Gun Control Takes Strong Step Forward With Court Ruling Against Domestic Abusers Having These Deadly Weapons

First, how absurd that this matter even needed to be brought to the Supreme Court. Logic 101 should have resolved this matter as soon as it reared its head. Europe is left wondering what in the heck happened to reason in the United States that abusive people would be allowed a deadly gun?

The Supreme Court correctly upheld a federal law Friday that bars guns for domestic abusers, rejecting an argument selfishly and unconscionably pressed by gun rights groups that the prohibition violated the Second Amendment. There is no more proof needed to demonstrate the callous disregard for life and safety that gun zealots desire than when seeing how they cavalierly tossed aside the importance of protecting abused wives and children from gun violence.

Chief Justice John Roberts said that “when a restraining order contains a finding that an individual poses a credible threat to the physical safety of an intimate partner, that individual may — consistent with the Second Amendment — be banned from possessing firearms while that order is in effect.” (Again I ask, what conclusion can Europe draw that in 2024 such a case needed to be brought to the high court for a slap down?)

Justice Coney-Barret (of all people!) wrote in her concurring opinion, “The Second Amendment is not absolute”.

This is no small decision, but rather a most solid and far-reaching one that will, without doubt, aid in furthering other federal gun regulations that have been challenged since the Supreme Court horrifically ruled on gun rights with the Heller decision, and then in 2022 ruled against restrictions on carrying a concealed handgun outside the home. (Why not just send a gun home after each birth with the baby so the fetishizing over deadly weapons can start at once?) That latter ruling was an affront in both law and reason, allowing for the widest expansion of gun rights in a decade. That ruling created substantial confusion for lower court judges reviewing Second Amendment lawsuits. Today the Court whipsawed back to reason and the law (after a dreadful bump stock ruing days ago) by putting a firm and much-needed brake on the runaway train of gun lunacy that has been unleashed across the nation.

I have consistently written that as a result of the above-mentioned cases, the result would be the loss of innocent lives, immeasurable pain and suffering from gun injuries along with mounting health care costs, and would further turn our nation into a much more dangerous place. I have argued in my writings that gun violence in the United States would diminish our standing in the world. I have argued over the decades of my gun control articles that as a result of the gun culture and the court rulings it was clear that a large percentage of the American citizenry valued guns far more than human life. The facts over the decades have sadly supported these points.

As I read about the Court ruling and pulled up a copy of the 8-1 decision (Clarence Thomas must have received ample funds from one of his uber-rich ‘friends’ to recklessly and carelessly rule as he did) I came across a pithy, and pointed comment about past Court gun rulings. It lands as the perfect conclusion to today’s CP posting.

“When Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson wanted to stop the cowboys from shooting up Dodge City, they took the cowboys’ guns away.

That is the only history of gun rights that the court would need to understand, if the court had properly interpreted the Second Amendment in the first place, relying on appropriate and simple rules of sentence construction to hold that the Amendment’s subject is the “security of a free state” and that there is nothing more basic to security than law and order, as is meant by the term “well regulated.”

But the court deviated from the plain rules of English grammar to obfuscate the Amendment’s meaning with some notion of historical originalism, which in turn frankly ignored history.”

Data Proves What Limiting Access To Abortion Services Looks Like In U.S.

I find myself needing to write about women’s reproductive health care today in light of the Supreme Court’s decision that mifepristone will remain legal. Though the vote was unanimous, the fact is, as it has been noted for many months when talking about the Court and this issue, it was a matter they had no right to even engage in from the bench. It was a sad joke when this Court took up a case from conservative religious types who wanted to con people into thinking that a proven medication with a decades-long safety record is dangerous. The partisan attack on health care for women should never have made it to the stage of a ruling before this Court.

Let us be honest about what we are dealing with when talking about some members of the Court. When a justice cannot even orchestra the simple act of correctly flying a flag are we to assume there is an ounce of the required skill set to wade into the science behind an FDA decision?

