Appeals Court Rejects Ruling on Maryland Assault Weapons Ban

The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals sent back the lower court’s decision upholding the Maryland “assault weapons” ban. While this won’t end the ban, it does mean that the recent ruling upholding the gun ban is no longer valid, and that the lower court must review their decision using stricter standards.
Writing for the three-judge appellate court panel that heard the case, Kolbe v. Maryland, Chief Judge William B. Traxler wrote: “In our view, Maryland law implicates the core protection of the Second Amendment — ‘the right of law-abiding responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home, District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570,635 (2008), and we are compelled by Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), as well as our own precedent in the wake of these decisions to conclude that the burden is substantial and strict scrutiny is the applicable standard or review for Plaintiffs’ Second Amendment claim.”
The court vacated the district court’s denial of the plaintiffs’ claims and remanded the case to the lower court, ordering that it apply the appropriate strict standard of review.
“We are greatly heartened by the Fourth Circuit panel’s ruling today,” said Lawrence G. Keane, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), one of the lead plaintiffs in this case. “As this important case goes forward, NSSF will continue to work with our co-plaintiffs to ensure that our citizens’ Second Amendment rights are protected and that the lawful commerce in firearms is restored in support of this constitutional protection.”
Chris W. Cox, the executive director of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, issued the following statement in reaction to today’s ruling by the federal 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in the Kolbe v. Maryland case. The case challenges the legality of Maryland’s 2013 ban on so-called assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The 2-1 decision sends the gun-control law back to a lower court for review because it “implicates the core protection of the Second Amendment.”
“The Fourth Circuit’s ruling is an important victory for the Second Amendment,” said Cox. Maryland’s ban on commonly owned firearms and magazines clearly violates our fundamental, individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. The highest level of judicial scrutiny should apply when governments try to restrict our Second Amendment freedoms.”

Scorpion and 805 Bren Carbines

Two new versions of the Scorpion.

CZ Does a Carbine Right

If you are a fan of CZ’s firearms, 2016 is going to be a great year for you. New for 2016, CZ is releasing carbine models of their very popular Scorpion and Bren pistols that maintain the CZ integrity as well as spare you the NFA rigmarole.
CZ is launching with two versions 9mm Luger Scorpion carbine, one with a faux suppressor and the other with a conventional muzzle brake. Both rifles sport 16.2-inch barrels and come standard with side-folding stocks. The barrels have standard 1/2×28 threads for other muzzle devices and suppressors.
A lot of companies make the mistake of just extending the barrel when converting pistols to carbines, but CZ went the extra mile and actually developed a new handguard that gives the gun an integral suppressor look and provides a longer grip and sight radius. The handguard features M-Lok slots for accessories.
Availability for the Scorpion carbine has not been set yet but they are expected to be released later this year, possibly in the third quarter of 2016.

The new side-folding stocks.

Scorpion EVO 3 S1 Carbine Specifications:

• Caliber: 9mm Luger
• Capacity: 20+1, 10- and 30-round magazines available
• Barrel: 16.2-inch cold hammer-forged with 1/2×28 threads
• Weight: 6.1 pounds
• Overall length: 34.75 inches
• Controls: ambidextrous thumb safety
• MSRP: $1,049.00

The Bren rifle.

Next, looking at the Bren rifle, we see the same solid features included with the Bren pistol, made available in the U.S. last year, but with the addition of a polymer adjustable side-folding stock and full-length barrel. The cold hammer-forged 16.2-inch barrel is also threaded for 1/2×28 muzzle devices. These rifles will come in black as the standard color but will also be available in flat dark earth as an upgrade.
We were told that the Bren rifles are ready to go into production and should hit gun store shelves within the next two months.

CZ 805 Bren S1 Carbine Specifications:

• Caliber: 5.56 NATO/.223 Remington
• Capacity: 30+1, uses AR-pattern magazines
• Barrel: 16.2-inch cold hammer-forged with 1/2×28 threads
• Weight: 8.02 pounds
• Overall length: 39 inches
• Controls: ambidextrous thumb safety
• MSRP: $2,099

