Yesterday the Supremes decided to strike down gun ownership bans in Chicago in a case brought by this nice old guy named McDonald who lives in a really crime-ridden neighborhood. McDonald said he has burglar alarms, motion sensor alarms, and myriad other barriers set up to keep the drug addicts and burglars off his property, but owning a gun would work best. Only he couldn't own a gun in Chicago.
A long time ago, I actually looked up the gun laws in Chicago. I used to live there. At the time, Chicago didn't have an outright ban against guns, but a strange mess of related laws that made gun ownership impossible nonetheless. It was like, you could buy a gun, but you couldn't keep it on your property within the city limits. And/or you could get a permit to own a gun, but you weren't allowed to carry a gun anywhere, not even in your car. I kinda wondered, well, if you bought a gun, did you have to have the dealer fly over your house and drop it from a helicopter or what? I'm not saying these are the exact prohibitions, but the laws were something like that. And Mayor Daley still thinks gun bans work.
Every few years, the city does a campaign to "get guns off the streets." This usually involves something like, turn in your old fire arm, and we'll give you a $10.00 discount coupon for a shoe store. Or something like that. Mostly the guns they collect are the skeletal frames of blunderbusses that someone dug up in their yard and stuff like that.
The one thing the anti-gun people just can't seem to understand is that guns are dangerous mostly in the hands of criminals, and criminals, BY DEFINITION, are people who don't obey the law. If criminals don't pay attention to things like private property laws, why would they obey a gun law? The net effect of gun ownership bans is to disarm law-abiding citizens and establish a flourishing black market in fire arms.
For a very short time, I worked for the National Safety Council and had the chance to read through a bunch of their brochures. Gun accidents were pretty low on the list and had dropped every year since the 1930s or around that time. However, farming was pretty damn dangerous. Farming and logging were positively frightening for the number of accidents every year. Should we ban farming and logging? (Well, logging has other problems... ancient forests, you know.)
About 10 - 15 years ago a few states passed laws allowing concealed carry. That means you can carry a gun hidden under your jacket or in your handbag, concealed. As I understand it, Florida had such a law. According to a scholar named Lott (if I recall correctly), Florida suddenly got this rash of armed robberies and muggings directed against tourists. Why tourists? They'd just got off a plane. They weren't carrying. Tourists from foreign countries became the most desirable targets because surely they weren't carrying any guns. Criminals would actually follow them out of the airport to catch them in some secluded place.
Just a couple months ago in Chicago the papers reported a case where an armed burglar was shot as he was climbing into the window of a private home at about 3:30 am. The home belonged to an elderly couple, and they had a young daughter/grand-daughter and a couple of her kids living with them. The grand-dad heard the noise, grabbled his (illegal) weapon, and fired in the dark, killing the guy. Lucky shot. The wannabe burglar had a police record going back to his early teens. And he was still out on the street, had just been released from his last incarceration, as I recall.
The pro-gun-ban people complained that the burglar would not have been executed for burglary.
They don't consider what that armed burglar might have done to the family. Who says he would have confined himself to burglary?
The police decided not to kick up any more dust, so they didn't prosecuted Grampa for owning a gun. But he probably did have to give it up.
So the Supremes shot down the bizarre and ineffective Chicago gun ban. But the decision still allows for "restrictions," like having to get a gun permit, take fire arms classes, and in one state, you have to put up like a $500.00 bond of some kind to get a gun permit.
I was listening to all that, and it brought to mind the Jim Crow laws. Yeah, blacks could vote in Mississippi and Alabama, if they could pass a Constitution test, owned property, and maybe could rub their tummies and pat their heads at the same time. You get the idea. Similar to the gun ownership restrictions.
My favorite thing in regard to guns is something I got from an NRA member, who called the Second Amendment "The Enforcement Clause." Of course, politicians and anti-gun people are quick to point out that a hand gun is hardly effective against something like a tank or a rocket. But then there's also a reason that the war in Afghanistan is so hard to fight, and why Vietnam was such a mess -- guerilla warfare, an armed population, whether legal or not, organized or not.
There is a reason the Founding Fathers put the right to own guns as the Second Amendment, just after the First Amendment, which protects free speech, a free press, and religious choice. They considered self-defense pretty important. And throughout history, the greatest perpetrators of crime, the most diabolical violators of human rights, the perpetrators of the most horrendous massacres have been governments. The Founders were surely aware of that.
Just something to think about.
Save the republic.
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