Second Amendment Under Fire?

This sort of thing makes me ill:

CASSELBERRY, Fla. - A central Florida woman who fatally shot her son then killed herself at a shooting range wrote in suicide notes to her boyfriend that she was trying to save her son.

"I'm so sorry," Marie Moore wrote several times. "I had to send my son to heaven and myself to Hell."

The mother in question who did this was ineligible to own a firearm:

Mitchell's father, Charles Moore, told police that Marie Moore had a history of mental illness and had previously attempted suicide and been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital in 2002 under the state's Baker Act.

One of the questions on form 4473 deals specifically with mental incompetence, specifically, whether you have ever been adjudicated mentally incompetent. 

Florida's "Baker Act" is the statute under which someone can be involuntarily committed as a risk to themself or others due to mental instability.

It appears that the firearms that were being used had been rented at the range, which is legal (as it should be); this allows one to go to a gun range, rent a few firearms and fire them to test their "fit" to you before you purchase one.

Needless to say random acts of mass-murder are rather tough to commit at a gun range, as everyone there is armed (duh!)

However, this also points out that random acts of single-murder followed by a suicide are impossible to prevent, even if you are in the company of a group of people who are all armed and able to defend themselves.

I would not be surprised to see the NICS (instant background check) system proposed to be extended to ranges as a result of this event if one wants to rent a firearm.  Perhaps this is appropriate given that it is not hard to argue that a rental, even within the confines of the range property, is a temporary "transfer" of the firearm to the person involved, and that this "transfer" is occurring in commerce (that is, you typically pay a fee for rental of the firearm to the range, as one would expect given that it has to be purchased and, once you've used it, it must be cleaned and maintained.)  That's the definition under which the NICS ("Brady Law") was conceived, even though I personally believe the Brady Law is fatally flawed as every criminal shooting that takes place proves that crooks don't care about and don't adhere to firearms laws just like they don't pay attention to laws against murder, rape, robbery, drug running and carjacking. 

I believe the statistics on this point are clear - the more restrictive the firearms laws, on balance, the more crime.  This is just plain common sense; the "bad guys" would much rather their victims not be armed, as it increases their odds of getting away with their crime.  In those states that have gone from restrictive firearms policies to permissive ones, violent crimes (with and without firearms) have dropped, in many cases precipitously so (normed to the rest of the nation), and yet those states that have imposed more restrictive firearms policies have either not seen materially better statistics (normed to the rest of the nation) or have seen their statistics worsen.

The poster child for this is of course Washington DC which (until Heller) had the most restrictive gun laws in the nation.  This, of course, hasn't prevented the bad guys from both obtaining handguns and using them with disastrous results for the (unarmed, law-abiding) citizens.

20/20 did a "hit piece" on personal firearms ownership the other day, and it was a doozy.  Their claim that "packing heat" is worse than worthless belies a few outright lies: first, their "assailant" in the exercises was a trained police officer while the "citizens" were not and second he was told who was armed before he came into the room. 

If you tell an assailant in advance about the one person in the room who is armed, you now are devolving the use of defensive force into a debate about quality of training and practice, and little else.

In the real world it doesn't work that way.  In the real world the assailant has no clue who is and who is not armed until he barrels into the room and starts firing.  If he selects the wrong initial target, he eats a round or two himself and if he winds up with multiple defensively-armed people that are at disparate angles from his location he must take his eyes off at least one of them to attempt to shoot the other; leaving the first defender with an "uncovered" shot to stop him.

But even under these contrived, intentionally-designed-to-fail scenarios, one of the "armed citizens" won, although 20/20 didn't present it that way.  That "armed citizen" scored a groin shot.  This was considered a "loss" by 20/20 as it was a "miss" (the intent was to shoot at center-of-mass) but since the essential purpose of a defensive shooting is to stop the assault - that is, disable the attacker - does anyone here believe that a shot to the groin would not have succeeded in that goal? If you're a man and have been kicked in the balls, you tell me how much fight you had left in you.

20/20 also apparently couldn't manage to find even one successful defensive use of a firearm.  This had to be due to willful blindness as I found one with a glance at the local paper:

Rick Crider, 52, killed Reba Crider, 49, on Jan. 25 inside the home in the 10300 block of Aileron Avenue, off West U.S. 98.

"My wife just took a shot at me," Crider told a 911 dispatcher. "I killed her."

In a report released Thursday, Assistant State Attorney David Rimmer concluded that Reba Crider, who was outside, fired a single shot through a kitchen window in her husband's direction.

He returned five shots in self-defense, using a gun he kept atop his refrigerator, according to Rimmer. She was struck in her chest, right hand and right arm.

The rest of the article makes clear that this wasn't exactly a "friendly marriage", but when you shoot into someone's home from the outside it is rather clear what your intent is; the DA has investigated and found wanting any cause for prosecution.  Of course without a firearm, the husband would have been defending against his wife's bullets with his bare hands.

Nor do we have to look far to find non-firearms killings.  How about "beer and cars"?

Joseph Stewart said he drank three beers as he played a round of golf at Tiger Point Golf Club, an investigator testified Wednesday at a Santa Rosa County detention hearing.

Within 20 minutes after he left the course on April 1 to go home, Stewart had two crashes.

The second crash left 25-year-old Bartholomew Cole of Gulf Breeze dead and two passengers injured. Stewart is charged with DUI manslaughter, DUI with serious bodily injury, DUI with property damage and vehicular manslaughter.

