The ABA Doubles Down On The Stupid

ABA Journal: Quoting Scalia, ABA president says Second Amendment rights have limits

Not content with annoying a vast number of members with her press release endorsing Feinstein's Assault Weapons ban, she showed up and claiming to speak on behalf of the ABA and its members before Congress.

ABA president Laurel Bellows, having leaned nothing and forgotten nothing dutifully testified like a good, coastal elite anti-gunner to Congress that the ABA supports the proposed ban and thinks it is just ducky.

That's a nice slap in the face to the many members who raised an issue with this unilateral decision to back such an unconstitutional law.

Bellow's selective quoting of Scalia's opinion in Heller and the misleading analysis of the quotes drawn by her in her testimony, as reported in the article, was an especially nice touch, and one that would get you slapped in court if you tried it before a judge.

While the ABA's president and board may support such a move, many of its members seem to be saying otherwise by resigning to protest the ABA's support of this proposed violation of the Second and Fifth Amendments.

If the ABA wishes to reduce itself to a legal group that acts as a platform for the left, so be it. It sure doesn't represent me, nor the vast number of conservative and constitution-respecting (the two are not necessarily synonymous) lawyers out there.

Looks Like The ABA Might Be Taking Notice That They Overstepped

I'm sure it is completely coincidental timing-wise in the wake of the ABA's announcement supporting Feinstein's gun ban, the ABA just sent out a survey to its members.

Dear Aaron,

The American Bar Association invites you to share your opinions by completing a very short, online survey to track our progress in several key areas.

Your participation is extremely important to us so we've kept the survey very short and it will take less than 5 minutes to complete. The deadline to participate is midnight Sunday, February 17. All responses are confidential and will be reported in aggregate.

They asked, I answered.

Included in the survey was a question asking members if they were planning to renew their membership.

Upon checking "No" you were taken to a set of questions for the reasons for not renewing, and options included disagreement with ABA's policies and positions.

It then ended with a slot for comments, which I provided thusly:

The ABA' president's public display of support for Senator Feinstein's gun ban bill, without having even read nor analyzed the bill itself, and without consulting the ABA's members regarding this policy pronouncement was the final straw in my deciding to no longer be a member of the ABA. That the ABA would support a bill with contents that violate both the 2nd and 5th amendments based on nothing more than a press release and without a careful consideration of the law and facts of the matter is both shocking and un-lawerly in the extreme.

Well, at least they know why I'm cancelling my membership.

ABA Ignores Constitution, Goes Decisively Anti-Gun Democrat

In a sadly unsurprising demonstration that the American Bar Association is run by Democrat hacks and is not representative of America's lawyers, we get this:

ABA supports assault weapons bill introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein

ABA President Laurel Bellows says the association is endorsing a bill that would regulate military assault-type weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced the legislation in the Senate today, USA Today and CNN report. At a news conference, Feinstein displayed weapons that could not be sold under the proposed ban, including a Bushmaster automatic rifle.

Bellows wrote to Feinstein and U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy to thank them for introducing the bill, according to an ABA press release. Feinstein was author of a previous assault weapons ban that expired in 2004.

Now, as a Lawyer, I've been trained to not rely on pretty words or press releases about a proposed law but to actually read the bill to see what it really does.

One would have thought the ABA would both consider the diversity of its members and wait for the text of the actual bill and analyze it -- like a lawyer -- before jumping in with both feet to give a blessing to an unconstitutional bill based on a press release. Instead, the ABA, in its breathless push to support this unconstitutional measure, not so much.

Instead of actually reading what the bill does or waiting for an actual draft of the bill and analyzing it, the ABA simply goes by the press releases on Feinsteins's webpage.

The Assault Weapons Regulatory Act of 2013 would ban the sale, transfer and importation of 120 specially named firearms, according to a summary at Feinstein’s website. The bill also bans large-capacity ammunition feeding devices capable of accepting more than 10 rounds.

