What is wrong with the Media in America?
All I’ve seen on the news over the past two days about the senseless and horrific killing of this man, Robert Godwin, is about “what is Facebook going to do about this?”.
Which seems the absolutely wrong question.
Because does it really seem possible that the only reason this murder happened was because the killer wanted to try and get infamous on Facebook? That’s a crazier idea than the one which says that people who are going about their ordinary, sad lives sometimes get up one day and just decide to kill someone (or a lot of someones) they don’t know, never met and have no connection to. But that’s exactly what happens in this country now, all of the damned time.
You get up and find out another shooting took place in a another fucking elementary school.
There is a reason why this news keeps happening, and every one of us knows what that reason is.
The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution as interpreted by the Roberts Supreme Court, and the National Rifle Association and it’s 40 years of propaganda.
I’m old enough, I remember America from before the gun crazy took over our national politics. When I was 12 years old I attended Gun Safety training with a .22 long rifle at the local Moose club my parents belonged to, which was sponsored by the NRA. It was 1973.
By 1993, the NRA was already in full blown metamorphosis into a public relations arm of the gun manufacturing industry. The following three decades brought about the rise of self-styled Militias in states across the nation, people who believe part of gun ownership is the parading around in public with a firearm strapped to your hip or slung across your back.
In 2008, the John Robert’s SCOTUS found in District of Columbia et al v Heller, with the majority opinion written by the late Antonin Scallia, that gun ownership by individual Americans irrespective of their membership in a Militia, even of handguns, is a Right enshrined by the 2nd Amendment.
These are the findings from Heller, courtesy the Cornell University Law School Legal Institute:
Held:
1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2–53.
(a) The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Pp. 2–22.
(b) The prefatory clause comports with the Court’s interpretation of the operative clause. The “militia” comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens’ militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved. Pp. 22–28.
(c) The Court’s interpretation is confirmed by analogous arms-bearing rights in state constitutions that preceded and immediately followed the Second Amendment . Pp. 28–30.
(d) The Second Amendment’s drafting history, while of dubious interpretive worth, reveals three state Second Amendment proposals that unequivocally referred to an individual right to bear arms. Pp. 30–32.
(e) Interpretation of the Second Amendment by scholars, courts and legislators, from immediately after its ratification through the late 19th century also supports the Court’s conclusion. Pp. 32–47.
(f) None of the Court’s precedents forecloses the Court’s interpretation. Neither United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542 , nor Presser v. Illinois, 116 U. S. 252 , refutes the individual-rights interpretation. United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174 , does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to militia purposes, but rather limits the type of weapon to which the right applies to those used by the militia, i.e., those in common use for lawful purposes. Pp. 47–54.
2. Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons. Pp. 54–56.
3. The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment . The District’s total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of “arms” that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition—in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute—would fail constitutional muster. Similarly, the requirement that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock makes it impossible for citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence unconstitutional. Because Heller conceded at oral argument that the D. C. licensing law is permissible if it is not enforced arbitrarily and capriciously, the Court assumes that a license will satisfy his prayer for relief and does not address the licensing requirement. Assuming he is not disqualified from exercisingSecond Amendment rights, the District must permit Heller to register his handgun and must issue him a license to carry it in the home. Pp. 56–64.
478 F. 3d 370, affirmed.
Scalia, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Roberts, C. J., and Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito, JJ., joined. Stevens, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Breyer, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg, JJ., joined.
All that talk of “self defense in the home” makes me angry. Mostly because it’s nothing more than another Urban Legend grown over the later half of the 20th century into a basis of reasoning in a Supreme Court case like Heller.
From the LATimes.com
Dateline June 19, 2015
Gun and self-defense statistics that might surprise you -- and the NRA
Violence Policy Center released a fresh analysis of federal crime and health data that explores how often potential victims actually turned the tables. Parsing 2012 numbers, the center counted 259 justifiable gun-related homicides, or incidents in which authorities ruled that killings occurred in self-defense.
Oh, and match those 259 justifiable homicides with the theft of about 232,000 guns each year, about 172,000 of them during burglaries. That’s a ratio of one justifiable homicide for every 896 guns put in the hands of criminals.
Those 259 justifiable homicides also pale compared with, in the same year, 8,342 criminal homicides using guns, 20,666 suicides with guns, and 548 fatal unintentional shootings, according to the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Report. The ratio for 2012, per the Violence Policy Center, was one justifiable killing for every 32 murders, suicides or accidental deaths (the ratio increases to 38-1 over the five-year period ending in 2012). That’s a heavy price to pay.
So when the SCOTUS justices said that keeping a firearm, specifically a handgun, in your home, unlocked and loaded for your own self defense was a Right under the 2nd? What they really meant was that COULD be true if you have, for instance, a half mile drive with motion sensors and security guards outside your home, to alert you if an intruder gets past the first lines of defense, so that you can pull your .45 and kill that intruder, so your family can continue sleeping safely in their beds.
What they should have said in Heller?
The notion that a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun is a romanticized vision of the nature of violent crime.
It’s all an Urban Legend, one bought into by enough of the United States Supreme Court Justices to make it The Law. But even though it’s the Law, it’s still not reality.
Guns are no longer the means of protection for the vast numbers of Americans, they are the means by which tens of thousands of Americans meet their doom, each year.
Until the people in this country are ready to sit down and have a realistic discussion about the costs to our society to continue with the 2nd Amendment under the Heller decision, then we’ll continue to see murders taking place, with firearms the weapon of choice of these murderers, time and time and time again.
So don’t blame Facebook, that’s like blaming the two year old who reaches into his mother’s purse and somehow fires the unlocked, loaded handgun inside it and kills her — when it’s obviously the fault of the dead parent who didn’t use due care and caution and at the very least put the Safety Lock on the gun she carried around because she believed it made her safer.
Disclaimer:
I am the owner of a .22 rifle and have been since my father gifted it to me in the mid-1980s. My ex-husband, his entire extended family, my oldest daughter and many friends are also gun owners and hunters. I’ve never shot anything more than a target. I would be willing to register my weapon, if the law required it.