JULY 24, 2018
It’s not terribly often that major, earthshaking rulings come down that reverberate throughout the entirety of the Second Amendment community.This week, however, is now an exception to that rule after a US appeals court made an incredibly bold decision on the nature of the Second Amendment.
On Tuesday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Second Amendment protects a right to openly carry a gun in public for self-defense.
That ruling was a reversal of a decision by the U.S. District Court in Hawaii, which had ruled that state officials did not infringe on a citizen’s rights when they twice denied him a permit to carry a gun outside.
Two of the three 9th Circuit judges agreed to reverse the decision by the district court; Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain wrote, “We do not take lightly the problem of gun violence. But, for better or for worse, the Second Amendment does protect a right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense.”
This movement on the right to bear arms comes at a time in which the United States is facing an unprecedented amount of political animosity, with the mainstream media fanning the flames of their self-described “New Civil War”.

Furthermore, this ruling helps to corroborate a very poignant interpretation of the Second Amendment as being its own concealed carry permit outright. Proponents of this legal view believe that any sort of regulatory restrictions on the right to concealed carry are infringements of the right to bear arms and are thusly illegal and unconstitutional.
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KYLE KASHUV POISED TO EDUCATE CLASSMATES ON 2ND AMENDMENT
ANDREW WEST
JUNE 26, 2018
Unfortunately, in American society today there seems to be an inordinate amount of confusion regarding the Second Amendment and the reality of the liberal left’s wishes for repeal.Of course, this newfound kerfuffle can all be traced to a ruthless and inexcusable exploitation of the Valentine’s Day tragedy in Parkland, Florida in which a mentally ill teenager was allowed to enter Stoneman Douglas High School, unmolested by a single police officer or security guard, and murder 16 of his former classmates and a coach.
The perpetrator, Nikolas Cruz, was reported to the FBI in the days leading up to the massacre as a person that was likely to commit just such a crime, yet those calls went ignored.
Then, when the mentally ill teen walked into Stoneman Douglas High School, armed, he did so right in front of the face of a former Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy who was making $75K per year to keep the children safe. He did nothing.
In the ensuing rage, the left blamed “guns” in general for the violence, refusing to take into consideration Cruz’s horrific behavior and his admission that he was being guided by “demon voices” during this rampage. This allowed the mainstream media to focus on “educating” America on the “issue” at hand – as determined by them.
Now, one of the student survivors of the incident is working on a lesson plan of his own, and it’s not something that you’d find on the likes of CNN.
Turning Point USA is holding a High School Leadership Summit in D.C. and is offering travel and lodging scholarships to any student from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the site of the heinous February 14 attack.
The summit will be held July 24-26, 2018.
Marjory Stoneman shooting survivor Kyle Kashuv is chairing the summit and hopes the scholarships will allow students to come hear messages far different than the gun control mantras being pushed by celebrities, establishment media, and gun control activists like David Hogg.
Kashuv told Breitbart News, “As the chair of the High School Leadership Summit, I can tell you that our lineup is going to be incredible. We have speakers — not all announced yet — from all walks of life and parts of government. This will give everyone the opportunity to engage with people from the First Family (Donald Trump Jr. has been announced), to members of the Cabinet, to current and former Senators, to White House officials, and more.”
Trending: Trump Staffers Gets Serious CCL Suggestion After Sarah Sanders Incident
Kashuv has become a sort of conservative folk hero in recent months as the antithesis to fellow Parkland student David Hogg – the left’s de facto spokesman for the repeal of the Second Amendment.
And, given his knowledge, poise, and eloquence, he may also be the precocious Hogg’s worst nightmare.
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A tip in October disrupted an attack planned by two juniors at Etowah High School in Georgia, where students are pictured in 2003 praying at a flagpole before class. (Photo: Robin Nelson/ZumaPress/Newscom)

I Go to a School Where an Attack Was Foiled. Here’s Why I’m Against Limiting Gun Rights.
Nicole Martin / March 06, 2018
BY Nicole Martin

Nicole Martin is a freshman at Etowah High School in Woodstock, Georgia, northwest of Atlanta.

