Nonetheless, the conversation must be had: the conversation to amend the Second Amendment. To collapse private gun ownership in a way that is Just and true. So that our lives can have a little less worry, a little less pain.
[ … ]
So what is the answer?
Evolution. Gun’s may never again be the same domestically entwined concept which they have occupied for the last century, but they need not not be invisible. To those who simply enjoy firing the weapon – for sport, hobby, practice – I propose the proliferation of recreational shooting courses. Now what does this mean? If marketed and executed correctly, there can be highly vetted (and highly disciplined) establishments which provide a social scene for people who enjoy the sport. Think of a gym, but instead of exercising your body, you are entering into an exercise of exhilaration, precision, and above all things, marksmanship. At the same time, these courses must be very structured (both physically and abstractly,) adhering to a stringent set of bylaws stamped into each establishment’s foundation.
[ … ]
To conclude, there is no steadfast answer to the pertinent and delicate second Amendment issue before us. Nonetheless, I think there are several partial resolutions that can dam up the leaking reservoir and ultimately propel our country back into a haven of security and social-progress. We cannot be certain how the balloons will inflate, but we do know what color they will be. Maybe it’s the establishment of indoor shooting recreation. The introduction of controlled-environment outdoor hunting. Or even artificially intelligent auto-locking weaponry. Regardless, we can be certain that the world – our world – will soon become a better place for more reasons than one: No more school shootings. No more unnecessary Chicago murders. And the birth of a new industry. The world is constantly changing around us; it’s time to get back to the forgotten Darwinian train of growth and to change with it. It’s time to evolve.
Jeremy Streich is a young author from Georgetown University.
Oh how cute! A legitimate, full-orbed social Darwinist! Say it ain’t so? Are they still teaching that crap in college these days? I would have thought it would have met its demise along with belief in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny. Jeremy doesn’t really have much to worry about in his life except learning from his Marxist professors, no matter what he tells you. Not when he has time to write drivel like this.
But there are problems. He proposes to “collapse” private gun ownership, but you know he is lying because he doesn’t propose disarming the police. This evolution he sees on the horizon apparently doesn’t include enough good will that law enforcement isn’t needed. He just believes in a monopoly of force, what all social Hegelians believe (which is why cultural Marxists are always statists). Once the evolved elitists have taken power, they must manage the world for the rest of the un-evolved peasants.
He doesn’t consider that I don’t get my right to self defense from the second amendment, so that nullification of said article doesn’t in the least affect my right to bear arms. He also doesn’t understand that the second amendment has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with personal self defense. Good Lord. Do these kids take history courses from anyone other than communists these days?
He also waxes highly emotional over the horrible state of affairs these days, while violent crime is at its lowest in decades. He sees the world through youthful, uneducated eyes, aware of nothing much but what is going on immediately around him and over the last couple of years, thinking nothing much but what he’s been taught by the Marxists in college.
It would be amusing except for the danger inherent in his views. He may one day be in a position of power and authority. After all, such men always seem to rule others. There is no need to wonder why America is so divided, with wicked men acting upon such a voracious appetite for controlling others. It begins right here.
Jeremy wants to “collapse” private gun ownership. Jeremy doesn’t think for a moment about the bloodshed that would cause. The Jewish Holocaust and Armenian genocide were both predicated on gun confiscations, leading to millions of deaths. This is one road. The other is a people who won’t suffer such nonsense, leading to bloody civil war. Jeremy is okay with at least one of these options, or otherwise hasn’t thought that deeply yet. Perhaps his history courses haven’t covered any of this.
So here’s a quick note to Jeremy to assist your studies. You want to collapse private gun ownership? Any time you’re feeling froggy, Jeremy. Roll the dice and take your chances. You don’t make me the least bit nervous. Get busy, boy. Any time you’re feeling froggy.
Postscript to Jeremy. You ought to demand a refund for the courses they’ve taught you at Georgetown. Postscript to The Hill. Can’t you do better than this? What editor made the decision to go with something so random and disconnected, and so philosophically and historically bankrupt as this?
