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No, The Second Amendment Doesn’t Rule Out New Gun Restrictions

No, The Second Amendment Doesn’t Rule Out New Gun Restrictions

When the Supreme Court vindicated the right of individuals to own firearms for self-defense, it might have opened a new era of calmer debate about regulation of guns. The National Rifle Association had always trumpeted the danger of complete bans and mass confiscation, and the 2008 decision ruled out such drastic measures once and for all.

Finally, gun owners could breathe a sigh of relief. No longer did they have to worry that gun control measures would put us on a slippery slope to outlawing firearms ownership.

But the court didn't rule out all restrictions. Justice Antonin Scalia noted, "Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."

Any constitutional right is subject to some regulation. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and assembly, but that doesn't give me the right to organize a protest march on an interstate highway or to drive a sound truck through a residential area at 3 a.m. or to broadcast on a radio frequency without a license.


Gun-rights fanatics, however, were only radicalized by the Supreme Court decision. They act as if it gives them a complete exemption from government interference. Some champion "constitutional carry" — defined as "the overall unrestricted right to carry a firearm, either with a license or not."

But the right to keep and bear arms is not absolute. It is subject to limits defined by the Supreme Court, which may go beyond the ones Scalia cited. That simple fact matters to the current debate over guns.

On Wednesday, the U.S. House approved a bill making 21 the minimum age to buy a semiautomatic rifle or shotgun and forbidding the sale of guns with magazines holding 15 rounds or more. It passed a "red-flag" measure to let federal courts remove guns from those shown to be dangerous.

Joe Biden wants to revive the 1994 federal ban on "assault weapons." Universal background checks are also on the table.

Would these restrictions prevent school shootings or bring down the rate of gun murders? I'm skeptical that outlawing "assault weapons" would help, because these rifles are no more capable or deadly than many conventional guns. I'm skeptical that limiting the size of magazines would make a difference, because killers can carry several magazines and quickly reload.

Universal background checks, however, would close a loophole that lets felons acquire weapons they are not allowed to have. Raising the minimum age can impede some would-be attackers, as we know from the Uvalde, Texas, school shooter — who didn't buy his guns until immediately after turning 18.

Red-flag laws undoubtedly prevent some shootings. But gun control opponents are right in pointing out that none of these changes is guaranteed to head off any particular crime.

Firearms regulations, however, don't have to be foolproof to be constitutional. It's entirely possible that some or all of the ideas being considered would pass judicial muster.

In 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld bans on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines enacted by New York and Connecticut. The opinion was written by Jose Cabranes, a veteran judge with a moderate reputation. His analysis laid out a persuasive template for evaluating gun restrictions.

Cabranes held that, to be consistent with the Second Amendment, the laws had to meet certain conditions. They had to serve an important purpose; they had to reflect "reasonable inferences based on substantial evidence"; and they had to leave citizens with good alternatives for self-defense. He concluded that these laws were constitutional.

The argument for banning assault weapons and large magazines is that they are overrepresented in mass shootings, because their design makes them alluring to killers and perfect for the task. Banning them doesn't deprive anyone of personal protection or home defense, because plenty of other guns are as good or better.

The court's analysis presents a dilemma for gun rights zealots. They can't very well claim that, first, these bans are useless because criminals can easily overcome them and, second, they render citizens incapable of defending themselves. If criminals can find good substitutes, so can law-abiding gun owners.

Gun-rights advocates may disagree about the practical value of any particular restriction, and they may be right. But the Second Amendment isn't the end of the debate. It's just the beginning.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Texas Abortion Law Threatens Unintended Consequences  For The Right

Texas Abortion Law Threatens Unintended Consequences  For The Right

By Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As abortion providers backed by President Joe Biden's administration prepare for Monday's U.S. Supreme Court arguments in their challenge to a near-total ban on the procedure in Texas, they have found an unlikely ally: a right-leaning gun rights group.

A "friend of the court" brief filed in the case by the Firearms Policy Coalition against Republican-governed Texas illustrates how the law's unique structure - enforcement by private individuals, not the state - has alarmed advocates for all kinds of constitutionally protected rights.

Some conservatives are warning that similar laws could be crafted by liberals targeting issues important to the right.

