As Vice President Joe Biden prepares to offer legislative recommendations to reduce and prevent gun violence on Tuesday, gun advocates across the country fear that the administration may succeed in expanding background checks for all gun purchases or limiting the sale of high capacity magazines and assault weapons.

State-based gun advocacy organizations are vowing to oppose any additional gun safety measures, NBC News reports, and have formed the National Coalition to Stop the Gun Ban to act as a counterweight to the National Rifle Association (NRA), which, the Coalition claims, is too eager to compromise with gun control advocates.

In an open letter to members of Congress, the Coalition argues that assault weapons are “functionally identical to hunting rifles” and that banning high capacity magazines would be “moot” since “nearly all mass murderers who use guns carry multiple firearms.” “Like the misnomer ‘assault weapon,’ the ‘high capacity’ designation of more than ten rounds for magazines represents nothing more than an arbitrary limit set on devices which have been in common possession since the early Twentieth Century.” The group also claims that attempts to expand background checks for all gun purchases is “nothing less than a stepping stone to national gun registration.”

A separate letter to President Obama from Grass Roots North Carolina (a member of the Coalition), warned the administration against issuing executive orders regulating guns, calling such action an “usurpation of power” and predicting that gun owners will resist any additional safety measures:

And what happens when, inevitably, some resist? Do you honestly believe people will go peacefully into bondage? How many will die as the direct result of your actions?

There is no need to send the Secret Service to my door, Mr. President (although I suspect you might anyway). I am not advocating violence; I am merely saying what others are afraid to.

The real question, Mr. President, is whether you so hunger for power that you are willing to foment what might be the next American Revolution. Will that be your enduring legacy?

The New York Times reported on Friday that while Obama “pledged to crack down on access to what he called ‘weapons of war’ in the aftermath of last month’s schoolhouse massacre, the White House has calculated that a ban on military-style assault weapons will be exceedingly difficult to pass through Congress and is focusing on other measures it deems more politically achievable” like background checks and “more federal research on gun violence.”

Earlier this week, U.S. Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske issued a response to three different White House petitions urging President Obama to support softer federal marijuana law with a statement that many took as a positive signal:

Thank you for participating in We the People and speaking out on the legalization of marijuana. Coming out of the recent election, it is clear that we’re in the midst of a serious national conversation about marijuana.

At President Obama’s request, the Justice Department is reviewing the legalization initiatives passed in Colorado and Washington, given differences between state and federal law. In the meantime, please see a recent interview with Barbara Walters in which President Obama addressed the legalization of marijuana.

He then refers the petitioners to Obama’s comments on 20/20 that it would not make sense to focus federal enforcement on “users” of recreational marijuana (with no mention of suppliers and distributors), and that the executive branch is charged with carrying out the law, which “Congress has not yet changed.”

Tom Angell, chairman of marijuana majority, called the statement a “pretty stark shift” from Kerlikowske’s earlier remarks that “legalization is not in my vocabulary and it’s not in the president’s.”

“I guess it makes a difference when marijuana legalization gets more votes than your boss does in an important swing state, as happened in Colorado this last election,” he said.

But lest there be any doubt that Kerlikowske opposes legalization, he just this week told an audience of law enforcement officers in San Francisco, the heart of the early medical marijuana movement, that calling cannabis medicine “sends a terrible message” and that legalization presents a “false choice.”

He added:

Medicinal marijuana has never been through the FDA process. We have the world’s most renowned process to decide what is medicine and what should go in peoples’ bodies. And marijuana has never been through that process.

What he doesn’t say is that marijuana has never been through that process in large part because the obstacles to clearing the FDA’s research hurdles are almost unsurmountable so long as marijuana remains a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, an executive branch determination that the Drug Enforcement Administration has repeatedly refused to revisit.

A Yale University study determined that male jurors are more likely to find an suspect guilty when that suspect is a heavier woman, with thin male jurors the exhibiting the most pronounced bias:

The researchers corralled a group of 471 pretend peers of varying body sizes and described to them a case of check fraud. They also presented them with one of four images—either a large guy, a lean guy, a large woman, or a lean woman—and identified the person in the photograph as the defendant. Participants rated the pretend-defendant’s guilt on a five-point scale. No fat bias emerged when the female pretend peers evaluated the female pretend defendants or when either men or women assessed the guilt of the men. But when the male pretend peers pronounced judgment on the female pretend defendants, BMI prejudice reared up. Jesus wept. The justice system and our basic faith in male decency took another hit.

The study offers further depressing insights. Not only did the male pretend jurors prove “significantly more likely” to find the obese female defendants—rather than the slim ones—guilty, but the trim male participants were worst of all, frequently labeling the fat women “repeat offenders” with “awareness” of their crimes.