By Dave Workman
Senior Editor

It was the year that the US Supreme Court finally issued a long-awaited ruling on gun rights, defining the Second Amendment as protective of an individual civil right…subject to reasonable restrictions.

It was the year that saw one of the ugliest presidential campaigns in memory and a national press community acknowledging that it was biased in favor of one candidate, as if that were news to millions of disappointed Americans.

The year saw a final settlement in the long and often exasperating lawsuit against the City of New Orleans by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and National Rifle Association (NRA) over the September 2005 post-Hurricane Katrina illegal gun confiscations.

America saw history made with the election of its first black president, though the moment was overshadowed by the knowledge that Barack Obama is an ardent supporter of gun control, as is his vice president, Joseph Biden of Delaware. Obama picked as his chief of staff Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who served as point man on gun control issues for the Clinton Administration.

And, as the year ended, the Obama election and Democrat triumphs in Congressional elections sent Americans stampeding to gun stores across the nation, buying semi-auto rifles, full capacity magazines, ammunition by the case load, and handguns by the proverbial bushel. Ironically, and with no small degree of hypocrisy, many of those gun buyers were first-timers or established gunowners who voted for the Obama-Biden ticket despite their anti-gun credentials.

Altogether, 2008 will go down in history as a rollercoaster ride for gun rights that ended with dark storm clouds on the horizon, gunowners wearing black arm bands or putting American flag decals upside down in their vehicles.

The year began with the revelation that the FBI’s national instant check database for disqualified mentally ill people had doubled last year in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007. At the same time, the anti-gun Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG) had questioned then-presidential candidates about their views on gun rights.

In a brighter note, a Georgia appeals court tossed a Coweta County ordinance prohibiting legally-concealed handguns in county parks. Gun rights groups including the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) and Gun Owners of America (GOA) held firm against confirmation of Michael Sullivan as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Anti-gunners became hysterical when Congress passed a NICS Improvement Act toward the end of last year, a move that seemed to energize them to become even more politically active in the presidential election contest. The move to allow legal concealed carry in national parks gained momentum when 47 senators signed a letter to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne asking that the National Park Service change its policy that prohibits firearms in the parks.

It was early in the year that the California Court of Appeals signaled that the handgun ban in San Francisco passed by Proposition H in 2005 was going down finally in a legal challenge mounted by NRA, SAF and other groups. The unanimous ruling said that the measure was illegal under state preemption, but the city defiantly appealed to the state Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the gun rights organizations.

Early in the year, Remington announced that it was purchasing the Marlin Firearms Company, which also owns Harrington & Richardson and New England Firearms. The announcement came just before the
2008 SHOT Show in Las Vegas, NV, and less than a year after Remington had been acquired by Cerberus Capital, which also owned Bushmaster.

It created one of the largest firearms conglomerates on the map, yet did not interfere with Marlin’s re-entry into the bolt-action big game market, nor the development of new gun and cartridge combinations.

Anti-gunners are always trying to convince people that concealed carry laws are the gateway to anarchy and bloodbaths, but a report out of the Detroit Free Press revealed that after six years of concealed carry reform, in Michigan there were fewer violent crimes and even the suicide by gun rates had declined.

Gun Week Executive Editor Joseph Tartaro revealed the rise of the Union Sportsmen’s Alliance, a group formed to undermine the pro-gun movement and strip gun votes away from Republicans. Election results in several states show they were at least partly successful.

In March, US Solicitor General Paul D. Clement infuriated gun rights activists with a legal brief in the Heller case that asked the Supreme Court to recognize the Second Amendment as an individual civil right, but to remand the case back to the appeals court. The brief also defended all existing gun control laws, which angered activists all the more.

The Virginia State Senate Courts of Justice Committee voted down Gov. Tim Kaine’s proposed legislation requiring background checks on all transactions v at gun shows.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson, an ardent pro-gunner, dropped out of the presidential race when his campaign failed to catch fire with voters. And in Arizona, the Game and Fish Commission rejected a proposed ban on lead shot.

Anti-gunners were busy, spreading model legislation calling for ammunition registration in ten states, with the owner of the microstamping technology supporting the move. In the US Senate, anti-gun New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg and ten others filed federal legislation to require background checks at all gun shows nationwide, and on Valentine’s Day, a gunman stormed into a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and opened fire, killing five people before turning the gun on himself. Alan Gottlieb, chairman of CCRKBA, was quick to note that this happened in yet another gun-free campus zone, where students were unable to defend themselves.

In the wake of that shooting, rhetoric heated up over a movement called Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC). While the press tried to exploit the tragedy and demand even stricter gun laws, the media failed to mention that the shooting occurred in a state with some of the toughest gun laws on the map.

