Tag Archives: Gun Rights

U.S. judge rejects Texas professors’ bid to halt student gun carry

FILE PHOTO: Members of the University of Texas of the Guns Free UT group that includes faculty and staff protest against a state law that allows for guns in classrooms at college campuses, in Austin, Texas, U.S. August 24, 2016. REUTERS/Jon Herskovitz/File Photo

By Jon Herskovitz

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) – A U.S. judge rejected efforts by three University of Texas professors to ban students from bringing guns to their classrooms after the state granted them that right last year, court documents showed on Friday.

Professors Jennifer Glass, Lisa Moore and Mia Carter had argued in a federal district court in Austin that academic freedom and classroom debate could be chilled under the so-called “campus carry” law backed by the state’s Republican political leaders.

The law allows concealed handgun license holders aged 21 and older to bring handguns into classrooms and other university facilities, including the University of Texas system, one of the nation’s largest with more than 221,000 students.

“Plaintiffs present no concrete evidence to substantiate their fear,” U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel wrote in his decision dismissing the professors’ complaint. Defendants included Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, University President Gregory Fenves and the university’s Board of Regents.

Paxton, who backed the law, praised the decision.

“The fact that a small group of professors dislike a law and speculate about a ‘chilling effect’ is hardly a valid basis to set the law aside,” he said in a statement.

University of Texas professors had lobbied unsuccessfully to prevent the law, arguing the combination of youth, firearms and college life could make for a deadly situation. Fenves reluctantly allowed campus carry, saying last year he was compelled to do so under state law.

Republican lawmakers said campus carry could help prevent a mass shooting.

A lawyer for the professors said the ruling was narrow and did not address the plaintiffs’ constitutional concerns.

“The order accompanying the dismissal doesn’t reach the merits of either the professors’ substantive First Amendment claims or any aspect of their Second Amendment and Equal Protection claims,” attorney Renea Hicks said in an email.

As of the start of May, 10 states had provisions allowing the carrying of concealed weapons on public college campuses, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state laws.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Georgia governor signs bill allowing guns on college campuses

A selection of Glock pistols are seen for sale at the Pony Express Firearms shop in Parker, Colorado

By Bernie Woodall

(Reuters) – Georgia Governor Nathan Deal on Thursday signed a bill allowing guns on college campuses in the state, making it the 11th of the 50 U.S. states to do so.

Since the 2007 shooting deaths of 32 people by a student at Virginia Tech, a university in southwestern Virginia, state legislatures have grappled with the question of allowing licensed gun owners to bring their weapons on college campuses.

Deal said in a statement that he believed that people licensed to carry guns could help increase safety on college campuses. He said students at campuses where guns are known to be disallowed are easy prey for assailants.

“At the present time, assailants can, and do, target these students knowing full well that their victims are not permitted to carry protection,” said Deal.

On March 31, the Republican-controlled Georgia Senate and House of Representatives approved the guns-on-campus measure and sent it to Deal, a Republican.

Laura Cutilletta, legal director for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said her group was disappointed in Deal’s action.

“Colleges and universities are safe havens from gun violence, largely because guns are prohibited on the vast majority of campuses. Allowing guns on campus will jeopardize students, faculty and staff and likely lead to more campus homicides and suicides,” Cutilletta said in an email.

The new Georgia law will prohibit firearms in some campus areas with large crowds, including football stadiums and basketball arenas.

Guns will remain prohibited in campus housing, including fraternity and sorority houses; any rooms where high school students are taking classes; rooms where disciplinary hearings are held; preschool or child care areas; and faculty, staff and administrative offices.

The American Journal of Public Health found that 23 percent of Americans in a recent survey supported guns on college campuses. (http://in.reuters.com/article/us-health-guns-public-opinion-idINKBN17N28Y)

(Reporting by Bernie Woodall; Editing by Richard Chang)

Trump pledges fealty to NRA gun lobby

NRA Executive Director Chris Cox (L) and Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre (R) welcome U.S. President Donald Trump (C) onstage to deliver remarks at the National Rifle Association (NRA) Leadership Forum at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., April 28, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

By Steve Holland

ATLANTA (Reuters) – President Donald Trump pledged to uphold Americans’ right to possess guns on Friday in a speech that he used to revisit some 2016 election campaign themes from his vow to build a border wall to dismissing a Democratic senator as “Pocahontas.”

Trump pledged his allegiance to the powerful National Rifle Association, the country’s leading gun-rights advocacy group, at a convention attended by thousands. Elected in part on a law-and-order platform, Trump was the first sitting president to address the NRA since fellow Republican Ronald Reagan in 1983.

“As your president, I will never, ever infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” Trump told thousands of people attending the NRA’s annual convention in Atlanta, Georgia.

