The United States is at a fork in the road regarding which way we will go as a people. The 2012 election could be the most important in our lifetime, and conservative leaders have reached a consensus on how to channel the energy and concerns of the American people to realize historic change this year.

The status quo will not survive the year. Our debt and spending have reached catastrophic proportions in the context of global financial difficulties and political upheaval. Consequently, by the end of 2012, America will either have taken a decisive step toward socialistic collectivism in the name of “equality” and “social justice,” where businesses and owners are punitively taxed to “pay their fair share,” or America will take a major step in the direction of returning to our Founders’ constitutional government, restoring the rule of law, federalism, free enterprise, and individual initiative and responsibility.

The American people will decide which path to take in the 2012 elections, not only in the general election on November 6 but also in the nominating process in primaries over the next several months for all major offices, including the presidency. Conservatives must act in a concerted and informed fashion in all of these contests to shape the public dialogue and thoroughly vet the candidates.

To achieve these ends, top conservative leaders acting under the umbrella of the Conservative Action Project have released “A Conservative Consensus for 2012” announcing agreement on major policies. These issues span all three wings of the conservative movement: economic, social, and national security.

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Walk into your local gun shop and you’re likely to be greeted by some of the hardest working salesmen and women in America. On Black Friday alone Gun dealers flooded the FBI with background check requests for prospective hand gun and long gun buyers, smashing the previous record by more than 30%. Deputy Assistant FBI Director Jerry Pender said the checks, required by federal law, surged to nearly 130,000 during the day, far surpassing the previous high of 97,848 on Black Friday of 2008. The actual number of firearms sold is likely much higher because multiple firearms can be included in a transaction by a single buyer. The FBI does not track actual gun sales.

Gun buyers are more diverse than ever. This however is not the kind of diversity the anti-gun left is happy about. Young professionals, people starting families and women, in greater numbers than ever, are purchasing guns. Dennis Henigan, acting president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said he was “skeptical” of the Black Friday gun surge.

Refusing to accept the reality of the trend, he said “I think there may be no real significance at all.” This of course is the same Brady Center that that in the face of gun violence, has focused it’s efforts on restricting law abiding citizens’ access to guns, rather than campaigning for tougher penalties against criminals who use guns in crimes.

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About a week ago, I wrote that people in western nations need the freedom to own guns just in case there are riots, chaos, and social disarray when welfare states collapse.

Much to my surprise and pleasure, this resulted in an invitation to appear on the National Rifle Association’s webcast to discuss the issue.

As I noted in the interview, I’m just a fiscal policy wonk, but the right to keep and bear arms should be a priority for anyone who believes in freedom and responsibility. And even though I only have a couple of guns, you can see that I’m raising my kids to have a proper appreciation for the Second Amendment.

I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point where we suffer societal breakdown, but I won’t be too surprised if it happens in some European countries. We’ve already seen the challenges faced by disarmed Brits during recent riots in the United Kingdom.

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Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) have focused on the Justice Department in their investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, in which U.S. officials deliberately sold American guns to Mexican criminals that were later used to kill a U.S. border agent.

Questions have arisen about the involvement of Attorney General Eric Holder, as new evidence has arisen that Justice Department officials may have wanted not only to target Mexican druglords but also to create anecdotal evidence to support tighter gun control rules.

A look back at the early days of the Obama administration suggests that responsibility for Operation Fast and Furious. may go even higher.

Source: AP http://tinyurl.com/cj4lz3

In the spring of 2009, both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blamed American gun-running for violence in Mexico’s drug wars.

On March 25, 2009, for example, Clinton stated in Mexico City: “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.” She also announced new efforts to stop gun-running.

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Just one week ago on Sunday, June 19^th, we were reminded once again that our God given right to life, as declared in the Declaration of Independence, is meaningless without the right to self-defense.  That day, Father’s Day, a terrible tragedy took place in a Medford, New York pharmacy when an armed robber shot and murdered four innocent people.

