They've Done it for 'Civil Rights' Violations

COMPEL PRESIDENT TRUMP TO REINSTATE, PROTECT & ENFORCE THE 2ND AMENDMENT NATIONWIDE AT BOTH THE STATE & FEDERAL LEVEL [More]

There will no doubt be some who will argue "federalism," as if states can also ignore the rest of the Bill of Rights.  I have five words:

Supreme Law of the Land.

This reminds me of our old Ashcroft Petition.

Thanks to the work of volunteers throughout the land, I sent box after box, over 40,000 hard copy mailed-in signatures in all, to the DOJ, where they probably reside off-site in storage until such time as their records retention policy says they can landfill them.

At least it proved that all that talk about supporting the Second Amendment was just that.

I also had to send a letter to NRA-ILA telling them to call off a California rep who was actively discouraging members from signing by telling them that we were, and I quote, "wild-eyed extremists."

Take a minute?

What have you got to lose?  You don't think you're not already on all kinds of lists?

Now Everybody Read from This Page

NRA needs to spend more time getting out there among the people, and most importantly educating them, and offering the tools they need to be successful. [More]

The question becomes "Successful at what?" The Fairfax agenda will brook no dissent.

Sorry, but I won't be attending any meetings where the agenda is to help push for bump stock bans, erosions of due process and prior restraints. Ditto for throwing political support behind obvious lying squishes and frauds.

Back when I was an officer with the Westside Los Angeles NRA Members Council, NRA's state "grassroots coordinator"  (read "lackey for the Lairds") tried to shut down a meeting where we were calling Sacramento to urge proper action on a bill. I had to stand up and defy him, and tell him he did not have authority to dismiss us.  This was the same character who caused me to write a letter to then-ILA head James Baker because he was discouraging other gun groups from supporting our effort to petition John Ashcroft to enforce the Second Amendment by libeling us as "wild-eyed extremists." Hell, he was trying to strangle it in its crib. And when I stood down from being nominated for president, and instead endorsed someone who I believed could be more successful due to better name recognition, this was the same lickspittle wormtongue who threatened to sue the new president if he organized a public demonstration using the NRA name (which is the reason why a few years earlier I had opposed becoming a Members' Council and wanted to leave things at "affiliated club.")

NRA will always be fake grassroots because Wayne and Chris demand total control, something more than apparent by the way they make sure the Board will always be comprised of rubber stamps.

If you want to organize, do it locally with those of like mind and purpose. You're going to need to learn who you can count on anyway in your AO. Don't turn your back on opportunities to join in coalitions, but only if your goals are the same and never at the cost of losing your autonomy.

Escaping the Village II: False Alternatives

I know I promised "Profiles in Apathy" as the next installment to my ongoing series on steps needed to restore gun rights, but the timeliness of the linked article needs to take precedence. I was going to cover this topic later.

A Second Amendment group is warning gun owners that a "massive gun control bill" is now working its way through Congress -- and is surprisingly close to becoming law.

Gun Owners of America also admits that it is the only national pro-gun group to oppose the "NICS Improvement Act of 2005" (H.R. 1415)....

Okay with NRA

The National Rifle Association takes a less ominous view of the bill.

"This bill...would improve availability of criminal history and other records for conducting background checks on firearm buyers," says an analysis on the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action website.

Why doesn't that surprise me?

Still, missing from the debate is a system proposed years ago that would allow for checks without identifying individual gun owners. Did you know such a proposal existed?

I thought not.

It been ignored by the major gun groups.

The Blind Identification Database System, or BIDS, was developed by my friends Russ Howard and Brian Puckett. Note that they are the first ones to admit that no prior restraint is constitutional, and that background checks are ineffective at keeping guns out of the hands of "prohibited persons" (as if there is government authority to prohibit or put prior restraints on anyone who is not incarcerated).

But what BIDS would do is reduce the amount of infringement the government is currently forcing on us, and preclude them having a registration list of identified gun owners as NICS provides.

Anyone who has read my work knows I prefer no system--my long-stated position is anyone who can't be trusted with a gun can't be trusted without a custodian. But I have also long admitted I am a minority, and stipulate that those who tout the benefits of incrementalism view people like me as unrealistic "absolutists" (hell, an NRA rep once warned people that Brian and I were "wild-eyed extremists"!)

So here's my challenge to the majority: Why not BIDS? So far, the only objection I've heard is "it's not politically feasible."

Yeah, I guess if all the major gun groups are going to suppress it from the debate, that's probably correct. Let's just all give up before we even engage. That'll win back our gun rights.

Click on the BIDS link above and save your own copy of this proposal.

My guess is only a few gun owners will even take the time to read the whole thing. Which brings me back to the start of this post--I still need to work on "Profiles in Apathy."

Questions and Answers III

Before proceeding, it would probably be a good idea to read Part I and Part II if you haven't already.

