Apparently Politico does not like the new concealed-carry reciprocity law recently passed in the House. They must not like it. After all, aside from covering it in a negative light, the newser so badly misstated the law that it could easily turn its readers against the whole idea. But perhaps that’s the idea?

The law, the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2011, would allow gun owners that have a concealed-carry license in their home state to carry their firearm in another state if that state also has a carry law in place. The law, however does not allow someone to carry a firearm in a state that does not currently allow its own citizens to enjoy concealed-carry rights.

All this law does is standardize the lawful status of interstate gun carriers so that law-abiding citizens are not confused by and in fear of violating the many different state statutes concerning their firearms when traveling.

But that isn’t what Politco said on Nov. 15 in its overwrought and badly fact-checked piece. Not only is Politico spectacularly wrong, but it leads with a false reading of what the bill does. [My bold for emphasis]

If congressional gun-rights stalwarts get their way, a firearms owner with a concealed-weapons permit issued in Utah could be allowed to carry that gun in New York — regardless of the gun laws in the Empire State.

Politico is simply wrong that the bill would allow concealed-carry regardless of the gun laws in any state.

Politico goes on to report how critics of the bill are trying to use states’ rights claims against the bill to prevent its passage. One would think that this is not a very reliable tactic in this case. After all, the Second Amendment is a Constitutional issue so it’s a bit harder to claim that all gun laws are local issues. If it’s a right guaranteed right in the Constitution, that makes it a bit hard to claim that it shouldn’t at all be a federal issue!

Another false claim of those that oppose this law is that state laws are nullified and replaced by some national concealed-carry law. This is also bunk.

Politico gives space to a New York State Attorney who claims that his state’s stricter laws on who can and cannot carry would be nullified by forcing New York to accept the concealed-carry rights of other states. But this is not a true statement.

(more…)

MSNBC’s newest show host Alex Wagner is eager to make her mark on the world of punditry. Twice this week Wagner has made mention of how much she detests the Second Amendment. The other evening while on a political panel with Martin Bashir and Jedediah Bila, Wagner challenged Bila’s recollection of firearm statistics, and when faced with a losing battle, looked to Bashir for support. While doing so, Wagner essentially called Bila stupid for disagreeing with her:

(more…)

I can’t stand listening to the guy blabber for more than a minute, but I listened for the hilarity of his firearms stereotyping.

“That imaginary person thats gonna break into your home and kill you, who does that person look like? … We never want to talk about the racial or class part of this in terms of how it’s the poor or people of color that we imagine we’re afraid of.”

Good grief.

I honestly believe that in some cases liberals project their own closeted feelings on race since they spend so much time trying to convince conservatives that they (the conservatives) should find black people scary.

(more…)

Yesterday evening I was on AC360 to discuss the Arizona Tragedy with David Gergen and Roland Martin. While I personally like Gergen, his knowledge of Arizona’s gun laws and invalid premises on conceal carry were a disservice to our discussion. He presupposes that Jared Lee Loughner was a CCW permit holder, and thus, right to carry failed, which, to all knowledge Loughner did not possess a permit, a violation of AZ law.

More on the role of conceal carry in a bit. I’ve seen many are making the case that just “anyone” with mental illness can buy a gun and that Arizona’s “relaxed” gun laws contributed to the Arizona tragedy because a mentally ill individual was allowed to legally purchase a firearm and we can’t just have mentally ill people buying guns. No, we can’t, which is why Arizona has a law about this. AZ law expressly states that due to their prohibited possessor stipulation, anyone proving a danger to themselves or others pursuant to court order is not allowed to purchase a firearm.

Under Arizona law, prohibited possessor are defined in ARS 13-3101 which states:

7. “Prohibited possessor” means any person:

(a) Who has been found to constitute a danger to himself or to others or to be persistently or acutely disabled or gravely disabled pursuant to court order under section 36-540, and whose right to possess a firearm has not been restored pursuant to section 13-925.