CCRKBA and SAF issued a call to presidential candidates to sign a pledge on gun rights. Only Republican Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, said he would sign the pledge. The others, including president-elect Barack Obama, ignored the pledge. Yet the pledge campaign may have prompted Obama and anti-gun Sen. Hillary Clinton to announce that they “support” the Second Amendment, which they felt was subject to “reasonable controls.”

Lesson from Israel
If the debate over guns on campus was heating up, an incident in Jerusalem in early March caused it to temporarily boil over when an armed student shot and killed a gunman who had opened fire at the Mercaz Haray seminary. For a time, newspaper accounts tried to portray the shooter as an off-duty soldier, but authorities told one reporter that the man was a “private citizen who had a
gun license and was able to shoot the gunman with his pistol.”

When it became known that student Yitzhak Dadon had been thusly identified, news media attention to the shooting disappeared.

About that same time, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report that said the government should not create a national database of so-called ballistic fingerprints from new firearms. The report cast doubt on the efficiency and reliability of such a system.

In a show of force, gunowners in Illinois descended on the state capitol in Springfield for their fourth annual Lobby Day. More than 2,000 Illinois gunowners arrived for the all-day event which included a march on the capitol. A couple of weeks later, gunowners in Pennsylvania did the same thing when they rallied at the capital in Harrisburg for their third annual Right to Keep and Bear Arms gathering.

In Arizona, a 10-year-old boy was rescued from a mountain lion attack in a national forest near Phoenix when one of the adults in his group pulled a pistol and shot the big cat.

Heller arguments
The March 18 oral arguments before the Supreme Court put attorney Alan Gura of Virginia “on the map” when it became obvious that a majority of the court, with swing vote Justice Anthony Kennedy asking many of the tough questions, was coming down on the side of individual gun rights.

Steve Sanetti, former CEO of Sturm, Ruger was named president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), succeeding Doug Painter, who became senior advisor and trade liaison. Painter had held the position for six years.

As sportsmen struggled with exorbitantly high gasoline prices, an armed pilot was dismissed from US Airways because he was storing his handgun per Transportation Safety Administration rules and it discharged in the cockpit, a scenario that seemed prone to happen because of the TSA requirements.

The gun rights community was saddened in the spring with the April 5 death of Academy Award winning actor and former NRA President Charlton Heston. He had battled Alzheimer’s disease for more than two years after stepping down from his post at the end of his unprecedented fifth term.

The Kansas Legislature passed a gun rights bill that prohibits seizures of firearms following a disaster, after complaints emerged in the wake of the devastating tornado that destroyed the entire town of Greensburg in 2007.

And it was about that same time that Gun Week reported on statements made by Obama to The Pittsburgh Tribune Review that he is opposed to concealed carry by private citizens. He insisted that such laws increase violence, but he had no proof to back up the claim.

In reaction, CCRKBA’s Gottlieb issued a call to gunowners to use their stimulus checks from the government to purchase guns and ammunition, thus boosting sales for the gun industry and helping save jobs in that sector.

Kansas Rocks
If anti-gunners thought they were having a bad year already, nothing could have prepared them for what happened in Kansas in April, when traditionally anti-gun Gov. Kathleen Sebelius signed legislation that makes it possible for private citizens, who meet the legal qualifications, to legally own machineguns. That statute took effect July 1 after it was passed by a veto-proof majority in the Senate (28-9) and the House (105-18). Of course, citizens must go through all the required paperwork and background check, but gun rights activists called it “a reasonable first step,” mocking language often used by the gun ban lobby to describe some new piece of restrictive gun legislation.

That same month, a judge ordered Philadelphia to not enforce some local gun laws the city council had adopted, and in Illinois, the Legislature turned thumbs down on a package of anti-gun proposals floated by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Some North Carolina school officials got egg on their faces for barring a high school’s rifle team from participating in state competition. These officials refused to speak with Gun Week at the time, but told a local newspaper that they stopped the team from participating based on a school policy that bars students from having firearms along on school-related trips. CCRKBA’S Gottlieb went public, calling the case an “outrage” and demanding that the school principal and area superintendent be fired.

Gun Week reported that Chicago’s handgun ban wasn’t working, as the first few months of the year found the city racking up quite a body count. During one April weekend alone, there were 36 shootings that resulted in nine fatalities.

The United Nations renewed its interest in global gun control in May, while an Appeals Court tossed out a New York City lawsuit against the gun industry. At the same time, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a second gun rights case, this one challenging the Lautenberg Amendment’s permanent revocation of gun rights from anyone convicted of or having pleaded guilty to misdemeanor domestic abuse charges. The case is being watched closely because it could send shock waves through the anti-gun community by prohibiting the federal government from stripping gun rights from people over a misdemeanor conviction.

