Transcript:
Some Democratic Leaders say Impeachment is off the table.
So, let us set a new table for our nation, upon which we place the Constitution and where we demand that all those who have taken an oath to defend it .. keep their promise and protect our nation from the threat within.
Please go to kucinich.us now and sign the petition, which calls for impeachment. This is the one petition that will make a difference because I will be delivering it personally to your member of congress. Please circulate word of this petition far and wide, to all your friends and family. This is the one opportunity that we have right now to actually change events in this country.
Two hundred and thirty-two years ago, our nation was conceived in liberty. We have once again reached a moment of truth, one that Lincoln recognized at Gettysburg as to whether “this nation or any nation so conceived or so dedicated can long endure”.
Through the ashes of war, Lincoln prayed that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
This Fourth of July, 2008, we face a different kind of war; one which is trying our souls.. a war based on lies. But with the power of truth and the power of the people we can achieve a new birth of freedom, standing up for what is good in America, insisting on the rule of law, demanding adherence to the Constitution, and supporting the impeachment of a President who lied to take us into a war against Iraq.
Be the answer to Lincoln’s Prayer. Please pledge your support now to restoring the rule of law in America. As we once again celebrate our Independence, let us celebrate freedom from fear and pledge that this government of the people will survive in this land that we love.
Please go to kucinich.us now. This is your chance to make a difference; truly celebrate our Independence. Thank you.
Today, long-time international arms dealer Monzer al Kassar will appear before federal judge Jed Rakoff in a hearing in Manhattan. Al Kassar already was arraigned on Friday, shortly after his extradition to the U.S., and he pleaded not guilty to charges of selling millions of dollars worth of machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and surface to air missiles to the FARC, the Colombian rebel group designated as a terrorist organization. Al Kassar’s current accommodations, the federal correctional system, are a far cry from what he was used to when NBC News producer Aram Roston met him in 2006, in a palace in the south of Spain.
I don’t think Monzer Al Kassar even imagined back then, when I met him in 2006 in his palace, that he was the target of a nascent U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency sting investigation. I was surprised at the time that he’d agreed to meet me. His name was ubiquitous in international arms scandals and his reputation was grim: allegations of drugs, guns, arms to all sorts of terror groups.
And yet when I met him he acted calm as could be, a bit dramatic and a bit pompous, occasionally pretending the allegations against him were political conspiracies against an aggrieved activist. And he would stoop to pet his small white poodle, named Yoqui. Investigations seemed to be quite far from his mind. The DEA had investigated him in the past, and a DEA agent had even testified against him in a Spanish court years ago. But it seemed, back in September 2006, that he had eluded all the investigators and the cases around the world, and was enjoying his ill-gotten gains.
But if he was not worried about the DEA, he had other concerns. Back in September 2006 the Iraqi government accused him of assisting the insurgents. I flew to Southern Spain and checked into a hotel in Marbella. Al Kassar sent an aide to chauffeur me to the hotel, in a big black BMW. The man’s name was Felipe Moreno, a Chilean. He was gray-haired and short and apparently he was al Kassar’s personal assistant. He spoke of traveling to Syrian with Al Kassar.
(Felipe, like Al Kassar, is now in custody in federal prison. With Al Kassar, in 2006, he was about to be drawn, allegedly, into the web DEA investigators and undercover informants were weaving around Al Kassar.)
The palace was set off in the small neighboring area of Puerto Banus, up on a hill overlooking the harbor. It was a beautiful, white marble estate, surrounded by high walls. Watchmen pulled back gates to let us in, and there were small guard shacks to the right and left. Felipe told me that at night three Spanish Mastiffs prowled the grounds to keep intruders away.
It was a lavish interior, with sweeping staircases, a grand piano and various bronze sculptures. I was led into a grand salon, and there Monzer Al Kassar kept me waiting, until he finally made an appearance, waving me to sit and settling himself down too. He wore a well-tailored suit of some heavy fabric, and a salmon shirt with a matching kerchief in his pocket.
