Colorado Sheriffs Launch Challenge to Magazine and Private Transfer Ban

Good for these Colorado Sheriffs not laying down and taking the Constitution bashing Colorado government's anti-gun laws without a fight. From the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA).

While anti-gun legislation rarely comes as a surprise in the Northeast, anti-gun activists were especially proud to pass New York-style gun control in Colorado. What they may not have counted on was determined opposition in the courts—led by most of the state’s top elected law enforcement officials.

On May 17, 54 of 64 Colorado county sheriffs, joined by several other groups representing gun owners, filed a complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief to halt the enforcement of HB 1224, a ban on magazines holding more than 15 rounds, and HB 1229, which restricts the ways in which gun owners may lawfully transfer firearms. Signed into law by Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) on March 20, the laws are set to take effect on July 1. NRA counsel is providing assistance to our fellow gun rights advocates and working on behalf of the rights of the disabled plaintiffs.

HB 1224 bans the sale and transfer after July 1 of magazines capable of holding more than 15 rounds of ammunition. Complicating matters is the problematic wording of the law, which can be interpreted to ensnare nearly all magazines—even those permanently attached to a firearm. The legislation prohibits any magazine that is “designed to be readily converted” to a capacity greater than 15.

The complaint points out that those familiar with magazine construction understand that most magazines on the market are made with removable floorplates, allowing for the owner to maintain or clean the magazine. However, this could also allow the attachment of aftermarket or homemade parts that might increase the capacity of a magazine to more than 15 rounds, potentially making the majority of magazines on the market illegal under Colorado law. (The complaint notes that Gov. Hickenlooper and the chief sponsor of the legislation support this interpretation.)

The complaint also takes issue with HB 1224’s requirement that all magazines with a capacity greater than 15 rounds be under the “continuous possession” of the person who possessed them before July 1. As the complaint points out, this “makes it impossible for firearms to be used or shared in ordinary and innocent ways, such as a gun owner loaning his or her firearm with the magazine to a spouse, family member, or friend; entrusting it to a gunsmith for repair; [or] a military reservist leaving firearms and their associated magazines with a spouse when he or she is called into service away from home.”

The complaint makes clear that HB 1224’s ban on magazines with a capacity greater than 15 rounds is a violation of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The complaint notes that the landmark Heller decision protects the ownership of firearms “in common use at the time.” Magazines capable of accepting more than 15 rounds, and magazines that are constructed with detachable floorplates, are unquestionably common today. As the complaint points out, “By outlawing the larger and smaller magazines which are necessary components of the large majority of handguns and of a very large number of rifles. HB 1224 is a gun ban even more sweeping than the handgun-only ban which was ruled unconstitutional in Heller.”

Also under attack is HB 1224’s provision banning magazines “designed to be readily convertible” to hold more than 15 rounds. This provision is unconstitutionally vague under the Fourteenth Amendment, because individual plaintiffs “cannot possibly know the intent of the designers of all magazines for the firearms which Plaintiffs own,” and sheriffs “have no means to determine the intent of magazine designers” in order to enforce the law.

As in the New York suit, the Colorado plaintiffs include a pair of disabled citizens, whose disabilities force them to face the burdens of the magazine ban. Unable to manage a magazine change as quickly as an able-bodied person, these plaintiffs rely on larger-capacity magazines for their self-defense. The complaint argues that under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, states are prohibited from engaging in discrimination against the disabled. Thus, as the burdens of the new law fall inordinately on the disabled by limiting the meaningful exercise of their right to self-defense, HB 1224 should be struck down as a violation of federal law.

Meanwhile, HB 1229—the private sales ban—presents its own set of problems. The complaint points out that one category of gun laws the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed “presumptively constitutional” are laws “imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of firearms.” But HB 1229 bars non-commercial transfers such as loans for hunting or self-defense and requires that other temporary transfers last no longer than 72 hours. Making this restriction even more problematic, as the complaint notes, is that the wait time for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to conduct background checks for firearm transfers has stretched at some points to several days or even longer, leaving some residents with no opportunity to immediately acquire the means for self-defense.

