Supremes Rule: NY Gun Grab Law 'Unconstitutional'!
In a stunning 6-3 decision, the US Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the New York requirement that applicants for a concealed carry handgun permit must show a special cause for the request. The Second Amendment "protects an individual's right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home," wrote Justice Clarence Thomas in the majority opinion. Also today: Biden's top economic advisor claims the best way out of inflation is...more government spending!
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Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel Nick Adams, our co-host, Daniel.
Good to see you this morning.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
Doing well.
We have a little good news today, and things are perking up, and the Supreme Court is not as bad as it used to be, but it still has a little ways to go.
They're not all dedicated libertarians, but we have a report that just came out dealing with the gun issue, and it just happened that my favorite member of the Supreme Court wrote it, wrote the opinion, and that, of course, was Clarence Thomas.
And it has to do with a law that said that it was going to be very restrictive on the Second Amendment, and you had to, it was a state law, and they ruled it unconstitutional.
They ruled correctly, and the vote was 6-3.
And the three most liberal, considered liberal, members of the court, you know, voted against it.
So, six is pretty good.
But that doesn't mean that the rest of the term now with this group of Supreme Court justices, that the conservative libertarian wing of the Supreme Court is always going to win.
But this was good.
This was good and said that you can't curtail the ability for somebody to apply, or you don't have to go through the hoops in order to prove that you needed it and you had a right to it, and you could therefore do it.
I have followed all the rules, I've done what you said, which would have eliminated the right of the person as the Constitution.
The Constitution is pretty darn clear on that.
So, I guess even if a member of the Supreme Court was lukewarm on the issue personally, you know, the issue was clear-cut.
But some people can adjust rather easily no matter how clear-cut it is.
They can go and vote the opposite way.
But I thought this was great news.
It just came out, and the pro-Second Amendment people are going to be very happy.
Yeah, I'm glad it came out, too, because we were wondering what to talk about today.
Sometimes it falls in your lap, and it makes us happy when that happens.
But let's look at that tweet.
This is from Scotus blog, and this is it in a nutshell.
The Supreme Court strikes down a New York gun control law that required people to show a proper cause to get a license to carry a concealed handgun outside the home.
The vote was 6-3.
Thomas wrote the opinion.
Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Roberts joined Alito.
Also joined the majority.
As you say, Breyer, Sotemeyer, and Kagan opposed.
Thanks to Zero Hedge, they reminded us of Jonathan Turley's comment.
If we can put that up next, we can see his excellent analysis.
New York's proper cause requirement violates the 14th Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their Second Amendment rights.
And that was key, and that's what Dr. Paul, that's what Justice Thomas noted in his majority opinion, that the New York law requires you to demonstrate, quote, demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.
And he ruled that that special need is unconstitutional because there is should have a generalized interest in self-defense.
Those who are law-abiding citizens should be allowed to carry concealed firearms.
You know, the whole move by the far left and the authoritarians to remove the guns, you know, from the population really doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't make sense constitutionally, but it doesn't make any sense practically, and it doesn't make any sense when it comes to just pure common sense.
What happens is they say if you have a million people out there that have guns, but 10 of them last year committed a bad, vicious crime with a gun.
Therefore, what we have to do is really crack down on that million people who had guns and didn't commit crimes.
And so they justify it by what is happening.
At the same time, they don't even look at it in a good practical manner.
How many other crimes were committed with guns that were never reported or they didn't use guns?
The biggest attack on this country, the most people killed in one day by terrorists would have been 9-11.
They didn't have to have guns to do it.
So the gun is used many, many more times to protect people than it does to cause a problem.
But there is no doubt that there is a problem.
There's too much violence.
But you know, the people who belong to gun organizations are usually very strict in teaching safety and different things like that.
But you do see when something comes up, there's probably hundreds, if not thousands, of times that guns have stopped something bad from happening.
But that doesn't make the newspaper.
What you hear is when there's 10 people killed, and it is obviously very vicious.
But what if there was 100 killed that night in inner city fighting in the big cities?
And that's happening too with guns and with knives and everything else.
You know, imagine if down in Uvalde and other places there had been properly armed people.
The cops wouldn't even let people go in that had guns that wanted to take the guy off.
So, you know, I wouldn't even go into it, but I was on a terrible debate program yesterday with a couple of Clintonista liberals, and it was awful.
