Category: Second Amendment rights

Categories
Second Amendment rights

Common Sense Reprieve

She must still suffer bogus punishment for her non-crime.

But at least Shaneen Allen won’t have to rot in prison for up to ten years.

What is the charge? Crossing a state border.

I’m glad that she no longer lives in the purgatory of that possibility.

And I think I know how she feels, having been arbitrarily threatened with prison myself, along with two colleagues, for a “crime” that was, in fact, a non-crime.

Twice a victim of real crime last year, Ms. Allen has a concealed carry permit from her home state of Pennsylvania. Her duly licensed gun was in her purse on the day she drove into New Jersey. A routine traffic stop led to its discovery and to Atlantic County Prosecutor James McClain’s injudicious determination to throw the book at her for possessing that gun in New Jersey without New Jersey’s permission.

Laws at all levels of governance being what they are — prolific, contradictory, and potentially ruinous — let’s agree that Allen should have double-​checked her assumption that her constitutional right to bear arms would not dissolve en route to the Garden State. Let’s also agree that crossing a border between two states of our union hardly stacks up to bank robbery or murder.

This kind of lapse of due diligence should not be used to destroy a life.

In late September, bowing to public pressure, McClain reversed himself. Shaneen Allen must enter a so-​called pre-​trial intervention (PTI) program, but no longer faces prison. The Daily Caller called the prosecutor’s welcome caving to public pressure a “stunning outbreak of sanity.”

I call it Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Second Amendment rights

Bearing Arms and Using Them

Wrong place, wrong guy.

A Palm Beach County jewelry store. You’re going to rob it because that’s where the money is. And the guy behind the counter is a frail-​looking codger. Looks like a piece of cake.

But your intel is faulty. Store owner Arthur Lewis may be 89-​years-​old, but the World War II vet is also, as the headline goes, “Armed & dangerous.”

He demonstrated it four years ago, when Brandon Johnson entered the store shooting. Johnson fired one shot, Lewis answered with five. Somehow neither got hurt.Arthur Lewis

What happened several days ago was scarier than the 2010 confrontation, Lewis says. He was working behind the counter when Lennard Jervis thrust a gun at him; Lewis grabbed it and brought out his .38; the two grappled with and shot at each other. Lewis did okay. Jervis ended up taking four bullets to the chest and two more to the arm and leg before finally lurching to the exit and not getting very far. He is expected to survive his wounds.

Lewis’s girlfriend says: “People think because he’s 89, he’s frail. That irritates me because he’s anything but.”

“It’s a hazardous business,” says Lewis. “I thought he was going to kill me as soon as I saw the gun. I thought, ‘This time, I’m dead.’”

The right to bear arms isn’t just for geese hunting and target practice. Sometimes it really comes in handy.

Sometimes it’s life or death.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
media and media people Second Amendment rights

Rapid-​Response Counterfire

If somebody tries to polemically gun down your rights, button your flak jacket and shoot back.

It may take years — say, if you’re John Locke answering Robert Filmer.

Sometimes you’ve got only seconds.

You’re on a gab show being watched by millions. Somebody says something unwise, illogical and destructive — but possibly persuasive to a certain percentage of viewers. Unless you reply, instantly, with something wise, logical and constructive, you lose your chance.

If it’s dueling YouTube videos, maybe it takes a couple of days to blast the enemy and win a viewership the size of a small city.

The offending “celluloid” I have in mind is a Bloomberg-​funded skit that opens with the caption “Warning: this video depicts scenes of domestic violence.” An armed ex-​boyfriend breaks into a woman’s home and threatens to take their kid. The woman calls the police — minutes away when seconds count. The video implies that the way to “stop gun violence against women” is to get rabid-​ex-​boyfriend-​empowering guns off the streets.

Two days later, Liberty PA had posted a parody-​rebuttal. This time, the prospective victim flourishes a shotgun to scare off the ex. Opening caption: “Warning: this video depicts scenes of self-​defense.” Closing caption: “Stop gun control against women.”

Bull’s‑eye.

The video-​rebuttal didn’t cost much more to make than the quick wit and time of a few alacritous participants. Within a couple days — credit partly yours, O modern technological infrastructure! — it had garnered 72,000 hits.

