New York Strikes Back at SCOTUS, and Whiffs

For John, BLUF:  "Eight days after the Supreme Court struck down New York's unconstitutional "proper cause" requirement for conceal-carry licenses, the State responded with even more restrictive legislation, barring all conceal-carry license holders from vast swaths of the State."  This case focused solely on carrying in "any place of worship or religious observation,".  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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N.Y. Law Banning Gun Carrying in Churches (Including by People Authorized by the Church) Struck Down

From Reason, by Law Professor Eugene Volokh, 21 October 2022, 5:24 PM.

Here is the lede plus five:

From Hardaway v. Nigrelli, decided yesterday by Judge John L. Sinatra, Jr. (N.D.N.Y.):

Eight days after the Supreme Court struck down New York's unconstitutional "proper cause" requirement for conceal-carry licenses, the State responded with even more restrictive legislation, barring all conceal-carry license holders from vast swaths of the State. The complaint and motion in this case focus solely on one aspect of the new legislation, namely, the portion making it a felony for such a license holder to possess a firearm at "any place of worship or religious observation."

Ample Supreme Court precedent addressing the individual's right to keep and bear arms—from Heller and McDonald to its June 2022 decision in Bruen—dictates that New York's new place of worship restriction is equally unconstitutional. In Bruen, the Court made the Second Amendment test crystal clear: regulation in this area is permissible only if the government demonstrates that the regulation is consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of sufficiently analogous regulations. As set forth below, New York fails that test. The State's exclusion is, instead, inconsistent with the Nation's historical traditions, impermissibly infringing on the right to keep and bear arms in public for self-defense….

Reverend Dr. Jimmie Hardaway, Jr. and Bishop Larry A. Boyd filed this lawsuit on October 13, 2022, and are joined by institutional plaintiffs, Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc. ("FPC"), and Second Amendment Foundation ("SAF")…. Hardaway and Boyd, leaders of their respective churches, "wish to exercise their fundamental, individual right to bear arms in public for self-defense by carrying concealed firearms on church property in case of confrontation to both themselves and their congregants." They allege that, as "leaders of their churches, they would be authorized to carry on church premises to keep the peace, and would do so, but for Defendants' enforcement of the unconstitutional laws, regulations, policies, practices, and customs at issue in this case." In particular, they seek to prevent the enforcement of New York's new law that makes it a felony to carry firearms at all places of worship and religious observation….

The State argues that the place of worship exclusion complies with Bruen. The State cites to 1870-1890 enactments by four states (Texas, Georgia, Missouri, and Virginia) and the territories of Arizona and Oklahoma that contained place of worship firearm restrictions. This does not carry the State's burden, as explained below.

At the outset, as the Supreme Court has made clear, individuals have the right to carry handguns publicly for self-defense. New York's exclusion is valid only if the State "affirmatively prove[s]" that the restriction is part of the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. The test is rigorous because the Second Amendment is the very product of an interest balancing, already conducted by "the People," which "elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms for self-defense." …

From the beginning this banning of guns in places of worship seemed sketchy, and against the intend of the US Supreme Court.  It represented a danger of a major mass shooting in a church at some point in the future.

This seems like a fairly quick turnaroun, which is a good thing.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

The School Shooting, Another Angle

For John, BLUF:  A reporter for The LA Times was "shocked" that the shooter in Uvalde, Texas, was an American of Hispanic heritage.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Los Angeles Times Columnist Can’t Believe Texas Shooter Was Latino

Here is the sub-headline:

Gustavo Arellano blames American values for shooter's bloody rampage

From The Washington Free Beacon, by Washington Free Beacon Staff, 27 May 2022, 1:20 pm.

Here is the lede plus three:

A Los Angeles Times columnist expected the Texas elementary school shooter to be a "white supremacist" and was disappointed to learn he was a Latino.

"When I heard that a gunman had killed multiple schoolchildren in a predominantly Latino town in Texas, I immediately thought: white supremacist," Gustavo Arellano wrote in a Wednesday column. "How could I not?"

