In today’s poll, we’d like to know about what drives you. Why did you get involved in gun rights? What made you passionate about your right to keep and bear arms? What drives you?
For me, personally, it was leaving the former USSR, helpless, disarmed and at the mercy of heartless Soviets, who felt the Jews were something to grind under their boots. You can read the story here.
But what was it for you? Was it a specific incident? Was it the realization that you alone are responsible for the safety of you and your loved ones? Was it a specific text? What inflamed your passions for this issue?
Poll question is below. Feel free to expound further in comments, especially if none of the choices fit.
This is not just because a new Supreme Court Justice should be nominated by the next President of the United States – no matter who wins that office – and not someone who is committing a “hit-and-run” on the Supreme Court on his way out the door with the rest of the nation left to deal with the consequences for years to come.
This is not just because the American people should have the opportunity to express their views on the next Supreme Court Justice at the ballot box by their choice of POTUS.
This is because Merrick Garland would be a steadfast, true voice that would tip the nation’s highest court in the direction of total destruction of our gun rights.
Erich Pratt, executive director of the group Gun Owners of America, said Mr. Obama chose a “radical leftist” in Judge Garland despite promises to nominate a consensus candidate.
“He supported the D.C. gun ban in 2007, thereby showing he opposes self-defense and opposes the right to keep and bear arms,” Mr. Pratt said.
That 2007 case, Parker v. District of Columbia, ultimately became the landmark Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller. Before it reached the high court, it was heard in Judge Garland’s circuit, and a three-judge panel ruled that the D.C. handgun ban was unconstitutional. Judge Garland wasn’t part of that decision, but he did join three other judges in trying to have the full court get a chance to overturn the ruling.
National Review digs further into Garland’s anti-gun views.
Garland voted… to uphold an illegal Clinton-era regulation that created an improvised gun registration requirement. Congress prohibited federal gun registration mandates back in 1968, but… the Clinton Administration had been “retaining for six months the records of lawful gun buyers from the National Instant Check System.” By storing these records, the federal government was creating an informal gun registry that violated the 1968 law. Worse still, the Clinton program even violated the 1994 law that had created the NICS system in the first place. Congress directly forbade the government from retaining background check records for law abiding citizens.
Garland’s lack of respect for the people’s fundamental rights is unacceptable. The Obama Administration was obviously a failure at implementing much of the gun control plans it was pushing, even though it consistently used every tragedy to its advantage.
So now Barack Obama is trying to preserve his statist, anti-gun legacy by nominating a Supreme Court Justice who would do it for him.
No. Just no!
Barack Obama has already foisted one obviously biased Justice on the rest of us – a Justice whose support for ObamaCare was well known, and who did not recuse herself when King v. Burwell was argued in front of the Supreme Court.
We certainly don’t need another Justice whose grasp on the Constitution is tenuous and definition of “objectivity” only involves issues with which he agrees.
Well, the 2016 election season appears to be in full swing. We all know that gun rights are the premiere issue for most of us here, but we would like to know what else you care about deeply and passionately.
If a presidential candidate is bad on gun rights, it’s a deal breaker for me and many others here, I’m sure. However, for me personally, the economy is the second most important issue. Without a sound economic policy, it won’t take long for an overreaching government to start regulating other aspects of our lives.
So… other than gun rights, what is your issue?
As always, feel free to comment and explain further.
None of us want to leave our country, but what if something happened? What if you had to go? What if you had to escape? Where would you go, based strictly on gun laws?
None of these countries are perfect when it comes to gun rights, and no country is, but we tried to choose some of the better ones out there.
What do you think? Where would you go?
If there’s one we haven’t thought of, feel free to choose “other” and tell us in comments.
We’re waxing a bit nostalgic this week. Many of us learned how to shoot when we were really young. Others were lucky enough to have shooting be part of a family tradition. Others didn’t learn until they were much older.
Tell us about your experiences!
Were you just a little tyke with your first Henry rifle?
Did you go plinking with a parent?
Did you learn when you were older? Did a drill instructor put that first rifle in your hands in Basic Combat Training?
Give us your story in the comments, if you’d like. We’d love to see it!
Hey, all! It’s time for another fun Zelman Partisans poll. Today we are asking you which remaining GOP candidate would be the most dangerous for your gun rights.
We previously asked you who in the GOP clown car would best protect your right to keep and bear arms. Now, that the field has narrowed, we want to know who would be the worst.
