Trump defeated Harris handily and pro-gun senatorial candidates secured a GOP Senate majority and the House is poised to remain in GOP control. This trifecta provides an opportunity to secure pro-Second Amendment legislation that has heretofore eluded both the White House and Congress.
Such legislation includes national reciprocity for concealed carry, which Trump supports, and a hearing protection act, which would remove suppressors from NFA (1934) oversight and regulation.
The previous Trump administration was on the cusp of securing a hearing protection act in 2017, but it was torpedoed by then-Speaker Paul Ryan (R) following the October 1, 2017, Las Vegas attack. Although Yahoo News reported that Ryan tabled the act “indefinitely,” Trump and the GOP-led Congress can pursue suppressor deregulation anew.
We should try for this. Even if we only move the Overton Window a bit, it will make future actions easier. Future action options include court rulings and reintroducing the bills in the next legislative session.
The NFA never should have been enacted but we are (unfortunately) stuck with it for now. In my view, the proper way to attack in the courts the NFA is incrementally, i.e., one case at a time. As I see it, we need SCOTUS victories on AR bans and Mag bans first. Then attack the NFA by arguing “suppressors” and perhaps “short barrel rifles” are protected arms and, of course, look to attack the NFA via going after the Hughes Amendment as per the Rybar dissent in the Third Circuit by then-judge Alito. We have several 2A issues to clean up first before I think we can launch a serious legal assault on the NFA. That’s just the political and legal reality today.
As to my views, I unfortunately do not possess the power to waive a magic wand and eliminate unconstitutional and and/or stupid gun control laws. So, I have to work within our constitutional system, which is not perfect but it certainly beats all the other political systems out there.
Yes, this was posted a year ago. I’m trying to clean up my queue.
If you follow Smith’s YouTube channel (164 K subscribers), you will find his predictions about SCOTUS. He predicts they will take the semi-automatic ban case out of Maryland this term. That would likely mean “assault weapons” and normal capacity magazine bans in all states would be “dead men walking” by next summer:
With that out of the way the NFA would soon see front line action in the courts.
WHAT THIS MEANS: No matter which state you’re in, if you’ve got your concealed carry license, each state will still have to honor it – for example, you have a Florida concealed carry permit – California would have to… pic.twitter.com/GwFYgwOmfx
— Frank Fighting For Freedom 🇺🇸 (@thinktankfranks) November 10, 2024
But words are cheap. It will take a lot to get it through the legislative process. The problem is that if it becomes law then the politicians just lost something to promise during the next election cycle.
This is devastating. The gun safety movement has faced countless setbacks but when it comes to the number one killer of kids, nothing will stand in our way. Make no mistake: Trump’s extremist agenda is a danger for our nation, but it means we’ll double down on our efforts to protect our communities and continue to make progress, just like we did in 2016. The momentum of the gun safety movement can’t be stopped. Gun violence isn’t a left or right issue, it’s a life-or-death issue. We can and will overcome this—together.
Republicans are the party of emotional, knee-jerk responses. They don’t care about facts, truth, or their fellow Americans. They are emotional children and incapable of empathy.
Just a FYI. This may help you understand how her mind works. I don’t know for certain, but this is the only way I can make sense of it. The original definition of a fascist was:
Fascism The principles or methods of the Fascisti—Fascist, I. A member of the Fascisti. II. Of or pertaining to the Fascisti.
Fascisti … The members of a patriotic society in Italy, animated by a strong national spirit, and organized in connection with a repressive movement directed against the socialists and communists and the disturbances excited by them during 1919 and the years following, which regarded the government as criminally negligent in failing to deal with these disturbances, and took measure on its own account, often violent ones, to combat them, and which developed into a powerful party obtaining political control of the country in Oct., 1922, under its founder and leader, Benito Mussolini, as prime minister; hence, the members of a similar society or party elsewhere.
If you want to loosen up the definition a little you would conclude the following. If you are opposed to socialism and/or communism you are a fascist. Nazis Germany was opposed to Soviet socialism (worldwide socialism, versus national socialism). Both sides were competing for, essentially, the same mind share. Nazis were allied with Italy and shared the common political alignment with fascism.
