Tag Archives: 2A

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Daily Broadside | The DOJ Sets Up A Soviet-Style Snitch Line

From PJ Media comes word that the feds have just announced and funded the “National Extreme Risk Protection Order Resource Center.”

Joe Biden apparently thinks he isn’t going to make it to a second term. On Saturday, his attorney general announced a new resource program for Red Flag laws across America that will go on long after Biden is no longer in the White House.

Congressman Thomas Massie sounded the alarm, asking: “What the hell is this evil? A Federal Red Flag center; We did not authorize this. Announced, of course, just hours after the omnibus passes.”

So unelected bureaucrats are now making law and funding it out of the money Congress voted to give them? The out-of-control ring masters are planning to disarm all of the junta’s enemies. That means all white, conservative, right wing, extremist, Christian Nationalist, MAGA Republican men who object to a government that is trampling their God-given rights.

Red flag laws sound reasonable, don’t they, considering how often gun violence is preceded by the perpetrators dropping blatant warning signs of murderous intent (signs which the FBI and DHS then ignore)? But make no mistake – red flag laws, which enable authorities to disarm someone who has been deemed a potential gun violence threat by family members or others in close contact with the “suspect,” will be used to target political enemies of the Biden administration. Under the guise (as usual) of keeping Americans safe, the government will exploit these laws in totalitarian ways.

Own a MAGA hat or a Gadsden flag? The Biden administration sees you as a potential danger. Complain about woke schoolroom indoctrination at school board meetings? The FBI already considers you a domestic terrorist. Post support on social media for the J6 political prisoners? You’re a threat to American “democracy” (i.e. Democrat one-party hegemony). Does anyone doubt that the government will use red flag laws to neuter such “threats”?

Who decides who “poses” a threat? Who decides what constitutes a threat? They’ve already demonized whites, “MAGA” Republicans, “deplorables” and “bitter clingers,” anti-vaxxers, hoax-busters and others as the greatest threat to the country since sliced bread or something.

Red flag laws are unconstitutional because they offer no due process. Authorities can show up to take your lawfully purchased weapons based on a report from anyone, and you don’t get them back until the authorities say so.

If you have a firearm, you best be quiet about it.

The potential danger and violence that red flag laws pose is real.

These imposters in the federal government — they’re American in name only — intend to disarm the populace in the interest of “public safety.” Safety is a disingenuous head fake.

The truth is that these left-wing cultural Marxists and their enablers in the media and our formerly great institutions are the true threat to a safe and stable society.

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Daily Broadside | Writing More Laws Won’t Solve the Problem. Plus You’re Trampling My Rights

Sorry I was AWOL last week. Lots of factors at play. Upside was keeping my eyes off the screen; downside was a lapse in my snappy, incisive commentary on the circus that is the United States of America these days.

I happen to live in Illinois and our esteemed governor, JB Pritzker, signed a broad ranging “assault weapons” ban in January this year that requires owners of any guns on the banned list to register them with the authorities by December 31, 2023. They can keep such guns (how benevolent! how gracious!) but if that person doesn’t register them with the Illinois State Police before the end of this year, they risk being fined or jailed or both.

This is, of course, an extreme infringement on our Second Amendment rights: “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.”

INFRINGE, verb
1 : to encroach upon in a way that violates law or the rights of another

Whenever there is some kind of law or regulation enacted on the ownership of firearms, there you have an infringement. Making me fill out paperwork and register with the government is an infringement on my right to “keep and bear arms.” Making me pay a fee in order to own a gun is an infringement. A “right” in its purest form is not something that a government bestows or manages, but something that I already have, free and clear from government interference.

Yet that doesn’t stop the “””elected””” bureaucrats from trying to manage speech, religion, guns or any of a dozen other things that the US Constitution guarantees to its citizens.

Illinois citizens are fighting back.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – A firearms retailer and a national gun rights group have filed an emergency plea with the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to block Illinois’ assault weapons ban.

The plea argues that law-abiding citizens in Illinois are facing irreparable injury as their fundamental right to keep and bear arms is being infringed.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied an emergency request for an injunction made earlier this year. I’m not overly confident that this will fare any better.

Meanwhile, the Illinois State Police is urging gun owners in the state to register their assault-style weapons in compliance with the Protect Illinois Communities Act. The legislation prohibits the sale of 170 firearms, but owners of previously possessed weapons can maintain them if they are registered with the state before January 1, 2024.

This is where it gets interesting. The Illinois State Police are urging Illinoisians to register their guns, but Illinois sheriffs are not being so supportive.

At least 74 Illinois sheriff’s departments vow to defy state assault weapons ban
The sheriffs say they believe the law violates the Second Amendment.

