Second Amendment

President Donald Trump’s pardoning blitz has dominated the headlines with reality-TV stars, a rapper and political allies all walking free from prison after he granted them clemency. But quietly in the office of the Justice Department’s pardon attorney – where all of the above appeals were processed – a much more significant and wide-reaching process of forgiveness is taking shape. Ed Martin, Trump loyalist and new pardon attorney, is preparing his team to review applications from people – a lot of people – with criminal convictions to have their gun rights restored. “The pardon staff has already been working at it, because we anticipate hundreds and hundreds of thousands of applicants,” Martin told the Wall Street Journal.

To hear the New York Times tell it, you’d think Vice President Kamala Harris had finally started answering questions about the Biden administration’s accomplishments and her own policy positions. The Times claims Kamala “hit core campaign themes,” “spoke off the cuff” and “confronted a range of pressing issues” in a two-hour sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey.But did she really?When asked about how she would secure the southern border — one of voters’ top concerns — Kamala said:So it’s a wonderful and important question. I, you know, my background was as a prosecutor, and I was also the elected attorney general for two terms of the border state. So this is not a theoretical issue for me. This is something I’ve actually worked on.

Hunter Biden’s defense against felony gun chargesa faced two toxic problems — problems that, in the end, proved insurmountable. One was that the crime itself was straightforward. It was easy to present to the jury. The other was that there was a mountain of evidence that Hunter actually committed the crime. A lot of that evidence came from Hunter’s own texts and his memoir. He had the best defense money could buy. Abbe Lowell is tough, a shrewd and smart defense attorney, but he had almost nothing to work with. One by one, the defenses he put forward collapsed under the weight of direct evidence. Lowell tried to show the gun shop employee might not have seen Hunter fill out the purchase form. Turned out the employee was two feet away.

Former president Donald Trump railed against the “rigged” trial that saw him convicted on thirty-four felony charges during a forty-minute press conference at Trump Tower in New York on Friday. In addition to speaking about the case and the individuals he believed to be responsible for corrupting it — DA Alvin Bragg, Judge Juan Merchan and his former lawyer Michael Cohen, among others — Trump went on offense against the Biden campaign and administration and tied this latest trial to the years-long investigation into alleged Russian collusion and the three other cases pending against him. He claimed the United States is now officially a “fascist” country, flipping the term that Democrats have long used to describe him and and his plans for a second term.

Everything from the flintlock rifle to the dialogue was planned — somehow people often don’t realize that, even when there’s a Hollywood actor on stage. When Charlton Heston raised the prop above his head at the 2000 NRA convention and bellowed, “from my cold dead hands,” those gathered in Charlotte reacted just as the ghostwriters thought they would. It didn’t matter that the line in question had been a bumper sticker for decades, or that the septuagenarian Oscar-winner was reciting a phrase Vincent D’Onofrio had parodied just three years earlier in the blockbuster Men in Black. Viewers of the film today won’t realize the cart is pulling the satire horse until they check IMDb.

It’s going to be an awkward Fourth of July cookout chez Biden, as Hunter’s legal team is reportedly planning to invoke a Supreme Court ruling dad Joe said “contradicts both common sense and the Constitution.” But hey, Hunter seems to be thinking, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right? Especially when doing so could keep you out of prison. The SCTOUS opinion that new Second Amendment rights poster-boy Hunter Biden is embracing was handed down in June 2022. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen challenged a New York law requiring residents applying for concealed carry weapons permits to show “proper cause” for carrying a gun.

President Biden just said he wants to “get rid of” tens of millions of firearms owned by law-abiding Americans. Biden, of course, is not known for making sense when it comes to guns (this was true even pre-senility), but his latest rant can’t be dismissed as another glitch in the ol' gaffe machine. “The idea we still allow semiautomatic weapons to be purchased is sick. It’s just sick. It has no social redeeming values. Zero. None. Not a single, solitary rationale for it except profit for the gun manufacturer," Biden said on Thanksgiving Day. He added, "I’m going to try to get rid of assault weapons.” Congressman Mark Alford of Missouri called his words "sheer ignorance," and Breitbart editor Emma-Jo Morris tweeted that Biden "clearly doesn’t know what semi-auto is.

The mainstream media has picked up on a story of a heroic armed citizen being heralded as “a good Samaritan” for shooting and killing a gunman who opened fire inside a Greenwood, Indiana mall. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s better late than never for such left-leaning media outlets as ABC, NBC, People magazine, the Today Show, the Washington Post and others reporting what gun owners have known forever: the best — and ofttimes only — way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with another gun. Yesterday, a man with a rifle managed to kill three people inside the Greenwood Park Mall. But then, a 22-year-old man used a firearm he was legally carrying concealed to shoot the gunman and end his killing spree.