He also has some simple but obvious and interesting things to say about gun control (he’s referring to the Hughes amendment). He doesn’t often broach the subject of politics.
As the killer stood before him, Judge Kenneth Walker couldn’t stay silent.
“If I could I would take all the guns in America, put them on big barges and go dump them in the ocean,” the judge told the defendant. “Nobody would have a gun. Not police, not security, not anybody. We should eliminate all of them. We could save 33,000 people a year if we didn’t have guns in this country.”
Marcell Lee Daniel Jr. had unleashed 30 bullets during an afternoon drive-by shooting of an innocent man on a North Portland sidewalk. The man, Andrew Coggins Jr., 24, died.
The judge kept going.
“Australia after a major shooting rounded up all the guns, and they haven’t had near the death that we do here in this country,” he said.
“I just saw last night a statistic that 11,000 people in America are murdered each year and another 20,000 commit suicide with guns,” Walker said, referring to figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“They are a scourge of this country and no one should have one as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “There’s no defense to guns. There’s just absolutely no reason to have them. But it is a right of people in this country to own and possess them, and I will not say anything to affect that right.”
Walker, a Multnomah County Circuit Court judge for nearly 10 years and a criminal defense attorney before that for 25 years, sentenced Daniel to 17 1/2 years in prison.
The dead man’s mother, Connie Holmes, said she appreciated the judge’s comments.
Okay. You first. Let me know how the police react when you go confiscate their firearms. What? You were going to do this, right? You didn’t expect someone elseto do it for you, did you?
But just remember TheAlaskan’s dictum: “Those who hammer their guns into plowshares will plow for those who do not.”
There is no absolute right to self-defense; the right is qualified or limited. When the limits to this right are in view, the ground beneath gun ownership rights appears shakier.
Suppose I live in a country with useless law enforcement and know that an assassin is trying to kill me. Surely I, an innocent person, may defend myself. But if the only effective means is by blowing up a crowded building, killing not only the assassin but dozens of innocent people, I may not proceed. My act of self-defense would be disproportionately harmful to innocent others and would violate their rights. My right to self-defense is limited by the means I may take in exercising it.
Perhaps, then, people have a right to take effective means to defend themselves so long as these measures don’t wrongly harm or violate the rights of others. Yet this isn’t quite right either.
When others threaten your security or rights, certain measures may be necessary to protect you. But it doesn’t follow that you may take those measures if another party has assumed responsibility for taking them on your behalf. As Thomas Hobbes argued centuries ago, when we leave a “state of nature” and enter civil society — which features the rule of law rather than anarchy and vigilantism — we transfer some rights to a government whose job description includes protecting us from various common threats. For example, the police, an arm of the government, are permitted to pursue criminals, forcibly apprehend them and bring them to justice. As private citizens, we generally lack the authority to perform these actions.
So it is questionable whether we have not only a right to forceful protective measures but also a right to take those measures ourselves. If the right to do so has been delegated to the police and, in case of foreign invasion, to the military, then our right to self-defense is further qualified. We have, in fact, partly delegated the job of protecting our security to the police and military in the interest of a well-ordered society. So the qualified right to self-defense comes to this: a right to defend oneself when doing so (1) does not wrongly harm others or violate their rights and (2) is necessary to protect one’s security and/or rights because such protection isn’t otherwise forthcoming.
Does the qualified right of self-defense support gun ownership? Presumably, this right concerns the freedom to use effective means to defend oneself — subject to the two qualifications just stated. So, it must be asked: Are guns effective means? Are they necessary for one’s protection? And does gun ownership steer clear of harming others and violating their rights?
These questions raise complicated issues in the social sciences, political philosophy and ethics. In this short space, I can only offer a few brief notes of skepticism.
First, in our current American milieu of minimal gun control, gun ownership is associated with an increased likelihood that someone in the household will die a violent death. Assuming the spirit of “self-defense in the home” includes defending not only oneself but other household members, this evidence-based generalization suggests that gun ownership, on average, is not an effective means to personal security; rather, it tends to be self-defeating.
