Gun laws are getting looser across much of US

[darrels joy]

Gun laws are getting looser across much of US

By ERIK SCHELZIG, Associated Press Writer Erik Schelzig, Associated Press Writer 2 hrs 30 mins ago


NASHVILLE, Tenn. – It's been the year of the gun in Tennessee. In a flurry of legislative action, handgun owners won the right to take their weapons onto sports fields and playgrounds and, at least briefly, into bars.

A change in leadership at the state Capitol helped open the doors to the gun-related bills and put Tennessee at the forefront of a largely unnoticed trend: In much of the country, it is getting easier to carry guns.

A nationwide review by The Associated Press found that over the last two years, 24 states, mostly in the South and West, have passed 47 new laws loosening gun restrictions.

Among other things, legislatures have allowed firearms to be carried in cars, made it illegal to ask job candidates whether they own a gun, and expanded agreements that make permits to carry handguns in one state valid in another.

The trend is attributed in large part to a push by the National Rifle Association. The NRA, which for years has blocked attempts in Washington to tighten firearms laws, has ramped up its efforts at the state level to chip away at gun restrictions.

"This is all a coordinated approach to respect that human, God-given right of self defense by law-abiding Americans," says Chris W. Cox, the NRA's chief lobbyist. "We'll rest when all 50 states allow and respect the right of law-abiding people to defend themselves from criminal attack."

Among the recent gun-friendly laws:

• Arizona, Florida, Louisiana and Utah have made it illegal for businesses to bar their employees from storing guns in cars parked on company lots.

• Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina and Virginia have made some or all handgun permit information confidential.

• Montana, Arizona and Kansas have allowed handgun permits to be issued to people who have had their felony convictions expunged or their full civil rights restored.

• Tennessee and Montana have passed laws that exempt weapons made and owned in-state from federal restrictions. Tennessee is the home to Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, the maker of a .50-caliber shoulder-fired rifle that the company says can shoot bullets up to five miles and is banned in California.

The AP compiled the data on new laws from groups ranging from the Legal Community Against Violence, which advocates gun control, to the NRA.

Public attitudes toward gun control have shifted strongly over the past 50 years, according to Gallup polling. In 1959, 60 percent of respondents said they favored a ban on handguns except for "police and other authorized persons." Gallup's most recent annual crime survey in October found 71 percent opposed such a ban.

The NRA boasts that almost all states grant handgun permits to people with clean criminal and psychological records. In 1987, only 10 states did.

Only Wisconsin, Illinois and the District of Columbia now prohibit the practice entirely.

"The NRA has a stranglehold on a lot of state legislatures," said Kristin Rand, legislative director the Violence Policy Center, a gun control group in Washington. "They basically have convinced lawmakers they can cost them their seats, even though there's no real evidence to back that up."

Tennessee's new laws came after the Republican takeover of the General
Assembly this year, but most other states that loosened restrictions didn't experience major partisan shifts. Most of the states where the new laws were enacted have large rural populations, where support for gun rights tends to cross party lines.

While some states have tightened gun laws during the same period, the list of new restrictive laws is much shorter. In 2009 alone, more than three times as many laws were passed to make it easier on gun owners.


New Jersey's 2009 law limiting people to one handgun purchase per month is the most notable of the more restrictive laws. Other examples this year include Maryland's ban on concealed weapons on public transit and Maine's vote to give public universities and colleges the power to regulate firearms on campus.

The most contentious of Tennessee's new gun laws was one allowing handguns in bars and restaurants that serve alcohol. It took effect in July after lawmakers overrode a veto by the governor. Last month, a Nashville judge struck down the law as unconstitutionally vague, but supporters have vowed to pass it again.

A similar Arizona law that took effect in September allows people with concealed-weapons permits to bring their guns into bars and restaurants that haven't posted signs banning them.

While Tennessee's law was in place, many bars chose not to let customers bring guns in. Likewise, more than 70 communities have opted out of allowing guns in parks.

"People go in there and start drinking and then they want to start a fight.

What are they going to do if they got a gun in their hand?" said Larry Speck, 69, who works at an auto repair shop in Memphis. "I've got a gun permit and I'm not carrying mine in there even if they have a law."

Chattanooga retiree Ken Hasse, 71, said he worries about the possible consequences of allowing people to carry their guns in places like parks.
"It's going to tempt somebody to use one," he said.

Supporters of expanding handgun rights argue that people with state-issued permits are far less likely to commit crimes, and that more lawfully armed people cause a reduction in crime. Opponents fear that more guns could lead to more crime.

Academics are divided on the effects of liberalized handgun laws, and determining the impact is complicated by the move in several states to close handgun permit records.

