SCOTUS Takes the Case!

I’m not feeling much better today, but I thought this was too important to let slip by. -Yuri

UPDATE: Moments after I posted this, the Brady’s sent me an email wanting more money. They’re clearly worried about this case and the effect it will have on gun bans and gun control laws nationwide. Follow me in giving a donation to your favorite gun rights organization!

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High Court to Hear D.C. Gun Ban Case

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 20, 2007; 1:08 PM

The Supreme Court announced today that it will decide whether the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns violates the Constitution, a choice that will put the justices at the center of the controversy over the meaning of the Second Amendment for the first time in nearly 70 years.

The court’s decision could have broad implications for gun-control measures locally and across the country, and will raise a hotly contested political issue just in time for the 2008 elections.

The court will hear the case after the first of the year. A decision likely would come before it adjourns at the end of June.

For years, legal scholars, historians and grammarians have debated the meaning of the amendment because of its enigmatic wording and odd punctuation:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Gun rights proponents say the words guarantee the right of an individual to possess firearms. Gun-control supporters say it conveys only a civic or “collective” right to own guns as part of service in an organized military organization.

The court’s last examination of the amendment was in 1939, when it ruled in United States v. Miller that a sawed-off shotgun transported across state lines by a bootlegger was not what the amendment’s authors had in mind when they were protecting arms needed for military service.

Since then, almost all of the nation’s courts of appeal have read the ruling to mean the amendment conveys only a collective right to gun ownership. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit broke ranks last spring, becoming the first to strike down a gun-control law on Second Amendment grounds.

A panel of three Republican-appointed judges voted 2-1 that the amendment “protects an individual right to keep and bear arms” and that “once it is determined — as we have done — that handguns are ‘Arms’ referred to in the Second Amendment, it is not open to the District to ban them.”

The District law, enacted in 1976, soon after the city won home rule, is one of the toughest in the nation. It prohibits residents from registering and possessing handguns in almost all circumstances. The District also requires that rifles and other long guns kept in the home be unloaded and disassembled or outfitted with trigger locks. The court struck down that law as well, saying it rendered the right to possess such a weapon for self-defense virtually useless.

It is unusual that both the losing party and the winners of that decision asked the court to consider the case. But Robert A. Levy, a wealthy entrepreneur and lawyer who is also a scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, has worked for years to bring the matter to the Supreme Court.

He and others, including co-counsel Clark M. Neily III and Alan Gura, assembled six D.C. residents to challenge the District ban. Their idea was to present the courts with law-abiding plaintiffs who wanted the weapons for self-defense rather than people appealing criminal convictions for possessing weapons.

A federal district judge ruled against the residents, but the appeals court overturned that decision in a strongly worded opinion written by conservative Senior Judge Laurence H. Silberman.

The District argued in its petition to the Supreme Court that the decision “drastically departs from the mainstream of American jurisprudence.”

The petition filed by District Attorney General Linda Singer said the appeals court was wrong for three reasons: because it recognized an individual rather than collective right; because the Second Amendment serves as a restriction only on federal interference with state-regulated militias and state-recognized gun rights; and because the District is within its rights to protect its citizens by banning a certain type of gun.

“It is eminently reasonable to permit private ownership of other types of weapons, including shotguns and rifles, but ban the easily concealed and uniquely dangerous modern handgun,” said the petition. “Whatever right the Second Amendment guarantees, it does not require the District to stand by while its citizens die.” (There’s irony for ya! -Yuri)

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Another One Down!

Following the lead of Barrett (also), STI has now decided to stop selling anything to the state of California. As many of you already know, California recently brought out their “Microstamping” law. The following is from Dave Skinner, STI’s Commander-In-Chief.

On the “flip side” of states? laws, we have California! As you know, we let all of our DOJ listings lapse several years ago. We also stopped selling to CA law enforcement agencies in the same time frame. We did, however, continue selling to individual officers, who could get their agency to approve, for (IPSC, IDPA, etc.) sporting purposes. Now we have more even MORE onerous restrictions on the general populace? No more! We?re sorry! We?re done! No guns! Nobody! ?Nuff said!

