Tag Archives: rights

Permit to Buy

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The Delaware legislature is trying again to infringe on American citizens’ right to keep and bear Arms; the Know Betters of the legislature are renewing their drive to require the State’s citizens—who, for those Progressive-Democrats not keeping up at home, also are American citizens—to get the State’s permission just to buy a firearm.

A proposal filed Wednesday in the state Senate would require prospective handgun owners to complete a state-authorized firearms training course and submit an application that would include fingerprinting and an extensive background check. If approved, Delaware’s Department of Safety and Homeland Security would issue a free 180-day permit.

A permit just to buy. The duration of this…requirement…is laid out in the proposed bill:

A handgun qualified purchaser permit is valid for a period of 180 days from the date of issuance….

I have no conceptual objection to requiring training on the firearm, so long as neither the training itself nor the cost of it, are constructed as barriers to the getting and subsequent keeping and bearing, and so long as any license (not permit to buy) is issued on a will-issue basis.

I do object to fingerprinting the prospective firearm keeper and bearer of his weapon. No government has any business keeping track of which of its citizens have weapons and which of them do not. That’s a need only with regard to criminals, and acquiring a firearm is not, by definition, a criminal act.

But beyond that, these worthies are carefully ignoring the key phrase in our Constitution’s 2nd Amendment [emphasis added]:

…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Plainly, getting Arms, including the purchase of one or more of them, is a necessary precondition to the keeping and bearing of them. Restrictions on buying a firearm—which is what a State-granted permission slip, of any duration, is—is just that infringement. No permit to buy, no matter its construction, is legitimate; such permission slips start out unconstitutional and they are incurably so throughout their existence.

 

The bill on offer can be read here.

ERIC Surveillance

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ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center) is an increasingly farther-Left standing organization that shares voter registration data among the member States, ostensibly so the States collectively have cleaner voter rolls that contain fewer ineligible registrants. Apparently, ERIC also shares those data with others than the member States, too, and does so in deliberate secrecy, without required permissions, and outside the center’s charter—for instance, with the Center for Election Innovation & Research, which got $70 million from the Leftist Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, just in time for the 2020 elections. I’m actually more concerned about another aspect of ERIC’s activities [emphasis in the original].

The authors [of a Heritage Foundation report] note concerns about ERIC forcing member states to engage in active voter registration activities, despite states already making it easy for citizens to register to vote. …the membership agreement forces states to send out notices essentially yearly (every 425 days, to be precise) to at least 95 percent of the individuals in a state who are potentially eligible to vote but who have not registered “inform[ing] them how to register to vote.”

How does a State know who is eligible to register but has not? Certainly, the needed data are generally publicly available, but they need explicitly to be sought out, collected, and then fused into an eligible-but-not-registered list. Why are States being required by ERIC to conduct this surveillance, instead of leaving that up to the citizens of each State to do or to refuse to do? Why is it any American government’s business why this or that American citizen chooses to register, or not? Why is it any American government’s role to hector any American citizen to engage in this lawful behavior rather than that one? What other government surveillance is this supposed Organizational Compact trying to get governments to carry out at its behest? For what purposes? Maybe more States should be leaving ERIC and leave the government surveillance of private citizens to the Progressive-Democratic Party-run States whose governing personnel actually think this level of surveillance is a good idea.

Ban Assault Weapons

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President Joe Biden (D) wants to ban assault weapons completely.

His Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Director Steve Dettelbach, testifying under oath before a House Appropriations subcommittee, flat refused to say what an assault weapon was when asked by Congressman Jake Ellzey (R, TX).

…if Congress wishes to take that up, I think Congress would have to do the work, but we would be there to provide technical assistance. I, unlike you, am not a firearms expert to the same extent as you maybe, but we have people at ATF who can talk about velocity of firearms, what damage different kinds of firearms cause, so that whatever determination you chose to make would be an informed one.

Weasel words. You define the term, Dettelbach said, we’ll “help.” After all, he could have provided his own definition; those same experts could have advised him as he prepared for his testimony.

Biden wants to ban, and his ATF honcho—the man and the agency responsible for “regulating” the weapons us American citizens choose to keep and bear—refuses to say what it is that this administration would ban.

The obvious, and only logical, conclusion from this deliberate obfuscation is that Biden and his fellow Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate members intend to ban all of our firearms.

Rogue Judge

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A couple of teachers had the impudence to demur from compulsory “antiracism training” imposed by their Springfield Public Schools district managers.

In response, US District Judge Douglas Harpool, of the Western District of Missouri, not only ruled against the teachers, he ordered them to pay $313,000 in legal costs for bothering the district, and he did this cavalierly disregarding their arguments and issuing his ruling via summary judgment—which means the court—Harpool—never really took the case up, or took it seriously. He wrote in pertinent part, as summarized by Just the News:

They have not provided evidence they were compelled to “speak favorably” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.

Never mind that the very parts that Harpool cited demonstrates the compulsory nature of the requirement not to speak unfavorably about the district’s “message” and not to remain unaffiliated or unassociated with the district’s “message.” That pressure to not be unaligned or to not speak unfavorably is exactly the compulsion to speak favorably and to align. The fact that the beratement went unchallenged by the program’s instructors or the district’s managers further emphasizes the compulsory nature of the district’s “message.”

This is a Federal judge who needs to be removed from the bench forthwith. He has shown himself not just incapable of, but openly refusing to, adjudicating a case objectively and on the basis of the facts and statute(s) presented. Instead, Harpool reigns over his court on the basis of his personal agenda.

Harpool’s ruling can be read here.

A String’s Attached

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President Joe Biden (D) and his DoEd Secretary Miguel Cardona are trying to rewrite the Title IX statute to bar States from categorically ban[ning] transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

Never mind that the actual statute, enacted those decades ago, is explicitly designed to give women a fair and reasonably equal opportunity to play sports: if a State school or a local school district has a men’s program, that school or district must fund and provide for a substantially similar program for women.

Now the Biden/Cardona DoEd is proposing a rule that would ignore the sex-based Title IX statute and require biological men be allowed to compete in women’s sports in those schools that get Federal funding.

The proposed rule would establish that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are[.]

Never mind that a transgender woman is a man by his biology, by his genes, by his XY chromosome pair.

Never mind that a transgender man is a woman by her biology, by her genes, by her XX chromosome pair.

This is the Biden administration’s open war on women.

My advice to the States: don’t take the Federal funds. The strings attached are more like chains.