Category: Guns

Basically they don’t want to pay up. Alan Gura, understandably, wants to be paid. It’s important that Gura win this, not just for his own sake, but for ours as well. DC should have to pay the cost of defending an unconstitutional law, and that has to include reasonable fees for the person who challenges them.

The fact that this is getting some public play is also good. That 3.5 million dollar price tag DC is getting slapped with will be noticed by other state or municipalities, and that might make them decide to just fold rather than proceeding forward with a court case and losing. I look forward to Mr. Gura pursuing Chicago for attorneys fees if we prevail there. The idea of Chicago having to fork over a seven figure check is even sweeter than DC having to do it.

Looks familiar to anyone in this country:

A pro-weapons advocate, Otso Vainio claims that the hysterical media has distorted the scope of the problem.

“The [average] amount of people killed with legal guns in Finland, I can’t remember exact figures, but it was two point something annually. Thirty-nine people die from the heat of the sauna annually.”

The gun debate will continue to divide Finland, but if further shooting tragedies happen, it may eventually spur Finnish lawmakers to make citizens surrender their firearms.

If the Finns want to keep their guns, they are going to have to fight to keep them. One of the big problems I think European gun owners have had is they fall back reflexively to the sporting position. The problem with that is, no one is going to agree to preserve your sport over what they see as social ills. Pit sports against the public good and sports are going to lose.

It becomes a very different argument when you frame it as removing people’s ability to defend their own lives. Having spoken with some Europeans about this issue, I will say I don’t know how much this will resonate with them versus how much it resonates with Americans. Some Europeans I’ve spoken with are very committed to the idea that protection is a community function rather than an individual function. In the US, even fairly liberal, lefty people fundamentally believe in the right to use lethal force in self-protection, even if they aren’t completely comfortable with the idea of guns. A big aspect to our success here has been to get ourselves on the side of individual self-protection, and our opponents on the other side of that debate. In any political struggle, you want to pass your position off as the mainstream position, and paint your opponent as a nutty extremist. What’s the issue in Finland? I don’t know. Defense against bears maybe? Then there’s also this kind of bear, which has occasionally been known to wander into Finland.

There’s been pressure put on the Wilmington Housing Authority trying to get them to remove the gun ban language from their leases. It would seem that asking nicely didn’t work, so NRA is filing suit against them.

This sort of ties into the previous post about privilege vs. right. Obviously no one has a right to live in public housing either, really. But how much of a condition may the government impose? If it’s ruled that public housing bans are unconstitutional, it would give more ammunition to a case like the one in the previous post.

Eugene Volokh links to an interesting case in California:

The prosecution had asked that Javier be placed in a juvenile “camp,” “placement in light of appellant’s gang involvement and prior history,” but the juvenile court sentenced Javier to probation and “house arrest” but with a condition: “I want no weapons anymore at your house. Dad, I’m sorry, no weapons, none.” (This apparently referred to “guns or other deadly or dangerous weapons.”) And the Court of Appeal upheld this, on the grounds that this was “reasonable in light of the facts that appellant was on probation at the time of the charged offense for possession of a firearm and had admitted to participating in gang activity.”

This is a difficult question, as to whether this would be constitutional. What makes it questionable is the voluntary nature of the probation. The father could presumably retain his rights and let the kid serve a sentence in juvie. You have a right to a gun, but you don’t have a right to probation. How much can the court condition the exercise of a right on receiving a privilege from the state? One useful way to look at how we condition rights on other state privileges, like free speech for example, versus holding a government job.

This is especially true if you look at this in the free speech context. In some of the Court’s early free speech cases, the courts were pretty deferential to government conditioning the job privilege on limiting free speech rights, with Oliver Wendel Holmes saying, “There may be a constitutional right to talk politics, but there is no constitutional right to be a policeman.”

But modern free speech doctrine does protect a government employees right to free speech. In later cases, beginning in 1967, the Court extended protections for the speech of government employees when they speak on matters of public concern. But it’s important to note that the speech of government employees still does not enjoy the same protections, in terms of the government being able to fire you, that you would enjoy as a private citizen. The government can still fire individuals for certain exercises of what would normally be free speech.

Applied to the gun context, it would seem that the government couldn’t condition not owning a gun in exchange for the privilege of a government job. It strikes me that a probation case involving a juvenile isn’t really that clean an analogy, especially when it was a firearm involved in the original offense. I suspect something like this wouldn’t be constitutional under all circumstances, but under some it might be. This one might be.

I’m kind of boggled why California has something called the “Commonwealth Club”, when only Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky and Massachusetts go by that title, but they are holding a forum on the open carry issue generally, and the bill to outlaw it specifically, in both San Francisco and the second in Lafayette. See the link if you’d like to attend.