“I respect the Second Amendment.” Hillary Clinton actually spoke those words in 2008—not coincidentally, the year of her first presidential campaign. Now that she has officially entered the 2016 presidential race, let’s not forget where she actually stands on guns. Hillary has vocally supported:
- a national gun registry;
- a smart gun mandate;
- a modern sporting rifle ban;
- all guns stored separately from ammunition;
- gun ownership for only a select group.
Let’s not give her the opportunity to show her “respect” for the Second, the First or any other amendment. As NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre warned at the NRA Annual Meetings—our U.S. Constitution, in her hands, would be erased from the pages for history.
Under Attack In Oregon
The Oregon Senate is considering a gun rights beat-down that would require individuals to appear before an FFL-licensed dealer before completing a private firearms transfer, despite lacking a single bipartisan sponsor. Failure to comply with SB 941 carries a stiff fine and the loss of Second Amendment rights. As with all background check proposals, it also creates the essential “stealth” precursor to the Holy Grail of gun confiscation—a list of owners.
Several other pieces of anti-gun legislation are also winding their way through Oregon’s upper House. SB 945, SB 525 and SB 913 also impose stiff penalties or otherwise burden ownership. And all three measures also lack a single bipartisan sponsor.
Pro-Gun Blogger Exacts Retractions From NY Times, MSNBC
After The New York Times and other national media outlets gleefully (and falsely) attacked the NRA’s “hypocrisy” for supposedly allowing firearms at certain events and venues but not others during the NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits in Nashville last weekend, pro-Second Amendment blogger Bob Owens set “The Gray Lady” straight and demanded a retraction of their story.
He also exposed as a lie the claim by Bloomberg’s anti-gun group Moms Demand Action that they were leading a protest by some 400 people in Nashville against the NRA. As Owens’ bird’s-eye-view photo of the protest showed, Everytown had succeeded in assembling just a fraction of the protesters it had claimed.
“Gun-Free Zones” Fail Again
While the failure of “gun-free zones” to prevent shootings has been demonstrated time and again, a shooting Monday at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, N.C., suggests that “mostly gun-free” zones may not be any better. 20-year-old Kenneth Morgan Stancil III, a former student at the college, killed print shop director Ron Lane with a rifle inside a campus building restroom. Stancil had been a work-study employee in the print shop before recently being fired by Lane.
In 2013 North Carolina passed a law allowing right-to-carry permit holders to store firearms in locked vehicles in campus parking lots—a good law indeed. But it’s unlikely that an onlooker could have made it down several flights of stairs, out to the parking lot to retrieve his or her legal firearm, and back up the stairs in time to have prevented this tragedy.
Measure Targets Race Question For Gun Purchases
A measure introduced on Monday in the U.S. Congress would put a stop to the government asking about a purchaser’s race on Form 4473, the form required when buying firearms from a licensed dealer.
The Freedom from Intrusive Regulatory Enforcement of Arbitrary Registration Mandates (FIREARM) Act, introduced by Rep. Diane Black, R-Tenn., and Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, would delete the question on race, which was added to the form in 2012.
“Forcing citizens who are lawfully purchasing guns to disclose race and ethnicity with the threat of federal prosecution if they fail to disclose is completely unnecessary,” Rep. Poe said in a statement. “Bottom line, if a law-abiding citizen is lawfully purchasing firearms, race and ethnicity are irrelevant.”
Armed Defense Against Road Rage Assailant
“I was forced to make a decision that no man should have to make,” said Kenneth Catlett of Louisville, Ky. Catlett received a phone call from his son about a driver who had followed him off the interstate. As the son pulled up to the house, Catlett came outside with his gun and was accosted by the other driver, who claimed the young man had cut him off in traffic.
When the angry man came out of his car holding a firearm, Catlett and his son wrestled him to the ground and disarmed him. Instead of leaving, the man retrieved a hammer from the vehicle and charged them. Catlett shot the assailant, who drove away in his car and was later found dead. While the armed citizen regrets the choice he was forced to make, it’s fortunate that he and his son are both unharmed.
Wal-Mart Win For Gun Owners
An appeals court has ruled in favor of Wal-Mart and against Trinity Church in a case that could change the way public companies make business decisions and decide what products they sell. The ruling by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals reverses a lower court decision that Wal-Mart must let Trinity Church submit, in the company’s annual report to shareholders, a proposal that would give shareholders oversight over the sale of rifles with so-called “high-capacity magazines.”
The court is set to issue a full opinion with its reasoning at a later date, according to the order signed by Judge Thomas L. Ambro. The win by Wal-Mart is a big victory for gun owners, as the retail giant is a go-to location for many seeking to purchase firearms.