I was gratified to have an attorney ask me to be an expert witness in a case in California. California recently licensed open carry. You did not know it had been legal? Yes, outside cities in most of the state. But no more. So in Baird v. Becerra (E.D.Cal. 2019) there is a challenge to this law. The California Attorney-General is defending this law, as they are required to do. But their defense included these claims: 1. The 2nd Amendment does not protect a right to open carry. 2. State supreme court decisions before the Civil War that seem to regard open carry as protected, also claimed Read More >>

You are doubtless aware that a bump stock ban has been adopted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco * Firearms effective March 26, 2019.  Doesn’t Congress have to pass a ban?  The way BATF did this was by redefining a bump stock to be a machine gun, requiring you to destroy it or turn it into BATF.  What? The federal law definition of a machine gun is a gun that fires multiple rounds by one function of the trigger.  Now the Obama Administration approved bump stocks because each time the trigger is pulled, it fires one round, even though you only pull the trigger once.  Within the strict Read More >>

You doubtless heard that a “silencer” was used in the recent Virginia Beach mass murder. Do not use the word “silencer.” The correct term is “suppressor.” I have yet to see a suppressor that made a gunshot silent; at best they make gunshot less obnoxiously loud. Only in Hollywood do “silencers” exist which made a firearm sound like a pellet gun. As Dr. John Lott observed, the only reason a mass murderer would use a suppressor is to make the noise less deafening to him. The use of the term “silencer” makes it easier to justify bans that will have no impact on nearly every Read More >>

You may or may not have heard of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association vs. City of New York.  This is a challenge to a New York City regulation that says people with premises licenses for their handguns (which is required to have a pistol in your home or business) may not take their unloaded, inaccessible, and secured pistols anywhere except one of the licensed gun ranges in the city.  You may not go to a range outside the city, to your home in upstate New York, to a competition of any sort.  You are allowed to take your gun to a gunsmith, but only if you get advance permission from Read More >>

And from New York!  Avitable v. Beach (N.D.N.Y., 2019).   Important points: Second Amendment protects possession of stun guns and Tasers.   New York State argued that Tasers are not in "common use," by comparing the number in private hands "to the relatively small number of civilian-owned machine guns that were sold prior to the 1986 federal ban on those weapons."   “Avitable argued that he preferred one of these electric weapons over using his rifles or shotguns because he would prefer not to kill in self-defense,  (A good argument--it shows Read More >>

Mass murders with firearms justify stricter gun control laws: that’s the core assumption of the news media and politicians (which are pretty much identical). So what is the weapon that is the big killer in American mass murders? So big that more than half of all mass murder victims since 1657 were killed with this weapon, one that was not invented until the 20th century. My current research project is a comprehensive history of mass murder. I have identified 360 mass murders (defined as three or more persons murdered or wounded in a 24 hour period). This includes 5,948 dead. And the Read More >>