In a major expansion of gun rights after a series of mass shootings, the Supreme Court said Thursday that Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense, a ruling likely to lead to more people legally armed. The decision came out as Congress and states debate gun-control legislation.About one-quarter of the U.S. population lives in states expected to be affected by the ruling, which struck down a New York gun law. The high court’s first major gun decision in more than a decade split the court 6-3, with the court’s conservatives in the majority and liberals in dissent.Across the street from the court, lawmakers at the Capitol sped toward passage of gun legislation prompted by recent massacres in Texas, New York and California. Senators cleared the way for the measure, modest in scope but still the most far-reaching in decades.Also Thursday, underscoring the nation’s deep divisions over the issue, the sister of a 9-year-old girl killed in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, pleaded with state lawmakers to pass gun legislation.
It's already a problem to link the court case to the actions in the legislatures. The court wasn't ruling on 'guns' per se, but on a particular controversy brought before it that has nothing to do with the particular bloody shirt the reporter wants to wave. The issue was specifically about law-abiding citizens who belonged to a shooting club, all of whom have perfectly exemplary records as citizens, who objected to not being able to transport their firearms for shooting matches and similar purposes.
The legislatures can consider the one matter, the court was asked to consider a particular other matter. It ended up doing so on principled grounds that apply broadly, but there is no reason that a court case arising from the facts in New York city five years ago should be decided based on the passions of a moment in time five years later.
Also, why would this ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States only affect states containing "about one-quarter of the U.S. population"? Rulings by this court affect all states and all Americans.
What the reporter means to say is that only one-quarter of the population lives in states that don't already comply with the general principle that you can carry a firearm in public as an ordinary matter. That means that three-quarters of us already do live with the rules the Supreme Court acknowledged today. Most of us live in areas with much lower crime rates, including gun crime rates, than in those areas pondered by the reporter -- places like Chicago, D.C., New York, or Los Angeles. These include major metropolitan areas as well as rural paradises like my own.
In point of fact, though the headline describes the nation as 'divided,' the division has a clear majority/minority split that runs against her favored position. My firearms carry permit is recognized by 38 states including my own.
38 states is, coincidentally, the number required to call a constitutional convention, propose a new amendment to the Constitution, and then ratify it. It is the three-quarters supermajority that the Founders pondered as sufficient to justify altering the basic law. The Supreme Court has done nothing but bring the outlier minority into line with the general consensus of the United States of America.
That's a painful process, as few know better than citizens of the South, which has so often been the object of the Supreme Court's edifying attentions. However, it is widely admitted these days that for the most part those painful adjustments have been to the general benefit and improved morals. In the fullness of time, it may be that these minority states will likewise come to see the wisdom of respecting the genuine dignity, and encouraging the martial virtues, of their citizens.
4 comments:
I continue to find it infuriating that there is the assumption that any of these measures will reduce violent crime, or that overturning them increases it. Rights and theories of government can be debated. But more death/less death is simply a matter of arithmetic. That they cannot engage in this very simple measure of honesty tells you everything you need to know about how they will approach any question of rights.
The attachment to 'massacres' is part of that as well. Any reasonable student quickly realizes that mass shootings are a tiny percentage of gun crime, so small in fact as to be statistically insignificant. They love to talk about them because of the emotional pull of them, but the vast majority of gun violence has nothing to do with such things. It's ordinary criminal violence, or it's domestic violence.
By the same token, the semiautomatic rifles they're so hot to ban are used in only a tiny fraction of gun violence and fewer homicides than knives (by far) or blunt objects. Almost all the money to be made in gun homicides has to do with handguns. They go for the emotional and rhetorical instead of the statistical every time.
Meanwhile, here in Chicago/Cook County our County prosecutor bargained down a felon caught with a full-auto capable firearm to a misdemeanor.
"They go for the emotional and rhetorical instead of the statistical every time."
It's incremental. Go after what they see as the low-hanging fruit first. Then work their way up to semi-automatic handguns, and finally everything that's not a musket.
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