Hence, her twisted mind can conclude that since you are opposed to socialism/communism you are a fascist Nazi.
Who would have guessed lying about Biden’s cognitive health for 2 yrs, refusing to do an open convention for a new nominee, never mentioning public healthcare & embracing fracking, the Cheneys & a yr long slaughter of children in Gaza wouldn’t be a winning strategy?
Anyone with half a brain? But I thought liberals’ whole thing is being smart? It’s not? They actually just blindly cheer the parade of rickety optics wrapped up in New York Times fonts that is the modern Dem Party?
Well at least it’s time for the dusty hacks & careerists to spread their feathers wide post election and blame Russia and third party candidates. That should fix things.
This was a large donor to the Democrat party. I find this guy most interesting. His take on things, at best half right, at least puts the blame on Harris and the Democrat party.
I find it very telling that all the other whining I see on the web about Harris’s loss is based on introspection. It does not include asking republicans why they voted the way they did. And, one would think, they should especially be asking people who usually vote for democrats why they voted for Trump in this election.
I see, again and again, insistence the voters are sexist, racist, white nationalist, and/or fascist. Nevermind that black men, and all Latinos voted for Trump in greater numbers than in 2020. And in some counties a larger fraction of blacks voted Republican this year than they have since the 1870s! Nevermind these evil voters wouldn’t be pushing lawsuits through the courts that make it easier for individuals own guns and training them on how to defend themselves from the likes of the KKK, men who women, and a fascist government.
Their mindset is it always someone else’s fault. The problem is not they are trying to sell an inferior product. The problem is the people are too stupid and/or evil to buy it. In an individual, this sort of reasoning is a strong indicator of mental illness. It can be argued it means the same thing in a group.
While it’s not always possible to evade government mandates, registering your guns just puts them on a shopping list for sticky-fingered officials. That’s true of registering anything that you value and that powerful people might fear or covet.
Even more concerning, though, is the prospect of governments in supposedly free societies conducting intelligence operations against their people and punishing those who hold disapproved ideas. That’s a great argument for getting rid of the need for government permission to go about our lives. Politicians will never approve of those who disagree with them, but we shouldn’t need their approval.
Way back when I started getting into guns, I thought everyone was in agreement that free speech was a good thing. While considered extremely bad form, it was legal for Nazis to have a peaceful march through Jewish neighborhoods. As near as I can recall, 30 years ago there wasn’t any real consequences to not believing the 16th Amendment was properly ratified, or that the moon landings were faked.
That is not the case anymore. New York passed a law (recently thrown out by the courts) requiring people to hand over your social media accounts to the government before you can get a concealed carry license. People have lost their jobs at Facebook for donating a couple thousand dollars to President Trump’s campaign. Others have lost their jobs for saying men, in general, were better at certain things and women were better at other things.
There currently is a deliberate chilling effect on the exercise of fundamental rights. There is some push back, as in the repeal of the New York law, but it is going to take a lot more time and resources to restore the free exercise of our rights to where they should be.
If “extremists” use objective facts, state and federal law, lower court rulings, the Constitution, and Supreme Court decisions; what is a good, succinct term for folks like Terrence Cummings who actively reject all that, and prefer falsehoods and feelz?
In other words the entire event despite its marathon length and hodgepodge of z-list speakers, delivered over and over again a very focused message. The Trump campaign is about retribution and revenge. It is about the white supremacist desire to purge America of all their neighbors of different colors and beliefs. It is about Trump’s desire to seek out his enemies and punish them. And over the course of its Wagnerian length (and resonances) it single out group after group that would be deported or punished.
From a political perspective the strategy is pure suicide. The rally will almost certainly alienate more voters who might have voted for Trump and it is hard to imagine it has earned him one single new vote. (Unless there is a Franz Liebkind somewhere who has been too busy writing “Springtime for Hitler” to have paid attention to the campaign until now.) It was a play to the base when the biggest problem Trump has in this election is breaking through his rock solid ceiling of around 47 percent of the electorate.
Standout details from the complaint include an RV stash and an attempted “boating accident.” Turns out ATF just sends a dive team, by the way. Freeman continued the Gravedigging tradition by asking his friends to unknowingly hold his hottest products and, unsurprisingly, this backwoods network collapsed the first time a lawman made a phone call.
