The Second Amendment is itself a reasonable, common-sense gun law–it provides powerful security for a fundamental individual right.
Alan Gura
June 29, 2010
McDonald – A Victory for the Second Amendment
[We should start using this when people start talking about “common-sense gun laws”. Just say, “It has already been enacted. We just need to enforce it.”–Joe]
I participated in a USPSA match at the Lewiston Pistol Club today. After the pistol match we had a shotgun side match.
I forgot to turn on my video glasses for the first string. On the second string I tried some “Low Recoil” ammo. I had to hand cycle every round fired with that ammo. I gave all my remaining ammo of that type to someone with a pump action shotgun.
My third string went well. I probably could have cut at least three or four seconds off my time had I not had so many misses, I had counted my shots so I had not taken the time to drop the hammer on an empty chamber, and I had practiced my reloads. I also don’t think I have fired a shotgun in at least a year. Here is the video from the shooters point of view:
The artist apparently doesn’t realize this has never been an issue at the level of the Supreme Court. Even the Cruikshank decision in 1875 and the Miller decision in 1939 supported the individual rights interpretation. And if they would have read the Heller decision they would have realized this was settled law two years ago rather than something new with the McDonald decision last week.
But, by definition, bigots have little need of facts to maintain their belief system.
[H/T to Reese who sent me an email with the link to this cartoon.]
Most people who are familiar with the Violence Policy Center (VPC) know that the Court’s decision appears to doom the very thing for which the little anti-gun fringe group was formed–a total ban on handguns.
As it happens, this also appears to have sent Josh Sugarmann, Kristen Rand and their one or two fellow VPC employees into conniption fits. After the Court’s decision became known, at least the Brady Campaign pretended to address the decision’s substance, claiming it gave a green light to the states to impose every form of gun control short of a total ban on handguns. But VPC, used to living fat off the dole from the Joyce Foundation, hysterically claimed that “People will die because of this decision” and “areas of the country with the highest concentration of gun ownership also have the highest rates of gun death.”
Scary sound bites indeed. But VPC’s religiously-held belief that increasing the number of privately-owned guns necessarily causes firearm-related deaths to increase is proven false by the fact that, since 1991, as the number of firearms in the U.S. increased by about one-third, the firearm-related death rate decreased by more than one-third. The best estimate is that guns are used for protection 3-4 times more often than to commit a crime, and the disparity between defensive uses and criminal homicides with guns is much greater.
NRA-ILA
July 2, 2010
VPC’s Self-Induced Plunge Into Irrelevancy Continues With Knee-Jerk Reaction To McDonald Decision
[Conniption fits indeed! And maybe some sort of psychosis. In addition to the delusion that increased gun ownership means increased violent crime the people at the VPC have a hallucination that the NRA is a lobbyist for gun manufactures rather than a civil rights group for individuals.
Someone should remind them to take their meds on a more regular basis.–Joe]
The artist limits “the solutions” by posing “the problem” as he does. Just as we would, and should, if we pose the problem as a civil rights infringement problem. I’ve posted on this general topic before (and here).
As a wise engineering manager once told me, it is more important to define the problem than discover a solution. We can’t let the anti-freedom bigots define the problem.
Alan Gura spoke about this some with us bloggers at the NRA convention this year. He is of the opinion the NRA is an expert at legislation and lobbying but that in our current situation civil rights lawsuits are most effective. This is not to say that we can’t have two or more solutions to the same problem but that we should recognize the problem can be framed multiple ways and that depending upon the framing we change the solution set. And with those changing solution sets it may be that a different set of experts are needed.
In a constitutional democracy the moral content of law must be given by the morality of the framer or legislator, never by the morality of the judge.
Robert Bork
Speech
American Enterprise Institute, 1984
[The dissent in the McDonald case does not seem to have adhered to this principal or if they did they were living in an alternate reality.–Joe]
There are times when I think people, in general, intuitively know how to determine truth from falsity. Then reality comes crashing in on me:
An acupuncturist in Vietnam who claims she can detect a man’s virginity based on a small red dot on the ear is credited with helping to free three convicted rapists from prison, the Associated Press reports from Hanoi.
…
“They all had small red spots on the back of their ears,” said Hong, 54. “The
spots should have disappeared if they had had sex. My many years of experience
told me that these men did not have sex before.”Investigators who revisited the case found other flaws, leading to the
release of the prisoners.Hong says she was first taught how to determine if a man has ever had sex by
feeling his pulse. She later developed the ear-spot method on her own, the AP
says.She says the red spot only disappears after heterosexual intercourse and is
not affected by gay sex or masturbation.
