I also doubt that conservatives will be too upset by the "judicial activism" involved in the Supreme Court overturning the DC handgun ban. I don't really understand the details of the ruling at this point, but I'm not complaining about it either. From a policy perspective, what DC is trying to accomplish is just futile -- as long as the District is a very small patch of land adjacent to Virginia, there's no way gun regulations of this sort will prevent criminals from acquiring weapons.
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Activism I Can Believe In
26 Jun 2008 10:23 am
Comments (140)
Now that every DC resident will magically be turned into Rambo McRobocop and will be an unerring dispenser of hot lead justice, there will never be a violent crime in DC again.
Matt,
I suggest you buy the 454 Cassul. You can shoot through walls with the thing. Yeeehaaaaw!
Since guns help people defend themselves from criminals, clearly not only should we allow handguns in DC; we should launch a program to arm & train DC residents.
I'm sure we can count on the NRA to actively support such an active expansion of government / citizen participation in the lessons of preventing crime through handgun ownership.
"...as long as the District is a very small patch of land adjacent to Virginia, there's no way gun regulations of this sort will prevent criminals from acquiring weapons."
The District is adjacent to Maryland as well. Truth be told, there's no way gun regulations of this sort, even applied nationally, would prevent the acquisition of firearms by criminals determined to get them.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but "judicial activism" doesn't mean any time the court over turns a law -- as it is proper to do when said law is in violation of the constitution.
Even sarcastically, let's not give the "tyrants in black robes" crowd this linguistic victory.
"It's an .88 magnum...it shoots through schools."
"there's no way gun regulations of this sort, even applied nationally, would prevent the acquisition of firearms by criminals determined to get them."
There're limitations to that argument. There's no way we can stop all crime, but it's still good to prohibit certain behavior. In this case, you're balancing the efficacy of a ban against individual rights, and, in some people's view, the law is not effective enough to warrant the reduction of personal freedom (because of DC's proximity to Maryland and VA). A national ban, though, would change that calculus.
Will this force Secret Service agents to be a bit more "enthusiastic" in their duties?
Truthfully, it was already faster for me to buy a .380 from someone in NE/SE than it was to go about it the legal way in Virginia (although the legal route was cheaper).
Anyone that thinks this will lead to a huge uptick in gun violence shouldn't panic. Guns were already plentiful here, they may get a little cheaper, but I doubt there will be a significant rise in shootings.
Matt - I can't see how this is "judicial activism", unless your point is that the term itself is meaningless when used by conservatives to attack rulings that favor liberal/progressive opinion. If so, meh. Some rulings clearly are a bit of legislation from the bench, on both sides. This, not so much.
I have always supported the entire Bill of Rights and (I hope obviously not contradictorily) have been a vocal advocate of repealing the 2nd rather than attempting to do away with it via a death of a thousand cuts. The 2nd Amendment was never meant to limit gun ownership to hunters in red states, and this ruling seems sound to me.
That said, I am in favor of a national referendum on the 2nd, and believe that Americans can reach a reasonable agreement on what we want the present and future of firearms ownership to look like in this country.
Truth be told, there's no way gun regulations of this sort, even applied nationally, would prevent the acquisition of firearms by criminals determined to get them.
Ridiculous and meaningless statement.
While it's obviously impossible to eliminate the use of firearms by criminals, other countries manage to make possession of firearms by criminals far less common than in the United States. Are you suggesting that law enforcement in the US is simply incompetent compared to the forces of other nations?
On the bright side, Obama's chances just went from 70 to 90 percent.
"I don't really understand the details of the ruling at this point, but I'm not complaining about it either."
You could try noticing that the court has never ruled on the 2nd amendment this straightforwardly, so it's hardly activism. You might also try reading what the founders thought about an armed populace, and trying to apply that to the wording of the 2nd amendment.
Then again, that would involve having to educate yourself, something you seem very, very disinclined to do.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but "judicial activism" doesn't mean any time the court over turns a law -- as it is proper to do when said law is in violation of the constitution.
Well, that's the problem. "Judicial activism" doesn't mean anything at all - it's just a cudgel to use against decisions you don't like. Sarcasm is the only thing it's good for.
Truth be told, there's no way gun regulations of this sort, even applied nationally, would prevent the acquisition of firearms by criminals determined to get them.
Constantly asserted without evidence. Many, many countries reduce gun violence and the amount of guns in their borders extremely effectively through strict legislation. No, you will never perfectly eliminate the problem. We certainly could reduce the problem to a tremendous degree. And even if we really only kept guns out of the hands of non-criminals, that would be a good thing, considering you are something like 48 times more likely to injure or kill yourself or a loved one than to injure or kill a criminal.
People act as though when you become a criminal, they give you a Certified Criminal card and you can then get into Criminal Sam's Club and buy an Uzi off the rack. Illegal guns were once legal guns. Dramatically reducing the number of legal guns in the system dramatically reduces the number of illegal guns in the system.
Individual gun laws never work, because the vast majority of crime is committed by illegal weapons. But I was hoping that sometime in my lifetime the political landscape would change and Congress would take some action to try and reduce the number of guns in the country as a whole. Unfortunately, today makes that pretty much impossible.
"On the bright side, Obama's chances just went from 70 to 90 percent."
Hmm. If so, then why did Obama decide to call his earlier support for the DC ban "inartful" ahead of this opinion. It's almost like he knew that he was on the wrong side of this one, from a polling perspective.
I can't see how this is "judicial activism", unless your point is that the term itself is meaningless when used by conservatives to attack rulings that favor liberal/progressive opinion.
It's judicial activism because the DC law in question was a reasonable regulation targeting a particular type of firearm (handguns), not a ban on firearms per se. As far as I know, Washingtoninans were able to possess rifles and shotguns. With this ruling, the court is saying it is more competent than local authorities to formulate public safety regulations.
I hope I have a gun the next time I hear a so-called conservative babbling on about his love of federalism.
Many, many countries reduce gun violence and the amount of guns in their borders extremely effectively through strict legislation.
And many countries reduce gun violence while having legal gun ownership. The Swiss don't seem to have problems with gun violence.
Hmm. If so, then why did Obama decide to call his earlier support for the DC ban "inartful" ahead of this opinion.
James Robertson: Are you really that stupid, or do you just play a stupid character on the blogosphere?
Obviously Obama "knew he was on the wrong side of this one." Guns are popular in America. Nobody disputes that. This ruling, by helping to defuse the passions of American gun zealots, helps Obama.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but "judicial activism" doesn't mean any time the court over turns a law
Oh, it's pretty clear (from this post and the last) that Matthew is being perfectly straightforward: Matthew believes that any time a court does anything, it is "judicial activism".
Which is either deliberately obtuse or pretty moronic on Matthew's part. I'm not sure which.
"I also doubt that conservatives will be too upset by the "judicial activism" involved in the Supreme Court overturning the DC handgun ban."
Matt, how is the Court engaging in "judicial activism" when it is strike down a government's total ban against a citizen's right to "keep and bear arms" that violates the clear language of the 2nd Amendment? Isn't that the whole point behind judicial review?
If you were truly interested in chastising the Court for engaging in "judicial activism", then where's your criticism of yesterday's decision in the death penalty for child rapists case? There, we have 5 members of the Court imposing their own personal views that the 8th Amendment prohibits such a law when the historical record is clear that laws imposing the death penalty for rape against adult women, let alone against a child, existed at the time of the Amendment's adoption and no one at the time would have suggested that such laws violated the Amendment.
Did the wording of the 8th Amendment somehow change to justify the Court's actions? No. But the actual language of the Amendment that doesn't matter to liberals who believe that the Constitution is a "living-breathing document." Instead, the Court invalidated a law because of the majority's unsupported claim that a "consensus" exists against such laws and their ability to discern "evolving standards of decency", which now renders such laws unconstitutional.
There is your example of "judicial activism" to decry. One that even Obama couldn't publicly support, but which clearly represents the thinking of Justices that he would appoint if given the chance.
As far as I know, Washingtoninans were able to possess rifles and shotguns.
We were, but we had to keep them locked and/or disassembled in our own homes, which pretty clearly infringed on the ability to use them for self defense in a variety of situations. That is part of the ruling as well.
It's judicial activism because the DC law in question was a reasonable regulation targeting a particular type of firearm (handguns), not a ban on firearms per se.
No, the precedent was Miller, which the DC handgun ban contradicted, in terms of types of firearms protected by the 2nd.
With this ruling, the court is saying it is more competent than local authorities to formulate public safety regulations.
Um, no. The DC handgun ban was in violation of the 2nd as it stood. Like I said, I favor a complete removal of the 2nd and a fresh start over shit legislation designed to neuter or eliminate it. I view it as a consistent support for the Bill of Rights and Constitution, even though I don't personally have a vested interest in possessing a handgun here.
The handgun vs. rifle aspect was never really in doubt- given the precedents, if individual right was ruled in favor of, a blanket handgun ban would be out the window.
And many countries reduce gun violence while having legal gun ownership.
Nearly all countries that effectively "reduce gun violence" allow for "legal gun ownership." As far as I know, hunting and shooting are still popular pursuits in much of Europe and Canada. These places don't eliminate ownerships of guns. They quite sensibly strictly regulate and restrict said ownership.
Having less of something obviously doesn't mean having none of it.
"Many, many countries reduce gun violence and the amount of guns in their borders extremely effectively through strict legislation."
Really? What evidence do you have to support that claim, other than your blithe assertion itself? Examples, please. I suspect you're really talking about the institution of strict gun laws in nations that didn't have much gun ownership to begin with. I'll give you a counter-example--Jamaica. Yeah, that gun prohibition law in the early 1970's really did the trick. No gun violence there, no sirreee.
