Freedom

I Carry a Gun Every Day

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Every day I get up and put on a gun. It’s part of my daily routine. No different from making coffee or feeding the dogs before I leave for work.

There is so much misinformation about who that makes me. I’m a “gun nut.” I’m one of “those right-wing Second Amendment people.” I’m the scourge of the earth to some.

Funny how that works.

They don’t even know me but they are worried that I’m what’s wrong with this country, this state and this city I call home. I walk among them and they don’t even know it. I’m the guy in the jeans and Under Armour shirt, the guy in the $200 sport coat and $125 shoes, the guy in Nike pants and a hoodie, and some days I’m the guy with dirty hands from working in the yard, but most of all I’m the guy they never see.

Oh, they acknowledge me sometimes. When I hold the door for them because my parents raised me that way. When I let them go ahead of me in line at the gas station because they seem to be in a hurry. When I pick up their baby’s pacifier in the aisle at the grocery store and hand it back to them because it fell out and they didn’t notice. But they don’t see me. I’m just another guy in the store with things in my hand. But only my left hand. I don’t carry things in my right hand. Not at the store. Not in public.

Why? Because I’m “that guy.” I know that bad things happen. Every day. Everywhere. So I try to be aware. I try to study my surroundings. I expect to not see it coming every time. I expect that evil may show up while I’m shopping or walking through the mall or eating at a restaurant. It doesn’t make me crazy. It doesn’t make me paranoid. It simply makes me aware. Unlike a lot of people that walk by me every day. Looking at their phones, their notes, their purses, or any of the other distractions that plague us. I get it.

I also get that there are wolves. Hungry. Lean. Skilled at their trade. Studying you. Studying me. They like you. They don’t like me. I see them at the mall. I see them at the gas station. I see them right here in this town. Do they know I’m armed? No, they don’t. They know that I’m aware. I look at them. Kill them with kindness. It’s a like a mutual agreement. I see you; you see me. Let’s not kid each other.

It’s weird in a way. The man and his friend in the store that looked all around and even glanced at the camera above us — those guys see me. I’m aware that the door is over there. I’m aware that the coffee pot is within reach and full. He urges me to go first to the counter. “Oh no, you go please. I have all day,” I reply. Now he has to make a purchase. Now he knows I’m polite …. I’m polite and I do not want them behind me in line.

The lady with her kid? She doesn’t notice me, but I’m there. I have a phone. I have a flashlight. I have two knives. I have a firearm. And I have a plan. If this doesn’t go well I want to get her and that little one out of here. Chances are nothing is going to happen until they’re gone anyway. I’d like to leave too.

One man asks the other a question. He hands the guy a few extra bucks to make the purchase of an item at the counter. They leave. I make my purchase. I call the employee by name and tell him to have a good night. I walk to the door and hold it open for the woman approaching. She says, “Thanks.” I say, “Yes ma’am.” Then, poof. I’m gone.

Just another uneventful trip to the store. The best kind ever. It’s funny those men truly saw me but other customers didn’t. Why? Maybe too busy. Maybe too much on their minds. Maybe because they didn’t worry for one second about those two men or me.

When I get home I don’t tell my wife about the two men who lingered. The two men who entered together but stood so far apart. The two men that seemed to have no sense of purpose or item they were in search of. No need to talk of them because nothing happened. This happens daily. Sometimes once. Sometimes multiple times. I like uneventful days.

Most people don’t know me. But man, they sure do judge me. If I use a gun to defend myself they will read about it. They will hear about it. They will weigh in on what should have happened.

I have seen bad people do bad things. I have seen good people dumbfounded and in shock because they couldn’t comprehend what was happening in front of them or, worse yet, to them. It’s not fun or pretty to think about, so most people don’t. They don’t stay awake late at night watching videos from self-defense experts. They don’t read the articles. They don’t look at unedited news on the Internet. They don’t search out the videos of people fighting for their lives and losing.

A man stabbed outside a bar. A couple hijacked and killed in front of the store. A store clerk shot even after complying with a robber’s demands. A video from inside the grocery store of a mad man with a gun shooting people while looking for his ex. Dashboard cameras of an officer involved in a shooting. It’s an ugly world so they choose not to see it.

I don’t train for the warm fuzzy days where everyone gets along. I train for the other days. I try to round out my skill sets. I look at what others have done to succeed. I watch videos of those who haven’t. Some refer to it as making something good out of something bad. Like watching videos of officers being killed as every person that’s gone through any type of law enforcement academy has had to do. Learn from others’ experiences.