Update: Now if she had said the red spots were an indication of not being a virgin in their ears I could see the possibility of some truth in her conclusions.
As if this would be a bad thing. They don’t even consider the possibility that existing gun laws that prohibit the innocent from defending themselves are both unconstitutional and unconscionable.
Of course, spikes in gun violence do not follow gun-rights rulings, either. Yet that has not stopped gun-control advocates from falsely predicting them, again and again. So they’re wrong on the empirical evidence, the normative considerations, and the Constitution. Aside from that, they’ve got an airtight case.
Robert Nozick
July 2, 2010
Facts & Law Aside, Gun Control Advocates Are Right
[The part of the anti-rights advocates which is “airtight” is the part that allows them to be subject to the influences of reality.–Joe]
I had two different people suggest this cartoon for today.
The artist thinks this ruling went too far? As if the incredibly tiny step of recognizing the specific enumerated right to keep and bear arms means cities and states may not enact total bans on handguns in the home for self-defense implies unfettered access to rocket launchers for non-adults.
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling today it is absolutely important to emphasize that the conservative majority held that strong and effective gun
laws are still constitutional and can be enacted.
Thom Mannard
Executive Director of the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence
http://www.gunguys.com/?p=4049
June 28, 2010
[Emphasis in the original.
And when you find one of those mythical laws let us know. Okay?–Joe]
Penis “jokes”, freedom is about killing people, guns are only good for killing, armor piercing bullets, and racism. Not bad for a four panel cartoon.
But they left out kids killing kids, explicitly saying gun owners are stupid and crazy, the NRA is a lobby for greedy gun manufactures, and we worship guns.
Nonetheless, the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decisions have made a major difference. In particular, they have offset the gun-control community’s longstanding effort to “denormalize” firearms ownership — to portray it as something threatening, deviant, and vaguely perverse, and hence demanding strict regulation, if not outright prohibition. That effort went on for decades, and received much media support. Two decades ago, it seemed to be working.
But with the Supreme Court saying that it’s clear the Framers regarded individual gun ownership as “necessary to our system of ordered liberty,” that effort must be seen as a failure now. Gun ownership by law-abiding citizens is the new normal, and the Second Amendment is now normal constitutional law. It will stay so, as long as enough Americans care to keep it that way.
Glenn Reynolds
June 29, 2010
The New Normal: The Second Amendment After Heller and McDonald
[They are still trying to “denormalize” it. They do it with zero tolerance in the schools for even a sandwich bitten to look like a gun, registration, licensing, publicizing concealed carry license holders along with sex offenders, and here and here for example. See also my gun cartoon of the day topic.
We came very, very close to losing this via “denormalization”. It’s how the holocaust came into being and it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine a similar fate for gun owners had we not been able to turn it around.
We must continue to normalize it. The safe and responsible exercise of a specific enumerated right is not something that should ever be looked down upon. Those that disparage it should be derided, scorned, and humiliated and the Heller and McDonald rulings give another great tool to accomplish that with.–Joe]
In the Facebook thread here a commenter points people at his blog post on the McDonald ruling:
Yesterday at 11:35am
And the response? It’s typical:
Suzanne MacDougall Avilato the
above poster, take your H&K 93, shove it up your ass and pull the trigger.Yesterday at 12:46pm ·2 people
Sara L.
MessengerCould
have said it better myself Suzanne, he has to be a nut.Yesterday at 12:52pmSara L.
MessengerYou are
sick.Yesterday at 12:56pmSara L.
MessengerI am not
mad but, people like you who shoot off their mouths don’t need guns.Yesterday at 12:57pm
Suzanne MacDougall AvilaThank
you, Sara. He’s not even worth arguing with. He can take his filthy mouth and
his guns somewhere else.Yesterday at 1:20pm
There is lots of other stuff worthy of comment in the thread as well. I particularily liked the irony of this one:
Richard J. OsborneRepeal
the Second Amendment. It belongs on the scrap heap of history along with the
provisions of the Constitution that protected slavery.Yesterday at 9:04am ·
If they can repeal the Second Amendment then people could repeal the 13th Amendment as well. For some reason they can’t seem to grasp the principle of freedom.
I was reading the article titled “Supreme Court extends rights of gun owners” and I was annoyed with the title. The Supreme Court didn’t extend anything. It recognized the pre-existing right and said local government may not infringe that right.