Cockburn doesn’t leave the swampy bounds of the District too often, but he has now and then been tempted by a trip to Colorado’s Western Slope, where, until last Sunday, Representative Lauren Boebert ran a restaurant in the town of Rifle. Every waitress who worked there open-carried a gun. Cockburn learned of this Second Amendment-themed eatery through a video his colleague Teresa Mull produced back when Boebert was just a gun and burger-slinging small business owner. Now, eight years later, Shooters Grill has closed. According to the Glenwood Springs Post Independent, Boebert was shocked to learn that her new landlord would not be renewing her restaurant’s lease: Boebert said the letter came as a shock.

There’s a new federal gun law in the works and it's being heralded as a “bipartisan breakthrough agreement on gun violence.” I can’t even get past the first sentence without issuing an objection, your honor! Because the proposed gun control package is just more manipulative language aimed at eroding Second Amendment rights. “Gun violence” makes it sound as if the guns are the ones causing the violence. The same goes for “gun safety” — a term President Biden used in response to this proposed legislation, which will not make guns any safer or less violent. Guns are inanimate objects, neither violent nor safe. They don’t spontaneously combust. People do.

Following every tragic mass shooting, there is outrage directed at the firearms industry. The highly popular AR-15 platform is once more in the crosshairs after the recent killings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. The AR — erroneously described as an "assault weapon” — has been targeted by politicians and celebrities who think it should be banned. A House Democrat recently introduced a bill that would add a 1,000 percent sales tax to the purchase of the semi-automatic rifle. Misinformation rather than facts has been weaponized against the AR, which has been falsely described as a "high-powered" "weapon of war." Major General Paul Eaton, US Army (retired), even suggested in a series of tweets that the AR-15 has no place in civilian hands.

Matthew McConaughey came to Cockburn’s hometown of Washington, DC on Tuesday. It was not to say hi, of course, but to advocate for “commonsense gun control” at the White House. McConaughey is a Uvalde native and wanted to speak about the victims, as well as how the government might better regulate firearms. McConaughey spoke about going back to Uvalde and talking to the families of the victims. He said, “We need background checks, we need to raise the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 rifle to 21, we need a waiting period for those rifles, we need red flag laws and consequences for those who abuse them.” He went on Bret Baier’s Fox News show that night to continue opining.

President Joe Biden delivered a speech yesterday in response to the Uvalde school shooting that can be summed up in one sentence: “I don’t trust you.” There are at least 20 million so-called “assault rifles” in the US, and in proposing to ban these weapons, Biden and his supporters are purporting that the very presence of guns causes people to be violent — that in the absence of laws making it illegal for us to kill each other, we will all inevitably become mass shooters. An assault weapons ban and increased background checks are the only things, they say, capable of stopping us from becoming one of the demented gunmen who inflict tragedy and evil on our world.

The calls started almost immediately. The bodies of nineteen children and two teachers had barely cooled when politicians and activists took to social media demanding some sort of action on guns. Some called the National Rifle Association a terrorist organization, while others castigated Republicans for allegedly supporting gun rights over children. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was urged to bring a bill on background checks up for a vote so the “votes fall with the children who died.” Politics takes no break during tragedies. The crescendo of activist furor will likely peak this weekend during the NRA Convention in Houston. Demonstrations are already planned near the George R. Brown Convention Center with political actors of all kinds expected to attend.

Many of our political leaders are historically illiterate. This is especially concerning given that some of these politicians have been around since the dawn of time. They've lived through much of the history they now seem to know so little about. While heaping praise on Biden’s decision to nominate the first black woman to the Supreme Court, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer decided to spread misinformation. Luckily his misinformation was just a rant on the Senate floor and not on Spotify. Otherwise, Neil Young might have had some words for him. "Until 1981, this powerful body, the Supreme Court, was all white men. Imagine. America wasn't all white men in 1981, or ever.

Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong in law, but this does not mean he did the right thing in going armed to Kenosha. Much of the right is celebrating him as a patriot for taking arms against a sea of troubles, and as a poster child for the Second Amendment. He is neither. He is a liability for both of those causes. The right to bear arms is just that: a legal right. Choosing to bear them publicly is another matter: an ethical choice. Rittenhouse’s defense was that he was legally innocent because he was ethically innocent. Despite growing up with guns, he seems to have been unaware of the adult commonplace about bearing them: if you produce a weapon, you should be prepared to use it.

Joe Biden has released a new statement on gun control and it’s about as concise and coherent as you would expect. Here’s an excerpt per a White House transcript: ‘Those who say the blood of lib- — “the blood of patriots,” you know, and all the stuff about how we’re going to have to move against the government. Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there have never been — if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.’ There’s the silver-tongued devil we all know and love.

Isn’t normality great? That’s been Joe Biden’s selling point from the beginning, ‘normality’. Back in March 2020, the former conservative Bill Kristol announced that Biden represented the ‘simple’ choice for the ‘normal American’. Biden wasn’t Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders — but especially, just between us, he wasn’t Donald Trump — ergo, etc. Achilles was the ‘swift-footed’. Ronald Reagan was ‘the Great Communicator’. Joe Biden is — what? People talk about ‘gaffes’, but that is unfair. A ‘gaffe’ is a clumsy social error, a faux pas. Emitting gibberish when you can’t remember the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence is not the same thing as committing a gaffe.