Harry Reid's Friends - Birds of a Feather,........

From a Tea Party News Network (TPNN) artivcle by Greg Campbell a few weeks ago with the headlines: "Nevada Developer Found Guilty for Illegal Campaign Contributions to Harry Reid"

http://www.tpnn.com/breaking-nevada-developer-found-guilty-for-illegal-campaign-contributions-to-harry-reid/

Harvey Whittemore, a Reno, Nevada, businessman has been found guilty on three counts of making illegal campaign contributions to Nevada Senator and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Whittemore, who maintains powerful political connections, has made a fortune from land development and it has been widely speculated that his land dealings have been greatly aided by political connections.

Whittemore has been found guilty on three of the four counts concerning unlawfully funneling more than $133,000 in campaign contributions to Sen. Reid. The jury has deadlocked on the fourth count. Jurors have told the judge that they have been unable to reach an agreement on whether or not the power broker willfully lied to the FBI. The jury sent a note to U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks, saying, “Judge Hicks, We have three counts resolved and one count we are deadlocked on. Even after a lengthy discussion we cannot resolve. How should we proceed?”

The judge has sent the jurors back for further deliberation.

The charges stem from a 2007 scheme where Whittemore funneled the money to Sen. Reid through third-party participants such as friends and family members to conceal the source of the campaign contributions.

How can it be that politicians like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Al Sharpton and others take political office then expotentially increase their net worth? People say that the last act of politicians in a dying country is to loot the treasury - is this what we are seeing?

G-8 Countries Find America Under Obama No Longer Matters

This is a well written article by Mark Steyn of the respected Investor's Business Daily concerning just how far America has slid under the Obama Administration.

Descending from the heavens for the G-8 summit at beautiful Lough Erne this week, President Obama caused some amusement to his British hosts. The chancellor of the Exchequer had been invited to give a presentation to the assembled heads of government on the matter of tax avoidance (one of the big items on the agenda, for those of you who think what the IRS could really use right now is even more enforcement powers). The president evidently enjoyed it. Thrice, he piped up to say how much he agreed with Jeffrey, eventually concluding the presentation with the words, "Thank you, Jeffrey."

Unfortunately, the chancellor of the Exchequer is a bloke called George Osborne, not Jeffrey Osborne.

Obama subsequently apologized for confusing George with Jeffrey, who was a popular vocal artiste back in the '80s when Obama was dating his composite girlfriend and making composite whoopee to the composite remix of Jeffrey Osborne's 1982 smoocheroo, "On the Wings of Love."

I suppose it might have been worse. When Angela Merkel proposed a toast to a strong West, he could have assumed that was the name of Kim and Kanye's new baby.

At any rate, Obama's mishap had faint echoes of a famous social faux pas during the Second World War. Irving Berlin, the celebrated composer of "White Christmas," was invited to lunch at 10 Downing Street and was surprised to find that Churchill, instead of asking what's that Bing Crosby really like, badgered him with complex moral and strategic questions and requests for estimates of U.S. war production.

It turned out the prime minister had confused Irving Berlin with the philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, then under secondment to the British Embassy in Washington, and thought it was the latter he'd invited to No. 10.

In the Obama era, any confusion is the other way around. It would be a terrible thing for the president to invite the eminent rapper Jay-Z to lunch only to find himself stuck next to the turgid British philosopher professor Sir Jay Zed.

Although Obama's confusion went largely unreported in America, the BBC's enterprising Eddie Mair got Jeffrey Osborne on the line and inveigled him into singing George Osborne's best-known words — "Tax cuts should be for life, not just Christmas time" — to Jeffrey's best-known tune.

