Category Archives: Second Amendment

Senate panel okays Tax Laws (Second Amendment) Bill: Fixed tax scheme gets nod to bring 2m retailers into tax net  The News International

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Senate panel okays Tax Laws (Second Amendment) Bill: Fixed tax scheme gets nod to bring 2m retailers into tax net - The News International

Gohmert: Without a change to how children are taught, 'We're going to have to get rid of the Second Amendment'  Fox News

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Gohmert: Without a change to how children are taught, 'We're going to have to get rid of the Second Amendment' - Fox News

Minim, Inc. and Cadence Connectivity, Inc. Enter Second Amendment to Loan and Security Agreement with Silicon Valley Bank  Marketscreener.com

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Minim, Inc. and Cadence Connectivity, Inc. Enter Second Amendment to Loan and Security Agreement with Silicon Valley Bank - Marketscreener.com

1. Opinion: Let's talk about repealing the Second Amendment  The Connecticut Mirror
2. New Jerseys tough gun bill respects the 2nd Amendment and will save lives | Opinion  NJ.com
3. Guns in the Workplace: What Has Changed, and What Can Employers Expect?  SHRM
4. How Many Americans Favor Bruen? Depends on How You Ask.  The Trace
5. Supreme Court Second Amendment Decision in Bruen Regains Public Approval  AmmoLand Shooting Sports News
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Opinion: Let's talk about repealing the Second Amendment - The Connecticut Mirror

The second amendment has become a badge and bumper sticker, a shield for gun activists and scripture for much of the American right. But like other cherished texts, it is not as clear as many make it out to be.

The amendment reads: 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.

For most of the republics lifespan, from 1791 to 2008, those commas and clauses were debated by attorneys and senators, slave owners and freedmen, judges, Black Panthers, governors and lobbyists. For some, the militia was key; for others the right that shall not be infringed; for yet others, the question of states versus the federal government. For the most part, the supreme court stayed out it.

Americans have been thinking about the second amendment as an individual right for generations, said Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. You can find state supreme courts in the mid-1800s where judges say the second amendment protects an individual right.

But for the 70 years or so before a supreme court decision in 2008, he said, the supreme court and federal courts held that it only applied in the context of militias, the right of states to protect themselves from federal interference.

In 2008, the supreme court decided the District of Columbia v Heller, 5-4 , overturning a handgun ban in the city. The conservative justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion in narrow but unprecedented terms: for the first time in the countrys history, the supreme court explicitly affirmed an individuals right to keep a weapon at home for self-defense.

Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, saying the decision showed disrespect for the well-settled views of all of our predecessors on the court, and for the rule of law itself. Two years later, he dissented from another decision favoring gun rights, writing:

The reasons that motivated the framers to protect the ability of militiamen to keep muskets, or that motivated the Reconstruction Congress to extend full citizenship to freedmen in the wake of the Civil War, have only a limited bearing on the question that confronts the homeowner in a crime-infested metropolis today.

This fight over history, waged by supreme court justices and unlikely allies and foes, goes all the way back.

People look at the same record and come to wildly different conclusions about what the view was in the 18th century, in the 19th century, said Nicholas Johnson, a Fordham University law professor who argues against Winklers view of 20th-century case law.

Attempts to parse original intent go all the way back to the revolution and its aftermath, when the countrys founders bickered about what exactly they were talking about. Carl Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University, has argued that James Madison wrote the second amendment in part to reassure his home state of Virginia, where slave owners were terrified of revolts and wary of northerners who would undermine the system.

The militia were at that stage almost exclusively a slave-control tool in the south, he said. You gave Congress the power to arm the militia if Congress chooses not to arm our militia, well, we all know what happens.

The federalist Madisons compromise, according to Bogus, was to promise a bill of rights. After weeks of tense debate, his federalists narrowly won the vote to ratify the constitution. He writes an amendment that gives the states the right to have an armed militia, by the people arming themselves.

A year later, the federal government passed a law requiring every man eligible for his local militia to acquire a gun and register with authorities. (The law was only changed in 1903.)

After the civil war, second amendment rights were again debated by Congress, which abolished militias in the former Confederate states and passed the 1866 Civil Rights Act, explicitly protecting freed slaves right to bear arms. A century later, the founders of the Black Panthers took up guns, symbolically and literally, to press for equal civil rights in California.