A law written like the one in Texas to impede courts from ruling on constitutionality before it takes effect could be used, for example, to take aim at constitutionally protected activities including gun rights, religious practice or free speech. Abortion is protected under the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which recognized a woman's constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, and subsequent decisions.

"You can't short-circuit the ordinary steps of judicial review for serious constitutional questions," said Erik Jaffe, the attorney who filed the Firearms Policy Coalition's brief.

When laws are enacted that restrict constitutional rights, courts have a vital role to play before they take effect, Jaffe added.

"This circumvents that debate. This says, 'Too bad you don't get to have that debate except ... with my foot on your neck,'" Jaffe said.

The Supreme Court will consider whether the Texas law's structure prevents federal courts from intervening to block it and whether the U.S. government is even allowed to sue the state to try to block it.

The measure, one of numerous restrictive Republican-backed state abortion laws passed in recent years, bans the procedure after about six weeks of pregnancy, a point when many women do not yet realize they are pregnant. There is an exception for a documented medical emergency but not for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.

The case reaches the nine justices as the future of abortion rights hangs in the balance. On December 1, the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, is due to hear another major abortion case in which Mississippi is seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Texas attorney general has signaled he also wants Roe v. Wade overturned.

What is unique about the Texas law is that the state plays no enforcement role. Instead, anyone can sue abortion providers - regardless of whether that person has a personal stake - and potentially win at least $10,000 in damages, a process critics have compared to placing a bounty on abortion providers.

At least three states already are considering legislation mirroring the Texas law's language including one in Illinois targeting gun dealers, said David Noll, a professor at Rutgers Law School in New Jersey who filed a brief opposing Texas.

The Texas citizen-enforcement provision does not mean such laws can always evade judicial review. But to challenge them someone would have to be sued under the law first and then take aim at the enforcement mechanism in the defense. In the meantime, the fact that the law is on the books may chill the conduct at issue. That is the case in Texas, with abortion clinics complying with the ban since the Supreme Court let it go into effect on September 1.

Lawyers opposing the law have found potential analogies on other issues involving Supreme Court precedents. Laws that would enable people to sue gun owners and seek to prohibit unlimited independent spending in political campaigns are examples cited by Biden's administration in its challenge to the abortion law.

In both instances, "those statutes, too, would violate the Constitution as interpreted by this court. But under Texas's theory, they could be enforced without prior judicial review, chilling the protected activity - and the effect of any successful constitutional defense in an enforcement proceeding could be limited to that proceeding alone," the administration wrote in court papers.

Legislators have enacted other laws that let people bring individual claims on contentious issues including transgender rights. But those are more like earlier statutes that empowered people to sue over matters such as environmental or civil rights violations.

In Tennessee, a law barring transgender students from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity includes a provision that lets individuals sue local school districts if they "encounter a member of the opposite sex" in a bathroom.

Some conservative and religious groups that oppose abortion have signaled little concern about the Texas law's structure, feeling that critics have exaggerated potential consequences.

Walter Weber, a lawyer with the American Center for Law and Justice religious rights legal group that filed a brief backing Texas, said there is nothing to stop abortion providers from challenging the law after they are sued.

"Abortion advocates crying wolf can raise a lot of money and give cover to legislative and executive measures to push further support for abortion," Weber said.

If the Texas law is so clearly unconstitutional, Weber asked, "Why are abortionists so terrified?"

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung; Additional reporting by Karen Freifeld; Editing by Will Dunham)

‘Boogaloo’: Neo-Nazis Using Memes To Foment Violent Confrontation

‘Boogaloo’: Neo-Nazis Using Memes To Foment Violent Confrontation

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

The myths and conspiracy theories that fuel the radical right often take on lives of their own: Think of how the QAnon phenomenon began as a handful of conspiracy theorists making groundless claims and predictions about a coming “Storm” that metastasized first into a wildly popular body of “Patriot”/militia conspiracism, and finally into a massive submovement operating within the framework of the Trump presidency—while producing a growing record of lethal violence by its unhinged believers.

Something similar appears to be coalescing around the “boogaloo”—the vision of members of the far right of a coming civil war, which they claim is being forced upon them by liberals who want to take their guns away as the first step toward their incarceration and enslavement. In reality, of course, a number of sectors of the far right have ginned up this kind of rhetoric for decades—but now, a systematic study of its spread through social media has found that it appears to be massing into a movement of its own.

