State officials sought Tuesday to revive gray wolf hunts in the Northern Rockies, even as they entered talks with environmentalists whose lawsuit restored the endangered status of the animals. On Tuesday, Montana asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to commit by Sept. 10 to the state’s plan for “conservation hunts” beginning this fall.

Read About It: The Associated Press

The South Korean government, in an effort to raise money for its military, wants to sell nearly a million antique M1 rifles that were used by U.S. soldiers in the Korean War to gun collectors in America. The Obama administration approved the sale of the American made rifles last year. But it reversed course and banned the sale in March — a decision that went largely unnoticed at the time but that is now sparking opposition from gun rights advocates.

Read About It: Fox News

This important legislation, sponsored by Representative Judy Boyle (R-Midvale), would amend Idaho’s existing law to limit public access to Fish and Game records of issued tags.  HB 531aa would also prohibit future harassment, intimidation and threats relating to the lawful taking and control of fish and wildlife. As the law currently stands, any person or organization can contact Fish and Game and request the names of all people who have been issued tags and what type of hunting tag they have been issued.

During the 2009 hunting season, the names of everyone who had a wolf tag were printed in a local paper and subsequently broadcasted nationally.  Although these hunters followed the law and direction by Idaho’s wildlife experts, they were incessantly harassed by anti-hunting groups and radical animal “rights” extremists.   It is the intention of Representative Boyle to prevent such future harassment and the NRA supports her effort to protect hunters’ rights to privacy and protection.

This email is a broadcast email generated by an automated system. To contact NRA-ILA call 800-392-8683.
Address: 11250 Waples Mill Road Fairfax, Virginia 22030

On February 22, a new law on guns in national parks takes effect. The law repeals a National Park Service rule that has long prohibited Americans from lawfully possessing firearms in national parks for self-defense.

The new law, passed last spring by an overwhelming bipartisan vote in the U.S. Senate, will allow people to possess, carry and transport firearms in national parks, in accordance with state law.

However, many details remain to be worked out. Reports indicate that National Park Service officials are debating issues such as the definition of “federal facilities,” where firearms will remain prohibited under a different federal law.

NPS officials are expected to issue further information as February 22 approaches, and some parks have already published information on their new policies. Because state laws vary greatly, before you visit a national park, you should check the park’s website or call the park headquarters for more information. NRA will also provide updates as they become available.

Copyright 2010, National Rifle Association of America, Institute for Legislative Action.
This may be reproduced. It may not be reproduced for commercial purposes.
11250 Waples Mill Road, Fairfax, VA 22030 800-392-8683
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In the past two years IDSSA has had remarkable success.  Idaho now has some of the strongest range protection laws in the country. Instructors, match directors, and match officials no longer have to fear nuisance lawsuits that threaten to put them out of business. Firearms laws are now required to be uniform throughout the state. With your help we will add to these successes in 2010.

We are currently drafting bills which (among other things) will remove some location prohibitions on concealed carry and offer an opportunity of rehabilitation for certain people under Federal firearms restrictions. When the legislative session in Boise starts we will monitor the legislative proposals and report to you on bills that have the potential to affect firearm ownership and use or shooting ranges whether obviously firearms related or not. Finally, as part of our core mission, we continue to work with multiple government agencies and elected officials to improve funding for shooting ranges and locate land for new ranges.

We could not have accomplished anything without you, our members. Your continuing support is what makes our efforts possible going forward. If you or your club has not renewed your supporting membership yet please take this opportunity to do so. No one takes a salary and all membership funds go directly to supporting our mission. Membership support is our sole funding source.

As always: thank you again for your support and if you or any of your club members has any questions or concerns about issues that they would like to see addressed please feel free to give me a call.

The Idaho Sport Shooters Alliance is organized under IRS Code section 501(c)(4). Contributions are not tax-deductible because of our lobbying activities.

Best wishes in 2010,

Mike

Michael C. “Mike” Brown

Executive Director/General Counsel

Idaho Sport Shooters Alliance

208 835-3737

208 835-3744 Fax

www.idahossa.org

P.S. I have included a  membership application if you need to update your information.