He was guarded in the interview at first. When I took out my digital recorder he told one of his aides to bring in a big black tape recorder and he ostentatiously insisted on recording our interview as well. Later on, he relaxed.
He denied funding the Iraqi insurgency. “I’m answering you frankly,” he said. “I have nothing to hide. I have to tell you the truth; if they connect me with money or laundering money this is nonsense. To start with, where’s the money? Where’s the money?
But he insisted he would have been proud if he had supported the insurgency.
“What they have accused me with, if it’s true, it’s an honor for me, if it’s true.” He postured as a freedom fighter a bit. “It’s an honor for every honest people in this world to be against the occupation of Iraq and against what is going on there.”
Connections to Saddam’s son
While he denied having known Saddam Hussein, he admitted having met Uday Hussein, Saddam’s notoriously sadistic son, and on his wall near the fireplace were two photos of him with Uday, in fact.
His photo collection, of which he was quite proud, was a rogue’s gallery. There on a coffee table, in an ostentatious frame, was a portrait of the famous Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas, the head of the Palestine Liberation Front, and mastermind of one of the most notorious terror incidents of the 1980s – the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruiseliner, where tourist Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound and elderly Jewish American, was killed.
In one photo, the portly Abu Abbas and Monzer Al Kassar, dressed in 70’s clothes, hugged. Monzer Al Kassar was tried, and acquitted, by Spanish authorities in the 1990s, for alleged involvement in the Achille Lauro atrocity. He beat the case.
“You cannot call him a terrorist!” Al Kassar insisted to me. “He’s a hero. Put it down. Write it down.” Al Kassar portrayed himself as an ardent supporter of Palestinian rights. “If you’re on the side of the Israelis, then he’s a terrorist of course. You call him a terrorist, but I don’t allow you to call him a terrorist.”
But in spite of all this, Al Kassar would not admit to supporting Abu Abbas. “He never asked any help. He doesn’t need any help. He has his own people. He did not ask and I did not send any weapons to him.”
Another photo on his wall was Hassan Aideed, the son of Farah Aideed, the notorious Somali warlord portrayed in the movie Black Hawk Down. Al Kassar has been named in UN reports as shipping weapons to Somalia in violation of UN arms embargoes.
Al Kassar told me he became an arms dealer back in the 1970s, when the government of Communist Yemen, a Soviet client state, gave him a diplomatic passport. He shrugged, as if it was all no big deal. “I’m not here now to remember, of course,” he said. “I’ve worked more that 20 years in the arms business. I have never seen a gun. Believe or not. You go to the ministry, on the catalog, they give us the code or the name: ‘We want ak47’ and we go and sign the ministry.”
He also denied almost everything. He says he never dealt drugs and never acted as an intelligence informant.
He invited me to lunch, too, where he had some visitors. We ate around a huge circular table, serving ourselves off big platters, while Monzer Al Kassar’s little lapdog, the poodle, begged for scraps.
“I’ve met interesting people,” he said. “Good people, bad people. How do I know who’s good and who’s bad? And this is a matter of opinion. Who is bad? The bad people for you may be the good people for me and the good people for me may be the bad people for you.”
Fresh off of the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting, it looks as if New York Federal Reserve president Timothy Geithner is set to push a new agenda in the world of central banking that was likely decided upon at Bilderberg. Geithner yesterday, wrote an article in the Financial Times calling for a global regulatory banking framework. In addition, Geithner called for the Federal Reserve to have an instrumental role in this new framework. Geithner cites all of the problems that were actually created by the central bankers in the first place as the rationale for having greater centralized power. It is interesting Geithner decides to write this piece right after the Bilderberg Meeting where some of the most powerful figures in the world of central banking attended. Not only did Geithner attend, but the attendee list included Ben Bernanke the Federal Reserve Chairman, Henry Paulson the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jean-Claude Trichet the president of the European Central Bank, Robert Zoellick the president of the World Bank and other high profile bankers. With the who’s who of central banking attending the Bilderberg Meeting, it is highly unlikely that what Geithner is proposing in his Financial Times article was not discussed at the Bilderberg Meeting. It is no secret that the true objective of the Bilderberg Meeting is to steer the world into accepting a global government. By establishing a new global regulatory banking framework, this will inch the planet ever closer to a one world currency operating in a cashless society where microchips are used to facilitate transactions. Make no mistake about it, this system will not be good, because it will be controlled by a bunch of criminal psychopaths like the one’s who attended the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting.
