TexasCHLforum.com

rdcrags wrote:Strong letter to follow?

Who in Austin would listen? I know that MY rep won’t.

treadlightly wrote:The philosophical arguments have been well put. Here's a practical concern.

If there is a line between some rights and more rights, that line is going to move over time.

Which way do you suppose it might go? Would the legacy LTC holder lose or gain rights over time?

The risk of death by gunfire in an armed society, at least in our armed society, is preferable to risking lost liberty. Constitutional carry and due process for me.

Besides, if you want to make society safer, the first thing to do is enforce the law, not shackle the law abiding.

It's easy enough to break the law, anyway. Today, I saw a government sign near the edge of town I'd never thought about before.

Right there, on the way to the Walmart, is a sign that says "45" in large print, "speed limit" in somewhat smaller lettering. I assume they mean roughly 850 fps.

I was OK this morning, my 1911 comfortably cocked and locked, but I've carried a 9mm right past there hundreds of times!

For the win.

flechero wrote:

.....The requirement to have a license to carry if you want the “free” exercise of your RKBA is a fact of life.....

Sadly, that is true. And for that very reason I would get the enhanced LTC if offered. I'm not willing to wait it out to see if we ever get our intended rights back and doubt we'll live long enough to see gun free zones eliminated. I spend enough time at my son's school that I wouldn't hesitate one extra day to get in line for the enhanced version.

Even though I disagree 100% with the premise, I want the benefit and would gladly give up the dollars, time and ammo to get it.

I can understand that completely. If something like that were passed, I would probably pursue it too, for the same reasons. The justification is the same as for why I got my CHL/LTC in the first place....didn’t want to HAVE to do it, but DID do it so that I could carry most places without fear of arrest. But, until such a political crime of tiered licensing occurs, it is a better use of our time, effort, and money to work toward the goals of increasing the places we can carry under our current licenses (which is an achievable goal in the next 1 or 2 legislative sessions if we are smart about it), and to keep pushing for some kind of Constitutional Carry passage in the future. That would be a trend away from regulation (read that as “infringements”), instead of adding a layer of complexity to the existing infringements, which would be a trend toward additional infringements.

I wasn’t around at the time of her tenure in the legislature, and it has been communicated to me by someone in the logic of whose opinions I have confidence, that Suzanna Gratia Hupp wasn’t always the most politically effective advocate for gun rights - meaning not that she wasn’t a vocal supporter, but that she sometimes got hoist by her own petard, as they say. Whether this is entirely true or not, I do not know. But what I do know is that was absolutely right on when she said:

How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of.

The fact is, you could apply that standard to how the US Congress has trampled on ALL of our rights. Is Federal Asset Forfeiture consistent with 4th Amendment?

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Well, that’s not what happens when some hick highway patrol officer doesn’t like the cut of your jib and decides that the emergency cash you brought on your trip which he found in your motor home along with a .357 revolver (but no drugs) because he used the “I smell marijuana” pretext for a Terry stop and searched your motor home without your permission OR a warrant. The fact that you’re retired and have no “visible means of support” (while you’re on vacation, no less) is suspicious. When he asks how you support yourself, and you say you have retirement accounts, he takes your bank cards, swipes them, and drains your accounts into the Pooville city coffers. Then he impounds your motor home on the notion that it must have been acquired with unlawfully gained money.....again, “because he smelled marijuana.” It ends up costing you a minor fortune and 2 or 3 years wending your way through the courts to get any of your property or money back, because SCOTUS - the “Defender of the Constitution” - has allowed the gov’t to construct such a Byzantine system for private citizens who themselves have never been charged with, let alone convicted of a crime, to recover their confiscated assets, which were taken under “civil (not criminal) asset forfeiture laws”. And by the time you reach an agreement, you never get it all back. They used some of the money to buy new computers for the squad cars. They sold your expensive motor home at auction for half its actual value and used some of the money to buy a couple of armored vehicles from the fedgov’t (for their little town of 10,000 people). They used some of the money to buy updated radar guns. They used some of it to fund the annual police and fireman’s annual picnic. By the time you win your case, your assets are long gone. So they offer to settle. They’ll give you back 40¢ on the dollar, if you will just walk away. If not, they’ll use their city attorney to keep this in the courts until they bleed you dry.

