guns

Do Illegal Immigrants Have the Right To Own Guns?

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

WHAT? My visceral reaction was immediately, “That’s crazy!” My considered conclusion is, “I think they do.”

US District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman ruled yesterday in US v. Carbajal-Flores that the federal prohibition on illegal immigrants owning guns is unconstitutional, at least as applied to Heriberto Carbajal-Flores, an illegal with no criminal record or record of violence. “The noncitizen possession statute, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(5), violates the Second Amendment as applied to Carbajal-Flores,” Judge Colman wrote “Thus, the Court grants Carbajal-Flores’ motion to dismiss.” She reached this conclusion after considering the US’s historical tradition of gun regulation as set out in the Supreme Court’s landmark New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen ruling. Breaking misdemeanor immigration laws alone should not be sufficient justification for stripping someone of gun rights, the judge determined.

“[C]arbajal-Flores has never been convicted of a felony, a violent crime, or a crime involving the use of a weapon. Even in the present case, Carbajal-Flores contends that he received and used the handgun solely for self-protection and protection of property during a time of documented civil unrest in the Spring of 2020,” Judge Coleman wrote. “Additionally, Pretrial Service has confirmed that Carbajal-Flores has consistently adhered to and fulfilled all the stipulated conditions of his release, is gainfully employed, and has no new arrests or outstanding warrants….The Court also determined that based on the government’s historical analogue, where exceptions were made that allowed formerly ‘untrustworthy’ British loyalists to possess weapons, the individuals who fell within the exception were determined to be non-violent during their individual assessments, permitting them to carry firearms,” she wrote. “Thus, to the extent the exception shows that some British loyalists were permitted to carry firearms despite the general prohibition, the Court interprets this history as supporting an individualized assessment for Section 922(g)(5) as this Court previously found with Section 922(g)(1).”

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The Rest Of The Story: The Mother Of That Six-Year-Old Who Shot His Teacher Is In Prison. GOOD!

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

But some conservative pundits have a problem with that.

Ethics Alarms covered the revolting tale of the Newport News, Virginia second-grader who shot his teacher in a January post. The position here is and has always been that when children get their hands on guns and shoot anyone, including themselves, parents who own the guns should be held strictly responsible, and should go to jail. Amusingly, some commenters here thought I was jumping to conclusions assuming that parents were at fault in the Newport News case. “What happened to waiting for facts before making a judgement?” caviled one. MIA Ethics Alarms gadfly P.M. Lawrence (where have you been, P.M.?) offered several unlikely scenarios that didn’t involve parental misconduct. I was confident that Occam’s Razor applied, and that this was res ipsa loquitor: if a second grader shoots his teacher, the parents of that second grader are almost certainly at fault.

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Update: “The New York Times Legal Expert Doesn’t Understand The Constitution”

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Well, what do I know….

At least in the view of the New York Times SCOTUS reporter Adam Liptak, the course of the Supreme Court oral argument in United States v. Rahimi indicates that the Court is likely to over-rule the Fifth Circuit and let the law discussed her in this post stand. Just call me “Fredo”: I was certain that the Court would agree that the law is unconstitutional, and I’m still certain it should be so ruled.

Based on the story, the Justices are persuaded by the fact that Rahimi, after the law was imposed on him, proved he was in fact a danger to society and should not have access to a gun.

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Comment Of The Day: “Really, New York Times?…”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Arthur in Maine, who doesn’t live there now but used to and for a long time, has typically astute reflections to pass along in this Comment of the Day on the Lewiston shooting and more. Here he is, responding to the post, “Really, New York Times? Stephen King’s Facile, Ignorant Appeal To Emotion And Anti-Second Amendment Bias Is Worthy Of Space On Your Op-Ed Page?”:

***

I am still trying to process what happened in Lewiston – a place in which I spent as little time as possible during the many years I lived in Maine. The town is gritty, an ex-mill town, and I rarely there unless I had business. In my last eight or ten years in Maine, I lived about 30 miles down the road.

Between 1977 and 2017, with a year or a season off elsewhere, I lived in northern New England – specifically, Vermont and Maine. I moved to Vermont in the autumn of 1977 and, with the exception of a year in France in the early 1980s, lived there until 1987, when I moved to Maine. And I lived in Maine far longer than I have lived anywhere else.

In 1983, when I was still living in a tiny town in Vermont, there was a murder. In a town of several hundred, in a state of less than a million, this was shocking news that stayed in the headlines for a week. The victim was a young woman. She was a sweetheart, had a Russian accent, and she and her common-law husband, ran the local gas station/convenience store. He was an Iranian immigrant, gruff and taciturn, but capable of great kindness, which I witnessed more than once. I liked them both very much.

He wasn’t there the morning that Bill Harvey walked into the store and shot her point blank. I knew Bill, too. He was quiet and mousy and shy; he was the guy who serviced the gas equipment at the area restaurants I worked in. He was odd, but he did know his trade; he brought more than one expensive piece of kit back to life over the several years I watched him work.

