Speaking to reporters outside the White House after returning to Washington from a weekend that included a visit to the site of last week’s mass shooting in Texas, Biden recounted a visit to a trauma hospital in New York, where he said doctors had showed him X-rays of gunshot wounds caused by various firearms.

“They said a .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out — may be able to get it and save the life,” Biden said. “A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.

“So the idea of these high-caliber weapons is, uh, there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of thinking about self-protection, hunting,” the president went on.

Later in his remarks, Biden appeared to rule out the possibility of taking major executive action on guns, saying: “I can’t dictate this stuff. I can do the things I’ve done and any executive action I can take, I’ll continue to take. But I can’t outlaw a weapon. I can’t, you know, change the background checks. I can’t do that.”

Biden’s statements about 9mm pistols are in keeping with his rhetoric before entering the White House. At a 2019 fundraiser in Seattle, for example, then-candidate Biden asked his audience: “Why should we allow people to have military-style weapons including pistols with 9mm bullets and can hold 10 or more rounds?”

According to Shooting Industry magazine, 9mm pistols accounted for 56.8% of all handguns made in the US during 2019. In all, more than 15.1 million 9mm guns were produced in this country during the 2010s. The possibility of outlawing or otherwise regulating such weapons is likely to be a non-starter among conservatives and gun rights advocates.

“Remember, the Constitution, the Second Amendment, was never absolute,” Biden said. “You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed. You couldn’t go out and purchase a lot of weapons.”

Biden has made that claim before, most recently when he announced new regulations to stop the spread of so-called “ghost guns,” and they have been repeatedly declared false by fact-checkers.

“The Second Amendment did not place limits on individual ownership of cannons,” PolitiFact stated in April when it rated his claim false.

The website pointed out the text of the Constitution: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”​

Despite widespread public outrage over Tuesday’s massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and the racially motivated May 14 mass shooting at a Buffalo grocery store, Biden said he had not yet spoken with any Republicans about potential gun control legislation, but expressed hope for a compromise.

“I think things have gotten so bad that everybody is getting more rational about it,” he said. “At least, that’s my hope and prayer.”

Asked whether Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) authorizing Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) to work with Democrats could lead to results, Biden said, “I don’t know.”

“I think Senator McConnell is a rational Republican. I think Cornyn is as well,” he added. “I think there’s a recognition in their part that they — we can’t continue like this. We can’t do this.”

Without Republican support, Democrats are powerless to pass any gun legislation in the 50-50 Senate unless they manage to temporarily set aside the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold for passing most bills.

Biden’s comments came less than 48 hours after Vice President Kamala Harris called for an assault weapons ban after attending a funeral for Buffalo shooting victim Ruth Whitfield, 86.

“You know what an assault weapon is? You know how an assault weapon was designed?” Harris said Saturday. “It was designed for a specific purpose — to kill a lot of human beings quickly. An assault weapon is a weapon of war with no place, no place in a civil society.”

Source: https://nypost.com/2022/05/30/biden-goes-on-anti-gun-tirade-suggests-theres-no-rational-basis-for-9mm-pistols/

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President Biden will address the nation on mass shootings and his push for gun control legislation, the White House announced Thursday.

Biden’s Thursday evening address will focus “on the recent tragic mass shootings, and the need for Congress to act to pass commonsense laws to combat the epidemic of gun violence that is taking lives every day,” according to the White House.

Biden’s address comes as Congress is debating the Protect Our Kids Act, an expansive piece of gun control legislation that Democrats argue is common sense, while Republicans say it is unconstitutional.

The renewed push for gun control legislation comes after a pair of mass shootings killed 31 people in recent weeks. Ten Americans were killed in a racially-motivated mass shooting in New York in early April, and 19 children and two teachers were killed at an Uvlade, Texas, elementary school last week.

Biden is expected to appeal to Republicans during his address. He has discounted some Republicans as unreasonable on the issue, however. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is among the “reasonable ones,” Biden said.