Had campus security and his parents followed up with proper treatment and reported his actions, he, from what it sounds, would have been an easy PP and unable to buy a weapon. Had the Sheriff’s office acted upon what is suggested as their advanced knowledge of Loughner’s troubled history, they may have obtained a warrant and confiscated his firearm – or apprehended him before he bought it. Of course, this simply assumes that Loughner was only motivated to cause harm because he was in possession of a firearm and presupposes that the firearm was an accessory motivator and rules out for certain that Loughner would never have attacked anyone with, say, a knife, bat, or any other weapon.

The problem isn’t the fallacy that Arizona’s law failed – Arizona’s law, like every law, can only work if followed. Prohibited possession can only work if if troubled individuals are reported to authorities so that the existing laws can be applied to them and, in this case, prevent them from purchasing firearms.

Many are also targeting Arizona as a right to carry state, saying that concealed carry is a “loosening” of the laws and that it contributed to the AZ tragedy. I’m not sure if concealed carry records are public in Arizona, but considering that Loughner broke the law by killing people, I’m going to make a logical deduction here again and say that he likely didn’t obtain a CCW permit, either. Open carry is legal in Arizona and he could have openly carried his weapon just as easily as illegally concealing it.

As far as arguing against conceal carry, something else as well: statistically, states which adopt CCW laws see a dramatic crime reduction.

(more…)

Wasn’t it the late Bill Safire who called the current Secretary of State a “congenital liar?”

How right he was.

The New York Times sent Mattathias Schwartz to find out what was going on at Jack Dailey’s firearms training camps across the country and what he found apparently made the writer fear that America was going to the lily white, revolutionary, tea party dogs.

Schwartz went to learn about Jack Dailey’s Appleseed Project firearms marksmanship training camps and what he found were folks of “uniformly white skin” whose ideas were influenced by those “motley carnivals of the Tea Party movement.” And apparently Schwartz fears that they all want to institute a violent revolution in America. Yes, it’s all about those scary “militias” despite that the Appleseed Project has no connection to any.

“Determining whether this revolutionary talk constitutes a threat comes down to finding the fine line between expressing anger and inciting the angry to action,” Schwartz writes, “a distinction that is clear as a matter of law but less so in cultural practice.”

Then right away Schwartz invokes the Timothy McVeigh incident as if every American who wants to enjoy his Second Amendment rights is an Oklahoma City bomber-in-waiting. (more…)

In case you ever thought the media played things straight — you know, actually quoted people accurately and, when paraphrasing, gave a fair summation of what the person actually said and meant — think again.

Check out this priceless clip from the increasingly irrelevant Morning Joe MSNBC gabfest, which features a sputtering Chris Matthews summarizing some remarks from Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle, who’s running against Harry Reid in Nevada for the U.S. Senate.

Like a typical leftist, poor Chris has no sense of irony or metaphor or anything else — spooked by his own dark fantasies of the right, he takes every statement made by a conservative absolutely literally, then spins it into a terrifying tale of lurking militias and Christian-rightists and lions and tigers and bears oh my… (more…)

In 2008, as the Supreme Court was preparing to hear D.C. vs. Heller, the case against D.C. handgun ban, liberal news outlets were going out their way to explain why the ban should be kept in place. Anti-gun columnists like Marian Wright Edelman, writing for the Huffington Post, argued that the ban ought to be upheld as a means of “protecting the health and safety of America’s children.” The Court did not agree with Edelman.

Earlier this year, as the Supreme Court was considering McDonald vs. Chicago, the case against Chicago’s handgun ban, gun-grabbing Mayor Richard Daley scoffed at the pending decision. In May 2010 he told the Chicago Tribune that maybe one of the justices would “have an incident and…change their mind” on guns: that they might “see the light of day.” But I suppose none of the justices had an “incident,” because the Court did not agree with Daley.