What I tried to do in parentheses is give you guys a taste of each candidate’s Second Amendment views. It’s not a complete report card, and I’ve tried to include Gun Owners of America ratings where appropriate.
On November 13, 2015 a terrorist attack in Paris killed 130 people – 89 of them at the Bataclan concert hall where the band Eagles of Death Metal was performing that night.
The band felt it was a sacred duty to return to Paris and perform as a sign of defiance – not allowing “the bad guys to win.”
And while you may not be familiar with their music, or may not even like it all that much, Eagles of Death Metal’s Jesse Hughes told French channel iTELE that firearms were the equalizer that day.
“Did your French gun control stop a single f****** person from dying at the Bataclan? And if anyone can answer yes, I’d like to hear it, because I don’t think so. I think the only thing that stopped it was some of the bravest men that I’ve ever seen in my life charging headfirst into the face of death with their firearms.”
The interview is below. You can watch the entire thing if you want.
A week ago Second Amendment firebrand Ted Nugent posted an appalling graphic on his Facebook page, showing a dozen of America’s most famous gun grabbers with Israeli flags superimposed on their photos. The implication was clear – an obvious, disgusting claim that some kind of vast Jewish conspiracy was behind gun control efforts in the United States.
Fans of Ted’s music and his Second Amendment supporters were understandably upset. Was Ted implying that Jews were somehow responsible for the demise of our freedoms? Was he an anti-Semite? Is Ted prejudiced in some way against Jews? Has Ted become a liability to the gun rights movement?
Fast and furious calls for the NRA to cut ties with Ted. The National Review Online called Nugent a disgrace to the gun rights movement. The usual suspects – everyone from the Huffington Post to Mother Jones to the Southern Poverty Law Center to Media Matters – screeched about Ted’s alleged anti-Semitism. Even Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership – the organization from which this group sprang – immediately jumped into action to condemn Ted for his alleged Jew hatred.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MICHAEL IVES Toting a guitar covered with camouflage pattern and a zebra-striped semi-automatic assault rifle, Ted Nugent is ready for an assault on the outdoors.
You know what these reactionary outrageatrons didn’t do? No one in the mainstream media or any major gun rights organizations contacted Ted Nugent for a comment. They didn’t try to find out what was going on. They just assumed that a longtime friend and supporter of our freedoms, who never had an anti-Semitic bone in his body all of a sudden became a Jew hater, and they tripped all over themselves to condemn him.
You know how I know this? Because on behalf of the Zelman Partisans, I spent time on the phone with Ted Nugent – quite a bit of time – discussing this issue, and he told me so. “It’s not like my contact information is hard to find,” he told me. But no one called him to get a statement or to find out what was up.
“I can’t believe that knowing my history, knowing how much I love freedom, and how much I’ve fought to protect it, that no one thought to call me!” he said.
Now, what I’m about to tell you is not an excuse for the use of the graphic in any way. The graphic was originally found in 2013 on an anti-Semitic site called “the Jewish Problem” (and no, I’m not linking to that fascist crap – find it yourselves if you’re curious), according to a TinEye search I did when I first saw the Facebook post. There’s no doubt about what this thing is. Ted used it. There’s no way around it.
Ted is known for some pretty outrageous comments and his blunter than blunt delivery. He’s got energy and fire, and he doesn’t have a whole lot of time for political correctness. But the one thing he has never been is a racist or a bigot, so what happened? Why did a steadfast friend of freedom – regardless of color, race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation – all of a sudden turn into an anti-Semitic jerk?
The answer is: he did NOT.
How do I know? Again, I asked him. Ted and I chatted on the phone first, texted, and then I asked him some questions via email. Apparently, that’s something every reactionary jackass who rushed to condemn him failed to do.
I simply asked, ” What happened? How did you wind up using this thing?”
“Can I say oy vey?” He replied. “I sincerely apologize for my irresponsible re-posting of such a nasty and offensive meme. In my rush between songwriting jams and musical recording frenzy, all I saw was the images of people dedicated to disarm us, I made no connection whatsoever to any religious affiliation. Everyone knows deep down that at 67 years of age I didn’t suddenly become anti-Semitic. That’s patently ridiculous, and those who rushed to such a mistaken condemning judgement should re-examine the system by which such equally irresponsible knee-jerk judgments are made.”