Police cars surrounded my high school as I walked fast across the street to the science building. Eyes were glancing in many directions. The slight panic—bordering on hysteria—was obvious.
Hundreds of students stayed home, but I did not. Why? Because the threat was safely locked away in jail.
Four months before the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, my own school in Cherokee County, Georgia, was under serious threat in October from two 17-year-old students.
Together, the two juniors at Etowah High School planned a Columbine-style attack using explosives, law enforcement authorities said.
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But campus police and the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office learned about the pair’s plans ahead of time through a tip, and reacted immediately to the first report. The two students are charged as adults with attempted murder and other offenses.
If that threat had not been stopped, many people at my school would be dead. It could have been me, my brother, my closest friends, or all of us.
But it was stopped. We are alive.
Having this perspective, my heart was shattered into pieces when I heard the news Feb. 14 about Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. I have been praying for all of the students, teachers, and families who are going through hell right now.
“Take away gun rights. Something needs to be done,” my friends keep telling me.
Yes, something absolutely does need to be done, but not that way.
Reports and tips need to be taken seriously. Death is an unchangeable thing, and anyone who jokes about it is sick. A threat is not a joke; it is illegal, and it demands an immediate response.
Next, teachers should be trained and armed with guns, if they choose to be. I am constantly hearing friends say that if teachers were armed, they would be too scared to shoot back. That is an offensive statement, and it needs to stop.
A coach at Douglas High died because he ran into the shooting and jumped in front of a bullet. How could anyone say that man would have been afraid to shoot back? He chose to die so his students didn’t have to, yet people say teachers would have been hiding if they had guns.
Taking away gun rights isn’t going to help the cause. Immediately after our Founding Fathers listed our God-given rights, they decided that every American’s right “to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Everyone needs a way to defend himself or herself. I realize that many people simply want to add restrictions to buying a gun for everyone, which I thought seemed reasonable at first until I researched it.
Some of the most infamous shooters were approved to buy a gun because their previous felonies had not been reported to gun shop owners. Those shooters should not have been approved, but they were.
The system of background checks needs to be tightened to include felons and those who courts say are mentally ill.
Taking away Second Amendment rights from everyone is not the solution.
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THE NUMBERS DON’T LIE: RASMUSSEN RELEASES BOMBSHELL GUN SURVEY
ANDREW WEST
FEBRUARY 28, 2018
As lovers and keepers of the Second Amendment, conservative Americans are feeling the effects of a sustained attack on the right to bear arms in the mainstream media.Of course, this was all to predictable behavior from the vultures over at CNN, MSNBC, Google, and Facebook, who have all longed for another horrific tragedy to blame on firearms in America. In fact, the continued assault on our Constitution has been so methodical and ordinary, that the moment the anti-gun crowd’s boots hit the ground, they were being picked apart by the patriots of our great nation.
Even in the face of CNN inventing new ways in which guns fire, (“full semi auto“), our keepers of Second Amendment have stood strong.
To prove that, Rasmussen has released the findings of a recent poll regarding the Valentine’s Day Massacre at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that completely blows the liberal narrative out of the water.
“According to Rasmussen, 54% of Americans believe government failure is to ‘blame for the mass shooting.’ Only 33% of Americans blame guns. Eleven percent of Americans say they are unsure what contributed to the occurrence of the mass shooting.
“When the sample group was adjusted so as to focus only on Americans ‘who have children of elementary or secondary school age,’ the percentage of Americans who cite government failure as causal jumped to 61 and the percentage who blamed guns dropped to 23.”
This powerful statistic should be shared far and wide, in hopes of discrediting the leftist media who tend to claim otherwise.
This result certainly was somewhat predictable, given the massive failures that have been outlined in the wake of the Parkland incident, as well as the bizarre series of events that allowed mentally-ill Nikolaus Cruz to enter the school and commit his atrocities.
Breitbart laid out a pretty thorough list of the reasons why Americans aren’t buying the left’s nonsense this time around:
1. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office (PBCSO) received 911 calls about Nikolas Cruz in November 2017. The calls referenced violence and erratic behavior. CNN reports that in one of the calls with the host family, with whom Cruz was living after the death of his mother, told PBCSO they feared Cruz was going to turn a gun on the family. The family member told deputies that Cruz was “buying “tons of ammo” and had allegedly put “put [a] gun to others heads in the past.” No charges were filed, no arrest made.
2. On January 5, 2018, the FBI received a tip describing “Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting.” The FBI did not act on the tip.
3. On February 14 Cruz attacked students and unarmed teachers in Stoneman Douglas High. A report from CNN claims four Broward County sheriff’s deputies were at the school as the attack was taking place but not one of them entered the school. On February 22 Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told ABC 13 that video showed deputy Scott Peterson by building 12 on campus, yet Peterson never went inside to confront Cruz. The CNN report quotes Coral Springs sources that claim there were actually four Broward County deputies on scene who did not enter the building.
It truly doesn’t tend to get any clearer than that.
Furthermore, incredible doubts are to be had surrounding the story of David Hogg, a Parkland survivor who has repeatedly been a guest on a number of liberal news networks after his mid-shooting, calm, collected gun rights diatribe went viral.
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No Weapons Violations in First Six Months of Campus Carry at KU Lawrence
Written by Bob Adelmann

