Tag Archives: rights

Red Flag Laws

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Apart from their unconstitutionality—they ignore due process, equal protection, and privileges or immunities that are central tenets of our Constitution and of what it means to be an American—these laws don’t work on a petty practical level, either.

Illustrative of that are the mass shooting in Buffalo and especially the one on Independence Day in Highland Park.

In the latter case, police even entered the shooter’s home in 2019 and seized knives, only to return them later that same day.

According to Lake County officials, police had visited Crimo’s home twice in 2019 after he threatened to kill himself and his family. Police said they recovered knives from the home but no guns.
But, authorities pointed out, he responded no when asked if he felt like harming himself or others, and his father said the knives were his and were being stored in his son’s closet for safekeeping. Based on that information, the Highland Park police returned the knives to the father the same day.

Following that, at the end of 2019,

Crimo applied for a FOID [Firearms Owner Identification] card, according to the state police. Because he was under 21, the application had to be sponsored by a parent or guardian, according to state law.
“The application was sponsored by the subject’s father,” the agency said.
In January 2020, “There was insufficient basis to establish a clear and present danger to deny the FOID application” and Crimo was given a card, according to the state police.

Then,

Crimo passed four separate background checks to buy guns on June 9, 2020, July 18, 2020, July 31, 2020 and Sept. 20, 2021, the state police said.

Pushing for Red Flag laws is frivolous, nothing other than cynical virtue-signaling, and it’s a waste of taxpayer money for the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and too many Republican Party politicians to push them in government legislatures.

The Uniter Says…

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…to Hell with bipartisanship. Again.

Last time, President Joe Biden (D) wanted an “exception” to the Senate’s filibuster rule so he could get passed the Progressive-Democratic Party’s voting “rights” legislation on strict party lines—no bipartisanship wanted.

This time, Biden wants an “exception” to the Senate’s filibuster rule so Party can codify Roe v Wade in the law.

If the filibuster gets in the way, it’s like voting rights, it should be we provide an exception for this[.]

The Senate’s filibuster rule forces compromise and bipartisanship—a measure of unity—in legislation by requiring at least 10 members of the minority party to agree to the legislation.

To Hell with bipartisanship, Biden says. Pass Party’s legislation. Unification means everyone does it Party’s way.

California Progressive-Democrats Strike Again

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This time, it’s the California’s Attorney General, the Progressive-Democrat Rob Bonta, who released the personally identifiable information of thousands of California’s firearm owners and concealed carry permit holders.

In the name of transparency, he claims. Oh, and that much transparency was an accident, he claims.

The information “accidentally” released includes

the person’s full name, race, home address, date of birth, and date their permit was issued. The data also shows the type of permit issued, indicating if the permit holder is a member of law enforcement or a judge.

This is what Bonta said in his Press Release, put out last Monday, regarding his “transparency” move:

The dashboard [Bonta’s 2022 Firearms Dashboard Portal] is accessible though DOJ’s OpenJustice Data Platform. The announcement will improve transparency and information sharing for firearms-related data and includes broad enhancements to the platform to help the public access data on firearms in California, including information about the issuance of Concealed Carry Weapons (CCW) permits….

You bet he broadly enhanced public access to data about firearm ownership and concealed carry permit holders.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident. Bonta knows who is in the IT section of the California DoJ that he runs. He knows who did the software adjustment to release the data from the department’s concealed carry permit holder database. That those folks have not been fired for cause, much less arrested by his California Bureau of Investigation or Bureau of Firearms agents, speaks volumes about Bonta’s role in this attack on honest American citizens, who also are citizens of California.

That Bonta hasn’t resigned now that his release (yes, his release—he’s the one in charge; he’s the one who authorized the release) has been exposed says volumes about his continued approval of the release.

This is a continuation of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s attack on our 2nd Amendment rights, just a few days after the Supreme Court upheld them, explicitly, in striking down New York’s law requiring a citizen to get government permission to exercise his right by satisfying a government bureaucrat that he has a “need” and is a proper—in the bureaucrat’s eyes—citizen.

Update: Corrected the opening sentence, which had mistakenly omitted the first half due to a copy/paste fit of sloppiness.

Wuhan Virus Lethality in Children

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A thought on this. Using data from the CDC, Fox News points out that children

aged 0-17 make up about 22.3% of the US population but have accounted for about 0.1% of all Wuhan Virus [my term] deaths.

According to the CIA’s World Factbook, the US population is 337.3 million; those 22.3%, then, amount to 75.2 million children. According to worldometer, there have been (as of 25 Jun 22) a skosh over 1 million total deaths in the US from or related to the virus.

That works out to [0.001 x 1,000,000] 1,000 deaths among those children. Which works out to a mortality rate of a tiny skosh over 0.1% for children overall—not a likelihood given a case or a likelihood given an infection.

That puts the likelihood of a child dying from the Wuhan Virus down in the range of that child getting a serious side effect from one of the Virus’ vaccines.

That absolutely makes the decision to vaccinate a child a matter solely for the parent and doctor (and perhaps an older child) to decide and not for any government to require through CDC “guidelines.”

In fact, vaccinating a child really seems indicated only for those children with serious comorbidities which this virus might potentiate. That’s the only metric worth weighing against the (low) probability of one of those side effects.

“Rights” and Precedent

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There is considerable discussion concerning whether a constitutional right to an abortion existed and was taken away by the Supreme Court’s just released ruling on Dobbs or whether, as Justice Alito emphasized in his Dobbs opinion for the Court that such a right never existed, it was merely the creation of Roe and then claimed again in Casey.

And therein lies the point of this post.

There is no right to an abortion contained in our Constitution, whether couched in the 14th Amendment or in any other part of the document—not literally, not figuratively, not encompassed in any penumbra.

Nevertheless, the claimed right has been, and rightly so, the law of the land since the 1973 Roe ruling, as are all Supreme Court rulings the law of the land from the moment of publication of the ruling. But it’s not a very durable law.

That’s a problem with Court rulings, a problem closely analogous with Presidential executive actions: Executive Orders and the like. Any “right” created by a Court ruling can be withdrawn by a subsequent Court ruling, just as any Presidential executive action can be withdrawn by a subsequent President.

The rights acknowledged in our Constitution, in contrast, can only be undone by a supermajority of us American citizens, through a supermajority of our States.

A Supreme Court precedent should be deeply respected. However, as Justice Clarence noted in his Gamble v United States concurrence,

In my view, the Court’s typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions [whosever view of erroneous, I add]…over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law.

And [emphasis added]

This view of stare decisis follows directly from the Constitution’s supremacy over other sources of law—including our own precedents.

By their nature, no precedent can be the final word, else we’d have neither Brown nor Citizens United nor Janus, and we’d have only war to which to resort regarding rulings like Dred Scott and the war organizations like Ruth Sent Us and Jane’s Revenge currently threaten over Dobbs, that politicians like Chuck Schumer threatened if Court rulings didn’t go his way, that Cori Bush and Maxine Waters currently threaten, and that Federal government officials like Merrick Garland and Joe Biden indirectly threaten with their refusal to enforce Court rulings of which they personally disapprove.