The NRA held its annual convention in Louisville, KY, and members heard from then-Republican hopeful Sen. John McCain. He acknowledged past differences with the gun community, but also pointed to his support of gun rights over the years, and his rejection of the semi-auto ban and other gun control measures.

Microstamping again came under scrutiny as experts at the University of California at Davis concluded that the technology works “with some firearms” but “does not perform equally well for every encoding format or in every semiautomatic handgun.”

The Brady Campaign launched an effort to prevent judges with pro-gun leanings from being appointed to the federal bench, while a Chicago alderman was criticized for drafting an ordinance that would have given him cover for not re-registering his own guns in the city.

Open Carry
The Open Carry movement continued to gain momentum, and publicity, during 2008. In Georgia, gun rights activists demanded that the Glynn County Police stop harassing law-abiding citizens who carried their handguns openly. GeorgiaCarry.org led that fight, complaining that one of its members had been repeatedly detained “in complete absence of any probable cause or reasonable suspicion” that he was involved in any criminal activity.

In Seattle, anti-gun Mayor Greg Nickels declared war on law-abiding gunowners over an incident at the city’s Folklife Festival in which a man carrying a concealed pistol was confronted by another man and a scuffle followed. During the fight, the man’s gun discharged as the two were wrestling over it, and the bullet hit two bystanders. Nickels reacted by announcing his intent to ban guns from all city property, licensed or not, and in complete disregard of the state’s decades-old preemption statute. Immediately, SAF and CCRKBA vowed legal action if he carried through on his threat. That standoff continued late into the year.

In Washington, DC, the police set up neighborhood checkpoints just as the nation was awaiting a high court ruling on the Second Amendment. The checkpoints were to check for people moving through certain neighborhoods who had no business there, and gun rights activists compared the practice to police checkpoints in Nazi Germany.

About the same time, the FBI reported that violent crime had declined in 2007 by 1.4 percent overall, reversing a trend from the previous two years. Not surprisingly, the same issue of Gun Week that reported this also revealed that in Great Britain, violent crime has skyrocketed, including crime with firearms. The nation is even cracking down on pocket knives.

About the same time, five Pennsylvania Open Carry activists filed two separate federal lawsuits against police in Dickson City for an incident May 9 in which several gun toters were detained and one even arrested by the cops at a restaurant.

It was the latest in a growing string of confrontations around the country that suggest local police are behind the learning curve on the legality of open carry.

Also last summer, Louisiana open carry proponent Mark Edward Marchiafava settled out of court for an undisclosed sum in his dispute with the Gonzales, LA police department over his arrest in January 2006 while openly carrying a handgun at a strip mall.

DC v. Heller
And then, on June 26, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling in the District of Columbia v. Dick Anthony Heller case. In a narrow 5-4 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court found that the Second Amendment does protect a fundamental individual civil right that goes far beyond service in a militia.

The high court did not entirely satisfy gun rights activists who had insisted that the right to keep and bear arms is absolute. Scalia wrote that the right, like other civil rights, is subject to reasonable regulation, but the ruling did not define what such regulation might cover. Quickly, gun control groups declared victory by insisting that reasonable regulation might cover all sorts of things.

But it was a watershed moment. It was the first time that the court had defined the Amendment, which anti-gunners had long held to protect only some mythical “collective” right of the states to organize militias. Gottlieb and other leading gun rights advocates said the Heller ruling was one upon which the gun rights movement can build, and quickly they began setting bricks in place. Literally minutes after the high
court ruling was released, SAF attorneys filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Chicago, in cooperation with the Illinois State Rifle Association.

Reporters erroneously said the NRA had filed that lawsuit, but it was not until the next day that NRA sued not only Chicago but surrounding communities that had banned handguns back in the 1980s.

Within weeks, NRA and CCRKBA filed a joint lawsuit against the San Francisco Public Housing Authority over gun bans in public housing. Later in the year, NRA and SAF would be working together again on a lawsuit against Washington State over its unique “alien firearms license” requirement for legal resident aliens.

But the Heller ruling left the nation polarized, with gun control advocates insisting the Supreme Court majority had been wrong and had re-written the Constitution. Even the ACLU declined to recognize the ruling!

Meanwhile, a Florida judge declined to block a Florida law allowing legally-armed private citizens to have guns in their cars while at work.

