(Dr. Jerome Corsi) – Now the Supreme Court has weighed in on the side of the gun control lobby in a case that defies reason.
In the case, U.S. vs. Castleman, the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Obama liberal appointee Justice Sonia Sotomayor has decided that a misdemeanor conviction in a state court for “domestic violence” can be used under federal law to deny a person the Second Amendment right to own a firearm, even if the offense occurred years ago and the nature of the abuse involved in the “domestic violence” misdemeanor was minor in nature.
In other words, the Supreme Court opened the door so federal gun control law enforcement is free to investigate a person’s domestic relations past to deny gun rights if the person did something within the “family” a spouse, lover, or child considered objectionable, even if the incident occurred 20 years ago and did not involve allegations of physical force or violence.
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Put simply, Justice Sotomayor has used the Supreme Court to invade families to achieve her ideologically-driven radical-leftist goal of grabbing guns and denying to American citizens their legitimate Second Amendment rights.
The standard articulated by the Supreme Court was so loosely defined that one has to wonder if the ordinary discipline of a child or saying sharp words in an argument with a spouse might be sufficient to consider the person disqualified from gun ownership if misdemeanor charges arose from the incident.
The case involved James A. Castleman, a Tennessee resident who was convicted in state court in 2001 for causing bodily injury to the mother of his child.
Remarkably, the state court records from 2001 failed to establish what precisely Castleman did or what injuries the woman involved suffered.
“This country witnesses more than a million acts of domestic violence, and hundreds of deaths from domestic violence, each year,” Sotomayor noted in the first sentence of the opinion of the Supreme Court that she authored.
Please stop to consider that for a minute. With this standard in place, the radical left anti-gun lobby has found a way to mine state domestic violence convictions conceivably going back decades in order to find an excuse to deny a person their Second Amendment rights.
The case began when federal law enforcement officers began investigating Castleman on charges he was selling firearms on the black market.
Castleman moved to dismiss the charges because his Tennessee conviction involving a “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” did not involve the use of physical force.
This did not deter Sotomayor, who concluded domestic violence crimes do not necessarily involve the use of physical force, using as her example that under the Tennessee law a person could be charged and convicted for domestic violence if that person deceived the victim into drinking a poisoned beverage.
Why didn’t Sotomayor conclude that anyone who forced their partner to drink poison ought to be charged under laws prohibiting attempted murder, rather than laws designed to prohibit domestic violence.
Later in the opinion, Sotomayor justifies her argument by referencing Department of Justice briefs that have argued most domestic violence against women includes “hitting, slapping, shoving, grabbing, pinching, biting, and hair pulling,” all minor acts that would fail to reach the threshold of felony assault or battery in a court not stretching to justify a radical liberal prejudice against gun ownership.
As she proceeds down this tortured line of reasoning Sotomayor rationalizes that even seemingly minor acts such as “a squeeze of the arm that causes a bruise” could constitute a crime of domestic violence that years later be resurrected from a person’s past to deny gun ownership under federal statutes.
Only Justice Scalia in his dissent returned to rationality when he insisted that a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence has to include an element of force or an attempted use of physical force.
Scalia reasoned that Sotomayor’s “inventive, nonviolent definition” of domestic violence charges stretched so far that the definition of “a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” no longer requires force capable of causing physical pain or bodily injury.
How now does one define child discipline, domestic disagreements between marriage partners, or any other of hundreds of issues that make family life difficult, even if nobody in the family lays a hand on anybody else or takes any action that causes physical pain or bodily harm.
What the radical-left anti-gun lobby wants to do is to use domestic violence misdemeanor convictions, no matter how long ago the incidents occurred, as an excuse to take guns away.
Under this standard, federal firearms authorities are unleashed to involve the government in mining the history of a person’s domestic relationships to argue there is some past incident that “proves” a person is potentially to “violent” to own a firearm.
So, radical-left anti-gun activists have finally found an excuse to make federal “gun cops” into “family police” in order to negate Second Amendment rights over even minor family incidents that potentially happened decades ago perhaps even in no longer functioning families that broke up years ago through formal divorce procedures or simple separation.
How broadly will federal firearms law enforcement authorities interpret this new Supreme Court-granted power?
Will the authority include denying gun rights on convictions of misdemeanor domestic violence that were reversed, expunged, or erroneous in the first place.
The ramifications of this case are frightening now that the Supreme Court has taken the first step toward unleashing federal firearms law enforcement authorities to start investigating a person’s domestic family history.
Will even a person’s behavior in a contentious and hostile divorce be considered domestic violence justifying denial of Second Amendment gun rights even if the only “offense” involved angry words harshly spoken?
Tea Party Loyalists must let Congress know the Supreme Court’s new effort to engage in gun-grabbing demands a re-write of federal law to clearly protect Second Amendment Rights from federal law enforcement authorities allowed to behave as if they were qualified to become family relationship experts.
Is nothing in our private lives outside the intrusive inspection of federal firearms a law enforcement authority whose goal is to take away our guns?
TeaParty.org has developed a special “45-GUN FAX,” named after the noble 45 caliber, and designed to allow Tea Party loyalists to communicate to Washington a message that is designed to knock the notion of gun grabbing and Second Amendment annihilation right out of the heads of the Obama-supporting gun-hating political left.
The message is hot and blistering. It is designed to be sent to all 100 Senators and 435 members of the House of Representatives – for a total of 535 faxes to the Washington establishment in Congress.
Please join me in sending a “45-GUN FAX” to Congress right now.
“45-GUN FAX” costs only $45.00 and you will be making a powerful fax statement to Congress that supports Tea Party loyalists in our drive to preserve gun rights.
We’ve seen the expanding threat to the Second Amendment. Now Congress needs to see Tea Party loyalists do not intend to sit by idly.
Our gun rights are in jeopardy, now under attack by Sotomayor and the Supreme Court.
Our only choice is to demand Congress must pass whatever laws are necessary to prevent the Supreme Court from saying an incident in our family history that happened perhaps decades away proves we are “too violent” to be allowed our Second Amendment freedom to own firearms.
Washington needs to know that Tea Party Loyalists intend to win – either now by impeaching Barack Obama for his back-door attack on the Second Amendment, and/or by throwing at the ballot box in November 2014, and again in November 2016 any and all incumbent members of Congress – Republicans and Democrats alike – who do not stand with us in the defense of our gun rights.
Dr. Jerome Corsi
Dr. Jerome Corsi received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Political Science in 1972. He is the author of two No. 1 New York Times nonfiction bestsellers, “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry” (with co-author John O’Neill) and “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality.” In the past 5 years, Dr. Corsi has written 5 New York Times Bestselling non-fiction books. Dr. Corsi is the Senior Commentator for TeaParty.org.
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