Category: Second Amendment rights

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initiative, referendum, and recall Second Amendment rights

A Voter Revolt

The signatures are in: 16,199 of them — twice as many as needed to initiate the first recall election of a state lawmaker in Colorado history.

The target of voter ire? Senate President John Morse. He ticked off his El Paso County constituents by spearheading the recent triple whammy of gun control legislation that neatly bypassed Colorado voters earlier this year.

You may remember the controversy. The three bills in question, signed by the governor as emergency legislation so that no voter referendum was possible, elicited widespread negative reactions in the state, including nearly every county sheriff in Colorado publicly opposing the bills.

So, why did the sheriffs oppose the legislation, while Democrats in the legislature passed the bills?

Like state legislators, sheriffs are elected. But, unlike legislators, sheriffs deal with self-​defending citizens qua citizens, as well as criminals and victims, on a regular basis. Such experience brings a different perspective, and makes sheriffs more skeptical of blunt legislative solutions.

Traditionally, Democrats — despite the fondness demonstrated by their party constituencies for increased government control over private weapons — tend to treat the issue of “gun control” with some modicum of care. At least, those in the mid-​west and western states tend to.

But Senator Morse did not.

Morse won the senate seat back in 2010 by fewer than 350 votes, with a Libertarian Party candidate racking up 1,320 votes — almost 5 percent. Libertarians are strongly pro-​Second Amendment. Yet, Morse treated his narrow victory as a call for sweeping change. A mandate!

He may reap the “reward” for such “courage.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Second Amendment rights

The Cost of Saving a Life

The going rate for saving a child’s life in Washington, D.C., is $1000. That’s not what somebody pays you for doing so; that’s what you pay.

Considering the punishment he could have suffered, though, Benjamin Srigley got off easy.

A few years ago, a Supreme Court decision forced a little liberalization in D.C.’s gun laws. Even so, city officials always seek new ways to make bearing arms onerous. So some exercisers of their Second Amendment rights simply ignore the mandatory hurdles.

On January 11, Srigley used one of three firearms not registered in DC to shoot a pit pull attacking 11-​year-​old Jayeon Simon. In May, authorities agreed not to pursue criminal charges. So Srigley won’t be sent to prison. He must merely turn over $1,000 of his wealth, plus his guns. Police say he’ll get the weapons back after he registers them in Maryland, to which he is moving soon.

“We took it into account that he saved this boy’s life,” says Ted Gest, a spokesman for the attorney general.

A cousin who helps care for the boy thinks the deed should be taken even more into account. “I don’t think he should be charged at all, because it’s an act of heroism,” he says.

Oh sure. The people who value the boy’s life would be prejudiced in favor of letting his savior off the hook entirely for doing everything right and nothing wrong, wouldn’t they? That shows you where their priorities lie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Second Amendment rights video

Video: Fifty-​four Colorado Sheriffs File Suit Against Anti-​Gun Bills

Big news from Colorado:

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies Second Amendment rights Tenth Amendment federalism

Nullification Today

As the federal government lurches further out of control, wildly grasping to increase control over our lives, an old and controversial method of reining in our central government gains popularity: State nullification of federal law.

A recent Rasmussen survey asked whether “states have the right to block any federal laws they disagree with on legal grounds,” and 38 percent of likely voters surveyed said “Yes.”

Cutting to the quick of the Commerce Clause, a new Kansas law — Senate Bill 102, the Second Amendment Protection Act, signed by Governor Sam Brownback last month — states that firearms manufactured and owned in Kansas that do not cross state lines are not subject to federal law.

Of course, the Supreme Court thinks otherwise. In Wickard v. Filburn, the Court allowed the federal government to regulate darn near anything on the grounds that any conceivable act of consumption affects demand, and thus “commerce.” Goofy ruling? Yes. But by tradition it’s the Supreme Court justices who get the final word.

Yet even that has been denied by many constitutional theorists, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — “Mr. Constitution” himself — both of whom supported nullification, as recently explained by historian Tom Woods. No compact joined into by multiple parties may only be interpreted by one of the parties alone, unless specified to that effect. The Constitution doesn’t even mention judicial review, so the tradition of the Supreme Court’s final word is itself a matter of dispute.

Standing up for the status quo, Attorney General Eric Holder has written to Brownback against the new Kansas law, citing the Supremacy Clause. Problematic? Yes. But not easily dismissed.

Brownback has volleyed back.

At least we can expect the old issues of constitutional law to gain a new and lively hearing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Guns Grabbed in New York

Many folks are scared of “mentally unstable folks” with guns. Me too.

However, being scared doesn’t mean that we get to take the rights away from people we’re uncomfortable around – or whose demographic group might be found to be statistically more “dangerous” than another.

“Mental illness” is itself an unstable concept — Asperger’s Syndrome has been listed as a separate disorder in the e Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), but it looks like it will be collapsed into the spectrum of autism-​related disorders in the DSM‑5. Indeed, the more you learn about the history of the DSM, the less it looks like a scientific document and more the product of a congress, with “diseases” voted in and out because of ideological pressure and fashion and whim. Homosexuality? Used to be a disease. Now it isn’t. Progress, I think, but the actual process was no more scientific than changing the recipe for hot dogs, the manufacture of which we are warned not to inquire about.

Ask David Lewis, a 35-​year-​old gentleman from Amherst, New York. His guns were confiscated by the state. Why? He was once prescribed an anti-​anxiety medicine, and that flagged him as unstable under New York’s new gun law.

A judge just ruled that the state has to give him his guns back.

Talk about slippery slopes. Were it not for one commonsense judge, New Yorkers who’ve experienced some social anxiety would have been lumped in with utter crazies, and had their rights simply stripped.

Indeed, they already have. Lewis is almost certainly not the only perfectly sensible citizen to have had his guns grabbed.

Thus it begins.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

It’s Not About Responsibility

“It’s not about me,” insisted the President of these United States, before crowds in Hartford, Connecticut.

Barack Obama, in expert oratorical mode, elaborated: “Some in the Washington press suggest that what happens to gun violence legislation in Congress this week will either be a political victory or defeat for me.” After a long and impressive facial pause, he went on. “Connecticut, this is not about me; it’s not about politics. This is about doing the right thing.…” but he didn’t stop there. He listed the beneficiaries of “gun violence legislation”:

  • “for all the families who are here who have been torn apart by gun violence”;
  • “and all the families going forward … so we can prevent this from happening again”;
  • “it’s about the law enforcement professionals putting their lives at risk.…”

Not about politics? Sounds exactly like politics.

No discussion of the efficacy or practicality of what’s on the line, universal background checks on all gun sales. (Private trades in legal armaments now constitute a “loophole,” you see.)  What evidence is there that universal background checks would have stopped the murderous Adam Lanza — or most such hard-​to-​predict murderers?

The Orator-in-Chief’s earlier emphasis on the ostensible fact of 90 percent American support for this rule is also political. You can bet that the pollsters did not probe very deeply into the nitty gritty of the issue by asking about increases in bureaucracy, paperwork, the regulation of law-​abiding folk.

Or how to get criminals to comply.

None of that.

It is all politics. The feel-​good politics of politicians claiming they are “doing something.”

That is not principle. Not philosophy. And certainly not responsible policy making.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.