Second, is gun ownership necessary in the event of an attempted break-in? That is uncertain. Some evidence suggests that calling the police and hiding are more frequently sufficient for a good outcome than is brandishing or using a gun.
Third, does gun ownership avoid wrongly harming others or violating their rights? Not if, as I believe evidence suggests, gun ownership more often leads to injuring or killing innocent persons than to appropriate defensive use.
Well, this is a strange set of arguments indeed. I’ve never seen anything quite like it (at least put together like this in such a disjointed, disconnected set of passages). Let’s unpack this is a bit.
David displays a childish understanding of Western law, or any law in the world for that matter (Asian, Middle Eastern, etc.). Let me rehearse the reality where we’ve addressed this sort of argument before.
In the 1981 decision in Warren v. District of Columbia the D.C. Court of Appeals concluded that it is a “fundamental principle of American law that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.” In Castle Rock v. Gonzales (2005), the Supreme Court declined to expand any requirements for protection and ruled that the police cannot be sued for failure to protect individuals, even when restraining orders were in place.
Mr. Hubbard knows these decisions, and also knows that even if it was commonly accepted that the police were required to protect individuals, it would be impossible. They cannot be there all of the time, and they cannot even promise any particular timely response to your calls. The police can literally eat popcorn and watch while a woman is raped, as long as they effect an arrest after the fact. They may be fired for failure to follow a department procedure, but they will not be charged with a crime. “To protect and serve” is a sweet campaign slogan for Sheriffs who are running for office, but it’s a lie – it’s always a lie … The police are there for stability operations and security of the government. Understand that.
It may be a sweet bedtime story for all the little collectivists and their children to believe that the government is in some sort of contract to protect them and bring utopia to earth, but it just isn’t true. No court in America recognizes such a contract. David is engaged in propagating myths and fairy tales.
Next, he disconnects rights from any mooring or foundation and thus leaves the notion of rights meaningless. Not once does the author, who is supposedly a professor of philosophy, anchor his “rights” in a larger system of philosophy with the requisite epistemology, cosmology, metaphysics, ethics and so on. He does throw in a reference to Hobbes (and here I should mention that I consider Hobbes to have been an extremely weak thinker and his philosophy full of problems), but he says too much by using Hobbes as a reference because Hobbes believed in the right of revolt.
Next, he takes an even further turn into the bizarre by becoming a tactical advisor. He would counsel people under threat call the police and hide. Hide! But concealment isn’t cover, and dry wall doesn’t stop any handgun round known to man, much less rifle rounds. If anyone listens to his counsel, you are risking your life and the lives of your loved ones.
Next, he conflates the damage done by criminals with the good done by innocent victims, regardless of the weapon (and here one can substitute hammers, knives, etc.). He has divorced volitional intentionality from the use of tools (here substitute cars, truck loads full of fertilizer, and many other things that can be used to harm man but which can also be used for good). He even throws in a derogatory term for good measure, i.e., “brandishing,” which has nothing whatsoever to do with behavior in one’s own home, and everything to do with threatening or menacing behavior with a weapon in public. No respected tactical trainer to my knowledge has ever suggested that someone “brandish” or wave around guns at home invaders. You should shoot them, just like this woman did who recently used a handgun in self defense.
Finally, he is recommending the abdication of individual rights of innocent men because of the damage done by criminals, as if removal of the liberty of peaceable men will affect criminal behavior. He gives absolutely no justification for the rationality of this belief, or why it should be taken as properly foundational and basic. It isn’t rational, and it isn’t properly foundational and basic.
Regular readers know the true foundation of the Western principle of self defense, and it extends beyond mere self defense. The basis for this principle is found in the Decalogue.
I am afraid there have been too many centuries of bad teaching endured by the church, but it makes sense to keep trying. As I’ve explained before, the simplest and most compelling case for self defense lies in the decalogue. Thou shall not murder means thou shall protect life.
