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Firearms Industry Group Backs Sessions for AG
Firearms industry group National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) has released a statement backing President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick for Attorney General.
The trade association for the firearms, ammunition and related industries, today expressed its strong support for the nomination of the U.S. Senator from Alabama as the 84th Attorney General of the United States.
“During the last eight years, through numerous attacks on our Second Amendment liberties, Senator Sessions has worked tirelessly to protect the rights of law-abiding citizens, including through his staunch support of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.” said Lawrence Keane, NSSF senior vice president and general counsel. “We are confident that with Senator Sessions as the top law enforcement officer in the nation that our public will be safer, that criminals will be taken off the streets, that justice will be served, law enforcement priorities will take precedence over politics and the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans will be respected.”
Frankly, we here at GunLink are just excited to see someone other than anti-gun Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch filling the roll, whose duties as the head of the United States Department of justice include being at the helm of the BATFE.
National CCW Reciprocity Bill Introduced for 2017
Ask any concealed carry license holder who does any appreciable amount of travel and they can tell you that the United States can be a patchwork of state and local laws. Can you have a loaded firearm in your car? Are rifles and handguns treated differently? Does a loaded magazine count as “loaded,” or must a round be chambered? Do No Guns Allowed signs carry the force of law? Can you carry in restaurants which serve alcohol? Is your concealed carry permit even good in your destination state?
These issues might represent a lot to consider when traveling with firearms, but a new bill introduced in the House might solve at least one of them.
Yesterday marked the first day of the 115th Congress and Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC-8) kicked it off with a piece of pro-gun legislation in the form of The Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017. HR38 would eliminate the confusing hodgepodge of laws across the nation by allowing individuals who legally carry a concealed firearm in their home state to exercise the same right in any other state that does not prohibit concealed carry – a concept known as National Reciprocity.
NRA-ILA Executive Director, Chris Cox, supported the bill, saying “the current patchwork of state and local laws is confusing for even the most conscientious and well-informed concealed carry permit holders. This confusion often leads to law-abiding gun owners running afoul of the law when they exercise their right to self-protection while traveling or temporarily living away from home.”
The official Congressional summary of HR38 is still pending as of this writing; however, Rep. Hudson has released this text of the bill, a one-pager summary, and a brief Q&A.
Hudson, a strong advocate of Second Amendment rights, has introduced similar legislation in the past, including last session’s HR986 during the 114th Congress. Despite decent support from among his congressional peers, this bill failed to make it through the legislative process. Now, with republican control of the House, Senate, and White House – along with at least one Supreme Court seat to be filled by the incoming President Trump – the new iteration of the national reciprocity bill has a chance at passing. It is already off to a good start with a bi-partisan field of more than 60 co-sponsors. Continue reading
Miss Sloane: America Votes “NO” Once Again
via NRA-ILA
“You can’t win them all,” as the old saying goes, but when it comes to the Second Amendment, gun control advocates can’t even come close. Such is clearly the case with Miss Sloane, the latest of Hollywood’s repeated attempts to push a gun control narrative on the American people. Of course, they didn’t see this coming, any more than they saw a Donald Trump victory coming. But that’s because they refuse to acknowledge the basic simple truth about the American people when it comes to our firearms freedom. Well, we’ll say it again, the American people aren’t buying your anti-gun narrative.
Miss Sloane features Jessica Chastain as a Washington lobbyist who takes on “the establishment” to push for passage of gun control in the U.S. Congress. As reported by Stephen Gutowski at FreeBeacon, the “political thriller” opened last weekend to much buzz and fanfare among gun control groups, but tanked completely at the box office, making one industry list of the worst openings of the past 35 years for a movie with a national release.
Incredibly, Gutowski reports that a representative of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence actually said, “… I can tell you that its production alone, with our input, is the success.” In other words, it is of little consequence that nobody wants to see a movie that pushes for gun control, its mere existence is what matters.
This very telling admission provides great insight into the base motive and method of those in the gun control movement and their view of policy-making in the United States. What the American people want is irrelevant, gun control elites know better, and they will continue to push their message through all available means. They certainly have willing accomplices in the media and entertainment industry.
