New York's New Gun Laws

New York is preparing legislation to regulate private ownership and possession of firearms following the Supreme Court's decision that invalidated their "may issue" scheme for concealed carry permits. From the sound of it, the new legislation will be even more restrictive than before. So called "sensitive places" that will be off limits for armed citizens are expected to include, "government buildings, parks, mass transit, health and medical facilities, places where children gather, daycare centers, schools, zoos, playgrounds, polling places and educational institutions." In addition, the new law is expected to declare all privately owned businesses as presumptively invoking their owner's property rights to not allow firearms on the premises unless they post a sign clearly stating that armed persons are welcome. In short, it sounds like a concealed carry permit will be good for your car and some public sidewalks. And that's about it. The rest of the state is about to become a "sensitive place." Beyond that there are expected to be significant new requirements for getting a concealed carry permit including a requirement for a heavy-duty insurance policy. (The 2nd amendment equivalent to a poll tax?) Also in the proposed legislation is a requirement for a special license to buy ammunition. It sounds like the state is trying to stick its finger in the eye of the SCOTUS. I am skeptical as to how well that's going to work out. 

Details.

SCOTUS Strikes Down Restrictive New York Gun Law

Private citizens have a constitutional right to carry firearms outside their home for personal protection and states may not refuse permission to do so without good cause. The ruling was 6-3.

Read the decision here.

NRA sues New York attorney general, alleging politically motivated abuse of power

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The National Rifle Association filed a countersuit against New York Attorney General Letitia James, saying she lacks authority to invoke state laws governing nonprofits in her zeal to destroy the gun rights group.

In a Tuesday night court filing, the NRA, which filed for bankruptcy last month, accused James of “weaponizing” her powers to pursuing a “blatant and malicious retaliation campaign” against it because she dislikes what it stands for.

James’ office did not immediately respond on Wednesday to requests for comment.

The attorney general had sued the NRA and Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre last August, saying the nonprofit diverted millions of dollars to fund luxurious trips for officials, no-show contracts for associates, and other questionable expenses.

“James commenced her investigations and this action against the NRA with the sole purpose of seeking to dissolve a political enemy,” the NRA said.

The NRA said the Democrat’s “selective enforcement” of state not-for-profit laws violated its constitutional rights to free speech and equal protection, warranting the lawsuit’s dismissal.

Read the rest here.

9th Circuit ends California ban on high-capacity magazines

 SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday threw out California’s ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines, saying the law violates the U.S. Constitution’s protection of the right to bear firearms.

“Even well-intentioned laws must pass constitutional muster,” appellate Judge Kenneth Lee wrote for the panel’s majority. California’s ban on magazines holding more than 10 bullets “strikes at the core of the Second Amendment — the right to armed self-defense.”

He noted that California passed the law “in the wake of heart-wrenching and highly publicized mass shootings,” but said that isn’t enough to justify a ban whose scope “is so sweeping that half of all magazines in America are now unlawful to own in California.”

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office said it is reviewing the decision.

“Until further proceedings in the courts, the stay on the injunction issued by the district court remains in place,” his office said in a statement. “The Attorney General remains committed to using every tool possible to defend California’s gun safety laws and keep our communities safe.”

Becerra did not immediately say if he would ask a larger 11-judge appellate panel to reconsider the ruling by the three judges, or if he would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

He also did not immediately say if the state would seek a delay of the ruling to prevent an immediate buying spree if the lower court lifts its stay.

 Read the rest here.

Symposium before oral argument in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York

Well worth the reading.

New York gun case to move forward

This morning [yesterday] the Supreme Court issued more orders from last week’s private conference – the first regularly scheduled conference since the end of June. As expected, the justices did not add any more cases to their merits docket for the term, but they did deny review in over 1,000 cases.

One of the most closely watched orders today was the justices’ denial of New York City’s bid to dismiss the challenge to a now-repealed restriction on transporting guns outside city limits. The justices agreed to review the case in January, setting the stage for the Supreme Court’s first ruling on the scope of the Second Amendment in nearly a decade. But in July the city urged the justices to remove the case from their docket, arguing that changes to the city’s rule and to state law rendered the case moot – that is, no longer a live controversy. However, the court went ahead and scheduled the case for oral argument in December, deferring consideration of the city’s motion until last week. Today the justices made clear that the case will move forward: They rejected the city’s request to dismiss the case as moot immediately, instead announcing that the “question of mootness will be subject to further consideration, and the parties should be prepared to discuss it.”

