Here we go again!

Apparently Washington D.C. has a reading comprehension problem.

Assuming he is not disqualified from exercising Second Amendment rights, the District must permit Heller to register his handgun and must issue him a license to carry it in the home.

DC Rejects Handgun Application

WASHINGTON (WUSA) — District residents can start registering their guns today. But at least one very high profile application was already rejected.

Dick Heller is the man who brought the lawsuit against the District’s 32-year-old ban on handguns. He was among the first in line Thursday morning to apply for a handgun permit.

But when he tried to register his semi-automatic weapon, he says he was rejected. He says his gun has seven bullet clip. Heller says the City Council legislation allows weapons with fewer than eleven bullets in the clip. A spokesman for the DC Police says the gun was a bottom-loading weapon, and according to their interpretation, all bottom-loading guns are outlawed because they are grouped with machine guns.

Besides obtaining paperwork to buy new handguns, residents also can register firearms they’ve had illegally under a 180-day amnesty period.

Though residents will be allowed to begin applying for handgun permits, city officials have said the entire process could take weeks or months.

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D.C. Gun Registration

From the Examiner:

D.C. police start the gun registration process on Thursday as an 180-day amnesty period opens.

The amnesty period allows residents to register handguns they have had illegally, or guns from other states.

The police department opens an office to handle registrations at 7 a.m. Thursday at police headquarters at 300 Indiana Avenue northwest.

Officers will take temporary possession of guns to tag them and conduct ballistics tests.

Guns will be returned to owners and they’ll get paperwork indicating that registration is in process. After an FBI background check, about 14 days, the guns will be officially registered.

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Meet the new boss…

…same as the old boss!

Apparently the D.C. City Council and Mayor Fenty just can’t help themselves when it comes to their gun ban. Didn’t these fools learn anything from their SCOTUS smack down?

I smell a lawsuit coming…

The gun bill establishes regulations for residents to keep handguns in their homes legally to comply with last month’s historic Supreme Court decision that found the city’s 32-year prohibition of handguns unconstitutional.

City leaders say the legislation goes as far as it can on gun regulations while respecting the high court’s ruling. Weapons must be unloaded, disassembled or trigger-locked, except when there is a “threat of immediate harm to a person” in the home.

The legislation also requires that guns remain inside homes. It requires eye and written exams for gun owners, and ballistics tests conducted by police.

Opponents of the gun ban say the new legislation and the city’s continued prohibition of semiautomatic weapons are not in accordance with the high court’s decision. Fenty (D) and council members, presenting a unified front on the gun ban, say they are prepared for lawsuits.

Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), chairman of the Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary and one of the mayor’s most vocal critics, said he and the administration collaborated on the legislation.

“I want to commend my partners on the Council for their swift, sensible action on our gun laws today,” Fenty said in a statement yesterday in which he singled out Mendelson’s leadership. “None of us wanted this bill to be necessary. But I think we have struck the right balance between honoring the Supreme Court’s Heller decision and protecting the safety of our residents.”

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Heck yeah!

Read the whole editorial here:

Among the Bill of Rights were such assurances that Americans were free to speak and pray unfettered, to own guns, to bar intruders from their homes, to not testify against themselves, to received an informed, speedy trial by a jury of peers, to receive a reasonable sentencing, and freedom from anything not otherwise listed. Oh yeah, the states were free, too.

Free from whom? The federal government. Future laws could not encroach on these individual freedoms.

It is illogical that Madison would embed an item to further empower the government in his list of items to empower the people against that very government. Yet that must be the belief of four dissenting Justices who presumably think the Second Amendment is about the right of America to have a National Guard. To the contrary, many founding fathers feared a standing peacetime army of any kind. It might abuse its power.

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Limiting Rights

Excerpt from The Salt Lake Tribune:

Having met a fair number of gun-rights advocates in 30 years of covering hunting and shooting, I know many feel that any restriction - registration, bans on assault rifles, waiting periods, trigger-lock requirements or concealed-weapons laws - is unconstitutional.But there are limits on all rights. As a journalist, I know the importance of freedom of the press, but I can’t be irresponsible with it. That’s why, for example, there are libel laws. Using that same argument, some firearm restrictions seem appropriate, a fact the Supreme Court recognized in its decision. In most places in the Salt Lake Valley, it is illegal to discharge a firearm. It is illegal for me to allow my kids or grandkids to use a BB gun or pellet rifle for target practice in my backyard. The Division of Wildlife Resources requires hunters to take an education class that emphasizes gun safety before issuing them a hunting license. The agency does not allow high-powered rifles to be used in crowded Wasatch Front canyons. It’s also illegal for hunters to carry loaded rifles in their trucks or on their ATVs.