The study, conducted by the independent Network Contagion Research Institute, explores, according to its subtitle, “how domestic militants organize on memes to incite violent insurrection and terror against government and law enforcement.” It focused on the “boogaloo” in large part due its increasing popularity—particularly as a hashtag (#Boogaloo or #Boogaloo2020)—on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as the extreme and often callous expressions of violent intent that form the essence of the chatter.

In its initial forms, the “civil war” talk was generated in different sectors of the radical right in different ways. Among neo-Nazis, it generally has focused on a “race war”—i.e., a genocidal conflict between whites and nonwhites—dating back to the 1980s and the classic white-supremacist blueprint, The Turner Diaries. This vein of rhetoric has produced a long record of lethal domestic terrorism, including the 1984 neo-Nazi criminal gang The Order; the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; and more recently, the 2011 attack in Norway that killed 87 people and the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand that killed 51.

Among the “Patriot” movement believers who form militias in resistance to “the New World Order,” most of the rhetoric has focused on using arms against law enforcement, particularly the federal kind, as well as the mythic “blue-helmeted” United Nations soldiers about to descend on them from black helicopters. In its more recent iterations among far-right Oath Keepers and “III Percent” militiamen, the “boogaloo” talk has mostly revolved around resistance to liberal gun-control legislation.

This reached its apotheosis in January when thousands of armed “Patriots” from around the United States descended on Richmond, Virginia, to protest imminent gun safety legislation making its way through the state’s General Assembly. Before the rally, FBI agents arrested a trio of neo-Nazis who were preparing to open fire on law enforcement at the event.

However, one of the results of the broad emergence of popular “boogaloo” rhetoric has been a blurring of the lines between the anti-government extremists who foresee conflict with federal forces and the more extreme white supremacists who lust for a bloody conflict between the white and nonwhite races. While many of the latter also eagerly participate in the anti-government talk, many of the former appear to be warming up to the race-war talk.

The NCRI study found not only that the discussion of the “boogaloo” on social media had surged, but that discrete groups were coalescing around the discussion and creating the nascent forms of a movement. The “boogaloo” “topic network” produces “a coherent, multi-component and detailed conspiracy to launch an inevitable, violent, sudden, and apocalyptic war across the homeland,” it said, adding that the models created by researchers “show that the meme acts as a meaningful vector to organize seditious sentiment at large.”

The conspiracy, replete with suggestions to stockpile ammunition, may itself set the stage for massive real-world violence and sensitize enthusiasts to mobilize in mass for confrontations or charged political events. Furthermore, the meme’s emphasis on military language and culture poses a specific risk to military communities due to the similar thematic structure, fraternal organization, and reward incentives.

One of the “boogaloo” groups featured in the study, calling itself “Patriot Wave,” illustrated perfectly how the lines between militia “Patriots” and alt-right white nationalists were completely blurred and submerged in the larger project of fomenting a violent civil war. Its members wore alt-right “Pepe the Frog” patches with the title “Boogaloo Boys,” while others wore the skull balaclava generally associated with members of the fascist Atomwaffen Division.

The study also pointed to a particular area of concern: namely, the ability of these extremists to simply blend into existing power structures, including law enforcement and the military. One “boogaloo” enthusiast, Coast Guardsman Christopher Hasson, was arrested with a full arms cache and a plan to assassinate liberal political leaders. A Patriot Wave member is quoted in the study: “Some of the guys we were with aren’t exactly out of the military yet, so they had to keep their faces covered.”

The spread of the “boogaloo” organizing on social media has been facilitated with the use of hashtags #Boogaloo and #Boogaloo2020, which are then accompanied by associated hashtags such as #2A, #CivilWar2, and #2ndAmendment, as well as hashtags such as #BigIgloo, intended to elude filters.

This kind of informational conflict—or what the study calls “memetic warfare”—has evolved, the study says, “from mere lone-wolf threats to the threat of an entire meme-based insurgency.”

The NCRI report was sent to members of Congress and the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice, among others. Paul Goldenberg, a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, told NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny that the report was “a wake-up call.”

“When you have people talking about and planning sedition and violence against minorities, police and public officials, we need to take their words seriously,” said Goldenberg.

