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Bloomberg gathers anti-gun mayors to plan post-Bruen moves

July 29, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made it his life’s mission to essentially erode the Second Amendment to the point that it means nothing.

Standing in his way, however, is that whole pesky “constitutionality” thing.

The Bruen decision was undoubtedly a major setback for the former mayor and his anti-gun allies. Now, as NSSF’s Larry Keane notes, it seems they’re getting together to plan their next step in attacking our rights.

Democratic mayors from the largest cities aren’t going to stand idly by and allow the U.S. Supreme Court to reaffirm Americans’ Constitutionally-guaranteed rights.
Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) is the gun control kitchen cabinet of billionaire Michael Bloomberg, ever on his quest to deny God-given rights to law-abiding Americans even while he enjoys them. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen, Bloomberg summoned his coterie to New York City.
Reporting for Duty
The cattle call included a who’s-who of gun control mayors. Many have defunded their police departments, restricted gun rights and some have already been rebuffed by courts for misguided local policies.
Baltimore Democratic Mayor Brandon Scott joined the meeting, as did St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, Little Rock, Ark., Mayor Frank Scott and Buffalo, N.Y., Mayor Byron Brown. Kansas City’s Mayor Quinton Lucas attended too – he was just named “Gun Sense Lawmaker of the Year” by Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety for his participation in a scheme by mayors to sue gun manufacturers.

Their focus seems to be to use “public nuisance” lawsuits to try and punish gun manufacturers for the actions of third parties.

Likely emboldened by the Remington lawsuit’s results, we’re going to see a lot more such lawsuits, but what they’re forgetting is that this wasn’t Remington who settled. This was an insurance company with no stake in the Second Amendment.

A lot of gun companies will fight such lawsuits and challenge these efforts right to the Supreme Court.

Do Bloomberg and company like their chances there?

If so, they’re more masochistic than I gave them credit for.

But until the Court smacks them down, they can do a lot of damage to the firearm industry. Pro-gun legislatures may want to look at how they may be able to curtail such actions by the anti-Second Amendment mayors marching to Bloomberg’s tune. Otherwise, the damage could become incalculable over the long term.

See, the purpose of the lawsuits isn’t to get restitution for some wrong. It’s extortion. The Bloomberg Bunch are basically saying, “You do things our way or we sue you into oblivion.”

After all, Michael Bloomberg has deep pockets, no heirs to worry about, so he can throw his billions at little more than just this. That’s something most gun manufacturers can’t afford to deal with.

And that’s the point.

They’re threatening these companies to either comply or die. If I did that to you, it’s basically extortion and I’d be thrown in prison for it, as I should be.

Yet Bloomberg’s efforts are considered perfectly legal.

Which means we need to dig in and fight back. After all, if Bloomberg gets his way in this, there won’t be any guns to buy, which essentially renders the Second Amendment irrelevant.

Democrats decried Second Amendment sanctuaries, but many are okay with ignoring abortion laws

June 29, 2022 by Cam Edwards Leave a Comment

Ever since the first Second Amendment sanctuaries started popping up a few years ago, anti-gun politicians and gun control groups have complained that the communities putting these measures in place are overstepping their authority and have no recourse but to enforce any new gun control measures adopted by state legislatures or the federal government. The anti-gun website The Trace helpfully pointed out statements to that effect back in 2020, and the rhetoric hasn’t changed much since then.

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring opined in December that the resolutions “have no legal force.” Last year, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson warned that sheriffs who declined to enforce Initiative 1639 — which required enhanced background checks for semiautomatic rifles — could be held liable if a law enforcement official refused to vet a gun buyer who later uses that gun to harm someone. And Colorado’s Attorney General Phil Weiser said that any sheriffs who refuse to enforce new gun laws should resign.
Mary B. McCord, a former acting assistant attorney general for national security, argued in The Washington Post that Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions have no legal basis and that only a court can overturn a state or federal law. “State constitutions, statutes and common law generally affirm the ‘supremacy’ of federal and state law, meaning that local jurisdictions are preempted from enacting conflicting ordinances and resolutions,” she wrote.