The states conservative lawmakers promptly took up the cause of gun control. In 1967, Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act, banning the public carry of loaded guns in cities. The governor said he saw no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.

Reagan later supported the Brady Act, a gun control law named after his aide, who was shot during an assassination attempt on Reagan in Washington DC. The National Rifle Association supported the Mulford Act but opposed the Brady Act, signed into law 26 years later.

Winkler, the UCLA professor, said that during the 1970s, a revolt among the membership profoundly altered the NRA overnight. Since the 1930s, the group had supported restrictions on machine guns and public carry, but angry hardliners took control over the organization in 1977, when moderates wanted to retreat from lobbying work. The group then began a decades-long campaign to popularize its uncompromising positions.

The NRA goes far beyond what the second amendment requires people walking around with permits, on college campuses, Winkler said. Their argument is its a fundamental right and freedom. People care more about values than they care about policy.

In the late 1990s, several prominent liberal attorneys, such as Laurence Tribe and Akhil Reed Amar, also argued for an individual right while advocating gun regulation. Gun control activists say they have not changed tack since the supreme courts 2008 decision. Scalia wrote a narrow opinion and listed several exceptions, such as bans on unusual and dangerous weapons and sales to domestic abusers and people with mental illness. He also wrote that states and cities could ban firearms from places like government buildings.

Lower courts have upheld many gun laws around the country since 2008, and the supreme court has declined to hear any second amendment cases since 2010. Attorneys and activists on both sides expect a looming fight over the right to carry guns in public, which the Heller decision does not address.

The courts generally strike a balance between the need for lawmakers to protect public safety and this notion of second amendment rights, said Avery Gardiner, co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The Heller decision, she said, was entirely consistent with gun laws like background checks.

Theres a mythology here that the supreme court has said something about the second amendment that it hasnt, she said. I think most Americans dont like reading the footnotes.

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The right to bear arms: what does the second amendment really mean ...

A Texas judge ruled that a state law preventing adults under 21 from carrying a handgun was unconstitutional.

Carrying a handgun in Texas wasnt a problem for gun-owning adults who had a license to do so. However, because the state didnt hand out licenses for anyone under 21, legal handgun owners were prevented from carrying their firearms outside of their homes.

In this Jan. 26, 2015 file photo, a supporter of open carry gun laws, wears a pistol as he prepares for a rally in support of open carry gun laws at the Capitol, in Austin, Texas.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman ruled that the Second Amendment prevents restricting the rights of gun owners based on their age.

TEXANS WILL BE ABLE TO CARRY HANDGUNS IN PUBLIC WITHOUT A LICENSE ON SEPT. 1 UNDER CONSTITUTIONAL CARRY LAW

"Based on the Second Amendments text, as informed by Founding-Era history and tradition, the Court concludes that the Second Amendment protects against this prohibition." Pittman wrote. "Texass statutory scheme must therefore be enjoined to the extent that law-abiding 18-to-20-year-olds are prohibited from applying for a license to carry a handgun."

Two unnamed plaintiffs, an 18-year-old and a 20-year-old, along with the Firearms Policy Coalition, filed the lawsuit challenging Texas law in November.

A customer shops for a pistol at a sporting goods store. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Pittman noted the Second Amendment doesn't contain any mention of age as a restriction, unlike other portions of the Constitution.

"To start, the Second Amendment does not mention any sort of age restriction," he wrote. "This absence is notablewhen the Framers meant to impose age restrictions, they did so expressly."

Thursdays ruling comes on the heels of a major victory for Second Amendment advocates in June when the Supreme Court struck down a restrictive New York law on issuing concealed carry licenses.

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Pittmans ruling also builds on top of the permitless carry law in Texas that Gov. Greg Abbott signed last year. The states "constitutional carry" law allowed Texans over the age of 21 to carry handguns in public without a license.

Max Thornberry is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. You can reach him at Max.Thornberry@fox.com and on Twitter @Max_Thornberry

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Texas judge rules law preventing adults under 21 from carrying handguns ...

