Dustin offers a personal example of how you can’t depend on living in a “good neighborhood” to mean you’ll be safe from crime. I also live in a decent neighborhood, but that didn’t stop an armed robber from trying to stick up an old man in the bathroom right down the street from me. Fortunately, the old man pulled his mohaska, and the guy took off.
Category: Guns
Plight of the Deer
Ahab links to an editorial calling for us to recognize the “plight” of deer, and not make sport of it. While I would not try to pass myself off as a wildlife biologist (most of whom are paid for by hunters) I’m pretty sure the plight of the deer pretty much revolves around eating, running away from shit, and humping other deer.  We have a word for things that don’t do anything except eat, run and hump: food.
Altering the Past
It looks like The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership made sure to scrub their web site of Dennis Henigan stating that “The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” before accusing the DC circuit of leaving certain parts out of the second amendment. Why am I not surprised?
Game On, Washington
Both Joe Huffman and Ahab are reporting on Joyce latest efforts to push gun control, this time in Washington State. Joe says:
They have no interest in hearing anything other than their predetermined agenda. This isn’t a “conference”, it’s a conspiracy against rights and they should be arrested and be given a fair trial.
Yep, and they will keep trying. They are getting desperate to show some progress, and Washington has been one of the states they’ve thought they could turn. It’s been received wisdom in the anti-gun circles for a while that the state would be receptive to an assault weapons ban. I seem to recall before the federal ban expiring that the Brady’s, or some other gun control group, claimed that they would get several states to pass assault weapons bans if the federal ban were allowed to expire. So far their tally is a big fat zero. They are desperate, and I expect a push to be made on Washington. We beat them back in Pennsylvania, hopefully Washingtonians can too.
ABC News Story
I had my friend Jason record the ABC news story in high definition for me just in case we had a nice spread like we had with the CBS story a month or so ago. While the ABC story was poorly researched and entirely one sided, it didn’t have any goodies, and their evidence table actually had a few Kalashnikovs laid out on it.
Ryan reported on this story as well. It’s pretty clear ABC didn’t even bother to research what the Assault Weapons Ban actually did, and didn’t do, or bother to do anything other than offer John Timoney and his anti-gun pals, a forum to push their crap on a media organization who doesn’t know any better, and couldn’t be bothered to check.
UPDATE: I agree with Illspirit that it’s quite likely police were using these firearms before Timoney decided to push his agenda in the media.
Swiss Gun Culture Under Fire Again
Looks like there was a shooting, along with further calls for more restrictions and bans.
The initiative includes a call for army weapons to remain in the barracks and a national gun register. The anti-gun proponents argue that the practice is no longer necessary from a military point of view.
But speakers from the rightwing Swiss People’s Party and the centre-right Radical Party say the decommissioning weakens Swiss security and is a vote of no confidence in soldiers.
I have to be honest, I’m not optimistic about the future of shooting in Switzerland. Because their gun culture is so tied to militia service, which is increasingly unpopular among young people in the country, I don’t think it’ll survive if the militia system is abolished. Unlike the US, there is no right to bear arms in Switzerland; it’s tightly tied with militia service. If that goes, I think the shooting culture goes with it.
D’Allesandro v. Pennsylvania State Police
Eugene Volokh blogs about a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision that mentions something very key: that the second amendment is an individual right.  Read the whole thing.
A Quick Response
I know some people pooh pooh e-mail as being a poor means of communication with representatives, but I’m impressed that I got such a quick response from Representative Daylin Leach on the issue I e-mailed him about, basically outlining the same points I did in the post below. Here’s his response:
I understand your rhetorical point but I think comparing speech to guns (or any right to any other) is apples and oranges. We don’t restrict the number of E-mails because there would be no state interest (“compelling” or otherwise) in doing so. But where there is a compelling interest in restricting speech to preserve public safety, we do so.
In states where it has passed, one-gun-per-month has, at least on a temporal basis (comparing crime rates shortly before and shortly after the law went into effect) shown an average reduction in gun violence of about 30%.