Arellano said his "stomach dropped" when he learned the mass shooting was in fact carried out by an 18-year-old Latino named Salvador Rolando Ramos. In an attempt to explain why a "Latino-on-Latino mass school shooting" would take place, Arellano blamed the tragedy on Ramos's assimilation into American culture.

"What Ramos did—stemming from a pathology found almost nowhere else on Earth—is as American as apple pie."

The LA Times Reporter has a good point.  The shooter had adapted to US Culture.

On the other hnd, Reporter Gustavo Arellano seems ignorant of a nation 144 mile south of the LA Civic Center, the United Mexican States.  A nation where drug cartels run big patches of territory and peole disappear.  For example, on 26 September 2014, students from a teacher training school in rural southern Mexico commandeered some buses, with an ultimate destination of Mexico City, for a demonstration.  Two buses disappeared enroute and 43 of the students went missing, to be tortured and killed.

Not every Latin American culture is like that, but to think the United States stands along in the Whestern Hemisphere in terms of violence and the use of guns is to reveal ignornce.

However, Reporter Arellano is spot on to identify culture as a part of the equation.  Our culture has shifted in the last 60 years and not for the better.  We thought we were making things better, but we were not.  I went to High school in LA County and for two of those years was on the High School Rifle Team.  I took my 22 Caliber Rifle to school on dzys we went to the range.  No big deal.  What changed?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

School Shooting and Society

For John, BLUF:  History and sociology tell us that school shootins, like the recnt one in Uvalde, Texas, are a relatively new phenomena, which calls for explanation.  just move along.

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Flashback 30 Years:  Guns Were in Schools... and Nothing Happened

From PJ Media, by Writer J. Christian Adams, 15 May 2018 5:30 AM ET.

Here is the lede plus four:

The millennial generation might be surprised to learn that theirs is the first without guns in school.  Just 30 years ago, high school kids rode the bus with rifles and shot their guns at high school rifle ranges.

After another school shooting, it’s time to ask:  what changed?

Cross guns off the list of things that changed in thirty years.  In 1985, semi-automatic rifles existed, and a semi-automatic rifle was used in Florida.  Guns didn’t suddenly decide to visit mayhem on schools.  Guns can’t decide.

We can also cross the Second Amendment off the list.  It existed for over 200 years before this wickedness unfolded.  Nothing changed in the Constitution.

That leaves us with some uncomfortable possibilities remaining.  What has changed from thirty years ago when kids could take firearms into school responsibly and today might involve some difficult truths.

I am one of those kids who took his rifle to [an urban] high school.

Like the author, i want to understand what changed in society since then.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Getting It Wrong, Again and Again

For John, BLUF:  When Newspaper Editor Maxwell Scott said "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." it made sense.  But, that was a movie.  In real life we need the truth, not the legend.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The Enduring False Narrative About the PULSE Massacre Shows the Power of Media Propaganda

Here is the sub-headline:

Politicians and activists should stop ratifying the fiction that Omar Mateen was motivated by anti-LGBT hatred.  It dishonors the victims and obscures the real motive.

From Glenn Greenwald, at Substack, 14 June 2021.

Reporter Greenwald goes on for a while, so here is a lengthy excerpt:

On the fifth anniversary of the PULSE nightclub massacre in Orlando, numerous senators, politicians and activist groups commemorated that tragic event by propagating an absolute falsehood:  namely, that the shooter, Omar Mateen, was motivated by anti-LGBT animus.  The evidence is definitive and conclusive that this is false — Mateen, like so many others who committed similar acts of violence, was motivated by rage over President Obama's bombing campaigns in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and chose PULSE at random without even knowing it was a gay club — yet this media-consecrated lie continues to fester.