“It doesn’t matter if you like the law, you have to enforce it” is the mentality of these anti-gun Democrats. And yet, now that the Supreme Court has tossed out Roe v. Wade and left it up to states to address the issue of abortion, Democrats have a newfound respect for ignoring laws they don’t agree with.

Local legal officials say they and other city attorneys and county prosecutors in the U.S. will not make abortion ban enforcement a priority.
Zach Klein, city attorney for the city of Columbus, and Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley signed on with more than 60 other prosecutors throughout the country, pledging not to use their offices’ resources to enforce abortion bans.
“We will continue to use our prosecutorial discretion to put the safety and security of Columbus residents first by allocating our resources to target the most serious crimes facing our community,” Klein wrote in a statement.

If these prosecutors have the discretion not to pursue cases related to abortion, then why don’t prosecutors or law enforcement have the same discretion when it comes to enforcing gun control laws?

Well, the obvious answer is that they do have that same discretion. It’s nothing more than pure hypocrisy for these anti-gun Democrats who take a dim view of Second Amendment sanctuaries to embrace prosecutorial discretion when it comes to abortion.

In fact, we’re now seeing lefty politicians work to establish their communities as “sanctuaries” for abortion, even when it conflicts with state law.

City Council Member Chito Vela, the lead sponsor of a resolution discouraging Austin police from investigating allegations concerning abortion, said Monday he expects City Council to consider the resolution at a special meeting held the week of July 18. In addition to Vela, sponsors of the resolution so far include Mayor Steve Adler and Council members Vanessa Fuentes, Paige Ellis, Leslie Pool, Ann Kitchen, and Kathie Tovo. The planned action is in direct response to Dobbs v. Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision protecting a woman’s constitutional right to have an abortion.
Vela’s resolution is known as the GRACE Act, or Guarding the Right to Abortion Care for Everyone. It states that it is the policy of the city, except as required by state or federal law, not to use city funds “to store or catalog any report of an abortion, miscarriage or other reproductive health care act.” The resolution also discourages police from providing information to any other governmental body related to any abortion or other reproductive health care activities. None of that would apply in cases “where coercion or force is used” against the individual who is pregnant.
… Vela said he had not discussed the matter with Police Chief Joseph Chacon. “I don’t think they’re eager” to pursue abortion providers or those helping women get abortions “given the personnel issues,” he said. He felt that the police were particularly unlikely to pursue reproductive matters, especially since Travis County District Attorney José Garza has said he will not prosecute such allegations.

So where are the howls of outrage from folks like Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who declared that county sheriffs have no authority or discretion when it comes to enforcing the state’s gun control laws? Well…

“It removes and reverses decades of legal precedent relied upon by millions and millions of women in this country,” he said. “It is outrageous, and we will not accept it.”
Ferguson confirmed that, even if the draft opinion is adopted by the Supreme Court, abortion access in Washington will not change. Moreover, his office has also written to a number of medical commission boards to make sure that any doctor who ends up with a criminal history due to practicing safe and legal abortion in another state until it is criminalized, will not have that negatively affect them should they look for work here in Washington.

If it weren’t for double standards they’d have no standards at all.

The bottom line is that these Democrat-run cities and counties, as well as individual prosecutors and law enforcement, do have the authority to decide which laws are going to be prioritized and which ones are going to be mostly or completely ignored. So do the Republican-run cities and counties that have made the same decision when it comes to gun control, and all the handwringing and pearl clutching over Second Amendment sanctuaries has now been proven to be just another sanctimonious bit of political hypocrisy on the part of the anti-gun left.

Five opinions released, but SCOTUS still silent on Bruen decision

June 21, 2022 by Cam Edwards Leave a Comment

The Supreme Court continued to whittle down the number of cases still before the justices on Tuesday, releasing opinions in 5 of the 18 cases from this term that had yet to be released, but the hotly anticipated decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen was not among them.