People from all walks of life legally carry guns. Some are men and some are women. Some are old and some are young. The ones I know train. The ones I know are aware: Aware of their surroundings. And aware of all of the armchair quarterbacking that will be done if they ever have to use that tool of last resort on their belt. So why do it anyway? Because they value their life and the lives of others. Simple.

My so-called “gun nut” friends and customers are some of the most congenial, trustworthy people I know. I only wish everyone had such friends. I wish everyone understood like I do.

By: Ernie Traugh January 4, 2015 The Gazette

Paskalos

Gun control groups scrounge for cash, ideas to fight GOP-controlled Congress

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Gabrielle Giffords’ Americans for Responsible Solutions PAC seeks guidance after defeats

Gun control groups are scrounging for money and ideas as they prepare for the Republican-controlled Congress, which they expect will continue to thwart stricter firearm laws and move to expand gun rights.

Americans for Responsible Solutions PAC, the group founded by gunshot victim and former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, sent an email to supporters soliciting cash and guidance on how to advance its cause in the wake of repeated legislative and election defeats.
The email linked to a survey that asked more than a dozen questions about how to make the group more effective, including whether its efforts should be concentrated on Congress, state legislatures or ballot initiatives.
“We’re asking our supporters to tell us what they think Americans for Responsible Solutions should do next year. Our team has some great ideas, but we want to hear from you,” the email said.

The group did not respond to repeated inquires about its agenda for 2015.

Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said he would fight to hold ground in Congress. He said he has set his sights on the next election cycle and the Congress that will convene in 2017.
“We’ll probably be playing a little more defense, but I think we’re optimistic that we’ll be able to tamp down any type of [National Rifle Association] meddling and then be in a better position in 2016 to continue our work,” he said. “We’re not going to be going away. I can tell you that much.”

Mr. Horwitz found a bright spot in election losses that reduced Senate Democrats to minority status: It weeded out red-state Democrats who supported gun rights and left the party united in opposition to the pro-gun agenda.

“It’s going to be a much stronger, unified bunch of Democrats, and I think that is going to be able to hopefully stop most of the NRA’s agenda,” he said.

He said the pro-gun agenda likely would include policy riders on spending bills that would expand concealed carry rights and ease gun laws in the District of Columbia.

NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam would not confirm the organization’s legislative goals but said it would continue the fight on behalf of gun owners.

“We don’t take anything for granted. If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is the gun ban and gun control advocates are extremely well-funded, they are really adept at exploiting tragedy and nothing, including logic, stops them from pushing their political agenda,” he said.

Candidates endorsed by gun control groups lost to NRA-backed candidates throughout the country this year in contests for governor, the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The election defeats followed years of unsuccessfully lobbying for bills that would expand background checks for firearm purchasers and limit the number of bullets in ammunition clips, measures backed by President Obama after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that left 20 children and six teachers dead.

Americans for Responsible Solutions fared worse than some other like-minded organizations. It poured resources into trying to re-elect Rep. Ron Barber, a former congressional aide to Ms. Giffords who succeeded her as representative of the Tucson-area district after she was severely injured by gunfire at a rally in 2011.
Mr. Barber, who also was injured in the attack, narrowly lost to Republican Martha McSally in an election dominated by gun issues.

Gun control groups found solace in victories in state legislatures and with ballot initiatives, including a referendum in Washington state that resulted in a law requiring background checks on all firearms sales.

“That was the Washington that mattered last election season. It proved that if politicians won’t act to prevent gun violence, voters will take matters into their own hands,” said Erika Soto Lamb, a spokeswoman for Everytown for Gun Safety, a group financed by the personal fortune of former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Everytown will be shifting its focus from Congress next year to legislative fights in as many as 20 states, the group said.

Gun control advocates also pointed to the recent confirmation of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy as evidence that their cause was not completely lost on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Murthy was opposed by the NRA because he advocated for gun control laws and characterized the prevalence of firearms as a public health issue. In his confirmation hearing, however, he pledged not to use his office as a “bully pulpit for gun control.”

Mr. Murthy’s confirmation was pushed through with a batch of nominees in the final days of the session before Democrats ceded power to Republicans.

“We can see that political leaders are listening to what’s happening in the states as they recently confirmed Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in a stunning defeat of the gun lobby’s fight against his nomination,” Ms. Lamb said.
By S.A. Miller – Thursday, January 1, 2015- The Washington Times

Paskalos

2014: The year liberalism died

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Jack Cashill sees fingerprints of Soviet apparatus in Ferguson response

Katherine Ann Porter had been duped, badly. In her memoir, “The Never-Ending Wrong,” published on the 50th anniversary of the 1927 execution of convicted murderers Nichola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Porter told how this came to be.

