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2nd amendment
Trump 'Going to Get Americans Killed' With Industry-Friendly Gun Order, Warn Critics
"Remember the next time that a mass shooting happens," said one gun control advocate, "Trump did everything in his power to enable it, not prevent it."
Feb 08, 2025
An executive order issued Friday by President Donald Trump that aims to rollback gun control measures instituted by his predecessor received a swift rebuke from critics who said the order should be seen as a giveaway to the profit-hungry gun industry at the expense of a society ruthlessly harmed by gun violence year after year after year.
Trump's order tasks U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi with conducting a sweeping review of the policies and positions of the previous administration and Justice Department as it relates to gun policies, including any executive orders issued by President Joe Biden during his term and the DOJ's positions taken on "all ongoing and potential litigation" related to firearms.
"On the chopping block," reports The Trace, "are several high-profile attempts by [Biden] to reduce gun violence, including regulations on ghost guns, expanded background checks on gun sales, and tougher regulatory oversight of lawbreaking gun dealers."
"Trump's priorities couldn't be more clear. Spoiler: it's not protecting kids."
According to the outlet, which focuses on the nation's gun violence crisis:
While most of Biden’s policies have taken effect, lawsuits against them are ongoing. In his executive order, Trump directed the attorney general to also review the Justice Department’s decision to defend those regulations, as well as all other gun-related litigation in which the government is involved. From age limits on firearm sales to the ban on gun possession by people convicted of felonies, federal gun laws have been under constant threat in the courts since a 2022 Supreme Court decision dramatically expanded gun rights.
If the Justice Department declines to defend the current federal laws in court, it would significantly raise the chances of them being ruled unconstitutional.
Gun control advocates widely rebuked the executive order, warning that Trump's reversal of the minimal amount of progress Biden was able to make was an endorsement of more death, pain, and suffering for the American people, including children, who too often find themselves at the deadly end of a gun's barrel.
"Trump's priorities couldn't be more clear. Spoiler: it's not protecting kids," said Natalie Fall, March For Our Lives executive director. "Gun deaths finally went down last year, and Trump just moved to undo the rules and laws that helped make that happen."
Trump's right-wing MAGA movement, she continued, "loves to rage about 'keeping kids safe,' but it’s all a smokescreen. They don’t care about what is actually killing and maiming thousands of American kids every year: gun violence. He is going to get Americans killed in his thirst for vengeance and eagerness to please the gun lobby and rally armed extremists. Remember, the next time that a mass shooting happens, Trump did everything in his power to enable it, not prevent it."
Hudson Munoz, executive director of the advocacy group Guns Down America, shared similar sentiments and said the president's latest order "is as reckless as it is predictable."
Not for the first time, he argued, Trump is "proving that he cares more about appeasing the gun industry than protecting the American people. This order is downright dangerous. His incompetence and Attorney General Pam Bondi's blind loyalty to the Trump agenda will lead to more violence while a few shareholders and gun industry executives line their pockets."
Referencing public polls, Munoz said more than 70% of people in the U.S. approve of common-sense gun safety laws that Trump and the gun lobby are attempting to destroy.
"Make no mistake, this executive order is about business," he said. "Trump is working to unleash more guns into American public life to boost the profits of gun manufacturers. This order leaves Americans to foot the bill with more gun deaths, more taxpayer dollars spent on emergency responses, and more families shattered by violence—while a handful of businesses cash in."
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Guns, the Supreme Court, and American Way of Death
How the nation's highest court supercharged the nation’s gun violence epidemic.
Sep 21, 2024
If you’re looking for someone to blame for the gun violence that has left our schools, streets, and communities soaked in blood, don’t point just at the National Rifle Association and their lackeys in the Republican Party. Raise another finger, ideally your middle one, toward a Supreme Court that has enabled the unceasing rise of gun-related carnage in all its ever-more-obscene forms.
The key decision came in 2008, when a 5-4 majority led by the late Justice Antonin Scalia ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms. Prior to Heller, the combined weight of academic scholarship and legal precedent had construed the Second Amendment as protecting civilian gun ownership only in connection with long-antiquated state militias. This view was long seen as reflecting the spirit of the actual debates held during the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
Scalia and the other members of the conservative Heller majority purported to base their radical reinterpretation of the Second Amendment on their “originalist” understanding of the Founding Fathers’ intentions. But their novel conclusion essentially ignored the first 13 words of the Second Amendment regarding the necessity of preserving the militias.