In a report that the national media didn’t deem newsworthy, the Office of Public Safety at the Lawrence campus of the University of Kansas (KU) said last week that during the first six months that students were allowed to carry concealed on campus, there were no incidents — zero criminal weapons violations — to report. But the office did report that overall crime, mostly thefts, dropped by 13 percent.
The report said nothing about the freedom granted students starting last July to carry concealed on campus if they so desired, but instead stated that the drop in crime and the utter lack of weapons violations were likely due to “the use of security technology on campus, such as cameras … and more police and security officers [that] were added to the Public Safety Office in 2017.”
Undoubtedly, if there had been one weapons violation — just one — it would have made headline news in every liberal media outlet in the country. But in its absence, the media has remained silent.
The Kansas City Star noted that prior to July 1, there had been 14 weapons violations on the campus between 2008 and 2016. That was when the campus was a so-called gun-free zone. But since July 1, there has not been a single incident. A spokesman for KU Public Safety, Captain James Anguiano, said it was too early to tell if the decrease was permanent: “We know that crime could go up next year.”
And one can be certain that if it does the mainstream will cover it like a blanket.
The KU report, issued annually, didn’t surprise Dudley Brown, head of the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR): “There’s no doubt that allowing citizens … to carry the tools of self-defense makes criminals think twice.” It’s also in line with the analysis John Lott provided in his book The War on Guns:
Since 2011, there have been only three mass public shootings in areas where concealed carry was allowed.… These cases are very rare. From 1950-2010, not a single mass shooting occurred in an area where general civilians are allowed to carry guns.
Over the entire period from 1950 through February 2016, just over 1 percent of mass public shootings occurred in such places.
Put another way, according to Lott, more than 98 percent of the time shooters choose places where their intended victims aren’t allowed to defend themselves with firearms.
Lott then reviews the shooters who left notes and plans behind, such as Khalil Abu-Rayyan, an ISIS supporter who was planning an attack on one of the biggest churches in Detroit. According to Lott, Rayyan explained his choice of target this way: “A lot of people go there. Plus people are not allowed to carry guns in church. Plus, it would make the news. Everybody [on the planet] would’ve heard [about it].”
Dylann Roof, the shooter at the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church, was originally going to shoot up a nearby campus but changed his plans when he learned that his target, the College of Charleston, had armed guards.
James Holmes, the “Batman movie killer,” was originally planning to attack a nearby airport but decided not to, as he wrote in his diary, because of “substantial security” there. Holmes then selected a move theater that was a gun-free zone, even though there were six other theaters closer to where he lived.
It’s a general rule that where people are free to defend themselves with firearms, crime will decline. Ben Shapiro, Daily Wire’s editor-in-chief, published a chart showing (and contrasting) the percent changes in firearm ownership in the country versus the nation’s gun homicide rate from 1993 through 2013. While the number of privately owned firearms increased by 56 percent, the gun homicide rate dropped by 49 percent. Tweeted Shapiro, “Please explain how more guns inevitably mean more murder?”
Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center noted that between 2007 and 2015, the number of concealed carry permits issued nationally skyrocketed by 215 percent, while the murder rate dropped by 14 percent and the overall crime rate dropped by 21 percent.
Kansas is one of just eight states that allow concealed carry on campus, while 23 states leave that decision up to the schools and universities themselves. Sixteen states still ban outright the possession of firearms on campus.
It should be no surprise that there were no criminal weapons violations on KU’s Lawrence campus. It’s also no surprise that the national mainstream media didn’t consider it worthy of a single headline.
Image: Screenshot of a University of Kansas ad
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Clarence Thomas rebukes California and 9th Circuit over gun control
February 21, 2018
MitchellShapiroPhotography / CCL
