Bitter – Page 27 – Shall Not Be Questioned

More Stalling in the Pennsylvania Legislature

Dear Pennsylvania GOP,

You know what you need to do this year? Motivate some voters. One way to motivate some pro-gun voters is to get moving on preemption legislation that you guys have been ignoring in various forms through the last four year instead of recessing to enjoy spring weather.

Of course, you’ll need more than just pro-gun voters to help save your party’s most visible candidates this year. The completely lack of ability to move any real reforms on ridiculously popular issues like liquor privatization have turned quite a few voters off since it’s clear that a vote for some of your candidates isn’t a vote for any kind of change at all. Regardless, you need all the friends you can get this year.

Sincerely,

Bitter

******

Dear Pennsylvania Democrats,

You know what some of your moderates may need this year in tough districts? Votes to show they aren’t totally associated with the complete disaster the national party seems to want to bring down on candidates who aren’t running in solid blue districts full of rabidly liberal voters. You know an issue that can help with that? Gun rights. One thing you might want to encourage from some of your more moderate Democrats is to publicly push for the House leadership get moving on preemption legislation, but without the 124 amendments filed.

Now, because the national party has done a really good job at pissing off lots of people across the country, I can’t promise this vote will save you if you’re being challenged by a credible opponent. But, it certainly will help cement your NRA grade while the other guy has to run on a questionnaire only rating.

Sincerely,

Bitter

******

Dear Pennsylvania Gun Owners,

Have you called your state representatives yet to ask them why they aren’t moving this bill?

Sincerely,

Bitter

No Federal Gun Control Push in the Senate

Not surprisingly, Harry Reid is reassuring red state Democrats that he is unwilling to continue sacrificing the future of his political power – and their Senate seats – by bringing gun control to the front page and the Senate floor in 2014.

I’m pretty sure the only people who are surprised by this are the Moms who believed him when he promised a big gun control vote right before the mid-terms last year. Anyone who seriously follows politics would have known that was a lie.

Machine Guns & Public Television

I noticed this story about a Friends of NRA event in the midwest that gave donors the opportunity to shoot one of the Gatling guns that Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders used at San Juan Hill plus some machine guns, and I had to say that I’m impressed a public television program actually aired the event in Milwaukee.

This is one of those opportunities that makes our anti-gun opponents cringe – men, women, and children have huge smiles on their faces as they fire round after round into the berm.

The Surge in Teenaged Shotgunners

It’s not really the biggest deal to say that Minnesota’s fastest growing high school sport is trap shooting. If not many people started shooting it in the first place, it doesn’t take much to make it grow quickly.

However, when they put out there that only 30 students across the state participated in clay shooting as an official high school sport in 2008, and now that number is 6,100, you have to admit that’s one heck of a growth spurt in just 6 years.

With all of those teens using guns, it has also managed to remain Minnesota’s safest high school sport. That’s not something the gun control crowds want to hear about – responsible teens using firearms in a responsible way.

Why Range Protection Laws Matter

A Chattanooga-area club that has been around since 1905 is facing complaints from new residents who are angry about the noise now that they have moved in, so they filed a $1.25 million lawsuit since they can’t get the shooting range shut down through other legal channels.

I learned about this case via a source involved with the Law Seminar I mentioned the other day, and she added that they have seen an increase in these kinds of cases over the years. It’s one reason they offer a range protection section of the seminar every year. These are the kinds of cases that make up the vast majority of firearms-related litigation, not the big constitutional questions that make it to the SCOTUS or other appeals courts.

(The range is not in the photo, but it is a photo of a Tennessee gun range that Sebastian took a few years ago.)

The Golden State Gun Control Honor Roll Recipient Fall from Grace

While I was preparing dinner for Sebastian’s birthday celebration with family, more details broke about the accusations against anti-gun California Senator Leeland Yee. The charges that were initially only described as bribery and corruption now reveal his alleged ties to gun running operations. The hypocrisy is so extreme that even the mainstream media is taking notice and opening their stories with the fact that a gun control advocate has been arrested on charges related to facilitating illegal gun sales.

Twitchy is having some fun going back through Sen. Yee’s tweets on gun control sent as the man was allegedly working to help out organized crime networks get more guns into the country illegally.

Through Cam Edwards, we see that Sen. Yee’s website still touts himself as an honoree of The Brady Campaign that held a reception to honor him as a “Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll” member, according to a press release.

