Hegar Files the Bill That Isn’t There

I am a little perplexed today, on the day we celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A man that led millions down the path to social equality. A man who was shot dead with a single shot by one armed with a Remington Gamemaster 7600 rifle crouched near the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee nearly 33 years ago.

Perplexed because we seem to be moving backwards and one evidence of that is a bill that was filed last week by my state senator, Glen Hegar. SB 321 to be exact.

Here is the meat of it:

“A public or private employer may not prohibit an employee who holds a license to carry a concealed handgun under Subchapter H, Chapter 411, Government Code, who otherwise lawfully possesses a firearm, or who lawfully possesses ammunition from transporting or storing a firearm or ammunition the employee is authorized by law to possess in a locked, privately owned motor vehicle in a parking lot, parking garage, or other parking area the employer provides for employees.”

Now why is this going backwards?

What riveted my attention to this bill was the “holds a license to carry a concealed weapon” part of it. A history lesson is needed. I see.

Texans who hold a license to carry a concealed weapon can all credit State Rep Suzanna Gratia Hupp for this. It was this woman’s single-minded effort, an effort that also got her elected to the state legislature that saw passage, in 1996 of a law that allowed Texans to carry a concealed weapon once they had passed a safety course and obtained the license.

It is her story that compels me, and perplexes me.

In 1991 a crazed gunman opened up on patrons of a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, killing 24. Hupp’s parents were among the dead. Hupp was there. Her statement:

“I was looking for a weapon, any weapon, because my handgun was 100 feet away, outside in my car. I made an incredibly stupid decision to follow the law, and that cost my family's lives.”

Get it? Her weapon was in her car, exactly in the location specified by Hegar’s 2011 bill. Yet Hegar’s bill specifically targets those who already have concealed weapons licenses.

My point is, if the author of the concealed weapons license law had a gun in her car, and felt powerless to effect a change in the 24 tragedies that befell on that day how will employees who are allowed to lock guns in their cars be so dissimilarly affected? How will they, with their guns locked in their cars, in any way be more empowered than Suzanna Hupp was on that day?

Truth to tell, the only scenario that I can see happening at a workplace where employees are armed, if only at a distance, is that after a set to, a disgruntled employee comes back to the workplace after a smoking break armed to the teeth and ambushes his supervisor or any fellow employees who happen to offend them.

In other words in Hegar’s world, you need some pre-meditation in order to go and get your gun and then use it. What is lost is the immediacy of the moment which is what other lawmakers want to work on, like getting guns in the hands of college students and professors.

My other point is, then, that there has been just a whole series of retrograde motions here – backwards movement. Hegar’s reasoning fails because of Hupp’s 1991 experience. Therefore the next obvious step is to put concealed weapons in the hands of everyone willing to carry one with the nightmare of a possible future circular firing squad as one possible outcome.

My point is, is that we are going, and for some time now, have gone down the wrong path. And the more “gun freedom” laws that get filed and passed by state legislatures the less safe I feel.

 

"Open Carry" Your Handgun to Church

It was over a year ago, early April 2008, when then candidate Barack Obama was secretly recorded at a northern California fundraiser and he made some candid off the cuff remarks on small town America to his well heeled audience. To wit:

“Our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not.”

“And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

And everyone piled on top. Obama was not only skewered by his principal opponent, Hillary Clinton, but also by the McCain campaign (which, as we found out later, was simply defending their base).

And guess what? Just downriver from small town in Pennsylvania we find a small town in Kentucky, with a small church and a small congregation whose pastor is celebrating the 4^th of July (on June 21st) and the 2^nd Amendment to the US Constitution by inviting his flock to bring their handguns to church with them. To “open carry” them, meaning to strap on their gun belts and carry their beloved guns openly in holsters.

From US News:

“A Louisville church is encouraging people to wear unloaded guns in their holsters to an "Open Carry Church Service" later this month, our sister paper, The Courier-Journal, reports. Participants will be able to enter a raffle to win a free handgun, hear patriotic music and listen to talks by operators of gun stores and firing ranges.”

Did I just hear a huge verification of Barack Obama’s often vilified statement on small town America clinging to their guns and their religion?

To their credit, some local religious leaders are openly criticizing this plan, causing the pastor, Pastor Ken Pagano of New Bethel Church, to backpedal slightly and ask that the guns that the congregation brings not be loaded.

Because as we all know, guns don’t kill people, bullets kill people.

I have always wondered which kind of handgun the Lord and Savior of the World, Jesus Christ would have preferred. Would He have been a fan of the old style Roscoe? Or would He have packed a Nine? I just can’t fathom it. Mainly because when I think of handguns, and the sole purpose of handguns, to kill people, I just don’t see Jesus “open carrying” anything but a Remington deer rifle.

Texas And Its Love Affair With Guns

Look at what came into my inbox today: an email from my congressman telling me about a Town Hall meeting to be held tonight, celebrating gun owners’ rights to keep and bear arms.

Nick Lampson, you will recall, is a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association, and this allows him to be associated with right-leaning gun-toting constituents of CD-22.

