Daily Archives: December 20, 2013

A federal lawsuit in Boston against the town and the police department was recently dropped.

Police Chief Robert MacDonald and Selectmen Chair Dean Cronin both confirmed that 19-year-old resident Matthew Plouffe and his lawyer Matthew Trask, of Framingham, dropped the Second Amendment suit that they brought against the town and police in United States District Court.

Trask, a Second Amendment lawyer and co-plaintiff, did not return a call seeking comment, after he and Plouffe alleged that the town violated Plouffes Second Amendment rights. Plouffes firearms were seized by police and his firearms identification card was suspended by MacDonald earlier this year.

MacDonald said this week that the lawsuit was dropped because Plouffe has a separate legal issue. MacDonald could not comment further, other than to state that this legal issue influenced Plouffes and Trasks decision to drop the suit against the town and police.

Matt Costa, the towns lawyer in the case from Gay & Gay in Taunton, also would not comment further.

According to Gazette reports, the initial lawsuit states that Plouffe was stopped by a Dighton police officer in the late afternoon on March 26, after a passenger in a car matching Plouffes vehicle had been involved in a verbal altercation earlier that day.

The officer spotted an unloaded shotgun, equipped with a cable trigger lock, in the back seat, the lawsuit states. Plouffe, according to the lawsuit, produced a valid FID card and the officer inspected the gun, but the items were returned and no citation was issued.

MacDonald said this week that concerned parents had called the police station, stating that Plouffe was friends with a 13-year-old male who was in a verbal altercation between a group around that same age near one of the towns fire stations.

MacDonald said Plouffe was not related to the 13-year-old and police at an earlier time had pulled over Plouffes car when he was with the youth. In that car at the moment, Plouffe had a shotgun.

Fearing that a violent altercation could erupt between Plouffe and his friend, along with the other 13-year-old kids, MacDonald seized all of Plouffes firearms and suspended his license. All told, the town police seized from Plouffes home two pump-action shotguns, 10 rounds of rifle ammunition, five rounds of shotgun ammunition, a muzzle-loading black powder rifle, a 28-inch shotgun barrel, a box of black powder bullets and other accessories and tamper-resistant locks.

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Second Amendment suit against Dighton, police department dropped

From the Archive: The comedy team Key and Peele cut through the Rights Second Amendment madness best in a bit in which Peele travels back in time with Uzis to confront its authors over their careless wording. But there is nothing funny about piles of dead kids, victims of bad history, as Robert Parry wrote a year ago.

By Robert Parry (Originally published on Dec. 15, 2012, a day after the Newtown massacre)

The American Right is fond of putting itself inside the minds of Americas Founders and intuiting what was their original intent in writing the U.S. Constitution and its early additions, like the Second Amendments right to bear arms. But, surely, James Madison and the others werent envisioning people with modern weapons mowing down children ina movie theater or a shopping mall or now an elementary school.

Indeed, when the Second Amendment was passed in the First Congress as part of the Bill of Rights, firearms were single-shot mechanisms that took time to load and reload. It was also clear that Madison and the others viewed the right to bear arms in the context of a well-regulated militia to defend communities from massacres, not as a means to enable such massacres.

President James Madison, a principal author of the Bill of Rights..

The Second Amendment reads: 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. Thus, the point of the Second Amendment is to ensure security, not undermine it.

The massacre of20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, 2012, which followed other gun massacres in towns and cities across the country, represents the opposite of security. And it is time that Americans of all political persuasions recognize that protecting this kind of mass killing was not what the Founders had in mind.

However, over the past several decades, self-interested right-wing scholarship has sought to reinvent the Framers as free-market, government-hating ideologues, though the key authors of the U.S. Constitution people like James Madison and George Washington could best be described as pragmatic nationalists who favored effective governance.

In 1787, led by Madison and Washington, the Constitutional Convention scrapped the Articles of Confederation, which had enshrined the states as sovereign and had made the federal government a league of friendship with few powers.

What happened behind closed doors in Philadelphia was a reversal of thesystem that governed the United States from 1777 to 1787. The laws of the federal government were made supreme and its powers were dramatically strengthened, so much so that a movement of Anti-Federalists fought bitterly to block ratification.

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The 2nd Amendment and Killing Kids

The city of Seattle will pay $38,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the Second Amendment Foundation over failure to release public records relating to Mayor Mike McGinns January gun buyback.

The settlement was signed today by Carl Marquardt, legal counsel to mayor Mike McGinn, and includes an apology for the mayors offices failure to releaserecords about the controversial buyback program that netted about 700 guns but also provoked criticism from public health and gun-rights advocates that it wouldnt reduce gun violence.

The city of Seattle acknowledges that it had a duty under the Washington Public Records Act to provide all documents in response to the Second Amendment Foundations public disclosure request in a timely manner, and that it did not do so While the initial failure to produce records in this case was unintentional, the city acknowledges that it did not meet the requirements of the Public Records Act, and for that we sincerely apologize.

The statement goes on to say that the city is working to improve its processes for locating documents and responding to public-records requests. The Seattle Police Department earlier this year paid $20,000 to The Seattle Times to settle a claim that it had not released public records as required by state law.

In February, the Second Amendment Foundation, based in Bellevue, requested all communications and related documents about the gun buyback andin response received from the city more than 1,500 emails between five McGinn staffers. But in June, a reporter for Seattlepi.com wrote thathis own public-records request showedthat the states most prominent gun control group, Washington CeaseFire, was not notified about the gun buyback before it was announced.

Ralph Fascitelli, president ofWashington CeaseFire, emailed the mayor when he learned of the plans and told him that buybacks often backfire and thatthe overwhelming research shows that they are a waste of resources, according to the Seattlepi.com report.

Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, said the emails detailed in the news story were not previously disclosed to the organization. In filing the lawsuit, he accused McGinns staff of playing games with the governments legal requirement to be transparent and accountable.

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Withheld documents about gun buyback will cost city $38,000

County commissioners unanimously pass Second Amendment ordinance

ENTERPRISE A Wallowa County ordinance preserving the Second Amendment was unanimously passed Monday during a public meeting at the Wallowa County Fairgrounds Cloverleaf Hall.

Commissioner Paul Castilleja read a five-page draft of the ordinance compiled in part by Chad Nash of Enterprise.

Nash said writing the ordinance was due to reactions to gun violence across the country.

Groups across the country have been trying to put together some languages to make sure our Second Amendment rights are not infringed upon. Its not just in Eastern Oregon, but in other states, Nash said.

In a previous county commissioner meeting, Nash said three other counties in the nation had passed a similar ordinance. There are 3,077 counties in the U.S.

Nash said the ordinance was written by thoseof us who want to restore rights that have been taken from us through the adoption of a county ordinance.

Nearly 100 people were in attendance and Nash said he had 67 signatures on a petition supporting the ordinance from citizens of Lostine and Wallowa.

Nash said Sheriff Steve Rogers is the chief executive of the county who is charged to carry out the law when the legislature exceeds its bounds.

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Edict gets OK from county