On Saturday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) falsely described the massacre as an "unspeakable act of hate toward the LGBTQ+ community.” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) went even further, claiming “the LGBTQ+ community was targeted and killed—all because they dared to live their lives.”  Her fellow Illinois Democrat, Sen. Dick Durbin, claimed forty-nine lives were lost due to “anti-LGBTQ hate” (he forgot the +).  These false claims were compiled by the gay socialist activist Matt Thomas, who correctly objected: “the shooter literally picked PULSE at random from Google after security was too tight at the mall he went to first,” adding that while LGBT groups “are hopeless of course,” too much money and power is at stake for them to give up this self-serving fiction.  But he asked, “Shouldn’t the bar be a little higher for senators?”

In the immediate aftermath of that horrific crime, it may have been reasonable for the public to speculate that Mateen, given his professed support for ISIS, chose PULSE because it was a gay club.  That belief also neatly played into a liberal political agenda of highlighting anti-LGBT hate crimes, and also comported with the dual stereotypes of the gay-hating Muslim and the closeted gay man who harbors self-hatred that ends up directed at other gay people.  This storyline was instantly consecrated when politicians and LGBT groups quickly seized on this claim and ratified it as unquestionably true.

Rather than acknowledging that it was anger over his relentless bombing raids in the Muslim world, President Obama immediately declared that anti-LGBT hatred was the real cause.  “This was an attack on the LGBT community,” the president said, adding:  "And hatred towards people because of sexual orientation, regardless of where it comes from, is a betrayal of what’s best in us.”  Chad Griffin, then-head of the largest LGBT advocacy group, Human Rights Campaign, claimed:  “the maniac who did this was somehow conditioned to believe that LGBT people deserve to be massacred, that they are ‘less than’ in this society.”

Then-candidate Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign, made a pilgrimage to Orlando and seized on the attack.  In addition to its constituting anti-American terrorism, the Democratic nominee proclaimed the massacre “was also an act of hate,” adding that “the gunman attacked an LGBT nightclub during Pride Month.”  She vowed:  “We will keep fighting for your right to live freely, openly and without fear. Hate has absolutely no place in America.”  Speaking with Clinton in Orlando, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that it is “a cruel irony that a community defined almost exclusively by whom they love [LGBT people] is so often a target of hate.”  Then-candidate Donald Trump also endorsed this view:  “A radical Islamic terrorist targeted the nightclub, not only because he wanted to kill Americans, but in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens, because of their sexual orientation.”

Liberal propagandists who pose as journalists treated this storyline as definitively proven.  The massacre was “undeniably a homophobic hate crime,” Jeet Heer wrote in The New Republic.  “Let’s say it plainly:  This was a mass slaying aimed at LGBT people,” Tim Teeman wrote in The Daily Beast.  In USA Today, James S. Robbins speculated that Mateen was likely “trying to reconcile his inner feelings with his strongly homophobic Muslim culture. ” In the days following the killing spree, one writer in USA Today, Steph Solis, even accused those of questioning this narrative of propagating bigotry and exhibiting cruel indifference to gay suffering:  “Those who insist the shooting was solely an Islamic terror attack try to erase the LGBT community from the narrative, causing only more pain by invalidating their experiences in this ordeal.”

But journalism is supposed to function on evidence, not speculation, and there never was any evidence that supported the storyline that he was driven by hatred for LGBTs.  The evidence that was available suggested the opposite.

On June 12, 2016, Mateen spent just over three hours in PULSE from the time he began slaughtering innocent people at roughly 2:00 a.m. until he was killed by a SWAT team at roughly 5:00 a.m.  During that time, he repeatedly spoke to his captives about his motive, did the same with the police with whom he was negotiating, and discussed his cause with local media which he had called from inside the club.  Mateen was remarkably consistent in what he said about his motivation.  Over and over, he emphasized that his attack at PULSE was in retaliation for U.S. bombing campaigns in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.  In his first call with 911 while inside PULSE, this is what he said about why he was killing people:

Because you have to tell America to stop bombing Syria and Iraq.  They are killing a lot of innocent people.  What am I to do here when my people are getting killed over there.

Killing LGBT+ humans for their sexual orientation is wrong.

Not getting a story correct on a mass shooting is unhelpful to say the least.  We can't make proper corrections if we don't know what really happened.

