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Photo Members of a militia at Charlottesville, Va. Credit Joshua Roberts/Reuters

When militia members and white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Va., last Saturday with Nazi flags and racist placards, many of them also carried firearms openly, including semiautomatic weapons. They came to intimidate and terrify protesters and the police. If you read reports of the physical attacks they abetted, apparently their plan worked.

They might try to rationalize their conduct as protected by the First and Second Amendments, but lets not be fooled. Those who came to Charlottesville openly carrying firearms were neither conveying a nonviolent political message, nor engaged in self-defense nor protecting hearth and home.

Plain and simple, public terror is not protected under the Constitution. That has been the case throughout history. And now is the time to look to that history and prohibit open carry, before the next Charlottesville.

Historically, lawmakers have deemed open carry a threat to public safety. Under English common law, a group of armed protesters constituted a riot, and some American colonies prohibited public carry specifically because it caused public terror. During Reconstruction, the military governments overseeing much of the South responded to racially motivated terror (including the murder of dozens of freedmen and Republicans at the 1866 Louisiana Constitutional Convention) by prohibiting public carry either generally or at political gatherings and polling places. Later, in 1886, a Supreme Court decision, Presser v. Illinois, upheld a law forbidding groups of men to parade with arms in cities and towns unless authorized. For states, such a law was necessary to the public peace, safety and good order.

In other words, our political forebears would not have tolerated open carry as racially motivated terrorists practiced it in Charlottesville. They did not view open carry as protected speech. According to the framers, the First Amendment protected the right to peaceably not violently or threateningly assemble. The Second Amendment did not protect private paramilitary organizations or an individual menacingly carrying a loaded weapon. Open carry was antithetical to the public peace. Lawmakers were not about to let people take the law into their own hands, so they proactively and explicitly prohibited it.

Read the rest here:
Ban the Open Carry of Firearms - New York Times

Press release:

Congressman Chris Collins response to the Union-Sun & Journal's recent editorial (Aug. 11):

My bill would restore New Yorkers Second Amendment rights and doesnt supersede states rights.

I do believe in States' rights, the need for local control and the 10th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing state rights. However, I want your readers to know my steadfast belief that states like New York should not have the ability to take away the Constitutional rights of their citizens. Under no circumstances should these basic rights be denied, and federal action is warranted in a situation where a state is infringing on the rights of any American.

The Constitution is the law of the land, and the Founding Fathers produced a document with a clear vision regarding Second Amendment rights. The Second Amendment can only be interpreted one way, and that is it guarantees that Americans have the right to own a firearm.

My proposed legislation, the Second Amendment Guarantee Act (SAGA), has sparked a needed conversation about the Second Amendment rights granted to Americans in the Constitution. In 2013, Gov. Andrew Cuomos Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (SAFE) Act infringed upon the rights of law-abiding New Yorkers by instituting strict rifle and shotgun regulations. As you pointed out, these regulations were put in place purely for political purposes.

SAGA focuses specifically on protecting Second Amendment rights, and in no way is taking away the rights of states. When a state crosses the line and starts to implement regulations that are in stark contrast to the basic rights given to Americans, action needs to be taken. That is exactly why I am proposing my law to rein in the unconstitutional policies that Cuomo forced into law.

Cuomo overstepped with the SAFE Act, and my proposal to repeal much of the law has had a great deal of support. SAGA isnt hypocritical; it is a sincere effort to bring back the freedoms given to New Yorkers by our Constitution when it comes to owning a firearm. Law abiding citizens should not be punished because of onerous and unconstitutional state regulations.

It is my duty as an elected representative to make sure my constituents are protected, and that includes protecting the basic rights granted to them in the Constitution. The SAFE Act only curbed the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding New Yorkers, instead of providing them with a safer place to live as promised by the governor.

The SAFE Act has done nothing to help our communities and has only taken away our freedoms. It is time we end this disastrous law for all New Yorkers and revert back to what the Founding Fathers intended for our nation.

