Big Dogs House

MD Senator Currie Wrong On Gun Ownership

Aug 18, 2008 Political, Second Amendment

Maryland State Senator Ulysses Currie of the 25^th district (who is under federal investigation for illegal activities) wrote a piece about gun control. Currie is upset that the Supreme Court reaffirmed what our founders stated by ruling that the Second Amendment is an individual right. Currie takes exception to this and indicates that no other court has ruled this way. Actually, no other court has looked at this issue. The 1939 Miller case is held by gun control advocates as a bellwether for a militia interpretation but the ruling had nothing to do with the issue at hand. It dealt with interstate commerce and a weapon, not who had the right to carry it.

Currie is very upset that the SCOTUS overturned the DC gun ban and, like Chicken Little, cries “the sky is falling.” He asserts that we will have more murders in DC and he further goes to point out that states with more lenient gun control laws have higher death by gun rates. His statistics come from The Violence Policy Center which is an anti gun organization. The raw numbers are misleading and there are many other factors that play into this. What is very interesting is that Currie fails to mention the DC gun death rate which is one of the HIGHEST in the country. How can that be if strict gun laws keep us safe?

It is important to remember that one can make any claim using numbers. It is also important to note that gun death rates encompass a lot of reasons for death like suicide, justifiable shootings (as in the police or self defense), accidental shootings and criminal acts (murder or crimes resulting in murder). Another thing to consider is the number of crimes that were committed by law abiding citizens with carry permits. This makes a big difference because if the crimes are committed by people who should not have guns then the laws forbidding their possession are not working. Currie should whittle down the numbers and point out how many crimes are committed by people who are permitted to carry.

This is important because people like Currie lamented about how Florida would see a marked increase in gun deaths after the state relaxed its gun laws and allowed more people to carry. This has never come to fruition. In Florida hundreds of thousands of permits to carry have been issued and fewer than 20 people with a permit have been involved in crimes (not necessarily involving gun use). Up through 1998 no permit holder has ever shot a police officer but several permit holders have assisted police.

If Currie wants to skew statistics let me help him out. Blacks comprise a small portion of the population and yet they account for a disproportionate number of gun deaths. Cities with the largest number of blacks in the population (like DC, LA, and New Orleans) have higher murder rates than cities with more whites. In 2007 California ranked fourth behind Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Indiana in the number of black homicides. The black homicide rate pushes the rate for each state high because the rate is about four times higher than their percentage of the population. Is it fair to say that removing blacks from the states would lower gun death rates? While we are on the subject, Hispanics account for a disproportionately high number of gun deaths as well. The statistics certainly lay out a case for lowering the death rate by removing the minorities. This approach is as legitimate as using crime statistics for illegal acts as a methodology to ban LEGAL gun ownership. Perhaps we should ban people who live in Maryland’s 25^th District from running for office there because 100% of the current Senators from there are under federal investigation. Banning everyone for the acts of criminals is nonsensical. Before anyone tells me that Currie has not had his day in court so he should be presumed innocent, keep in mind that he is assuming that all gun owners commit criminal acts and should not be allowed to own them.

What Currie fails to realize is that the crimes are being committed by people who have no regard for the law. DC, Chicago and many other major cities with extremely tough gun control laws have high gun murder rates. Once again, if the gun laws work why are these places suffering gun deaths? If gun control lowers gun deaths than these places should be the safest places on earth. Unfortunately, some of them have a higher death rate than Iraq and it is in the middle of a war.

People who obey the law do not get permits to carry weapons and then go around shooting people. The facts have proven time and again that law abiding citizens do not commit murders and that law breakers do not care about gun laws because they don’t follow the rules anyway.

Currie has his panties in a wad because the Supreme Court acknowledged that gun ownership is an individual right. This is nothing new. As I have pointed out before, the founders stated that the PEOPLE will be allowed to have guns. It is an undeniable truth. Regardless of the fact that it defies logic to think that the words “The People” mean all citizens everywhere it is used except the Second Amendment, the issue is moot because of the founder’s own words. Walter E Williams has a comprehensive listing of the founder’s quotes on the subject. I defy Currie or anyone else to read them and then demonstrate how they mean anything BUT an individual right. For example:

“That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms … ”
– Samuel Adams, Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at 86-87 (Pierce & Hale, eds., Boston, 1850)

The people of the United States who are peaceable citizens. How can anyone misconstrue this to be anything other than an individual right?

Ulysses Currie is absolutely wrong on this issue. The places that allow citizens to own and carry weapons are the safest in the country. There are some gun control states that have low gun death rates. It would be interesting to see what the demographics of the population are because I would wager they are mostly law abiding people.

