Tag: guns

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Accountability Second Amendment rights

Accidentally on Purpose?

Sacramento, California, guns, permits, privacy

“Just an accident?” 

Maybe. 

But the “accidental” release of the private information of thousands of California gun owners is just the sort of thing that many foes of Second Amendment rights would happily perpetrate.

So we can be forgiven if we harbor doubts.

On June 27, the California Justice Department’s 2022 Firearms Dashboard Portal went live. The publicly accessible files included private details — names, dates of birth, and home addresses — about persons who had applied for concealed carry permits between 2011 and 2022. More than enough information to cause trouble.

The info was removed the next day. Attorney General Rob Bonta said that his office would investigate. 

The California Rifle & Pistol Association is threatening to sue.

If the leak was deliberate, maybe the AG was not responsible even indirectly. Maybe the culprit was some anonymous clerk, akin in spirit to the clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court who leaked Dobbs.

If the leak was a pure accident, though, the degree of carelessness strains credulity. This wasn’t a hack of data that had been poorly encrypted in keeping with modern traditions of lackadaisical security. The data was out in the open for all to see.

But, sure, maybe the exposure was unintentional. Maybe what happened was just some tech guy not knowing what he was doing. And every tester of the system also screwing up. Etc.

Such blunders are not unknown. Government workers have bungled bigly before, serially and in parallel. There are precedents. Yes.

So maybe.

But if government cannot reliably keep private information confidential, then maybe it should not require the logging of such information in the first place. Maybe “concealed carry” should be a right, not a licensed privilege.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom local leaders nannyism

The Next-​Worst Thing

New York City, big apple, mayor, censorship

New Yorkers can breathe easier now — they’re finally rid of the repellent Mayor Bill de Blasio.

But — uh oh — the new mayor, Eric Adams, may be another worm to keep that bitter taste dominant in the Big Apple.

Mayor Adams dislikes guns and violence, so he wants social media to censor rap videos that display and glorify guns. It’s unclear whether he also wants social media to censor links to westerns and Matrix movies and lots of other movies and media in which guns to fight bad guys or bad algorithms are approvingly deployed.

“You have a civic and corporate responsibility,” Adams intones, enjoining social media firms to expand their list of banned things.

“We [we?] pulled Trump off Twitter because of what he was spewing. Yet we are allowing music displaying of guns, violence. We allow this to stay on the sites.”

 “Stagecoach” and a rap video proposing that one “[expletive deleted] that [expletive deleted]” may have little in common in the categories of values and sensibilities. But if violence is “glorified” in both, well, that’s bad. Right?

Adams is a government official. A “public servant.” And a functionary in such a position cannot make solemn, well-​publicized declarations about what companies should censor without thereby seeking to enlist them — deputize them, you might say — as agents of government censorship.

He is not sending police to the offices of Twitter and Facebook and ordering them to ban rap-​video tweets or else. But he’s doing the next-​worst thing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Second Amendment rights

The Right to Bear Toy Guns

toy guns

Elizaveta Zlatkis could be jailed for up to a quarter century. 

What heinous crime has she committed? Prepare yourself: she kept a stash of guns in her home.

Well, toy guns … used as props. 

Not real armaments, pretend armaments.

New York City police confiscated 21 starter pistols and toy replicas that, according to the NYPD’s own lab reports, cannot fire bullets. And “one actual firearm” that the police acknowledge “was rendered ‘inoperable’ because the trigger, hand grip and internal components were all missing.” 

“We do videos with them as props,” attests a rapper named Crucial. 

“That’s wild,” he says of the prosecution. “They’re fake.”

NYPD cops acted on a tip — standard prelude to many a dastardly home invasion by putative officers of the law — in raiding her home in December 2019.

It’s been a nightmare for Ms. Zlatkis ever since.

She thinks she’s innocent, refusing a plea deal. Meanwhile, the prosecuting attorney, Melinda Katz, won’t drop the charges. 

What’s next? Raids of toy stores and movie studio warehouses?

BearingArms​.com stresses one aspect of the lunacy: Zlatkis is facing decades behind bars for heaping toy guns while thugs arrested “for actually shooting someone are quickly returning to the streets.”

The guns are fake, and the charges too — if only this story were fake! Unfortunately, it is the believable kind of unbelievable. In the increasingly creedal crusade against guns, the kookier, more cultish element appears to dominate.

The DA and everyone else pursuing this case after the guns had been examined are the ones who should face charges for hounding this woman — not that exercising the right to keep and bear fully functional arms should be a life-​destroying offense, either.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people Second Amendment rights

Self-​Defense Is for Everybody

Virginia, guns, 2nd Amendment, race,

Last week, Virginia’s infamous black-​face governor claimed to possess “credible intelligence … of threats of violence surrounding” Monday’s “Lobby Day” gun rights rally in Richmond, including “extremist rhetoric similar to … Charlottesville in 2017.” 

