Author Archive
VA AG Attempts To Defend His Defense Of Anti-Gun University…And Fails
by Dave Vann on Nov.18, 2011, under Uncategorized
On Nov. 17 Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli appeared before gun owners at the monthly meeting of the Virginia Citizens Defense League and tried to defend his defense of George Mason University in a case before the Virginia Supreme Court. This came three years after he had told the same group that if GMU came to him seeking a ban he would, as AG, tell them to go elsewhere.
During the meeting Cuccinelli said that three years ago he’d gotten it wrong and had made a “legal mistake”. He further stated that “…all governing agencies, the governor and legislators are my clients”. The AG is correct that the governor and legislators are his clients, however, he is under no obligation to take their cases particularly if there is a conflict of interest or if his client is breaking the law. His main duty and concern is to the citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia NOT to an agency. An agency, such as a university, is an inanimate object and the safety of those people who travel and inhabit that university trump any possible claim to representation that the agency may have.
In a further slap in the face to gun owners Cuccinelli issued an opinion that a University of Virginia policy banning carrying a handgun on campus by those who have been issued a concealed handgun permit would not stand a legal challenge, but the University could still ban them if they were to enact a regulation. Could he have shouted “here’s how to do it” from the roof tops any more plainly?
When AG Cuccinelli took his oath of office part of that oath was to “defend and preserve the Constitution of the United States and the Commonwealth of Virginia”. Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia reads: “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their post erity, namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety” (emphasis added).
Exactly how did your ruling preserve the safety of students on GMU Mr. Attorney General? How did you serve the safety of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia who elected you to, primarily, ensure the well being of themselves in their travels throughout the Commonwealth with this ruling?
It’s very easy for AG Cuccinelli to now proclaim that the University is “nuts” and doesn’t make students safe with its policies. Where were you when it really counted? Where was Ken Cuccinelli when a student was raped on campus? How did his ruling protect her?
Ken Cuccinelli took the easy way out by siding with an agency, to wit a university, instead of flesh and blood human beings. The Constitution of Virginia, moral law and the inherent rights of citizens demanded he stand up for them. In that respect he failed miserably and so have all who supported him.
When election time rolls around Virginia voters need to remember this and send Ken Cuccinelli home.
Meeting Your Doppelganger – David Vann v David Vann
by Dave Vann on Oct.12, 2011, under Uncategorized
A doppelganger is described as a paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune. When Jeff Knox and David Codrea emailed me and informed me that David Vann had written an anti-gun column (David Codrea, Gun Week Examiner) and was a professor at the University of San Francisco, I knew I had found mine.
One David Vann is on the right coast, a former law enforcement officer, RKBA supporter, Co-Founder of Gunleaders.com & USRKBA.org who believes in the absolute right of individuals, including military personnel, to defend themselves, the other, on the left coast, is a virulently anti-gun professor who writes about those who commit mass murder, teaches at a liberal college, doesn’t trust military personnel to own firearms and believes handguns should be totally banned because, he says, they are only used to kill.
What to do? I’ll follow conventional and traditional wisdom and confront the beast. So, David Vann, meet David Vann.
I saw exactly what you propose. I saw a handgun ban at work from 1976 forward in Washington, D.C. I witnessed the body count rise, steadily, each and every year, as this social experiment continued to fail. I cringed at the battered, bloody bodies of women who had been raped, robbed, beaten and murdered and had no way to defend themselves. I heard stories of business owners who were so terrified of being robbed and killed that they were willing to break the law themselves and obtain firearms on the black market rather than risk being shot and killed by robbers, an all too frequent event when D.C. became known as the “Murder Capitol” of the Country.
Gun control advocates have an explanation to all this that is far too simplistic. “Well, they keep selling guns elsewhere”. Yes, they do, however, law abiding D.C. residents could not simply go somewhere else and buy a handgun and bring it back to the city, a fact you and others conveniently forget to mention. Criminals, however, steal guns and laugh at all laws.
As for handguns being only used for killing, every law enforcement officer in this country should be sending you a message loud and clear that if that was the case the body count would be astronomical. Police officers do not carry handguns to kill people Mr.Vann, they carry handguns to protect lives. Occasionally it becomes necessary to use that handgun to save an innocent life. Are you going to object to a police officer using a handgun to save your life from someone who is intent upon killing you? If you are, please let the police know so that they can avoid responding to your address, putting their lives in jeopardy, when you really don’t want to be saved.