Then I thought about the picture they used in the article. It wasn’t of gun owners and gun rights activists waiting for the decision. It was the anti-rights people:
Would the LA Times have used a similar picture of the KKK standing outside the Supreme Court waiting on a decision regarding the rights of non-whites with such a neutral caption? What’s the difference? The Brady Campaign and the KKK both want to use the force of law to suppress the rights of others. Sure, the KKK sometimes took violence into their own hands. But the Brady Campaign has a lot of innocent blood on their hands too. Some of it via criminals enabled by disarmed victims and some of it via the enforcement of repressive gun laws against private citizens (Ruby Ridge and Waco are the better known examples).
The biggest difference that I see is had the KKK been standing outside the Supreme Court there would have been more of them. The KKK had far more public support and members than the Brady Campaign ever has. They are fringe group by any definition of the phrase and they need to be politically extinguished.
Would a political cartoonist say this about “allowing” blacks the right to vote and keep their job? Yet the anti-gun people talk about the Supreme Court “allowing” people to own firearms.
Don’t forget what Bill Clinton said about rights.
Through this lawsuit in North Carolina we intend to show that state emergency powers statutes that allow government officials to suspend fundamental civil rights, including the right to bear arms, are unconstitutional and therefore should be nullified. Citizens do not surrender their civil rights just because of a natural or man-made disaster.
Alan Gottlieb
June 29, 2010
SAF SUES TO OVERTURN NORTH CAROLINA’S ‘EMERGENCY POWERS’ GUN BANS
[I expected something in New York City or maybe New Jersey. But I suppose this was fairly low hanging fruit with lower risk.
It may also be that it will take some time to incorporate the McDonald rulings into the filings for those jurisdictions.–Joe]
Rob reports on something that gives me a warm glow.
Almost as rewarding is the Wikipedia entry for the Brady Campaign shows the membership as 50,500. Nice (you heard it here first)!
But then I noticed the link in the Wikipedia entry for the citation supporting that number no longer lists the number of members. Apparently the Brady Campaign didn’t like having the information being that public. It seems to you can request that information but the numbers are not public.
Hmmm… apparently I had an impact on them.
Well, it’s not as if Winston Smith from the book Nineteen Eighty Four is editing history in this case. It’s only the Brady Campaign attempting to implement Nineteen Eighty Four.
The Internet is forever and we have backups.
The baby’s name is McDonald.
The “proud parent” really should be labeled “SAF“. But since the cartoon was drawn many years ago with a completely different intention they can’t really be faulted for that particular error.
The intent, of course, was to claim the NRA has no limits as to who may own and use a gun.
We are practical guys. We don’t want to win on philosophy and lose on freedom. The end question is, can law-abiding men and women go out and buy and own a firearm? Today the Supreme Court said yes – anywhere they live!
This decision cannot lead to different measures of freedom, depending on what part of the country you live in. City by city, person by person, this decision must be more than a philosophical victory. An individual right is no right at all if individuals can’t access it. Proof of Heller and McDonald will be law abiding citizens, one by one, purchasing and owning firearms.
The NRA will work to ensure this constitutional victory is not transformed into a practical defeat by activist judges, defiant city councils, or cynical politicians who seek to pervert, reverse, or nullify the Supreme Court’s McDonald decision through Byzantine labyrinths of restrictions and regulations that render the Second Amendment inaccessible, unaffordable, or otherwise impossible to experience in a practical, reasonable way.
What good is a right without the gun? What good is the right if you can’t buy one? Or keep one in your home? Or protect your family with one?
Here’s a piece of paper – protect yourself. That’s no right at all!
Victory is when law abiding men and women can get up, go out, and buy and own a firearm. This is a monumental day. But NRA will not rest until every law-abiding American citizen is able to exercise the individual right to buy and own a firearm for self defense or any other lawful purpose.
Wayne LaPierre
June 28, 2010
Statement by Wayne LaPierre Executive Vice President, NRA and Chris W. Cox Executive Director, NRA-ILA Regarding U.S. Supreme Court Decision McDonald v. City of Chicago.
[SAF also has a statement. Tomorrow’s QOTD will come from it.
Expect the NRA and SAF to be racing to file cases within minutes or at most hours, from now. I’m placing my money, literally, on SAF.–Joe]
log post on today’s Supreme Court ruling: http://wwwtoecheesecom.blo