Imagine yourself in that pharmacy.  You are facing an obvious threat from a man with a gun.  You cannot retreat because the gunman is too close.  You have no weapon, because the State of New York has made it extremely difficult to posses any sort of a weapon, and certainly not a gun.  Hence, your only means of self-defense is to plead for compassion from a soulless thug.  At that point, with your right to life materially impaired by the government restricting your right to self-defense, you simply die.

Gun law advocates are undoubtedly ready to demand more control of firearms, and argue that citizens should rely on the police.  They are missing the point.  Had those innocent victims in the Medford Pharmacy managed to call the police and had the police responded within minutes, all four would still have been killed because the robber acted within seconds.  The painful meaning of the phrase, “when seconds count, the police are minutes away” was all too clear on June 19^th.

For decades the National Rifle Association, gun rights advocates in general and especially hunters have worked hard to prevent gun laws from becoming too restrictive.  Their argument is the Second Amendment and its words proclaiming, “…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  For all their fine work, these groups are also missing the point.  Guns, knives, batons and other tools of defense are only tools.  It is the right to self-defense that has been under attack all this time.

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Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has filed a simple amendment to the Patriot Act protecting the rights of Americans to lawfully carry a firearm.  His Amendment would stop federal agencies from collecting gun records under the Patriot Act.  The amendment preserves two provisions of current law that protects gun owner privacy from a Patriot Act exemption.

The Paul Amendment (SA 328) states in part “no provision of this Act or an amendment made by this Act shall be construed to authorize access to firearms records in the possession of licensed under Chapter 44 of title 18 of the US Code.”  The purpose of the Amendment is to “clarify that the authority to obtain information under the US PATRIOT Act does not include the authority to obtain certain firearms records.”  Seems like a non-controversial clarification of the powers of the federal government with regard to the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution.

Leadership in both parties disagree and have been doing everything to block consideration of the Paul Amendment. Neil McCabe at Guns and Patriots reported yesterday on Facebook that “finessing arcane procedural tactics, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., blocked the amendment by withdrawing his own bill for Patriot Act extension for consideration and then attached it to an unrelated bill.”  McCabe further reported that Reid was overheard on the Senate floor expressing an interest in avoiding this vote.  That was yesterday, now Republicans in the Senate Leadership are actively opposing the Paul Amendment to the Patriot Act.

In an Email obtained by Big Government from a Senate Republican Leadership staffer for Senator Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) to Republican staff below titled “OPPOSE the Paul Firearm Amendment” argues for Republicans to block the Paul 2nd Amendment protection legislation:

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On Fox News Sunday, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer spoke of his dissenting decisions in the several Second Amendment cases that he heard as a Justice. He told host Chris Wallace that he thought that James Madison only included the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights as a sop to the states and Breyer insisted that historians agreed.

In essence, Breyer was saying that Madison was not interested in an individual’s right to gun ownership and self-protection and for that reason his dissenting opinions against that individual right accorded well with what the founder’s thought on the issue.

But Breyer’s assumption that a citizen’s right to bear arms is not sacrosanct and his following contention that the founders would agree seems to ignore much of the history of the era not to mention the precedents in law and the historical record upon which the founders relied to define their political ideas — including Madison.

Of course, it is a bit ridiculous to take one lone founder’s words and assume that it represents the opinion of all of them. It is quite easy, after all, to find quotes from any particular founder that in no way reflected even a minority opinion of the day. For instance, Thomas Jefferson once advocated that all laws be dumped every few decades so that the next generation could start over with their own ideas unencumbered by past generations. Even Madison thought that idea was absurd. Hamilton found that many of his most dearly held financial ideas left his fellows cold. John Adams thought that we should call the president “your majesty,” an idea that earned him much derision. And Poor Richard himself, Benjamin Franklin, once proposed that each galaxy had it’s own “God” that ruled in his own sphere meaning that there were infinite gods for infinite galaxies. Not every idea the founders had were gems, to be sure.

Still, Madison spoke with most of his contemporaries, not outside them, when he considered the meaning of the Second Amendment.

