{"id":10908,"date":"2010-05-14T12:00:09","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T17:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=10908"},"modified":"2010-05-16T09:25:58","modified_gmt":"2010-05-16T14:25:58","slug":"10908","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=10908","title":{"rendered":"A Rabbi, A Country Singer And An NRA Instructor Walk Into A Bar…"},"content":{"rendered":"

The battle for the Second Amendment, in my lifetime, has turned nearly 180 degrees.\u00a0 When I was a kid (and a liberal), things were looking pretty bleak; US V. Miller <\/em>was broadly (and mistakenly) accepted as a precedent; the media and big government culture largely regarded firearms as a social illness that needed to be controlled and then eradicated.<\/p>\n

But in one of the greatest grass-roots political movements in American history, millions of law-abiding citizens have turned the tide, for now – vote by vote, state by state, and finally, even turning much of this nation’s bobbleheaded “legal elite” around, to the point where the forces of good prevailed in the Supreme Court two years ago, in the Heller <\/em>decision.\u00a0 And with any luck, sometime in the next month or so, the McDonald <\/em>case will incorporate Heller <\/em>to all fifty states, causing the “individual rights” interpretation of the\u00a0Second Amendment to become binding on all lower levels of government.<\/p>\n

This is good.<\/p>\n

One thing one can not <\/em>say is that the human rights and civil liberties interpretation of the Second Amendment won because the broad sweep of the extreme “progressive” movement got especially better informed on the subject.<\/p>\n

Because if this post at Mahablog<\/a> is any indication, we have a long, long way to go.<\/p>\n

Not content with merely supporting an individual right to own firearms, the National Rifle Association is hellbent on eliminating all restrictions on any citizens carrying guns anywhere he or she wants, including churches, workplaces, and now bars and restaurants. This is in spite of the fact that even in the most 2nd-amendment lovin\u2019 red states a large majority of people think it\u2019s a real bad idea for a bunch of drunken yahoos to be packing heat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So many responses.<\/p>\n

For starters:\u00a0 the term “packing heat” should be a signal that whomever is writing really knows nothing about the topic.\u00a0 I know – it’s a correlation that doesn’t equal causation, but there is an extremely <\/em>high correlation between people who use the phrase (which has been otherwise absent from American English since the 1930s, except in old gangster movies) and abject ignorance on the subject.<\/p>\n

Next – “Maha” claims that “big majorities” oppose the rights of legal permit-holders<\/em> to carry in churches, bars and restaurants.\u00a0 I’m not sure where she gets this – I’d love to see a cite – but it reminds me of the polls the “progressives tossed about from the seventies through the nineties that claimed a huge majority supported gun control.\u00a0 The devil was in the details; the vast majority approve of some <\/em>controls.\u00a0 Keeping guns away from criminals and convicted felons is “gun control”, and I favor it; I’d be part of that putative “vast majority”.\u00a0 It’s fodder for giggly statistical games, but it’s not really honest.<\/p>\n

Because the only numbers that really matter are these; a law-abiding citizen with a carry permit (which proves, in 40 states, that he or she has no criminal record, no documented drug or alcohol problems, and in many of them has passed a skills course) is vastly less likely to harm you or anyone else than the general public – as in “two orders of magnitude” less.<\/p>\n

Yes, the new Tennessee law that lifts all restrictions on where a citizen can carry a concealed weapon, including into bars, provides that the carrier must abstain from drinking<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have to wonder – do these people either read, or talk with each other?<\/p>\n

Because it was two years ago that this blog humiliated the <\/a>Minnesoros “Independent<\/a>” <\/em>on this exact question.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s been legal,l in \u00fcberliberal Minnesota, to carry permitted guns in bars since 2005, <\/em>provided one’s blood alcohol level is below .04 – half the level allowed to drive a car.\u00a0\u00a0 This is true in many other “shall issue” states.<\/p>\n

You don’t have to look very hard to find stories of people shooting people in bars.\u00a0 But you have to look long and hard to find any involving legal carry permit-holders.<\/p>\n

The NRA pushed hard for the new Tennessee law:<\/p>\n

The NRA\u2019s argument is that while the militia may be \u201cwell-regulated,\u201d any<\/em> restriction on an individual citizen\u2019s ability to carry a firearm amounts to an \u201cabridgment\u201d of the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. This assumes that all such rights are absolute and untouchable by law under all circumstances, but we certainly have never treated any other right that way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And we don’t treat the Second Amendment that way.<\/p>\n

“Maha” writes imprecisely – which is as good as most “progressives” can do on the subject, to be fair.\u00a0 The NRA is pretty absolutist about the rights of law-abiding <\/em>individual citizens.\u00a0 The NRA has also led the way on laws to punish gun possession and use by criminals<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The rub, of course, is that “progressives” never, ever <\/em>distinguish between the law-abiding and criminals when the topic is guns (or, for that matter, quite a few other topics as well) – which we see in the following clip:<\/p>\n

