From My Substack Account: Today’s story. Thanks to Urs for asking me to post it.
I am a member of the White House Correspondents’ Association. Though that may sound impressive, it’s not in any way. Virtually everyone who has ever written for a news site is a member. The biggest takeaway from that “membership,” is that I get roughly twenty to thirty emails a day from agents asking me if I want to interview their expert on whatever. I’ve never responded to one, until today.
Today I got an email that I originally thought came from the ACLU. Those are generally interesting enough to read, and some of the best lawyers in the country work for the ACLU. But my quick glance led me to mistake the sender. The “New Civil Liberties Alliance” sent me an email, and it appears evident that the only liberty for which they fight is to ensure that Americans can access the most lethal weapons possible. From their email, in part:
NCLA asks the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah to declare ATF’s “Bump Stock Rule” invalid and require the government to return the bump stock confiscated from Plaintiff Clark Aposhian.
A bump stock is not a “machine gun.” As you all surely know, “Fully automatic weapons,” the ones where you press the trigger and it fires until you release it, are banned… even in America. No, if you want to shoot many people in America, you must pull the trigger each time. So you are not allowed to buy fully automatic weapons.
But you can buy a bump stock, or you could, until recently. A bump stock is something easily inserted into the trigger area that alieves you of having to pull that pesky trigger each time. Properly placed, you essentially now own a machine gun. Remember, these were only recently banned by the ATFE.
If you can stomach it, you can hear the work done by a bump stock in Las Vegas, where a man killed 60 people in a matter of minutes and could have killed many more, but his “machine guns” got too hot, and the barrels started to ripple.
Again, caution is warranted. It is a deeply disturbing video, but it may be necessary to reinforce the violence a “bumpstock” can unleash. It is video from the Las Vegas shooting:
These lawyers want to protect your right to fire shots that quickly, essentially a fully automatic weapon, because if that’s not a machine gun, I don’t know what is. Again, that’s a legal weapon with a legal accouterment… at the time. Which brings us back to the law and the email.
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During the Dobbs’ decision overruling Roe. v. Wade, we were told:
The crux of Dobbs is a highly constrained and antiquated view of what constitutes a fundamental constitutional right. Specifically, Justice Alito wrote that for a right to be protected by the Constitution, it must be either explicitly spelled out in the text or “deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition.”
Explicitly spelled out? Deeply rooted in tradition? Here are the “arms” referenced in 1791 when the 2nd Amendment was explicitly set out and is a deeply rooted tradition in America:
The typical firearms of the day were muskets and flintlock pistols. They could hold a single round at a time, and a skilled shooter could hope to get off three or possibly four rounds in a minute of firing.
A skilled shooter could “hope” to get off three to four slow-moving rounds that aren’t lethal at 50 to 100 yards.
One wonders if the Founders were able to see the video from Las Vegas above and know that 60 people were killed in minutes while also being told that under our jurisprudence at the time, the man did not commit any crime until he pulled the trigger, one would think they would be furious. “There’s no war!”
Ah, but they would be wrong. There are wars at our concerts, our nightclubs, our schools, our schools, our schools, and malls and various other places. To that end, the Las Vegas shooting happened in 2017. Bump stocks were declared illegal in 2018, with a lot of unhappy 2nd Amendment enthusiasts.
This brings me back to the email.
The email goes on to state:
NCLA released the following statement:
“The case for entering judgment for Mr. Aposhian and striking down ATF’s bump-stock rule became even stronger in January, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled 13-3 that the rule conflicts with the statutory definition of ‘machinegun.’ Some have suggested that bump stocks should be banned as a public safety measure. But any such decision needs to be made by Congress, not by ATF’s unelected administrators.”
-Rich Samp, Senior Litigation Counsel, NCLA
So, there is a case in Utah that seems to be upholding the bump stock ban, while a case in the 5th Circuit declared the rule to be unconstitutional because the change had to be made by Congress through a new law and not a change made by the ATF through regulations. Perhaps it helps to know that the Fifth District consists of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. It is, without question, the most insanely conservative circuit in the nation, and that insanity has been on full display for years now with bizarre rulings. Now, the NCLA wants to make Utah “as safe” as Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, by allowing Utah gun owners to install bump stocks.
The last part of the email?
Please let us know if you would like to speak with an NCLA attorney about this case.
Best,
Judy Pino
Hmmmm.
I wrote back (first time ever). I have joined a movement that believes that we are so hopeless when it comes to guns that it is time to take the cameras into the mass shootings and photograph what these guns do. The Civil Rights movement was going nowhere until people from the North and West saw on television the pictures of dogs, water hoses, batons, and the dehumanization. It was television news, recording the horrific treatment of “negroes,” to use the language of the day, that gave the brave civil rights leaders the needed momentum. Only pictures brought the cruelty home and forced change.
Pictures from within the mass shootings, especially schools, would be horrific, the stuff of nightmares. But we have sanitized these mass shootings in America. These are assault rifles (the mass shooting weapon of choice.), they fire rounds at three to five times the speed of a handgun which inflicts exponentially more damage. They needed DNA and shoe pictures to identify the babies at Uvalde. And yet all the public saw, again, was a school wrapped in yellow tape, flowers, and crying parents. Yawn. Seen it. Thoughts and prayers, and mental health, say the gun people.
