I'm not the only one -- The New York Times found a whole bunch of distinguished law professors.
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Gun Lovin' Liberals
05 May 2007 07:15 pm
Comments (27)
sorry--the other half of that thought was:
"and even if you think the right is collective, there is no political prospect of passing legislation that seriously changes the nature or extent of gun-ownership in the U.S."
i.e., however you interpret the damned thing, the political constraints are pretty clear: a lot of people are going to own guns, and there will be lots of restrictions on what kinds of guns they can own and how they can acquire them (as there already are).
I tend to be a gun-lover myself. I'm also a car-lover, and I accept all sorts of restrictions on what kinds of cars I can own, what tests I have to pass to use them, and so on. So my policy preferences would be for shifting gun legislation over to the model of automotive legislation: everybody's got 'em, many have two or more, but you gotta follow some sensible rules.
The prohibitionist dreams of some anti-gun types only up the absolutist ante from the NRA wackos. What we need is less absolutism.
(oh jesus I sound like broder. Yes, you may shoot me, provided that thing is registered.)
Whatever the merits of the 2nd Amendment question, there's no way the pro gun nuts are going to win in the Supreme Court after what happened in Virginia Tech.
Dan,
Do you think Roberts, Alito, Thomas or Scalia give a monkey's butt what happened at VT? I am looking forward to the day when Roberts presides over impeachent hearings in the Senate. I bet he'll have the look on his face like a guy that's been bent over the toilet bowl all morning because he drank way too much the night before.
But it would be a better use of our energies--both collective and individual--to hammer out what kinds of detailed restrictions on the sale, possession, and use of arms are best for the country.
I tend to think it would be a better use of our energies to hammer away on non-gun issues and let the NRA babies have their bottle.
Do you think Roberts, Alito, Thomas or Scalia give a monkey's butt what happened at VT?
No, but I think Kennedy will care. Show him some photos of the dead Virginia students with some bios of them, and he'll probably roll over pretty quickly.
So long as ultrasounds of embryos can be worked into the display somehow, I think the VT tragedy can be harnessed to push not just Kennedy but Scalitoroberthomas.
Given rising fears about the possibility of a police state, the unlikely alignment of the NRA and civil liberties types does make more than merely tactical sense.
Matt, I have to confess that I'm skeptical about this "gun lovin' liberal" thing. Have you ever USED a gun? Had one around you and/or your home for any stretch of time?
Gun lovin' liberals. More of us than you think.
What kind of douchebag loves a gun? I have firearms of all types, a few bows and several very large knives in my house and have no emmotional attachment to any of them. They are nothing more than tools or implements. What you sissies love is this idea that owning, holding, and/or firing a gun somehow makes you a manly tough guy. It does not.
I didn't see anything in this article about anyone loving guns, just some apparently disinterested interpretations of the ambiguous 2nd Amendment. I haven't been reading this blog long enough to understand why Matt's rhetoric about guns is so frivolous.
FWIW I dislike guns and don't want them near me. But I agree that the Constitution should be interpreted with a bias towards individual rights; so I favor repeal of the amendment.
It's been six years and change since a nontrivial number of liberals looked as if they were ready to fight for gun control. Which is just as well, because there are a few zillion more important issues right now, and being for gun control loses us a bunch of people who would otherwise be in our corner.
As Consumatopia said above, "I tend to think it would be a better use of our energies to hammer away on non-gun issues and let the NRA babies have their bottle." I'll worry about gun control when we're out of Iraq, when we've got universal health care, and when we're actively dealing with global warming and domestic income inequality.
One thing that bugs me is the attitude captured in the quote from the guy who said these professors are just being contrarian to get attention. Of course that's possible, but it's at least as possible that people hold the conventional view because they like the goodies to be gotten from being conformist.
Genetic explanations of this sort can account for any position and are therefore pretty useless.
"One thing that bugs me is the attitude captured in the quote from the guy who said these professors are just being contrarian to get attention. Of course that's possible, but it's at least as possible that people hold the conventional view because they like the goodies to be gotten from being conformist."
I agree completely. However, the linked NYT article made almost no mention of the legal merits of anyone's position. The closest I could find was this:
"If only as a matter of consistency, Professor Levinson continued, liberals who favor expansive interpretations of other amendments ... should also embrace a broad reading of the Second Amendment."
So aside from the vague issue of being consistent in one's support for "expansive"-ness (whatever that might mean), it's once again the NYT Red-Blue Football Game Story. If the Times is going to cover it without any deeper analysis, I'm just glad they bothered to include a quote from someone who was willing to come out and say the debate's largely political.
But I agree that the Constitution should be interpreted with a bias towards individual rights; so I favor repeal of the amendment.
I tend also to agree that the constitution should be interpreted with this bias. I just don't see anywhere in the document that says rights are unlimited, or not subject to regulation.
This reminds me of the old saw about "driving being a privilege, not a right." Whenever I hear that I've always thought "Fuck that. Of course I have a right to drive a car. This is the USA."
I favor a similar view toward firearms. But just as I don't think it's the least bit unreasonable for big gubmint to force me to, say, register or insure my vehicle, or subject it to a safety inspection, or make me pass a test to give me a license to operate it, so, too, I don't think it's at all unreasonable for the state to require such measures with respect to tools that, after all, are designed to kill.
Still, I agree that pushing even modest firearms regulations is almost certainly a vote loser for liberals, at least in national campaigns. What needs to be done is to emulate what the NRA has done, but in reverse: a robust, multi-year, high-volume, well-funded public education campaign teaching folks that a comprehensive, sensible system of gun regulations that will make the country safer does not mean ordinary folks will not be able to own firearms. But such a campaign will take years. The NRA's success wasn't built overnight.
