Kagan & The Second Amendment

I'll admit up front: I am a former Rangemaster for my major law enforcement department (at one point, over 2,000 officers until budgetary layoffs this and last year) in California, seven years ago. I am not a huge "gun guy" per se -- it is not the end-all and be-all of my life -- but I am sufficiently knowledgeable and facile that a favored Captain specifically solicited me to take over the Rangemaster position in a particularly critical point in our training history. My job was to pointedly eliminate "difficult" personnel and streamline training. In other words, fire specific people and ensure we were up to POST training mandates. I therefore cleaned up our image, our history, our ammo bunker, destroyed illegal weapons, ensured we were compliant with all laws, and retained every "targeted" employee because, for me, they worked.

I changed procedures, locks, ordering and inventory regulations, and insisted that those deputies who couldn't shoot or perform on the range were referred back to personnel for addressing. During my tenure many recruits were let go due to lack of performance, including "protected classes" such as females and the melanin-enhanced. Moreover, if they couldn't perform, they couldn't perform. I insisted their observable results were documented and immured.

Worse yet, I not only turned down a Captain who wanted his chippie to pass the Academy in firearms -- despite the fact that she was a former secretary "under him" and horrible in her firearms score -- I also insisted there be accountability for handguns issued to former Executive Staff members and DSA members. Even more egregious, certain "golden" personnel had actually SOLD their county-issued weapons to third parties for PROFIT and NO ONE, except me, had the balls to point out the obvious. Finally, of course, nothing was done.

I was not destined, clearly, for easy promotion. I was a Sergeant then and I shall retire a Sergeant. I made my decisions and that was that. After 35 years I still sleep well at night with a few garish yellow hash marks on my sleeves. And no bars on my lapels.

As I used to say: I may have been issued kneepads, but I never used them.

And yet, in my career as a Supervisor, I found myself in charge, oddly enough, of the two most political supervisory appointments in the entire department: the Range and EVOC.

That written, in terms of my history, I should like to point out the newly-obvious:

From The Washington Times:

President Obama poses a real and present danger to the Second Amendment, and he's working to pack the Supreme Court with justices who will undermine Americans' gun rights.

Mr. Obama didn't fess up to this radical agenda when running for the highest office in the land. "I have said consistently that I believe that the Second Amendment is an individual right, and that was the essential decision that the Supreme Court came down on," Mr. Obama told Fox News in June 2008. Despite the campaign rhetoric, Mr. Obama is appointing judges who strongly oppose that position. The most recent pick, Elena Kagan, ran much of President Clinton's war on guns from 1995 to 1999.

When Ms. Kagan served as Mr. Clinton's deputy domestic policy adviser, she was a feverish proponent of gun control. From gunlock mandates to gun-show regulations, she was instrumental in pushing anti-gun policies, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Every court nomination counts. Two years ago, the Supreme Court barely mustered a narrow 5-4 majority to strike down the extreme District of Columbia gun ban. Should Justice Anthony Kennedy or one of the four more conservative justices retire or die while Mr. Obama is in office, the high court likely will undo such narrow victories for the Second Amendment.

While Ms. Kagan was nominated to replace the liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, and thus won't swing the court in a new direction, her being there will necessitate that gun owners concentrate more than ever on fighting outright gun bans.

Ms. Kagan's defenders acknowledge her liberal political views but claim that as a judge, the former Harvard Law School dean will somehow manage to separate her judgments from her political opinions.

The hitch is that her legal views correspond with her political views. When Ms. Kagan clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, she wrote, "I'm not sympathetic" to the claim that "the District of Columbia's firearms statutes violate [an individual's] constitutional right to 'keep and bear Arms.' "

America: you'd best make your cartridge and defensive purchases now.

Whilst you can.

BZ