Trump, whose candidacy last year was endorsed by the NRA, marks his first 100 days in office on Saturday with no major legislative achievements but with a long litany of actions to loosen federal regulations and review free trade agreements.

Stymied by his initial bid to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border when Congress balked at funding the initiative, Trump vowed he will sooner or later build the wall, which had been a signature campaign promise.

“We need a wall. We’ll build the wall. Don’t even think about it,” he said.

Politics and his unexpected election victory on Nov. 8 over Democrat Hillary Clinton also featured prominently in his remarks.

Speculating on who might run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Trump brought up the name of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and used a derogatory nickname he had adopted for her last year.

“It may be Pochahontas, and she is not big on the NRA,” Trump said of Warren, who had once said she had some Native American ancestry.

Pocahontas is a legendary Native American figure from the 1600s.

Trump later attended a fund-raiser for Republican candidate Karen Handel, who will face Democrat Jon Ossoff on June 20 to determine who will win a House of Representatives seat to replace Tom Price, who became Trump’s health and human services secretary.

Trump, at the NRA event, returned time and again to the theme of responsible gun ownership.

“You have a true friend and champion in the White House,” he said. “We want to assure you of the sacred right of self defense for all of our citizens.”

(Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Tom Brown)

New Black Panther Party says to carry arms in Cleveland if legal

Demonstrator and member of New Black Panthers Party

By Ned Parker

(Reuters) – The New Black Panther Party, a “black power” movement, will carry firearms for self-defense during demonstrations in Cleveland ahead of next week’s Republican convention if allowed under Ohio law, the group’s chairman said.

The plan by the group could add to security headaches for the Ohio city after last week’s killing of five police officers in Dallas by a U.S. army veteran who had been drawn to black separatist ideology, including on Facebook, before hatching his plan to target white police officers.

Several other groups, including some supporters of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, have said they will carry weapons in Cleveland, leading to concerns about rival groups being armed in close proximity.

“If it is an open state to carry, we will exercise our second amendment rights because there are other groups threatening to be there that are threatening to do harm to us,” Hashim Nzinga, chairman of the New Black Panther Party, told Reuters in an interview.

“If that state allows us to bear arms, the Panthers and the others who can legally bear arms will bear arms.”

Nzinga condemned the Dallas shootings as a “massacre” and said his group played no role in the attack.

Police in Dallas, where Texas’s “open carry” law allows civilians to carry guns in public, said seeing multiple people carrying rifles led them initially to believe they were under attack by multiple shooters.

Officials in Ohio have said it will be legal for protesters to carry weapons at demonstrations outside the convention under that state’s gun laws.

Eric Pucillo, vice president of Ohio Carry Inc., a non-partisan firearms rights, education and advocacy group, said he supports the rights of others to carry firearms close to the convention site.

“As long as they’re abiding by the law, I see no issue with it,” he said.

“VIRULENTLY RACIST”

Nzinga said he expected “a couple hundred” members of the New Black Panther Party to join a black unity rally that is scheduled to begin on Thursday. Nzinga said he and the Panthers plan to leave Cleveland on Sunday, the day before the convention officially opens.

His group plans to join a “black unity” convention in Cleveland that will hold a series of protest events in the city from this Thursday through at least Sunday.

“We are there to protect… (the black unity) event. We are not trying to do anything else,” he said. “We are going to carry out some of  these great legal rights we have — to assemble, to protest and (to exercise) freedom of speech.”

“Black Power” groups promote defense against racial oppression, with some advocating for the establishment of black social institutions and a self-sufficient economy.

The New Black Panther Party became active in 1990 and has long espoused black separatist ideology. Founding members of the 1960s Black Panther Party have denounced the New Black Panther Party as racist, but Nzinga says his movement does include original Black Panther members.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate group watchdog, describes the New Black Panther Party as “a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers.”

But the center said the group has not been found to have actually carried out any violent attacks.

Nzinga complained that his group is regularly demonized. “When we use our rights, the police want to take it away from us and they can’t,” he said. “We protect our community and they make us the villain.”

Law enforcement officials say the New Black Panther Party and other black militant groups have not been implicated in any attacks against police since the 2014 police killing of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. They also say the groups played no roles in last week’s attack in Dallas.

Nzinga says his group has grown amid racial tensions in the wake of a series of police killings of black men in the past two years. The Southern Poverty Law Center says the number of black militant chapters around the country grew from 113 to 180 in 2015.

The center says there are 892 hate groups total nationwide and at least 998, anti-government “patriot groups.” It says white hate groups, such as the Aryan Brotherhood, have a much longer track record of carrying out violent attacks than black extremist groups.