What irritates conservatives is that with the use of the drug, abortions have remained about steady in our nation, despite the Dobbs decision which removed a 50-year precedent of abortion rights.  As I roamed over the news about the Court’s decision and other related news stories about abortion, the graphs and information from The New York Times really registered as more proof of how women are forced to take, at times, expensive steps to receive health care.

“Abortion is one of the most common procedures in medicine,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder of Whole Woman’s Health, which runs clinics in Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia.

“We’re having people travel hundreds or thousands of miles for a procedure that typically takes less than 10 minutes and can be done in a doctor’s office setting,” she said. “Nobody does that for any other medical procedure.”

“More than 14,000 Texas patients crossed the border into New Mexico for an abortion last year. An additional 16,000 left Southern states bound for Illinois. And nearly 12,000 more traveled north from South Carolina and Georgia to North Carolina.

These were among the more than 171,000 patients who traveled for an abortion in 2023, new estimates show, demonstrating both the upheaval in access since the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the limits of state bans to stop the procedure. The data also highlights the unsettled nature of an issue that will test politicians up and down the ballot in November.

Out-of-state travel for abortions — either to have a procedure or obtain abortion pills — more than doubled in 2023 compared with 2019, and made up nearly a fifth of recorded abortions. On Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected a case that would have sharply curtailed access to medication abortion, allowing the pills to remain available to patients traveling from states with bans.”

Open the link to activate the map below.

Polls generally find that when women voters are questioned on the issue of abortion nearly 80% of those between the ages 18-49, two-thirds of suburban women, 60% of independents, and even a third of Republican female voters say they disapprove of the court’s removing federal protection of the right to abortion. The Donald Trump base is wired for the most outlandish policy moves concerning abortion they can concoct, as evidenced by the draconian efforts in state legislatures. Their desire to ‘own the libs’ over abortion has a huge and fatal flow. That is due to President Biden and the Democratic Party standing up for a woman’s right to choose while stressing the need for federal legislation to restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.  In other words, speaking to the choir in the nation of voters.

My reading of history shows that standing up for freedoms and urging for their increase and spread is a winning strategy. Democracy runs best when the law is stable and society understands what it means and how it relates to our society. Over the past couple of years, the Supreme Court has upended, and disastrously so, the precedent about abortion. That runs counter to the prevailing mood and tone of the nation, a place very politically split on many issues. But on abortion rights, there is a strong majority of support. Most polls show it at roughly 70%–in support. Therefore, the brunt of negative reaction will be placed, correctly, upon the party who willfully undermined women’s health care.

Today the Fifth Circuit Court was rejected by the full Supreme Court, as the voters will reject Republicans this fall who wish to limit reproductive health care.

Journalism Question Looms Large At Washington Post Over Years Of Failure In Not Reporting Justice Samuel Alito’s Upside-Down Flag Story

A news story erupted Saturday catching me off-guard and James too, as I shouted the lead paragraph to him while sitting in my office. Last week, many of us learned from The New York Times that an upside-down American flag had been temporarily raised over the Samuel Alito household in the days after January 6, 2021.  For those of us who come from homes where respect for the flag is almost hereditary and as adults, we follow the traditions of flag flying from our parents and grandparents, the news story was troubling.  Especially since the person at the heart of the story was a sitting justice on the United States Supreme Court. During the following days, the news about the flag was made into pointed, and correctly so, editorial cartoons blasting his lack of patriotism and making it clear that blaming one’s wife, as Alito did, was slimy.

Justice Sam Alito tried to claim in his awkward attempt at rationalization that the whole matter was simply a response to a dispute with neighbors.  How demeaning oneself and looking like a complete idiot across the entire nation ‘showed the neighbor’ is not something I have yet been able to compute.  But then I do not live in a conspiracy bubble of insanity. I was opposed to the insurrection by the angry white mob who stormed the Capitol on January 6^th, 2021.

With that as a backdrop comes the news report on Saturday that the Washington Post did not learn about the flag on May 16 from that Times report.  Rather the newsroom knew of the shameful Alito story since the day it happened. Like anyone who wishes to drop an embarrassment and have some cover, the Post dropped the news in the middle of this Memorial Day weekend.  More than a week after the Times’s report.

