Category: Gun Rights

John Richardson reports on an ordinance floated by Rahm Emanuel that would allow ranges in the City of Chicago. This is ostensibly aimed at Ezell v. Chicago, but Alan Gura is reporting on Twitter it shouldn’t moot the case. This is good news.

Mayor Rahm’s backpedaling indicates he’s smarter than his predecessor. He’s at least backing up to what he thinks is a more defensible position. Daley basically stuck to his guns and tried to reargue Heller.

You can read more about the ordinance here:

Chicago ranges would be confined to areas zoned for manufacturing, but that’s only the baseline. Gun ranges would also be prohibited within 1,000 feet of a school, park, place of worship, day care center, liquor store, library, museum, hospital or residential district.

No wonder Alan Gura isn’t worried about Ezell. Is there anywhere in Chicago you could have a range under this ridiculous standard?

The New York Times has a rather lengthy piece on the subject, with examples they found of people having their rights restored who pretty clearly were still disturbed. No mention of how many people have had their rights restored and are doing fine. Several of the examples were committed involuntarily for being suicidal, had their rights restored, and then killed themselves. I don’t consider this much of an example because someone who was committed for being suicidal should be more prone to having rights restored than someone who is schizophrenic and on medication. I’m far more understanding of right restoration for transient mental health issues like depression, PTSD, and other manageable conditions. I’m open to the notion that some states may not have good procedures for rights restoration for mental infirmities, but one of the examples appearing repeatedly is California, a state relatively strict when it comes to firearms, especially with regards to mental health.

It’s relatively unsurprising that with enough digging you can find example of where the system failed. No one wants to do a story on a solider who was committed for severe PTSD, got treatment, got better, got his rights restored, and then went on to live as an ordinary citizen and responsible gun owner. There’s no story there.

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.

As we’ve said, there’s not way to buy a fully automatic assault rifle at a gun show without a background check, but that’s not stopping Bloomberg from buying ad time to try to drum up support for denying constitutional rights with no due process by scare mongering among the public.

This is the kind of propaganda the Brady folks, nor other gun control groups, have the funding for anymore, which shows that MAIG and Bloomberg are really the last organization remaining credible threat to the Second Amendment.

With my usual caveat that I do not agree with NRA on these parking lot laws, It’s worth noting that while our opponents were busy fighting hysterically to prevent the campus carry bill, our side managed to slip this in.

The message to our opponents is that you can’t win. Even when you think you do, you really don’t. At best, their greatly touted victory in Texas was a delaying action. How many other states can this be done in? How many other states can we distract them with Campus Carry bill, then slip in substantive reforms under the radar while our opponents are pouring resources into defeated the diversionary action?

They will not win. Their only fate is the dustbin of history, along with ideas like monarchy, slavery, segregation, and temperance.