People convicted of violent felonies were not prohibited from purchasing or possessing guns under federal law until 1934. It wasn’t until the 1968 Gun Control Act when that prohibition was extended to all felonies and to people with a history of drug abuse or mental illness. Background checks were not mandated by federal law until 1994, and the National Instant Criminal Background Check System didn’t start until 1998. States didn’t begin criminalizing domestic violence until the 1900s, and federal law didn’t prohibit people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanor offenses from getting a firearm until 1996.
Chip Brownlee
July 19, 2022
The Real Significance of the Supreme Court’s Gun Decision
[This is from The Trace.
It is nice for them to admit this. Because these laws are far newer than when the 2nd Amendment was ratified, the Bruen decision will almost certainly mean these laws are vulnerable to being thrown out as unconstitutional.
It is long road but the signage to a win is easily visible.—Joe]
I don’t get it. The commies have been releasing and arming criminals for years.
What’s the big duh all of a sudden?
Telling criminals they can’t buy guns is like telling them they can’t buy drugs.
What we do know about communists is that whatever they say it’s a lie. And they can’t be argued with in good faith. We should always remember the first and stop trying the later.
2A is 2A. We know what it says. There is no carve outs in it for certain classes of people because that would be ignorant on its face.
And we don’t need a professional opinion that never seems to come to any true conclusion.
Read the text and live by it. Leave, or enjoy your trial. This stuff just don’t seem that difficult.
(I guess I should be more grateful that the professional class is finally getting a clue?)
I’m confused, Joe. Are you saying we *should* allow people with violent felony convictions and/or mental illness to have guns? Why would we want that?
I get that there are scenarios where liberals try to twist the laws to take guns away from people they shouldn’t, but that just means we need to write the laws better, not open the doors to psychos.
My view is that someone can’t be trusted in public unsupervised with a gun then they can’t be trusted in public with a pint of gasoline and a book of matches or a hunting knife.
Furthermore, background checks for gun purchases do not make people safer: https://fee.org/articles/california-s-background-check-law-had-no-impact-on-gun-deaths-johns-hopkins-study-finds/
Hence, background checks should be eliminated and those resources allocated to something useful.
So, are you saying you think we should imprison anyone with a violent felony and/or mental illness permanently? There are definitely lots of folks (lining the Seattle highways living in tents, among other things) who can’t be trusted unsupervised with a gun, and never will be. Are you suggesting we create institutions where they all be locked up permanently?
No. I’m saying people convicted of a felony or has mental health issues should be treated appropriately until they can (probably) be trusted to not be a public menace.
Background checks for guns are useless as well as being unconstitutional and should be eliminated.
See also: https://blog.joehuffman.org/2013/01/29/background-checks/
Make a distinction between punitive confinement and rehabilitative confinement.
The punitive confinement is the hard time you are sentenced to for the crime you committed
The rehabilitative confinement is where you stay until you meet objective criteria for being able to live with other people again. The problem is: who can be trusted to adjudicate this? The entire academic field of psychiatry is ideologically captured with Marxists that treat criminals as allies to keep the productive population under pressure. So, “experts” don’t. Statists gain power by making the crisis they won’t let go to waste. On the other hand, “community leaders” are more likely to be NIMBY. So, where do you find a No-persuadable-to-Yes that can’t be swayed by perverse incentives?
Of course, if the rehabilitatively confined can identify another country that will take them, maybe they’ll prosper somewhere with less opportunity to offend. They can’t be trusted here, but maybe they’ll fit in just fine in Cambodia or western Brazil or Morocco.
Tirno, a good way to deal with rehabilitative confinement and the corruption of psychiatry is to make shrinks personally liable when they release a criminal who goes on to commit another violent crime.
Not to get between you and Joe. But since when have even well written laws worked when the actual psychos are the ones administering them?
John Schussler
on September 27, 2022 at 10:01 am said:
“So, are you saying you think we should imprison anyone with a violent felony and/or mental illness permanently? There are definitely lots of folks (lining the Seattle highways living in tents, among other things) who can’t be trusted unsupervised with a gun, and never will be. Are you suggesting we create institutions where they all be locked up permanently?”
What are you suggesting we do with them? Write better laws?
They already have guns, drugs, matches, gasoline, steal whatever and shit wherever they want.
How ’bout we just defend ourselves from them and quit supporting them and it will work itself out in winter or two?
That and Singapore’s exemplary use of cane and rope in place of our present book and release crime-go-round were on.
It should go double for those violating the public trust.
I wonder where the idea that a constitutional right can be revoked permanently for violating a law, even after serving a sentence and making restitution, comes from. It isn’t in the constitution I read. But if it is hidden in there somewhere, why not use that power to revoke some serious rights? Like (after your first felony conviction) you permanently lose the right to a trial, or to bail, or for a warrant prior to search, or perhaps even the right to not be punished by cruel and unusual means. Certainly those would boost the motivation to be law-abiding? Or maybe, after you’ve done your time and paid your fine, all your rights should should be restored?
Gonna try to make a consistent argument here:
Second Amendment: …the right of The People to Keep and Bear Arms shall not be infringed.
The People. All people in the world? No. We don’t recognize the right of any foreigner to bear arms on American soil without explicit permission. “The People” are the same The People that established the Constitution. The same The People that have the right to peaceably assemble and petition for the redress of grievances. The People of the USA does not include persons from other nations, unless The People decide that some rights must also be extended to Other People out of necessity to protect the rights of The People. The People established the Constitution, the process and procedure to creating, enforcing and adjudicating the laws and consequently consent to abide by the results of that process.
So, we come to the situation where there are individuals that have demonstrated through objective, observable fact and impartial review by jurors of The People that these same individuals will not abide by the laws passed and executed according to proper Constitutional order, all rights respected fully. By choosing to egregiously defy the law in profound ways, particularly to victimize others, they demonstrate that they are not part of The People. Accordingly, they may not hold office, or serve on a jury, or keep arms, or travel freely, or a myriad of other restrictions. Frankly, the only reason they consume oxygen on American soil is that we’re unlikely to find another country that would take them off our hands. They’re effectively exiled from America while the practicality of literally exiling them is not available. In many ways, they need to re-naturalize in order to regain the rights and privileges that The People enjoy. Would you call that second-hand citizenship? No; I think it’s more like permanent residency without citizenship in another nation. Practically, they are not citizens any more, other than in worthless name.
I think we’d be more honest to just say what is really happening. Citizenship would be seen to be more valuable if it were explicitly known that you could lose it, and what the price is to regain it. But then, I’m of the mind that birthright citizenship should be entirely ended, and every person should have to go through the same naturalization process that the immigrants do. It should be a process of uniform effort, but not something altered by economic status, true equality between the billionaire’s heir and the pauper. US Citizenship is valued as it costs the citizen, in too many cases, and that value for many is zero. Too many born here are American in citizenship, but not American by positive cultural adherence.
Crazy people are always going to be with us and some of them will be armed. Their actions will be unpredictable (sort of the definition of crazy). What I want is the ability to protect myself which most of all means an end to gun free zones. All this other stuff we argue about is peripheral.
When the criminal left in power refuse to obey the law and there is NOBODY to hold them unaccountable under the law then the rest of us can NEVER WIN.
We follow the rules. They have only ONE RULE. WIN! And anything that serves that rule is acceptable to them.