Gun Free Zone

Where a Hispanic Catholic, and a Computer Geek write about Gun Rights, Self Defense and whatever else we can think about.

Month: November 2023

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“Stupid Is As Stupid Does,” The Hill

Nov 9, 2023 awa 8 comments
How to curb gun violence: States should ban corporations from selling guns
Federal courts across the country have routinely found that there is no Second Amendment protection for selling arms

The Hill starts by telling use that the Rahimi case is about “red flag” laws. It isn’t. Of all the dumb takes that they could make, this is likely the dumbest. It does have a strong emotional punch, though.

They attempt to blame “skyrocketing” gun deaths on the opinions of the Supreme Court. How dare the highest court in the land uphold the law of the land?

So the Hill proposes a solution. The states should outlaw (restrict) the sale of guns.

They explain the meaning of the three Second Amendment cases they actually know about:

In Heller, the Court found that a handgun ban in D.C. violated an individual right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment. Two years later, the court expanded this rule nationwide by striking down a similar handgun ban in Chicago. Last year in its Bruen decision, the court concluded that concealed carry permits for guns could not be premised on a proper need requirement. What’s the common thread? This court is extremely protective of an individual’s possession of firearms.

How about, the court is extremely protective of the law, of the Constitution? The right they are protecting is the Right of The People to Keep and Bear Arms.

But you see, there is a loophole. “Keeping and bearing” arms is not the same as a right to buy or sell arms. Isn’t they smart! When people told their parents that brothers shouldn’t marry sisters, they didn’t expect smarts like The Hill got from that union.

What can gun reform advocates do with that? We can pass laws to close gun stores in the 17 states where Democrats have unified control. As a candidate for the state Assembly in New York — one of those 17 states — I am proposing a law telling every corporate entity in the state to make a choice: either stop selling guns or stop doing business in our state.

Those entities that refuse to comply would be subject to dissolution or an injunction preventing further business activity in New York. This would essentially close stores that sell guns in our state, since virtually all such stores are corporate entities. That would not eliminate gun violence, but it would help to stem the tide by making it harder to get a gun.

This idiot then suggests that people who want to buy guns just drive over the boarder and buy them in a red state. This person is advocating a felony. You can’t buy a handgun in a different state. Well, you can, but it has to be shipped to a local FFL.

When his uncle and aunt married each other event then, the best part of him ran down his mother’s leg. He seems to think that the —Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393 (Supreme Court 1857) should still be good law. Because of “precedent”.

Regardless, I wish Scott Budow, Democratic candidate for New York State Assembly, District 52 all the respect he deserves.

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“The ATF can’t arrest anyone for owning a pistol-brace-equipped gun.”

Nov 9, 2023 Miguel.GFZ 6 comments

The ATF can’t arrest anyone for owning a pistol-brace-equipped gun.

That’s the outcome of a ruling handed down by United States District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk on Wednesday. He granted a motion to stay enforcement of the agency’s rule banning the possession of effectively all braced guns that weren’t registered earlier this year. He found the ATF exceeded its power when crafting the rule.

“[T]he Court is certainly sympathetic to ATF’s concerns over public safety in the wake of tragic mass shootings. The Rule ’embodies salutary policy goals meant to protect vulnerable people in our society,’” Judge Kacsmaryk wrote in Britto v. ATF. “But public safety concerns must be addressed in ways that are lawful. This Rule is not.”

Federal Judge Blocks Nationwide Enforcement of Pistol-Brace Ban | The Reload

It is a war of attrition and for once, our side is the one causing it.

Two favorable rulings in a row makes me feel slightly confident, but I know better that dance a jig.

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The USS Liberty

Nov 8, 2023 J. Kb 17 comments

In my last post, Chas left this comment:

If you spend any time on Basef Right X, you might see posts like this:

Or maybe this:

https://twitter.com/MiscStuff084/status/1720528545401676159?s=19

 

The USS Liberty incident another antisemitic conspiracy theory that the Based Right latched onto to justify their Jew hatred.

The USS Liberty incident is the most studied friendly fire accident in military history.