The following day Mangue Obama — whoops, my mistake, Mangue Obama was the prime minister of Equatorial Guinea from 2006 to 2008, and has a way smaller and less incompetent entourage — Barack Obama departed for Berlin (the German city, not the American songwriter or British philosopher). Five years ago at the Brandenburg Gate, he thrilled a crowd of 200,000 with his stirring clarion call to himself, "Ich bin ein Baracker." This time, he spoke to an audience barely a 50th of that size — 4,500, most of whom were bored out of their lederhosen.

As I wrote of Obama's Massachusetts yawnfest in 2010, he went to the trouble of flying in to phone it in. If the BBC's mash-up of Jeffrey Osborne's 1982 Billboard hit and Chancellor Osborne's recent speech at the Mansion House in London was something of an awkward fit, you could slip large slabs of "On the Wings of Love" into Obama's telepromptered pap and none of the 27 Germans still awake would have noticed the difference:

"Peace with justice means extending a hand to those who reach for freedom, wherever they live. Come take my hand and together we will rise, on the wings of love, up and above the clouds, the only way to fly ...

"Peace with justice means pursuing the security of a world without nuclear weapons — no matter how distant that dream may be, just smile for me and let the day begin. You are the sunshine that lights my heat within, and we can reject the nuclear weaponization that North Korea and Iran may be seeking, because we are angels in disguise, we live and breathe each other, inseparable ...

"The effort to slow climate change requires bold action. For the grim alternative affects all nations — more severe storms, more famine and floods ... coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise, you look at me and I begin to melt, just like the snow when a ray of sun is felt ... This is the future we must avert. This is the global threat of our time… That is our task. We have to get to work. We're flowing like a stream, running free, flowing on the wings of love ..."

The wings of love don't seem to carry Obama as far as they used to. MSNBC's Chris Matthews blamed the lackluster performance on the sun's glare affecting his ability to read the text. That's how bad it is: global warming melted his prompter.

But the speech itself was barely distinguishable in its cobwebbed utopian pabulum from the video for a nuclear-free world just released by Michael Douglas and other celebrities. And Douglas, who recently gave a fascinating interview to The Guardian in which he blamed his cancerous walnut-sized tongue tumor upon his addiction to oral sex, at least has a better excuse as to why his silvery tongue doesn't work its magic quite the way it used to. Der Spiegel, which is the very definition of mainstream media in Germany, described the president's Berlin stop as a visit by "the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented" — and under the headline "Obama's Soft Totalitarianism".

Obama isn't a "soft" totalitarian so much as a slapdash one. His apparatchiks monitor the emails of both Jeffrey and George Osborne, but he still can't tell one from the other.

Likewise, in Syria as in Libya, "the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented" can't tell a plucky freedom fighter itching to build Massachusetts in the sands of Araby from your neighborhood al-Qaida subsidiary whose health care plan only covers clitoridectomies.

His G-8 colleagues have begun to figure out that America no longer matters. To be sure, the trappings of the presidency are a lagging indicator: He still flies in with more limos and Secret Service agents than everybody else, combined.

Then again, the other American story to catch the fancy of the Fleet Street tabloids in recent days is that of the unfortunate Las Vegas man with the world's biggest scrotum, weighing 140 pounds, yet unable to perform.

Of his talks with Vladimir Putin, the president said, "With respect to Syria, we do have differing perspectives on the problem, but we share an interest in reducing the violence." Putin aims to reduce the violence by getting his boy Assad to kill everyone he needs to. Obama aims to reduce the violence by giving a speech about the "intolerance that fuels extremism" — or is it the other way round? The world understands that Putin means it and Obama doesn't — just as in Afghanistan everyone knows the Taliban means it and the fainthearted superpower doesn't.

Thanks to the stork delivering his bundle to Miss Kardashian (see above), Americans seem not to have noticed that the U.S. has just lost yet another war.

But in Moscow, Beijing, Teheran, they noticed, and they will act accordingly. On the wings of love, up and above the clouds, Obama wafts ever higher on his own gaseous uplift. Down on solid ground, the rest of the world must occasionally wonder if they haven't confused the U.S. delegation with the world's most empty-headed boy band.