By Peter Charalambous
January 13, 2023, 6:01 PM

Just days after Illinois became the ninth U.S. state to ban assault rifles, the state already hit a roadblock to implementing the law: defiant sheriff’s offices.

At least 74 Illinois sheriff’s departments have publicly vowed to defy elements of a recent gun-control law signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker, which banned assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and switches. The offices have vowed to not check if weapons are registered with the state or house individuals arrested only for not complying with the law.

You might pass the legislation, but enforcing it is a whole other world.

I don’t support this legislation. It came on the heels of a heinous crime in a community not far from where I live, as described in the Response in Opposition to Renewed Application for Injunction Pending Review filed with the U.S. Supreme Court by the City of Naperville and the State of Illinois.

“On July 4, 2022, a shooter armed with a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle and 30-round magazines opened fire on an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois. This weapon made it possible for the shooter to fire 83 rounds in less than a minute, killing 7 and wounding 48. A Highland Park ordinance prohibited the sale of assault weapons, but the shooter had legally purchased the murder weapon elsewhere in llinois.”

Yes, a heinous crime committed by a kid who bought the gun legally. The reaction by our state legislators—the Democrats—is to ban anyone and everyone from having any gun they deem an “assault weapon” so that such crimes are no longer committed.

A noble goal, but impossible to achieve. All they’re doing is stripping law-abiding citizens of their rights. The problem isn’t the gun; the problem is the person who’s using the gun.

This is where we try to use laws to tame the human heart—an impossible task. The only thing that can change a heart is the love of Christ, and that can’t be legislated.

For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. (Romans 7:5-6)

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Daily Broadside | 80 Illinois Sheriffs Won’t Enforce New Gun Ban

About a week ago or so I wrote about the new Illinois law that bans the sale of military-style firearms, despite it being clearly unconstitutional. At the end of the column, I said that Democrats use lawfare to make citizens sue for their rights.

Legal challenges have already been filed against the law, which we thought might be our only recourse, but lo and behold, sheriffs in 80 Illinois counties have vowed to not enforce the law. They have all issued similar statements in explaining their decisions. For example, here is the statement that Monroe County, Ill., Sheriff Neal Rohlfing issued.

Part of my duties that I accepted upon being sworn into office was to protect the rights provided to all of us, in the Constitution. One of those enumerated rights is the right of the people to keep and bear arms provided under the 2nd Amendment.

The right to keep and bear arms for defense of life, liberty and property is regarded as an inalienable right by the people.

I, among many others, believe that HB 5471 is a clear violation of the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution.

Therefore, as the custodian of the jail and chief law enforcement official for Monroe County, that neither myself nor my office will be checking to ensure that lawful gun owners register their weapons with the State, nor will be arresting or housing law abiding individuals that have been arrested solely with non-compliance of this Act.

These sheriffs have obviously banded together to defy Pritzker and are turning it into a conflict between enforcing state law and protecting the Constitution of the United States. The state may not infringe on the rights of the people through the law, and the police may not infringe on them through enforcement.

Here’s a map of the counties declining to enforce the gun ban law, effectively making themselves sanctuary counties.

Map of counties of Illinois which will and will not be enforcing Illinois’s new Assault Weapon Ban from MapPorn

This of course did not sit well with the hard-left, anti-Constitutional Pritzker, one of the many governors who shut down their states during COVID and kept renewing their emergency powers.

Gov. JB Pritzker warned that law enforcement “will in fact do their job” on enforcing Illinois’ new gun ban or else they “won’t be in their job” as some sheriffs have announced they will not enforce it.

The Illinois sheriffs are showing us one way through the constant barrage of anti-constitutional overreach by government at all levels, whether local, state or federal. Just like certain cities and states declared they were “sanctuary cities” where they would not enforce federal law concerning illegal aliens and turning them over to ICE, so the same tactic can be used by those who respect the Constitution of the United States.

How this plays out over the next year will be a good test of this strategy.

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Daily Broadside | What About ‘Shall Not Be Infringed’ Do You Not Understand?

Daily Verse | Job 36:16
“He is wooing you from the jaws of distress to a spacious place free from restriction, to the comfort of your table laden with choice food.”

Tuesday’s Reading: Job 38-39

There have been a handful of dreadful shootings over the last few weeks, including the NYC subway shooting, the racially-motivated bloodbath in a Buffalo, NY grocery store, and the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. There have also been several smaller, “one-off” shootings.

None of them should have happened. They aren’t what our Founders envisioned when they enshrined the right to be armed in our U.S. Constitution. What they envisioned was the right of the people to protect themselves from a tyrannical government.