On Fox’s Red Eye and elsewhere the inanity of the original propaganda piece was pointed out. But it was the Liberty PA video response that really brought the point home.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Terrorized?

This week, a major-​party politician said that “we cannot let a minority of people — and that’s what it is, a minority of people — hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority.”

How can simply having a viewpoint — a very American thing to possess, by the way — terrorize anyone?

But of course, this person wasn’t talking about real terrorism. This person — a Democratic Party politician of high standing — was using the T‑word to smear defenders of the Second Amendment.

Yes, it was Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, and former U.S. Secretary of State (an office she has now taken “full responsibility” for holding), who trotted out those words, allegedly to encourage “a more thoughtful” debate about gun control.

Demonizing her opponents as “terrorizing” her comrades is hardly a way to produce the stated result.

Them’s fightin’ words.

I know of no one who defends the Second Amendment and opposes the gun control agenda of the Democratic Party who also supports the terroristic activities of spree murderers. Not one.

We have more complicated reasons to oppose gun control than merely focusing on such violence.

But understanding those reasons would require a “more thoughtful” attitude than besmirching opponents with the word “terror.”

And as for terrorizing, there are few words more frightening coming from an American politician than “we cannot let a minority” exercise their rights — whether to arms or … holding “a viewpoint.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment Second Amendment rights

Gun Control of the Very Best Kind

The headline: “Husband and wife shoot gunmen who try to enter their St. Louis home, killing 1, police say.”

They acted when two thugs tried to force their way into their home by using the St. Louis couple’s 17-​year-​old daughter as a shield. She had been outside fetching something from her car when the men grabbed her.

Inside, the father happened to see what was happening and pulled out his gun. His wife also retrieved a gun. Home invader Terrell Johnson entered first and received the first bullets. He didn’t survive. His partner Cortez McClinton — arrested in 2010 on a murder charge, but eventually released because of uncooperative witnesses — managed to escape, if only briefly. His brother took him to a hospital for chest and thigh wounds. The police picked him up there.

Mom had also gotten off a shot but did not hit either intruder, leading one blogger to opine that although her heart is in the right place, she needs practice. A reader replied, rightly, that when your own daughter is directly in harm’s way, your shooting skill is hardly the only variable.

Besides, the goal in brandishing a weapon isn’t necessarily to wound bad guys, but better yet to scare them off. There’s a deterrent effect in owning guns.

I am surprised that advocates of gun control and their compatriots in the national MainStream Media are not all over this story. For here is yet another dramatic proof of the need for effective gun control on which they constantly insist.

The gun used to thwart the invaders was very effectively controlled indeed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Second Amendment rights Tenth Amendment federalism

Nullifying Future Fed Gun Regs

The legislative history of Idaho’s Senate Bill 1332 can be briskly told; its enactment was swift indeed. The Federal Firearm, Magazine and Register Ban Enforcement Act was

  • introduced on the tenth of February;
  • unanimously approved by the full Senate nine days later;
  • leapt out of House committee, on March 10, with a Do Pass recommendation;
  • read in full in the House two days later, and
  • passed unanimously; whereupon it
  • went to the governor, who signed it into law March 19.

Because of an emergency clause, SB-​1332 went into full effect on that date.Idaho, with bullet holes?

The new law instructs Idaho’s public servants not to co-​operate with the federal government on any future gun and ammo registration, prohibition or regulation passed by the U.S. Congress. It also provides a civil penalty of a maximum $1000 fine for each instance of co-operation.

It’s part of the low-​key rebellion that many state legislatures and governors are waging  against the federal government. Claiming something like a right to nullify unconstitutional laws — a right enumerated, after all, as the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution — at issue is the usurpation of state prerogatives by the feds.

We’ve seen a number of states resist the federal government’s attempt to “organize” a grand (and catastrophic) public-​private alliance known as Obamacare.

The current Idaho effort doesn’t strike me as pure nullification, however. It relies on a proven principle of federalism: the states may not be commandeered to enforce federal law. Specifically, any future federal law attacking our essential Second Amendment rights.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.