Clarence Thomas rebuked the Supreme Court for passing up two challenges to California gun control laws Tuesday.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court turned down a challenge to California’s 10-day waiting period for purchasers who are already licensed and own registered weapons. In his dissent, Thomas accused the court of bias against the Second Amendment, opining that the high court would have considered challenges to a waiting period on things such as abortion.
The Court also refused to hear a challenge to a law imposing gun sales fees that go toward enforcement against illegal guns purchasers.
Thomas blasts SCOTUS for gun biasThe high court denied a petition to hear a case challenging California’s “cooling off period” for gun purchases Tuesday. California law requires gun buyers, including those with concealed carry licenses and who have passed background checks, to wait 10 days before receiving their guns.
California claims the waiting period can prevent those with homicidal or suicidal intentions from acting impulsively to kill others or themselves. It also provides state authorities with extra time to run background checks.
Plaintiffs Jeff Silvester and Brandon Combs, two legal gun owners, alongside the Calguns Foundation and the Second Amendment Foundation, challenged the waiting period in 2011 on the basis that it invalidated the Second Amendment rights of licensed gun owners who already have registered guns. Their complaint, which received a favorable ruling in district court, was reversed by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Thomas saw the high court’s decision to let the lower court’s unfavorable decision remain as clear evidence of bias against gun rights.
“If a lower court treated another right so cavalierly, I have little doubt this court would intervene,” Thomas wrote in his dissent. “But as evidenced by our continued inaction in this area, the Second Amendment is a disfavored right in this court.”
The Court also refused to consider a challenge by the National Rifle Association to a law that requires fees on firearms purchases go towards funding programs to track illegal guns purchasers. That challenge rested on the notion that criminal misuse of guns is not legally related to the legitimate use of firearms by licensed gun-owners.
That law was also upheld by the 9th Court.
Abortion good, guns badThomas accused the court of singling out the Second Amendment to be cavalierly dismissed, writing that the high court would have had no problem challenging waiting periods for things such as abortion.
Rights not secured by the Constitution get a more sympathetic hearing from the high court than the right to bear arms, he said, noting that the SCOTUS has not heard a significant case on gun rights in over eight years.
Whereas four members of the high court would have agreed to hear cases on waiting periods for abortions and publication of racist speech, gun rights get short shrift, he said.
“The Court would take these cases because abortion, speech, and the Fourth Amendment are three of its favored rights,” Thomas wrote. “The right to keep and bear arms is apparently this Court’s constitutional orphan. And the lower courts seem to have gotten the message.”
Lower courts like the 9th Circuit have taken the high court’s cue on gun rights, he said.
“In the Ninth Circuit, it seems, rights that have no basis in the Constitution receive greater protection than the Second Amendment, which is enumerated in our text,” he wrote.
Thomas criticized the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in 2016 to reverse a previous favorable ruling by the district court, calling its decision “symptomatic of the lower courts’ general failure to afford the Second Amendment the respect due an enumerated constitutional right.”
If the Supreme Court won’t uphold the law of the land, where can gun rights’ advocates turn?
It’s a good thing we have justices like Thomas who don’t let partisan prejudices tip the scales.
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Ginny Simone Reporting | S5 E20: "Servin' Up the Second Amendment"
NRA
Published on Nov 25, 2014
Good food, friendly service and a huge helping of freedom — that’s what they’re dishing up at Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado. “It’s not about politics, it’s a way of life,” says one of the servers, who can be seen with a Ruger Blackhawk .357 strapped on her hip. But she’s not alone, customers carry too and owner Lauren Boebert wouldn’t have it any other way. “We’re certainly able to protect ourselves,” she says. Featuring menu items such as the "Locked and Loaded Nachos," "The Rifle Breakfast" and "The M16 Burrito," Shooters is a favorite of locals who grew up with guns and visitors who think more establishments could stand to put the Second Amendment on the menu. The restaurant also offers firearms classes to patrons and staff—they always fill up fast, and the price includes dinner!