This amounted to a distortion of American history. State militias played a critical role in the American Revolution, and before that, in maintaining order in the 13 colonies. As the Second Amendment historian Noah Shusterman has written:
The men writing the Bill of Rights wanted every citizen to be in the militia, and they wanted everyone in the militia to be armed. If someone was prohibited from participating in the militia, the leaders of the founders’ generation would not have wanted them to have access to weapons… Read the debates about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the militia’s importance leaps off the page. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, called a well-regulated militia “the most natural defense of a free country.” His anti-Federalist critics agreed with the need for a citizens’ militia, writing that “a well-regulated militia, composed of the Yeomanry of the country, have ever been considered as the bulwark of a free people.”
Few errors of constitutional interpretation have had such deadly real-world consequences as Heller. Justice John Paul Stevens, who authored the principal dissent in Heller, later condemned the ruling as “the worst self-inflicted wound in the court’s history.”
Since Heller, both guns and gun deaths have surged in tandem in what the American Enlightenment Project calls the “Heller Inflection.” In 2008, there were 305 million guns in circulation and 31,500 reported gun deaths; there are now 470 million guns in circulation and over 45,000 reported gun deaths per year. Mass shootings, defined as events involving four or more victims, have grown as well—from 272 in 2014 to 653 last year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
But as bad as Heller was, it still recognized that certain gun control measures remained “presumptively lawful.” In the words of Scalia:
Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
In 2010, in McDonald v. Chicago, the court extended Heller’s Second Amendment analysis to cover state and local governments in addition to federal enclaves. But in 2022, with Clarence Thomas’ 6-3 majority opinion in New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court cast aside the limiting language of Heller about presumptively lawful gun-control restrictions.
Bruen struck down New York’s firearm permit system that had been on the books since 1909. To reach that result, the court rejected the traditional methods of judicial scrutiny used to determine the constitutionality of state and federal statutes that required judges to balance the governmental interests advanced by legislation against the competing rights of individuals. In place of interest balancing, Thomas and his cohorts substituted a specious “history and tradition” test based on the justices’ highly selective and subjective reading of history and their sense of tradition.
In fact, gun-control regulations like the New York permit system have been commonplace in the United States from colonial times to the present. The founders supported a variety of strict measures, including the registration of guns issued to militia members and prohibitions against carrying firearms in public. By the early 1900s, nearly every state had enacted laws requiring firearm licenses and banning concealed carry.
As a result of Bruen, however, that history has effectively been neutered. Judges now must regard gun-control measures as presumptively invalid. To overcome the presumption, the government must prove that even the most commonsense laws are firmly rooted, either explicitly or by analogy, in the “nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Together with Heller and McDonald, Bruen has led to a surge in Second Amendment challenges to gun laws since 2008. Pre-Heller, the lower federal courts decided an average of 26 gun cases per year; they now hear nearly 700 per year. The challengers are also winning a higher percentage of cases compared to the pre-Heller era, especially in cases decided by Donald Trump-appointed judges appointed. “Trump judges are close to casting 50% of their votes in favor of gun rights, when the average for other Republicans is 28%,” one study has found.
Last term, the Supreme Court surprised many by upholding a federal law that bars anyone subject to a domestic-violence restraining order from possessing a gun. However, it did so without signaling that it is prepared to modify the hard Second Amendment lines drawn in Heller and Bruen. As long as the court is controlled by right-wing activists beholden to the gun lobby and the Republican Party, those lines and their horrendous consequences are here to stay.
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Citing The Wire's Slim Charles, Hawaii Supreme Court Rebukes SCOTUS on 2nd Amendment
"The thing about the old days, they the old days."
Feb 08, 2024
A 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling paved the way for states to weaken gun safety laws, but the Hawaii Supreme Court made clear on Wednesday—with the help of the character Slim Charles on HBO's "The Wire"—that the high court's regressive decision would not force the state to allow residents to carry unlicensed firearms in public.
The court unanimously upheld the state's ban, saying that "states retain the authority to require individuals have a license before carrying firearms in public."
The 5-0 decision was at odds with New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, the 2022 case in which the Supreme Court's right-wing majority ruled that laws and regulations pertaining to firearms must fall within the United States' so-called "historical tradition."
Last year, Bruen underpinned a decision made by a federal judge in Virginia that 18-to-20-year-olds could not be barred from purchasing guns since men as young as 18 were permitted to join armed militias at the time of the United States' founding.
"Time-traveling to 1791 or 1868 to collar how a state regulates lethal weapons—per the Constitution's democratic design—is a dangerous way to look at the federal constitution," wrote Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins in the ruling. "The Constitution is not a 'suicide pact.'"
Eddins acknowledged that the state's constitution, like the U.S. Constitution, says, "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."
"Those words do not support a right to possess lethal weapons in public for possible self-defense," he wrote.
The court issued an unequivocal rebuke of the importance the Supreme Court placed on the United States' "historical tradition."
