To be sure, correlation doesn’t prove causation. But the experience of Colorado State and DC should come as no surprise. By now there’s so much evidence that higher rates of gun ownership lead to lower rates of crime that it isn’t hard to fathom why fewer and fewer Americans want to ban handguns.
Jeff Jacoby
March 21, 2012
A safer society with guns
[Via David Hardy.
As David said, “It’s staggering that the Boston Globe ran this.”
We need to continue the mop up operations in many places but at this time it is just pockets of resistance that need to be cleaned up. They will scream, yell that the blood will run in the streets, and fight us as best they can but their current strategy and tactics is a losing game plan. Their only hope is to change their approach and I don’t see anything that has a reasonable chance of working. Only terrorist operations have any chance at all against us and I can’t see that working without other, extreme, complicating factors coincidently aligning in such a way as to be enable them.
On the other hand it is easy to imagine we eventually will have constitutional carry everywhere in this country.—Joe]
Considering the racist origins of gun control, Nationwide Constitutional Carry will be the removal of the last vestiges of racist laws so that America can live up to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; a process that began with abolitionists, made a great and costly advance via the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and slowly and inexorably worked through a series of lawsuits seeking to overturn the setback of Plessy v Ferguson, culminating in Brown v Board of Education.
I added “Nationwide” after I had written the rest of the comment. President Obama thinks that there should be different interpretations of the right to keep and bear arms depending on what part of the US we live in, particularly whether we live in an urban or rural area. No other Constitutional right is so varied in expression. The protection against unreasonable searches and seizures is not applied differently depending on whether you live in a high-crime zip code or not, so neither should your right to keep and bear arms for your own protection and the protection of others be so varied. Licensure of carry should not be any greater than the requirement of a license to write my newspaper to comment or complain about something the local government is doing. This is a digression, but it relates back to the liberty interest of all citizens represented by the specific expressions of limitations on Federal power that is the Bill of Rights.
I wish the Globe allowed comments on Jacoby’s column. I’d love to hear what the good people of Boston think of it.
One questionable self defense shooting in Florida (Zimmerman/Martin) has started a high priority push from the President, the Democrats, and multiple large special interest groups to reverse Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws nationwide.
Do you really think there will ever be a time in this country when pro-rights gun groups can claim victory, or do you think there will be a perpetual effort by the anti-rights groups, dancing in blood and using any excuse, to reverse any progress?
“Do you really think there will ever be a time in this country when pro-rights
gungroups can claim victory, or do you think there will be a perpetual effort by the anti-rights groups, dancing in blood and using any excuse, to reverse any progress?”The answer (to the generalized question) is that we will always have to defend our rights from those who seek power over us. Even now, anti-rights groups aren’t just after our gun rights–they seek to nullify our 1st, 4th and 5th Amendment rights as well, along with other rights enumerated in the Constitution (both in the Bill of Rights, and in the original, non-amended version) and even 9th Amendment rights protected by the Constitution, but not mentioned.
It’s a never-ending battle.