Prosecutorial Misconduct

What is Prosecutorial Misconduct?
Prosecutorial misconduct occurs when a prosecutor breaks a law or a code of professional ethics in the course of a prosecution. In Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78 (1935), Justice Sutherland explained prosecutorial misconduct meant “overstepp[ing] the bounds of that propriety and fairness which should characterize the conduct of such an officer in the prosecution of a criminal offense.”
Prosecutors are entrusted with determining who will be held accountable when a crime occurs. They hold a great deal of power. They work with the police as they gather evidence and build a case against a suspect and then they take that case to court and are charged with convincing a jury of the guilt of the suspect. First a foremost, it is the prosecutor’s job to seek justice and present the judge and jury with facts and legal arguments that result is the conviction of the guilty defendant.
Sometimes, prosecutors find evidence that would tend to exonerate the person they are trying to convict. Because Prosecutors are charged with presenting the truth, the prosecution is obligated to turn over all exculpatory evidence to the defense. This can be difficult. Imagine that you are a prosecutor in the midst of a heated trial, fighting to get justice for a murder victim – a woman who you believe was murdered by her husband. You are absolutely convinced that this man beat his wife to death. In a police report, you find notes taken during an interview with the murder victim’s three year old child who witnessed the murder. The child told the police, “Daddy wasn’t home when mommy got hurt. A monster with a mustache hurt Mommy.”
A prosecutor in this position must turn over this evidence to the defense, even if it will torpedo the case against the defendant. Because the criminal justice system is adversarial – the prosecution and the defense battle against each other within the framework of the law – it is very difficult to hand the opponent the tools that could very well destroy your case. Nevertheless, it is the prosecutor’s duty to do so.

difficult to believe that Hillary Clinton is not just another bought and paid for politician

Subject: Release ALL Transcripts

Hi,

I find it difficult to believe that Hillary Clinton is not just another bought and paid for politician by Wall Street.  The exorbitant amount of money she was paid per speech begs the question:  What was promised to them by her?  What did they discuss?  Democrats need to know that their candidate for president isn't already selling them out and the game is rigged against them.  Hillary can reassure the voters by releasing the transcripts.  At the debate, she refused to make any such assurances and said she would look into it.  Well that isn't good enough for me.

That's why I signed a petition to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Candidate for President, which says:

"As a progressive democrat, I call on Secretary Clinton to release the transcripts from all her paid speeches.  She claims it was just about chit chat.  Well I want to see."

Will you sign this petition? Click here:
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/release-all-transcripts?source=s.icn.em.cp&r_by=15097892

Thanks!

Stewart Rhodes interviews Oath Keeper SWAT Officer About the LaVoy Finicum Shooting

Stewart Rhodes interviews Oath Keeper SWAT Officer About the LaVoy Finicum Shooting