On June 8, 1967, right in the middle of the Six Day war, the USS Liberty was on patrol in the Mediterranean, in international waters, off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula.

It was a spy ship. It’s job was to record all the radio transmissions in the area during the Six Day War.

It was in a waterway that had previously been used by the Egyptian Navy and at the time was not flying the US colors.

There was an explosion of munitions on a beach in Israel, and the IDF suspected it had been shelled by the Egyptian Navy.

The Israeli Air Force spotted a ship in range, and misidentified it as an Egyptian vessel and opened fire.

The location of the USS Liberty was radioed to Israeli Navy patrol boats.

There is some debate to if the USS Liberty fired upon the Israelis or if it was ammunition cooking off in a fire, but the patrol boats launched torpedoes, one struck the USS Liberty.

As a result, 34 US sailors were killed and 171 were wounded.

The USS Liberty identified itself, at which point the Israelis called off the attack and immediately offered assistance, which was rejected.

The US Navy, IDF, US Congress, and Knesset all investigated, as well as a number of historians in the private sector.

The US Government released all radio communications prior to and during the attack on a FOIA.

The conclusion by all parties was that the attack on the USS Liberty was an accident caused by confusion in the middle of a war in which Israel was attacked on all sides by seven Arab nations.

The Israeli government paid $3.2 million to the families of the dead sailors, $3.5 million to the wounded sailors, and $13 million to the US Navy for damages to the ship.

It was a friendly fire accident between allied nations during a war and Israel paid restitution.

End of story.

Except for the Jew haters who want to sever ties between the US and Israel.

They claim that the attack was deliberate.

They generally give one of three justifications.

The first is that the Jews hate white Christian America and simple wanted to attack Americans.

This is just naked bigotry and Jew hatred.  It also fails to explain why Israel admitted fault and paid restitution.

The Second is that they wanted to draw America into the war on its side and make it look like an attack by Arab states.

The logic of Antisemites isn’t logic, so they fail to explain how Israel attacking a US ship while flying Israeli colors and speaking Hebrew would trick the Americans into thinking they were attracted by Arabs and join the war on Israel’s side.

The third is the USS Liberty has recorded evidence of an Israeli war crime in Egypt.

Except that supposed war crime didn’t happen and no evidence for it was released with the other radio traffic from the Liberty.

This conspiracy theory usually digresses, when these points are brought up, that the Jews and/or Israel secretly owns or bought off Congress and the Department of Defense and that’s why they say it was an accident and are not telling the truth that it was a deliberate attack.

The Based Right continue to bring this incident up to try and prove the Jews hate the United States and the US should abandon Israel as a friend and ally.

Friendly fire incidents happen.

They are tragic.

In 1966, the US Coast Guard Ship Point Welcome was attacked by US Air Force aircraft, killing two Coast Guard sailors.

In Desert Storm, another fast paced war in the Middle East, 24% of all US casualties were friendly fire.

There were a number of high profile friendly fire incidents in the GWOT.

The US Air Force killed five Green Berets by bombing them.

US Army Ranger and former NFL player Pat Tillman was killed by US troops when an IED was mistaken for enemy mortar fire.

The US has killed allied troops as well.

We dropped JDAMs on both Canadian and British military units in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These incidents are always explained as having occurred during the fog of war.

But the one time an Israeli friendly fire incident against an American ship occurs, it’s the result of malicious action and evidence of the evil of the Jews.

The USS Liberty has entered the Canon of Antisemites and the people who bring it up now do so in bad faith.

 

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The antisemitism of the Based Right

Nov 8, 2023 J. Kb 13 comments

After years of prioritizing diversity, the US Army released a video on X that show exclusively white male soldiers.

The replies were full of comments saying that after years of disrespect from the military, they as white males won’t die for Israel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then there was this:

 

Since Desert Storm, there has been a consistent theme that all the wars the United States has fought in the Middle East are for the benefit of Israel.

This is usually coupled with the conspiracy theory that the Jews, Israel, and/or Zionists secretly control the US Government, and use Americans for cannon fodder in their proxy wars.

The world is melting down because of Biden’s incompetence.

October 7th was a symptom of that.

And when shit gets ugly, for many people, the rush is to blame the Jews.

