Arms and the Law

Hardaway v. Nigrelli, W.D.N.Y. A victory for FPC and SAF. Plaintiffs are clerics who want to carry to protect their churches. The court had earlier issued a temporary restraining order against enforcement of the ban, and now elevates that to a preliminary injunction (which usually turns into a permanent injunction once the trial is finished -- issuing a PI requires finding that the movant is likely to win on the trial).

The 2A analysis starts about p. 25. Text, history, and tradition, and the only examples defendants could find of bans in churches come from 1870 and later.

One-time NRA director, and life-long activist Bob Baer, of the Houston area, has passed on. He and Jim Norell and I spent many an hour on the telephone over the years. Now he and Jim are gone.

Around 2000, Bob played a big role in reawakening the Waco tragedy.

Our own media would never tell us the dark side of Sen. Ted Kennedy. It's more than Chappaquiddick.

"My legislation says there can be no more than eight bullets in a round."

Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue and he meant to say "no more than eight bullets in a pound." That is, "a ten gauge is all you need for self-defense and sport, no eight gauges!"

It's against Sheriff Laurie Smith, of Santa Clara County, CA. One of her major donors got a carry permit even though he left blank the box for explaining his need, while other applicants never even got a reply.

3 teens (one, it turns out, wanted for robbery) try to enter a school with guns. The security guard calls 911 and locks down.

Then an assistant principal lets them thru the first set of doors "because it was unsafe to be outside because I saw police officers."

Instead of having the assistant publicly flogged, the school board seems to think his decision was understandable: "The staff member made a split-second decision that the individual thought was the best way to keep students and staff safe."

They've brought on Steve Gutowski as commentator on the issue. Which is driving Brady Campaign insane! Because, of course, the last thing they want is real debate.

The FBI says about 4% of the time. John Lott does a more comprehensive study and concludes it's more like 34%, and in certain settings over 50%.

Mark Smith discusses it here. Post Bruen, it's a whole new legal day!

Clayton Cramer: "I Will Take Seriously Government Concern About Machine Guns in Private Hands When the Government Shows It Is Similarly Concerned" It sounds like the government lost track of upwards of a thousand M-4s, and shipped them to someone who thought he was buying empty rifle crates.

Oh, well, considering how many thousand we left behind in Iraq, this is minor.

I just returned from it, you can access the videos on their YouTube channel. Here's one five-hour segment.

Some sessions were very interesting. One speaker has an organization devoted to giving teachers first-aid training and equipment. He points out one school shooting where nobody knew what to do to save a student who was hit, they were even applying a defibrillator when there was no reason to do so. The organization also trains armed teachers. He said just being armed is only the beginning, they should also be organized so that each goes to a critical place or a choke point, and have some training in action shooting so they don't freeze up. His group uses guns that fire small capsules at enough speed to hurt, because messing up should hurt, and pain is a powerful aid to memory.

Josh Blackman has a legal obit on the good judge. He wrote the DC Circuit opinion in Parker v. DC, which thereby became Heller v. DC. That opinion, by splitting with all the other circuits, and by striking down a gun law, became a perfect vehicle for a Supreme Court case.

Irony: he spoke at a gathering which I attended, and said that when he was up for a Supreme Court nomination, NRA opposed him. He had been asked if he'd support a "Saturday Night Special" ban (which was the fad of gun control groups then), and replied he might, if anyone could tell him what a SNS was. This was interpreted as an anti-gun answer, when it was quite the opposite. Thus he never sat on the Supreme Court, but, he added, if he had we might not have gotten Heller (meaning he wouldn't have been in the DC Circuit to generate the Circuit split).

Clayton Cramer has the story.

Story here. The good guy saw another person waving a gun and shouting threats after pistol-whipping another person in his rage. The good guy, Lloyd Muldrow, subdued and disarmed the offender and held him for police. Muldrow had a handgun, with a Virginia but not a Maryland permit to carry, and police arrested him.

(The article says he was arrested for carrying within 100 feet of a public building. Bruen specifically says that while "sensitive place" limitations may be constitutional, they must be strictly limited and find an analogy in restrictions that were in place at the time of the framing. The Maryland statute, if applied not just to a government building, but to an area of 100 feet around it, and even to persons inside other buildings within that radius, would seem clearly unconstitutional).

Donations for his defense can be sent to his GiveSendGo page.

US v. Quiroz, W.D. Tex. The judge does a good job, and is quite faithful to Bruen. I just worry that too faithful an application might lead to results that could lead a later Court to abandon "text, history, and tradition" as unworkable.

UPDATE: Wikipedia indicates that Judge Counts is an interesting judge. Made a magistrate judge in 2009, Obama nominated him for district judge in 2016; it failed to be confirmed. A year later Trump nominated him, and this was confirmed by the Senate 96-0 in 2018.

I just received this from Steve Halbrook:

Some of you might be interested in our 3rd Annual Firearms Law in Virginia Seminar 2022, Oct. 14, https://www.vacle.org/product.aspx?zpid=7674. It's both in-person and remote. Among other speakers, we'll have Virginia Supreme Court Justice Stephen McCullough, Kyle Rittenhouse attorney Mark Richards, Fairfax Circuit Judge Richard Gardiner, Erin Murphy of Clement & Murphy, ATF Counsel James Vann, and myself. CLE credit approved for VA and DC.

Story here. 10 dead and 15 wounded.

The War on Guns has the story. To register one, you must also send a photo of it.

I bet they are trying to avoid what happened during the 1986 ban on registering newly-made full autos. As the deadline approached, makers of full autos, realizing prices would skyrocket once the ban went into effect, began rushing out and registering receivers. Those who made folded receivers, ones bent out of sheet metal, stamped out as many pieces of sheet metal as they could, stamped them with a serial number, and registered them without finishing them as receivers, then finished making them after registration. As I recall, there was one company that didn't even bother with that, they just registered a lot of serial numbers, then made the receiver and serial numbered them later.

As part of the state's "massive resistance" to the Court's enforcement of the Second Amendment, a restrictive carry bill was proposed in the legislature. Last night it defeated or died, together with another bill to add taxes to firearm sales.

With the Court's striking of "good cause" requirements, this means that Californians now can get carry permits and carry, a big loss for the other side!

Big hat tip to reader Andrew Endsley...

From the Daily Mail. If you want insightful news about the U.S., read the British papers. In the days when I was on the east coast, I monitored American elections over the BBC shortwave.