Ex-Spies Say That Clinton’s Illegal Server Triggered Widespread Devastation

Three veterans of American intelligence are horrified by the havoc that they believe former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton caused through her epic abuse of state secrets in the E-Mailgate scandal. “If there really were SAP [special-access programs] material on her server, consider the implications,” a former U.S. intelligence officer tells me. He refers to the “several dozen” messages marked TOP SECRET/SAP that I. Charles McCullough III, inspector general for the intelligence community, reports were on the private server at Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, N.Y., 267 miles north of the State Department. Special-access programs are America’s most clandestine activities. Their revelation could damage national security severely and possibly get people killed. In the anonymous words of this one-time American intelligence professional, here is some of the devastation likely caused by Clinton’s exposure of SAP secrets: Intel officers responsible for those programs must be alerted. Once alerted that SAP was mishandled and on a system that has been attacked, it is only prudent to end those programs. What does ending those programs mean? Depending on the SAP involved, it could mean redoing war plans, terminating ongoing covert actions, rethinking how the exposed covert actions must be done and executing on that new plan, or, if it reveals a source, removing that source from his environment. That has a significant impact. Presume, if you will, that it was a source. If that source were providing intel of such value that it rose to the SecState, now we’ve lost that source. Intel officers care about their sources, and for two reasons. One, we’re human beings. We don’t want those assisting us and our country to be hurt, even though we recognize the danger in which they are placing themselves. Two, the business model doesn’t work very well if sources think they’ll be outed. The US intel community already has so much trouble in that regard due to Edward Snowden and Bradley [now Chelsea] Manning. This just compounds it. Think about the next meeting between a prospective source and a CIA case officer trying to recruit that source to risk his/her life for the United States: “Are you sure a high-level official won’t out me?” So, since Clinton and her illegal, off-site server contained evidence of these beyond-top-secret initiatives, the safest course for the CIA and other agencies is to assume that these efforts were compromised and then to wind them down. Once terminated, these activities stop yielding information that keeps America secure and Americans alive. Intelligence agencies also would relocate and possibly repatriate the relevant U.S. operatives whose covers Clinton likely blew. This would affect their careers. Those whom Clinton’s crimes have unmasked would become unable to serve overseas, lest hostile nations or actors find, exploit, or kill them. RELATED: Hillary Clinton’​s E-mail Scandal: Far Graver than First Thought Also, if Clinton’s server contained the identities of American agents, that could mean that, say, an undercover “diplomat” here and a “businesswoman” there might be ordered back to the United States at once. While these people might wind up stuck behind desks at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., at least they would be safe. But how about their contacts in Somalia, Ukraine, or Venezuela? The friends and associates of American agents exposed via Clinton’s at-best gross negligence might awaken to loud knocks at their doors at 4:00 a.m., followed by one-way rides to Third World dungeons. “To me, it’s offensive,” the former spook tells me. “If it were really SAP, Clinton was undoing all the hard work that my friends were doing. This is oftentimes intensive, painstaking, costly work, and her carelessness has now undone it. That pisses me off.” RELATED: Hillary’​s E-mail Scandal Is Criminal; When Will She Get Her Handcuffs? This source uses an analogy from American industry to put Clinton’s misdeeds into everyday language. “Imagine that you work at Pepsi, your 401K is tied to the performance of the company, and that performance is inextricably linked to the secret ingredient for Pepsi,” this intelligence specialist explains. “How would you feel if one of your superiors were just casual with that most sensitive of information? I think it would upset you. Now, for intel, multiply that by at least ten. We can have arguments over whether confidential material is unnecessarily classified; we generally don’t in mishandling cases, but I’d potentially be open to it. But with SAP, no way. This is so grossly negligent that either it is false or Hillary Clinton doesn’t care.” Share article on Facebook share Tweet article tweet Meanwhile, a veteran who worked in military intelligence for more than 25 years thinks that this first source may be too optimistic. “As for damage done, my suspicion is that it is much worse than it looks,” he says, also anonymously. “We need to consider that everything that was on that server has been compromised.” “We need to consider that everything that was on that server has been compromised. There isn’t an intelligence service out there that isn’t interested in the actions of our senior people,” he continues. “Outside the president, the two most important targets for collection are SecDef and SecState. And that means everyone. Russia and China, certainly. Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, Iran, and Israel — I would guess — would all be interested as well. Very interested.” The former military-intelligence man outlines how foreign spy agencies would handle the most sensitive information, after capturing it. “The SecState is seeing a whole bunch of stuff. Virtually everything she does is classified — honest. There are all sorts of stuff that would fit under the generic heading of SAP. . . . Let’s assume this is a program about some particularly well-placed individual somewhere who is feeding us information. If I were a bad guy, and I got hold of this kind of information, the last thing I would do would be to roll the guy up.” He adds: “If it were one of my people, I might start feeding him, the source, slightly skewed information so as to mislead the U.S. But that is only the beginning. No matter what, the last thing I want to do is let the U.S. know that I know of this source. . . . So, from the U.S. side, everything that remotely touches that material, from the date of the compromise, should now be considered tainted.” RELATED: Hillary’​s Latest E-mail Gambit: Tragedy, Comedy, or Low Farce? The former military spy echoes the first source: Breaches, such as what likely befell Clinton’s private server, are not just technical glitches. They hammer real people. “More to the point, it affects other folks,” the ex-military-intelligence operative tells me. “Everyone who was remotely associated with the source is now on shaky ground. Compromises are expensive. They mean everyone who was derived from one source is also tainted. If the compromise happened a while ago, and we just found out, it could mean years of not only being misled by some other organization, but by now virtually all the people in a given network have been compromised and either turned by the other side or are under close observation, and they are waiting to roll them up when we start acting. If this compromise, and it was a compromise, took place in 2012, then more than three years have passed since the compromise. That’s really a mess.” This veteran thinks that Hillary Clinton cannot have it both ways: She’s either too brilliant to be as innocent as she asserts or too innocent to be as brilliant as she professes. RELATED: How the FBI Could Force DOJ to Prosecute Hillary Clinton “Secretary Clinton has been seeing this kind of thing for a long time,” he says. “If she is competent to handle major decisions, if she is the highly capable person she claims to be, she would know what all this material was, without having some label stating it was secret.” “If, on the other hand, someone could put reports in front of her describing these various things, again and again, without the appropriate labels, and she was not smart enough to recognize that this material was from classified sources, then she isn’t competent to be the president, or a departmental secretary. Or, of course, this is all lies. There are no other options.” One retired intelligence officer did comment on the record — and how. ‘The fact that she had a completely separate system for her chats with Sid Blumenthal and others is outrageous.’ “I assume that the messages discussing SAP programs were known instantaneously by the Russians and the Chinese and were likely shared to some degree with other really bad actors — Iran?” Martha Sutherland tells me. She spent 19 years as an operations officer in the Central Intelligence Agency. “The only saving grace, in some weird way, is that Bibi and the Mossad probably had their eyes all over them as well!” Sutherland is appalled by what we already know about Hillary Clinton’s behavior. More Clinton E-mail Scandal Hillary’s Latest E-mail Gambit: Tragedy, Comedy, or Low Farce? Hillary Calls on State Department to Publish Her Top Secret E-mails White House Toes the 'Clinton Is Not a Target' Line “The fact that she had a completely separate system for her chats with Sid Blumenthal and others is outrageous,” this former CIA agent observes. “And then the tie-in to the Clinton Foundation and the quid pro quo is another felony count. If I had cut and pasted classified documents and put them in an e-mail on my unclassified server to avoid a written record, I would have been frog-walked in handcuffs out of Langley, no questions asked.” People keep demanding a smoking gun in this scandal. Sutherland explains that Hillary’s unencrypted, do-it-yourself server is, ipso facto, the smoking gun. It never should have been purchased. Its mere presence is the crime. “It goes beyond having classified stuff without markings,” Sutherland says. “It is the fact that she maintained a shadow communications system, separate from the government-mandated, secure system. And she was the BOSS! Its existence, the now damning news of SAP info on it, and her continued denial that she did anything wrong are proof positive that Hillary and the Clintons still think they are above the law! Enough already — the BIG HOUSE for Hillary, not the White House, for goodness sakes!”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430597/hillary-clinton-email-server-former-intelligence-officers-havoc

