The Associated Press published a story yesterday about the likelihood that the US Supreme Court will take up the issue of gun ownership rights. From Yahoo news:
This is dangerous ground folks. No doubt about it, we have a very violent culture. Consider this dentist who got out of his car, in front of TV cameras, and assaulted a man and his sister, pushing her to the ground. He was arrested. When I lived in Marshfield, MO, I was driving down Interstate 44 when a man in a red pickup truck, ran a car off the road and into the median. We called it in, but he managed to evade police. Violence is not about guns anymore than rape is about sex. It is about power and control and we Americans have a serious problem.
I take a pretty strong, conservative stance on gun control and the rights of the people to own arms. I see no viable reason why we need conceal-and-carry laws, but I do see valid reasons why persons should be allowed to keep arms.
Amendment 2 of the Bill of Rights 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.”
The issue comes down to the interpretation of the law and if it applies to individuals or not. I really think an interpretation that limits an individual’s rights to own a firearm is revisionist history, but this is still a contested issue.
I do not pretend to have the answer to our violent ways. Sure, there are historical implications. we tend to act like cowboys, do we not? Most human cultures have had their share of violence and war and whatnot. We Americans are special in our anger. I think banning guns and scrubbing our children's literature is not the answer. In fact, I have a hypothesis that some of our attempts to curb our violence in children are actually fueling the fire. That's vague I know. I haven't thought it through yet so I do not want to publish more on those thoughts yet.
Opposing gun control is a strange stance for a typically left-leaner, I know. But as I have always maintained: I am a Demublican.
The justices are facing a decision about whether to hear an appeal from city officials in Washington, D.C., wanting to keep the capital's 31-year ban on handguns. A lower court struck down the ban as a violation of the Second Amendment rights of gun ownership.
This is dangerous ground folks. No doubt about it, we have a very violent culture. Consider this dentist who got out of his car, in front of TV cameras, and assaulted a man and his sister, pushing her to the ground. He was arrested. When I lived in Marshfield, MO, I was driving down Interstate 44 when a man in a red pickup truck, ran a car off the road and into the median. We called it in, but he managed to evade police. Violence is not about guns anymore than rape is about sex. It is about power and control and we Americans have a serious problem.
I take a pretty strong, conservative stance on gun control and the rights of the people to own arms. I see no viable reason why we need conceal-and-carry laws, but I do see valid reasons why persons should be allowed to keep arms.
Amendment 2 of the Bill of Rights 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.”
The issue comes down to the interpretation of the law and if it applies to individuals or not. I really think an interpretation that limits an individual’s rights to own a firearm is revisionist history, but this is still a contested issue.
I do not pretend to have the answer to our violent ways. Sure, there are historical implications. we tend to act like cowboys, do we not? Most human cultures have had their share of violence and war and whatnot. We Americans are special in our anger. I think banning guns and scrubbing our children's literature is not the answer. In fact, I have a hypothesis that some of our attempts to curb our violence in children are actually fueling the fire. That's vague I know. I haven't thought it through yet so I do not want to publish more on those thoughts yet.
Opposing gun control is a strange stance for a typically left-leaner, I know. But as I have always maintained: I am a Demublican.
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11 comments:
The ban is long overdue to be lifted. Kind of like the embargo on Cuban cigars.
Is your argument "guns don't kill people, people kill people?" I'm not being smart-alek, I really do want to know. I enjoy your thoughtful posts.
Sky Girl,
I think that simplifies the issue way to much. It's like saying that all liberals are pro-abortion. It's just too general a statement.
I do not think guns are the real issue. I think America has an anger problem and a problem with power that is somehow corrupting us and creating violence.
Beyond that, I really don't have the answer. I think this is a big issue and cannot be boiled down to a sound byte.
Does that make sense? I just hate that quote because it is so trite and simple. I wish I had more answers, but I don't. I just do not think that banning guns will fix what really ails us. There is something much more sinister at work.
Good question. Thanks for asking. What say you?
I don't see why folks need automatic hand guns and assault rifles with armor-piercing ammo. I would be for removing these from the hands of the populace at large. I guess I am for gun control rather than against it, though I have no problem with hunters.
It seems to me that fewer people want to engage in grusome hand-to-hand combat with other weapons than are willing to engage in the comparatively impersonal shooting of someone with a gun. Fatal violence could be reduced by removing some of the firearms.
I'd say more than "I'm with you Jack" but I don't think I can add more to your view.