As the anarchists’ final hours ticked down, Porter had been standing vigil with others artists and writers in Boston. Ever the innocent liberal, Porter approached her group leader, a “fanatical little woman” and a dogmatic Communist, and expressed her hope that Sacco and Vanzetti could still be saved.

The response of this female comrade is noteworthy largely for its candor: “Saved … who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?”

As their predecessors did with Sacco and Vanzetti, progressives in 2014 falsified narratives and manufactured outrage to advance some ill-defined leftist agenda.

What is different now is that progressives no longer content themselves with claiming the guilty innocent. Dating back to the arrest of George Zimmerman in 2012, they are prepared to claim the innocent guilty, a darker turn altogether.

Their goal might be as grubby as enriching a race hustler or as grand as turning a presidential election, but no longer is it about justice, and always there is someone to accuse.

Nearly a century after Sacco and Vanzetti’s demise, crowds stood vigil outside the Ferguson, Missouri, police station waiting to hear whether a grand jury would indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of black 18-year-old Michael Brown.

In the crowd were many protesters as naive as Porter had been. In the crowd, too, were leftist agitators eager to see Wilson go uncharged. After all, what earthly good would Wilson do them in jail?

The Soviets called the practice “framing” – that is, taking a small kernel of truth and rewriting the history of a person or an event around it.

In Ferguson, that small kernel was the testimony of Brown’s partner in crime, Dorian Johnson. Immediately after the shooting Johnson told all who would listen that Brown raised his hands to surrender before Wilson shot him dead in a Ferguson street. The story could not withstand the least bit of scrutiny.

“It seems hard to come to any other conclusion,” the Washington Post finally conceded some months later, “than that Dorian Johnson’s version is simply made up.” In fact, Brown attacked Wilson in his car and then charged him when told to stop.

For the left, however, Johnson’s kernel trumped Wilson’s testimony, the corroborating testimony of a half-dozen eyewitnesses, the forensic evidence and the cautious judgment of a multi-racial grand jury.

Even while Brown’s body lay sprawled on Canfield Drive, activists were rehearsing his neighbors in the “Hands up, don’t shoot” gesture. With the help of an obliging media, this thoroughly corrupt iconography swept the world.

The seeds of Ferguson were planted 90 years earlier when Josef Stalin took control of the Soviet apparatus. More of a realist than Lenin, Stalin focused his American efforts not on a workers’ revolution but on discrediting the American dream.

For the Soviet experiment to prevail, the American experiment had to yield. The world had to see America through fresh, unblinking eyes, not as the great melting pot, but as a simmering stew of racism and xenophobia.

In 1925 the Comintern found just the victims of American injustice Stalin was looking for in Sacco and Vanzetti, a pair of Italian anarchists justly convicted of the murdering an Italian American payroll clerk five years prior.

While their capital murder case worked its way through the appeals process in the Massachusetts courts, the Comintern ginned up a worldwide frenzy around the fate of the convicted killers.

“Spontaneous” protests sprang up seemingly everywhere. Europe’s great squares – in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin – filled with sobbing, shouting protesters, declaiming the innocence of the immigrant martyrs and denouncing the vile injustice of their persecutors.

Sound familiar? The reaction to the Ferguson grand jury decision was eerily similar. Hundreds gathered outside the American embassy in London with signs proclaiming “no justice, no peace” and “solidarity with Ferguson.” In Berlin, protesters waved signs that read “Ferguson is everywhere.”

The difference between 1927 and today, and this is critical, is that Wilson was transparently innocent. So was Zimmerman. The left no longer cares.

In their own minds, liberals still see themselves as Atticus Finch standing outside the jailhouse, shotgun reluctantly in hand, protecting the innocent within.

There are a few liberals for whom that image make sense, but not many. Most on the left have joined the mob clamoring for the mockingbird’s head, his innocence be damned.

Today, that mockingbird could be George Zimmerman or Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo or anyone with the potential to feed the mob’s mindless frenzy.

The mob has not yet seized control of the jailhouse, but no Atticus stands against it, not the president, not the attorney general, not the governor of Missouri, not the mayor of New York City, not any Democrat anywhere.