If you look in your local rag you can likely find several similar incidents, none of which involve firearms.

Yet nobody is (seriously) calling for banning either beer or cars.

There have been a number of recent shootings, and one must wonder if the incidence is related to the current set of economic conditions, in that stress levels have, in general, been high and rising across the board.

But when I sadly count the rounds and the dead, I am left with the same inescapable conclusions that I have every other time I've looked at this issue over the years:

• The majority of the shootings are committed by people who are ineligible to own firearms due to some (legitimate) legal disability.  We simply refuse to enforce existing law, although this has improved.  NICS checks in many places now take place "online" via the encoding on a purchaser's driver license, and I've heard reports of NICS inquiries being routed to the mobile data terminals in squad cars if the intended purchaser has outstanding wants or warrants.  That's what I call "a good thing."
• There are some 14,000 homicides (and a similar number of suicides) committed with firearms a year in the United States.  However, there are somewhere between 800,000 and 2.5 million defensive uses of firearms annually. These aren't the numbers from either a "gun banning" or "gun advocacy" group (e.g. The Brady folks or the NRA) - they are an estimate from the Department of Justice.
• Even the most critical "study", one which focused only on actual victims of crimes (that is, resulting in a police report) and which would trap someone into admitting to possession of a firearm where it might not be lawful (e.g. in the City of Chicago) came up with an estimate of over 100,000 annual defensive uses.  Yet most defensive uses of firearms result in no police report as no shots are fired, the intended felony is not completed, and in the majority of these cases either no or nearly no property damage takes place (e.g. a single broken window); ergo, these criminal attempts often go unreported.

There is also the Second Amendment issue.  Heller was the first direct ruling on the Second Amendment by the United States Supreme Court in a very, very long time; the previous ruling is the famous US .v. Miller (1939) which is often MIS-cited.

See, Miller in fact held two things:

1. It was lawful for the government to prohibit the ownership of a shotgun with a barrel of less than 18 inches.
2. That the term "militia", in historical context, meant all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense, and further that when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.

It is obviously impossible for Miller to thus be interpreted as somehow conferring only a "collective" right to bear arms (e.g. as part of The National Guard or similar), since the second point above could not be true in such a circumstance.

What those who wish to write about firearms and their regulation conveniently forget is that The Second Amendment is not about defensive use of firearms to prevent crimes, or even about hunting.

Those two uses are both convenient side effects that benefit society tremendously.  The prevention or cessation of over 1 million felonies a year is certainly a tremendous benefit to society, and the management of game populations by lawful hunting activity is necessary to promote and protect the health of various animals that otherwise lack sufficient natural predatory pressure (that lack, by the way, is also mostly of our doing!)

No, The Second Amendment, if one bothers to read The Federalist and The Antifederalist, is clear in intention.

The Second Amendment exists as the final check and balance on government against the usurpation of the other nine Amendments in The Bill of Rights, along with the text of the Constitution itself.

In fact, it is the precise existence of The Second Amendment, standing as originally written, that is our best guarantee that it will never need to be used.

Each time we permit The Second Amendment to be diluted, chipped away at or otherwise tampered with we come closer to the day in which we will need it and not have it.

History is replete with examples; Hitler's Third Reich began with the mandatory registration of all firearms, which was readily agreed to by the citizens "for the common protection."  That was shortly followed by confiscation, literally door-to-door, with a few resisters being publicly shot.  Having secured essentially all of the civilian firearms Hitler was then of course free to commit the rest of his evil deeds with little chance of the people rising up against him (they tried anyway, many times, all of which were failures and most of which led to death by summary execution of the protagonists.)

Nor is it always The State that takes advantage when firearms are confiscated; a more recent example is in Australia, where a lunatic in 1995 shot 35 people.  The uproar resulted in a complete ban of all semi-automatic weapons, leading to their confiscation and destruction.

Unfortunately violent crime increased; within 12 months of enactment of that law armed robberies were up a whopping 44 percent, and there was a 300% increase in homicides in one Australian State (Victoria.)  Two years later, in 1998, South Australia had recorded a 60% increase in robberies with a firearm.

So much for gun bans actually managing to decrease the number of bad guys with guns!

The logic here folks should be obvious:

If I am willing to commit a violent felony, whether it be rape, robbery or murder, I have already decided to ignore the law prohibiting this conduct and inflict intentional harm on other people.  As such we are now reduced to one simple question: do the intended victims of these crimes have a right to fight back with the only device known to man that equalizes the strength of assailant and defending citizen, or are the intended victims of such a criminal expected to simply "lie down and take it"?

If it is your wife, daughter, grandmother or niece that is the intended victim of a 250lb drug-crazed rapist are you willing to tell her that she is prohibited by the law from defending herself with the only device known to man that will render her 120lb mind and body the precise equal of that assailant?

Note that this decision - one that would be hers and hers alone - does not mean she will win in such a confrontation.  Rather, it is a question of basic human rights - do you, or do you not, have a personal right of self-defense against a felonious thug who intends you great bodily harm (or worse.)

Yet this question - one that should be at the forefront of your cognitive process in this debate - is a secondary beneficial side effect to the very reason we have a Second Amendment.

The primary reason The Second Amendment exists is to prevent Auschwitz, and all that came with it, from happening here, and the unfortunate truth is that the annals of recorded history prove that it is only a right of personal arms possession that prevents it.  If you doubt this see Switzerland - both in terms of it's violent crime rate and history through two World Wars.

I rest my case.