AR Shotguns

Tristar had some new shotguns at SHOT Show this year. If you are not familiar with Tristar they are making some very nicely built shotguns that won’t break the bank. They may not have the fanciest fit and finish, or every bell and whistle, but they flat out run.
There were two standouts in the new guns Tristar had at SHOT this year. One is a tactical AR styled shotgun and the other is their new trap gun.

The KRX 12 gauge. Mag fed, gas operated.

The AR pattern shotgun is appealing becasue of the simple cross-platform operational familiarity. But they’re a challenge to get right.

The old school carry handle comes off.

The new Tristar KRX Tactical is an AR styled semi-auto shotgun. The obvious selling point here is the AR platform familiarity. The white-whale of the industry for the last few years has been the ideal tactical shotgun. There are traditional pump overhauls, bull-pups, two loading tubes, two tubes and two barrels–just abotu every combination imaginable. Yet everyone is pushing toward a shotgun that works like an AR platform rifle. Here’s Tristar’s.
The KRX feels solid. These types of guns typically have issues with either feeding or ejection, or both. We’ll be back here with a full-on function test just as soon as the gun is out in the wild, so stay tuned. From what we saw at the show, it looks like a promising design. The gun should sell for less than $500, too.

The three new sporting guns that caught our eye.

The stock is adjustable for a precise fit.

The ribs are high and sturdy.

My favorite of the three new sporting guns is, well, a bit different. Different in a good way though. It is a single barrel that looks, feels and shoulders like an over/under. They call it the Unsingle and it is a new addition to the TT-15 series of trap guns. It has the under barrel of the O/U only. As over/under shooters know, the bottom barrel is the one that is more inline with your shoulder for better felt and controlled recoil.  Tristar is also making a Top Single and I bet you can figure out where the barrel is on that.  However, it is the Unsingle that has our attention as a great practice trap shotgun. Tristar is also offering these in a combo form that includes a standard set of O/U barrels.
All of the TT-15 shotguns come with adjustable comb stocks and Beretta type extended choke tubes. They are all 12 gauge with 2 3/4″ chambers. These are shipping now and have an MSRP between $1,190 and $1,350. The combo comes in at $1,725.

The over. The under is available, too, as is the over/under.