The most dangerous place in the US.

House passes concealed carry gun bill

BY CRISTINA MARCOS -
12/06/17 04:45 PM EST
Two months after the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history, the House on Wednesday passed legislation that would allow people to use permits for carrying concealed handguns across state lines while also boosting the background check system.Despite bipartisan support for enhancing background checks for gun purchases, the bill passed along party lines, 231-198, due to Democratic opposition to the concealed-carry reciprocity measure.
Six centrist Democrats voted with Republicans to approve the package: Reps. Sanford Bishop (Ga.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Ron Kind (Wis.), Collin Peterson (Minn.) and Kurt Schrader (Ore.).

Fourteen Republicans voted “no,” including a mix of conservatives and centrists.

Conservative Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) held the mirror opposite position of Democrats who voted against the legislation: he supports concealed-carry reciprocity but didn’t want the background check measure attached.

"It throws millions of dollars at a faulty program and it will result in more law-abiding citizens being deprived of their right to keep and bear arms," Massie wrote in a Facebook post ahead of the vote.The gun policy measures were originally two separate bills. But House GOP leaders opted to combine them so that lawmakers only had to cast one vote.

Attaching the concealed-carry reciprocity measure puts the bipartisan measure to beef up background checks in jeopardy in the Senate.
The legislation as passed by the House faces an uncertain future in the upper chamber, where Democrats are sure to block the concealed-carry measure, but a bipartisan coalition has enough votes to break a filibuster on enhancing background checks.
Under the House legislation, people with permits for carrying concealed handguns could do so in any state that allows concealed weapons.
People could only use their concealed-carry permits in other states that allow the practice if they are carrying a valid government-issued photo ID and are lawfully licensed to possess a concealed handgun. They would still have to adhere to established state and local laws.
Concealed-carry reciprocity is a top legislative priority for the National Rifle Association, which has resisted proposals to restrict access to guns in response to mass shootings.
Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), the author of the concealed-carry bill, compared the concealed-carry reciprocity measure to how driver’s licenses and marriage licenses are recognized across states.
He gave an example of a single mother in south Philadelphia who had twice been mugged and purchased a handgun to protect herself. But she traveled to New Jersey, which didn’t recognize her Pennsylvania concealed-carry permit.
"If I get married in North Carolina but I move to Arizona, I’m not a single man again. They recognize that marriage," Hudson said during House floor debate. "The concealed-carry permit should be recognized the same way."
Gun reform groups lobbied against the concealed-carry measure. Mark Kelly, the co-founder of a group named after his wife, ex-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), said that the policy doesn’t work if people aren’t properly trained.
Kelly recalled how a well-intentioned man with a concealed gun almost shot one of the people responsible for wrestling the shooter who nearly killed Giffords in a 2011 shooting to the ground.
“The situation that played out in the Safeway parking lot that day shows the potential for tragedy and bloodshed when untrained people carrying loaded guns react to a crisis. Even with the best intentions, an armed person without the extensive firearms training that is required to respond under pressure in a crisis will risk making the situation worse, not better,” Kelly wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.
States have varying requirements for carrying concealed weapons, like gun safety training, age limits, and prohibitions on individuals known to have abusive pasts.
The package also included a bill from Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) that would ensure authorities report criminal history records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) and penalize agencies that don’t report to the FBI.
Democrats supported the background check measure but balked at including the concealed-carry reciprocity.
“Unfortunately, the dangers posed by the concealed carry reciprocity portion of the bill greatly outweigh the benefits of the NICS improvements,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), the acting ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.
The shooter responsible for the Nov. 5 massacre at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, was prohibited from buying or possessing a gun due to a domestic violence conviction while serving in the Air Force. But the Air Force failed to enter the criminal record into the federal database used for gun background checks.
Another provision in the bill is in direct response to the Oct. 1 shooting in Las Vegas, which killed nearly 60 people and injured more than 500 others.
Law enforcement authorities found a dozen devices known as bump stocks, which are used to make weapons fire more rapidly, in the Las Vegas shooter’s hotel room.
The measure would require the Justice Department to report to Congress on the number of times a bump stock has been used in a crime. It’s far less stringent than bipartisan bills introduced in Congress since the Las Vegas shooting to prohibit the manufacture, sale and use of the devices.
But ahead of Wednesday’s vote, the Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) announced on Tuesday that it is considering a possible ban on certain bump stocks.
Lawmakers had been pushing for the Trump administration to clarify whether bump stocks violate the ban on fully automatic weapons manufactured after 1986.
“The regulatory clarification we begin today will help us to continue to protect the American people by carrying out the laws duly enacted by our representatives in Congress,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.
Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) introduced a bipartisan bill after the Las Vegas shooting to ban bump stocks. He voted against the Wednesday legislation, citing the lack of an effort to prohibit the devices.