Freedom of speech doesn\u2019t include a right to publish and distribute hard-core pornography, for example. Freedom of religion doesn\u2019t rubber stamp human sacrifice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That “Maha” thinks my right as someone with a clean criminal record is on par with human sacrifice is almost as telling as the fact she thinks that there are any restrictions on hard-core porn.<\/p>\n

The NRA is using bullying tactics to impose its will on lawmakers, even when a whopping majority of constituents (and probably the lawmakers\u2019 consciences, if they have any) disagree with the NRA\u2019s position. There are some cities and states in which a big majority would prefer some level of legal gun control, for safety\u2019s sake.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If decades of statistic don’t show you that controlling the rights of the law-abiding in the interest of\u00a0 “safety” isnt’ a canard, the example of Chicago <\/a>is probably lost on you.<\/p>\n

Anyway – the issue is at a bit of a head, with the nomination of Elena Kagan to the SCOTUS, and with the high court’s upcoming McDonald <\/em>decision.<\/p>\n

“Maha”:<\/p>\n

Now the wingnuts are screaming that Elena Kagan is opposed to gun rights because<\/a> \u2013<\/p>\n

Elena Kagan said as a U.S. Supreme Court law clerk in 1987 that she was \u201cnot sympathetic\u201d toward a man who contended that his constitutional rights were violated when he was convicted for carrying an unlicensed pistol.<\/em><\/p>\n

Note the \u201cunlicensed\u201d part.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We do.\u00a0 That’s the point; it is impossible, in DC, Chicago and other cities, for the law-abiding citizen to get the “license”<\/em>.\u00a0 In other cities – New York is a great example, as was Minnesota until 2003 – it was entirely a matter of the applicant’s political clout and connections.<\/p>\n

More recently she has said,<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no question, after Heller, that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to keep and bear arms and that this right, like others in the Constitution, provides strong although not unlimited protection against governmental regulation,\u201d she said.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Right.<\/p>\n

And it’s the “…although not unlimited…” bit that we are watching closely.<\/p>\n

A conservative’s idea of a “reasonable limit” is “keeping guns out of the hands of criminals”; a “progressive” thinks that putting a gun into anyone’s hands at all makes them suspect.<\/p>\n

I don’t read Mahablog much.\u00a0 But I noticed she’d linked to me:<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not good enough for the gun nuts, who predictably compared Heller to Third Reich Nazis<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which is a rather “un-nuanced” view of what I actually wrote.\u00a0\u00a0 Read it yourself; I criticize those who defend Kagan’s 1987 comments on the Second Amendment by saying “it reflects what the “elite bar” thought at the time”.<\/p>\n

The “elite bar” once thought that a black man was worth 2\/3 of a white man, and defended slavery with carefully-written, legally-scrupulous opinions – that were morally utterly vacant<\/em>, since they abridged basic human liberties.<\/p>\n

The “Nuremberg Laws” were perfectly acceptable law under German jurisprudence, too.\u00a0 The German “legal elite” said so.<\/p>\n

There’s no comparing the results of the two; Slavery and the Holocaust were evil, while gun control is merely stupid and racist.<\/p>\n

But my point wasn’t comparison; it was simply that a stupid opinion isn’t made correct because “the elites believed it was correct”.<\/p>\n

The crazy part of this is that the basic position of the gun lobby \u2014 that the 2nd amendment protects an individual right to own firearms \u2014 is settled law at this point. And the issue of gun control isn\u2019t even on the progressivist back burner any more, compared to, say, 15 years ago. It\u2019s not even in the bleeping kitchen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And how do you think it got that way?<\/p>\n

Because millions of us schlumpfy, un-hip guys and gals in flyoverland – the ones that Bill Maher giggles at – made it that way, one vote and one state and, finally, one justice\u00a0at a time.<\/p>\n

And, by “Maha’s” leave, we’re going to make sure it stays that way.<\/p>\n

About the only way gun rights are going to be seriously challenged in the foreseeable future is if there is a huge<\/em> swing of public opinion in the direction of more gun control. A few shoot-outs in Tennessee roadhouses might do it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Keep waiting.<\/p>\n

And if you look at the statistics, you might wanna bring a water bottle.\u00a0 You’ll be waiting a long, long time.<\/p>\n

Side note:\u00a0 Let’s see if Barbara “Maha” O’Brien is any better at allowing dissenting comments than she used to be<\/a>.<\/p>\n

UPDATE:\u00a0 Nope, she’s not.\u00a0 I’m told that several comments critical of her “position” have been removed.<\/p>\n

Why are some liberal bloggers so utterly gutless?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The battle for the Second Amendment, in my lifetime, has turned nearly 180 degrees.\u00a0 When I was a kid (and a liberal), things were looking pretty bleak; US V. Miller was broadly (and mistakenly) accepted as a precedent; the media and big government culture largely regarded firearms as a social illness that needed to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,82,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lefty-alt-media","category-scotus","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10908"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10913,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10908\/revisions\/10913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}