Author: Sebastian

Remember the case of that guy who got caught at LAX because he was picking up a friend to go shooting with a trunk for of so-called “assault weapons?” He plead guilty to Misdemeanor CCW and had his guns returned. Good work on the part of his attorneys. It’s a travesty that he was guilty of anything, but at least this lets him go on with life, and he won’t be a prohibited person. You’ll notice in the memo that the LAPD were trying to consider multiple firearms, including a Broomhandle Mauser, “assault weapons”, when they were no such thing according to the legal definition.

Saul Cornell’s Joyce funded center is no more. Apparently Professor Joe Olson got a rather hilarious e-mail about the same. We continue to rack up victory while detractors among us continue to claim Heller was really a defeat. Their prattle gets more and more ridiculous by the day.

From a chapter two in Dave Kopel’s book Aiming for Liberty: The Past, Present, And Future of Freedom and Self-Defense, called the same as my title:

Michigan’s law requiring a government permit in order to buy a handgun was enacted after Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black man, shot and killed a person in a mob that was attacking his house because he had just moved into an all-white neighborhood. The Detroit Police stood nearby, refusing to restrain the angry crowd.

Indicted for first degree murder, Sweet was acquitted after a lengthy trial at which Clarence Darrow served as his attorney. Black newspapers such as the Amsterdam News and the Baltimore Herald vigorously defended blacks’ right to use deadly force in self-defense against a mob.

Darrow summed up for the jury: “eleven of them go into a house, gentlemen, with no police protection, in the face of a mob, and the hatred of a community, and take guns and ammunition and fight for their rights, and for your rights and for mine, and for the rights of every being that lives. They went in and faced a mob seeking to tear them to bits. Call them something besides cowards.”

The name Clarence Darrow should ring a bell. Even progressives have historically supported the right to bear arms and the right to self-defense. The opposition it received from the modern left for the latter part of the 20th century is largely an anomaly, quite possibly a result of history largely ignoring the role the right to keep and bear arms had in the Civil Rights movement. Kopel’s chapter continues:

Black and civil rights workers armed for self-defense. Daisy Bates, the leader of the Arkansas NAACP and publisher of the Arkansas State Press during the Little Rock High School desegregation case, recalls that three crosses were burned on her lawn and gunshots fired into her home. Her husband, L.C. Bates, stayed up to guard their house with a .45 semi-automatic pistol. Some of their friends organized a volunteer patrol.

After the Bates’s front lawn was bombed, Mrs. Bates telegrammed Attorney General Herbert Brownell in Washington. He replied there was no federal jurisdiction, and told them to go to the local police. “Of course that wasn’t going to protect us,” Mrs. Bates remembered.

State or federal assistance sometimes did come — not when disorder began, but when blacks reacted by arming themselves. In North Carolina, Governor Terry Sanford (who later served as an anti-gun US Senator) refused to command state police to protect a civil rights march from Klan attacks — until he was warned that if there were no police, the marchers would be armed for self-defense.

There was a time when even the NAACP recognized the importance of the right to bear arms in protecting other civil rights. I will continue to bring other choice quotes from Dave Kopel’s book as I make my way through it.

Utah is warning that it needs more funding for its state background check system or “it could be forced to cut off all background checks next year unless lawmakers prop up its anemic budget.” The problem with this is you have a constitutional right hinging on the smooth operation of the system. I can’t think of any better way to get background checks thrown out than states messing with the system and causing real infringements on the exercise of the right.

Utah is among the states that are Points-of-Contact for the purposes of the Brady Act, meaning their state system serves as a substitute for the NICS check. One way Utah, and other states, could save money during these difficult times is by eliminating their state systems and relying solely on the federal NICS system. Most states rely on the federal system.