See related: Collins proposes new measures for protecting Second Amendment rights

Read more from the original source:
Second Amendment - Wyoming County Free Press

ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said, If a protest group insists, No, we want to be able to carry loaded firearms, well, we dont have to represent them. They can find someone else.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the policy shift that Romero highlighted is focused on hate groups, which are listed as white nationalists and neo-Nazis. Romero did not say whether ACLU protection would also be denied to Black Panther protesters who are armed or to communist party members who could rally for the left while armed.

The policy shift comes after the ACLUs Virginia branch helped organizers of the Unite the Rightprotest secure a permit to assemble in a Charlottesville park [on August 12]. When the city of Charlottesville pushed to move the protest away from the park, the ACLU stood by protest organizer Jason Kessler and won the day.

On August 15,Breitbart News pointed to Southern Policy Law Center (SPLC) reports that Kessler is rumored to be aformer Occupy Wall Street activist and supporter of former President Barack Obama.

According to SPLC:

Rumors abound on white nationalist forums that Kesslers ideological pedigree before 2016 was less than pure and seem to point to involvement in the Occupy movement and past support for President Obama.

At one recent speech in favor of Charlottesvilles status as a sanctuary city, Kessler live-streamed himself as an attendee questioned him and apologized for an undisclosed spat during Kesslers apparent involvement with Occupy. Kessler appeared visibly perturbed by the womans presence and reminders of their past association.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host ofBullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter:@AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.

P.S. DO YOU WANT MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS ONE DELIVERED RIGHT TO YOUR INBOX?SIGN UP FOR THE DAILY BREITBART NEWSLETTER.

Read the original here:
ACLU Refuses to Defend Protesters Exercising First and Second Amendments Together - Breitbart News

These guys aren't law enforcement. Is this about to become normal?

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

With more white nationalist rallies planned in the coming weeks, including one this upcoming Saturday in Boston, cities across the country may soon be looking for ways to try to prevent the sort of violence that took place last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Bostons Mayor Martin Walsh is reportedly looking into legal grounds to stop the next alt-right rally from happening in his city. Those rallygoers are permitted, though, and have a First Amendment right to peaceably assemble.

Peaceablyis the key word there, however. The white supremacists who showed up in Charlottesville were reportedly armed to the teeth. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe claimed his state police were outgunned on Saturday, while one white nationalist leader showed off his firepower in a popular Vice News documentary about the weekends events. Another rallygoer in that videoclad in camouflageseemed to be warning police that he planned to send at least 200 people with guns to gather equipment that was at the site of the rally. Heavily armed paramilitary groups barely distinguishable in appearance from law enforcement officials, meanwhile, made their own show of force in Charlottesville, saying they were there to keep the peace between white nationalist rallygoers and counter-protesters.

As my Slate colleagues Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern reported on Monday, those trying to exercise First Amendment rights clashed with those claiming to exercise Second Amendment rightsincluding Virginias open-carry lawsin Charlottesville, and the guns won. Current constitutional doctrine, they argued, is poorly equipped to handle a situation where one heavily armed group of assemblers is able to silence with their weaponry the free speech rights of a different group of would-be assemblers.

But University of Virginia professor Philip Zelikow argues that the Constitution does allow for restricting armed rallies. Writing in Lawfare, Zelikow notes that there is precedent for preventing groups of heavily armed white supremacists from gathering in intimidating mass assemblies:

The judge granted their request, the order worked, and the group was enjoined from displays of intimidation.

Reading a description of one white supremacist group in Charlottesville by BuzzFeed News reporter Blake Montgomery, its hard not to think of that standard for an illegal paramilitary gathering:

In his article, Zelikow went onto write that, while the Second Amendment guarantees a right to a well-regulated militia, federal courts have held that private militias do not have the right to free reign.

When private self-styled militias get organized, equipped to fight, and travel to my town for a confrontation, this is not a Second Amendment story, Zelikow told me over email. They are organized to violate civil rights and intimidate my townspeople, to show their strength not with their speech, but with their firepower.