But I mentioned, well, the places with the strictest gun control, Chicago, Detroit, D.C., they seem to have a lot of violence, and everyone seems to get killed every weekend.
And they said, oh, well, all that violence is because of nearby red states smuggling weapons in.
So it's never the fault of that area.
It's never the fault of those gun laws.
It's always the fault of those red states that are nearby smuggling in guns.
You know, and it's just really sickening into how the liberal elite views the rest of the country.
And I think they're so out of touch.
And I think it's reflected in Biden's polling numbers and in the general view of the Democratic Party now, that the elites don't want people they consider to be knuckle-draggers to have access to firearms or anything else for that matter.
All you need to do is shut up and obey, obey your bettors, and it's really not working out very well for them, but they still do have that mentality.
Yeah, and just think how many guns are used to protect these elite people you're talking about.
Of course.
They have these guarded communities.
And yes, they're innocent people.
But even those, they're hypocrites too.
How many times have they found out and it became known that some of these very rich people who preach they're taking the guns away from the average citizen end up they have their guns themselves.
Yeah, or they hire people to have their guns.
Right.
So one of the fallout of the Supreme Court decision today is that I believe it's nine states that currently have the may issue law, which means they may issue if you can prove that you have a specific need, will be forced to change unless they find a way to get around it, which they may well do, to a shall issue, which is you are a generalized citizen.
If you have a generalized need for self-defense and you're law-abiding, then you shall be issued.
And these states are California, New York, of course, we mentioned, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Hawaii have the May issue.
So if the ruling is obeyed or is recognized, then these states will have to change their approach to concealed carry.
Right.
The opposition, you know, to the Second Amendment, they will not give up.
You know, and it sort of has come and gone over the decades.
There was a time, maybe a decade or two ago, where it was a non-issue in the sense that the liberals were quiet because they had lost a lot of seats, and that was one of the big issues, the Second Amendment, and they didn't even bring it up.
But now they're back at it again because of the amount of attention that's gotten with these horrible incidents where people have been killed.
So they take advantage of that.
But really the gun issue, I think, also invents, we've already mentioned government guns.
Government guns so often are the real killers.
And if you include undeclared unconstitutional immoral wars, and if you include a gun as being a violent weapon, that has to be, you know, if you looked at the 20th century, what percentage of the killing occurred by individuals because he was a citizen and he was trying to protect his house, especially in this country.
That isn't what was happening.
But how many people have died, you know, at the hands of government guns?
And even now, how about the illegal break-ins by the police and the FBI and so much abuse that has gone on?
And Yavaldi was, that's a sad, tragic thing.
Poor management, poor training, as far as I can tell.
Yeah.
Well, I hate to harp on this, but on this debate with these two Clintonites, one was an Obama advisor or what have you.
I was accused, of course, of being a Republican and a racist, which I'm neither, because I just want black people to die in the inner city.
And I came back with something which I truly believe, which is there are great groups out there like Black Guns Matter, Maj Touré's organization that goes into the inner cities and trains and teaches blacks and other minorities and other people that live in the inner cities how to properly use firearms to defend themselves.
I said, no, I don't want blacks to die.
I want blacks to get guns to defend themselves in dangerous areas.
A Neat Article Explains Inflation Failures00:07:05
Well, they changed the subject when it came to that, but they can't take that.
I haven't figured out why the argument from our side has never really helped that much.
And that is all dictators register and take the guns away from them.
When you think about it, the tragedy of the Holocaust, all the guns were taken away and the Jews were just rounded up and put in there.
And nobody could fight back.
All the guns were taken.
And that is the case so often that that happens, but they don't see the connection.
So either they're stupid or they actually believe this is going to be helpful or they don't really care.
But it doesn't make any sense.
You'd think that would be a good reason.
And I think sometimes in the minority community, they are being more willing to look at our side of the argument.
That's why there are other good groups too, like Jews for the preservation of firearms ownership in America.
So there are strong groups that understand that when they take the guns away, you're pretty vulnerable.
Well, let's move on to the next one because this is something that I know is interesting to you and to most people.
The top economic advisor to President Biden, her name is Elena Rouse.
She's the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, so she's got to be pretty smart.
She's got to be a pretty good economist.
Maybe she's spoken to that Mises a few times.
I don't know.
Well, no.
No, not quite.
She's asserting that the only way to solve the inflation crisis is more government spending.
