Second Amendment Rights

Report: Nearly 5 Million First-Time Gun Buyers in 2020

The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reported that there have been nearly five million first time gun buyers thus far in 2020. On August 24, 2020, NSSF contrasted the number of National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) checks from January 1, 2020, through July, 2020, with the number of checks from January 1, 2019, through July 2019. After adjusting for checks that were tied to concealed carry permits or other ends, other than sales, they ascertained that the number of checks for sales was 12.1 million. NSSF then surveyed retailers and found that “40 percent of sales were conducted to purchasers who have never previously owned a firearm.” Forty percent of 12.1 million is 4,840,000, or nearly five million sales. NSSF senior vice president of general counsel Larry Keane commented on the new gun buyers, saying: This is a tectonic shift in the firearm and ammunition industry marketplace and complete transformation of today’s gun-owning community. These first-time buyers represent a group of people who, until now, were agnostic regarding firearm ownership. “That’s rapidly changing, and these Americans are taking hold of their God-given right to keep and bear arms and protect themselves and their loved ones,” Keane said.

This is great news!  Good for these folks exercising their 2nd Amendment rights to protect themselves and their families from all the craziness going on out there.  For more, click on the text above.

Intrusion Suspect Shot Dead While Allegedly Trying to Enter Home

An intrusion suspect who allegedly tried to make entry into a Springfield, Missouri, home Friday night died after being shot by the homeowner. Ozarks First reports that the incident occurred around 11:00 p.m. Friday night. Springfield Police Lieutenant Chad McIntyre indicates that the suspect was allegedly breaking into the home when he was shot. KY3 identified the deceased suspect as 36-year-old Kenneth L. Clay. He was shot by homeowner David R. Jones, who says Clay allegedly shot first, striking him in the foot. Jones then returned fire, killing Clay.

Yet another great example of the need to own a firearm!

Gun sales surge 80% in May, says research firm

Gun sales surged in May as shops reported an uptick in interest and demand amid national protests after the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd and as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc and stoke fear across the country. “Almost, you couldn’t even keep up with it. That’s how crazy it was,” said Joe Hawk, owner of Guns & Roses in New Jersey. “After Memorial Day, it spiked again. It just went crazy again.” Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting, a private research firm, estimated that more than 1.7 million guns were sold in May, an 80% jump from May 2019. “Yet again, firearms sales have surged in unprecedented ways,” said Jurgen Brauer, the group’s chief economist. The stock prices for several gunmaking companies, including Sturm, Ruger & Co., jumped Monday. Larry Hyatt, owner of Hyatt Guns in Charlotte, North Carolina, said the gun demand prompted by COVID-19 was already straining suppliers. “Then you have this looting and rioting causing another demand, and it’s really putting pressure on inventory,” Mr. Hyatt said. Gun sales typically increase during presidential election years and during periods of national unrest, including after mass shootings, but Mr. Hyatt said the confluence of factors is unique.

Indeed..  For more, click on the text above.

Florida man shoots, kills home intruder who was attacking his wife, police say

A Florida man in his 70s fatally shot a home intruder who busted through the glass front door and began attacking his wife on Tuesday, investigators said. Deputies arrived at the Panama City home around 6:05 a.m. and found 31-year-old Nathan Jerrell Edwards laying on the floor dead and a handgun on the counter, the Bay County Sheriff’s Office said. “The husband stated he felt he could not physically stop the intruder, so he went upstairs to get his firearm,” the sheriff’s office said. “He shot the firearm multiple times, ending the threat.” The husband, whom deputies did not name, said he was standing outside when Edwards walked up to his driveway and approached him in a threatening manner. Witnesses told deputies that Edwards was “acting erratically,” screaming and swearing. He went into his home through the garage to get away from Edwards, according to deputies, but Edwards followed and pounded on the door to the house. He shattered the large glass panel in the front door and entered the house. Edwards then knocked the man’s wife to the floor, got on top of her and was beating her, the husband told deputies. The husband said he shot Edwards, who was pronounced dead at the scene. The man’s wife was treated at a local hospital for her injuries. Edwards, who was from Georgia, was staying nearby in a short-term rental residence.

Just another story showing the importance of owning a firearm for personal protection.  This poor man was no match for the younger thug beating his wife.  And, if he had called 911, the cops wouldn’t have made it in time.  So, he did what he had to do, and earned the praise of the local sheriff, as well he should.