(Reporting By Ned Parker; additional reporting by Daniel Trotta.; Editing by David Rohde and Stuart Grudgings)

Dallas police chief says armed civilians in Texas ‘increasingly challenging’

Baton Rouge Protest

By Ernest Scheyder

DALLAS (Reuters) – The Dallas police chief stepped into America’s fierce gun rights debate on Monday when he said Texas state laws allowing civilians to carry firearms openly, as some did during a protest where five officers were killed, presented a growing law enforcement challenge.

Dallas Police Chief David Brown also gave new details about his department’s use of a bomb-carrying robot to kill Micah Johnson, the 25-year-old former U.S. Army reservist who carried out last Thursday’s sniper attack that also wounded nine officers.

A shooting in Michigan on Monday underscored the prevalence of gun violence in America and the danger faced by law enforcement, even as activists protest against the fatal police shootings of two black men last week in Louisiana and Minnesota.

Two sheriff’s bailiffs were shot to death at a courthouse in St. Joseph in southwestern Michigan, and the shooter was also killed, Berrien County Sheriff Paul Bailey told reporters.

By Monday evening, protesters were marching again in several large American cities, including Chicago, Sacramento, and Atlanta, where news footage showed a number of protesters being arrested after street demonstrations north of downtown.

President Barack Obama and others reiterated their calls for stricter guns laws after last month’s massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, but many conservatives responded that such measures could infringe on the U.S. Constitution’s protection of the right to bear arms.

Texas is known for its gun culture and state laws allow gun owners to carry their weapons in public. Some gun rights activists bring firearms to rallies as a political statement, as some did at Thursday’s march in Dallas.

“It is increasingly challenging when people have AR-15s (a type of rifle) slung over, and shootings occur in a crowd. And they begin running, and we don’t know if they are a shooter or not,” Brown said. “We don’t know who the ‘good guy’ versus who the ‘bad guy’ is, if everybody starts shooting.”

Seeing multiple people carrying rifles led police initially to believe they were under attack by multiple shooters.

Brown did not explicitly call for gun control laws, but said: “I was asked, well, what’s your opinion about guns? Well, ask the policymakers to do something and I’ll give you an opinion.”

“Do your job. We’re doing ours. We’re putting our lives on the line. Other aspects of government need to step up and help us,” he said.

‘SIMPLY MISTAKEN’

Rick Briscoe, legislative director of gun rights group Open Carry Texas, said Brown was “simply mistaken” in viewing armed civilians as a problem.

“It is really simple to tell a good guy from a bad guy,” Briscoe said. “If the police officer comes on the situation and he says: ‘Police, put the gun down,’ the good guy does. The bad guy probably continues doing what he was doing, or turns on the police officer.”

Police used a Northrop Grumman Corp <NOC.N> Mark5A-1 robot, typically deployed to inspect potential bombs, to kill Johnson after concluding during an hours-long standoff there was no safe way of taking him into custody, Brown said.

“They improvised this whole idea in about 15, 20 minutes,” Brown said.

“I asked the question of how much (explosives) we were using, and I said … ‘Don’t bring the building down.’ But that was the extent of my guidance.”

The incident is believed to have been the first time U.S. police had killed a suspect that way, and some civil liberties activists said it created a troubling precedent. Brown said that, in the context of Thursday’s events, “this wasn’t an ethical dilemma for me.”

The attack came at the end of a demonstration decrying police shootings of two black men in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and near St. Paul, Minnesota. Those were the latest in a series of high-profile killings of black men by police in various U.S. cities that have triggered protests.

In the shooting near St. Paul, the Star Tribune newspaper reported that the officers had pulled over 32-year-old Philando Castile because one of the patrolmen thought he and his girlfriend matched the description of suspects involved in a robbery.

In Dallas, a vigil was held for the slain officers on Monday evening.

In Chicago, images and footage on social media and news stations showed about 500 protesters marching through downtown after holding a quiet sit-in in Millennium Park that spilled into the streets and a rally near City Hall.

In Atlanta, media footage showed a number of handcuffed protesters being loaded onto a police bus surrounded by armed officers and emergency vehicles with lights flashing. Television station WSB-TV reported that police started arresting demonstrators marching on Peachtree Road at about 8:30 p.m.

In Sacramento, about 300 people were marching peacefully on Monday evening. Earlier in the day, in an incident not linked to protests, Sacramento police said officers fatally shot a man carrying a knife after he charged at police.

Johnson was in the U.S. Army Reserve from 2009 to 2015 and served for a time in Afghanistan. He had been disappointed in his experience in the military, his mother told TheBlaze.com in an interview shown online on Monday.

“The military was not what Micah thought it would be,” Delphine Johnson said. “He was very disappointed. Very disappointed.”

The Dallas police chief, who is black, urged people upset about police conduct to consider joining his force.

“Get off that protest line and put an application in, and we’ll put you in your neighborhood, and we will help you resolve some of the problems you’re protesting about,” Brown said.

