The Secret History Of Guns (?)

[Peregrinator]

Silly title, but interesting historical notes in this piece:


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/8608/

 

[koalabear]

Silly title, but interesting historical notes in this piece:


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/8608/

Boring and it says nothing about Operation Gunrunner.

 

[Shagly]

Silly title, but interesting historical notes in this piece:


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/8608/

I never trust any government.

 

[Fabala]

Wonder how the Republicans would feel about a mandate to own guns these days?

Gun control = evil.
Individual mandates = unconstitutional.

Heads exploding.

 

[richard_daily]

The founding fathers declared a mandate on gun ownership... people HAD to buy guns... the federal government decreed it!

I suppose the wingnuts on here are going to denounce the founding fathers as "communists' now...

 

[Peregrinator]

The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.

 

[Fabala]

The founding fathers declared a mandate on gun ownership... people HAD to buy guns... the federal government decreed it!

I suppose the wingnuts on here are going to denounce the founding fathers as "communists' now...

But wouldn't they then have to stop calling them Christians?

 

[richard_daily]

But wouldn't they then have to stop calling them Christians?

Nah, they'd still try to propagate that lie.

 

[Peregrinator]

In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”—a title he earned by winning three gold medals in pistol-shooting at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games. As a special consultant to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Frederick helped draft the Uniform Firearms Act, a model of state-level gun-control legislation. (Since the turn of the century, lawyers and public officials had increasingly sought to standardize the patchwork of state laws. The new measure imposed more order—and, in most cases, far more restrictions.)

Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.

The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.” According to Frederick, the NRA “sponsored” the Uniform Firearms Act and promoted it nationwide. Highlighting the political strength of the NRA even back then, a 1932 Virginia Law Review article reported that laws requiring a license to carry a concealed weapon were already “in effect in practically every jurisdiction.”

When Congress was considering the first significant federal gun law of the 20th century—the National Firearms Act of 1934, which imposed a steep tax and registration requirements on “gangster guns” like machine guns and sawed-off shotguns—the NRA endorsed the law. Karl Frederick and the NRA did not blindly support gun control; indeed, they successfully pushed to have similar prohibitive taxes on handguns stripped from the final bill, arguing that people needed such weapons to protect their homes. Yet the organization stood firmly behind what Frederick called “reasonable, sensible, and fair legislation.”

One thing conspicuously missing from Frederick’s comments about gun control was the Second Amendment. When asked during his testimony on the National Firearms Act whether the proposed law violated “any constitutional provision,” he responded, “I have not given it any study from that point of view.” In other words, the president of the NRA hadn’t even considered whether the most far-reaching federal gun-control legislation in history conflicted with the Second Amendment. Preserving the ability of law-abiding people to have guns, Frederick would write elsewhere, “lies in an enlightened public sentiment and in intelligent legislative action. It is not to be found in the Constitution.”

 

[Instant_Star]

I never trust any government.

I never trust any Government that says they'll give you everything...

 

[Peregrinator]

IN 2008, IN A LANDMARK ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

Gun-rights groups trumpeted the ruling as the crowning achievement of the modern gun-rights movement and predicted certain victory in their war to end gun control. Their opponents criticized the Court’s opinion as right-wing judicial activism that would call into question most forms of gun control and lead inevitably to more victims of gun violence.

So far, at least, neither side’s predictions have come true. The courts have been inundated with lawsuits challenging nearly every type of gun regulation; in the three years since the Supreme Court’s decision, lower courts have issued more than 200 rulings on the constitutionality of gun control. In a disappointment to the gun-rights community, nearly all laws have been upheld.

The lower courts consistently point to one paragraph in particular from the Heller decision. Nothing in the opinion, Scalia wrote, should

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.


This paragraph from the pen of Justice Scalia, the foremost proponent of constitutional originalism, was astounding. True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.