1. Judge: Disarming those under protective orders is constitutional violation  The Texas Tribune
2. Disarming under protective orders violates Second Amendment  KRLD
3. Court Rules That Since The Framers Didn't Care Much About Domestic Abuse, Abusers Get To Have All The Guns They Want!  Above the Law
4. Texas judge rules taking guns from respondents of protective orders unconstitutional  KRIS 6 News Corpus Christi
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Judge: Disarming those under protective orders is constitutional violation - The Texas Tribune

1. Oregon sheriffs won't enforce new gun law: Infringes on Second Amendment  Fox News
2. Oregon Gun-Control Initiative Faces Immediate Legal Peril After Slim Victory  The Reload
3. Can Oregons Measure 114, new gun limits, be stopped by court challenges?  OregonLive
4. Oregon's gun safety initiative will challenge the state's Democratic leadership Oregon Capital Chronicle  Oregon Capital Chronicle
5. Multiple Oregon Sheriffs Refusing to Enforce State's Strict New Gun Control Law Saying It Circumvents The Second Amendment  The Published Reporter
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Oregon sheriffs won't enforce new gun law: Infringes on Second Amendment - Fox News

The states didnt do such a good job of protecting our civil rights.

Even while they did not have great regard for Congress and the Presidency, many Americans have had the fondest opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court. People have viewed the court as the constitutional authority to curtail the deviancy of other branches of government and assure the constitutional rights of citizens. Of course, people from different groups objected to Supreme Court rulings that did not support their objectives, but now popular opposition to SCOTUS seems to be growing.

To most Blacks, SCOTUS was simply another arm of racial oppression. In the Dred Scott case of 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that a Negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect. At that time, slavery was an immutable status. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation in public places was permissible as long as the accommodations were equivalent.

Protests by Blacks later induced the Court to modify some rulings on race. In 1954, SCOTUS held in Brown v. Board of Education that racial discrimination in public schools was unconstitutional. The court also reversed the earlier ruling in Plessy that segregation was constitutional. It took 58 years to acquire that wisdom.

Recently the Supreme Court issued two decisions that have generated broad public opposition. In Dobbs v. Jackson, the court overruled a womans constitutional right to have an abortion. Judge Samuel Alito asserts in his majority opinion that the Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

According to an NBC news poll prior to the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, 71% of those queried objected to overturning Roe v. Wade.

SCOTUS further deteriorated their public support by overturning a 1911 New York State case that requires a showing of proper cause to permit someone to carry a concealed weapon. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen, and he essentially determined the restriction to offend the Second Amendment.

The basis for Thomas opinion was that the law prevents law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms as authorized by the Second Amendment. The decision aroused considerable opposition because the Court essentially removed any reasonable restriction on issuing firearms regulations, especially during a period of increased gun deaths in the U.S.

While recent cases assert that the Second Amendment was primarily for self-defense, a conflict still continues because of the specific language of the provision. It states, 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.

It is hard to believe that the nations Founding Fathers were primarily concerned that citizens should be well armed for a dispute with a violent neighbor. With only 13 states forming the original United States of America, it was clear that the boundaries of those states might be contested, and other properties would become states as part of the nation. Under such circumstances, state militias would have to be formed.

In fact, the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts was formed in 1637 as a citizen organization to develop militia forces for protection even in Colonial days. These militia were the precedent of the National Guard institution.

American women are enraged that the Supreme Court has denied them the constitutional right to an abortion. They assert that this right is among those to be asserted by the Ninth Amendment of the Constitution to be retained by the people although it is not specifically enumerated. In a democracy, every adult must have control of his or her body.

Respect for the U.S. Supreme Court is declining because of these questionable decisions.

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Supreme Court takes a stand against the American people - BayStateBanner

This November 5th marks the five-year anniversary of the shootings at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, where a man wearing military-grade body armor shot and killed twenty-six parishioners. AMAC had the opportunity to talk with Stephen Willeford, the hero whose quick actions wounded the shooter and drew him away from the church.

Stephen Willeford is a former plumber who is employed by the Gun Owners of America (GOA) serving as the groups national spokesperson and grassroots liaison. He is also an AMAC member, and he shares his thoughts on how this transformative experience changed his life. This good guy with a gun also discusses his views on the Uvalde, Texas school shooting, gun violence, recent gun legislation, and the Second Amendment.

AMAC: It has been almost five years since you confronted the mass shooter at the First Baptist Church in your hometown. How has this experience influenced your life moving forward?

Stephen: Wow. So, nothing is the same anymore. I used to be a plumber at a major metropolitan hospital working maintenance, and now I travel the country and fight for our right to keep and bear arms and train churches to set up safety response teams, and that is what I do for a living now. I would say I am more aware of what is around me. Although I was pretty aware before that happened also. But my life has totally changed.

