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Circuit Court: ‘Unsettled’ if 2nd Amendment Applies Outside of Home

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Photo Credit: APIn a case over New Jersey’s requirement that a citizen demonstrate “justifiable need” for a carrying a firearm before receiving a concealed carry license, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that such a requirement “does not burden conduct within the scope of the Second Amendment’s guarantee.” The court also said “it remains unsettled” whether the Second Amendment is even applicable outside one’s home.

Filed on July 31, 2013, the ruling in Drake v. Filko upheld New Jersey’s practice of placing the burden of proof upon the citizen. In other words, the citizen who wants to carry a gun for self-defense must demonstrate why doing so is necessary for him or her. In simple terms, the citizen must justify being free.

That runs contrary to previous rulings in other circuits, such as on March 6, 2012 when U.S. District Judge Benson Everett Legg ruled against Maryland’s requirement that citizens who wanted a concealed carry permit had to demonstrate a “good and substantial reason” for getting one. Overturning this New Jersey-like requirement, Legg ruled: “A citizen may not be required to offer a ‘good and substantial reason’ why he should be permitted to exercise his rights. The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.”

Read more from this story HERE.

More Evidence Zimmerman Trial Really Was About Second Amendment (+video)

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Attorney General Eric Holder took aim at Stand Your Ground laws Tuesday, saying the measures increase the chance for violence.

“These laws try to fix something that was never broken,” Holder said in a previously-scheduled speech to the NAACP convention in Orlando that marked the Obama administration’s first new policy announcement since neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman was acquitted last weekend in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

“By allowing and perhaps encouraging violent situations to escalate in public, such laws undermine public safety,” he said.

More than 30 states have passed Stand Your Ground laws, which eliminate the duty to retreat before using deadly force in self defense.

The doctrine has long been recognized across the country with respect to home invasions. But the new laws expand the concept — doing away with the duty to retreat in a variety of other venues. The Florida law authorizes an individual to use deadly force as self defense “in any…place he or she has a right to be.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Zimmerman Trial’s Real Goal: Destroy the Second Amendment

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By Jonathon Moseley. Destroying the Second Amendment and the people’s right of self-defense was the real goal of the George Zimmerman prosecution. Liberals hoped to scare gun owners, regardless of the eventual verdict. Traumatizing and intimidating people from using a firearm to defend themselves were what this case was really about.

This prosecution was an attempt to overturn Florida’s “stand your ground law.” Florida dramatically changed the law effective October 1, 2005 by amending Florida Statute 776.013(3). Previously, one had to run away if possible when threatened.

But many believed that this put the burden of proof on the victim of aggression. Victims of crime would have to prove that they could not have escaped safely and they had no other choice but to use deadly force. Florida’s legislature was persuaded that the “duty to retreat” often put the innocent party in an impossible position to prove their innocence. While deadly force should never be used unless necessary, the victims of crime sometimes faced an unwinnable challenge.

But liberals were outraged. Gun control activists hysterically called it “Florida’s Shoot First Law.” Opponents passed out fliers at Miami International Airport scaring tourists, hoping to blackmail Florida’s powerful tourism industry and pressure the Florida legislature into a repeal.

Florida’s “stand your ground law” had to be reversed or nullified. If owning a gun is useful for self-defense, then banning guns becomes more difficult. So self-defense had to be eliminated so that owning a gun would have no purpose. How else could liberals create a population dependent upon government? Read more from this story HERE.

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Ted Nugent says lesson in Trayvon Martin incident: ‘Teach your children not to attack people’

By Jeff Poor. On Dennis Miller’s radio show on Monday, rock and reality show star Ted Nugent sounded off on the outcome of the trial of George Zimmerman, who was acquitted of charges in the murder of Trayvon Martin…

“I’m 65 years old this year, Dennis, and I’ve never seen such ugly race relations since the white and black water fountains in Detroit went away,” Nugent said. “We were on an even keel. We were on the upgrade. I think racism for all practical purposes was gone five, six years ago and it’s back with a vengeance and it breaks my heart. But here’s the ultimate lesson, if everyone would take a deep breath — I hear a lot of squawking that parents go, ‘Well, that could have been my kid, that could have been my dead child.’ Well, here’s a little update for you: Teach your children not to attack people, thank you very much.” Read more from this story HERE.

Army Vet Discovers Feds Now Digging Up Decades Old Minor Convictions to Prevent Gun Ownership

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A local Army veteran is fighting for permission to own a gun after a misdemeanor pot conviction from 1971 stopped him from buying .22 caliber rifle.

Ron Kelly, who retired from the Army in 1993, after a career of firing tanks, machine guns and an array of other weapons [shooting an estimated 100,000 rounds through the course of his career], was recently turned away at the Wal-Mart in Tomball after a computerized background check turned up the arrest.

Today’s Houston Chronicle has a front page story on Ron Kellly and his fight to own a gun.

Kelly said he’d forgotten all about the incident, in which he was arrested over a baggie of pot while in high school, and given one year of probation.

He was a bit embarrassed. Now he’s outraged…

According to the FBI, which runs the background checks known as the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, the law states that a person can be prevented from owing a gun if they are convicted of a misdemeanor in which they could spend more than two years behind bars.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Castle Under Siege

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Photo Credit: Alexander HunterThe First, Second and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution aren’t much admired by liberals, or “progressives,” or whatever they’re calling themselves this month. Free speech is restrained by speech codes, President Obama’s disdain for the right to bear arms is well known, and the government’s electronic snooping has shredded the guarantees against self-incrimination.

Now even the Third Amendment, which guarantees that “no soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law,” is endangered, too. The courts have rarely considered this iron prohibition on quartering of troops, but now they must.