 

[richard_daily]

IN 2008, IN A LANDMARK ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

Gun-rights groups trumpeted the ruling as the crowning achievement of the modern gun-rights movement and predicted certain victory in their war to end gun control. Their opponents criticized the Court’s opinion as right-wing judicial activism that would call into question most forms of gun control and lead inevitably to more victims of gun violence.

So far, at least, neither side’s predictions have come true. The courts have been inundated with lawsuits challenging nearly every type of gun regulation; in the three years since the Supreme Court’s decision, lower courts have issued more than 200 rulings on the constitutionality of gun control. In a disappointment to the gun-rights community, nearly all laws have been upheld.

The lower courts consistently point to one paragraph in particular from the Heller decision. Nothing in the opinion, Scalia wrote, should

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.


This paragraph from the pen of Justice Scalia, the foremost proponent of constitutional originalism, was astounding. True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.

Scalia's quote on that case is pretty damning to his credibility as a constitutional "originalist".

 

[Hallow_Ed]

i'm pretty sure i'd rather be shot than gutted.

 

[Peregrinator]

Scalia's quote on that case is pretty damning to his credibility as a constitutional "originalist".

I thought so, too. Was everyone wrong about him? Was he being cagey for some reason? If so, why?

 

[Johnny_Ray_Wilson]

IN 2008, IN A LANDMARK ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the government cannot ever completely disarm the citizenry. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court clearly held, for the first time, that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to possess a gun. In an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court declared unconstitutional several provisions of the District’s unusually strict gun-control law, including its ban on handguns and its prohibition of the use of long guns for self-defense. Indeed, under D.C.’s law, you could own a shotgun, but you could not use it to defend yourself against a rapist climbing through your bedroom window.

Gun-rights groups trumpeted the ruling as the crowning achievement of the modern gun-rights movement and predicted certain victory in their war to end gun control. Their opponents criticized the Court’s opinion as right-wing judicial activism that would call into question most forms of gun control and lead inevitably to more victims of gun violence.

So far, at least, neither side’s predictions have come true. The courts have been inundated with lawsuits challenging nearly every type of gun regulation; in the three years since the Supreme Court’s decision, lower courts have issued more than 200 rulings on the constitutionality of gun control. In a disappointment to the gun-rights community, nearly all laws have been upheld.

The lower courts consistently point to one paragraph in particular from the Heller decision. Nothing in the opinion, Scalia wrote, should

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.


This paragraph from the pen of Justice Scalia, the foremost proponent of constitutional originalism, was astounding. True, the Founders imposed gun control, but they had no laws resembling Scalia’s list of Second Amendment exceptions. They had no laws banning guns in sensitive places, or laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, or laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed. Such restrictions are products of the 20th century. Justice Scalia, in other words, embraced a living Constitution. In this, Heller is a fine reflection of the ironies and contradictions—and the selective use of the past—that run throughout America’s long history with guns.

I have no problem with gun control. I do have a problem with a Judicial system who has no knowledge whatsoever of how to use a gun and/or no knowledge of why law abiding citizens have to defend themselves against thugs. Thugs that attack without warning and no law enforcement there at that very second to defend the victim(s).

I can legally possess a firearm anywhere in the US. In Texas, I have the right to carry that firearm (handgun) on my person. I fully exercise my right to to bare arms.

3 times in my life, I have been forced to point a gun at someone with the intent to kill or maim. Twice, they broke into my house - twice I fired. Twice I fired to maim, not kill. Twice, the gun saved my life, twice the intruder was allowed to live because I chose not to kill them (against my best wishes). Twice, the intruder(s) were very lucky I knew exactly what I was doing.

The other time, I pulled a gun when I caught someone trying to break into a neighbor's car. The little scumbag literally shit in his pants when I politely asked him wtf he was doing as I pointed the gun in his face. Lucky him, the gun was not loaded. He went to jail anyway.

And to hell with a society that defends the little bastards that kill, rape, and steal from us.

 

[Peregrinator]

You can carry in VT too, then.

 

[richard_daily]

I thought so, too. Was everyone wrong about him? Was he being cagey for some reason? If so, why?

His reputation was never deserved in my opinion. He was appointed for his conservative values... an activist judge, if you will.

 

[Johnny_Ray_Wilson]

You can carry in VT too, then.

I agree with that, in any state of the US. The sad thing is, the anti-gun advocates do not understand that the banning of guns only work to the advantage of criminals. If they know you cannot legally carry a gun, then they know you cannot legally shoot to defend. And they know they can get a gun very easy on the black market.

A simple solution is to have a federal test for US citizens every 4 years or so. One that proves you know how to properly fire, reload, and handle a gun with respect to its' ability to kill anything. The problem is not the gun itself, but the ability of the person who possesses it. Not only their gun skills, but the ability to recognize when it is necessary to use that gun.

Whenever someone makes the CHOICE to attack someone or unlawfully trespass, then that someone has made the choice to be met with deadly force.

 

[Fabala]

His reputation was never deserved in my opinion. He was appointed for his conservative values... an activist judge, if you will.

Only liberal judges are activist judges.

I fully exercise my right to to bare arms.

The right to bare arms - the reason wife-beaters were invented.

 

[Peregrinator]

His reputation was never deserved in my opinion. He was appointed for his conservative values... an activist judge, if you will.

I haven't really followed his career enough to comment, but enough to be surprised when I read that graph from his ruling.

I agree with that, in any state of the US. The sad thing is, the anti-gun advocates do not understand that the banning of guns only work to the advantage of criminals. If they know you cannot legally carry a gun, then they know you cannot legally shoot to defend. And they know they can get a gun very easy on the black market.

A simple solution is to have a federal test for US citizens every 4 years or so. One that proves you know how to properly fire, reload, and handle a gun with respect to its' ability to kill anything. The problem is not the gun itself, but the ability of the person who possesses it. Not only their gun skills, but the ability to recognize when it is necessary to use that gun.

Whenever someone makes the CHOICE to attack someone or unlawfully trespass, then that someone has made the choice to be met with deadly force.

I mean, by law in VT, you can carry.

The armed society is an option, for sure. I don't carry, but I don't mind that some people do.

 

[Johnny_Ray_Wilson]

Only liberal judges are activist judges.



The right to bare arms - the reason wife-beaters were invented.

Where is your logic in that connection? Are you saying a person's right to defend themselves breeds wife-beaters or that men become wife-beaters are the ones that cannot legally carry a gun?

 

[richard_daily]

Only liberal judges are activist judges.

Good point.

The right to bare arms - the reason wife-beaters were invented.

I don't think that he's going to get that one...

Where is your logic in that connection? Are you saying a person's right to defend themselves breeds wife-beaters or that men become wife-beaters are the ones that cannot legally carry a gun?

Nope, it went way over his head.

 

[richard_daily]

I haven't really followed his career enough to comment, but enough to be surprised when I read that graph from his ruling.

He's never once dissented against the "conservative" viewpoint, even when it was at odds with the constitution. For example; voting against Habeas Corpus for US citizens held as "enemy combatants", continuously ignoring the Establishment Claus, and a variety of other things... You should be able to turn quite a bit up about his "activism" through a bit of searching.

 

[Fabala]

Where is your logic in that connection? Are you saying a person's right to defend themselves breeds wife-beaters or that men become wife-beaters are the ones that cannot legally carry a gun?

Wow.

Wifebeater (and, coincidentally, a nod to gravyrug):

http://www.nexternal.com/dreamland/images/gotchristwbeater.jpg

 

[Johnny_Ray_Wilson]

I haven't really followed his career enough to comment, but enough to be surprised when I read that graph from his ruling.


I mean, by law in VT, you can carry.

The armed society is an option, for sure. I don't carry, but I don't mind that some people do.

I feel the same way. Scalia's decision comes as a surprise as well. Ironically, I agree with it. Our founding fathers, and ever so rarely would I choose to argue their well founded and good intentions, never (collectively) conceived the idea that we would have raving lunatics carrying guns to open fire in sensitive areas such as schools, churches, non-violent gatherings, etc..