The courts have ruled that the police have no obligation to protect the individual (Warren v District of Columbia), therefore it falls upon the individual to act responsibly in that regard. A handgun protects the innocent and saves lives every day. Forty eight States now have licensing for concealed carry and the consistent drop in violent crime attests to the fact that criminals are well aware that it’s becoming dangerous for them to ply their trade, except of course in cities like Washington, D.C., Chicago and a few other holdouts.
Is there aberrant behavior in our society that goes undetected? Of course, just as there are journalists and writers who present one-sided rants. Should we require them to register their computers and undergo a mental exam to determine if they are fit to fill the papers and academia with all the garbage we are subjected to today? It might be tempting but the First Amendment is protected by the Second so we all remain free to express our opinions no matter how far from the truth some of them may be.
You rail against the NRA yet fail to acknowledge that the NRA is the chief training organization for Police nationwide and has developed more educational programs for firearms safety than any other group in this Country.
As a doppelganger you truly are a malevolent entity that seems bent on destruction of our most cherished freedoms; freedom of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I reject you and I cast you out.
Dave Vann – The real one
2nd. Amendment Interview With Ambassador John Bolton
by Dave Vann on May.18, 2011, under Uncategorized
(This post copied from our sister site, USRKBA.org)
Note: USRKBA interviewed former United Nation’s Ambassador John Bolton right after the November elections, last year, and before the ATF Project Gunwalker scandal. As of this writing, Ambassador Bolton remains undecided as to whether or not he’ll run for President.
We recently had a chance to talk with Ambassador Bolton again. That update follows this interview.
USRKBA: The Second Amendment was written more than 200 years ago, how do you view its relevance to the average citizen and the country today?
Ambassador Bolton: Well, I think it remains just as important as when the Founders wrote it. And I think we can see from a lot of recent developments, in terms of safety in our cities and around the country and even in some of the challenges that we face internationally, that the peoples right to keep and bear arms remains a cornerstone of our free society.
USRKBA: When you were the Ambassador to The United Nations you were adamantly opposed to the United States entering into any small-arms treaty. Why?
Ambassador Bolton: The hidden agenda of a lot of the people who sought to negotiate a small arms treaty really, had less to do with reducing dangers internationally and a lot more to do with creating a frame work for gun control statutes at the national level. There was very little doubt, if you looked at the non-governmental organizations that were surrounding the UN and the negotiations they were perusing, some of the language they were trying to introduce into the negotiations, that the international aspects of the whole process were much less significant, from their point of view, than trying to constrain national government. And, specifically, and most importantly, constrain the United States.
USRKBA: Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about how to make airline flights safer, by the Transportation Safety Administration. Do you believe that retired police officers and law-abiding citizens, with concealed carry permits, should be allowed to carry on airplanes?
Ambassador Bolton: I’d have to take a look at that. There are ways in which citizens can participate to help make things safer on the airlines and I think citizens would generally feel safer, for sure, if pilots, who were licensed and approved, were allowed to have firearms in the cockpit. I think a lot would depend on what our Air Marshals think and whether there would be ways to work together on that. But I think all Americans need to be thinking of creative ways to keep air travel safe and to keep travel, in other public transportation systems, busses and trains and the like, safe too.
USRKBA: Recently, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives has come under fire for saying that if plastic toy guns look the same and have plastic parts that look the same as real parts in machine-guns, they should be classified as machine-guns. Given this, plus the fact that the Bureau can declare anything illegal with a simple rule change; would you be in favor of having that part of their authority stripped and any new changes, in the law, subject to the law making authority of the Congress?
Ambassador Bolton: I think what we need to focus on is real weapons not children’s toys and I think there’s been a kind of fascination with this issue over the years that have led to some pretty absurd results, even in dealing with elementary school children. I think the inclination, the bureaucratic inclination, that BATF or any other bureaucracy, is always to expand their authority and I think, really, that’s what Congress should spend more time doing, overseeing agencies like the ATF and clarifying, refining and limiting exactly what their mandates are. Congress spends a lot of time doing a lot of other things besides legislating and I’m hoping, especially when the new Congress comes into office in January that they’ll get back to their real legislative core business.
USRKBA: As you probably already know, the Federal Government has an abundance of Federal Firearms Laws and Regulations, some of the executive branch agencies, like the National Parks and Federal Cemeteries go well beyond the scope of their statutory authority. If you were President, would you support legislation to ensure that the Second Amendment Rights of all citizens are protected on Federal Property and in Federal facilities, not including the courts?