Appeals court reinstates California law requiring background checks for ammo purchases

A federal appeals court reinstated a California background-check requirement for ammunition purchases this week after another court had deemed the law unconstitutional and a violation of the Second Amendment. U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez in San Diego called the regulations “onerous and convoluted,” but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco disagreed and granted the state’s request to stay the order, according to the National Rifle Association (NRA). “This means that the same restrictions that have been previously in effect regarding ammunition in California are back for the time being,” the NRA said in a statement. California became the first state in the U.S. to require background checks for ammunition purchases when the law took effect in July 2019. Ammunition sales jumped 300 percent last June before the regulations took effect. Voters originally approved the measure in 2016. Benitez had ruled in favor of the California Rifle & Pistol Association, which asked him to halt the background checks with a preliminary injunction. “The experiment has been tried. The casualties have been counted. California’s new ammunition background-check law misfires and the Second Amendment rights of California citizens have been gravely injured,” Benitez wrote in his 120-page opinion.

Federal judge tosses California law requiring background checks for ammunition

A federal judge blocked a California gun law on Thursday that required people to undergo a background check before purchasing ammunition. U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez in San Diego called the regulations “onerous and convoluted,” adding that they violate a citizen’s Second Amendment rights, the Associated Press reported. Benitez ruled in favor of the California Rifle & Pistol Association, which had asked him to halt the background checks with a preliminary injunction. “The experiment has been tried. The casualties have been counted. California’s new ammunition background check law misfires and the Second Amendment rights of California citizens have been gravely injured,” Benitez wrote in his 120-page opinion. “Criminals, tyrants, and terrorists don’t do background checks,” he added. “The background check experiment defies common sense while unduly and severely burdening the Second Amendment rights of every responsible, gun-owning citizen desiring to lawfully buy ammunition.” Benitez reportedly claimed the law blocked legitimate sales to law-abiding citizens, about 16 percent of the time. He also ruled that California’s ban on importing ammo from outside the state violates federal interstate commerce laws. California became the first state in the country to require background checks for ammo purchases when the law took effect back in July. Ammunition sales jumped 300 percent in June before the regulations took effect. Voters originally approved the measure back in 2016. The state attorney general’s office told the AP it is reviewing the decision but did not immediately say if it would appeal the decision or not.

Kudo to Judge Benitez for this outstanding decision.  It’s a HUGE victory for law-abiding gun owners in California.  The whole background check for purchasing ammo is beyond ridiculous on so many levels.  Excellent!!     🙂