But in Washington, DC, officials tried vainly to put every kind of restriction they could on citizens who wanted to register handguns in the city. First they said only revolvers would be allowed, but then relented on that restriction when threatened with further legal action. The city was sued by Dick Anthony Heller and the NRA.

Throughout this drama, another controversy was playing out at the Department of Interior, where gun rights activists had been pressing for a change in national park rules to allow legal concealed carry of handguns in parks for personal protection. Anti-gunners almost immediately misrepresented this effort as an attempt to open up the parks to hunting, target shooting and even poaching.

The Brady Campaign formed an alliance with anti-gun churches to further demonize gun ownership, calling it “Gundamental-ism.” The churches have launched a campaign called “God Not Guns.”

Morton Grove
A symbol of anti-gun activism in the 1980s, the Morton Grove handgun ban, died quietly in late July, about one month after the NRA sued that village and other Chicago-area suburbs, over their handgun prohibitions. The village board, citing the high cost of litigation and the Heller ruling, decided that the 27-year-old ban had outlived its purpose.

About the same time, Evanston and Wilmette trashed their handgun bans.

It was about mid-Summer when the public first began paying much attention to the media bias that was seeping into press coverage of the primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Gun activists in particular took note of the bias, and so did Investors Business Daily, which took other news organs to task for their obviously lopsided coverage of the Obama campaign, and provided financial figures to prove the bias went beyond just philosophy. The magazine showed how news agencies had contributed many times more money to Democrats than Republicans, and that even journalists—who are supposed to be non-partisan—had contributed to Democrats 20-to-1 over Republicans.

In late summer, Smith & Wesson, working with SAF, announced a commemorative Heller Ruling model of the hammerless J-frame Model 442 revolver, chambered in .38 Special. Part of the proceeds from the sale of these specially engraved revolvers will be donated to SAF for future legal battles. Syndicated radio host Tom Gresham, host of Gun Talk, was instrumental in this effort. Gresham sits on the CCRKBA Board of Trustees.

Late in the summer, a small school district in northern Texas announced it would allow teachers to carry handguns on campus as a measure against a possible school shooting. The announcement elicited the expected hysterical reactions from gun banners, but was hailed as a “common sense” measure because police are some distance away.

At the same time, Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC) really began gaining momentum, with hundreds of chapters springing up on college campuses all over the country. The group held its first conference in Washington, DC, last summer, with support from SAF and others.

American shooters took six Olympic medals at the Summer Games in China, but their feat gained little recognition from the mainstream press.

Federal prosecutors announced they wanted to start carrying guns, a move that brought cries of “foul” from gun rights activists, who suggested that these attorneys should call police, like other citizens.

Presidential Picks
With Obama and McCain ultimately emerging as their respective party’s’ picks, it remained for the nation to begin defining which direction each ticket might take the country. Obama chose perennial anti-gunner Joseph Biden, the senator from Delaware known as much for his buffoonish gaffes as he is for his hatred of guns.

It was as clear a signal as possible to the gun rights community where an Obama administration would stand on firearms ownership and restrictive gun laws.

Meanwhile, McCain’s campaign was caught in lethargy until the Arizona senator announced that his pick for running mate was ardent pro-gun Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. The announcement sent a charge of adrenalin through conservative ranks. The no-nonsense Palin, who has fished commercially, taken on cronyism and corruption in her own party, energized Republicans.

Suddenly, gunowners were happily telling one another that “I’m voting for Palin and her running mate!”

But no sooner had Palin been picked than the vicious attacks began. She was savagely parodied on “Saturday Night Live” to the point that many believe the parody to reflect the true Palin, as a rather airheaded moron. Those who knew the straight-talking Palin and her real record stuck up for the woman they hoped would become the first female vice president.

With McCain’s defeat, and the Republicans in disarray, many began looking at Palin as a rising star to come back in 2012 as a potential nominee to challenge Obama.

But as the presidential campaign unfolded, there was other news. Wyoming lost a federal case on its mechanism for expunging misdemeanor domestic violence convictions to restore gun rights. The procedure, said the court, does not actually expunge the conviction from someone’s record.

Residents of a Florida neighborhood began publicly advocating armed response to local crime. They planned to work with a Texas-based gun rights group to promote training in firearms and self-defense.

A tragic and avoidable hunting fatality on the opening day of Washington State’s black bear season started a regional controversy between hikers and hunters on at least two Internet forums. A female hiker was fatally shot in the head by a 14-year-old hunter who mistakenly took her for a black bear. Yet the dead woman was dressed in a blue windbreaker, and was on the open side of a mountain on a popular hiking trail, a place where hikers argued that no hunting should be allowed. Hunters responded that hikers ought to be cognizant of hunting seasons and be required or at least encouraged to wear blaze orange in the woods. The youngster has been charged with a felony in the case.

