Almost 30 years ago (I think it was the summer of 1996) Alan Gottlieb invited me to bring my family to dinner at his place with his family. It was a very special evening. Our kids were near the same age has his and I learned a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff from Alan and Julianne. One of the things that stuck with me was that Alan’s college major was nuclear engineering.

He told me of the history of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and the Second Amendment Foundation. Also, it was a member of the Microsoft Gun Club (now, The Gun Club at Microsoft) who registered the domain names saf.org and ccrkba.org before most people knew the Internet existed. He gave the domain to Alan’s organizations when it was time to bring their message to the web.

Now, today, the Second Amendment Foundation is 50 years old.

SAF CELEBRATES 50th ANNIVERSARY – Second Amendment Foundation

Today, Monday, Aug. 26, marks 50 years of the Second Amendment Foundation’s (SAF) unwavering commitment to defend, secure and restore the Second Amendment rights vital to the defense of liberty.

From a landmark victory at the United States Supreme Court to triumphs in state courthouses, SAF has scored numerous successes in the past half century, including the all-too-important McDonald v. City of Chicago decision handed down by the Supreme Court in 2010. SAF’s win in McDonald has been critical to the fight against modern gun control, as it paved the way for legal action against states and municipalities for violations of the Second Amendment.

“The goal when I created SAF was to get a case all the way to the Supreme Court,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “We did that in 2010, and that momentum hasn’t stopped. SAF has been part of more than 260 lawsuits since our founding and we currently have more than 55 active cases across the nation. This includes one case – Garland v. Vanderstok – that will be argued before the Supreme Court in October.”  

Although SAF has won numerous critical pro-Second Amendment cases since 1974, the organization has shown no signs of slowing down. In fact, in 2022 SAF brought on board a new Executive Director – practicing attorney Adam Kraut – to lead the organization into the next half-century.  

“When Alan started SAF 50 years ago, he laid out a comprehensive vision to fight for our right to keep and bear arms,” Kraut said. “Over time, he and those who joined him built a solid organizational foundation that was effective in winning where it matters. I think we continued to build on that foundation and have a tremendous team to lead the organization into the next 50 years. I’m looking forward to the challenge of continuing to build on the work Alan started.”

Over the past 50 years, SAF has been at the forefront of numerous legal battles, challenging unconstitutional firearms regulations such as “assault weapon” bans, magazine capacity bans, young adult carry laws, “sensitive places” restrictions, red flag laws, prohibited person and many, many more. Through aggressive, strategic litigation, SAF has successfully challenged restrictive gun laws across the nation, dismantling barriers that impede the right to keep and bear arms for all Americans.

We are on a path to concealed carry any state we want to visit:

Federal Judge Grants Preliminary Injunction In Challenge To California’s Non-Resident Concealed Carry Ban (msn.com)

A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and its partners, challenging California’s prohibition on non-resident concealed carry permits. U.S. District Court Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett, appointed by President Joe Biden in 2022, partially granted the motion for preliminary injunction, setting the stage for further legal proceedings.

Even a Biden appointed judge admits we have the constitution on our side!

See also SAF SCORES VICTORY IN CALIFORNIA NON-RESIDENT CARRY CASE.

We are making progress… one lawsuit at a time.

Meme idea via MTHead. Image from here.

Never mind the AI gave us a poor excuse for a gun image and granny with five fingers on her right hand.

Quote of the Day

In what may be the most poorly conceived and horribly researched study ever published by The Journal of the American Medical Association during its entire 141-year history, a trio of anti-gun researchers now claims deer hunting is associated with a substantial increase in firearm violence.

To arrive at their laughable conclusion, the authors used data from the infamous Gun Violence Archive, which has been debunked dozens of times and is well known for its shoddy research and biased statistics.

Even the authors admitted there were problems with the GVA data. “Our study relies on shooting data from a single source, the GVA. Data from GVA have been shown to have a bias toward incidents that receive more media attention and do not include comprehensive counts of firearm suicides,” the report states.

Despite these inherent biases, the researchers used the GVA data anyway. They didn’t allow the facts to interfere with their preconceived and biased narrative.

Lee Williams
August 14, 2024
Deer hunting causes gun violence, researchers claim | Armed American News

Of course they didn’t allow facts to interfere with their narrative. This has been the culture of anti-gun people for decades. Perhaps forever.

This just amazes me. I thought justice was supposed to be “speedy”.

Historic Gun Suit Survives Serious Legal Threat Engineered by Indiana Republicans

Republicans in Indiana’s legislature passed a bill this year intended as the final blow to a long-running lawsuit filed by the city of Gary against gun manufacturers seeking to hold them accountable for local illegal gun sales.

The lawmakers even included language making the bill retroactive to ensure that it would apply to the Gary suit, which was filed nearly a quarter century ago.

On Monday, that effort failed.

Indiana Superior Court Judge John Sedia ruled that while the law barring cities from pursuing lawsuits against the gun industry is constitutional, applying it retroactively would “violate years of vested rights and constitutional guarantees.” It was a rare courtroom setback for makers of firearms in the U.S.

Gary’s case is the last of a generation of civil suits that made similar claims against the gun industry. Attorneys for gun manufacturers and retailers filed for the case to be dismissed based on the new Indiana law, which placed the power to sue solely with the state’s attorney general.

The bill’s backers made no secret that the Gary case was the bill’s target. It included language to make it retroactive to Aug. 27, 1999 — three days before the city filed its lawsuit. But that decision appears to have doomed the industry’s challenge.

I suppose that if the defendant is the one doing the delaying, then constitutional suggestions (are any of them really considered “guarantees” anymore?) may not be considered all that important.

Via email from Rolf:

Footnote 2 on page 87:

This unorthodox procedural posture bears some explanation. After hearing the case in December 2022, the initial panel majority reached a decision and promptly circulated a draft opinion. Yet for more than a year, no dissent was circulated. The panel thus held the proposed opinion in accordance with our custom that majority and dissenting opinions be published together. A year later—as the proposed opinion sat idle—a different panel heard arguments in United States v. Price (No. 22-4609), which also involved interpreting and applying Bruen. The Price panel quickly circulated a unanimous opinion that reached a conclusion at odds with the Bianchi majority’s year-old proposed opinion. Facing two competing proposed published opinions, the Court declined to let the earlier circulated opinion control. Rather, in January 2024, we “invoked the once-extraordinary mechanism of initial-en-banc review.” Mayor of Balt. v. Azar, 799 F. App’x 193, 195–96 (4th Cir. 2020) (Richardson, J., dissenting). I hope that we will not find ourselves in this posture again soon. Cf. United States v. Gibbs, 905 F.3d 768, 770 (4th Cir. 2018) (Wynn, J., voting separately) (suggesting that majority opinions may be issued without awaiting dissenting opinions to prohibit those dissenting opinions from exercising a “pocket veto” to “deny or delay fairness and justice”).

The one judge on a three-judge panel who is hostile to the 2^nd Amendment deliberately did not release her dissent for over a year in order to create a ‘pocket veto’ long enough for an anti-2^nd Amendment opinion from a different three-judge panel to create a conflict and prevent the first case from establishing a precedent.

I hope those judges enjoy their trials.