THAT is what the federal gov’t and the govts of most states think of your 4th Amendment rights. I completely understand that they’ve gotten away with it with full blessing of SCOTUS, so it is “constitutional”. But the FACT is, when SCOTUS arrived at that decision, they had to completely ignore the OBVIOUS intent of the founders, plainly written in the text of the 4th Amendment. Let’s apply a paraphrasing of Hupp’s words to the 4th Amendment:

How a politician stands on the 4th Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of.

......or......

How a politician stands on the 4th Amendment tells you how he or she views Constitution of the United States… as a sacred and reliable framework for the limitation of gov’t growth and protecting the rights of The People, or as a bludgeon against an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and kept in the dark about their rights.

You can look at our government today, at virtually any level, and make that comparison with regard to ANY of your natural or God-given rights, which belong to you for the simple reason that you are alive and breathing.....and no other reason. Does the way they treat YOU personally in YOUR life reveal that they view you as “as a trustworthy and productive citizen”, or does the way they treat YOU in YOUR life personally reveal that they view you as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of? Those rights are YOURS. They are NOT gov’t permissions.

So, I follow the existing rules, under protest, and do the best job I know how of avoiding lawless behavior on my own part. But that does NOT mean that I will support ANY tweaking of the laws to make me jump through additional hoops and pay additional money, just so that I can expand my right to keep and bear arms, a right which is not to be “infringed” upon in the first place - NOT BY ANYBODY - unless I have received my Constitutionally mandated due process, and have been accused, tried, and convicted in a court of law of a disqualifying crime.

The more layers of crap they pile on good, decent people, just so that those people can have what the Founders originally intended for them to have - and all done simply because they do not view those people as unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of - the closer we get to it being time to burn this thing to the ground and start over.

As anyone who moved here from either the east or west coasts can tell you, Texas - as a general thing - is better governed than those coastal states. But even Texas is not perfect; and the demonstrable fact that people who have jumped through the licensing hoops to gain the exercise of their right to carry a firearm have a better crime record as a class than those people whose very job it is to enforce the law and fight crime, and yet they cannot carry their firearm into all the same places as those enforcers of the law, is proof positive that Texas still has a ways to go to be TRUE defenders of the Constitution. Partial defenders is better than confirmed oppressors such as California’s gov’t, but just because we’re better than California, it does not follow that we’re good enough.

“Good enough” means we have Constitutional Carry - pretty much anywhere we want except maybe inside of a prison. “Good enough” means that not one more resident of Texas is EVER subjected to civil asset forfeiture without FIRST having been accused, tried, and convicted of a crime in a court of law. Etc., etc.

So NO. I will NOT support legislation that would add an additional layer of “my gov’t doesn’t trust me” to the already existing infringements. We either stand for Liberty, or we don’t. I choose to stand for it. And I will continue to stand for it until gov’t gets all of it right.

(I’m ba-ack! )

From day one, I’ve always seen licensed concealed carry and licensed open carry as steps toward unlicensed carry.....or Constitutional Carry, as some call it.

We talk about legislative intent in this forum occasionally, and we bemoan legislators and judges who reinterpret the law in a different manner from the way the legislature intended that law when they wrote it......and rightly so. Those deviations are perversions of the original legislative intent.

That same discernment should be applied to the words of the Constitution. It is very clear to anyone who has read contemporaneously written supporting documents such as the Federalist Papers and other writings of the founders that: (A) the 2nd Amendment was written with the intent to describe an individual right (not a “permission”); and that (B) they added the specific wording “shall not be infringed” BECAUSE they knew that gov’t would eventually get around to trying to infringe upon it. Additionally, there were other protections in the Constitution existing within the Bill of Rights which apply to the right to keep and bear arms, to whit, Article V:

Article [V] (Amendment 5 - Rights of Persons)
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

So let’s get it out of the way right here and now, the Founders never intended the 2nd Amendment to be applied in any way except the most (small “L”) libertarian interpretation, and they required due process FOR THE PERSON before he/she could have their individual right to keep and bear arms infringed in any way. THAT was the founder’s INTENT. This is how we rationalize the abrogation of rights for convicted felons.

But we are NOT convicted felons, and EVERY single little restriction on the right to keep and bear arms since then has been in opposition to the Founders’ intent for the 2nd Amendment - whether enacted legislatively, by SCOTUS decision, or executive fiat. When you agree philosophically with the requirement of a license in order to exercise one’s 2nd Amendment rights - whether the state is offering tiered levels or not - you are accepting the proposition that the 2nd Amendment is a permission, and not a right.