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“As a nation, we have to ask, when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby? When in God’s name, will we do what we know in our gut what needs to be done?” Biden said last week.

“We have to act. Don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage,” he added.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-primetime-address-mass-shootings-gun-control

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“I have news for the embarrassment that claims to be our President,” state Rep. Randy Fine wrote on Twitter. “Try to take our guns and you’ll learn why the Second Amendment was written in the first place.”

The remark was met by a flood of criticism, with posters asserting that Fine, a Melbourne Beach Republican, had issued a threat.

Actress Rosanna Arquette entered Fine’s inferno of outraged Twitter replies.

“Are you threatening president Biden?” she asked. “Because it sure sounds like it.”

Congressman Jamal Bowman of New York also weighed in.

“Further evidence that the Republican Party has completely lost its way,” he wrote, arguing that Fine and the GOP were promoting “fascism.”

Thousands of posters tagged the FBI and Secret Service in their condemnations.

Fine later doubled down.

“The reaction exposes the lie of the left that they just want ‘common sense gun control.’” he tweeted later. “They want one thing and one thing only — gun confiscation and an end to the 2A — and the notion that Americans will exercise their right to fight them makes them go crazy. Boo hoo.”

Fine was surrounded by reporters in the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee Wednesday as the controversy spiraled.

He denied that he had threatened Biden but repeated his critique of the president’s handling of the Texas massacre thus far.

“He turned his speech into a speech on gun control,” Fine said outside an elevator. “It was hugely inappropriate.”

In his address on the shooting, Biden called for politicians to take a stronger position against gun manufacturers but did not offer any detailed proposals.

Source: https://nypost.com/2022/05/25/florida-pol-warns-biden-will-learn-why-2nd-amendment-was-created-if-he-takes-guns/

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Rep. Madison Cawthorn said President Joe Biden’s call to offer COVID-19 vaccines door-to-door could lead to the government taking people’s guns and bibles.

Cawthorn, a Republican from North Carolina, was speaking Friday during an interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference event in Dallas, Texas, taking place this weekend. He was speaking with Right Side Broadcasting Network, a conservative media outlet.

“And now they’re sort of talking about going door-to-door to be able to take vaccines to the people. The thing about the mechanisms they would have to build to be able to actually execute that massive of a thing,” Cawthorn said, in reference to Biden’s latest community-based vaccine push.

“Think about what those mechanisms could be used for. They could then go door-to-door to take your guns. They could go door-to-door to take your bibles,” Cawthorn said.

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A new law that went into effect recently in West Virginia eliminates the sales tax on all small firearms and ammunition, meaning that customers can purchase most handguns, shotguns, and rifles without any sales tax.

The law, which went into effect on July 1, was enacted after the passage of House Bill 2499 earlier this year. The bill is designed to promote business and economic growth.

“If you are going to buy that $2,000 rifle, it’s going to be $120 cheaper here in West Virginia than compared to our neighboring states,” said Delegate Gary Howell, a Republican, according to local news outlet WOWK-TV.

The law is also designed to encourage gun and ammunition manufacturing in the state by allowing tax credits for arms and ammunition makers. Ranger Scientific, an ammunition maker, said in May that the company will build an ammunition plant in Montgomery due to the tax law, providing more than 400 jobs.

“If they do a $1 million piece of equipment, we will tax it as if it’s a $50,000 piece of equipment. That’s to encourage investment in the state,” Howell told the station. “It makes West Virginia the single best place to locate arms or ammunition manufacturing plant,” he added of the law.

The law is one of many that have been enacted by state legislatures in recent months, as Republicans and gun rights groups have warned that Democrat politicians are attempting to pass legislation making it harder to purchase or own a firearm.

In nearby Virginia, five new gun-control measures went into effect on July 1. Some of the laws include a prohibition of firearms on the state’s Capitol grounds in Richmond, lengthening the amount of time the FBI can conduct a background check, and another would prohibit domestic abusers from buying, owning, or transporting a firearm for three years after they’re convicted.