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Incompetent Elected Official Of The Week: Ector County (Texas) Commissioner Michael Gardner (R) [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Alternate headline: “Wow! What an idiot!

Michael Gardner, an elected commissioner in Ector County, Texas, was officiating at his nephew’s wedding in Nebraska and had the cool idea of calling the throng of 200 guests gathered at the outdoor ceremony to order by shooting a pistol into the air. Gardner cocked back the hammer of the weapon but it slipped—he had never fired the Pietta 1860 revolver before—and the gun went off prematurely. Worse yet, the blank he thought he was shooting off was home-made (for a borrowed gun he was unfamiliar with, remember) and wasn’t nearly blank enough. As a result, his misfire shot his 12-year-old grandson in the shoulder.

Other than that, the wedding went off without a hitch.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Gardner said he regretted using a homemade blank, since he had never made one before, and also using a gun that didn’t belong to him and that he had never used . Then there was that shooting his grandson thing. He regrets that too. Luckily, the boy is okay.

Gardner was charged with felony child abuse committed negligently and resulting in serious bodily injury. He turned himself in to authorities the day after the wedding and was released on a $10,000 bond. Gardner could face up to three years in prison, a $10,000 fine or both. He says that the shooting has put his political future in jeopardy.

Ya think?

He also said, incredibly, “Accidents happen.” Well, that accident never happens unless some idiot has the brilliant idea of firing a gun to start a wedding.

Stories like this are why the rest of the world thinks Americans are nuts.

See? Someone Is “Doing Something” About Gun Violence!

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

The gun you see below…

…. was duly taken from its owner for illegal use: shooting fish (though not in a barrel, which is even more unethical). A Finney County Game Warden seized the 9 mm handgun because it was “being used to take fish in Garden City,” Kansas game wardens said.

You would expect officials in Finney County to be protective of fish, wouldn’t you?

The wardens issued written violations, reminding citizens that “firearms are not a legal means to take fish.”

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End Of Week Ethics Exegesis, 1/20/2023, SCOTUS Ineptitude, The Child Shooter’s Parents, A Coinkydink, And More…[Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

[NOTE: This was another one of those posts that I had to squeeze in and get up before I had a chance to do a careful proofing. Coming back to it hours later, it is so embarrassing to find all the irritating little typos: missing letters, transposed letters, words I thought I typed in but didn’t. Ugh. I’m sorry.]

***

The mainstream media (and Democrats, but I repeat myself) is doing everything it can to try to make Lyin’ George Santos the big story rather than Joe’s Biden’s document scandal, which has nicely exposed Biden’s hypocrisy along with that of law enforcement and the Trump-Deranged. The Republicans have made it easier for them than it should be: Kevin McCarthy should have created a committee called “Shameless Lying Committee and placed only Santos on it, and made him chairman. Oh, maybe have Adam Schlitt on it to keep George company. McCarthy’s canned line about how Santos was elected to represent his district by voters and they deserve representation is worse than if he said nothing at all. Santos gets to vote on bills, and that’s all an incompetent, lazy, gullible district like his deserves. (If Santos says one more time that he’s done nothing wrong, I may jump out my office window.)

Back to the news media: This morning I watched CNN, Fox, News, and BBC all at once on the DirecTV “News Mix” channel. The experience would be depressing to anyone under the delusion that broadcast news is anything but a confederacy of dunces. As the abrasive and smug “Fox and Friends” kept repeating the same outrage about Joe’s stash of classified materials, CNN interviewed high school students in Santos’ district in an obviously carefully staged segment purporting to show that teens are more ethical and instinctively wise than their elected elders. (Hey, look at these kids! Let’s let 16-year-olds vote!) When one student said that Congress should vote to expel Santos, his grandstanding teacher didn’t point out that Congress can’t, probably because the teacher doesn’t know.

Neither CNN nor the teacher brought up Joe Biden’s career of making up credentials and experiences, which would have been an interesting counterpoint for the aspiring Democrats in the student group (there was one self-proclaimed future Republican, which doesn’t mean there weren’t others afarisd of getting wedgies) to ponder: the thrust of the segment was that Santos and the GOP acceptance of him pushed the students into the Blue.

MSNBC, as usual, was even more flagrant in its bias, and also funnier. It had—get this—Al Sharpton and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele discussing how corrupt and incompetent Republican House members were. Michael Steele calling anyone incompetent is like, well, Sharpton calling anyone corrupt. Steele is now a Never-Trump talking head for MSNBC in the Ana Navarro mold, because his flip-flop was the only way anyone would hire him to give his opinion on anything. He was a disaster as RNC head, embarrassing the party by such stunts as okaying a fundraising mailing that intentionally masqueraded as a census document—while the census was underway. Congress passed a bi-partisan law making such chicanery illegal.