"As the world turns, it makes no sense for contemporary society to pledge allegiance to the founding era's culture, realities, laws, and understanding of the Constitution," wrote Eddins before citing the words of Slim Charles, the fictional character from the popular series, who once said: "The thing about the old days, they the old days."
"This is a top-10 court precedent in history," one lawyer said of the citation.
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A Modest Proposal To Combat Gun Violence
It's too easy to possess a gun and therefore too easy to maim, kill, and make this nation a more dangerous and less ideal place to live.
Jan 15, 2024
It is not news that’s the United States suffers from way too much gun violence. This sad fact is common knowledge around the world. When the American problem of gun violence is brought to the attention of our leaders, they announce their sadness over the situation and then conclude that nothing can be done about it. I disagree.
First, a quick review of the problem. Although the last few years have seen a slight reduction in violent crime, the United States still has more gun violence by far than any other developed country. Our rate of gun violence is seven times that of Canada and 340 times the rate of the United Kingdom! To be sure other develop countries have poverty and inequality, racism and patriarchy, violent entertainment, and mental illness just like the United States; but they do not have the high rates of suicide and homicide by gun that we do.
The proposals described do not challenge the individual right to own a firearm, they simply organize and regulate it.
What is this so? Clearly, it is the presence of guns. The United States has about 330 million people and it has nearly 400 million guns. Guns are present in around 45% of American homes. And, it should go without saying, these firearms are dangerous, very dangerous. In the USA there are around 240 million car owners and, sadly, every year there are about 43,000 deaths from car accidents; at the same time, there are nearly 82 million gun owners and over 45,000 guns deaths. Guns cause nearly 50,000 deaths every year. They produced nearly 27,000 suicides and 21,000 homicides in 2022; this was 75% of all homicides and 54% of all suicides. Every day in our country, over 300 people are shot and over 100 of these people die (40% murders, 60% suicides).
So, yes, it is a huge problem in our country. But it is soluble problem.
Current comparisons between states with strong gun ownership regulations and those with less stringent laws point toward a solution. Gun deaths are higher in states with lots of gun owners and lower in states with fewer. And gun deaths are highest in states that have created a right to concealed carry of a weapon. Gun deaths decline when gun control regulations are instituted in a state, and they become more frequent after a state reduces regulations or creates new gun ownership rights. And, as already mentioned, countries with strong gun control laws have much lower rates of gun violence than the United States.
A sad reminder of these facts recently occurred in the Czech Republic where an armed man shot and killed 14 people in Prague. This tragic event occurred only a short while after the country loosened its gun regulations. It must be noted that the Czech Republic is the only EU member that claims a constitutional right to bear arms.
I would like to suggest a simple two-part solution for gun violence in the United States.
First, we must make it more difficult to own guns.
Taxes and national pricing regulations could be used to increase the cost of guns. Regulations could be enacted that charge tariffs to gun manufacturers and retailers based on the real costs of guns to society. Estimates are that gun violence costs our country over $500 billion dollars a year, including costs to victims, cost to police, courts, and the criminal justice system, lost wages and spending, losses to quality of life, etc. And much of these costs are born by government agencies and thus are paid for by all taxpayers. These costs could inform a tariff added to the price of guns manufactured and/sold in the United States.
Second, we could treat guns more like cars; that is make it a bit cumbersome and difficult to own and operate one. We could enact a registration system for guns that would require folks to possess a gun owner’s license before they could purchase or own a gun. To get such a license, people would have to be a certain age (30?), pay a substantial annual fee, and pass an annual gun training course and exam. Of course, the course and exam would also change a substantial fee to participants, and buying the resultant permit would also be costly. In addition, owners could be required to answer a tedious and complicated gun ownership application and present their gun and ammunition to the “Department of Firearms Ownership,” DFO, for inspection. DFO offices could be very understaffed, very bureaucratic, and very difficult to visit and use. In addition, there would be substantial fines assigned to people who violate any of these rules and, of course, their guns and ammunition would be confiscated.
In other words, let's make buying and owning a gun very expensive, bureaucratic, and time-consuming process in the United States. And, as an added benefit, the taxes and fees collected in the gun owner licensing and registration process could be used to cover some of the costs created by gun violence and could be directed to public health education programs concerned with the problem of gun violence.
Secondly, we must get rid of many of the existing guns in our communities.
The funds collected from gun manufacturers and owners could help solve the oft-heard question, “What about people who already own guns?” At the same time that we are making it more difficult and more costly to own a gun, the government could sponsor frequent “gun buyback” events where current gun owners are offered, with no questions asked, top dollar for their guns (which the government would then destroy). Experience here in the United States and other countries shows that these events are politically popular and buyback programs in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and elsewhere demonstrate that they can lead to a reduction in gun violence. The most effective program would be one operated by a public agency other than the police due to the fact that trust in law enforcement is low in many communities. And, of course, the amount paid for a buyback must be large enough to motivate owners to sell. Certainly, it is true that by themselves gun buybacks may have only a small effect in reducing violent crime, but recent experience in Australia indicates that when combined with increased government regulation of gun ownership they do help reduce gun violence. If owning a gun is difficult and expensive and the government offers to buy it from you for a good price, many people will take that offer.