A Violence Policy Center project has mined news reports to find that more than 100 people have been killed by holders of handgun-carry permits since 2007, including nine law enforcement officers. The project originally intended to list all gun crimes by permit holders, but there were too many to keep track of, Rand said.

"They shoot each other over parking spaces, at football games and at family events," Rand said. "The idea that you're making any place safer by injecting more guns is just completely contradicted by the facts."

The flood of legislative victories in Tennessee after many years of frustration now has some gun backers aiming for a whole new level of freedom: No permits at all.
The permit laws "are an extra burden on people to exercise essentially a constitutional right," said John Harris, executive director of the Tennessee Firearms Association.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091211/...ooser_gun_laws

[darrels joy]

REBELLION IN AMERICA

State No. 6 tells feds to stuff their gun regs

Arizona declares weapons exempt from national firearms paperwork

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Posted: April 07, 2010
9:25 pm Eastern



By Bob Unruh
© 2010 WorldNetDaily

A sixth state – Arizona – now has declared that guns made and kept inside its borders essentially are free from federal application, registration and ownership regulations in a surging movement among states that one supporter describes as a direct challenge to "a government monopoly on the supply of firearms."

Gov. Jan Brewer this week signed the state's version of a "Firearms Freedom Act," which originated in Montana and now has been adopted by six states, with several dozen more in various stages of their own plans.

Brewer issued a statement that the law is intended to give Washington the message that they should not try to "get between Arizonans and their constitutional rights."

Arizona joins Wyoming, South Dakota, Utah and Tennessee as well as Montana, where Gary Marbut of the Montana Shooting Sports Association was a key proponent.


Marbut has warned that under the current system of federal approval for gun purchases, federal registration requirements, federal restrictions and federal limits, the U.S. essentially has established a monopoly on guns.

All the information you'll ever need about guns, ammo and a special video on how to make them, found in the "Firearms Multimedia Guide."

The "Firearms Freedom Act" measures being adopted around the nation now, he said, are supported by the Ninth and Second Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and are needed to break down that monopoly.

In an analysis posted on the ProGunLeaders website, he wrote:

"The current federal scheme of regulating the supply system for new firearms in the U.S. is so complete it might actually constitute a government monopoly on the supply of firearms. Under current federal regulation, no firearm may be made and sold to another person without federal government permission – not one firearm," he wrote.

"With the natural right of self-defense, people must also be allowed access to firearms made and sold outside the government-controlled supply chain," he said.

To submit to a government gun monopoly, he said, would be to believe "that the Constitution is an old, dead, obsolete and meaningless piece of paper, the Ninth Amendment is as worthless as the rest, and has no relevance to the [Montana Firearms Freedom Act]," he wrote.

"If the observer believes that the Constitution actually means something, and that those who ratified the Constitution and its amendments had authority to do so, that they understood meaningful terms precisely as used and applied in their time, and that they knew what they were doing, then import of the Ninth Amendment begins to come into focus."

Derek Sheriff reported at the Arizona Tenth Amendment Center that Arizona's bill asserts "Arizona's sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment and the people's unenumerated rights under the Ninth Amendment. They also emphasize the fact that when Arizona entered the union in 1912, its people did so as part of a contract between the state and the people of Arizona and the United States."

Kurt Hofmann of the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner said the surging movement across the states is "a challenge to the federal government's grotesquely expansive use of the interstate commerce to regulate – well … everything, whether it has anything to do with interstate commerce or not."

"Liberty doesn't just happen – it needs to be worked for," he said. "Getting that work done can make the difference between having to work for liberty, and having to fight for it."

Marbut, who has described himself as the godfather of the Firearms Freedom Act movement, has reported previously that while Constitution's Commerce Clause can be viewed as regulating interstate commerce, it also can be viewed as having been modified when the later Second Amendment assuring citizens of the right to own weapons was adopted.

No less significant, he suggests, is the Ninth Amendment, which states, "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

In the Western world, he said, "Individuals voluntarily surrender some portion of their political power to the community of their state in order to empower the state to do some selected things for them in common that they cannot do well or effectively as individuals. The political state of individuals, in turn, surrenders a specific portion of its collected political power to the United States under our federated system, and for the same reasons.

"However, it is important to note two important points. First, this grant of power from sovereign individuals to state, and secondarily from state to federal, is a limited transfer of power. Under this system, people do not sell themselves into slavery to unlimited governments, nor do they fail to delineate limits to this grant of political power to governments. Second, this grant of power from individuals to government is for a very specific purpose."

The Declaration of Independence states "governments are instituted among men" "to secure" the rights of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," he writes.