Major media outlets went on a rampage, repeating his linkage between gun rights supporters and “white nationalists” faster than semi-​automatic fire.

“Big media and mainstream media be damned,” announced a Virginia man recorded at yesterday’s event, and tweeted by social media entrepreneur Michael Coudrey. 

The unidentified but obviously black demonstrator jested, at first, that he was “out here because I got roped into it by the group of guys you see standing to my right.” But then he explained his opposition to “Governor Northam and the Democrats’ gun control” as well as “every news piece you’ve seen on this this weekend.…”

He objected especially to the incessant race angle — “as if it’s nothing but white rednecks and hillbillies out here who care for the Second Amendment. I work at a gun store part-​time and I can’t tell you the number of customers I see of all races, all colors, all creeds who care about the Second Amendment.”

His account was corroborated by Julio Rosas, a senior writer at Townhall​.com, who tweeted “pictures of people carrying rifles at the #VirginiaRally and more evidence that debunks the narrative that the rally is filled with racists and white supremacists.”

Yesterday, more than 22,000 pro-​gun people of all races descended on the capitol in a completely peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights in defense of Second Amendment rights … making Richmond the safest city in America. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

NOTE: There was only one arrest at the rally, a woman charged with violating a 1950-​era law against wearing face masks (like Hong Kong’s law). Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-​Cortez (D‑NY) voiced her displeasure that there weren’t more arrests.

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Virginia, guns, 2nd Amendment, race,

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Second Amendment rights

Poked, Stoked and Woke

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam

“Let’s have an honest conversation based on fact,” Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam chided in his annual State of the Commonwealth speech before assembled legislators last week. 

“Not fear.”

Last year, fear was more popular. In the frightful aftermath of a Virginia Beach city employee shooting and killing 12 co-​workers, Northam was quick to call a special session of the legislature to pass gun control legislation. 

Republicans said no, however, and adjourned.

With Democrats newly in control of both chambers of the state legislature, the governor now runs interference for “a package of eight gun-​restricting measures, including universal background checks; banning assault-​style weapons; requiring owners to report lost or stolen guns; and a ‘red flag law’” — along with raising the legal age to purchase a gun from 18 to 21. 

“When the General Assembly passes new guns safety laws,” proclaims Attorney General Mark Herring, a Democrat, “they will be enforced, and they will be followed.”

In response, Virginia’s many Second Amendment defenders are stepping up. Already, more than 110 cities and counties have declared their status as Second Amendment sanctuaries.

“These resolutions have no legal force,” informs the AG, adding, “and they’re just part of an effort by the gun lobby to stoke fear.”

Oh, yes, unmistakable stoking has occurred. On January 20, the Virginia Citizens Defense League is organizing a massive lobby day at the capital, where the stoked will politically poke their delegates.

Join us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* You may recall Northam as that fellow whose personal medical school yearbook page contained a photo of a man in black-​face next to someone donning a KKK robe. First, the governor apologized, then reversed course, claiming he had no idea how the picture mysteriously materialized into the yearbook — though he acknowledged other instances of wearing black-​face in the past. A limited investigation by a law firm hired by the medical school came to no conclusion and the media seemed to move on.

** Herring apologized for his own blackface past.

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Virginia Governor Ralph Northam

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Categories
Popular Second Amendment rights Tenth Amendment federalism

Assault on Second Amendment Ricochets

guns, 2nd Amendment, Virginia, Washington, gun rights,

Were gun owners expected to roll over and play dead?

After the November 2019 election, Democrats took over the Virginia statehouse. A slew of gun-​control bills were soon in the works, including proposals for expanded background checks, a ban on “assault” weapons, limits on magazine capacity, and seizure of legally owned guns if the owner should be deemed “dangerous.”

Defenders of the right to keep and bear arms expect that the precedents lawmakers are working to establish would soon be expanded. And not without reason. After all, many advocates of gun control regard all private ownership of guns as “dangerous.”

In response, more than 100 Virginia counties have passed resolutions declaring themselves Second Amendment Sanctuaries, with many sheriffs voicing their support. In response to the response, the gun grabbers pledge to call in the National Guard if law enforcers don’t grab guns on command. 

The state’s attorney general has declared the Second Amendment resolutions null and void.

This sanctuary movement began before November’s election. Indeed, it began elsewhere.

Last January, I wrote about sheriffs in 25 out of Washington State’s 39 counties that have pledged not to enforce a citizen-​passed gun control measure while it is being challenged in court. David Campbell, on the board of Effingham County in Illinois, reports that his county was among the first in the country to pass a Second Amendment Sanctuary resolution — in April 2018. Seventy Illinois counties have also passed such resolutions. Kentucky counties are following suit. Locales in Colorado, Oregon, and New Mexico are also on board.

Something has started.

As with state nullification of federal marijuana laws, the story isn’t over: a major  constitutional conflict approaches.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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guns, 2nd Amendment, Virginia, Washington, gun rights,

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