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The Second Amendment, self defense, and the meaning of 'in the home'
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Mark A. Taff
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For starters, to what does "in the home" apply? It is clear that it applies to a person's residence, whether a single family house or apartment. Would it apply to a room rented by a boarder in a dwelling occupied by other boarders and/or an owner and family?
While "home" presumably, applies to a second residence such as a vacation house; would it apply to a hotel or motel room? What about a cabin at a campsite; or a tent or sleeping bag at such site? Would it matter if the camp site were on federal, state, or private land?
What about a motor home or similar vehicle used as a temporary or permanent residence? |
Supreme Court finds history is a matter of opinions
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Mark A. Taff
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In doing so, however, the court has drawn criticism from some historians and legal experts who say the justices' readings of history were less than scholarly. And the justices sometimes disagreed sharply on the historical record, demonstrating that divining the original meaning of the Constitution is no small matter.
The term's two most important opinions -- on the reach of habeas corpus in the war on terrorism, and on the meaning of the 2nd Amendment -- trace the origins of the right to go to court and the right to "keep and bear arms" to 17th century England and Colonial America. |
Is buying a gun a suicidal act?
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Mark A. Taff
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So says Matthew Miller, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If you bought a gun today, I could tell you the risk of suicide to you and your family members is going to be two- to tenfold higher over the next 20 years," he told The Washington Post. Since the chance of a gun being used for suicide is so much higher than the chance of it being used to prevent a murder, we would all be better off with fewer firearms around.
It's a rich irony--as though smoke alarms were increasing fire fatalities. But the argument raises two questions: Is it true? And, when it comes to gun control policy, does it matter?
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The Supreme Ricochet Has Begun
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Mark A. Taff
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To say the Supreme Court term ended with a bang is quite an understatement.On the last Thursday in June, the marshal gaveled the Court into its summer recess, but not before the justices announced their decision in the D.C. gun ban case (a.k.a. District of Columbia v. Heller, No. 07-290).
Of course, as the whole country knows now, the Supreme Court struck down D.C.’s gun laws, which were the most restrictive in the nation. And, literally within minutes, that landmark Second Amendment ruling had the metaphorical effect of firing a starter pistol in a constitutional race to determine what freedoms and rights are guaranteed by the Second Amendment. (We might add, just as we explained in “Supreme Ricochet.”) |
IDPA: Training or Just a Game?
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Mark A. Taff
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John Wills, one of my colleagues here at Officer.com, has once again hit the nail squarely on the head with his current column: Good Cops Know The Value of Training: Doing for yourself when your department can't. If you haven't seen it yet, please check it out (linked below). I've been working on this article for a while, and it seems appropriate to bring it forward now. Because he made the case so eloquently, I'm going to try to build on John's premise and suggest a specific way for you to improve your firearms skills, even if your department doesn't have the time or the resources to do as much training as you, or they, would like. Check out IDPA, the International Defensive Pistol Association. |
TX: Get your gun: Group seeks signatures for 'open-carry' law
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Mark A. Taff
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People like Edward Isenberg, owner of handgun distributor Just Glocks, aren't sure which type of law they'd prefer.
"I haven't seen the petition, but I would not for sure sign it," Isenberg said Tuesday.
For Isenberg, carrying a handgun and having it displayed openly means making a common sense judgment.
If you were hunting and had your sidearm in a holster and stopped for a sandwich, you may not take if off before eating, Isenberg said. In contrast, why would someone need to carry a handgun into a bank? he asked.
"People have really good intentions, but it all lies in how they carry," Isenberg said. |
AK: Aggressive black bears deserve to be eliminated
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Mark A. Taff
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McKnight then told about an encounter with a black bear that approached his tent in northern Alaska.
He opened the flap, and there was the bear. The biologist fired a warning shot across its nose.
The bear simply ignored the warning shot and stared at McKnight. McKnight said the look sent a chill up his spine.
At that point, the biologist did the sensible thing. He stopped wasting ammunition and shot the bear dead.
Alaska, like much of North America, has lots and lots of black bears.
Killing the extremely rare bear that looks at people as potential food is not simply justifiable, it's sensible. |
UT: Assault with a deadly backpack?
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Mark A. Taff
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We've all run into mumbling, stumbling misfits on the sidewalks downtown. Some rant and rave. Most of us walk away or call the police. But when 47-year-old Mike Mays reached into his pocket and "intimated he was reaching for a weapon in his pants," the part-time restaurant security guard didn't wait to find out if he was. Harrison pulled his concealed weapon and squeezed the trigger.
A gun will always beat a backpack.