Opinion/Analysis: Bloomberg: Guns for Me, but Not for Thee

‘How do you justify pushing for more gun control when you have an armed security detail that is likely equipped with the same firearms and magazines you seek to ban the common citizen from owning? Does your life matter more than mine or my family’s or these people’s?” a Virginian named Clarke Chitty asked Democratic Party presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg during a recent Fox News town hall. It’s an outstanding question. And Bloomberg’s answer is pretty straightforward: Yes, his life is worth more than yours. “Look, I probably get 40 or 50 threats every week, OK, and some of them are real. That just happens when you’re the mayor of New York City or you’re very wealthy and if you’re campaigning for president of the United States,” Bloomberg replied. “You get lots of threats. So, I have a security detail, I pay for it all myself, and . . . they’re all retired police officers who are very well trained in firearms.” In the United States, our rights aren’t — or shouldn’t be — meted out according to status. But you’ll notice Bloomberg doesn’t really answer the question, anyway. I suspect millions of Americans who aren’t as famous or rich (very rich, in this case) live in situations in which their property and safety are threatened to the same extent. Not that it matters. Does Bloomberg propose that everyone undergo a government risk assessment before being allowed to practice constitutional rights? Probably, right? More importantly, Clarke Chitty, one suspects, has zero interest in stripping away Bloomberg’s constitutional right to own a firearm, or to hire professional armed bodyguards to protect him from legitimate threats. The former mayor of New York City, on the other hand, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in efforts to pass laws and regulations that would leave Americans like Clarke Chitty defenseless. It’s this kind of arrogance that brought about District of Columbia v. Heller, the case affirming that the Second Amendment is an individual right. One of the first plaintiffs in that effort, Shelly Parker, was an African-American resident of Washington, D.C., who had gotten fed up with the crime near her Capitol Hill home. She attempted to rally her neighbors to clean up the neighborhood, provoking the ire of local drug dealers, who began vandalizing her property and threatening her life. “In the event that someone does get in my home,” she explained, “I would have no defense, except maybe throw my paper towels at them.” It would have been illegal for Parker, neither wealthy nor famous, to obtain a gun to protect herself. She was also in danger. Or take Otis McDonald, the retired 76-year-old of McDonald v. City of Chicago, a case that affirmed that the right of individual gun ownership extended to the states. By 2010, the neighborhood McDonald had lived in since 1971 had become infested with gangs, drug dealers, and widespread criminality. His home had been broken into on five separate occasions, so he had a legitimate reason to worry about his safety. Someone like Bloomberg might have suggested that Otis keep some paper towels handy, but McDonald wanted a handgun. At the time, Chicago had a handgun ban in place, ensuring that only criminals could own them. I suspect that McDonald was in as much jeopardy as Bloomberg. To top it off, Bloomberg then blatantly lied to the Fox crowd, claiming that “the Supreme Court said you can have reasonable restrictions, and the only restrictions which I am in favor of is to prevent us from selling guns to people with psychiatric problems, criminals, or people that are minors, OK?” Not really. If Bloomberg had any practical hope of overturning the Second Amendment, he would certainly do it. As it is, Bloomberg bankrolls major anti-gun efforts that go much further policy-wise than keeping guns out of the hands of children and people with serious psychiatric problems — both of which are already illegal, and supported by nearly everyone. Bloomberg, the presidential candidate, supports banning “assault weapons,” the most popular rifles in the country, which account for a sliver of the gun crimes in the country. Bloomberg supports stripping gun companies of “immunity” in civil lawsuits that would allow activists to hold manufacturers responsible for all criminality — a blatant attempt to put them out of business. Bloomberg supports “red flag” laws, which strip away due process for gun owners. Bloomberg supports raising the age of gun ownership from 18 to 21. Bloomberg supports federal efforts requiring every gun buyer to obtain a permit. Bloomberg wants to create a position for a federal gun czar to implement all these restrictions on the federal level. In other words, Bloomberg supports every single active effort to restrict gun ownership that exists. Well for you, not him.

Mike Bloomberg is the poster child for an elitist, self-righteous, arrogant, self-serving hypocrite.  He looks down at the rest of us unwashed peasants and tells us that we have no right to have a firearm…and yet he himself is surrounded by firearms protecting his pompous ass.  He is quite literally a little Nazi.  If you think that’s over the top, then consider this…   Not only is he short in stature….but, he would love nothing more than to register all gun owners, before ultimately having those guns confiscated.  Hitler did the exact same thing in the late 1930s in Germany.  Thanks to David Harsanyi over at National Review for that sobering assessment of that little Nazi from New York.

Texas churchgoers are training to fight off attackers wielding guns

Beneath the Christmas lights still hanging in the church’s fellowship room, Jack Mills pointed a Glock handgun at his enemy’s chest and pulled the trigger. A loud crack rang out as a shell casing flew from the weapon, but the man facing the gunfire didn’t fall. Instead a red light on his high-tech vest began blinking, signaling a hit from the laser in Mills’ gun. A U.S. Air Force veteran, Mills began designing the equipment a year ago to help armed churchgoers learn how to confront a gunman. Shooting a paper target is one thing, Mills said. Firing at a real person is another. “If you haven’t shot somebody in the face, how do you know you can?” he said. Mills is part of a growing cottage industry in Texas that uses police-like tactics to train churchgoers who fear the next attack could target their house of worship. Requests for help spike after each tragedy, businesses said. The most recent came in December, when a man opened fire during Sunday service at a White Settlement church and killed two worshippers, before he was fatally shot by an armed congregant. There’s no official count of how many congregation members pack heat in Texas churches. But security businesses said the number is growing thanks to recent changes by the Legislature that make it easier for worshippers to carry guns in church and form teams of armed protectors. With few industry standards, however, the training offered in Texas runs the gamut from active shooter drills, to programs that demand congregants pass a psychological evaluation and train for hours in life-like scenarios. One Texas firm has a trainer walk the church halls shooting blanks, so parishioners learn what approaching gunfire sounds like in their own sanctuary. “What’s driving it is an awareness,” said Carl Chinn, president of the national Faith Based Security Network. “We were under some illusion that because we had a cross on the roof and a name over the door that we were somehow immune from these kinds of attacks.” Still, congregations grapple with whether to welcome guns in the door. Just under half of 1,000 Protestant pastors nationwide reported arming their members, according to a survey released in January by Lifeway Research. Roughly 6% of the pastors said they hire police or armed security during services, a step that can be out of reach for smaller churches that don’t have the funding. Some critics warn that letting congregants carry guns without any training could lead to catastrophe if a firefight erupts in a crowded church. It can be a delicate balance stationing armed congregants at the church doors, while still maintaining an atmosphere inviting to newcomers.

