Second Amendment Victories, and Gun Owners Showing some Spine

While Dave Hardy had it first at his Of Arms and the Law blog last night, I could not access the opinion to read it. Katie Pavlich has a more accessible piece over at Townhall.com today. The title says it all: Second Amendment Victory: Liberal Court Rules Unconstitutional for Government to Restrict Concealed Carry Permits based on "Need."

I have dubbed the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals the "Ninth Circus" because the "reasoning" coming out of their opinions is often head spinning. This is a major victory for California gun owners. This ruling is likely to be appealed, and since we have conflicting rulings from other courts, will end up in the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, in Connecticut, it seems that that tens of thousands of gun owners decided to flout the recent "assault weapon" registration requirement. Hot Air has the story here. I don't envy these people, for surely they have had to make a calculations of the risks of getting caught versus the risk of having their defensive weapon confiscated without a fight. Not knowing whether or not their calculations were correct must cause pain and stress.  But it is good that Connecticut gun owners are showing some spine. Mike Lawlor now has to decide how far he is willing to go to enforce the law, how much he is willing to rile the populations to achieve its goals, which, BTW, have nothing to do with stopping another Sandy Hook school shooting.  But now the political class knows exactly how far they can take the war on guns.  Connecticut gun owners are saying, like the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae "Come and take them!"

A War on Your Freedom

As has often been mentioned by numerous gun writers, the Second Amendment exists primarily to allow citizens to be armed and trained in the use of weapons as a deterrent to both foreign and domestic enemies who would overthrow the Constitutional government.  The implication is that citizens should have access to the same small arms carried by our armed forces.  In other words, fully automatic weapons like the M16 and the M4.  But when it is our own government which is defying the Constitution, and thus overthrowing the government, it does become trickier.  Leftists are fond of saying that the Founding Fathers never envisioned so-called "assault weapons," but what they really never envisioned was that the Constitutional government would be undermined by elected officials within the government.  But that is what is happening, and a major front in the battle to save the republic is an ongoing war on guns.  William Levinson writes about the war being waged at the American Thinker in an article entitled Gun Control: A War, not a Conversation on February 6, 2014.

 Levinson cites the many ways in which the current crop of gun control laws are in fact a war on guns, and on gun owners. These new laws attempt to delegitimize the bearing of arms by making possession of classes of weapons illegal, and those possessing them criminal.  What was legal yesterday has become illegal today.  In New York today, a handgun that carries 10 rounds of 9mm ammunition is a legal self defense weapon, but a similar handgun that carries 11 rounds of the same ammunition illegal.  There is no sense to such a thing, other than to wage a war on guns and gun owners, and further restrict the type of weapons civilians can own.   Noteably, police officers are exempt from such silly rules.

Gun owners have become the new Jews, the scapegoated minority that took the blame for the country's difficulties in Nazi Germany.  The nasty cartoons and articles demonizing gun owners as somehow sanctioning the murders of children by our refusal to give up our guns insults each and every peacefully armed citizen.  The use of the National Rifle Association as a stand in for the "gun lobby" resemble again the propaganda that was run against the Jews in Nazi Germany.  Lest you think that the anti-gun crowd is made up of mere citizens upset at the murders that seem to continually take place, please note that the fact that the NRA is cited so often as an enemy of the anti-gun crowd is due to the Saul Alinski's Rule 13 "Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." The facts do not matter.  The truth does not matter. The only thing that matters is the goal of disarming the American people. Levinson also points out the many other ways the war in being waged, including blitzkrieg legislation, military grade propaganda, and incrimentalism.  Yes, other writers have remarked on any number of these methods, but none has framed them in terms of the debate we are supposed to be having.

After the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Heller, and the Left began its drum beat for a "national conversation on guns," I commented that we had been having a national conversation since the 1950s. Arguably, we have really been having the conversation since the 1930s, with the passage of the National Firearms Act, making fully automatic weapons effectively out of reach of the average man. Heller settled the issue by deciding that the Second Amendment meant that Americans can have weapons, at least at home. McDonald extended that to possession of arms outside the home.  The Constitutional side in the war on guns won that particular battle.  But the Left never gives up, and the current crop of gun control laws illustrates that fact very clearly.

Unfortunately, the Constitutionalists side in this war has never understood it as a war.  Understand, the Jews could not have had a meaningful conversation with the Nazis about differences.  The Nazis were determined to kill them, and either the Jews had to fight back, flee the country, or be killed.  There was no compromise.  Similarly today, there is no compromise with radical Islam.  They are determined to kill us, and the only reason to understand them is to live rent free in their heads in order to fight back.  Gun owners must adopt guerrilla tactics of their own if we hope to win the war on guns.  Failure to do so...

Update:  Bob Barr has an article up at Townhall.com entitled Another Federal Court Undermines the Second Amendment today. It illustrates the war being waged on all fronts. Bob Barr:

Ever since the 2008 Heller opinion (and the companion, 2010 Chicago v. McDonald decision), liberal judges and anti-gun state and local government officials have been fashioning ways to undercut and subvert the ability of citizen to exercise their Second Amendment rights. That’s why Alan Gura, the prominent Second Amendment lawyer who argued both Heller and McDonald, has stayed so busy since 2008. “It's nice that the Supreme Court declared we enjoy a fundamental individual right to bear arms, but that doesn't mean much if they allow lower courts to rubber stamp any infringement of the right,” says Gura. “It's not the judiciary's role to 'defer' to the legislature's alleged wisdom and expertise. It's the judiciary's role to guard our rights and enforce the constitution.”