Nearly all countries that effectively "reduce gun violence" allow for "legal gun ownership."
Correlation does not equal causation. What were gun crime rates before and after. Perhaps, these countries already had relatively lower gun crime rates even when they had fewer gun control laws.
Look, I'm libertarian enough to be agnostic on gun control, and I think that there are some compelling arguments in favor of limited public access to guns. But when Yglesias posts on the subject, Jesus, it's hard not to argue in an entirely anti-gun way. It's hard because both he and many of the commenters around here seem to be engage in a contest to see who can have as juvenile and callous an opinion on guns as possible. It's 90% "guns are cool!", I-need-to-feel-powerful-cause-I-can't-get-laid bullshit. (You know, like taking a picture with a Punisher t-shirt and two guns like you're some douchebag high school student out to make a really bitching Facebook profile pic.)
I would like for once for Yglesias to acknowledge that gun violence in the DC area has been a horrific and terrible problem for the poor residents of the city, that there's nothing glamorous about the murders and maimings that take place in DC every week, and that a community that is desperate for some solution has been denied at least a partial remedy. And I would also like him to acknowledge that though he sees no downside to gun ownership for him, he is part of a community, and the same laws he pines for that gives him easy access to guns hurts the (poor, black) community that exists as background noise in his life.
There are some really despicable class politics bubbling under the surface of DC bloggers enthusiastic, I-love-playing-Quake style of support for guns. Affluent white media types descend on DC and treat it like it's nothing more than a playground for the political intelligentsia-- precisely the kind of behavior liberal values argue against.
It's judicial activism because the DC law in question was a reasonable regulation targeting a particular type of firearm (handguns), not a ban on firearms per se.
Huh? This makes no sense whatsoever. The fact that the law doesn't ban every firearm of every sort ever created would not mean the law can't be unconstitutional. Just as the fact that a law banning some particular form of speech doesn't ban every type of speech would not mean that the law couldn't be unconstitutional. (Hey, my law banning all liberal blogs is just a reasonable regulation targetting a particular type of speech (liberal blogs), not a ban on speech per se! According to you, that law would be perfectly constitutional, right?!)
We were, but we had to keep them locked and/or disassembled in our own homes, which pretty clearly infringed on the ability to use them for self defense in a variety of situations.
And had the court confined itself to ruling on this issue, I'd be in agreement.
Um, no. The DC handgun ban was in violation of the 2nd as it stood.
Um, according to five activist justices it was. Four others disagree. Eight years of Obamian court shaping could swing things to my view of things.
An armed society is a polite society as Mogadishu and Baghdad have shown.
"This ruling, by helping to defuse the passions of American gun zealots, helps Obama."
That might be true, if only we knew what Obama really thought on this (or really, any) issue.
More so than any politician I can recall, Obama's public positions all come with an expiration date, stamped "as soon as they start making me look bad"
While it's obviously impossible to eliminate the use of firearms by criminals, other countries manage to make possession of firearms by criminals far less common than in the United States. Are you suggesting that law enforcement in the US is simply incompetent compared to the forces of other nations?
Are you suggesting that it isn't?
More seriously, even with the best police force in all possible Americas what's possible in other countries might be impossible here, or so much more difficult as to be practically impossible. First of all, the guns are already out there. Even if every NRA lobbyist and active member were Raptured tomorrow, there would still be a lot of illegal and semi-legal weapons whose owners wouldn't be inclined to part with them, probably a lot more than there are today in Britain or wherever.
Secondly, the federal system means that America has something like 60 different, overlapping jurisdictions with competing legal systems. That isn't a problem most countries have.
And had the court confined itself to ruling on this issue, I'd be in agreement.
In ruling on whether or not the 2nd protected an individual right, the consequences wouldn't be "confined" to that issue. Once individual right was decided upon, the handgun ban necessarily becomes unconstitutional, as I imagine any future "assault weapons ban" would be.
Miller already staked out the types of firearms permitted under the 2nd to a great degree. Once the 2nd is applied as an individual right, blanket bans on specific types of arms protected by the 2nd obviously get tossed out as well.
Freddie, D.C. is already one of if not the most violent city in America. Are you saying the violence would be even worse without the gun ban? Or, presumably, that it will go up now?
If true, what does that say about the competence of D.C. government and the nature of its citizenry?
Isn't the point not that it will keep guns from criminals but that it will give the DC courts more arsenal to prosecute those criminals? It's like mail fraud or RICO for violent crime. In that regard, overturning the ban is a huge step backward.
Isn't the point not that it will keep guns from criminals but that it will give the DC courts more arsenal to prosecute those criminals? It's like mail fraud or RICO for violent crime. In that regard, overturning the ban is a huge step backward.
Are you suggesting that it isn't?
Yes. I don't think there's any broad-based evidence pointing to a major quality gap in American law enforcement vs. that in other rich nations, or at least none that would explain away the vastly higher incidence of homicide (and especially gun homicide) in the US.
First of all, the guns are already out there. Even if every NRA lobbyist and active member were Raptured tomorrow, there would still be a lot of illegal and semi-legal weapons whose owners wouldn't be inclined to part with them...
Who's arguing otherwise? Were the US to adopt UK style gun regulations tomorrow morning, it would obviously require time and money to bring American gun homicide rates down to British levels, if such a reduction were even possible. I would argue that strict firearms regulation would help bring about a large reduction in the incidence of homicide in the United States; I offer no specific estimate about how large that drop would be.
Secondly, the federal system means that America has something like 60 different, overlapping jurisdictions with competing legal systems. That isn't a problem most countries have.
True. And what they also don't have is a court telling them they can't strictly regulate firearms even if they wanted to.
Nice to know that 180-some years after Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, we're still paying the price for the specter of servile rebellion that hung over the young Republic.
My favorite part of the opinion:
"We know of no other enumerated constitutional right whose core protection has been subjected to a freestanding “interest-balancing” approach. The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government—even the Third Branch of Government—the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting
upon. A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges’ assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all. Constitutional rights are enshrined with
the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them, whether or not future legislatures or (yes) even future judges think that scope too broad. We would not apply an “interest-balancing” approach to the prohibition of a peaceful neo-Nazi march through Skokie. See National Socialist Party of America v. Skokie, 432 U. S. 43(1977) (per curiam). The First Amendment contains the freedom-of-speech guarantee that the people ratified, which included exceptions for obscenity, libel, and disclosure of state secrets, but not for the expression of extremely unpopular and wrong-headed views. The Second Amendment is no different. Like the First, it is the very
product of an interest-balancing by the people—which JUSTICE BREYER would now conduct for them anew. And whatever else it leaves to future evaluation, it surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and
home."
The distain with which judges treat second amendment rights as opposed to finding all sorts of expansive interpretions for first, fourth, sixth, eighth (penumbras, anyone?) rights has always bothered me. Now the court has affirmed what most Americans believed the second amendment to mean.
On the bright side, Obama's chances just went from 70 to 90 percent.
I think it's true that Obama's chances go up on this, but maybe not for the reason you think. His stance on gun control is one major reason I'd hesitate to vote for Obama. With this ruling, it takes the gun issue (mostly) off the table, and I, and other Obama-leaning gun enthusiasts can vote for him without fearing him re-enacting things like the dumbass assault weapons ban.
Is it possible that this ruling might, in the very long run, help gun regulation?
Now that the Court has ruled that individual gun ownership is a constitutional rights, does that end the entire line of reasoning, the whole "slippery-slope" shabang, that gun control is a step to "outlawing" guns? Guns are now legal until the second amendment is appealed, does the whole semi-paranoid NRA style of argument lose force, so in the long run will it will it easier to pass some kind of comprehensive national regulation scheme?
"There's no way we can stop all crime, but it's still good to prohibit certain behavior"
Yes, ideally behavior which actually harms other people, rather than behavior which enables you to harm other people, but which also has a vast range of perfectly legitimate applications.
Could someone who knows legal stuff please answer this:
Now that we got an individual right to bear arms, can't the legal question shift to what is a reasonable definition of "firearm" in a particular area? For instance, if DC wants to define firearm down (so it can outlaw more guns), is that okay?
There is nothing to prevent D.C. from requiring extensive education and training prior to issuing permits to possess firearms, and instituting extraordinarily severe sanctions for possession of a firearm without a permit. In fact, I highly suspect that if extremely severe minimum sentences (say, 25 years without parole) were handed down upon conviction of any type of violent crime in D.C., including possession of a firearm without a permit, the murder rate in D.C. would plummet. It really isn't complicated to reduce the rate of violent crime; lock up violent criminals, upon their first conviction, until they are elderly, thereby minimizing the rate of recidivism. Gee, I dunno, maybe resources could be redirected from the War on Drugs to fight a War on Violent Criminals.
If I were under the impression that any prominent conservative had any intellectual honesty whatsoever, I would be surprised at the vast conservative silence with respect to the Court's finding of a right that is never mentioned in the Constitution (to say nothing of the right to own some kind of handgun--or something). But having paid attention to the right's lack of consistent standards with respect to any policy or philosophy, I'm not surprised.
So it goes with conservative jurisprudence: states' rights is nothing but code for hating niggers, strict constructionism is the cover for Scalia to make up whatever reactionary bullshit he feels like, ...and let's not forget Bush v Gore.
Shockingly, it turns out conservatives only protest when their favored policies are overturned, and that the supposed philosophical foundations for their objections are lacking in salience and importance when laws they detest are nullified by judical fiat.
