News Briefs

News Briefs

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Anti-gunowner rights shareholder complainants are planning to sue the board of Smith & Wesson because, they allege, the board members “knowingly allowed the Company to become exposed to significant liability for intentionally violating federal, state, and local laws through its manufacturing, marketing, and sales of AR-15 style rifles and similar semiautomatic firearms.” This move is part of a broader trend of using the legal system to target gun manufacturers who make AR-style rifles. The lead instigator in the legal effort is Sister Judy Byron, an anti-gun activist nun who tries to stop companies from making guns that customers want.

Perhaps she and the other Sisters of Perpetual Misfires should give up their orders’ tax-exempt-status designations. Those orders are political, not religious, institutions as they’re being currently operated. 

On November 30, 2023, U.S. Senator Angus King (I-Maine) introduced legislation with his colleague, Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM), to ban semi-auto firearms nationally. The ill-aimed bill was called the Gas-Operated Semi-Automatic Firearms Exclusion (GOSAFE) Act. According to a summary of the bill provided by King’s office, the legislation dictates that magazines must be “permanently fixed, meaning the firearm cannot accept a detachable, high-capacity magazine that would increase the number of rounds that can be fired before reloading and make reloading easier.” Bump stocks would also be banned. Those who already own such guns could keep them or pass them on to family members, but not sell them to any other people. There would also be a federal gun-purchase program so that people could turn in guns that don’t meet the regulations, and get money for doing so. That provision should be called the “They’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse” section.

Of course, there is no historical support for giving a federal agency control over what types of firearms can be lawfully brought to the civilian market.

As such, this proposed legislation is clearly unconstitutional, in my opinion, because the U.S. Supreme Court held in Heller that entire classes of firearms cannot be banned from legal sale and possession by law-abiding citizens. That name is hokey, too. May I propose the GOFY Act instead?  

In early December 2023, shootings in Texas were carried out by an assailant who used a “large caliber handgun,” according to reports in the New York Post. Several news agencies covering the campus shooting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in the same time frame reported the killer there was armed with a handgun.

Yet in his prepared White House statement, President Biden demanded that “Republican lawmakers must join with Democrats in Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” Biden seems to have an obsession with banning semi-automatic rifles, but the truth of it is that rifles of any kind are used in only a fraction of all homicides in any given year, and banning rifles will have zero impact on the criminal misuse of handguns.

Do you see the pattern yet? If you don’t own an AR, it’s time to get one. — Todd Woodard

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