Year: 2011

As you may have heard, Rep. Elijah Cummings and his other sympathetic friends in the Democratic Party had a closed symposium designed to deflect attention off the gun walking scandal surrounding Fast and Furious. The conclusion was meant to result in this:

This bill allows law enforcement officials to track the sales of multiple guns, end unlicensed gun purchases, formally define gun trafficking, and ease evidentiary requirements to revoke gun licenses.

I’m very interested in to see language in this bill just to figure out what they are trying to slip past. I can promise you that criminals will not be the target of whatever bill comes out of this, given the players involved in this charade. You can find the prepared testimony of participants here. The hearings were off limits to cameras, as I am aware NRA News attempted to get in and were denied. Likely they don’t want to give us time to organize opposition to whatever they are cooking up.

Local police in Wisconsin favor the new concealed carry law. Shocking what happens when you bother to look beyond big city police chiefs appointed by big city politicians.

Garry McCarthy think federal gun laws are racist. By contrast Chicago’s are just fine by him. For Chicago’s un-racist gun laws, they seem to be denying an awful lot of African Americans:

He once legally owned a gun, but lost his privileges roughly 15 years ago after firing a gun in his backyard to scare a pack of dogs. Since then, he said, there’s been incident after incident at his home, including fires, broken windows and other disturbances.

I heard his attorney last night on Cam & Company, and his line of argument is that such a minor ordinance violation, such as this one, cannot be grounds for denying a fundamental constitutional right. That sounds like a good line of reasoning.

Diane Feinstein is getting on her closing the foreign felon loophole hobby horse again. For those unaware, about six years ago the Supreme Court ruled that the Gun Control Act’s prohibition, worded that someone convicted of certain offenses “in any court,” only applies to convictions and adjudications in American Courts. Feinstein wants to extend that to foreign courts, because clearly we can’t have Cuban dissidents, or other such dangerous persons who were not good Comrades, and displeased the party.

The fact that foreign courts routinely defecate on what we would regard as due process, even in civilized countries such as Japan, apparently is not a concern to DiFi. This is not surprising, since I doubt she’s all that thrilled about due process here, at least not when it comes to rights not valued by the left.

This looks to me like a pretty clear cut First Amendment violation by a Chicago suburb:

“Without legal authority and in violation of the Constitution, my client, a federally licensed firearms dealer, was delayed by the village when he initially applied for a weapons dealers business license in Norridge,” Maksym said.

“When village officials realized they couldn’t stop him from obtaining a gun dealer’s license, they arbitrarily imposed more restrictions on him without any legal basis.”

After failing to keep Kole from opening, Maksym said, his client was restricted by the village from advertising.

That should be a slam dunk in court. It might be permissible for a local governmental entity to regulate advertising generally, but it do it on the basis of content has no basis. I just hope his attorney is decent. They should not be able to condition the exercise of one constitutional right on the surrendering of another.