It is too early to predict the future of the mob, but is not too early the write the epitaph for liberalism. It died an ugly death in 2014.
By: Jack Cashill December 31, 2014 (WND)

Paskalos

Gun Ownership comes with Responsibility

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An Idaho woman shopping at a Wal-Mart store was killed Tuesday when her 2-year-old son, seated in a shopping cart, reached into her purse and fired her 9mm handgun, hitting her in the head.

According to news reports, Veronica Rutledge was an experienced shooter who had a permit to carry a concealed weapon. The gun was in a zippered section of a specially-designed concealed carry purse, which she left unattended for a moment.

While it’s legal in Louisiana to carry a gun in your purse with a concealed carry permit, that’s not the best way to carry a weapon, Mark LeBlanc, director of operations at Barney’s Police Supplies in Lafayette, said Wednesday.

It’s the responsibility of a gun owner to minimize the opportunity for someone else to gain possession of their gun, said LeBlanc, a former law enforcement officer who teaches gun safety. The safest way to ensure no one else gets your gun is to carry it on your person in a holster or, if in a purse, the purse should be on your person, not left unattended, he said.

Gun sales across the nation are on the rise. In 2013, 12 million new guns were sold in the U.S., LeBlanc said, and 2014 sales are expected to exceed that.

“In the past six years or so, there’s been a massive increase in gun sales,” he said.

Gun stores have had trouble in recent years meeting the demand for some guns and ammunition.

Gun owners come from every part of society — all ages, all backgrounds, all socioeconomic categories, and they’re buying guns for personal protection, hunting and recreation, LeBlanc said.

Whether they received their first weapon as a Christmas gift or are life-long owners, gun owners should be familiar with the mechanics and safe operation of each weapon, LeBlanc said. That means practice, practice, practice.

First-time gun owners should carefully read the informational brochure that came with the gun, familiarize themselves with the weapon before ever loading it, consider taking a gun safety course and practice shooting the weapon at a gun range.

“Safe operation of a weapon and basic understanding of its operation are two slices of bread that make up a sandwich,” he said. “Everything has to go together.”

Gun owners also should be familiar with the laws in their parish and state.

Louisiana is an open carry state. You can carry a gun on you without a permit as long as it’s visible. If it’s hidden, you need a concealed carry permit, said Cpl. Paul Mouton, public information officer, Lafayette Police Department.

Bergeron’s Restaurant in Port Allen made national news in 2014 when it started offering discounts to customers who wear a gun on their hip. According to news reports, the owner implemented the policy after some national chain stores banned customers from wearing guns in their stores, despite state laws allowing the practice.

A concealed carry permit isn’t necessary in Louisiana to transport your gun in your automobile because it’s considered an extension of your home, LeBlanc said.

Louisiana law doesn’t specify that a gun in a vehicle must be unloaded. But best practice is to transport a weapon unloaded or in the safety of a lock box or holster, Mouton said.

And he cautioned gun owners that different states have different laws.

“If you’re traveling in another state, you need research their laws reference the transport of firearms,” Mouton said.

By the numbers:

136,505 Louisiana residents had concealed carry permits as of December 2013.

3.89 percent of adults in Louisiana had concealed carry permits as of December 2013.

(Source: July 9, 2014, report by Crime Prevention Research Center)

Gun safety tips

Treat all weapons like they’re loaded.

Before and after firing a gun, always confirm it is not loaded.

When inspecting or cleaning a gun, don’t have ammunition in the room.

Learn as much as you can about your weapon and gun safety.

Never point a weapon at anything you don’t intend to destroy.

Keep your finger off the trigger and out of the trigger guard until you are ready to fire.

Always be aware of your total environment.

Properly maintain your weapon.

Clean your weapon after every use.

(Source: Mark LeBlanc, director of operations, Barney’s Police Supplies)

Story by: Claire Taylor January 1, 2015 (The Advertiser)

Freedom

Common Core: Continuing the lies that Divide America

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If you look at the “peaceful protestors” talking part in the recent demonstrations across America, what do you see?  Young people who are products of the public school system. If you listen to the “peaceful protestors” what do you hear? Lies about America that were “taught” in the public schools. As if we need another reason to be cynical regarding Common Core, it continues the lies the built Ferguson. There is no doubt that our schools are places where a leftist agenda is being pushed but it gets even more sinister. Are we deliberately encouraging these protests and the resulting civil unrest?

The unrest and the “change” we are seeing in the attitudes of the young is the result of several different factors, one being what is taught in the public schools. For example, History used to teach civics and love of country. Nowadays, history isn’t even considered an important subject. History teachers and the history curriculum do not show America positively. Children used to learn about the history of America in a way that instilled pride. These children grew up to build America, the most desirable country ever to exist.  Instead of continuing the lessons which made America the envy of the world, we are presenting a picture of America that causes our children to question its’ goodness.

