Category: Gun Fearing Wussies
BELLEVUE, WA — -(AmmoLand.com)- A California appeals court panel has unanimously denied a request from state Attorney General Rob Bonta for an immediate stay of an injunction in a case brought by the Second Amendment Foundation in a challenge of the state law allowing the state Department of Justice to share personal information about firearms owners with private researchers.
Bonta claimed the law, AB 173, “does not create a serious invasion of privacy.” The trial court disagreed, granting a preliminary injunction to the plaintiffs, thus placing a hold on the enforcement of the information-sharing law. The case is known as Barba, et.al. v. Bonta.
Second Amendment Foundation is joined in the lawsuit by the Firearms Policy Coalition, Inc., California Gun Rights Foundation, San Diego County Gun Owners PAC, Orange County Gun Owners PAC, Inland Empire Gun Owners PAC, and a private citizen, Ashleymarie Barba. They are represented by attorneys Bradley A. Benbrook and Stephen M. Duvernay with the Benbrook Law Group, PC in Sacramento.
“We’re delighted the appeals court panel unanimously rejected Bonta’s effort to set aside the preliminary injunction because the privacy of California gun owners is important, even if he thinks otherwise,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “Bonta is determined to supply gun owner information to biased researchers who, we believe, will use it to promote additional restrictions on their Second Amendment-protected rights.”
Gottlieb dismissed arguments by Bonta that the researchers take steps to protect identifying information about gun owners.
“That’s not the point,” Gottlieb said. “The point of our challenge is that this information is being shared at all, especially with non-government entities. This isn’t just about Second Amendment rights. California’s law clearly threatens the privacy rights of gun owners.”
The lawsuit was filed because of a change in the California Penal Code that required the state DOJ to share private information on millions of gun owners in the state, with the California Firearm Violence Research Center and others.
About Second Amendment Foundation
The Second Amendment Foundation (www.saf.org) is the nation’s oldest and largest tax-exempt education, research, publishing and legal action group focusing on the Constitutional right and heritage to privately own and possess firearms. Founded in 1974, The Foundation has grown to more than 720,000 members and supporters and conducts many programs designed to better inform the public about the consequences of gun control.
By Larry Keane
A New York Times conference featured a bank CEO pushing the financial industry to track Americans making purchases at retailers and monitor their “suspicious activity” under the guise of “reducing gun violence.”
Amalgamated Bank CEO Priscilla Sims Brown was the special guest at the Times’ DealBook confab and was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin. He’s the Times’ columnist who previously proposed the gun buying monitoring scheme and spelled out the “next steps” in a column highlighting Sims Brown’s efforts after an international financial standards board adopted her petition to create the tracking codes.
Putting even a little thought to the idea reveals the serious flaws of the plan. Implementing the enormous system to track the private financial transactions will create a myriad of privacy and civil liberty concerns and no doubt is ripe for abuse.
Gun Control Dragnet
Sims Brown lobbied the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to create a gun-related Merchant Category Code (MCC) for credit and debit card companies to use to track cardholders’ purchases of firearms and ammunition. The ISO adopted the proposal and banks are beginning to use them. Listening to Sims Brown forecast what’s ahead, her true gun control aim is revealed. It’s a dragnet for law-abiding Americans.
“We’re at the very early stages of this –,” Sims Brown told Sorkin and the audience. “But as this is implemented, those scenarios will be used.”
By “those scenarios,” she means “detection scenarios” in which a particular purchase prompts a bank to file a Suspicious Activity Report to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Here’s how the MCC tracking will reportedly work. Purchases made at retailers selling firearms or ammunition would be assigned the new code for purchases. The MCC won’t identify what is in the customer’s basket, so it could be a total purchase for a firearm and several boxes of ammunition. It could also include a new tent, sleeping bag, propane stove, waders, decoys, blinds and other outdoor gear. The total cost could be flagged as “suspicious” since it might be an outlier on a customer’s purchase history. That doesn’t make it nefarious, though.