The Court’s next day to release opinions will be Thursday of this week, and there was a lot of speculation in the SCOTUSblog live chat this morning that justices will dispense with the remaining cases, including Bruen, two days from now. Of course, there was also quite a bit of speculation that there’s been some vote-shifting among the justices in Bruen, despite the fact that there’s absolutely no evidence pointing towards that scenario, so take any and all speculation with however many grains of salt as you like. Given that we still have 13 decisions remaining, I doubt that the Court is going to release them all in one fell swoop, and I think the most likely scenario is that Bruen is one of the last opinions to be released sometime next week.

What we do know is that the opinion is coming soon, and as we discussed on Monday’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co, gun control advocates and anti-gun politicians are already prepping for the decision by strategizing on how to severely curtail where concealed carry licensees can bear arms if states are no longer allowed to limit who can carry by requiring applicants to demonstrate “good cause” or a “justifiable need” before they’re approved by the licensing authority.

While the gun prohibitionists aren’t going to simply give up and slink away, a strong Supreme Court decision could still mean a dramatic improvement for New Yorkers, as this incredibly biased report from CBS 2 in New York City recently detailed.

Here’s the good news: the NYPD already has a four-point plan to try to limit both the number of guns and the places it will be legal to bring them if the high court overturns our strict gun laws. The bad news is that more people may seek to get guns.
“The NYPD has always been quite careful about who they give permission to to carry guns and that has really kept the number of people carrying guns, lawfully, way down,” said Richard Aborn of the Citizens Crime Commission.
Aborn is right when he says the NYPD has been careful, and some say admirably stingy, when it comes to issuing gun permits that allow New Yorkers to carry concealed weapons on the streets of the city.
But with the Supreme Court poised to overturn New York’s strict gun carry laws, the big worry is the people who have been issued permits to have guns in their homes, which can also be used on a firing range. Conceivably, they could be turned into concealed carry permits because of the Supreme Court decision.
CBS2 has learned that:
16,462 city residents have so called “premise residence” permits
773 have “premise business” permits
2,403 have “carry guard” permits that can be carried while working but have to be left at the place of business at the end of the shift
John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism, told CBS2 in a memo that a ruling against New York, “… does not mean that you wake up the morning of the ruling and the premises permit magically turns into a carry.”
Depending on the ruling, it could take New York a year or two to implement, Miller says, especially if the court allows New York to limit the places a gun can be carried, so-called “sensitive places.”

Is there any doubt about the anti-Second Amendment bias on the part of the CBS statiion here? The “bad news” is that more New Yorkers may want to legally exercise their right to carry a firearm in self-defense? That’s only bad news if you believe that our constitutional rights should be based on zip codes, population density, and (most importantly in New York) who you know and how much money you make.

As for the idea that New York can drag its feet for several years to implement any changes to the law required by the Supreme Court’s decision, the city and state will quickly find themselves back in court if they fail to abide by the Court’s order in good faith. It didn’t take Washington, D.C. a year or two to rescind its prohibition on keeping handguns in the home after the Court’s decision in Heller back in 2008, and when the District’s own “good cause” requirement was struck down by the D.C. Court of Appeals (a decision that District officials decided not to appeal to the Supreme Court), the city’s “may issue” law quickly became a “shall issue” statute with little delay.

Even if the city and state quickly accede to the Court’s order (which they won’t), Aborn is right that there will be a lot of New Yorkers suddenly applying for a carry license, and we may very well end up seeing lengthy delays in processing the onslaught of applications, particularly if New York Mayor Eric Adams decides to freeze or even reduce the number of employees in the NYPD Licensing Bureau. We saw something similar during the early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020, when many government offices were closed to the public and concealed carry applicants across the country were told it would be a year or more before they could even apply for a license. If New York wants to play games with the constitutional rights of residents, that would be one easy way to do so, and I suspect that Adams might suddenly decide that those working in the Licensing Bureau are needed elsewhere if SCOTUS does declare the current rules violate the Second Amendment.