The Supreme Court announced today that it will decide, in McDonald v. Chicago, whether the Second Amendment applies to state and local gun laws. That puts the focus on the Court’s newest Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, and on President Obama’s future picks for the Court.

Gun owners were alarmed by Sotomayor’s nomination to the Court, because of her “extreme anti-gun philosophy” and record on the Second Circuit, in the words of former NRA president Sandy Froman. At her Senate hearing this summer, Sotomayor defended that record by saying that her hands were tied by old Supreme Court precedent. Now that she’s on the High Court, her hands are no longer tied. She will have a lot of explaining to do if she decides in McDonald that the right to keep and bear arms is the only significant right in the Bill of Rights that doesn’t apply to the states. Such a decision would indicate that she was not serious when she promised the Senate that she would put the rule of law above ideology.

Today’s announcement ensures that gun owners will continue to play a big role in Supreme Court confirmations, just as they did this summer. The Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, recognizing the Second Amendment as an individual right, moved the battle over gun rights from the legislatures to the courts. That set the stage for gun owners to enter the judicial wars. The decision to review McDonald puts the future of gun rights back squarely in the Supreme Court, reinforcing the conviction among gun owners that their fate is now in the hands of judges and that their continued involvement in the judicial confirmation process is vital.

Whatever the Supreme Court’s decision in McDonald, it will further focus the Second Amendment community on the needs for constitutionalist judges. Heller was limited to federal gun laws and the District of Columbia, but most of the laws that worry gun owners are at the state and local level. If the McDonald decision recognizes an individual Second Amendment right at that level, the number of gun rights cases – and thus the importance of the judges issue to gun owners – will explode. Should the Supreme Court rule the other way in McDonald, the anger of gun owners will be a force to reckon with every time there’s a Supreme Court nomination.

Cross-posted at the Committee for Justice blog.

This is extremely important.

I need you on the phone right now. Tomorrow, July 22nd, the Senate will vote on John Thune’s Concealed Carry Reciprocity Amendment.

The amendment will be filed as part of the hate crimes legislation. The amendment will be fined as part of the Defense Authorization Bill, but will impact the hate crimes legislation.

The amendment, should it pass, would allow citizens with concealed carry permits in one state to continue carrying their guns into other states that also have concealed carry gun permit laws.

It looks like the hate crimes legislation is going to pass. We should be working to make it better.

Please click here to find your United States Senator. Call now and ask him to support the Thune Concealed Carry Reciprocity Amendment.

Call now. Time is of the essence.

While a little late and lacking an official position against her, the National Rifle Association has expressed its “very strong concerns” with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court.

In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and Republican Ranking Member Jeff Sessions, the NRA used particularly harsh language for an organization often hesitant - to say the least - to appear partisan. To wit:

But the organization’s letter is far from partisan - rather, it focused intently on Judge Sotomayor’s dismal record regarding, and lack of respect for, the Second Amendment and the right of American citizens to keep and bear arms.

Democrats in Congress would have Americans believe that they have largely given up on their attempts to restrict the right of law-abiding Americans to keep and bear arms. Barack Obama tried to fudge questions on gun control during the campaign, but has nominated to the Supreme Court a judge whose radical view of the Second Amendment is that states and localities have the right to ban firearms if they so choose.

And now Congressman Dan Boren speaks to the NRA about his commitment to defending the right to keep and bear arms, despite the efforts of left wingers in Congress to take guns away:

It’s gratifying that a Democrat is willing to step up and tell the truth about the ‘unfavorable political climate’ in Washington, and the desire of the ‘political fringe’ to ban guns, and reinstitute gun control measures in general. Hopefully Boren will vote the way he talks.

And while liberals frequently paint Boren as a conservative extremist, National Journal ranks him quite close to the center of the House of Representatives. They rate him as the 197th most conservative Member of the 435 in the House - hardly a right winger. If a moderate like Boren is wary of the aims of gun control advocates in Congress, believers in the Second Amendment ought to be as well.

From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, an AP report that Congress has voted to allow licensed gun owners to carry loaded firearms in national parks and wildlife refuges. The bill easily passed Wednesday in the House by a vote 279-147. On Tuesday, the Senate passed a similar measure.

The House and Senate votes mark a return to Bush administration policy that briefly allowed loaded guns in national parks before being set aside by a federal judge in March. The measure was included as a rider on a bill which imposes additional restrictions on credit-card companies. The newly-restored right to carry in national parks and wildlife refuges only applies where it is also permitted by state law.

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Once again The New York Times unleashes a not-so-hidden agenda on its reading public. Here the Times is regurgitating the debunked claim that “90%” of Mexico’s recovered guns used in crime south of the border are from U.S. gun dealers. There is a lot of misdirection in this piece against gun dealers and gun shows, as well. Contradictory claims are made with no proof offered but the say so of The Times.

The Times begins its tall tale by talking about Mexican gun smugglers that find it easy to buy “military style” weapons at U.S. gun shops to be smuggled into Mexico. The story talks of these “lightly regulated” gun dealers and blames them for the smuggling apparently because no records are kept or buyer’s identities ascertained. And near the top half of the story is the debunked “90%” claim.

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Wait a minute Mom. Don’t let little Johnny go to his buddy Tommy’s house. Tommy’s parents are psychos that own — **gasp** — GUNS! This is the message that ABC is telling parents in an April 10 piece headlined, “Before Arranging Playdates, Ask About Guns.”

