Arms Keeping and Bearing “Reform”

The House passed a bill last December that greatly expands background checks and that mandates concealed-carry reciprocity among the several States.

The Senate should take up that bill without further delay and pass it as well.  With the much broader background checks, there’s no longer any rational argument for opposing concealed-carry reciprocity.

It’s a pipedream, though; there aren’t enough Progressive-Democrat Senators willing to vote for cloture.  The lack of progress is too important to them as a campaign issue.

3 thoughts on “Arms Keeping and Bearing “Reform”

  1. The Progressives want Tenth Amendment protection for their state’s desires to regulate (to whatever degree) the keeping and bearing of arms. However, the language of the amendment itself is clear –

    The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

    The Second Amendment, however, resolves the issue –

    A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

    “…nor prohibited by it to the states …” is trumped by “… shall not be infringed.” It doesn’t say shall not be infringed by Congress, but shall not be infringed. Period. And the Constitution remains the supreme law of the land, superseding state laws where the latter conflict.

    Or, at least, that’s how I thought it was supposed to work.

  2. “Extreme Risk TROs do not violate due process, since the orders are of short duration and must be followed by a full blown trial court hearing with notice and an opportunity to be heard. This has been well-established through constitutional challenges to domestic violence temporary restraining orders. That said, our President is massively overcompensating over the latest shooting. The fact of the matter is that even had such a law been on the books, the police, the school, and social services dropped the ball on Mr. Cruz. To make matters much worse, he has told two senators that national reciprocity should not be coupled with the FixNICS bill, “because we have to do something. But without connecting the two, as does the House bill, leverage is lost and the odds of overcoming a Democratic Party filibuster on the reciprocity bill is slim to none. I am reasonably certain that there will be no national reciprocity law passed this year, and if the midterms go as currently projected, with Democrats picking up a few key seats, reciprocity is dead.

    • I agree with you in principle, but I think you’re overstating the case.
      Last things first: …if the midterms go as currently projected, with Democrats picking up a few key seats, reciprocity is dead.
      Not dead, just set back. Nothing is ever final in politics or in legislation.
      The larger point is that a single failure of government or law enforcement–and I’m satisfied the Broward County failure is an isolated incident; the average police response time in urban areas, after all, is 3-5 minutes–is not a reason to not take corrective action. We just need to take care regarding that corrective action.
      IMNSHO, the proper corrective action is to arm trained teachers or other staff (taking schools as a canonical example) so that the true first responders, those already on scene, can begin responding inside those 3-5 minutes, which in the present instant also would have filled in the delay caused by the BSO’s failure to perform.
      I keep looking for an answer from those who want gun controls expanded to this kind of question: how many of those murdered students in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School would be alive and how many of those injured would be unharmed today had there been an armed responder or two or three among the school’s teachers and staff who could have answered Cruz within those 3-5–or 30-ish–minutes before the police arrived?
      Eric Hines

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