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2nd Amendment Tag

Posted by Leslie Eastman on June 17, 2016 12 Comments
The ISIS-inspired terror attack in Florida has impacted the entire nation. From the American political outback called California, one of the most unexpected responses came from West Hollywood. The community woke up to find images of posters of "Gay Pride" flag (designed with a new, conservative twist) plastered along the streets.
Stickers and posters featuring a rainbow-colored version of the Gadsden flag and the hashtag #ShootBack were raising eyebrows in West Hollywood on Thursday morning in the wake of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida. The signage was affixed to electric boxes, light poles, trash cans and other fixtures near West Hollywood City Hall, the Pacific Design Center and along Santa Monica Boulevard. Several were hung near the Abbey Food & Bar, a well-known gay lounge. The posters featured a coiled, striking rattlesnake, similar to the yellow Gadsden flag that reads “Don’t Tread On Me” and often is used by the Tea Party movement. The West Hollywood signs were rainbow-colored, like the gay pride flag.
Welcome to the Tea Party, home of constitutionally inspired activism since 2009!

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 17, 2016 7 Comments
Shiloh Gun Range in Houston, Texas has opened their doors to members of the LGBTQ community who want to learn how to defend themselves. What started as an idea to hold a concealed carry class or two for members of the gay community rapidly ballooned into close to 300 class registrants and more emails and phone calls than the range can keep up with. Houston local news reported:
One look at his hole-filled paper target and you can see Ryan Thomas is a great shot. He has had his concealed handgun license for two years. Thomas also happens to be gay.

Posted by Mary Chastain on June 16, 2016 81 Comments
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has blamed due process as the reason why the government cannot pass more gun control. From The Washington Examiner:
"The problem we have, and really the firewall we have right now, is due process. It's all due process," he said Thursday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "We can all say we want the same thing," he continued, "but how do we get there?"
I wonder if he gets that THIS is why our awesome Founding Fathers put in the Fifth Amendment.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on June 16, 2016 47 Comments
There was a stunning moment on today's Morning Joe, when Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson was stumped when asked a simple question. With all the brouhaha over gun control in the wake of the Orlando massacre, what law could have stopped Omar Mateen? It was, of all people, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post who asked the killer question. Stein pointed out that Mateen was not on the no-fly or terrorist watch list, and had passed a background check. "So what is the actual legislative response" that would have stopped the Orlando attack? Johnson resorted to claiming that Congress had "a lot of ideas," but could not name one that would have made a difference. He also repeatedly recited the new mantra: gun control is a matter of homeland security. Bottom line: the Dem clamor for gun control is a political stunt. It's about increasing vote totals, not public safety.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on June 14, 2016 82 Comments
How do we know AR-15s are the single most lethal weapon on the planet? Because they're SO LOUD. LOUD, YOU HEAR ME?! LOUD!!!! This is one of those things that must be read to be believed, and no, this was not found in The Onion, amazingly. New York Daily News reporter Gersh Kuntzman set out to test shoot an AR-15. "It feels like a bazooka — and sounds like a cannon," he writes. A cannon. And Bazooka? The same bazooka also known as a "recoilless rifle"?

Posted by Andrew Branca on June 09, 2016 48 Comments
Today the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, finally released its long awaited opinion in the Second Amendment case of Peruta. The core issue in that case is whether the Second Amendment provides an individual right of the general, law-abiding public to bear concealed arms in public places.  The full decision is embedded at the bottom of this post. In short, today’s 9th Circuit decision states that:
We hold that the Second Amendment does not preserve or protect a right of a member of the general public to carry concealed firearms in public.
The majority arrives at this conclusion having applied intermediate scrutiny, rather than either strict scrutiny (almost invariably finds a constraint to be unconstitutional) or rational basis (almost invariably finds a constraint to be constitutional), to the dispute. In District of Columbia v. Heller the Supreme Court held that rational basis was an inappropriate level of scrutiny to evaluate claims of Second Amendment infringement, but left open the door for intermediate scrutiny. As this opinion shows, allowing for intermediate scrutiny in practice is little different in the hands of anti-Second Amendment judges than allowing them to apply rational basis—every gun control restraint will survive scrutiny, and the Second Amendment effectively loses all meaning.

