Jackson, MS — Just when the entire Chinese Virus narrative has played itself out, one tinpot dictator is hustling to flex his power. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba of Jackson, Mississippi released the following video on Friday, April 24th. That’s just yesterday. In the video below, the Mayor announced that he was ‘suspending’ the current open carry lay.
This is more than a month after most little tyrants are already considering relenting! It’s like this guy just realized he was missing a great opportunity to bully his citizens and doesn’t want to miss the bus.
Check it out. It’s less than 4 minutes long:
https://youtu.be/YDKFdbaeLtQ
Now, we’ve seen some flimsy legal explanations for why elected leaders are allowed to throw out the rule book, but this one takes the cake.
For example, Mississippi has state-wide preemption law: § 45-9-51 This preemption law normally wouldn’t let mayors do what Mayor Lumumba is attempting.
Granted, there is one piece of code, § 45-9-53(1)(d) that would allow for some cities to make some restrictions on their citizens in declared emergency situations. But even then, just eliminating open carry is NOT on the list of things that municipalities are allowed to do!
So then we get to the point: Lumumba says that he gets the power to do this from this code: 45-7-17(7)(e). § The trouble is that the section of code he cited, 45-7-17, doesn’t exist. In fact, all the code in Chapter 7 deals with County Patrol Officers—not mayors or emergency declarations!
Doing the mayor’s homework for him, it looks like he might have misspoken, despite reading from a script.
A Blank Check For A Leftist Mayor
THIS section deals with emergency provisions: § 45-17-7.
After proclamation of a civil emergency, the chief administrative officer may at his discretion, in the interest of public safety and welfare:
(a) Order the closing of all retail liquor stores.
(b) Order the discontinuance of the sale of intoxicating liquor and/or beer.
(c) Order the discontinuance of the manufacture, transfer, use, possession or transportation of a Molotov cocktail or any other device, instrument or object designed to explode or produce uncontained combustion.
(d) Order the discontinuance of selling, distributing, dispensing or giving away of any firearms or ammunition of any character whatsoever.
(e) Issue such other orders as are necessary for the protection of life and property.
But a close reading of d) in that section of code makes it clear that even in a state of emergency, the mayor has no right to ‘cancel’ open carry law. He can stop the sale or transfer or guns until the emergency declaration expires.
But apparently he thinks this falls under e), and he can issue whatever “other orders” he wants to in order to stay high on his own power.
Meanwhile, in the video, the mayor makes a convoluted effort to say that open carry laws are responsible for high crime rates in the city because cops can’t summarily pull over anybody they see carrying a gun. And clearly, he’d like them to be able to!
Mayor Lumbumba said, “We cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the fact that the open carry law has lead to an increase in gun violence in our community.”
We’d LOVE to see the data behind that ‘fact’….but we’re pretty sure it’ll be a lot like the chase to find his legal footing for having this executive power.
Propaganda Talking Points With an Emotional Twist
As for the propaganda he repeats at the end of the video, our first thought was just that he was incredibly ignorant about how the law works.
Look at this quote that comes after he says that he’s not principally opposed to the Second Amendment, but thinks that all rights needs to be subject to ‘reasonable’ regulation:
“A right that protects illegal guns and puts more people in fear. A right that escalates conflict beyond the point of resolution. A right that interferes with another persons right to live is not a legitimate right to be maintained. Your right to swing…ends at my nose.”
- Whether or not guns put fear or security into people is entirely subjective. We can’t help if some people are scared by tall people or by short people. By guns or by pens. By loud cars or by dogs, etc. What ‘inspires fear’ is not legal precedent you can use to make law.
- Open carry doesn’t protect illegal guns and we’d LOVE to see the argument behind that one!
- NOBODY says that the second amendment gives people a right to kill innocent people, Pal.
- And gun owners have no right to take a swing at you unless you’re threatening them or their families. Then they have the right to bust your nose as badly as they possibly can to stop the threat you pose.
This radical anti-gun Mayor then went on to call for the total repeal of Open Carry, since his edict will expire at the end of the emergency declaration.
Leftist Activists Are All The Same
This guy….wow. Talk about drinking your own bath water! He really thinks that people’s critical thinking skills are so low as to fall for the load of bullarky he’s selling.
We’ve heard all this emotional ‘how many babies have to die’ stuff from the left for decades. The same radical left that wants taxpayers to be forced to pay planned parenthood to kill babies then trots those same babies out when they want to take away our gun rights. Don’t you care about the kids??
All Americans should call this sort of stuff out for what it is: manipulative propaganda meant to put more power in the government’s hands and less in ours.