When it is acknowledged that conservatives start at the conclusion they prefer and then subsequently find rationalizations for their beliefs is when we start having an honest conversation on judicial matters. I also advocate for my prefered rulings without respect to some make believe constitutional hermeneutics, but I'm at least honest enough not to pretent otherwise.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but "judicial activism" doesn't mean any time the court over turns a law -- as it is proper to do when said law is in violation of the constitution.
Congress has exclusive authority over the District. They have ceded much of that authority to the local government. The second amendment is premised on the ability of the States to raise militias. The District is not a state. Ergo, judicial activism.
And if this...
“In sum, we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense. Assuming that Heller is not disqualified from the exercise of Second Amendment rights, the District must permit him to register his handgun and must issue him a license to carry it in the home.”
...isn't the courts stepping in to do Congress's job and demanding that legislation be written to their satisfaction, then what is judicial activism but an empty barb thrown around by adherents of conservative jurisprudence or originalism as its more often and inaccurately called?
Am I taking crazy pills?
Let's look at three statements:
"I'm hungry; let's go out to eat."
"I'm sick; I won't be at work tomorrow."
"Bill has cancer; he needs chemo."
All of these statements have the same structure as the second amendment: A therefore B.
If I'm no longer hungry, you would assume I'd cancel dinner, as the reason to go eat is removed.
If I'm well, you'd assume I'd be back at work.
If Bill had a false positive, you'd cancel chemo.
And if militias no longer exist, the right to bear arms is longer relevant.
This seems stupidly obvious to me. Am I missing something?
The kinds of criminals we are afraid of do not buy their guns from the gun store in Manassas. They buy them on the street, trade drugs or cars for them, or steal them during a burglary. The handgun genie is out of the bottle and no amount of gun control short of mass confiscation is going to put her back in.
Yes, Michael M., you are. A militia, as the term was employed at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, still exists.
D.C.'s government has as much legitimate power to ban handgun ownership as it does to ban the publication of the Washington Post.
D.C.'s government has as much legitimate power to ban handgun ownership as it does to ban the publication of the Washington Post.
DC has a state militia? Has DC's governor ever had to call them out? Have their senators and representative ever decided to review the troops? Is the state bird on their uniform?
"I would be surprised at the vast conservative silence with respect to the Court's finding of a right that is never mentioned in the Constitution"
I would be, too, but amendments ARE part of the Constitution, and the 2nd amendment DOES mention this right. Got to have a pretty severe case of "firearms aversive dyslexia" to not notice that mention.
D.C.'s government has as much legitimate power to ban handgun ownership as it does to ban the publication of the Washington Post.
Do you really think the government has no right to regulate what kind of arms people can carry? Can I have Stinger missile? Fat man or little boy sitting in my backyard? Since we recognize the right of the government to regulate which kinds of guns citizens can carry, and since the DC ban didn't restrict ownership of all guns, I don't think you can make this claim.
And if militias no longer exist, the right to bear arms is longer relevant.
The understanding of a militia at the time was that it comprised all able-bodied men over 18. It was a non-governmental army essentially. So by the original understanding, militias are still around.
Freddie, just as "militia" at the time of the Constitution meant, "every able-bodie person" (well, every able-bodied white man, but thankfully we've progressed there), "arms" meant, "small arms, the things you can carry on your person." You can argue whether a stinger missile qualifies, but you can't really argue that handguns aren't "arms."
"I would be, too, but amendments ARE part of the Constitution, and the 2nd amendment DOES mention this right. Got to have a pretty severe case of "firearms aversive dyslexia" to not notice that mention."
See Michael M.
Even if you disagree with him, an individual right to bear arms is never mentioned in the Constitution, just like the right to privacy isn't either (which conservatives have been bitching about since Griswald). I don't care that they are arguing for what they want, but their supposed principles are nonexistant.
I would be, too, but amendments ARE part of the Constitution, and the 2nd amendment DOES mention this right. Got to have a pretty severe case of "firearms aversive dyslexia" to not notice that mention.
Again, there is no specific language defending the right to own guns in the US Constitution. We already do pick and choose which kinds of weapons we allow the citizenry to have. There's no difference between saying citizens can't have guns and saying citizens can't have nukes. Now, if you want to be a maximalist and say that the government doesn't have a right to regulate any weapons, that's a consistent opinion. It happens to be the only logically consistent reading of the 2nd amendment that says the government can't ban guns.
RD, you are ignorant regarding the meaning of the word "militia", and if you wish to maintain that the word "State" refers to each individual State government, and not to the "state", in the sense of the "government", thus giving people who live in D.C. different Constitutional rights than people who live in Chicago, well, you just go right ahead.
Yes, Michael M., you are. A militia, as the term was employed at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified, still exists.
Not in any real sense. The Reserve Militia exists more on a theoretical plane than in the real world.
In fact, I highly suspect that if extremely severe minimum sentences (say, 25 years without parole) were handed down upon conviction of any type of violent crime in D.C., including possession of a firearm without a permit
I was not aware that possession of a firearm without a permit was a violent crime. The idea of taking away someone's whole life for a non-violent crime which didn't actually harm anybody seems pretty outrageous, at any rate.
"I would like for once for Yglesias to acknowledge that gun violence in the DC area has been a horrific and terrible problem for the poor residents of the city, that there's nothing glamorous about the murders and maimings that take place in DC every week..."
Funny how it sounds like you're saying the gun ban never did any good anyway.
Blue Moon,
Maybe I'm naive, but it seems to me that the handgun problem could be alleviated by enforcement of a strict law against illegal gun possession. I'm sure many areas do this, but illegal guns seem to be a much bigger problem to me than, say, drug dealing.
Also, for all the people who live in rural and suburban areas that demand handguns for self-defense, how often to home invasions occur in which a handgun would have prevented serious personal injury? I've heard a similar number of stories about friends and family being accidentally shot by startled people in their own homes. Seriously, I'd guess the risk of being killed or raped by a home invader is less than .0001% It is terrifying to be sure, but I'm not convinced that public policy should be dictated by extremely rare events.
My favorite part of the Second Amendment is the "Well Regulated" bit. I see this ruling as as a step forward if regulation is the response. As Shine pointed out above, we can ignore slippery slope arguments and regulate the living hell out of gun ownership: You want to own a handgun in DC? Fine, join a well regulated militia, do two years of service (a la Switzerland or Israel), get a battery of background and mental health checks, and sure, here's your gun. Have fun.
Funny how it sounds like you're saying the gun ban never did any good anyway.
As Yglesias pointed out, this ban doesn't accomplish much, because it's too easy to get guns from other places and bring them to DC. That doesn't change his ethical duty to talk about the actual cost of gun violence in DC, particularly when he favors politics that support precisely the inner-city poor who are the overwhelming victims of gun violence.
Again, there is no specific language defending the right to own guns in the US Constitution... There's no difference between saying citizens can't have guns and saying citizens can't have nukes... It happens to be the only logically consistent reading of the 2nd amendment that says the government can't ban guns.
I'd agree in principle with the maximalist reasoning, but think it's so obvious that that nukes would fail a strict scrutiny test on a 9-0 vote (assuming a complainant ever managed to get their case heard), that the practical interpretation of the 2nd amendment ought to be that people can own whatever guns they want. Missiles, anti-tank weapons, nukes and other wmd can't be owned.
I agree with others that the political saliency of the gun control issue just lost a lot of steam, at the national level, anyway. The whole concept of "gun prohibition" is finished, but there's a lot that the NRA won't like about this ruling.
Yes, there is an individual right to bear arms, and yes, unduly burdensome limits on firearms ownership--like bans on entire categories of firearms, and mandatory trigger locks in the home--are not kosher. But the Court seemed to clear a good many limits that the NRA hates--some registration and permit requirements, bans on some subcategories of firearms, bans on concealed carries, etc.
What I would like to see is a statement by the gun supporters as to what weapons they think that the Government has a right to ban from private ownership. It should be noted that the 2nd amendment doesn't say guns, it says arms. For instance, does the Government has the right to ban private ownership of nuclear weapons, which, after all, certainly qualify as arms? If the answer to this question is yes, then where do they propose to draw the line?
Again, there is no specific language defending the right to own guns in the US Constitution... There's no difference between saying citizens can't have guns and saying citizens can't have nukes... It happens to be the only logically consistent reading of the 2nd amendment that says the government can't ban guns.
I'd agree in principle with the maximalist reasoning, but think it's so obvious that that nukes would fail a strict scrutiny test on a 9-0 vote (assuming a complainant ever managed to get their case heard), that the practical interpretation of the 2nd amendment ought to be that people can own whatever guns they want. Missiles, anti-tank weapons, nukes and other wmd can't be owned.
Seriously, I'd guess the risk of being killed or raped by a home invader is less than .0001% It is terrifying to be sure, but I'm not convinced that public policy should be dictated by extremely rare events.
The chances of my vote changing who becomes the next president are much lower than that, but I'm glad that whether a right is constitutional doesn't hinge on its "success" percentage.
RD, you are ignorant regarding the meaning of the word "militia", and if you wish to maintain that the word "State" refers to each individual State government, and not to the "state", in the sense of the "government", thus giving people who live in D.C. different Constitutional rights than people who live in Chicago, well, you just go right ahead.
Oh, I'm sorry is "being necessary for the security of a free State" not plain enough in its intent and original meaning for you?
Well, John, the law exists on a theoretical plane. Also, if you wish to claim that owning a firearm without adequate training, or that owning a firearm despite being within a specifically defined class of people whose behavior has caused a duly elected legislative body to ban your ownership, does not constitute a violent threat to your fellow citizens in violation of the law, okay. I disagree.