God’s law requires [us] to be able to defend the children and helpless. “Relying on Matthew Henry, John Calvin and the Westminster standards, we’ve observed that all Biblical law forbids the contrary of what it enjoins, and enjoins the contrary of what it forbids.” I’ve tried to put this in the most visceral terms I can find.
God has laid the expectations at the feet of heads of families that they protect, provide for and defend their families and protect and defend their countries. Little ones cannot do so, and rely solely on those who bore them. God no more loves the willing neglect of their safety than He loves child abuse. He no more appreciates the willingness to ignore the sanctity of our own lives than He approves of the abuse of our own bodies and souls. God hasn’t called us to save the society by sacrificing our children or ourselves to robbers, home invaders, rapists or murderers. Self defense – and defense of the little ones – goes well beyond a right. It is a duty based on the idea that man is made in God’s image. It is His expectation that we do the utmost to preserve and defend ourselves when in danger, for it is He who is sovereign and who gives life, and He doesn’t expect us to be dismissive or cavalier about its loss.
We do not need to prove that when a good thing is commanded, the evil thing that conflicts with it is forbidden. There is no one who doesn’t concede this. That the opposite duties are enjoined when evil things are forbidden will also be willingly admitted in common judgment. Indeed, it is commonplace that when virtues are commended, their opposing vices are condemned. But we demand something more than what these phrases commonly signify. For by the virtue of contrary to the vice, men usually mean abstinence from that vice. We say that the virtue goes beyond this to contrary duties and deeds. Therefore in this commandment, “You shall not kill,” men’s common sense will see only that we must abstain from wronging anyone or desiring to do so. Besides this, it contains, I say, the requirement that we give our neighbor’s life all the help we can … the purpose of the commandment always discloses to us whatever it there enjoins or forbids us to do” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapter viii, Part 9).
I have further observed that “If you’re willing to sacrifice the safety and health of your wife or children to the evils of abuse, kidnapping, sexual predation or death, God isn’t impressed with your fake morality. Capable of stopping it and choosing not to, you’re no better than a child molester, and I wouldn’t allow you even to be around my grandchildren.”
You’re the equivalent of the child predator if you reject your duty of self defense and defense of the little ones. I haven’t one ounce of respect for you. Mr. DeGrazia has done a pitiful job of arguing against the principle of self defense. And with his unseemly deference to the state, he has also given us no reason to conclude that he would have been willing or able (or armed) to save Christian lives in the Armenian genocide or Jews in the Holocaust (both of which were predicated on gun control). Mr. DeGrazia is in bad company.
A few things are clear: guns are a murderous problem; the NRA is racist and reactionary; and liberals are deluded if they believe that sentencing more black men to prison for gun crimes will do anything other than send more black men to prison. Government must disarm America, including NRA members, including the police. And it is government too that must end the war on guns.
Daniel Denvir, the writer of this pitiful piece, is so confused one wonders if they have any editors at this web site and how they let such a paragraph slip through. A good editor might have thought to ask the writer, “So how are we going to disarm America is we disarm ourselves, and who will do the disarming, since, if government disarms itself they won’t have the necessary arms to disarm anyone? And as for that matter, how does creating such a war end a war?”
But they apparently don’t have good editors. At least you can give this to the author. He’s honest about his confusion, to the point that he is willing to embarrass himself writing about it to the world. The folks at Bloomberg – not so much.
The NRA is not suggesting that every aspiring gunslinger become an expert. Quite the contrary. The organization talks a lot about gun safety and runs training programs. But its priorities lie elsewhere — such as its demand that virtually every American have immediate access to firearms, without training or qualification or cause or background check, and that they be authorized to carry those firearms in public no matter how unskilled or reckless they may be. That’s one reason that there are countless cases of accidental shootings, rage-induced homicides and alcohol-fueled attacks for every rare instance of a good guy with a gun stopping a killing.