Advocates of the laws said they’re necessary.

“We know these people are among the first to commit more violence, this is already a federal law,” Lori Haas with Coalition of Stop Gun Violence said, reported WHSV. “However, since we didn’t have a state law for this our police officers could not enforce it, we were an anomaly and now that has been fixed.”

David Adams, legislative director of the Virginia Shooting Sports Association, said he was most concerned with the law regarding firearms at the Capitol.

“It is absolutely possible that a responsible gun-owner could be caught in this by accident, and it will only negatively affect us—not the criminals who won’t care,” said Adams.

Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-west-virginia-law-eliminates-sales-taxes-on-guns-and-ammo-huge-economic-boost_3886249.html

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In August 2015, 68-year-old Edward Caniglia joked to Kim, his wife of 22 years, that he didn’t use a certain coffee mug after his brother-in-law had used it because he “might catch a case of dishonesty.” That quip quickly spiraled into an hour-long argument. Growing exhausted from the bickering, Edward stormed into his bedroom, grabbed an unloaded handgun, and put it on the kitchen table in front of his wife. With a flair for the dramatic, he then asked: “Why don’t you just shoot me and get me out of my misery?”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tactic backfired and the two continued to argue. Eventually, Edward took a drive to cool off. But when he returned, their argument flared up once again. This time, Kim decided to leave the house and spend the night at a motel. The next day, Kim phoned home. No answer.

Worried, she called the police in Cranston, Rhode Island, and asked them to perform a “well check” on her husband and to escort her home. When they arrived, officers spoke with Edward on the back deck. According to an incident report, he “seemed normal,” “was calm for the most part,” and even said “he would never commit suicide.”

However, none of the officers had asked Edward any questions about the factors relating to his risk of suicide, risk of violence, or prior misuse of firearms. (Edward had no criminal record and no history of violence or self-harm.) In fact, one of the officers later admitted he “did not consult any specific psychological or psychiatric criteria” or medical professionals for his decisions that day.

Still, police were convinced that Edward could hurt himself and insisted he head to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. After refusing and insisting that his mental health wasn’t their business, Edward agreed only after police (falsely) promised they wouldn’t seize his guns while he was gone.

Compounding the dishonesty, police then told Kim that Edward had consented to the confiscation. Believing the seizures were approved by her husband, Kim led the officers to the two handguns the couple owned, which were promptly seized. Even though Edward was immediately discharged from the hospital, police only returned the firearms after he filed a civil rights lawsuit against them.

Critically, when police seized the guns, they didn’t claim it was an emergency or to prevent imminent danger. Instead, the officers argued their actions were a form of “community caretaking,” a narrow exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

First created by the Supreme Court nearly 50 years ago, the community caretaking exception was designed for cases involving impounded cars and highway safety, on the grounds that police are often called to car accidents to remove nuisances like inoperable vehicles on public roads.

Both a district and appellate court upheld the seizures as “reasonable” under the community caretaking exception. In deciding Caniglia’s case, the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals acknowledged that “the doctrine’s reach outside the motor vehicle context is ill-defined.” Nevertheless, the court decided to extend that doctrine to cover private homes, ruling that the officers “did not exceed the proper province of their community caretaking responsibilities.”

Siding with law enforcement, the First Circuit noted that a police officer “must act as a master of all emergencies, who is ‘expected to…provide an infinite variety of services to preserve and protect community safety.’” By letting police operate without a warrant, the community caretaking exception is “designed to give police elbow room to take appropriate action,” the court added.

In their opening brief for the Supreme Court, attorneys for Caniglia warned that “extending the community caretaking exception to homes would be anathema to the Fourth Amendment” because it “would grant police a blank check to intrude upon the home.”

That fear is not unwarranted. In jurisdictions that have extended the community caretaking exception to homes, “everything from loud music to leaky pipes have been used to justify warrantless invasion of the home,” a joint amicus brief by the ACLU, the Cato Institute, and the American Conservative Union revealed.