I’ve thought about this issue of gun control and the right to bear arms. #1 the right to bear arms and own a gun is never going to be taken away, it’s in the Constitution and is therefore guaranteed and you’ll never get enough states to ratify an amendment, the gun nuts and gun lobby are too strong. So what to do…OK, let everyone buy a gun if they want.. no problem..
But I’m wondering why it is that the same regs that apply to my driving can not and have not been applied to gun ownership.. Examples:
#1… in my wallet I have a card that has my picture on it and says I can drive…why not the same for gun owners?
#2…I have to take a drivers test to get the card, to show I now how to drive…why not the same for gun owners?
#3…I have to take a test to show that I understand the rules of the road… why not the same for gun owners?
#4…I have to renew this license ever so often… why not the same for gun owners?
#5…I have to take an eye test to make sure I can see the road… why not the same for gun owners?
#6…when I abuse my rights of driving my car, I have my license taken away for a period of time… why not the same for gun owners?
#7…since there is no public transportation system in the U.S., I need my car to get to work…I don’t need a gun to do that…
#8…I can’t hide in the bushes with my car, or rob a convenience store with my car, I NEED my car, and yet I have more restrictions on my owning, or using a car that are applied to gun ownership…..WHY?
When the Constitution was written and the right to bear arms was added, the nation was very young and the world was very different, there were hordes of French, English, Spanish, and Indian troublemakers just waiting to pounce, and since there was no standing army as there is today, a militia was needed to guard our shores, hence everyone needed to be armed and ready to do battle against any possible invaders… Also there were no grocery stores on every corner, so a gun was a useful tool for getting the days dinner…I doubt very much if a shotgun or a 45 magnum will be very effective against an invading army that has AK47s, rocket launchers, battle tanks, jets and bombs…if people want to own guns, why not require them to store them at a police station or at a gun range, where they can check them out, for use in whatever LEGAL mayhem they would like to do…..
gt281:
The government does not have the power to say that you can own something, but that THEY will keep it under lock and key for you. That goes against democracy and capitalism. There is nothing free about that.
#1 Gun ownership is a Constitutional Right, driving is a privilege. Unless you have committed a felony and have lost your right to gun ownership, this right is protected. It is interesting that our capital, Washington D.C., is the murder capital of the U.S. and yet gun ownership is severely restricted and the last that I knew it has a large contingency of Military in the district but the populace is under house arrest "e.g. you can't go out safely at night - fear is your jailer"
#2 Driving is a privilege with understood penalties to pay for not following the rules.
The issue of photographs. Is it not interesting that those who wish to see the intrusive need for photographs for gun owners are the same ones who complain about the cameras in high crime areas to deter the crimes that the lack of gun ownership causes, complain about the intrusive nature of cameras on the stop light cameras and an endless list of other similar issues; yet when it comes to ascertain the validity of those who participate in the most sanctioned hallmark of our government, i.e. voting rights, the issue of required photo identification becomes a "by no means and a well not in this case" cry.
I see that gt281 likes Nazi marches, I now understand why he would want us to lock our guns at the government offices, i.e. police stations.
He wrote: "When the Constitution was written and the right to bear arms was added, the nation was very young and the world was very different, there were hordes of French, English, Spanish, and Indian troublemakers just waiting to pounce, . . ." Our government is still young compared to those enemies, both external and internal, who are still ready to pounce. He seems to have forgotten the attacks of September 11th, the constant incursions of the multi-national illegals who are crossing our borders, not just the southern but also the northern, those who have already entered and have settled in our community. Do not underestimate the potential for violence of the street gangs that are here. Not the wannabe gangs but the verifiable ruthless gangs that have settled in the town of Ozark,Springfield and other areas - the MS-13 and other Latin gangs.
As for shotguns, they were the most feared of weapons of the American soldier in Vietnam. The enemy will run against machine guns but they hesitate knowing a shotgun is in the scrap.
When we are attacked by tanks, rpg's etc. then the US Military has a right and obligation to mobilize in a military manner across our country other than that they can only function under civilian authority.
Google the use of weapon for the commission of crimes and you will find that the majority are committed with knives - just that guns are more sensational and those who have the agenda that is anti-gun ownership print only those stories. Unless there is a gory, bloody slashing then the knife is not reported. The knife is cheap, practically untraceable, silent and very concealable. It causes more fear with its appearance than a gun. It is closer and more personal.
". . .in high crime areas to deter the crimes that the lack of gun ownership causes."