Media reported the proposal won’t have its intended effect. “The payment network and its banking partners would have no idea if a gun-store customer is purchasing an automatic rifle or safety equipment,” Bloomberg News reported. Banks aren’t saying what purchases would be “suspicious.”
Just a Steppingstone
The MCC scheme has caught the attention of Congressional gun control politicians. Legislation has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 5764, by Reps. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) and Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) and in the U.S. Senate, S. 3117, by Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). That legislation, The Gun Violence Prevention Through Financial Intelligence Act, would provide banking institutions the cover they need to track purchases by requiring the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to provide “guidance” needed to institute the MCC.
“Financial institutions have a legal obligation… to have programs in place to help detect and report suspicious activity, but they have to know what they are looking for,” Rep. Wexton said.
Rep. Dean has praised the back door gun control effort, too. “Financial institutions already have proven systems in place to identify suspicious behavior and purchasing patterns,” she wrote in a release.
Still no one has offered what “suspicious behavior” or “purchasing patterns” would be flagged. The questions are endless, answers few and the threat to Constitutional rights high.
Trudging Ahead. Trampling Rights.
Sorkin hypes his work in getting the MCC code established. He told the Dealbook audience, “This is an emotional topic for me in many ways… because back in 2018 I started writing about the role of guns in our society… and the role of credit card companies and banks in financing mass shootings.”
Sorkin stated his belief that lawful firearm retail businesses and the already-highly regulated Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) which provide for the legal exercise of the Second Amendment should do their part to create the backdoor database of gun buyers – something Congress is prohibited by law from doing on their own.
“Merchants must start using the code, and not obfuscate transactions by using other classifications,” Sorkin wrote. “Most crucially, the payments industry needs to develop and refine software algorithms for identifying suspicious activity…”
There are those words again – “suspicious activity.”
The suspicion is better reserved for those who would compile lists of Americans lawfully exercising their Constitutional Second Amendment rights. The right to keep and bear arms begins with the ability to make a purchase at the retail counter. Financial industry power players, though, are twisting their roles to facilitate legal transactions into social credit scores that put Americans on secret watch lists.
The financial industry doesn’t need to be suspicious of gun buyers who already are subject to FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) verifications. This move, though, is reason enough for Americans to be suspicious of “woke” banking CEOs doing the bidding of gun control politicians.
Larry Keane is Senior Vice President of Government and Public Affairs and General Counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association.
——————————————————————————– Does anybody remember voting for this guy? I don’t! Grumpy
WASHINGTON, D.C. -(Ammoland.com)-The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Department of Justice have sent the rule surrounding pistol stabilizing devices to the White House for Presidential review.
After the 2020 Presidential election, President Joe Biden called on the ATF to change regulations around pistol braces and unfinished frames and receivers. The ATF drafted a proposed rule dealing with unfinished frames and receivers thirty days later. Then a month later, the ATF unveiled its proposed regulations around firearms with pistol stabilizing devices.
During the open comment period, the Federal Registry received just under 300,000 public comments on the proposed frames and receiver rule. The proposed pistol stabilizing device rule received a little more than 250,000 public comments. The vast majority of the comments opposed the new anti-gun rules. The ATF continued to move forward with the rule-making process despite the general public disdain for the new regulations. This rule was the second time a pistol stabilizing rule was proposed. The December, before the final rule proposal, a public comment period was opened on another attempt at introducing a new rule, but the ATF pulled the rule before the comment period closed.
If the final draft rule is any indication, the new rule will treat the vast majority of firearms with pistol stabilizing devices as short barreled rifles (SBR) or short barreled shotguns (SBS). The statute does not ban pistol stabilizing devices but does regulate the firearm utilizing the brace. Companies that make braces can still make the items, but if the ATF treats the stabilizing devices as stocks, the market for pistol stabilizing devices will be small.
It is believed that the new rule will have an amnesty period for gun owners to register their pistols equipped with a stabilizing brace as an SBR or SBS.