Posted by Mary Chastain on June 03, 2016 3 Comments
Police have connected a murder in Minnesota to the man who killed a UCLA professor and then himself. Mainak Sarkar, 38, left behind a kill list in his aparment, which included two UCLAS professors and Ashley Hasti, 31, his estranged wife. Police in Minnesota discovered Hasti's dead body on Thursday, the day after Sarkar killed Professor William S. Klug. Deputy Police Chief Mark Brutley said Sarkar killed her before he killed Klug:
Sarkar apparently believed Klug had stolen some of his work while he was a doctoral student at UCLA. Sarkar’s motive for Hasti’s slaying remains unclear. The two were married by a justice of peace in 2011, said Hasti’s grandmother, Jean Johnson. The couple split about a year later and Hasti moved back home to Brooklyn Park.

Posted by Mary Chastain on May 31, 2016 18 Comments
Katie Couric has changed her mind and finally decided to take responsibility for an edit in her "Under the Gun" documentary that made a pro-gun rights group look idiotic. She released this statement last night:
As Executive Producer of “Under the Gun,” a documentary film that explores the epidemic of gun violence, I take responsibility for a decision that misrepresented an exchange I had with members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL). My question to the VCDL regarding the ability of convicted felons and those on the terror watch list to legally obtain a gun, was followed by an extended pause, making the participants appear to be speechless. When I screened an early version of the film with the director, Stephanie Soechtig, I questioned her and the editor about the pause and was told that a "beat" was added for, as she described it, “dramatic effect," to give the audience a moment to consider the question. When VCDL members recently pointed out that they had in fact immediately answered this question, I went back and reviewed it and agree that those eight seconds do not accurately represent their response.

Posted by Andrew Branca on May 10, 2016 18 Comments
I know many of you have been wondering where the heck I've run off to from the pages of Legal Insurrection, so I want to immediately dispel the most common rumor:  No, Professor Jacobson and I have not broken up. :-) More seriously, the reason for my absence has been that I've been hard at work finishing the thoroughly updated newest edition of my book, "The Law of Self Defense, 3rd Edition," which I'm proud to announce published last week.  Further, I learned this morning that we've already achieved the number one position in Criminal Law new releases at Amazon.com, at that we're #6 in the Criminal Law category overall. And today we also became #1 in the Hunting & Shooting category at Amazon.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 29, 2016 10 Comments
The NRA's Freedom's Safest Place series of videos is excellent. So far, we've run posts about three of the videos: The video below came out a month ago, but I just saw it:
I'm a mom, a business owner and a patriot. But I am not a politician. A few years ago I founded a nonprofit to defend voters' rights and stop election fraud. We exposed corruption—so the corrupters wanted me silenced. The IRS, FBI, ATF, OSHA and a U.S. Congressman turned my life upside-down. Their investigations were invasive, abusive, relentless … and political.

Posted by Sarah Rumpf on April 14, 2016 20 Comments
When the Texas Legislature passed a campus carry bill during the 2015 legislative session, part of the law allowed the state's universities to create rules designating certain areas of campus to remain gun-free, as long as those rules were not thwarting the law's goals and making it impossible to carry a gun on campus. Texas A&M University (TAMU)  announced its proposed rules for carrying guns on the campuses within the TAMU system on Wednesday, providing very few restrictions other than honoring existing private contracts and specifically identified safety issues. The sharp contrast with how the issue has been handled at TAMU and at the University of Texas at Austin illustrates many of the divisions in the gun control debate.

What Texas' campus carry law actually does

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on April 13, 2016 24 Comments
Last month, we interviewed children's authoress, Amelia Hamilton. Her reimagined renditions of well-loved fairy tales, published by the National Rifle Association, have raised more than a few eyebrows. In Hamilton's versions, the characters, like Red Riding Hood, are armed. The result? Granny doesn't get eaten, and everyone lives happily ever after. With outlets like the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Daily Show picking up her stories, Hamilton received more than her fair share of hate. All too obvious is that the haters never read the fairy tales in their newly armed glory before responding to them.