(Additonal reporting by Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas, Fiona Ortiz and Justin Madden in Chicago, Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles, and David Beasley in Atlanta; Writing by Daniel Wallis, Scott Malone and Eric M. Johnson; Editing by Will Dunham, Peter Cooney and Paul Tait)

No constitutional right to concealed guns: U.S. appeals court

Guns at Cabela's

By Alex Dobuzinskis

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Firearm owners have no constitutional right to carry a concealed gun in public, a divided U.S. appeals court in California ruled on Thursday, upholding the right of officials to only grant permits to those facing a specific danger.

The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a victory for gun control advocates which sets a legal precedent in western states, was seen as unlikely to be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the near future.

The San Francisco-based court, in a 7-4 decision, found California’s San Diego and Yolo counties did not violate the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects the right to bear arms, when they denied some applicants a concealed firearm license.

“We hold that the Second Amendment does not protect, in any degree, the carrying of concealed firearms by members of the general public,” Judge William Fletcher wrote in a 52-page opinion.

Sheriffs in the two California counties had limited their permits to applicants showing “good cause” to be armed, such as documented threats or working in a wide range of risky occupations.

The ruling places the 9th Circuit Court in line with other U.S. appellate courts that have upheld the right of officials in the states of New York, Maryland and New Jersey to deny concealed carry applications in certain cases.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 2013, in the middle of a raging national debate on guns, declined to weigh in on whether firearm owners have a constitutional right to carry concealed guns.

The 9th Circuit Court’s opinion noted the Supreme Court had not answered the question of whether the Second Amendment ensures a right to carry firearms openly, as opposed to concealed under clothing.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Consuelo Callahan wrote that her colleagues on the 9th Circuit had gone too far. “The Second Amendment is not a ‘second class’ amendment,” she wrote.

Under California’s concealed carry law, more than 70,000 residents or less than 1 percent of the state’s population had active permits last year, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris applauded the ruling while Chuck Michel, president of gun rights group the California Rifle and Pistol Association, criticized it.

“This decision will leave good people defenseless, as it completely ignores the fact that law-abiding Californians who reside in counties with hostile sheriffs will now have no means to carry a firearm outside the home for personal protection,” Michel said in a statement.

If plaintiffs appeal, the Supreme Court may refrain from reviewing the case because other U.S. circuit courts have also upheld certain requirements for concealed carry permits, said University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Adam Winkler in an email.

The decision by the full 9th Circuit reversed a 2-1 decision in 2014 by a panel of the appellate court that found California residents have an inherent right to a concealed weapon for self defense.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Richard Chang and Tom Brown)

Controversial Open Carry Law Set to Take Effect In Texas

Texans could soon see a lot more handguns in public places as a new open carry law takes effect.

Beginning on New Year’s Day, the state will allow people to openly carry handguns, provided they first obtain a license. The guns can be loaded or unloaded, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, but carriers must keep them holstered on their belt or shoulder.

Texas residents were already allowed to openly carry long guns — like rifles and shotguns — in public, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and the state also permitted those with licenses to publicly carry concealed handguns. But the state is now poised to become the latest — and largest, by far — to allow anyone with a license to carry handguns in plain view.

According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, when the New Year arrives and the Texas law goes into effect, there will be only five states that totally bar handguns to be carried openly. They are California, Florida, Illinois, New York and South Carolina, plus the District of Columbia. Several states place some limitations on how and where people can openly carry the guns, the center says, but by and large open carry is already legal in the vast majority of states.

Texas, though, is drawing some attention because it’s the biggest state to take this step, and the law is taking effect just weeks after the San Bernardino terrorist attacks caused Internet searches for concealed carry permits to surge to record levels. But the state Legislature actually passed the law much earlier in the year, and Governor Greg Abbott signed it into law back in June.

With a population of about 27 million people, Texas is the country’s second-most-populous state, trailing only California. Texas has just shy of 826,000 concealed carry permit holders, according to the state Department of Public Safety, which represents one of the highest totals in the nation. Everyone with a valid concealed carry permit will be allowed to openly carry their handguns once the new law takes effect, the department says, though it will still be illegal for people to carry guns in places like schools, hospitals, courtrooms and in some parts of airports. Businesses and private landowners can also post signs that would prohibit weapons on-site.

The law has created some divide among gun advocacy groups and those who favor gun control.

Proponents of the bill, such as the gun rights group Open Carry Texas, are planning a celebration on the steps of the state Capitol in Austin to celebrate. They say the law is a step toward their goal of “constitutional carry,” which would ultimately allow anyone who legally purchased a gun in the United States to carry the weapon without government interference.

The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a critic of open carry laws, say that the sight of handguns in public often intimidates people, and they hinder public safety more than they help.

People must undergo safety training before they can obtain a license, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.