When the Supreme Court ruled against the D.C. gun ban in the Heller decision, gun owners and lovers of liberty were elated. But amid all the joy, it began to dawn on people that because D.C. was a federal district instead of a city in state, the ruling was not likely to reverse bans in cities there were in states. This meant Chicagoans were likely to continue living unarmed, because Mayor Daley was consumed with the thought of preventing law-abiding citizens from keeping arms on their persons or in their homes. (more…)

By some ironic twist of fate, the Senator from the Ku Klux Klan has died on the same day the Supreme Court — by a distressingly narrow 5-4 ruling — affirmed that the Second Amendment is incorporated, via the 14th Amendment, to the states, and that Chicago’s gun ban is therefore unconstitutional. In part, the ruling rested on the historical fact that African Americans were denied gun ownership in many places following Reconstruction, and thus were not fully free:

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, who has written extensively on the Second Amendment, has just posted his reactions:

OKAY, having quickly skimmed the McDonald opinion, a few thoughts…

… it really is interesting how much emphasis the majority, and Justice Thomas’s concurrence, put on the racist roots of gun control. See this article and this one by Bob Cottrol and Ray Diamond for more background. And isn’t it interesting that this is happening on the same day the Senate’s last Klansman went to his reward?

(more…)

Who else could utter such fatuous nonsense with a straight face but “Booger” Max Blumenthal, ”independent journalist” and son of Clinton flack Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal, who takes to the Independent Film Channel tonight with a documentary about, what else, the “far right” and the Tea Party movement. If these snarky, sneering teasers are any indication of the kind of sophisticated analysis we’re in for, we can hardly wait:

The people I’ve written about have called me everything from a left wing hack to a sociopath to even a self-hating Jew.

Meanwhile, Max — who’s plainly terrified by inanimate objects — fears for the future of a Republic that has such folks as these in it:

Lest we forget, this memorable moment in Blumenthalism: (more…)

Last week, Oklahoma state senator Randy Brogdon (R), who is also a serious candidate for governor, inadvertently set off a national firestorm, courtesy of the Associated Press’s egregiously distorting his words.

An article by Sean Murphy and Tim Talley, about tea parties and militias (funny, how those two entities are conveniently linked together), implied that Sen. Brogdon, who was elected to office in 2002, is eager to help launch a kinder-and-gentler version of the Hutaree milita chapter. Or, something to that effect.

The AP story noted that state miltia supporters have chatted up the Senator, and that he acknowledged (correctly), that the Second Amendment allows for a “citizen unit.” Now here’s the colorful quote that got tongues a-wagging and keyboards a-clicking:

The founding fathers ‘were not referring to a turkey shoot or a quail hunt. They really weren’t even talking about us having the ability to protect ourselves against each other,’ Brogdon said. ‘The second Amendment deals directly with the right of an individual to keep and bear arms to protect themselves from an overreaching federal government.’

(more…)

Hard to know what to make of this piece by Eliott C. McLaughlin — except, of course, that it pretty much sums up the state of journalistic thinking in the MSM these days, which includes a reflexive disdain for constitutional principles it disagrees with while trying to be “fair and balanced.”

Experts: Angry rhetoric protected, but can be disturbing

Here’s how it begins:

Letting disgruntled citizens vent is important to national security, experts say, but some messages emanating from angry Americans in recent weeks have pressed the boundaries of free speech.

Important to national security?  Free speech is important for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that, since John Milton’s Areopagitica essay, it has been the basis of all the liberties of modern democracy. And what, exactly, are the “boundaries of free speech” in a society whose Constitution states, in the First Amendment, that “Congress shall make no law.. abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”

Politicians have reported slurs as well as threatening letters and phone calls. Congressmen have reported vandalism to their offices. One said he was spit on. Another said his brother’s gas line was cut after a Tea Party member posted his address online.