IDAHOSSA Application Link!

Whether the Second Amendment right to keep and
bear arms is incorporated as against the States by
the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or
Immunities or Due Process Clauses.

Please Click the Link Below to view the Amicus Brief Draft

AB Draft 11 11 09 – McDonald v City of Chicago

Most laymen, and quite a few lawyers, too, are surprised to find out that the Bill of Rights does not automatically apply to state and local governments. There’s a long and complicated history behind this, but here’s the bottom line

All of the provisions of the Bill of Rights are direct restrictions on the federal government. Likewise, directly limited is an entity whose powers exist only because they were granted from the federal government. For example, under the Constitution, the federal government is in charge of the District of Columbia. The D.C. Council’s powers exist solely because Congress delegated to the Council some of Congress’ authority over the District. As the D.C. v. Heller case recently affirmed, the Second Amendment prohibits the federal government, and federal entities such as D.C., from banning handguns for self-defense.

As Justice Scalia’s opinion in Heller stated, the decision did not resolve the separate question of whether the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments. The Fourteenth Amend-ment, enacted during Reconstruction, provides: “… nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law … .”

Under modern Supreme Court doctrine, the Fourteenth Amendment’s “due process” clause protects both “procedural” and “substantive” due process. Procedural due process involves the fairness of how the government acted; for example, before the government took away someone’s driver’s license, did the person have an opportunity to present his side of the story to a neutral decision-maker?

Substantive due process involves what the government did. And some things that a government might do would involve an unjust deprivation of constitutional liberty, even if the procedures were fair. Suppose a state passed a law that said, “Anyone who reads a book criticizing the state’s governor will be imprisoned for one year.” And also suppose that for prosecutions under the law, there were all the usual procedural protections: that is, a defendant had a right to a jury trial; the defendant could cross-examine prosecution witnesses; the prosecution had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant really had read the book; and so on. Even with all the procedural protections in place (procedural due process), the law would be a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment because there are just some ways in which a government may never deprive a person of liberty (substantive due process).

How does this affect the Bill of Rights? The Supreme Court has ruled that some, but not all, of the provisions of the Bill of Rights are “incorporated” in the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. The incorporated provisions of the Bill of Rights are thereby made enforceable against state governments. They’re also enforceable against local governments, since local governments’ powers are derived from the state.

Most of the Supreme Court’s cases on Fourteenth Amendment incorporation were decided between the 1930s and the 1960s. By the time the court was done, almost all of the provisions in the Bill of Rights had been incorporated, except: the Second Amendment right to arms; the Third Amendment right not to have soldiers quartered in one’s home; and the Fifth Amendment right to a grand jury indictment before being prosecuted. Also incorporated, of course, is the Tenth Amendment, which affirms that the people and the states retain powers not granted to the federal government.

So once Heller definitively affirmed that the Second Amendment protects the individual rights of ordinary citizens, the next question was whether the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments. There are some old cases from the 19th century suggesting that it does not, but those involved another provision of the Fourteenth Amendment (the “privileges or immunities” clause), not the due process clause.

Some state trial courts in Massachusetts, Missouri and New York have already treated the Second Amendment as applicable to the states. But other courts have disagreed. Based on the Supreme Court’s articulated standards for “selective incorporation” into the Fourteenth Amendment, the argument for incorporating the Second Amendment is very strong, as George Mason University law professor Nelson Lund explained in a recent issue of the Syracuse Law Review. (The article is availablehere. Click the word “Download” which appears above the article title.)

However, the question will not be definitively resolved until the U.S. Supreme Court issues a decision. From the pro-rights perspective, the sooner the Supreme Court takes a Second Amendment incorporation case, the better, since President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees are unlikely to look favorably on the Second Amendment.

Nordyke v. King might be the case that the high court takes. The “King” in Nordyke v. King is Alameda County, Calif., Supervisor Mary King. She authored a 1999 ordinance that banned firearms on all county property. She wrote to the county attorney that she had “been trying to get rid of gun shows on county property” for “about three years.” She was, she wrote, angered by “spineless people hiding behind the Constitution.”