In his Financial Times article, Geithner wrote the following:
Link to full article: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/807c8a64-355a-11dd-998d-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
The institutions that play a central role in money and funding markets – including the main globally active banks and investment banks – need to operate under a unified framework that provides a stronger form of consolidated supervision, with appropriate requirements for capital and liquidity. To complement this, we need to put in place a stronger framework of oversight authority over the critical parts of the payments system – not just the established payments, clearing and settlements systems, but the infrastructure that underpins the decentralised over-the-counter markets.
Because of its primary responsibility for the stability of the overall financial system, the Federal Reserve should play a central role in such a framework, working closely with supervisors in the US and in other countries. At present the Fed has broad responsibility for financial stability not matched by direct authority and the consequences of the actions we have taken in this crisis make it more important that we close that gap.
Finally, we need a stronger capacity to respond to crises. The Fed has put in place a number of innovative new facilities that have helped ease liquidity strains. We plan to leave these in place until conditions in money and credit markets have improved substantially.
What Geithner is proposing is entirely insane but this is the same tactic that the financial elites used to establish the Federal Reserve back in 1913. They created a crisis and said that the crisis happened because they didn’t have enough power to prevent it. The Panic of 1907 which was used to justify the passage of the Federal Reserve Act was actually caused by JP Morgan and assorted elite financial interests. They did this so they could use the crisis as an excuse to centralize their control and power over the banking system. Through the Federal Reserve, banks were finally consolidated under its umbrella through the Great Depression which was deliberately caused by the tight monetary policies implemented the central bank. Throughout the 1920s money was made plentiful, but following the stock market crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve tightened the money supply which put hundreds of community banks out of business and allowed the central bankers to consolidate control over the nation’s banking system.
Geithner is using the excuse of the current financial crisis that was caused by the Federal Reserve and the world’s assorted central banks in order to again consolidate more power for the banking cartel. It is simply history repeating itself, only this time it is on a much larger scale.
Below is another blurb taken from Geithner’s Financial Times piece:
Since last summer, we have lived through a severe and complex financial crisis. Why was the financial system so fragile? What can be done to make the system more resilient in the future?
The world experienced a financial boom. The boom fed demand for risk. Products were created to meet that demand, including risky, complicated mortgages. Many assets were financed with significant leverage and liquidity risk and many of the world’s largest financial institutions got themselves too exposed to the risk of a global downturn. The amount of long-term illiquid assets financed with short-term liabilities made the system vulnerable to a classic type of run. As concern about risk increased, investors pulled back, triggering a self-reinforcing cycle of forced liquidation of assets, higher margin requirements, increased volatility.
What Geithner doesn’t say in his article is that the current global financial crisis was caused by the Federal Reserve and the world’s various central banks. Alan Greenspan intentionally set interest rates at incredibly low levels after the 9/11 attacks. This encouraged lenders to lend out money using all sorts of creative financing packages. It also encouraged borrowers to borrow money from the lenders because of the cheaper money. These policies lead to the continued devaluation of the U.S. Dollar and the U.S. housing crisis which have been the main drivers behind most of the economic problems we are currently seeing.
Geithner wants us to believe that giving the Federal Reserve and the rest of this private banking system more power is what’s needed to resolve all of the economic problems that were caused by the central bankers themselves. How stupid does Geithner and the rest of the global elite think we are? We have a historical track record of central bankers creating economic problems and bringing in phony solutions to expand their control. We need decentralization and free markets to resolve the economic problems that have been created by these people, not more centralized power.
