In America, the police don’t determine what rights we have good reason to enjoy. You don’t need a good reason to speak, to worship, to vote or to carry a gun for self-defense.
Alan Gura
September 17, 2014
Lawmakers grudgingly draft bill to authorize concealed carry of guns in D.C.
[But guns are different than speech or religion! No one is harmed by speech!
Wrong.
Ideas are more powerful than weapons. How many innocent people have been murdered on the basis of books like Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, The Bible, and The Qur’an? Compare those numbers to the number of individual criminal uses of firearms and then get back to me.—Joe]
You could make a good argument for abrogating First Amendment rights based on the actions and words of a certain Rev. Al Sharpton…
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I’ve mentioned it before but it’s worth mentioning again, L. Neil Smith’s essay “supposed you were fond of books”: http://www.lneilsmith.org/banabook.html
This bit about “the police doesn’t get to determine…” ties into an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, reporting on the storms of indignation from the FBI and other police agencies about the fact that Google and Apple had the nerve to build new features into their smartphones that make it much harder for the authorities to suck private information out of those devices. From the way they are reacting, it is clear they believe that everything we own is theirs to peruse, with the exception of whatever they might condescend to leave unsnooped out of the goodness of their ice cold hearts.