There is no evidence that arming the general public reduces crime. Lack of gun ownership does not cause crimes.
My mistake in choice of words. ". . .in high crime areas to deter the crimes that the lack of gun ownership causes." It should have been better stated as "...that the lack of gun ownership may prevent."
As for "There is no evidence that arming the general public reduces crime." . . . Can Gun Control Reduce Crime? Part 1
by Benedict D. LaRosa
In the wake of the shootings at Columbine High School in April 1999 and other schools across the country, there has been a chorus calling for more gun-control measures to prevent similar incidents and to control crime in general. Setting aside the obvious emotional response that such tragedies always engender, is it realistic to expect that more gun-control laws will make our schools and streets safe? To answer that question, we need to understand the relationship between gun control and crime control.
The cry for gun control to solve crime problems, although not new, is finding greater acceptance today among Americans. Throughout most of our history, people armed themselves in response to increased danger from criminals, bandits, marauding Indians, invaders (British in 1814 and Pancho Villa in 1916), or abusive government (as in the case of the American Revolution and the Civil War), a move considered normal and rational until recently.
Today, there are numerous well-funded lobby groups, such as Handgun Control, Inc. (renamed the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in 2001), the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Million Mom March, that advocate the disarming of Americans as a means to prevent and reduce crime. These organizations use tragedies such as Columbine to focus public attention and influence public opinion in their favor.
At the opposite end of the gun-control spectrum are such organizations as the National Rifle Association, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, and Gun Owners of America, which believe that gun control is an ineffective crime-fighting tool.
Who is right? With the assumption that history is a better guide than good intentions, let’s consider the arguments pro and con and draw our own conclusions.
Despite thousands of gun laws at the federal, state, and local levels, gun-control advocates insist that guns are still too readily available. They point to statistics that indicate that violent crime is down since the Brady Law (February 1994) and the assault-weapon ban (September 1994) went into effect. For example, a 1999 study by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice, shows that violent juvenile crime by minors 10-17 years old was down 30 percent between 1994 and 1998, the lowest since 1988.
Gun-control proponents advocate everything from gun-free zones, waiting periods, background checks, limited-capacity magazines, safe-storage regulations, gun registration, owner licensing, and owner-only locks to banning firearms entirely from the hands of everyone but the military and police.
On the surface, it seems logical to conclude that making guns more difficult to obtain will keep them from the hands of some criminals. But what does the record of past gun-control measures show?
John Stossel reported correctly in the October 22, 1999, edition of ABC’s 20/20 that despite the headlines, schoolyard killings are down 50 percent since 1992. Gun-rights advocates point out that crime began declining two years before the Brady and assault-weapon laws went into effect, because of increased imprisonment rates and improved prosecution.
Gun-control advocates look at guns only as a means to harm others even though they are more often used to prevent injury. According to a 1995 study entitled “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun” by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, published by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology at Northwestern University School of Law, law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year.
That means that firearms are used 60 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to shoot with criminal intent. Of these defensive shootings, more than 200,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse. About half a million times a year, a citizen carrying a gun away from home uses it in self-defense. Again, according to Kleck amd Gertz, “Citizens shoot and kill more criminals than police do every year [2,819 times versus 303].” Moreover, as George Will pointed out in an article entitled “Are We a Nation of Cowards?” in the November 15, 1993, issue of Newsweek, while police have an error rate of 11 percent when it comes to the accidental shooting of innocent civilians, the armed citizens’ error rate is only 2 percent, making them five times safer than police.
Other studies give similar results. “Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms,” by the Clinton administration’s Justice Department shows that between 1.5 and 3 million people in the United States use a firearm to defend themselves and others from criminals each year. A 1986 study by Hart Research Associates puts the upper limit at 3.2 million.
Those studies and others indicate that often the mere sight of a firearm discourages an attacker. Criminologist John Lott from the University of Florida found that 98 percent of the time when people use guns defensively, simply brandishing a firearm is sufficient to cause a criminal to break off an attack. Lott also found that in less than 2 percent of the cases is the gun fired, and three-fourths of those are warning shots.
Guns stop crime
Long before those studies, history records what happened when the Cole Younger gang of eight tried to hold up the bank in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1876. They were recognized by a citizen who sounded the alarm. The gang was shot to pieces by armed civilians as they exited the bank. Two were shot dead, two wounded, and Cole Younger was captured. Jesse James and his brother Frank escaped, though Jesse was wounded. It wasn’t the police but rather armed citizens who thwarted the gang’s attempt to rob the bank.
