Doug Huffman
Banned
imported post
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/16/america/letter.php
This Tuesday is a rare one in the United States, without a presidential primary. The political fireworks instead will be at the Supreme Court, which will hear a case on whether the government can limit firearms.
In a country racked by gun violence, this should be a hot topic among presidential aspirants. It isn't.
The Democratic candidates, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, and, less surprisingly, the likely Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, are ducking the issue. There is minimal attention to guns on any of their Web sites.
Every reputable poll shows most Americans believe in limits on gun use[My emphasis and the end of my reading of this drivel].
Most of the passion on the issue, however, is with the powerful gun lobby and its adherents.
Clinton and Obama believe that taking a dive on guns will make it easier to cut into Republican strength in Southern, Western and rural areas.
The case that will be argued Tuesday is over the meaning of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "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."
Courts have long interpreted that to protect the state's right to form a militia rather than a citizen's unfettered right to own firearms. Last year, a conservative appellate court, however, overturned a ban on ownership of handguns in Washington, arguing that it violated the Second Amendment.
Walter Dellinger, the former U.S. solicitor general who is arguing the case on behalf of Washington, says the gun lobby is trying "to hijack" the Second Amendment.
"This is not an amendment designed to give every individual freestanding gun rights," he says. "The Supreme Court got it right as far back as 1939," when it unanimously ruled that a federal gun law didn't violate the Constitution.
Today, much more than 70 years ago, the gun-violence culture is deeply ingrained in America:
The firearms-homicide rate of about 3.42 per 100,000 citizens is the highest of any industrialized country. It is about 100-fold the gun-homicide rate in Britain or Japan; only violence-prone developing nations like Colombia have a higher rate.
Last year, more children died from gunfire than from cancer and HIV/AIDS combined; the firearms death rate for kids under 15 is 12 times more than the 25 other largest industrialized countries combined, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The United States has the highest concentration of gun ownership in the world, 283 million guns - a third of them handguns - owned by about a third of the citizenry.
Less than a year ago, the nation was shocked when 32 students and professors were gunned down by a deranged student armed with two pistols at Virginia Tech university. Last month, five more were killed in a similar incident at Northern Illinois University. If Congress in 2004 hadn't allowed a 10-year-old federal ban on the individual use of assault weapons to expire, both of these shooters would have had less ammunition, and lives would probably have been spared.
In Washington in 2006, more than 1,400 robberies were committed with guns; 125 people were killed. By contrast, Canada, with a population 59 times larger than Washington's, had 190 deaths related to firearms.
In 2006, Washington law-enforcement officials recovered 2,656 firearms, many of which had been used in crimes and a number of which undoubtedly would have been in the future.
The rationale for focusing on handguns is simple. In an urban area, these easily concealed weapons have posed lethal threats in schools, office buildings and public transportation.
While the law hasn't worked perfectly, it has reduced crimes and deaths.
Mayors of many cities, led by Michael Bloomberg of New York (the principal owner of the company that runs Bloomberg News), are pushing for a crackdown on the lax enforcement of gun laws, on the inability to trace illicit firearms use and the activities of unscrupulous dealers.
The gun lobby and its political allies have fought back ferociously.
State legislatures like Virginia's have passed measures prohibiting sting operations by law-enforcement officers in shady gun stores. Sting operations for illicit sex are fine, but not to stop deadly weapons.
Few matters better illustrate the gun culture's hold on Americans than the case before the Supreme Court now. The Bush administration took a middle ground, arguing that individuals have a right to bear arms but that the state, in this case the government of Washington, has the right to reasonably regulate guns.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/16/america/letter.php
This Tuesday is a rare one in the United States, without a presidential primary. The political fireworks instead will be at the Supreme Court, which will hear a case on whether the government can limit firearms.
In a country racked by gun violence, this should be a hot topic among presidential aspirants. It isn't.
The Democratic candidates, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, and, less surprisingly, the likely Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, are ducking the issue. There is minimal attention to guns on any of their Web sites.
Every reputable poll shows most Americans believe in limits on gun use[My emphasis and the end of my reading of this drivel].
Most of the passion on the issue, however, is with the powerful gun lobby and its adherents.
Clinton and Obama believe that taking a dive on guns will make it easier to cut into Republican strength in Southern, Western and rural areas.
The case that will be argued Tuesday is over the meaning of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "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."
Courts have long interpreted that to protect the state's right to form a militia rather than a citizen's unfettered right to own firearms. Last year, a conservative appellate court, however, overturned a ban on ownership of handguns in Washington, arguing that it violated the Second Amendment.
Walter Dellinger, the former U.S. solicitor general who is arguing the case on behalf of Washington, says the gun lobby is trying "to hijack" the Second Amendment.
"This is not an amendment designed to give every individual freestanding gun rights," he says. "The Supreme Court got it right as far back as 1939," when it unanimously ruled that a federal gun law didn't violate the Constitution.
Today, much more than 70 years ago, the gun-violence culture is deeply ingrained in America:
The firearms-homicide rate of about 3.42 per 100,000 citizens is the highest of any industrialized country. It is about 100-fold the gun-homicide rate in Britain or Japan; only violence-prone developing nations like Colombia have a higher rate.
Last year, more children died from gunfire than from cancer and HIV/AIDS combined; the firearms death rate for kids under 15 is 12 times more than the 25 other largest industrialized countries combined, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The United States has the highest concentration of gun ownership in the world, 283 million guns - a third of them handguns - owned by about a third of the citizenry.
Less than a year ago, the nation was shocked when 32 students and professors were gunned down by a deranged student armed with two pistols at Virginia Tech university. Last month, five more were killed in a similar incident at Northern Illinois University. If Congress in 2004 hadn't allowed a 10-year-old federal ban on the individual use of assault weapons to expire, both of these shooters would have had less ammunition, and lives would probably have been spared.
In Washington in 2006, more than 1,400 robberies were committed with guns; 125 people were killed. By contrast, Canada, with a population 59 times larger than Washington's, had 190 deaths related to firearms.
In 2006, Washington law-enforcement officials recovered 2,656 firearms, many of which had been used in crimes and a number of which undoubtedly would have been in the future.
The rationale for focusing on handguns is simple. In an urban area, these easily concealed weapons have posed lethal threats in schools, office buildings and public transportation.
While the law hasn't worked perfectly, it has reduced crimes and deaths.
Mayors of many cities, led by Michael Bloomberg of New York (the principal owner of the company that runs Bloomberg News), are pushing for a crackdown on the lax enforcement of gun laws, on the inability to trace illicit firearms use and the activities of unscrupulous dealers.
The gun lobby and its political allies have fought back ferociously.
State legislatures like Virginia's have passed measures prohibiting sting operations by law-enforcement officers in shady gun stores. Sting operations for illicit sex are fine, but not to stop deadly weapons.
Few matters better illustrate the gun culture's hold on Americans than the case before the Supreme Court now. The Bush administration took a middle ground, arguing that individuals have a right to bear arms but that the state, in this case the government of Washington, has the right to reasonably regulate guns.