Thanks to Larry Correia for the tip.

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Cool Toon

From Kevin Tuma

Click picture for a larger version. Found via Blogonomicon.

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It’s that time of year again…

I can’t bring myself to post much today, on this day when over 3,000 innocent people were murdered six years ago. Every year at this time I get depressed, I can’t help it.

It’s been six years now, and the sociopath responsible is still alive. I would personally end his miserable existence if given the opportunity, but let’s face it, that’s not likely to happen.

In the meantime, others with the same psychopathic hatred and disregard for human life run about doing his bidding. Yet in the face of this, there are some who would still have us disarmed in the face of death. Never mind the everyday threat to life and property from the criminal element, we have these nuts to worry about too. …and still they stick their heads in the sand and pretend they can’t hear reason.

We’re in for a long fight ladies and gentlemen, and it’s not going to end unless we’re victorious, or we surrender and convert. Funny how the same people who want to disarm me are the same people fighting for our destruction, praying for a defeat to suit their political goals.

Anyway… This will be the last post today. I’m going to take my kids out to the park while it’s still warm and sunny. Perhaps things will start to look better.

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OMG! Someone in Britain Gets It!

Wouldn’t you feel safer with a gun?
British attitudes are supercilious and misguided
Richard Munday

Despite the recent spate of shootings on our streets, we pride ourselves on our strict gun laws. Every time an American gunman goes on a killing spree, we shake our heads in righteous disbelief at our poor benighted colonial cousins. Why is it, even after the Virginia Tech massacre, that Americans still resist calls for more gun controls?

The short answer is that “gun controls” do not work: they are indeed generally perverse in their effects. Virginia Tech, where 32 students were shot in April, had a strict gun ban policy and only last year successfully resisted a legal challenge that would have allowed the carrying of licensed defensive weapons on campus. It is with a measure of bitter irony that we recall Thomas Jefferson, founder of the University of Virginia, recording the words of Cesare Beccaria: “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

One might contrast the Virginia Tech massacre with the assault on Virginia’s Appalachian Law School in 2002, where three lives were lost before a student fetched a pistol from his car and apprehended the gunman.

Virginia Tech reinforced the lesson that gun controls are obeyed only by the law-abiding. New York has “banned” pistols since 1911, and its fellow murder capitals, Washington DC and Chicago, have similar bans. One can draw a map of the US, showing the inverse relationship of the strictness of its gun laws, and levels of violence: all the way down to Vermont, with no gun laws at all, and the lowest level of armed violence (one thirteenth that of Britain).

America’s disenchantment with “gun control” is based on experience: whereas in the 1960s and 1970s armed crime rose in the face of more restrictive gun laws (in much of the US, it was illegal to possess a firearm away from the home or workplace), over the past 20 years all violent crime has dropped dramatically, in lockstep with the spread of laws allowing the carrying of concealed weapons by law-abiding citizens. Florida set this trend in 1987, and within five years the states that had followed its example showed an 8 per cent reduction in murders, 7 per cent reduction in aggravated assaults, and 5 per cent reduction in rapes. Today 40 states have such laws, and by 2004 the US Bureau of Justice reported that “firearms-related crime has plummeted”.
In Britain, however, the image of violent America remains unassailably entrenched. Never mind the findings of the International Crime Victims Survey (published by the Home Office in 2003), indicating that we now suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United States; never mind the doubling of handgun crime in Britain over the past decade, since we banned pistols outright and confiscated all the legal ones.

