I came across this video last night. It is on the gun friendly YouTube competitor Full30. In it, Eric – IraqVeteran8888 of YouTube fame – discusses the impact of social media on the gun industry with Jon Patton. Given that I will be giving a presentation at the Gun Rights Policy Conference on the role of media in advancing gun rights, I found this very timely.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals provided a win for knife rights and the Second Amendment yesterday. The case involved the suit that Knife Rights had filed in New York against DA Cyrus Vance, Jr. The judge in the District Court had dismissed that case in favor of the defendants saying that the plaintiffs did not have standing because they hadn’t identified specific knives. The Second Circuit disagreed in part and remanded the case back to the District Court for the Southern District of New York.
In a decision authored by US Appeals Court Judge Reena Raggi, the Second Circuit said the individual plaintiffs clearly showed that they had shown a threat of prosecution for intended conduct. Indeed, Native Leather, the business plaintiff, was under a deferred prosecution agreement with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Because of this, they had standing. However, she found that Knife Rights and the Knife Rights Foundation did not have standing to sue.
To summarize, we conclude as follows:
1. Plaintiffs Native Leather, Copeland, and Perez have standing to
challenge defendants’ application of N.Y. Penal Law §§ 265.00(5) and 265.01(1)
because each has expressed a present intent to possess such knives (but for
defendants’ challenged enforcement actions) and each has demonstrated a
credible threat of prosecution based on defendants’ (a) recent enforcement
actions against them, (b) express threat to prosecute Native Leather further
under the terms of a deferred prosecution agreement, and (c) continued defense
of the wrist‐flick test that allegedly prompted plaintiffs’ past violation charges.2. Our precedent precludes Knife Rights and Knife Rights Foundation
from asserting standing on behalf of their members under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Nor
can these organizational plaintiffs demonstrate standing to sue on their own
behalf based on claimed injury to their activities from expenditures diverted to
oppose defendants’ actions. Such past injuries cannot be redressed by the
declaratory and injunctive relief sought in this action, and plaintiffs fail to demonstrate that any future expenditures and attending injuries are certainly
impending.3. The district court did not abuse its discretion in denying plaintiffs’
motion for leave to amend their complaint a second time to address defects in
standing.Accordingly, the district court’s judgment of dismissal is AFFIRMED as to
Knife Rights and Knife Rights Foundation, and VACATED as to Native Leather,
Copeland, and Perez. The case is REMANDED as to these three plaintiffs for
further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Knife Rights was quite pleased with this ruling even if they were found not to have organizational standing in the case.
The reversed lower court previously found that the claims were not specific enough to proceed because they did not identify specific makes and models of folding knives at issue — even though the very inability to determine which knives would be arbitrarily deemed “illegal” is the basis of the lawsuit itself! The Second Circuit agreed that specific knives need not be identified for the case to proceed.
Knife Rights Chairman Doug Ritter said, “we are very pleased that we have overcome the absurd ruling of the lower court on ‘standing’ and can now proceed with the heart of the case itself — the unconstitutional manner in which the City and DA enforce the New York State’s gravity knife law to potentially demonize all folding knives.”
There have been over 60,000 “gravity knife” prosecutions in the City in the past 10 years, with the rate doubling recently. These prosecutions have focused almost exclusively on common locking-blade pocket knives, not actual historical paratrooper gravity knives which were the basis for the statute back in the 1950s. The so-called “wrist flick” test employed by the City and DA is a completely subjective test with immense variability and no knife owner can know can know with certainty whether or not his or her knife is legal at any point in time. This enforcement is unconstitutionally vague and must not continue.
Perhaps the lower court will finally see just how abusive the NYPD and DA Vance have been towards knife owners.
I am most certainly not a fashionista. However, I do from time to time watch Project Runway with the Complementary Spouse. So I do have some exposure to the world of fashion. Thus, when I saw the picture below of Kanye West’s line of clothing my eyes rolled. What would Tim say and how soon would Heidi be saying “Auf Wiedersehen!”.
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| From NY Mag |
I probably saw that picture of his clothing line in the Wall Street Journal. My immediate thought was that it was zombies from the Walking Dead. Given that Kanye is a big gun control supporter, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Gun control does tend to attract zombie-like supporters.
The Vektor CR-21 was a bullpup carbine made in South Africa. It was based upon their R4 rifle which was a derivative of the Israeli Galil. The internals of the CR-21 were similar and it used the same magazines as the video shows.
The CR-21 never made it out of the prototype stage but it would have been interesting to see how with a little more development it would have stacked up against the Tavor and other bullpups. It really is futuristic looking
Jean Fontaine is the “data lead for South Carolina Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.” She lives in Greenville, South Carolina. I’m not sure what a data lead is but I imagine it to be somewhere between a mailing list manager and someone who clips articles from a newspaper.