And, you know, that's not the first time they've said it because that's Pelosi was very blunt about it.
You have to spend more money.
And the neat part about this article on Zero Hedge, and this one has just come out recently, too, but it's so insane, you know, because they lack understanding.
And, you know, when I saw the title and in my mind, I said, oh, more of the same thing.
You know, they're going to, this article is going to be talking about, you know, the different excuses for it.
And they're not going to mention the Federal Reserve, and they're not going to mention excessive spending.
And they're not going to mention the need for big government and all the things that are behind the incentive to spend more money, but not deal with the real problem.
But it turns out that this is a neat article.
Zero Heads really did it well because they go through and point out how ridiculous some of their arguments are and say, you know, they start off by saying, this is just like they want to spend $5 trillion and they figure, you know, build back better.
Could be $5 trillion.
It reminded them of the FDR's depression and the bailing out of the depression.
But they conclude the article after doing some history here and explaining what has happened in the past and why this is failing and the administration isn't doing a very good job and why they think that they don't define inflation.
I said, well, it's more Keynesianism.
Even our side doesn't understand sound money and they don't understand intervention and they don't understand Keynesianism.
But the conclusion is worth reading today.
So I want to read the conclusion of this article.
And it starts with the clones.
It's a closing paragraph.
The true cost of the Build Back Better program, if approved, will be approximately $5 trillion.
And this spending would occur swiftly over a course of a couple of years, flooding the economy with even more fiat dollars at a time when inflation is officially at 40-year highs.
But he's building the case, you know, what causes inflation.
We're getting more of it.
Never in history has fiat spending ever reduced inflationary pressures.
It only makes them worse.
That's good stuff.
The real solution is a complete restructuring of the currency model, such as coupling a nation's money to a hard commodity like gold and a moratorium on deficit spending.
Obviously, Biden will never do this, and so inflation is going to be a problem that Americans face for many months to come.
It makes me happy because my early motivation of just speaking out before I even thought about politics was because I recognized what kind of problems were coming after they got rid of the very, very weak connection between our dollar and gold, and that was August 15th in 1971.
But this little summary here, if people would read this and understand it, they could quit looking, you know, have an answer to these people who say, oh, well, it's Biden's fault.
It's Putin's fault, Putin's fault.
They have all these excuses.
But it isn't just, it's a lot of partisanship, which is terrible about it.
But it's most of the time that very few people, because people aren't, you know, being educated.
Most people are still educated in government schools.
We have some alternatives we could suggest, but that's really what counts.
And I know my introduction to understanding this issue came from private sources, and it had nothing to do with an economics course in college I thought was crazy.
And it came, you know, from the Foundation of Economic Education, Leonard Reed.
It was totally private, and he issued books and pamphlets, and there were seminars.
So that was outside, and that's how I got started.
But still the majority.
But the minority is what, the minority even, if it's small, it's their leadership position and position.
And like when people can put out articles like this, I think this is good stuff and this is what we need to not only to realize what sound money is all about, but also realize how it's connected to some of the bad things that government does with unsound money, you know, the welfare warfare state.
And we've talked a lot about that.
Yeah, well, they're not getting the word in Washington.
And our last little tidbit here is in a related way.
You know, Biden put up what he wants for the military in 2023.
And again, the House and Senate said, no, that's not quite enough.
We want to add some stuff into it.
So, and this is from our friend Dave DeCamp on antiwar.com.
Actually, that's not the one.
Early Bird Special Available00:03:59
House panel increases Biden's 2023 military budget request by 37 billion.
Well, in fact, they're official conservatives because the Senate wanted to go $45 billion.
So this is what happens, you know.
This describes the problem that I was trying to explain or make a point about, because no matter what is said and the information is there and how silly this is, and $5 trillion of more inflated currency is not going to not be solving the problem.
But the other point here is I don't have the vote on it, but it may have even passed in the committee, you know, on a voice vote.
But if it was a vote, you can be sure that it didn't pass without a lot of Republican support.
And that is the big problem because it's sort of supported by both sides of the aisle.
Yeah, they love it.
Well, I'm going to close out.
If we can put on that last clip, because I'm very happy to report, and that's why I'm a little bleary-eyed, because I finished up around 12.30 last night.
Our tickets for the September conference are now finally available.
I will include a link at the conclusion of this show in the description of the show.
