Newspaper editors reap the benefits of our Constitution’s First Amendment and expect us to accept a literal or exact meaning of it.  Can you blame them since it helps provide them with their livelihood. Funny how so many of them like to blame guns whenever a shooting occurs. 

Where is their expectation for a strict interpretation of the Second Amendment? “…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Note that our NY Constitution does not contain this language, but NY civil law uses the term “cannot” be infringed. 

Those who like to blame guns after recent mass shootings should recall when the Buffalo shooter said he chose New York because its strict gun laws made armed opposition less likely.  Shooters often choose a “gun free zone”.  Why? No doubt less likely to run into a “good guy with a gun”.  There might have been a totally different outcome with one or more concealed-carry customers in the store. 

The CDC, in 2021, published a “fact sheet” showing estimated defensive gun uses (DGU) happen between 60,000 and 2.5 million times per year in the United States. Lives can be preserved by relying on the Second Amendment just as livelihoods are preserved by the First Amendment. 

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Senators John Kennedy (R-La.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) introduced the ‘Respect for the Second Amendment Act’ to protect an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. The legislation would codify the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen. 

Kennedy said: “Congress has the ability to use its authority to guard against state overreach—and that is what this bill does. At a time when the constitutional right to keep and bear arms is under attack in courtrooms throughout America, we must ensure that the Supreme Court’s decision about the Second Amendment is not only legal precedent but that the law preserves it forever…The Supreme Court has spoken very clearly in Heller and Bruen on the Second Amendment: We have an individual right to own a gun.”

Kennedy added: “I also believe that love is the answer, but…I own a hand gun just in case.”

According to the bill’s announcement, The Respect for the Second Amendment Act would:

• Create public and private rights of action against any person who seeks to enforce a law, rule or ordinance that violates the constitutional right of an individual to manufacture for personal use, acquire, possess, own, carry, transport or use a privately owned firearm or privately owned ammunition unless that law is consistent with the U.S. Constitution and history of firearm regulation.
• Prohibit states from rejecting firearms licenses on the sole basis of the license originating under another state’s jurisdiction.
• Eliminate 18 U.S. Code § 927 so that, on a case-by-case basis, Congress can override state law when it proves an unconstitutional attempt to override the Second Amendment.

Section 2 of the bill (FINDINGS) is a good short summary of why this is necessary and Section 2 (6) strikes directly at Hochul and New York.

Section 3C gives us the right to recover ‘costs and a reasonable attorney fee’ if we have to sue because our rights are violated. The cost of these lawsuits has been a major factor which discourages people from taking to court these infringements of our rights.

This is an opportunity to contact your Senators, no matter what party, and tell them you support this bill and 2A. This bill gives the Senator the opportunity to support the Supreme Court decision in Bruen. This is especially important since Senator Gillibrand is coming up for reelection in 2024. 

Consider doing the same in the House of Representatives and add that they should introduce a companion bill in the House.

Hochul proposes ‘technical’ changes to concealed carry law

Updated: Feb. 03, 2023, 4:14 p.m

By Joshua Solomon | Times Union, Albany

Albany, N.Y. — Gov. Kathy Hochul is seeking a number of “technical” revisions to New York’s contested concealed carry laws, including allowing armed security guards at places of worship and providing clearer guidelines for retired law enforcement officers in good standing to possess a firearm in a “sensitive location.”

The proposals were included in Hochul’s executive budget, released Wednesday, and seek to update the state’s retooled concealed carry laws, enacted in July following a U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down the state’s longtime rules governing the possession and concealment of firearms in public.

The “Concealed Carry Improvement Act” is the target of numerous challenges in federal court by pro-Second Amendment groups. Some judges have already ruled it is an unconstitutional reach on people’s right to possess a firearm following the landmark decision in the Supreme Court case — New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Kevin Bruen, the then-superintendent of the State Police.

Hochul is seeking to clarify under the state’s new concealed carry laws that security guards at places of worship can possess a firearm, despite places like churches being deemed a “sensitive location” where guns are prohibited. Currently, security guards can possess a firearm while working their job, but it does not specify they can be hired to work at a place of worship.

The governor is also proposing to allow retired law enforcement who are in good standing and up to date on their firearms licenses to be exempt from the concealed carry laws. The statute allows retired police officers to carry a firearm in sensitive locations, but the new language expands on that definition, using a federal standard for law enforcement instead of the state’s regulation.