Now, I have agreed to obtain a license so that the state will not put me in prison for exercising my right to keep and bear arms, but I do NOT agree with the proposition that a license ought to be required, because the requirement is an infringement. How so? Try and get a license if you owe the state unpaid taxes. There are plenty of legitimate possible reasons for why those taxes have not paid yet.....like maybe you are contesting them, and a decision has not yet been reached.....but the fact that you are exercising your right to petition gov’t regarding your taxes should NOT be a disqualifier to freely exercise your right to keep and bear arms. Until you’ve been convicted of a disqualifying tax evasion charge through due process of law, the state should not be restricting your right to carry a firearm.

Now, the fact that license holders as a class have a better track record of lawful behavior than law enforcement is a good thing, but if that is the case, then why do we have more restriction on where we can carry than any LEO has? The explanation goes back to gov’t at all levels believing that the state grants a RKBA permission rather than the RKBA being a human right we all have simply because breath air. Furthermore, the state believes that LEOs, as agents of the state, are more trustworthy than the citizens they rule over, even though the statistics do not support that notion when it comes to license holders. The statist belief in the power of gov’t over the people, instead of the power of the people over their gov’t is in full display.

So, for the purposes of the poll:

1. I picked Constitutional Carry. That is what I firmly believe, based on their own words and writings, to be the Founder’s intent. Every gov’t restriction on that right without due process for the individual citizen is a perversion of liberty.
2. I went ahead and got my license anyway so that the state would not have a reason to jail me for exercising my right - in the same way that I buy motor vehicle insurance to avoid getting tickets for being uninsured while exercising my right to use the roads that my taxes helped to pay for. I do it, but I do it under protest, just to stay out of trouble with the law. And, in the same way that I have never given anyone reason to doubt my trustworthiness as a citizen by behaving unlawfully in Texas with a firearm, but the state still requires me to have a license to carry one, I also have an excellent driving record in Texas....but the state still requires me to maintain a driver’s license. So the state obviously considers the RKBA to be a privilege, which it may infringe as it sees fit. I see it as a long term fight that will be won in steps. We got licensed concealed carry. Then we got some expansions on that. Then we got licensed open carry AND campus carry, and there will be expansions on those - including the eventual broadening of the places we can lawfully carry......for ALL of us, not just an elite few.
3. I would be very much opposed to creating an “elite” class of license holders for several reasons. For one, we should not allow ourselves to be pigeon-holed, labeled, and culturally divided by the state. For another, anyone who claims full support for the “uninfringed” RKBA, and yet also believes that license holders ought to be segregated out by skill level according to where they may or may not go, is a flaming hypocrite. Figure out what side of the fence you sit on, but get the heck off the fence. If you have an elitist view of the RKBA, then get off the fence and just admit you’re an elitist, and stop denying it. OR, conversely, get off the fence and give an impassioned defense of the free exercise of the 2nd Amendment right as an individual right - AS THE FOUNDERS INTENDED. But quit fiddle-faddeling around.
4. Not everybody can afford to take additional training classes and pay additional licensing fees. And still others may be physicially unable to take and pass higher level training classes. Certainly this becomes a bigger issue for the elderly. If you’re an elitist, are you telling me that a grandpa should have less right to carry his firearm into a classroom (as an example of a prohibited place where police can carry) to talk to his grandkid’s class about his military experience, or his career field, than a “super-license” holder - just because the former is more frail and less fit than the latter? That’s ageist! Should the poor be barred from obtaining super licenses because the requirements are out of their reach?

The requirement to have a license to carry if you want the “free” exercise of your RKBA is a fact of life, so get the license in order to stay out of trouble, but NEVER support any licensing scheme which creates separate classes of licensees, further subdiving the right into a series of permissions in which the state gets to decide who the winners and losers are.

Remember, the goal is the FREE exercise of your rights, not submission to additional requirements for additional permissions, in order to exercise a right which the founders intended should be uninfringed. It is always a good thing to get training if you are capable of taking it, and can afford any costs associated with it. But the human right to keep and bear arms must never be subject to physical or economic limitations, because if you accept a tiered system, then you accept that not all Americans are equal before the law. This is what people like Hillary Clinton and Obama believe. They believe that not all of us should be equal before the law, because they do not believe in the rule of law......they believe in the rule of men. If you support a mandated tiered licensing system in order to expand your permissions, then you are joining the ranks of those who believe in the rule of men over the rule of law, and who do NOT believe in equality before the law for individual citizens.