An undocumented immigrant fires a gun on a Brooklyn sidewalk to frighten off gang rivals.
He gets arrested on a federal charge of being in the U.S. illegally and possessing a gun. But he claims he has a Second Amendment right that voids the charge.
Now for the clincher: The man, Javier Perez, just may have a case.
Perez, a Mexican national, has filed court papers saying that because the law forbids gun possession “in all places, and for all purposes, it violates that (Second Amendment) individual right on its face.”
Brooklyn federal prosecutors blast the argument. First off, they said, Perez doesn’t have a Second Amendment right because he’s here illegally. And even if he did have constitutional cover, prosecutors maintain the law has legitimate aims on “crime control and public safety.”
So now we officially don’t know anything more than we did six months ago . . .
Paddock acted alone, left no suicide note or manifesto, and police found no evidence that he belonged to or supported any hate group or terrorist organization, domestic or foreign. He had no criminal record, and financially, he was indebted to no one, the investigation found.He killed himself as officers closed in.
“In reference to the 2,000 investigated leads, 22,000 hours of video, 252,000 images obtained and approximately 1,000 served legal processes, nothing was found to indicate motive on the part of Paddock or that he acted with anyone else,” the report states.
The investigation did identify what it called “indicators of intent,” most of which authorities had previously reported.
Those indicators included a room Paddock rented but never checked into in August 2017 that overlooked Lollapalooza, an open-air music festival held in downtown Chicago’s Grant Park.
ATF has released its annual Firearms Commerce in the United States Statistical Update for 2018. As my one friend put it, “Let the nerdery begin.” To be fair, you have to be pretty nerdy to enjoy this stuff, hence me writing about it.
The Annual Firearms Manufacturing and Exportation Report (AFMER) is only current through 2016. This is because AFMER data is not published until one year after the close of a calendar reporting year because the information provided by those who filed a report is protected from immediate disclosure by the Trade Secrets Act. Which is why you see a two year lag (2016 data reporting in the beginning of 2017 and a year delay between its reporting and publication).
In 2016, there were a total of 11,497,441 firearms manufactured. This was up from 2015’s number of 9,358,661 by about 20%. The number of exports was up from the previous year by about 9%, from 343,456 in 2015 to 376,818 in 2016.
Nothing beats the military procurement process for speed and efficiency . . .
The U.S. Army has restarted a program to evaluate various 9mm submachine guns just weeks after canceling it to reexamine the requirements. The service says it could end up ordering as many as 1,000 of these “Sub Compact Weapons,” or SCWs, to give personal security details extra firepower they can carry concealed when they guard senior officials in high-risk areas.
On July 26, 2018, the Army’s Product Manager for Individual Weapons office at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey re-announced the SCW project and stated it had plans to award contracts to up to six potential contractors. Any firm the Army selects will have to submit 15 examples of their weapon for evaluation, along with three suppressors, various magazines, any necessary special tools, and spare parts. The service had first gone looking for suitable weapons in May 2018, but scrapped those plans earlier in July 2018 to reassess its needs.
I’m no NRA superfan, but this is kind of a weird over-reach. It’s a generic legal argument that *if these laws exist* the NRA’s fundraising system is ineffective. It’s not like it’s on the brink of disaster. https://t.co/mqysBIGbvi
Oh look. Rolling Stone concocted some #fakenews wishful thinking about the imminent demise of the NRA . . .
The National Rifle Association warns that it is in grave financial jeopardy, according to a recent court filing obtained by Rolling Stone, and that it could soon “be unable to exist… or pursue its advocacy mission.” (Read the NRA’s legal complaint at the bottom of this story.)
The reason, according to the NRA filing, is not its deep entanglement with alleged Russian agents like Maria Butina. Instead, the gun group has been suing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state’s financial regulators since May, claiming the NRA has been subject to a state-led “blacklisting campaign” that has inflicted “tens of millions of dollars in damages.”