I want you to know that I feel compelled to set my own record in clear view and be upfront before continuing this article. For the record, this home has subscribed to the digital edition of the Washington Post since the campaign season in 2016. We feel it is important to support newspapers, (Wisconsin State Journal, New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times) but also strongly feel that having updated news along with views and perspectives about this perilous time where autocrats and fascists are posing direct threats to our democracy. Being solid news consumers is something every citizen needs to undertake. Being informed of facts is essential in any age, but more so now than ever. I do not shy away from standing alongside sound journalistic standards or the straight talk required when those standards are not upheld. Just because I have a subscription to a newspaper and respect the overall product published each day does not mean I will be quiet when their newsroom fails to meet the required standards. Being a subscriber seems to make it incumbent that I speak out. Let me then be blunt. I am simply aghast that the Washington Post scuttled this story about Alito for years.

On Jan. 20, 2021 — the day of Biden’s inauguration, which the Alitos did not attend — Barnes went to their home to follow up on the tip about the flag. He encountered the couple coming out of the house. Martha-Ann Alito was visibly upset by his presence, demanding that he “get off my property.”

As he described the information he was seeking, she yelled, “It’s an international signal of distress!”

Alito intervened and directed his wife into a car parked in their driveway, where they had been headed on their way out of the neighborhood. The justice denied the flag was hung upside down as a political protest, saying it stemmed from a neighborhood dispute and indicating that his wife had raised it.

Martha-Ann Alito then got out of the car and shouted in apparent reference to the neighbors: “Ask them what they did!” She said yard signs about the couple had been placed in the neighborhood. After getting back in the car, she exited again and then brought out from their residence a novelty flag, the type that would typically decorate a garden. She hoisted it up the flagpole. “There! Is that better?” she yelled.

I cannot afford the Post any praise for reporting their account of the story this weekend. Yes, there was that first-hand account of confronting the Alito family at their home, and it underscores (again) the white and angry mentality that is so ripe among their kind. “Feel our pain’ from the resentment-prone and heavily weighted grievance crowd makes the rest of us want to vomit.  But so does the lean and half-hearted and surely hours-long struggle of how to explain the paper’s lack of reporting this story in a timely fashion. What resulted felt like an iron-deficient hospital patient needing another blood transfusion.

The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors, a Post spokeswoman said. It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics, the spokeswoman said.

“At the time” they decided “not to report” the Alito story. But what about during the many months of court chaos that unfolded where the very fabric of objectivity had been torn asunder with bribes provided to Clarence Thomas for luxury travels and his wife was reported to be neck deep in far right-wing activism and outright lunacy? And of course, Alito himself was in the muck, too. I am sure he undertakes Catholic finger play before dinner but that does not give him license for what was at the heart of a New York Times story. They reported a conservative activist knew the ruling in 2014’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby after donors of the right-winger had dinner with the justice.  Alito surely needed a confessional session by then, and yet in recalling that story during the past three years, the Post saw no need to report the flag events of 2021 to their readers. They could not see the long chain of events and draw any conclusions?

The integrity of the Supreme Court is a major story that plays out almost weekly with news articles and court cases that strike at the very heart of our conscience as a democracy. Yes, the Post sat on the flag story.  A story that showcases the weak foundation of a fragile white conservative male justice who willingly tossed his country and his wife off the flagpole at his home.

The Post had the PRIME moment to report the flag story when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision barring Trump from that state’s primary ballot.  The Court stated Colorado couldn’t make the decision, but also shockingly set forth additional rules for how Section 3 can be applied….and equally important not applied. But hear me now, the ruling was a bare five-justice majority that issued that harmful decision for our democracy. Oh….yes…let us not forget……Justice Alito provided that powerful essential fifth vote that cratered the Fourteenth Amendment’s bar to insurrectionists’ holding office.

The Washington Post has a great deal to explain.  Not only to loyal newspaper subscribers who rely on information but also to a nation that faces a severe test about the very foundations of this nation.