When Pancho Villa attacked Columbus, New Mexico, in March 1916 with more than 600 men, he did so in the early morning, catching everyone by surprise. Although his men damaged a great deal of property, only 17 Americans died, 8 of whom were soldiers from a nearby army post. Because the civilians were well-armed, 94 of Villa’s men were killed and an unknown number wounded, despite the surprise attack.
As nationally syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, shooting sprees are usually stopped “by the arrival on the scene of other people with guns,” whether police or private individuals.
In 1997, assistant principal Joel Myrick used a gun to stop a violent teen who was shooting up his school in Pearl, Mississippi. He succeeded in preventing a massacre, but was prosecuted for having a gun within 1,000 feet of a school. (Go figure!)
In an article published in the August 3, 1999, edition of the San Antonio Express-News, Sowell recounts an incident that occurred in July 1999 at a shooting range in San Mateo, California, where a man armed with a handgun took three hostages. A note said he was going to kill the hostages and then himself. An employee took a gun from the range and shot the gunman, freeing the hostages.
Sowell, who is African-American, correctly points out that gun-control laws don’t control guns, “They disarm potential victims. Why do you think they disarmed slaves? Because if slaves had been armed, that would have been the end of slavery.”
Several years before the Columbine shootings, Congress imposed a school-zone gun ban which prohibited firearms within 1,000 feet of any school, under the mistaken belief that potential killers obey gun-control laws. That law didn’t deter the two perpetrators of the Columbine massacre, but it did get Joel Myrick in trouble.
Gun control advocates argue that the police are there to protect us from criminals and the military from invaders. But in 1992, the National Guard and police refused to engage hoodlums during the Los Angeles riots, effectively abandoning people to their fate. Nevertheless many Korean merchants successfully used firearms with high-capacity magazines, which Congress has since banned, to fend off rioters. Their stores still stood after the riots.
After passage of the 1968 gun-control act, the number of robberies jumped from 138,000 in 1965 to 376,000 in 1972, while murders committed with guns increased from 5,015 to 10,379 in the same period. According to the Census Bureau, the proportion of cases in which the murder weapon was a firearm rose from 57.2 percent to 65.6 percent.
Gun control and crime
In 1976, Washington, D.C., instituted one of the strictest gun-control laws in the country. The murder rate since that time has risen 134 percent (77.8 per 100,000 population) while the overall rate for the country has declined 2 percent. Washington, D.C., politicians find it easy to blame Virginia’s less-stringent gun laws for the D.C. murder rate. Yet Virginia Beach, Virginia’s largest city with almost 400,000 residents, has had one of the lowest rates of murder in the country — 4.1 per 100,000.
In New York City, long known for strict regulation of all types of weapons, only 19 percent of the 390 homicides in 1960 involved pistols. By 1972, this proportion had jumped to 49 percent of 1,691. In 1973, according to the New York Times, there were only 28,000 lawfully possessed handguns in the nation’s largest city, but police estimated that there were as many as 1.3 million illegal handguns there.
In 1986, Maryland banned small, affordable handguns called Saturday night specials. Within two years, Maryland’s murder rate increased by 20 percent, surpassing the national murder rate by 33 percent. Then Maryland passed a one-gun-a-month law. Yet between 1997 and 1998, 600 firearms recovered from crime scenes were traced to Maryland gun stores. Virginia, one of only two other states with a similar law, ranked third as a source of guns used by criminals in other states.
On the other hand, New Hampshire has almost no gun control and its cities are rated among the safest in the country. Across the border in Massachusetts, which has very stringent gun-control laws, cities of comparable size have two to three times as much crime as New Hampshire.
Vermont has the least restrictive gun-control law. It recognizes the right of any Vermonter who has not otherwise been prohibited from owning a firearm to carry concealed weapons without a permit or license. Yet Vermont has one of the lowest crime rates in America, ranking 49 out of 50 in all crimes and 47th in murders.
States which have passed concealed-carry laws have seen their murder rate fall by 8.5 percent, rapes by 5 percent, aggravated assaults by 7 percent and robbery by 3 percent.
Texas is a good example. In the early 1990s, Texas’s serious crime rate was 38 percent above the national average. Since then, serious crime in Texas has dropped 50 percent faster than for the nation as a whole. All this happened after passage of a concealed-carry law in 1994.
Benedict LaRosa is a historian and writer with undergraduate and graduate degrees in history from the U.S. Air Force Academy and Duke University, respectively.
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