Freddie, the Amendment doesn't state that the rights of the people to bear any sort of armament shall not be infringed, any more than the First Amendment says Congress shall pass no law which regulates or prevents a newspaper from printing anything the publisher desires. Under your logic regarding language, all libel and slander attorneys would need to learn new specialties.
Scalia:
It was plainly the understanding in the post-Civil War Congress that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to use arms for self-defense
========
Certainly, with all those newly freed heathens running around causing havoc, guns were required by white communities for their very survival. Scalia is a racist piece of shit.
"I'd agree in principle with the maximalist reasoning, but think it's so obvious that that nukes would fail a strict scrutiny test on a 9-0 vote (assuming a complainant ever managed to get their case heard), that the practical interpretation of the 2nd amendment ought to be that people can own whatever guns they want."
Why? You just admitted that Constitutional logic has nothing to do with it and the justices just make up whatever ad hoc bullshit they feel like, so why is it obvious that people ought to be able to have any handgun they feel like?
If anybody disagrees with the hermeneutics of our respected black shirts, they hate America!
My favorite part of the Second Amendment is the "Well Regulated" bit.
Except that it doesn't say that the arms should be well regulated, it says that the militias should be. There's no implication whatsoever that "well regulated" should be applied to "the right to keep and bear arms"
RD, you apparently are ignorant of the meaning of "State" (or "state", as it was originally submitted for ratification to Congress, before a scribe used the capitalized version when it was sent to the states). We'll just have to disagree that people in D.C. have different Constitutional rights than people who live in Chicago.
Having read through the decisions, one gets the sense of how limited the idea of original intentions really is.
Neither Scalia nor Stevens makes a poor argument, although Scalia's repeated claims that Stevens does reflects poorly on his judicial temperment.
At the heart of the dispute is the fact that some state constitutions explicitely state that there is a right to bear arms for the purpose of self defense. Scalia takes this to establish that the 2nd Amendment must do so too, and apparently unlike the states found it not to be worth mentioning.
Stevens takes the decision not to mention that the right to bear arms is one of self-defense, while at the same time putting the right specifically in the context of a militia to indicate that they were not asserting that right. That is to say Stevens considers it significant that they chose to mirror the words of those Amendments which seem to limit the right to military purposes, while Scalia considers it significant that there existed Amendments which explicitely included self-defense while there are none that explicitely exclude it.
But two things seem to weaken Scalia's version. The first is that his take on a draft of the Amendment which explicitely excluded pacifists from having to take up arms as long as they paid a replacement makes no sense at all. The obligation described there only makes sense on the military reading of the Amendment, the idea that this draft was meant to suggest that Quakers has to pay people to defend their houses is silly. And if the words in the second amendment refered only to the military context in that draft, it is hard to see how those exact same words would change meanings after that clause was edited out.
The other is that Scalia's explanation of the preamble is rather unconvincing. It is certainly true that the clearest threat to the right to bear arms had been cases of the state disarming militias whose loyalties were in question. The idea that they wrote an amendment to protect rights A, B, and C but threw in a preamble to explain the least important of these because it was the one most likely to be taken away seems rather silly. It would be as if the Framers has put a preamble in front of the first amendment like "Since busybodies try to interfere with people's enjoyment of art that they they consider pruriant, ..." Who would be silly enough to focus on the least important aspect of a right in setting out the reason for it?
And yet Scalia, original interpretist that he is, states that undoubtedly they considered the other aspects of the right to be more fundamental. Which seems mostly to indicate that had he been there authoring the right he would consider the other aspects more fundamental. But the words in the Amendment suggest that the writers didn't agree.
The limitations that Scalia places on the scope of this decision further suggest that he ultimately intends to interpret the 2nd Amendment as he would have intended it. There are certainly no historical case provided to indicate that demanding a gunlock would violate the 2nd Amendment. How could it be a constitutional matter, rather than a legislative one, as to what is a reasonable balance between safety, and how quickly the gun becomes usable?
Actually, gun control laws in the post Civil War South were most frequently used to keep freed slaves disarmed, so they could be more easily attacked by the Klan and other racists.
I'm confused, Will Allen-- by what you just said, then, there's no right to own guns guaranteed by the Constitution. Again, none of you are confronting the central question. The 2nd amendment says the right to bear arms is protected. It doesn't say anything about which kinds of arms. If you all don't think there is a constitutional protection on owning Tomahawk missiles or weapons-grade plutonium, how can you say there is a constitutional protection on owning guns? If the government can make a judgment call about which kinds of arms can be regulated, why can't it make the judgment call that guns can be banned, just like nuclear weapons or mortars or bazookas?
Blue Moon, that's not exactly true. Lots of handguns in the District were purchased "legally" by straw purchasers in Virginia. That is, it wasn't truly a legal sale because it was a straw purchase, but if the straw purchaser had been buying for his own use (and before this ruling, kept the gun in his house in Virginia instead of giving it to someone in D.C.), it would have been legal.
Anyway, Matt's right that the gun ban was largely ineffective because the District is so close to lots of places where handguns can be bought and owned legally (although there's no doubt in my mind that this ruling will lead to an uptick in gun crimes). However, a national handgun ban would work, simply because for most of the country, there wouldn't be anywhere you could go to legally buy a gun (and for those places near the Mexican border, you're still going to have to go through a checkpoint on the way back home). And moreover, when the legal market goes away, then Smith & Wesson, etc., are going to stop making handguns because there's nowhere profitable to sell them. Handguns, unlike drugs, require a degree of engineering sophistication and industrial methods, so there's little ability for a black market to create enough demand for their manufacture, only their illegal resale.
Why? You just admitted that Constitutional logic has nothing to do with it and the justices just make up whatever ad hoc bullshit they feel like, so why is it obvious that people ought to be able to have any handgun they feel like?
I don't understand where I admitted that Constitutional logic doesn't have anything to do with it.
Just like there are some compelling, narrowly tailored exceptions to the first amendment, there obviously are to the second as well. I think that virtually everyone agrees that the weapons (nukes, WMD, etc.) I listed would be among such exceptions. I (and many others) don't think that anything that fires a bullet is.
"We'll just have to disagree that people in D.C. have different Constitutional rights than people who live in Chicago."
People who live in DC don't have a right to be represented by a Senator or a Representative.
Why? You just admitted that Constitutional logic has nothing to do with it and the justices just make up whatever ad hoc bullshit they feel like, so why is it obvious that people ought to be able to have any handgun they feel like?
I don't understand where I admitted that Constitutional logic doesn't have anything to do with it.
Just like there are some compelling, narrowly tailored exceptions to the first amendment, there obviously are to the second as well. I think that virtually everyone agrees that the weapons (nukes, WMD, etc.) I listed would be among such exceptions. I (and many others) don't think that anything that fires a bullet is.
I am aware that those who advocate the second amendment as an individual right, will go picking through Blackstone and speeches by James Madison to prove that "a free State" refers to the US as a nation state. These are often the same people that cringe at seeking out extra-constitutional textual evidence of Establishment Clause meaning when discussing the separation of church and state.
So, even though Congress has the ability to raise an army to provide for defense, to protect that same "free state," individuals must also have the right to arms to contribute in some well-regulated fashion to that "free state's" protection. And what entity would regulate that militia? Well, if it was Congress, that would just be the army, so, it must be the State states, no?
Client #11, no individual in Chicago has such a right, either. The State of Illinois is constitutionally guaranteed Senators and Representatives.
Again, Freddie, by the logic you employ to interpret language, newspapers should be able to legally publish any person's medical records without his permission, or even print false information, no matter their status as a public figure.
Matt, how is the Court engaging in "judicial activism" when it is strike down a government's total ban against a citizen's right to "keep and bear arms" that violates the clear language of the 2nd Amendment? Isn't that the whole point behind judicial review?
Chicounsel, you are completely clueless. The ruling's overturning of the handgun ban was based on the premise not of a constitutional nature (since "long guns" were not banned for self defense purposes), but rather based, from the opinion itself, that people prefer handguns for self-defense, and thus should be considered to be a Constitutionally protected form of self-defense, even though other firearm options were available.
Again, none of you are confronting the central question. The 2nd amendment says the right to bear arms is protected. It doesn't say anything about which kinds of arms. If you all don't think there is a constitutional protection on owning Tomahawk missiles or weapons-grade plutonium, how can you say there is a constitutional protection on owning guns? If the government can make a judgment call about which kinds of arms can be regulated, why can't it make the judgment call that guns can be banned, just like nuclear weapons or mortars or bazookas?
I don't understand what's unclear about this--There are pretty specific ways to limit an enumerated constitutional right.
Under strict scrutiny, for instance, a law which limits the right must be: a) narrowly tailored, b) The least restrictive means available and c) be in services of a compelling gov't interest.
I don't think any significant portion of people would disagree that a law banning citizen ownership of nukes meets these three criteria and passes the strict scrutiny test with flying colors.
However, lots of people (including 5 Justices, it seems) believe that a law regulating gun ownership does not meet these criteria, and so would be unconstitutional under the strict scrutiny test.
Does that address "the central question"?
"Just like there are some compelling, narrowly tailored exceptions to the first amendment, there obviously are to the second as well. I think that virtually everyone agrees that the weapons (nukes, WMD, etc.) I listed would be among such exceptions. I (and many others) don't think that anything that fires a bullet is."
