January 16, 2013

The best argument against gun control is American history. Not at the nation’s founding. In the nation’s capitol on it’s bicentennial.

JHo

Since my rights and yours precede and trump the left’s chronic mendacity, I’m not one to argue with leftists about my right to defend myself, regardless of the nature of the threat against me.

But when I do meet the left on its terms I use Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, criminal prosecutor for the District of Columbia from 2007-09.

In the wake of the horrific elementary-school shootings in Newtown, Conn., last month, many Americans, desperate to do something in response, have decided that much stricter gun control is the answer. Democrats have proposed reinstating the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein has proposed legislation that would even restrict the use of some semiautomatic handguns.

[...]

The D.C. gun ban, enacted in 1976, prohibited anyone other than law-enforcement officers from carrying a firearm in the city. Residents were even barred from keeping guns in their homes for self-defense.

[...]

The gun ban had an unintended effect: It emboldened criminals because they knew that law-abiding District residents were unarmed and powerless to defend themselves. Violent crime increased after the law was enacted, with homicides rising to 369 in 1988, from 188 in 1976 when the ban started. By 1993, annual homicides had reached 454.

The Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department also waged a war on firearms by creating a special Gun Recovery Unit in 1995. The campaign meant that officers were obliged to spend time searching otherwise law-abiding citizens. That same year, the department launched a crackdown called Operation Cease Fire to rid the District of illegal firearms. But after four months, officers had confiscated only 282 guns out of the many thousands in the city.

Civil liberties were endangered. Legislative changes empowered judges to hold gun suspects in pretrial detention without bond for up to 100 days, and efforts were made to enact curfews and seize automobiles found to contain firearms. In 1997, Police Chief Charles Ramsey disbanded the unit so that he could assign more uniformed officers to patrol the streets instead, but the police periodically tried other gun crackdowns over the next decade—with little effect.

In 2007, a panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the city’s gun ban was unconstitutional. Senior Judge Laurence H. Silberman wrote in the majority opinion that “the black market for handguns in the District is so strong that handguns are readily available (probably at little premium) to criminals. It is asserted, therefore that the D.C. gun control laws irrationally prevent only law abiding citizens from owning handguns.”

The ruling was affirmed the following year by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller. Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion said that citizens were guaranteed a right to keep firearms that were in common use in their homes for self-defense, but that the government could pass reasonable regulations concerning firearms and ammunition.

Heller created a panic among gun-control advocates because it condoned the ownership of semiautomatic handguns, which are among the most common firearms in use but also the target of many restriction efforts. Supporters of the District gun ban maintained that because a semiautomatic handgun could potentially be converted into a machine gun—a class of firearms not expressly protected by Heller—they were in fact machine guns and therefore not protected by the Second Amendment. In response, Congress threatened to pass a law that specified the legality of semiautomatic handguns in the District. To avoid the embarrassment of being dictated to by Congress, the D.C. Council passed emergency legislation in September 2008 amending the gun ban to allow ownership of semiautomatic handguns for home defense.

Since the gun ban was struck down, murders in the District have steadily gone down, from 186 in 2008 to 88 in 2012, the lowest number since the law was enacted in 1976. The decline resulted from a variety of factors, but losing the gun ban certainly did not produce the rise in murders that many might have expected.

The urge to drastically restrict firearms after mass murders like those at Sandy Hook Elementary School last month and in Aurora, Colo., in July, is understandable. In effect, many people would like to apply the District’s legal philosophy on firearms to the entire nation. Based on what happened in Washington, I think that would be a mistake. Any sense of safety and security would be a false one.

Learn from history or be doomed to repeat it. But do not do so at the expense of my rights, property, or liberty because those rights, property, and liberty shall never be yours to take. You have nothing but history to warn you.

Heed it.

Posted by JHoward @ 4:04pm
13 comments | Trackback

Comments (13)

  1. newrouter says January 16, 2013 at 4:26 pm

    ot

    What is news is that courtesy of the supplied calendar of events in the Buba statement, it will take the Fed some seven years to procure Germany’s 300 tons of gold. This is the same Fed that, in its own words, holds some “216 million troy ounces of gold” or some 6720 tons, in its vault 80 feet below ground level.

    link

  2. Merovign says January 16, 2013 at 4:26 pm

    Learn from history? The deuce you say.

  3. newrouter says January 16, 2013 at 7:52 pm

    ot fiats need some gold

    Gold accounted for some 80% of mining activity in the mid 2000s, while there remain considerable proven reserves of other minerals not currently exploited. Gold has become Mali’s third-largest export,

    link

  5. geoffb says January 16, 2013 at 10:41 pm

    From the comments at nr’s link.

    Germany wants their gold holdings repatriated to home soil. They have asked the French to return all of their gold, at a rate of 50 tonnes per year until all 374 metric tonnes are received.

    The French have just commenced military operations in Mali. Mali is Africa’s third largest gold producer. Mali, this past year, increased its gold production by just over 50 metric tonnes.