Following backlash from upstate Republicans, Hochul wants to clarify that firearms are also allowed at historical reenactments, on movie or theater production sets, as well as by people participating in military ceremonies, funerals and honor guards or in a biathlon competition. She also is recommending that the designation of a public park as a restricted “sensitive location” does not apply to the Adirondack or Catskill state parks, which encompass massive swaths of residential areas

Without any further legal questions, the proposals are likely to make their way through the budget process, a two-month period of negotiations among lawmakers and the governor as they seek to push their respective policies and financial initiatives into the state’s $227 billion proposed spending plan.

Democratic lawmakers signaled no concern with the proposal in the 24 hours following the release of Hochul’s policy bills. (Hochul had not noted in her State of the State address last month nor her budget remarks this week that any changes to the concealed carry laws would be offered.

Hochul’s proposed changes would help to “ensure that the state’s firearm regulations are implemented effectively and keep New Yorkers safe,” according to a budget memorandum explaining the need for the amendments.

U.S. District Judge Glenn T. Suddaby ruled in August on GOA-NY’s case against the concealed carry laws. He said that “while pursuing the laudable goal of public safety, and in an attempt to curb ever-increasing mass shootings, the New York state Legislature has generated an unconstitutional statute.” The ruling is being appealed by state attorney general’s office and Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James stand by the law as written.

In a separate court case, pastors with New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms contend the restrictions on firearms in places of worship are a violation of civil rights.

The group, which advocates on behalf of New York’s evangelical Christian community, are seeking to “exercise their constitutional and natural right to self-defense while also exercising their constitutional right to worship free of discrimination or prejudice,” according to a complaint filed in the case.

“It appears that the Hochul administration has tacitly acknowledged that the (Concealed Carry Improvement Act) goes too far and that a course correction is needed,” Rev. Jason J. McGuire, executive director of New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, said in a statement.

McGuire viewed it as Hochul seeking to “cut her losses ... on an issue that the courts have not looked kindly upon.”

“While it appears that those lawsuits have sent the governor a message, churches should not have had to take legal action to defend themselves from this unfair and unconstitutional law in the first place,” McGuire said.

 

 

Friday, December 30th 2022

Rochester, N.Y. — New York State Supreme Court Judge Thomas Moran ruled last week that one of the state's strongest gun laws is unconstitutional.

The Extreme Risk Protection Order law, also known as the Red Flag law, allows law enforcement to temporarily seize a person's guns based on someone else making a written allegation in a petition to a judge that the person poses a harm to themself or others.

Payton Gendron recently pleaded guilty to murder and hate-motivated terrorism charges for gunning down 10 people in a racially motivated massacre at a Tops store in Buffalo earlier this year.

Less than a year before the May 14 attack, New York State Police investigated Gendron for a threat he made at his high school.

Zeneta Everhart, whose daughter Zaire, a Tops employee, was injured by Gendron, believes the Red Flag law could have saved many lives and prevented life-altering injuries if it was properly enforced when Gendron made the initial threat.

"These are things that authorities around him knew about," Everhart said. "These are things that law enforcement around him knew about, so why would he still have access to a gun?"

The attorney who successfully argued the unconstitutionality of the Red Flag law, Daniel Strollo, said the law allows a "very quick and easy mechanism to deprive somebody of their fundamental Second Amendment rights."

"You have people who are essentially not medical professionals expressing medical opinions that result in the deprivation of rights," Strollo said. "And you have a procedure that essentially allows somebody to lose those rights without ever having gone in front of a judge."

The following link will provide a video that summarizes the reaction by Governor Hochul and her political party to the Supreme Court decision last June which modified NY’s concealed carry laws in our favor.

You may recall Hochul’s fervorous reaction was to call a special session of the state legislature followed by its passage of the Concealed Carry Improvement Act (CCIA) which gutted our concealed carry rights in NY. 

There have been a series of court decisions declaring the unconstitutionality of most parts of the act. Each has earned an appeal by our state government (utilizing our tax dollars).

berties. This link will provide you with a credible and tenable summary of the actions taken by all involved. Rest assured that the 2A organizations statewide and nationwide are working diligently to protect your God-given liberties. These include SCOPE; GOA; GOA-NY; NRA; NYSRPA. Feel free to share this link:

                            https://youtu.be/gPcgEK7Jjq0

Once again, we have a shooter who had a history with law enforcement yet was never prosecuted. It’s on record that he threatened his family last year with a homemade bomb and a gun. What consequences did he suffer? None, despite federal kidnapping and menacing charges possibly resulting in prosecution and preventing his possession of a firearm. Yet no gun law would have prevented him from obtaining a gun illegally. Criminals, by nature, do not obey laws, period.

