Thursday, January 24, 2019

NY State Rife & Pistol Case Unnerves Brady Campaign


I had been waiting to see the response of the gun prohibitionists to the Supreme Court granting certiorari in NY State Rifle & Pistol v. City of New York. Jonathan Lowy, head of the Brady Campaign's Legal Project, didn't disappoint. A fundraising email was sent out yesterday under his signature yesterday afternoon.

He said, in part, that the stakes are high and it is a case of "life and death".
The Supreme Court announced yesterday that, for the first time in almost a decade, it will hear a Second Amendment case – the first gun case to be decided by a Court with two Donald Trump-appointees. The case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York, challenges a city ordinance governing transportation of firearms. Make no mistake: the stakes could not be higher. Commonsense gun safety laws across the country are at risk. We need your support to make sure that the voices of Americans who want stronger gun regulation are heard loudly in the Supreme Court.

The stakes for this case are nothing short of life and death. Whatever the Supreme Court says in its decision will help determine whether Americans maintain the right to enact the strong, commonsense public safety laws they want and need to protect loved ones and communities from gun violence, or if judges will take this right from us. But the Framers put “well-regulated” in the Second Amendment and “the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence for good reason. We are committed to making sure the Supreme Court doesn’t write the gun industry’s guns-everywhere vision into our Constitution.
 He goes on to say that the Supreme Court never meant the Second Amendment to apply outside the home as evidenced by the Heller decision. In my opinion, he has misconstrued the late Justice Scalia's decision.

What is interesting about all of this is that none of the gun prohibitionist organizations bothered to file amicus briefs against the Supreme Court granting cert in this case. The only amicus briefs were from a coalition including GOA, another organized by the Attorney General of Louisiana on behalf of a number of states, and another from the Western States Sheriffs Association and various law enforcement groups. These all were in favor of cert being granted. I don't know whether it was hubris or ignorance that explains the casual approach of the gun control industry to this case but I am certain they will now be submitting amicus briefs fast and furiously in support of the position of New York City.

6 comments:

  1. The stakes for this case are nothing short of life and death.

    Not the slightest bit of melodrama and hyperbole here, is there?

    I'm sure all the illegal gun owners in NYC make sure they don't carry a gun when they go out of the city limits. I'm sure all the mafiosa from New Jersey leave theirs behind when they go into the city.

    Matter of life and death? Puh-lease.

    I know it's in their corporate persona to think law-abiding gun owners don't exist, but this is going a bit far.

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  2. Replies
    1. I think that the way that the opinion is written, if the court does rule against the New York law, does indeed have possible repercussions for the gun laws of the entire nation. That some of the justices are unhappy with how the various cities and jurisdictions have bent their rulings to still disallow the rights of gun owners is no secret. I suspect that if the justice who gets to write the opinion is one of the strong supporters of the 2nd amendment, they will not only write about the case at hand, but also reinforce the Heller amendment, in effect scolding the anti gun people. I think this is the reason that they agreed to even hear this case.
      Look for more cases to be heard by this court that are somewhat conservative, because of the makeup of the court now. And if RBG leaves the court, for whatever reason, Trump will appoint yet another conservative, which will be an even bigger thing for his administration. He was elected partly because of his list of candidates from which he promised to draw from as nominees to the Supreme Court. He has kept his word on this, and really everything.

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  3. How the heck does banning people from transporting their forearms outside of the city's limits protect public safety? Do the residents own their gins or does the city? What if you want to move out of the city? You can't transport your stuff to a gun dealer and you can't drive out with it. How is this not a violation of at least property rights?

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  4. Lowy is showing his willfully ignorance. There is an excellent video on YouTube called "The History of the Second Amendment." As he stated, based on the word definitions and sentence structure of the day, the "well regulated" is the preamble and the "right to bear arms shall not be infringed." is the declarative part. He also went and looked at the legal definitions of the words as they were understood by the writers of the Declaration and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I highly recommend you look it up. If you like it please share it over every platform you can. The greatest problem today is lack of knowledge. This video needs to go viral.

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  5. "NY State Rife & Pistol Case Unnerves Brady Campaign". What a bunch of pansies, to be unnerved by a plastic box with a state logo imprinted on it.

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