Zelikow argues that towns and citizens have the right to sue and enjoin such heavily armed organized groups from staging such rallies. He also suggests that rallygoers like the ones in Charlottesvilleas well as some of the counter-protestersmight have fit the standard for such an injunction. [T]here were a number of clusters that deployed together with standardized dress (to recognize each other), standardized insignia, similar combat/riot gear, and similar classes of weapons, Zelikow, who worked in multiple prior presidential administrations, said over email. Not incidentally, the Antifa [anti-fascist] group also has some standardized identifiers (red neckerchiefs, for example), deploys together in an obviously coordinated way, and carried assault weapons.

(At least one leftist group was reported to have showed up armed with guns.)

Ultimately, Zelikow compares the appearance of these sorts of heavily armed groups asserting the right to mass public assembly to darker periods in world and U.S. history:

The coming weeks seem likely to continue to test that line between protected assembly and unprotected civil violence. The ability of civil authorities to respond when that line is crossed also seems likely to face some very serious challenges.

See more here:
Is There a Way to Prevent the Next Charlottesville? - Slate Magazine (blog)

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Wednesday, August 16, 2017, 12:27 PM

The armed encampment formerly known as the idyllic college town of Charlottesville showed the world what a gun-happy nation looks like: a toxic mix of armed white supremacist alt-right Neo-Nazis and KKK members protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, counter-demonstrators, some of whom were armed, Charlottesville police, Virginia state National Guard and other so-called militias private citizens armed and outfitted in military garb who claimed to be there to keep the peace.

This confrontation revealed two epic American blunders: the idea that arming hostile groups somehow improves public safety, and the parallel notion that so-called private militias are a legitimate expression of Second Amendment rights.

To its detriment, Virginias lax gun laws allow for open civilian gun carrying and easy gun access to virtually any kind of hand-held firearm, including assault weapons. While Virginias law enforcement has been criticized for not intervening more effectively between the opposing groups, the situation was only complicated by the presence of self-styled militias, including representatives from the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia, who claimed to be there not to take sides-although they were initially invited by the white supremacists but to help keep the peace (although theres no evidence they did anything of the kind).

According to a typical news account, these unofficial paramilitary groups . . . have long thrived across America due to the second amendments directive: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

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America and the rest of the world need to know that this is false: the Second Amendments right to bear arms does not protect, much less encourage, private citizens to form their own armed para-military groups.

From the colonial era on, Americans organized as militias did so and sought to do so-under the recognition and control of the state or national governments. The Bill of Rights had just been ratified when Congress enacted the Uniform Militia Act of 1792, a law designed to bring greater uniformity and control to the nations militias, which at the time were central to national defense.

In a little-known Supreme Court case from 1886, Presser vs. Illinois, the court made clear why private militias are not, and cannot be, militias under law. In ruling against the right of an armed paramilitary group to march in Chicago, the court explained that Military organization and military drill and parade under arms are subjects especially under the control of the government. . . . They cannot be claimed as a right independent of law.

To deny the government the right to restrict or outlaw such private groups would be tantamount to denying the government the right to disperse assemblages organized for sedition and treason, and the right to suppress armed mobs bent on riot and rapine (looting).

Trumps America is an alien nation

As the court said then, the only legal militia is the National Guard. That is no less true today.

Every state in the union, including Virginia, has laws against private armies, but law enforcement is often reluctant to press the matter with armed private militias for fear of provoking an armed response. And when anyone can carry guns openly, law enforcement finds itself boxed in.

Too bad that Virginia has missed the lesson of Americas actual gun law past: by the end of the 19th century, every state but four had enacted laws to restrict civilian gun carrying, especially in the cities and towns of the old West. The best way to keep trouble from escalating, they knew, was to require everyone entering town to surrender their firearms, to be retrieved only when they left.

In the upside down world of todays gun laws, at a time of record low crime, places like Virginia seem to say the opposite: bring your guns! Carry them openly!

Our countrys forebears knew that hostilities could only be made worse when antagonists were armed, and that law enforcement was best left to the professionals. And as for private militias, if they really want to serve their country, the National Guard is still taking applications.

Spitzer is distinguished service professor and chair of political science at SUNY Cortland, and the author of five books on gun policy, including Guns Across America.

Original post:
Armed private militias like Charlottesville's offend the Founding Fathers' intent: This is not what the Second ... - New York Daily News