Throughout the founding of the U.S., he explains, individuals always have granted "carefully specified powers" to a central government, not an authoritarian right to control everything.

Specific rights were retained in the Bill of Rights, which was never intended to be an exhaustive list. Hence, the Ninth Amendment, he said.

"Some of those most interested in instituting a federal government 'to secure these rights' understood that it would be impossible to provide an exhaustive catalog of rights inherent in people as a part of their humanity, 'natural rights' or 'liberty rights,'" he wrote.

He said there are powers and rights that cannot be particularly enumerated, and if a list of rights is specific, it could be interpreted that no other rights exist.

"The Ninth and Tenth Amendments [reserving other rights to the people and states] were added to protect all rights not listed in the first eight amendments," he said.

"Examples are the right to privacy, the right to self-defense, the right of freedom of conscience, and the right to choose in one's own affairs, all considered to be important individual rights but none mentioned under the list of protected rights in the Bill of Rights," he said.

Applying it to the present case, he said, the right to self-defense strongly implies the right to keep and bear arms.

"Of what value are any or all of the other protected rights if a person may not defend the person from threat to life or limb? How could a newspaperman exercise his freedom of the press if he could be killed with impunity? How could any person effectively exercise his freedom of speech if he could be summarily killed because he exercised that freedom?" he asked.

When South Dakota's law was signed by Gov. Mike Rounds, a commentator there noted it addresses the "rights of states which have been carelessly trampled by the federal government for decades."

Marbut has told WND the issue is not only about guns but about states' rights and the constant overreaching by federal agencies and Washington to impose their requirements on in-state activities.

Michael Boldin of the Tenth Amendment Center said Washington likely is looking for a way out of the dispute.

"I think they're going to let it ride, hoping some judge throws out the case," he told WND earlier. "When they really start paying attention is when people actually start following the [state] firearms laws."

WND reported earlier when Wyoming joined the states with self-declared exemptions from federal gun regulation, officials there took the unusual step of actually including penalties for any agent of the U.S. who "enforces or attempts to enforce" federal gun rules on a "personal firearm."

The costs could be up to two years in prison and $2,000 in fines for an offender.

But the bellwether likely is to be a lawsuit pending over the Montana law, which was the first to go into effect.

As WND reported, the action was filed by the Second Amendment Foundation and the Montana Shooting Sports Association in U.S. District Court in Missoula, Mont., to validate the principles and terms of the Montana Firearms Freedom Act, which took effect Oct. 3, 2009.

Marbut argues that the federal government was created by the states to serve the states and the people, and it is time for the states to begin drawing boundaries for the federal government and its agencies.

In demanding the dismissal of the case, the government claimed the authority to regulate even "intrastate" commerce if it chooses.

In an analysis by the Tenth Amendment Center, the gun laws were described as a nullification.

"Laws of the federal government are to be supreme in all matters pursuant to the delegated powers of U.S. Constitution. When D.C. enacts laws outside those powers, state laws trump. And, as Thomas Jefferson would say, when the federal government assumes powers not delegated to it, those acts are 'unauthoritative, void, and of no force' from the outset," said the analysis.

"When a state 'nullifies' a federal law, it is proclaiming that the law in question is void and inoperative, or 'noneffective,' within the boundaries of that state; or, in other words, not a law as far as the state is concerned. Implied in such legislation is that the state apparatus will enforce the act against all violations – in order to protect the liberty of the state's citizens."

[1CAVCCO15MED]

I believe any sane non-felon has a right to have weapons. By the same token there should be a mechanism to deny guns to insane people and convicted felons and anyone who wants to carry a concealed weapon should know the difference between self defense and murder, whoever teaches the course. I believe if you let a child have unsupervised access to a gun and it kills or injures themselves or another you are guilty of negligence or negligent homicide unless found innocent by a court or judge. I believe that any person that is non insane non convicted felon and lives in a high crime area has a natural right, even an moral obligation to arm and defend themselves and their property. I define insane as anyone who has been deemed by a physician as a danger to themselves or others. This should only be for twenty four hours and based upon the actions of the individual and then the legally defended person should be taken before a judge by a psychiatrist to determine if it should be extended for a definite term at the end of which it is dropped unless once again the person is taken to court by a psychiatrist and again has legal representation. It should always be for a definite period and the person should always have legal representation. This is the present system in most states for declaring a person insane. I believe the person that owns the property has a right to decide if guns are allowed on it. The government does not have that right except in certain instances, i.e. courtrooms, halls of Congress.

I believe if you are a non violent convicted felon it is tough sh** on your gun rights. If you were idiot enough to commit a felony you are too stupid to have a gun.

If you are a violent felon, you are the reason we need guns.