As a public school teacher, I have noticed the same broken record played over and over.  I remember watching a movie about Emmet Till with a class of 11 year olds. The movie shows Till, an innocent, black 14 year old, who whistled at a white woman in Mississippi in the 1950s.  As punishment, he died at the hands of white men in a gruesome way.  The school movie spared no horrific detail. The white cops were vile. Their disdain for Emmet and his family was revolting. The screen showed us the actual photo taken at Emmet’s wake, of his face swollen from being beaten and left in the river for days, for far too long. The all-white jury took an hour to come back with a “not guilty” verdict. The murderers laughed and celebrated after the verdict was read. When the movie was over, my class of mostly black students wanted to “kill white people” over the sad injustice.  No doubt this was the desired reaction.
For a long time, I debated whether I should show this movie, even during black history month. I did not understand the point in enraging these kids with this one horrific event without also explaining that his death sparked a movement and angered whites throughout the country as well. Not to mention that we can find examples of horrific crimes committed by blacks against whites where justice was not served.

Since February is also presidents’ month I decided to show a movie about Thomas Jefferson. While all my students knew Emmet Till by fifth grade, none knew Jefferson. I got a movie from the school library. I was sharing with the class some wonderful things about Jefferson, some of his famous quotes and why he is my favorite president. The kids were interested, receptive, and impressed. The movie was going well until…. Slaves built Monticello. A black boy turned to me and asked if Jefferson owned slaves.

Over and over we see the same pictures in the schools. Beginning in kindergarten, we see hundreds of Africans chained together on slave ships and being forced to America, many of them dying miserably during the voyage. We aren’t told they were sold by other Africans. There are many more examples. Even if the worst is true, it’s at the point where I wonder what the point is. I know many black teachers I work with will say that these horrific events occurred and that these things need to be taught.  OK. Are we all happy with the results? Are we portraying America fairly?  Or are we (obviously) trying to make a political point?

Michael Brown is not Emmet Till. Today’s cops are not the cops of the 1950s. The grand juries of today are not the grand juries of 1950. Yet truth doesn’t matter. To these (black and guilt-ridden white) kids, now is the time to avenge these acts. They are being encouraged by our political leaders, teachers, athletes, celebrities, and the media. None of this is good for any kid, black or white. What good is tearing down and the country that they call home and dividing people?

There is an antidote to this mind poison our children are being fed. I have had opportunities to teach American history the way I learned it. It is easy and natural to teach children the story of America in a way that fills them with pride. I know this because I’ve done it. I’ve had classrooms children from every background. By June they were proud to call themselves American and crying when listening to the “Star Spangled Banner”.  But I am one teacher in a school district with 1.1 million kids. Besides, Common Core tells me exactly what to teach. My students are tested on exactly what the experts want them to know. I am rated on whether they have “learned” the information that the creators of Common Core have deemed is a proper education.

There is no doubt that the “peaceful protestors” feel justified and empowered. They are true believers and have been programmed from an early age (Let’s get them even earlier with universal pre-K). Where we will be as a country if we allow the progressives to have full control and even more time to teach this hate for America via Common Core? Do we want a United States of America? These things have been put into motion and we are seeing the results. What’s it going to take for people to connect the dots?
By: Mary Anne Marcella January 1, 2015 American Thinker

Freedom

Making Colorado Safe for Guns and Pot

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A planned initiative would challenge federal prohibitions on marijuana smokers’ right to carry guns

Two Colorado firearms instructors are planning a ballot initiative in their state to help smash a huge violation of citizens’ rights: that marijuana smokers, according to the federal government, are not allowed to own guns.

The 1968 Gun Control Act declared in section 922(g) that unlawful users of, or those addicted to, a controlled substance can’t legally possess guns. As more and more Americans use marijuana, medically or recreationally, and legally under state law, the feds have more urgently stressed that point. In September 2011, the ATF issued a memo reminding federal firearms licensees there’s no exception to section 922(g). If they sell a gun to someone they know or reasonably suspect to be a marijuana user, even if that use is state-legal, the dealer is violating federal law. Gun purchasers must fill out a form from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in which they are legally compelled to truthfully answer: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana…or any other controlled substance?”

