Tag Archives: freedom

“Orderly Implementation”

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Judge Katherine Menendez, of the Federal District of Minnesota, has ruled a Minnesota State law barring 18-20-yr-olds from obtaining handgun carry permits in Minnesota to be unconstitutional.

Based on a careful review of the record, the court finds that defendants have failed to identify analogous regulations that show a historical tradition in America of depriving 18- to 20-year-olds the right to publicly carry a handgun for self-defense. As a result, the age requirement prohibiting persons between the ages of 18 and 20 from obtaining such a permit to carry violates the Second Amendment.

She based that argument on the Supreme Court’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v Bruen ruling in which the Court explicitly required a showing of a national history of regulation of the type contemplated in this or that gun control legislation.

What’s of particular interest here, though, is Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s reaction to Menendez’ ruling. He wants the judge to stay her ruling pending a potential State appeal, or in the alternative, a stay for 60 days to allow for its orderly implementation.

The first is common enough and not entirely unreasonable. It’s normal to stay a ruling that has a chance of being overruled on appeal in order to prevent the harm that can be done to the ultimately winning side before it wins the appeal.

The last is utterly disingenuous, though. It doesn’t take 60 days to stop blocking 18-20-yr-olds from exercising their Constitutional rights. It doesn’t take a day to do that, with the possible exception of a Sunday, when legal firearm sellers are closed and might need until Monday to receive the rescission of the State law. After all, nothing has changed in any of the other, still in place, requirements surrounding obtaining a firearm; all that’s happening is the removal of one of those requirements.

FISA Revamp

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Congress may be moving to revamp the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which among other things, creates a secret Federal court that empirically allows the Federal government to spy on American citizens in the United States—one of whom was a representative of citizens of Illinois whom they had elected to Congress—without a warrant.

[Congressman Austin, R-GA] Scott said lawmakers on the committee want to address who in government can query the database, who can be targeted and who must sign off on such warrantless surveillance. He also suggested there is some support for adding lawyers to the secretive process to help defend the rights of Americans who are being surveilled without their knowledge.

The problem with those first three…suggestions…is that there already are limits on who can query, who can be targeted, and who must sign off, and each of those limits have been routinely violated by FBI and intelligence personnel. There’s no reason to believe that new limits won’t similarly be blithely ignored.

The problem with that last is even larger: the secret process still would be secret, the lawyers supposedly defending the targeted Americans’ rights would be secret, they would be appointed by the same government that has been abusing FISA surveillance powers right along, and there would be no way for us American citizens to assess the skill with which those “defense” lawyers defend, or even their level of zeal.

It’s promising that there is finally a recognition that the FISA process is flawed in some way.

However, what’s truly required is to abolish altogether the Star Chamber that is the secret FISA Court. Scott made the case for abolishment—although he didn’t intend that—when he told JtN that there was clear evidence that the law’s past safeguards have been breached by the FBI and intel agencies. Given that, there’s no reason to believe those FBI and intel agency personnel won’t “breach” any new safeguards, also.

Illinois and the 2nd Amendment

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In a Just the News article concerning an Illinois district judge’s impending order declaring unconstitutional that State’s Progressive-Democratic Party-run government ban on a broad range of firearms and the requirement for citizens to register with that government those firearms they already possess, there’s this closing paragraph.

In federal court, four cases consolidated in the Southern District of Illinois have a hearing set for April 12. The state filed its response to a motion for a preliminary injunction Thursday arguing the ban addresses dangerous and unusual weapons the Founders of the US Constitution couldnt imagine in the 18th Century. Plaintiffs argue the law violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Which leads me to ask: what would be more dangerous than privately owned artillery and sea-going combat ships? Yet those weapons were privately owned and contributed heavily to the war effort in our Revolution against another government that was, among other things, seeking to disarm us.

For the benefit of those Illinois Progressive-Democrats, here is the 2nd Amendment:

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.

Those personages should note carefully that there are no caveats in that short sentence. In particular, there is no caveat for “Arms of which Government disapproves from time to time.”