Once again, Mr. Currie, law abiding citizens do not go around killing people. Criminals account for the overwhelming majority of the gun deaths and all the laws in the world will not change their behavior.

We call them criminals for a reason.

Tags: DC, gun control, individual right, Maryland, Second Amendment, supreme court, ulysses currie

Gun Rights Drive Liberals Crazy

Jul 5, 2008 Second Amendment

Attention is drawn to more moonbattery with regard to the Second Amendment thanks to my friends at Red Maryland. Seems that a person named Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of University of California Irvine school of law (and supposed Constitutional scholar) is very upset with the decision of the Supreme Court that affirms our Individual right to keep and bear arms:

The Supreme Court’s invalidation of the District of Columbia’s handgun ban powerfully shows that the conservative rhetoric about judicial restraint is a lie. In striking down the law, Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion, joined by the court’s four other most conservative justices, is quite activist in pursuing the conservative political agenda of protecting gun owners.

If the terms “judicial activism” and “judicial restraint” have any meaning, it is that a court is activist when it is invalidating laws and overruling precedent, and restrained when deferring to popularly elected legislatures and following prior decisions.

Never before had the Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment bestows on individuals a right to have guns. In fact, in 1939 (and other occasions), the court rejected this view. In effectively overturning these prior decisions, the court both ignored precedent and invalidated a law adopted by a popularly elected government. Baltimore Sun

According to this so called scholar, upholding the Constitution is judicial activism. Despite Chemerinsky’s claims that the Court changed previous judicial rulings, that is not what happened. Since the Court has NEVER ruled on whether the Second Amendment is an individual right there is no way the Court changed history. However, even if it did what would be the problem? The Court is obligated to overturn any ruling that was in error. If a previous Court ruled on something and it turned out to be incorrect then the Court is obligated to fix it. If the Court were bound to uphold all previous decisions then we might still have slaves and the Dred Scott decision might not have invalidated by the Thirteenth Amendment. Interestingly, the Dred Scott decision provides us with the Court’s views on the Second Amendment even though the issue was not about gun rights.

In its opinion on the matter, the court stated that freeing a negro would cause several problems:

It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised[sic] as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. Cornell Law

Chemerinsky, in his liberal fantasy of a world, would have people believe that the Court has gone against previous rulings (despite the fact that it has never ruled on the matter) and would ignore the fact that the Court, in a statement during a ruling on a different matter, affirmed the INDIVIDUAL right to keep and bear arms. The supporting statements in Court decisions hold weight. In the Scott case the Court affirmed the individual right even though that is not what they were asked to rule on.

Chemerinsky describes the 1939 US v. Miller decision (and others) as rulings ignored by the Court. What are those other cases? If this guy is the dean of a school of law then one would expect him to be able to come up with the names of the cases. Instead, he uses a reference to unnamed cases to give the reader the impression that many cases exist. In reality, very few cases involving the Second Amendment exist and Miller in 1939 discussed the type of weapon, not who was allowed to posses it.

It is also interesting to note that Chemerinsky states; “the court both ignored precedent and invalidated a law adopted by a popularly elected government.” First of all, if the law was unconstitutional then it does not matter what precedent there was (none) and it does not matter that it was instituted by a popularly elected government. The Bush Administration is a popularly elected government but that has not stopped the left from filing suits and from the VERY SAME Supreme Court from ruling against the President. I guess to a liberal there is one standard for laws they like and one for laws they do not.

I also think it is interesting that when the popularly elected government of California enacted, through the vote of the people, a definition of marriage that was not good enough for a lower court. The court, in that case, ruled the law and legal definition of marriage unconstitutional and allowed gay marriage. How many people from Chemerinsky’s side hailed that ruling as a wonderful day in jurisprudence.

The fact is, regardless of what anti gun nuts say, the Supreme Court affirmed the individual right to keep and bear arms, the same thing the people who wrote the Amendment stated about it when they described what it meant. It is also a fact that more lawsuits will be filed in order to completely define exactly what that Amendment means and, when is all said and done, the left will be even more upset because we will finally have our rights appropriately defined and have protection against those who will usurp those rights.

Of course, the 5-4 decision should give all conservatives chills down their spines. There were four justices that were unable to see the meaning of the Amendment correctly despite the numerous writings describing it, written by the very people who authored the Amendment. We need to elect a president who will appoint justices who are able to interpret the Constitution the way it was written, using the words of the people who wrote it.

Now, if we could only get deans of law schools who understand the law…

Tags: constitution, gun laws, judicial activism, Second Amendment