Penny Dean and Your Rights

Ismael Lopez awoke to a commotion outside his front door on July 23rd, shortly before midnight. Moments later, he was dead.

A police officer shot Lopez after he allegedly refused to put down the gun he was holding when he answered the door. Police were looking to serve an arrest warrant for an assault that had occurred earlier that day. Only after Lopez had died did they realize their mistake: they had gone to the wrong house.

After every shooting, people say America needs more gun laws. But they don’t know how strict and cruel some current gun laws are. NYC traumatizes legal gun owners from other states:

The man who was shot and killed by a customer while attempting to rob a north Phoenix drugstore was identified Wednesday as 30-year-old Stephen Holguin, officials said.  

The incident occurred about 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday at a Walgreens in the 3400 block of West Union Hills Drive, Sgt. Jonathan Howard said.

Responding officers found about a dozen workers and customers hiding in the store from an armed robber who was still inside, Howard said.

Despite decades of the reports that smart guns are based on theoretical technology that does not work in reality, leftists have gravitated to the German manufactured Armatix IP1 as the smart gun of the future.

Problem #1: A hacker at a Colorado shooting range just showed how to completely sidestep the gun’s lock mechanism via the use of $15 of magnets.

Problem #2: The same hacker showed how to the lock the gun—when it is supposed to be in fire mode—so that the gun’s owner cannot use it in self-defense.

Second Amendment advocates scored a significant legal victory today when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit blocked Washington, D.C., from enforcing a law that effectively bars most D.C. residents from lawfully carrying handguns in public. "The Second Amendment," the court declared, "erects some absolute barriers that no gun law may breach."

A U.S. federal appeals court on Monday upheld nondisclosure rules that allow the FBI to secretly issue surveillance orders for customer data to communications firms, a ruling that dealt a blow to privacy advocates.

A unanimous three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco sided with a lower court decision in finding that rules permitting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to send national security letters under gag orders are appropriate and do not violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution's free speech protections.

Content distribution firm Cloudflare and phone network operator CREDO Mobile had sued the government in order to notify customers of five national security letters, or NSLs, received between 2011 and 2013.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the Justice Department will issue new directives to increase the federal govenment's use of civil asset forfeiture, a controversial practice that allows law enforcement to seize property from suspected criminals without charging them with a crime.

A federal judge has stopped a voter-approved law that would have forced gun owners to surrender magazines that hold more than 10 bullets.

Californians voted Prop. 63 into law last year, outlawing the high-capacity magazines, requiring background checks of people who buy ammunition and imposing other gun restrictions. Judge Roger Benitez said the bullet ban went too far.

This week, the Supreme Court blew a critical opportunity to interrupt the ongoing assault by states like California against Second Amendment rights. 

Scratch that.  Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito, all of whom joined the landmark D.C. v. Heller majority affirming the individual right to keep and bear arms, blew the opportunity.  Justices Thomas and Gorsuch would've heard the case. 

The opportunity in question was Peruta v. California, a prototypically defective Ninth Circuit decision condoning a California law that not only infringes upon the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, but nearly eliminates it. 

Under California law, citizens cannot openly carry handguns outside of their homes, whether loaded or unloaded.  Accordingly, concealed carry is the only alternative means by which someone can possess a handgun outside the home.  Unfortunately, California law only allows concealed carry upon demonstrating "good cause" to the satisfaction of county authorities empowered to grant permits. 

In Peruta, the San Diego County Sheriff imposed an extremely restrictive interpretation of "good cause," demanding that applicants show a "particularized need for self-defense that differentiates the applicant from the ordinary citizen." 

The horrifying scene at a practice field in Alexandria, Virginia, at which Congressman Steve Scalise was shot in a shocking flurry of gunfire, could have been much worse. Rand Paul pointed out that “it would have been a massacre” had a member of the House leadership not been there. His presence guaranteed that the heavily armed Capitol Police could take him down. Many others present expressed similar feelings. They were sitting ducks.