Samuel and large bore largely covered it.
The question is what are reasonable uses for firearms. Where are they a legitimate and necessary tool.
Well hunting for one. People may oppose it on principle but it is not going away. So at a minimum shotguns and high powered rifles will remain legal. On the other hand retaining limitations on cutting down barrels and restricting high capacity magazines make sense. In a hunting context the former is counterproductive and the later useless and in some places illegal under the game laws.
Home and self-protection. Out in the West we have counties bigger than Rhode Island and in a lot of places the sheriff's deputy is not minutes away, more like an hour or more. Restrictions on hand guns that may make perfect sense in an urban or suburban setting simply make no sense at all in a rural setting. When a coyote is attacking your kid you don't have the luxury of calling animal control, when somebody is breaking down your front door telling them "I'm calling the sheriff" is not going to be a deterrant. Once again restrictions on magazine capacity are reasonable enough, but the chances of making the kinds of pistols Cho was carry, a .22 and a 9MM, illegal is just a non-starter on a national basis.
By all means push back on assault rifles. In general they are illegal to hunt with and are not particularly useful in home protection compared to pistols and shotguns. When people try to call them 'sporting weapons' the sport they mean is dressing up like Rambo and blasting away like they do in the movies and first-person shooters.
But focus where the end result is greater public safety, which is to say where it always was, regulating fully automatic weapons, military-style assault weapons (those people who tell you that is just a matter of external features are spinning, gun people know better) and magazine capacity. Because you are not going to get all guns out of the hands of people in the South and West, that is a waste of time.
______________
On a slightly different note. Those people who think that everything would have been better at VT if everyone was packing are obviously a few years out from their last time at a college bar at closing time. Pick any Thursday you like and go to a college hangout and ask yourself if you would be feeling safer if that loudmouth harassing that table of women was packing. Alcohol, guns and testosterone are a deadly combination, you see it every day in urban settings, the dynamic doesn't change by transferring it to a campus. For every mass murder you might prevent you will get hundreds of stupidities as guys escalate barroom bullshit into gunfire. Count on it.
1) As always, the New York Times is either deceitful, full of crap --or more often --both.
2) It was not liberal con law professors who developed the individual rights interpretation
-- libertarian and conservative professors like Glenn Reynolds did much of the
initial argumentation. Way back in 1995, their arguments caused Garry Wills to fall into
a frenzy-- chewing the carpet, foaming at the mouth, and urinating uncontrollably.
See Wills' 1995 article in the New York Review of Books at
http://www.potowmack.org/garwills.html and the
reply of Reynolds et al at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1720.
That's true, Don, but the NYT is still pointing out something important --- that the collective-rights interpretation is collapsing. This is the sort of debate you see right before something goes belly-up.
Bruce, what exactly is the definition of an "assault weapon"?
C'mon, guys. If we don't have guns, how are we going to shoot the Republicans? ;)
Restrictions on hand guns that may make perfect sense in an urban or suburban setting simply make no sense at all in a rural setting.
Except that really don't let local govt's have this kind of latitude with the Bill of Rights. Cities can't just decide to let cops do warrantless searches, tax religions, license reporters, etc. As Gary Sugar said above, if we're really going to talk bans, the amendment should be repealed.
What kind of douchebag loves a gun? I have firearms of all types, a few bows and several very large knives in my house and have no emmotional attachment to any of them. They are nothing more than tools or implements. What you sissies love is this idea that owning, holding, and/or firing a gun somehow makes you a manly tough guy. It does not.
For christ's sakes, why do some people enjoy old cars, or custom knives, or anything of this nature? To some people a car is only point A to point B, whereas the guy down the street might spend years of time and thousands of dollars restoring that '57 Chevy. Certain things appeal to people in different ways. Maybe to you they've got all the appeal of a screwdriver, but for some of us it's more than that.
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [as in one of the 50], the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
Regardless of the purpose, i.e., to aid States in maintaining a well regulated militia, the text says the right is of the people. And the text, after all, should be the first and most powerful source for discerning the intentions of the framers.
Count me as another liberal for the rule of law. That is, after all, one of the key distinctions between liberals and those who nowadays call themselves conservatives.
sorry, footloose--this is exactly the kind of move that gets us back into the interpretive morass.
The word "people" is far from unambiguous in these contexts. The word was very commonly employed in ways that demand a collective reading rather than the individual reading. (It often takes singular verbs when so use, e.g. "The American people enjoys a very mixed ancestry".)
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Comments closed May 19, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
it's a shame that the interpretive question--individal vs. collective reading of the designee of the rights--tends to get conflated with the more important, but independent, question of what practical restrictions we can live with.
Having read quite a lot of the law-review literature on this, it has always seemed to me that the most likely answer to "what did the Framers mean?" is expressed by the collective reading. (Burger is basically right about the fraud--and calling half a sentence a "preamble" is merely aiding and abetting the fraud.)
But that's really neither here nor there. Even if you think that it vests individuals with some right or other, no one thinks that right is exceptionless and unqualilfied--even the NRA agrees to the 'no nukes' exception, and will probably live with the 'no conventional ICBMs' restriction, too.
We could spend a lot of time reading 18th century lexicons to see what meaning "bear" bears, or read military treatises to see what "well-regulated" means.
But it would be a better use of our energies--both collective and individual--to hammer out what kinds of detailed restrictions on the sale, possession, and use of arms are best for the country. There have to be some, on either reading, and the rest of the debate is a distraction from that.
Posted by samuel | May 5, 2007 7:56 PM