The street fight between Harrison and Mays goes to the heart of our notions of a "reasonable" right to self-defense. Police shifted a good chunk of the blame to the dead man; he "contributed to the confrontation that ultimately led to his death." |
Second Amendment clear
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Mark A. Taff
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The recent ruling on the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court certainly merits intelligent discussion, but to assert, as Robyn Blumner does, that the ruling gives the individual the right to own a nuclear weapon is a waste of printer's ink ("Does the Supreme Court's decision give us the right to bear nukes?" Opinion, July 7). ...
Justice John Paul Stevens got it right in his dissent when he wrote, "Specifically, there is no indication that the Framers of the Amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution." Note that Stevens states that there is a "common-law right of self-defense." The framers did not confer this right in the Second Amendment because it already existed. |
Framing The Future: The Supreme Court Vs. Survival As A Free People
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Mark A. Taff
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If anyone needed more convincing about the importance of the next presidential election, one need go no further than the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller where a Washington, D.C. ban on hand guns was declared unconstitutional because a majority of justices properly interpreted the Second Amendment.
The 5-4 decision in this case required the assent by one man, Justice Anthony Kennedy, to join with four other justices, which is bad enough inasmuch the court's opinion should have been unanimous; but worse still is the thinking process about the constitution as expressed by some justices in the minority opinions. |
When do human rights extend to nonhumans?
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Mark A. Taff
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If you caught your son burning ants with a magnifying glass, would it bother you less than if you found him torturing a mouse with a soldering iron? How about a snake? How about his sister?
Does Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - the Guantánamo detainee who says he personally beheaded the reporter Daniel Pearl - deserve the rights he denied to Pearl? Which ones? A painless execution? Exemption from capital punishment? Decent prison conditions? Habeas corpus?
Such apparently unrelated questions arise in the aftermath of the vote of the environment committee of the Spanish Parliament last month to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes - chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans. |
Feds cite Schumer in collapse of IndyMac
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Anonymous
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An important angle in the IndyMac failure that may get lost in ominous headlines tonight and tomorrow: federal regulators pointedly cited U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., in explaining the bank's failure. In simple language, federal regulators blamed Schumer for a run on the bank.
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Submitter's note: Chuckie the fearmonger strikes again. |
TX: Tarleton rifle team receives NRA grant
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New York State Rifle & Pistol Association
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The Tarleton State University Rifle Team recently received a $2,000 grant from the National Rifle Association (NRA). The funds will be used for operating expenses and keeping membership dues low. “We got a grant last year and were lucky enough to get another one this year,” said Dr. George Eichenberg, Tarleton Rifle Team adviser. “We really emphasize responsibility and the safe use of firearms.” |
Bore cleaning & lubrication when supplies run low
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I originally did this because I used a lot of rifle bore cleaner and was deterred by the high price of commercial products. I knew there was no technical reason why you could not mix an effective bore cleaner using common hardware store ingredients which would be inexpensive, effective, and provide reasonable corrosion protection and adequate lubrication. |
KS: Buntain wins second national shooting championship
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New York State Rifle & Pistol Association
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Stephen Buntain won his second national championship in as many years when he came out on top in air rifle competition at Grand Island, Neb., June 23-26. Buntain won the national championship in small bore rifle last year. The year before that, he earned the right to go to the national finals in another discipline, but declined to take the trip. This year, he competed in air rifle. Buntain also helped a four-person team from Kansas place second in team competition behind the team from Nebraska. |
NY: Grim data for gun owners
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New York State Rifle & Pistol Association
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Seventeen years ago, a couple of criminologists at the University of Maryland published an interesting paper about the 1976 Washington, D.C., ban on handguns -- a ban that was recently overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds it was inimical to the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms to protect themselves. The researchers employed a simple procedure: They tabulated all the suicides that had taken place in Washington between 1968 and 1987. Colin Loftin and David McDowall found that the gun ban correlated with an abrupt 25 percent decline in suicides in the city. |
UK: Knife crime claims 60 victims a day
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Pastor Guest
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The Sunday Telegraph has obtained data from 33 of the 43 forces in England and Wales, covering more than four-fifths of the population. The figures show that 20,803 serious knife crimes were recorded in the year to March, or 56 per day.
Allowing for forces that did not provide figures, the nationwide total is expected to be about 25,000. If Scotland and Northern Ireland attacks were included, it would be even higher. |
IL: A gun in every hand won't deter killers
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Shabby
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"In some idealized conception, arming civilians will deter or mitigate crime, but the assumptions that underlie such claims that tragedies such as those at Virginia Tech or Columbine could be prevented are at best wishful thinking and at worst delusional. In any event, they are dangerous." |
Warrantless Spying - By Your Own Government
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clell
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Mark Klein, the retired AT&T engineer who stepped forward with the technical documents at the heart of the anti-wiretapping case against AT&T, is furious at the Senate's vote on Wednesday night to hold a vote on a bill intended to put an end to that lawsuit and more than 30 others.
Ed.: The bill the article refers to is now law: See http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/aclu-challenges.html for more. |
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