Fine, but you are (apparently, to me anyway) claiming a right that isn't in the constitution. To me it's an example of the I can't define it, but I know what porn is when I see it school of faux logic; it really means that I have no coherent philosophy and just make decisions on an ad hoc basis.
I think we should spurn such dishonesty and just advocate for rulings we agree with without claiming to be able to divine the thoughts of men who lived two centuries ago, or pretend that there is a possibility of a systematic hermeneutics applied to an anachronistic, vague, and logically inconsistent document. For esample, just because the word "militia" is used to describe two different things (a 18th century non-state military organization and Tim McVeigh and his posse), doesn't mean they are the same phenominon; words and organizations change, and it is silly to pretend that a militia has the same political and social value it did centuries ago--and Timmy's corpse isn't the only thing protecting Lady Liberty from being captured by the state.
It's all nonsense. Nobody has a coherent philosophy of jurisprudence that is applicable to our Constitution; it's impossible. Argue you should be able to own a handgun, but stop pretending it's a direct logical consequence from the second amendment--it isn't.
No, Rd. The fact that Congress can raise an army does not preclude it from regulating a militia. Raising an army is a time consuming process, in an era without a standing army, whereas the militia is always in existence.
Does that address "the central question"?
Do your scare quotes make you "feel smarter"?
"And moreover, when the legal market goes away, then Smith & Wesson, etc., are going to stop making handguns because there's nowhere profitable to sell them."
Except police, the military, foreign police and military, private overseas buyers, etc. In other words, lots of profitable places to sell.
"Handguns, unlike drugs, require a degree of engineering sophistication and industrial methods, so there's little ability for a black market to create enough demand for their manufacture, only their illegal resale."
I guess what you're trying to say is that it would be difficult to manufacture handguns in a U.S. where handguns were totally illegal, so that the cops would only have to worry about the guns that were in circulation prior to the ban. To be honest, that's totally asinine. There is a huge black market in handguns in the U.S. NOW. All that a total ban on handguns would do is shift that black market opportunity to importers and sellers of foreign-manufactured weapons. Do you really think global arms dealers are going to ignore the massive U.S. criminal market for handguns?
"Client #11, no individual in Chicago has such a right, either. The State of Illinois is constitutionally guaranteed Senators and Representatives."
You can't read. I never said that they had a right to vote for such officies (they don't have any such constitutional right), I said that they have a right to be represented by such officers (they do--in Chicago, and the rest of Illinois; not in DC).
Fine, Client, let us also then simply disband the Supreme Court, or at least elect them with term limits. The idea of anyone in such a position for life, while claiming that the language of the Constitution poses absolutely no constraint on how they issue rulings, is not wise.
Fine, but you are (apparently, to me anyway) claiming a right that isn't in the constitution. To me it's an example of the I can't define it, but I know what porn is when I see it school of faux logic; it really means that I have no coherent philosophy and just make decisions on an ad hoc basis.
I don't think it's unclear at all. See my previous comment about how strict scrutiny and laws limiting constitutional rights.
Basically, I think the right as written extends to all arms. I think that right is limited by laws which pass strict scrutiny. I don't see what's inconsistent about that.
No, Client #11, I never wrote the word "vote". Stop hallucinating, please.
"I don't understand what's unclear about this--There are pretty specific ways to limit an enumerated constitutional right."
If you can limit it, it isn't really a right, is it?
Do your scare quotes make you "feel smarter"?
Vastly.
"No, Client #11, I never wrote the word "vote". Stop hallucinating, please."
Never said you did.
Well, Client, it was then pointless for you to use the word "vote".
First of all, the guns are already out there. Even if every NRA lobbyist and active member were Raptured tomorrow, there would still be a lot of illegal and semi-legal weapons whose owners wouldn't be inclined to part with them, probably a lot more than there are today in Britain or wherever.
Wait, you mean all those NRA guys are going to get raptured up and take their weapons with them? I'd assumed all that "cold dead hands" business meant there'd be no guns in heaven. Or is rapture different?
If you can limit it, it isn't really a right, is it?
Insofar as any of the other enumerated rights are. I don't think any reasonable person would argue that any of the rights in the Constitution are subject to no limitation.
I mean, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater, or attempt to incite a riot. Certain material is considered obscene and so not constitutionally protected. There are quite a few limits, really.
The fact that Congress can raise an army does not preclude it from regulating a militia. Raising an army is a time consuming process, in an era without a standing army, whereas the militia is always in existence.
So, the Constitution is saying that Congress will regulate the militias whose purpose includes opposing the potential tyranny of the federal government?
The fact that Congress can raise an army does not preclude it from regulating a militia. Raising an army is a time consuming process, in an era without a standing army, whereas the militia is always in existence.
OK, but isn't 'militia' as used in the 2nd Amendment understood to refer to an organization that exists separately in each of the several states? (As defined in the 1792 Militia Act, for example.) Isn't the most natural interpretation then that the respective state would regulate a state-level organization of that sort?
Sure, RD, because Congress does not wholly constitute the federal government.
If you all don't think there is a constitutional protection on owning Tomahawk missiles or weapons-grade plutonium, how can you say there is a constitutional protection on owning guns?
If you don't think there is a constitutional protection against yelling, "Fire!" in a crowded theater, how can you say there is a constitutional protection on criticizing the government during a time of war.
I mean, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater, or attempt to incite a riot. Certain material is considered obscene and so not constitutionally protected. There are quite a few limits, really.
But this is exactly my point. There are judgment calls to be made in all legislation. What I don't understand is why people act like there is no judgment call to be made regarding the legal availability of guns. If the state can take stock of all the available information and say that I shouldn't be able to buy a bazooka, I don't see why that's different, in principle, from the state doing the same regarding hand guns.
I'm just saying that people act as though there is a bright line, black letter defense of the right own guns in the Constitution, but not to own missiles or similar, and there isn't. And individual people people can disagree about what is or isn't reasonable restriction. What aggravates me is that people are saying that there is a clear principle dividing the decision to regulate military ordinance and the decision to regulate guns, and moreover that this clear principle is constitutionally explicit, and that isn't the case.
DC has a state militia?
Only for about 200 years. They were called out to actually, you know, try to defend the District in 1814, and again in 1861.
I'm a raving, moonbat liberal, but all of you people using the "but...but...NUKES!" and "it doesn't say anything about guns" and "there's no militia!" canards need to kindly STFU.
The argument that the 2nd was a collective right of the militias has no historical support. One of the reasons why pro-gun people were super excited to see Heller go before SCOTUS is because they had probable intent of the BoR on their side and they wanted the individual/collective argument decided once and for all. Now, I am of the mindset that interpreting the 2nd does not reduce to a false dichotomy of "individual vs. collective"- there are interesting roots in English law re: Scottish militia that point to a third way of sorts- like an individual right practiced collectively such as assembly. That being said, a purely collective interpretation is completely unfounded.
The question of what constitutes "arms" was in a large part constrained by Miller, and those hoping to rule out handguns have no basis to do so. In fact, Miller honestly interpreted should in theory allow for select fire rifles, short barreled shotguns, and a number of other arms suitable for military and militia use currently restricted by the NFA. In short, any reasonable definition of "arms" includes semi-automatic rifles and pistols, at the minimum. However, while some may make the case that cannon and warships were owned by individuals comprising the militia, such an interpretation is wildly unlikely to be considered under a modern interpretation of individual rights. And the people whinging about nukes and other WMDs can relax, ordnance are not arms, and there are plenty of historical documents that indicate arms were intended to be personally owned and carried firearms and blades.
guix, my understanding is that the term "militia" was generally thought to be all able bodied adult white males.
Also, from Article One, Section 8....
To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
.....which pretty clearly says that Congress can regulate the militia.
DC has a state militia?
From http://www.ngef.org/tier.asp?bid=77:
"In 1802, the Congress enacted legislation officially establishing the District of Columbia Militia. President Thomas Jefferson directed the formation of the First Columbian Brigade and selected John Mason as the first Brigadier General Commanding. The militia organization was unusual for its time since it was organized into Legions with balanced proportions of infantry, artillery and cavalry, rather than the more customary Regiments. One Legion was assigned to what is now the District of,Columbia, the second was headquartered on the Virginia side of the Potomac.
The DC Militia made its first appearance on a battlefield during the War of 1812. Its most memorable engagement was at the Battle of Bladensburg where, with a combined force of regulars and Maryland Militia, it vainly attempted to prevent a British attack on the City of Washington. DC militiamen fought gallantly that day but were eventually ordered to withdraw. They reformed along the East front of the Capitol for a final defense, but before they could engage the attackers were ordered again to withdraw, this time to an area North of Georgetown then known as Tenlytown. In September 1814, Lieutenant Francis Scott Key, a member of the Georgetown Field Artillery of the DC Militia, was, under a flag of truce, permitted aboard a British man-of-war 'in Baltimore Harbor. While watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry, Lieutenant Key was inspired to write the poem which later became our National Anthem.
"D.C. militiamen participated in the Creek Indian Wars and the Second Seminole Campaign during the early 1830's, but saw no combat. In the 1860's, D.C. militiamen were the first to be called by President Lincoln to defend the Union. Some units refused to serve and resigned to join the Confederacy, but the majority served loyally during the war. D.C. Militia units spearheaded the first excursion across what is now the 14th street bridge to establish a Union presence in Confederate Virginia. In May 1861, Private Manuel Causten, a member of Captain Owens' President's Mounted Guard of the D.C. Militia, earned a dubious honor by becoming the first Union soldier to be captured the war. Black D.C. Militia units formed during the Civil War served with distinction."
