RUTHFULLY YOURS

Critics often accuse the National Rifle Association of paranoia for arguing that gun controllers want to eliminate the Second Amendment. Well, being paranoid doesn’t mean the NRA is wrong.

Look no further than former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who is arguing this week that the Parkland, Florida, students and their allies shouldn’t settle for mere restrictions on guns. They should lobby Congress and the states to abolish the Second Amendment.

“Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment,” the 97-year-old former Justice wrote in an op-ed published in The New York Times Tuesday, adding, “today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.”

Apparently Justice Stevens is still sore about losing the argument in the 2008 landmark gun-rights case, D.C. v. Heller. He wrote the dissent in that case arguing that the Second Amendment was merely intended to support a militia, not the individual right to bear arms.

Former Associate Justice John Paul Stevens was a foe of any broad reading of the Second Amendment while he served on the U.S. Supreme Court. He dissented from the 2008 majority decision in the District of Columbia v. Heller case, which held that there was an individual right to bear arms. Mr. Stevens is now going even further in his retirement, writing an op-ed column for the New York Times entitled “John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment.”

Mr. Stevens is of the view that the Second Amendment is an artifact with no current beneficial purpose to serve. “Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states,” he wrote in his op-ed column, “led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that ‘a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.’ Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.”

In his op-ed column Mr. Steven sharply criticized the Heller decision, which he wrote “has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power.” Mr. Stevens added: “Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”

Mr. Stevens provides no reasoning in his op-ed column to speak of for getting rid of the Bill of Rights amendment to the Constitution protecting the right of the people to keep and bear arms that comes right after the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, free exercise of religion, the right to petition the government and the right of assembly. We need to look back at his dissenting opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, joined by liberals Justice Souter, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer, to get a sense of his disdain for any continuing relevance of the Second Amendment in today’s society. In his dissent, he rejected the notion that the framers of the Constitution “intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution” or had “the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian uses of firearms.”

Christopher Steele, the author of the Steele Dossier that alleges Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, also penned a report for the FBI that supposedly sheds light on one of the most puzzling incidents in recent history.

Mikhail Lesin was a former Russian media tycoon who was minister of the press early in Vladimir Putin’s tenure as president. Later, he played a role in stifling Russian independent media and used thuggish tactics to acquire huge holdings in Russian media companies.

Lesin was found dead in his DC Dupont Circle Hotel room in 2015. He died as a result of head and body trauma — an “accident,” the coroner said. Authorities say that Lesin died as a result of multiple falls after going on a two-day drinking binge.

But nobody ever bought that explanation. It was 11 months before a severely redacted autopsy report was released and to this day, even with many FOIA requests and digging by reporters, the mystery surrounding Lesin’s death persists.

Steele gave the FBI a report gleaned from several Russian sources that states that Lesin was murdered unintentionally — that he had a falling out with an oligarch close to Putin who wanted to send a message to Lesin but killed him by accident. The bureau got the report from Steele as it was helping D.C. police investigate the case.

BuzzFeed has the story:

Steele’s report says that Lesin was bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for an oligarch close to Putin, the four sources said.

The thugs had been instructed to beat Lesin, not kill him, but they went too far, the sources said Steele wrote.

Three of the sources said that the report described the killers as Russian state security agents moonlighting for the oligarch.
The Steele report is not the FBI’s only source for this account of Lesin’s death: Three other people, acting independently from Steele, said they also told the FBI that Lesin had been bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for the same oligarch named by Steele.

Even more surprising, federal prosecutors called witnesses before a sitting grand jury in 2016. It is not known what those witnesses testified to, but 150 pages of information were amassed and are being sought by numerous news outlets. CONTINUE AT SITE

Stoneman Douglas students’ passion is not wisdom.

All you needed to know about student activist David Hogg’s speech at the “March for Our Lives” in Washington, D.C., over the weekend was that he affixed a price tag on the microphone to symbolize how much National Rifle Association money Senator Marco Rubio took for the lives of students in Florida.

The stunt wasn’t out of place. Indeed, it perfectly encapsulated the braying spirit of the student gun-control advocacy in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting.

These young activists are making our public debate even more poisonous and less civil, and are doing it as teenagers. They are precocious that way.

The Stoneman Douglas students experienced a horrific trauma. No one can deny their grief or blame them for being impassioned. And allowance has to be made for the fact that they are teenagers, who universally believe that they know better than their hapless elders (Hogg says the problem is that their parents don’t know how to use a democracy).

Yet none of that excuses their scurrilous smears of the other side in the gun debate. The student activists presume that there is a ready solution to mass shootings that everyone knows, and the only reason why someone might not act on this universally accepted policy is malice or corruption. This makes the other side the equivalent of murderers.