Posts

Paskalos

Iowans Push for ‘Stand Your Ground’ Law

/in /by

Iowa state senator Rick Bertrand (R-Dist. 7) is pushing legislation to change the state’s current self-defense laws to included a “Stand Your Ground” provision.

Bertrand says his bill “clarifies [the] Second Amendment” Iowans already possess and protects law-abiding citizens who have to use a gun in self-defense.

According to ABC 9 News, “Stand Your Ground” legislation failed to pass in the last legislative session but supporters have since gathered “thousands of signatures” and are making clear that their votes in the 2016 elections will be used to get rid of lawmakers who oppose the self-defense bill.

Iowa Gun Owners director Aaron Dorr points out that Iowa law currently lets Iowan use lethal force when under threat, but he stresses that that law is not sufficient because it doesn’t shield the law-abiding citizen when he or she has to pull the trigger. He stressed that no one wants to be in a situation where they have to shoot but at the same time he said it is not right to keep law-abiding citizens in a place where they fear possible charges for protecting themselves or their families.

Senator Bertrand said, “Gun laws don’t keep guns away from the bad actors. They keep them from the good players, so at the end of the day, I trust Iowans and Americans.”

Paskalos

Federal Judge Denies Injunction against State Department in 3D Printed Gun Suit

/in /by

A federal judge denied 3D printed gun inventor Cody Wilson’s request for a preliminary injunction against the State Department after the agency forced him to remove gun designs from his company’s website.

Wilson’s lawsuit came after the State Department claimed the posting of designs for his 3D printed gun on his company’s website violated the Arms Export Control Act because they could be accessed outside of the United States. Wilson was joined in the suit by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and together they argued the State Department was violating Wilson’s First, Second, and Fifth Amendment rights.

U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman disagreed in a ruling earlier this month. In the ruling, first reported by Reason‘s Brian Doherty, Judge Pitman said the plaintiffs did not meet the requirements necessary to secure a preliminary injunction against the State Department and were unlikely to succeed on the merits of the case.

Wilson took issue with the reasoning Judge Pitman used in his ruling. “I think the gun owning public would be incensed to learn the judge’s reasoning. He doubts there’s a right to own a firearm protected by the Constitution,” he said. “He considers it trivial to censor the speech online because we could use the mail or people could come in person to get the files from us. He thinks gun software development isn’t handicapped by being banned from the Internet because there’s still other means of communication.”

SAF’s founder said he didn’t like the ruling but was happy the case would now move through the court system faster. “It would have been better to win the preliminary injunction but this case now will move faster and we believe we will win it at the appeals court,” SAF founder Alan Gottlieb said. “The government would have liked to tie us up in the lower court for years.”

A State Department official said the case was about protecting Americans.

“The United States is cognizant of the potentially adverse consequences of indiscriminate arms transfers and, therefore strictly regulates exports of defense items and technologies to protect its national interests and the peace and security of the broader international community,” said the official. “At the end of the day, it’s about protecting U.S. national security by regulating foreign access to exports of U.S. defense articles and potentially sensitive defense manufacturing technologies that could be used by terrorists or other bad actors to harm Americans, including our troops serving overseas; as well as citizens from U.S. allies and partners around the world.”

Wilson said the case showed that the fight over the Second Amendment is still raging. “We’re like seven years after the Heller decision here and we’re still in the courts fighting over whether you have the right to buy a gun, like in Mance v. Holder case, or the right to even make one or talk about making one, in my case,” Wilson said. “I mean, this is crazy, man.”

Paskalos

PEW: Majority of Americans Say Gun Ownership Protects Them from Crime

/in /by

A majority of Americans say it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns than for the government to limit access to firearms, a Pew Research Center survey conducted this month found.

The nationwide survey was conducted Dec. 3 to 7 with 1,507 adults using landlines and cellphones and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points for all respondents. For African-Americans, the error margin is plus or minus 10 points.

The center said that it was the first time in two decades of its surveys on attitudes about firearms that a majority of Americans had expressed more support for gun ownership rights than for gun control.

Fifty-two percent of respondents said it was more important to protect gun ownership rights, and 46 percent said the priority should be controlled access to firearms.

In a 2000 Pew survey, 29 percent chose gun rights over gun control, and in a 2013 survey conducted a month after the Newtown shooting, 45 percent favored gun rights.

The Pew poll on firearms, conducted in early December, also found that African-Americans have become increasingly likely to believe that firearm ownership does more to protect people than it does to threaten an individual’s safety, even as they continue to support gun control measures.

When asked in 2012, 29 percent of African-Americans said guns offered people protection rather than exposed them to greater danger, but in this year’s survey, the number of African-Americans who viewed firearms as offering more personal safety nearly doubled to 54 percent.

By contrast, the views of whites who believe guns are more likely to provide personal protection have changed more modestly rising to 62 percent this year from 54 percent in 2012, the poll found.

Overall, 57 percent of Americans said gun ownership was more helpful in protecting people from becoming victims of crime, and 38 percent said it did more to endanger one’s safety.