We are so self-congratulatory about our officially disarmed society, and so dismissive of colonial rednecks, that we have forgotten that within living memory British citizens could buy any gun – rifle, pistol, or machinegun – without any licence. When Dr Watson walked the streets of London with a revolver in his pocket, he was a perfectly ordinary Victorian or Edwardian. Charlotte Brontë recalled that her curate father fastened his watch and pocketed his pistol every morning when he got dressed; Beatrix Potter remarked on a Yorkshire country hotel where only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver; in 1909, policemen in Tottenham borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by (and were joined by other armed citizens) when they set off in pursuit of two anarchists unwise enough to attempt an armed robbery. We now are shocked that so many ordinary people should have been carrying guns in the street; the Edwardians were shocked rather by the idea of an armed robbery.

If armed crime in London in the years before the First World War amounted to less than 2 per cent of that we suffer today, it was not simply because society then was more stable. Edwardian Britain was rocked by a series of massive strikes in which lives were lost and troops deployed, and suffragette incendiaries, anarchist bombers, Fenians, and the spectre of a revolutionary general strike made Britain then arguably a much more turbulent place than it is today. In that unstable society the impact of the widespread carrying of arms was not inflammatory, it was deterrent of violence.

As late as 1951, self-defence was the justification of three quarters of all applications for pistol licences. And in the years 1946-51 armed robbery, the most significant measure of gun crime, ran at less than two dozen incidents a year in London; today, in our disarmed society, we suffer as many every week.

Gun controls disarm only the law-abiding, and leave predators with a freer hand. Nearly two and a half million people now fall victim to crimes of violence in Britain every year, more than four every minute: crimes that may devastate lives. It is perhaps a privilege of those who have never had to confront violence to disparage the power to resist.

Richard Munday is editor and co-author of Guns & Violence: the Debate Before Lord Cullen

Thanks to Alphecca.

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The Brady Campaign…the Criminal’s Best Friend

In actuality, this could apply to any of the anti-freedom groups out there. They say “We don’t want to ban your guns!” and then work actively to ban them and defend gun bans already in existence. They say, “We need sensible (common sense) gun laws!” while backing feel good legislation that does nothing to help crime and does more to hurt the law abiding gun owners. We have 20,000+ gun laws in this country already, if that many gun laws haven’t solved the problem, then what makes them think another one will have any more effect?

Criminals laugh at gun laws, plain and simple. They routinely break the law as it is, so why should they care about one more? The criminals will be armed, that is a fact. Even in the “gun free Utopia” of England and Australia, criminals seem to have an inexhaustible supply of firearms available to them. It’s no surprise to me and others like me that the violent crime level went up shortly after the law abiding citizens were forcibly disarmed.

Criminals prefer unarmed victims. In an interview with John Stossel, which was broadcast on nation wide TV, inmates openly admitted they chose victims who they thought would be unarmed. They admitted liking gun control laws because it made their job easier, and boasted how easy it was for them to get a gun if they wanted to. Criminals don’t buy their guns at the local Wal-mart or gun store, and as a result, they don’t have to pass a background check; it’s simply ‘cash & carry’ for them.

So as the anti-rights groups keep pounding away at our second amendment freedoms, all they are doing is empowering the criminal element. Is this really what they want to do? Probably not, but it makes you wonder. I’m sure there are some wonderful, but misguided people who are anti-gun. The problem is, they are so invested in their beliefs that no amount of “Reasoned Discourse” will ever change their minds. When someone presents facts that disprove their closely cherished world view, they just stick their fingers in their ears and say “lalalalalalalala - I can’t hear you!” Case in point, Paul Helmke and Robyn Ringler. They couldn’t take the heat, so they closed comments on their blogs. This does nothing to stop people with facts from disagreeing with them, but it means they don’t have to hear it.

I will never delete a comment just because the commenter disagrees with me, but I will not stand for personal attacks or rudeness. Luckily I’ve been troll free to this point, but just in case, that is my policy.

In Sarah Brady’s Utopian fantasy, guns have been banned, pure and simple. If she and her cohorts were honest with the American public they would admit this. And in this Utopian future, while you and I are disarmed and left to our own devices, the criminals will still have their weapons… Like sheep to the slaughter. Like I said before…

Criminals prefer unarmed victims!