In each of those instances, safety considerations should be more important than gun rights. But I suspect that some gun-rights advocates might disagree.

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An English twit mourns the Heller ruling

Commentary from a whiny elitist twit British subject living in America. Something which irks me too is his capitalization of the words militia and arms in the 2nd amendment. Apparently people having rights is something foreign to him.

Here’s an excerpt:

“You can live in a country for more than a dozen years. You can marry one of its citizens, and watch your son grow up to be one of its citizens. Yet on occasion, here in the United States, I still feel like an alien from the opposite end of the universe.

This week provided one of those moments, when the Supreme Court threw out the District of Columbia’s 32-year ban on handgun ownership, ruling in the process that the second amendment of the country’s constitution guaranteed the right of every American to possess firearms.

A statement of the blindingly obvious, you might think, given that the gun population of the US is not far short of its 300 million human one. But that did not prevent this affirmation of the status quo being trumpeted by leading newspapers, with headlines of the size normally reserved for terrorist attacks and presidential election results.

The majority and dissenting opinions in the 5-4 decision, and the shifts from the nine-man court’s previous pronouncements on the issue, have been parsed and dissected with the zeal classics masters from my schooldays used to apply to the finer points of Greek grammar. And, it must be said, not without reason.

The crux of the debate is in the language of the amendment, second of the 10 that form America’s bill of rights, that noblest of charters of basic human rights, but also perhaps the most picked-over body of words on the planet.

It reads as follows: “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.” Try disentangling that one, and its idiosyncratic use of commas that would have appalled my classics master had the text been written in the language of Demosthenes. How exactly are the thoughts of statesmen of the late 18th century to be divined and applied to gun control in the first decade of the 21st? Previously, the court has upheld ownership of firearms as a collective right – in the context of those citizen militias who 220 years ago were a safeguard against any attempt by Britain to regain the colonies that had the cheek to fight for, and win, their independence.”

He goes on to blame George Bush for SCOTUS ruling in favor of individual Rights and hopes that Barack Obama will be elected and change the makeup of the court so this won’t happen in the future.

No wonder we kicked their asses out of our country more than two hundred years ago!

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Sour Grapes from Arthur Kellerman

Yes, that Arthur Kellerman. Author of the flawed and much discredited study. The one who said:

“If you’ve got to resist, you’re chances of being hurt are less the more lethal your weapon. If that were my wife, would I want her to have a .38 Special in her hand? Yeah.””

The one whose study said a handgun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than a criminal. Of the 43 deaths reported in his flawed study, 37 (86%) were suicides. Other deaths involved criminal activity between the family members (drug deals gone bad).

Kellerman admits that his study did “not include cases in which burglars or intruders are wounded or frightened away by the use or display of a firearm.” He also admitted his study did not look at situations in which intruders “purposely avoided a home known to be armed.” This is a classic case of a “study” conducted to achieve a desired result. In his critique of this “study”, Gary Kleck notes that the estimation of gun ownership rates were “inaccurate” , and that the total population came from a non-random selection of only two cities.

Source: Gunfacts

Guns for Safety? Dream On, Scalia.

The Supreme Court has spoken: Thanks to the court’s blockbuster 5 to 4 decision Thursday, Washingtonians now have the right to own a gun for self-defense. I leave the law to lawyers, but the public health lesson is crystal clear: The legal ruling that the District’s citizens can keep loaded handguns in their homes doesn’t mean that they should.

In his majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia explicitly endorsed the wisdom of keeping a handgun in the home for self-defense. Such a weapon, he wrote, “is easier to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency; it cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is easier to use for those without the upper-body strength to lift and aim a long rifle; it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police.” But Scalia ignored a substantial body of public health research that contradicts his assertions. A number of scientific studies, published in the world’s most rigorous, peer-reviewed journals, show that the risks of keeping a loaded gun in the home strongly outweigh the potential benefits.