Posted by Andrew Branca on April 08, 2016 19 Comments
The Washington Post reports on a new study that suggests racial bias motivates police to fatally shoot black suspects at a disproportionally high rate.  That study, entitled “Fatal Shootings By US Police Officers in 2015: A Bird’s Eye View,” is published in the once well-respected scientific journal Nature. The first alarm bells went off for me when I noted the source of the "data" used for this "study":  journalists from the Washington Post itself, as well as the left-wing UK newspaper, The Guardian.  As we've seen in the past, "data" collected by journalists is rarely worth the paper it's printed on, not surprising given their generally utter lack of expertise in the subject being covered.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 24, 2016 24 Comments
The latest in the NRA's Freedom's Safest Place video series features Charlie Daniels, who starts out with a provocative statement: "You might have met our fresh-faced flower-child president, and his weak-kneed Ivy League friends." Good thing he limited "weak-kneed Ivy League" to "friends" of Obama. Otherwise I'd take great offense. Here is the full text:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 22, 2016 11 Comments
Meet Amelia Hamilton -- dear friend, gifted children's authoress, and education advocate. Amelia Hamilton is a blogger and author of the Growing Patriots children's books. A lifelong writer and patriot, she also loves hockey, old cars, old movies and apple juice. Amelia has a master’s degree in both English and 18th-century history from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Her dog Virgil is her co-pilot. With two books under her belt in the Growing Patriots series, Hamilton's latest project has encouraged the wrath of just about every left-leaning media outlet on the internet. Taking our favorite fairy tales, Hamilton is reimagining these well-loved stories with one tiny little change -- the would-be victims are armed. Her first installment, Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun), was published on NRA Family mid-January. Last week her latest, Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns), hit the internet. They're great reads and highly recommended (if I do say so myself).

First, a little about you:

Posted by Sarah Rumpf on March 21, 2016 25 Comments
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled today that Second Amendment does include stun guns, in a ruling issued on Monday. In the short per curiam ("by the Court") opinion in Caetano v. Massachusetts, the Court set aside a ruling by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, rejecting the arguments offered for allowing the state to ban possession or use of stun guns as in conflict with the Second Amendment. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas wrote a separate concurring opinion supporting the self-defense rights of Jamie Caetano, the Boston woman whose conviction was the basis for the case. The State of Massachusetts now has the choice of dropping the conviction against Caetano, or coming back to try new arguments to support their ban.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on March 20, 2016 44 Comments
A 25-year-old black woman who appeared to be brandishing a handgun was shot and killed by police in Virginia; it was later discovered that, like Tamir Rice, she held a non-firing replica (see below). CBS reports:
A 25-year-old black woman was shot and killed by police officers in Virginia on Saturday after threatening them with what turned out to be a fake handgun, police said. Investigators with the Norfolk Police Department's Vice and Narcotics Division were conducting a surveillance operation when they came across a fight in a parking lot, police said.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on March 09, 2016 27 Comments
As Obama, Bloomberg, and assorted progressives continue in their gun-grabbing push, red states and those states with Republican legislative majorities have been pushing back, legalizing guns on campus, expanding carry laws, and now, in West Virginia, allowing permitless concealed carry. The bill, HB 4145, allows anyone over the age of 21 to carry a concealed handgun without a permit and was vetoed last Thursday by Democrat Governor Tomlin in a theatrical ceremony. In a bipartisan vote in first the State House and then in the State Senate, the governor's veto was overridden. The Charleston Gazette reports:
It will soon be legal for adults in West Virginia to carry hidden handguns with no training and without a permit, after the Legislature acted swiftly, and against the wishes of law enforcement, to override Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin’s veto of the legislation. Tomblin held a rare veto-signing ceremony Thursday, surrounded by dozens of police officers, to try to convince legislators to let the veto stand. “I urge you to look around this room for a moment and see that law enforcement are concerned about this bill,” Tomblin said Thursday. They didn’t listen.
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