Colorado is one of 19 states and the District of Columbia with a “Red Flag” law. These are of little value when potential federal charges are ignored. The government again failed to do its job. Yet we are expected to relinquish our God-given right under the Second Amendment and put our faith in our government to keep us safe. 

The problem with “red flag” laws is they can be misused by anyone with a grudge. Where is the evidence sufficient to warrant an arrest or seizure of firearms? These laws are profoundly unconstitutional since they are based upon the concept that the state or a court can predict who may commit a crime. 

Our Constitution guarantees us due process and I’m referring to “front-end” due process applied prior to gun confiscation.  A hearing does not guarantee our constitutional rights nor does the expenditure of thousands of dollars for an attorney. Realize that waiting months for the return of one’s firearms can place one in jeopardy. 

President Biden again called for an “assault weapons ban”. This is no solution. Should we expect a ban on hammers following the Paul Pelosi incident? Certainly the presence of police did not prevent him from being assaulted. Let’s face the facts. We have over 20 million so-called “assault weapons”or AR-15s in this country. Do we really believe that a ban would truly stop a criminal from obtaining one? 

No government could prevent the nightclub shooting. The shooter was stopped by patrons inside the club.  These patrons fought against insurmountable odds. This is why the Second Amendment exists. It provides us the power to fight against any person or government attempting to terrorize us. 

The truth is the anti-gun lobby uses fear from such shootings in an attempt to control law-abiding citizens. Their real agenda is to strip away our Second Amendment rights. Their goal is to control us, not save us. 

Dr. John Lott has a new piece on some of our research at Real Clear Politics.  
With crime such an important issue, Americans depend on the FBI for accurate data. The crime data for 2021 is a mess, with almost 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country not submitting any data to the FBI. In California, 93% didn’t report crime data. In New York, 87% didn’t. Cities are embarrassed by the soaring crime rates, and even when they have collected the data they aren’t transmitting those numbers to the FBI.

But many more data errors are the direct responsibility of the FBI. Up until January of last year, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. I found that they were missing lots of cases and had misidentified others. Unfortunately, the FBI was unwilling to fix any of these errors. Since leaving that job, I have found many more missed cases, updating the list this month.

Nor was that the first time I pointed out such errors to the FBI, and I published a list of them in a criminology publication in 2015.

These news reports relied on a series of FBI reports on active shootings put together by researchers at Texas State University.

The FBI reports that armed citizens stopped only 11 of the 252 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2021. The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include shootings that are deemed related to other criminal activity, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf. Active shootings may involve just one shot being fired at just one target, even if the target isn’t hit. 

To compile its list, the FBI hired academics at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. Police departments don’t collect data, so the researchers had to find news stories about these incidents. 

My organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, also undertook a search for news stories. The CPRC discovered a total of 360 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2021, and it found that an armed citizen stopped 124 of these. I also found that the FBI had misidentified five cases, usually because the person who stopped the attack was incorrectly identified as a security guard. We found these cases on a tiny budget of just a few thousand dollars. Though we found that armed citizens had stopped 11 times more cases than the FBI reports, I make no claim that we have identified all of them. It is quite possible that the news media itself never covers many such incidents.

But no one needs to take my word for it that the FBI missed many cases. All of the news stories that my team collected are listed on the CPRC website.

While the FBI claims that just 4.4% of active shootings were stopped by law-abiding citizens carrying guns, the percentage that I found was 34%. I am more confident that we have identified a higher percentage of recent cases, and the percentage in 2021 was even higher – 49%. 

The FBI doesn’t differentiate between law-abiding citizens stopping attacks where guns are banned and where they are allowed, but you can’t really expect law-abiding citizens to stop attacks where it is illegal to carry guns. In places where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry firearms, the percentage of active shootings stopped is above 50% for the whole period. And, again, we are more confident that we have more of the cases in recent years. The figure hits 58% in 2021.

In order to follow the FBI’s definition, I also had to exclude 24 cases because a law-abiding person with a gun stopped the attacker before he was able to get off a shot.

But there is a more basic problem in the reliance on news coverage to determine whether an active shooting was stopped by an armed civilian. The news media has a clear bias to cover cases where bad things happen over cases where bad things are prevented. The old adage is: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Killings are usually more newsworthy than woundings, and woundings more notable than confrontations defused simply by someone brandishing a gun.