Tea Party leaders denounce the threats and deny involvement, pointing to fringe elements — not Tea Party members, per se, but groups with degrees of overlapping ideologies.

But the angry rhetoric is not isolated to fringe groups. Both mainstream liberal and conservative camps have joined the chorus, and while some of the language sounds threatening, most of it is protected.

(more…)

Norman Leboon, a convert to Islam, was charged today with making death threats against the House Republican Whip, Eric Cantor (R-VA), and his family. The threat came in a YouTube video that Leboon posted last Wednesday. In it, Leboon says:

Remember Eric…our judgment time, the final Yom Kippur has been given. You are a liar, you’re a Lucifer, you’re a pig, a greedy [expletive deleted] pig. You’re an abomination. You receive my bullets in your office. Remember they will be placed in your heads. You and your children are Lucifer’s abominations.

In calling Cantor a pig, Leboon may have been thinking of the passages of the Koran where Allah transforms the disobedient Jews into apes and pigs.

His threats to Cantor come after the congressman’s office was hit by what police called a stray bullet, and he received anti-Jewish threats from left-wingers.

A difficult Pesach for the Cantor family, I am sure. (more…)

The Ohio Free Press, an independent online news source run by liberty-minded citizens, has its sights fixed on setting the record straight and is taking aim squarely at one newspaper’s editor.

Two and a half years ago, when readers of the Sandusky Register in Ohio opened the paper on June 25, 2007, many were shocked to find their name, age and county of residence published alongside those of nearly 2,700 other law-abiding private citizens.  At the top of the page read only the title, “Sandusky County Concealed Carry List“, accompanied by a menacing graphic with the words “Conceal Carry: Who Needs to Know?” cunningly framed around a gun’s scope.  While the page offered no other content or context whatsoever, the lack of such more than set the tone.  It may as well have been headlined, “Hey – Fear These Scary Gun-Toting People.” (more…)

Pollster Frank Luntz is trying to hawk his new poll on gun laws commissioned by the left-wing group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns. He’s trying to sell the concept that NRA members are just as interested in “common-sense gun policies” as anti-gun nuts and that legislators should take this into account when crafting future anti-gun legislation. The problem is that this poll (.pdf at link) is misleading in some important ways, and the fact that the devil is in the details is totally glossed over.

In an op ed in the Los Angeles Times written by Luntz and Tom Barrett, gun owners are compared favorably with non-gun owners over their feelings on gun banning laws. “The culture war over the right to bear arms isn’t much of a war after all,” the pair tells us. “As it turns out, there is a lot everyone agrees on.”

And this main point serves as the biggest problem with Luntz’s poll. Of course everyone will claim he’s for “common-sense” firearms laws. But the first thing that anyone will find out when discussing concrete policies is that disagreement quickly reigns when people start getting specific. An assumption that everyone “agrees” on just what common sense means disappears pretty quickly when the details are laid out. (more…)

The Citizens United decision is a powerful rebuke to the forces that believe our Constitution is less a solid foundation of our democracy then a political pretzel to be bent and twisted into any form the politicians choose.  Sadly, far too many journalists and other people who really should know better blindly accept this bizarre vision of our founding documents.  They allow themselves to be seduced by the notion that the foundations of our democracy are actually barriers to “progress” that can simply wished away instead of firm principles that, if they are to be changed at all, can be amended only with the overwhelming and express consent of the governed.

The Left often argues that the Constitution is a “living” document, by which they really mean that the plain text is irrelevant and that over time the Constitution’s provisions inevitably morph into – surprise – something that just happens to correspond exactly to their precise policy preferences.  And so the “Living Constitution” grows, but less like a mighty oak than a patch of weeds.  Take the Commerce Clause, originally drafted to allow the federal government to control trade between the states but today a bloated behemoth that provides an excuse for every Congressional power grab that comes down the pike — including, if Nancy Pelosi is to be believed, “health care reform.” (more…)