This week, the NRA claimed victory for beating back an Obama administration policy that would have essentially stopped American hunters and sport shooters from traveling internationally with their personal firearms and ammunition. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced on Thursday that it is returning to its previous system of facilitating the international transport of personal firearms and ammunition, after meeting with representatives from the NRA, firearms industry and sportsmen’s groups, and key members of Congress.
Last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) brought renewed attention to the plight of a growing number of veterans who have been unjustly stripped of their Second Amendment rights. In an April 14 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Sen. Grassley takes the Department of Veterans Affairs to task for overreaching policies that have resulted in the names of well over 100,000 veterans and dependents being placed in the FBI’s National Instance Criminal Background Check System (NICS) as prohibited from possessing firearms.
Last week, Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) tweeted a picture of himself and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C) holding an AR-15. Rep. Buck later reported that the photo was taken in his Capitol Hill House office. While a photo of two congressmen posing with the most popular rifle in the United States (and one trigger-locked and without a bolt carrier group at that) shouldn’t raise any rational public safety concerns, it apparently caused enough handwringing for the D.C. Attorney General’s Office that they referred the picture to the Metropolitan Police Department for further investigation.
On April 23, 2015, President Obama’s U.S. Attorney General Nominee, Loretta Lynch, was confirmed in the U.S. Senate by a vote of 56-43, becoming the latest (but not likely the greatest) Attorney General of the United States.
Never mind all the rhetoric about how Hillary Clinton can’t get the Democrat Party’s presidential nomination because some fringe elements don’t think she’s radical enough. The Hill reports that “Advocates for gun control [an increasingly fringe group in their own right] have high hopes for Hillary Clinton’s presidential run,” seeing her as “an ally who can finish the push for tightened background checks that has stalled in President Barack Obama’s second term.” Indeed, Clinton has been a vocal gun control supporter for more than 20 years.
Monday must have been a hard day for New York Times columnist Charles Blow, given the anti-gun, anti-NRA tone of his previous musings. Two years ago, when the Senate voted down the gun control restrictions President Obama was pushing, Blow blamed it on the "Politics of Paranoia." A contemporary Pew Research Center poll had found that 51 percent of Republicans approved of the Senate votes, and the way Blow figured it, that proved "how frightened of the government far-right Republicans are." Never mind that 22 percent of Democrats agreed with the Republicans who opposed gun control.
Thanks to your continued calls and emails, NRA supported National Right-to-Carry bills have seen increases in cosponsorships this past week. Please continue to contact your elected officials and urge them to cosponsor and support these important bills!
On April 2, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granted D.C.’s motion to voluntarily dismiss an appeal of the ruling that held the District’s ban on carrying a firearm outside the home for self-defense was unconstitutional. The District’s decision not to continue the appeal ends one of the last outright bans on carrying firearms in the United States. While this marks the end of the District’s total ban, those wishing to lawfully carry firearms in D.C. still have a long way to go before all law-abiding individuals have a legal means of exercising their right to bear arms in the District. Shortly after the ban was held unconstitutional last July, the D.C. council adopted a temporary law that makes it all but impossible to get a license to carry a concealed pistol. A nearly identical version of that temporary law is still in effect, and a permanent version is under review by Congress and set to become law on May 30.
