Category Archives: rights

Private Citizens and Firearms Licensing in Israel

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Israel has some firearms licensing requirements that would greatly please the Leftists in our nation. The particular requirement of interest to me is this one:

Firearm licenses for private citizens in Israel are typically only granted to individuals who can prove a need for extra security in their line of work or daily life.

And those who do succeed in getting licenses are limited to 100 rounds of ammunition at any one time.

Israeli citizens live in a small nation surrounded by terrorists that routinely and frequently attack that nation, particularly targeting civilians and civilian gathering spots. That’s their need for extra security.

In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ current butchery, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is relaxing the nation’s gun control laws. More permanent and broader reaching relaxation/easier access to firearms for the citizenry may be in the offing.

Such moves are late, but that’s better than never. If they actually happen.

Bad Mistake

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Federal DC District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over former President and current Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s (R) trial on “election charges,” has issued a gag order limiting what Trump is allowed to say on matters associated with that trial. Her gag order should be found, on appeal, to be strongly unconstitutional—based on Chutkan’s own characterization of her order.

His presidential candidacy does not give him carte blanche to vilify public servants who are simply doing their jobs[.]

Trump’s status as a Presidential candidate is wholly irrelevant to this. Trump’s status as an American citizen is.

Here is what the Right to Petition Clause of the First Amendment of our Constitution says:

Congress shall make no law…abridging…the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Chutkan’s public servants are, most assuredly, Government officials, and Citizen (and Presidential candidate) Trump, most assuredly, is allowed to petition them, including through criticism, without regard to how prettily or rudely he couches his phrases.

That same Amendment also has this Free Speech Clause:

Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech

Citizen (and Presidential candidate) Trump, most assuredly, is allowed to speak about, as well as to, those same public servants, (and any other person, Government official or not) whether he does so with pretty words that suit Chutkan’s personal preference or with plainer words.

Chutkan’s characterization is her motive for issuing her gag order, and that motive disqualifies her order on its face: it was issued in bad faith, solely to satisfy her personal definition of propriety. It has nothing to do with any material or potentially prejudicial impact on the ongoing case, which is the sole reason for issuing any gag order.

The Way to End Racism is to Stop Doing Racism

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And that includes ending racial gerrymandering.

On Friday a Fifth Circuit panel heard arguments in a Voting Rights Act lawsuit (Robinson v Ardoin) that seeks to force Louisiana to draw a second majority-minority Congressional district. The case was put on pause while the Justices considered a challenge to Alabama’s map. Now the plaintiffs are using the Court’s Alabama ruling (Allen v Milligan) to advance an extreme racial gerrymander.

Never mind the 14th Amendment’s injunction that nor shall any State…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Or the 15th Amendment’s Art I:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Or the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2, which prohibits election practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race.

The 14th Amendment bars discrimination on the basis of race—which setting up representational districts explicitly to favor one race over others does. The 15th Amendment makes that even more explicit: favoring one person’s right to vote over another’s explicitly abridges that other person’s right to vote.

As if those Amendments weren’t clear enough—and apparently social justice warriors in the general population and even our courts’ activist judges and Justices can’t read—the VRA is explicitly explicit on the matter.

The Supreme Court is badly mistaken in Allen. Either all American citizens are equal under law, or we’re not. Creating a legislature’s representation districts to favor one group of Americans over other groups is one of the last bastions of racism in our nation.

Favoring Illegal Aliens over American Citizens

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That’s the position of Illinois’ Progressive-Democratic Party Governor JB Pritzker.

We have taken some of the programs that have pre-existed the crisis and adjusted them to help with the migrant crisis. Let me give you one example, our rental assistance program. We have provided some of that rental assistance money, which wasn’t originally intended to be about asylum seekers, for this challenge.

Pritzker is deliberately, cynically taking money intended to help American citizens, Illinois citizens, who are economically straitened and using it for illegal aliens instead. Because illegals are more important than citizens.

This is yet another example of the contempt for ordinary Americans that the Progressive-Democratic Party has. Keep this in mind in November 2024.

Choosing not to Understand

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The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has broadened an existing injunction that bars various Federal agencies from colluding with social media to censor speech to include the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The court wrote, in part,

CISA used its frequent interactions with social-media platforms to push them to adopt more restrictive policies on censoring election-related speech. And CISA officials affirmatively told the platforms whether the content they had “switchboarded” was true or false….
Thus, when the platforms acted to censor CISA-switchboarded content, they did not do so independently. Rather, the platforms’ censorship decisions were made under policies that CISA has pressured them into adopting and based on CISA’s determination of the veracity of the flagged information. Thus, CISA likely significantly encouraged the platforms’ content-moderation decisions and thereby violated the First Amendment[.]

Here’s the Federal government’s overt decision to not understand the matter of free speech as it appeals the ruling to the Supreme Court [paraphrased by Fox News]:

the government faced “irreparable harm” because [5th Circuit Federal Judge Terry, who ordered the first injunction] Doughty’s order may prevent the federal government from “working with social media companies on initiatives to prevent grave harm to the American people and our democratic processes.

This is, to use the legal jargon’s term, a steaming crock. The order in no way bars the Federal government—its bureaucrats and its political appointees—from working with social media companies. It only bars the Federal government’s from defining what speech constitutes “grave harm,” and it bars those personnel from pressuring social media to implement those definitions and then to censor speech based on those definitions.

The order in no way bars the Federal government’s personnel from working with social media companies to publish, also (not instead of), those folks’ own, answering, speech that debates the information an original speaker has offered and with which the Federal government’s bureaucrats or politicians disagree.

The Biden administration personnel know that full well; hence their conscious decision to pretend to not understand the basic principle of free speech and why the Federal government is Constitutionally barred from interfering with it. The grave harm stems from those government personnel’s attempt to disregard the First Amendment.

The 5th Circuit’s ruling can be read here.