Finally, let's take a brief look at the elephant in the room, 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.” Most legal scholars agree that the Constitution does not grant individuals a completely unregulated right to own a gun. Regulations such as fees, licensing, and registration are clearly constitutional. This position has been validated by Supreme Court justices from Scalia to Stevens. The proposals described do not challenge the individual right to own a firearm, they simply organize and regulate it.
In the United States of America, you have to pay fees, pass tests, undergo inspections, and earn a license to own and operate a car, operate a small business, build a building, serve food or liquor, sell cannabis, practice law, medicine, accounting or architecture, or do many other things. Shouldn’t the same kind of rules apply to owning a firearm?
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Rebrand 'Mass Shootings' as 'Second Amendment Celebrations'
When people hear the term, they will know that somewhere a true patriot is expressing his God-given Constitutional right.
May 13, 2023
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really bummed out by all of these mass shootings. One after another, day after day, more than one a day since the beginning of the year. Something has to change. This is America after all. The United States has a long history of dealing with challenging problems.
So, what’s the solution? Simple, rebranding.
America has a long history of rebranding, of changing the terms we use when dealing with unpleasant issues.
When slaughtering Indigenous people and stealing their land started to sound bad, we rebranded. We called it “Manifest Destiny” and said it was about spreading freedom from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This made it sound noble.
Clearly, we Americans have a long history of successfully rebranding difficult issues. Or more accurately, I should say that conservatives have a long and successful history of rebranding troubling issues.
When enslaving and dehumanizing the people stolen from Africa started to get bad press, slave owners knew they had to do something. So they rebranded. They began calling it “The Peculiar Institution.” Peculiar, sort of like your weird Uncle Phil, with his handlebar mustache and old MG, who affects a British accent. Although, as peculiar as old Phil was, he never whipped anyone to death or bred them like cattle.
After the South lost the Civil War, Southerners knew they needed to change the terms of the debate. They knew that if everyone thought they had simply been fighting to maintain slavery they would lose sympathy. They knew they had to do something to preserve any vestige of their traditions (you know, white supremacy). So they rebranded. They starting to refer to the war as “The Lost Cause.” This just sounds mundane, non-offensive. It made it sound not much different than the loss of a hard-fought, though honorable, soccer match. Simply a “Lost Cause,” never mind the fact that they were seeking to preserve the enslavement and systematic brutalization of millions of human beings, or the fact that Confederate soldiers routinely and summarily executed Black Union soldiers on the spot. Reality often is bad, and so sounds bad. Much better to hide behind banality, behind “The Lost Cause.”
When systemic and frequently violent racism in the 1950s started to get bad press, Southerners wisely rebranded it from white supremacy to “States’ Rights.” This sounds so much more noble, and hearkens back to the nation’s founding. Who could argue with a state simply seeking to preserve its own rights?
Perhaps the most recent example of rebranding involves “Parental Rights.” This is how conservatives now sell book bans and restrictions on medical care for transgender youth. After all, what kind of monster doesn’t support the right of a parent to protect and safeguard their own child? “We’re not banning books,” they say, “we’re not discriminating against gay or transgender children,” conservatives add, “we’re simply protecting the rights of parents to safeguard their children.” That just sounds so much better, doesn’t it?
Clearly, we Americans have a long history of successfully rebranding difficult issues. Or more accurately, I should say that conservatives have a long and successful history of rebranding troubling issues.
Now there are nearly daily news reports about mass shootings. And in nearly every news story there is also someone, a liberal politician or a grieving family member, demanding a solution. More often than not they call for restrictions on access to guns.
“Mass Shooting” has such a negative connotation, particularly when paired with “Mass Casualties.” The term is scary, and frankly it almost seems as if the biased liberal media has coined the term to embarrass gun rights advocates, and to make them look callous and uncaring. This must change.
I’ve batted the idea around in my mind for a while now, trying to come up with something more palatable or benign. And I think I’ve finally got it. Here’s my proposal.
Let’s changed “Mass Shooting” to “Second Amendment Celebration.” That shifts the tone from scary to laudatory, and when people hear about it (for example on Twitter at the hashtag “Active Shooter”) it will put a smile on their faces. They will know that somewhere a true patriot is expressing his God-given Constitutional right. This will also change the unwilling victim (“victim” is another downer of a word) from a casualty to a patriot, since they are nobly sacrificing their lives to preserve one of the primary rights in our revered Constitution.