After Gun Massacre, Charlotte Is ‘One Of Those Cities’

After Gun Massacre, Charlotte Is ‘One Of Those Cities’

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — “Now we’re one of those schools.” That’s what a University of North Carolina student, in more sadness than anger, told a local radio station after a gunman killed two and wounded four others on her campus last Tuesday. And now Charlotte, a city already experiencing a spike in homicides, is “one of those cities.”

In the city and state, there is shock, plus questions. A suspect is in custody, but that doesn’t provide answers about why it happened and what can be done to keep it from happening again.

That this latest incident did not make it to the top spot in many national news outlets speaks to how commonplace such incidents have become and how frustrated many citizens are. Is the answer more mental health resources, more “good guys with guns,” more regulations and background checks, or something else?

Against this backdrop, the National Rifle Association is undergoing shakeups of its own, with warring leaders (chief executive Wayne LaPierre has won that fight with former president Oliver North), a sprawling mission that now includes NRATV taking stands on issues such as immigration and race as often as guns, and a looming investigation of its finances and nonprofit status by the New York attorney general.

But despite that, expect its GOP politicking and power plays to remain, as the presence of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence as speakers at the NRA’s recent annual meeting makes clear. The organization’s new president, Carolyn Meadows, lives in Georgia’s 6th District, where Democrat Lucy McBath won in 2018 with a campaign that included support of some gun control measures, and Meadows has promised to support McBath’s opponent.

As usual, Americans looking for reassurance, or at least a discussion and some compromise, won’t get very much of either in a debate that will only grow more politically charged in an election season, especially with parties increasingly divided so evenly into opposite camps.

Several Democratic presidential hopefuls have made the issue their signature, including former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who was in office in July 2012 when a gunman in a movie theater killed 12 people and wounded many others. After that incident, Hickenlooper shepherded gun control legislation, including background checks, in the state. Rep. Eric Swalwell also centered the issue in his campaign rollout, saying the Second Amendment does allow for gun control measures.

Sen. Kamala Harris, further up than either in most polls, has said that as president she would sign an executive order that includes regulations for gun manufacturers and restrictions for gun dealers, since legislation proposed in one chamber of Congress has little hope of passing in the other.

In North Carolina, where this latest school shooting has left many in shock, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is up for re-election in 2020. Last year, after the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, he said that if there are breakdowns in the current process, “Then we need to talk about the next program for background checks, we need to talk about bump stocks, we need to talk about a number of other things that I think reasonable people are prepared to take action on in Congress.” Tillis, who has received support from the NRA, has also emphasized more mental health resources and has shied away from most gun control restrictions.

Debate in the North Carolina legislature mirrors the national one, with Democrats and Republicans offering dueling proposals, tightening or loosening gun restrictions, and framing the issue as a matter of freedom or safety. Republicans, who held a super-majority they lost in 2018, have filed bills that would expand gun rights, including one that keeps showing up, which would eliminate the state requirement for concealed handgun permits. In the wake of shootings, though, both sides are preaching what looks like impossible bipartisanship.

When bipartisanship fails, frustrated grassroots organizations have continued the discussion. If there is action or compromise, it will be prompted in part by groups such as the Parkland students, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, organizations named for and inspired by Gabrielle Giffords and James Brady, victims of gun violence, and citizens in neighborhoods and cities across the country touched by gun violence.

That list is growing. Tucson, Arizona, where my son was born, became one of those cities, as did the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, where friends and acquaintances lost those close to them when a murderer killed nine at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015. Shootings in schools, places of worship, in acts of domestic terrorism, in personal disputes, or because of imagined grievances unfortunately mean many more places are in danger of becoming one of those cities where no one imagined gun violence could happen.

Charlotte is now in the center of that debate, but if history is any guide, tragically it won’t be for long.

The danger is becoming numb to the unacceptable; the goal is to remind our leaders that that is not an option.

Mary C. Curtis is a columnist for Roll Call. An award-winning journalist, she has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, and as national correspondent for Politics Daily. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.

IMAGE: File Photo: NRA gun enthusiasts view Sig Sauer rifles at the National Rifle Association’s annual meetings and exhibits show in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. on May 21, 2016. REUTERS/John Sommers II