Thank you Mr Greenwald.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

For John, BLUF:  .  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Shooters may have been targeting 50 children in yeshiva, Jersey City mayor suggests

DEFINITION:  yeshiva

an Orthodox Jewish school for the religious and secular education of children of elementary school age.

From NJ dot Com, by Reporters Jeff Goldman and Rebecca Panico, 13 December 2019.

Here is the lede plus one:

Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop said Friday it’s his opinion that the shooters who killed a police officer and three civilians on Tuesday afternoon had an even more sinister objective - killing students at a religious school next door.

“My opinion is that as more info comes out it’ll become increasingly clear that the target was the 50 children at the Yeshiva attached to that store,” the mayor wrote on Twitter just after 8 a.m. “We will never know 100% but the doorway to the yeshiva was 3 feet away (and) it seems he goes in that direction 1st.”

SO, it could have been much worse.

The Mayor is correct when he praises the police from making sure it wasn't much worse.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Looking For Solutions in All The Wrong Places

For John, BLUF:  Our problems, from drug abuse to mass murders, are being viewed through defective lenses.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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No-One's Life Matters. That's Why There Are Mass Shootings

From Pajama Media, by Mr David P Goldman, 7 August 2019.

Here is the lede plus:

Writing in the left-wing Forward website today, Cathy Young warns the Left to take its own violence seriously:

...It has been a staple of conventional wisdom that the real danger comes almost entirely from the far right....But is that still true today? We don’t know if Connor Betts, the 24-year-old Ohio man who killed nine people (including his own sister) and wounded 27 more when he opened fire on a crowded street in Dayton on Sunday, had any involvement with Antifa. But Betts’s Twitter trail makes it clear that he was a hardcore leftist who embraced some fairly extreme ideas—and, in some cases, advocated violence toward political enemies in Antifa-style language.

Good for Ms. Young, who declines to join the chorus blaming President Trump for the last two atrocities. Never mind that the five worst mass shooting incidents took place outside the United States, or that more mass shootings occurred during the Obama presidency than under Trump. But that leaves us with the question: Why are there mass shootings?

Mass shootings are a special form of suicide. The shooter never expects to survive. But the shooter combines self-hatred with group hatred. Hate becomes so melded with the shooter's identity that he determines to take as many people as he can with him. They are of the same order as the pilot who crashed a Germanwings airliner into the Alps in 2015.

Emil Durkheim's 1897 diagnosis of "anomic suicide" describes the Columbine perpetrators as well as the 2016 San Bernardino attack by Muslim fanatics, the "right-wing" shooter in El Paso and the "left-wing" shooter in Dayton. They are individuals cut off from society, destabilized by change and despairing of their own place in the world. Such monsters always have been among us. But now we are cultivating such monsters by destroying the ties that bind us to each other, to our past and to our future.

We are looking for easy answers, or answers that don't point back to cultural failures, at least not failures in our current culture.  Blaming The Gun is foolish.  It is like The Old Gray Lady, yesterday, saying airplanes aimed at the Twin Towers.  No, People did.  To achieve an objective.  And most discussions of the El Paso and Dayton mass killings neglect the Garden Grove killings that weekend—perhaps because an edged weapon was used.

If we can't (or won't) name the problem, any solution will be partial, and by accident.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Gun Control Statistics

For John, BLUF:  "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."—H. L. Mencken.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED:  I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.

This 13 August 2019 blog post at InstaPundit, by Professor Glenn Reynolds, highlights an article in The Washington Post, I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.  The Author, Leah Libresco, is a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site.  She is the author of “Arriving at Amen.”

Here is the key excerpt:

The thing to understand is that gun control isn’t about saving lives.  It’s about humiliating the deplorables and keeping them in their place.  It’s culture war of the crassest kind.

Then there is Senator Ed Markey's Primary opponent in 2020, Ms Shannon Liss-Riordan, Esq.  She has come out for abolishing the Second Amendment.

Hat tip to InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff