Author: Sebastian

Glad to see local Tea Party activists making a big issue of something like this:

Rickabaugh, who has a child in the high school, also said the teacher espoused beliefs that the Second Amendment has no place in contemporary society and that socialized medicine is better for Americans.

The left has controlled our educational institutions for entirely too long. If we’re going to beat them back in the long run, it’s going to take people like Rickabaugh. Use the left’s own standards against them. That’s what Saul Alinsky would have done.

See here:

A conservative Delaware County mayor who worked on behalf of the National Rifle Association to challenge Philadelphia’s well-publicized attempts at local gun laws died in a skydiving accident Friday.

C. Scott Shields, 45, was killed around 4:30 p.m. when his main parachute did not deploy and his emergency chute failed.  He landed in the trees surrounding the Cross Keys airport in Gloucester County and was pronounced dead on arrival at Underwood Memorial Hospital in Woodbury, N.J.

They take Obama to task for trying to seek a phony “middle ground” on gun control:

So it is with guns. The president is fond of speaking about “common sense” gun restrictions. To supporters of the Second Amendment, that is like speaking about “common sense” press restrictions in the context of the First — which forbids any restrictions at all. There is nothing particularly noble about compromise when it calls for someone to compromise his principles.

As the article mentions, this isn’t some obscure budgetary matter, or building a bridge, where there could be some give an take. This cuts to the very core of the citizens’ relationship with government.

Both Eugene Volokh and Dave Hardy have commentary. The courts can not be counted on to do anything except take the extreme, like total gun bans in the home, off the table. I’m not optimistic about much else.

UPDATE: More from Josh Blackman

UPDATE: Even more here.

Kudos to Jeff Winkler of the Daily Caller for noticing:

Get collared years ago on a bogus drug charge because the oregano in your back pocket looked like was a bag of weed? Or maybe a judge back in 2006 dropped those charges because you were able to provide proof for that Adderall prescription? Under proposed legislation, it will not matter if you were innocent all along or even proven innocent by a court of law.

Read the whole thing. The article points out one of the hidden easter egg in the bill to encourage more states to report mental health records to NICS, which I pointed out flaws in a few weeks ago.

The whole point here is that owning a gun is a constitutional right. If that’s going to be the case, you can’t just take the right away from people without due process of law. Our opponents in Congress suggest they accept Heller and McDonald, but their policy preferences show that’s all lip service. There are certainly criteria for prohibited drug users that would probably be constitutional, but that’s not what our opponents are talking about. Their goal is different. Their goal is to expand the class of prohibited person to be as wide as humanly possible.

It’s very interesting that even the Brady Campaign acknowledges due process concerns here. They say they are working with McCarthy’s office on this. It will be very interesting to see the language of McCarthy’s bill.

Seems it needs some help.