This expansion could also have perverse effects and disincentivize people from calling for help. As that brief noted, “When every interaction with police or request for help can become an invitation for police to invade the home, the willingness of individuals to seek assistance when it is most needed will suffer.”

But in its first amicus brief before the High Court, the Biden Administration glossed over these concerns and called on the justices to uphold the First Circuit’s ruling. Noting that “the ultimate touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is ‘reasonableness,’” the Justice Department argued that warrants should not be “presumptively required when a government official’s action is objectively grounded in a non-investigatory public interest, such as health or safety.”

“The ultimate question, in this case, is therefore not whether the respondent officers’ actions fit within some narrow warrant exception,” their brief stated, “but instead whether those actions were reasonable,” actions the Justice Department felt were “justified” in Caniglia’s case.

As a fail-safe, the Justice Department also urged the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court ruling on qualified immunity grounds, arguing that the officers’ “actions did not violate any clearly established law so as to render the officers individually liable in a damages action.”

But the Biden Administration, along with the courts that have extended the community caretaking exception, overlook a key component of the Fourth Amendment: the Security Clause. After all, the Fourth Amendment opens with the phrase, “the right of the people to be secure.”

In an amicus brief, the Institute for Justice noted that “to the Founding generation, ‘secure’ did not simply mean the right to be ‘spared’ an unreasonable search or seizure” but also involved “harms attributable to the potential for unreasonable searches and seizures.” Expanding the community caretaking exception to “allow warrantless entries into peoples’ homes on a whim,” argued the IJ brief, “invokes the arbitrary, looming threat of general writs that so incited the Framers” and would undermine “the right of the people to be secure” in their homes.

The IJ brief further argued that extending the “community caretaking” exception to the home would “flatly contradict” the Supreme Court’s prior rulings, which “has only discussed community caretaking in the context of vehicle searches and seizures.” In those cases, “the animating purpose for the exception [was] to allow officers to remove damaged or abandoned vehicles that pose a risk to public safety.” By contrast, the IJ amicus asserted,  “that justification is entirely absent” when it comes to homes.

“The Fourth Amendment protects our right to be secure in our property, which means the right to be free from fear that the police will enter your house without warning or authorization,” said Institute for Justice Attorney Joshua Windham. “A rule that allows police to burst into your home without a warrant whenever they feel they are acting as ‘community caretakers’ is a threat to everyone’s security.”

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President Biden Friday demanded the Republicans in the Senate move on passing gun background check legislation, calling the string of mass shootings and gun violence a “national embarrassment.”

Biden pushed the Senate to take a vote on House-passed legislation that would expand background checks and close certain loopholes.

“I strongly, strongly urge my Republican friends in the Congress who refuse to bring up the House-passed bill to bring it up now,” Biden said. “This has to end. It’s a national embarrassment.

BIDEN SAYS US, JAPAN ‘COMMITTED TO WORKING TOGETHER’ ON CHALLENGES FROM CHINA, NORTH KOREA

Speaking at a joint White House press conference Friday with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Biden was pressed on whether he needs to prioritize police reform and gun control measures in the wake of more mass shootings and police-related deaths.

Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and U.S. President Joe Biden hold a joint news conference in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 16, 2021. REUTERS/Tom Brenner (Reuters)

Biden rejected the notion that guns have taken a backseat to his infrastructure and coronavirus agenda in Congress and he doubled down on his support for banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

“I strongly support the universal background checks, which I continue to push. And Congress has to step up and act. The Senate has to act,” Biden said. “I strongly support and … never stopped supporting the ban on assault weapons and magazines that hold more than 10 bullets.”

BIDEN CALLS ON SENATE TO PASS GUN CONTROL MEASURES ‘IMMEDIATELY’ AFTER BOULDER SHOOTING

Biden said “no one has worked harder” than him on ending gun violence and he pointed to his work in the Senate to pass the now-expired 1994 assault weapons ban. He said he’s committed to passing such gun restrictions again.