“[T]he refusal to meaningfully address dangerous bump stocks in this legislation ‎is inexplicable and contrary to the position held by most Americans and the overwhelming majority of responsible gun owners,” Curbelo said in a statement.
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Florida Expedites 82,000 Carry Licenses to Military Personnel After Chattanooga Terror Attack

AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, Fileby AWR HAWKINS
19 Jul 2017
The state of Florida has expedited 82,000 concealed carry licenses to military personnel in the two years since the heinous attack on unarmed members of USMC and the U.S. Navy.Florida responded to the attack by announcing an expedited concealed carry permitting process which allows military personnel to acquire a carry permit quicker–and at a younger age–than regular civilians. The issuance of the permits has been overseen by State Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam.
The Chattanooga terror attack occurred July 16, 2015. The following day, Breitbart Newsreported that retired Marine Colonel Gary Anderson pointed to gun control as a problematic contributor; one that kept the victims from being able to shoot back in defense of themselves and their fellow military members. Florida’s response was to be sure more military personnel are carrying guns in more places.
According to News4Jax, the Sunshine State “has fast-tracked concealed-weapons licenses to 82,000 military members and honorably discharged veterans since [the] terror-related shootings.”
Putnam commented on the issuance of the expedited permits, saying, “This is just one example of what we do through our department to make Florida the most veteran- and military-friendly state in the nation.”
Looking at concealed carry broadly, since 2010 Florida has gone from roughly 800,000 to nearly 1.8 million. It is one of the most gun-friendly states in the union for military personnel and civilians alike.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at [email protected].
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CONGRESSMAN SAYS HE’LL CARRY GUN AFTER SCALISE SHOOTING
DAVE
JUNE 15, 2017
To no surprise, anti-gun fanatics instantly took to every form of media possible to call for more and stricter gun control after a Sanders’ supporter shot Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), House Majority Whip. The topic of gun control became an instant political hot-potato. One Congressman, Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) told the media that the shooting was directed at Trump supporters and that from this day on, he will carry his gun in his pocket. The shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise and four others at a baseball practice for Republican members of Congress on Wednesday morning in Alexandria, Virginia, was always going to quickly turn to politics.
Rep. Chris Collins, one of President Donald Trump’s most prominent congressional supporters, insisted that the shooting was directly tied to anti-Trump rhetoric from the left. “I can only hope that the Democrats do tone down the rhetoric,” Collins said on a local radio station in upstate New York. “The rhetoric has been outrageous — the finger-pointing, just the tone and the angst and the anger directed at Donald Trump, his supporters. Really, then, you know, some people react to things like that. They get angry as well. And then you fuel the fires.”
Collins also said in the same interview he would have his gun “in my pocket from this day forward.” …
If more law-abiding citizens carried a gun with them at all times, there would be far fewer shootings and less violent crime. Notice that most mass or public shootings take place in gun free zones or in cities with strict gun control laws already in place that make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to be armed and ready to defend themselves and others. The solution to violence and shootings is to arm the people!
READ MORE HERE
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Canadian News Anchor Gives Warning To American Gun Owners | Canadian Gun Laws | American Gun Laws

Sept 11th
Let's make this simple - Good guys - Bad guys

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Why Carry a Gun?

