by Bob Barr | Dec 22, 2022 | Townhall Article |
TownhallAnti-Second Amendment Democrats are at it again, this time in Washington State, where Gov. Jay Inslee just held a press conference to urge the legislature to pass three cookie-cutter gun control measures. If the legislature grants Inslee’s wishes, law-abiding residents of the state wanting to exercise their Second Amendment rights will be severely impacted. At the same time, the edicts wend their way through the court system, to be eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Inslee knows the wheels of justice turn slow on such matters, and, like his counterpart in New York, he is more than happy to take advantage of judicial lethargy in his crusade to limit Second Amendment rights.Inslee recites the timeworn litany of false facts on which the gun control movement is founded: (1) “assault-style” rifles are “weapons of war” and have no legitimate use by civilians, (2) firearms manufacturers and retailers enjoy immunity from being sued beyond that applicable to manufacturers or retailers of other products, and (3) because a license is needed to drive a car there is no reason not to require a license to purchase a firearm. The “weapons of war” narrative is factual and historical nonsense. The AR-15 rifle, invariably cited by the Left as an example of such a firearm, is, in its lawful configuration, a semi-automatic rifle; capable of firing a single bullet with each pull of the trigger. It is not – unless unlawfully modified — an automatic rifle, meaning one that fires multiple rounds so long as the trigger remains depressed and there are rounds in the ammunition clip.Calling the semi-automatic AR-15 rifle a “weapon of war” displays the ignorance of those...
by Bob Barr | Dec 20, 2022 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerFor more than half-a-century, Uncle Sam has been giving banks the legal tools to snoop into the otherwise-private affairs of their customers. Now, they are monitoring the exercise of their Second Amendment rights. Thanks to a recent move by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO, headquartered in Switzerland), U.S. banks are starting to build databases on their customers’ purchases of firearms and ammunition. And, of course, they are ready and quite willing to share that information with federal law enforcement in the name of providing a public service to identify “mass shooters.”This invasion of privacy began in earnest with enactment of the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which mandated that banks assist federal law enforcement in uncovering, investigating, and ultimately prosecuting violations of federal law. Banks have long complained about the burdens of compliance with the 1970 law and several related laws signed since then due to the multi-faceted regulations they spawned. But the trove of data these procedures have allowed banks to gather and database has more than paid for the costs of compliance.These laws’ main focus, according to the Treasury Department, which has primary responsibility to their enforcement, has been money laundering. Over the years, however, the many-headed hydra we call the system now includes virtually any banking customer activity that a bank employee might consider to be suspicious. In fact, banks’ primary tool in this regard is a document called a “Suspicious Activity Report” or “SAR.”Then there is the USA PATRIOT Act, passed in the immediate aftermath of the 911 attacks.The vast reach of the Patriot Act has been a shot of adrenaline to bank “secrecy” laws, creating new sets of problems for banking...
by Bob Barr | Dec 15, 2022 | Townhall Article |
TownhallAs the Congress careens toward passing a multi-trillion dollar “omnibus” spending bill before adjourning sine die, at least two states – California and New York – are preparing their own massive spending sprees, called “Reparations.” If such multi-hundred-billion-dollar packages are enacted in these two most populace of states, it will lead to one of the biggest runs on government treasuries in American history – far more expensive and expansive than President Biden’s paltry-by-comparison “student loan forgiveness” program.While the concept of reparations – paying former slaves and their descendants for the horrors of slavery in centuries past – has been around since the end of the Civil War (and resurrected occasionally since then), it is only in the past several years that it has taken hold as a serious policy discussion at the federal and state levels.Considering that slavery has been outlawed in the United States by constitutional amendment and statutory law for more than a century and a half, and with the last actual slave having died in 1940, a threshold question to be posed to those officials pressing for reparations is, on what basis should those living today with no conceivable relationship to slavery be compensated?As with all things racial these days, the answer is, of course, “equity.A 2020 policy paper published by the Brookings Institute, Why we need reparations for Black Americans, makes the liberal case for mandating that governments and private entities pay reparations for every “Black person who can trace their heritage to people enslaved in the U.S. states and territories” as well as for all “Black people who can show how they were excluded from various policies...