Paskalos

Church Launches Range Ministry and Builds Gun Range

/in /by

Rocky Mount United Methodist Church in Jemison Alabama has opened a gun range directly behind its sanctuary in effort to educate its members about gun safety and reach out to the community in the process.

“Really, the whole purpose of this range is to provide recreational and gun safety in a warm, loving, Christian environment,” the church’s pastor Phillip Guin told the Clanton Advertiser. “We wanted to come up with some different ideas to help our church grow, and we thought this would be a unique ministry to offer to the community.”

After the range opened, the church formed the Rocky Mount Hunt and Gun Club LLC, a separate, membership-only, not-for-profit group. To use the gun range, people must be members of the gun club or be guests of a member.

The Jemison Police Department even used the gun range to provide firearm training through annual Citizens Academy, Guin said.

“There are a lot of people that are interested in enjoying themselves in a safe fellowship environment with a gun,” Guin told Mashable. “This is not anything about some radical form of militant Christianity. It is a bit unique out of the box as church ministry goes, but we see it no differently as a church having a softball team or hosting camping ministries.”

Guin said that criticism of the gun range is unwarranted, and that the purpose of the range is sincere and pure.

“The ministry itself is what we’re doing in the name of Jesus Christ,” he told a Mashable reporter. “It does happen to involve guns, but we don’t want it to sound as though we’re forming some kind of weird cult that revolves around guns.”

Range

Paskalos

Gun Registry Necessary to Enforce Background Check Law says Oregon Sheriff

/in /by

Oregon’s unconstitutional SB 941 legislation requiring background checks for all gun sales went into effect on August 9, but Lane County Sheriff Byron Trapp pointed out that the law is unenforceable without an accompanying statewide gun registry.

To be clear, Trapp did not call for a gun registry but simply observed that those who fashioned and passed the law actually heaved new gun control upon the backs of Oregonians which is unenforceable.

Some keen observers point out that the government has to know where every gun is in order to know that one neighbor is not selling a gun to another without a check, or that one co-worker is not selling a gun to another without a check; or that one childhood friend is not selling a gun to another without a check, and so forth.

Until the government knows where every single gun and gun owner are located, talk of requiring a background check for every single sale is just that—talk.

Sheriff Trapp is making the same point in Oregon.

According to The Register-Guard, Trapp indicated Oregon’s SB 941 is “logistically unenforceable” because “there is no centralized registry of guns in Oregon, only five-year records of gun sale transactions that could be used to track a gun found in a criminal’s possession.” And without a gun registry to demonstrate the origins of a given gun, Trapp explained that “offenders could claim they bought or sold a gun legally in a person-to-person sale before SB 941 became law,” and there would be no legal way of countering them.

Again, Trapp is not calling for a gun registry. Rather, he is making a logical observation. But it highlights the insidious threat posed by expanding background checks inasmuch as those checks will require gun control proponents to push an unconstitutional gun registry scheme to make the system work.

Just a reminder, gun registration always leads to confiscation.

bservation. But it highlights the insidious threat posed by expanding background checks inasmuch as those checks will require gun control proponents to push an unconstitutional gun registry scheme to make the system work.

Just a reminder, gun registration always leads to confiscation.

Paskalos

Armed Texas Dad Protects Wife and 8-Month-Old Son from Two Home Invaders

/in /by

Two masked intruders forced their way into a Texas home. Then, they met a man ready to protect his wife and baby.

Kenrich Dickson was at his house in East Dallas, Texas, around 11 a.m. Tuesday when he said two men banged on the unlocked back door so hard the key frame broke off. The intruders made their way inside the house from there, coming face-to-face with Dickson’s wife, Amy, and their 8-month-old son.

Dickson said he was in the back bedroom at the time and went down the hallway to confront the intruders on his own — with his gun, KDFW-TV reported.

“I stood right here, because this is the only way to get out,” Kenrich Dickson told KDFW-TV. “I shot one. His friend pushed him down to get out the door.”

It all happened so fast, his wife didn’t know at first who had actually been shot during the confrontation.

“You couldn’t really tell who was gonna pull the trigger,” Amy Dickson said. “I just heard a gunshot. I thought, ‘Is he OK? I’m scared to move because if there’s someone in here, I don’t want to move.”

After the gunshots, both suspects ran out into a nearby alley to their car, blood still dripping. One managed to escape police; the other was taken to a hospital for treatment.

No one in the family was injured.

Paskalos

Lieutenant Commander Tim White confirms he opened fire on Mohammad Abdulazeez with personal weapon during Chattanooga attack

/in /by

On July 30 the Times Free Press reported that Tim White the commanding officer at the Navy Operational Support Center returned fire with his personal weapon when his facility was attacked by the terrorist know as Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez.

Abdulazeez attacked the U.S. Naval and Marine Reserve Center on July 16 with a handgun and an assault rifle. Abdulazeez killed four Marines and a Navy specialist in the bold daytime attack.

Commander White’s wife, Franicia White told Stripes she was proud of her husband for fighting back. Franicia said, “He values human life enough to protect his sailors and others. I am honored to be his wife and stand by him 100 percent.”