AMAC: Can you tell us how you think the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas was handled?

Stephen: Well, you know, I usually try to give the police department a lot of credit. There were so many failures. Its ridiculous that a lady ran in where the Uvalde Police Department refused to. She ran in and got her children and other children out safely, which is unacceptable. The police should have been handling and gotten in there much sooner. They could have been in within 3 minutes, and they were not.

But this does talk to the idea that you are your own first responder. You cannot bet on the police department to save you, youre going to have to save yourself and in this case, your community. Also, I would hope that the police are better trained than what happened in Uvalde, and for the most part, they are. I usually give them the benefit of the doubt, but in this case, they failed miserably.

AMAC: What, in your opinion, can be done to discourage gun violence in schools?

Stephen: We need to start training our teachers to be able to carry within their classrooms. Again, like I say, when seconds count, police are only minutes away. And we need to train our teachers and our staff, their staff members, and the school faculty need to understand and be aware and need to be able to carry within schools.

We need to be able to lock our [school] doors. And that was a major failing. Alarms should have been going off. There should be no reason that we leave our doors for schools unlocked. There should be school resource officers at any door. And we need to do away with gun-free zones and allow parents, when dropping off and picking up their children, to be able to carry.

AMAC: Is the root of the many problems we are facing as a society now something deeper than government has the capacity to address?

Stephen: Well, the government has been trying to divide us in social and economic ways, and theyve been trying to divide races for so long. They have created that. And I truly believe that they theyre trying to make it where police are the bad guys and defund the police. But they do not need to defund them. They actually need to fund them more, give them better training and better tools. But they need to make it where police are not afraid to respond.

Police nowadays are afraid of doing the right thing, afraid they will get prosecuted themselves. And its time that we get back to respecting police and the government isnt the answer. Ronald Reagan said it best when he said the governments the problem, not the answer, not the solution.

AMAC: Do you think the bipartisan gun legislation signed by Joe Biden in June will have an effect on gun violence?

Stephen: Absolutely I think it will. I think it [gun violence] will absolutely go up. I think that red flag laws without due process, you know, this country was founded on due process and being innocent until proven guilty, and red flag laws negate that. In Maryland, there was a case where a mother-in-law claimed that her ex-son-in-law was violent and dangerous and had guns. They kicked in his door in a no-knock warrant. He came out not knowing it was the police with a pistol in the hand [and] they shot and killed him. And that was unfortunate. He had never committed a felony in his life. And it was just from the word of his ex-mother-in- law that got that warrant to be served.

We in America have the right to the assumption of innocent until proven guilty. Red flag laws tend to come in and take all your guns and your property away, and then you must prove that youre okay and that costs money. So red flag laws are not the answer. They want to make it harder for 18-year-olds to own semi-automatic rifles and pistols. And I have a problem with that, because 18-year-olds serve our country in foreign lands with a fully automatic M-16 and drive M-1 Abrams tanks. This is not a maturity issue. This is a mental health issue. The shooter in Sutherland Springs was 26 years old. The shooter in Vegas was 60 something years old. It is not maturity. It is mental health.

AMAC: So,you think that gun violence will go up because of this bipartisan legislation?

Stephen: Any time you restrict good guys from having guns, that creates a problem where no one can stop a shooter. Case in point, the Buffalo, New York shooting where the guy [shooter] went specifically knowing that [area] was the lowest percentage of concealed permits in the United States. And so, his numbers were up because no one can defend themselves.

AMAC: How can law abiding gun owners protect themselves from the attacks on their right to bear arms?

Stephen: Well, they need to get with their legislators, the federal government, and they need to push their state representatives, especially their state representatives. They need to push for more freedom to be able to carry and to stop the infringement. They need to get active in the political realm. They need to support groups like the GOA.

AMAC: Final question, Stephen. What does the Second Amendment mean to you?

Stephen: The Second Amendment does not grant the right to keep and bear arms, because anything granted by the government can be taken away. Instead, the Second Amendment is recognizing that we have a God-given right to bear arms for protection and stop tyrannical government. What the Second Amendment does is restrict the government from infringing upon the God-given right we have to keep and bear arms.

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The Good Guy with a Gun Five Years Later - AMAC