These sorts of categorical exclusions of certain types of Americans from their Second Amendment rights might not stand up to intelligent judicial scrutiny in a post-Heller world. Others have already tried and failed to get the Supreme Court to overturn such blanket restrictions of gun rights for illegal aliens and those convicted of domestic violence. But as Jacob Sullum has written, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals declared this month in Tyler v. Hillsdale County Sheriff’s Department that prohibiting gun ownership to everyone who’s ever been committed to a mental institution is overly broad, not narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest, and thus invalid. Whether other circuits or, eventually, the Supreme Court agree remains to be seen.

The Colorado activists behind the would-be ballot measure, Edgar Antillon and Isaac Chase, are making an end run around courts as they launch the Colorado Campaign for Equal Gun Rights. The measure would amend Colorado law so that state-legal use of marijuana would be no barrier to receiving a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

Antillon says that as a firearms instructor he has run into many students who “are users of marijuana for medicinal or recreational reasons. The bottom line is we saw they were being denied their right to self-defense and we thought it appropriate to start this campaign for equal access.”

This Colorado effort isn’t the first recent attempt to topple the pot smoker exception to the Second Amendment. Oregon saw a victory for the cause of gun-toting pot smokers in the 2011 state case Willis v. Winters. Local sheriffs thought that being required to issue concealed carry permits to state medical marijuana permit holders put them in violation of federal law, and sued. The state’s Supreme Court ultimately declared that “State law requires sheriffs to issue concealed gun licenses without regard to whether the applicants use medical marijuana.” That doesn’t mean federal officials, or even state sheriffs, can’t still enforce the federal law against marijuana users possessing guns; merely that such users can get an Oregon permit to carry a weapon and are not violating state law by doing so.

The losing sheriffs tried to take the issue to the Supreme Court, but in January 2012 the Court declined to take up the case. Although it was an Oregon state case, the court’s arguments should be of some value to a hypothetical lawyer who might have to defend any victory for the proposed Colorado amendment, if such victory occurs in 2016. As an Oregon appeals court declared in one iteration of Willis v. Winters as it moved through the state’s court system, and as the Oregon Supreme Court upheld, the “circuit court correctly concluded that Oregon’s concealed handgun licensing statutes are not preempted by the federal Gun Control Act. The concealed handgun licensing statutes do not affirmatively authorize controlled substance users to possess handguns; rather, they exempt a licensee from state criminal liability for the possession of a concealed handgun.” If Colorado ends up also having a concealed carry permit process via ballot measure that allows for known pot users to get such a permit, the same argument could be made that a mere lack of a state carry permit process that punishes pot users is not inherently pre-empted by the federal Gun Control Act—though that is no guarantee a federal court will agree.

Wilson v. Holder is a federal case also challenging the prohibition of medical marijuana licensees from owning guns. Rowan Wilson, then a Nevada medical marijuana card holder, tried to buy a gun from a dealer who knew her status. He refused to sell to her because of the ATF’s letter. The ATF policy that dictated the dealer’s decision violated her Second Amendment rights, she believed, and in October 2011 sued about it in federal court in Nevada.

In March 2014, Wilson’s case was tossed out of court by Judge Gloria Navarro, a decision that Wilson and her lawyers are now appealing to the Ninth Circuit. Among their arguments in their Ninth Circuit filings: it is illegitimate to equate marijuana license possession with current illegal drug use; the ATF letter essentially declares a class of citizens criminals with no due process, and even constitutes a substantive change in law by making mere medical license holders presumptive criminals without following the Administrative Procedure Act.

Wilson’s lawyers also insist the 2011 Ninth Circuit Dugan decision that Navarro relied on in declaring the challenged ATF policy or any other prohibition on gun possession related to drug use had no Second Amendment implications was about someone with a career of criminality, including drug and weapons trafficking. Thus, his position is not analogous in terms of a compelling state interest in prohibiting weapon possession to an otherwise law-abiding medical marijuana card possessor such as Wilson

On the legislative front, Sen. John Walsh (D-Mont.) proposed a bill amendment this year to defund Department of Justice and ATF attempts to enforce gun laws against state-legal medical marijuana users, but it failed.

ATF’s Colorado office didn’t respond to a request for comment on the proposed ballot measure by press time. But the mixture of pot and guns seems very likely to be too combustible for the feds to ignore, except, maybe, with a Rand Paul Justice Department and ATF, or a Ted Cruz one. Dave Workman of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF), which has fought successful court battles to extend Second Amendment rights in the wake of Heller, is sure the Justice Department and ATF would crack down hard on any state that tried to ignore federal prohibitions on drug user’s gun possession.

