The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
Fresh from stabbing gun owners in the back with the Heller Brief, the Bush administration seems to have decided to be nice to us again:
At the request of the Bush Administration and 51 members of the United States Senate led by Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prohibition of firearms on agency land will be revised in the following weeks.
Victory at last.
This turd passed unanimously out of committee. Folks in Nebraska need to get off their butts and join Joe in stopping this. You only get one chance. Repealing laws once they pass is next to impossible.
CNN has a pretty balanced piece of campus concealed carry. They get some of the legal subtleties wrong though. For instance, you can carry on a college campus in Pennsylvania legally, it’s just that Colleges and Universities, including those in the state system, exclude firearms through policy (rather than law). This is the case in Virginia as well. The laws being proposed in different states are meant to have various effects.
Many states, including Texas and Tennessee, ban concealed carry on college campuses through law. There are proposals to repeal this, but that would still allow college to ban them through policy. You could be expelled from the school, but you won’t be facing charges for violating a gun free zone. Virginia’s proposal would have prevented the state run school system from imposing restrictions on individuals who possessed a Concealed Handgun License.
While I have some issues with how CNN has chosen to cover this, the fact that this is becoming a serious debate at all is a sign on how far we’ve come here. Even five years ago, it wouldn’t even be up for serious debate.
Obama says that he wants to implement California style gun controls, as an example of how much he loves the second amendment. Sportsmen for Obama talks about what exactly that would mean for the whole country.
Robb Allen has a bit of Montana’s brief in Heller:
A collective rights decision by the court would violate the contract by which Montana entered into statehood, called the Compact With the United States and archived at Article I of the Montana Constitution. When Montana and the United States entered into this bilateral contract in 1889, the U.S. approved the right to bear arms in the Montana Constitution, guaranteeing the right of “any person” to bear arms, clearly an individual right.
There was no assertion in 1889 that the Second Amendment was susceptible to a collective rights interpretation, and the parties to the contract understood the Second Amendment to be consistent with the declared Montana constitutional right of “any person” to bear arms.
As a bedrock principle of law, a contract must be honored so as to give effect to the intent of the contracting parties. A collective rights decision by the court in Heller would invoke an era of unilaterally revisable contracts by violating the statehood contract between the United States and Montana, and many other states.
That sounds like secessh talk to me. This will mean that quite possibly Montana will be the haven of shooters when The Messiah sends his jackbooted angels to give us the knock on the door.
SayUncle details other instances when Montana has told the feds to go to hell. If Montana secedes from the union to preserve gun rights, I’ll move there.
From Joe’s Crabby Shack:
State Sen. Brad Ashford (Omaha) amended his proposed Gun Crime bill to remove everything, but to add the formation of a seven-member panel to meet every two years to decide what guns are inherently dangerous and should be prohibited from sale or ownership in Nebraska.
As is typical with these types of bills, the real risk comes in how they determine what is an assault weapon.
- A semiautomatic center-fire rifle that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine, with any one of the following: a pistol grip protruding conspicuously beneath the weapon’s action; a thumbhole stock; a folding or telescoping stock; a grenade launcher or flare launcher; a flash suppressor; or a forward pistol grip.
- A semiautomatic center-fire rifle with a fixed magazine with capacity for more than 10 rounds.
- A semiautomatic center-fire rifle that has an overall length of less than 30 inches.
The first clause is the usual list of cosmetic features, but the overall length and application to fixed magazine firearms is a new twist. Needless to say, this has to be opposed most vigorously.
It’s good to see that Gun Law News‘s Sportsmen for Obama project is shaping up quite nicely, including some snippets of his voting record on the gun issue in the Illinois Politburo.
Life long hunter Hillary Clinton wants a presidential “gun summit”:
“I believe we really should have a summit where everybody comes together on all sides of this issue,†Clinton said. “Let’s figure out how we can be consistent with the Second Amendment, which I wholeheartedly support, and do more to keep people safe.
“I think we can do that, but it’s going to require us all to maybe give a little and understand the point of view of the other people,†she said. “That’s something I would do as President to really bring people together.â€
While surely this is campaign rhetoric, all one has to do is go read Bryan Miller’s comments on his blog to see what Hillary’s summit would look like. It’s hard to come to terms with people who don’t even want to recognize the existence of a constitutional right to arms, or recognize that it means anything.
Thanks to reader Jack, we have an update on the lawsuit by the City of Philadelphia to overturn state preemption through the court system, talked about several months ago here.
Bochetto said some things have changed since [the 1996 ruling upholding preemption], including the recent increase in Philadelphia’s gun violence. Also, the state Supreme Court recently ruled the city can impose its own rules when it comes to campaign finance.
And three justices who issued the 4-0 decision in 1996 have since left the court.
“I’m playing Texas Hold ‘Em — of my seven cards, I now get six new cards,” Bochetto said.
Clarke and Miller first sued in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court in July, but the case was later transferred to Commonwealth Court, where disputes between Pennsylvania governmental bodies often end up. The March 12 hearing concerns whether the case should be thrown out or allowed to continue.
So basically, the City is just going to keep playing poker with your rights until they get a winning hand, and gun owners in or near Philadelphia lose. I sincerely hope that Commonealth Court throws this case out based on the Ortiz precedent, and this stops here. The law is not a card game, and preemption in Pennsylvania is well established.
Joe Huffman has a great write up on it.