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crime and punishment Second Amendment rights social media

A Gun with His Name On It

An “X” post by a Trump spokesperson implicated the former president in a crime.

What followed implicates the U.S. Government in something far worse.

But first, to clarify:

  1. By “X” I mean “Twitter.” Remember, Elon Musk changed the name of his social media company.
  2. By “Trump” I mean, of course, Donald John Trump, former president of the United States running the same office, a man surrounded by armed guards at all times.
  3. By “crime” I mean an infraction of federal law, not a willful abuse of someone’s rights at common law. 
  4. The crime in question is the act of receiving “any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce” by a person “under indictment . . . a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.” Trump’s been indicted quite a number of times, recently, and therefore isn’t legally allowed to buy a gun.

The initial tweet said Trump admired a Glock that had his name stamped on it. It was the “Donald Trump edition,” gold-colored, retailing for under a thousand bucks. Trump’s on video saying he wants one of these handguns.

When X went all a-twitter with the implications, spokesman Steven Cheung took down his post and the campaign issued a corrective: “President Trump did not purchase or take possession of the firearm. He simply indicated that he wanted one.” 

This is all explained by Jacob Sullum at Reason, who goes on to indicate that the law makes no real sense. The obvious absurdity of not allowing a well-guarded presidential candidate to guard himself with gun of any kind, that’s one thing. Flouting the Second Amendment by prohibiting the innocent, i.e. not yet proven guilty, from bearing arms, looks far worse — a policy of rights suppression.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Corrigendum notice: a correction was made late on the date of publication [Trump is not a “Jr.,” as originally stated].

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crime and punishment general freedom Second Amendment rights

Balking at the Ban

Key Albuquerque officials won’t enforce the New Mexico governor’s recent order.

At a press conference last Friday, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham had vowed to suspend the right to publicly carry firearms “in any public space” in the Albuquerque area. The temporary order, declared in response to recent shootings, was justified by the governor as an “emergency health measure.”

The response has been far from uniformly positive. In addition to officials balking, a gun-rights group, National Association for Gun Rights, is suing to block the order. And there has been talk of impeaching the governor. There was even an armed protest.

The governor is either unaware or heedless of the possibility that bad people with guns can be stopped by good people with guns — a lesson that would-be robbers belatedly learned in Maryland a couple weeks ago when they failed to rob a pub full of police officers. (They had missed the cop-bar scene in Code of Silence.) Violent criminals in the area, for their part, have somehow not agreed to defer their activities for a month in deference to her wishful thinking, however.

Officials who say they won’t cooperate with the governor’s aggressive power grab include Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, Police Chief Harold Medina, and Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman.

Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen says he is wary of the risks “posed by prohibiting law-abiding citizens from their constitutional right to self-defense.”

District Attorney Bregman says, “As an officer of the court, I cannot and will not enforce something that is clearly unconstitutional.” 

Thus raising a standard to which people in positions of authority should repair much more often than they do.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability crime and punishment Fashion property rights Second Amendment rights

Don’t Make It Easy

Rachel Rogers and Jennifer Ferguson, employees at a Lululemon in Georgia, were fired for neglecting to stand by mutely during a robbery and for then calling 911.

“They’re just full-blown, like, running circles around you grabbing as much as they can,” Rogers told WSBTV. “So, our reaction is to scream, ‘No! Get out! Leave!’ ”

The two employees called the police. The same thieves were caught when trying to rob another Lululemon store in the area the next day, perhaps because police were on the alert.

But two weeks later, Rogers and Ferguson were fired, without severance pay, for violating the retail chain’s policy of zero tolerance for calling 911 to report a robbery.

“We are not supposed to get in the way. You kind of clear path for whatever they’re going to do,” Ferguson said. “We’ve been told not to put it in any notes, because that might scare other people. We’re not supposed to call the police, not really supposed to talk about it.”

In a post blasting the company, Jennifer’s husband, Jason Ferguson, observed: “If we, citizens of the community, allow criminal activity to go unchecked, that is tacit approval for them to continue their ways.”

And how long can we hold onto our belongings and our civilization if we meekly usher in the Visigoths and Vandals and tell them go ahead, take whatever you want, we won’t try to stop you or even call the cops after it’s all over?

A lot of people, including higher-ups at Lululemon, have forgotten that property rights are at the foundation of civilization.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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partisanship Regulating Protest Second Amendment rights

Partisanship & Pretense

Protest is a tricky business. 