Here ABC attempts to make every gun owner seem like a lunatic just ready to blow and encourages parents to be deathly afraid of anyone that owns a gun. It encourages parents to pry into the lives of family members of their kid’s friends and bases it all on the lies passed off as scary gun violence statistics.

Naturally, ABC’s back up for this anti-gun screed is by a supposedly “non partisan” anti-gun group called PAX USA, an organization with board and advisory councils filled with left-wing Hollywood actors such as Richard Belzer, Tim Robbins, and Rob Reiner among many others.

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The assignment for Central Connecticut State University student John Walberg and his two classmates was to give an oral presentation on a “relevant issue in the media.” The three chose school violence for their topic.

After the oral presentation was over, professor Paula Anderson of Communication 140, promptly filed a complaint with the CCSU Police against student Wahlberg claiming he made students “scared and uncomfortable.” Professor Anderson deemed Wahlberg a “perceived risk” and felt it was her duty to “protect” her class.

What did the young man say in his oral assignment that was so threatening? Shockingly, Wahlberg had the temerity to discuss concealed carry laws, guns on campus in the hands of law abiding students, and the problems with the concept of a “gun free zone.” He was gauche enough to have posited that if students and/or professors had legal guns on their persons in 2007 the death toll in the Virginia Tech shooting spree could have been much lower.

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MSNBC took the occasion of a triple homicide on Chicago’s south side to push its own anti-”assault rifle” meme on February 27 by including the words “assault rifle” in the headline of its story on the incident. No other media source, however, took this unusual step. So, here we have some old fashioned bias by MSNBC.

MSNBC’s version of the story clumsily screams “Man charged in assault rifle killings of 3 teens” over the top of its AP wire feed. Yet, while every story in the news and certainly every AP story mentions that the killer used an “assault rifle,” only MSNBC put the words in the headline. This befits MSNBC’s anti-gun agenda, presumably.

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Her dig at George W. Bush notwithstanding, it is clear that Nancy Pelosi’s veto of any prospect of reviving the assault weapons ban that Eric Holder and the Obama Administration want, demonstrates that despite the election, Second Amendment rights are still very much on the march. This little incident shows a great deal; we see that Congressional Democrats are very much aware of lines that they ought not to cross and that the Obama Administration should not cross, and that the Attorney-General and the Administration did nothing by way of consulting with Congressional Democrats before coming out in favor of the assault weapons ban.

Political clumsiness + a misreading of the sociopolitical situation = potential trouble down the line for the Obama Administration. The Speaker may have pulled them back from a misstep in this particular case, but the Administration’s (pardon the pun) jumping-of-the-gun signals that there could be serious political missteps in the offing.

Kudos to Senators John Ensign (R-NV), John Thune (R-SD), Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Jim DeMint (R-SC) for using the bill to provide a vote in the House of Representatives to the District of Columbia to force votes today on expanding gun rights and trashing the idea of the federal government regulating the radio airwaves.  These senators used an unconstitutional bill to essentially treat the District of Columbia as a state to force votes on guns and free speech.

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Seriously, do the kindly folks at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s editorial board even know what the definition of the word logic is? In theirs headlined, “Hysteria fuels sales of guns and ammo,” the Sun-Sentinel takes Floridians to task for being so stupid as to be afraid of Obama’s gun banning plans, claiming that Obama “didn’t do it.” But, even after telling readers no one wants to ban guns, the piece ends with the Sun-Sentinel editorial board advocating for the banning of guns! So the message is, no one wants a gun ban but we should ban guns? This is the sort of logical disconnect that fuels the very “hysteria” that the paper is claiming to want to dispel.

And this ridiculous about face isn’t the only illogical idea or uninformed claim the piece makes, either. Just about every word in this piece proves that the editorial board of the Sun-Sentinel is wholly uninformed about the Constitution and the technical aspects of firearms, not to mention being uninformed about the various gun banning bills floating about Congress and the several states at this very moment.

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Want a gun in Illinois? Fine. Then you’ll be forced to carry an expensive, million dollar insurance policy to be “allowed” to observe your Second Amendment right. At least, that will be the law if lefty gun-banner Kenneth Dunkin has any say in the matter.

Dunkin (D, Chicago) has made this attempt to undermine the Second Amendment even worse than a mere “insurance” policy. He has also slipped into this unConstitutional morass a provision that says gun owners will be liable if their gun is used in a crime after it has been stolen from them. The bill also authorizes the State Police to confiscate the firearm owner’s ID (FOID) from any citizen that doesn’t comply with purchasing the hefty insurance policy.

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The Senate Judiciary Committee hours ago voted 17-2 to approve the nomination of Eric Holder to be the next Attorney General.  A floor vote on his nomination is expected for next week.   The only two Conservative stalwarts voted no: John Cornyn (R-TX); and Tom Coburn (R-OK).  Eric Holder, former Deputy Attorney General for President Bill Clinton, has taken actions that disqualify him from Senate consent to be the next Attorney General of the United States.

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The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the federal appeals court sitting in Manhattan, rejected this morning a legal challenge by an attorney convicted on Long Island of possession of nunchaku, or chuka sticks, who argued that the Second Amendment protects his right to bear these traditional Okinawan weapons.

The court’s decision, however, did not address whether the Second Amendment protects a right to have nunchaku in your home, as it instead disposed of the legal challenge on the considerably more significant grounds that the Second Amendment is not “incorporated” as a restriction on state government by the Fourteenth Amendment:

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