It does seem to be common sense that if I want to go into a store and buy 20 cheap hand-guns to sell on the street, but find I can only buy one, that will mean 19 illegal gun-seekers will be disappointed and have to look elsewhere. Some will find a gun elsewhere right away, some won’t. If all straw-purchasers are similarly affected, it will be increasingly difficult (although certainly not impossible) to buy illegal guns on the street. This will save some (but not all) lives. But if it’s your 6 year old daughter who doesn’t get shot by a stray bullet as she plays on the porch; that will be very important to you.
I think we’ll probably have to agree to disagree on this. Actually, I included e-mail spam as the compelling state reason for limiting people to say, 50 e-mails a month. Who sends 50 e-mails a month? That’s 600 a year. It won’t affect anyone but spammers. Spam costs the economy billions of dollars a year. No compelling state interest in trying to stop that? We don’t accept those kinds of prior restraints on speech, why should we on firearms?
As for the assertion that it has lowered crime, I’m pretty sure he’s confusing that with a study done on ATF tracing data, using a subset of traced firearms in 1996 that appeared in the JAMA. The problem is, ATF has said again and again that its tracing data can’t be used to draw conclusions about crime guns. Therefore, these studies lack a real scientific rigor, because they don’t use a representative example of crime guns. It’s possible, though, that maybe legislators have some data that I don’t have.
Either way, if you look at cities who are in one-gun-a-month jurisdictions, like Baltimore, the crime rate is still atrocious — nearly double that of Philadelphia. Maryland and Virginia are still the largest source of crime guns for Washington DC, which bans all guns, despite the one-gun-a-month law present in both surrounding states. Even if one-gun-a-month has a temporary effect on crime, it would seem that the criminals have no trouble figuring out how to get around it.
So I still question why a law, even if it only affects gun owners at the margins, passes a strict scrutiny test when a) the criminal activity it’s meant to stop is already unlawful, and b) there are is a profound lack of good evidence it actually works.
The Bastard Child of the Bill of Rights
I was mentioning the other day that we need to get ready for the meaningless individual rights arguments to start popping up. Here they come in Philly.
As a member of the House Judiciary Committee I received a lot of e-mails urging me to vote against the gun-control bills we considered last week. Many of these e-mails argued, in some form, that the governor’s proposals violated the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. The writers seemed to feel that the Second Amendment prohibits any restrictions on gun ownership. However, that is simply not how the amendment works.
First off: good job Pennsylvania Gun Owners! He knows we’re watching. But while I agree the second amendment isn’t absolute, I worry when a politician starts down this road.
Last week we voted down two bills dealing with guns. The first would have required people to report the loss or theft of a gun they owned. The second would have limited to one a month the number of guns a person could purchase.
People can argue about the merits of these bills from a policy perspective, but there is clearly no constitutional impediment to either bill. The two rights spelled out in the Second Amendment do not bestow a constitutional “right” not to report a lost or stolen gun. Nothing in the wording of the amendment even arguably says that.
Really? So if I passed a law limiting the amount of ink people could buy with an aim to combat libel, that would be constitutionally permissible under the first amendment? Would limiting someone to a certain number of e-mails a month, with an aim to combat spam, be respectful of our right to free speech and free association?
All we insist on is that the second amendment be treated as seriously as other rights protected by the constitution. Daylin Leach is arguing for something less than “strict scrutiny”, because applied to your right to free speech, the laws I described above would be tossed.
Hat tip to Melody Zullinger, of PFSC for the heads up.
UPDATE: I just e-mailed Representative Leach. We’ll see if he responds. I would encourage everyone to do so as well, because it’s important that he hear from gun owners. Be nice, be factual, and stick to the issues.
Shotgun Hunting
This study suggests that hunting with a shotgun isn’t really any safer than hunting with a rifle. I’m not really surprised. Fast moving rounds will tend to fragment more if they hit something, which would mean the pieces have less momentum, and won’t travel as far.