Tag: 2nd Amendment

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crime and punishment Second Amendment rights social media

A Gun with His Name On It

Trump, Glock, self defense, 2nd Amendment

An “X” post by a Trump spokesperson implicated the former president in a crime.

What followed implicates the U.S. Government in something far worse.

But first, to clarify:

  1. By “X” I mean “Twitter.” Remember, Elon Musk changed the name of his social media company.
  2. By “Trump” I mean, of course, Donald John Trump, former president of the United States running the same office, a man surrounded by armed guards at all times.
  3. By “crime” I mean an infraction of federal law, not a willful abuse of someone’s rights at common law. 
  4. The crime in question is the act of receiving “any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce” by a person “under indictment . . . a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.” Trump’s been indicted quite a number of times, recently, and therefore isn’t legally allowed to buy a gun.

The initial tweet said Trump admired a Glock that had his name stamped on it. It was the “Donald Trump edition,” gold-colored, retailing for under a thousand bucks. Trump’s on video saying he wants one of these handguns.

When X went all a-twitter with the implications, spokesman Steven Cheung took down his post and the campaign issued a corrective: “President Trump did not purchase or take possession of the firearm. He simply indicated that he wanted one.” 

This is all explained by Jacob Sullum at Reason, who goes on to indicate that the law makes no real sense. The obvious absurdity of not allowing a well-guarded presidential candidate to guard himself with gun of any kind, that’s one thing. Flouting the Second Amendment by prohibiting the innocent, i.e. not yet proven guilty, from bearing arms, looks far worse — a policy of rights suppression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Corrigendum notice: a correction was made late on the date of publication [Trump is not a “Jr.,” as originally stated].

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Concealed Carry and the Careful Criminal

prison, TLC, 2nd Amendment

Crime is the most basic of problems. But across the political spectrum we see different strategies. 

On the right, the go-to solution has always been to ramp up policing, to make the basic function of the state — crime-fighting — stronger and more effective. 

On the left, a leading idea has been to disarm the populace so people cannot do as much harm, and also to “rehabilitate” troubled folks with government TLC.

I grew up in the ’70s, when the failures of benevolent leftism (which we called “liberalism”) were becoming clear. So there was a reaction: Lock more people up.

That reaction fizzled in recent years, and, perhaps not wholly coincidentally, crime on a city-by-city case, as well as nationally, has increased. 

Nevertheless, during this period another policy has gained a huge momentum: instead of disarming the populace, arm them!

How’s that going? The most recent case study is in Maine, which in 2015 allowed permit-less concealed carry of firearms.

“While rates of violent crime increased nationally from 2015 to 2020,” writes Steve Robinson in “Maine Crime Fell Following 2015 Repeal of Gun Control Law” (MaineWire, December 29, 2022), “the rate of violent crime in Maine fell steadily beginning in 2015, after a slight increase from 2014 to 2015, according to data collected by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program.”

Robinson notes that while the Maine experience doesn’t prove that “an armed society is a polite society,” it falsifies, quite clearly, the catastrophic predictions made by gun control advocates back in 2015.

I hazard it does much more. It shows that distributed power (in this case, firepower and defensive capacity) in the peaceful population is a separate, non-left/non-right solution to the age-old problem of crime.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom Second Amendment rights too much government

The Gun-Toting Ruling Class

elites

How to tell if you are part of the favored ruling class? If it is easy for you, but not most others, to obtain a concealed carry permit in your gun-controlling state.

It’s extremely difficult to carry firearms for protection in states like Illinois, California, New Jersey and New York — except for certain Very Special Persons — rich enough or connected enough for special treatment.

Thankfully, the judicial system — which has the benefit of various guiding principles from a long-gone time when the rulers wore red coats — is disallowing some of the nonsense.

Still, it’s a struggle to “de-class-ify” Second Amendment rights — that is, take gun rights from being a class issue favoring the rich and famous and allowing all peaceful citizens legal access to firearms.

“Two weeks ago, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against many of the restrictions on public possession of guns that New York imposed after the Supreme Court upheld the right to bear arms last June,” writes Jacob Sullum in Reason. “Unfazed by that warning, New Jersey legislators this week advanced a strikingly similar bill that includes a subjective standard for issuing carry permits and sweeping, location-specific restrictions that make it legally perilous even for permit holders to leave home with guns.”