It is certainly true that the founder’s chief interest in creating the Second Amendment was to serve two important roles. One was to create a citizen army, a militia that could be called upon to defend the nascent nation. The second was to prevent the necessity of a large standing army, a body that most of the founders feared. Based on a clear reading of history, the prevailing opinion of the day was that a standing, powerful army served the forces of tyranny far more often than it served those of liberty. Consequently they wanted to figure out a way to make sure that the U.S. Army was small and too weak to threaten the citizenry.

This fact is what Breyer pointed to in order to prove his contention that Madison was not concerned with an individual’s right to own firearms.

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The Left will have you believe that people who own guns are a bunch of fun-loving, action-hero-wannabes, who are excited by shiny things and loud noises and like to run around blowing things up by remote control. And I say, that’s not a bug — that’s a feature!

But there is much, much more to it than that.

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Just outside the DC Beltway, in Maryland’s sprawling first congressional district, an electoral battle is underway that exposes unique ideological fault lines beneath America’s political landscape.

The campaign pits freshman “Blue Dog” Democratic congressman Frank Kratovil in a rematch against Republican Dr. Andy Harris. Given the political tilt of the district, coupled with the Tea Party tsunami gathering force this year, one would think that this race should be a slam dunk for Harris.

A tall, affable family man, Harris is an anesthesiologist, Navy veteran, hardcore free-marketer, and constitutional conservative. By contrast, Kratovil, a former attorney, tries to portray himself as an “independent” who distances himself from Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic majority. However, the Washington Post reports that “Frank Kratovil has voted with a majority of his Democratic colleagues 84.6% of the time during the current Congress.” Among his least popular votes since taking office: support for the “cash for clunkers” program, for the near-trillion-dollar “stimulus” spending orgy, and for the hugely expensive “cap-and-trade” energy bill. Plus, of course, his vote to elevate the widely reviled Pelosi to the Speaker’s position.

Yet, despite all that, a recent poll finds Harris holding only a statistically insignificant three-point lead over Kratovil. This, while other GOP candidates are faring much better even in usually “safe” Democratic districts.

What’s going on here?

One of the most infuriating spectacles this election season is supposedly “Republican,” “conservative,” and “pro-business” individuals and groups supporting entrenched liberal incumbents against free-market, limited-government challengers. For many special-interest “insiders,” even on the right, philosophical convictions are far less important than sharing a “seat at the table” with the politically powerful.

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This week’s historic Supreme Court case on gun rights has pivotal implications for Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. From now on, the biggest battles over the Second Amendment will be won or lost in the Supreme Court.

In the 2008 case D.C. v. Heller, the Supreme Court held 5−4 that the Second Amendment secures an individual right to own a gun. But because the Bill of Rights only applies directly to federal laws (such as those in D.C.), Heller only made the Second Amendment a right against the federal government.

On June 28 of this year in McDonald v. Chicago, a new 5−4 Supreme Court decision held that the individual right to own a gun from Heller is a fundamental right, and as such extends through the Fourteenth Amendment as a right against state and local governments as well.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor joined in full. (Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a separate dissent.) That dissent contains a telling revelation about Barack Obama’s Supreme Court.

When Sotomayor was nominated for the High Court last year, she was asked by Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D−VT) whether after Heller it is now a matter of settled law that the Second Amendment secures an individual right to own a gun. Her answer was clear and direct: “Yes, sir.”

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“We had to put the Second Amendment over the First Amendment.” (7:21)

Yes, it’s common sense to credit the NRA for its involvement with the McDonald vs Chicago case and its fight for the Second Amendment, which, I think, would have been infringed upon even greater longer ago without the NRA.

However.

I don’t like what I’m seeing with the NRA on this – and their wish to protect the Second Amendment by way of seeking exemption under DISCLOSE is nullified if they traded exemption for silence on the hearing of an anti-gun Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan as part of of the deal.

You can’t be non-partisan because the Second Amendment, in current society, is not a bipartisan issue.