And you know what? Given his decades of commitment to freedom for every single person, regardless of race, color, or anything else, alarm bells should have gone off when Ted posted something so out of character. I was surprised to hear that no one, other than the Zelman Partisans (and one regional writer who put us in touch with Nugent), had made an attempt to contact him about the issue, and I asked him how he felt about supposed Second Amendment allies not bothering to contact him and clear the air.
“In a world of soulless political correctness and the dishonesty and denial that goes with it, I was not at all that surprised,” he told me. “The real tragedy is how many who claim to be on the side of freedom so viciously attacked me with zero effort to communicate with me directly as you so honorably did. For that I thank and salute you.”
I will say that as a former disc jockey for the American Forces Network, I blushed a bit at that. But you know what? That’s just good journalism, and I’m glad we got the chance to clear the air.
Ted Nugent’s real message that got lost in the outrage about the badly thought out use of that graphic? It was about Jewish people needing to defend their rights and freedoms, so that the horror of the Holocaust never happens again.
NEVER AGAIN! Plain and simple, the same powerful uniting message against freedom haters and gun banners that I have dedicated my entire adult life to in 1000s of concerts, numerous books, 1000s of articles, blogs, media interviews and constant speaking presentations. Period.
Oh, and our offer to Ted? He took us up on it. We’re sending him a Zelman Partisans membership packet, plus the yarmulke we promised, and he said he would wear the yarmulke on TV!
Remember when former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who during a Democratic debate (his pathetic campaign has thankfully and quietly faded into the annals of historical obscurity) got into a screeching argument with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton about who among them is the biggest enemy of American gun owners?
Remember how O’Malley and his gun-grabbing monkeys in the Maryland legislature rammed though the “Firearms Safety Act” assault weapons ban, which had nothing to do with actual safety?
That’s the one upheld by an activist judge last year, because she soiled her frilly, pink panties at the thought of scary, black guns being legal in the state, even though they were almost never used to commit crimes.
That judge has been issued a slap on the judicial nuggets by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Maryland’s assault weapons ban implicates its citizens’ core Second Amendment rights and must be reviewed under a more rigorous judicial standard than the one used by a judge who upheld the law’s constitutionality, a divided federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
[…]
The appeals court said Maryland’s law affects the constitutional right to possess firearms for self-defense and home protection by banning virtually an entire class of weapons commonly owned by law-abiding citizens. In 2012, the number of semi-automatic rifles manufactured and imported into the United States – and banned by the Maryland law – was more than double the number of Ford F-150 trucks sold, the appeals court said.
I want to stress that the court didn’t rule on the constitutionality of said law, but did say that the judge who issued the ruling on the Scary Black Guns ban issued a ruling that “conflicts sharply with rulings of other federal appellate courts.”
What? You mean to tell me that standards pulled randomly out of a petty statist Clinton appointee judge’s fourth point of contact, influenced by her own prejudices without any knowledge about these guns, and armed with nothing but an uninformed opinion, don’t represent sufficient reason to deprive Americans of their rights?
You mean “Well, I think these guns are scary, so I’m upholding their ban” is not sufficient legal standing to shred the Constitution?
Look at my shocked face!
Of course the gun-grabbing authoritarians in Maryland aren’t done yet. There’s a chance they will appeal this case to the Supreme Court. There’s no length to which they will not go to infringe on the People’s right to keep and bear arms!
But for now, at the very least, we have a ruling that recognizes that bigotry and ignorance are not standards by which the constitutionality of a law should be judged.
In today’s poll, we’d like to know about what drives you. Why did you get involved in gun rights? What made you passionate about your right to keep and bear arms? What drives you?
The Zelman Partisans strongly opposes President Barack Obama’s 
Well, the 2016 election season appears to be in full swing. We all know that gun rights are the premiere issue for most of us here, but we would like to know what else you care about deeply and passionately.
None of us want to leave our country, but what if something happened? What if you had to go? What if you had to escape? Where would you go, based strictly on gun laws?
Tell us about your experiences!
Hey, all! It’s time for another fun Zelman Partisans poll. Today we are asking you which remaining GOP candidate would be the most dangerous for your gun rights.
We are wondering if current events are having an impact on how much ammunition you purchase.
Remember when former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who during a Democratic debate (his pathetic campaign has thankfully and quietly faded into the annals of historical obscurity) got into a screeching argument with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton about who among them is