Source.

Kamala Harris Promises To 'Disarm Violent Hate' by Seizing Guns From Bigots

Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), who is seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, says that if elected she will push legislation that would authorize federal courts to issue gun confiscation orders against people who express opinions that may indicate an intent to commit a hate crime. These "domestic terrorism prevention orders" would "temporarily restrict a person's access to guns if they exhibit clear evidence of dangerousness," including "violent racist threats or anti-immigrant manifestos."

Harris' plan to "disarm violent hate" is pretty vague, so it's hard to say whether it would be consistent with the First Amendment. If the bill she imagines would merely create a federal "red flag" law focused on a subset of people deemed a threat to others, that would be bad enough, since these laws generally give short shrift to due process. But her description of the problem she is trying to address suggests that constitutionally protected speech might by itself be enough to suspend someone's Second Amendment rights.

"From El Paso to the Tree of Life Synagogue, and from Poway to Mother Emanuel Church," her campaign website says, "one thing is clear: Guns are the weapon of choice for domestic terrorists and perpetrators of hate crimes….Whether it's violent racist threats or anti-immigrant manifestos, signs of impending violence are often evident before tragedy strikes." While that may be true in retrospect, it does not mean that all racists, nativists, white supremacists, or anti-Semites who express their views online, or even a significant percentage of them, are bent on mass murder.

Read the rest here.

Fearing Supreme Court Loss, New York Tries to Make Gun Case Vanish

WASHINGTON — A couple of weeks ago, the New York Police Department held an unusual public hearing. Its purpose was to make a Supreme Court case disappear.

In January, the court agreed to hear a Second Amendment challenge to a New York City gun regulation. The city, fearing a loss that would endanger gun control laws across the nation, responded by moving to change the regulation. The idea was to make the case moot.

The move required seeking comments from the public, in writing and at the hearing. Gun rights advocates were not happy.

“This law should not be changed,” Hallet Bruestle wrote in a comment submitted before the hearing. “Not because it is a good law; it is blatantly unconstitutional. No, it should not be changed since this is a clear tactic to try to moot the Scotus case that is specifically looking into this law.”

David Enlow made a similar point. “This is a very transparent attempt,” he wrote, “to move the goal post in the recent Supreme Court case.”

The regulation allows residents with so-called premises licenses to take their guns to one of seven shooting ranges in the city. But it prohibits them from taking their guns to second homes and shooting ranges outside the city, even when the guns are unloaded and locked in containers separate from ammunition.

The city’s proposed changes, likely to take effect in a month or so, would remove those restrictions. Whether they would also end the case is another matter.

Until the Supreme Court agreed to hear the dispute, the city had defended the regulation vigorously and successfully, winning in two lower courts. In inviting public comments on the proposed changes, the Police Department said it continued to believe the regulation “furthers an important public-safety interest.”

Read the rest here.

Chutzpah

Chutzpah: (Definition) When one of the most liberal justices in the history of the Supreme Court complains about the Court overturning centuries of established law and precedent to create a hitherto unknown constitutional right by judicial fiat.

Scott Adams on Guns

On average, Democrats (that’s my team*) use guns for shooting the innocent. We call that crime.

On average, Republicans use guns for sporting purposes and self-defense.

If you don’t believe me, you can check the statistics on the Internet that don’t exist. At least I couldn’t find any that looked credible.

But we do know that race and poverty are correlated. And we know that poverty and crime are correlated. And we know that race and political affiliation are correlated. Therefore, my team (Clinton) is more likely to use guns to shoot innocent people, whereas the other team (Trump) is more likely to use guns for sporting and defense.

That’s a gross generalization. Obviously. Your town might be totally different.