This way, at each mass shooting… sorry, old habits die hard… at each Second Amendment Celebration, Americans can be reminded of what the Second Amendment means to all of us.
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'Madness': Federal Judge Rules 18-to-20-Year-Olds Can't Be Barred From Gun Purchases
"The court's ruling will undoubtedly put lives at risk," said one policy expert. "It must be reversed."
May 11, 2023
A federal judge's ruling in Virginia on Thursday once again made clear the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, in which the right-wing majority ruled that laws and regulations pertaining to firearms must fall within the United States' so-called "historical tradition."
The ruling on Thursday was handed down by U.S. District Judge Robert E. Payne, a George H.W. Bush appointee, in the case of a 20-year-old who was turned away when he attempted to buy a Glock 19x handgun from a federally licensed dealer.
Under regulations put in place by the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives (ATF) and the Gun Control Act of 1968, federally licensed sellers have been prohibited from selling guns to 18-to-20-year-olds, who have had to make such purchases in private sales.
Payne ruled that "the statutes and regulations in question are not consistent with our nation's history and tradition," and that "therefore, they cannot stand."
The judge made clear in his decision that the ruling was underpinned by Bruen, in which Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion that "constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them."
According to Payne, the fact that 18-year-olds were permitted to join militias at the time of the nation's founding suggests that buyers should not have to reach age 21 before purchasing handguns from licensed sellers.
"The Second Amendment's protections apply to 18-to-20-year-olds. By adopting the Second Amendment, the people constrained both the hands of Congress and the courts to infringe upon this right by denying ordinary law-abiding citizens of this age the full enjoyment of the right to keep and bear arms unless the restriction is supported by the nation's history," said Payne. "That is what Bruen tells us."
Princeton University professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. denounced the ruling as "madness," while New York University law professor Chris Sprigman said the decision is the latest result of "America's extremist form of constitutionalism."
Janet Carter, senior director of issues and appeals at gun control advocacy group Everytown Law, pointed to research that shows that "18- to 20-year-olds commit gun homicides at triple the rate of adults 21 years and older."
"The federal law prohibiting federally licensed firearms dealers from selling handguns to individuals under the age of 21 is not just an essential tool for preventing gun violence, it is also entirely constitutional," Carter told The Washington Post. "The court's ruling will undoubtedly put lives at risk. It must be reversed."
Attorneys on both sides of the case said they expected the Biden administration to appeal the ruling.
Numerous polls have shown that the majority of Americans favor stricter gun control measures, and a survey of gun owners taken last year by NPR/Ipsos found that 67% of respondents favored raising the age for any gun purchase from 18 to 21.
"At a moment when Americans are growing more unified and in favor of gun control," said historian Brian Rosenwald, "Clarence Thomas' grotesque, inane opinion in Bruen is going to make all of them illegal."
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'The Future the GOP Wants for All of America': Texas Gun Law Unleashes Deadly Mayhem
"Who could've predicted arming folks without a license would result in this type of chaos?" one columnist asked sardonically.
Oct 27, 2022
"Insanity."
"Utter madness."
These are just some of the ways critics are describing Texas' new law allowing people to carry handguns in public without a permit--a Republican achievement that many local officials say has already led to a spike in spontaneous shootings in highly populated parts of the state.
"It seems like now there's been a tipping point where just everybody is armed."
In one high-profile case earlier this year, Tony Earls "pulled out his handgun and opened fire, hoping to strike a man who had just robbed him and his wife at an A.T.M. in Houston," The New York Times reported Wednesday. "Instead, he struck Arlene Alvarez, a 9-year-old girl seated in a passing pickup, killing her."
A grand jury declined to indict Earls, agreeing with his lawyer that "everything about that situation, we believe and contend, was justified under Texas law."
As the Times noted, "The shooting was part of what many sheriffs, police leaders, and district attorneys in urban areas of Texas say has been an increase in people carrying weapons and in spur-of-the-moment gunfire in the year since the state began allowing most adults 21 or over to carry a handgun without a license."
"Far from an outlier, Texas, with its new law, joined what has been an expanding effort to remove nearly all restrictions on carrying handguns," the newspaper continued. "When Alabama's 'permitless carry' law goes into effect in January, half of the states in the nation, from Maine to Arizona, will not require a license to carry a handgun."
"But Texas is the most populous state to do away with handgun permit requirements," the Times pointed out. "Five of the nation's 15 biggest cities are in Texas, making the permitless approach to handguns a new fact of life in urban areas to an extent not seen in other states."
"In the border town of Eagle Pass, drunken arguments have flared into shootings," the newspaper reported. "In El Paso, revelers who legally bring their guns to parties have opened fire to stop fights. In and around Houston, prosecutors have received a growing stream of cases involving guns brandished or fired over parking spots, bad driving, loud music, and love triangles."