Politicians in these blue states remain resolute: they aim to unconstitutionally restrict access to guns. They strongly resist the current individualistic (as opposed to class-based) trend in judicial interpretation of the Second Amendment. 

Their idea seems to be: guns for us, but not for them.

And we’re the Them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The Indicted Have Gun Rights

self defense, gun rights, gun control, 2nd Amendment

The idea that those who are indicted for a serious crime may not buy a gun, is, I think, what many in America might think of as “common sense gun control.”

But it isn’t, for it rubs against the grain of the American legal tradition.

The pseudo-commonsense view appears nonsensical when boldly defended by the U.S. attorney’s office, which, The Texas Tribune informs us, argued that a “law to prohibit those under felony indictment from obtaining guns does not interfere with the Second Amendment ‘because it does not disarm felony indictees who already had guns and does not prohibit possession or public carry.’”

That argument boils down to this: if you retain some relevant gun rights, others may be taken away. 

Compare it to free speech: if the government allows you to talk freely with your family, its regulation of your conversations with neighbors is hunky-dory!

“The Second Amendment has always allowed laws restricting the gun rights of groups viewed by legislatures as posing a public-safety risk,” the prosecution elucidated, “including those accused but not convicted of wrongdoing.”

But U.S. District Judge David Counts, introduced in every account of this I’ve read so far as “appointed by former President Donald Trump” — so that must be important, eh? — denies this. He found no historical precedent for disallowing the accused and indicted from buying firearms.

Therefore, based on the recent Supreme Court decision,* Judge Countssays the government has no case. It’s still innocent until proven guilty.

That is, governments may not “take away” our rights until convicted of a specific crime, punishment for which is loss of liberty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* That U.S. Supreme Court case is New York State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Bruen.

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Gun Grabbing G-Men

red flag, gun control, 2nd Amendment, FBI

The FBI itches to take away your guns.

Or at least some people’s guns. That’s what recent revelations indicate, anyway.

What happened is that FBI agents got at least 15 people — it could be many more — to sign away their rights to obtain and possess firearms. Specifically, we read at The Epoch Times, “FBI officials had Americans fill out a form that said they want the FBI to make it illegal for them to purchase or own guns forever because of a mental health condition.”

Yes, it’s a strange case. 

“We’ve learned the FBI had no business disarming these individuals. They did not pose a threat to society. The FBI actions were wholly unlawful,” explained Aidan Johnston, president of a national firearms rights group, Gun Owners of America. GOA demands that “the FBI remove the records from the background check database by Oct. 8 and that Congress enforce the removals.”

This is all about Red Flag laws and similar legislation, such as the “federal law [prohibiting] shipping, transporting, receiving, or possessing any firearm or ammunition” by anyone who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective” or “committed to a mental institution.” But these people were not adjudicated on any status like that. Somehow the FBI pressured them to “give up their rights” — which technically cannot be done. 

But can be, in practice.

I said it was a strange case. Senator Rand Paul (Ky-R) highlighted the strangeness on Fox News, noting the legal puzzle of “how someone that’s mentally incompetent to own a gun could be competent to sign away their gun rights.”

More reasons to distrust the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Cannabis and Carry

guns, gun control, marijuana

The Biden Administration wants to make sure that marijuana users do not own guns. 

Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Nikki Fried, a Democrat, is not with the administration on this matter. Her department oversees concealed carry permits as well as some cannabis regulation, and she “argues that prohibiting all cannabis consumers from owning guns violates the Second Amendment” as well as violating “a congressional spending rider, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment, that bars the Justice Department from interfering with the implementation of state medical marijuana laws,” explains Jacob Sullum for Reason magazine. Fried has sued the federal government to allow Florida to grant concealed carry permits to marijuana users — something the federal government disallows.

The Justice Department has now asked the courts to dismiss the case.

This is especially rich, since President Biden himself has been on the liberal side of marijuana regulation — though certainly not with guns, where he’s on the tyrants’ side.

Among many inconsistencies, current law does not prohibit people addicted to legal psychoactive drugs from owning guns, as Sullum notes, nor make a big deal about alcohol, the abuse of which has a well-understood linkage with violence, while marijuana does not.

One could go through all the inanities, here, but we should not assume government makes sense on these issues. The federal government should generally not be in the business of regulating either gun ownership or drug usage.

States that recognize “constitutional carry” show how Florida could advance beyond the current mess of too much government interference in this realm. 

It wouldn’t be an issue were Florida to get out of the concealed carry permit racket.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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