Two years ago, Christopher Worley, a police officer in Henderson, Nev., called on Anthony Mitchell to ask whether police could use the Mitchell home to keep watch on a neighbor. Mr. Mitchell declined. Soon he heard pounding on the front door. Henderson police officers arrived with orders from their superiors: “If Mitchell refused to answer the door, force entry would be made, and Mitchell would be arrested.” The door was battered down, and Mr. Mitchell was arrested at gunpoint for “obstructing an officer.” The frightened family dog was shot.

The Mitchell family sued, asking the U.S. District Court for Nevada to hold the cities of Henderson and North Las Vegas in violation of their constitutional rights when police seized their home and used it for a sting operation against a neighbor.

Read more from this story HERE.

Professor Calls for NRA Members to be Shot by Firing Squad for Treason

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Photo Credit: Biz Pac Review

A professor in West Virginia provides yet another example of the inescapable reality that the real threat to America, beyond a complicit media, is likely to be found in college classrooms.

Christopher Swindell, journalism professor at Marshall University, is calling on National Rifle Association members to be shot before a firing squad.

In an op/ed published in the Charleston Gazette on Thursday, Swindell offered his version of the “final solution” for supporters of the Second Amendment, as Independent Journal Review’s Michael Miller characterized his vile rhetoric.

While passing himself off as “mainstream,” Swindell labels the NRA’s concerns as “knuckle-dragging Cretan talk” and accuses the organization of advocating for the overthrow of the U.S. government:

“Here it is. The NRA advocates armed rebellion against the duly elected government of the United States of America. That’s treason, and it’s worthy of the firing squad.

Read more from this story HERE.

Conn., Colorado Gun Owners File Lawsuits to Win Back Second Amendment Rights

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Photo Credit: APAs quickly as gun-grabbing governors snatched away citizens’ Second Amendment rights, gun owners are filing lawsuits to get them back.

Individuals, retailers, gun-rights groups and manufacturers joined together in Connecticut and Colorado this week to take the 2013 gun-control laws to court.

On Wednesday, plaintiffs filed suit in U.S. District Court in Connecticut challenging the constitutionality of Gov. Dannel Malloy’s dramatically-titled “Act Concerning Gun Violence Prevention and Children’s Safety.” The National Rifle Association (NRA) is one of the plaintiffs.

The Democratic governor signed the law on April 4 after using “emergency” procedures to rush it through the legislature, just four months after the Newtown shooting. Scott Wilson, the president of the Connecticut Citizens Defense League, one of the plaintiffs, told me in an interview Thursday that the law puts people in more danger.

“They are trying to legislate utopia. They think passing a law and putting up these magical ‘gun-free zones’ will work,” Mr. Wilson said. “But it’s just an invitation for a killer to come in because there will be no resistance.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Inhofe: Obama Admin. Buying So Much Ammo It’s Dried Up Civilian Supply (+video)

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Photo Credit: APOn Aaron Klein’s weekend show on New York City’s WABC radio, Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe accused the Obama administration of buying up ammunition at an unprecedented level to bypass the Second Amendment so gun-owners “can’t even buy ammunition because government is purchasing so much.”

“Let’s make sure that your audience out there is aware, Aaron, that our president, Obama, has been doing everything he could to stop the private ownership of guns in America,” Inhofe said. “You know that, everyone knows that. And yet he’s been voted down in a big way by a large majority. And so my feeling is that he’s doing this to buy up [ammunition] so that we can’t buy: Honest, law-abiding citizens here in the United States, like my son, can’t even buy ammunition because government is purchasing so much.”

Inhofe explained to Klein he is working to introduce the Ammunition Management for More Obtainability (AMMO) bill that will limit “non-defense, armed federal agencies to pre-Obama levels of ammunition.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Holder Threatens Kansas Over New Gun Law

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photo credit: USDAgovKansas Governor Sam Brownback received a letter today from Attorney General Eric Holder threatening action against the state should it enforce SB102, the pro 2nd Amendment law Brownback signed into law last month.

The new law declares that the federal government has no power to regulate guns manufactured, sold and kept only in Kansas.

Any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States which violates the second amendment to the constitution of the United States is null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas.

The legislation made it a felony for a federal agent to enforce any law, regulation, order or treaty regulating ammunition made, sold and kept in the state because the federal government does not [have] “interstate commerce” authority over such items.

The law became effective only a week ago, but already Holder has leapt into action, firing off a letter to the governor of Kansas threatening to take “all appropriate action including litigation if necessary” to prevent the state of Kansas from protecting the 2nd Amendment. (Amazing for a guy who didn’t even know about his own department’s gun-running operation, Fast and Furious until months after a border patrol agent was killed by one of its guns.) But when a state passes a law he doesn’t like – this Attorney General is FAST!

Read more from this story HERE.

Kansas Enacts Nullification: Governor Sam Brownback Signs Radical 2nd Amendment Protection Act into Law

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Today, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed into law Senate Bill 102 (SB102), formerly HB2199 – the 2nd Amendment Protection Act. In the wake of increased federal interest in restricting the right to keep and bear arms, the new Kansas law is the most comprehensive nullification of such acts thus far.

The new law nullifies a wide range of federal attacks on the right to keep and bear arms in the State of Kansas. It states, in part:

Any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States which violates the second amendment to the constitution of the United States is null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas

In conjunction with Section 6a (quoted above), the bill defines what is meant by “the second amendment to the constitution of the United States,” and that it isn’t based off a decision of the supreme court.

The second amendment to the constitution of the United States reserves to the people, individually, the right to keep and bear arms as that right was understood at the time that Kansas was admitted to statehood in 1861, and the guaranty of that right is a matter of contract between the state and people of Kansas and the United States as of the time that the compact with the United States was agreed upon and adopted by Kansas in 1859 and the United States in 1861.

Read more from this story HERE.