Category: Gun Rights

I know our opponents hate it when we bring up the ‘N’ word, but Dave Kopel quotes for us a 2009 article by Stephen Halbrook in the St. Thomas Law Review:

That brings us back to Alfred Flatow. [The article provides a case study of Flatow, a Jewish veteran of the German army, who competed for Germany in the 1896 Olympics.] What if he – and an unknown number of other Germans, Jews and non-Jews alike – had not registered his firearms in 1932? Or if the Weimar Republic had not decreed firearm registration at all? What if the Nazis, when they took power in 1933 and disarmed social democrats and other political enemies, or when they decided to repress the entire Jewish population in 1938, did not have police records of registered firearm owners? Can it be said with certainty that no one, either individually or in groups small or large, would have resisted Nazi depredations?

One wonders what thoughts may have occurred to Alfred Flatow in 1942 when he was dying of starvation at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Perhaps memories of the 1896 Olympics and of a better Germany flashed before his eyes. Did he have second thoughts, maybe repeated many times before, on whether he should have registered his revolver and two pocket pistols in 1932 as decreed by the Weimar Republic? Or whether he should have obediently surrendered them at a Berlin police station in 1938 as ordered by Nazi decree, only to be taken into Gestapo custody? We will never know, but it is difficult to imagine that he had no regrets.

Now our opponents tell us we can’t talk about the mass disarmament that preceded the Holocaust, because that’s just a ridiculous thing, you know. But it seems to me that the firearms policies of mass murdering totalitarian states are highly relevant to the debate over the scope of a constitutional amendment that was meant, ultimately, to be a check on governmental power.

We’re told by our opponents that mass registration is harmless, and under normal circumstances it probably is. But I think there’s a strong argument to be made that registration infringes on the core purpose of checking governmental power, whether that power is a totalitarian murder on a mass scale, or the more common history in our country of local law enforcement colluding with domestic terror organizations for the purposes of keeping disfavored racial minorities subjugated.

We’d like to think we’re more enlightened than that now, but that strikes me as hubris. Where flawed humans are involved, it’s never a wise to rely on the better angels of our nature.

Iowa is one of the states that has no Right to Keep and Bear Arms provision in its constitution. The one being proposed leaves little weasel room:

The NRA would like Iowans to add the following words to the state Constitution: “The right of individuals to acquire, keep, possess, transport, and use arms to defend life and liberty and for all other legitimate purposes is fundamental and inviolable. Licensing registration, special taxation, or any other measure that suppresses or discourages the free exercise of this right is forbidden.

Except I think there’s a word missing from that, namely “bear.” Couldn’t we make this “acquire, keep, bear, possess, transport, and use arms,” is the same language that’s in the Second Amendment too controversial for Iowa? I mean, I’d love to use the word carry, but why not bear if carry implies too much?

UPDATE: Apparently the full text is as follows:

The right of individuals to acquire, keep, possess, transport, carry, and use arms to defend life and liberty and for all other legitimate purposes is fundamental and inviolable. Licensing, registration, special taxation, or any other measure that suppresses or discourages the free exercise of this right is forbidden.

The reporting paper apparently left a key word there out.

All from John Richardson: Gura is calling out the delaying tactics of New York State in the gun permit case. A federal judge sides with SAF in this one. Gura has also filed a Motion for Summary Judgement in the North Carolina case.

Bill Whittle opines on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms:

Cemetery, upon attending a high-end antique gun show:

One thing that annoyed me, was the sense of elitism.  I’m not talking about the hoity-toitiness of balls out antique collector’s, but the sense that somehow *they’re* safe, since they’re not involved with scary *assault weapons*.  Sorry to tell ya bub, they were assault weapons in their day, and if gun was to come, those $50k rifles would be heading to the smelter to become rebar.

It doesn’t matter what you shoot. The real question is whether you can be drawn away from the pack and preyed upon individually. That’s what the whole “assault weapons” business was about. Antique gun aficionados should recall that back before the last redistricting, around 2000-2002 timeframe, the GOP redistricted Congressman Joe Hoeffel out of a seat. Hoeffel was a proponent of a bill that would treat antique firearms the same as any other firearm. Let’s not also forget New York State’s attempts to do the same.

Anyone who shoots anything, that projects anything downrange at paper breaking velocities, thinks they are safe at their own peril. We are all most decidedly in this together, or our opponents will try to break us apart and kill us separately. That includes hunters too.

I don’t know what NRA is thinking, but I’m thinking our two top priorities need to be:

• Trying again for national reciprocity.
• Federal preemption of state and local gun bans.

I know that NRA probably also wants to push ATF reform, and I agree this is important, but these two issues can be carried out using Congress’ Section 5 enforcement powers under the 14th Amendment. There is court precedent in the case of City of Boerne v. Flores, which stated that Congress did not have enforcement powers that were more broad than the Court has established. Justice Kennedy’s opinion from that case:

Legislation which alters the meaning of the Free Exercise Clause cannot be said to be enforcing the Clause. Congress does not enforce a constitutional right by changing what the right is. It has been given the power “to enforce,” not the power to determine what constitutes a constitutional violation.

There have been subsequent cases backing up this one, which could make both of these legislative actions problematic. But I am not one to believe the Supreme Court’s rulings were chiseled on stone tablets brought down from Mount Horeb. There is language in Heller to support both of these. Let the Congress tell the Supreme Court what they think the breadth of the Second Amendment is, and let the Supreme Court tell the elected branches of government why that is not the case. Personally, I think they’ll be very reluctant to overturn Congress’ determination.

I believe these two items are more important than ATF reform because they put us on the offensive in the Courts, rather than the defensive. Rather than having to justify why certain restrictions are unconstitutional, we leave our opponents arguing why an Act of Congress is beyond its Section 5 powers under the 14th Amendment. ATF reform is great, but it doesn’t help us much in our struggle to define the meaning of the Second Amendment, which is the most important thing we’re facing right now.

Decided by the DC Court of Appeals. Dave Hardy notes that a few years ago, this would have been unthinkable.