IBut this is exactly my point. There are judgment calls to be made in all legislation. What I don't understand is why people act like there is no judgment call to be made regarding the legal availability of guns. If the state can take stock of all the available information and say that I shouldn't be able to buy a bazooka, I don't see why that's different, in principle, from the state doing the same regarding hand guns.
In principle, it's not different from the state regulating bazooka ownership, except that I (and others) don't think a law regulating gun ownership meets the criteria to pass strict scrutiny, whereas I concede that a law regulating bazooka ownership would be meet the strict scrutiny requirements.
Circumstances may change such that laws restricting gun ownership would meet the strict scrutiny test, but for now, particularly given the evidence that levels of gun ownership have very limited impact (either way), I have a hard time imagining such a law.
"The ruling's overturning of the handgun ban was based on the premise not of a constitutional nature (since "long guns" were not banned for self defense purposes),"
The District rather tendentiously claimed this, on the basis that, while the strict text of their law made it impossible to have a functioning long arm available for self defense, there was an implicit self defense exception allowing people to yank that box of parts out of the safe, and assemble them into a functioning rifle, in the event they were attacked.
This stunningly absurd argument has been rejected right up the line. D.C.'s former gun law did NOT allow for self defense with long arms.
Again, there is no more basis for ruling that D.C. can ban handguns than there is for ruling that D.C. can ban the Washington Post from printing David Broder, irrespective of how pleasant such a prospect might be to many.
"Well, Client, it was then pointless for you to use the word "vote"."
You already misinterpreted what I wrote (after mistakenly claiming that there are no differences in the rights of citizens of Chicago and DC), I was just trying to help you understand I didn't write what you thought I did. You misunderstood my reply, but now you seem to be catching on...however slowly.
"I mean, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater, or attempt to incite a riot. Certain material is considered obscene and so not constitutionally protected. There are quite a few limits, really."
So you see my point that despite the nomenclature, they aren't really rights. See, eg, the obsolete fourth amendment and the end of habeus corpus rights.The constitution is an anachronistic, vaguely written, and logically inconsistent document. Some people want to claim that our founders were poor enough writers that they lacked the ability to achieve a skill level sufficient to be able to pass a freshman composition class. Despite the ridiculousness of this claim, our precious blackshirts agreed today; so now we are in a brave new world where conservatives are celebrating the creation of rights not enumerated in the Constitution.
Anyway, while it is possible to delineate a distinction between nukes and handguns, it isn't possible to do so on the basis of the right to bear arms; it can apply to none or both, but not one. If one can ban nukes due to public safety overriding the rights of the individual, one can also do the same with respect to handguns (it does not have to be so, but it can be so). The government of DC did so; the SC overruled them not on the basis of some consistent philosophy, but because all it takes is five bullshitters to feel like it was a good idea; rule by comittee is never the same as logically coherent rule.
Also, since he is writing more clearly than I am, what Freddie said.
More so than any politician I can recall, Obama's public positions all come with an expiration date, stamped "as soon as they start making me look bad"
You've forgotten McCain already?
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/15924.html
So you see my point that despite the nomenclature, they aren't really rights. See, eg, the obsolete fourth amendment and the end of habeus corpus rights.The constitution is an anachronistic, vaguely written, and logically inconsistent document.
Uh, I guess if you want to talk about rights in some abstract, transcendental, can't-ever-be-taken-from-me sort of way. I'm more interested in what these rights mean in our judicial system.
If you want to argue for scrapping the constitution and coming up with something else, be my guest. But while you're waiting for the revolution, I'm just happy that we got a plain reading of the 2nd amendment.
No, client, I didn't misinterpret what you wrote. You simply hallucinated that I had referred to the right to vote, thus you employed the term.
TW, not that I believe in any of this bullshit, but all that would need to be required for a handgun ban to pass strict scrutiny is if it were proven that banning handgun sales reduced violence in DC; it would then be narrowly tailored, there would be a compelling government interest (these two standards are obvioulsy already met), and it would be the least restrictive means of doing so (by tautology). But "narrow" is a relative term, etc. Anyone can come with a bullshit legal theory for almost anything.
"If you want to argue for scrapping the constitution and coming up with something else, be my guest. But while you're waiting for the revolution, I'm just happy that we got a plain reading of the 2nd amendment."
Waiting? Have you heard of the unitary theory of the executive branch; Yoo believed that the government could crush little boys' testes; probable cause has been gutted; on the president's say so us citizens can be detained indefinately, etc. The only thing preventing these abuses from being perminant and more widespread is the limited success of Republican electoral campaigns; if they get enough fascists installed in the judicary to say it's constitutional, it is.
"No, client, I didn't misinterpret what you wrote. You simply hallucinated that I had referred to the right to vote, thus you employed the term."
Why do you even bother? You wrote a few things that were wrong, I corrected you...life goes on. Let it go.
No, client, you are wrong. Let it go.
This debate has raged for years. I remember thinking then as now that to the Founding Fathers, state of the art firearms consisted largely of single shot smoothbore, flintlock muskets and pistols. Ouch, you could put an eye out. About 80 years later, the American Civil War was made deadly by advances in arms and munitions – and WWI deadlier yet. Today's technological advances make the cap & ball, WWI, WWII, and even Vietnam era weaponry seem antiquated. To know what the founders had in mind, we must also consider their frame of reference. By their definition, what's available on today's market didn't even exist. Should what will exist 100-years today be legal to own? Are we equipped to make the decision, and does today’s court decision set a precedent: http://theseedsof9-11.com
There is nothing to prevent D.C. from requiring extensive education and training prior to issuing permits to possess firearms, and instituting extraordinarily severe sanctions for possession of a firearm without a permit. In fact, I highly suspect that if extremely severe minimum sentences (say, 25 years without parole) were handed down upon conviction of any type of violent crime in D.C., including possession of a firearm without a permit, the murder rate in D.C. would plummet. It really isn't complicated to reduce the rate of violent crime; lock up violent criminals, upon their first conviction, until they are elderly, thereby minimizing the rate of recidivism. Gee, I dunno, maybe resources could be redirected from the War on Drugs to fight a War on Violent Criminals.
Posted by Will Allen
1. Your idea of onerous, expensive permits only issued if you know someone important or the cops feel like allowing you the "privilege" ? It exists in several states and cities and likely just fell by the wayside with the SCOTUS ruling.
Think! If it is a right like freedom of speech or freedom of religion, would you support extensive training and education with, along with the permit processing fee and the FBI check - a 200-250 dollar cost for the right to speak or worship? And only on the say so of a bureau of unelected government employees???
2. Yes, you could make possession of illegal drugs, a firearm subject to 25 years without parole. You would also have thousands of arrestees going for broke - using every lawyer trick and delay to tie up the courts and you would, if a gang member, have others out trying to kill any witness that gave police probable cause to search you or your possessions.
3. Yes, crime would go down as you depopulated 1/4th of black men in a city. Then you would have more pathologies in the next generation and utter rebellion against law enforcement...
4. Locking every violent person up for life, or anyone caught with a non-permitted weapon or illegal drug, might increase US prison size 12-fold. We already incarcerate more than any country on the globe.
******************************
Again, there is no specific language defending the right to own guns in the US Constitution. We already do pick and choose which kinds of weapons we allow the citizenry to have. There's no difference between saying citizens can't have guns and saying citizens can't have nukes. Now, if you want to be a maximalist and say that the government doesn't have a right to regulate any weapons, that's a consistent opinion. It happens to be the only logically consistent reading of the 2nd amendment that says the government can't ban guns.
Posted by Freddie
That's clownish logic.
At the time of the Constitution, States had regs on what sort of weapons able-bodied white men must purchase and field if they wished to be part of a militia. That was edged weapons, small arms, and ammunition and powder enough for 30-150 rounds brought to muster. Larger weaponry capable of mass deaths - Cannon, exploding artillery rounds, rockets, mines, grenades, and naval warships were all once prerogatives only for the Crown, then Congress after the Revolution - to authorize.
That is the distinction that was made in subsequent rulings affecting private poison gas, machine gun, high explosive, even sawed off shotguns (Miller,1939). One body of arms traditional and permitted for engaging one enemy at a time, then the larger destruction weapons that besides being unaffordable to the regular American to be expected to bring to a war muster, were always on State leash..
That also included fortifications which since they could exert offensive control over critical commerce paths - were banned to private indivuals and states and only done by the US Army Corps of Engineers.
Only Congress is authorized to raise an Army and supply it with weapons beyond small arms. Only Congress maintain a Navy and the Navy will only have such weapons as the Feds assign.
In short, it is blindingly obvious that the Court in Heller held these distinctions between a pistol or nuke in the home were well understood, and Heller was only about those small arms that are ouside the Federal gov'ts use and regulation of more powerful, indiscriminate weapons that require special licensing for state gov'ts or private individuals to access (Machine gun permits to private company guards at critical facilities like Los Almos, Federal Class "A" explosives permit, etc.)
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At the heart of the dispute is the fact that some state constitutions explicitely state that there is a right to bear arms for the purpose of self defense. Scalia takes this to establish that the 2nd Amendment must do so too, and apparently unlike the states found it not to be worth mentioning.
Just shows how Scalia's 'original intent' is hard to distinguish from 'cherrypicking'. The Virginia state constitution at the time of the Bill of Rights is often quoted as the model for the Second Amendment, but a) it ain't; b) other state constitutions had quite different models.
The most compelling 'original intent' reading of the Second Amendment is that it's a 'strictly defined area of doubt and uncertainty', a committee-room fudge. But the SCOTUS can't say that it's a committee-room fudge. It has to say something. Which is one reason why 'original intent' as a jurisprudential model is a pile of bollocks.