Mostly Steele is just an idiot. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it should be flashed up on the screen any time this dolt tries to be a pundit. When he was running to be re-elected RNC head (he lost), Steele was asked during the one debate among the contenders to name his favorite book. The other hacks (like Reince Priebus, the eventual winner) said that a Ronald Reagan’s biography was their favorite book, but Steele, trying to seem erudite, said “War and Peace.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” he quoted (from “A Tale of Two Cities”), causing questioner Tucker Carlson to facepalm.

1. The SCOTUS Dobbs leak can’t be found. That’s bad enough. Equally bad were the stunning revelations of sloppy procedures at the Court, probably long the status quo, that nonetheless made this scandal inevitable. From the 20-page report

1. Too many personnel have access to certain Court-sensitive documents. The current distribution mechanisms result in too many people having access to highly sensitive information and the inability to actively track who is handling and accessing these documents. Distribution should be more tailored and the use of hard copies for sensitive documents should be minimized and tightly controlled.

2. Aside from the Court’s clear confidentiality policies and the federal statutes outlined above, there is no universal written policy or guidance on the mechanics of handling and safeguarding draft opinions and Court-sensitive documents, and practices vary widely throughout the Court. A universal policy should be established and all personnel should receive training on the requirements.

3. The Court’s current method of destroying Court-sensitive documents has vulnerabilities that should be addressed.

4. The Court’s information security policies are outdated and need to be clarified and updated. The existing platform for case-related documents appears to be out of date and in need of an overhaul.

5. There are inadequate safeguards in place to track the printing and copying of sensitive documents. The Court should institute tracking mechanisms using technology that is currently available for this purpose.

6. Many personnel appear not to have properly understood the Court’s policies on confidentiality. There should be more emphasis on training so that all personnel fully understand the policies.

7. Bills were introduced in the last Congress which would expressly prohibit the disclosure of the Supreme Court’s non-public case-related information to anyone outside the Court. Consideration should be given to supporting such legislation.

Summary: The Court’;s security has been incompetent and inexcusable.

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Gee, Can We Lock Up The Parents For THIS Shooting?

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Ethics Alarms has always maintained that when a child gets control of a real firearm and shoots it, the parents must be held criminally responsible, not only for the consequences of the shooting, but for allowing the child access at all. I also believe that this should be strict liability: I don’t care if the child is a whiz at picking locks or a precocious little Michael Corleone. If you own a gun and your kid gets a grip on it, you’re the menace to society.

I can’t imagine a more perfect illustration of the need for this policy than the story out of Richneck Elementary School in Newport News Virginia. A 6-year-old boy shot and wounded his first grade teacher yesterday. He apparently did it intentionally—he had some dispute with her, we are told—and is a good shot: she is in critical condition.

The Washington Post story about the shooting is infuriating:

“Newport News Police Chief Steve R. Drew said at a news briefing…’We did not have a situation where someone was going around the school shooting.’”

Oh, the first grader wasn’t an active shooter then! We could guess that. What about the parents?

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One More Time: Hold Gun-Owners Criminally Liable When Something Like This Happens

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

We have covered such incidents before, but it bears repeating.

Tiffany Callaway, a Miami-Dade Corrections officer, left her five children unsupervised in her home while she was working. While she was gone her 13-year-old son got a shotgun out of a firearm case in the master bedroom closet. He accidentally discharged it. His eleven-year-old brother was fatally shot in the chest, and died.

In a masterpiece of gall, Callaway started a GoFundMe page to attract donations. “Imaging life without him is something we never thought we’d have to do as a family,” she said.

“Only goes to show it can impact anybody in the community,” said Miami-Dade Police Director Alvaro Zabaleta in another fatuous pronouncement that misses the point. “It” won’t “impact” anyone who doesn’t leave young children alone with access to deadly weapons.

Apparently no charges will be filed against the officer. Ridiculous.She is 100% responsible for the death of her child and the trauma to the older child who fired the weapon. She was negligent to leave them alone in the house, negligent in not training them regarding gun safety, and negligent in not having the gun secure, Police say they are investigating whether the gun was properly secured—what is there to investigate? A kid got a hold of the gun, which was loaded, and fired it! Of course it wasn’t properly secured: it it were properly secured, no one would have been killed.

No wonder anti-gun fanatics think guns just kill people all by themselves.

Ethics Quiz: Now THIS Is An Irresponsible Mother! So…

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

A 4-year-old Detroit girl is in critical condition after being shot in the arm and leg. Her mother is in custody: first she said that her daughter was wounded in an attempted robbery, then she admitted that her gun went off accidentally while she was cleaning it.

Twice.

Now, this ethics quiz is based on the facts as the mother stated them. According to the reports, there are many reasons to doubt what she is now claiming—for example, police say the girl’s mother said the firearm was inside the apartment, but they did not find any gun there after getting a warrant and searching. But let’s assume, arguendo, as lawyers say, that she is telling the truth. Let’s also assume that she isn’t crazy or a drug addict.

According to the ATF, these are the conditions under which a citizen can lose the Second Amendment Right To Bear Arms:

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