Plans, Reports, and Lies—Biden’s Latest Gun Control Gambit

Townhall President Biden signed an Executive Order on “Reducing Gun Violence and Making Communities Safer” this week and delivered prepared remarks to those gathered in Monterrey Park, California, to witness the event. The Order itself promises the American people more “reports” and “plans” that largely repeat what the laws already on the books allow or require. His public remarks added nothing new to the “reduce gun violence” debate, even as he reiterated a favorite gun-control lie to the American people. In other words, the much-heralded event was more of the same – plans, reports, and lies. First, the Big Lie. A major component of this administration’s narrative to “reduce gun violence” has been to shift blame from failures by prosecutors to enforce gun laws already on the books, to businesses that lawfully sell firearms and to the firearms industry more broadly. To market this blame-shifting, Biden and the previous Democrat administration of which he was a part, routinely claim that the “gun industry” is immune from being sued. Yesterday, for example, Biden declared that the “gun industry” is “the only outfit you can’t sue these days.” This is a flat out lie, but, as with other falsehoods by government officials, the more it is repeated the more likely it is to be believed by the American public and to serve as the basis for more gun control measures. In fact, the 2005 “Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,’’ does not shield firearms businesses from being sued for the negligent manufacture of a firearm, nor does it immunize them from being held legally liable if they sell or transfer a gun knowing or having reason to believe...

The Mean Underbelly Of The Snowflake Generation

Daily Caller While there is no definitive, scientific definition of “Generation Z,” or “Zoomers” as they also are known, in general they share much in common with what in the last decade of the 20th century became known as “Snowflakes” — individuals who are overly sensitive, timid, and self-centered.  In contradistinction to this timorous façade, however, the sense of Snowflakes’ high self-worth leads them often to be extremely intolerant, mean and nasty, especially when in a group. Emory University English Professor Mark Bauerlein noted this in The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, his most recent book analyzing today’s young adults who, while being led to consider their internet-filled lives a path to “utopia,” morph into a “fury” when threatened with ideas and circumstances not in accord with their worldview.  This Snowflake fury was on display just last week at Stanford University Law School, when a federal appeals court judge, who had been invited by the Federalist Society to speak at Stanford Law School, was rudely heckled by students upset that he did not share the disrupters’ views on abortion, the Second Amendment, and other controversial topics.  Unlike other similar disruptive scenarios, the Stanford wannabe lawyer-hecklers were egged on by one of the law school’s top administrators – the associate dean responsible for ensuring “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Once the heckling and calls for the “racist” judge to shut up began, this “adult” in the room, Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach, usurped the lectern reserved for the speaker and bloviated at length about how the mere presence of such a jurist was “threatening” to her and some of the students in the room. “Threatening,” indeed, simply to...

Elizabeth Warren’s shocking Spirit folly will hurt all air travelers

Democrats embrace antitrust attack on JetBlue merger with Spirit Airlines FoxNews.com Markets are more flexible, more innovative, and move faster than the government. Still, repeatedly over the years we have seen the government decide to take antitrust action against innovative private companies, only to realize years later, as the markets in question matured, just how costly and counterproductive such moves truly were.   Now, as Yankees catcher Yogi Berra once said, it’s “déjà vu all over again.”  In the 1960s, government antitrust lawyers at the Department of Justice targeted IBM. “Big Blue” was sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act, with the feds claiming it attempted to monopolize the market for “general-purpose digital computers.”   Embarrassingly, a cottage industry of personal computers was coming into the computer market at the time, making IBM far from the only game in town. The case, however, lingered for more than a dozen years until, on January 8, 1982, the Department decided it lacked merit.  In the 1990s, the Clinton administration targeted Microsoft for offering its Internet Explorer browser as part of its operating system, a move the Justice Department found unfair to Netscape, which at the time was its leading competitor. Today, neither browser exists. The market moved on despite government efforts to constrain it.   More recently, a federal court in 2018 threw out the government’s case against the AT&T-Time Warner merger, reflecting the reality that the idea of a cable company having a viewer monopoly was laughable, considering that YouTube, satellite TV, Netflix, Roku, and others were all competing for the attention of the viewing public.   Today, we are witnessing this same antitrust folly repeating...

Second Amendment Rights Continue Under Attack by Courts, Governments, and Banks

Townhall For more than five decades, the degree to which the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to “keep and bear arms,” and the extent to which that right may be “infringed,” have been among the most hotly debated issues demanding the attention of courts and governments at all levels. Now, two months into 2023 (and 232 years since the Second Amendment’s ratification) things have not changed a bit. In fact, the battle between gun control advocates and Second Amendment supporters is hotter than ever, especially with banks and credit card companies moving toward monitoring firearms purchases. The U.S. Supreme Court threw down the gauntlet to gun control advocates last June, when it ruled in a New York case that arbitrary and absolute government restrictions on an individual’s right to possess a firearm must be evaluated based on the meaning and history of the Second Amendment. Accordingly, only those government-imposed restrictions consistent with such analysis would henceforth be deemed constitutional. Not surprisingly, the Bruen decision has met with fervent pushback from New York and several other states where gun control proponents wield the levers of government power. Immediately following that decision, New York openly thumbed its nose at the Supreme Court, enacting a new anti-carry law even more restrictive than the one shot down by the Court. It has become clear the High Court will again be forced to tackle the underlying and fundamental questions surrounding how individuals in 2023 and beyond may possess firearms for self-defense in the real world. Precisely when the Supreme Court will decide to again weigh in on the Second Amendment (and hopefully slap down the...

Feelings Win Over Biological Reality In New Ruling For Weightlifting Competitions

Daily Caller In a 46-page opinion ordering the national and state-level powerlifting organizations to allow men who have “transitioned” to female to compete as women, a Minnesota judge illustrates everything one needs to know about the contemporary leftist culture, which elevates subjective feelings above objective, scientific fact. The controversy between transgendered female powerlifter JayCee Cooper (nee, Joel Cooper, a biological male) had been percolating for some five years when, on Feb. 28th, Minnesota District Judge Patrick Diamond ordered USA Powerlifting and Powerlifting Minnesota to change their policies prohibiting participants born as male from competing as women, and to permit Cooper, who  “in 2015 or 2016” had begun “a process of transitioning to a female identity,” to compete as a female. At its core, the judge’s ruling reflects the contemporary, liberal notion that the science of biology has no place regarding an individual’s “sexual orientation” to determine either their legal rights (in this instance, pursuant to the Minnesota Human Rights Act), or their rights to participate in organized sports. To Judge Diamond, all that matters is the individual’s “self-identity.” Thus, it matters not a whit what “sex” appears on an individual’s birth certificate – the document might as well no longer carry any significance. The only factor that, in this case a sporting organization, may legally employ to decide the category in which a member may compete, is what the individual “self-declares” at the time they wish to compete.   The statutory underpinning for the court’s order is the Minnesota Human Rights Act, which defines “sexual orientation” as a person “having or being perceived as having a self-image or identity not traditionally associated with one’s...