Ms. Fontaine had an op-ed in the Greenville News regarding a training session she attended in Minneapolis, Minnesota this summer. She started the column by saying:
This summer, I took training in Minneapolis for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a nonpartisan organization that supports the Second Amendment. It was created after Sandy Hook to advocate common-sense gun reforms that are straightforward…
Either the training Ms. Fontaine took in Minnesota was on how to be a commedienne or she just told a whopper. The Demanding Moms for Illegal Mayors are neither non-partisan nor pro-Second Amendment.
Fortunately, those who bothered to read this screed long enough to comment thought she was full of it as well. There was not one comment supportive of her position.
A quick Google search reveals that Ms. Fontaine is a former educator who objected to constitutional carry in South Carolina when it was proposed in 2013. She also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru in the late 1960s. I’m sure Ms. Fontaine, bless her heart, is a nice person and means well but her advocacy is misguided and dangerous.
There was a column a couple of weeks ago in the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer. The columnist, Ned Barrett, blamed legal gun owners who had their guns stolen for fueling “criminal gunfire”. The column said that legal gun owners who had their guns stolen were “the headwaters in the river of guns that flows to criminals.”
Grass Roots North Carolina President Paul Valone did not let this lie go unchallenged. As Tom Gresham always says, “A lie left unchallenged becomes the truth.”
Blaming gun owners for theft of guns lawfully locked into cars is like blaming rape victims for wearing their skirts too short; it faults victims, not perpetrators.
Paul is absolutely correct. The victim should not be blamed. If anything, the blame lies with the so-called gun free zones that force people to lock their legally owned and carried firearms in their cars.
The 2015 Gun Rights Policy Conference opens next weekend, September 25-27, in Phoenx. The free event is sponsored by the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms and has been for the past 30 years. You can still register to attend and I believe that they do allow in person registrations on Friday night and Saturday morning. The event is being held at the Sheraton Crescent Hotel.
My colleagues and I on the Polite Society Podcast will be livestreaming the event. We will also feature interviews with some of the presenters during conference breaks. You can watch the livestream either on our webpage or on our YouTube channel.
C-Span will be broadcasting the Sunday portion of the conference. I’m not sure which C-Span channel it will be on but I’m sure you can find it if you check their website later in the coming week.
The final agenda has been published and I have uploaded it to Google. A number of state level organizations will be participating including Grass Roots North Carolina, Georgia Carry, the Virginia Citizens Defense League, the Illinois State Rifle Association, Florida Carry, and many more. Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed will be speaking on Saturday about the impact of 3-D printing on the future of gun control. This is just a taste of what is being presented at GRPC.
If you check the agenda for Sunday morning, there is a panel on Using Media to Advance Gun Rights. It will feature people like Dave Workman of Gun Week, Charles Heller of Liberty Watch Radio, and someone else whose work you may have read a time or two.
If you can’t be there in person, I would encourage you to partake of our livestreaming of the event. It was a grassroots effort to put it together. I would thank the New Jersey Second Amendment Society, Ammoland.com, and those who contributed to our GoFundMe campaign for their monetary support in making this a reality.
US District Court Judge David Bury ruled on Friday that no mention of Operation Fast and Furious aka Project Gunwalker could be made in the trial of two men accused of the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.
The U.S. asked the judge this summer to keep the details of Fast and Furious out of the murder trial, stating it was irrelevant.
Bury agreed. “I agree with one exception. I can’t find any relevance expect if the government should open the door,” he said.
If the government brings up the origins of the guns found, Bury ruled that defendants can then bring up Fast and Furious.
Bury ordered the defendants “not to refer to … or elicit any testimony regarding Operation Fast and Furious. Understood?”
Excuse me?
The defendants, Ivan Soto Barraza and Jesus Leonel Sanchez Meza, used AK-47s to kill Agent Terry that the BATFE had allowed (encouraged) to be walked to Mexico as part of Operation Fast and Furious. Given that the Department of Justice and BATFE were complicit in providing the firearms used to kill Agent Terry, ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata, and 300 or more Mexicans, I’m not surprised that the US Attorney’s Office doesn’t want it mentioned. However, I am surprised that a judge would deny the defense of the opportunity to use it in defending their clients.
It is obvious that burying the details of Operation Fast and Furious is important to the prosecutors. In addition to the judge’s order above, they have a whole series of questions for potential jurors asking about their knowledge of Project Gunwalker. One does have to wonder if this was a local decision to suppress mention of Operation Fast and Furious or did the order come down from DC.
Comedian Steven Crowder calls out gun controllers in this parody called “Rogue Guns”. I think one of the reasons that parody is such an effective political tool is that it is so close to the truth.
In this case, how many times have we heard the gun blamed rather than the person using it? The answer is much too often. A gun or a knife or even a Martha Stewart marble rolling pin are all tools until they are misused.
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