To read more, click on the text above.

For First Time, A Colorado Judge Denies Confiscation Request Under Red Flag Law

For the first time, a judge has denied a request to take away a man’s guns under Colorado’s new red flag law. A Limon woman claimed a man who she had a relationship with threatened her with a gun and filed the request. Since the law took effect, the red flag law has had many gun owners seeing red. At least four requests have been filed since the first of 2020; CBS4 is aware of them being filed in Denver, in Larimer County and this one — in Lincoln County. Many gun owners, like Jak Gruenberg, despise it. “Red flag laws just allow for harassment of legal gun owners,” he said. The law allows guns to be taken away from those who present a danger to themselves or others. The decision is up to a judge. A woman wrote she was getting “verbal and physical threats” with a handgun from the man identified in the order. She said he had a problem with alcohol and marijuana. The judge denied the request to take his guns. “I think it’s a good thing. I think any other new law you’re going to have a lot of case law to determine exactly where the lines are,” said Gruenberg, a gun owner not associated with the case. Lincoln County is one of the many counties that has indicated it would not honor the red flag law.

This so-called “red flag law” in Colorado (and in other states) is brazenly unconstitutional on its face.  And, the fact that some local judge can arbitrarily make the decision as to whether or not they’ll sign an order to remove someone’s guns without due process should have every law-abiding gun owner in Colorado (and other states that have similar laws) terrified.  Anybody can just go into a police station and say, “so and so scares me and I think he should have his guns taken away,” and then it goes to some local judge who makes the arbitrary decision.  Crazy!!  This is the kinda crap that happens when Democrats are in power.  The raise your taxes, increase the size and scope of government, and take away your freedoms.  Unreal…

Supreme Court: Right to bear arms protected by highest category of liberty recognized by law

Last weekend’s mass murders in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have produced a flood of words about everything from gun control to mental illness to white nationalism. Most of those words have addressed the right to keep and bear arms as if it were a gift from the government. It isn’t. The U.S. Supreme Court has twice ruled in the past 11 years that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual pre-political liberty. That is the highest category of liberty recognized in the law. It is akin to the freedoms of thought, speech and personality. That means that the court has recognized that the framers did not bestow this right upon us. Rather, they recognized its pre-existence as an extension of our natural human right to self-defense and they forbade government — state and federal — from infringing upon it. It would be exquisitely unfair, profoundly unconstitutional and historically un-American for the rights of law-abiding folks — “surrender that rifle you own legally and use safely because some other folks have used that same type of weapon criminally” — to be impaired in the name of public safety. It would also be irrational. A person willing to kill innocents and be killed by the police while doing so surely would have no qualms about violating a state or federal law that prohibited the general ownership of the weapon he was about to use. With all of this as background, and the country anguishing over the mass deaths of innocents, the feds and the states face a choice between a knee-jerk but popular restriction of some form of gun ownership, and the rational and sound realization that more guns in the hands of those properly trained means less crime and more safety. Can the government constitutionally outlaw the types of rifles used by the El Paso and Dayton killers? In a word: No. We know that because in the first Supreme Court opinion upholding the individual right to keep and bear arms, the court addressed what kind of arms the Second Amendment protects. The court ruled that the Second Amendment protects individual ownership of weapons one can carry that are of the same degree of sophistication as the bad guys have — or the government has. The government? Yes, the government. That’s so because the Second Amendment was not written to protect the right to shoot deer. It was written to protect the right to shoot at tyrants and their agents when they have stolen liberty or property from the people. If you don’t believe me on this, then read the Declaration of Independence. It justifies violence against the British government because of such thefts. Governments are the greatest mass killers on the planet. Who can take without alarm any of their threats to emasculate our right to defend our personal liberties?

Agreed..   Thanks to Andrew Napolitano for reminding us how much our precious Second Amendment is protected.  Andrew is a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey.  He is the author of nine books on the U.S. Constitution.