But for easy reference, you can go to RonPaulInstitute.org and on the upper right-hand corner, you can click for more details.
Anatomy of a police state.
Here's a famous Da Vinci drawing, updated for our modern times.
You'll see here, it's going to be a great conference, Dr. Paul.
The tickets are now on sale.
They started going pretty quickly, and I'm glad.
We do have less tickets available this year than we had last year, I'm sorry to say, but we had to choose a venue carefully, and there were less seats available.
So they will sell out quicker.
But the one thing we did, because, you know, America is suffering from inflation, higher prices.
I was talking to Adam, my colleague.
We were trying to figure out what can we do to try to make it a little easier on people.
But we've been able to hold the line and actually not only offer the tickets at the same price, but to encourage people so that we know what we're facing early on rather than at the end.
To get tickets early, we have put in an early bird special.
So for the, I think, until the end of July, you can save $10, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's less than last year when everything is going up.
Save $10 with an early bird special.
Adam negotiated great room rates with the hotel.
Less than $100 a night in D.C. for a very, very nice hotel.
That is going to be really something.
So we're doing everything we can to make it easier for you to attend.
And we hope that you will be interested enough to click on check out.
We don't have the speakers listed yet, but we'll start to announce them.
We'll have some of them on the show so you'll know what you're getting into.
Some of them you know very well because they've been in the news a lot.
So get your early bird tickets so we know how many that we're dealing with.
If you're interested in the host committee, click on that link and they'll be, you can send me an email.
The host committee are people who are sponsors of the conference.
And in exchange for helping sponsor the conference, we give them some nice perks.
We have a great cocktail reception the night before.
We have special seats for them in front so they have a great view and they don't have to scurry for seats.
We have a great wine and cheese after the event, mix with the speakers, mix with the other supporters.
So there's a lot of great stuff happening.
DC, it's Labor Day weekend, so you can kind of bake it into your vacation.
Yeah, D.C. is a cesspool, but there's a lot of fun stuff to see there anyway.
And I'm happy to share some fun things to do.
So all in all, I'm very excited, Dr. Paul.
I love doing the DC conferences.
I love meeting everyone.
I know you do too.
And I'm just really looking forward to, as our friend Bumper Hornburger says, it recharges our batteries.
Very good.
I'm going to close out by re-emphasizing something about the budget.
Anti-War Coalition Needed00:03:03
And we just talked about the $37 billion increase in the military budget, which I claim the big problem there is very bipartisan.
There was a time when progressive, very liberal Democrats were generally seen as being anti-war.
That is not the case anymore.
The coalition to be built and rebuilt and expanded has to come elsewhere, but everybody is welcome to come anti-war and make it a little bit more than bipartisan bickering or bipartisan plans just to spend more money and claiming that's going to solve the problem of inflation spend more money.
But this last incident in the committee for the $37 billion, the ringleader there was Elaine Luria, a Democrat from Virginia.
And this is a quote from anti-war, an ultra-hawk who wants to give President Biden war powers to fight China if it invades Taiwan was one of the leaders' efforts to do it.
Plan for more wars and more spending.
And she predicts it is going to be, when this does settle, it's going to be a lot more than $37 billion.
So this is the kind of thing that continues to go on.
And they mix it up.
They're hawks.
They like the war.
They want the antagonism.
They don't believe deficits matter.
And then they talk themselves and they try to talk the American people into believing that actually it's going to stop inflation.
Well, that's not going to happen.
But the mechanism there is solid in place.
And it starts with the principles devised in 1913 when it was given to the people in this country was given this income tax.
It gives license to the authoritarians to do what they want in the welfare, warfare state.
And also, the way the Federal Reserve operates, the availability of the Fed, which was established in 1913, makes it an open-door policy.
Yes, this spending on the military and all these budget things are very important, but that is not the inflation.
It's an incentive for inflation.
The inflation comes from the Federal Reserve designed for a scheme of things, and then the politicians, they don't even have to think about it and talk about it because it's something that's out of their hands.
It's secret.
We don't control the Federal Reserve, and this is the mess we have.
But this is so typical of the way it works, and it's just a system that is devised for big government, and if you believe in liberty and prosperity, it's a tough road to hoe.
And that is our goal.
We want to have a system which emphasizes personal liberty, which will provide the peace and prosperity that everybody deserves, and it can be achieved.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.