“Who in God’s name needs a weapon that can hold 100 rounds, or 40 rounds, or 20 rounds,” Biden said. “It’s just wrong. And I’m not going to give up until it’s done.”

AS BIDEN CALLS FOR GUN BAN, MANCHIN SAYS HE DOESN’T SUPPORT BACKGROUND CHECK LEGISLATION

The first hurdle, though, will be getting support for a universal background check bill in the Senate that’s split 50-50. The House already passed legislation to expand federal gun background checks on all firearms sales and extend the background check review period from three days to a minimum of 10 business days.

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But Republicans have resisted the legislation and moderate West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin also said he can’t support new background checks measures on private sales.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-says-gun-violence-is-a-national-embarrassment-demands-gop-move-on-background-check-bill

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KEY FACTS

CRUCIAL QUOTE

Biden also referenced the well-documented rise in homicides across major U.S. cities last year—“including the gun violence disproportionately devastating Black and Brown individuals in our city”—in his statement. “We mourn for all those who have lost loved ones to gun violence,” wrote Biden.

KEY BACKGROUND

Biden campaigned on these gun control reforms, which have already drawn the ire of gun advocacy groups like the National Rifle Association. An NRA representative recently told the Wall Street Journal that Biden “may become the most anti-gun president in American history.” Former President Trump, who was in office during the Parkland shooting, initially said he would confront the gun lobby in the tragedy’s aftermath, but ultimately backed away from any commitments to broad reform.

Update: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that 14 people died in the Parkland shooting.

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Credit: Illustration by Dan Hubig for CalMatters – California has become a laboratory for progressive policies

CALIFORNIA, USA — With Democrats holding all the political power in California for nearly the last decade, the Golden State has evolved into a laboratory of big blue ideas. Put a price on carbon? We’ve done it. Ban assault weapons? We’ve done that too. Gun control, minimum wage hikes and two years of free community college are also realities here.

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His attempt to enforce unpopular and unconstitutional gun-control laws is doomed to failure.

Ralph Northam is about to make the biggest tactical mistake in Virginia since Cornwallis decided to park his army at Yorktown. With his attempt to force local commonwealth’s attorneys and sheriffs in Second Amendment sanctuaries to enforce his unconstitutional gun laws, Governor Northam is setting himself up for a catastrophic failure. In fact, there’s no way for Northam to win the fight he seems intent on picking with Virginia gun owners and Second Amendment sanctuaries.

The governor isn’t being helped by fellow Democrats such as U.S. congressman Donald McEachin, who said the governor should call out the National Guard to enforce the law, or Attorney General Mark Herring, who blithely says he expects that the laws will be followed once they’re on the books.

There are also Democrats, such as Delegate David Toscano, who have been comparing the Second Amendment–sanctuary movement to the Massive Resistance movement that unfolded in Virginia in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Massive Resistance came about after Democratic governor Thomas B. Stanley organized a state-level opposition movement to the integration of public schools in Virginia in the late 1950s. To compare it to today’s Second Amendment–sanctuary movement is to compare apples and oranges on a couple of different levels.

First of all, the Second Amendment–sanctuary movement is morally just, unlike the Massive Resistance movement of the late ’50s and early ’60s. The Second Amendment–sanctuary movement isn’t about curtailing rights, but rather about protecting their free exercise.

Practically speaking, Massive Resistance was a top-down movement, spearheaded by U.S. senator Harry Byrd and his fellow Democrats in the governor’s mansion and Virginia’s attorney general’s office. The Second Amendment–sanctuary movement, on the other hand, is a hyper-local grassroots movement that has no leader, though state-level Second Amendment groups are doing a good job of informing folks where meetings are taking place and even providing curious supervisors with examples of Second Amendment–sanctuary resolutions that have been approved elsewhere. Thousands of people show up at these board-of-supervisors meetings, and not because Philip Van Cleave or Cam Edwards or Nick Freitas or anyone else told them to be there. They’re showing up because their neighbor told them about the meeting, or they saw something on Facebook. They’re showing up and speaking out because they care.

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