I want gun manufacturers and the hardcore Second Amendment people to SEE their handiwork, not sanitize it. Far from being disrespectful to the victims, I think it might be the only means by which to honor them. We know that we’ve made almost no progress when it comes to gun regulations. Time to do something bold. I want them to face pictures.
I wrote:
I hope all of you get to tour the next mass shooting with the bodies still there. I wish the next time a school is shot up; they show the carnage. Maybe then people like you will realize that you’re nothing but aiding and abetting murderers to make money for gun manufacturers and the parasites around them.
Keep your blood money. I have no desire to deal with any of you.
Was I impulsive? Immature? Yeah, maybe some. But far more mature and enlightened than people trying to restore your right to turn your assault rifle, the same one used by the American military, into a fully automatic weapon.
One thing, though, going back to the Second Amendment, the Founders, a well-regulated militia, and the military. We have this from Google. There is no 2nd Amendment in the military.
People on most bases are not as free to carry firearms as they are in many states. Only those with certain types of jobs, such as law enforcement, investigations, security or counterintelligence, are authorized to carry weapons on duty.
It sounds like we have a tradition of regulating firearms in our militias. Do you suppose Alito cares?
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Anyone can support me on Venmo @Jason-Miciak, or going to Substack: Much Left Ado, where I”ve amassed quite the library, perhaps 40 stories like the one above. And, just to be nice, and because I often address heavy topics, I always end with a picture of a beach. Single women are welcome to support me in that endeavor, too.
Good for you! What does it say about us when we lock up cannabis users based on nixon’s lie, which was provably politically motivated to stop the anti-war and civil rights activists, yet allow 400 million guns on the streets that have resulted in more mass murders, with many being children, than any country on earth? Evil. We live in an evil culture that gives rapists and religious cult members lifetime appointments to make our laws, and throws people doing no one harm into jail. Madness. Pure fucking madness.
Well, remember that Alito was one of the Justices who essentially overturned the “well-regulated militia” part of the Second Amendment (incidentally, the NRA itself has left out that clause in their own promotions for several decades) in the Heller and McDonald cases.
Very true.
Odd, no? For a guy who says that if something “isn’t” in the Constitution, specifically, it has no weight? (That’s why he included the “historical American tradition” bc he can’t get around it), but as someone who is a contextualist, there is a reason that the people who wrote the 2nd amendment included a national defense component.
I recommend reading “The Grouchy Historian” by Ed Asner. The whole book is readable and informative, but the chapter on the 2nd Amendment is wonderful!
The ‘carry and bear arms’ cou;d also include 10 foot pikes, swords and an assortment of bladed weapons. It does NOT mention ‘firearms’ specifically
Now, to the best of my knowledge, it’s illegal to carry a bladed weapon where the blade is over a certain length, so swords, cutlasses, machetes, etc would be included as ‘arms, but if they can be banned, so can specific types of firearms
Make the bastards carry full liability insurance on EVERY weapon they own! You can’t drive a car legally without insurance. Only certain age groups can obtain auto insurance. So, equate guns with cars and insure the shit out of them. The “bubbas” won’t like it and that tickles the shit out of me!
I agree, show the carnage and WITHOUT giving a “trigger warning” (no pun intended).
Screw the “sensitive viewers”, make them look the horror in the face.
This. Needs. To. Stop.
That’s a lot of bullets being fired in a short amount of time. You will do time if you are caught with a full auto weapon. That sounds pretty close to that. I had never seen what a bump stock was. I’m sorry now that I know what it is. When are people going to stop killing each other.
Mr. Miciak, If you bothered to read any of the legal papers in the Aposhian v. Garland case (or responded to our inquiry with something other than grotesque and childish snark), you would discover that it has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. You would also see that five Tenth Circuit judges sided with NCLA at an earlier stage of the case. Nor is NCLA a Second Amendment/gun rights group. Rather, we believe that other parts of the Constitution are critical to ensuring that we maintain democratic self-government in the United States. In particular, when a regulation written by the prosecutors turns 500,000 people into felons overnight, that is serious problem for personal liberty having little to do with the Second Amendment. A quick review of our other cases would show you that we have civil liberties cases involving the First Amendment (Hoeg v. Newsom; FDRLST Media v. NLRB), Fourth Amendment (Mexican Gulf v. Dept. of Commerce; Mas Canosa v. City of Coral Gables), and Fifth Amendment (Cochran v. SEC), etc. And we are winning these cases all around the country. In short, we believe that unlawful administrative power threatens self-government regardless of political party. You’ll also find more cases on our website brought against the Trump Administration than against the Biden Administration. We did not sue over the gun control law that Congress passed last year, because Congress is the entity that the Constitution empowers to pass such laws. But the ATF has no such power, not even the ATF under Pres. Trump, which issued the unlawful bump stock ban regulation.