By silencing yourself, ironically, on an issue for exemption so that you don’t have to be silenced later on is playing with the First Amendment whether you realize it or not.

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At long last the 2nd Amendment has been considered a personal right per the Supreme Court of the United States. In McDonald v the City of Chicago the Supreme Court has ruled in a 5 to 4 decision that Chicago’s gun banning laws are not in keeping with the right to self-defense as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. After 200 some years we are finally accorded our rights officially. Further, the Court found that the 2nd Amendment was meant to protect the very people that Mayor Richard Daley and his comrades are trying to forcibly disarm: black Americans.

The decision threw out the Seventh Circuit ruling upholding Chicago’s gun ban and ordered the Seventh to revisit its decision. This new ruling does not specifically strike down Chicago’s gun ban but the opinion leaves little room for the Seventh to up hold Mayor Richard Daley’s gun banning efforts.

One of the main questions before the Court was whether or not the 14th Amendment served to shore up the rights in the 2nd. The Court found that it did, indeed. In fact, it is interesting to note that the ancestors of the very people that the 14th Amendment was meant to specifically protect — newly freed slaves, called freemen — are today those that Mayor Richard Daley and others like him want to disarm. Daley and his ilk want to disempower blacks and other minorities and tie them plantation-like to their government authority.

In the majority opinion in the McDonald decision specifically notes the history of the 14th Amendment and its preceding basis for being the protector of the freemen.

After the Civil War, many of the over 180,000 African Americans who served in the Union Army returned to the States of the old Confederacy, where systematic efforts were made to disarm them and other blacks. The laws of some States formally prohibited African Americans from possessing firearms. For example, a Mississippi law provided that “no freed- man, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife.” (pg 23)

There was but one reason why freedmen were prohibited from having firearms and that was so that they would be unable to defend themselves against terrorists like the Klan or be able to enjoy the fruits of citizenship. Scalia notes that the Freedman’s Bureau began to add rules to its repertoire to specifically affirm the newly freed black’s right to self defense (pg 27).

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From the Associated Press:

The Supreme Court held Monday that the Constitution’s Second Amendment restrains government’s ability to significantly limit “the right to keep and bear arms,” advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.

By a narrow, 5-4 vote, the justices also signaled, however, that some limitations on the right could survive legal challenges.

Writing for the court in a case involving restrictive laws in Chicago and one of its suburbs, Justice Samuel Alito said that the Second Amendment right “applies equally to the federal government and the states.”

The court was split along familiar ideological lines, with five conservative-moderate justices in favor of gun rights and four liberals opposed. Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority.

Two years ago, the court declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess guns, at least for purposes of self-defense in the home.

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Last year, when Tea Party activists almost derailed ObamaCare, the White House and its comrades in the House of Labor knew they had to somehow neutralize Americans who voiced opposition to their agenda. Ever since President Obama dispatched his soldiers to take on concerned Americans at townhall meetings last year, unions have tried to downplay their culpability in targeting tea party activists. But the targeting has not stopped. In fact, it seems like a new assault takes place every month.

In February, the union campaign against the Tea Party movement was publicly exposed.  In fact, the union-backed website TheTeaPartyisOver.org openly states  that “Patriot Majority is also putting together a tracking program of Tea Party activity nationwide to monitor outbreaks of actual violence, threats of violence or other types of extremism.” [Emphasis added.]

In March, Teamster boss James P. Hoffa took aim at Tea Party activists accusing them of being ‘manipulated’ and ‘misdirected.’

In April, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) introduced a bill that eviscerates the First Amendment called the DISCLOSE Act.  The DISCLOSE Act is another attempt by the union-controlled Democrat Party to shill for its big union bosses.

As Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) noted here on Big Government, ”the White House and their allies on Capitol Hill see honest criticism as a threat to forcing their big government, liberal agenda through Congress.”  While the DISCLOSE Act provides exemptions for traditional news media, Reason’s Bradley Smith and Jeffrey Patch point out:

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Today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear McDonald v. Chicago, in which the Court will decide whether the City of Chicago can disarm its citizens by forbidding them from owning handguns, or whether gun ownership is a “privilege” of citizenship protected by the U.S. Constitution.  In doing so, it will reconsider whether courts should play a more robust role in the protection of the basic liberties of the people.