"Who could've predicted arming folks without a license would result in this type of chaos?" columnist Wajahat Ali asked sardonically on social media.
Another person tweeted: "This is the future the GOP wants for all of America. Vote accordingly."
Peer-reviewed research published Wednesday showed that Americans are more likely to die early if they live in states dominated by right-wing lawmakers, and weak gun safety measures were among the factors driving up state-level mortality rates.
No statewide data on shootings has been released since the law--passed by Texas Republicans last spring--went into effect last September, but many law enforcement officials say the presence of firearms on the street has increased while handgun permit applications have decreased.
"It seems like now there's been a tipping point where just everybody is armed," said Sheriff Ed Gonzalez of Harris County, which includes Houston.
As the Times reported:
Recent debates over gun laws in Texas have not been limited to handgun licensing. After the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, gun control advocates have pushed to raise the age to purchase an AR-15-style rifle. And after the [United States] Supreme Court struck down New York's restrictive licensing program, a federal court in Texas found that a state law barring adults under 21 from carrying a handgun was unconstitutional. [Republican] Gov. Greg Abbott has suggested he agreed, even as the Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the state police, is appealing.
Meanwhile, the Texas GOP's assault on gun control is just part of a "state-by-state legislative push," which "has coincided with a federal judiciary that has increasingly ruled in favor of carrying guns and against state efforts to regulate them," the Times reported.
With their June decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the high court's reactionary justices--most of whom were appointed by Republican presidents who lost the popular vote--struck down New York state's restrictions on the concealed carry of firearms in public. In the process, journalist Mark Joseph Stern argued, they enlarged the scope of the Second Amendment and made it harder for voters around the U.S. to protect communities "by enacting gun safety laws through the democratic process."
Calling it "a revolution in Second Amendment law," Stern wrote that "the Supreme Court has effectively rendered gun restrictions presumptively unconstitutional."
Before the ruling was handed down, journalist Jay Michaelson shed light on the right's "preposterous misreading of the Second Amendment, funded largely by gun manufacturers," in a Rolling Stone essay:
Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, until 2008, no federal court had held that the Second Amendment conveyed a right to own a gun. On the contrary, the Supreme Court clearly said that it didn't.
[...]
And what had once been a fringe view rejected by the Supreme Court--that the Second Amendment gave individuals a right to own guns--gradually became Republican Party gospel when the fringe took over the party. Former Chief Justice Warren Burger (a conservative appointed by Richard Nixon) described it as "a fraud on the American public."
Years before making it easier to carry handguns in public, Texas Republicans turned their state into one of the 29 nationwide with so-called "stand your ground" laws. These laws, also known as "shoot first" laws, upend the common law principle of a "duty to retreat," enabling individuals to use deadly force in purported self-defense as a first, rather than last, resort.
A study published earlier this year found that "shoot first" laws are associated with hundreds of additional firearm homicides each year.
Although Texas was one of the few states where the enactment of "shoot first" laws did not lead to a significant change in gun homicide rates between 2000 and 2016, it remains to be seen if its new permitless carry law will generate a surge in violent encounters between armed parties claiming "self-defense."
Last week in Florida, which became the first state to enact a "shoot first" law by statute in 2005, a man and his teenage son were arrested for attempted murder after allegedly shooting at a woman whom they suspected of being a burglar.
There are more guns than people in the U.S., and due to National Rifle Association-bankrolled Republicans' opposition to meaningful gun safety laws, it remains relatively easy for people to purchase and carry firearms in many states.
As a result, there have been thousands of mass shootings since 2012, and guns recently became the leading cause of death among children and teens in the United States.
Studies have shown that gun regulations with high levels of public support, including bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, help reduce the number and severity of fatal mass shootings.
"We don't have to live this way," mom, teacher, and Democratic Minnesota House of Representatives candidate Erin Preese said Monday after a deadly school shooting in St. Louis. "Vote for lawmakers who will stand up to the gun lobby. Our kids' lives depend on it."
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Judge's Ruling on Gun Serial Numbers Highlights 'Deadly' Impact of Right-Wing Supreme Court
"The Supreme Court's Second Amendment jurisprudence has grown so radical that it now shields criminals trying to conceal their involvement in a violent crime," said one observer.
Oct 14, 2022
Legal experts said Friday that a federal judge's ruling in West Virginia illustrates the danger posed by the U.S. Supreme Court's right wing majority, which ruled this year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen that restrictions on firearms must fall within the so-called "historical tradition" of gun laws.
U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin, who was appointed to the Southern District of West Virginia by former Democratic President Bill Clinton, ruled against a federal law prohibiting people from possessing firearms with serial numbers that have been "altered, obliterated, or removed."