For his commitment to ending gun violence, Assembly Speaker pro Tem Leland Yee (D-San Francisco/Daly City) has been named to the Gun Violence Prevention Honor Roll by the Brady Campaign. The Brady Campaign will honor Yee and other state legislators from throughout the country who earned an A+ for working against gun violence at a reception during the National Conference of State Legislators in Nashville, Tennessee, on Wednesday, August 16, 2006.

I guess it is accurate to describe Sen. Yee as an honor roll worthy politician since he did do his homework. From the indictment against him, you have to give him extra credit for actually knowing the difference between fully automatic firearms and semi-automatic, so that he would (allegedly) make sure to get the right kind of firearms for criminals looking to buy illegally through him.

122 Attempts to Stop a Preemption Fix

When an NRA-backed bill to allow citizens to more easily challenge their towns that are passing gun control laws in violation of state law passed a committee vote with a solid, bipartisan vote, we knew that anti-gun advocates would pull out all the stops to try and keep this bill from becoming law.

They do not want their residents to have standing to hold these cities accountable for their violations of state law.

However, even I was a little stunned by the number of amendments already filed to try and stop the bill – 122. I didn’t realize that public accountability of local government was so vehemently opposed by some members of the legislature.

California Gun Owners Enjoy the Day…

Well, the decision on San Francisco laws was unpleasant news late yesterday, but at least California gun owners can be happy that one Second Amendment opponent isn’t quite as likely to be a threat in the future. Sen. Leeland Yee was just arrested on bribery and corruption charges, and the FBI is apparently raiding his offices at the moment.

Peruta, New York, Colorado, oh my!

With so much litigation currently up in the air, and some of it having a shot at having a hugely meaningful impact to improve the growth of the pro-gun community, it seems like a good time to remind any lawyers or seriously legal-minded types about the NRA Foundation’s Law Seminar taking place next month at the Annual Meeting in Indianapolis.

I have to say, there’s rarely been a year that I’ve been more excited by the topics – the issue of the new carry law in Illinois, the nail-biting cases in the jurisdictions where we did suffer some setbacks, and the regular topic that I often find oddly interesting – laws dealing with shooting ranges. Peruta, even though I mention it in the title, isn’t specifically on the schedule. However, when you get a bunch of pro-gun legal minds together, it’s pretty much assured that a big game-changing case like that won’t come up in some form.

Remember, attorneys, it can count for CLE credit. For non-attorneys, you never know what you might learn that can keep you out of jail. For example, I should probably warn my horse farm owning cousin that last year, I learned that riding one’s horse at “unusual speed” on any street or alley is a crime in my home state.

Bloomberg’s $600k Pennsylvania Politician

It looks like the Attorney General that Mike Bloomberg ~~bought~~ heavily contributed to in Pennsylvania is having a less than wonderful 2014. This was supposed to be the year that she would release the results of her Penn State “investigation” that would trash Gov. Tom Corbett right before the election – at least, that’s what some observers might think after watching her run on an immediate investigation with promised swift results in 2012 and not having anything to show for it after more than a year. Instead, it may be turning into the year that has investigations could be opening into her handling of political corruption cases.

For those who haven’t been following the general political news in Pennsylvania, Bloomberg’s golden girl who received hundreds in thousands of dollars in advertising during her campaign shut down a long-running undercover sting of politicians that found several Philadelphia-area lawmakers accepting cash and gifts from a lobbyist that they did not disclose. After the report came out, she lawyered up, refused to talk to the press during a meeting, and appears to be hinting at suing the press for even reporting the story that relied on named sources involved in the investigation for daring to run such criticisms of her.

Oh yeah, and it was said she tried to argue that because most of the politicians caught in the investigation up until the point she shut it down happened to be black, the investigation may have been racist. Then, the District Attorney from Philadelphia, who happens to be a black politician himself, stepped up and said that’s a bunch of bull and criticized her for shutting down the sting. Actually, that might be an understatement. Even the media called the criticism from the DA “unusually barbed criticism of a fellow prosecutor and fellow Democrat.”

Today, we learn that she has just gone through her 3rd spokesman in 14 months as the press begins to pile up against her for lawyering up. In addition, a website largely read by people pretty close to Pennsylvania politics ran a reader poll that asked if Kane should have brought charges against those politicians who were already on the record of accepting cash & gifts without reporting them, and a majority said she should have.

Bloomberg’s little Pennsylvania investment just put a big statewide spotlight on Democratic divides in the state, along with a reminder about the political corruption so well known in Philadelphia political circles as we come up in a big election year for the state. I’m not sure that’s what Bloomberg was hoping to get with his donations.