Gun Control and Racism

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Jacob Gershwin opened his Wall Street Journal piece on gun control with this lede:

Historical, racist gun laws are taking on new relevance in legal battles over modern-day gun regulations, following a Supreme Court ruling that expanded the right to bear arms.

He followed up [emphasis added]:

In the 1700s and 1800s, states across the country passed laws to keep guns out of the hands of slaves, free Black people, Native Americans and Catholics. Such discriminatory gun restrictions would be unconstitutional today, but they have entered the gun-rights debate as judges look to apply the Supreme Court’s decision last June that said gun restrictions must be anchored in historical traditions.

Now, despicably, many Federal and State government “lawyers” are claiming that those old, ugly, and by-design racist and anti-religion—those Evil Catholics—are part of that historical tradition as they continue their efforts to disarm all of us average Americans, in toto. US prosecutors in front of an appellate court:

They [[those racist gun control laws] nevertheless show that the Framers understood that legislatures could make such judgments to categorically disarm groups of people deemed to be dangerous.

Dangerous groups of Americans like those of us who might want to demur from Government behaviors, behaviors like the IRS targeting conservative American political groups, like the Department of Justice targeting mothers disputing with local school boards as domestic terrorists, like the FBI targeting traditional Catholics (those folks again…) as right-wing extremists and “investigating” them.

What prosecutors like those so carefully ignore is that that prior set of laws, that prior “tradition,” was wholly erased from the American body politic—the honest body politic—by the Civil War, the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments, and the recognition that all Americans are equal under American law—under all American laws.

For those persecutors prosecutors to argue that those racist gun control laws are somehow still part of our historical traditions is for them to ignore critical parts of gun control law history: the part that had post-Civil War South and too many jurisdictions in the North enacting gun control laws explicitly to disarm and keep unarmed and helpless black Americans—freed and newly freed—along with their white supporters against depredations, that ranged from rape through lynching, at the hands of racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.

Those prosecutors are showing their own invidious racist bent.

Should be Good for Us

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Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to start another arms race, which of necessity includes a technology race and a matching of economic strengths.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia would suspend its participation in the last remaining nuclear-arms treaty between Moscow and Washington, a vestige of the security architecture that has helped keep the peace for decades.

Despite the outcomes of Progressive-Democrat Party policies, we still have the strongest economy in the world, with lots of potential for getting even stronger, and we still have the largest economy in the world, with lots of potential for getting even larger. That feeds into our ability to innovate more rapidly than our competitors or our enemies, and so more rapidly in technology arenas, including weapons and cyber tech. And both our economic and technical capabilities potentiate our ability to produce existing weapons and the ammunition and logistics systems needed for them faster than our competitors or our enemies, and to more quickly develop new weapons and get them deployed in useful numbers.

We dissolved the USSR with that nation’s initiation of its late-stage arms race. Russia’s economic and technological establishment is even more fragile.

The People’s Republic of China? That nation is stronger than Russia, but not as strong—still—as the USSR was.

There’s this, too:

An entente between the two would replicate their Cold War anti-Western partnership with one significant difference, that Beijing rather than Moscow would be the dominant partner.

That prior entente was one in which the two nations routinely exchanged gunfire across their border, especially along the Amur River. One factor leading to those exchanges is the PRC’s—and Kuomintang China, and emperor-ist China and on back—longstanding holding that Siberia belongs to China and that Russia stole it centuries ago. This time around, the PRC is not only the dominant partner, it’s much more dominant than was the USSR in that prior arrangement. And the PRC still insists that Siberia is Chinese. Gunfire exchanges would be much more dangerous for Russia, although it would bleed the PLA, also.

That’s a risk worth taking seriously, but this is the much more likely outcome:

The prospect of the two great autocratic powers that dominate the Eurasian landmass moving closer together carries risks for Beijing. It would probably force European countries that now are hoping to maintain close commercial ties with China to move more decisively toward Washington, on which they depend for security. If that happened, geopolitical competition between the West (along with Asian democracies such as Japan and South Korea) and the Moscow-Beijing axis would solidify.

And that also would redound to the benefit of the US and to the West in general, for all the reasons listed earlier.

Bring it.