In the real world, Scalia’s scenario — an armed assailant breaks into your home, and you shoot or scare away the bad guy with your handy handgun — happens pretty infrequently. Statistically speaking, these rare success stories are dwarfed by tragedies. The reason is simple: A gun kept loaded and readily available for protection may also be reached by a curious child, an angry spouse or a depressed teen.

More than 20 years ago, I conducted a study of firearm-related deaths in homes in Seattle and surrounding King County, Washington. Over the study’s seven-year interval, more than half of all fatal shootings in the county took place in the home where the firearm involved was kept. Just nine of those shootings were legally justifiable homicides or acts of self-defense; guns kept in homes were also involved in 12 accidental deaths, 41 criminal homicides and a shocking 333 suicides. A subsequent study conducted in three U.S. cities found that guns kept in the home were 12 times more likely to be involved in the death or injury of a member of the household than in the killing or wounding of a bad guy in self-defense.

Oh, one more thing: Scalia’s ludicrous vision of a little old lady clutching a handgun in one hand while dialing 911 with the other (try it sometime) doesn’t fit the facts. According to the Justice Department, far more guns are lost each year to burglary or theft than are used to defend people or property. In Atlanta, a city where approximately a third of households contain guns, a study of 197 home-invasion crimes revealed only three instances (1.5 percent) in which the inhabitants resisted with a gun. Intruders got to the homeowner’s gun twice as often as the homeowner did.

The court has spoken, but citizens and lawmakers should base future gun-control decisions — both personal and political — on something more substantive than Scalia’s glib opinion.

– Arthur Kellermann, a professor of emergency medicine and public health at Emory University

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Judge tells woman buy a gun and learn how to use it

Judge Advises Crime Victim To Arm Herself After Attack

General Sessions Court Judge Bob Moon said Friday that crime in Chattanooga “has become so rampant that it is no longer possible for the police department to protect our citizens.“

He told a woman who had been pulled from her car and beaten in the head that she or her mother needed to “purchase a weapon, obtain a gun permit and learn to protect yourself.” The woman moved back in with her mother after the May 4 incident on E. 17th Street.

Judge Moon said, “The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that all citizens have a right to purchase a weapon to defend themselves, their families and their homes - unless there is some disqualification that prevents them from owning a weapon.”

He said, “All area of our city are subject to crime, and some areas have very high crime rates and need to be ‘overpoliced.’”

Judge Moon said Coolidge Park is one area that needs to be “overpoliced.” He said, “I frequently hear of break-ins, thefts and robberies to tourists and citizens in that area. Having a high police presence there is one way you are going to abate it.”

Judge Moon raised the bond for Dewayne Beard from $65,000 to $130,000 on especially aggravated robbery and from $15,000 to $50,000 on theft. He bound both cases to the Grand Jury.

The woman said she was driving on E. 17th Street when Beard came riding up on a bicycle and pulled a gold handgun on her. When she refused to get out of the car, he began hitting her in the head with the gun.

He then pulled her out and drove off with her gold 2001 Toyota Corolla.

Police found the woman semi-conscious with severe head injuries. She had to have eight stitches in her head and 10 stitches in her leg, where she was also hit.

Police located Beard at 4724 Tomahawk Dr. and arrested him as he walked out of the residence. He told officers the stolen car was being driven “by one of my goons.”

Officers located the vehicle a couple of blocks away on Bella Vista Drive. Blood was found inside the vehicle, and the woman’s purse was also inside.

Beard said he threw the gun out of the window while driving through Highland Park.

Beard was allowed out on an OR bond when the case was not ready for a hearing within 10 days.

On May 31, he picked up new charges of aggravated rape and aggravated burglary.

A woman said she was lying nude in her bed and a man began performing a sex act on her. She said when the man then began having sex with her using a condom, she realized it was not her boyfriend.

She said she pulled the sheets up and saw it was Beard.

That case was bound to the Grand Jury earlier.

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Run Obama, Run!

Run away from your record on gun rights!

Barack Obama who maintained a lengthy relationship with a racist “minister,”cosponsored a bill to limit handgun purchases to one a month. He voted against allowing people to violate local weapons bans in cases of self-defense .Source: The Improbable Quest, by John K. Wilson, p.148 Oct 30, 2007.