So it seems to me that gun control can’t be solved because Democrats are using guns to kill each other – and want it to stop – whereas Republicans are using guns to defend against Democrats. Psychologically, those are different risk profiles. And you can’t reconcile those interests, except on the margins. For example, both sides might agree that rocket launchers are a step too far. But Democrats are unlikely to talk Republicans out of gun ownership because it comes off as “Put down your gun so I can shoot you.”

Read the rest of this pointed, and hilarious post here.

US Court of Appeals Strikes Major Blow for Civil Liberties

In a major victory for gun rights advocates, a federal appeals court on Thursday sided with a broad coalition of gun owners, businesses and organizations that challenged the constitutionality of a Maryland ban on assault weapons and other laws aimed at curbing gun violence.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit said the state's prohibition on what the court called "the vast majority of semi-automatic rifles commonly kept by several million American citizens" amounted to a violation of their rights under the Constitution.

"In our view, Maryland law implicates the core protection of the Second Amendment -- the right of law-abiding responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home," Chief Judge William Traxler wrote in the divided ruling.

Provisions that outlaw these firearms, Traxler wrote, "substantially burden this fundamental right."

Read the rest here.

Guns and Politics

Pondering French gun laws and the terrible "what ifs"

When American audiences read of a dramatic event in a foreign country, they often frame it in terms of the political debates occurring at home. As such, it was no surprise that after shootings at the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris this week, some Americans began to wonder about gun control laws.

"Isn't it interesting that the tragedy in Paris took place in one of the toughest gun control countries in the world?" American reality television star Donald Trump wrote on Twitter shortly after the news broke. The tweet prompted both praise (over a thousand retweets) and scorn (Trump was labelled a "moron" and an "idiot" by other tweeters).

Trump, a perennial attention seeker, was likely attempting to score political points and insult liberals with his tweet. But behind the disingenuity, there is is a genuinely troubling question: Why didn't France's gun laws save the Charlie Hebdo victims?

Read the rest here.

So, would the outcome have been different if this had gone down somewhere a bit more friendly to the right of self-defense? We will never know with any certainty, but let's consider a hypothetical alternative scenario.

Let's move the crime from Paris to San Antonio Texas. Texas, for those who don't pay attention to such things has a pretty libertarian approach to gun ownership. Assuming you are not a convicted felon, you can pretty much own anything that is legally sold in the United States. A concealed carry permit is required if you want to carry a weapon, but again, barring a serious criminal record getting one is mostly just a matter of filing some paperwork and getting fingerprinted.

So would the victims have been armed? Again, we cannot know with any certainty. These were mostly left wing wienies, so maybe not. But even Democrats have been known to pack heat in Texas. And we are talking about people who had been directly, and very credibly threatened. My gut says at least some of the ten targeted victims would have been armed.

Would the presence of one or more armed persons among the victims have changed the outcome? This is HUGELY speculative because there are so many variables. How many would have been armed? What would they be carrying? Remember the bad guys had fully automatic assault weapons and were at least competent in their use. And contrary to rumor those kinds of guns are generally illegal, even in Texas. So the victims would almost certainly have been outgunned. Most likely they would have been carrying sidearms of some kind. And then we have to factor in training. The bad guys had some. Who knows about our victims. And of course the bad guys were fanatics willing, and perhaps even desirous of dying in their twisted cause. So it's unlikely they would have been deterred or frightened off by a few shots fired in their direction. But probably the one factor that would have weighed most against the victims is that the bad guys were wearing at least some level of body armor. That, plus the huge difference in firepower would have tipped the odds severely in favor of the terrorists.

Conclusion: The best that can be said with even a moderate level of confidence is that the bad guys would not have had a walk over. Which is to say that if even one or two of the victims had been carrying something as simple as a .38 revolver, it would have instantly added a degree of danger and complication that the assassins did not have to face in France.

Appeals court: Gun control must meet toughest test

Breaking ranks with other federal appeals courts, and probably setting up a major test case for the Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled that laws imposing controls on the personal right to have a gun must satisfy the most rigorous constitutional test.  And, in another split with other courts, it was the first to strike down a federal gun law under the Constitution’s Second Amendment as expanded by the Supreme Court six years ago.

