Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Mark Walters, creator of Armed American Radio and Armed American News, to discuss the recent ruling by a New York federal judge to stop key components of the state’s gun laws that violated the Second Amendment.
Leahy: We welcome for the very first time to our newsmaker line, mark Walters with Armed America Radio. Good morning Mark.
Walters: Good morning. Thank you very much for having me this morning. I appreciate it.
Leahy: Well, of course, you are pals with our very good pal Neil W. McCabe, and he appears with you regularly on your program. The big news here is a judge in New York State has basically said that the New York State legislature, a federal judge, by the way, his name is Glenn Suddaby, said the New York State legislature overstepped its bounds when it reacted to the Supreme Court by putting in a law that in essence violates the Second Amendment. Tell us about the details of this particular decision.
Walters: What you have is basically five states that are snubbing their noses, all run by Democrats. Imagine that. They are snubbing their nose at the June 23 ruling in the New York State Pistol and Rifle Association, the Bruen, which was a sweeping decision that ruled that these types of schemes are unconstitutional and eliminated the two-step measure for lower courts to review Second Amendment cases.
That gets into a little bit of nuance. I’ll make that easy to say that we now depend on a historical context. Would these types of laws have been in place at the time the Founders wrote the Second Amendment, at the time the Second Amendment was in place and written, and would it stand muster today?
Of course, we all know the answer to that. The anti-gun, professional gun, prohibition lobby doesn’t like that. So after the Bruen decision, New York’s hateful Haku, who hopefully will be ousted in a few months, decided that she was going to double and triple down as did Newsom in California and instituted a number of new laws to eliminate the one law that the court struck down in bruin predominantly, which was having to show proper cause to get a permit to carry a firearm.
I would argue you don’t need a permit to carry a firearm anyway. That is in and of itself unconstitutional. But again, a different discussion. So she is now seeking, get this.
Three years of social media background, massive training, knocking places off limits and making it nearly impossible for people to carry guns. Judge Suddaby came in, rolled in on his white horse, and said no, I don’t think so, not today. We’re going to issue an injunction.
The gun owners of America have standing in this case. Most of what you’re doing is unconstitutional. I’ll give you three days to appeal it, and off we are to the races. This could very well be the very beginning, the shot across the bow that begins to wipe out the gun control laws post-Bruen that we know will happen.
Leahy: By the way, a little personal note about federal District Judge Glenn Sutterby. He’s a former U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of New York State, appointed by George W. Bush to the court. I knew this guy as a kid.
I grew up across the street from him. His family lived in Dalamoore, New York, which is a little town right across the Canadian border. And my dad was a principal of a school there. He was one of eight kids.
His dad was a guard at the prison, and I was good pals with his older brother. I can tell you this. If you grow up in upstate New York in a little town where there’s a prison, and your dad is a prison guard, you’re going to have a certain attitude of respect towards the Second Amendment.
Walters: No question. And that’s kind of neat. I would refer to him as your honor, you can say, Glenn, what’s up, dude?
Leahy: I haven’t seen him in 50 years, (Laughter) but he’s doing God’s work and the work of the Constitutional Republic.
Walters: Yes, a great ruling.
Leahy: So what happens next in this? Who are the states that are passing laws and regulations that are intended to thumb their nose at this outstanding Second Amendment ruling by the Supreme Court?
Walters: Essentially, you have New York, New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, and California. And if you look at the gun control schemes in these states again, and I’m being nice by saying they’re snubbing their nose at the Supreme Court, they’re literally ignoring its ruling, doubling and tripling down.
And we just like to put it this way, they’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what will stick knowing that they’re eventually going to lose because of the brilliant ruling and the strength of Thomas’s ruling.
And we know that the Supreme Court is eventually going to take another case. They know that as well. So really what they’re doing is just delaying the inevitable. They’ve lost. They’ve been beaten. The Constitution won.
Unfortunately, if you live in any of these blue states that hate the United States and hate our Constitution, you’re going to have to suffer through this nonsense and waste a ton of taxpayer money until the courts eventually smack you down yet again. But it will happen.
Leahy: When the next case reaches the Supreme Court on this, I’m guessing it will be a six to three victory for the Second Amendment and that Elena Kagan, the new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor will vote against the Second Amendment. Am I wrong in that guess?
Walters: No, it isn’t that sad. It ought to be a 90 decision when you’re talking about a constitutional right enumerated in our Bill of Rights.
And I’m hopeful that the next case that reaches the court, we’re very hopeful, you know, that the bump stock case refused to be heard. The court did not grant cert this week. Not that much concern on that. That can be revisited.
Leahy: Let’s step back for our listeners. Two words bump stock and cert. Not frequently used together in the same sentence. Let’s talk about cert first. What does cert mean?
Walters: Cert is when the court grants a rid of certiorari agreeing to hear a case. In this case, there was a case regarding bump stocks that had been filed again by the gun owners.
Leahy: Now let’s stop. We are now rid of certiorari means. Hey, there are thousands of cases out there that have percolated up from the federal district court to the appeals court, somebody’s appealing, and a thousand cases come before the Supreme Court.
They pick, what 70, 81 to here every year, and they have to grant rid of certiorari, right? That’s what that means?
Walters: That is correct.
Leahy: Now, tell us about bump stock. What’s that?
Walters: Bump stock is an inanimate piece of plastic that affixes to the stock of a semi-automatic rifle with no moving parts that harness the power of the recoil to move the semiautomatic trigger.
Each individual pulled the trigger a little bit faster than the human hand or human finger can do so, and it mimics, they say, automatic fire.
Leahy: Let me just stop for a moment. That was the clearest and most concise definition of bump stock I have ever heard. Mark Walters with Armed America Radio. Congratulations. That’s very well done, my friend.
Walters: Here’s the fear of this and the reason it’s important that the court take this case. Maybe not just now. Now, they refuse to hear it, of course, as we just mentioned.
But the reason it’s important they take the case is because you don’t need a bump stock to bump fire, which is rapid-fire where the individual pulls the trigger, a semiautomatic rifle. I can do it with a rubber band or a belt loop.
So if they can define an inanimate object as a machine gun, which is what this case is about and what the ATF did, then they can say, well, wait a minute, you don’t need that bump stock to fire that gun like that.
Maybe we’ve misclassified semiautomatics. Maybe semiautomatics really are fully automatic. That’s what we’re concerned with. And that’s the ATF skirting Congress, regulating around Congress to create whatever new definition they want and then banning it by fiat.
So this is very dangerous stuff. Now, having said that, that’s not the most important case. The case we want to the supreme court next is an “assault weapons ban case” so the court can end the nonsense. 25 million guns, semiautomatic rifles in the hands of millions of Americans that are in common use at the time.
We have to get that case to the court so we can end this assault weapon nonsense and put Joe Biden to bed with this and his, I’m not going to stop until I pass an assault weapons ban.
These are common-use, regular firearms in the hands of millions of Americans. That case is more important than the bump stock case. I know nobody really wants to hear that, but it’s true.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Mark Walters” by Armed American Radio’s Mark Walters. Background Photo “Gun Wall” by Michael Saechang. CC BY-SA 2.0.