In early September, AmmoLand News discovered an ATF request for increased funding for this proposed amnesty period. There are only rumors of the exact number of days in the amnesty period, but a similar period was introduced after the announcement of the frames and receiver rule. That rule saw a 120-day amnesty period. It is logical to conclude that the new amnesty period will have a similar number of days.
Some think President Biden will schedule a press conference like he did when he held a press conference in the Rose Garden to unveil the final frame rule. When the text of the frames and receiver rule was announced, the President invited anti-gun advocates and politicians, including David Hogg, to the White House for a ceremony. Pro-gun advocates saw this press conference as President Biden “spiking the football.”
The White House has not announced when the new rule will be unleashed on the American gun owner. When the final rule is revealed, a slew of lawsuits challenging the regulation is expected to be filed. The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) has already filed a lawsuit challenging the yet-to-be-unveiled rule, but the case has been stayed until the end of December to give time for the rule to be unveiled.
The White House did not return AmmoLand’s request for comment.
About John Crump
John is a NRA instructor and a constitutional activist. John has written about firearms, interviewed people of all walks of life, and on the Constitution. John lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and sons and can be followed on Twitter at @crumpyss, or at www.crumpy.com.
Disney CEO Bob Iger: Those of Us in Positions to Influence Laws, Shape Culture ‘Have an Extra Responsibility’ to Push Gun Control
3:06
Disney CEO Bob Iger attended a Sandy Hook Promise Benefit and referenced people in influential positions and suggested that those who shape culture “have an extra responsibility” to push gun control.
Sandy Hook Promise is the group with to whom country singer Tim McGraw donated concert proceeds for a gun control fundraiser in July 2015.
On April 16, 2015, Breitbart News pointed to McGraw’s planned participation in the fundraiser and he responded to the coverage by telling MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, “I lead my life leading with my heart, I do the things that I can do and support the causes that I support, try to help in the areas where I can help, and I do that with my heart. If I have a decision to lead with my head or my heart, I’m going to lead with my heart every time.”
The Hollywood Reporter noted that Iger, Barack Obama, and actor Matthew McConaughey all gathered in New York Tuesday, where they honored the work of Sandy Hook Promise and continued the push for more gun control.
Iger said, “As a grandfather, as a father, as CEO of The Walt Disney Company, I believe there is no greater or more important task than ensuring the safety and well-being of our children.”
He added, “Those of us who are in positions to affect change, whether it’s by influencing laws of shaping culture or supporting organizations on the frontlines, I think we have an extra responsibility.”
Obama also made comments, lamenting the failure to pass Second Amendment restrictions wanted by the gun control lobby:
Perhaps the most bitter disappointment of my time in office, the closest I came to being cynical, was the utter failure of Congress to respond in the immediate aftermath of the Sandy Hook shootings. To see almost the entire GOP, but also a decent number of Democrats equivocate and hem and haw and filibuster and ultimately bend yet again to pressure from the gun lobby.
Universal background check legislation was the key proposal pushed under the Obama administration following the attack on Sandy Hook. It failed as an emphasis was placed on the fact that the Sandy Hook attacker used stolen guns, thereby eliminating any benefit of the passage of more point-of-sale gun controls.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. AWR Hawkins holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, together with 17 other state attorneys general, are asking shipping companies UPS and FedEx to explain their newly implemented policies to track and record Americans’ firearms purchases and disclose whether these policies have been coordinated with the Biden administration.
In letters sent on Nov. 29 to FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam and UPS CEO Carol B. Tomé, Knudsen and his co-signers wrote that the shipping companies’ policies “allow your company to track firearm sales with unprecedented specificity and bypass warrant requirements to share that information with federal agencies.”
“What both of these companies are saying is that they’re doing this so they can better cooperate with law enforcement,” Knudsen told The Epoch Times. “That’s all fine and well, until you find out that that’s a violation of federal law.”
Based on reports from gun stores, Knudsen’s letter states, FedEx and UPS are now requiring federal firearms license holders to provide details of each shipment to the shipping companies, including the contents and recipient, allowing them “to create a database of American gun purchasers and determine exactly what items they purchased.