Iran has been trying to destabilize the region and undermine us since 1979.  Remember that the Iranians attacked American ships and took sailors hostage.

But if we do anything, the Based Right will say it’s a war for Israel.

Based Antisemites to the Right, Woke Antisemites to the Left, and here I am stuck in the middle again.

 

Case Analysis Legal

Rahimi oral arguments, big picture take away

Nov 8, 2023 awa 1 comment

(1100 words)

The very first thing to note is that Mr. Rahimi isn’t actually involved with this case. He was recently interviewed in prison, where he claims to be “reformed”. He says that he will never touch another gun and wishes the case would just go away.

With that out of the way, the takeaway from today’s oral arguments is that everybody is playing on a bigger chessboard than just this case.

§922 is the unlawful acts portion of the Gun Control Act. (I wonder if “gun control” implicates the Second Amendment?)

This case is about §922(g)(8), a person with a restraining order for domestic violence being a prohibited person. According to Mark Smith, only about 21 convictions per year are made on §922(g)(8). This means that this is not an arrow in the quiver of the state. This is a tack they place on the chair of somebody they have already kitted up.

Rahimi was charged with §922(g)(8) because he was a bad man doing bad things and the authorities needed him off the streets now. He is currently in prison for all the other things he did. If this charge were thrown out, it would not change his situation in the least.

It is also important to note that this case was brought back from the dead by the Fifth Circuit court. Just before Bruen was issued, they had found, via means-end, that §922(g)(8) was constitutional, and the charge would stand against Mr. Rahimi.

After Bruen, the Fifth Circuit court brought the case back. On the post Bruen pass through the Circuit Court, they found that §922(g)(8) was unconstitutional. I do not remember if they remanded the case back to the district court. Regardless, we had a circuit court opinion that followed Bruen and found that parts of the GCA were unconstitutional.

At the same time, the Range case is currently seeking certiorari. That case is likely to be taken up by the Supreme Court as well. If the Supreme Court grants certiorari on the Range case, it will mean that there would be three gun rights cases to be heard by the Supreme Court within the next year, maybe even this term.

What this means, is that the Rahimi case is a holding action by the state, DOJ. They would love a win. The facts of Rahimi are bad. Mr. Rahimi was a bad man doing bad things.

Therefore, the briefs and oral arguments today, were about setting the groundwork for the cases to come without losing this case.

What does the state want out of this?

Thank you to Justice Kagan for getting the state to actually say it out loud:

Yes. I think that there are three fundamental errors and methodology that this case exemplifies and that we are seeing repeated in other lower courts and that this case provides an opportunity for the Court to clarify that Bruen should not be interpreted in the way that Respondent is suggesting.

The first error we see is that Respondent has asserted here and other courts have embraced the idea that the only thing that matters under Bruen is regulation. In other words, you can’t look at all of the other sources of history that usually bear on original meaning.

And I don’t think that that can be squared with this Court’s precedents, starting with Heller, which consulted a – a wide variety of historical sources, the same kind of evidence we’ve come forward with here about English practice, state constitutional precursors, treatises, commentary, state judicial decisions. All of that is relevant evidence about the scope of the Second Amendment right, and I think the Court could make clear that it’s not a regulation-only test.

Second, I think that looking just at regulations themselves, one of the fundamental problems with how courts are applying Bruen is the level of generality at which they’re parsing the historical evidence. Court after court has looked at the government’s examples and picked them apart to say: Well, taking them one by one, there’s a minute – minute difference between how this regulation operated in 1791 or the ensuing decades and how Section 922 provisions operate today. And I think that comes very close to requiring us to have a dead ringer when Bruen itself said that’s not necessary.

The way constitutional interpretation usually proceeds is to use history and regulation to identify principles, the enduring principles that define the scope of the Second Amendment right. And so we think that you should make clear the courts should come up a level of generality and not nit-pick the—the historical analogues that we’re offering to that degree.

And, third and finally, I think that in many instances, courts are placing dispositive weight on the absence of regulation in a circumstance where there’s no reason to think that that was due to constitutional concerns.