At a press conference touting the ban, King declared that the county government should no longer “provide a place for people to display guns for worship as deities for the collectors who treat them as icons of patriotism.”

The Nordyke family, which promotes gun shows throughout California, sued. Their lead lawyer is Donald Kilmer, a California attorney with extensive experience in gun law cases. He has been assisted by Don Kates, a Washington state lawyer with a very long and eminent record of Second Amendment scholarship and litigation. After many twists and turns, the Nordyke case was argued before a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit in January 2009.

The panel consisted of Circuit Judges Arthur L. Alarcón (appointed by President Carter in 1979), Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain (Reagan, 1986) and Ronald M. Gould (Clinton, 1999).

An amicus (friend of the court) brief on behalf of the NRA and the California Rifle & Pistol Association was filed by Chuck Michel of California and Stephen Halbrook of Virginia.

On April 20, the three-judge panel issued a unanimous decision written by Judge O’Scannlain: the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments. But, the court ruled, the ban on county property is not a violation of the Second Amendment. (The decision is available here.)

Applying the Supreme Court test for selective incorporation, the Ninth Circuit examined whether the right to arms was “necessary to an Anglo-American regime of ordered liberty.” The panel noted the parallels between the right to arms and the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial in criminal cases—a right that has already been incorporated. Both were protected by the 1689 English Declaration of Right; the preeminent English legal scholar William Blackstone extolled both rights; in the years before the American Revolution, the colonists vehemently protested British interference with both rights.

President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees are unlikely to look favorably on the Second Amendment.

Thus, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the Second Amendment is, in the words of the Supreme Court test, “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” The court noted that the tradition continued in the early republic, when legal scholars affirmed the importance of the right to arms, and many new state constitutions protected that right.

When Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War, congressmen repeatedly stated their intent to stop Southern governments from interfering with the Second Amendment rights of freedmen. The Ninth Circuit cited Stephen Halbrook’s excellent book on the topic, Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms, 1866-1876.

Judge Gould joined in the majority opinion, and also wrote a short concurrence elaborating the importance of the Second Amendment to national security: “The right to bear arms is a bulwark against external invasion. We should not be overconfident that oceans on our east and west coasts alone can preserve security. We recently saw in the case of the terrorist attack on Mumbai that terrorists may enter a country covertly by ocean routes, landing in small craft and then assembling to wreak havoc. That we have a lawfully armed populace adds a measure of security for all of us and makes it less likely that a band of terrorists could make headway in an attack on any community before more professional forces arrived. Second, the right to bear arms is a protection against the possibility that even our own government could degenerate into tyranny, and though this may seem unlikely, this possibility should be guarded against with individual diligence.”

But all three judges agreed that the Alameda County ordinance did not violate the Second Amendment. Even though the ordinance, by banning gun shows, made it more difficult or expensive to acquire guns, this fact in itself did not show an infringement of the Second Amendment, which the Ninth Circuit (quoting Heller) described as primarily involving the right to armed defense in the home.

Second, Heller had said that guns could be banned from “sensitive places,” such as schools or government buildings. The Ninth Circuit stated that the county property, as a whole, could be considered a “sensitive place,” since it was part of county government functioning, and since large numbers of people gathered at the county fairgrounds.

The county, having won the case (in that its ordinance was upheld), cannot appeal to the Supreme Court, but the Nordykes can. The Supreme Court might take the case in order to issue a definitive national ruling on incorporation, and perhaps also to clarify the scope of the “sensitive places” exception. Or the Supreme Court could reject the petition, and let lower courts continue to wrestle with Heller’s meaning. If that happens, the Supreme Court might choose to resolve the issue in another case—such as the cases challenging D.C.-style handgun bans in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois, both filed by the NRA right after the Heller decision was handed down. Those cases are now before the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, partially consolidated for appeal with another Chicago case filed by the Second Amendment Foundation. (Top Second Amendment scholar and attorney Stephen Halbrook represents the NRA in the Illinois cases, while Heller case winner Alan Gura represents SAF.)