Perhaps not waiting for the National Park Service to change its rules on concealed carry in the parks, a Senate panel okayed a measure to make it law. It is doubtful that the legislation will go anywhere, especially since the incoming Obama administration is likely to turn thumbs down on the proposal.

The election was high on the agenda at the September annual Gun Rights Policy Conference in Phoenix, AZ. Though the audience was fired up with the prospect of keeping Obama from a victory, their activism did not spread across the country, nor was it evidently shared by all gunowners.

However, on the other side of the debate, the American Hunters and Shooters Association, an organization created primarily by Democrats to whittle away at the NRA, was working hard to elect Obama, whom they had endorsed last Spring.

Gun sales boom
With the election of Obama to the presidency, gun sales across the country began to skyrocket on election day and the week afterward. Gun shops across the map reported brisk trade, especially in semi-auto sport-utility rifles and magazines and ammunition for those guns. At least one gun shop told Gun Week that many customers appear to have been first-time buyers who had voted for Obama despite his anti-gun credentials. They were buying in anticipation of a renewed ban.

In Washington State, applications for concealed pistol licenses rose and now almost 260,000 Washington residents are licensed to carry handguns.

The New Jersey Institute of Technology received a $225,000 grant to study “smart gun” technology, while a FedEx staffer in the Garden State was arrested in the theft of 146 firearms.

On Capitol Hill, the House approved gun rights legislation for the District of Columbia on a 266-152 vote, which was largely done to give some Democrats political cover in tight races where they need to boast of a “pro-gun vote.”

The Ohio Supreme Court struck down a municipal gun ban in city parks in the City of Clyde. The ruling should have a dampening effect on local city councils, discouraging them from adopting anti-gun ordinances.

Taurus acquired Rossi firearms in a no-surprise-to-anyone deal, since the two companies had been long linked to one another.

In a revelation that will probably be ignored by gun control extremists, a joint study by the University of Michigan and University of Maryland suggested that gun shows are not tied to homicides.

The study was ignored by the press, probably because the authors noted, “We find no evidence that gun shows lead to substantial increases in either gun homicides or suicides.”

While people around the country were buying every semi-auto rifle they could afford, voters in ten Illinois counties approved referendums on whether the state should be encouraged to adopt a concealed carry law. The measure was on the ballot in 14 counties, and while the Illinois State Rifle Association was not the sponsor, ISRA did hold seminars on concealed carry in the counties where it passed.

Another revelation sure to raise hackles with anti-gunners is that United Kingdom gun crime may be actually 60% higher than previously reported.

Meanwhile, on these shores, the FBI reported that self-defense shootings by armed private citizens had risen, as had shootings by police.

And in keeping with their bias, mainstream news agencies ignored both stories.

Dark political storm clouds are rising as the year comes to an end. Where the firearms civil rights community once portrayed Bill Clinton as “the most anti-gun president in history,” and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as “the most anti-gun candidate,” that dubious honor now falls to Obama, who has yet to demonstrate how strongly he “supports” the Second Amendment.

This year has provided the United States with an abundance of history, in the definition of the Second Amendment as an individual right, and the election of the first African-American as president. It was the year that has seen the Republican Party left in shambles.

It is a situation that extends to state legislatures, where Democrats also made gains. Out in Washington, for example, the Seattle mayor, backed by at least one newspaper in his city, is poised to lobby the legislature to erode the state’s preemption law, so that he may set his own gun laws in Seattle.

Gun rights activists are bracing for the worst, with Obama in the Oval Office supported by a Democrat majority in both the House and Senate, and major anti-gunners in positions of leadership in both houses of Congress.

In the midst of this, another battle has erupted within the gun rights community, as a legal dispute over ownership and management of TheHighRoad.org, a popular gun rights Internet forum, is now unfolding (see related story). This is not the best time for gun rights activists to be fighting one another, insiders say.

As the new year unfolds, and the new administration takes its reins, Gun Week will be there, covering each day’s historic events, watching to see what actually does happen. We will be keeping an eye out for threats to gun rights, quashing rumors if and when they arise, and reporting immediately when genuine news breaks.

Perhaps Gottlieb put it best in a statement to the press, issued days after the election.

“We wish our new president smooth sailing in his new ship of state, because we are all along for the ride,” he said. “But we caution his crew that the eyes of every American gunowner are on you. Democrats have an opportunity and an obligation to prove they mean what they have been saying about protecting the Second Amendment, or to demonstrate to the nation that they truly are the party of extremist gun control.”