Month: September 2013

They are tomorrow. Charles Cooke has a pretty good article about the recall efforts, and Jim Geraghty notes that Giron has enlisted some grassroots help of her own. Everyone who cares about Second Amendment rights in those districts need to get out to the polls. There’s absolutely no excuse for staying home.

Writes Joseph J. Ellis, in the Los Angeles Times:

The 2nd Amendment represented Madison’s attempt to respond to the fears of a standing army by assuring that national defense would reside in the states and in militias, not at the federal level in a professional army. The right to bear arms derived from the need to assure that state militia could perform its essential mission.

All this was what constitutional scholars call “settled law” until Heller, in which the high court ruled that the right to bear arms, despite the language of the 2nd Amendment and the historical context of its creation, existed independent of service in the militia.

I guess he missed the years of Second Amendment scholarship which generally convinced most of the legal academy that the “settled law” was anything but. Actually, Second Amendment law was far from settled in terms of collective rights. This article is full of ignorance on a great many topics, including the fact that “original intent” originalism has largely fallen out of fashion and has few supporters these days even among ardent originalists.

But even Scalia, fully aware of the legal precedents he was overturning, saw fit to insert the following caveats near the end of his opinion.

What legal precedents? Heller and McDonald have overturned nothing. Miller, in fact, is still valid case law because it was never the collective rights case that people imagined it to be.

According to the Washington Times, the DC police have a policy to arrest individuals with empty shell casings:

Under the law, live or empty brass and plastic casings must be carried in a special container and unavailable to drivers. Having one, for example, in a cup holder or ash tray is illegal.

She told Secrets that the police are “under orders to arrest tourists or other legal gun owners from out of state who wouldn’t think to empty brass and plastic from their cars or pockets.”

I haven’t been doing much shooting these days, but at one of my past jobs our usually hapless facilities guy found an empty 9mm casing in the parking lot and proceeded to overreact to impress our management about how on top of things he really was. They proceeded to overreact and call police, who told them it was no big deal and not to worry about it. Convinced someone was shooting at the geese outside, or plotting to shoot the place up (because whack jobs always put an empty shell casing in the parking lot as a warning) they got the landlord to agree to e-mailing other tenants to look for suspicious activity.

I just kept my mouth shut and let them comically overreact to this, despite the fact I was fairly certain it came from me, because I had been shooting the day before. My guess is the brass ended up in my pocket, and came out when I took out my keys to open the car. Had it been the later management team, I would have just told them as much and it all would have ended there. People who aren’t shooters don’t realize the weird places shell casings end up when you’re shooting. Most of them knew I was a shooter, and there were at least four other people in the company who were too, but it never occurred to anyone involved in that sad affair that maybe it was just a loose shell casing that fell out of someone’s car or pocket.

It shows how politicians and anti-gunners can use the ignorance of others to slip something like this by without a lot of people realizing how deep into police state territory policy like this really goes.

Reuters is reporting that NRA is joining an ACLU suit against the Obama Administration over NSA surveillance, and being welcomed by the ACLU. You can find NRA’s amicus brief here. From the brief:

The mass surveillance program could allow identification of NRA members, supporters, potential members, and other persons with whom the NRA communicates, potentially chilling their willingness to communicate with the NRA.

Perhaps they know our people a bit too well.

The Supreme Court made clear in NAACP that it had long “recognized the vital relationship between freedom to associate and privacy in one’s associations.” NAACP, 357 U.S. at 462. Because of that relationship, the “compelled disclosure of affiliation with groups engaged in advocacy may constitute as effective a restraint on freedom of association” as the regulation of lobbying activities or the discriminatory taxation of certain newspapers. Id. Compulsory disclosure is unconstitutional where groups show that disclosure subjects their members to “manifestations of public hostility,” which would “affect adversely the ability of [groups and their] members to pursue their collective effort to foster beliefs which they admittedly have the right to advocate,” because the intrusion on privacy “may induce members to withdraw … and dissuade.

We’ve worked enough gun shows to know there’s a lot of guys who don’t do anything public as a gun owner for fear of identifying themselves as such and ending up on “a list.” That attitude tends to annoy me, but it’s out there, and is not as rare as I wish it were.

Admittedly, some post-NAACP cases have been more deferential to government, focusing on the language in NAACP noting members’ exposure “to economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility” and requiring evidence of such harm to strike down disclosure regimes. See, e.g., McIntyre v. Ohio, 514 U.S. 334, 379 (1995); Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 69 (1976).

But the NRA and its members have certainly been subjected to “public hostility,” from the highest levels of government as well as from the media and other prominent elements of society. Individuals who are concerned about government monitoring of their communications might well avoid seeking information from a group that has been accused by the President of the United States of “spreading untruths,” and by the President’s press secretary of “repugnant and cowardly” advertising. See Obama’s Remarks After Senate Gun Votes, The New York Times, April 17, 2013; Michael D. Shear, White House Denounces Web Video by N.R.A., The New York Times, January 16, 2013. They might also be concerned about associating with a group of which the Vice-President of the National Education Association has said, “[t]hese guys are going to hell,” or which a journalism professor has accused of committing “treason … worthy of the firing squad.”

At root, I’m wondering if NRA’s concern is the Obama Administration using what they find to punish political enemies (namely NRA, it’s members and its employees). Before, I would have said that was crazy talk, but these days, quite sadly, it is not.

Each of these programs standing on its own could provide the government with an extraordinary amount of information about those who communicate with the NRA for any reason. Under the programs revealed so far, the government may already possess information about everyone who has called the NRA by phone, e-mailed the NRA, or visited the NRA’s website. Conversely, the same programs would also gather information on potential members or donors contacted by phone or e-mail for NRA membership recruitment or fundraising programs, or for legislative or political reasons such as the transmission of legislative alerts or get-out-the-vote messages. The programs could also reveal at least the outlines of research and advocacy activities undertaken by NRA staff members, such as the websites visited in the course of legislative analysis or the identities of legislative staff members contacted by e-mail. At the outer extreme, a location tracking program could reveal the identity of every mobile phone user who visits the NRA’s headquarters—whether for a political or legislative event, or simply to use the NRA’s shooting range or visit its National Firearms Museum. Similarly, location-tracking surveillance could reveal the travels of NRA staff members to engage in legislative meetings, political events, or other activities protected by the First Amendment. Any of these forms of tracking could easily reduce individuals’ desire to interact with the NRA.

Personally, my reaction would be the opposite. If I knew Barry was watching, I’d be pleased to head down to NRA HQ and walk out a nice “F you” pattern. But this is by far not the only concern. The whole brief is worth reading, if you’re interested. The brief also notes, “The government’s interpretation of Section 215 would nullify statutory protections against centralization of gun ownership records.” Read the whole thing.