Ambassador Bolton: I think this is a very important area and we’ve seen that it is possible to carry firearms on to National Parks and other National properties and, actually the level of safety has gone up. So I think this is something that really has to have attention paid to it, the people who have tried to restrict the use of the carrying of firearms have really been perusing an agenda that hasn’t seen much review or over-sight in recent years, so I’m hoping that we can change that.
USRKBA: Do you feel that there are any new laws that we need or any laws that we need to get rid of regarding firearms?
Ambassador Bolton: Since the Supreme Court’s decision that made the absolutely critical point that the Second Amendment Right to Keep and Bear Arms is an individual right, it’s not a collective right, for purposes only of the militia, as some people argued over the years, there are a host of state and city and probably still some Federal statutes that, I think, have to be reviewed, in light of this Supreme Court decision and in light of lower court decisions. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done all around the country in that regard.
USRKBA: Would you support a national reciprocity law that would allow anyone with a concealed carry permit in one state to carry in all states?
Ambassador Bolton: I think that’s definitely something to take a look at. I think you’d find a lot of opposition to that in some jurisdictions, but it seems to me that’s the kind of approach that could be very helpful and creative people, who are used to a concealed carry regime, in the state where they live, might find themselves in trouble in another state when they really hadn’t thought that they were doing anything in violation of anybody’s laws. So I think this is worth exploring.
Update 05/11/2011:
USRKBA: With Senator Grassley and Congressman Issa conducting their respective investigations and hearings into Project Gunwalker, do you believe there should be criminal charges brought against the ATF Agents who were responsible for letting the guns enter Mexico, especially in light of the US Federal Agent who was murdered in Mexico?
Ambassador Bolton: I don’t know that there would be criminal liability. I suspect the real responsibility goes a lot higher than ATF Agents. So I think Senator Grassley and Congressman Issa are doing exactly the right thing. This looks to me like the pursuit of an ideological agenda by the Obama Administration to try and prove that the US purchased guns and are arming the drug cartels to give them a basis to try and regulate firearm ownership in the United States. I think it’s outrageous and that’s why I think these investigations are so important.
USRKBA: What about the agents who were actually responsible for actually letting the guns go across the border? Don’t they bear some criminal responsibility in the death of Agent Jaime Zapata and the wounding of Victor Avila?
Ambassador Bolton: I think you have to have an intention there, but more importantly, my guess is that the agents will show that they were merely carrying out the orders from higher up and I hope that the Congressional investigations will trace the orders. Even when gun store owners were saying ‘we’re very worried here’, the order was to continue the program and keep selling the guns. And I think that really demonstrates the ideological basis for what the Obama Administration had ordered.
USRKBA: Regarding the Firearm Owners Protection Act (FOPA), certain states, two of them being New York and New Jersey have been ignoring this Federal Law and arresting law-abiding citizens and confiscating their firearms. Would you be in favor of criminal sanctions against jurisdictions that violate this Federal Law?
Ambassador Bolton: I think the first thing you need is adjudication on whether these various local and state statutes are pre-empted by the Federal Law. As you know, the Obama Administration is very big on pre-emption, if you look at the Arizona Statute and the litigation they brought against it. So, we need to have the pre-emption issue tested. I think the sooner that happens, the better.
USRKBA: That has been tested and FOPA does pre-empt all State and local laws. There seem to be a few bad actors who continually violate the Congressional mandate. In light of that, do you think there should be some punishment for States and localities that continue to violate the law?
Ambassador Bolton: I think one way to look at it would be a damages action against them, not only by citizens who have to go through this but also as a class action. That’s really what gets their attention.
Harry Houdini, meet Justice Breyer
by Dave Vann on Dec.13, 2010, under Uncategorized
Harry Houdini spent a good portion of his career exposing charlatans who said they could communicate with the dead. Were he alive today he would have had a field day with Supreme Court Justice Breyer. On Fox News Sunday (Dec. 12), Breyer made the astounding claim that “….Madison included the Second Amendment to appease the statesâ€.
Breyer continued that, ‘That being the case, and particularly since the Founding Fathers did not foresee how modern day would change individual behavior, government bodies can (emphasis added) impose regulations on guns.’ “Change individual behavior� Really? So, in more than 200 years human behavior has changed? I would ask the Justice exactly how it has changed. Is there no more good and evil in the world or would the Justice have us believe there is only evil, more evil, more good, what, exactly? His argument is specious at best and an affront to all at worst.
These profound (and I use the word with a great deal of sarcasm) words from a learned scholar who sits on the highest court in our land. I cannot imagine what the Justice would do if left to his own devices.
The full interview can be found here:
