IT APPEARS THEY ALSO IGNORE FACTS.
-THE WATCHMAN
There are times when we have to sit here and wonder how people ever got passed their exams to be able to practice in the fields that they have chosen. Law is perhaps the most interesting of these fields of study and work, and one of the most expensive degrees to obtain. We must ask then why is it that so many attorneys seem to have such a limited understanding of Constitutional Law? The most commonly attacked Constitutional Right is the 2nd Amendment. There is no exception to that policy this year either. Below is listed several pieces of proposed legislation that are proposed which all violate the Constitutional rights of citizens. Yes, you will see names mentioned more than once. We are going to talk about the Red Flag Law proposed by Senator Boren. Much of what we will actually say applies to all the pieces of proposed legislation and should be remembered.
We are going to discuss SB 312 Red Flag Law, authored by Senator Boren. We first went to this site to see what the bill said. You can read the bill here. The bill is crafted just like those in many other states. The fatal flaw with this bill and all those like it is the simple fact that it is devoid of providing any Constitutional rights to the accused. This boils down to as simple as I don’t like my neighbor and he has a gun. Before your neighbor knows it, he’s had all of his weapons confiscated ordered to court and he has no idea why. These types of laws just weaponize a restraining order.
Now we aren’t going to deny that there should be something in place to protect real victims of abuse, rape, stalking and other such crimes, but that should be accompanied with police reports that are properly filed and the law enforcement officers who responded to the calls should be witnesses at the proceedings. There are no such protections for the accused in this bill.
We wanted to know more about the individual who wrote this piece of legislation so we started by going to here biography page here. There is some good information about her background there, but not enough to base any opinion on.
We next went to www.votesmart.org to see what information they had available. We started with her biography page which can be found here. We will give her credit for one thing. There is more detailed information about her on this site than any politician or candidate that we have ever researched before. For that we thank her or her biographer for their openness.
We do our due diligence here. In order to get to know the individual better, we next went to the voting records section found here. Now we do take into consideration that she has only been in an elected office for a brief period of time. There is enough information there to recognize that she is another social justice warrior who feels that criminals are punished to harshly and this piece of legislation she has offered indicates she doesn’t feel we citizens should defend ourselves. That thinking contradicts all logic and statistics.
We next went to her ratings and endorsements page found here. She received two endorsements that were reported. One from a Union, the United Auto Workers and one from Sally’s List. She only received one rating as indicated below:
2019 Research Institute for Economic Development 69%
Those are indicative of pro-tax, pro-victim liberal numbers. It is very typical of the district she represents to send a liberal politician to office.
We next went to her campaign finance reports found here. Although these were helpful, they were lacking information necessary to verify the time frame for accuracy. We were unable to tell if these were from her campaign for office in 2018 or the beginning of a re-election campaign. We knew we needed to look elsewhere.
We next went to the Oklahoma Ethics Committee Guardian site to see what information was available there. It went into a lot more detail and did indicate several left leaning groups donating to her campaign. By far she was the largest donator to her own campaign. We found no contributions past November of 2018.
We don’t know if there was a donation to her campaign from the Bloomberg campaign or not. Frankly, it’s irrelevant. An individual who wants to buy the Presidency and turn the nation into another New York City is a man without morality. We do find it unacceptable that those that want to lead our state fail to do the basic research into matters that affect us all. A quick search would have found this article from the Oklahoma Report concerning gun violence in Oklahoma. Quoting from the report “In the last decade, an average of 589 Oklahomans died each year from guns. By far, the largest share of those deaths was from suicide, with an average of 405 Oklahomans who shot themselves from 2007 to 2016, according to the Oklahoma State Department of Health. An Average of 173 Oklahomans annually were victims of gun homicide in the same period.
However, the rate of gun deaths has been rising in Oklahoma. The state’s suicide rate from guns was 8.5 per 100,000 people in 2007; that increased to 12.7 per 100,000 people in 2016. And the homicide rate from guns rose to 5.9 per 100,000 people in 2016 up from 4.3 per 100,000 people in 2007.
What they did not tell you was that during that same time period the number of beds available to treat those with mental and drug problems declined to a point that the state now has only 300 beds available to treat patients. This has crippled law enforcement and the judiciary’s ability to properly deal with these problems. A vast majority of those needing treatment are now sent to prison where they receive little to know treatment for their problem. Yet nowhere do you see a proposed piece of legislation to assist them.
Further research produced this information from the federal government. Listening to all these social justice warriors and reading all these anti-gun bills that have been proposed one would think that Oklahoma is one of the most dangerous places in the world for gun violence. Start looking at the facts and you will see that we are actually one of the safest states in the Union.
Now we are inherently fair about our research. We found this article from the Gifford Law Center. We don’t hold much stock by it. Let’s face it, the former Congresswoman has a legitimate beef, but she and her husband lose the argument when they fail to disclose the disposition of the small arsenal the two of them owned at the time of the attempted assassination of the Congresswoman.
When a Presidential candidate and founder of a gun control group makes two visits to a state after an article such as this appears in a major paper, one can’t help but wonder why all these anti-gun bills all of a sudden appear. The truth of the matter is, anyone that is walking around with armed security and claims to be anti-2nd amendment is doing so just to fool the public.
Many people say that Red Flag Laws violate the individual rights of the citizens. They do. We found no better description of those violations than in this article. They not only violate the 2nd Amendment, they violate the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th. How could any licensed, practicing attorney, regardless of political affiliation, compose a piece of legislation that strips the citizens of this state or nation of the very rights that our forefathers fought a Revolution for.
Over the last three years we have witnessed an ongoing battle to secure our southern border. The intensity of that battle has grown over the last year. Why does one political party, yes, the Democrats, seem so set in allowing everyone and their brother to enter this country legally or not. This is what we get from their insistence more Americans are killed by illegal aliens than by AR-15 rifles, yet the U.S. House passes legislation on guns that exempts gang members. Whose safety do they have in mind.
Then they choose to completely ignore this piece of evidence from the Washington Times. This completely contradicts their argument for more gun control. The headline reads “Murder rates drop as concealed carry permits soar” Why would anyone in their right mind want to ignore all the available information on any subject.
We are going to ask you to do two things right now. They are both hard things to do. The first is to place your shoes in those of a parent who has lost a child. The second is to place yourself into the boots of a combat veteran who has lost many friends. Both are tough, and we know that unless you’ve actually been in that situation, you will never understand the feeling. You will see where we are going with this in the next paragraph.
There is more than ample room for abuse of Red Flag Laws. We have been following a story out of Colorado of a case of such abuse. We can understand the pain that the mother of this young man is going through, but it doesn’t excuse what she has done. We urge each and everyone of you to open this link and follow the story.
In accordance with Constitutional Law 53
The Federal Constitution provides that the laws of the United States made in the pursuance thereof shall be the supreme law of the land, anything in the law or the constitution or the laws of any state contrary thereof notwithstanding. Therefore, an act of Congress, constitutionally passed within the limits of its authority, becomes a part of the supreme law of the land. Hence a state law is void if it is contrary to a valid act of Congress, since Congress clearly has the power to pre-empt state law.
Federal statutes operate essentially as part of the law of each state, and are as binding on its authorities and people as are its own local constitution and laws in the same manner as if they were embodied in the Federal Constitution, and are controlling over state constitution and statutory.
It’s a shame that a local newsletter has to bring out a point of law to a practicing attorney. One thinks that an attorney would be aware of such little items as this. We guess not. What this would mean is that regardless of whether or not the proposal passes and is signed, it is unenforceable due to its numerous violations of U.S. Constitutional Law. We are only surprised that such a case has not been made to the U.S. Supreme Court as of yet.
In closing we have only one suggestion to make. Instead of going after the law-abiding gun owners in the state of Oklahoma, why don’t you tackle the root of the problem. We’ve shown you where most gun deaths are suicides. Why not provide more beds for those in need of treatment. That has never been addressed. Why not address the illegal alien violence in the state. Oklahoma County is a sanctuary county. Why? So democrats can get more votes? You elected officials work for the people. We don’t work for you. Stop working for your special interest groups and work for the people who elected you for a change.
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