Via a pointer from David Hardy I found John Lott’s article in the Maryland Law Review.
Lott discusses strict and intermediate scrutiny and what it means to Right-To-Carry laws and concludes the same thing as I did last month. Those proposing more, or even retaining, restrictions on firearms are going to have a very tough time meeting the threshold to overcome a 2nd Amendment challenge:
Under “strict scrutiny,” a regulation will only be upheld if it “furthers a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.” While government might regulate how guns may be carried, it seems doubtful that it can completely ban the “bearing,” or carrying, of guns. Whether such regulations must meet the same strict scrutiny test as regulations of other “fundamental” rights or a lesser standard of intermediate scrutiny, a balancing test is necessary. In the case of concealed carry laws restricting the right to carry a concealed gun in public, however, gun control proponents face a heavy burden.
That is, the governmental goal must be something crucial and there cannot be other less restrictive means of accomplishing the same goal. Intermediate scrutiny is an easier to meet standard where, as Judge Legg writes: “the government’s interest must be ‘significant,’ ‘substantial,’ or ‘important,’ . . . and the ‘fit’ between the challenged regulation and the asserted objective must be reasonable, though not perfect.”
The problem for the anti-gun people is that:
As Carlisle Moody and his co-authors recently summarized the literature: That is ultimately an empirical question. The only difference between “compelling” and “important” is how large that drop has to be before the regulation is allowed. In addition, under either standard, gun control advocates must show that there are not other ways of accomplishing the reduction in crime.
There have been a total of 29 peer reviewed studies by economists and criminologists, 18 supporting the hypothesis that shall-issue laws reduce crime, 10 not finding any significant effect on crime, including the NRC report, and [Aneja, Donohue, and Zhang]’s paper, using a different model and different data, finding that right-to-carry laws temporarily in-crease one type of violent crime, aggravated assaults.
With only one study out of 29 supporting the thesis of the anti-gun position what are they going to do?
Well, of course they will do exactly what they have been doing since right-to-carry came up as a legislative agenda and they continued to do even in 2008 and 2010 with the Heller and McDonald decisions:
Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Washington, D.C., in 2008 and Chicago in 2010. These were the Heller and McDonald decisions that divided the Supreme Court in close five-to-four votes.
Politicians predicted disaster. “[M]ore handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,” Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned the day the Court announced its decision. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley predicted that we would “go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun and we’ll settle it in the streets.” Similarly, the New York Times editorialized about the Supreme Court’s “wrongheaded” Heller decision.
The results were no surprise to us:
But Armageddon never happened. Data released for Chicago and Washington shows that murder and gun crime rates didn’t soar, they didn’t even rise after the gun bans were eliminated—they plummeted. In fact, Chicago and Washington’s crime rates have fallen much more than the national crime rate.
I expect the anti-gun people stuck their fingers in their ears and are yelling “LA-LA-LA-LA-LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” As tough as might be to imagine they have a reality distortion field that warps reality for them almost as much as a black hole warps space and time. Like black holes those inside the reality distortion fields cannot seem to escape the hold on them, there isn’t much we can do to help them, and they release toxic radiation as they evaporate.
The major difference is that even though they are distributed throughout the population we are getting to the point where we can essentially ignore them and you can’t ignore a nearby black hole.