"Serial numbers were largely unknown to the Framers, Goodwin wrote. And so the Second Amendment confers a right to remove them from modern weapons."
Serial numbers have been required for guns since the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 and are intended to prevent the illegal sale of guns and to allowing law enforcement to trace firearms.
But basing his ruling on the majority Supreme Court opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas in June, Goodwin said Wednesday that requiring serial numbers is not part of the "historical tradition of firearm regulation" and therefore runs afoul of the Second Amendment.
In his majority opinion in Bruen, which overturned New York's state law restricting the concealed carry of firearms in public, Thomas wrote that for a gun control law to stand, the federal, state, or local government "must affirmatively prove that its firearm regulation is part of the historical tradition that delimits the outer bounds of the right to keep and bear arms."
Goodwin's opinion, said Demand Justice, which advocates for Supreme Court reform, demonstrates the far-reaching impact the Bruen ruling could have on gun laws across the country.
"That radical ruling is impacting measures as basic as a requirement that guns have serial numbers," said the group.
The case heard by Goodwin originated with a traffic stop in Charleston, West Virginia during which police found a gun with the serial number removed. The driver, Randy Price, had also been convicted of a felony.
Price argued in court that he had a constitutional right to have the firearm, while lawyers for the federal government said the law regarding serial numbers was a "commercial regulation" that did not violate the Second Amendment.
On Thursday, Slate journalist Mark Joseph Stern wrote that while Goodwin's ruling "might sound bizarre... his analysis closely follows Thomas' test" that requires the government to prove a gun regulation had a historical "analogue" in 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, or 1868, when it was imposed throughout the U.S.:
The only remaining question is whether the government could find an analogous regulation from 1791 or 1868 that restricted the possession of guns with an altered serial number. It could not, for a fairly obvious reason: Serial numbers only became common following the mass production of firearms, which took off in the decades after the Civil War.
[...]
Serial numbers were largely unknown to the Framers, Goodwin wrote. And so the Second Amendment confers a right to remove them from modern weapons.
When Bruen was handed down in June, Stern called the ruling "a revolution in Second Amendment law" which would ultimately go "so, so far beyond concealed carry."
Goodwin noted in his opinion on Wednesday that firearms that can't be traced using a serial number "are likely to be used in violent crime and therefore a prohibition on their possession is desirable," but said that argument "is the exact type of means-end reasoning the Supreme Court has forbidden me from considering."
Stern suggested that parts of Goodwin's opinion read "as if the judge is desperate to show readers just how dangerous and radical [the Bruen] ruling is."
According to the Supreme Court, Stern wrote, "all that counts is that serial number laws arose over the last century, so they are too modern to comport with the Second Amendment. Goodwin made this point over and over again; it almost sounded like he was quietly protesting the extreme and dangerous results demanded by the Bruen test."
"His decision thus doubled as a warning," he added. "The Supreme Court's Second Amendment jurisprudence has grown so radical that it now shields criminals trying to conceal their involvement in a violent crime."
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The Second Amendment and Gun Violence in the US
The loose interpretation of the Second Amendment is responsible, to a great extent, for thousands of lives lost every year.
Jul 11, 2022
It has been a particularly sad 4th of July. In Highland Park, Illinois, a young gunman opened fire on a parade with a high-caliber rifle, killing 7, wounding at least 47 others and traumatizing many more. In the same weekend, more than 50 people were shot in New York City. It is conceivable that those shootings were made possible because of a loose interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
A fair textual and contextual reading of the Second Amendment clearly indicates that those entitled to claim a constitutional right to bear arms are not average citizens, but rather those belonging to a group of civilians trained as soldiers.
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified on December 15, 1791, reads: 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. This amendment was inspired by the right to keep and bear arms recognized in the English common law, and by the English Bill of Rights of 1689 that prevailed in the American colonies. The scope and prerogatives arising under the Second Amendment have been the subject of considerable controversy, and its vague interpretation has had serious legal consequences.
Opponents of gun control emphasize the last part of the sentence, "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed," neglecting that this constitutional entitlement is centered on a "well regulated militia," which at the time was deemed "necessary to the security of a free state." As noted by Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, a well regulated militia is "the most natural defense of a free country."
The intimate connection between the right to bear arms and the natural rights of self-defense and resistance to oppression noted by Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780,) an English jurist known for writing the Commentaries on the Laws of England, is critical to understand the meaning and purpose of the Second Amendment. The civic duty to act in concert with fellow citizens to defend the state is also at the core of the right to bear arms under the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776: "the people have the right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state."
Obviously, the exacting circumstances to defend the state during the American Revolution were totally different from those existing now. On September 17, 2013, during an interview with John Hockenberry in WNYC radio, former Associate Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, discussed her dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), where the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within a home.