As an example, I examined news stories of defensive gun use data from Jan. 1 to Aug. 10 of this year, and found 774 defensive gun uses, fully 85% involving people shot: 43% resulting in death and 42% in wounding. Less than 4% of cases involved no shots fired. But survey data indicate that in 95% of cases when people use guns defensively, they merely show the gun to make the criminal back off. Such defensive gun uses rarely make the news.

The problem is that the FBI numbers are used by academics who do research and by the media. To see how the FBI reports alter news coverage, see the July 17 Greenwood Mall shooting near Indianapolis, where a young man, Elisjsha Dicken, used his legally carried gun to stop what clearly would have been a horrible mass public shooting. The news coverage immediately relied on the FBI and Texas State University reports to tell people Dicken’s heroism was very unusual.

“Making Dicken’s heroism perhaps even more remarkable is the fact cases of an armed bystander attacking an active shooter are rare,” CNN noted two days after the attack. “The Greenwood incident is unique, however, because it became one of the rare instances of an armed civilian successfully intervening to end a mass shooting,” claimed the Washington Post the day after the attack. But what is really rare is the news coverage of these attacks. Few know that there were at least six other similar likely mass public shootings that armed civilians stopped in the first nine months of this year.

It is hard to ignore how all of this feeds into the gun control debate. Nor can one forget about the charges of political bias leveled by whistleblowers in the FBI.

The FBI is systematically missing defensive gun uses. And it has failed to fix these errors, even when I have pointed them out. Considering how often the media cites the FBI as an authoritative source, this institution needs to do better.

A federal court judge in Buffalo, N.Y. has granted a temporary restraining order in a case filed by the Second Amendment Foundation that challenges New York State’s new concealed carry law, declaring the state’s “place of worship” restriction is unconstitutional.

“Ample Supreme Court precedent addressing the individual’s right to keep and bear arms—from Heller and McDonald to its June 22 decision in Bruen—dictates that New York’s place of worship restriction is equally unconstitutional,” wrote District Judge John L. Sinatra, Jr.

The order is effective immediately and prohibits enforcement of this provision.

“We’re delighted with the quick action by Judge Sinatra,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “We believe this law to be wholly in violation of not only the letter but the spirit of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.”

Joining SAF in the case, which is known as Hardaway v. Bruen, is the Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc., on behalf of Bishop Larry A. Boyd of Buffalo and Rev. Dr. Jimmie Hardaway, Jr., of Niagara Falls.

“As we noted in our petition for the TRO,” Gottlieb observed, “Reverend Hardaway has almost always carried a firearm for self-defense on Sundays and at services on the premises of the churches he has pastored. New York has now stripped Reverend Hardaway, Bishop Boyd, and other New Yorkers of their ability to defend themselves should the need arise at their places of worship. The restrictive new statute prevented both men from doing so.”

The motion was filed earlier this week by attorneys David H. Thompson, Peter A. Patterson and John W. Tienken with Cooper & Kirk, PLLC in Washington, D.C., and Nicolas J. Rotsko at Phillips Lytle, LLP in Buffalo. They represent the plaintiffs in the original lawsuit, which was filed only a week ago.

friendly reminder you only have 10 days left to register online, by mail, or in person for the general election.  The deadline to register for the general election is October 14th, 2022.

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     “Meet the Candidates Night”

• Sponsored by

  Wayne County Shooters Committee On Political Education 

  Wednesday, October 12th., 2022, 7:00 PM

  Marion American Legion
  4141 Witherden Road
  Marion, NY

  Location: On Google Maps

  Focus will be on the upcoming November 8 election and participating candidates.

  Wayne County S.C.O.P.E. (WCS) is inviting candidates for countywide (local/state/federal) offices to attend its October 12, 2022 meeting.  Each candidate will have approximately ten (10) minutes in which to discuss their political platform followed by a Q&A period of the same length. 

  WCS is a member of a statewide organization dedicated to preserving our Civil & Constitutional Rights as stated in the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment and Article 2, Section 4 of the New York Civil Rights Law.

  Please note:

• 1.    Please be brief as other items and individuals are on the agenda. 
• 2.    The time intervals will be managed by the Chairman/Vice-Chairman of WCS. 
• 3.    A designated surrogate may replace a candidate who is unable to attend. 
• 4.    This NOT a debate format. We ask candidates to refrain from engaging one another. 
• 5.    Handouts are always welcome. 

Candidates invited include those persons running for: Wayne County Judge; County Legislature; New York State Senate; New York State Assembly; U.S. Congressional District NY-24 or others.  Please reply to this email and indicate if a candidate (surrogate) plans to attend.