    Is anyone else seeing the connection here?

    I’m willing to bet that France does not have Germany’s gold and the Bundesbank has given them a few years to mine it from Mali. Yet the Mali source must be secure, hence the military must make sure the gold flows.

  6. Merovign says January 17, 2013 at 1:23 am

    Yeah, this is the Year of the Screw, looks like everywhere.

  7. JHoward says January 17, 2013 at 4:47 am

    Jesse:

    The opposite of love is not hate, but callous apathy and uncaring. Hate is a passion, the opposite of lust.

    And tragedy occurs when such heartlessness is advantaged by careerism, and an ideology that rationalizes unconscionable expediency, sanctioned privation, organized repression, and eventually murder, on a massive scale.

    This is not how monsters are created, but how their enablers and supporters are formed, so that they too can, over time, become as beasts to escape their unbearable shallowness, and the emptiness of their souls.

    These are not the Hitlers, but the little Eichmanns. And they are abroad again, making and influencing policy on an alarming scale, today.

    Fiat is the ultimate manipulation, the ultimate power, the scenario that enables — no, forces — today’s beginning of the end game. Fake money landscapes the ultimate killing field.

  8. Pingback: Summer gun wars: Jesse Jackson leads the way

  9. mojo says January 17, 2013 at 10:16 am

    Has there been a blip in Tungsten production, I wonder?

  10. Merri says January 19, 2013 at 10:49 pm

    Learn from history. This is a good motto, but one that is oh so easily corrupted.
    .
    Now, I really don’t want to dig further into archives gathering data so I am using a 1998 MPDC report and other general census data for general analysis.

    Link

    The gun ban had an unintended effect: It emboldened criminals because they knew that law-abiding District residents were unarmed and powerless to defend themselves. Violent crime increased after the law was enacted, with homicides rising to 369 in 1988, from 188 in 1976 when the ban started. By 1993, annual homicides had reached 454.

    This seems to claim that “criminals” were preying upon the now helpless citizens, and that the increase of crime was directly related to the aforementioned bill… but why leave out the 1990 – 2000 data which shows a clear decline in the homicide rate (485′s to 250′s) and by 2006 we have a 169 data point.

    Furthermore, “criminals” do not “prey” upon people by KILLING them, they ROB them or ASSAULT them. (Robbery is a motive in only 10% of 1998 homicides (23% unknown motive))

    Data indicates a fairly stable rate of robbery in 1989 – 1996.
    Assault has a growth pattern with a serious peak at 1993 (~60% growth over 5 years)

    In 1997, Police Chief Charles Ramsey disbanded the unit so that he could assign more uniformed officers to patrol the streets instead

    1997 shows strong drop in Robbery (30% from 6.5k) and Homicide (25% from 397).

    Indications show that the NATIONWIDE homicide rate was on the rise, rising from 16k to 24k from 1970 to 1980. (Rate analysis is an 8.7 to a 10.3).
    link

    Of further interest is that D.C. underwent a serious population contraction
    link

    Furthermore

    He pointed to pictures of an extended-barrel MAC-10 machine gun and a tommy gun, the cylinder-fed machine gun known best from the Prohibition days of Al Capone. They represented a fraction of the 1,308 guns that the city’s firearms recovery units yanked from D.C. streets in 18 months from 1995 to 1997.

    Link

    But after four months, officers had confiscated only 282 guns out of the many thousands in the city.
    Blatant manipulation of fact (to this extent) is absurd. The 2006 reports off MPDC show a healthy (but not adequate) gun confiscation rate (~2.5k a year). Still, the purpose of the confiscation is to trace the guns to the dealers; not simply to “remove the gun.” (The 2006 report indicates a ‘more is better’ approach with many guns not getting traced back to criminal dealers.)

    Learn from history or be doomed to repeat it.
    But do not do so at the expense of my rights, property, or liberty because those rights, property, and liberty shall never be yours to take.

    Slaves are my property, I own my property, you cannot take my slaves away. History shows that Africa honors slavery and these slaves were legally traded by African tribesmen to European merchants who then traded them to me, you have no right to stop it. History shows that slaves existed for eons before and some claim slaves built the Egyptian Pyramids, surely History shows that SLAVES make great things possible?

    This no longer is an argument about history. It is an argument about PERSONAL LIBERTIES. You, and others, value a particular freedom above all others because you have been spoiled by a life filled with freedoms; to those who have felt otherwise, they would question your devotion and ask why you would value your freedom above their freedoms.

  11. Ernst Schreiber says January 20, 2013 at 12:27 am

    And here I thought it was an argument about the Constitution. Silly me.

  12. Ernst Schreiber says January 20, 2013 at 12:40 am

    You know, I don’t remember us getting rid of slavery by instituting an oppressively onerous regulatory regime that made slaves too expensive and burdensome to own, except, of course, for government agents and the extremely wealthy.

    Oops, I forget, this is no longer an argument about history.

  13. Pingback: Gun Control Controversy | heidiandresen

Leave a Reply