It’s always dangerous to read too much into a slogan, even a catchy one. Still, it bears repeating: A guy with a gun and good intentions is not enough to stop a bad guy with a gun. As Jason Falconer showed, it also takes a guy who’s good with a gun.
The author isn’t calling for the disarming of cops, just others. That’s how you know he’s lying. He is advocating the collectivist belief in monopoly of force. He just doesn’t want you to have a gun. I did quite well the last time I was at the range, and I’ll put my ability with weapons up against most cops any day. Either way, it’s a lie to say that people who haven’t been trained in stress management can’t defend themselves. The author knows it. The author of the editorial just isn’t being as honest as the Daniel Denvir, who admitted to us that he has no idea what he’s talking about.
Here’s something else about which the author(s) should be honest. Attempting to confiscate guns or even place further controls on them risks bloody civil war. If they didn’t know that before, they do now. They’ve been told.
Uncle gives us his usual quick take on what Rubio’s proposal. Go and read it for yourself. TCJ reader Fred comments on this, but I want to focus on one comment in particular from Sean Sorrentino who is himself a blogger.
Sorry, Uncle, but you’re wrong on this one. This is a great move on his part. It offers the lying shitweasel Dems everything they *say* they want without giving them anything they *actually* want.
They say they want to ban terrorists from buying guns. This would do it. It gives the AG the power to prove, in court, that a person is a terrorist, and stop him from buying a gun. I’m totally cool with this. Who wouldn’t be? And they only get three days to get the paperwork in. And if they fail in court, they have to pay ALL reasonable attorney fees and costs. So you know that every ambulance chasing dickhead in the nation will show up to defend the little terrorist jerk. Or me, if it’s me.
But the shitweasel Dems can’t just randomly declare that every person who buys a “Don’t Step on Snek” flag is a terrorist and make them fight to get their rights back.
This is why Rubio’s opponent is screaming about this like someone just raped him with a running chainsaw. He realized that they just got outmaneuvered. They just got fucked over.
“Oh, you want to ban terrorists? Here you go. ACLU would buy in on this process. Why are you angry? It’s everything you SAID you wanted?”
But gun owners are too busy screaming “MUH RAHTS!” instead of finding new and interesting ways to screw over our enemies …
Horrible. Just horrible. Who wouldn’t be okay with your option, Sean? I wouldn’t be. You give far too much deference to the corrupt court and the corrupt officers of the court for my tastes, and you’ll be sorry for this approach one day if they seek a declaratory judgment for folks who believe in second amendment remedy for tyranny to be right wing terrorists. They’re either there already or not far away.
Hey, I have a much better idea, Sean. How about if they can prove to a jury of our peers (even here I’m skeptical given the idiots that make up juries these days) that a person is a terrorist – you know, has actually perpetrated some act of terror – they jail him or deport him? Or put him to death? In fact, if a person isn’t a citizen and believes in the application of Sharia law in America, they should deport him too! I can give you all kinds of suggestions for how to close the border. I’ve thought about this a good bit. For example, let’s deploy the U.S. Marines along the Southern border to shoot “mules” who transport people across. See? I have lot’s of worthy ideas.
If a person is really a terrorist, we should do a lot more than prevent him from purchasing a gun. He can get a car and kill far more people, or a truck load full of fertilizer and kill even more. You see Sean, you’re chasing after Red Herrings and misdirects. It’s how they want their underlings to behave.
That’s what the progs want us to do. As for Rubio, he is an open borders freak. I’m not surprised he wants to help folks chase after misdirects rather than focus on closing the borders. It took Ted Cruz, Louie Gohmert, Dave Brat, Mike Lee and Jeff Duncan to shut that crap down when he tried to do it as part of the gang of eight bill before. Don’t help the little weasel keep the borders open by chasing after this misdirect. Be smarter than that.
The notion that a military-grade weapon could be in the hands of local criminals is shocking, but police have already seized at least five machine guns and assault rifles in the past 18 months. The AK-47 was not among them.