Had those in power their druthers, no protest would be allowed. Had those out of power their way, all their demands would be met.

I’d say the necessary middle ground lies in the rule of law.

Did the recent Tennessee legislature’s reaction to three legislators who broke House rules follow the law?

Not according to The Washington Post, which provided the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” spin in the headline: “Tennessee House expels two Democrats in historic act of partisan retaliation.”

In the wake of the shooting at the Covenant School in late March, with its death toll of six, “activists descended on the Tennessee Capitol and demanded that lawmakers pass gun-control legislation. Republicans, with supermajorities in both chambers, refused to do so. The three lawmakers — dubbed the Tennessee Three — said they joined the protests inside the legislative chamber to speak out for Tennesseans whose voices have been ignored.”

But what they did is disrupt the proceedings of the legislature. Noisily. Angrily. Not-very-reasonably.

While it’s true that the votes to remove two of the three offending members were along partisan lines, it’s also true that all three offending members were unified by party.

But only two were removed from the legislature. Both are black, and the woman not removed is white. So of course the big issue for many became racism.

She escaped expulsion by one vote.

Was that vote racist?

Well, the two who were ousted used bullhorns within the legislative chamber. She did not.

That does seem an extra-outrageous breach of decorum.

Of course, the whole idea of legislators jumping sides to pretend they are “voiceless” protesters is itself absurd, making the issue here neither partisanship nor racism.

It’s a question of posturing and pretense.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


Note: After his expulsion last week, the Nashville-Davidson Metro Council yesterday voted to return Rep. Justin Jones to the state legislature on an interim basis. A special election will be held to fill the seat in the coming months.

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Concealed Carry and the Careful Criminal

Crime is the most basic of problems. But across the political spectrum we see different strategies. 

On the right, the go-to solution has always been to ramp up policing, to make the basic function of the state — crime-fighting — stronger and more effective

On the left, a leading idea has been to disarm the populace so people cannot do as much harm, and also to “rehabilitate” troubled folks with government TLC.

I grew up in the ’70s, when the failures of benevolent leftism (which we called “liberalism”) were becoming clear. So there was a reaction: Lock more people up.

That reaction fizzled in recent years, and, perhaps not wholly coincidentally, crime on a city-by-city case, as well as nationally, has increased. 

Nevertheless, during this period another policy has gained a huge momentum: instead of disarming the populace, arm them!

How’s that going? The most recent case study is in Maine, which in 2015 allowed permit-less concealed carry of firearms.

“While rates of violent crime increased nationally from 2015 to 2020,” writes Steve Robinson in “Maine Crime Fell Following 2015 Repeal of Gun Control Law” (MaineWire, December 29, 2022), “the rate of violent crime in Maine fell steadily beginning in 2015, after a slight increase from 2014 to 2015, according to data collected by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program.”

Robinson notes that while the Maine experience doesn’t prove that “an armed society is a polite society,” it falsifies, quite clearly, the catastrophic predictions made by gun control advocates back in 2015.

I hazard it does much more. It shows that distributed power (in this case, firepower and defensive capacity) in the peaceful population is a separate, non-left/non-right solution to the age-old problem of crime.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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general freedom Second Amendment rights too much government

The Gun-Toting Ruling Class

How to tell if you are part of the favored ruling class? If it is easy for you, but not most others, to obtain a concealed carry permit in your gun-controlling state.

It’s extremely difficult to carry firearms for protection in states like Illinois, California, New Jersey and New York — except for certain Very Special Persons — rich enough or connected enough for special treatment.

Thankfully, the judicial system — which has the benefit of various guiding principles from a long-gone time when the rulers wore red coats — is disallowing some of the nonsense.

Still, it’s a struggle to “de-class-ify” Second Amendment rights — that is, take gun rights from being a class issue favoring the rich and famous and allowing all peaceful citizens legal access to firearms.

“Two weeks ago, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against many of the restrictions on public possession of guns that New York imposed after the Supreme Court upheld the right to bear arms last June,” writes Jacob Sullum in Reason. “Unfazed by that warning, New Jersey legislators this week advanced a strikingly similar bill that includes a subjective standard for issuing carry permits and sweeping, location-specific restrictions that make it legally perilous even for permit holders to leave home with guns.”

Politicians in these blue states remain resolute: they aim to unconstitutionally restrict access to guns. They strongly resist the current individualistic (as opposed to class-based) trend in judicial interpretation of the Second Amendment. 

Their idea seems to be: guns for us, but not for them.

And we’re the Them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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