America has a problem. We are guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms. But we are no longer the society in which that right was declared.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

I’ve quoted this from Adams before, but I’ll keep doing so because the more I sit with it, the more profound it is. The Founding Fathers knew that freedom without virtue is license. If there’s anything that describes our society today, it’s “license.” And license is only a step removed from anarchy. All restraints, all standards, all guidelines are being thrown off in order to indulge our most naked desires or to give ourselves over to the darkest corners of our inner life.

When people do not accept divine guidance, they run wild. But whoever obeys the law is joyful.
— Proverbs 29:18 (New Living Translation)

Yet the Founders took the risk and bestowed on us our inalienable rights, including the right to keep and bear arms.

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. — Second Amendment, U.S. Constitution

Brandon is going on these days about the Second Amendment not being “absolute.” (Actually, he has said that “There’s no amendment that’s absolute.”) What he means by that with 2A is that there were always some kind of limits on what “Arms” a person could keep and bear. His now (several times) debunked example is that private citizens couldn’t own a cannon.

I’m not a constitutional scholar, but a straight-forward reading of the text seems to be absolute. The modal verb “shall not” is absolute. My right to keep and carry (bear) an arm may not, will not, cannot, shall not be infringed.

“Infringed” here means to limit, to undermine, to encroach upon.

Yet that doesn’t keep the illiterati (constitutionally speaking) from their efforts.

Rep. Donald Beyer (D-Va.), who sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, is looking to put a 1,000% excise tax on AR-15-type rifles as a means of making them less affordable to the public.

“What it’s intended to do is provide another creative pathway to actually make some sensible gun control happen,” Beyer told Business Insider. “We think that a 1,000% fee on assault weapons is just the kind of restrictive measure that creates enough fiscal impact to qualify for reconciliation.”

With the affected guns ranging in price from $500 to $2000, the tax could add as much as $20,000 to the final sale price of the weapons. While bullets would not be taxed at the high rate, high-capacity magazines would be.

Hey Don, what is it about “shall not be infringed” do you not understand? He says, right there in his quote, that it “is just the kind of restrictive measure” they want. To restrict means to limit and 2A says, absolutely, that the government SHALL NOT do that.

Every time another “gun control” law is passed or another “gun free zone” is created, our absolute right to be armed is infringed upon. In other words, a case could be made that such laws or regulations are illegal.

Now, I’m not an absolutist in the extreme. Given that we are now an immoral and irreligious people who no longer view self-control and an orderly society as virtuous, we may have to admit that some regulations are in our best interest.

But let’s be honest: regulations don’t control the heart or behavior. At best they only tell us what is “legal” and what the penalties are for breaking the law. And that’s a poor substitute for personal virtue and responsibility. Take California for example:

An FBI report on ‘Active Shooter Incidents’ in 2021 shows that California was the number one state for such incidents, with six incidents total.

California is also number one for gun law strength, the Mike Bloomberg-affiliated Everytown for Gun Safety noted …

… California has universal background checks, an “assault weapons” ban, a “high capacity” magazine ban, a 10-day waiting period on gun purchases, a red flag law, gun registration requirements, a “good cause” requirement for concealed carry permit issuance, a ban on carrying a gun on a college campus for self-defense, a ban on K-12 teachers being armed on campus for classroom defense, a background check requirement for ammunition purchases, and a limit on the number of guns a law-abiding citizen can purchase in a given month, among other controls.

All potentially illegal controls, I might add, because they violate the people’s right to “keep and bear Arms.” But the people in positions of power don’t care about our rights. They only care about getting and keeping power.

None of the gun control laws on the books stopped any of the killers I mentioned at the outset. And adding more laws—apart from confiscating all of our guns, which is the goal—would have done nothing more to prevent the tragedies.

Frankly, the driving force behind all the “gun control” laws is to make it as difficult to own a firearm as possible, if not make it outright impossible. Jack the price of a firearm up by 1000% and you can plausibly deny that you’re infringing on anyone’s right to keep and bear Arms. “I’m not saying you can’t keep and bear a weapon; of course you can. I’m just going to make it so expensive that most people won’t be able to.”

That’s infringement.

Worse still is a growing attitude of contempt for the U.S. Constitution. Here’s Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) expressing his feelings about constitutional rights:

“… so spare me the bullshit about constitutional rights.” Really? Why is this guy in Congress? Didn’t he take an oath to protect and defend the constitution of the United States when he took office?

Then there’s Brandon.

This is what the erosion of liberty looks like. When you have “representatives” in the legislature and executive branch who have contempt for the very ideas they swore to protect, it’s a house of cards.

And that’s an infringement on the security of our rights as citizens.