Such a statement may seem counterintuitive.  Of course courts protect rights; it’s their job to interpret the Constitution to do just that.

But the practice of constitutional law has unfortunately long since been about more than the simple application of the plain text.  That’s because the Constitution—the point of which is to limit government power—is a rather inconvenient roadblock when government wants to do something without restraints.  Courts, in many cases, have abandoned their responsibility to apply the clear commands of the Constitution and have become extremely deferential to legislatures, especially with regard to progressive policy goals the judges themselves often share.  It seems crazy that we would let legislatures determine when laws they themselves create violate the Constitution.  But that is exactly what has happened.  We’ve let the fox guard the henhouse.

Some call this judicial “restraint,” but increasingly, a more accurate term would be judicial abdication.  And judicial abdication is every bit as dangerous as judicial activism, and arguably even more so because it allows politicians to disregard whatever constitutional limits they find inconvenient, which leads to unchecked expansion of government power.

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The District of Columbia’s murder rate plummeted by an astounding 25 percent last year, much faster than for the US as a whole or for similarly sized cities. If you had asked Chicago’s Mayor Daley, that wasn’t supposed to happen. The Supreme Court’s 2008 decision to strike down DC’s handgun ban and gunlock requirements should have lead to a surge in murders, with Wild West shootouts. The Supreme Court might keep Daley’s predictions in mind today as they hear the oral arguments on Tuesday in the Chicago handgun ban case.

Everyone in DC now knows that murder rates rose after the handgun ban and fell after they were removed. Unfortunately, Chicago never learned that lesson. The forthcoming third edition of More Guns, Less Crime shows that in the 17 years after its ban on new handguns went into effect, there are only two years where Chicago’s murder rate was as low as it was in 1982. Chicago’s murder rate fell relative to other largest 50 largest cities prior to the ban and rose relative to them afterwards. For example, Chicago’s murder rate went from equalling the average for those other cities in 1982, to exceeding their average murder rate by 32 percent in 1992 and by 68 percent in 2002. There is no year after the ban that Chicago’s murder rate fared as well relative to other cities as it did in 1982.

Similar comparisons exist for the top ten largest cities, the US as a whole, or the counties that boarder Chicago. The accompanying figure shows how Chicago’s murder rates changed relative to the rates in the adjacent counties. In the five years before the ban, Chicago’s murder rate fell by 28 percent relative to those counties. (County level crime data only goes back to 1977.) in the five years after the ban, Chicago’s murder rate doubled relative to those other counties.

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Last year’s landmark Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller definitively settled the fact that the Second Amendment secures an individual right—not a collective one—to keep and bear arms. Yet that ruling applied only to the federal government (which oversees Washington, D.C.). Does the Second Amendment apply against state and local governments as well?

Through a series of legal decisions handed down over the past century, the Supreme Court has gradually held that most of the protections in the Bill of Rights apply to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment, which declares, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Second Amendment, however, has been glaringly absent from this process, leaving state and local governments free to systematically violate gun rights.

Until now.

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There are still these things called newspapers out there. Yeah, I was surprised too – I gave up hardcopy papers way back when dissent was still patriotic. But out for a Sunday lunch at one of our favorite places in lovely Manhattan Beach, I noticed the front section of the Los Angeles Times lying forlornly on a counter between the napkins and the hot sauce. Someone had left it behind. The price being right, I decided to see what I’ve been missing.

The first thing I found was a long story on how the conservative movement is struggling to prove that it is not infused with racism. I was unaware of that the burden of proof is upon the accused to demonstrate its innocence, but then I remembered what I was reading. The banner picture of Joe Wilson summed up the way the article would combine dubious preconceptions with the lamest kind of liberal conventional wisdom and ignorance of the most basic elements of the conservative movement. (more…)