You notice he repeats how he supported the recent Supreme Court decision which struck down the District of Columbia’s anti-gun ordnance by essentially cutting out the whole reason why it is such a good idea to keep and bear arms. The Supremes did this to the 2nd Amendment.

Leaving Americans only the bad reasons to keep and bear arms.

But that’s OK, this is Texas after all. You have to make allowances for gun-totin’ tobacco chewin’ constituents who also vote.

Why am I harping on this once again? It has to do with the timely bit of news coming out of the tiny Harrold Independent School District in Harrold, Texas [map]. Harrold is a one-horse town just off US 287 in North Texas. It seems that their board of trustees has just OK’d a district policy change that allows teachers to carry concealed weapons during the school day.

Now wait. They didn’t just go into this all helter-skelter (sorry perhaps a poor word choice), they put some thought into this. The teachers must be licensed to carry concealed weapons and take a course in “crisis management and hostile situations,” and must use ammunition that is less prone to ricochet.

Their reason? They are 30 minutes away from police protection, and right next to the hustle and bustle of US 287 which brings all sorts of elements up north from . . . Wichita Falls.

So now that we don’t keep and bear arms because having a well-maintained militia is a good idea, we keep, bear, and wear arms in school buildings. Arms that don’t shoot bullets that ricochet. I guess, ammo made of very soft materials like soft expanding lead.

Now that is what I call a grand idea.

We replace minimally paid armed police and sheriff’s deputies with minimally paid armed school teachers.

In addition, I think students would probably think twice about sassing back over a low grade they received if they knew that their teachers are packing heat.

This all reminds me once again of the immortal words of Senator Tip O’Neill:

“All politics is local.”

On Judicial Activism in the US Supreme Court

Well the pendulum has swung a complete cycle. We are again beset by an activist Supreme Court, but now, they come with a new flavor.

Judicial activism is something that the right wing used as a mallet to beat over the heads of liberal judges when they found interpretations of the law that favored progressivism. Brown v. Board of Education is one decision that comes off the top of my head, the SCOTUS decision that desegregated public schools in 1953. At the time a decision that “separate but equal” violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution was viewed as a radical departure from how courts should rule on cases. They said it violated the separation of powers of the 3 branches of government, and that the Judicial Branch was claiming a legislative power that they did not actually have.

But now, over a half century later, we find that the worm has truly turned.

This case is a long time coming. I wrote a little about it over a year ago when it was being ruled on by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The District of Columbia handgun law was overturned there by a 2 to 1 majority. Today, by a 5-4 split decision, the Supreme Court verified the lower court’s decision.

But it did more.

Today we see that the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution has been rewritten by these 5 activist justices. No longer is the 2nd Amendment about the military and a militia. Now it’s about individual rights.

To review. Here is the text of the 2nd Amendment:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”

Now back in March, when I commented on the Appeals Court decision, I marveled at how the Court went on a voyage through English grammar and punctuation in order to conclude that “the people” do not signify members of “the militia”. They relied on a grammatical argument to conclude that “the people” are individuals, and then went on to define this right as an individual right.

The majority on the Supreme Court didn’t spend time bandying grammatical interpretations about, they went right for the jugular and said that an individual’s right to own a firearm is supported by “the historical narrative” of practices and events both before and after the 2nd Amendment was written.

So it appears that the Supreme Court majority has exchanged a lesson in grammar, which in my opinion had flaws, with a lesson in US history.

Everyone in America owned guns in the late 18th century, so it must be a constitutional right.

Justice Stevens dissenting from the bench, said that this decision is just what it appears to be: legislation. From the Washington Post:

“He spoke dismissively of the court's ‘newly discovered right’ and said decisions about gun control should be made by legislatures.”

He also said something about which I have been raging (to myself) all day.

"Justice John Paul Stevens spoke from the bench to denounce the decision, which he said violated the court's precedent that the Second Amendment refers to a right to bear arms only for military purposes."

All day I have listened to CNN and MSNBC reporters prattle on about how this is the first time the Supreme Court has ruled on this decision. It’s not. As Justice Stevens said, there is precedent. In 1939, in United States v. Miller, the Supreme Court found that a prohibition of having a sawed-off shotgun was not in violation of the 2nd Amendment because a sawed-off shotgun does not lend itself to “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia”.

They had it right back in 1939. They got it all wrong in 2008.

That’s progress for you.

Army Surplus For Sale: Equipping a “Well-Regulated Militia”

The fact is, you can buy just about anything online. And now I find out here that if you need a good pair of night vision goggles, or an “enhanced” body armor vest, those things can now be gotten on eBay or Craigslist.

What gets put up for sale is largely unpoliced on these sites, so even if you want to sell some Iraq cammies with all the patches, bells and whistles, you can, despite the fact that sale of any of that has been illegal since January 2007 after a team of Iraqis infiltrated a US base in Karbala wearing used US military uniforms. And killed 5 US soldiers.

Not one to get in the way of good old American capitalism, Congressman John Tierney (D - Mass) proposes a ban on the sale of all military equipment that is not older than 50 years old.

That makes tremendous sense to me. Any fool can dress up and arm oneself in pre-1958 military hardware and be turned into hamburger with the weaponry we have available to our military today.