Antillon and Chase’s idea, though it has already won national press attention from the Associated Press and Fox News, is at a very early stage. Antillon admits they haven’t fully worked out a fundraising or legal strategy, though he offers $100,000 as a likely minimum to even get on the ballot, much less fight via ads through the election cycle.

His group has done randomized internal polling of 2500 Coloradans, he says, that finds 60 percent support. Many would-be supporters who themselves are licensed weapons dealers might be understandably reluctant to publicly endorse or fund the effort, he thinks. The list of gun world endorsees so far is small, although the campaign only filed their first paperwork with the Colorado secretary of state a couple of weeks ago.

Antillon says he knows it’s not apt to appeal to the likes of the National Rifle Association, though when Fox and Friends got Tony Fabian of the Colorado State Shooting Association to appear opposing Antillon, Fabian said he was not so much against the proposition as merely not for it, because his group’s mission is to “provide shooting opportunities for law abiding residents and because of the federal ban” support of the measure “would run afoul of that mission.”

Representatives of major national Second Amendment rights groups and major national marijuana rights groups this week both said that, while they can’t predict how the initiative would do if it makes the ballot, the melding of gun rights and pot rights wasn’t a high priority for either movement individually.

Workman of the SAF says that to the firearms rights movement, the prohibition against marijuana smokers “on a scale of one to 10, might be a two or three” and that most such activists think “there are a lot more important things going on with the Second Amendment than this.”

Paul Armentano of the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) says his group has long been aware of the feds’ prejudice against pot users when it comes to guns, especially compared to other potentially judgment-impairing substances such as alcohol of prescription meds. He’s unaware of any national polling on the issue, and his sense is that “this is not an issue that rises to the top of the priority list for the average marijuana consumer.”

That said, NORML’s executive director Allen St. Pierre did list Second Amendment rights for marijuana users as one of his major concerns going forward into 2015, but Armentano says as a matter of policy they don’t comment on the specifics of potential ballot measures until they’ve actually made the ballot.

Given the convoluted multistep process of pre-approval for Colorado ballot measures, it will be at least three months, Antillon says, before a signature collection process might even begin. Colorado law links signatures required to 5 percent of the votes cast in the previous secretary of state election, which means this proposal will need over 98,000 signatures to get before Colorado voters. It’s uncertain how resonant an issue this will be, how many citizens straddle the crossroads of gun rights and marijuana rights. Associated Press reports that Colorado officials do not know how many people in the state have been denied gun possession or carry rights because of marijuana.

For now, Antillon’s nascent operation doesn’t have a well-planned strategy or an idea where big money might even potentially come from. By crossing the streams of Second Amendment and pot activism, they risk alienating large swaths of the dedicated activist financiers of both sides, staking ground in a libertarian middle that recognizes self-defense, self-medication, and self-pleasuring that harm no one else’s life or property as rights eminently worth fighting for. Changing state’s relationship to pot via initiative can be difficult and costly, and it doesn’t always work the first time it’s tried. It’s a grand battle symbolic of a Libertarian Moment. Even if it fails to go all the way the first time around, it’s a logical constitutional victory  that deserves to be won, whether via lawsuit or ballot.

By: Brian Doherty | December 31, 2014 Reason.com

Freedom

LIBERALS: IF THE SHOE DOESN’T FIT, MAKE EVERYONE WEAR IT

/in /by

It is a common practice of the left to stage an incident and then demand enormous legal changes to respond to their hoax.

Griswold v. Connecticut was a scam orchestrated by Yale law professors to challenge the state’s anti-contraception law. The case was a fraud: The law had never been enforced and never would have been enforced, until the professors held a press conference announcing they were breaking the law.

But we still got the new constitutional “privacy right” which, less than 10 years later, transmogrified into a constitutional right to kill an unborn baby.

The premise of that case, Roe v. Wade, was also a hoax. Norma McCorvey lied about being raped to get an abortion in Texas, but was denied because there was no police report. There was also no rape: She had gotten pregnant for the third time by her mid-20s as a result of a casual sexual encounter.

After Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman — the “white Hispanic,” since upgraded to full “white” by The New York Times — liberals howled about Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. The case had absolutely nothing to do with that law: Zimmerman wasn’t standing his ground; he was lying on the ground having his head bashed in. The jury accepted Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense and acquitted him.

The law of self-defense has been around since William of Orange ascended to the British throne in 1688. But liberals are still harping about the Trayvon Martin shooting to demand the repeal of Stand Your Ground laws.

