Category: Gun Fearing Wussies
In with a rat-tat-tat, out with barely a whimper. That describes the great lawsuit filed by Chicago not even four months ago. The suit, originally filed in state court was transferred to federal court. And with a very short, two sentence filing, Chicago voluntarily withdrew the lawsuit from federal court.
CWB Chicago, as usual, reported on Chicago eating some humble pie.
CHICAGO — When Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson announced in March that his administration was filing a “first-of-its-kind lawsuit” against firearm manufacturer Glock, the city drummed up publicity with a press release and widespread media coverage.
There was no press release and no media coverage on Monday when the city’s attorneys unceremoniously dropped the case in a two-sentence federal court filing.
Chicago and its top-shelf lawyer buddies over at Everytown for Gun Control hailed it as a “first of a kind” lawsuit claiming that Glock pistols posed a public nuisance because criminals misuse them. The announcement back on March 19, 2024, attracted all sorts of national headlines happily parroting Chicago’s sensational claims.
Moreover, the usual menagerie of gun control advocates cheered the fake news. “Good job, Mr. Mayor,” the ever-shrinking Chicago Tribune editorialized at the move.
Here it is, from Chicago Mayor Let’s Go Brandon’s mouth press room:
CHICAGO – Today, the City of Chicago announced a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against Glock, the manufacturer of the most popular handguns in the United States, alleging that Glock is facilitating the proliferation of illegal machine guns on the streets of Chicago. The lawsuit alleges that Glock unreasonably endangers Chicagoans by manufacturing and selling in the Chicago civilian market semiautomatic pistols that can easily be converted to illegal machine guns with an auto sear – a cheap, small device commonly known as a “Glock switch.” The suit is the first to use Illinois’s new Firearms Industry Responsibility Act, passed and signed into law in 2023 to hold gun companies accountable for conduct that endangers the public.
Filed earlier today in Cook County Circuit Court, the lawsuit reports that law enforcement personnel in Chicago have recovered over 1,100 Glocks that have been converted into illegal machine guns in the last two years alone in connection with a wide variety of crimes, including homicides, aggravated assaults, batteries, kidnappings, burglaries, home invasions, carjackings, and attempted robberies. The lawsuit alleges that Glock knows it could fix the problem but refuses to do so, and the City is seeking a court order requiring Glock to cease sales of its easily converted pistols to Chicago civilians. The City also seeks penalties against Glock and damages for the harm that Glock has caused to the City.
“The City of Chicago is encountering a deadly new frontier in the gun violence plaguing our communities because of the increase of fully automatic Glocks on our streets,” said Mayor Brandon Johnson, a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. “Selling firearms that can so easily be converted into automatic weapons makes heinous acts even more deadly, so we are doing everything we can in collaboration with others committed to ending gun violence to hold Glock accountable for putting profits over public safety.”
“Right now, anyone in the United States with $20 and a screwdriver can convert their Glock pistol into an illegal machine gun in just a few minutes,” said Eric Tirschwell, executive director of Everytown Law.“We intend to hold Glock accountable for the unconscionable decision to continue selling its easily modified pistols even though it could fix the problem, knowing that by refusing to do so it is exacerbating gun violence in Chicago.”
“We are proud to partner with the City of Chicago and Everytown Law in this vital effort to enhance public safety and create a safer Chicago for all its residents,” said H. Christopher Boehning, partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.
Yes, Everytown’s Law division website literally couldn’t contain their glee in the filing.
https://cdn0.thetruthaboutguns.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Everytown-Law-Headline.jpg
The page, still up as of July 24, 2024, shows a screaming headline that won’t even fit on at the top of their page.
In with a rat tat tat, out with barely a whimper
In recent days, in a move barely mentioned (if at all) in most of those same media outlets, Chicago dropped their lawsuit. In fact, the great ground-breaking lawsuit, filed with the help of the very best legal minds (cough) over at Everytown, was withdrawn in a two sentence filing.
In reality, the lawsuit filed in March of this year proved nothing new. It was just another poorly rehashed lawfare action against a respected firearm manufacturer that produces some of the most popular defensive handguns sold in America and elsewhere in the world.
Glock products have saved countless lives when used in self-defense and to put down violent criminals, terrorists and lunatics. They have also thwarted millions of criminal attacks.
But Chicago politicians needed to do something to distract from their feckless leadership and the failure of gun control schemes to stop criminals. After all, gun control disarms victims, not criminals. And when the victims are unarmed and defenseless, the criminals can ply their trade with impunity, particularly when prosecutors don’t prosecute and judges don’t incarcerate offenders.
Right along those lines, the same legal beagles re-filed the the withdrawn case once more in state court, only this time they’ve added a couple of Glock authorized gun shops as defendants. Yes, Eagle Sports and Midwest Sporting Goods now get to spend tens of thousands of dollars defending against a defective lawsuit. At least until Brandon’s legal team files another two sentence voluntary dismissal.
Does anyone want to take a bet that this latest filing will meet the same end, perhaps even sooner than the original filings?
California gun owners have long been besieged by a lengthy list of unjust, unconstitutional firearm laws that make practicing their Second Amendment right more difficult. And a new law that just took effect is going to make freedom even more scarce in The Golden State.