Ouch, you could put an eye out.
Please. Rate of fire and range aside, their firearms were incredibly lethal. Given a choice between being shot 3 times in one minute from 10m away by either a musket or a 9mm or smaller handgun, I'll take being shot by the pistol, hands down.
Today's technological advances make...even Vietnam era weaponry seem antiquated.
The second scariest boogeyman of gun control advocates (next to the gangsta pistol) is the EBR (evil black rifle). It is, in America, the iconic M16, first deployed in Vietnam.
M16s are in use in Iraq and Afghanistan as we speak. And they have been restricted before their conception by the NFA, as their successor, the M4, and all other select fire weapons have been.
To know what the founders had in mind, we must also consider their frame of reference. By their definition, what's available on today's market didn't even exist. Should what will exist 100-years today be legal to own?
By this logic free speech should be relegated to the printed and spoken word, and the First Amendment should not extend to television, the internet, etc.
How ever could the framers have envisioned the intarwebs? Surely they never intended for us to have access to this much power!
To paraphrase Matt:
"as long as the United States is a very small patch of land adjacent to the rest of the planet, there's no way gun regulations of this sort will prevent criminals from acquiring weapons."
To make the more general point, there IS NO way to prevent criminals from acquiring weapons.
Period.
What part of "black market" don't you people understand?
Peggy: "state of the art firearms consisted largely of single shot smoothbore, flintlock muskets and pistols. Ouch, you could put an eye out"
No, you could kill someone dead. And those weapons still exist - and most of them in fact aren't even covered by existing gun laws. Black powder weapons are quite powerful and a lot of survivalist types keep them around precisely because of that and because they are not covered by laws covering modern weapons.
It's completely irrelevant what the state of the art in weapons is. In fifty or a hundred years, we'll have nanotech weapons such that one person can destroy the entire planet - not just all human life, but all life and the entire physical planet short of the molten core (where the heat would probably disable the weapon.)
The purpose of the Second Amendment was and is to guarantee the right to possess weapons for the purpose of enabling the citizenry to protect itself against foreign attack and a tyrannical Federal government. It says nothing about what kind of weapons, who should possess them or what the social consequences of that would be in other respects.
If you want to change that, make a Constitutional Amendment limiting the rights as appropriate. Denying the Second Amendment says what it does is not correct. Attempting to ban personal weapons from individual citizen possession is contrary to that Amendment.
It's that simple.
And the very notion of banning personal weapons is so stupid and unenforceable as to be ridiculous to even discuss. Only morons with no concept of physical reality even consider it.
You tried banning drugs. Where did it get you? How do you figure you can ban firearms when a bunch of gunsmiths in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Phillipines can grind them out of nothing in hours? Not to mention the millions of tons of stocks held in every country in the world. There are an estimated seventy to one hundred and seventy million firearms in the US.
Ban that? You're all idiots.
Go ahead. Try it. Succeed in setting up a black market where guns are available untraceably on every street corner in America. I'd like you to do that. Then I could more easily acquire the weapons I'd like to own as a former Federal felon without worrying about anything except being caught in actual physical possession of one.
Do it. Please.
"Cannon, exploding artillery rounds, rockets, mines, grenades, and naval warships were all once prerogatives only for the Crown, then Congress after the Revolution - to authorize."
Simply put, no. That's bogus history, and you're not Carl T., you shouldn't resort to it. Hell, my neighbor across the street has a cannon on his front lawn, and it's fully functional. (I keep asking him if he couldn't point it somewhere else, and we both have a laugh.)
Such munitions weren't required of ordinary folk in the militia act, but neither were people barred from owning them at the time. Not on in America, anyway.
Not everything which wasn't guaranteed as a right was prohibited, you know.
Such munitions weren't required of ordinary folk in the militia act, but neither were people barred from owning them at the time. Not on in America, anyway.
One man cannot crew a cannon. There is no reason to ban ownership since it is essentially unusable by a single individual.
Such munitions weren't required of ordinary folk in the militia act, but neither were people barred from owning them at the time. Not on in America, anyway.
One man cannot crew a cannon. There is no reason to ban ownership since it is essentially unusable by a single individual.
Heck, one man can't crew a large yacht, but individuals still manage to own 'em. Private ownership of cannon was not common, but scarcely unknown, about the time the 2nd amendment was ratified. Usually by wealthy people who had servants to crew the weapon for them.
It's just a historical fact: The 2nd amendment might not guarantee a right to own crew served weapons, but that doesn't mean ownership of them was prohibited, as Ford would suggest.
Small cannon were quite common on sailing vessels, or so I understand.
To make the more general point, there IS NO way to prevent criminals from acquiring weapons.
Richard Steven Hack:
Those of us who support sane, European/Canadian style firearms regulations have no illusions criminals won't continue to possess knives, say, or baseball bats. Indeed, we are well aware that at least some criminals will always continue -- via the black market -- to gain access to firearms. We simply want to make it difficult for criminals to possess the latter, because killing is much easier and more efficient with firearms than with knives and clubs (and is therefore more common).
It is utterly non-controversial among criminologists that a laxly regulated surfeit of guns drives up their availability and drives down their price for all who seek to own them -- criminals included. And it is likewise utterly non-controversial among criminologists that there exist a number of widely employed, proven and successful gun control strategies in place in the rest of the rich world that: A) prevent many (though not all) criminals from gaining access to guns; and that, B) consequently drive down the incidence of gun crime and homicide.
I'd have a lot more respect for gun rights advocates if, in a spirit of intellectual honesty, they said something along the lines of "A completely unfettered right to own firearms is so important, and so fundamentally based in our constitution, that preserving and defending this right justifies America's greater incidence of homicide and other gun crimes."
Instead, we continually hear the risible contention that there's is no connection between America's gun surplus and her blood-soaked (by rich world standards at least) streets.
I remember thinking then as now that to the Founding Fathers, state of the art firearms consisted largely of single shot smoothbore, flintlock muskets and pistols. Ouch, you could put an eye out.
Once you go hunting with a smoothbore flintlock and see a .54 cal ball blow a deer 3 feet sideways and drop it stone dead with a fist-sized hole in it where half the heart and part of Bambi spine exited, I assure you you will never think those weapons were unimpressive again.
The best soldier of modern times, the German Wehrmacht trooper, was armed with a 1898 single shot bolt action Mauser design. Deadly enough with that. In the US Civil War, we had about 24 million people in America and lost 660,000 to black powder and slow-load muskets.
The infantry rifle from each era was used by the citizenry, as well, right up to the 10-shot M-1 Garand. After the Soviets made the AK-47 machine gun standard, we went with individual soldier machine guns as well. Which ended the practice, with the M-14 and M-16, of having civilians get unaltered GI issue weapons (instead we saw they semi-auto .308 and the AR-15 and other models that fired the .223). In America, M-1s, 1903 Springfields, even the 1873 Trapdoor still remain in use, since a good accurate gun is useful and lasts forever if properly maintained. I ate venison killed with a 120 year-old trapdoor that was once owned by a Civil War and US cavalry vet ancestor of my wife's family.
For defensive use in combat, a M-16 is better than a bolt action, but with interesting examples of soldiers or a single good one defeating better-armed foe. In 2000, a Palestinian being hunted down by an Israeli squad armed with M-16s managed to kill 8 of them with a bolt action Lee-Enfield made before WWI and sending the 4 survivors into retreat. He told media that the Israelis just sprayed rounds, hundreds as he ducked and weaved through the boulders, while he aimed well and took 11 shots, total.
It's just a historical fact: The 2nd amendment might not guarantee a right to own crew served weapons, but that doesn't mean ownership of them was prohibited, as Ford would suggest.
True, just because something is not covered by the 2nd doesn't mean it is prohibited - but it does mean that it can be.
My main point is that I essentially agree with the thinking, if not the decision, in the old Miller case. I think it is reasonable to restrict the protection to weapons that have plausible claim to be useful in the context of a "militia". I find the idea of actually and effectively integrating some privately owners crew-serviced weapon into a militia to be a bit far-fetched for many reasons.
Semi-automatic pistols, rifles, and shotguns, seem adequate to me.
"I think it is reasonable to restrict the protection to weapons that have plausible claim to be useful in the context of a "militia"."
My position, too, with the proviso that the greater encompasses the lesser: Once you've got people walking around with selective fire military weapons, it's pretty damn difficult to justify banning anything less deadly.
Probably one of the best written articles on why the "shall not be infringed" part of the second amendment is no conditioned on the "well-regulated militia" part is here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/kopel/kopel051601.shtml
Additionally, as a few posters have mentioned, the Miller decision is a truly bizarre decision that both sides of the gun-control argument can and do claim as a victory. It's worth mentioning that the Miller decision is effectively the Supreme Court equivalent of a default judgment. Based on the decision, the facts of the case were in Miller's favor, but he was unable to present his defense in court on account of his being dead at the time.
Apparently, Mr. Ford, you missed where I explicitly wrote that I would no longer jail people for possessing drugs. Second, you imagined somehow that the word "extensive" is synonymous with "expensive", and that I advocated giving local law enforcement the sort of discretion in issuing permits that you conjecture. You are wrong on both counts. You apparently also believe that 25% of black men are unable to avoid committing violent crimes. That's quite an assertion.
Whatever your feelings about the merits of the ruling, or on the 2nd Amendment in general, it is undeniable that the battle over gun ownership rights in this country has been a loser for the Democratic Party. When our electoral chances are dependent on gun-loving states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan staying in our column in November, allowing ourselves to be outflanked year after year on the gun issue is a non-starter.
