Is that Burns in the above picture??

i didn’t say that rednecks were the only ones. i did say that i’m related to them though and my family, well the men in my family, will be excited.

i agree with you. i do. you don’t need to explain that to me. it’s obvious to anyone who keeps up with the news knows that the ban has not done the city any good, hasn’t helped keep crime down, and if someone really wanted to shoot anyone, they could.

I just hope that an English teacher somewhere is using the Second Amendment and Scalia’s explanation of it to demonstrate why grammar is important in the real world.

teaching moment!

let’s see how many times one of you Charles Bronson wannabes actually shoots a violent criminal in self-defense and compare that to the number of kids who end up fatally wounded because they find a parent’s gun in the house.

*stoked to buy a glock and clean up shaw*

rob: i agree with michael. if there is a gun in the house everyone, including tots should be aware of it, know how it is used, etc.

i’ve known familys that have taken their three year old hunting, and that kid never got into any trouble with guns.

if you kill the curiosity before they have a chance to get in trouble then things like that wouldn’t happen.

spot on brilliant:
“OTOH there are hundreds of gun laws that should be enforced that aren’t. I’m also of the firm belief that if you pass muster to own a gun then you should have extensive training in the use of it. We have tens of thousands of road deaths because our driving licensing procedures are a fucking joke but no politician has the balls to dare say they should be more stringent. Gun licensing procedures should be comprehensive and exhaustive. I’d love to see people have to go through hours of written courses to test knowledge, be able to fully operate and control the gun, be able to take it apart and put it back, be able to memorize the muzzle velocity, bullet grain weight, and also fire the gun in an operational environment (such as those fake training rooms the military and police use to test your ability to use one under pressure) before they’re ever issued the permit to own one, much as drivers -should- have to operate their vehicles on closed courses under a variety of conditions to include emergency braking before they’re allowed to get behind the wheel of a car.

I despise the yuppie douche changing lanes while on a cell phone, I also don’t want that douche owning a gun.”

I have things to do but I’ll try to respond quickly to this.

“What relaxed legal standard?”

I’m talking about the interpretation of the second amendment, and the less restrictive environment that will result from reading a private individual right to arms into the second amendment. The striking down of the DC law, while relevant to us, is only a fraction of the impact of the ruling.

“For three decades the city has banned handguns. For 3 decades murders have risen. How have the majority of these murders been committed? By criminals using illegal handguns. The ban did absolutely nothing to stem, much less stop, handgun violence.”

We live next door to Virginia, there’s an inherent enforcement issue in a jurisdictional arrangement like the one we’re stuck with.

“If anything it emboldened criminals because they knew that the overwhelming majority of people they would rob would not be armed.”

How would you know what’s going on in the mind of an armed criminal? Besides, going by your own logical train of thought here, anyone who wanted a buy a gun elsewhere and keep it in DC has always been able to do so, and certainly an armed criminal would be even more aware of this than the average resident.

“There are a lot of criminals re-thinking their positions today I bet.”

This is pure speculation and doesn’t need to be addressed.

“Regardless, the SCOTUS has agreed with the framers of the Constitution that it is the right of all citizens to own a gun for self defense.”

The holding certainly did not proclaim a right for “all citizens,” try reading the opinion.

“The only difference is the person they attempt to rob may just be packing too.”

You think society benefits from a legal regime in which people use deadly weapons against other human beings to repel a deprivation of property? Where are your priorities? Show me an example of a dense urban area full of handguns in which property crimes are low and the quality of life isn’t miserable.

“Trying to frame your dislike of guns by wrapping it up in the argument that children MAY be killed by handguns laying about on coffee tables willy-nilly is emotional nonsense.”

Ah, emotional nonsense. As long as we’re posturing in pointless ways about the nature of arguments, your position is a bunch of macho bullshit and I remain confident that you’ll sooner piss yourself than pull a gun on a criminal in your life. Back to actual discussion though - I think accidental deaths are a very important concern and deserve to be considered when calculating the costs and benefits of a policy on deadly weapons.

“Since more kids are killed by irresponsible parents driving like idiots than are killed using public transportation, shouldn’t you feel that it is a “net loss and we’re worse off for it” because cars aren’t banned for personal use?”