Nordyke is especially important to California residents. Most of the states in the Ninth Circuit already have a state constitutional right to arms—Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. So Nordyke’s legal effect there will probably be relatively small. But California is one of the few states that doesn’t have a state amendment on the right to arms. Now, thanks to Nordyke, the good citizens of California finally have a written guarantee of that precious right.

As Nordyke itself shows, judges may still be willing to uphold a variety of laws inspired by anti-rights bigots. Nevertheless, Nordyke is a significant victory for the Second Amendment. Donald Kilmer, Don Kates and the Nordyke family have done a great service to the sacred cause of freedom.

Posted: 6/9/2009 12:43:52 PM

Copyright 2009, National Rifle Association of America, Institute for Legislative Action.

This may be reproduced. It may not be reproduced for commercial purposes.

11250 Waples Mill Road, Fairfax, VA 22030 800-392-8683

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Please read the article below, “The State of Heller” to fully understand why the decision to file this Amicus Brief became necessary.

Our unity in the protection of the second amendment is critical and we must get this resolved before President Obama stacks the high court with anti-gun judges giving us no chance to resolve this issue once and for all, and in fact, risk a decision that would devastate our rights. There has never been a more important time for State Associations such as the I.S.R.P.A. to stand up and fight and insist that the Second Amendment be upheld in its purest meaning. The I.S.R.P.A. and all other State Associations need the financial support of its membership, and even those who are not members, in order to do the work that must be done. I make this appeal with the truest sense of urgency!

If you wish to help I.S.R.P.A. defer the enormous costs of filing this brief, donations may be sent to the I.S.R.P.A. Please be sure to include a note with your donation that it is for that specific purpose. Any amount is helpful. If you wish to donate by check, just drop it in the mail to our office, P. O. Box 140293, Boise, ID 83714-0293. We thank you in advance for your support in answering our call to all patriots to step up and be partners with us in the effort to protect the Second Amendment rights of every American.

Yours in Freedom,

Neill Goodfellow, President

Devin Jones, Vice president

Jon Carter, Secretary-Treasurer

The Deadline for Applications is August 1, 2009.
If you are an NRA Affiliated Club or Association with 100% of club’s members
also being NRA members, you are eligible to apply for this grant.
Preference is given to Gold Medal Clubs.

Projects and Activities Eligible for Funding are:

* Acquisition
* Development and/or Improvement of Shooting Facilities
* Projects Designed To Enhance Community Relations
* Projects Addressing Range Environmental Issues such as Lead Reclamation
Restrictions on Funding:

* Applications for funding will not exceed $5,000 for any qualifying NRA
affiliate per year
* Range Grants will be limited to one per year per facility in cases where
more than one qualifying affiliate uses the same range
* Range Grants will not be approved for multi-year funding of projects
* Applications must be submitted for consideration each year
Projects Not Eligible for Funding:

* Deficit Financing
* Projects related to commercial ventures
* Applications from clubs or associations that did not submit a final report
for previously awarded grants (if you received an NRA Range Grant already,
please fill out a final report before applying for your next
grant)

For a complete Application and list of all rules and regulations, please
visit our website at http://www.nrahq.org/shootingrange/grants.asp or submit
your request to:

NRA Range Grants
c/o Elizabeth Bush
11250 Waples Mill Road
Fairfax, VA 22030
(703) 267-1348
ebush@nrahq.org

If you are not an NRA affiliated club with 100% membership or if you would
like to find out more about the Gold Medal Club status, please
contact:

Son Nguyen, Marketing Manager
Clubs & Associations Department
National Rifle Association
11250 Waples Mill Road
Fairfax, VA 22030
703-267-1345
703-267-3939 fax
dcodinach@nrahq.org
To become a Gold Medal Club, a club must do the following:

1) Be a 100% NRA Club (furnish copy of club bylaws)
2) Have a club Newsletter
3) Belong to NRA State Association in your own state
4) Have administered or currently incorporate a NRA Youth Program into the
club’s agenda
5) Be an active participant in NRA’s Membership Recruiting Program
(703-267-3759)

Submitted from NRA Mailer and written by NRA.ORG