Only a fortnight ago, law enforcement authorities announced they were hunting another seven assault rifles recently smuggled into the country. Weapons from the shipment have been used in armed robberies and drive-by shootings.
[ … ]
Despite Australia’s strict gun control regime, criminals are now better armed than at any time since then-Prime Minister John Howard introduced a nationwide firearm buyback scheme in response to the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.
Shootings have become almost a weekly occurrence, with more than 125 people, mostly young men, wounded in the past five years.
[ … ]
Crimes associated with firearm possession have also more than doubled, driven by the easy availability of handguns, semi-automatic rifles, shotguns and, increasingly, machine guns, that are smuggled into the country or stolen from licensed owners.
These weapons have been used in dozens of recent drive-by shootings of homes and businesses, as well as targeted and random attacks in parks, shopping centres and roads.
“They’re young, dumb and armed,” said one former underworld associate, who survived a shooting attempt in the western suburbs several years ago.
“It used to be that if you were involved in something bad you might have to worry about [being shot]. Now people get shot over nothing – unprovoked.”
Sounds rather like Chicago, yes? But wait. I predict that they’ll try to make a new set of laws that makes it illegal to disobey laws already on the books.
In response to the violence, it can be revealed the state government is planning to introduce new criminal offences for drive-by shootings, manufacturing of firearms with new technologies such as 3D printers, and more police powers to keep weapons out of the hands of known criminals.
They’re all the same everywhere, these collectivists. The law abiding citizens turned in their weapons, and so now they are defenseless against the criminals. What they need is to rearm peaceable men and women to shoot the criminals and Melbourne will regain a sense of peace. The police can’t stop this. No police anywhere can stop this. Since that’s the only option that will work, they will studiously avoid it.
In an era where anti-government positioning is a hallmark of the modern right, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that increasingly Republicans are absolutist in their views on the right of citizens to own guns. They want to preserve the right of revolution as a means of showing how much they truly hate the current government, administered by President Barack Obama.
Interestingly, Murphy has been bashing claims that gun rights are “God-given” for some time; this is not a new issue for him. In fact, when the Senate rejected new gun controls in the wake of the attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, an angry Murphy reacted by assuring Second Amendment supporters that gun rights were not “God-given.” He told MSBNC’s Rachel Maddow, “The Second Amendment is not an absolute right, not a God-given right. It has always had conditions upon it like the First Amendment has.”
Breitbart is a strange animal indeed. They have Milo Yiannopoulos as an editor, who wouldn’t have anything to do with claiming that rights of any sort are granted by God, but then they will post an article like this basing the right to own firearms on God’s law. They can’t have it both ways.
It’s easy for me, and hard for them (or easy if they don’t care about logical consistency). Murphy is confused, or simply a disbeliever in God. God doesn’t simply grant the right of self defense to men, He commands it as a duty. It is based on the Decalogue, and since that is based on His character, it is immutable.
The right of revolution doesn’t exists as some sort of perfunctory statement about how we feel about our current government, and Murphy is only saying that to insult men who believe in the second amendment. The right of revolution is based on covenant law, eternal contracts, and the basis for this is to be found directly in the Holy writ. It applies to all men, everywhere and in all times and epochs based on violations of agreements to live together under stipulations and within strict boundary conditions. When the covenant is broken, it is no longer valid.
Gunmaker Remington has asked a judge to halt what it characterized as an unreasonable and unconstitutional demand by the Massachusetts attorney general for its customer information.
Remington Arms Co. filed the petition for injunctive relief on Aug. 29 in Suffolk County Superior Court, saying Attorney General Maura Healey’s civil investigation demand is “excessively burdensome” and tramples the Fourth Amendment rights of the company and its customers.
“The AG’s demand that Remington produce each of the Product Service files without redacting customer identifying information violates the privacy rights of its customers, chills lawful conduct in exercise of the Second Amendment, and substantially interferes with Remington’s business and customer good will,” the petition states.