Had they even read all the summaries released by Feinstein and understood the implications (note the bill is not available to be read yet) they would know that for the lie it is. Heck, even the more recent summaries by Feinstein raise the number of "specifically named" firearms to 157.

The list is even including some like the Tavor that are not even available for sale in the USA yet. If the ABA had any integrity they might have pointed out that this ban would ban far more than the named 157 models based on the features test, including many very common firearms and pistols that the average member of the the public doesn't even consider to be "assault weapons".

The ABA fails to mention the bill will result in slow-moving confiscation of existing "named" and "featured" firearms and magazines as under the bill current owners would be unable to sell or transfer them and they would be confiscated at the death of the current owner.

Watch as the ABA supports the trampling of the Fifth Amendment along with the Second, and ignores both the Heller and McDonald Supreme Court decisions regarding the right to bear arms.

If an average lawyer did that, we would call it malpractice.

I will be not be renewing my membership in the ABA and letting them know why.

ABA Concerned The Kids Aren't All Right On Civics

The American Bar Association is concerned about the lack of the American public's understanding of civics and the low level of political engagement by the youth.

In Flunking Civics: Why America’s Kids Know So Little, the ABA expresses concern that civics are not being taught well in schools or elsewhere.

Well, with a public education system that has constantly downgraded the importance of civics and history, what does the ABA expect?

Only one state deserved a rating of A when it came to teaching its students American history, according to a recent study. Most states fall in the category of “mediocre to awful.”

The study ranked history standards in 49 states and the District of Columbia (Rhode Island has no mandatory history standards, only suggested guidelines) for “content and rigor” and “clarity and specificity” on a scale of A to F. Only South Carolina got straight A’s.

Nine states’ standards earned a grade of A- or B. But a majority of states—28 in all—had standards ratings of D or F, the study found.

It is a real concern, as a democracy's citizenry untaught in its history and governance, and ignorant of its history and the history of the world, tends to not choose its leaders wisely.

While reading the article, try not to guffaw too loudly at one of the expert's supposed reasons for the lack of understanding of civics:

.. . the disappearance of traditional newspapers and TV news shows that objectively report information, youngsters have become increasingly disengaged from civic and political life, experts say.

Ah yes, the golden olden days of the objective mainstream media reporting - when was that again?

The article even goes on to blame Bush for this lack of focus on civics:

Since the late 1990s, when American students tested poorly in reading, science and math against students from 20 other Western nations, federal educational policy has focused strongly on those three subjects at the expense of history, social studies, government and civics.

That trend began in 2001 with the Bush administration’s landmark No Child Left Behind Act, which gives priority to federal funding for efforts to improve student performance in reading and math, skills that are considered fundamental to student success in the workplace.

Not only is civics lacking, but apparently so is math, history, and logical reasoning. The 1990s, dare I say, preceeded Bush so the trend can't have begun under Bush in 2001 a decade later, no? It is true that there has been more of a focus on those areas since NLCB cosnidering performance in them was also woeful, but schools have been neglecting civics for far longer than Bush had been in office.

This federal meddling in education being complaint about in the article is of course a further argument to get the feds out of education but that might be too complex a separation of powers argument for this study's civic-knowing authors to handle for now.

And as with all things, in lack of understanding of civics, it is women and minorities that are hardest hit:

The problem is exacerbated by evidence of what researchers describe as a growing “civic achievement gap” between white, wealthy, native-born youths—who demonstrate consistently higher levels of civic and political knowledge, skills, attitudes and participation—and poor, nonwhite and immigrant youths, who are thus at a disadvantage politically.

Well yes, if you're in a lousy area in lousy public schools coupled with not having been here as a child to learn civics in the first place, it is a shocker that you're at a disadvantage and don't know civics.

The sidebar of the article (at the bottom of the page) "American Know-How & the ABA" gets even funnier in that it blames conservatives for the decline in teaching "progressive" civics in schools. Yes, really.

In any case, it is nice for the ABA to recognize there actually is a problem. Perhaps they could urge other states' to adopt South Carolina's curriculum?