This is absurd. The beneficial uses of automobiles can hardly be counted and outweigh the risk of accidental deaths by any calculation. The value of private handgun possession is largely delivered in pure hypotheticals, and the “benefit” necessarily involves the risk of death or serious injury to another human being.

when you buy a gun don’t you have to show identification? and when you do wouldn’t it be illegal for anyone to sell a gun to a resident of the district?

i mean i’ve never bought a gun, but one would think something like that was how it was supposed to be.

or is that another thing they don’t enforce?

i’m getting lost in this strand.

anyone want to go handgun shopping? i like this one…

http://www.starstore.com/acatalog/Han-solo-blaster-replica.jpg

it puts the HAN in HANDGUN. Get it? Han. Han Solo? Nevermind.

jeff: that was intense.

i prefer the old-school cowboy variety.

http://tgscom.com/images/sharedimages/gunsourcefrontpage/images/blackhill/cowboy.jpg

and my dad’s remington single-bolt-action .22 rifle. he got it for christmas when he was ten.

just as a counterpoint to the app. law story, a classmate of mine in law school decided it’d be a good idea to stand on the balcony of his apartment with a high powered rifle and do target practice on his real estate finance text book by shooting it while it was in the back seat of his car parked on the street. while this is beyond inexcusably stupid, and terrorized the entire city, he had no intention of actually hurting anyone, and i’m glad the police had a chance to defuse the situation before a vigilante neighbor (without discounting what legitimate fear they probably had) ran over and shot him. he belongs in prison, not dead.

i don’t feel strongly gun ownership (other than i would never advocate for someone to buy a gun) but i think some of the statistics bounced around on this post show that as a whole we don’t really know what the true danger of gun use really is. I think it’s hard to argue with the fact that we perceive ourselves to be in more danger than we actually are, (lily’s minority/majority statements) and i’m not comfortable with many people using these misconceptions to guide their gun toting decisions. however, i think it’s this lack of knowledge that needs to change, rather than try to carve out the constitution

“Rob, do you think that a law-abiding citizen with a gun has ever deterred a violent crime, and would you be ok if that citizen were dead as long as guns were banned?”

Apparently you have a problem with dead citizens, yet your solution is to make guns as accessible as possible? Guns are not just used for lawful citizens’ deterrence of violent crimes. See also manslaughter, domestic violence, et al.

“consider the majority of guns used in crimes are illegal (either stolen or imported illegally) and that criminals will ALWAYS have guns (drug war, anyone), do you really think it would be better for guns to be “banned” knowing full well that criminals will always be able to obtain them?”

See above, and consider the strength of restrictions on gun ownership in New York City, whose laws Mayor Bloomberg expects to pass constitutional muster even after Heller. New York City is as safe from violent crime on a per capita basis as Ann Arbor, Michigan. Apparently there are intelligent alternative ways to combat crime than to turn real life into a Death Wish sequel.

On a purely functional level, you’re getting toward the cost/benefit thing that I can get behind in terms of policy evaluation. My concern would be in the (inevitably partisan and thus difficult to parse out) manner in which the costs and benefits could reasonably be calculated. What I mean there is that while “gun related deaths + 1 = total deterred crimes” would be at least a foundation to support private gun ownership, I feel like there are a lot of intangibles that are difficult to work into the analysis - stuff like the quality of life issue of living in a dense city under the assumption that a significant portion of non-criminal, but possibly temperamental, people are walking around with guns at any time. Even the basic formula is problematic, since deterred crimes are unquantifiable. The death penalty’s had some similar analysis on this point in the past, and what I’ve read has typically come down against the deterrent effect as a useful externality of the punishment.

I picked Ann Arbor because it’s a close per capita analog. The article below references it, it’s from 2003 but violent crime in New York is actually down a bit since then anyway.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1D7113CF935A25751C1A9659C8B63

I think the correlative effect with some of these numbers, DC in particular, can be overexaggerated insofar as the existence/absence of a deterrent lead significantly to those crime rates. Sticking with DC for the sake of a commonly held example, there are a variety of other factors that merit consideration within the span of time in which the handgun ban has been in effect - basically everything we all know about the state of affairs in DC in the 1970’s and 80’s that affected the demographics, incomes, etc. and could conceivably contribute to higher crime rates.

In addition, while I’m not sure which jurisdictions or cities are referenced in that last line of your post, the statistics fail to account for the New York City example, where they’ve maintained the most restrictive gun laws of any big city while steadily lowering violent crime rates. That leads me to embrace something like an Occam’s Razor approach to gun laws - if we can make a city significantly safer with or without guns, I opt for the choice that doesn’t take the extra step of introducing guns.

That gets into law enforcement strategies that are beyond my pay grade, and I reaaaaally ought to be studying for the bar right now anyway, so I’m going to have to lay off this thread for the rest of the night. Cheers.

in more pressing legal matters, will this settlement endanger the open sale and distribution of Sparks?!!
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/26/anheuser.busch.settle/index.html

oh, and i didn’t mean it was unfortunate that you said it, michael; i meant it was unfortunate that nobody has a crystal ball.