Citing the new policies, the letter states: “Perhaps most concerning, your policies allegedly allow FedEx [and UPS] to ‘comply with … requests from applicable law enforcement or other governmental authorities’ even when those requests are ‘inconsistent or contrary to any applicable law, rule, regulation, or order.’ In doing so you—perhaps inadvertently—give federal agencies a workaround to federal law, which has long prevented federal agencies from using gun sales to create gun registries.”
“The ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] is hoping they’re not going to have a warrant problem,” Knudsen said. “They could just go get this information from UPS and FedEx.”
FedEx and UPS’s new gun-tracking policies follow efforts by Visa, Mastercard, and American Express to also monitor purchases from gun stores, with the intention of handing that information over to federal law enforcement. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits the federal government from conducting searches of U.S. citizens without a warrant and “probable cause” that a crime was committed.
Increasingly, however, banks, credit card companies, and now shipping companies are conducting those searches on the government’s behalf.
The letter demands that the shipping companies respond within 30 days, clarifying their policies and explaining whether or not they acted in coordination with the ATF or any other government agency. It also asks them to clarify a reported “gag order” under which they directed gun shops not to disclose the terms of this policy to the public.
Possible Collusion?
The two letters to UPS and FedEx were virtually identical because the policies the companies implemented appear to be strikingly similar, raising the additional issue of possible collusion between companies that hold an oligopolistic position in shipping. Collusion in restraint of trade has long been illegal under U.S. antitrust laws, including the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.
“It’s either collusion, they’re working together, or what I suspect is, it’s probably originating out of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or the Biden administration,” Knudsen said. His letter recommends that the shipping companies “consider taking actions to limit potential liability moving forward, including the immediate cessation of any existing warrantless information sharing with federal agencies about gun shipments.”
If the shipping companies don’t answer his questions within 30 days, Knudsen said, “I’ll probably start with an actual formal civil investigative demand where we’ll ask for some documentation. That’s short of a subpoena and an actual lawsuit, but, ultimately, if they don’t want to cooperate, a lawsuit is where we’re going to end up.”
In response to the letter, FedEx told The Epoch Times in a statement that “FedEx is aware of the letter from the state attorneys general. We are committed to the lawful and safe movement of regulated items through our network.”
UPS responded that it “has not bypassed any laws to provide customer information to the Biden administration or federal agencies related to the shipment of firearms. UPS will only provide information about our customers or shipments when required to do so by law, such as in response to a subpoena or a warrant.”
UPS “will respond to the letter sent by several state attorneys general to answer their questions and clarify misinformation. UPS will continue to abide by all applicable laws in providing service for firearm shipments,” it stated.
“The policies set forth by FedEx and UPS are troubling, to say the least,” Mark Oliva, public affairs director of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, told The Epoch Times. “They carry with them serious risk of privacy concerns for law-abiding gun owners, and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen is correct to be wary of how this information is to be used.
“We know that pressure was applied to these common carriers by antigun Democratic senators and the result was these new policies. It does seem rather coincidental that the Biden administration and certain elected officials that have been frustrated in instituting extreme gun control measures are suddenly and curiously seeing big businesses doing exactly what they are not allowed to do by law.”
Knudsen was asked why the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which is tasked with protecting consumers against corporate collusion, is taking no action against what appears to be a coordinated effort by the shipping companies to target the firearms industry.
“I think there’s probably pressure from the White House to not do that, which is why you’re seeing AGs in states like Montana that have joined me to push back on this. If the federal government isn’t going to do their job, we’ll step in and make them do it.”
He said that gun shops are being targeted not only by credit card and shipping companies but by insurers as well.
“I’m aware of a number of FFL brick-and-mortar gun shops, and also some retailers that are just middlemen in Montana, that have been denied property-casualty insurance on their business property simply because they’re in the firearms industry.”
Kevin Stocklin is a writer, film producer, and former investment banker. He wrote and produced “We All Fall Down: The American Mortgage Crisis,” a 2008 documentary on the collapse of the U.S. mortgage finance system.