But we will warn those in the gun control movement not to take box-office losses lightly. Because Hollywood does not. Lest anyone forget, it is middle-America that provides the means which afford so many in the entertainment industry extraordinary wealth and lavish lifestyles. Continue reading
Corporate Lawyers Can’t Tell the Truth about Gun Laws
via NRA-ILA
The newly formed anti-gun Firearms Accountability Counsel Task Force was featured in a National Public Radio interview with attorney Mike Schissel of Arnold & Porter, one of the big corporate law firms that has joined together with other firms to provide free legal services to anti-gun groups. Mr. Schissel openly bragged about the “collective talent and collective manpower” of his group and that “the brute force of the major law firms in this country” would use “novel and aggressive thinking … to put a full-court press on the gun lobby.”
This “novel and aggressive thinking” clearly does not involve telling the truth about the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), since Mr. Schissel claimed “There’s no other law – no other law at all – that shields consumer products from safety regulation.” He further alleged that “there are state laws that literally immunize a gun seller of any liability even if that gun seller knows he’s selling a gun to a criminal.”
Unfortunately for Mr. Schissel, literally every part of his claim is untrue. The firearms industry is not the only industry to enjoy the type of protection the PLCAA affords, and it most certainly does not provide blanket immunity from lawsuits. Any honest lawyer would also understand that it is a federal crime to knowingly sell a firearm to a criminal. There is no law which can immunize against this action in such cases.
The truth is that gun manufacturers have been found liable for defective firearms and gun dealers have been held both criminally and civilly liable for selling guns to prohibited persons. While spurious claims like the Connecticut suit against Remington Arms and the Brady Campaign’s lawsuit against Lucky Gunner were dismissed, Badger Arms was found liable for selling guns to an obvious straw purchaser – a case Brady Campaign attorneys were forced to leave after violating Wisconsin Supreme Court rules on pretrial publicity.
The truth about the PLCAA cannot be clearer. It was passed after anti-gun activists partnered with big-firm plaintiffs’ lawyers, big-city mayors, and the Clinton administration to bring an avalanche of lawsuits against the firearm industry and force them to either settle or go bankrupt from legal fees. The PLCAA only prohibits lawsuits for injuries “resulting from the criminal or unlawful misuse” of firearms – the same way that car manufacturers and auto dealerships are not liable for injuries caused by drunk drivers.
Schissel’s other “novel and aggressive” strategy is to claim that state carry laws infringe on the rights of private property owners because they have to post “No Gun” signs to exclude people who are legally carrying a concealed firearm. Following this line of reasoning, business owners must be equally burdened by having to post signs to exclude other legal activity – like “No Smoking,” “No Pets,” and “No Shirt-No Shoes-No Service.” It is laughable to think that the effort to post these signs is so terrible and onerous that it can only be remedied by the courts. Continue reading
Gear Up for SHOT Show 2017 with GunLink
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) annual Shooting Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show (SHOT Show) is just around the corner and, as usual, the GunLink team will be there to cover it all. From the opening shots of the pre-show Industry Day at the Range through the last booth of the show floor, be sure to follow our coverage on our family of websites and social media outlets.
Join the discussion on the GunLink Forums in the 2017 Industry Day at the Range thread and in the 2017 SHOT Show thread. For more in-depth coverage, reviews and more, stay right here on the GunLink Blog. If instant gratification and up-to-the-second updates, photos, and reports from the range (as if there was cell service out in the desert) and SHOT Show floor is what you are looking for, find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Don’t forget that you can use all of these avenues to connect with us to let us know what type of shooting and firearms news you want to see covered from the show. Continue reading
The Wild West of Shooting Sports – Cowboy Action Shooting
Sure, sporting clays might be in the Olympics, 3-Gun matches may have made their way into televised sports via 3GN, and all levels of shooters may compete on the weekends in IDPA, USPSA, and IPSC matches, but those aren’t the only names in the game. The shooting sports game, that is.
Practical shooting competitions generally have real-world applications that can be carried into our concealed carry, home defense, and general self defense routines. Skeet, Trap, and Sporting Clays help sharpen skills that will carry over into the field for the scattergun hunter. Three-gun matches certainly showcase some amazing shooting abilities with a variety of defensive tools. Do you think that you could perform similar feats of shooting prowess? While riding a galloping horse at full speed? With a single-action firearm?
That is exactly what participants in the sports of Cowboy Action Shooting (CAS) do as they carry on the traditions of the Old West. Continue reading