There are multiple lessons to be learned here. Here are the two most obvious to me:
Don’t have your “boating accident” underneath a bridge in diveable waters.*
Three people can keep a secret… if two of them are dead.
* If I recall correctly, in the book Breaking Blue (spoiler alert) a gun was disposed of in the Spokane River Falls. The river was diverted, incidental to gun retrieval, and the gun was recovered during the diversion.
In the classical use of a “boating accident” one should claim the accident occurred “somewhere” in a large and deep body of water, such as “somewhere in the Pacific Ocean”. This would reduce the risk of the ATF “sending a dive team” to demonstrate you lied to them. But Lake Michigan (22,405 square miles and 928 feet deep) or Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho (148 square miles and 1,158 feet deep) would be beyond the practical capabilities of almost all dive teams. Keep in mind the U.S. Navy does conduct acoustic underwater submarine research in Lake Pend Oreille and may have capabilities beyond what one might expect.
Massachusetts law prohibits the issuance of a firearms license before the State Police complete a background check based on an applicant’s fingerprints. For individuals residing in Boston, after an application is submitted to the Boston Police Department, the Department’s Licensing Unit makes them wait for many month before they are provided with an appointment to have their fingerprints taken. It is currently estimated the wait time is more than six (6) months for an appointment.
Prior to this litigation, the Licensing Unit engaged in a practice that made individuals seeking licenses wait for months on a “wait list” to merely submit their applications – a practice that was abandoned in response to litigation from some of the Plaintiffs in this case. The Boston Police Department has seemingly traded one mechanism to effectuate lengthy delays with another, all in an effort to prevent peaceable Bostonians from obtaining firearms.
This is yet another important victory for Second Amendment rights and another major loss for New York, authoritarian governments, and radical anti-rights organizations like Everytown and Gifford.
We will continue to fight forward as we work to restore the full scope of the right to keep and bear arms throughout the United States. Hopefully Kathy Hochul is ready to write another check for legal fees.
Ignore the two references to “open carry” in the article. That was just the author demonstrating their ignorance. It was all about concealed carry in stores, parking lots, and other private property generally open to the public.
The state of New York made it law saying the default situation was that bearing arms on private property is prohibited unless you were given permission by the owner. This is sometimes called a “vampire law”. The judge ruled that the default has to be you are allowed to carry unless you are given notice otherwise.
This victory was at the district court level. It is possible the appeals court will see things differently and SCOTUS will have to slap them down again.
The FPC does a lot of good work, and I donate money to them each month with matching funds from my employer.
You can also follow them on X to get a sense of what they are up to and how things are going. They also tend to be very entertaining.
This hotline is nothing more than a page out of the Stasi playbook – encouraging children to spy on their own families. This is a dangerous step toward weaponizing children in households for the left, and an outrageous government overreach under the guise of public safety.
The dangers of werewolves and socialists make the ready access of information and guns critical to our survival. And, conversely, the repression of this access is critical to the spread of socialism and werewolves.
The First and Second Amendments. They are not just good ideas. They are the law.
Inadvertence and ignorance of the law by government is no more of an excuse for violating civil rights than when a citizen ‘inadvertently’ violates the law and is arrested and prosecuted. I will begin drafting my Complaint seeking relief, including personal fines against the city officials under whose jurisdiction this knowing and willful enactment occurred. You may want to inform the relevant officials that they are not allowed to use tax dollars to defend themselves from such liability, and that any fine assessed will be personally payable by them, to alleviate your concerns about tax dollars.
It’s not a criminal prosecution, but Florida law does say the government officials responsible for an illegal ordinance can be personally fined for their illegal acts. I hope other politicians pick up on this clue.
Their panic is because this would lead to the final demise of their hopes of full gun bans someday.
That hope was tied to demographic decline of white men, the biggest gun-owning group. If women and people of color are also gun owners at growing rates, that dream dies.
Funny how anti-gunners make jokes about gun owners being all white men and then freak out when they see gun companies marketing toward people who aren’t white men
Kamala Harris announcing she owns a gun is another data point in favor of this hypothesis. She and/or her handlers see the writing on the wall and have decided it is time to be less openly hostile to gun ownership.