Jamie Leigh Jones made fantastical claims about being fed Rohypnol, gang-raped and then held at gunpoint while working for KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, in Iraq in 2005. Without considering the likelihood of a military contractor doing this to an American citizen, knowing she’d get back to the U.S. someday and be able to tell her story, our adversary media and well-paid Democratic senators believed every word out of Jones’ mouth.

It is a common practice of the left to stage an incident and then demand enormous legal changes to respond to their hoax.

Griswold v. Connecticut was a scam orchestrated by Yale law professors to challenge the state’s anti-contraception law. The case was a fraud: The law had never been enforced and never would have been enforced, until the professors held a press conference announcing they were breaking the law.

But we still got the new constitutional “privacy right” which, less than 10 years later, transmogrified into a constitutional right to kill an unborn baby.

The premise of that case, Roe v. Wade, was also a hoax. Norma McCorvey lied about being raped to get an abortion in Texas, but was denied because there was no police report. There was also no rape: She had gotten pregnant for the third time by her mid-20s as a result of a casual sexual encounter.

After Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman — the “white Hispanic,” since upgraded to full “white” by The New York Times — liberals howled about Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. The case had absolutely nothing to do with that law: Zimmerman wasn’t standing his ground; he was lying on the ground having his head bashed in. The jury accepted Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense and acquitted him.

The law of self-defense has been around since William of Orange ascended to the British throne in 1688. But liberals are still harping about the Trayvon Martin shooting to demand the repeal of Stand Your Ground laws.

Jamie Leigh Jones made fantastical claims about being fed Rohypnol, gang-raped and then held at gunpoint while working for KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, in Iraq in 2005. Without considering the likelihood of a military contractor doing this to an American citizen, knowing she’d get back to the U.S. someday and be able to tell her story, our adversary media and well-paid Democratic senators believed every word out of Jones’ mouth.

As always happens when members of a disfavored racial and gender group — i.e., white males — are accused of heinous acts, liberals heard Jones’s claims and concluded: Well, the one thing we know is: There was a gang-rape. All that’s left to do now is to investigate the military/fraternity/lacrosse rape culture.

Thus, for example, Sen. Patrick Leahy began a hearing on Jones’ insane accusations with this statement of facts: “Jamie Leigh Jones a young woman from Texas who took a job at Halliburton in Iraq in 2005 when she was 20 years old. In her first week on the job, she was drugged and then she was gang-raped by co-workers. When she reported this — remember 20 years old — she reported this assault, her employers moved her to a locked trailer, where she was kept by armed guards and freed only when the State Department intervened.”

Sen. Al Franken raved about “the culture of impunity” among defense contractors, saying, “Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by KBR employees.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse helpfully added, “But as best I can tell, there is no legitimate intelligence function that involves rape.”

And then, after all the grandstanding, it turned out Jones had made the whole thing up. DNA evidence proved she’d had sex with only one man, and he said it was consensual. The female doctor who examined Jones the day after the alleged attack found no traces of Rohypnol in her system. Both the female doctor, as well as Jones’ own plastic surgeon back in Houston, contradicted Jones’ claim that her breast implants had been ruptured. It also turned out that none of KBR’s employees carry guns, much less machine guns. By the age of 20, even before Jones had left for Iraq, she was 0-for-2 on rape allegations, having already falsely accused two other men of raping her.

No grand jury would indict the poor, falsely accused KBR employee who foolishly had sex with Jones, so she filed a civil suit against that one man. The jury ruled for him, and the court ordered Jones to pay $145,000 in legal costs. Jamie Leigh Jones’ place in the Crystal Magnum, Tawana Brawley Hall of Fame was thus secured.

But we still got Sen. Al Franken’s pro-trial lawyer amendment to a Defense Department bill, touted as the “Anti-Rape Amendment,” prohibiting military contractors from including mandatory arbitration clauses in their employment contracts. Any Republican brave enough to oppose this sop to trial lawyers was denounced as “pro-rape” in mass-phone calls to their offices and by liberal prophet Jon Stewart, who railed on his show “How is ANYONE against this?”

Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown is today being used as grounds to demand all sorts of new rules for cops. Most people had a pretty good sense of the case after seeing surveillance camera shots of Brown assaulting the manager of a liquor store he was robbing about 10 minutes before his encounter with Officer Wilson. By the time the grand jury documents were released, there was no serious doubt that the shooting was justified.

But again, as a result of a hoax racial incident, Democrats are demanding race quotas for arrests. To hell with due process. If we can stop just one thing that never happened from ever happening again, it will have been worth it.

The only new rule we really need is one to stop these infernal liberal hoaxes.

By: Ann Coulter, December 30, 2014