So, for, example here, we don’t have a regulation disarming domestic abusers. But there is nothing on the other side of the interpretive question in this case to suggest that anyone thought you couldn’t disarm domestic abusers or couldn’t disarm dangerous people. And in that kind of context, I think to suggest that the absence of regulation bears substantially on the meaning of the Second Amendment is to take a wrong turn.

It’s contrary to the situation the Court confronted in Bruen where there was a lot of historical evidence to say states can’t completely prohibit public carry, and against that evidence, you might say that the absence of regulation is significant. But, here, there’s nothing on the other side of this interpretive question, and I think that that just shows that you shouldn’t hold the absence of a direct regulation against us.
— Transcript

There you have it, the state wants to gut Bruen. First, they want the lack of a regulation to indicate that the current regulation is constitutional. This flips the issue on its head. The plaintiff would then have to prove that the lack of regulation was because the people of the founding era knew it was unconstitutional.

Likewise, They are unhappy when the nuanced approach is not accepted, and they have to actually find matching regulations, which don’t exist.

And the big one? They want Second Amendment cases to become expert battles. Instead of courts having to do their jobs, to understand the law (regulations), it will become a “Which expert do I want to pick?”

I intend to read the rest of the transcript later today. Hopefully, I’ll have a more complete write-up on the arguments.

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Losing their minds about The Covenant Manifesto.

Nov 8, 2023 Miguel.GFZ 3 comments

The usual punditry is officially with their capillary secretions in flames because three pages of the Asshole Audrey Hale’s are out there now for the public to see. And the “official experts” once again are pulled out for the obligatory interviews to tell us poor ignoramus folks why is bad to seek the truth.

Hodges has spent years studying the psychology of murderers and serial killers and has seen how attackers can be inspired by predecesors.

According to ABC News reports and law enforcement investigations, the shooter behind the tragedies in Parkland, Sandy Hook, and Virginia Tech looked up to or researched the shooters responsible for the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.

As another example, the person behind the 2019 shooting at a Texas Walmart was inspired by the shooting that killed 51 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, according to the Associated Press.
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“I don’t see any good that can come from it,” Hodges said of the publication of three pages of the shooter’s writings.

However, above all else, Hodges was worried about the impact these writings will have on the family and friends of the six victims of the Covenant School shooting.

“They don’t need to go through this,” he said.

 

Covenant School Shooting: Release of shooter’s ‘manifesto’ raises fears of inspiring copycats (wkrn.com)

 

Two things wrong with these platitudes: People have been killing other people by ones and by many since the dawn of humanity. And the trend kept improving without the need of details because the basic facts are out just with the announcements. If they were truly concerned about avoiding copycats, the first thing they would negate info would be the method and tooling used to kill, right? But guess what is the first thing out the mouths by the Media Folks Who Care So Much? : “ZOMG! EEEEEEVIL BLACK RIFLE DU JOUR! WE MUST BAN!”

The second thing that bothers me is the “How will it affect the families of the victims” wringing of the hands. Really? That the release of papers be as bad or worse as having a child shot is just such a load of manure, it bends the needle in the BS meters.

So why is the opposition? Maybe plain fear that it will stop the grooming of children in its tracks.

Tennessee GOP lawmakers have continued to call for all of the shooter’s documents to be made public.

“The General Assembly has been very specific on this; we want the entire manifesto; we want the toxicology reports; we want to be able to look at the entire picture before we start trying to craft legislation in regards to what happened to covenants, so we can make a well informed decision,” said Tennessee Rep. Scott Cepicky (R- Culleoka).
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“I spoke to many of those parents and understand their pain, that there’s none of us (who) can understand what that is,” he said. “But, I think the more information we can have on this manifesto and the toxicology report of the drugs that this individual was on, the bigger picture and the better picture that would give us when we come back into session in January of how to solve these issues moving forward.”

And I am betting he is not talking about if Asshole Audrey Hale was doing coke or meth or essential oils but those drug combination to transition people into something they are not genetically designed to be. And those results, boys and girls, would go brutally against the government-approve grooming campaign we have been enduring in the last few years.

As usual, it is all politics of the worse kind: The one against The People.