Justice Ginsburg said, "The Second Amendment has a preamble about the need for a militia...Historically, the new government had no money to pay for an army, so they relied on the state militias. And the state required men to have certain weapons and they specified in the law what weapons these people had to keep in their home so that when they were called to do service as militiamen, they would have them. That was the entire purpose of the Second Amendment... So, the Second Amendment is outdated in the sense that its function has become obsolete."
Also in a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens stated that the court's judgement was a "strained and unpersuasive reading" which overturned longstanding precedent. He stated that the court had "bestowed a dramatic upheaval in the law".
Thus, a fair textual and contextual reading of the Second Amendment clearly indicates that those entitled to claim a constitutional right to bear arms are not average citizens, but rather those belonging to a group of civilians trained as soldiers who, in case of an emergency--such as a threat to the state--must become available to supplement the regular army.
At the time the second amendment was enacted, the Founding Fathers couldn't have predicted the tremendous technological advances in modern weaponry. There are considerable differences between the muskets used during revolutionary times and assault weapons readily available today, capable of killing scores of people, including children, in a matter of seconds.
The erroneous identification of the "right to bear arms" with an individual right finds unfortunate support in a misguided, but culturally entrenched, understanding of virility. Far too many individuals equate gun possession with manhood. But, as New York journalist Michael Hart observes, "The adults who promote gun culture need to be understood and I'm not sure that as a society we've come close to doing that yet. I don't understand at all why men - and it's overwhelmingly men - feel that owning a gun is something they need to do. It's somehow a part of their identity - but what does that mean? Is that identity so hollowed out, so fearful, so worshipful of absolute deadly power that guns supply a missing link? Do these men feel bigger, stronger, more themselves by owning a gun? Does the prospect of killing another human being draw them?"
The loose interpretation of the Second Amendment is responsible, to a great extent, for thousands of lives lost every year. The absence of effective legal restraints to the marketing of arms in this country, resulting from this misguided understanding, will continue to cast a shadow over our survival as a truly civilized society.
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The Second Amendment Demands Gun Control
A National Guard, yes. Heavily-armed lunatics roaming the streets unregulated? Never.
Jun 23, 2022
This piece was first published in large part at Common Dreams on January 13, 2011; it has been updated in light of the latest horrific Supreme Court ruling.
Make no mistake: this murder and mayhem has been made possible by the claim to a Constitutional right that is not there.
The Second Amendment supports those of us who would CONTROL guns---and thus prevent the insane slaughter that compromises our security.
James Madison and the Founders of this nation would be enraged to see the Second Amendment being used to put guns in the hands of so many random, crazed mass shooters in this country.
Indeed, this week's horrifying Thomas-written ruling undermining most American gun control will have all-too-familiar consequences that would utterly devastate Madison and his ilk.
Here is what the Second Amendment actually says:
"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."
Of the first Ten Amendments, this is the only one that contains a rationale for what it requires.
The Bill of Rights is the law of the land, clearly stated. Guarantees of religion, speech, assembly, the press, freedom from torture and so much more are natural rights, inherent to the human condition.
But "the right to keep and bear arms" is granted only in the context of a well-regulated militia and thus the security of a free state.
A National Guard, yes. Heavily-armed lunatics roaming the streets unregulated? Never.
Lawyers and the courts have been fighting over guns for 220 years, since that great day in 1791 when the Bill of Rights was ratified. The essence of the Founders' intent was embodied in the Supreme Court's 1939 Miller decision, the prevailing judicial view until the recent coming of a hard right NRA-based court very much out of synch with the sane balance our nation has tried to maintain between gun rights and the public good.
As we've just seen in Uvalde and so many other places, these faux "conservatives" have allowed renegade ownership of rapid-firing instruments of wholesale slaughter.
This imbalance clearly threatens "the security of a free state." The Second Amendment says access to these weapons must be strictly regulated.
As a free and lawful people, we have the legal duty to end this unconstitutional madness.
Make no mistake: this murder and mayhem has been made possible by the claim to a Constitutional right that is not there.
The assassins and mass murderers who continue to threaten our national security make ever so clear the reason for the Founders' demand that gun ownership be wisely regulated.
These are dark times for those who demand sane regulation of gun ownership. But courts come and go. Public opinion and political power, like the common law, change and evolve. These murders in Uvalde--just the latest in a long, horrifying, thoroughly avoidable procession of senseless, gun-inflicted tragedies--underscore once again that this is a struggle we can never abandon.
And in continuing to do this work, gun control advocates must not cede a legal inch. We are the the ones with a more accurate "Second Amendment remedy"... the clear Constitutional demand for a "regulated" gun ownership that serves rather than destroys the "security of a free state."
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