My old grandpa said to me 'Son, there comes a time in every man's life when he stops bustin' knuckles and starts bustin' caps and usually it's when he becomes too old to take an ass whoopin.'

I don't carry a gun to kill people.  I carry a gun to keep from being killed.

I don't carry a gun to scare people.  I carry a gun because sometimes this world can be a scary place.

I don't carry a gun because I'm paranoid.  I carry a gun because there are real threats in the world.

I don't carry a gun because I'm evil.  I carry a gun because I have lived long enough to see the evil in the world.

I don't carry a gun because I hate the government.  I carry a gun because I understand the limitations of government.

I don't carry a gun because I'm angry.  I carry a gun so that I don't have to spend the rest of my life hating myself for failing to be prepared.

I don't carry a gun because I want to shoot someone.  I carry a gun because I want to die at a ripe old age in my bed, and not on a sidewalk somewhere tomorrow afternoon.

I don't carry a gun because I'm a cowboy.  I carry a gun because, when I die and go to heaven, I want to be a cowboy.

I don't carry a gun to make me feel like a man.  I carry a gun because men know how to take care of themselves and the ones they love.

I don't carry a gun because I feel inadequate.  I carry a gun because unarmed and facing three armed thugs, I am inadequate.

I don't carry a gun because I love it.  I carry a gun because I love life and the people who make it meaningful to me.

Police protection is an oxymoron.  Free citizens must protect themselves.  Police do not protect you from crime, they usually just investigate the crime after it happens and Then call someone in to clean up the mess.

Personally, I carry a gun because I'm too young to die and too old to take an ass whoopin'.....author unknown, but obviously brilliant!

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A LITTLE GUN HISTORY:

In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Germany established gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, one million educated people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

Defenseless people rounded up and exterminated in the 20th Century because of gun control: 56 million.  You won't see this data on the US evening news, or hear politicians disseminating this information.  Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws adversely affect only the law-abiding citizens.

Take note my fellow Americans, before it's too late!  The next time someone talks in favor of gun control, please remind them of this history lesson.

With guns, we are 'citizens'. Without them, we are 'subjects'.

During WW II the Japanese decided not to invade America because they knew most Americans were ARMED!

If you value your freedom, please spread this anti gun -control message to all of your friends.

The purpose of fighting is to win.

There is no possible victory in defense.

The sword is more important than the shield, and skill is more important than either.

The final weapon is the brain.

All else is supplemental.

SWITZERLAND ISSUES EVERY HOUSEHOLD A GUN!  SWITZERLAND'S GOVERNMENT TRAINS EVERY ADULT THEY ISSUE A RIFLE.  SWITZERLAND HAS THE LOWEST GUN RELATED CRIME RATE OF ANY CIVILIZED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD!!!

IT'S A NO BRAINER!  DON'T LET OUR GOVERNMENT WASTE MILLIONS OF OUR TAX DOLLARS IN AN EFFORT TO MAKE ALL LAW ABIDING CITIZENS AN EASY TARGET.
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Best concealed carry handguns
A look at the best concealed carry weapons for self-defense
The Ruger LCR is a compact .38 Special caliber revolver built by Ruger. The LCR acronym stands for 'Lightweight Compact Revolver'. It incorporates several novel features such as a polymer grip and trigger housing,[3] monolithic receiver, and constant force trigger. At 13.5 oz (380 g),[4] the LCR is nearly 50% lighter than the stainless steel SP-101[5] and with only the barrel and fluted cylinder made of stainless steel. The frame is aluminum alloy and synthetic glass-filled polymer finished in matte black with Synergistic Hard Coat. The LCR operates in double action only (DAO) as the hammer is concealed within the frame handle's fire control housing of the gun and cannot be cocked prior to firing. In order to create a crisp and light trigger pull that is non-stacking, it features a friction reducing cam, a feature seldom found on double action revolvers (which by nature of their mechanism normally have a very heavy trigger pull).

Read more:

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August 21stImproved RFID Technology in Smart Guns Threatens Second Amendment

Sept 11th Let's make this simple - Good guys - Bad guys

August 21st
Improved RFID Technology in Smart Guns Threatens Second Amendment

Sept 11th
Let's make this simple - Good guys - Bad guys