The new law, passed by the legislature last year and signed by anti-gun Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom, required credit card networks to make a new firearm-specific Merchant Category Code (MCC) available to banks and other financial institutions by Monday.
At issue is a special MCC for gun and ammunition purchases adopted last year by the International Organization for Standardization. MCCs are used by payment processors (like Visa and Mastercard) and other financial services companies to categorize transactions.
Prior to the creation of the specific code for guns, firearms retailers fell under the MCC for sporting goods stores or miscellaneous retail. If the new code is used, credit card companies and other payment processors can tell the purchases were firearms, basically creating a de facto registry of firearms and firearm owners.
While many find that distasteful—even illegal—California Democrats and Newsom embraced the idea. Consequently, for any firearms or ammunition now purchased in California with a credit card, there is a record kept that it was for a firearm or related product.
As NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action has pointed out in the past, collecting firearm retailer financial transaction data amounts to surveillance and registration of law-abiding gun owners. Those promoting this scheme are in favor of firearm and gun owner registration. Consequently, it should be assumed that the goal of this program is to share all collected firearm retailer MCC data with government authorities and potentially private third parties that might include gun control organizations and anti-gun researchers.
Being able to know if a purchase was for a gun or ammo must sound like a great idea to Newsom and his gun-ban cronies, and a few other states have passed similar laws, including Colorado and New York. However, just as with many gun-related issues, while California seeks to punish gun owners, many states have sought to protect them from such overreach as the use of the new gun-specific MCC. In fact, more than a dozen states have passed laws outlawing the uses of such codes, including nine states—Indiana, Utah, Wyoming, Kentucky, Iowa, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Delaware—just passed such measures this year.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul at a recent gun violence prevention convention. (Photo: Hochul/Ny.gov)
Today, the Supreme Court gave New York’s “Concealed Carry Improvement Act” the boot, thanks to a challenge led by Gun Owners of America (GOA) and Gun Owners Foundation (GOF).
GOA and GOF weren’t messing around when they filed their petition back in February.
They argued that the Second Circuit ignored the Supreme Court’s precedent from the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen case.
The petition took aim at parts of the law they deemed unconstitutional, like the “good moral character” requirement for concealed carry permits.
After the Bruen decision in 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the Albany crew rushed to pass this new law, but it turned out to be even more restrictive than the last one that got shot down.
GOA quickly stepped up to challenge it.
Even though GOA managed to get a preliminary injunction to block some parts of the law, the Second Circuit mostly reversed it.
The controversial law demanded that applicants for a concealed carry license prove their “good moral character,” undergo in-person interviews with law enforcement, provide four character references, and complete 18 hours of training—way more than the previous 4-hour requirement.
Erich Pratt, GOA’s Senior Vice President, didn’t hold back his excitement:
“New York’s anti-gun politicians were quick to double down after the Bruen decision, but today they’ve been smacked down again,” he said in a press release.
“With the High Court making clear the Second Circuit got it wrong and by remanding the case back to the lower court, the High Court is forcing New York’s politicians to eat a huge plate of humble pie,” he continued. “We look forward to continuing the fight for New Yorkers’ right to carry – without government pre-requisites.”
This Supreme Court decision marks a big win in the ongoing battle for gun rights in New York.
A critical ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit has saved the state of Ohio’s firearm preemption law.
Like many states, Ohio has a law on the books barring municipalities from passing gun laws more restrictive than those that the state has instituted. Such laws are designed to alleviate the pitfall of a gun owners trying to navigate and patchwork of different gun restrictions every time they cross into a different city.
In 2007, Ohio enacted a preemption law prohibiting municipal ordinances from infringing on Ohioans’ rights to “own, possess, purchase, sell, transfer, transport, store, or keep any firearm, part of a firearm, its components, and its ammunition.” The law additionally awards “costs and reasonable attorney fees” to anyone “that prevails in a challenge” to an ordinance that violates the preemption law.
As a little background on the issue, twice—in 2018 and again in 2020—Ohio lawmakers expanded the law to forbid more regulations and to also apply to knives. Since 2010, the state has fought for the law in the courtroom, winning some and losing some.
In 2010, the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the original 2007 law in a lawsuit where the city of Cleveland had challenged the statute claiming that it infringed on the city’s municipal home rule authority. Later, Cincinnati filed a similar lawsuit, challenging the 2018 and 2022 amendments, that also argued the law violated free speech and separation of powers.
In City of Cincinnati v. Ohio, the trial court originally ruled in favor of Cincinnati and preliminarily enjoined the 2018 and 2020 amendments. However, when the state appealed the case to the 1st Circuit, that court held that under the 2010 Cleveland case the 2018 and 2020 amendments do not violate the state’s constitutions.
In the ruling, the court stated: “Amended R.C. 9.68 survives this constitutional challenge primarily because the Supreme Court of Ohio largely foreclosed the City’s arguments against it in its decision upholding Original R.C. 9.68 against substantially similar claims.
To the extent the 2018 and 2022 amendments to the law may have altered its preemptive effects and expanded the liability of political subdivisions that act in conflict with it, the City has not proven by clear and convincing evidence that those amendments change the constitutional calculus forged by City of Cleveland (2010). We therefore sustain the state’s sole assignment of error and reverse the trial court’s judgment preliminarily enjoining Amended R.C. 9.68.”
The case has been remanded back to the trial court for further proceedings.