Since the Justices’ ruling in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller, finding in the Second Amendment a guarantee of a right to have a gun for personal use, at least in some circumstances, federal courts have struggled with how to apply that ruling in specific cases testing specific gun laws.  Before the Sixth Circuit ruled, however, none had declared that gun laws should be judged by a “strict scrutiny” test.

The Sixth Circuit’s decision came on Thursday in the case of Tyler v. Hillsdale County Sheriff’s Department, involving a southern Michigan man, now seventy-three years ago, who was involuntarily sent to a mental institution for only a brief period nearly thirty years ago.  He has long functioned normally in society, and is now considered to be mentally healthy and not dangerous.

Because of the brief stay in that institution, however, he is barred for life from having a gun, under the federal law that the Sixth Circuit has now nullified because it failed the “strict scrutiny” test.  He is not eligible for a special federal-state program that gives some who are barred by law from gun ownership a chance to become eligible to have a gun, because Michigan does not take part in that program, and he cannot get relief under another federal program that Congress has refused to fund.

Read the rest here.

Sacrificing Property Rights on the Altar of Gun Rights

...As a matter of personal preference, I would certainly encourage private companies to allow their employees to bring their firearms to work, and, as a matter of taste, I would prefer it if those who have been discovered violating company policy were treated gently — especially if they were forced to break the rules in self-defense. But, unless one is to wholly rewrite the nature of American constitutional government, these decisions must be reserved to the private sector, and not to local voters or representatives. Like all of the provisions within the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment serves as a check on government and on government alone. It does not apply to Walmart or to FedEx or to Joe’s Highway Diner. When the NRA gripes that some politicians are “heeding corporate concerns” over the predilections of gun owners, what it is really saying is that those politicians are respecting property rights and refusing to get involved where they are not welcome. At what point, one wonders, did that become undesirable to liberty-loving people?

Read the rest here.

DC Gun ban is struck down

D.C. police were told Sunday not to arrest people for carrying handguns on the street in the wake of a judge’s ruling that overturned the city’s principal gun-control law.

However, the D.C. attorney general’s office said it would seek a stay of the ruling while the city decides whether to appeal.

In an order approved by Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier, police were told that District residents are permitted to carry pistols if the weapons are registered. Those who had not registered their handguns could be charged on that ground, the instruction said.

The number of registered pistols is thought to be low.

Lanier’s instructions to police also said that residents of other jurisdictions without felony records would not be charged under the ban on carrying pistols. 

Read the rest here.

Foot, meet gun

So arch-libertarian and gun rights activist Adam Kokesh actually carried out his long standing threat to openly carry a weapon in DC last year. He videotaped himself loading a shotgun in Freedom Plaza and broadcast it, with predictable results. He was arrested and charged with possession of an unregistered firearm with drug possession thrown in for good measure as he had some in the house when the cops came knocking.

Today this sad chapter in idiocy came to a close with Kokesh entering guilty pleas in exchange for a suspended sentence with probation, less time served (about four months in the clink). Of course, he also now has a felony criminal record. So no more guns for Mr. Kokesh... anywhere.

Anathematized for suggesting moderation on guns

This is from the NY Times, so it goes without saying there is an agenda here. But this really does seem like overkill. Metcalf is right on an important point; no right is absolute. That he should be treated this way for stating such an obvious truth is disturbing. Further this does not reflect well on the gun industry. For the record, my position on gun laws remains simple. No one should be allowed to buy or own a gun without passing a criminal background check. Moving beyond that, I have serious doubts about the wisdom or efficacy of 99% of the thousands of laws on the books.

Read the story here.

From here.

Senate Votes Down Background Checks For Guns

As the Senate began voting Wednesday on nine proposed changes to a gun control bill, the centerpiece proposal on background checks quickly failed to win enough support, despite broad public backing.

The vote on the so-called Manchin-Toomey amendment was 54 in favor, 46 against — failing to reach the 60-vote threshold needed to move ahead. Four Republicans supported it, and four Democrats voted no.

A controversial Democratic plan to ban dozens of military-style assault weapons was also defeated by a vote of 40 to 60.

The votes were a setback for President Obama, who angrily blasted Republicans for defeating the background check compromise, saying, “The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill.”

“All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” Obama said, promising that “this effort is not over.”

Read the rest here.