“I am consistently on record and will continue to be on record as opposing concealed carry.”
Source: From Promise to Power, by David Mendell, p.250-251 Aug 14, 2007

Obama also has maintained close ties and received extensive financial support from Tony Rezko.

Principles that Obama supports on gun issues:
Ban the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons.
Increase state restrictions on the purchase and possession of firearms.
Require manufacturers to provide child-safety locks with firearms.
Source: 1998 IL State Legislative National Political Awareness Test July 2, 1998

“The second area which may be fought by the NRA, but I think has to be looked at is the availability of 19-round clips. I’m a strong believer in the rights of hunters and sportsmen to have firearms. I’m a believe in homeowners having a firearms to protect their home and their family. It’s hard for me to find a rationale for a 19-clip semi-automatic. “

Obama said this about small town gun owners:

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

(shamelessly stolen from The Oregon Firearms Federation)

In 2007 Obama’s campaign said:

“Obama believes the D.C. handgun law is constitutional.”

Today he had this to say:

“I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through common-sense, effective safety measures. The Supreme Court has now endorsed that view, and while it ruled that the D.C. gun ban went too far, Justice Scalia himself acknowledged that this right is not absolute and subject to reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe.  Today’s ruling, the first clear statement on this issue in 127 years, will provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.

As President, I will uphold the constitutional rights of law-abiding gun-owners, hunters, and sportsmen. I know that what works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne. We can work together to enact common-sense laws, like closing the gun show loophole and improving our background check system, so that guns do not fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals. Today’s decision reinforces that if we act responsibly, we can both protect the constitutional right to bear arms and keep our communities and our children safe.”

So the 2nd amendment doesn’t apply to all American’s equally? Are some of us more equal than others? Enquiring minds want to know.

Perhaps he’d also like use to forget his ties to the anti-rights Joyce Foundation?

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign has worked to assure uneasy gun owners that he believes the Constitution protects their rights and that he doesn’t want to take away their guns.

But before he became a national political figure, he sat on the board of a Chicago-based foundation that doled out at least nine grants totaling nearly $2.7 million to groups that advocated the opposite positions.

The foundation funded legal scholarship advancing the theory that the Second Amendment does not protect individual gun owners’ rights, as well as two groups that advocated handgun bans. And it paid to support a book called “Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns.”

Obama’s eight years on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which paid him more than $70,000 in directors fees, do not in any way conflict with his campaign-trail support for the rights of gun owners, Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Obama’s presidential campaign, asserted in a statement issued to Politico this week.

LaBolt stressed that the foundation, which has assets of about $935 million, doesn’t take “detailed policy positions,” but rather uses its grants to “fuel a dialogue about how to address public policy issues like reducing gun violence.”

Run Obama, run from your record…but we won’t forget, even though you most certainly would like us to!

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Supreme Court rules in favor of “Individual Right”

We won! Mostly…

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States, today issued a ruling, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, that the 2nd amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear a firearm. The ruling can be downloaded here.

From SCOTUSblog:

Answering a 127-year old constitutional question, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to have a gun, at least in one’s home. The Court, splitting 5-4, struck down a District of Columbia ban on handgun possession.  Although times have changed since 1791, Justice Antonin Scalia said for the majority, “it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.”

Examining the words of the Amendment, the Court concluded “we find they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weaons in case of confrontation” — in other words, for self-defense. “The inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right,” it added.

The individual right interpretation, the Court said, ”is strongly confirmed by the historical background of the Second Amendment,” going back to 17th Century England, as well as by gun rights laws in the states before and immediately after the Amendment was put into the U.S. Constitution.

What Congress did in drafting the Amendment, the Court said, was “to codify a pre-existing right, rather than to fashion a new one.”

The decision however left the door open for registration and licsensing, and banning unusually dangerous weapons (whatever they might be) and did not abrogate the prohibition on carrying weapons in schools etc.  Likewise, felons and the mentally ill are still barred from owning a gun.

Justices Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Alito and Thomas ruled in favor of Heller, while Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg and Breyer came out in favor of D.C.’s gun ban, finding that the 2nd amendment is a “collective right.”

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