Mr. Licht continues:

I am asking sincerely as a newly minted (though not born yesterday) attorney that wants to make the second amendment (and the constitution) the law of the land for my children (and yours). Everywhere I look I don’t see it as a practical reality. As much as I want to believe in the second, it seems like a mass delusion (or worse) a cynical use of the concept for pure fund raising hype with no expectation (by the professional promoters) that there is any argument to win.

We should all be familiar with the letter John Ashcroft wrote to the NRA proclaiming "[L]et me state unequivocally my view that the text and the original intent of the Second Amendment clearly protect the right of individuals to keep and bear firearms."

That was bold language for a sitting attorney general. It filled the "pro-gun" community with hope. It evidently aligned their interests with those of the Republican party, especially when the treasonous record of Democrats in general on the Second Amendment is considered.

Often overlooked is the footnote Ashcroft added, a seemingly innocuous "*Your actual mileage may vary" kind of statement that, on the surface, would not create too much concern with conservative "law and order" gun-owning voters:

Of course, the individual rights view of the Second Amendment does not prohibit Congress from enacting laws restricting firearms ownership for compelling state interests, such as prohibiting firearms ownership by convicted felons, just as the First Amendment does not prohibit shouting “fire” in a crowded movie theater. As Samuel Adams explained at the Massachusetts ratifying convention, the proposed Constitution should”never [be] construed . . .to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.”

With all due respect to Mr. Ashcroft, he's describing a prior restraint on the Second Amendment and a response to an act for his First Amendment example. So he's talking apples and oranges, but most people never noticed. Besides--you can yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

What this does is justify the feds being in the "gun crime" business, even though there is no enumerated Constitutional authority delegated to them in this area by We the People. Further, it reflects a belief that the unambiguous "shall not be infringed" from the Bill of Rights is trumped by the open-ended and amorphous standard of "compelling state interest," a term found nowhere in the Constitution, and which can be twisted and contorted as much as, say, the Interstate Commerce Clause.

Republican Kool-Aid vendor Hugh Hewitt--a man with an awesome understanding of Constitutional law as practiced by "the establishment"--practically admitted as much when blogger Publicola called in to his program. "Intermediate scrutiny," Hewitt pronounced, is the best gun owners can hope for on the Second Amendment.

From a political "pragmatism" perspective, and as much as this may infuriate us, he's probably right. If we rely on "the system," with the current state of gun owner awareness, involvement and commitment, we'll be left with the Second (Class) Amendment from the Bill of Rights (Lite).

This means practically every "gun control" edict will find justification for being upheld. What judge won't find a "compelling state interest" to license gun owners, or register them, or subject citizens to the prior restraint of background checks, or permitting (and prohibiting!) the acceptable manner, places and conditions for bearing arms, concealed or otherwise. Certainly a "compelling state interest" can be found to keep "weapons of war off our streets," thus securing the National Firearms Act and FOPA '86, and blocking further inroads against GCA '68...

This is the door Ashcroft left open--one that would allow his boss and his successor to both proclaim support for renewing the "assault weapon" ban. But it was not his footnote that got the attention, was it? Gun owners almost had an orgy over the "sea change" in attitude-- without asking what in practice had really changed.

We tested Mr. Ashcroft's sincerity with a petition you may have seen circulating a few years back. Without going into a lot of detail, which you can catch up on here, we stated grievances of California gun owners who have had their rights unlawfully abridged, specifying the violations in detail. The theory was, had any other right been abused by local or state governments, such as the rights of minorities to vote, or to enjoy full lawful use of public accommodations, etc., the Justice Department would be quick to send a team down to enforce "the supreme law of the land" by which all subordinate political entities are supposedly bound.

Did we think this was really going to happen? We'd have been floored, but we thought it important to separate rhetoric from (lack of) deeds--if we were being sold a bill of goods, that is, Ashcroft mouthing support for 2A with no action offered or taken, we'd at least be able to point out that we were being played.

Over the course of the year the "Ashcroft Petition" was promoted, we managed to get over 30,000 gun owners to sign on from every state of the union. Understand we did this with no budget or donation requests, strictly as part time volunteers--and this was not an Internet petition, but one that required actual signatures. Over the course of the year we mailed several large boxes of signed petitions to the AG, along with cover letters summarizing our project and reminding him of our previous correspondences. The only acknowledgment we ever received was a non-responsive reply from the chief of the Terrorism and Violent Crime Section--a curious and chilling person to assign such a project to, we thought...

There's more to this story, of course, including professional representatives of the most prominent "gun lobby" group discouraging members from signing the petition because we who promoted it were "wild-eyed extremists." The bottom line is, we were small fries. Bush support for the AWB notwithstanding (hell it was touted as a clever ploy to appeal to "moderates"), gun owners danced to the Lee Atwater tune--who else were they gonna vote for?

While paying for the privilege?

"Fund raising hype" ? I guess a cynical person would start to have some questions...

You'll note I haven't come up with any solutions yet. I'm still working on defining the problem, and have the rest of Mr. Licht's email to address.

More to come...