If all of this wasn’t bad enough, Jim Tucker from the American Free Press speaking on the Alex Jones show today stated that one of his Bilderberg sources revealed to him that the global elite are planning to push forward their cashless society grid agenda with the use of implantable microchips. The implantable microchips would be sold as a way for people to easily move through the militarized control grid that they’ve setup via the bogus terror war. Tucker also mentioned that we would see the media hyping the phony terror war and specifically the phony “white Al-Qaeda terror threat” as a way for them to continue the justification of the enslavement grid. Assuming Tucker’s Bilderberg source is providing accurate information, this agenda that Geithner is pushing in his Financial Times article is right in line with their well documented plans to get rid of cash. The central bankers would need a global regulatory framework for the banking system so they can move closer to a global currency operating in a cashless society.
This is some incredibly scary stuff. Of course there was not one word of the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting in any major U.S. media outlets. The corporate controlled media maintained a blackout on any coverage of this incredibly important yearly meeting of the global elite. It is pathetic when citizen journalists like the ones at InfoWars, PrisonPlanet and RogueGovernment provide the best coverage of what is one of the most important geopolitical meetings of the year. Either way, the commentary from Geithner as well as the information from Tucker’s Bilderberg source seems to indicate that the global elite are getting ready to further centralize the banking system in order to establish their one world cashless society grid. These criminals must be exposed and their system of global corruption and tyranny must be defeated. Let’s tell these bastards that they can take their cashless society grid and their implantable microchips where the sun don’t shine.
PROVO, UTAH — For years, Kevin Jensen carried a pistol everywhere he went, tucked in a shoulder holster beneath his clothes.
In hot weather the holster was almost unbearable. Pressed against Jensen’s skin, the firearm was heavy and uncomfortable. Hiding the weapon made him feel like a criminal.
Then one evening he stumbled across a site that urged gun owners to do something revolutionary: Carry your gun openly for the world to see as you go about your business.
In most states there’s no law against that.
Jensen thought about it and decided to give it a try. A couple of days later, his gun was visible, hanging from a black holster strapped around his hip as he walked into a Costco. His heart raced as he ordered a Polish dog at the counter. No one called the police. No one stopped him.
Now Jensen carries his Glock 23 openly into his bank, restaurants and shopping centers. He wore the gun to a Ron Paul rally. He and his wife, Clachelle, drop off their 5-year-old daughter at elementary school with pistols hanging from their hip holsters, and have never received a complaint or a wary look.
Jensen said he tries not to flaunt his gun. “We don’t want to show up and say, ‘Hey, we’re here, we’re armed, get used to it,’ ” he said.
But he and others who publicly display their guns have a common purpose.
The Jensens are part of a fledgling movement to make a firearm as common an accessory as an iPod. Called “open carry” by its supporters, the movement has attracted grandparents, graduate students and lifelong gun enthusiasts like the Jensens.
“What we’re trying to say is, ‘Hey, we’re normal people who carry guns,’ ” said Travis Deveraux, 36, of West Valley, a Salt Lake City suburb. Deveraux works for a credit card company and sometimes walks around town wearing a cowboy hat and packing a pistol in plain sight. “We want the public to understand it’s not just cops who can carry guns.”
Police acknowledge the practice is legal, but some say it makes their lives tougher.
Police Chief John Greiner recalled that last year in Ogden, Utah, a man was openly carrying a shotgun on the street. When officers pulled up to ask him about the gun, he started firing. Police killed the man.
Greiner tells the story as a lesson for gun owners. “We’ve changed over the last 200 years from the days of the wild, wild West,” Greiner said. “Most people don’t openly carry. . . . If [people] truly want to open carry, they ought to expect they’ll be challenged more until people become comfortable with it.”
Jensen and others argue that police shouldn’t judge the gun, but rather the actions of the person carrying it. Jensen, 28, isn’t opposed to attention, however. It’s part of the reason he brought his gun out in the open.
“At first, [open carry] was a little novelty,” he said. “Then I realized the chances of me educating someone are bigger than ever using it [the gun] in self-defense. If it’s in my pants or under my shirt I’m probably not going to do anything with it.”
As Clachelle pushed the shopping cart holding their two young children during a recent trip to Costco, her husband admired the new holster wrapped around her waist. “I like the look of that low-rise gun belt,” he said.