FBI Special Agent in Charge Ed Reinhold held a press conference in which he did not identify White by name, but said, “A service member inside the building saw Abdulazeez approaching and fired at him.” An unnamed Marine allegedly opened fire on Abdulazeez with a “sidearm” as well, but there is no confirmation on whether he found his target either.

Many politicians after the terrorist attack immediately called for a change in policy to allow more service members to be armed. Within two days, six states either ordered their National Guard recruiting personnel to be armed or ordered those in recruitment relocated to armories or similar facilities.

The Associated Press reported, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter directed the military branches to review security policies, including adding armed personnel in the wake of the Chattanooga attacks, “The tragic shooting on July 16 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, illustrates the continuing threat to DOD personnel in the U.S. homeland posed by homegrown violent extremists,” Carter wrote in a memo released by the Pentagon.

Paskalos

Citizens Band Together, And Get Governor to Overturn illegal ‘Gun Free Zone’

/in /by

A story featured at the Alabama news outlet Yellowhammer exemplifies the American ideal that government is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people, as Abraham Lincoln so famously said during his Gettysburg Address. And for the citizens of Alabama, they have reason to celebrate that foundational American truth — though slipping quickly away — for this brief moment in time.

Writer Cliff Sims penned the article “Indisputable proof Alabamians have the power to demand the government they deserve” after witnessing a relatively unknown law that made public rest areas “gun free zones” become abolished in less than a week.

In great detail, Sims gives a play-by-play of what exactly went down — and it all started with one person’s e-mail. (Redacted version below)

On Sunday, July 19, an Alabamian named Jayson wrote to Sims asking him to investigate the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) overstepping its authority in turning the state’s rest areas into “gun free zones.” By Monday, Sims’s editor and a fellow journalist began the investigation and found that signs declaring “no weapons beyond this point” were indeed present at the rest stops. Yellowhammer began reporting on the story during the week asking about the legality of the ban. ALDOT didn’t initially responded to comment requests.

On Sims’s radio program Tuesday, he urged listeners to “politely” call ALDOT and express their complaints with the department’s decision. Though ALDOT fielded many complaints, they deferred to the state attorney general’s office without much other response.

An ALDOT spokesperson finally told Sims on Wednesday that the attorney general was “reviewing the matter” and said:

“We don’t want this to be a distraction for us. You can probably imagine we have a lot of issues we deal with day in and day out.”

Thursday, Sims rallied his radio listeners to contact the attorney general’s office, again “politely,” and relay their concerns there. And this is where it gets good!

By Friday — less than a week since one person stood up against the government —  Sims received an e-mail from Republican Alabama Governor Robert Bentley’s administration saying that the governor himself reviewed the rule and took action. Governor Bentley later tweeted, “I have ordered the Alabama Department of Transportation to remove signs banning weapons at all Alabama rest stops to comply with state law.”

Paskalos

Federal court says state can enforce ‘docs vs. Glocks’ law

/in /by

Florida can start enforcing a contentious law that restricts what doctors can say to patients about guns.

The measure was first adopted by the Florida Legislature four years ago, but had been caught in a lengthy court battle in which a federal judge in Miami had blocked the law from taking effect.

But the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on Tuesday issued a new ruling that lifts the injunction that had blocked enforcement of the law.

The measure, signed into law in 2011 by Gov. Rick Scott, prohibited doctors from asking patients about their gun ownership or recording that information in medical records unless it was medically necessary.

A panel split 2-1 over the law with the majority of judges finding that the law is constitutional and doesn’t violate First Amendment speech rights of doctors. It is the second time the appeals court has ruled on the measure and the decision is likely to be appealed.

“The act codifies the commonsense conclusion that good medical care does not require inquiry or record-keeping regarding firearms when unnecessary to a patient’s care—especially not when that inquiry or record-keeping constitutes such a substantial intrusion upon patient privacy,” said the opinion written by U.S. Circuit Judge Gerald Tjoflat.

Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature adopted the Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act after an Ocala couple complained that a doctor had asked them about guns. The two say they refused to answer and the physician refused to see them again.

The 2011 law, which had become popularly known as “Docs vs. Glocks,” was challenged by organizations representing 11,000 state health providers, including the Florida chapters of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians.

Doctors who break the law could potentially be fined and lose their licenses.

 

Paskalos

Pro-Second Amendment Pastor Shoots Church Intruder

/in /by

According to ABC 13 Eyewitness News in Houston. a pastor shot and injured an intruder at the Church of New Beginnings in Baytown, Texas sometime after 6 a.m. Tuesday, police say.

Pastor Benny Holmes was sleeping in his office when he woke up to the sound of someone attempting to break into the church. Holmes then armed himself and shot the burglary suspect in the right shoulder.

The alleged intruder, identified as Lee Marvin Blue, was immediately taken to Memorial Hermann Hospital and is now in stable condition. Police described Blue as having an extensive criminal history.

Last year, Pastor Holmes made national news for taking down a suspected package thief in his front yard. Holmes gave a sermon after the incident, telling his congregation why he believes that God approves of the Second Amendment.