It's completely fair and necessary to bring up the hideous amount of gun deaths that occur in America each year. It's fair and necessary to suggest that these deaths could possibly have been avoided by greater gun regulation. Just yesterday in my home state of Kentucky, a plastics plant employee went on a rampage at work, killing 5 co-workers and himself with a handgun he retrieved on his lunch break.
I also think it's fair and necessary, however, to consider how much the fight over gun regulation in this country has cost the progressive movement. It's certainly a good bet that had the Democratic Party not become synonymous with gun control by the end of the 1990's, George W. Bush would not have been able to win Ohio in 2000, thus losing the electoral college to Al Gore regardless of the shenanigans in Florida.
I think if you're going to tally up the bloodshed caused by gun deaths in America, you also have to consider the amount of deaths caused here by a lack of universal health care. And you have to consider all those blue-collar workers in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan who, but for the love of their guns and fear of liberals who will take them away, would be voting down-the-line Democrat election after election.
We could already have universal health care in place by now. Instead, the progressive movement has spent much of its political energy the last couple decades lecturing law-abiding gun owners about the blood on their hands. Whether that criticism was fair or not, I think it's indisputable that there were better ways to seek progressive change for the greater benefit of us all.
Regardless, today's decision on the 2nd amendment was a boon to the Democratic Party. Much the way Bush was able to point to Roe vs. Wade as "settled law" when accused of threatening to overturn abortion rights back in 2000, Obama can point to D.C. vs. Heller as having "settled" the debate over the 2nd Amendment the next time McCain demagogues him on guns.
Its not clear to me why I shouldn't be able to buy a SAW, in the light of Heller.
Now, a SAW can fire .50 caliber armor-piercing bullets that can go through walls and body armor and fire at the rate of 85-200 rounds per minute. A crew firing an SAW would make mincemeat of a police car and its occupants in ten seconds.
Now, its obvious to me (and presumably not the gun nuts) that the USA would be a far more dangerous place if there were lots of SAWS floating around out there, but I can't see any reason why SAWs could be banned under Heller. Sure, Scalia airily said that the machine gun ban could remain in place but apart from his ipse dixit, what is the reasoning that makes a SAW capable of being prohibited and a handgun legally permissible. . Heck, both are firearms.
I guess you could talk about time, place, ands manner restrictions, but once the SAWS are out there, they are out there and if law-abiding folks can acquire them, then so can criminals. One final image: picture two disaffected teenage boy staking a SAW to high school to revenge themselves because some cheerleader turned them down
Let's parse Jasper's points one by one.
"We simply want to make it difficult for criminals to possess the latter, because killing is much easier and more efficient with firearms than with knives and clubs (and is therefore more common)."
The latter part is irrelevant. The bone of contention is whether it is POSSIBLE to make it difficult for criminals to possess firearms.
At the moment, there is not a huge black market for firearms in this country (that I'm aware of, anyway.) This is because they can be legally purchased by non-felons. So any felon who wants a weapon simply gets someone who isn't a felon to buy one for him - or he gets one from someone who stole a weapon from a National Guard Armory, or a cop, or a private citizen. With the large number of private weapons around, it's fairly easy for a criminal to acquire a weapon. This much is true.
The problem is establishing that once you outlaw private possession of firearms, what are you going to do about: 1) the seventy to one hundred seventy million weapons already existing in this country; and 2) if you DO get rid of those weapons, the immediate and effective black market for supplying weapons to the US which will spring up in every country surrounding the US and overseas?
These two questions have never been answered by the gun law proponents - because they have no answers. There are no answers to those two questions because it is 1) physically impossible to force everybody who has weapons to disarm, and 2) economically impossible to stop a high-profit black market absent eliminating the laws creating it.
THESE two facts are non-controversial among criminologists!
"It is utterly non-controversial among criminologists that a laxly regulated surfeit of guns drives up their availability and drives down their price for all who seek to own them -- criminals included."
It also drives up the availability and drives down the price for those citizens who buy them for personal protection, as well as for sport.
The problem for the gun banners is that a black market invariably becomes more and more effective. While initially the price of the black market good is driven up and is less available, the black market is subject to the exact same economic principles of investment and ROI as any other market. This results in higher availability of the black market commodity over time and drives the price back down toward its legal level - depending on how effective the law enforcement of those laws are.
The drug laws are a perfect example. And the size and heft of firearms is not much different from a kilo of drugs (although the value of a firearm is much less than a kilo of drugs.) Therefore it is likely that firearms will be made available to those who want them.
Only now they are completely illegal, untraceable, and much more easily available to the criminal networks that use them because systems are set up to make them so.
"And it is likewise utterly non-controversial among criminologists that there exist a number of widely employed, proven and successful gun control strategies in place in the rest of the rich world that: A) prevent many (though not all) criminals from gaining access to guns; and that, B) consequently drive down the incidence of gun crime and homicide."
Citations please. And demonstrate that these methods would work in the United States, please.
And the United States is not "the rest of the rich world". Not to mention that in many countries, the economic and social and cultural history circumstances are so different from the United States that criminal gun ownership has never been an issue and therefore it probably was considerably easier to limit the spread of firearms in criminal hands.
I'd say if you look at the rise of terrorism in the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, and Turkey in the 1970's, you'll see that effective gun laws basically didn't matter once somebody decided to start conducting terrorism. Guns were obtained fairly easily from outside those countries - and the same would apply to the US.
The fundamental problem with gun laws is the fundamental problem with ALL law. Laws simply don't work when the society doesn't work. Fix the society first. But when you have a state and corporate culture predicated on a society that doesn't work, this is impossible.
As I said above, go ahead and ban guns. Do it. Then we'll see the results. I'll have my untraceable, illegally acquired weapons, the gun violence and suicide rate will be unchanged (except those who would have suicided by gun will now choose another method, probably drugs), and the only loss will be to the legal firearms industry - who will be replaced by foreign firearms makers selling to the police and the military (they pretty much already are - Glock owns the police handgun market.)
Banning guns is a fantasy. It's on a par with cheap oil by invading Iraq.
It's actually a little worse than that, stonetools. A SAW is a lot closer to what the 2nd Amendment was all about than a handgun. A really principled conservative (i.e., not Scalia et al.) would probably find handguns less worth of protection than SAWs.
Whatever your feelings about the merits of the ruling, or on the 2nd Amendment in general, it is undeniable that the battle over gun ownership rights in this country has been a loser for the Democratic Party.
The arguments over torture and warrantless surveillance have been losers for the Democratic Party. The arguments over racial and sexual equality? Losers. The arguments over unnecessary wars built upon lies have been losers, also. Which really just says that more often than not, in recent history, the American electorate has had a plurality of bloodthirsty fucktards.
Obama can point to D.C. vs. Heller as having "settled" the debate over the 2nd Amendment the next time McCain demagogues him on guns.
I'll agree with you on that: he can say that the holy blessed Founding Prophets blessed the nation with a shitfuck of a constitutional provision, and his administration can at least ensure that people don't have to empty their savings to mop up the blood.
If you dont know the reasoning behind the ruling how can you deem the decision 'judicial activism'? Do you even know what the term means, matty?
The bone of contention is whether it is POSSIBLE to make it difficult for criminals to possess firearms.
It obviously is possible to make it more difficult than it is in the US for criminals to possess firearms, as the examples of numerous rich countries attest. I suspect just about every fellow OECD member save Mexico has a lower incidence of gun-related crime -- and homicde -- than the US. Although crime statistics are notoriously difficult to compare, in at least some of these countries it would appear that the overall crime rate is comparable to that of the US. In other words, we see plenty of crime (including violent crime) throughout the rich world, but lots more deadly crime and gun-related crime in the United States. I find it highly unlikely that non-American criminals are nicer people than American criminals. I find it equally highly unlikely that they're denser than their American counterparts, and it just hasn't occurred to them that firearms will magnify their capacity to inflict violence. The simplest explanation is that policies which restrict the distribution of firearms negatively impact the ability of even criminals to possess guns.
Not to mention that in many countries, the economic and social and cultural history circumstances are so different from the United States that criminal gun ownership has never been an issue and therefore it probably was considerably easier to limit the spread of firearms in criminal hands.
Citations please.
As I said above, go ahead and ban guns.
No thanks, I'd rather not ban them. I'd much rather follow the example of, say, Canada, and make it very difficult and costly to go outside the system.
I'd say if you look at the rise of terrorism in the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, and Turkey in the 1970's, you'll see that effective gun laws basically didn't matter once somebody decided to start conducting terrorism.
"Effective gun laws" work at reducing the lethality of crime. Citizens of rich countries are far more likely to die from the gun shot wounds of common criminals than they are from terrorists. It would be eminently justifiable on grounds of efficacy alone to have in place policies that work well at reducing the use of firearms by common criminals even if said policies were completely inadequate at keeping guns out of the hands of terrorists.
Laws simply don't work when the society doesn't work. Fix the society first.
It's hardly self-evident that America society doesn't "work." What does such a bland, overgeneralized assertion even mean? Heck, it's not even clear that crime in general is higher in the US than in other rich nations. What is clear is that the US suffers from much higher levels of gun crime and homicide. You can't, as the saying goes, fake a body.
Banning guns is a fantasy.
True. Who exactly is trying to ban them?
Comments closed July 10, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
True enough, but I was sort of hoping for a tongue-in-cheek response from Justice Stevens, something to the effect of "[This decision] will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."
Posted by Seth | June 26, 2008 10:34 AM