The Jensens’ pistols were snapped into holsters attached to black belts that hug their waists. Guns are a fact of life in their household. Their 5-year-old daughter, Sierra, has a child-sized .22 rifle she handles only in her parents’ presence.
Clachelle is the daughter of a Central California police chief and began shooting when she was about Sierra’s age. She would take her parents’ gun when she went out and hide it in her purse because the firearm made her feel safer.
“I love ‘em,” Clachelle said. “I wouldn’t ever be without them.”
Kevin Jensen’s first encounter with guns came when he was 11: His grandfather died and left him a 16-gauge shotgun. The gun stayed locked away but fascinated Jensen through his teen years. He convinced his older brother to take him shooting in the countryside near their home in a small town south of Salt Lake City.
“I immediately fell in love with it,” said Jensen, a lean man with close-cropped hair and a precise gait that is a reminder of his five years in the Army Reserve. “I like things that go boom.”
Jensen kept as many as 10 guns in the couple’s 1930s-style bungalow in Santaquin, 21 miles southwest of Provo. In January 2005, he decided to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon, mainly for self-defense.
“I’m not going to hide in the corner of a school and mall and wait for the shooting to stop,” he said.
When Jensen bought a Glock and the dealer threw in an external hip holster, he began researching the idea of carrying the gun in public and came upon OpenCarry.org.
Its website, run by two Virginia gun enthusiasts, claims 4,000 members nationwide. It summarizes the varying laws in each state that permit or forbid the practice. People everywhere have the right to prohibit weapons from their property, and firearms are often banned in government buildings such as courthouses.
According to an analysis by Legal Community Against Violence, a gun control group in San Francisco that tracks gun laws, at least eight states largely ban the practice, including Iowa and New Jersey. Those that allow it have different restrictions: In California, people can openly carry only unloaded guns.
Utah has no law prohibiting anyone from carrying a gun in public, as long as it is two steps from firing — for example, the weapon may have a loaded clip but must be uncocked, with no bullets in the chamber. Those who obtain a concealed-weapons permit in Utah don’t have that restriction. Also, youths under 18 can carry a gun openly with parental approval and a supervising adult in close proximity.
Most of the time people don’t notice Jensen’s gun. That’s not uncommon, said John Pierce, a law student and computer consultant in Virginia who is a co-founder of OpenCarry.org.
“People are carrying pagers, BlackBerrys, cellphones,” Pierce said. “They see a black lump on your belt and their eyes slide off.”
Sometimes the reactions are comical. Bill White, a 24-year-old graduate student in ancient languages at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wears his Colt pistol out in the open when he goes to his local Starbucks. Earlier this month a tourist from California spotted him and snapped a photo on his cellphone.
“He said it would prove he was in the Wild West,” White recalled.
But there are times when the response is more severe. Deveraux has been stopped several times by police, most memorably in December when he was walking around his neighborhood.
An officer pulled up and pointed his gun at Deveraux, warning he would shoot to kill. In the end, eight officers arrived, cuffed Deveraux and took his gun before Deveraux convinced them they had no legal reason to detain him.
Deveraux saw the incident as not giving ground on his rights. “I’m proud that happened,” he said.
Cases like this are talked about during regular gatherings of those who favor open carry. At a Sweet Tomatoes restaurant in the Salt Lake City suburb of Sandy, more than 40 civilians with guns strapped to their hips took over a corner of the restaurant, eating pasta and boisterously sharing stories.
Hassles with law enforcement were a badge of honor for some.
Travis White, 19, who has ear and chin piercings, congratulated Brandon Trask, 21, on carrying openly for the first time that night. “Just wait until you get confronted by a cop,” White said. “It’ll make you feel brave.”
Having pistols strapped around their waists made Shel Anderson, 67, and his wife, Kaye, 63, feel more secure. Longtime recreational shooters, they began to carry their pistols openly after a spate of home-invasion robberies in their neighborhood. The firearms can serve as a warning to predators, they said.
“I decided I want to have as much of an advantage as I can have in this day and age,” said Kaye Anderson, a retired schoolteacher.
Nearby, Scott Thompson picked over the remains of a salad, his Springfield Armory XD-35 sitting snugly in his hip holster.
The gangly graphics designer grew up in a home without guns and didn’t think of owning one until he started dating a woman — now his wife — who lived in a rough neighborhood. One night last year, a youth had his head beaten in with a pipe outside her bedroom window. The next day, Thompson got a concealed-weapons permit.
Thompson found out about open carry last month while reading gun sites. He’s become a convert. He likes the statement it makes.
Glancing around the restaurant, as armed families like the Jensens dined with men in cowboy hats and professionals like himself, Thompson smiled.
“I love this,” he said. “I want people to be aware that crazy people are not the only ones with guns. Normal people carry them.”
The Jensens’ daughter, Sierra, and newborn son, Tyler, began to get restless, so the couple bundled up the children and pulled the manager of the restaurant aside to thank her for hosting them.
A patron appeared at Jensen’s side and began to berate him. “What you guys are doing here is completely unacceptable,” he said. “There are children here.”
Jensen said that everyone in the restaurant had a legal right to carry. The man didn’t back down and the Jensens left.
Days later, Jensen was still thinking about the reaction and the man’s belief that guns are unsafe.
“People can feel that way and it doesn’t bother me,” he said. “If they have irrational fears, that’s fine.”
NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s crusade against illegal guns entered the courtroom on Tuesday in a battle against a Georgia gun dealer.
It is the first of two civil cases New York has brought against 27 gun dealers in five states — Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia — on the grounds that their sales practices allowed criminals to buy guns and then bring them into the city.
All but one dealer in the first lawsuit — Jay Wallace — has settled out of court. Wallace, 51, owner of a sporting goods store in the Atlanta, Georgia, suburb of Smyrna, vowed to fight on, likening his battle to David versus Goliath.
“I believe that I care more about firearms getting into criminals’ hands than the mayor of New York City does,” Wallace was quoted by local media has having said at Brooklyn federal court. “I’m in the business. I know how my business is run.”
Jury selection for the trial began on Tuesday.
City lawyers said Bloomberg had planned to testify about the toll illegal guns have taken on the city, but last week U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein rejected that idea, saying Bloomberg’s testimony would do nothing to advance the city’s case and could instead create a “media circus.”
The city has accused dealers like Wallace of allowing “straw purchases,” a transaction where one person shops for a gun and then has someone else fill out the required federal forms to pass a background check.
The guns are then sold on New York City streets for twice or three times their original price, police say.
The city caught some dealers by hiring undercover private detectives with hidden cameras to carry out straw purchases.
The second trial is expected to begin in July.
Nationally, the black market is the source for guns used in more than 90 percent of gun crimes. Since Bloomberg became mayor in 2002, every gun homicide in the city has been committed with an illegal gun, police say.
More than 300 people were killed in New York City by illegal guns last year, with nearly all of the guns coming from out of state, said Bloomberg, who has made the campaign against illegal guns a centerpiece of his second term in office.
“Where is the outrage in this country? Well, mayors see it,” Bloomberg has said. “We’re the ones who have to go to the funerals. We’re the ones that have to look somebody in the eye and say your spouse or your parent or your child is not going to come home.”
In 2006, Bloomberg co-founded Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group that has grown to some 321 mayors.
FORT WORTH, Texas — A college violated some students’ constitutional rights by not allowing them to wear empty gun holsters as part of a nationwide protest over campus bans on concealed weapons, a student claims.
Brett Poulos said that although he asked permission before last month’s demonstration, a Tarrant County College official said empty holsters could not be worn anywhere on campus. Poulos said he was told students could protest only in the “free-speech zone” — a 12-by-12-foot concrete platform.
“It was really upsetting to me because they wouldn’t provide me a reason,” said Poulos, 20, of Arlington. “And I’ve never seen anyone protest there. I’ve seen people pass out flyers and demonstrate on campus. Mine happens to be a protest over firearms, and I guess he disagreed with it personally.”
Of the 600 campuses where thousands of students wore empty holsters to classes April 21-25, Tarrant County College was apparently the only one that wouldn’t allow it, according to Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, a nationwide group.
Juan Garcia, vice president for student development for the two-year college, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he denied Poulos’ request because “from a distance, you can’t tell if a holster is empty or not.”
Poulos, a junior who transferred to Tarrant County College in January, said he was afraid of getting expelled after Garcia said he would take action if students disregarded his ban. So Poulos ended up getting permission to hand out fliers about the Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, which he did from the concrete platform.
Robert L. Shibley, vice president for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said wearing empty holsters is similar to students donning black arm bands to protest the Vietnam War, a right that the Supreme Court upheld in 1969.
“It’s important because it’s a matter of symbolic speech,” Shibley said.
He also said several campus free-speech zones had been ruled unconstitutional because they limited free speech, including Texas Tech University’s 20-foot diameter gazebo that was the designated zone for 28,000 students.
Shibley, whose group was contacted by Poulos, said Tarrant County College has not responded to his letter asking officials to allow students to do the empty-holster protest and to get rid of the free-speech zone.
Students for Concealed Carry on Campus was founded by a University of North Texas student just after last year’s Virginia Tech tragedy in which a student gunman killed two people in a dormitory, then killed 30 others more than two hours later in a classroom.
The national nonpartisan organization quickly grew through the online student-networking site Facebook. It now has 30,000 members — mostly students — who advocate for colleges to allow students and professors to carry guns if they already have concealed-weapons permits.
About 125 colleges and universities participated in the group’s first empty holster demonstration one week in October, said group spokeswoman Katie Kasprzak, a student at Texas State University.
Although every state but Illinois and Wisconsin allows residents some form of concealed handgun carrying rights, many states prohibit license-holders from taking weapons to school campuses. In states where the universities decide, they almost always ban it. Utah is the only state that expressly allows students to carry concealed weapons on campus.
Earlier this year, the government tried and convicted David Olofson on the charge of transferring a machine gun. The Army veteran, Army reservist, husband and father of three contended that his gun was not a machine gun but simply a more than 20-year-old rifle that misfired. But instead of ordering him to repair the rifle, the government took Olofson to court.
He was previously arrested for carrying a firearm in a state that allows it.
Lawyers for Mayor Bloomberg are asking a judge to ban any reference to the Second Amendment during the upcoming trial of a gun shop owner who was sued by the city. While trials are often tightly choreographed, with lawyers routinely instructed to not tell certain facts to a jury, a gag order on a section of the Constitution would be an oddity.
“Apparently Mayor Bloomberg has a problem with both the First and the Second amendments,” Lawrence Keane, the general counsel of a firearms industry association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, said.
The trial, set to begin May 27, involves a Georgia gun shop, Adventure Outdoors, which the city alleges is responsible for a disproportionate number of the firearms recovered from criminals in New York City. The gun store’s owner, Jay Wallace, says his store abides by Georgia and federal regulations and takes steps to avoid selling firearms to gun traffickers. Mr. Wallace’s store is one of 27 out-of-state gun shops sued by New York City, and the first to go to trial.
City lawyers, in a motion filed Tuesday, asked the judge, Jack Weinstein of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, to preclude the store’s lawyers from arguing that the suit infringed on any Second Amendment rights belonging to the gun store or its customers. In the motion, the lawyer for the city, Eric Proshansky, is also seeking a ban on “any references” to the amendment.
“Any references by counsel to the Second Amendment or analogous state constitutional provisions are likewise irrelevant,” the brief states.
Many Americans believe that the Second Amendment provides an individual the right to own a gun. Others believe that it provides no right to private gun ownership, but gives states the power to keep militias.
In a recent court deposition, Mayor Bloomberg said he believed “the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights gives you the right to keep and bear arms.” But in a recent brief to the Supreme Court, lawyers for Mr. Bloomberg argued that the amendment “was not intended to vest armed power in citizens acting outside of any governmental military effort — either federal or state.”