So that makes a lot of sense.

But then, what about the 2nd Amendment? Hey, don’t we have a right to bear those arms? Don’t we have a right to protect our bodies against the onslaught of depleted uranium projectiles?

Don’t we?

We do! It is right there in the 2nd Amendment.

“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Get it? It’s not a penny ante amendment we have here. This thing is talking about fighting wars.

Only a 4th grader would be able to misinterpret the full meaning of this amendment. Sure there’s a comma after the words “free state”, but they weren’t making a shopping list, they were framing a conditional clause. One condition, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state”, leads to the resolution: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Cause and effect.

The Framers, in their infinite wisdom, saw the need to write into our Constitution a fundamental right to bear arms so that we might, as the need arises, take up arms against a common enemy when events merit it. It made huge sense, in that this strategy worked well for us in the War of American Insurrection, as the British would see it.

Our Constitution is transcendental. Times change, weaponry gets upgraded to degrees of lethalness unheard of in the 18th (or even 19th) century, but the Constitution is a constant whose meaning transcends the generations.

The meaning of the Framers is clear: we Americans have a right to all of the most advanced weaponry that any present or future foe can arm themselves with. That is the full meaning of the 2nd Amendment.

After all, what if it happens that we stop fighting them over there? Won’t we end up fighting the terrorists over here? They with Heckler and Koch MP 5s wildly outgun we with our nickel plated pea shooters.

With what do you defend yourself against an RPG?

What if a Bradley Fighting Vehicle comes rumbling down our neighborhood streets with Islamofascist flags and symbols arrayed about them?

Clearly, there is something unconstitutional about limiting what we Americans can buy and maintain in our homes in order to guarantee a well regulated militia, as our constitution requires.

It is time, no it is past time, for our government to stop these unconscionable and unconstitutional acts of weaponry deprivation.

If every American owned a BAR, a LAWS rocket launcher (with loads) and a dozen or so hand grenades, I’ll bet the Islamofascists would think twice about attacking us at home.

And just think, it could be so convenient if it is all offered on the internet.

Or, if you think all of that seems like a bad idea, and that we should leave our war fighting to our professional soldiers, then maybe the 2nd Amendment has seen its better days.

Charlton Heston or no, maybe it should be repealed.

Do All Americans Have the Right to Keep and Bear Arms?

An interesting opinion was rendered yesterday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In the case Shelly Parker, et al., v. District of Columbia and Adrian M. Fenty, Mayor of the District of Columbia, by at 2-1 majority, the court upheld the right of individuals to keep and bear arms, as guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

For most Americans, this is a no-brainer. However, it has been argued for years and years that the language of the 2nd Amendment reveals that keeping and bearing arms was a precondition to maintaining a local militia. I quote:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”

The District of Columbia argued that the first clause “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State” proclaims the Amendment’s sole purpose was to protect state militias from federal intrusion—and that the second clause is a discussion of military matters and guarantees civic rights, but not an individual right.

Good point. I’ve had that opinion for years and years.

This is a case involving a 1976 District of Columbia law forbidding the ownership of handguns. D.C. residents wanted to own guns for home protection and filed suit against the District of Columbia. On appeal, the case now has an opinion that will affect how the second amendment is interpreted across the country.

The majority opinion is actually a lesson in sentence construction and grammar. If you don’t believe me, read this:

“The provision’s second comma divides the Amendment into two clauses; the first is prefatory, and the second operative. Appellants’ argument is focused on their reading of the Second Amendment’s operative clause. According to appellants, the Amendment’s language flat out guarantees an individual right “to keep and bear Arms.”

But finally, like all specious reasoning the majority relied on definition - what is meant by “the people”. “The people”, they say represents the same idea as found in the term “the people” in the 1st, 2nd 4th 9th and 10th amendments.

“In determining whether the Second Amendment’s guarantee is an individual one, or some sort of collective right, the most important word is the one the drafters chose to describe the holders of the right—“the people.” …. It has never been doubted that these provisions were designed to protect the interests of individuals against government intrusion, interference, or usurpation.”

There you have it. “The people” are individuals so the right to bear arms is an individual right, not one that is a precondition to having a militia.

In her dissenting opinion Judge Karen Henderson just laid it on the line, essentially telling her counterparts, “Look, it’s already been decided by the U.S. Supreme Court”

In an opinion that can only be described as feisty, Judge Henderson agreed with her brethren that higher court opinions on the 2nd Amendment are few and far between. “Notoriously scant” is the term she used.

But there is one. A 1939 case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court which upheld the indictment of men who carried a sawed off shotgun across state lines.

Henderson cites United States v. Miller in which defense argued that the National Firearms Act, outlawing shotgun barrels under 18 inches in length, violated their 2nd Amendment rights. Disagreeing, the Supreme Court opinion put it this way:

“In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.”

So here we have a lower court overturning a long-standing Supreme Court opinion.

So can we now all own sawed-off shotguns? M-16s? TOW missiles?

I don’t think the issue is settled or will be settled anytime soon. And really, it won’t be settled until Americans lose that insane belief that it is their God-given right to whack Bambi with an AK-47.