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More on the "English Experiment"

Weapons sell for just £50 as suspects and victims grow ever younger
Richard Ford, Home Correspondent and Philip Webster, Political Editor

Senior police officers have been warning for several months that a growing number of teenagers in big cities are becoming involved in gun crime.

The age of victims and suspects has fallen over the past three years as the availability of firearms in some cities has risen. Liverpool and Manchester are the cities where illegal guns are most readily available, with criminals claiming that some weapons are being smuggled from Ireland. Sawn-off shotguns are now being sold for as little as £50, and handguns for £150.

Despite a ban on handguns introduced in 1997 after 16 children and their teacher were shot dead in the Dunblane massacre the previous year, their use in crimes has almost doubled to reach 4,671 in 2005-06. Official figures show that although Britain has some of the toughest anti-gun laws in the world, firearm use in crime has risen steadily. This year eight young people have been killed in gun attacks: six in London and one each in Manchester and Liverpool.

“Illegal firearms have become increasingly accessible to younger offenders who appear more likely to use these firearms recklessly,” a report on gun crime commissioned by the Home Office cautioned last year.

The research supports warnings from police chiefs in Merseyside and London about the spread of gun use in gangs and among teenagers.

Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Chief Constable of Merseyside, said this year that although gun crime in the area had fallen there had been an increase in the number of teenagers involved in firearms crimes.

Figures from the Metropolitan Police show that the average age of gun crime victims in London fell from 24 to 19 between 2004-06 and that there was a similar trend among suspects charged in connection with shootings.

Mr Hogan-Howe said that youths were being protected by a wall of silence, and he demanded a new law to compel the public to give information about gun crime. He said that action must be taken to break down the power base of families involved in gun crime. “Families who do nothing to stop their children’s involvement in gun crime put society at risk and could find themselves identifying their child in the morgue,” he said.

The Home Office research highlighted how guns were an integral part of a gang culture in which guns were used to deal with disputes. “In the context of firearm ownership, even quite trivial disputes may result in shootings as the presence of guns elevates threat levels and the so-called ‘shoot or be shot’ scenario precipitates pre-emptive violence,” the study said.

Policies to help to deal with the problem were considered at a scheduled No 10 summit yesterday, chaired by Gordon Brown and attended by Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, Beverley Hughes, the Children’s Minister, Lord Hunt, the Justice Minister, as well as police chiefs and local government leaders.

It was the first of a series of meetings to tackle the issue. Mandatory minimum jail sentences for carrying knives and requiring people to give information if they are aware that people have illegal weapons are among the ideas under discussion. Mrs Smith has asked the Serious Organised Crime Agency to look atways to curb the importation of illegal weapons.

After the 90-minute meeting, the Prime Minister said: “Make no mistake about this — the people responsible will be tracked down, they will be arrested and they will be punished.” He said that the Home Office would be earmarking ten areas for an intensive campaign against gun and knife crime. The areas will be announced next week.

Mr Brown added that families would be offered greater support. “The vast majority of young people are decent and law-abiding. They too want to feel safe and secure on our streets. Where there’s a need for early intervention, we will work very intensively with those families so that young people are deterred from going into gangs and guns and knife crime,” he said.

Mrs Smith has outlined a range of measures, including the increased use of Acceptable Behaviour Contracts and a crackdown on the sale of alcohol to under-age children. The Government has issued guidance to police and local authorities on how to use the contracts — written pledges to improve behaviour — effectively.

David Cameron said that social breakdown would be the central theme of the Conservative election manifesto. Sir Menzies Campbell, leader of the Liberal Democrats, called for a “change of atmosphere” in communities with gang violence, but said that there was “no simple solution”.

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Calls For Gun Bans

“Opponents of gun restrictions often argue that even seemingly modest restrictions are the first step towards total bans on all guns or all handguns.

Some proponents of gun restrictions mock this: No-one is talking about gun bans, they say — the slippery slope concern is groundless. In the words of Martin Dyckman, associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times (Dec. 12, 1993, at 3D), “no one is seriously proposing to ban or confiscate all guns. You hear that only from the gun lobby itself, which whistles up this bogeyman whenever some reasonable regulation is proposed.”

