Random Nuclear Strikes

Yes, even worse than the topic of the post right below this one.

Jerry Large, Seattle Times Staff Columnist,  opines that the Heller decision came about because five of the Justices think all Americans are John Wayne and that the 2nd Amendment is outdated.

Go ahead and do what you’ve been doing.

That’s what the Supreme Court said in its ruling Thursday on gun rights.

The court knocked down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns and for the first time said directly the Second Amendment protects individual gun ownership.

Most of the country has been operating under that assumption for the past two centuries anyway.

Aren’t guns part of what makes America America? You wouldn’t throw John Wayne out over a question of linguistics.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution says, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

It’s about having a militia to protect the state, but I think five members of the court read it through a haze of gun lore.

Guns are iconic.

The self-sufficient man with a gun is embedded deeply in our national mythology.

We idealize the minuteman, the frontiersman, the cowboy with a six-shooter at his side.

…

It’s not guns in the closet that make us strong, it’s our adaptability.

America has changed since the first set of amendments to the Constitution were sent to the states for ratification in 1789. We need to look at gun ownership and regulation in a modern context.

Two centuries ago, America was a rural society. Guns were still primitive — shoot and reload. People couldn’t call on a police department, and the country didn’t have much of a military.

There are still circumstances in which a gun might come in handy. But how often and at what cost?

Presumably, Mr. Large would weight the cost of our current state of affairs against a society where firearms are illegal.

Also presumably, Mr. Large hasn’t studied the issue enough to know that violent crime and death rates skyrocket in societies where only the cops and the criminals have firearms.

Either that or he just loves him some human suffering.

I’m a bit confused by this piece in the LA Times.

Written by UC Berkeley Professor of Law, Stephen D. Sugarman, and Columbia University Professor of Law and Public Health, Jeffery Fagan, they propose a twist to blaming all firearms related deaths on firearms manufacturers.

This year, about 12,000 Americans will be shot to death. It’s a staggering figure, and even though lawmakers have continued to pass gun-control laws to try to bring the number down, they have not significantly reduced the murder rate. Indeed, for the last decade, guns have steadily remained the cause of about two-thirds of all homicides.

Gun manufacturers insist that these deaths are not their fault, preferring to pin the blame on criminals and irresponsible dealers. They have fiercely resisted even minimal restrictions on sales and have simultaneously washed their hands of responsibility for this “collateral damage.”

Blah, blah, blah, whine about the Heller ruling and the passage of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, etc., etc.

We propose a new way to prod gun makers to reduce gun deaths, one that would be unlikely to put them out of business or to prevent law-abiding citizens from obtaining guns. By using a strategy known as “performance-based regulation,” we would deputize private actors — the gun makers — to deal with the negative effects of their products in ways that promote the public good.

In other words, rather than telling gun makers what to do, performance-based regulation would tell them what outcome they must achieve: Reduce deaths by guns. Companies that achieve the target outcomes might receive large financial bonuses; companies that don’t would face severe financial penalties. Put simply, gun makers — whose products kill even when used as directed — would have to take responsibility for curbing the consequent public health toll.

First of all, notice the phrase “unlikely to put them out of business”. This plan first requires firearms manufacturers to admit that they are the problem, which will open them up to lawsuits of the type shut down by the PLCA.

Secondly, as Dean Esmay points out here, these two university professors cannot even take it upon themselves to fleah out their apparently brilliant ideas and come up with a realistic answer as to what exactly the manufacturers could do the lower the number of firearms related deaths.

This is because neither of these two half-wits wants to admit that it is a single socio-economic class that is responsible for a very high percentage of firearms related deaths, and that locking them away for long periods of time and executing the most violent of them would permanently stop them from perpetuating their criminal “lifestyle decisions” which usually involve violent crime.

And lastly, do you like the “even when used as directed” line? I know I did.

That line proves that these two, just like the VPC and the Brady’s, don’t care that it might be a criminal that is killed so that multiple other lives might be saved, they only care about the statistic.

Btw, I know they’d never let Remington execute anyone. They fight against the government executing anyone. Fagan is against the death penalty altogether, and even life in prison in some cases.