Remington’s demand comes on the heels of a March 9 civil investigation demand by Healey, seeking a copy of each product service file Remington has for every one of its customers.
Cyndi Roy Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s Office, said the demand is part of an investigation into how often Remington’s guns had potentially dangerous defects.
“There are scores of public reports about defects involving firearms, including accidental firing, misfiring, overheating problems and low ‘trigger pull’ leading to horrific stories of accidental shootings by children,” Roy Gonzalez said in an email.
Lack of product-safety oversight in the gun industry makes demands like these critical, the spokeswoman added.
“Many years ago, the gun industry managed to exempt itself from federal consumer product safety oversight, resulting in no public access to consumer complaints about the guns they manufacture,” Roy Gonzalez said. “This lack of transparency is unlike nearly every other consumer product sold in this country. As the chief law enforcement office in Massachusetts, we are seeking that information to better inform our residents and to protect them from any safety or manufacturing issues with guns sold here. It’s unfortunate that these gun manufacturers have taken our office to court rather than comply with a simple request for consumer complaints and related information.”
Here is a test question for readers. Where in the constitution of her state does it give SJW Healey the right to demand customer information over an investigation into product safety when no laws have been broken? In case you missed that one, here’s an extra credit question worth 100%. Where does the constitution of her state give the AG the right to spend taxpayer money to perform studies and inform citizens concerning her opinions on product safety, or to rank products according to her own criteria?
Every reader should have scored 200% on that examination. It’s a shame that Remington has to petition the court for injunctive relief, rather than gathering some local gun owners, apprehending Maura Healey and using some hemp rope to hang her from the nearest lamp post as an example to other social justice warriors to mind their own damn business.
COLUMBIA – S.C. residents will have four chances this fall to weigh in on the state’s gun laws.
A special S.C. Senate committee has scheduled public hearings on “gun issues” for Greenville, Charleston, Hartsville and Columbia. The hearings start Sept. 15.
State Sen. Gerald Malloy, D-Darlington, the committee’s chairman, said the hearings could address a variety of gun-related issues, including expanding the waiting period to buy a firearm, currently three days.
Malloy and another committee member, state Sen. Marlon Kimpson, D-Charleston, unsuccessfully pushed to lengthen that waiting period during the 2016 legislative session. They say that change would give authorities more time to investigate potential red flags found in FBI background checks.
Malloy said he expects to hear plenty from both sides – 2nd Amendment advocates as well as gun-violence victims. Any legislation that can pass the GOP-controlled Legislature must balance the right of responsible residents to own guns and the protection of society from the dangerous and mentally unstable, he said.
“We are scheduling hearings because it is a pressing issue in our society,” Malloy said. “We have a committee together that we think will be receptive of the issues of fellow South Carolinians.”
Regardless of the hearings’ testimony, Malloy said he will file bills in the upcoming legislative session to lengthen the waiting period. But testimony could influence details of those bills, such as the number of days allowed to complete a background check, he said.
In addition to Malloy and Kimpson, Republican state Sens. Chip Campsen of Charleston, Greg Gregory of Lancaster and Greg Hembree of Horry County are on the five-member committee.
Oh, there is a never ending stream of chances to do nefarious things to the rights and liberties of the people. “Receptive to the issues of fellow South Carolinians” is shorthand for we want a bilateral committee to infringe on the free exercise of rights in the name of cooperation and collegiality.
Resist this temptation, folks. Just don’t do it. There shouldn’t be any more gun control laws. No one elected you to infringe on their God-given rights and liberties, no matter what you were taught by your Marxist college professors. Don’t try to be the family, church and state all wrapped up into one totem like Molech. You cannot solve problems of morality by laws. The state doesn’t have salvific powers.
But here is one bill we need to see come from your pens, as a committee, or individually, or from the pens of someone else in the Senate or House. We need to see a bill legalizing open carry in South Carolina, like the vast majority of other states. Reject that awful, racist, communist, Jim Crow legacy and finally bring South Carolina into the twenty first century.
9 years, 10 months ago
