“Professor Michael Bellesiles will be on paid leave from his teaching duties at Emory University during the fall semester.”
Some say a woman ought not to try to defend herself with a gun, because her attacker will just take it away from her and shoot her with it. Ha ha ha!
On September 11th, our president could have gone on national TV and said, “I call upon all armed citizens to load their weapons, and go outside to secure their communities against terrorists. Under the emergency powers granted to me, I hereby suspend all federal[,] state and local regulations against the possession and carrying of firearms.” Large chunks of the US would have been safe from terrorists. Then the government could have concentrated on the disarmed bits like airliners and so forth. Make their job much easier.
And Senator Feinstein would screech about state sovereignty; that’s worth a heap of bonus points.
How about that loon Ashcroft, eh, going against a grand old tradition of squeezing the Constitution for every drop of authority it could be construed to grant to Washington. The nerve!
You’ll probably hear it repeated, if you haven’t already, that the Supreme Court in US v Miller (1939) upheld a conviction for illegal possession of a short shotgun, on the grounds that Jack Miller was not enrolled in an organized militia. That’s the conventional story, and it is inaccurate. (For one thing, Miller was never convicted; the government appealed a dismissal.) ( . . more . . )
nonsense, only Americans shoot people
Just when you thought I had stopped talking about guns, here are John and Antonio on the recent school shooting in Germany:
And guess whose fault it is, according to psychologist Andrés González Bellido in the Vanguardia? You guessed it. America’s. “These episodes that once seemed only to occur in the US can be explained (in Europe), says this psychologist, because European society is becoming more similar to American society. ‘Loneliness, individual frustration, and greater and greater social inequalities lead to extreme situations,’ he adds.” These people took Death of a Salesman much too seriously. Interestingly enough, the exact same sort of commentary was made after 16 were killed in Hungerford, England, in 1987, after 14 were killed in Luxiol, France, in 1989, after 17 were killed in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, after 14 were killed in Zug, Switzerland, in 2001, and after 8 were killed just recently in Nanterre, France.
We are often reminded that US murder rates are the Highest in the Developed World. This parade makes me yearn suddenly for a comparison of mass murder rates.
This ought to surprise nobody. (Another link from Kopel; search for “April 2”.) I’m pleased that Mr Harper had the good sense to shoot at the robbers even though they claimed to be police. If it happens more often, maybe some of the police will speak up about the foolishness of the War On Some Drugs.
Hey, I can dream, can’t I? But more likely they’ll ask for further police-statist legislation to make such violations of the Fourth Amendment safer for the violators.
Someone (forgot who) recounted a conversation with a cop during the siege of Waco: the cop agreed that BATF was in the wrong, but still wanted the Davidians to be smacked down hard, because resistance cannot be tolerated.
A few years ago, Massad Ayoob’s column in one of the gun magazines invited us to weep for the wife and small child of a policeman who was shot dead during a “dynamic entry”, police euphemism for breaking into a home at night to terrorize the occupants. Ayoob (himself a cop) hoped the killer would be sentenced to death. I was delighted to see that the next issue’s letters disagreed with Ayoob in the strongest terms, and later a jury rejected the murder charge: even a trader in contraband (I believe he was convicted on that count) has a right of self-defense.