Who is right here? Is it true that no-one is seriously proposing broad gun bans? Is it true that the slippery slope concern is just a bogeyman? Here are a few relevant quotes on this point. (All of them have been verified by me, Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law, UCLA Law School, with help from our excellent law library.)

1. Quotes from gun control proponents praising the slippery slope, and urging mild restrictions as steps toward a total ban.

2. Citations to laws that in fact ban all guns or all handguns.

3. Quotes from politicians urging gun bans.

4. Quotes from leading media figures and institutions urging gun bans.

5. Quotes from advocacy groups urging gun bans.

These are of course only a subset of all the material that’s available.”

The whole document can be found here, I strongly urge you read it and bookmark it for later reference.

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San Francisco gets even more irrelevant.

Supervisors approve tough gun measure

Wyatt Buchanan, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

San Francisco’s already tough laws on firearms will get even stronger — becoming some of the most restrictive in the country — after a vote at City Hall Tuesday. But even new restrictions won’t do much to stop the gun violence escalating on city streets, one sponsor of the new laws said after the vote.

The violence that has been generally confined to more crime-plagued neighborhoods crossed into a major tourist area Monday afternoon, with a shooting that left one person dead and put bullet holes through the front window of a popular restaurant.

Gun-related homicides, injuries from shootings, and gun crimes in and around schools are becoming increasingly common, according to the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.

The laws — which gained final approval from the Board of Supervisors — would restrict both the sale and possession of firearms.

Specifically, they would prohibit the possession or sale of firearms on city property, require firearms in residences to be in a locked container or have trigger locks and require firearm dealers to submit an inventory to the chief of police every six months.

The last provision is intended to allow city officials to know how many guns are sold, though there is only one gun shop in the city.

“We’re pleased that, as soon as the mayor signs this, San Francisco has the strongest anti-gun laws in the nation,” said Nathan Ballard, spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom. The mayor sponsored the legislation, along with Supervisors Sophie Maxwell and Ross Mirkarimi.

Despite the laws, however, Mirkarimi said he doubts they will quell the kind of violence that erupted on Monday afternoon, which police suspect may be tied to a feud between a San Francisco gang and an East Bay gang.

The shooting happened at the corner of Ellis and Cyril Magnin streets, across from the Hilton hotel and near the Powell Street cable car turnaround.

“Nobody should be surprised about the migration and proliferation of gun violence in San Francisco,” Mirkarimi said. “We’ve been saying this for two-and-a-half years, that the murders, homicides and gun violence that have been occurring in the more routine areas … have now migrated into other areas.”

The number of shootings resulting in nonfatal injuries continues to rise, with 269 such incidents in 2005 and 303 in 2006. As of May 10 of this year, there were 105.

Supervisor Maxwell said the new restrictions, which passed 8-3, are separate issues from the violence in the streets. Supervisors Aaron Peskin, Chris Daly and Ed Jew voted “no.”

While the mayor has praised these new restrictions, he only expressed tepid support for Proposition H in 2005, which would have required gun owners to surrender their weapons to police and would have made it illegal to buy and sell firearms and ammunition in the city.

Voters passed the proposition with 58 percent in favor, but it is tied up in court after the National Rifle Association challenged its constitutionality. Newsom said the vote amounted to a “public opinion poll.”

The gun owners association did not return a call for comment on the new restrictions Tuesday afternoon.

Peskin said he didn’t support the laws because he believes they will have no impact.

“It is silly feel-good legislation with no teeth,” Peskin said.

Daly has questioned Newsom’s commitment to gun control, noting that the mayor wasn’t a strong backer of Prop. H, which Daly sponsored.

Jew said sufficient laws already are in place and he questioned the further use of city resources on the issue in the wake of challenges to Prop.

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Where Gun Registration and Banning Lead!

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